Kathianne
05-07-2008, 09:16 PM
This Is A Kosovar Muslim
Michael J. Totten
Lee Smith laments that American Muslims have to read almost exclusively about scary Muslims and slightly less scary Muslims in the mainstream American media. “One can only sympathize with American Muslims,” he writes,
those who may or may not be religious, but surely have no attachment to the obscurantist fanatics that drove them from the region, and must now be wondering what is wrong with the New York Times that the only Muslims that register with the paper of record are very scary ones, and less scary ones.
I have noticed and been annoyed by this tendency myself, and it goes double today: I'm writing this from the capital of Kosovo, the least “scary” Muslim country on Earth. I've grown accustomed to moderate Muslims after living in and traveling to places like Beirut and Istanbul, but Kosovo is surprising even to me. Islam in this country is so thoroughly liberal (“moderate” doesn't quite cover it) that, if it weren't for the mosques, there would be no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim country at all. I've been in Prishtina, the capital, for four days, and I can count the number of women I've seen wearing a hijab on one hand. Aside from the conservative dating culture, women here are as liberated as Christian women in the rest of the Balkan region....
....Forget creepy crypto-Islamists like Tariq Ramadan and his ilk, whom reporters like to swoon over. Genuinely liberal and moderate Muslims do exist. They're just not famous. If NATO's Kosovo war had taken place after September 11, 2001 instead of two years earlier, perhaps the Muslims of Kosovo wouldn't be so obscure. As it stands now, hardly anyone bothers to write about them because their country no longer explodes....
So, who is the enemy?
Michael J. Totten
Lee Smith laments that American Muslims have to read almost exclusively about scary Muslims and slightly less scary Muslims in the mainstream American media. “One can only sympathize with American Muslims,” he writes,
those who may or may not be religious, but surely have no attachment to the obscurantist fanatics that drove them from the region, and must now be wondering what is wrong with the New York Times that the only Muslims that register with the paper of record are very scary ones, and less scary ones.
I have noticed and been annoyed by this tendency myself, and it goes double today: I'm writing this from the capital of Kosovo, the least “scary” Muslim country on Earth. I've grown accustomed to moderate Muslims after living in and traveling to places like Beirut and Istanbul, but Kosovo is surprising even to me. Islam in this country is so thoroughly liberal (“moderate” doesn't quite cover it) that, if it weren't for the mosques, there would be no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim country at all. I've been in Prishtina, the capital, for four days, and I can count the number of women I've seen wearing a hijab on one hand. Aside from the conservative dating culture, women here are as liberated as Christian women in the rest of the Balkan region....
....Forget creepy crypto-Islamists like Tariq Ramadan and his ilk, whom reporters like to swoon over. Genuinely liberal and moderate Muslims do exist. They're just not famous. If NATO's Kosovo war had taken place after September 11, 2001 instead of two years earlier, perhaps the Muslims of Kosovo wouldn't be so obscure. As it stands now, hardly anyone bothers to write about them because their country no longer explodes....
So, who is the enemy?