Voices of Islam (125 page)

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Voices of Islam

Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan have supported her publishing projects. She is an accomplished lecturer in art history, world religions, and filmmaking and is a founding member of the Thomas Merton Center Foundation. Henry- Blakemore received her BA at Sarah Lawrence College, studied at the Ameri- can University in Cairo and Al-Azhar University, earned her MA in Educa- tion at the University of Michigan, and served as a research fellow at Cambridge University from 1983 to 1990. She is the volume editor for Vol- ume 3,
Voices of Life: Family, Home, and Society.

THE AUTHORS

As stated earlier,
Voices of Islam
seeks to meet the need for Muslims to bear witness to their own traditions by bringing together a diverse collection of Muslim voices from different regions and from different scholarly and profes- sional backgrounds. The voices that speak to the readers about Islam in this set come from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, and include men and women, academics, community and religious leaders, teachers, activists, and business leaders. Some authors were born Muslims and others embraced Islam at various points in their lives. A variety of doctrinal, legal, and cultural positions are also represented, including modernists, traditionalists, legalists, Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, and ‘‘progressive Muslims.’’ The editors of the set took care to represent as many Muslim points of view as possible, including those that they may disagree with. Although each chapter in the set was designed to provide basic information for the general reader on a particular topic, the authors were encouraged to express their individual voices of opinion and experience whenever possible.

In theoretical terms,
Voices of Islam
treads a fine line between what Paul Veyne has called ‘‘specificity’’ and ‘‘singularity.’’ As both an introduction to Islam and as an expression of Islamic diversity, this set combines historical and commentarial approaches, as well as poetic and narrative accounts of individual experiences. Because of the wide range of subjects that are covered, individualized accounts (the ‘‘singular’’) make up much of the nar- rative of
Voices of Islam,
but the intent of the work is not to express individu- ality per se. Rather, the goal is to help the reader understand the varieties of Islamic experience (the ‘‘specific’’) more deeply by finding within their speci- ficity a certain kind of generality.
12

For Veyne, ‘‘specificity’’ is another way of expressing typicality or the ideal type, a sociological concept that has been a useful tool for investigating com- plex systems of social organization, thought, or belief. However, the problem with typification is that it may lead to oversimplification, and oversimplifica- tion is the handmaiden of the stereotype. Typification can lead to oversimpli- fi ation because the concept of typicality belongs to a structure of general knowledge that obscures the view of the singular and the different. Thus,

Voices of Islam
xv

presenting the voices of only preselected ‘‘typical Muslims’’ or ‘‘representative Muslims’’ in a work such as
Voices of Islam
would only aggra- vate the tendency of many Muslims and non-Muslims to define Islam in a sin- gle, essentialized way. When done from without, this can lead to a form of stereotyping that may exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the tendency to see Muslims in ways that they do not see themselves. When done from within, it can lead to a dogmatic fundamentalism (whether liberal or conservative does not matter) that excludes the voices of difference from ‘‘real’’ Islam and fosters a totalitarian approach to religion. Such an emphasis on the legiti- macy of representation by Muslims themselves would merely reinforce the ideal of sameness that Arendt decried and enable the overdetermination of the ‘‘typical’’ Muslim from without. For this reason,
Voices of Islam
seeks to strike a balance between specificity and singularity. Not only the chapters in these volumes but also the backgrounds and personal orientations of their authors express Islam as a lived diversity and as a source of multiple well- springs of knowledge. Through the use of individual voices, this work seeks to save the ‘‘singular’’ from the ‘‘typical’’ by employing the ‘‘specific.’’

Dipesh Chakrabarty, a major figure in the field of Subaltern Studies, notes: ‘‘Singularity is a matter of viewing. It comes into being as that which resists our attempt to see something as a particular instance of a general idea or cat- egory.’’
13
For Chakrabarty, the singular is a necessary antidote to the typical because it ‘‘defi the generalizing impulse of the sociological imagina- tion.’’
14
Because the tendency to overdetermine and objectify Islam is central to the continued lack of understanding of Islam by non-Muslims, it is neces- sary to defy the generalizing impulse by demonstrating that the unity of Islam is not a unity of sameness, but of diversity. Highlighting the singularity of individual Islamic practices and doctrines becomes a means of liberating Islam from the totalizing vision of both religious fundamentalism (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) and secular essentialism. While Islam in theory may be a unity, in both thought and practice this ‘‘unity’’ is in reality a galaxy whose millions of singular stars exist within a universe of multiple perspec- tives. This is not just a sociological fact, but a theological point as well. For centuries, Muslim theologians have asserted that the Transcendent Unity of God is a mystery that defi the normal rules of logic. To human beings, unity usually implies either singularity or sameness, but with respect to God, Unity is beyond number or comparison.

