Speaking Qur'an

An American Scripture

Timur R. Yuskaev

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781611177947
• eBook ISBN: 9781611177954
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

An exploration of how Muslims in the United States have interpreted the Qur'an in ways that make it speak to their American realities

In Speaking Qur'an: An American Scripture, Timur R. Yuskaev examines how Muslim Americans have been participating in their country's cultural, social, religious, and political life. Essential to this process, he shows, is how the Qur'an has become an evermore deeply American text that speaks to central issues in the lives of American Muslims through the spoken-word interpretations of Muslim preachers, scholars, and activists.

Yuskaev illustrates this process with four major case studies that highlight dialogues between American Muslim public intellectuals and their audiences. First, through an examination of the work of Fazlur Rahman, he addresses the question of how the premodern Qur'an is translated across time into modern, American settings. Next the author contemplates the application of contemporary concepts of gender to renditions of the Qur'an alongside Amina Wadud's American Muslim discourses on justice.Then he demonstrates how the Qur'an becomes a text of redemption in W. D. Mohammed's oral interpretation of the Qur'an as speaking directly to the African American experience. Finally he shows how, before and after 9/11, Hamza Yusuf invoked the Qur'an as a guide to the political life of American Muslims.

Set within the rapidly transforming contexts of the last half century, and central to the volume, are the issues of cultural translation and embodiment of sacred texts that Yuskaev explores by focusing on the Qur'an as a spoken scripture. The process of the Qur'an becoming an American sacred text, he argues, is ongoing. It comes to life when the Qur'an is spoken and embodied by its American faithful.

Chapter One

TIME

View the world otherwise, and it will become other.

Muhammad Iqbal, Javid-Nama, no. 2019

Repeating is neither restoring after-the-fact nor re-actualizing: it is “realizing anew.” The creative power of repetition is contained entirely in this power of opening up the past again to the future.

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, 380

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Fazlur Rahman was born in 1919 in prepartition India, in a family that had deep roots in Islamic scholarship. After completing his M.A. in 1942 from Punjab University in Lahore, he moved to England in 1946, and in 1949 received his Ph.D. from Oxford. From 1950 to 1958 he taught at Durham University in England and from 1958 to 1961 at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. In 1962, after sixteen years abroad, he returned home, to the new nation of Pakistan, to serve as the director of the Central Institute of Islamic Research, whose mission was to interpret “Islam in rational and scientific terms” that met “the requirements of a modern progressive society.”¹ In this capacity he provided support to the modernization reforms of Pakistan’s ruler, General Ayyub Khan, whose opponents ultimately forced Rahman to resign and immigrate to the United States in 1968, after one of his English-language books, Islam, was translated into Urdu. The central charge against him had to do with the Qurʾan: he was accused of denying its uncreated and divine nature—arguably a tone-deaf reading of what he actually proposed. The longest and most productive phase of his career took place in the United States, where, while teaching at the University of Chicago from 1969 until his passing in 1988, he solidified his reputation as a Muslim scholar of global importance.²

Rahman’s impact was most pronounced in the academic study of Islam. At the University of Chicago, he was the teacher to dozens of students who became well-known scholars of Islamic studies in the United States and Canada. Through his books and students, he contributed to a dramatic transformation in how Islam came to be studied at American universities and colleges.³ Yet what was his influence among American Muslims? I asked this question often during my research. A typical answer came from Sayyid M. Syeed, a longtime leader in the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was the largest Muslim American organization. Like many people who knew Rahman personally, Sayeed considered him an intellectual giant and remembered him fondly. But, he noted, echoing many other respondents, “regretfully, [Rahman’s] influence [was] limited to academics.”⁴

Syeed’s evaluation was understandable: unlike other prominent American Muslim intellectuals of his day, such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) and Ismail Raji al-Faruqi (1921–1986), the Iranian American and Palestinian American philosophers, Rahman was rarely seen or heard at the gatherings of American Muslim organizations. One possible reason for this was that ISNA, like many other American Muslim institutions of this era, had significant South Asian constituencies, and many people in these groups allied themselves with the ideology of one of Rahman’s opponents in Pakistan, Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi (1903–1979), an exegete, journalist, and the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Indian subcontinent’s predominant Muslim political movement. Therefore, Rahman and this group stayed out of each other’s way. This made his influence less visible. But it does not mean that it did not exist.

In many ways Rahman’s position in American Muslim history is akin to the role of Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) in American Catholicism. Like Rahman, Maritain was a foreigner, in his case French, and an academic. In the 1940s and 1950s, he taught at Princeton University and was known as a global Catholic intellectual. He was a philosopher and a student of Henri Bergson, whose name will appear in this chapter. His central contribution to international Catholic discourses was in articulating “more nuanced understandings of the challenges posed by modernity.”⁵ In the post–World War II context, when the Catholic Church had to overcome widespread misgivings about its affiliation with antidemocratic regimes, he formulated the language of Catholic participation in democratic societies. This global proposition became American through the efforts of Maritain’s local followers, such as John Courtney Murray (1904–1967), a Jesuit priest, theologian, and public intellectual, who used Maritain’s insights to develop a new vision and language of American Catholic politics.

