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“Prom Accommodation” Is Bad for American Muslims
Several weeks ago a school in Brooklyn was petitioned to move their prom to an earlier date. As reported by The Blaze, the petition had been organized several months before but faculty claim it had not been brought to their attention. The petition was in relation to the beginning of Ramadan. Muslim students at the school wanted to be able to participate in both prom and the beginning of the great Islamic fast.
Initially I was not sure why prom would have anything to do with Ramadan. I have participated in fast-breaking during Ramadan and nothing I observed seem to conflict with what happens at a prom. After the prayers are said almost everyone breaks the fast with dates and milk. Good dates, not bad dates. Then lots of delicious food is brought out and since it is obvious I am a Christian (in general I almost always wear a cross necklace) the merits of Christianity vs. Islam are passionately but civilly discussed. In other words, it is a delicious respite from the insanity of regressive western culture. And aside from skin color and clothing, it’s virtually indiscernible from a Baptist potluck. Theology is being discussed and food is being eaten. That’s Baptist. That’s an ecumenism I can get behind.
Now obviously if prom were during the day it would be more clear why those participating in Ramadan would not also be able to enjoy the festivities of prom. But proms take place at night after the daily observance is over. After some light digging I found that practice of Ramadan often is interpreted as involving avoidance of music. Particularly secular music because of course the Islamic liturgy involves singing.
This issue obviously has some complicated cultural and political issues. And these issues, while not unprecedented in US history, do not have easy or obvious correlations to other religious groups. One issue is the unnecessary entanglement of a public school with religion. This is undoubtedly the tack certain types of unbearable atheists will take. Of course they would have a legitimate point, but not much of one since the lunar dating of the beginning of Ramadan would mean this accommodation would not occur every single year. Also the accommodation should have almost nothing to do with the event itself outside of the date. This is at worst the tiniest sort of entanglement possible. Also accommodating Ramadan observance is clearly an aid to religious freedom and community enrichment rather than an endorsement or imposition upon others. The same unbearable “brights” that would likely take the first line would almost certainly try to fight along this one as well. There would likely be some conservative Christians and right wingers jumping on that bandwagon as well trying to fallaciously prove that this represents government endorsement of a religion.
Thankfully this did not blow up into a massive controversy. Which could be a sign that Trump will draw so much media energy that communities will be allowed to deal with some of these issues in relative anonymity. This is something to consider for all conservatives in positions of power or influence. I think most of us feel that we may be under more scrutiny right now but the regressive media is essentially like a badly led army. They keep committing the fallacy of a frontal assault against a fixed defensive position. This means that while General “Picket” CNN wastes itself on the bloody angle there will assuredly be some opportunities to break PC ranks and win some minor covert political victories for the next three and a half years.
But the simple fact that some Muslims wanted religious accommodation is almost assuredly a bad thing for Muslims. I can’t claim to have a Muslim perspective but if I were part of a religious minority community that believed deeply in things antithetical to the general values of a country like the US (morals like forbidding extramarital sex or teetotalism, which also ironically is identical to being a Baptist) I would be deeply concerned for the next generation. In fact this is not hard for me to imagine at all since my religious background is that of Conservative Baptists! Baptists generally try to participate in things like Prom but not without moral guidance. Older generations of Baptists would probably exclude their children from these sorts of events simply because of the dancing and the secular music. The idea of making prom conform to their principles would most likely be far from their minds. Obedience to their religious faith would be the primary motivation and a simple acceptance of the fact that not everyone thinks and feels the same way. And that’s okay. Society should not have to conform to me but neither should it try to conform me to it.
A cynical devout Muslim could view this attempt at accommodation as an attempt by the young liberal Muslims to engage in Halal without incurring Allah’s fullest wrath. Sort of like a Christian who won’t fool around with their girlfriend on Sundays. Everyone knows that the opportunities to be a bad Muslim are plentiful at an event like prom. Activities like drinking and sex. But from my perspective if this sort of thing becomes a trend the bigger problem could be that Muslims simply do not want to acclimate as genuine Americans. And this is really not good for anybody.
