Research Proposal

European Judaism Volume 46, Number 1, Spring 2013: 115–121 Doi:10.3167/ej.2013.46.01.15 ISSN 0014–3006 (Print), ISSN 1752–2323 (Online)

yOUNG, GIFtED AND RELIGIOUS: whAt DO wE ExPECt FROM OUR tRADItION AND OUR SOCIEty?

Rukea M. Azougaye

Abstract:

This paper for the JCM Conference 2012 is in the first part an attempt to explain how it is to grow up and live as a mixed-raced, Muslim girl in Germany. It brings many challenges and difficulties with it but also a lot of fun, excitement and very life enriching lessons, to discover all those cultural and religious differences, developing a very own view and understanding towards certain religious traditions. It then continues to discuss the importance and meaning of Islam in my life, how living according to what I understood the Islamic tradition requires, gave me peace and happiness as well as complications and rejections. And finally some thoughts about the expectations I have towards Islamic communities and how we could all contribute to a better understanding and ways of living together as a community

When I was asked to do the speech for the Muslim part this year, I was really excited and happy to accept, but very quickly became very nervous as well. It is not only the fact that the team has considered me to do the speech (which is a great honour for me) but the question of what I would talk about. Since the subject is ‘Young, gifted and religious’, which led me to the conclusion that the team thinks I’m young and gifted, I started to worry that what I have to say may not come up to the expectations since all I can talk about is what I have experienced in my 22 years of living as a Muslim in Germany.

Let me just start with a little bit of background information about myself: I was born in Hamburg in 1989 (which makes me the youngest of four children) to my German mother and my Moroccan father. I grew up in a very multicultural area of Hamburg where the majority of people came from Turkish and Arab backgrounds. Growing up in a mixed household in Germany was both enriching and confusing. The fact that my father comes from Morocco and my mother from Angeln which is in North Germany, two people with two completely different cultures and mentalities, who found each other in

Rukea M. Azougaye was born and grew up in Germany and is currently studying for a BA in Abarahamic Religions at Heythrop College in London.

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the city of love (Paris) and managed to bring 3 languages (French, Arabic and German of course) into our house and daily life, has probably more of an experiment than of the idea of a marriage in harmony and understanding. However the two of them decided to live together with their differences and it may more or less work for them as both of them have their own status and can be sure to say they’re German or Moroccan. But the real confusion starts with us children growing up as mixed children in Germany, but still not really fully belonging there or anywhere else. So while people mostly in their late teenage years start to think about questions like identity and belonging children like me and my siblings have thought about it ever since we could consciously think. Like I said my parents both may know what their cultural background is and what it involves but they have never been very cultural or traditional with us in their upbringing. Although my parents made sure we got to know Morocco and visited the country every year which helped us to learn about the country, our family and improving our Arabic, my father did not really explain any of the Moroccan culture to us and neither did my mother with the German culture. All we got from the German culture was the visits to my German grandfather, Heinrich (may he rest in peace), every now and then, especially at Christmas and Easter, to celebrate with him, but back at home there was no superiority to either of the two cultures. The situation at home was already confusing enough but oddly, at the same time, made a lot of sense to me. The world outside home which was filled with even more cultures and traditions, including my friends, who all came from different cultural and religious backgrounds such as Turkey, Bangladesh, South Africa, Lebanon, Syria and many more, would not make it any easier for me to find my own way and place in this beautiful mess, and so I continued to inhale as much of everything as I could. Despite these differences, however, what we all had in common was religion and our faith in God. Therefore for me the Islamic tradition has always been without a doubt the only thing that was clear and made no differences between countries and cultures. Even though I did not necessarily understand everything my parents and Islamic teachers tried to teach me (which sometimes annoyed and frustrated me a lot), all in all I have always felt blessed and thankful that I could always refer to the Islamic tradition and call it my own whenever I was totally lost in all the cultural diversity around me.

Even though my parents did a great job in trying to raise us in the Islamic tradition, trying to make us understand ever since we were children, I still found myself coming to a point where I started to properly think about my faith and about what I want and expect from life (I think I was around 11,12,13 years old). For me there has never been any doubt that I am a Muslim and I have always felt happy and proud to call myself a Muslim but still had

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to decide for myself whether I wanted to be a practicing Muslim or just to continue to pray and read about the prophets because my parents told me to.

