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Muslims And The Challenge Of Life In The West
Muslims have emigrated to Western nation-states that have a fully developed myth of national identity, which has been inculcated in the citizens over two centuries through schools and codified through legends and a particular reading of history. This identity has shaped several generations of Europeans and Americans through the cauldron of two world wars. It has been celebrated in literature, art, music, and dance. The nation-states have fashioned distinctive identities based on collective assumptions, promoting a particular worldview that includes a core of values and attitudes that are taken for granted as unique to a superior West. At the same time, the process of nation building has delineated what is considered alien, strange, and weird.
Immigrants have also been shaped in their home countries by the particular events and perceptions of their generation. Most of the adults among them have a pre-formed distinctive identity not only of their tribe, village, town, or city but also of a national identity instilled by the schools and the institutions of the state from which they emigrated. This identity provides the immigrants with a particular understanding of who they are and what their relationship is to the state in which they live; it therefore conditions their understanding of events and reality. Immigrants also bring a pre-formed understanding of Western culture based on a particular interpretation of the shared heritage between the Muslim world and Europe, one that is particularly focused on the recent experience of colonialism and neocolonialism. These perceptions are enhanced and shaped by Western movies and television, which tend to depict Western society as imbued with drugs, violence, racism, and pornography. Muslims who come from societies that favor strong family solidarity are repelled by what they see as a degenerate Western society consumed by premarital and extramarital sex, burdened by a high rate of divorce and births to unmarried women, latchkey kids, and fragile family bonds. They condemn Western values as lacking in the responsibilities of parents and children toward one another, and they believe that Western society puts too much emphasis on individual freedom and not enough on corporate responsibility.
The formation of Muslim minority communities in the West by choice became problematic to some Muslim intellectuals, especially those from India, where “minority-ness” involves the survival of Islam under non-Muslim rule. The late Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, who traveled all over Europe, the United States, and Canada, admonished Muslims to avoid integration into their new environment or to leave lest they lose their souls in the West’s wayward ways. Other scholars have insisted that such opinions are misguided because the proper interpretation of Islamic law allows Muslims to live outside the abode of Islam, as long as they have the freedom to practice and propagate their faith. Still other scholars are of the opinion that Muslim presence in the West provides them with an unprecedented opportunity to fulfill their Islamic duty to propagate the faith. In the process they not only obey God’s commandment to call people to Islam, they also help to redeem Western society from its evil ways and to restore it to the worship of God. The empowerment of Muslims overseas and the propagation of the Islamist ideology as normative for the world should supersede personal gain.
For Zain el-Abedin, the founder of the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, the greatest challenge the Muslims face in the West is the loss of identity in an alien social and ideological context. The fear is that in its eagerness to fit in, the minority community reluctantly but steadily gives up its cherished values, while the hostile environment slowly but surely chips away at its core beliefs. To protect the community from disintegration, Abedin determined that it was necessary to promote Islam as an ethnicity and in the process erect ramparts not only to keep the aliens out but, more important, to hold the Muslims in. He was aware that this was not an easy task given the diversity of the community. He thus identified important ideological constructs as well as behavioral distinctions as indispensable markers of the cultural divide. He therefore called for the creation by consensus of a particular body of ideals, values, aspirations, goals, and doctrines. While crucial in setting the Muslim community against other worldviews, the ideals in themselves are not sufficient, nor is such a task easy, because Muslims must “squarely confront the reality of the modern secular, multinational state.” While maintaining the unquestioned primacy of allegiance to Islam, Muslims in the West thus need to determine the proper attitude toward the new social reality in which they live. Also to be determined is the nature and extent of their commitment to and participation in the new environment. In the process they must clearly identify the ideological constraints that impede full participation in the economic and social spheres, fully cognizant of the consequences of adhering to a precise and ideologically exclusive stance. They also need to “see how some of the political and social effects of this stance can be softened and mitigated and learn to live with those that cannot.” There must be an individual as well as a corporate willingness to pay the price for the decision to live on the social, political, and economic margins of society.
