'Islam is a strange religion'

Ajmal Masroor challenges some of the preconceptions about his faith

By Ajmal Masroor Published 29 May 2007 17:15

'Muslims are not normal and Islam is a strange religion!' Do you believe this or do you demonstrate this in your direct and indirect behaviour?

Ask a Muslim this question and I can almost guarantee you that he/she would have felt treated like this, if not on a regular basis, occasionally. This has become the popular perception amongst many non-Muslims today. Once I went out for dinner with a group of people.

They all ordered alcohol and I ordered a glass of fresh juice. This sparked off a discussion amongst us all, why I did not drink alcohol; in the course of the discussion one of them asked what was wrong with me that I do not drink?. I explained to them that according to my faith drinking or taking any intoxicants was forbidden.

I know this makes me different from the popular culture here in Britain but what is wrong with being different? In fact Islam encourages me to challenge such cultural values, not to shove Islamic values down anyone throat, but to engage in a reasoned rational discussion about the benefit and harm of some of these popular cultures.

I remember another occasion when I was invited to speak at an event and I said to a group of white English audience that I was English. I heard murmurs of disapproval from the audience. One elderly lady stood up in protest and said 'young man you are not English, the best you can be is British and you should be proud of it'. She further explained to me that only people with Anglo-Saxon heritage and white skin complexion can claim to be English. I know I was making a controversial claim but can we ever imagine accepting someone who is brown or black, English and Muslim?

 
 

2 comments

Douglas Chalmers's picture

Sat, 2007-06-02 08:52 — Douglas Chalmers

Well, the lady was theoretically correct but what are the English anyway? They are not Scots or Irish or Welsh but, then, if you ask these people if they are English, they will be even more emphatic in denying that. Its rather like a Pakistani claiming to be Chinese simply because both are somewhere in Asia.

If one looks around England at least, one sees the genetic heritage as it really is and, despite their current opinions of bias and bigotry, they are as close to the Romans, the Saudi Arabs and the Greeks as they are to the Dutch , the French and the Spanish, all of whom have settled in England at some time or another.

gnuneo's picture

Wed, 2007-05-30 17:23 — gnuneo

of course we can, this woman was ignorant.

yes, Englishness is partly cultural, (and partly geographical), but our English culture teaches tolerance and acceptance, we once beleived that eccentricity was a central feature of being English. This allowed us English to accept many other cultures as part of our own, now even the Asian-origin 'curry' is our National Dish!

how can we accept the curry, but not the people who invented it? Ludicrous.

we need to go back to those roots of eccentricity and acceptance, and realise that English people can be of any colour or creed, otherwise we lose that very element that actually defines us English at our core.

i have non-muslim English friends who do not drink, who follow 'strange' religions, they are still 100% English, and so are any moslems who are born into our country.

let us not go down the path of fascism and exclusionism, that is a greater blow to any English culture than any strange religious custom could possibly be.

peace.

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