Dr. John Young 3/4/08
UUCJ
A Need for Islamic and American Heresy
Unitarian Universalists have always been and continue to be heretics for heretics are people who stand up for opinions different from authoritarian dogmas. The term heresy comes from the Greek for taking a choice. We believe that the foundation of a living faith is having the courage of your convictions, “confronting the powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love,” as it asserts in the UUA’s traditions.
We do not set out to be heretics, but we are committed to freedom, reason, and tolerance, and unfortunately, far too often in the history of religions and other ideologies, people who stand for freedom, reason and tolerance are branded heretics. Islam, like each of the other great historic religions began as a movement for reformation, in its native Arabian culture, to assert freedom, reason and tolerance. It asserted the freedom of each of its followers to a direct and liberated connection with God. Muhammad urged his followers to use their reason and carefully nurtured a practical religion. His work in Medina integrated a multi-ethnic group of people including three Jewish tribes, and celebrated Jesus, and he regained Mecca by embracing the pre-Islamic sites of pilgrimage there, and developed an early Islamic culture of unusual tolerance for his time. Because of Islam’s explosive growth into a multi-cultural religion, and its many internal divisions in the centuries after Muhammad’s death, Islam in its early centuries had a strong and varied tradition of dissent which built upon the goals of spiritual freedom, a life of reason and political practices of tolerance with which Muhammad had grown his religion.
The basic argument of this sermon is that it is essential that this foundational sense of heresy, of dissent from authoritarian dogmas, must be renewed in both the Islamic religion and in the United States. The United States has presented throughout its history the American dream, not only as a goal for its own citizens and prospective citizens but as a model of civil religion for the world. Unfortunately, the American dream in this last generation has been kidnapped by neoconservative and fundamentalist ideologues that have tried to sell both Americans and the world a golden calf version of the American dream instead of the genuine American dream of freedom, reason, and tolerance based on just laws and activist civic responsibility. The argument of this sermon is that Americans need to take back the American dream and make our civil religion whole again, and that Islamic reformers need to take back the true heritage of freedom, reason, and tolerance in their faith, and make their faith whole again, and that as we each do these vital internal tasks within our own traditions that we will together most effectively nurture a safe, just, and more peaceful world.
The short version of the genuine American civil religion is found in the preambles to the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution and in the Bill of Rights. It is founded on the belief that all people are created equal, endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is committed to the democratic process with divided powers, shared and mutual responsibilities and individual rights to practice religion in the ways you choose and to be free to express your opinions and work on behalf of your principles. We recognize today that when these documents were written, these ideals were imprisoned in ways that we find unacceptable today. Genocide and expropriation was practiced against the Native Americans; African-Americans were enslaved and treated with oppression and bigotry when they were finally freed. Women and others who did not own property did not receive the full rights of citizenship. The scriptures and actions of the American civil religion needed to be progressively changed and reinterpreted in order to obtain the fulfillment of the American dream.
The built-in problem with a sense of worldwide mission held by both the American dream and the Islamic faith is that it can easily give way to the scourge of authoritarian orthodoxy that assumes that the world must come to see things our way and do things as we think best. It too easily justifies imperialism as a saving mission. For some Americans it means bringing democracy and free enterprise to liberate the world, and for some Muslims it means to provide the only true way to God and the comfort and safety of Islamic law for everyone by force if necessary. In the contemporary world, in the hearts of these potent minorities, the American dream has become equated with out-of-control consumerism, unregulated global capitalism, and pre-emptive imperialism as the speediest way to Armageddon for most and rapture for the saved. While for the Wahhabis Muslims and their terrorist militants, Islam implies authoritarian control at least of the Muslim world and the imposition of strict Islamic law throughout that world. These goals betray the genuine goals of the American dream and of the Islamic faith, but if they are going to be effectively countered and dissipated, we must empower dissent and heresy within both the Islamic and the American dreams.
