Some observations on the Michael Muhammad Knight versus Hamza Yusuf articles

Recently Michael Muhammad Knight published two provocative pieces on Vice critiquing Hamza Yusuf as a white convert and a spiritual salesman.

Here is the first one. It's called "The Problem with White Converts" and features a huge picture of Hamza Yusuf.
Here is the second one. It's called "Michael Muhammad Knight vs. Hamza Yusuf." It has a picture of Knight with a cape on, about to get in the wrestling ring with Yusuf.

Perhaps most readers outside the US have not even heard of Michael Muhammad Knight, so the context will seem unfamiliar. If that is the case, I recommend skipping the articles altogether. There are likely better uses of your time. But if you are American, what MMK is saying is important and true, although problematic.

Here are my cursory observations on the two articles:

1. MMK is not know for having good manners, or rather I should say, since I don't know him personally, he is not known for conforming to the rhetorical and performative aspects that Muslim scholars and the larger Muslim community understand as good manners. That means he says things in a bald-faced way, which makes some Muslims uncomfortable and means they are more likely to write him off.

2. To imply, as MMK does in the above articles, that Yusuf is some kind of huckster who is spouting rhetoric he does not believe is disrespectful, and wrong. Not just morally wrong (in the sense of implying that Yusuf is not sincere), but unverifiably wrong. Whether or not another person believes as he/she says is not a matter for idle speculation on the internet. Hamza Yusuf deserves more respect, not because he is Hamza Yusuf, but because it is neither good manners nor good argumentation to imply that someone is insincere. MMK ought to know as much, given how many times he has likely been dismissed, attacked, called insincere, etc.

3. White converts using Islam to authenticate and thereby de-privilege and "de-whiten" themselves is a real phenomenon. It is not altogether a bad thing. There are ways of moving through these spaces with integrity, and avoid becoming a slogan spouting, cartoonish parody. An analogy might be drawn to William Wimsatt's famous essay in Bomb The Suburbs "We Use Words Like Mackadocious", in that the attempt to shed white skin privilege by becoming Muslim often mirrors similar attempts by white kids trying to be down with hip-hop culture. There is an elaborate "hyper-performativity" of Muslim-ness (thank you Mahdi Tourage!) that mirrors the hyper-performativity of blackness in its relentless search for authenticity. I think Hamza Yusuf is a poor example of this, however. MMK could have done some more research, or perhaps even offered up himself as an example (actually he has in his books), before targeting Yusuf in this article.

4. The racial rhetoric of the "white convert", and the use of Hamza Yusuf as an example obscure an important point MMK is making, which is:
   The "classical Islamic tradition" is being packaged and sold as a product in the US, and it is product that cannot begin to fulfill the expectations people have of it. Notice that Hamza Yusuf and others who study abroad rarely speak on the debates going on over interpretation in the places they studied. Take Mauritania for example: I have yet to hear Hamza Yusuf give an opinion on how the Maliki fiqh scholars dealt with slavery in that country. It was instructive to hear an Mauritanian activist talk about other activists who burned books of Maliki fiqh, because of Mauritanian fiqh scholars complicity and intransigence with regards to the issue of slavery! These Mauritanian activists symbolically enacted their belief that the "classical Islamic tradition" did not have the resources to "do what was necessary" in Mauritania. Whether or not they were correct, it is instructive that there is a deep and divisive debate within the classical Islamic tradition that touches on issues of basic human rights. The packaging of the tradition hides the dimensions of these debates from Hamza Yusuf's audiences.

5. Lastly, a major issue which prevents MMK's point from really getting a hearing is that, by and large, lay people do not see their religion as religious studies scholars see it. Religious studies scholars tend to see religions as historically shifting sets of discourses and practices without an essence that is constantly debated and constantly undergoing change. But everyday people prefer their religion as an ideal that humans need to realize through obedience. It is something to be lived and practiced as a route to perfection. Historicization is seen as a threat to faith, an undermining of metaphysical certitudes. One hears, for example, in conversations among Muslim Americans, "Islam is perfect, but I am not." The attraction of an ideal is very strong in human history and human thought, and the logic of the historian (or even the anti-historical, anti-essentialism of Nietzche or the Tao) is cold comfort to those attracted by this idealism.

Inshallah, I am developing some further thoughts on the idea of tradition, empirical certitude, faith, belief, law, practice and the text, which will elaborate in more detail some things I have been thinking of in relation to the issue MMK raised. I hope to post it soon.
-NLM

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"Intellectually Black and Socially South Asian": Michael Muhammad Knight

excerpt from Sepia Mutiny:

(the pic is of W.D. Fard)
What’s interesting about Knight’s story for our purposes is the role South Asian Americans play in his books, especially Bangladeshis and Pakistani Americans. At one point early in “Blue-Eyed Devil” (and I can’t find the exact passage for some reason), he describes his engagement with Islam in America as “intellectually black and socially South Asian,” and the phrase has stuck with me.

Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America began as a series of columns Knight wrote for the website Muslim WakeUp! between 2003 and 2005. Some chapters are personal accounts of hanging out (and sometimes hooking up) with Bangladeshi American girls he meets in environments like ISNA. These chapters alternate with travel experiences and encounters, all loosely structured around resolving the identity of the figure who inspired the founding of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s, a figure known as W.D. Fard (or sometimes Wallace Fard Muhammad).

One of the major threads in Blue-Eyed Devil is the thesis, which Knight investigates at length, that this pioneering figure in black Islamic theology, W.D. Fard, may have actually been from South Asia, rather than the Middle East, as was originally thought. There is at least some evidence uncovered by Knight and others (none of it overwhelming) that Fard may have come from India via Fiji. After 1934, Fard disappeared for awhile, and officially no one knows what happened to him. However, the successor to Elijah Muhammed in the black Muslim community in the U.S., Warith Deen Muhammed, claimed that Fard re-appeared as a “Pakistani” Imam in the Bay Area named Muhammed Abdullah starting around 1959, and died in 1976.

The prospect of W.D. Fard as a South Asian immigrant is a thesis not so much proved as explored in Blue-Eyed Devil. But it presents an interesting image: this founding figure in black nationalist Islam may not have been of African, but South Asian, descent.

Knight’s narrative involves contemporary desis to a considerable extent. One passage, which gives a strong indication of Knight’s complex relationship to South Asian American peers, is in a section where he talks about going to a Muslim Summer Camp in the U.S.:

Often I’d try to boost my Muslim cred by wearing the right kind of hat but only ended up looking like a crazy convert with something to prove. Which I was, of course. I had taken a decent religion and made it real crazy, crazier than any of the good normal kids at my Islamic summer camp back in Rochester. All those desi teenagers would go out between lunch and Zuhr to play basketball or soccer or man-hunt and I’d sit in the office pouring through Bukhari with the imams telling me that it was okay to go outside and play, that even Prophet Muhammad enjoyed sports. I had soon read enough to teach kids my own age who had been raised with Islam around them all their lives. I remember one summer-camp afternoon when all the kids sat in a circle in the mosque and the imams asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said that I wanted to be an imam or an alim and assumed that everyone else would say the same thing, but one after another it was all doctor, engineer, computer programmer. It blew me away; I thought we all wanted to live in mosques and read the Qur’an all day. (3)

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