Islam Explained
by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Jacana R135
How do you explain - particularly to your own impressionable child - that the murderous actions of September 11, 2001 need not be a source of shame among co-religionists?
When the conversation goes like this:
Daddy, am I a Muslim?
Yes, like your parents.
And am I an Arab, too?
Yes, you're an Arab, even if you don't speak Arabic.
But you saw on TV, the Muslims, they killed a lot of people. I don't want to be a Muslim.
Tahar Ben Jelloun is a novelist, essayist, critic and poet of Moroccan origin who has lived in France for more than three decades. He is a winner of the Prix Mahgreb and the Prix Goncourt.
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He is also the father of deeply troubled daughters living in a country which prides itself on its attachment to logic.
So, when his child said she didn't want to be a Muslim, he knew he had to answer some serious questions.
In this little book, Tahar takes those questions further, to explain - as he sees it - the nature of Islam.
I say "as he sees it", because Tahar is only one voice among many: he writes approvingly of such sages as the North African Ibn-Khaldun (1332-1406); the Afghan Jamal Eddine al-Afghan (died 1897); and the Egyptian Muhammed Abduh (died 1905).
The first warned against "using the mosque for teaching things other than the Koran". The others encouraged "certain changes of rules and habits in practising religion" - in other words, reforms.
"They said that we should not blindly accept what the ancient teachers laid down as rules for Islamic conduct, that the time when Islam was born was very different from modern times."
This statement would be unexceptionable in perhaps 95% of the worldwide Christian community, where to be "fundamentalist" is equated with ignorance, backwardness, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, intolerance - and so on.
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