Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (23 page)

of Islam as a civilization, but we have said precious little about what exactly a civilization is and how it furthers our understanding of Islam to identify it as a civilization. This is precisely where we are headed, but there is one more stop on the way before we reach our final destination . . .

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We have been searching for a definition of Islam, and many of you have no doubt been somewhat uneasy about the fact that we have not yet considered any of the common, standard definitions of Islam even though these proliferate in popular venues among both Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide. These standard definitions, you might even assert, are rather straightforward and fairly easy to understand. Why not use them? Why, they may even help us supply the substance for the otherwise hollow concept of religion and steer clear of the problematic concepts of culture and civilization!

Let us take this point seriously and consider these common definitions, encountered in descriptions of Islam provided by scholars and non-scholarly observers and believers alike. The ubiquitous “five pillars” formula is the obvious example, and we will limit our discussion to this definition. According to this formulaic approach, Islam can be defined as honoring the foundational principle of
shahada
(standing witness to the truth of the claims that there is only one God and that Muhammad is His messenger) and performing the four foundational ritualistic acts of
salat
(daily prayer),
zakat
(charity),
sawm
(fasting during Ramadan), and
hajj
(pilgrimage to sites in and around Mecca during a set time period in the Islamic calendar). Does this formula work?

Contrary to the popular view that it works, I would like to argue that it largely fails. In fact, the only part of this formula that stands up to close scrutiny is the
shahada
: it would be fair to say that anyone who does not subscribe to it (of course, after interpreting it in his or her own fashion) cannot be considered a Muslim. But the same cannot be said for the other four pillars, since the ways in which these four performative acts factor into the definition of Islam have always been hotly contested theologically, legally, and culturally. Let me cut to the chase here and announce the main point directly and clearly: the four ritualistic pillars do not form a good and accurate measure of being a Muslim, historically, sociologically, or theologically. To put it in reverse, there have been and continue to be millions of people who wholeheartedly adhere to the
shahada
but who do
not
perform these four particular ritualistic acts in the manner prescribed in legalistic manuals. Not only that: a good percentage of such Muslims would
not
agree that these four rituals are necessary to be considered a Muslim. In other words, these “believers” are not just slackers who know perfectly well that they should perform these rituals but fail to do so for a number of reasons. (Incidentally, it is chastening to remember that there may well be more
negligent
Muslims in the world than
observant
Muslims. The largest Muslim movement on

the globe by a wide margin,
Tabligh-i Jama‘at
with its headquarters in Pakistan, is out there to win the slackers back to Islam by teaching them the five pillars.) Instead, they are Muslims who consciously and deliberately stay clear of some or all of these rituals and express their allegiance to alternative ritual packages. Examples in history and contemporary societies simply abound. To stick to only the contemporary Middle East, one can name the Alevis in Turkey (fully one- fourth of the population, perhaps even more), the Ahl-i Haqq in Iran, the Alawis in Syria, the Ismailis in both Syria and Iran, the Yezidis and some radical Shi‘i communities in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. To these Muslims who observe the precepts of Islam according to their own, alternative pillars, one should add the millions who choose to emphasize belief over acts and consequently de-value the performance of some or all of the four ritualistic pillars. These are not negligent believers or simply non-believers, but Muslims who choose to prioritize certain beliefs over certain ritualistic acts in accordance with long- standing theological orientations in Islamic history.

Where does all this leave us? Should we do away with the definition of Islam that is based on the five pillars, since it fails to be as comprehensive as it is sometimes made out to be? Or, more to the point perhaps, is this formulaic approach of any value to us in our attempt to identify Islam? In answer to these questions, we can say that there is utility in this formulaic definition, but only if it is embedded in a civilizational framework and used with care and caution. Islam
does
revolve around certain key ideas and practices, but it is imperative to catch the dynamic spirit in which these core ideas and practices are constantly negotiated by Muslims in concrete historical circumstances and not to reify them into a rigid formula that is at once ahistorical and idealistic. Many different formulae made up of the same core stock of ideas and practices that we call Islam have always co-existed in Islamic history, and it would be a mistake to attempt to freeze Islam into only one of these molds by fiat.

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We are now in a position to identify Islam as a sprawling civilizational edifice under continuous construction and renovation in accordance with multiple blueprints (these are the numerous Islamic cultures at local, regional, and national levels encompassing innumerable individual, familial, ethnic, racial, and gender identities) all generated from a nucleus of key ideas and practices ultimately linked to the historical legacy of the Prophet Muhammad. It is vital to realize that nothing about this edifice is ever fixed or frozen in either space or time and that the construction itself is in constant flux. Alternative plans of new construction, renovation, even partial demolition emerge, rise to prominence, are implemented to different degrees, and fade away, while the core ideas and practices themselves, visible only through these very plans, assume different shape and color depending on the blueprint one uses to view them. What ties all

this together is the commitment of Muslims to a shared stock of ideals and key ideas along with their willingness to express these in a shared idiom, a common language. In short, Islam is a civilizational project in progress; it is an evolving civilizational tradition constantly churning different cultures in its crucible to generate innumerable, alternative social and cultural blueprints for the conduct of human life on earth.

