Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism

INTRODUCTION: THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ – A MUSLIM QUEST FOR JUSTICE, GENDER EQUALITY, AND PLURALISM*

Omid Safi

Inna ’l-laha ya’muru bi ’l-‘adl wa ’l-ihsan

Indeed God commands justice (‘adl) and the actualization of goodness, realization of beauty (ihsan)

Qur’an 16:90

Come gather ’round people

wherever you roam

and admit that the waters

around you have grown

and accept it that soon

you’ll be drenched to the bone.

If your time to you

is worth savin’

then you better start swimmin’

or you’ll sink like a stone

for the times they are a-changin’.

Bob Dylan (1)

Evoking the sacred message of the Qur’an and the revolutionary spirit of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, this book represents the collective aspirations of a group of Muslim thinkers and activists. We realize the urgency of the changin’ times in which we live, and seek to implement the Divine injunction to enact the justice (‘adl) and goodness-and-beauty (ihsan) that lie at the heart of the Islamic tradition. It is the urgency of realizing that in so many places the waters around Muslims have grown (Palestine, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iraq, Gujarat, sub-Saharan Africa, and now the United States). It is time to start swimming in these turbulent waters, to save both ourselves and the variety and vibrancy of the Islamic tradition. It may not be an exaggeration to state that unless we succeed in doing so, the humanity of Muslims will be fully reduced to correspond to the caricature of violent zealots painted by fanatics from both inside and outside the Muslim community.

It is time to start a-changin’. It is time to acknowledge the complicated mess around us, and to aim for the implementation of the vision of justice and goodness-and-beauty that is rooted in the Qur’an. We start by admitting that it is not just our time that is worth saving, but also our very humanity, the most precious blessing we have been given by God. The conversations in this volume are an open-eyed move in that direction, one that is simultaneously optimistic and critical. What brings us together is a deep distrust of all simplistic solutions, since we are aware that complicated problems call for equally complicated analyses and answers. This book is not about arriving at convenient solutions, but rather about starting the process of getting to a viable destination. Before one gets to the destination, however, one needs to get on the path. Before one gets to the shore, one has to swim. In Dylan’s prophetic words, it is time to start swimming. The progressive Muslim movement is above all an attempt to start swimming through the rising waters of Islam and modernity, to strive for justice in the midst of society.

THE MULTIPLE CRITIQUE UNDERTAKEN BY PROGRESSIVE MUSLIMS

Feminist scholars have introduced the useful concept of “multiple critique,” an idea with great relevance for Muslims committed to social justice, pluralism, and gender justice. In short, multiple critique entails a multi-headed approach based on a simultaneous critique of the many communities and discourses that we find ourselves positioned in. (2) As we will document shortly, an important part of being 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 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. (3) A vital corollary component of our multiple critique entails standing up to increasingly hegemonic Western political, economic, and intellectual structures that perpetuate an unequal distribution of resources around the world. This hegemony comprises a multitude of forces, among them the oppressive and environmentally destructive forces of multi-national corporations whose interests are now linked with those of neo-imperial, unilateral governments. Together they enforce policies through overwhelming military force, hammering down at the poorest people in the world with disturbing frequency. And yes, as much as it makes some Muslims uneasy to hear this, it does mean challenging certain policies of the United States and other countries that put profit before human rights, and “strategic interest” before the dignity of every human being.

At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation is a simple yet radical idea: every human life, female and male, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich or poor, “Northern” or “Southern,”(4) has exactly the same intrinsic worth. The essential value of human life is God-given, and is in no way connected to culture, geography, or privilege. A progressive Muslim is one who is committed to the strangely controversial idea that the worth of a human being is measured by a person’s character, not the oil under their soil, and not their flag. A progressive Muslim agenda is concerned with the ramifications of the premise that all members of humanity have this same intrinsic worth because, as the Qur’an reminds us, each of us has the breath of God breathed into our being.(5)

Many people today who come from a whole host of religious, political, and ethnic backgrounds describe themselves as “progressives.” There is, furthermore, a nascent community of Muslim activists and intellectuals who readily identify with the term “progressive Muslims” and publicly embrace it. “Progressive,” in this usage, refers to a relentless striving towards a universal notion of justice in which no single community’s prosperity, righteousness, and dignity comes at the expense of another. Central to this notion of a progressive Muslim identity are fundamental values that we hold to be essential to a vital, fresh, and urgently needed interpretation of Islam for the twenty-first century. These themes include social justice, gender justice, and pluralism. Of course, the kind of Islamic interpretation one comes up with is largely determined by who undertakes the interpretation.

