Chapter Two
Islam as an American Religion
Introduction
In the wake of the decolonization of the world after the Second World War, notably with the end of British rule in the subcontinent and the birth of Pakistan on August 14, 1947, as an independent state and of independent India on the following day, an opportunity was presented to the inhabitants of these two countries, in time to all formerly colonized peoples of the world, to immigrate to and settle in the former so-called mother countries, or the European countries that had colonized them. From the subcontinent, the flow of immigrants, including tens of thousands of both Muslim students and families, began with the start of the decade of the 1950s to go to Great Britain. In the 1960s Pakistani students began to go for higher studies to North America, largely the United States, as well and, on the completion of their education in the United States, a great number of them decided not to go back to Pakistan. Soon it became a Pakistani dream, not only for the young and unmarried, but also for married men with families, too, to immigrate to and settle in America and Canada. Countless thousands realized their dream. This phenomenon of the second part of the twentieth century has continued to this day and will no doubt continue in the twenty-first century as well. Today there are permanently settled in the United States, by most estimates, approximately six million immigrant Muslims from all parts of the world. They have to live Islam, for the first time in Islamic history, in a very different kind of environment. This presents, by itself, the need for rethinking Islam in its new—Western generally and American particularly—environment.
But this poses a cruel dilemma for Muslims and, I am sure, for America too. This dilemma is that Islam, as it was historically understood and lived by Muslims in their old country, whatever that country was, if understood and lived in the same way in the United States might, indeed in all probability would, produce a misfit between the newly arrived Muslim immigrants to America and the American way of life. To be sure and to its eternal credit, the United States Constitution does provide the freedom of religion, meaning that every one is free to believe in one’s own religion, worship in one’s own way, and live freely one’s religion within the bounds of the law of the land of the United States. Even so, undeniably Muslims do find themselves up against a whole new environment in America in which they must reorder their daily personal and communal lives. Given this fact of life, I think, there is a definite and urgent need to rethink Islam and Muslim life and living in America. Indeed, there is an urgent need to rethink Islam everywhere in the world, including the holiest of the holy places of Islam, such as Makkah and Madinah. Much of old thinking about Islam belongs to the museum of history now. Muslims in America are ideally placed to do this rethinking about Islam.
I have italicized the word "rethink" to stress the point, because I do not think that Muslim life and living can be business as usual in their new environment, actually and literally the new world, of America in which millions of Muslims have freely and voluntarily chosen to make their new home. But, instead of saying that Muslims need to rethink Islam in America, I could just as well have used some other appropriate and telling word of the English language as, for instance, reinterpret, re-conceptualize, re-understand, reconsider, reexamine, relearn, reconstruct, reconstitute, recreate, remake, rediscover, retool, readjust, reorient, revitalize, revivify, restructure, remodel, modernize, postmodernize, even reinvent Islam in America as an American religion. Islam’s future in the modern and postmodern world may depend on it.
In all of Islamic history, Muslims, probably even non-Muslims, have thought of Islam as a single religion. Today we should speak of, not Islam but of Islams, as Jews speak of Judaisms and Christians of Christianitys. This indeed is proper and called for, too, in the age of pluralism and multiculturalism in which we live. We may speak of Islams in the sense that there are, for
example, the particular types of Islam that are preferred by and prevalent among Islam’s various sects, races, ethnic groups, and, above all, in the more than sixty different and sovereign nations, whose citizens cannot travel from one country to another without obtaining a valid international passport from their nation’s government and a valid visa from the government of the country to which they wish to travel. Just because the Qur'an makes it obligatory upon a Muslim to perform Hajj, or pilgrimage, for which one has to travel to Makkah, does not mean that he or she can simply go to that holy city of Islam. One can do so only if one has a passport from one’s government and a visa from the Saudi Arab government. This, for example, in the modern world is a new condition for living Islam.
Today, Islam can be likened to a cafeteria. You throw your glance all around, take stock of all the various foods and drinks in sight, and pick and choose what you think you would like to eat and drink and should eat and drink and which would be healthful for you, given your tastes and preferences, your budget, and the religious and medical restrictions, if any, on your diet. So Islam today should be seen as something of a cafeteria, too, from which you/we can pick and choose from amongst its commandments, injunctions, traditions, institutions, concepts, precepts, norms, and what you/we are habituated to from our upbringing at the hands of our parents and a sense of filial piety and loyalty toward our family traditions and customs and to what your/our parents themselves did in our sight and experience and to our knowledge. Indeed, we see Muslim immigrants in America usually living their lives in much the same way, or as far as it is possible, according to what they were familiar with and habituated to in their old country. But there is choice in the matter, too. For example, we can eat or refuse to eat non-zabiha (non-kosher) meat; grow a beard or not; practice (accept or pay) riba, or usury and interest, or not; date, form relationships, and engage in premarital sex with Muslim or non-Muslim persons—openly or secretly; continue to practice arranged marriages or opt for love marriages; practice polygamy and cohabit polygamously or contract muta, or temporary marriage, as consenting adults, privately, but all too Islamically or not; and so on and so forth in the United States. Indeed, America offers Muslims an opportunity to jettison the whole body of the Shariah, Islamic law, and espouse and abide by the civil law of the United States, as Turkey did under the leadership of Ataturk, when in the 1920s it jettisoned the Shariah and implemented Swiss civil law in that country, which they abide by even to this day.
But whereas Muslims in the modern world can still choose to live by the Shariah, they can also choose to reinterpret, readjust, and even abolish some of its unjust laws that sanction female (sex) slavery, concubinage, polygamy, muta (temporary marriage), child marriage (including marriage of a prepubescent girl to a man old enough to be her grandfather), divorce by repudiation of the wife, unequal weights of the witness of man and woman, unequal inheritances of sons and daughters, and so on and so forth. Muslims and Muslim states, societies, and families can also establish the equality of the statuses, dignities, rights, and roles of men and women. In the modern world, we actually have a real choice to do these things. The choice is ours. The chains that bind us are the ones we have bound and keep ourselves bound in. It is our ancestors and we ourselves who have made an iron cage of Islam.
The problem arises when and if one group, sect, party, or nation of Islam seeks to impose its Islam upon another group, sect, party, or nation of Islam, because then there is not only conflict, civil strife, and bad blood, but even blood-shed, among Muslims, which phenomenon we are witnessing in our day in so many Muslim countries. American Muslims need to think about, interpret, and construct—indeed, what would be even more desirable is that they must rethink, reinterpret, and reconstruct---Islam in their new, i.e., American environment, and the new conditions of life in which they have to live Islam. Needed urgently is an Islam rethought as an American religion, because only as an American religion can and will Islam help them to survive, succeed, and flourish as Americans? In this project, American Muslims may even have to engage in deconstructing past Islams, or understandings and interpretations of Islam that were formulated by our ancestors under wholly different environment and conditions of life. What is more, in this project the orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist ulama, or religious scholars, of this, that, or some other Muslim country would be of little help, for they still have the mindset and the thinking habits of a time long past and the conditions of Muslim life and living long gone. America is an entirely new Dar-ul-Islam, or House of Islam. For centuries we thought of the West as Dar-ul-harb, or House of War. Today we cannot
afford to think of the West, of America in the main, as Dar-ul-harb. Politics among nations is not always harmonious, and, to be sure, there is plenty between the nations of Islam and the nations of the West to be acrimonious about, but even so Muslims cannot regard the Medieval Islamic classification of the world into Dar-ul-Islam (House of Islam) and Dar-ul-harb (House of War) as valid in our own time. The world has become truly a Global Village. These old familiar categories of Muslim thought are obsolete today.
