Event transcript from the the April 30, 2002 conference with Professor of Theology at Boston College Dr. Qamar-ul Huda.

Hillel Fradkin: We are very fortunate to have Qamar-ul Huda here with us today. Dr. Huda is a Professor of Theology at Boston College. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Comparative Religion from Colgate University, and his Ph.D. in Islamic History from UCLA. He has done research in Egypt, Syria, Pakistan and India. He is an advisor to the Archdiocese of Boston -- I presume on Islamic, and not Catholic, matters -- and a member of the Islamic Council of the New England Christian-Muslim Dialogue.

He is a great student of Sufism -- Islamic mystical thought -- and in particular, of one of the very greatest Islamic thinkers, Suhrawardi. Dr. Huda brings to today’s discussion the resources of what has been called in the Muslim tradition, and occasionally in the newspapers, the "Greater Jihad" -- the jihad which does not involve warfare, but instead focuses on personal struggle and personal improvement.

Qamar-ul Huda: When one speaks about Islamic democracy, one tends to focus on the political institutions within Islam -- shura, which is consultation; ijma’, which is consensus; the issues of minority rights -- and how to reform them. A lot of people start and end their thinking about Islamic democracy there.

I’d like to move away from that, because my expertise is history. I would instead like to forge and develop ideas that are newer and more pertinent to my work. I would like to show that contemporary issues and ideas and discourses within the Islamic community are democratic, in a sense, for they are pluralistic, with numerous perspectives and views. I would like to focus on two groups as an example of some democratic trends and patterns and to put the whole conversation in context. The whole discussion of this subject is really a continuation of a history of polemics and apologetics.

Starting in the ninth or tenth century or even earlier, there has been a polemic between Christians and Muslims of seeing and thinking of each other through defined formulas. Some Christians, like Saint John of the Cross, said that the Mohammed had delusions, false revelations and multiple marriages. He was violent and so forth -- how could he be a prophet? Conversely, Muslims described Catholics as being too subordinate to the papacy, too subordinate to the priestly class, making up the Trinity, and so on. This was an ongoing pattern of polemics, not apologetics.

This happened on both sides, and it still continues today in popular discourse and in academic circles. Look at the Christian fundamentalists. Jerry Falwell called Mohammed a terrorist; others have called Islam an evil religion. And on the opposite side, Islamic fundamentalists call Christianity a false religion and call Christians infidels. This is a continuation of a long line of polemics, not apologetics, and it’s important to keep this in mind as we try to move beyond the discussion of political reform and political institutions.

Let me narrow the conversation even more. There are two major groups that come up in scholarly discussions about Islamic democracy. For lack of better terms, they identify themselves as "progressive" Muslims and "liberal" Muslims. And I would like to analyze those two groups, not only because they represent trends within the community of thinking about democracy, but also because they are expressions of some democratic sentiment within the Muslim community.

So progressive Muslims move between the competitiveness of individualistic modernity on the one hand, and thinking about the dislocating results of modern globalization and modern institutions on the other. The term "progressive" Muslim was coined back in 1982 by Iranian scholar Suroosh Irfani, who wrote a book -- Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? -- about how progressive Islam has to be anti-authoritarian and opposed to the conservative clerical class. You could be pro-clerical, so long as the clerics were progressive, moderate and liberal. So the notion of "progressive" Islam was started by an Iranian scholar under the ayatollahs of Iran. The term later became more complicated -- and then formalized into an official group, the "Progressive Muslim Network," which felt that something needed to be done about institutional injustices.

The "liberal" Muslims who have come out after 9/11 have been very aggressive in asserting that we’re just like all other Muslims: we’re very invested in capitalism and the free market system, we’re invested in secular values and in the separation of state and religion. In part, the "liberal" Islam movement got its start when Samuel Huntington published his "clash of civilizations" thesis, which really upset a lot of people in the Muslim community. They felt like they were contributing -- they were paying taxes and being decent Americans, so what does this mean that "my civilization is going to clash with the West"? There was a great surge within the American Muslim community to refute this notion. "We are not clashing with the West; in fact we are Westerners, we are Americans." They argued that the Islamic world as a whole is not stagnant, and there are only pockets of extremism and fundamentalism.

