Are we witnessing the beginnings of an Islamic Reformation?
By Deborah Caldwell
First came the shock of the terrorist attacks. Then came an avalanche of Muslim leaders denying Islam has anything to do with terrorism. Then a queasy silence. Now, two months later, something potentially historic: the beginnings of an Islamic Reformation movement in the West.
An assortment of moderate and liberal Muslims--scholars, writers, artists and poets, men and women, many of them young--have begun organizing, writing and speaking about "modernizing" or "reforming" Islam.
"Something major is happening," says Farid Esack, a top liberal Muslim scholar and activist.
Ingrid Mattson, a Muslim who is professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary, argues that this movement may some day even become as powerful as the Iranian Revolution in 1970 that toppled the Shah of Iran and brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.
What is the movement trying to accomplish? While it's hard to generalize, these activists mostly want Muslims to embrace modern scientific and social changes. They argue for greater equality between men and women; peaceful coexistence with people of other faiths; an end to anti-Jewish rhetoric; a less literal reading of the Qur'an; and acceptance of American ideals of freedom and tolerance.
It's impossible to say how many of the nation's 2 million to 6 million Muslims sympathize with reformist ideas, but there are many small signs that a broad movement is underway.
Last week, Salman Rushdie wrote a piece that ran in The Guardian and the New York Times describing "the need for a reformation in the Muslim world." In the article, he claimed that a groundswell of reformers is demanding Muslims take responsibility for their own problems.
Mattson, vice-president of the Islamic Society of North America, the oldest and largest group of American Muslims with about 40,000 members, in September published a piece on Beliefnet saying that Muslims have a "special obligation" to fight extremist Islam.
In upstate New York, Qur'anic scholar Omid Safi started a web page compiling articles and links of interest to moderate Muslims in the wake of the terrorist attacks. About 7,000 people from 75 different countries have visited the site so far.
Just after Sept. 11, about 70 young Muslims in New York City organized Muslims Against Terrorism. Its website reads: "In this defining moment, we are defining Islam." In its eight weeks of existence, the group has branched out to six cities around the country.
In St. Louis, Sheila Musaji became irate after Sept. 11--and went to work. In the late 1980s she edited a glossy magazine called The American Muslim that promoted reformist ideas. The magazine died in the mid-1990s, partly because the people involved felt beaten down by ultra-conservatives. Two weeks ago, Musaji tracked down some of her old colleagues and created a newsletter begging them to get back in the reformist saddle.
In San Francisco, an advocacy group of progressive Muslims called AMILA (Americans Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism), at the urging of Muslims nationwide, is putting together kits to help other progressives start AMILA chapters.
On the Beliefnet discussion boards, dozens of Muslims have weighed in on a debate called Defining an American Islam. "The U.S. is a lot more 'Islamic' in beliefs and ideologies than many of the so-called 'Muslim' countries," AbrarAlsayed wrote. "We have a democratic form of government, we have women's rights, we have the 'innocent until proven guilty' thing, we have freedom of speech and freedom to worship any way we choose."
These may seem like small steps, but they are dramatic nonetheless because they are so unprecedented. Liberals and moderates generally have shied away from confronting conservative Muslims--partly because they've felt intimidated by the conservatives' confident, steel-trap knowedge of the Qur'an, and partly because they haven't wanted to cause a rift among Muslims.
Of course, not everyone in a huge faith like Islam thinks alike--even other relatively moderate American Muslims. Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the most high-profile of the American Islamic organization, is a case in point. Hooper says Islam doesn't need a "reform" movement--because it is "the original reform movement." Further, he says, he is suspicious of any movement that purports to get hold of "modernity."
"Islam establishes basic principles, and the society is built around those basic principles," he says. "What's modern today is outmoded tomorrow. Are we to change our faith each day to conform to society? And what are the limits?
"Often we hear from these quarters that we need to reform, but they're never able to establish the limit. Is wearing a bikini at the beach OK, as long as you have modesty in your heart?"
