The Space to Be

I spend most of my days at home. My world is pretty small. There is cooking, gardening, some reading and Muslim Space events. I have friends that I hear from through texts, phone calls, and small social gatherings. And then there is the  socializing I do with my relatives back home through Whatsapp. It is on whatsapp that I get to hear about things happening in Kerala , in India , where I am from. It is a very lively, chaotic place, with non-stop social or political controversies, and social media battles over it. 

And it’s on Whatsapp that I came upon the speech by a young woman, speaking at an atheist and freethinkers conference. The Title of the Speech was “The Woman Who Left Religion”. The religion she left was Islam. We  know how much we love listening to people who found islam, their conversion stories. But when someone leaves islam, we want nothing to do with their journey. Our common attitude is that something is wrong with them that they left Islam, better stay out and be safe. But I did listen to her. Her speech began by her saying that there are two scenarios- a person leaves a religion, or a religion leaves a person. When a person leaves a religion, she says, it is because the person finds  religion a barrier as one tries to live according to one’s truth, one’s reason and principles. But when religion leaves a person, she said, it is often for very silly reasons. Religion started to leave her out, she says,  when she felt too hot in her hijab and she took it off for a while. Religion began to leave her out the minute her appearance did not fit with the symbolic boundaries that religion set for her.  This opening comment was impressive. I agreed with her. Religion left me first, she said and then I left religion. 

But what followed was an argument that seemed like it came right out of an Islamophobic playbook. I was surprised that the arguments were so flawed. It was clear that the religious community she had been born into, had left her out first, and then she had looked for arguments to reject their faith, arguments readily available to her in present day conditions of festering islamophobia. 

So what happened that made her feel that the religion of islam had left her out? I would say that it was just pettiness on the part of Muslims. At first, she  was this little girl, a third grader, who took lessons in bharatanatyam, the classical indian dance, and then was asked by her religious teachers to choose between her religion and a hindu dance. Her parents chose for her religion, and that ended her dance lessons. What followed was a foray into drawing and painting, again to earn scoldings from her religious teachers. When she did theatre, and then got busy with practice, shows etc, her parents were again rebuked for letting her do it. What turned out to be straw that broke the camel’s back was a flash mob dance that went viral on social media, and then her community turned against her and her parents calling on them to disown her. I agree with her when she says that no one would have been bothered if she were a man. Kerala is not a place where muslims don’t engage with art at all. What outraged people was the fact that she was a woman. 

Listening to her story makes me ask, should Islam be so suffocating, with such tight borders of haram and halal? And why do we make these borders even tighter for girls and women? Is individual freedom a value in Islam? 

I feel a connection with her story, because I come from a similar muslim cultural background. I did not have her boldness, so i just disagreed in my mind, sometimes even raged inside, but never took the courage to break boundaries outwardly. Do I wish I had lived differently, I really don’t know. But , when I look back on my growing up years, what I see is a complete lack of understanding of Islam. Yes there were prayers. Sometimes too many of them, like those few months in 4th grade when I prayed  all the fards as well as sunnas, including a prayer called dhuha in the midmorning! It really pleased my grandmother. There was a real fear of hell, its horrors. It becomes our life’s mission to stay out of it. But what I never learned as part of my religious teachings are what today I hold as the real core, its spirit, its strength, its beauty and its treasure- the message of compassion and justice that islam opens out to us. All the dos and don’ts were never given to me from the standpoint of these two essential qualities of Allah and of ourselves as his worshipers. Once we start looking at our religion from the lens of these two primary principles, it challenges us. Dos and don’ts are simply not that black and white. That should explain the volumes that have been written and rewritten on islamic law. 

What we encounter often is that dos and donts are simply put forward as the bricks that make the fortress of islam- the fortress that defines who is a muslim and who is not. A muslim does this, a non muslim does not. Often the impetus is the other way round, a non muslim does this,so we as muslims dont do it. This preoccupation intensifies when we are threatened as a minority community. Even scholars are not immune to this, even great scholars from the past at that. It is understandable, but is that necessary? 

To answer this, we have to look at the lifetime of the Prophet and what happened then. Allah’s revelation to the Prophet brought to the Arabs a monotheistic message that was already available in the Jewish and Christian books, but one that had lost its hold on the society. It was a message that needed to be rejuvenated through a prophet’s living example. The prophet’s guidance allowed them to look at their world in a new light, without the weight of older , tribal affiliations. But at the same time, the old way of life formed the context to which the new values were applied. There was a universal message, but it was applied to a particular context, that of 7th century Arabia. Thus, what their new faith gave them was not a totally alien culture, but a new paradigm, where every individual is seen as a  blessed creation of God, endowed with the spirit and the intelligence needed to surpass egotistical and tribal views of themselves and enter into a relationship with the divine. This brought to them an awakening in the understanding of their responsibilities to one another, and helped bring social change, giving the marginalized members rights they did not have earlier, and a clear command to treat every member of the society fairly, without any exploitation. 

