LECTURE THREE

Inside and Outside Perceptions of Islam

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Consider what we dealt with in the first two lectures. The first one gave a conceptual basis for understanding. The second gave information. This one is to challenge your presumptions and assumptions. Mutual perceptions - Us and Them.

At the end of the last lecture I gave a description of the Prophet's life.

Is it factual? Yes. Is it true? It is partial truth. To fit 63 years into 271 words requires considerable selectivity. It mostly outlined "historical" details of his life, rather than aspects of his personality, yet clearly someone else could have made a different choice of events.

In fact it tells us very little about the man. Compare the following.

"It is a truism to say that everybody wants to be loved, but more than power and achievements it is the thing that gives satisfaction to our beings. Wouldn't we all like to feel that everyone we knew loved us, that they would give up all their possessions for us, and that they would die to protect us. Surrounded by friends like that would we not be satisfied and happy.

So whose example can we take as an example of this kind of life. The example that muslims take was patient, honest, just and chaste. He was the most generous of men, never asked for anything but that he gave it to the asker. He would prefer the seeker to himself and his family, and often went hungry because of it. He patched his own sandals and clothing, and did household chores. He was shy and would not stare into peoples faces. He attended feasts and funerals, visited the sick, and walked among enemies without a guard. He was the humblest of men. He sat and ate with the poor. He tyrannized nobody and accepted the excuse of anyone who begged his pardon. He was always joyful and never awed by the affairs of this world. He joked, but only spoke the truth. He did not eat better food than his servants. He refused to curse his enemies, saying "I was sent to forgive, not to curse". When asked to wish evil on anyone he blessed them instead. If there was a bed he slept on it, if not he reclined on the earth. One did not argue in his presence. He spoke only the truth. He was the most smiling and laughing of men.

His companion Ali said 'Of all men he was the most generous, the most open-hearted, the most truthful, the most fulfilling of promise, the gentlest of temper, and the noblest towards his family. Whoever saw him unexpectedly was awed by him, and whoever knew him intimately loved him.'

His answer to his name was 'At your service'. His name was Muhammad."

Not a description of historical details, but a description of his character - that aspect of a person which we find much more important in our day to day relationships. Does it sound like you imagined him? If not, perhaps it has something to do with an inevitable bias on my part. In fact :-

"The bias of the Musalmans is to gloss over the aberration of mind.... of their prophet.... Most of his biographers pass over [it] in silence.... We may, therefore, be justified in stretching the scanty information which we can glean from them to the utmost extent, and in supposing that he was for some time a complete maniac; and that the fit after which he assumed his office was a paroxysm of cataleptic insanity." as Dr. Sprenger says in his Life of Muhammad.

Or as Hughes says in his Notes on Muhammadanism; "....in the case of Muhammad, his professed inspiration sanctioned and encouraged his own vices. That which ought to have been the fountain of purity was, in fact, the cover of the Prophet's depravity"

And our own dear Sir William Muir in his Life of Mahomet says; "there was nurtured by the Prophet in his own heart, a licentious self-indulgence, till in the end.... he justified himself by `revelations' from God in the most flagrant breaches of morality......he could take pleasure in cruel and perfidious assassination, could gloat over the massacre of an entire tribe, and savagely consign the innocent babe to the fires of hell"

Are we actually talking about the same person? Living in the Christian West, your presumptions about Islam are inevitably coloured by cultural perspectives inherited from centuries of global confrontation. The Crusades soak through our culture. It is not just tales of Richard the Lionheart - when Allenby marched into Jerusalem he said "This is the end of the Crusades". He should have cleared that with the locals. We may think that Dante was a little extreme when he plunged the Prophet into the pit of Hell, but are modern media representations any more unbiased? Are you aware of how much you accept unquestioningly, especially when it conforms to your prior presumptions? Whose side are you on in El Cid? Am I us, or am I them?

Today I want to consider some of our stereotypes, and see if they are really justified. Us and Them. Here's tae us, wha's like us. Actually, THEY are quite often. One of the strangest manifestations of humanity is the way people have of thinking the same derogatory things about each other.