In a way similar to Maritain’s, Rahman’s influence in American Muslim discourses was embodied in the works of local intellectuals such as Amina Wadud, who followed in his footsteps (see chapter 2). Here, I will situate Rahman in the American Muslim context of the post-1965 era and then examine his American masterpiece, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, a book he published in Chicago in 1980. In the 1980s and 1990s, Major Themes was perhaps the most widely used text on the Qurʾan at American colleges and universities. Its impact was more than academic. For many young American Muslims, it served as their first significant introduction to the Qurʾan. What made it appealing was how naturally it harmonized the scripture with their sensibilities, including their concepts of justice and ethics (which, like the notion of time, tend to appear constant but, historically speaking, are not). The significance of Major Themes for my study, however, is broader than the tracing of Rahman’s influence on those who acknowledged it directly. His exegesis was unique in one specific way: its author was also a historian. Because history was for him a central interpretive tool, his work highlighted what most exegetes typically skip: the dilemmas that arise when a premodern text is translated into a meaningful guide for its modern believers. An understanding of what this entails is imperative for all of this book’s case studies.

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In the year 2000, twelve years after Rahman’s death, a group of American Muslim academics and activists published a book, Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar Activists in North America. Its aim was to “give evidence of, and voice to, the diversity of expressions that constitutes contemporary Muslim women’s scholarship and activism in the United States.”⁶ The range and depth of its articles certainly fulfilled this goal. But it did something else as well. Its language, both in terms of its conceptual vocabulary and internal logic, demonstrated the depth of Rahman’s influence on American Muslim discourses of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Indicative of this was an article by Nimat Hafez Barazangi, a Syrian American professor at Cornell University. One of Barazangi’s arguments was acutely controversial: she challenged her Muslim colleagues to embrace the term “feminism.” As is often the case with daring propositions, she presented it as grounded in uncontested sources, which, to her, were the Qurʾan and Fazlur Rahman. She proposed that “the basis of feminism lies in the Qurʾan” because the principles of feminism correspond with “the Qurʾanic concept of justice.” She added that it was not her intention to “read history backward,” that she was “merely reinterpreting what Rahman stated: The basic principle in the Qurʾanic view of Islamic justice is the equality between sexes.”⁷

A telling illustration of Rahman’s broader influence is an autobiographical vignette by Ingrid Mattson, a Canadian convert to Islam who spent much of her career in the United States and from 2006 to 2010 was the first female president of ISNA. On the website of Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, where she was a professor of Islamic Studies from 1998 to 2012 (and where I happened to teach as well), she chose to introduce herself in the following way:

In the summer of 1987, I was riding the train out to British Columbia to start a tree-planting job in the mountains. I had just finished my undergraduate degree in Philosophy and had only recently begun my personal study of Islam. I came across Fazlur Rahman’s Islam in a bookstore a few days before my trip. Reading that book as I traveled across the Canadian prairies, I made the decision to apply to graduate school in Islamic Studies…. Going a step further, I wrote a letter to Rahman…. I dropped the letter in a post box somewhere in the Rockies and forgot about it until I returned east in August. There I found a hand-written note from him, inviting me to come to the University of Chicago to study with him. Rahman died before I arrived in Chicago, but it was his book and his encouragement that inspired me to start on the path to scholarship that I have found so rewarding.⁸

Islam, the book that inspired Mattson, was the same text that stirred the controversy that forced Rahman to leave Pakistan. Mattson’s recollection glossed over this fact. In a way her sidestepping of this issue was natural because she encountered Islam in Canada. First published in England in 1968, its 1979 edition by the University of Chicago Press was one of the most widely assigned textbooks on Islam in North American colleges and universities. So it is not surprising that a recent graduate from a Canadian university just happened to “come across” it while not being cognizant of its somewhat controversial status in Pakistan. When Mattson recalled that story in the late 2000s, however, the situation was different. At that time, some twenty years after the incident she narrated, she was serving as the president of ISNA, whose membership was overwhelmingly South Asian. Her statement, therefore, risked ruffling feathers among some of her organization’s older members. Yet, many years after Rahman’s passing and beyond that specific constituency, his name was now safe and acceptable enough to be presented by the president of the largest North American Muslim organization as a kind of an ijaza, or a certificate that a student of a respected Muslim scholar receives to demonstrate the validity of his or her intellectual lineage.

