Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (60 page)

This simultaneous alienation both from American culture and from the culture of immigrant Muslim parents encourages the embrace of a culture-free, global Islamic militancy. Here I draw on British theorists who have understood “identity Islam” movements as yielding a positive identification in the face of

British racial rejection.
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While the categories of race and class in America vary from those in Europe, the parallel experience of some degree of racism certainly exists.

Ironically, Muslim youth in the United States are often expected to be the “model,” which is to say model minority, being streamed from childhood to enter the most lucrative and demanding fields. An alternative subculture of Muslim youth in the U.S., however, is those with gang or “gangsta” identification, linked to the most stigmatized social minorities in American culture. A polarization exists in the eyes of the community between the young person with beard or
hijab
who is a Muslim Student Association (MSA) member on the way to being an MD and the gangsta-identified youth who does poorly in school and may be suspected of drug use. Of course the great majority of American Muslim youth fall somewhere in-between; some flee from their Muslim identity, others are progressive activists, most are moderate, struggling with the anomalies of allegiance to a country that does seem to take policy decisions that are harmful to Muslims abroad and, increasingly, to the domestic population.

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One of the major slogans of Muslim youth movements is the “rejection of culture.” Recently I heard a young man who stated that he was “recovering” from the MSA experience saying that he had attended a play for the first time and really enjoyed it, but somehow felt guilty for associating with this “cultural” thing. I am often told that I speak too much about culture in my classes, and that we should be learning about the “true” Islam.

An ideological premise of internationalist identity Islam is that this “true” Islam is apparently floating above everything cultural. It is pristine and unassailable, politically it has established a utopian state where everyone is happy and honest, and that this state should be re-imposed on humanity today and it will make a better world. Internationalist Muslim revivalist movements such as Jama‘at Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood (
Ikhwan al-Muslimin
) have encouraged this concept of a “cultureless” Islam around the world. These revivalists have been able to dominate Muslim organizations and mosques because of their commitment, pre-existing networks, external material support, and defined ideological agenda. The American immigrant Muslim community welcomed the identity element promulgated by such Muslim organizations in the 1970s and 1980s because it solved the immediate threat of assimilation into American culture, by keeping the youth “Muslim and proud of it.” One can well imagine the problems of Muslim youth, often isolated by having distinctive names, physical appearance, and being associated with a stigmatized culture and religion. No wonder the concept that they were actually the superior ones, fending off the corrupt and evil society around them, rang pleasant.

An example of this is the manner in which one is constantly being warned on Muslim internet lists of the evils of Western cultural elements such as the celebration of birthdays, Halloween, and prom night – the insidious threat of paganism and worse. To be fair, a progressive critique of these practices could well be mounted on the basis of their commercial and commodified nature, their thrust toward a globalized consumerist monoculture, and so on. What I take issue with is the religious and cultural superiority that sustains what I term “identity” Islamic attitudes, the sense of Muslim cheerleading that goes on at so many organized Muslim events for youth and that seems to have been the element most strongly internalized. Identity Islam is not an intellectual critique of alternatives but rather a mindless and rigid rejection of “the Other” and the creation of a de-cultured, rule based space where one asserts Muslim “difference” based on gender segregation, romantic recreations of madrasa experiences, and the most blatantly apologetic articulations of Islam. It replaces spirituality with arrogance and a smug pride in one’s superior manifestation of visible symbols of identity.

The outline of identity Islam is derived from frameworks of Salafi and Wahhabi interpretation.
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It features a rejection of specific cultural elements that diverge from a literal understanding of Islamic norms. Thus, wearing saris or celebrating the birthday of the Prophet are seen as heretical innovations (
bid‘a
). The fact is, almost anything cultural would be a
bid‘a
if everything had to be done as Arabs in the Prophet’s time did it. But who are these ideal Arabs? It is clear that the population in Mecca and Medina were not ideal, in fact the Prophet had constant problems with their rudeness and ignorance. It is also clear that wherever Islamic civilization took root around the world, it acculturated at the same time as it Islamicized. The idea of a “culture-free” Islam is therefore derived from modern ideologies rather than from authentic practice or historical fact.

As part of this celebration and affirmation of pure identity, any discourse purporting to be Islamic is performed and welcomed without analysis or regard for context. For example, I recall a campus MSA meeting where selections of the most naive and apologetic nature from a certain South Asian publication were read out before an audience of university students. No one commented or questioned and the few non-Muslim students in attendance were perplexed and alienated by the childish level of credulity exhibited. If any of the Muslim students had comments or criticisms to offer, they were stifled by the conformity and group-mind culture that excludes diversity and marginalizes independent thinking.

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The MSA was founded in the United States by Muslim students from South Asia and the Arab world in the 1960s. The various local chapters are essentially independent, although they receive suggested directives from a central body.

