Education & Health

The Role of Muslims and the Community

Good Evening, Salaamualeikum

Thank you for coming

Bismillah
How it's used - Abu Dhabi Lift
What it looks like - different forms, same meaning

Why are we here?
A group of strangers
All different motives for coming.
All different frameworks of understanding.

Trying to Communicate
If we are to be able to share anything as a community, we have to have a common language.
Before language we have human link of shared experience
To build a bridge we need to recognize how little we know about each other
We need openness to unfamiliar ways of expressing things
And sincerity in our efforts, or at least our good intentions towards each other

Recognising Prior Prejudices
We all have them
I'm from Scotland
I have trouble saying a good word about Tories
But deep down I know that they're people - almost like us.
A little bit of Glasgow prejudice
A true story from a Glasgow primary school
Kids going to be taken on a visit to a mosque
OK only if it's a Protestant mosque
If it's a Catholic mosque I can't go Miss

How do you feel about the muslims?
Are you here to learn about them?
So you know how better to deal with them when you meet them in the future?
Do  you expect to learn anything that might be a useful insight or point of view for yourself?
Even though you might move into a cottage in the country and never see another muslim in your life again?
What is most useful to you?

Teaching a Glasgow University class of trainee ministers
Good News Bibles on their desks
Why would they want to learn about Islam?
Know their enemy?
Globalise their understanding of community.
Some were afraid that their faith would be 'corrupted'
One said that half of what I said could go straight into her Sunday sermon, and no-one would object to anything in it.
What would you have expected?

Do you have questions you want to ask?
It's not questions you want but answers
How do you know they are the right questions?
Can you understand the answers?
Can you make any judgement as to whether a person telling you something knows what he or she is talking about?
I stand here a case in point!

A Common Language
Is it possible?
How long does it take to learn a language?
How many of us ever found time?
But we're not talking about learning Arabic, just a framework of understanding
Something on which to hang the bits of information that we pick up
Possible!
We do that kind of communicating all the time
Trying to understand what someone means
A fellow human being, so having a huge overlap of experience
Yet sometimes seemingly understanding things so differently

This is a familiar topic in my repertoire
University / Staff Development with Strathclyde Schools / Representatives of nearly every school in Strathclyde / Regular radio slots for an overwhelmingly non-muslim audience
Finding a language non-muslims understand
Which is why I'm here
Outline description of my umbrella talk
One way of understanding the muslim world
Not necessarily a way muslims would think of expressing it for themselves
But they would recognise it in all its parts
How much detail?
Takes 20 hours with muslims
4 hours with university students
An hour with teachers in-service
Ten minutes for primary school classes
How much do we have time for?
Primary One! 

Understanding the world of Islam
Variety and Unity
Goodness, Faith & Submission
Knowledge, Worship, and Way of Life

Cultural Expressions
Common Values
Expressed through Cultural Norms
Modesty - we all understand
We all veil bits of ourselves
Which bits vary with time and place
But we always consider ourselves to be normal and variations to be shockingly naked or comically overdressed
In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking
Europeans colonised the South Pacific with bra's
Now we have Page 3 and Playboy
Is that what women want?

Misperceptions
Cultural Groupings misperceive each other
Us and Them
We usually have similar views of each other
I know an old lady from Wembley
After Wembley became Asian and her local butchers turned Halal
She took a bus across town to buy meat wrapped in plastic from a man she trusted to be clean
It might well have been racism, but she thought of the halal butchers as dirty
But the halal butcher is there because his customers think her butcher's meat to dirty (not 'too clean')
There would be pig meat all over the place
What if he also butchered your unclean animals?
What if he was skinning and slicing dead dogs or bush meat on his slab?
How would you feel?

Reinforcing Preconceptions
Day to day life moves very fast
We get used to making quick judgements
We then tend to use those early judgements as a window any time we look in the same direction
It only sees one view
I was interviewed by Edie Stark on Radio Scotland
After a brief lead-in asking how muslims might suffer from prejudice
In one sentence mentioned Fundamentalism, Terrorism, Lockerbie, Militant School Separatism, Salman Rushdie, Veiling and Female Circumcision, and gave me five frequently interrupted minutes to explain it all away for the listeners.
Those were her pigeonholes for Muslims and Islam, being broadcast nationwide
1/5th of the world's population for 1400 years and that was all she could think of to say
Sad really
That's why Islamic Awareness Week Edie
For people like you

Women in Islam
She brought up women's oppression in muslim countries like Pakistan
Segregated, veiled from head to foot, locked away, powerless
All I had time to say was Benazir Bhutto
Of course women have power in Pakistan
I often have to say to ladies who voice this concern - You underestimate your muslim sisters.
Many will tell you a woman leader is completely unacceptable to God and Man
Just as they will here
But the muslim population voted for a woman
Just as they did in Bangladesh

Pigeonholes
Preconceptions are really just mental pigeonholes we use to make sense of the world
The problem comes when we discard the world that doesn't fit the shape of our pigeonhole
Preconceptions about muslims here?
Living with muslims
Who are the muslims?
Foreign or British?
Getting more British by the generation
In Glasgow First Generation
Over 30's from somewhere else
Talking of the 'Host Community'
Many longer established communities down here Second and Third generation
How many generations does it take?
Bosnian muslims still spoken of as aliens in Bosnia, to be repatriated somewhere?
Can the red indians send home all the descendants of the early American settlers?

Organisations or Individuals
Who can you trust?
I follow the muslim tradition of the master who says to his pupil 'Never trust anyone - especially me!'
All muslims are individuals
What an individual considers religious must be treated as such
Birmingham muslims who demand that children's mouths be washed out if they day the word 'pig'
I don't consider their understanding to be Islamic - but they do, and their situation needs to be dealt with locally
It is not a national crisis, however, any more than a Jehovah's witness refusing a blood transfusion is a crisis for Bible scholars
Just a group of parents in Birmingham

The role of the Mosque
Not a church
Not owned by an institution
Belongs to the people who run it and use it
No ministers with authority over the people
The people employ ulama - people with knowledge
Often closely linked with a distant culture
The majority of the muslim community knows that in the Mosque they can trace their roots
And try to reconcile that as best they can with the lifestyle imposed by their surrounding culture
Some succeed better than others

Muslim flaws and foibles
We have deranged psychos in our community
Our raging madmen, our depraved sickos
As well as just plain greasy sneak thieves
What community doesn't
They're out there!
Perhaps even in here - You never know
But most muslims are mostly concerned with what most people are concerned with most of the time
Everyday life

A multicultural society?
Muslims are members of society
Muslim needs are societies needs
Muslim needs are shared human needs?
We want Societal Systems for everybody
Not just giving muslims what is best for them
To the detriment of others
Systems that encompass all our cultural variety
Allowing muslims to be distinctly muslim, as proud individuals and groups
How many muslim film and TV villains
Corrupt oil sheikhs, rabid terrorists
How few positive newsviews and documentaries
Try to think of a muslim hero
How many role models for muslim children
Are they included in our culture?

Systems included within our societal structures
Structures like Education and Health are huge and hard to shift, but it can be done
Strathclyde came up with a Religious Education initiative to solve the "muslim problem" which could easily have transformed communal attitudes to education in this country
For all minority religions
Christians wanted same
To their eternal shame the muslims killed it
But the problem was political, not technical or administrative, or financial

What do muslims need?
No time to discuss anything with the depth the subjects require
Especially when it is secularity itself which needs challenging, and any such suggestion invariably triggers fear and outrage
such thoughts nowadays being almost taboo
Education for Health and Life
A holistic approach to Education
Including the spirit, as well as the intellect
Where moral values and ethics are seen as central, not peripheral to the curriculum
Where learning has a purpose, in a life that has a purpose
Supporting and strengthening family ideals
Enriching and stabilizing the national culture
Care during Sickness and Death
Avoiding the dehumanization of patients
Seeing them only in terms of their diseases
Demanding that they fit into a soulless system
Where children should be born in office hours
Family visits are deterred as an inconvenience
Old age is a geriatric administration problem
And death is always an embarrassing failure
When in fact, the meaning of death is central to our understanding the purpose of life

The Meaning of Life
I always seem to end up with the biggest questions just when I'm finishing
A question I want to be central in the consciousness of any educationist or teacher, doctor or nurse in my society
The End or the Beginning?

Astaghfirallah