The Mutual Exclusivity in the Mutual Inclusivity!
“Verschlimmbessern”
As always, there is that long or semi-long German word with no precise English translation. “Verschlimmbessern” is another of those words. It suggests making something worse or causing more damage while trying or thinking one is making it better. Allah made brief mention of people who could be said to be “Verschlimmbesserers” towards the end of suratul kahf; those who thought they were do-gooders and reformers but who were indeed upon error.
قُلْ هَلْ نُنَبِّئُكُمْ بِالْأَخْسَرِينَ أَعْمَالًا
الَّذِينَ ضَلَّ سَعْيُهُمْ فِي الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا وَهُمْ يَحْسَبُونَ أَنَّهُمْ يُحْسِنُونَ صُنْعًا
أُولَئِكَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا بِآيَاتِ رَبِّهِمْ وَلِقَائِهِ فَحَبِطَتْ أَعْمَالُهُمْ فَلَا نُقِيمُ لَهُمْ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ وَزْنًا
Say: “Shall we inform you of the greatest losers as regards their deeds”?
They whose work (deeds) is deviated in the life of the world (the degrees that they have lost are more than the degrees that they have earned) while they thought, they were doing good by their actions.
These are they who denied the Verses of their Lord and reaching Him (the spirit’s reaching Allah before death). So, their deeds became vain and therefore We will not set up a scale for them on the Day of Resurrection.
[Quran 18:103–105]
. . .
Its 5am in the morning on the 28th of Ramadan and I have now been off Twitter for about a month now. The goal was to try to get some needed air and also accrue some Ramadan points. I decided to log back on to contact a brother I only communicate with through twitter and I came across a number of tweets and two of them stood out. One was this news item by Aljazeera about Sherin Khankan titled: ‘Denmark’s female imam: ‘We challenge the structure’ and another article by a Sister, Wardah Abbas titled: Muslim Feminism is Here to Stay-The Mutual Inclusivity of Feminism and Islam. Coincidentally, the introductory quote in Abbas’s article was by none other than Sherin Khankan. And it just jumped at me! Ah! The mutual exclusivity can be seen clearly in the mutual inclusivity!
The article was supposed to be a response to an earlier article by another sister Khadija Sanusi titled: Between Feminism and Islam. I caught wind of Sanusi’s article when it was first published but I didn’t get to read it. Partly because I feared it could be just another one of those badly thought out antifeminism porn; these are usually just meant to give those who define themselves exclusively by opposition to feminism something to gloat about. I don’t trust myself not to spoil the party if that was the case, so I ignored it. I have now read the article and even though there are some things I would address differently, it was quite insightful. It was particularly interesting to read about her journey and thoughts, especially after learning about her background and who her father was. You experience the world differently as a Muslim, as well as a woman in that space and it was nice to read about her journey.
. . .
I don’t write often because as is already obvious I am not the best of writers. The last time I wrote something that could be said to be worth reading was in December 2019 when I wrote The Unpretentious Muslim as a cover article for Al-Fajr. On that occasion, I just gathered all my tweets from the year and it was made into an essay. I got some valuable critical feedback as well as some thumbs up and I thought why not do the same thing at the end of 2020? But from what we have seen of 2020, who’s even sure it’s going to end!
Not to be overly eccentric, but I thought deeply about writing this article. Just a few weeks prior, I was speaking to a friend and she commented the reason I don’t write often is that I have become too “conflict-averse”. In her words: “it is as though you play out all the possible confrontations that could come up in your head & decide against it. But you shouldn’t always assume the worst”. This aversion for conflict didn’t come out of a vacuum though, it was a lesson learnt the hard way. I am a relatively young man, actually younger than most people assume, but in this very short adult life of mine I have spent a considerable amount of time involved in argumentation and debates online, many of which became extremely virulent and unpleasant. To this day I still go through my Facebook page to delete posts and comments to people that I am not very proud of. I simply just couldn’t see myself reliving those experiences.
The thing is, I have learnt that when our primary mode of engaging with others is on social media, we often lose the ability to negotiate conflict especially when it has to do with people we disagree with fundamentally. Contrary to engaging with people personally which means you have to understand how to negotiate differences and mete out criticism in a way that’s both proportional to the wrong and kind. Social media in a way inures us from this reality; it makes us view even the smallest mistake or disagreement as a form of microaggression and consequently treat them with immense hostility. This is so because in our minds, if we let it go what will come next will be worse. So we let go of the understanding that humans will disagree or even make mistakes and that we must regardless remain mu’adab (civil) and fair even in criticism. That being said, I hope I am able to live up to my own standards.
