Islam, Christianity and LGBT in the United States: What do we owe to each other?

This is a response to Mobeen Vaid's reflection from Feb. 19, 2020. The author of this piece is an excellent, incisive writer. I enjoy reading him, in spite of my substantive disagreements, because he makes me think. This piece is not the best example of his abilities. In fact, I think the piece shows that the author has some blind spots, some unexamined bigotry on the LGBT issue, as do many of your Muslim faves on this issue. To see why, and to see what I believe to be the shortcomings of his approach, it may help to imagine the post below being written by a Christian about Muslims. To understand the validity of this comparison, we need to erase the Eurocentric distinction of distinct "religious" and "non-religious" communities in modern society. This doesn't mean denying that certain groups think of themselves as religious groups, rather it means seeing that IT MATTERS how, and with what language, groups relate to each other in a plural society. Under US law, religious groups don't have a privileged right to an authentic identity that exceeds that of any other group. In the US, there isn't a meaningful legal distinction between the protection for religious identity, and the protection for sexual identity, although today a number of conservative Christian legal theorists are highly invested in making the distinction. However, both are legally protected by the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. A thought experiment I often perform when thinking through the subtleties of this issue, is to imagine if a Christian wrote about Islam, the way Vaid writes about LGBT. I can see a Christian 'apologizing' for centering their point of view unequivocally with the following, betraying their profound anxiety about losing followers: "There are increasingly Christians who are attracted to the abominable heresy that is Islam, who are still trying to live a life of fidelity to Jesus Christ, in spite of the increasing public tolerance for Islam's perversion of the gospel." or, an edited version of a sentiment expressed in Vaid's article, from a Christocentric perspective : "Today, Christian activists and politicians are free to support masjids being built in majority Christian neighborhoods, the legalization of polygamy, the practice of the sharia, restrictions on Christian religious freedom, and basically any other pro-Muslim program without receiving even mild push back or concern from anyone other than a few nominal corners online." We can recognize the 'right' of someone to express these opinions, about Muslims as well as gays and lesbians, even if we find them distasteful. But if it is important to critique the above sentiment as partial and based on low-information and a degree of hysteria, then it is equally important to challenge the sentiments expressed in the linked piece by Vaid. With study, we should be able to recognize that the Christian perspective I articulated above is Islamophobic, even if it is a valid generalization from the perspective of an authentically, orthodox Christianity. Similarly, LGBT-phobic Muslims are expressing a clearly recognizable form of bigotry, even if it is a valid generalization deeply rooted in Muslim religious orthodoxy. There are a number of shortcomings and contradictions in modern social progressivism, which Vaid is an eloquent critic. But these contradictions pale in comparison to the contradictions that would arise if orthodox Muslim and Christian views of human sexuality were implemented on a universal basis in US society today, or even ONLY within their respective communities. With its shortcomings, 'liberal progressivism' still provides a valuable safety valve for victims to escape from some of the more damaging views of sex and gender relations emanating from within religious communities.

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A Different Take on American Muslim Progressivism and Identity Politics

A response to a Medium post, "On American Muslim Progressivism and Identity Politics", by Mobeen Vaid: 

This is a thought provoking piece that I disagree with. By way of opening up a line of critique, consider this short passage from the author: "This recalibrated politics represents a radical departure from the American Muslim community of yesterday that spoke with pride of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, not as cultural symbols who shared an overlapping “identity” with themselves, but as people who contributed in positive ways to society, lived admirably, and embodied the ethics, morals, and values that — and here lies the crucial difference — emerge from a life informed by God’s instruction."

Now I have no doubt that many American Muslims did just that. But to reduce of the history of the 'American Muslim community'-- replete with personality disputes, insane theological hair-splitting, cult-like thinking, ethnic/racial tensions, and a number of prominent spiritually abusive figures-- to a simple group of united pious folks, and to then contrast that putative piety of the past in such a way that subtly communicates that today's activist and progressive Muslims don't seek to live a life informed by God's instruction, is not an argument grounded in actually existing histories. It is a form of cultural anxiety dressed up in the clothes of nostalgia.

It is worth noting in passing that today's focus on sexual autonomy as the far boundary point between 'what Islam believes' and the alleged degeneracy of modern culture, sometimes obscures a useful fact to remember: that Muslim communities of the past argued just as passionately, with plenty of Quranic justification, over issues Muslims today view as relatively minor. In all likelihood in a hundred years or less, controversial issues we now consider pressing will have been definitively resolved and the consensus will be incorporated into religious discourse, through strategic forgetting.

The author asks: "Will we stand by idly and preside over the effective secularization of American Muslims and the reduction of “Muslim” to a mere social identity marker?"

Assuming for a moment that this reduction is what is actually happening, what would *not* idly standing by look like? The author provides some clues about how he thinks about these things in another essay (https://medium.com/…/on-gender-wars-metoo-and-building-a-pr…):

"Muslims need to speak forthrightly about the sex-specific obligations of the Shari’a, even when they are inegalitarian. Obedience to one’s husband in matters of good is necessary for a healthy household (with due recognition to the typical machinations of household disagreement, of course). Non-maḥram men and women must maintain reasonable separation within parameters established in the Shari’a, and both should lower their gaze with the other, particularly when shahwa is felt. Khalwa is impermissible and should not be disregarded absent dire circumstances. Men must retain their responsibility as qawwām over women — providing financially, guiding spiritually, and protecting socially (even — and especially — against those malefactors in our midst)"

These are confident assertions of the necessity of patriarchal control. But unless Muslims are in a position of majoritarian political power, most of these ideas cannot be practically implemented without causing massive social chaos and fitna. The answer often given in response individualizes the response; Muslims 'should want' to implement these things in their own life to protect their piety. There ought to be space for such patriarchal piety to exist; you cannot legislate it out of existence as it forms a deeply held part of the psyche of millions of people. But let us imagine the implications of implementing some version of this vision in a public sphere.

Mobeen Vaid, like many neo-traditionalists, is relatively naive to the pitfalls of that implementation. In the current political climate, most of these proposals would mean instantiating a millet-like form of internal religious government in which 'Muslims' as a bloc govern themselves as Jews did in the Ottoman empire or as Copts do in modern Egypt. Is Vaid prepared for what this entails: the abandonment of the struggle for equal civil rights in a secular public sphere? Vaid completely ignores that many religious people have confidently balanced a set of private conservative beliefs with commitment to a more robustly liberal public sphere. In Vaid's model, it appears that, unless patriarchal piety is publically implemented in the Muslim community, it does not deserve the name of Islam. He quotes Dr. Sherman Jackson, but does not engage with Jackson's concept of the "Islamic secular".

A self-governing Muslim community in the US under patriarchal law would basically look a lot like Mormonism. In fact, many Muslim communities have attempted to replicate the model of Mormons. Very few succeed in overcoming the inherently cult-like dynamic of that kind of formation. The further danger these strictures represent to faith can be understood by imagining what should happen when Muslim parents, like well meaning religious parents in many contexts, attempt to 'crack down' and 'enforce' this hyper-patriarchal model on their children. In societies where patriarchal piety is enshrined in law, private sexual morality is a matter of public anxiety and concern. More often than not, one can observe the spiritual rot this authoritarianism produces. In fact it is rebellion against the harshness of these strictures that is the main producer of atheism in religiously authoritarian states. Progressive Muslim culture, for all its foibles, acts as an invaluable safety valve for critical questioning of internal community dynamics. I want to ask Vaid if he think issues like the imam grooming underage girls in Texas, or Mawlana Saleem in Chicago would have come to light without a critical lens on patriarchal piety, by which to hold the community accountable and shine a light on its processes of governance? The anti-authoritarian impulse of progressivism gives a huge fillip to struggles against the abuse of this patriarchal model. Right now, there are a number of morally upright liberal/left alternatives in the American counterculture that don't come with the heavy baggage of patriarchal purity culture. Vaid would have you believe those are a liability to the Muslim community and an affront to the ummah's piety as a whole. I regard this as an immature view because it does not realistically address the implications of implementing patriarchal piety in governance and law, nor the positive aspects of having a spectrum of thought on social issues without resorting to false universalism.

The emphasis on reviving patriarchy as the route to reviving piety raises some interesting questions as to which of the many Muslim social issues should take precedence for the US-based ummah, for Vaid's is not the dominant model of public engagement. Modern Muslim social justice orgs in the US have rightfully given precedence to liberation theology as the entry point for Islam into the public sphere. But perhaps Muslims should focus more on sexual issues, as Vaid suggests. What about allying with right-wing evangelicals and Catholics on abortion? Or joining evangelical Christians in advocating for a reversal of same-sex marriage equality? This tactic has to be considered very carefully in a climate of Islamophobia. Do Muslims in the US have sufficient institutional power to wage these battles? And at what cost?

Finally, what about socio-religious issues where Muslims would stand alone? How much priority is it prudent to give to issues that were once an integral part of the tradition? Should the Muslim community advocate the government to have the right to punish apostates, as is mentioned in the tradition? Should Muslims advocate for all women who are unmarried to travel with a male companion? Should they endorse the Prophetic sunna of holding slaves and taking concubines? Vague resorts to imagined ideals of 'sacred activism', 'Quran and sunnah', 'ultimate commitments to God' are simply not cutting it. They will all ultimately fail to stem the tide. And in spite of the tone of that essay, not all of that tide is negative. Allowing people to think of themselves beyond and outside of Abrahamic religious identities, esp the globally hegemonic ones of Christianity and Islam, is a positive development overall for religious faith.

