The following is from my friend Ali Sedehi - had to cut and paste because the original privacy settings wouldnt allow everyone to read it - and everyone should: Yes we are all Muslim, but Muslim is not all we are. Yes Islam is integral to who we are, but it is not definitive to who and what we are. Yes Islamic law is integral to being a Muslim but not definitive to being a Muslim. There is more than one way to be a Muslim and no Imam, no Mullah, no Sheikh, no sect, absolutely no one and nothing has a monopoly over defining who or what is a Muslim. Muslims are the descendants of vast and successive world and worldly empires. A rich and diversified intellectual, discursive, institutional, spiritual, and symbolic history informs the transnational public sphere upon which Muslims can now articulate who and what they are. There is more to “Islam” than any fraternity club of Mullahs or Imams or self-appointed “leaders” can imagine or legislate in their Shariah. Just because there is a nasty streak of racism and Islamophobia in Europe and North America and all they see in us is being a “Muslim” (which for them is a coded word for being a “terrorist”) it does not mean we too should reduce and compromise the diversified plurality, the rich complexity, the life-affirming multiplicity of who and what we are to their common denominator of fear and loathing. We are a world and we have inherited a worldliness of which both the Islamophobes and the Islamists (two sides of the same nasty coin) are constitutionally ignorant and every day that passes their ignorance increases. In order to break the vicious cycle between the militant Islamists and racist Islamophobes and deny them the monopoly of the dominant discourse we need to expose them simultaneously—for the ugly mirror image of each other that they are. - Dr Daboushi
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 23:09:24 +0000