Westerners and good Muslims
Westerners and good Muslims
Tariq Ramadhan claims that what we have here in the West is
the absence of Islam (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 17, 2003). Well, it
all depends on his perspective, on how he interpreted it and, of
course, on how he views the issue of the relationship between the
civil government and the religious authorities.
I am sure that many good Belgian Muslims would disagree with
his opinion. Actually, a view on that issue is not clear yet as
far as most Indonesian religious figures are concerned. It
appears as if they are all confused when asked to have a clear
position on that specific issue, even when they are involved in
politics.
About the situation of Islam in the West, and in Belgium in
particular, we have an Islam adapting to its new environment the
best it can, step by step. Islam was nowhere to be seen at the
end of the 1960s in our country. Now, we have a large community
of Muslim people -- mostly from rural regions of Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia and Turkey -- who came to work in Belgium.
Most of them are living in urban areas such as Brussels and
Antwerp. Seemingly, they like it here since many of them decided
to settle and to bring more members of their families to make a
new life in Belgium. The Belgian civil government is giving its
place to Islam on a slow and legitimate pace so as to ensure that
there is no conflict of interest between the respect of basic
Human Rights and how Islam is lived in general.
So the problem, if any so far, is that the majority of Belgian
people are opposed -- who could say they are wrong -- to an Islam
which would like to import "extremist views or habits" into our
country. The vast majority of the Belgian people do not want to
see Muslim people in their streets wearing religious attributes
such as the veil for example. It is contrary to our culture to
wear such religious attributes in school for example.
I, personally, have nothing against that when such items are
worn by consenting women. However, in many cases, you have many
problems with that specific issue in the Muslim community (mostly
rural Maghrebins who are intolerant about their women making
their own choices and are definitely not willing to give them the
same freedom as Belgian women, indeed a similar thing exists for
most Indonesian women).
If we do accept the import of Islam in Belgium, we do not
accept the import of foreign cultural "attributes and habits" of
any religion in our country that is contrary to the important
basic human rights that Belgian women and men obtained step by
step, sometimes fought over, -- over the last two centuries.
YVAN MAGAIN
Tubize, Belgium