Need to Shed the Dual Personality
By S. Ehtisham, MD
Bath , NY
Compared to European countries like Britain, France and Holland, which had colonized large Muslim populations, Muslims were late arrivals in the US. Even as late as 1974, when I landed in Brooklyn, NY, they had one mosque in Manhattan for all the boroughs of New York city, and prayed in apartments in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, Bronx, Westchester and Staten Island. This was also true for other large cities. In smaller cities, towns and villages, Muslim rented space in churches.
Weekly prayers were held on Sunday. They were as much for service to God, as for maintenance of identity and culture.
International Islam had been on a precipitous downward path in science and technology and general literacy for the last six hundred years. The reason was that from a mercantile mode of production, Muslims had reverted to an agricultural mode. The Moghal Empire had been in decline since early 18 th CCE, the Ottomans too were very much on the same path at about the same time.
Muslims went into communal depression and allowed the mullahs tell them that their sorry plight was due to non-conformance with religion. They, the mullahs and the public, were too ignorant to know that Muslims, especially the ruling class at their zenith, had not been very compliant in the performance of religious rites.
International Islam had hardly unshackled itself from colonialism when it suffered the humiliation of the 1967 defeat of the combined Arab armies at the hand of tiny Israel, the greater humiliation, for the Muslims of the Indian Sub-continent at any rate, of a shattering defeat at the hands of arch-foe India and dismemberment of the country. The 1973 Suez War, after initial success, turned out to be an abject failure.
But the immediate post-independence days were marked by a vibrant civil society, demanding freedom of expression, economic development and political activism among the workers and students. Nasser was triumphant in Egypt, Syria was in ferment, Algerians had brought France to the point of surrender, Soekarno had launched an industrialization and nationalization program in Indonesia, and Iraq had overthrown a parasitical monarchy. The setbacks were the victory of Shah, aided and abetted by mullahs and the CIA, over progressive forces and the bureaucratic takeover of Pakistan, in this case aided and abetted by the landowners and the ever-helpful mullahs.
In contrast to India, which had a developed industrial class, Muslim countries were suffering under various degrees of feudal and monarchical (satrapies). They effectively curbed development of political consciousness.
The continuous defeats handed the field to the mullahs again. We told you so, they exclaimed, gloatingly.
The level of regression can be imagined by the fate of that bastion of liberalism, Dow Medical College in Karachi, which had led the progressive movement of students at an All Pakistan level from 1950 onwards. It had two parties, the progressive National Students Federation (NSF) and the conservative Young Medicos Organization (YMO).
We did not discriminate between ethnic or linguistic groups.
Two decades later, I walked into the college to be greeted by walls festooned with Mohajir, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pakhtoon, Baluchi and Jamiat banners.
In the early post-independence years, the trend among the educated young people was to go to England for education. The illiterates were encouraged by the British to take up menial jobs.
Mid-sixties saw the trend change to migration to North America. There was acute shortage of skilled workers there too. But the country screened visa applicants; so that only the educated or the rich investors could get in. For every doctor, scientist and engineer the country allowed in, it saved $500,000.00, it would have had to spend educating and training one of its own. And they did not even have to acknowledge the receipt of this aid!
By the mid-nineteen seventies, a substantial number of expatriate doctors and other professionals were well settled, owned homes, and started buying house and offices to convert them into Islamic centers.
Like expatriates all over the world Pakistanis had brought their social, cultural and religious norms and practices.
Generally speaking liberal-secular parents who were “cultural” Muslims and who had frank discussion with their children about the good and bad aspects of the culture they had inherited and the one they had been born into, had less social conflict. The zealots living in urban centers also had an easier time because they made their own world and lived in it with minimal outside contact.
It is the majority in the middle ground, who always suffer the most. They cannot impose their views forcefully and cannot accept unconventional behavior. Some work two full-time jobs, make the children attend prep schools during vacations, get them tutored by private academies for college entrance examinations and send them to the most expensive schools they can get into.
The average American parent is rather permissive. Their children get used to having their way from a very young age. They acquire boy and girl friends before going to school, see their parents drinking and often drunk and a high percentage is brought up by single mothers/fathers. Many start drinking while still in lower school grades and a substantial number take to drugs too.
Pakistani children live in two different worlds. Their parents expect them to be obedient, insist that they work hard at their studies, go to bed at the prescribed time, avoid girls/boys, alcohol is taboo, drugs a direct route to hell. Most parents would send them to an Islamic school on Sundays. But what keeps them on the straight and the narrow path is the devotion and loyalty of the parents to them and each other.
In the higher grades in the school, biology takes over. They are in early youth with splashing hormones unrepressed by social norms. They want to go out on dates and do whatever that involves. At this point parents suffer further anguish of dichotomy. They are socialized to boys sowing their oats. Girls are a different kettle of fish. But they have been socialized too and are rather more restrained than the boys.
College-University is at age eighteen. Children leave home. But by this time the die has been cast. If they have done well so far they will keep on doing so.
Very few full blooded, US-born and brought up children would countenance an arranged marriage. Most are cognizant of the advantages of marrying in their own culture and religion. But it is not easy to click with a person with all the requisite qualifications. Here another dichotomy raises its head. Parents would take a boy’s “deviant” decision much more easily than they would a girl’s. If a girl were from a particular linguistic group and the boy from another, the parents would be grieved. And the very heavens will fall if she were to choose a Christian or a Jewish boy. But the worst-case scenario would be a Hindu boy.
The average parent would cry his/her eyes out, and I have come across fake (and genuine too), heart attacks, but in the end they accept it and the “other” party goes through a convenient conversion.
The mix of living in two cultures, affluence, struggle to keep religious and cultural identity, had put the community on the defensive. It is frightened out of its wits that boys will forsake religion, become unobservant, adopt liberal attitudes, take to dating, dancing and drinking, and the girls would give up Hijab and heavens will fall if they veered to American norms.
At the same time they have to associate with ‘locals’-colleagues, co-workers, politicians, neighbors and teachers. They indulge in inter-faith meetings, become members of social clubs, participate in the political process and invite politicians to their Islamic centers.
The contradictions have put community leaders on the defensive and frankly, unhinged some of them.
They try to fight the system by regressing ever more. They hire full time, generally half-baked mullahs to give sermons, which are generally as far removed from the reality on ground as they can make it. They have Sunday schools, where they try to indoctrinate children and adults in obscure dogma. As they grow, they try to have separate entrances into the Islamic centers for men and women, and segregation of the sexes during dinners and other functions.
Many of the members of the so-called Islamic centers lead a schizophrenic life, devoutly reciting the Qur’an and praying during the day (Sunday) and having a nice time in bars and clubs in the evening. They would go berserk if their women flirted even mildly with another man, but have affairs on the “women under the right hand” facility.
Girls wear the Hijab at home and discard it on the college university campus. Some go even further, put on form revealing jeans and shirt, wit the hair covered carefully.
Expatriates and especially the children will spend their lives in this country. Their future is here. They have to assimilate in the society and adapt to local norms and if they really want to practice religion and culture at home, nobody would or should stop them.
It is incumbent on community leaders to shed the dual personality. They will do every one and themselves a favor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
