Stop calling for a Muslim Enlightenment

After every terror attack the call rings out for the Muslim world to become mode
rn. But as Christopher de Bellaigue writes, Muslims have strenuously engaged wit
h all that is new for hundreds of years
A spectator at Meydan racecourse in Dubai.
A spectator at Meydan racecourse in Dubai. Photograph: Frank Sorge/racingfotos.c
om/Rex
Christopher de Bellaigue
Thursday 19 February 2015 06.00 GMT
Last modified on Wednesday 25 February 2015 16.12 GMT
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A party of school-age swimmers takes to the waters of a municipal pool in north
London. Among her peers, one Muslim girl stands out nine or 10 years of age, bro
wn face and eyes under a yellow cap, sliding gingerly into the water in a cotton
salwar kameez that prevents the male attendants, the boys in her class, and oth
er random males in the pool, like me, from seeing her prepubescent body.
So far as I know, there is nothing in Islam that bars girls below the age of men
struation from showing their legs and tummy in public, but in more conservative
households there is a strong distaste for the idea of even partial undress in mi
xed company at any age. In less understanding circumstances, this distaste could
have led to the girl s withdrawal from her school s weekly swimming outing denying
her a part of our holistic modern curriculum. But in this case consultations hav
e evidently taken place between parents, school and pool management (has the sal
war kameez been washed?), leading to this civilised modus vivendi.
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Back home, in Pakistan, or Bangladesh, the question would not have arisen becaus
e such outings to the pool would almost certainly be single-sex affairs. Silly m
e: this is home, where she was born, where she is part of, and her life here wil
l be one long variant on this trip to the swimming baths, a negotiation between
her expectations and the expectations that others have of her. Ideas will be bat
ted about, solutions proffered; change and adaptation happen on both sides. It i
sn t only among Muslims that values are in an unsettled state who would have thoug
ht that gay marriage would enter polite acceptability as smokers are being shown
the door?
The girl in the yellow cap popped into my mind after the attacks in France this
January which, like the copycat killings last week in Copenhagen, prompted anoth
er round of discussions about Islam s place in the modern world. It was generally ag
reed that the Muslims must pull themselves together. According to Hubert Vdrine,
a former French foreign minister, writing in Le Monde on 13 January, the answer
is the kind of Islam that is in tune with the Enlightenment and sharply delineat
ed from jihadism. What a boost that would be for an enlightened Islam, he wrote, wh
at an example (while awaiting a genuine reform of Islam), and what a beacon! In t
he following day s edition of the same paper, three schoolteachers renewed their o
wn vows to secular values. We have learned to do without God, they wrote. We have n
o master but knowledge we take it for granted that [Eugene Delacroix s painting] L
iberty Leading the People and [Voltaire s] Candide are part of the heritage of hum
anity. The challenge, they wrote, is to inculcate this heritage in their pupils,
those left by the wayside of republican values .
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Whenever jihadi groups carry out an atrocity, or as is happening a lot these day
s, western foreign policy failures lead to large areas of the world coming under
the sway of oafs who claim to be acting for God the call goes up for a Muslim E
nlightenment. The imputation of Vdrine, the French schoolteachers, and thousands
of other commentators is that various internal deficiencies have excluded Islam
from this indispensable cultural and intellectual event, without which no cultur
e can be considered modern. Such views cut across political borders; they would
find sympathy at the BBC as well as in the editorial offices of the Sun. Islam n
eeds to get with the programme.
Yet it cannot escape the attention of any westerner who has travelled to a Musli
m country that for the people there, the challenge of modernity is the overwhelm
ing fact of their lives; the double imperative of being modern and universal on
the one hand, and adhering to the emplaced identities of religion and nation, on
the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. To anyone outside the w
est, it is self-evident that there is more than one way to be modern a truth eas
ily observed in any developing country. Modernity is at the best of times a tens
ion, a dislocation and an agitation, producing in a phrase from Nietzsche that e
xpresses a kaleidoscopic weirdness of perspective a fateful simultaneity of sprin
g and autumn.
