For Michael, the link between Islam and Punk is obvious. In his view, both exhibit an ‘idol-smashing consciousness’. Such a consciousness remained an important aspect of his several books that followed afterwards. One of those was ‘Tripping with Allah’, for example, in which he discusses his experiments with drugs such as the ritualized hallucinogen Ayhuasca and how that leads to a vision of Fatimah, the Prophet’s daughter. Another example is his study of the Five Percenters tradition that tries to help African-Americans spiritually free themselves of racist suppression through a very particular interpretation of Islamic elements. Like their founder, adherents of the movement (such as some protagonists of the famous hip-hop collective ‘The Wu-Tang-Clan’) often call themselves ‘Allah’. On top of it, in their mythology someone like Michael can be considered a ‘white devil’. Nevertheless, in many ways, he sees himself as a Five Percenter. Then again, his previous book bears the title ‘Why I am a Salafi’ while his newest book, published today (May 24^th 2016), is about Magic in Islam. And – importantly – within all of that he also remains a huge fan of American Professional Wrestling.

In these days when the academic study of religion is rife with the effort to ‘deconstruct’ all sorts of themes and topics, few people seem better placed to do so in matters of religion than this catholic-turned-muslim-turned-radical-turned-punker-turned-academic-turned-we’ll-see-what’s-next-because-it’s-bound-to-be-interesting-in-any-case. After he presented the first Dutch translation of ‘The Taqwacores’ at the ‘International Literature Festival of Utrecht’, we found some time to sit down and get into some of that deconstructing of religion. Ironically enough, Michael himself would call it a time to ‘build’ – the Five Percenter term for a positive exchange of ideas.

Your name and personality is still mostly associated with Punk Islam. The fact that the release of the first Dutch translation of ‘The Taqwacores’ brings you to the Netherlands for the first time, is a good example. Yet fourteen years have passed since you wrote the book. Is the Michael Muhammad Knight who’s sitting in front of me today still the same man, or has he changed?

A main difference is my deeper knowledge about the accumulated tradition of Islam. When I wrote the novel I didn’t have the tools to historically contextualize or theorize. Those weren’t necessary at the time. I simply screamed out what I needed or what hurt me. In the years since, as an academic, I developed the theoretical tools and the knowledge to dig deep within Islam’s diversity and find precedence for the Muslim punk of Taqwacore.

Now, when I say ‘precedence’, I don’t mean it in the same way as those who said that the Taqwacores were a modern version of the Sufi Qalandars, who also didn’t always abide by the religious rules. When I wrote the book I had no idea who the Qalandars were, so you can’t say it was a rejuvenation of that old concept. Nevertheless, now that I know about the existence of the Qalandars and many other phenomena, I understand there certainly was and is a space for punk in Islam.

In what manner then, is your current writing any different? As you said during the book presentation, perhaps one could say that you’re doing exactly the same, only now in a more academic manner by throwing in a bit of Derrida or Ibn al-Arabi to make it sound more sophisticated.

Sure. I think I’m trying to answer the same crises and similar hurts. I just have more tools to do it.

But another important change besides the ‘scholarliness’ is my relationship to people. When I came into Islam, as a fifteen year old isolated convert, it was as a religion. It was an ‘either you believe it or you don’t believe it’ kind of thing. My relationship to Catholicism was far more complicated because I grew up in a Catholic family and I could see people with all kinds of relationships to it. As a Muslim, at first, I didn’t get to see that. That’s why I wrote ‘The Taqwacores’ as a religious dilemma, as a theological problem I felt confronted with. Today, however, my understanding of religion became broader. I now see Islam as a set of references. It’s the stories and experiences that I use to process myself as a human being in the world. And I don’t think that’s a lesser thing than saying: “well, there’s this dude up in the sky and that’s what makes Islam for me.”

So I don’t like the way people frame my religiosity when they ask me to tell them more about ‘my faith’. I don’t have a stable doctrinal position. It changes. What I say tomorrow will be different from today. Yet I married a Muslim and that created a different set of relations. In the end then, on a personal level, being Muslim is about my family. And I don’t think that’s a shallow thing. To be honest, people are more important to me than the transcendent things at this point. I could perhaps even say that my mother in law is a bigger part of my current Islam than the Prophet – although she wouldn’t like it, of course, if she heard me say that. (Laughs.)

If your Islam is for a great part defined by relationships, what then does the concept of ‘silsilah’ mean to you? To explain where the question comes from: I actually use the concept of silsilah myself to define my ‘Christianness’. After my long involvement with different aspects of Islam – both personally and professionally – I find myself in a hybrid space of spiritual osmosis between these two traditions. As such, this idea of ‘chains of transmission’ not only helped me to redefine religion in general, but also to more properly place myself within my own tradition. It helped me to leave behind the idea of religion as a set of faith doctrines or rules and to start seeing it as organic lines of ‘wisdom transference’. My own chain of transmission, for example, ultimately runs through more punky people like Saint Francis back to Christ. Do you see such a silsilah for yourself?

That’s actually where my latest book ‘Why I’m a Salafi’ ended up. I see much use for the concept but I don’t see a silsilah as a straight line from A to Z or as a sort of tree model with one particular trunk and many branches. I see it more as a tangle of roots. I don’t have this singular chain. I have multiple silisilahs and they connect in multiple ways. I feel a connection to the Five Percenter tradition, I feel a connection to the Nimatullahi Sufi order that I joined and I feel a connection to the Sunni tradition – whatever that is.

Sometimes these chains are radically irreconcilable. For example, I took my shahada from a student of Ismail al-Faruqi who’s a very important American Muslim scholar. So I consider al-Faruqi part of my chain but I also really consider myself a student of Azreal, who, during the sixties, was a close companion of Allah. [The founder of the Five Percenter movement, red.] Yet I have all of these chains within me and none of them gets to dominate. This is where my instability comes in. There are times when I can sense the ‘big thing up there’ but just as much there are times where it’s all internal to myself.

This religious ‘fluidity’ is one of the main themes in most if not all of your books. You often reflect on what it means to be the margin or the norm, you question the borders of these concepts and you express stinging critiques on the power play that produces such borders. Do you think that religion can one day become completely deconstructed or ‘borderless’?

Of course, there’s a certain value to the historical critique which shows that the borders weren’t always there or weren’t always drawn in the same way, but it’s not going to end. If the people that argue for a borderless religion would come into power, they would marginalize the people who like borders. So yes, I advocate a borderless and deconstructed Islam but if somehow I’d have the authority to take away borders, that in itself would be an act of violence because there are people who define themselves through the cohesion of their tradition and I would take that option away from them.

I just try to make some space for people who find themselves in these ‘in between spaces’, in these liminal conditions. I try to say: “Look, you’re feeling troubled by the fact that you don’t fit into this category or that category, but don’t bother too much, because these categories aren’t all that real. You can create your own categories and boundaries.”

And actually I think that is the norm. Most people don’t know it, but the liminal conditions are the norm.

In a statistical sense I would agree. But that norm simply isn’t in charge.

