Posted by binsar on 15 Nov 2007 at 03:07 pm | Tagged as: Article, Interreligious Dialogue
The whole controversy about the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad has drawn angry reactions from Moslems all over the world. The main issue is the fundamental value of democracy in the West against the misuse of freedom of speech by insulting the Prophet Muhammad. We can now see that there is a big misunderstanding of culture on how the West in looking at others beliefs and values.
However, this issue has made me question myself, what would be the reaction of a Moslem from the West? This intriguing idea soon reminds me of an interview I made for the class of religious leadership, as a course in my master’s program in the Netherlands in 2004. Among various choices of religious leaders, one particular Moslem Imam interests me. His name is Imam A. van Bommel, a converted Dutch Imam, born as a Dutch citizen in a Christian background. His father is a Catholic and his mother is a Reformed Protestant. He converted to Islam at the age of 23 after a 5 years research among the Mollucans in a small village in Frisland. Having this kind of background has made Imam van Bommel thinks and acts as a Moslem as well as a Dutch.
I managed to get an appointment with him sometimes in October 2004. Our conversation was not on the topic of the cartoon, which is not the case yet, but rather on what is the type of his leadership in his congregation. What could be interesting to note here is his opinion during the conflict within himself, with him being a Dutch who is raised in a democratic environment, and having a migrant congregation who has different types of cultures and style of leadership.
He said that one of the difficulties during his early time serving as an Imam was the fact the lots of migrant workers, including Moslems, came to the West and does not want to blend with the culture. There is a gap between cultures. First, this was caused by the problem of the language; for instance, most of the Turkish people were still not able to speak Dutch because they are so busy working and only talk with their fellow Turks, so there was no real contact between them with Dutch culture and language. Many of the congregations imported their own Imam from their own country, and therefore this Imam could not understand the idea of living in the Netherlands. This is something that van Bommel regretted; he says, “There are very few Moslem leaders that are conscience about the situation of Moslems in the West. I went to many conferences, listened to many scholars, writers, Imams, and most of the time they are rather rigid in their thinking about the West. They do not understand the complexity of the West and the neo-colonialism that is happening at the moment. The West is not Christian any more, they are secular and don’t think much about religion anymore.”
Being born and raised as a Dutch really nurtured van Bommel type of leadership. He would consider himself as a natural and democratic leader. He found that being a democratic leader is not always easy. The Moslems community is not used to democratic style of leadership. Imam is expected to know and explains everything to the congregation. One should never go against his/her Imam, and they are expected to follow him. According to Van Bommel, “The Moslems community is not used to democratic style of leadership. If you give them the opportunities to do and manage things together as a group, they naturally withdraw themselves from the responsibility. They want to be a group; if you asked them what is your opinion on certain topics, they will say go and asked my Imam at the mosque. They never gave their own opinion. There is a kind of hierarchy of thinking.” Consequently, there is this kind of dilemma on what people expected and his type of leadership in the traditional congregation.
Our conversation finally came to one important point, where we talked about how how he handled the Salman Rusdhy “satanic verses” case. He was at that time appointed as spokesperson on behalf of Moslems community regarding this case. He managed to convince the boards of Moslems to stop doing medieval methods by burning the book. But then, in the interview by Volkskraant, he was made headline saying “I would like to live in a country where a book like this is allowed to be read by everyone.” His reason for saying this was that he understood that the Netherlands is a free country where people have the freedom of speech. However, the board questioned his statement. He explained that, “we were living in a country where we had the freedom of religion, freedom to build mosques and educate our children and doing our own thing. By demanding to ban the book we were in a sense denying the spirit of religion freedom that gave us so many privileges – especially seen against the secularized world view of the Dutch society that did not thought about religion very much, but rather of the scientific point of view. By doing that it would have been a sort of Catholic Inquisition, witch hunting and that we must not do.” So, they went to the Minister of Justice, demanded the book to be banned. Afterwards he withdrew himself as a spokesperson.
The story of how van Bommel handles the satanic verses shows us an interesting way of how a Dutch Imam thinks. He really understands the problem of blasphemous acts and freedom of speech. He too is of the opinion that no one should use his freedom of speech to attack others. This was caused by a huge misunderstanding of how the West looked upon Moslems and vice versa, which has been repeated again in the case of the cartoon of the prophet.
What we must do now is trying to find the solution for this problem. Act of violence will not overcome the problem. We need to listen, talk, understand, and grasp the real problem, so that we are able to find the real solution on the whole misunderstanding of culture issues. I think both sides must learn from this that they should not use their own measurements on others, try to put everything in the frame of dialogue so that this kind of ridiculous act of provocation would not be repeated again in the future.
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