Voices of Islam (64 page)

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Voices of Islam

Contemporary World,
‘‘It still amazes me that intelligent people can believe that all Muslims are violent or that all Muslim women are oppressed, when they would never dream of uttering slurs stereotyping much smaller groups such as Jews or blacks. The strength of these negative images of Muslims is remarkable, even though they are not based on personal experience or actual study, but they receive daily reinforcement from the news media and popular culture.’’
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Such prejudices and misconceptions have only become worse since the ter- rorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq. There still remains a need to portray Muslims in all of their human diversity, whether this diver- sity is based on culture, historical circumstances, economic class, gender, or religious doctrine. Today, Muslims represent nearly one-fourth of the world’s population. Although many Americans are aware that Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country, most are surprised to learn that half of the Muslims in the world live east of Lahore, Pakistan. In this sense, Islam is as much an ‘‘Asian’’ religion as is Hinduism or Buddhism. The new reality of global Islam strongly contradicts the ‘‘Middle Eastern’’ view of Islam held by most Americans. Politically, the United States has been preoccupied with the Middle East for more than half a century. Religiously, however, American Protestantism has been involved in the Middle East for more than 150 years. Thus, it comes as a shock for Americans to learn that only one-fourth of the world’s Muslims live in the Middle East and North Africa and that only one-fi of Muslims are Arabs. Islam is now as much a worldwide religion as Christianity, with somewhere between 4 and 6 million believers in the United States and approximately 10 million believers in Western Europe. Almost 20 million Muslims live within the borders of the Russian Federation, and nearly a million people of Muslim descent live in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland.

To think of Islam as monolithic under these circumstances is both wrong and dangerous. The idea that all Muslims are fundamentalists or anti- democratic religious zealots can lead to the fear that dangerous aliens are hid- ing within Western countries, a fi column of a civilization that is antithetical to freedom and the liberal way of life. This attitude is often expressed in popular opinion in both the United States and Europe. For example, it can be seen in the ‘‘Letters’’ section of the June 7, 2004, edition of
Time
magazine, where a reader writes: ‘‘Now it is time for Muslim clerics to denounce the terrorists or admit that Islam is fi g a war with us—a religious war.’’
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For the author of this letter, Muslim ‘‘clerics’’ are not to be trusted, not because they find it hard to believe that pious Muslims would commit outrageous acts of terrorism, but because they secretly hate the West and its values. Clearly, for this reader of
Time,
Islam and the West are at war; however the ‘‘West’’ may be defined and wherever ‘‘Islam’’ or Muslims are to be found.

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Prejudice against Muslim minorities still exists in many countries. In Rus- sia, Muslim restaurateurs from the Caucasus Mountains must call themselves ‘‘Georgian’’ to stay in business. In China, being Muslim by ethnicity is acceptable, but being a Muslim by conviction might get one convicted for antistate activities. In the Balkans, Muslims in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedo- nia are called ‘‘Turks’’ and right-wing nationalist parties deny them full eth- nic legitimacy as citizens of their countries. In India, over a thousand Muslims were killed in communal riots in Gujarat as recently as 2002. As I write these words, Israel and Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shiite political move- ment and militia, are engaged in a bloody conflict that has left hundreds of dead and injured on both sides. Although the number of people who have been killed in Lebanon, most of whom are Shiite civilians, is far greater than the number of those killed in Israel, television news reports in the United States do not treat Lebanese and Israeli casualties the same way. While the casualties that are caused by Hizbollah rockets in Israel are depicted as per- sonal tragedies, Lebanese casualties are seldom personalized in this way. The truth is, of course, that all casualties of war are personal tragedies, whether the victims are Lebanese civilians, Israeli civilians, or American sol- diers killed or maimed by improvised explosive devices in Iraq. In addition, all civilian deaths in war pose a moral problem, whether they are caused as a consequence of aggression or of retaliation. In many ways, depersonalization can have worse effects than actual hatred. An enemy that is hated must at least be confronted; when innocent victims are reduced to pictures without sto- ries, they are all too easily ignored.