Yet the thing is, even the people who are pushing up against whatever it is that scares them ‘on the other side’, are transformed by their pushing.  By their very recognition of the border, they actually start poking holes in that border.

On the other hand, some more subversive elements can, once in a while, be quite needed to give the borders a very thorough shake – Taqwacore being a good example. Yet isn’t it a problem that the ‘intellectual elite’ incorporates someone like you or something like Taqwacore and thus takes away their subversive and punky elements? In other words, shouldn’t you have stayed outside the borders to be able to rattle them?

Well, I’m still outside. I don’t get invited to the mosques or by the politicians. And I still piss of a lot of people. There are some scholars who have networks of mosque audiences and there are some scholars who are seen as community leaders who get invited to the Presidential Ramadan diners. I’m not part of that.

What does that do to you on a personal level? I guess that you, just like any other writer, have some sort of ‘fame impulse’ as well. Would you sometimes like to be invited to the White House?

It’s of course nice to be liked. And it can always be hurtful to read to read hostile things about myself, depending on what’s affecting my vulnerability that day.

As Azreal once told me: “being Azreal is a lonely thing”. [Though Azrael was very close to the founder of the Fiver Percenters, he always remained one of the few white exceptions in a movement of ‘black gods’, red.] He named me Azreal as well and I feel very serious about that. I’ve alienated basically everybody and I’ve never been too careful. (laughs.) I’ve alienated myself from many Sunnis by being open to the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenter Tradition, I’ve alienated myself from the Five Percenters by being pro-queer and I’ve alienated myself from the progressive Muslim spaces because they’re bad on race. It’s a bit bouncing back and forward but I’m not the type to kiss asses and play the kind of games that would entitle me to a community position.

Now, besides vanity, ego or the fame impulse or anything like that, it’s of course comforting to belong somewhere. So sometimes I feel I could really have a place if I would be able to choose one particular platform and compromise a little. But then I get responses from people who are on the outside – often more outside than I am – and they see some value in a guy who’s recognising their position.

I suppose the very same effort of interrogating the borders and categories also drove you to research the topic of ‘Magic in Islam’.

Yes, that too was a way of reflecting on the false perceptions concerning the unity of religion. We tend to think about religion and magic as separate categories, clearly defined against each other and both clearly defined against science. But historically that’s not the case. In many ways, they can’t be separated. Magic is just religion which we decided to discredit, or considered to be weird. But there’s no meaningful difference – or no consistent meaningful difference in any case. Today there might be, but five hundred years ago there was no such boundary-drawing. In my upcoming book I discuss, for example, how people use the sounds of the Qur’an as something which contains power or why some people ‘drink’ the Qur’an. I also write about the occult esoteric revival in American history and how that connected to the revival of Islam in the US, in the late 19^th beginning of the 20^th century. And just as well, I talk about the figure of Hermes and how he becomes Idris in the Qur’an. As such, my focus on magic was an opportunity to show just how permeated Islam’s border around itself is. There are things slipping in and out of it all the time.

After you focused so intensely on the topic of magic and some particular ways in which it manifests itself in the lives of many Muslims, how ‘real’ is the concept of magic to you?

I have no idea. I don’t have a position.

I do feel like brains can do things but I don’t necessarily fear that, for example, somebody can write bad words about me on a page to cause my hand to fall off or something.

Nevertheless, in an academic context I was reading about affect-theory, which tries to explain how you can ‘feel’ the atmosphere when you walk into a room because of affect-transmission. That’s not magic exactly but it’s at least about people transmitting something out of themselves that changes the energy around them.

So you didn’t have any personal magical-religious encounters of which you might say “I don’t know what the hell that was, but that was weird!”

I’ve had cool experiences in my life that I can’t explain. One day I was in a cemetery, searching for Elijah Muhammad’s grave. [Elijah Muhammad is the founder of the Nation of Islam, the community to which Malcolm X originally belonged and of which the Fiver Percenter tradition is a split-off. Red.] I couldn’t find it, but suddenly a car pulls up and the driver asks what I’m looking for. After I told him, he told me to get in the car because he’d show me where it was. It turned out that he was the grandson of Elijah Muhammad. It’s random weird things like that. As I’m experiencing these things, I can only feel that I’m on some kind of magical mission and that builds up an energy around me that encourages more happenings. Yet I don’t know how it works.

Something you do know how it works is American Professional Wrestling. It’s one of your main personal interests. I was wondering therefore, would you somehow be able to link your research about magic to your wrestling?

Yes. Charisma.

In what sense?

That affect. That changing the room when you walk into it. That’s what wrestling is all about. That’s wrestling a hundred percent.

After all the lines and borders have blurred in your view on religion, would you now consider wrestling as a religious phenomenon?

Sure. Years ago I wrote a paper about Hulk Hogan as a religious figure. He was really operating in a religious system – sometimes very explicitly, very Christian and very mystical. And I take this seriously. In fact, there’s no writer who influenced me as much as wrestling. I often processed religion through wrestling. The way I thought about sacrifice, the way I thought about performance and the way I thought about community was all influenced by wrestling. There’s so much religion in wrestling and also wrestling in religion.

Wrestling is about storytelling, it’s about myth-making. Often when I mention wrestling people react by asking: “Don’t you know it’s fake? Why would you watch it?” They’ve been saying that since I was nine years old and even then I didn’t understand it. It made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now. I watch TV, I watch movies and I read novels, but nobody seems to question that. Yet it’s not like you’re watching a super hero blockbuster and in the middle of the movie you suddenly go like “oh, wait a minute, this is just a movie.”

Good point. Where do you think that different approach comes from in the case of wrestling?

They think that wrestling is trying to fool people. They think – and this is not grounded in reality – that the wrestlers are trying to convince you it’s all real. In the eighties, during the professional wrestling boom, Vince McMahon said in court that wrestling is just a show. Entertainment in New Jersey was taxed differently, so it benefited him greatly as one of the most important organisers of wrestling matches. So I’ve never understood this idea that they must be trying to fool me. Why wouldn’t they be allowed to do a suspension of disbelief the way any TV show would do it? In fact, one thing I love about wrestling is that it’s ok with itself being fake. Yet I can still use it in all the ways I can use any great story – and forget to care that it’s fake.

This obsession with the idea that “if it’s not real, you should throw it out” is, of course, also very present in all sorts of discussions about religion.

Certainly. And the parallel can even be drawn further. I’m no longer questioning whether a book is really what it says it is. Whether it’s ‘really’ what it claims to be, doesn’t make it less ‘useful’ to me. Similarly, wrestling can be real in the moment. I mean, I walk into the arena and I’m just completely drawn into it.

But when you deconstructed religion that far, why then still read the Qur’an again and again? Couldn’t you just read ‘Harry Potter’ for example?   

People actually do that. I do it with Star Wars myself. Tough not the prequels. (laughs.)

Understandable, those prequels are an absolute disaster.

