Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (20 page)

An obsession with a single truth as understood by the believer or the believer’s group.

A sense of chosenness tied to the demonizing or damnation of all others

who refuse to get behind this “truth.”

The willingness to destroy those who offer alternatives in a “holy war” where innocent victims are referred to as “collaterals.”

The conflation of ideals with one’s personal being: “Islam is a perfect religion, therefore I am beyond questioning”; “The American Dream is perfect, therefore trust me.”

While the Taliban and Al-Qaeda represented the worst of Muslim fundamentalism, in the larger scheme of things their reach was and remains rather limited. This is particularly true if one does not embrace the growing tendency of many states to utilize the new anti-terrorist orthodoxy as a way of dealing with all forms of internal dissent and resistance to foreign occupation, ranging from the Uighur Chinese, to the Tibetans and Chechens. Far more extensive in its actual – as opposed to perceived reach – is the fundamentalism of the Market. As David Loy argues, because we have failed to recognize Market Capitalism as a religion, let alone a fundamentalist one, we have failed to offer “what is most needed, a meaningful challenge to the aggressive proselytizing of market capitalism, which has already become the most successful religion of all time, winning more converts more quickly than any previous belief system in human history.”
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Harvey Cox has detailed the remarkable similarities between the description of God and the Market as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Here I want to briefly deal with the way we relate to the Market as God and to Market Capitalism as religion. Adherents of the Free Market see their lives driven to the worship of the One All-Powerful and Jealous God: Capital. Underpinned by its

theology – economics – it has numerous huge temples in the form of shopping malls to which people are increasingly being drawn by deeply unfilled inner needs, for which the temple, church, or mosque are now perceived as inadequate. (“I shop to feel good”; “I go to the mall to hang out”). The connectedness with both God and community provided by the temple has now been supplanted by the highly individualized and anonymous encounters between cashier and consumer. These temples of consumerism often display a determination to drive out all the smaller little corner churches propounding insignificant little heresies such as “the humanness of chatting to your own friendly butcher.” The major symbol of this religion, the “Golden Arches” of McDonalds, has driven out that other symbol of a now old-fashioned religion, the crucifix of Christianity, as the most widely recognized symbol in the world. The arches are telling the crucifix “The Lord, your God is One; you shall have none others in my presence.”

Many who have remained nominal religionists find their lives rotating around the worship of Capital and like suicide bombers drive themselves to death as sacrificial lambs (or martyrs) at the altar of “success” in its service. “Shop till you drop” is a basic creed of faith. It is difficult to leave one’s home or switch on one’s TV without being confronted by its missionaries or having a pamphlet thrust in one’s hand. (“Convert Now Or You Will Lose Out!” “Buy Now – The Sale Ends Today!”) So successful have these missionary activities been that no one seems to be annoyed by their intrusion, unlike the response given to missionaries such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The religion of the Market also has an eschatology, even a theory of the “End of History”; paradise awaits those who believe and hell those who reject or who fail – or have failure written in their destiny. (“The unemployed are just lazy”; “The poor shall always be with us.”) Images of the ideal of “the glorious lounge,” “the perfect toilet for you,” “the BMW accompanied by your very own sex-bomb” correspond to images of paradise presented by other religions that sometimes have their own sex-bombs, houris thrown in as an added incentive for martyrdom. While very few can ever hope to possess the “houri” accompanying the picture of the BMW, hope springs eternal.

The struggle against countries that choose an independent economic path is unashamedly described as a “crusade” with collateral damage. (“There are no innocent victims in our crusade against Cuba. Their children dying under our sanctions are either the offspring of infidels so who cares. We are doing it for the greater good.”) Damnation awaits those who do not share the beliefs of this religion’s adherents. Belief is important; for believers will always fall short as practitioners. The vast majority of believers in the Market are destined to be failures simply because in the market economy success can only come to a minority. Its paradise, after all, is founded on an earth that has limited resources. This fundamentalism of the Market seeks to convert all other cultures in its image, utilizing them for consolidating the system. In the aftermath of

September 11, several spokespersons for the U.S.A., including Colin Powell, have linked “anti-terrorism” to the adoption of “free trade” policies as the dual requirements of allies in the “you’re either with us or against us” doctrine of the Bush administration. The Market is thus being openly presented as the only way with the assertion that outside its pale there is no salvation for the world, only the hell-fire of destruction, or the limbo of “primitivism.”

