Redeeming Islam: Constructing the Good Muslim Subject in the

Contemporary Study of Religion

Farid
Esack

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not

dependent on us; we are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in
our work; he is the purpose of it. He is not an intrusion in our business; he
is a part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him; he is giving us
an opportunity to do so. (“MK (Mahatma) Gandhi”)1

Islam is peace (George W Bush)2

Introduction
Vice Chancellor Ihron Rensburg, Pro Vice Chancellor Derek van der Merwe, Deputy
Principals Adam Habib and Angina Parekh, Dean Rory Ryan, Ministers Ebrahim Patel and
Trevor Manuel, President of the Muslim Judicial Council, Shaikh Ihsan Hendricks,
Professors Allan Boesak, the Chairperson of my department, Prof Lilly Nortje-Meyer,
Secretary General of the South African Council of Churches, Eddie Makue, colleagues,
friends and family, and students, good evening, assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa
barakatuh.
For an academic there are few tasks as challenging as delivering an inaugural
lecture. He has to vindicate the trust placed in him by his colleagues; he has to make
scholarly sense to his peers in his own discipline, possibly even impress them, and he
has to perform for friends and family, most of whom are there simply to celebrate his
arrival and who may know little about the discipline into which he is being welcomed as a
worthy fellow.
The subject of my presentation tonight is rather loaded. ‘Redeeming Islam’ – a
slightly mocking play on the irony of religion which is usually itself in the business of
offering redemption - being the subject of attempts by others to save it. ‘Constructing
the Good Muslim’ suggests a) that this ‘Good Muslim’ is being manufactured’ by an
external agency, b) that there is a project to distinguish between a ‘Good Muslim’ and a
‘Bad Muslim’ which may be related to the philological meaning of the word ‘muslim’
(someone who submits) but certainly not in the manner in which the ‘faithful’ have
‘traditionally’ understood it, in, for example, the distinction between the sinful (fasiq or
fajir) Muslim on the one hand and the pious (salih) Muslim on the other and c) that this

1
At least this is what I read on a poster at a pharmacy in Accra, Ghana in November, 2006. This
quote, which did not originate from Gandhi, is a good example of how prophetic figures are
appropriated for causes entirely unrelated to the ones for which they lived and died.
2
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628-7.html (accessed 13th September,
2010)
1
Muslim is an object of enquiry as any ‘Study of’ may suggest. The borrowing of the term
from Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim Good Muslim: America, the Cold
War, and the Roots of Terror’ (2004) further suggests two things: firstly, that this Muslim
is the subject of a larger ‘civilizational’ project located within an hegemonic project and,
secondly, that is he or she is a subject in the sense that subjects of monarchs exercise
their rights at the pleasure of the monarch rather than as citizens of a republic.
After some introductory overview remarks about the current context of the Study
of Islam in the academy and some of the major issues around its development and place
in relation to the Study of Religion, I will look at the two major developments which
contributed to a significant irenic tendency in the field. Following the work of Richard
Martin and Carl Ernst (2010), I will argue that the publication of Edward Said’s book,
Orientalism in 1978 and some of the more spectacular revolts against the West by
Muslim actors (primarily the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the September 11 th,
2001 attacks in the USA.) impacted significantly on Islamicists (scholars in the Study of
Islam) – both in terms of how they viewed their primary obligations in the academy and
much of their work. I concur with the view that these events contributed immensely to
the growth rise of irenic scholarship which saw Islamicists increasingly getting into the
trenches to help save the Muslims and their image as they were coming under attack
from different quarters, primarily Western governments and armies and the mass media
in these countries.3
This defensive engagement of the Islamicist, described by a friend as ‘bunker
scholarship’ raises significant questions about fidelity to the post-Enlightenment
foundations of critical scholarship. More than simply being an irenic approach to Islam
that does not take these foundations seriously or assisting Muslims to redeem the image
of Islam, I argue that such scholarship often plays a significantly accommodationist role 4
in co-creating compliant Muslim subjects in a larger hegemonic project. I critique the idea
of essentialist approaches to both Islam and these foundations and argue that the focus
should shift from epistemology to hermeneutics to take cognizance of the ideological

3
See for example the following statement by Ron Greaves in his Aspects of Islam: “After a decade
of close contact with Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in the Muslim world I find myself horrified by
the opening of a Pandora’s box whose contents are over-simplification, overwhelming ignorance,
and blatant racism directed at a religious community; This is combined with a fear of the ‘other’,
which at the beginning of the twenty first century, it is to be hoped and that any thinking member
of the human race would view with great distrust and suspicion, especially as we are all familiar
with the historic consequence of the anti-Semitism that so blighted the twentieth century. (2005,
1)
4
The term “accomodationist theology’ has been used in various senses. I use it to describe the
attempts to present Islam in a form acceptable to dominant powers by removing elements that are
found offensive by the shifting needs of those powers. An example is offering theological
justification for jihad as armed insurrection in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and then
offering alternative non-violent interpretations of it when the dominant power becomes one with
which you identify.

