Oh, But Had We Known Then

In a book review on a memoir by one Pam Grier, I caught this bit:-

Grier, at 61, has been through a few guys herself, and the juiciest parts of her book involve them. She gets some topicality out of her relationship with a U.C.L.A. basketball player named Lew Alcindor, better known now as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: their romance, she says, went bad when he went Muslim (*) and began doing things like sending her from the room when his male Muslim friends came over.

That was many years ago.

Had we know what it meant for women when their American boy friends became Muslim we would have saved ourtselves a lot of trouble.


(*)

For example:

My interest in Islam started when I was a freshman at UCLA and I got the opportunity to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it really made me understand that there was a lot more to monotheism than what I knew being raised as a Roman Catholic. I found in Islam that I certainly had a limited view of what monotheism was about, and it made me curious enough to read the Koran and see that it probably was something that I needed to investigate more completely. I was won over by the arguments. The fact that the Roman Catholic Church was greatly invested in the slave trade did not help me want to remain Catholic, and because of that, I changed my affiliation.

I embraced Islam basically after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which gave me a different perspective on monotheism and the history of religions.

I think Islam has given me a moral foundation. It gave me a way of trying to balance your own personal ambitions, what you want and need in the world, with some type of morality and a way of viewing what life is about. It certainly doesn't help, at this point now, that there are so many problems with the Islamic world. But I think those have to do with politics, and the Islamic world's reaction to colonialism and being exploited, a lot more than really is based on religious belief. Because all of the religions that come from Abraham basically have the same message. Not very much difference if you can study it objectively, but that is hard to do in this day and age when there is so much politics and nationalism and resentment for things that have gone on centuries ago. It's kind of hard to overcome.