In historiographical terms, a work that seeks to describe Islam through the voices of individual Muslims is an example of ‘‘minority history.’’ However, by allowing the voices of specificity and singularity to enter into a trialogue that includes each other as well as the reader,
Voices of Islam
is also an exam- ple of ‘‘subaltern history.’’ For Chakrabarty, subaltern narratives ‘‘are mar- ginalized not because of any conscious intentions but because they represent moments or points at which the archive that the historian mines develops a degree of intractability with respect to the aims of professional

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Voices of Islam

history.’’
15
Subaltern narratives do not only belong to socially subordinate or minority groups, but they also belong to underrepresented groups in Western scholarship, even if these groups comprise a billion people as Mus- lims do. Subaltern narratives resist typification because the realities that they represent do not correspond to the stereotypical. As such, they need to be studied on their own terms. The history of Islam in thought and practice is the product of constant dialogues between the present and the past, internal and external discourses, culture and ideology, and tradition and change. To describe Islam as anything less would be to reduce it to a limited set of descriptive and conceptual categories that can only rob Islam of its diversity and its historical and intellectual depth. The best way to retain a sense of this diversity and depth is to allow Muslim voices to relate their own narratives of Islam’s past and present.

NOTES

1. Carl W. Ernst,
   Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World
   (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), xvii.
   

2.
Time,
June 7, 2004, 10.

3. Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
rev. ed. (San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest Harcourt, 1976), 54.

4. Ibid., 55.

1. Guillermo Gomez-Pen˜a, ‘‘The New World (B)order,’’
   Third Text
   21 (Winter 1992–1993): 74, quoted in Homi K. Bhabha,
   The Location of Culture
   (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), 313.
   

2. Bhabha,
   The Location of Culture,
   13. 7. Ibid., 14–15.
   

8. Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(London, U.K.: Pluto, 1986), 116. The original French term for this condition is
surde´termine´
. See idem,
Peau noire masques

blancs
(Paris: E
´
ditions du Seuil, 1952), 128.

9. Ibid., 112.

1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith,
   The Meaning and End of Religion
   (Minneapolis, Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 7.
   

2. Khaled Abou El Fadl,
   Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women
   (Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publications, 2001), 9–85.
   

3. Paul Veyne,
   Writing History: Essay on Epistemology,
   trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 56.
   

4. Dipesh Chakrabarty,
   Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and His- torical Difference
   (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 82.
   

14. Ibid., 83. 15. Ibid., 101.

I
NTRODUCTION
: D
AILY
L
IFE IN
I
SLAM
‌

•

Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore

One always hears Muslims say, ‘‘Islam is a way of life.’’ What does this mean? If we entered a Christian home in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent a day with a family, what would we learn about Christianity? Spending a day in a home in Cairo, Egypt, will surely teach us something important about Islam because so much of daily life occurs within the framework and practice of Islam. The chapters in this volume provide the reader with a taste of what is meant by the statement, ‘‘Islam is a way of life.’’

At dawn one hears from the nearest minaret the
adhan,
the call to prayer broadcast by microphone over the surrounding neighborhood:
Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!

God is most great! God is most great! God is most great! God is most great! I testify that there is no god but God. I testify that there is no god but God.

I testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. I testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. Come to prayer! Come to prayer!

Come to success! Come to success! God is most great! God is most great! There is no god but God!

As the birds begin to chirp and the mourning doves begin to coo, the members of the family make their way to the washroom to perform their ablutions (
wudu’
) before prayer. This purification is a conscious preparation made in advance in the act of standing before God. At dawn, the ablutions bring one fully into wakefulness, washing away the traces of sleepiness; dur- ing the daytime they serve as a transition between the mundane activities of the world and prayer. One makes
wudu’
in order to stand cleansed before God, but
wudu’
is not merely a physical washing. Externally,
wudu’
is the washing of the extremities, which would normally get dirty or dusty from being out in the world: hands (right hand fi mouth, nose, face, arms

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Introduction

(right arm first), head, ears, neck, and feet (in this order). However, there are many ways for us to become ‘‘dusty’’ when out in the world. Our hearts can become dusty too.

The following story is often told to Muslim children to familiarize them with the deeper meaning of ablutions in Islam:

A well-known Muslim scholar was about to go to bed one night when he heard a knock on the door. On his front porch was an old man in ragged clothing and with a torn blanket over his shoulders. The scholar inquired, ‘‘Can I help you with anything?’’

The old man said, ‘‘I’d like for you to teach me to do
wudu’.
’’

Shocked and a bit annoyed, the scholar said, ‘‘What? In all these years has no one taught you to perform the daily ablutions?’’

‘‘Yes, my father taught them to me when I was a boy, but you are a wise man and I would like to learn from you.’’

So the scholar quickly began explaining the motions of the
wudu’.
But the old man persisted, ‘‘Please, I would like for you to show me.’’