The problem of depersonalization has deeper roots than just individual prejudice. Ironically, the global village created by international news organi- zations such as CNN, BBC, and Fox News may unintentionally contribute to the problem of devaluing Muslim lives. Depictions of victimhood are often studies in incomprehension: victims speak a language the viewer cannot understand, their shock or rage strips them of their rationality, and their stan- dard of living and mode of dress may appear medieval or even primitive when compared with the dominant cultural forms of modernity. In her classic study,
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt pointed out that the ideology of human equality, which is fostered with all good intentions by the international news media, paradoxically contributes to the visibility of dif- ference by confusing equality with sameness. In 99 out of 100 cases, says Arendt, equality ‘‘will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more con- spicuous.’’
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According to Arendt, the widespread acceptance of the ideal of social equality after the French Revolution was a major reason why genocide,

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whether of Jews in Europe, Tutsis in Rwanda, or Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, has become a characteristically modern phenomenon.

The idea of equality as sameness was not as firmly established in the United States, claimed Arendt, because the ‘‘equal opportunity’’ ideology of Ameri- can liberalism values difference—in the form of imagination, entrepreneur- ship, and personal initiative—as a token of success.
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This ideology enabled Jews in America to assert their distinctiveness and eventually to prosper in the twentieth century, and it provides an opportunity for Muslim Americans to assert their distinctiveness and to prosper today. So far, the United States has not engaged in systematic persecution of Muslims and has been relatively free of anti-Muslim prejudice. However, fear and distrust of Muslims among the general public is fostered by images of insurgent attacks and suicide bombings in Iraq, of Al Qaeda atrocities around the globe, and of increasing expressions of anti-Americanism in the Arabic and Islamic media. In addi- tion, some pundits on talk radio, certain fundamentalist religious leaders, and some members of the conservative press and academia fan the flames of prejudice by portraying Islam as inherently intolerant and by portraying Mus- lims as slaves to tradition and authoritarianism rather than as advocates of reason and freedom of expression. Clearly, there is still a need to demonstrate to the American public that Muslims are rational human beings and that Islam is a religion that is worthy of respect.

Changing public opinion about Islam and Muslims in the United States and Europe will not be easy. The culture critic Guillermo Gomez-Pen˜a has written that as a result of the opening of American borders to non- Europeans in the 1960s, the American myth of the cultural melting pot ‘‘has been replaced by a model that is more germane to the times, that of the
menudo chowder.
According to this model, most of the ingredients do melt, but some stubborn chunks are condemned merely to fl t.’’
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At the present time, Muslims constitute the most visible ‘‘stubborn chunks’’ in the
menudo chowder
of American and European pluralism. Muslims are often seen as the chunks of the
menudo chowder
that most stubbornly refuse to ‘‘melt in.’’ To the non-Muslim majoritarian citizen of Western countries, Muslims seem to be the most ‘‘uncivil’’ members of civil society. They do not dress like the majority, they do not eat like the majority, they do not drink like the majority, they do not let their women work, they reject the music and cultural values of the majority, and sometimes they even try to opt out of majoritarian legal and economic systems. In Europe, Islam has replaced Catholicism as the religion that left-wing pundits most love to hate. Americans, however, have been more ambivalent about Islam and Muslims. On the one hand, there have been sincere attempts to include Muslims as full partners in civil society. On the other hand, the apparent resistance of some Muslims to ‘‘fit in’’ creates a widespread distrust that has had legal ramifica- tions in several notable cases.