2
dynamics at play in the construction and representation of Muslims as reliable subjects
and of Islam as an empire-friendly faith. Finally, I offer my position of an engaged
scholarship attentive to the radical inequality between the partners to the conversation
and am conscious of the political, cultural and economic conditions that shape the terms
of the dialogue

An Overview of Contexts and issues in the Study Islam and its Place in the
Academy
First, the academic study of religion remains a largely Western endeavor although
far greater numbers of Muslims, (relatively few of them in Muslim majority countries) are
emerging as leading figures in the discipline. In my own preparation for this lecture I was
struck anew by how increasingly US-centric the field is. For example, a major question
that academic or trade publishers consider before proceeding with a particular
manuscript on Islam is ‘How well will it do in the States?’ One of the reasons for my
return to South Africa from the United States was my own fatigue at being driven by
what I roughly describe as ‘Northern questions’. (E.g., “Tell us about Islam and
reconciliation?”) and the ‘irrelevance’ or disinterestedness in Southern questions (e.g.,
‘Does Islam have anything to say about pandemics, poverty/impoverization, death by
starvation?) This fatigue notwithstanding ‘contemporary’ as in the ‘Contemporary Study
of Religion’ of my title is largely confined to observation of the academy in North America
and in recent introductory works to Islam published there or geared towards that
audience. I do so in large part because the work done is increasingly shaping Muslim self-
understanding.
Second, there has been significant increase in interest and literature on Islam and
the Muslim world in the last thirty years or both at a public and an academic level
(evident in bookstores, openings and offerings at universities, journals and members of
professorial societies etc.)5 However, as Carl Ernst and Richard Martin point out, ‘while
Islamic studies as a field has been powerfully affected by political events, debates within
the academy have had a longer and more pervasive role in shaping … this area of
inquiry.’ (2010, 1). (Cf. Martin, Empey, Arkoun and Rippin, 2010)
Third, Islamic Studies, (dirasah al-Islamiyyah) - notwithstanding the claims of the
faithful to ahistoricity or the divine origins of that ‘other occupation’ of the same name,
‘Islamic Studies’ (islamiyyat) in the madrasah (Islamic seminaries) may make – has a
relatively recent history. Like several of its siblings in other fields and/or disciplines in the

5
Ernst and Martin note that as ‘recently as the last decades of the twentieth century […] interest
in, and room for, curriculum on Islam and Muslims could be found in barely one-tenth of the
approximately 1200 academic departments of Religious Studies in North America […] and it was
not so long ago that Islam did not even have a primary presence in the major professional society
for faculty of religion, the American Academy of Religion. (2010, 1)
3
humanities, it is still undergoing a struggle to be ‘not-a-step-child’. For now, much of this
struggle takes place within departments of Religious Studies, a discipline itself not
entirely beyond suspicion – both from its internal ‘others’ – the Church and the managers
of the sacred - and its external others – sociologist, anthropologist, psychologists etc. 6 At
a deeper level though, this quest is also connected to the academic impulse for greater
specialization and deepening commitment to post-Enlightenment scientific rationality –
which remains the uncritiqued raison d’être of the modern university and the intellectual
foundations of the academic study of religion. This deepening commitment to enquiry
which is ‘descriptive, phenomenological and theoretical (Smart, 2001, xiii), rather than
confessional or faith driven, is reflected in the shifting nomenclature where ‘Islamic
Studies’ and ‘Religious Studies’ becomes the ‘Study of Islam’ and ‘Religion Studies or the
‘Study of Religion’ respectively. Our work, says Ninian Smart, ‘is morphological; it
presents an anatomy of faith, [… ] for the application of epoche. It is an intentionally
bracketing method which tries to bring out the nature of believers’ ideas and feelings.’
(ibid. 3) While this ‘involves walking in moccasins of the faithful’ (ibid.) we are not
supposed to be the faithful – at least not the ones in whose moccasins we are walking.’7
Fourth, while in the darul ‘ulum, the yeshiva or the seminary affirmation of one’s
work and quest may be sought from the Transcendent or some sacred foundational texts
in the study of religion where the debates shift primarily between methodological
atheism or agnosticism, affirmation is sought from our peers, more particularly from the
species above us in the academic pecking order – those with an even deeper suspicion of
the idea of a Transcendent, of faith and, and sometimes even of the faithful - as
legitimate fields of scholarly enquiry in an institution committed to scientific and rational
enquiry. This conscious shift in the source of affirmation inevitably - arguably also
‘ideally’ - puts the faithful/believing academic into quite a fix. She exists in a state of

6
The idea of the hierarchy of knowledge is that the basic fields of the sciences and mathematics
can be organized from its least specialized and most derivative manifestation to its purest form. In
relation to Islam the lowest level in the hierarchy of knowledge would probably be the slamseskool,
followed by the local madrassa or maktab, - the equivalent of Sunday School for Christians - the
dar al-`ulum, seminary or yeshiva, then the faculties or departments of ilahiyyaat (divinity) or
Divinity School and finally Religious or religion Studies located in departments in non-confessional
or secular institutions where it forms part of a humanities cluster. Then the pecking, or legitimacy
or order continues in academy in roughly the following chain: Sociology < Psychology < Biology <
Math < Chemistry < Physics.

7
At a time when religionswissenschaft was having its own struggle for acceptance as a serious
social discipline the idea of obeisance to distance – of epochē - (to stand apart, to hold back) was
crucial. The debate ranged largely between phenomenologists of religion who argued for
methodological atheism (scholars must deny the possibility that the objects of religious faith are
true or real) on the one hand and Ninian Smart’s alternative of methodological agnosticism, on the
other. ‘Not knowing how the universe really is organized – not knowing if it is organized at all – the
scholar of religion seeks not to establish a position in response to this question but to describe,
analyse, and compare the positions taken by others’ (McCutcheon, 1999: 216-17).

