Wrenching Light Out of the Darkness

As perpetually horrified as we are of terror and violence, we are riveted by them and we let them define our take on reality. The communications miracles of the 21st century make wondrous connections possible, and yet they also bring us images of horror with an immediacy and vividness that are debilitating. Violent images seem altogether more solid and substantial, more decisive and telling, somehow, than kindness, goodness, and lived peace. It is easy to bow down before these images and give in to the despair they preach.

I offer this observation now as horrific news from Virginia Tech saturates television screens and airwaves. I offer it as a reason to listen seriously, closely, to the reasoned calm and pragmatic hope of one Muslim woman, Ingrid Mattson, even as the news accustoms us to daily death and destruction in Iraq.

Ingrid Mattson first became a Muslim leader — the first woman vice president — of the Islamic Society of North America ten days before 9/11. This striking event went virtually unreported. And when she ascended to the presidency of that organization last fall, news of her election was obscured by headlines of European crises involving Islam, focused on controversies around women and Islamic dress.

In this conversation, you will hear her speak openly and with great humanity about the qualities of character of Muslims who first drew her to study and embrace Islam after a Catholic upbringing in Canada. You may be moved, as I am, by the passion that enters her measured voice when she speaks about her love of her chosen tradition, and about her diplomatic balancing act to reconcile the gifts of modern women with the original example of the Prophet Muhammad.

Mattson also offers a rare window, I think, into what she calls the "double bind" North American Muslims experience at present. They are held culpable in Western society for atrocities perpetrated globally in the name of Islam. And they are held culpable in the wider Muslim world for association with controversial U.S. actions and policies.

So it is with a fierce determination that Ingrid Mattson resists pressure — from within Islam and outside it — to lead defensively, reactively in any direction. She has been, and remains, a critical voice within and for Islam. And yet she refuses to overextend her energy condemning, positioning, demanding. She is committed foremost, as she puts it, to "slow, patient" work — counterintuitive in our culture — of participating in lasting change by helping to build a model Muslim community here.

Ingrid Mattson affirms a profound insight of my life of conversation about religion, ethics, and meaning: Goodness prevails in the world not in the absence of reasons to despair but in spite of them. People who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness and contend openly with darkness all of their days. For me, their goodness is not naive and idealistic but more interesting, more genuinely inspiring, because of that reality. People like Ingrid Mattson — and people who are going to do the slow, patient work of healing in Blacksburg, Virginia — don't let despair have the last word. Nor do they close their eyes to its pictures, or deny the enormity of its facts. They say "Yes, and…" And they get up the next day, and the day after that, and live accordingly.

 

 

I Recommend Reading:
Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today
by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Kathleen M. Moore, and Jane I. Smith

Ingrid Mattson has written many intriguing and thought-provoking essays. I'd encourage you to read "Discovering (Not Uncovering) the Spirituality of Muslim Women" and "Stopping Oppression: A Muslim Obligation."

Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity is written by three leading scholars on Islam in America. This lively and thorough book attempts to demystify some of the challenging stereotypes surrounding Muslim women in America. The authors present a diversity of ways Islamic women live out their faith and the competing discourses taking place in North America today. The authors, like Ingrid Mattson, are helping to bridge the gap between "us and them."