American Public Policy and American-Muslim Politics - The Diigo Meta page

• 03 Feb 07
  

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  enemy-muslim islam muslim political-islam research-910

  •  The second thing to keep in mind is that notions of what is cruel and unusual, of what is barbaric, of what is barbaric, of what is draconian (which is the real basis upon which America rejects these punishments) are a function of culture, not law. It is only through changes in American culture that American attitudes towards such things are likely to change.
  • Islamically sanctioned
  •  This much said, it would be foolish to deny that the prospects for American acceptance of such institutions as stoning, or flogging or amputation are virtually nil, at least for the foreseeable future.
  •  It is precisely through this ability to penetrate and articulate the rules of Islamic law in ways that clearly define their benefit and utility to society at large that Muslims are likely to be able to influence the legal order in America. And it should be understood that once this is done, there are no Constitutional impediments to having these laws applied in the public domain. Muslims must be vocal and confident in articulating the public utility underlying the rules on things like riba, adultery, theft, drinking, contracts, pre-marital sex, child-custody and even polygyny.
  •  A more profitable approach for Muslims would be to look at the opportunities the Constitution affords them to promote their interests as Muslims and to take full advantage of those opportunities. According to the Constitution, the U.S. government cannot force a Muslim to renounce his or her faith; it cannot deny him or her the right to pray, or fast, or perform the pilgrimage; it cannot force him or her to eat pork, shave his beard or remove her hijab; it cannot deny Muslims the right to build mosques or to hold public office; it cannot deny them the right to criticize government officials and policies, including the person and the policies of the president. The U.S. government cannot even force a Muslim to pledge allegiance to the United State! Surely it must be worth the Muslims’ time and energy to ask if these (and many other) rights and opportunities should be squandered in the name of dogmatic minutae and uncritical readings of Islamic law and history, rather than turned to the benefit and welfare of Islam and the Muslims.
  • f in the future America becomes a predominantly Muslim country (politically or numerically) then Muslims will be responsible for ensuring that its legal and political order are consistent with the dictates of Islam. In the meantime, this becomes a questionable demand at best. The kind of confusion that has been generated over this issue is, I think, another example of what happens when Muslims in the West blindly import views and ideologies from the modern Muslim world.
  • MUSLIMS AND THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
  • No school and no jurist has ever held (to my knowledge) that is permissible for Muslims to reside in a non-Muslim land and remain completely passive, doing nothing to promote the safety and welfare of the Muslims and the dignity of Islam! This amounts, in effect, to what some jurists have construed to be a type of consensus (ijma) to the effect that if Muslims do decide to take up residence in a non-Muslim land they must, as a community (ala wajh al-kifayah), do everything that would appear necessary to ensure the safety and welfare of the Muslims and, above all, the dignity of Islam.
  • Child Protective Services’ discriminatory intervention into Muslim family life.
  • our retreat from the more difficult task of penetrating, appropriating and redirecting American culture
  • If Muslims are to establish a real existence here in America, one that will enable them not only to consume but to shape American reality, the Muslim cultural imagination will have to be liberated. Once this is done, Muslims will be able to move beyond the relatively safe arena of sports (Hakeem Olajuwan, and until recently, Mahmud ‘Abd al-Ra’uf, etc.) into those of literature, poetry music,  fashion design, comedy, interior decorating, etc., just as has existed throughout Islamic history, and just as exists in virtually every Muslim country in the world!
  •  I begin with an insight borrowed from the Italian neo-Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (d.19-). Gramsci had witnessed the collapse of the American economic system during the Great Depression of 1929. He also observed that despite the economic ruin that came to many among the elite, there was virtually no change in the social cum political relations among America’s haves and have-nots. Whereas one would have expected the haves’ loss of wealth to reduce them - socially and politically - to the status of have-nots, in the end they lost virtually nothing of their status as premier citizens who both assumed and received the right to deferential treatment. On this observation, Gramsci developed his concept of “hegemony,” via which he concluded that it was not control over the means of material production that determined relations of power and authority in society but control over the means of material production that determined relations of power and authority in society but control over the means of producing and disseminating intellectual products, namely, ideas and images. It was the educational, cultural and religious institutions along with the media and entertainment industry, that held the keys to how people saw themselves and interacted with each other in society. And where there existed no challenge to the views and images created by these institutions, politics and economics would do little to change the status quo.
  • But this is done with extreme caution and in the context of a conscious rejection of the proposition that their coming to America imposes upon them any obligation to assimilate. In fact, as one observer has recently noted, coming to America is now seen by many immigrants as the greatest ensurer of the right to remain themselves!
  •  From the outset, the enterprise of Muslim self-definition is complicated by the fact of the heterogeneous make-up of the Muslim community in America. American-born converts (the majority of whom are African-Americans) are a product of American history, as are their hopes, fears, fantasies and proper ambition. They are both repelled by the American experience, by virtue of their history as a marginalized minority, and attracted to it, by the virtue of their connection to a uniquely rich Afro-American historical and cultural tradition. Their search for a boa fide Muslim identity is still in its exploratory stage. To this point, however, the record of successive turns and turnabouts has proved one thing if nothing else: Whatever this Afro-American-Muslim identity turns out to be as a final product, if it is to be life-affirming as opposed to a paralyzing agent, it will have to embrace, however discriminately, rather than ignore the reality and history of African-Americans, just as effectively as it fortifies for them the boundaries between Islam and non-Islam.

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