“But, what,” you will ask, “exactly is in that nucleus of ideas and practices lying at the center of this civilizational tradition?” Unfortunately, there is no pithy and definitive answer to this question. There have always been and continues to be a multiplicity of perspectives among Muslims even about what the core ideas and practices of Islam are. Minimally, however, we can assume a set of beliefs (a version each of monotheism, prophecy, genesis, and eschatology) that underwrite a set of values (dignity of human life, individual and collective rights and duties, the necessity of ethical human conduct – in short, a comprehensive moral program), in turn reflected in a set of concrete human acts (ranging from the necessity of greeting others to acts of humility like prayer). It is also necessary to add, though this is an obvious point, that this nucleus is believed to be contained in the fundamental sources of Islam, the Qur’an and the exemplary life story of Muhammad. It is a version of this core that lies at the center of each and every one of the innumerable manifestations of the Islamic civilizational tradition in human history.

We have arrived at our final destination. We now know what Islam is, and, equally important, what it is not. Has the journey been worth it? How useful is it to view Islam as a civilizational tradition, as opposed to seeing it as a religion or a culture? By way of closure, let us enumerate some of the virtues of this perspective on Islam.

Viewed as a civilizational project, Islam emerges as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon, one that cannot be reified or fixed in any way. This is a healthy reality, one that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated, and not to be concealed from view under the banner of dubious calls issued by some Muslim activists “to establish true Islam” (normally an unmistakable sign of authoritarianism) or “to unify all Muslims” (normally betraying an extremely naive political utopianism).

When it is understood as an ongoing civilizational construct, it is easier to highlight and to appreciate Islam as a truly global tradition. Not only is Islam not inextricably attached to specific human groups or to specific geographical locales (Judaic, Chinese, and Hindu traditions, for instance, have largely been so attached), but it is genuinely adaptable to most, if not all, human communities anywhere on the globe. To put it in other words, the emphasis on Islam’s globality enables us to acknowledge and cherish its transcultural, transethnic, transracial, transnational, in short, its truly
humanistic
dimensions.

A civilizational tradition, simultaneously in and above specific cultures, is fundamentally interactive with and inclusive of culture. As an ongoing civilizational discourse, Islam is an interactive and inclusive tradition: it interacts with the cultures it comes into contact with and, where it takes root, reshapes and reforms cultures inclusively from within. As a result, there are numerous different Islamic cultures on the globe, and they are all equally Islamic, equal partners in the making and remaking of the Islamic civilizational tradition.

Finally, identifying Islam as civilization puts it on a par with the other major civilizations on the globe that share all of these same characteristics. While all civilizational traditions are by definition
dynamic
, surprisingly there are only a few traditions other than Islam that are also
global
and
inclusively interactive
in the sense we have discussed: Christianity, Buddhism, and Secular Humanism (which normally goes by the name Western civilization). The history of these civilizations clearly needs to be retold in a comparative and interrelated manner, and the future of all civilizational traditions (some global and interactive, but all dynamic) needs to be considered in the light of this history and in the context of increasing globalization. These are weighty and involved matters that need not, however, detain us from proceeding to our final point: Islam is one of only several truly global and inclusively interactive civilizational projects currently available on our globe, and all signs are that it will remain a major civilizational resource from which all humanity will continue to benefit. Let us all, Muslim and non-Muslim, contribute to the realization of this prospect by acknowledging Islam as a treasure trove of civilizational riches.

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THE DEBTS AND BURDENS OF CRITIC AL ISLAM

Ebrahim Moosa

A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds.
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Modern Muslim thinkers are not only challenged to be innovative, but they are also simultaneously required to engage with tradition. And yet, the content of tradition is possibly one of the most complex and contentious issues contemporary Muslims face. In the past two hundred years, tradition has been subject to an extraordinary assault both from within Muslim societies as well as from outside. The advent of colonization brought yet another tradition, namely modernity, into a more forceful encounter with Muslim tradition.

