幾個重點
1. 生活在西方的穆斯林群體，不可避免受到西方社會大環境的影響。如近期反性侵害運動，在穆斯林社群內部也開始發酵。Tariq Ramadan與Nouman Ali Khan成為爭議性的人物。
2. 穆斯林女性即使包含有學問的女性，也難以在公眾領域發聲。但早期伊斯蘭的歷史，不少穆斯林女性與男性平起平坐。
3. 當前那些穆斯林知識份子與知名教長，他們也是一般人，不是不會犯錯。跟隨他們的信眾不經思考盲目跟隨，無助於穆斯林社群的發展。
This has been a
difficult year for Muslims. I’m referring not only to the external forces that
buffet us daily—anti-Muslim hate crimes, inflammatory tweets or President
Trump’s travel ban—but also to the internal ruptures
that have forced us to reexamine our own communities. As the #MeToo
movement reveals the names of alleged sexual predators in politics, media, and
business, and the #ChurchToo hashtag trends on Twitter, Muslims are also
grappling with fresh allegations against revered men. (西方穆斯林不可避免受到西方社會整體大環境影響)
Muslim women are
speaking up about Islamic scholars and clergymen who have allegedly preyed on
their piety, and their stories are forcing a reckoning about the fallibility of
these outsized personalities.
What distinguishes the
moment of reckoning among Muslims is that it takes place in the context of
forces that aren't present for the media, Hollywood, or even other religious
groups. Anti-Muslim sentiment has made Muslims balk at publicly airing their
dirty laundry; nobody wants to fan the already raging flames of Islamophobia.
What’s more, discussions about sexual misconduct and
the misuse of power remain taboo in many Islamic circles. Finally,
sizable personality worship continues to persist within modern Islam.
But as this year comes
to a close, it offers Muslims an opportunity to embrace a necessary and
liberating realization. Our faith should not be contingent on individual preachers
and scholars; instead, it should be established independently of them. To the
extent that relying on individual leaders reflects an immutable human need, we
should ensure that our leaders reflect our diversity and are held accountable. This requires including more women leaders in our religious
spaces.
The name of Swiss-born
Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan is at
the epicenter of France’s #MeToo uprising, known as #BalanceTonPorc (“expose
your pig”). Two Muslim women have accused him of rape and sexual assault.
Ramadan, who has taken a leave of absence from Oxford University, denied the
allegations and attributed them to “a campaign of slander clearly orchestrated
by my longtime adversaries.”
Ramadan, who is the
grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, has been a
controversial figure in France on the topic of Muslim identity and assimilation
for more than two decades. In a country that understands secularism
more in terms of freedom from religion than freedom of religion,
he has worked to defend Islam and determine a place for it in public life. But
as Adam Shatz wrote recently in The New Yorker, Ramadan
is “a projection screen, or Rorschach test, for national anxiety about the
‘Muslim question.’”
Against the backdrop of
the terrorist violence that has plagued France in recent years and the brazen
anti-Muslim response from the European far right, Ramadan’s
case is no longer about women’s
rights. It has instead devolved into a racist discussion about political Islam
that seeks to demonize Muslim men and blame the religion for his alleged
behavior. In the eyes of much of French society, as Souad Betka noted in the online magazine Les
Mots Sont Importants, “a Muslim man is always more than a man. He is the
tree that represents the forest.”
Ramadan’s defenders
readily attribute the allegations to a “Zionist conspiracy” or to an
Islamophobic effort to topple the prominent scholar. They also discourage
Muslim women from speaking out, arguing that it may cast all Muslim men in a
negative light and may embolden Islamophobes. “It is exhausting that Muslim
women’s voices and our bodies are reduced to proxy battlefields by the
demonizers and defenders of Muslim men,” Mona Eltahawy wrote in The New York Times.
“Neither side cares about women. They are concerned only with one another.”
Caught in the middle, the voices of those affected by sexual violence risk
being further suppressed.
In early fall of
this year, a Texas-based Islamic teacher named Nouman Ali Khan was
accused of inappropriate relationships with multiple Muslim women, including
some who worked for him or sought his counsel. The relationships, at odds with
the moral virtues he publicly espoused, allegedly involved shirtless selfies
and vile texts, screenshots of which surfaced shortly afterward. Khan has
garnered a robust, international following among young Muslims for his animated
Koran lectures, which meld a conservative interpretation of scriptural texts
about male-female relations with relatable, modern-day scenarios. In a Facebook post on
Khan’s page, he “explicitly” rejected and denied the allegations.
