Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (26 page)

There has been a pattern in contemporary Muslim scholarship to let the sovereign voice of the Qur’an speak without the community of the Qur’an speaking and interacting with the Qur’an in deep and life-transforming conversations. For instance, modern Muslim interpreters, especially Muslim feminists, make too much of a few verses of the Qur’an that suggest reciprocal rights and duties between unequal spouses and then hasten to suggest that the Qur’an advocates egalitarianism as norm. In order to accept this one must pretend to be blind to the welter of evidence that suggests an outright patriarchy as the “textual” norm. Generations of Muslim scholars have correctly stated that the Qur’an advocates patriarchal norms, since that was the historical condition in which the Qur’an was revealed. By privileging a few verses and then suggesting that these isolated and singular verses should control the meaning and interpretation of numerous other verses, using the adage that “part of the Qur’an explains other parts” (
al-qur’an yufassiru ba‘duhu ba‘dan
) is nothing short of hermeneutical acrobatics or a hermeneutics of wishful thinking. It may be preferable to hear the Qur’an in its patriarchal voice but to understand it with the sensibility of an actor/reader/listener/reciter immersed in the process of revelation. It is that listener/reciter who discovers through her or his history, experience, and transformed inner sensibility that gender justice, equality, and fairness is a norm for our time, and not patriarchy.

Having once done the former kind of interpretation myself, I increasingly find it unfulfilling and unsatisfactory. I am more inclined to give history and the performative role of the revelation a greater place in an interpretive schema. A closer look at text fundamentalism suggests that it sustains several fictions.

Such interpretations attempt to exclusively seek authority in some founding text. However, in doing so they fail to engage the revelatory text in an interactive manner. It is precisely such interactivity that transforms the human being who is ultimately the subject of revelation, and who has to embody the qualities that combat patriarchy and endorse justice and equality. Glossing the text with anti-patriarchal virtues is not the warrant of liberation or egalitarianism. Text fundamentalism in part perpetuates the fiction that the text actually provides the norms, and we merely “discover” the norms. The truth is that we “make” the norms in conversation with the revelatory text. If one reads medieval Muslim legal texts, one will note how the discursive formation orchestrated by the jurists constructs the norms. For this reason, many people are surprised how early Muslim jurists could give verdicts seemingly contrary to the explicit sense of the revealed text.

The answer is both simple and revealing: the earlier scholars gave greater credence to their specific social context and often gave the context decisive authority in the interpretation of the text by employing a very sophisticated hermeneutic. Thus, we find that some classical jurists argue that causing injury to the wife by means of beating is a ground for divorce, despite the Qur’an saying that a disobedient spouse can be chastized. Abu Hanifa has no objections to non-Muslims entering the holy city of Mecca, despite an explicit text of the Qur’an that deems the polytheists to be unclean and prevents them from entering the sacred mosque. For him the Qur’anic passage had a once-only application at the inception of Islam, when the holy sanctuary had to be dedicated to the faith of Islam, and has no subsequent mandate.
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What is required is to explore the multiple interpretive methods that were employed by scholars in the past to discover the creativity they invested. In addition, we need to explore and develop new ways of interpretation of especially the revealed text in order to allow its full breadth and vision to speak to us in a transformative way.

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This moment in history, more than any other, places an extraordinary burden on Muslim intellectuals. In short, there is an almost impossible expectation on us to provide solutions in places where none appears on the horizon, offer hope in times of utter despair, and address issues that are overwhelming in their magnitude and proportions. And yet, we dare not retreat. If anything we need to offer hope. Hope, as the novelist Anne Lamott says, is a revolutionary patience. The painstaking and soul-searching intellectual quest must be embraced boldly, creatively, and patiently. The uncomfortable questions have to be asked. If we do not, then the responsibility of learning and faith has gone unanswered.

endnotes

1. Orhan Pamuk,
   My Name Is Red
   (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 161.
   

2. My use of the term “Orthodoxy” must be distinguished from other uses of this term. I use it the way Talal Asad employs it, in which orthodoxy is not merely a set of opinions but a relationship of power, where this power is used to exclude, correct, and undermine. In short, orthodoxy is a discursive practice. See Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” (Washington: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University Occasional Papers Series, 1986), pp. 15–16.
   

