Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (4 page)

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The attempt to reflect critically on the heritage of Islamic thought and to adapt it to the modern world is of course nothing new. At the opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary Muslims grappling with tradition one finds rigid extremes – on one side a steadfast conservative traditionalism, and on the other a knee-jerk rejectionism of the traditional Muslim heritage by certain Muslim modernists. Conservative traditionalism sees all Muslims as bound by what it deems the authoritative juridical or theological decisions of the past. The rejectionist perspective argues that there is now an epistemological rupture with the past so severe as to warrant throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Among other points, this modernist perspective calls for abolishing the Islamic legal and theological schools of thought (
madhahib
, sing.
madhhab
).

Most Muslims today recognize that neither extreme is fully viable. The two positions represent above all idealized camps from which the adherents of the two schools of thought shout at each other. Most of us find ourselves in the gloriously messy middle where real folks live and breathe. One of many commonalities between the conservative traditionalists and the modernists is that they both have had a difficult time attracting many ordinary Muslims, especially at a communal level. The edicts of those who would wish to see twenty-first-century Muslims bound by all medieval juridical decisions have seemed too restrictive to many. On the other hand, many modernists have simply not appeared authentically “Muslim” enough to most Muslims. This has had less to do with their personal piety (or lack thereof), than with the fact that their interpretations have not sufficiently engaged Islamic sources.

Progressive Muslims seek to learn from the deficiencies of both of these ideologies, in order to get past the slogan games. The challenge is not to find some magical, mythical middle ground, but rather to create a safe, open, and dynamic space, where guided by concerns for global justice and pluralism, we can have critical conversations about the Islamic tradition in light of modernity.
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A wonderful Jewish friend of Muslims, Rabbi Zalman Schachter, perhaps said it best: “Tradition has a vote, not a veto.”
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It is our hope that the book you hold in your hand marks a new chapter in the rethinking of Islam in the twenty-first century. Our aim has been to envision a socially and politically active Muslim identity that remains committed to ideals of social justice, pluralism, and gender justice. The aim here is not to advocate our own understanding as uniquely “Islamic” to the exclusion of the past fourteen hundred years of Islamic thought and practice. This is not a tyrannical attempt to insist that standing here at the threshold of the twenty-first century, we finally “got it right”! No, warts and all, from its glorious nobility to misogyny, there has always been a spectrum of interpretations in Islam. We seek to locate ourselves as part of that broader conversation, not to collapse the spectrum. But ours is not a passive, relativist locating of our own voices. Being progressive also means to issue an active and dynamic challenge to those who hold exclusivist, violent, and misogynist interpretations. Traditions do not arrive from heaven fully formed, but are subject to the vicissitudes of human history. Every tradition is always a tradition-in-becoming, and Islam is no exception. Our aim is to open up a place in the wider spectrum of Islamic thought and practice for the many Muslims who aspire to justice and pluralism. This will entail both producing concrete intellectual products and changing existing social realities.

Progressive Muslims are concerned not simply with laying out a fantastic, beatific vision of social justice and peace, but also with transforming hearts and societies alike. A progressive commitment implies by necessity the willingness to remain engaged with the issues of social justice as they unfold on the ground level, in the lived realities of Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Vision and

activism are both necessary. Activism without vision is doomed from the start. Vision without activism quickly becomes irrelevant.

Allow me to elaborate what I understand to be the key agenda items of progressive Muslims. But before I get to that, let me shatter any illusion that the following is meant as a “progressive Muslim manifesto.” While it is the case that the fifteen contributors to this volume have been involved in many intense and fruitful conversations, I wish to make it very clear that there are substantial differences of opinion among us. This is as it should be. I cannot – and do not – advocate my own understanding of progressive Islam as canonical. Indeed, that notion runs against the progressive Muslims’ model of the fluid exchange of ideas and the acknowledging of a wide spectrum of interpretations. The following, therefore, represents my own reflections on being a progressive Muslim. Others in this volume would no doubt add many more items, and would perhaps take exception to some of my formulations.

