Transition time

In July, 2005 I plan to retire after thirty-three years at the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In preparation for this, I have begun working half-time for the coming year. You will notice on the masthead that our capable associate editor, Rabia Harris, will serve as Interim Editor while I will serve as Editor-in-Chief.

My health is good and my commitment and zest for peacemaking are as strong as ever. After retirement I plan to largely devote myself to research  and writing, along with some peacemaking efforts, but I will also continue my life-long joy in gardening and playing the clarinet.

Rabia has edited this present issue on the exciting renaissance going on in Islam today. I am sure you will agree with me on the importance of this topic that has largely escaped the attention of the media.

Special thanks to you, our readers, and to Fellowship staff, writers, artists, and photographers. We are sharing a wonderful journey together. Peace!

Richard Deats

editor@forusa.org

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In the Name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Caring

The Way Forward

Things look bad in the short run.

There’s injustice everywhere, and a widespread condition of fear (or “terror”). Everyone seems to be at everyone else’s throat. Groups incomprehensibly throw themselves at other groups, often enough in the name of religion. And Muslims seem somehow embroiled in every crisis the media choose to air.

Since communism lost its aura of numinous evil, and after the tragedy of 9/11 released in Americans a deeply disquieting sense of exposure and vulnerability, Islam has turned into the monster of choice for the world’s most powerful state. And that has been grim news for the 1.5 billion Muslims on the planet, who feel themselves more exposed and vulnerable every day. With so much insecurity in the air, an indefinite escalation of Muslim-centered violence would seem to be inevitable.

But life has a way of surprising us. And when we only focus on the short run, we often can’t see the forest of history for the trees of headline news.

Faith urges us to take the long view. It insists that in the long run, “all manner of things shall be well.” As Martin Luther King, Jr., so beautifully put it, “The arc of the universe may be long, but it bends toward justice.” Or as the Qur’an teaches us, “The scum disappears like froth cast out, but that which is for the good of humanity remains in the earth.” Such a statement implies that the world contains an ongoing process of benign creative change. And it counsels us to bank on it.

The vast majority of Muslims, at ease in their faith, leave the business of change entirely in the hands of God. Some, though, moved by Qur'anic teachings on human responsibility, feel that the course taken by change depends crucially on us.

Change moves from the periphery of a society to its center, from the “margins” to the “mainstream.” All great prophetic movements share this characteristic. The movement of the prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, was perhaps the most dramatic of them all—for in his case, the work of just over two decades brought about the complete transformation of the social world into which he had been born. His message still contains profound untapped radical potentials, possibilities that went into occultation when Islam became mainstream. But over the past three centuries, as Muslims were globally marginalized (and suffered greatly in the process) those transforming potentials have gradually moved back into view. And now they are here among us—despite the simultaneous presence of every conceivable negative conflicting sign.

That “Muslim rage” and “Muslim malaise” we hear about are scarcely definitive of a great and varied global community. But they do exist, and they make perfect sense. Imagine it happened to you.

Everybody likes to be at the center of power. It’s comfortable. To grow accustomed to that position, or to feel entitled to it, and then to find oneself on the margins instead is a disorienting and traumatic experience. When our expectations fail, when our foundations shift, we feel anxiety. And anxiety translates into the bitter feeling of powerlessness, accompanied by nostalgia for the past and, often, apocalyptic thinking about the future. When action seems possible to us, it is often fantastic and vindictive, for shame drives us to try to fight our way back to where we imagine we belong. When no action seems possible to us, chronic depression sets in. God has ordained that things can only get worse. The great contemporary Syrian nonviolence theorist Jawdat Said writes,

It occurred to me one day that our instructors [at al-Azhar, in the Forties] seemed to suggest to us that the end of time was drawing near, and that there would be not a day but worse than the previous day; so I reasoned to myself: "How can I devote myself to a system doomed to be worse today than it was yesterday, and worse tomorrow than it is today?"... Such reasoning brought me to wonder whence that idea of "the end of time" stemmed? Was there in the Qur'an such an idea? I did read the Qur'an with that question in mind, but could not find it...but when societies cease to see the "process" of forming, when they cease to develop, they are frustrated. It is then that this idea of the end of time prevails; it is true in their case that time has come to an end. ("Jawdat Sa'eed Identifies Himself," interview by Abdul-Jabbar Al-Rifa'ee, Editor-in-Chief of the Iranian journal Current Islamic Issues; available in English translation at jawdatsaid.net.)

But there is an alternative. Activist Muslims have the choice of accepting our present historical position as a gift, not a punishment. Maybe we haven’t learned all there is to learn: maybe there’s more. Maybe we’ve been positioned to discover something new. Maybe God has ordained good for us, after all. We can wake up to find that what we thought was the margin is really the cutting edge. It’s happening to more Muslims all the time. And this spiritual force has now surfaced with enough strength to produce a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize as well as a visionary traditional cleric of extraordinary stature.

In this issue of Fellowship we are letting readers in on the birth of a new paradigm in a major world religion.

Progressive Islam is a vital marginal creative movement with intellectual centers on the periphery of the old Islamic empires: South Africa, North America, Europe, southern India, Malaysia. Though there are Muslims everywhere who are influenced by its élan, it first sprang up in lands where Islam did not originally enter in the train of conquerors, but was introduced and spread primarily through the peaceful exchanges of trade and spiritual teaching. One encounters it, too, wherever force in the name of religion has left disillusionment in its wake. It champions a distinctively non-imperial religion.

We may think of empire as the attempt to hold the periphery permanently subject to the center. The tools of empire are manipulation and violence. The mystique of empire is the preeminent institution for the justification of oppression, and Islamic history has known plenty of empires. However the great Qur’anic commandment of la ikraha fi-din—“let there be no compulsion in religion”—is only the clearest of many explicit indications that the religion of Islam as understood by its Prophet was foundationally opposed to oppression in all its forms. Progressive Islam aims at restoring this original vision of freedom.

There is no quietism here. Islam, like Christianity, is a religion of outreach. And the “evangelism,” or da`wa, of progressive Islam speaks to the liberation of all humanity from coercion and subjugation. Progressive Muslims are therefore unwilling to let empires conveniently define peace as the absence of struggle against their power. And the current call for an imaginary “Islamic reform”—a call that has now issued from a variety of ideologues and pundits (most notably the Rand Corporation)—is precisely an imperial attempt to undermine Muslim resistance to cultural domination. Such an attempt affronts the God of Justice and is therefore doomed to fail.

By contrast, the actual Muslim renaissance that is now underway is effervescent with ideas about making domination itself a thing of the past. Progressive Muslims come together in this endeavor with progressives of many other faiths. And to such a project, nonviolence is essential.

Conflict transformation training often makes use of an exercise called the Fishbowl. In a Fishbowl, members of a group that has been regularly silenced are invited into the middle of a circle to talk to one another about whatever is on their minds. Members of a group that has been regularly speaking sit around the outside and listen, without interjecting, to the conversation that goes on. The experience can be enlightening for all concerned.

We are proud to have invited a broad range of "renaissance" Muslims into the Fellowship Fishbowl. We expect that you’ll be surprised by what you hear.

So welcome to this new/old part of the great conversation. The ripple is still small, but God willing, it’s the wave of the future.

 Rabia Terri Harris

mpf@forusa.org