While the passage of time and Rahman’s academic accomplishments contributed to the transformation of his image, more significant was that his overall arguments, reflected in Islam and other works, were quite at home in broader American Muslim discourses of the time. What he shared with many Muslim immigrants of his generation was the language of Islamic reform. As Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, a historian of American Islam, explained, for many American Muslim activists of Rahman’s generation, the “adherence to Islamic beliefs and practices was not only a religious duty but a transformative experience.”⁹ For many of them, religiosity was tied to political activism. This combination was reflected in their conceptual vocabulary, which took on such modern political notions as “nation” and “progress” and reformulated them as Islamic and even Qurʾanic. They often derived the language of their religious and political activism from the works of Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), an Egyptian writer, exegete, and one of the ideological fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world’s parallel to Jamaat-e-Islami. Although there were many differences between Rahman and these two Muslim thinkers, what they had in common was an understanding of modern Islamic reforms as necessitating a return to Islam’s original texts, the Qurʾan and Hadith, which, they felt, had to be interpreted anew and often in contradiction to established exegetical traditions. In this context the overall direction of Rahman’s interpretation of the Qurʾan was not particularly contentious. America, for many of Rahman’s immigrant Muslim contemporaries, held the promise of a new beginning. It was a modern nation, where they could build a new Muslim community that would be free from the politics they left back home. Besides, Rahman’s interpretation had another element in common with Mawdudi and Qutb: like them, he explained the Qurʾan thematically, which was an acutely modern methodology. Qutb, for example, who was originally a literary critic and journalist, borrowed his methods from the literary studies of his day.¹⁰

Of course, such resonances would not matter had Rahman been still absorbed in local Muslim politics. By immersing himself in the academy, he avoided unwelcome political exposures. This was reflected in the decidedly academic style of his writing: his works came across as objective and above the politics of the day. Yet even this element was not unusual among immigrant Muslim intellectuals of his generation. Another person who maintained the same seemingly detached approach was Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was often perceived as a direct opposite to Rahman. Another commonality Rahman and Nasr shared was that they highlighted the serious nature of the challenges faced by individual Muslims and their societies in the postcolonial era. Rahman’s solution was to formulate new and decidedly modern strategies of rethinking Islam, including the Qurʾan. Nasr’s response was different: he rejected modernity itself. He wrote and spoke about it as a civilizational disease, accompanied by hypermaterialism and secularism. He argued that Islam was a “traditional” religion, which to him meant premodern. Because of this heritage, it and other old traditions—such as Catholic and Orthodox Christianities, as well as some forms of Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism—had the depth of knowledge necessary to overcome the modern predicament. Like Rahman, he wrote academic and more popular books, which addressed secularly educated Muslims around the globe and especially in the West.¹¹ Their disagreement was profound: while Nasr viewed modernity as godlessness, Rahman embraced what he saw as its positive streams.

In spite of this, both of these authors shared yet another stylistic commonality: they avoided writing about politics and concentrated instead on “essential” meanings of Islam. In Nasr’s books the phrase that conveyed such principles was “integral Islam.” Another term he and Rahman used frequently was “normative Islam.” While what they meant by these phrases was somewhat different, their rhetorical choice of stressing—and thus defining—some core aspects of Islam was pedagogically productive in a similar and telling way. During their careers in Iran and Pakistan, both Nasr and Rahman were close to the political centers of power that intruded into the domains of religious authorities. In Iran and Pakistan their “integral” and “normative Islam” reflected their attempts to avoid direct confrontation with guardians of orthodoxy and their institutions. In the United States, however, these same words had a different utility. They resonated with how many American immigrant Muslims of the post-1965 era spoke about themselves—because they were a very diverse conglomeration of people, who did not agree on what was “orthodox” but needed to work together. To Rahman and Nasr’s immigrant Muslim audiences, “normative Islam” was a godsend. In 1968, for example, the year Rahman immigrated to the United States, the Muslim Student Association included among its members individuals from thirty-six countries, and described itself as an organization of “Muslims first, Muslims last, and Muslims forever.”¹² This sort of pan-Islamic rhetoric was not unique to the MSA. It was shared by many national and local groups: many mosques established in this period, for instance, included both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims.

“Normative”—as opposed to the stern-sounding “orthodox”—Islam appealed to some converts as well. This was the time when many Americans—and Canadians—were searching for spiritual alternatives and were finding them in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. For some of them Rahman and Nasr’s essentialist language provided an opening into an Islam that was at once exotic and relatable. In this respect Mattson’s remembrance of Rahman’s Islam was quite telling. He had written it, after all, for Western audiences, as well as for secularly educated Muslims all over the world. Its language appeared unfettered by local politics, either in Pakistan or North America. Practically speaking, it presented a vision of Islam that was essential enough to be readily translatable into new sets of local realities.

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Wendy Cadge, an anthropologist specializing in contemporary American Buddhism, noted that “[with] the exception of Native American religions, Mormonism, and a few other religions started in the United States, American religious history is a story about how religions started in one place are carried along global networks and constructed and reconstructed in new ways on American shores.”¹³ The story of Islam becoming an American religion is complex. It is undeniable, however, that Muslim intellectuals have been pivotal in this process. By serving as authoritative voices of Islam, they contributed to its cultural translation into an American reality. Their role was in formulating conceptual voca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Time
• Chapter Two: Justice
• Chapter Three: Redemption
• Chapter Four: Politics
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index