Religion
and Foreign Policy Conference Call with Hamza Yusuf
Islamic Education in America
|
Speaker:
|
Hamza Yusuf, Founder and
Chairman of the Board, Zaytuna Institute |
|
Presider: |
Irina A. Faskianos, Vice President, National Program &
Outreach, eane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for
national security studies |
September
11, 2007
Council on Foreign Relations
Full Transcript can be
found here: http://www.cfr.org/publication/14289/religion_and_foreign_policy_conference_call_with_hamza_yusuf.html
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy
Conference Call Series. Our goal, as many of you know, is to provide a
non-partisan forum for discussion on issues at the nexus of religion and
foreign policy. We are pleased to kick off our 2007-2008 series today
with Shaykh Hamza
Yusuf. He is the founder and Chairman of the Board of the Zaytuna Institute and he will lead the discussion on
Islamic Education in America. As you all saw from his bio, he has been
recognized as one of the West’s most influential Islamic scholars and
recognized Muslim leaders in both the Western and Arab world. He is the
author of several books, numerous essays, op-eds and
a host of a widely watched Arab television programs. He was the first
American lecturer to teach at the Morocco’s prestigious and oldest university
and has also translated several classical Arabic traditional texts and poems
into modern English. Shaykh Hamza, thank you so much for being with us today.
HAMZA
YUSUF: All
right, thank you for having me.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
It’s wonderful. I thought we could start by having you give us an
overview of the work that you are doing at the Zaytuna
Institute-- as people on the call know, Zaytuna is
one of the only globally recognized of a handful of Islamic teaching
institutions in the United States-- and talk about the role that you’ve played
in providing an Islamic education and the role that you’re playing on educating
and training in this country, so over to you.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Right. First of all, just thank you very much and thanks everybody who
joined in. Hope this is a fruitful conversation.
Basically
the Zaytuna Institute was founded eleven years ago
and it was founded out of a vacuum that I and others perceived in the United
States, and that is a real stark absence of traditional seminaries or training
institutions that would produce teachers and people that were capable as
serving as Imams in communities. In the United States, one of the things
that is, I think, really starkly apparent for anybody that knows the Muslim
aims, is that many of our mosques actually have Imams and Friday preachers, the
person called (inaudible). People that actually have very little or no training
at all, many of them are trained in engineering and other sciences, and
obviously have a strong commitment and are autodidacts, but a lot of the
religious preaching that goes on, in my own experience, and many, many Muslims,
is really not up to the level that one would expect from a religion as globally
recognized as Islam.
So the
idea was really to create a seminary here in the United States that would
produce indigenous Imams and teachers. My own experience as a convert,
when I embraced Islam and became quite fervent, I wanted to study the religion
and study primary sources. My only option really at the time was to go
overseas. And even the overseas conditions were not really, I think, very
conducive to somebody who was just new in the religion. So I ended up in
the United Arab Emirates. I was at an Islamic institute there and then I
was in Saudi Arabia for over a year studying with private scholars, although I
was offered a scholarship to Medina University there. And then I went to
North and West Africa and spent about ten years abroad, and then came back and
I continued studies with teachers from abroad because I think that’s the nature
of the Islamic teaching.
So
coming back here and founding this, I think it’s evolved in our own
understanding of what’s needed. And partly what we recognize is that
Imams that are more fluent with the discourse in the West, with the very
specific conditions that Muslims find themselves in in
the West. My primary teacher right now who is Shaykh
Abdullah bin Bayyah, who’s a professor of Islamic law
in Jeddah, but also recognized globally as really one of the foremost Usuli or constitutional jurisprudence scholars, he’s
written a book recently called The Jurisprudence of Minorities and he
has addressed this situation that has really not been addressed by many
scholars, and certainly not at the level that he has, of just recognizing that
we do have unique conditions.