Following the time of the prophet, Islam took a historical route that gave it certain characteristics, that we associate with islamic culture and civilization today. But once you probe into that history, you realize that the contemporary cultures and civilizations that were in contact with muslims, like the byzantine, and the persian, as well as others,  influenced every aspect of islamic development including its knowledge tradition, social life, law, philosophy,  art and architecture. Islam never originated in a bubble nor did it develop in a bubble. Islam influenced as well as was influenced by others.

So, today when we talk about Islam, can we draw rigid boundaries? Are we expected to draw such rigid boundaries? I would say not. 

For the simple reason that rigid boundaries are oppressive. They kill the human spirit, the one that Allah endowed humans with. It is the spirit of free will, the spirit of enquiry, seeking knowledge, creativity, and the Godly attributes of love, and compassion. As we impose the boundaries, we waver from the Quranic idea that there is no compulsion in religion. Good and evil are self-evident. But what does this verse mean? Are the distinctions between good and evil like the distinction between an apple and orange? No. As individuals and communities, we need certain freedoms to be on the journey of  understanding these concepts intimately, and to be convinced freely and completely. 

Recently, while reading about Judaism, I found out that there is an age in their history that they refer to as the Golden age of Judaism. I was surprised to find out that this golden age is the Islamic Age in Spain. Jews were present in that region from before Roman times, and were persecuted greatly under the Visigoths, but Umayyad rule in the 8th century gave them protections that saw a flourishing in their intellectual achievements as well as their financial success. Jews from other regions emigrated to al-Andalus, as the region was called,  and it became a new Jewish homeland that lasted for more than 500 years. They called it Sefarad in hebrew. The unique coexistence and cooperation between Jews, Christians and Muslims there came to be known as convivencia in spanish.

A similar inclusive and pluralistic culture also took root in Iraq under the Abbasid rule. The patronage that the caliphs gave to intellectuals, and artists, drew people from far and wide, and it was a city of Arabs, Persians, jews, christians and buddhists. Islamic world saw the development of many such centers of learning, of innovation and co-existence, like Cairo, Samarkand, Isfahan, and Delhi. 

This would not have happened if Muslims had not embraced a culture that valued human creativity and  intellectual pursuits. The basic tenet of theology in islam, la-ilaha illallah, is as much a declaration of the existence of God as a declaration of the non-exitence of any other entity to whom human beings owe submission. This is the Truth to which Prophet Muhammad called his followers. It is an idea that frees the human spirit, but at the same time, also guides it away from the trappings of its own desires. 

I know that we tend to look at this past history and feel pride without really understanding its complexity, focusing on the good aspects while ignoring the not so pretty. Not everything about that culture seems admirable, especially not if you look at it as a woman. But let us give it credit when it is due, and the achievements of the Islamic age is one that is understood very little by Muslims. In the popular western narrative, modern civilization  was created from fossilized DNA of Greek philosophy that Europeans found preserved in Arabic books! In actuality, Muslims had absorbed Greek knowledge, and it had been as much a part of the Islamic age as the Prophet’s teachings. Not just Muslims, but Jews and  christians as well, grappled with the manner in which reason and revelation correlates, trying to make space in their world for both these facets of human life. 

Getting back to our own times, as we live in secular contexts,  in the middle of grinding Islamophobia, what do we do as Muslims? How do we preserve our identity as Muslims? How do we raise our children? Do we cripple them by making them too afraid of God, to engage with the civilization that they find around them? Do we bubble wrap them for the fear that they will stray from Islam? 

I would say that rather than present a god who is made to appear like a tyrant, who is waiting to catch them at a mistake, present to them God as God truly is,  their creator who is loving and nurturing, as well as forgiving, who created them to grow up discovering their own potential for kindness, for compassion, for justice, for intellectual inquiry, and for the pursuit of beauty. Present to them a path of growth, one that will require God’s help, one that will require courage, one where they will be respected by their parents as well as community, cherished for who they are, and at the same time require them to respect and cherish others. 

Let us not stifle their innate yearning to explore, to seek, to discover and to learn and to love. Yes, there will be mistakes on their part just as there were on our part as we lead our life.

Let us give one another the freedom and the space to be, to become who we were meant to be.