…
EXCLUSIVE inclusive
The goal is not to write a whole essay about the sources of “Islamic” feminist epistemology, the major precepts of modern (“Islamic”) feminist thought and how all these are mutually exclusive with classical Muslim thought. There are enough works dealing with that already and I need not reinvent the wheel. What I intend to do is demonstrate how even in an article written to show their compatibility, we find ample and clear evidence to the contrary. The article itself was a display of how much of a contradiction there is between actual Islam and what is being sold as “Islamic” feminism today. And how in reality the project the author and others are unknowingly participating in is the systemic distortion and mutilation of Islam until it conforms and is remodelled in the image of whatever is the bane of the moment. The most glaring proof of this is that the central thesis of her article was firstly to malign and discredit generations of scholars as misrepresenting the religion and then to promote different feminist theorists in their stead as reinterpreting the Quran. These feminist theorists’ different heresies are now papered over under the banner of “varied scholarship” and “different interpretations and analyses of religious texts”. This is done tandem with actively or passively endorsing their works and misleading people in the numbers.
For what it’s worth I think there is something fundamentally broken about how we treat women and how we navigate discussions on issues around women in the majority of Muslim communities. I strongly believe that a lot has to change about how we raise young Muslim men and how we teach them to see and appreciate themselves in relation to women. I believe a lot has to change structurally about our communities and its replacement has to be something that fully involves and considers how the other half of our community is affected by each and every detail of it.
For what it’s worth I think there is something fundamentally broken about how we treat women and how we navigate discussions on issues around women in the majority of Muslim communities. I strongly believe that a lot has to change about how we raise young Muslim men and how we teach them to see and appreciate themselves in relation to women. I believe a lot has to change structurally about our communities and its replacement has to be something that fully involves and considers how the other half of our community is affected by each and every detail of it.
What I do not believe is that Hierarchy and Patriarchy are inherently vices which must by all means be dismantled. What I do not believe is that 1400 years of Islamic scholarship is filled with men who have all grandly misrepresented Islam or read their misogyny into revealed scriptures in order to subjugate women and continue their exploitation. What I do not believe is that anything from the Islamic corpus which does not fit in squarely into the modern feminist categorization of sexism, freedom, autonomy, misogyny etc. was smuggled into scriptures by tyrannical men. So, these all must now be reinterpreted by our newly found “Islamic” feminist scholars until we rid the scriptures of it all. These are all central precepts of “Islamic” feminism and it’s impossible for one to be a sound Muslim while holding these to be truths. The end result is either cognitive dissonance or kufr.
FEMINISM IS NOT JUST AN ATTITUDE. IT’S AN IDEOLOGY; A WORLDVIEW!
العبرة بالحقائق والمعاني لا بالألفاظ والمباني
Things are evaluated based on their real meaning; reality & implications as opposed to naming, slogans & claims.
When criticism of an ideology is being made, the claim is not that every single person who claims to subscribe to that ideology is exactly as described, or that the said ideology has no single correct viewpoint. The same goes for “Islamic” feminism. The point is not that every single thing about it is wrong or unfounded. Marxist thought, critical race theory, classical liberalism and even anarchism all have good and beneficial critiques of society, but it doesn’t mean they are ideologies Muslims can or should take on. And worse still, add the tag Islam or Muslim behind it. The reality is that the foundations upon which those thoughts are built, as espoused by their different thought leaders across different cultures and generations, are antithetical to Islam. And you can’t decide you want to be Marxist today and deny the central theories of Marxist thought, you can only develop Marxist thought further and refine its details, but you can’t deny its central thesis. If you do so, then yours will be anything but Marxism. The same goes for feminism.
The retort is usually ‘are you saying Islam is against the rights of women?’. No, it isn’t. But feminism isn’t just the movement for the emancipation and liberation of women, that’s a pickup line just like a one-liner designed to sell a product. To emancipate and liberate you must first determine what constitutes the oppression which you want to emancipate people from and its presence therein, as well as what constitutes freedom and equality into which you want to usher people. Feminist thought, regardless of whatever adjective attached to it, has clear ideas about this. It is a well-developed thought that makes fundamental claims about life, human history, about human anthropology, and about the nature of power and moral duty. While different strains of feminism might vary in approaches and priorities depending on the location and conditions, they are united in their central thought and ultimate telos.
