Zai had written: "I hope I am not one of those desafinado..."
Zai:
Salaam 'alaikum.
No, I don't consider you to be among the "desafinado" Muslims (and never have). To me, the desafinado are the "progressives" except that, to me, their rhetoric isn't "progressive," but confused. After a few years away from the US, living in a Muslim community in SE Asia, and seeing the American Muslim community from afar, I've come to the conclusion that the desafinados:
* are poorly educated in Islam
* lack the educational resources (facilities, teachers, books, you name it)
* overly rely upon the Qur'an (a bad habit from their Christian upbringing) and barely rely upon the Sunnah
* don't have the community support or history to help guide them (it takes a village, ya know ;) )
* are guided by certain elements of Western culture (or worse, their nafs) in interpreting Islam
And this problem isn't limited to Islam. Just this evening, I came across the following quotation by Cardinal Ratzinger, one of the current frontrunners to become Pope: "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." I'm not sure Ratzinger's "dictatorship of relativism" is relevant here, but I think the latter part of the sentence ("...which has as its highest goal...") is completely relevant. (I've been impressed by Ratzinger in the past few days, but I'm not sure I want him to become Pope - Islamic-Catholic relations might go backwards if he does.)
Anyway, I digress... :)
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