Our injured Muslim pride
Op-ed: The honor of Islam is not served by violence, but by the greater jihad of self-improvement and self-responsibility. If we learn to balance a deep Islamic faith with sincere respect and love for all of Allah’s children, Islam will be restored to its place of dignity and respect among religions.
It is clear that many of us moderate Muslims are religious Muslims: Proud of Islam, proud of its past, proud of what it has achieved and proud of what it has contributed to the world. But while all this is true, at the same time it is time to be deeply ashamed of the people who claim to represent our faith.
We must face up to the fact that jihadists kill, destroy and rape in our name. And that as Muslims we do not bear collective guilt, yet must accept collective responsibility for the rot and extremism within our ranks.
It is tempting to dump responsibility for the problems of Islam on our colonial past, on Western military adventurism, on a biased and hostile media. This approach is comforting to our apologists, but profoundly foreign to Islam.
The Quran teaches that a community which purifies its heart is bound to be blessed by Allah. This means that those who perpetually blame outsiders for our strife and suffering lack genuine trust in God. This misguided sense of victimhood has hounded us in the peripheries of Europe’s cities.
Muslim refugees and immigrants who arrived to our continent in the 1950s and 1960s were no less disadvantaged than members of other religious communities. Yet while many Muslims joined Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist immigrants into the mainstream, a disproportionate minority of Muslims often gave up the ethics of their elders without seizing upon opportunities open to them.
It is tempting to blame native racism and xenophobia for the alienation and hopelessness present among second and third generation Muslims in Europe. This approach is once again not Islamic. Our prophet and role model Mohammed, peace and blessings upon him, was left orphaned at an early age, was raised by foster parents and never received a formal school education. This did not deter him from learning a trade, engaging in commerce, and being a devoted husband and father prior to receiving the Quranic revelation.
It should be drilled in our youngsters that one serves one’s faith best by being a devoted son, a better student, an industrious employee and a generous spouse. To embrace jihad as an escape from crime, addiction to drugs or alcohol consumption is an insult to human dignity and an affront to God.
But it is also an affront to God to ignore the wisest and noblest elements of our tradition. Too many Muslims who devoutly attend Friday prayers have never heard the hadith reminding Muslims that "the ink of the scholars is dearer to God than the blood of the martyrs." If our communities were led by men and women of wisdom, we would teach every Muslim child to dream about being a writer. And if we did so, we would no longer need to be ashamed when contrasting the contribution of 13 million Jews to human knowledge to that of over 1500 million Muslims.
There are many beautiful things in our faith. Our Quran is heart-wrenching, our hadiths inspire noble actions and the beauty of our architecture is unsurpassed. Yet we cannot rest on the laurels of the past. We must ask ourselves some hard questions and confront the deeper reasons for our stagnation older than 700 years. We need the integrity to admit that we are not the best community. And that there is generally more Islam in lands populated by non-Muslims, than in lands populated by Muslims.
Some say that we need to shed our faith for our societies to progress. We disagree. We believe we need to shed our stupidity, our rote learning, crude literalism and lack of theological self-confidence that masks itself behind dogmatism and intellectual intolerance. We need to embrace open debate and honest self-criticism and demand that our leaders display moral stature – not just conformism. We need a renewal of leadership that restores accountability to our communal institutions.
The honor of Islam is not served by violence, but by the greater jihad of self-improvement and self-responsibility. We don’t need jihadists in our ranks, but doctors, nurses, scientists, writers and thinkers who are able to balance a deep Islamic faith with sincere respect and love for all of Allah’s children. If we learn to do this, Islam will be restored to its place of dignity and respect among religions. If we don’t, the 21st century will surely be the last century of Islam.
Rashid Khan resides in Europe. The author chose to publish this essay in Ynetnews to demonstrate that peace and reconciliation between Jews and religious Muslims is not beyond reach.
