Children of a Mixed Message

Children of a Mixed Message
Shireen Pishdadi
http://www.seehearspeak.com/?p=30


The Past Before Us
IN CASE YOU missed it, presidential phenom and forerunner Barrak
Obama is NOT a Muslim. Not now. Not then. Not never. Not no how. No.
No. No. And most of our "leading" Islamic organizations and
burgeoning Muslim umbrella convention personalities assure us that
this is as it should be, because, they say, religion doesn't matter.
This is politics. And we ought to get behind the big O—at least to
serve our own interests…which is the exact same thing they told us in
2000 about another presidential contender.
*
If this reminder doesn't exactly fill you with confidence about the
wisdom of many of those ageing community figures who have managed to
keep themselves at the forefront of our meandering Muslim parade
through America these past 40 years, then you should be heartened to
know that they have now been joined there in the limelight by a new
generation of younger Muslims, mostly in their 30s and 40s—Obama's
own generation—who have jauntily leaped their feeble fifty-ish
predecessors to fulfill their rendezvous with destiny at the head of
this motley procession.
*
That seems, at first, a hopeful thought. Young blood. New ideas. All
the externals, at least, show well: Native tongues, cultural fluency,
professional degrees from top schools, attraction to weekend
spiritual immersion experiences, media dexterity, and the ability to
stand in straight lines in public places.
*
But there is a paradox here. A harder look reveals that these same
capacities have not translated into a better articulation and
exemplification of moral integrity, or a more systematic and focused
presentation of Islam, religion of life, in either this thirty-
something generation or the twenty-somethings following after it.
More crucially, the major spiritual dynamics and forces of social
change within our Muslim American community—for us, largely a product
of the interaction of our elder now sixty-something Muslim generation
and their offspring, that thirty-something generation—have rather
systematically escorted our community down American society's secular
escalator rather than up through the traditional spheres of Islam's
insistent social justice and the stations of spiritual elevation well-
marked by our polymath Muslim predecessors, those who came before us
in, and delivered to us in tact, this faith.
*
Take a good look at who we Muslims in America are becoming and what's
become of us. The most significant aspects of our life and identity—
like our personal and communal worship of God, virtually all the
signs of meaningful relationship with Him, and our intramural
community cohesion and family conditions—have deteriorated not
improved, and dramatically so, over the last decade. The vast
majority of us do not practice Islam. Most of those who do, do not
possess even its basic knowledge sets, nor are they seeking to
acquire them. Even less has the community institutionalized truly
effective means of delivering these `ilm-essentials to its members—
and, in fact, that is no longer even a serious personal aspiration
for most of us.
*
Yet we are all so very self-impressed with our over-flowing Friday
Prayers, double-timed in the major mosques. But the number of Muslims
who make it to Salatul Jumuah every week—despite the fact that the
quantity of those newly coming to Islam is constantly increasing and
our national masajid count has shot past 2,500—still does not exceed
a mere 10 percent of the community's obliged population, at best. Or
take ribah (or, rather, don't). Dealing in interest-based financial
transactions, one of the gravest sins in Islam (see the Qur'an, 2:278-
279 to set your hair on end) is now rampant among us. Abuse in the
family is soaring. The divorce rate for new marriages has jumped to
nearly 50 percent, probably the highest of any Muslim community or
country in the world.
*
But set aside the statistical indictment. Check out your own internal
proceedings, your subjective experience. Anyone who has been hanging
around the Muslim community long enough knows way down in his or her
bones that something old has gone awfully wrong with us in the New
World. There is a definite sense of degeneration in both our moral
discourse and traditional behavior. This categorical decline in our
worship, our learning, our transactions, our relationships, our
families is not "just the way things are," as we are constantly and
mindlessly being told. My contention is that this is the fallout that
many of us have warned was in the coming, but that there is sociology
to it. It is primarily the result of the leadership dabka being
danced for a decade now by the two Muslim generations I've been
talking about, the aged elders and their now thirty-something
children.
*
Indeed, together they have captained our community to a clear-cut
shift toward relativism as a rationale for questionable conduct and
doubtful communal judgment. Based on their neat moral separations,
they can now tell us with a straight face to vote for someone who is
furiously distancing himself from us on the most crucial level, who
wants to fight the "right war" against the poorest and most battle-
ravaged members of our faith-family (is that something we endorse?),
and who has studiously shunned even intimating that our community is
bearing the brunt of the new homeland stupidity, lest he anger with
audacity those select souls who have appointed themselves to
perpetually marginalize us in the world. I know the get-out-the-vote
argument is everywhere on the wing in our all-American community. But
if this is now the major thrust of our organized existence (along
with aggressive arts and culture programming)—and it is—how pathetic
a da`wah is that?
*
Here's an example of just how pitiable it is. While we're chanting
(with perfect tajwid) "YES WE CAN," that same external message is
reverberating breathlessly through the hormones of two generations of
Muslim men and women. Intermingling between the sexes, both among
thirty-something Muslims and their late-teen and twenty-something
cohort of successors, has clearly inverted our community's
traditional gender-relations values—namely, no fraternizing before
marriage or after, and staying married once you do wed.
*
If you have been asking yourself how our Muslim elders raised up this
increasingly central age group among us—the thirty-somethings—you are
far from alone. But take the irony out of your voice, because there
really is none. This unique Muslim bracket, in every beat and
synapse, is exactly the experimental age band they nurtured. But who
is this generation, really, and how did they come to this?
*
X Marks the Generation
In American sociological parlance, the Muslim thirty-something
generation I have been spanking is part of a broader generation known
as Xers, short for Generation X. And no, it's not because they're
anything like brother Malcolm, quite the opposite. They achieved
their namelessness because of their sort of lost, deliberately
undefined (or perpetually redefining) "whatever" attitude and "e"-
(for ephemeral?) status. They share this platform with their age
group in England, incidentally, which should be clear to anyone who
has been watching this Muslim contingent among both societies.