Beyond the public drama of religious fundamentalism and more covert forms of religiously justified political violence are realities that impact on a much larger number of people and on the only home of humankind, the earth. The obsession with Muslim fundamentalism may, in fact, serve to detract from this (regardless of whether there is a causal relationship between Muslim fundamentalism and these realities).
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There may indeed be a relationship between the war on terrorism and the decision of the Bush administration to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil-drilling exploration. The United Nations Development Program’s statistics indicate that in 1960 the countries of the North were about twenty times richer than those of the South. By 1990 Northern countries had become fifty times richer. The richest twenty percent of the world’s population now have an income about 150 times than that of the poorest twenty percent, a gap that has continued to grow. According to the UN Development Report for 1996, the world’s 358 billionaires are wealthier than the combined annual income of countries with forty-five percent of the world’s people. As a result, a quarter million children die of malnutrition or infection every week, while hundreds of millions more survive in a limbo of hunger and deteriorating health. For the
mustad‘afun fil’ard
bin Laden is a distant figure or, sadly, a hope, as some demonstrators at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg seemed to think with their T-shirts displaying his smiling face. For those 2.8 billion who live on less than U.S.$2 a day and who confront death by starvation or half an existence under foreign occupation the realities cited above may well be the terrorism of our age. When Muslim liberals suggested any relationship between September 11 and political grievances, it was confined to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. One searches in vain for any critique on the problems of domestic wealth, domestic consumption, domestic corporate greed, domestic homelessness, and domestic racism – all issues that drive foreign policy considerations. It’s as if the only tragedy was one of exclusion from the table of the new empire, leading to sadly misguided yearnings of “if only our lobby could be as powerful as the Jewish lobby.” A progressive rereading of our theological heritage does not take its point of departure from the concerns of dominant and dominating classes nor from yearnings to join “the club” but “in a perception of the real situation of the poor, and, with new eyes, bestowed by this experience, it rereads the foundational texts of the faith.”
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The location of the progressive Muslims among the marginalized of the world is the
Sunnah
(precedent) of the all the Prophets of God and the choice that God himself exercises (Q. 7:136–7; 34:31–33).
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CC OO NN CC LL UU SS II OO NN

There is nothing in this clash of fundamentalisms that is intrinsically Islamic, in the same way that there is nothing intrinsically Christian about the religion of the Market or of the ideology of apartheid. That the Muslims responsible for this attack may have been inspired by Islam is plausible; that they used Islam as justification for their deeds is apparent, for the Qur’an is as open to diverse readings as any other text. There is thus some responsibility on the part of Muslim thinkers to expose and oppose the theological and textual basis of their arguments. To confine oneself to combat with those tendencies, however, is inadequate from both a Southern perspective as well as an Islamic one. To do so also risks being co-opted in an uncritical peace discourse that has a name:
Pax Americana
; peace on the terms of the United States and with an ideology incompatible with social, economic, political, and environmental justice.

A progressive commitment to destabilizing the current world order – and destabilization is not to be conflated with political violence, as numerous activists in the global justice movement are increasingly demonstrating – is not to be undertaken out of blind hatred for the advocates of the religion of the Market. Rather, unlike the Market fundamentalists, we progressive Muslims actually believe that an alternative vision of the world and being in it is possible. Humankind, as the Progressive Muslim Network Declaration affirms, are not only consumers or the objects of greed; we are in a state of returning to God. Islam is, indeed, a religion of peace, but not exclusively that. It also calls upon people to destabilize the peace when it hides the demons of injustice. In addition to confronting the fundamentalism of the Market and the havoc that it has bought forth, we also have to deal with the problem of Muslim brokenness, fragile egos, and delusions of grandeur involving our power and control over a world governed by the
Shari‘ah
. The problem with Muslim fundamentalism is that it is as totalitarian and exclusive as the order that it seeks to displace. It seeks to create an order wherein its proponents are the sole spokespersons for a rather vengeful, patriarchal, and chauvinistic God – a God that incidentally resembles that of George W. Bush and his fellow travelers in the religious right wing. The Taliban represent the logical consequence of a literalist and misogynistic reading of our earlier Islamic heritage. Their reading is not so much an aberration of Islam as a carrying out to an illogical conclusion previous extremist stands of interpretation. They have, for example, always insisted that women will also have access to medical treatment if the government can afford it. How different is this from the Wahhabi Saudi regime, where gender segregation is enforced because they have the financial resources to do so. When we see Osama sitting cross-legged surrounded by hundreds of books on Islamic jurisprudence and theology, we are seeing one of the strands in the Islamic. Arguing that the Taliban and the Wahhabis do not “really” represent Islam is unhelpful, for we fall into the trap of setting ourselves up as the sole authentic

spokespersons – the same weapon that is being used against liberal and progressive Muslims. We can insist on asking, along with ‘Ali Shari‘ati, “Whose Islam? Whose lives and interest are being advanced by our understanding and interpretation of Islam?”

