This essentialism is reinforced by the mental habit of trying to subsume Old and New World realities under a single articulation of Islam. Even when Immigrant Islam purports to address specifically American issues, half its audience remains the teeming throngs and popular clerics of the Middle East and Asia. As one Muslim immigrant writer recently boasted, his column in a Western newspaper was also run in the Muslim world, enabling him to speak to both audiences simultaneously. [16] But on such an arrangement, with rare exceptions, the real object of his ruminations could be neither the concrete realities of New York or Karachi or Cairo, but, rather, an empty abstraction hovering somewhere over the Atlanitc. Yet, because these declarations carry the imprimatur of having issued from an individual from the Muslim world and because non-Western critics located in the West are able to present their cultural inheritance as bona fide and useful knowledge, these prescriptions routinely pass for a genuine engagement of "the West" in the name of Islam.
–pg. 12 of Sherman A. Jackson's Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
ebaadenews.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment