Redeeming Islam: Constructing the Good Muslim Subject in the Contemporary Study of Religion

Farid Esack

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

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Islam is peace (George W Bush)

Introduction
Vice Chancellor Ihron Rensburg, Pro Vice Chancellor Derek van der Merwe, Deputy Principals Adam
Habib and Angina Parekh, Dean Rory Ryan, Ministers Ebrahim Patel and Trevor Manuel, President of the
Muslim Judicial Council, Shaikh Ihsan Hendricks, Professors Allan Boesak, the Chairperson of my department,
Prof Lilly Nortje-Meyer, Secretary General of the South African Council of Churches, Eddie Makue, colleagues,
friends and family, and students, good evening, assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
For an academic there are few tasks as challenging as delivering an inaugural lecture. He has to
vindicate the trust placed in him by his colleagues; he has to make scholarly sense to his peers in his own
discipline, possibly even impress them, and he has to perform for friends and family, most of whom are there
simply to celebrate his arrival and who may know little about the discipline into which he is being welcomed as
a worthy fellow.
The subject of my presentation tonight is rather loaded. ‘Redeeming Islam’ – a slightly mocking play
on the irony of religion which is usually itself in the business of offering redemption - being the subject of
attempts by others to save it. ‘Constructing the Good Muslim’ suggests a) that this ‘Good Muslim’ is being
manufactured’ by an external agency, b) that there is a project to distinguish between a ‘Good Muslim’ and a
‘Bad Muslim’ which may be related to the philological meaning of the word ‘muslim’ (someone who submits)
but certainly not in the manner in which the ‘faithful’ have ‘traditionally’ understood it, in, for example, the
distinction between the sinful (fasiq or fajir) Muslim on the one hand and the pious (salih) Muslim on the other
and c) that this Muslim is an object of enquiry as any ‘Study of’ may suggest. The borrowing of the term from
Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim Good Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of
Terror’ (2004) further suggests two things: firstly, that this Muslim is the subject of a larger ‘civilizational’
project located within an hegemonic project and, secondly, that is he or she is a subject in the sense that
subjects of monarchs exercise their rights at the pleasure of the monarch rather than as citizens of a republic.
After some introductory overview remarks about the current context of the Study of Islam in the

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At least this is what I read on a poster at a pharmacy in Accra, Ghana in November, 2006. This quote, which did not
originate from Gandhi, is a good example of how prophetic figures are appropriated for causes entirely unrelated to the
ones for which they lived and died.
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628-7.html (accessed 13th September, 2010)
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academy and some of the major issues around its development and place in relation to the Study of Religion, I
will look at the two major developments which contributed to a significant irenic tendency in the field.
Following the work of Richard Martin and Carl Ernst (2010), I will argue that the publication of Edward Said’s
book, Orientalism in 1978 and some of the more spectacular revolts against the West by Muslim actors
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(primarily the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the September 11 , 2001 attacks in the USA.) impacted
significantly on Islamicists (scholars in the Study of Islam) – both in terms of how they viewed their primary
obligations in the academy and much of their work. I concur with the view that these events contributed
immensely to the growth rise of irenic scholarship which saw Islamicists increasingly getting into the trenches
to help save the Muslims and their image as they were coming under attack from different quarters, primarily
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Western governments and armies and the mass media in these countries.
This defensive engagement of the Islamicist, described by a friend as ‘bunker scholarship’ raises
significant questions about fidelity to the post-Enlightenment foundations of critical scholarship. More than
simply being an irenic approach to Islam that does not take these foundations seriously or assisting Muslims to
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redeem the image of Islam, I argue that such scholarship often plays a significantly accommodationist role in
co-creating compliant Muslim subjects in a larger hegemonic project. I critique the idea of essentialist
approaches to both Islam and these foundations and argue that the focus should shift from epistemology to
hermeneutics to take cognizance of the ideological dynamics at play in the construction and representation of
Muslims as reliable subjects and of Islam as an empire-friendly faith. Finally, I offer my position of an engaged
scholarship attentive to the radical inequality between the partners to the conversation and am conscious of
the political, cultural and economic conditions that shape the terms of the dialogue