*
And while there is an argument to be made that the Muslims of this
generation are not truly part of their larger American (and British)
cohort, since many issue from diverse ethnic backgrounds as first-
generation offspring of immigrants, it doesn't hold up. Generational
gravities, particularly in highly developed societies, are immensely
powerful shaping forces, and the behavior of the Muslim Xers betrays
the justice of that label. Their "abandoned" upbringing, dress,
isolated interactive experience, media socialization, special
language, and cultural nomadism all identify our Muslim thirty-
somethings as classic Xers.
*
What I meant by "abandoned" upbringing is that their parent elders,
although heavy-handed in terms of their expectations for their
children, virtually left this generation to raise itself while they
were busy building the Muslim community. But here is where the Muslim
Xers may differ from their mainstream counterparts. Their now elder
parents might not have invested a great deal in the child raising
itself, yet the former worked very hard to elevate their Muslim Xer
offspring to the head of our community institutions, above an
intervening generation, to their current heir-apparent status. Those
village mentalities of the "olders" were too strong to yield to the
Islamic governance and management principles that they themselves
were in love with espousing. They were, in reality, "strong-men"
and "royal families" from those very sociological environs—and that
is precisely the kind of institutions they themselves set up, with
the accoutrements of public participation. Hence, they have been very
much in a position to bequeath their seats of community authority to
their children.
*
Yet the outlook, motivation, and moral equipment of these "children"
could not be more divergent from that of their parents. And the
consequences of this are the main adverse realities that have been
rampaging through our community. That intervening generation, who
might have softened the change and redirected the thrust, if you're
wondering, is the Muslim Boomers, who, unlike their counterparts in
mainstream society, have little presence within the Muslim community,
less respect, and, therefore, hold no power. To complete the picture,
the Muslim Boomers are now, for the most part, raising the twenty-
something generation, known as Millennials. We cannot go much deeper
here into the fascinating subject of generational interplay, but
there are two must-read books for Muslims on American generational
theory by William Strauss and Neil Howe called Generations: The
History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 and The Fourth Turning.
*
But make no mistake. Awareness of the external generational waves
crashing repeatedly against our Muslim communal vessel and beginning
to whip lash our families is essential for any of us who wish to
chart our own Muslim narrative through the emerging formidable tides
of history. This is especially true for Muslim parents daunted by the
prospects of founding and forming stalwart Muslim families in America
and the West—families that can forge themselves back into communities
and re-establish continuity with a more authentic Muslim heritage. To
achieve this, the Muslim American family must find within it the
stuff to beat back the three substantially erosive forces of
modernity now threatening to reduce us to a mere ethnic or cultural
dash in the pluralistic pot—all of which are modes that our Muslim
elder and Xer generations have mentally embraced—namely, secularism,
ethnocentrism, and debt-based monetarism.
*
It is certainly true that the new pageant of carefully crafted Muslim
public imagery, which the media and our Muslim leadership are now
increasingly cooperating in—particularly the strategically astute
Muslim Xer generation—is beginning to exert a potentially profound
influence on our families, children, and child-raising. But as much
as Muslim parents may now like to cite this as an excuse for family
failures, this force has not yet become determinative.
*
Rather, for understandable, or at least traceable, cultural reasons,
we Muslims of the West are deeply averse to open-air self-appraisal,
though we have learned to join heartily in the public flogging of a
steady stream of manufactured depictions of ourselves that violate
the irreproachable sensibilities of our evermore-sensitive "hosts,"
as some Muslim writers have called the mainstreams of the communities
we live in. We have never civilized that blood lust, however, into a
rational ability to examine and diagnose the pathologies of our
unhealthy communal situation, and discuss its remedies and treatments.
*
Yet now we have found that the stakes of silence run high, indeed,
through the very hearts of our own families and children. The truth
is we can no longer avoid examining and publicly critiquing the
shabby internal dynamics and flabby discourse of the Muslim community
concerning what is driving its development and where we are going.
This need has become particularly urgent since 9-11, as these
influences and ideas have metamorphosed into forces and agendas that
clearly imperil the very legitimacy of the Muslim community in
America—militating to dissolve our divine purpose, melt our moral
sensibilities, and, most especially, dilute the religious identity of
the rising generations.
*
To See, or Not to See
It is all very well to try to improve our families by evaluating
issues like parent-child communication or teenage travail in the age
of Internet pornography. But while highly disturbing, it is a
relatively easy measure (which this magazine did in its Rajab 1427 /
September 2006 issue). One discerns the problems, defines them, and
chooses from ten thousand pages and four decades of well-documented
research and its interpretation to make fairly certain analyses and
assessments. Yet, truth be told, this information is really beside
the point—which, if I may, is Does our community have direction, or
are we just flying by the seat of our pants? If it does, then who's
articulated it, who's leading it, and what are the intellectual and
social notions that constitute their thought? Moreover, are these
ideas firmly underpinned by the Quran and the clear Sunnah of the
Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, or are they simply an amalgam
of personal desires and the cultural moment?
*
When it comes to reading the Muslim community in America today, there
are precious few relevant statistics, hardly any substantive studies,
and, I would say, virtually no closely argued books cataloguing the
statements, opinions, and thought of our critical institutions and
leadership (at least among the living), and, yes, we have both (their
effectiveness and wisdom being another matter). Manifestos seeking to
establish benchmarks of change by which to plot the community's
direction are trickling off the presses. But these are still
personality or institutionally driven, and, therefore, of limited
seriousness and worth. They resemble the ideological programs
published in previous generations—for example, those of the modernist
Muslim advocates of decades past. They are issued to the internal
fanfare of constituents, but gain little communal traction and offer
no substantial human gain.
*
The kind of writings or communications needed for our community are
not so much statistical abstracts or academic studies, but epistles
pointedly addressed to us that awaken and connect us to the mission-
inspiriting message of the Quran and its Messenger, sallallahu alayhe
wa sallam, statements that remind us of why we are alive and what in
the world we Muslims are here for, beyond ridicule, ravaging, and
depleting the earth of oil. When comes our time—O Muslims of the age—
and what is our purpose under Heaven?