I do not think there is any place in Islam today to divide the world along the orthodox classification of the world into the House of Islam and House of War, with the West being regarded as the House of War. That only produces what is called the clash of civilizations, so often resulting in terrorism and terrorist acts carried out by misguided Muslims against not only specific targets, but also against innocent persons. My point is that Islam today is as much a religion of people in the Western world at it is in the Muslim world. The former is attested by many millions of Muslims living in the West. This is certainly true in the United States. There are now thousands of mosques and other Islamic institutions in America. It is, therefore, not surprising that, in a major speech, "The U.S. Is Against Terrorism, Not Islam," which Mr. William B. Milam, Ambassador of the United States of America to Pakistan, delivered before the English Speaking Union of Lahore, on December 2, 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, he should have said the following:
Another reason that the United States is not an opponent of Islam is the fact that the United States is, itself, a major Muslim society (italics added for emphasis). Now this may seem like a strange claim, maybe even a false one. But in saying this I want to dramatize the fact that between six and seven million American citizens are Muslims. Another way of putting this fact is that the American Muslim population is larger than Jordan’s is and larger than the combined population of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman put together. Muslim Americans are found in every state and region of the country, they contribute to every part of the American economy –from laborers to company executives; they serve in the United States armed forces; and they are officials in all government departments, including the diplomatic service.8
I have lived in America since 1962. On the basis of my own experience, I can attest to the truth of the statement made by His Excellency Ambassador William Milam.
The Environment in Which Muslims Live in America
My own familiarity with Muslim life and living is limited to my experience and observation of the same in three countries, viz., India, Pakistan, and America. Of these, India and America are non-Muslim majority countries, but Pakistan is a sovereign Muslim country with an overwhelming majority of Muslims, Sunni Muslims that is. This fact, whether it is a Muslim majority or a Muslim minority country, by itself, makes a radical difference in the conditions of Muslim life and living in each country. For example in secular and democratic India, given the past history of Indian Muslims, the most important issue of controversy between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority is whether the Government of India would allow Muslims, contrary to the obligation of all Indians to abide by the uniform civil code of the country, to practice their own Islamic personal law, as laid down in their own Shariah, or Islamic law, dealing with such matters as marriage, divorce, divorce settlement, custody of children, inheritance, law of evidence, etc. In secular and democratic America, where all Americans are obliged to abide by the uniform civil code of the United States of America, the Muslim community being so very, actually negligibly, small and new, American Muslims have not—not yet—raised the demand of being allowed to practice their own Islamic personal law, as laid down in their own Shariah.
By contrast, in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Muslims are free to do as they please. In Pakistan, they can practice not only the personal law of their Shariah, but its civil, criminal, commercial, and international laws, too. But what civil strife and murderous conditions of life and living in Pakistan the controversy and disagreements over the laws of and how to implement the Shariah have created in that country is only too well known. Similar conditions have been created in a number of other Muslim countries, too, on account of the controversy and disagreements over the implementation of the Shariah. Tens of
thousands of Muslims are being killed violently on account of disputes over the Shariah in the Muslim world. Even intelligent and well educated Muslims, who know that so many parts of the Shariah are quite unsuitable today, because they are dated, outdated, and obsolete, are drawn into these disputes.