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Engaging Tradition

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Progressive Muslims insist on a serious engagement with the full spectrum of Islamic thought and practices. There can be no progressive Muslim movement that does not engage the very “stuff” (textual and material sources) of the Islamic tradition, even if some of us would wish to debate what “stuff” that should be and how it ought to be interpreted. The engagement with the weight of the tradition might be uneasy at times, occasionally inspiring, now and then tedious, and sometimes even painful. Still, we believe that it is imperative to work through inherited traditions of thought and practice. In particular cases, we might conclude that certain pre-existing interpretations fail to offer us sufficient guidance today. However, we can only faithfully claim that position after – and not before – a serious engagement with the tradition. To move beyond certain past interpretations of Islam, we have to go critically through them.

It is not difficult to find progressives from a Muslim background who tackle issues of social justice, disparate distribution of wealth, oppression of Muslim women, etc. However, it has been our experience that too often such activism lacks the necessary engagement with the specifics of Islamic tradition. Such programs for social reform could just as easily come from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Secular Humanist, or agnostic progressives. Perhaps this partially explains why the progressive agenda has held little appeal for many Muslims worldwide, who have correctly detected that those who espouse these otherwise valuable teachings are simply giving an “Islamic veneer” to ideologies such as Marxism. Some have leveled charges in the past that Muslim voices speaking up for justice are simply parroting the secular ideology of socialism dressed up in Qur’an and
hadith
. To state the obvious, a progressive Muslim

agenda has to be both progressive and Islamic, in the sense of deriving its inspiration from the heart of the Islamic tradition. It cannot survive as a graft of Secular Humanism onto the tree of Islam, but must emerge from within that very entity. It can receive and surely has received inspiration from other spiritual and political movements, but it must ultimately grow in the soil of Islam.

We hold that some interpretations of Islam in both the past and the present have been part of the problem. We also assert that ongoing interpretations and implementations of Islamic ethics guided by justice and pluralism can be part of the solution. To introduce an Islamic term, one might state that the progressive Muslim project represents an ongoing attempt at an Islamic
ijtihad,
or committed critical thinking based on disciplined but independent reasoning, to come up with solutions to new problems. This progressive ijtihad
is
our jihad. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the term “jihad” is all too familiar to most people. To both the Muslim fanatic and the Muslim-hating xenophobe, jihad is simply “holy war” declared by Muslims against Westerners. For the Muslim apologist, jihad is instead purely the inner struggle against one’s own selfish tendencies. Neither interpretation takes into consideration the possibility of engaging and transforming the social order and the environment in a just and pluralistic fashion that affirms the humanity of us all.

It is vitally important to recognize that “jihad” is etymologically related to the concept of
ijtihad
. In Arabic, concepts that share the same triliteral etymological derivation are essentially linked to one another. “Jihad” and
ijtihad
both come from the root
ja-ha-da
, meaning “to strive,” “to exert.”
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For progressive Muslims, a fundamental part of our struggle (
jihad
) to exorcise our inner demons and bring about justice in the world at large is to engage in a progressive and critical interpretation of Islam (
ijtihad
).

An essential part of the progressive
ijtihad
is to account for and challenge the

great impoverishment of thought and spirit brought forth by Muslim literalist- exclusivists. Groups such as the Wahhabis have bulldozed over not just Sufi shrines and graveyards of the family of the Prophet in Arabia, but also whole structures of Islamic thought. As some of the essays in this volume – especially that by Khaled Abou El Fadl – make clear, there is an urgent need for progressive Muslims to problematize, resist, and finally replace the lifeless, narrow, exclusivist, and oppressive ideology that Wahhabism poses as Islam. I view Wahhabism – amplified by hundreds of billion dollars in petrodollars and supported by the same U.S. government that claims to support democracy and freedom in the Muslim world – as the single greatest source of the impoverishment of contemporary Islamic thought. Yet ours is not simply an “anti-Wahhabi” Islam. That would be to remain in the realm of the polemical and oppositional. There is no option of going back to the eighteenth century prior to the rise of the Wahhabis, nor would that be desirable. As with all other modes of injustice and oppression, we have to identify Wahhabism and oppose it before we can rise above it. This aspect of the progressive Muslim agenda yet

again identifies the necessity of remaining engaged with the very stuff of Islam, past and present.