The anxiety that many people of faith, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, feel at modern statist liberalism is authentic and must be acknowledged and mitigated as much as possible. In many cases the deeply rooted beliefs of religious communities provide some of the best critiques of injustice, tyranny and greed. But religious commentators shouldn't just get a pass in the name of infusing the public square with piety. Instead, anyone within those traditions who is interested in critical thinking ought to scrutinize what is being offered as an alternative to overcome this anxiety. Most of the times the rhetoric of these alternatives far outruns the practical reality of their implementation. Many times there are extremely compelling reasons for rejecting these alternatives, and not all of them need to have some explicit scriptural justification. Some of them are pragmatic, others are deeply rooted in prophetic akhlaq, others in general understandings of the fragility of knowledge, others in a spiritual discipline against religious ressentiment.

postscript: It ought to be noted that this nexus of anxiety-nostalgia I describe also underlies a great deal of modern Hindutva discourse about liberalism. Although tempered in the US by Muslims being a minority, today's global neo-traditionalism shares some profound similarities with the Hindu right wing, in its nostalgia for an imagined social unity, its anxiety about changing forms of sexual autonomy for women, and its antagonistic relationship to modern science. Like the Hindu right, neo-traditionalists are wont to discuss Islam primarily as an aggrieved and victimized subject who has been betrayed by modern liberalism, even in societies where Muslims are an overwhelming majority.

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Religion, Monotheism, and Ancestral Tradition

Religions that shift veneration away from accomplished and wise ancestors to more abstract, anti-iconic notions of divinity are most successful in times of social crisis, when elders fail in their duties and the collective wisdom of past ancestors seems unable to address the complexity of interpersonal conflict, ecological crisis or the breakdown of political order. In such moments the idea of calling on a force/idea that transcends local ancestral wisdom (a High God) becomes more and more powerful. Originally the High God and the Ancestral traditions could coexist in mutual harmony. But social crisis has tended historically to weaken the ancestral tradition and strengthen the High God tradition (who is seen as above it). This is at least part of the explanation why the original Egyptian religion was weakened over time and eventually abandoned. The reasons for this gradual shift are something I am still studying. Historically, the vulnerability of ancestral transmission as a form of active wisdom, has been replaced by the idea of wisdom as coming in the form of 'revelation' from a High God. An exclusivist 'High God' paradigm has become the new 'norm' of religious practice, condemning the older tradition of ancestral transmission as paganism, shirk, idolatry, kufr, superstition, etc, and projecting itself as ancient and unchanging and true, over against the false idolatry of the ancestral tradition. When believers in the exclusivist High God tradition complain about the anti-iconoclasm of the Wahhabis, they are really complaining about the epistemology at the very core of their own professed tradition, taken to its logical extreme. My own opinion is that the healthiest belief systems have to make room for both communication with ancestral traditions, broadly conceived (an open question is: what does it mean to communicate with ancestors in 2016, when those links were severed in past generations?), and the High God tradition as a form of transcendent 'outside' knowledge. The old ways are not always the best ways, nor are the new ways necessarily an improvement on the past.

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On why the Asadian turn in Islamic studies isn't far enough

I've written before on this blog about the profound influence Talal Asad's Geneaologies of Religion had on my thinking and scholarship. As with many books that become semi-canonical in the academy, however, Geneaologies has inspired a host of lesser works, combining astute theoretical insights on the Islamic tradition with often astounding shortsightedness and naive idealism

. The critiques of liberalism, secularism and the secular nation-state by Asad, Hallaq, Saba Mahmood and others have succeeded admirably in historicizing these processes of formation and dealing with the particularist and paradoxical edge of secularism's universalist Enlightenment aspirations. 

The aforementioned theorists have been markedly less successful in critiquing  the particularist edge of their own favored discursive and governing traditions. As I've said before, dealing with the Islamic tradition as a 'tradition' doesn't solve the problem it purports to. It only circles back to it by way of a shifting battleground in the same war. For the battle over the Islamic tradition contains precisely the impulse which Asad, Hallaq and Mahmood critique so trenchantly in liberal secularism: the tendency of a governing order to define and put limits on cosmic understandings of human destiny. Secularism is certainly the western state's attempt to do that, but the theorists I mentioned don't go far enough in recognizing the paradoxical nature of attempts to govern the divine, and to place those who don't submit to that governance beyond the pale. They don't deal with the most striking instances of the Islamic tradition's own attempts to govern religious order, and the manifest shortcomings of these attempts, predicated as they are on an unsustainable line (created by the Islamic tradition) between monotheism as order, piety, rational ground and sanctity, and polytheism as shirk, rebellion, illogic and disobedience.

The irony that this is virtually the same line christocentric secularism draws between itself and islam should not be lost on the astute observer. The reasons for this are many, but at least part of it is that Christianity and Islam both are entangled with Aristotelian paradigms, that inform their approach to logic, order, being and presence. Another limitation is a shared legacy of monotheism, which drastically narrows the ability of either tradition to conceive poly or non-theistic ethical traditions. The lack of serious philosophical engagement with non-monotheistic african traditions, as well as non-theistic Asian concepts of the same, stymies them saying anything of deeper relevance to those interested in how mystical imagination can inform governance.

In point of fact, the critique of secularism is defensive. Asad and others working in the US and European academies want to create space for "piety" (as they understand it) to operate more freely in the western public sphere as well as in academia. But they have no answer at all to the problem of governance in the modern middle east or modern society more generally, especially the tension between religiously particularist modes of governance and a presumably neutral state. They have little to say on how secularism might be mystical, or how it might positively inform governance outside the United States and Europe (and what little they do say, I might add, seems to me incredibly shortsighted and privileged by their own positionality) They are able to show that the state is rarely, if ever neutral, but quite unable to conceive a theory of the self and good governance that would serve as a viable alternative to that of secular individualism. I am suggesting here that one reason they are unable is that their own visions are constrained (at least discursively) by an imagination of Abrahamic traditions as being at the center of the earth.

Their attempts to sympathize us to those with religious commitments is an important and vital project. But it leaves unanswered the vitally important questions about how a non-secular governance might look that did not discriminate among its members by religious affiliation. Such a project is vitally important in a time of seemingly ever-expanding religious bigotry at home and abroad.

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Public Healing Monotheism and Violence: The Religious Encounter in African History

a Mijikenda sacred grove in East Africa

The various teachers of precolonial African history I've had the privilege to learn from all emphasize that “public healing” is a useful descriptive to understand how a variety of people in Africa understood the connected realm that Western scholars separate into religion and politics. Public healing in Africa symbolized and symbolizes the collective aspiration for harmony, social reproduction and abundance. Public healing was about healing the political-social body. One of my mentors calls this dynamic discourse of public healing “a moral aspiration for community.” And it is very very old. For instance, if you go back and look at the identity of the earliest dynasty in Great Lakes history, the progenitor to all the subsequent kingdoms, that dynasty is not really a dynasty at all, but a coalition of healers, mystics and wisemen called the Cwezi.

Till today, the Cwezi continue to be venerated, as what some might label as gods, or perhaps more accurately, ancestors or spirits. In some places in the Great Lakes region, the place where this veneration happened was a territorial shrine. In 1996, the Ugandan journalist Geoffrey Kamali described a fleet of seven taxis filled with people who left Kampala in the middle of the night following an “ancestor guide”, someone who had the ability to communicate with these spirits. They sought a shrine on a hilltop outside Kampala, a place with many caves. They brought cash and coffee berries to give to the omusambwa of that place, the territorial spirit. During the fire, some people became possessed by the spirits and the ancestor guide moved through the fire without being burned. Afterwards she took the people to the shores of Lake Victoria, where she tattooed their right arms and asked them to confess their sins to her and swallow several of the coffee berries.

The Great Lakes experience is not unique. Similar kinds of shrines exist at the East African coast. The Giriama are one group among the Mijikenda, a people who have lived near the Swahili coast for many centuries. In the precolonial era, they most often lived in rural areas adjacent to the coastal towns. They had their own forms of sacred enclosures/shrines in the form of groves of trees, called kayas. In 1914, the British, in response to Giriama resistance to British colonial taxation and labor policies, demolished one of these sacred groves. The main trees and gates were blown up, all the dwellings and trees inside the kaya burned, and the entrance dynamited and barricaded. This prompted a rebellion by the Giriama, in which 5000 houses were burnt and 150 men killed. Harming religious-political space touched to the core of Giriama conceptions of the good and the sacred.

Nor where such sacred shrines confined to the continent of Africa. They were also found throughout "Arabia" both before and after the arrival of Islam, and constituted an important part of how people related to the divinity. When we think of the ka'aba, we usually think of a place in Mecca, but a ka'aba could potentially be any sacred place where people would gather to seek intercession. It was a plural religious space, where violence was forbidden. This is not to say that people always respected these boundaries, but there were rules elaborated about coexisting sacred spheres.