This has certainly become a huge problem in Europe and the UK. It has not been as bad here because of what America is and remains: a nation of laws, not last names. Where you came from has nothing to do with whether or not you can be a good American. If I were English I would be concerned about immigration for the basic reason that England is an English country. The issue of terrorism is really a completely separate security issue, that is of course deeply related to Islam. But the basic idea that America exists for whoever is willing to be American means that we have no conflict with Islam. Shariah Law has a conflict with American Law but that’s an issue for Muslim Americans to figure out.
But at the end of the day you cannot have your religious cake and eat it too as an American. Well actually you can! Unless your religious cake means that you want to make others eat it also. But America is supposed to be just as capitalist intellectually as it is fiscally and that means that Muslim Americans are welcome to try to convince others all day long that they are right and everything else is wrong. But I’m also free to point out that the Dome of the Rock has variant surahs on it which prove that the textual transmission of the Quran has some errors. And then we get to fight about that with our words and ideas like civilized people.
The upshot is that Catholics and Orthodox Christians never complained about Thanksgiving being during the Advent fast. They adapted as they were able according to conscience. And Jews simply created their own version of Christmas. That’s awesome. That’s virtuous civil freedom. Muslims will be better off if they follow the same line. It isn’t the end of the world if your kid can’t go to prom. Love of Allah’s laws should come before youthful partying. And it’s also not the end of the world if your child engages in Halal during Ramadan … well actually maybe it is, and if that’s the case maybe Allah and YHWH don’t have as much in common as some would have us believe. That’s ‘Merica baby! Ultimately your life is your own and you get to make real decisions with it everyday. Freedom isn’t easy, its good.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
That’s a good point. The contemporary American context has changed significantly since Vatican II. A fish fry is a wonderful time of fellowship but they can occur several Fridays in a row during Lent and feel remarkably similar to the Orthodox celebration of Pascha (except they don’t take place at midnight), which says to me that lent has broken down for many American RC.
@jamesofengland
Well either I’m just mistaken about the lent practices of my brothers or they hold to an idiosyncratic understanding. You have persuaded me.
In regards to ENF I’m close to having Chapter 1 done and I think I’ll post it on ricochet when I’m comfortable with it. If I do I will tag you and we can discuss it there.
Here is my HS:
faith.edu.ph
Neo-palimism is both profound and troubling. But your lack of familiarity with it reinforces my conclusion that it is quite small. Dr. David Bradshaw of U. Of Kentucky is someone I used to correspond with because I was considering doctoral work and he never understood any of my questions regarding palamite issues. He is a great defender of Palamas and his theology is generally comfortable with the…actually I’m getting sleepy. I think this has enough energy in it for a post of its own because it is a very strange and interesting subject. I’ll tag you when I post it.
Oh, no question that Lent is horribly damaged. I was arguing that substitution is an important part of fasting and that it took place even when Catholics took Lent seriously. The big formal changes took place in 1917 and 1966 but you can see how recently the folk changes have been in the continuing traditions of Pancake Day and Madi Gras; if at the start of Lent you consume all your eggs and dairy, there’s still some folk memory that there was a time when there was a point to doing so, rather than it merely being followed by the replacement of said eggs and dairy. The yucks about beavers being considered fish depend on Jesuits caring whether they were or not. Heck, in a fair amount of Catholic Eastern Europe they still celebrate Martinmas as the end of omnivorousness before Advent, because while Communism did them the disservice of destroying much of the Church it saved them from the corruption of the church that they would have partaken in if they’d been able to be openly Christian in the meantime. They thus have a more traditional understanding of the religious observances that they don’t treat religiously than Western agnostics.
If you see the value placed on eggs in Ethiopian restaurants (order a meal with various meat dishes and at least one egg and you will almost always find the egg in the center), you can see a culture in which the absence of egg during fasts is keenly felt, much more so than of meat. I don’t know why we don’t have as many prominent egg reverencing meals in Eastern as in Oriental Orthodoxy, but the dyed egg is still a big deal. The presence of so many stupid claims about paganism doesn’t mean that Easter eggs fail to preserve a clear element of the form of Christian worship they spring from, even if it does attest to the widespread forgetting of what that was.