To anyone outside the west, it is self-evident that there is more than one w
ay to be modern
Nietzsche was referring to the west, where the questions that led to modernity h
ad been volunteered in the first place, during the Enlightenment, the Industrial
Revolution, and the race for empires, and where the cultural necessity of provi
ding an answer was never seriously doubted. But his words are also relevant to t
he lands of Islam. The history of the Middle East over the past two centuries is
also a history of modernisation of reforms, reactions, innovations, false start
s, discoveries and betrayals and there is something gloriously cack-handed and u
nreal about westerners demanding an Enlightenment from people whose lives are cote
rminous with a strenuous, ceaseless engagement with all that is new. The experie
nce of modernity cannot be reduced to various rites of passage through which the
west has passed. Modernity is the shared predicament of all who discover or are
discovered by new values and technologies and a description of the pleasure and
pain that follows.
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I have retained the image of the young swimmer negotiating the waters in her sal
war kameez, steering between competing expectations, while I have been researchi
ng a book about the earlier time when modern ideas first arrived in the Middle Eas
t from the newly dominant west. Few people have thought to qualify the word moder
nity using a culturally loaded adjective other than Muslim ; one doesn t hear much abo
ut Indian modernity, or Chinese modernity, even though the new ways of looking at th
e world have not entered these cultures without difficulty. Nor do I think that
many modern Muslims regard their lives as substantially different or more compli
cated than those of non-Muslims across the globe. Certainly, those in the 19th a
nd early 20th centuries who were the first bearers of new ideas were animated by
a desire to be part of a movement that represented not only certain cultures or
geographies, but all mankind.
Looking at the tableau before me, running from those early modernisers to the bl
ameless mermaid of north London, I have the impression of a long, difficult, but
very often joyful negotiation the same negotiation in which many more have pros
pered without being noticed, and in which a number, among them the killers of Pa
ris and Copenhagen, have catastrophically failed.
***
The reform of the Muslim world began in earnest at the turn of the 19th century,
when Europe penetrated the Middle East with all the brusqueness you would expec
t from a rapidly developing civilisation whose constituent parts were in a race
for colonies, wealth and glory. The cultural heartlands of Islam, by contrast, w
ere lame, lachrymose, and chronically resistant to novelty. Cairo s school of Al-A
zhar the acknowledged citadel of Islamic learning suspected science, despised ph
ilosophy and hadn t produced an original thought in years. The paradigmatic idea w
as that society under the prophet Muhammad had attained a perfection from which
later generations were condemned to live at an exponentially increasing remove.
The meeting of the two cultures (which, for obvious symbolic reasons, is often d
ated to the Napoleonic invasions of Egypt) led to a realisation on the part of M
uslim rulers that only by adopting western practices and technologies could they
avoid political and economic oblivion. The extraordinarily rapid process of cha
nge that this triggered has been summed up by the historian Juan Cole:
Napoleon Bonaparte at the Great Mosque in Cairo, Egypt.
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Napoleon Bonaparte at the Great Mosque in Cairo, Egypt. Photograph: Musee des Be
aux Arts Mulhouse/Dagli Orti
In the space of decades intellectuals forsook Ptolemaic for Copernican astronomy
businessmen formed joint-stock companies (not originally allowed in Islamic law)
, generals had their armies retrained in new drills and established munitions fa
ctories, regional patriotism intensified and prepared the way for nationalism, t
he population began growing exponentially under the impact of cash cropping and
the new medicine, steamboats suddenly plied the red Sea and the Persian Gulf, an
d agrarian capitalism and the advent of factories led to new kinds of class conf
lict.
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And so on. In the middle of the century the Ottoman Sultan declared equality bet
ween his Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, the slave trade was outlawed and the ha
rem fell gradually into desuetude. The sheikhs and mullahs saw their old preroga
tives in the law and public morality arrogated by an expanding government bureau
cracy. Clerical opposition to dissection was overcome and theatres of anatomy op
ened. Culture, too, was transformed, with a surge in non-religious education, an
d the reform of the Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages the better to present
modern poetry, novels and newspaper articles before the potent new audience of pu
blic opinion . Compared to the western experience, modernisation was drastically te
lescoped , as Cole puts it, with the moveable-type printing press, dating back to
the 15th century, and the telegraph, which was invented in 1844, arriving almost
simultaneously.
Political consciousness also rose. In the last decades of the 19th century, Egyp
t, Iran and Turkey, the most populous and culturally influential centres of the
Middle East, all experienced movements in favour of representative government in
Turkey and Iran, parliamentary rule came into effect a few years after the turn
of the new century, and in Egypt after the first world war.
