Why I am not a progressive Muslim

By Mohja Kahf

16. Labels suck. They don’t do us complex humans justice. (And you’ll note that I use them anyway, just like you do, so shuttup.)

15. Hussein Ibish.

14. Mean-butt personal attacks on Hina Azam, Muqtedar Khan, and others. (If your instinct is to point out that this list contains personal attacks too, please defenestrate yourself. This essay is obviously not my best work, nor is a tiresome consistency the guiding light here, shuttup.)

13. Half of them treat shariah like it was a bad word. All they seem to know about shariah is stoning, just like the mainstream US press.

12. Ditzy cheerleader McMuslims who think they are oh-so-rad bad girls but whose feminist rebellion consists of shopping at the mega-mall for Victoria’s Secret underwear. Radical feminism has a critique of capitalism and that whole world trade imbalance thing? Oooh but there’s a saaale!

11. Abu Fattoush. Who affirms that he’s not a Muslim, and learned the word Islam and its entire contents and discontents about a minute ago, yet gets to have a great big meanbutt voice on the main progressive Muslim website. Go figure.

10. They tend to forget who owns the surplus of the enormous imbalance of power in the world and so they spend more of their energy excoriating those who don’t have hegemonic power, instead of combining a critique on both fronts. “Usama bin Laden sucks bigtime, AND the US created him in the mujahideen camps of the 1980s and then had its Cold-War pawn backfire on it.” That’s an example of dual-front critique. “Usama sucks” is one-sided critique. That was fun, let’s do it again. Simultaneous dual critique: “Hijab the way the conservatives codify it is patriarchal and misogynistic while pretending to be liberating AND so is the Western mainstream attitude toward women’s bodies and fashion, both suck, yet there are ways out of both, and ways in which women negotiate their own good places through both systems.” Now the one-sided critique you hear from many progressive Muslims: “Hijab sucks.” See the difference?

9. They sometimes make Danny-boy and his neo-con cronies grin evilly. Even though they don’t mean to. I believe in the integrity of progressive Muslims. But sadly, one-sided critique is easily co-optible even when its proponents don’t mean it to be. (On the other hand, one neo-con website calls progressives ‘Islamists in yuppie clothing.’)

8. A US soldier progressive Muslim said my stories on “Sex & the Ummah” were doing to tradition what his gun was doing to Iraq. Ugh. Get that sentiment away from me. I hate US foreign policy. I love Islamic traditions. They are living traditions to me, which is why I feel we have a right to bring them into our living rooms and make them diaper our babies and get up to morning coffee with us today. (Just the other day I multi-called Ali and Aisha. Ali goes, tell the Shias and Sunnis to cut the fighting, they’re both clueless. And Aisha started to say, ‘Overall I disapprove of you, Mohja, but—’ and then she got on the subway and I lost her.)

7. Mike Knight ain’t one either, and he my bud.

6. They don’t get us creative types except when we hit the pc notes they wanna hear.

5. They can’t stomach concepts like the wrath of God and other stuff from the dark side of the all-encompassing Divine. Who does? But they don’t even wanna be in the room for it. Spiritual wusses.

4. They’re condescending to conservative Muslim women. That’s my grandma & ma you’re dissing & calling too infantile to know what they want, Tarek Fattah, so back it up. Supporting the hijab ban? Back it THE HELL up.

3. Too much Beltway energy. Not enough grass roots. Too much concern for what goes on in the corridors of power and influence, not enough humility and knowledge that in the end, it’s not really in any of our hands. Or that, it is in our hands maybe, but not that way. Beltway or not, too little spiritual surrender and sweetness in the picture (and none in this essay whatsoever; shuttup).

2. The lazier among the progressives in the U.S. and Canada tend to act like House Slave Muslims. Too much reliance on what is pc in left-liberal Western discourse and what is au courrant in postmodern thought as the basis for their critique rather than a truly independent grounding in alternative spiritual paths. Here they should take a cue from the South African progressives & others abroad. If only the U.S. progs had experience with any sort of extra-systemic thought, with environmentalist thought, black radical thought, anything that would give them some backbone, some honest-to-goodness principles of their own. Instead, they run the other way wringing their hands abjectly whenever the nasty Field Slave Muslims say something Not Nice to Massa. Hey proggies, sometimes the Field Slave Muslims get it right, you know, even when one disagrees with their brute violence.

1. And the Number One reason I am not a progressive Muslim: I don’t want my teenaged kids hanging out with them if that leads to their thinking that all the openness-postmodern-fluidity yadda-yadda means I will budge on our family’s no-dating rule. And no premarital sex, ibni, binti! No judgment implied on any readers—you folks do what you deem right in your life path, your decisions are between you and God, I will defend your right to privacy. I know this issue is not as black-and-white as the conservatives make it, that abstaining from or engaging in sex outside sanctioned relationships is not the isolated standard by which purity of heart is discernible (by God, in any case, not by us), and that honor is an internal quality known to God, not a quality indicated by, say, an intact hymen. So I won’t shake my holier-than-thou finger at you, and I won’t tell you how to raise your kids. Me, I’d rather hang with Mormons and Baptists on this issue. Until my kids—male and female—are, like, at least thirty. Yeah, you heard me. Same person from the Sex and the Ummah column. This will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows me, or has read me carefully, as opposed to alarmists and cheerleaders. Just because a person writes openly about sex and respects discourse from differing opinions about it, doesn’t imply she advocates in her personal life all the practices described in the writing (the imbeciles who believe that it does know who they are). And just because the damn conservatives believe in this principle (no premarital sex) for all the wrong, anti-feminist reasons, guess what progressives, doesn’t make it automatically wrong. It’s right in my book, on entirely other, spiritual-ethical grounds.

Why I am not a liberal (or moderate, or modernist, whatever you call it) Muslim:

• They don’t have the guts to come out against stoning.
• They were too chicken to support the woman-led juma, even though they claim to be feminist. And even though the event had its flaws. What milestone event doesn’t?
• They think the solution is in modernist rationalist thinking. They miss the whole spiritual mystery thing. (See progressives.)

Why I am not a conservative Muslim:

1000. I was one in my callow youth, and it sucked. I ain’t goin back there. Dank basement full of Soul-Forcers clanking inauthentic chains of spiritual hell (for me; if it’s your cup of tea, why, I defend your right to have it). I could write a thousand page essay on that, but it’s been done. Here are just a few more reasons.

999. Sincerely believing that anyone who isn’t them is a murtad, kafir, unbeliever, heretic deviant doomed for hell.

998. Thinking they own integrity, morality, and religion. Thinking they own God. Etc. etc.

997. That whole anti-feminism thing, yeah. While pretending (some of them) to be pseudo-feminists (“Islam liberated woman fourteen hundred years ago blah blah blah”). Being really rigid on hijab and all that. Oh yeah, and stoning!

996. Girls don’t get to play sports. Or swim, except fully clothed. Been there, done that. Blech.

995. The music sucks on this side. (The food is great here, though. That’s one thing conservies got on the others, terrific food. The women spend more time cooking.)

994. Theater-going, movies, ballet, opera, song, all creative opportunities suck here, except calligraphy. Art, pursuit of beauty, in general dismal here. Seen as worldly, worldly = bad.

993. Dualistic thinking, separating God out, despising the world of humanity (see #994). God good, world bad, humans unworthy. Totally miss the profundity of tawhid.

992. Fear, guilt, dread of God emphasized. God on this side functions sort of like a big mean parent-in-the-sky with an all-seeing video camera recording everything you do so he can on Judgment Day show the world footage of you masturbating (or even fantasizing about masturbating, since he’s inside your head) to shame you into groveling for forgiveness. That’s their interpretation of ‘closer to you than your jugular vein.’ Except they’d find the anthropomorphism of my metaphor horrifying. But the gist of it holds.

991. Love of God seen by conservies as a sell-out to Christianity or to hokey pantheistic Sufism. Love = obedience, period. No sweetness here, to use a phrase of Ghanaian novelist Ama Ataa Aidoo. I wrote about this lack in my diary when I was fifteen, trying hard to fit in conservo-land and wondering: “Where is beauty? Where is love? Sweetness, gentleness, kindness, heart? Hate is everywhere, hate, anger, hostility.”

990. They’re real good at anger. That’s why I’m still real good at anger, I was raised that way. Anti-this, anti-that, conservatives know how to be great passionate haters. (This is true of hardcore people in other religions too, as the recent anti-‘Happy Holidays’ campaign showed us.)

Why I love them all:

Progressives—because they’ll let me cuss them out on their own forum. Who else would do that? How can you not love someone who would do that? Who else encouraged my Sex & the Ummah column, come what may? Who else is so open, so fluid, so up for any new experiment (except when they’re not)? Because they’re calling Muslim communities out to badly needed levels of self-examination, airing our dirty laundry that somebody needed to take out of the damn closet before it rots, daring to ask the questions that mainstreamers at the mosques of conformity are too mind-numbed by religious bullyism masquerading as ‘fear of God’ to ask.

Liberals—because their hearts are in the right place, and they’re trying so hard to do that shariah reform thing from the inside and we’re all gonna need their work in the days ahead.

Conservatives—aw, hell, they raised me. They’re my homies. I know them better than I know anyone, I know the beauty in them, and I won’t be a denier of that.

I won’t be a denier of the beauty and human frailty and pathos in any of them. They’re all part of an internal Muslim dialectic whose unfolding process I love, and none of them have the final answer to anything. I love progressives, especially the gentle spiritual Omid Safi types and the Ahmed Nassef provocative website types. I love liberals; shoot, my best friends are liberals (as they say; but no, really, it’s substantive and mutually true in this case, not me imagining I’m best friends with someone who is really only marginally in my life and doesn’t reciprocate and I merely use them for ‘credit’ of having best friends from that crowd, the way it usually is when someone says that), and they are doing amazing work in Islamic thought. I love conservatives, from young bearded homophobes shooting hoops at mosque gyms to earnest bespectacled jilbabies protesting liquor stores, and I know them inside out; they’re my family on figurative as well as literal levels.

They are all family to me, as schmaltzy as that sounds. Feuding, ornery, ugly family. Egotistical, asinine, contradictory family. About as contradictory, asinine, and egotistical as I am.

They are all dear to me. And I can’t stand any of them right now. (This curmudgeonly article is what it is, a failure of communication, shuttup. Which I will now do.)