Muslims Between Western Culture(s)

and
Western Cultural Authority
Sherman A. Jackson
The University of Michigan
International Conference on Muslims in Multicultural Societies
14-16 July 2010
Singapore
Given the history of Islam in the modern world, it not surprising that a certain protestspirit vis--vis the dominant cultures and intellectual traditions of the West should inform the
religious ethos of many Muslims across the globe. This is not always expressed in formal,
ideological terms. But even the now commonly used neologism, Islamic, which carried little
to no substantive meaning among pre-modern Muslims, is deployed in a manner that clearly sets
Islam apart not so much from atheism, paganism or even other religious traditions but first and
foremost from the West. Even so-called liberal or progressive Muslims are not always able
to deny this antithetical relationship; for their very effort to refute this antagonism must begin
with at least a provisional admission of its existence. Indeed, it seems to me, on some level at
least, that what may be ultimately modern about modernity for contemporary Muslims is the
fact that for the first time in history, the process of Muslim cultural, intellectual and even
institutional appropriation is complicated by a disquieting sense that to borrow from the now
ascending non-Muslim civilization connotes not simply unwarranted capitulation to the nonIslamic but constitutes a gesture that signals the ultimate superiority of non-Islam.
Having said this much, there is, to my mind, is nothing unqualifiedly wrong about this
diffidence towards the West. After all, one could argue, Islam itself is at its core protest
oriented, insisting, as it does, against all competing claims and presumptions, that There is no
god but God. As such, even above and beyond any direct subjugation of Muslims, efforts by

the modern West to absolutize various secular visions liberalism, capitalism, conservatism,
human rights, equality, democracy, freedom and the like would seem to render modernity a
potential hotbed of false absolutes and therefore of false pretensions to divine authority.1 In such
a context, serious commitment not only to Islam but to any revealed monotheism would seem to
provide ample occasion for protest and resistance. Thus, for example, speaking of the normative
relationship between Christianity and the dominant culture of the U.S., Stephen Carter, the quite
mainstream American Christian scholar insists, Religion, at its best, is subversive.... Religion
resists.2 Meanwhile, his equally Christian counterpart, Stanley Hauerwas, a pacifist,
incidentally, affirms, Christians train or should train their children to resist the authority of

This is eloquently captured in the Christian theologian J.F. Haughts investigation of the subtle

contradiction between soft atheists denial of transcendence, on the one hand, and their
invocation of absolute values (religion is evil, peace is good, al-Qaeda is bad), on the other: In
order to make such value judgments, one must assume, as the hard-core atheists [e.g., Sarte,
Camus] are honest enough to acknowledge, that there exists somewhere, in some mode of being,
a realm of rightness that does not owe its existence completely to human invention, Darwinian
selection, or social construction. If we allow the hard-core atheists into our discussion we can
draw this conclusion: If absolute values exist, then God exists. But if God does not exist, then
neither do absolute values, and one should not issue moral judgments as if they do. See J.F.
Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 26. Bracketed addition not in original.
Compare this position, incidentally, with the theistic subjectivism of the Asharite school of
Muslim theology. See my Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 77, and esp. 94-97. My point here is, of course, that only God can
author absolute, transcendent values, and even these are only as absolute as God says they are.
2

Stephen L. Carter, Gods Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (New

York: Basic, 2000), 31.

the state, not in the name of their rights as individuals, but because the justice of the state is to
be judged against Gods justice.3
Yet, unless those who are committed to protest in the name of Islam remain fully and
purposefully cognizant of the fundamental religious truths and values that validate, and ideally
animate, their protest, there may be little that distinguishes their agenda from secular, selfserving utopian movements.4 For there is an important difference between refusing to validate
anothers universe of values and meanings, on the one hand, and simply refusing to be the object
of that others will, on the other. And where these modes of protest are mistakenly conflated, the
result is invariably the reduction of religion to a cultural performance, an artful game of
symbolic manipulations and antipodean maneuvers aimed first and foremost at sustaining a sense
of identity-in-difference as an autonomous, self-validating ideal.
Refusing to validate anothers rgime of values and meanings is simply to deny their
ultimate authority as a matter of conscience. Here, however, speaking in religious terms, ones
objection is not merely to that other qua other; ones objection is based on ones inability to
reconcile the latters rgime of values and meanings with a transcendent rgime that is
understood to originate with God. This is fundamentally different from simply refusing to be the
object of anothers will. For, refusing to be the object of anothers will may amount to little
more than raising individual (or group) autonomy to the level of an absolute good. Beyond this,
the actual substance of that others will may hold little relevance in comparison with the fact that
the idea, value or institution in question is presumed to be the intellectual, cultural or
civilizational property of that other. Provenance, in other words, becomes in effect an absolute
3