Though Khan
has not been charged with a crime, the fallout polarized the Muslim community. In cyberspace
specifically, there was a barrage of mudslinging against female critics to
coerce them into silence. The women involved in the scandal, who claimed to be
threatened with lawsuits if they spoke up, were also maligned. As Shaheen Pasha wrote in The Dallas Morning News, “Some Muslims
considered them vengeful scorned women and questioned their religious purity
for even engaging in such conversations with Khan.”
This reaction reveals why talking about sexual abuse openly and
honestly within the Muslim community can be fraught with difficulty. The Koran and
Prophetic traditions are replete with “references to sex and sexuality which
are celebratory and what we might today call ‘sex positive,’” said Zareena
Grewal, a professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale
University. But, she added, they “have typically been interpreted by Muslims in
ways that privilege men and patriarchy.” While discussions of consensual sex in
the context of marriage are acceptable, sexual assault and abuse of power fall
outside these boundaries.
The
response to a 2015 revelation likewise echoed this sad truth. That year, reports
unexpectedly surfaced of sexual misconduct within Chicago’s
South Asian Muslim community. Mohammad Abdullah Saleem, an imam and founder of
a boarding school known as the Institute of Islamic Education, was accused in a
lawsuit by multiple women of decades of sexual assault and child sex abuse.
When he pled guilty to
two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in 2016, several civil suits
still awaited him.
Though
Saleem’s transgressions made headlines and were appropriately brought before
the law, the conversations they sparked faded by 2017. Few tangible
efforts resulted within Muslim communities to identify, investigate, and
prevent such abuses in the future. Reminiscent of a new investigative report by
The Associated Press that illuminated the rampant sexual abuse of children by
clerics in Pakistan’s madrasas, here was a vivid example of how depraved
religious figures potentially lurk inside the walls of mosques and other Muslim
spaces—and yet it was brushed under the rug until the #MeToo moment caused a
stir that made it impossible to ignore.
Complicating all this is a danger that exists in
any religion: the potential for cult-like personality worship. The spiritual
search for God is suffused with great emotion, and the reverence for, and
reliance on, the religious figures involved often affords them great power and
influence. These preachers and scholars are seen as the actual path to discovering
God, when they are only really meant to shine a light on the path, which must
be traversed by each individual independently.
In Islam’s nascent stages, a budding Muslim
community became distraught after Muhammad’s death. Many wondered how Islam
would endure in his absence. A belief began to sprout that the Prophet had been
taken to heaven and would return shortly. Cognizant of this exaggerated focus
on the individual, Abu Bakr, a close companion of Muhammad who became the first
Caliph, said, “O men, if anyone worships Muhammad, Muhammad is dead; if anyone
worships God, God is alive, immortal!”
Personality worship wan’t limited to early Islam. Nowadays, the Sufi
shrines, or mazars, of
prominent saints like Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and Data Ganj Baksh in Pakistan teem
with thousands of highly dedicated devotees on special
occasions. Followers venerate these men as mediators between themselves and
God, often praying directly to them for health, jobs, marriage, and fertility.
Regardless
of whether the figure is historical or contemporary, many people are attracted
to a leader who offers something transcendent. In the process of elevating that leader,
they often dismiss his moral failings, deeming him near-infallible and allowing
him to live with impunity. This approach typifies some of Ramadan’s besieged
Muslim supporters in France and throughout the West, who look to his
words to reconcile their hyphenated identities. It also typifies some of Khan’s
apologists, whose virulent online backlash may dissuade Muslim women in the
future from making known sexual crimes they've experienced.
According to Ayesha Chaudhry, a professor of Islamic studies and
gender studies at the University of British Columbia, these examples of
personality worship mostly revolve around men “because in patriarchal
societies, people follow men more easily than women.”
This is why
it’s so crucial to double down on the longstanding effort to expand female
religious authorities’ involvement in Islam. Long ago, authentic prophetic traditions
tell us, our forebears lived in a more egalitarian society in which women acted
as religious leaders. Today, this spirit is preserved in multiple South
African mosques and at the Noor Cultural Centre in Toronto, to name a
couple of examples. There, women are active members of the mosque committees,
give Friday sermons, and share authority with men in all initiatives.
Generally,
however, although many Muslim women possess the necessary qualifications, few
find themselves on speaker panels or in mosque leadership positions. More
inclusive spaces would provide support and protection for vulnerable women and,
on a more systemic level, challenge an entrenched patriarchy. As Chaudhry
pointed out, the voices of marginalized groups like women are important because
power does not see itself or its own abuses: “The only way to see what
patriarchy is and how it works is to have diverse voices that include those
marginalized by it.” To galvanize the Muslim #MeToo revolution, we must amplify
the voices of victims regardless of whether the perpetrators are our beloved
preachers or scholars, and regardless of Islamophobia. For a faith that began centuries
ago with a stated goal of countering society’s unconscionable injustices, this
is a natural obligation.
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