On the one hand there are the pre-modern or traditionalist/“orthodox” accounts of tradition.
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On the other hand, staunch advocates of Enlightenment rationality within Muslim societies not only challenge the idea of the pre-modern tradition or tradition itself, but propose a version of modernity as a mode of living and thinking for Muslim societies. The poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal was extremely perceptive in understanding the challenge with which the modern Muslim intellectual has to grapple. “The task before the modern Muslim is therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past . . . The only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us.”
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This dilemma to keep past and present in a productive conversation while producing something entirely innovative and fresh has had a fairly schizophrenic outcome, to put it mildly. On the one hand, religious knowledge is regarded as being coterminous with the pre-modern Muslim tradition itself, with the full pedigree of authenticity and legitimacy. That version of tradition continues its passage through the modern period largely by resisting modernity or grudgingly adjusting to modernity, on its own terms. On the other hand, another more contested Muslim tradition that is more euphoric about modernity and dazzled by its rapture develops side-by-side with the pre-modern tradition. This one is relatively smaller, has less popular appeal, and remains the domain of a small elite. In between these two polarities a plethora of traditions emerge that co-exist within Muslim societies and communities globally. Thus, it is preferable to speak of Muslim traditions in the plural. Like all traditions, continuity and discontinuity are essential elements in a dynamic and organic tradition.

The question of innovation and continuity in tradition has never been an unproblematic one in Muslim societies. From Islam’s very inception in the seventh century and afterwards, Muslim intellectuals have found themselves embattled by this question. It has its roots in the furious debates about the legitimacy of borrowing knowledge and insights from the Greeks, Indians, Persians, especially Aristotelian philosophy and Neoplatonic mystical knowledge. Intellectuals have found themselves on both sides of the debate. A close examination enables one to see clear battlefield scars on the knowledge handed down the centuries in the multi-dimensional and polyvalent Muslim intellectual tradition. For many scholars, like al-Farabi, al-Baqillani, Ibn Sina, al-Juwayni, al-Ghazali, and many others, there could be no boundaries in matters of knowledge. Knowledge itself could not be tainted by the religion, ethnicity, or beliefs of the producer of knowledge, since we have the tools of independent judgment to evaluate it on its merits. Their attitude was shaped by the belief that “foreign knowledge” was the “lost camel of the believer.” Wherever believers find such knowledge, they were the most deserving of it. But these scholars have also had their opponents. Many luminaries in the early intellectual tradition balked at even studying the knowledge of “others,” let alone internalizing it and employing such knowledge to illuminate the teachings of Islam. For men like al-Shafi‘i, Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Salah, and even more so Ibn Taymiyya, knowledge that had its provenance in other cultures and civilizations had a corrupting influence on the legacy of the pious ancestors of early Islam. For them the teachings of the Qur’an and those of the Arabian Prophet were sufficient and could not be contaminated with the ways of thinking of other cultures.

This is but a very brief and simplified snapshot of the kinds of debates that preceded us. Knowledge produced in those medieval contexts was not uncontested. In fact, what is often hailed as the high point of Islamic civilization and knowledge was also a period of contestation, conflict, and debate not very different from ours. Innovation in knowledge did not come without a price.

Knowledge, like the birth of a new style in the art of miniature portraits, “is the result of years of disagreements, jealousies, rivalries and studies in colors and painting,” says one of the characters of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.
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While the most gifted of painters, writers, and scholars will beget the innovations, to the rest will fall the “singular duty of perfecting and refining this style through perpetual imitation.” Both the innovators as well as the imitators deserve our respect, even though we acknowledge that we may no longer be able to agree with their views today.

How do we both acknowledge the debt we owe to our intellectual

predecessors and at the same time also recognize that they are products of their time just as we too are products of our time? To simultaneously acknowledge and respectfully disagree requires humility. The British historian E.P. Thompson offers sobering advice. When reviewing the past, we moderns have a tendency to gravitate towards elitism and vanguardism, especially when our practical experiences do not live up to theoretical hopes we thought the past could offer.
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Often we may incline to judge the people and the times of the past rather harshly when they do not live up to our expectations. This is what Thompson in his justly famous and endlessly quoted phrase calls that “enormous condescension of posterity” to dismiss all movements and ideas that have not made the grade by today’s standards of ideology of achievement.
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For people who wish to build and innovate in tradition such condescension will be unhelpful, if not serve as an obstacle to any kind of progress.

Another useful approach is offered by the prodigious belletrist (
adib
) and rational thinker ‘Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz (d. 255/868). Jahiz shows complete awareness of the double debt of the Muslim community, both to the hereditary intellectual tradition, as well as to the tradition in the making: the ongoing and unfolding knowledge-making (discursive) tradition. Yet, he notes that one’s attitude towards the earliest fathers of the tradition should not be marked by a stultifying reverence, but that it should rather be similar to one’s stance towards posterity. “For surely we inherited more edificatory admonition (‘
ibra
),” observes Jahiz, “than our predecessors ever found; just as posterity will acquire an even larger amount of edificatory admonitions than we did.”
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Jahiz implies that by means of an unending and continuous process of accumulation, each later generation will have an advantage over its predecessors because they will have a larger body of knowledge at their disposal from which they can derive meaningful insights. His social Darwinism aside, Jahiz does open the door for a continuous revision and engagement with the legacy of the past.

