My (earnest, irate) thoughts

I have never been so profoundly affected by an essay. Tradition or Extradition? The Threat to Muslim-Americans by Abdal-Hakim Murad, a British shaikh, is pretty much the best thing ever.

As the new ‘Jews’ of this country, U.S. Muslims must be vigilant not to — ahem, dare I say it? — deserve being labeled Other. The shaikh takes us quickly through the particular struggles being faced among Muslim-Americans. And how America has handled other perceived enemies in decades past. And what we must do to avoid a showdown with an increasingly suspicious host, who has a history of antisemitism.

The believer’s greatest argument is his face. True religion lights up the face; false religion fills it with insecurity, rage and suspicion. This is perceptible not only to insiders, but to anyone who maintains some connection with unsullied primordial human nature in his heart. The early conversions to Islam often took place among populations that had no access to the language of the Muslims who now lived among them; but they were no less profound in consequence. Religion is ultimately a matter of personal transformation, and no amount of missionary work will persuade people — with the occasional exception of the disturbed and the desperate — unless our own transformation is complete enough to be able to transform others. Rigorism, discourtesy and narrow-mindedness, the tedious recourse of the spiritually inadequate and the culturally outgunned, end up reinforcing the negative attitudes that they claim to repudiate. Conversely, a reactivation of the Prophetic virtue of rifq, of gentleness, which the hadith tells us ‘never enters a thing without adorning it’, will make us welcome rather than suspected, loved and admired rather than despised as a community of resentful failures.

Yeah!