Lauding a Canadian Muslim's reformist zeal

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta
HindustanTimes.com 
UK Edition

London, January 7, 2006

Being a reformer in Islam is to flirt with ridicule, danger, vituperation and anger. It is not an easy job. It becomes doubly difficult when one goes public. It becomes even more problematic when one tries to overturn 
centuries old traditions.

It could even become dangerous when it is a woman who is trying to enter a male dominated patriarchal arena. It is frankly amazing when all this is happening in the "hot-house" atmosphere of immigrant societies.

This is a story of a Canadian lady Raheel Raza and her journey over the past five years as expressed in her recently published book.

www.raheelraza.com/home.html

I came across her mention few months back when it was announced that she had led a mixed congregation of Muslims in prayers in Canada. I have been keeping a beady eye on Muslim activists/reformers. While nowhere near anything like an expert, I am an interested observer for obvious reasons. In the past, we have explored two American ladies, Dr. Amina Wadud and Asra Nomani

(http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2005/04/
women-priests-much-ado-about-nothing.html and http://piquancy.blogspot.com/
2005/07/saint-sinner-or-bit-of-both.html). 

This is the third in that rather interrupted series and will be followed by another reformer, Tariq Ramadan.

Raza is an immigrant from Pakistan, settled in Canada since 1989. Married with two grown up sons, she is a polyglot, an award winning writer, public speaker, media consultant and interfaith advocate. In her book, entitled "Their Jihad... Not My Jihad", she has put together a collection of her newspaper columns in the Toronto Star over the past five years arranged in themes.

The first theme is "Political Jihad - A Struggle for the soul of Islam". The second theme is "Gender Jihad - A Struggle for Women's Rights", while the last one is "Spiritual Jihad - A Struggle to Know Each Other".

A collection of newspaper op-ed columns is a tricky piece to pull off. I know by personal experience that a newspaper op-ed column does not allow one to do full and in-depth justice to a topic. Hence one can only express one's opinion and hope the editor will allow the extra words to slip past.

The format and medium of a newspaper

column is a big tight straight-jacketed.

But once one has put together a themed collection, what one gets is a relatively consistent view of what the author thinks on a high level on those themes and topics. The five-year time horizon also shows how the author's opinions have evolved. It is a fascinating exercise to cross-correlate external events with how a Muslim activist dealt with them and thought about some of the most earth shattering events in recent times.

9/11 and after
Before 9/11, Islam and the West had a rather subdued relationship with each other. Muslim populations in the West were not seen that much on the radar.

There have been some issues, such as the Bradford riots in the UK, some incidents such as the first World Trade Centre bombing in the US, some rather poignant immigrant problems and incidents in France, the Turkish problem in Germany, but nothing earth shattering. They were usually subdued in the generalized cacophony of immigrants (all nationalities) trying to fit into a secular Westernized society.

9/11 changed that equation. It caused the world to look seriously not only at the Muslim world across the wide swathe from Algeria to Indonesia, but also inside into the Muslim minority populations.

The racial profiling, the sideways glances, terrorist incidents in Madrid, London, New York, Stockholm, the Afghan and Iraq war, the shrill propaganda and media war etc. all raised the visibility hugely. What it also did was to shine light on some of the rather medieval practices such as honour killing, patriarchal societal, illiteracy, arranged marriages, mis-representation of religious dictates, etc. This is where liberal Muslims stepped up to fight back on three fronts.

The first front was against the "fundos" of their homelands, as well as other Muslim countries, against their strange interpretations of Islam, their religious justification of terrorist actions and the misogynistic approaches in their homelands.

The second front was against the Western governments who started to tamper with their civil liberties as a reaction against terrorism.

The third front was what I would call as the fight against the immigrant thought processes - the gender/women's right fight, the fight for secularism, the fight against patriarchy and the fight against immigrant antiquated traditions brought over.

Raza seems to have fought this war on these three fronts on a consistent basis over the last five years. This is what jumped out clearly at me once I finished the book.

On a broad basis, the overwhelming feeling I had was of a lady who possesses a very strange quality. That is of innocence and belief in the essential goodness of humankind. I have never met her, but I would not hesitate to treat her as my favourite aunt and talk openly and honestly with her. It is that sort of innocence that shines forth, a sort of earnestness that is clear from every column. They are the plaintive cry mixed with righteous indignation of a Muslim who is revolting against the injustices done by the protagonists of the 
three fronts.

She is "one of us" crying out against the blood, gore and terror, which have suddenly infested the world. Her words are not dense prose, not dry academic writing, not polemics, but ordinary day-to-day language, something that the common man/woman can read and think, hey, she thinks like me.