The point I am trying to make is simply that the environment and conditions of Muslim life and living in any country are a crucible in how Islam is understood, interpreted, and lived. I am certain that, for instance, the practice of a certain kind of Islam which inspires and tolerates "honor killings" of unmarried daughters and sisters by their fathers and/or brothers to save the honor of the family, because the former are found, suspected, or rumored to be guilty of improprieties of conduct and sometimes of premarital sexual intercourse, cannot be and will not be allowed to go unpunished in the United States. But in my own former country, Pakistan, such murders usually go unpunished. Honor killings are common in Middle Eastern countries, too, as reported, for instance, in a well-documented book of essays, viz., Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, edited by Mai Yamani (New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp. 141-194). In her essay, "Crimes of Honour and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies," Lama Abu-Odeh writes: "A paradigmatic example of a crime of honour [sic] is the killing of a woman by her father or brother for engaging in, or being suspected of engaging in, [forbidden] sexual practices before or outside marriage." In an informal conversation with an Arab physician-alim (scholar), I once mentioned this to him and asked him as to what was included within the scope of extramarital forbidden "sexual practices?" His reply was that it, the phrase forbidden "sexual practices," included three things in the main, viz., 1) for an unmarried girl, fornication or any contact with a boy or man which may potentially lead to it; 2) for a married woman adultery; 3) for both unmarried and married woman, sexual activity with another girl or woman (lesbian sex); and, he added as an aside, 4) even masturbation by a girl is looked upon as a serious enough crime to be punished. But what is never done in a Muslim society is to kill a boy or a man for engaging in any of these crimes, i.e., pederasty, homosexuality, prostitution, illicit sexual intercourse with a girl or woman, in a word, sex before or outside marriage. And there is of course an open season on dating and premarital sex and cohabitation with foreign girls, when Muslim men (unmarried or married) are abroad at Western universities for their education.
Be that as it may, I want now to list briefly some of the salient features of the environment—legal, social, cultural, moral, ethical, political, ideological, economic, and psychological—in which immigrant Muslims live in America, which have already begun to influence and shape Muslim life and living and will no doubt do so in the foreseeable future. These are:
Indeed, because American Islam has left behind all these taboos, restrictions and prohibitions of the older Islams, it has made itself more attractive to Americans as well. It was certainly the restrictions and constraints upon the activities and movements of girls and women in older Islams that earned for Islam the reputation of being a primitive religion in the judgment of the people of the West and rightly so. With the veil of the woman’s face, segregation of the sexes, polygamy, divorce by repudiation, seclusion of women, denial of girls’ or women’s education, denial of the right to work outside the home, compulsory domesticity, etc. etc. no longer being the most outstanding features of the religion of Islam and of Muslim life and living in America, that Islam has begun to look attractive and acceptable to people, women particularly, of the West, too. In time Islam might even look as good as Christianity to Western women. At any rate, American Islam is on its way to becoming a new and unique version of Islam.
I am not raising the question; can Islam be an American religion? to sensationalize the issue. Of course, Islam can be an American religion, as any other religion can. Indeed in the de facto as well as de jure senses, Islam is already an American religion. Thanks to the American Constitution and the common consensus in America, all Americans, including American Muslims, are guaranteed full and complete freedom of religion, religious beliefs, and religious worship. Actually, there is
greater freedom of religion in the United States of America than in any Muslim country. I think Dr. Murad Wilfried Hoffman, a convert from Christianity to Islam and formerly the German ambassador to Algeria and Morocco, is quite right when describing the comparative political realities in Western and Muslim countries today that "it is less risky to promote Islam in [his native] Germany than in Turkey."10 What Dr. Hoffman says of Turkey is true of the majority of Muslim countries. What is more, the predominant American religion, viz., Christianity, allows more freedom and choice to its own and to the followers of other religions to remain faithful to their religion, but also to convert to another religion, and, if not satisfied with their new religion, to revert to their former religion. Anyone can do so any number of times. As we know, Islam does not grant this sort of freedom of religion to its own followers. The Shariah, or Islamic law, defines the conversion of a Muslim to another religion or to irreligion (atheism) as irtidad, or apostasy, meaning abandonment of Islam, akin to the crime of treason, and lays down for it a capital punishment, too. In his Dictionary of Qur'anic Terms and Concepts, Mustansir Mir writes: "Traditional Islamic law prescribes the penalty of death for a Muslim who commits apostasy. The punishments is not stated in the Qur'an, but is said to be based on certain ahadith [Traditions of Prophet Muhammad]." To my knowledge, no other religion or religious law prescribes capital punishment for anyone who chooses freely to abandon it. It is incomprehensible to me that Islam, itself a missionizing and proselytizing religion, should prescribe a capital punishment, including death, for the "crime" for choosing to abandon it. Why? If others can convert to Islam and are welcomed heartily by Muslims, why can a Muslim not convert to another religion and be welcomed equally heartily by its followers?
