THE EVENTS of September 11, 2001, still painfully etched in many people’s minds, have played a crucial role in contemporary perceptions of Islam among both Muslims and non-Muslims. How, it was asked, could “religious” individuals fly planes filled with innocent passengers into buildings, killing thousands more? This question gave way to several others: “Who are these people,” some asked, perhaps naively, “and why do they hate us?” With these questions, a public discourse on Islam—what its main teachings are, what its opinions on particular topics are, what it condones or does not—has been created. Contributions to this discourse are rarely neutral; they are dependent on the different political and ideological agendas of the actors involved, all of whom claim “expert” knowledge of what Islam really is.
This chapter’s goal is to survey some of these voices with an eye toward understanding Islam at the present moment. In order to get as broad a picture as possible, it is important to examine the many actors responsible for manufacturing the competing versions of Islam and Muslim identities that currently dot the landscape of public discourse. The actors in the debate are both Muslims and non-Muslims, militant and apologetic or fearful; they come from the left and the right; and they are both liberal and conservative. What they all share—and this should come as no surprise given what has been show in the previous eleven chapters—is the need to define Islam in their own image: to emphasize those aspects of the tradition that best articulate their particular version of the religion and marginalize those aspects that do not.
Because of these myriad voices, it is important not to take one and hold it up as normative, thereby mistaking a part for the whole. Unfortunately, however, various commentators, politicians, and even scholars try to make liberal Islam or a militant Islam somehow representative of the Islam. It is necessary to be aware that contemporary Islam is a polyphony of voices that are rarely, if ever, in harmony with one another.
As witnessed throughout this study, numerous events in the past fifty or so years have demonstrated this multivocality: the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, reactions to the Salman Rushdie “affair” in 1989. Muslim responses to such events have been anything but monolithic and show to just what extent the “Islamic world” is composed of competing visions, interests, and identities.
One of the enduring yet misplaced questions since the events of September 11 has been: Why hasn’t Islam had a reformation? Both Christians and Jews have, with the result that in both of these traditions there exist both moderate and assimilationist voices that successfully counterbalance more fundamentalist ones. Implicit in the question of Islam’s inability to produce a reformation is the notion that there is something the matter with the tradition as such. Moreover, such a question ignores the fact that—as we have seen time and again—Islam possesses under its large canopy many different worldviews and conceptions of what the religion is or should be. Some of these voices are reform minded, others are not. This diversity creates manifold Muslim identities and produces, as witnessed in
chapters 10 and
11, a dynamic set of responses to the contemporary period. We have to be careful, of course, of assuming that one of these responses is the correct one simply because it fits our understanding of what Islam is or should be.
It is also important to remember that although certain militant groups and Muslims do bad things in the name of Islam (they, of course, consider such actions to be good and authentically Muslim), the truth is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are like anyone else. They are trying to raise families, gain meaningful employment, take comfort in friendship and marriage, and make sense out of life using, in part, the religion bequeathed to them from their parents. The moment that we assume that Muslims are somehow different from some vaguely constructed “us,” making them the proverbial Other, problems inevitably arise.
Many non-Muslims tend to conflate Islam solely with militant Islam, perhaps owing to the headline-grabbing actions of groups that follow this type of Islam. Although transnational in scope, militant Islamic groups tend to have various political objectives that revolve largely around reasserting Islam in the face of American imperialism and U.S. support for Israel and overthrowing various corrupt regimes in the Islamic world that are perceived to be “American–Zionist” puppet states. Such groups include, but are certainly not limited to, al-Qaeda (in Afghanistan, but now also in other areas), Hezbollah (in Lebanon), Hamas (in the Gaza Strip), Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba (in Pakistan), al-Shabab (in Somalia), and Jemaah Islamiyya (in Indonesia and Malaysia). All these groups are committed to ensuring that their vision of Islam replaces competing versions that they perceive to be too lax, popular, or mystically inspired.
Despite the fact that many liberals, both Muslim and non-Muslim, consider groups such as al-Qaeda to be “hijackers” of a more peaceful version of Islam, the great paradox is that members of such groups consider themselves to be not only Muslims, but the most authentic ones. And although most governments outlaw them as terrorist organizations, followers of such groups regard themselves as waging war (jihad, or at least one interpretation of it) on the West and their puppet states in the Islamic world.
