American Footprints » Islam

The Shari’a Stalking Horse

Brian Ulrich — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:51:27 +0000

Several days ago, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released the following video showing demonstrators outside a charity fundraiser by a Muslim group in Yorba Linda, California:

Because of the recent spate of activist video clip manipulations, I held back to see if anyone protested. All I’ve seen is a statement by Congressman Ed Royce, stating that he was actually at a nearby park, and said of the protesters in the clip: “I disavow those remarks and conduct. It was wrong.” He also specifically defended his involvement with the park rally, which was targeted at two keynote speakers, who seem to be the reason it was singled out all along. The more important was Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was at one point one of 170 people named in an attorney’s memo as a possible unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and who testified as a character witness in the 1995 trial of Omar Abd al-Rahman, who masterminded that bombing. Although right wing sites frequently assert that he was officially named an unindicted co-conspirator, or even “a co-conspirator of 9/11,” I can find no supporting evidence of that and several denials that he was so named. He has apparently refused to condemn Osama bin Laden, but also apparently doubts that Bin Laden perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. As an expert witness in a 2001 trial, he testified that Islam prohibited terrorist activities. He seems to be a theologically conservative religious community activist who believes in conspiracy theories against the U.S. government, and that’s about it. In explaining his opposition to Wahhaj, Congressman Royce repeats some of what I mention above as right-wing activist tropes, as he probably got his information from conservative activists in his district.

What I want to focus on about this video, however, is what the protestors are shouting. The “Go back home!” chant and terrorism references are obviously reprehensible to anyone likely to be reading his post, as Muslims have been in the United States since independence, and Founding Fathers explicitly mentioned Islam and Judaism among lists of Christian denominations to which they foresaw extending freedom of worship. More significant Muslim immigration began in the 1920′s, and chances are almost all the Muslims pictured were natural born American citizens. Part of what’s happening today, however, is that the U.S. is becoming more multicultural, and people who are used to living in a Christian bubble are having that bubble popped.

What mainly interests me is the emphasis on shari’a, which is becoming central to grassroots hostility toward Islam in the United States. Shari’a is usually translated as Islamic law, and is probably best thought of as God’s all-encompassing path for how people should live their lives in the world, including not only basic faith and morals, but personal status and criminal law. (The word was used in the 7th century to refer to a path which led to a desert watering hole.) In Sunni shari’a, there have for centuries there have been four recognized schools of thought, as well as a long-standing belief that the use of individual reason was no longer permitted and all Muslims should follow versions of shari’a as codified by these four schools around 900 CE. The consensus on this latter point as been steadily breaking down since the 1800′s, though medieval views continue to dominate in the Middle East which is what most Americans think of when they think about Islam.

A few days ago, Beenish Ahmed wrote of attempts to ban shari’a at the state level:

“Last week, Tennessee state senator Bill Ketron introduced a law that would prosecute any practice of Shariah law — defined as a ‘legal-political-military doctrine’ that promotes spread of ‘homegrown terrorism’ — as a felony, punishable with a minimum of 15 years of jail.

“In no unclear terms, the law equates the practice of Shariah — the oft-debated guidelines of the Muslim faith — with treason. ‘[K]nowing adherence to Shariah and to foreign Shariah authorities is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the United States government — with the aim of imposing Shariah on the people of this state.,’ it reads…

“Like the Vatican’s Code of Cannon Law for Catholics, Shariah, derived from the revelations of the Quran and the life of the Prophet Mohammad and interpreted by various scholars of Islam , offers a nebulous outline on how to practice Islam and adjudicates on matters of faith. Given that it many of the guidelines are highly specific instructions on religious rituals — for instance, on whether feet must be washed in each pre-prayer ablution — it is hard to imagine why legislators are so concerned with it.

“On a purely factual level, Shariah law has in fact been used and recognized in U.S. courts. If enforced, a major effect of the laws which include language banning not only the use of Shariah but foreign laws as well, could be that Shariah-compliant marriage contracts and international business contracts are rendered void.”

