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| Conversations within Islam: Culture, Politics and Religion in the Global Public Sphere. | |
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| A forum of leading younger Islamist scholars and activists, Central European University, Budapest, May 29, 2003. |
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| Draft Report by Mark LeVine, 09/04/2006 |
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| "You all are like a great jazz band. You seem to be so in tune with each other, each one picking up on the last person¹s riff and taking it to a new direction without losing the thread." |
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| During the last three years I have traveled around the world bringing together scholars, activists and artists from different cultures into unique conversations and performances‹what I call "culture jams"‹that could, I hoped, help produce new ways of communicating across the boundaries of religion, class, ethnicity and other divisions that normally stifle such conversations. While my primary focus has always been on the Arab and Muslim world, the voices of religiously motivated Muslim scholars, activists and artists have always been particularly difficult to bring into conversation with each other, even as conversations with Western-trained scholars have become less peculiar in recent years. |
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| It was the great need for such intra-Muslim conversations, especially among the rising generation of thinkers and activists with a commitment to social and political justice within their countries, and dialog and peace between them (and with other societies), that led me to organize this meeting of six of the leading younger generation of Muslim scholars in the world in Budapest. The participants included Tariq Ramadam, the leading voice of European Islam, award-winning film-maker ("Divorce Iranian Style") and anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Cairo and Free University (Berlin) professor Amr Hamzawy, Turkish Islamist scholar Hakan Yavuz, Nadia Yassine, the head of the Justice and Spirituality Party of Morocco and perhaps the most important woman political activist in the Muslim world today, and as co-moderator of the forum, best-selling author and distinguished professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University John Esposito. |
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| While I knew that such a gathering would be an important event, I was not prepared for the significance it took on. First of all, to paraphrase the quote above (made by a leading American sociologist who was in the audience for the forum), this was a great performance‹innovative, sometimes shocking, certainly challenging people¹s accepted understanding of the role of Islam and Muslim intellectual and activist thinking within the "umma" at large and the Middle East, North Africa and Europe specifically. Indeed, like the best jazz performances, this one was not scripted at all; the participants had never dialoged together before, and few even knew each other before our dinner meeting the night before. The fact that such our very public meeting could take on such a musical sensibility, could establish important connections between people at this high level, and in so doing both produce insights and discussions of enough significance to lead the participants to agree to meet again for an extended dialog, are a testament to the principles and practice of culture jamming that I have been building for the last three years. |
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| The forum was divided into two sessions, the first dealing with questions and issues framed within the context of intra-Muslim dialogs and debates, the second vis-à-vis conversations between Muslims and scholars and activists from Europe and the US. Specifically, there were several immediately apparent highlights from the forum, and many questions that were raised that will only begin to be answered as we continue the conversations in the editing of the transcripts of the forum and in follow-up meetings. Beginning with the former, the single most important aspect of the meeting was the presence of Nadia Yassine. Madame Yassine, whose father, Abdessalam Yassine is among the four or five most important Islamist political figures in the world, and who herself is perhaps the senior female Muslim political activist alive, had never in her life been allowed to travel out of Morocco until our event. Indeed, her party is still officially banned and persecuted by the authorities. What made her presence so poignant, especially only a week after the horrible bombings in Casablanca, was her radical message of non-violence and uncompromising support for real social, economic and political justice for all people, from all countries and religions. |
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| This is a message whose power and importance is obvious, as are the reasons why the Moroccan Government would want to stifle it, considering her continual criticism of the monarchy as undemocratic and therefore unislamic. It was thus crucial that Yassine be present to ground our discussions in the difficult realities of autocracy and oppression in the post-9/11 and post-Iraq American-dominated regional order, and why the dozens of letters, faxes and phone calls were well worth the effort to help secure her a passport (which will hopefully allow her to travel to France and the US soon). |
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| Indeed, her words provided the opportunity for all the participants to affirm their commitment to non-violence‹although Ramadan challenged all of us to contextualize the support for non-violence with the high level of violence continuously directed against Muslims by their own and other states. Yassine¹s presence was also important for another reason: it allowed for a serious and critical conversation between her and Mir-Hosseini as to best manner for women scholars and activists to approach and draw from their Muslim tradition in confronting patriarchy within their societies and the larger context of political repression and foreign hegemony that supports it. Mir-Hosseini, who is one of the few Iranian women to receive a high enough level of theological training to be able to earn the respect of (and right to publicly question) leading members of the Iranian religious establishment, clearly disagreed with Yassine¹s appropriate of early Islamic history to justify calls for democratic reforms today even as both agreed on the need to engage tradition as the ground for one¹s investigations. Their debate grounded the larger theme of the gathering, which was the extent to which a discourse of authenticity vis-à-vis Western notions of modernity has always been and continues to be the most central question facing modern Muslim scholars and critics. |
