How to think about religions – Islam, for example

Abstract

One day while driving home from work, I turned on National Public Radio, as I often do, and landed right in the middle of a story on women in Saudi Arabia. A Muslim woman was speaking about the well-known prohibition of women driving in that country; she argued that this and other constraints on women's freedom were “part of Saudi culture, not Islam.” The NPR narrator began her summary with, “In this traditional Islamic culture…” It is tempting to ascribe features of social life in certain societies to their “Islamic culture,” to a way of life that follows from their religious beliefs. Older ways of thinking in Islamic studies (Lewis 1988) were built around this kind of reasoning. Sometimes we do the opposite, as the Muslim woman interviewed did, when she contrasted Islam to the regrettable facts of “Saudi culture.” Neither way of speaking admits to reciprocal linkages between religion and particular cultural frameworks. For the one, Islam is only a matter of culture; for the other, it is only a matter of religion. Unfortunately, these two ways of speaking tend to dominate public discourse about Islam in North America and Europe. I recall a recent series of gatherings at a Unitarian church in St. Louis with several representatives of the largest local mosque, an outreach group that had found its work multiplying after 9/11.