KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 7 — Khalid Latif was made the first imam of New York University in 2005, amid growing religious tension between white Americans and the Muslim community during the post 9/11 anti-Islam frenzy.
This was fostered by constant vilification of the faith, driven either by domestic politics or Washington’s foreign interests.
Since then, Khalid has dedicated his time to community work aimed at bringing people together, so much so that in 2007, then New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made him the youngest chaplain in the history of the New York City Police Department, at just 24 years old.
But unlike your typical state-sponsored interfaith initiatives which tend to focus only on superfluous and in-the-moment types of dialogue between religious leaders, Khalid opted for a more genuine engagement: by initiating real community work that aims to empower individuals to trigger change.
And interfaith dialogue has never been more important than today, at a time when Islamophobia has reached unprecedented heights in most parts of the West, and the burgeoning intolerance against anything deemed “infidel” in the Muslim world, which is also taking root in ethnically and religiously diverse Malaysia.
Khalid was in Malaysia for various faith-related talks last month, and Malay Mail Online managed to meet with the award-winning speaker, interviewing him on various problems plaguing the Islamic world.
In his own words:
Islam is Islam, just like any system, the individual can utilise (exploit) it in any capacity that they can. I think the problem today is we are not having any real interaction.
We have to look at people with (their) complexities. People are bigger than their race, than their ethnicity, than their social class, bigger than their faith. And when we try to put them in these boxes, and we paint it in homogeneity that doesn’t exist, all it does is feed into the hatred and bigotry.
When you have individuals who create rhetoric that tends to be nativist — if we don’t act a certain way, people are going to talk about what it is that’s ours — that’s when you start to see the validation of some of these atrocities that results in hate-based crime.
(Religious) texts can be empowering, but it can also be a dangerous thing. I come from a country where people use biblical evidence to justify the slave trade. I come from a country where the Constitution literally degrades black people.
Islam is a construct, has ideas of what’s continuity and change to it. So to be able to see where pre-modern notion and modernity might conflict also necessitates seeing where they fill in to each other in a way that’s quite valuable and quite fluid.
I can turn text texts into anything that I want to, and the manifestation of the interpretation is going to be an indication of anything but other than what is going on in that person who is rendering that interpretation. So people can read the Quran and turn it into a doctrine that supports the universality of human rights, or people can turn the Quran to justify things that are beyond problematic.
When you have the interjection of a reductionist approach to Islam, that limits it and doesn’t see the relationship between texts and context, it yields what can be a potentially limited capacity of understanding.
I don’t necessarily believe that government apparatuses alone are enough to (bring people together). But if you bring together the houses of worship, specific institutions like educational institutions and have a multi-pronged approach (and) to really understand that, there is a goal that is necessary to do this. I mean literally man, people all over the world are killing each other.
(On Islamic State’s appeal to educated, former liberal middle class Muslims) I think if you are to do an analysis on it, what you are identifying at a surface level, people who are not so religious are drawn towards this. So maybe the challenges aren’t that they are influenced by religion, if any, they actually need more religion to dissuade them away from this kind of stuff.
(On Islam’s position on homosexuality) I think when we talk about Shariah, the challenge in identifying it as a system of law is that it loses the nuances around ethical conduct. When people think of laws, they think about it as a system of do’s and don’ts... that’s not what Shariah is. It doesn’t function in an analogous way. Legalistic framework has to be complemented with ideas around compassion and mercy and love and understanding.
