Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (8 page)

The very concept of “peace” can be and has been co-opted and adopted by hegemonic powers to preserve the unjust
status quo
, as we have seen in both Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. At times like this, a progressive can and perhaps must reject the superficial appeals of an unjust peace, and insist instead on a peace that is rooted in justice. This is precisely the sentiment echoed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, he stated, “Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold . . . Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.”
28
Similarly, Bob Marley’s former partner in reggae, Peter Tosh, sang, “We don’t want no peace – we want equal rights and justice!” Marley himself sang a powerful song called “War,” which captures this sense well. In the lyrics below, “war” is seen as more than a violent military conflict. It is, rather, a declaration that one will fight systems of prejudice, injustice, and inequality.

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior

is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned – Everywhere is war –

Me say war.

That until there is no longer

first class and second class citizens of any nation until the colour of a man’s skin

is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes – Me say war.

That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race –

Dis a war.

That until that day

the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship

rule of international morality

will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained – Now everywhere is war – war.
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The statement that “Islam is a religion of peace” must not be allowed to become a license to avoid dealing with the grinding realities of social, political, and spiritual injustice on the ground level. To do so is to sell out our humanity, and to abandon our cosmic duty to embody the Qur’anic call for implementing justice (
‘adl
) and realizing goodness-and-beauty (
ihsan
). Our great challenge as progressive Muslims is to find a non-violent means of resisting the powers that be, and to speak truth to them. At the same time, we must aim to bring about a just and pluralistic society in which all of us can live and breathe, and realize the God-given dignity to which we are entitled as human beings. We do not
grant
this dignity to one another: it belongs to all of us simply because, as the Qur’an teaches us, all of us have the Divine spirit breathed into us.

CC OO NN CC LL UU SS II OO NN

It is superficial to talk about a conclusion to the progressive Muslim project, since it is clearly only at its beginning. Yet let me offer a final thought here: in the visionary song that frames this essay, Bob Dylan talks about how the “waters around you have grown.” The Qur’an likewise talks about a prophet, Noah, who found his community surrounded by rapidly rising waters. Like Noah, we must accept that we will soon be drenched to the bone. And like Noah, we repeat the prayer:

wa qul rabbi: anzilni munzalan mubarakan, wa anta khayru ’l-munzilin

And say: “O My Lord, lead me to a blessed landing, for you are best of deliverers.”
30

Let us remember that Noah’s task did not end when he got on the ark, but continued after he landed on the ground. We ask God to lead us to a blessed landing station, one from which our work will continue. The road
there
starts here, at this very moment, with every one of us.

May we all have the courage, the vision, and the compassion to heal this fractured world.
31

Wa ilayhi raji‘un

“And we are perpetually returning to God”

endnotes

*I am deeply grateful to all the friends who have looked over this essay in its various incarnations, and provided me with invaluable suggestions for refining it. Rob Rozehnal took time out of a very busy phase of his life to unselfishly provide me with not one but two sets of comments. Kecia Ali, Scott Kugle, Tara van Brederode, and Tazim Kassam all provided very insightful feedback. Nasrollah Pourjavady graciously pointed out the quotes from Rumi’s
Masnavi
and Hazrat ‘Ali. Their friendship and kindness is a constant reminder of the fact that none of us walks alone on this path.

1. Lyrics are from Bob Dylan’s official web site,
   http://www.bobdylan.com/. This song appeared in Dylan’s 1964 album, also titled
   The Times They Are A-Changin’
   . That version is classic, revolutionary, and powerful. Also worth listening to is the more tender live version on Dylan’s
   The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3
   (released 1991). In the second version Dylan sings, “If your spirit to you is worth savin’. . . .”
   

2. I am here indebted to miriam cooke’s discussion of “multiple critique” in her insightful work
   Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature
   (New York: Routledge, 2000). Sa‘diyya Shaikh’s essay in this volume also brings up this concept, and I am grateful to both of them.
   

