Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (62 page)

endnotes

1. To be fair here, I need to point out that this is not a majority reaction but a somewhat extreme one. I have heard of other Muslim youth who were so deeply disturbed by the attacks that they questioned their own faith; others who were dismayed and immobilized; others clearly confused by the mixed reactions in the community, and frankly by the political responses from the West that continue to avoid the real injustices and disparities that exist in American foreign policy.
   

2. K. Gardner and A. Shakur, “I’m Bengali, I’m Asian and I’m living here: the changing identity of British Bengalis,” in
   Desh Pardesh
   , ed. R. Ballard (London: C. Hurst, 1994), 142–64.
   

3. For an insightful discussion and critique of Wahhabi interpretation Islam in the contemporary Islamic world, see the essay titled “The Ugly Modern and the Modern Ugly: Reclaiming the Beautiful in Islam” by Khaled Abou El Fadl in this volume.
   

4. Garbi Schmidt,
   American Medina: A study of the Sunni Muslim Immigrant Communities in Chicago
   (Lund, Sweden: Department of History of Religions, University of Lund, 1998), 167.
   

5. Ibid.
   

6. I should point out that this opinion was not representative of most Muslim students’ views on gender relations.
   

7. Islamic Forum,
   1(1), 2000.
   

8. A historical study of the movement is Suha Taji-Farouki,
   Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate
   (London: Grey Seal, 1996).
   

9. Islamic Forum
   , ibid.
   

10. Ibid.
    

11. Claire Alexander, “Re-imagining the Muslim Community,”
    Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences,
    11(4), 1998, 439.
    

12. One of the essays in this volume, titled “American Muslim Identity: Race and Ethnicity in Progressive Islam” by Amina Wadud, deals with issues of racial prejudice in North American Muslim societies.
    

13. Yasmin Zine, “Muslim Youth in Canadian Schools: Education and the Politics of Religious Identity,”
    Anthropology & Education Quarterly
    , 32(4), 2001, 399–423.
    

14
‌

WHAT IS THE VICTORY OF ISLAM? TOWARDS A

DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDING OF THE
UMMAH
AND

POLITIC AL SUCCESS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Farish A. Noor
1

We have not yet recognized the goal of Islam. We all talk about the Islamic revolution, (but) ask yourselves, what is the goal of Islam? This group, that group, “they curse one another” (
Qur’an, Surah
29:25). This one contradicts that one, this one calls that one deviationist. But we have not yet recognized what Islam demands, what Islam is.
2

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Walking in the streets of London in the early 1990s, I came across a poster that bore the slogan
“The Islamic State: Coming soon to a country near you.”
The poster was put up by the radical Islamist group
Hizb al-Tahrir
, which was originally formed in Palestine in the early 1950s and had spread its branches all over the world, extending as far as Western Europe. For decades groups like
al-Muhajirun
and
Hizb al-Tahrir
have been pre-occupied with the single-minded task of projecting themselves as the sole and exclusive voice of “pure Islam” in the West, confronting not only their respective Western governments but also other Islamic groups and movements that they regard as un-Islamic and “contaminated” by the evils of the Western environment.

Marginalized though they were, groups such as these were propelled to the forefront of European Muslim politics thanks to the machinations of the Western media (perpetually working on the basis of a “take me to your leader” mentality) and variable factors that were beyond the control of anyone. Events such as the
Satanic Verses
controversy, the Gulf War of 1990–1, the military coup in Algeria after the elections of 1992, and the Bosnian crisis contributed to a growing sense of insecurity and persecution among Muslims the world over. For

Muslims living in Europe, the fear of being engulfed by “the Other” and losing one’s identity seemed even more acute.

In time, a host of radical Islamist groups began to appear on local university campuses in Britain and other Western countries. Many of these were made up of young, angry, and frustrated Muslim youths who were desperate for change in their own societies. Fed up with what they saw as the passivity of their elders and weakness of their community, these groups began to mobilize themselves and demand their rights on a communitarian basis. The groups themselves were a myriad assembly of different movements with radically different beliefs and orientations. While some adopted the politics of communitarianism (fighting for Muslim rights on the basis of democratic pluralism and democracy), others opted for a more radical approach by directly challenging the law of the land. Groups like
Hizb al-Tahrir
organized numerous “worldwide” rallies in cities like London which managed to attract mainly local participants and a number of foreign dissidents who graced their events. In many of their rallies and campaigns, talk was rife of the “second coming of Islam” and Islam’s “final victory” over Western hegemony. Another common theme that was often brought up was the final victory over Israel and “international Jewry,” calling on Muslims to unite and rise up against a common foe.

It struck me that what actually united these Muslims were the common negative tropes of the malevolent Other. On the many occasions when I attended these rallies, I was struck by the number of books and leaflets that were being distributed which spoke of the so-called “Western/Jewish/Zionist/Christian/ communist conspiracy against Islam and Muslims.” There were books about how AIDS was a plot to destroy the
umma
, how population control was a Zionist/Vatican plot to stop the growth of Islam, and how young Muslims were being corrupted by the secular education they were being given in Western schools. There were also the usual sensational revelations that insults to Islam could be read in Coca Cola labels, provided one looked at them upside-down and reflected backwards in a mirror, and so on.

Here the unity of the
umma
was based on a simplistic form of dialectical opposition which invariably pitted Muslims against the non-Muslim Other. Two neat chains of equivalences were formed: Islam was equated with Muslim needs and concerns, ethics, morality, spirituality, and justice. By default, everything un-Islamic was portrayed as immoral, secular, worldly, and corrupt. A Hegelian dialectic follows suit: Islam is presented as an oppositional force that has to propel itself towards confrontation and conflict, in order to overcome obstacles placed before it before achieving its final and ultimate triumph.

Another recurrent theme that struck me was the millenarian idea of the victory of Islam over the West and the forces of
kufr
(unbelief). A harrowing image was being painted through the discourses that were circulating in these meetings. The propagandists of groups like
Hizb al-Tahrir
and
al-Muhajirun
spoke of a glorious age yet to come when Islam would reign triumphant over the

West, and the flags and banners of Islam would flutter over the gilded towers and parapets of Western capitals. The Western world, deemed corrupt and decadent to the core, would one day be brought under the heel of the Islamic Caliphate, and Islam (and Muslims) would rule the West, and by extension the world. One could only imagine the effect that such rhetoric would have on the unsuspecting populations of Western Europe (had they been invited to attend).

This state of affairs was allowed to go unchecked and to fester for years. During the 1990s the fortunes of many of these radical groups improved markedly as their leaders were quick to hog the limelight and grab the headlines with their fiery rhetoric and combustible speeches. Calls for the creation of an Islamic state in Britain, the imposition of
Hudud
law in the West, the formation of separate Islamic communes with legislatures, courts, and councils of their own – all reinforced the popular Western prejudice of Islam as a religion of exclusivism, intolerance, and dogmatism, unable to cope with the demands of the present and unwilling to live with the realities of a multicultural world.

Then came September 11, 2001, and in a flash the paranoia of the West took on a life of its own. The nightmare of a resurgent militant Islam growing in the very heart of the Western world seemed to many a reality, and there were just as many at hand to support the claim that Islam was indeed a religion of violence, conflict, and terror. Western authors like Steven Emerson were there to remind their readers that hidden Islamist “cells” had been allowed to develop all over North America and Western Europe, thanks to the liberal laws and regulations of these Western democracies.
3
Others like Rohan Gunaratna wove byzantine narratives about transnational Islamist terror networks working in basements all over the world.
4
The bottom line was simple and clear: Muslims were a hidden menace to the West; they could not be trusted; they should not have been given the same democratic rights as others (on the grounds that they were bound to abuse it); and they have a pathological hatred of the West which cannot be understood, rationalized, or engaged with.

The net result of years of radical thinking among some Islamist movements in the West and elsewhere was the reinforcement and perpetuation of the myth of Islam as a threat to the West. By living up to the stereotype of Muslims as intolerant fanatics, these radical movements had given additional support to the claim that Islam was indeed an enemy and threat to the world. A monumental own-goal had been scored by the radicals against not only themselves, but the Muslim community as a whole.

Caught as Muslims are in this mess that is partly of our own making, the question remains: how do we extricate ourselves from this impasse while maintaining our identity and right to speak about matters that are of pivotal concern for the Muslim community? How can we defend our rights, articulate our demands, communicate our anxieties, and aspire to success in a way that is inclusive and non-confrontational? In short, how do we work towards a new

understanding of the
umma
(and its relationship with the Other) and political success in the contemporary world?

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One of the key features of many contemporary Islamist movements is their reliance on a form of simplistic oppositional dialectics which requires the creation of a negative Other as the constitutive alterity to the Islamist project. Such dialectical opposition rests upon a neat and clear division, usually constructed along a strictly policed boundary line that demarcates the differences between the self (“us”) and the other (“them”).

Such oppositional dialectics have been put to service in the quest for political success and victory by many Islamist movements. This was most clearly demonstrated in the case of the revolution in Iran, which demonstrated a conscious reliance on both traditional Islamic political notions and values, as well as the dialectical approach of Marxism. In the words of Mehdi Bazargan, one of the intellectual founders of the Iranian Revolution,

Freedom requires . . . the existence of an oppositional force, along with the power of choice on behalf of the individual or the society. Opposition promulgates movement and change, which may, in turn, lead to decline and progress, depending on the choice of the agent involved.
5

The instrumentalization of dialectics for the sake of a political project is not new and not specific to any particular tradition. Such a dialectical approach is certainly not unique to Islamist movements. It was, after all, derived from the Western political tradition and experience of Western societies and the Islamists merely took up a strategy that had worked elsewhere. The problem with such a dialectical approach, however, is that it also introduces internal boundaries and strategies of differentiation that contribute to the bifurcation of society and the distortion of social relations. It introduces a moment of internal division and potential conflict that is necessary for the dialectic to get off the ground in the first place. Indeed, such a dialectical approach cannot possibly work without first introducing tension and division within society and, after doing so, emphasizing such divisions. Dialectics requires an enemy to be opposed. And if such an enemy cannot be found it will simply have to be invented.

Over the past few decades we have seen how such a dialectical approach has been normalized and generalized across the board among Islamist movements worldwide. In fact one of the defining features of the current Islamist resurgence worldwide is that it requires the presence of the trope of the negative Other, which manifests itself in a number of forms: secularism, the West, international Jewry/Zionism, capitalism, etc.

There are two problems that should attract our attention from the very beginning. Firstly, from a simply practical and logical point of view, the

dialectical approach would be problematic for any political project aimed at diminishing the potentially conflictual side-effects of confrontational politics for the simple reason that dialectics itself rests upon conflict and opposition. While a dialectical starting point may be the norm expected of all political movements, it has to be noted that dialectics also introduced tensions and divisions that cannot simply be transcended overnight. One of the major problems faced by all movements for social change – be they pacifist or revolutionary in nature – is the difficulty that arises when the foundational revolutionary moment has passed. From then on, the revolution merely devours itself as the dialectics within it consumes more and more victims. This was the case for the French Revolution as it was for the Iranian Revolution that came nearly two centuries later.