But if Americans and the American Constitution provide freedom of religion to one and all in the United States, it does not mean that legal restrictions are not placed upon the observance of the religious institutions and practices of minority religions in America. Let only one instance suffice. As we know, American law prohibits the practice of polygamy, or the plurality of wives, unlimited in Mormonism and limited up to four in Islam, within the boundaries of the United States of America. By law, an American citizen may have only one legally wedded-wife. This is a clear restriction on the religious freedom of Mormons and Muslims. For polygamists, the only option open and available to practice polygamy, if they so wish, is outside the bounds of American law. Insofar as extramarital sex and cohabitation are not unlawful in the United States, some Americans do, in point of fact, practice polygamy privately, but wholly legitimately according to their religion. Hence, Muslims can circumvent the anti-polygamy laws of the United States by privately having and cohabiting polygamously with two, three, and four wives, of whom, however, only one may be the legally—according to the letter of the American law of the land and its observance—wedded wife.
As to the question of American tolerance or the lack of it for minority religions, especially Islam, American prejudices, intolerance, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims in domestic and foreign policies are not uncommon. And they are usually very plain to Muslims in America and abroad. You will hardly find a Muslim who has not suffered discrimination at the hands of American Christians and Jews and other, mostly Oriental, Americans, so often and so very willing to score points with the securely established and powerful Americans—obviously Christian and Jewish. I have myself been the victim of it at school, in the civil service, and at other places in the American society over the last more than three decades. But all in all, it more or less balances out against the benefits and privileges minority religions and their followers, including Muslims, enjoy in America. Hence, though it is unfortunate and regrettable that Islam and Muslims are often the victims of intolerance, Muslims, more often than not, take a certain or considerable amount of "bad press," prejudice, hatred, and hostility against Islam and Muslims in their stride, as they must. Indeed for Muslims, the privilege and opportunity of living in America and the benefits of holding an international passport of the United States of America are so great that they outweigh all the negatives of living in America, put together. For me personally, things did not go well in India, and then as a refugee in Pakistan, but I did succeed in making a life of sorts in America, though nothing to write home about. America still proved a good bargain for me. I think this is the experience and opinion of virtually all immigrant Muslims in America.
At any rate, I raise the question: Can Islam be an American religion? not at the empirical level, but at the doctrinal.
At the doctrinal level, the question is relevant because, whereas the religious, philosophical, ideological, and constitutional basis of the American way of life and living and the ordering and functioning of the social, political, economic, and cultural institutions of the American society is secularism, Islam rejects secularism as a basis of the Muslim way of life. The American espousal of secularism is in perfect accordance with the teaching of the Christian Bible, popularly called the New Testament. Jesus said: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s."12 Islamic theology is radically different from this. Caesar has no separate and independent claim and domain from that of God. All belongs to God. Nothing belongs to Caesar. The Muslim’s allegiance and loyalty are due to God alone. In this respect, Islam is more like Judaism than Christianity.