An Overview of Contexts and issues in the Study Islam and its Place in the Academy
First, the academic study of religion remains a largely Western endeavor although far greater
numbers of Muslims, (relatively few of them in Muslim majority countries) are emerging as leading figures in
the discipline. In my own preparation for this lecture I was struck anew by how increasingly US-centric the field
is. For example, a major question that academic or trade publishers consider before proceeding with a
particular manuscript on Islam is ‘How well will it do in the States?’ One of the reasons for my return to South
Africa from the United States was my own fatigue at being driven by what I roughly describe as ‘Northern

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

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questions’. (E.g., “Tell us about Islam and reconciliation?”) and the ‘irrelevance’ or disinterestedness in
Southern questions (e.g., ‘Does Islam have anything to say about pandemics, poverty/impoverization, death by
starvation?) This fatigue notwithstanding ‘contemporary’ as in the ‘Contemporary Study of Religion’ of my title
is largely confined to observation of the academy in North America and in recent introductory works to Islam
published there or geared towards that audience. I do so in large part because the work done is increasingly
shaping Muslim self-understanding.
Second, there has been significant increase in interest and literature on Islam and the Muslim world in
the last thirty years or both at a public and an academic level (evident in bookstores, openings and offerings at
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universities, journals and members of professorial societies etc.) However, as Carl Ernst and Richard Martin
point out, ‘while Islamic studies as a field has been powerfully affected by political events, debates within the
academy have had a longer and more pervasive role in shaping … this area of inquiry.’ (2010, 1). (Cf. Martin,
Empey, Arkoun and Rippin, 2010)
Third, Islamic Studies, (dirasah al-Islamiyyah) - notwithstanding the claims of the faithful to
ahistoricity or the divine origins of that ‘other occupation’ of the same name, ‘Islamic Studies’ (islamiyyat) in
the madrasah (Islamic seminaries) may make – has a relatively recent history. Like several of its siblings in
other fields and/or disciplines in the humanities, it is still undergoing a struggle to be ‘not-a-step-child’. For
now, much of this struggle takes place within departments of Religious Studies, a discipline itself not entirely
beyond suspicion – both from its internal ‘others’ – the Church and the managers of the sacred - and its
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external others – sociologist, anthropologist, psychologists etc. At a deeper level though, this quest is also
connected to the academic impulse for greater specialization and deepening commitment to post-
Enlightenment scientific rationality – which remains the uncritiqued raison d’être of the modern university
and the intellectual foundations of the academic study of religion. This deepening commitment to enquiry
which is ‘descriptive, phenomenological and theoretical (Smart, 2001, xiii), rather than confessional or faith
driven, is reflected in the shifting nomenclature where ‘Islamic Studies’ and ‘Religious Studies’ becomes the
‘Study of Islam’ and ‘Religion Studies or the ‘Study of Religion’ respectively. Our work, says Ninian Smart, ‘is
morphological; it presents an anatomy of faith, [… ] for the application of epoche. It is an intentionally
bracketing method which tries to bring out the nature of believers’ ideas and feelings.’ (ibid. 3) While this

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Ernst and Martin note that as ‘recently as the last decades of the twentieth century […] interest in, and room for,
curriculum on Islam and Muslims could be found in barely one-tenth of the approximately 1200 academic departments of
Religious Studies in North America […] and it was not so long ago that Islam did not even have a primary presence in the
major professional society for faculty of religion, the American Academy of Religion. (2010, 1)

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

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‘involves walking in moccasins of the faithful’ (ibid.) we are not supposed to be the faithful – at least not the
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ones in whose moccasins we are walking.’
Fourth, while in the darul ‘ulum, the yeshiva or the seminary affirmation of one’s work and quest may
be sought from the Transcendent or some sacred foundational texts in the study of religion where the debates
shift primarily between methodological atheism or agnosticism, affirmation is sought from our peers, more
particularly from the species above us in the academic pecking order – those with an even deeper suspicion of
the idea of a Transcendent, of faith and, and sometimes even of the faithful - as legitimate fields of scholarly
enquiry in an institution committed to scientific and rational enquiry. This conscious shift in the source of
affirmation inevitably - arguably also ‘ideally’ - puts the faithful/believing academic into quite a fix. She exists
in a state of tension with her peers, who may suspect her of nifaq (proclaiming one view and believing in
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another) or rational shirk (associationism with God, i.e., Reason), with the faithful, and herself all wondering
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how the believing academic manages to simultaneously ride multiple horses.

