1
It is God Who created you in a state of helpless weakness,
Then gave (you) strength after weakness …
He creates as He wills, and it is He Who has all knowledge and power.
QUR’AN 30:54
ISLAM TODAY PRESENTS itself wrapped in a conundrum. By all economic and political measures, the late twentieth century was a time of terrible decline for the Islamic world, particularly its Arab heartland. The deterioration continues in the first decades of the twenty-first century, accelerated by the American shattering of Iraq and Afghanistan, the disintegration of Syria, and the resurgence of virulent extremisms. Sober voices from the Islamic world regularly and accurately describe the condition of Dar al Islam (the Islamic world) as the worst in the 1,400-year-old history of Islam.1
Yet, precisely at this time of unprecedented material vulnerability, Islam emerged as the only transnational force to create a galvanizing identity strong enough to challenge America’s homogenizing global power. At the same time, Islam inspired the most successful of the Arab resistances to the expansion of the Israeli state. In the spring of 2011 the extraordinary popular uprisings in Arab lands, although not led by Islamic groups, evinced a distinctive Islamic coloration. The ordinary Muslims who made these revolutions, notably in Egypt and Tunisia, framed their mobilizing calls for freedom and justice in an Islamic idiom rarely appreciated or even understood in Western commentary. Calls celebrating the greatness of God were as loud as or louder than those demanding the fall of the regime. Such invocations of Islam should not be regarded as the exclusive property of political groupings. They are expressions of faith of all Muslims, including those who explicitly oppose any particular Islamic political party or movement. Ordinary Muslims quite naturally differentiate between Muslims and Islam. The unexpected assertiveness of Islam should not be obscured by the deadly distortions of extremist forces like al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the failings of particular Islamic parties like the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. This assertiveness of Islam itself, in so many ways, is the central and little-understood paradox of today: How, at a time of such unprecedented weakness, did midstream Islam make itself such a powerful transnational force with so promising a future?
Islam’s Unlikely Strength
Two things are clear. Islam’s unexpected strength does not originate from official political, economic, or religious systems and institutions, all of which are in decline. Nor can it be explained by focusing exclusively, as we in the West do obsessively, on the often-criminal assertions of violent minorities who rationalize their crimes in Islamic terms. Nor does the explanation lie with political parties that define themselves in Islamic terms, whether ruling or in opposition. The source of Islam’s power derives from the far broader al Tagdid al Islami (Islamic Renewal). First stirring in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Renewal has swept across Islamic lands. Those who respond call for revitalizing and rethinking the heritage. At the same time, they resist Western intrusions, challenge established authoritarian systems, and counter criminal Islamic extremists. The Renewal takes multiple forms, ranging from quietism and compliant withdrawal to radical reform (islah) and revolutionary agendas. The values and higher purposes of Islam, the historian Tareq al Bishri argues, shine through the differences explained by time and place. He adds emphatically that Islam, wherever found and however expressed, is inherently political.2 The most important source of Western confusion about the meaning of the Renewal is the insistence on distinguishing between Islam as religion and so-called political Islam. Neither of these characterizations is in fact applicable. Islam is far more than a religion, and its political dimensions have no such autonomy. Islam is a pluralistic way of life that in all its varieties is insistently holistic and therefore unavoidably political. The notion of political Islam is an alien construct whose fortunes have little bearing on Islam’s development. Only Marxism rivals “political Islam” in the number of times it has been pronounced dead or dying or in some obscure “post” state. Meanwhile, Islam itself appears to magically reassert itself in new and more energetic forms, providing inspiration for yet another generation of believers. In the wake of the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, assessments once again announced the end of the Islamic wave of renewal. The premature obituaries for a failed political Islam miss a simple but fundamental point: Islam as lived faith refuses any division between the religious experience and human efforts to act in this world. In short, there is no such thing as political Islam. There is only Islam, although it is subject to adaptations and a wide variety of human interpretations.
No effort will be made here to pronounce one or another of these many human understandings of Islam authentic, while discrediting all others. The salience of one or another interpretation flows from the aims and purposes of the observer rather than any inherent character of one or another form of Islam. Depending on time and place, all human understandings of Islam draw inspiration from the sacred Islamic texts, no matter how unpersuasive or distorted particular interpretations of those texts might be. All have made contributions, for better or worse, to the development of Islamic civilization at one time and place or another.
The Islamic Midstream and the Renewal
The many incarnations of Islam, however, do not have equal importance for an inquiry like this one that seeks to understand Islam’s unexpected contemporary strength. This book argues that the motivating force of the broad and varied Islamic Renewal is the contemporary Wassatteyya (Islamic midstream) that emerged in complex and adaptive forms as the guiding force of the Renewal. The Wassatteyya is neither myth nor meaningless slogan. It is rather a manifest historical tradition, whose evolution and importance are subject to analysis, documentation, and critical assessment. In the view of its adherents, the Wassatteyya functions as a vital yet flexible midstream, a centrist river out of Islam. Today, the Wassatteyya has made itself a presence everywhere Muslims are found. It connects, but does not unify, all parts of the Islamic world or ummah. It plays an important role even in those parts of the globe where Muslims are a minority.
The midstream defines Islam for the vast majority of Muslims, even as it acts as a wellspring for all manner of tributaries that allow Islam to renew itself in the most diverse ways. The Islamic midstream draws, as no other force, on the inherent strengths of the revelation. It is the world of midstream Islam that is safeguarding the faith in these difficult times. It is the world of the midstream that will ultimately shape the future of Islam and Islamic societies. The obsessive focus of the West on contemporary Islamic extremism has obscured and, at times, even obstructed and delayed this outcome. The horrific violence used to combat extremism has had the effect only of augmenting its role at the expense of the midstream. Military invasions, occupations, and bombings radicalize the Islamic world in destructive ways. They temporarily crowd out the midstream. In the end, when calm returns to Islamic lands, midstream Islam of the Wassatteyya will prevail and, consistent with well-established historical patterns, reabsorb the extremists into a recentered and inclusive Islamic body.
