The Muslim’s Inner Struggles by Anjuli Pandavar

Inner Struggle?

Jihad Watch : Never before in the history of Islam has it faced a danger such as this. For the first time, Muslims en masse are reclaiming their place in humanity and rejoining history. Islam has always relied on Muslims being unequivocally Muslim in clear contradistinction to the kafir, the unbeliever, treating the values and mores of the infidel with utter disgust and contempt. But history has played a trick on Islam and increasing numbers of Muslims find the values and mores of the infidels growing within their own hearts, gradually forcing out the Qur’an so firmly lodged there during their early childhood. This drama plays out as Islam struggling against Muslims and Muslims struggling against themselves. This short series explores aspects of that complex struggle. Read all of  Part 1 here.................

In the blistering summer of 2016, I was doing research into Shinto, for which I interviewed the representative of the High Priest of Daiganji Temple, on an island off Hiroshima. I learnt a great deal about the fluid syncretism across animism, Shinto and Buddhism, and how social hierarchy and state power plugged into these at different points in Japanese history and social evolution, my particular interest being in the transition from Heian to Kamakura. Right at the end of the interview she summed up everything in one simple observation: Shinto is about fear; it’s all about fear.

I’ve since thought a lot about that observation and about what drives or drove animist and pagan religions. From time to time, I am reminded of the fear that drove us in our infancy to attempt to placate the terrifying and unfathomable forces of nature that could so easily, for reasons known only to those forces themselves, destroy us, and how, right from when we first conceived of gods, we created them in our image. How could we do otherwise; it was the only image we had. Read all of Part 2 here....................

Cast your mind back to your wistful backpacking days of travel guides and folded maps and bewildering coins and phrase books. Days of visa applications and weird vaccinations, of Kodak and Fuji and sleeping bags and hiking boots, of beers and guitars on roof terraces and condoms (because you never know), of hoping you can still find something to eat after having arrived late at night and of dying for a shower and........

Perhaps in your day, backpacking included time out to write postcards to friends and family, finding a post office and briefly noticing the picture on the stamp; or maybe you’ve only ever known emails and selfies and Facebook, er, “friends”? Either way, you will have noticed the large, colourful wall maps in the youth hostel receptions. The ones bristling with pinheads and bordered with little flags of the many countries from which guests have hailed.

If you looked carefully, and had a modicum of geography to your credit, you will have picked out your own homeland, naturally, then gone to the other familiar ones such as the USA, Germany, the UK, Italy, Brazil, Canada, Australia (or is that New Zealand? — whatever), Israel, Japan, South Korea, and on to unfamiliar ones, such as Jamaica, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Uruguay.

And perhaps you noticed, but did not wonder about, why there seemed to be no flags of Muslim countries anywhere around that map.

Read all of Part 3 here........................