September 6, 2010
EVEN BETTER TO UNDERLINE THE FACT...:
Islam & Modernity: Not All Muslims Think Alike (Patrick J. Ryan, 9/10/10, Commonweal)
To understand Muslims today one needs to recognize three strands of faith—in effect three different cultures—among Sunni Muslims, who account for nearly nine-tenths of the world’s Muslims. (In discussing these subgroups, I do not wish to slight the 10 percent of the world’s Muslims who are Shiite, nor the 1 percent who are neither Sunni nor Shiite.) First is the relatively small but intense Sunni minority that advocates a radically countercultural understanding of Islam. These are the people characterized in the West as Islamists (formerly referred to as Muslim fundamentalists), and most have been influenced by the conservative understanding of Islam propagated in and by Saudi Arabia. A second, larger population participates in the Islamic tradition but can be characterized as culturally secularized, often more influenced by socioeconomic and political forces than by the Qur’an. Most of these culturally secularized Muslims live in Turkey, the Balkans, the former Soviet Asian republics, and parts of Africa. But the largest bloc of Muslims are people of faith participating in a centrist tradition whose understanding of Islam engages with the many nonreligious factors in their world; they can best be described as inculturating their faith in a world that is only partly Islamic. These are Muslims for whom faith and culture are not completely coextensive. Most Arabs (Saudis excepted) and most South Asian Muslims fit into this category.The Sunni Muslims I characterize as countercultural sometimes trace their ideas back to key passages in the Qur’an. The Qur’an came to historical birth in the two decades before Muhammad’s death in 632, and in its original setting it was in some sense markedly countercultural, critical of Muhammad’s contemporaries and their faithless ways. The Qur’an refers derisively to elements of pre-Islamic Arabian culture as jahiliyya, a term usually translated as “ignorance” but more akin to “barbarism.” Jahiliyya appears only four times in the Qur’an, each time in a passage of revelation received by Muhammad when he was attempting to establish an ideal Islamic rule in Medina. For instance, during a battle with the Meccans in the year 625, when some of Muhammad’s army broke ranks to take booty—standard practice for the pre-Islamic Arabs—many were killed and others wounded; and the Qur’an excoriates them for falling back into pagan Arab ways, “entertaining wrong suppositions about God, suppositions typical of barbarism” (Qur’an 3:154).
The Qur’anic term jahiliyya provided the rigorist Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) with a useful category for condemning the Mongols, converts to Islam who invaded the Middle East, destroyed the ailing Sunni caliphate, and established a rule that owed more to their own legal tradition, the Great Yasa of Genghis Khan, than it did to Islamic sharia. In turn, much of what is called Islamism today stems from the work of twentieth-century writers who studied Ibn Taymiyya. Two of the most influential are the Indian-born journalist Sayyid Abul A‘la Maududi (1903–79) and Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), an Egyptian novelist radicalized by his experiences as a student in the United States in the late 1940s. Undoubtedly the most influential Islamic rigorist in the Arab world, especially since his execution by the Nasser government in 1966, Sayyid Qutb embraced a pristine vision of Islam based less on history than on a catechetical idealization of history. In this he was much affected not only by Ibn Taymiyya’s denunciation of the Muslim Mongols, but also by the writings of Maududi. Both Sayyid Qutb and Maududi were autodidacts, as far as Islamic legal tradition is concerned. The countercultural vision of Islam they espoused, divorced from any past concrete cultural expression of Islamic faith, was a reactionary schematization, conspicuously lacking the historical and cultural depth that might have informed a more humane vision. Their writings, translated into English, have gained them a following among other Muslim autodidacts throughout the world.
These examples of post-Qur’anic invocation of jahiliyya reveal an expansion of the term well beyond its original sense. The jahiliyya of the Mongols had to do with their reliance on the Yasa of Genghis Khan alongside Islamic legal sources. Yet far more significant than any injury to Islam by the Mongols was the benefit to Islam brought by their conversion—the greatest eastward expansion of Islam in its history. Indeed, the historic genius of Islam has been its ability to penetrate non-Arab cultural settings and to bring to them, if only gradually, a deepening sense of the oneness of God and the moral demands that Islamic monotheism involves. Ibn Taymiyya, a Syrian Arab, had little historical perspective on the extraordinary process of Islamization that was going on in Central Asia in his lifetime. The countercultural Muslims holed up in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora caves today share this shortsightedness. For us it is important to realize that such countercultural Muslims remain a small minority of the world’s total Muslim population. To be sure, they are a very dangerous small minority. But the threat they pose is not only to non-Muslims, but also to other Muslims whose relationship to outside cultures is more benign. [...]
What needs underlining in modern times, and especially here and now in the United States, is the variety of ways in which Muslims past and present have understood the relationship of their faith to culture. Only when we understand this variety will we begin to grasp the richness of that religious tradition, a richness not exhausted by the proponents of any one particular school of thought. Jews and Christians, in particular, must learn how to interact creatively with all three types of Muslims. We might start by welcoming Muslims to pray in the mosque next door—and even in a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero.
...that we've Reformed religions with stricter orthodoxies than the rather amorphous Islam.
