Being a Muslim in the World

H. Dabashi

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137301284
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301291
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does it mean to be a Muslim - in this world, in this deeply transformative time? Hamid Dabashi suggests that the transition to a changed, post-Western world requires the crafting of a new language of critical conversation with Islam and its cosmopolitan heritage - a language that is tuned to the emerging, not the disappearing, world

1

But There Is Neither East nor West

Abstract: In Chapter 1, I posit the question of what it means to be a Muslim in the world, in the context of the collapsing “Islam and the West” binary. This transition requires the crafting of a new language for coming to terms with Islam, and it no longer matters whether it is in Arabic, Persian, German, or English, as long as that language is in conversation with the emerging, not the disappearing, world. The language of “Islam and the West,” as indeed the language of “religion versus secularism,” have exhausted themselves, slammed into a cul de sac; and with the decline and implosion of “the West,” the emerging diction of Muslims must flower into its own universality, a universality embedded in the global context of our worldliness.

Dabashi, Hamid. Being a Muslim in the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137301291.

Estimates are that some 1.6 billion human beings living on this earth identify themselves as Muslims. But beyond their ritual prayers and other obligations of faith, beyond their common belief in a set of doctrinal principles (chief among them the Unity of God, the sanctity of the Holy Qur’an, the nobility of Prophet Muhammad, and the certainty of a Final Resurrection and Divine Judgment), what else does it mean for them to be Muslims? They are told they have a proud and noble heritage, and yet they face, and in fact are integral to, a rapidly disintegrating human habitat. Beyond any degree of piety that they might hope and anticipate for their posterity, what sort of Muslims would they dream their children to be in this world, and framed in this very history they live?

Indeed, how is it possible for a Muslim child—whether Afghan, Iranian, Arab, Turk, Pakistani, Indonesian, American, European, Latin American, or African—to grow up with a sense of rootedness, belonging, moral and intellectual responsibility to, in, and for this world? It no longer matters if you live in Cairo, New York, Damascus, London, Tehran, Tokyo, or Dakar: being a Muslim in the world requires rethinking the world Muslims inhabit—around 6o% of them in the Asia-Pacific, 35% in the Middle East and Africa, around 3% in Europe, and just about 0.3% in the Americas. Muslims are everywhere—but where in the world are they?

“Islam and the West”

The casting of Islam against the West—both essentialized and forced to the polar ends of an immaterial binary—has, ever since the European colonial encounter with Muslims, posited a proverbial “Islam” against a falsifying category code-named “modernity,” camouflaging the inner logic and rhetoric of a worldly religion that is yet to rediscover its own tropes of multiple and varied historic encounters with its alterities.

Today, in their new worldly globality, Muslims must decouple their communal faith from the delusional apparition of “the West,” and at the same time stop indulging in the fake and futile binary between their “tradition” and a “modernity” that for them was a colonial construct. After a two-hundred-year-plus encounter with colonial modernity, the inner logic of that European project has imploded, and Muslims are finally free to re-imagine themselves anew in the world.

With the rise of European and then American imperial adventures, Muslims have been at the receiving end of other worldly empires (collectively code-named “the West”) that have forced them into a self-alienating dialogue. Under the spell of non-Islamic imperial settings, Muslims have continued to be conscious of themselves, to be sure, of what and who they are, but it is a false, defeated consciousness, formed under duress, resulting in Muslims being unable to recognize themselves in the mirror of those other empires. There is a cognitive dissonance in the historical memory of Muslims to be the subject of successive imperial settings not their own. From the Umayyads and the Abbasids early in Islamic history to the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals at the dawn of European colonial modernity, Muslims have been the defining moments of world historic empires. The task today is not the delusional fantasy of retrieving those empires but to recollect the cosmopolitan worldliness that thrived under those empires, now necessary to be recast into a new globality—a task not to reinvent another Muslim empire, but to resist any and all empires. In that resistance dwells the new worldliness of being a Muslim the world.

The Eurocentric project of modernity against which Muslims have had to recognize themselves was from its very inception a colonial modernity, with no universal validity or force to it beyond its battleships and fighter jets, violent means of domination that have in fact exposed its bellicosity and revealed its belligerent nativism that insists on universality—wiping out the moral maps that faced and challenged its claims to global validity. The task facing a world in which the underbelly of the false universalizing urge of the thing that calls itself “the West” is to actively retrieve worlds that have been concealed and falsified under the distorting questions that European modernity or secularity keeps asking from those worlds—with and through concepts and categories entirely alien to peoples and cultures from Asia to Africa to Latin America, except when they have faced the gun barrel of European (and then American) colonialism and imperialism, in other words, modernity and secularity under duress.