4
tension with her peers, who may suspect her of nifaq (proclaiming one view and
believing in another) or rational shirk (associationism with God, i.e., Reason),8 with the
faithful, and herself all wondering how the believing academic manages to
simultaneously ride multiple horses. 9

Fifth, the development of disciplines in the humanities takes place within what are
presented as ideational contestations (or, as the Dean and Vice Chancellor will no doubt
remind us even clearer, fiscal and budgetary constraints). One would, for example, argue
about the dominance, of say, revelation or theology over, say, reason or Western modes
of thought. While the Study of Islam rather than ‘Islamic Studies’ and the critical Study of
Religion rather than Theology or ‘Religious’ Studies’, as recent battles at this university
indicate, are emerging as victorious, these victories are not necessarily won because of
an intrinsic [secular, objective, post-Enlightenment] superiority of the Study of Islam
over ‘Islamic Studies’ or theology but because it is subsidiary recipient of a larger
enterprise and part of ‘web of economic, cultural, and political forces which propagates
and perpetuates a mode of production (Brodeur, 1999, 9). It is to this larger enterprise
that Edward Said (d. 2003) spoke so eloquently and which I want to address in

8
In recent years, this suspicion of unduly warm relationship between the academic/enquirer and
the subject (sometimes also ‘subjected’) community being researched or of the believing scholar
has waned somewhat in a number of fields in the humanities as is evident in the presence of
committed feminist women in Gender Studies, gay people in Queer Studies, openly Black people in
African studies, etc. (“These feminists or liberation theologians are not really scholars, or
theologians.”) There is still, I suspect, a much deeper suspicion of people with a religious
commitment located in the Study of Religion.
9
From time to time one reads fiery warnings against studying Islam at ‘secular universities’ and
these are usually dismissed as the rantings of extremists. I am not sure if, in terms of the
worldview of these traditionalists, and the inevitable and necessary critiquing of faith and its
marginalization in the academy, these fears are entirely ungrounded. It is somewhat disingenuous
for academics to consciously promote ‘objective’ and non-faith enquiry and then to complain when
others find this threatening to their worldviews and power paradigms. The following is an excerpt
from The Majlis, locally published, that reflects the anger at the ‘treachery’ of those who study
Islam in the academy: ‘We have on the one side the menace of the Christian missionaries who
have made huge inroads in the Ummah [Muslim community] with their kufr (disbelief) which they
have succeeded to implant in numerous backward and remote Muslim regions. But this too is not
the primary enemy. These overt enemies while constituting a threat, are not as great a menace to
Islam as the enemy which lurks within the Ummah [Muslim community]. The most poisonous and
lethal enemy for Islam in this century consists of the munaafiqeen and murtaddeen who are
concealing within the folds of the Ummah. The Munafiqin (hypocrites) and the Murtaddeen
(Apostates —those who have reneged from Islam, albeit covertly)- are classified by the eternal
Shari`ah of Allah Ta’ala as Mulhideen. They are such notorious villains who proclaim themselves to
be Muslim, in fact authorities of Islam while they cannot even recite the Qur’aan Majeed properly
nor are versified with the elementary rules of Tahaarat (purification] and Salaat [prayer]. They
advertise themselves as being the ‘intelligentsia’ while they grovel in abject jahaalat (ignorance).
They profess to be Muslim while at heart they are kaafir [unbelievers]. These Mulhideen and
apostates are the products of kuffaar [disbelieving] universities. They have studied under kuffaar
or apostate professors and have acquired scrap degrees in a secular branch of kufr [heresy]
learning called ‘Islamic Studies’. On the procurement of their scrap PhD degrees doled out by
kuffaar masters wallowing in constant impurity – spiritual, ceremonial and physical najaasat (filth)
— they believe in their jahaalat [ignorance] that they have superseded the illustrious Sahaabah
[companions of the Prophet] and Aimmah-e-Mujtahideen in the various branches of Shar’i Uloom.
{knowledge of Shari’ah) These Mulhideen [atheists] are the greatest enemies of Islam and the
Ummah, (The Majlis, vol 15, No 11)
5
considering how the Muslim is increasingly constructed as a ‘moderate’ and ‘harmless’,
subject.

Orientalism
For more than three decades, the term ‘Orientalism’ has cast a long shadow over
the Study of Religion in general and Islamic studies in particular. The term acquired its
overwhelmingly pejorative connotations in scholarly discourse largely due to Edward
Said’s groundbreaking book Orientalism. (1978). In looking at the development of the
field of the Study of Islam and the other disciplines where Islam and Muslim were studied
over the last hundred years or so, the general demarcation – the dangers of
simplification and reductionism, notwithstanding - is often described as pre- or post-
Saidian.10
In summary, Said argued that ‘Orientalism constitutes not only a field of
investigation but an exercise of power, part of the story of cultural hegemony over the
‘other’ against which European culture is asserted. In the context of radical inequalities
of power Orientalism was more revealing of the formation and presence of Euro-Atlantic
power than as a truthful discourse the Orient itself. European culture not just managed
but produced the Orient and Western analytic categories not just reflect but also produce
facts. A rationalist analysis is not simply the application of non-normative, ahistorical
constructs to apolitical phenomena but involves the translation of all culture through the
filter of Western categories of knowledge. The terms ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident,’ ‘East and
West’, thus do not refer real entities or essences, but rather to bodies of knowledge that
have been constructed in the service of particular aims - the domination of the Middle
East by European imperial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by the
United States in the twentieth. Said presented Orientalism as a rather disaggregated
monolith, ‘a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the
East‘, ‘a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and
their culture.’ Despite Said’s disdain for orthodoxies, his own ideas became the basis for
a new orthodoxy and his critique of Western scholarship on the Orient has too often been
reduced to a Manichaean division of opposing sides. This transformation, in the words of
MacKenzie, ‘has turned Orientalism into one of the most highly charged words in modern
10
‘A single book’ says Richard Martin, changed the meta-discourse on what we [Islamicists] were
doing and what we should be doing.’ (Martin, forthcoming) Said’s work was also, and not
unsurprisingly, greeted by a chorus of criticism from virtually all of the well-known Orientalists at
that time including Ernest Gellner, Albert Hourani, Mark Proudman, Maxime Rodinson, Robert
Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, and, most famously, Bernard Lewis. Said was criticized for presenting,
in fact, constructing, a monolithic ‘Occidentalism‘ to oppose a similarly constructed ‘Orientalism’ of
Western discourse, of failing to acknowledge the diversity in impulse, genres and ideological and
scholarly orientations of the various scholars that he treated uniformly. For a critique of the Irenic
approach to the study of Islam and a review of the Said-Lewis debates see Aaron W Hughes,
Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline, London: Equinox, 2007)

6
scholarship’ (need citation ) ‘and remains for most scholars the bête noir in the
expanding of family Islamic studies today. (Ernst and Martin)’

The Turbulent Gulf, then New York, and Kabul, and Bali, and Lahore, and the
Horn of Africa and…

The successful framing of Orientalism as a disreputable profession by Edward Said

coincided with the Revolution in Iran in 1979 and the hostage taking drama which lasted
for a year. This event and even more so the spectacular displays of raw violence against
the empire on September 11th 2001 rather rudely altered the spatial dimensions of the
narrative of Islam as a volatile Middle Eastern phenomenon, prone to militancy and
brought it ‘closer to home’. That September 11th, particularly, saw the beginning of a
frenzy of Islamophobic caricatures of Muslims and Islam as an enemy of all civilized
values in the print, audiovisual and virtual media. Everyone remotely connected to the
study of Islam and Muslims were marshaled in to service the desperate need for clarity
about the religious impulses of ‘these people’ who had the chutzpah to challenge the
empire on its home ground. Their motives had to be located somewhere outside the
reasoned and ‘normal’ behavior of Western human beings. The mass media does not
suffer complexity gladly and many of us were drawn into what Said had lamented as ‘a
culture of headlines, sound-bytes, and telegraphic forms whose rapidity renders the
world one-dimensional and homogenous’ (Bhaba, 2005, 11). Our ‘subject’ communities –
the Muslims - were and (indeed are) constantly under attack and we felt an enormous
compulsion to push against the ‘misrepresentation’, and misinformation politically
incorrect attitudes of citizens who ‘formed opinions about Islam from media fixations on
sensationalism and a grossly inadequate and Eurocentric textbook industry.’ It was
understandable that many of those who had insights into the tradition would step in as
interlocutors.11

This defending of Islam though, I argue, is also located within a particular

ideological project, a project like Orientalism, not without its hegemonic interests. It is
common cause that identities, including religious ones, are constantly in a state of flux. I
do assert the value of conversation in all its tentativeness and heurism in the academy,

11
This form of scholarship as Clifford Geertz had pointed out as early 1982 is certainly not new in
the history of Islamic studies: The tendency has always been marked among Western Islamicists
[…] to try to write Muslim theology from without, to provide the spiritual self-reflection they see
either as somehow missing in it or as there but clouded over by routine formula-mongering. D. B
Macdonald made al-Ghazzali into a kind of Muslim St. Thomas. Ignaz Goldziher centered Islam in
traditionalist legal debates, and Louis Massignon centered it in the Sufi martyrdom of al-Hallaj […]
A half-conscious desire not just to understand Islam but to have a hand in its destiny has animated
most of the major scholars who have written on it as a form of faith.

7
more characteristic of hermeneutics rather than the essentialism of both traditional
religion and supposedly objective scholarship (more characteristic of epistemology). I
am, however, particularly interested in drawing attention to how the “bad Muslim” of
Orientalism is being supplanted by the construction of the “good Muslim” as a citizen of
the Empire (with all the essentials of what constitutes the empire still in place –
occupations, greed, imbalanced power relations, exploitation, etc.) In preparing for
this paper, I considered about fifty op-ed pieces written by generally serious scholars in
Islam in various United States, Canadian and British publications, more than a dozen
introductory books on Islam produced in the last six or seven years, another dozen
selected anthologies which aimed at introducing the latest “good Muslims” and their
ideas to the [Western] world.12 I want to make a few very general observations about the
work that I have looked at and then raise the question of the relationship between what
is being cast as the post-Enlightenment basis of religionswissenschaft of methodological
agnosticism or atheism versus an engaged or embedded scholarship.

First, most authors writing on Islam in the academy are largely still non-Muslim
although they have been joined by a growing number of younger Muslims, nearly all of
whom – with notable exceptions - are located in the North. A significant number have
also started their scholarly journeys as non-Muslims and have since become Muslims.
The dominant pattern of edited anthologies and accredited journals dealing with Islamic
Studies is still one where the Non-Muslim is the editor, bringing Muslim and non-Muslim
voices - and occasionally, only Muslim voices - together. Where books are co-authored
the primary author is usually a non-Muslim.
Second, while a number of these younger scholars, children of post-modernity -
have indeed been able to saddle multiple horses, many have remained wedded to the
irenic scholarship of their mentors in the post-Sa`idian academy. The work of Kecia Ali
(2006), Ebrahim Moosa (2008), and Majeed Annouar (2006) do reflect a relatively rarer
Muslim willingness or ability to deal seriously and critically with the traditions of Islam (or
the tradition of Islams.)
Third, there is growing emphasis on Sufism in the academy. While the motivations
of this remain largely unexplored I relate this a) to the modern interest in individual
experiences and fulfillment, b) the perceived pliability of Sufism as amenable to various
cultures, gender friendliness, religious and sexual diversity) c) the interest in Islam as a

