Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (24 page)

No one has seen “Islam” in its transparent glory to really judge it. But what we have seen are Muslims: good Muslims and bad Muslims; ugly Muslims and pretty Muslims; just Muslims and unjust Muslims; Muslims who are oppressors, racists, bigots, misogynists, and criminals as well as Muslims who are compassionate, liberators, seekers of an end to racism and sexism, and those who aspire for global justice and equity. Therefore it is not uncommon to encounter Muslims saying, “You have to separate between Islam and Muslims”; “Islam is great, with every epithet of perfection.” The general rhetoric would be: “Islam is a religion of peace, it is Muslims who are bad.” But can one ever imagine Islam without Muslims? While the rhetoric that pleads for a separation between “Islam” and “Muslims” implicitly endorses my claim that it is actually Muslims who embody Islam, it is often employed in order to defend “Islam,” as if the tradition is in need of protection in the first place. More harmful than being part of an apologetic move, such rhetoric absolves Muslims from

responsibility for what they do in the “name” of Islam. For every time Muslims perform an act and claim that it has religious sanction and cite their scriptural authority, one cannot deny them their claim when they insist that what they did was a religiously mandated act. If they do harm in the name of Islam, then other Muslims are required to take the religious justification of violence seriously, and contest their discursive use of Islam.

The truth is that our only understanding of Islam is what Muslims know it is. Even if one accepts the Kantian notion of the thing in and of itself, the artifact is known to us only through the knowledge we have of it as human beings. Thus, whatever Islam is in its ideal formation, the version we know of it is only the imperfect and flawed one we have as imperfect beings. The heavenly attempt to make sure we get the closest version to perfection of Islam was undertaken via prophecy. From then onwards, we require neither a divine incarnation to make sure we remain perfect nor an infallible authority to tie our feet to the chains of authority.

Often authoritarian interpretations of Islam argue that entrenched practices and beliefs are not mere constructions, but that they are indeed practices that have consistently been replicated in Muslim societies over centuries. If one makes a claim that Muslims have prayed five times a day, paid their taxes according to a set formula designed by the first believers, outlawed certain trade practices, and followed an ethics of war according to uniform and non- negotiable norms, then the burden is to prove the validity of such claims.

In order to find such proof, one is at the mercy of history and its contingencies and perils. Surely it will not be difficult to prove that Muslims believed in the obligation of five daily prayers. But it will be inordinately difficult to prove that they prayed in an identical manner. For among different Muslim schools of law and doctors of interpretation there are major differences in the practice of rituals themselves. If for the Shafi‘i school reciting the chapter called the “Opening” is an obligation in every ritual prayer including congregational prayers, then in the Hanafi law school for a follower to recite any liturgical passage in a congregational prayer comes close to invalidating his or her prayers. While all schools of law acknowledge five daily prayers, the Sunni schools insist that each prayer must be performed in its appointed time slot. The Shi‘i law schools permit the noon prayer to be joined with the afternoon prayer and for the evening prayer to be joined with the night prayers in two time slots on a regular basis. Some Sunni law schools offer such concessions only when a person is traveling. Certain trade practices may be perfectly legitimate in the eyes of one law school, while in the view of another they may be totally invalid or forbidden. So any claim that an unbroken chain of practice serves as the incontrovertible evidence for an authentic and unchangeable tradition, as some Muslims do claim, can only be a figment of the imagination. For any such assertion can rest only on ideological fictions or specious generalizations, not on the grounds of history or even idealism, for that matter. It is only when one

begins to compare practices of Muslims over time, and then dares to confront the details of such practices, that one encounters the complexity of traditions. Once one becomes aware of the historical processes by which human communities take shape, then the emphasis on the authority of a text or the authority of some infallible person or coercive capacity of consensus evaporates like mist in the rays of the sun.

Surely, what threatens the inscrutable authority of authoritarians is history. Any serious and close study of the Muslim tradition will unmistakably vaporize claims of uniformity and absolute obedience to authorities. To their utter disbelief, protagonists of authoritarianism will discover that Muslim societies in the past, as in the present, have always been diverse, differentiated, dynamic, but also in a state of contestation as all organic human social formations naturally are. The false utopias of ideal and perfect Muslim societies in the past, widely touted by ideologues of authoritarianism, will not survive the scrutiny of history.

