Unless you’re living under a rock, as a Muslim in the West you must recognize that our religious and social identities are far from solid. Maybe it’s in transition, maybe it’s in flux, maybe we’re doomed. In this muddle, we’ve polarized into general left-right political wings. This Us/Them dichotomy is very real: just look at any Facebook/Twitter posts on sensitive issues, grab some popcorn, and enjoy the fireworks. Conservatives call out liberals as servants to their Western, colonial masters, and liberals call out conservatives as repressive cult crazies.

What’s not real, however, are the purported reasons for the division. Leaning left or right doesn’t necessarily invalidate your Muslim identity, nor does it make you a threat to someone else. Loads of conservative Muslims live peacefully, going about their day-to-day lives without condemning everyone else to hellfire, and loads of liberals Muslims exist just fine without self-hate or overcompensating through alcohol and Zionism. Like the American Left-Right discourse, we’ve created giant straw men in the media, causing deep distrust and tension between each other. Most Americans, like most Muslims, want to work together for a better future. The “hot-button” issues are hardly reasons to fight; in fact, they should be reasons to work together even more.

But it’s easier to blame someone for all our problems, painting an entire half of our community as evil, ignorant, or just plain stupid. Maybe I’m guilty of this, too. My comics often highlight problematic issues and attitudes in our communities; perhaps they come off as indictments of the old conservative guard. While I don’t enjoy having angry people curse me out in messages and comments, I think I understand their feelings of betrayal, anger, and disgust.

“If you’re just highlighting problematic issues,” you might say, “why don’t you highlight the problems with liberals, too?” Fair point. Maybe I should. But my perspective as an artist comes from growing up and living in deeply conservative communities. This is what I know. I am not slinging mud and jeering at people I hate: I am holding a critical mirror up to my own community. What I hope to dissuade is not conservatism, but an insular culture that has kept a choke-hold on the Western Muslim identity. Dr. Tariq Ramadan, in

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, puts it more eloquently than I ever could:



“Globalization contains the paradox that at the same time that it causes the old traditional points of reference to disappear, it reawakens passionate affirmations of identity that often verge on withdrawal and self-exclusion. The Muslim world is not exempt from such phenomena: from Africa to Asia, via America and Europe, this kind of discourse is multiplied. It is about self-protection, self-preservation, and sometimes even self-definition over and against the “Western megamachine,” to use the formulation of Serge Latouche: “Whatever is Western is anti-Islamic” or “Islam has nothing in common with the West.” This bipolar vision is widespread and gives some Muslims a sense of power, might, and legitimacy in Otherness. But not only is this bipolar and simplistic vision a decoy (and the claims that justify it are untruths), but the power it bestows is a pure illusion: in practice, the Muslims who maintain these theses only isolate themselves, marginalize themselves, and sometimes, by their excessive emotional, intellectual, and social isolation, even strengthen the logic of the dominant system whose power, by contrast, lies in always appearing open, pluralistic, and rational.“



(By the way, he’s still being held illegally and abusively by the French government, and is in critical condition. Please take some time to help him at https://www.freetariqramadan.com/)

Dr. Jeffrey Lang adds onto the problems of this isolationist attitude: second- and third-generation Muslims are almost non-existent in American mosques, which seem perpetually occupied by immigrants and their children. Because no effort has been made to synthesize a Western Muslim identity (or because those efforts have been repressed), Muslims born and raised in the West are given no place in their Islamic heritage. So we leave.

Unless young, Western Muslims return to mosques to claim our place and validate our identities, we’re doomed to lose it, too. Equally, “traditionalist” Muslims must make room for diverse opinions and practices. It’s not an easy task. And it has to start with a lot of self-critical discourse. Again, from Dr. Ramadan:

What I mean exactly by the idea of “independence” is that Western citizens of the Muslim faith must think for themselves, develop theses appropriate to their situation, and put forward new and concrete ideas. They must refuse to remain dependent, either on the intellectual level or, more damagingly, on the political and financial levels. These types of dependences are the worst because they prevent the acquisition of responsibility and the reform and liberation of hearts and minds.

To be clear: the dependencies he refers to are to the religious authorities and cultures of the countries we’ve immigrated from. Again, I want to make clear that it is not conservatism (however that’s defined), that is the issue here. It is a dedicated effort to remain separate and Otherized from the societies we live in. Synthesizing a new identity in the West is neither forbidden nor damaging to the Muslim identity.



…it is not a question of relativizing the universal principles of Islam in order to give the impression that we are integrating ourselves into the rational order. In my view, the issue is to find out how the Islamic universal accepts and respects pluralism and the belief of the Other: it is one thing to relativize what I believe and another to respect fully the convictions of the Other. The postmodernist spirit would like to lead us unconsciously to confuse the second proposition with the first. I refuse: it is in the very name of the universality of my principles that my conscience is summoned to respect diversity and the relative, and that is why, even in the West (especially in the West), we have not to think of our presence in terms of “minority.” What seems to be a given of our thinking: “the Muslim minority,” “the law of minorities” (fiqh al-aqalliyyat), must, I believe, be rethought.

Dr. Ramadan is a scholar. He spends the rest of the book talking about how he draws from traditional and new methodologies to craft this new model. Most of us are not scholars, so there’s not much we can do in that regard. The future of the Western Muslim identity necessarily requires a rigorously developed philosophical and academic foundation, but in the meantime, we laypeople can contribute to the discourse by mapping out and validating the comprehensive Muslim experience, whether that’s through literature, music, media, YouTube parody films, or, oh, I don’t know, sarcastic webcomics?

Discourse is necessary. The path ahead has never been walked, so we must grope and fumble our way through it. It’s easier to find a well-worn path and follow it, whether it’s the “back-home” attitude or a whitewashed identity, but neither will grant us the fulfillment we’re looking for, and neither will build a real future that truly includes and validates our experiences as human beings. Building this path requires all of us working together. This necessarily requires that we step down the vitriol and judgment, but also that we practice constructive criticism, where we seek to build— and not not break— each other.