In talking about social justice, gender issues, and pluralism, we are mindful to avoid the trap in which “Islam” becomes a fac¸ade for some contemporary political ideology such as Marxism. Rather, ours is a relentless effort to submit the human will to the Divine in a way that affirms the common humanity of all of God’s creation. We conceive of a way of being Muslim that engages and affirms the humanity of all human beings, that actively holds all of us responsible for a fair and just distribution of God-given natural resources, and that seeks to live in harmony with the natural world. To put it slightly differently, being a progressive Muslim means not simply thinking more about the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet, but also thinking about the life we share on this planet with all human beings and all living creatures. Seen in this light, our relationship to the rest of humanity changes the way we think about God, and vice versa. OMID SAF I : S A F Introduction 3

Throughout this book, we will time and again challenge, resist, and seek to overthrow the structures of injustice that are built into Islamic thought. These challenges cannot be conducted haphazardly, however. They must be undertaken patiently and critically. Yet the necessary and contingent element of being a progressive Muslim is the will to resist the structures of injustice that are built into the very societies in which we live. That goes for the Muslim world as well as the United States and Europe. In all cases, we strive to be social critics, rather than outright revolutionaries. We criticize not because we have stopped being Muslim (or American, or South African, or Turkish, or . . .) but precisely because we want to see all the various communities of which we are a part rise up to their highest potential of justice and pluralism.

In crucial ways, being a progressive Muslim also means being mindful and critical of the arrogance of modernity. What we mean by arrogance of modernity is an alleged teleology that posits a Hegelian, unidirectional, and inevitable march towards the end game of modern Western civilization. Progressive Muslim interpretations share this critique of modernity with other thinkers who are now commonly described as post-modern.(6) Indeed, this is one important way in which progressive Muslims differ from the host of “modernist” Muslim thinkers in the late-nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. We no longer look to the prevalent notion of Western modernity as something to be imitated and duplicated in toto. In fact, we direct our critique just as much to the West as to Muslim societies. This is particularly the case in response to arrogant voices in the West that insist on the inevitability of a global march towards modernity.

It is disturbing that these arrogant voices are not only coming from certain corners of the academic community (Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, etc.), but are also now being echoed by the most powerful government in the world. A recent policy paper released by the United States White House titled The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, for example, is riddled with disturbing instances of hubris. According to the very first sentence of this document, there is now “a single sustainable model for national success,” based on the essential components of freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. Not many people would argue against freedom and democracy, but many progressive Muslims would point out that the foreign policy record of the United States is less than stellar in its support of democracy around the world. Time and again, the United States has supported and armed tyrannical rulers who have oppressed their own pro-democracy citizens. One could point to the U.S.-led overthrow of the pro-democratic Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the U.S. support of the Mujahidin fighters (including Osama bin Laden) in Afghanistan during the 1980s, or the U.S.$1.5 billion given to Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime during the Iran–Iraq War. To these, one could add the more recent examples of U.S. support of anti-democratic Parvez Musharraf in Pakistan, and support for Hosni Mubarak’s regime when the Egyptian government imprisoned the noted pro-democracy reformer Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Democracy would indeed be a worthy goal if we in the United States actually pursued it globally, and if we truly believed that other people should have the choice to decide for themselves as to whether or not they should embrace it. As Gandhi himself stated, “I would heartily welcome the union of East and West provided it is not based on brute force.”(7)

It is the third component of this “single sustainable model,” an element benignly called “free enterprise,” that drives much of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Later on, the document further boasts, “Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty.” Where are these “whole societies” that have allegedly been lifted out of poverty? Nowhere is there an acknowledgement of or engagement with North/South divisions, or the myriad ways in which globalization has worked to make some of the rich super-rich, and the super-poor even poorer.

