The post-9/11 image of Islam as a religion that endorses chopping off thieves’ hands and oppressing women is very different from the Islam that Tamim Ansary grew up practicing in Afghanistan.
The Islam in his Afghan community said that it was good to pray five times a day, but also fine not to.
It was good to fast during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, but also fine if “I made it a day, or a half-day, or I skipped breakfast,” as Ansary joked about his attempts to fast as a child from dawn until dusk.
The religion of his boyhood, he told an Omaha audience Thursday, was infused with macho Afghan culture and guided by local religious leaders who criticized people they considered “bad Muslims.”
But it was also a faith that embraced the poetry of Sufis, a splinter religion that stressed the love of Allah, not the fear of him, Ansary said.
“Be a good neighbor, a good father, a good friend, don’t cheat, don’t lie ... then you are a Muslim,” Ansary said, repeating advice his father gave him in Afghanistan. “I always thought that is what being a fundamentalist Muslim meant.”
Ansary, an Afghan-American writer, spoke at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Alumni Center. The speech was organized by Project Interfaith.
Ansary moved to the United States in 1964 as a teenager and returned to Afghanistan in 2002. He is uniquely suited to bridge the divide between American perceptions, Afghan Muslim tradition and current Afghan reality.
His father was one of the first Afghans to travel to the United States for college, and his mother, an American, became one of the first U.S. women to marry an Afghan and move to Afghanistan.
Ansary said he is one of the first Afghan-Americans, a background that isolated him when he first moved to the United States but one that caused him to empathize with today’s young Afghan-American adults struggling to find their place in the country after 9/11.
One young man told Ansary that he pretended to be Afghan when at home with his parents and pretended to be American while at school.
“He realized, ‘When am I not pretending?’” Ansary said.
The transition from one culture to another got far tougher when Islam — the religion that many young Afghan-Americans gravitate to because it connects them to their roots — was increasingly viewed with hostility following the al-Qaida attacks on 9/11, Ansary said.
“It’s a psychologically troubled generation,” he said of young Afghan-Americans.
Ansary, author of several books that deal with Islamic history and Afghan culture, said several tours of the Middle East and Afghanistan taught him that politics, culture and war have altered the religion of his boyhood.
Many Afghans, for example, rallied around an extremist brand of Islam while suffering years of war and desperation during the Soviet Union’s occupation of the country in the 1980s, he said.
That war destroyed the social fabric, he believes, and the destruction led in some ways to groups like the Taliban.
But the Taliban are only one small part of Islam, he said.
He told the crowd about returning to Afghanistan in 2002 and traveling to the burial place of his great-great-great-grandfather, an acclaimed Sufi poet.
While there he watched people chant Sufi poetry, passing a book of his ancestor’s poems from one person to the next — those who couldn’t read had the poems memorized, he said.
He marveled at how he, a San Francisco writer married to a Jewish woman, was so very different from his ancestor.
Then he heard a voice telling him, “You haven’t gone that far away.” The voice was inside his head.
He told the crowd that as a Muslim, he prays more than ever before.
“I do it for me, not for the bearded guys,” he said.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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