Are Elections Haram? Says Who? And Based on What? Part 4 | April 11, 2005
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Dr. Pasha
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CONTENTS:
(8) Excuse Me, But We Are the West!
(9) I Am America!
(10) Islam and World Citizenship
(11) An Islamic Logic of American Citizenship
(12) The New West
(13) “The Western Wing”
(14) Sharing the West
(15) Ignoring a Beautiful Hadith
That is right.
That is what is missing in all this. The simple fact that you and I, and other Muslim folks who live in the West, we are the West.
And we have been for a long time – many of us.
And many of us have played a key role in making the modern West what it is today. Therefore, when we say we are the West, we are not making an empty claim.
We have made significant contributions to the building of the West. We therefore have ownership rights in the West.
Below are some of the ways in which we did it.
Muslims Built America:
There are Muslims in America who have lived there from the days of slavery. Don’t forget that Muslim sweat, toil, tears and blood went into the making of America.
And then there are others whose Muslim parents and grandparents immigrated to America as a result of which they themselves were born and brought up in America as Muslims.
And then there are all those other people whose ancestors have been living here in America for God knows how long, and who now have embraced the Deen of Allah and become Muslims by their own choice and volition.
Muslims Built the West Indies:
And then there are fifth, fourth and third generation Muslims in Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam in the West Indies who date their arrival into the Western Hemisphere from the days when slavery was ended in the West Indies and Muslims from Indonesia and undivided India were brought in to replace the newly freed African slaves.
It was these Muslims, along with all the others that were similarly brought in, that built the West Indies and helped save the British Empire when centuries of slavery suddenly collapsed in that part of the world.
Muslims Rebuilt Europe:
There are Muslims living in Germany for generations whose parents and grandparents were invited in from Turkey to rebuild a war-ravaged Germany. Don’t forget that it was Muslim muscle that put Germany back on its feet after it was laid low by the British, the Soviets and the Americans in World War II.
To what extent this is true of other European nations such as the Netherlands and Austria is an empirical question. That means just go and search the records and see who was brought in by whom when and where and told to do what.
And find out how and when and for what purpose the Muslim workers were imported in all these European nations.
Colonial and Imperial Legacies:
Colonialism and Empire Building leave their own legacies. They produce their own chickens that come home to roost.
Colonialism means forcible taking over of someone else’s land and natural resources and exploiting them for the benefit of what is called the Mother Country.
Often it involves the subjugation or elimination of the native classes of people that are resistant to foreign occupation and control and fostering and creation of some others to replace them that are more submissive and pliable.
Empire means in part continued domination and exploitation of other peoples’ lives, lands and natural resources for the benefit and advantage of the Imperial Center.
Empire building often requires the implementation of the Divide-and-Rule principle according to which different segments of a society are set against one another to facilitate continued occupation, control, domination and exploitation of their land and natural resources.
In all these cases, the ebb and flow of the colonial and imperial waves washes up on the mother countries’ shores a lot of bodies from the client classes in the colonies and the periphery of the Empire.
Since a great many former colonies and a great many of those nations that bore the brunt of the most recent European Empire were Muslim, it was a lot of Muslim bodies that washed ashore in these mother countries and former and present-day Imperial Centers like France, Italy, Britain and the Netherlands.
French-Born, British-Born and Other European-Born Muslims:
That is why there are generations of Muslims living in France, Britain and other parts of the Western world that were born and brought up there.
So, who and what are all these people if not the West?
And why would they be any less of the West than anyone else living in the West?
Where are they supposed to go if they cannot live an honorable and productive life in their own places of birth and upbringing?
And what is life worth to them if they are not permitted to live life as they wish and allowed to have a voice in what happens to them and to their life and culture in the society of their birth?
And what is life worth to them if all they are allowed is a second-class existence without equal rights with their fellow-citizens?
Therefore, if being a Western Muslim has to have any real meaning for the Muslims, every Muslim currently living in the West should truly feel and should be able to say: I am the West!
That means every Muslim in Europe, America and other parts of the West must be able to feel and say without hesitation:
“I am England!”
“I am France!”
“I am Europe!”
“I am America!”
And that is irrespective of all denigration, degradation, persecution, abuse, exclusion, discrimination and dehumanization that the West may choose to practice or allow against Islam and Muslims in the West or elsewhere.
And I did.