DD EE BB TT TT OO

MM UU SS LL II MM MM OO DD EE RR NN II SS TT SS

Contemporary Muslim thought is profoundly indebted to the labors of Muslim modernist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given that modernity, according to the German philosopher Ju¨rgen Habermas, is itself a work in progress, it is not surprising that we have come to recognize many of the errors of Enlightenment thinking and modernity as legions of scholars engaged in post-modernism have pointed out.
8
In some ways, post-modernism can be seen as a corrective as well as a continuation of modernity. In the light of what we have learnt about the pitfalls of modernism, we are compelled to ask whether the tradition of scholarship known as modernism is Islam’s redeemer, nemesis, or perhaps a bit of both?

For what we do know is that some of the key figures of Muslim modernism, like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Shibli Nu‘mani, and Muhammad Iqbal all from India, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq in Egypt, as well as important figures in Turkey, Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world, were tremendously impressed by both the ideals and realities of modernity. They truly believed that Muslim thought as they imagined it from its medieval incarnation had an almost natural tryst with modernity. Modernity and “Islam” were not mortal enemies, but rather, as many of them suggested, Islam itself anticipated modernity.

In their definition, modernity was synonymous with innovation and openness to new knowledge. Thus to be modern, they argued, was historically an integral process of Muslim thinking. They pointed out that Muslim thought was sufficiently flexible to foster innovation and adapt to change commensurate with time and place. This was both a legitimate and natural process whereby the Muslim tradition could survive the rigors of time. Innovative thinking
(ijtihad)
and renewal
(tajdid)
, they argued, was emblematic of Muslim discourse. Critical

to this understanding was also the place of reason and rationality as a way of objectively ascertaining the truth.

TT HH EE

BB UU RR DD EE NN

OO FF

MM OO DD EE RR NN II TT YY

The way Muslim modernists understood modernity presents a very different picture from the way we perceive it today. Some of the ways in which we perceive reason, self, and truth might be very different from how early modernists of all stripes construed these very concepts. Reason in the past was seen as universal, held by all to articulate a set of rational true beliefs, to distinguish reason from tradition and emotion. Now we have to admit that reason is not a self-evident faculty but a socially constructed one. It exists within practices and discourses; reason is embodied. The idea of the self was once understood to be exclusively unique and transcendent. This is no longer the case. Now we acknowledge that the self is a product of language and discourses. The correspondence between language and reality exerted a strong influence in the modern period and this contributed to our understanding of truth. Today, we have a healthy skepticism about what passes for the truth. Truth is the result of agreement. We do not say there is no truth, or that the truth is arbitrary. What we do say is that the truth is not static, an end-state at which we arrive at once and for all.

What Muslim modernists most profited from in their encounter with modernity was the idea of rationality. Armed with rationality they felt that they could effectively achieve several things. Firstly, it served as a defensive weapon in apologetics. In competition with the West, Muslim modernists could argue that the best ideal in the West, namely reason and rationality, was already an artifact of Muslim civilization. Most modernists viewed the Mu‘tazila school and other thinkers such as Ibn Rushd and Mulla Sadra as epitomizing the rationalist tradition. Secondly, rationality was employed to combat superstition as part of the onslaught against popular religious practices. The desired goal was to transform Muslims into autonomous rational agents. Thirdly, modernists believed it was highly desirable for such rational individuals to lessen their dependence on authority, be it the charismatic authority of the Sufi mystics and saints or the religious authority of the scholars of religion (
‘ulama
). Muslim modernists effectively despaired of rehabilitating both groups. Fourthly, educated Muslims with a rational bent, they believed, could derive their inspiration and guidance directly from the Qur’an. Furthermore, they held that with the rise of print and the circulation of knowledge, lay people could educate themselves in matters of religion without any retrogressive mediating authority. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist Muslim reformists viewed modernity as an ally. Twenty-first-century critical Muslim scholars are much more apprehensive of its allure and offer a critique of modernity. Of course it is partly unfair to level critique at early Muslim modernists in their assessment of modernity, since our critical appreciation of modernity has the

hindsight of at least a century of critical reflection. This should moderate our criticism of this group of courageous thinkers of the nineteenth century; our criticism should be more a reflection of the different kinds of modernity that each generation of Muslim scholars has inherited.

