A Quiet Revolution (49 page)

This then is the conclusion that I find myself arriving at in light of the evidence surveyed through the preceding pages—a conclusion that represents in fact a complete reversal of my initial expectations: that it is, after all, Islamists and the children of Islamists and not secular or pri- vately religious Muslims who are most fully and actively integrating into this core and definingly American tradition of social and political ac- tivism and protest in pursuit of justice. It is they, after all—they and not us, the secular or privately religious Muslims—who are now in the fore-

front of the struggle in relation to gender issues in Islam, as well as with respect to other human rights issues of importance to Muslims in Amer- ica today—and implicitly of importance in the long term to other Amer- icans too.
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This fact is all the more remarkable in that, as scholars of Islam in America unanimously assert, Muslims who attend mosques or associate with American Muslim organizations—the venues typically influenced by Islamism—in fact still constitute only a minority of American Mus- lims. The estimated percentages of those attending such institutions in America is gradually rising, according to these experts, from an estimated

5
or
10
percent into the late
1990
s to perhaps
30
or
40
percent today: a ris-

ing percentage that nevertheless still leaves them as making up the mi- nority of American Muslims. Thus Islamists and their heirs and children are for the present no more than a minority of a minority. However, controlling most American Muslim institutions, they constitute the most influential and most publicly visible segment of this minority. And they are also quite visibly and publicly the most socially and politically com- mitted and activist segment of the Muslim community.

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I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard.

—Drew Faust,
2007
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Shirin Neshat and Lalla el-Sayyedi are today prominent American artists of Muslim background. Both make ample use in their work of the visual resources of their Islamic heritage, often incorporating, for exam- ple, the Arabic script in their art, as well as images of women in hijabs and chadors. Neither artist is herself a hijabi or appears to have been at any point influenced by Islamism. On the basis of her art and films and also of her statements in lectures and interviews, Neshat evidently draws on this heritage as a committed secularist, though she at times gestures too toward some unspecified notion of mysticism. El-Sayyedi’s art in this matter is perhaps even more inscrutable and ambiguous: neither her art nor her statements rule out the possibility that Islam may be for her also a spiritual resource.

Many American Muslims, the majority, according to most statis- tics, are pursuing lives in which, in accordance with another well-estab- lished American tradition for ethnic and religious minorities, they are doing their best to blend and meld as unobtrusively as possible into the fabric of America as they pursue their lives. As one writer, Tariq Ahmad, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, put it in an op- ed column in the
New York Times,
“We are trying to succeed in life, try- ing to be effective doctors, lawyers, business people, artists and other kinds of professionals.”
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Some no doubt define themselves, as does the author of these words, simply as secular. However, it is possible—in light of the recent Pew Report indicating that many younger Americans do not belong to religious institutions but nevertheless believe in God, life after death, and the existence of “heaven, hell and miracles” at about the same rate as older generations—that some Muslims are believers who are at the same time non-mosquegoing Muslims.
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Studying what the term “secular” means exactly when applied to Muslims and Muslim histories in their diversity, as well as exploring shifts in meanings of that word over time, in different locales, and as it crossed borders, is a matter that unquestionably calls for further investigation and more precise understanding of the subject than we currently have. Similarly tracing the word’s specific histories in English when applied to Muslims and Muslim-majority societies, and the origins and provenance of such English usage, is a no less essential task. Notably, the meaning of “secular” implied by the op-ed author just cited, Dr. Ahmad, itself opens up some questions. Describing himself and many other Muslims as secular, he writes, “We do not pray five times a day, do not read the Koran and have not spent much time inside a mosque. We only turn to Islam when a child is born, someone gets married or someone dies.” This description, it should be noted, focusing as it does on the
mazhar
—the external and outward di- mensions of religion as measures of commitment to religious belief—in fact describes the norms of practice prior to the rise of Islamism of many believing Muslims (in Egypt at any rate, as we saw) who nevertheless con- sidered themselves to be faithful Muslims according to the
jawhar
or inner and “essential” meanings and rules of living Islam as ground of faith.

