Ingrid Mattson – The Ethical Maturation of the American Muslim Community After 911
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of individual and community responsibilities in achieving collective obligations and the need for a community of faith and a strong sense of community. They emphasize the importance of the Quran's goal of an ethical, egal never social order and the success of the American Muslim community in addressing issues such as poverty and lack of fairness. The speakers also discuss the importance of studying priorities and understanding public interests to determine which priorities are essential and important. The community's actions, including sending students to Saudi Arabia and Iran, and their support for civil rights groups led to a more positive reaction to the crisis, and the speakers share two examples of positive developments, including the importance of the common word movement and the importance of gay pride and gay pride in political and political communities.
AI: Summary ©
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon. Timur and I didn't even consult
in it. It's almost as if you were
just setting up for me. So that was
perfect.
It's been already a full day. I don't
know about the rest of you. I had
a wonderful opportunity to be at, Saint John's
Episcopal Church.
Reverend Joseph Pace is here. He kindly invited
me
to, say a few words to the congregation.
I spoke. I I cried, so I've gotten
everything out of my system already.
But I also just, I I really want
to thank I I look around, I see
many of you who I've
interacted with in churches and synagogues and other
places, and just use this occasion to say
once more, thank you so much, you know,
for your hospitality and kindness and love and
generosity
that has been so present in the interfaith
community
the last 10 years. And, it was great
to hear mention of some of my favorite
people. Rich Sizek, the head of the new
evangelical partnership for the common good is one
of my favorite American,
I almost said Wilson,
American religious leaders.
Fantastic person, and if you wanna know more
about about the best in the evangelical community,
that that man is just,
is just my hero.
So briefly and and after me, you have
a break, 15 minute break before we, get
to hear from Bruce Lawrence.
I I wanted to talk a little bit
about, what I call the ethical maturation of
the Muslim American community after 9 11.
And when I'm speaking about ethics, I'm not
speaking about,
individual morality or good character, which has always
been the foundation of the religious formation of
Muslims wherever they are and is universal.
Be honest, fulfill your covenants, be good to
neighbors, be generous to the poor,
be faithful to your family.
What I am interested in observing is the
way in which the American Muslim community or
communities,
those who identify themselves as such as religious
people who come together to live their faith
and fulfill their collective obligations,
how they are,
ethical approach to these obligations
has matured
over the last 10 years.
And what do I mean by collective obligations?
In Islamic law, there is a fundamental,
distinction
between between 2 types of obligations,
an individual obligation,
fardaim,
and a collective or community obligation, a fard
kafaya.
So for example,
it is my individual obligation as a parent
to make sure that my children
are fed,
have proper medical treatment,
and are well educated.
That's my individual
obligation,
and I can't
I can't,
you know, just neglect that and expect someone
else to to do it. If I do
not fulfill that obligation
of care and nurturing,
then I will be sinful.
But I also
am part of a community that collectively has
an obligation to make sure that all children,
all children are fed
and are cared for and are educated and
are nurtured.
All children,
Some children are orphans. Some children have parents
who can't take care of them. And, yes,
some parents some children have parents who are
negligent,
but it is not the fault of the
children
that their parents are negligent.
If any child,
if any child in my community
does not have his or her basic fundamental
essential needs fulfilled
and I'm not part of working with my
community in some form to ensure
that that situation is alleviated,
then we all bear collectively the burden of
sin.
All of us. It doesn't matter how good
I am to my own kids or even
if I extend a hand to the neighbor
kids.
But if I'm not part
making sure that my community has some kind
of mechanism
to look after those needs,
then
I individually
also bear the burden of sin.
It's a very profound and awesome duty with
when we think of all of the people
that are in our communities.
And we think of,
the constant chain of events of people's lives
and people falling in and out of need.
Now the Quran emphasizes the necessity of the
Muslim community working together to do good in
so many places. In
in Surah 3 Adi Imran,
God says you are the best community that
has been brought forth for the good of
humanity.
You enjoin what is right and forbid what
is wrong, and you believe in God.
This is a responsibility of men and women
together.
The Quran in Surah Nai Atawba
says, the believing men and the believing women
are partners with one another.
They enjoin the right and forbid the wrong.
They establish prayer and give charity,
and they obey God and his messenger.
Now this morning, Bruce Lawrence and I were
speaking about the enduring legacy of the late
Fazir Rahman and his marvelous book, major themes
of the Quran.
In that book, Fazir Rahman devotes a whole
chapter to man in society, where he explores
the importance of collective responsibilities
in the Quran.
You know, there's I think there's 6 or
maybe 7 chapters in that book,
and it is such an important theme in
the Quran that it takes us up a
significant
part of of the discussion
of the themes of the Quran, and I
think rightly so.