Groups such as al-Qaeda envisage themselves as upholding the pure Islam practiced by Muhammad and his followers, the so-called salaf (from which we get the modern name “Salafi”), and the next generations. They see the use of violence as a valid and justifiable way to spread their version of Islam and as the duty of every believing Muslim. Whereas critics of the followers of this form of Islam may accuse them of hijacking the true and peace-loving Islam, those who struggle against the West in violent jihad accuse those Muslims who do not share this vision of collusion with the West (usually code for America and Israel) and, even worse, of infidelity. Osama bin Laden (1957–2011), the founder of al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, stated, for example,
Honorable and righteous scholars, this is your role. Today is your day. Our Islamic
umma is confronting a very grave challenge and being subjected to terrible aggression, and her rulers and many of her scholars have forsaken her. Who will lead and direct her, if not you?
Would we give the reins of our umma to secular, apostate opportunists? Our umma has despaired of all those politically and militarily bankrupt leaders, who have lost all credibility. She is looking to the divine scholars who lead her with inspiration and drive her on the right path and fight with her in the theaters and in the battlefields of jihad for the sake of God Almighty. If you do not dedicate yourselves to this task now, then what are you waiting for?
After the Crusaders’ occupation of Saudi Arabia, the Jews’ violation of Palestine and … the destruction and slaughter being meted out to Muslims in Chechnya today and Bosnia yesterday and throughout the world everyday, can matters get any worse?
1
Here bin Laden laments the presence of American troops throughout the Islamic world, especially in Saudi Arabia (which includes the Holy Cities Mecca and Medina) and in Palestine, which includes Jerusalem (with Israel serving as the U.S. proxy in the Middle East)—the three holiest places in Islam. He calls upon conservative or Wahhabi clerics not to sanction this presence and not to lend the religious and intellectual support that is responsible for propping up what he considers to be corrupt regimes. The goal of such scholars, he says, should be to fight such regimes both legally and physically.
Suicide bombing is another instance in which the same thing can be interpreted in different ways. Many Muslims find such acts abhorrent, and many religious leaders, including the fuquha (legal scholars), have labeled such acts as illegal and contrary to the teachings of Islam. Religious leaders associated with militant groups, however, argue that the clerics who make this claim are ignorant of the religious law and are little more than employees of corrupt states (for example, the clerics associated with al-Azhar University in Cairo) and do the bidding of “infidels.” These more radical or militant scholars point to fact that the killing of civilians is legitimate—allowable under law—under certain conditions. According to bin Laden,
Our prophet Muhammad was against the killing of women and children. When he saw the body of a non-Muslim woman during a war, he asked what the reason for killing her was. If a child is older than thirteen and bears arms against Muslims, killing him is permissible. The American people should remember they pay taxes to their government and they voted for their president. Their government makes weapons and provides them to Israel, which they use to kill Palestinian Muslims. Given that the American Congress is a committee that represents the people, the fact that it agrees with the actions of the American government proves that America in its entirety is responsible for the atrocities that it is committing against Muslims.
2
Bin Laden here justifies the killing of innocents by arguing that in the modern world there are no longer such things as “innocents” (at least in the West). According to his worldview, the nature of public opinion and democratic elections make the entire American (or British or Canadian or Israeli) citizenry complicit in the fight against Islam because they support what the military does by paying taxes and voting in elections that further support military action.
Support for these types of groups comes from numerous constituencies. Some who join are part of the swelling number of unemployed in the Muslim world, where Islamist parties and more extreme militant groups (the line between them is often fine) produce a subversive discourse (e.g., a version of Islam) that is familiar. Another constituency, as recent headlines in America have shown, is Muslims in the West, some of whom feel tremendous dissatisfaction with “Western-style” materialism, racism, and xenophobia and who believe that America and Europe are at war with and thus kill Muslims throughout the world (e.g., in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine). Some of these individuals travel to secretive militant training camps in places such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and rural Pakistan with the aim of joining some global jihad against the West.
Muslims who disagree with this vision are labeled ignorant of their tradition and corrupt because of their willingness to engage in direct dialogue with “the West.” Bin Laden once said, speaking of the Saudi regime specifically, although his sentiments are echoed in militant objections to virtually every other government in the Middle East (from Morocco to Egypt to Syria):
The Saudi regime has committed very serious acts of disobedience—worse than the sins and the offenses that are contrary to Islam, worse than oppressing slaves, depriving them of their rights and insulting their dignity, intelligence, and feelings, worse than squandering the general wealth of the nation. Millions of [dollars] flow into the bank accounts of the royals who wield executive power. At the same time, public services are being reduced, our lands are being violated, and people are imposing themselves forcibly through business without compensation. It has got to the point where the regime has gone so far as to be clearly beyond the pale of Islam, allying itself with the infidel America and aiding it against Muslims, and making itself an equal to God by legislating on what is or is not permissible without consulting God.