Another equally disturbing example of the essential arrogance that (mis)- informs The National Security Strategy of the United States of America is the call for a single system of morality. The President of the United States is here quoted as stating, “Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities.”(8) Just whose system of morality is it that we are to abide by here? That of the President of the United States? Right-wing evangelical Christians? Tibetan Buddhists? Catholics? Secular Humanists? The implication is clear: according to this document, just as there is now (or so we are told) one sustainable model of national success, there is now one single acceptable system of morality. And it is the President of the United States (and his advisors) who get to determine what that is. It is precisely such a hegemonic discourse that progressive Muslims would challenge, in the same way that we reject the arrogant authoritarian discourse of Muslim literalistexclusivists.(9)

PROGRESSIVE MUSLIMS AND THE ENGAGEMENT WITH TRADITION IN LIGHT OF MODERNITY

The attempt to reflect critically on the heritage of Islamic thought and to adapt it to the modern world is of course nothing new. At the opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary Muslims grappling with tradition one finds rigid extremes – on one side a steadfast conservative traditionalism, and on the other a knee-jerk rejectionism of the traditional Muslim heritage by certain Muslim modernists. Conservative traditionalism sees all Muslims as bound by what it deems the authoritative juridical or theological decisions of the past. The rejectionist perspective argues that there is now an epistemological rupture with the past so severe as to warrant throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Among other points, this modernist perspective calls for abolishing the Islamic legal and theological schools of thought (madhahib, sing. madhhab).

Most Muslims today recognize that neither extreme is fully viable. The two positions represent above all idealized camps from which the adherents of the two schools of thought shout at each other. Most of us find ourselves in the gloriously messy middle where real folks live and breathe. One of many commonalities between the conservative traditionalists and the modernists is that they both have had a difficult time attracting many ordinary Muslims, especially at a communal level. The edicts of those who would wish to see twenty-first-century Muslims bound by all medieval juridical decisions have seemed too restrictive to many. On the other hand, many modernists have simply not appeared authentically “Muslim” enough to most Muslims. This has had less to do with their personal piety (or lack thereof), than with the fact that their interpretations have not sufficiently engaged Islamic sources.

Progressive Muslims seek to learn from the deficiencies of both of these ideologies, in order to get past the slogan games. The challenge is not to find some magical, mythical middle ground, but rather to create a safe, open, and dynamic space, where guided by concerns for global justice and pluralism, we can have critical conversations about the Islamic tradition in light of modernity.(10) A wonderful Jewish friend of Muslims, Rabbi Zalman Schachter, perhaps said it best: “Tradition has a vote, not a veto.”(11)

It is our hope that the book you hold in your hand marks a new chapter in the rethinking of Islam in the twenty-first century. Our aim has been to envision a socially and politically active Muslim identity that remains committed to ideals of social justice, pluralism, and gender justice. The aim here is not to advocate our own understanding as uniquely “Islamic” to the exclusion of the past fourteen hundred years of Islamic thought and practice. This is not a tyrannical attempt to insist that standing here at the threshold of the twenty-first century, we finally “got it right”! No, warts and all, from its glorious nobility to misogyny, there has always been a spectrum of interpretations in Islam. We seek to locate ourselves as part of that broader conversation, not to collapse the spectrum. But ours is not a passive, relativist locating of our own voices. Being progressive also means to issue an active and dynamic challenge to those who hold exclusivist, violent, and misogynist interpretations. Traditions do not arrive from heaven fully formed, but are subject to the vicissitudes of human history. Every tradition is always a tradition-in-becoming, and Islam is no exception. Our aim is to open up a place in the wider spectrum of Islamic thought and practice for the many Muslims who aspire to justice and pluralism. This will entail both producing concrete intellectual products and changing existing social realities.

Progressive Muslims are concerned not simply with laying out a fantastic, beatific vision of social justice and peace, but also with transforming hearts and societies alike. A progressive commitment implies by necessity the willingness to remain engaged with the issues of social justice as they unfold on the ground level, in the lived realities of Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Vision and activism are both necessary. Activism without vision is doomed from the start. Vision without activism quickly becomes irrelevant.

Allow me to elaborate what I understand to be the key agenda items of progressive Muslims. But before I get to that, let me shatter any illusion that the following is meant as a “progressive Muslim manifesto.” While it is the case that the fifteen contributors to this volume have been involved in many intense and fruitful conversations, I wish to make it very clear that there are substantial differences of opinion among us. This is as it should be. I cannot – and do not – advocate my own understanding of progressive Islam as canonical. Indeed, that notion runs against the progressive Muslims’ model of the fluid exchange of ideas and the acknowledging of a wide spectrum of interpretations. The following, therefore, represents my own reflections on being a progressive Muslim. Others in this volume would no doubt add many more items, and would perhaps take exception to some of my formulations.

