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Do they not travel through the land, so that their hearts (and minds) may thus learn wisdom and their ears may thus learn to hear?
QUR’AN 22:46
I ANTICIPATED A lifetime of travels, following the itinerary laid out by Ibn Battuta. I reveled in the opportunities to experience, in his wake, Islam’s inventive adaptations to local conditions across the globe.1 I traveled along historic routes from Andalusia in Spain, across north Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia, and on to China. Impressed by the contrasts, I searched as well for the commonalities that made all these far-flung and very different places Islamic lands. By observation and conversation, I sought to discover the ways ordinary Muslims across Dar al Islam expressed their faith, as they went about the business of living. I looked forward to adventures of all kinds in the large communities of Muslims in Africa, India, and southeast Asia that I had not yet visited. The ancient pathways that pass through those lands insistently beckoned.
Just when I had the timing of the final stages of my itinerary sketched out, the unexpected happened. In the mid-1970s new issues began to dominate my thinking and shape my interests. I continued my voyages, but gradually my focus shifted. The great historic puzzle of sameness and difference that lingers over the history of Dar al Islam gave way to new questions. After several years of living in Arab countries, notably Egypt, I concluded by the early 1980s that a great deal of the unifying history and heritage of classical and medieval Islam has survived into the modern world. Contemporary Islam, for all the talk in those years of its eclipse, remained a powerful force. The conviction gradually took hold that millions of Muslims were succeeding in their daily struggles to live in accordance with their faith. Islam was renewing itself and growing in strength. It was the efforts of ordinary people, I came to believe, rather than the grand battles of politics and foreign policy that ensured the spiritual coherence and worldly future of Dar al Islam. From this perspective, al Tagdid al Islami (the Islamic Renewal) of the late 1960s and early 1970s presented itself as a heightened awareness of everyday struggles already under way. Ordinary people aimed to bring Islam more centrally into their daily lives. They sought to strengthen the sense of connection to the worldwide ummah that Islam created. At sites across Dar al Islam, I took note of the impressive successes they registered, as Islam moved into the public square. Social and political movements under Islamic banners proliferated. Women, including my female students at the American University in Cairo, took the veil, often against the advice of their parents. Regular reading of the Qur’an became more and more a social norm.
Only a handful of Western scholars agreed with this broad conclusion that Islam was experiencing a rebirth, although that realization left me unmoved. For the majority of Western analysts the human future would be a secular one. Islam would be relegated to a historical museum. The Qur’an would have its place as an antiquarian artifact in a glass case.2 The violent onslaught of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism and imperialism had undeniably done great damage to the connective tissue of Dar al Islam. The great European empires dismembered the Islamic world with particular savagery. Yet, in my view, the Renewal and the popular response it evoked promised an improbable transcendence of those terrible ruptures. That promise raised intriguing questions for the most part ignored in Western scholarship: How did ordinary Muslims, responding to the Islamic Renewal, hope to reassert and strengthen their sense of connection to the ummah? What actions, all a form of resistance, were they taking to restore the vitality of the faith? How did the intellectuals of the Wassatteyya (Islamic midstream) propose to guide the efforts of Muslims to resist external Western intrusions and act to revitalize the heritage?
From my travels and experiences of living in Islamic lands, I was convinced that these questions were real and important ones, although almost no one in the scholarly community took them seriously. I wanted to get a more intimate sense of the great contemporary affirmation of Islam that was occurring across Dar al Islam from those who were making it happen. Ibn Battuta had made his point about the coherence of the ummah, but his influence in my consciousness began to wane. An absence occurred.
Enter Fahmi Huwaidi
Before long, I realized that a new presence had appeared. Without any conscious decision on my part, a more suitable companion for my new talab al ‘ilm (travels in search of knowledge) appeared. The Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaidi moved figuratively into my life. He arrived without formal introduction. He didn’t need one. I had begun following leading Egyptian political journalists in the 1960s, notably the Nasserist Ahmed Bahaeddine and the leftist Mohamed Sid Ahmed. Bahaeddine’s combination of political intelligence and commonsense decency exerted a powerful appeal, while Sid Ahmed’s nuanced leftism exerted its own attraction. Both were highly influential public figures. Both mentored younger journalists. Huwaidi emerged as a protégé of the secular Bahaeddine. From the outset he had a very distinctive voice. Even Huwaidi’s earliest work had an Islamic coloration. His masterful Arabic and deep knowledge of the heritage set him apart as a journalist. His Islamic formation and often provocative views stirred endless controversies with prevailing secular and nationalist trends. Huwaidi commanded more and more of my attention. There was just something more engaging about Huwaidi. At the time the leftists and liberals among my colleagues were displeased, given his overt Islamic commitments, with my new companion for travels through the contemporary networks of Dar al Islam. They still are.
The Iranians and their extraordinary mass revolution cemented the new relationship with Huwaidi. In 1979 Huwaidi was working as a journalist in Kuwait. He arrived in Tehran on the first civilian plane into the airport after the revolution. I was initially convinced that Huwaidi was really a rahal (traveler), disguised as a journalist. However, Huwaidi’s frequent travels were not an end in themselves. He makes his living as a widely syndicated columnist. Yet, before anything else, Huwaidi was emerging as a leading Islamic public intellectual. The real Fahmi Huwaidi at any given moment is always some shifting combination of the three identities of rahal, journalist, and Islamic public intellectual. Over time it is the Islamic intellectual who has come to dominate.
In Iran from Within Huwaidi provides his account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.3 The book is a modern-day classic, although it remains untranslated into English or any other Western language. Huwaidi traveled five times to Iran in the period between his first visit in 1979 and the publication of his book in the mid-1980s. His work in the Gulf before that among the large Shi’i communities there provided critical background even before his first visit to Iran. Huwaidi hit the ground in Iran running, aware of issues and personages, religious and ideological debates as well as political differences. Iran from Within provides an accumulative, layered picture of the revolution. It emerged only slowly, captured in shifting and fluid patterns as Huwaidi’s own understanding deepened. As the picture of the Iranian Revolution and Islam’s role in it sharpened, so, too, did my sense of Huwaidi as a serious Islamic thinker who had a deep understanding of both the faith and worldly history, including rare depth in his understanding of Shi’i Islam.
Huwaidi frames all his commentary on Iran with a broad vision of the importance of the revolution to the larger Islamic Renewal. For an American, Huwaidi provided an indispensable antidote to the hysterical reaction in the United States to the loss of the brutal, corrupt, but endearingly compliant regime of the shah. Huwaidi’s perspective, in contrast, allowed one to grasp the historical importance of what the Iranian people had accomplished. For all that came later of sorrows and profound disappointment, Huwaidi makes clear the basis for his judgment that the success of the Iranian Revolution in removing the despotic regime of the shah ensured Ayatollah Khomeini’s place in the history of the ummah.
Huwaidi wrote for fellow Muslims who advocated for the Renewal. I positioned myself imaginatively to overhear the conversations. From those travels and Huwaidi’s commentaries, I learned of the places and people important to visit. I was made aware of the way the Iranian Revolution related to the other great unifying issues that mattered most to the future of the ummah. At Huwaidi’s side, I could feel in particular the searing impact on the body of the ummah of the relentless Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands. I sensed with him the ominous threat it posed to Islamic Jerusalem. Huwaidi’s published commentary yielded a practical record as well of the small actions of resistance that rippled through the ummah and gave unexpected life to the Renewal. Moving with Huwaidi, I was positioned to gauge precisely those subterranean developments, notably the heightened role of the faith in the everyday life of ordinary people, that Western scholarship missed.
I made it a point to know as much about Huwaidi himself as possible in order better to take the measure of his observations. Fahmi Huwaidi began his career in journalism very early. His father, an employee in the Ministry of Justice, had participated in the Muslim Brotherhood from its earliest years, under the leadership of Hassan al Banna. Although Huwaidi himself never joined the Brotherhood, he grew up in its presence. While still a secondary school student, Huwaidi drew caricatures for the Islamic journal al Da’wa in the mid-1950s. He was detained by the authorities twice. At the time of his arrest in 1956, he was among the youngest political prisoners in the country. On his release, Huwaidi studied at the Faculty of Law at Cairo University, graduating in 1961. Before graduation, he joined the Research Department at al Ahram newspaper and worked there until 1976. During that period, Huwaidi supervised the religious page of the paper. In the early 1960s, President Sadat banned him from writing. Huwaidi moved to al Arabi magazine in Kuwait, where he served as managing editor. He never stopped writing and traveled frequently across the Middle East. In 1982, Huwaidi moved on to London to work as deputy chief editor of Arabia, the first English-language magazine addressed to the entire Islamic world. In 1984, he returned to al Ahram, where he remained until 2006, when the oppressive censorship under the Mubarak regime in its last years prompted his decision to leave. Huwaidi began to write regularly for al Sharuq newspaper and has remained a fixture there to this day.
Huwaidi from the outset wrote from a consistent centrist Islamic perspective. That viewpoint is midstream yet, paradoxically, is largely unstudied by Western observers. Most Western specialists focus their attention on the violent Islamic extremists. The countless articles that Huwaidi has produced over the decades represent a treasure trove of direct observation and experience moving through the centrist networks of the ummah. It has yet to be tapped for scholarly analysis in any systematic way.