Abedin promoted the idea of fashioning Islam as an ethnicity defined by religion, admittedly a rather difficult task because most immigrants have been fashioned by the nation-state from which they came and identify with its causes and feel particular allegiances to ethnic and linguistic preferences and racial origins. The West thus becomes a laboratory in which a new modern identity is to be fused, one that fosters particular behavioral patterns and promotes a common language, distinctive customs and traditions, and recognizable styles of dress and food, among other cultural distinctions. These are easier to identify and particularize than the effort to inculcate ideas because they are more tangible. At the same time, Abedin was aware that ethnicity could be very divisive, given the diversity of migrant groups. The difficulty is in determining whose language, customs, or behavior is more Islamically legitimate. Abedin was aware of the dilemma his recommendations posed for Muslims because on a very important level, ethnicity itself is un-Islamic. Although cultural distinction promotes cohesion and functions as a barrier to being absorbed or assimilated into a multicultural society, it may also veer from the truth of Islam, which affirms that “physical traits, cultural traditions, dress, food, customs, and habits are subordinate or subsidiary to their main doctrinal identity, that God created differences in people in order to facilitate recognition, that the true identity is determined by the manner in which a person or group of any race, color or physical type approaches the business of living, uses his faculties, selects ends and means for his worldly endeavors.”
Khalid Ishaque of Britain is under no illusion that the host societies are about to accept an ideological minority that seeks to maintain its self-respect by promoting commitments and priorities that are deliberately incompatible with those of the host culture. Thus the community must realize that suffering is not only inevitable, but it is to be welcomed in some cases because it provides the opportunity to demonstrate the commitment to a higher cause and walk in the footsteps of the early Muslim community, who were persecuted for their faith, under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad in Mecca. Ishaque notes that Muslims who choose to live in nations that are not governed by Islamic law should realize that they must assume certain obligations. While accepting adversity, they must constantly endeavor to establish a relationship with the majority that will foster an atmosphere conducive to the propagation of Islam, in which the larger society is receptive to the Muslim solutions to the problems of humanity.
By the 1990s there began to be a shift in the perspective of leaders of the Islamist movement on this issue. Azzam al-Tamimi of Britain, for example, recently identified the reality facing Muslims living in the West as a state of crisis. He feels that the options fostered for Muslims in the West in the 1970s have not succeeded. His assessment is that although not all of the obstacles in the relations of Muslims and non-Muslims in Western societies are brought about by Muslims, the more dangerous and difficult ones are the consequences of Muslim perceptions and behavior. Some Muslims erroneously seek to overcome these obstacles by melting into Western culture and abandoning some or all of their Islamic identity. Others insist on avoiding these obstacles by resorting to isolation and hiding in cocoons, which some fear could eventually form ghettos similar to those occupied by the Jewish communities in previous centuries. For al-Tamimi this discrepancy in dealing with the crisis led to the sundering of relations between the generations. On the one hand is the generation of the fathers, mothers, and grandparents, who have an emotional and cultural tie to the original homeland, who hold on to the same customs and traditions whether or not they accord with the new environment. On the other hand is the generation of the children and grandchildren, who have no emotional ties to the homeland and find little of value in those customs, which are seen as counterproductive, an impediment to progress in the society in which they have been born.
The new Muslim presence in Europe has made some Europeans more self-consciously reflective about being European. Ignoring the history of immigration into Europe over the centuries, the tendency of scholars and politicians is to depict European nations as unique, cohesive, and integrated societies with distinguishing pre-formed and established characteristics. The presence of Muslims who are able to exercise their political rights in Britain as citizens and the possibility of granting citizenship to these Muslim immigrants and their children in Germany, France, and other European countries has become a contentious matter. At the same time, the recent encounter has also made Muslim immigrants more reflective about their identity, as a growing number have become more self-consciously Muslim. Many who would not have entered a mosque in their homelands have become active in the mosque movement in the West and are increasingly defining the mosque as the center around which Muslim life should revolve. They seem to seek refuge in religion, rummaging through tradition for identifying proper belief, and eager to Islamize behavior, demeanor, and lifestyle as well as to erect cultural boundaries.
For a growing number of Muslims, strict adherence to ritual practice in the adopted country marks the boundaries of distinction. Announcing the need for a clean space for daily prayer, the act of praying, refraining from eating pork and improperly slaughtered meat, and fasting during the month of Ramadan have become important self-delineated boundaries that help the Muslim immigrant feel secure, distinct, and outside the bounds of pollution. For some, conforming to Islamic prohibitions has become a conscious act of witness of a distinctive faith despite public ridicule and a demonstration of steadfastness and perseverance in the face of social obstacles. For others the act of affirming uniqueness itself has become an important affirmation of the need to uphold their identity despite the pressure to change and to abandon the faith. It is a declaration that not only is difference normal, but in a most important way it is divinely designed, approved, and sanctioned. Some Muslims will not associate with other Muslims who do not practice these rituals. Those Muslims are deemed as being outside the pale. Inculcating this message in Muslim children is a mechanism to keep them within the fold. Thus for some, the ritual is Islam and Islam is the ritual.
Muslims And The Challenge Of Life In The West
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http://discerningislam.com
Last Updated: 04/2022
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