The urgent task facing contemporary Muslims is to bring their worlds to self-consciousness beyond the self-alienating encounter with European colonial modernity and in the context of the new worldliness that Muslims (like all other people) face. During their encounter with colonial modernity, Muslim intellectuals themselves—from Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) to Ali Shari’ati (1933–1977)—systematically and consistently reducing their own multifaceted cosmopolitanism into a solitary site of ideological resistance to colonialism. This was not the Orientalists’ task. But now, in the wake of a global uprising—from the Green Movement in Iran to the Arab Spring, the Eurozone crisis unrest from Greece to Spain, and the widely globalized Occupy Wall Street movement—the world is on the verge of a renewed awareness of itself. In this context, Muslims need to be equally instrumental in retrieving a past that will cast them as agents in their future beyond that falsifying binary of “Islam and the West.”

To be a Muslim in the world today does not require an Islamic reformation, as some have suggested. Quite the contrary: it requires the restoration of Islam back into its worldly disposition, remembering its conditions of pre-coloniality to deliver itself from the conditions of post-coloniality. If Osama bin Laden and Ayaan Hirsi Ali represent the two extremes of militant Islamism and virulent Islamophobia, respectively reading Islam back and forth into a fictive past and a pathological present—the restoration of Islam into its worldly disposition means entrusting Muslims with the emerging and pressing task of being-in-the-world. Islam has always been the dialogical outcome of Muslim collective consciousness engaging in conversation with the dominant moral and intellectual forces in the world—from a position of power. Having been for over two centuries at the receiving end of European and American imperialism, and having turned their faith into a singular site of ideological resistance to those empires, Muslims will now have to retrieve that habitual dialogue, though not from a position of power but from a position of care—care of the other, of the world, that will in turn redefine who and what they are.

“Islam” as a sign

In this new world, as Islam as a signifier is categorically released from its “Islam and the West” binary, Islam has lost its chief nemesis and interlocutor of the last two hundred years, and when “Islamism” as a political ideology has been effectively exhausted, and the new globality of Islamic presence requires a different mode of multiple and parallel dialogues, when the face and the fact of the other of being a Muslim-in-the-world will have to be the site and citation of Muslims’ emerging worldliness. If the traumatic events of 9/11 were the end of Islamism as a militant ideology, the Arab Spring is the commencement of this new dispensation. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and the Islamophobia evident in the Western European and North American celebration of Ayaan Hirsi Ali are the mutually destructive sites of the emerging dialogue of Muslims with their posterity—spoken in the language of the hope they have invested in their children in the ideologically liberated global context. It is not enough to say that Osama bin Laden did not represent Muslims; nor is it sufficient to say that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an Islamophobe. Muslims need to live a life in defiance of both those pathologies—by inhabiting the world that is much in need of their care.

Today Muslims around the globe look at their children and can only imagine, and must dare to dream, the language of liberation their offspring have already started speaking.

To come to terms with the specifics of that global context we must locate the sign of “Islam” where it has been most maligned. From the public pronouncements of such prominent and powerful figures as the former US President George W. Bush, former UK prime minister Tony Blair, and Pope Benedict XVI to the erudite musings of some of the most distinguished European philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Umberto Eco, a binary opposition between an ahistorical “Islam” and an equally essentialized “West” has disproportionately determined the language and disposition of almost everything that is politically consequential for encounters between two major components of humanity at large—two components that have already dissolved into the making of a globalized fragility far beyond their fictive boundary.

To alter the terms of public conversation about Islam in both its immediate regional and global contexts, I put forward the proposition of Islam in the world via the active agency of Muslims-being-in-the-world by highlighting two interrelated but pervasively neglected intellectual domains. At the heart of this idea rests the simple proposition that throughout its long and multifaceted history, Islam has always been in creative, critical, or even combatant conversation with one or another major and effectively “global” interlocutor. This historical fact has given Islam a quintessentially cosmopolitan and dialogical disposition.

In the forced binary manufactured between “Islam and the West” under colonial duress Muslims as Muslims are deprived of agential autonomy to worldliness—the world in which they find themselves is already determined. In this essentialist distinction, maintained not just in the public domain but also even in much contemporary “critical” thinking, “Islam” is often posited as a monolithic and entirely ahistorical proposition, while “the West” is presupposed in equally categorical and definitive terms—having attained in fact an ontological disposition. Thus, “Islam” and “the West” alike become catatonic fixtures of moral authenticity and normative measure beyond cultures and conditions, civilizational premises outside the fold of world history, as readily cherished and celebrated by some as demonized and denounced by others. My emphasis here on the intellectual diversity, cosmopolitan organicity, and organic historicity of Islam directly repudiates the fallacious and dangerous fabrication and propagation of these dominant and exceedingly dangerous binaries—the last, lingering, vestiges of a colonial and colonized imagination.

