Minister of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Call and Guidance Saleh Al-Asheikh recently gave a lecture on moderation and its impact on the lives of Muslims. He highlighted the importance of spreading knowledge, clarifying facts and understanding the purposes of Islamic Shariah.
Al-Asheikh said we need to behave in a moderate manner and keep away from extremism. He explained that moderation requires correction of some of our ways of thinking and stressed the need to adapt to the great changes in the life of our nation. He also said we should understand our reality and the environment surrounding us and consider the effects of our actions. It is wise counsel from a wise man.
I hope the extremists among us and those who adhere to a rigid interpretation of Islam adopt the advice of the minister and refrain from dictating hard-line policies that are contrary to the merciful rulings of moderate Islam.
I would like to stress to our religious scholars that one of the major obstacles to progress and development is the strict segregation law imposed on society, which makes life difficult for every man, woman and child. It is time we changed this policy. If we continue on this path inevitably we will lag behind the rest of the world, and our society will continue to suffer from the social and economic ills that threaten the future of our younger generation.
It is incumbent upon government officials as well as social and economic experts to educate our religious scholars about the sociopolitical and economic concerns of modern-day society. We need preachers to provide appropriate advice to help society cope with current challenges and ensure a more prosperous life for all.
Many of our people take their direction from Friday sermons and Islamic preachers; therefore, it is the responsibility of those scholars to advance change and progress. Al-Asheikh is right. We need to keep pace with the world, and that is why our religious scholars must be more aware of our societal needs and concerns.
Islamic preachers cannot be in denial and fantasize that we can live the life of our ancestors. So much has changed; our needs are different, and modern-day challenges are complicated and sometimes seem overwhelming. They need to be addressed with a more open-minded, progressive and relevant approach.
The responsibility to provide a healthy environment for our children remains to be our greatest challenge. The way to protect our children from the modern-day threats of drug abuse, crime and immoral behavior is by providing them with good education and spiritual guidance to make them better people with Muslim character and a strong sense of right and wrong.
The segregation rules imposed on our schoolchildren at the age of seven have been very detrimental to their emotional development. According to social scientists and psychologists, children suffer when they are segregated at an early age in school. Researchers believe it is very stressful for a child to be deprived of his mother’s attention and supervision of his schoolwork at this very young age.
In order for our society to be competitive and succeed, we need both men and women to be able to coexist with understanding and respect. The only way to achieve this is to teach respect and understanding to the boys and girls who will become our women and men — women and men who will work together to create a better future for the generations to follow.
It is everyone’s responsibility to create an environment where such learning will occur, which will require an understanding on the part of today’s men and women why we need to change. It will require us adults to have the determination and selflessness to learn how to do it. The message needs to come from the ministries and the mosques, from the family rooms and the classrooms. If it doesn’t, our men and women will be prevented from working together because of their utter lack of the emotional maturity needed to get along with respect and understanding as adults.
In most countries, youngsters overcome these interpersonal hurdles in the classroom under the watchful supervision of a qualified teacher who can provide the guidance our youngsters need to exist together. Parents work with teachers to help guide their children. Parents — men and women — take an active part in interaction with teachers and administrators regarding both their sons and daughters.
When a mother cannot attend her son’s school meetings, or when a mother is not allowed to visit a son’s school to discuss his problems or academic performance, the child understandably feels lost and insecure. A father usually cannot give him the comfort and the security that he needs at this sensitive age. Another negative effect is the child’s disappointment when his parents cannot attend school activities, watch him participate in sports activities or receive his certificate at the end of the term.
What is worse is the teenager’s frustration when he is barred from shopping malls and excluded from family outings or festivities. Our young boys are left to loiter in the streets and drive their cars recklessly. Ultimately this sense of abandonment leads them to a lot of mischief and inappropriate behavior.
The reasons we have teen problems in our malls and on our roadways is because those are the only places our children come together. They come together with no experience in interaction because we have allowed them no experience or given them any guidance in interaction. You might conclude the real reason we have such problems is that we have elected to ignore them.
It is time we all acknowledged that the segregation laws do not safeguard morality or help us create a perfect society.
Our society is greatly harmed by clinging to this policy that indoctrinates the public to view women as a source of sin. Men are not allowed to talk to women, do business with them or interact with them face to face in any academic or government institution. Social scientists need to speak against this social custom that has been adopted willingly by many in our society out of a profound desire to do right. Slavery was an evil institution, and we were able to reject that and yet we still enslave our youth through this unnecessary and damaging segregation.
Many still believe that shunning any interaction with women is an obligation that must be respected by every Muslim; although millions of good Muslims around the world have been able to get beyond that and advance their countries without affecting the sincerity of their faith. This rigid interpretation prevents decent, innocent contact between men and women.
In the past, this way of life has prevented many from finding compatible spouses or seeking happiness with partners of their choice. In the present day it also denies women to use their God-given knowledge, skills and talent to play an equal role in the development of their nation as it also denies them the most fundamental right to self-determination.
The rigid interpretation of our Islamic laws and values need to be revised so that they become pointers for the future as opposed to intractable walls that block our progress. Trends that perpetuate negative attitudes against women and traditions that label the face of a woman as indecent to expose need to be reconsidered. Indeed, the narrow-minded approach adopted by many to safeguard our Islamic morals and values have unfortunately led to the negative effect in our society and have reflected very badly on the way others view our country and our segregated way of life.
It seems to me the National Dialogue is the perfect forum for us to resolve such problems — or at least begin to consider them seriously. Change can occur with respect to our profound faith and cherished culture if we accept that we as a people are the ones who must work for change.
Our government and many of our businesses and other institutions have been working hard for some time to bring our country toward a prosperous future with all respect for the true tenets of our religion.
What has been missing is the interest and involvement of many of the people, as well as many of the clerics, to confront the basic issues many other countries have solved long ago.
If you think today that we can put off making the changes so dearly needed now, tomorrow you may be wishing that we made the right choices when we had the chance — and when our children still had a chance.
— Samar Fatany is a Saudi radio journalist.