What exactly is the Islamic Wassatteyya, and how does it work these effects? It is most useful to start with the provisional definition that the Wassatteyya is what its adherents say it is. We can then follow their self-descriptions to discover what supporters take to be its essential elements. At their heart these self-definitions identify the Wassatteyya as a cultural/institutional configuration, which emerges from a unique Islamic historical tradition that has gained new life as part of the much broader Islamic Awakening of the 1970s. The transnational midstream tradition comprises a complex of elements, both intellectual and organizational, linked by shared commitments and a “network of networks” of interaction. These elements form a composite conceptual unit, a “difficult” whole, with a common centrist orientation to Islamic reform, resistance, and a constructive global role, expressed in a shared vocabulary. As a manifest historical tradition, the Wassatteyya can be critically evaluated, measuring pronouncements against actions, with all the usual tools of historical and social scientific analysis. It is, however, impossible to elaborate the comprehensive meaning of such a unique historical phenomenon in advance. A concept of this kind must be constructed gradually from its individual elements, identified and empirically verified as the analysis unfolds. The “final and definitive concept” in such analyses, as Max Weber has pointed out, “cannot stand at the beginning of the investigation, but must come at the end.”3
The most violent and vociferous of these offshoots, with their clamorous claims and deadly disruptions, have inevitably captured the lion’s share of attention around the world, as ISIS does today. Proponents of criminal versions of Islam have been successful in making themselves available to the Western media and policy elites for interested manipulations that advance the interests of extremists in both the West and the Islamic world. However, they have not captured the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Muslims, whose faith continues to find its most compelling and durable expression in the Islamic midstream. Muslims of the center, this book argues, are writing Islam’s epoch-defining story.
This substantive thesis on the centrality of the midstream to the strength of the Renewal raises a large question: What are the prospects of Islamic centrists with democratic and social justice commitments participating in the antisystemic struggles of global civil society for political freedom and more just social orders? This question, let me be clear, originates in my own commitments. However, I find it perfectly appropriate to ask it of the Islamic world, and so would many of the Islamic activists and thinkers of the center with whom I have interacted over the years. It is as much their question as mine. In itself, the question leans against the grain of prevailing Western views of Islamic exceptionalism that rule out any serious prospects for democracy in the Islamic world. In my view, neither the historical record nor the present landscape is as bleak for democratic prospects as such views assume. On the contrary, I will argue explicitly that the most promising advocates of democratic development in the Islamic world are, in fact, Islamic centrists. In a variety of sites and most often in alliance with centrists of other trends, they are seriously engaged in theorizing and acting on democratic experiments to advance the goals of freedom and justice. By nature, real experiments are as open to failure as they are to success. The difficulties of democratically elected parties in both Egypt and Tunisia do not signal the end of all such experiments. They offer lessons that, in the end, are more likely to advance the aims of the Renewal. Thanks to the reality of these reforming experiences, discussion must now move from airy speculations about the compatibility of Islam and democracy to far more meaningful assessments of the actual struggles of democrats in Islam. I am quite aware of the standard arguments that Islamic centrists merely adopt democratic rhetoric as a screen for theocratic ambitions. I am familiar as well with the view that moderate forces, even if genuine, will easily be swept aside by the more powerful militants who lurk in the shadows. However, I am not persuaded by these cautions on the basis of long observation and careful analysis of the real histories of events on the ground. There are, of course, no absolute guarantees. Still, the chapters that follow will show that the historical record speaks clearly and reassuringly enough to encourage us to proceed with an exploration of possible forms of cooperation with Islamic centrists on behalf of common democratic and social justice goals.
This prospect of cooperation in common projects raises its own intellectual challenges, for which we are quite unprepared. The Western literature on the Islamic world is an overgrown jungle. Yet very little of that work is of much use to the purposes of this study. For cooperation with others, what we need is practical knowledge of the actors in whom we are interested and of the contexts in which they live their lives and act on their commitments. Such knowledge of others is never complete, although it can be rigorous and verifiable. The measure of such knowledge is its usefulness for effective interaction in pursuit of common ends.
Western Scholarship: Absolutism, Relativism, and Ethnocentrism
The bulk of Western writings on the Islamic world has a quite different aim that is far more extravagant but ultimately debilitating. Western scholarship on Islam, for the most part, has a representational rather than a practical purpose. It seeks to present a true and complete picture of the Islamic world, or various aspects of it. The aim is to make Islam and all things Islamic transparent to us. Despite this shared general understanding of truth as accurate representation, there is of course great variety in the dominant literature. One way to sort it out is to recognize absolutist, relativist, and ethnocentric attitudes toward the common, but misplaced, goal of truthful representation.
From an absolutist point of view, there is an objective reality and sure knowledge of it is possible. Absolutists offer their work as embodiments, or at least approximations, of that ideal. The Arab mind, for example, exhibits certain invariable qualities that can be accurately catalogued. Islam has a determinate, unchanging character that can be faithfully portrayed. The political economy of the Islamic world responds to the laws of liberal or neoliberal economic theory and can be fully understood in its terms. These economic regularities about the Islamic world are knowable in an objective sense, whatever our motivations and whatever the subjects of our work may think of our findings. By these lights, one should envision cooperation only with those who accept the objective character of these truths. Such an inflated truth claim builds a high barrier to shared projects with others.
Those with a relativist bent, in sharp contrast, reject any such notion of absolute truth. However, for contrary reasons, this approach also rules out cooperation. All truth is relative to one’s own experience, its advocates argue. Our truth will be about ourselves, our world, and perhaps the way we see others. We can know very little, if anything at all, of a cultural or social world other than our own. Despite our best efforts, it remains mysterious and unfathomable. Since we cannot know this world, however much we might want to, it is impossible to form any coherent, evaluative judgments about it or about the behavior of the persons who act in it. All we can do is record the strange goings-on as we see them. Implicitly, conversation, let alone cooperation, is rendered unthinkable with people whom we cannot know and whose behavior is ultimately incomprehensible. Others are knowable only to the extent that they remake themselves in our image. In such cases, of course, they are not really “other” but pale, inadequate imitations of ourselves. The Western literature on the Islamic world is littered with such invidious, demeaning characterizations. They are hardly an invitation to joint action.
The ethnocentric stance essentially agrees with the relativist position but without the slightest hint of regret at the loss of potential partners. The ethnocentrist believes, quite insistently, that our way of doing things is the best way and, really, the only way. Our truths, objective or not, are the only truths that matter. Others must either conform to our way of thinking and acting or any joint action is completely ruled out.
The representational notion of truth, no matter whether given absolutist, relativist, or ethnocentric shading, has done enough damage to our relations with others. The intolerable arrogance of both the absolutist and the ethnocentrist dictates that dialogue on their terms will really be monologues about their own truths and the agendas for action that those truths unilaterally define. The relativist will give us truths about ourselves, including our understandings of those different from ourselves, but abandons the quest for genuine knowledge of others. None of these prevailing approaches opens to genuine cooperation.
Pragmatic Humanism and Understanding the Islamic Renewal
In contrast, humanistic scholarship should aim for the kind of mutual understanding that makes possible conversation and working together to achieve some common purpose. What we need is a pragmatic notion of truth, geared to those practical ends, rather than the tyrannical demands of some unattainable aim.
