I hesitated to ask this question, given the acute sensitivities engendered by current events. But since the fortnightly topic challenge is religion and I would like to include a British Muslim character in my future world, I decided to go ahead.
The setting is London 50-70 years in the future.
For background, this question refers to the same world as in this question, in which a repressive regime has forced the regression of technology to mid-twentieth century levels. The takeover and regression occurred some forty years before the time in which the story is set. The top people in this regime are actually alien magic-users inhabiting human bodies but, since they are few in number and magic is fairly weak, that makes little difference to ordinary people's lives. In fact many people still refuse to believe that they are anything other than human frauds. The alien rulers are probably no worse than most human rulers throughout history. Most people accept the situation.
Among those who don't are quite a few religious people. I think I can explore the very different ways in which various types of Christians would respond to the "compatibility issues" caused by probable existence of - and rule by - magic-users and aliens from my own background knowledge. Ditto for the somewhat simpler philosophical situation of atheists. I am much more in the dark about how Muslims would respond to this scenario.
The Muslim character I am concentrating on is a female, mid-20's, lower middle-class, unmarried member of the Resistance with a mostly South Asian ancestry. She wears a headscarf but not a veil and works outside the home. Her beliefs are not shared by all British Muslims of her time, but she is meant to arise from a significant current of opinion. In the Resistance she is part of a fractious but functioning coalition of humans of many different religious and non-religious beliefs.
Would she be willing to believe in magic or aliens at all? or would she be one of those who think it is a bunch of humans cooking up a technological fraud to keep themselves in power? What would she take from the Koran about the possibility of magic and/or aliens? They clearly are not either demons or angels, but morally mixed creatures like us. If she does accept their genuineness, does she see their rule as something that needs to be opposed on the grounds that magic is evil, or rule by non-humans is evil, or would her resistance be purely political? It is relevant to state that the regime permits religions to be practised so long as they stay in line. Decades ago risings against the aliens in Muslim countries were savagely put down, but Islam is not seriously persecuted in Britain at the time of the story.
What words would she use to describe her own beliefs as a member of the resistance? Jihad seems an obvious one, but are there other concepts from Muslim thought that she would apply to this situation? What suras, ayahs, and hadiths would she quote?
The aliens generally exhibit mild disdain for all Earthly religions and political theories, although a few express a rather condescending interest. Would she think it obligatory to make the probably futile effort to convert any she meets?
Moving away from this one character, what other types of Muslim response would there be? What religious justifications might those Muslims who choose to collaborate with the aliens put forward? Or those who resist, but not in cooperation with the officially pluralistic general resistance movement in Britain?
