How to become a real Muslim

This article sets out helpfully a basic set of issues around the presence of Islam in Europe: Eurozine - How to become a real Muslim - Kenan Malik:

Among the things that I though helpful was this reminder of how lumping people together under one label can be really misleading:

"If there is no such thing as a set of 'European values' that transcend time, the same is true of 'Islamic values'."

The point being that cultural change means that to keep things the same, you have to change and as change takes place in relation to various changes in life, history, technology etc different responses emphasise different aspects and understandings of the received tradition as the best resources to guide responses. The article before this point notes how 'European' values as we tend now to think of them are actually likely to have been unrecognisable, even shocking, to some of the 'founding fathers' of European Enlightenment who may well have found many 'Islamic values' more familiar and understandable.

And so this applies to Islam:

Islam, like all religions, comprises both a set of beliefs and a complex of social institutions, traditions and cultures that bind people in a special relationship to a particular conception of the sacred. Over the centuries, those institutions and cultures have transformed the reading of the Qur'an and the practice of Islam. Religions, like all social forms, cannot stand still. Islam today can no more be like the Islam of the seventh century than Mecca today can look like the city of Mohammed's time

And by the way, that's a pretty neat definition of religion back there: I like the way that belief and institutions (plural) are held together in it and the idea of binding people in relation to their shared understanding of 'the sacred'. I'm also interested in the way that particular readings of certain texts in the Qur'an have become de rigueur and unchallengeable through dint of historical developments when in fact they do seem tenuous and even unhelpful. For example, the now traditional interpretation of the verse that is taken to deny the crucifixion would, most naturally (as Kenneth Cragg argues, I believe) be interpreted in tandem with similar phrases elsewhere describing, eg, the outcome of the battle of Badr as denying decisive human agency in such events rather than that they happened. But the perceived necessity to differentiate from Christians was more important than historical defensibility and now Islam has a tremendous apologetic hurdle to get over; denying the crucifixion of Jesus is pretty tough to maintain and the Qur'an probably doesn't maintain it.

And so while this is true

"The key question", the French sociologist Olivier Roy points out, "is not what the Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the Qur'an says." Muslims continually disagree on what the Qur'an says, he adds dryly, "while all stressing that the Koran is unambiguous and clear-cut."

The interpretation of the crucifixion seems to be a no-go area for reinterpretation. Even secular Muslims seem reluctant to go there speculatively.

But then the next bit reminded me of RE lessons I used to take on Islam where I would show a Muslim graphic depiction of Muhammed and point out that the supposed prohibition had not always and everywhere been true in Islam.

The prohibition against such depictions only emerged in the 17th century. Even over the past 400 years, a number of Islamic, especially Shiite, traditions have accepted the pictorial representation of Muhammed..

The article then goes on to dig out the context behind the Danish cartoon furore, and it turns out that Muslims of the more radical drift needed some prodding and encouragement to get with the plot of controversy. And this produces a media product: a definition of Islam for western liberal consumption.

In liberal eyes, in other words, to be a real Muslim is to find the cartoons offensive. Once Muslim authenticity is so defined, then only a figure such as Abu Laban can be seen as a true Muslim voice. The Danish cartoons, as Jytte Klausen observed, "have become not just a tool for extremism but also created a soap opera in the West about what Muslims 'do' with respect to pictures'. Or, as Naser Khader has put it, "What I find really offensive is that journalists and politicians see the fundamentalists as the real Muslims."

The liberal west has helped to create and foster the monster it decries. It has given an appearance of legitimacy to the more extreme voices and portrayed them as if they are most authentic. Interestingly, I think, the same may now be happening with Christianity whereas previously less extreme versions tended to be seen as more authentic. I think that a big part of the problem in this respect is the 'need' in popular media to create clear dramatic stories and to do that extreme positions produce conflictual situations or at least the possibility of portraying them and these make for stories that are easy to follow and promote.