RISTalks

Dr. Abdal Hakim Jackson - "Changing the Present, Dreaming the Future"

Opening

"[Peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you]"

"[In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful]"

Khutbat al-Hajah (Opening Khutbah)

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah. We seek His help, His forgiveness, and His guidance.

We seek refuge in Allah from the evils of our souls and from the evils of our deeds. Whomsoever Allah guides, none can misguide him. Whomsoever He guides astray, none can guide him.

And I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah. And I bear witness that Muhammad is His servant and Messenger. Peace be upon him and his family and companions.

May Allah open my heart and make my words clear to me. May He protect me from the evil of my soul and the foulness of my tongue. And may I not be misguided without the right of the Lord of the worlds.

Main Address

And after this, peace be upon you. First of all, I have to confess that I am just a little bit starstruck as I stand before you tonight. I don't know if many of you know the value that Dr. Nasr has represented in our community.

And I can speak quite personally on this point as a former student of Dr. Nasr and as an academic. I think that oftentimes Muslims don't know just how wrenchingly challenging it can be to try to sustain a dignified existence as a believing, practicing Muslim in the academy. And for me, Dr. Hussain Nasr has always been a beacon of inspiration.

And he has been a beacon of inspiration. Not because, and I hope that this comes through the way exactly that I mean it. Not because I have always agreed with everything that he has said. And I think that he is a man of integrity who, like myself, believes that we don't need a community of zombies. So it's not a matter of always agreeing with what my brother or sister says. But in everything that I've ever read by him, and every time I ever heard him lecture, the deep, profound, uncompromising belief in Allah, in his book, in his messenger, and in the day of judgment comes through with such uncompromising clarity.

It has been an inspiration that has sustained myself, and I can assure you, many other students in the Western Academy. And if he's still here, I know he's getting up there in years, but I just want to say publicly and in his presence, Jazakum Allahu Khair. And thank you very much, and I pray that Allah continues to give you years and enables you to continue to inspire us.

Your presence has been most valuable, most valuable indeed. Now, I have very little time, and I want to apologize to the organizers for going over time last night. I will not do that tonight.

Hadith Correction

I have one order of business that I have to take care of. Last night, there was a Hadith of the Prophet, which in my presentation I completely mangled. And so, for the interest of those who may have taken an interest in that Hadith, I just want to give it to you as it is.

This is from Ibn Abbas, may Allah be pleased with him, and the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. In what he narrates from his Lord, the Exalted, and this is Sahih Muslim:

[Note: The speaker mentions he will provide the correct Hadith but the exact Arabic text and reference are not fully provided in the transcription. The complete Hadith would need to be verified from Sahih Muslim.]

This is the Hadith that I tried to sort of unsuccessfully abbreviate last night, and I just wanted to give it to you as it actually is, so that my slate will be clean before Allah on the Day of Judgment.

Understanding Our Present Reality

Moving on to the topic at hand, it's very difficult to follow Dr. Nasr, who took you to such elevated heights, and then to bring you back down to the lowly heights that I'm used to operating on, but I am what I am, and I thank Allah for his bounties, and so I'm going to give you what I have. I think the issue of changing the presence requires that we first come into some clear understanding of what that presence is. To my mind, we live in a very highly integrated world, and some of us have talked about this already, the internet, cell phones, I mean we can be in contact, we can know what's going on from time to time, in real time, second by second.

And all of this is shaping human relations, and I think that in all of this, none is more important to understand our present, and to begin to dream clearly, to go back to the point of Sheikh Habib Ali Jifri. I think we have to understand what this is producing in terms of cultural evolution, and what may soon develop into a cultural revolution that is quietly creeping upon the world. And this cultural revolution has to do with the fact that cultures and peoples are coming into mutual contact and interaction, on levels and in ways that are unprecedented in human history.

Cultural Challenges and Diversity

And this presents new cultural challenges, new ways of coming to terms with cultural diversity, with cultural authority, and with the ability to carve out one's own cultural identity. And I think that where we are successful in managing cultural diversity, then we are in a position to pool our resources in such a manner that might enable us to rise to some of the challenges such as those Dr. Nasser laid out tonight. And when we're not able to rise to this challenge, then the tendency is, however silently, to have us divided, unable to cooperate with each other, each going our separate way, and not being able to pool our resources.

So in a certain way, the cultural challenge is as serious as any other, because it will determine what kind of human relations we have, both on the level of sort of micro-communities and on the global level as macro-communities. Now I tried to very briefly lay out some of this last night, and I want to try to just very quickly enumerate it, and hopefully fill out the picture so that I can talk about what I think the present challenge is, and what a reasonable dream for the future might be. I said last night that the 19th century saw Western societies thoroughly dislocate non-Western societies culturally.

And this was, I think, especially true for Muslim societies. And I think that the cultural dislocation was much more severe and went much farther than any other influence that affected the Muslim world. And I think that some of what Dr. Nasr actually lamented has a lot to do with the loss of cultural authority in the Muslim world.

