“I love Ramadan, because it brings daddy home early,” says eight-year-old Latifa Mahmood, who goes to an independent school in New Zealand.
She said it was the only period in the year, when her family, including her parents and eight siblings are at home for evening prayers and Iftar.
“Yes, those 29 or 30 days constitute the best during the year,” agrees Anwar Hussain, a part-time worker.
“Everyone is at home by 6 pm and prepares to offer prayers and break fast. Dad does of complain of having to be away from his dairy. We always ask him, ‘Why can’t you be with us every day of the year? Surely, if you can do for a month, you can do for the rest of the year as well.”
But not everyone considers the Holy Month and easy period.
After the daily dawn-to-dusk fast, comes the feast, and even the most career-minded single women are dragooned back into the kitchen to help prepare the time-consuming harira bean soup and the traditional pancakes and sweets.
“It is like a difficult month for many,” Ahmed, who recently converted to Islam, agreed in sympathy.
Manicured fingers become caloused from pounding. Jameela, a literature student, recalled the time when she wanted to protect her hands with rubber gloves.
“What if the neighbours see?” her scandalised mother remonstrated.
Yet those culinary hours have compensations, enabling a middle-class girl to polish the traditional skills that help towards finding a suitable husband. Indeed, Jameela and her friends admit to adoring Ramadan’s ‘completely different atmosphere,’ which allows them, once the eating is done, to go out with their friends at night.
Just as folks at home long for their people – husbands, wives, sons and daughters and others to return home to a warm welcome every day, many hope that countries around the world would welcome them as human beings and not as ‘branded terrorists’ or perpetrators of violence.
Large following
With 1.2 billion followers, Islam is the world’s second largest religion. It is also the fastest growing, having spread far from its origins in Saudi Arabia.
Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh are now the three most populous Muslim countries. Another 380 million Muslims are spread across Africa, while Europe and the US have large Muslim population.
Around 90% of Muslims belong to the orthodox Sunni sect. Rival Shia Muslims predominate in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan.
Differences between and within these two groups has led to war and civil unrest (in countries like Turkey).
But members of both sects abide by the Holy Quran and follow similar Islamic traditions such as Ramadan and performing Haaj in Mecca.
Islam experiences an uneasy relationship with the West.
Muslims cite many reasons for this – from the crusades to the West’s support of Israel. The West meanwhile worries that Islam is hostile to democracy, pointing to fundamentalists such as the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
This mutual enmity has led some to suggest that Islam and the West are on a collision course. Extremists want it so.
But the religious differences are not irreconcilable and neither are political ones.
Indeed, Islam is historically the most tolerant of religions but differences in approach persists in many parts of the world.
The difference between the US and Europe in dealing with Islam reaches down to some basic questions of principle, such as the limits of free speech and free behaviour.
America’s political culture places huge importance on the right to religious difference, including the right to displays of faith which others might consider eccentric.
As Reza Aslan, a popular Iranian-American writer on Islam said, “Americans are used to exuberant displays of religiosity.”
So the daily prostrations of a devout Muslim are less shocking to an American than to a lukewarm European Christian.
American society is open to religious arguments and to new approaches to old theological questions, in a way that Europe is not.
In general, Americans are more optimistic (or less gloomy) about Islam than Europeans. A Pew Research Centre poll said Americans who saw Muslim-Western relations as “generally bad” outnumbered those who take the opposite view by 55% to 32%. Not exactly cheery.
But in Germany, the pessimists are ahead by 70% to 23%, in France by 66% to 33%, and in Britain by 61% to 28%.
America vs Europe
Some things are off-limits even in America.
In Britain, for example, members of a radical (but non-violent) movement have appeared on television to express their rejection of the principles of liberal democracy and secular justice.
That is unlikely to happen in the US. Nor would it be possible, in any American context, to argue for the superiority of sharia (Islamic law) over laws passed by elected lawmakers.
But the right to say almost anything on most other subjects is deeply entrenched in the US. This means, whatever weapons the parties in America’s religious arguments try to use, they do not usually include attempts to deny the other side’s right to speak.
The result is that there is more space for hard religious argument. No law restrains that quite large body of American thought, which is critical not just of extreme readings of Islam but of Islam itself; arguing that the warrior ethos of the faith’s earlier centuries was one of its essential features, not just a regrettable excess.
But the American system also guarantees the rights of those who argue for the opposite view: that Islam is a peaceful, Universalist faith, which restricts rather than enjoins the use of violence.
The idea that freedom is the cornerstone of politics is one reason why people like Mr Ellian, that Iranian who fled to Leiden, look hopefully towards America.
His argument goes as follows. Islam’s sacred texts either can be read in a spirit of militant intolerance or in a spirit of altruism, and the latter can prevail only in conditions of hard, open-ended debate in which nobody holds back for fear of giving offence. The free-speech culture of the US may have a better chance of fostering such a debate than European political correctness.