12
A few others stand out in a category of their own for their sheer audacity in the scale of this
attempt to intervene in the creation of the “Good Muslim” and in commending him or (in a few
cases) her to the world. ‘Notable Muslims?of the Twentienth Century by Natanya De Bas Long
(Oxford: Oneworld) and the 500 Most Influential Muslims, 2009, and the 500 Most Influential,
Muslims, 2010, published by The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Jordan and Georgetown
University and edited by John Esposito and Aref Ali Nayed. With some reluctance I should point out
that I feature in both of these publications.
8
lived reality rather than dogma located in texts and d) a part of a desire to see Muslims
‘calming down’ and returning to a mythical innocence where Islam is perceived as
inherently inward looking, a-political, gentle and non-confrontational (cf. Nixon Center).
(Related to this is a discernable pattern of assigning the Shari`ah a less important role in
Islam. When the Shari`ah is actually covered it increasingly is done within a framework of
re-thinking its contents and privileging its supposed spirit and objectives.)
Fourth, with some notable exceptions (e.g., Waines, 2005, Rippin 2005, Sheppard,
2009), Islam is largely still reified and presented in essentialist terms (Islam ‘properly’
understood’ means this or that) – even if that essentialization is now adorned with the
currently fashionable virtues of inclusivism, multi-culturalism and religious diversity along
with the assumption that all Muslims do or should aspire to these values. The desperation
to prove ‘real’ Islam’s ”compatibility" with contemporary political and western cultural
values have resulted in a plethora of often unnuanced affirmations of gender equality,
democracy, religious pluralism, human rights and more recently also of sexual diversity.
Finally, and most importantly for purposes of this paper, the major contestations
are often presented as one between Muslims where internal Muslim identities and are at
odds with one another, a ‘battle of ideas’ taking place between ‘moderate’ and ‘literalist’
or ‘extremist’ Islam. (Abu El Fadl) ‘civil war’ taking place within the religion. (Bernard
Lewis, Reza Aslan), a struggle between ‘reactionary Islam’ and ‘moderate, mainstream
Islam’. Islam had to be taken back from those who had hijacked ‘it’ (Michael Wolf),
wrestled back from the extremist who captured it in ‘The Great Theft’ (Abu El Fadl). This
portrayal is largely silent about any possible Western responsibility for any of current
crises around the Muslim world and displays not only a rather ahistorical and equally
unscientific ignorance of the interconnectedness of cultures, but also a willful blindness
to the impact of colonialism and its socio-political engineering of colonized societies. To
raise this question risks politicizing a ‘serious cultural, theological and civilizational
critique’ and, opens the door to the possibility that that there may even be something
that requires fixing inside western society itself.13 And for now, the fundamental values
underpinning the imperial impulses are not on the table for discussion – as least not in
the project of dealing with the Muslim barbarians.

Disinterested Scholarship
13
In March of 2007, the RAND Corporation, a major US think tank issued a widely discussed paper
‘Building Moderate Muslim Networks.’ The paper defines ‘moderate’ or ‘good’ Muslims as ones who
support democracy and internationally recognized human rights, including gender equality and
freedom of worship, notions of nonsectarian sources of law and oppose terrorism. The report’s
stated objective is to promote an alternate version of Islam that is compatible with American
policies in the Muslim world by painting ‘moderate Muslims’ as a marginalized group that has been
silenced by a radical minority. To counter radical networks, Western governments need to actively
help ‘moderate Muslims’ better articulate and disseminate their views. (Rand 2007)

9
 The first question that I want to reflect on is if, in the keenness to ‘walk in the
moccasins of the faithful’ – to return to Ninian Smart’s metaphor – does the
‘disinterested’ scholar ‘risk’ becoming of one the faithful? The second question is
whether an increasingly accommodationist academy has simply moved on to another
kind of essentialism, with its construction of the “Good Muslim” – “Islam is peace” – a
project as fused to an ideological agenda as the Orientalism critiqued by Edward Said? -
an approach which while it presents itself as objective really seeks to construct a
particular kind Islam, a non-threatening, or to use Slavoj Zizek’s term ‘decaffeinated
faith’ – without asking raising any questions about the imperial, ethical nature or simple
sustainability of that which is threatened.
Post-modernity and post-colonialism have raised some serious questions about
the Enlightenment basis of learning, its assumptions of rationality and of the mind as a
clear slate, or as capable of being cleansed from the ‘distortions’ of personal
commitment. Not only has the assumption of objectivity come under sustained criticism
by host of new entrants in the academy, such as feminists, liberation theologians, and
post-colonial scholarship, but they have argued that the notion of knowledge as accurate
representation […] needs to be abandoned.’ Rather than conceiving of knowledge in
terms of the accurate representation of a ‘nonhuman reality,’ with which the mind
interacts, (often within a falsely assumed ‘permanent, neutral, framework for inquiry.’
(Rorty, 1979, 8) we should conceive of knowledge a) in terms of a conversation between
persons and b) a conversation that takes place within particular power relationships. We
scholars also operate within history along with our critiques of the theories of both
knowledge and the way it is produced and the intellectualist responses to the material
that we study or communities that we observe. We cannot view communities, traditions
and ideas historically and then take an ahistorical view of ourselves and of our critiques.
(Context was something particularly privileged by feminist and liberation theologians).14

Said offers a clear statement of what he finds problematic about Orientalism in

the Afterword that he appended to Orientalism at the fifteenth anniversary of its
publication. Those who thought they had the requisite distance to produce knowledge
about the ‘Orient’ were, in fact, imposing their own agendas without subjecting those
agendas to any kind of critical scrutiny.