Fahmi Huwaidi’s close and often impassioned identification with the Wassatteyya (the Islamic midstream) may raise objections that he is too biased to provide reliable witness. After decades of reading Huwaidi, I find the description of his overall orientation accurate. I also find little merit in the charge. Huwaidi puts his centrist Islamic commitments forward directly.4 Their effects are quite obvious. He makes no attempt to conceal them. They are no more pronounced than the conservative principles of my first graduate school advisor and mentor, Samuel Huntington, or the strong Zionist commitments of my second mentor, Nadav Safran. Neither of these Harvard scholars did much to mask their political commitments. Since their views were in line with dominant points of view, no one seemed to mind, and neither did I (although for my own reasons). Whether an academic, a public intellectual, or a journalist, we know where such forthright figures are coming from. It is really quite easy to take such explicit value commitments into account when evaluating their work.
Painting Fahmi Huwaidi with a black brush is a thriving cottage industry in secular Arab intellectual circles. From Huwaidi’s vast body of published work, quotations taken out of context or the presentation of occasional excesses as representative can make the case that he is an Islamic extremist. For Arab and Islamic intellectuals with strong secular commitments, Huwaidi’s insistent Islamic orientation can itself be a source of consternation. For those who support Israel’s expansionist goals and America’s imperial ambitions in the Islamic world, the task is even easier. Huwaidi staunchly and unapologetically opposes both. But so do I. Those positions, shared by anticolonialists and anti-imperialists around the world, hardly make one an extremist. Nor, for that matter, do they make one anti-Israeli or anti-American. Huwaidi, despite his personal elegance and the gentle formality of his personal interactions, can be abrasive in print. The seasoned journalist does have his rough edges. For all of these reasons, I considered myself fortunate that Fahmi Huwaidi had slipped into Ibn Battuta’s shoes. Classic Islamic travel literature is drenched with an insatiable curiosity and a will to know more about Muslim brothers and sisters living close at hand or in distant lands within and beyond Dar al Islam. So, too, are Huwaidi’s articles and books. Rarely do I come away from reading them without imagining I have learned something important. Of course, Huwaidi himself bears no responsibility for what strangers imagine they have learned about the Islamic networks through which he has moved for decades.
The Networks of the Islamic Midstream from Hardwiring to Software
Ibn Battuta first exposed for me the historic hardwiring of the Islamic world. Fahmi Huwaidi in turn has facilitated exploration of its most impressive contemporary software, designed and updated periodically by the Islamic midstream. As a columnist at al Ahram, Huwaidi was in constant motion. For many decades the paper was the largest and most influential of the official Egyptian newspapers and one of the most important Arabic-language publications in the world. Based for most of his career in Cairo, Huwaidi roamed all over the Islamic world. He generated a rich and instructive record of contemporary happenings. His accounts were as vivid as those of Ibn Battuta of places visited and personalities encountered. With time, however, Huwaidi’s scholarly work eclipsed the journalism. The status of Islamic thinker was something the great rahal never achieved. In Cairo, Huwaidi surrounded himself with some of the most creative Islamic intellectuals anywhere in the ummah. He engaged with them on the great issues facing Dar al Islam with thought-provoking and original work. An impressive library of books by Huwaidi resulted. They reflect his sustained efforts, very often collaborative, to formulate a broad and inclusive centrist Islamic vision responsive to the needs of the late modern world.
My new companion for travels through the networks of centrist Islam could not have differed more from the great rahal who first inspired my voyages across Dar al Islam. Reserved about his personal affairs, Huwaidi’s passions have consistently been Islam and the well-being of the worldwide Islamic community.5 Huwaidi is a model of personal propriety. He evinces none of the character of the worldly rogue of my first companion. The man I have sought to know is the public intellectual whose weight is most directly felt in Egypt and other Arab societies but appreciated throughout the Islamic world. Huwaidi’s public presence has been crafted over some five decades. The reactions and sentiments it arouses are always themselves instructive, particularly when Huwaidi plunges into heated debates about Islam’s proper role in the struggles of Muslims to build better societies.
Huwaidi’s work, like Ibn Battuta’s before him, reveals a great deal more than the intellectual, political, or economic interests that animate the networks of Dar al Islam. The existence of Dar al Islam is sustained as much by shared social practices, memories, and emotions. Unities of subjective experience and feeling cannot easily be observed. They must be experienced. There is no alternative to experiencing the pervasive presence of Islam and the improbable coherence of the contemporary Islamic world from the inside. No single figure has had more privileged access to those interiors than Fahmi Huwaidi.
My travels throughout Dar al Islam since the early 1970s following Huwaidi have coincided with the emergence and development of the momentous Islamic Renewal. Many, both within and outside the Islamic world, have been alarmed by the increased role for Islam in public life that this shift has brought. However, it is my clear impression that the overwhelming majority of ordinary people have welcomed the enhancement almost everywhere of Islam’s presence. The embrace, it should be noted, often does come with sharp criticism of particular Islamic parties and movements. It is a common mistake of outsiders to underestimate the capacity of ordinary believers to make such distinctions between their faith, on the one hand, and the claims to speak for it of particular Islamic groups, on the other.
My earlier prolonged experience with Ibn Battuta had suggested how best to make sense of the wealth of experiences gained moving through the ummah. With time, I had come to recognize Ibn Battuta as a forerunner of contemporary anthropologists. It seemed natural, therefore, not only to embrace Huwaidi as Ibn Battuta’s successor but also to immerse myself in the anthropological literature that Ibn Battuta had helped pioneer. My aim was practical in my forays into the extensive anthropological literature on the Islamic world. I wanted to know what insights anthropologists provide into the sensibilities and skills of interpretation that I would need as I moved imaginatively with Huwaidi through the contemporary networks of midstream Islam. I wanted to know how much progress the anthropologists had made toward a useful anthropology of Islam that might assist my own work on the Islamic Renewal.
The Quest for an Anthropology of Islam
The guiding premise of my work on the Renewal has from the outset been that efforts to understand the experience of Islam in the time of the Renewal could not proceed by an exclusive focus on accessible exteriors. Other scholars have reached similar conclusions. Olivier Roy, in his influential Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, suggests a useful place to start the quest for internal understanding. Roy tells us that real knowledge of global Islam and the groups that actually people worldwide Islamic networks will require what he calls a “religious anthropology.”6 Knowledge of Islamic networks, he explains, cannot avoid the human encounter. We must acquire a sense of specific histories, geographic settings, and cultural contexts. Yet their human meaning can only be read from the inside out. There must be interaction with the human subjects of our quest. Knowledge of the interior life of the ummah is a critical part of the promise of an anthropology of Islam.
Roy himself posits this ideal only to back quickly away from it. With refreshing candor, he states plainly that the breadth of his subject matter and his own limitations as a scholar dictate that he opt for a network rather than anthropological approach.7 Roy follows his praise of the rich fieldwork of anthropology with the admission that he does not have the range of skills and sensibilities necessary to generate the kind of contextual understanding that alone can bring the worldwide nodes of Islamic networks to life. Indeed, who among us does when the subject is the global community of Muslims? Instead, in Globalized Islam Roy gives us a focus on the networks themselves rather than the meaning they have for those who move through them.
Now, as Roy successfully demonstrates, we can quite competently trace much of what takes place in the new Islamic forms of electronic connectivity. Documents and communications are posted. Pathways between sites can be plotted. The frequency of connections can be tallied. The overall structure of the network can be sketched. In all these ways and more, mountains of data can be amassed. Yet just how useful for internal understanding are all the data that network analysis generates? Unless we have insight into the actual meaning to particular groups and individuals of those electronic postings and the grids that enable them, how much of value have we really learned? The externally viewed mechanics of human interactions are rather basic and generally of only very marginal interest. There is no way around talking with insiders. Inevitably, that means learning their language and traveling to meet them, although travel in itself is never enough. It is important to allow conversations to happen on their own turf or simply to be invited into the room to hear those already under way.
Travel, of course, need not be only physical. An artfully crafted story can carry us off to distant shores. The beautiful, whether in nature or the arts, has the power to transport. As a child in an inner-city neighborhood, I discovered that beauty in everyday life brings this gift of transcendence as well. I experienced it in the unlikely gardens of Italian immigrants who were our inner-city neighbors on Brown Place. They somehow produced grapevines and flowers on urban patches of abused soil in a neglected neighborhood of Jersey City. Arriving at Harvard for graduate studies, I was nevertheless caught unawares by just how far the beautiful can take us. I was quite unexpectedly captivated by Qur’anic Arabic, which leaves no one unmoved by its unexpected aesthetic power. Fahmi Huwaidi writes frequently of the importance of Arabic to Muslims. He revels in the beauty of classical Arabic. His own prose is a model of a stunning command of modern standard literary Arabic. References to the great figures of the classical era are threaded through his work in a language worthy of the references.
For me, it was the study of classical Arabic in graduate school that granted admission to the company of the intellectual giants who shaped the medieval Islamic heritage. The Orientalist scholars with whom I studied and whose works I read revealed very early on their limitations as guides to the contemporary world of Islam. Nevertheless, they did know classical Arabic and had experienced its beauty and power. Their love of the classical heritage and the great scholars of those times was as strong and genuine as their disdain for contemporary Arabs and Muslims. They immersed themselves especially in the contributions of the giants who forged the corpus of medieval Islamic philosophical writings.8 They insisted their students do the same. Most influential for me were al Farabi (870–950), Ibn Sina (980–1037), Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), and al Ghazali (1058–1111). I have found Ghazali, in particular, endlessly engaging, as does Fahmi Huwaidi. A mystical experience transformed Ghazali’s personal life. His attack on the philosophers and embrace of Sufism had a momentous impact on Islamic thought and spirituality through the ages. However, after all these years since our first encounter in the 1960s, I have still not forgiven him for refusing to characterize in any detail for his readers through the centuries just what his encounter with mysticism meant to him. The mystical experience, he reports, always entails “a kind of proximity to God,” which various mystics represent in different ways. Ghazali himself refuses any such effort. He takes refuge in a line from the poet Abdullah Ibn al Mu’tazz (861–908) that says simply, “I do not remember what happened, so assume the best, and do not ask for a report!”9 Ghazali dazzles by his speculative brilliance. He also exasperates by his silences, secrets, understatements, and inclinations to a mysticism that cannot be shared.
