Faithbook: An Open, Uneasy Mind - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

An Open, Uneasy Mind

Newsweek and the Washington Post bring us “What Islam Really Says” about various issues. They, correctly, have asked various Muslim experts. After all, the inheritors of a faith tradition have a privileged relationship with that faith tradition’s meaning, as do scholars of it. Non-Muslims, including, I daresay, most of the publishing staff of Newsweek and the Washington Post, should provide a forum in which the necessarily Muslim debate about the meaning of Islam can take place.

One voice in the present debate belongs to Irshad Manji and her recent campaign Project Itjihad, “a charitable initiative to promote the spirit of Ijtihad, Islam’s own tradition of critical thinking, debate and dissent.” In calling for diversity and reform in Islamic thought, she necessarily addresses Muslims; she necessarily addresses non-Muslims in calling for human rights, including women’s rights, for all Muslims. When we ask, “What does Islam say?” we ask, “What interpretation of Islam on Islam’s terms is there that accords with core ‘Western’ beliefs?”

I recognize the danger in asserting certain baseline values before the debate on religious meaning has been concluded. I am holding particular facts to be true: that all men are created equal, for instance. It is difficult to justify this holding. Call it my faith. While I neither ask nor expect all religions to think the same, I expect all communities of faith to act in accord with civil society; how believers justify this I leave to their hearts, their meetings, and their gods.

Eboo Patel, whose column on Islam comes out today, has observed that it is the congregants that define a religion, that how a society understands its mission is as important as what the mission is called. The debates of theologians are important, and I hope to say more about those debates, but unless their arguments reach the adherents of a faith tradition, they do not exist.

I also must credit Patel, about whom I’ve written before, with rescuing me from the theory of theological segregation. We moderns have no choice but to see our neighbors responding to the muezzin, so it should surprise no one that from time to time we are caught up in church plenaries, too. Just as congregants cannot now forget their neighbors outside whom church policy will effect, so too the neighbors, if not already voting, must consider the issues that someone else’s church considers. But we must go a step even beyond this self-understanding and tolerance of the other. Not only must a Muslim be able to explain how his Islam is a social, pluralist faith tradition, but the Jew across the street ought to be able to explain how a pluralistic society accords with Islamic tradition, too.

So, as a non-Muslim eager to see the present debate unfold, I have no answer to the question, “What does Islam really say?” I have only blank pages on which to record Islam's answer, a mind ready to persist if the debaters are not forthcoming, and a heart eager to distribute answers true to Islamic revelation and defensive of human equality.