14
Writing in another context, but with relevance to our subject here, Gustavo Gutierrez, the famous
liberation theologian, describes this appeal to ideological neutrality in the following terms: ‘The last
systematic obstacle for any theology committed to human liberation is [...] a certain type of
academicism which posits ideological neutrality as the ultimate criterion; which levels down and
relativizes all claims to absoluteness and all evaluations of some ideas over others. This is the
theological equivalent of another great ideological adversary of liberation: the so-called quest for
the death of ideologies or their suicide at the altars of scientific and scholarly impartiality. (1973,
25)
10
 My objection to what I have called Orientalism is not that it is just the antiquarian
study of Oriental languages, societies, and peoples, but that as a system of thought
Orientalism approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality
from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests both an enduring Oriental
reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence, which observes the
Orient from afar and from, so to speak, above. This false position hides historical
change. Even more important, from my standpoint, it hides the interests of the
Orientalist. (2003. 333)

Feminists, liberation theologians and post-colonial scholarship do not propose that

the alternative to Orientalism is ‘scholarly disinterest.’ After all, they argue, such
disinterest is a mere fiction. ‘There is no innocent interpretation, no innocent interpreter,
no innocent text’ (Tracy 1987, 79). Instead they appeal to a spirit of relentless critique of
tradition, religion, academicism, but also of modernity and, and, is I said, of ourselves.
Knowledge, like any other social tool, while it can and must be critical, is never neutral.
My beef is not with the idea of empathetic scholarship that characterizes much of
essentialist irenics and, yes, liberal, material produced in the contemporary Study of
Islam, but with its uncritical position towards the larger ideological and power structures
wherein it is located, its ‘embeddness’. in those structures and how it contributes to
provide them? with meaning15 The question for me is, thus, not one of the faithfulness of
the academic or lack of faith – but ‘Which faith?’ and “In whose service?’ 16

The Construction of the Decaffeinated Muslim

There is more to embedded scholarship than a desire to simply dispel
misconceptions or help create a better understanding of Islam for the general public. In
attempting to ‘write Muslim theology from without,’ this approach implicitly provides a
sympathetic yet essentialized view of Islam that casts “good Muslims” against “bad
15
The term ‘embedded journalism’ first came into vogue with media coverage of the US invasion
of Iraq in 2001 when selected journalists were given privileged access to military units after
undertaking to censor information that could negatively impact on the those units. Confronted
about the ethical problems of objective journalist, Lt. Col. Rick Long of the U.S. Marine Corps
replied, "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to
attempt to dominate the information environment." (http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/940078 ).

16
Yoginder Sikand, an analyst of South Asian Islam, describes in his article, “‘Civic, Democratic
Islam’: America’s Desperate Search for the ‘Liberal’ Muslim,” the hypocrisy of a United States
which at one point supported the most extremist and fanatical Muslims in the world to counter the
growing popularity of secular nationalist and progressive forces, but now is devising a myriad
strategies to create an America-friendly, moderate Islam: Today, America’s policy on Islamic
movements has turned full circle. In order to counter the radical fringe of Islamism that it had so
fervently courted till recently, America is desperately scouting around for ‘liberal’ Muslim allies who
can sell an alternate vision and version of Islam that fits into the American scheme of things. This
explains the sudden flurry of conferences and publications on ‘liberal Islam’ and the setting up of
NGOs in Muslim countries with liberal American financial assistance. The underlying aim of these
diverse activities appears to be the same: to promote an understanding of Islam that cheerfully
accepts American hegemony, camouflaged as global modernity, as normative and, indeed,
‘normal’. This goal, is, of course, not stated openly. Rather, it is generally clothed in the garb of
high-sounding slogans such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘pluralism’.
11
Muslims”.17 The ‘real’ Muslims follow the ‘true’ Islam. And the main detractors, who
obscure this ‘essentialized goodness of Islam’, then, the argument goes, are both the
neo-Orientalist – in the Saidian sense - scholars from a variety of disciplines (such as
Daniel Pipes, Ibn Warraq, and Bernard Lewis) who ‘misunderstand’ then ‘misrepresent’
them, on the one hand and also the “bad Muslims” themselves (Osama bin Laden, or the
Wahabis)18 who resort to ‘extremism’ or other ‘false ways’ because they do not, as
Esposito says, understand the ‘real’ history and the ‘real’ teachings of Islam which,
according to him are ‘moderate’, peaceful, and inoffensive’.19
This kind of essentialism does have a role in the life of faith communities much of
which is based on belonging which necessarily entails constructing or embracing ideas of
who constitutes outsider and insiders. The disciplines of dogma and heresiography, after
all, have well-deserved places in most religious traditions. The post-Saidian problem
though is the assumption that once that (Non-Muslim) scholar is convinced that he or she
is positively disposed towards Muslims, he or she can now participate in the
reconstruction of the Muslim identity and Islamic tradition in ways which are more
acceptable to the largely Northern/Western society or context in which that scholar is
located and with which dominant ideology he or she identifies. For the Muslim scholar,
the problem is often an inability to ask critical questions of his or her socio-political
context on the one hand and a seamless embrace of the dominant politically constructed
assumptions about what is a “good Muslim” on the other (indeed, an often blissful
ignorance of the fact that there are conscious political and economic forces initiating and
supporting these constructions).
The ‘moderate Muslim’ is held up as the ideal, new slogans of ‘wasatiyyah’,
(moderation) bandied about with little or no critique of what constitutes the center and
peripheries, who defines these, the historical-ideological moment and agenda that
creates the urgency and need for moderate Muslim ?Islam. Indeed the very raising of the
question of agendas in relation to ‘moderate Islam’ makes one suspect. The

17

18
Wahabism, a more puritan austere, nearly Calvinist from of Islam, has for long, and not without
just cause, been viewed as the nemesis by Sufi groups, the more organized sectors or what has
been variously described as “popular” or ‘folk’ or “low” Islam and by modernist Muslims. The post
9/11 era, particularly with the alleged role of Saudi citizens in the events and the putative role that
that religious approach has played in the theological formation of the alleged terrorists have given
a much more pronounced tone and energy to anti-Wahabism.

19
This essentialization of Islam and Muslim or has been variously described as ‘theologocentricism’
(Rodinson) or ‘cultural determinism’ where ‘almost all observable phenomena can be explained by
reference to Islam, in societies where Muslims are the majority or where Islam is the official
religion.’ Mahmood Mamdani refers to this as ‘Culture Talk’; A kind of discourse that assumes that
every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and then explains politics as a consequence of
that essence. Muslim cannot be any other way. This of course opens the way for the argument of
Islam’s inherent incompatibility with modernity and, by extension, Westernism.]

