The Absent-Minded Muslim Public Intellectual

Like many Muslims, I attended protests for Gaza and like many Muslims I found myself looking to see the guidance our leaders have to offer. On the cusp of yet another useless OIC and Arab League summit, we were gifted by the soft spoken insights of Hamza Yusuf in a seemingly talking down manner on the Kim Iversen show. The Muslims on Twitter (or X as its called nowadays) are furious and critical of this appearance. Nowhere in the brief discussion is there any enjoining good and forbidding evil, or a call to justice and truth. What we get instead is psycho-babble about the trauma of Netanyahu, himself who started out as a terrorist, and who was on his way out as leader of the Israeli government. Is anything he said wrong or incorrect? No, but if not absent-minded, it was a clearly a sidestepping of Islam’s martial tradition and misdirect towards what has become Hamza Yusuf’s Hellenic-style California Sufism that is more academic than practical, more malleable to Americanism and controlling of Muslim masses, and more eager for pale-skinned converts than championing justice for the not-as-pale-skinned oppressed. To be sure, the contribution of Hamza Yusuf is great to the education of Islam (his Life of the Prophet (salallahu alayhi waslaam) Seerah CD set is likely the best Islamic resource in the English language) is uncontested, but liberation theologian he is not. I suspect Hamza Yusuf’s American upbringing which leads him to be critical of Muslim garb at times (see here) or perhaps his fear of reprisal against his seminary, jeopardize his commitment to justice, and so whenever he appears in public, he is content speaking about Muslims rather than speaking for Muslims. 

Why is there no public intellectual at the forefront of the Muslim masses? The now deceased Palestinian academic and intellectual, Edward Said spoke about public intellectuals commitment to justice and the challenges they face in speaking truth to power at length in his Reith lectures on the “Representations of the Intellectual”

The fundamental problem is therefore how to reconcile one’s identity and the actualities of one’s own culture, society and history to the reality of other identities, cultures, peoples. This can never be done simply by asserting one’s preference for what is already one’s own: tub-thumping about the glories of ‘our’ culture or the triumphs of ‘our’ history is not worthy of the intellectual’s energy, especially not today when so many societies are composed of different races and backgrounds as to beggar any reductive formulas. As I have been discussing it here, the public realm in which intellectuals make their representations is extremely complex, and contains contradictory features. But the meaning of an effective intervention there has to rest on the intellectual’s unbudgeable conviction in a concept of justice and fairness that allows for differences between nations and individuals, without at the same time assigning them to hidden hierarchies, preferences, evaluations. Everyone today professes a liberal language of equality and harmony for all. The problem for the intellectual is to bring these notions to bear on actual situations where the gap between the profession of equality and justice, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rather less edifying reality, is very great.

…

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so, to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralise and finally kill a passionate intellectual life, it is these considerations, internalised and so to speak in the driver’s seat.

And finally a word about the mode of intellectual intervention. One doesn’t climb a mountain or pulpit and declaim from the heights. Obviously, you want to speak your piece where it can be heard best; and also you want it represented in such a way as to affiliate with an ongoing and actual process, for instance, the cause of peace and justice.

Yes, the intellectual’s voice is lonely, but it has resonance only because it associates itself freely with the reality of a movement, the aspirations of a people, the common pursuit of a shared ideal.

Let’s look at an example. Opportunism dictates that in the West, much given to full-scale critiques of, for instance, Palestinian terror or immoderation; you denounce them soundly, and then go on to praise Israeli democracy. Then you must say something good about peace. Yet intellectual responsibility dictates, of course, that you say all those things to Palestinians, but your main point is made in New York, in Paris, in London, around the issue which in those places you can most affect, by promoting the idea of Palestinian freedom and the freedom from terror and extremism of all concerned, not just the weakest and most easily bashed party. Speaking the truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change. (end quote)