I did precisely that and went about giving speeches in which I said: I Am America!
A Shocked Reaction:
It produced a shocked reaction among some of my best friends when I first started saying it in the early 1990s.
Look at me, I am America, I said. They looked at me, and they saw nothing that looked anything like America.
What they saw instead was an ethnic, hyphenated, Muslim immigrant – like a lot of other ethnic, hyphenated, immigrant Muslims.
My audiences generally consisted of some brilliant professors, doctors, students and other professionals.
We were at that time trying to form a broad-based community organization to perform social service in Upstate New York – using, of course, the name of Islam.
To make Islam more socially relevant, as some people would put it, or just plain giving people Islam as I would prefer to say.
Mainstreaming Islam:
One of my goals in those days was what I used to call mainstreaming of Islam in America – making Islam and Muslim life and culture part of the daily life, vocabulary, imagination, consciousness and activities of mainstream, everyday America.
My wife and I had been working on that goal starting way back in the early 1970s.
And now to me it meant one simple thing: I Am America! And now that is what I was proclaiming to the rest of the world from every rooftop I got.
You are not even a Real American:
Naturally, it was funny to several of those who listened – all this talk about I am America.
“Not a real American though,” some of those in the audience, who did not know me very well, would have thought. And some of them came out and said just that.
But you are not a real American, they said.
And you can never be a real American, added some others.
Most of those who knew me, however, listened to me with patience. But that did not stop them from looking at me with crinkled eyes and quizzical looks.
They were too polite to snicker or sneer openly, but I could tell they had serious reservations about the central thesis I was trying to advance.
A huge gulf seemed to lie between us. Sadly, with every passing minute it seemed to grow wider.
What on Earth Do You Mean?
This is what I thought they were saying to themselves:
“You are not a Christian; you are not a Jew; you are not White.”
“You have an accent; you are dark; you were born in India; you are from the Third World; you are an immigrant.”
“And on top of that you are a Muslim; you are just like the rest of us.”
“You don’t drink or do drugs; and you have no power, position or status in America.”
“You know as well as we do that America has some serious traditions and credentials in the department of racism and xenophobia.”
“And you know as well as anyone what America can do when America panics and decides to go on one of her periodic rampages of bigotry and paranoia.”
“So what on earth do you mean you are America? You are not even an American in the real sense of that expression. You can never be one!”
Self-Hate Masquerading as Bravado?
I am afraid some of them were even thinking if this was a new face of self-hate, defeatism, inferiority complex, surrender or just plain sellout – masquerading as bravado and machismo.
They were feeling sorry for me, I am sure. They were thinking, nice fellow Pasha, just lost his marbles – a once-passable Muslim who had now suddenly gone bonkers.
To them – and, to be fair, to any one in their position – the problem would have been that I was not just saying I was an American, I was saying I was America, which is a very different proposition altogether.
America’s New Face:
That meant I was saying I am the face of America – America’s new face if you will.
And I was saying I am the soul and spirit of America; and I am the past, present and future of America.
I am all that is good or bad in America; and I represent America’s failings as well as her triumphs.
I share America’s guilt and virtue; and I embody America’s dreams and destiny.
I was in effect saying to the world, you want to see America, look at me, for I am America.
Evidently, to a lot of those present it was sheer nonsense; to me nothing was more self-evident.
To some of them it was madness; to me it was the height of logic and lucidity.
To some of them it was laughable; to me it was sad and pitiable that the cream of Muslim intelligentsia failed to see something this obvious and this clear.
To some of them the question was: How could it be?
To me the question was: How could it be otherwise?
True world citizenship – even cosmic, intergalactic citizenship – is really what Islam is all about. But it is something that is not often obvious even to a lot of Muslims themselves.
The fact is that Muslims are world citizens in the truest and fullest sense of that expression if they fully and properly understand Islam.
My wife and I had even at that time, in the early 1970s, more or less decided to make America our home. Even otherwise, what my wife and I never doubted was the simple fact that to a Muslim the whole world was home.
That was our upbringing as Muslims, and in our culture and vocabulary, the expression World Citizen was neither cliché nor cute but a simple statement of fact.
Elementary Islam:
This was to us elementary Islam, and we had very little ambiguity or ambivalence on that subject.
Islam – and somehow growing up under my parents’ influence, may Allah bless them – had taught me that the whole of earth was to humans home and national borders and boundaries were mere human conveniences and practicalities.
To me the entire human history – and the history of Islam – from Adam and Nuh and Ibrahim Alaihimussalam to Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, bore powerful and incontrovertible testimony to this universal, supranational, trans-territorial Islamic perspective that I had come to develop on the notion of citizenship, whether Indian, American or some other.
Tauheed – Unity – the Core of Islam:
Unity is the core of Islam – one God; one world; one creation; one human family – Adam’s progeny, all of them.
Islam is the unified common path designed by God Almighty for human beings, through which they will be able to identify their one common creator and master and live a truly happy, peaceful and successful life on earth.
A life that will also guarantee them success in the next world – in life after death.
As a result, Islam invites all human beings to live together on earth in peace and harmony as one people, worshipping one God and loving and caring for one another as one people.
A World Moving Closer to Islam:
Even as many powerful forces are busy fighting Islam and Muslims around the world, everything that has happened in the world over the past several decades, shows – once again – how the world of Allah has been moving, willy-nilly, to the path mapped out by Allah’s Deen for human beings.
It shows how peoples and nations of the world have found it necessary to come together to address common issues and concerns based on commonly acceptable principles of fairness, justice, cooperation, compassion and mutual respect.
If League of Nations and the United Nations are old examples, the European Union is among the latest ones.
Increased education, travel, communication, transportation, trade and infrastructure have brought nations and peoples of the world closer to one another than perhaps they have ever been before.
Swimming in Street Clothes:
Those were the days, in early and mid-Seventies, when my wife got our school district in Madison, Wisconsin, to identify and label the contents of school food for kids.
From then on Muslim – and non-Muslim – children at school were able to see what they were eating – whether it was pork, fish, chicken or all vegetables that was on their lunch menu that day.
Those were also the days when my wife and I won a major concession from our school district in Wisconsin, after a series of representations and appeals, to give permission to my little daughter to take swimming lessons in the school’s Olympic-size pool wearing what the school district called “street clothes.”
The 1990s:
The world had now come a long way, from early 1970s to the early 1990s. America was slowly beginning to rub its eyes and blink at the looming presence of Islam right in its midst.
Islam was putting out its bright and beautiful shoots everywhere in America in the cracking dawn of a new day in the history of America – the West and the world.
All this to me meant one simple fact – that I, like every other Muslim in America, was now America.
American citizenship to me had an inexorable Islamic logic to it, and here is the crux of it:
“The moment you decided to be born in America, or in England, France, Scotland or Trinidad – well Allah decided it for you, you will say – you became an heir to all that America had to offer by way of wealth, poverty, culture, tradition, history, bigotry, failures, successes, foibles, triumphs, defeats, hopes, frustrations and dreams.”
That was the basket of goodies in which you landed as a newborn baby in America.
This was also the basket that was handed to you the day you became a citizen through naturalization.
Accepting American citizenship was an act of deliberate choice on your part. No one held a gun to your head.
You could have said yes or you could have said no, but you wanted it, so you said yes to it. And now you were left holding that basket.
No Crossed Fingers for Muslims:
However, as a Muslim, it was always your right, as well as your duty, to renounce that part of the American basket that was clearly contrary to Islam. But you needed to do that clearly and openly, without appearing to lie or deceive.
The one thing that you could not have done as a Muslim, however, was kept your fingers crossed behind your back and pretended you did not know or mean what you were doing or saying.
Muslims do not play games like that. And if you are that kind of person, then frankly you should not go anywhere even near the name of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, or call yourself Muslim.
For, he never in all his life tried to deceive people that way.
A Train Called America:
With American citizenship in your pocket, you were now boarding a train. And when you board a train you go where the train goes, not where you want the train to go.
That much you should know – and I suspect you did.
Unless you thought of yourself as a gun-toting cowboy who could jump off the running train on your own horse that came galloping alongside and set off into the wilderness.
A Choice of Destinations and Directions:
Of course, it was a different matter that a train like America affords a choice of destinations – at least in theory.
That it grants you the right to negotiate the very direction in which the train could be moving – at least in theory.
And that it opens up before you the possibility – however small and no matter how theoretical – of making life better for all travelers, in all trains, all over the world.
And frankly, it was not so much the train ride, but rather this choice that made some of us want to hop on the train of American citizenship.