Ahmed does not mention the conservative, highly codified idea of shari’a, but does report on the idea of shari’a as it is lived and advocated in the United States. As she correctly points out, the Tennessee bill bans the practice of Islam, if not belief, and as such is sure to be struck down under the U.S. Constitution’s “free exercise” clause. These efforts, however, serve to keep a hostile vision of Islam front and center in the public mind. Part of this may relate to the insecurity felt by many conservative Christians at the bursting of their religiously monolithic bubbles mentioned above, which is also seen in their declining ability to use state power to promote their religion. It is also linked to support for American military ventures in the Middle East, conservative support for Israel, and perhaps in some cases holds shadowy hands with the idea that President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.

Hostility to Islam became unmistakable over the summer, when Rick Lazio made the previously unremarked Park51 community center in lower Manhattan a campaign issue. Those fires were also duplicitously stoked by FOXNews, the leading conservative news outlet, as seen clearly in this memorable Jon Stewart segment. Last month, FOXnews also interviewed Anjem Choudary, a British Muslim cleric who advocates shari’a, presumably the conservative, codified version, in the Unites States. He’s British, however, has little American support, and wound up not showing up for the pro-shari’a protest he tried in vain to get together. I can think of no reason to give him a platform save to stoke fear and try to portray a phantom menace as real. And then, what actually happened, was that protestors motivated by Choudary’s publicity in the American media, simply harassed a nearby Muslim performing his daily prayers.

Certain politicians and media outlets are using shari’a to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States for use in political grand-standing, as a wedge issue, and perhaps for ratings. As with Congressman Royce, most who partake of this discourse do not harass individual Muslims, or even condone such behavior. A portion of them do, however, and since the entire line of concern is fantasy, those who are stirring the pot bear a moral burden for the social climate they create. And that this is a social climate problem for American Muslims can be seen in the way the spreading of the shari’a meme even co-opts other people and institutions into its service.

The best example of this is Catholic Bishop of Springfield Thomas John Paprocki, who in his Christmas Eve homily said, “If we are lukewarm about our Christianity, the Islamists won’t need to invade with armies like they marched into Vienna in 1683, but they could simply continue to move in peacefully and legally as they are already doing in Western Europe and even here in the United States until they reach a majority and impose Islamist values and sharia law with little or no resistance.” Paprocki later said in response to the uproar that: “The context of my homily was the fact that Christian churches in Iraq had cancelled their Midnight Mass and other Christmas celebrations due to the threats of al-Quaida on their tiny Christian community that was still terrified from a bloody siege on a Baghdad church this past Oct. 31…My Midnight Mass homily was a call ‘to live our Catholic faith and practice our Christian beliefs much more fervently.’” I happen to believe him. Junaid Afeed called his comments, “misguided opinions of a priest dabbling in matters far beyond his expertise.”. The man can’t even spell al-Qa’ida correctly. The quote just mentioned, for example, references “Islamist” immigration, not “Muslim” immigration in general, and I believe that this would have been written differently by a man who hated all Muslims. On the issue of Christians in Iraq, Juan Cole among others has called attention to their plight.

Consider, however, the way in which this was done, which as Afeef pointed out was “dangerous an inflammatory.” One thread is Paprocki’s historical sense of a clash of religious civilizations, which probably resonates because of the survival over the centuries of a centralized and authoritative top hierarchy within the Roman Catholic Church. This is clearly not the case in Islam, however, and I can think of little Osama bin Laden has in common with the Ottoman Empire aside from Islam and the fact they both fought people. The other thread, however, is conservative orthodoxy. Bishop Paprocki’s comments about Iraq read like a vintage 2004 Republican campaign assessment. He also called for racial profiling, and then there’s the central bit about the non-existent creeping shari’a. In this case, I suspect that many within the Catholic hierarchy, based mainly on common views of abortion and gay rights, have come to identify strongly with American movement conservatism, despite the latter’s roots in American nationalism and conservative evangelical Protestantism. As part of this, they rely mainly on conservative media outlets, and so fall victim to the epistemic closure of the American right, which proves critical in shaping opinions on all issues where there is not a strong countervailing trend, such as that found in Catholicism on immigration, Orthodoxy on the environment, and so forth. In any case, however, Paprocki’s homily functionally cast a pall of suspicion over Muslim immigrants, and especially since most people still see Muslims as Others within the United States, all American Muslims, even if at this point nothing has happened in Springfield as has happened elsewhere.