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At a time when religionswissenschaft was having its own struggle for acceptance as a serious social discipline the idea of
obeisance to distance – of epochē - (to stand apart, to hold back) was crucial. The debate ranged largely between
phenomenologists of religion who argued for methodological atheism (scholars must deny the possibility that the objects
of religious faith are true or real) on the one hand and Ninian Smart’s alternative of methodological agnosticism, on the
other. ‘Not knowing how the universe really is organized – not knowing if it is organized at all – the scholar of religion seeks
not to establish a position in response to this question but to describe, analyse, and compare the positions taken by others’
(McCutcheon, 1999: 216-17).
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In recent years, this suspicion of unduly warm relationship between the academic/enquirer and the subject (sometimes
also ‘subjected’) community being researched or of the believing scholar has waned somewhat in a number of fields in the
humanities as is evident in the presence of committed feminist women in Gender Studies, gay people in Queer Studies,
openly Black people in African studies, etc. (“These feminists or liberation theologians are not really scholars, or
theologians.”) There is still, I suspect, a much deeper suspicion of people with a religious commitment located in the Study
of Religion.

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From time to time one reads fiery warnings against studying Islam at ‘secular universities’ and these are usually
dismissed as the rantings of extremists. I am not sure if, in terms of the worldview of these traditionalists, and the
inevitable and necessary critiquing of faith and its marginalization in the academy, these fears are entirely ungrounded. It is
somewhat disingenuous for academics to consciously promote ‘objective’ and non-faith enquiry and then to complain
when others find this threatening to their worldviews and power paradigms. The following is an excerpt from The Majlis,
locally published, that reflects the anger at the ‘treachery’ of those who study Islam in the academy: ‘We have on the one
side the menace of the Christian missionaries who have made huge inroads in the Ummah [Muslim community] with their
kufr (disbelief) which they have succeeded to implant in numerous backward and remote Muslim regions. But this too is not
the primary enemy. These overt enemies while constituting a threat, are not as great a menace to Islam as the enemy
which lurks within the Ummah [Muslim community]. The most poisonous and lethal enemy for Islam in this century consists
of the munaafiqeen and murtaddeen who are concealing within the folds of the Ummah. The Munafiqin (hypocrites) and
the Murtaddeen (Apostates —those who have reneged from Islam, albeit covertly)- are classified by the eternal Shari`ah of
Allah Ta’ala as Mulhideen. They are such notorious villains who proclaim themselves to be Muslim, in fact authorities of
Islam while they cannot even recite the Qur’aan Majeed properly nor are versified with the elementary rules of Tahaarat
(purification] and Salaat [prayer]. They advertise themselves as being the ‘intelligentsia’ while they grovel in abject jahaalat
(ignorance). They profess to be Muslim while at heart they are kaafir [unbelievers]. These Mulhideen and apostates are the
products of kuffaar [disbelieving] universities. They have studied under kuffaar or apostate professors and have acquired
scrap degrees in a secular branch of kufr [heresy] learning called ‘Islamic Studies’. On the procurement of their scrap PhD
degrees doled out by kuffaar masters wallowing in constant impurity – spiritual, ceremonial and physical najaasat (filth) —
they believe in their jahaalat [ignorance] that they have superseded the illustrious Sahaabah [companions of the Prophet]
and Aimmah-e-Mujtahideen in the various branches of Shar’i Uloom. {knowledge of Shari’ah) These Mulhideen [atheists]
are the greatest enemies of Islam and the Ummah, (The Majlis, vol 15, No 11)

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

Orientalism
For more than three decades, the term ‘Orientalism’ has cast a long shadow over the Study of
Religion in general and Islamic studies in particular. The term acquired its overwhelmingly pejorative
connotations in scholarly discourse largely due to Edward Said’s groundbreaking book Orientalism. (1978). In
looking at the development of the field of the Study of Islam and the other disciplines where Islam and Muslim
were studied over the last hundred years or so, the general demarcation – the dangers of simplification and
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reductionism, notwithstanding - is often described as pre- or post-Saidian.
In summary, Said argued that ‘Orientalism constitutes not only a field of investigation but an exercise
of power, part of the story of cultural hegemony over the ‘other’ against which European culture is asserted. In
the context of radical inequalities of power Orientalism was more revealing of the formation and presence of
Euro-Atlantic power than as a truthful discourse the Orient itself. European culture not just managed but
produced the Orient and Western analytic categories not just reflect but also produce facts. A rationalist
analysis is not simply the application of non-normative, ahistorical constructs to apolitical phenomena but
involves the translation of all culture through the filter of Western categories of knowledge. The terms ‘Orient’
and ‘Occident,’ ‘East and West’, thus do not refer real entities or essences, but rather to bodies of knowledge
that have been constructed in the service of particular aims - the domination of the Middle East by European
imperial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by the United States in the twentieth. Said
presented Orientalism as a rather disaggregated monolith, ‘a constellation of false assumptions underlying

