Voices of Islam (255 page)

To be sure, just as progressives cannot artifi be made to look alike (homogenized), so too it would be wrong to portray contending views to be uniform. However, for the purpose of characterization, but not defa- mation, I am compelled to resort to a certain strategic essentialism to describe how my views by way of general brushstrokes differ from those of my opponents. A more careful and technically nuanced comparison belongs to another genre of writing and cannot be composed in the brevity of the space and scope allotted here. The assertion that at least some individuals affi iated with the above-mentioned tendencies, vague as it might sound, would endorse certain aspects of progressive methodology and practice while refraining from doing so with respect to other aspects remains true. This observation should put paid to any illusion that progressive viewpoints are solely the preserve of scholars in the North American academy.

Hence, when I allege that some viewpoints held by Muslim groups are ideological, it is animated by some very specifi concerns. Perpetuating an inhibiting cultural inheritance suggests a denial of the obvious facts of the world and the absence of common sense. In a nutshell I would say that the major differences between Muslim progressives and their critics would be that the latter are either wedded to dated methodologies or committed to doctrines and interpretations that have lost their rationales and relevance over time. On the other hand, progressives are also painfully aware that to uncritically succumb to every fact and fad also makes little sense, since it results in a Panglossian option of being unwaveringly and unrealistically optimistic about everything in the modern style.

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Many fi the term ‘‘progressive’’ to be exclusionary. In other words, does it imply that if one does not subscribe to a progressive agenda that one is by default adhering to a retrograde agenda? In my view such an inference is a flawed one. Any definition can be deployed in both an affirmative and a negative manner. To say that one is black, is a statement that primarily affirms one’s black identity and does not necessarily imply the negation of white identity. However, what such a claim does propose is to signal a difference in identities. Similarly, to say that one is American or Indian does not mean that one necessarily despises Canadians or Pakistanis. What such a label affirms is a package of loyalties and commitments, which in some rare instances, especially during conflict, might turn out to be badge of hostility and exclusion.

Another shorthand way to describe my intellectual approach would be to designate it as critical traditionalism, for reasons that will hopefully become clear later. But someone could make the point that in the very act of naming, one is implying that others are just the opposite: uncritical traditionalists. In reality one is trying to assert the element that distinguishes one’s intellectual agenda from those of others. What is distinctive in my work is to engage with tradition critically: to constantly interrogate tradition and strive to ask productive questions.

AMBIVALENCE OF PROGRESS

If some are drawn to the term ‘‘progress’’ then others are recoiled by its echo. Those who buy into a Hegelian worldview imagine that history is moving toward some clearly defined and concrete end. For believers of this stripe, any change is productive and clearly directed toward a wholesome ‘‘progress.’’ Epitomizing this viewpoint is Francis Fukuyama in his contro- versial book,
The End of History and the Last Man
.
1
For Fukuyama, philoso- phers of old have held that history has an end, not as events, occurrences, and happenings, but as something more deeply philosophical and profound. In this view ‘‘history’’ means a single, coherent, evolutionary process that takes into account the experiences of all peoples over all times. As an evolu- tionary process, if not a program, Fukuyama believes that history is neither random nor unintelligible. Societies develop with coherence from tribal ones based on slavery and subsistence agricultures to theocracies, aristocracies to culminate in liberal democracies driven by technology-rich capitalism. All this is the result of ‘‘progress’’ in history.

In Fukuyama’s view we have reached such a pinnacle of progress that the principles and institutions underlying liberal democratic societies will no longer be in need of alteration or have to be changed. The evolution of history has determined for us what we should behold as the ideal institutions: not communism but capitalism; not socialism but liberal democracy;

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and definitely, no imponderable third way. In his determination to prove the salvifi benefi of liberal democratic progress, Fukuyama drifts into the morally unsettling and theologically Christian territory of eschatology that produces utopia and messianism.

However, there is something deeply troubling and unquestioned in such a conception of progress. Progress becomes hubristic when it only emphasizes the mastery of nature but does not recognize the retrogression of society. Such a vision of progress, notes the German thinker Walter Benjamin, displays the technocratic features that was a hallmark of fascism and other kinds of authoritarian societies. Lots of unsavory movements have in the name of progress been treated as historical norms when in fact they were aberrations. Yoked to the tyranny of unchanging principles is a notion of sec- ular progress that is as fundamentalist in its posture as its religiously inspired counterparts.

This view of progress was inspired by certain biblical themes of an apoca- lyptic end and driven by a mechanistic view to create a New Jerusalem. In numerous apocalyptic writings, Ernest Lee Tuveson comments, history was endowed with a plot and encompassed a narrative of what happened before and what was expected to come. Building on the Hebraic tradition, Christian thinkers and pioneers adapted the moral narratives of the Bible to their own special interpretations of the divine.
2
Later, Protestant attitudes implicitly held that history moves by divinely preordained and revealed stages to the solution of human dilemmas. Gradually this attitude also infected the philosophies of modernity, coming to dominate modern theories of history and science despite a plethora of opposing voices. Notable among these opposing voices were the Romantic thinkers, among them Herder and also

T. S. Eliot who did not accept the inevitability of progress as many others conceded. While everyone accepts that the notion of change is the essence of life, the disagreement is about something much more subtle but is pregnant with significant consequences.