Still, many liberal and moderate Muslims are willing to wade into a fight. They say they've stood on the sidelines for too long, watching as a rigidly conservative brand of Islam has taken root here. This strain of Islam--called Wahhabism--is dominant in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism enjoys enormous influence here because of Saudi Arabia's oil money and the fact that Mecca and Medina, the Muslim holy cities, are in Saudi Arabia. In the last decade, its influence has spread to the United States, as Saudi money has helped build mosques and schools.
On the other hand, the moderates--whose basic ideals are supported at some level by most American Muslims--have little money or organization with which to fight back. They are now in a period of soul-searching and, to some extent, blaming themselves for not speaking up.
"We just can't keep on going to the same conferences and teaching the same information to the same people," says Omid Safi, a Qur'anic scholar at Colgate University. "The sad fact of the matter is there are genuine voices of fanaticism in the Muslim community. How do these hateful voices function in our community? Why are we silent when they talk right next to us?"
Safi says he is frustrated by Muslims' lack of "active wrestling" with the faith. "On one hand, you have reformers who want to throw out the entire thing, and on the other hand, you have people who feel completely bound by it because one jurist said one particular thing in the 14th century," Safi said.
Mostly, average Muslims are exposed to what Safi calls "testosterone Islam"--run by men, many of them engineers and physicians, who are drawn to spare Wahhabi theology. Safi says their line of thinking goes like this: "Islam is sick. We need to heal it. We need to do this and this and this." Or: "The circuit of Islam is broken. If we attach this and fix this, it will work."
Sheila Musaji is typical of the ranks of frustrated moderates. She says she has grown angry in the last decade as new immigrants, often fundamentalists, take over local mosques. "The immigrants may have a narrower outlook. A lot of time gets wasted on what kind of hijab (head covering) someone is wearing," she says.
A few years ago, she said, she made copies of an article by an important Muslim scholar explaining why interfaith dialogue is Islamically correct. When she tried to pass them out at the mosque, a leader there said the writer was wrong--and simply threw the papers away.
After a while, Musaji says, she got tired of fighting. But when the terrorist attacks happened, she couldn't stand by anymore. First, she watched moderate Muslims speak out against the terrorists. But then she noticed that many of them were attacked by conservative Muslims. So she started her newsletter. "I personally wanted to offer support for those in the forefront of what hopefully appears to be a movement to recapture traditional, moderate Islam," she wrote in the first issue.
If we are in the beginnings of an Islamic "reformation" in the West, it wouldn't be the first time American immigrants have taken the religion of their ancestors and put a distinctly American stamp on it. When Catholics came to the United States in 150 years ago, they had the freedom to start their own organizations and build their own churches. Eventually, they began questioning the Vatican's hierarchical power and conservative moral stance--a struggle that continues to this day.
When Jews immigrated to America, they, too, experimented with theology and social organization. They built Jewish Community Centers and all manner of synagogues for different kinds of Jews. American Jews invented Bat Mitzvah ceremonies for girls and Reconstructionist theology.
In both cases, they sought to join the American religious mainstream. First, Catholics united with Protestants in ecumenical groups. By the 1950s, Jews had joined the interfaith scene to create what we now think of as the "Judeo-Christian" ethic.
Reform-minded Muslims are pushing for the same story line.
"There have been two responses to this thing," says Esack. "One is to sweep all our theological garbage under the carpet and say, 'It's not us.' Another position is to say 'It's not us' but at the same time say secretly, 'We did it! Brilliant!'"
What Muslim leaders must do, Esack says, is replace both those responses with a new line of thinking that helps Muslims coexist peacefully with others--without conversion tactics or violence. "Muslims in general cannot live with people of another religion in a state of what I call 'coolness,'" Esack says.
That is because, he says, right now they have only two models for understanding their place in the world. The first is that of the oppressed--as Muslims were in their early days in Mecca. The second is that of rulers--the way Muslims eventually lived in Medina.
Esack says, however, that embedded in the Qur'an is a story about a group of Muslims who lived in Abyssinia, a Christian kingdom. There they lived peacefully--neither trying to convert Christians, nor being proselytized by Christians.