3
According to bin Laden and those like him, the Saudi ruling family is guilty of
shirk and
takfir (apostasy) because of their acts of disobedience. As such, they have ceased to be Muslims and to rule according to the tenets of Islam. The ironic result is that the Saudi regime, despite being one of the most conservative in the Muslim world, is here regarded as the object for jihad.
Events such as those that occurred on September 11, 2001, present numerous obstacles to the student of religion. The most important one is: Were these individuals’ actions religious? Or, perhaps framed slightly differently, are we to consider their actions as “Muslim” (however we define that), or, as some want to, do we label such actions as inauthentic and a distortion of the “real” Islam?
4 The danger of making their actions into a distortion or perversion, however, is that it risks overlooking how such actors use religious teachings to justify what they do. It makes them potentially too easy to dismiss, thereby undervaluing their so-called religious component.
5Another way to circumscribe such actions is to claim, as is commonly done in the Islamic world, that Muslims were not responsible for the attacks of September 11. On the contrary, and despite claims of responsibility by al-Qaeda, certain segments of the Muslim world contend that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Israeli Mossad were the real perpetrators of the attacks as a way to discredit Islam and conquer Muslim (i.e., oil-producing) countries. In the aftermath of the attacks, for example, an infamous e-mail message circulated widely stating that Jews had been told to stay home on the day in question.
Such accusations of American and Israeli involvement are frequently heard not only for the attacks on September 11, but for various suicide bombings throughout the Muslim world. The Iranian government blamed “foreign elements,” in particular the United States and Israel, for the recent suicide bombing at a Shi
ʿi mosque on July 15, 2010, the anniversary of the birth of Imam Husayn, in Zahedan, Iran, even though a Sunni militant group, Jundullah, claimed responsibility for the attack.
6The Internet is rife with conspiracy theories and half-truths on these issues and must therefore be used with caution. The best place to look for information on such events is reputable news sources (although, again, whether even reputable sources are unbiased is open to debate).
7 Many Internet sites, despite being glossy and expensive looking, may be the work of any number of groups with a particular ideological ax to grind. It is certainly fine to peruse such sites, but they should be treated as primary sources as opposed to secondary ones.
Perhaps adding to the conspiracy theorists’ arsenal is the fact that the suitcase of the individual who is generally considered to be the ringleader of the September 11 attacks, Muhammad Atta, was checked only as far as Boston. He took two planes: one from Portland, Maine, to Boston, and then American Airlines 11, which was scheduled to fly from Boston to Los Angeles but instead was used as one of the weapons that destroyed the World Trade Center. The suitcase did not make it onto the plane that eventually crashed into the World Trade Center. Some have argued that the suitcase was a CIA plant, but it seems most likely that he intended it to be found because in it he had left both a will and a set of instructions about how the attack was to be carried out. Perhaps he intended for others to use these documents as a way to interpret and understand his life and actions. Both the will and the instructions assert repeatedly that he perceived himself to be a good Muslim. Just so there would be no debate concerning whether his actions were political as opposed to religious, he opened his will with the following:
MILITANT ISLAM AND THE INTERNET
Recent years have witnessed a rapid rise in the use of the Internet to spread the messages of militant and violent Muslim (and non-Muslim) groups. The result is that these messages are easily and readily accessible at the click of a mouse.
Many of these Internet preachers reach a wider and unprecedented audience than they would if they did not use the Internet to communicate their messages. American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, a former imam, posted his lectures and messages from his home base in Yemen until his death in September 2011. According to the U.S. government, he inspired many Islamic terrorists against the West. American-born Nidal Malik Hasan carried out an attack on the army base Fort Hood in Texas, and the Nigerian Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab (the so-called Christmas Day Bomber) attempted to blow up a plane bound from Amsterdam to Detroit on December 25, 2009—both had encountered al-Awlaki’s “teachings” on the Internet and corresponded with him by e-mail.
Individuals such al-Awlaki use the Internet, among other reasons, to recruit and motivate potential terrorists to their cause, to raise funds, to coordinate actions, and—perhaps most important—to instill fear in their perceived enemies. The Internet’s utility resides in its ease of access, lack of regulation, potentially large audiences, and ability to allow for a fast flow of information.
In the name of God all mighty
Death Certificate
This is what I want to happen after my death. I am Mohamed the son of Mohamed Elamir awad Elsayed: I believe that prophet Mohamed is God’s messenger and time will come no doubt about that [sic] and God will resurrect people who are in their graves. I wanted my family and everyone who reads this will to fear the Almighty God and don’t get deceived by what is in life and to fear God and to follow God and his prophets if they are real believers. In my memory I want them to do what Ibrahim [Abraham] told his son to do, to die as a good Muslim.