And so
it’s been very important for me to really, what I’d like to do right now
quickly before we go into the conversation with others, is just to give you
just a quick overview. There’s a book written by Franz Rosenthal, he’s a
brilliant historian of Islam. He wrote a book called Knowledge
Triumphant: the Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam. And one of
the things that he says in there-- it’s published by Brill and it’s really a
fascinating book-- but one of the things he says in there is that the Islamic
civilization was a civilization probably more than any other historically that
really was centered around knowledge, the ideal of knowledge. And so you
have many great teaching institutions that emerged in the Muslim land. If
you go on any search for the oldest university in the world you’ll find it was
the Karaouine in Fez, which was established in the
seventh century, sorry in the ninth century, 853, and precedes the great
teaching universities of Europe by over one-hundred years.
So
these great teaching institutions produced extraordinary scholars and you had
what the Catholics would call a Magisteria, which in
a sense protected the religion, because you had qualified scholars that were
coming out of these institutions like Al-Azhar in
Egypt and Mustansiriya in Bagdad, in Iraq; the
(inaudible), which was in what’s now Central Asia, and also in Bagdad and other
places, Bahria in Damascus. You have these
great teaching institutions and they produce scholars that had a recognized
level of expertise in their various fields. And these became the great
preservers and teachers of Islam. In the Colonial period a lot of these
institutions were seen as areas of resistance and so there was quite a move to
harness them, and you actually, the Usafia in Morocco
was closed down and the Karaouine was changed quite
radically. The same occurred -- Lord Cromer working with Mohammad Abdul
in Egypt instituted some pretty serious changes in Al-Azhar
and the Mustansiriya really becomes an Arabic
college. It’s still being used in Baghdad.
So you
really have a crisis in the twentieth century of knowledge in Islam. The,
probably the areas where you don’t find this as much is Turkey and Iran, where
you have the Shia scholarship has maintained the Madrassas largely due to the fact that they have
independent funding sources because of what they call (inaudible), a certain tithing
that merchants have to pay in Iran. And in Turkey, because the Ottoman
system was really quite extraordinary, and so they’ve maintained quite a high
level of scholarship within Turkey, and they tend to be state Imams that
preserve the state religion, even though it’s a secular state, religion still
is very much controlled by the state. The only other place that you’ll
find that is in Morocco.
Now in
the United States, we have obviously an immense immigration that occurs during
the 1960s after the 1965, the Immigration Act, and you got a lot of Muslims
coming in to these countries from various places, many of them to study
engineering and medicine with the hope of going back home and having a kind of
technology transfer. Well a lot of these people ended up staying and
their children have been born and raised here. And so we find now that
there’s probably between six and ten million American Muslims today, and yet we
don’t have any serious teaching institutions, despite the fact that we have over
two-thousand mosques in the country. We, there are some, what are called Darul Uloom that are based on the
Indian model from Deoband that do provide a certain
level of scholarship. But the scholarship tends to be very provincial and
limited in its scope, and certainly is unable in many ways to address a lot of
the very sophisticated problems that our community is facing as a minority
community and a religious community that has many, many similarities to the
Jewish tradition. And I think a lot of the things that the Jewish
community suffered in this country are now being replicated within the Muslim
community. And so you actually find if people know the Jewish model, it’s
actually a more useful model, as far as I’m concerned, than the RAND model, because
if you look at the RAND model and how it classifies Muslims in the West, it
tends to use the kind of cold-war Soviet categorization of certain types of ideologs in Marxist traditions, so you kind of box people
into what type of Marxist they were. And that’s, I don’t think a helpful
in Islam, because you’ll find that when RAND categorizes the Muslims into these
certain categories, you actually end up being quite limited. And I think
many Muslims will find themselves in more than one of those categories and in
the different areas, or subject matter that they talk about.
So in
this country, I think you’ll find that the majority of Muslims would probably
go under what is, would be called in Judaism a conservative branch of
Judaism. It’s not entirely orthodox, but it’s certainly not a reformed
type of Judaism, which is far more liberal or reconstructionist,
which now you have a reconstructionist Islam that’s
beginning to emerge in what’s been called the Progressive Muslim Movement,
which sees Islam more than a religious phenomenon but a civilizational
phenomenon, and this really is not a problem being a cultural Muslim as opposed
to being a religious Muslim. And there certainly are many, many cultural
Muslims.
So in,
you know, our attempt really is to try to provide an Islam that is compatible
with the West. I think less politicized, which does not mean that I and
others that I’m associated with don’t have strong political views, but we don’t
want to see the religion become a vehicle of, a political vehicle for Middle
Eastern politics or something like that, which it often has been made into,
unfortunately, because of immigrants bringing Middle Eastern baggage and other
baggage.