When the part of London in which my family were living became a cultural extension of South Asia, most of the original shops closed down, and very soon an older woman I knew well had half a dozen Halal butchers within walking distance. Nonetheless, she insisted on catching a bus to be able to buy meat wrapped in plastic from a white man in a white coat and a white hat. She was prepared to make the effort because she thought that any meat from those muslim butchers was probably "dirty". So does that mean that the local muslims didn't use her shop because they objected to its pernickety cleanliness? Of course not. They consider the meat sold in that shop as not being "clean" enough to eat.

That meat was almost certainly cut with the same knives and on the same chopping block as dead pigs. Does that sound like ridiculous and extreme behaviour, objecting to a smear of bacon fat? Would you feel the same about the shop if it was also serving dog? Perhaps not, as that is an animal that our culture also considers unclean. Whether the opinion is based on reason or not, the responses are culturally conditioned. We can be sure that there are places in the world where dog stew is considered a delicacy. People are capable of eating almost anything, including other people.

What other stereotypes do we have? What do we think about the muslims? What do we think that they think about us? To keep things manageable, I will just take for example three topics that often tend to raise the temperature of debate - Sex, Drugs, & Rock & Roll.

SEX

It seems that everyone knows that muslims are all sex-mad. Our best known scholars speak of the Prophet himself in terms of "depravity" and "licentious self-indulgence". Well, they know that the Prophet had numerous wives, and they obviously found it impossible to imagine any other motives for the situation. People on the street, who could tell you virtually nothing else about Islam, know that your average muslim man is allowed 4 wives. They also know that they are willingly shared - they've seen it in the James Bond movies.

This tabloid combination of moral reprehension and furtive envy is not new. It was the Victorian view of the harem, the women naked (apart from a few diaphanous veils), languid and glistening in the heat, and the men dark, forbidding, and sexually rapacious, with the potency of Arab stallions. The visions of Alma Tadema carried through into Hollywood with Valentino as "The Sheikh", and white slave movies. Are these images and attitudes valid?

Yet travel from a muslim country to the "Christian" west, and what do you see? Apparently live sex any night on the movies and TV, and our women virtually naked, on billboards, in magazines, and walking the streets. It was not always that way here, and the pendulum will probably swing back again someday. These things are socially and culturally determined, but along with our women's fashionable freedoms we inevitably accept Penthouse, Playboy and Page Three, and similar, somewhat more contentious liberties.

In most parts of the world, kissing in public is considered inappropriate behaviour. In Abu Dhabi, it took me a while to work out why "The Waltons" jumped so strangely from one scene to another. Then I realised that the censor had ruthlessly cut out all the kisses, a private sexual act that he clearly considered was not fitting to be seen on public TV. But Charles and Diana had their wedding around about that time, and what the Abu Dhabi authorities consider pornographic, our Royal Family did in public on Buckingham Palace balcony. I suspect, however, that if they had waved a bloodstained sheet as proof of her deflowered virginity (a custom common enough in other cultures), the crowds in the Mall might well have been horrified rather than delighted.

Attitudes to sexual relationships, family matters, are complex in any culture, and concerns are often similar. Propriety in matters of love, marriage and parentage, and whose responsibilities lie where. In most of the muslim world, marriages are considered as a relationship between families, and the western ideal of romantic love (shared by two perfectly matched individuals living in a blissful bubble of isolation) is viewed with a certain scepticism. But this attitude is not specifically muslim. In South Asia, Hindu and Christian families are likely to approach marriage the same way. Not too long ago, it would have been much the same here, and I'm sure that similar attitudes can still be found in the English aristocracy. At the moment, we still don't quite expect our future rulers to pick up their future spouses at the checkout queue in Our-Price Records.

In fact, not only is the "arranged" marriage not intrinsic to the muslim way of life, but there is a grand tradition of romantic love expressed in muslim poems and stories, and muslim tales of romantic chivalry considerably predating their Arthurian English equivalents. Passions are natural, but whether envy, anger or desire, they must be held in restraint for the cohesion of a society. That doesn't mean that such restraint should feel like a prison. Divorce is freely permitted for those who are so inclined, and in that light the betrayal of marital trust by adultery is treated as perhaps the most reprehensible of acts. A community is based on trust, and if you can't even trust your marriage partner, what hope is there that you will ever trust anyone else? The early muslim community often changed partners, and in the past, some orientalist scholars have found the flexibility of those marriage arrangements so alien as to be unrecognisable as marriage at all. But childrens' parentage was always a matter of public record, and their inheritances secure.