In fact the prequels took all the religion out of it. In the original trilogy Yoda is like a Sufi master but in the prequels being a Jedi becomes this kind of chromosomal disorder. And then they try to compensate by laying the religion on extra thick. You can see that, for example, in the idea that Anakin was immaculately conceived, that he was the chosen one and all this shit. That’s just garbage. But the original trilogy was very innocent myth making.

So your religiosity and Islam include things like wrestling and Star Wars.

Absolutely. And I’m very ok with that.

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
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Musdah’s direct experience with the social and political discrimination of women in Indonesia has always given her work a strong focus on human rights and gender equality. In 2004, for example, she was the coordinator of the state endorsed Gender Mainstreaming Team. The eventual results of the team’s research weren’t easily accepted as many factions deemed them too liberal. Nevertheless, Musdah’s approach can also count on much support from Indonesian, as well as international, circles of Muslim scholars.

People often forget that Indonesia is the country with the highest population of Muslims in the world, even though it’s not an Islamic state.

Indeed. Eighty-five per cent of the Indonesian population is Muslim, but our founding fathers and mothers didn’t make Islam the state ideology. They realized that there are too many differences in interpretation, so they settled on the Pancasila instead. This Pancasila is a combination of five general principles that could create a common ground: spirituality, humanity, unity of the country, democracy and justice. As such, Islam isn’t the sole basis of our governance, but the Pancasila incorporates many of its values because when you talk about the principle of spirituality, you talk about a spirituality that touches on love, compassion and mercy. You talk about a spirituality that goes to the essence of all faiths and religions.

Yet, although the Pancasila offers a lot of room to build a spiritual society, sadly enough this does not seem to suffice for some more radical groups that would like to implement a purely Islamic political order.

Sure, Indonesia has its fair share of reactionary groups. Yet, we must be aware of the fact that the rise of more radical groups coincides with the advent of democracy. As everybody knows, the Suharto regime was a very repressive regime, but once it fell and democracy found its way, it was also used and abused by radical Islamic groups. In the Suharto era, they would simply have been repressed, but now they are given the public space to spread their views. So yes, many Muslim leaders – and certainly feminist Muslims like me – are faced with the growth of radicalism.

We have to keep in mind, however, that the expressions of religious radicalism – like disadvantaging women in the Muslim community – come from the religious interpretation of those who possess the religious authority. It doesn’t stem from religion itself. So, the solution to the problem, ironically enough, lies in countering them with the ‘democracy’ of our own religion; that is to say, with ijtihad, the process of constantly (re)interpreting our religion. Ijtihad means that we search for new ways to properly apply our religion within our contemporary contexts. With proper ijtihad then, we can explain to people that the goal of upholding human rights is not only in accordance with the Pancasila but also with the teachings of Islam

How, then, do you counter the arguments of certain Muslim groups that consider the idea of human rights to be non-Islamic?

Many Muslims see human rights as set of Western values. They perceive it as an ideological framework that’s being forced upon them. However, they forget that, in the twelfth century, the great scholar, Al Ghazali, already said that the maqasid al-sharia[1] can be formulated into five basic rights of a human being that should be provided for by religion. In my view, he talks about five human rights and, more precisely, about the right to life, the right to religious freedom, the right to express your opinion freely, the right to property and the right to reproduction.

Like Al Ghazali, I strongly believe that religion came to us for the betterment of human kind, not for the betterment of God. God has no defects or problems. So, it’s not God who ‘needs’ religion. It’s humans who need it.

But if you build your argument on tradition and even refer to Al Ghazali, why then does it often remain difficult to convince people of the ‘Islamicness’ of your approach to human rights?

Sadly enough, the religious interpretation being spread and taught in our cities is the conservative interpretation. That is why I try to let people read the Qur’an and try to help them understand their religious teachings. Only when you take enough time to educate everyone, can they come to understand that there is no contradiction between Islam and human rights values and that there is no contradiction between tawhid and democracy.

In itself, the spiritual principle of tawhid refers to both the unity and the uniqueness of God. So, how exactly do you connect it to democracy?

As you know, every Muslim accepts the principle of tawhid. In its essence, tawhid is the unity of God as it is expressed in our creed of faith: there is no God except THE God. A direct result of this tawhid is the fact that no creature can be equal to God, and the conviction that no human equals God gives rise to the principle of the equality of humankind. For a king cannot be a god to his people, a husband cannot be a god to his wife, a man cannot be a god to a woman, etc. Because no one is a god, no human can be superior to another human. All are fundamentally equal. No one can decree his will to someone else as if he was God.

From this, obviously, follows that all forms of discrimination against women or minorities can be considered as a denial of the principle of tawhid. A true understanding of tawhid seeks the liberation of all human beings from every form of tyranny, dictatorship or despotic structure. A true understanding of tawhid and Islam should bring about a society based on moral, civil and humanitarian values that frees it from any injustice or suppression.

In your work, you have a strong focus on the empowerment of women. I suppose, then, that the principle of tawhid is the driving force behind it as well.

Indeed. Women have to realize that they are full human beings with basic rights. They think they are the ‘second’ human being, created from Adam. It makes them feel as if they aren’t ‘complete’ human beings, but the Qur’an doesn’t say that Eve is created out of Adam’s rib. That idea comes from the Bible. Yet, when our religious leaders speak – both male and female – they mention that rib. Women should learn that in the Qur’an we come from the same essence, that both male and female are called to stewardship of creation. In the eyes of God, both men and women have the same obligation to build a civil society and to work towards peace with ourselves, others and the whole of creation.

Sadly enough, however, we don’t find such ideas in our current socio-political system. Many of the current articles in Indonesian common law marginalize and discriminate women. This inequality has deep roots within the patriarchal culture of our country and has pervaded our juridical system. It influences the decision-making processes of our prosecutors and judges.

So, how do you confront these deeply embedded imbalances as a woman?

To breach the social and political patriarchy, we need a cultural reconstruction, which should rest on three pillars. First of all, we need to have more education, in schools certainly but also in family life. Because it’s above all in family life that people should raise their kids with a critical and open mind. Second, we need to change laws and regulations and we need to get rid of the subordination of women in family law. And third, we need a reinterpretation of religion so that it becomes compatible with humanity and human rights.

And let me be clear that these things aren’t only necessary in Muslim communities. Christian and Hindu women face similar problems. We are all in the same boat. We all need a humanistic reinterpretation of our religions.

Do your efforts of reinterpretation bring you into much conflict with other scholars?

Some conservatives actually agree that the things I propose are truthful and just, but that our society isn’t ready for them yet. Other women aren’t educated like I am, they say. Even my husband doesn’t like that I provoke people with humanistic progressive interpretations of Islam. (Musdah laughs.) But when people tell me: “Musdah, you’re so ambitious”, I readily answer: “I’m not ambitious. It’s simply my right.”

And even ambition is your right, I would say. The Islamic tradition knows a lot of powerful women. The stories surrounding the wives of the Prophet, such as Khadijah and Aisha, portray this all too well.

That’s another good example of how we neglect many noble things in our religion. Nowadays, they depict Khadija as a rich widow and Aisha as a pretty wife of Muhammad, while both of them were strong women who commanded men – Khadija in her business and Aisha as the leader of an army. People easily forget what such brave women have accomplished. Much historical context got lost in our teaching of Islam. And we often don’t know how to place everything within our present context and time.

Just look at the way we deal with the Qur’an. The verses in the Qur’an can actually be divided in two types: universal verses that speak of basic values to all human life and specific verses for specific contexts. Thus, when interpreting the latter they can only be understood in light of the former, i.e. the call for compassion and justice. For example, when you speak of marriage, you have to place it within bigger moral values like love and fidelity. But many scholars and preachers give too much attention to the implementation of certain contextual verses and don’t place them in the context of the universal verses. This often makes their judgements and interpretations very strict, exclusive and very female unfriendly.

In the end, it’s quite simple: the Qur’an comes from God, the interpretation comes from men. I’m not an infidel when I say this. And I can’t stress it enough: we need to realize that the interpretation of religious truths always exists within a certain context. That is why education is so important. Education makes it possible to get rid of the dangerous and misleading forms of religion that bring about injustice and discrimination. Certainly in the case of women, they are on the back foot, socio-economically speaking. So, women have to become self-confident through knowledge.

All in all, that’s an ongoing struggle, not just in Indonesia but, in fact, all over the world.

You know, to be a Muslim is to be a khalifah,[2] a moral agent. That means that everyone is responsible for continuing the Prophetic task. The Prophetic task of human kind didn’t end with Muhammad. It’s the duty of every Muslim to continue al-amr bi ‘l-ma’ruf wa ‘n-nahy ‘an al-munkar. Literally, this means ‘enjoining what is good and forbidding what is wrong’. I conceive it as ‘efforts of transformation’. We have to transform ourselves, our families and societies. That’s not easy. But we have to do this prophetic task in our own capacity, as a teacher, a husband, a wife, a scholar, a brother, a sister, a politician or whatever your status and situation might be. And, like I often say, our mission will only end on judgment day. (Musdah laughs.)

[1] The Maqasid al Sharia are the ‘intentions of the Sharia’. That is to say, they are the underlying purpose behind the Islamic laws.

[2] The concept of khalifah is, of course, related to the concept of the caliphs, the successors of the Prophet and leaders of Muslim caliphates. Yet, as a spiritual term, khalifah implies the ‘stewardship’ of every human being. It, thus, refers to the manner in which everyone is called by God to take care of creation and humanity. To retain the distinction between the socio-political and spiritual use of the word, different transliterations, i.e. ‘caliph’ and ‘khalifah’, respectively, were used.

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.

I met Yassin in a slam class on music, poetry and art. It seemed the perfect opportunity to discuss the relation between activism, art and self-expression – all aspects of Yassin’s own identity as well as important topics among the migrant youth of my own country .

The last decade we’ve seen a lot of debates on culture and identity in the Western world. I guess you were caught in those debates simply because you were a migrant, just like many young Muslims in my own country whose parents or grandparents were migrants sometimes find themselves in the crossfire of those debates, whether they want it or not.  

We moved to Canada during the eighties and in the nineties you had the first Gulf War. So there was a lot of racism then that was getting worse and worse. It started with Hollywood movies like Indiana Jones. But we didn’t think about it until it happened in real life and people started treating us in a certain way. So when I was young, there always was a sort of hurdle to being heard and I think I’m so loud now because I couldn’t speak then. I directly feel that was the reason I became a vocal performer because when I was trying to express myself as a kid, I was constantly confronted by the language barriers, the social barriers and the cultural barriers.

Considering the rising racism and Islamophobia many Muslims migrant communities experience all over the world, it indeed seems only logical that the activists and artists would become, like you did, a bit ‘loud’ . But I sometimes wonder whether that ‘loudness’ sometimes lacks a bit of introversion. Isn’t there too much focus on ‘expression’ so that it becomes a bit aggressive sounding?

I don’t think that’s specific for the Muslim community activists. If we look at the broader society and observe things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on, we can see that it’s almost as if we have created our own importance. So I think it’s a sign of the times: everybody wants to be heard. Even when people are just talking to themselves, they want to hear themselves.

It’s both a gift and a curse. There are a lot of possibilities to independently create your own expressions these days but at the same time I also see a lack of thinking in the process because everything is so accessible. So we have to wonder: where do we draw our line?

Indeed, but I was also questioning the way people express themselves because I’m afraid that if the message or the package of that message comes across as aggressive to people, it becomes very difficult to win them over. So sometimes I have the feeling that the activists don’t tap enough into the well of introspection and spirituality that the tradition of Islam offers.

I understand what you’re saying, yet my personal conflict is not so much on that level. I have more of an inner clash at the university between teaching things and being a free thinker. The university is very much an institution and sometimes it feels like a corporation. When you walk in the hallways of the buildings you see Pepsi machines everywhere. And then you see advertisements of the university where you teach it says: “taking you to the real world” but we’re sitting in a class room.

Those were already things I thought about when I was a student myself. My ideas didn’t change, now I’m just on the other side of the spectrum. But certain teachers I had, got fired when they told us: “Forget about the box. Think whatever you want to think and do whatever you want to do because, in here, we simply work in an institution.” So I started wondering how I could say it to my students without saying it.

Of course I deal with eighteen year olds that just got out of college. A bunch of them are weed-smokers and partiers that often don’t give a shit. They just want to get their grades and bounce. So my question isn’t so much ‘how do we express ourselves’ but more ‘how do we make young people care’? Especially this generation: most of them are on Facebook during classes.

The problem with the political, activist and educational platforms is therefore that we tend to skip the generational aspect of change. Nowadays when you ask kids: “would you like to buy a CD.” They’ll reply: “Hell, no.” When you ask: “wouldn’t you read a newspaper.” They say: “Why? We have an iPad. I’ll just download the app or  I’ll just google that shit, and I’ll know.” That changes the relationship. It changes that aspect of introversion, because it makes you a ‘genius’.

It changes the relationship for artists like me as well. The experience of art seems less permanent than it used to be. When I was young, musicians that would release something, made it into an experience. You knew when it would come out, you’d go to the store to buy it and run home, pop the artwork out and listen to it on your stereo. But now you can download an album in literally ten seconds and then it’s on your phone. It becomes more digestible.

The fact that art and information become more easily digestible can go both ways of course. It can give people a broader view on more aspects of the world or it might make them more superficial. I see this as one of the underlying problems in a certain disconnect between intellectuals and activists in migrant Muslim communities. On the one hand you have a few academics that write in depth articles and on the other hand you have grass root movements that come on strong from the side of art or personal expression, but I have the feeling that they often don’t interact enough. You are an exception. You’re an artist that was offered a position to teach at a university. How do you think we can break that divide between the two?

I don’t think the divide has to be ‘broken’. I think it’s more about finding the right door to open it. It’s about figuring out the code. I was a guy who didn’t have a PhD and I was rapping for years and making much noise in the multicultural city of Montreal where rap is being viewed as a negative expression of angst, but I eventually still got asked to give a class at the university. That does in a way challenge the status quo. So art is probably the best way of figuring out the code. As they say: the poet can be together with the king and the pauper. He can be in the street talking to a beggar and at the same time be such a good poet that the king wants to invite him to listen to him. It’s all about finding that right poem and talking to both layers of society. 

