Aspie Muslims?

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I'm not really a regular here, I just like to drop in from time to time, but from what I recall there were a couple of people here who were Muslims. I recently became a Muslim myself, and I was thinking of starting up an Aspie Muslim LJ comm or YahooGroup. First off, does anything like that already exist, and if it doesn't yet, would people be interested?

have a look in the politics, philosophy and religion forum, antieuclid - there's a couple of threads i can think of which might be of interest to you. (i'm not muslim, by the way).

asalmualykum ahkee

I would love to learn more about Islam from you all, welcome.

First off, why do most women I see where Black?
Do they have to cover everything up?

The Qur'an merely tells women to "guard their modesty". Different cultures have interpreted that in different ways. For most cultures, that means some sort of headcovering, but it's really only among a few extremist groups that unfortunately happen to be in charge of Saudi Arabia that you see things like only wearing black and covering the face. Face veils were actually adopted after the Muslims conquered Constantinople, where Christian women in the upper classes wore them to seperate themselves from the lower classes. Try visiting a mosque with a large Pakistani membership sometime, you'll see just about every color but black.

The more traditional view is that women should wear long clothes that conceal their figure. That could be a blouse and a long skirt, it could be a Pakistani shalwar kameez (knee-length tunic and pants), or it could just be a long sleeved shirt and loose jeans. I'm a member of a muslimah sewing YahooGroup, and it's always interesting to see how different cultures have developed different types of modest clothing.

Personally, I usually go either with a shalwar kameez or a long-sleeved shirt and this one long denim skirt I have that I really like. It's a great dress code for aspies, because it requires you to wear nice loose comfy clothes. I also wear hijab (the headscarf) but I've never found anything in the Qur'an or in the Hadith (the sayings of Mohammed) to say that it's manditory. It feels very natural for me, and I like being able to counter all the "covered hair = oppression" stereotypes that people have. After all, most policemen have to wear hats, and no one thinks they're oppressed. Unfortunately, because so many people assume that all muslims are from foreign countries, I've had a number of conversations like this:
Cashier: "Wow, you're English is so good, how long has your family been in the country?"
Me: "Since about 1765"
Cashier: *slightly confused* "Really? Where were they from?"
Me: "Scotland."
Cashier: *looks very confused*
Me: "I converted."
Cashier: "Oh."
It can be a little annoying, but it's helping to break down a misconception and it's kind of nice to finally get some credit for my English skills

What were you before you became a Muslim?

I was open-minded but towards the atheist end of agnostic.

Why would anybody become a muslim? Everything good in islam was taken from either Judaism or xtianity, the syphillitic "prophet" was extremely manipulative.
Many islamic leaders claim islam is the fastest growing religion, it is not and has actually shrunk in recent years.

Islam considers things such as clitoridectomy and other "female circumcision" to be acts of modesty. The saudis are the truest of all muslims, encouraging murder of htose that refuse to submit in the tradition of mohammed.

Jewish tradition (4,000 years older than islam) only mandates married women cover their hair, as a sign of modesty. Long hair is a sign of health, and therefor attractiveness, and a married woman covers her hair to show she is taken.

Machloket

I'm not going to respond to that sort of mudslinging, but I hope that at some point you have a chance to really look at the history of Islam and the Qur'an. You seem to have been misinformed.

For the reference of more moderate people who might read this, Female Genital Mutilation is absolutely banned in the Qur'an. Islam actually lists sexual satisfation as one of the rights of women in marriage, and a wife can divorce her husband over it. Similarly, the Qur'an specifically states "There can be no compulsion in matters of Religion" For centuries while Christian kingdoms were forcibly converting or expelling Jews, Muslim empires were opening their borders to religious minorities and practicing tolerance. When the Muslims were first invading Spain, many Jews and non-Orthodox Christians joined the Muslim fighting forces because they could expect so much better treatment under the Muslims. Using modern Saudis or other extremists as models of "true Islam" is like using Timothy McVeigh, a Christian Identity believer who felt that the Federal government was an instrument of the Zionist forces fighting the Aryan Christ, as an example of "true Christianity". To find the true heart of any religion you have to look at it's origions and holy texts, not just a few individuals who happen to get on TV.

I think the concern is not that the hijab automatically means they're oppressed, but that, in some predominantly Muslim countries, women are compelled to wear it whether they want to or not.