For monotheistic visions of divinity, public healing can look a lot like polytheism, paganism or shirk. Where it gets controversial for African and Islamic history is when the Prophet Muhammad is directly implicated in the destruction of such sacred places. Hisham Ibn al-Kalbi, the famous Kufan scholar, in his book Kitaab-ul-asnam, reports the following passage:

"When the Apostle of God captured Mecca and the Arabs embraced Islam, among the delegates who came to pay their homage was Jarir ibn-'Abdullah. He came to the Apostle and embraced Islam before him. Thereupon the Apostle addressed him saying, "O Jarir! Wilt thou not rid me of dhu-al-Khalasah?" Jarir replied, "Yea." So the Apostle dispatched him to destroy it. He set out until he got to the banu-Abmas of the Bajilah [tribe] and with them he proceeded to dhu-al-Khalasah. There he was met by the men… who resisted him and attempted to defend dhu-al-Khalasah. He, therefore, fought them and killed a hundred men of the Bahilah, its custodians, and many of the Khath'am; while of the banu-Qubafah ibn-'Amir ibn-Khath'am, he killed two hundred. Having defeated them and forced them into flight, he demolished the building which stood over dhu-al-Khalasah and set it on fire." 

This incident is also in Sahih al-Bukhari :

"During the Jahiliya, there was a house called Dhu-l-Khalasa or Al-Ka'ba Al-Yamaniya or Al-Ka'ba Ash-Shamiya. The Prophet said to me, "Won't you relieve me from Dhu-l-Khalasa?" So I set out with one-hundred-and-fifty riders, and we dismantled it and killed whoever was present there. Then I came to the Prophet and informed him, and he invoked good upon us and Al-Ahmas." 

Keep in mind here, we are talking about the destruction of a very similar type of shrine to that of the Cwezi shrines or the Giriama sacred groves. In fact, Dhu al-Khalasa was simply a carved piece of white quartz, resting in a place called the ka’aba by the local people who tended it. People used to come to this shrine when faced with difficult decisions and seek advice. It was sacred to those people, as showed by their determination to defend it.

The above incident raises several uncomfortable questions for the Islamic tradition and, beyond that for all monotheistic traditions. What is the difference between ancestor veneration and idolatry, and who gets to decide what that difference is? What are the limitations of the concept of toleration in dealing with the religious other? How does monotheism construct its other? I wonder if we regard the Prophet Muhammad’s need to destroy other people’s holy objects as a form of necessary evil on the way to monotheism. Were the tribes and the men a form of collateral damage in the march of the progress of the deen?

Forms of ancestor veneration and spirit possession have been a nearly universal part of all cultures and civilizations. The ancient Egyptians venerated ancestors, through a panoply of shrines, gods, idols, statues, figurines. One wonders however, if the ancient Egyptians worshipped their gods as a community in Mecca under the Prophet, would they have been regarded as rank idolators? I don't know the answer, but the above incident made me think about the likelihood that their buildings and shrines would have been burnt down and destroyed under those circumstances.

I would suggest that we need to interrogate the epistemological assumptions at the root of 1) the categorical move to create people whose beliefs place them beyond the sacred law, and thus in natural rebellion 2) the logic that makes it necessary to kill hundreds of men, simply to destroy an idol, and the moral calculus that makes figuring that possible. More is at work here than mere “Arab ethnocentrism” or “Arab racism” versus “African” religion. In fact what is at work is a profound devaluation of other forms of epistemology, cosmology and meaning making about the sacred in Africa.

For Muslims, the Prophet Muhammad is understandably the moral exemplar of a virtuous life. This is not an attack on the Prophet. As a human, he was truly great, a man who rose above the times he lived in. As a prophet, he was no doubt inspired. As a political leader he often dealt with difficult situations with the greatest sensitivity to human personality. But on the coexistence of monotheism with what we understand as “polytheism”, paganism, shirk, or iconoclasm, I believe the overwhelming historical evidence doesn’t support the way he linked polytheism to disobedience to the one God.

The great scholar of religion Talal Asad has done much work denaturalizing the secular, as something that the West created to help it imagine itself as civilized, and those still stuck in religious orthodoxy as barbarous. In fact, Asad and his many students have said and have demonstrated that secularism created religion, as a category with which to consign forms of non-rational belief. But Asad and his students have not gone far enough. Just as Euro-Americans have had difficulty recognizing that their experience of the Enlightenment was particular to their cultural and historical trajectory and its categories, so the Abrahamic traditions have had incredible difficulties recognizing the particularity of their own experience of universal religion. It would be interesting to get Asad's thoughts on how the Abrahamic faiths have created a category of shirk or polytheism,  filled it with a host of negative, immoral meanings which do not correspond to what we actually find in the historical record, and then constructed themselves in distinction to it. This process of meaning making has had profoundly tragic consequences for non-monotheistic aspirations for moral community and divinity.

I do not think these anecodetes exhaust the possible entailments of Islam, Muslims or Islamic epistemologies. But they do highlight the degree to which force, conquest and a deliberate violence, both epistemological and literal are part of attempts to secure a particular tradition as sacrosanct. How do we avoid linking the sacred with a concept of governing exclusion? In reforming society a prophet has to participate in public life, in the affairs and concerns of the many, rather than in the cultivation of the one. The prophetic has to combine the ethical with the political. As the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal describes it, the Prophet returns: ‘to insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history, and thereby create a fresh world of ideals.’ To make a "fresh world of ideals" is a political act; the creation of a world is inherently political. But such a world cannot be sustained, if it continues to instantiate such a profound disregard for epistemologies that do not share in the logocentric assumptions of the dominant Abrahamic religions.

Finally, I want to suggest that we not be so quick to justify the Prophet’s actions above as necessary or divinely inspired. By apologizing for them, we create a direct connection to imagining and modeling the type of world we want to create, support and live in. If we as scholars of Islam want to challenge the rhetoric of ISIS and Salafism, if we want to imagine a world where we create enough room for “other ways of knowing”, for traditions which challenge the narrow technocratic ways of knowing of the modern world, and its attendant domination over nature, then we cannot afford to ignore some acts of profound violence and disrespect of other ways of knowing, at the root of ‘our’ tradition. In reckoning with these acts, I think we will be led into new definitions of tawhid, in which we are not so quick to think that we know the difference between tawhid and shirk. Inshallah, that will lead us into a profound humility and care in our encounter with the religious other.

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Write and Live Forever (inspiration from ancient Egypt)

from Ancient Egyptian Literature, edited by Miriam Lichtheim

"As to those learned scribes,
Of the time that came after the gods,
They who foretold the future,
Their names have become everlasting,
While they departed, having finished their lives,
And all their kin are forgotten.

They did not make themselves tombs of copper,
With stelae of metal from heaven.
They knew not how to leave heirs,
Children to pronounce their names;
They made heirs fro themselves of books,
Of Instructions they had composed.

They gave themselves [the scroll as lector]-priest
The writing-board as loving son.
Instructions are their tombs,
The reed pen is their child,
The stone-surface their wife.
People great and small
Are given them as children,
For the scribe, he is their leader.

Their portals and mansions have crumbled,
Their ka-servants are [gone];
Their tombstones are covered with soil,
Their graves are forgotten.
Their name is pronounced over their books,
Which they made while they had being;
Good is the memory of their makers,
It is for ever and all time!

Be a scribe, take it to heart,
That your name become as theirs.
Better is a book than a graven stela,
Than a solid tomb-enclosure.
They act as chapels and tombs
In the heart of him who speaks their name;
Surely useful in the graveyard
Is a name in people's mouth!

Man decays, his corpse is dust,
All his kin have perished;
But a book makes him remembered
Through the mouth of its reciter.
Better is a book than a well-built house,
Than tomb-chapels in the westl
Better than a solid mansion,
Than a stela in the temple!

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Duality and Tradition (by way of Wael Hallaq's The Impossible State)

"Many religious, mystical and other formulations are, up to a point, shrines for the relics of a completely or partially successful attempt to present and make available to various individuals and communities means for acquiring this knowledge. Like almost everything on earth, they are subject to deterioration or fossilization. They become both museums and exhibits, at one and the same time.
Because the tendency of stress discipine and group-attention without contemporaneous adjustment of other factors, many such formulations crystallized in the short or long term, and not infrequently claimed a monopoly of truth or effective ritual. This process, mirroring limited thinking patterns, frequently goes so far as to lead to a virtual destruction of the dynamic of the formulation of the school. In practice, exclusivism and dogmatism, beyond a certain point, militate against certain necessities of flexibility. There is a continuing need for regeneration.
What appears to some people as the sum total of the human heritage of philosophy or metaphysics or religion can also be viewed as heavily burdened with the wreckage or misinterpretation (through selective choice) of formulations previously operated by coherent schools. The factor causing this state of affairs is endemic in the human community."  -Idries Shah

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading the brilliant, but deeply flawed book The Impossible State, by Wael Hallaq. If you are looking for a more thorough critique of the book, you can google Dr. Lamu Abu-Odeh, who adroitly identifies some the book's major shortcomings (including its cynical reading of the modern nation-state as contrasted with the lofty idealism of something Hallaq calls "Islamic governance."). Despite its flaws, the book is a major work of scholarship and deserves serious attention. However, I will have to deflect my extended thoughts on the book to a later time. For now I would like to focus on a major ethical problem of Hallaq's book: the idealist characterization of a past ethical paradigm (what Hallaq calls 'Islamic governance.').