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| What was clear from the discussion in the first section was that the issue of authenticity in confronting what is today termed "globalization" is a major theme across Muslim societies, although the approaches are different in various locations. Thus Ramadan argued that there is a "Euro-Islamic specificity" that is reshaping the larger framework of intra-Muslim dialogs. On the other hand, Hamzawy, viewing the Egyptian situation, and Yavuz, examining the bourgeois Sufistic movements that have become so important in Turkey, each felt that local cultural and political-economic dynamics were shaping unique responses in their countries: for Hamzawy, a largely negative and suspicious view of globalization and even of real dialog between Muslims outside of accepted norms, for Yavuz, a belief that in the last instance it has been the relative strength of the Islamic bourgeoisie in Turkey that has led to an embracing of Western consumerist values alongside Sufi notions of piety and justice. Such a position, everyone agreed, was much harder to sustain in a rentier-statist economic system as predominated in the Arab world and oil-dependent economies in particular. |
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| Other observations from the first session include the belief that it is of paramount importance for the younger generation of Islamist activists, scholars, etc., to challenge their traditions (whether it is patriarchy, corruption, sanctioning of violence, etc) from a perspective of discourses of non-violence, democracy and human rights, and to do so in cooperation with sympathetic voices outside the Muslim community. This led to a conversation about Muslim responses to the events of the last two years. For almost everyone, while the war on terrorism, Iraq and the like are crucial events that have reshaped intra-Muslim conversations, they have not completely reframed the discourse, much as the US might wish. What they have done however, was to demonstrate the importance of recognizing the possibility of having a "radical" yet "progressive" politics within Islamist activism that all of the participants felt was necessary to build upon in their own work and collectively as well. |
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| Central to such a politics is the increasing power of women and lay intellectuals to reshape profoundly the landscape of Islamist thinking and activism in the Sunni and Shiite context alike. Indeed, one apparent development is that the very notions of separate "secular" and "religious" public spheres, which would make it very difficult to communicate across generations and between religious activists and their lay colleagues, is losing its salience within the Euro-Middle Eastern Muslim context. This insight is crucial for encouraging new conversations between religious and supposedly "secular" intellectuals in the Muslim world, and between both and their counterparts in Europe and the US. |
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| The second section dealt with the relationship between Muslim activists and intellectuals and their counterparts in the West. The impetus for this section came directly from my own experiences, which demonstrate how little cross-cultural communication there has been on these issues, even as the current world political and economic situation demands greater dialog. Just to give two examples, while speaking at a conference in Prague in September 2000, I asked the audience of 400 people how many were Muslims or Arabs and the only person to raise their hand was a cameraman for German Television. The situation is just as bad in the US, where most of the important so-called anti-globalization groups (IFG, Global Exchange, 50 Years, etc) have yet to incorporate voices from the ME into their coalitions or analyses. More recently, Tariq Ramadan¹s invitation to the European Social Forum in Florence caused an outbreak of knee-jerk prejudice by many of the organizers, who couldn¹t understand how and why a Muslim intellectual would/could participate in an event geared toward progressive politics. |
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| What this situation demanded, as Ramadan himself articulated‹and in fact this is at the heart of the reasoning underlying the forum‹is a concerted effort to bring Muslim and non-Muslim scholars and activists together in critical yet sympathetic conversation. The discussions revealed several important issues, which were also addressed by the audience during the Q&A period. First, most Arab/Muslim writers on globalization consider the phenomenon both a natural and ultimately neutral process ('neither heaven nor hell' as one author put it), yet at the same time believe it in its current form to be a continuation of at least two centuries of European and now American colonialism/imperialism. Thus however complex the phenomenon of globalization, it is still ultimate a system of renewed occupation and colonial control that must be addressed as such by Muslim scholars. |
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| Perhaps the two most interesting discussions were surrounding the relationship between scholars, and the role of culture. For the former, the main issue was the continuing frustration in two directions: first, among more traditional Muslim religious scholars who refuse to accept the growing sophistication and power of lay and women intellectuals‹a position which frustrates much needed dialogs and conversations within Islam‹and second, between Muslim and Western-trained "secular" scholars who do not have the training, desire or patience to engage the deeply rooted questions that our panelists are grappling with every day. Finally, the participants agreed, as Hamzawy explained, that culture has become the defining parameter of globalization, and that a primary reason why this has been particularly evident in the Middle East is precisely because of its relative marginalization from leading global economic processes, which has helped sensitize many Muslims to a sometimes phantasmagoric "cultural invasion" by the west and America in particular. |
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| Utlimately, in some ways the conditions of globalization are slowly rendering suspect the very categories of "western" and "Muslim," "secular" and "Islamist" even as they acquire mainstream acceptance. There was no agreement on how Muslim scholars and activists from as diverse traditions as the forum participants could forge a common response to this situation; however all the participants agreed that such a position needs to be articulated, and that they were willing to meet again for a more in depth meeting on these issues. |
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| A full transcript of this forum is being prepared which will include the full hour long question session and detailed responses from participants. It will be available by late July/early August 2003 on the internet in English, Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Since the forum participants have begun discussions with various locations in their home countries to determine a new place of meeting for the group before the years is out. |
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