And we Muslims have to come to terms with the reality that Feminist (as well as LGBTQ) philosophy is as powerful an independent affecter of interpretive choices of empirical data, religious scriptures and logical argument as naturalism and scientism. And just like naturalism and scientism, it doesn’t make its conclusions any more correct than the alternative. These are interpretive choices in which the choice is forced by the hand of overwhelming ontological, epistemological and cultural pressure. And this philosophy contradicts Islam fundamentally and this is the more reason why many of its adherents in no time either find it hard to stay true to the demands of eeman, start questioning Islam or abandon it all together.
For the “Islamic” feminists, even when they feel uneasy publicly espousing some of these ideals, the trend has been that of tactical silence as opposed to explicit disapproval. Many of their non-Muslim counterparts talk about them like infants who are being tolerated because they are relatively young in the journey to the promised land of “equality”. The idea is that along the line they will catch up and meet them in the promised land and we see them taking baby steps towards this every day. Almost every few months there is this new stereotype in Islam that “Islamic” feminists have found to be misogynistic and subsequently needed to be broken. Coincidentally, they are always things that fit a particular narrative.
THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL VERY FAR FROM THE TREE. EVEN WITH A SLOPE!
“If your following of Islam depends on Islam being in agreement with another ideology, then that other ideology is your religion, not islam”
Bassam Zawadi
If our icons and examples of “strong” women scholars breaking stereotypes and reinterpreting Islam are people who think you can say no to the Qur’an, who think you are permitted to adopt hadith when it agrees with contemporary Western ethics, but to reject it when it contradicts them, then it’s no surprise when people begin to question Islam. And if it doesn’t even make our heart heavy to associate with such people, rather we paper over it as “diverse views and interpretations”, then إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ.
The author of the article mentions she has not once questioned Islam and I say it gladdens my heart and I pray Allah keeps her steadfast. But I also add that there are many like her who make the same claims while in reality what they do is reinterpret (read: mutilate) whatever part of Islam they question until it conforms to their newly found ideology. What we have seen is a new wave of men and women, the vast majority embarrassingly unlearned about the religion, who in the name of emancipating Muslim women have joined in on the age-old project of “modernizing” Islam. Nothing demonstrates that this Ramadan more than the Aljazeera article about Sherin Khankan and how they are “challenging the structure”. The She-imam whose quote coincidentally introduced the Abbas’s article. In the article we can see clearly what Sherin and her co-travellers consider diverse views and interpretations; the mutilation of Islam.
This idea was pioneered by another popular “Islamic” feminism icon Amina Wadud and it has since taken a jump and replicated itself in different places across Europe. These are not lone wolves and there are probably hundreds of examples to cite all around the world. From the slightly iconoclastic to the obnoxiously blasphemous, they represent a well-organized, well-funded and systemic thought pattern that’s increasingly being marketed as Islamic. What we have on our hands is a collection of people, who more often than not, neither have anything in common with the women scholars of the ummah they seek to inherit nor are they practical examples for Muslim women today in their praxis.
عَنْ عَبْدِ اللَّهِ بْنِ عَمْرِو بْنِ الْعَاصِ قَالَ قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَقْبِضُ الْعِلْمَ انْتِزَاعًا يَنْتَزِعُهُ مِنْ الْعِبَادِ وَلَكِنْ يَقْبِضُ الْعِلْمَ بِقَبْضِ الْعُلَمَاءِ حَتَّى إِذَا لَمْ يُبْقِ عَالِمًا اتَّخَذَ النَّاسُ رُءُوسًا جُهَّالًا فَسُئِلُوا فَأَفْتَوْا بِغَيْرِ عِلْمٍ فَضَلُّوا وَأَضَلُّو
Abdullah ibn Amr reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Verily, Allah does not withhold knowledge by snatching it away from his servants, but rather he withholds knowledge by taking the souls of scholars, until no scholar remains and people follow ignorant leaders. They are asked and they issue judgments without knowledge. Thus, they are astray and lead others astray.”
