Opinion

The Distorted Face of My Faith
By Nadir Khan, PhD
Alta Loma, California

I cry, I weep, and I pray. Sometimes, I cry and weep while I am praying. My range of emotions ranges from anger to anguish to despair to frustration to helplessness and beyond. My issue is that I cannot, anymore, recognize the face of my faith.
When I was growing up on the west coast of India, the mosque next to my house was a sacred place. We even had a little space for wayfarers and travelers. After sunset, every family in the neighborhood used to send food to the mosque for the imam and the muezzin and their families, otherwise they could not sustain themselves. If someone passed away in the neighborhood, the muezzin would walk around the neighborhood, stopping every few yards and making the announcement of the name of the deceased, the time of the funeral prayer and then the time and place of the burial. The mosque was our sanctuary and a haven for us.
I had never thought that I would ever live to see the day when my brothers in faith would kill each other in the mosque because of trivial political and religious differences.
I thought and now firmly believe that every mosque is a sacred place, the house of Allah, where earth and heaven meet in a communion. I prostrate for submission and nearness, seeking to find my way to the Transcendent One.
Now, I live in a time when the so-called imam of a mosque in Islamabad publicly declares that there is a cache of arms in his mosque and he is going to use it on anyone who does not agree with HIS interpretation of MY faith. Suddenly, he is the judge, the jury, and the prosecutor. The defendant has no rights. He has even set up his private court. He is using these innocent young girls from far off villages as human shields to advance his agenda. They have built a mosque on someone else's land, illegally occupied it, just because they think having a mosque is so important! Now we can proudly declare that Pakistan has its own Mulla Umer. The word talib means a seeker. I wonder what are they seeking - personal power or the glory of the One whose guidance they are dragging in the mud.
It has become more important to be a shia and sunni, then being a simple Muslim. The Kurds, who claim to be sunnis and live in predominantly Muslim countries, want to have their own country, because being a Kurd overshadows being a Muslim. For me as a biologist, human taxonomy runs something like this: I am a human being first, then a Muslim, then an American, then a Democrat or a Republican, then a Californian. At each of these levels I make a different connection and to some extent assume a different identity, but the core of my being is defined by my faith.
What is really frightening is that these midget mullahs have given the government only a month to enforce some of their demands (they call them reforms), completely forgetting the simple fact that even the prophets, with the explicit availability of divine guidance and support, could not change social structures in decades. The ignorance of these religious leaders is disturbing in that their behavior reinforces the argument that our madrassas are breeding grounds for terrorists. In this particular situation, ignorance is not a bliss but a curse. These imams are the perfect examples of darkness at noon.
This condition is not confined to Pakistan only. In Iraq, religious leaders want a shiite state. If you are a sunni in Iraq, you literally become a religious minority in a Muslim country. There is absolutely no doubt that what Saddam did was horrendous. But does that mean we continue to punish all sunnis in Iraq. We have forgotten the simple truth that the Prophet was neither a shia nor a sunni.
In Sudan, particularly in Darfur, the silence of the Muslim countries is deafening. There the Arab militias (remember they are Muslims and are called janjaweeds) are killing other Muslims, partly because they are blacks. So much for Islamic brotherhood and the equality of all human beings! The situation in Somalia is unfolding. There the weak interim government, with the help of Ethiopians, are killing their own people because they are "fundamentalists."
And then there are those suicide bombers, indiscriminatingly killing and maiming innocent children, women, the elderly in the name of my faith, negating not only the simple teachings of my faith which says in the Book that killing one human being is like killing the entire human race. How do these people reconcile their behavior with such teachings? I am so glad that I am not endowed with those thought processes, that are truly the "ignorance of the intellect."
The picture looks pretty bleak. We have dug ourselves into an abyss (not a hole) and the process is going on full force. Sometimes I wonder whether we really need any enemies, we are doing such a good job of hurting one another, while others are watching us gleefully.
When a person gets sick, he or she is the first one to know something is not right. Then they go to a physician who makes the diagnosis and ultimately the treatment and hopefully a cure or healing begins. We as a community have gone through this process a million times. We know what is wrong with us. The diagnosis has been made. It s a serious illness and as a consequence the suggested treatments are painful. But all treatments have only one purpose: the well-being of the patient.
These physicians are knowledgeable, thoughtful, concerned people who are familiar with their patient and his background. Because these backgrounds and training are so very different, their suggested modalities of treatment are also different. But it does not make any difference as long as the patient recovers. Some of these physicians are very familiar and include: Shah Waliullah, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Jamluddin Afghani, Muhammed Abduh, Imam Ghazali, Hassan Banna, Iqbal, Mawdoodi, a large number of scholars in North Africa and the Maghreb, in Indonesia, Malayasia and the Far East. Some of them have organized their own movements and attempted to participate in the political process.
The issues are not that simple though. The prescribed medication is a bitter pill and Muslims are not very compliant patients. Digging out of the abyss is not going to be easy.
The dimensions of the problems are overwhelming. But begin we must, both individually and collectively. According to the prophetic example, we need to begin as individuals. But as Iqbal has said a wave cannot exist without an ocean. What we need is a jolt. Iqbal prayed that we need a catastrophe and we need to be Sahib e Kitab and not just readers of the Book.
Personally, I am waiting for the day when the face of my faith will not be defined and distorted by a few individuals who are literally clueless about the ethos and spirit of a divine message which has enriched the lives of millions of the faithful and contributed so much to human civilization in making it what it is today. A perfectly decent religion is being made a laughing stock of the world. Tariq Ramadan is absolutely correct when he says, "Deeply, simply: he who cannot love cannot understand."

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