What about your ‘poem’, that’s to say, your music and your lyrics. Do you feel they keep speaking to both layers?

I think that’s the hardest part of being a communicator: to keep it fresh. I started with Hip Hop and I still make music and write verses but I’m trying to breach out. My main medium is music, but if I’m anything, I’d like to say I’m multimedia because I want to expand my modes of expression.

The thing is that we have to keep questioning our own decisions and expressions. So something I love to do is to reflect on all the experiences that brought me to where I am as an artist. It’s like an onion. You keep on peeling the layers. It might make you cry sometimes but when you get to the core of what you do as an artist, a writer or a creator, it kind of makes it pure again. It often gets lost in a technique. Things sometimes become like clockwork and you know what you’re doing but you’re not there anymore and you’re only doing the surface of it.

If you ask me, this brings us back to what I called the lack of introspection. For I often think that activists become so focused on doing things and expressing themselves that they sometimes forget why they’re doing those things.

True. As long as I was hanging out with activists I always had the feeling that as much as they were a part of the solution, they’re also part of the problem because it becomes a nested environment. It has its internal politics and people have their own individual missions – and some of them even became politicians so they became who they were talking against.

The same is true for musicians. Although Hip Hop used to contain quite some criticism on society, nowadays a lot of the stars have become narcissistic. That’s partly why I call myself the Narcycist. It’s an anti-statement to what Hip Hop became like. But it’s also to remind myself that there’s a narcissist hidden in every rapper. It’s to remember that I shouldn’t become like that and that I should try to keep myself humble… So I failed miserably. (laughs)

As the Narcicyst, Yassin Alsalman, has shared the stage with some of hip-hop’s elite like Kanye West and Mos Def. His company, The Medium, is a multimedia arts and music label and culture brand. He uses it to provide a platform for the production and dissemination of independent artistic endeavors and multi-media productions: www.wearethemedium.com

Yassin has penned a series of op-edss for CNN and the Huffington Post, and is the author of “The Diatribes of a Dying Tribe”, about the beginnings of the Arab Hip-Hop movement in America. His teaching career began at Concordia University where he helped develop a course on the history and cultural impact of Hip Hop culture.

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.

In 2013, Prof. Siddiqui also wrote the interesting book, ‘Christians, Muslims and Jesus’ which delves deeper into the various views Muslims held of Jesus throughout history, and the ways in which these views determined the relationship between the two faiths.

What brought you to study Jesus in Islam?

Through my encounters with many Christians, I simply came to realize that Jesus was the focus of many theological questions and differences between the two faiths. So, I gradually felt the subject needed more attention.

Of course, the Qur’an has a particular theme, which is that Muhammad is walking the same path as the Old Testament prophets, such as Abraham, Moses, as well as Jesus. The Qur’an also relates that Jesus was born to a virgin called Mary, preached God’s word, gathered disciples and performed miracles. Jesus will even return to Earth, according to Islamic tradition, as al-Masih – the Messiah. But the crucial difference from the Christian narrative lies in the essence of prophetic revelation, however. For Muslims, Jesus cannot be acknowledged as ‘the Son of God’. Within Islam, revelation appears but divine distance is maintained, while for Christians, God is revealed in Christ and, as such, distance is overcome. And I find this theological difference in the modes of God’s disclosure quite fascinating.

This poignantly summarizes the traditional Islamic and Qur’anic view on Jesus and you point out the crucial theological aspects that make it different from the Christian view. But how would you describe the symbolic or spiritual meaning of Jesus in the lives of Muslims — if there is any at all?

I could, of course, refer to a statement like Rumi’s that Jesus is a prophet in whom the attributes of God became manifest, but eventually the Muslim community holds Muhammad in ultimate veneration. Even though Muslims revere Jesus as God’s prophet and messenger, there is no understanding of Jesus as God incarnate. It’s only in scholarly debates you’ll find Muslims talking about Jesus from a variety of perspectives. On a daily level, people will simply say He’s one of the prophets. But he has little ‘devotional value’.

So, although Jesus could be a perfect bridge figure between Christianity and Islam, because he doesn’t feature in the daily life of Muslims and because, theologically speaking, He will also always be the quintessential element on which ‘the twain shall never meet’, there is little chance of Him becoming such a bridge figure?

The two don’t have to meet anyway. Dialogue isn’t necessarily about bridging anything. It’s about understanding themes, persons and ways of looking at how God expresses Himself in different religions. So, the interest in Jesus isn’t to say: “Oh, now we’ve reached some good compromise.” Certainly, for me personally, it’s more about trying to understand another way of looking at God, and about wondering how I can make sense of it as a Muslim.

That reminds me of something that happened at an interreligious dialogue group I once attended. The group read and discussed certain passages from both the Qur’an and the Bible that focussed on similar topics. Suddenly, however, the tone of the conversation became quite tense when it got to a very crucial difference between the two traditions: some of the Christians said that God was in need of humans in order to relate to them. For Muslims, of course, this is quite unthinkable. In their view, God doesn’t need anyone. This difference isn’t all that surprising since the Qur’an often emphasises the ultimate self-sufficiency of the divine, while Christianity stems from the very idea that God became human. That was one of the many moments that increasingly convinced me that efforts of interfaith dialogue shouldn’t be trying too obsessively to find common ground. Perhaps more than that, they should, in fact, focus on learning to accept the difference.

It shouldn’t even be about that necessarily. It’s simply about exploring the fact that you noticed a fundamental difference. It might make you wonder how the God of Christians and Muslims can be one and the same if they have such different understandings of God. And it might make you dig deeper into your own tradition as well.

There are many ways of talking about God in relation to sin and repentance, mercy and compassion which open up all kinds of dialogue. There are hadiths that recount how someone went to the Prophet and asked him to give him a prayer that would prevent him from sinning ever again, yet God told him: “Don’t give him such a prayer, for if my servant does not sin, upon whom will I bestow my mercy?” So, does God need us after all, if He wants us to turn to him for repentance?

I remember using such hadiths in a talk once and asking the question, “Does God want us to sin?” There were Muslims in the audience who were annoyed and thought I couldn’t say such a thing. But I can say whatever I want. It’s just exploring the idea. It doesn’t mean I know anything more about God. It’s a theological exercise to see what we can make of such texts and traditions. Constructive dialogue does not reduce one’s faith, it rather enlarges it.

A Muslim could, therefore, say: God has no need. Full stop. But hearing Christians talk about the ‘humanization’ of God can, in many ways, also make you reassess the manner in which you think about God as a Muslim.

But if dialogue does not have a specific goal and is only an exploration, don’t we then deny its capacity to dispel certain prejudices and conflicts?

Of course, if people are getting together in community groups to get to know each other, that’s great. Because at the community level, people might have misconceptions about many things that can easily be clarified by simply talking to each other. But if you do scholarly work, you have to be open to the possibility that there might be no definitive outcome at all.

