Daily Times

As someone who has spent most of his life outside Pakistan, what I find a bit odd about our Muslim community as a whole is that we are isolationist. We come to the US with all our dreams to better our lives and economic conditions, yet we do not consider this country as our own. There are lots of our brethren who live here, earn here, remit dollars to their families and friends from here, enjoy all the perks of religious and social freedom here, but still consider this place unworthy of a ‘true’ Muslim. Talk about double or triple standards, but who is keeping track or count anyway? What is so objectionable here, one may ask? Their ready-made response is the rotten culture. To them, this culture is anti-Islamic and instils repugnant western values, which clash with our belief system and eastern values. Before some wisecrack gives another sigh and says, “There he goes again”, let me clarify. I come from a rather conservative Pakistani Punjabi household and consider myself quite conservative as well, but I certainly do not defame this country with any questionable terms or names. I do not subscribe to the idea that if I were in some other country today, my conservative Pakistani Punjabi values would have been any different. My religion and the way I connect with my God are independent of where I choose to spend my life.

I see our folks emphasising the need for full time Islamic schooling for their children. Some go to the extent of home schooling their children. Do not get me wrong; it is a free country and people have the right to do what they deem appropriate. My question, which often remains unanswered, is: then what? After the children are done at grade level, whether they go to an Islamic or home school, they still have to go to colleges and universities — what do you do then? Once they go to a college or a university, they are going to be exposed to this so-called ‘un-righteous’ system. When they graduate from a college or a university, they will look for work and end up becoming a cog in the wheel of this system; then what? The point I am trying to make is that we have our fears and biases that we bring with us. We want the economic prosperity that this country has to offer but want to be secluded in our own little sub-culture, and still call and consider this a foreign land. That is where we are dead wrong. I hear people telling me I can say all of this, because I do not have any daughters. I feel a bit offended because, come to think of it, blessed are those who the Almighty grants daughters. Those are people who are extremely dear to the Almighty. There is this misconception that if you have daughters you are more susceptible to the wrongs of this culture. This sure makes these girls feel inferior in their own households.

I beg to differ with this line of thinking. You create your own culture and you create your own boundaries within your own household and outside your domain as well. Creating those limits certainly does not mean that you only focus on the shortcomings of the people around you. I question our rather rhetorical behaviour as well. Is being a Muslim solely for the men to grow beards and women to cover their hair? Is being a Muslim signalling others with a look that those ‘other’ people are not up to our standards and hence not worthy of our company? I know I am an extremely sinful person and not even worthy of this mention, but just imagine for a moment: why would the Almighty dispatch His messengers to perfect places? As part of our lip-service we say that we want to be the best followers of our beloved Prophet (PBUH) but when it comes to walking the walk we tend to limp and lag. The US, like any other place in this world, carries a bit of good and a bit of bad. The people around us are our people too. Agreed, these people may look or act differently but these are our fellow Americans. These are people who accepted us and gave us a bit of their land. It is time that we accept a simple fact: this is our home and this is our land too. Ultimately, it is our character and our values that will prevail and those virtues ought to be shared. That in itself is the best form of daawa.

The writer is a Pakistani-American mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com.
He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar