Mark's Notebook

Under the Cover of Islam

New York Times Op-Ed

By Irshad Manji

Secular Europe can't quite grasp the life of a liberal Muslim.

From Amsterdam to Barcelona to Paris to Berlin, people incredulously ask me one type of question that I'm never asked in the United States and Canada: Why does an independent-minded woman care about God? Why do you need religion at all?

To a lot of Europeans, still steeped in memories of the Catholic Church's intellectual repression, religion is an irrational force.

Not so in North America. Because it has long been a society of immigrants seeking religious tolerance, religion itself is not seen as irrational.

The mass immigration of Muslims is bringing faith back into the public realm and creating a post-Enlightenment modernity for Western Europe. This return of religion threatens secular humanism, the orthodoxy that has prevailed since the French Revolution. Paradoxically, because many Western Europeans feel that they're losing Enlightenment values amid the flood of "people of faith," they wind up sympathizing with those in the Muslim world who resent imported values that challenge their own.

Why do I, an independent-minded woman, bother with Islam? Religion supplies a set of values, including discipline, that serve as a counterweight to the materialism of life in the West. I could have become a runaway materialist, a robotic mall rat who resorts to retail therapy in pursuit of fulfillment. I didn't. That's because religion introduces competing claims. It injects a tension that compels me to think and allows me to avoid fundamentalisms of my own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/opinion/18manji.html?th

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008