In the last few years, I’ve been forced to accept what I consider to be a stark and harsh reality: Muslims around the world, my fellow adherents of the beautiful religion of Islam, are lamentably falling short in our duties. The caliber of person that gave the modern era the fundamental knowledge of the Roman and Medieval epochs is suddenly difficult to find. Now, the image of a Muslim conjures up expressions akin to strange, backwards, crazy and different.
Now, I honestly don’t walk around the AU campus feeling all that different, and I imagine the Muslim lady who covers doesn’t feel she is in a hostile environment either; but these are exceptional times. Out there lies a world of much less acceptance. Let me offer a snapshot of that world as seen from a Muslim lens.
In 2007, I crossed through nearly all of Pakistan. I was shocked at the rapid increase of the narrow-minded Salafi ideology — essentially fundamentalist Islam following literal interpretations of the Quran — running through the country. In every mosque I visited, both urban and rural, women were never allowed to pray. A new kind of distrust and cynicism had emerged in the people. While they were generally more religious than I had remembered, they were also unsure of their religious identities, digesting radical ideas and venomous hate without question.
At home, I have always felt that Muslims living in the United States are professionally top-heavy - that we are more likely to be doctors, lawyers and educators than service workers. Indeed, the 2007 Pew Research Center report on Muslim Americans found us to be “middle class and mostly mainstream.” Any extremists were from overseas, we American Muslims thought, not from our communities.
However, a number of recent events have disillusioned me: the five young men from the D.C.-area who traveled to Pakistan allegedly to join Al-Qaeda; the producer of “Bridges TV,” a television media effort at interfaith understanding and mainstream integration, who decapitated his wife after years of physically abusing her and a prominent traditional scholar in Michigan denouncing each and every Muslim organization operating in the United States as infiltrated with Salafi and Wahhabi doctrine. To be sure, such shameful acts and accusations are painful to experience. Yet the chance that these accusations are found to be true makes me gasp in horror.
Have we lost our way? What happened to the Muslims around the world? What happened to the likes of Al-Razi and Ibn Sina, pioneers in medicine during the Medieval days when Europe was lost in darkness? Why can’t we replicate the successes of Al-Mawardi in political science, Al-Haitham in physics, Al-Tabari in pharmacology, Jaber ibn Haiyan in chemistry and Ibn Khaldun in history? Calculus and algebra would not exist if not for the Muslims of old (sorry all you math-haters out there). It seems that for every major success we Muslims enjoy, like Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and Pakistan electing a female prime minister in 1988, an exponential amount of “minor” failures accompany it.
Unfortunately, the Muslims of new have not been able to accomplish what our religious predecessors did. We are not accepted in much of the world as upholders of the mainstream or leaders of the future. It remains our duty to call ourselves to account and integrate into society productively and without prejudice. We have many challenges as an international community, but as other communities faced with similar trials have learned, with challenge comes great opportunity.
Parevez Khan is a graduate student in the School of Public Affairs and the religion and international affairs columnist for The Eagle. You can reach him at edpage@theeagleonline.com
