Islam Is a Foreign Country

American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority

Zareena Grewal

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781479800902
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura e tradizioni

“A powerful, lyrical, and boldly rendered book… Profound and compelling ethnography.” – Junaid Rana, author of Terrifying Muslims

PART I

The Roots and Routes of Islam in America

1

Islam Is a Foreign Country

Mapping the Global Crisis of Authority

THE BABYSITTER

With the first blue light of morning, Usman waits at Damascus International Airport for a young Muslim American stranger.¹ As always, Usman will help him with the heavy suitcases; he will find him a suitable, furnished, and reasonably priced apartment and make the introductions to appropriate tutors; he will escort him to the embassy and patiently go through the red tape; he will take him on guided tours of the city and share its secrets; he will act as translator and, when a faux pas is committed, a diplomat; he will listen to daydreams deep into the night and impart advice with humility; he will even cook feasts of American Chinese food for his homesick friends with queasy stomachs.

Each year, dozens and dozens of Western student-travelers in Damascus cross Usman’s path and receive his help at no cost. They are beneficiaries of the extraordinary hospitality he and his wife lavish on strangers. In their circles, Usman is known as the Babysitter. His babysitting career has made him a kind of expert on his “clients” and, therefore, a “key informant” for an anthropologist with her own heavy suitcases. Usman explains this strange world to me with the patient eyes of experience: “The two-monthers have goatees and wear clothes from the Gap, and the six-monthers try to buy traditional clothing and they don’t really know why they’re doing it. Romantic stuff. Us long-term ones, we don’t really care, anymore. That is, unfortunately, how a lot of people experience Damascus: superficially. If they’re here for two months, they’re into their romantic thing, or they can’t handle the cockroaches, and that’s all they remember. The guy who thought he was in heaven on earth, the guy who thought he went back in time, and the guy who will say Damascus is nothing but huge cockroaches in a giant ashtray of a city, they are all wrong.”

Since Usman spends so much time arranging for student-travelers’ pedagogical needs, he often plays the role of sounding board for wistful ambitions. “The first thing I tell [Americans] is that learning is a commitment; it’s not a package, not ready-made. Islam is not going to pick you up at the airport—I am. You can call it a lot of things: finding their identity, Islamic escapism, romantics looking for an island of tradition, spiritual tourism, whatever. They all get disappointed because Damascus is not a utopia. All of the Americans are good people, but [their educational] goals are different, and so the experience is gonna be different.”

Usman expects the Americans’ romantic notions of Damascus-asutopia to dissipate on their own after a few months, but he feels obligated to disabuse them of romantic notions about their self-important social activism back in the US. “Damascus is not MSA training-ground,” he says, referring to the Muslim Students Association, a popular group on American college campuses. “The goal is not to return to America as more effective public speakers or Muslim celebrities but to become mu’minin [true believers].

“In the US, in MSA, instead of bars and clubbing, [Muslim youth] work to plan these events on campus: Islam Awareness Week, Eid dinners, and it’s very self-congratulatory. But if you say, ‘OK, we’re gonna have a qiyam [all-night prayer vigil],’ those same activists will walk out. Something is wrong. At some level, the activism thing is a dunyawi [worldly] thing, halal [good, clean] fun. But do Muslim Americans actually know what they are working for? What? An Islamic state? What’s the goal? Why do we need an Islamic state—as a safe haven from our corrupt dictatorships? What does establishing Islam in America mean? Raw numbers of converts? That we want a Muslim president? I mean, is that what Allah wants us to do? I don’t think so.

“I’m not into discussing what Islam needs, and Syrians don’t use that kind of vocabulary. So, when Americans say ‘Islam needs a renaissance,’ it’s like, ‘Allah doesn’t need a renaissance.’ Islam is just the system, the means. Allah is the end. Sometimes Muslims go about it backwards. At the end of the day, it’s more than leaving a mark. It’s what’s happening to your soul.”

Then Usman’s face and voice soften. “I’m like this, too, by the way,” he confesses. “I’m much more intellectual than spiritual. I’m much more inclined to reading than praying, and I know I need to change that, and I learned that here.” As an Egyptian American who arrived in Damascus not only with broken Arabic but with broken Arabic in an Egyptian colloquial accent, Usman endured years of chiding from his Syrian peers who could not forgive his parents for speaking so much English in their American home. Seven years later, Usman’s Arabic is good enough for him to pass as a Damascene local, a pipe dream for most American student-travelers. But despite his affection for Damascus, Usman admits he still does not feel at home.

“I don’t know a single Westerner that really feels at home here. Damascus taught me that I am [an American] no matter how good my Arabic gets. In that way, I really am like a babysitter. I can help you, I’ll take care of you while you’re here, but it’s not my house and I will leave.”

