My (earnest, irate) thoughts

“If one person is harmed it is an unpardonable sin, but a whole people’s destruction is something to debate.”

Like most Americans, I was aghast when a British schoolteacher was jailed in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear ‘Muhammad’. Jailed? Seriously? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. And, without my being fully conscious of it, Sudan was added to my ever-growing private list of places I’m unlikely to visit.

As usual, it feels impossible to be American and Muslim simultaneously. I feel emotions stirring within myself, warring against each other, and it’s hard to know which voices to listen to, let alone sift fact from fiction like grain from chaff. Which is why I’m (usually) curiously silent on the atrocities that happen in the Muslim world. Many native-born Muslims just dump the blame on the zionist bent of our media and government. They point out the wars America starts there, and the empty consumerist culture America exports there. And they demand, “What are we talking about? One teacher? What about Iraq? What about Palestine?” It’s politics, not religion. Then they go on with their day, justice served in their own minds.

But it’s not that simple for me. How can I fit comfortably in the position of Muslim apologist? Though I may, unlike most Americans, actually know where Sudan is, I, too, know very little about the lifestyle of the Sudanese: their culture, their history, their politics, their language, their families, their hearts. It hurts when an American says to me, ‘What’s up with this teddy bear nonsense? Your religion is crazy.’

That’s why I like reading the thoughts of Hamza Yusuf Hanson, born in Walla Walla, Wash., a convert to Islam of Jewish descent who lived in the Middle East for a decade or more. He is thoroughly American, but fervently Muslim, and he articulates the opinions that I think could bridge this gap, real or imagined, that exists between the warring worlds, that of political Islam and that of the secular West. Maybe there is no gap… or maybe the gap is being erased by folks like yours truly, wouldn’t that be sumfin’… but no lie, this world doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense to me.

Here, he writes poignantly about ‘The Real Teddy Bear Tragedy‘.