As I began this congregational year, I knew I wanted to present this sermon, but I was looking for a Muslim contemporary that was thinking similar thoughts. In that radical book store next door to my daughter’s apartment in Washington D.C., I was fortunate to find a book by Anouar Majid, a Moroccan Muslim and a Professor of English at the University of New England. The book is entitled A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America published in 2007. The book is complex, and Majid seems to want to talk about practically everything. Sometimes he seems to proscribe without much background or evidence. However, the book is also full of the very explanations of historic dissent within Islam that I was looking for and a clear demand for major Islamic reform now.
Majid reminds us that like all the major religions Muhammad’s thoughts were only slowly turned into scriptures. That disputes over succession after his death set up conflicting traditions of Islam and that rapid integration into a variety of world cultures meant that Islam contains tremendous variety and significant traditions of dissent from philosophical atheists to rapturous Sufis, from humanistic, progressive negotiators to ascetic, condemning legalists. Islam has no single living spiritual leader. It leaves much up to individual interpretation and puts much of the rest in the hands of cultural consensus, which varies tremendously according to the culture. For instance, Morocco’s king has radically re-interpreted Islamic law modernizing relations to women and families while in Saudi Arabia, there are still slaves, women are severely limited, and in some places honor killings of women are still the norm.
There is tremendous diversity within Islam, and there is also, according to Majid, an overpowering need for the empowerment of dissent. He feels that Islam has largely been without significant, empowered dissent for 500 years, and that it cannot flourish in the 21st century without allowing its scripture and prophet to be studied and criticized by the best human standards, its religious law to be made relevant for contemporary Islamic cultures, and to regain the wholeness of genuine Islam by rejecting the chains of authoritarian orthodoxy. Majid argues that the foundations for freedom, reason, and tolerance exist within Islam and can be embraced by using the best Islamic standards. However, they are at present largely seen as heresies by millions of Muslims and so in order to regain the genuine foundations of the religion of the prophet, the enduring insights found in the Koran, Islamic believers must regain their individual liberated dialogue with God, the practical evolving religion of the prophet, the true essence of their religious law which is to empower fairness, to nurture lives of unselfish service, and to embrace and empower a multi-cultural, multi-religious and democratic world.
Majid says: “Muslims have reached a level of intellectual and emotional maturity to confront their own contradictions….to examine their faith in the light of modern knowledge, to see how both their concept of the sacred that broaches no dissent, our notions of The God [that is, nameless god, for that is the literal meaning of Allah—al-ilah], infallible prophets and scriptures, and apocalyptic views of the future are human constructions, shaped by cultural borrowings and adapted to particular needs….we must deal rationally with our own history, an often imperialistic and violent history even among ourselves….Memorization of old truths doesn’t lead to intellectual breakthroughs; it merely enshrines ancient ones. [47-48]
“Modernity in its Islamic sense is no more than embracing the right critical methods and ensuring a society that doesn’t punish difference or proscribe intellectual pluralism. As Christopher Hart says: ‘all religions [and I would add ideologies] without exception are fallible human creations, in parts beautiful and profound and in parts ridiculous and repellant. To protect them from criticism is bad for our society and for our souls.’…the Kingdom of Heaven is right here and now, within and around us, a sacred trust not to be negligently confused with theological mandates or wasted for the elusive benefits of material riches or political power. Al-Jabri and Rubenstein are right to think that Aristotle and his famous commentator, Averroes, are our common link to modernity, for they guide the way to free inquiry, politely separating the realms of Karen Armstrong calls mythos and logos and Stephen Jay Gould terms the two ‘non-overlapping magisterial.’” [221-223]
Majid also argues, as I do, that Americans need to do likewise. The golden calf of the fundamentalists and neo-cons is not the true American dream. We are not in an apocalyptic struggle with most of the world. The cold war is over, and it is time for America to drop its pretensions of preemptively saving the world. Betraying our American dream in order to save the world for capitalism or force countries to embrace our brand of democracy will not work. We need to work cooperatively to empower freedom, reason, and tolerance throughout the world and within our own nation. In such a world, democracy will spread and individual enterprise will flourish, but it will do so because authoritarian dogmas are outgrown by the people in each culture not by shock and awe, torture and suppression.