Frankness,
Sadness and Hope
By Alan Race
“We can
only see into each other’s souls if we take
the trouble – and sometimes the risk –
to visit each other” (p. 252).
I intend to adopt this sentence from Journey Into
Islam as my motto for all future inter-religious
work. Of course, we visit each other in mental as
well as physical geography, but it is the former
that represents the greatest challenge to our inherited
defensivenesses – as Akbar Ahmed knows well.
The celebrated anthropologist enlisted a small number
of research assistants and traveled into the Islamic
world – covering the Middle East, Far East
and South Asia – to discover the souls(s)
of those who adhere to the second most populous
global religion. The result is a marvelous, moving,
sobering, troubling, and compelling insight into
a religion which is scarcely out of the media limelight.
It is intended as a work in cultural anthropology,
but that dry categorization does not march the rich
reward that awaits the reader. For a narrative that
weaves together – seamlessly and with apparent
ease – travelogue discovery, historical overview,
personal memories, present impressions, reflective
carefulness, analytic sharpness and much more besides,
is bound to excite the imagination. There is also
a frankness in acknowledging the polarization which
pertains between “Islam and the West”,
together with a streak of sadness at the decline
in subtlety and adaptability of the intellectual
potential of Islam. But the book ends by reaching
after hope in the face of current world trends.
Frankness, sadness and hope – these are the
themes which came through to this reviewer.
Part of the frankness is the sheer breadth of Islam
and the diversity of its cultural embeddedness that
that the book portrays. This is largely unknown
to audiences in the West, for whom Islam has become
synonymous with terrorism and rage, at least in
the popular mind. For this reason alone this book
should be obligatory reading for every Islam media
correspondent. But the project itself – a
journey into Islam, viewed not so much as a religion
with a holy text and schools of exegesis, but as
a people with human passions and expectations of
God and the world – has helped us to see why
we are where we are in our reckoning with one another.
The research group met with ordinary citizens, shapers
of society such as educational and political leaders,
and religious scholars of influence and power. They
discovered anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and
anger at the denial of access to the goods of globalization.
But underneath it all was the feeling that Islam
itself was hugely misunderstood, misconstrued, maligned
and therefore placed under attack. This was the
real grievance of Muslims and it is sobering for
westerners to know it as such. The challenge of
Islam is not that it is simply “another“
religion in competition with “other religions”
but that it determines everything from domestic
behaviors to political governance. The task of comprehension
is in the end a theological and dialogical one,
however crucially important the sociology and anthropology
is along the way.
How to comprehend the mass of data that the researchers
collected? Akbar Ahmed adopted a simple but effective
typology, involving three models based metaphorically
on three towns in India. Ajmer, as home to the shrine
of the mystical Moin-uddin Chisti, the founder of
the Chisti order, stands for an Islam which is Sufi
in orientation, and therefore inwardly spiritual
in religious disposition. Aligarh, the home of a
University modeled in the nineteenth century after
Cambridge in England, stands for an Islam which
has made its accommodation to the western values
of democracy and ideas of liberty without losing
its own essential identity. Deoband, home to a whole
school of Islamic persuasion based on orthodox lines,
stands for the conservative Islamic mainstream,
but which has sometimes been dubbed as “puritan”.
(The Deoband model has become synonymous with figures
such as Osama bin Laden). These models are less
watertight descriptions than heuristic devices to
aid comprehension. Akbar Ahmed successfully uses
them in the illumination of a complex global Islamic
geography and history.
Clearly the author favors the Aligarh model, but
is also receptive to a strong dose of Ajmer for
spiritual encouragement. Aligarh represents his
own background and training and it is what he has
spent his lifetime advocating. Through the operation
of the concept of ijtihad (independent
interpretation), believes Ahmed, there is no reason
why Islam should not evolve in concert with cultural
change. But if Aligarh conjures up a modernist Islam,
it is also a source of sadness for Ahmed. For it
is the Deoband model which is in the ascendant right
now and it is hardening in reaction to the American
exercise of power since 9/11. The Ajmer model remains
too other-worldly to be of political use, and Aligarh
had become “enfeebled” through the failure
of the Jinnah vision for Pakistan and a perceived
subservience to western aspirations. In his bid
to promote the Aligarh model, Ahmed says of himself
towards the end of the project from 2006 onwards:
“I felt like a warrior in the midst of the
fray who knew the odds were against him but never
quite realized that his side had already lost the
war” (p. 192).