But as everything in life even that came with a price. Once I decided to live according to what I understood and found possible of living an Islamic life, including wearing the Hijab (generally known as the headscarf) all of which made me happy and made perfect sense in my head, I realised that the rest of the world did not necessarily make sense of my world. So being a “mixed raced Hijabi-Muslim girl in Germany” became more a social problem and a struggle of explaining and justifying myself than the life-enhancing experience I thought it would be. I did not understand why and what the problem could possibly be as I did not think it would threaten or provoke anyone, in fact it had never crossed my mind or my intentions. But apparently I became one of these mysterious Muslims (also known as immigrants) who do not want to integrate themselves into German society, who like to live in the so-called “Parallel Gesellschaft” (parallel society); and somehow everyone started to think that they could have an opinion about my life and felt the urge to share it with me, which was not always the best idea. Even though it has been a struggle sometimes, I would never have stopped living that life because I was convinced, and still am, that this is the right way for me, and my faith only grew the more I got rejected.

Having this faith and knowing that there is a God watching from above whom I try to please with the way I live my life and knowing that it is my right to live this life, gave me the strength to keep on going. I know there are a lot of people who think that religion is the most ridiculous thing and try to make it look as a human weakness, a sign of dependence, anxiety and insecurity to live their lives on their own, just listening and acting after their own intuitions, but I strongly disagree. I believe that there is much more to it than just the feeling of not being lonely and having something in this world to hold on to. I believe in the guidelines of my religion because they make a lot of sense to me – it brings peace into my life and the feeling of doing right by me and the people around me. Even though I respect the antipathy people feel towards religion I have never really understood what the problem is and why it is so bad to want to have a feeling of belonging and some sort of security in life. Everyone understands and agrees that people need love in their life and happiness in their life, and even if some people claim they don’t, the opposite is written all over their face, a face that is marked with pain and sadness, and no one can tell me that this is the way to live life. I also never understood why it is so bad to be weak at times and to admit that one needs something more than what the norms and the material world can provide you. We are made with all these emotions to feel and use them to succeed or to fail, to learn and to understand. We cannot be strong and brave all the time and the longing

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for love and security is something that comes with birth. We can see it with every child who needs their parents to love and guide them and teach them about life, and no one would ever think of seeing it as a mistake because it is only logical. But in this world today it seems that the older we get the less we have the right to feel these things and it is more and more seen as a mistake to look for guidance, which I find incredibly sad and leaves me wondering whether we have still have the right to call ourselves human beings anymore if the meaning of being a human is to act like a robot. Believing in something higher is as natural as the need to eat and drink and it has been an important issue ever since the world was created and it will always continue to have a big importance for people. Therefore, my faith for me is the most important and most valuable part of my life and I honestly don’t think that I could or would ever want to live without it.

Considering my own experiences and the fact that I have been occupied with religious issues since forever (as it seems to me), I don’t think that there is a big difference between the expectations young people have towards their religious traditions than older or more experienced people. We all seek knowledge and truth and a way to find answers and explanations for our need and to have another level of satisfaction and happiness. For someone who has just started to think about religion and a different meaning of life than one has experienced so far just shows that one has not been entirely satisfied with the life they have lived and are looking for a change. This is a situation that does not depend on age and can happen from the moment a person starts to consciously live their life onwards until death. Therefore I believe that my expectations on my tradition as a young person are not necessarily different from those of someone older. In the end we all try to understand what and who God is and what he tries to tell us with all his messages and how to live life according to those messages. But what I think is most important – and that is regardless of age or religious tradition – is the understanding that we as human beings have a relationship with God. What I mean by this is that God (in my opinion) is not just the All-Knowing, Almighty Being that only uses His potential when it comes to punishing us for our sins and is just waiting for us to die so he can send us to heaven or to hell. I know that sounds a bit harsh and I can’t help sounding sarcastic, but this view of God and his message annoys me beyond belief. If we keep looking at religion only from this perspective I would not be too happy to be a Muslim and would be far more worried and not enjoying life at all.

If we look at humanity, how diverse it is and how open and understanding we can be towards each other, with all our differences and problems, flaws and weaknesses, how can someone who claims to believe in an omnipotent God put him in a little box and reduce him to only being the judge. I recently