*
So though we see our children (and thus the future of Islam in
America) sliding ever deeper into this culture's deeply sick special-
interest political tribalism, wanton material obsession, and
adolescent sex abyss, we should nonetheless recognize that this is
not the problem. There is an underlying socio-spiritual vicious cycle
of unoriginality-yielding-religious-lassitude churning our
generations into doubt-ridden dupes, whirling us as a community into
perennial irrelevance.
*
More specifically, we are no longer a people who see in the
unchanging Quran and the model of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa
sallam, the profoundly timely answers to the harrowing questions of
the age—how to feed and free humankind and creation, how to marshal
men to peace and prosperity, how to restore ourselves to the divine
vicegerency of the earth for which we were meant, and thus the earth
and ourselves to the essential harmony of tawhid—what the sorely
missed and martyred Isma`il al Faruqi defined as "the act of
affirming Allah to be the One, absolute, transcendent Creator, Lord
and Master of all that is." This is the long lost mission of the
Muslim American community, and its absence is the real ungodly bane—
of our community, yes—but also of our time. For this is what is
inducing our debilitating muteness with our young people and greasing
our failing grip as we let them slip ineluctably from God's handhold
into feckless mainstream diffusion.
*
We don't have the statistical certainties and longitudinal proofs by
which to seize the community by the ear of its mind and drag it face-
to-face with the mirror of truth. But what we do have, all of us, are
our intuitive senses, if we can still muster the courage to take an
honest look at this shadow of our former selves, the caricature of an
Islamic community, of half-believing men and half-believing women,
which we have become. By now our hearts should be registering an
alarmingly consistent repetition of "novel" ideas circulating in our
community and which always happen to coincide with the emergence of
power-at-large's changing values and elite behaviors, and this ever
seems to spring up specifically among those of us entering mid-
adulthood and, lately, with those younger than them, as well.
*
We see trends in our families and community that appear to illustrate
fundamentally bad alterations of attitude, signaling aberrant changes
in direction. We hear friends speak in ominous tones about their
corroborating communal observations and dire family experiences. We
can even read between the lines of endless public releases issued by
important Islamic institutions and the writings and statements of
community opinion molders and decipher meanings that seem squarely
aimed at radically changing our spiritual mindset in order to wedge
us away from Quranic norms and pry our hands from the Sunnah
altogether as a binding guideline, the purpose being to more easily
shift our key social positions to coincide with the crowd, everything
nicely Islamized, ethically sliced, and religiously diced.
*
What I am talking about is the death of blessed innovation among us,
what `Umar ibn Al-Khattab reportedly called bid`ah mubarakah. For him
it was tens of things, lamp-lighting the masajid for night vigils,
bringing worshippers together to collective salah for taraweeh in
Ramadan, and compelling the merchants of Madinah to lower food prices
in a time of severe shortage, or bear the hudud penalties of theft
for the poor who could only survive by stealing food from them.
*
But what we see now in our community is a da`wah to gain acceptance—
not by presenting our message forthrightly, even if alone, like the
Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, from the hillock of Safa, but
by following the spiritually desiccated example of the faith
communities that have devolved before us in America, those that have
reduced their belief to the likes of a mere foreign lobby, or a power
bloc of intransigent voters seeking to verify their blind faith
through globally lethal end-times games. We see this absence of
blessed Islamic innovation in our organizations installing women as
leaders on the basis of sex for the express purpose of "sending a
message" to society, in our schools copying long-failed curriculums,
our mosques emulating priestly hierarchies, our businesses indexing
quasi-Islamic loans to current interest rates, our youth aping hip-
hop artists—right down to the fake indigo-serious album cover photos
of their angry-postured selves. And, now, not only are we making
sitcoms satirizing the sacred in ourselves, but we introduce into
them the offensive double entendre and blatantly sexual innuendo—all
under the billowing `abaayah of a single word—"Islamic."
*
Most importantly, we are aware of the programs our leaders make and
the decisions they take, and, vitally, what these choices represent—
that is, how they seem invariably to correlate and line-up with the
decisive events and demands of outside voices and pressures in
American society. The rationale for all of this, of course, is that
we are trying to position ourselves advantageously in society by
ensuring the mainstream that we are just like them, only Muslim. Are
we? If these are the ends that "Islamization" has come to, then the
Janis Joplin syllogism of inverted negation, I guess, is sorta right:
Islam is just another word for nothing left to believe—even though
virtually everything we know about Islam and see in the world belies
this desperately reductive logic.
*
Don't Fear the F-Words
Observation alone, however, is not enough.
It is time to draw conclusions about the impact of these changes and
choices in and by our community leaders on the rest of us. Do they
bode well or ill for the future of our society, both here and in the
Hereafter?
*
But we first ought to free ourselves of two fears: One is of being
blamed for "making fitnah" if we speak out against decisions that
clearly put the interests of "party" and "persuasion" before the
wellbeing of the community. This is an old device by which some seek
to overthrow the minds of others, when their real goal is to maintain
this rather insulting culture of paternalism that much of our
community remains steeped in.
*
The other is the accusation that one is
a "fundamentalist," "fanatic," or other such loaded term when one
refuses to bless the latest expressions of what is
termed "progressive," or to acquiesce in the most recent assertion of
the unalienable rights of "culture."
*
Both of these charges seek to de-legitimize the critical voices
of "troublemakers" born to swell the receiving side of the
microphones, and to ridicule into silence those labeled "idealistic,"
or "simplistic"—people who would take the Muslim community off the
treadmill of an evermore elite and out-of-touch American mainstream
and onto alternative paths that just seem to run in so much more
harmony with the Qur'an and the model of the Prophet Muhammad,
sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, and which hold so much more consistently
with the intellectual heritage of the scholars.
*
To dream such dreams aloud may mean standing alone for a time. But at
least it means standing. Some may not like what is said. Yet my view
is let the discourse begin. Throw down, brother!