If these words reflect the sadness of the loss of
all that the Aligarh model once promised, there
is also a more upbeat side to Ahmed’s determination.
The personal investment he exhibits in the desire
both to educate the western world about Islamic
habits of mind and to remind the Muslim world of
their own treasures of spirituality and intellectual
subtlety is palpable. In other words, the level
of personal investment in communicating these necessities
is high, and it forms part of the attractiveness
of the book’s narrative. No-one will fail
to benefit from engaging with it. If you want to
know about the internal struggle for the definition
of Islam, or how the Western relationship with Iran
has taken the shape it has, or what is stirring
among some women’s circles, then read this
book.
What then of hope? The researchers found this: “Throughout
our journey, each and every discussion led directly
or indirectly to events that took place far away
in America on September 11, 2001, and to the passions
generated by that day.” Which raises the question
for me: is 9/11 the fulcrum on which our inter-religious
and inter-civilizational discussions should be balanced
or has 9/11 hi-jacked our long-nurtured dialogue
of mutual knowing and accountability? These were
not the questions behind this journey into Islam.
But the task of mutual knowing and accountability
need to become the largest part of the solution
to the issues aroused by terrorism in the name of
Islam. Colonial history cannot be unpicked but it
can be understood, as can the rise of so-called
Islamic militancy. There is responsibility for both
sides to face: the West for its crass “war
on terror” and Islam for the perversion of
extremist faith germinating in its midst. This is
the book’s hope, that the dialogue that needs
to ensue will bear the right fruit for longer term
aims than dealing with the immediacy of 9/11 alone.
As with all hope, however, there is no inevitability
about the outcome.
But the Akbar patience and perseverance does pay
off, and this is hope backed up by evidence. The
beginning of the book opens with the icy words,
from one of the chief ideologues of the Deoband
model, that the actions of bin Laden, the Taliban
and others are justified in Islam even if they result
in the deaths of women and children, that is, the
innocent. Calmly delivered as though they were obvious
to all right-thinking Muslims, these sentiments
represented the antithesis of all that Ahmed holds
dear about Islam. By the end of the book, however,
Ahmed is telling us that the Deoband ideologue,
is now translating Ahmed’s earlier book, Islam
Under Siege (2003), into Urdu and is advocating
a less embittered approach to the West. His motivation
was the professor’s enthusiasm for communicating
Islam to westerners, but the hope is that a more
dialogical future might prevail.
Beyond this unexpected conversion, the book promotes
hope by recounting the gathering in Washington’s
National Cathedral, when Ahmed was hosted by the
Episcopal Bishop, John Chane, and honored with a
special service celebrating his award as Professor
of the Year 2004, an occasion which was attended
also by the head of the Washington Hebrew Congregation,
Senior Rabbi Bruce Lastig. In such a context, imbued
with liturgical exuberance, hope inevitably takes
on an aspirational quality. But it is no less significant
for that. It is part of liturgy’s role to
promote hope, especially as the verdict of how our
current polarizations might get resolved remains
wide open.
Earlier I hinted that there was a theological task
to undertake at the heart of the dialogue. If there
is a missing dimension to Ahmed’s otherwise
absorbing discussion, for me this would be it. The
globalizing future, which we are now entering, asks
not only mutual understanding of each of us, as
though comprehending our differences was sufficient,
but also mutual adjustment to one another. Part
of the inspiration for religiously-motivated violence
in our world lies in the exclusivity and sense of
superiority accorded to our several traditions.
Without tackling these issues our attempts at dialogical
rapprochement, it seems to me, will falter. But
in these regions there be dragons. Can we bear to
face the dragons together as the next step in dialogue?
Sensitivities to religious difference as an anthropological
and cultural issue alone can take us only so far.
Akbar Ahmed embodies in his person that hope which
challenges both Western and Islamic leaders alike.
For some in the Islamic world he may already be
tainted with too much modernity and for some in
the Western world his unwillingness to apply the
language of “reform” to Islam might
not go quite far enough. But it is the patient hours
of conversation, listening and sifting which resides
in the background pages of this book that deserve
both our applause and emulation. Akbar Ahmed is
a man on a mission, an advocate for a different
kind of world than what pertains at present. We
need more of such visionaries.
I shall be referring to this book again and again.
Journey Into Islam
the crisis of globalization
Akbar Ahmed
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007,
323 pp., hbk., $28.95,
ISBN-13: 978-0-8157-0132-3
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