Dr. Jackson on approaches to Muslim intellectual history

"The challenge, rather, has been and remains to produce approaches to Muslim intellectual history that can locate and monitor through time and space the semantic contributions of both the secular and the transcendent."-pg. 133

footnote no. 26:

"In my view, neither of the two contemporary tendencies, progressivism and conservatism, achieves this balance. Progressives (as well as some called liberals) tend toward impugning if not dismissing the entire past as well as the perspective of the ancients as entirely secular, that is, devoid of transcendent meaning, and this entirely-or almost entirely-nonnormative. "Conservatives," on the other hand, tend toward enshrining the entire past and the perspective of the ancients as the repository of nothing but transcendent meaning and this of totally (and totalizing) normative understandings of revelation." -pg. 207

from Dr. Sherman Abdal-Hakim Jackson's Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering

To Be Part of the Corrective Conscience of the West

I love this quote with such passion from Dr. Jackson:

"If historical process, however, that is, routes rather than roots, is really the stuff of which human identities are made, the immigrant Muslim (like Muslims in the Muslim world) should be able to see himself as a product of the "process of modernity," a process that enthroned not all but a particular persuasion of "white" Westerners as the standard-bearers and definers of human value and achievement.

From this perspective, the Post-Colonial Muslim might be able to see that he and the Negro are products of the same historical process. Both reflect the unlit side of the Enlightenment, the darker dimensions of the triumph of "Western" man, the scarred and mutilated underbelley of modernity, with all its hypocrisy, racial terror, and moral myopia: "We hold these truths to be self-evident," in the most brutal and inhumane period of American slavery; "Liberte, equalite, fraternite," on the eve of the the most unequal, unbrotherly, and dehumanizing period of European colonial savagery.

On this understanding, the immigrant and Blackamerican Muslim could join forces as part of the corrective conscience of the West, a new Western consciousness committed to liberating both itself and humanity from the debilitating self-alienation and idolatry imposed by the false universals of white supremacy. On this approach, rather than being divided and pushed in opposite directions by American whiteness, immigrant and Blackamerican Muslims could be united in a common cause to undermine its ill-gotten authority and ensure than domination (from the Latin dominari , to rule, to be lord, master of) remains emphatically and uncompromisingly the preserve of God alone."- pg. 95 of Islam & the Blackamerican

"This raises the question, of course, of the future of Blackamerican-immigrant relations. As I hope to have shown, there are no insurmountable obstacles to immigrant-indigenous unity. Continued conflict between the two communities will only come of a conscious decision on part of either to ignore or reject their own or the other's participation in a common history. Even on such a recognition, however, immense effort will be required to sustain a shared historical consciousness. And in the absence of the latter, the two communities are likely to continue to meander along their separate paths, coexisting in a pro forma mutual recognition, resigning themselves all the while to the impossibility of bridging their respective paths, presents and future."-pg. 97

ChaiPod: Culture, Identity & Islam

Check out the ChaiPod hosted by brother Dash for a conversation on "Culture, Identity, Islam" with Shaykh Abdallah Adhami

Download: Part 1 & Part 2

Also see Islam & the Cultural Imperative

UPDATE 5/8/09: Also see this Youtube series recorded by brother Dasham at IC NYU with Dr. Jackson