ESSENTIAL CONCERNS OF PROGRESSIVE MUSLIMS

Engaging Tradition

Progressive Muslims insist on a serious engagement with the full spectrum of Islamic thought and practices. There can be no progressive Muslim movement that does not engage the very “stuff” (textual and material sources) of the Islamic tradition, even if some of us would wish to debate what “stuff” that should be and how it ought to be interpreted. The engagement with the weight of the tradition might be uneasy at times, occasionally inspiring, now and then tedious, and sometimes even painful. Still, we believe that it is imperative to work through inherited traditions of thought and practice. In particular cases, we might conclude that certain pre-existing interpretations fail to offer us sufficient guidance today. However, we can only faithfully claim that position after – and not before – a serious engagement with the tradition. To move beyond certain past interpretations of Islam, we have to go critically through them.

It is not difficult to find progressives from a Muslim background who tackle issues of social justice, disparate distribution of wealth, oppression of Muslim women, etc. However, it has been our experience that too often such activism lacks the necessary engagement with the specifics of Islamic tradition. Such programs for social reform could just as easily come from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Secular Humanist, or agnostic progressives. Perhaps this partially explains why the progressive agenda has held little appeal for many Muslims worldwide, who have correctly detected that those who espouse these otherwise valuable teachings are simply giving an “Islamic veneer” to ideologies such as Marxism. Some have leveled charges in the past that Muslim voices speaking up for justice are simply parroting the secular ideology of socialism dressed up in Qur’an and hadith. To state the obvious, a progressive Muslim agenda has to be both progressive and Islamic, in the sense of deriving its inspiration from the heart of the Islamic tradition. It cannot survive as a graft of Secular Humanism onto the tree of Islam, but must emerge from within that very entity. It can receive and surely has received inspiration from other spiritual and political movements, but it must ultimately grow in the soil of Islam.

We hold that some interpretations of Islam in both the past and the present have been part of the problem. We also assert that ongoing interpretations and implementations of Islamic ethics guided by justice and pluralism can be part of the solution. To introduce an Islamic term, one might state that the progressive Muslim project represents an ongoing attempt at an Islamic ijtihad, or committed critical thinking based on disciplined but independent reasoning, to come up with solutions to new problems. This progressive ijtihad is our jihad. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the term “jihad” is all too familiar to most people. To both the Muslim fanatic and the Muslim-hating xenophobe, jihad is simply “holy war” declared by Muslims against Westerners. For the Muslim apologist, jihad is instead purely the inner struggle against one’s own selfish tendencies. Neither interpretation takes into consideration the possibility of engaging and transforming the social order and the environment in a just and pluralistic fashion that affirms the humanity of us all.

It is vitally important to recognize that “jihad” is etymologically related to the concept of ijtihad. In Arabic, concepts that share the same triliteral etymological derivation are essentially linked to one another. “Jihad” and ijtihad both come from the root ja-ha-da, meaning “to strive,” “to exert.”(12) For progressive Muslims, a fundamental part of our struggle (jihad) to exorcise our inner demons and bring about justice in the world at large is to engage in a progressive and critical interpretation of Islam (ijtihad).

An essential part of the progressive ijtihad is to account for and challenge the great impoverishment of thought and spirit brought forth by Muslim literalistexclusivists. Groups such as the Wahhabis have bulldozed over not just Sufi shrines and graveyards of the family of the Prophet in Arabia, but also whole structures of Islamic thought. As some of the essays in this volume – especially that by Khaled Abou El Fadl – make clear, there is an urgent need for progressive Muslims to problematize, resist, and finally replace the lifeless, narrow, exclusivist, and oppressive ideology that Wahhabism poses as Islam. I view Wahhabism – amplified by hundreds of billion dollars in petrodollars and supported by the same U.S. government that claims to support democracy and freedom in the Muslim world – as the single greatest source of the impoverishment of contemporary Islamic thought. Yet ours is not simply an “anti-Wahhabi” Islam. That would be to remain in the realm of the polemical and oppositional. There is no option of going back to the eighteenth century prior to the rise of the Wahhabis, nor would that be desirable. As with all other modes of injustice and oppression, we have to identify Wahhabism and oppose it before we can rise above it. This aspect of the progressive Muslim agenda yet again identifies the necessity of remaining engaged with the very stuff of Islam, past and present.

One should add here that Wahhabism is not the only brand of Islamic literalism-exclusivism, and our task as progressives is to resist all of them. In doing so, it is imperative for progressive Muslims to resist the oppressive ideology of Wahhabism, but equally important to avoid the trap of dehumanizing the Wahhabi-oriented human beings. If we dehumanize and demonize them, we have lost something valuable in our quest to acknowledge the humanity of all human beings. Gandhi was right: “It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself, for we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator.”(13) This is a great challenge.