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watched a stand-up comedy show of Eddie Griffin and he talked for probably only five to six minutes about religion, how he agrees and disagrees with certain religious issues. He started to make jokes about Jesus walking on the water, saying that he probably must have had a lot of fun as a child not just playing in the water but also being able to walk on it, while his mom probably must have told him not to play in or walk on the water. I found it incredibly funny (he also made fun of Muslims as well) but also had my doubts whether I should find it funny or not. He continued his sketch saying that he knows that probably a lot of Christians think that he might go to hell because of this joke, but his answer to it was simply: “I’m made in my heavenly father’s image. I’ve got a sense of humour that man God got one…God probably up there cracking up right now” (which means he is probably having a lot of fun right now). I know it is not every one’s humour, but it was not only the jokes that stayed in my mind but the whole message of it. God is so much more than everything that we know and I am tired of people focusing on just one percent of what we know and can imagine about him. It is so important to understand that he literally created us in all our complexity and everything that we are, he MADE us, so how can we not fully recognise that and understand that we not only have a guide and a judge as a God but also a friend, a mother, a father, a teacher, a school and a home that gives you shelter and love and keeps you from loneliness. I am not saying that it always feels as idealistic as it sounds, and that one never feels lonely with God in their life is not true as well, but reminding oneself and being aware that there is more to God, religion and life than we might know helps us to deal with a lot of things, and gives hope that not everything is hopeless. It says in the Islamic tradition that there are always two angels on each of our shoulders writing down all our actions, everything that we do every day. The angel on the right side writes down the good things and the on the left side the bad things, and I remember when I was younger it kind of helped me dealing with the loneliness that I often felt. Just knowing that, even though I am alone in a room or anywhere else, I still never felt alone because there were always two angels with me. Of course as I got older it changed but it is a memory I always like to think of and in moments like them I realise how much little things can actually mean to someone.

What young people can contribute for the future of their religious tradition is a good question. Since young people are part of a community I’d rather ask what the community can contribute and how they can help as whole to make things work. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in Hamburg which is one of the major cities in Germany and has plenty of Islamic groups and mosques, but still I found it very hard to find a group or Islamic classes where I thought I really belonged. I have been to different classes and have had many teachers but there was always something missing, mostly explanations. So most of my

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teenage years I have been doing things that I have thought were right and felt right because all I knew was that it was seen to be Islamically correct. But why exactly I didn’t know, and I didn’t feel like I was ready to look things up myself and deal with the Islamic texts because I was afraid that I would get things wrong and preferred it to have someone explain things to me. And, by the time I found a great teacher who could explain and make me really understand, and of whom I was not afraid or ashamed to ask any question and in whom I could trust and know that she would not judge me, unfortunately the community were missing! However the saddest thing I noticed throughout all those years was when I constantly discovered how little I could trust the community I was in and how judgemental they always were. Like other faiths Muslims have many different groups within the tradition and I always found it very disappointing to see how little understanding and tolerance we bring towards each other about some ridiculous reasons such as someone praying a little bit different than the other, accompanied with the following verse as an argument and excuse to constantly nag about something:

“…and help one another in righteousness and piety – and do not help one another in sin and injustice and keep fearing Allah: Indeed Allah’s punishment is sever.” (Surah 5:2)

This beautiful verse has a lot of sense in it and I usually wouldn’t mind if someone corrects me in my behaviour if my actions really are not compatible to my faith or religious tradition, as long as it comes without judgement. I really don’t believe that anyone of us has the right to judge the people around us and we should try to put a little bit more trust in each other and focus on important issues such as making every Muslim feel welcome and accepted in the community.

Now my being and sitting here shows that I am a fan of interfaith dialogue and if I am completely honest I have felt more of a Ummah (Brotherhood) in the two JCM Conferences that I have attended than I have felt in any Islamic community and it both makes me happy and sad. I love interfaith dialogue. I think it’s great. But it just makes me realise, once more, that if we brought half as much respect, tolerance and understanding towards each other in our own religious tradition as we bring towards our non-Muslim brothers and sisters, I believe that we would be in a much better state and a lot happier in our own communities. Therefore, as much as I think that interfaith dialogue is important I believe that intrafaith dialogue is just as important. It is quite funny here at JCM in the only intrafaith session at the beginning of the week when we try to decide who leads the prayers and who makes the speech on Friday and all sorts of organisation for the Islamic group, how much disagreement within our own faith comes up. I’ve been told that in the other traditions it is the same case and I think that we get more disagreement in these two hours than in the

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whole week. As I said it is quite amusing to watch and experience this for two hours but really it is not amusing anymore when we step out to “reality” and see that things really aren’t working because of minor disagreements when we all have the same basics. But I guess this is the way things have to be and it is a long way to try to change things but all together I think that a lot more ease and joy has to come into our community and less intolerance and judgement towards each other. These are the only major things I can think of when it comes to expectations towards the community but I know that even that is a lot to ask, but as long as we keep trying we are much better off than now.

In conclusion I am a product of the times in which we live – from diverse family roots to a world were communities and society are changing all the time. Within this I have had to find the things that are important to me and make sense – this journey has come with many challenges, questions and sometimes anxieties but despite this I have hope that one day I will be able to find the community in which I can feel at home.

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