Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy (RaceReligion) - Softcover

Corbett, Rosemary R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1503600815 ISBN 13: 9781503600812

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Drawing on a decade of research into the community that proposed the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," this book refutes the idea that current demands for Muslim moderation have primarily arisen in response to the events of 9/11, or to the violence often depicted in the media as unique to Muslims. Instead, it looks at a century of pressures on religious minorities to conform to dominant American frameworks for race, gender, and political economy. These include the encouraging of community groups to provide social services to the dispossessed in compensation for the government's lack of welfare provisions in an aggressively capitalist environment. Calls for Muslim moderation in particular are also colored by racist and orientalist stereotypes about the inherent pacifism of Sufis with respect to other groups. The first investigation of the assumptions behind moderate Islam in our country, Making Moderate Islam is also the first to look closely at the history, lives, and ambitions of the those involved in Manhattan's contested project for an Islamic community center.

About this title

About the Author

Rosemary R. Corbett is Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Making Moderate Islam

Sufism, Service, and the "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy

By Rosemary R. Corbett

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5036-0081-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Debating Moderate Islam, 
1. Islamic Traditions and Conservative Liberalisms, 
2. Service, Anti-Socialism, and Contests to Represent American Muslims, 
3. Sufism and the Moderate Islam of the New Millennium, 
4. From Sufism without Politics to Politics without Sufism, 
5. The Micro-Politics of Moderation, 
6. The Prophet's Feminism: Women's Labor and Women's Leadership, 
7. Islam in the Age of Obama: What's More American than Service?, 
Conclusion: Community Service and the Limits of Inclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

ISLAMIC TRADITIONS AND CONSERVATIVE LIBERALISMS

"AMERICA WAS FOUNDED on Judeo-Christian principles — that's the basis of our laws, and people try to deny it," claimed Representative Mike Reynolds, author of a 2010 bill to ban the use of Islamic law in Oklahoma courts. Although midterm elections often seem unremarkable, the 2010 election was an exception, as various critics of the Cordoba House project — particularly Republicans on the far right and those catering to the Tea Party, a new right-wing political movement — tried to harness opposition to the so-called Ground Zero Mosque for electoral gain. Similar ballot initiatives appeared in over two dozen states during the next two years, with supporters frequently emphasizing that the use of Islamic law in the United States would violate America's "Judeo-Christian" heritage.

Use of the words "Judeo-Christian" to describe US history and identity is ubiquitous in American political rhetoric. The term is a seemingly timeless characterization of American society. Crucially, not only does the expression have a much shorter and more complicated history than its ancient connotations convey, but it is also often employed euphemistically to denote a Christian (and, more specifically, Protestant) perspective or position. As late as World War II, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman found their attempts to create national religious cohesion challenged by the fact that they could not get Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders to participate in interreligious endeavors, primarily because conservative Protestants refused to work with Catholics. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in contrast, the notion that the United States has a Judeo-Christian heritage was firmly cemented in the minds of conservative Protestants like Reynolds. Yet, despite this strongly stated conviction about the country's dual heritage, Reynolds clarified in his same comments the singular nature of the impulse that led him to introduce State Question 755: concern "about Christian values in our nation."

Evangelical politicians cited America's Judeo-Christian character as a reason why Muslims posed a national threat before the Ground Zero Mosque debate of 2010. For example, when the first Muslim elected to Congress — black American Keith Ellison from Minnesota — performed his oath of office with Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an instead of a Bible in 2006, Republican Congressman Virgil Goode warned that "we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon of freedom-loving peoples around the world."

It was in response to claims like these that Feisal Abdul Rauf promoted his narrative of Abrahamic (Jewish-Christian-Muslim) tradition after 9/11 and penned his 2004 book, What's Right with Islam. Although many advocates of interfaith cooperation echoed his narrative after 9/11, it was not always well received — particularly not after the Ground Zero Mosque debate. At a January 2012 campaign stop in South Carolina, for example, presidential candidate Rick Santorum not only spoke in terms of Judeo-Christian heritage, he pointedly excluded Muslims from so-called Abrahamic traditions and from the ethical lineage that stems from them. Equality "doesn't come from Islam ... It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," Santorum, a conservative Catholic, argued. (Muslims trace their religious lineage not through Isaac, but through Ishmael, Abraham's first son.)

Santorum was not Rauf's only conservative Catholic detractor. Newt Gingrich, another 2012 Republican presidential candidate, was a more prominent spokesperson for the anti-Muslim movement and against Cordoba House. Long active in trumpeting the nation's Judeo-Christian history, Gingrich led the Republican takeover of Congress on a "family values" platform in 1994. After he was charged with eighty-four counts of ethics violations, the former Southern Baptist retired from Congress in 1998 and pursued a new religious and political path: he converted to his third wife's Catholic faith and founded Gingrich Productions to promote his "vision of an America in which a belief in the Creator is once again at the center." This vision characterizes his 2010 film about the dangers of "radical Islam" called America At Risk: A War with No Name, as well as his 2010 and 2011 books, To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine and A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters.

