Voices of Islam (124 page)

The problem of depersonalization has deeper roots than just individual prejudice. Ironically, the global village created by international news organi- zations such as CNN, BBC, and Fox News may unintentionally contribute to the problem of devaluing Muslim lives. Depictions of victimhood are often studies in incomprehension: victims speak a language the viewer cannot understand, their shock or rage strips them of their rationality, and their stan- dard of living and mode of dress may appear medieval or even primitive when compared with the dominant cultural forms of modernity. In her classic study,
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt pointed out that the ideology of human equality, which is fostered with all good intentions by the international news media, paradoxically contributes to the visibility of dif- ference by confusing equality with sameness. In 99 out of 100 cases, says Arendt, equality ‘‘will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more con- spicuous.’’
3
According to Arendt, the widespread acceptance of the ideal of social equality after the French Revolution was a major reason why genocide,

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whether of Jews in Europe, Tutsis in Rwanda, or Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, has become a characteristically modern phenomenon.

The idea of equality as sameness was not as firmly established in the United States, claimed Arendt, because the ‘‘equal opportunity’’ ideology of Ameri- can liberalism values difference—in the form of imagination, entrepreneur- ship, and personal initiative—as a token of success.
4
This ideology enabled Jews in America to assert their distinctiveness and eventually to prosper in the twentieth century, and it provides an opportunity for Muslim Americans to assert their distinctiveness and to prosper today. So far, the United States has not engaged in systematic persecution of Muslims and has been relatively free of anti-Muslim prejudice. However, fear and distrust of Muslims among the general public is fostered by images of insurgent attacks and suicide bombings in Iraq, of Al Qaeda atrocities around the globe, and of increasing expressions of anti-Americanism in the Arabic and Islamic media. In addi- tion, some pundits on talk radio, certain fundamentalist religious leaders, and some members of the conservative press and academia fan the flames of prejudice by portraying Islam as inherently intolerant and by portraying Mus- lims as slaves to tradition and authoritarianism rather than as advocates of reason and freedom of expression. Clearly, there is still a need to demonstrate to the American public that Muslims are rational human beings and that Islam is a religion that is worthy of respect.

Changing public opinion about Islam and Muslims in the United States and Europe will not be easy. The culture critic Guillermo Gomez-Pen˜a has written that as a result of the opening of American borders to non- Europeans in the 1960s, the American myth of the cultural melting pot ‘‘has been replaced by a model that is more germane to the times, that of the
menudo chowder.
According to this model, most of the ingredients do melt, but some stubborn chunks are condemned merely to fl t.’’
5
At the present time, Muslims constitute the most visible ‘‘stubborn chunks’’ in the
menudo chowder
of American and European pluralism. Muslims are often seen as the chunks of the
menudo chowder
that most stubbornly refuse to ‘‘melt in.’’ To the non-Muslim majoritarian citizen of Western countries, Muslims seem to be the most ‘‘uncivil’’ members of civil society. They do not dress like the majority, they do not eat like the majority, they do not drink like the majority, they do not let their women work, they reject the music and cultural values of the majority, and sometimes they even try to opt out of majoritarian legal and economic systems. In Europe, Islam has replaced Catholicism as the religion that left-wing pundits most love to hate. Americans, however, have been more ambivalent about Islam and Muslims. On the one hand, there have been sincere attempts to include Muslims as full partners in civil society. On the other hand, the apparent resistance of some Muslims to ‘‘fit in’’ creates a widespread distrust that has had legal ramifica- tions in several notable cases.

Voices of Islam
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A useful way to conceive of the problem that Muslims face as members of civil society—both within Western countries and in the global civil society that is dominated by the West—is to recognize, following Homi K. Bhabha, the social fact of Muslim
unhomeliness.
To be ‘‘unhomed,’’ says Bhabha, is not to be homeless, but rather to escape easy assimilation or accommoda- tion.
6
The problem is not that the ‘‘unhomed’’ possesses no physical home but that there is no ‘‘place’’ to locate the unhomed in the majoritarian con- sciousness. Simply put, one does not know what to make of the unhomed. Bhabha derives this term from Sigmund Freud’s concept of
unheimlich,
‘‘the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.’’
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Unhomeliness is a way of expressing social discom- fort. When one encounters the unhomed, one feels awkward and uncomfort- able because the unhomed person appears truly alien. Indeed, if there is any single experience that virtually all Muslims in Western countries share, it is that Islam makes non-Muslims uncomfortable. In the global civil society dominated by the West, Muslims are unhomed wherever they may live, even in their own countries.

This reality of Muslim experience highlights how contemporary advocates of Muslim identity politics have often made matters worse by accentuating symbolic tokens of difference between so-called Islamic and Western norms. The problem for Islam in today’s global civil society is not that it is not seen. On the contrary, Islam and Muslims are arguably all too visible because they are seen as fundamentally different from the accepted norm. Like the black man in the colonial West Indies or in Jim Crow America, the Muslim is, to borrow a phrase from Frantz Fanon, ‘‘overdetermined from without.’’
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Muslims have been overdetermined by the press, overdetermined by Holly- wood, overdetermined by politicians, and overdetermined by culture critics. From the president of the United States to the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and in countless editorials in print and television media, leaders of public opinion ask, ‘‘What do Muslims want?’’ Such a question forces the Muslim into a corner in which the only answer is apologetics or defi nce. To again paraphrase Fanon, the overdetermined Muslim is constantly made aware of himself or herself not just in the third person but in
triple person.
As a symbol of the unhomely, the Muslim is made to feel personally respon- sible for a contradictory variety of ‘‘Islamic’’ moral values, ‘‘Islamic’’ cultural expressions, and ‘‘Islamic’’ religious and political doctrines.
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In the face of such outside pressures, what the overdetermined Muslim needs most is not to be seen, but to be heard. There is a critical need for Islam to be expressed to the world not as an image, but as a narrative, and for Mus- lims to bear their own witness to their own experiences. The vast majority of books on Islam written in European languages, even the best ones, have been written by non-Muslims. This is not necessarily a problem, because an objec- tive and open-minded non-Muslim can often describe Islam for a non-

