Jameelah and Esack

The correspondence of Maryam Jameelah and On Being a Muslim by Farid Esack both talk about the struggles of being Muslim in a liberal, diverse world. Esack writes primarily from a social justice standpoint, and also to some extent a theological standpoint. Jameelah writes more personally: she herself is young New Yorker, newly converted to Islam, and she encounters many apparent conflicts between her faith and the surrounding lifestyle. I found one particular difference between the two writings to be very interesting.

First, the authors obviously arrive at very different conclusions. Jameelah strongly feels that Westernization/progressivism and Islam are incompatible. I'm not sure if Esack ever says this in quite so many words, but he seems to believe that that's not true, that Westernization and Islam are not incompatible. I feel this way because he has a progressive worldview overall, and also because in various anecdotes that seem to imply his belief that culture can be separated from ideology.

So these authors arrive at these different conclusions, and I think part of the reason is that they have different definitions of "context." For Jameelah, context means the history of Western colonization. Maulana Maudoodi writes that westernized Muslims are "mental slaves" to the West and are actually emulating their former oppressors (second letter) (presumably Jameelah shares this same view with Maudoodi). But for Esack, context means the socio-cultural-historical Arab surroundings into which the Prophet Muhammad walked (ch. 5). He writes that the severe patriarchy of the time and place rendered the Prophet's teachings about women actually revolutionary. But to read them today, with the backdrop of feminist history, the teachings seem oppressive. Therefore, Esack argues, it's important to retain the original spirit of movement that is visible when looking at the original cultural context. So for Jameelah, context renders Islam and progressivism incompatible. But for Esack, context renders Islam necessarily progressive.

(Also, I kind of chuckled to myself when I read On Being a Muslim because it is so strongly in opposition to Jameelah's perspective. Esack would be one of those progressives about whom Jameelah writes, "All these so-called Muslim 'Progressives' are far more dangerous than any external enemies for they are attacking the very foundations of Islam from within" (first letter).)

When reading these two writings, I kept thinking about the parallel situations within contemporary Christianity. There has never much question about Christianity vs. Westernization, but there is a lot of discussion about the intersections of Christianity and progressivism. A lot of the issue comes down to Biblical interpretation, just as how in Islam a lot of the issue comes down to interpretation of the Quran (Esack talks about this a bit in ch. 5). Like Esack, progressive Christians tend to take into account the socio-cultural-historical contexts in which the books of the Bible were written, and they look at how the Biblical text would have been interpreted by the audience within that context.

-GGM