And
then finally, just the reason why I feel this is extremely important is because
there are many, many problems that will occur, that have already occurred, and
will continue to occur as a result of this lack of sound Islamic institutions
in the West, in the United States and Canada, and certainly in Europe, that’s,
but one of the big problems that we have is, I think many people have noticed,
and it’s September 11th, so we’re probably thinking about this today
more than other days, but some of the people that have been involved in
extremism are coming out of the convert community. Ibrahim (inaudible) is
an example of that recently in Germany. Some German converts were
arrested because of alleged plots and also now the spokesperson in English for
al-Qaeda is actually a convert from, a Jewish American convert, from Southern
California. American (inaudible) John Walker Lynn is also another
one.
So,
one of the dangers with conversion is conversion is an extremely powerful
experience, which I can personally attest to. And Gandhi once noted about
Mohammed (inaudible), an Englishman who became Muslim, he said he was that rare
breed of man who was capable of adopting a new religion without becoming a
fanatic. So unfortunately it’s quite common for people who have strong
conversion experiences to enter with a lot of zeal. And because of that,
they’re susceptible at that period in their life to whatever ideas they happen
to be exposed to at the time, believing them to be the sound ideas or
principles of this new adopted religion.
And
the other very serious concern is in the prison population, because many of the
people that adopt Islam within the prisons are coming from dysfunctional homes
and already had criminal tendencies, and if they come into Islam and are
exposed to an extreme form of Islam, which is very, very possible, [the German
convert to Islam] being a good example of that, then I think it’s potentially
extremely dangerous. So if we don’t have really well trained scholars in
the United States that can argue a sound orthodox and moderate Islam that
preaches coexistence and also is able to be adaptive to the needs of modern
society. I think that if we don’t do that, it’s going to really be a major
problem, I think, for a burgeoning population in the West. So I’ll leave
it at that.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Terrific. That was a wonderful overview. [Operator], let’s open it
up for questions and comments. And we really would like, encourage, both,
so please do not be shy. And over to you [Operator].
OPERATOR: At this time we will
open the floor for questions.
QUESTIONER
A:
Good afternoon to everyone. I think I first should thank you, the
organization, and Shaykh Hamza
Yusuf, who have started a discussion on this very important and timely
subject. I, being a student of psychology and education for almost fifty
years of my life, went to teachers college at Columbia University. I have
come to realize, and I’m from India, some of the issues that have been raised
in the introduction by Shaykh Hamza
Yusuf. I think they can be viewed, to begin with, in a more objective
fashion and then we can talk about the possible ways in which this subject
needs to be discussed to begin with, and see how people will respond to some of
the issues that are going to be raised during these discussions.
Islam,
as Shaykh Hamza Yusuf
pointed out by referring to an author, has advocated knowledge as an extremely
important means of empowering human beings and human society from the very
beginning. It has never restricted itself only to the revelation.
The revelation, in fact, guides Muslims as to how they need to become active
seekers in a natural setting. That’s one way, clearly, that why in the
very beginning stages of Islam, from the time of the prophet (inaudible), we
see an explosion of Muslim scholars from all over the known area of the Muslim,
you know, community of that time. Unfortunately, as societies go through
the process of rising and falling, the Islamic culture and Islamic civilization
started to fall. And then people just, you know, for their own
understanding, preferred to be successful here and in the hereafter, they
probably have to make sure that they observe the five pillars, you know, and
they do certain social and other activities in a certain way, and the rest were
left to the politicians and other people to determine the society of, you know,
later teachers in Islamic history.
And
the fact that Islam was a major factor in the struggles for freedom should be
recognized very clearly by everyone. Islam was, in fact, the mainspring
of many political indigenous movements throughout the Western world and it
still inspires people to make sure that their government implements a system of
justice and fairness that’s consistent with Islamic values. So at every
stage since the independent movements in the Muslim world, we see Islam playing
a very important role. And even as we see the wars that are taking place,
whether it’s in the Middle East or in Africa, Islam is a source of inspiration
for quite a few people.
