Framing a ‘third way’ for the Muslim Ummah and the world

By Rahhalah Haqq

Conventional American public discourse characterizes Islamic resistance movements as intolerant and predisposed toward violence. Although many contemporary movements do have a strong anti-Western sentiment, it is often qualified and in any case is a fairly recent phenomenon. If Arabs and Muslims are extremists in anything, it is in the patience and tolerance they have shown toward persistent Western interference. Seen from within, Islamic movements have much more important characteristics than their alleged intolerance and violence.

One central concept is social justice, a component of ‘adl. In the West, where it is fashionable to be anti-social under the pretense that socialism is obsolete, it is easy to overlook calls for social justice and fixate instead on violent struggle. To see social and political movements only in terms of violence (real or imagined) is to see them in terms that are important only to a narrow set of strategic interests. This might be understandable for Westerners who may be unaware and taken in by propaganda, or who adhere to various political agendas, but it is tragic when parroted thoughtlessly by Muslims. In the present world climate, to be a Muslim at all—moderate, extreme, or whatever label one chooses—is by definition to be politicized. Muslims cannot be apolitical; they can only be unaware of how their identity is publicly politicized. Until this is accepted and until it informs public relations, academic endeavors, and other encounters with the West and modernist institutions, any efforts to liberate Muslims from colonialism, imperialism and their consequences can only be illusory.

With this in mind, a few general observations and recommendations are in order. A detailed plan of action can be reserved for future studies, which can hopefully be conducted collaboratively with concerned Muslims and organizations in a variety of contexts. The danger of offering ‘solutions’ after proposing any complex problem facing Muslims is that if those solutions seem somehow unfeasible or far-fetched, then the problems may be dismissed as well. The fact is, seeking simple solutions to complex problems is itself problematic, and suggests an inability to comprehend the depth and complexity of the problems. If described and understood properly, problems may even suggest their own solutions.

Foremost among the problems facing Muslims is Western education. This is a form of colonization, and higher education is a form of higher colonization. With respect to knowledge and power, education has an impact on the way people interpret knowledge, since education is largely about putting in place conceptual mechanisms—conscious and unconscious—and other methodologies for understanding how the world works. While people clearly learn about themselves and their world in other settings, formal education is an important site of identity construction and validation of cultural norms. So, to avoid falling prey to Western interpretations as if they were the only ones, and to have the presence of mind to see beyond contrived interpretations of current events, it is necessary to reconstruct relationships to education and develop educational systems that are not constrained by the Western nexus of knowledge and power.

This can begin with a series of questions. What is education for? When did it come about? Has it changed? Why? What kind of world does it imagine? What possibilities are left out or marginalized in Western education? Why? How might an Islamic educational system operate? Education is especially crucial for two reasons: it is how Western academics and policy pundits validate their power to produce public images of Muslims, and it is also the tool by which the West constructs its loyal proxies to maintain and guard the Western world order. The West is unsure of itself and is currently in the process of redesigning its own sense of purpose. To the extent that Islam is intertwined with the West in a dichotomous relationship, the West also has to redesign ‘Islam’, to create its own ‘Islam.’ This has already begun, and as long as Muslims remain in this sort of love/hate relationship with the West (and with America in particular), the imbalance of power must result in a reconfigured version of Islam along American-defined lines.

Much of the world is already rising up against the Western order, as is evident from the various forms of opposition to the new global casino-economy. Muslims need to get involved in high profile and broad-based resistance movements, but these have to be selected carefully, since many reproduce the dominant paradigms in different guises. Jubilee 2000 is a good example of a co-opted social movement, from the perspective of the Islamic world. Calling for the complete cancellation of debt to Third World countries, Jubilee 2000 takes its name from Biblical concepts and is headed by a number of Christian and missionary organizations in coalition with various left-wing, labor, progressive and environmental organizations. Muslims are absent from the movement in any meaningful way. In fact, Jubilee 2000 media-programming has also succeeded in linking the greed and exploitation of global capitalism with ‘Arab oil.’ Several of its video press-releases show pictures of sinister sheiks and amirs, while solemn voice-overs intone the story of oil-largess in the 1970s providing the Northern banks with money to lend to the South at exploitative conditions and rates. The link is strong: rich Arabs—and Muslims, by extension, since in the Western mind the two are fused into one—are behind the current debt-crisis of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the Christians are coming to the rescue. Jubilee 2000 is a media coup for Christians and the secular left, who are taking advantage of the negative image of Arabs and Muslims in the West — along with a general absence of Muslim voices against globalization and world trade issues — to construct a worldwide movement that may alleviate some suffering and poverty for millions.

