Page 23 - Pakistan Link - February 1, 2019

COMMENTARY FEBRUARY 1, 2019 – PAKISTAN LINK – P23

Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society by Akbar Ahmed

n By Lawrence Rosen matters are indeed incompatible or capable of being reconciled.
William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princ- Here, too, the traveler cannot avoid taking a position as he glanc-
eton University and Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia es to either side: he is forced both to judge (and hence to establish
University cr it er i a for judgment), and to decide what is or is not incom-
hallenged by a request from his father that he initially pa ti b l e such that one avoids the feckless or morally bankrupt
felt neither disposed nor capable of fulfilling, Akbar practice of pretending that everything and everyone are really
CAhmed came to this book only after he had found his alike. The twinned ques-tions of democracy and tolerance
voice both as an anthropologist and as a believing Muslim. It are examples of such concerns.
is a happy coincidence of orientations for Consider the following quotations. The first comes from
the reader who joins him in this venture, a member of the Caliphate State, a self-declared Islamic state
for this is not a book to be read as a member comprised of Turkish workers living in Germany, who said: ‘It
of an audience nor even as a text from which is very simple—Islam and democracy are incompatible.’4 This
didactic expertise is to be sought. For all its de- stark statement is not only placed in the context of a European
ceptive appearance as straightforward descrip- state that protects the speaker’s right not to believe in the system
tion and analysis, the book is, I believe, best that protects his ability to make such utterances but may make it
approached as an opportunity to look over the possible for him, like the Islamicists in Algeria and elsewhere, to
shoulder of one who is unflinchingly trying to explore and use democracy to gain power for an undemocratic regime. The
assess his cultural and religious heritage. Indeed, it is a book second quotation, from the New York Times columnist Thomas
that is almost oral in nature, an attempt to engage those who L. Friedman, poses the issues no less baldly:
are willing to walk in the author’s shoes for a while in a genu- We patronize Islam, and mislead ourselves, by repeating the
ine conversation, one that teases up the readers’ own assump- m a n t r a that Islam is a faith with no serious problems accept-
tions, experiences, and reactions in the hope, not of overcom- ing thesecular West, modernity and pluralism, and the only
ing them, but of engaging and even incorporating them. ‘Part problem is a few bin Ladens. Although there is a deep moral
autobiography, part history, part literature, and part science’ impulse in Islam for justice, charity and compassion, Islam has
(as the author himself describes it), ‘its aim was political’ (as not developed a dominant religious philosophy that allows equal
he later said)1 in the sense that it engages us in imagining a recognition of alternative faith communities.5
world where power may indeed come to be shared through Ahmed’s approach to both of these positions is, again, a
mutual comprehension. Seen in this light a strategy for read- middle course. He certainly does not deny that to some Mus-
ing the book necessarily suggests itself—as the sincere invita- lims, even those who intend no harm to the West, authorita-
tion of a host who so respects his guest as to share and attend tive religious guidance cannot simply be left to each individual
to the exchange of honest views. For even though the reader to determine. He shows that, although there is neither church,
cannot reply directly, at each point in the presentation one course one need only consider, for example, the place one gives formal hierarchy nor authority, it comes from consistency with
can hardly fail to sense, even without knowing the author, the to history. foundational moral doctrines, not the cultural slant given to that
openness for dialogue that suffuses his life and his work. In a recent interview, Bernard Lewis, the well-known schol- which lies within human control. He can, therefore, applaud the
From the outset non-Muslims raised in the West with an ar of Middle East history, said that people in the West ‘need to Saudis’ construction of a social welfare state in the 1960s, but he
image of Islam drawn from the Arab world will be tipped slightly understand that people in the Middle East, unlike in this coun- challenges them for their lack of generosity to Africans and their
off center as they find the baseline for many comparisons situ- try [the United States] have a very strong sense of history. In indulgent life-style. He appreciates the distinctive sense of injus-
ated in South Asia rather than in the Middle East. This is not a America, if you say, “That’s history”, you mean it’s unimportant, tice articulated by Shiite Muslims, but he does not mince words
matter of authorial chauvinism: rather, it is a focus that allows irrelevant, of no concern. That is accompanied by a breathtaking about political corruption or even the frequency of incest within
the reader, guided by one coming at issues from the South Asian ignorance of even recent history.’3 One does not have to agree Muslim families. His middle course is not the ‘evenhandedness’
experience, to appreciate, in ways that are neither idealized nor with Henry Ford, who famously asserted that ‘history is bunk’, that cites tit for tat, or one that casts a pall on everyone alike. In-
impersonal, that Islam as a religion is indissoluble from Islam as to suggest, however, that even here the matter is not so simple. stead it gives us the concrete information about specific cultures
a series of cultures—that the peoples who embrace this faith do Memory, both individual and collective, is highly selective: con- on the basis of which we can converse with him about the very
not do so in the abstract but as embodied communities whose temporary events may not only color one’s uses of the past but as points of democracy and authority, tolerance and power that are
diverse experiences are conjoined by engagement in a common a culture’s ideas of what constitutes a fact, a cause, or an explana- raised by a wide range of believers and analysts.
