Dr. Jackson on a Framework for Protest & Spirituality

Beyond the issue of theology, there is the more subtle and complicated matter of the relationship between protest and resistance, on the one hand, and spirituality, personal piety, and moral rectitude, on the other. Here, however, we confront again the problem of a possible mismatch between an imported tradition and an indigenous heritage. The most commonly recognized regime of pietism and spirituality among Muslims is that of Sufism. Sufism includes, however, at least two distinct aspects: (1) a focus on matters of personal piety and moral refinement (tahdhib al-nafs, tahdhib al-akhlaq, tazkiyat al-nafs); and (2) a concern with mysticism, including the supernatural extraction of service from nature and achieving mystical union with the Divine (fana’, hulul, wahdat al-wujud). In terms of substance, the personal piety side of Sufism is a veritable gold mine for Blackamericans, especially in its psychology of rectitude. Its institutional structure, however, tends towards a highly stratified authoritarianism, including a master-disciple relationship that borders at times on the cultic. Moreover, in its American manifestation, organized Sufis, has most often taken the form of a quetistic critique of and alternative to what are cast as the more politicized or even radical expressions of Islam. As for the mystical dimension of Sufism, it tends to ground itself in either the Neoplatonic tradition of Late Antiquity or the superstitious traditions of sub-Saharan Africa, neither of which are easily reconciled with the deeply protestant, lay predisposition of the masses of Blackamerican Muslims, not to mention the protest sentiment of Black Religion.

If Blackamerican Sunni Islam is to subvert false mysterium tremendum and the “second creation” without degenerating into just another secular ideology or cultural performance, it will have to ground its protest mission in articulations of the religion that show such a mission to be consistent with the pursuit of divine pleasure. This will require certain adjustments and modifications to the theological and spiritualist traditions handed down from the Sunni past. And issues of personal piety and spiritual development will have to assume their proper place in the everyday lives of Blackamerican Muslims. Over the remainder of this chapter, I shall attempt to lay out a framework within which such a reconciliation might be effected. While I am confident that my views are entirely validatable from the perspective of Muslim scripture and Tradition, it is perhaps too early in the history of American Islam to expect anything approaching consensus. As such, my statements might be taken as more of a beginning than the end of a process that I hope will be long and fruitful.

-pg. 175-6 of Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection

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Dr. Jackson on the Challenge for Blackamerican Sunni Islam

(and the challenge also for the young generation of Muslim Americans of different ethnic and racial backgrounds here who need/seek for their religion to be relevant to their concerns, needs, and realities)

The challenge, as such, for Blackamerican Christians has been to keep God at the center of religion without compromising the mission to expose and frustrate the manipulations of the fascinating trickster. It is the challenge of remaining focused on God not simply as the Great Intervener in the crucible of race relations but as the ultimate source of value and the true object and motivator of love, awe, obedience, religious contemplation and worship.

This has been and remains no less a challenge for Blackamerican Muslims. The habitual use of the term “kafir” (Unbeliever) as a cultural/racial delineator between black and white instead of being restricted to marking the boundary between those who accept and those who reject the religion of Muhammad is ample testimony to this effect. In fact, whereas Blackamerican Christianity has produced a towering edifice of Black Theology to obviate, or perhaps establish, the relationship between the worship of Jesus and the liberation of Blackamericans, Blackamerican Sunni Islam has witnessed no such effort to ensure that its consciousness remains religious and that the religion itself does not degenerate into a cultural performance. The Islamists of Modern Islam have contributed nothing in this regard. And the theological tradition of Modernized Islam, as well as that of the Neofundamentalists, consists, outside the basics, largely of abstractions grounded in the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic presuppositions of Late Antiquity or equally abstract reactions to these. These theologies emphasize such doctrines as the noncreatedness of the Qur’an, the beatific vision in the Hereafter, and the anthropomorphic versus the nonanthropomorphic interpretation of the divine attributes. Beyond the question of how readily the average Blackamerican Muslim can understand or identify with much of this tradition, in its present form it obviates little relevance as a source of liberation or a bridge to primordial meanings. Moreover, if this theology, as presently articulated, is to occupy the center of Muslim religious consciousness and serve as the criterion for determining who is and who is not Muslim, it may not be obvious how relevant Islam itself is to the present and future of Blackamericans.