I don't know of many people who have a problem with choosing to dress a certain way of your own free will; the issue is simply whether the freedom exists to choose differently. If you're forced to wear the hijab as a matter of law, that's oppression. Perhaps not the most extreme example, but still something to be opposed.

Jeremy

I can see both sides of this issue (though I don't have a kneejerk opposition to Islam like the original poster). While the actual teachings of Islam appear to be mostly admirable, and certainly no worse than Christianity's, I'm sure you'll agree that the results in the real world have proven to be...well, "highly suboptimal" are the words that come to mind.

Global terrorism is almost exclusively a Muslim phenomenon, and, to coin the media's term, the "outrage" from mainstream Muslims on that topic has been subdued to say the least. Predominantly Muslim countries consistently have very poor human rights records and, while most individual Muslims are no doubt reasonable people, as a group they seem to create conditions which lead to the creation of theocracies and religious intolerance.

To say that these attitudes belong exclusively to extremists is to deny the negative qualities that nearly all Muslim governments have in common.

Please don't feel like I'm insulting Muslims or their beliefs, or saying they are worse than other religions -- Christianity had even worse issues a few hundred years ago, and Judaism was no different back in the bronze age. It's primarily the availability of modern weapons and explosives that makes the situation seem more dangerous on a global scale.

Jeremy

Oh, I'm not saying that modern Muslims are in any way perfect, I'm just trying to draw the line between "Muslims" and "Islam". There are very few Muslims today who would deny that the Islamic world is in a sorry state right now. But that has as much to do with the history of Western Imperialism in the Middle East as it does with Islam. Nobody blames the oppressive governments in Latin America on Catholicism or in Africa on the Anglicans. But because people in the West (and I'm just using that phrase because it takes too long to type out 'Europe and the US' each time, not in the crazy soapbox sense) don't know much about Islam, they immediately assume that anything they see repeatedly in the Muslim world must be coming from Islam. And no one ever looks at Turkey, which has been a very sucessful democracy for about a hundred years.

As for the terrorism issue, there's a lot more outrage than the media is willing to cover. You should have seen the folks at my mosque the day after those hotels were bombed. Anyone supporting terrorism would have had to hope for a decent head start. I will agree that the Muslim community needs to do a better job of publicizing their outrage, but there are also a lot of people getting tired of being asked to express outrage. They don't see Catholics being asked to apologize for the IRA, or Jews being asked to apologize for the Israeli Military, so they don't see why they should have to apologize for Al Qaida. It's like accusing Episcopaelians of supporting terrorism because they haven't denounced the people who bomb abortion clinics. I mean, there are nearly a billion Muslims in the world. If we all wanted to blow stuff up, a lot more stuff would blow up.

Well, I do, to a certain extent. But the fact remains that there are examples of Catholic or Anglican countries which do not display these problems. With the exception of Turkey, which is fairly stable despite some issues, how many developed, democratic countries are there in the Islamic world? How many with a decent standard of living that doesn't derive from a petroleum windfall?



It's possible that the outrage is underreported, but I'm still skeptical of that -- we've all seen the videos of Palestinians dancing in the streets on 9/11. Am I to believe they were all "extremists?" They looked like normal people to me. And I'd still like an explanation for why Islam claims such a high percentage of the terrorist population; a percentage far out of proportion to the number of Muslims in the world. There are many other countries which have borne the brunt of imperialism and oppression but which haven't gone down the same road.



Oh, I absolutely agree, and I'd like to confirm that I'm sure most Muslims are normal, decent people...or at least no worse than anyone else. But I do think there's reason to believe that Islam, as a collective social force, tends to create extremists, or at least lead normal people to tolerate extremists, more than other religions.

Jeremy

Personally in the context of faith, I was edging towards converting to Judaism once because I could get the hang of God but not of Jesus. Someone encouraged me to take another look at the Christian faith I had been brought up in, and I got confirmed a month ago and in religious terms, have never looked back. I had difficulties with a very demanding exclusivist idea in a multi-religious society (and the fact that the person I admire is Jewish with a converted Christian-baptised son had a lot to do with my own questions, I was lucky to meet this man and his son at a very important crossroads in my spiritual journey). The son talked to me and reassured me that he felt that Christianity and Judaism were not mutually exclusive, but that having been born into a Christian family he felt that I did not need to search elsewhere for a belief in God, and that at some point, if I kept looking - "Seek and ye shall find" - I would come to terms with Jesus in due course. It wasn't until last month that I sat in church while getting confirmed and suddenly realised what Jesus did for the sake of the people he loved (even if it had only been for the benefit of his immediate family it would have been a supreme sacrifice). I still don't believe he is the only person or prophet worth following - that is IMHO where all the political strife that gives religion a bad name comes from, and applies equally to any faith with zealous followers, Christianity, Judaism, Islam etc etc...though I'd like to see a militant Buddhist bomb an underground train! - but that my way to God was revealed at the very moment I was committing myself to my own faith, rather than someone else's.

