Muslim WakeUp! Why I am (not) a progressive Muslim
Is it important to be progressive Muslim. On Muslim WakeUp! a discussion.
Why I’m A Progressive Muslim Some arguments:
7. My penis. As the owner of a penis I can assure those without one that my penis confers no significant religious insight upon me its owner. Nil. Nada. I will go out on a limb and assume that my penis is somewhat similar in thinking ability to others’. I extrapolate from that similarity that a woman leading a prayer is perfectly fine since a penis cannot think.
10. Big words like patriarchy, misogyny, hegemonic power. Because thankfully progressive Muslims don’t need any of them to get their point across. Sure they could bore you with talk of the need to create a counter discourse to the received orthodoxy inherent within the socio-, political economy of the faith as constructed and understood both subjectively and implicitly; that this has been and continues to be based on certain constraints that are arguably social and not religious in the strictest sense; that their enterprise is merely an attempt to marry Islam as praxis to external experience so as to negate the disconnect between the temporal and spiritual, and that such an endeavor presupposes a certain dynamism that runs counter to the current orthodoxy. But who in the world would want to listen to that?
Or Why I am not a progressive Muslim, some arguments:
16. Labels suck. They don’t do us complex humans justice. (And you’ll note that I use them anyway, just like you do, so shuttup.)
And the Number One reason I am not a progressive Muslim: I don’t want my teenaged kids hanging out with them if that leads to their thinking that all the openness-postmodern-fluidity yadda-yadda means I will budge on our family’s no-dating rule. And no premarital sex, ibni, binti! No judgment implied on any readers—you folks do what you deem right in your life path, your decisions are between you and God, I will defend your right to privacy. I know this issue is not as black-and-white as the conservatives make it, that abstaining from or engaging in sex outside sanctioned relationships is not the isolated standard by which purity of heart is discernible (by God, in any case, not by us), and that honor is an internal quality known to God, not a quality indicated by, say, an intact hymen. So I won’t shake my holier-than-thou finger at you, and I won’t tell you how to raise your kids. Me, I’d rather hang with Mormons and Baptists on this issue. Until my kids—male and female—are, like, at least thirty. Yeah, you heard me. Same person from the Sex and the Ummah column. This will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows me, or has read me carefully, as opposed to alarmists and cheerleaders. Just because a person writes openly about sex and respects discourse from differing opinions about it, doesn’t imply she advocates in her personal life all the practices described in the writing (the imbeciles who believe that it does know who they are). And just because the damn conservatives believe in this principle (no premarital sex) for all the wrong, anti-feminist reasons, guess what progressives, doesn’t make it automatically wrong. It’s right in my book, on entirely other, spiritual-ethical grounds.
And you can discuss it further on their forum.