Struggling for the Souls of Islamic Schools
In the end, the goal of liberal American Muslim leaders is to combine what is, in their minds, the best of their two worlds. They'd like to preserve their Islamic identity while democratizing Islam, and use their beliefs to change American society and foreign policy. And the key to achieving those goals, they believe, is to create a network of quality Islamic schools from the elementary through university levels, modeled on Roman Catholic schools, that provide both academic and religious schooling. To read the entire article click here..
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Muqtedar, Salam. Sensitizing Muslim teachers and children to the best parts of American culture requires also inviting them to explore the spiritual depths of all religions. In order to understand other religions, the best way for children is to understand one's own religion. Parents must first show their children that they understand it themselves, because mere explanations without understanding may be sufficient for most adults but not for children. Children by nature have a capacity to know truth directly, so they will be satisfied only at this level.
Adults have the same capacity but usually have been taught that ultimate truth comes only from the mullahs or their equivalent in whatever religion. Decades ago, I used to ask Catholic priests why their sermons never addressed the spiritual needs of their parishioners. The standard answer was that ninety percent of them would not understand such sermons and would not come back. This, of course, is why the charismatics and pentacostals or their equivalents are the real force in modern Christianity and, in fact, in all world religions today.
The "mullahs" in every religion are taught to stay away from addressing the deeper meanings of sacred scripture, because discussing anything beyond the superficial level will only confuse sincere believers and threaten their faith. The result is that sincere believers, whose faith cannot be threatened anyway, either stay at home so that the rantings and ravings of their own mullahs will not ruin their day or look elsewhere in hidden Sufi orders or even in other religions. Even in Sufi families, when the parents show by their behavior that their understanding can only be skin deep, their children end up just as alienated and rebellious, if not more so, than the children of secularized parents who merely send their children to religion class once a week.
The problem for first generation Muslims in America is their background in a Muslim country where there are no options other than Islam, so the children "back home" have no other choice than to do what their parents say. In America, all options are open, so the question about explaining religion to kids becomes the big question of the day.
The most extreme example of what happens when Muslims so obviously do not understand their own religion is the famous or infamous Sister Irshad Manji. This week, I bought her book, The Trouble with Islam Today, in the BWI airport and read it on the plane. Her entire problem is summarized at the beginning of her book, on page 4, in her introductory "Letter to my fellow Muslims." She writes concerning the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu 'alayhi wa salam, "When he was asked to define religion, he reportedly replied that religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others. A fine definition - simple without being simplistic. And yet, by that definition, how we Muslims behave, not in theory but in actuality, is Islam." This confusion of the divine with the human, perpetrated by such as Pat Robertson and Daniel Pipes, is the most seditious and evil perversion of truth ever prompted by the Anti-Christ.
Sister Irshad complains on pages 13 and 18 that in her madrassa education, despite classes in Arabic, she never learned that, "Haram, for instance, can refer to something forbidden or something sacred, depending on which "a" you stress. Forbidden versus sacred. We're not talking suble shifts in meaning here." From this elemental confusion of the religion Islam with its alleged practitioners, the Muslims, from this equation of the Qur'an with its narrow-minded interpreters, Irshad Manji concludes on page 36, that "the Koran is profoundly at war with itself" and is "a bundle of contradictions" and "blatant inconsistencies."
On pages 43-45, she describes contextual interpretation as "a fancy dance of evasion" designed to hide the fact that when the Prophet moved to Medina "the Koran's message of compassion turns to retribution," which, she says, proves that, "The Koran's perfection is, ultimately, suspect."
"The Koran's wild mood swings," she writes on page 51, "make any interpretation of its text selective and subjective." Having dismissed centuries of the best minds of humanity dedicated to exploring the meaning of the Qur'an, Irshad Manji claims her own right to exercise ijtihad and expose what on page 45 she calls "the paralysing sickliness of the entire religion" and on page 47 "Pavlovian Muslim prejudices." She condemns those who disagree with her belief, stated up front on page 2, that homosexuality is O.K. because "the Koran states that everything God made is 'excellent'." On page 51, she concludes that by monopolizing the right of ijtihad, "the follow-my-fatwa ayatollahs are the actual heretics." "Why do we need these guys at all," she asks on page 60. "Rather than imitating their imitation of each other's rulings, shouldn't we be rattling the gates of ijtihad and ripping off the lock? ... If we're going to imitate, then why not imitate tolerance instead of tyranny." This leads her to a number of conclusions throughout her book, including her statement on page 67 that Hassan al Banna's Muslim Brotherhood was "the Al-Qaeda of its generation."
All of this nonsense results from her initial premise that religion is not what is revealed or discovered but what is practiced by the people she has met. Is Sister Irshad only an extremely articulate example of what is happening to tens of thousands of young people in every religion when their parents cannot "explain religion to kids"?
What about those kids, unfortunately perhaps the minority, who grow up to recognize the difference between ultimate truth and the false pretensions of fallible humans? Perhaps these kids, who will be the future of wisdom in the modern world, have been blessed by knowing early on people who understood and practiced their religion. In my own case, my parents raised me to make my own choices in religion in the belief that all religion is a strictly private matter and should not be taught at all, especially by parents. The decisive influence in my life therefore was the year I spent with my father's mother when I was six years old. In retrospect, it is clear that she was the most spiritually profound person I have ever met. She read the bible an hour or two every day even though she was busy taking care of half a dozen delinquent girls who were sent to live in her small house as part of their rehabilitation (nowadays we lock them up). These girls remained in close contact with my grandmother, who outlived most of them, the rest of their lives.
My education consisted in watching her and joining her in singing Christian hymns, which was the staple of her everyday life. I don't remember her ever deliberately teaching me anything about religion even later in her life, because she knew that true religion consists in being and doing. This is the only way to explain religion to kids.
Sister Irshad Manji is correct in understanding the wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu 'alayhi wa salam, that "religion is the way we conduct ourselves." But, she is dead wrong, in concluding that human conduct therefore is the standard for evaluating religion. On the contrary, the ultimate knowledge and love that people instinctively seek in religion is the standard for evaluating human conduct.
The Prophet said that man is created in the image of God, which is why many devout Muslims recite the 99 names of Allah as guides to reflecting this perfection as best they can in their own lives. This concept of imago dei, found in Christianity and in all world religions, may be the best way to explain religion to kids.
Wa as-salam, Bob
Bob, Walaikum Salam. I agree whole heartedly with you. I remember in one class John Esposito made a fascinating comment, he said, "He who knows only one religion, knows no religion"! And I agree with him.
I have nothing to say about Irshad Manji or her book, I have not read it. However I find it a bit disingenous of her to call the Qur'an all sorts of things such as at "war with it self" and a "bundle of contradictions" etc.. and then use a verse from the same text to justify her own sexual preferences.
But these days everyone is using or rather abusing the Quran to justify their politics, so in that sense she is no different from any other Muslim.
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