For there is more to marriage than lust and romance. There is a merging of people at a sub-cellular level as the species is propagated. These blood relationships are encompassed by cultural understandings of family values, but the way that these are expressed usually has little to do with any Qur'anic stipulation. Qur'an states the limits of marriage with regard to family relations, for example, but leaves decisions as to the proximity of living arrangements (nuclear or extended families) open to discussion. Different solutions will be preferred by different people in different societies. In the West, where individualism is god, a family is still thought of as 2 adults and 2.4 children. Few people see anything advantageous about living with parents, yet most would also prefer the idea of facing death in the midst of their children and grandchildren rather than surrounded by nurses in an old folks home.

What other sexual issues come to mind when we think of the muslims? Perhaps the most frequently quoted and challenged concerns the status of women in the muslim world. Downtrodden and subjugated by their men, marginalized socially and politically, imprisoned away from public view in harims, forced to be veiled, and worst of all, brutalized by circumcisions and even desexualized by clitoridectomies, all being perceptions so prevalent as to seem virtually universal. How close is that to your impressions?

Western women in particular, with their new found freedoms to go to work (usually for male bosses) as well as cooking for their husbands and children and cleaning their homes, are particular abusive and scornful when considering the achievements of their muslim sisters. Few ever seem to think that they might just be coming from a different starting point, have different needs, and wish to move in a different direction.

Of course men have subjugated and brutalized women all around the world for the entire history of humankind, just as they have also subjugated and brutalized their fellow men. In our present situation it is necessary, however, to distinguish those particular forms of oppression applied specifically to women, see how the muslim world compares to the Christian west, and also see if any such oppression is due to Islam or in spite of it. Yet when making cultural comparisons and evaluating Islamic fundamentals, how many non-muslims consider their ignorance a barrier to formulating a credible opinion, or recognize that any such opinions will inevitably be based on preconceptions and prejudice.

Preconceptions, by their nature, are rarely recognised and tend to be self-sustaining. Once an initial framework of understanding is constructed, a mental filing system or set of pigeonholes in which to place information is in place which imposes its own structure on incoming information, and data that does not fit the framework is more likely to be distorted to fit or discounted, rather than the much more difficult process of demolishing the framework and constructing one more suited to the information. This applies, even in the sciences, where results conflicting with initial theories are regularly discarded as "experimental error". What criteria do we use for our definitions of muslim women? Are they those prevalent perceptions I mentioned previously, and if so how well do muslim women fit into the pigeonholes we provide?

The tendency is to look at Benazir Bhutto, see that she is a Prime Minister, and deal with the information by ignoring it. Perhaps she isn't really a muslim. Perhaps the population that voted for her weren't really muslim. Clearly, if muslim women's lives are supposed to be limited to cooking and childbearing, some Pakistanis have made a serious mistake somewhere. We know muslim women are imprisoned in the home, so what need can there be for house arrest? And as Bangladesh also has a woman Prime Minister, clearly the population there have never bothered to learn those Islamic fundamentals that are so familiar to non-muslims in the West. Strangely enough, even that "fundamentalist" country Sudan has a much higher proportion of women in its Parliament than Westminster, which we arrogantly like to think of as the mother of them all, but of course, there are countries in the muslim world where it would be as hard for a woman to achieve political office as it would for a woman to become President of the U.S.A.

Sexual roles are defined in every culture, and as it's necessary for the continuance of the race, and men can't do it, childbirth has been central to women's roles for a long time now, not only in the muslim world. But muslim women have had many rights ever since the time of the Prophet which give them a societal strength, a personal power and self-assurance, that their western counterparts are only just beginning to achieve. A muslim woman has a right to personal finances and property quite independent of any husband, as well as a right to divorce if she decides that the match is not as appropriate as it once seemed. Whereas in the west, well within living memory, when a woman became a wife, she and her money and property all equally became part of her husband's goods and chattels forever, unless she managed to outlive him.