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 100, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2673
Islam historically has not been short of learned, brave and outspoken women. But what all these women have and had in common is that Islam was undoubtedly the central moral framework from which they operated. They were learned in the science of the Shari’ah, they knew and still know where the boundaries of meaning and valid opinions lied, and they protected it dearly. They were not “hidden” from history, rather they raised the best of this ummah and knew Tabararujj wasn’t a virtue; they actually narrated the hadiths themselves. What we see today are people trying to appropriate every brave and outspoken historical Muslim woman as a feminist icon. The claim is that they operate within Muslim framework, but reality belies that claim. What we see is large scale revisionism and retelling of Muslim history through a borrowed lens that has everything but belief and submission. Whatever from the Islamic tradition, however clear cut, that doesn’t agree with their ideology is cut down: it’s just another of those things invented by the patriarchy or inherited through colonization. They lay claim to decolonisation but more often than not are themselves well-funded agents of colonisation 2.0; the movement to remove all the “misogynist” elements of Islam that was inherited from the colonizers and replace them with ones that just coincidentally are today also popular with the colonizers.
HUMAN & FLAWED THEY WERE BUT YOUR SIMILITUDES THEY WERE NOT!
أَفَمَن كَانَ عَلَى بَيِّنَةٍ مِّن رَّبِّهِ كَمَن زُيِّنَ لَهُ سُوءُ عَمَلِهِ وَاتَّبَعُوا أَهْوَاءهُمْ
So is he who is on clear evidence from his Lord like him to whom the evil of his work has been made attractive and they follow their [own] desires?
Al-Muhammad, Verse 14
Pivotal to the central thesis of the article and which further demonstrates the mutual exclusivity is that the author and other “Islamic” feminists need to constantly discredit and malign thousands of years of Islamic scholarship to make their ideas sellable. But it isn’t without a goal, when you discredit experts of a field you need to replace them with something, so we are left with feminist theorists and their co travellers. It is as the Yoruba proverb goes: Alágbẹ̀dẹ tó ńlu irin lójú kan, ólóhun tó fẹ́ fà yọ ńbẹ̀. That is a blacksmith who keeps hitting a piece of iron at a single spot has his reasons. And these people most definitely do have their reasons. For clarity, the working thesis is that generations of scholars from the companions who themselves met the prophet, the tabi’oon and every generation of expert scholars in different fields after them till this day weren’t reading the Qur’an properly. They came to it with their own ideas using it for whatever point they want to make and manipulating the verses to confirm whatever they want to hear. This is not only outrageous but extremely laughable and it shows a gross ignorance of the Islamic heritage and how it was preserved. One wonders how much of the heritage they have actually studied.
Alágbẹ̀dẹ tó ńlu irin lójú kan, ólóhun tó fẹ́ fà yọ ńbẹ̀.
The blacksmith who keeps hitting a piece of iron at a single spot has his reasons.
The common trope of accusing all premodern scholars of being influenced by the vile patriarchy and misogyny in their culture and consequently their jurisprudence unreliable is quite appalling. If anything, it demonstrates the musings of a people who are fathomlessly heedless of their own reality but think themselves as bastions of insight and rationality. The similitude of premodern culture and what we face today is like drowning in rain-flood and wallowing in an ocean. And yet it is those wallowing in an ocean who accuse the ones in a rain-flood of drowning. Nothing in the premodern world compares to today’s social programming project.
Like who is in more danger of drowning?! Have we for once considered maybe we are the ones drowning? Maybe we are the ones being influenced and reprogrammed by popular culture? By the world of mass media, fast news and infotainment? All which is bombarded on us from an early age and has shaped the way our minds have developed and still develop? That has shaped how we perceive ourselves and the world around us, how we experience reality, and the language with which we define concepts? Like is it just one massive coincidence that people are increasingly adapting and seeking to make Islam acquiescence itself to different modern-day subjectivities. Like is it really one big happenstance that an extremely ubiquitous, hedonistic culture and worldview which enjoys massive political support is becoming more and more popular? To critique the treatment of women in modern world is one thing, but to relegate classical fiqh while propping up neo-liberal standards of equity and justice as “law” is a joke. One that’s unfortunately not funny.
