Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (51 page)

Muslim leaders in North America have made a number of comparisons between their communities and the Jewish communities. They appreciate the fact that the Jewish communities in North America have been able to build not just synagogues, but educational facilities and medical centers. Many Muslims want to match the success of the Jewish communities in North America with regard to creating public institutions as well as public support for their religious tradition.

Comparisons have also been made between Muslim and Catholic commu- nities in North America. Catholics needed to survive as a minority in Protestant North America and to create their own educational, cultural, and medical facilities. Their success is seen as another model for Muslims to follow. Catholic– Muslim dialogue has received official support since the Second Vatican Council, and Muslims and Catholics have often spoken out in solidarity with each other at conferences around the world. Currently, Georgetown University in Washington, DC, a Catholic (Jesuit) institution, supports the Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding.

Hartford Seminary in Connecticut is home to the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for Christian–Muslim Relations, and also publishes the academic journal
The Muslim World
. In June of 1990, the seminary organized an international conference entitled “Christian–Muslim Encounter: The Heritage of the Past and Present Intellectual Trends.” A very useful resource volume,
Christian–Muslim Encounters
, was produced as a result of that conference.
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Because of the interfaith dialogue in Canadian cities such as Toronto, many non-Muslims are aware of some of the basic elements of Islam. By contrast,

American cities such as Los Angeles do not have the same level of interfaith dialogue. Having participated in interfaith dialogue in both cities, I find that in Los Angeles people ask me basic questions about Islam. By contrast, in Toronto, people have a basic knowledge and instead are interested in deeper questions.

There is also the issue of what some of the underlying assumptions of religious pluralism mean for Islamic theology in North America. Are we teaching things that are old news to our students or things that our students are not prepared to hear? As an example, when I say, “I have said Friday prayers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque and in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and I have prayed in the sweat lodge in Manitoba with my Cree elders, and I do not think that Allah distinguishes between these prayers,” I get some very interesting student reactions. Some want to hear more about each of these occasions. Some are genuinely interested in connections between Islam and the religious traditions of First Nations. Others are horrified that I have prayed with non-Muslims or that I have linked the lodge with the mosque.

Unfortunately, there are Muslims in North America and around the world who have no interest in pluralism. They see Islam as the only true religion, and often see their particular way of being Muslim as the only way to be Muslim. As a teacher, I often have Muslim students who are such zealous defenders of Islam. In hearing their rhetoric of intolerance, I think back to one of my own beloved teachers, Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith, one of the greatest North American scholars of Islam in the past century.

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Professor Smith was, for many of us who study religion, the epitome of critical scholarship. From his deep knowledge, he was able to offer critique when it was needed. Of Professor Smith’s scholarship, John Hick wrote, “An outstanding feature of Wilfred’s work is that it is on the highest level of technical historical scholarship and yet it is at the same time driven by involvement in and concern for the worldwide human community, with a keen sense of the threatening disasters and the amazing possibilities before us. This human involvement goes back to his work in India before Partition and has continued ever since, as a constant thread running through all his writings.”
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Professor Smith was a committed Christian, who was deeply concerned about the issues facing Muslims. He was not a Muslim. He was not an apologist for Islam. Yet his critique never did violence to what it meant for other people to be Muslim. In
Islam in Modern History
he wrote, “A true Muslim, however, is not a man who believes in Islam especially Islam in history; but one who believes in God and is committed to the revelation through His Prophet.”
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Those words were published in 1957. In his 1963 book
The Meaning and End of Religion
, he continued “the essential tragedy of the modern Islamic world is the degree to which Muslims, instead of giving their allegiance to God, have been giving it to

something called Islam.”
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Those words could have been written yesterday with equal force and validity.

Professor Smith has served as a shining example of the loftiest ideals of humanity and scholarship for me and many others. Like others of his Muslim students, I often felt that he was a better
muslim
(one who submits to God) than I was, a fact that inspired me more than I can express. As alluded to earlier in the comments by John Hick, Professor Smith and his wife Muriel spent six years as missionaries in Lahore before the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. When we first met, he commented that he had lived in Lahore, my birthplace, longer than I had lived there, six years to my four. But Professor and Mrs Smith were no ordinary missionaries. I don’t know that they ever converted one person, but I am sure that they taught and influenced thousands. And they were splendid representatives of the kind of Christianity that I came to know and love in Canada. Years ago, on a television show in Canada, I had the honour of sitting on a panel with the Very Reverend Dr Bruce McLeod, a former Moderator of the United Church of Canada. Dr McLeod told me a story about Professor Smith. Someone once asked him, “Professor Smith, are you a Christian?” After his characteristic pause, Professor Smith repeated the question, “Am I a Christian?” Then he answered, “Well, maybe I was, last week, at lunch, for about an hour. But if you really want to know, ask my neighbour.” For many of us who see ourselves as progressive Muslims, Professor Smith’s comment captures our own various Islams. We strive to be Muslim, meaning that we live out our submission to God in a way that can be seen by those with whom we are in contact. Not that we put on a pretence for the benefit of others, but our lives are lived as an integrated whole, with no easy teasing out of our individual Islam from the poetry of our ordinary lives.