"That’s the way for Muslims to go," says Esack.
But the shape of an alternative movement is not yet clear, either. Among the moderate voices is that of Ingrid Mattson. She is the first woman to hold a position on the board of ISNA, the oldest and largest of the official--and generally quite conservative--Muslim organizations in the United States. She believes Muslim countries shouldn't enforce Muslim religious law on their citizens.
At the same time, Mattson wears a head covering and considers her faith the "primal religion" and the "right way." What's more, she likes the spare, simple Wahhabi theology--and she is not sure Islam even needs a "reformation," since Wahhabism, which emerged in the 18th century, is considered a reform movement.
And Mattson understands why Muslims have shied away from theological brawls in the United States.
"There's been this feeling for so long that Muslims have been under siege from external threats so there's been no time or energy left for internal examination," Mattson says. "But also there is this feeling that if we're criticizing our own structures we'll give more ammunition to those people who are attacking our community from the outside."
It's a tricky balance, says Amir Hussain, a religion professor at California State University-Northridge. He is quite critical, for instance, of some aspects of U.S. foreign policy (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the sanctions against Iraq, and now the continued bombing in Afghanistan), but he is also unabashedly pro-Western. "There's no question we're Americans, and as Americans, we may well dissent with our country's internal policies," he says.
But that's a distinction lost on some of the newer arrivals in the United States, Hussain says. One of his targets for "reform" is foreign-born Muslim students. He is trying to become more involved in Muslim Student Association groups to give foreign exchange students, and the children of recent immigrants, a sense of Islam's diversity--and also to let them see that Muslims in this country love both their faith and their nation.
"There are a whole lot of us," he says. "And it's important for us to come out of the woodwork and say this is who we are."
Mattson sees this as a critical juncture that could shape Islam in America for decades.
"We as Muslims have an obligation to care about justice issues wherever we live," she says. "It's not enough to simply collect funds and send them overseas, or agitate for political rights of Palestinians and other Muslims. We have to care equally about bad public schools and the lack of health care for poor people.
"If we're going to live in this country," she says, "we have an obligation to care about the welfare of the people in this country."
And the irony is: While much of the Muslim world professes to hate the United States and its liberated, Western ways, it is Muslims here--among the freest, best-educated and richest in the world--who ultimately may hold the real key to empowering Islam.
Dialogue is a necessity
Only by honestly addressing the cultural schism with Islam can we reach accommodation
Jeremy Rifkin
Tuesday November 13, 2001
The Guardian
I'm ashamed to admit it, but before September 11, I didn't pay much attention to Islam. I had a cursory knowledge of the historical struggle between Israel and its Arab neighbours. I knew a bit about the struggle with the west over oil. I followed the comings and goings of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria. But, when it comes to Islamic culture and history and its long engagement with the west, I was virtually ignorant.
It took the deaths of 5,000 Americans in a horrific act of terrorism to get my attention. Like so many others, I have been reading up on Islam - its tenets, internal struggles, contradictions, visions and shortcomings, its similarities and deep differences with Christianity and the west. Some of what I'm learning gives me hope; other things make me frightened for what might lie ahead.
I'm not alone. Seven of the 15 lead books on the New York Times paperback bestseller list are devoted to Islam. The Koran has become a bestseller. The whole world, it seems, has been converted into a classroom as we try to make sense out of the tragic events of September 11 and its aftermath.
What have we learned, not about Islam, but rather about ourselves? First, that we tend not to regard realities that differ in some fundamental respects from our own. We have come to accept, at face value, that our way of life is the universal standard. We cannot imagine anyone not aspiring to it. Therefore, in our minds, such people either don't exist, or their way of thinking is so alien that we have no way of making allowances for their presence. For all practical purposes, these "others" are not there, and they do not count.
Over the past several weeks, I have heard Muslim intellectuals use the word "humiliation" to describe how vast numbers of Muslims feel. Humiliation is a deeply cultural construct that cuts far deeper than economic or political terms like "impoverished" or "disenfranchised". To feel humiliated is to be denied consideration or respect.