 In what follows, I would like to reflect briefly on the broad claim that it is both possible and desirable to "recover" precolonial ethical paradigms that were lost or fragmented by colonialism. I regard this claim as wrong. I do not mean to say that one cannot gain from studying the past, nor do I mean to deny the profound ways Western thinkers have ignored or subjugated "non-Western" traditions. What I have to say is that it is urgent that those interested in ethics and spirituality learn to see the duality in all religions and cultural traditions.

I must start with the most obvious claim. The primacy of enlightenment reason is a false absolute. In parts of the academy where I spend a great deal of time (notably Religious Studies) this is now a truism. The slow death of enlightenment reason has left intellectuals looking around for other enabling traditions, many of which were suppressed or denigrated by modernity. Understandably they find in these a source of moral guidance and clarity. But if enlightenment reason is a false absolute, there is no past tradition that contains this absolute ground of truth.

Thus I am suspicious of claims that we can find ourselves out of the duality of modernity (its violence that co exists with and is constitutive of its reason) through access to various modes of precolonial reality. I would not be so bold as to say that various premodern traditions cannot be enabling guides or fonts of moral inspiration. But there are two objections when it comes to "recovering" precolonial spiritual traditions. One is that these traditions no longer exist in their original form. There is a real sense in which modernity has rendered significant parts of these traditions obsolete or at least incomprehensible and trying to go back to 'sankofa' what has been lost leads to various forms of cult like veneration of outmoded ideas. For example, since one cannot recover the type of self these technologies worked on, the technologies themselves are obsolete. This is the significant agreement I have with Wael Hallaq's argument about sharia and the Islamic State. He argues that the Islamic State is an impossible one in the current Westphalian climate, and is thus a doomed proposition. This is a significant objection that is not readily or easily overcome. But Hallaq still seems to think it is possible to argue that "Islamic governance" was manifestly superior to the current nation-state system. I do not regard the comparison as feasible, due to an absence of any comparable data. I think it is quite likely that if we were able to go back in time to observe, we would find most of the same problems that plague our current justice system: bias, favor towards the affluent, corruption, blatant disregard for the law, etc. Hallaq, however, succumbs to the temptation to read a universal Islamic subject out of old jurist manuals. Yet he does not seem to realize the anachronism. Imagine if I were to read the universal Western subject out of John Rawl's A Theory of Justice!!  No doubt this anachronism will be less troubling for some than others, and some will regard the statement as cynical. I do not wish to advocate cynicism, but neither do I believe it healthy to persist in the illusion of being able to "go home again" (to quote Thomas Wolfe), or even the desirability to do so, were it possible.

The second objection is that modernity and what we currently know about the world has also rendered the objective descriptions of the world by past traditions obsolete. It is not merely a matter of mis-translation, or the need for new interpretation. These avoid the real ontological issue. Rather the problem is about new understandings of the objective world which render past pictures in holy books as a kind of blurred picture taken using outmoded and outdated equipment. The 'sacred' nature of a particular book ought not to blind us to this fact, although it often does. I suspect, the construction of the "sacred" is in itself an attempt to place dogma and tradition beyond the reach of reasonable doubt. The declaration of a book or a tradition as the objective and final word on reality is a tremendously tempting path for many smart, caring and dedicated activists and intellectuals. But one must ask oneself if they are dealing with things as they are or as things as they wish them to be. Finally, there is a dark side to "choosing or converting" to a single tradition. It manifests in an unwillingness to interrogate their own chosen tradition with the same acuity with which they critique modernity or atheism. Perhaps said tradition is under attack, and they feel the need to close ranks against outsiders, or perhaps it "works for them" and they do not wish to give the matter further thought. These reasons ought not to be taken lightly, but they cannot be regarded as serious arguments by the contemporary seeker.

My call again is for seeing the duality in all ethical social cultural and religious projects, and their contingent nature, including Enlightenment as well as all past religious traditions. I believe this attitude in and of itself is the appropriate ethics for our time, rather than any one tradition which needs to be (or can be) recovered and revived. I believe we have yet to investigate the possibilities of this attitude as an ethical and spiritual one. Indeed religious believers will see it as a form of unbelief, or radical skepticism which undermines their foundationalism. Our point should be that all past foundationalism is arbitrary. Once you realize the need for setting a foundation line for what you know, it becomes impossible to authentically do so, for foundationalism can only arise out of an objective conviction of the truth of something, not out of a psychological need for some foundation.

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Religion and Approaches to History (A Peoples History of Monotheism?)

Picking up where A. Thompson left off in his insightful discussion of monotheistic religion: One thing all religions need to do, above all, in order to make themselves more relevant and less reactionary, is to avoid making essentializing statements about their history. Notwithstanding the enormous positive impact Christianity and Islam (to name the two major examples) have had on world culture and world society, there is an almost unbearably facile tendency on the part of some of their adherents to engage in a complete whitewashing of the more 'unsavory' aspects of that history. The violence and corruption of the medieval church, the at times rapacious conquest of the early Muslims--these histories are either conveniently forgotten or, if they are mentioned at all, made external to the faith, i.e. they were just a few bad apples. This tendency was aptly described by Wilfred Cantwell Smith:

"This process [of recovering lost history] turns disruptive only when, as has sometimes happenned, the grip of the need to defend is tightened to the point where this delight in greatness, this compensatory self-satisfaction, becomes the compulsive cause rather than the honest result of historical reconstruction. Historiography is then designed alsmot explicitly to nourish and to support one's predelictions. It seeks not to analyse or to understand the past, but to glorify it; that is to glorify oneself. The purpose is not investigation but aggrandizement, not intellectual accuracy but emotional satisfaction."

Smith, as usual, has a penetrating insight here. There is a certain approach to religion and history which sees religion as being 'under attack' by secular forces (Although such charges are usually trumped up, since religion did far more to indict itself than secularism ever could, the motive power of the perception is nevertheless real) and thus rushes to write a history absolving X religion, showing it to be the perfect way, the answer to all our problems, WAAAY better than those other religions, and what would we do without it? While I cannot accept the ignorant rantings of such blowhard atheists as Christopher Hitchens, I equally cannot accept these canards employed in religion's defense. Bottom line, since I cannot accept either approach, I need a new method. Simply defending religion through idealizations and essentializations of its quite checkered history is not only intellectually dishonest, it is bad for the soul.

I define religion as a way of getting closer to God. This obviously includes a great deal under its umbrella. The difficulty comes when X religion claims Y religion just 'doesn't get it'. They are infidels or kaffirs, or they worship cows, or they drink the blood of Christ, or they are going to hell because they don't have the right belief ABOUT God. The sincerity with which these views are propounded do not lessen their incredible shortsightedness. Christians claim Islam is the 'religion of the sword'. Muslims accuse Christians of deifying Christ without bothering to understand what the faith of a Christian might mean for him/her personally. Jews and Christians also battle it out over the divinity of Christ. Now there is nothing wrong with believing in something and standing to defend it. But such an approach has a law of diminishing returns. Instead of trying to get closer to God, many religious adherents are frantically trying to convince everyone else how naturally great and superior their own belief is! And in doing so, they strain logic and credulity.

As a convert to Islam, I wondered for a long time what it truly 'meant' to be Muslim in an ultimate sense. And the best and most general idea I could come up with, after considering all the evidence, both internally and externally, is that Islam is a joyful response to a Divine Reality. I have my own reasons why I consider it 'better' than other religions in this respect, but these are mostly private and personal. Nevertheless, in actual fact, there is a practical tension between Islam as an inner response and Islam as a public cultural matrix one shares with and participates in. Thus the most forward thinking intellectuals now working in the Islamic tradition are those who propose that a distinction should be made between the nucleus of the Islamic revelation (the Meccan revelations), and those rules (the Medinan revelations) which were brought to the early community, and thus constitute an integral part of the social milieu of the Prophet.

The need for this approach becomes clear if we compare the ideals of an Islam touted by its public boosters (The "Islam is the solution for everything" people) and the actual treatment of human beings under modern day Islamic state experiments. Without engaging in an essentialization of Western values, I think it is safe to say that the three foremost examples of Islamic state implementation today--Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran--have an absolutely horrible record with regard to the treatment of religious minorities, not to mention women. All obfuscations aside then, if Islam is in its essence aiming for what is supremely right and completely just, then it cannot justify such things as the penalty for adultery, the equivalence of a man's testimony with that of two women, slavery, the status of the 'other' under shari'a, and so forth.

Now apologists will argue in response that we cannot ignore context, and it is certainly true that the penalties outlined in Quran and hadith were not always applied. It is true that manumitting a slave was considered an eternally meritorious act in Islam, unlike the on-the-ground reality of the institution of chattel slavery in the West. It is true that at the time of the Prophet, Islam actually improved the rights of women in that society. But it is the height of foolish arrogance to assume that, for all times and places, implementing these legal penalties and rules as a legal code in will result in the emancipation of women or the establishment of God's justice. Islamic countries, even those where shari'a is implemented through the judicial code, have outlawed slavery, admitting that the Prophet's pronouncements about it were aimed at its eradication. This is patently a social and contextual judgment, so why is it so difficult to undertake the same move when it comes to rights of women or other ideas?