One should add here that Wahhabism is not the only brand of Islamic literalism-exclusivism, and our task as progressives is to resist all of them. In doing so, it is imperative for progressive Muslims to resist the oppressive ideology of Wahhabism, but equally important to avoid the trap of dehumanizing the Wahhabi-oriented human beings. If we dehumanize and demonize them, we have lost something valuable in our quest to acknowledge the humanity of all human beings. Gandhi was right: “It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself, for we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator.”
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This is a great challenge.

Social justice

There have, of course, long been Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, avowed atheists, and others involved in many social justice issues. Increasingly, they now find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with new Muslim friends. The term “social justice” may be new to some contemporary Muslims, but what is not new is the theme of justice in Islam. Justice lies at the heart of Islamic social ethics. Time and again the Qur’an talks about providing for the marginalized members of society: the poor, the orphan, the downtrodden, the wayfarer, the hungry, etc.

It is time to “translate” the social ideals in the Qur’an and Islamic teachings in a way that those committed to social justice today can relate to and understand. We would do well to follow the lead of Shi‘i Muslims who from the start have committed to standing up for the downtrodden and the oppressed. Everyone knows that Muslims have always stood for the theme of Divine unity. Yet how many people have also realized that the Mu‘tazilites (who have greatly affected Shi‘i understandings of Islam) so valued justice that they identified themselves as the folk of “Divine Unity
and
Justice” (
ahl al-tawhid wa ’l-‘adl
)?
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In the Sunni tradition, there is a vibrant memory of the Prophet repeatedly talking about how a real believer is one whose neighbor does not go to bed hungry. In today’s global village, it is time to think of all of humanity as our neighbor. The time has come for us to be responsible for the well-being and dignity of all human beings if we wish to be counted as real believers. To borrow a metaphor from our Christian friends, we are all our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers now.

The time has come to stand up and be counted. As Muslims and as human beings, we stand up to those who perpetuate hate in the name of Islam. We stand up to those whose God is a vengeful monster in the sky issuing death decrees against the Muslim and the non-Muslim alike. We stand up to those whose God is too small, too mean, too tribal, and too male. We stand up to those who apologetically claim that the beautiful notions of universal

brotherhood and sisterhood in the Qur’an have somehow made Muslim societies immune to the ravages of classism, sexism, and racism. To all of these, we say: not in my name, not in the name of my God will you commit this hatred, this violence. We stand by the Qur’anic teaching (5:32) that to save the life of one human being is to have saved the life of all humanity, and to take the life of one human being is to have taken the life of all humanity. That which you do to my fellow human beings, you do to me.

And yet again we recall that ours is a multiple critique, one of engaging and challenging all the ideologies and institutions of injustice and inequality in the various communities in which we find ourselves. This means standing up to those who support and benefit from the Western hegemony over the rest of the world. The time has come for us to stand up to those who look at the world not as a single human family, but as “us” versus “them.” The time has come to stand up to those who look down at others through an imperialist lens, those who favor a “globalization” that works to the exclusive benefit of multi-national corporations at the detriment of ordinary citizens. The time has come to stand up to those who proliferate the structures whereby five percent of the world’s population consumes twenty-five percent of its resources, while tens of millions perish in agonizing starvation. The time has come to stand up to drug companies who clutch their patents of HIV drugs while untold millions die of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere. The time has come to stand up to those who are rightly outraged at the murder of innocent civilians in the U.S.A. and allied countries, but easily dismiss the murder of innocent civilians in other countries as “unfortunate collateral damage.” To all of them, we say: not in my name will you commit these acts of violence that result in the death of so many innocents. That which you do to my fellow human beings you do to me.