challenge. Two crucial aspects of this approach thus engage the tion change so do the ways they relate to the past. It is thus quite At the end, as the Welsh saying would have it, one must
reader from the outset: first, that Islam and Islamic cultures may common in the Muslim world, as elsewhere, for events that are judge. Ahmed’s judgment is, however, neither that of final arbiter
best be understood in terms of themes and variations rather than no longer seen as affecting current relationships to be relegated nor all-seeing scientist. Instead, it is the voice of one who seeks
as a scattering out from some real or imagined base of purity; to the attic of memory. The key, then, may be to understand what criteria for evaluation, and through these at least implicit criteria
and second, that whatever the perspective from which one ap- is regarded as relevant to present-day relationships, images, and to assess the extent to which the moral principles of Islam suffuse
proaches Islam—as a believer or a non-believer, as a South Asian identities, and how some, but not all, elements of the past are the cultures to which they have given shape. Nowhere is this car-
or a member of the faith from any spot on the globe—one is nec- shaped by larger cultural ideas that are at once common to most ried out more poignantly than in the contemplation of the father
essarily at the center, drawn to the concerns of a faith that holds Muslim groups and distinctive to each Muslim culture. It is here, who inspired the book. It is not for sons to judge fathers, though
the vision of reality for one person out of five on the planet, and as in so many other ways, that Akbar Ahmed pursues his middle sons will always judge fathers. In poetry and impassioned ac-
which thus places every single one of us at a central point joined way. count, Ahmed confronts the plight of that generation absorbed
to every other such point. Three axial moments in Islamic history reveal the author’s by their encounter with the West, and by keeping the account at
That all who read this book are of necessity drawn together approach: the early period of the Caliphate, when the death of once personal and exemplary he honors both the difficult cir-
in a common enterprise is not, alas, a vision that is shared by the Prophet challenged the very existence of the Community of cumstances of parents who sought to retain what is most valu-
even many well-educated people in either the Muslim or non- Believers; the Moorish renaissance in Spain, when accomplish- able in their faith without sacrificing what is most distinctive.
Muslim worlds. It is all too easy to cite those whose animos- ment and tolerance appeared as a model for future ages; and the And, where the local practices of one’s culture may seem the only
ity blinds them to the simple grasp of others’ beliefs or values. colonial period, when the confidence of Muslim cultures was un- reality of enacted faith, the evaluation of that culture, and the
How can one hear without shame an American Congressman, dermined by political subordination and technological superior- role of one’s predecessors in its design, cannot but be a painful
John Cooksey of Louisiana, following the events of September ity. Ahmed’s approach to these moments may call forth hints of challenge. Ahmed lets us see his criteria—and lets us think about
11, 2001 say: ‘If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on the romanticization of the past or even of that form of nostalgia our own— without ever letting us or himself escape into easy
his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy that sees inevitable decline from ages of greater purity or from generalities or the simple erasure of difference.
