Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (59 page)

The disintegration of the state and of society brings back the need for another appropriate interpretive discourse. For an eternal interpretation is an interpretive impossibility, since interpretation is conditional and tentative. In their attempts to find proper channels for relative interpretations of the text, the Islamists focus their work on reviving the role of social forces. However, a Muslim society does indeed need an Islamic state that becomes the symbol of collective self-awareness and the possibility of a relatively correct textual understanding. Thus, moderate Islamism opens up, at least theoretically, a host of possible Islamic discourses that are in tune with realities but are nonetheless relative, conditional, and tentative.

As such, moderate Islamism theoretically frees Muslims from the finished products of early and medieval thinking and ways of living. It permits and in fact exhorts Muslims to modernize Islam and Islamize modernity: again,
shura
becomes democracy, and democracy
shura
. This forceful conceptual correspon- dence that took place through a process of historical neutralization brings closer together both modern Islamic political thought and its Western counterpart, and creates a possibility of a new political discourse and a meaningful dialogue.

A popular liberating democracy, grounded in Islamic law, is a political bridge between the Muslim world and the West. For authoritarianism and despotism

are not specifically cultural or Islamic. While they have existed in both the West and the Muslim world, they are more prominent now in the Muslim world. The moderate trend adopts an Islamic interpretation of liberal democracy as opposed to the popular democracy of radical Islamism or the authoritarian nationalism of the Arab world. Thus, radical Islamism proclaims the constitutionality of Islam even in non-Islamic states and as such requires no prior popular approval and excludes the possibility of its inclusion in dialogues and cooperation whether with Arab/Muslim regimes or the West. However, moderate Islamism seems more amenable and eager to be included in dialogue and compromise, whether in party formations or the general discourses about politics, ideology, and religion within the context of a civil society.

endnotes

1. For a full treatment of the topics of democracy and pluralism, See Ahmad Moussalli,
   The Islamic Quest for Democracy, Pluralism, and Human Rights
   (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001).
   

2. “Islamism” is another term for “Islamic fundamentalism.” It is not only a set of political movements but carries also a spectrum of moderate and radical intellectual and political discourses. These discourses constitute a critique of philosophy, political ideology, and science. In a philosophical sense, though believing in the existence of objective and ultimate truth, fundamentalism claims that no individual can understand it, and thus all of our knowledge is relative. More substantially, it attempts to offer a way of life and thought based on its understanding of both God’s law,
   al-Shari‘ah
   , and the phenomenon of nature. Both constitute what religion is about. Fundamentalist political ideologies depend on adhering to divine governance (
   hakimiyya
   ) and on refuting paganism (
   jahiliya
   ) and the notion of people’s ultimate authority and humankind natural possessiveness. Instead, it relegates that ultimate authority to God. Fundamentalist worldviews revolve around setting up virtuous, just, and equal societies that are regulated by Islam. “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism” is an umbrella term for a wide range of discourses and activism which, from a high level of moderate pluralism, and thus inclusive democracy, to extreme radicalism, intolerant unitarianism, and exclusive majority rule. While some fundamentalist groups are pluralistic in terms of inter-Muslim relations and between Muslims and minorities, others are not. Again, while some fundamentalists are politically pluralistic but theologically exclusive, others are accommodating religiously, but direct their exclusivist programs to the outside – the West and imperialism. Even at the scientific level, Western science and technology are argued for by some fundamentalists as Islamicly sound, while others exclude them – because of their assumed un-Islamic nature.
   

3. This phrase is used by Professor Richard Bulliet as a title of one of his books,
   Islam: The View from the Edge
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
   

4. Ibid., 4.
   

5. Wajih Kawtharani,
   Mashru‘ al-Nuhud al-‘Arabi
   (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘a, 1995), 12–18. See also Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri,
   Al-Khitab al-‘Arabi al-Mu‘asir
   (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘a, 1980), chapter 2.
   