Item 14 of the will states: “I should be laying on my right side. You should throw the dust on my body three times while saying from the dust, created you dust and to dust you will return. From the dust a new person will be created. After that everyone should mention God’s name and that I died as a Muslim which [
sic] is God’s religion. Everyone who attends my funeral should ask that I will be forgiven for what I have done in the past (not this action).”
8 Such statements should make us cautious of being too hasty to write off the motivations of individuals who carry out attacks like the ones on September 11 as “un-Islamic” or crazed. Individuals like Muhammad Atta regard their actions as being true to the religion, and they therefore regard themselves as true, perhaps the only true, Muslims in a world of unbelief—practitioners of the faith who are prepared to die for their religion in the ultimate fight against the self-perceived forces of evil.
When we turn to the transcript of the September 11 attackers’ instructions, we once again witness the role of religious language and terminology in justifying such acts. For instance, after the customary Muslim opening (“In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate”), we read that on the night before the attacks, the perpetrators were to
Make an oath to die and renew your intentions. Shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne. Shower.
Make sure you know all aspects of the plan well, and expect the response, or a reaction, from the enemy.
Read al-Tawba and Anfal [traditional war chapters from the Quran] and reflect on their meanings and remember all of the things God has promised for the martyrs.
Remind your soul to listen and obey [all divine orders] and remember that you will face decisive situations that might prevent you from 100 per cent obedience, so tame your soul, purify it, convince it, make it understand, and incite it. God said, “Obey God and His messenger, and do not fight amongst yourselves or else you will fail. And be patient, for God is with the patient” [Quran 8:48].
9
The Quranic references in such passages are unmistakable and quickly contradict the notion that these individuals were not Muslims. This latter claim, of course, is an ideological one that returns us to some of the theological debates as to who gets to count as a believer. Such debates are internal ones that revolve around notions of what others perceive to be authentically Muslim acts and behaviors: Although the September 11 attackers perceived themselves to be true Muslims, both Muslims and others critical of such actions deny this claim. If any more proof is needed as to the attackers’ religious justification, consider the following statement:
You should feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage [in heaven] is very short. Afterwards begin the happy life, where God is satisfied with you, and eternal bliss “in the company of the prophets, the companions, the martyrs and the good people, who are all good company” [Quran 4: 71]. Ask God for his mercy and be optimistic, because [the Prophet], peace be upon him, used to prefer optimism in all his affairs….
Bless your body with some verses of the Quran [done by reading verses into one’s hands and then rubbing the hands over whatever is to be blessed], the luggage, clothes, the knife, your personal effects, your ID, passports, all your papers.
Check your weapon before you leave and long before you leave (you must make your knife sharp and must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter).
10
In this quotation, we see many themes and motifs discussed in previous chapters. Muhammad is held up as the exemplar of moral and religious valor, someone whose actions are to be replicated (or indeed interpreted) by each generation. The Quran becomes not only an important document for what it says, but also a ritual object, something whose very words impart a sacramental quality to that which it touches, including the most mundane of objects such as knives and passports. Finally, this passage compares those to be killed on the airplanes (presumably the flight attendants) as animals whose throats are to be slit in a ritualized manner.
As disturbing as such a passage may be, it needs to be understood contextually. What we see is the shrewd use of Quranic verses and traditional terminology in the service of the murderous actions. This use does not mean, of course, that every Muslim agrees with the hijackers or that the entire Muslim tradition sanctions such activities. What it does tell us, however, is that these particular individuals—not unlike other individuals encountered in previous chapters—used select materials from the past to create an identity for themselves in the present. They and the larger al-Qaeda network of which they were a part envisaged themselves as the true heirs to Muhammad.
Although some people might not like to read this explanation, scholars of religion cannot pick and choose from the numerous voices within the contemporary Islamic world to indicate which ones are the most valid or the most authentic. Our goal must be both to understand whence such voices emanate and to explain how they use and interpret the tradition to achieve their ends, with which we may or may not happen to agree.
It is important to be aware that not all Muslims agree with the attackers’ interpretations of Islam. As clarified in the coming sections, huge debates in the Muslim world discuss how to deal with groups such as al-Qaeda. Some Muslims, especially some young Muslims in the West and in Muslim countries, see such groups romantically and seek to join them and train with them. Other Muslims, although disagreeing with these groups’ tactics, may nevertheless see them as sticking up for Muslims worldwide and drawing attention to the plight of oppressed Muslims—for instance, those in Palestine. Yet other Muslims, presumably the great majority, regard groups such as al-Qaeda as an abomination and a bastardization of what they perceive the true Islam to be. And for many of these latter Muslims, events such as the attacks on September 11 should lead to further examination and introspection regarding the future of Islam and its place in the modern world.
The term “Islamophobia” has recently been coined to refer to prejudice and hatred directed against Muslims and Islam. Although one might make the case that Islamophobia has always been a constituent feature in defining the nature of Europe’s interaction with Islam, the term itself is more customarily employed to refer to the post–September 11 period. In this regard, Islamophobia is the racist and discriminatory technique that claims, both explicitly and implicitly, that all Muslims are potential terrorists and that Islam is an extremely hostile and violent religion. It can be witnessed in the fact that the bad guys in movies and television produced after September 2001 have often been Arabs and that Muslims are frequently “racially” profiled at airports, border crossings, and so on.
Although this profiling of Arabs and Muslims has been in existence since at least the 1970s, the events of September 11 certainly exacerbated matters. However, some argue that Islamophobia is as much a fear that emerges from the increased number of Muslims in Europe and America as it is from the attacks, although the two are probably interconnected. Examples of Islamophobia range from the general, such as stereotyping Muslims at airports and firebombing mosques, to the more specific, such as the vote in November 2009 in Switzerland against the construction of minarets or objections to the construction of an Islamic center near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. There is some debate as to whether the movement to ban the veil (or at least the full face covering) in places such as France (
chapter 11) is based on Islamophobia, as critics of the movement would charge, or on the traditional French notion of
laïcité, or secular society, as proponents would claim.
There have been numerous criticisms of the term and concept “Islamophobia.” Some critics argue that although hatred of Muslims is certainly real, it is just another variation on racism and hence does not require its own category. Perhaps the biggest criticism, however, is that this term is employed to censor criticism of Islam—not unlike cries of anti-Semitism that are invoked whenever people are critical of Israel and its policies. Anyone critical of Islam—its teachings on women or on the status of the non-Muslim—can potentially be labeled an Islamophobe. Even those who research the origins of Islam from a purely secular perspective are at risk of such charges because their approach might be perceived as insensitive to Muslim belief and practices. A final example of the term’s ambiguity is the controversy over the publication of the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. Critics labeled the cartoons a “classic” act of Islamophobia, whereas defenders argued that they were an exercise of free speech. The truth of the matter most likely resides, as it so often does, somewhere between the two arguments.
THE PARK 51 CONTROVERSY
Park 51 (originally given the name Cordoba House) is a planned thirteen-story Muslim community center to be located two blocks from the former World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, the focus of the attacks on September 11, 2001, often referred to as “Ground Zero.” The proposed structure is frequently called the “Ground Zero mosque,” although it is worth pointing out that neither is it a mosque, nor is it located at Ground Zero (nor would it even be visible from Ground Zero).
When this center was proposed, it created a great deal of controversy. Opponents of the Park 51 project have argued that erecting a mosque so close to Ground Zero would be offensive because the hijackers responsible for the attacks were Muslim and killed thousands in the name of Islam. Supporters, however, have argued that the center will be open to the general public and will ideally promote interfaith dialogue. They also argue that some of the victims were also Muslim and that many of the victims’ families are in favor of the Park 51 project.
Prominent supporters and opponents of the project can be found among the families of the September 11 victims, the American and worldwide Muslim communities, and local and national politicians. It even became a highly polarized issue in 2010, during the midterm elections. The debate over Park 51 coincided with unexpected protests against new mosque constructions in other states, further leading to concerns that relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States are once again deteriorating.
ISLAMOPHOBIA AMONG “NEOCON” COMMENTATORS
Neoconservativism is a right-wing movement that supports the use of American economic and military power to bring a particular version of democracy to other countries. In recent years, many in the so-called neocon movement see “militant Islam” as the biggest threat to American interests, both at home and abroad. According to neoconservatives, these militant Muslims seek to wage jihad on the West not only by violent means, by also by legal means through the use of the West’s notion of political correctness and calls of Islamophobia.
Such commentators are usually very supportive of Israel and highly critical of the prospects of Palestinian statehood, and they are generally (but not always) behind active American involvement in the affairs of places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. All neocons, like the members of any other category, cannot be neatly placed under the same canopy, however, and range from the rather dull-witted (witness some of the commentators on Fox News) to the more sophisticated (such as Daniel Pipes).
DANIEL PIPES AND CAMPUS WATCH
Daniel Pipes (b. 1949) is a Harvard-trained historian who began his career specializing in the medieval Islamic period. In the mid-1980s, he left the academy and began commenting publicly on political affairs, especially Islam and Islamism, which he labels as “militant Islam,” a threat to the global order in general and to America in particular: “As Islamists, they believe that their ways are superior and want to impose these on the country as a whole. In the short term, they promote Islam as a solution to the social and moral ills; in the long term, they work to turn the United States into not just a Muslim country but one run along militant Islamic lines. However outlandish this goal, it is one which in militant Islamic circles is widely assumed and much discussed.”
11Pipes has also worked for various conservative think tanks. In 1990, he founded the Middle East Forum, whose self-stated goal is “to define and promote American interests in the Middle East and protect the Constitutional order from Middle Eastern threats.”
12 Until 2010, Pipes also edited the forum’s journal,
Middle East Quarterly. Ephraim Karsh became the new editor and describes the journal’s mandate as one of “questioning established wisdom, debunking popular myths, and providing an alternative perspective on the region’s history and current affairs.”
13In 2002, Pipes founded Campus Watch, a controversial organization whose goal, according to its Web site, is to address “five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds.”
14Whereas Pipes is concerned largely with radical Muslims in the Middle East Forum, Campus Watch sets its sights on scholars of Islam and the Middle East. To achieve its goals, it monitors what academics have to say in the classroom about both the religion and the region. It is particularly critical of what it perceives to be many scholars’ liberal and anti-Israeli biases. According to its Web page, Campus Watch
• Gathers information on Middle East studies from public and private sources and makes this information available on its website,
www.Campus-Watch.org• Produces analyses of institutions, individual scholars, topics, events, and trends
• Makes its views known through the media—newspaper opeds, radio interviews, television interviews
• Invites student complaints of abuse, investigates their claims, and (when warranted) makes these known
15
Critics refer to this activity as a form of academic McCarthyism.
16 Campus Watch replies, however, that its goal is not to police such discourses, but to ensure that alternate viewpoints on the Middle East are heard and included in the public debate.
Finally, in 2006 Middle East Forum launched Islamist Watch, whose stated goal is to “combat the ideas and institutions of nonviolent, radical Islam in the United States and other Western countries. It exposes the far-reaching goals of Islamists, works to reduce their power, and seeks to strengthen moderate Muslims.”
17 Islamist Watch claims to educate the U.S. government, media, religious institutions, the academy, and the business world about “lawful Islamism,” presumably Islamism that seeks to overthrow the status quo by legal means.
These organizations affiliated with Middle Eastern Forum are but a selection of various neocon sites on the Internet.
18 The goal of all these sites is to expose so-called real Islam, which is often equated with Islamism or “Islamo-fascism,” a recently coined term used to denote militant Muslims’ authoritarian nature.
IRSHAD MANJI’S TROUBLE WITH ISLAM
The theme of “empowering” moderate Muslims is a big one for many commentators dealing with the troubles besetting Islam today. Joining this chorus is Canadian Muslim journalist Irshad Manji. In light of the September 11 attacks, Manji has called for an end to “Islam’s totalitarianism, particularly the gross human rights violations against women and religious minorities.”
19 Her book
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’
s Call for Reform in Her Faith has been translated into thirty languages and received widespread media attention. Manji is also the creator of the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary
Faith Without Fear, which chronicles her journey to reconcile Islam with human rights and freedom.
20 Manji is a journalist by training and has no formal background in the academic study of Islam. Her Web site, however, presents her as a “scholar,” and based on the fact that many are supportive of her attempts to reform Islam from within, she has been appointed as the director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University, which aims to develop leaders who will challenge so-called political correctness, intellectual conformity, and self-censorship.
Because Manji offers a critique from within the tradition, some liberal Muslims but also more frequently neoconservative commentators such as Daniel Pipes have labeled her a visionary. The tendency in Islamic studies circles, however, is to write her off as someone who, lacking the requisite academic and historical skills, largely misunderstands the complexity of Islam—although this criticism in itself may be considered problematic because it implies that academics/scholars are the only ones who can understand Islam. However we may see her, it is important to note that Manji’s critical voice has reached an audience far wider than anything produced by scholars. Moreover, others frequently cite her as the moderate face of the tradition. Pipes, for example, argues that the views held by people like Manji ought to be included in the highest level of government discussion and taught in universities:
Governments and leading institutions can do a lot. If you look at the situation today throughout the West including North America, you’ll find that the Islamists, the radicals, are the ones invited into government circles who are generally in the media, are cited as authorities, who do the research in universities, who engage in discussions with the churches and so forth. It is important for all these institutions, governmental, academic, media and alike, to remove the recognition from the Islamists and give it to the moderate Muslims.