This is the path of a dangerous falsehood . Produced with those with an agenda, it is passed to those who are either naive, ignorant, frightened, or culturally anxious, picked up by new potential channels of authority from those who might not listen to the original sources. And from there, even if most do no more than grandstand or propose meaningless laws, some act to harass and intimidate, and that is felt by Muslims throughout the country.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Fadlallah Dies

Brian Ulrich — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:40:00 +0000

One of the world’s top Shi’ite clerical leaders, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, has died:

“His career as an interpreter of Islamic jurisprudence and Shiite intellectual culture spanned more than half a century and touched on every aspect of public and private life for the millions of Shiite Muslims who considered him their ‘marja’, or ‘object of emulation’, a title bestowed upon only those clerics who have attained the highest level of scholarship and influence.

“But despite these varied religious and intellectual accomplishments, he is best remembered for his fierce resistance to the 1978-2000 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, as well as his role as the first major Muslim cleric of any sect to use religious justification for suicide bombing operations…

“Willingness to discard prior religious precedent…often endeared him to his community of followers far more than his support for military action against Israel, and turned him into one of the most liberal intellectuals in the Muslim world.

“In an interview four years ago, Fadlallah described much of what is considered Sharia as ‘nothing more than outdated Arabic tribal traditions that both pre-date and contradict the teachings of the prophets but are continued by falsely linking them to Islamic tradition’.

“It was this mentality that led him to challenge many tenets commonly associated with Islam that involve family law, divorce, womenâ€™s rights and even sex outside of marriage.

“He often granted divorces to women who could prove abuse or neglect by their husbands and would do so without consulting or even informing the husband or his family, as in his view their opinion was irrelevant once the tenets of marriage were broken by abuse or infidelity…

“This liberalism towards women led him to argue that not only would it be permissible for women to lead prayers in mosques for mixed audiences but that God had actually commanded that women should be allowed into the highest ranks of Shiite Islam as ayatollahs.”

Good pieces on his life and role have been written by Mohamad Bazzi and Juan Cole. Despite living in Lebanon, he was not that close to Hizbullah, but was deeply involved with the leaders of Iraq’s Da’wa Party, as well as its offshoots in the Gulf, particularly Bahrain, and the Bahraini cleric ‘Abdullah al-Ghurayfi is one possibility to rise to the head of his network.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Tantawi Dies

Brian Ulrich — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:20:58 +0000

This morning saw the death of Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, head of al-Azhar University, considered the world’s foremost seat of Sunni Islamic learning. Issandr El Amrani has an excellent overview of his career:

“Tantawi leaves a mixed legacy behind him: overall, the immediate verdict may be that he was too liberal for conservatives, too conservative for liberals, too compliant with the regime for those who want al-Azhar to be independent, and too independent for those in the regime who needed Azharite support to enact policy changes on issues as varied as Palestine, banking and TV game shows. The overall image is of a man besieged on all sides, but adept at fighting bureaucratic battles in the bloated, clerical civil service that al-Azhar has become.”

The whole piece is worth reading for its detail and local insight. As a historian, of course, I’m interested in what the Tantawi era meant for al-Azhar’s development as an institution. El Amrani touches upon this:

“He leaves behind an unreformed al-Azhar — an institution that includes a university and a school system as well as a theological center — whose credibility has hit rock-bottom. This may be because Tantawi was too pliant towards the regime, or because of the growth of various trends in contemporary Islam that reject al-Azhar’s centrality. While the Muslim Brothers dream of restoring al-Azhar to its former (imagined?) glories, Salafists and groups like the Quranists would do away with its mediation of religion altogether. The debate over al-Azhar and the trahison des clercs is far from over. Whoever replaces him — perhaps Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, another tentative modernizer — will have much work to repair al-Azhar’s standing and its vitality as a place of learning. It will also have to make difficult political decisions, especially on the issue of presidential succession, at a time when clerics are beginning to voice an opinion on the prospect of a Gamal Mubarak presidency.”