The story of Muslim modernisation has sometimes been depicted as the efforts of
a few potentates to enforce alien precepts on resistant populations. Muhammad Al
i, Egypt s khedive, or viceroy, for most of the first half of the 19th century, an
d his near contemporary (and nominal sovereign), Sultan Mahmud II, are the names
to remember here, and there were indeed many instances of popular opposition to
what were depicted as godless innovations. In 1814, for example, the Muslim not
ables of Piraeus were persuaded by a local divine not to set up quarantine stati
ons to protect themselves from an outbreak of the plague. The pandemic was from G
od , he said; to try and limit its progress is to oppose Providence . (The population
was duly obliterated.) The Persian crown prince Abbas Mirza, modernising his fi
efdom of Tabriz, in north-west Iran, drilled the soldiers of his new army behind
high walls, for fear that they would be spotted by their disapproving families.
The myth that modernisation had no natural constituency to be contrasted invidio
usly with the spontaneity of emergent modernity in the west has been exacerbated
by some of its rankly insincere recent apologists. The Mubaraks and Ben Alis of
this world paraded modernity like a codpiece; to look at these self-described a
postles of secularism and development, one might be forgiven for thinking that m
odernisation in the Middle East has always been infertile, and always will be.
But if we want to understand the relationship between ideas and change in the Mi
ddle East, we must turn to an earlier moment, and to the figures who found thems
elves mediating between the two. We are limited here by the historical record wh
ich preserves the accounts of a few distinguished figures but there is no reason
to believe the hope and trepidation that they expressed were not also felt by a
great many of their lesser-known contemporaries. Societies changed, as the dial
ectic of new and old continued, and people lost themselves in the intensity of t
he transformation of which they were a part.
***
One of the earliest Middle Easterners to appreciate the unavoidable, tentacular
qualities of modernity was the Iranian Mirza Muhammad Saleh Shirazi. He was one
of five students who were sent to England by Crown Prince Abbas Mirza in 1815 to
study useful things and bring them home. The travelogue that Mirza Saleh wrote
is among the first books written in Persian about a Christian country. Reading i
t one gets the sense of a worldview that is changing; even Mirza Saleh s writing a
lters as he acclimatises to Regency London, moving from stiltedness to fluency,
directness and utility. Here, in real time, is the literary modernisation of the
Middle East.
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In the spring of 1817, Mirza Saleh made a trip to the west Country, which forms
the most exquisite section of his book. A sense of diligent journalism permeates
his writing as his coach quits London on the westward turnpike. In comparison t
o the potholed and rutted dust roads of Iran, passable only on horseback or on f
oot, his detailed description of this efficient mode of transport must have stru
ck his readers as a great novelty. At first he sits inside the coach, with a Spa
niard and several farmers for company (all equally unintelligible); after nightf
all he takes his place on top, where he remains until Salisbury Cathedral comes
ethereally into view at dawn.
And on to Exeter, where he is met by his host, Robert Abraham, and the two set o
ff for the latter s home in the stannery town of Ashburton. Amid the tin mines, Mi
rza Saleh exchanges European clothes for Iranian robes, which causes the daughte
rs of his host much amusement. Indeed, much of Mirza Saleh s stay is spent in the
company of these and other Devonshire girls, moon-faced and sweet-natured . (He seems
to have censored himself, for in the descriptions he provides of bucolic musica
l interludes overlooking the River Dart, mention of cider is suspiciously absent
only tea.) Mirza Saleh is partial to young Sarah Abraham, who displays the utmos
t excellence, perspicacity, sagacity and delicacy as they converse on the road to
Plymouth. For the people back home, used to a strict segregation of the sexes,
the outlandishness of such a friendship would not need spelling out.
A series of street portraits taken in the holy city of Qom, Iran, by Magnum phot
ographer Paolo Pellegrin
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A series of street portraits taken in the holy city of Qom, Iran by Magnum photo
grapher Paolo Pellegrin.