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Muslim audience better than a Muslim apologist. The scholars Said and Ernst, mentioned above, are both from Christian backgrounds. The disci- pline of Religious Studies from which Ernst writes has been careful to main- tain a nonjudgmental attitude toward non-Christian religions. As heirs to the political and philosophical values of European liberalism, scholars of Reli- gious Studies are typically dogmatic about only one thing: they must practice
epoche´
(a Greek word meaning ‘‘holding back’’ or restraining one’s beliefs) when approaching the worldview of another religion. In the words of the late Canadian scholar of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith, it is not enough to act like ‘‘a fly crawling on the outside of a goldfish bowl,’’ magisterially observ- ing another’s religious practices while remaining distant from the subject. Instead, one must be more engaged in her inquiry and, through imagination and the use of
epoche´,
try to find out what it feels like to be a goldfish.
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Through the practice of
epoche´,
the field of Religious Studies has by now produced two generations of accomplished scholars of Islam in the United States and Canada. Smith himself was a fair and sympathetic Christian scholar of Islam, and his field has been more influential than any other in promoting the study of Islam in the West. However, even Smith was aware that only a goldfish truly knows what it means to be a goldfish. The most that a sympa- thetic non-Muslim specialist in Islamic studies can do is
describe
Islam from the perspective of a sensitive outsider. Because non-Muslims do not share a personal commitment to the Islamic faith, they are not in the best position to convey a sense of what it means to
be
a Muslim on the inside—to live a Muslim life, to share Muslim values and concerns, and to experience Islam spiritually. In the final analysis, only Muslims can fully bear witness to their own traditions from within.

The five-volume set of
Voices of Islam
is an attempt to meet this need. By bringing together the voices of nearly 50 prominent Muslims from around the world, it aims to present an accurate, comprehensive, and accessible account of Islamic doctrines, practices, and worldviews for a general reader at the senior high school and university undergraduate level. The subjects of the volumes—
Voices of Tradition; Voices of the Spirit; Voices of Life: Family, Home, and Society; Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science;
and
Voices of Change
— were selected to provide as wide a depiction as possible of Muslim experien- ces and ways of knowledge. Taken collectively, the chapters in these volumes provide bridges between formal religion and culture, the present and the past, tradition and change, and spiritual and outward action that can be crossed by readers, whether they are Muslims or non-Muslims, many times and in a variety of ways. What this set does
not
do is present a magisterial, authoritative vision of an ‘‘objectively real’’ Islam that is juxtaposed against a supposedly inauthentic diversity of individual voices. As the Egyptian- American legal scholar and culture critic Khaled Abou El Fadl has pointed out, whenever Islam is the subject of discourse, the authoritative quickly elides into the authoritarian, irrespective of whether the voice of authority is

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Muslim or non-Muslim.
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The editors of
Voices of Islam
seek to avoid the authoritarian by allowing every voice expressed in the five-volume set to be authoritative, both in terms of individual experience and in terms of the com- monalities that Muslims share among themselves.

THE EDITORS

The general editor for
Voices of Islam
is Vincent J. Cornell, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. When he was solicited by Praeger, an imprint of Green- wood Publishing, to formulate this project, he was director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Cornell has been a Sunni Muslim for more than 30 years and is a noted scholar of Islamic thought and history. His most important book,
Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufi
(1998), was described by a prepublication reviewer as ‘‘the most significant study of the Sufi tradi- tion in Islam to have appeared in the last two decades.’’ Besides publishing works on Sufism, Dr. Cornell has also written articles on Islamic law, Islamic theology, and moral and political philosophy. For the past five years, he has been a participant in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ‘‘Building Bridges’’ dia- logue of Christian and Muslim theologians. In cooperation with the Jerusalem-based Elijah Interfaith Institute, he is presently co-convener of a group of Muslim scholars, of whom some are contributors to
Voices of Islam,
which is working toward a new theology of the religious other in Islam. Besides serving as general editor for
Voices of Islam,
Dr. Cornell is also the volume editor for Volume 1,
Voices of Tradition;
Volume 2,
Voices of the Spirit;
and Volume 4,
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science.

The associate editors for
Voices of Islam
are Omid Safi and Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore. Omid Safi is Associate Professor of Religion at the Uni- versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Safi the grandson of a noted Iranian Ayatollah, was born in the United States but raised in Iran and has been recognized as an important Muslim voice for moderation and diversity. He gained widespread praise for his edited first book,
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism
(2003), and was interviewed on CNN, National Public Radio, and other major media outlets. He recently published an important study of Sufi-state relations in premodern Iran,
The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam
(2006). Dr. Safi is the volume editor for Vol- ume 5,
Voices of Change,
which contains chapters by many of the authors rep- resented in his earlier work,
Progressive Muslims.

Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore has been a practicing Sunni Muslim for almost 40 years. She is director of the interfaith publishing houses Fons Vitae and Quinta Essentia and cofounder and trustee of the Islamic Texts Society of Cambridge, England. Some of the most influential families in Saudi