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6
‌

T
RANSITIONS IN THE
‘‘P
ROGRESS
’’
OF
C
IVILIZATION
: T
HEORIZING
H
ISTORY
, P
RACTICE
,
AND
T
RADITION

•

Ebrahim Moosa

Life changes fast.

Life changes in an instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity
.. .

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

—Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking

Clever people are not credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!

—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil

INTRODUCTION

Those who think that ‘‘progressive’’ Islam is a ready-made ideology or an off- the-shelf creed, movement, or pack of doctrines will be sorely disappointed. It is not even a carefully calibrated theory or interpretation of Muslim law, theology, ethics, and politics. Neither is it a school of thought. Instead, I would argue that progressive Islam is a wish-list, a desire, and, if at all some- thing, then it is literally, accumulated action, as the word ‘‘progress’’ in the phrase ‘‘a work-in progress’’ suggests. At best it is a practice.

Another way of putting it is to say that progressive Islam is a posture: an attitude. What kind of attitude? Here lies the rub. To say
what
that attitude is, to give it content or even to be as bold as to say what it is
not,
is to sound like the high priestess or gatekeeper for ‘‘progressive Islam.’’ It is best not to invite such recriminations.

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Voices of Change

Yet, persons who are tightly or lightly associated with what is broadly identifi as ‘‘progressive Islam’’ will propose different practices and accompanying methodologies to verify and justify the content of the ethical propositions, philosophical visions, and contestations of history they hold. All this disagreement and difference is perfectly healthy for creative thinking in Muslim thought, especially ethical thought. What would certainly signal the death-knell for progressive Muslim thought is if there were to emerge a single voice, a unifying institution, a exclusive guild or association of scholars and practitioners who monopolized the epithet ‘‘progressive’’ and dictated its operations, debated its values and determined its content, like an ortho- doxy. If so, then the ship of progressive Islam leaves port badly listing.

What goes by the broad rubric of progressive Islam takes many forms. In some places it is the life and death struggles of people who are trying to make sense of the intensities of life whether in repressive patriarchal contexts, in the grips of rampant poverty, famine, and war, or in the midst of disease of pan- demic proportions. In more favorable conditions, there too similar chal- lenges await, albeit disguised by affluence and enviable certainty. Relying on their multiple traditions and the resources of transnational civilizations, many Muslims are trying to fi meaning for their lives. In ways not yet clearly articulated these individuals and communities are the lifeblood of what I would call progressive Islam. Detailed ethnographies of such communities and the substance of their struggles are documented elsewhere in this vol- ume. In this reflection, I prefer to outline some key concepts and ideas that emerged during my journey and discovery of how to critically engage the Muslim knowledge traditions. As it will forever remain a work-in-progress, I have more questions than answers; some of my observations will come by way of points of clarification and caveats. What might appear to be answers and exhortations, despite their vehemence, I would urge my reader to regard as tentative.

How does one develop a critical approach to tradition? If past experiences became the social laboratory for the making of tradition, why cannot our current experiences as Muslims become the threads to manufacture the garment of tradition? While there is no sensible and intelligent way to know how a revitalized tradition would unfold, the search for emergent knowledge and ethics has to continue energetically. Intellectuals and activists all have a responsibility to recast the knowledge of tradition and thus tradition in light of their contemporary experiences.

WHAT IS IN A NAME?

A great deal is both revealed and repressed in a name. The term ‘‘progressive’’ used to designate a loosely knit group of activists and thinkers advocating a different narrative of Islam compared to the dominant one is to

Transitions in the ‘‘Progress’’ of Civilization
117

be sure an oppositional term. In fact, for this author, the term ‘‘progressive’’ is itself a source of discomfort for reasons to be explained later, but I continue to employ it with caveats for the lack of a better substitute. As some French philosophers have helpfully suggested, one can use the term under ‘‘erasure.’’

Progressives differ in signifi t ways from the dominant orthodoxies of Islamic revivalism and traditionalism in their respective methodologies and ideologies. At least, I view myself in a complex relation to the intellectual heritage and multiple cultural formations in which Muslims lived and prospered, fl urished and failed, as well as changed and stabilized. One of the major points of departure for progressives is the heightened and surplus freight of ideology evident in the interpretations propounded by representa- tives of Islamic revivalism, such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt or the Jamat-e Islami of India and Pakistan to the orthodox seminaries of Al- Azhar in Egypt, the Deobandi, Barelwi, and Ahle Hadith schools of India and Pakistan, the schools of Najaf in Iraq, Qum in Iran, and the varieties of puritan (
salafi
) tendencies in the Gulf region and elsewhere, to mention but a prominent few. Each of these groups also have a global presence, as well as representation in Europe and North America where Muslim minorities are on the rise.