S. Hauerwas, Character, Narrative, and Growth in the Christian Life, The Hauerwas Reader,

ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 252.
4

Islam and the Blackamerican, 171-72, 192.

in its own right and, if one is not careful, can ultimately come to function as a god, or to use the
Qurnic term, an ilh!
To be fair, however, and many Muslim liberals and progressives are often seem a bit
too willing to overlook this fact -- provenance has always been an issue for Islam. Muslims have
always been concerned about ensuring that they are not enshrining cultural or intellectual
artifacts that are not their own or are not informed and or sanctioned by the values and
sensibilities of their religion. This is ultimately part of the whole point of the negative category,
bidah, or unsanctioned innovation, and partly explains its power and ubiquitous invocation
throughout Muslim history. Going all the way back to the time of revelation, this sensibility is
manifested in such Qurnic injunctions as that commanding Muslims not to imitate others in
using the phrase, observe us but to say instead, watch us and listen. [2: 104] We see a
similar concern at work in the manner in which the Prophet settled upon the adhn, or Call to
Prayer, as a conscious alternative to both the bells used by the Christian community and the horn
of the Jews.5 Indeed, not only did the Prophet, explicitly forbid his followers from imitating
Jews, Christians and pagans of Arabia, he even occasionally ordered them to contradict their
practices directly, e.g., khlif al-yahd wa al-mushrikn!.6
These are all simply textual facts that no honest engagement with the sources of Islam
can ignore. And depending on how critically or not such precedents were indulged, Muslim

We could add the qiblah and the explicit terms in which the Qurn portrays it as an alternative

to the way of the People of the Book.

6

Indeed, one may note in this regard the famous hadith that warns Muslims against following the

ways of others: You will follow the ways of those before you, step by step, foot by foot, even if
they should enter into the hole of lizard. The Companions responded, Who, O Messenger of
God, the Jews and Christians? The Prophet replied, Who else? See -----

attitudes towards non-Muslim cultures and civilizations might range from principled acceptance
to reasoned caution to outright blind rejection. Even when Muslims did adopt ideas or
institutions from others, a general vigilance if not disdain towards conscious borrowing often
spawned attempts to disguise or falsify the actual provenance of what was borrowed. We see
this, for example, in some of the facile attempts to trace later ideas and developments back to the
time of Prophet. We also see it at work in aspects of what W. Montgomery Watt describes as
the Muslim myth of self-sufficiency.7
Such tendencies towards nativism notwithstanding, however, Muslims did not always
equate non-Muslim with un-Islamic. But where they failed to recognize the all-important
distinction between the substance of the ways of others and the mere fact that others happened to
settle upon and claim these ways as their own, the tendency would be to assume a negative
predisposition towards non-Muslim ways. And here we come to see that the tendency to invoke
provenance as the sole delineator between an Islamic and an un-Islamic way of life is not simply
a modern phenomenon. Even before the rise of the modern West as the presumed anti-thesis of
Islam, questions reflecting this tendency pressed hard. To take just one example, in a small
7

W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Fundamentalism and Modernity (London and New York:

Routledge, 1988), 13-14. Regarding Watts speculations on the borrowed origins of aspects of
the Qurn, one wonders how far back this thesis is to be extended. Is the Bible and everything
preceding it also to be counted a product of borrowing? Or is Islam alone exempt from
spontaneous divine interventions in the form of revelation? Beyond the question of revelation, I
should note that I do not necessarily subscribe to his (and others) apparent definition of
borrowing. As I have stated elsewhere, many ideas make their way into Islam because convert
communities simply assume them to be as legitimate under Islam as they were under their old,
pre-Islamic order. For more on this point see my On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in
Islam: Ab $Hmid al-Ghazls Fay$sal al-Tafriqa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),
14-16; Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, 32-33.

collection of published fatws, we read the following query put to the late Ayybid, early
Mamlk jurist, al-Izz b. Abd al-Salm (d. 660/ 1262), also known, due to his forceful
personality and influence among scholars, as sul$tn al-ulam, or ruler among jurists:
What do the jurists mean when they refer to
foreign dress? Who are the foreigners?
And what is the difference between foreign
and non-Arab?8
Obviously, foreign, or even non-Arab, here is presumed to mean proscribed or
un-Islamic. In his response, however, Ibn Abd al-Salm underscores the importance of the
distinction between substance and provenance and goes beyond this to allude to a critical
consideration that I think is often missed in modern discussions on the relationship between
Muslims and non-Muslim cultures.
In his response, Ibn Abd al-Salm explicitly states the following:
Foreigners refers to those we have been forbidden
[by the Prophet] to imitate, such as the followers of
the Persian kings at that time. This prohibition applies,
however, only to what they do that is in violation of
our religious law. What they do that falls under the
legal categories of recommended, obligatory or simply
licit in our religious law is not to be abandoned simply

Izz al-Dn Abd al-Azz b. Abd al-Salm, Fatw sul$tn al-ulam al-izz b. abd al-salm

(Cairo: Maktabat al-Qurn, N.d.), 112. For a brief biographical sketch on Ibn Abd al-Salm,
see my Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihb al-Dn al-Qarf
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 9-13. It should be noted that Ibn Abd al-Salms reputation as a
staunch, uncompromising upholder of truth, even to the point of openly defying powerful rulers,
was the stuff of legend.

because they practice it (l yutrak li ajli ta$thim iyyh).

Indeed, our religious law does not forbid imitating
those who do what God The Exalted has permitted.9

Now, Ibn Abd al-Salm does not attempt to hide or play down the fact that the Prophet
forbade Muslims from imitating other communities. Taken as a whole, however, his response
suggests that he understood the Prophets actions to be directed not simply at specific actions per
se but more importantly at preserving the cultural and intellectual authority of the Muslim
community. The issue, in other words, was not simply what was being borrowed but
additionally, if not more importantly, why it was being borrowed. Was there some coincidental
likeness, utility or even attraction between what Muslims and non-Muslim believed, valued or
practiced? Or did Muslims see a certain probity, normativeness or even superiority in nonMuslim ways, simply because they were non-Muslim ways? Clearly, on the latter perception,
the authority of revelation itself could be weakened, misappropriated or even overridden. For if
non-Muslim ways as non-Muslim ways were perceived to be superior, the extent to which they
coincidentally or directly entailed values or priorities that contradicted scripture would
incentivize efforts to falsely re-interpret, marginalize or even flatly discard scripture, all in the
name, perhaps, of reconciling it with reality.
This was the context in which I understand the issue of imitating the ways of others to
have become an issue for the Prophet. Indeed, the Prophet seems to have clearly understood the
importance of cultural / intellectual authority, or what Harvard Professor Joseph Nye famously
referred to as soft power, or the ability to affect thought, feelings and behavior by means of a

Fatw sul$tn, 112.

certain attractiveness of ones culture and intellectual tradition.10 In this light, what appears to
be the Prophets concern with provenance, or where a practice originated, might be more
accurately thought of as a shorthand reference to cultural/intellectual authority. In other words,
in forbidding Muslims from following the ways of others, the Prophet was simply forbidding
them from surrendering to the latters cultural/intellectual authority. This prohibition carried
with it, moreover, the disjunctive command that his community establish and exercise a
cultural/intellectual authority of their own. Where Muslims clearly possessed such authority and
were not threatened by that of others, there was no problem and this was the point of Ibn Abd
al-Salm with Muslims freely appropriating from other communities, just as the Prophet
himself had done.11 But where Muslim cultural/intellectual authority was weak, absent or
vulnerable to displacement, it might be impermissible to indulge even ideas and practices that are
prima facie permissible, since doing so miught represent not simply an act of borrowing from the
culture of others but of coming under the influence of the latters cultural/intellectual authority.12

10

See, e.g., J. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (------1990); Soft

Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (------2004).