The ideology of secularism is usually defined narrowly as the separation of the church and the state, whereby religion is confined to the sphere of the private spirituality of the individual—religion being a private matter and one dimension of the individual’s life—with little, actually and strictly speaking, nothing to do with what the Shariah, or Islamic law, calls muamlat, or transactions in the public sphere, in which exists the state as one of the institutions of society. Hence, under secularly determined separation of church and state, it is not only the three branches of the government, viz., the executive, legislature, and judiciary, that are put beyond the concern or intervention of religion, but also public education, higher education, professional education, morality, ethics, economics, politics, business, finance, banking, industry, work, science, philosophy, literature, art, entertainment, sexuality, social relations, gender relations, division of labor, marriage, family, procreation, assisted reproduction, abortion, suicide, medicine, psychiatry, and so on and so forth. In a secular society, God belongs and has a place neither in the elementary school, nor in the graduate seminar, nor in the science laboratory, nor in the factory, nor in the courtroom, nor in the cabinet room, nor in the boardroom, nor, for that matter, in the bedroom. Strictly speaking, He does not even have a right to vote, much less a veto power in the public affairs of the nation. The separation of the church (what is private in the life of the individual) and the state (what is public in the life of the society) in the United States of America has been carried to a point that it bothers even the Christians, though perhaps, for historical and doctrinal reasons, it bothers Catholics more than it does Protestants, except perhaps fundamentalists among them. Witness the title of Catholic clergyman Richard John Newhaus’s book, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America,13 which argues the thesis that in America religion is systematically excluded from public discourse, i.e., kept from making a formal input in the process of discussion, deliberation, and decision-making, in the area of the basic choices and/or policy decisions of the American society, which, in his judgment, is equivalent to leaving the public square naked.
In Islam, as is only too well known, religion is neither a private matter of the individual, neither is there a doctrinal basis for the separation of the church and the state. In Islam religion, spirituality, culture, morality, ethics, economics, politics, government, judiciary, law, marriage, family, sexuality, society, education, business, industry, art, literature, philosophy, science, and the conduct of business life and the practice of the professions all come under the influence, power, and, indeed, the veto power of Islam and the Shariah, or Islamic law. Islam for Muslims is a comprehensive way of life and living and thought. What is more, the Qur'an and Sunnah laid down the basic rules of life and living originally already at the time of the advent of Islam fourteen hundred years ago. These basic rules were codified into the law manuals of the five surviving fiqhi, or jurisprudential, schools of law more than a thousand years ago and have remained fixed since. When Muslims speak of implementing the Shariah, or Islamic law, it is one of these codifications of the Shariah that they have in mind. Much has changed since the codifications of the Shariah. To insist on its implementation or even to expect the individual Muslim—man or woman—today to live by its laws would either make life impossible for him or her or would certainly pose some insurmountable problems for Muslim life and living in America today.
Like all American religions, American Islam, too, is acquiring a private character, though this goes against the grain of the Islamic religion, which is not only the religion of the community in the collective sense, but also asserts a right to be the publicly professed and patronized religion of the state and the organized institutions of the society in all its departments, as is the case in countries like Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Where this is not the case, there is inevitably a conflict between religion and
state with all its consequences, virtually none of them good for the society. In America, too, Islam and Muslims are showing a marked tendency toward organization and collectivization in religion. This is in part due to the suspicion with which Islam is viewed in the United states, both in terms of its fundamental nature and the inherent tendencies of Muslims toward fundamentalism, on the one hand, and the perception that Muslims in the United States and elsewhere in the West are fanatics, hateful of the West, and potential terrorists who are out to destroy Western interests, institutions, and way of life, on the other. Even some thoughtful and serious immigrants Muslims in America fear this and voice their opinions publicly. Most Muslims in America, as those in Muslim countries, denounce and reject out of hand American cultural constructions of gender and sexuality, love marriage, sexual values, way of life, family structure, and American feminism with its advocacy and practice of women’s sexual and social freedom, independence, and equality with men—without any traditional or conventional restraints, constraint, or prohibitions on women’s dress, drinking, smoking, drug use, dating, relationships, intermingling and being alone, unchaperoned, with members of the opposite sex, cohabitation or men and women living together, and premarital, extramarital, homosexual, and bisexual behavior of both men and women. The very idea in Islam that sons and daughters ought to marry the person that their parents choose, not the one they choose, puts Islam and America at odds. Yet and yet, Islam and Muslims in America, as in so many other countries of the West, are here to stay. So, Islam and America both have to find a way to co-exist. That alone makes it necessary that Islam in its new environment must be rethought. And, I think, there would be no better place to start this rethinking of Islam than on the questions and issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage and the adjustment to modernity and/or postmodernity under which Muslim life would be lived in America and elsewhere in the West.