My intellectual and personal journey toward this goal started with a remarkably generous grant, over multiple years, from the Foreign Area Fellowship program while I was a graduate student. With that support, I traveled widely throughout the Islamic cultural continent stretching from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. I eventually settled in Cairo for two years from 1968 to 1970. I went as a student of language and culture, a painter, and an art history major who had wandered, not quite innocently, into international studies. From my studies in the arts and French culture, it seemed elemental that you needed to know the language of a culture to hope to make any sense at all of its arts, literature, and customs. My love of conversation, with all manner of people, made it imperative that the language I studied be a spoken language. I didn’t realize at the time what a fateful choice that was between an emphasis on the sacred language of the Qur’an and its modern written derivatives, where my studies of Arabic began, or the ordinary spoken language of everyday life. I do recall thinking about the relative merits of Lebanese, Moroccan, and Egyptian dialects and deciding that only Egyptian made any real sense. Thanks to the Voice of Cairo radio broadcasts, popular songs, and especially films, Egyptian Arabic established itself as something of a lingua franca throughout the Arab world. I confess that I agree with the Egyptian poet Ahmed Fuad Negm, who argued forcefully that the Egyptian dialect has a quite special, much loved role in the life of Arabs everywhere.4 To this day, however, I sometimes regret that I did not stay focused on the starkly beautiful Qur’anic Arabic with which I began at Harvard. But the regret fades when I see one of the early films of Salah Abou Seif or Yusuf Chahine, read or hear Ahmed Negm recite one of his poems, or just chat with friends or, for that matter, with Muhammad, my local grocery man, about the state of the world or our children’s prospects.
So, my first paradigm for what it meant to study Arab and then Islamic culture, more broadly, was that of the language student. That approach tipped things in decisive favor of the native speaker, who is the only real expert. The danger, of course, is “going native,” or sliding into that compliant cultural relativism that, with language as a model, takes culture as a consistent whole with self-generated and self-regulating grammars for speaking and acting that can only be understood from within. In the end, “going native,” even if it were a desirable goal, can never be attained. It simply leads to the dead end of one’s indelibly foreign identity.
With this danger in mind, I have modified that approach in fundamental ways, both in my life in Cairo and in my scholarship. The special challenges and opportunities of choosing to spend so much of my life in Cairo and other Arab cities have forced a more practical stance. I learned to put emphasis on that most surprising of inalienable rights, “the pursuit of happiness,” both personal and professional, in novel surroundings. In these settings, I share my life and work with others quite different from myself, rather than just observing and recording. I seek to know them just well enough to cooperate in all manner of shared projects to make our lives fuller and richer. In this way, I have become something of a practical interpreter, trying to make myself and my family at home and happy in societies into which we were not born, with the exception of my son, who was in fact born in Cairo.
The Strange Loops of Personal, Philosophical, and Islamic Pragmatism
In fact, a pragmatic thread runs throughout this book, woven into strange loops that merit an explanation. The habits of heart and mind of pragmatism, as a way of knowing the world and the people who move through it, came naturally to me as one of the gifts of my childhood. That background shaped my reaction to studies in pragmatism as social theory at Harvard. The pragmatists, especially John Dewey, captured my imagination when everyone around me was beguiled by European social theory, Marxism of course but also the French poststructuralists such as Foucault and Derrida. Strangest of all, in pragmatism I had found, without quite knowing it, a bridge to midstream Islam. On that bridge, I would encounter quite unexpectedly some of the great theorists and activists who animated the contemporary Islamic Renewal that has been a worldwide force since the early 1970s. But all of that lay ahead.
My mother embodied the pragmatic spirit, and from her I learned to make it my way of being in the world. Her version was a lived rather than an academic one, as my mother had only minimal elementary education. At Harvard I encountered pragmatism as a formal philosophy. To my surprise, this quintessential American philosophical school gave names to the concepts and vocabulary that I had already absorbed, as naturally as the air I breathed. Pragmatism, as systematic philosophy, also tied life lessons to grander quests for knowledge and the betterment of the human condition, although if the truth be told these larger purposes lurked just below the surface of the lessons my mother taught as well. However, it is the third loop in the pragmatic thread woven into the texture of this book that is most unexpected of all. A good deal of my academic work has dealt with Islam, particularly midstream Islam, and its remarkable capacity for adaptation and absorption. In retrospect, my attraction to the neglected Islamic midstream tradition clearly has a great deal to do with how centrist movements interpret the heritage in order to accommodate and make the best of an astonishing variety of times and places, while preserving a recognizable core of higher purposes and values. Midstream Islam cultivates habits of heart and mind with which I have been familiar all of my life. Still, it was an unexpected revelation for me to discover in the course of wide reading in the Islamic literature of the Renewal that influential centrist Islamic intellectuals explicitly recognized and embraced American pragmatism as “the Islam of the Western world.”5 A connection that I felt intuitively, in fact, had an external and independent reality that others had noted and acted on.
In these ways, the skills of interpreting others and making the best of my situation were honed long before my formal studies, although I have not until recently given the matter much thought. One thing, however, was always clear to me from the time of my graduate studies. The cultural barriers entailed in making sense of another culture are no more difficult to breach than the social minefields through which I had made my way as a working-class boy who eventually got his doctorate from Harvard. Such social mobility is, of course, very much part of what Americans believe distinguishes their country and the opportunities it offers from more stratified societies around the world. Millions of Americans have had my experience, with individual variation to be sure, although today we are witnessing the erosion of those possibilities. Whether the context was a middle- or upper-class academic setting, or a cultural environment formed of Arab and Islamic elements, the fundamental challenges, I found, were fairly constant. Always there was a new language to learn and a prevailing pattern of practical and moral reasoning to apprehend just well enough to talk with people and join with them in common endeavors. In whatever setting I land, I aim to make myself feel as much at home as I can and available to potential partners in my new environment for the adventures open to us. This personal quality of adaptability is again not at all unique nor particularly American. In fact, Arab culture reserves a special place for such legendary travelers as Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century figure who traversed the length and breadth of the ummah and beyond. Ibn Battuta had a remarkable capacity to find his footing in the most diverse settings and to find the words to convey something of what he learned.6
Contemporary American society is more fast-paced than most, with not only social but also geographic mobility. I can almost always locate my Egyptian and Arab friends in the same neighborhoods where I left them, even a decade or more before. In contrast, we Americans are always on the move, it seems, and perhaps for that reason we need more than others to tap into the skills of landing on our feet and adapting to new settings, skipping only a beat or two. So my journey to a practical method of understanding others and their contexts did not begin with encounters in the Islamic world at all, but much earlier. Later it was my good fortune to study and then work collaboratively with some of the great American, Canadian, Arab, and European scholars of the Islamic world, who collectively represent a wide variety of disciplines and just about all the approaches under the academic sun. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising to me that the most fundamental methods that underlie my work today derive more from the practical sensibility that I first absorbed as a child from my mother, the first of that series of remarkable teachers. The lessons she imparted to her seven children, always by her own steady practices, showed us who we were, or rather should be, and what our environment demanded of us. These practical lessons, learned early, opened my mind to the critical values and reformist aims that marked the work of the pragmatists. More importantly, such acquired pragmatic attitudes of mind and spirit brought what should have been an alien tradition within comfortable reach. Islam of the midstream, from the first, made intuitive good sense to me.