After 9/11, liberal Muslims said that Islamic fundamentalism is clearly the most important global issue of our time. Liberal Muslims say -- and you can read this in the newspapers -- that 9/11 shook their faith to the core. In editorials and letters to the editor, liberal Muslims said, "I felt good coming out of the closet and criticizing the Wahabis." There was a desperate attempt by liberal Muslims to distance Islam from Wahabism and terrorism, and to assert that those things are not really in our traditions. But the problem with the liberal Muslim response is that there is no real way of historically defining the problem -- there is no real political or contextual analysis of the source of rise of fundamentalism.

Let me return to the progressives. Let me read you something from the Web site of the Progressive Muslim Network. They define progressive Islam as "that understanding of Islam and its sources which comes from and is shaped within a commitment to transform society from an unjust one where people are mere objects of exploitation by governments, socio-economic institutions and unequal relationships to a just one where they are the subjects of history, the shapers of their own destiny in the full awareness that all of humankind is in a state of returning to God and that the universe was created as a sign of God’s presence." They think their focus has to be on re-creating society -- so they make sure to study the power relationships between dominant classes and subjugated classes. Their intention was to think about how people have been exploited by governments, and other institutions, and to think about unequal relationships. Here is another quote from them: "The relentless promotion of corporate culture and consumerism which results in the exploitation of our natural environment, deforestation, the destruction of local communities and the eco-system and cruelty to animals." They are against "racism, sexism, homophobia and all other forms of socio-economic injustices both within and outside of Muslim societies and communities." These injustices, they declare, "detract from the sacredness of all humankind imbued when Allah blew of his own spirit into the first created person."

This could have been written by Alexander Cockburn or Eric Alterman in The Nation. Progressive Muslims are really concerned about institutions and their impact on individuals, and how institutions devalue individuals. Their broad critique is to think about the power and the powerless: How does this happen? How does one become a ruling elite and how does one not become a ruling elite? This is one of the central missions of progressive Islam -- to think about institutional change, about political reform, about the way corporate culture impacts individuals and societies.

Here, then, are two different Muslim voices, two examples of how Muslims are searching for democracy. These two groups are trying to redefine and rethink about the place of Islam, and they have different approaches to Islamic democracy. The progressive Muslims are clearly on the political left. And the liberal Muslims are thinking more about how to assimilate, how to be a part of this society, and how to be a political participant.

The question now becomes, how does this play out in Muslim countries? You cannot simply talk about importing Western democracy with its attention to freedom, assembly rights, individual rights, participation, fairness to children and so forth. In our countries, the heart of the economy is in child labor. In our countries, if you speak out, you disappear. In our countries, if you write something in the newspaper, you lose you bank accounts. So how do we move away from this serious repression to achieve internal reform?

And this is where progressive Muslims and liberal Muslims meet eye to eye. It’s useless to think about throwing away the clerics; you are not going to marginalize them and say they have no place in a new democratic Islamic state. But what is interesting is that both progressives and liberals are thinking about a new society that reserves a prominent place for religion. Religion won’t be put on a back burner; it can be an important force to create and keep an ethical society. That doesn’t mean there will be religious law or sharia. Instead, how can religion be used to build institutions, or for a greater gender equality, or to stay connected with the past. Thus, these two Islamic voices have different approaches and interpretations, but they are linked by their new and dynamic ways of thinking about religion and its role, as opposed to political theory.

DISCUSSION

Hillel Fradkin: How do progressive Islam and liberal Islam each try to understand and explain radical Islam and specific acts of terrorism?

Qamar-ul Huda: Right after 9/11, Muslims were forced to explain what happened. "Is this part of your tradition? Does the Koran say to fight and jihad and to go kill off infidels?" There was an overwhelming focus on Islamic fundamentalism and its sources. Liberal Muslims needed to come up with answers very quickly, and so an inaccurate historical reading of Wahabism emerged -- how it started as a spiritual reform movement, then as an outer reform movement, and then got the capacity to globalize thanks to Saudi Arabia and petrol money. So to liberal Muslims, Wahabism is the source of all of Islam’s problems and we need to contain it, we need to uproot it, we need to do something. Many liberal Muslims point to the Saudi-American relationship and argue that unless it’s reformed, we’ll never succeed in changing Wahabism or its impact around the world. Liberal Muslims thus don’t really understand the larger the socioeconomic issues involved -- the root causes of fundamentalism, which progressive Muslims tend to focus on.