What distinguishes a modernist from someone who is less enamored by everything modern is this: the modernist a` la Fukuyama believes in the
inevi- tability
of progress while the opposing view would, sometimes grudgingly, concede to the
possibility
of change or progress. Progress as fortuitous, rather than as inevitable, holds the promise that change might occur in diverse and multiple forms, not the totalitarian narrative of progress driven by scientism and liberal capitalism. The deterministic or apocalyptic theory of progress locks everyone in a Weberian iron cage or in a suffocating straitjacket of a singular modernity. Ignoring this subtlety can produce some of the most irreconcilable dilemmas and offer nonoptions forcing one to choose between science versus religion, rationality versus faith, and progress versus tradition.

Many Muslim thinkers unfortunately have purchased into the inevitability of progress thesis without thinking through its implications. Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), the poet and thinker of India, also inadvertently stumbled

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into some of these thorny patches. He redeemed himself with his poetry that gushed with romanticism and stirrings of the emotive self. For Iqbal’s poetry differed greatly with his occasional refl ctions on scientifi modernity that were secreted into his philosophy.

LOCATION OF WORK

In intellectual work, as in real estate, location is everything. In what con- text or environment one is located will to a large extent identify one’s primary audience. The question of audience is a critical element in all interpretive and revisionist projects. Since progressive Islam is not only a theoretical enterprise but is also closely related to practice, location, and audience, these concerns are in many ways decisive. The loose alliance of scholars who today write about progressive Islam in North America hail from different backgrounds and contexts. Some are North American-born or naturalized citizens whose base communities are unmistakably North American. Others, in turn, work in the United States but whose primary social laboratory are communities in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East.

Part of the challenge to grasp the trajectory of progressive Islam is to comprehend the journeys that many individuals associated with this very undefi trend have undertaken through scholarship and activism. In my case, my formative work was done in South Africa and what follows is admittedly a highly truncated slice of a much more complex and detailed narrative. The selective nature of this narrative is to highlight some critical elements of the progressive Muslim struggle in the South African context.

As graduates of the seminaries or
madrasas
of India, Pakistan, and other regions of the Muslim world, several of my contemporaries like myself returned to our native land in the 1980s only to encounter a cauldron of political conflict and social injustice perpetrated by the system of apartheid. Young and inexperienced, we were yet determined to engage in the libera- tion struggle from an Islamic moral perspective. After all, Islamic discourse was what we knew best and to which our identities were intimately but also complexly related. While several secular organizations were available from which we could participate in the struggle for liberation, many of us also recognized the need to mobilize our communities in the language that they understood best: the language of faith and tradition.

As aspiring scholars and clerics we were convinced that Islam embodied a message of justice, equality, and freedom, a teaching we needed to internalize and practice programmatically. Our primary audience was the minority Muslim community of South Africa whom we had to remind of their moral duty and responsibility to regard legalized racial discrimination as a violation of human dignity and as sinful as if one were complicit in terms of Muslim ethics. While a section of the Muslim community was willing to embrace

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this message, a larger group was content to go along with the quietist and accomodationist posture that the overwhelming majority of Muslim clerical associations had adopted by tolerating apartheid’s horrors.

It was no doubt an uphill battle to persuade many individuals and the leadership in the ulama community that they erroneously deemed certain doctrines to be part of tradition, such as requiring people to obey an oppres- sive state. Our exigencies required that such doctrines be reviewed. Most Muslim clerics saw it as their primary duty to defend their narrow sectarian and religious interests since they did not feel any obligation to make sacrifi on behalf of a largely non-Muslim and black majority, yoked and dehumanized by decades of legalized segregationist policies and systematic violence. Needless to say, consciously and unconsciously many nonblack communities in South Africa, Muslims included, had also internalized the structural racism of the society which blinded them to the realities of an oppressive state and caused them to ignore the ethical calling of justice demanded by their faith.

For the Muslim progressives this state of affairs required a mini-revolution in traditional juridical ethics (
fi h
) and theology (
kalam
). The need was to ensure that Muslim ethical deliberations abandoned sectarian interests and developed a humanist and inclusivist vision that embraced all human beings irrespective of color, creed, and race. This meant going against the grain of a very strong exclusivist tradition dating back to the days of Muslim empire.

What made matters a little bit easier was the visibility of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. This revolutionary message empowered disenfranchised people around the world with the promise of emancipation from authoritarian regimes and dictatorships supported by the major powers. Just as the United States was a major backer of the dethroned Pahlavi dictatorship in Iran, it also for a considerable time supported the minority white and apartheid government in Pretoria as a Cold War ally. Furthermore, around the 1980s, Muslim groups in different parts of the majority Muslim areas were also battling authoritarian governments. Solidarity with such liberatory and revolutionary movements, of course, inspired us in South Africa.

But it also dawned upon us that a progressive agenda in South Africa would be radically different from the kinds of developments occurring in Egypt, Iran, Sudan, or Pakistan. In those countries the emphasis was on the application of a full-blooded notion of Shari‘a, the content of which pro- duced bloody consequences and shocking miscarriages of justice. In South Africa our search was for a Shari‘a that took into account our realities that were at once very different from those of Muslims in majority contexts.

Often we found voices located on the margins of the Muslim intellectual traditions: particularly attractive were those messages, ideas, and concepts that had resonance with our experiences. For instance, the mainstream and

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canonized tradition forbade alliances with non-Muslims and harbored suspi- cions about our associations with Jews and Christians, given a long and unsa- vory history of political hostilities with these communities over centuries dating back to nascent Islam in Arabia and the Crusades. Over time these attitudes crystallized into a virtual separatist Muslim theology that at least in theory kept associations with Jews and Christians to a minimum save for some notable exceptions in Muslim Spain. In addition, narrow juridical inter- pretations devalued the role of women in public life and politics.