21
If one of the natural reactions to the events of September 11, 2001, has been a very critical assessment of Islam, an equally natural reaction has been to defend Islam, showing its intersection with principles such as liberalism, equality, and democracy. Although many practitioners may well want the heart of Islam to correspond to these values, such a construction functions on the same level as any other construction: it is the attempt to retrofit and impose a set of values deemed important in the modern period on Islam’s earliest period. Time and again we have encountered various historical actors’ attempt to construct an authentic Islam, so the use of this approach in defending Islam should come as no surprise.
Given the aftermath of the attacks on September 11 and other such events, there has been a tendency, as we have seen, to blame all Muslims for the activities of the few—to construct a monolithic Islam that sanctions violence against non-Muslims. The types of discourses produced by those examined in the previous section do much to create and sustain such hostility on a practical level. The individuals and groups discussed in this section attempt to counter claims that Islam is somehow inherently violent and that Muslims, more than practitioners of other religions, are prone to religious violence.
PROGRESSIVE MUSLIMS
Several organizations have served as the main vehicles to define Islam liberally and progressively, such as the Progressive Muslim Union, which was disbanded in 2006 and reconstituted in part as Muslims for Progressive Values. Perhaps there is no coincidence that many of these organizations have sprouted on American soil and are run largely by academics, many of them professors of Islamic studies. In a book reflecting these liberal and progressive values, Progressive Muslims, volume editor Omid Safi writes:
[B]eing a progressive Muslim is the determination to hold Muslim societies accountable for justice and pluralism. It means openly and purposefully resisting, challenging, and overthrowing structures of tyranny and injustice in these societies. At a general level, it means contesting injustices of gender apartheid (practiced by groups such as the Taliban), as well as the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities (undertaken by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds, etc.). It means exposing the violations of human rights and freedoms of the speech, press, religion, and the right to dissent in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt, and others. More specifically it means embracing and implementing a different vision of Islam than that offered by Wahhabi and neo-Wahhabi groups.
22
Implicit here is the assumption that there exists a liberal or progressive Islam that is somehow compatible with all these critiques. Not unlike Muslim feminists, progressive Muslims articulate this essential Islam, deriving it from the Quran and on the rare occasion from later Islamic sources, as compatible with modernity, liberal values, and so on. The flipside of this view is that the types of Islams practiced by the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and Wahhabi and neo-Wahhabi groups are somehow inauthentic precisely because they stray from this self-styled “straight path.” All these Islams, however, are constructed in the images of those doing the constructing, mirroring their concerns, issues, and socioeconomic positions. Even though they may be made uncomfortable by the comparison, both groups, the neo-Wahhabis and the progressive Muslims, are doing precisely the same thing: arguing that there exists an Islamic kernel somewhere in the ether or in a particular collection of texts and that their group can find it to provide the epistemological, religious, and intellectual categories to usher in the true brand of Islam.
TARIQ RAMADAN
Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962) is a Swiss-born scholar who presently teaches at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford. The grandson of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Ramadan is a highly controversial figure. Critics accuse him of supporting Palestinian organizations that carry out suicide attacks against Israelis, of defending the stoning of adulterers, of promoting anti-Semitism, of speaking about peace only when it suits him, and so on. At the same time, however, many conservative Muslims have also attacked Ramadan for his liberal criticisms and his pointing the finger at many Muslims countries (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia) for their violation of human rights and their overt violations of democratic principles.
In February 2004, Ramadan accepted a professorship at the University of Notre Dame, but the U.S. State Department revoked his nonimmigrant visa. The reason stated was the “ideological exclusion provision” of the USA PATRIOT Act. The persons instrumental in the denial of the visa to Ramadan included, not coincidentally, Daniel Pipes. Ramadan subsequently resigned his position at Notre Dame and took up his current one at Oxford. In January 2010, however, the ban on Ramadan’s admittance to the United States was lifted.
In terms of his ideas, Tariq Ramadan seeks to create an independent Western Islam. This Islam, according to him, must not be anchored in the traditions of Islamic countries, but in the cultural reality of the West: “I do not represent all Muslims but I belong to the reformist trend. I aim to remain faithful to the principles of Islam, on the basis of scriptural sources, while taking into account the evolution of historical and geographical contexts … unlike literalists who merely rely on quoting verses, reformists must take the time to put things in perspective, to contextualize, and to suggest new understandings.”