3. Muhammad Iqbal,
   The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
   (London: Oxford University Press, 1934; reprinted, Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1960), 97.
   

4. Orhan Pamuk,
   My Name Is Red
   , 168.
   

5. Sumit Sarkar, “The Relevance of E.P. Thompson,” in
   Writing Social History
   (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53.
   

6. E.P. Thompson,
   The Making of the English Working Class
   (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 12.
   

7. Abu ‘Uthman ‘Amr b. Bahr b. Mahbub al-Basri, “Kitab al-Futya,”
   in Rasa’il al-Jahiz,
   ed. Muhammad Basil ‘Uyun al-Sud, 2 vols (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2000), 1:223.
   

8. Maurizio Passerin d’Entre`ves and Seyla Benhabib (eds),
   Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
   (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
   

9. Asaf A.A. Fyzee,
   A Modern Approach to Islam
   (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1981), 112.
   

10. Ibid., 84–113.

11. Ibid., 110.

12. Martha Mundi, “The Family, Inheritance, and Islam: A Re-examination of the Sociology of Fara’id Law,” in
Islamic Law: Social and Historical Contexts
, ed. Aziz al-Azmeh (New York: Routledge, 1988), 1–123.

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ON BEING A SCHOLAR OF ISLAM: RISKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Tazim R. Kassam

This essay reflects on the conditions and contexts in which scholars of Islamic studies have found themselves, especially in the wake of the tragedy enacted in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. It raises the question of what it means to be a specialist in Islamic Studies teaching in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.
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These reflections emerge primarily out of experiences informally shared by scholars through email exchanges, personal conversations, list-serves and websites.
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Scholars of Islam currently face a reality consisting of both opportunities and risks. Working and living in the United States has many benefits, including the freedom to think, to speak, and to investigate; an environment of civil discourse that encourages the peaceful co-existence of a plurality of beliefs, ethnic backgrounds, and lifestyles; opportunities for self-expression, creativity, and industry in all walks of life; and the orderly exchange of material, cultural, and intellectual goods. Consisting of a multiracial, multicultural society, ideally speaking, it is a place that offers citizens and immigrants a space of freedom within which to identify and to address common needs and concerns and to help build civil society through civic engagements with other communities, neighbors, and co-workers while also preserving and enriching one’s own heritage. For the younger generation, it offers a place of hope to start afresh and put to rest older divisions and hatreds of their ancestral homes.

Notwithstanding these opportunities, being a Muslim in the Western world and, particularly in the United States, is cause for increasing concern following the fateful events of September 11, 2001. One wonders whether teachers and scholars of Islamic studies, Muslim and non-Muslim, are fighting a losing battle in their effort to make Muslim societies, their aspirations, cultural richness,

intellectual traditions, and modern challenges intelligible to a wider audience. The many challenges scholars face include: the widespread demonization of “Islam”; the tense atmosphere of public opinion; the increasing levels of state surveillance; the tacit restrictions on airing dissenting opinions; and the battle over who speaks for Islam among Muslim groups and Islamic specialists. Muslim scholars of Islam, who themselves come from highly varied ethnic, geographical, linguistic, and intellectual backgrounds, additionally face considerable challenges in the three settings of academe, Muslim communities, and Western society at large, settings in which their Muslim identities are either called into question as biased or upheld as voices of legitimacy and authenticity. This essay will discuss some of these challenges and consider the various roles played by scholars of Islam, including Muslim scholars, today.

