Voices of Islam (256 page)

Large chunks of this inherited tradition were unhelpful to our context, leaving activists agonizing over the psychological barriers such teachings produced. Many clerics and opponents of the progressive Muslim political cause repeated the authoritative readings that they had dredged from texts in order to discredit our meager new readings. Since only scant and selected authorities—past and present—in the tradition offered any kind of help to our context, our liberation theology and juridical ethics had to rely on new readings of the Qur’an and selections from the prophetic tradition. In his noted text
Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism,
Farid Esack carefully documents the outlines of our ethical struggles and demonstrates how we retrieved the messages of liberation and pluralism from the narratives of the Qur’an. In the frighteningly repressive political climate and life and death struggles that characterized South Africa, it was comforting to read that God was on the side of the oppressed and righteous who were patiently and justly steadfast in God’s cause.
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During the 1980s we hardly had the luxury to think through the complicated issues of Muslim ethics in a systematic and theoretically rigorous manner. The Muslim equivalents to theorists such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin were the writings of Qutb, Mawdudi, and Khomeini: the latter were rhetorically persuasive but intellectually limiting, if not at times castrating.

Given the exigencies of the struggle we were instantly required to produce reliable ethical positions on a host of issues. In hindsight, our writings were humane in their vision, but thin in intellectual depth; strong on polemics but weak on politics. Critical re-readings of the tradition in a systematic man- ner that would enable us to theorize our lived experiences in the tradition were a luxury and in short supply at the time.

What awaits those engaged in progressive Muslim discourses in the heat of crisis is to partake in critical reflection on those experiences. Many lessons are to be learned and an equal number had to be unlearned. High priority should be given to theorizing these experiences and practices. This is a task that a range of Muslim progressives needs to accomplish with the hope that our efforts from the geographical margins, as well as the edges of intellectual power vis-a`-vis the prevailing orthodoxies, could foster new debates and diversify the tradition.

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PROGRESSIVE TRADITION?

Progress is Janus-faced: it has opposing sides to it. Progress also signifies a particular relation to history; that history has an end (
telos
) and a predeter- mined goal. In a more benign way progress could mean advances in knowl- edge and the acquisition of some abilities and the loss of others, without making this contingent on the philosophy of history. In his
Theses on the Philosophy of History,
Benjamin meditates on the painting of the Swiss painter, Paul Klee (d. 1940), called the
Angelus Novus.
The image of the angel is for Benjamin the beguiling image of the angel of history. Here Benjamin’s caution and deep ambivalence toward historicism surfaces strongly, for in his view the adherents of historicism, like Fukuyama, tend to empathize with the victors in history.

What intrigues Benjamin in the Klee painting is
how
the angel fl

his wings are spread but his face is turned towards the past. The wings of the angel cannot close because they are kept open by a violent storm from Paradise that propels him into the future. With a strong dose of irony, Benjamin comments: ‘‘This storm is what we call progress.’’
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At the very time when the helpless angel of history is pushed into the future by the storm of progress from Paradise, he heroically and against the odds resists the storm by turning his face towards the past. The turning back is suggestive of history and tradition, both of which Benjamin believes will restrain a hubristic and a runaway idea of progress.

In order to avoid the negative sense of the word ‘‘progress,’’ says Benjamin, one needs to resist some senses of the word.
5
To understand ‘‘progress’’ as involving the transformation of the entirety of humankind is a hubristic posture, to say the least. Yes, indeed, one can acknowledge human advances in ability and knowledge. But to view progress as meaning the infi te perfectibility of humankind in competition with nature sits oddly with the notions of humility and balance advocated in Muslim ethical discourse. Of course, the struggle to reach moral and spiritual perfection is at the very core of Muslim ethical teaching but is very different to a historicist notion of perfection.

For some progressives knowledge of the tradition is important. I do not advocate that one should view knowledge of the tradition as sacred and unchanging; rather, it is subject to interrogation, correction, and advance- ment. For the upshot of all knowledge is not that it should be adored and worshipped but that it must be put to use and result in ethical practice. Therefore, the major question, if not the most challenging one that arises is whether a practice has to perpetually resemble its origin. The answer to this rhetorical question is not easily soluble: the answer is negotiated in the tradition, the state of
what
one is, and more importantly,
how
one exists.

One thing is for sure: tradition is definitely not a collection of texts. That would be only one source of knowledge of the tradition. Tradition is a state

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of mind and a set of embodied practices. As practice, tradition undoubtedly has authority and operates by certain rules of the game. Tradition, to use the felicitous words of Pierre Bourdieu, is what the body learned or what was ‘‘learned by body’’; it is not something one acquires like knowledge, but
what
one is.
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Put differently, one could say that tradition is the self- intelligibility of the past in the present; a continuously evolving and mutating intelligibility or state of being. One could also say that tradition has every- thing to do with one’s subjectivity.

The critical element, in order to be a person of tradition, is to have a historical sense ‘‘not only of the pastness of the past,’’ as T. S. Eliot noted, ‘‘but of its presence.’’
7
The notion of tradition implies more than an aware- ness of the temporal and the timeless. To be a person of tradition one must conceive of the temporal and timeless together; one must acutely become aware of one’s place in time and of one’s own contemporaneity. Instead of

living in the present, a writer or thinker who engages with tradition lives in the ‘‘present moment of the past’’ and shows an awareness, in Eliot’s words, ‘‘not of what is dead, but of what is already living.’’ Since tradition in Islam is so much about practices, it is then those practices that are learned by the body. Tradition, like the body, does not memorize the past but ‘‘enacts the past, bringing it back to life.’’
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Tradition is unlike palingenesis where certain organisms only reproduce their ancestral characters without modification. Rather tradition works more like kenogenesis: it describes how in biology an organism derives features from the immediate environment in order to modify the hereditary develop- ment of a germ or organism.

If tradition has fallen into disrepute, it is because some who claim to be traditionalist practitioners think of tradition, not as dynamic practices, but rather confuse the knowledge of the tradition with tradition itself. From such a perspective, tradition is reduced to a set of memories. Under trying and negative circumstances, these memories give rise to self-pitying nostalgia. Since some representatives of contemporary Muslim orthodoxy happily con- fuse knowledge with tradition, they err in imagining tradition to be immune to environmental influences. Hence, seminal figures and agents in the history of tradition are turned into unique and idealized personalities in an almost mythical past. In this scheme, history is elevated to mythology and the human beings who authored tradition are turned into hagiographical figures, beyond the scrutiny of historical evidence. It is this excessive reverence for the past, in my view, that in fact paralyzes dogmatic traditionalists. Paradoxically, what happens within the ostensible centers of traditionalism is that time is flattened and homogenized. Unfortunately, time looses its density and complex nature and is reduced to a secular version with a superficial overlay of piety.

One of the hallmarks of the ideology of progress, one that violently militates against notions of tradition, is that it considers and imagines time as being homogenous and empty. Subtly, such a notion of time eradicates

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difference: differences between people and in human experiences. In turn, it inspires the fantasy of a utopian historical process driving all nations toward the secular and hurtling toward an undifferentiated modernity. What differ- entiates the modern style—for that is what modernity really is, a style rather than a rupture—as opposed to its predecessors is the fundamental shift in the notion of time, which is antithetical to persons of tradition.

In the imagination of modernity, Reinhart Koselleck tells us, ‘‘Time is no longer simply the medium in which all histories take place, it gains a historical quality. Consequently, history no longer occurs in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own right.’’
9
By dynamic he means that time is credited with creative force, not with will and desire. And, in order to continuously create and re-create this dynamism, time must become singular and homogenous. In other words, time is no longer the vehicle in which history occurred, but rather time has become the driver who is on autopilot. All the passengers in the vehicle are completely at the driver’s mercy. The passengers have no will to decide which cars, makes, or models they will drive since the driver cannot take instructions for he is a factory-made automaton! Where conceptions of time were once shaped by the specifi ities of distinct environments, rhythms, and rituals, now these are eroded.

On this front Muslim progressives must be extremely cautious. If there is a wish to engage knowledge of tradition, one should resist the desire to reduce traditions to ‘‘things,’’ or a ‘‘single’’ interpretation, and deem tradition as only ‘‘one’’ practice. While certain forms of dogmatic traditionalism often portray themselves as the singular and authentic voices of Islam, a more care- ful investigation of Muslim knowledge traditions would often show that the very issues in question have been debated, contested, and disagreed upon and hence, less authoritarian. However, when tradition itself is imagined as a kind of prefabricated design of being then it is a sure sign of traditionalists gone berserk, obsessed with power but paradoxically also dressed in the imperial garb of the modern. This is what I would call designer traditionalism. Progressives should heed the caution of Michel Serres and his student Bruno Latour and not fall prey to something we all fall prey to from time to time: the issue of period-dating. Seventeenth century intellectual thought (a product of critique-thinking) artifi ially separated the modern from the premodern.
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Early science and capitalism, Latour points out, needed to engage in a reductionist philosophy in order to constitute reality into a

nature-culture division with the view to accelerate technological-scientifi advances. Making such arbitrary divisions in a ‘‘work of purifi ation’’ was

now indefensible. It arbitrarily splits objects from subjects and separates nature/earth from human/science. Ironically, this valuable insight itself assaults the term ‘‘progress,’’ for progress facilitates the false separation since it assumes that its opposite is static. (I have already explained that I use the term under protest.)

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A great responsibility rests on the shoulders of progressives to revive tradi- tion in all its vibrancy, intelligibility, and diversity. One might have to avoid the error made by some Christian and Jewish thinkers and schools of thought who uncritically bought into the inevitability thesis of progress.

Here I wish to offer the view that one should begin to aspire to the
possibil- ity
of progress by engaging the knowledge of tradition without marginalizing it or neglecting its wisdom. Indeed, most people who think of themselves as traditionalists might be surprised to learn that every enactment of tradition also involves a critique. A progressive intellectual posture involves a critical interrogation of the conveyerbelt of tradition, namely texts, practices, and histories, by posing a series of questions to the inherited knowledges of the tradition. In other words, a critical Muslim or a progressive Muslim is also engaged in critical traditionalism. Critique of tradition is not to debunk tradition, but it is rather an introspection of what one is: a continuous questioning of one’s being. Recall that I earlier said that tradition is all about what one is: it is more than identity, more than texts and practices, more than history. It is all that, plus more: the additional element remains undefi ed, but it involves all those things that make one feel that you belong.

TRANSITIONS, NOT CONCLUSIONS: KNOWLEDGES IN THE
DIHLIZ
(INTERSTICE)

Throughout this chapter I have not discussed the specifics as to what the content of anything conceivably called progressive Islam should look like. That was intentional. Rather, I reflected on my experiences in encountering the knowledge of tradition and tried to provide some ‘‘after the fact’’ theo- retical refl ons and self-critique. There is a reason why I am reluctant to be prescriptive about content. If the progressive movement is going to be prescriptive, then it is going to end up in a one-size fits all version of progressive Islam with predictable disasters in tow. Once one advocates a specific content for progressive Islam, then it becomes an institution with ideological interests that will cauterize its dynamism. And, from a practical point of view if progressives are going to take upon themselves the institu- tional representation, they take on a burden greater than they can bear. One can hardly forecast all scenarios and contexts in one country or region, let alone do advocacy for a global audience. Rather, I view the momentum toward progressive Islam to be a catalyst for other existing tendencies in Islam, not as a replacement. In fact, progressives must engage and challenge the existing practices and interpretations as members of those communities and not as a separate church or tendency whose credentials are questioned because of a certain aloofness from the larger communities. This is the hard and more challenging part of being an advocate of progressive Islam since it is easy to preach and work with like-minded people. The challenge is to