Where are the moderates, indeed

Where are the moderates? asks Dan Varisco in a recent post on Tabsir.net. Why are "moderate Muslims" not speaking out against the recent media feeding frenzies regarding Muslims--the teddy bear caper in the Sudan and the Saudi rape survivor who has been sentenced to lashings? And, why aren't "moderates" responding effectively to the critiques of people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

I'm not going to attempt some sort of totalizing answer. For one thing, I don't call myself a "moderate." I find that sort of labeling of Muslims insufferably patronizing. "Moderate" in relation to what--al-Qa'ida? Since when has the antics of Osama et. al. become the yardstick against which we should all be measured? And, by what right does anyone arrogate to her/himself the power to measure us? What exactly is a "moderate," anyhow?

But more to the point, I find that when this sort of  "moderate"/"extremist" dichotomy is imposed on Muslims, it effectively silences people like me because it de-legitimizes our voices and says that we either don't exist, or that we are too marginal to be bothered with. In that case, why would I join the conversation? What purpose would it serve?

I won't try to answer for all Muslims who have abstained from commenting publicly on either the teddy bear crisis or the Saudi rape survivor's ordeal. But, speaking for myself, my view of both issues can be summarized by six words reportedly uttered under very different circumstances by a German general during the First World War: "We are fettered to a corpse."

I have no more control over what other Muslims think, do or say than I have over the wind. All that I can be sure of, nowadays, is that nine times out of ten (we'll talk about the one time out of ten later), it will sadden, horrify or grieve me. There was a time when I felt that it was my bounden duty to speak up against  every injustice in Muslim communities world wide. We knew and could handily deploy a raft of textual arguments against injustices ranging from denial of education to women to nuclear weapons.

But it eventually became clear to me that the issue at stake in most injustices is not texts. Texts are an excuse. All sides in any controversy (selectively) quote the Quran, hadiths, the views of early authorities, select medieval scholars with whom they agree, and their favourite modern figures as well. That sort of argument settles nothing.

What is really at stake are identity and power: who can claim "Islamic authenticity", and who has the power to define what that is. And, these battles of definition take place more often than not on the bodies of women--Muslim women, like the Saudi rape survivor, and sometimes also non-Muslim women, like the British schoolteacher who allowed her class to  name a teddy bear "Muhammad."

Rape survivors like that Saudi woman are punished primarily because Muslim women's bodies are paradoxically positioned as both central to "Islamic authenticity" and marginal to it. Because Muslim women's bodies are central in the sense that they are supposed to exemplify pure, authentic Islam uncontaminated by "Western" hedonism, they tend to be heavily penalized when they fail to live up to such an ideal. And, because Muslim women's bodies are also marginal--"other" to the normative male Muslim bodies that make up the Ummah (the fiqh  of ibada as well as the layout of most mosques make this clear)--they are also dispensible. While the verdict of the Saudi judge regarding the rape survivor from Qatif saddened me, it did not really surprise me. 

As for the British schoolteacher's case, it did not really surprise me either, given that so much of  modern Muslim discourses about modernity use the figure of the "Western woman" as a foil over against which to construct the "ideal Muslim woman." Like it or not, Western women's bodies have certain negative values associated with them for many (or even most) modern Muslims, and hence they too lend themselves to becoming a terrain for contestations of Islamic authenticity. (Where this sort of thing leaves Western Muslim women, whether they are from the Balkans, or are second or third generation immigrants born and raised in Europe or North America, or converts is a subject for another time.)

I agree, these cases are horrific and demand action. But how does one derail or reroute the discourses of authenticity which give rise to them? Even those "western" Muslim leaders who seem to be trying to escape such discourses--Imam Zaid Shakir, to give one example--only end up perpetuating them in a different guise. (Fpr  example, see his post on "honor killings" and Islam, which is apologetic and studiedly avoids introspective analysis of the issue. I don't doubt that he means well, but the strength of the preexisting discursive frame is such that he is unable to go beyond it and effectively address the underlying problems.)

Varisco interestingly enough criticizes women such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji for their writings and public posturings, indicting them for their "anger." Why, aren't women allowed to be angry? Maybe I shouldn't admit that I too am sometimes incandescently angry when I contemplate all the oppression and injustice that is going on in the name of Islam?

Why should Ali or Manji be held to a different standard than the many angry feminists in the last forty years who have publicly written damning accounts of growing up Catholic, Jewish, Mormon or Protestant?  Why is it apparently all right for women who aren't Muslim to tell their harrowing stories involving child abuse, sexual repression, theological manipulation, awful marriages and just plain stupidity on the part of religious leaders, but not for Muslims? While I often find Manji pretentious (she didn't invent ijtihad, for god's sake) and Ali far too right-wing (her apparent willingness to be used by racists against Muslim immigrants is horrifying), I don't regard what they have to say as without merit.

Ali's film, Submission, stereotypical as it was, does raise some important questions as far as I'm concerned:
Why do some Muslims deem the sight of quranic verses written on the body of a naked woman blasphemous, when in reality Muslim women's bodies are used in just that way in these contestations over "Islamic authenticity" and few protest?

To conclude, I'll note that there are also Muslim actions that give me hope, and allow me in all conscience to continue to admit publicly that I'm a Muslim. For example, at a recent international conference on Islam and HIV/AIDS in Johannesburg, South Africa, organized by Islamic Relief Worldwide, a gay Muslim man courageously outed himself in the presence of a roomful of conservative ulama. His action changed the direction of the conversation at that conference, with speakers acknowledging that in order to effectively deal with the spread of AIDS, they would have to try to combat the unsafe environment in many Muslim communities which makes gays reluctant to seek medical help.  While the refusal of the conference to move beyond the usual condemnation of homosexuality as "forbidden by Islam" is of course discouraging, the courage of such individuals indicates that the tide is turning; conservative voices no longer have the monopoly even in such conferences to determine who  counts as a Muslim.