lexicon

Lexicon

by Anisah Sofia, London Monday, 10 July 2006

To my young nieces and nephews, I hope you're not hoping to read about unicorns when you see the title of this article!  It is anything but (!) but sometimes it might as well have been.  To me, it is a spiritual journey to ensure that lexicons like British Muslims, European Muslims and Western Muslims are not turned into unicorns, those creatures who live in myths.

Western Muslims have had a mini-reformation of their own identities.  They were expelled from Europe after the fall of Andalucia.  They recently came to the West again in the 50s and 60s, to help rebuild the economies of a war-ravaged Europe.  They intended to return, to earn their living here, and live their lives back "home".  But today, for the second and third generations of Muslim in the West, "home" is the West.  The country of origin of their parents are part of them as a memory.  For first generation Muslim Western citizens who had chosen to migrate from a Muslim majority country, they came here because they want to be in the West.  They are Western Muslims. 

Today, various local initiatives in the West are having ferocious debates on how to be a Western Muslim.  The debates include voices that still call for separation of anything Western and anything Islamic, hoping to create a Muslim in the West who whilst physically here, are out of the West.  Unknowingly this group is fulfilling the ill-conceived and ill-intended "prophecies" of far right groups in the West, that Muslims and the West are incompatible with one another.  The majority of opinions do not fall into this category.  They are talking about how to live in the West as Western Muslims.  To the majority, it is not the ends that is being debated, but the means.  This is the right direction. 

The next step is for Western Muslims as well as their fellow non-Muslim citizens to speak of the former as citizens of the Muslim faith.  Muslims and non-Muslims alike are still using the term, "Muslim communities" when referring to Western Muslims.  This is counter-productive.  It should be Muslim citizens of Britain, Muslim citizens of France, Muslim citizens of the U.S.A., etc., not Muslim communities in Britain, France, the U.S.A., etc.  In this age of media sound-bites, inasmuch as a debate on lexicon is not the debate, it is important to get that sound-bite right.  Get it wrong, and people will come to wrong conclusions without bothering to hear the discourse out.