The last decade or so has seen the publication of a number of interesting memoirs by Muslims. One expects to learn about the ummah and the individual soul in these memoirs. But one finds turbulence, displacement, and distance. Much has been written about the movement towards religious traditionalism as a response to modernity, and in these memoirs, there is certainly a tension between a more observant and less observant Islam. But that is not the only tension or division on display.
In the Western world, thanks to the post-structuralist thinkers, many have a more constructed view of the individual and the current fashion is to refuse ‘the binary.’ But the binary has a marked presence in these books, manifested by instances of barzakh, or barriers between modes of thought. There are divisions between inner lives and their surroundings; between more and less observant Islam; between the Western and Muslim countries; between women and men, straight and gay, between golden pasts and lapsarian realities—and plenty of false dichotomies.
Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up between Different Worlds. Canongate, Edinburgh, 2022.
Mohsin Zaidi, A Dutiful Boy, Vintage, London, 2020.
Omar Saif Ghobash, Letters to a Young Muslim. Picador, London, 2017.
Mona Siddiqui, My Way: A Muslim Woman’s Journey, I.B. Tauris & Co, Edinburgh, 2015.
Kamal Al-Solaylee, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes. Harper Perennial, Toronto, 2013.
Mohsin Zaidi’s A Dutiful Boy begins with his father’s muharram flagellation—fittingly, for over the course of the book, Zaidi’s struggle to acknowledge and deal with his early-recognised homosexuality is often as wounding as any physical flail. From a few passages in the Qur’an (specifically 11:82) about the fate of Lot’s people, and a singularly unhelpful book called Morals for Young Shias, Zaidi manages to construct a torture as wounding as any physical: he experiences the punishment visited on an entire population.
I had told myself that my fantasies were a harmless indulgence that helped prevent me from going mad. But I had to stop these thoughts. It was unnatural. With the book clutched tightly to my chest, I imagined stones of baked clay crashing through my bedroom ceiling, solving all my problems.
How much different might have been his story had he turned at first to the ayah that says: ‘Allah will not burden a soul beyond its ability to bear the burden’(2:289).
A central quandary is hereby set up: in order to realise his homosexual nature, he must embarrass his parents; in order to please his parents, he must deny his homosexual nature. His Oxbridge academic achievements make things worse. ‘But I was building a prison out of my success. The more I achieved, the more my parents’ eyes shone with pride for their boy – how could I tarnish this gleaming image?’
There are enough instances of Zaidi’s family’s good-heartedness and even their occasional tolerance of gayness sprinkled throughout—they find the gay American sitcom Will & Grace entertaining and funny; his brother, after learning that George Michael is gay, says ‘I don’t care. He’s still my boy.’ – that it is not surprising that his parents eventually come to accept his gay marriage:
‘I…I’m thinking of marrying Matthew…but I don’t want to do it without knowing you two are okay with it.’….
‘Okay with it?” My Mum leaned in towards me and grabbed my hand. “Mohsin, please hurry up before he dumps you!’
‘And gets snapped up by someone else, my dad added.
Since Zaidi and Al-Solaylee both deal explicitly with men coming to terms with their homosexuality, their jihads or internal struggles, we can compare their respective techniques, the shapes of the narratives.
In Zaidi’s book, the reader is dragged forward by a series of chapter-ending climaxes, much in the manner of a televised drama. Some of these effects are cheesy. The first chapter ends at the doorstep of the family home, where Zaidi has brought his male partner to meet his parents. The father answers the door, and Zaidi asks about his mother. There is a silence. What is the reader to think? That the mother won’t see them? That she has died during the interregnum. Well, no, as we find out hundreds of pages later, she is there and reasonably happy at the reunion. Similar ‘cliff-hangers’ happen throughout. After his mother says, ‘I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s bothering you,’ there is another silence, and she says,’You’re not gay, are you?’ and the chapter ends. Did anything interesting happen in the room then? We don’t know: a flashy chapter ending has sufficed.
The huge upside of his technique is that Zaidi effectively evokes a whole range of emotional responses to his homosexual predicament at their highest pitch—self-castigation, horror, despair, hope, worry, shame, gratitude—and in doing so will probably tell other Muslim homosexuals who read A Dutiful Boy, that they are not the first to suffer in this way, and that they are not alone.
Whereas in Zaidi’s narrative, the progression of his soul is forward and ascendant, towards a happy ending, by contrast, Al-Solaylee’s predominant mode is lapsarian. His own escape from religious orthodoxy and gay-intolerant societies is not redolent of high drama; I found it rather frictionless. He gets a PhD in England; he emigrates to Canada; he succeeds as a journalist and academic. The more substantial aspect of his narrative is his distanced chronical about the fortunes of the family he left behind. Al-Solaylee is looking back at a privileged childhood and the cinematic glamour surrounding his father, a successful real estate developer in Aden.
Mohamad escaping over rooftops and through back alleys to avoid getting caught in flagrante by a paramour’s father, or, in some cases, husband. Or Father inviting unsuspecting females to his office to show off the plans for his next development. My favourite, because of its Mad Men sordidness (or is it glamour?), my father flirting with flight attendants on the local airline. Aden was the Monte Carlo of the Arabian Sea, and Mohamed was its Cary Grant.
Great guy, eh? Just the sort that you would want in your community, a serial philanderer. At the risk of sounding prudish, I think he got it right with ‘sordidness’, not ‘glamour’: Mad Men’s Don Draper is shallow from the get-go and gets shallower as the series goes on, to the point where he is copulating in alleyways with waitresses.
This glamour of a period of family vacations in a liberal upper-class Cairo, of meals in fine restaurants, of bespoke dresses, of a renaissance in the worlds of Arab music and film, a glamour that will, as the family is forced to move from Yemen to Cairo to Lebanon, back to Cairo again, and finally to a dangerous Yemen of civil war and reduced circumstances, will gleam all the more for its disappearance, and leave his family members shaken. For his sisters, it is a loss of privilege; for the mother, an alienating loss of community:
They had every right to think of themselves as princesses. Didn’t their father reign over Aden? They had their dresses made in Cairo and bought fine jewellery from the Indian and Jewish traders in Aden. Whether it was Arabic or Western music they listened to, they had the latest records on vinyl. Men competed for their affections, and they turned down many suitors.
And:
(My mother) took part in the mythologising of Aden just like her husband and older children did, but her participation was often reluctant and punctuated with silences. When she was taken out of Aden, she lost her only safety net, her own three sisters and mother and a society that, despite its colonial moorings, was still tribal and village-like.
In both narratives these men drift away from Islam. They both forget how to pray. Al-Solaylee at a relative’s grave in Yemen cannot even remember Al-Fatiha. Zaidi after many years finally prays for a much-loved uncle. Their own struggles have caused an estrangement from diin.
Al-Solaylee, having escaped from his family’s straitened circumstances, feels this drift as a certain numbness, an anomie in the soul, perhaps a species of survivor’s guilt. This passage is especially sad:
My path in life couldn’t be just different from my own flesh and blood; I needed to be free of the legacy of guilt and abandonment I felt when visiting them. Their suffering forced me to examine a life that I didn’t want for myself, and I could undo nothing to change it for them. I don’t know when and how I became so heartless and selfish…. I saw no point in having this family as a compass for my life.
In a similar mood, once in Canada, Al-Solaylee does not dwell for long on the complexities of ending a long-term gay relationship, when a job opportunity separates them; he just slides away from it, in his typical transcendent fashion.
Al-Solaylee spares us no detail of how life constricts during times of increased piety and public morality, as his distant family suffer dislocations and then the privations of war. It is no fun at all. Perhaps it is fun if you’re the one doing the policing of public morality. Restrictions affect his sisters: increasingly mandatory modest dress and narrowing life-possibilities. A brother becomes much more observant and berates the sisters about their morality. When the family finally returns to Yemen, they must deal with curfews, bombings and unpredictable power outages meaning they must cook at all hours of the night, when there is electricity. They turn to their religion to help them cope. Al-Solaylee responds with a sort of weary acceptance of their fate, without much curiosity about exactly how their faith is helping them survive, a potentially very interesting conversation.
I believe that my siblings have written off this life, hoping that they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife, since they’ve been good and devout Muslims. Just a few years ago, I would have found that way of thinking not just defeatist but repellant. I can see it now as a natural conclusion of the intolerable journey they’ve been on.