A Crisis of Authority, a Crisis of Epistemology

The religious imagination of American Muslims is a profoundly geographic one. This book takes up Muslims’ own debates about the crisis of Islam, specifically a crisis of religious authority, and how this sense of crisis is intertwined with the notion that its resolution is located somewhere else, and often some time before. In the essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie inverts novelist L. P. Hartley’s famous opening line, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” Rushdie argues that it is the present that is foreign “and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.”² Lost homelands and lost glories have dominated the religious imaginations of Muslim Americans for at least a century, reflecting an enduring sense of being out-of-place in the US. African American Muslims speculate about their roots in Islamic Africa, about the learned princes and princesses ripped from their land, forcibly turned slaves on US plantations, forcibly turned Christians in their slave-masters’ churches. Nostalgic immigrants remember the lives they traded for their American dreams in a familiar but distant East, where time moved slowly enough for daily congregational prayers in the neighborhood mosque and for daily visits over tea with relatives. Their American children have few if any memories of the old country and often identify strongly with their religious heritage without necessarily feeling attached to their parents’ countries of origin. Devout Muslim American youth are often nostalgic for a deeper history, in an Islamic East that is not an airplane ride away but an epoch away, when Islam was a global superpower, a thriving, rich civilization, all lost to the rise of the West and its subsequent imperial domination of the East. Many, like Usman, travel to the intellectual centers of the Muslim world in the hope of recovering their tradition’s lost knowledge, lost dignity.

The subjects of this study, self-identifying devout American Muslims as well as their coreligionists in the Middle East, believe that Islam is under attack from all sides. There is a strong sense of crisis, a sense that the predictability of life is breaking down, a sense of unstoppable, damaging change. They speak of the crisis of Islam as a generalized condition, and the sources of danger they name are diffuse, including the cultural and political legacies of colonialism and the pressing realities of American empire in the Age of Terror but also internal conflicts, hot debates over the definition of Islamic authority that they fear could implode their tradition. I locate global debates over Islamic authority in specific historical and cultural contexts in the US as well as in the Middle East in order to isolate and analyze one strand of the amorphous body of issues that are so often glossed as a singular crisis of Islam.

One animating question of the crisis—how to define Islamic authority—is, ironically, a result of the contemporary, worldwide Islamic revival. Today, across Muslim societies all over the world, men and women without seminary educations are reinvigorating Islamic public discourse; these revivalists are aided by advancing levels of education and new media. Although they lack the philosophical sophistication of seminary-trained theologians and jurists, the revivalists dominate the Islamic public sphere and blogosphere; their voices echo from speakers in mosques, cars, computers, and television sets, their pamphlets, books, essays, and columns pervade bookstores, newsstands, and the Internet. The sheer popularity of these lay Muslim activists challenges the exclusive claim of seminary-trained scholars to interpret revelation and to develop an Islamic vision of social justice. Of course, this story of the modern fragmentation of Islamic authority has a darker side; voices of individuals such as Osama bin Laden are also amplified as a result of the widening access to Islamic public discourse, and although his lethal religious and political vision does not compel the masses, he successfully captured the imagination of a small but dangerous Muslim following around the world.

The question of who speaks for Islam—the question that preoccupies the devout Muslims in this study—is about more than the struggle to respond to Muslim terrorists and native informants in the mainstream US media, and it is also more than determining who should be the imam in their local mosque. American Muslim youth share a historical narrative of the fragmentation of Islamic authority with their coreligionists around the world, but their invocations of crisis also index a very particular, very American set of racial conflicts and religious anxieties. My aim is not to offer a resolution to what devout Muslims deem a crisis of authority but to show what their sense of crisis produces and forecloses, what it makes possible and impossible, what it makes thinkable and unthinkable. To this end, this chapter serves as an introduction to these global intellectual networks and the debates that animate them; it offers a kind of conceptual key to this fragmentary map, defining analytical terms such as tradition, counterpublic, crisis, and orthodoxy. As we follow the journeys of Muslim American youth in the US and in the Middle East, these conceptual tools will aid us in accounting for the ways that the global and the local converge in their debates about religious authority and Islamic knowledge, debates rooted to particular places but also shared across borders.

Today the phenomenon of young Muslims traveling abroad for religious study is a common feature across the diverse spectrum of US mosques. The overwhelming majority of American student-travelers abroad plan to return to the US, meaning that their Islamic education abroad is not an end in itself but a means to retrieve tools to help resolve Islam’s crisis. American Muslim youth are a cross-section of the heterogeneous American Muslim population spread across much of the US as a whole and vary a great deal in their degrees of religiosity. Like most faith communities in the US, only a fraction of Muslim Americans are “mosqued” Muslims, and even among those who are, many are not particularly aware of these debates about religious authority and Islamic knowledge, in contrast to individuals such as Usman who are deeply invested in these debates; in fact these debates drew him to Damascus.³ Urban intellectual centers, such as Damascus, have attracted Muslim seekers and students from around the world for centuries. Those students once came and continue to come from far distances, from Timbuktu, from Jakarta, from Grenada. Today Muslim student-travelers also come from Boston and San Diego, but their religious studies are energized by a strong sense of urgency, of crisis.

