Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (3 page)

SSAA‘‘DDIIYYYYAA SSHHAAIIKKHH
is a South African Muslim woman. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Temple University. Her research interests in Islamic studies include areas of feminism, qur’anic studies, Sufism and interfaith dialogue. From 1999 to 2001, she was involved in directing and facilitating interfaith programs focusing on social justice

issues for emerging religious leaders under the auspices of the National Conference for Community and Justice based in New York City. She is a long-standing member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians and the Gender Desk of the Muslim Youth Movement in South Africa. She is currently teaching at the University of Cape Town. Email: [email protected]

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is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the

University of Florida. She obtained her Ph.D. in Islamic Studies along with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from Temple University. Her primary areas of research and teaching include Islamic progressive reform; the contemporary impact of Islamic law on Muslim women; and women, religion and society. She also teaches in race, religion and rebellion; and African-American religious traditions. She is a Sufi Muslim who studied for over seventeen years with the renowned Sufi mystic, Sheikh Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyadeen. She has been a social activist for all of her adult life, beginning with full time work in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Her domestic work for justice for African Americans has blossomed over the years into a concern for international justice especially as it concerns the gross inequities between the Western world and so-called Third World nations and their people.

AAMMIINNAA WWAADDUUDD
is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Best known for her book,
Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from Woman’s Perspective
, she is a core member of Sisters in Islam, Malaysia, a group engaged in policy reforms on issues of gender.

INTRODUCTION:

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

– A MUSLIM QUEST FOR JUSTICE, GENDER EQUALIT Y, AND PLURALISM
*

Omid Safi

Inna ’l-laha ya’muru bi ’l-‘adl wa ’l-ihsan

Indeed God commands justice (
‘adl
)

and the actualization of goodness, realization of beauty (
ihsan
)

Qur’an 16:90

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam

and admit that the waters around you have grown and accept it that soon

you’ll be drenched to the bone.

If your time to you is worth savin’

then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone

for the times they are a-changin’.

Bob Dylan
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Evoking the sacred message of the Qur’an and the revolutionary spirit of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, this book represents the collective aspirations of a group of Muslim thinkers and activists. We realize the urgency of the changin’ times in which we live, and seek to implement the Divine injunction to enact the justice (
‘adl
) and goodness-and-beauty (
ihsan
) that lie at the heart of the Islamic tradition. It is the urgency of realizing that in so many places the waters around

Muslims have grown (Palestine, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iraq, Gujarat, sub-Saharan Africa, and now the United States). It is time to start swimming in these turbulent waters, to save both ourselves and the variety and vibrancy of the Islamic tradition. It may not be an exaggeration to state that unless we succeed in doing so, the humanity of Muslims will be fully reduced to correspond to the caricature of violent zealots painted by fanatics from both inside and outside the Muslim community.

It is time to start a-changin’. It is time to acknowledge the complicated mess around us, and to aim for the implementation of the vision of justice and goodness-and-beauty that is rooted in the Qur’an. We start by admitting that it is not just our time that is worth saving, but also our very humanity, the most precious blessing we have been given by God. The conversations in this volume are an open-eyed move in that direction, one that is simultaneously optimistic and critical. What brings us together is a deep distrust of all simplistic solutions, since we are aware that complicated problems call for equally complicated analyses and answers. This book is not about arriving at convenient solutions, but rather about starting the process of getting to a viable destination. Before one gets to the destination, however, one needs to get on the path. Before one gets to the shore, one has to swim. In Dylan’s prophetic words, it is time to start swimming. The progressive Muslim movement is above all an attempt to start swimming through the rising waters of Islam and modernity, to strive for justice in the midst of society.

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Feminist scholars have introduced the useful concept of “multiple critique,” an idea with great relevance for Muslims committed to social justice, pluralism, and gender justice. In short, multiple critique entails a multi-headed approach based on a simultaneous critique of the many communities and discourses that we find ourselves positioned in.
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As we will document shortly, an important part of being a progressive Muslim is the determination to hold Muslim societies accountable for justice and pluralism. It means openly and purposefully resisting, challenging, and overthrowing structures of tyranny and injustice in these societies. At a general level, it means contesting injustices of gender apartheid (practiced by groups such as the Taliban) as well as the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities (undertaken by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds, etc.). It means exposing the violations of human rights and freedoms of speech, press, religion, and the right to dissent in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt, and others. More specifically, it means embracing and implementing a different vision of Islam than that offered by Wahhabi and neo-Wahhabi groups.
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A vital corollary component of our multiple critique entails standing up to increasingly hegemonic Western political, economic, and intellectual structures that perpetuate an unequal

distribution of resources around the world. This hegemony comprises a multitude of forces, among them the oppressive and environmentally destructive forces of multi-national corporations whose interests are now linked with those of neo-imperial, unilateral governments. Together they enforce policies through overwhelming military force, hammering down at the poorest people in the world with disturbing frequency. And yes, as much as it makes some Muslims uneasy to hear this, it does mean challenging certain policies of the United States and other countries that put profit before human rights, and “strategic interest” before the dignity of every human being.