12
foregrounding of the themes of pluralism, human rights, democracy, peace and non-
violence20, etc., the framing of liberal responses to them as the new orthodox Islamic
response and the way the “Good Muslim” is constructed reflect the triumph, however
temporary, of the liberal ideological moment at least in relation to the Study of Islam in
the West. (In the same way the swords which dominate the entrance of the Anti-
Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg (‘Democracy’, ‘Equality’, ‘Reconciliation’ and
‘Diversity’ signify the triumph of a particular liberal vision of society, and through the
swords, perhaps the willingness of liberal society to also resort to violence to establish its
hegemony).
Yoginder Sikand, an analyst of South Asian Islam, describes in his article, “‘Civic,
Democratic Islam’: America’s Desperate Search for the ‘Liberal’ Muslim,” (2007) the
hypocrisy of a United States which at one point supported the most extremist and
fanatical Muslims in the world, the Taliban, to counter the growing popularity of secular
nationalist and progressive forces, but now is devising a myriad strategies to create an
America-friendly, moderate Islam: Today, America’s policy on Islamic movements has
turned full circle. In order to counter the radical fringe of Islamism that it had so fervently
courted till recently, America is desperately scouting around for ‘liberal’ Muslim allies
who can sell an alternate vision and version of Islam that fits into the American scheme
of things. This explains the sudden flurry of conferences and publications on ‘liberal
Islam’ and the setting up of NGOs in Muslim countries with liberal American financial
assistance. The underlying aim of these diverse activities appears to be the same: to
promote an understanding of Islam that cheerfully accepts American hegemony,
camouflaged as global modernity, as normative and, indeed, ‘normal’. This goal, is, of
course, not stated openly. Rather, it is generally clothed in the garb of high-sounding
slogans such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘pluralism’.

In irenic scholarship on Contemporary Islam, other than an occasional and casual

nod to Muslim sufferings and a lamentation of US foreign policy, there is no critique of
larger patterns of consumption, environmental or socio-economic justice, of modernity
and liberalism as class projects which hugely impact – and not always positively on the

20
In a challenging essay, Paul Salem challenges conventional notions of Western approaches to
conflict resolution and points out that its ‘theorists and practitioners operate within a macro-political
context that they may overlook, but which colors their attitudes and values. This seems remarkably
striking from an outsider’s point of view and is largely related to the West’s dominant position in the
world. All successful ‘empires’ develop an inherent interest in peace. The ideology of peace
reinforces a status quo that is favorable to the dominant power. The Romans, for example, preached
a Pax Romana, the British favored a Pax Britannica, and the Americans today pursue – consciously or
not – a Pax Americana. Conflict and bellicosity is useful – indeed essential – in building empires, but
an ideology of peace and conflict resolution is clearly more appropriate for its maintenance. (2003,
362-4.)

13
peripheries. The urgings towards awareness of these usually come from those outside
the Study of Islam such as anthropology (Talal Asad and Sabah Mahmood), Salman
Sayyid, (critical theory) political science (Mahmoud Mamdani) and literary criticism
(Hamid Dabashi). The Study of Islam with the Study of Religion must be studied as social
and cultural expressions within historical, geographical, political and economic contexts. I
agree with Ninian Smart’s polymethodical approach whereby we draw on “the full range
of human sciences to understand how traditions have been transmitted authoritatively in
various societies and how these have been re-enforced in myths, rituals, doctrines, legal
institutions, artistic expressions and in testimonies of believers, including states such as
spirit possession and out of the body experiences.” More important though, given the
urgencies of the multiple crisis facing humankind of warfare, environmental and
economic systems deeply wedded to systemic impoverization, we desperately need to
bring the insights of these post-colonial scholars and others who work on the peripheries
into our work. Scholarship – like all of human life - is compromised. We have a choice
between an uncritical embeddedness in the structures of power with accountability to
armies, governments, empires, and a critical engagement with the margins – however
shifting - for more just world.

Re-Thinking Contexts for Contemporary Scholarship

For me, the question that I am left with is “What is my context as an engaged
African Muslim scholar?” Where is my authenticity located when I uncritically embrace
the constructed intellectual and political categories and urgencies of others as my own
and seek to re-define a fourteen thousand year old tradition – albeit an ever-changing
one – in the face of external demands (even if these demands were generated by a
complex array of factors wherein that tradition is not entirely innocent)? Muslims too,
have a conflicting relationship with both “outsiders” and the tradition of Islam and its
ideals. The tensions are palpable of be-ing in a world in which the vast majority of
Muslims feel trapped between the demands imposed on them in their existences as
subjects of the Empire on the one hand, and the violent convulsions of a fascist-like
Islamically invoked response by the co-religionists on the other. At every step of our
encounter with our non-Muslim neighbours, colleagues, students and immigration
officers, those of us – committed or nominal Muslim, confessional or cultural - living or
working in the West, have to justify our existences, our faith, our humanness and our
non-violent intentions.
Declarations that Muslim societies must ‘come right’ are fairly easy. In nearly all
of the work that I have perused there is no shortage of argument against the idea that
Muslim societies or Islam are inherently opposed to democracy or that Islam is
compatible with democracy. (Cf. Feldman 2003, Abou el-Fadl Mousalli, (2002)
14
Sachedina and Anna'im, (1990.) The questions are what does ‘come right’ really mean,
what does the cover of democracy and moderation really hide, and what are the
historico-political reasons for the “democracy and moderation deficit” in the Muslim and
Two Thirds World in the first instance?
Questions of religious pluralism wedded to inter-religious solidarity against
oppression, of gender justice, human rights, democracy etc., have for long been ones
with which I have been engaged and with a sense of principled urgency that has its
origins in a rather different context than the current dominant empire building one that
only seeks to civilize the rebellious Muslim barbarian. My own engagement with the
South African liberation struggle and that of my comrades, my work in the field of gender
justice and my current work with Muslims who are living with HIV & AIDS have ?often
inspired many Muslim here and elsewhere who share our ideals with pride – a sense that
Muslims can be part of a vision larger than obscurantist fundamentalism. It is, ironically,
precisely this location of my own scholarship within a principled vision of a just world that
makes me so profoundly suspicious of the dominant urgency to re-think Islam in
‘contemporary terms’.