So
it’s very important for the [Council on Foreign Relations] to recognize that
it’s not going to be in the best interest of the policymakers in this country
to label those kinds of agencies from working in the Muslim community
(inaudible) as dangerous. In fact, they should understand that there is a
very important factor that needs to be recognized as not only consistent, but
compatible with the basic values of democracy: equality, freedom, liberty.
Unfortunately
our foreign policy has been viewed as supporting rulers and governments that
are more determined to suppress freedom and liberty and the struggle for
justice and fairness. So at this moment, while we are talking about
Islamic education in America, we also have to recognize that the younger
generation especially, and from within the older generation, a great number of
people do recognize that Islam does have very clear values in terms of
fairness, in terms of justice, in terms of liberty, that are very consistent
with the democratic values, and they need to be incorporated within the Islamic
education model in such a way that the traditional model automatically becomes
irrelevant for the Muslim generations that are going to grow within the United
States. And I personally feel that the best integrated model of Islamic
education will not only become a model that will be emulated by the Muslim
societies around the world, it will also present, as a model, for a secular
setting like within the United States, in which justice, fairness, equality,
liberty, which are the guiding principles of the Western society and also that
of Islam, can very well be integrated.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Okay, we have many people on the call, if we…
QUESTIONER
A:
I’ll leave it there. I thank you very much for this opportunity.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Thank you.
OPERATOR: Okay.
QUESTIONER
B:
Yes, hi. I’m very pleased to have a chance to hear you talk, Mr.
Yusuf. My field is European politics, and as you know, European
governments have been very directly involved in trying to address some of the
issues that you mention. And I was wondering how you feel government and
other voluntary institutions can help address some of the issues you are
rising? The problem you identify requires a tremendous amount of
institution building, from seminaries to training programs for how to teach
Islam in schools from top to bottom. And we have a fifth
amendment position in this country that makes it very difficult to do
anything somewhat similar to what is being done in Europe. So I was
wondering if you could outline some ideas about what could be done.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Okay. I think it’s a great question. I’m pretty… I’m actually quite
familiar with the British situation. I have less familiarity, though
some, with what’s happening with continental Europe, but you
know, I would say in the British model, I think it’s very dangerous for
the government to be directly involved in funding. And the main reason
for that is a lot of the extremism that has arisen in the Muslim world is a
direct result of this co-opted Islam that is seen as buttressing up these
totalitarian governments. And Muslims generally are extremely wary of
government involvement in their religion, and a lot of the voices that are
listened to are voices… I’ll give you one example. (Inaudible) in Europe,
his, his popularity went up considerably because he was not allowed to come
into the United States, in Europe. I mean, I can guarantee that there’s a
direct correlation, because Muslims who are seen somehow as standing up against
what other Muslims consider unjust foreign policy or whatever, they have a
credibility amongst the Muslims and in the community. So I think
government involvement, the best thing that they can do is just be, you know,
helpful in facilitating, just in terms of the legalities of what’s needed, and
not being road-blocks in the way.
I
think there’s a lot of, in this country there’s an immense amount of just fear
of anything associated with Islam. I think the governments need to become
more sophisticated in understanding the nuances of the community and the fact
that for instance, the Deobandi community is not a
threat to, they’re very conservative, they’re
apolitical. They actually emerged out of the Indian rebellion of 1857 and
decided that military struggle was no longer an appropriate strategy, and they
felt that a knowledge-based struggle was much more important. And so that
is their focus.
Now
their support of the Taliban in Afghanistan had much more to do with the Deobandi, just the fact that the Taliban was associated
with the Deoband community and not so much with its
involvement with al-Qaeda, which is a whole other problem. I mean the
Taliban’s involvement, which is a whole other problem. So, you know, I
think there’s a, I personally, you know, I’ve been involved in an advisory capacity
in the UK with the British government, but just my, the fact that I’ve been
associated in any way with the British government has had a negative impact on
my own credibility within the community in certain sectors, and you know, so
that’s why I’ve tended to try to keep, just avoid those types of associations
because of the impact it has on the credibility within the community.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Terrific, next question.
OPERATOR: Thank you.
