The Atheist

Thabet mentioned the spread of Salafism among British Muslims. Of course most of you know that North Indian Islam has an indigenous form ‘reformist’ Islam, Deobandism, which is not in intents all that different from Salafism. But the majority of North Indians are ‘traditionalist’ Barelvis, a variant of Hanafism.  Despite these historical precedents there is a tendency among non-Arab Western Muslims to ‘Arabicize’ their Islam, or at least reform it so as to expunge local accretions & interpretations (e.g., the veneration of Sufis and the recourse toward folk religious practices such as amulets). This is natural, when age old customs & traditions are extracted out of their original social and cultural context they lose their power & relevance for generations raised in totally different circumstances. The reconstruction and evolutionary process of a ‘traditional’ religious identity can be probably be illustrated by analogy with American Judaism; contrast shtetl rabbinical Judaism with suburban reform Judaism.  It is not surprising that Hasidism in the United States only persists in a strongly communitarian environment which attempts to reconstruct most of the Eastern European elements which made it such a vital force in the first place.  For example, Hasidic Jews are segregated from mainstream society and continue to speak in Yiddish dialects.

But one thing that I wonder about the “Middle Easternization” of Western South Asian Muslims in places like Britain: might it be that  the Arab tinged neo-Islam is less appropriate to the multicultural context that Western Muslims have to live with than South Asian traditionalism? To be short, I believe that South Asian (and Southeast Asian, and African, etc.) Islam has had to grapple seriously with pluralism and the fact that Islam may not necessarily always be the commanding force in the public square. In contrast, Middle Eastern Islam has been conditioned by a history where non-Muslims have over time moved further to the margins so as to exist at sufferance, not positions of equality where they can bargain as free agents (aside from aberrations such as the Christian viziers of the Fatimids). Quasi-Muslim groups who did attain a central position in society re-Islamicized their identity appropriately to maintain their legitimacy (see the evolution of both the Kizilbash and Alawites into Twelver Shia; they could never shift all the way toward vanilla Sunni Orthodoxy, but very few Sunnis would deny the Twelver Shia are Muslims).

To illustrate what I’m talking about in terms of aspects of a tradition which might be less congenial toward Western society, a common mainstream argument in the Middle East among religious scholars is that believers can not live under non-Muslim rule; one must migrate or rebel.  This is not the universal consensus, nor is it exclusively a Middle Eastern opinion, but the range of practical choices here is strongly conditioned by geography. Many Crimean Muslims did emigrate after the Russian conquest of their lands during the 18th century, relocating to the Ottoman Empire (others remained and their scholars argued that so long as Muslims are left alone that is sufficient to obligate their loyalty to their ruler). Obviously the choice of migration to a Muslim land is less practical if you are resident in China, so that Chinese Muslims formulated very different responses and rationales during the early modern period.  But with the awareness by Chinese speaking Muslims of the normative stances in Arab lands after more frequent hajj during the 19th century, there was greater friction with the overwhelming non-Muslim Han majority due to new religious currents which emphasized the distinctiveness of Muslims.  As a practical matter the migration of millions of Chinese Muslims to a Muslim land was not practical (Chinese Turkestan would not be able to support such a population, and today there are more Hui, Chinese speaking Muslims, than Turkic Muslims; that was likely true during the 19th century).  The subsequent rebellions of Muslims against the Manchus also inevitably ended in failure simply because of the weight of numbers.*  Though new attitudes influenced by sojourns among the Arabs are, in my opinion, not the sufficient or necessary causes for the troubles during this period they clearly interjected themselves into the ideological arguments trotted out to justify rebellion against the Emperor.  In contrast, up to the 18th century Muslim scholars viewed themselves as somewhat peculiar variant of literati who were in keeping with the fundamental values of Chinese society.

I think the analogy to Western Muslims is rather obvious; Muslims are a minority who can not expect to impose their values on society, nor does it seem likely that they are predisposed toward migration en masse to Muslim majority states.  They are here to stay.  I would submit that a religious tradition which is shaped by centuries of a necessary give-and-take with non-Muslim powers & peoples may offer better hope for social amity than schools shaped in a society where Islam is initial frame of reference for non-Muslims; e.g., the atheist Arab American intellectual from an Anglican background, Edward Said, would contend that Islam was still his civilization. What seems necessary today is for Muslim intellectuals to reinforce the point that the West is their civilization; I am skeptical that the Arab ulemahave would have any answers to this sort of position.

* These rebellions had a variety of casus belli.