well respected bro/sis , Islam is not a cultural religion . Anybody can become a Muslim -regardless of race, religion, skin color, language, geographical birth place, you name it
Yaa Allaah, my head just exploded! You’re kidding, right? Islam is not a cultural religion?
This might be HUGE news to every single non-Arab Muslim, since they all pray in Arabic and many also adopt Arab customs and values (nothing wrong with that last part, if done willingly of course). Among the non-Arab Muslims I have known (primarily black Africans from outside Arab North Africa), this is a big issue: Can a Somali practice “Warqa” (traditional Somali folk religion) and still be a Muslim? Why does a Nuba person from Sudan (native speakers of a number of Nilo-Saharan languages, in an area of great linguistic diversity) have to pray in the tongue of the people who try to assimilate him into an Arab world that is not his?
I know you yourself are a non-Arab Muslim, so I wonder what you think of these issues. Maybe you will say that you are proof that Islam is not inherently culture specific, but I will still wonder: If that is not the case, why does it so thoroughly dominate one specific culture (Arab) and those conquered or converted by that culture (various African people, S.E. Asians, etc), while being virtually absent elsewhere? Western converts to Islam are, for all intents and purposes, a relatively recent phenomenon in any sort of large number outside of those travellers, scholars, and other assorted peoples whose works brought them into contact with Muslims (in an inherently sympathetic position alien to much of the rest of their societies, I might add; what good would an Arabist be if he did not at least profess respect for Islam?).
If Islam is not a culture-specific religion, then why are non-Muslim Arabs often targeted in inter-religious violence started by Muslim Arabs to cleanse their lands of non-Muslim elements? Do you know nothing of the
Farhud, or how today Christians and other non-Muslims are persecuted in the Arab-Muslim world? I know that the violence is not so simple as to say that all Arabs think “non-Muslims cannot be real Arabs”, but the systematic destruction of the Arab Christian cultures across their native land certainly points to a desire to make Arab synonymous with Muslim on the part of at least some of the more fanatic Muslim groups and individuals. The great irony is, of course, that no place where Islam now predominates did not previously have established Christian communities, in some cases quite extensive (Egypt, Syria). The Aramaeans are the indigenous Christians of the Levant, the Amhara are the indigenous Christians of the horn of Africa (if founding an empire in the first century A.D. doesn’t make you indigenous, then what are we to make of the arrival of Islam some three centuries after the conversion of the Amhara at the hands of two shipwrecked Syrian monks?), the Copts are the indigenous Christians of Egypt, etc. Islam certainly has the right to be all of these places, but it unfortunately destroys all that came before it in many cases. Ahmed Gragn, for instance, tried that in Ethiopia in the 9th century and nearly succeeded (a fine way to pay back the love and tolerance shown by the Christian king to the first Muslim refugees three centuries earlier). Now an estimated 9 out of 10 Oromo (the largest single ethnic group in Ethiopia) are Muslim, and they insist that Christianity, which their own ancestors practiced for centuries prior to their forced conversion, is a foreign tool of dominance by other ethnicities and “the West”. Funny how that works out.
So, while I guess I ultimately agree with that anyone can become Muslim (why would it be otherwise? Why would any religion turn away someone wanting to convert? That doesn’t show Islam’s openness!), this does not address several problems with your idea.
- That non-Arab Muslims are required to deny their identities when it comes to praying to God (which is a pretty important part of any monotheistic religion)
- That non-Arab Muslims are encouraged (sometimes with threats of violence) to submit to Islam’s version of Arab customs, which Islam has for centuries sought to make synonymous with its own ideology (it has been very, very successful in this regard)
- That Islam produces in the minds of its adherents the idea that other religions, even religions once and sometimes still practiced natively by the people it now counts among its adherents, are inferior to Islam, which of course brings with it the correct customs, ideas, language and all that from an ARAB prophet, in an ARAB’s language, etc.
Everything about Islam is tailor-made for Arab supremacist ideology. I’m not going to defame your prophet by suggesting it was planned that way, as though Islam is some sort of conspiracy against the world to make us all speak Arabic and wear kaffiyeh or something, since I do not believe it is. But at the same time I do not for a second believe it a happy coincidence that Muhammad’s revelation from God fit so well with his cultural, political, and military remaking of the region. In previous holy books, God was clear that from among the Jews would come prophets and eventually the Messiah, the Deliverer. Nothing was specified for the Arabs in this regard, so it makes sense that Muhammad’s revelation would have to deny these previous books in order to confirm his status as a prophet.
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