At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation is a simple yet radical idea: every human life, female and male, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich or poor, “Northern” or “Southern,”
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has exactly the same intrinsic worth. The essential value of human life is God-given, and is in no way connected to culture, geography, or privilege. A progressive Muslim is one who is committed to the strangely controversial idea that the worth of a human being is measured by a person’s character, not the oil under their soil, and not their flag. A progressive Muslim agenda is concerned with the ramifications of the premise that all members of humanity have this same intrinsic worth because, as the Qur’an reminds us, each of us has the breath of God breathed into our being.
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Many people today who come from a whole host of religious, political, and ethnic backgrounds describe themselves as “progressives.” There is, furthermore, a nascent community of Muslim activists and intellectuals who readily identify with the term “progressive Muslims” and publicly embrace it. “Progressive,” in this usage, refers to a relentless striving towards a universal notion of justice in which no single community’s prosperity, righteousness, and dignity comes at the expense of another. Central to this notion of a progressive Muslim identity are fundamental values that we hold to be essential to a vital, fresh, and urgently needed interpretation of Islam for the twenty-first century. These themes include social justice, gender justice, and pluralism. Of course, the kind of Islamic interpretation one comes up with is largely determined by who undertakes the interpretation.

In talking about social justice, gender issues, and pluralism, we are mindful to avoid the trap in which “Islam” becomes a fac¸ade for some contemporary political ideology such as Marxism. Rather, ours is a relentless effort to submit the human will to the Divine in a way that affirms the common humanity of all of God’s creation. We conceive of a way of being Muslim that engages and affirms the humanity of all human beings, that actively holds all of us responsible for a fair and just distribution of God-given natural resources, and that seeks to live in harmony with the natural world. To put it slightly differently, being a progressive Muslim means not simply thinking more about the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet, but also thinking about the life we share on this planet with all human beings and all living creatures. Seen in this light, our relationship to the rest of humanity changes the way we think about God, and vice versa.

Throughout this book, we will time and again challenge, resist, and seek to overthrow the structures of injustice that are built into Islamic thought. These challenges cannot be conducted haphazardly, however. They must be undertaken patiently and critically. Yet the necessary and contingent element of being a progressive Muslim is the will to resist the structures of injustice that are built into the very societies in which we live. That goes for the Muslim world as well as the United States and Europe. In all cases, we strive to be social critics, rather than outright revolutionaries. We criticize not because we have stopped being Muslim (or American, or South African, or Turkish, or . . .) but precisely because we want to see all the various communities of which we are a part rise up to their highest potential of justice and pluralism.

In crucial ways, being a progressive Muslim also means being mindful and critical of the arrogance of modernity. What we mean by arrogance of modernity is an alleged teleology that posits a Hegelian, unidirectional, and inevitable march towards the end game of modern Western civilization. Progressive Muslim interpretations share this critique of modernity with other thinkers who are now commonly described as post-modern.
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Indeed, this is one important way in which progressive Muslims differ from the host of “modernist” Muslim thinkers in the late-nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. We no longer look to the prevalent notion of Western modernity as something to be imitated and duplicated
in toto
. In fact, we direct our critique just as much to the West as to Muslim societies. This is particularly the case in response to arrogant voices in the West that insist on the inevitability of a global march towards modernity.

It is disturbing that these arrogant voices are not only coming from certain corners of the academic community (Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, etc.), but are also now being echoed by the most powerful government in the world. A recent policy paper released by the United States White House titled
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
, for example, is riddled with disturbing instances of hubris. According to the very first sentence of this document, there is now “a single sustainable model for national success,” based on the essential components of freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. Not many people would argue against freedom and democracy, but many progressive Muslims would point out that the foreign policy record of the United States is less than stellar in its support of democracy around the world. Time and again, the United States has supported and armed tyrannical rulers who have oppressed their own pro-democracy citizens. One could point to the U.S.-led overthrow of the pro-democratic Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the U.S. support of the Mujahidin fighters (including Osama bin Laden) in Afghanistan during the 1980s, or the U.S.$1.5 billion given to Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime during the Iran–Iraq War. To these, one could add the more recent examples of U.S. support of anti-democratic Parvez Musharraf in Pakistan, and support for Hosni Mubarak’s regime when the Egyptian government imprisoned the noted pro-democracy reformer Dr. Saad Eddin

Ibrahim. Democracy would indeed be a worthy goal if we in the United States actually pursued it globally, and if we truly believed that other people should have the choice to decide for themselves as to whether or not they should embrace it. As Gandhi himself stated, “I would heartily welcome the union of East and West provided it is not based on brute force.”
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It is the third component of this “single sustainable model,” an element benignly called “free enterprise,” that drives much of
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
. Later on, the document further boasts, “Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty.” Where are these “whole societies” that have allegedly been lifted out of poverty? Nowhere is there an acknowledgement of or engagement with North/South divisions, or the myriad ways in which globalization has worked to

make some of the rich super-rich, and the super-poor even poorer.

Another equally disturbing example of the essential arrogance that (mis)- informs
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
is the call for a single system of morality. The President of the United States is here quoted as stating, “Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities.”
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Just whose system of morality is it that we are to abide by here? That of the President of the United States? Right-wing evangelical Christians? Tibetan Buddhists? Catholics? Secular Humanists? The implication is clear: according to this document, just as there is now (or so we are told) one sustainable model of national success, there is now one single acceptable system of morality. And it is the President of the United States (and his advisors) who get to determine what that is. It is precisely such a hegemonic discourse that progressive Muslims would challenge, in the same way that we reject the arrogant authoritarian discourse of Muslim literalist- exclusivists.
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