Organization for Islamic Learning

What's the Real Challenge for the Muslim 'Dissident'

by Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina

[This piece was written in response to the article on "Islamic Studies' Young Turks," by Danny Postel in The Chronicle for Higher Education, September 13, 2002.] Click here to view article

After eight months in Iran, with intense conversations and interactions with both scholars at the Islamic seminaries and at the universities, it is evident to me that without the translations and dissemination of the `dissident' scholarship produced in the West, it is impossible to see how the rethinking and the awaited reform among Muslims will ever take off. Whatever self-critical and intelligent research we, as Muslim scholars, undertake in the American and European universities, it is going to remain strictly academic, without any influence over the way our counterparts in the Islamic world think and teach. We are not only faced with irrelevance in the Muslim world. Our influence here in Muslim communities in the North American situation is stifled and confined to the Ivory Tower of the academia. This is even more dangerous for our groundbreaking work, because if it cannot find readers except among non-Muslims, and that also among academicians who applaud and support our work, the situation must be regarded even more critical right in our back yard. The level of irrelevance of the new `dissident' language that has evolved to speak about Islam and human rights, democracy, and women's rights can be observed in the kinds of people invited to speak in the Muslim conventions and organizations throughout the Western world.

Understandably, only few academicians, who have learnt to cheer Muslim crowds with points of `self- glorification thesis' about Islam and its `peace-loving' civilization have been invited to address these conventions. The narrow-minded attitude regarding this refreshingly new scholarship can be observed even among highly educated and professional Muslims in this country. One would have thought that they would be the first ones to understand and appreciate the value of research that is being conducted by this new generation of believing Muslims. Not so, when it comes to preserving the security of ignorance in the matter of Islam. The greater need to learn about the basic civic virtues and responsibilities cannot be overemphasized in the context of North America. In the aftermath of September 11, we discovered to our horror the kind of antagonistic worldview that was preached in a number of Muslim organizations that depended for their knowledge on Islam as taught by the "native" preachers from the Middle East, who taught their communities ways to protect their 'pure' religion that was threatened by the so-called Muslim academicians and the `enemies' of Islam in universities.

It is under these circumstances that one can objectively and sensibly appreciate the work that is being done by the likes of Professor Abd al-Karim Soroush in Iran and other places. Their work is in the native languages of the people who are searching for relevance of their religion in the modern times. Undoubtedly, their lives are made extremely difficult by the autocratic regimes in the region. But, what they write, even if it be an article on the need to challenge religious absolutist power of the obscurantist establishment, it does the work of thousands of books that we produce away from places where people are thirsty to read or hear something that generates hope for men and women, youth and children, faced with oppression and suppression. With a long term experience of working in the academia and the Muslim communities around the country, I can demonstrate with much evidence that if we think that our `dissident' scholarship is going to have an impact on the native Muslim scholars, then it is no more than an illusion connected with our self-importance as modern, liberal, reform-minded Muslim scholars.

We need not only cultural legitimacy in order for us to reach out the intelligent audience in the Middle East; but also the means to transmit our research in the language that conveys ideas to a wider, receptive Muslim audience. By inviting some of these scholars from our native countries to participate in our deliberations about our historical and critical methods of assessing scriptural sources in Islam, we might score some points in our intellectual interaction with them. But the tendency in academic conferences on such topics is to invite the `converted'; whereas the challenge lies in getting those who disagree with us, or even ridicule us as `corrupted' by Western secular methods of assessing sacred sources. Moreover, some of us did and continue to produce scholarship that is Amerocentric and usually applauded by the West and, rewarded by a secure job for us, maybe in one of the Ivy League schools.

However, I believe that there are a number of scholars in this country whose scholarship could foster better interfaith and inter-communal relations in our religiously pluralistic and democratic society. If this new Islamic rethinking that is taking place in our midst here can find proper platform for its dissemination, then it could lead to a badly needed reform in the Muslim communities to see themselves as others see them. I am under no illusion that such an acceptance of the `dissident' scholarship in the North American Muslim communities is distant. The influence of narrow-minded and stultified Islam funded by petrodollars for over a quarter century will take much longer to defeat. In the meantime, as a Muslim scholar, I need to think of ways to reach out the community that needs to reform the way it conceptualizes the world of disbelief and acts upon the intolerance and bigotry that is preached and taught in the mosques and Islamic centers in America and Europe. This is the challenge that those of us in the West ought to think seriously. Intolerance and bigotry are there in the field, and, we can no longer afford to remain in the protected arena of the academia.

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© Organization for Islamic Learning October 2007