Getting back to my original statement, it is obvious that Christian and Islamic histories have distinct and unique approaches to politics and political theory. Their histories overlap significantly but, as Carl Brown has explained, they developed into world religions out of vastly different social situations. Along the way, power became an emblem to implement Divine Reality, and Divine Reality became the de facto and often de jure explanation for an excercise of political power, however arbitrary. In the process the two were thoroughly confused. Therefore one step towards removing the confusion and telling an accurate history of religion is to untangle the two. Let the Divine do its work, as it continues to do, in the lives of people across the globe. Inshallah, if religious people can learn to think more historically they will recognize what M. Kane called "A Peoples History of Monotheism". That is, the histories of those who opposed rigid dogma, corrupt authority, and worship of idols. Those who eschewed violent conquest for power's sake, but promoted active resistance to authoritarian government. Those who felt compelled to respond to a Divine calling, something irresistible which called them, not to withdraw from the world, but to engage it in the most wholistic and organic way they were capable of.

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Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics

by IBRAHIM M. ABU-RABI'
In a 1946 seminal essay titled "Politics and the English Language," the British novelist George Orwell bemoaned the decline of post-World War Two English prose by pointing out that what was troublesome about some major English writing then was lack of precision, sheer incompetence, and vagueness.

This insight is at the heart of Brown's discussion in this timely book on Islam and politics. The author offers the most refreshingly sober analysis of the Islamic phenomenon; a welcome addition from someone who has spent his entire career analyzing modem North African and Middle Eastern societies by using original sources and
treating the Muslim world in the most balanced of ways. Brown focuses his analytical lenses on three interrelated phenomena: first, Islam as theology; second, Islam as history; and, third, Islam as politics. As a result, he presents an overwhelmingly clear picture of the interplay between these three factors in classical and modem Islamic societies. This type of analysis is the more welcome after the tragic attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, when every Tom, Dick, and Harry has become a specialist on Islam and the so-called Islamic terrorism. In his insightful analysis of the issues at hand, Brown cuts through the thick of it all by advocating a clear method of studying the Islamic religious phenomenon.

A scholarly approach or a scientific study of religion, he correctly maintains, ought not minimize the impact of religion on life but, on the contrary, ought to shed important light on the interplay between theology and other social and historical factors. That leads him to suggest that the Muslim people must be judged by the same "rules of logic and evidence" as other people (p. 19). Brown, just like Edward Said, is disturbed by Western perceptions of Islam and the Muslim people and is anxious to make sense of the complex historical and theological relationship between the Muslim world and the West. Once and again, he affirms the notion that Islam belongs to the Abrahamic family, that is, it is akin in its theological worldview to both Judaism and Christianity and "that the more Jews or Christians know of their own religious heritage the better able they are to understand Islam" (p. 21).

Aside from its theological core, Islam grew out of an urban environment and is "marked by an urban bourgeoisie outlook" (p. 27). Brown elaborates in a subtle way on the Benedict Anderson thesis of the "imagined communities" discussed in his classic work, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1993). Because of its Abrahamic theology, its bourgeois and urban dimension, its literati class, its Sufis, the intellectual leadership of formative Islam was able to imagine a universal community of believers who could transcend ethnic, linguistic, and geographic boundaries. Although he does not refer to Anderson's major study, Brown seems to be heading in the same direction of analysis. The Muslim notions of politics, he asserts, developed mainly in the formative phase against this background of universal imagining, and hence Muslim political theory is replete with such terms as the ummah, dar al-Islam, dar al-Harb, and dar al-Sulh. However, Brown stresses that in spite of the central role of the ulama, the main intelligentsia in classical Muslim society, in providing a universal imagining to the Muslim ummah, no corporate "church" body has ever existed in the Muslim world. The ulama, especially in the Sunni world, have more or less stood with the status quo by refusing to support opposition to the political authority. The mainstream Muslim ulama, providing legitimacy, put their weight behind an Islamic tradition that was pro-status quo and pushed their notion of orthodoxy often with the support of the political authorities. Brown clarifies the important connection between the ulama and the ruling elite in Muslim societies, a relationship of cooptation or at best cooperation: "The Sunni ulama have almost never acted in an organized fashion as if they constituted an institutionally distinct, hierarchically arranged body" (p. 33). Brown provides us with the necessary conceptual tools to delve into such central questions as the education of the ulama, their relationship to the state in the classical era, and their role in the dissemination of religious
knowledge. It is crucial to examine these points in light of the modem developments in the Muslim world, especially in light of the relationship between state and religion. In the wake of independence from colonialism, many Muslim countries created Ministries of Religious and Islamic Affairs and encouraged a class of ulama to be the official spokespersons of Islam. However, opposed to that, a new class of Muslim activists and thinkers emerged in modem Muslim societies, thus giving a new voice or representation to Islam and the problems facing
the Muslim world. It is interesting to examine the dynamics of the relationship between "official Islam" and activist Islam in contemporary Muslim societies. One can take the Wahhabi case in Saudi Arabia, the Turabi case in the Sudan, and the Shiite case in Iran. In Iran the ulama have, more or less, controlled the state since 1979.

How is one to view the relationship between religion and society in the modern Muslim world? What is the role of colonialism in this relationship? Brown admits that there have been major shifts in power relations between the Muslim world and the West in the past two centuries. Brown refers to the confrontation with the West or the Western impact but never explicitly to European colonization, the single most important event in the development of modern Muslim societies. It is in this context that one can understand the interplay between three major forces in the colonial Muslim world: Islamic forces, colonialism, nationalism, and a fourth force, Communism, in the case of Indonesia.

This interplay gave rise to the modern nation-state phenomenon with various degrees of political, cultural, and economic independence from the colonial center. The heavy colonial legacy along with the need to modernize the state without the appropriate personnel and resources to do so created many challenges for the nascent nation-states. In the Gulf states, because of oil, the challenges were of a different nature. That is why, as Brown notes correctly, in the early phase of the nation-state the "Muslim discourse" was dominated by such charismatic figures as Ataturk, Sukaro, Nasser, and Bourguiba. He notes that in the past few decades this discourse has been dominated by Islamist intellectuals and activists This is true only to a limited extent. The political elite in the contemporary Muslim world are still as powerful as ever, and dissent is rarely tolerated. In addition, a large number of the political elite are pro-West, as opposed to the first generation after independence that was, more or less, anti-West or anticolonial and stressed the importance of independent political and economic development in the Muslim world.

Why, then, the rise in Islamist politics? This statement has to be qualified. Most Islamist movements in the Sunni world have had a tough relationship with the new nation-state and the current military leadership. Some have been banned from politics (Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia are examples). The only example of an almost takeover of the state by an Islamist movement took place in the Sudan, under Turabi. But this experiment has come to naught. It is against the above theoretical background that Brown takes up the issue of Islamism (Islamic fundamentalism) in the modem Muslim world. Here his analysis lacks some theoretical clarity, unlike that in the first part of the book. How is one to characterize the Islamist movement in the Muslim world? First, Brown is correct to assume that Islamism is a multilayered phenomenon in the Muslim world and that it traverses the past two centuries. However, one can delineate several classes of Islamism: precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. The Wahabbiyyah is at the heart of the first class, whereas the Muhammadiyyah; Nahdatu ul-Ulama of Indonesia; the Ikhwan of Egypt; and the Jama'at-e-Islami of India and Pakistan, all products of the colonial eras, comprise the second class. Of the third class, we have the Egyptian Jihad and the Taliban movements. Brown assumes that all Islamist movements are political and thus radical in nature and orientation.

This is far from true in the case of Muhammadiyyah, Nahdatu ul-Ulama of Indonesia, and even of the Tabligh Jama'at, the most dominant revivalist movement in contemporary South Asia. Islamism is, in large measure, the product of modern European colonialism in the Muslim world and the failure of the modem nation-state to accommodate protest movements in their political systems. I think that the weakness of Brown's analysis in this section stems from his failure to accept Western colonialism as a historical fact in the Muslim world. Nowhere does he use the term; instead, he uses such terms as "changes,"" confrontations,"and so forth. It is the fact of colonialism that gave rise to the modem nation-state in the Muslim world, often an exhausted and poor nation-state that resorted to both modernization and repression in its formative phase. In the 1950s, the Masumi Islamist party was repressed in Indonesia, as were the Ikhwan movement in Egypt and the Jama'at in Pakistan. That is why the relationship between Islamism and the state in the Muslim world has been complex. In the case of Wahabbism, Islamism and the state have been allied, whereas in other cases, Islamism and the state have been at odds. The state in the modern Muslim world is a nineteenthcentury creation prompted by European colonialism. As such, Islamism has never been a static phenomenon. It has invented a powerful religious discourse to legitimize itself in the eyes of the masses and to gain political and economic support. Islamism has been in crisis for the last four decades for many complex reasons: first, because the whole of Muslim tradition has been in crisis, and second, because the new guard of Islamism is not satisfied with the achievements or lack thereof on the part of the old guard. This is true in the case of Wahabbism, and bin Laden is an example.

