Dr. Hatem: Muslim intellectuals and America's imperial project

Increasingly, Muslim American intellectuals call on segments of the community to refrain from engagement or critique of America's role abroad and urge a focus on domestic and "our" own problems. Here, the call is narrowly focused on refraining from foreign policy issues that may constrain the intended integrationist trajectory that might face derailment if serious opposition is mounted. Is the domestic really disconnected from the global? If it is disconnected, then in what way and how should it be navigated?

How can an intellectual argue for a focus on the domestic at a time when U.S. power, in all its manifestations, is on display daily across the globe? Walk to any grocery or department store across the country and you are immediately connected to the global dimension and the heavy impact of U.S. foreign policy, which is wedded to pernicious capitalist consumption. One may choose to ignore the "inconvenient truth" of the heavy weight of U.S. power across the globe because centering it in thought and action will complicate Muslim Americans' ability to "fit-in" and be accepted as the jolly next-door neighbor that patriotically flies the biggest and highest flag on the street.

[...] American Muslim intellectuals are joining the bandwagon and fitting in perfectly as functionaries of this massive and persistent domestic and global imperial enterprise. In 1967, MLK spoke of the internal and external colonial as he moved to critique the Vietnam War and the on-going racism directed at African Americans and minorities in America's cities.

Muslim intellectuals should carefully examine the monumental contribution of African American intellectuals in the 20th century - if not before - so as to understand the American imperial project with which they are being asked to partner. The problem is how to decipher the current state of affairs where Muslim intellectuals are being funded directly or indirectly by various U.S. government institutions to produce a Muslim subjectivity that affirms and rationalizes the empire, non-stop militarism, obscene capitalism, securitization and otherization paradigm. Under various rubrics, integrations, assimilation, patriotism, Americanism, exceptionalism and inclusion, Muslim intellectuals at America's red carpet of power end up reproducing the paradigmatic externalization of the community as a whole and rationalize empire in the process. 

http://www.dailysabah.com/columns/hatem-bazian/2016/09/08/muslim-intellectuals-and-americas-imperial-project 

Sending my aunt’s body to Bangladesh for burial: My account of the moments after she was brutally stabbed in Queens

http://theislamicmonthly.com/sending-my-aunts-body-to-bangladesh-for-burial/

First Muslim lawyer nominated for a federal judgeship

http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202766785916/Latham--Watkins-Partner-Nominated-to-DC-Federal-Court?cmp=share_facebook&slreturn=20160806232357

https://www.muslimadvocates.org/muslim-advocates-heralds-president-obamas-historic-judicial-nomination-2/

Tariq Ramadan in the Guardian: The politics of fear: how Britain’s anti-extremism strategy has failed

What is needed instead is a plan that deals with the phenomenon at many different levels and, first and foremost, focuses on grassroots education. To do this, local Muslim organisations must accept full partnership. Communication needs to be established with such groups to help build confidence in state institutions. At present, those organisations – the “good Muslims”– which the government collaborates with or finances, frequently enjoy no street credibility: how could they, if they never criticise the domestic or foreign policies of their government sponsor?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/05/politics-of-fear-britain-anti-extremism-prevent-government-radicalisation

a post-formative stage of an attitudinal normalization of the principle of agreeing to disagree

The Balkans-to-Bengal complex constitutes what we might usefully conceive of as a post-formative stage and condition in the history of societies of Muslims—a stage at which earlier foundational elements are brought together in a capacious and productive historical synthesis that, in turn, provides a maniplex yet stable ingrediential base for a further striking forth in a dynamic variety of trajectories of being Muslim. By the thirteenth century (seventh century of Islamic history), the major theological points of dispute which had riven the community of Muslims in its first centuries were for the most part settled, with the theological schools—primarily (in terms of demographics) the Ashʿarīs and Mātūrīdīs—agreeing to disagree over an agreed set of secondary theological questions. [183]  Similarly, beginning from the thirteenth century, the mutual recognition by the scholars of the four Sunnī legal schools of the orthodoxy of each other’s legal method and corpus of legal positions—that is, the acceptance by members of one legal school of the validity of the legal position of another school even when one position directly contradicts the other—exemplifies a larger attitudinal normalization  of the principle of agreeing to disagree. [184]

-Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2015, 75-76. 

