IN MUSLIM COMMUNITIES

OF THE UNITED STATES

A paper presented by Ghada Ramahi at the 28th Annual Conference of the Muslim Students Association--Persian Speaking Group, in Chicago on 26-29 November 1998.

One alarming contemporary trend is found as a creeping phenomenon in the US, where since the Revolution a plethora of Muslim technocrats are more frequently being found in positions of leadership and as authorities in our Muslim communities. These technocrats are recognizable as a cadre of professionals in medicine, science, engineering and technology, who are almost exclusively immigrants from various Muslim countries, and who uniformly ascribe to the dominant system of Eurocentric western knowledges, which reflects their academic and technical training in the colonial systems of their countries. They are culturally Muslims and rarely grounded in Islamic knowledge. These Muslim technocrats claim leadership of their communities locally and nationally, and have taken control of mosques and hawzahs, sponsoring events, campus activities, and dubious da'wah agendas. They have been giving their authoritative views on all subjects, especially those outside the bounds of their technical training, such as politics, economics, law and shariah, and many of them have been writing books on Islam. Dangerously enough, sometimes they even give Friday sermons, assuming in such cases the spiritual leadership of our communities. While they have been largely validated and endorsed by the Western colonial and post-colonial centers of power, all of this prestige and authority stems from the esteem accorded by the state and the dominant culture to their narrow technical training, which somehow gives them the authority to speak on whatever they please.

The Muslim technocrats are also responsible for another very dangerous fad invading Muslim communities, in their insistence on and even obsession with interpreting the Holy Koran in light of modern Eurocentric scientific and technological assumptions about how the world works and the nature of humanity. These assumptions are often in contradistinction to the teachings found in the authentic Muslim traditions, most of which are ignored or marginalized by the technocrats since these aspects of Islam are challenging or difficult to reconcile with Western thought.

The challenge posed to us by the Muslim technocrats is that of their tendency to redefine Islam in order to suit the cultural and political dictates of modern Western civilization, which results from their sifting and sorting of the Islamic tradition for wisdom that supports the status quo, while ignoring or omitting that which might serve to call the dominant culture into question. This problem is rampant within all schools of Muslim thought, Sunni, Shi'i and Sufi alike. The only difference is that while in some sects the technocrats are installed through political and ideological agendas, in other cases they are self-imposed and self-financed, operating as quasi-feudal lords owing to their considerable financial clout. In other cases their legitimacy comes from Christian, Jewish, and other religious groups, who find comfort in a watered down and acquiescent Islam.

Upon closer examination, the majority of Muslim communities living under this leadership is nominally Islamic, their thoughts and actions are more reminiscent of the tribal and lordship gatherings of jahili culture. In some cases the activities of these Muslim communities amount to little more than familial and ethnic social clubs for their younger generations. However, Muslims who are not part of these immigrant groups often fall between the cracks. The Muslim technocrats and the communities under their guidance often reflect the worst of white American middle class suburban attitudes. And those who thirst the most for Islam have been marginalized the most. African American Muslims, for example, are not usually of the upper echelons of power, nor of those with high professional and academic backgrounds. In some more extreme cases, surreptitious efforts have been mounted to bar poor Black and Latino Muslims from participating in various intellectual, social, political, and economic activities, and many times this even includes religious occasions and events. In contrast, Euro-American Muslims are often welcomed as a novel validation of the universality of Islam and as tokens of da'wah.

Although it might appear that the technocratic elite is ruling because of its financial clout, this is not the only source of the legitimacy. There are other factors related to their education. Members of the Muslim technocratic elite most often come from colonized Muslim countries, and their intellectual and economic hierarchy reflects the definitions imposed by European colonization on their educational systems. Because a high western academic degree is required for technocratic leadership, a non-professional but wealthy merchant is rarely found as part of this cadre. The poor and disenfranchised need not apply at all. We also find that the wealthy technocrats often attach strings to their generosity, which are many times un-Islamic or jahili.

This new leadership of many of our Muslim communities is part of a broader and recent tendency to replace the 'ulama' and fuqaha' with Eurocentric and West-inflicted technocrats. Since the important leadership role of the 'ulama was demonstrated in the Islamic Revolution, as well as in other resistance movements, the project of undermining traditional and committed ulama' has become a necessity in the Western policy agenda. This has been spelled out in numerous American government policy reports, some of which have been made public for the academic policy community by the RAND Corporation and other American and Israeli think tanks. The intention of this policy is to sequester the 'ulama' in strictly spiritual and honorary positions because at their best they remain to be the real threat to the west. In the case of Iran, the 'ulama' were the seedlings of the revolution. On occasion, even the court-'ulama' in other times and places have become unreliable to the colonial order. In short, and whether they know it or not, the Muslim technocrats have been inserted between the 'ulama' and the general public.

This tendency is made possible by many developments in modern Islamic history. Technocratic rule is legitimated in many ways by a very narrow, colonized understanding of some centrally important but often misunderstood concepts in the Islamic intellectual tradition, especially those of 'ilm and 'ulama'. Since Islam had always revered the quest for knowledge, as many hadith suggest, this legitimizing factor in the emerging Muslim leadership needs our careful attention.

