Muslims living in the West after Rushdie 
- A Crisis of Identity 

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim!

Salaamu aleikum
(Pantomime introduction)  

Establishing who are the audience - do we have muslims or non-muslims here - the lecture title says ‘living in the west’ so this lecture involves both.  As my audience is usually almost entirely muslims, however, the lecture is really written for muslims, but in language to be understood by non-muslims, so whoever you are you will be lucky if you understand half. 

Foreign mother tongue muslims may well find the language difficult, even if you understand all the words you can be sure you will be missing much of the inflections and the tone of voice.  The answer is to get it on tape or video then you can always rewind it and play it back again as often as you like. (Scratch video repeat) 

Language and understanding.  But then, who amongst the muslims am I talking to, those who are visiting, those who are settling here, or those who are from here.  And what about those born as Christians, raised as Christians, and converting to Islam, and those born as muslims but raised and educated in a Christian environment.  Different people with different needs, and they must be dealt with individually.  When the Pakistani cricket team or the Saudi soccer squad come to this country, does being a muslim influence which side you support.  Do you feel that you are British or expatriate? 

What language do you speak?  Communities tend to define themselves by language, and it’s wonderful to see people who preserve their cultural roots, but lessons in Urdu for the kids in school is not really taking care of their Islamic studies, they would perhaps do that better in English. 

Now if we are to talk in English do muslims and non-muslims speak the same language, are our ideas really so different?  Even though the words are English, I use different languages in each community, drawing on shared experience.  For instance how many here have been to a Christmas pantomime?  That is something that I share with most others who were children in this country.  How much of British culture is it possible for a muslim to share? 

How much of muslim culture is even remotely intelligible to the west, globally or locally?  Have you ever tried to find out, or do you really not want to know?  Those who are just visitors may never feel the need, but for the resident minority it is essential that they learn to talk the language of the majority.  And I don’t just mean English.  The recent Salman Rushdie uproar has been consistently fueled by aberrant decoding on both sides, but as people claiming leadership of the muslim community are demanding the right to censor what I read, I am also hoping nonmuslims will examine how they justify their authority, and perhaps learn enough to form a judgement as to the Islamic nature or otherwise of their stated aims. 

Here in Britain a few percent of the population define themselves as muslim, mostly from the BanglaPaklndia triangle, but with a scattering of other nationalities.  Western Europe are much the same, France having its Algerians, Spain its Moroccans, Italy its Libyans, and Germany its Turks.  America has some black muslims and then an assortment of everything else.  Small percentages of ethnic minorities preserving cultural traditions in a broad range from the mother-tongue speaking traditionalist to teenagers westernised to the limits of belief.  We are on the fringes of the muslim community, and have a particular need to understand the culture that embraces us. 

But although we are in the front line, the problems of Islamic definition that we face are reflected in the cultural confrontations of the muslim homelands, and the community cannot forever blame their weaknesses on military and economic colonialism.  Muslims were colonised because they were weak, and they must understand the strengths of those who colonised them. 

Qur’an - How many have we destroyed before you 

It is important that we look at the understandings, values and aspirations that we share, looking at the good points of the west as well as the bad, looking at the bad points of the muslim community as well as the good.  We have to see our similarities as human beings, good and bad, because those with a foot in each culture know that each accuses the other of much the same flaws. 

In what ways can we look at people to see how we share and compare?  Some men are narrow-minded and some are broad-visioned.  They can be standing in the same place and yet have very different views, one concentrating on a small area of specialization, while the other tries to see how it fits into the world.  Some are traditionalists and some progressives, looking backward and preserving wisdom inherited from the past, or looking forward to discover ways of applying it to the future.  Some men's minds are rigid and some more flexible, one concerned with setting limits to self-indulgence, and the other trying to find ways of extending mercy towards human weakness.  Many ideas can be looked at in this way, do we let one man rule and risk tyranny, or give the power to the people who can turn into a mob.  Is Islam better served by an extreme position, or is it the Middle Way. 

Qur’an/Hadith 

Muslims tend to see Islam as some ideal unchanging definable point to be reached, rather than a journey through ever-changing scenery following the Middle Way.  And from their understanding of that ideal goal they look at the world that surrounds them and judge it by standards that apply to another place and time. 

So how do muslims see the west, what are the bad points most frequently condemned, and are the standards of the muslim community so very different. Dress codes and sexual freedoms, unclean food, alcohol, and music.  The muslims talk of Westerners as obsessed with sex, so its a surprise for a Westerner getting close to the community to find that muslim men talk of little else. 

I object when they talk of western women as whores just because they are bare-legged and unchaperoned.  The number of times I have heard muslims talk of western women walking naked in the streets, and in 47 years I have never seen it.  Western women also veil themselves, to a greater or lesser extent.  It takes great restraint to listen to a muslim shopkeeper insisting on the need for purdah, when the shelf behind him is groaning beneath the weight of Penthouses, Playboys and the Sun, and his wife and daughters stand and take the money at the till. 

If every muslim with a newspaper shop stopped selling books and newspapers with dirty pictures, the publishers would soon go out of business, but such a moral stand would eat into the profits.  And of course the downtown disco, where the girls just wear black cami-knickers would also be out of business if the muslims stayed away.  Their alcohol sales would plummet of course, though the local ‘muslim’ off-licences would probably get the trade. 

And then there's food.  Surrounded by halal butchers, my mother would go out of her way to avoid them because of their bad manners as much as their lack of hygiene.  How can a man write "halal meat" on his door, then sell you meat that is obviously bad and then short change you?  I wouldn't talk about it if it hadn't happened to me personally in one of the best known ‘halal’ butchers in Glasgow – dare I say it, perhaps because I am white and not obviously a muslim (though who knows if it would have made a difference).  Sometimes the difference between the theory to which muslims give lip-service and the practise of their lives is breathtaking in its schizophrenia. 

Muslims from my local mosque organised pickets outside a Pakistani concert, because there is "no music in Islam".  Yet the TV's in their homes are switched on day and night, and just what is that noise in the background of every programme.  Every country I have been to had its music on TV, and what chance is there of cutting out the music from the Bombay movies.  The muslim video shops would soon be out of business.  This week it is a novel, but what is the next thing that ought to be banned?  How muslim do you want to be? How much are you prepared to give up, and on whose recommendation Can you really call TV Evilvision, like Yusuf, and appear on it every week?  And if you cannot censor the airwaves does it not come down to self control? 

Sex and drugs and rock and roll, those seem to be the mosque muslims’ view of the west's bad points, but what are its good points?  Political and religious freedom is one.  Now all Britain's residents may not be as free as they might like in some theoretical utopia, but you still have a better chance to speak your mind than in most of the nominally muslim countries, and many more would like to be here to escape the censors blue pencil, or even the policeman knocking on the door.  But I forgot, freedom of expression is not a very popular phrase amongst muslims at the moment.  People tend to talk of their own rights, and other peoples duties. 

A western good point is education, mostly of the practical kind, muslims visit for a while to learn medicine or engineering, hoping to return home and increase their own as well as their nations prosperity and material well-being.  In fact the west's capacity to provide wealth must surely be the most popular of its good points.  How strange that materialism, the driving force of most muslim minorities in the west, is one aspect of western life most often rejected by those westerners who turn to Islam. 

You see, one advantage of growing up in the west is that within the law you can criticise your own religion and culture, and if you choose you can reject it completely, and live as a Pakistani or a muslim.  If you want to wear strange clothes that's OK.  But what kind of person would want to be muslim? Are there any unifying factors? 

Well inevitably they tend to be individualists with the self-assurance that comes with having faced up to self-doubt.  You see it is often forgotten that doubt is a primary requirement for conversion.  The kind of person who can convert first needs to doubt the 2000 year long tradition of truth as preserved by the wisest men of the Christian West.  So converts tend to be loners, accepting only the advice of the sheikh who says "Never trust anybody -especially me." They have rejected the collective wisdom of the Christian priesthood as dogma incompatible with their ideas and experience, and have searched for understanding and spiritual values that are relevant to their lives, a way out of confusion, a glimpse of the reason why. 

The vast majority of converts approach Islam through the sufi traditions, and in fact it is really only there that they are welcome.  Few mosques are interested in opening their doors to converts, when they are obviously eager to ask probing questions and challenge tradition and accepted dogma.  One often hears from muslims that there is an astonishing rate of conversion to Islam.  Hundreds of British men and women are becoming muslim. Thousands even! Don't you believe it! Let us look at the reality in the town that I know best, Glasgow, and let us deal with conversions from two viewpoints. 

Firstly there are those due to intermarriage, mostly women but occasionally men who become muslim as part of a package deal in their plans to share their lives with someone they love.  Whether these outnumber the reverse flow of muslims marrying Christians and taking on their belief systems, I don't know, and I'm not too sure if there are any reliable statistics, but these are special cases due to the nature of the relationship.  Perhaps a dozen girls or so have taken on the Pakistani dress and culture, happily joining the extended family, and settling down to have babies.  Of course it is not always quite that easy, and I know of at least one convert who after six months in the bosom of a muslim family who will now have nothing to do with any of them.  And why do so many muslim men who fall in love with western girls somehow think they can turn them into traditional muslim women without losing what they originally preferred to the women they left at home? 

