It was Ibn Arabi, the Islamic Sufi master and theologian, who once said: ‘the perfect man is a woman’. This is also typical of something my father would say. He was the first feminist I knew (as well as the first political activist) with a social democratic leaning to boot. He is one of my role models, and he gave me his sense of political activism and his taste for current events and debating ideas.
My mother is a Finnish Christian and my father a Syrian Muslim. This rarely posed a problem for them, and when it did, my parents sought a point of convergence. Love is a process, an alloy of compromise and negotiation. I am the product of this wise philosophy. Half Finnish, half Syrian, my identity is an intersection.
.... Moreover, at Mariam Mosque, we celebrate interfaith marriages because we acknowledge the reality that, being in Europe, there is a considerable probability that a Muslim woman could fall in love with a non-Muslim man. We respond to this by respecting Quranic legality, since you only need to study the sacred book lightly to discover that it doesn’t oppose such unions. As such, I have officiated more than 30 Islamic marriages, half of them between faithful Muslim women and faithful Christian men. We have couples coming from all over the world to get married in our mosque, since the majority of male imams around the world do not accept Muslim women to marry outside Islam. [The Huffington Post UK] Read more