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A useful way to conceive of the problem that Muslims face as members of civil society—both within Western countries and in the global civil society that is dominated by the West—is to recognize, following Homi K. Bhabha, the social fact of Muslim
unhomeliness.
To be ‘‘unhomed,’’ says Bhabha, is not to be homeless, but rather to escape easy assimilation or accommoda- tion.
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The problem is not that the ‘‘unhomed’’ possesses no physical home but that there is no ‘‘place’’ to locate the unhomed in the majoritarian con- sciousness. Simply put, one does not know what to make of the unhomed. Bhabha derives this term from Sigmund Freud’s concept of
unheimlich,
‘‘the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.’’
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Unhomeliness is a way of expressing social discom- fort. When one encounters the unhomed, one feels awkward and uncomfort- able because the unhomed person appears truly alien. Indeed, if there is any single experience that virtually all Muslims in Western countries share, it is that Islam makes non-Muslims uncomfortable. In the global civil society dominated by the West, Muslims are unhomed wherever they may live, even in their own countries.

This reality of Muslim experience highlights how contemporary advocates of Muslim identity politics have often made matters worse by accentuating symbolic tokens of difference between so-called Islamic and Western norms. The problem for Islam in today’s global civil society is not that it is not seen. On the contrary, Islam and Muslims are arguably all too visible because they are seen as fundamentally different from the accepted norm. Like the black man in the colonial West Indies or in Jim Crow America, the Muslim is, to borrow a phrase from Frantz Fanon, ‘‘overdetermined from without.’’
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Muslims have been overdetermined by the press, overdetermined by Holly- wood, overdetermined by politicians, and overdetermined by culture critics. From the president of the United States to the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and in countless editorials in print and television media, leaders of public opinion ask, ‘‘What do Muslims want?’’ Such a question forces the Muslim into a corner in which the only answer is apologetics or defi nce. To again paraphrase Fanon, the overdetermined Muslim is constantly made aware of himself or herself not just in the third person but in
triple person.
As a symbol of the unhomely, the Muslim is made to feel personally respon- sible for a contradictory variety of ‘‘Islamic’’ moral values, ‘‘Islamic’’ cultural expressions, and ‘‘Islamic’’ religious and political doctrines.
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In the face of such outside pressures, what the overdetermined Muslim needs most is not to be seen, but to be heard. There is a critical need for Islam to be expressed to the world not as an image, but as a narrative, and for Mus- lims to bear their own witness to their own experiences. The vast majority of books on Islam written in European languages, even the best ones, have been written by non-Muslims. This is not necessarily a problem, because an objec- tive and open-minded non-Muslim can often describe Islam for a non-

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Muslim audience better than a Muslim apologist. The scholars Said and Ernst, mentioned above, are both from Christian backgrounds. The disci- pline of Religious Studies from which Ernst writes has been careful to main- tain a nonjudgmental attitude toward non-Christian religions. As heirs to the political and philosophical values of European liberalism, scholars of Reli- gious Studies are typically dogmatic about only one thing: they must practice
epoche´
(a Greek word meaning ‘‘holding back’’ or restraining one’s beliefs) when approaching the worldview of another religion. In the words of the late Canadian scholar of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith, it is not enough to act like ‘‘a fly crawling on the outside of a goldfish bowl,’’ magisterially observ- ing another’s religious practices while remaining distant from the subject. Instead, one must be more engaged in her inquiry and, through imagination and the use of
epoche´,
try to find out what it feels like to be a goldfish.
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Through the practice of
epoche´,
the field of Religious Studies has by now produced two generations of accomplished scholars of Islam in the United States and Canada. Smith himself was a fair and sympathetic Christian scholar of Islam, and his field has been more influential than any other in promoting the study of Islam in the West. However, even Smith was aware that only a goldfish truly knows what it means to be a goldfish. The most that a sympa- thetic non-Muslim specialist in Islamic studies can do is
describe
Islam from the perspective of a sensitive outsider. Because non-Muslims do not share a personal commitment to the Islamic faith, they are not in the best position to convey a sense of what it means to
be
a Muslim on the inside—to live a Muslim life, to share Muslim values and concerns, and to experience Islam spiritually. In the final analysis, only Muslims can fully bear witness to their own traditions from within.