Our neighborhood in Jersey City was not the best, and neither was our five-room, one-bath apartment for such a large family. My mother’s trick was to make the best of what it was. Not all the problems were outside. They never are. My father was often either between jobs or laid off. When things weren’t going well, he drank, and so my mother always put her wallet under her pillow when she slept. She let us know that by her action, with no comments about my father or visible embarrassment about the matter. We kids understood why she guarded what money there was. My mother coped.
Coping was an active thing, and it demanded some imaginative thinking and maneuvering to make the most of what was at hand. We kids had a red wagon that I can still picture. Family legend had it that my mother would take my older brothers to gather coal that spilled from the coal car alongside the railroad tracks at the end of our street. The oil burners might be empty in our living room, but the old iron kitchen furnace would heat the apartment. I loved that large kitchen with its wonderful metal ceiling. So did my mother. It had to be beautiful. Our side of the duplex house had been condemned and both apartments abandoned for a while, before we moved in on the second floor. Among other challenges, all the kitchen cabinet doors had been stolen. My mother found the solution in a deep reddish-maroon material, cut to size for each missing door, perfectly hemmed, and then mounted with wide loops on spring-set curtain rods. We all helped paint and wallpaper the kitchen. The cloth panels were the finishing touch. I have yet to see a kitchen I liked more. Resilience, my mother taught, need not be grim nor white knuckled. The pragmatists projected this same insight. Years later I was to discover that it was the Islamic centrists who really owned that concept.
Dealing with the world outside was a taller order in our Jersey City neighborhood. The first priority was the way we presented ourselves. We were “the Baker Boys” and the way my mother said that meant something very important, although to be honest I never thought through exactly what that might be. My brothers and I all look a good deal alike, but that’s where the similarities end. Our interests and personalities are all over the board. The complexities of dealing with such a diverse lot went off the charts when my twin sisters, the youngest of my siblings, arrived late and to an adoring if somewhat bewildered welcome. I think that living in such a small space with such diverse human beings taught me more about the challenges of understanding people different from me than any other life experience. My mother never wavered in her insistence that we recognize, respect, and make the effort to understand or at least live peacefully with the differences. At the same time, whatever our differences, to the neighborhood we were to present a united front.
How you presented yourself to the world outside mattered greatly, but what you thought of yourself mattered more. Clothes were a problem, but a needle and thread and soap and water were the solution. Every time I later saw my Muslim friends thoroughly wash both hands and feet before prayer, I could not help but think that my mother would approve. Cleanliness in Islam is not a minor matter, nor was it for my mother. Although my mother did the bulk of the wash, we all learned to clean and mend our own things. When the clothes wore out, handed down from one brother to the next, my mother would organize a trip to Burns, the used clothes store. In retrospect, I think that should have been a humiliating experience. It wasn’t. I am still not quite sure why. The one thing I do remember clearly is the shoes. That should have been the biggest problem, wearing other kids’ discarded shoes. It wasn’t. What I remember most clearly are the huge shoe bins that I could barely see into. My mother would lift me up and I would plunge into the shoes. A first victory was always finding that first shoe in good shape and the right size, but the real triumph came from rummaging through the piles to find the mate. Holding it up was sheer joy. My mother made it possible to feel like a hero under her affirming gaze. I never thought much about what other people might be thinking. I still don’t. What mattered then was her gaze and how it made me feel.
My mother encoded guidelines for dealing with the neighborhood in her own behavior. We were not to look for trouble, but to stick together, all five of us boys, if trouble came our way. You never hit first, but you always defended yourself and your brothers and sisters, whatever it took. My mother was not a pacifist and neither am I, although I abhor violence in all its forms. The scene I remember best occurred somewhat later, when my mother was working as a waitress at a lunch counter, attached to a bar. There, she encountered all types. I was visiting one day and saw one smart ass take the spoon out of his hot coffee and jokingly put it on the back of my mother’s hand. My mother didn’t flinch. She simply picked up a cut-glass bowl of sugar, rose to her full four feet eleven inches to look him right in the face, and told him that he would be wearing the sugar bowl if he dared do any such thing again. Much later, I never found mysterious or repugnant the spirit of resistance, even against improbable odds, that is at the very heart of the Islamic Awakening. That resistance emerges naturally from the pragmatic way of being in the world that midstream Islam cultivates. Pragmatism means that you are moved by higher purposes but use the weapons at hand, even if all you have is personal dignity, an indomitable spirit, and a sugar bowl.
We needed to see such things. To make it from one end of our street to another without being hassled was often a challenge. Luckily, at the upper end of the street on the way home from school, my mother’s friend Rita, with her elaborate hairdos and strong perfume, had a ground-floor apartment. If there was a problem on the street, we were to go there if we couldn’t get to our place. But if her husband, Dave, came home, we were to leave immediately. Dave drank heavily and was not to be trusted. He could be violent and worse. It was important to keep things real. There really are no completely safe havens, so sometimes you just have to keep moving.
We very rarely saw a doctor. My mother believed in cleanliness of body and home as the major antidote to illness. It was also one we could afford. Pepto-Bismol, peroxide, and aspirin were household staples; they could be trusted based on long experience. Burns were treated with tea leaves, high fevers with cool baths. Doctors did stitches only when the tightly taped bandages could not bridge a wound. Hospital emergency rooms and clinics were avoided. My mother believed that there was nothing for free. When my brothers were in the military, a stern warning was issued against volunteering to test anything, whatever the incentive offered. They experiment on people in those free clinics and in the army, she warned. And of course she was right.
As a graduate student I was delighted to discover many of these realistic, practical, and self-reliant habits of mind and heart in John Dewey, the great American pragmatist philosopher and social reformer. John Dewey, I am convinced, would have liked my mother, just as I am convinced my mother would have understood my choice to live so much of my life in contexts shaped by Islam. There is a great deal of my mother’s spirit and of her ways in Dewey’s championing of the practical improvement of human well-being and in the pragmatic approach he took to the great issues of education, social justice, and democratic reform. I suspect as well that he would have liked the way she taught us to deal with others, especially those who are different in one way or another—which means, in effect, just about everyone. I find it unhelpful to single out the difficulty of understanding those from another culture. It may be a longer walk from home, but the journey through cultural barriers in its essentials is no more daunting than working through individual, gender, or class differences. I will refer to Dewey and the other pragmatists as guides for my interpretive efforts to understand midstream Islam throughout this book, but I thought it only fair to let my readers know that he was not my most influential teacher of the ways of pragmatism. The pragmatic philosophers provided generalized insights. My mother had prepared me to understand them in personal terms. In the Islamic world, I was to discover those same insights expressed in Arabic and articulated in wonderfully expressive Islamic forms.