I suspect that the standard interpretation will be that Tantawi was the regime’s man by Midan Husayn. He was essentially Mubarak’s agent as Egypt’s Chief Mufti, and his reformist views should be seen in that light – not that they were necessarily insincere, but simply that they were what the regime wanted and Tantawi saw nothing wrong with allying himself with the government. This alliance, of course, may in some circles have hurt his message’s credibility as well as his own.

When I think of al-Azhar, however, I think beyond Egypt. I’ve seen Al-Azhar called the “Sunni Muslim Vatican,” but that’s a terrible analogy, as no formalized hierarchy establishes its position. A better analogy would be an Islamic Harvard in a tradition that emphasizes religious learning. Its status is based on multiple perceived indicators which are not necessarily directly tied to the quality of the education one gets there. Yet just as a Harvard degree carries cachet regardless of higher education gossip about the quality of the ivies vis a vis, say, the top tier of liberal arts schools in the U.S. Walking around al-Azhar, you can’t help but notice students from throughout the Muslim world, who will return to their countries with the prestige of an al-Azhar degree.

Of course, El Amrani is right that an assault on the ulama’s privileged authority in religious interpretation has been a key element of both liberal and conservative Islamic reform movements throughout the world since the 1800′s. In her excellent 1999 International Journal of Middle East Studies article “Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952-94),” Malika Zeghal addressed some shifts in the construction of religious education, but didn’t really tackle of extent to which Azhari claims to continued authority were accepted by the Egyptian public, much less how the issues with its administration and politicization have affected its stature around the world. The experiences of its students and their affect on their own communities are as much a part of al-Azhar in the world as is its moral authority in the Nile Valley.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Engaging the Muslim World: The Wahhabi Myth

Brian Ulrich — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:02:07 +0000

In reading the third and shortest chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, “The Wahhabi Myth: From Riyadh to Doha,” I was struck by something that wasn’t there. The point of this chapter is that Wahhabism does not cause terrorism, nor is Saudi Arabia the main exporter of anti-American violence in the region. He does say that Saudi Arabia has a deeply flawed human rights record and puritan domestic moral policy that the United States and its allies could address through diplomatic pressure, but detaches that from Wahhabism as well by describing the different conditions in Qatar. Given his emphasis on terminology in the last chapter, however, I’m surprised he didn’t go into the ways in which “Wahhabi” itself is usually used as a slur in intra-Muslim polemics, and is not used by Wahhabis themselves, who prefer to be called “Muwahidun,” which refers to God’s unity and is sometimes translated as “unitarians.” As for Wahhabi itself, I’m reminded of something one of my professors once said about “Fascism” – that today, it’s meaning has been largely reduced to, “this position is to my right, and I disagree with it.” Similarly, my understanding is that “Wahhabi” serves much the same function in Islamic theological debates, and has since it was coined centuries ago. This has two implications. One is that, when you read about “Wahhabis” somewhere causing problems, they may not be actual followers of the doctrines of Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhab – a lot depends on your source. Another is that it is used as a slur precisely because Saudi Arabia, far from being a society to which most Muslims aspire, is seen as a somewhat crazy, doctrinaire place by many.

Also in reading this chapter, I found I like “fundamentalist vigilante” more one its own terms than as something produced as a deliberate alternative to “Salafi Jihadi.” (I actually think Salafi, given the contemporary capture of that term by the theological conservatives, works well for the purposes for which “Wahhabi” is often employed.) In any case, Cole’s decoupling of the Wahhabism and militancy is similar to that argued for by David Commins in The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, though he seems not to have read Commins’s work, which would have buttressed his mention that the forms of extremism causing international concern owe more to the Sahwa tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood than they do to Wahhabism per se. To all this, Cole adds another point that Saudi Arabia has actually been a close ally of the United States, and has even taken the lead in trying to lead the Arab world to peace with Israel. This is a necessary corrective to the view that the kingdom is somehow our mortal enemy, though an informed reader might wonder about the differences within both the Saudi royal family and the country’s religious establishment.