Ghazali’s silences were splendid in themselves. They were also the perfect foil for Ibn Battuta. I was mesmerized by Ibn Battuta’s loquacity, endless revelations, and proclivity to hyperbole. However, with so much action and chatter, it was the unspoken that moved me most. One of the great mysteries of Islam hovers over the work of Ibn Battuta. How was it possible to live in so many profoundly different ways and in such diverse circumstances and still remain a Muslim?
Ibn Battuta himself never engaged this issue directly. However, his great work does suggest a way to tackle this question and others like it. By his own example, he argues for gaining entry into the social world of those you seek to understand and for spending as much time as possible simply moving with them. That talent is very much in evidence in the work of Fahmi Huwaidi. The seemingly ordinary human interactions of daily life, both Ibn Battuta and Fahmi Huwaidi understand, are never really mundane. The ordinary takes on much larger meaning as part of the quest for the gratifications of love, friendship, spirituality, and knowledge alongside the frequent struggles for sex, power, and wealth that characterize human communities. Most importantly, simply living with people creates spontaneous opportunities to connect with them in ways that exceed anything one could plan for.
Anthropologists are rightly annoyed when their work is viewed as an offshoot of travel literature. However, at the risk of causing such irritation, I must acknowledge that it was indeed Ibn Battuta who set me on the path that led eventually to the sophisticated work of contemporary anthropologists. The encounter with anthropology, however, came only after I had made my own voyages from one end of the Islamic cultural continent to another, from Spain to China, in the thrall of the Travels. Ibn Battuta justified the meandering and quite purposeless character of my early voyages that I treasure to this day. He was at that point in my life the best of companions. The tireless Ibn Battuta emerges from the Travels as equal parts real historical figure and crafted illusion. I never minded: After all, every friendship, not just those of childhood, is inevitably at least one part imaginary.
Decades of living abroad in a wide variety of places has reassured me that diverse human beings can talk to each other and experience all manner of other pleasures together. The heavy lifting required of the stranger is not really so distinctive. It is not all that different in kind from the parallel work of those born in a village or city neighborhood as they try to understand each other well enough to live together peacefully and productively. That everyday achievement represents yet another of those miracles in small places that I have come to love. Of all the social scientists, it is the anthropologists who recognize and celebrate these miracles. They radiate an enthusiasm for knowing others. With fieldwork as the centerpiece of their approach, they are inevitably travelers. Moreover, anthropologists have made notable progress in explaining how travels can become fieldwork that yields knowledge. They point to the ways in which casual experiences can become participant observation, or at least some reasonable approximation to it.
Some reserve, however, is in order when the aim is anthropological knowledge of the networks that define the ummah today. If the barriers were simply the limitations of any one scholar for so large a task, as Olivier Roy suggests, one could assemble a team with the area skills and language competencies required. Unfortunately, there are more serious problems with the putatively ideal solution of “religious anthropology.” Reading in anthropology made it clear to me that what we need is an anthropology of religion, rather than a religious anthropology. One need not be a religious believer to observe the role that faith plays for individuals and the groups to which they belong. The language of believers differs from the language of observers who seek to know them. In that unavoidable gap resides a host of challenges. There is quite simply no ready-made anthropological solution to our difficulties. Instead, the rich anthropological literature offers an instructive record of a quest for an anthropology of Islam. It is the thoughtful search and reflections on difficulties encountered, rather than any at-hand method, that are most instructive. That search will necessarily focus on particular interpretations of Islam that are shaped by the particular times and places where they occur. Believers may or may not recognize this reality, although anthropologists take it for granted.
As I moved along pathways brought into view by Fahmi Huwaidi, I turned to the work of the anthropologists to help make sense of what I was experiencing. Clifford Geertz, Paul Rabinow, and Michael Gilsenan are the three anthropologists who were most helpful in clarifying my own sense of how to work toward an anthropology of Islam. Like so many others, I found my introduction to anthropology in the elegant writings of Clifford Geertz. His slender and seductive volume, Islam Observed, opened the floodgates. For that I am grateful, despite my critical view of his work from the very first reading.10 There was something magical about the promise of traveling from one end of the ummah to the other, from Morocco to Indonesia, and coming back to say something meaningful about Islam. There were obvious shades of both Ibn Battuta and Fahmi Huwaidi in the promise. I was also genuinely delighted to discover that at least one variety of social scientist could write pleasurable prose.
Geertz defined the starting point but not the destination. What disappoints in Geertz’s most influential volume for Islamic studies is the silencing of the Moroccans and Indonesians with whom he presumably interacted. We learn very little about the nature of those interactions. How well did he know the local dialects, one wonders. It is Geertz himself who emerges as the central character in this most influential book, and indeed in all of his writings. His contribution consists of speculative interpretive essays that impress as a form of literature. They are not ethnographies at all. In fairness, it should be noted that Geertz’s sweeping generalizations ultimately do derive from what he has intuited, what he has grasped from his field studies. Yet Geertz’s greatest influence has come through the essays. In these writings, Geertz the anthropologist emerges as the master interpreter of a symbolic code. He stands apart, out of reach of the subjects of his work. Behind the backs of those observed, the symbolic code to which he somehow has privileged access shapes beliefs and behaviors. Behind their backs as well, Geertz explains the workings of the code. Here Geertz reminded me of the Orientalists. Like them, he seemed to believe he had captured some essence of Islam that obviated the need to deal with Muslims. There was no need to engage the ways their understandings, beliefs, and emotions gave the faith a distinctive worldly reality. The Orientalists read actual texts, while Geertz read what he constructed as social and cultural texts. With either approach, a disembodied Islam of the text could indeed be brought into view. But what do we learn about the Islam of flesh-and-blood human beings?
I learned much more from Paul Rabinow, although not all the lessons were positive. I read Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco soon after it was published in the late 1970s.11 My undergraduate college roommate was a Moroccan exchange student. With his help, in my senior year of college I made plans to run off to Morocco with a woman I had met while studying in France my junior year abroad. I therefore had a very focused interest in fieldwork in Morocco. That personal plot unraveled; I went to graduate school instead. Morocco, though, had won a secure place in my imagination, representing to this day the road not taken.
Over the years, I have traveled often to Morocco and worked there on several occasions as a higher education consultant. As a kind of ritual, I periodically reread Fieldwork. The book is a casual treasure. Fieldwork and participant observation have come to define anthropology, and Rabinow makes both real in unvarnished and instructive ways. I was taken by his acknowledgment of an awkward sexual experience with a prostitute in the village. Now, as graduate students, we knew that interactions in the field covered the full range of human possibilities, spiritual and worldly. Although rarely discussed in print even today, sexual encounters were not then, nor are they now, unusual or, for that matter, always diversionary.
Knowledge, Rabinow explained, has a negotiated, created character. So does the experience of sex, at least the more sophisticated varieties that regrettably eluded the young Rabinow in the village. Learning in all these areas always entails a process of negotiation, with both partners playing an active role. Knowledge, as Rabinow insisted, was not something to be collected like driftwood on a beach.12 There can be no paid or passive partners in the quest for knowledge.
Rabinow’s book helped me sort out my own experiences in the field. In particular, he put the travails of fieldwork in perspective. The battles invariably start with the debilitating intestinal wars. Those bouts, and the humility they impose, may well explain why those distinguished Orientalists whose work I first encountered at Harvard preferred classical texts to the field. Rabinow, in contrast, did make his way to a small and poor village in Morocco. He commented perceptively on the multiple challenges encountered with more frankness than usual.
There were, however, important limits to what could be learned from Reflections, especially given my own interest, like Fahmi Huwaidi’s, in Islam. The book brought instructive disappointment. From the outset Islam was a problem for Rabinow. It cast a debilitating shadow over his life in the village. Rabinow gained entry to village life through a connection to a dominant family. He was assured access to informants and the general cooperation he would need to complete his fieldwork. However, what he could not overcome, from the first until his very last day in the village, were deep suspicions on the part of the villagers as to his intentions toward Islam. Rabinow explained to the villagers that his stay in their village was part of his graduate student training. His university had sent him to write a systematic history of the village, he told the villagers. The work would, he hoped, result in a book that would lead to a professorship, God willing. The notion of a history or even a systematic study of village society posed no problems, but the idea of a student identity did. Taleb, student in Arabic, had religious connotations for the villagers that they could not quite shake. The term also means to ask for or demand, with all the open-ended implications that definition carries. The villagers knew the young stranger was a Christian, thus triggering, as Rabinow reports, “the widespread fear that I was a missionary.”13
Rabinow describes his continuous efforts throughout his village stay to disabuse villagers of this conviction. Yet, to the very last day, the conviction persisted that his true intent was to win converts from the faithful despite the fact, as he puts it, that “it should have been clear that I had not interfered with, denigrated, or tried to alter anyone’s religious beliefs.” Rabinow’s frustration is palpable. What is even more revealing is his explanation of why his efforts failed. “The constant expression of pure and noble intentions,” Rabinow explained, “is a rhetorical art which Moroccans have raised to the level of cultural performance, and they never take such profession of purity at face value.” In frustration he concludes, “I did my best to assuage these fears during my stay. I stressed time and time again that my interests were historical and social, but I doubt that I was very convincing.”14 Rabinow believes that the truth of his explanations was blocked by a tradition that saw his protestations as simply a cultural performance of practiced dissimulation. This explanation preserves his innocence, in this regard at least. In Rabinow’s account the culturally conditioned anxieties of the villagers, immune to argument, seem irrational and more than a little paranoid. They are their problem, not his.