23This hermeneutic leads Ramadan to try and reinterpret traditional Islamic sources (e.g., Quran, hadith) for Muslims who live in the West and to show how a “Western” understanding of universal Islamic principles can help to integrate Muslims living in European and American societies. He claims that
Western Muslims will play a decisive role in the evolution of Islam worldwide because of the nature and complexity of the challenges they face, and in this their responsibility is doubly essential. By reflecting on their faith, their principles and their identity within industrialized, secularized societies, they participate in the reflection the Muslim world must undertake on its relationship with the modern world, its order, and its disorder…. In my view, the future dialogue between civilizations will not take place at the geopolitical frontiers between “the West” and “Islam” but rather, paradoxically, within European and American societies.
24
For Ramadan, American and European Muslims must engage in the reexamination of the fundamental texts of Islam and interpret them in light of their own cultural, intellectual, and social contexts. This reinterpretation, he believes, will create a “Western Islam” with the potential power to gain intellectual control of the tradition.
KAREN ARMSTRONG
I mention Karen Armstrong, a best-selling non-Muslim author, here as a way to show how religion is considered an internal and spiritual phenomenon unsullied by political and external forces. This way of speaking about religion has been customary at least since Friedrich Schleiermacher’s critique of Kant’s relegation of religion to the realm of the ethical, a critique popularized in religious studies circles by the works of scholars such as Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade. Armstrong, among others, works with the binary that religion when spiritualized does good in the world but when co-opted by politics can often be an agent of violence. In
Islam: A Short History, for example, she writes that the “spiritual quest is an interior journey; it is a psychic rather than a political drama. It is preoccupied with liturgy, doctrine, contemplative disciplines and an exploration of the heart, not with the clash of current events … power struggles are not what religion is really about, but an unworthy distraction from the life of the spirit, which is conducted far from the maddening crowd, unseen, silent, and unobtrusive.”
25Here Armstrong claims that religion is inherently peaceful and that when people do bad things in its name, they misunderstand the religion or attempt somehow to sully it or “hijack” it. Although this view of religion may be helpful if we are trying to understand events such as the attacks of September 11, it does not necessarily help us understand any better the statements of individuals such as Osama bin Laden and Muhammad Atta, who, as we have seen, view themselves as the true inheritors of Muhammad’s message—a religious message. Armstrong’s comments and indeed variations on them are commonplace and may make us feel better, but they do not help us understand or contextualize religious violence.
This chapter has examined some of the many responses to events such as the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. These events have put Islam under a microscope, as it were. Many non-Muslims began to desire to learn more about the religion of Islam and how it makes Muslims “think.” Such events have also forced many Muslims to consider or reconsider both the place of Islam in the modern world and how Islam can integrate with (or segregate itself from) non-Muslim societies.
Many of these latter questions relate to the role of civil society and how such a society can be realized and maintained using what are perceived to be authentic Muslim principles. What, for example, is the relationship between Islam and democracy or Islam and human rights? These questions and the debates that revolve around them are not entirely new. Indeed, the tensions between the state and Islam in the present period certainly resonated in the early and medieval periods when scholars and caliphs argued about who had the vested authority to lead the umma, a debate echoed in statements made by Osama bin Laden.
Although bin Laden’s interpretation of Islam is certainly neither normative nor mainstream, it has functioned as a catalyst by which other Muslims (from fundamentalist to modernist to liberal and everything in between) have been forced to define and articulate their own visions of the tradition. It is for this reason that September 11 is so important: it has become a symbol against which various Muslim identities are being charted. In this regard, despite the ruminations of various conservative Muslim and non-Muslim commentators, September 11 is not the telos toward which Islam has been heading since the time of Muhammad. On the contrary, it is the point of departure for the future of Islam and the future of Muslim identities.
NOTES
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Abou El Fadl, Khaled. The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. San Francisco: Harper One, 2005.
Bin Laden, Osama. Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden. Translated by James Howarth. Edited by Bruce Lawrence. London: Verso, 2005.
Gottschalk, Peter, and Gabriel Greenberg. Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Hughes, Aaron W. Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline. London: Equinox, 2007.
Jamal, Amaney, and Nadine Naber.
Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subject. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007.
Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Manji, Irshad. The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004.
McCutcheon, Russell T. Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nation. London: Equinox, 2005.
Pipes, Daniel. Militant Islam Reaches America. New York: Norton, 2002.
Ramadan, Tariq. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
——. What I Believe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Safi, Omid, ed.
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism. Oxford: Oneworld, 2003.