Islam has no clergy and studying its sciences is not some esoteric sojourn that’s the exclusive preserve of select people. But neither is it also some open marketplace where any opinion is an opinion and just another “interpretation”. It has known sources, foundations, principles, boundaries; it boasts of arguably the most resilient and upstanding form of peer review the world has ever seen. Our heritage is over a thousand years old and has been served by a diverse group of individuals of different times and climes. Old, young, male, female, poor, rich, royalty, commoner etc. Chain after chain, text after text and generation after generation. A word in the wrong place was questioned! A vowel wrongly placed was corrected! A claim unsubstantiated was sternly rejected! The derivation of rules and principles weren’t with gender coloured lenses. It isn’t unimaginable and even quite plausible that a scholar here, another there, may have problematic views about women; but to throw this on a big chunk of scholarship is demonstrably wrong. These kinds of spurious claims are probably the greatest form of disservice to all the men and women who gave their lives in service of this deen!
All these scholars, men and women, they all came with the mindset of understanding the primary sources and implementing its rules, the very reason their example has survived hundreds of years and find studious followership till this day. As opposed to those whose methodology is making the texts conform to their desires and have only become footnotes of history. There is difference between studying Islam and trying to refashion Islam in the image of some ideology under the guise of ijtihad and the Islamic world across generations has had its fair share of the latter. They have appeared under different names, slogans, and pretences. There has always been something that was broken which nobody was able to mend and they alone with their ijtihad can fix. But all their ijtihad always had a common denominator; the remodelling of Islam to fit whatever was the dominant ideology of the day.
Ijtihad, independent reasoning, is akin to a skilled physician making tough medical calls in cases of novel ailments or old ailments that do not respond to standard clinical procedures. It is an effort to find a solution to a novel or complex legal question building on the clear legal principles of the deen. What ijtihad is not is the attempt to slaughter the principles of the deen and its clear matters at the altar of modernism and its different ideological manifestations. The mujtahid needs skills; he needs deep knowledge of the sources of the Quran and the sunnah, the Arabic language, knowledge of scholarly precedence and consensus, knowledge of the foundational principles of the religion etc. The mujtahid climbs on the back of the mountains of knowledge and wisdom who have served this ummah for centuries and takes from their wisdom and guidance to be able to delineate guidance from misguidance today. What the mujtahid is not is someone who tries to replace the foundational principles of the deen with feminist theorizing, what a mujtahid is not is someone whose ‘usool’ is the that of deconstruction. A mujtahid’s fundamental tool of discourse analysis is Muhammadan and that of his inheritors, not Derridean or Foucauldian. Those are not and cannot be mujtahids!
DO YOU BELIEVE IN SOME PARTS AND DISBELIEVE IN OTHERS?
أَفَتُؤْمِنُونَ بِبَعْضِ الْكِتَابِ وَتَكْفُرُونَ بِبَعْضٍ فَمَا جَزَاء مَن يَفْعَلُ ذَلِكَ مِنكُمْ إِلاَّ خِزْيٌ فِي الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا وَيَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ يُرَدُّونَ إِلَى أَشَدِّ الْعَذَابِ وَمَا اللّهُ بِغَافِلٍ عَمَّا تَعْمَلُونَ
Do you then believe in a part of the Book and disbelieve in the other? Then what is the reward of those who do so among you, except disgrace in the life of this world, and on the Day of Resurrection they shall be exposed to the most grievous torment. And Allah is not at all Unaware (Heedless) of what you do
[Quran 2:85]
In the effort to force fit feminism and its theories unto Islam we have seen a lot of selective quotation of scriptures in recent times. This is an approach to scripture that Allah’s chastised the Christians and the Jews severely for in several places in the Quran. But more heinous than simply ignoring some verses is the new trend of subjecting Allah’s verses to Foucauldian and Derridean deconstruction and calling it Tafseer. The author cites different verses of the Quran which allegedly supports the feminist equality thesis and proves anything short of that is due to the distortions by the patriarchal distortion of the tyrannical male interpreters. But quite conveniently she refused to cite any hadiths or Tafseer from the corpus of Islam explaining the meaning of those verses, rather she preferred the musings of feminist theorists.