So what other evidence have we of a massive wave of conversions? With 27,000 muslims in Glasgow, you don't need the fingers of two hands to count the converts, and those that did convert rarely came via the muslim community.  In fact the muslim community tends to dissuade those who are interested.  How many have fallen away after being told they have to accept a mental straightjacket if they are to be considered muslim?  

The bridge between Islam and the West reaches both ways.  If we are going to allow Westerners to become muslim, we are going to have to accept the discussion of doubt on the fringes of our own community.  These are the blurred edges of reaching outwards.  The narrower we make our doctrinal limits, the fewer muslims will be in the fold.  After watching various muslims on TV just recently, my wife said she would have to stop calling herself muslim as she didn't want to be associated with what she saw.  I have had the same feelings myself often enough, and have tried to find another name, something like ‘hanif’, but eventually decided that it has to be ‘muslim’, it’s the name that Allah uses. Why is it that the narrowest minds are so readily allowed to shout their claims to the name of Islam?  Is it not time for us to once more use Islam as the name of the Middle Way. 

So apart from marriage why do people convert - is it intellect or experience, because it made sense or because they had no choice? I said that most of us come from a rather more esoteric spiritual type than the usual, but apart from that there are many different types, from opportunist and mad, to spiritual and gentle, to intellectual and western, to narrow and traditional.  Some look for a sense of certainty, and gain it through surrender.  Some surrender to human beings, whether tyrants or servants of God only Allah can tell, some give themselves to an ideal or an idea, and some to God and the unfolding of Creation. 

Broad or narrow vision, both are neccessary.  For instance sufi converts will often be strict in practise and perhaps dress code, while having a much more relaxed approach to Islamic jurisprudence.  A report from a well-known black muslim womens group in America, stresses as a first principle that no-one criticises anyone else’s interpretation of Islam.  No guilty consciences.  Some converts take on narrow dress codes, highly restrictive behaviour codes, and tunnel vision of belief and understanding, though who am I to criticize or question their interpretations if they spend their time in the mosque, though woe to those that pray and are heedless of their prayers, to those who make display and refuse charity. 

Lack of Criticism is not common in Islam.  Muslims everywhere are always ready to tell you what you should be doing and quoting hadith to prove it. Making requirements so strict and difficult that they are impossible to live up to, and so justify their inability to cope with the rules themselves. I knew a man in Abu Dhabi who was forever telling me that the Islam that I was practicing was far from right, and that he was the man to explain the correct procedures in detail. Unfortunately he didn't actually pray or fast himself, because as he told me, when he started to seriously practise his Islam, it would have to be exceptionally perfect, and up to then he simply hadn't had the time.  Common enough in the ummah.  Make it so hard to do that you can excuse yourself on the grounds that it's impossible. 

How much to change is the question for converts.  How much cultural immersion do we feel necessary to accept.  In the change from non to muslim, how far do we have to go in cleaning up our act? How much do we have to do to be considered as muslim, and what is the practice of the ummah itself? It is that question that is most likely to throw a spanner in the works, because muslims really don't like to talk about such things, it brings out the guilty conscience in them. 

Let me make clear that it is from the ummah that I learned my Islam, or to be more precise, from a few individuals within the ummah.  I learned of a religion of truth and tolerance, mercy and compassion, patience and justice, but some years after my first Ramadan in the USA, I decided to see how muslims lived in the muslim world, and soon got the shock of my life.  When travelling through the lands of Islam, how rarely one meets truth and tolerance.  In fact most muslims seem to have an aversion for the truth that amounts to a refusal to look at the real world.  How rarely one gets to see the Prophet in his followers, and how frequently angry and ashamed I became that the behaviour of these people should be linked with his. 

Yet listen to the muslims, and you never would believe it.  All must be perfect in any land ruled by Islam, so to suggest that things are less than perfect is to suggest that the system is less than Islamic, and that will never do.  My wife when she first met the muslims came home saying how wonderful it must be in Pakistan.  No theft, no fraud, no corruption, no sexual abuse, no prostitution, male or female, and every marriage perfect.  At least that is what the Pakistani muslims told her. 

