Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (11 page)

Confronted by extreme acts of ugliness, there is no alternative for a Muslim who is interested in reclaiming the moral authority of Islam but to confront the quintessential questions of: Is this Islam? Can this be Islam? And, should this be Islam? It is far too easy for contemporary Muslims to avoid taking responsibility for the extreme acts of ugliness committed by zealots in our midst, and instead cast all the blame upon Western imperialism and colonialism. It is far too easy to engage in the morally evasive strategy of complaining about false universals, and to blame everything and everyone else, but refuse a confrontation with one’s own conscience. With every major human tragedy committed in the name of Islam, I think that it is imperative for every Muslim to put aside, for a while, the various intellectual methods by which responsibility is projected, transferred, diluted, and distributed, and to engage in a conscientious pause. In this pause, a Muslim ought to critically evaluate the prevailing systems of belief within Islam, and reflect upon the ways that these systems of belief might have contributed to, legitimated, or in any way facilitated the tragedy. In my view, this is the only way for a Muslim to honor human life, dignify God’s creation, and uphold the integrity of the Islamic religion.

If one engages in this conscientious and self-reflective pause, I believe that one would realize that a supremacist and puritanical orientation in

contemporary Islam shoulders the primary responsibility for the vast majority of extreme acts of ugliness that are witnessed today in the Islamic world. In my view, Muslims must come to terms with, and reclaim their religion from a supremacist puritanism that has been born of a siege mentality – a mentality that this supremacist puritanical orientation continues to perpetuate as the primary mode of responding to the challenge of modernity. Importantly, this orientation is dismissive of all universal moral norms or innate ethical values, regardless of the identity of their origins or foundations. In this orientation, the prime and nearly singular concern is power and its symbols. Somehow, all other values, traditions, and normativities are made subservient. As argued below, this orientation, which I will call Salafabism, was, and remains, uninterested in critical historical inquiry. It has responded to the challenge of modernity by escaping to the secure haven of the text, but it has treated rational moral insight as fundamentally corrupting of the purity of the Islamic message. As a result, it has ended up undermining the integrity and viability of the Islamic texts and, in the process, it has arrested and stunted the development of Islamic normative ethical thinking.

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The real challenge that confronts Muslim intellectuals today is that political interests have come to dominate public discourses to the point that moral investigations and thinking have become marginalized in modern Islam. In the age of post-colonialism, Muslims have become largely pre-occupied with the attempt to remedy a collective feeling of powerlessness and a frustrating sense of political defeat, often by engaging in highly sensationalistic acts of power symbolism. The normative imperatives and intellectual subtleties of the Islamic moral tradition are not treated with the analytic and critical rigor that the Islamic tradition rightly deserves, but are rendered subservient to political expedience and symbolic displays of power. Elsewhere, I have described this contemporary doctrinal dynamic as the predominance of the theology of power in modern Islam, and it is this theology that is a direct contributor to the emergence of highly radicalized Islamic groups, such as the Taliban or al-Qaeda, and the desensitization and transference with which Muslims confront extreme acts of ugliness.
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Far from being authentic expressions of inherited Islamic paradigms, or a natural outgrowth of the classical tradition, these groups, and their impulsive and reactive modes of thinking, are a byproduct of colonialism and modernity. These highly dissonant and defensive modes of thinking are disassociated from the Islamic civilizational experience with all its richness and diversity, and they invariably end up reducing Islam to a single dynamic – the dynamic of power. They tend to define Islam as an ideology of nationalistic defiance to the “other” – a rather vulgar form of obstructionism to the

hegemony of the Western world.
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Therefore, instead of Islam being a moral vision given to humanity, it becomes constructed into the antithesis of the West. In the world constructed by puritan modes of thinking and their groups, there is no Islam; there is only opposition to the West. This type of Islam that the puritan orientations offer is akin to a perpetual state of emergency where expedience trumps principle, and illegitimate means are consistently justified by invoking higher ends. In essence, what prevails is an aggravated siege mentality that suspends the moral principles of the religion in pursuit of the vindications of political power, and the symbolic displays of domination as well.
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In this siege mentality, there is no room for analytical or critical thought, and there is no room for seriously engaging the Islamic intellectual heritage. There is only room for bombastic dogma, and for a stark functionalism that ultimately impoverishes the Islamic heritage. One of the most salient characteristics of this orientation is a rabidly aggressive form of patriarchy that responds to feelings of political and social defeatism by engaging in symbolic displays of power that are systematically degrading of women. In my view, for example, the girls that died in Mecca were the direct victims of the sense of frustration and disempowerment felt by puritan men over the humiliations experienced in Afghanistan and Palestine. Of course, this is one of those associations that are virtually impossible to prove empirically, but, in my experience in studying puritan orientations in modern Islam, I find that women are not targeted and degraded simply because of textual commitments or determinations.
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Rather, there is a certain undeniable vehemence and angst in the treatment of women, as if the more women are made to suffer, the more the political future of Islam is made secure. Puritan orientations do not hesitate to treat all theological arguments aimed at honoring women, by augmenting their autonomy and social mobility, as if a part of the Western conspiracy was designed to destroy Islam. This is also manifested in the puritans’ tendency to look at Muslim women as a consistent source of danger, and vulnerability for Islam, and to go as far as branding women as the main source of social corruption and evil.
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Although it would be rather disingenuous to suggest that demeaning attitudes towards women were invented or exclusively adopted only by modern puritan orientations, it is important to understand the uniqueness and distinctiveness of the current puritan challenge in this specific historical juncture of Islamic history. What makes the puritan challenge today particularly compelling and singularly threatening to the humanistic tradition in Islam is the deconstruction of the institutions of religious authority in the age of modernity. Historically, these institutions played the primary role in undermining and marginalizing the supremacist and puritanical movements of the past. In addition, not only does the primacy of apologetic intellectual orientations within contemporary Islam not bode well for the ability of Muslims to overcome these supremacist and puritanical movements, but, even more, such apologetics are the main undercurrent feeding into such movements. The apologetic orientation