I wouldn't dream of discussing the individual columns, that will take away the pleasure of you gentle readers from actually reading the book, but simply discuss briefly the overall themes.

Book Launched Nov 25, 2005

Going to Extremes

"Muslim fundamentalists distort the faith's teachings and unjustifiably restrict women's freedom. They do Prophet Muhammad and Islam a great disservice"

writes Raheel Raza in 
her first book

Raheel's Letter

Dr. Azeez Sachedina's message

Book Review  (For Catholic New Times, written by Beth Porter)  

Book Review  (For Catholic New Times, written by Beth Porter)

Their Jihad…Not My Jihad! A Muslim Canadian Woman 
Speaks Out

by Raheel Raza. 
Basileia Books, 2005. 176 pages.
ISBN 0-9735087-2-8  

Their Jihad…Not My Jihad is a collection of articles, addresses, poems and interviews that could serve as a brief cultural history of the struggle of moderate Canadian Muslims in recent years to address misrepresentation and stereotypes in the wider society and confusion and reluctance to speak up against extremist elements within the Muslim community.  Several of the articles appeared first in the Toronto Star, where Raheel Raza writes frequently, but their content is of general relevance. 

Ms Raza has long been a leader and advocate in interfaith relations and is often called upon as a spokesperson and consultant. Recipient of numerous awards, she is a person of integrity and courage, who is knowledgeable about her faith and lives it meaningfully. In a mixed Sunni–Shia marriage herself, she knows first hand the struggle to overcome stereotypes of the “other.”  She and her family are representative of the many educated, broad-minded immigrants who come to Canada looking for a place where they can live and raise their children free of prejudice, people who make a great  contribution to Canadian society.  

Ms Raza divides her book into the three “jihads” (struggles) in which she is engaged—the political jihad against extremist forces within Islam who have hi-jacked and distorted Islam to justify an exclusivist and violent theology that endorses killing the innocent; the feminist jihad that challenges the subjugation of women and its false justification, rooted in patriarchy and in the misappropriation and misinterpretation of religious texts; and the spiritual jihad to free oneself of prejudice so as to discover the gifts of other faith traditions, and to take the high road when encountering prejudice oneself.  

These are all, as she says, struggles for the soul of Isalm, but each arena calls also for a struggle to convey to the wider society a more nuanced and appreciative understanding of normative Islam and to debunk misrepresentations. Raheel Raza made news last year as among the first Muslim women in Canada to lead mixed gender congregational prayers.

I was impressed by the frank manner in which in her sermon (included in the book), she named a central problem facing Muslims today: “Dialogue and debate, also known as ijtehad, an important cornerstone of Islam, have been deemed unnecessary evils and stopped since the sixteenth century.” 

She expresses the hope that events such this mixed gender prayer service will “open the doors to that much needed discourse and put us on a path to enlightenment together as men and women of faith.”

(Catholic readers aware of epochs of sustained hiatus in dialogue and debate within their own tradition should be able to sympathize!)  Elsewhere, in a reflection on the Khadr family, she challenges Muslim parents actively to teach their children a balanced understanding of Islam and to be good citizens.

I found particularly interesting, the second section of the book, which offers a number of short articles addressing women’s issues. Raza refuses to be simplistic. While she relentlessly condemns the appalling practice of honour killing in some Islamic cultures, and the cultural traditions and false teaching that lead to the degradation and exploitation of women, she critiques the “garbled image of Muslim women presented by the media” and challenges Western pre-judging of, for instance, the choice to wear the headscarf or the custom of arranged marriage.

She distinguishes between forced marriages and arranged marriages, the latter often today being very respectful of the young people’s wishes and quite successful.  And while she condemns the misappropriation of Shar’ia law, she supports Shar’ia law as a religious option that, rightly interpreted, does not discriminate against women, but she insists that it would need to be accompanied by much more extensive education of Muslim women about their rights under Islamic law and under Canadian law, and the provision of shelters and other support services for women by the Muslim community.

When a friend commented, “I had become quite anti-Muslim; this book turned my thinking around!” I knew I needed to write this review. Canadian civil society will be healthy only if its citizenry become more informed and more discriminating in the judgments it makes about Muslims (and of course, about people of any religion), and if it then demands more sophistication and discrimination of the media.  This timely collection of writings by a gifted journalist long committed to building interfaith bridges begins to fill a gap that fairness cries out we address.   (733 words).

Beth Porter works with L’Arche Canada and is involved in interfaith dialogue.

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