Hillel Fradkin: The way you described it, "progressive" Islam sounds very much like garden variety leftism, just very tenuously wedded to Islamic notions. Therefore, this progressive Islam seems unlikely to have very much Islamic vitality because it hasn’t grown up out of those religious roots, nor much democratic vitality because that kind of leftism has been shown to lack analytic power and political appeal.

Qamar-ul Huda: But to progressive Muslims, the divine is an important part of our life, and we need to appreciate divine in all creation -- which is why they emphasize ecology and environmentalism. They make heavy use of the Koran and the hadith and the sayings of the prophet, so they aren’t really able to communicate well and partake in a larger discourse. But within the Islamic world they have pockets of followers who have meetings. They really haven’t entered the mainstream; they’re essentially a fallen scholarly class. But they are a group to think about. They are very powerful in Indonesia.

Hillel Fradkin: How do the liberal and progressive Muslims differ on the subject of democratic reform?

Qamar-ul Huda: Neither have come out with clearly defined definitions of what a democratic Islamic state would look like. They agree on participation. They agree on some type of parliamentary system. They agree on the basic freedoms.

But they don’t agree on very many other things: the place of the divine, the place of religion. What’s the role of religion in a democratic Islamic state? Progressive Muslims have a type of blueprint, but I don’t think the liberal Muslims do, because they are more concerned with becoming accepted here in the States and distinguishing themselves from the fundamentalists. So they haven’t really defined what a liberal democracy would be for Muslims.

Steve Rempe: I noticed you used the term "fundamentalist," in reference both to Christianity and Islam. Do you mean to make some type of connection between fundamentalism in Islam and fundamentalism in Christianity -- and if not, is there a different way to phrase that, not to draw a difference?

Qamar-ul Huda: The clear difference is the political aspect of Islamic fundamentalism. In the States, fundamentalism is clearly a particular way of reading of the Bible and of understanding Christianity. In Islam, fundamentalism has various shades and colors. It’s not one monolithic group of people. There are fundamentalists very much involved with the state, as in Turkey and Pakistan, and then there are fundamentalists who are anti-authoritarian anarchists who believe they have to destroy secular states or tyrannical states. So within Islam, "fundamentalism" is definitely a political term as well as a religious one.

Brian Cathcart: You described liberal Islam as having an assimilationist paradigm and progressive Islam as viewing people as oppressed. I’m wondering whether there is a movement toward a constructionist paradigm -- where people play a role and can "take back the night."

Qamar-ul Huda: Progressive Muslims have identified this as one of their missions. Within the progressive Muslim movement, there are alternative views of politics, alternative views of religion, and so forth. So in many ways, the progressive Muslims, as part of a grassroots movement tied to all these scholarly initiatives, are doing some far more creative and innovative things than the liberal Muslims that I know.

Liberal Muslims are doing an equally important job, but not from the grassroots. Their view is from the top down: "We need to move set up an office in D.C., we need to be a part of the political process, we need to know the politicians there, we need to influence the top people in business." Their goal is to touch the top of the pyramid. The progressive Muslims would say that, before we can even get to that point, we need to really think about what’s happening on the ground: electricity, water, and gender issues, spousal abuse, and so on. So you have these different approaches and readings of their traditions, although I think they’re equally important. They both have some shortcomings in terms of actually defining what is actually needed to achieve a democratic state.

Hillel Fradkin: Are the issues that concern progressive Muslims -- the ones that are also most dear to the left -- likely to find a constituency in the American Muslim community, let alone worldwide? Are they the kind of issues that are under the surface, just looking for someone bring them to the fore, or are they really the preoccupations of small number of people?

Qamar-ul Huda: The vast majority of Muslims are working class and blue collar, but often they are represented by very well-educated folks who are trying to project an image of a very white collar Islamic community. When I travel and talk to cab drivers, it’s clear that they feel really disenchanted about what they’re hearing in the mosques -- the obtuseness of the sermons, which lack any connection to what’s really happening in these people’s lives. These people break their backs to survive, to meet their bills. They would have more of a connection if people spoke of their concerns: issues of improving their job futures, issues of immigration.

