[Note: The following excerpt is from Anouar Majid’s “A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 1-2, 47]

by Anouar Majid, University of New England.

“A Virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.” Benjamin Franklin

“The atheist from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.” Martin Buber

This book is both an attempt to treat Islam over and above the confines of the familiar extremist/moderate dichotomy and an extension of my reflections on ways to divert Muslim and other cultures toward more progressive formulations. In the past I called for a progressive interpretation of Islam and its canons, urged both Muslims and Westerners to question their orthodoxies, and argued for a polycentric world of ‘neoprovincials’ questioning dogmas at home, reaching out to progressive elements in other cultures, and forging global alliances in the building of a genuinely multicultural human civilization, one in which economics are integrated into the broader aspirations of nations, not ruling over them like ruthless, insatiable deities. Here I am taking the discussion to its outer limits, calling on both Muslims (who consider their religion to be God’s final word in history) and Americans (who often think of themselves of having received a special dispensation from the Creator) to embrace heretical thought, or freethinking, as the only life-saving measure left to avoid an apocalyptic future.

By asking Muslims and Americans to examine their histories, traditions, and cultures critically, I am not, obviously, assuming a perfect symmetry between Islam and America, for, technically speaking, Muslims are members of a faith, while Americans are members of a nation. (That nationalism is another form of religion is another matter.) Neither am I positing that Islam is monolithic in its effects, as many are wont to object anything the word Islam is use to describe the experience of people in sprawling and diverse parts of the globe. I could have used Marshall Hodgson’s adjective Islamicate to refer to the broader set of complex cultural practices one finds in Islamdom (lands of islam) and thus dissociate the religion proper from its cultural effects, or from the non-islamic customs on which the faith was grafted; but since the word Islam as a signifier is heavily used by both Muslims and non-Muslims, by scholars and nonscholars, in the current global environment, I think it would be better to use it – instead of a series of more technically accurate designations for each particular occasion – in order to intervene more meaningfully in the discussion about Islam in the world.

Suffice to say that while Islam, as a set of precepts and obligations, is universal, the practice of Islam varies from one cultural milieu to the next. I grew up in Tangier, Morocco, a city more famous for its beaches, cafés, bars, and nightclubs than for its mosques and minarets. In such a place, one could talk about God and good wine in the same breadth, although the spheres of the sacred and the profane are carefully kept apart, so as not to take away from the inherent quality of each. One may not find this social experience in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Iran, where absolutism in matters of faith is taken more seriously than in my native country and city. Yet even in Morocco today, there is a serious attempt to throw Saudi Arabia’s homegrown puritanical ideology, known as Wahhabism, on the country’s liberal attitudes, increasingly seen by Islamists as unacceptably hedonistic. One hopes that such an outcome never comes to be, not because I want to defend hedonism (although, obviously, a serious philosophical argument could be made for it) but because all societies are diminished when multiple ways of being are eroded by self-appointed, single-minded guardians of authenticity. The drive for purity, in the end, results in terror and genocide. The coexistence of different lifestyles within a polity is a testament to the community’s ability to live with real difference, an experience that is becoming increasingly rare in Muslim societies. Pluralism is essential to any conversation, and without it Muslims in Muslim societies will keep sliding deeper into the dark tunnel of monologues and self-congratulatory pronouncements…

Nothing has saddened me more over the course of my intellectual career than the Muslims’ inability to deal with their own religion and history critically, to admit that Muslims were, yes, imperialists, slave owners, racists, despots, and, even though the faith calls for compassion and tolerance, avengers. Heretics and Sufis were executed; blacks in Africa were hounded and sold in markets by muslim Arabs; and although Muslims are accustomed to seeing themselves as victims, they were equally responsible for the depredations of the Crusades, since islam was born to rival previously ‘revealed’ religions, particularly Christianity, carving out its domains in relentless military cavalcades, thereby fueling the spirit of reconquest and retribution among its rivals. Does admitting this make Islam inferior to its rival religions or any other ideology for that matter? Not at all. It only shows that Muslims have reached a level of intellectual and emotional maturity to confront their own contradictions, that their confidence is robust enough to allow for troubling questions to be raised (persecution is ever the mark of insecurity).

Note: Prof. Majid is giving a guest lecture entitle “Islam without Submission” at Hofstra University in room 101 Barnard Hall on Monday, March 2, 2009 at 2:55 pm.