There is a simpler explanation. The malaise of the villagers was perfectly reasonable. Some wariness at the presence of a wealthy young Westerner in such an unlikely setting is clearly warranted. No matter how little their formal education, Moroccan villagers had an idea of what powerful Europeans had done in Algeria and Palestine. It was not unreasonable to see the young American as an advance scout for a coming horde that would seize resources and undermine the Islamic character of their village. No European in such a setting should presume that his innocence will be taken for granted. Furthermore, Rabinow’s response shows him to be quite unreflective about the Western fears and hostile attitudes toward Islam that he inevitably brought into the field with him. His own frustrations with Islam seem an important part of the problem. Travelers need to make sure they know exactly what is in their luggage. Rabinow’s unhappy encounter with Islam drove him from Morocco. What Rabinow teaches has most to do with the ins and outs of fieldwork rather than any insight into the faith. In the end, he repositioned himself very far from Islam and that disquieting village in North Africa. His later research focused on postmodern theory and such subjects as molecular biology and genomics in which the subject of research doesn’t question why it is being studied.15
In Recognizing Islam Michael Gilsenan explains how he shed such unreal innocence and latent cultural hostility.16 It opens with one of the most memorable vignettes in the anthropological literature of the Middle East. Gilsenan tells the story of his introduction to the world of Islam as a nineteen-year-old overseas teacher in what is now Yemen. The narrative is recounted in an enchanting, dreamlike key. The young volunteer was living with a friend in Seyyun, an historic town ruled by British-appointed sultans. A family of sherifs (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad) dominated the area. Gilsenan reports meeting two young men of that family during a morning walk. They invited him to visit their home. He noticed immediately how their dress and manner, with a green band around their turbans, flowing cream-colored robes, and trimmed beards signified the “holiness and precedence of their position.”17 The experience was intensified when the small party encountered one of Gilsenan’s own students. The teenager immediately stopped to kiss the hands of the young sherifs, signaling his respect and appreciation for their position. “The world was a perfectly formed magic garden,” Gilsenan writes. “I was entranced. All my images of Islam and Arab society were brought unquestionably together.”18
Soon Gilsenan and the young sherifs arrived at their impressive home that reflected the prosperity the family enjoyed from business interests in Indonesia. The door was closed firmly behind them. The windows were quickly shuttered. Lights were turned on, along with Western pop music. Whiskey came out of the cupboard. There was no talk of the faith but only of “stifling boredom, the ignorance of local people, the cost of alcohol, and how wonderful life had been in Indonesia.” Several days later the dissolution of the “magic garden” was completed when Gilsenan, this time alone, encountered his own student once again. “We kiss their hands today,” the teenager confided, “but just wait till tomorrow.”19
The student was of the first generation of a peasant family to be educated. He was a Nasserist. His Arab nationalist and socialist commitments called for resistance to imperialism and to the conservative and reactionary social forces allied to it. He would talk to me, Gilsenan reported, “but I, too, was part of the apparatus of colonial administration, a fact that he realized much more clearly than I did.”20 For the student, the young men whose hands he kissed were obstacles to independence and social justice. They had nothing to do with true Islam. Islam had no need of sherifs, or deference to wealthy merchants in green turbans, or forced reverence for a sham religious hierarchy. The real Islam was free of such intermediaries. As embodied in the Qur’an and the traditions, Islam stood for equalitarianism and justice. The young man believed that true Islam was a natural ally in the battle against local tyranny, corruption, and alien power.21
Things are not what they seem. Yet surely it does not take a trip to southern Arabia to recognize this universal truth. If there is a community on the planet, Muslim or non-Muslim, where meanings are clearly and truthfully labeled, where codes of conduct and patterns of behavior are transparent, I have yet to encounter it in decades of restless wanderings. Nor, his writings make clear, has the Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaidi. Gilsenan, as a seasoned traveler by the time he wrote his most important book, obviously knew this. Why, then, introduce his book with a vignette of shattered innocence from his youth?
In my view, this introductory vignette is quite artfully positioned as a playful foil for all the discoveries to come. Telling this story of deception usefully invokes the most damaging at-hand stereotypes about the Arabs and Islam. It is all manipulation. Muslims, and not just the Arabs, do not say what they mean and they do not mean what they say. The faith is merely a screen for deception. The implications of such views, when generalized, are pernicious: Muslims cannot, in the end, be talked to or reasoned with; they can only be remade, by force if necessary. Gilsenan will have none of this nonsense, although he has felt its force and understands its importance.
Gilsenan uses the story of his own youthful vulnerability to accepted Western notions of Islam to bring these widely held views front and center. His engaging narrative allows him to do so without wearying preaching. Recognizing Islam then goes on to provide guidance on how best to elude the grip of these stereotypes. Gilsenan shows us how to engage in fieldwork in Islamic lands that does not reduce itself to a blinkered search for those Muslims and those actions that confirm preconceived notions. I consider his book the most important one we have in Islamic studies on the nature of fieldwork. Gilsenan lays out no grand theory, nor does he claim to have discovered the magic key to all encounters in the field. Rather, Gilsenan illustrates concretely how to conduct fieldwork in ways that avoid the common pitfalls. At the same time, he explains what our knowledge gains will look like. He explains just how modest they are likely to be. Gilsenan reports that “those sentences so laboriously written down in the red-backed reporter’s notebooks at one or two in the morning gave me such a sense of having achieved something concrete, having at last found out something.” But then he questions: “but weren’t they mostly remarkable for the days it took to realize their slippery and obscure nature?”22
Knowledge of Islam cannot even be aspired to without real human interactions that, for simplicity’s sake, can be called “conversations.” Islam cannot hold conversations. Only Muslims, always particular Muslims, can do that, and they cannot do so in the name of all Muslims. That reminder is the most important lesson of Gilsenan’s work. In all his work the journalist Fahmi Huwaidi reinforces the point. Only particular Muslims can tell us, at times directly but most often indirectly, about the ways in which Islam has become a meaningful part of their lives. We can interact with them and take note of their behavior for clues as to what those meanings are. We can talk to them about issues of faith and the ways Islam enters into their lives.
These elements of encounters in the field mark all Huwaidi’s experiences as he moves through the contemporary networks of the ummah. Huwaidi’s work reinforces the point that reconstructions based on such “slippery and obscure” indicators, always twice removed from particular direct experiences of the faith, will mark the only available path to an anthropology of Islam. Along the way, there will be little ground for overconfidence about our footing. Feeling unsteady, however, will encourage the shedding of the heavy baggage of our own preconceptions.
Things are never what they seem. Preconceptions are most likely wildly off the mark. It is best to walk slowly into the field. I mean that literally. Western economists and political scientists, not to mention the now-ubiquitous security analysts, stride into unknown territory in far too purposeful a way. They think they know what they are looking for. Unfortunately, they invariably find or invent it. Such findings rarely have much to do with the world into which they have intruded. They are all about their baggage and the litter they inevitably leave in their wake.
Interviews can be arranged. Conversations, in contrast, are always events. Events are not easily scheduled or harnessed. They demand patience and flexibility. Real conversations frequently cause some discomfort. They invariably leave one feeling vulnerable for the unintended revelations about self and the unexpected and sometimes disturbing discoveries about others. Calculated attempts at staging such conversations for the most part end in defeat. Yet real conversations do happen in the field. On very rare occasions they can reveal something about particular human understandings of Islam in the settings into which we have intruded.
Gilsenan writes perceptively of such moments as part of his studies of the Sufi networks that crisscross the Islamic world. Gilsenan on several occasions experienced Islam’s presence in the lives of the Egyptian Sufis among whom he did intensive fieldwork. For most Americans neon seems tawdry, associated with strip malls and strip joints. Yet, in many places in the Arab world, including Cairo where I live, green neon lights are frequently used to mark mosques. It is not unusual to have Qur’anic verses in neon both inside and out. The usual effect for a Westerner is distracting, even disconcerting. Gilsenan found it so in his regular attendance at a Sufi zhikr (ritual of remembrance of God) that is marked by collective chanting and swaying body movements. Gilsenan explains how with time and without conscious effort the associations that he brought to the scene faded. Eventually, something more abstract and more spiritual replaced them. The verses written in neon became quite simply green. It was not that green was recognized as the color of the Prophet, of the revered mystic figure al Khudr, or of life itself. Gilsenan had always known that history of the symbolism of the color green in Islam. Something more basic and less cerebral was at work. Gilsenan explains:
Then, one day, perhaps eight or nine months after my first hesitant observations of the zikr [sic], I turned unthinkingly away from the swaying bodies and the rhythms of the remembrance of God and saw, not neon, but simply greenness. Greenness, and letters that did not “stand for” anything but simply were powerful icons in and of themselves. No gaps existed between color, shape, light, and form. From that unreflecting and unexpected moment I ceased to see neon at all.
He continues that “it is the direct, self-creating, and recreating experience of greenness that ‘just is’ for Muslims in a particularly ordinary way, both intimately the same as and distinct from our own, that is so vital.”23
Gilsenan refused to over-intellectualize the experience, but he did try to explain it. The spiritual is not otherworldly in Islam. It makes its appearance in this world. The entire Earth for Muslims is a mosque, a suitable place to pray and feel God’s presence. The spiritual coexists and commingles with the full range of human experience. As Gilsenan teaches us, we can with patience learn to see Islam as a spiritual force in neon. These moments can only be apprehended in a spiritual register. Yet they reveal that Islam’s presence does enter into even quite ordinary activities like Sufi rituals. Gilsenan helps us understand how networks such as those of the Sufi order do bind the ummah and give it a distinctive character.