Please don't take offense at my questions but: I'm very curious (if you are a white Briton) as to why you chose to convert to Islam rather than explore your Christian heritage further. If you were "towards the atheist end of agnostic" why did you choose a very strident deist faith? My concern is that you are doing this for political reasons rather than religious reasons, and although you must have consciously learned a lot about Islamic/Muslim culture, it seems sad that you were not able to accept the faith of your ancestors if you were at all looking for spiritual fulfilment. I accept the choice you made and hope you find what you are looking for, but from what you said about "western oppression" I feel you may be rebelling against something rather than coming to terms with your own spirituality.

Anyway, good luck - salaam aleikum!

absolutely - it's about choice, as long as it's educated choice, so that all the meanings/ramifications etc. are understood before the choice is made.

(if anyone's interested, i argued this on a telelvision programme a few years ago - Women in Religion. my half an hour (or whatever it was) of fame... )

The problem comes though when the choice is ingrained culture. Not all women - or men - in any culture have the freedom or the means to make an educated choice over certain parts of their behaviour. Is this oppression?

e.g. if everyone had the free will to make choices about wearing clothes, I'm sure a lot of people would run around naked particularly in the summer (though for real exhibitionists or people protesting about not being able to show their bodies, it's a problem that the human body was not made for withstanding the cold European or North American winters). Similarly a peasant woman in a Muslim country may not have the wherewithal to make the choice or not - does that mean she is oppressed or merely following cultural norms? Personally I would go for the latter. She would probably be appalled at our lack of head-covering, feeling it disrespectful. That is why when understanding other cultures, you have to draw a line between criticising practices which are definitely cruel (e.g. circumcision) and mere expressions of what is acceptable in a certain culture (e.g. the hijab or modest clothing).

The best illustration comes from a woman at a folk museum dressed as a Puritan wife and who really got into the part. When my mother came in with shorts and tee-shirt she threw up her hands in horror - "Why, you poor woman, you're so poor you haven't got any clothes except your underwear - and look at you, you've been sitting so close to the fire, the hair has burnt off your legs!" It put modern clothing into perspective. I also made my mother dress up a little bit more than she normally does when she came to see me in Poland - women over there are generally smarter than we are over here and when we went to Latvia the summer beforehand I was awkwardly conscious of the difference - I tended to dress up more while I lived out there than I've done since I got home. Clothes out there are a status symbol and have been since the communist era, since they were all that there really was to spend accumulated wealth on. This has carried through to the post-communist era, none of your chavs or grungey students!

In France I was aware of the debate, but felt since it was taking place in a different culture I had no place to say that the French were right or wrong to ban the hijab etc in schools. The foundation of the French state is different to ours in the UK or "yours" in the US. Similarly even as a Christian I would never question the American idea of keeping prayer out of public schools, because that is built on a foundation and constitution which is not my own culture. Although I am pro-choice on abortion, I recognise that Ireland has a right to decide that it is not going to allow abortion over there, because of the values on which their state or their people were raised.

Having said that, I would move heaven and earth to keep a religious element - even one which is generally open and tolerant towards all faiths - in schools in the UK, since I think that all religions have an ethos which adds value to a secular basis. Secularisation of life does not mean that religion should not have a place, all it means is that the state should be fair and not discriminate against people of all religions or none. At the moment "secularisation" means "multi-faith excluding Christians because they're mean nasty and horrible oppressors", which saddens me more than seeing kids hear and learn about other faiths in school or at home.

Much of the debate either comes from well-meaning Westerners who think it is oppression when a religion claims to dictate dress code or from well-educated women who are savvy enough to be trying to fit into a different culture. I admire any such woman who wears the hijab - she is making a statement that she wishes to accept her cultural difference yet wants to play an active role in secular culture. For aspies it's doubly important that we tolerate others' differences rather than try to make them assimilate, since it affects the way we are seen by others.