Planning for Culture?

Can this up-and-coming culture be planned and strategized as it currently has? Various institutes and the Muslim equivalent of think-tanks have been planning and are competing to be the voice of this new culture. Each seeks to identify and define it according to their own understanding. This has led us to the motivation of a large part of the struggle between so-called traditionalists and progressives. Both sides seem to be fighting to define Islam as it represents itself in the lifestyle of American Muslims.

All groups have inherited one thing distinctly American, the thirst for academic relevance and legitimacy. Therefore we have one group, the pseudo-traditionalists, planning priorities and curriculum for their institutions a hundred years in advance, seeking to create an academic subculture where Imam Ghazali (R) replaces Aristotle and Kant.

The progressives have a more free-form agenda to hijack the spotlight by publishing books asserting their newfound Oriental-Americanness in a dozen of academically acceptable ways, including outrageous sexual poetry to quaint books announcing self-identity.

Of course within this spectrum of positions there are a variety of shades of gray, but in the end we have polar opposite approaches towards making Islam “American”. One is through the incorporation of Islamic values into the American lens of academic and secular humanist ideas, and the other approach is through the severing of unsuitable parts of Islam to American values.

The most interesting thing about how different the approaches are working is that they are all inherently Western in their underlying mindset. All of the approaches have been distinctly academic and elitist, relying on the appeal to the scholarly authority of the West in order to legitimize its own success.

Another commonality is that all of these new approaches towards Islam and culture are proud of their separation from the culture of the East. Eastern cultures have been doomed to be viewed by these groups as being completely anti-Islamic or being excessively Islamic, the final result being that the culture is something that needs to be eliminated. Indeed, many of our foremost thinkers seem to propagate the belief that the East was an experiment in Islam, one that ultimately resulted in the utter chaos that exists within that hemisphere today. They proudly proclaim that by establishing Islam in the West, we can take the now extinguished Eastern Islamic glory and implant it into the West in a way that is both Western and Islamic.

Yet the “Islamic” values that have been deemed acceptable for import are those which are deeply rooted in academia and the heterodox. Today we find that it is those Islamic movements which existed in the vacuums of Islamic history which are being promoted most. Ideas and trends which were quickly eliminated by traditional Muslim societies are now propped up in the false garb of traditionalism, masquerading as the faces of traditional Islamic societies when in fact they are its malignant tumors which were cauterized by the scholars, saints, and Sultans of the time. How can we truly call ourselves ‘traditional’ if we simply import the discarded remnants of a past society, as opposed to those institutions and ideas which led to its glory? Further to that point, how can we perform our duties in reviving Islam, when we don’t hold even superficial ties back to the cultures which carried Islam to us?

The issue here is the creation of a vision of an American Islamic culture before the reality has formed. And the reality has not formed because we have sought to marginalize all other Islamic cultures in the American Islamic discourse. Hence, we are left with the rubble from the battlefield of a variety of clashing ideals. These battles over defining culture between progressives, scholars, and reformers are occurring while everyone is ignoring the very traditional way that culture was impacted by Islam throughout Islamic history. The traditional process of influence involved people interacting with each other, a culture bringing what it has learned to another culture with tolerance and acceptance. It is clear that this type of growth cannot be planned or schemed into existence. It certainly cannot occur while there are hostile feelings across cultures and harsh religious arguments against established Muslim cultures.

By seeking to spend hours in small conference rooms pondering over methods through which to brilliantly create an American-Islamic culture, we do ourselves a disservice by stifling the growth of a nascent Islamic community, one that can only grow naturally. Recently, the Islamic Society of Boston erected a monumental masjid which is able to facilitate thousands of Muslims. While such a feat certainly contributes both architecturally and historically to the creation of an American Muslim culture, this project has left many small Muslim communities to the wayside. Masjid Noor, the markaz of Tablighi Jammat in New England, will now lose a great number of congregants, thus putting its already tenuous rent in more peril. The Mosque for the Praising of Allah, the oldest masjid which has a large African-American population, has also been displaced by this project. By theorizing on the topic of an American-Islamic culture in the comfort of large conference halls, we destroy the culture being created by those who live American Islam.

Planning a new American Islam, especially in the absence of the holistic religious and cultural tradition of the majority of its people cannot be successful. If the project continues down this path, we are sure to meet the exact failure that was experienced by the Salafi movement. American Islam will have to develop organically, and it will either succeed or fail as a result of how well Muslims will be able to incorporate traditional Islam (which includes traditional Eastern cultures) and the new culture of America today.

Immigrants are therefore key to establishing a legitimate American Islamic culture, yet we find that they are the ones who are most distanced from their own past.

(continued with “Afterthought Immigrants and Introducing Self-Hating South Asians“)