Dr. J on Reformist and "American Muslim Romantics"

['Abdullahi] An-Naim is representative, however, of a class of modern Muslim reformists who are adamant and unabashed in their insistence that Muslim tradition, specifically in its legal and jurisprudential dimensions, is the cause of rather than solution to the problem of Islam's maladjustment to the modern world. In this capacity, he is likely to exercise little influence among black American Muslims or even the masses of non-black American Muslims whose thinking he purportedly seeks to reform. September 11 has brought into sharper focus, however, another school of Muslim reform, namely the American Muslim romantics. In contradistinction to the modernists reformists of the An-Na'im variety, American Muslim romantics begin with Muslim tradition as the repository of all that is beautiful, civilized, and responsible. Tradition, in their thinking, is not the antithesis of modernity but rather of Muslim nontradition, which, as the product of postcolonial decadence and brutality, is the source of all that is wrong and stifling in modern Islam.

[footnote 12: There are, to be sure, American Muslim romantics who vehemently hold modernity in contempt. They, however, shall not be the focus of this essay.]

It is nontradition, for example, that lay behind the tortured interpretations and murderous deeds of Usamah b. Ladin and his ilk. In the view of American Muslim romantics, not only is tradition inherently superior to nontradition, it is only tradition that can provide the antidote to the kind of stultifying interpretive madness that abounds in modern Islam.

In a forthcoming book, Islam and the Black American, I too, as a neo-traditionalist and not a romantic, argue that Muslim tradition holds the greatest promise for the future of Islam in America. The great promise of tradition resides, however, precisely in its ability to accommodate and, indeed, authenticate multiple, even mutually contradictory interpretations and expressions of Islam. From this perspective, tradition is emphatically opposed to any effort at artificially fordizing Muslim doctrine or practice or reducing these to any single expression. Under the pressure of post-9/11 anti-Muslim mania, however, American Muslim romantics have turned to tradition as a means of "compressing" Islam into a single-minded commitment to one or another moral or aesthetic vision, categorically denying or affirming this or that contemporary "vision of the

truly Islamic." This enterprise often entails both an appeal to the dominant culture and the invocation of a false universal. More importantly, it exposes tradition itself to being converted into a tool for "domesticating" Islam,

[footnote 13: On the domestification of religion, Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter writes: "The domestification of religion is the process through which the state tries to move religion from a position in which it threatens the state to a position in which it supports the state." See Stephen l. Carter, God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 30.]

whereby the religion forfeits any ability to challenge the dominant culture and finds itself in a position where it can only support the latter.

[footnote 14: Lamenting American Christianity's forfeiture of its ability and duty to challenge the dominant culture, Stephen Carter writes: "So much of American religion today has become so culturally comfortable that one can scarcely find differences between the vision of the good that is preached from the pulpit and the vision of the good that is believed by the culture." Ibid., 185. Moreover, Carter adds, "If a religion wants to be just like everything else, it needs no guarantee of religious liberty." Ibid.]

To extent, again, that this process equates "dominant" with "universal," those who are or perceive themselves to be disadvantaged by the dominant culture will be called on to acquiesce, this time in the name of Muslim tradition, and accept such disadvantage as both normal and normative - indeed, Islamic. This is the great liability posed by American Muslim romanticism. And it is essentially this liability that the remainder of this essay will seek to address."

-pg. 115-6 of Sherman Jackson's "Islam(s) East and West: Pluralism Between No-Frills and Designer Fundamentalism" in September 11 in history: a watershed moment?

For their part, American Muslim romantics are quite familiar with the manner in which "fundamentalists" and "Muslim nativists" in the Muslim world pass off their "postcolonial" vision and experience for objective readings of scripture and/or tradition.

[footnote 24: This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion over the meaning of objectivity. For the moment, I shall go along with the definition suggested by Richard Rorty, according whom objectivity resides in "unforced agreement." See Richard Rorty, "Exploring Diversity and Postmodernity," in The American Intellectual Tradition, ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press), 2:390-400.]

This, indeed, is the mechanism via which the latter often deny both the modern and the Western any presumption of legitimacy and dismiss those suspected of being in sympathy with the latter as being either insufficiently "Islamic" or guilty of "selling out." It appears, however, that it is often only the substance of the fundamentalists' "Islamic" that is problematic for the romantics, not the fact of their abstracting a historically informed vision to the level of a universally valid (or invalid) norm. For, in the end, romantics also appear to be driven by a historically informed "vision of the truly Islamic," which they seek to raise to a universal standards for all Muslims.

The False Universal and "Designer Fundamentalism"

If, through the apotheosis of its historical experience and the resulting invocation of a false universal, the Muslim world is able to exercise a certain power of validation over its coreligionists in the West, the latter's attempt to validate their articulations through an identical process is no less hegemonic in its implications. While Western Muslim advocates of reform, and more specifically Muslim romantics, passionately aver their commitment to an Islam that is tolerant, nonviolent, and egalitarian, their effort to validate such an Islam routinely includes a combination of fictions and false universals that ultimately makes it impossible either to establish or sustain such a tolerant, pluralistic religion. For, at bottom, Muslim romantics tend to grant the time, place, and experience of modernity and the dominant culture of the West the same universal validity that their opponents tend to attribute to premodernity and the East.

[footnote 25: I should add in this context that significant aspects of black American culture might be considered "premodern," and thus Western in a way quite different from that of the dominant culture in the West. As Cornel West once observed, "The great paradox of Afro-American history is that Afro-Americans fully enter the modern world precisely when the postmodern period commences." See Cornel West, Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1982), 44.]

In the end, their approach includes a subtle civilizing mission that aims at obliterating one historical consciousness, without altering the history that produced it, in favor of another historical consciousness, without recognizing and critically analyzing the history behind it.

Let me be clear about something here. I share with the romantics their commitment to any number of concrete views and general principles: I condemn(ed) the attacks of September 11, whether they were committed in the name of jihad or on any other justification;

[footnote 26: See the section of this essay headed "9/11 and the Need to Appease the West]

I deplore the "intellectual terrorism" visited on those Muslims who have had the courage to hazard novel or dissenting views; I have been critical of uncritical appropriations of traditions; I agree that the interests of Muslim women are often ignored and that women are often denied rights that are recognized as God-given on event the most traditional readings of Islam; and I too have my issues with Wahhabis and Salafis, among others.

[footnote 27: On some of these differences, see Sherman A. Jackson, On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's Faysal al-Tafriqa Bayna al-Islam wa al-Zandaqa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).]

But I disagree - strongly - with my romantic coreligionists on at least two counts: (1) the manner in which they use history or tradition to substantiate their claims and characterizations; and (2) their lack of attention and commitment to an independent methodology on the basis of which those who do not share their interests, experiences, or cultural presuppositions could verify and authenticate those interpretations whose validity and "Islamicity" are presumably so painfully clear. These shortcomings reflect the fact that the romantics' approach is grounded in and seeks to promote a false universal. It is a chic, prestigious, and powerful universal; but it remains nonetheless, qua universal, patently false. Steeped in this false universal, romantics often end up engaging in a highly sophisticated form of "designer fundamentalism," which, however seductive, can neither promote nor accommodate true pluralism or tolerance.

-pg. 120-121 of Sherman Jackson's "Islam(s) East and West: Pluralism Between No-Frills and Designer Fundamentalism" in September 11 in history: a watershed moment?

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