Sunday, December 02, 2007
Hipper Islam
Glenn Reynolds discusses the prospects for a hipper brand of Islam driven by "young Muslim preachers who are using satellite television to promote an upbeat and tolerant brand of Islam." Read the whole linked story about Moez Masoud, a 29 year-old Muslim televangelist who is capturing the interest of the hip and liberal throughout the Arab Muslim world. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the article is how ultimately conservative even Masoud is by contemporary Western standards; see, for example, this passage about homosexuality:
Ibrahim said he has had homosexual desires since he was 10. He said he asked his parents about sex, but they were not comfortable discussing it. He turned to religious books and came to the conclusion that sex between two men was "wrong and unnatural."
He said he has been trying to suppress his desires ever since. Filled with guilt and suicidal over his attraction to men, he said he eventually turned to a psychiatrist who prescribed antidepressants.
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"I kept my secret for 18 years," he said.
In his TV show, Masoud preached that Islam forbids gay sex. But he argued that people who feel such urges cannot help feeling them. He said that those desires were a test from God, and that resisting them was a sign of strength and faith. He urged Muslims to show compassion rather than condemnation.
Ibrahim said that changed the way he felt about himself.
"Because of Moez, I am more self-confident," he said. "He told me that God selected me out of everyone to give me a very difficult test. So I have tasted a very unique flavor of spirituality that others haven't."
This is not far off from the position of many devout Christians and Jews, but truly devoted Christians and Jews make up a fairly small population of the West, even in the United States. That fact -- the liberal Masoud overlapping with, say, Orthodox Jewish rabbis on the subject of homosexuality -- reveals the gulf between the West and the Islamic world almost as much as it bridges it.
Anyway, the real question is not whether Moez Masoud's Islam can be popular in the Muslim world -- I'd be amazed if could not be -- but whether the religious conservatives within the establishment will try to censor him and whether the religious extremists outside the establishment will try to kill him.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Sun Dec 02, 09:24:00 PM:
What a breath of air! I hope he makes it.
By , at
Mon Dec 03, 07:28:00 PM:
Islam will never be hip. These are a bunch of fanatics that fear a woman's clitoris and are too clumsy to find their way around the labia. So, by ritual, they cut the offending parts off.
Hip? Never.
By 
Hiraethin, at
Sat Dec 08, 02:45:00 AM:
Is that paragraph beginning "Additionally, entries that are unsigned..." supposed to be in the quote in this post?
I have hope regarding this trend. Sooner or later it will prosper. How long it will take to displace conservative Islam - well, a long time. Hopefully not so long that it doesn't matter.