In spite of some major theoretical flaws in the second part of the book, I think this work paves the way for grasping the Islamist phenomenon in its diverse forms in the contemporary Muslim world. My criticism of the second section is not intended to minimize the importance of this book and the solidity of its arguments throughout. Brown has offered us the necessary epistemological tools to come to grips with the complex theme of Islam and politics both in the classical and modern phases of the Muslim world.

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Saba Mahmood interviews Talal Asad (excerpts)

full interview here.
Asad discusses modernity, religion, what agency is, Islamic reform, the difference between dependency theory and postcolonialism, and much much more. This is one of the best 'summations' of the various nature of Asad's intellectual pursuits and it maps out a great 'space' for scholars to follow up on his work in local contexts. Although its from 1996, over ten years ago, it is still a great read.

Talal Asad
modern power and the reconfiguration of religious traditions
Saba Mahmood

Contemporary politico-religious movements, such as Islamism, are often understood by social scientists as expressions of tradition hampering the progress of modernity. But given the recent intellectual challenges posed against dualistic and static conceptions of modernity/tradition, and calls for parochializing Western European experiences of modernity, do you think the religio-political movements (such as Islamism) force us to rethink our conceptions of modernity? If so, how?

Well, I think they should force us to rethink many things. There has been a certain amount of response from people in Western universities who are interested in analyzing these movements. But many of them still make assumptions that prevent them from questioning aspects of Western modernity. For example, they call these movements "reactionary" or "invented," making the assumption that Western modernity is not only the standard by which all contemporary developments must be judged, but also the only authentic trajectory for every tradition. One of the things the existence of such movements ought to bring into question is the old opposition between modernity and tradition, which is still fashionable. For example, many writers describe the movements in Iran and Egypt as only partly modern and suggest that its their mixing of tradition and modernity that accounts for their "pathological" character. This kind of description paints Islamic movements as being somehow inauthentically traditional on the assumption that "real tradition" is unchanging, repetitive, and non-rational. In this way, these movements cannot be understood on their own terms as being at once modern and traditional, both authentic and creative at the same time. The development of politico-religious movements ought to force people to rethink the uniquely Western model of secular modernity. One may want to challenge aspects of these movements, but this ought to be done on specific grounds. It won't do to measure everything by grand conceptions of authentic modernity. But that's precisely the kind of a priori thinking that many people indulge in when analyzing contemporary religious movements.

It has often been argued that the tradition of liberalism is based upon principles of pluralism and tolerance in ways that Islamic tradition is not, and that the concept of plurality remains foreign to Islam. How would you respond to that?

Well, I would say that it is certainly not a modern, liberal invention. The plurality of individual interests is what the liberal tradition has theorized best of all. On the other hand, the attempt to get some kind of representation for ethnic groups and minorities in Western countries has been difficult for liberalism to theorize. Liberalism has theories of tolerance by which spaces can be created for individuals to do what they wish, so long as they don't obstruct the ability of others to do likewise. But these aren't theories of pluralism in the sense we are beginning to understand the term today. Liberalism has theories of multiple "interests," interests which can be equalized, aggregated, and calculated through the electoral process and then negotiated in the process of formulating and applying governmental policies. But that is a very different kind of pluralism from the different ways of life which are (a) the preconditions and not the objects of individual interests, and which are, (b) in the final analysis, incommensurable.

Now the Islamic tradition, like many other non-liberal traditions, is based on the notion of plural social groupings and plural religious traditions--especially (but not only) of the Abrahamic traditions [ahl al-kitab]. And, of course, it has always accommodated a plurality of scriptural interpretations. There is a well- known dictum in the shari`a: ikhtilaf al-umma rahma [difference within the Islamic tradition is a blessing]. This is where the notions of ijtihad and ijm`a come in. As modes of developing and sustaining the Islamic tradition, they authorize the construction of coherent differences, not the imposition of homogeneity.

Of course there are always limits to difference if coherence is to be aimed at. If tolerance is not merely another name for indifference, there comes a point in every tradition beyond which difference cannot be tolerated. That simply means that there are differences which can't be accommodated within the tradition without threatening its very coherence. But there are, of course, many moments and conditions of such intolerance. One must not, therefore, equate intolerance with violence and cruelty.

On the whole, Muslim societies in the past have been much more accommodating of pluralism in the sense I have tried to outline than have European societies. It does not follow that they are therefore necessarily better. And I certainly don't wish to imply that Muslim rulers and populations were never prejudiced, that they never persecuted non-Muslims in their midst. My point is only that "the concept of plurality," as you put it, is not foreign to Islam.

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Secularism, hegemony, and fullness (Talal Asad)

I've posted some stuff from Talal Asad before, from his book Geneaologies of Religion. The link below will take you to a link where he critiques secularism in a very trenchant and incisive way.

Secularism, hegemony, and fullness

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Book Review: Muntu by Jaheinz Jahn

I can’t say enough about this book. Over 50 years old, it is still worth revisiting for the force for which it makes its defense of African thought, philosophy and religion. Janheinz Jahn, a German scholar, originally wrote Muntu in 1958, around the time of intellectual ferment of luminaries like Fanon, Cesaire, and Senghor. The American edition first appeared in 1961 and was named book of the year by at least one major publishing organization. Jahn lays out the characteristics of African thought as illuminated through New World African religions like Santeria and Voudoun.

Unlike so much of today’s timid postmodernist theorization. Jahn is unafraid of the broad comparison and the book is infused with both an urgency born of passion for the subject matter, in addition to Jahn’s considerable erudition. He is equally at home discussing the implications of nommo, or the magic of the spoken word, as he is the function and symbols within Voudoun, or the difference between New World African religion and its parent in Africa. He also devotes a section to tracing the strands of African thought in the works of the so-called Negritude poets.

I will let William J. Austin, who has reviewed Jahn's work here, have the word on explaining the basic philosophical principles of African thought and aesthetics, according to Jahn:

The text is neatly divided into the major categories of African culture and religion, two forces which, as Jahn points out, flow in and out of one another like a river and its tributaries. Although Jahn makes mention of the cultures formed in northern Africa via the commingling of African and Arabic/Islamic impulses, his focus here is on “Black Africa,” or that larger portion of the continent below the Sahara. This section of Africa, however various in its individual cultural expressions, was surprisingly united in an overall religious structure that informed the ritual of worship, as well as the more pedestrian day to day activities. This over-arching structure contains four major forces: Muntu, Kintu, Hantu, and Kuntu. Muntu, or “human being,” finds its earliest known expression in the culture of the Bantu tribe. As a “force” it is plural, reflecting the myriad variations of humanity. Muntu, however, is not a self-activating force, but rather ‘sleeps,” dormant, while awaiting its activation via a more active sub-force known as Nommo. Nommo, quite simply, is language. The priests and elders of a tribe are most invested with Nommo, and maintain the power to enliven natural objects, and even man-made ones, through a ritualistic process of naming. But all human beings participate in Nommo to some degree. In fact, it is not until a parent names a child, that the child may be considered human, may be said to participate in Muntu. What we have, then, in the concepts of Muntu and Nommo, is not unlike the structuralist/post-structuralist emphasis on language as the begetter of personhood, of humanity. The linkage is certainly there, but it also obtains between Nommo and the Biblical declaration that “In the beginning was the word.”

In any event, Jahn’s detailed analysis makes clear the amazing similarities that reach across seemingly isolated cultures. Like Muntu, Kintu is plural, and represents the force or “spirit” in all non-human objects, animate and inanimate, including animals. Hantu is place and time, and Kuntu, perhaps the most complex concept of the four, represents modality, i.e., quality, style, rhythm and beauty. All four forces are united linguistically by the suffix and concept of NTU, or the essential compatibility and coherence of all things, human and non-human. The many in the one, the one in the many — this is familiar philosophical ground, and more evidence that Nommo does indeed unite all cultures, races, creeds, in their differences.

The one fault with the book is its almost complete lack of discussion about the impact of Islam and the Arabs on African culture and religion. No doubt there are other books that do this admirably, but it would have been quite interesting for Jahn to extend his thesis to some of the cultures of East Africa such as Somalia, the Swahili Coast or Zanzibar. Or even Ethiopia…the point being that these cultures have a much more ancient tradition of contact with Abrahamic religions, ergo we might expect to see a different kind of integration within an overall philosophy of Muntu then that which occured in the Americas under Jahn's rubric of neo-African culture.

How does Neo-African culture apply to African Islamic cultures of the East Coast, where extensive cultural mixing also took place? No doubt a variety of practices exist today which reincarnate the ancient beliefs in new forms, for example the practice of praying to Sufi saints and venerating their burial sites as holy places.

What is perhaps most interesting about Jahn’s thesis, as Austin pointed out, is that he brings out the true monotheism at the core of most African religion, explaining that this ONE God who is RULER OVER ALL is so distant from humanity that humans needs a variety of intermediaries in order to tap into the power of GOD's Being.

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Scholars in the Empire: Sketching a Framework for Understanding

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا فِي قَرْيَةٍ مِنْ نَذِيرٍ إِلَّا قَالَ مُتْرَفُوهَا إِنَّا بِمَا أُرْسِلْتُمْ بِهِ كَافِرُونَ

Never did we send a warner to a population, but the wealthy ones among them said: "We believe not in the (Message) with which ye have been sent."