In the case of some of us at least, it was not a question of how quickly the American train would lead to personal fame and fortune. But how much of an opportunity it will afford to make Allah’s earth a better place for all of Allah’s creation.
Beyond Fame and Fortune, Looking for a Better World:
For some of us at least, it was more a question of how America’s sundry bounties, resources, courage, determination, compassion, fairness, pragmatism, spirituality as well as America’s commitment to liberty, equality and universal justice will help to create a better world.
And how we could make our own contribution in that regard.
That is where the real charm of American citizenship lay for some of us at that time.
And that is also where, despite all the holes punched into that optimistic outlook of late, it still lies for some of us. That is the true transcendental meaning, the spiritual dimension if you will, of the much-touted expression, the American dream.
The True Promise of America:
For, that is what America really is – a dream, a hope, a lighted city atop a topless mountain.
That is the real and true promise of America, quite possibly as her founders conceived it. Or at least that was, or so I hope, the overall vision Enlightenment Europe and America were in some ways after – including American Enlightenmentalists like Thomases Jefferson and Paine.
Without the promise and possibility of such a vision, human life turns into a nightmare and America herself would be a sham and a travesty, not only of her founders’ dream, but of all that America was supposed to be in the mind of anyone who ever looked upon her as the city on the hill.
But now I am no longer saying I Am America!
That is old hat now.
Rather, what I am saying now is: We are the West – you and I and all the Muslims who are citizens and immigrants and visitors in the West.
I am now extrapolating and extending my nearly 15-year-old model of “I Am America!” to a broader model of “We Are the West!”
You can call it the New West if you want. But if you want to leave it at just the West, that is fine too. For, as I explained earlier, we have been the West forever.
And forever more!
I have not the slightest doubt in my mind – May Allah protect me from folly! – that I was right then and I am right now.
I meant what I said then and I mean what I say now.
I saw clearly then how right it was for a simple, ordinary Muslim to think of himself as America.
And I see clearly now how perfectly right it is for even the most beleaguered, harassed, abused and disabused of Muslims in the West today to think of themselves as the West.
As Muslims, so long as we are here, we are not only of the West, and in the West, but we are the West.
For Muslims, as Muslims, nothing less is good enough. For Muslims, their paygrade from God Almighty would not allow for anything less.
Let us at this point revisit our concept of The Western Wing of the Muslim Ummah.
It should be obvious to anyone following our logic thus far that for Muslims of the West – for the Western Wing of the Muslim Ummah that is – Western ways are our ways.
And Western culture is our culture. And Western history is our history.
And we share with the West its future and its destiny.
That is to say, Western ways are our ways, largely and mostly, until they are found based on clear and incontrovertible evidence from Qur’an and Hadith to be utterly, totally and manifestly un- and anti-Islamic.
Then all we need to do is to say no to them – and set about correcting and changing them, in the most beautiful, sweet, gentle, wonderful, peaceful and democratic manner.
Grafting a Patch:
What we cannot do, however, is insist on aggressively grafting a patch of Pakistani, Malay or Egyptian or some other ethnic culture to the local cultures of the West in the name of Islam.
That is, using the hallowed name of a most universalist Islam to rationalize and market the narrow particularities of our own ethnic cultural habits and baggage from “back home.”
I am not saying the Curry Mile in Manchester, UK, should be closed or Kebab or chicken Tikka should be banned elsewhere.
But I do not know how useful or smart it is for us to make Egyptian-style or Pakistani-style or Afghan-style tribal and ethnic clothing the preferred street wear in London, Manchester, Marseille, Paris, Frankfort, Boston or Chicago.
Marginals vs. Mainstreamers:
It is common sense – the working capital, the seed money, of the Islamic enterprise.
In every society, there are marginals and mainstreamers. Islam is anything but a cult; and Muslims are anything but marginals; even though Islam sometimes may make its initial appearance in a society among the less privileged elements of that society.
Ethnic and tribal foreign wear in native public places may be all right for marginal elements in society, looking in, trying to take a stand or make a point.
But it is poor choice of attire for those with strong mainstream aspirations and powerful mainstream credentials and qualifications.
It certainly is wrong and foolish for us to project, practice or promote some of the more authoritarian, classist and dictatorial ways of doing things in everyday life, from “back home” in Muslim countries, and label them Islamic -whether it is in our personal matters or social relations or in our broader cultural, political and economic affairs.