*
If you indulge me somewhat more, I will try to show you the clear
connections I see between the unraveling of our family values and our
community's modesty and chastity, on the one hand, and the demands of
the cultural and political context on the destructive convergence of
the choices made by both our leading and rising generations, on the
other.
*
The Background and Our Muslim Generations
We are Muslims, living in a nation (1) whose leadership has declared
a limitless war on a vague concept that racist bigotry has associated
with our religion, and for which cause they highly suspect our
institutions, our traditions, and our people; (2) whose argument and
repressive actions its ethnic majority has endorsed out of fear of
us; and (3) whose oppositional liberal wing despises our sacred
morality, while its ruling conservative coalition—vehemently exhorted
by a powerful religious minority whose kingdom covets Muslim lands
and is right now openly slaughtering Muslim innocents—loathes our
worldly politics.
*
Any Muslim who denies that this state of affairs obtains in America
and that it is exerting a profoundly transformative pressure on what
Muslims and their organizations have been saying, doing, and deciding
for our future since at least September 11 is either disingenuous or
in denial.
*
A little history.
About 50 years ago three demographics came together to form the basis
for our contemporary American Muslim community: Students from the
Muslim world arrived to people President Johnson's "Great Society"
program. African American Muslims emerged as a reinvigorating,
indigenous force after Malcolm X popped the cork on the old Nation of
Islam. Other, mostly female, university students discovered both and
converted to Islam. (Within a decade, this prodded a fourth major
demographic: At first a few, and then a multitude, from the turn-of-
the-(20th)-century immigrant Muslim communities in America—mostly
from Lebanon and Palestine, but also from Pakistan, India, and
Bangladesh—began to reclaim their faith).
*
Notwithstanding the continuous presence of Islam on this continent
before there even was an American polity, these are the pioneers of
the American Muslim community we are part of today. They could hardly
have been a more miscellaneous lot. But they had one thing in common
(besides no money). Almost to a person they had made a dramatic
hijrah from circumstances and ways of life, and with sacrifices
hardly imaginable to their children, out of the various mainstreams
from which they hailed, as well as from the mother of all modern
American culture, the progressive, secular mainstream.
*
In those days of 1960s counterculture and well into the silly 70s,
these pioneers pursued the ideal of an Islamic culture that would
bring the da`wah of Islam to America. These were the early
institution builders. Any Islamic institution with an acronym (which
they loved), you can be sure they founded.
*
What is key, for our purposes, is to recognize that psychologically
they had exited the mainstream and migrated toward Islam. Having
committed to their own internal reform, they sought, at the same
time, to reenter the mainstream, but via the message of Islam.
As the numbers of Muslims in America quickly grew by every population
avenue—immigration, conversion, marriage, birth—the pioneers began to
make way for their children with many more acronyms, as well as
masajid, schools, youth groups, and so on. They viewed this new
generation—largely Generation X-ers in American cohort terms—as
the "first" authentic American Muslims.
*
What must be stated here is that at the same time of this explosive
growth in Muslim numbers, from mid-seventies to -eighties, the wealth
of the immigrants (and their access to petrol-dollars) also surged
exponentially. Their money fueled not only the growth and
institutionalization of Islam in America, but also a destructive and
virulent virus of ethnic separation. Their African American brothers
and sisters were largely left to the city and store-front masajid
where most of the pioneer generations first gathered, while the
immigrants fled, following mainstream demographic flows, to the
vanilla suburbs.
*
The deeply disturbing implications of this segregation did not go
unrecognized and efforts were made to incorporate certain voices from
the indigenous American community into the new institutional choir,
but this remained mostly personality driven, a liaison of elites.
From this point on, the very juncture at which serious youth work
commenced among Muslim communities, the story of Muslim Generation X
within the institutional establishment, becomes very much an ethnic-
immigrant one.
*
Everything about this Muslim generation's unique "American"
attributes, their parents did not fail to celebrate. The Qur'an in
one hand, Roberts Rules of Order in the other, this was the Messiah-
generation. Surely, they were destined to meld the best of both
worlds—their parents' movement orientation, and their very own
American accents and "native" organizational skills—and truly put
Islam on the map of the American psyche. "Visibility" (believe it or
not) was the byword in the days of their youth, in the 80s and early
90s, for at that time Muslims could not get any attention—which they
craved—from the American mainstream for love or money.
*
The Muslim X-ers thus came to believe in their own parent-propagated
myth, comprising a generation completely oriented toward their own
perceived "special difference": The gift of professionalizing and
marketing the Islamic experience, on the one hand, and, the pedigree
to "authentically" Americanize it and advertise it, on the other.
*
A Fork in the Road of the Mind
But something unexpected happened along the developmental roadway of
this generation. As they watched their parents move horizontally away
from a remarkably integrated Muslim community—in color, language,
gender, money, madhhab, nationality, Sunnis, Shi`ah, (the mix was,
indeed, remarkable by any measure)—to an almost total segregation by
all the above listed factors plus others too subtle to explain now,
they rejected their parents' generation's increasingly ugly,
Byzantine, vertical politicization of the community—and, deep inside,
they suspected their elders' spiritual sincerity.
*
Most of the pioneer-generation Muslim figures who were the luminaries
of the Islamic stage back then gained little of the X-er's approval.
A rare few were beloved, others politely respected, but none won the
Muslim X-ers hearts and minds. None earned their seal of authenticity—
until, that is, a new set of players entered the theater.
*
They were American converts (an occasional Englishman), mostly
preachers. A very few were true scholars. Their unifying
characteristic was rejection of the immigrant-based movement paradigm
and a call to return to an idyllic spiritual or classical archetype
of Islam. In addition, others promoted, or conjoined with this, an
urgent sense to take up certain urban socio-cultural struggles of non-
Muslim America. These were the guides whom the Muslim X-ers
ultimately anointed as the "real" (read "American") leaders of Islam
in the land, evoking for them the right blend of religious and
cultural authenticity.
