Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (9 page)

30. Qur’an 23:29

31. I am here reminded of the similarity of this Islamic perspective to the Jewish mystical concept of
Tikkun olam
, which calls humanity to be responsible for healing the world through concrete acts of righteousness and goodness, alongside mystical meditation on the Divine spheres. May this be one bridge that we can use to bring like-minded and like- hearted Muslims and Jews together to heal our communities, as we seek to heal this world.
Amin. . . .

Part I

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1

THE UGLY MODERN AND THE MODERN UGLY: RECLAIMING THE BEAUTIFUL IN ISLAM

Khaled Abou El Fadl
*

Around the middle of March 2002, Saudi newspapers reported an incident that took place in Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad’s birthplace, that should have caused a public outcry, investigations, and prosecutions. Instead, nothing happened, and the incident is now all but forgotten. According to the official count, at least fourteen young girls burned to death or were asphyxiated by smoke when an accidental fire engulfed their public school. Parents who arrived at the scene described a horrific scene in which the doors of the school were locked from the outside, and the Saudi religious police, known as the
mutawwa‘un
, forcibly prevented girls from escaping the burning school and also prevented firemen from entering the school to save the girls, by beating some of the girls and several of the civil defense personnel. According to the statements of parents, firemen, and the regular police forces present on the scene, the
mutawwa‘un
would not allow the girls to escape or be saved because they were not properly covered, and the
mutawwa‘un
did not want physical contact to take place between the girls and the civil defense forces. The governmental institution that is responsible for administering the
mutawwa‘un
(known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice)
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denied beating any of the girls or civil defense workers, and also denied locking the gates of the school and trapping the girls inside. But witnesses told Saudi newspapers that the
mutawwa‘un
yelled at the police and firemen to stay back, and beat several firemen, as they commanded the girls to go back into the burning building and retrieve their veils (known as
‘abaya
and
niqab
in Saudi Arabia) before they might be allowed to leave the school. Several parents told journalists that they saw at least three girls being beaten with sticks and kicked when they attempted to argue with the
mutawwa‘un
. Several girls did obey the

mutawwa‘un
, and returned to the school in order to retrieve their veils, only to be found dead later.
2

In recent times, Muslim societies have been plagued by many events that have struck the world as offensive and even shocking. This has reached the extent that, from Europe and the United States to Japan, China, and Russia, one finds that Islamic culture has become associated with harshness and cruelty in the popular. When one interacts with people from different parts of the world, one consistently finds that the image of Islam is not that of a humanistic or humane religion. In fact, for many non-Muslims around the world, Islam has come to represent a draconian tradition that exhibits little compassion or mercy towards human beings. From this perspective, the event described above ought not give us pause; it simply becomes yet another inhumane incident in the history of modern Islam that borders on the incomprehensible and insane. Placed in the context of many other morally offensive events, such as
The Satanic Verses
and the death sentence against Salman Rushdie, the stoning and imprisoning of rape victims in Pakistan and Nigeria, the treatment of women by the Taliban, the destruction of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, the sexual violation of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, the excommunication of writers in Egypt, and the killing of civilians in terrorist attacks, this event seems to be just another chapter in a long Muslim saga of ugliness. This saga of ugliness has forced Muslims who are embarrassed and offended by this legacy to adopt apologetic rhetorical arguments that do not necessarily carry much persuasive weight. One of the most common arguments repeated by Muslim apologists is that it is unfair to confuse the religion of Islam with the deeds of its followers. The fact that the followers commit egregious behavior in the name of the religion does not in itself mean that the religion commands or sanctions such behavior. A similar, often repeated argument is that one must distinguish Islamic religious doctrines from the cultural practices of Muslims, the implication being that it is culture and not religion that is the culprit responsible for immoral behavior. Another more subtle argument, but one that surreptitiously betrays the same feelings of discomfort and embarrassment, is simply to remind the world that only a very small percentage of the Muslim world is Arab. Although this is factually correct, Muslims would not have been keen about reminding the world of this fact if the behavior of Arabs or their image was honorable. It is exactly because Arabs suffer from a troubled image in today’s world that many Muslims feel the need to distance Islam from the Arab identity or Arab culture. I call these arguments unpersuasive not because they are inaccurate – in fact,