Loss of Cultural Authority in the Muslim World

One of the reasons why it is very difficult to get Muslims to think independently and to think spontaneously as they interact with the sources of their own religion is because the cultural authority in the world today rests outside the Muslim community. And so you're not going to be really considered a scholar, really considered a scientist, really considered this or that, unless what you do somehow earns the esteem of people who happen not to be Muslims. And so it is very difficult to incentivize Muslims to think independently, where that independent thought as Muslims will not be recognized in those centers that happen to be the validators of human activity in the world today.

And that is fundamentally at its heart a cultural issue. And so the issue of culture and cultural authority is a very, very important one for us as Muslims. Now culturally, I think Muslim societies were pushed on to a certain path of westernization.

The Phenomenon of "Gharzadegi" (West-struckness)

And I think perhaps no one captured this phenomena and this reality as poignantly as another Iranian intellectual who was a Marxist and soon came to discover that Islam was a much more profound outlook on life than Marxism. And so he became rededicated to Islam, a man by the name of Jalal al- Ahmad, who coined a very poignant phrase that captures what has happened in the Muslim world. He called it gharzadegi, which translates as west-struckness, that the Muslim world became struck, enamored by everything that seemed to have a western signature to it.

And this became something that sort of swept across the Muslim world. Now hand-in-hand with this westernization went the marginalization of the religious establishment and the religious scholars of Islam. And so for a time, coming out of the 19th century, even into the 20th century, what we have is the incursion of western cultural motifs on the one hand, and very thin filters, very weak filters that would put in place Islamic parameters, Islamic values, Islamic ways of seeing things such that what was coming in could be effectively filtered so that the good could come in and that the bad could be kept out.

The Process of Cultural Dislocation

This was a very wrenching process for much of the 19th century coming even into the 20th century. And I think that if any of you, if this sounds a bit abstract and we want to bring it down to a more concrete level, I would invite you to do the following. Those of you who are from the Muslim world or whose families come from the Muslim world, go back and look at some family albums from the 1940s or the 1950s or even as late as the 1960s and see what you see.

And we will see almost a total sort of disabusing Muslims of their Muslim cultural sensitivities. I won't go any farther than that. I'll let some of you tell others about it.

But this was a very serious and a profound dislocation. And it happened. And there's no point in denying it.

The Reemergence of Religious Scholarship

Fortunately, as the 20th century wore on, we see the reemergence of the religious establishment and especially a number of religious scholars who begin to recapture some of their standing in Muslim society. And this is a phenomenon that brought with it the ability to begin to reestablish, reconnect with a classical Islamic tradition to the point of being able to put back in place some of those filters that might enable Muslims to go about the whole process of interacting with these Western cultural motifs in a way that was consistent with Islam. And we begin to see a number of very important and influential intellectuals and Muslim jurists.

I mean, people like Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, people like Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah, Shaykh al- Buti, Shaykh bin Baz and others. Whether we fully agree or not with these people, I'm talking about their reentry into the fold in such a way that they begin to guide Muslims in terms of how they would come to look at the Western motifs that were coming into their midst. And so when we end up in a situation where we can reestablish the tools, and the tools with which to differentiate between non- Muslim on the one hand and un-Islamic on the other have been there for a very long time.

Islamic Tools for Cultural Integration

In fact, this was the process by which Islam traditionally spread into the societies in which it spread. Dr. Omar Farooq Abdullah has spoken about this. How Islam spread into various societies and how it interacted with local cultures, how it was able to let in the good and keep out the bad and empower those local cultures so that they themselves could go on and produce organically rich communities that could grow naturally in their own environment.

These tools had been there for a very long time. And as the Muslim religious scholars begin to reenter the fold, these tools begin to be reaccessed and the filters begin to get reestablished. And so to make a very long story short, in my perspective, what happens here is this process of reestablishing these filters enables the Muslims to avoid, to avert the twin cultural enemies of Islam.

The Twin Cultural Enemies of Islam

And the twin cultural enemies of Islam are cultural nativism whereby the mere fact that something was done in the past means that it is right, good, normative for the present. And we see many ayat in the Qur'an about this. This is a very common feature in the Qur'an.

Quranic Reference:

"Verily we found our fathers following a way and we are simply following their path."

With no ability to distinguish between whether what our fathers were doing was right, was healthy, was functional or not. The mere fact that they were doing it is enough to establish it as something that we should do.

This is the cultural nativism which is an enemy to Islam. The other enemy is cultural promiscuity whereby, again, we have no filters. And whatever the newest fad is, we simply take it on because it's a fad.

And because we want to be seen as being up with the latest fad. And we can see aspects of this in what the Prophet did both in Mecca and in Medina. There are several hadiths in which the Prophet says explicitly, "This was not, differ from the Jewish ways and from the ways of the Mushrikeen."

This was not an absolute command but there were always areas in which the Prophet warned us not to be culturally promiscuous. Because the reality is that, and by the way advertisers know this very well. And that is that along with a cultural practice may come a whole bunch of other associations that go along with it.

And that's why, you know, what do cigarettes have to do with a pretty woman? It's nothing to do with it. What they want to try and convince you is that if you smoke these cigarettes, you'll get this kind of a woman. I mean, that's the association.

And these kinds of things are very, very carefully crafted. And so we cannot be culturally promiscuous because when we adopt certain kinds of cultural practices, along with them come other things that we should not, that we should not be involved in. And so what we as Muslims have to have is the right filters to begin to let the good in and keep the bad out.