Voices of Islam (3 page)
Authors: Vincent J. Cornell
THE EDITORS
The general editor for
Voices of Islam
is Vincent J. Cornell, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. When he was solicited by Praeger, an imprint of Green- wood Publishing, to formulate this project, he was director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Cornell has been a Sunni Muslim for more than 30 years and is a noted scholar of Islamic thought and history. His most important book,
Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufi
(1998), was described by a prepublication reviewer as ‘‘the most significant study of the Sufi tradi- tion in Islam to have appeared in the last two decades.’’ Besides publishing works on Sufism, Dr. Cornell has also written articles on Islamic law, Islamic theology, and moral and political philosophy. For the past five years, he has been a participant in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ‘‘Building Bridges’’ dia- logue of Christian and Muslim theologians. In cooperation with the Jerusalem-based Elijah Interfaith Institute, he is presently co-convener of a group of Muslim scholars, of whom some are contributors to
Voices of Islam,
which is working toward a new theology of the religious other in Islam. Besides serving as general editor for
Voices of Islam,
Dr. Cornell is also the volume editor for Volume 1,
Voices of Tradition;
Volume 2,
Voices of the Spirit;
and Volume 4,
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science.
The associate editors for
Voices of Islam
are Omid Safi and Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore. Omid Safi is Associate Professor of Religion at the Uni- versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Safi the grandson of a noted Iranian Ayatollah, was born in the United States but raised in Iran and has been recognized as an important Muslim voice for moderation and diversity. He gained widespread praise for his edited first book,
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism
(2003), and was interviewed on CNN, National Public Radio, and other major media outlets. He recently published an important study of Sufi-state relations in premodern Iran,
The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam
(2006). Dr. Safi is the volume editor for Vol- ume 5,
Voices of Change,
which contains chapters by many of the authors rep- resented in his earlier work,
Progressive Muslims.
Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore has been a practicing Sunni Muslim for almost 40 years. She is director of the interfaith publishing houses Fons Vitae and Quinta Essentia and cofounder and trustee of the Islamic Texts Society of Cambridge, England. Some of the most influential families in Saudi
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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
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.
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.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.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith,
The Meaning and End of Religion
(Minneapolis, Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 7.Khaled Abou El Fadl,
Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women
(Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publications, 2001), 9–85.Paul Veyne,
Writing History: Essay on Epistemology,
trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 56.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
: I
SLAM
, T
RADITION
,
AND
T
RADITIONALISM
•
Vincent J. Cornell
‘‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.’’
1
This statement by the historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan sums up the challenge faced by Islam at the beginning of the twenty-first cen- tury of the Common Era. It may further be said, as Pelikan added about Christianity, ‘‘Traditionalism is what gives tradition a bad name.’’ This has certainly been the case with some kinds of traditionalism in contemporary Islam. Most Muslims would condemn the Taliban of northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan, who reject the intellectual traditions of the Islamic past in the name of a superficial traditionalism that puts more emphasis on tribal cus- tom and the vanities of male self-image—such as kohl-rimmed eyes, henna- dyed beards, and elegant turbans—than on the pursuit of justice or respect for women. Most Muslims would also reject the postmodern traditionalism of Al Qaeda, which combines a nearly wholesale rejection of modern political and social thought with a passionate embrace of the destructive forces of modern technology. The innovative use of technology by Usama bin Laden and his followers stands in stark contrast to their literalistic interpretation of the Qur’an, the ascetic simplicity of their personal lives, and their desire to create an idealized City of God on Earth. Such a utopia has not existed since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, if it has ever existed at all.
