The soft pornography of personal secularism

By Jawad Ali

A nice young Muslim woman submitted something to MWU! for publication. She added a note saying please don’t put it in the soft porn section. This put a smile on my face. My response to her turned into an essay.

Soft Pornography

The stories in the Sex and the Ummah section are of about women’s sexuality. They are thoughtful and polite, yet brave and honest. They are not obscene, and it is very rude to call them soft porn in general. You have to demonstrate four things to me before I allow you to call it soft porn.

1. You have to give me examples of actual soft porn that you have read.
2. You also have to give me some examples of women’s sexual fiction that you have read that was not pornographic.
3. Next you have to convince me that you can clearly articulate the difference between the two
4. Finally you have to convince me that according to this clear understanding, the Sex and the Ummah section falls in the first category and not the next one

If you cannot do this, then I would think that you are just being a silly prude. If someone happens to think that all discussion or fictional treatment of women’s sexuality is essentially pornographic, then I would argue that he or she is the one who is obscene and perverted. If fear, loathing and embarrassment are the emotions someone has towards women’s sexuality, instead of respect and reverence, then he or she is indeed the pornographer.

Obviously, some people are having a hard time with this simple concept. Others can’t even get past the overwhelming sexual urges they fear will come from seeing a fully clothed woman in prayer in the house of God. There was a time that the Victorian English would wrap shirts around tables, because table legs were too sexy. Now we would think that there is something a bit perverted about the person who obsesses over the sexy legs of the coffee table.

Personal Secularism

Sex is something that we can politely talk about in our normal lives. I don’t want to live a normal worldly life, and a then adopt a separate Islamic life when I am in the company of Muslims. Breaking this fake barrier, and exposing this two-faced life, are very important steps to finding ways of being Muslim that are awake and honest. This is perhaps one of the goals of Muslim Wakeup that we have not explicitly emphasized a lot.

Traditional Muslims have a very simple word for this duality. They call it “munafiqat” or hypocrisy. I have been told that the progressive movement should be trying to win friends through extra sweetness. “Hypocrisy” and “munafiqat” are fighting words, so we better find some softer ones. I’ll call it personal secularism for now, although I will use the phrase with all this negative baggage in the Islamic world. This is the condition where our lives are neatly divided into the religious and the mundane domains. We apply reason to our mundane lives, but look up (or pretend to) to religious authorities for religious issues.

Educated and reasonable sounding people write to me and tell me that they are fed up with MWU! because of the sex section. I ask them if they buy and borrow all their books from Christian bookstores, since normal libraries and bookstores have much worse. They respond that a different standard is applied to MWU! because of the word “Muslim” in the title. Maybe some of it makes sense. I think that as a society we have gone too far in this direction and squeezed all life and joy out of our religion. We can smile in our mundane lives, but we must make a serious face if Islam is mentioned.

We are all innocent till proven guilty in our earthly lives, but we are guilty until proven innocent in all matters Islamic. Most of the divide over the woman imam issue stems from this duality, particularly among Americans. No American Muslim of note has come out to speak against women in secular leadership. In fact all essays and white papers denouncing or questioning women’s spiritual equality start with tributes to women’s earthly equality. Every thing in this life is allowed except that which is explicitly forbidden. This is the golden rule of Islamic law we are told. But wait, the rule is reversed for all religious rituals. Women imams were never explicitly allowed. I am not sure which core Islamic text explicitly allowed Urdu with a thick Pashto accent in a khutba, but there it was last week, and nobody objected.

I do not understand why so many Muslims are so opposed to political secularism in theory, yet they so stubbornly cling on to such personal secularism. This duality makes a mockery of the notion that Islam is a complete way of life. There almost seems to be a desire to reduce Islam to a sacred object to be worshiped, and then placed on an altar in the corner of the house where only priests can touch it. Part of the MWU! project is to advocate a living and livable Islam.

Jawad Ali is the co-founder of MWU, and currently serving as its Minister of Vice and Virtue. He will be coming to your city soon to sample all the vices and declare them harmful.