QUESTIONER
C:
Thank you, Shaykh Hamza,
for your kind, nice explanation. I have a question about, when you say,
when you said in your presentation about why Islam is compatible with the
West. Could you elaborate on that, what you mean by that?
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Well what I would say is that there are a lot of Muslims, active practicing
Muslims, that don’t fully understand a lot of the principles upon which Western
political society certainly, and to a large extent cultural society, is
predicated. And so there’s a belief, because of the post-colonial trauma
that exists within a lot of the Muslim world, and certainly in the minds of a
lot of immigrants in these countries, there are many devout Muslims that just
simply see the West and anything that it advocates as being antithetical to
Islam. I think that’s changing, and it’s a necessary change. So I
do feel it’s changing within the community, but it’s not changing fast enough
and a lot of the young people-- the United Kingdom is a really good example of
this-- a lot of the young people are just completely alienated from the
political process, from the idea they can even participate.
I
mean, there’s, and this is where the dangers arise, I think. It’s
certainly, many of the American Muslims, Canadian Muslims and European Muslims
as well, many of them actually have very little to do with Islamic
communities. They’re quite assimilated and they’re living lives as
doctors and engineers and taxi drivers and other things. But for those
that are deeply committed to Islam, if they don’t, if they’re not presented
with an Islam that enables them to be fully Western and fully Muslim at the
same time… the West, like Islam, is not a monolithic. There’s, we have
orthodox Jews that live in the heart of Brooklyn that don’t read newspapers or
watch television and they’ve been here for over one-hundred years. And
they’re part of the tapestry of America. But the vast majority of them
pose no, you know, threat whatsoever, and probably you know, all of them with
the exception of some ultra-orthodox, very extreme groups that advocate hatred
toward Arabs and whatever, you find the reverse on the reverse side.
But my
point is, is that there are people that can be understanding
that this is part of the West, that there are many ways to be Western.
That I can be isolationist like the ultra-orthodox community and still be part
of the tapestry of this country. I can also be integrationist. I
can be fully active in-- swearing an oath of allegiance to the constitution
does not negate one’s faith. Keith Ellison, who’s a congressman, swore an
oath of allegiance to the constitution. There are many Muslims that view
that as completely unacceptable and as an act of apostasy. And so I think it’s
important that from within the tradition itself, which we have ample room for
presenting diverse opinion and view from within the tradition itself, I think
many of these problems can be resolved if they’re done with sensitivity towards
the community and awareness of many of the devout Muslims’ desires to simply
live lives that are congruent with their deepest religious beliefs.
QUESTIONER
C:
Thank you. I thank CFR for the initiation of this full kind of program
and I hope they can continue and encourage other organizations also to keep a
tab on this. Thank you very much.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Wonderful. We do intend to continue. We have a whole fall
lineup. So we will send that out. Next question.
OPERATOR: Okay, our next
question.
QUESTIONER
D:
Yes, thank you very much. Thank you very much for this talk. I work
with an organization called the American Jewish Committee and we’re starting a
task force towards Muslim-Jewish relations, and I’d like to put it to you maybe
to help me explore ways in which we can, we can improve such relations.
Thank you very much.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Okay, well thank you for the question. I think personally, the Muslim
community has so much to learn from the Jewish community and the Jewish
community’s experience. Because a lot of the very same issues that are
going on within the Jewish community are going on within the Muslim community,
and to me it’s sad that we’re not able to see the incredible similarities
between these two expressions of Abrahamic
tradition. So, you know, I think the onus is on both sides to reach out,
to be more conciliatory. I think there’s a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment
in the Muslim community that, that much of it is political. I don’t think
it’s as much historical and I think Bernard Lewis would agree with that. I’ve
read his book about Jews under Islam, and I think he would agree with that too,
that in fact he argues that much of the anti-Semitic ideology that’s crept into
the Muslim world was actually exported from Europe, from the Christians.
That doesn’t mean that there’s not, I think, a lot of problem within our
tradition. But I think the Jewish tradition has the same problem with the
Talmud, it has the same problem with their own
pre-modern sources. There are things that are objectionable in all of the
Abrahamic traditions’ pre-modern formulations, and
how we are able to maintain our tradition while recognizing that there were
egregious mistakes made by even some of the greatest of scholars. I mean
that is a very sensitive area, I think, for all three of the faiths, probably
more specifically for the Jewish and Islamic faiths because of the weight that
we put on these classical scholars.
