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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Yasir Qadhi on slavery in Islam

Some thoughts on this thoughtful presentation from probably the most prominent Muslim traditionalist in America. I very much respect his attempts to engage this serious and important issue. Here are some points where I agree and where I disagree:

1. I appreciate how he tries to contextualize slavery, the terms for it, and the meaning of it in the context of different times. This is an important first step.

2. He is right that slavery (broadly understood) was a universal practice across many cultures globally.

3. He is incorrect that Islam was the first belief system to create rules about slavery. Not sure how he could claim this. He later claims that many other cultures had no 'rules' about slavery. Also incorrect.

4. He is also slightly in error about the 'legitimate' source of slaves in Islam. I think that is probably because he's focused on deriving notions of 'legitimacy' from text, rather than from actual practice. That is a long side debate which I will not take up here.

5. The virtues of manumission are frequently mentioned in the books of law. The interpretation we give to this practice, however, is KEY. See point 7.

6. I find the argument that, because there is no specific law legislating FOR slavery, therefore Muslims don't need it and can preserve the tradition intact...interesting. I'm not fully convinced, mainly because I don't think Qadhi has fully faced the historical and epistemological difficulties of this position.

7. I'm glad to see he raises this past disagreement among the ulama. But he studiously avoids the colonial context of abolition (I am sure he is aware of it, as he has spoken out on the impact of colonialism on Muslims before). This silence is curious. If Qadhi is a traditionalist, and he follows the pious ancestors, then what right does he have to call abolition 'more humane' than previous practices? How can he avoid that abolition was almost always and everywhere forced on Muslim countries by colonial invaders? Finally, we should ask ourselves, how does Qadhi know the INTENTION (his word) of Allah apart from The Quran and the actual practice of the early community? The companions took female captives as slaves or sex slaves (there are plenty of documented instances of this in the hadith tradition). By most accounts, even the Prophet practiced this. Isn't Qadhi saying that the generation of Muslims now who have gotten rid of slavery know better than the early Salaf and the Prophet did, since the later generations were the one to fulfill what he claims is the internal logic of the tradition? I would like to know more about how Qadhi would square this with his veneration for the early companions, and the Prophet himself.

8. I have said it once, and I will say it again: The abolitionist hermeneutic is a modernist hermeneutic. And once you have accepted a modernist 'logic' of history where you believe (as Qadhi seems to here, though implicitly) that history has moved progressively towards abolishing a practice that the early companions openly practiced without sanction, then you have rendered most articulations of traditionalism anachronistic. Progressive history makes a lot of traditionalists nervous, because it undermines their absolutist claims to an 'ethical ground'. Keep this in mind whenever traditionalists accuse liberals of undermining the basis of a 'traditional' Islamic ethics. More often than not the 'tradition' they practice is as modern and anachronistic as anything Muslim progressives have yet dreamed of.

9. I say all of this, not to beat a tired old dead horse, but because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and emotional polemics on both sides of this issue. We need more clear sighted analysis. I think Qadhi himself might benefit from a serious engagement with scholars working on the links between slavery and law, both in Atlantic and Indian Ocean contexts.

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Some Thoughts on Islam, Feminism and Tradition

Some Further thoughts on islam and Feminism after reading Daniel Haqiqatjou's post: https://muslimskeptic.com/2016/10/15/a-parade-of-contradictions-when-feminists-are-inconsistent/

 A lot of Muslim traditionalists rightly point to tensions between Islam and feminism. There is plenty of real tension between the two, otherwise there wouldn't be such a vociferous debate about their compatibility. One recent blogger on this issue even called Muslim feminism an oxymoron. It is his position that Islam has a secure methodology for finding the truth, and is in no need of reform from feminists. (https://medium.com/she-zaadi/islamic-feminist-oxymoron-level-over-9000-3c15f773d975#.z0py6a74t)

 One of the ways that Muslims who argue against feminism have been able to argue is through the powerful idea that they are the stewards of something sacred and unchanging. Yet many traditionalists I've dialogued with seem unaware that the tradition has in times past absorbed many many foreign ideas and made these ideas its own. This absorption did not proceed through a strict methodological logic. Rather most of the absorptions were the product of historical contingency. And yet the tradition survived.

The abolition of slavery was one such foreign idea. A good analogy for the debates currently roiling the ummah around feminism are the debates around the abolition of slavery in the late 19th century. Then, as now, the issue was the relationship to a powerful bundle of discourses about human rights emanating from the West. The question was: is abolishing slavery legally justifiable?