Cole also describes Qatar in this chapter, and spends several pages on al-Jazeera that serve to make their own points about that station which are similar to those Abu Aardvarkian readers of this blog are probably already familiar with. (Marc Lynch’s work is actually cited in the endnotes here.) If memory serves, Sharjah, one of the components of the UAE, is also Wahhabi. It’s not relevant to the point of this chapter, but as a scholar, it might be interesting to explore the relationship of those dynasties with the Wahhabi ulama, as well as that of the Rashidis of Ha’il during the 1800′s, in attempting to understand the differences among Wahhabi states.

The takeaways from this chapter are that Saudi Arabia is not a geopolitical enemy of the United States, and conservatism does not equal militancy. Both points are well argued.

Engaging the Muslim World: Muslim Activism, Muslim Radicalism

Brian Ulrich — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:58:26 +0000

The second chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World tells the story of two organizations, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, which are vastly different but yet too often conflated in American minds. He portrays the Muslim Brotherhood as a critical component of Egypt’s political landscape which the United States needs to engage if it is serious about democratic reform in the Arab world, while arguing that al-Qaeda is not only a minor group in the larger scheme of things, but a spent force. In fact, he says that, “The September 11 operation…was the flailing about of aging revolutionaries banished to camps in the rugged wastelands of failed states.”

Much of the first half of the chapter is taken up with a history of the Muslim Brotherhood, which places its origins in the context of the Egyptian and Arab nationalist movements of the early 20th century, and traces it through the Nasser era and into the present as its relations with the government, organizational structure and activities, and attitude toward violence fluctuates over time. He also addresses the thinking of Sayyid Qutb, whose thinking was never accepted by most Islamists, let alone most Muslims, but has become important in terrorist circles.

Many of the innovations in this chapter concern terminology, and a common thread is that, by positing a normative Islam, Cole then denies the use of Islamic terminology to al-Qaeda and similar organizations. With the base term of “Islamic,” Cole asserts early that because it refers to the ideals of the religion, it cannot modify “terrorism,” and much of the chapter can be read as a defense of how terrorist activities are contrary to Islam as understood by most Muslims. He also replaces “Salafi Jihadis” with “fundamentalist vigilantes” by reference to standard theological definitions of “salafi” and “jihad.” This feels chancier, as Thomas Hegghammer, in trying to cull labels for these phenomena from Arabic sources, found that “jihadi salafi” today refers in practice to transnational fundamentalist militants. Cole also makes a strong case for seeing the militant Islamist movements as cults, of which his core definition is, “a religious group characterized by values that put it in severe tension with the outside society, and organized so as to demand very high levels of obedience and conformity to the cult leader.”

In laying out his view of al-Qaeda as a desperate force, Cole places emphasis on the defeat of Egypt’s internal terrorists in the 1990′s, which led Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden to shift their focus to the United States as the “far enemy.” A few pages later he mentions Egyptian dominance of al-Qaeda leadership. He also defines al-Qaeda narrowly as only those fighters who have pledged loyalty to Bin Laden. I happen to agree that al-Qaeda is falling apart, but I can’t draw these connections so neatly given the multiple theaters of “fundamentalist vigilante” activity, and I’m also interested in the possible “banner definition” of al-Qaeda which the index suggests may be addressed in future chapters.

Cole also assigns Israel a crucial role for both the Muslim Brotherood and al-Qaeda. I don’t know much about the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930′s, but Cole’s assigning it a role in the MB’s activities during that period fits the general picture I have of Arab politics during that decade. As far as al-Qaeda is concerned, he refers to Muhammad Atta’s radicalization by the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1996 called Operation Grapes of Wrath, and particularly the Qana debacle, and also cites Flagg Miller’s work on al-Qaeda documents retrieved from Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban government. I’ve been someone inclined to downplay the Israeli role for al-Qaeda, but found all this convincing.

Cole’s most controversial conclusion is likely to be his comparison between the Islamic militants and the far right in the United States represented by Timothy McVeigh and other fringe figures from the 1990′s. I find that, frankly, a perfectly good analogy. I hope, however, that with such groups starting to resurface now that an African-American Democrat is in the White House, Cole doesn’t get any more material for future commentary along those lines.