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‘A single book’ says Richard Martin, changed the meta-discourse on what we [Islamicists] were doing and what we
should be doing.’ (Martin, forthcoming) Said’s work was also, and not unsurprisingly, greeted by a chorus of criticism from
virtually all of the well-known Orientalists at that time including Ernest Gellner, Albert Hourani, Mark Proudman, Maxime
Rodinson, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, and, most famously, Bernard Lewis. Said was criticized for presenting, in fact,
constructing, a monolithic ‘Occidentalism‘ to oppose a similarly constructed ‘Orientalism’ of Western discourse, of failing
to acknowledge the diversity in impulse, genres and ideological and scholarly orientations of the various scholars that he
treated uniformly. For a critique of the Irenic approach to the study of Islam and a review of the Said-Lewis debates see
Aaron W Hughes, Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline, London: Equinox, 2007)

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Western attitudes toward the East‘, ‘a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic
peoples and their culture.’ Despite Said’s disdain for orthodoxies, his own ideas became the basis for a new
orthodoxy and his critique of Western scholarship on the Orient has too often been reduced to a Manichaean
division of opposing sides. This transformation, in the words of MacKenzie, ‘has turned Orientalism into one of
the most highly charged words in modern scholarship’ (need citation ) ‘and remains for most scholars the bête
noir in the expanding of family Islamic studies today. (Ernst and Martin)’

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

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

This defending of Islam though, I argue, is also located within a particular ideological project, a project
like Orientalism, not without its hegemonic interests. It is common cause that identities, including religious
ones, are constantly in a state of flux. I do assert the value of conversation in all its tentativeness and heurism
in the academy, more characteristic of hermeneutics rather than the essentialism of both traditional religion
and supposedly objective scholarship (more characteristic of epistemology). I am, however, particularly

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

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

First, most authors writing on Islam in the academy are largely still non-Muslim although they have
been joined by a growing number of younger Muslims, nearly all of whom – with notable exceptions - are
located in the North. A significant number have also started their scholarly journeys as non-Muslims and have
since become Muslims. The dominant pattern of edited anthologies and accredited journals dealing with
Islamic Studies is still one where the Non-Muslim is the editor, bringing Muslim and non-Muslim voices - and
occasionally, only Muslim voices - together. Where books are co-authored the primary author is usually a non-
Muslim.
Second, while a number of these younger scholars, children of post-modernity - have indeed been
able to saddle multiple horses, many have remained wedded to the irenic scholarship of their mentors in the
post-Sa`idian academy. The work of Kecia Ali (2006), Ebrahim Moosa (2008), and Majeed Annouar (2006) do
reflect a relatively rarer Muslim willingness or ability to deal seriously and critically with the traditions of Islam
(or the tradition of Islams.)
Third, there is growing emphasis on Sufism in the academy. While the motivations of this remain
largely unexplored I relate this a) to the modern interest in individual experiences and fulfillment, b) the
perceived pliability of Sufism as amenable to various cultures, gender friendliness, religious and sexual
diversity) c) the interest in Islam as a lived reality rather than dogma located in texts and d) a part of a desire
to see Muslims ‘calming down’ and returning to a mythical innocence where Islam is perceived as inherently
inward looking, a-political, gentle and non-confrontational (cf. Nixon Center). (Related to this is a discernable
pattern of assigning the Shari`ah a less important role in Islam. When the Shari`ah is actually covered it
increasingly is done within a framework of re-thinking its contents and privileging its supposed spirit and
objectives.)

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

Disinterested Scholarship
The first question that I want to reflect on is if, in the keenness to ‘walk in the moccasins of the
faithful’ – to return to Ninian Smart’s metaphor – does the ‘disinterested’ scholar ‘risk’ becoming of one the
faithful? The second question is whether an increasingly accommodationist academy has simply moved on to
another kind of essentialism, with its construction of the “Good Muslim” – “Islam is peace” – a project as fused
to an ideological agenda as the Orientalism critiqued by Edward Said? - an approach which while it presents
itself as objective really seeks to construct a particular kind Islam, a non-threatening, or to use Slavoj Zizek’s
term ‘decaffeinated faith’ – without asking raising any questions about the imperial, ethical nature or simple
sustainability of that which is threatened.