Also, as we saw earlier, “secular” in the Middle Eastern context was a term that was applied pejoratively early on in the rise of Islamism to

Muslims who were not Islamists and who did not practice Islam as Is- lamists did: to women, for example, who did not wear hijab even though many such women were, in their own eyes, believing Muslims. And as we also saw, the definitions of Islamists as to what “true” Islam was and what forms of dress and practices were “mandated” by Islam began to gain power in the Middle East in the
1970
s and in America too by the
1990
s. Today it is above all Islamists and Islamist-grounded institutions who are the authorities defining and determining the beliefs and practices of Islam in this country.

So powerful and effective have Islamist definitions of Islam become today in America and the West (and elsewhere), that even Muslims who grew up thinking they were believing Muslims and for whom Islam was above all a spiritual and ethical resource might well come to doubt their own sense and understanding of Islam. Finding themselves alienated by and feeling no empathy with the views and practices of this now domi- nant form of Islam—from its obligatory hijab to its activist social and political agendas—they perhaps begin to wonder if they are in fact Mus- lim after all: if
this
is Islam. I recall being told by an American Muslim friend that her twelve-year-old niece who attended Islamic school on weekends came home one day to inform her Sufi-practicing grand- mother that the way she was practicing Islam was “wrong” and “not Islam.” Although this is merely a personal anecdote, it would not surprise me if future researchers were to find that similar scenes of Islamist-in- fluenced youngsters challenging their families’ form of Islam were being played out in these years all across America.

Not uncommonly in our times this larger group of American and Western Muslims, whether secular or non-Islamist, feel—much as their non-Islamist Muslim predecessors did in Cairo as Islamism was gaining power—a degree of suspicion and even hostility toward the Western Is- lamists whose institutions and definitions of Islam now dominate the West’s landscape.

Many, for example, are thoroughly irked at the way that Islamists have “hijacked the mike,” as Kabbani had put it. And they are put off by its activist commitments to causes that non-Islamists see as essentially political. Altogether they often seem to feel a deep antipathy toward this Islamist form of Islam now so widely proclaimed and accepted in the West as Islam
tout court.

Ahmad succinctly articulates many of these specific peeves in his column. He complains, for example, that on those few occasions when he attended meetings at Islamic centers there were invariably speeches “about the Palestine conflict, the Kashmir conflict, the Chechnya con- flict, the Bosnian conflict,” issues which, he writes, “secular” Muslims such as himself who make up (he notes) the majority of Muslims in America, are in fact quite “dispassionate” about. “We certainly have no interest,” he explains, “in civilizational battles.” Moreover, he continues, “we are loathed” by this dominant Muslim minority who now loudly speak for Islam and Muslims. Despite constituting the majority, he con- tinues, “we have no clear voice, no representation and no one in the Western world appears to be aware of our existence.” And indeed this is surely an extraordinary situation: a situation in which one form of Islam
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—a form that just four or five decades ago was marginal in most Mus- lim-majority countries and which at that point constituted just one strand within the multiple strands of Islam—is today globally dominant in the West as elsewhere.

Other non-Islamist Western Muslims also sometimes give vent to their dislike for Islamism. The prominent British journalist Yasmin Al- ibhai-Brown, for example, wrote, “I am but Muslim lite, a non-con- formist believer who will not be told what and how by sanctimonious religious sentinels for whom religion is a long list of rules to be obeyed by bovine followers.”
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Alibhai-Brown differs from Ahmad in that she is by no means “dispassionate”—as her work and the positions she takes make clear—about political issues, including those affecting Muslims

and other minorities, whether at home or abroad. Appointed to the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in
2001
, Alibhai-Brown returned the award in
2003
in protest in part against the Labour government’s con- duct with respect to the Iraq war. All the same, though, as her words here (and most obviously, of course, “bovine”) make clear, she too evidently feels a distinct antipathy toward Islamists.

