In a forthcoming book, Islam and the Black American, I too, as a neo-traditionalist and not a romantic, argue that Muslim tradition holds the greatest promise for the future of Islam in America. The great promise of tradition resides, however, precisely in its ability to accommodate and, indeed, authenticate multiple, even mutually contradictory interpretations and expressions of Islam. From this perspective, tradition is emphatically opposed to any effort at artificially fordizing Muslim doctrine or practice or reducing these to any single expression. Under the pressure of post-9/11 anti-Muslim mania, however, American Muslim romantics have turned to tradition as a means of compressing Islam into a single-minded commitment to one or another moral or aesthetic vision, categorically denying or affirming this or that contemporary vision of the truly Islamic. This enterprise often entails both an appeal to the dominant culture and the invocation of a false universal. More importantly, it exposes tradition itself to being converted into a tool for domesticating Islam, whereby the religion forfeits any ability to challenge the dominant culture and finds itself in a position where it can only support the latter. To the extent, again, that this process equates dominant with universal, those who are or perceive themselves to be disadvantaged by the dominant culture will be called on to acquiesce, this time in the name of Muslim tradition, and accept such disadvantage as both normal and normative - indeed, Islamic. This is the great liability posed by American Muslim romanticism. And it is essentially this liability that the remainder of this essay will seek to address. -pg. 115-6 of Sherman Jacksons Islam(s) East and West: Pluralism Between No-Frills and Designer Fundamentalism in September 11 in history: a watershed moment?
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 11:26:52 +0000
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