*
What is important to note here is that unlike the cohort of their
pioneer parents, the Muslim X-ers never exited the American
mainstream. No hijrah for them. On the contrary, mainstream American
culture verified their "special difference." They saw themselves as
the human convergence point, the living nexus of both experiences,
the logical end of the dialectic of Muslim history in America. If
anything, they have viewed their mission as ushering the Muslim
community into the American norm and professionalizing it, ridding it
of its embarrassing "fobby" (a word they coined from the old "fresh-
off-the-boat" American anti-immigrant rhetoric) cultural baggage,
which they would accomplish by injecting a "genuine" American ethos
into Muslim institutions and community life.
*
The effect of this Muslim generation in our community and on our
families has been, and is, enormous. Yet it can be expressed in a
single word: Contradiction, or maybe two: Mind-boggling
contradiction. This is the generation that has institutionalized the
dual (or some might say "split") personality into our communal and
private lives. They are, in fact, great organizers, but confused
about their identities. They are genuinely concerned for the
generations coming after them, not wanting them to face the very real
hardships they themselves endured growing up, both as to lack of
understanding at home, with parents who could not relate to
their "outside" experience, and also with qualified acceptance at
large, with a society that feared and looked down upon their
spiritual-cultural character. But they detested the personal
conformity it would take to institutionalize that concern for Muslim
kids coming after them.
*
They rejected their parent's obsession with collective appearance,
public custom, and community structure, all of which smacked
hypocritical to them. So regularly in their youth they immersed
themselves in safely "set-aside" authentic spiritual programs. But
their Bedouin sensibilities could only manage the constraints of this
idealism in campus activities, or during a dedicated trip with
defined departure and arrival dates, or for a ritual seasonal
weekend, after which they would return to their "real" lives
seemingly without affect, like the transformers they played with as
children.
*
They learned an amazing amount about the historical elements,
constructs, and scholarly streams within Islam, and even took time
out for study-travel to learn religion and some Arabic abroad (which
highly disturbed their elder-generation parents, who, after all, had
run away from all of this). But in the end, they converted their
considerable talents, exposure, and insights into business tools,
mostly for the conscienceless mega-corporations and banks they almost
invariably ended up joining. Seemingly without a thought for the
consequences of their arduous labor, they now worked tirelessly for
the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance-legal establishment that
demanded not merely their genius, but their minds, bodies, and souls
(a move, incidentally, that immensely pleased and reassured their
status-conscious parents).
*
Even those few among them that chose other more socially conscious
routes, say, community organizing or issue enlightenment, could
generally not resist the pull of the paramount culture with which the
common American experiences of their generation had infused them. The
programs and institutions they systematized (wonderfully, by the way)
were Muslim bodies, but ensouled by the full breath of popular or
official culture.
*
Why has this mattered so much to our community and families? To begin
with, divine fate inserted this Muslim generation into the very
center of our community—the middle of all the generations—right at
the moment, in the 1990s, when the Muslim demographic reached
significance and Islam's institutional presence began to take real
root. But there they became something of a wedge, instead of a wheel,
a kind of vacuum in the developmental trend of the community. For
above all, their mistrust of the surrounding generations coupled with
their intense preoccupation with the event of their individual
experience and tightly-drawn sphere of concerns has left them
indelibly nomadic, wandering somewhat aimlessly wherever they deem
their ever-brooding emotions can best feed.
*
The result has been devastating for our community. Their dualism has
enshrined secularism into our formerly singular tawheedy Muslim
American ethos. In fact, it has raised this to the level of expected
public behavior, causing any who actually bring their full Islamic
complement or critique out for public view to receive sharp
castigation, distancing, and even ostracism from all further
association or platforms. This has, moreover, to a worrying,
deleterious degree, acculturated the Millennial Muslim generation,
with its rising substantial power, to begin to transform this
expectation into a law of behavior. Speakers, mentors, leaders—no
matter who you are or think you are, this new generation now demands,
not only that we address their issues—which are not at all the same
as the Xers—but that we compartmentalize Islam and the Quran to make
it conform to their unyielding civic will, as well as their greater
sense of commonality with their peers at large, whatever their
affiliation.
*
Moreover, the Muslim Xers have at once raised the bar of Islamic
knowledge to an ideal so lofty that no living human can achieve it—
not as the saints of the past they have substituted for the sahabah
have set the mark, at any rate. Hence, they have discarded their own
study, and thus relegated Islamic `ilm to practical irrelevance.
Religious knowledge, to them, is a great and noble thing, but we
should not let it interfere with our lives, or only so much as it
confirms our whims.
*
The impact of all this on the Muslim family has been incalculable,
both as the Xers were rising into adulthood, and now, when they
themselves have begun their own families. For one, they became an
almost impossible generation to manage within the family. Aloof,
moody, and impudent, they insisted to carry on relationships with non-
Muslim "friends" believing that they could compartmentalize such
associations and influences, just as they could secularize their
religious personality. Close encounters, outright sexual experiences,
and membership in myriad haram subcultures emerged. Sometimes this
resulted in marriage, perhaps, motivated to do, if not the right
thing, then the almost right thing. But more often it just grew like
a hidden tumor that they simply secreted into their "Muslim" home
lives—with parents, first, and then with husbands or wives and now
children.
*
The supposition, faulty, of course, was that they could control it,
continue to live this Dr. Jekyl-Mr. Hyde life. The reality was that
it reified in their personalities until it metastasized in their
families, causing untold suffering to well-meaning parents, damaging
siblings, and driving some to the brink of despair. It is currently
cutting a swath of destruction through the lives of ambushed spouses
and innocent offspring, who contracted one man or woman at the nikah,
but moved in with an alter ego, as well.
*
But to give you a better idea of how this has played out now in our
community, I must take you back to that fateful September Tuesday,
when the world came down around our previously ignored Muslim heads.