The Promise of Network Analysis
For the most part, however, those who have turned to network analysis thus far have had agendas quite different and largely irrelevant to the quest for an anthropology of Islam. They serve other purposes. They include security analysts, on the one hand, and Islamic studies scholars, on the other. The security analysts, like those of the Rand Corporation, focus on the ways that flattened and horizontal networks of militants represent a threat to established authorities. The Rand structural network studies purposefully avoid engagement with the actual Muslim fighters who populate militant networks. Such distance guarantees that no empathy for the fighters, so often struggling against impossible odds, will seep in. Such analyses, with their deliberate distance from the believers who move through the networks they study, can contribute nothing at all to an anthropology of Islam.24 They aim for control rather than understanding.
A different kind of distance marks academic network studies. The best aim for a grand rethinking of Islamic studies to “explore the dynamic past but also to imagine an elusive future, both of them marked by Muslim networks.”25 Networks operate as a core metaphor for the connectivities that unify the Islamic world. Such rethinking of Islamic studies along network lines teaches a great deal about how Western efforts to understand Islam have often gone wrong. It usefully addresses longstanding imbalances and distortions, such as the falsifying polarity of Islam and the West and other such deeply engrained Western stereotypes of Islam. Such work has enriched Islamic studies but in the end makes its major and most substantial contribution in what it tells us about Western thinking about Islam.
The Pragmatic Alternative: Grounded Network Analysis
This study is driven by practical interests closer to the ground of the everyday life of Muslims. The anthropological focus here entails the modest project of knowing enough about specific people to communicate with them and make reasonable estimations of how they live their lives. For access to that inner life of the communities and groups in which they are interested, anthropologists in the field rely on informants from the community of people among whom they wish to learn to live. The strategy here parallels that effort. Anthropologists frequently identify themselves as “interested strangers.” In that guise they turn for guidance and insight to articulate and aware informants, although I agree with the anthropologist Andrew Gardner that the term “sounds too formal and oddly traitorous to stand for these relationships.”26 These critical sources belong to the social world of interest. They also have the awareness and skill to communicate what they experience. Ibn Battuta represented such a figure for Dar al Islam in the fourteenth century. The Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaidi plays a parallel role for the contemporary ummah.
Pragmatic network analysis takes the underlying coherence of the ummah as a given. To be sure, Huwaidi is fully aware of the damage that has been done to the wholeness of Dar al Islam. Yet he remains convinced that the ties that bind, including the all-important spiritual ties, can be restored. What is required is the revival of the sense of belonging to the ummah. As the historian Tareq al Bishri argues, the task of reviving the sense of belonging to a shared Islamic world “just needs patience and alertness to the keys to bring people together in ways that empower them to influence states and the relations among states through infiltration just like water flows from one land to another.”27 Such an imaginative comparison is impossible without its spiritual dimension. The West has convinced itself that the modern era has brought the end of grand narratives and the death of God. Islamic intellectuals like Huwaidi and the historian Tareq al Bsihri disagree. The most influential midstream Islamic intellectuals of our time, both Sunni and Shi’a, have heralded the project of the Islamic Renewal that is nothing if not a grand narrative. In Dar al Islam, they announce quite rightly, God is not dead.
Such is the starting point of Huwaidi’s work as witness and advocate for al Tagdid al Islami. Today, to know the ummah, why rely on the hired hands of the world’s intelligence services, the ideological polemics of the denizens of overheated think tanks, or the intermittent work of university professors who venture periodically to the field from their campuses in the West, when we have a lifetime of reporting on centrist Islamic networks by one of the most important journalists and Islamic thinkers of our time? Doors open for Fahmi Huwaidi. Tareq al Bishri concluded his analysis of what revival of the ummah would demand with the clear recommendation that “the first step toward strengthening that possibility is to revive the awareness of the shared community through a continuous and systematic follow-up of the events and incidents that shape the Islamic world.”28 It would be hard to imagine a more apt summing up of Huwaidi’s career and the critical role he has played as a journalist and a centrist Islamic intellectual.
Learning from Huwaidi: Midstream Islamic Networks from Within
With Fahmi Huwaidi as my guide, the pace of my travels in Dar al Islam immediately quickened. The task was not so much to study Islamic networks but rather to move through them. Following Ibn Battuta left one open to aimless wanderings and unexpected adventures of all sorts. They were quite frequently more worldly than spiritual but always saturated by the insatiable curiosity that marks the anthropological imagination. There was always time to linger. Diversions of all kinds were to be savored. Huwaidi, in contrast, gives clear purpose to travels. Itineraries are laid out, schedules fixed, and objectives clear. All voyages and the writings they inform became part of an untiring quest for understanding midstream Islam in the modern world. They did so from the point of view of an engaged Islamic intellectual whose work aimed to reveal ways to advance the well-being of Muslim peoples everywhere.
Over the years, as I have traveled imaginatively with Huwaidi, I have managed to add exploratory side trips to slow his pace. I am always pleased when Huwaidi invites a friend to accompany him. It is in the nature of friendship to slow things down. Of such companions the late Egyptian journalist Ahmed Bahgat was my favorite. You cannot have a Sufi soul like Bahgat did and not linger pointlessly, until, that is, the point announces itself quite on its own.
As a fellow columnist at al Ahram, Bahgat also traveled widely, although he often did so without leaving home. He is less of a Wassatteyya intellectual figure than Huwaidi, although he sympathizes consistently with centrist methods and aims. However, it is also clear that he believes, rightly I think, that a conversation with the greatest of the Sufi poets, such as Galal Eddine Rumi (1207–1273) or Hafiz (1320–1388/9), offers as much to the advancement of the Wassatteyya as an interview with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, or Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. This creative interplay between Huwaidi and Bahgat nicely illustrates the way that both mind and heart are important to understanding the intellectual and emotional strengths of the Renewal.
Fahmi Huwaidi’s perceptive self-awareness means that he understands himself to be traveling through the already interacting parts of the centrist network. At no point does he set out to theorize centrist Islamic networks in the abstract. Rather, through his travels and his writings he simply makes their existence palpable. He also suggests ways they might be strengthened. In this sense, Huwaidi sees himself as a constituent element in a process already under way. He aims pragmatically to make possible intelligent activity in relation to that process. Huwaidi shows no interest in explaining the way actors in the network, considered in isolation, came to constitute the whole. As a set of interacting parts, the networks of the Wassatteyya precede the individual figures like Huwaidi who move through them. The point, by analogy, is that there aren’t any flames before the fire is already burning. Nor are there New Islamic centrists like Huwaidi before the Wassatteyya has made their presence possible. Before the trend is under way, there simply are not any isolated figures of the Wassatteyya with the interests, commitments, and patterns of practical activity that they display when participating in the whole. At no point does it make sense to take the elements we reify from the process and see them as the causal conditions for the process that they constitute. Social scientists, it should be noted, regularly ask precisely such unhelpful questions about how individuals come to form a society or a social movement. Just as Ibn Battuta did not create the ancient pathways of Dar al Islam, so, too, Huwaidi understood that he did not generate the contemporary networks of the Wassatteyya. He simply moves through them and thereby creates opportunities for outsiders to catch glimpses of their character as insiders experience it.
Huwaidi is more than an observer and analyst. He plunges into the events that shape the Islamic world. He pays particular attention to the creative movements and groups that work to advance the aims of the Wassatteyya. Huwaidi brings to his readers vivid and energizing reports about the real-world reforms and experiments in which Islamic centrists are engaged. He suggests the ways these social experiments might inspire parallel work elsewhere. Huwaidi takes sides in ongoing controversies. His widely recognized standing as an Islamic intellectual lends weight to the evaluations he offers. He is, in the words of social practice theory, an “authorized scorekeeper.”29 What is significant about him being an “authorized” rather than a “respected” scorekeeper, for example, is that the people whose work he is assessing take his evaluations seriously. As a recognized Islamic thinker, Huwaidi is entitled to offer his judgments. Islamic activists and theorists generally feel obligated to respond to his evaluations and entitled to make use of his reports.
The purposefulness on Huwaidi’s part makes rigorous demands on any effort to provide an overview of his work. The aim here is to identify, among the countless articles and numerous books, those exemplary moments when the quest for wisdom does bear fruit and when the effort to hear does amplify important but long-silenced voices. Huwaidi makes demands on both mind and heart. From the extensive corpus of his work, useful analytical summations of broad patterns do emerge, as well as informative distillations of what Huwaidi takes to be their larger meaning. Huwaidi’s evocations of places and persons are another matter. Only the heart can respond to their emotional impact. Huwaidi understands the ways emotions and feelings make their own distinctive contribution to the Islamic Renewal. From the raw materials of his observations, he crafts evocative opportunities for readers to feel their force.
The Islamic Strategic Triangle of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey
Huwaidi establishes that the collective history of the ummah does show broad and revealing patterns. Above all, he insistently points to the enduring imprint of what he calls the Islamic strategic triangle of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. Huwaidi’s work indicates the ways that the histories of Arabs, Iranians, and Turks are historically bound together. He points out how the contemporary experiences of these Muslim peoples provide significant reference points for the struggles of Muslims everywhere to live their own understanding of the faith.30 Most importantly, Huwaidi argues that the prospect of the consolidation of those underlying connections holds great promise for the future of the ummah, however distant such prospects might be at a given moment.
