A good friend of mine recently posted about her disappointment during a Roundtable discussion in Canada. You can read her post here. I initially began posting a comment to her post, but then realized I had much more to say.

What follows is excerpts from her initial posting, with my responses below. Please do read her initial posting for a better understanding of what’s being discussed.

It almost appeared as though the Round-table discussion was a free-for-all opportunity for these people to a) show off how politically connected and informed they were, b) lament their personal grievances against their own community (i.e. “My community calls me an apostate.”) or c) viciously attack the agency’s representative and hold them responsible for all their personal grievances.

I think what we’re talking about here is a more complex problem than appears on its face. I’ll throw out three issues which I believe are plaguing the Muslim community in Canada and the US these days:

1) Generation Gap — You come from a small town in Toronto, your parents come from that village in Pakistan. There are going to be problems seeing eye to eye.

2) Old World Mentalities — Coming from that village your parents are accustomed to a certain mode of living. Bribing the police officer to get out of a speeding ticket is standard operating procedure out there. So is loud mouthing your opinion, be it on the streets, in the office, or at family parties. Remember: Their home town is not a place wrought with opportunities for civilized dialogue. The net effect is a drastically diminished demographic of dialogue-ready lobbyists. These people don’t artfully navigate the idiosyncratic pathways to political power, they scream.

3) Lack of Alternatives — Take a look around. The sad reality is there is an overwhelming shortage of people who know how to lobby and when/where to be heard. And as mentioned earlier, people who crowd the streets and start yelling stand a better chance of getting attention than those precious few with sound points to be heard.

So where does this leave us? And what should we do about it? In great part the real answer is nothing at all. Within a decade the generation of loudmouthed Baburs will have taken a seat. Their kids will have moved out, they will have retired from their jobs, and generally will be out of tune with political reality except in the very tangential sense.

The kids who move out will be moving out to bigger and better things insh’Allah. What we are witnessing is a rapid transformation of the Muslim community in North America, where Muslims are quickly advancing to positions of power in the feilds where that power holds the most sway: law and business.

This next generation of Muslims is not a generation with ties to the homeland, it is a generation with ties to the Ummah. It has not scrapped together half-baked rumors of a religion from people who thought they were sheiks but couldn’t even understand Arabic, it has sought religious knowledge from sheiks and alims who have studied devotedly the precepts of our faith. The next generation of Muslims is informed.

So does all this mean we should just sit tight until our next Golden Age swings by? Absolutely not. As Hafsa herself stated:

The Round-table experience made me realize just how important it is for the Muslim students across Canada and North America to raise their voices, to stop letting others speak for them.

And I think that just about sums it up nicely.

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