In Zaidi, Al-Solaylee, and Yusufzaidi’s stories, there is a theme of polarisation, of parts of the ummah separating and coming apart, like Pangaea, the formerly unified continent; coming apart, through immigration into discrete, somewhat insular communities bound by faith and honour. I liked this nice distinction that Zaidi makes about faith and honour: ‘Faith and izzat are not the same thing, but, much like two languages with a shared history, they have a complex relationship with each other.’ This insularity is very different from, say, Tariq Ramadan’s vision of Muslims playing a part in civic society. Within these ‘island’ communities, there is a religious mutual surveillance, one test of piety being comparative. Everyone watches everyone else for evidence of impiety.
Our writers deal with this theme differently. In Yusufzaidi’s The Go-Between, this pious gossiping and shaming raise a relatively innocent schoolboy prank—he gets his pants pulled down at a sleepover—into a full-blown controversy and a meeting at the mosque. Al-Solaylee, visiting relatives in Birmingham is shocked and repelled by their Arabic milieu, because it ‘represented a kind of immigrant experience that I’d spend the rest of my life avoiding: closed-off households that showed no interest in British culture or civic society’.
Al-Solaylee finds this stifling – it is what he has escaped from – whereas some might find this atmosphere interesting and comforting, especially when compared with the public drunkenness, smug racism and classism, near-nudity of hen parties, and ubiquity of betting-shops that comprise street-level British culture. But, as we learn in Yusufzaidi’s telling, there are proximate causes to this closing-off: Margaret Thatcher’s policies and resultant factory-closings that have deprived men of their purpose and identity and caused them to gravitate to the mosques. These are the Muslim equivalents of American coalminers, say, abandoned by the elites and emboldened by Trump.
“She is going to throw us out, send us packing, back to where we came from.”
“We must continue to save and send money back home, buy land and build property, she won’t let us build a home here, it will only be taken away.”
We younger ones would listen, fearing the worst, or sometimes one of us would say, “she can’t, we were born here, she can’t just throw us out or send us back.”
The Go-Between refers to the privilege Yusufzaidi was given as a child of going between the discrete masculine and feminine worlds of his Pashtun-speaking British community, and his gift for vivid imagery is well-suited to paint it for us.
Like storytellers, she and her friends would gather and listen to each other’s heartbreak, even if they had heard it before. My closeness to this world of women was to come to an end as I grew older, but for now I stayed as close as I could. It was a full-blown epic, of tragedy, pathos, colour, jewellery and clothes, compared to the drab, smoky posturing of the men, who all seemed the same, who all dressed the same.
He can also with a few artful strokes draw the border between his family’s world and the greater world as here where he describes the local prostitutes:
everything would play out like a slow-motion movie, the kerb-crawlers cautiously cruising up and down the streets, flashing their headlights, stopping under the bridge. I would watch, mesmerised, as the ladies glided by in satin negligees under their fur coats, and golden strappy sandals that dug into their pale skin on cold nights, the straps crisscrossing over their bright red-painted nails. Some of them wore long, thigh-high boots pulled over their knees. Car windows would scroll down, and these mermaids would bend forward to say a few words through the window.
The chapter titles give an indication of his method (Our Hood, Our House, and Mum’s Sewing Salon; The Charpai, The Slipper, and the Jinn; God, Jelly and the Corner Shop), intending to bring these differing worlds into focus by a sort of layered triangulation. His ability to portray childhood with childish emotional responses is a remarkable literary achievement. He has a naïve but charming tone. He grievously laments the loss of his favourite sweets because of their haram ingredient of pork gelatine. On a visit to his ancestral Pakistani village, he narrowly escapes having to dive into a well to retrieve a polluting dead animal, but upon his return, writes a scary story of the adventure he didn’t have, casting himself as a hero.
