Muslims in Europe and the US are now confidently expressing ideas of asserting their own autonomy from Muslim majority countries. What is more significant is the epistemological shift in religious authority from Muslim heartlands to the new generation of Muslim intellectuals and thinkers in the West
The following article may go against the current narrative in popular media but this alternative must be seriously considered. Muslim minorities are well integrated in the mainstream and making good progress. The US and Europe, for all their foreign policy blunders, have given the gift of intellectual, social, political and cultural empowerment to their Muslim citizens that fellow co-religionists in other countries can only wish for. However, recently, especially after the Faisal Shahzad incident, this narrative is shrinking and being ignored for the caricatures of the “other” in both Euro-American media and across media outlets in the Muslim world.
For a start, there are no such discrete civilisational categories such as the ‘West’ or ‘Islamic civilisation’. Historically, for instance, in the Muslim world, there has never been a single ‘Islamic’ civilisation, even when we talk about the Safavids, the Ottomans or the Mughals. This imaginary historiography is not only intellectually crass but also downright dangerous, creating false illusions of the past in order to create opposition and barriers for the present and future. We must adopt a more flexible and global narrative of civilisation rather than talking exclusively on the basis of faith or ethnicity. Categories of civilisation, in their philosophical, ethical and cultural dimensions are meshed, interlinked and interwoven in a global tapestry. That is not to say there are no distinct civilisational models based on ethnicity or faith, but rather that such models do not exist in a vacuum with no interaction with other models. However, with these discrete models, one needs to recognise the ambivalence and multiplicity of identity. To try and homogenise and monopolise identity in the name of faith is to reduce the precious truths of religion to an imagined human construct, whilst using ethnicity borders on xenophobia.
By adopting such a narrative, we can go beyond ideological and binary constructs and appreciate this continuing inter-linking, interwoven odyssey of human civilisation.
Based on empirical evidence, Muslim communities in Europe and the US are doing well, their views and ideas about society and politics well within the mainstream. Studies such as those conducted by the Pew Forum and the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies testify to this. Indeed, most reputable empirical studies conducted by these well-known institutions debunk conveniently held stereotypes about American/European Muslims.
It is clear that these Muslim communities are making steady progress in social and civic life, the rhetoric of crisis or of a conspiratorial or sinister colonisation process by Muslims termed by the far right, as the “Islamisation of Europe” is simply a caricature. Empirical study attests that on the most basic criteria of citizenship such as civic duty, tolerance and pluralism, Muslims responded and reacted positively. There are no doubt other problems such as that of employment, socio-economic empowerment and education, but these do not presuppose an existential crisis or an inevitable clash of civilisations. These are problems facing all new immigrant communities.
However, Muslims are not just passively acting in their countries within the mainstream; intellectual life, public debate and discussion are growing and budding within Muslim communities. In the US, the popular Muslim scholar, dubbed by The Guardian as the most influential Muslim scholar in the West, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf has opened his own seminary of Islamic Studies, Zaytuna Institute, which is now, in 2010, branching out into Zaytuna College, talked about as a liberal Islamic arts institution with a fusion of rigorous Islamic scholarship and modern intellectual tools. These new models of teaching and disseminating religious knowledge mark a crucial era in the maturation of Euro-American Muslim communities.
This suggests that Muslims in Europe and the US are now confidently expressing ideas of asserting their own autonomy from Muslim majority countries. Autonomy not only in terms of political activism and political thought, but also in terms of attitudes to social norms and civic participation. What is more significant is the epistemological shift in religious authority from Muslim heartlands such as the Middle East and the subcontinent to the new generation of Muslim intellectuals and thinkers in the West, such as Hamza Yusuf, who want to combine the traditional discourses of Islam with the new intellectual realities of their countries and societies.
This intellectual and political autonomy is encouraging and suggestive. It suggests the democratisation of Muslim social structures in Europe and the US, a shift in thinking among the new generation. A further example is the conference held this year by the Oxford Islamic Society, ‘Re-thinking Islamic Reform’, with Hamza Yusuf but also another notable European Muslim intellectual, Tariq Ramadan. The access to mass communication and mass education has allowed Muslims in Europe and the US to more confidently determine religious discourse and religious interpretation than their co-religionists elsewhere.
There are well-meaning academics and intellectuals in Muslim societies but, due to their lack of engagement with religious texts and religious traditions, they fail to make a deep impact. From Mohammed Arkoun the ardent modernist to Seyyed Nasr Hossein the exponent of classical traditional Sufism, a wide spectrum of religious intellectualism has been established, and is only set to grow and flourish. The fusion of the modern and the traditional, and the freedom to put forward without fear of retribution new expressions of faith whilst maintaining the fundamentals without being obscurantist and evolving without surrendering fundamentals, is becoming a distinctly Euro-American Muslim project.
Muslims in the West have managed to maintain their core religious traditions and values whilst enjoying a fruitful synthesis of ideas, weaving a new narrative of Islam. It has been suggested, for the first time in the history of Islam, more Muslim intellectuals live abroad, away from traditional Muslim societies. A combination of push and pull factors are responsible for this, but it is becoming apparent the notion in the Muslim world, that Europe and the US are inhospitable to Muslim sensibilities is clear nonsense. If anything, these environments are becoming conducive to more creative and rigorous religious scholarship, and are more fertile ground for the revitalisation of religious knowledge than those found in many parts of the Muslim world.
This development, indeed this phenomenon, of new distinctly European and American discourses and traditions of Muslim thought is an example that civilisations and identities are not destined to clash, but to mesh and to interweave, producing new realities.
The writer is a student at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle Upon Tyne, England.