Nevertheless, it is also true that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Muslim modernists utilized the discourse of modernity differently.
Vis-a`-vis
those outside the Muslim community, they used the modern discourse to demonstrate that Islam was very much in tune with progress and social evolution. A few of them, for instance, justified women’s rights and justified the study of science and technology on modern grounds when traditionalists resisted these ideas. However, when it came to applying the intellectual harvest of modernity, namely the phenomenal developments in knowledge, to the study of religion itself, this elicited a different response. At that point modern knowledge was viewed with skepticism accompanied by a fear that it would undermine the canonical knowledge of Islam.

With some exceptions, the critical light of modern knowledge developed in the humanities did not illuminate the Muslim modernists’ theories, as applied to the interpretation of scriptures, history and society, the understanding of law, and theology. What they did not undertake or in some instances refused to undertake was to subject the entire corpus of historical Islamic learning to the critical gaze of the knowledge-making process (episteme) of modernity. They of course correctly suspected that a complete embrace of modernity as a philosophical tradition would result in an Islam that they would not be able to recognize. They still felt that the pre-modern Muslim epistemology as rooted in dialectical theology
(‘ilm al-kalam)
and legal theory
(usul al-fiqh)
was sufficiently tenacious, if not compatible with the best in modern epistemology. With a few exceptions, this expedient attitude towards modernity is an indication of both the good faith as well as the naivete´ of some of the modernist Muslim reformers.

Some Muslim reformers did adopt new ways of writing history in order to “appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge,” as Iqbal proposed. This becomes evident in the work of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Iqbal, Shibli Nu‘mani, and others. However, it was not a thorough-going approach. Iqbal’s caveat of an “independent attitude” for some signaled a caution and resistance to the allure of modern knowledge, a sentiment that was widely shared by most other reformers. How Iqbal expected far-reaching and different understandings of early Islamic teachings to take place without taking the risk of embracing the modern episteme, he never elaborated. In fact, most reformers viewed modernity and its philosophical legacy as an instrument; as an aid to advance and explain the pre-modern tradition and knowledge of religion, but never to internalize modernity entirely.

In fact, at the slightest hint of the application of modern knowledge to the traditional Islamic sciences, traditional
‘ulama
called for the excommunication

of the above-mentioned Muslim modernists. The result was a discursive battlefield filled with corpses of those charged with heresy. Notable among those who partially adopted a modern approach in the investigation of knowledge about religion were modernists such as Ahmad Muhammad Khalafallah, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, and Nasser Hamid Abu Zayd in the Arab world, and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, and later Fazlur Rahman in the Indian Subcontinent. All were effectively harassed, their lives turned into a misery, ultimately resulting in their marginalization or exile.

Iqbal, it seems, understood the magnitude of a serious reform project and

was understandably intimidated by its weight as well as its far-reaching consequences. Given his insight, it is not surprising that he vacillates when it comes to the application of his modernist vision. The twentieth-century Indian thinker Asaf Fyzee was perhaps among the few courageous voices to advocate far-fetching reforms practically. He spoke movingly and passionately. “After serving the cause of humanity for some seven centuries,” observed Fyzee, “Islam came under a shadow. Its spirit was throttled by fanaticism, its theology gagged by bigotry, its vitality was sapped by totalitarianism.”
9
He was among a very few to advocate that a modern approach to Islam requires a separation between religion (belief) and law.
10
He clearly understood the dilemma of
Shari‘ah
. It is a composite concept that involves both religion and law. For this reason Fyzee argued that in every age the Qur’an has to be “interpreted afresh and understood anew.”
11
Fyzee endorses a post-Enlightenment notion of religion in which belief is a matter of individual conscience and law is a public matter that is enforced by the state. He of course did not provide any detailed argument as to how one justifies such a separation, even though the idea makes eminent sense.