Which Islam is it that the Shah refers to? Is it the Islam of imperialism? An Islam which is made for the next world and says nothing about this world. The imperialist brand of Islam dictates that Islamic nations be their colonies and allows them to loot the wealth, resources and productivity of Muslim lands.
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People concerned about other people and aware that the earth is our only home and has finite resources need to find each other and collectively work for socioeconomic alternatives before these fanatics – led by corporate America under the McDonalds Golden Arches and Bush as its spokesperson or Al-Qaeda under the crescent with Osama bin Ladin as its spokesperson – destroy all of us.

endnotes

1. ‘Ali Shari‘ati, cited in E. Abrahimian, “‘Ali Shari‘ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution,”
   

   MERIP Reports
   , January 1982, 14–15.
   

2. Paul Salem, “A Critique of Western Conflict Resolution from a Non-Western Perspective,”
   

   Negotiation Journal
   , 9(4), 1993, 364.
   

3. Haideh Moghissi,
   Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis
   (London: Zed, 1999), 126.
   

4. Terry Eagleton,
   The Illusions of Postmodernism
   (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 103.
   

5. For a contemporary discussion on the philosophical bases of liberalism and commu- nitarianism in these debates see Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift,
   Liberals and Communitarians
   (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
   

6. While I use the term “North” (juxtaposed against the “South) to refer to the economically developed countries, I believe that one needs to be careful not to view these societies as homogeneous. There are significant variations of class, race, and gender and a lack of awareness of these can obscure the value of the progressive tendencies within these societies.
   

7. Sorush Irfani,
   Revolutionary Islam in Iran – Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship?
   

   (London: Zed, 1983).
   

8. Other than Iran, another area where the term gained relatively wide coverage as a reflection of trends within Islam was among a section of the Islamists in South Africa during the struggle against apartheid in the 1980s, when both the Muslim Youth Movement and the Call of Islam used it to characterize their understanding of an Islam opposed to racism, sexism, and the degradation of the environment. See Esack,
   Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism
   (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997).
   

9. Irfani,
   Revolutionary Islam in Iran
   , 33.
   

10. From the Progressive Muslim Network website: http://www.progressive
    muslims.com/ index2.html.
    

11. Rebecca S. Chopp,
    The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies
    (New York: Orbis, 1989), 38.
    

12. From the Progressive Muslim Network website: http://www.progressive
    muslims.com/ index2.html.
    

13. Ibid.
    

14. The rejoicing was quite widespread in the Muslim world and was roundly condemned by liberal Muslim commentators. The limited base of their perspectives was however evident from the fact that Muslim responses were treated in isolation, as if only these responses required a moralistic condemnation. There was no reference in their comments to the broader rejoicing that occurred in other parts of the South, such as Brazil and China. When there was any suggestion that the rejoicing might have some explanation, although not justification, such explanations were confined to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. They displayed no awareness of the way foreign policy is driven by domestic imperatives related to consumerism, corporate interest, and the commodification of people.
    

15. Writing in
    The Independent
    , Yasmine Alibhai-Brown argued that “Enlightened Muslims have an almost impossible role, but it is one which must be taken up. We must continue to rebut the foolish claims of fundamentalist liberals and remind them of the distressed, atomized and utterly lonely society which they have created through aggressive individualism, where the habits of obligation and duty have been obliterated. But whatever our feelings about this and the failures of the West in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, or colonialism and the unbearable U.S. hypocrisy and hubris, we must act to stop the rot within.” See Alibhai-Brown, “Don’t Tell Me How I Should Worship,”
    The Independent
    (London), October 15, 2001.
    

16. Mona Eltahtawy,
    Washington Post
    , January 3, 2002, 17.
    

17. Richard Neville, “Beyond Good and Evil,” April 15, 2002, 3. The article can be accessed at http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/04/15/1018333477336.html.
    