I think I’m more pro-fish fry than you; I’m very much a half a loaf loving guy. The habit of doing things differently in Lent than at other times brings one to configure one’s life in a manner that sets a floor on how little one can contemplate God. The twice a week light fast is often supplemented by giving up something specific, chocolate or somesuch, which gives one a taste of the secular longing that traditional fasting provides and orients it in the same direction.
Nice!
Lossky has a fair amount of academic support, primarily heterodox, and I get the impression that there are Russians who pay attention, but I wasn’t aware of people who went beyond discussing his ideas to actually implementing a distinctive faith tradition. Still, my formal study was at a nominally Presbyterian school (St. Andrew’s, Scotland) and the Orthodox Church is large and diverse. I wouldn’t find it terribly persuasive evidence that a Catholic movemnent did not exist in force if a Catholic friend of mine said that he’d never seen much of it or met a member. I don’t think I’ve been to more than a couple of dozen churches in the US for even a single service, and most of those weren’t places that I really explored much; so long as they more or less stuck to the Liturgy, they could be radical followers of St. Herman who believed strongly in semi-naked conversation with bears for all I’d know. Admittedly, if said conversation took place on a Sunday morning or was mentioned in notices I’d might have had a “hang on, what?” moment, but I bet they’d have a fancy name for it; if the priest at a church that wasn’t my home church said that the Hermanite Ursinity Men’s Group was meeting outside after the service I probably wouldn’t have asked.
Similarly, I’ve been to plenty of services where a preacher said something in the sermon that I thought was clearly nuts. Some of the time that might not have been because I was hubristically mistaken myself. Any of those statements could have been a marker for influence from some divergent movement that sailed over my head. Also, I’ve listened to plenty of sermons that headed out into neo-platonic territory that might have been nuts, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell. I’m generally of the view that impassibility and related doctrines are the sorts of things that are so abstractly grounded that they allow one to make so diverse an array of claims based on them, generally with so little a level of consequence, that discussion of it tends to be a good opportunity for private prayer and reflection. I’m glad that we have serious thinkers to wrestle with this stuff, but unless there’s a meaningful takeaway it’s probably not worth having non-academics do so. If there is a meaningful takeaway, it’s probably a misuse of the doctrine.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with Baptists in which they’ve sworn that no Baptist believes [this thing that came out of the Southern Baptist Convention] and with Episcopaleans who deny that anyone with Archbishop Jefferts Schori’s beliefs exist. I wouldn’t feel comfortable asserting that there were not tens of millions of neo-Palamites out there. This is even more the case since there are two uses of St. Gregory Palamas that I am aware of; to theologically modernize the church and to resist cultural westernisms. I’m not really down with either of those efforts, to put it mildly, so if given opportunity to discover such a movement I’d probably head the other way.
I vaguely feel like I should apologize; even for me, that was an exceptionally verbose way of declaring ignorance.
It was exceptionally poorly worded. I feel like I may have outdone it in my last comment; it’s been a pretty sleepless week. I appreciate your charity.
There’s a few liturgies used. I guess, on checking, that the faux Catholic liturgies I’ve attended are less common than the St. Tikhon’s faux Anglican liturgy. I should emphasize that I’m not opposed to Western Rite services, it’s just that the value is that one gets sound theology with a different aesthetic, which is important if one connects better with that aesthetic. Quite a lot of Orthodoxy is like that; the differences between, for example, Russian, Serbian, Greek proper, and my own Antiochian Orthodoxy often seem to people like serious issues, like the Reformed/ Protestant divide rather than being like the differences Argentinian and St. Louis Catholicism, but are closer to the latter. More explicitly, I don’t mean “faux” in a derogatory sense, just that the liturgies are intended to provide as close an approximation of a theologically sound Anglican or Catholic service as one can get. I’m open to suggestions on a better way of describing them.
It’s wholly possible that at some point in the future I will find myself attending Western Rite services; it’s just that all things being equal, I’d rather have Chrysostom’s liturgy.