3. Wahhabism is a reactionary theological movement that originated in eighteenth-century Arabia. It remained an undistinguished intellectual movement for a long time, until it was adapted as the ideology of the ruling Sa‘ud family, who came upon the incredible wealth of oil resources. Subsequently, this previously trivial ideology was armed with the financial resources to export its vision all over the Muslim world. The essay by Khaled Abou El Fadl in this collection is very useful in demonstrating the ways in which Wahhabism and Salafi reformist movements have not always been in agreement, although many tend to conflate the two today. For more information on Wahhabism, refer to Ahmad Dallal, “The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 1750–1850,”
   Journal of the American Oriental
   

   Society
   113 (3), 1993, 341–59; Michael Cook, “On the Origins of Wahhabism,”
   Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
   3(2), 1992, 191–202; and Hamid Algar,
   Wahhabism: A Critical Essay
   (Oneonta: Islamic Publications International, 2002).
   

4. “North” and “South” evoke the language of those who point out the hypocrisy and injustice of the global inequalities in the distribution of resources and consumption. The “North” represents those who consume more than their fair share, at the expense of the “South.” Many have favored using this terminology in place of the explicitly hierarchical language of “First World” and “Third World” (as if there is more than one world), or other euphemisms like “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries (as if “development” is unequivocal, or quintessentially positive).
   

5. As the Qur’an states in two separate passages,
   wa nafakhtu fihi min ruhi.
   God states, “I breathed into humanity something of My own spirit.” (Qur’an 15:29 and 38:72)
   

6. Post-modern critiques of modernity were developed in a whole range of academic disciplines, including feminist scholarship, anthropology, literary criticism, and post- colonial studies. The corpus of post-modern scholarship is truly vast, and often bewildering. A good starting point is the collection of essays by Habermas, Lyotard, Jameson, Eco, Rorty, and others in Thomas Docherty, ed.,
   Postmodernism: A Reader
   (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1992). Also useful is Ania Loomba,
   Colonialism/ Postcolonialism
   (New York: Routledge, 1998).
   

7. Shalu Bhalla,
   Quotes of Gandhi
   (New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1995), 143.
   

8. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
   , released by the White House of George W. Bush in September 2002. Available on-line at:
   http://www.whitehouse.gov/ nsc/nss.pdf.
   

9. I have deliberately avoided the term “fundamentalist,” since that term is open to so many interpretations and abuses. The groups that I address here combine a literal reading of
   

   select texts with an exclusivist understanding to arrive at what in any other time in Islamic history would be seen as an extreme position on the spectrum of Islamic interpretations. Yet, contrary to what is often stated, their response is also a distinctly modern one, in the sense that it requires modernity as a foil against which it articulates itself. It is not, as its advocates might claim, simply “traditional,” or “the way things have always been.” Living as we do in these terrible days of Islam-phobia, it is important to point out that just as is the case in the Christian and Jewish traditions, one can be a literalist-exclusivist without necessarily resorting to violence. To put it in a shorthand fashion, not every Wahhabi (or Jama‘at Islami) is a terrorist. However, the communal enforcement of literalist-exclusivist ideologies such as Wahhabism so dehumanize entire groups both inside and outside the Muslim community that they narrow the gap to violence against both other Muslims and non-Muslims. So many places in the Muslim world where violence is a fact of life also feature these literalist-exclusivist interpretations of Islam.
   

10. For insightful reflections on tradition and modernity as related epistemic fields rather than binary oppositions, see Marilyn Robinson Waldman, “Tradition as a Modality of Change: Islamic Examples,”
    History of Religions
    25, 1986, 318–40; Daniel Brown,
    Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
    

11. Rabbi Zalman Schachter, cited in Roger Kamenetz,
    The Jew in the Lotus
    (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,1994), 43. I am deeply grateful to Reb Zalman for reminding me in a
    

    conversation that as one commits to undertaking the transformation and reformation of the social and spiritual order, it is also necessary to mourn the injustices that we have willingly and unwillingly participated in. Failure to do so always runs the risk of reformers getting caught in arrogance and self-righteousness.
    