*
The Pivotal Juncture
Here is the scene as it was on the eve of the new millennium. The
pioneer Muslim generation, deeply riven with division, is still
pushing hard to legitimize Islam in the American mainstream. Their
goals and issues (but no longer Islam's message) remain clear in
their agenda. Having chosen to walk the familiar routes of access to
influence, the worn paths of the power-seeking communities before
them, they are poised on the establishment threshold.
*
They have trekked the money and voter allegiance trails through both
political parties, made associations with prominent professors and
academic institutions, forged alliances in the ecumenical movement,
and created investment agreements with conscience funds and financial
niche products. Yet the stigma of being Muslims representing their
community's interest (an unpardonable offense for some very powerful
adversaries) remains a formidable barrier to their wholehearted
acceptance by the American elite—though compromise of certain core
values had long ago become an art form among this the most focused
and relentless generation in the American Muslim constellation.
*
The Muslim X-ers (mostly in their twenties at the time) at the same
historical moment stand in the wings, ready to begin repositioning
the Muslim community into a more authentic American product.
Seemingly, they still had years to sort out the incongruities of
their second-gen experience.
*
Then September 11 loomed.
Some Muslims have been chagrined by the media mantra that September
11 "changed everything," feeling, at the time, this tended to
discount the enormously tragic suffering that impoverished Muslims
across the world have so long endured. Every day in the Muslim world,
the retort went, is September 11.
*
However tenuous the tune seemed in those early days, seven years have
proven that nothing could have been more accurate. September 11 has,
indeed, altered entirely the American equation—indeed, disfigured it
beyond recognition for the Muslims here.
*
Immediately in its aftermath—with the outrage of the nation trained
squarely on them, and beholding in absolute shock the impossible
realization of their most secret paranoia, and knowing they would be
blamed—Muslims in America split instantly in two. None, by any
measure, condoned the calamity. But some sought to stand up for
Muslim innocence, to challenge conventional opinion, to caution the
nation to act with circumspection and humility, and to take a
resolute stand against warring on pathetic Afghanistan and regressive
Iraq.
*
The truth is these voices were not few, but they were utterly whelmed
away by the pioneer generation, who held the reigns of institutional
power and who had finally drawn themselves face-to-face with the
upper echelons of mainstream America; and especially by the Muslim X-
ers and their guides, who warned of the boiling up of frenzied public
anger and counseled complete and abject apology, commiseration,
identification, and even support of the inevitable war effort.
*
Muslim marchers, bearing the flag above them, went out to meet
their "white-power-incited" detractors. Previously unassailable
Muslim luminaries abruptly retracted every conceivable litmus
statement, while Muslims disappeared by the thousands into unknown
jails.
In that intense time of aftershock, a new war president was
applauded, his war renamed, and the bombs on a by-standing, war-
ravaged Muslim country defended—all by "authentic" Muslims or their
willing images.
*
Freeze it here.
What does this have to do with the Muslim family, with, say, rising
divorce rates, child and spousal abuse, our present Muslim adolescent
sexual confusion, and the declining valorization of modesty and
chastity among us? Only everything.
*
Two-Stepping into the American Moral Meat Grinder
First, the pioneer Muslim generation has had a lifetime of hurdles,
roadblocks, and ball bearings strewn before it. Its whole modus
operandi has been to jump, go around, and tip toe toward its members'
single, inalterable goal—namely, establishment Islam. September 11
meant making an instant choice for them: "With us, or against us?"
And without batting an eye, the pioneers lined up, some quite
literally, squarely behind the president.
*
Given the "bluepill," "redpill" choice of the Matrix, the pioneers
have proven "bluepillers" every time—take me back to that fictional,
media-generated world. This has meant that the entire Muslim
institutional establishment, those organizations, that is, that would
survive the indiscriminate hammer of American justice system
attrition, would henceforth only operate within the clear yellow
lines of the establishment norm. Take any one of them. Read their
literature. Track their decisions. Watch their trajectory. They never
stray beyond the straight and narrow without some permission-slip of
a mainstream movement being in place first, making it acceptable, and
running cover for them.
*
They will never lead, ever, into a gray area, let alone an unpopular
political red zone. And should they dare criticize something or
someone that is in direct, egregious violation of Muslims or Islam,
they rush always to quickly balance this with a harder "equalizing"
bash against Muslims.
*
Read any of their websites now on, say, the July Lebanon atrocity or
the current Gaza killing games (what they are calling "war") and then
read their even more vehement denunciation of, for instance, the 2006
Seattle incident, perpetrated by a clinically psychotic man baptized
in an Evangelical church not long before. Tragic? Absolutely. Yet is
there a moral scale of any equivalency? Is there even any linkage?
But a full, pre-planned peace demonstration in behalf of five hundred
children and babies blown to bits in Palestine and Lebanon, a
spineless Seattle Muslim leadership duly canceled.
*
The stunning demonstration, repeated over and over again, that the
lead generation of Islam in America has tacitly installed American
power, and those who pull its chain, as, in effect, the halal-making
standard for the community has not been lost on our young people.
Rather, it has struck them (as with Apocalpse Now's Colonel Kurtz)
like a diamond bullet right between the eyes.
*
And here's where the generational rubber meets the squealing Muslim
family road. With the pioneer generation's every whimpering
genuflection for the sake of mainstream acceptance, we have further
alienated our own youth's hearts and minds because we have given them
the clear signal, not with our vacuous words, but with our fatuous
deeds, that Islam is not worth taking a hard stand for. When the
going gets tough, the tough give in.
*
Our youth now also use the yardstick of cozying up to acceptance from
power, often in the form of peer pressure, to legitimize the actions
they increasingly take. And what exactly is that power play for the
young in this land?
*
Power for young people in America is the power to get close to the
girls, the power to get to know the boys, the power to leave home,
the power to live in coed dorms, the power to be-bop, the power to
hip-hop, the power to rap rad, the power to take off hijab, the power
to smoke, the power to do dope, the power to watch porn, the power to
club, the power to make love.
*
And if you think this is just a jazzy alliterative list, go read the
hair-raising statistics on teen decadence from sea to shinning sea.
