D
dzheremi
Guest
And how exactly do you reconcile this with Islamic apologetics of the type that I posted earlier, which grant special significance to Arabic as the most direct route to God? These arguments must carry some currency across much of the Islamic world, as our friend Elwill essentially quoted them (without the quotes) to justify the Arab-centric public prayer of Islam.
It has occured to me that you and I are possibly making two separate arguments and hence may be talking around each other, so to speak. It seems to me from reading your replies to my posts that you think that I am equating “Arab supremacy” with “use of the Arabic language as an official policy towards public prayer”. Perhaps I’m reading you wrong, but if that is what you think I’m saying I can see that I wasn’t as successful in clarifying myself earlier as I thought I was. I’ll try again now:
The issue is NOT one of Muslims praying in Arabic regardless of their ethnic or cultural background. While I do have issues with that and the underlying logic that supports it (that I hopefully made a bit more clear in my post about the problems of a “sacred” language), really what I have called the “Arab supremacist” viewpoint inculcated by Islam is only most obviously shown with reference to the language issue. It is in reality much larger than that, as Byzantine Wolf has pointed out, though I suppose I feel most comfortable commenting on the linguistic aspects of Arab cultural expression/domination within Islam, for obvious reasons.
Again, we are apparently in agreement that Islam has been defined and practiced in different ways throughout the world, according to the interpretations of different cultures. No problems there, right? Islam is no more a monolith than Christianity or any other world religion is. The problem, in my view, lies with what are Muslim-specific claims regarding God, culture, epistemology, etc. To the extent that anyone of any background can accept those claims, Islam is most certainly a universal religion. I have never, as far as I can remember, denied this. I still claim that it is better to call it a universalizing religion, as it universalizes ONE cultural mindset via its religious character, rather than universalizing the religion itself through its expression via many different cultural mindsets which are (ideally) seen as equally acceptable so long as they express the same religious orthodoxy (which all cultures are theoretically capable of doing, regardless of language, origin, etc). In Islam, it seems to me that this model is tweaked due to the presence of a religious orthodoxy that contains within it the idea that Arabic language, culture, and customs are to be seen as permissable whereas others are not, for various reasons. Outside of prayers, things not considered in conformity with Islam include those cultural practices common to incompletely Islamicized people like certain “Berbers”, whose women actively pursue men for marriage, and wear makeup (see Venema and Bakker “A permissive zone for prostitution in the Middle Atlas of Morocco”, Ethnology, Vol. 43, No.1, Winter 2004). Now what on earth is wrong with that? As explained in the study, Arab women don’t do it! So it is “far from Islam”, as a Qur’an teacher among the Ait Abdi Berbers said of all this barbaric behaviour like women proposing marriage to him. Oh my stars! The gall of some women, right?
I pray for those bosnian women to know the true Most High God, His Word which He sent, and His Spirit which is with us…