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It is not just some Muslims who are intolerant towards non-Muslims, but also non-Muslims who show callous disregard and ignorance about Islam in North America. At the beginning of the new millennium there was a rise in anti- Muslim polemic from certain Christian groups.
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Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, spoke of Islam as a “very evil and wicked religion.” Jerry Vines, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, labelled Muhammad a “demon-obsessed pedophile” (an odd remark if one remembers that the Jesus of the Gospels was particularly concerned with casting out demons). David Benke, a minister in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, was suspended for participating in an interfaith event, and was charged by his

church that, “Instead of keeping God’s name sacred and separate from every other name, it was made common as it was dragged to the level of Allah.” Much of this rhetoric came in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Although every major Muslim group in North America

was quick to condemn the attacks, this was not widely reported in the news media in the days after the attacks. Many individual Muslims took the initiative after the attacks to do interfaith dialogue for the first time, and speak to their friends and neighbours about Islam. Academics who study Islam were in great demand to address groups, large or small, across North America.
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While North Americans learned a great deal about Islam and Muslims in the months after the attacks, there were also a number of horrible sentiments that were expressed by media pundits who had overnight become “experts” on Islam and Muslim communities. One of the few groups in the United States to immediately stand in solidarity with Muslims were Japanese Americans, many of whom were Christian. Having experienced racism and discrimination during their internment in the Second World War, Japanese Americans wanted to make sure that the same fate did not befall American Muslims.

What was immensely troubling was the anti-Muslim rhetoric from a number of American Jewish leaders. Naively, I expected American Jews, with their history of having faced persecution, oppression, and discrimination, to stand with Japanese Americans alongside Muslims. Instead, some of them used the turmoil over the terrorist attacks to further their own political agendas. In October, 2001, two different Jewish groups released studies about their estimates of the American Muslim population, usually thought to be at least six million by most researchers.
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A study conducted for the American Jewish Committee estimated a population of between 1.4 and 2.8 million. The other study by researchers at the City University of New York estimated a population of 1.1 million adults and 650,000 children. To anyone that knows anything about the Muslim population in America, these figures were absurd. A respected scholar of American Islam, Fred Denny, estimated the American Muslim population in 1994 to be around

4.5 million.
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Yvonne Haddad and Jane I. Smith, two of the leading scholars who

have studied the American Muslim population over the past twenty-five years, have put the number in the same time period at, conservatively, three to four million.
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Every statistical study undertaken points to the drastic and ongoing rise in the number of Muslims in America, owing to continued immigration, conversion, and large family size. It is reasonable to expect that the number of Muslims in America would thus continue to grow from the mid 1990s figures reported above. Indeed, the most recent report, conducted by the Council on American–Islamic Relations, puts the total number of Muslims in America at six to seven million.
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All of this data, conducted both by Muslim advocacy groups and independent members of the scholarly community, point to the inaccuracy of the American Jewish Committee report. This had nothing to do with objective scholarship, and everything to do with the politics of representation. That the sponsors released these studies shortly after September 11, with heightened discrimination against Muslims, was particularly problematic.

More troubling was the work of the Jewish Defence League, the Anti- Defamation League (ADL), and the Middle East Forum, which sought to slander

American Muslim leaders. At the urging of the ADL, the
Washington Post
and Fox News both reported the following words from Dr Muzammil Siddiqi, the former President of the Islamic Society of North America, a year before the attacks: “America has to learn . . . Because if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.” Even allowing for the fact that the quotation was taken out of context, I could not see why these words were regarded as problematic, since American Christian leaders often refer to God’s judgment of nations and societies, including America itself. In context, the passage was even less offensive: “We want to reawaken the conscience of America. America has to learn that. Because if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come. Please! Please all Americans, do you remember that Allah is watching everyone. If you continue doing injustice, and tolerating injustice, the wrath of God will come. But we want blessings for America. That’s why we want the conscience of America to be awakened and Americans to stand on the side of justice.”
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Even sadder, a number of academics got into the act. In an article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
(February 8, 2002), Alan Wolfe wrote the following in a review of Diana Eck’s book
A New Religious America
: “Eck occasionally lapses into cheerleading; her chapter on Muslims, in particular, stresses the degree to which they ‘are increasingly engaged participants in the American pluralist experiment,’ giving scant attention along the way to those adherents to Islam who continue to believe that America is the Great Satan and who, even

while living here, reject this country and its values.” Perhaps I am being biased here, for I consider Diana to be a colleague, and “cheerleading,” although a word held in high esteem by many Americans, is not one that I would use to describe her. But it is the second part of Wolfe’s sentence which is most troubling. First, I haven’t seen the U.S.A. referred to by North American Muslims as the “Great Satan” in years. Second he implies that there is an equivalency here, that as many Muslims reject America as embrace it. Certainly there are Muslims – as well as those of other religious traditions – in America who don’t see themselves as participants in pluralistic American society, but these represent a tiny percentage of American Muslims. Wolfe neglects to mention that a great many Muslims emigrated to America precisely because they wanted to live in a pluralistic and democratic society where they could succeed on their own merits. Abraham Verghese describes with his characteristic brilliance the situation of a young Indian intern seeking a visa to come to America. When asked by the visa officer the real reason why he wants to come to America, the intern speaks the words below, which could easily come from the mouths of countless American Muslims:

Vadivel, who had held on to his American dream for so long that he could speak with the passion of a visionary, said, “Sir, craving your indulgence, I want to train in a decent, ten-storey hospital where the lifts