WELCOME TO THE TOWN OF MOIRA

I am old enough now to wonder about how things mutate. How do eternal stories come about? How do things get remembered and how do they become forgotten? I began this blog because I suddenly found myself married, moving to another city, in jail, divorcing and fired from a job all within months. Right now I am beyond feeling anything because the only thing worse that might happen is a plane purposefully coming towards my apartment building while I am enjoying the latest episode of EastEnders. Things can't get any worse. That being said I am finding things rather amusing at this point; as I got the joke God intended.

I am Moira. The photo above left is a sign post from a small town in The Adirondacks. The spelling is the same as my name but the pronunciation is different. My name is pronounced MOY RA and the town is known as MOR RYE AH. It doesn't really matter because most of you, if you met me, would say something like: Do you have a nickname?

I converted to Islam in 2005 because the teachings, pure and simple, of Islam, spoke to me. I then went out into the world and met nothing but mean-spirited people claiming to be Muslim. I met people who prayed 5 times a day and lied and cheated. I met people who could quote the Qu'ran backwards and forwards but who were intolerant of anything and everyone who did not practice Islam they way they deemed to be the only way to practice the religion. Basically I became overwhelemd by what I had gotten involved with. Then I remembered a concept that I had while writing a paper  for school years ago on the subject of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: That the narcissism of our religious beliefs brings out the worst in us. More specifically, religions (ALL religions) are good; it is the people who practice them that are bollixed. The problem with me is that once you become educated and broadminded it becomes practically impossible to go backwards and become narrow minded. 

In Toronto, Canada, once a year, there is a conference, Reviving the Islamic Spirit, that brings together some of the greatest thinkers and scholars on the subject of Islam. It is there that I met and listened to Tariq Ramadan. For me, as you will have to decide for yourself, he is the epitome of what Islam is and should be about. The religion claims to be a religion for all ages, all times, and for all people. The religion itself begs its followers to read and question and learn, yet the illiteracy rate for Muslims is well over 50% and amongst Muslim women that rate soars to around the 90% mark. That makes the religion and those that follow it a type of oxymoron. 

What I mean is: If the religion asks that you apply good scholarship to your own religion and you can't, (or worse yet, refuse), then you are following the religion simply because it was taught to you, or it was something you learned by rote. That is bad scholarship. If you ask the average Muslim why he believes what he believes s/he will respond because "It is the word of God". It may very well be but it is also because the majority of Muslims were born Muslim and they learned what they know without questioning it. My premise is that one must understand why one knows what one knows, study it, scrutinize it, and once you understand it and still choose to believe it then and only then can you say with authority and certainty: I am a Muslim. 

I am an American. I converted to Islam. Conversion does not mean forgetting who I am. To paraphrase Mr. Tariq Ramadan in a lecture he gave in Toronto (2006): My life is my school. I must draw from it and apply the lessons I have learned to show empathy and compassion. Too many think that conversion means leaving oneself behind. Islam means to submit not change who I am. Too many have asked me if I was a wanton woman before I converted. No. I was not.  Americans have much we can bring to this religion the biggest that I can see thus far is tolerance. (As time goes on I will do a blog on what Americans really mean by tolerance).

Those that can read, and might be Muslim, might say that what I am doing it badmouthing the religion and that that makes me a sweet candidate for jihad, but I ask you to hold on to your kufi, (or hijab), for one minute and read a bit further. Good scholarship requires one to question and read further. Only those that don't know what they grasp fear loosing it and think of it as something that can be taken away. You can no more take from me my religion that you can the air I breathe. Religious groups that get offended by cartoons, depictions in movies and a host of other ridiculous things miss the point. Religion is in the heart, it is what I do, not what you do. All the things that you do, be it good or bad, should not have an impact upon my behaviour.

For my next post I shall remove my hijab so that you can see I really do have something in common with you. I remove it also to prove a point. All those abayas and hijabs you see women wearing are the cultural manifestations of that particular country. As an American I think I look insincere wearing an abaya as I have my own definition of modesty and it is no less modest than an abaya. Each culture has its set of signals that play out in the course of everyday life. For example, I have a friend from Jordan who came to America and went to a disco with a bunch of other Jordanian men. These men grouped themselves together, pack-like on the dance floor to watch the people dance, a custom that would be normal in Jordan. Their intention was to be a part of the dancing and to hopefully get a chance to dance with a few woman. From their perspective they were involving themselves with the party. He relayed this story to me later and asked me why the Americans seemed to edge away from his group, he even went so far as to feel that perhaps the American men became almost aggressive and protective of the women on the dance floor. From our perspective we can easily see that to an American his group translated into a pack of perverts ogling in an inappropriate way, the dancing women. These are cultural signals that are not so easily picked up but they go both ways. Modesty to an American is perhaps a skirt below the knee and no cleavage showing. It is a light application of makeup and turning off the 'flirt' mechanism so that every man in the room, except the daft one, knows you are not interested. Do not translate my words to suggest that I am a woman that thinks the woman in the mini doesn't deserve your respect; think that and you will be gravely wrong. Mind you there are many definitions of modesty, I am simply trying to evoke a rather simplistic one. See you all soon...