So I
would say that we definitely, it’s starting to happen, I’m definitely seeing
it. I’ve been trying to be more outspoken about the anti-Jewish sentiment
that exists within the community in recent years, because I’ve recognized it as
a major problem within the Muslim community. And I think also the fear
that exists within the Jewish community-- much of it I don’t think is phobia,
it think it’s rational fear, because of a lot of the unfortunate rhetoric that’s
emanated from the Middle East-- but I think a lot of that fear has to be
alleviated by the American Muslim community. And I think that we in
America have an extraordinary, and really a unique opportunity to try to
transgress, to try to transcend these political barriers that we have
now. And I think that the central and most important thing at this stage
is to leave Palestine out of this because I’ve just found that it’s a
completely, it’s just an area that I think we need to establish relations.
Before we get into any discussions about what’s going on overseas we need to
really look at what’s happening here and how we can improve the situation
between our communities here.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Thank you, next question, comment.
OPERATOR: Thank you. Your next question.
QUESTIONER
E:
Hello. Hello.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Yes, you’re on.
QUESTIONER
E:
Okay, thanks. I’m actually, I wanted to thank you for your comments and
also attest that you, Shaykh Hamza,
has actually spoken out against any kind of anti-, you
know, the anti-Jewish sentiment. I heard you speak two years ago at
(inaudible) and clearly you did that. My question is; I’m actually an
attorney. I was in New York and now I’m in public policy school at the
Kennedy school, and I wanted to push you a little bit about nomenclature.
You spoke on sometimes about, let’s say moderates or other ones, and I’m not, I
wanted to get some clarification, because I’m not comfortable within the
formality on-- sometimes the words are used in terms of labeling. I don’t
think they’re saying that this, but I wanted to get more clarification, how can
we be a part of the process of helping to establish good public policy but at
the same time, I myself am not comfortable with being defined as a moderate or
a progressive Muslim. So if you can elaborate on that I would appreciate
it.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Well, yeah, it’s a great question. The topic of nomenclature is an
incredibly important one. There’s actually a scholar from Morocco that,
he has an argument that much of the problem in the world is what he calls
(inaudible), which is the crisis of technical terminology. You know, the
words we use are so poorly defined in what we mean by them and this is
obviously, you know, in the pre-modern society, in the pre-modern society the
basis of any debate or discussion was a definition of terms. A
(inaudible) was a common term that was used in the medieval period. When
somebody used a term, the interlocutor would say, you know, define the term so
we know what you’re talking about. And so I totally agree with you, it’s
a major problem. I certainly don’t have an answer to the problem.
Moderation is something that is based on a definition of extremes. And
extremes, if you look in the United Kingdom for instance, you have a spectrum
from the Guardian to the Daily Telegraph, which is certainly a
broader political spectrum than we would have. In this country, much of
what shows up in the Guardian would be considered extreme left, whereas
in England it’s not considered extreme left, it’s considered mainstream
left. So I think whoever defines these, and this is Foucault’s labeling
theory, you know that people in power tend to have the power of
definition. So I would agree with you. I find problems with all
these terms and, you know, I just, we have to do our best and try to at least
define them from within our own usage.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Great, next question, comment.
OPERATOR: Your next question.
QUESTIONER
F:
Hi. I have a very short question and then another question, my main
question. The short one is, what is the RAND
classification system of U.S. Muslims? I’m not familiar with that.
And the longer question is, you mentioned the specific
conditions and needs of U.S. Muslims. And you also mentioned trying to do
without the baggage of immigrant Muslims from the Middle East. I’m
looking for, that it shouldn’t, that Middle East immigrants sometimes bring
baggage that perhaps should not be part of the discourse here in the
U.S., and I guess my question is, how does one really separate that out,
since immigrants are so much part of the American experience, and living in
Southern California, certainly the Muslim American experience? Not
exclusively immigrant by any means, but quite large immigrant communities,
many, not all, from the Middle East, as well as South Asia, Africa and other
places. But how is this sort of talking about how does one be a good
Muslim and say that one be both Eastern and Western? Is that possible, is
that part of the specific conditions in the U.S., or are you saying that this
is really about defining how to be both Western and Muslim together?