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

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 Post-modernity and post-colonialism have raised some serious questions about the Enlightenment
basis of learning, its assumptions of rationality and of the mind as a clear slate, or as capable of being cleansed
from the ‘distortions’ of personal commitment. Not only has the assumption of objectivity come under
sustained criticism by host of new entrants in the academy, such as feminists, liberation theologians, and post-
colonial scholarship, but they have argued that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation […] needs
to be abandoned.’ Rather than conceiving of knowledge in terms of the accurate representation of a
‘nonhuman reality,’ with which the mind interacts, (often within a falsely assumed ‘permanent, neutral,
framework for inquiry.’ (Rorty, 1979, 8) we should conceive of knowledge a) in terms of a conversation
between persons and b) a conversation that takes place within particular power relationships. We scholars
also operate within history along with our critiques of the theories of both knowledge and the way it is
produced and the intellectualist responses to the material that we study or communities that we observe. We
cannot view communities, traditions and ideas historically and then take an ahistorical view of ourselves and
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of our critiques. (Context was something particularly privileged by feminist and liberation theologians).

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

My objection to what I have called Orientalism is not that it is just the antiquarian study of Oriental
languages, societies, and peoples, but that as a system of thought Orientalism approaches a
heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this
suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence,
which observes the Orient from afar and from, so to speak, above. This false position hides historical
change. Even more important, from my standpoint, it hides the interests of the Orientalist. (2003. 333)

Feminists, liberation theologians and post-colonial scholarship do not propose that the alternative to
Orientalism is ‘scholarly disinterest.’ After all, they argue, such disinterest is a mere fiction. ‘There is no
innocent interpretation, no innocent interpreter, no innocent text’ (Tracy 1987, 79). Instead they appeal to a
spirit of relentless critique of tradition, religion, academicism, but also of modernity and, and, is I said, of
ourselves. Knowledge, like any other social tool, while it can and must be critical, is never neutral. My beef is
not with the idea of empathetic scholarship that characterizes much of essentialist irenics and, yes, liberal,
material produced in the contemporary Study of Islam, but with its uncritical position towards the larger
ideological and power structures wherein it is located, its ‘embeddness’. in those structures and how it

14
Writing in another context, but with relevance to our subject here, Gustavo Gutierrez, the famous liberation theologian,
describes this appeal to ideological neutrality in the following terms: ‘The last systematic obstacle for any theology
committed to human liberation is [...] a certain type of academicism which posits ideological neutrality as the ultimate
criterion; which levels down and relativizes all claims to absoluteness and all evaluations of some ideas over others. This is
the theological equivalent of another great ideological adversary of liberation: the so-called quest for the death of
ideologies or their suicide at the altars of scientific and scholarly impartiality. (1973, 25)
9
 15
contributes to provide them? with meaning The question for me is, thus, not one of the faithfulness of the
16
academic or lack of faith – but ‘Which faith?’ and “In whose service?’

The Construction of the Decaffeinated Muslim

There is more to embedded scholarship than a desire to simply dispel misconceptions or help create a
better understanding of Islam for the general public. In attempting to ‘write Muslim theology from without,’
this approach implicitly provides a sympathetic yet essentialized view of Islam that casts “good Muslims”
17
against “bad Muslims”. The ‘real’ Muslims follow the ‘true’ Islam. And the main detractors, who obscure this
‘essentialized goodness of Islam’, then, the argument goes, are both the neo-Orientalist – in the Saidian sense -
scholars from a variety of disciplines (such as Daniel Pipes, Ibn Warraq, and Bernard Lewis) who
‘misunderstand’ then ‘misrepresent’ them, on the one hand and also the “bad Muslims” themselves (Osama
18
bin Laden, or the Wahabis) who resort to ‘extremism’ or other ‘false ways’ because they do not, as Esposito
says, understand the ‘real’ history and the ‘real’ teachings of Islam which, according to him are ‘moderate’,
19
peaceful, and inoffensive’.
This kind of essentialism does have a role in the life of faith communities much of which is based on

15
The term ‘embedded journalism’ first came into vogue with media coverage of the US invasion of Iraq in 2001 when
selected journalists were given privileged access to military units after undertaking to censor information that could
negatively impact on the those units. Confronted about the ethical problems of objective journalist, Lt. Col. Rick Long of the
U.S. Marine Corps replied, "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to
attempt to dominate the information environment." (http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/940078 ).

16
Yoginder Sikand, an analyst of South Asian Islam, describes in his article, “‘Civic, Democratic Islam’: America’s Desperate
Search for the ‘Liberal’ Muslim,” the hypocrisy of a United States which at one point supported the most extremist and
fanatical Muslims in the world to counter the growing popularity of secular nationalist and progressive forces, but now is
devising a myriad strategies to create an America-friendly, moderate Islam: Today, America’s policy on Islamic movements
has turned full circle. In order to counter the radical fringe of Islamism that it had so fervently courted till recently, America
is desperately scouting around for ‘liberal’ Muslim allies who can sell an alternate vision and version of Islam that fits into
the American scheme of things. This explains the sudden flurry of conferences and publications on ‘liberal Islam’ and the
setting up of NGOs in Muslim countries with liberal American financial assistance. The underlying aim of these diverse
activities appears to be the same: to promote an understanding of Islam that cheerfully accepts American hegemony,
camouflaged as global modernity, as normative and, indeed, ‘normal’. This goal, is, of course, not stated openly. Rather, it
is generally clothed in the garb of high-sounding slogans such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘pluralism’.
18
Wahabism, a more puritan austere, nearly Calvinist from of Islam, has for long, and not without just cause, been viewed
as the nemesis by Sufi groups, the more organized sectors or what has been variously described as “popular” or ‘folk’ or
“low” Islam and by modernist Muslims. The post 9/11 era, particularly with the alleged role of Saudi citizens in the events
and the putative role that that religious approach has played in the theological formation of the alleged terrorists have
given a much more pronounced tone and energy to anti-Wahabism.
19
This essentialization of Islam and Muslim or has been variously described as ‘theologocentricism’ (Rodinson) or ‘cultural
determinism’ where ‘almost all observable phenomena can be explained by reference to Islam, in societies where Muslims
are the majority or where Islam is the official religion.’ Mahmood Mamdani refers to this as ‘Culture Talk’; A kind of
discourse that assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and then explains politics as a
consequence of that essence. Muslim cannot be any other way. This of course opens the way for the argument of Islam’s
inherent incompatibility with modernity and, by extension, Westernism.]

10
belonging which necessarily entails constructing or embracing ideas of who constitutes outsider and insiders.
The disciplines of dogma and heresiography, after all, have well-deserved places in most religious traditions.
The post-Saidian problem though is the assumption that once that (Non-Muslim) scholar is convinced that he
or she is positively disposed towards Muslims, he or she can now participate in the reconstruction of the
Muslim identity and Islamic tradition in ways which are more acceptable to the largely Northern/Western
society or context in which that scholar is located and with which dominant ideology he or she identifies. For
the Muslim scholar, the problem is often an inability to ask critical questions of his or her socio-political
context on the one hand and a seamless embrace of the dominant politically constructed assumptions about
what is a “good Muslim” on the other (indeed, an often blissful ignorance of the fact that there are conscious
political and economic forces initiating and supporting these constructions).
The ‘moderate Muslim’ is held up as the ideal, new slogans of ‘wasatiyyah’, (moderation) bandied
about with little or no critique of what constitutes the center and peripheries, who defines these, the
historical-ideological moment and agenda that creates the urgency and need for moderate Muslim ?Islam.
Indeed the very raising of the question of agendas in relation to ‘moderate Islam’ makes one suspect. The
20
foregrounding of the themes of pluralism, human rights, democracy, peace and non-violence , etc., the
framing of liberal responses to them as the new orthodox Islamic response and the way the “Good Muslim” is
constructed reflect the triumph, however temporary, of the liberal ideological moment at least in relation to
the Study of Islam in the West. (In the same way the swords which dominate the entrance of the Anti-
Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg (‘Democracy’, ‘Equality’, ‘Reconciliation’ and ‘Diversity’ signify the
triumph of a particular liberal vision of society, and through the swords, perhaps the willingness of liberal
society to also resort to violence to establish its hegemony).
Yoginder Sikand, an analyst of South Asian Islam, describes in his article, “‘Civic, Democratic Islam’:
America’s Desperate Search for the ‘Liberal’ Muslim,” (2007) the hypocrisy of a United States which at one
point supported the most extremist and fanatical Muslims in the world, the Taliban, to counter the growing
popularity of secular nationalist and progressive forces, but now is devising a myriad strategies to create an
America-friendly, moderate Islam: Today, America’s policy on Islamic movements has turned full circle. In
order to counter the radical fringe of Islamism that it had so fervently courted till recently, America is
desperately scouting around for ‘liberal’ Muslim allies who can sell an alternate vision and version of Islam that
fits into the American scheme of things. This explains the sudden flurry of conferences and publications on
‘liberal Islam’ and the setting up of NGOs in Muslim countries with liberal American financial assistance. The