Actually, one of the pitfalls of efforts of dialogue is the idea that we should reach some kind of goal with which we should all be happy. I’m opposed to a ‘dialogue on the surface’ as well. We need to go deeper. But how do you know you’ve gone deep enough? It makes no sense to say: “Oh, this is deep enough.” It’s just about trying to understand how people talk about the things that matter to us in life. And once you start to look at it like that, you don’t go into any dialogue setting with some sort of intended goal. You’re just there to learn. You’re not there to defend your viewpoint, but to listen to how somebody else is expressing themes that you’re interested in as well.

Which implies you learned a lot through your own interaction with the Christian theological tradition.

Absolutely. And we actually touched on it already: there is a vulnerability in talking about God that Christians have and that Muslims don’t. Muslims are very certain about God. Christians might be very certain about their convictions, but the way they talk about God and His vulnerability is not something that we have in our vocabulary. And that’s quite intriguing. It makes me wonder, most of our convictions about God, are they convictions because that’s really what we believe or are they convictions because that’s what we derive out of centuries of theological thinking? I already mentioned some hadiths, but I could just as well refer to someone like Ibn Arabi who said that God created creation so that creation would love Him. There is vulnerability there. But, on the whole, these questions weren’t the central questions asked by Muslim theologians because they were concerned more with human worship, adoration and love for God as opposed to God’s love for us.

It’s interesting you mention this ‘vulnerability’ as something you’ve learned. During my own journey through Islam, the ‘certainty’ of Muslims and the way they put God so strongly at the forefront have been some sort of ‘mirror’ for me. Even something as basic as the fact that many Muslims pray five times a day continuously challenges me.

A good friend of mine, who’s an American scholar, spent a long time in Jerusalem and has recently gone back to the States. When he gives lectures – often for a Christian public – he sometimes says: “When I hear the adhan, the call to prayer, it always touches me. I’ve been listening to it five times a day for years in a row, but I’m still so moved by the ‘come to prayer, come to prayer’ and when it resounds, I feel like I want to go and pray with the Muslims. But then I stop because in so many inscriptions in mosques it reads: ‘He didn’t begat neither was he begotten.’[1]And that stops me in my tracks because I realize they still deny what is fundamental to my belief.”

I think that’s quite beautiful. He’s not saying he rejects anything, but he’s saying that there is always a certain call in somebody’s faith and it has a way of inviting all of us to look for God. We may not, in the end, respond to it the way a believer would, but the very fact that we’re pulled in that direction is really quite moving.

When we speak of encounters with other religions, ‘being moved’, indeed, seems far more important than being convinced.

When we are looking for a bridge, we have to realize that there’s emotional and intellectual common ground. And often, the intellectual common ground turns out to be of little importance in the lived lives of people. In the lived lives, it’s mostly the sense of love for God that moves Christians and the sense of compassion of God that moves Muslims. There’s a lot more common ground there.

Which is why, in some of your writings, you have made a plea for a theology of compassion, rather than a theology of salvation, is it not?

Indeed. It has changed a little, but I think that for too long, traditional interreligious dialogue was about whether someone would be ‘saved’. But how do we talk about people in terms of salvation? You get nowhere with that. In strict Muslim theology, I don’t even know whether I’ll be saved myself – whatever that may be – so how am I making pronouncements about anyone else? In a way, therefore, that’s almost a futile exercise for me. I would never stand up and say: “Jews and Christians can’t be saved because the Qur’an has an ambivalent relationship with them.” The truth is that I don’t know what the truth is. But there’s that sense . . . that sense that God is always present in our own nature as human beings. And that sense makes it possible to relate to one another. So, being in a certain way, justbeing humble for example, is a theological exercise as well — and a very important one for that matter.

[1] A Qur’anic sentence that often places itself within the theological discussion about the nature of Christ and the question of whether or not He is the son of God.

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.

Mali, your homeland, was plagued by much conflict and violence in recent years. What are they about, from your point of view?

The current conflicts did not arise yesterday or today. To truly comprehend them we have to put a large step back into history.

The Tuareg are the original inhabitants of the desert, which they have been traversing for thousands of years. In a distant past, they used to hold the trade of West-Africa in their hands. But they became the political victims of the manner in which artificial boundaries were drawn throughout West and North Africa. The territory in which the Tuareg roamed was divided into different parts and they got spread out over five states: Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Libya and Algeria.

The situation differs quite a lot from country to country. The Tuareg in Algeria live a very different life from those in Mali or Libya. You’ll find the biggest problems in Mali. Since the sixties there has been a lot of unrest. Because of the political decisions of the time, Touaregs started to feel like strangers in their own country. They paid taxes, worked and conformed to their obligations, but did not receive anything in return. It all led to a first open battle between the Tuareg and the Malinese government in ’63.

In Western countries we also often get to see news about the violent acts of Islamist groups in Mali.

Indeed. But the political goals of groups like Aqim (al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) have no relationship with the struggle of the Tuareg.

The goal of the Tuareg was their independence. The manner of fighting was completely different as well. In the sixties they still used camels. There were no tanks, machine guns or rocket launchers. These things were all used against the Tuareg and caused many bloodbaths amongst our people. It made many youngsters move to Algeria and Libya who then forged a deal with Gaddafi. But Gaddafi abused this deal to send them to Lebanon and Israel. In the nineties they returned to take up their own battle once more. That’s how a new revolution came about in 1990. In 1992 some agreements were signed that envisioned more self-determinacy and decentralization, but those treaties were never enacted. That’s why we saw new uprisings in 1994 and 2006.

So where do the Islamists come from in all of this?

For more than ten years certain evolutions are taking place that aren’t natural at all. I remember very well how they came to the Kidal region (the North-East of Mali) and pretended to be very religious people. They acted as if they were pacifists. They were Pakistanis, Algerians, etc. They came to the mosques to preach and to deepen the faith of people. At that time, I had no idea what it was all about. But gradually it became clear. Between the missionaries there were many different groups. Some could perhaps have been real pacifists but others traded in drugs and were responsible for kidnapping tourists.

I’m of course not a politician nor an academic who can thoroughly analyze everything on a socio-political level. But I simply look around and I notice that there are different parties. There’s a group that wants to ‘convert’ people to drag them into their system and there’s a group that wants to close the desert. You won’t find much in the desert however. The state never invested in it. Everything you’ll find there was built by the Europeans. There used to be a little tourism as well. Not much, but at least a little. Ever since 2003 all of this started to disappear. The authorities knew what happened but turned a blind eye. They didn’t do any effort for the region and gave free play to the terrorist groups.

In other words, the religious and the political were, as it happens more often and elsewhere as well, got all mixed up?

Indeed. The members of the islamist groups had a completely different goal than what they showed to people. But when someone comes to a Tuareg and says he believes in God, we see him as a good person because someone who believes in God, to us, is someone who doesn’t have any bad intentions, who behaves in a proper way and who we can trust. That’s how they use their religiosity to enter our community and bind many Tuareg to them.  In that manner and step by step they want to implement a strict interpretation of the sharia that was more normal many centuries ago. But why would we go back to that time?

If religion is a gate to the Tuareg community, isn’t there any religious component in the struggle of the Tuareg? Religion can always go in two directions: it can lead towards liberation as much as it can lead towards suppression.  So even though you do not wish to install a caliphate like many islamists do, doesn’t the spirituality of Islam give a sort of sustenance to your struggle for independence?

Tuareg are Muslims of course. More than a thousand years ago we converted. But without war or violence. We chose to be Muslims. To us, it was a tolerant religion. So the struggle of the Tuareg doesn’t revolve around religion. It’s simply about the vindication of our rights. We are the inheritors of the desert. We simply want to be a part of the decisions that determine our future and we don’t want the desert to be taken away from under our feet.

And what does your faith mean to you personally? Is it a source of inspiration for your music?

In all honesty I must admit that my religious side has nothing to do with my music. I am a musician. Period. And my religion is between me and God?

So what is a source of inspiration for your music?

What I see.

What pushed me into music is the situation of the Touaregs. It’s what I witness and experience every day. And it hurts my heart.

We, Touaregs, are a suppressed and marginalized community. So I have made the choice to be a musician and take up an important role in our society. We don’t have much space in the media or in the Malinese politics. But we have a history, a culture and a language that are very important to us. With our music we protect our memory because we don’t have any archives. It’s the musicians who protect our history.

That history is of course complex and you can’t get to know it in one-two-three. You can only understand it in small bits. It’s a slow process but it’s never too late. That’s also why we go on tours with our music. With our music we make a little piece of tradition travel through the world. Even if the listeners don’t understand our language, the Tamasheq, maybe they get interested. It might seem like something very small, but it’s a little more than before. In that way one song can be the start of a search that leads a lot further.

Many songs on your album ‘Chatma’ sing about the women in the Tuareg community. Even more so, the title ‘Chatma’ is Tamasheq for ‘My sisters’. Does that also relate to the ‘collective memory’ you try to keep alive through your music?

Our women are sacred to us. They are our honor and our dignity. When you touch our women, you touch us. That’s why I wrote many songs about the way in which they’ve become the victims of the political and terrorist groups that want to change their lifestyle.

Nevertheless I see that many women stay strong, remain courageous and withstand all these desperate situations. As such, my songs aren’t only a lament about the injustice that befalls them but also a tribute to their strength.

Yet my message goes even further. It’s also a message to men, wherever they are. Because all men need to be aware of the way they treat women. All over the world, you can find the same problems that we have. In many countries, politicians provoke wars and the greatest victims of these wars are always women – even though they aren’t guilty of anything. 

Ousmane Ag Mossa is the leader and main songwriter of the Malinese touareg band Tamikrest. They mix traditional African music with Western rock and pop influences and sing in Tamashek. The youth of several band members was shaped by the civil war that took place between 1990 and 1995. They now want to continue the struggle of their people through music instead of arms.

Tamikrest’s albums include Adagh, Toumastin and Chatma. More info on www.tamikrest.net.

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.

For many decades, this polymath has portrayed a relentless intellectual energy. The titles of his books varied from ‘The Future of Muslim Civilisation’ to ‘Why Do People Hate America?’ to ‘The A to Z of Postmodern Life’, and his professional life includes periods of research work for the Hajj Research Centre in the 1970s and an advisory position in the cabinet of Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia in the late 1980s.

When I met this somewhat fidgety but very welcoming man in London, his main preoccupation was editorial work for magazines like ‘Critical Muslim’ and ‘East West Affairs’. The former bundles contemporary Muslim ideas and thought, the latter is a journal of North-South relations in postnormal times.

You are known as an outspoken critic of tradition. Yet, my own ‘journey through Islam’ has, in fact, rekindled a great deal of my respect for traditions – both the Islamic tradition as well as my own Christian tradition. 

Traditions carry much beauty within themselves, but a great many problems also come from tradition. Normally, traditions are not something static. They are constantly reinvented, so to say. In fact, a tradition stays a tradition by reinventing itself. If it doesn’t reinvent itself, it can become a custom and a custom can become very oppressive. And a great part of the contemporary problem is that much of our tradition is ossified, frozen in history, very misogynist and has a great fear of ‘the other’. On top of it, certain aspects of these ossified traditions are very deathly, such as not allowing free thought, killing apostates or like traditions that are oppressive towards sexual orientation. 

Many of these traditions actually come from what I would call ‘manufactured hadiths’. Therefore, all criticism has to start with our own sources. We should never accept all the hadiths that are thrown at us, without critically engaging with them.

Is it not so, however, that the Islamic tradition normally does critically engage with them, for example, by trying to find the chain of narrators in order to figure out the authority of a certain hadith?

Sure, but we have to keep in mind that the methodologies have moved on. There are new ways of criticizing. Even within the old traditional methodologies, I do not think that the hadith criticism was good enough. Two of the premises of accepting a hadith are that it shouldn’t contradict the Qur’an and that it should be a rational hadith, yet lots of accepted hadiths do, in fact, contradict the Qur’an and are totally irrational. According to Bukhari, for example, one hadith explains, “Seeing a black woman in a dream is the sign of an oncoming epidemic.” Or what are we to make of the hadith from The Book of Nikah that tells us, “The Messenger used to visit all nine of his wives every night.” How could any man, no matter how close he was to the Prophet, have known this? And even if some men might know more about his nocturnal relationships with his wives, how could he humanly have done that, particularly when we are told elsewhere in the same collection that he used to pray all night, so much so that his feet swelled?

We can say the same about Qur’an interpretation. We have the classical Qur’anic methodology that we have to interpret the Qur’an from within the Qur’an, where we have to look at the historical context, and so on. But even that has not really been followed. Some of the classical commentaries, thus, are pretty irrational and unreasonable in terms of what they say about women, about Christians or the way they speak about belief.

Obviously, I agree that both Muslims and Christians should critically engage with their sources — certainly when traditional interpretations gave rise to certain discriminatory or suppressive situations. Yet, on the other hand, belief can never be a totally ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’ concept. You can’t be endlessly critical and analytic about it, I would say. It is, in the end, also a matter of ‘acceptance’.

Belief certainly doesn’t have to be a totally rational thing. There is such a thing as ‘a leap of faith’. But the leap of faith is about God. In a sense, God has to remain the unseen. Because if God can be seen or if you can prove him by logical argument, everybody will believe in God and there will be no need for faith. What follows after the leap of faith, however, has to be based on some notion of rationality, objectivity, analysis and method. We can’t just believe something because people tell us they found it in the Qur’an or because they heard a particular hadith.

That’s why criticism is so important. Actually, for me, the greatness of the Muslim civilisation resides in its criticism. The early Muslim scholars were very critical, even those who canonized Islamic law. And they expected that those who would follow them would be equally critical. The whole idea of the hadith collection, for example, was based on criticism, but the generations that followed them did not pay much attention to this aspect of criticism and a lot more to following their predecessors. One person follows the previous one, and he, in turn, is followed by another, so there’s rather a chain of followers instead of critical engagement with the text.