No single incident I have come across which demonstrates that the frustrations a lot of women have are only natural while at the same time uprooting the Muslim feminist thesis from its very roots like the narration of Ummu Salamah, the wife of the prophet, as reported in Sunan at-Tirmidhi. Ummu Salamah and other women went to the prophet to complain about some legislations (laws of inheritance, jihad etc.) they felt were favourable to their male counterparts. The prophet didn’t shut them up or reprimand them, but neither did he try to reinterpret Islam. Rather Allah revealed what will till this day serve as the central framework through which every legislation in the Shari’ah that differentiates between a man and woman is understood:
وَلَا تَتَمَنَّوۡاْ مَا فَضَّلَ ٱللَّهُ بِهِۦ بَعۡضَكُمۡ عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٖۚ لِّلرِّجَالِ نَصِيبٞ مِّمَّا ٱكۡتَسَبُواْۖ وَلِلنِّسَآءِ نَصِيبٞ مِّمَّا ٱكۡتَسَبۡنَۚ وَسۡـَٔلُواْ ٱللَّهَ مِن فَضۡلِهِۦٓۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ بِكُلِّ شَيۡءٍ عَلِيمٗا
And do not wish for that by which Allah has favoured some of you over others. For men is a share of what they have earned, and for women is a share of what they have earned. And ask Allah of his bounty. Indeed, Allah is ever, of all things, Knowing.
[Quran 8:32]
The guidance of Islam is that men and women are the same in all rulings except when the law giver specifies otherwise or there are obvious practical impediments for it to be so. Some of those differences will have practical reasons we can understand while some wouldn’t. But our inability to understand them is not a reason to mutilate them until it conforms with modern feminist sensibilities. There is a reason Allah ended that ayah with a declaration of His knowledge of all things, it’s to demonstrate to us that He alone knows who deserves what in this world and he decrees accordingly. Not feminist theorists.
IDENTITIES AND INTERSECTIONALITY
Seeing how vehemently the Muslim feminists claim their course is exclusively bounded within the framework of Islam, one would wonder why then they do so doggedly cling onto a label they themselves claim carries so much baggage; so much baggage that they need to add a Muslim/islamic tag behind it. My thesis is that it is because of the clout it commands on the identity politics market and this is all the more reason why it should be done away with.
In the modern world identity is sacred, be it gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity etc. In this world those who adopt these different identities derive from them how to live and what to think about various social causes, Islamic or otherwise. Issues about where one’s politics should be, who to socialize with and how one should think about other aspects of life including religion are now completely derived from these various identities and how they intersect. That’s why it is easy for a Muslim who claims belief in Allah and the last day to stand in support of all forms of fawahish (indecencies) in the name of intersectionality. It is not weighty anymore for a Muslim to retort at the one who seeks to cautions them, “my spectrum is LGBTQ+”.
More so, haya (modesty) and adab that Islam preaches are now dismissed as tools of gaslighting and patriarchal oppression, while lewdness and shamelessness are touted as virtues and signs of an emancipated mind and body. Denying or neglecting the power of these identities would be extremely erroneous, rather we must get people to conceptualize themselves differently. Mobeen Vaid while commenting on some of these identities mentions that as Muslims, there is no identity that is more critical in our lives than being Muslim. Being Muslim is for us the identity, it tells us how to view the world, our place in it, and how to live morally. Our other identities as parents, women, wives, fathers, children, siblings, students, teachers, etc. are conditioned and qualified by the identity of Islam, not the other way around. What we see today is that people attempt to redefine Islam to fit these identities and the true priority is lost on them. This priority is further expressed beautifully by Dr. Sherman Jackson in a piece he authored on politics:
‘’I want to declare that my ultimate commitment is to God and the religion of Islam, that Islam shall sit in judgment over my racial (or any other) identity, not the other way around. Thus, even as I pursue the well-being of the broader Black American collective, I shall commit to doing so on the basis of the values, virtues and priorities of Islam. My blackness is neither a morality nor a statement of ultimate truth nor a path to other-worldly salvation. Islam, on the other hand, is all of these for me.’’
Dr. Sherman Jackson
Politically Speaking, Who Am I, And What Do I Want As An American Muslim?
Replace blackness with any other identity and this statement would still be as poignant and beautiful!
HERE TO STAY, BUT WITH NO FORESTAY
That a view or ideology endures is no way evidence of its soundness. The very concept of truth indicates that there will always be associated untruths and the very concept of misguidance necessitates that there will always be misguidance. On the contrary, it is truth and its people which will eventually disappear as narrated by Al-Daarimi on the authority of Abdullaah ibn Mas’ood about the period preceding the end time:
وَيَنْسَوْنَ قَوْلَ لا إِلَهَ إِلا اللَّهُ، وَيَقَعُونَ فِي قَوْلِ الْجَاهِلِيَّةِ وَأَشْعَارِهِمْ، وَذَلِكَ حِينَ يَقَعُ عَلَيْهِمْ الْقَوْلُ…
“…They will forget the phrase ‘laa ilaaha ill-Allaah’ and they will start to recite the sayings and poetry of the Jahiliya. That is when the Word will be fulfilled against them. “
Ibn Katheer commenting in the context said this describes the end of time when mankind becomes so corrupt that they neglect the commandments of Allah and change the true religion. This will gradually become widespread until the hearts become dark such that it cannot differentiate between what is good and what is abominable, rather it is impregnated with passion and nihilism becomes the order of the day.