Scholars were divided into two camps at the time. One camp, the traditionalists, rightly pointed out that there was no legal basis for abolition in the fiqh tradition, that the meanings of Quranic verses around slavery were unchanging and not to be abrogated, and that to follow the European countries in abolishing slavery would be a reprehensible innovation. One of the 20th century's most illustrious Sufi Sunni scholars, Yusuf al-Nabhani, held these views. al-Nabhani doubted the sufficiency of human reasoning to abrogate that which God in his book did not prohibit. He and others believed that the abolition of slavery was a doctrine aimed at weakening Islam. The textual criterion was self sufficient, and one could only err in assuming an independent standard for moral progress. In short, the traditionalists then were making the same arguments against abolition that many Muslims now make against feminism.

 The second group were the Muslim modernists/reformers. They argued that the new circumstances of the time called for new rulings and new interpretations on issues previously thought settled, such as the role of women, and the legality of slavery. They argued that abolishing slavery was the right thing to do, Islamically. They used Quran and Hadith, but more abstractly, since there was no clear statement about the evil of slavery therein. But to them, freedom was the essence of the teachings of Islam. Their arguments were premised on the idea that Islam, as a vehicle of human progress, has the capacity to accept change, if it leads to beneficial moral progress, thus assuming that the standard for progress exists independently of the textual criterion. (Amal Ghazal "Debating Slavery and Abolition in the Arab Middle East")

 Something strange seems to have happened in this divide on the way to our present moment. The modernists are still the modernists, still arguing from moral essence, often using an implicit societal standard. But the traditionalists by and large accepted the modernist view about abolition, and made it their own. And they did this without much sound traditional Islamic legal reasoning to support it. Although this was the right thing to do, it also, In my view, fatally undermined any authority the current conservative argument from Islamic tradition has in the contemporary world.

 Muslims the world over, of all ideologies, rightly regard all kinds of slavery with a moral repugnance. Their attitude shows to what degree Muslims are inheritors (and even champions) of Western abolitionist assumptions about modern human rights. A true empirically sound traditionalist position on Islam is extremely rare in our modern world, because a true empirically sound traditionalism would have to acknowledge that abolition of slavery has no unequivocal textual and legal basis in Islam. In other words, a truly consistent traditionalist could still potentially regard slavery as something to be practiced within the limits set out for it in the Quran and Hadith, not as a morally outrageous anachronism. Most if not all Muslims are modernists, even many Salafis, because they accept the assumption that slavery is inherently immoral. Once you start extracting the idea of 'moral essence' separate and above the clear meaning of the text, you can no longer call yourself a traditionalist.

 I wrote all this because, if you're Muslim and feminist, there is little need to spend a lot of time worrying overly much about contradictions that alleged traditionalists point out between feminism and Islam, from an empirical standpoint. Most, if not all traditionalists themselves have their own empirical contradictions to deal with in the way they formulate tradition. Next time a traditionalist asks 'why, if feminism is so important, there is no mention of it in the Quran?', ask them 'why, if abolishing slavery is so important, is there no mention of it in the Quran?' The abolitionist hermeneutic IS the feminist hermeneutic. The Islamic tradition has survived inconsistencies greater than this, and it will survive traditionalist hostility to feminism, and feminism's alleged contradictions to Islam. It will survive, not because of human vigilance, but because of our nearly boundless ability to keep changing, all the while imagining we inherit our moral code from an unbroken chain of tradition.

 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, abolition also became accepted because the formerly enslaved struggled for knowledge, rights, and attained positions of religious authority. Similarly, a true and profound synthesis between Islam and feminism is already occurring because women are struggling for knowledge, rights and for attaining positions of religious authority. Each and every tradition is an arena of social struggle. The tradition itself will change as a result of these struggles. Accepting those changes will be difficult, especially for men. But I am confident the changes themselves will strengthen Islam and make its conceptions of equality more and more robust. (Bernard Freamon "Conceptions of equality and slavery in Islamic law")

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Arab World Diasporas in Historical Perspective - Panel at CCAS Annual Conference, Georgetown University, 2011

In March, I had the privilege to speak on a panel with a group of distinguished historians at Georgetown University. I spoke about my research into Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui and his project of Islamic reform through the Swahili-Arabic newspaper "al-Islah". Here is the full panel:

2011 Symposium - Arabia to Africa: Reassessing the Omani Trade Diaspora in East Africa, 1861-1920 from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.

2011 Symposium - Reimagining Communities: Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui, al-Islah and Transnational Arab Muslim Identity in Kenya, 1897- from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.

2011 Symposium - Syrian Migrants to the Colonial Philippines, 1880s to 1940s from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.

2011 Symposium - A World of Their Own: Algerian Diaspora and the Making of Algerian Nationalism from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.

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