Fazir Haman says, for example, the Quran's goal
of an ethical, egalitarian,
social order is announced with a severe denunciation
of the economic disequilibrium
and social inequalities prevalent in contemporary commercial American
society.
I think of among all all of the
diversity
among Muslims globally,
this belief that the Quran, fundamental message of
the Quran, Quran, fundamental message of Islam
is about justice,
equality,
fairness.
But what, you know, as as Timur suggested,
what does a just social, political, and economic
order look like?
And who should decide
what it looks like?
Now, when we look at the diversity
of Muslim Americans, if we just look back
at the late 19 sixties,
early seventies, for example,
for those immigrants from the Middle East
who came to America in that time, escaping
the oppressive
socialist nationalisms of their homeland,
the Ba'ath party of Arab under Saddam Hussein,
or the Ba'ath party socialist nationalist party in
Syria
under Hafez al Assad,
For them, a free economy
was a big part of the justice they
were seeking in coming to America. And the
portrait of the prophet Mohammed and his wife
Khadija as entrepreneurs,
as active in the marketplace, as traders,
was an especially attractive model for
how they could be
Muslim in a free America.
And it's one of the reasons why many
immigrants from the Middle East
tended to favor the Republican Party
because of the, economic policies
towards oriented what they felt towards freedom in
the Republican Party.
That inclination,
however, as we approach the eighties started to
be leveraged by some smart people in the
Republican Party to also appeal to Muslim Americans
and say, well,
when the whole
family values issue came up, they said, look,
you have the same values as we do.
Shouldn't we want to put in place legislation
that bans all of this immoral behavior?
And it was interesting to see some Muslim
Americans
starting to be
moving in that direction.
Now on the other hand, at the same
time, a large segment of the Muslim American
population was African American.
And for them,
Islam's teachings about racial equality
was the Prophet's companion Bilal as the role
model. And the Quranic teachings on taking care
of the poor and needy were compelling messages.
And they were very alarmed
by the immigrant Muslims' orientation
towards,
conservative
politics and the Republican Party,
by and large. And of course there are
African American Muslims who who were Republicans as
well, but by and large the vast majority
then until now
were oriented towards liberal or progressive politics.
And what they said is,
what are you talking about? This isn't Islam
is about justice, and they're not speaking about
justice.
But we had 2 groups who were talking
about things like freedom and justice, 2 groups
within the Muslim community in America. And as
Timur said,
it was a word. It was in a
way an unexamined word.
And the the,
disadvantage of the African American community is that
they didn't have
the technical language
to speak about this issue.
Their Imams
did not have the formal religious training, the
formal training in Islamic law and ethics to
be able to articulate their concerns about justice
in a way that was compelling
to the immigrant Muslims.
And it got to the point where in
the year 2000,
mostly
Muslim Americans from an immigrant background or first
generation
formed a block vote to vote for George
Bush
because he promised to abolish
abolish certain,
restrictions
that have been placed or certain,
security,
what was it called? I can't remember what
that was called.
It wasn't special registration. It was something else
that it was in place before 2000
that that similar to the Patriot Act allowed
that special surveillance
and detention
of, people accused of, security concerns.
Now
George Bush didn't abolish those regulations.
And after 2011,
and we had, president Bush
developing special registration,
where the male members of our community between
1665
had to line up in front of immigration
offices,
and the sort of sweeping out of Queens,
of,
thousands and thousands of,
Muslim immigrants
on any kind of minor violation, just cleaned
out whole neighborhoods that were empty, vibrant
neighborhoods, mostly Pakistani
and Indian.
Then the Muslim community, the Muslim immigrant community
started to look at
politics,
justice,
what are our priorities differently.
Beneath the accusation
and recriminations
between the two communities about
not understanding
politics,
we had very little discussion about
our priorities
as a community and how do we identify
the priorities.
It was really this lack of a forum
or even,
thinking that it was in any way important
to discuss priorities. Because in the end, certainly,
there were important concerns that were voiced in
each community. But how do we prioritize
them?
In Islamic,
ethical or legal teachings,
what we needed to do was was examine
how important priorities are. And this is one
discipline within Islamic Ethics is to study priorities.
To understand the difference between a a a
3 part priority system
from the most important, essentials,
then
needs, and then compliments or ornaments or things
that are that are are good. So how
do we, you know, what is an essential?
Who decides what's an essential?
Maybe something that is essential in my neighborhood
because it is completely
missing, like a good education. A good public
education
is not the most important thing in your
neighborhood or your life, but we're a community.
So how do we discuss those things?
These public goods, public interests that are known
as Masaadi.