As he ages, his observations become more sophisticated and discerning, and many of these portraits and anecdotes are not flattering to these Muslims. We get an example of intended piety morphing into shocking dissociation when an acquaintance reasons that the Yorkshire ripper must have been a good Muslim because he killed prostitutes. We see his sisters entering purdah at the age of thirteen and getting taken illegally out of school; when the school investigates, the family smoothly lies about extended visits to Pakistan. We eavesdrop on his father’s conversations with other men and learn that it is not only white people who are prejudiced, as they enjoy mocking Christians for their Christmas customs and beliefs. And he vividly describes the change brought into the local mosque by stricter imams:
Gone were the Sunday suits –worn with such pride in their new homeland – with which they had cut dashing figures in both the black-and-white and Kodachrome photos taken in their front rooms. Their dark, pomaded, old-Hollywood hair was now shorn and covered with handmade skullcaps. Those who had beards grew them longer so they were able to make a fist of them with their hands…
Mona Siddiqui’s My Way also takes note of this move towards religious insularity, but she elevates the discussion somewhat, seeing the increased focus on conventional piety as a diminishment of ‘ilm, of knowledge, inimical to the ‘bold and free inquiry’ enjoined upon Muslims by the Qur’an. Siddiqui is an intellectual and she detects a strain of anti-intellectualism and contemptus mundi in the ummah. She suggests, as a Muslim scholar, that this sheltering from outward circumstances bears with it a cost: it has effectively dealt away some of the complexity and philosophical richness of Islam:
I see a different kind of tension—the clash between religious knowledge and secular professions, the idea that spiritual growth comes from living apart from this world and that it is only religious knowledge which can strengthen our faith in God. I believe this has produced a cultural malaise in which basic books of theology suffice as learning and the dissemination of empirical and scientific knowledge, of literature, music and the arts, is seen by some as weakening the faith. I personally can’t see this when I look at the rich history of Islamic civilisation or even the way the Qur’an commands us all to reflect upon the world, encouraging bold and free enquiry, not a closed and trapped piety.
Her own personal story is told within certain limits, a certain fastidiousness about how much she reveals of herself. Surely one can expect greater drama and personal information in a memoir? For instance, she alludes to disputes and disagreements within her own family but does not give any details; she comes to conclusions about the necessary ingredients of a successful marriage but reveals very little of her relationship with her husband. This is a quibble, not terribly important: it is likely that she is respecting her family members’ privacy. One accepts the trade-off: less personal drama for more of her nourishing intellectual perspective.
When she does relate a personal anecdote, as here where internalised propriety encounters a breaching situation, the effect is even more startling.
When I was leaving to return to the UK, he leant over to give me a hug. I remember recoiling, thoroughly embarrassed and ashamed of myself. How had I given such an impression, where a man felt he was at liberty to show me physical affection, even if it was just a friendly hug? It sounds so innocent, and looking back I sound so immature, but there are times when you know you have discovered something about yourself which can can’t quite identify straightaway. On my return flight I kept thinking about why I had recoiled when I felt so comfortable with him. I realised I wanted all the experiences of life without feeling unsettled and that was impossible. I was a different person now.
We don’t want to make too much of this anecdote—many other factors no doubt motivated Siddiqui to propel propelled herself beyond the overly parochial into her pursuit of inter-faith dialogue, for which she was awarded a CBE. There is a largeness and generosity of spirit that characterises her meditations on marriage, death, and the presence of Allah, and she brings in the Qur’an, Sufi thinkers, Christian thinkers, and secular philosophers.
She is not going to get sucked into the culture war, which she correctly identifies as a limiting series of skirmishes about politically loaded signs and symbols. The ‘contemporary debate has limited the very concept of modesty to gender segregation alone, where women continue to be the primary repositories of sexual ethics and family values…unless Muslims are willing to actively engage with pluralism in all matters of life and religion, debates on Islam and the place of Islam as a public and private faith will continue to remain for the most part simplistic and uninspiring’.
Although she comments on the lack of lived experience in Islamic studies, and urges Muslims to engage, she doesn’t have many concrete ideas about how to engage with those whose views are narrower or differently focussed than hers; engagement with British society tout court is the cure for narrowness, which begs the question. (So-called fundamentalists are also part of British society.) There is a consistent sense of being above the fray. A good example of this is her discussion with other Muslims women about modesty and dress; the women are looking for answers, and Siddiqui responds by saying that her job is to make them think, a sort of obstinate Oxbridge donnishness (or Socratic tactic, if you like) that doesn’t address whatever tensions and disagreements there may be in such women’s families about such matters.
Siddiqui alludes to and disapprove of a soft relativism (also noted by Tariq Ramadan), which would deny the essential truth of Islam, but does not entirely escape the soft-boiled language of ‘relativism’. At one point she says she thinks of Allah as a permanent mental presence, but not in any ritual or performative way. It certainly must be at least tautological to call the salah performative, but leaving that aside, Siddiqui has put her finger on an important theme. A performance is done in public, and it is this being-in-public that constitutes Zaidi’s struggle and A-Solaylee’s urge to escape and causes both to fear punishment.
Siddiqui gently suggests that this concentration on punishment is a choice and that there are other perspectives available:
We are turned off by the language of fire and brimstone; the vivid images of heaven and hell, although ingrained in our cultural consciousness, seem alien. But words which speak of grace and generosity, compassion and forgiveness draw us in and slowly we begin to imagine God in a different kind of language.
This is not a rejection of the Creator’s message about the punishment and reward in the afterlife, and her clarifying comment is more subtle than it first appears: ‘The relationship between this life and the afterworld lies in accepting that there is a place in time that has yet to occur … this other world can be imagined but it is not imaginary.’ Jinnah and Jahannam are real indeed, but portrayed in a way that we can visualise them.
If only Zaidi and Al-Solaylee had read Siddiqui; it would have saved them some grief. Or this quote that Siddiqui includes, by the Sufi theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya: ‘the Gnostic journeys towards on two wings, awareness of his own faults and recognition of his Lord’s grace. He cannot journey without them, and if he be denied one, he would be like a bird that had lost a wing’.
The benefit of Siddiqui’s deep Islamic knowledge is the precision with which she selects from other’s thought to support her own. This is William Chittick quoting Ibn Arabi; the passage employs a brilliant metaphor that at once honours Islam as the final revelation, but acknowledges respectfully the contribution of other religions:
All the revealed religions are like lights. Among those religions, the revealed religion of Muhammad is like the light of the sun among the lights of the stars. When the sun appears, the lights of the stars are hidden, and their lights are included in the light of the sun. Their being hidden is like the abrogation of the other revealed religions that takes place through Muhammad’s revealed religion. Nevertheless, they do in fact exist, just as the existence of the light of the stars is actualised.
Omar Ghobash’s memoir/polemic, Letters to a Young Muslim, uses a literary conceit, a series of letters to his ‘sons,’ to deliver a progressive argument supporting a universalist and humanist Islam. A left-leaning, Guardian-reading person such as myself can find much to agree with: he wants his ‘son’ to think for himself, to resist calls to violence and a simplistic vision of a ‘pure’ or revanchist Islam. So far so good. My reservations have to do with how much Ghobash is willing to engage with countervailing arguments and with how little his polemic is grounded in the Qur’an and a more representative selection of modern Islamic thought: in other words, how much his screed leaves out.
It is entirely understandable that Ghobash is energetically opposed to violence, having lost his father at an early age to an assassination. His account of how he experienced this loss is unbearably poignant.
My siblings and I were told that there would be a three-day holiday and we celebrated. Back at the house, however, we returned to find my mother crying. Men stood in small circles outside in the garden. The women remained inside to watch a funeral broadcast on the family television … The house was crowded, hot, and I have a vague recollection of everything feeling saturated by tears. An Emirati flag covered the coffin. I asked whose funeral it was but received no answer.
Many years later I realised it was my father’s funeral.
Early on there is interesting information about the sort of place that the United Arab Emirates were before the coming of oil wealth: hard-scrabble existence focussed on getting enough fish and rice. He portrays himself as a sincere yet skeptical participant in his own religion, telling us that he has felt religious fervour albeit while reciting the Qur’an badly in a singsong manner, but his self-portrait is tinged with a certain narcissism. Searching for role models as a young man, he looks around the mosques, and finds no one worthy or wise enough or with an adequate character. Really! In all the mosques?
It is not that he is incapable of giving good advice. I liked this exhortation to the ‘son’ to ground his faith in lived experience, for example:
By purposeful experience I mean going out and placing yourself in positions where you are compelled by circumstances to take responsibility. Climb a mountain. Volunteer with children in a poverty-stricken country. Help a friend out of trouble. Defend someone less privileged than yourself. Teach someone to read and write. Speak in public and hear what people think of you. You will refine your understanding of yourself…
Now, I am not in any way agreeing with Muslims, or so-called Muslims, who attempt to solve political problems with violence (that often kills innocent civilians), but what I do object to in Letters is that it is extremely thin on Qur’an quotations and excessively thick on caricatures. He sets up the problem of violence by positing a certain type of ulema as a possible but easily knocked over solution to the problem:
Could it be that the online ulema—or religious scholars of Islam—are correct`? Could it be that they are the living embodiment of what Islam can and should and will become? The path is clear, the language is straightforward and simple. When all the clutter of modern life is removed, the path opens up before you towards meaning and purpose.
There are indeed such clerics, devoted to a bellicose approach. (I thought of Yusuf Ali’s comment in his 1907 Life and Labours of the People of India: ‘Their dreams are centred in those nooks and crannies to which the light of modernity has never penetrated.’) Hidebound, mumbling over their sacred texts. But there are others, who do indeed live in the modern world and use modern approaches. Could these online ulema be the same religious scholars, for instance, who wrote and published on the internet a point-by-point refutation of ISIS leader Al-Baghdadi’s warlike theology?
Furthermore, Ghobash tells us that the battle between revelation and reason was lost over a thousand years ago. He is referring to skirmishes between the Mutazilites and orthodox Sunnism and to the ascendancy of fiqh over falsifa. The twin figures of Al-Ghazzali and Sayyid Qutb loom, the former approved of because of his turn to Sufism, and the latter despised as a proponent of the nastiest type of jihad. This overlooks an entire century of intellectual Muslim response to the West, such as one might find in Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.
One of Ghobash’s stylistic tics is the posing of rhetorical questions.
How can we stretch ancient concepts and attitudes without destroying our emotional and mental understanding? Should we turn back to our past, closing our eyes to what we can learn from others, insisting that we are special and different from all others?
And:
What are we to do with the complex idea of being born with a predisposition to homosexuality? What are we to do with the idea of not having chosen one’s sexuality? …. What if ‘family values’ hide tremendous injustice committed by patriarchal fathers against their wives and children, especially their daughters?
And:
If we are Muslims and our religion is a one of peace, then why are there loud voices that have declared that we are at war? And that this war is one that has enemies everywhere and all the time?
But his pacific argument conveniently ignores that the Qur’an itself defines necessary war (it is defensive, when you are persecuted and killed for your religious beliefs) and lays down guidelines for its proper conduct, including conditions for peace. A responsible discussion of the problem of extremist violence must surely take account of that, and meet the extremists’ arguments on their own terms by referencing appropriate Qur’anic verses. Consequently, his book has little of value to say to anyone who perceives or believes they are at war.
As for the Qur’an, Ghobash rarely quotes from it. Instead, in a section called “The Qur’an and Knowledge”, he argues that the Qur’an is indeed the word of Allah, but it needs other books to explain it and still others to place it in a context. Then he skips to a relatively weak hadith (Utlub bi-l-‘ilm wa law fii Siin; Seek knowledge, even though it be in China) in order to bolster the importance of knowledge.
Ghohash’s often-deployed rhetorical method comes off as ill-suited to his goal of encouraging his son to think for himself; too often, it sounds more like he is telling his son what to think, because the answers are contained within the questions; they are circular arguments that sometimes lead to dubious conclusions, such as here where, instead of referring to the Qur’an as firqan, a guide to right and wrong, he suggests that its guidance can ultimately be transcended:
Points [for good and bad deeds] fit in well with the question-and-answer approach to moral conduct, which uses questions such as, Is this halal or haram? —allowed by Islam or not. The balanced, principled person I want you to become no longer needs to ask these questions because he or she has absorbed the appropriate principles of behaviour. (Emphasis mine.)
To be generous, this sounds a tad like Confucius’s ‘I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.’ To be less generous, it sounds like magical thinking: as Muslims, we will always need the Qur’an to guide us.
In this way, Letters reflects the preference or anti-religious bias of secular society (or the publishing industry), where religion is presented as a boiled-down set of moral concepts without connection to their sacred texts. Letters disappointed me because it seemed repetitive and smug, at times sounding like a training manual for the United Kingdom’s Prevent programme, preaching to the converted, as unwilling to directly engage with opposing points of view as the Islamicists criticised by Abdou Filali-Ansari, quoted in Siddiqui’s My Way.
Today it is clear that fundamentalists and their supporters are completely closed off to even the most elaborate theological refutations of their views, even when produced by distinguished religious authorities. The first reflex of the fundamentalists is to withdraw from the mainstream, to build around themselves a shell that is impervious to any logic except their own.
After reading Siddiqui and Ghobash, it struck me that the polarisation I referred to earlier has made it difficult for more liberal Muslims to communicate with more traditionalist Muslims. That old barzakh again. Those on the left are also prone to only listening to those who agree with them. So: you out there, are you a Salafist, a Wahabbist, educated by the Jamat-i-Islami or the Muslim Brotherhood, with conservative views and interesting life experiences, but not a hater? We’d love to hear from you.