Sura Saba (34:34)

This verse made me stop and re-read it. It struck me with the force of electric shock actually. NEVER, says the Qu'ran, was there a message of truth sent down in which the rich and established ones didn't say, "Naw, that can't be true, and anyway, its not for us." NEVER.

Revolutionary knowledge such as that brought by the Qu'ran, is always a threat to established authorities. Even scholarly authorities (kinda ironic, given the way US development dollars and oil revenue are the engines fueling how the Saudi discourse of Islam dominates Islamic education, Islamic publishing, and the production of Islamic knowledge)

The role of the scholar is to be a witness against imperial projects. Scholars deny their calling if they avoid speaking against totalitarianism, fascism, colonialism, and all forms of immoral societal control. The modern empire—transnational, transcapital, and transformational—is a fusion of older imperial projects with the newest technology and techniques available for social control. Our understanding of empire has broadened. Although the image may still conjure up Darth Vader and authoritarian regimes with power over vast stretches of territory, today’s real empire—i.e. those who exercise true ‘imperial perogatives’ over the globe, are not always openly tied to projects of police repression, military might, and a developed ‘center’. Centers and peripheries are ever-shifting and there are smaller peripheries within larger geographical units representing the center. The beast has more than one belly! Today’s empire may condemn police tactics on the periphery because the center has been so thoroughly pacified. Today's empire is about the mobility and power of a global elite to shape the discourse of the major knowledge-producing institutions of our day and age.

That is to say: Although violence is still the most blunt and often effective tools in the imperial arsenal (see Iraq, 1991-2008), today’s empire shapers have a variety of more sophisticated techniques for quelling a more educated populace as well as dissipating the righteous rage of the downtrodden into a million different diversions.

The empire produces knowledge about the world, but it also produces ontology…that is it shapes what is to be known and makes it the truth. The various agents of empire have very sophisticated tools of media, mass marketing, and international finance mechanisms at their disposal and scholarship is not immune from the power of these tools. If you operate in say, Europe or America as a scholar, you do have certain freedoms—to write, to publish, to say what you like. But there are subtle ways in which the ontology of knowledge in the West is able to counter the antihegemonic strains within its plurality and maintain its core intact.

What I envision the scholar doing is using the tools of the empire—all the latest, most sophisticated conceptual frameworks for ‘studying’ the world and especially other cultures, and using these lens to look at the empire itself. Instead of using the masters tools to build our new house (an alternative to imperialism in all its forms), we are using those tools to burn down the masters house, or if it remains flame-retardant, then brick-by-brick, we will reveal all the shiny promises of instant gratification, value globalization, and ‘development’ to have its own dark-side.

There is a duality at the heart of this project, inevitably. Its a duality I am reminded of when I read that Farid Esack, the noted Islamic liberation scholar, was the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Professor at Harvard University (come to think of it, I think Prince al-Waleed sponsors more than a few things at Georgetown too). I do not think this duality can be avoided, especially if one wants access to the latest and most sophisticated resources and to keep abreast of the variety of theories produced within these institutions. I would rather someone produce the truth from a position within the empire than produce inferior scholarship outside of it. And this in itself may be a false dichotomy. But after watching enough videos and homemade DVDs from amateur 'professors' and 'teachers' claiming to be bringing knowledge to the people while spitting PURE unscientific NONSENSE, I've come to believe that right knowledge doesn't necessarily depend on being 'outside the system.'

Science is not somehow value free in the context of our discussion. For even as the industrialized countries produced some of the most stunning insights into our world through the scientific method, this method was tied to a culture whose core beliefs remained rooted in fratricidal warfare and extreme suspicion of the ‘other.’ It has proved to be a deadly combination, but I would caution against the mistake of blaming science or secularism for all these evils. The secular method of inquiry into the world has yielded the most fruitful and productive insights of any current tradition. Certainly religion must acknowledge the tremendous power of science and indeed, it has largely ceded certain domains to scientific explanation.
When we look at what the empire has done, a part of us must stand in awe of the power it has produced. At the same time, this façade of power is a mere smokescreen for catastrophic weaknesses inherent in its model. The signs are clear: the ‘progress’ of the last century or two in the West has come not only at the expense of the rest of the world, but of the planet itself.

Scholars in the humanities are perhaps more attuned to the political dimension of this problem, while scienctists and mathematicians may approach it more from the perspective of pure knowledge. But all would benefit by asking ourselves: who is the knowledge we produce benefiting? And what is the purpose of being a scholar? We cannot be content with the answer of ‘simply learning more’ but must go on to specify for whom and in what way. Thus one answer might read, “learning more about the Middle East in order to become an area specialist and consult with American foreign policy experts on how to represent American interests in the region.” An alternative answer might be, “To learn about different cultures and broaden my cultural understanding in order to become a bridge or ambassador between worlds.”
Or another answer might be, “To advance in academia far enough in order to gain the necessary freedom and prestige to return to my own country and do development work.” Or “To master the techniques of my chosen field in order to be able to engage in the current debates within that field and by doing so contribute to the progression of the field." To all these I would add my own personal goal: to gain knowledge in order that not only may overall human knowledge be advanced, but that knowledge will help serve in such a way as a historical witness against the violence of empire, against the fashionable babbling of our age, against the two extremes of hip, empty trendiness, and religious literalism stuck in the outmoded debates of a bygone age.

This project entails being down in the trenches, as it were, in the sense that the relevant information for scholars is not merely found among the halls of university campuses and scholarly quorums. For a while now the media has invoked the term 'public intellectual' or 'organic intellectual', so much they have made into a cliche (herein lies my only beef with Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson). For some of these PIs and OIs, the public side has outweighed the intellectual side and they have become too fond of panels and interviews. Nevertheless, the terms have a real and ongoing meaning for those like myself who seek to balance impeccable scholarship (which entails a large amount of time buried in archives and books) and an engaged political stance against the various dimensions of empire.

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Taqleed, Ijtihad, and Wujub al-nazr

You drown in an ocean of God and can't breath -Jedi Mind Tricks

Recently I have been digging into different facets of Islamic theology, and it is certainly interesting to see the early theologians having debates similar to what the early Christian theologians were debating (the nature of G-d, His attributes, free will, eternity, oneness.)

What I always find MOST interesting about these debates is the degree to which the debaters assume that all those in the conversation know how to ascertain that something is true. It is rarely questioned HOW we actually KNOW FOR CERTAIN that something is true.

Islamic theologians tried to address this systematically, but even they were limited by the ideas and ideology current at the time. Many of them borrowed heavily from Hellenistic philosophy in order to argue their theological and philosophical viewpoints. However, if one reads the average book of aqeedah, what one generally gets is not sophisticated argumentation but crude propositional logic using mostly hadith. In fact, I have found that these books are rarely encouraging believers towards the pursuit of knowledge but towards the pursuit of certainty and non-argumentation. This is disappointing but understandable, as religious scholars are often tied to state projects of social and political control and religious ideology offers a convenient prop for this. Even if said religious scholar is not tied to a state-project, he still exists within a milieu which requires him to convince his followers that he knows THE way: uncertainty is public enemy number one when it comes to religious knowledge.

After considering all this, and then reading more on the basic principles of knowing (i.e syllogistic knowledge, first order logic, etc) I came across the following concept from Jainism (an an Indian religious and intellectual tradition predating Hinduism and Buddhism):

Anekantavada--the principle of multiple viewpoints

Anekantavada is basically the idea that since everything changes, what we know to be 'true' ought to be tempered by another knowledge: that of our impermanence and extremely limited knowledge of the world. Reality itself is manifold in its manifestations. Special relativity demonstrates this is in regards to the nature of space and time: an object's experience of it may be profoundly different depending on the reference point and relative nature of motion. This is rarely present at the level of ordinary awareness, rather it becomes apparent only as one moves at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Our experience of the world presents a profound paradox which we can ignore existentially, but not philosophically. To me at least, anekantavada is like saying "Allahu 3lim."

Even math, otherwise one of the purest and clearest ways to see the world, has its own set of inherent limitations. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem shows that since any given mathematical system complex enough to contain arithmetic, contains propositions that are true but not provable from within the system, then it may be possible that no single theory will be able to explain the whole world. To extrapolate beyond the abstraction: If we consider Islam as a "system" or a "special world-system" to borrow John Voll's words, then is it not the case that there are true propositions within it that are not provable using its internal methodology. (i.e the existence of G-d). By extension, doesn't this mean that there are things outside the system which are also true but not demonstrably true within the system? This does not invalidate the system's truths, but it does inject a sense of humility into the conclusions one draws within the logic of that system. In other words, the conclusions from our system or set, have to be part of a larger set of sets (The SET OF ALL TRUTH, if you will)

I will let al-Ghazali have the last word on this one, with his criticism of the Mutazilites:

"Don't you see that when you are asleep you believe certain things and imagine certain circumstances and believe they are fixed and lasting and entertain no doubts about that being their status? Then you wake up and know that all your imaginings and beliefs were groundless and unsubstantial. So while everything you believe through sensation or intellection in your waking state may be true in relation to that state, what assurance have you that you may not suddenly experience a state which would have the same relation to your waking state as the latter has to your dreaming, and your waking state would be dreaming in relation to that new and further state. If you found yourself in such a state, you would be sure that all your rational beliefs were unsubstantial fancies."