The core of Dewey’s work is the notion that doing is at the heart of knowing and doing always takes place in value-laden human interactions within a specific environment. Theories that make sense of the world are always, in this sense, grounded theories of particular situations in which identifiable people find themselves and discern the possibilities for action that their situations offer. There is no substitute for such textured, local knowledge, even for a project as ambitious in geographic scope as the one raised in this book—that is, for the daunting task of developing an understanding of midstream, transnational Islam. The Islamic Renewal unavoidably is about a broadly shared human religious and cultural experience. It is distinctive, but not incomprehensible to others. Dewey reminds us that, when our subject is religion, we should bring into view not only religions in general but also particular religions and the actual religious experiences that religion makes possible for specific human beings. We must pay attention to Islam’s distinctive message to humanity, while not losing sight of the fact that there is nothing exotic or alien about the religious experience itself. But we also need to remind ourselves that access to the meaning of a particular religious experience can only come through our interactions with the men and women for whom it represents their religious experience. They are the ones who seek to make it a force in the world in ways that make it available to us. Precisely for that reason, the religious experience should not be regarded as totally interior and unavailable for engagement.
These pragmatic attitudes mark all of the engagements with the Islamic centrists who are the primary actors in this book. I am not sure that Goethe is exactly right when he pronounces that to understand something you must love it, but there is surely something to his observation.7 To be frank, although not uncritical, I do find much that is admirable in the thinking and actions of the main figures and movements of the Wassatteyya on both intellectual and moral grounds. For that reason I have found it easy to sustain my interest in their work for decades as successive generations have renewed the centrist project in a wide variety of settings, almost all of which I have visited. Shared affinities must surely facilitate understanding, although the inclination to airbrush shortcomings must be actively resisted. After all, those who love us most have the obligation to be our sharpest and most incisive critics—at least that is what my mother taught. Moreover, when we are interacting with those to whom we are drawn, it is important to be clear about precisely what is shared and what is not.
Few intellectual blunders are as irritating to me as the very common misuse of the term “pragmatism” as a synonym for opportunism. This misusage runs through the Western literature on Islamic movements. The pragmatists, of course, strongly objected to thought and action voided of its moral implications. As a school, pragmatists stood firmly for progressive reform against the rigidities of conservatism and the excesses of ideological extremism. At the core of their thinking is a positive faith in human beings, all human beings, and their shared potential to do good things with their lives, however depressing the clear-headed record of actual behavior can be. Doing is, for the pragmatists, both an intellectual and moral activity of the highest order. None of these attitudes would be foreign to the centrist Islamic groups, as subsequent chapters will make clear. They share the focus on actions rather than simply words, on the inclusive rather than the exclusionary, and on rescuing the best of past efforts rather than destroying and building anew. The explicit acknowledgment of the reflexive loop in the exchanges means that the midstream current has an awareness of both American pragmatism, or at least of the basic concepts, ideas, and values that define it. Moreover, they recognize in this way of knowing and being in the world a good deal that is Islamic.8
There is for Islamic centrist Muslims great promise in the Qur’anic advisement that God created a diverse humanity so that they might “know one another” and in the Qur’anic injunction to a righteous humanity to “build the world.”9 Both themes echo clearly in pragmatism. Centrist Islamic groups, like the best of global civil society bodies in non-Islamic societies, are working actively to lessen the violence of our shared world, the damage to our lonely planet, and the miseries that plague our human race. Practical knowledge of these shared aspirations to improve the human condition can be the grounding for acting together. Such joint projects, so important on their own terms, are also needed in the task of containing the deadly mischief of fundamentalists and extremists of all stripes. These extremist elements, particularly destructive in our Western world because of our exorbitant power but no less murderous in theirs, routinely attack the center and undermine those who work to build a world with a modicum of justice and freedom. It is perfectly reasonable to think that we should at least remain open to the possibility of finding among the centrists and democrats in Islam partners for works, large and small, that advance the human interest.
The responsive openness of this approach expresses a degree of optimism that is not fully justified by the facts of human experience, particularly the record of Western violence toward the Islamic world and the criminality of extremist Islamic groups. It is rooted ultimately in faith in a human nature with the potential for good. That faith assumes a human love of justice and freedom, a human capacity for science and learning, and an always unwarranted human willingness to reconcile and forgive. The contradictory record of human history makes such assumptions just as reasonable as their opposites. Dewey’s responsive openness to others suffuses his practical drive to ameliorate the human condition and his search for partners in that endeavor. It finds its grounding in the idea that all human beings, given the right circumstances, could contribute to the development of sound science and just democracy, the highest human attainments and the most promising means of human advancement. To think otherwise, he believes, is racism. So do I and, more importantly, so do major Islamic thinkers of the center who are major players in the stories of the Wassatteyya told here. To be sure, American pragmatists and Islamic centrists arrive at these conclusions from very different starting points. But what matters is that they do arrive.
For those with direct knowledge and lived experience in the Islamic world, it will seem self-evident to comment that the vast majority of Muslims live rather ordinary and decent lives, concerned with the health and well-being of their families while quietly entertaining moderate hopes of making a positive difference, however small, in their city or village, society, and the world. It will seem unnecessary as well to comment that ordinary Muslims often do so in the quite extraordinary circumstances of domestic tyrannies, foreign incursions, and local extremisms. Muslims do look to Islam for balance and moderation in their everyday lives. At the same time, without contradiction, they also find in Islam a source of practical inspiration for resistance to foreign incursions and domestic tyrannies, whether of ruling regimes or extremist minorities that distort the faith for criminal ends. Today, however, we need to say these things out loud to a broader Western public and to identify the sources and trends in the Islamic world that speak for this longstanding and pragmatic centrism.
