I was born into a mildly observant Muslim family in Iraq. At that time, the 1950s, secularism was ascendant among the political, cultural, and intellectual elites of the Middle East. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Islam would lose whatever hold it still had on the Muslim world. Even that term — "Muslim world" — was unusual, as Muslims were more likely to identify themselves by their national, ethnic, or ideological affinities than by their religion.
To an impressionable child, it was clear that society was decoupling from Islam. Though religion was a mandatory course in school, nobody taught us the rules of prayer or expected us to fast during Ramadan. We memorized the shorter verses of the Koran, but the holy book itself was kept on the shelf or in drawers, mostly unread.
The elderly still made the pilgrimage to Mecca to atone for their transgressions in preparation for death — more an insurance policy than an act of piety. I don't recall ever coming across the word "jihad" in a contemporary context.
The political rhetoric of the day focused on Arab destiny and anti-imperialism. A bit of religious fervor surfaced during the Suez crisis of 1956, when the radio broadcasts out of Cairo blared out martial songs calling for divine support against the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion, but that was an anomaly. Women, not only in my own family but also throughout the urban middle class, wore only Western-style clothes. They had long ceased to wear the hijab, or head scarf. My only connection to a premodern past was my grandfather, who continued to dress in the dignified robes and turbans of an old-line merchant.
Apart from religious holidays, there were few public observances of Islamic rituals. The rites of Muharram, a Shia Muslim practice to commemorate the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein, during which participants often indulged in self-flagellation, was celebrated, sometimes wildly, but I was advised to stay far away; such ceremonies were considered unbecoming of genteel folk, who preferred to hold semiliterary soirees to remember the passion of the martyr.
Modernity was flooding in everywhere. Cinemas and snack bars; cabarets and country clubs, freely flowing alcohol and mixed-sex parties; Baghdad was turning into Babylon, its hedonistic predecessor of yore. Things were not much different, as memoirs of the era testify, in Cairo, Casablanca, Damascus, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, and Tehran.
When I first left Iraq, in 1958, whatever lingering interest I had in religion was ground down further by my exposure to the stifling atmosphere of an Anglican boarding school in England. Enforced attendance at chapel and endless formulaic sermons helped nurture an abiding distaste for organized religion. But in hindsight, I can see that the seeds of my rekindled interest in Islam may well have been planted during this time. I instinctively reacted to the slights against Islam that ran throughout the curriculum — the depiction of the Crusaders as brave knights defending against marauding Saracens, for example, or the casual dismissal of the leaders of the so-called Indian Mutiny against 19th-century British rule as bloodthirsty barbarians.
There were other Muslims in the school, mostly from Britain's shrinking empire. They were no different from me; we all came from the same type of secularized background. Despite our resentment at the depiction of Islam, our presence in England seemed proof that modern civilization was anchored firmly in the West. Our Islamic past may have been glorious, but it was just that — the past. The future was in the West — the more Western, the better. I spent most of my last year at school dreaming of America.
In 1964, when I began my studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was impossible not to be swept up in the cultural and political convulsions of the era, even if you were an outsider. I enthusiastically participated in sit-ins and teach-ins, civil-rights and antiwar protests. I was fascinated by the struggle for black empowerment in America, which demonstrated that a spiritually charged movement could effect great change. Martin Luther King Jr. was a far cry from the establishment churchmen I had encountered in England. And Malcolm X was a practicing Muslim. I began to think about Islam as a force for social transformation.
Later, like many young people during the 1970s, I was preoccupied with the search for a meaningful ethic to fill the spiritual and moral void of the times, to find an inner balance against the excesses of the counterculture. Those thoughts crystallized in the unlikely setting of 1976 London, amid a disintegrating British economy beset by labor strife and the first whiffs of hyperinflation. Between April and June, London was host to the World of Islam Festival, an event designed to convey to the West the richness and diversity of Islam's culture and civilization. More important, it showed the unity of Islamic civilization across its component nations, languages, and cultures. Read more here......
Source: Chronicle Review
Ali A. Allawi is a senior visiting fellow at Princeton University. He has just been named one of the first two Gebran G. Tueni human-rights fellows at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His latest book, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, was published in March by Yale University Press.
Posts