11

For example, when informed that foreign leaders would only read letters upon which there

appeared an official stamp, the Prophet had Muhammad, the Messenger of God engraved on a
silver ring to be used as a stamp. See $Sa$h$h al-Buhkr, 4: 453-54. This was done, of course,
in a context where there was no question of being overly influenced by the cultural authority of
these foreign cultures.
12

One could cite in this regard such examples as the Prophets directing the prayer towards

Jerusalem (while in Mecca and the first couple of years in Medina) or fasting on the day of
Ashr upon learning why the Jews of Medina did so. Later, however, the direction of prayer
was changed to Mecca, and the Prophet ordered the Muslims to fast an additional day before or
after Ashr. All of this should be seen, of course, in light of the well-known fact that the

This explains numerous decisions by the Prophet, such as his initially adopting the prima
practice of growing his hair long without a part, as was the custom of the Jews in Medina. Later,
however, upon encountering the negative implications of appearing to pay too fawning a degree
of homage to Jewish cultural authority, he changed this practice and conspicuously parted his
hair.13 Similarly, he initially forbade the early Muslims from visiting graves, out of fear of their
being overly influenced by the cultural authority of their pagan background, only to permit this
practice later on, when the Muslims had sufficiently internalized the dictates of Islamic
monotheism (taw$hd) and succeeded at parlaying their pre-Islamic, Arabian cultural/intellectual
authority into a now identifiably Islamic cultural/intellectual authority.14 This distinction,

nascent Muslim community in Medina had to contend with the initially superior cultural
authority of the Jewish community there.
13

See the discussion of this topic in Ibn $Hajar al-A$sqaln, Fat$h al-br bi shar$h $sa$hi$h

al-imm ab abd Allh mu$hammad b. isml al-bukhr, 2nd ed. 14 vols. (Beirut: Dr I$hy
al-Turth al-Arab, 1402/1982), 10: 297-98. See also, Muslim b. $Hajjj, $Sa$h$h Muslim, 4
vols. (Beirut: Dr Ibn $Hazm), 4: 1450, where it is stated that parting the hair was the practice of
Arabian polytheists (al-mushrikn) presumably most particularly the Meccans. During the course
of his discussion, Ibn $Hajar notes that, in any number of cases, whether Muslims should
actually contradict the ways of others may revolve not simply around the substance of what the
Prophet forbade but around the broader interest (ma$sla$hah) of the Muslim community, which I
would take to include (at least) the issue of cultural/intellectual authority. Ibn $Hajar indicates
that he devoted an entire monograph to this topic, al-Qawl al-thabt f $sawm yawma al-sabt (The
Firm Statement Regarding the Ruling on Fasting on Saturdays) in which he identifies some thirty
issues on which the Prophet commanded his followers to contradict the People of the Book. If
the Prophets intent had been to ban imitation or borrowing qua imitation or borrowing, there
would certainly seem to have been more than thirty instances in which he forbade this.
14

See, e.g., Sulaymn b. al-Ashath al-Sijistn, $Sa$h$h sunan ab dd 3 vols. ed. N$sir al-

Dn al-Albn (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Marif li al-Nashr wa al-Tawz li $S$hibih Sad b. Abd

incidentally, between substance and authority, also explains the position of those modern Muslim
jurists who condemned a certain Muslim leaders banning of turbans and tarbshes and replacing
these with Western-style hats. While there is nothing in sharah that would ban Western hats
per se, their imposition represented at the time the cultural authority of Europe, and it was clearly
this leaders aim to undermine indigenous Muslim cultural authority and replace this with that of
the Europeans.15
Clearly, a major element in the whole enterprise of Muslims adjusting to non-Muslim
cultures continues to be a certain fear of falling under the cultural authority of alien others. In
and of itself, this, I think, is perfectly understandable. The problem, however, is that while
Muslim cultural authority may be necessary to the establishment of an Islamic socio-political
order, it is not sufficient to this task. For, where there is weak, confused or precarious
attachment to the universe of values and meanings defined by the Qurn and teachings of the

al-Ra$hmn al-Rshid, 1419/1998), 2: 308: I used to forbid you from visiting graves. Now you
may visit them; for in visiting them is a reminder.
15

