Change Agents
If Khan is largely for academe, and Feisal, who wears his heart on his sleeve, is chiefly pastoral, then the Canadian journalist and television personality Irshad Manji cries like a Muslim Amos sent to the grassroots. “Islam is on very thin ice with me,” she writes, then shows why in her blunt and provocative book, The Trouble with Islam Today (retitled from The Trouble with Islam). This daring book, a bestseller, is meant as a wake-up call for what Manij calls mainstream Islam, to whom the very liberated Manji puts her honest questions about fundamentalist attitudes toward women, human rights, Jews, America, and even the Quran.the real battleground for hearts and minds lies in the Muslim immigrant communities of European cities
But it’s not all diatribe. Manji’s appeal for a mainstream return to ijtihad (independent thinking) lies at the heart of her passion. Without ignoring or romanticizing Islam’s darker periods — which is the great weakness of an otherwise important book, Why I Am a Muslim: An American Odyssey by Asma Gull Hasan, a somewhat conservative Muslim woman—Manji shows the benefits that ijtihad once produced for both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. And then she asks, “When did we stop thinking?” The book suggests ways Muslims may liberalize Islam through what she calls “operation ijtihad,” an ambitious initiative that would empower more Muslim women economically, align Islamic human rights codes with the modern world, reform the radio and television outlets, create a less militant paradigm for the relationship between mosque and state, incorporate more democracy into the Muslim world, and engage in peaceable interfaith activity. This, she concludes, “would give Muslims a future to live for rather than a past to die for.”
The European situation, including Britain, is more nuanced than the North American, largely because its Muslim populations have a longer and more established social and political history in nations where Muslims (of the theological left, right, and center) are represented by sophisticated networks of mosques and political NGOs that defend the rights of Muslims and shape their participation in civic life, including the introduction of Islamic law for settling civil cases. Muslim reformers in Europe therefore face different challenges.
In The War for Muslim Minds, Gilles Kepel, a French Arabist and scholar of Islam, has little patience for neoconservative foreign policy, but most of the book is taken up with what he sees as the chief enemy of Muslim reform in Europe: jihadist ideology imported from Saudi Arabian Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Qutb brothers (Sayyid and Muhammad), and like-minded sources. Kepel argues that the jihadists are losing ground, but he does so by providing a political, religious, and historical tour of the Middle East (“a nexus of international disorder”) that could be seen as providing evidence the jihadists aren’t losing ground. This remains something of a paradox in the book. Kepel’s conclusion is that the real battleground for hearts and minds lies in the Muslim immigrant communities of European cities, where they are being propagandized with “terrorist ideology and tactics” that seek converts to jihadist violence. “The battle for Europe,” he writes, “is a battle for self-definition. The war for Muslim minds around the world may turn on the outcome of this struggle.”
And it is a struggle rooted in the concerns of daily life. Bill Gordon, a mental health nurse manager who works for Britain’s National Health Service, lives near a small, neighborhood mosque in a well integrated section of Birmingham, England. What fascinates Gordon are the daily lives of young Muslims. “They go filing into the mosque for prayers wearing traditional Muslim garb, and then later I see them around town wearing baseball caps turned backwards and all kinds of hip Western gear. Pop culture is completely inside Islamic youth culture here. It’s just that it’s all under wraps.” This neighborhood microcosm represents the conflicting forces of religion, secularism, and pluralism pulling at Europe’s growing Muslim population (estimated at at least 15 million), whose heaviest concentrations are found in France, Britain, and Germany.
One voice in this contentious mix is that of Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Islamic intellectual followed by many of Europe’s young Muslims. Arguing that Islam is universal and comprehensive in its message (“for all of life,” as Christians would say about their faith), Ramadan offers European Muslims a fresh reading of Islamic sources to help them integrate faithfully into their pluralistic settings. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam takes the vision of his earlier To Be a European Muslim (1997) and applies that more theoretical work “in practical terms on the ground,” suggesting “a number of concrete responses to questions asked by Western Muslims in the various areas of their daily lives.”
Just as decades ago it dawned on many Western Christian families that, try as they might, they could no longer “keep the world out,” Western Muslims has that kind of feel to it. The book carries chapters of well-thought-out commentary, written with much circumspection, on daily practical issues that secular pluralism in Europe forces Muslim communities to deal with. Ramadan’s advice ranges from issues of food, fashion, and free time to children’s education and Islamic feminism, to social commitments, political involvement, and partnerships with groups outside of Islam who share progressive Muslim concerns, such as about the environment, human rights, and drug abuse. His stated goal in all this is to see the creation of an independent Western Islam, a new “Muslim personality,” whose conscience can be faithful to Islamic principles while being fully integrated into Western societies.
But controversy has swirled around Tariq Ramadan. Although he made Time magazine’s list of the world’s top intellectuals in 2004, that same year the U.S. Department of Homeland Security revoked his visa to enter the U.S., which prevented him from taking up a new post as lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame. The problem is what some scholars and others perceive as Ramadan’s “double discourse,” a term he himself uses to describe that accusation.This is the great task we have been called to shoulder since 9/11
In The War for Muslim Minds, for instance, Kepel argues that Ramadan says one thing to Western audiences and quite another thing to fundamentalist Muslims in order to expand his circle of influence. Others, however, are having a change of heart. Andre Hussey, a lecturer in French studies at the University of Wales, critically interviewed Ramadan in June, 2004 for the New Statesman, but in a September, 2005 interview of Ramadan for the New Statesman, Hussey writes that he “came away impressed with his honesty, passion, and courage.”
Publicly, things do seem to be looking up for Ramadan. Still rejected by the U.S., he has been taken in by Britain, where he recently accepted two posts, one as a Visiting Fellow of St. Anthony’s at Oxford University and the other, not without some controversy, as an advisor to a Home Office task force on Muslim extremism in England.
In the present atmosphere of mutual mistrust and disagreement between the West and Islamic religion, the Muslim reform movement can act as a catalyst for positive change in dialogue with responsible counterparts in the Western world. Many important questions will arise, especially because the dialogue must include Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secularists. Though they all work out of different worldviews, with all the headaches resulting from that, it must be a struggle together to make the world a safer place for communities and families who see things differently. This is the great task we have been called to shoulder since 9/11. And to achieve the goal will require an imaginative height previously unknown to us.
Books discussed in this essay
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism. Edited by Omid Safi. Oneworld, 350pp., $25.99.
American Muslims: Building Faith and Freedom. M.A. Muqtedar Khan. Amana, 194pp., $14.95.
What’s Right With Islam: A new Vision for Muslims and the West. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. HarperSanFrancisco, 314pp., $23.95.
The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. Irshad Manji. St Martin’s Press, 240pp., $12.95.
The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Gilles Kepel. Harvard University press, 320p., $23.95.
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. Tariq Ramadan. Oxford University Press, 272pp., $29.95.
(First published in The Christian Century, Aug. 9, 2005. Slightly revised for the Muslim Public Affairs Journal, Jan. 2006.)
Copyright. Permission to reprint required.
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