Huwaidi’s reporting shows particularly well-worn pathways between Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. Today each of these Egyptian, Iranian, and Turkish poles has a population of roughly eighty million or more. Together they represent impressive human and natural resources. Huwaidi directs our attention to the signal advantages of geography that the triangle enjoys. Arabs, Turks, and Iranians, he notes, represent a coherent block that extends over territory that includes the most strategic maritime passages in the world. The area boasts the world’s largest oil reserves in addition to huge stores of natural gas. Oil and gas pipelines for the whole of the industrial world pass through this region. Finally, Huwaidi does not fail to remind us that Islam creates a powerful natural connection among the majority populations in the region.31
Naturally, Huwaidi is most interested in exploring this Islamic dimension. In his commentaries Huwaidi reveals how the histories of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey remain braided together in loose but important inherited patterns. Those patterns, he argues, remain relevant and important to Dar al Islam today. In the body of his work Huwaidi provides an exhaustive study of the contrasting yet complementary experiences of Islam in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. Huwaidi, as a leading member of the Egyptian New Islamic school, has played a key role in elaborating the centrist New Islamic vision of the future of Islam. He has given almost equal time and energy to efforts to understand Islam in revolutionary Iran. At the same time, he has carefully chronicled the quite remarkable rise to dominance in public life of a distinctive Turkish Islam, rooted ultimately in Sufism.
The Egyptian, Turkish, and Iranian lived experiences of Islam have all three been critical to the global coherence and historical continuity of the contemporary community of Muslims. None of the three points of the triangle appears in Huwaidi’s depictions as fixed endpoints. All three are themselves nodes in multiple networks that open to further connections and invite yet more travel and interactions of all kinds. Egypt and Turkey are Sunni, while Iran is Shi’i. Built into the notion of an Islamic strategic triangle is an inclusive commitment to recognize and struggle to transcend the Sunni–Shi’i divide that has for centuries threatened to weaken the ummah. Huwaidi carefully registers the distinctions entailed in these designations. Yet, in the end, he tilts decisively to the conclusion that “they are all Muslims,” although he is quite aware that not all Muslims have come to this realization.
Centrist reformism in Egypt, revolutionary dynamism in Iran, and quiet and resilient mysticism in Turkey define three strikingly different modalities of the Islamic Renewal. They indicate the way in which Huwaidi gives a distinctively Islamic focus to the notion of a strategic triangle that goes beyond politics, economics, and geographic advantage. All three angles of the triangle represent elaborations responsive to different environments of Islamic ‘aqida (doctrine). Huwaidi explains how these contrasting yet complementary experiences of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey reinforce the underlying coherence of Dar al Islam.
Huwaidi, in his situated commentaries from all three angles of the triangle, provides privileged access to experiences as they are processed and understood by millions of Muslims. In hundreds of articles, very often written on site, Huwaidi records developments in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey with an eye to the ways they advance or impede the prospects for the unity of the ummah, centered on the strategic triangle. The records from these key sites, weighed and considered by centrist intellectuals throughout the ummah, contribute to the common repertoire of the Islamic Renewal. They identify broad patterns that define the Renewal. They provide resources on which movements throughout Dar al Islam can draw in ways that respond to their own distinctive circumstances. Huwaidi points to that repertoire as a source for inspiration rather than for definitive prescriptions or models.
Other Travels, Other Broad Patterns
The strategic triangle is not the only pattern to emerge from Huwaidi’s travels. It is simply the most important as measured by the analysis and commentary it evokes in the writings of major figures who identify themselves with al Tagdid al Islami. Huwaidi does bring into view an array of other such broad patterns. He uses his platform in al Ahram and stature as a major Islamic thinker to renew ties with parts of the ummah that have been broken, most often by political barriers that isolate Muslim communities. He works as well to overcome the neglect of other areas that merit greater attention from the traditional centers of the Islamic world in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. At the same time, as an intellectual of standing Huwaidi works to highlight important research findings and the fruits of practical experiments on matters of importance to the ummah as a whole, such as democracy or development.
Huwaidi ventures repeatedly into newly accessible Islamic lands of great potential importance to the ummah. The exemplar here is his frequent reporting from the Muslim communities of central Asia that have emerged as independent states in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The purpose is to reestablish historical connections with Muslim peoples absorbed into the Russian and Soviet empires and cut off for decades from contact with the Islamic world. These renewed linkages with the great centers of Islamic learning in central Asia and the sites of some of the most impressive architectural treasures of the classical period are an important enhancement of al Tagdid al Islami. Huwaidi’s reports have a particular importance to Turkey and Iran since both countries have strong cultural ties to central Asian lands and peoples. However, all of the ummah is called to respond to Huwaidi’s updated treatment of the reopening of these historical centers of Islamic civilization.
At times Huwaidi travels to areas of the ummah with which connections have frayed. The aim is revitalization. Such travels take Huwaidi to neglected parts of the ummah, most notably in Africa, with its estimated 250 million Muslims. African Islamic intellectuals welcome the attention to their experience of Islam and the opportunities that Huwaidi often brings with him to enhance educational and cultural ties.
Huwaidi’s voyages through Dar al Islam often have purely intellectual and academic purposes. He regularly takes his readers to conferences and research centers throughout the ummah. From these sites he reports on innovative efforts to reinvigorate Islamic learning and strengthen institutional ties among Islamic research and cultural centers. Huwaidi through his reports encourages debate and discussion on critical theoretical issues and their grounding in particular Islamic experiences. He pays notable attention to ongoing Turkish and Tunisian debates on the relationship of Islam and democracy. He makes sure that the economic advances of Malaysia and Turkey in the development of successful economies in Islamic political and cultural settings receive the attention they deserve.
For many Westerners, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, with its clear Islamic roots, seemed to come out of nowhere. Such is not the case for readers of Huwaidi’s columns. Over many years he has followed the intricacies and the ebbs and flows of attempts to establish a Turkish political party with an Islamic orientation that can flourish in a secular setting. In parallel fashion Huwaidi has brought insightful attention to the rise of the Malaysian “tiger.” Huwaidi documents the role played in that economic success story by Mahathir bin Mohamad who was Malaysia’s prime minister from 1981 to 2003. Huwaidi focuses not simply on the impressive measures of economic growth or the intemperate bursts of anti-Israeli rhetoric that distort Western understanding of this pivotal figure. Huwaidi emphasizes the ways in which Mahathir brought a tolerant Islam to the rescue of a country plagued by ethnic and religious divisions. He brings into view a political figure who was also a serious Islamic thinker who made important contributions to contemporary Islamic thought. Huwaidi has repeatedly cautioned that, while the Turkish and Malaysian experiences convey instructive lessons on such critical issues as economic growth and democratic development, there was no Turkish or Malaysian model that could be implemented in any mechanical way elsewhere. Yet Huwaidi does aim to go beyond journalistic reporting to distill important and practical generalizations that advance the aim of understanding the essential political and economic dynamics of the Islamic Renewal.
Distillations: The Modalities of Islam’s Response to the Western Threat
An important focus of Huwaidi’s extensive work on the strategic triangle of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey has been the relationship between the impact of the West and a heightened presence of Islam itself as well as the emergence of Islamic movements of all kinds. Huwaidi has shared this preoccupation with other New Islamic thinkers, notably the historian Tareq al Bishri. From their collective work over many years, the New Islamic intellectuals offer a simple and compelling generalization on how different modes of resistance are generated. They reason that the deeper the Westernizing trend and the more violent the means used to advance it, the more radical the Islamic response is likely to be.32 A quietist response to Western and Westernizing pressures takes shape in sites where a secular government with strong nationalist credentials attains a strong measure of legitimacy, especially with urban liberal elites, the higher reaches of the government bureaucracy, and the military. Outside imperial powers are kept at bay and the public appreciates the regime’s nationalist successes. When such a secular government, like that of Atatürk in Turkey, consolidates its power, it invariably aims directly and with all means at its disposal to eliminate Islam from all aspects of public life. Islam is seen as the most likely opposition force to the blend of nationalism and secularism that defines the regime. In the face of such a powerful repressive onslaught with considerable popular support, the most effective response is indirect. Islam in its spiritual and quietist dimensions seeps like water into the soil of the nation. It avoids direct confrontation with a hyper-empowered secularism. At the same time, it feeds the roots of the cultural legacy and creates the conditions for later resurgence. Turkish Islam, shaped by such figures as the Sufi Said Nursi, survived militant secularist attacks. It did so as a subterranean spring, out of repression’s reach until a more propitious moment arrived to resurface in the public sphere.
A centrist middle way of reform and resistance, like that of Egypt, with reliance primarily on nonviolent reform, becomes possible when Western influence is indirect. In such cases the postcolonial national government coopts enough of both national and Islamic symbols to mask to some degree the authoritarian character of its rule. Typically, such a government allows some limited role to civil society. A circumscribed public life takes shape. The regime offers circumscribed tolerance to diverse political forces. An opposition press is tolerated. Movements with an Islamic orientation play a role and the public becomes accustomed to their presence. Such movements, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, become the seedbed of activist Islamic political forces, primarily centrist with only occasional radical offshoots. The predominant centrists attempt to cultivate broader support that goes beyond the Islamic trend, although without any great success.
The radical revolutionary Islamic response like that in Iran takes shape in a context where Western incursions have been most violent and have penetrated most deeply. Under such circumstances, the dependent, overtly pro-Western regime the Western powers installed is most repressive and most compromised in its claims to represent the nation. Yet it is also deeply entrenched and protected by a complex of security forces and the promise of external support. For these reasons, displacement of the shah required an “earthquake.”
