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Your truly honest opinion of Muslims?
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14-06-2016 12:46am#1
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My ex is one of THEM that can't be mentioned. He is a somewhat liberal Muslim. He used always go to mosque on Fridays but he didn't always do Salah everyday. He would try but then he would lapse again. He was more influenced and affected by the vicious politics in his country and societal cultural norms rather Islam. I was often 'lulled' to sleep by stories of Islamic mythology some of which are quite intriguing.
Ramadan was quite interesting. We were a very touchy feely couple so he would always have try to control himself but he sometimes lapsed on the impure thoughts/words aswell
By his own admission he is not a very good Muslim. 0 -
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When I was a teenager in the American South, an immigrant Muslim family bought the house next door, presumably with the help of the father's employer. Muhammad, a young engineer, and his wife Nadiyah brought their two little girls with them. My dad was friends with him, and my mother was friends with her, and I babysat the little girls (3 and 5). I remember she kept her house and daughters very clean, and she taught me about halal so I could properly care for the kids when they came over to my house. They were very careful. I still remember little Hanan always asking, "Is this food halal? Can I eat this?". And that was my first experience with Arabic food, too; we used to raid the bottom drawer of the refrigerator for halwah and dates. We were invited to the nightly Ramadan celebration dinners that summer and it was funny to be able to stay up so late at night to play and eat and listen to music. Nadiyah became pregnant and I went to help her clean the house for extra pocket money before and just after her little boy was born, so I was able to see a lot of how they lived. The little girls would try to teach me what they learned in Arabic school, which they attended in addition to the local public school. After little Hisham was born, it was not lost on me how the fact that he was the family's first son was celebrated so that the little girls became subdued and felt pushed aside. It was different than what had happened to me (the oldest) when my little brother was born. I had only felt like my little brother was taking away my status as the family baby, but Amana and Hanan felt very strongly that they were placeholders until the all-important boy came along. We used to talk about it before I put them to bed on nights I babysat, and I'd tell them things were different in America. They were nice people, though, and didn't hold themselves apart from or above the rest of the community. A couple years later, my family moved away and they threw us a nice going-away party.
At university, one of my friends from high school, a former Southern Baptist, converted to the Baha'i faith. I wondered how that was going to affect his major in international studies, but it didn't seem to harm his career; he later went to work for the CIA. That was the first time I'd heard of different sects within Islam, and though he and I didn't talk about his new religion, I read about it and was impressed by its similarity to things my mother had told me about being raised in the Reform tradition in Judaism. (Kept that to myself, though.) Later in college I had a housemate from Iran whose family were rich importers. Shabnam was the most spoiled young woman I have ever met, but I and our South African socialite housemate managed to calm her down. She used to max out her credit card and cry because she had no money, then Fern and I would make her unpack her closet and take back all the unopened, unused things that were still in their department store bags so she could pay her tuition. It was kind of funny. She was pretty cool though once she started to catch on to being an adult, and she taught me how to cook Iranian food and introduced me to an Iranian boy (which didn't last; he got too grabby too early and I knew he was only playing around until he went home and married someone). She clearly wasn't terribly religious, heh.
When I lived in Houston, I was in a part of the city that was extremely multinational and multicultural. I lived down the road from an Arabic school. Across the road was an apartment complex where many of the Muslim oil workers and their families lived. I'd often see women in long gowns and headscarves and their children in the supermarkets, or out walking behind their husbands. At work, they acted just like everyone else, but naturally religious differences were very downplayed in the workplace. My boss would send me on business trips to Europe and South America, but he didn't want at first to send me to the UAE because he was afraid how I'd be treated there. Finally after I showed I could handle myself, he sent me to Dubai and I did well, and then he sent me to Abu Dhabi, where I did run into some of the treatment he was afraid of. One of my training students made a huge fuss about being trained by a woman, claiming he'd been "tricked" by my gender-neutral first name, and flatly refused to come to class. His boss didn't even let him clear his desk before he was escorted out of the building. Another one of my students handed me his phone number with a wink (me, the dumpy 40-year-old nerd). I mentioned my boyfriend back home in Texas and the dude backed off. I thought it was kind of funny and mentioned it in passing to that fellow's boss at our team dinner a few days later, and was surprised when he treated it like a big sexual harassment deal and fired that guy, too. "It happens a lot here and we can't let it become a thing", he said, "what you don't know is they really do try to take advantage because you're a Western woman". I did know; oil industry women have a saying, "My Mohammed is different", which essentially means that women who fall for opportunist Muslim guys while posted in the Middle East always think their squeeze is completely unlike everyone else's and won't ever take advantage of them, only to be bitterly disappointed when they don't keep up the correspondence, or worse, blandish their way into green card marriages.
I did have a nice time being shown around the little Abu Dhabi historical museum (not that there was a lot of history, given how recently it became a country). The curator was a philosophical, intelligent man who was related to a famous imam. He said, thoughtfully, that in his opinion good people of all religions and of no religion were linked by their goodness and not separated by their religious differences. He was the first Muslim man I had met who didn't give me the feeling that he looked down on me because I was a woman, also. We stood together in the small garden and listened to the broadcast call to worship, which was amazingly powerful and well-sung. I went back to the hotel, where I resumed being condescended to by the desk clerk. Oh, well.
Here in the UK and Ireland, I haven't had any particularly notable experiences with Muslim people. Of course, I have no religion to speak of myself, so I don't have a chip on my shoulder as regards religious differences. I am of much the same opinion as the museum curator. Good people will be good, and bad people will be bad, but it takes religion to really make good people bad.0 -
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