"Islam(s) East and West: Pluralism Between No-Frills and Designer Fundamentalism"

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 the 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?