Two American sheiks have formed a Muslim seminary:
Sheik Hamza Yusuf, in a groomed goatee and sports jacket, looked more like a hip white college professor than a Middle Eastern sheik. Imam Zaid Shakir, a lanky African-American in a long brown tunic, looked as if he would fit in just fine on the streets of Damascus.
U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground By LAURIE GOODSTEIN, New York Times, Published: June 18, 2006
The story goes on about how the two each understand both Islam and U.S. popular culture. Judging by the examples, they also understand both Islamic and Christian religious history. It continues:
Mr. Yusuf told the audience in Houston to beware of "fanatics" who pluck Islamic scripture out of context and say, "We’re going to tell you what God says on every single issue."
"That’s not Islam," Mr. Yusuf said. "That’s psychopathy."
Not stopping with an easy put-down, Yusuf continued:
He asked the audience to pray for the victims of kidnappers in Iraq, saying that kidnapping is just as bad as American bombings in which the military dismisses the civilians killed as "collateral damage."
"They’re both sinister, as far as I’m concerned," he said. "One is efficient, the other is pathetic."
That’s a message that might get listened to elsewhere in the Muslim world. (Maybe some people in DC should listen to it, too.)
A listener asked:
"You said we have an obligation to humanity. Did you mean to Muslims, or to everyone?"
Mr. Shakir responded: "The obligation is to everyone. All of the people are the dependents of Allah."
A bit different from the divide and conquer rhetoric of so many "religious" leaders these days.
An older woman from Iraq begged him to contact Muslim scholars in her homeland and correct their misguided teaching.
That would be a good idea.
What are the sheiks trying to teach?
The American seminary was Mr. Yusuf’s idea. His diagnosis of the problem with Islam today is that its followers lack "religious knowledge." Islam, like Judaism, is based in scripture and law that has been interpreted, reinterpreted and debated for centuries by scholars who inspired four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Mr. Yusuf laments that many of the seminaries that once flourished in the Muslim world are now either gone or intellectually dead. Now, he said, the sharpest Muslim students go into technical fields like engineering, not religion.
He said he believed that if more Muslims were schooled in their faith’s diverse intellectual streams and had a holistic understanding of their religion, they would not be so susceptible to the Osama bin Ladens who tell them that suicide bombers are martyrs.
"Where you don’t have people who have strong intellectual capacity, you get demagoguery," he said.
Meanwhile, Imam Shakir does say that he would wish the U.S. to become a Muslim country, but he says only by persuasion and only because he thinks it would help people. While I don’t support his position on that, I find it hard to see how it differs from that of so many Christian preachers.
That aside, by promoting a better understanding of Islam by Muslims, Sheik Yusuf and Imam Shakir could do more for world security than several divisions of U.N. peacekeepers in Iraq or Palestine. Communication can be the best type of risk management.
-jsq