In Plymouth, Mirza Saleh lavishes his ever-improving descriptive powers on the mo
st secure port in England , with its armouries and massive hospital. The anchorage
is so extensive a thousand warships could park there, protected by ramparts bri
stling with cannon and he explains dry docks and breakwaters for the landlocked
Tabrizis, whose only experience of the sea is as poetic metaphor. Amid celebrati
ons to mark George III s birthday he ventures out clutching the hand of Miss Sarah
(again, a liberty he would not take with a girl back home) is mobbed by 500 peo
ple, and flees. And when the time comes for him to say farewell to the Abrahams,
he asks, of what importance are differences of religion? I wept for the members
of this family, old and young, such that I have never been so affected.
Several hundred pages of British history and actuality are still to come. Mirza
Saleh traces events from the Roman invasions to the Napoleonic Wars, and there i
s something thrilling about seeing the names of the Saxon Kings transliterated i
nto Persian for the first time. His account of contemporary London takes in hous
e design, domestic mores (not unreasonably, he is surprised that when people ent
er houses, rather than take off their dirty shoes, they remove their hats), and
detailed descriptions of the prerogatives of the king and parliament. Admiring b
ut never cringing, fully aware that his exposition of Britain s partial democracy
will prompt interest and perhaps envy in the Iran of the divine right of kings,
he reserves his greatest astonishment for the ability of a single artisan, a poor
man, with a shop , to postpone the building of Regent Street by refusing to sell
his freehold to make way for the thoroughfare. And suppose, Mirza Saleh writes wit
h pardonable hyperbole, that the whole army were to come down on his head, they c
annot oblige him to give it up the prince himself cannot inflict the slightest f
inancial or physical harm on him.
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Mirza Saleh and his fellow students were a small sample of similar contingents t
hat were dispatched from Muslim countries to Europe over the course of the 19th
century. In 1819 the five Iranians were recalled home, where Mirza Saleh went on
to become a teacher, diplomat and pioneering newspaper owner and printer. (Amon
g his productions was a Qur an with a Persian translation between the lines he app
reciated the importance of Tyndale s translation of the Bible into English). Of hi
s former travelling companions, one rose to be chief engineer to the (newly mode
rnised) army, and translated a biography of Peter the Great, while another, who
had studied medicine in London, assumed the title of royal doctor and designed I
ran s first polytechnic. The only artisan in the party, the master craftsman Muham
mad Ali, became head of the royal foundry; his English wife introduced knives an
d forks into their household.
Thus change entered Iran and the wider region through the cerebral and the banal
, and if it was to stand a chance of popular success it would need the endorseme
nt of men of religion. In the absence of a central ecclesiastical institution ca
pable of bringing people with the authority, say, of a papal encyclical over to
a new understanding of things, the sheikhs and mullahs would have to be guided b
y their own consciences.
***
Perhaps the most celebrated of the early modernising theologians was Egypt s Rifa a
al-Tahtawi. Rifa a was the archetypal new sheikh; chloroformed at al-Azhar and reviv
ed abroad (in his case, as a student in Paris in the late 1820s), he returned ho
me to join the bureaucracy and trill the virtues of civilisation a word whose Ar
abic equivalent, tamaddun, from the word meaning city , he did much to popularise.
The idea that the future will be better than the past is integral to any underst
anding of progress, and Rifa a adopted it unambiguously: his love of the new was h
eartfelt and unapologetic; he ridiculed those who dismissed the modern era. He p
romoted a reformed Arabic, published furiously (including the first Arabic gramm
ar for schools), and edited the country s first newspaper. In 1836, he set up a tr
anslation bureau that brought new and unfamiliar ideas rushing into Egypt by ren
dering 2,000 European and Turkish works into Arabic, ranging from Greek philosop
hy and ancient history to books about geography and geometry.
The effect of these translations on the engineers, doctors, teachers and militar
y officers who read them can easily be imagined. For this new elite, forerunners
of the secular-minded middle classes that dominate public life even now, learni
ng about antiquity expanded the meaning of the instructive past. The feats of th
e hitherto reviled non-Muslims presented an alternative story of talent and achi
evement, occluding faith-based partitions and suggesting a more equitable distri
bution of God s favours than many Muslims had previously entertained.