all the defensive points mentioned above are logical or factually correct. Nonetheless, I call them unpersuasive because they fail to take account of a variety of counter veiling arguments and problems. For instance, they ignore the role of history in understanding the present, and they also ignore the fact that it is not always possible to separate with surgical accuracy a system of belief from the social practices that have grown around it. Specifically, these arguments fail

to take account of the role of human subjectivities in determining and acting upon doctrine. For example, it is true that Arabs constitute twenty percent of the sum total of Muslims in the world today. But it must be remembered that the very racial category of Arab was socially constructed and re-invented in different periods and places of the world. In certain times and places, whoever spoke Arabic eventually became an Arab, or, at least, came to be perceived as an Arab. The very classification of an Arab was the product of a dynamic and creative socio-linguistic process. The Arabic language, itself, demonstrated a remarkable ability to spread to new nations, and, eventually, to Arabize them. Consider, for instance, the complaint of the Bishop of Cordoba, Alvaro, in ninth-century Spain. He states,

Many of my coreligionists read verses and fairy tales of the Arabs, study the works of Muhammedan philosophers and theologians not in order to refute them but to learn to express themselves properly in the Arab language more correctly and more elegantly. Who among them studied the Gospels, and Prophets and Apostles? Alas! All talented Christian young men know only the language and literature of the Arabs, read and assiduously study the Arab books. . . If somebody speaks of Christian books they contemptuously answer that they deserve no attention whatever (
quasi vilissima contemnentes
). Woe! The Christians have forgotten their own language, and there is hardly one among a thousand to be found who can write to a friend a decent greeting letter in Latin. But there is a numberless multitude who express themselves most elegantly in Arabic, and make poetry in this language with more beauty and more art than the Arabs themselves.
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One notices that, at least for conquered Spain, the relation between Arab and Muslim is far more fluid. According to Alvaro, young men were eager to learn the language of the Islamic culture of Andalucia because in that age the Arab was not considered a symbol of reactionism or barbarity. One doubts that a Muslim living back then would have had much incentive to differentiate between Arabs and Islam. Even in countries, such as Persia and India, that preserved their native languages after the Islamic invasions, scholars continued to write most books on theology and law in Arabic.
4
Alvaro’s statement is significant in another respect; it reminds us of the shifting fortunes of the reputation of Muslims in the world. There is no doubt that Islam and Europe have had a long and unpleasant tradition of mutual vilification and demonization, but these processes of the past were materially different from the present.
5
In my view, the Western attempts to vilify Islam in the past were inspired by fear and respect, and Western perceptions of Muslims were not based on any realistic understanding of Muslim socio-political circumstances. Most of the vilifications were nothing more than the anxieties, fears, and aspirations of Westerners projected onto the dominant force at the time without any foundation in reality. At the intellectual,

