Email Link
Facebook
Twitter
DiggWhat I Know About Islam
By Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons
As told to Robert Owens Scott
Simmons is among the speakers at the 2006 Trinity Institute National Theological Conference, "The Anatomy of Reconciliation: from violence to healing."
Islam Is…
I see Islam as submitting to the beautiful qualities of God, which are also the beautiful qualities of the human being.
Progressive Muslim
One of the reasons that I went to graduate school was to study Islam because of all the questions I had. In my heart, I had all these questions and doubts. So I said, “I’m going to study Islam academically so that I can see about its history, its theology, its philosophy and all of that.” Once I started reading the Koran, I saw that this religion had been twisted around, that there was so much affirmation of women in the Koran and in the prophet’s lifetime. Some of the Muslim feminists say Islam was hijacked by the misogynists after the prophet died. And so I spend my time trying to educate people on how it was hijacked and how it can be used to affirm equality between men and women.
I would never have termed it “reconciliation.” I would have called it “educating men and women about the equality of women as being an integral part of Islam,” and that Islam has as its central foci, justice, equality, equanimity. And it’s very clear that women and men are of the same substance. So to educate my fellow Muslims and myself to this reality is what I see as one of the main things I am trying to do in my work as a scholar.
Christians and Muslims
The obstacles are great. They are manmade, humanmade: ignorance, religious intolerance, vengeance, the inability to admit when one is wrong, not seeing every other human being as equal to yourself. These are the things that separate us and cause us to hate one another and get behind these walls of ignorance and misunderstanding. One of the reasons that I teach an introduction to Islam course is that I like teaching it because most of the students are not Muslims. I think it gives me a chance to try and help students see the similarity between the three Abrahamic faiths and how much we have in common, and that there shouldn’t be enmity between us.
Justifying Violence
We have to understand the difference between believing that this killing is something you’re doing out of religious motivation versus out of political and economic, social motivations, and that you’re using religion to justify it. It does get to be a bit difficult if you’re talking with Muslims who have some knowledge of the Koran, because they can fall back on some of the verses that enjoin Muslims to fight. There’s this long history of the expansion by the sword, even though that is not the main way many people were brought in. In my view, God is not violence. There isn’t violence in God. It’s violence in humans that gets projected on to God.
Real Jihad
In my own life, I’ve had the opportunity to go through many stages. And I have gone from being a young civil rights activist who used nonviolence as a tactic, to being a person — primarily through my study with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (a Sufi mystic from Sri Lanka) and the teachings that he imparted — to understanding that if I personally want to achieve what I think I knew even as a nine-year old, that to realize my true self — my God self — that I could not carry hatred, animosity, enmity. So I can’t let these things exist in my heart. And of course they come up, and I’m constantly trying to rub them out, get rid of them. And that is the jihad, that is the big jihad: the struggle against the evil inside oneself.
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons came to Islam by way of Sufi mysticism and nonviolent struggle in the Civil Rights movement. She is currently an assistant professor of religion and affiliated faculty in the Women Studies Department of the University of Florida.
2006 National Conference:
