defining a muslim Left III: a muslim bloc?

at alt.muslim, Shahed discusses the flaws in the concept of a muslim bloc vote:

A necessary component of the "block vote" strategy is the faulty assumption that Muslims either have uniform political views or are indifferent enough to drop them in favor of a recommendation by Muslim leaders. But every survey of Muslim political opinion shows a wide variety of views on issues ranging from national security and foreign policy to education and trade. While some Muslims conservative values are in line with the Republicans, their social justice, civil rights, and foreign policy viewpoints are sometimes more in line with the Democrats. In the current race, many Muslims also admired Ron Paul's fiscally conservative, anti-war bent.

It is unreasonable to expect, and unfair to encourage, Muslim voters to drop these personal political leanings in favor of a dictate from above. To do so would be to mirror dysfunctional electoral politics in less-sophisticated democracies, where voters cede their responsibility to be informed decision makers, casting their votes largely along ethnic or tribal lines. This approach can only lead to political apathy and atrophy in the Muslim electorate - the exact opposite of what the Muslim American community needs.

I have to agree. Shahed discusses a bit of the history of the muslim bloc in 2000 and 2004 and illustrates in both cases how dysfunctional and meaningless the bloc was in practice.

However, I can't agree to the prescription that he offers as an alternative:

Instead of focusing on orchestrating a block vote, Muslims must be (or should have been) encouraged to focus on issues at grassroots levels, and not be swayed by personalities, throwaway overtures, or one-time favors. Interest groups of every persuasion are effective at promoting their issues because they work with politicians across the spectrum, at all levels, from local to national. Muslim leadership should be enabling this by opening doors for Muslims to get involved in this way, and not just during an election year. And rather than swinging from Democrat to Republican, as the last two endorsements have done, Muslims should be encouraged to become involved in the political party of their choice, staying true to their own ideals.

This is a laudable suggestion for civic involvement, but is a universal strategy rather than one of particular or unique relevance to the muslim community. In essence, it surrenders the idea that muslims have a political identity in america all their own. That idea is certainly open for debate; the point about the diversity within the muslim community is well-taken. However, is there really no broad umbrella principle we muslims can look towards as a point of commonality?

To answer that question, we as a community need to first decide just what muslim "issues" are. As I have argued previously, these issues will necessarily be both muslim and American; therefore there will be issues of social justice such as Darfur and Palestine in which we might have an emotional stake, but which are not strictly within the boundary of our collective political self-interest.

A good example, again, is Obama, whose position on the Israeli-Palestine issue is pretty run of the mill (rhetoric about balanace, in practice will do nothing to upset the status quo). However, as regards to Pakistan, Obama alone has spoken of a post-Musharraf, pro-democracy policy instead of the pro-stability policy of administrations past, and ties US aid to Pakistan directly to the performance of the Paksitani government in rooting out the extremist enclaves. This is a refreshing approach to Pakistan policy and one that will be of significantly more relevance to the muslim community (given its large fraction of members of Indopak heritage) than Israel-Palestine.

Unlike the AMT endorsements of Bush in 2000 and Kerry 2004, where the parameters of the decision were decided by a relatively small group of self-appointed muslim leaders, any decision on what constitutes an American muslim policy platform needs to be made in consultation with the community. Ideally, a panel for discussion at next year's ISNA conference could be expressly devoted to fleshing out muslim concerns and identifying topics of relevance. Such a panel would not be tasked, initially, with anything more than simply identifying such areas of concern. However, follow-up panels would be required to devote attention to the topics in turn, and perhaps also fund polls to assess how well they are tracking genuine muslim american opinion. Ultimately, I envision a convention structure with delegates appointed/elected from within all muslim organizations and groups, who could meet in a political Shura whose ultimate aim would be to define the issues platform. If we embrace the mechanism of party politics, we can leverage them to truly give ourselves voice. This can be done under the banner of our cultural and religious identity rather than despite it.

Andre Carson wins IN CD-7 special election

Shari'a alert! The number of muslims in Congress has now doubled:

Democrat Andre Carson defeated his Republican rival tonight by a wide margin in a special election to replace his grandmother in representing the 7th Congressional District.
[...]
He called the win an “extremely humbling experience” and said his message of protecting Social Security, bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq and fighting for jobs and health care had resonated with the voters of the 7th District.
[...]
Carson will be the first Muslim to ever represent Indiana in Congress — and only the second Muslim nationwide in Congress.

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama congratulated Carson on “winning a hard-fought race.”

Carson's tenure is likely to be somewhat short as the regularly scheduled primary takes place in two months, and he faces numerous challengers. Still, his win is noteworthy in its own right.

I think it's interesting that both muslims in Congress are African American Democrats. In contrast, Brown Americans (aka Desis) like Bobby Jindal and rising star (you heard it here first) Amit Singh in Virginia are Republicans (thus far, of the old-fashioned, sane, fiscally-oriented variety). Neither Jindal nor Singh are muslim. Overall, though, Desis are leaning towards the Democrats, and Hillary in particular (for this cycle, anyway). I don't think that Desi-Americans can be assumed to be as reliably Democratic as African-Americans, regardless of religion. At City of Brass I have been attempting to articulate a political identity for a muslim Left, but if the GOP were ever to abandon its war on muslims, there's no guarantee that the muslim vote would stay left. It's clear though that the Desi political identity is already split left-right, the question becomes whether desi-muslims will follow or will the "Muslim" political identity override.

(via Tariq Nelson, whose blog is essential reading for African American muslim perspectives)

western feminism and Islamic values

Kudos to Jill at Feministe for raising the issue of how oppressive head-scarf bans are - just as oppressive in their own way as mandatory burqas. She quotes extensively from an article in the NYT written by a Turkish woman detailing her experiences with the ban at Turkish universities. I found this particularly cogent:

Ms. Benli was the first person in her family to get a college education. She earned her law degree before the state began to enforce the ban in the late 1990s. But her two years of additional graduate work was stopped by the restriction, an interpretation of an earlier court ruling. A 300-page master’s thesis at Istanbul University law school had to be orally defended on campus. Her mother, also covered, pressed her to remove her scarf, to no avail.

“I just couldn’t do it,” Ms. Benli said in an interview in her small law office this week. “I left the room crying. They marked me absent.”

She says the reasons, deeply personal and hard to put into words, are a combination of her relationship to God and her aversion to accepting what she sees as misplaced authority.

“This is related to my private life,” she said. “It’s my personality. My wholeness.”

In one particularly traumatic example, as told to Ms. Benli by several of her clients, a university rector forced several women to uncover their heads in front of him, in order to obtain his signature to allow them to transfer out of the college he was taking over and no longer allowing them to attend.

The state, she said, was saying, “No matter what you think, I can make you do what I want,” an attitude which, if obeyed, made one feel “degraded.”

An analogy might be if the Dean of a college required women to strip to their underwear before receiving their diploma. It might be more cloth than the woman wears the next day at the beach, but whether the cloth is imposed upon or forbidden from, it is the woman's sense of self-modesty that is violated.

Unfortunately, many feminists argue that "less is more" with respect to clothing and that taking clothing off equals empowerment. My classic essay on the Burka and the Bikini drew much criticism from feminists because they could not accept that a bikini could also be oppressive. This mindset manifests immediately in comments to the post at Feministe:

I don’t agree with headscarves/burqas, in that they’re clearly tools designed to supress female freedom/identity. Yet at the same time I obviously hope everyone has the freedom to wear what they damned please, and some women clearly want to cover themselves in this (to my, western eyes) demeaning fashion- and they should have the freedom to do so, and go where they please when they do. Yet some women are clearly forced to wear these things against thier will (or, worse still, have lost sight of even the concept of having a choice in the matter at all).

Note how the commentor is compelled to raise the issue of forced-veiling and is much more comfortable with denouncing that aspect of control, whereas the right to veil is treated with dripping condescension, "clearly" demeaning. It's essentially impossible to communicate with people of this mindset, the best you can do is register your dissent and hope that a reader coming across it will understand our point of view.

The danger in allying western muslim political identity to the Left should be clear. Muslims must remain an independent entity from the greater Left, because the secular divide is simply impossible to cross. At best we can be allied against external threats but we must be wary - a headscarf ban is not outside the realm of the possible here in the United States, should Progressivism grow ascendant. The greatest bulwark against it woudl be to articulate our own liberal, Islamic sense of feminism in which we fully embrace the right of a woman to choose her expression of faith and reject any a-priori assumptions about how much cloth - too much, or too little - is intrinsically oppressive.

UPDATE: I cross-posted this at DailyKos and the resulting debate was quite vigorous. I think the comment by Jerome a Paris, one of DK's better-known voices, is instructive of the secular divide to which I refer.

defining a muslim Left II: The Gash of Civilizations

I have previously argued that in defining a genuinely Islamic-American political identity, we must identify what exactly our issues are. This news seems relevant in that regard:

Most people in Muslim countries and the West believe divisions between them are worsening, a Gallup poll for the World Economic Forum (WEF) suggests.

The poll also suggested that most Europeans thought more interaction with Islam would be a threat - though most Americans disagreed.
[...]
Describing the position now, majorities on both sides said they did not believe the two sides were getting along.

This belief was strongest in the US, Israel, Denmark - where the publication of cartoons about the Muslim Prophet Muhammad caused worldwide controversy - and among Palestinians.

WEF experts examining the poll data put this down to the effect of the Iraq war and the Middle East conflict.

By contrast, there was a less gloomy response in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

According to WEF poll, neither the West nor the Muslim world believed the other side respected it.

But while Muslims said they believed their world did respect the West, Western respondents agreed that the West did not respect the Muslim world.

The issue for Muslim Americans is fairly obvious, given that we are highly vested in closing this gap between east and west, because the existence of this "gash" of civilizations serves to strain our own identities. We have family and friends on both sides of the Gash, we have cultural practices and values that span it, and we live in two worlds at once. Hence, a political party or politician that demonstrates an awareness of the Gash, and policies that serve to mend it or bridge it, is one that deserves our support.

It should be noted that neither political party is doing much to mend the Gash at present. The Democrats' seizure of the Dubai Ports World issue was a disgraceful example of latent xenophobia, but had they played it the correct way would have served as a powerful example of an issue which could draw east and west together (on the basis of economic cooperation and mutual gain). However, the Republicans are far worse than this, engaging in a rhetorical war against muslims and engaging in overt religious prejudice by their insistence on the phrase "Islamofascism" :

The pairing of "Islam" and "fascism" has no parallel in characterizations of extremisms tied to other religions, although the defining movements of fascism were linked to Catholicism - indirectly under Benito Mussolini in Italy, explicitly under Francisco Franco in Spain. Protestant and Catholic terrorists in Northern Ireland, both deserving the label "fascist," never had their religions prefixed to that word. Nor have Hindu extremists in India, nor Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka.

In contrast to the way militant zealotries of other religions have been perceived, there is a broad conviction, especially among many conservative American Christians, that the inner logic of Islam and fascism go together. Political candidates appeal to those Christians by defining the ambition of Islamofascists in language that makes prior threats from, say, Hitler or Stalin seem benign. The point is that there is a deep religious prejudice at work, and when politicians adopt its code, they make it worse.

The use of such rhetoric becomes a feedback loop which drives the GOP further and further into the jafi embrace. There is a real danger that if this continues, the GOP will ultimately become as radicalized as the white supremacist political parties of Europe, except on religious grounds rather than racial. It may be that Democrats are not doing anything to improve the Gash, but the Republicans are actively exacerbating it. The challenge then for the muslim Left is to articulate the concern about the Gash, and present the case for why its existence is not just a threat to our interests but to the nation as a whole.

defining a Muslim Left: part I

Introduction: Eteraz on Islamic reform

Ali's series on Islamic Reform at The Guardian has been, in my opinion, nothing less than a tour-de-force. I've linked the series below; they really are mandatory reading for anyone interested in discussing Islam in the context of politics and policy.

1. The Roots of Islamic Reform
2. The Islamic reformation
3. An Islamic counter-reformation
4. Beyond Islamic enlightenment
5. The making of the Muslim left

The Falwell muslims

In his latest entry, Ali identifies what he terms the Muslim Right - evangelical religious supremacists who follow the roadmap of the Christian Right, seeking to utilize the mechanisms of democracy as a vehicle to further their agenda and polemic. These are essentially the muslim analouge of Falwell and Dobson; they are not violent and they are much more numerous in the UK than in the US. Dal Nun Strong and Tariq Nelson have both done real yeoman's work in identifying and rebutting these "Falwell muslims" on their respective blogs. However, their efforts are largely isolated since the Islamosphere is loosely organized and does not have much of a platform for articulating the counter arguments within the broader media environment.

Principles for a muslim Left

To try and address the problem, Ali calls for the emergence of a "Muslim Left" which would explicitly affirm the following principles:

• separation of mosque and state;
• opposition to tyranny (even if the tyrant has liberal values);
• affirmance of republicanism or democracy;
• an ability to coherently demonstrate that the Muslim right represents merely one interpretation of Islam;
• a commitment to free speech and eagerness to defeat the Muslim right in the marketplace of ideas;
• commitment to religious individualism and opposition to left-collectivism, specifically Marxism;
• opposition to economic protectionism;
• opposing any and all calls for a "council of religious experts" that can oversee legislation (even if those experts are liberals); and
• affirming international law.

Strategies for a muslim Left

To be effective, Ali argues that the muslim Left must utilize the following strategies:

1. Popularising the slogan "theocentric, not theocratic" to counter claims of religious treason that will be hurled by Islamists;
2. An alliance with supporters of old-school Muslim orthodoxy who despite their conservative values are not the same as the Muslim right because they do not like to politicise their faith. These Muslims, by virtue of doctrine and history, have always supported separation of mosque and state, and still do;
3. Having the confidence to call their solutions truer to the ethos of Islam than the ideas of the Islamists, without engaging in apostasy wars;
4. An alliance with Marxists and neo-Marxist Muslims without getting sucked into their collectivist phantasmagoria;
5. Opposing any and all punishments, fines and stigma for "apostasy," "heresy," and "blasphemy". This includes opposition to all "sedition" crimes;
6. Accepting that the enthronement of the left through democratic means might require the intermediate step of the Muslim right succeeding as well, due largely to its head-start;
7. Supporting arts, literature, agnosticism and atheism without engaging in derogatory or insulting gestures. The battle against Islamism isn't a fight against Allah or Prophet; it is against an ideology;
8. Supporting Muslims' right to express their piety with beards, hijab, niqab in order to draw the moderates among the pietists away from the Islamists; and most importantly
9. Opposition to all imperial western behaviour. Also, rejection of any and all alliances and support from the western right.