Again, the issue of imitating or borrowing is not always as black and white as is often

assumed: there is always a determination to be made as to whether or not it entails an act of

surrendering to or being overly influenced by the cultural/intellectual authority of an other, and
this will be informed by how much cultural/intellectual authority Muslims themselves happen to
wield in any particular time and place. This is another area, incidentally, in which universal
articulations of Islam become problematic. In the present case, for example, certainly, Westernstyle hats would not represent the cultural authority of Europe as a non-Muslim entity for
indigenous European Muslims, any more than speaking only German, French or English would.
In fact, it might be among the legitimate, Islamic priorities of European Muslims to negate any
presumed contradiction between being Muslim and being European. Thus, it may never be
legitimate to condemn them for speaking only European languages or wearing only Westernstyle hats, even if it might be legitimate to condemn non-Western Muslims for doing so.

10

Prophet, no amount of autonomous Muslim cultural or intellectual authority will be able to

establish and sustain a truly Islamic order. Nor will any amount of resisting the cultural ways or
authority of others result in such an order. Such resistance might produce a non-Persian, nonWestern or a non-pagan order; but that will not necessarily amount to an Islamic order.
This is the trap into which modern Muslims have become so prone to falling. On the one
hand, any Muslim deficit in cultural/intellectual authority is imagined to be offset by vigorous
resistance to the cultural/intellectual hegemony of the West, which in turn is imagined to result in
a normative expression of Islam. On the other hand, the prima facie allowances of Islamic law
are often imagined to be wholly dispositive to the point that questions of cultural and intellectual
authority can be completely ignored. Here, again, it bears reiterating, however, that where the
actual attachment to Islams universe of values and meanings is weak, confused or precarious,
such values will not inform the order that is brought about by ones exercise of cultural authority,
even if one should have it. Nor are the basic values and meanings of Islam likely to inform the
judgments passed on the substance of the ways of others. What is more likely to result is the
rather curious phenomenon of patently Islamic values, e.g., pluralism, being rejected and
patently un-Islamic values, e.g., honor-killings or terrorism for that matter, finding acceptance
among Muslims, based on their simple preference for the dictates of their own autonomous
cultural and intellectual authority over the dictates of that of others.
To be fair, this is not a uniquely Muslim tendency but one routinely found among
vanquished peoples of any religion, as they pursue their various corrective utopias. Their
stated reasons notwithstanding, the true motive behind much of their activity is painfully
captured in a statement by Isaiah Berlin:
What they want, as often as not, is simply recognition
(of their class or nation, or colour or race) as an inde-

11

pendent source of human activity, as an entity with a

will of its own, intending to act in accordance with it
(whether it is good or legitimate or not), and not to be
ruled, educated, guided, with however light a hand, as
being not quite fully human, and therefore not quite
fully free.16

It is here that we come to the crux of the matter and to the outer precincts of some of the
lessons I would like to draw from all of this. If Muslims in multicultural and particularly
Western societies -- are to overcome the equally fatal tendencies of cultural rejectionism, on the
one hand, and crass cultural assimilationism, on the other, they will have to come to a deeper and
more immediate understanding of the distinction between the substance of non-Muslim artifacts
and the presumption that by provenance alone these remain the property of non-Muslims.
Indeed, provenance, it turns out, is a false and misleading criterion for judging the propriety
things. We saw this in some of the adopted practices of the Prophet; and we witnessed it in the
response of Ibn Abd al-Salm; we see it even more clearly in the fact that any number of what
are now taken to be Islamic artifacts, e.g., domes or minarets, do not originate with Muslims.
Here, in fact, we come to the second lesson that I would like to highlight: It is not at all
provenance that determines whether one is acting authentically when one engages this or that
enterprise; it is rather whether one has enough cultural authority to make such claims or
assumptions believable! No one in the United States would believe that Americans got coffee or
the ice-cream cone from Arab Muslims which they did; but even more importantly, no one

16

I. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2005), 202-03. Emphasis added. This essay, incidentally, was actually first published in
1958.