6. Muhammad Hamadah,
   Bina’ al-Umma bayna al-Islam wa al-Fikr al-Mu‘asir
   (Casablanca: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1986), 86–134; Kawtharani,
   Mashru
   ‘, 18–24. See also Muhammad ‘Amara,
   Al-Din wa al-Dawla
   (Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-Amma li al-Kitab, 1986), 151–72; ‘Abd al-Majid al-Sharfi, “Mushkilat al-Hukm fi al-Fikr al-Islami al-Hadith,”
   Al-Ijtihad
   , 4(14), 1992, 69–93; and Muhammad Tawfiq al-Shawi,
   Fiqh al-Hukuma al-Islamiyya bayna al-Shi‘a wa al-Sunna
   (Ann Arbor: New Era, 1995).
   

7. For a further discussion and critique of the Wahhabi movement, see the article by Khaled Abou El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern and the Modern Ugly: Reclaiming the Beautiful in Islam,” in this volume.
   

8. Al-Hayat
   , August 4, 1993, 19, 25; September 25, 1993, 14, 17. The series ran on August 2–6. See also
   Qadaya al-Isbu
   ‘, September 10–17, 1993, 1–2.
   

9. Edward Djerejian, “One Man, One Vote, One Time,”
   New Perspective Quarterly
   , 10(3), 1993, 49; Judith Miller, “The Challenge of Radical Islam,”
   Foreign Affairs
   , 72(2), 1993, 54–5; “Will Democracy Survive in Egypt?,”
   Reader’s Digest
   (Canadian edn), 131(788), 1987, 149; “The Arab World Where Troubles for the U.S. Never End,”
   U.S. News and World Report
   , February 6, 1984, 24; Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,”
   Foreign Affairs
   , 72(3), 1993, 22–49.
   

10. For a study of violent religious movements in a comparative context that brings together
    

    Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Buddhist movements, see Mark Juergensmeyer’s valuable book,
    Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
    (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
    

11. See, for instance, al-Ghannushi,
    Al-Hurriyyat al-‘Amma fi al-Islam
    ; Fahmi al-Huwaidi,
    

    Al-Islam wa al-Dimocratiyya
    ; and
    Al-Hayat
    , October 11, 1996, 21; October 12, 1996, 21.
    

12. Al-Safir
    , September 25, 1993, 10 and
    Al-Diyar
    , September 25, 1993, 14.
    

13

HOW TO PUT THE GENIE B ACK IN THE BOTTLE? “IDENTITY” ISLAM AND MUSLIM YOUTH

CULTURES IN AMERIC A

Marcia Hermansen

I am an American Muslim and a Professor of Islamic Studies at a Jesuit University in Chicago. For most of my adult life I have worked with youth as a teacher and advisor. I began studying Arabic, Urdu, and Islamic studies as an undergraduate student in the 1970s. From that time until the present, I have lived for extended periods in various parts of the Muslim world including the Arab Middle East, South Asia, and Iran, often within Muslim families. In my academic research I have been concerned with both classical Islamic studies and the lived experience of Muslims, particularly in South Asia and in the West.

In terms of our volume’s theme of a progressive Islam, one might expect that

Muslim youth in America would be at the forefront of taking an interest in this development. However, increasingly in recent years I have seen the tide turning in the opposite direction, one in which quite a number of Muslim youth in America are becoming rigidly conservative and condemnatory of their peers (Muslim and non-Muslim), their parents, and all who are not within a narrow ideological band of what I will define as internationalist, “identity” Islam.

I would define a progressive Muslim outlook as one based on informed understanding of the tradition in its historical and multicultural context as evolving to address the needs and issues of the time in a way that is both spiritually and politically empowering. In this essay I express my observation and concern that a considerable portion of American Muslim youth seem to be moving in a direction antithetical to progressive interpretations. In fact they are moving in a direction that negates interpretation and diversity altogether, one that rejects historical development and cultural context. Furthermore, it privileges certain external markers of identity and is, in the process, anti- intellectual. I will be focusing on the youth I see most often, who are primarily

raised in America and born of parents who emigrated from South Asia or the Middle East.

