Is It Not Enough to Be a Good Human Being?
By Zulfiqar Rana, MD, MPH
Moody, AL
The Muslim Diaspora in the West is finding it increasingly hard to balance the conflicting demands imposed by their religion and the Western ideology in the post 9/11 world. There is much at stake here. On an individual level it is the unfettered expression of one's Muslim identity. On a collective level, it is the choice of political and religious trajectory the Ummah is faced to choose.
On a personal level, Muslims in the West faced with this issue find themselves increasingly embroiled in proxy wars in the shape of dinner-table skirmishes. Are Islamic schools better for our kids? Is Hijab mandatory or optional? Should there be dance and music in our parties? Is it all right to have a Christmas tree in your home? What is wrong with giving a nice little card to your wife on Valentine's Day? Should my steak be zabihah? Should my next house be Sharia financed? On the surface, these arguments are a petty waste of time. On a deeper level, they struggle to answer a fundamental question haunting Muslims in the West.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the Islamic injunctions for at least some of these issues are clear-cut. However, the problem is not the lack of knowledge about different injunctions. Gone are the days when you had to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles on a mule's back to meet a teacher in remote accesses of foreign lands. The problem then is the willingness to learn and acceptance of the basics - or lack thereof. For some Muslims who are very thankful to be away from their dreary homeland lives, Islam very frankly, is becoming a liability that is not worth risking their jobs and lifestyles. Therefore, through denial, dissent, or doubt they are looking for alternatives and posing this problem in this way has ceased to be of any practical value.
For most of us, the main question is this: do I leave my religion back home, as I go out to work? Is my religion a matter of personal choice? For obvious practical reasons a lot of moderate Muslims, find this paradigm shift quite appealing. What is wrong with doing what the Romans do while in Rome? Is it not enough to be a good human being? God's mercy would take care of the rest. At least we are not hurting anybody like the terrorists. Without going into its merits or demerits, this Muslim variant of humanism is clearly another idea borrowed from the West. It stands on the pillars of acceptance of humanistic ideals as well as revulsion to a carefully crafted caricature of Mulla who is a corpulent, turbaned, belching, and bearded creature with a sword in his hand and a queue of concubines following him. However, its deeper implications are far reaching for in it is the implicit notion that being a good Muslim and being a good human being are two different things.
A "good human being" is a welcome addition to the Western work force while a "good Muslim" is a gadfly to other fellow Muslims and downright dangerous to the Western ideals. In a post-9/11 either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us world, solving this predicament has become increasingly expedient.
The West went through the throes of this dilemma a few centuries back and out of it were born the twins of democracy and pluralism. It did not come easy though. It took two bloody revolutions and countless lives to settle the issue and no wonder the West jealously protects its Lockean ideology that is still warm with the blood of its ancestors. For Muslims this issue is still very much unresolved. The debate rages on while Muslims are torn between the ideas of Khilafat, kingdoms, military rules, dictatorships, and democracy willingly or by fiat.
For the intelligentsia it is a matter of life and death, for the rulers this genie has to be kept hermetically sealed. The masses who are entangled in a struggle of survival by and large consider this discussion an intellectual luxury and a desolate outpost. For an outside observer it paints a picture of a psychotic Muslim society with multiple personalities. Its deeper implications are even more ominous. There is already an orchestrated chorus of voices in the West that staunchly believe that Islam is not compatible with democracy (read: rationalism and tolerance). By this, I mean mainstream Islam and not radical Islam that is uniformly despised. More and more Muslims are starting to believe that too.
The crux of the argument is this: does everything in life fall under the canopy of religion (Islam in our case) or do we compartmentalize our lives between rationalism as our guide in daily lives and revelation our teacher on Fridays only. A few centuries ago, the West grappled with the same issue against the backdrop of the French and American revolutions. The West made up its mind and since then has moved on. From the Western perspective, Muslims need to go through the same evolution if they are serious about establishing tolerance, democracy, and pluralism in their societies. From an Islamic perspective, the whole argument is spurious and not even congruent with Islamic culture. Who is right? Only time will tell.
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