pg. 174-175 of Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection

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Dr. Jackson on Real & False "Mysterium Tremendum"

Every serious student of religion is familiar with the German scholar Rudolf Otto’s concept of mysterium tremendum. Mysterium tremendum refers to that ineffable fear that accompanies the experience of encountering the Divine. This is not a natural fear, such as [one] might obtain should one happen upon a lion. This is a supernatural, “cosmic” fear that is grounded in the recognition of a power so awful, inescapable, and beyond restriction that it nearly stupefies. Here one is brought face-to-face with one’s contingency and ceatureliness before an irresistible Creator whose very presence inspires an inscrutable sense of danger, indebtedness, and a will to appease. All of this is accompanied, moreover, by a “personal feeling of nothingness and abasement before the awe-inspiring object directly experienced.” To be sure, there are other emotional and psychological moments attending mysterium tremendum, for example, fascination, love, mercy, even pity. But none of these are capable of fully breaking the association of the Divine with the elements of categorical otherness and inescapable power.

Mysterium tremendum, in Otto’s analysis, lay at the center of all religion. From primitive times to the present, religion has been essentially a manifestation of and response to mysterium tremendum. For the most part, throughout human history, the real or putative object of mysterium tremendum has been God. A notable exception emerges, however, in the encounter of the Negro with the white man on the transatlantic slave ships and the plantations of North America. In a brilliant essay, “The Oppressive Elements in Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed,” Charles H. Long speaks of a false or “spurious mysterium tremendum” that befell Blackamericans in the New World. This was a mysterium tremendum in which the fear-inspiring, inescapable other whose presence engendered a sense of danger and a will to appease was not God but the white man and the critical categories of modernity he had created: race, civilization, culture, primitiveness, I.Q., and so on. According to Long,

“The other” of religious experience, with its impenetrable majesty, was replaced by the quixotic manipulation of a fascinating trickster whose rationality was only a veneer for control.

In a real sense, Blackamericans (like other orphans of modernity) were “created” by the forces of white supremacy and the theoretical disciplines of the Enlightenment. This “second creation” complicated the task of breaking through to the First Creation and the primordial meanings enmeshed in the God-created self. In many ways, Blackamerican religiosity and protest are manifestations of a desire to transcend this second creation and reconnect with the first. For Blackamericans are instinctively driven by the belief that the “second creator” can only by trumped by the First, and the First Creator can only be accessed by resisting, indeed rejecting, the second creator (qua creator).

-pgs. 172-173 of Dr. Jackson's Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection

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Dr. Jackson on The Challenge for the Third Resurrection

I love Dr. Jackson. His voice for me really does bring 'clarity amidst confusion.'

Few committed practitioners of revealed religion would argue with Stephen Carter that, at its best, "religion resists." The challenge to religion, however, is to make sure that resistance remains a means rather than an end in itself and that is exercised in consideration of goals that lie beyond self-serving quotidian interests. Otherwise, there is little that separates religion from secular movements and utopias. And in this confusion lies the ultimate impoverishment and potential abuse of religion. For it is here that religion is subject to being reduced to a thinly veiled form of eudaimonism that substitutes the whims and wishes of men and women for the will and pleasure of God. (171)

If Islam is to retain concrete meaning in the everyday lives of Blackamerican Muslims, it will have to continue to show its ability to address the concrete circumstances that inform and circumscribe their lives. At the same time, if Islam is to remain true to its constitution as a religion and avoid degenerating into what W. E. B. Du Bois once described as "a complaint and a curse...a sneer rather than a faith," it will have to remain God-centered and committed to matters of personal piety and eschatological success, even where these evince no direct relevance to the worldly plight of Blackamericans. (172)

At stake in all of this is not whether Blackamerican Muslims choose between piety and protest, activism and spirituality, or secular interest and eschatological success. The issue is, rather, whether these competing interests can be reconciled through an understanding of Islam that avoids both fideistic obscurantism and self-serving eudaemonism, while resonating with deeply-felt meaning in the concentric contexts of black and white America. Without doubt, this is the greatest challenge confronting Blackamerican Muslims as they enter the Third Resurrection. And it is this challenge that I shall seek to address in this final chapter. (172)

from Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection

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