“you are not qualified to talk about islam”

that phrase came from farish noor in his latest post “you are not qualified to talk about islam: how to respond to attempts to close the public domain”.

“You are not qualified to talk about Islam”. How many times have I heard and read that same line, again and again? And more often than not, the same sentence is uttered or written by precisely the sort of self-trained autodidact whose own knowledge of Islam came from whatever he or she read on the internet or some cassette he bought at the local market.

farish brought this up in the light of the call to ban sisters in islam (SIS) but i can relate very well to the above paragraph because when i used to blog touching on islam, i had many commenters coming in to say that to me – “you are not qualified to talk about islam”. said? the word to use should be rather ‘to admonish’.

yes each time i brought up some issues that touch on islam, some commenters, of course mostly muslim, will attacked me with this childish mantra “you are not qualified to talk about islam, so please shut up”. at that time, i thought to myself … “what’s wrong with these people? what stupid logic is that!!”… and farish prove me right it is stupid with some of his analogies. then i also thought these people were so narrow-minded… and true enough, farish mentioned that too:

It has become rather commonplace for conservative Muslims – as well as conservative Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews – to claim monopoly over the discourse of Islam and to try their best to close off the space of public discourse on all matters religious for the sake of protecting the integrity and sanctity of that discourse. Or so we are told. But one can also argue that such attempts at restricting the participation and contribution of others in a discursive arena that is hotly contested is little more than a conventional and predictable attempt at censorship and the narrowing of the Muslim mind.

thanks to farish for this post – i can use them as my argument when i have people telling me “not to speak about islam” when i’m not a muslim or when i’m not ‘authority’! go and read his post in full.

NOTE: penangites, don’t forget tonight’s 1blackmalaysia kopi-o session at old town white coffee, bayan baru is on.