A sample of the 'overlapping curriculum of madrasahs from the Balkans to Begal'

Further, in this period, a set of institutions mark the social, physical and imaginal landscape of the Balkans-to-Bengal societies of Muslims in an inter-relational matrix that structures and configures discourse differently to what has gone before. Exemplary among these is the proliferation of the public institution of the madrasah (made possible by the prodigious application of the legal institution of the waqf endowment) which displaces the private household as the major locus of education and which, in the vast territory of Balkans-to-Bengal, is characterized by a remarkably overlapping curriculum not only of subjects and program of study, but also of books. [185] From the Balkans to Bengal, madrasah students studied similar texts: foundational works of logic such as the the Īsāghūjī (Isagoge) of Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 1265) [186] (whose other foundational text, the Hidāyat al-Ḥikmah, has been discussed earlier) and al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah of Najm al-Dīn al-Qazwīnī al-Kātibī (d.1204–1277); [187] of dialectics, such as the Risālah Samarqandiyyah of Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (fl. 1303) and the commentaries thereon; [188]  of “argumentative” (that is, dialectical) philosophical theology, [189] such as the Mawāqif  of ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 1355), [190] the Maṭāli al-anẓār of Abū al-Thanāʾ al-Iṣfahānī (d. 1349), [191] and the Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 1389); [192] of Qurʾānic exegesis such as the Kashshāf of the Muʿtazilī rationalist, Jār Allāh al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1144), [193] and the “toning-down”of the rationalism of the Kashshāf in the Anwār al-tanzīl of ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar al Bayḍāwī (fl. 1305); [194] of Hadith (not only the Ṣaḥīḥs of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, but also later Hadith selections, such as the Mishkāt al-Maṣābīh of Walī al-Dīn al-Tibrīzī (fl. 1337); [195] and of fiqh-jurisprudence, such as, in the cases of the Ḥanafī Ottoman and Mughal madrasahs, the Hidāyah of Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī (d. 1197), and the commentaries thereon. [196]

-Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2015, 76-78. 

God as the sole Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd)

The historical centrality and foundationality to the history of Muslims of the philosophers’ rational striving to know truth-as-it-Really-is can most economically be illustrated by way of the philosophers’ definition of God. Ibn Sīnā conceptualized God as the sole Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd) upon W/which all other existents are necessarily contingent. It is this philosophers’ conceptualization of God that became the  operative concept of the Divinity taught in madrasahs to students of theology via  the standard introductory textbook on logic, physics, and metaphysics which was taught to students in madrasahs in cities and towns throughout the vast region from the Balkans

to Bengal in the rough period 1350–1850, and which was tellingly entitled Hidāyat al-ḥikmah, or Guide to Ḥikmah [45] In the discourse of madrasah theology, God is conceptually posited as and routinely referred to as “The Necessary Existent”...

-Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2015, 18-19.

[Chapter 1 is available as a PDF on the Princeton University Press website. http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10587.pdf]

al-Rāzī on love of this world, true love & happiness in the Hereafter

In commenting on this verse [Q3:142], al-Rāzī says,

Know that love of this world cannot coexist with happiness in the Hereafter, and to the degree that one of them increases the other diminishes. That is because happiness in the world only is achieved by the heart's occupation with worldliness, and happiness in the Hereafter can only be achieved by emptying the heart of all that is other than God and filling it with the love of God. Not all those who affirm the religion of God are truthful. Rather, in the difference there is a question of the sway of things that we hate and things that we love. Love is that which does not diminish with difficulty and does not increase through fulfillment. If love survives the onset of suffering, it is shown to be true love.

SQ, p. 169. 

Nicholas Kristof: Do You Care More About a Dog Than a Syrian?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/opinion/but-what-if-my-dog-had-been-a-syrian.html

Professor [Ebrahim Moosa] launches project to advance scientific and theological literacy among madrasa graduates in India

With a $1.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Ebrahim Moosa, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame, has launched a three-year project to enrich scientific and theological literacy among recent graduates of Islamic seminaries in India. 

Working with scholars and teachers at Notre Dame and in India, Moosa will develop a curriculum and online learning program that integrates modern and classical knowledge traditions for young orthodox seminarians in India. 

The teaching team will recruit and train 100 recent madrasa graduates who are eager to acquire scientific knowledge that is indigenous to the Muslim tradition and interested in exposure to comparative theologies and modern humanities and social sciences. 

“Equipped with these knowledge resources,” Moosa said, “madrasa graduates can discover new ways to transform their lives and advance human dignity and the public good.” 

http://news.nd.edu/news/66428-professor-launches-project-to-advance-scientific-and-theological-literacy-among-madrasa-graduates-in-india/