Evocations: The Ummah Has a Soul
Huwaidi complements these well-founded analytical summaries with more personal evocations of specific persons and places that give emotional depth to his reports. Huwaidi’s descriptions in both registers of the mind and the heart allow readers not only to see general patterns but also to feel their emotional impact. Inevitably for an Arab and Islamic intellectual, the great Western crime against Palestine and the Palestinians dominates. The images and sounds of a threatened and humiliated Islamic Jerusalem permeate Huwaidi’s work. His writings express the pain of the terrible losses suffered by the Palestinian people. “We are all Palestinians” is how Huwaidi repeatedly expresses his commitment at those times when the suffering is greatest. These cries of anguish and anger over the torment of Palestine ring through all of Huwaidi’s work. By no means, however, do the fears for Jerusalem and the Palestinian people stand alone as reflections of the soul of the ummah. There are other such evocations of deeply felt sentiments as well. They all center on the unity and inclusive character of the ummah. They inevitably begin within the strategic triangle. However, they draw as well on the experience beyond the triangle, from Bosnia in the heart of Europe in the West to China in the East.
Bringing the Islamic Strategic Triangle to Life
An emotional connection to Turkey and to Turkish Islam looms large. Huwaidi’s periodic visits to Turkey often meant that Ahmed Bahgat would travel with him. The decision was always a wise one. The Turkish experience is Eastern and it is Western. It is Islamic and it is secular. Huwaidi conveys this complexity analytically. However, it is Ahmed Bahgat, with his Sufi sensibility, who most effectively captures the essence of Turkey’s Islamic identity. Bahgat especially loved the poet Galal Eddine Rumi, who fled Persia when the Mongols invaded and eventually settled in Anatolia. Bahgat understood Rumi’s relevance to the mysticism at the heart of Islam in Turkey. Bahgat often introduced that great Sufi thinker into his reporting. From Rumi Bahgat gives us the story of a servant who suffered from double vision. His crossed eyes produced two images, side by side, of any object before him. One day his master called to him from another room to bring a bottle to him. The servant asked which one. The master replied that he only wanted one and that the other could be discarded. The servant broke and threw away what he took to be the second bottle, only to find that both had shattered.33
Bahgat believed that understanding Turkey required double vision: Anything less is simply destructive of the complexity of the Turkish experience. Huwaidi’s analysis makes it clear that the Turkish people have not renounced Atatürk, nor have they accepted the notion of an Islamic revolution in Turkey. In our own time, to see Turkey whole is to embrace both the secular nationalism of Atatürk and the Sufi Islam of Said Nursi. To deny either is to shatter the wholeness of the Turkish experience, as the story from Rumi suggests. Secularism is far from discredited in Turkey. Atatürk retains his founding father status. All Turks know that in the end Atatürk did protect the Anatolian heartland and kept Turkey out of the clutches of colonial rule at a time when there were armies of four European powers on Turkish territory. This history in no way contradicts the strong attachment to Islam of the Turkish people. Deeply felt Turkish Islam, with pronounced mystical overtones, coexists with intense Turkish nationalism.
To Huwaidi’s analytical gift for political analysis, Bahgat juxtaposes a Sufi sensibility. Bahgat writes with astonishing brevity, drawing mostly on his own personal reactions to persons and events. In his reporting, Huwaidi dissects, in overwhelming detail, the meaning of the electoral victory of Islamic centrists in Turkey for all of Dar al Islam. At the base of his political commentary is the assumption of the depth of commitment to Islam of ordinary Turks, particularly those from the countryside. Ahmed Bahgat strikes the same chord, but he does so in his own distinctive way. Bahgat tells the story of a visit to Medina in Saudi Arabia, where he was able to pray at the Mosque of the Prophet. Bahgat prefaces his meditation on the experience with the comment on the human inclination to give priority to family ties. Bahgat disagrees: He believes that there are Muslims today who love their fathers very much but love Omar Ibn al Khattab more; who dearly love their mothers but love the Mother of Believers, Khadija, even more; who love their sons very much but love the Prophet Muhammad more. Bahgat explains that to make such connections of the mind and spirit, and not simply biology, we need strong emotions. We need, he writes, a person “whose heart flies with the stars.” Bahgat continues that “Man, originally, is a part of the earth and the earth is part of the solar group which is part of the universe. Thus, Man lives in a universe with galaxies, suns, moons, mountains, seas and deserts and without intellectual connection the universe will be a lonely place, and moons and mountains will lose their meaning. Connections of mind and spirit actually give meaning to everything …” He explains that “when we find a friend, a lover, or a stranger who thinks like us, then we feel that earth’s rotation around the sun has a meaning of love.”34
To illustrate his point, Bahgat describes an experience with a Turkish Muslim in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Bahgat was reading the Qur’an in the mosque. When he finished, a man approached him and said things in Turkish that he could not understand. Bahgat tried to tell him that he did understand Turkish. The man signaled by gestures “it is not important whether you know the language or not. The important thing is that we are more than brothers. Our God is one, our Prophet is one, and our Holy Book is one. That is enough for creating a cultural and spiritual connection.”35
Huwaidi makes it clear that connections of this kind extend to Iran. He evokes the Iranian angle of the triangle with a surprisingly imaginative reconstruction that brings to life the deep Islamic roots of the revolution. He does so in a novel way. Throughout his career, Huwaidi has paid special attention to the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic scholars who dominate the new order. Yet, of all the affecting portraits in Iran from Within and his later accounts of revolutionary Iran, it is not the depictions of personalities that dominate. Rather, the most affecting evocation of the soul of Iranian Islam and of the revolution it inspired is Huwaidi’s kaleidoscopic and nuanced portrayal of the holy city of Qom, the heart of the new Islamic order.
Like other journalists, Huwaidi headed first to Teheran in 1979 to take the measure of the momentous events that were transforming Iran. He soon suspected that Qom, the seat of Shi’i Islamic learning, had far greater importance in the new Islamic order. Huwaidi’s sense of Qom’s new importance was confirmed by an incident involving a group of Muslim scholars who traveled to Iran to gauge the course of Iran’s war with Iraq. The group was welcomed very well and a meeting was arranged with six major ayatollahs. After the meeting, the scholars asked whether they could meet with the president or the prime minister. Huwaidi noticed two ayatollahs smile and overheard one ask in a bemused tone, “Why do our brothers want to waste their time with those clerks?”36
Huwaidi visited Qom three times to plumb the depths of the city that was the vital nerve center of the revolution. “On first impression,” he writes, “Qom takes you centuries back when the Islamic world was full of centers of knowledge in Bukhara and Samarkand in the heart of Asia to Kairouan in Northern Africa.” Like Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, Qom is considered holy by Shi’a Islam. The city is the site of the shrine of Fatema Mæ’sume, sister of Imam Reza (789–816). Qom is a destination for pilgrims. Huwaidi comments on the endless bookstores on the narrow streets of the old city and the “huge numbers of scholars who are walking down the streets in their distinct religious outfits.” While the religious dimension makes the most lasting impression, Huwaidi explores as well Qom as a modern agricultural, industrial, and trading center. In the end, he understood that Qom was, as he put it, “a city without a bottom.” Every time you think you have reached the bottom, Huwaidi explains, “new depth appears and when you explore it a new dimension emerges and so on.”37
Huwaidi aims quite purposefully for access to deeper levels. He is convinced that “Qom is the lock and key to Iran after the revolution.”38 To get beyond surface impressions, Huwaidi concludes that one must “walk the streets and sit in meetings with scholars and their students and followers in order to unravel the mysteries and learn the secrets.”39 Meetings with major figures in the new order were more easily arranged. In Qom Huwaidi found that the Islamic scholars were more relaxed and more open with visitors than in Teheran. Still, Huwaidi, the experienced journalist, naturally sought ways to verify the things he learned. To that task he brought an insider’s strategy. “Scholars may not let you know what you want to hear,” cautioned an Iranian friend who knew how Qom worked. However, he also pointed out that those scholars “have students, and students of students and you will hear from them everything. You can trust to a great extent that what they say does reflect what is going on in the mind of the scholars.”40
The abstract characterizations of Qom and the opportunities it offered took on a liveliness when Huwaidi proceeded to meet with major scholars who reflected the character of the city. He describes two such meetings in detail. These descriptions bring readers directly into the presence of Iran’s new political class. More importantly, they effectively conjure up the qualities that made the experience of Qom so central to any attempt to understand the revolution.
Huwaidi was invited to the home of Grand Ayatollah Lutfallah Safi Golpaygani in Brogrody Street in the old city, where a number of other important scholars live. Except for the guard standing at the door, there was nothing to draw special attention to his house. The street, Huwaidi reports, was extremely narrow. The house looked as though it had remained unchanged since the founding of Qom. Huwaidi removes his shoes at the door and passes through the many followers and students who have filled the house. He then finds himself in front of a white curtain. Someone drew the curtain aside. There was the grand ayatollah seated on the floor, with two of his assistants to his right. Huwaidi describes the ayatollah as thin and wearing thick glasses that had extremely dark frames. In front of him there were piles of papers and a stamp with his name. He was dictating answers to questions sent by his followers. The assistants would write out his answer and read it back to him, and he would then stamp the replies. After some time, the ayatollah slowly looked up toward Huwaidi and welcomed him “with a good Arabic accent.” He then spoke about the necessity for the unity of Muslims and the need to bring Sunnis and Shi’a together. He counseled me, Huwaidi concludes, with “a voice coming from the past that was very difficult for me to follow.”41
An equally important interview took place in 1983 with Ayatollah Montazeri, the figure second only to Khomeini in the emerging political order. This meeting was the second, as Huwaidi had met him briefly in 1980 in the company of other journalists. Montazeri at this time was shielded from all journalists by official order. He agreed to meet Huwaidi a second time in his capacity as an Islamic scholar rather than a reporter, conditioned on agreement that the actual interview not be published. As with Ayatollah Golpaygani, what emerges from this encounter is less the portrait of a personality than a still clearer sense of Qom and all it connoted for the new order. In this depiction one feels in the city the continuous presence of a venerable tradition of a religion as a way of life that had just inspired a modern mass revolution.