Between 2010 and 2012, Gingrich went to extraordinary lengths to condemn Cordoba House and the larger Abrahamic vision of America it was to instantiate. Yet his rhetoric overstated his ideological differences with Rauf. Undoubtedly, he and politicians like Santorum are in many ways more socially conservative than the imam. Nevertheless, as I demonstrate below, both Rauf's and Gingrich's philosophies are liberal in terms of the Lockean liberalism evoked in the Declaration of Independence, of Progressive Era liberals who viewed Protestant America as the triumphant culmination of world history (a theme each modifies to include Catholicism or Islam), and of the post-Great Society neoliberalism that stresses individual responsibility, the privatization or repeal of state welfare provisions, and government involvement in the economy primarily on behalf of the market. This latter variety of market liberalism has often come to define the political perspectives of politicians and pundits like Gingrich — ones more commonly called "conservative."

Tellingly, although Rauf describes American society as "Abrahamic" and Gingrich insists it is "Judeo-Christian" in culture and origin, both define the nation's identity in terms of an exceptional "American Creed" based on US founding documents, fortified by religious roots and replete with economic implications. A closer look at this creed reveals the liberal philosophies of rights and neoliberal economic arrangements — including those in which religious organizations, rather than the state, provide community services — central to each man's story of American progress and uniqueness. Meanwhile, a closer look at the history that led them to write such narratives illuminates how the racialized themes of service and anti-socialism have been central to religious minorities' struggles for acceptance since at least the mid-twentieth century — but not in the ways Gingrich and Rauf suggest.

The American Creed: Common Ethics, Liberal Rights, and Liberal Markets

In his 2004 book, Rauf mixes theology with history, sociology, psychology, biology, and even game theory. His argument is structured to demonstrate how US political and economic systems progressively evolved to fulfill Islamic norms, even though the lives and traditions of Muslim Americans have been little noticed until fairly recently. The core of the book focuses on what Islam and the United States can offer each other, and this discussion is framed by an opening segment on common Abrahamic origins and a later chapter on contemporary historical convergence. That later chapter is devoted to demonstrating how Protestant-dominated America developed into a Protestant-Catholic-Jewish nation whose leaders imbued society with Abrahamic ethics. It also forecasts the inevitable Americanization and acceptance of Muslims.

Rauf's footnotes for these sections read as a "who's who" of American intellectuals, such as sociologist Will Herberg, author of the 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, and as an inventory of iconic Muslim thinkers, including the twelfth-century Sufi thinker Muhammad ibn al-Ghazali, whom Rauf likens to Protestant reformer Martin Luther. His penultimate chapter on history is the progressive narrative's denouement, a demonstration of Rauf's frequently iterated assertion that "America is substantively an 'Islamic' country ... whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of government." A final chapter outlines the "New Vision for Muslims and the West" promised in the subtitle of the book. This new vision for getting Muslims and other Americans to recognize their common Abrahamic heritage and ethics and to jointly export American liberal democracy and free markets contains action items for the US government, for educators, for the media, and for religious communities (all targets of ASMA and Cordoba programming), as well as for business elites.

For evidence of the Abrahamic-American ethical convergence, Rauf points to the nation's founding documents and the liberal philosophies of religion, reason, and rights they express. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution exemplify "the core values" of the Abrahamic ethic, he argues. Because the Declaration of Independence "ground[ed] itself in reason, just as the Quran and the Abrahamic ethic did in asserting the self-evident oneness of God," he asserts, it embodies the moral and philosophical worldview revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Referencing the third and thirtieth chapters (suras) of the Qur'an, the imam also introduces readers to the Islamic concepts of nature (al-fitrah) and the "religion" of nature (din al-fitrah, which he translates as "natural religion"). Rauf then compares these Qur'anic teachings on what he calls the Islamic tradition of natural religion with the Declaration's mention of the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," concluding that the natural law referred to in the nation's founding documents is synonymous with what Muslims call shari'ah. For Rauf, shari'ah is not just complementary to American values, it is based in the same mixture of reason and revelation. Consequently, although no political society on earth will ever embody Islamic precepts as fully as the Prophet Muhammad's did, the United States comes as close as possible and constitutes a "shariah-compliant" state.

While expanding Will Herberg's tri-fold narrative of Protestant-Catholic-Jewish America into one of Muslim-Christian-Jew, Rauf addresses some of the potential concerns non-Muslim interlocutors might have. One is that an Abrahamic framing cannot accommodate broad religious diversity. In response, Rauf points to the pluralistic history of many Muslim-governed societies (especially Cordoba) and repeatedly asserts that religious freedom is fundamental to Islam. (God, after all, endowed humans with free will.) Additionally, he reemphasizes the "natural" aspect of his argument and puts it in terms of the Founders' prescriptions. Quoting Hamilton and Jefferson on the divinely inspired laws of nature, Rauf posits that, when the Founders cited the God-given "rights of 'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,'" they adumbrated "cardinal moral truths" that all religious groups uphold. Because all Americans hold these founding tenets and rights in common, he concludes, these values constitute the American Creed — a "peculiarly American" form of the Abrahamic ethic to which even atheists subscribe.