While the Muslim reverence and respect for seeking knowledge stems from the teachings of the Holy Quran, where Allah (swt) invokes His servants to ponder the signs of His creation, and from the sunnah which exhorts all Muslims to seek knowledge, nowadays there seems to be ample confusion regarding the vocabulary and definitions used in speaking about these traditions and mandates. When considering the modernist Muslims' discourse of the relationship between knowledge in the traditional sense and science in the Western sense, we find contradictions. When vocabulary and definitions originate in any language they become saturated with implicit meanings, and if these words are translated out of their native language into another, they tend to lose their precision. Translating the denotations does not carry the connotations, so the translated words and definitions may then become vague, ambiguous, and eventually misleading.

The Arabic word 'ilm does not translate into the English word science. Most importantly, the Quranic implication of 'ilm differs fundamentally from the contemporary English implication of science. In English, science implies a very specific ideology and methodology that was the product of a particular historical period of western civilization. During colonization and towards the end of the 19th century, the Arabic and Islamic implicit meaning of 'ilm became somehow obscured with that of science. More recently, Muslims obviously use 'ilm and science interchangeably with one denotation and one connotation, that of contemporary English. But 'ilm and science are neither equal nor equivalent in their denotations or connotations. Consequently, the Quranic verses and the hadith that honor 'ilm and 'ulama' do not refer to western trained Muslim scientists and technocrats, such as physicians, geneticists, engineers, physicists, computerists, or any other of the technical specialists that come out of the western knowledges.

Western science is not universal nor is it the culmination of the sciences of all civilizations. Instead, it is based exclusively on a particular ideology and methodology specifically designed in the seventeenth Christian century. It is based strictly on dualism and rationalism, on abstracting the mind from the body, the object from the subject and the male from the female. Consequently, western science is accumulative and not cumulative. While the Muslim technocrats spend a lot of time and effort boasting about the past contributions of Muslims to Western science, they need to try and understand why, when and how the once pioneering Islamic sciences became incompatible with those of the West. Muslims should also verify if the methodology on which western science is based is Islamically compatible. The objectivity which the west defines and claims for itself does not exist, nor is it humanly possible. Rather, Muslims are really not even in need of such constructs, since they ought to be focusing on concepts like haqq and the truth.

Muslims ought to also understand that modern western science and technology are Christian to the core, and that Christianity in large part determined how Western thinkers interacted with the intellectual traditions of other cultures. Modern Western science and technology emanate from the philosophy of Christian millenarianism, which is based on Biblical prophesies formulated in the 12th century AD. The millenarianist doctrine, in turn, is based on the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and it calls for a thousand-year reign on earth of the returned messiah, Christ, together with an elite corps of the saintly elect priesthood. This is the definition of millennium that we ought to remember when our leaders and politicians tell us to prepare for the new millennium. And in the millenarianist vision, Western science and technology exist in a very Christian sense only for mankind in the fallen state. They are a means for redemption and salvation which represent a movement towards the supposed return of man's dominion over paradise on earth. Similarly, the vagueness surrounding the mythical war between science and Christianity resulted from the 17th century mechanistic philosophy which deliberately separated God from nature, then gave man as a divine being, who was created in God's image, the sole dominion over nature. Therefore, in Christianity, man is a partner with God and separate from nature, whereas in Islam, man is separate from God (swt) and part of nature and the creation. In other words, Western science sprouted from a soil polluted by the poisonous waters of shirk.

Modern Muslims are sadly deficient in understanding the genesis of Eurocentric western science, hence are unable to evaluate the repercussions of their involvement in it. Muslim organizations of professionals and academics are divided amongst themselves according to their sects and schools of thought, unaware of the fact that they are all united in their loyalty to the Islamically incompatible Western science. Ironically, while many western intellectuals and scientists have realized the shortcomings of this hegemonic science, Muslims are completely absentminded in their unquestioning adherence to the modern Western assumptions embodied in scientific discourse and practice. They are often limited to lamenting their pioneering past, now mesmerized by their ability to learn how to speak the West's language even if they do not understand it. Such technocrats choose not to understand the ideology behind the eurocentric western science because they do not want to lose the prestige, esteem and authority they acquired with this science. This is where the spectres of economic gain and position intersect with allegiances to a set of Western norms. Therefore, actively or passively, Muslim technocrats are participating in redefining Islamic knowledge and leadership to expedite Western interests.

The lack of any Muslim critics of Western science is symptomatic of a larger problem: the absence of a contemporary independent Muslim conceptual framework. In order for Muslims to have a genuine Islamic leadership, they must have an intellectual infrastructure outside the lock of the Eurocentric West. This requires not only Islamic content, but most importantly an Islamic methodology. And Muslims should reconsider their priorities, since learning the language of the Koran is a primary necessity. We may one day wish to call upon our honorable 'ulama' and marja' to consider a fatwah in this regard, making fluency in Arabic wajib for all Muslims. And here in the US, there is a desperate need for independent Islamic educational institutes and centers to be established. Muslim holy places should not be the only monopolizing educational centers. Converts, reverts, expatriates and the disenfranchised should not be left under the mercy and leadership of immigrant technocrats. While Muslims are reconciling their internal differences, they should not get distracted from keeping focused on their common enemy, who does not discriminate in his fear, hatred, and disdain of a truly independent Muslim consciousness. Our challenge for survival and prosperity will be to learn Arabic, embark on a program to regenerate the wisdom of the Islamic sources and sages, and to provide Islamically grounded leadership for the Muslims and ultimately for humanity.