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Orthodox Islam brought the spiritual strain of Islam—Sufism—into the mainstream. His personal
scholarship and ability to organize ideas intellectually allowed for the acceptance of ideas outside of
strict orthodoxy. He opened up our religious experience to the spiritual and the poetic.
Anyone who has spent time learning and thinking will recognize the feeling of the confusion that
new information and new ideas cause to previously held beliefs. This is also a normal reaction. When
we come across new information and ideas, previous understandings need to be refined in order to
accommodate the new input. The same processes happen in our religious and emotional lives. As we
build up personal experiences with the world around us, we find that the clarities of childhood no
longer ring true. They don’t make sense. They seem too simple for a complex world. What presented
itself as either black or white now contains many shades of gray. Black is not so black anymore, and
white not so white. What do we do? Do we force ourselves to cling to earlier understandings that
don’t fit the world around us? Well, some people insist that this is the only way. Some people insist
that they force themselves back into the box of an earlier consciousness. It is a futile task. Life is to be
embraced as it is today. Knowledge cannot be evaded. Concepts and ideas exist in the air around us.
We cannot choose to un-know ideas that came from somewhere else.
Some of our fellow Muslims insist that this is not only possible but also necessary. They demand
that we accept only ideas that are Muslim in origin. This can include ideas that appear in the Quran,
the early dictionaries of the Arabic language, and the sayings of the Prophet, and the biographies of
the Prophet and his Companions. Foreign ideas are to be rejected as outside of the faith.
What are some of these ideas that we are told are foreign, and even alien, to Islam?
There is much discussion about whether democracy is compatible with Islam. Some say that
discussion, debate, and consensus building are an ancient Islamic tradition. Others say that democracy
is a sin against Allah’s power, against his will, and against his sovereignty. People kill one another
over this question. People radicalize and go underground to fight for Allah’s sovereignty.
Another question revolves around the word freedom. As I have told you elsewhere, freedom can
mean freedom from the moral law, freedom to live what some Muslims regard as an animalistic life
of pleasure without constraint. On the other hand, freedom can mean responsibility and the conscious
choice to live a disciplined and principled life.
There is the broader idea that the Muslim and the Arab worlds are under attack by an Islam-hating
West. This attack is said to take many forms, but the central one is the cultural invasion that threatens
to undermine our identity and values. We watch movies in which women run away from home and
live independent lives. We hear of artists’ exhibits that are entirely blasphemous. These types of
experiences open the minds of our youth to ideas that are alien to our culture. What would happen if
our youth are no longer able to separate themselves from these foreign ideas and concepts?
The question of sexual identity and practice is becoming a topic that raises its head more
frequently. The strict Islamic approach as interpreted today states that homosexuality is a choice and a
sin. This is seen as a foreign idea being imposed by liberal, godless, Western states on the Islamic
world in the guise of human rights. But what if we were to consider the idea that homosexuality is not