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What is a positive agenda?
Sabahat Iqbal Ashraf
Here's my question:
As someone who really does not come out of the progressive, leftist, socialist, or secular tradition, but from a traditional Muslim background, to someone like Kaleem Saahab (or Ghazali Saahab—see http://www.amperspective.com/html/pragmatic_muslims.html) is this: Forget the progressives, for a second. If we, people like me, are genuinely not uncomfortable with about 80-98% of the ideological, political and theological content that dominates the mosques of Muslim America (and I would gladly list chapter and verse), what do we do? Do I bite the bullet and send my 5-year old to a Sunday School that will teach him 6 pillars of Islam (by counting Jihad) when I was brought up with a Hadith that lists 5?
Please, I would love an answer to that question. Again, I am not a socialist, progressive, leftist, secularist, or atheist. I come from a religious sunni tradition, but one that is not Maududist.
April 18, 2005
Dear Sabahat,
If you read carefully, I tried to make the following points in my article:
1. Leading Friday prayer by a woman is a non-event that aims to create divisions in the Muslim community. I made it very clear that it will neither strengthen nor weaken his/her belief in Islam if a Muslim accepts or rejects the idea that a woman could lead Friday prayer.
2. The so-called progressive Muslims lack integrity as proved by the stand of one of their director.
3. The issue of status of woman, just like lack of democracy in the Muslim world, is being used to defame Islam.
4. You may have some legitimate reservations about what is taught at the Islamic Centers. But we cannot reform them by negative criticism without suggesting a positive alternative package. The cliché of calling Jihad or Hijab as the 6th pillar of Islam is not going to help.
At the end I would like to ask: There are attempts to edit the Quran. Should we have a King’s version of Quran to “modernize” Islam?
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
April 18, 2005
Ghazali Saahab, with utmost respect. You haven't addressed my issues.
And the question of editing the Qur'an and other such things is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about that you and I agree on.
I am NOT from that school of thought. I am a person who considers himself within the traditional mainstream of Islam. Yet, I have issues with a lot of what our mainstream communities do; how they react and how we are bringing up our children.
Where do people like me go? Are you telling me that the only choices I have are to accept unquestioningly what I hear in the Khutbas or to go away and completely join the people who want to edit (na'uzu billahi
min zalik) the Qur'an?
It is exactly the "positive alternative package" which you mention that I am demanding from my elders. I am saying that if we are to say that what the Progressives are doing is the negative way to do it, where is the positive one that I can bring my child up in, so he is inoculated against the fanatic militants on the one hand and the people who want to edit the Qur'an on the other.
If we spend so much time telling them that we are a community that is under attack and we need to fight, fight, fight, all too often even ignoring the principles that Allah and his Prophet have given us for
how to engage adversaries (both intellectual and military), then we leave them in a place where they are too often knee-jerk reactionaries that--to use an example that happened over the last day or two--take
even a satirical report from the Borowitz website as an attack on Islam--without any regard, in this example, for the Hadith that says ALWAYS, ALWAYS confirm any news before forwarding it, or you are no
different from the "Munafiqoon", or hypocrites, the Prophet had to deal with.
Sabahat Iqbal Ashraf
April 19, 2005
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