Fast-Food-Islam: How Wahhabism Feeds Our Intellectual Retardation

By Adam Misbah'ul Haqq

In the mid part of the twentieth century fast food franchises popped up all over the country. It was a time of assembly lines, burgers, fries and the ideologies of “progress” and “create the demand and fuel the supply,” ideologies which helped shape the contemporary age.

This was the first time in history in which the laws of supply and demand were so atrociously manipulated as to produce a complete economy based upon want as opposed to need. We now live in the age of consumerism where the customer is told they are right but are influenced and manipulated to the extent that their standards are reduced to what the market provides for their consumption.

In the early eighties major corporations lobbied to market their products to the captive audience of children, where the expectations of quality where thumped over the head by profit margin and quantity. People stood in line to purchase a burger wrapped like a present, thin french-fries fried in grease, and a cup of sugar, water, syrup and carbonate with a straw sticking out for a few dollars. During the seventies, eighties and nineties the fast food industries grew into multi-national conglomerates and could be seen popping up in almost every country, industrialized or not.

This is a place where the burgers arrive as frozen patties injected with artificial beef-flavoring which are later rolled through an oven press for mass-consumption, a place where cheap toys are fiercely marketed to excited and bewildered children who drag in their naive and bewildered parents for a quick and simple “all-American meal.” The gimmicks of attracting children and exploiting their undeveloped discriminative faculties were brought to near mastery by the early nineties. It was the wave of the future, and even though a journal of health recently stated that 80% of the country’s health problems were directly related to the American diet, the burgers were still walking out the doors, and those super-sized fries continued to disappear into the stomachs of hungry consumers.

In Islam a similar occurrence has emerged. A sort of fast-food-Islam, mimicking the Western phenomenon, began to emerge in the seventies shortly after the Saudis started raking in billions in petro-dollars.

It was a period of serious transformation within the Muslim world. After a decade of Wahhabi influence in the Middle East the Muslim world began seeing the proliferation of highly dogmatic literature which sought to explain to the colonized peoples what “Islam” really was and who the “real” authorities in Islam were--namely, the Saudis and those “scholars” who signed on to their policies.

The literature that resulted from this occurrence soon made its way in various shapes and sizes into an uneducated American-Muslim population in the eighties and nineties. This material, which for the most part hails from the Arabian Peninsula or is funneled out of the numerous publishing houses owned by the Wahhabi press in the Middle East, is, for the most part, designed for children. One could easily argue that intellectually, only a child or young adult could really gain anything from this literature because the way in which the material is laid out and the topics are examined disengages the reader from the tradition by telling them that they basically have nothing to offer the interpretive process in Islam, but that they should simply follow what the “noble” Saudi scholars tell you Islam is.

No longer do we have scholars who spent their entire lives studying and contemplating the principles, concepts and teachings of the Prophet, teaching what they have discovered in highly sophisticated halaqahs in mosques and in their homes. Instead we have books like, “Islam: The Simple Religion” and “What Islam Says About Free-Mixing.” These books, written by either engineers or Wahhabi scholars, are very popular because they can be read in one sitting. They allow us to avoid any debt we may feel we have to investigate what God wants of us, or any debt we might feel toward our rich and diverse intellectual tradition.

All of the sophistry of our past can be swept under the rug of the contemporary feel-good fast-food-Islam literature. For the first time in Islamic history we have an institution (The Saudi Council of Esteemed Religious Scholars, or whatever they call themselves) which can tell us (the lay people) what Islam is and how to follow it. Employing the materialistic philosophy of Wahhabism, a gloomy and puritanical religio-political movement which emerged about two hundred years ago in the Najd province of Arabia, a philosophy which concentrates on outward acts of worship and the dogmatic theology of its founder, the Saudis have perfected, for the time being, the art of legitimizing their own draconian rule by redefining the normative standards in our tradition with an authoritarian religious discourse.

This institutionalized ideology, which never existed in the pre-modern period, has crippled any intellectual advancement in the contemporary age and has subsequently set the Muslim community even further behind its Western counterparts than it was at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Even so, the production of this childish religious literature, literature that quotes endlessly verses from a crude translation of the Qur’an, the medieval rulings of Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taimiyah, and loads of Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari, continues to sell in the various Islamic bookstores which populate the web. Most of these bookstores have established a successful Internet market and sell this literature for a very inexpensive price.

Any book which might value over twenty dollars and which might purport a high level of accountability to the sources will be passed over. Any title which exhibits the high standards usually employed by contemporary Western scholars will be disregarded as “too expensive” and one of the colorful and simple fast-food books will be purchased. Looking for an “easy-read,” the contemporary Muslim will normally buy one of the pamphlet books instead of investing their money in material that challenges the intellect and upholds basic scholastic ethics. A brief examination of these titles and the conventional wisdom that one can find in them rivals the most marginalized Christian fundamentalist literature available in the West today.

So why are Muslims buying this material? Is it their superficial and romantic attachment to the tradition which compels them to read these pamphlet books in order that they feel comfortable in their “Islamic skin?” Is it a lack of access to quality literature, or possibly the inability to discern between research and scholarship, and dogma and rhetoric? What compels Muslims in the contemporary age to spend their hard earned money on Wahhabi propaganda in the disguise of objective religious literature?

The answers to this challenging question are as numerous as the reasons why Islam as a religion and alternative to materialism and world-worship has been fundamentally retarded (here meaning the inability to experience growth) in its intellectual progress. Gone are the early centuries where Muslims soaked up every bit of knowledge from within and without their tradition and used whatever beneficial knowledge they came across to not only strengthen their belief and conviction, but to further the cause of Islam as well. Now we have, unfortunately due to our deathly ill intellectual tradition, successfully empowered the very dogmatists who have cheapened Islam into a veritable fast food happy meal to tell us what Islam is and how we ought to follow its precepts. The very philosophy of this non-critical, faith-blind and anti-spiritual parody of Islam is identical to many of the contemporary Christian religious philosophies in the sense that “religion” is primarily reduced to an extra curricular activity, or something that does not complicate your worldly life.

Much of this material reflects the over-simplicities and generalizations common amongst all supremacist ideologies. The emphasis of this material is of course the positive law of the shari’ah, the greatness of Muslims and the wretchedness of the “other,” the subjugation and humiliation of women, and the idea that the only way to approach God is through a literalist construction of the text, a construction that is the sacred precinct of the Saudi scholars only, but a construction that we can read and adopt as our “religious identity.”

This literalist construction of the text is always the same. It is a rhetorical articulation of doctrine, sprinkled with ayahs from the Qur’an and a selective isolation of hadith reports, almost always from the Sahih of Muslim or the Sahih of Bukhari, and if you’re lucky Abu Dawud or Tirmidhi are thrown in for good measure. In the same way that frozen patties are rolled on a conveyor belt through an oven and slapped onto a bun by a teenager making minimum wage, these books are sewn together by miscellaneous authors with no credentials other than their attendance at the Wahhabi institutions such as Medina University, or they are constructed on the computer by publishers seeking to profit off of the easy access to paper and the audience ready to invest money in anything which claims to speak for Islam.

The content of this material reeks of intellectual bankruptcy. If one wanted to produce one of these titles, all you would have to do is purchase a copy of a piece of software called “Alim.” Alim is marketed as an encyclopedia of the sources which Islam is based upon. Now, let’s say you want to write a book and call it, “Greed in Islaam.” All you would need to do is type “greed” in the search engine of the Alim software, and it will bring up all of the ayahs from the Qur’an and any hadith report from the “sound collections” pertaining to greed. Now you have to write short and simplistic paragraphs, punctuating them with the search results of the “Alim” software, and you have your very own “authoritative” book called “Greed in Islaam.” This book can be marketed with bright colors in any of the Islamic bookstores that live online.

This fast-food-Islam has already cost us a generation and a half of Muslims. The same health problems which afflict the American fast-food population afflict the intellectual progress of the Muslim fast-food-Islam population. In an age where Islam is facing humiliation after humiliation at the hands of fundamentalists with the intellects of cave-men, in an age where we think that stoning a poor woman in Nigeria constitutes our Islamic civilization, in an age where the most important features in Islam are hijabs and miswaks, it is in this age that we must strive to overcome this despotic element which has oppressed our minds and usurped our legacy.

Our striving must include the raising of our expectations in our religious scholarship. Before we can raise these expectations, and until fast-food-Islam ceases to command such a ready market, there can be no real progress in our tradition. All of the flashy and colorfully gaudy books that are shipped off to America from the Middle East can never revive our near dead scholarly tradition but can only further destroy it. In the end we will have cheapened our tradition and transformed it into a tool for profit, advocating an underdeveloped religion of institutionalized dogma and childish simplicity as the final message of God.