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ShareMumbai: It is difficult to maintain intellectual and cultural segregation in a globalised society. There are unforced, inevitable, frequent encounters of the everyday kind, where prejudices do not melt away but certainly become a little more nuanced. Muslims are forced to reckon with things non-Muslim even as non-Muslims discover that the Muslim world and Muslims are more complex than they had imagined.
These subtle meetings of people and minds and ideas do not draw much attention until a controversy flares up. The late Edward Said started off one with his cult essay, 'Orientalism', in 1978, where he had argued passionately and with much evidence that the West had misread Islam and Muslims because of the imperialist and colonial nature of the encounter in the 19th and 20th centuries. It soon became the staple argument of most people from Asia and Africa who smarted against the intellectual domination of the West.
The next big controversy flared up exactly a decade later, in 1988, when Iran's populist dictator Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued that infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, a bad book which got a fresh lease of life because of the diktat. The issue dominated the East-West debate so much that nothing else seemed to matter about Muslims and the so-called Muslim world.
The cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001 altered the relations and perceptions between the Muslims and the rest of the world once again. It seemed that the whole of the Muslim world had become a vast ghetto, and there were no bridges between them and the others. The global war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq has only heightened the tense equations.
Reflecting the despair of September 11, 2001, Canadian journalist Irshad Manji wrote an angry book with the provocative title, The Trouble With Islam Today (2004). She writes of the book, "The Trouble With Islam is an open letter from me, a Muslim voice of reform, to concerned citizens worldwide -- Muslim and not. It's about why my faith community needs to come to terms with the diversity of ideas, beliefs and people in our universe, and why non-Muslims have a pivotal role in helping us get there." This was indeed sweet music to ears of Western critics of the Muslim world. But to the Muslims themselves, Manji was an ignorant Muslim ranting in a Western mode against Muslims. It was both true and untrue. There is no denying that Manji had no idea of the rich and complicated world and history of Islam. Then she would have known that there was enough diversity within the traditional Islamic world, and only the fanatics inside and outside the Muslim circles were trying to pretending it was otherwise. After a flickering moment of fame in the Western liberal media, Manji has faded away.
The other western Muslim voice is that of Lebanese-born Iranian Shia, Fouad Ajami, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He focuses on the politics of West Asia and tries to deconstruct for westerners the cultural and traditional codes of Arab society and politics. Ajami stands at the opposite end of the ideas spectrum of Edward Said. He does not see the Western view of Islam as problematic. His reputation in West Asia is in inverse proportion to the one he enjoys in the US. The other man who has written extensively on Islam, the Muslim world and west Asia is Bernard Lewis, but he is suspected by Arabs and other Muslims to be a Zionist sympathiser.
There has also been a counter-blast from other Muslims living in the West. There is Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which expresses in an absorbing monologue the feelings and views of a Muslim who has faced the backlash of the post-9/11 Western paranoia about everything Muslim, from traditional beards, to prayers, which are a far cry from extremist violence. Ahmed's monologue depicts in an intense interior drama the ironies and ambiguities that mark the encounter of two estranged civilizations. The other work of interest is that of Asra Q Nomani, an Indian-born Wall Street Journal staff reporter, whose Standing Alone In Mecca: A Pilgrimage Into The Heart of Islam (2007) narrates in a straightforward manner a single mother's rediscovery of the roots of her faith. She meets the Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, in Allahabad during the Kumbh Mela, and visits Hindu shrines in the Himalayas before undertaking the mandated pilgrimage to Mecca.
These are general, popular books by critics and defenders of the Muslim worldview that reflect the exigencies and pressures of the moment. But they do not capture the real values and contradictions of Muslim civilization. That is a job that scholars have been carrying out with great rigour. Lebanese scholar Mahmoud M Ayoub's The Crisis Of Muslim History: Religion And Politics In Early Islam (2006) boldly locates the problems of the Islamic polity in the period immediately after the death of Prophet Muhammad.
The period of the first four caliphs is considered in traditional Islamic history to be an ideal one, serving as an example for the rest of the Muslim rulers. Ayoub goes back to original sources to trace the many problems faced by the first four caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali. He demonstrates that there is less of the sacred in the events that followed the death of the Prophet. It was political turbulence, pure and simple.
Another interesting and important book that describes the bewildering diversity of Islamic history, covering continents and centuries, languages and cultures, is R Stephen Humphreys' Islamic History: A Framework of Inquiry (1996). Humphreys explains the difficulties of handling Islamic history: "...the administrative history of Umayyad Egypt calls for a thorough command of Greek, Arabic, and Coptic, of papyrology, numismatics, and archaeology, of early Islamic historiography, of late Roman and Islamic law and administrative practice." Now that is a superhuman task even for the most rigorous and dedicated scholar. The so-called Islamic experts of the popular media fall far short of the standards that the task demands.
It does not mean that no good work is coming out of present-day scholarship. The most admirable accomplishment in English language has been the five volumes of Encyclopaedia of the Quran (Brill, Leiden, Boston, Koln; first volume, 2001; fifth volume, 2006). The general editor of the encyclopaedia is Georgetown University's Jane Dammen McAuliffe. It contains interpretive entries by Muslim and non-Muslim, eastern and western scholars, who hold traditional and modern views. This may not please either the orthodox or the radical moderns, but it shows what can be done through collaborative scholarship to understand a difficult subject.
They may not be popular or controversial, and therefore not many people may get to hear of them, but it is scholarly works such as these that contribute to greater understanding. The true bridges of understanding are really built by selfless scholars who try to understand and explain the complex issues involved instead of indulging in propaganda. They may remain unknown but they fulfill the role of building bridges over troubled waters.