Rifa a had been amazed by the malleability of the French language, geared to utili
ty more than embellishment, and he introduced similar principles into Arabic as
Mirza Saleh, through his travelogue, had done for Persian. Translation is an exp
ression of the universality of the intellect, but one Middle Eastern language re
mained unable to receive the new ideas arguably the most important of them all,
Ottoman Turkish. When writing in Ottoman Turkish it was considered a fine thing
to approach the subject in as ornamental and long-winded a fashion as possible,
executing puns, ransacking the Persian classics and eschewing punctuation. Nine
different calligraphic systems were in use, getting to the point was considered
facile and functionality was ignorance.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s Turkish was made fit for purpose by a curmudge
only polymath named Ibrahim inasi. The orphaned son of an artillery captain, inasi
grew up in the Tophane district of Istanbul (now much sought after by foreigner
s), where he learned Arabic, Persian and French before going to Paris on a schol
arship. He returned with a shrewd realisation that the goals of human progress a
nd linguistic development are linked and applied himself to both.
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In 1860 inasi co-founded the empire s first independent Turkish-language newspaper,
and shortly afterwards he launched his own paper, the Tasvir-i Efkr, or Illustra
tion of Opinion. The subjects he wrote about ranged from foreign policy (he was
a hawk) to literature and the importance of good manners. inasi also pushed the i
dea, then in its infancy, of a national identity. In Egypt Rifa a al-Tahtawi was t
hinking along similar lines, popularising the word watan, or nation, and transla
ting the Marseillaise. The outlines of the Middle Eastern nation states were com
ing into view.
One of the most fascinating of inasi s editorials reveals his ability to draw philo
sophical significance from apparently quite workaday subjects. The government ha
d announced a scheme to introduce street lighting to parts of central Istanbul,
opposed by kneejerk conservatives just as the same innovation had been opposed i
n London almost 200 years earlier. inasi, of course, was enthusiastic, not only f
or practical reasons of reduced criminality and enhanced commerce, but also beca
use the illumination of the streets seemed to presage the deeper and less exting
uishable illumination of people s minds. Who opposes street lighting, he demanded, if
not those ruffians who profit from the darkness of the night? And then, in a bar
bed reference to the intellectual monopolists whose feeble glow depended on surr
ounding gloom and the ignorance of others: A firefly only glows at night.
Sultan Abdulaziz read impertinence and sedition into editorials of this kind, an
d in January 1865 the government introduced censorship following the example of
Napoleon III. Within the month inasi had fled to Paris but the press could not be
controlled. Over the next 11 years the number of publications available in Ista
nbul went from four to 72, with the most popular papers selling as many as 24,00
0 per issue. It was a similar, if slower story in Egypt, where the newspaper-rea
ding public in 1881 has been put at 72,000; Iran s press revoultion was just as dr
amatic.
A series of street portraits taken in the holy city of Qom, Iran, by Magnum phot
ographer Paolo Pellegrin
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A series of street portraits taken in the holy city of Qom, Iran by Magnum photo
grapher Paolo Pellegrin
It was little wonder that governments across the Middle East viewed with alarm t
he transformation of the public discourse and their diminishing ability to regul
ate it. Relationships between people of different backgrounds were being formed
against the neutral backdrops of the university, the office and the steamship. T
he rigid seclusion of the harem fell away and for men it was no longer necessary
to be a eunuch in order to enjoy the society of a woman who was neither a prost
itute nor your mother. Between the strata of the Ottoman family a kind of plural
ism inserted itself, with one modernist insisting that his patriarchal father sh
ow respect for an individual s opinion .
What if that individual was female? While decades would pass before most Muslim
women were acquainted with even the theory of their rights, change came earlier
for the upper classes in the cities. There, rising female literacy led to employ
ment in nursing and teaching, and the emergence of western-style charities indep
endent of the mosque. New women s magazines showed the Paris fashions and called f
or the prohibition of polygamy.
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The career of the Turkish writer Fatma Aliye shows how a combination of new inst
itutions, technology and altered patterns of thought were changing society with
a convulsive force. Born in 1862, the daughter of an Ottoman grandee, she might
have seemed destined for a traditional life and indeed, despite showing exceptio
nal intellectual promise and even learning French in secret (her mother feared h
er exposure to impious notions), she went into purdah at 15 and was married off
at 19 to a man who disapproved of her vocation.
But Aliye continued to write and translate, eventually winning her husband s suppo
rt, and what she produced in seclusion the new press enabled her to diffuse amon
g an expanding audience of literate women. Hers became a distinctive voice in th
e Istanbul papers, where she promoted girls education and kicked against the stoc
k male denigration of women as long on hair, short on nous .