An intrinsic conflict

I am in large, broad agreement with essentially all of this (with some exceptions, addressed shortly). I agree that the mainstream conservative Right is now a hostile entity, emphasized by Ali in the last point above. However, it must also be noted that the mainstream liberal Left is not automatically a natural ally for our putative muslim Left, either.

Part of the conflict arises from the basic principles, which come into conflict with the mainstream of liberal political thought. For example, the issue of "opposition to leftist collectivism specifically Marxism" is problematic. What aspect of Marxism specifically do we mean? The central tenets of Marxism, ie the dignity of the working class and the conscience that keeps capitalism fettered, remain core principles of modern liberalism. Likewise, the warning against "economic protectionism" is also somewhat vague and opens us to conflict with the liberal mainstream. The free vs fair trade debate is a critical one. The final and "most important" strategy prescription that Ali makes is to reject the Western Right, but it's worth noting that embracing the principles above would put the Muslim Left in de facto alliance after all.

The Fallwell Left

More important than matters of domestic policy and social justice however is tolerance. And on this score, the Left is just as hostile to muslims as the Right. The mainstream Left remains deeply skeptical of religious faith, with secularism as a core value. Ali notes that the muslim Left will need to make concrete and sincere alliance with old-school muslim orthodoxy, but this also entails defending the orthodox (muslim and christian alike) against the secularist assault. An example is the overt hostility to expressions of faith in the public sphere, which do not violate the concept of separation of church/mosque and state but still elicit a pathological response from the warriors of secularism on the Left. In Europe, the fault line lies firmly upon hijab, which Ali mentions above as an expression of piety. The zeal with which the secularists pursue their agenda is no less supremacist than their analouges on the right.

Dubai Ports World

Beyond the conflict with secularism lies something even uglier; outright xenophobia. The best example of this was the Dubai Ports World fracas. While President Bush argued forcefully in support of the deal, Democrats seized upon the issue as a means to burnish their security image, a gross example of political pandering at the expense of the muslim community. Leading the charge was none other than Hillary Clinton, who claimed the deal would "surrender" our ports to "foreign governments", even though 80% of US ports are already operated by foreign-based firms (including Chinese). There were Democratic voices in support of the deal, including former Presidents Bill Clinton (heh) and Jimmy Carter, the latter of whom took the trouble to answer a question I posted to him on Daily Kos regarding the matter:

Answer to azizhp: In an interview on CNN, I publicly supported the DPW as
soon as the issue arose. My agreement with President Bush on the issue was highlighted that evening by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. There was no
threat to U.S. security, and it was a false and demagogic issue.

(emphasis mine). Eventually DPW sold its stake to an American-based firm to defuse te issue, but the damage was done.

And the DPW issue is not an isolated incident. Via 'Aqoul, there was another display of Democratic xenophobia, this time with Senator Charles Schumer leading the crusade against another Dubai-based firm buying a stake in the NASDAQ exchange:

Saying the deal gives him pause, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., pressed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Thursday to thoroughly review a proposal by Borse Dubai to buy a nearly 20% stake in the Nasdaq Stock Market.

"I believe that the acquisition of such a large stake in a U.S. exchange by a foreign government raises some serious questions," the senator wrote to Paulson.

An outdated political axis

It should be noted that if one wishes to critique Dubai, there are plenty of legitimate avenues to do so; for example, the fact that the engine of economic prosperity runs off the back of indentured labor. Man-made island chains, 7-star hotels, and the tallest building in the world, all are gleaming Pharonic monuments to economic disparity. Dubai is a "gulf" state indeed, but there is little critique of Dubai on this score from the liberal mainstream.

And therein lies the crux of any attempt to define a muslim Left solely in relation to the traditional left-right political axis. In doing so, we become constrained by the same stultifying left-right narratives that so hobble mainstream political discourse. Exhibit A is today's New York Times piece on Ali's reform series, where they (wrongly) describe the concept of a muslim Left as "centered on Western political liberalism." But who can blame them for that perception, when Western political conservatism is so explicitly rejected in its formulation? The truth is that there are issues on which the muslim Left can, and even must, agree with the political Right. Of these, the most critical is foreign policy, to be addressed in Part 2 of this post.