In fact, muslim women around the world do not always have the same problems with regard to acceptable roles as women in the Christian west. Ask some of those pretty little Malaysian girl students in the University what they are studying, and you may be surprised to discover how many will end up as civil engineers, an almost exclusively male occupation in our recent local history. Muslim women run banks and newspapers, hospitals and colleges. They were at the forefront of the Pakistan independence movement, reclaiming the Islamic rights they had known for years before the Raj reduced them to British justice. A well known muslim heroine fought alongside the Prophet when their community came under attack, and women have been central to the organization and mobilization of the intifadah in Palestine - and they've also been known to wear scarves.

Which, strangely enough considering the importance of some of the other issues involved, brings us to one of the major bones of contention. Some people dress differently. Why should this be such a major point of  conflict? Much like the colours of a football team's supporters, our style of dress tends to be seen as a pledge of allegiance and a mark of our cultural identity. And as with most cultural manifestations, their logic or usefulness is rarely questioned. They are simply considered as "normal", and anything too far in any direction from that "normality" is considered undesirably "extreme". Of course, most people consider the ultimately desirable normality as congruent with themselves.

What is important for a society, however, is to examine how tolerant we are of those who differ. So many years after the Beatles, it may seem strange to imagine the strength of the reaction whole communities once had to the "corrupting" influence of their hair. I am sure that there are still loggers bars in Wyoming with signs threatening to give hippies haircuts with a chainsaw, yet things come full circle, and since that time "skinheads" have equally been seen as a societal threat. As with hair, so with dress codes in general. We use our clothes as a subtle language defining our class, our occupation, and our morality, and even more than with a verbal language, we tend to demand that everyone else speaks our own.  

Dress codes - cultural variety of hijab - enforced removal of hijab in Turkey and in the West - muslim girls at home - modern nakedness - the right to take off female clothes in public, even occasionally for money - female nudity and advertising - the relative newness of Page 3 - In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows - anything goes

Sexual separation - muslims mixing - catholic attitudes - the effect of separate sex classes on education - living history examples of social sexual separation in the West

DRUGS - The social and medical effects of Alcohol - recent change in attitudes - the requirement for alcohol on American army bases in muslim countries - Tobacco advertising and sales in Turkey and the third world - Dietary laws - Pork - culturally conditioned nausea when facing unfamiliar foods

ROCK'N'ROLL - Music - The silencd of Yusuf Islam and the melodies of Richard Thompson - Muslim rappers - Heavy metal - the impact of Elvis Presley on the west - the global influence of Band Aid - powerful stuff - hence dangerous - ditto images - movie 'idols' and the unreality of celebrity - belief in the reality of Coronation Street

JIHAD - Muslims represented as bloodthirsty by nature - blood spilt in secular 20th century wars - the British invention of Gunboat diplomacy - Greater and lesser Jihad - removing fear of death - fearlessness and the prevention of tyranny

ISLAMIC STATES - No separation of religion and politics - religious scholars independent and critical of rulers - religion as an instrument of social control - hypocrites use of religion - Mu'awiya and the slaughter of the Prophet's family - Multicultural Muslim Spain becomes The Spanish Inquisition - modern Islamic states mostly created by non-muslims - Britain in Arabia - colonial support for feudal autocratic 'muslim' kings - the arming of Saddam by the West - Mosque ownership - no clergy - Syrian Khutbas centrally issued by secular state - the burning of beards in 'muslim' Syria - colonial Shari'a reduced to Hudud punishments and devoid of 'Adl - justice

So where is Islam - preserved in the hearts and minds of individual muslims -punters can recognise hypocrisy - Islamic values (good & bad) culturally defined - piety and sincerity - truth and tolerance - humility and generosity - shared values - the prison of secular logic - the infinitude of spirit - an end to the conflict - the end of time - now is different - cooperate or die

I ask forgiveness of Allah for such mistakes as I have made. The glory and the praise are for God alone.