Dispatch Faith: The Islamic Introspection That Never Came, by Michael Reneau (Executive Editor, The Dispatch):
While much of what was written at The Dispatch and elsewhere this week focuses on what 9/11 means to America, or to families of the day’s victims, religious scholar Iqbal Akhtar has written this week’s Dispatch Faith essay to consider that day and the years since from the perspective of an American Muslim. He has critical words for his community in describing how it has related to the rest of the U.S. in the years since Islamic terrorists killed thousands.
Dispatch Faith: After 9/11, by Iqbal Akhtar (Florida International University; Founder & Executive Director, The East-West Foundation):
American Muslims have not built a tradition that can speak to America.
[The Muslim] community that never did the introspection the 9/11 attacks demanded of it, and that instead built a politics organized around two things—denouncing Islamophobia and turning out voters—while leaving the deeper work undone. That work is theological and institutional before it is political, and it is the only path by which American Muslims can contribute to the American experiment without further polarizing it. And I make this argument as a fellow Muslim. …
I was a pre-med student at Washington University when the towers fell. Within months, I had abandoned medicine and changed my majors to political science and Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Studies. Later, after a fellowship to study Pakistan’s education system, I served as a civilian in the Air Force and worked as an analyst at U.S. Northern Command, the combatant command created after the attacks to defend the homeland. The experience of watching Islam and Muslims become the existential “other” of American life, almost overnight, was the most formative thing that ever happened to me, and I responded to it by trying to be inside the institutions that were now defining us from outside, such as the military.
Neither side quite knew what to do with me. Inside the military, I faced the questions about loyalty you would expect. In my own community, the hostility was sharper. I was trying to get married in those years, and more than one family turned me away because of the uniform. The question I was living, which is the question every American Muslim has been living since 2001, whether they admit it or not, is how one remains faithful to an ancient religion and to a nation whose security is purchased, in part, through violence against people who share that religion. That is not an easy question. It deserved a generation of serious thought. It mostly did not get it. …
The lived reality of most American Muslims is pluralism, practiced daily and without ideology. I have called it “covenantal pluralism” elsewhere: the discovery, at PTA meetings and in hospital breakrooms and on corporate boards, that one can hold a demanding faith and still bind oneself in good faith to neighbors who do not share it. That is the raw material. What the community lacks is the translation.
The best model we have is 55 years old. In 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned Muhammad Ali’s conviction for refusing induction into the Army, accepting that his objection to the Vietnam War was grounded in sincere religious belief. Ali did not win by denouncing his critics as bigots. He won by making his tradition legible in the moral and legal language of the majority, and in doing so he expanded American religious liberty for everyone. He was punished for it, stripped of his title and his best years. He was also, by the end of his life, among the most beloved Americans alive. That is what witnessing over winning looks like, and it is the tradition American Muslims have most neglected.
[W]hat should the next 25 years look like? I would begin with a rule the Muslim world has been learning the hard way since Napoleon landed at Alexandria in 1798: Ideas precede reality, and theology precedes politics. Every modern Muslim political project, from Islamic modernism to the Muslim Brotherhood to the Iranian Revolution, was first a theological argument about what Islam is and what it demands. American Muslims have never made that argument for themselves. They have imported theologies built for other places and layered American electoral tactics on top.
The alternative is to build the institutions that can do the arguing: seminaries and colleges that read the Islamic tradition, in its philosophical and mystical and legal depth from West Africa to China, alongside John Locke and James Madison and Martin Luther King Jr.; think tanks that produce policy from a rational Muslim perspective rather than grievance; philanthropies that fund the professional class, which is the only base such institutions can stand on; and an intellectual culture in which a Muslim can criticize the community without being read out of it. But all this must be built on a theology of what Muslims owe America and what they have to offer it, not on a strategy for accumulating power.
The prize is larger than the community. A Muslim minority that worked out, in public and in American terms, how to be both fully Muslim and fully committed to a pluralist republic would be a model for Muslim minorities from Europe to India, and for Muslim majorities struggling with conflicts of power, wealth, and identity in their own countries. That contribution at the intersection of American and Islamic civilizations is worth more than any election. The country just marked its 250th year. Muslims have been part of it from the beginning, among the enslaved and among the founders’ correspondents, and they have a claim on its next 250. Making that claim requires something the last quarter-century did not produce: the willingness to look at ourselves from the outside, and to build what we see is missing.
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