12. In Arabic, as in other Semitic languages, most nouns are based on a triliteral root system which is then applied to different forms to yield slightly different shades of meaning. Both
    jihad
    and
    ijtihad
    come from the triliteral root
    ja-ha-da
    .
    

13. Quotes of Gandhi
    , 99.
    

14. It is significant that in this Mu‘tazili interpretation,
    ‘adl
    did not stand for an abstract principle of justice, but rather was seen as being directly related to human free will. If human beings were not free to choose between good and evil, then God would be unjust in punishing us for actions that we are not ultimately responsible for. See W. Montgomery Watt,
    The Formative Period of Islamic Thought
    (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998), 231.
    

15. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community,” in
    A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
    , ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986; reprint, 1991), 633.
    

16. The Qur’an uses the phrase
    bani adam
    , literally “children of Adam,” on at least seven separate occasions to refer to the totality of humanity: 7:26, 7:27, 7:31, 7:35, 7:172, 17:70,
    

    and 36:60. “Thus we have honored the children of Adam. . .”
    

17. The Rose Garden.
    Shaykh Muslih al-Din Sa‘di,
    Gulistan
    , ed. Muhammad Khaza’ili (Tehran: Intisharat-i Javidan, 1361/1982), 190. Translation is mine.
    

18. Mawlana Jalal al-Din Balkhi Rumi,
    Masnavi-yi Ma‘navi
    , ed. R.A. Nicholson (Tehran: Intisharat-i Nigah, 1371/1992), 532. This line is found in the third book of the Masnavi, line 4726 of the Nicholson Persian edition.
    

19. Quotes of Gandhi
    , 25.
    

20. Translation is from R. Walzer, “Islamic Philosophy,” cited in Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
    Three Muslim Sages
    (Delmar, NY: Caravan, 1964), 11. This same sentiment is echoed by many other Muslim philosophers.
    

21. Only half jokingly, I like to refer to these last two figures as “the two holy Bobs.”
    

22. Abdullahi A. an-Na‘im,
    Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law
    (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
    

23. Robin Wright, “An Iranian Luther Shakes the Foundations of Islam”
    , The Guardian
    , February 1, 1995 (quoted from the
    Los Angeles Times
    , January 1995). Available online through Soroush’s own website: http://www.seraj.org/guard.htm.
    

24. There were of course some exceptions, and there are records of women teachers and students at madrasas who were usually still required to teach from behind a screen to an audience of male pupils.
    

25. I am here referring to the different corpus of
    hadith
    collections that contain the statements of the Prophet Muhammad.
    

26. Among contemporary Muslim authors, one of the most eloquent critics of authoritarian tendencies has been Khaled Abou El Fadl, particularly in his
    Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women
    (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001) as well as his
    And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses
    (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001).
    

27. To be fair, one has to admit that the very nature of the web does allow for greater flexibility of scholarly and activist presentations of Islam than in the realm of pamphlets, which tend to be dominated by neo-Wahhabi interpretations. Despite what has been called the “digital divide,” there are great opportunities for Muslim communities and individuals to place their views on the web, even if they do not have access to costly printing and distribution resources. Today we find Muslim websites devoted not just to literalist interpretations of Islam, but also to women’s groups, social justice organizations, peace movements, gay and lesbian Muslim groups, and Sufi communities.
    

28. The Dalai Lama,
    A Policy of Kindness,
    ed. Sidney Piburn (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 1990), 17.
    

29. Bob Marley, “War.” Lyrics are from Bob Marley’s official website, http://www.bobmarley. com/. The words to Marley’s song are actually from a speech made by Haile Selassie to the United Nations. The song is featured on the third disk of the four-CD compilation of Marley’s songs, entitled
    Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom
    .