Thank you.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Okay. Well in terms of the first one, RAND, has a, you know, I think they
have six or seven categories. You can look it up on their website.
You know, they have, you know, fundamentalist, extremist, they have moderate,
but they have boxes to show you their views in different, like women. So
they’ll say, you know, that the fundamentalist, extremist, you know, believe
that women should have their head covered and this, that. Well, I mean,
that’s, there are many Muslims that believe that that wouldn’t fall into that
category. So I think…
QUESTIONER
F:
Right.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Categories as you know are always problematic. They work really well in
physical nomenclature when you’re using taxonomy or something like that, you
know. A horse, you can use a category to define horses, even though a
thoroughbred is different from, you know, a Tennessee walker or something like
that. But when you get into humans and psychological categories,
categories based on belief, it becomes a lot more complex. So I just feel
those categories are often too simplistic, and they will often do more harm
than good, because people end up being pigeonholed or stereotyped in categories
that don’t suit them.
In
terms of the second question, I think we tend to forget that over 30 percent of
the Muslims in America are actually indigenous. African-American,
increasingly Hispanic-American, Caucasian-American, so we already have 30
percent. But the indigenization of Islam has yet to occur.
It’s occurred to a certain degree within the African-American community, but
within that community you will find expressions of Islam that are purely Middle
Eastern. So you’ll find in an inner city in New York, an African-American
woman dressed from head to toe in a black abaya with
gloves and a veil, believing that this is Islam. Whereas if you go to
African, the African continent, you won’t find any African women dressed like
that, from Senegal, or Mauritania, where I lived, or anywhere, even Sudan and
places like that. You’ll find very different expressions.
So the
process of an indigenization of Islam in America is going to take time.
And what I mean by that indigenization is that, where a Western, a person born
here, whether an immigrant child who is born and raised here, that they do not
feel that their religion is an imported religion. It’s an alien religion.
It has to do with Pakistan. Or, and when I became Muslim for instance,
there were certain cultural choices in front of me. You could become a
Pakistani Muslim. And I know American converts who became so Pakistani
they actually adopted a Pakistanian accent when they
spoke English because of the time they spent amongst South Asian Muslims.
And the same is true with people that adopt certain Arab cultures. I, for
a period of my life, adopted a North African expression of Islam, and it still
influences my Islam to this day. But I’m increasingly becoming aware of
the need for people to feel comfortable, what my friend Dr. Winter from
Cambridge University says is that Muslims need to be able to make the jump from
the West to Islam without losing their clothes in the process. And I
think that really expresses that idea of, that you don’t have to adopt a
foreign culture. That you can be Muslim, you can watch the Super Bowl,
you can partake in Thanksgiving and certain cultural expressions without
feeling that you’re doing something wrong, which right now there are many, many
Muslims that still believe that, that there is a total incompatibility.
And so we have an isolationist culture.
QUESTIONER
F:
Thank you.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
Shaykh Hamza, thank you so
much. I think we’ve reached the end of our time, and indeed have gone
over, but this has been a terrific forty-five minutes.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Okay.
IRINA
A. FASKIANOS:
I think everybody would agree. We appreciate your insights. If you
want to learn more about Zaytuna, the website is
zaytuna.org, very easy to remember. So all of you,
thank you for participating in today’s call. Our initiative, the Religion
and Foreign Policy Initiative, seeks to connect religious and congregational
leaders, scholars, and thinkers from across the country in cross-denominational
conversations such as these to deepen the understanding of religion on U.S.
foreign policy. We would greatly appreciate your feedback and topics that
you might like to discuss in future calls, so please send us your ideas to
[email protected]. Our schedule for the fall lineup of calls is now
set. You all should receive the agenda. Our next one will be on
October 17, with Walter Russell Mead on his book, and he will be discussing
religion and the open society. So I hope you join us for that. So
thank you all and again thank you Shaykh Hamza for your, your insights
today.
HAMZA
YUSUF:
Okay, Irina, thank you.