Engaging the Mosque

[graphei]

I'm going to jump in.

I'm going to relate a little story of mine. It was my sophomore year in college (2004) and I was taking a course called 'Religion and Resistance'. It was team-taught by a Professor of Islamic Studies and a Professor of Christian Studies, and it was a brilliant course. Great reading. Snagged an actual copy of Jalal al-e Ahmad's Gharbzadegi. Anyway, a debate was raging about religion and politics, as usual, and one student uttered, "Well, take the politics out of Islam." 'B', the Iranian Professor of Islamic Studies, looked up and said, "You can't. Islam is politics. Religion is politics." Everyone shut up and thought about that for a bit.

So, to run with that train of thought: If Islam is politics, and the heartbeat of Islam is where the faithful converge, then the mosque is politics also. Granted some mosques take on that role more so than others, but nevertheless, it is a political place. It's just as political as a church, temple or synagog.

Also, as a scholar of Islamic Studies, I'm a bit curious as to what you're all referring to when you say a "mosque's established role?"

[davidbfpo]

Graphei asked:

I'm a bit curious as to what you're all referring to when you say a "mosque's established role?"

I too went on a journey to reach a level of understanding, which is still far from adequate, but sufficient to enable my own engagement. For a long time even though policing a multi-ethnic and multi-religious area of Birmingham I had next to nothing to do with mosques and very few exchanges with the public on their faith. After time in Pakistan I knew a little more; mosques were visited for their architecture.

Skip forward I was lucky to have time to read, meet Muslims without conflict who knew I was a police officer and listen to others explain their views on the Jihad, not the Muslim faith.

Then I met several Muslims who wanted to explain themselves and it progressed from mutual points of interest to some conversations about their faith. One mosque repeatedly made me welcome, with invitations to Iftar and courses on understanding Islam.

In my journey it was clear each mosque had their common ground on enabling their faith - which I would describe as their 'established role' - but differed over interpretation. There is a wide divergence beyond that role, for example some play an active part in the wider community, encouraging voting and hosting non-Muslim organisations within mosque grounds on public safety and public health.

I think pushing the boundaries of the 'established role' depends on a wide range of factors. In the local context here, what language Fridays prayers are conducted in can attract or repel converts.

[Ray]

One could engage if issues were rational.

Check this out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62k8o...layer_embedded

[MSG Proctor]

Islam is a civilization, a total expression of life - religious, social, political, artistic, psychological, existential. The idea of conducting COIN Ops "around" the mosque instead of aiming center-of-mass at the three Ms - mullahs, mosques, madrassas - is a fool's errand, and in the final analysis gets people killed.

Westerners are interlopers - outsiders in an intense argument between Islamic believers of various degrees and distinctions. The only way to proceed with any expectation of lasting results is to back a faction and stay with them til the end. The idea of building neutral governance is impracticable. This is not the West. In fact, the idea of building neutral government in the West is a myth that is becoming more exposed each day as secular humanism continues to advance as a philosophy with religious tenets.

It is quite possible to have Islamic allies and partners. It is not possible to stand outside the polemics being vollied to and fro as a detached, impartial observer. This frustrates our allies and emboldens our enemies. The dirty little secret is that our defacto state religion - secular humanism - is our achilles heel over here (I am in Afghanistan). Secularism brings more ominous cultural baggae with it than anything a Christian civilization could bring. And for those fighting in this theater, it is instructive to recall that the USSR - an atheist empire - inflamed the zeal of the Mujahidin here and eventually succumbed to a defeat widely credited to jihadic forces and divine favor. Whether you believe in it or not is irrelevant. If the people are the center of gravity in a COIN fight, then what matters is what they believe.

Engaging the mosque is also no longer simply a problem of figuring out heroes and villians on the COIN battlefield. As the Europeans found out, when a society rejects its own religion for a secular ethic that results in rapidly declining birthrates, immigrants enter the vacuum. If we fail to understand mosque engagement in Kandahar and Najaf, we will not have the luxury of figuring out from a distance in Peoria or Poughkeepsie.