12

would care! Indeed, no American would feel that he or she was somehow imitating Muslims
by drinking coffee or eating ice-cream cones. And the reason for this is that Americans have
enough cultural and intellectual authority to define for themselves what is and what is not
authentically American and to make these claims believable to everyone else. Muslims, by
contrast, even when they have history on their side, lack this very ability.
This brings me to the third lesson. Neither assimilationism nor rejectionism will deliver
the goods for modern Muslims, especially those who live in the West. For rather than translating
into cultural authority for Muslims, assimilationism will only strengthen the cultural and
intellectual authority of the dominant West; after all, Imitation, as they say, is the highest
form of flattery. As for rejectionism, not only will it not translate into cultural authority, it will
actually block all avenues to achieving it. This is because the whole point of modern Muslims
acquiring cultural authority is not to simply to reject or destroy the West, any more than it was
the Prophets aim to totally reject or destroy pagan, jhil Arabia. The point of acquiring cultural
authority is, rather, to articulate and model new modalities of being authentically Western, even
as one remains authentically and conscientiously Muslim, just as the Prophet and the early
Muslims articulated and modeled a new, alternative modality of being authentically Arab and
Muslim.
This brings me to one final suggestive observation that I hope I have time to make. To
date, Muslims have labored under two conceptual innovations that have severely limited their
access to their own human resources. The first of these is the restricted notion of religion,
according to which an explicitly devotional mode is the only legitimately Islamic mode of
being. In this context, we are quite comfortable in the mosque and in the home; but the space
between these two is experienced as a danger zone. In other words, we are quite at ease with

13

words such as pious, wholesome and familial; but we are far less secure with words like
sexy, adventurous, or fun. The second observation is simply that we have been so caught
up in what the American scholar Victor Anderson refers to as the European cult of genius that
we have invested reason or aql with the panacean power to do virtually everything. This has
severely stunted the growth of our powers of imagination and blocked our access to them. And
yet it is precisely the power of imagination not simply or reason -- that plays the critical role in
any cultural production and thus in the development and deployment of any cultural authority.
When we look, for example, at those artifacts of Muslim civilization that most effortlessly
produce in us (and in others!) that most irresistible sense of awe, wonderment and appreciation -those ornate niches and minarets, those magisterial domes, the stunning and ineffably beautiful
calligraphy these are all the products not of the rational faculties of Muslim jurists, theologians
or philosophers but of the aesthetic and cultural imagination of everyday Muslims!
What we need, in conclusion, is to re-discover the broad understanding of religion that
was bequeathed to us by the Prophet and from here the nexus between Islamic religiosity and the
engagement of aesthetic and cultural imagination. Of course, as even the Qurn itself tells us in
several places, imagination can be a very dangerous thing; but so can sex, power, or brainsurgery. The whole point of Islam, meanwhile, is to provide us with the guidance and disciplines
to tame, train and refine our faculties. And in our quest to find direction and balance in these
modern times, purification of the self (tazkyat al-nafs) will play not a secondary but an
absolutely primary role. For, in the end, all the outer jihad against being rendered the object of
some others will amounts to nothing in the absence of an inner jihad against the self and its
lazy opposition to the universe of values and meanings that have been gifted to us by God.
Indeed, on this jihad, the jihad against the self, foreigners and others cease to be the sole or

14

even greatest threat to a dignified Islamic existence, provenance, or where a thing originated,
ceases to be the only consideration in determining the propriety of things, and a God-pleasing
life is redefined in terms of values, meanings and acts that are actually traceable to the will,
pleasure and prerogative of God.

15