And indeed a dislike for and even a fear of Islamists and a strong sense that they loathed “us” certainly described my own feelings about Islamists when I began the research whose findings I present in these pages. As I described, Aisha and I had no doubt that “they” hated us and all that we and other feminists, liberals and progressives, stood for. Nor

was this perception mistaken. As we saw earlier, feminism along with communism and Zionism was ranked among the most hated enemies of Islamism through the
1970
s and onward, and feminists were defined as people who were “un-Islamic and culturally westernized.” This no doubt continues to be a view that flourishes among some Islamists. Quite likely, too, some level of anti-feminism and even of deep-seated opposi- tion to the idea of justice as extending fully and equally to women is still alive and well among many ordinary Islamists in Muslim-majority coun- tries. And as regards non-Islamist Muslims generally, as we saw, Islamists typically viewed such Muslims as, at best, suitable targets for da‘wa and conversion to their own uniquely “true” form of Islam.

But these may be the traits mainly of an older home-country Is- lamism and of the Islamism, in this country, of an older and generally immigrant generation. Already there are significant changes under way as another and rising generation of American-born and/or American- raised Muslims shaped to some degree by Islamism begins to emerge into the foreground of Islamic activism and to take over the reins of power. Obviously, for example, these old Islamist traits of hostility to the idea of equal justice for women are not characteristic of that segment of the American Muslim and Islamist-influenced population committed to women’s rights and activism that I was observing—the group, making up a segment of the broader Islamist population, who are at the fore- front of this study
because
of their concern and activism in relation to issues of women and gender.

This means, too, as it is important to acknowledge and underscore here, that these positive elements regarding issues of women and gender that are emerging today in America are elements that are characteristic only of a particular segment of the Islamist-influenced American Mus- lim population—specifically of the most liberal and progressive segment. Certainly one cannot assume that such views and attitudes are typical of the entire Islamist-influenced American Muslim population. Similarly, this means that had I focused not on activism in relation to women and gender but on observing and following out other forms of activism and views on other themes and concerns in circulation among the American Islamist population—had I set out to study, for example, the prevalence among them of ideas as to a God-given gender hierarchy and God-given

male prerogative—I would no doubt have accumulated quite different kinds of evidence and found myself writing a very different kind of book, and one in which I might well have arrived at a far bleaker and more dis- heartening conclusion.

It is important, therefore, to underscore that these positive traits and views related to issues of women and gender emerging among the Is- lamist-influenced American Muslim population represent the traits and views of those making up the distinctly liberal end of American Islamist- influenced thought. Moreover, this liberal end of Islamist thought is it- self constituted of a spectrum of positions ranging from the conservative pro-feminist views emerging among ISNA and MSA women, to those making up the more radical and progressive ends of the spectrum. And just as was the case with the American feminist movement, such views obviously are by no means necessarily generalizable to the broader pop- ulation of which they are part.

While it is American Islamists and the children of Islamists today who are most visibly in the lead as activists and who are most distinc- tively assimilating into the American tradition of protest and activism in the cause of justice, others of Muslim heritage who are secular or sim- ply non-Islamist are clearly also contributing in other and no less time- honored American ways to their society. The route of hard work and professional achievement is obviously one such route. And sometimes, and quite possibly frequently (this is a matter yet to be studied), such work involves, as the example of Alibhai-Brown suggests, taking up is- sues of rights of minorities, including Muslims, in varieties of ways. Thus the defining differences between this reportedly larger proportion of the American Muslim population on the one hand and the Islamist-influ- enced American Muslims we have been focusing on in these last chap- ters on the other, may in fact prove to be above all that often the former, in distinct contrast to the latter, do not explicitly ground themselves and their life goals and actions in Islam as religious commitment and as pro- claimed and visible ground of action and identity.