18. Scholarly estimates suggest U.S. bombs killed at least 3767 civilians by the middle of December 2001. The price in blood was paid by ordinary Afghans who had nothing to do with the atrocities, did not elect the Taliban who ruled over them, and had no say in the decision to offer hospitality to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. See Seumas Milne, “The Innocent Dead in a Coward’s War”
    The Guardian
    , December 20, 2001, p. 7. Marc Herold, an economics professor from the University of New Hampshire, who conducted the research that led to this figure told ABC Radio that “a much more realistic” estimate of civilian deaths is five thousand in the period October 7 to December 10, 2001. See Marc Herold, “Counting the Dead – Attempts to Hide the Number of Afghan Civilians Killed by
    

    U.S. Bombs Are an Affront to Justice,”
    The Guardian
    , August 8, 2002.
    

19. The reality, as John Whitbeck has argued, “is that most acts to which the word ‘terrorism’ is applied are tactics of the weak, usually (although not always) against the strong.” Whitbeck argues that “such acts are not a tactic of choice but of last resort . . . the Palestinians would certainly prefer to be able to fight for their freedom from a never- ending occupation by ‘respectable’ means, using F-16’s, Apache attack helicopters and laser-guided missiles such as those the United States provides to Israel. If the United States provided such weapons to Palestine as well, the problem of suicide bombers would be solved. Until it does, or at least until the Palestinians can see some genuine and credible hope for a decent future, no one should be surprised or shocked that Palestinians use the ‘delivery systems’ available to them – their own bodies. In this regard, it is worth noting that the poor, the weak and the oppressed rarely complain about ‘terrorism.’ The rich, the strong and the oppressors constantly do. While most of mankind has more reason to fear the high-technology violence of the strong than the low-technology violence of the weak, the fundamental mind-trick employed by the abusers of the epithet ‘terrorism’ (no doubt, in some cases, unconsciously) is essentially this: The low-technology violence of the weak is such an abomination that there are no limits on the high-technology violence of the strong which can be deployed against it.” See John Whitbeck, “‘Terrorism’: The Word Itself Is Dangerous”,
    Al-Ahram Weekly Online
    , 564, 2001,
    www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/564/ op10.htm
    

20. Khaled Abou El-Fadl was one of the few Muslim liberal commentators who attempted to place “terrorism” within some social framework. He wrote “The extreme political violence we call terrorism is not a simple aberration unrelated to the political dynamics of a society. Generally, terrorism is the quintessential crime of those who feel powerless seeking to
    

    undermine the perceived power of a targeted group. Like many crimes of power, terrorism is also a hate crime, for it relies on a polarized rhetoric of belligerence toward a particular group that is demonized to the point of being denied any moral worth. To recruit and communicate effectively, this rhetoric of belligerence needs to tap into and exploit an already radicalized discourse with the expectation of resonating with the social and political frustrations of a people. If acts of terrorism find little resonance within a society, such acts and their ideological defenders are marginalized. But if these acts do find a degree of resonance, terrorism becomes incrementally more acute and severe, and its ideological justifications become progressively more radical.” See Abou El Fadl, “Islam and the Theology of Power,”
    Middle East Report
    , 221, 2001, p. 2.
    

21. Cf. M.A. Khan, “Memo to Muslims,” http://www.ijtihad.org/memo.html.
    

22. “Islam” literally means “submission,” i.e., submission to the will of God. While the
    root
    of the word is
    s-l-m
    , which is the same root as
    salam
    (peace), the structure of Arabic words allows a large variety of words to come from the same root. It is misleading – or ignorance
    

    – to suggest that identical roots lead to identical meanings. If violence to the text were real then some of these commentators really got away with murder; in a widely circulated “Memo to Muslims,” Muqtedar Khan offered numerous Qur’anic references in support of his arguments, very few of them having any relation to the point that he makes. For example, he writes, “While encouraging Muslims to struggle against injustice (Al Quran 4:135) He (God) also encourages Muslims to forgive Jews and Christians if they have committed injustices against us (Al Quran 2:109, 3:159, 5:85).” A casual perusal of these verses indicates that none bears a remote resemblance to his assertion about God encouraging Muslims to “forgive Jews and Christians.” Liberal Muslims were not the only ones culpable of this violence towards the text. Hamza Yusuf, a prominent traditional scholar, wrote, “We have seen images since of American flags burning to further arouse the wrath of a nation filled with grief, confusion and anger. Again, Islam prohibits the burning of flags according to the explicit verse, Do not curse [the idols] of those who call on other than Allah, thus causing them to curse Allah out of animosity [toward you] and without knowledge.” In Yusuf’s apologetic the U.S. flag becomes an idol worthy of respect in one neat stroke and the verse is presented as “explicit.” Hamza Yusuf, “A Time for Introspection,” http://www.islamfortoday.com/hamza01.htm.
    