The genesis of this
Progressive Muslims
volume took place in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Individually and as a group, scholars of Islam,
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who represent a diversity of specializations, were as horrified and stunned by the attacks and the wanton destruction and loss of life as the public. Muslim academics in particular were distraught at the damage these attacks had done to the reputation of peaceful and law abiding Muslims everywhere. They worried that the event would be misused to give confirmation to harmful theories that set up “Islam” as the post-Cold-War- enemy of “the West.” In the following pages, I will briefly explore the implications and fallout of September 11 to which scholars of Islam have had to respond. This includes the ongoing necessity of putting into historical and socio-political context the events of September 11 as well as other conflicts in the Middle East within an already inhospitable atmosphere in which all things Muslim and Islamic are demonized. Unfortunately, the attacks of September 11 and the American global “war on terrorism” has given a new lease of life to stereotypes and suspicions about the “other” in the so-called Western and Islamic world, and has dealt a blow to the efforts of teachers, scholars, and activists who work hard to reduce this unhealthy and dangerous state of mutual incomprehension. The chapter will consider the deleterious cost of ignorance and of the perpetuation of discourses of hatred which foil hopes of achieving lasting peace, security, and justice for Muslims and non-Muslims alike in an irreversibly interdependent global village. It will also raise issues pertinent to the roles of scholars of Islam in the Western world with particular emphasis on their responsibilities for “speaking truth to power,” to borrow Edward Said’s phrase, and to highlight the intimidating and silencing accusations of disloyalty and treachery which are received by those who dare to speak up.

The September 11 crisis brought into sharper focus a number of challenges and risks already faced by experts in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies prior to the tragedy. Most scholars of Islam and the Middle East were called upon to juggle divergent roles and to play a balancing act that was simultaneously sympathetic, dispassionate, and critical. Scholars were pressed into service in a

variety of contexts. Muslim student associations and Islamic centers expressed fears of reprisal and anti-Islamic, anti-Arab sentiment and they wanted and expected scholars of Islam, especially Muslim scholars, to defend their religion and culture. Americans, young and old, were angry, confused, and worried about further terrorist attacks, the implications of declaring a state of war, and the potential loss of life and civil liberties in the U.S.A. which heightened security measures would entail. Together with newspapers, TV stations, radio talk hosts, civic associations, and church organizations, citizens wanted information, explanations, rationalizations, debates, and discussions on Islam, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Wahhabism, jihad,
fatwa
s, and so on. Specialists with knowledge of Arabic, Afghanistan, and radical Islamist movements were called upon to assist the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department in their criminal investigations. Some experts were engaged in providing scholarly rationalizations for going into war in Afghanistan and, more vaguely, against terrorism while others argued that a unilateral show of American military force in countries speculated to harbor terrorists and lying in the dubious “axis of evil” would only serve to fuel the very social, economic, and political conditions that are hotbeds for terrorist organizations. Scholars of Islam were in demand in women studies programs, the media, and at other venues to discuss the plight of women in Afghanistan and the place of women in Muslim culture generally. In sum, highly complex issues had to be discussed in contexts that pushed for simplification, taking sides, and drawing conclusions.

Tragically, the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon revived centuries-old prejudices of “Islam” as a force to be feared and of Muslims as an inherently violent and irrational people, prejudices that have antecedents reaching back to the Christian Crusades. This event has made the already difficult task faced by scholars and teachers, enlightened journalists, and Muslims themselves of dispelling the negative stereotypes that abound of “Islam” virtually impossible. Among the many questions people asked in the wake of the horror and destruction of that day were: Why do
they
hate us? Why do Muslims oppose modernity and the West? How do Muslims relate to Christians and Jews? Why are Muslim women oppressed? Not just Americans, but people around the world (including Muslims) were shocked and traumatized by the event. Not surprisingly, as the identities of the terrorists came to be known, greater hostility and anger were expressed towards Muslims, and especially Arab Muslims. The event played into the cynical predictions of commentators such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and Martin Kramer whose sensationalist, polarizing, and contemptuous views of Muslims and Islamic cultures have been fed to an unsuspecting and misinformed public.
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In this respect, the actions of the suicide bombers have damaged the reputation and, practically speaking, the future of Muslims worldwide who must live with the slur, albeit unfair, that has been cast upon them. The judgment of guilt by association, while unfair, will inevitably be invoked by some to justify their oppression.
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