Does Islam Scare You? If So,
Here's Why
09/16/2015
Barbara Falconer Newhall Huffpost
Does Islam scare you? Does it feel like an aggressive religion is
trying to take over the world, subjugate women, persecute the LGBT
community, and cut off your hand if you're caught
stealing?
Well, you've got good reason to be scared -- but not
of Islam. Islam is a fine old wisdom tradition with millions of
kind, reasonable, neighborly adherents in the US and around the
world.
It's the fundamentalist, anti-modern Wahhabi brand
of Islam that is scaring you.
Scaring you because it does indeed want to
proselytize the world.
And scaring you because it has had the money to do
so. Barrels of it.
Thanks to the Wahhabis' centuries-old alliance with
the Saudi royal family (and all that Saudi oil money, barrels of
it), they can -- and they have been -- spreading puritanical Islam
in the US and around the world. (Some observers trace ISIS's roots
back to Wahhabism; others assert that ISIS is a political movement
with but a tenuous connection to Islam.)
Wahhabism and the
Saudis
In a column on the New York Times op ed
page, Thomas
L. Friedman says it all started back in
1979 during the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist
extremists.
Those extremists, he writes, "challenged the
religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family, accusing them of
impiety. The al-Sauds responded by forging a new bargain with their
religious conservatives: Let us stay in power and we'll give you a
freer hand in setting social norms, relations between the sexes and
religious education inside Saudi Arabia -- and vast resources to
spread the puritanical, anti-women, anti-Shiite, anti-pluralistic
Sunni Wahhabi fundamentalism to mosques and schools around the
world."
The result has been a great leap backwards for the
Saudis and for Islam around the world. That we are seeing a
backlash against Islam in the US and Europe should come as no
surprise.
American Muslims
One of my writer friends, Sumbul Ali-Karamali, an
American-born, mainstream Muslim who doesn't wear hijab, complained
to me recently that people assume she is a "progressive" or
"secular" Muslim, "because I don't look or act oppressed. I tell
them that I practice Islam the way my mother does and the way my
grandmother did."
(Sumbul, btw, is the author of "The Muslim Next
Door: The Qur'an, the Media, and that Veil Thing." Check it
out.)
If you are looking for a progressive Muslim, that
would be Ani
Zonneveld.
Ani is the Malaysian-born daughter of a diplomat;
she's one of the interviewees in my book, "Wrestling with God." A
southern Californian, she co-founded an organization called Muslims
for Progressive Values.
Progressive -- to Ani and to her MPV colleagues --
means inviting women to preach, to make the call to prayer, and to
pray alongside men -- not at the back of the mosque. It means
welcoming the LGBT community and celebrating interfaith and
same-sex marriages.
Muslim culture has changed radically in recent
decades, Ani tells me, and not for the better -- thanks to the
proselytizing, puritanical influence of Wahhabism.
The Influence of
Wahhabism
"I'm in my early fifties now," she says. "And
unfortunately the Islam of today--in Malaysia and around the
world--is very different from how it was twenty-five years ago. My
perspective of Islam is much more open-minded and loving in
expression, more celebrative, than the conservative Islam we are
seeing in so many Muslim countries.
"Even Malaysia has become very conservative," she
says. "Sunnis are in the majority there, and because of the events
in the Middle East, anti-Shia sentiments have become acute. Some
people are even saying that you can't wish your Christian neighbor
a merry Christmas or a Buddhist a happy Vesak. 'It's haram, it's
forbidden.' That's the sad condition in Malaysia right
now."
Sumbul says that in many parts of the world the
conservative Saudi version of Islam has been getting pushback from
more moderate Muslims in recent years. Vast women's movements are
having an influence, she says. So are scholars who are reevaluating
the tradition "after hundreds of years of colonization under which
Islam was not allowed to develop and modernize."
As for me, does Islam scare me? Yes, some of the
forms of Islam that are out there right now do worry me. Wahhabism
with its close-minded rigidity is one. The brutally violent ISIS --
which most of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims would say is not even
Islam -- is another.
But Ani and Sumbul -- they give me hope. Lots of
it.