Islam Misunderstood

I was watching “Morning Joe” on CNBC, a morning political talk show co-hosted by Joe Scarboro, a conservative former Senator from Florida. Recently he was talking about the murder of a dozen people by a Muslim US Army Psychiatrist and said that people should have been suspicious of him when they saw him dressed in Islamic clothing. My issue for this discussion is not with the profiling but the “Islamic clothing”. People in the US often confuse regional culture with religion and Joe should have known better both in his position as Senator and talk show host. He is either ill informed, which is scary, or he wants to stoke anti Muslim sentiment which is scarier given the platform he has available.
We Americans often consider all Muslims to be Arabs and all Arabs to be Muslim, neither of which is true. Arabs represent a small portion of all Muslims. About 10% of Palestinians are Christians (Yaser Arafat’s wife was a Christian) and there is a population of Coptic Christians in Egypt. The largest Muslim country is not in the Middle East but, Indonesia in Asia. There are areas of China which have a significant Muslim population. I have heard reports claiming that as much as 10% of Russia is Muslim. Islam is followed by most of the North Africa’s population and Sub Saharan Africa also has large pockets of followers.
Much of what is attributed to Islam is really more regional culture based on custom and levels of societal development. The major areas of misunderstanding are dress, the inequality of women and harsh punishment for acts that in the West often would even be considered the norm.
The custom of women covering themselves to various degrees in many Muslim Countries is thought of in the West as an “Islamic” thing. Though the Qur-an preaches modesty in dress for both men and women, what is modest in one culture is immodest in another. A man wearing a tank-top t-shirt or a woman dressed in shorts with her butt hanging out would be considered immodest not only by the standards of Islam but also by many Western cultures. Yes Women in many Arab countries cover their faces in public and in places like Indonesia and Iran their hair. On the other hand, I saw a documentary on Islam in Sub Saharan Africa filmed by a South Korean crew where they showed a tribal ritual in a Muslim village where the women danced with their breasts uncovered. There was another documentary on PBS that followed a Chechen youth dance company touring Western Europe that had among its members, young teen age girls looking very typical of teenagers anywhere in the Western world. They even sounded like young Western girls when asked about boys and dating except when they became melancholy talking about boys, saying that most of the “cute” ones were either killed or jailed by the Russians. Were it not for an occasional use of Allah in reference to God during the interview or the cupping of hands in prayer prior to the performance no one would ever have recognized these girls as Muslims. I also imagine if you were walking in the streets of Tehran, you would be hard pressed to recognize a Zoroastrian from a Muslim or Christian. We often take for granted local customs and think of other’s as being strange.
Whereas women bathing topless is acceptable in Europe, depending on where you are in the US, it could possibly land you to jail. A European could argue that the remnants of a patriarchal society still exist in the US and a woman continues to be subjected to the whims of men. I Saw a show on HBO where Bill Maher had as guests Martina Navratilova (a former tennis great) and a man who was involved with her in some sort of program to free women in Afghanistan of the “Burka” (covering from head to foot with only a screen to see through). Another guest was retired general Wesley Clark who, after listening how the others wanted so much to free woman from the oppression of the Burka, asked Martina if she had ever asked a woman under the Burka how she felt. Martina was taken aback. Though well intentioned, I suspect she was imagining what it would be like for her in her current circumstance and not the Afghan woman’s. General Clark said he had and that there are a lot of things, other than her dress, that she was worried about more.
Our democracy evolved over a period of more than a millennium, starting with the “Magna Charta” in England. Women here gained the right to vote only about 100 years ago not to mention that until the 1960s African Americans in the South were by law prohibited from drinking from the same water fountain as those of European ancestry. A major part of the evolution in women’s rights was a transition from a predominantly agrarian to an industrial society. Throughout history, agrarian societies have been patriarchal where the role of the man was that of CEO of the enterprise, the farm and the woman managed household. (I believe that managing the household and family to be apart from managing acquisition of goods for the home even today in our culture.) One can debate how, over time, the role of CEO of the farm fell to the man in most if not all societies but that is another subject. As the head of the farm, he was responsible for managing the enterprise’s activities and resources and the woman’s role in this external enterprise, though not necessarily in the family, was subservient. As the societies became industrialization, and families moved from the farm into cities the enterprise of which the man was the CEO vanished and he became just a worker in a factory as did more and more women. Outside the family, the difference between men’s and women’s roles kept shrinking. This shrinkage still continues. As these differences started to diminish so did patriarchy and women’s equality increased. However, this improvement in equality lagged industrialization by more than one hundred years. Many of the predominantly Muslim counties have yet to get into an industrialized state and in those that have, Turkey for example, the condition of women are on a par with much of the Christian West. Immigrants from agrarian Muslim societies who have emigrated to the West have in many instances yet to fully integrate into the communities and some of their cultural attitudes toward women’s position have yet to change completely.
Equality for women certainly has improved with industrialization but has their lot in life? (I know I am getting out on thin ice with that question.) There was a Worldwide Pew Pole reported in the Economist looking to correlate material well being with happiness. They found that there was indeed some correlation. A more interesting finding however came when they compared the difference in responses between men and women in a given country to determine the level of separation in happiness. They rated the levels of happiness of women relative to men disregarding the happiness of one country versus another. Afghanistan came in first place. Though in general everyone was unhappy, there women were no less happy than the men. In fact the top 10 countries by this ranking were all predominantly populated by Muslims. (I know! The women were too scared to answer correctly or they didn’t understand the questions or the answers were improperly interpreted. Maybe.)
Beside dress and women’s rights there is the matter of harsh corporal punishment. Not to justify this but to understand it one needs to put jurisprudence into the right context. As mentioned above societies develop over long periods of time and to compare them one need’s to understand where they are in time relative to each other. In discussing humanity, one cannot compare the act of a child to that of a grown person. To properly compare someone yet a child to a mature individual, one needs to think of the adult in their childhood. We tend to compare societies this way, not taking into consideration where they are in their development. To properly compare Afghanistan to the industrialized West, we must bring the West back to a comparable stage in its development. During a comparable state of development we here in this country were drowning witches in Salem. Probably a more appropriate alignment would go back further in time to where tens of thousand were burned at the stake for heresy during the inquisitions. When we see and hear about barbaric behavior in the primitive areas we need to see these in the context of the primitive times in which these societies exist and compare them not to us in this era and our current interpretation of Scripture but to us centuries ago and to our interpretation of Scripture at that time which led to the tortures and burnings.
If one considers the current state of the Western society to be desirable (which I happen to) and as an act of altruism wants to have people in the more primitive ones, be they women or men, modernize, one needs to get down to the fundamentals. We tend to want to force changes to behavior rather than changing the socio-economic structures which lead to the behavior. We must either help these countries, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian or Animist, to industrialize or somehow find ways to absorb them into our cultures. Regardless of which path it will be a long journey. “Rome was not built in a day.” Of course there is always the option to leave them alone and let them evolve.