Thus, it would be unfair to paint all with the same brush. Some campus chapters are exceptionally rigid and exclusionary, others are no doubt progressive. Since students matriculate and graduate, the leadership and membership are constantly changing. However, the direction I am witnessing gives me cause for concern. While in some cases Muslim students form other bodies on campuses as alternatives, MSAs tend to occupy the most accepted position as campus Muslim organizations. Garbi Schmidt, a Danish sociologist of religion, writes about the Muslim student events she attended in Chicago in the 1990s. After describing the context of MSA lectures and especially the events of the annual Islamic Awareness Week, she discussed the rhetoric of most events in terms of their dialogue with “the Other,” the non-Muslim institution and its members:

But the Other – fellow students, teachers – were more than an audience. They were a means to Islamic interpretation. Interpretations of the role of women, political issues, scientific investigations, and media presentations all pointed to an adoption of powerful topics and opinion formers within the United States. Though this at times included an “apologetic pitfall” it also included a means for collective empowerment. By attacking, formulating against, and arguing to formulate more correct views than majority authorities (scientists, politicians, journalists) Muslims appealed for social recognition. By “correcting” the errors of the Other they were convinced (and tried to convince) that although they socially were in minority, the knowledge they represented was intellectually superior.
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Thus, while the apologism of such events and the simplified and rigid identity Islam that they often promote may raise concerns on the part of liberal Muslims and others of the direction MSA students are taking, one can at least understand the rigid stance and triumphalism as empowering individuals feeling disempowered in other contexts.

Sympathy for the pietistic expression of identity Islam may come from the campus ministry and chaplain community who are impressed by the level of participation of Muslim students in religious observances. I note a certain nostalgic admiration of Muslim students’ piety on the part of ministry workers who struggle with involving their largely secularized student populations.

Among some young Muslim ideologues, fear of being co-opted by the “Western” university system leads to a fascination with the madrasa style of learning. Online mullahs provide the most rigid and hateful
fatwas
proscribing the most picayune and oppressive regulations. Western “shaykhs” in robes and turbans purvey a new brand of authoritarian charisma.

For many children of Muslim immigrants technical fields and medicine are seen as being less corrupting than the interpretive humanities and social science subjects, and the former are sometimes justified as being of potential service “to Muslims.” Furthermore, of the Muslim students who study the sciences, very few engage in fields such as the philosophy of science; most prefer to limit themselves

to the applied sciences. In addition, the issues of interpretation raised by the humanities and social sciences involve the sort of nuance and multivalency that more rigid Muslim youth wish to avoid confronting in understanding Islam itself. The lack of involvement in the humanities and social sciences by Muslim youth has been viewed by some American Muslim leaders as detrimental to the community being able to articulate its positions within mainstream society. As a result, small movements toward encouraging these other fields have been made: for example a few Muslim organizations offer scholarships to students who might pursue journalism. At the same time, certain traditionalist Muslim opinion-makers in the West encourage the avoidance of studies whose epistemological underpinnings might threaten the acceptance of a mythologized

worldview.

The origin of the MSAs in the 1960s makes them contemporary to African- American Black Power movements. African-American students lobbied for black studies, and Muslim students, while not yet in a lobbying position (and they are not there yet), responded with the idea of the “Islamization of knowledge” – the call for a critique of the epistemological foundations of academic disciplines from an Islamic perspective. The Islamization of knowledge movement, while failing to dent the hegemony of Western scientific and secular paradigms to the extent of, say, feminist or even post-colonial theory, does partake to a certain extent in the destabilizing force of post-modern plural discourses.

Muslim Student Associations on university campuses may ironically fulfill the need for alternative Muslim spaces as sites of resistance to the dominant “West” and its institutions. Schmidt observes in her study of Muslim culture in Chicago that formal Islamic institutions of learning tend to accommodate to American patterns and standards because of regulations of accreditation, credentials of staff, and so on. More informal spaces such as MSA meetings and campus mosques are therefore sites in which the “imagined madrasa” can be more freely re-created and expressions of identity Islam may be articulated.
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The extremes to which this may be taken, however, are illustrated by the case of an MSA group that would not allow their non-Muslim American professor to enter the campus mosque.

On one occasion, I heard a Friday speech in a student mosque in which the speaker said that in the traditional Islamic educational system the teachers cared for their students as kindly as if they were their own children. In contrast, he stated, modern university education in the West exploits the students so that the teachers are economically profiting from their pupils. I found this comparison especially egregious, since the problem of economic exploitation, bribery, and forcing the students to buy one’s lecture notes is endemic in certain Muslim societies, where the university teachers are paid so poorly that they need to make extra money out of the situation. It may be that pre-modern madrasas cultivated long-term, family type relations among teachers and pupils, or that even today madrasas provide social welfare services such as room and board to poor

students. However, to idealize the contemporary Muslim world, or even the past, in this way is a disservice to the honesty and critical assessment of fact.
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One way of asserting difference is through enforcing rigid norms of gender segregation at “Muslim” events on campus. One young woman at an MSA meeting declared that she didn’t want to even know the names of any “brothers” (male Muslim students at the university), since she should have nothing to do with males at all. Ironically, she used the term “brother” in referring to the male Muslim members of the MSA. Is this what one means by “brotherhood” and “sisterhood,” a level of distance that leads one to not even wish to know the other’s name?
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Muslim students who don’t conform to strict dress codes, at least on campus, are ostracized and called
kafir
behind their back.
Kafir
in American Muslim youth culture has been extended to signify anyone who is different than you, rather like the semantic function of “honkey” in Black Power discourse. It migrates from the theological referent of being a denier of God to that of non-Muslim, or anyone, even another Muslim, co-opted by the majority Western system.

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Some extremist elements in the American Muslim community go so far as to send death threats to a host of progressive and liberal Muslims, and to exercise other forms of ostracization and intimidation. This strategy is used troublingly often among Muslims, even in America, and has to be openly condemned and exposed. In some Islamic centers if there is a contentious discussion or election to a board, one faction or the other may threaten individuals who disagree with them. One reason for the lack of public moderate and progressive voices is the explicit threat of reprisal from the community itself.