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

11
underlying aim of these diverse activities appears to be the same: to promote an understanding of Islam that
cheerfully accepts American hegemony, camouflaged as global modernity, as normative and, indeed, ‘normal’.
This goal, is, of course, not stated openly. Rather, it is generally clothed in the garb of high-sounding slogans
such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘pluralism’.

In irenic scholarship on Contemporary Islam, other than an occasional and casual nod to Muslim
sufferings and a lamentation of US foreign policy, there is no critique of larger patterns of consumption,
environmental or socio-economic justice, of modernity and liberalism as class projects which hugely impact –
and not always positively on the peripheries. The urgings towards awareness of these usually come from those
outside the Study of Islam such as anthropology (Talal Asad and Sabah Mahmood), Salman Sayyid, (critical
theory) political science (Mahmoud Mamdani) and literary criticism (Hamid Dabashi). The Study of Islam with
the Study of Religion must be studied as social and cultural expressions within historical, geographical, political
and economic contexts. I agree with Ninian Smart’s polymethodical approach whereby we draw on “the full
range of human sciences to understand how traditions have been transmitted authoritatively in various
societies and how these have been re-enforced in myths, rituals, doctrines, legal institutions, artistic
expressions and in testimonies of believers, including states such as spirit possession and out of the body
experiences.” More important though, given the urgencies of the multiple crisis facing humankind of warfare,
environmental and economic systems deeply wedded to systemic impoverization, we desperately need to
bring the insights of these post-colonial scholars and others who work on the peripheries into our work.
Scholarship – like all of human life - is compromised. We have a choice between an uncritical embeddedness in
the structures of power with accountability to armies, governments, empires, and a critical engagement with
the margins – however shifting - for more just world.

Re-Thinking Contexts for Contemporary Scholarship

For me, the question that I am left with is “What is my context as an engaged African Muslim
scholar?” Where is my authenticity located when I uncritically embrace the constructed intellectual and
political categories and urgencies of others as my own and seek to re-define a fourteen thousand year old
tradition – albeit an ever-changing one – in the face of external demands (even if these demands were
generated by a complex array of factors wherein that tradition is not entirely innocent)? Muslims too, have a
conflicting relationship with both “outsiders” and the tradition of Islam and its ideals. The tensions are
palpable of be-ing in a world in which the vast majority of Muslims feel trapped between the demands
imposed on them in their existences as subjects of the Empire on the one hand, and the violent convulsions of
a fascist-like Islamically invoked response by the co-religionists on the other. At every step of our encounter
with our non-Muslim neighbours, colleagues, students and immigration officers, those of us – committed or
nominal Muslim, confessional or cultural - living or working in the West, have to justify our existences, our
faith, our humanness and our non-violent intentions.
12
 Declarations that Muslim societies must ‘come right’ are fairly easy. In nearly all of the work that I
have perused there is no shortage of argument against the idea that Muslim societies or Islam are inherently
opposed to democracy or that Islam is compatible with democracy. (Cf. Feldman 2003, Abou el-Fadl Mousalli,
(2002) Sachedina and Anna'im, (1990.) The questions are what does ‘come right’ really mean, what does the
cover of democracy and moderation really hide, and what are the historico-political reasons for the
“democracy and moderation deficit” in the Muslim and Two Thirds World in the first instance?
Questions of religious pluralism wedded to inter-religious solidarity against oppression, of gender
justice, human rights, democracy etc., have for long been ones with which I have been engaged and with a
sense of principled urgency that has its origins in a rather different context than the current dominant empire
building one that only seeks to civilize the rebellious Muslim barbarian. My own engagement with the South
African liberation struggle and that of my comrades, my work in the field of gender justice and my current
work with Muslims who are living with HIV & AIDS have ?often inspired many Muslim here and elsewhere who
share our ideals with pride – a sense that Muslims can be part of a vision larger than obscurantist
fundamentalism. It is, ironically, precisely this location of my own scholarship within a principled vision of a
just world that makes me so profoundly suspicious of the dominant urgency to re-think Islam in ‘contemporary
terms’.

