Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism by Omid Safi

everything and everyone else, but refuse a confrontation with one’s own conscience. With every major human tragedy committed in the name of Islam, I think that it is imperative for every Muslim to put aside, for a while, the various intellectual methods by which responsibility is projected, transferred, diluted, and distributed, and to engage in a conscientious pause. In this pause, a Muslim ought to critically evaluate the prevailing systems of belief within Islam, and reflect upon the ways that these systems of belief might have contributed to, legitimated, or in any way facilitated the tragedy. In my view, this is the only way for a Muslim to honor human life, dignify God’s creation, and uphold the integrity of the Islamic religion.
    If one engages in this conscientious and self-reflective pause, I believe that one would realize that a supremacist and puritanical orientation in
    contemporary Islam shoulders the primary responsibility for the vast majority of extreme acts of ugliness that are witnessed today in the Islamic world. In my view, Muslims must come to terms with, and reclaim their religion from a supremacist puritanism that has been born of a siege mentality – a mentality that this supremacist puritanical orientation continues to perpetuate as the primary mode of responding to the challenge of modernity. Importantly, this orientation is dismissive of all universal moral norms or innate ethical values, regardless of the identity of their origins or foundations. In this orientation, the prime and nearly singular concern is power and its symbols. Somehow, all other values, traditions, and normativities are made subservient. As argued below, this orientation, which I will call Salafabism, was, and remains, uninterested in critical historical inquiry. It has responded to the challenge of modernity by escaping to the secure haven of the text, but it has treated rational moral insight as fundamentally corrupting of the purity of the Islamic message. As a result, it has ended up undermining the integrity and viability of the Islamic texts and, in the process, it has arrested and stunted the development of Islamic normative ethical thinking.

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    The real challenge that confronts Muslim intellectuals today is that political interests have come to dominate public discourses to the point that moral investigations and thinking have become marginalized in modern Islam. In the age of post-colonialism, Muslims have become largely pre-occupied with the attempt to remedy a collective feeling of powerlessness and a frustrating sense of political defeat, often by engaging in highly sensationalistic acts of power symbolism. The normative imperatives and intellectual subtleties of the Islamic moral tradition are not treated with the analytic and critical rigor that the Islamic tradition rightly deserves, but are rendered subservient to political expedience and symbolic displays of power. Elsewhere, I have described this contemporary doctrinal dynamic as the predominance of the theology of power in modern Islam, and it is this theology that is a direct contributor to the emergence of highly radicalized Islamic groups, such as the Taliban or al-Qaeda, and the desensitization and transference with which Muslims confront extreme acts of ugliness. 33 Far from being authentic expressions of inherited Islamic paradigms, or a natural outgrowth of the classical tradition, these groups, and their impulsive and reactive modes of thinking, are a byproduct of colonialism and modernity. These highly dissonant and defensive modes of thinking are disassociated from the Islamic civilizational experience with all its richness and diversity, and they invariably end up reducing Islam to a single dynamic – the dynamic of power. They tend to define Islam as an ideology of