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

apologetics was to argue that any meritorious or worthwhile modern institutions were first invented and realized by Muslims. Therefore, according to the apologists, Islam liberated women, created a democracy, endorsed pluralism, protected human rights, and guaranteed social security long before these institutions ever existed in the West. Nonetheless, these concepts were not asserted out of critical understanding or genuine ideological commitment, but primarily as a means of resisting the deconstructive effects of modernity, affirming self-worth, and attaining a measure of emotional empowerment. The main effect of apologetics, however, was to contribute to a sense of intellectual self-sufficiency that often descended into moral arrogance. To the extent that apologetics were habit forming, they produced a culture that eschewed self-critical and introspective insight, and embraced the projection of blame and a fantasy-like level of confidence and arrogance. Effectively, apologists got into the habit of paying homage to the presumed superiority of the Islamic tradition, but marginalized the Islamic intellectual heritage in everyday life. While apologists revered Islam in the abstract, they failed to engage the Islamic tradition as a dynamic and viable living tradition. To a large extent, apologists turned Islam into an untouchable, but also entirely ineffective, beauty queen, simply to be admired and showcased as a symbol, but not to be critically engaged in its full nuance and complexity. 39 In many ways, apologists ended up reproducing the legacy of orientalism – a legacy of which they were very critical. Orientalists dealt with the Islamic tradition as a static and, perhaps, even mummified heritage that is represented by a set of self-contained intellectual paradigms, and that is incapable of adapting to the demands of modernity without becoming thoroughly deconstructed and collapsing into itself. In essence, orientalists, who worked in the service of colonialism, paid nothing more than lip service to Islam, but otherwise negated the practical value of Islamic culture. The most typical strategy was for orientalists to insist that the Islamic tradition, while generally decent, lacked essential features necessary for rational modernization. As such, it is not so much that orientalists deprecated Islam, as a religion, rather, they cast serious doubts on the ability of what might be called “active” or “dynamic” Islam to deal with rational modernity. 40 Ironically, Muslim apologists ended up with the same basic construct. They paid lip service to the Islamic tradition, by, among other things, insisting that not only was Islam compatible with modernity, but, in fact, it had already achieved “rational modernization” fourteen hundred years ago. Effectively, apologists
    treated the Islamic tradition as if it was fossilized at the time of the Prophet and the Rightly Guided Companions, and, thus, rendered this tradition non-dynamic and un-living. 41
    Not only was the practice of apologetics unhelpful in dealing with the challenges of modernity, but also it significantly contributed to the sense of intellectual dissonance felt in many parts of the Muslim world. The problems posed by this response to modernity were only aggravated by the fact that Islam was, and continues to this day, to live through a major paradigm shift the likes of which it had not experienced in the past. There is a profound vacuum in religious authority, where it is not clear who speaks for the religion and how. Traditionally, the institutions of Islamic law were de-centralized, and Islamic epistemology tolerated and even celebrated differences of opinions and a variety of schools of thought. Islamic law was not state centered or state generated, but was developed by judges and jurists through a slow, creative, indeterminate, and dialectical process, somewhat similar to the common law system. 42 Classical Islam did develop semi-autonomous institutions