In Their Own Words: Misunderstandings about Islam

This is a selection of an interview I took in Osh. This man runs a religious school for women. He and the other founders of the school spent a lot of time searching through different religions after the fall of the Soviet Union. They finally decided that Islam was correct, but they felt that very few people knew anything about Islam, so the opened the school. Here, he explains why people in and out of Islam misunderstand the religion.

The thing is that people in the world today don’t understand Islam correctly. There area a lot of bad representatives of what Islam is and what it is like. Islam isn’t there to do bad things to people. Besides that, the majority of people, when they hear the word Islam, only understand a few limited things, like saying prayers, giving charity, going on the hajj. We tell people that that is not Islam, that those are just duties given to man.

So what are some examples of misunderstandings about Islam?

Terrorists, for example. People connect that with Islam. Or places where there are attacks, people connect that with Islam. Or take our society. We don’t know how to build family relationships. The exploitation of women, for example, forcing her to just do housework. People assign that sort of thing to religion, say it’s part of Islam. That’s not the way it is in Islam. We want to explain that. Also, when it comes to the question of who is supposed to run the family, a lot of people say, of course, it’s the man. That’s not what is says in our religion. It says that Shari’a is the head of the family: that husbands have their own duties and so do wives. We take a look at what Shari’a says about who ought to go grocery shopping, who out to do the washing, make the food. Everyone says that that’s for women to do. That is absolutely not what it says in Islam. Just the opposite: it says that a man is supposed to go buy groceries, that he ought to carry the heavy things, that he ought to help with the washing, with the cooking.

Why do those misunderstandings exist?

It just so happens that the majority of mullahs and imams up to our current day are uneducated. When you say they’re uneducated, it really hurts them. They know how to read the Qur’an, they can open the book and read it, but they don’t understand the meaning of what they are reading, they don’t grasp it. They didn’t learn how to do that—they weren’t taught religion on that level. During the Soviet Union, the only religious school was in Bukhara (Uzbekistan), and there they taught people how to read the Qur’an and recite prayers. They’re wrote the Qur’an into people’s brains like with a parrot or a tape recorder. If you tell them to read they open the book and read, but they didn’t teach them to understand the meaning, the point of what they read. They’re still ignorant in that sense. If you take doctors for example, you can divide them up according to specialty: surgeons, eye doctors, therapists. The same thing happens in Islam. When they teach them to become imams, they teach them how to read the Qur’an correctly, how to recite a prayer, how to answer simple questions that people often have. It’s like preparing teachers for elementary school. Besides that there aren’t any specialists equivalent to middle school, high school, or higher education.