RETHINKING ISLAM: dispatches from the Kenyan left

The faces of Islam: does it have any, can it have one?

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Having attended an Islamic school during my very important formative years, I’m free of those unique suspicions that plague any red-blooded anti-Muslim or the paranoia of American neo-conservatives in D.C over people blowing themselves up like Christmas trees.

Perhaps, there’s been too much a sensationalization of Islam and its attendant splinter groups, largely owing of course to ‘sexed-up dossiers’ on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Why should a bearded Arab with TNT scare us more than a cleanly shaven anti-abortion crusader willing to blow up an abortion clinic? Or a pathological moralist who walks into a gay bar and shoots down every drag queen in sight. This is fundamentalism too. Christian fundamentalism.

So what is fundamentalism? According to terribly over simplistic terms of conventional wisdom, it is taking religion too seriously. To some an affront to the West’s insistent paternal surrogacy of Israel, a defiance to imperialism. And yet to others a frenzied spiritualism that pitts itself as a bulwark against new age pluralism perceived as a threat to age old Muslim values. A panicked reaction perhaps? It is also a sociopath’s religion. I don’t know a God who revels in chaos, or one who would want us to blindly follow it. It is also known for its ‘back to basics’ approach, its commitment to the unquestionably absolute truth of doctrine, scripture and clerics.

Submission to the will of God, by all means yes. Islam also preaches a society ‘Ummathan wasathan’ – a society of equilibriums, no extremes.

I remember the day after 9/11. Remember walking into a class full of head-scarved jubilation, like a maniac dance for death. ‘People died,’ I protested refusing to join the mirth. The Americans deserved it, came the stage managed reply. Like listening to an angry answering machine. I could brush away this brand of zealotry because I knew had they been there…they too would have wept. There’s nothing jubilant about death, even an American death.

I remember also Kawithar, my desk mate in class 3 pleading with me to convert to Islam because she feared for the eternal damnation of my Kaafir soul. I laughed and was touched and left the moral of the story for another day. Belief is potent and it can also be the devil. But just because we believe different things, doesn’t mean we’re so. If we tickle them, do they not laugh? Kawithar laughed. I remember also alighting once from a bus in Mombasa and a man in a Kanzu walking up to me unprompted to welcome me to the city. These are the face of Islam for me. They are benevolent faces and my first instinctive pulls of kindness have Islamic influences in them. As do my earliest memories…I knew how to recite Arabic prayer before any whole Psalm. I celebrated Milad-An-Nabi more heartily than Christmas. (My protestant church a bit fuzzy on the precise date; they’re not wild about the 25^th)

And it is in deference of this memories, or defence of them that I ask simply for your outrage. Delayed though it be. To Kenyans being shipped off secretly to third countries, tortured and denied counsel. All in contravention not just rafts of domestic and international laws, but the simple dictates of human dignity.

When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. Since September 11^th there has been a prodding of Islam, an intensive interrogation of it. Once thought distant and exotic, it is now seemingly expansive and potent. Militant piety, radicalism, Islamic fervour…is this the problem or is it the nature of religious thought and belief to justify some acts. A holy war that writes God’s name in blood, that sees murder as the ultimate act of supplication. Yes, the road to the 72 virgins is paved with roadside bombs.

Bred in the Middle East, who really fed this monster? According to deeply reliable ‘sources’ it’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost. America, an empire creating its own realities and boogie men, shipped fundamentalist literature to Afghanistan, an anti-communist outpost to stop the Red Army. And they did.

In Kenya, the face of Islam is changing too. The tussle between politics and religion is not something we want to massage, but here, constitutional forums that have displayed deep-seated biases, in a subliminally polarising environment dim the hopes of a moderate Islam. And with a warring Somalia, a coastline full of jihadist sympathisers, a Government that has to play to the West to keep afloat and the emergence of Muslim Block, Islamic fundamentalism is not about to go gently into that good night.

Perhaps fanaticism is some indispensable feature of not just religion but human culture. Ideally, everyone wants a democratically submissive Islam but this is hardly rational since God is neither. And from a Pragmatic point of view Muslims everywhere must be suffering from some peer pressure of sorts to join the cause. Yet in every case where religion presents itself as the seeming enemy, neither it nor God are in question. Every day it is our humanity that is called to question. The Muslim story is also part of the Kenyan story.

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