Allah, Liberty and Love by Irshad Manji

Author:Irshad Manji
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

All of which reinforces the larger point about what we can do. We have to legitimize countercultural Muslims as credible Muslims, not watered-down believers or Western wannabes. Abdul Ghaffar Khan never set foot in Europe or America, yet he epitomized universal values that Muslims, including the tens of millions of us who live in the West, can identify with through and through. Countercultural Muslims are his heirs. We’re waging the next stage of a struggle to interpret Islam in ways that are bound to offend tribalists everywhere—just as Ghaffar Khan elicited shrieks from the mullahs, the woman-bashers and the Hindu-haters. Giving offense goes with the territory of fighting for diversity.

Many of us in democracies believe otherwise, emotionally browbeaten into accepting the illiberal notion that diversity is all about appearances. The embellished costumes. The rehashed scripts. The clichéd roles. The predictable performances. Another term for this confection? Acting. Truer diversity drills down to reach minorities within communities—the individuals with the unorthodox views. Individuality will always rattle assumptions and jar feelings. That’s the nature of nonconformity. Offense, then, isn’t a problem to duck at all costs. It is the cost of meaningful diversity.

Frederick Douglass, whose example taught Martin Luther King, Jr., adds perspective. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground,” he observed. “They want rain without the thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.” His wisdom applies to more than the struggle with external oppressors. For four decades Douglass had a black wife. Two years after she passed away, he married again—only to confront race-baiters among African Americans themselves. A column in one newspaper, black-owned, bitterly declared that “Fred Douglass has married a red-head white girl. We have no further use for him. His picture (hung) in our parlor, we will (now) hang it in the stable.” Countercultural Muslims have been there. We’re still there.

Martin Luther King, Jr., told Americans about two kinds of peace: “Negative peace” is the absence of tension, while “positive peace” is the presence of justice. As the price of realizing a diverse nation, King accepted tension—the oceanic roar that arose from offending white and black segregationists. In the twenty-first century, such backlash is the price of inhabiting a diverse globe.

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