Al-Ghazali didn't reject reasoning, he simply said that it had its limits especially in regards to attaining the WHOLE truth of a situation. Thus he indirectly pointed to the principle of multiple viewpoints.

Now let us consider the application of this viewpoint to the science of knowledge leading to right guidance:

The central debate in Islam seems to be between taqleed (following a particular authority out of respect for their knowledge) and ijtihad (making a decision, particularly a legal decision, by independent judgement). Taqleed is what we 'ordinary' humans do, while ijtihad is for those well-versed in Islamic scholarship. There is a place in Islam for both of these concepts (for example, taqleed tells me that when I want an opinion about mathematics, I don't go to any random friend but to a mathematician or math teacher. That doesn't preclude my friend the Calculus II student from offering some brilliant analysis up to his level of expertise.)

Unfortunately the two been distorted into opposite poles (like when Western critics argue that "closing the gates of ijtihad" was the cause of intellectual stagnation in the Muslim world but ignore that there are plenty of Islamic commentators who have parsed this debate in different ways, with great skill.)

My question: Why can't an ordinary person perform ijtihad? Is there anything in the Quran prohibiting this? Unequivocally, no. Therefore, I am convinced that, with the availability of modern knowledge, one can easily perform ijtihad, and indeed should. One ought to have the deepest respect for true scholars, and be quick to point out factual errors, but the arguments against ijtihad only demonstrate how scared some 'ulama are of losing their power, as well as how far some have come from the reforming message of the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him.

But even beyond ijtihad is the process of wujub al-nazar, or the obligation to reason to produce truth. Given the above limitations, proof with al-nazar will necessarily still be contained within a system (that of human thought) but it will be a larger system with more points of overlap. Whereas to reason from within ijtihad alone might also produce truth, but within a more limited system (the framework of Islamic law).

Now the question REALLY is: how does one parse out the differences between an obligation to use reasoning, and an obligation to obey the principles of a given system (Islam, for example). This is a very relevant question, especially when it comes to implementing Islamic law.
ASIDE: Please note that I don't use the word 'reason' (i.e. Western rationalism) but the word 'reasoning' to denote the process by which any group of humans produces its fundamental truth and which has produced a pretty stunning plurality of viewpoints on a range of ethical and ontological issues.
Many 'liberal' or 'modernist' Islamic scholars (I have problems with those two labels but we will address that later) have correctly pointed out that institutions which are now basically assumed to be the pillar of Islam as a 'system' are not in fact as ontologically sound as they have been purported to be and thus not to be relied on to establish the truth of a given proposition within that system. See, for example, Kassim Ahmad's Hadith: A Re-evaluation. The most shocking aspect of what Ahmad reveals is that the Prophet Muhammed himself (in an often ignored or misinterpreted hadith) clearly forbade his followers from writing down what he said.

Here is one of the reason's Prophet Muhammed's revelation was so important: he was specifically addressing the corruption and empty formalism that had arisen within the Judaic tradition due to the fact of relying on Talmudic interpretation and scholarly opinion. Using our earlier terminology, the logic of that system (Judaism) had become strained and unharmonious due to its overreliance on taqleed.

This produced a sort of disharmony between the obligation to reason speculatively towards the truth, and the opinions of past scholars. What the early Islamic scholars did, in an attempt to ensure that its system would not be corrupted along the same lines, is to try to ensure that there was a given system in place for discerning the accuracy of a given hadith. (Compare this to the Christian Church fathers decision to implement a priesthood)

But given that compilers like Bukhari didn't begin to write these down until some two centuries after the Prophet's death, isn't it ironic that Muslims would claim that the hadith are more accurate than say, the Gospels? (With a similar time lag between events and recording). I do not make this point in order to incite the ongoing battle of correct revelation; I am merely pointing out that theological controversies in Islam are a function of human limitation within that system, as is the case for Christianity, Judaism, etc. Any given system of religion will necessarily have a degree of pluralism; the question is never about eliminating that pluralism but of establishing its boundaries: how do we discern what is 'of the system' and 'not of the system'. Mathematically speaking, what is our set? And does our set harmonize with the set of sets? We are back to the principle of allahu 3lim.

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Liberation, Theology, and the Abrahamic Religions

"We must go beyond giving a piece of bread to the little ones who knock on our doors...Saying 'yes' to them may make us feel good but does not solve the problem. one finds business people spending huge amounts on charity and it makes them feel very good. Nobody asks how come they have so much money...We must understand that if we choose solidarity with the poor that our option has a political character in so far as it means attacking structures and making decisions to take concrete actions to help specific classes."
quoted in Qu'ran, Liberation, and Pluralism


One thing I realized about myself during the course of reading Farid Esack's Qur'an, Liberation, and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity Against Oppression.: I cannot support any religion, no matter how orthodox, that does not have as its absolute center, support for the struggle of the poor and oppressed against their oppression. If that sounds like apostasy, then I think its an indication of how much theology these days, be it Islamic or Christian, is majoring in utter trivialities and consistently failing to address itself to the overarching needs of our world. It seems as if I am constantly reading or coming across apologetics which seek to 'prove' scientifically that the Qur'an is correct, or that Jesus was really the 'Son of God' or that modernity cannot explain the 'wonders' of creation. Which is all well and good up to a point. Yet I notice in this preoccupation a defensive position which religion has adopted against secularism and modernity and in consequence, ceded the great source of its prophetic power. Religion has the ability like no other instrument to mobilize the masses, yet the problem is that the conception of religion put forth is that of purely personal piety. I utterly reject this pie-in-the-sky approach. Its not that I don't believe in an afterlife or in the power of Allah. But I am just tired of seeing it used to justify words, actions, and policies that are directly opposed to the mandate of a JUST GOD!
Growing up as a Christian, and encountering liberation theology for the first time at the age of 21, I was deeply impressed but also deeply worried for the implication it held of relativism and undermining the authority of the Scripture. Since then, my perspective on this issue has changed radically, and I find myself drawn to its expression through the work of Farid Esack.
Esack has done for Islam what James Cone did for Christianity: give it a radical wake-up call and force it to confront the message of liberation inherent in the text of the Qur'an.
In studying the evolution of the Islamic community in the early days, one finds that the Prophet(SAW) was gathering followers from all walks of society and life and calling them to an order that transcended tribal, racial and previous religious classification. At its core, the message of Islam is no different than what Jesus came to do. Remember that Jesus said he came to fulfill the law, and that he preached from the Torah in order to call for the reform of the old order which was hierarchical and collaborationist, and had forgotten the basic 'spirit' of Judaism. Similarly in Eastern religion, the Buddha and other acknowledged spiritual masters often began their quest for truth not out of a desire to 'create' a new religion, but to reform the old one (often corrupt varieties of Hinduism). All this is not to say that Islam or Christianity are not legitimate religions in their own right. But it does go to illustrate how we generally think about religion: religion is something you 'have'. Thus, if I walk around Mombasa and go to pray in the masjid and someone asks my name, many people will not believe I am a Muslim because I have a 'Christian' name. Of course, when pushed they will admit that, "kwa hakika, dini ndani ya moyo yako." (In truth, religion is in your heart) It goes to show that religion functions dually: as a cultural marker in everyday usage, but also on a more philosophical level as a purification of the soul.Because true religion is a purification of the inner self, it follows that it will be reflected in how we live it.
This deeper reality is in line with how Jainism, one of the world's oldest religions, perceives religion, a reality also reflected in the Quran; knowledge of the truth has risen and fallen cyclically throughout history. Thus, with each new generation, new prophets have arisen in order to communicate this truth to the people, typically in the form of religion. And the Prophet (SAW), Jesus, Buddha, any great spiritual teacher would cry in disbelief and outrage if they saw the trivialities and worthless theological fiddling their followers engage in the name of 'religion'. Religion is not a immovable fortress to be guarded and hoarded. It is something so much more holy than can be expressed in words, something so much more radical than the status quo would like it to be, and something immeasurably powerful beyond imagination. I find its highest expression in the world today to be the struggle for justice, for how can we claim to 'submit to Allah', to 'be like Jesus', how can we claim a 'Christ-centered life' or to be following the way of the Prophet (Sunnah) if we are not living some kind of radical witness to the power and corruption of this world? And does not the power and corruption of this world find its most evil expression in the immoral pillage of Iraq by the US government, the tremendous and growing gap between rich and poor, the food policies of the the G8 (especially America) which have catastrophic effects on the ability of farmers worldwide to sell their produce at a fair price, the persecution and violence perpetrated outrageously against women worldwide by so-called 'Islamic' countries, and a host of other injustices, many of them far more local than what I have named.
I find myself so angry sometimes at the complacency in regards to this issue. And it leads me to define religion as this: 'an active response to the will of God with regard to justice and right conduct on every level of existence.' I acknowledge the relevance of religion as something you 'have' (i.e. culture, language, membership in a socio-ethnic group) but I prefer the first definition. What do you think? And remember, I am just an amateur scholar! I don't read Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, or any of the original languages of the books the religions I discussed find holy. But I contend that one doesn't have to in order to grasp the BASIC ESSENCE OF ALL RELIGION. RELIGION IS ONE. GOD IS ONE. Peace be upon those who follow right guidance. And God knows best.

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