Voices of Islam (179 page)

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Voices of Islam

Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan have supported her publishing projects. She is an accomplished lecturer in art history, world religions, and filmmaking and is a founding member of the Thomas Merton Center Foundation. Henry- Blakemore received her BA at Sarah Lawrence College, studied at the Ameri- can University in Cairo and Al-Azhar University, earned her MA in Educa- tion at the University of Michigan, and served as a research fellow at Cambridge University from 1983 to 1990. She is the volume editor for Vol- ume 3,
Voices of Life: Family, Home, and Society.

THE AUTHORS

As stated earlier,
Voices of Islam
seeks to meet the need for Muslims to bear witness to their own traditions by bringing together a diverse collection of Muslim voices from different regions and from different scholarly and profes- sional backgrounds. The voices that speak to the readers about Islam in this set come from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, and include men and women, academics, community and religious leaders, teachers, activists, and business leaders. Some authors were born Muslims and others embraced Islam at various points in their lives. A variety of doctrinal, legal, and cultural positions are also represented, including modernists, traditionalists, legalists, Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, and ‘‘progressive Muslims.’’ The editors of the set took care to represent as many Muslim points of view as possible, including those that they may disagree with. Although each chapter in the set was designed to provide basic information for the general reader on a particular topic, the authors were encouraged to express their individual voices of opinion and experience whenever possible.

In theoretical terms,
Voices of Islam
treads a fine line between what Paul Veyne has called ‘‘specificity’’ and ‘‘singularity.’’ As both an introduction to Islam and as an expression of Islamic diversity, this set combines historical and commentarial approaches, as well as poetic and narrative accounts of individual experiences. Because of the wide range of subjects that are covered, individualized accounts (the ‘‘singular’’) make up much of the nar- rative of
Voices of Islam,
but the intent of the work is not to express individu- ality per se. Rather, the goal is to help the reader understand the varieties of Islamic experience (the ‘‘specific’’) more deeply by finding within their speci- ficity a certain kind of generality.
12

For Veyne, ‘‘specificity’’ is another way of expressing typicality or the ideal type, a sociological concept that has been a useful tool for investigating com- plex systems of social organization, thought, or belief. However, the problem with typification is that it may lead to oversimplification, and oversimplifica- tion is the handmaiden of the stereotype. Typification can lead to oversimpli- fi ation because the concept of typicality belongs to a structure of general knowledge that obscures the view of the singular and the different. Thus,

Voices of Islam
xv

presenting the voices of only preselected ‘‘typical Muslims’’ or ‘‘representative Muslims’’ in a work such as
Voices of Islam
would only aggra- vate the tendency of many Muslims and non-Muslims to define Islam in a sin- gle, essentialized way. When done from without, this can lead to a form of stereotyping that may exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the tendency to see Muslims in ways that they do not see themselves. When done from within, it can lead to a dogmatic fundamentalism (whether liberal or conservative does not matter) that excludes the voices of difference from ‘‘real’’ Islam and fosters a totalitarian approach to religion. Such an emphasis on the legiti- macy of representation by Muslims themselves would merely reinforce the ideal of sameness that Arendt decried and enable the overdetermination of the ‘‘typical’’ Muslim from without. For this reason,
Voices of Islam
seeks to strike a balance between specificity and singularity. Not only the chapters in these volumes but also the backgrounds and personal orientations of their authors express Islam as a lived diversity and as a source of multiple well- springs of knowledge. Through the use of individual voices, this work seeks to save the ‘‘singular’’ from the ‘‘typical’’ by employing the ‘‘specific.’’

Dipesh Chakrabarty, a major figure in the field of Subaltern Studies, notes: ‘‘Singularity is a matter of viewing. It comes into being as that which resists our attempt to see something as a particular instance of a general idea or cat- egory.’’
13
For Chakrabarty, the singular is a necessary antidote to the typical because it ‘‘defi the generalizing impulse of the sociological imagina- tion.’’
14
Because the tendency to overdetermine and objectify Islam is central to the continued lack of understanding of Islam by non-Muslims, it is neces- sary to defy the generalizing impulse by demonstrating that the unity of Islam is not a unity of sameness, but of diversity. Highlighting the singularity of individual Islamic practices and doctrines becomes a means of liberating Islam from the totalizing vision of both religious fundamentalism (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) and secular essentialism. While Islam in theory may be a unity, in both thought and practice this ‘‘unity’’ is in reality a galaxy whose millions of singular stars exist within a universe of multiple perspec- tives. This is not just a sociological fact, but a theological point as well. For centuries, Muslim theologians have asserted that the Transcendent Unity of God is a mystery that defi the normal rules of logic. To human beings, unity usually implies either singularity or sameness, but with respect to God, Unity is beyond number or comparison.