What makes Aliye s experience so instructive is the way in which she was formed by
modernisation and formed it back in turn. Among her best-known works is an epis
tolary novel comprising letters by upper-class women speaking of their lives and
their loves, a conceit that would have been meaningless were it not for the new
institution of the imperial postal service. She was the sort of woman who would
engage in philosophical conversations with strange men while crossing the Bosph
orus on a steamer. Public transport was exercising its usual levelling function,
with hitherto segregated members of society thrown together and their candour n
aturally heightened by the transience and anonymity of such encounters.
In her later years, she continued to exercise a degree of autonomy as a Muslim w
oman that would have been unthinkable in her youth travelling alone to Europe to
pursue her errant younger daughter Zubeyda, who (to her immense chagrin) had be
come a Catholic nun and moved to France. Zubeyda later recalled that her mother
had been haunted by the question of the equality of the sexes in society and the st
ruggle to achieve it . In the Turkey of the 1860s, when Aliye was a child, there h
ad been little question of equality of the sexes . There had been no struggle . Now th
ere were both.
The stories of Fatma Aliye, Mirza Saleh, Rifa a al-Tahtawi and Ibrahim inasi are on
ly few among many, but they reiterate what should already be apparent, that Musl
ims had an energetic engagement with modernity more than a century before televi
sion pundits began demanding one an engagement, then as now, defined by negotiat
ion rather than conquest. It may be, as these examples show, that there is not a
canon into which they can be fitted a neat narrative of Muslim modernity to put a
longside the western one we know so well, thanks to M. Vdrine and others. But the
n it could be argued that the idea of a canon is somewhat dclass, with contributio
ns to the collective experience being written, as the young swimmer in the counc
il pool demonstrates, around us all the time.
To suggest that the Muslim world s experience of modernity has been severely deran
ged by the repeated incursions of western imperialists and post-imperialists is
to restate one of the truisms of our age. When Britain and France invade Egypt w
ith the aim of protecting their loans (literally in the case of Gladstone, with
his heavy personal exposure to Egyptian government bonds) and Sykes and Picot sp
lit the region into British and French zones under cover of the first world war;
when the western nations award land to Zionism that isn t theirs to give and when
the region is thrust into a cold war not of its making, with a harvest that inc
ludes Saddam, Mubarak and the Assads with all this happening in the space of a f
ew decades it would be optimistic to expect the reordering of cultures and socie
ties to go without a hitch.
It is not surprising that many at the business end of this penetration have been
sceptical of the westerners claim to be acting in their best interests, and that
in time some of these Arabs, Turks and Iranians expanded their distaste for the
curled colonial lip into a more general critique of modern life. When the radic
al Muslim Brother (and founder of modern Islamism) Sayyid Qutb went to study in
the United States in the late 1940s, his reaction to the west was sharply dissim
ilar to that of Mirza Saleh 140 years earlier; what was revealed to Qutb was les
s a model worthy of emulation than the seedy internal workings of a system that
he an Egyptian chafing against a sybaritic monarch propped up by Britain knew al
l too well.
Few westerners have considered how bruising it is to be constantly reacting
to another s invention, statement or action
Few westerners have considered how bruising it is to be constantly reacting to a
nother s invention, statement or action: always being told to catch up or improve. T
his is the situation that so many Muslims have found themselves in over the past
two centuries. But this is the backstory that has made Islam s engagement with mo
dern values more suspenseful, more despairing, more suffused with the simultaneit
y of spring and autumn , than anywhere else in the world.
In the light of adverse politics and history, the surprise is not that modernity
has been a tortuous experience for some Muslims, but that it has been adopted s
o widely and with such success. (Many millions of Muslims live in harmony with t
he modern values of personal sovereignty and human rights: another self-evident
truth in need of reiteration.) With immigration from the Middle East and north A
frica to Europe, the Mediterranean culture that ended with the expulsion of the
Muslims from Spain in 1492 has been revived. Our world is even more interpenetra
ted than the communal gallimaufry of the Ottoman empire. Talk of European values
that exclude Islamic values will be barren for as long as millions of Europeans
regard Islam as an important element in their lives. Talk of teaching them Volt
aire is a joke as long as they cannot teach us back. The much-touted choice faci
ng the Muslim community , between modernity and obscurantism, between here and home , is
false. Here is home. Life is modern. All we can do is negotiate.