I have spoken about our witnessing, and many Islamicists participating, in an

intense and even ruthless battle for the soul of Islam; a ruthlessness that often escapes
many of us who are keen to nurture and imagine a faith that is peaceful and compatible
with the values of dignity, democracy and human rights. For many non-Muslim
Westerners who are driven by conservative ideological imperatives, Islam and Muslims
have become the ultimate other. Many liberals, on the other hand, move from the
assumption that “global harmonies remain elusive because of cultural conflicts” (Majid,
2000, 3). Hence, the desperation to nudge Islam and Muslims into a more ‘moderate’
corner, to transform the Muslim other into a Muslim version of the accommodating and
‘peaceful’ self without in any way raising critical questions about that western self and
the economic system that fuels the need for compliant subjects throughout the Empire.

I am not suggesting that issues of democracy, human rights and moderation have
not been dealt with in Islamic scholarship before Edward Said’s Orientalism or 11th of
September 2001. I am concerned that a teacher with a formidable cane has sent all of us
into a corner after one of our classmates said something unspeakable about his favourite
project. Discerning a lack of complete and unqualified remorse – even some rejoicing –
the entire class is now subjected to collective punishment. And so, all of us now have to
write a thousand times, “I shall behave – I shall be democratic – I shall respect human
rights – I shall be peaceful.” As it is, the class – Muslim societies - is a “remedial one” for
“slow learners” and we are on probation. Meanwhile, many of the other kids are dying

15
around me, in the case of Africa and indeed in much of the Two-Thirds World, quite
literally. We are living in a world where more than one 1.5 billion live on less than one
dollar and a half, where the gap between the lowest 20% and the top 20% of the word’s
population has increased from a ratio of 1:30 in 1960 to 1:194 in 2007. Yet, my major
project is to get into the good books of the teacher; to present myself as worthy of his
acceptance, as different from the barbarian who did what he did.
Besides the immediate reality of the children dying around me, there are, of
course, other realities around me including coercion, the irony of violence being used to
impose a language of peace, the larger context of education and schooling which
pretends to be ideology-less. Neither the elite nor the aspirant elites of our generation,
so desperate to ‘succeed’ within the system, have ever been too interested to engage
the works of thinkers such as Paul Goodman, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. Too tantalizing
is the promise of entry into the domain of the establishment subject to turning a blind
eye to its inherent injustice, the demand for uniformity, the reduction of human beings to
empty vessels to be moulded to serve a particular kind of society with particular
economic needs, the transformation of insan in to homo aeconomicus.
In many ways, scholarly elites are represented by the student who is desperate to
outdo his fellow students in appeasing the teacher. For these students threats are
unnecessary; the promise of acceptance by the teacher and the concomitant material
advantages are sufficient incentives. Despite the protestations of benign objectives of
advancing education and learning, the teacher is there as part of larger project – a
project that is politically unwise to interrogate; in an authoritarian system any moment
spending “valuable” time on challenging teachers means losing marks … it is
“unscholarly, it lacks intellectual depth, does not have the sang froid of true
scholarship”… (Majid, 2000, 2) As with the learners, the teacher is also not a
disembowelled human being. He comes from the city and it is a village school. There are
larger civilizational and ideological issues at stake, including understandings of
development and its price on the earth, the transformation of the earth as sacred in
traditional cosmologies into simple real estate, our very understanding of what it means
to be human, of culture, the commodity value attached to people and land and the
supremacy of supposedly rationalist forms of thinking. The issue of the teacher’s sullied
pet project represents only the sharper edge of the frustration, anger and agenda, the
rise and march of the Reconstituted Empire. The larger context of this is globalization for
which we require the intellectual courage and political will to also historicize and unravel
its implications when we consider issues of human rights, democracy and the moderate
Muslim in relation to Islam today.

Conclusion
16
 In my own approach to the Study of Islam, I am committed to challenging the
imposition of western analytic categories and fostering dialogue, I argue for the
abandonment of a positivist epistemology both within Islam and outside that sustains a
conception of understanding as discovering the objective and final truth. Instead I believe
understanding to be the result of a dialogue between horizons of meaning none of which
can claim a monopoly over truth. Here the demand is for a willingness to risk oneself into
a transformative process in which the status of the self and other are constantly
renegotiated. Authentic dialogue is about entering the other’s world while holding on to
yours, with the willingness to be transformed. It isn’t a space of trade where deals are
struck. One cannot speak of genuine political participation, integrity of communities, etc.
unless one can reach some kind of consensus on a shared system of ethics. The context
of power in which the current drive for such conversation is driven by the Empire’s
agenda makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to have any kind of authentic
conversation that holds within it an openness to mutual transformation.

I believe in the inexhaustibility of the meaning of texts and challenge the

possibility of an objectively valid interpretation. At the same time I am deeply attentive
to the radical inequality between the partners in the conversation and am conscious of
the political, cultural and economic conditions that shape the terms of the dialogue. The
pluriverse I therefore imagine is not one of culturally isolated factions but an ongoing
dialogue for and commitment to radical social change

17
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