By Usama Khalidi,
A new Islam is rising in America largely under the media’s radar, which is routinely and profitably focused on the more competitively conservative, and violent, Islam of the Boko Haram of Nigeria, the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and now the infamous ISIS, the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”, founders of a newly minted “Caliphate”. Consider this:
A young Asian Muslim woman, accompanied by a white friend, appears before the imam of a New York City mosque and asks him to turn her male friend into a Muslim. But why, the imam asks. The answer: Because we want to get married. I am a Muslim. I cannot marry a non-Muslim. He must become Muslim for me to marry him. The imam asks her a series of questions about the man: Can he provide for his family? Does he love children? You trust him? Can you vouch for him? In the end, he advises her that he could perform the wedding ceremony and declare them man and wife. This is what I call a new fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. It takes into account the realities of the situation, or circumstances, in which the Shari’a law is being applied.
An innovative interpretation of the traditional Islamic law is far from being limited to a few mosques or imams. Tariq Ramadan: “To be Western Muslims is to confront reality with all its challenges and, sustained every day by the ‘need of Him,’ to take on all our responsibilities” (Western Muslims and the Future of Islam by Tariq Ramadan, OUP 2004 p223.) In other words, accept other societies’ experiences in their struggles against oppression and for freedom and justice in all aspects of life. This acceptance has both historical and theological support. In Muslim history, everything that was not in conflict with the core Islamic beliefs was both acceptable and desirable as it was seen to be in conformity with Islamic tenets. This principle served as the basis for appropriating much Greek thought during the 10th through the 13th centuries. It also legitimized regional expressions of Islamic ideas according to custom.
The New York City incident may have been an isolated case, but the fact is that it stands in sharp contrast to the times, in the 1990s, when imams at mosques on both sides of the Atlantic were imported from the villages of Egypt, Sudan and Pakistan on the basis of their demonstrated devotion to Islam, viz memorization of the Qur’an. They preached an Islam of hellfire and damnation because that’s all they had learned. The history and sociology of their host countries didn’t mean anything to them. Gay rights? Why, these deviants deserve to be pushed off high mountains. Women’s rights? No such thing. Their purpose in life is to serve men, and produce children. The fine arts? Haram, haram, haram. Fun is not allowed in Islam. In London, a few British-born young men with black beards and white, Arab robes told me that there were four reasons for living in the West: proselytizing, tourism, seeking medical help, and espionage. It was not clear who would benefit from their spying.
The events of September 2001changed everything. The general crackdown on radical Islamism in the West helped moderate the discourse in mosques everywhere, except for poverty-stricken villages of Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Muslim lands. Many people discovered Sufism, a pacifist and pluralist version of Islam. But the Saudis and their partners in the rich gulf emirates wouldn’t buy it. The billions of dollars they poured into madrassas in the poor Muslim countries, and on mosques in the West, put an end to any march toward greater humanism in the ideas of Islamic doctrine. The problem was that the Islamic ideology that the Sauds used to seize power in 1850s still ensures their descendants’ grip on it, aided and abetted by U.S. policies, the mendicant states of Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan and possibly Bangladesh. The 14th century ideologue, Ibn Taymiyya, preached a return to the imagined glory days of early Islam. He lived during a time of slow recovery from the catastrophic Mongol invasions of Muslim lands. He located the cause of Muslim defeats in a general weakening of the Islamic faith. He called for a purging of all “foreign” influences in Islamic practice. Thus both Sufism and a reverence for holy men became anathema in his eyes. The Saudi Islam has not moved an inch from that line. Powered by money, that line has been preached in the Arab media for many decades now.
A highly progressive but still an essentialist Islam has been a powerful force among Muslims of America and Canada since the early 1980s. It was launched by a group of well-funded Iraqi Americans with PhDs in social sciences. They started ambitious projects that have become widely respected institutions among Muslims today. The largest of these organizations is the Islamic Society of North America. It organizes an annual convention, usually in Washington, DC, or in Chicago, attracting more than 50,000 paying members from north America. Their mother organization, SAAR Foundation, was an umbrella body for a cluster of over 100 charities, think tanks, and businesses. The foundation managed an endowment fund worth several hundred million, initially. (In 2002, the US government raided the SAAR network looking for ties to the Al Taqwa Bank and other Muslim groups; nothing came of the FBI investigation.) SAAR Foundation also supported the School of Islamic Social Sciences in Herndon, VA, the Council of American Islamic Relations, an Islamic social science journal, and a large mosque known as the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center. Imams at this mosque preach tolerance, participation in the American political and social life, and a private religious practice. They don’t care for Sufism, nor for the Shi’a version of early Islamic history. Their strictly social gatherings are not sex segregated, unlike those in most Muslim countries. The scarf-wearing Muslims and the bearded ones among them have almost comfortably integrated themselves into their professions and suburban communities, usually with incomes way above the American per capita. Most South Asian Muslims in America, far more numerous than Arabs, are happy to follow the lead of their Middle-Eastern brothers and sisters in religious matters.
The pedigreed scholar and reformer, Tariq Ramadan, by speaking of Western Muslims legitimizes the idea of regional expressions of Islam, thus repudiating the notion that there is one right way of practicing faith, one right interpretation of the Qur’an, and one right answer for everything — the way engineers of all stripes tend to think. Ramadan’s formulation of Islamic tradition sits comfortably with Western intellectual foundations: Pluralism, secularism, democracy, equal rights for all, and other categories of thought. Islam, indeed, has thrived in many continents over the centuries by offering a vision of life, a method of worship and a sense of Allah’s kindness and mercy.
A new generation of young American Muslims live and breathe the values of their times, participating in a new globalism that is a good reflection of the legacy of al-Andalus, where Jews, Christians and Muslims were the first to elevate “a deep-seated vision of complex and contradictory identities . . . to an art form,” according to Maria Rosa Menocal, author of The Ornament of the World.
Ramadan is right, Islam is not a culture by itself. In its essence, it asks for faith in five tenets, or five pillars as they are known in Muslim societies: a declaration of faith in the oneness of god and Mohammed being his last prophet; pilgrimage, daily prayers, a month of fasting, and the giving of alms. When an American or an Albanian stands next to a Zanzibari at the Adams Center, all they would have in common is a reverence for Qur’anic verses. Not language necessarily, certainly not history, nor “race” and not necessarily any similarity in their attire. Their only bond is their common way of prayer and a vague sense of the Prophet’s history. They wish each other peace and invoke Allah’s munificence for the common good. This universalism is Islam’s great attraction, its hallmark. The sectarianism that afflicts much of the Muslim world, and “Islam’s bloody borders,” have only a faint echo in America and Europe. It may be both because of the West’s tradition of a rule of law, relatively speaking, and guaranteed freedom of conscience. Muslim intellectuals have believed that Islamic values flourish only in an environment that allows freedom of thought. This was true in the times of Al-Andalus, the Ottomans, the Safavis and the Mughals. Their dominant feature was pluralism.
American Muslims are beginning to exhibit the vitality that goes with pluralism.