Most of us are incredulous that many in the Muslim world, even among the well-off and well-educated, responded to the deaths of thousands of Americans in an almost haughty manner, as if to say, you won't be able to ignore us ever again. Large numbers of Muslims probably feel a certain pride in what Osama bin Laden accomplished. After all, he forced us to take note of 1.2bn Islamic people. But his accomplishment was a negative one, born in violence. Now, the question is, can this horrible act be an opportunity?
What if, instead of holding on to every utterance of the extremists, analysing their every pronouncement and fatwa, we focus on the centre of gravity in the Muslim world and call for a cultural dialogue between Islam and the west? There are many questions we need to ask. For example, how do most Muslims feel about values we hold dear, like civil liberties, democratic participation and gender equality? I'd like to know if most Muslims can accept living in a pluralistic world, with respect for different faiths, creeds and ways of life. Many in the Muslim world would probably like to ask why we are so preoccupied with material values.
Is it possible that Islam and the west might have things they can learn from each other? It's hard to believe that there isn't something we might learn from a culture that has had such a powerful impact on the world for nearly 1,500 years and in which one out of every five human beings finds meaning.
If, however, both sides believe there is little of positive value to be learned from each other, then there is little hope of resolution of the cultural divide that separates us, short of escalating violence and a protracted struggle in which each side tries to impose their will. We have been putting large sums into a military and political response to the new terrorism. Perhaps we need to put as much, or more, attention on finding mechanisms to engage each other where it most counts - in the cultural arena.
It is disheartening that even in America and Europe, where millions of Muslims live, there is often little interaction between their communities and others. This is all the more troubling when we consider the sheer number of Muslims. They make up a majority in 52 countries and a sizeable minority in many others. There are 6m Muslims living in the US, 2m in the UK, 3.2m in Germany and 5m in France. Moreover, Islam is the fastest growing religion. Demographers predict that one out of every four human beings will be Muslim in 24 years. If demographics is power, then the world is tilting toward a Muslim century.
We need to begin a cultural dialogue with Islam now, rather than wait until the point of no return. Let me cite just two ticking cultural time bombs. First, in the US, western Europe and other countries, the Muslim populations are young, often unemployed or impoverished, and the subject of growing discrimination. Millions of Muslim youth have been left behind by globalisation. In their desperate search to find identity, purpose and hope, many are being won over to the fundamentalist call for a jihad to recapture the golden age of Islam and reconquer the world for God - a kind of Islamic view of globalisation.
Second, for most of us who have long accepted the notion of giving private loyalty to our faith and public loyalty to our government, the idea that substantial numbers of Muslims living among us do not share our conviction is unsettling. A New York Times reporter recently interviewed young Muslim students in the US and was surprised to learn that some did not think of themselves as Americans, but rather as Muslims living in America. Their bonds are extra-territorial and based on the revival of the Islamic idea of umma, the "universal Islamic community". Many young Muslims in Europe and America since September 11 have said they would not fight against their fellow Muslims in Afghanistan if called upon to do so by their own governments. They also view the nation state as a colonial construct imposed on the Middle East and the rest of the world. Add to this the fact that the Muslim diaspora is spreading into virtually every country, and we begin to understand the risk of perpetuating a global ghettoisation of Islam.
We are long overdue for an open cultural exchange between Islam and the west in our own neighbourhoods. We desperately need a frank discussion with each other about who we are and what we believe - even if neither side likes what they hear.
President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor Schröder have attempted to put distance between Islam and the al-Qaida network, suggesting that the only real threat to the western way of life is Bin Laden's terrorist campaign. Still, even if Bin Laden's network ceased to exist, we'd still have to confront the fact that two great civilisations, with a long history of conflict, are once again facing off in the global arena.
Politicians, military commanders and journalists talk about the "Great Game", a reference to the geopolitical intrigues being played out between Islam and the west in the Afghan war. What we need is "The Great Conversation" between Islam and the west so we can figure out how to accommodate each other. Until we do, our world will continue to be a dangerous and precarious place.
· Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Age of Access and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington.