Islam: The Other Western Religion
Until very recently I knew embarrassingly little about Islam. I was, in some way, aware of my lack of knowledge. Islam existed, Out There, but had never been discussed in any of my classes or mentioned with any depth in my home. Islam was a subject, like Astronomy, that I figured would be interesting to take a class on, if it fit in my schedule. In the fall of 2001 I was a freshman at the University of Iowa, and one day as I got ready for class my phone rang. My mother was crying saying something terrible had happened in New York and that I should turn on the radio. We didn’t have a television at the time, and I remember I carried my Discman all day listening to the news. It was a confused mess and no one knew anything for certain, but I remember clearly, early that day, that Islam was somehow implicated, they said, and they seemed to be searching for it in the mountains.
That semester I was taking a class, one of those giant lecture hall ordeals that they have at state schools involving 300 freshman, 6 grad students, and one professor who seems to be counting down the days till winter break. The class was called “Living Religions of the East” and we were supposed to cover Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shinto. A student asked, in light of what was going on in the world, if Islam could be added to the course syllabus. The professor addressed the class at large, “Islam is not an eastern religion, it is a western religion, if you want to learn about Islam, take a class on western religions.” When did Islam become part of the west, I thought, and how did I miss that? I had been born and raised in the west. I was enveloped in the west. I was the product of hundreds of years of western migration, my ancestors in the European west, traveled west to the New World then headed even further west where they mixed with the locals, who they westernized, and became part of the “Wild West,” the “Old West” and eventually “Country-Western.” How was Islam western? I knew nothing about Islam. I am part of the challenge Muslims face in the modern world, because I somehow reached adulthood knowing nothing about the Islamic world or its history. All of my knowledge of Islam involved oil and warfare and a sense that Muslims were either being oppressed, or oppressing others. I knew Islam was a religion, but it seemed also to be a political system, an economic policy, and strangely un-modern. All I knew about Islam, at that time when my country seemed so eager to declare a war on the Muslims of the world, was that they weren’t like us, and that unfortunately, seems to be their biggest challenge. This American narrative relies on two assumptions in order to work, the first is that Muslims all over the world are the same, the second is that we in the US are all the same. Neither of these things, it should seem to the rational person, could possibly be true. But it is this narrative, which goes largely unchallenged in American popular media and fuels the rivalry between the Christian-West and the Islamic-Slightly-Further-East-West and permits us, self-righteously, to proselytize, to bomb, and to conquer. Muslims in the US face a lack of understanding and compassion. The religion becomes identified with corrupt political systems, with oil, and poverty, and the cultural practices that subjugate women. Islam becomes a single entity and is seen as the cause and culprit for the problems of dozens of countries, and so, by extension, Muslims around the world become problematic. Islam as a whole becomes identified with those on the periphery, like political extremists, and oil moguls, when they are in fact by-and-large, normal people. The primary issue that Muslims face in the modern world is that they are people like us, diverse, rural, urban, modern and traditional, but we just haven’t fully understood that yet.
