By Tahir Aslam Gora
The Hamilton Spectator
(Mar 22, 2007)
Reviving Islam is a struggle for both fundamentalist and secular Muslims. Both see the process of revival as essential to survival, but have entirely different perspectives on it. Both groups are vocal.
Neither represents the majority of Muslims.
The majority of Muslims are moving from one direction to the other. They tend to go close to the fundamentalist side when they need to practise their rituals, and they find the expression of their heart from the secular when they need to celebrate their life.
Actually, they are looking for balance between these two perspectives -- but no Muslim individual or group is certain exactly what sort of balance they are looking for.
Each and every Muslim has -- like their literalist or liberal ideals -- his or her own interpretation of Islam.
On the other hand, westerners direly need to know and understand Islam -- but find the same types of blurry answers.
Some of them then consult the Koran by themselves, but the Koran, like any religious scripture, can't provide direct answers for most contemporary issues.
Then the westerners, like most Muslims, look for opinions of both groups of Islam. They listen to imams, traditional Islamic organizations and literalists.
They also read or listen to Muslim writers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, Asra Nomani and Irshad Manji in order to understand different perspectives of Islam.
They listen to Tarek Fatah, (founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress) and Haroon Siddiqui (a columnist who appears occasionally on this page), who claim to be modest voices of Islam through their own personal perspectives. Neither, though, agrees with the other.
Particularly in Canada, Manji (the Toronto author of The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith) Fatah and Siddiqui are prominent voices of Islam, raging from critical to accommodative.
Manji's brilliant and sharp questioning is not tolerated by most Muslims.
Fatah's activism bothers many. However, Siddiqui's accommodative writing comforts most Muslims, especially when he speaks out for Muslims' right of free expression.
But he fails to suggest that his Muslim fellows respect freedom of expression elsewhere in the world.
The "rest of the world" expects that if Muslims want free expression of and for their religious beliefs, they are expected to extend the same right. Muslims could have tolerated the infamous Danish Allah cartoons; they could have rescinded the death Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and so on.
Such complexities do not make issues easy to resolve.
Recently, Muslim and non-Muslim people found a rising star in writer Tariq Ramadan.
They thought he would provide them the answers and balance they were looking for.
They thought that the author of Western Muslims and the Future of Islam would be able to offer solutions for unresolved issues between Islam and the West.
But Ramadan proved himself a Muslim scholar rather than a thinker, by and large.
He talks about the indulgences of Muslims living in the West but also advises them to continue protests against Danish cartoons, to support the campaign to ban an "offensive" play and to justify suicide bombings against Israelis.
So, the question remains: Will the majority of the Muslims be able to find the balance they seek? If not now, when?
Tahir Aslam Gora is a Pakistani writer living in Burlington. He is the author of several books and is now working on Why Islam Needs to Evolve. E-mail: goratahir@yahoo.ca
