The Afghan scholar Nushin Arbabzadah has written an excellent article on the adaptability of Islam to modern times ("Can traditional Islam adapt to the needs of western Muslims?").
In it she relates how the sermon given at her father's funeral in the German city of Hamburg was both incomprehensible and irrelevant.
I waited for the mercy and compassion that Muslims referred to every time they said "bismillah"...
Soon I gave up on listening altogether. The imam might as well have spoken Korean, a language as unfamiliar to me as the Arabic in which the sermon was conducted. I wondered why was I not allowed to hear the words of God in my own language?... For the first time in my life, I really needed religion to give me solace, but here I was, listening to an unfamiliar language where the word "devil" kept popping up, alarming rather than comforting me.
When the language finally switched to Persian, I hoped to get something out of the Hadith [the Prophet Muhammad's sayings]. But to my alarm, even though the Hadith and the imam's interpretation of them were in my language, I failed to understand how they related to the life and death of my father. We were in Hamburg, in the north of Europe, but the imam told a story that took us to the Arab lands of the eighth century, where a group of believers were hiding inside a cave. It was a tale of violence, an attempted mass murder, from which the believers were saved after God miraculously created a spider's net, covering the cave's front and misleading the prospective killers.
Nushin describes only her own, sad experience in Hamburg. But the problem isn't just confined to Muslim clerics failing to make Islam relevant to the needs of the diasporic communities of the West, Arabic speaking or not.
The problem is far wider than that: all the mainstream expressions of Islam, regardless of language, are largely irrelevant to Muslims wherever they are, be it in the Arab world, Asia or the diaspora. I am an Arabic speaker but whenever I hear Muslims – clerics or otherwise – talking about religion I end up feeling exactly the way Nushin felt at her father's funeral. In fact, I begin to wonder whether I am in the seventh or the 21st century.
As individuals, we are free to be as backward or as progressive as we like, provided we do no harm to others. But as societies, we in the Muslim world have a big problem on our hands. In the Arab component of that world, large sections of our societies appear to be gripped by backwardness, yearning not to catch up with the 21st century after years of stagnation under incompetent and corrupt dictatorships but to go back to the seventh century, as is clear from the election results in Tunisia and Egypt, and from the utterances of public figures in Libya.
There is no easy or quick answer to this problem. My feeling is that our societies must first taste the full experience of Islamist backwardness – the "Full Monty" of retards as represented by the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – before turning against it and having their critical faculties collectively jump-started. Hopefully, people will then begin to look to more modern and forward-looking interpretations of Islam, ones that respect people as human beings and their right to say what they want to say, believe in what they want to believe and wear what they want to wear.
This will take time, perhaps as long as we have endured the dictatorships of Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali.