Huwaidi describes his impression that “I had to travel back 1,000 years to meet him—ten centuries to the early years of Islam.” The modest house was crowded with people, sitting everywhere, the men on one side, the women on the other. Some were reading a book, others sleeping, still others playing with children. Montazeri cut a distinctive figure, modest yet imposing, with his long white beard, large dark-rimmed glasses, traditional headdress, and white flowing robe of the shaikhs. Huwaidi adds that his white socks were ripped, although neither the ayatollah nor anyone else attached any importance to the tears. Huwaidi stayed for two hours and again regarded his time in that house in Qom like a voyage to the first days of Islam. In the extreme modesty of his person and his home, Montazeri himself evoked for Huwaidi one of Islam’s first converts, Abu Dharr, a companion of the Prophet, a friend of the poor, and a figure revered by Ali Shariati. Huwaidi’s message is this evocation of a timeless time and an unbounded place that is Qom.42
Beyond the Strategic Triangle from Bosnia to China
Learned Iranian scholars thrust into political roles were not the only Muslims to inspire Huwaidi’s artful depictions. Yet another Islamic intellectual and political figure captured his imagination and inspired a penetrating evocation. In Alija Izetbegovic the iron will of the Bosnian people found an improbable vehicle. The sober, reflective voice of a philosopher, not greatly moved by material things and deeply committed to Islam, led Bosnian Muslims to nationhood through unimaginable ordeals that called forth sympathies and material support across Dar al Islam. In the midst of all that drama and bloodshed, what consistently impressed Huwaidi was the man’s calming presence. Trials, imprisonment, and siege did not overwhelm his intellectual and spiritual explorations. Behind the heroic public figure, Huwaidi encountered a man who lived more simply and thought more deeply than one could possibly expect from a national political figure.
What impressed Huwaidi most of all was Izetbegovic’s stunning personal simplicity. Huwaidi traveled to Bosnia from Arab lands where rulers inhabit ostentatious palaces, invariably decorated with stolen national art treasures placed in horrific, gilded settings. Huwaidi could not quite believe his experience in locating the president’s apartment in Sarajevo. The neighborhood was ordinary. The president had not left his family apartment. There were no guards. Ordinary citizens simply pointed out where their president lived with no sense of just how astonishing the simplicity of it all was.43 Huwaidi understood just how remarkable such simplicity was, and he enabled his readers to feel the lessons the portrait conveyed.
Huwaidi’s travels to China created opportunities to hear from China’s Muslim minority. Listening to those voices of China’s forgotten Muslims provides one of the most moving and insightful of all the experiences that Huwaidi’s work makes possible. Huwaidi reminds us that while China’s Muslims have had little presence in the consciousness of the ummah, Islam itself has venerable roots in China. The opening of China to Islam dates back at least a thousand years. Estimates on the number of Muslims in all of China are unreliable, although Huwaidi, writing in the 1980s, ventured a minimal figure of some 20 million. Estimates now are several times that much, although still unofficial. The largest grouping of Muslims is the Uyghur ethnic group, concentrated in the Western province of Xinjiang and now estimated to number approximately 25 million. In some of the larger cities of China proper, there are also established communities, ethnically indistinguishable from their Han Chinese neighbors. Huwaidi identifies them as Muslim Chinese or Hui.
It is in China that Huwaidi’s identity as a rahal comes through most clearly. For one thing, his book Islam in China shows the strongest and most direct influence of Ibn Battuta. Like his predecessor, Huwaidi uses all the senses to take the measure of the cities he visits. “I listen, I smell, I see and I use all three to understand the reality of the Muslims,” he writes.44 Huwaidi goes out of his way to make the great rahal a very palpable presence in his text, invoking his name directly at least a dozen times. Huwaidi takes obvious pleasure in walking in the footsteps of a kindred spirit across the centuries.
While Ibn Battuta drew back from scenes he found disturbing, Huwaidi plunges into different lives lived in oppressive shadows. While Ibn Battuta is rightly regarded as one of the predecessors of modern-day anthropologists, Huwaidi just as clearly brings to contemporary journalism and travel literature even more of the characteristic methods of the anthropologists. From his indigenous sources he learns of the great lengths that China’s Muslims in the major cities of Beijing, Canton, and Shanghai go to in order to blend into their surroundings.
Everywhere, China’s Muslims conveyed to Huwaidi an acute awareness of their vulnerability. At the time of the communist revolution, Muslims sided overwhelmingly with Mao. They viewed his movement from a social justice prism, given the promise of a tilt to the poor and a progressive nationalism that resisted foreign interference. Still, when China later experienced major upheavals, notably the Cultural Revolution, the Muslim communities across China were targeted, along with other religious minorities, and often with great violence. Muslims had few resources for self-protection.
As Huwaidi moved through Chinese cities, he was very warmly welcomed as an Islamic scholar from a major Arab country and a center of Islamic learning. All manner of doors opened for him. Confidences were shared. Huwaidi took painful note that knowledge of Arabic had all but disappeared. China’s Islamic intellectuals had suffered greatly in the times of upheavals. Huwaidi encountered one scholar who had studied in Cairo at al Azhar and translated the work of the Egyptian scholar Ahmed Amin on Islam and Islamic historical personalities. In private conversations, he recounted to Huwaidi how his home had been invaded by hooligans during the Cultural Revolution. They destroyed the personal library that he had built up over a lifetime. We hear the pain of a scholar in his voice. Huwaidi noted that with a great deal of tradition lost or adulterated, people clung with great passion to Islam’s dietary restrictions. The refusal to eat pork became a badge of commitment to a tradition whose forms had over the centuries slipped through their fingers, although it remained strong in their hearts.
Unlike Ibn Battuta, Huwaidi did not lapse into depressed withdrawal with what he experienced in China. Huwaidi traveled not just to major cities in China proper but also to the Western province of Xinjiang, the land of the Uyghurs. He described himself as “the first Arab or Muslim journalist who entered the province.” Huwaidi reported that in the early 1980s “you were quite clearly in a Muslim society, indistinguishable from other Islamic countries.”45 Huwaidi had an acute historical understanding of just how challenging Chinese conditions were for Islam. The long and repressive rule of the Manchu dynasty took a terrible toll over some three hundred years. The fall of the ancien regime and the eventual triumph of Mao brought initial promise, although followed by the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution and the violent repression that came with it. Huwaidi arrived in China at a time when relative political calm prevailed and the Chinese economy had begun its really impressive rise. Huwaidi focused on the resilience of the Chinese Muslims. He was able to celebrate those elements of the tradition that they had preserved in the face of such daunting obstacles. At the same time, he registered a clear sense of guilt that China’s Muslims, in all their years of travail, had received so little assistance from the Islamic world.46 Worse, Muslims elsewhere were for the most part unaware of Islam’s forgotten millions in China.
Huwaidi heard that neglect and its consequences in the voice of an imam in a large and crowded urban mosque during Friday prayers. He noted all sorts of irregularities in the way the prayers were conducted.47 The voice of the imam haunted him: He spoke in a strange blend of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese, and Huwaidi could understand next to nothing. More disconcerting was his certitude that the assembled believers understand no more. Huwaidi concluded that the “Chinese have a deep faith but little knowledge about the faith itself.”48 He feared that unless there is an opening to China’s millions of Muslims, there will only be “something called Islam that bears little resemblance to the Message.”49
Huwaidi did uncover and report some more hopeful revelations in China. He took note of the large numbers of young people who made their way to the mosques. Chinese law banned children from houses of worship until they were eighteen, but once that age was reached, Chinese Muslim teenagers appeared with their parents and grandparents in large numbers. Genuine piety filled the air. From his deeper conversations with intellectuals, he learned that they were aware al Tagdid al Islami was sweeping through the Islamic world. They expressed the desire to be part of the Islamic Renewal, even though they had precious little in the way of resources to act on that commitment. Huwaidi reported on their efforts to acquire and translate books about the revival of Islam and to study Sufism as well as the Sunni and Shi’i teachings. The passion to know and practice Islam was there, and Huwaidi heard it in the stumbling voice of that imam.
So Hearts and Minds Can Learn Wisdom and Ears May Learn to Hear
With Ibn Battuta, the urge is almost irresistible to map his voyages. Yet any such summary sketch of his travels is profoundly misleading. A mapping suggests an underlying purpose of which the great rahal was completely innocent. Worse, such a summary obscures the major advantages that came from his meandering ways. It was precisely these qualities that allowed him to help build the foundations for modern anthropology.
With Fahmi Huwaidi, there is a parallel inclination to enumerate the Islamic causes and controversies that he engages. Huwaidi’s detailed dispatches from the frontlines lend themselves to the generation of an informative record of insider information on happenings in Dar al Islam. Such a catalogue approach misses a great deal of what is most important about Huwaidi. Huwaidi seeks depth of understanding rather than simply coverage of the momentous events that are bringing new life to the ummah. He seeks to discern who and what is making a real difference. Huwaidi does not just aim to be a witness of important events, but throws himself into the ongoing efforts to determine their larger meaning to the ummah. In short, Huwaidi aims, through sustained attention, timely reporting, and diligent research, to provide the necessary materials so that, as the Qur’an says, “hearts and minds may learn” from the experience of brothers and sisters in Islam across the world. Huwaidi understands just as clearly that his role entails the amplification of the voices of marginalized and forgotten Muslims so that, again in the words of the Qur’an, “ears may learn to hear.”50