The Fourth Wave of Renewal in a Global Age
The contemporary Islamic Renewal has deep roots and clear historical precedents. The efforts of the Islamic midstream to renew Islamic thought and provide foundations for actions for reform have come in three successive historical waves, at the end of the nineteenth century, after World War I, and after World War II, each responsive to the felt need for the tradition to speak more effectively to changed conditions. In the period beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a fourth wave of renewal swept through the Islamic world. It continues to work its effects today. Intellectuals of the Islamic center, from Morocco to Malaysia, began articulating their assessments of the radical transformations that were reshaping the world in these critical years. They advanced their visions of how Islamic reform should proceed in the startling new conditions created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, American hegemonic claims as the sole superpower, and the combined impact of the Information Revolution and the unified global market. These several factors combined to sweep away the order of the Cold War international system and create a new global context to which Islamic groups had to respond. In their writings, centrist Islamic groups identified core concepts from the heritage that would allow Muslims to understand and overcome the chaos of a world falling apart, while also invoking the Qur’anic values that could be the basis for repair. Self-consciously, they announced their projects with the hope that they would be recognized and understood by similar-minded intellectuals elsewhere in the Islamic world.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s such independent Islamic intellectuals, connected to social groups and movements of reform rather than official religious institutions or radical movements of violent opposition, responded most effectively to this historical moment. These disparate, centrist assertions all had a principled yet pragmatic character, suffused with a worldview that sought out a middle way. They eschewed stagnation, on the one hand, and radical excesses, on the other. They argued that the validation of their ideas would come with their implementation. All of their manifestos were calls to action, tied to particular local circumstances, but informed by a broader vision of happenings elsewhere in the ummah. They were soon connected in a loose network, facilitated by the improved means of communication and transportation. These networks made it possible to share ideas and experiences in order to define the Wassatteyya for a global age.
In its decentralized form, the centrist Islamic web has more in common with computer networks and their systems of parallel processing and distributed intelligence than with traditional political movements that depended on the secret cells of underground systems. In the Western literature, these movements are more often than not mischaracterized as social movements. Yet the Wassatteyya is clearly distinguished from the new social movements that are for the most part characterized by a singular focus. In contrast, the Islamic midstream has a comprehensive orientation toward social change. In the new conditions created by the Information Revolution, new relationships have emerged among dispersed intellectual leaders and between the attentive publics that responded to them. These relationships have an organic character in ways made possible by the personal computer and the Internet. The lifelike character of this flexible web of groups and movements of the center does not escape notice and quite vivid commentary within the Islamic world. Alert intellectuals of the center have found in updated versions of the organic imagery that suffused the inherited Islamic tradition a perfectly suitable vocabulary to describe the new kinds of “living” systems that the Wassatteyya is spontaneously generating. These familiar organic vocabularies help Muslims understand how the thinking and action of those moved by the Islamic Renewal are undergoing profound transformations.
These radical changes of the fourth wave of renewal enabled the unprecedented forms of spontaneous coordination and cooperation on a transnational level that is the subject matter of this study. The revitalized Wassatteyya addresses the major issues of reform and resistance, as they present themselves in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Wassatteyya insistently sets its own agenda, adamantly refusing that imposed by the West. It formulates its own models to respond to the challenges of the new age. It does so most often as much in opposition to existing regimes in the Islamic world as to the West. Inherited tradition is made to speak to the new age. The core Islamic notion of tawhid (the oneness of God) and the complex of related Qur’anic concepts of ‘ilm (knowledge), ‘aql (mind), and ‘adl (justice) jihad and (striving or struggle) have all been interpreted anew, with one eye on the sacred texts and the other on the new realities of a global age. In this way, one balances between religion and pragmatism. These Qur’anic concepts serve as markers on the path of resistance to Western intrusions and reform efforts to develop and build exemplary Islamic societies in the face of the daunting obstacles of cruel authoritarianisms. Today, distributed experiences across the Islamic world that in earlier times might have remained isolated, or with only delayed effects, can be absorbed immediately for what they reveal of both opportunities and challenges. Notable in this regard are the practical economic successes of the Malaysians, the democratic theorizing of Tunisian Islamic groups, or the democratic practices of their Turkish and Iranian reformist counterparts. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things on behalf of reform and resistance also find a space of appearance.
What emerges from these complex and unpredictable interactions results neither from a division of labor nor a model of specialization. The relationship of part to whole is organic rather than mechanical. Experiences are absorbed into the organic whole that is the Wassatteyya rather than remaining localized in its parts. Thus, the ways to economic success of Malaysia or the victories of practical politics of Turkish Islamic groups or the trials of Iranian reformists become lessons that circulate throughout the Wassatteyya network. The pragmatic vision of progress that emerges from these efforts is insistently Islamic. The inspiration comes from the experience of Islamic groups, although including of course those Islamic groups unafraid to borrow from the successful experiences of others. Self-criticism is essential for such a project. It is recognized as such. The midstream vigorously resists the temptation to attribute all ills to outside forces. However, there is also a realistic assessment of the damage done by forces hostile to the vulnerable Islamic world, often with horrific levels of violence and destruction.
Everywhere, the revitalized Wassatteyya also confronts the fringe minorities that attempt to capture the Renewal for their own criminal purposes. The deadly aims and the terrible means of criminal Islam are even more at odds with centrist understandings of Islam than they are with the West. The midstream has been far more consistent in its opposition to Islamic extremism than have Western governments. The United States, in particular, has far too often succumbed to illusions that such groups could be used, without cost, for its own purposes. Centrists regard the distortions of Islam by the often-ignorant marginal groups as so dangerous that cooperative projects with the militants, such as those undertaken by American intelligence agencies, are far more difficult to imagine. For much the same reason, the midstream has developed a principled opposition to compliant, official Islam that makes itself the handmaiden of authoritarian rule. In the eyes of the midstream, the damage from extremist forms of Islam, as well as the compromises of domesticated Islam to the inherited tradition, if unchecked, threaten Islam itself. For the Wassatteyya, the importance of this battle of “religion against religion,” to borrow Ali Shariati’s phrase, stands second to none.10
The Co-Evolution of Islam and American Empire
This story of the Islamic Renewal and of the challenges faced from within the Islamic world by the midstream engine that drives it cannot be told in isolation. The turbulent years of the 1970s witnessed not only the appearance of the wave of Islamic Renewal but also the rise of the American empire. American power now exercises unprecedented global hegemony, asserted with particular force and willful ignorance in Islamic lands. It does so through an expanding network of bases and client regimes. From the outset, the emergence and evolution of the Islamic midstream have taken place not only in continuous conflict with the repressive state structures and violent Islamic militants but also in continuous interaction with the aggressive American empire.
The Wassatteyya exists today as a vital, autonomous force, increasingly capable of resisting U.S. government efforts to manipulate and repress. This resistance has brought the Islamic midstream into conflict not only with U.S. policies but also with the regional regimes the United States maintains. All too often, it is forgotten that the established regimes in the Arab Islamic world are for the most part the products of the colonial era or the Westernized outcomes of the struggles for decolonization. As such, they have made themselves available as the instruments of American power in our own time. Those regimes in turn correctly regard the independent Islamic midstream, not the violent extremists, as the most important opposition force they confront. These authoritarian regimes, whether monarchies or dictatorships that originate from the military, often receive Western and particularly American support to combat the midstream Islamic challenge to their repressive monopoly of power. The periodic announcements of American support for democracy and moderation are simply rhetorical cover, as the historical record makes clear. The ease with which the American administration facilitated and accommodated the military seizure of power in Egypt in 2013 is only the most recent case in point.
These various connections and interactions mean that Islam and the American empire, the heir of earlier such imperial ventures, cannot be disentangled without severely dimming the prospects of understanding either. They shaped each other through decades of complex exchanges and continue to do so today. Both have also drawn strength from the explosive changes in technologies, production, and administration, occurring first in the 1970s in the United States and eventually engulfing the world. In this precise way, both have defined themselves in important, although rarely acknowledged, ways, by their co-evolution in the new space and time of globalism. Indeed, the points of connection have been so prolonged and so intense that Islam and empire function in some ways as a composite whole, responding continuously to each other. However counterintuitive such a notion might seem, for some analytical purposes some Islamic movements and empire are best considered a single unit of study, forged through continuous interactions.
Those interactions between Islam and empire have taken various forms in the past that will all be considered in the analysis offered here.11 At the same time, I want to raise the question of the likely form of those interactions for the future as well. It is my hope that this book will be of interest to those in the Islamic world, not least Islamic groups themselves, who have an interest in developing a richer, more nuanced and self-critical sense of the meaning and implications of the Islamic Renewal both as history and contemporary reality. I also have another audience in mind. As an American scholar with strong democratic and social commitments in the best critical traditions of my country, I have written this book as well for my fellow Westerners, genuinely committed to the ideals of justice and democracy. They are often quite bewildered by the almost exclusive focus in the Western media and scholarship on the violent and antidemocratic forces at work in the contemporary Middle East. That focus obscures our own American contributions to the sum total of human misery in the region. One purpose of this book is to show concerned Western democrats, faced with our own democratic struggles at home, that they do have de facto allies on the ground around the Middle East. They are rightful partners in the broader global struggle for democracy and justice, although they simply are not on our radar screen (nor we on theirs). The Wassattayya, the chapters that follow show, does represent a positive global force in the struggle for democracy and progress. Although we use different vocabularies to describe and defend our aims, we are committed to the same transnational project on behalf of justice and freedom. We can participate together in the emergence and strengthening of an effective, global public. The democrats in Islam of the Wassatteyya are no more perfect in attainments and commitments than we are. However, if there is any basis at all for hope about the triumph of constructive forces over foreign mischief, extremism, and authoritarianism in the Middle East, they are an indispensable part of it. Thus, while the primary focus of this study is assessment of the role of the midstream in the Islamic Renewal, it inevitably and consistently brings into view the co-evolving American empire as well and considers the possibility that the interactions of Islam and the West might yet take more progressive forms.
Arabesques, Networks, and Egypt as Point of Entry
Focus, of course, is not quite the right word for coming to grips with the complex and decentered living web that is the Wassatteyya. After all, how can you focus on something that is always in formation and never fully formed, always emerging and evolving without ever achieving final shape, endlessly interacting with its environment and never fully distinguishable from it? Seeing the Islamic midstream in this way as a complex, adaptive system with many of the characteristics of a living organism brings to mind the arabesque, the prototypic Islamic art form.12 Like the arabesque, the interacting patterns of the Wassatteyya remain open-ended. They extend infinitely around the globe, adapting in unpredictable ways to the most varied settings, while remaining recognizably Islamic. There is no one focal point or single privileged point of entry to such a system, although in any given period one node may be more important than another for some specific purpose. All we can do, really, is to grasp hold of a few useful threads that will lead us into the complex arabesque of the Wassatteyya, without expecting any completely satisfying sense of finding either the most appropriate beginning or the most conclusive ending for the exploration. A comprehensive, definitive mapping is out of the question. The patterns of meaning and social action shift too rapidly for that. Such total understanding is the dream of idle fools and strategic planners in powerful centers and think tanks whose well-paid job it is to come up with such definitive analyses, however unreal they may be.13 But we can hope for enough understanding to feel more at home, to find our way around, to recognize potential partners for our projects when they emerge.
The threads pulled here originate in Egypt, although they extend throughout the Arab and Islamic world beyond. This starting point, like any other, builds distortions into the analyses. Perhaps the most damaging is the reinforcement of an Arab-centric view of the Islamic world. Surely by now we all should know that Islam does not belong to the Arabs. It never did, as the Qur’an makes clear. Of the 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, only a minority of some 350 million are Arabs. Muslims today constitute a majority in some forty extremely diverse countries, and there are Muslim minorities in nearly every country on the planet. Moreover, the largest Muslim population is found in Indonesia rather than the Arab lands. Still, it does make a certain sense to start our journey to the pluralistic Islamic community or ummah through its Arab quarters. All Muslims know that their beloved Prophet was an Arab, that the language of the Qur’an is Arabic, and that the Arabs were, as the historian Albert Hourani, notes, “the ‘matter of Islam’ (maddat al Islam), the human instrument through which it conquered the world.”14
The choice of Egypt in particular as beginning point, while arbitrary, is also a reasoned one that affords considerable advantages. Not least, of course, is the Islamic ethos that permeated Midan Tahrir, the epicenter of the quite miraculous Egyptian revolutionary uprising of January 2011.15 In early July 2013 the Egyptian revolution entered its second phase. Once again, Islam was everywhere a presence. One striking incident makes the point. When the pro-Mursi activists gathered near Cairo University, the military forces that surrounded the intersection where they gathered did all the usual things. They moved established barriers, they moved tanks into place, and they prepared to do battle. Then, once again, they did the extraordinary. Ordinary soldiers, Muslims, spontaneously responded to the call for prayer in the streets in clear sight of the men and women, supporters of the Muslim Brothers, they were sent to contain. Islam itself made itself felt on both sides of those barriers. Later, pro- and anti-Mursi Egyptians prayed in exactly the same way in Rabaa al ‘Adawiya and Tahrir squares. The social culture shaped by Islam was the same. The differences were political and, in the end, brutally so.
This pervasive Islamic ethos that has defined the unfinished Egyptian revolution should not be a cause for surprise. Egypt experienced the Islamic Renewal early on and continues to be an exceptionally important node in its evolution. Even more decisively, from an Egyptian school of Islamic intellectuals, this book argues, has come the most impressive and influential formulations of midstream positions and guidance for effective action for the twenty-first century. More specifically, I take the position that a school of Egyptian centrist thinkers has generated the most significant advances in midstream fiqh (understanding of Qur’an and Sunnah) for the twenty-first century. Fiqh has come to mean not simply substantive understandings but also articulations of the rules and guidelines on how those understandings are reached. Fiqh for this reason has a very practical function. While Turkish and Iranian thinkers, in particular, have made their own important contributions, the Egyptian Wassatteyya has a distinctively transnational character that gives the record of their thought and action the greatest usefulness for our purposes here.