There are some dreadful people calling themselves muslims - even the muslims don't know why anyone would want to be a muslim. Why a muslim? It is the question every convert hears from the muslims all the time. It is the question I have asked many muslim students and thrown them into consternation when making obvious challenges to their answers. Even the most devout muslims don’t know have any idea why someone would choose it. Muslims are not taught to ask why they do the things they do, they are taught just to follow the rules.  

It's hard to live in the muslim world if you're not prepared to play the game and accept a set of rules from somebody.  The first time I went into a mosque in a muslim country it was for the ‘Asr prayer early one Ramadan.  A man rushed across to throw me out thinking I was a tourist, but when I explained that I was a muslim wanting to pray, the first question was "are you Sunni or Shi’a?"  My answer nowadays is "both", though it could be neither, as for me the question is quite meaningless.  Tell me which was the Prophet, and that's the one I want to be, and if he wasn't either I'm not bothered, you can argue about it amongst yourselves. So many different varieties of muslim, each arguing his own case for some petty distinctions, and saying that's what I ought to be.  The whole thing seemed decidedly anti-islamic. 

So how do muslims understand the basic laws of living in Islam?  I remember half the muslims in Indonesia don’t fast because they have ‘bad stomachs’ during Ramadan (though this should perhaps not be surprising as with what seemed like incredible ignorance of the underlying principles of Islam they would make wudu in water so dirty that I wouldn't wash my socks in it).  I remember an Egyptian builder who looked forward to Ramadan, as he got the chance to eat quietly at home.  My wife now tell all sorts of Pakistani women’s horror stories, such as being raped by their ‘muslim’ husbands in the days of Ramadan.  The greed, the corruption, the lies, the injustice, and all by people who call themselves muslim.  I remember the shock of sleeping in a dormitory with a couple of dozen muslim teachers, when despite the furious racket of several alarm clocks and the amplified booming from the minarets, only three of us made it out of bed for the dawn prayer. I don’t suppose many born muslims would be surprised. Not a bad percentage - many people suggest that only one out of ten nominal muslims actually make the prayer. It should have been just two of us. 

So is the actual religious practise not essential to the Law (I thought they were the five pillars!) and if so is the behaviour of ordinary muslims somehow outside it? Historically the Law has tremendous subtlety in the freedom it allows the individual, especially on the fringes of the community.  The muslim people live according to adab, muslim manners, often quite different from place to place, and the actual praying and mosque going they leave to those who make their Islam a full time job, while they get on with the things that interest them.  All this despite the Qur’an's clear warnings against ‘withdrawing to monasteries’.  

The problem with this religious apathy however is that the apparent spiritual high ground is seen to be remote, but is actually unavoidably central to the lives and thoughts of the people who live within its system, and those who realise that real power comes not from military control of a people, but the shaping and controlling of their minds, also realise that the job opportunities in Islam are wide open to anybody who wants to stake a claim.  The financial rewards are not substantial, but I think that the political leaders of most nations are rarely in it for the money, whether they be secular or clerical, and who knows which is more flattering to the ego, to be a pop-star or a spiritual leader. Wide open indeed. In Glasgow, post Rushdie, we have ‘The Islamic Defense Council for Scotland’ – three men with loud voices and an axe to grind - shouting slogans, and calling for demonstrations as self appointed ‘leaders of the community’. How much easier to shout death and hatred than to do something creative and positive in the long term. 

The definition of a muslim seems hopelessly confused, something between making Shahada and taking on a whole system of rules for life. Can we not establish the fundamental laws of living as a muhsin, a hanif, a good man? More than prayer is needed, we need good works. The language of the Qur’an constantly links faith with doing good, and similarly links prayer with the paying of zakat. God says ‘Woe to those who pray and are heedless of their prayers – to those who make display and refuse charity!’ What about the first principles of Islam, are they not truth, tolerance, mercy, compassion, patience, humility, justice etcetera? 

Is this the way that muslims are seen? Well not too much in the mosque, where one can usually expect a profound intolerance of any ‘deviant’ behaviour (I have taken extraordinary abuse for placing a Qur’an on the floor while I was reading it). Do we see it in the mullahs? Or do they tend to be more interested in the formalisation and codification of their religion, a power tool with authority for doctrinal control, as with the government issued khutbas of some parts of the muslim world, where you can be jailed for speaking your mind in the mosque, or here where imams are regularly imported from BanglaPakIndia to retain some kind of cultural purity. We don’t even see it too much in the adab of the people, as they make sure to apply the Shari’ah they demand with the utmost latitude and ambiguity for themselves.  

