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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIn God's Name
Muslim Scholar Ebrahim Moosa On Freedom, Fundamentalism, And The Spirit Of Islam
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Last Christmas I traveled to Libya to meet my husband’s large Muslim family for the first time. Stepping off the plane in Tripoli, I was greeted by a massive portrait of Muammar al-Qaddafi, Libya’s dictator since 1969, his head draped in an ornate covering and his eyes obscured by 1970s-era sunglasses. From that moment on, Qaddafi was with us wherever we went in Libya. His face covered buildings, stared down from posts at the marketplace, flashed by on freeway billboards, and loomed over us in museums, shops, and hotels. My husband translated the Arabic writing beneath his picture for me: “Qaddafi, our souls belong to you.”
From the Tripoli airport, we drove along trash-strewn roads where cars careened at seventy miles per hour, their bumpers nearly grazing one another as they dodged potholes and puddles of stagnant water. My husband’s family home lies hidden in a tangled labyrinth of alleys off an unmarked dirt road. We knew we were nearly there when my husband recognized a towering pile of trash. “Unbelievable,” he muttered, shaking his head. “That pile of trash looks exactly the way it did eight years ago, when I was last here.” Now I understood why we never sent mail to his family: mail delivery — along with trash collection, street maintenance, and urban planning — is not among Qaddafi’s national priorities. Yet Libya is an oil-rich country, home to the eighth-largest oil reserve in the world.
Our first day in Tripoli, my husband’s brother — a judge and a prominent official in Qaddafi’s regime — invited us to his beautiful house for a feast. When we arrived, I jumped out of the car and spread my arms wide to hug him. My brother-in-law deftly leapt to one side with an expression of alarm, leaving me grasping at air. His children watched wide-eyed as I recovered my balance. This brother-in-law, a conservative Muslim, would avoid shaking my hand, or even making eye contact with me, throughout our visit.
My female in-laws wore floor-length dresses and head scarves and gathered in animated circles on the floor, apart from the men. Lounging on pillows and sipping sweet, strong tea, I let their Arabic words and laughter wash over me. Sometimes, watching my mother-in-law shuffle around her cold, sparse home in threadbare socks, I felt sorry for her. Other times I envied the intimacy these women clearly shared and the slow pace of their daily lives, devoid of my typical American concerns: balancing career and family; saving for retirement; trying to stay fit and thin.
More than once, Libyans asked me why President George W. Bush had chosen to invade Iraq, and yet decided to repair relations with Libya. Qaddafi is a far worse dictator than Saddam Hussein was, they said. People voiced heated criticisms of the U.S. — and equally passionate desires to move there. The American dream, I learned, was also the Libyan dream. All the people I spoke to longed to be able to express themselves freely, to improve their lives, to secure an education and a promising future for their children. But under Qaddafi’s iron-fisted rule and nearly two decades of economic sanctions, these dreams have become unreachable for most Libyans.
Each morning, awakened at dawn by the call to prayer from the local mosque, I lay in bed and tried to sort out all that I had seen and heard. What, I wondered, was the difference between Saddam Hussein and other dictators in the Middle East? How had the prophet Mohammed viewed women? What did Islam teach about violence? What, if anything, did Muslim terrorists have in common with my humble and generous in-laws? And how did Muslims around the world view Americans? Once back in the U.S., I decided, I would seek out a progressive Muslim voice to address these questions and others.
Ebrahim Moosa is a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University whose services are in great demand these days. He has been called upon by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to serve with a group studying governance in the Muslim world, and he was recently named a Carnegie Scholar and awarded one hundred thousand dollars to write a book about madrasas, the traditional Islamic schools he attended as a youth.
Moosa is a rare scholar whose worldview is shaped equally by traditional Islamic schooling and Western academia. The son of a grocer of Indian heritage, Moosa grew up in a traditional Muslim home in Cape Town, South Africa. At the age of seventeen, he abandoned his plans to become an engineer in order to study Islam. Against his parents’ wishes, he enrolled in one of India’s foremost Islamic madrasas — an austere, male-only institution where he pored over theological and legal texts for three years, completely cut off from the outside world. By his third year, Moosa had grown restless with the isolation of the madrasa and its parochial view of Islam. He longed to engage the world more directly, and so, after earning his degree as a Muslim cleric, he traded his robes for a suit and became a journalist in London, England. As the antiapartheid movement gained momentum, he returned to South Africa to pursue a doctorate in Islamic studies from the University of Cape Town.
Moosa soon made a name for himself as an activist who not only rallied against apartheid, but also spoke out against injustice within the Muslim community. One night, after he’d criticized the use of violence by a fundamentalist Muslim group, a pipe bomb exploded in his living room. Luckily he and his family were watching TV in a rear bedroom. Within two months, Moosa had moved his family to Palo Alto, California, where he took a position as visiting professor at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Moosa delivered a commencement address in which he warned of international outrage over the double standards in U.S. foreign policy. “Even those of us who think we are safe and secure from the anger of the disgruntled and teeming millions can no longer be safe in our own homes and lands,” he said. “We sleep uneasy if people are hungry and angry, even if they are continents away.” It was June 2001, just three months before the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Driving to Moosa’s house in Durham, North Carolina, I was struck by how far he’d come from the South African neighborhoods and Indian seminaries of his youth. His home is tucked away in a typical American suburb of cul-de-sacs and neatly mowed lawns. Moosa answered his door in casual clothes and socks, smiling broadly and gripping my hand in a warm greeting. He served me a cup of Indian chai, and for the next three hours we sat in his living room and talked. Moosa spoke passionately, leaning forward and waving his hands for emphasis, and sometimes surprising me by breaking into contagious laughter.
Bremer: How would you define Islamic fundamentalism?
Moosa: First of all, I think many Westerners mistakenly believe that all observant Muslims are fundamentalists, because they all fulfill the “pillars of Islam,” which include daily prayer, fasting during Ramadan, and a pilgrimage to Mecca. Most Christians think one day a week is enough to pray, and Muslims pray five times a day. They must be fundamentalists! And when Christians hear that Muslims don’t even drink water during Ramadan, they think that’s terrible — a violation of human rights! And when they hear about the animals killed for feasts during the pilgrimage to Mecca, they think that’s an “orgy of blood.” In short, Americans and Europeans are accustomed to seeing religion practiced a certain way, and when they see something else, they call it “fundamentalism.”
Historically, Muslim societies have understood that in certain arenas, the voice of religion prevails, and in other arenas, the voice of reason prevails. Thus, questions about how you worship God and how you perform your rituals would fall under religious authority. But how do you build roads? How do you organize your banking system? How do you handle agriculture? These questions require the authority of reason. Islam has had very little to say about these issues for most of its history.