Muslim American student-travelers seek a way to imagine a future for Islam in the US, a way to resolve the contemporary religious crisis in their US mosques, and thus their hopes for religious study are merged with a particular moral geography of the Islamic East (not always the Middle East) as an Archive of Tradition. Although they hope to revive their tradition, Muslim American student-travelers often talk about their tradition in simple, static terms, as an object that can be found, excavated, and brought home, a view that corresponds to the term’s older usage in anthropology. Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber’s classic definition of tradition as the “internal handing on through time” of culture traits renders tradition a static object.⁴ Although Muslims often sound like an older generation of anthropologists when they talk about their tradition as an object waiting for discovery abroad, to be extracted and brought back to the US, as we will see, the processes of studying, teaching, and arguing over what constitutes tradition are far more complex and challenging than the retrieval of a souvenir.

The crude construction of tradition as a fixed body of practices and ideas that move through time unchanged and unchallenged, except when abandoned, will not take us very far in understanding the religious lives and debates of Muslim students and teachers in the global networks explored here. This commonsense usage of the term tradition operates on the assumption that “normal” tradition requires an unthinking conformity to the past that opposes reason. Therefore, this view of tradition as fixed cannot account for the arguments within a tradition and as a result, arguments within tradition are always represented as exceptional, as a problem, a rupture in the flow of tradition. In contrast to this impoverished understanding of tradition, I draw on an alternative understanding of tradition developed by critical anthropologists of Islam who place argument and reason at tradition’s center. In this more rigorous understanding of tradition, debate itself becomes a testament to the health of the tradition.⁵

Talal Asad, in his now classic literature review “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” first redirected scholars studying Muslim societies away from debates about the right scale of their analyses to a more productive set of questions about which concepts could best capture Muslims’ lives. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, Asad recuperates tradition as an analytical tool, as a set of discourses connected to an exemplary past and to interpretations of foundational texts that Muslims draw on in their ordinary lives.⁶ Just as the Orientalist claims to have the tools to be able to get at the heart of Islam, anthropologists of Islam claim that their method allows them to access the point of view of their Muslim subjects, their interior worlds, Muslim hearts and minds, so to speak.⁷ Although anthropologists interested in social structure and historical causation, such as Ernest Gellner, are typically seen as very different from symbolic anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Asad argues that they all treat Islam as a total system. Whether they construct Islam as a distinctive historical totality or deterministic system or as a body of Islamic symbols, these anthropologists represent Islam dramaturgically. Asad writes, “Gellner’s Islamic actors do not speak, they do not think, they behave [within a fixed social structure] . . . for Geertz, as for Gellner, the schematization of Islam as a drama of religiosity expressing power is obtained by omitting indigenous discourses, and by turning all Islamic behavior into readable gesture.”⁸ Asad rejects the idea that anthropologists might be able to isolate “Islamic” social systems, as Gellner claims, or “Islamic” experiences, as Geertz attempts to do. Instead, Asad argues that by thinking of Islam as a discursive tradition, an unfolding of arguments over shared foundational texts across space and over time, anthropologists could discern Islamic practices and styles of reasoning. In other words, in lieu of Muslim subjects who “behave” or “act” out their roles, Asad urges anthropologists to examine the arguments, logics, and styles of reasoning and interpretation of Muslim subjects who think.⁹ Asad’s complex and open-ended definition of Islam as a discursive tradition best captures the religious debates about authority and Islamic pedagogical practices in the US and in the Middle East that I map here.

It is important to note that whether in the US or in the Middle East, the crisis of authority and epistemology that preoccupies devout Muslims is a qualified crisis, not a total crisis of authority. In these Muslim networks, the normative belief in the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad’s example as authoritative sources of divine revelation are taken for granted. Rather than the core sources of revelation, the debates about Islamic religious authority in these networks are over the scholarly disciplines built around revelation. The Quran is believed to be the divine word as revealed to Muhammad in the seventh century through the medium of the angel Gabriel. As a human prophet receiving direct divine guidance over twenty-three years, Muhammad’s own life example, as recorded in the hadith traditions and ancillary literatures, is a second source of revelation for Muslims. The death of the Prophet in 632 meant the loss of religious authority based on cultural and temporal proximity to the event of divine revelation. To the extent that the Prophet was inerrant, to the extent that even his human errors—and there were a few, as the Quran itself points out—were rectified through divine intervention, Prophet Muhammad’s moral vision for hi...