needs to be pulled over and checked.’ How without sadness can models extremists have rendered ever more distant. But a care- It is, I know, a veritable act of heresy to attribute to a faith
one hear Muslim commentors on Al-Jazeera, the most open of ful reading of his overall orientation shows a much more subtle a belief I know it does not hold. And yet it is hard to avoid the
television broadcasts emanating from the Middle East, perpetu- theme: for to Ahmed it is the constancy of moral themes, within feeling that the author is the incarnation of those whom he has
ate the canard that thousands of Jews were warned away from a framework of variable practices, that renders history a well- reason to most admire. Never having met Ibn Khaldun or Sala-
the World Trade Towers before the terrorists attacked, thus sug- spring for the templates and choices that confront Muslims in din, the great Mughal Akbar or the medieval social theorist al-
gesting it was all a plot by Jews rather than Muslim extremists. every culture and every age. The Caliphate thus becomes an icon Beruni, one comes away from every encounter with his work
And reviewers of the first edition of the book displayed every of shifting from the Prophetic moment to the institutionalization prepared to believe one has indeed encountered each of them
stereotype and form of personal agenda imaginable.2 All of them of the Message, and with it the hard decisions that must chart a reincarnated in Akbar Ahmed himself. So let me introduce you
are, however, among the voices that Akbar Ahmed wants us to course between extremes—a course the early successors did not, to this most genial and enlightened of guides, and through him,
understand without being forced to forgive, to place in their his- in their humanity, fulfill through constancy to the moral precepts as his friends and colleagues know so well, to yourself.
toric contexts without thereby justifying them, to accept as part laid down, with extraordinary practicality, in the Prophet’s own . 1 Akbar S.Ahmed, ‘Postmodernist Perceptions of Is-
of the landscape of a shared world while struggling to under- life and works. The Moorish moment may well have incorpo- lam: Observing the Observer’, Asian Survey, vol. 31, no. 3 (March
cut their claims to acceptance. In doing so he tries to follow that rated a level of tolerance, a meritocracy of accomplishment, but 1991), p. 215.
most difficult of courses, the middle path. it was still within a framework of confessional separation that . 2 Id.
The Qur’an (2:137) says: ‘Thus we appoint you a midmost conflicts with modern Western ideas of equality, thus posing the . 3 Jennifer Greenstein Altmann, ‘Lewis: Strong Sense
nation, that you might be a witness to the people, and thus the hard question of whether some forms of segregation—by gender of History Compels Muslims’, Princeton [University] Weekly
Messenger might be a witness to you.’ On its face it sounds as or religion—constitute discrimination or enablement. And in Bulletin, vol. 91, no. 11 (December 3, 2001), p. 1.
though positioned at the middle must be the easiest of paths: that most difficult of moments for the author’s own generation, . 4 Ian Fisher, ‘Europe’s Muslims Seek a Path Amid
avoiding extremes one can avoid difficult choices; dodging pit- the aftermath of colonialism, one may be forced to ask if one’s fa- Competing Cultures’, The New York Times, December 8, 2001,
falls to either side one can easily prevaricate; eschewing attach- thers collapsed in the face of outside force or resolved to preserve pp. Bljj at B5.
ments on either hand one can claim as the high ground an imag- a core of inner solidity their successors would have to revivify . 5 Thomas L.Friedman, ‘The Real War’, The New York
ined neutrality. In fact, the very opposite is closer to the truth. through means their forbears could neither determine nor fully Times, November 27, 2001, p. A19.
For the middle path, whether stretching forth for believer or for comprehend. History matters, but it does so not as an omnipres- (This foreword by Professor Lawrence Rosen of Princeton
scholar, is in fact the most difficult of passages: it demands de- ent entity strikingly different from experience in the West, but University was originally published in Discovering Islam: Mak-
cisiveness at every step; the capacity to knit together the seem- as just that sort of localized and personalized, culturally situated ing Sense of Muslim History and Society by Dr Akbar Ahmed)
ingly irreconcilable without sacrificing principle; the ability to and personally integrated element all of whose contradictions (Lawrence Rosen is the William Nelson Cromwell Profes-
unite groups who are in need of constant attention to their own Akbar Ahmed confronts in his account. sor of Anthropology at Princeton University and Adjunct Profes-
sense of injury. To see the difficulties inherent in such a middle To pursue the middle course is also to ask whether certain sor of Law at Columbia University)
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