In addition to arguing that all Americans subscribe to the basic truths of Islam, whether they recognize it or not, Rauf attempts to neutralize fears of Islamic law — namely, of the violence commonly depicted as inherent to shari'ah — and to build the basis for incorporating Muslims into state processes. In a point meant to dispel the image of corporal punishment, among other things, Rauf reminds his readers that US laws already "institutionalize" the Abrahamic ethic. Therefore, they already accomplish the goals shari'ah is designed to effect. Further, because Muslims are commanded to observe the laws of the societies in which they live, he clarifies, they have no need to reject or re-create them. However, Rauf admonishes, the United States does fall short on its pluralistic promise by not permitting Muslims the same accommodations afforded other religious minorities (e.g., Jewish Americans): the ability to consult their own bodies of law to settle "personal status" cases involving divorce, child custody, and inheritance. At the very least, he proposes, the judiciary could have advisors who operate as translators between religious communities and legal authorities and who advise judges on whether laws are "kosher or Shariah-compliant." Because the United States already embodies the Abrahamic ethic, Rauf reiterates, such a system would not challenge most legal decisions. Crucially, though, creating this kind of "subsidiary entity within the judiciary" would help turn the increasingly secular country back to its faith-based founding. Moreover, it would demonstrate to Muslims in the rest of the world that the United States is a God-centered nation rather than a secular materialist one.

Finally, Rauf argues that divine law and the Declaration of Independence mandate certain economic arrangements — ones badly needed in the Muslim world. These are "free enterprise and a free market economy," which, when coupled with individual rights and concern for the disadvantaged, he believes, "imply vigorous economic competition and high social mobility." Together, Rauf asserts, democracy and free-market capitalism create a social environment that enables believers to live out the primary commandment underlying all authentic religions: to "love one's neighbor" as oneself. Proof of this resides in American "democratic capitalism," which — because it combines "democracy with a free-market economy," he argues — has fueled a historically unprecedented expansion of freedom and equality for all peoples.

Rauf acknowledges that Americans sometimes fail to live up to their founding ideals, and his 2004 book is not short on critique, from the labeling of civilian casualties in Iraq as "collateral damage" instead of "terrorism" to US support for repressive regimes. Nevertheless, he forecasts, once Muslims and other Americans recognize their commonalities, they can jointly reorient wayward American practices back to their Abrahamic origins and, by extending democratic capitalism around the world, undercut extremism — what he defines as a response to both "militant secularism" and material deprivation. With these goals in mind, Rauf explains in the book's final pages, he created the Cordoba Initiative.

Five years after publishing his treatise on how to recreate the spirit of Cordoba, Rauf announced plans to open Cordoba House. Less than a year later, the backlash was so severe that Roger Cohen of the New York Times wrote, "not since 9/11 has Islamophobia been at such a pitch in the United States." This backlash took several forms, including violence against Muslims and those taken to be Muslim (often Sikhs) and the destruction or vandalizing of mosques and other Muslim-owned properties across the nation. Instead of engaging in such overt acts of aggression, some Americans protested the creation or expansion of other mosques and Islamic centers,while others concentrated on combatting the scenario Gingrich frequently warned against in his 2010 film: the Muslim conquest of America effected, in part, by replacing the Constitution with shari'ah. As Cohen noted in his Times piece, "[s]hariah is the new hot-button wedge issue, as radicalizing as abortion or gay marriage, seized on byRepublicans to mobilize conservative Americans against the supposed 'stealth jihad' of Muslims in the United States and against a Democratic president portrayed as oblivious to — or complicit with — the threat."

It is unlikely that Gingrich failed to notice the political benefits of denouncing the Cordoba House project or of vowing to outlaw Islamic law in the United States during his multi-year campaign for the presidency. Admittedly, Gingrich's reasons for opposing Rauf could be attributed to significant policy differences — particularly on Mideast issues. Nevertheless, what many people might find surprising is the extent to which the premises of Gingrich's philosophy overlap with Rauf's. This overlap is most evident in the ways Gingrich similarly attributes America's unique combination of religion, reason, and (economic) liberties to the American Creed exemplified in the nation's founding documents.

"The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and the unique American identity that arose from a civilization that honored them, form what we call today 'American Exceptionalism,'" Gingrich argues in the introduction to his 2011 book. Starting with his first chapter — devoted to outlining how the American Creed, grounded in natural law, was forged from a mix of Enlightenment reason and religious devotion — Gingrich stresses the importance of recovering the ethos of the Revolutionary era. Only in so doing can the nation avert impending disaster and prosper in the free-market manner the Founding Fathers intended.

The fact that Gingrich's liberal creed so closely resembles Rauf's is no accident, though it is also by no means intentional. Their commonalities stem from their reliance on common sources — ones not immediately apparent because the two do not cite the same authors in the portions of their analyses devoted to liberal democracy or US republican history. Focusing on the neoliberal economic precepts each derives from the American Creed, however, allows the individuals and institutions that influenced their models of American exceptionalism to emerge and reveals a more complicated history of American religious minorities than their narratives acknowledge.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making Moderate Islam by Rosemary R. Corbett. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1503600815
• ISBN 13: 9781503600812
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304