So the tools of ethical reasoning, these terms
that I'm referring to,
were not widely available
in the Muslim American community generally. Most of
we talked about lawful and prohibited. Something allowed
or not allowed? Can I eat this meat
or not? Can I eat kosher meat or
not? You know, it didn't get much beyond
prohibited
or permitted.
And so getting more deeply into evaluating
priorities,
needs,
public interest, common interest, is something that took
a far greater stage
after 9 11.
But it's interesting because
even before 9 11,
African American leaders and especially Imam WD Mohammed,
may God bless his soul,
who was the leader of the largest
African American Muslim community,
identified this as important a long time ago.
Because Imam Mohammed
and his Imams, mostly inner city Imams,
you know, knew a lot about justice and
injustice in America,
and about structural injustice,
and the problems with,
economic disparities and opportunities in America and lack
of access to education and how significant that
is.
But when they spoke about it to the
immigrant community,
there was a certain deafness because as I
as I mentioned,
the language was not religiously compelling.
And so, Imam Mohammed began sending
members of his community
overseas for training in the early nineties.
His his early experiments were not very successful.
Unfortunately,
he the first place he tried to send
them to was Saudi Arabia, and they came
back,
can I say flaming fundamentalist? Not very helpful
to the community, so he realized that, you
shouldn't send them there. But But then he
started sending them to Syria, and that's really
I mean, as bad as we know the
Syrian regime is,
the religious education
is excellent in Syria,
and they've they've maintained
excellent seminaries. And so, once he started sending
his students there, they started to get an
excellent education.
And someone like,
Professor Intisar Rab, she's now a professor of
law
at,
Boston University.
She,
went to Syria to study, then she went
to Qom to Iran to also study Shiite
jurisprudence.
And I think it's very significant.
Intisada was a brilliant woman she studied. She
got her degree at Princeton and then Yale.
And her brother is is the imam in
the WD Mohammed community in the Baltimore area,
imam Sofia Roq. And Dusab wrote her doctoral
dissertation
on
on,
the,
Kauai'il,
the,
the principles
of the Simon Jurisprudence
that looks at things like
like goals and priorities and how to think
systematically
and ethically about complex situations.
And so now we have
some people like her experts who were able
to, on behalf of that community and the
American Muslim community generally, bring a more sophisticated
discourse.
And, frankly, the immigrant,
Muslims needed African American Muslims after 911 because
suddenly,
there was religious
profiling. Well, if anyone knew something about profiling
in America, it was African Americans. You know,
how do you deal with with profiling?
What is our response?
And the African American community now became the
teachers of the immigrant Muslim community and also
were able to teach
something else.
But it's not only this this inner conversation
that was accelerated, and it's a conversation that
I think would have developed at any place,
but the events of 9eleven and the reaction
of the Bush administration and of many of
the,
regulations that were were put in place
accelerated this conversation, made us mature
more quickly.
This conversation not only took place among Muslims,
but also between or among Muslims and people
of other faiths.
Because the social justice issues we're talking about
were not only concern
of concern to us.
And as I argued, you know, even as
I argued previously in an article I wrote
probably in in 2000 or earlier
called, the Axis of Good.
If we are to take seriously,
those
collective issues, if Muslim Americans are to take
seriously
the collective obligations that we have,
our notion of who that community is that
we belong to, who that community is that
we need to work with to achieve the
end needs to be expanded to include the
broader community of faith.
I mean, you know,
no matter if every Muslim community in America
set up a soup kitchen
and served in it every, you know, every
weekend,
or if every Muslim community established a free
clinic, a free health clinic, and there are
many, many,
Muslim established and run free health clinics in
America,
it still would not make a serious impact
on the health care crisis or the hunger
crisis in America.
It's good to do
and it's important to do, but without
good policy
that addresses the social inequities,
you know, nothing's gonna happen. We're 2% of
that of the population.
Are we serious about addressing these issues
if we don't work with other people? We're
not serious. We're just
pretending. We're just making a show of it.
And so
at the level of social justice,
that was important even before 911, but after
911, the political issues,
freedom,
surveillance,
all of these things became so much more
important.
And the Muslim community felt very much under
siege, but we benefited from the support and
assistance,
not only of people of other faiths, but
of civil rights groups.
The Quran says,
Is the reward for for kindness
anything other than kindness?
This notion of reciprocity,
that when someone does good to you, how
can you do other than good towards them,
is a foundational ethical principle
in in in all ethical systems, and it's
clearly
affirmed by the Quran and the Prophetic teachings
in many places.
So
let me just give you two examples of
some interesting
developments.
Professor Ai, you mentioned the importance of the
common word,
Just a
a very important document, and the whole movement,
the common word movement
that followed it. It is,
has had such a great impact on Christian
Muslim relations globally, and you can learn more
about it by going to the website, acommonword.comororg.