Hillel Fradkin: Could you comment on the notion of a kind of Western training, a Western study of Islam? Some have seen it as a route by which Islam and the West could find some common ground. But when people like Fazlur Rahman, or Muhammad Abdu even earlier, suggested going down that route, they were met with great resistance. In the case of Rahman, there was great resistance from what became to be called fundamentalists. Do you think that resistance is dissipating at this point?

Qamar-ul Huda: In Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan, there are major scholars who are appreciated and who have developed a following -- a grassroots movement that attends to their lectures, hundreds and thousands of people that flood hotels wherever they may meet to listen to them. Professor Rahman left Pakistan because of the protests; I think if he were there today, he would have a great deal of very interesting factions supporting him, and of course people who would protest him. The fundamentalist movement has really evolved; they are in politics now.

Sarah Wolfowitz: Could you address the subject of the media in the Middle East, and what role they might play in the move from repression to reform?

Qamar-ul Huda: The lack of press freedom in various countries is tied to larger institutional issues. The press is restricted and controlled by the heavy hand of the state, for reasons connected with the post-colonial experience. There have been gradual steps for reform, and if you look at some press institutions -- like Al Jazeera in Qatar, and Al Arabiya in Dubai -- these particular reforms didn’t happen overnight. There was instead a gradual acceptance that the state controlled the media, and everyone in the press was on a state salary.

Clearly, alternative views were missing. And even now, if you look at Al Jazeera, although it is a very nice alternative to the state-controlled press of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it still has a long way to go. Just listen to some of the debates. They don’t roll up their sleeves and ask, for instance, why Egypt rounds up thousands of people without any recourse. They don’t address these real issues. If someone was set on fire for something, they may show the newsreel and show particular things around it, but they don’t analyze it.

Steve Lenzner: In order to be made compatible with liberal democracy, does Islam have to be transformed from a religion understood as a comprehensive guide as it were religiosity, to something to be mined for statements that make it compatible with liberal democracy? In other words, to what extent do you have subordinate Islam to make it compatible with liberal democracy?

Qamar-ul Huda: Liberal Muslims argue that there are democratic institutions already in Islam. They take a very narrow reading of Islamic texts and history. They argue: "We already had democracy. We had democracy before it was even there." Then they say that even though those democratic institutions didn’t survive, they are all part of our history and we just need to recover them -- so it’s not unfeasible to think about having an Islamic democracy.

But progressive Muslims say it didn’t work then, it’s not going to work now, and we need a real separation of religion. We don’t need a theocracy. We don’t need clerics in the place of the executive branch. We instead need clerics to be an "ethical branch" within society, to think about cutting-edge issues, like stem cell research or genetic engineering or things like that. We want the clerics, we just don’t want them to be our politicians. We don’t want them to be our economists. We certainly don’t want them to be our military.

David Abramson: You said that your lecture today is a work in progress, so I just wanted to ask you in what ways this is still a work in progress -- and what questions remain unanswered that you will pursue?

Qamar-ul Huda: I belong to a tradition, the Islamic tradition. I see myself, in much of my speaking and critiquing, trying to use particular language of that tradition for reforming and rethinking. Why? Because I’m trying to create a healthier society in various parts of the world.

But the subject of today’s lecture is just a little cross-section of something larger I’m calling Islamic "liberation theology," similar to Catholic liberation theology. The concept of liberation theology was very influential in my life, and I continue to find it very valuable. I’m not using a carbon copy of that concept for Islam, but there are many things -- in classical theological texts, Sufi readings of the Koran, Sufi perspectives of the world -- that will help in thinking about being more inclusive and pluralistic and tolerant, both in theological and in non-theological terms.

So this process of searching is liberating. Faith should not be stagnant and oppressive and repressive. It should be uplifting and innovative. There were a lot of good people in the century and a half after the prophet doing some wonderful things with Greek philosophy, and some of these thinkers were devout, some weren’t. There is a place where faith and reason mix and match, and this is what I am doing with Islamic liberation theology.

David Abramson, Office of International Religious Freedom, U.S. Department of State
Brian Cathcart, Initiatives of Change
Hillel Fradkin, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Qamar-ul Huda, Boston College
Steve Lenzner, New Citizenship Project
Eliseo Mercado, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University
Steve Rempe, Institute on Religion and Democracy
Sarah Wolfowitz, InterNews Network