Once posited in such binary and oppositional terms—and against a massive body of scholarship on both “Islam” and “the West,” respectively, that underline the historically specific nuances of such categories and thus effectively undermine their generic essentialization—Muslims lose all their internal dynamism, geographical expansiveness, heterogeneous cultural dispositions, doctrinal variations, sectarian tendencies, and above all, their prolonged historical developments and trajectories. The very first Islamic dynasties, the Umayyads (651–750) and then the Abbasids (750–1258), were formed in combatant battles with the Sassanid and Byzantine imperial institutions, imaginations, kingship theories, moral and intellectual underpinnings, and political practices. In the domain of enduring ideas and intellectual institutions, a similar dialectic has been at work. In gradual conversation with classical Greek thought, the vast and multifaceted aspects of Islamic philosophy took shape. In both subtle and overt exchanges with Jewish theology, various schools of Islamic theology were elaborated. In similar exchanges with Christian asceticism, Hindu and Buddhist Gnosticism, and Neoplatonic philosophy, Islamic mysticism (Sufism or Irfan) emerged. In eventual conversation with Pahlavi and Sanskrit literatures, Arabic as well as Persian, Turkish, and Urdu canons of literary humanism (Adab) developed. Following exposure to Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophies, various disciplines in Islamic sciences developed. Finally, and most immediately evident for contemporary purposes, following the various Muslim encounters with European colonialism and Enlightenment modernity, a diverse range of ideological movements and political perspectives (politcial Islamism, Third World Socialism, and anti-colonial nationalism) came to preoccupy Muslim thinkers and define the modern Islamic world—always in dialogical and progressively unfolding terms.

To rethink Muslims in the world, we need to remember the creative cultures of medieval Islam and how their dialogical dispositions were conducive to the eventual creation of a multifaceted, syncretic, and polyfocal civilization. We need to recall a broadly historical perspective that demonstrates the cosmopolitan character of the Islamic civilization in its varied forms and manifestations. We must pay particular attention to the rise of literary humanism (Adab) in its Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu contexts. We need to re-imagine the rise of major multicultural urbanism in Muslim lands—in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Istanbul, Cordoba, Isfahan, and Delhi, in particular—as the principal sites of these cosmopolitan cultures. In making the case for the prevalence of this cosmopolitanism we must mark the territorial and material basis of Islamic civilization

The goal is to retrieve the internal dynamics of Islam itself, breaking it down to its discursive, institutional, and symbolic forms—all competing with one other, each remembering Islam anew as the constitutionally cosmopolitan culture that it has always been, and thus dialectically denying any one component of this multifaceted religion the presumption to assume a dominant, exclusionary, or defining moment. Polyfocal has always been the discursive disposition of Islam, just as the languages and cultures through which it has spoken are polyvocal, and the geographical domains and domesticities of its historical manifestations are polylocal. The polyfocality of Islamic epistemic cultures has spoken and written itself in conflicting nomocentric (the law-centered Shari’ah), logocentric (the reason-centered Falsafah), and homocentric (the human-centered Tasawwuf or Irfan) languages and lexicons. The centrality of Arabic language in varied expressions of Islamic thought has had to contend with equally powerful traditions of the same in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu (and now, one might add English, French, German), or any of the other languages spoken by Muslims around the globe—thus giving a distinctly polyvocal disposition to Islamic discourses, all mapped out in a geographical polylocality that has profoundly impacted where and when a Muslim speaks one or another particularly powerful scholastic diction.

My principal argument here is that only under dire political circumstances does one of these discourses (the nomocentricity of the Islamic law in particular) assume an overriding claim over the entirety of Islam, and always at the heavy expense of repressing, denying, and thus distorting the factual cosmopolitanism of Islamic historical experiences. In arguing and unfolding this lived experience of Islamic moral and imaginative history, we will retrieve the idea and practice of an Islamic cosmopolitanism that weds its characteristically multifaceted orientation to an increasingly globalized world which has hitherto assigned to Islam either a retrograde or even an intrinsically fanatical disposition, either a “moderate” or a “radical” nature. Given the rapid globalization of a notion of Islam negotiated between two modes of extremism—one systematically demonizing it, the other categorically reducing it to a militant juridicalism, the articulation of Islam in its historically anchored cosmopolitanism is an urgent concern for a large global audience.

The defining disposition of Islam in its encounter with European colonial modernity has been the generation of a succession of cosmopolitan cultures that embraces and includes Islam in its varied forms and doctrinal expressions, but that is not reducible to Islamic doctrinal principles in general or to juridical mandates in particular. Here we need to make a distinction between “Islam” in its doctrinal foundations in the Qur’an and the Hadith literature and its juridical character in Islamic law (Shari’ah), on one hand, and “Islam” as a lived experience that covers a vast range of symbolic, discursive, and institutional domains, on the other. The characterization of a society, thus, as “Islamic” certainly includes the fundamental beliefs and practices of its inhabitants as Muslims but is by no means limited—and might in fact be contrary—to such doctrinal principles and practices. Muslim worldly experiences thus reemerge as the locus classicus of a vast and diversified body of cosmopolitan mores and practices, ranging from the sacred to the mundane, and as such, remain irreducible either to narrowly Islamic or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Muslims in the World
• 1  But There Is Neither East nor West
• 2  Breaking the Binary
• 3  The Muslim Cosmopole
• 4  Being a Muslim
• 5  Din, Dowlat and Donya: Rethinking Worldliness
• 6  “Religion—Quote, Unquote”
• Conclusion: Toward a Hermeneutics of Alterity
• Index