I wish Hamza Yusuf and other Muslim scholars would listen to this entire lecture from Edward Said and pondering on these quotations in particular. What a waste to ignore Edward Said’s example as the most dangerous academic in the West and his guidance on the errors intellectuals often make. What is emerging now in the West is a growing number of academic Muslim converts, who are drawn to Islam because of its intellectual richness, where they can get high on how stimulating Islam is and how it echoes all their favorite philosophies and ideas in front of captive audiences (see this panel discussion where we get no mention of a Muslim scholar until halfway through the discussion and one paraphrased hadith near the end) but offer nothing more than that. Islam is not content with insightful observations that do not contribute to spiritual and moral upliftment — any and all insightful observations must be martialled for justice and tawhid. To make my point clear, imagine how would Malcolm X have appeared on the Kim Iversen show? For a Muslim, justice and religion cannot be separated. We simply cannot allow any movement in the direction of separating justice from Islam and that is the trend now with Hamza Yusuf’s recent behaviour and brand of Sufism.

And justice requires confrontation and conflict and standing up for the oppressed. If the highest articulation of Islam is found in Sufism as many suggest and if the most oppressed today are the Palestinians, this means Palestinians cannot be ignored by Sufis. Sufism has always been martially inclined and there is historical and prophetic precedent for this statement. Muslims are to pray on the battlefield, in rows, as if bound and ready for engaging the enemy. Our tawaf requires we expose our biceps as a show of strength and a warning to our enemies. “Dua is the weapon of the believer.” Ribat is the tradition of spiritual retreat while at the same time engaged in guarding the borders of Muslim lands. The Ottoman Khalifah would be inaugurated by the sword of the dervish. Why would a dervish have a sword? Why were most of Salahuddin’s lieutenants murids of the great Shaykh Abdul Qadir al-Jilani (rahimullah). Why were great Muslim freedom fighters Abdel Kader al-Jazai’ri and Imam Shamyl Sufis? It is because dhikr and spiritual exercise is not in service of only spiritual development, but training for advancing justice in society. Surah al-Anfal verse 45 speaks of dhikr in conjunction with battle: “O believers! When you face an enemy, stand firm and remember Allah often so you may triumph.” Worship is intertwined with war. How could it not be when we are warring against shaytan and our nafs that we would not understand a thing or two about battle? Any attempt to make Islam a milque-toast game of intellectualizing and ruminating endlessly until conviction becomes muted cannot stand and will fall apart and lead to Muslims going astray and away from the truth. A lackadaisical and seasonal tasawwuf that rears its head in Rabi’ul Awwal and maybe Ramadhan and then goes back to sleep academizing and philosophizing when injustice occurs has no future. Islam is about justice and we do not have the luxury of scholars alienated from the ugly realities of the believer. 

In our times, we are seeing the separation of belief and knowledge – iman is in the believers, the simple awamm, while ilm has gone to the ulema. The bifurcation of ilm and iman is a sign of the End Times. The hadith states that the believers are ‘God’s witnesses on earth’ – not the ulema. Allah has not put over us a anointed priestly caste, as in the Bani Isra’il but rather he has made the ummah self-referential in its morality with the Qur’an and Sunnah as it’s unchanging guide. The ulema remind, but the believer is the one who doesn’t forget, in a feedback loop ultimately where the Islam of the jama’ah is what we should stick to.

The public intellectual is what a Muslim scholar should be. A galvanizing force, not yet another tool to control the Muslims employed by non-Muslim entities too afraid of 2 billion unpredictable Muslims who if mobilized properly could destroy billion dollar companies that finance Zionism. 

Some good has come of the last few weeks with the Muslims awakening slowly and realizing their own strength is greater than the strength of their armies, politicians, scholars, even multinational corporations – whether they be righteous,  clueless and useless, or corrupt, greedy and useless. Any delusion of being lead from the front is also gone; we know for certain we only have leaders who lead from the back, backseat drivers, who are too civilized, Westernized and domesticated to even imagine speaking truth to power. We know now the Islam of sabr, suffering, and sacrifice is true faith that will lead to victory. We know what sort of leaders we don’t want to support and what sort of leaders we want to raise. 

Subhana kallahumma wa bihamdika ash-haduana la ilaha illa Ant astaghfiruka wa atubu ilayk, ameen.