I observe that subsequent to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim community, like the larger American society, has become increasingly polarized along ideological lines. Many Muslims in America before September 11 had been celebrating their increasing voice and presence. This sentiment, I believe, was acceptable both to progressive liberals within the community and to those Muslims who focused on preserving and promoting more conservative and isolationist observance of religious injunctions. At the same time, observers, whether academic or in the media, of Islam in America seemed to be divided as to whether to celebrate this civic integration of Muslims or to warn of an essential element of Islamic identity that would never adapt to pluralistic and democratic institutions. The aftermath of the terrorist attacks, both immediate and continuing, has made me painfully aware, not only of my own personal struggle with conflicted identities, but also of the issues facing younger Muslims in America. I now feel alienated from the Muslim community here in ways I had not previously experienced. When I turn on my television or read the paper or emails, I often experience a similar alienation from those segments of American society which seem to feel they have a “Divine right” to ignore issues of global justice and world ecology.

I hesitate to construct this piece of writing on the basis of “problematizing” or “pathologizing” Muslim youth cultures. So often one is confronted by the concept of Muslim youth and of Muslims generally as a problem – criminalized, unable to adapt, and now as a violent threat. At the same time, even within the Muslim community, I sense a general concern over trends developing among youth. The energies of youth, like the genies in Islamic folklore, are potentially creative, powerful, and destructive simultaneously. I wish to interrogate my own imagery in the title of this piece of a genie put back in the bottle. Am I suggesting that Muslim youth should be contained and silenced? That would be far from a progressive stance. At the same time, I think there is a certain destructive, arrogant, and nasty energy that has been allowed to run unchecked and uncriticized, and has even been encouraged among youth by mainstream Muslim organizations in America. It is that energy that I would like to see named and examined more critically, and to a certain extent put into a framework of analysis, if not into an airtight bottle, so that it can be channeled in more productive directions.

I have to say that I was shocked when I encountered some Muslim students on my campus who seemed to feel vindicated by the destruction and loss of life on September 11.
1
I couldn’t understand how children of Muslim immigrants, born and largely raised in the United States, could somehow twist their understanding of their own situation and history to welcome such an event as payback. In one case, I was told that the attacks were payback for the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. I could hardly fathom how such hatred and contempt for

the society in which one lives could exist in those who had chosen to come here and in their children, but it led me to retrace and rethink the various trends that I had observed in Muslim American organizations and discourses, and how the young were positioning themselves with regard to their Muslim identities. Putting it bluntly, I find these tendencies troubling and therefore in this essay I want to explore them, as well as my own reactions to them.

Some Muslims may be disturbed that I would speak of these things so publicly, although I know that inside Muslim circles they are being discussed, at least by those who feel there is a problem. I, like many other Muslims in America, am tired of the attitudes that are expressed in Friday sermons and other forums of what had been, at least previously, insider Muslim discourse.

CC OO MM PP OO NN EE NN TT SS OO FF II DD EE NN TT II TT YY

One of the main factors driving Muslim youth activities in America is the quest for identity. That this identity might be shaped (distorted) in odd ways is not surprising. The majority of immigrant American Muslims arrived only after 1980, therefore today’s youth are the first cohort born in America. The struggle of a new generation for a place in the dominant society is nothing new. Muslim youth of immigrant parents are often more “different” in terms of skin color, names, and religion than the previous waves of immigrants were. The American political situation since the 1960s has, in increasing measure, constructed Islam and Muslims as the enemy or threat to the American way of life or Western civilization. At the same time, since the 1970s, a new form of internationalist Islamic ideology, combining political ambitions, anti-colonialism, and con- servative religious revivalism, has often been the only oppositional voice raised against repressive regimes in the Muslim world. A litany of injustices of the West against Islam is part of Muslim collective memory and present rhetoric, and to a large extent present reality, most recent examples being the Palestinian situation, Kashmir, and the blockade on Iraq.

One can well imagine the identity dilemma of a Muslim teenager brought up largely in an American environment who has been encouraged by parents, Islamic groups, and extended family to dis-identify with American cultural and political contexts and to imagine himself or herself as being from somewhere else (Pakistan or Palestine, for example) as a critical or oppositional stance. At the same time, this young person is probably never going to make it as an authentic citizen of the imagined homeland, since he or she faces substantial inadequacies in language competency, historical knowledge, and even cultural and social assumptions about the idealized place of origin.