For, Islam has nothing to do with some of these decadent practices and habits that some of us have acquired over the years through our general lack of understanding of Islam and through our lack of proper Islamic training and culturization.
What all this means is that we Muslims are privileged to share the West with all the other wonderful folks – the Christians, the Jews and all the others – who are privileged to share the West with us.
These wonderful folks are all definitely the West. And so are we – the Muslims: absolutely, definitely, positively.
No Abduls-Come-Lately:
That means we are as authentic, real and original a product of the West as anyone can imagine or claim to be.
In other words, we are not Abduls-Come-Lately on the Western scene.
We are not interlopers and pretenders. We are the real thing, the genuine article.
And we do not carry with us some of the negative baggage that some others do.
We did not come here as Conquistadors and Colonialists.
We were not instrumental in the wholesale wiping out of significant elements of native populations upon our arrival in this part of God’s beautiful earth.
We are just folks, ordinary folks, who, like many of the rest of the folks in the West, came here at different times and in different capacities in search of a living and in search of better opportunity and greater freedom for ourselves and our children.
It is a different matter altogether that some of us had no choice in the matter at all. We were mercilessly snatched out of our homes and from the embrace of our loved ones and were brought here without our having a say-so. We were just nabbed, nailed and hauled off to these shores in slave ships and sold off — those of us who survived the sea and the brutality of our captors — on the auction block to the next highest bidding young man or old lady.
Rejoicing with Divine Expressions:
When human beings get excited they often seem to have a need to resort to animated and colorful use of language. Some of the expressions they choose on these occasions invoke bad outcomes for themselves or for others.
Islam teaches us how to cope with that human need too. It gives us a supply of expressions that provide psychological relief, capture the mood and also at the same time fill our life as well as our world with immeasurable divine blessings.
Among such divine expressions in the Qur’an are the following:
Alhamdulillah!
It means all praise belongs to God.
You say it when good things happen. And on every other occasion.
For, no matter what happens, to you or to anyone else, God still deserves to be praised.
Mashallah!
It means that is what God willed and how wonderful is what God willed.
It is an expression of joy and rejoicing at something good that has happened.
Therefore, as I feel good and wonderful about Muslims being the West, and as my natural human inclination looks for ways to express this feeling in words, I cannot do better than to express the exuberance of the moment in words like Alhamdulillah!
And Mashallah!
And, of course, Allahu Akbar!
All that these expressions mean in this context is how wonderful it is that it is so: That we Muslims are in, of and from the West.
And that we are “The West.”
Even in times as hard as the ones the world is currently going through.
And even in times as hard as the ones the Muslims in particular are going through right now.
Forgetting a Fundamental Fact:
It is this fundamental and all-important fact – the fact that we Muslims are in fact the West – that some of us Muslims seem to forget, as do a lot of non-Muslims also, while we bicker and fight over things like whether elections are Halaal, Haraam or Fard or something else.
And while we squander our energies and opportunities debating such non-issues and irrelevancies as whether elections and democratic forms of government are a Western invention or an exotic Eastern concoction.
In doing all this, we ignore the simple fact that if there are three or more of us human beings in a place, then the best way for us to arrive at a commonly acceptable decision is through mutual debate, discussion, opinion sharing and agreement.
But when our numbers reach hundreds of thousands or more, the best way for us to arrive at mutually agreed decisions is through balloting, referenda and elections.
How beautifully the Hadith of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, captures this scenario, which I paraphrase here:
When three of you set out on a journey,
let them appoint one of them as their leader!
“Let them!” That is what the Hadith says.
And that says it all.
Wallahu A’alam! Allah knows best.
Allahumma Aslih Ummata Muhammadin, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam!
Ya, Allah! Straighten out the affairs of the Ummat of Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam!
This brings us to the end of Part IV of Are Elections Haram? Says Who? And Based on What?
Inshallah, we will bring you Part V as soon as Allah enables us to finish working on it.
But do bear in mind, however, that our manuscripts are mostly drafts in need of further research and revision, which we are often unable to undertake or complete due to time and resource constraints.
End of Part 4 of 8
Written, January 2001
Modified, 2004, 2005
(To be Revised)
© 2005 Syed Husain Pasha
Dr. Pasha is an educator and scholar of exceptional
talent, training and experience. He can be reached at DrSyedPasha [at]
AOL [dot] com or www.IslamicSolutions.com.