Then talk to your own kids about "others" they "know of." Every
single one of these so-called "powers" is accruing today to our
Millennial Muslim children, and the bad numbers are going north not
south.
*
Second, the Muslim X-er generation have begun to show us who they are
in terms of the figures they intend to cut in society, the cultural
model they seek to normalize in the Muslim community, and, above all,
the new-standard of gender integration they actively carry on in
their personal and peer relationships. At the very core of their
thinking lives a belief in the mythologies of the American narrative
and a concomitant despair at the failure of the Islamic reality with
which they have grown up.
*
They would present themselves in the digitized image of avant-garde
creativity, but their true hallmark is, rather, a visceral revulsion
for the Muslim experience in America and horror at the thought of
being identified with it in almost any shared light. Therefore, they
practice an almost slavish, humiliating ethic of emulation of both
the corporate structures and the ideational frameworks legitimized by
the society around them.
*
September 11 created a vacuum in the Muslim American community that
ushered this vacuum-of-a-generation, prematurely, into the fore. The
difference between their reaction to September 11 and their pioneer
parents' generation's is that their parents viewed it in terms
of "survival," both for the Muslim community and, more importantly,
their agenda to enfranchise Islam in "system" America—just another
color-change for a generation of lifelong chameleons.
*
For the Muslim X-ers, the whole experience served to confirm them in
their intuitive inclination to "conform." It catalyzed their
generational feeling that theirs was an urgent mission
to "Americanize" the Muslim presence here, beginning (and sometimes
ending, too) with themselves, and secondarily to save Muslim's from
their parents' inauthentic branding.
*
Firstly, through the prism of September 11, they witnessed the entire
Muslim community, under the guidance of the lead generation, bow, and
bear witness to its unalloyed "Americanness." This inspired the X-ers
to early press their generational agenda to mainstream the Muslim
community, which in practical effect meant legitimizing American
majority-culture views (something, incidentally, that makes division
among us, for all the wrong reasons, inevitable if left unchecked.
Yes, I am talking about racism between us here.) Finally, September
11 encouraged the Muslim X-ers to appropriate not only the
vocabulary, but the disparaging intellectual categories, of the
American mainstream in its assessment of Muslim (indeed, all)
religious manifestation: Fundamentalists, terrorists, fanatics,
moderate Islam, etc.
*
Thus one hears this cohort today dismiss the more activist religious
demeanor of their own youth as "my radical Islamist days," or their
more devoted practice of Islam as "my fundamentalist phase." This is
the generation, then, that has very nearly raised the notion of a
distinctive "culture" to a sixth pillar of Islam. In place of at
least the pretense of "doing da`wah," the byword of the pioneer
generation, the Muslim X-ers have given us instead Muslim rappers,
hip-hop musical poetry shops, Islamic singers, and the offensively,
irreverently titled "Allah Made Me Funny" Muslim comedy troupe. As
one Muslim comedienne so witlessly but aptly, put it: It's to show
Americans that we're just like them, just another minority.
Now that's really funny because I thought we were supposed to show
our fellows that we are unique as a prophetic community with an
intact revealed message, and how deeply serious we are about faith in
One God and the difference it makes.
*
Yet a neo-Islamic, supposedly baggage-free, American "cultural" Islam
has, indeed, been the blaring clarion call of the Muslim X-ers since
September 11. In fact, it is now unmistakable that the intellectuals
and writers among them are totally committed to crafting a new
American Muslim narrative, seeking to supplant the speckled history
of the American Muslim community previously summarized in order to
emphasize a more romanticized "native" history of Islam in America.
*
That such research on pre-modern Islam, or later Muslim communities
and individuals, in America should unearth the record is laudable,
even essential. This is particularly urgent when it comes preserving
the struggle and thought of our predecessors in faith from slavery,
but also as to the much wider African Muslim experience and legacy in
the New World, along with the stories of the first converts after the
European invasions, even substantiating and clarifying the reports
circulating about early Muslim mariners and their peaceful
commingling with native Americans.
*
But if such histories deliberately decline to draw the natural
continuities between Islam in the Old World and the New in order to
justify an imaginary continuity of experience between our modern
community's practice of Islam and certain current mores of popular
American culture at large; or, more normatively, if it contends that
Islam need have no name here (as a measure of the thoroughness of its
native integration and acceptance, in order to insinuate a
correspondence between Islam and American culture, as has been
suggested elsewhere); or to rationalize an insular sense of
an "organic" separation between a provincial "American" Islam and
the "cultural" (read, "backward") Islam of the "Muslim world," that
is patently deceptive, divisive, and unacceptable.
*
This latter notion of separate "Islams" here and "there" came into
view during the recent Danish caricature turmoil, reflecting widely
circulated post 9-11 policies proposing to divide Muslims by
perpetrating exactly this sentiment among us. Unfazed, the Muslim X-
er generation's spokesmen picked up this lead and angrily denounced
the angry expressions in the angry Muslim world, but turned tepid
about the caricature's themselves. One is reminded of the genius
legist Imam Shafi`ee's remark: When the dignity of men is offended,
and they have not the sense to be outraged, know, then, that you are
no longer dealing with men but with jackasses!
*
The Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, is more a part of a
Muslim's dignity than even one's own mother, wife, or daughter.
*
In fact, indications abound that this generation, through its
monotone chant that Islam is not a monolith, seeks a partition
between Muslims in America and the rest of the world in the name of
culture, a limp message that flaps in the face of both the world's
obvious globalizing and Allah's direct Qur'anic commandment that
Muslims are bound together as a single, missionized, community (an
ummah): "So let there be of you one community (ummah) calling to all
that is good and enjoining what is right and forbidding what is
wrong. And it is these who are the [truly] successful. Therefore, be
not like those who became divided and disputed [regarding the true
religion]—even after the clear [and miraculous] proofs [of God] had
come to them! Indeed, for these, there shall be a great torment
[awaiting]" [3:104-05].
*
Wither Islam?
