Recently, while touring the U.S. and Canada, London’s first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, “attacked anti-Muslim views and policies and argued that what is needed is to build ‘bridges rather than walls’ – a reference to Mr. Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.”
He specifically and repeatedly criticized the notion “that it is not possible to hold Western values and to be a Muslim.” This notion, which he attributed to Trump, plays “into the hands of Daesh and so-called ISIS because it implies it’s not possible to be a Western liberal and mainstream Muslim.”
Can Muslims hold to Western liberal values and still be true to mainstream Islam?
This pivotal question is easily answered by determining what is and is not Islamic. Muslims have traditionally accomplished this by asking the following questions: what do the core texts of Islam say about the thing in question – call it “X”? Does the Koran, believed by Muslims to contain the literal commands of Allah, call for or justify X? Do the hadith and sira texts – which purport to record the sayings and deeds of Allah’s prophet, whom the Koran (e.g., 33:21) exhorts Muslims to emulate in all ways – call for or justify X? – READ MORE