commercial, and scientific levels, one finds that Westerners borrowed heavily from Muslim social and legal thought and scientific inventiveness. By contrast, today, whatever bigotry exists against Muslims, it is based in the unfortunate socio-political realities experienced by Muslims, which the West perceives, generalizes, and exaggerates, and which then become the basis for stereotypes. Today’s prejudices against Muslims are not based on fear and respect, but on the worst and most cruel type of bigotry, and that is the type that is displayed against those whom the West dominates and controls. Pre-modern bigotry was directed at Muslims, as the masters of the world. Today’s bigotry is directed at those who are seen to be at the bottom of the human hierarchy – people who politically and socially live in a dependent and bonded status, like that of slaves. Hate and bigotry are often based on what social psychologists have called the binary impulse in human beings – the primitive and vulgar tendency to define the world in terms of “us versus them.” This binary impulse first attempts to find an “us,” and then associates that “us” with all that is good and virtuous. At the same time, “them” becomes associated with all that is counter to the “us,” and therefore, the “other” is presumed to be not good, and even evil. What disrupts and challenges this simplistic primitive paradigm is “social need.” Although human societies gravitate towards this binary instinct, the need for interaction and cooperation between different societies and nations acts as a force often inducing human societies to define themselves a way that does not exclude the “other.” With a sufficient amount of overlapping interests, interactions, and conscientiousness, the paradigm could shift from an “us versus them” to an “us–us” perspective.
6
In the pre-modern age, although there is clear evidence of a strong binary impulse pervading both the Muslim and Western worlds, given the scientific and intellectual achievements of Muslims, Christian and Jewish bigotry towards Muslims had to be tempered by the element of need. Both Jews and Christians could not help but be influenced by Muslim intellectual products, and this made the dynamics with Islam complex and multi-faceted.
7
In the modern age, however, the binary perspective of Muslims is no longer one that is undertaken from a position of strength: the relative self-sufficiency of the West is matched by the economic dependency of the Muslim world. Muslim nations are underdeveloped and economically and political dependent, and in the contemporary age there is little that Muslim cultures are able to contribute to the West, other than the Muslim faith.
8
But offensive incidents, such as those mentioned above, greatly impact upon the way that this faith is understood in the West, and further feed into binary constructs
vis-a`-vis
Islam and Muslims.
9
Put simply, such incidents of stark ugliness lead many to believe that the Islamic tradition and civilization is fundamentally at odds with the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that a civilizational showdown or confrontation between Islam

and the West is inevitable.
10

My point in this article is not to examine the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, and I am also not interested in assessing the reasons for the Western bias and

prejudice against Islam or Muslims. I am interested, however, in exploring what might be called the vulgarization of contemporary Islam.
11
By “vulgarization” I mean the recurrence of events that seem to shock the conscience of human beings or to be contrary to what most people would identify as moral and beautiful. As noted above, Islam in the modern age has become associated with violence, harshness, and cruelty, and although mercy and compassion are core values in Islamic theology, these are not the values that most people identify with Islam. As argued below, Islam in the modern age has become plagued by an arid intellectual climate and a lack of critical and creative approaches, which has greatly hampered the development of a humanistic moral orientation. In my view, in order for an intellectual tradition to develop morally, and to vigorously confront renewed moral challenges, a rich and critical intellectual discourse is necessary. But the contemporary Islamic world has been intellectually impoverished, and so there have been far too few influential philosophical or critical intellectual movements emerging from the Muslim world in the modern age. As I argue later, even the most puritan and literalist movements within contemporary Islam have remained largely reactive and intellectually dependent.

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The incident recounted above regarding the schoolgirls and religious police in Mecca ought to give all Muslims a long conscientious pause. If the event did in fact take place as witnesses alleged that it did, then, in my view, it ought to mark a point for Muslims to rethink much of their experience in the contemporary age. This incident symbolizes not only the abysmal condition of women within certain theological orientations in Islam, but also the gross misuse of the doctrines and traditions of Islamic law in the contemporary age. At the most basic level, even if one assumes that Islamic law does command strict adherence to rules of seclusion and veiling, the necessity of preserving human life would trump any such rule.
12
Furthermore, the Qur’an, itself, clearly states that whatever rules of seclusion might have been commanded, at one time or another, for women, had one justification and one justification only, and that is the safeguarding of women from molestation or harm.
13
The death of these girls was contrary to the very
raison d’eˆtre
and every possible rational basis for the laws of seclusion. One even wonders, if the preservation of the life of these girls had any value whatsoever to the Saudi religious police, why this police did not do something as simple as unlocking the gates of the burning schools, and then withdrawing all the men from the area so that the girls could escape to safety without being seen by men. If the religious police were sufficiently concerned, they could have even removed their own head gear (known as the
ghutra
) and placed it on the heads of the escaping girls, thus allowing them to survive.
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The point, however, is not the Saudi religious police’s lack of creative problem solving, or their abnormal obsession with the seductive power of women, or