Oxley: 'Devote more time to family, less time to foolery'

Mullah talks about raising a family in the modern age

SAN FRANCISCO (RWN) - Outside the window of the mosque, the traffic is stop-and-go. A cold front has come in off the Pacific and the bridges are shrouded in fog. The sound of two men laughing floats up from the street below.

Mullah Oxley stops his conversation, looks annoyed, and changes the subject.

"Those men down there, whoever they are, should stop laughing so much and get back to the business of making this a pure nation," he says. "In this day and age, we need to devote more time to family and less time to foolery. How else can we become pure of heart and soul?"

It is a battle that Oxley is fighting every day. As the mullah of the nation's religious police, the Black Robes, Oxley has to balance the call of the Qur'an with the circumstances of living in a modern world.

"I don't think Mohammed foresaw motor cars," Oxley said, "or television or cellular phones. When he commanded a man to be good and true to his family, I don't think he knew how hard that was going to be in the 21st Century."

Though he's the head of the Black Robes, Oxley is more moderate than his predecessor Derek Ali, who helped cleanse San Francisco of homosexuals and pressed the federal government to rid the entire nation of them. Oxley, though devout, preaches accommodation.

"It's not really accommodating to a lesser standard of Islam," he says. "It's about understanding how pure Islam fits into the modern world. I have a nephew," he gestures at a picture of a young boy on his desk, "and he loves to watch the television. If I say 'Little Nephew, you may not watch the television anymore, you must only study the Qur'an,' he not only will resent me for taking away the TV, but also for forcing him to study. The best approach is the slower, more comfortable approach."

At the heart of that approach, though, is encouraging Muslim men to spend less time with technology and friends and more time as leaders of their households.

"We know that a good wife should submit to her husband," Oxley says, "but we should also have a situation where the man shows good and humane manners towards an obedient wife, spending time with her, educating her, radiating the beauty of Islam through every pore, so that his wife and his entire family can soak it up and be better for it. You can't do that being on the computer all the time."


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