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Like our predecessors, we too are faced with uncomfortable questions. Whenever we, like those in the past, go about our ordinary practices or when we raise difficult questions, we consciously or unconsciously make assumptions and

tenaciously hold on to certain imaginations, about ourselves as well as the worlds that we inhabit. In doing so, each one of us also articulates a version of “Islam.” This proposition has led some scholars to say that there is not one, single, monolithic “Islam,” but a multiplicity of “Islams.” While I may not disagree with the underlying idea in this formulation, it also has the tendency to miscommunicate with lay audiences or tends to deny the idea of Islam as an event in history. What many “Islams” suggest is that there are many discursive traditions through which Muslims imagine themselves. It is through different ways of conceiving knowledge in all its complexity of time and space that people adhering to this faith identify themselves as “Muslim.” In other words we can say that there are multiple and diverse forms and articulations of “Muslimness” or “being Muslim.” In other words what we really have are multiple representations of being Muslim, embodied by concrete individuals and communities.

To argue whether there is one Islam or many leads to a somewhat fruitless and hypothetical debate as to whether an ideal formulation of Islam existed in the first place. And, if it did exist, where, when, and how did it do so and why did it cease to exist? These questions certainly have the character of being conversation stoppers. For, whatever Islam
is
, the closest we can come to what “it” is or is not, is through its embodiment in concrete forms, practices, beliefs, traditions, values, prejudices, tastes, forms of power that emanate from human beings who profess and claim to be Muslim or profess belonging to a community that calls itself Muslim. Needless to say, in each representation of themselves as being Muslim, they also simultaneously contest the meaning of their Muslimness in relation to others. Their claims inevitably make them assert doctrines and practices that signify some of kind of sectarian, political, and ideological affiliation. In the process, they either de-legitimize, affirm, or are indifferent to each other. Nevertheless, whatever they do, they do so in the matrix of the complexity of their Muslimness. In doing so they may put on display appealing and desirable manifestations of their Muslimness or they could represent ugly and disgusting manifestations of their Muslimness.

Imagine how jarring it might be to the sensibilities of ordinary Muslims, if one were to talk about an ugly Islam and a pretty Islam? For the immediate reflex would be to attribute that goodness or detestability to some founding sacred text, a revered person, or a symbol that believers might tend to regard as sacred and sacrosanct. While the idea of many Islams may make philosophical sense, ordinary discourse is not always very receptive to such presentations. Perhaps ugly and pretty versions of Muslimness may be less offensive or jarring. But we should also readily admit that all we really know about what we call “Islam” is what humans have ever told us. God never directly spoke to humans, except to Prophets such as Moses and Muhammad through the medium of revelation (
wahi
). Islam is what a mortal, in his authority as Prophet, told us what it is; this is God’s revelation, this is the moral conduct that God approves of from you His followers, and this is how we view ourselves
vis-a`-vis
other faiths

and communities. In the post-revelatory period, Islam is what the Companions, the imams, the scholars, jurists, and authorities said, practiced, and imagined it is. In short, all we know about what Islam is, is and was always the claims made by fellow Muslims, whether they be the Prophet, the Companions, the learned scholars past and present, or the most humble individual Muslims. Each one expresses what Islam is from their experience as a Muslim. In the language of the modern humanities, these claims
about
authoritative and authentic Islam are called “constructions.”

Of course there are other Muslims who would forcefully resist such

categorization and insist that what they hold out to be Islam is anything but a construction. They would challenge my statement and say that they do not talk
about
Islam; they
talk
Islam or they just purely
do
Islam or they
just Islam
. But I can counter by saying that unless they claim to being God themselves – which surely takes the debate out of the realm of sanity – and therefore claim the right to speak with unmediated authority, then what they claim can be nothing but representations of Islam or plainly “talk”
about
Islam.

Plainly “talking” Islam is a hallmark of Muslims who not only imagine but

also practice Islam with a heavy dose of authoritarianism. In other words, religion and Islam are in the final instance about authority: an unquestionable and given (a priori) set of obligations. The discourse of religion in this construction is about such an overwhelming authority that it silences one into submission. Even in this narrowly conceived authoritarian mode, one cannot avoid the reality that it is people in flesh and blood, namely Muslims who embody beliefs and practices, that make the ultimate moral judgments. They have to listen, understand, and then follow that “given” divine authority and live accordingly. It is human beings who are required to mediate this authority. In this entire process, there are as many subjective moments that undermine notions of objectivity: there is proverbially many a slip between the cup and the lip.