Our children and teens, so young, sadly face in America a literally
life-threatening challenge that is clearly beyond them in the current
dilapidated condition of our community. That test is to grow into
generations of noble men and virtuous women that can uphold the
weighty message of the Qur'an and live the model of its Messenger
Muhammad, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, in order to gain admission to
Allah's Paradise in the Hereafter and become guides for a people here
on earth whom Heavenly guidance did not reach before. But that,
nonetheless, is their calling and ours. We must do more than face
this. We must alter ourselves, and thereby our communal course, and
strive to make it happen. Outcomes are with Allah, yet the deeds are
our own.
*
In the happiest of all endings, our leading generation would reassess
its own collective agenda, come to its senses, and take up the
perpetual stand of the prophets in this last phase of their life:
Conveying a clear message of no deity but Allah, and an
uncompromising call for social justice for all, rather than a failed
strategy of currying favor with those who hold only the illusion of
power. This is the message of `abasa wa tawalla in the Quran, and its
application by our elders would galvanize our community around its
only legitimizing reason for being: To carry forth the mission of
upholding the Qur'an and the final Messenger, sallallahu alayhe wa
sallam, a gift which we have hid from deserving Americans for far too
long. Moreover, it would bring forth true leaders from the elder
generation (until now, a mostly factionalized cohort) who could be
supported and emulated by our young people. (A word here to the
meager Muslim boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1960:
This is your natural role.)
*
In addition, the mentoring generation, that of the Muslim X-ers,
should use their immense organizational talent and unparalleled
executive abilities to structure the Muslim presence here, to retool
every Muslim institution in America, from the still rootless
continental umbrella societies right down to our yet bootless
neighborhood mosques, in order to bring into them and guide the two
generations behind them.
*
In particular, they should use the valuable knowledge they have
garnered of Islam in its classical period and their varied pietistic
inculcations to totally remake the Muslim community educational
platform in the image of our predecessors' educational experience—
from the private schools, to efficient after-school programs, to a
robust public school presence, to a thriving, smart-set adult Islamic
education scene. The religious sciences are where it's at and we are
going exactly nowhere without them.
*
Thus, no Muslim generation in America can effect the change that the
Xers can, though it will not happen at their hands but by the
activation and facilitation of the good works of the more diligent
and team-oriented Muslim Millennials. Muslim X-ers can only play this
role, however, if they drop their unfounded infatuation with American
cultural elitism, resurface from their self-centeredness, reestablish
in their own lives Islam's perennial mores and controls, and drape
their strong arm of highly realistic experience over the shoulders of
their younger brothers and sisters and show them the way.
* * * * *
GENERATIONAL THEORY DOES not replace individual choice and identity,
nor does it predetermine outcomes. But as Ibn Khaldun observed,
certain ahkam, or rules, apply to human social behavior and become
predictive, even as the physical universe follows its divine decrees.
The Prophet's well-known statement on the appearance of a renewer at
the "head" of every qarn, or saeculum, as well as other ahadeeth,
clearly implicates generational dynamics.
*
Many may think that the chances in the timid Muslim American
community for the bold changes I've just outlined are negligible. I
emphatically disagree. We are precisely in the kind of miraculous
time where such dramatic alterations do occur—and they can happen in
the space of a generation, as the Prophet's example bears witness,
sallallahu alayhe wa sallam.
*
Indeed, it should be clear to any alert soul that the tides of
spectacular renovation have already swept us up, very much against
our will, and shall not set us down in the same world we once
inhabited, not unlike Noah, perhaps, after embarking on the Ark. Yet
in the odd equation of nations and the individual, somehow it is the
lonely man that invariably proves of far greater value and thus,
potentially, of a transformative, sea influence in society.
*
Let this be a hope and reminder for us all, especially as parents.
Our native power to sculpt the supple substances—emotional,
intellectual, and imaginative—that are the composites of our children
and families is nothing short of astonishing, for wondrous is the
instrument of parental love. Moreover, in the face of community
diffusion, if not dissolution—and this is exactly the reality we are
living here—we parents have not only our children, but other Muslim
parents and their children. When we bond together in the name of
Allah, across age and cultural divides—the perpetual miracle of Islam—
something enchanted happens: Just, morally strong, mission-bound,
universal communities of tremendous sacrifice coalesce. And they
grow. Their success, relative to this world, is with God—with whom, a
right English maxim tells us—all things are possible. Yet none who
persecute them prevail.
*
The real beauty shimmering in this possibility of illumined families
extended into renewed community is that whether such a people,
whomever they may be, succeed or not in reshaping society, remaking
the world, their numinous greatness forever triumphs. For Allah
brings them, in eternity, into the company of the godly, not alone,
but as families and communities. And was it not for just this kinship
that they wasted no chance in life for change? And wasn't it the very
likes of this society that their hearts all along yearned for in
behalf of all others, whom they called out to, family, fellow, and
friend? This is the message of Surat Al-Tur, as I have learned it
from my own teacher. Shall we take it into the bosom of our families?
Our community? Our nation?
*
What say you?
Moreover, [as for] those who [in the world] believed—and whose
children followed them in faith—We shall unite their children with
them. And We shall not deprive them of anything [from the rewards] of
their [good] work. Every person is himself in pledge for what he has
earned [in life]. Thus We shall extend to them fruit and meat, such
as they desire. Moreover, therein they will pass to one another a
chalice [of wine, stirring] no obscene talk nor sinfulness therein.
And there shall be going round them, [serving] them, [immortal]
youths, as though they were well-preserved pearls. And they shall
turn to one another [amid Gardens of Paradise] asking each other [of
their state of bliss, whereupon] they shall say: Indeed, we were ever
cautious [about displeasing God] in our households; wherefore, God
has conferred favor upon us and saved us from the torment of a
blowing fire [in Hell]. Indeed, always before [in life], we were ever
calling upon Him [in fear and in hope]. For, indeed, He [alone] is
the All-Benevolent, the Mercy-Giving. [52:21-28]