Social justice

There have, of course, long been Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, avowed atheists, and others involved in many social justice issues. Increasingly, they now find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with new Muslim friends. The term “social justice” may be new to some contemporary Muslims, but what is not new is the theme of justice in Islam. Justice lies at the heart of Islamic social ethics. Time and again the Qur’an talks about providing for the marginalized members of society: the poor, the orphan, the downtrodden, the wayfarer, the hungry, etc.

It is time to “translate” the social ideals in the Qur’an and Islamic teachings in a way that those committed to social justice today can relate to and understand. We would do well to follow the lead of Shi‘i Muslims who from the start have committed to standing up for the downtrodden and the oppressed. Everyone knows that Muslims have always stood for the theme of Divine unity. Yet how many people have also realized that the Mu‘tazilites (who have greatly affected Shi‘i understandings of Islam) so valued justice that they identified themselves as the folk of “Divine Unity and Justice” (ahl al-tawhid wa ’l-‘adl)?(14) In the Sunni tradition, there is a vibrant memory of the Prophet repeatedly talking about how a real believer is one whose neighbor does not go to bed hungry. In today’s global village, it is time to think of all of humanity as our neighbor. The time has come for us to be responsible for the well-being and dignity of all human beings if we wish to be counted as real believers. To borrow a metaphor from our Christian friends, we are all our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers now.

The time has come to stand up and be counted. As Muslims and as human beings, we stand up to those who perpetuate hate in the name of Islam. We stand up to those whose God is a vengeful monster in the sky issuing death decrees against the Muslim and the non-Muslim alike. We stand up to those whose God is too small, too mean, too tribal, and too male. We stand up to those who apologetically claim that the beautiful notions of universal brotherhood and sisterhood in the Qur’an have somehow made Muslim societies immune to the ravages of classism, sexism, and racism. To all of these, we say: not in my name, not in the name of my God will you commit this hatred, this violence. We stand by the Qur’anic teaching (5:32) that to save the life of one human being is to have saved the life of all humanity, and to take the life of one human being is to have taken the life of all humanity. That which you do to my fellow human beings, you do to me.

And yet again we recall that ours is a multiple critique, one of engaging and challenging all the ideologies and institutions of injustice and inequality in the various communities in which we find ourselves. This means standing up to those who support and benefit from the Western hegemony over the rest of the world. The time has come for us to stand up to those who look at the world not as a single human family, but as “us” versus “them.” The time has come to stand up to those who look down at others through an imperialist lens, those who favor a “globalization” that works to the exclusive benefit of multi-national corporations at the detriment of ordinary citizens. The time has come to stand up to those who proliferate the structures whereby five percent of the world’s population consumes twenty-five percent of its resources, while tens of millions perish in agonizing starvation. The time has come to stand up to drug companies who clutch their patents of HIV drugs while untold millions die of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere. The time has come to stand up to those who are rightly outraged at the murder of innocent civilians in the U.S.A. and allied countries, but easily dismiss the murder of innocent civilians in other countries as “unfortunate collateral damage.” To all of them, we say: not in my name will you commit these acts of violence that result in the death of so many innocents. That which you do to my fellow human beings you do to me.

The time has come, and that time is now. We cannot start committing to social justice tomorrow, because the tomorrow of social justice is the tomorrow of “I will lose fifteen pounds”: it will never come. There is only today. We are, as the Sufis say, children of the present moment (ibn al-waqt). It is in this present moment we live, and in this present moment we have the choice to be fully human. It is for our decisions in this very present that we are held cosmically accountable, and will answer to God Almighty. Justice starts now, starts at this present moment, and it starts with each of us.

Gender Justice

Progressive Muslims begin with a simple yet radical stance: the Muslim community as a whole cannot achieve justice unless justice is guaranteed for Muslim women. In short, there can be no progressive interpretation of Islam without gender justice.

Let us be clear that by “gender” we are not just talking about women. Far too often Muslims forget that gender injustice is not just something that oppresses women, it also debases and dehumanizes the Muslim males who participate in the system.

Let us be clear that by “gender” we don’t mean to focus exclusively on the hijab (head covering worn by some Muslim women). The hijab is, no doubt, one important marker of identity for many Muslim women who choose either to wear or not to wear it. It is also an important marker of social regulations when many Muslim women are forced to wear it. But it is futile to engage in conversations about gender that reduce all of women’s religiosity and existence to the hijab. There are many more fundamental issues at stake in the social constructions that affect the lives of both men and women, and we aim here to engage many of them.