I just finished sitting in on a live taping of TVO's The Agenda.  Tonight's topic was: "What is a moderate Muslim?"  Throughout the show, I found myself getting incredibly frustrated with the narrowness nature of the debate.  I ultimately felt that the need to differentiate between "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims" was simplistic, reductionist, and not helpful to discussing what the solutions are to the current international discussion on Islam.  The panel on the show (all Muslims, of course) had one other thing in common: no one agreed with one another.

I have been studying and writing on Islam's relationship with the West for over a year now, and it is the subject of my Master's dissertation that I am about to defend in Portugal.  Tonight's discussion reminded me of a small section of my dissertation (pasted below) that I thought I would share...

The Diversity of Islam

Muslims in and outside of the West, are far from unified in opinion about their faith and beliefs, with conflicting prescriptions as to what direction Islam, as a religion and culture, should take.

In the prestigious Egyptian Al-Azhar Mosque, there is a leading cleric by the name Abdel Muti al-Bayyumi.  This cleric, who suggests he is not alone in his thinking, has publicly supported the French government for recently instituting a ban on the niqab.  He is on record stating, “I want to send a message to Muslims in France and Europe.  The niqab has no basis in Islam” (AFP, 2010).  Comments such as this one, made by a Muslim cleric, have been reiterated by non-Muslim politicians and individuals in order to express their distaste with the presence of niqab and burqas in several countries of the West.  No matter how true this idea may be, banning different forms of Islamic attire does not expedite the process of building a safer society.

At the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, Salim Mansur, a professor of Muslim origin suggests that “the beast within Islam has been prowling for a very long time” (National Post, 2009), and he calls on countries in the West to “join in a common effort to crush Islamist terrorists and those who shelter them” (Mansur, 2006).  Without specifically saying the words, Professor Mansur is advocating for a collective commitment to continue the war on Islam.

Hamed Abdel-Samad, a political scientist and authour of The Downfall of the Islamic World is openly and highly critical of Islam.  He currently lives in Germany, but he grew up in Egypt as the son of an imam.  In a recent interview he declared that “Islam has no convincing answers to the challenges of the 21st century.  It is in intellectual, moral and cultural decline – a doomed religion, without self-awareness and without any options to act” (Spiegel, 2010).  Mr. Samad, in the same interview compared Islam “to a drug” and admits that he “converted from faith to knowledge” a long time ago.

Irshad Manji, a Canadian authour and now a professor at New York University thinks the solution to the “Muslim question” rests not with fixing something that is inherent in the faith; rather, it is Muslims themselves who need to change.  She is the authour of The Trouble With Islam Today, and in it, “she calls on Muslims to question the insularity of their faith, the harsh treatment of women” (Macleans, 2003).  In an interview in 2003, Manji stated that “when people are told that you must pray at assigned times of the day, wash prescribed parts of your body and face, and recite only selected verses, you don't have to think” (Macleans, 2003).  Manji, a Muslim who is also openly lesbian, is considered a Muslim reformer who is never shy about criticizing Islam’s shortcomings.

The aim here is to shift and expand the dialogue on Islam and to highlight the fact that Muslims do not speak with one voice.

If the ultimate aim for today's democracies is peaceful coexistence and understanding between people and faiths, the policies of the West need to change.  Instead of contributing to the unreasonable logic that Islam is one culture, or one religion, we need to realize why it is vital to place Islam and Muslims in general along a spectrum.   Furthermore, we need to begin making policy decisions based on that reality.

Once we accept and comprehend this diversity, and stop debating from the margins, then and only then, will we be on our way to achieving solutions.

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