An Attempted Exorcism and Thoughts on the American-Muslim Future

Insha’Allah I will finish the Sharia post when I have time. I have been working so many hours lately I am fatigued and do not have he mental energy when I am off work to tackle such a serious issue.

Business has been slow so I have to work longer hours and besides, with the pregnancy of my wife, my expenses are going up. Maybe these days I am looking a little more intense than I have at other times in my life. A high school teacher once told me that I was one of those students who teachers would never forget because of the intensity of my eyes (whatever that means).

Maybe it was this intense look to lead an elderly black female passenger leaving her home to give me a dirty look before she got into the cab. Before she got in she said “yea I know you…take your hat off…are you a black boy?”

Once she got in she went on a tirade “you are full of evil and you are trying to fool people but you cannot fool me. You have done terrible things and are going to do more terrible things in a few days.” A few moments later she took both of her arms ad put them around my neck and put them on my chest and told me “I don’t want you I am gonna take the devil out of you” and at this point I had been driving about 20 hours with only short breaks for the essentials and I pulled over and told her she had to get out.

That was on Friday and despite having that deranged older lady wanting to perform an exorcism on me, the day ended up pretty good. Things went downhill on Saturday as I just could not catch a decent trip until the end of the night, and by that time I didn’t want it because by that time I was so tired I didn’t know if I was going to be able to stay awake to make it home.

To Be Strangers: Time to Cling to Our Rightful Position After The Election

Now that the election is over I would like to talk about an issue that will not leave us as Muslims in America; our place within the political, social, and cultural aspects of American society.

I do not need to go over the history of Muslim thought in America; an inter-mixing of African-American Muslims with the revolutionary-left in the 1960′s and 70′s, the flirtation with and support of the Republican party and the Conservative Movement by many immigrant Muslim leaders from the 1980′s on, the hard left turn of the mainstream Muslim organizations post 9-11 and the blurring of the lines between what is Islam and what is the secular humanistic left by many of the younger generation and even some established leaders.

This election cycle I strategically supported Barack Obama for reasons I have stated before and in the vast-majority of elections I favor the Democratic candidate based on what I feel is a Party Platform that is better for my family and most of the people I know, Muslims and non-Muslims. However, my support for Obama, and my enthusiasm for his campaign, does not mean that I am “one of them”.

The world view that I have is first and foremost shaped by Quran and Sunnah and any modern ideas that I encounter, in the political, cultural or social realm, are filtered through Islamic knowledge. Therefore I take what is good from the Democratic Party, and the left in general, and I discard what is not compatible with Islam. So while I am favor of many, but not all, of the economic polices championed by the left, if I am to believe in the Quran and the Sunnah I have to be at odds with their secular relativist cultural agenda.

In search of allies, or in the need of love from peers in a society they are trying to fit into, we have seen a group of mostly second-generation immigrant Muslims lurch farther and farther to the left since 9-11. What started as solidarity over our shared opposition to the war in Iraq and erosion of civil liberties of American-Muslims (and even shared solidarity with Palestinians with some on the left), has sent many young Muslims on a slippery slope towards the creation of a Reformed Islam (whether this goal is stated or not). This is based not on the belief of and fear of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger ( S.A.S.) and the way of those who came after him, but in the consensus of non-Muslim Western sociologist, thinkers, and activists.

These young Muslims have flipped the script in that they are not filtering liberal thought through Islam; rather they are filtering Islam through the secular-left. What is in the Sunnah that is compatible with the view of their non-Muslim allies they keep, such as caring for the poor and giving rights to workers and being good stewards of the environment. What from Sunnah does not jive with the modern Western-left they discard, giving their favorite modern thinkers supremacy over the Prophet (s.a.s.) and rendering the revealed knowledge of the Quran second-class to what you can learn at Harvard.