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

I am not suggesting that issues of democracy, human rights and moderation have not been dealt with
th
in Islamic scholarship before Edward Said’s Orientalism or 11 of September 2001. I am concerned that a
teacher with a formidable cane has sent all of us into a corner after one of our classmates said something
unspeakable about his favourite project. Discerning a lack of complete and unqualified remorse – even some
rejoicing – the entire class is now subjected to collective punishment. And so, all of us now have to write a
thousand times, “I shall behave – I shall be democratic – I shall respect human rights – I shall be peaceful.” As it
is, the class – Muslim societies - is a “remedial one” for “slow learners” and we are on probation. Meanwhile,
many of the other kids are dying around me, in the case of Africa and indeed in much of the Two-Thirds World,
quite literally. We are living in a world where more than one 1.5 billion live on less than one dollar and a half,
where the gap between the lowest 20% and the top 20% of the word’s population has increased from a ratio
13
of 1:30 in 1960 to 1:194 in 2007. Yet, my major project is to get into the good books of the teacher; to present
myself as worthy of his acceptance, as different from the barbarian who did what he did.
Besides the immediate reality of the children dying around me, there are, of course, other realities
around me including coercion, the irony of violence being used to impose a language of peace, the larger
context of education and schooling which pretends to be ideology-less. Neither the elite nor the aspirant elites
of our generation, so desperate to ‘succeed’ within the system, have ever been too interested to engage the
works of thinkers such as Paul Goodman, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. Too tantalizing is the promise of entry
into the domain of the establishment subject to turning a blind eye to its inherent injustice, the demand for
uniformity, the reduction of human beings to empty vessels to be moulded to serve a particular kind of society
with particular economic needs, the transformation of insan in to homo aeconomicus.
In many ways, scholarly elites are represented by the student who is desperate to outdo his fellow
students in appeasing the teacher. For these students threats are unnecessary; the promise of acceptance by
the teacher and the concomitant material advantages are sufficient incentives. Despite the protestations of
benign objectives of advancing education and learning, the teacher is there as part of larger project – a project
that is politically unwise to interrogate; in an authoritarian system any moment spending “valuable” time on
challenging teachers means losing marks … it is “unscholarly, it lacks intellectual depth, does not have the sang
froid of true scholarship”… (Majid, 2000, 2) As with the learners, the teacher is also not a disembowelled
human being. He comes from the city and it is a village school. There are larger civilizational and ideological
issues at stake, including understandings of development and its price on the earth, the transformation of the
earth as sacred in traditional cosmologies into simple real estate, our very understanding of what it means to
be human, of culture, the commodity value attached to people and land and the supremacy of supposedly
rationalist forms of thinking. The issue of the teacher’s sullied pet project represents only the sharper edge of
the frustration, anger and agenda, the rise and march of the Reconstituted Empire. The larger context of this is
globalization for which we require the intellectual courage and political will to also historicize and unravel its
implications when we consider issues of human rights, democracy and the moderate Muslim in relation to
Islam today.

Conclusion
In my own approach to the Study of Islam, I am committed to challenging the imposition of western
analytic categories and fostering dialogue, I argue for the abandonment of a positivist epistemology both
within Islam and outside that sustains a conception of understanding as discovering the objective and final
truth. Instead I believe understanding to be the result of a dialogue between horizons of meaning none of
which can claim a monopoly over truth. Here the demand is for a willingness to risk oneself into a
transformative process in which the status of the self and other are constantly renegotiated. Authentic
dialogue is about entering the other’s world while holding on to yours, with the willingness to be transformed.
It isn’t a space of trade where deals are struck. One cannot speak of genuine political participation, integrity of
14
communities, etc. unless one can reach some kind of consensus on a shared system of ethics. The context of
power in which the current drive for such conversation is driven by the Empire’s agenda makes it exceedingly
difficult, if not impossible, to have any kind of authentic conversation that holds within it an openness to
mutual transformation.

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

15
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