In historiographical terms, a work that seeks to describe Islam through the voices of individual Muslims is an example of ‘‘minority history.’’ However, by allowing the voices of specificity and singularity to enter into a trialogue that includes each other as well as the reader,
Voices of Islam
is also an exam- ple of ‘‘subaltern history.’’ For Chakrabarty, subaltern narratives ‘‘are mar- ginalized not because of any conscious intentions but because they represent moments or points at which the archive that the historian mines develops a degree of intractability with respect to the aims of professional

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Voices of Islam

history.’’
15
Subaltern narratives do not only belong to socially subordinate or minority groups, but they also belong to underrepresented groups in Western scholarship, even if these groups comprise a billion people as Mus- lims do. Subaltern narratives resist typification because the realities that they represent do not correspond to the stereotypical. As such, they need to be studied on their own terms. The history of Islam in thought and practice is the product of constant dialogues between the present and the past, internal and external discourses, culture and ideology, and tradition and change. To describe Islam as anything less would be to reduce it to a limited set of descriptive and conceptual categories that can only rob Islam of its diversity and its historical and intellectual depth. The best way to retain a sense of this diversity and depth is to allow Muslim voices to relate their own narratives of Islam’s past and present.

NOTES

1. Carl W. Ernst,
   Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World
   (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), xvii.
   

2.
Time,
June 7, 2004, 10.

3. Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
rev. ed. (San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest Harcourt, 1976), 54.

4. Ibid., 55.

1. Guillermo Gomez-Pen˜a, ‘‘The New World (B)order,’’
   Third Text
   21 (Winter 1992–1993): 74, quoted in Homi K. Bhabha,
   The Location of Culture
   (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), 313.
   

2. Bhabha,
   The Location of Culture,
   13. 7. Ibid., 14–15.
   

8. Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(London, U.K.: Pluto, 1986), 116. The original French term for this condition is
surde´termine´
. See idem,
Peau noire masques

blancs
(Paris: E
´
ditions du Seuil, 1952), 128.

9. Ibid., 112.

1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith,
   The Meaning and End of Religion
   (Minneapolis, Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 7.
   

2. Khaled Abou El Fadl,
   Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women
   (Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publications, 2001), 9–85.
   

3. Paul Veyne,
   Writing History: Essay on Epistemology,
   trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 56.
   

4. Dipesh Chakrabarty,
   Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and His- torical Difference
   (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 82.
   

14. Ibid., 83. 15. Ibid., 101.

I
NTRODUCTION
: B
EAUTY
, C
ULTURE
,
AND
‌

C
REATIVITY IN
I
SLAM

•

Vincent J. Cornell

In ‘‘Diary of a Careless Woman’’ (
Yawmiyat Mar’a la Mubaliya
), the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, bemoaning the state of contemporary Arab culture, wrote: ‘‘Our culture! Nothing but bubbles in washtubs and chamber pots!’’
1
Qabbani’s complaint, which shocked readers at the time it was written, refl what the French Arabist and culture critic Jacques Berque called the ‘‘ravaged subjectivity’’ of the Arab intellectual. ‘‘In aesthetic matters as in everything else,’’ wrote Berque, ‘‘the Arabs suffer both from the valuation they place upon their classicism, and from their training on foreign models. They attach value to this training itself, since in most cases they take it as an index of modernity and a criterion of survival. Arabic expression is thus caught between two millstones, one coming from the depths of the ages, the other from the outside.’’
2

Berque’s analysis of the dilemma of Arab cultural expression can be applied to Islamic cultural expression as well. The two millstones of which he speaks

—a formalistic classicism that leads to the idealized construction of a mythical past and a shallow and materialistic modernism, imported from the outside, which offers the allure of progress without the antidote of self-criticality— imprison the contemporary Muslim artist and intellectual between two dog- matisms that offer few avenues of escape. In response to this dilemma, the Muslim artist or intellectual often retreats into an antimodern or anti- Western stance in order to preserve the integrity of a classical ideal that is more metaphorical than real. However, what such artists and intellectuals fail to realize is that Muslims and Westerners are both caught in a similar dilemma. Both are born into the ‘‘original sin’’ of modernity, whether they live in Cairo or Cleveland, Tehran or Topeka, Lahore or Los Angeles. Because of this, any attempt to escape from modernity can only be made through modernity itself, by using modern concepts, strategies, and method- ologies. Muslim artists and intellectuals make frequent and regular use of

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Introduction

modern concepts and strategies whether they intend to do so or not. This is why the attempt to undo the loss of tradition often becomes a false front, the fetishization of an ideal, and an artificial invention of a pseudo-tradition. This problem is not unique to the Muslim world. The invention of pseudo-tradition is as much a problem for Western conservatives as it is for Muslim revivalists. For example, speaking empirically, what makes the ‘‘Greatest Generation’’ of Americans who fought in World War II necessarily better than the present generation of Americans? How can one be sure that the present generation of Americans would not respond with the same cour- age and resolve if faced with the same challenges? Eric Hobsbawm has observed that the nostalgic reinvention of tradition is not a creative revitaliza- tion of the past but is instead a sterile process of ‘‘formalization and ritualiza- tion, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition.’’
3
The Moroccan feminist writer Fatima Mernissi refers to the fetishization of tradition in the contemporary Muslim world as a
mal du pre´sent,
a ‘‘sickness of the present,’’ which leads Muslims to experience ‘‘a desire for death, a desire to be elsewhere, to be absent, to flee to the past as a way of being