Out of that document, we had in 2008,
the 1st Catholic Muslim Forum,
in Rome. I was there,
it was actually during the 2008 presidential election.
And at the end of a very intense,
5 day,
discussions,
presentation of papers, discussions between
major Catholic,
theologians and thinkers
from the Pontifical Institute and globally,
and representative Muslim leaders from Sunni and Shiite
and a diverse approach both more conservative and
more liberal,
but really representative Muslim leaders.
We agreed on a document. We signed the
document in the end, and you can find
it on the common word website,
in which, and I believe this is the
first time I don't know, professor, you may
may correct me on this.
But I believe it's the first time where
there was this kind of Muslim leaders affirmed
in a written document
in,
in such a large number
support for
absolute religious freedom, including the freedom to change
your religion.
And
I believe that that came out
of experiencing
the kind of attacks on on Islam that
Muslims felt in Europe
and beyond, the attacks on religious freedom,
and the and seeing the response and the
defense
of so many non Muslims Muslims for the
freedom of of Muslims to practice and live
their religion.
And and the jurists affirm that there's a
difference between that apostasy, the apostasy of the
medieval
period that was,
conflated with treason, political treason, is no longer
relevant. That religious freedom is an absolute and
the prime and people should be free,
to change their religion. I think that was
a a really important outcome,
or or it's a sign of the maturity
of this community.
The second
is quite interesting is the example of homosexuality.
One of the things that that Muslim students
across campuses will tell you is that very
often their most,
you know,
quick supporters
were students from the,
from the,
the gay lesbian alliances or organizations on campus
who also had experienced discrimination,
you know, hate speech,
just mean general meanness against them.
And
what happened is that, you know, Muslims looked
at this and said, okay, what should our
response be?
Now there is a Pew study that was
just published.
A Pew study on American American Muslims. It
was just published a few weeks ago, and
it shows something quite interesting.
The Muslim Americans were asked,
and I hate these kind of questions. I
feel like in a way, they they don't
tell you almost anything.
This is a question,
should homosexuality
be discouraged by society
or should it be accepted?
Now, I don't know what discourage means. I
don't know society is. This is why I'm
not a social scientist, and I almost never
use these things. But the same question was
asked in 2007.
Okay. So at least as a,
you know, if it's the same question asked
4 years earlier, then maybe it can tell
me something. Well, what's interesting is that
in
2007,
61% of Muslim Americans said homosexuality
should be discouraged by society.
27%
said it should be accepted.
In 2011,
only 4 years later,
45
percent of Muslim Americans said homosexuality
should be discouraged by society,
while 39%
said it should be accepted.
It went from 61
percent down to 45%
of discouragement
in a period of 4 years,
and acceptance went up from 27% to 39%,
I think that's quite remarkable.
Now
I don't know what everyone meant when they
answered that question, but I know from my
engagement with,
many Muslim American student groups is
certainly the change was,
and and we saw a number of Muslim
student groups doing this, is joining
anti hate and anti bullying campaigns.
At least it meant it should not be
allowed to say anything
that would lead
to,
homosexual students being bullied,
or hurt, or targeted in any way. And
so this was a minimum,
I think, ethical response
in saying we don't want to be bullied.
We don't wanna be the object of hate
speech. They shouldn't as well.
Now to what extent
do did these respondents,
accept homosexuality,
as a as,
moral rather than immoral?
It is unclear by this.
But I can say that there's also a
very interesting discussion in the Muslim American community
saying, well,
we know that people there are many people
who don't like,
you know, who actually don't agree with it
what Islam teaches on many issues even on
family law.
Yet they vigorously affirm our right
to practice
and live according to our own, you know,
values in a place like America.
Can I, as a Muslim,
and I think this is where this where,
you know, an example of how
our ethical discourse is getting more sophisticated,
would it be possible as a Muslim for
me to maintain at least,
even if I say that religiously, I think,
any, you know, any sexual intimacy outside of
marriage is impermissible, including homosexual, but they should
be given their civil rights and equal civil
rights and legal rights of anyone else, including
the right to marry? And I'm hearing those
kind of conversations,
which shows that, you know, I'm not advocating
for any one position or another, but what
I'm saying is that this is a big
change
from the kind of get on board to
the family values of the religious right in
the 19 eighties,
which was a kind of very superficial approach
to politics and ethics and engagement.
So I think that,
you know, what has happened has helped us
in many ways,
has pushed us to think more deeply,
and we're continuing
in that, you know, in that that, process.
It will be very interesting to see if
I'm still alive 10 years from now
where we are, but I think, you know,
God willing, we'll continue to make some progress.
I believe that I now can announce
to you that we're having a 15 minute
break. It is,
12 or so to 3. So if you
can start gathering back here a little bit
after 3, we'd appreciate it. Thank you.