Editor,
In Friday's Daily Lobo, Mark D. Erasmus suggests that efforts taken by Muslim students at UNM to introduce a moderate and gentle interpretation of Islam to their non-Muslim peers via free food and open discussion amounted to a dangerous plot by multiculturalists and those Muslim students alike to "equivocate the nature of Islam."
The "nature of Islam," Erasmus asserts, is one defined by irrationality, violence and fanaticism. Erasmus suggests as a preferable alternative to Islam - or any religion - "reason, rights, freedom, material prosperity and personal happiness."
What Erasmus doesn't seem to get is that for many Muslims, Islam is understood as a means to at least four of these objectives, and in many cases, all five insofar as Islam, in addition to its potential as a basis for just political and ethical systems, is also understood as a route toward a more equitable distribution of resources throughout the world than now exists.
Of course this begs the question, "What is Islam?"
Because I am not a Muslim, I feel less free to answer this question than Erasmus, but what I can say with confidence is that in the earliest Islamic texts we possess - whether the text in question is an example of tafsir, hadith, ta'rikh, fiqh, sira or tabaqat - there is plenty of evidence that Islam developed in dialogue with the ideas, aspirations, beliefs and values of non-Islamic people.
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For the Muslim zealots Erasmus so privileges, this has never been a comfortable process, just as among many Christian and Jewish rigorists in the centuries before and after the advent of Islam, foreign influences or hybrid beliefs and practices frequently provoked violent and often horrific reactions.
But to believe that any religion is and must remain just one thing - its "essential" self - is to ignore the fact that any system of belief either evolves with the experience of its adherents or becomes irrelevant.
Accordingly, the young Muslims who have been inviting their non-Muslim peers to enter into dialogue with them about Islam as they interpret it or those Muslims around the world who understand Islam as a means toward such enlightened ideals as equality, justice, sovereignty and personal freedom, are doing what Muslims have been doing since the death of the Prophet Muhammad - interpreting Islam in dialogue with a much larger universe of ideas and ideals.
In the Middle Ages, this often meant waging holy war. In the early 21st century, this may mean something else entirely if zealots of all sorts can be properly restrained.
Thomas Sizgorich
UNM faculty