Joining Jubilee 2000 at this late date may be ineffective, since all of its iconography is from the Church. Instead, forming alternative movements within the ummah, especially by way of alliances between those segments that are groaning under enormous debt and those that are living comfortably in the West or in the oil-rich countries, seems necessary. The media campaign can begin immediately, via the internet and Muslim press. Muslims can at least acknowledge other broad-based movements and find ways to contribute to them, and anticipate future movements in order to play a more meaningful role in them, and perhaps even become trend-setters instead of followers, thus fulfilling our Qur’anic role as the ummatan wasatan. This is a good example of how knowledge and power are intertwined: the West now has the power to define images, and thus maintains its own power and determines the utility of images. Those who do not have their images in the mix, who do not control how they are publicly represented, are effectively rendered powerless. In a modernist context, George Orwell once said that "who controls the present controls the past: who controls the past controls the future." Post-modernity is characterized by imagery as a form of hyper-reality, and so who controls the imagery controls the reality, and past, present, and future become increasingly convoluted.

The time is ripe for Muslims to launch their own media conglomerates, with independent satellites and broadcasting. There is certainly ample wealth and talent in the ummah for this, and colonization and fear are the only real obstacles. This needs to be done not only for da’wah or providing information about Islam for public-relations purposes, but in order to provide an alternative perspective—in this case Islamic—on how the world works, why it got that way, and where it might be heading. But at the same time it needs to be remembered that the information superhighway sifts and sorts knowledge and images, ideologically but also as a result of the limitations and inherent biases of computer technology and the digital domain. The virtual world, in the end, is no substitute for the real world, but it can shape the way people relate to the real world. And finally, Muslims need to be distrustful of the Western media, which have an extremely poor track-record in dealing with Islamic issues. Since media-images form a sort of hyper-reality, faster, larger, and seemingly more real than the plain lives most people live, providing the Western media wit images fuels their control over reality, virtual or otherwise. This means that a truly Islamic media must look and operate in ways that are unintelligible—and thus useless—to the West as it stands.

In this context, it is important to emphasize that globalization is a euphemism for Westernization, (more specifically, Americanization), and that the Western corporate media have already convinced most of the world that globalization is inevitable and that everyone will have to accept it and adjust to it. The media megaliths also define the ‘enemies’ of this supposed inevitability. But much of this is largely speculation and strategic wishing thinking. No one really knows the future, except Allah. What is happening is that, while claiming to ‘predict’ the future, Western governments and corporations are defining and prescribing a future they wish to build, and attempting to enlist a global consensus in this endeavor. But several futures are imaginable and possible, and the work of the present can involve rescuing the future. To the extent that Americanization has been successful in steering Muslims westward, some of those possible futures have already been colonized or excluded from public discussion. One way out of this is to develop and put into practice alternative visions of many possible futures, and convince others, by example, on any scale possible, that they are better than or at least just as viable as the current Western prescriptions. In this way, the so-called Third World, of which the Muslim world is a part, can actually become a source and model of a ‘third way’ outside the self-destructive Western dichotomies. For otherwise Muslims may be sucked into the vacuum of the post-Cold War vortex, merely fulfilling their ancient role vis-a-vis the West, providing the West with a self-telling mirror and nothing else. Or, by mining the Qur’an, Seerah, and other sources of Islamic wisdom and insight, Muslims can contribute to an emerging ‘third way’ and leave the West to its own devices, to implode or self-destruct, or simply fade away.