تُعْرَضُ الْفِتَنُ عَلَى الْقُلُوبِ كَالْحَصِيرِ عُودًا عُودًا فَأَىُّ قَلْبٍ أُشْرِبَهَا نُكِتَ فِيهِ نُكْتَةٌ سَوْدَاءُ وَأَىُّ قَلْبٍ أَنْكَرَهَا نُكِتَ فِيهِ نُكْتَةٌ بَيْضَاءُ حَتَّى تَصِيرَ عَلَى قَلْبَيْنِ عَلَى أَبْيَضَ مِثْلِ الصَّفَا فَلاَ تَضُرُّهُ فِتْنَةٌ مَا دَامَتِ السَّمَوَاتُ وَالأَرْضُ وَالآخَرُ أَسْوَدُ مُرْبَادًّا كَالْكُوزِ مُجَخِّيًا لاَ يَعْرِفُ مَعْرُوفًا وَلاَ يُنْكِرُ مُنْكَرًا إِلاَّ مَا أُشْرِبَ مِنْ هَوَاهُ ”
Temptations will be presented to men’s hearts as reed mat is woven stick by stick and any heart which is impregnated by them will have a black mark put into it, but any heart which rejects them will have a white mark put in it. The result is that there will become two types of hearts: one white like a white stone which will not be harmed by any turmoil or temptation, so long as the heavens and the earth endure; and the other black and dust-coloured like a vessel which is upset, not recognizing what is good or rejecting what is abominable, but being impregnated with passion
[Sahih Muslim: The book of trials Hadith 276]
So, I can say quite clearly, that I am not writing this with the expectation that I will wake up tomorrow and all the movements to reinvent Islam and make it amenable to feminist theology amongst others will suddenly stop. Even though nothing will please me more, that kind of thought will be me overestimating myself. I don’t even think the presence of the Prophet and his companions amongst us today will make it stop. What is more likely is that the feminist-modernist ideology and others like it will remain with us for a very long time and that it will even eat more and more deeply into Islam and other religions. But the reason we write is not to score points or to make it all magically disappear, it is to fulfil the duty of naseehah incumbent upon a Muslim to other Muslims and to ensure as Allāh said:
لِّيَهْلِكَ مَنْ هَلَكَ عَن بَيِّنَةٍ وَيَحْيَى مَنْ حَيَّ عَن بَيِّنَةٍ وَإِنَّ اللّهَ لَسَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ
That those who would perish (in disbelief) will do so (knowingly) upon evidence and those who would live (upon faith) would do so (knowingly) upon evidence. And most surely Allah is All-Hearing, All-Knowing
[Quran 8:42]
WHAT THE CALL IS NOT
وَلَا يَظْلِمُ رَبُّكَ أَحَدًا
And your Lord does injustice to no one.
[Quran 18:49]
The call is not for us to become dispassionate, indecisive people who don’t have opinions about anything at all in the world we live in. Neither is it for us to become pushovers who suffer injustices in silence and walk around with indignation. The call is for our understanding, passion and yearnings for justice to emanate from a place of deep moral commitment to Allah and mercy for His creations. It is for the windows and mirrors through which we see the world and our place in it to be that of eeman, worship of the Creator and moral duty. Not that of deconstruction, worship of the self and moral bankruptcy. This is what is sustainable and eternally fulfilling.
تِلْكَ حُدُودُ اللّهِ فَلاَ تَعْتَدُوهَا وَمَن يَتَعَدَّ حُدُودَ اللّهِ فَأُوْلَئِكَ هُمُ الظَّالِمُونَ
These are the limits of Allah, so do not transgress them. And whoever transgresses the limits of Allah — it is those who are the wrongdoers.
[Quran 2:229]
30th Ramadan 1441.
الحق لا يعرف بالرجال.. وإنما يعرف الرجال بالحق.. فاعرف الحق تعرف أهله
Truth is not measured by people, rather it is people who are measured based on the truth.. So seek out truth and you will know who its people are