consisted of an effort by a large number of commentators to defend and salvage the Islamic system of belief and tradition from the onslaught of orientalism, Westernization, and modernity by simultaneously emphasizing both the compatibility and also the supremacy of Islam. Apologists responded to the intellectual challenges of modernity by adopting pietistic fictions about the Islamic traditions, but such fictions eschewed any critical evaluation of Islamic doctrines, and celebrated the presumed perfection of Islam.
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A common heuristic device of apologetics was to argue that any meritorious or worthwhile modern institutions were first invented and realized by Muslims. Therefore, according to the apologists, Islam liberated women, created a democracy, endorsed pluralism, protected human rights, and guaranteed social security long before these institutions ever existed in the West. Nonetheless, these concepts were not asserted out of critical understanding or genuine ideological commitment, but primarily as a means of resisting the deconstructive effects of modernity, affirming self-worth, and attaining a measure of emotional empowerment. The main effect of apologetics, however, was to contribute to a sense of intellectual self-sufficiency that often descended into moral arrogance. To the extent that apologetics were habit forming, they produced a culture that eschewed self-critical and introspective insight, and embraced the projection of blame and a fantasy-like level of confidence and arrogance. Effectively, apologists got into the habit of paying homage to the presumed superiority of the Islamic tradition, but marginalized the Islamic intellectual heritage in everyday life. While apologists revered Islam in the abstract, they failed to engage the Islamic tradition as a dynamic and viable living tradition. To a large extent, apologists turned Islam into an untouchable, but also entirely ineffective, beauty queen, simply to be admired and showcased as a symbol, but not to be critically engaged in its full nuance and complexity.
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In many ways, apologists ended up reproducing the legacy of orientalism – a legacy of which they were very critical. Orientalists dealt with the Islamic tradition as a static and, perhaps, even mummified heritage that is represented by a set of self-contained intellectual paradigms, and that is incapable of adapting to the demands of modernity without becoming thoroughly deconstructed and collapsing into itself. In essence, orientalists, who worked in the service of colonialism, paid nothing more than lip service to Islam, but otherwise negated the practical value of Islamic culture. The most typical strategy was for orientalists to insist that the Islamic tradition, while generally decent, lacked essential features necessary for rational modernization. As such, it is not so much that orientalists deprecated Islam, as a religion, rather, they cast serious doubts on the ability of what might be called “active” or “dynamic” Islam to deal with rational modernity.
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Ironically, Muslim apologists ended up with the same basic construct. They paid lip service to the Islamic tradition, by, among other things, insisting that not only was Islam compatible with modernity, but, in fact, it had already achieved “rational modernization” fourteen hundred years ago. Effectively, apologists

treated the Islamic tradition as if it was fossilized at the time of the Prophet and the Rightly Guided Companions, and, thus, rendered this tradition non-dynamic and un-living.
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Not only was the practice of apologetics unhelpful in dealing with the challenges of modernity, but also it significantly contributed to the sense of intellectual dissonance felt in many parts of the Muslim world. The problems posed by this response to modernity were only aggravated by the fact that Islam was, and continues to this day, to live through a major paradigm shift the likes of which it had not experienced in the past. There is a profound vacuum in religious authority, where it is not clear who speaks for the religion and how. Traditionally, the institutions of Islamic law were de-centralized, and Islamic epistemology tolerated and even celebrated differences of opinions and a variety of schools of thought. Islamic law was not state centered or state generated, but was developed by judges and jurists through a slow, creative, indeterminate, and dialectical process, somewhat similar to the common law system.
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Classical Islam did develop semi-autonomous institutions of law and theology that trained and qualified jurists, who then provided a class of individuals who authoritatively spoke for, and most often disagreed about, the Divine law. The institutions of religion and law were supported by a complex system of private endowments (
awqaf
), which enabled Muslim scholars to generate a remarkably rich intellectual tradition.
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The guardians of this were the
fuqaha
, whose legitimacy to a large extent rested in their semi-independence from the political system, which was already fairly de-centralized, and in their dual function of representing the interests of the state to the laity and the interests of the laity to the state.
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Importantly, however, much of this drastically changed in the modern age. The traditional institutions that once sustained the juristic discourse have all but vanished. Furthermore, the normative categories and moral foundations that once mapped out Islamic law and theology have disintegrated, leaving an unsettling epistemological vacuum. Colonialism formally dismantled the traditional institutions of civil society, and Muslims witnessed the emergence of highly centralized and despotic, and often corrupt, governments that nationalized the institutions of religious learning and brought the
awqaf
under state control. This contributed to the undermining of the mediating role of jurists in Muslim societies.
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The fact that nearly all charitable religious endowments became state controlled entities, and that Muslim jurists in most Muslim nations became salaried state employees, de-legitimated the traditional clergy and effectively transformed them into what may be called “court priests.”
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In addition, Western cultural symbols, modes of production, and normative social values aggressively penetrated the Muslim world, seriously challenging inherited normative categories and practices, and adding to a profound sense of socio-cultural alienation and dissonance.