The main task for someone interested in Islam is learning to recognize the misguided and the hypocritical in all areas of the community, in the mosque and on the street, and the thought of cant and hypocrisy brings me directly to the way that the community has handled the Rushdie affair. I personally see Rushdie as an inevitable product of the system that nurtured him. Can he be condemned for rejecting Islam if he was never really muslim in the first place? Take his formative years raised in the ‘Islam’ of the sub-continent, then place him in a western education system to challenge it with doubt, and you have a tortured soul. When that child also has an extraordinary talent, a flair for words that can win international literary prizes, and he turns his gaze on the repressive elements of the Islam he has experienced, it is hardly surprising that what he says causes a stir amongst those whose power he challenges. 

But what did he say, and did he say what he is supposed to have said? How many have read the book, and does he accept that it says what so many people say it does? In fact, the actual content has barely been discussed, as the assumptions of what it says have been used as a springboard for popular fury. For to treat it as a simple insult is an easy way to avoid discussing the issues actually raised in the book, while the ludicrous ignorance displayed in the actions of so many has managed to instill quite the opposite effect to the one they are demanding. It has made the book indispensable reading for the vast majority of the population (though not the ones doing the shouting), to the extent that it is now sold out and unavailable for closer examination.  

So I, like many others, have been reduced to gleaning my understanding of the facts of the case from the excerpts published in inflammatory pamphlets. Even so, perhaps it is my familiarity with the form of the novel, or my view of the muslim culture of the sub-continent as an outsider, but I find it hard to read the meaning into those excerpts that the pamphlets’ authors usually do. The ‘rules, rules’ passage seems more than likely to have been the way that he was taught. The ‘whores’ passage doesn’t seem to have much to do with the Prophet’s wives, but is much more linked to the present day, for do Pakistani girls never end up on the street, and what names have they been given before being driven into their trade? If that’s the worst that is on offer, it really doesn’t seem that he is guilty of much more than bad taste – hardly death threat stuff. 

So why has it been so misrepresented? Why are so many trying to impose their own interpretation of its meaning, their ideas of how it should be understood, upon the rest of us by forceful persuasion. Who and what should be feared here? Well, clearly another theme that is dealt with in the book is that of ‘mind control’, what he calls the ‘thought police’ trying to impose doctrinal formulations. He is making a direct challenge to claims of infallibility, or taqlid, or the imamate. In bringing up the story of the Satanic Verses he makes the point that if the Prophet can be fooled then surely so can the mullahs. And if it comes to that, which of those who condemn him would even have read it? One has to wonder which was more important with regard to starting all this uproar, offending Muhammad or offending the mullahs. God knows that in his lifetime Muhammad was given much more grievous insults than any I have seen in any of these pamphlets, and he never responded with anything except compassion for the one who gave the insult. Does the Qur’an not say that he was sent as a Mercy to all beings? So where is the mercy of those who claim to be his followers? 

But now it seems that we have a confrontation between a whole string of conservative muslims and the west, and one wonders what they might be hoping to achieve, what powers they might be hoping for. Life or death it seems. Or censorship of what we read with regard to anything Islamic? Even if this was not questionable on moral grounds and unworkable on pragmatic grounds, it is laughable in its megalomaniacal arrogance. Who are to be the censors? You are students, expected to meet the challenge of ideas, the best brains of your countries. How are you to meet the challenge of western ways of handling ideas if you are not allowed to read them? How could you function without discussion, debate and questioning (Oh how depressing it is to talk to groups of muslims about Islam and have to face their astonishing lack of facility for questioning), the use of a devil’s advocate? How do you use fable, fairy stories (the 1001 nights?), science fiction, magical realism, to cast your world in a different light? Films, plays, novels, investigative journalism, history, geography, science, philosophy, all use language as a means of communicating ideas. You cannot burn it – you have to master it. 

If you are to give up your freedom to study and to judge for yourself, who can you trust? To give any trust you have to be able to recognize real muslims, those who truly follow the example of the Prophet. And what are the attributes of Muhammad? Mercy, compassion, justice, tolerance, forgiveness, love, humour, patience, humility, piety, generosity, contentment, truth, cleanliness, courage, repentance, submission to God, and gratitude. You know his attributes as well as I do, so if you are looking for someone to follow in this world today, look for those who reflect those attributes of the Prophet in their own lives. Beware of those who preach intolerance and refuse mercy and forgiveness. The world is a mosque and all our lives should be lived as worship and service to our Maker, not lost in a maze of doctrine and dogma, and if the Message of Islam is to be brought to the west it will have to be explained in the language of the west, and who will do that if not for you.