The choice has a personal dimension as well. I have lived and traveled widely for over more than four decades in the historic Islamic world, from Córdoba in Spain to China. Precisely for that reason I am painfully aware of the barriers of language and culture and lived experience that make it hard for a single scholar to make sense of what is happening in great swaths of that vast cultural continent where the most concentrated populations of diverse Muslims live. Egypt is the place I know best. Its rich intellectual and spiritual life, while delightfully elusive, is still more accessible to me than any other. It is the site where, over these many years, I have developed and refined the pragmatic method of understanding others that informs every page of this book. For these substantive reasons Egypt makes sense as point of entry into the networks of the Wassatteyya.
More than any others, it is my professional and personal experiences with Egyptian family members, friends, and colleagues that ground the faith I have that, for all the barriers, we can talk to each other through cultural differences. With some luck and considerable patience we can also manage to engage in moral argument and even reach agreement, thanks to those little, always unexpected miracles of breakthrough that enliven human interactions.
Small stories sometimes carry large messages and effect real changes. A conversation I had some years ago with the daughter of a very close Egyptian friend had precisely such an effect. My friend Kamel was one of the very first to introduce me to some of the centrist Islamic figures who will play such a large role in this book. I played with Samar as a toddler and shared with her father his delight in his strong-willed, highly intelligent child. Her only fault, from my point of view, was the astonishing speed with which she spoke. I regularly had to plead with her to slow the “train,” a request that always amused her. In her teens, like many of her generation, Samar took the headscarf and I also noticed her sleeves and skirts getting longer. Samar’s dad, who died suddenly and tragically just as Samar was entering high school, was a religious man, well read in both classic and contemporary Islamic writings. He and I often discussed Islamic issues. Although an engineer by training and occupation, Kamel loved the classic Islamic texts more than any others, and he avidly followed developments in contemporary Islamic thinking. I first met Kamel in 1968 at the Russian cultural center in Cairo, where my wife and I were studying advanced Russian so we would not lose that daunting language under the pressure of our study of Arabic. Later, as friends, when Kamel and I made our yearly treks to the Cairo book fair, two stops were required before the aimless wandering in which we delighted most. We had to know first what was new in children’s books and then in Islamic philosophy. Admittedly, there was something just a little odd about our obsession with children’s books. When the tradition began, he didn’t have any and neither did I. But Kamel was convinced that, whatever else we did with our lives, being good fathers had to be a high priority. Given our limitations, he would slyly note, we had better get started acquiring the skills and sensibilities we would need. I agreed, worried that I had not had the best experience of just what it means to be a good father. Before his first child was born, Kamel already had a considerable library waiting for him, not to mention the old computer he refused to throw away because Mostafa could play with it.
It was Kamel who introduced me to Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazzali, whom I consider one of the two or three most important Islamic thinkers of the twentieth century, quite possibly the greatest. Kamel didn’t know Ghazzali personally, but he loved him. He insisted on several occasions that I stay over with his family so we could hear Ghazzali lead the dawn prayer for the vast crowd in a large public square near his apartment in Cairo. There was nothing forced or artificial about Kamel’s religious commitments. He treasured them, while wearing them lightly. He was always amused when, pretending to forget, I would invite him for his favorite lunch in the middle of the Ramadan fast. I never minded opening my computer to hear Qur’anic verses that he had surreptitiously planted on my hard drive for my enlightenment, knowing full well I would never figure out how to remove them. His faith was so much a part of his life that the notion that we somehow couldn’t talk, argue, or even joke about it never occurred to either of us. Islam was part of the air that Kamel breathed. It was an integral part of our lifelong friendship.
Still, with all this background, Samar’s sudden decision to wear gloves and not shake the hand of any males still startled me. In my mind, I saw the niqab (face veil) as the next step. The niqab covers the entire face and not just the hair, as the hegab (headscarf) does, and I feared her countenance would disappear from my life. Kamel disliked extremisms in all forms. I had no doubts that he would have regarded this sudden turn in his daughter’s life as one worthy of thought and serious reflection, although I also understood that it would be the subject of conversation and not a diktat.
Samar was used to my involvement in her life in those early years, so she wasn’t really too surprised when I asked her bluntly why she was adopting “Saudi” manners and dress. I knew the comment would displease her, as Egyptians hardly view the Saudis as mentors in matters of faith, fashion, or lifestyle. I also knew that she would reject any attribution to Saudi Arabia for the adoption of what she took to be proper Islamic dress and behavior. She pointed out that modest dress was an Islamic obligation. I asked her how she knew that modesty meant gloves. She said that Islam enjoins modest dress for women, noting that the gloves were perhaps not obligatory but nevertheless pleasing to God. I asked her how she knew what was pleasing to God. She told me about her shaikh, who conveyed this wisdom. How did he know? I inquired. Samar didn’t hesitate to say, from the Qur’an.
Kamel had given me my opening. Never resisting the opportunity to remind me that his familiarity with the Bible exceeded mine, Kamel had for years encouraged my reading of the Qur’an. I had frequently discussed particular verses with him, most often in his living room with TV blasting and the children playing between our legs. More often than not, we would turn to Islamic scholars like Yusuf al Qaradawi or Muhammad al Ghazzali for help when understanding of a particular verse or concept eluded us. So, there was nothing unusual in my suggestion to Samar that we first check the actual texts. Samar couldn’t remember the precise verse her shaikh had alluded to, but from the description it seemed to me it might be in the Surah of Women. We searched but, to Samar’s disappointment, she could not find the verse that matched the description the shaikh had given in his loose Qur’anic reference. She resolved to ask him for the precise text. The next time we met, Samar announced that the verse was indeed in the Surah of Women, but Samar had discovered that neither the face nor the hands were mentioned explicitly as requiring covering. The verse called instead for modesty in dress of both men and women, indicating that the area of the body to be covered was that private domain from above the knees to the waist. It took a considerable imaginative leap to relocate either the hands or the face to those areas. Samar then learned that the shaikh had relied for his interpretation of the verse on certain hadiths, or traditions of the Prophet. Hadiths can be verified and evaluated as to their reliability, and it turned out that these hadiths cited were weak ones. Samar’s sense of certainty in her course began to erode. At that point, I suggested she read an important book by Muhammad al Ghazzali, one of her father’s favorites, on women’s role in Islam in which he supports the headscarf but not the face veil.16 Samar was, of course, familiar with Ghazzali as a figure whom her father respected. The book itself was still nestled on one of the shelves surrounding the family entertainment center that Kamel had designed. I am not sure if she ever did read it, but I do know that Samar still wears a stylish version of the headscarf, although the gloves disappeared without comment, and I can still see Kamel in her face.