23. Ziauddin Sardar,
    The Observer
    , September 23, 2001.
    

24. In 1997 senior Taliban figures were entertained at George Bush (Sr)’s home in Texas, where they enjoyed halal barbeque with the Vice-President of the oil giant Unocal. Unocal produced billions of barrels of oil from Turkmenistan, and wanted to pump it across landlocked Afghanistan, through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. The talks broke down in 1998 but resumed immediately after the current administration took office. It is worth noting that both Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan leader, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to Kabul, are “former” consultants to Unocal.
    

25. Farid Esack,
    Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism
    (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997).
    

26. Rebecca Chopp,
    The Praxis of Suffering
    , 34.
    

27. In a challenging essay, Paul Salem challenges conventional notions of Western approaches to conflict resolution and points out that its “theorists and practitioners operate within a macro-political context that they may overlook, but which colors their attitudes and values. This seems remarkably striking from an outsider’s point of view and is largely related to the West’s dominant position in the world. All successful ‘empires’ develop an inherent interest in peace. The ideology of peace reinforces a status quo that is favorable to the dominant power. The Romans, for example, preached a
    Pax Romana
    , the British favored a
    Pax Britannica
    , and the Americans today pursue – consciously or not – a
    Pax Americana
    . Conflict and bellicosity is useful – indeed essential – in building empires, but an ideology of peace and conflict resolution is clearly more appropriate for its maintenance.” See Paul Salem, “A Critique of Western Conflict Resolution,” 362–4.
    

28. For distinctions between the “North” and the “South” in terms of unequal distribution of wealth, resources, and consumption, see note 6 in this essay.
    

29. This was the title of an op-ed piece that I wrote for the
    Financial Mail
    (Johannesburg), September 21, 2001.
    

30. The similarities between the current rhetoric of Muslim and Christian fundamentalism are also evident from the following statement made by (then Senator) John Ashcroft upon receiving an honorary degree from Bob Jones University in 1999: “Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being Godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.” Regrettably, this is the tendency that the mainstream American Muslim organizations, ranging from the Islamic Society of North America to the Washington, DC based International Institute for Islamic Thought, embraced prior to the Presidential elections. While there is now great regret about this, the reasons for this shift are dubious, given the way the Bush administration has embraced Israeli policies in Palestine.
    

31. Tariq Ali,
    Clash of Fundamentalisms
    (London: Verso, 2002).
    

32. Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,”
    The Guardian
    , September 29, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html.
    

33. Some U.S.-based scholars of Islamic law attempted to indict bin Laden under the laws of the
    Shari‘ah
    in addition to any indictments that he may face under international law. (Alan Cooper, “Scholars Plan to Show How Attacks Violated Islamic Law,”
    Washington Post
    , January 20, 2002, A 15.) Holding individual alleged criminals against humanity accountable for atrocities is obviously an important measure of our commitment to human rights. While an insistence that this also be uniformly applied to all such alleged criminals, whether they are named Henry Kissinger or Osama bin Laden, is even more important, my criticism is about the reduction of problems and solutions to “evil” or “good” individuals.
    

34. Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice.”
    

35. David Loy, “Religion of the Market,” http://www.just-international.org/comm-30.htm.
    

36. Harvey Cox, “The Market as God,” www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm.
    

37. David Loy, “Religion of the Market.”
    

38. Many scholars have argued that there is a direct relationship between the rise of religious extremism and the socio-political conditions of political repression and poverty. Dario Fo, the Italian playwright and satirist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997, said rather bluntly in a widely circulated email, “The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty – so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.” While this may well be the case it offers a rather inadequate explanation of why this expression of righteous rage is much more characteristic of Muslim countries than others. Cited in Steven Erlanger, “In Europe, Some Say the Attacks Stemmed from American Failings,”
    The Guardian
    , September 22, 2001.