And, of course, many feminist Muslim scholars have pointed out that most of the Qur’an and hadith interpretations were done by men and, as such, many of those interpretations have been far too patriarchal.

They’re absolutely correct on this. Even more so, they weren’t just men, but men with a very tribal outlook on life so that their tribal culture became a part of the tafsir[1] and the manufacturing of hadiths.

So, without a critical engagement with our sources, I don’t think we have much of a future. This blind faith on tradition is absolutely appalling.

But – and this is an emphasized ‘but’ – I do understand that you cannot ditch tradition completely. You do need traditions. They are very important for our sanity because they give us a sense of identity and purpose in life. Actually, this is where criticism comes in – or positive criticism at least. Negative criticism simply deconstructs and destroys. But positive criticism tries to take us forward. Positive criticism tries to preserve and promote the many life-enhancing elements of our traditions.

Nowadays, many people will turn to what they call the ‘Sufi tradition’ to find such life-enhancing elements of Islam. Throughout my many conversations, I got a more nuanced view on this matter, but how do you assess this quite modern focus on ‘Sufism’?

Lots of people are often impressed by Sufi teachings and Sufi talk on tradition, but Sufis themselves have contributed a great deal to misogynist and authoritarian thought in Muslim culture. In classical Sufi tariqas, for example, you’re often supposed to accept your shaykh unquestioningly. But why? Is he God? Why should I accept anyone unquestioningly? Of course I should learn from the shaykh, but I should be able to discuss, debate and openly criticize when I deem it necessary. I find this whole idea of a ‘guru’ and ‘disciple’ quite repugnant. Lots of Sufi’s are, however, promoting such things.

Exactly the same methodology is used by groups like Al Qaeda, by the way. In those circles, you’re also not supposed to question the authority.

All of that Sufi business is often just recycling the old traditional stuff. Now, I don’t mind that people engage with great minds like Ibn Arabi or Rumi and their illuminating thought. What I dislike is the uncritical perpetuation of certain traditional elements.

Can we really compare this type of historic ossification to the current trend of Salafi-style ossification of Islam?

The underlying process is the same. First of all it involves an exaggerated ‘reverence’. It’s about giving complete reverence to authorities, teachers or your shaykhs and idealizing them as perfect human beings who can solve all problems. This comes with a fear of failure. In the presence of such an idealized figure, you are afraid to be wrong because it feels like a sin. But, of course, questioning and criticism necessarily involves getting it wrong. Being human means that you sometimes make mistakes. If you’re perfect, you won’t, but if you’re human, you will.

So fear, idealization and over-reverence are essential in this matter, and they’re nothing new. The fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun criticized others for exactly these three things.

Today, however, these things are also strongly connected to specific economic and political realities, the spread of Petro-Islam from the Gulf being one of them.

I think the Gulf and the Saudi’s have done a lot to promote Wahhabism[2] and closing the minds of Muslims. But that’s hardly surprising. It’s a very tribal society. In fact, their construction of God is a bit like the leader of the Quraysh. He’s always angry, he’s always vengeful and he’s always protective of his tribe. The whole ‘image’ they made of God is, therefore, very problematic in my eyes. Where’s the mercy? Where’s the beauty? Where’s humanity? If you look at God’s 99 names, those aspects are among them as well, yet they tend to ignore them.

When I spoke to Dr. D. Latifa, she said: “Their work is done. They’ve created the priests, now they will claim Mecca as the Rome of Islam.”

She was right. They act quite like an empire and it’s painful to see how they’re transforming Mecca very much into a city like imperial Rome. All the cultural property has been removed. They build huge hotels, shopping malls and palaces right behind the Great Mosque. It’s not much of a sacred city anymore. It’s a pretty ugly city in many respects. Of course, the Kaaba and its surroundings will always be sacred to Muslims, but once you go outside of it, you’re greeted with much ugliness.

Your criticism of such issues is very outspoken and straightforward. Often, that type of criticism evokes a counter reaction that pushes people outside the community. Do you sometimes have the feeling you’re being pushed outside the Muslim community?

Of course people sometimes get upset by my criticism, but fortunately, I’m still seen as part of the community and I still see myself as a part of it. And what is a community in any case? You can create community in various ways. There’s also a community of critical Muslims, for example. Yet, criticism is frowned upon everywhere. It’s not a specific Muslim problem. If you’re American and criticize America, for example, you’ll experience the same thing. Those in power always despise criticism. But those in power can also only be held accountable through criticism. So criticism is essential to accountability.

The possibility to hold things accountable seems to diminish, however, as we witness a worldwide growth of narrow-minded conservatism that increasingly restricts freedom of thought and action.

I think this growth of conservatism is produced by fear. When people fear change, they look inwards and try to create boundaries.

A big part of the problem for conservatives has been the accelerating rate of change. Look at computers; their computing power doubles every six months, so to speak. It took thirty years to take the first genome out of a fly and now we can take genomes out of everything in a matter of days. How we approach the body, what we regard as life, how we need to construct society, and so on — all these things have become major issues. As a result, people come together and focus on their particular group, creating ‘us versus them’ boundaries in their effort to navigate the sea of change. Of course, fear of the others was already there, but when you bring in rapid change, it increases manifold and uncertainty becomes dominant. And people who want certainty often find it in certain literal notions of religion. They simplify things and make clear cut lists of dos and don’ts. Yet, this only creates an illusion of certainty, because, in the end, there is no ultimate certainty.

Postmodern philosophy starts from exactly this premise, that there aren’t any ultimate certainties in lives. Nonetheless, besides being an outspoken critic of ossified Islamic traditions, you’re also a critic of modernism and postmodernism. You’ve written several texts and books on the matter. In a sense, I see great similarities between the two topics of critique, because modernity as it exists today, is, in my eyes, also an ossification, but then of the secular, atheistic, scientistic idea that all value can eventually be levelled down to the preferences of the individual. You wrote about the need for ‘transmodernity’ in this respect. What do you exactly mean by it?

As you say, we know that there are lots of problems with modernism. Postmodernism is supposed to critique modernity and take us forward. But it has turned out to be a new form of Western imperialism. Everything is vanity, there are no ground narratives, nothing gives meaning, there is no sense of direction, etc. These postmodern ‘building blocks’ are absolutely untrue; they only have us staring in a void. So, we need to go beyond them. That’s where transmodernity comes in.

Transmodernity is an effort to go beyond modernity and postmodernity. We need to bring the life-enhancing aspects of tradition and the best aspects of modernity together. They need to be synthesized into a new way of looking at things. In modernity, tradition is always looked down upon. In transmodernity, tradition is critiqued, but then the best bits of tradition are kept and built upon. In postmodernism, modernism is almost seen as evil. But again, in transmodernity, modernity is critiqued and its best aspects are enhanced. So, it’s a much more critically engaging process that takes the best of what was already there. It doesn’t disconnect you from history, but builds upon elements that can take you forward.

What are some of the most valuable aspects of tradition which, in your eyes, the world needs today?

The whole idea of family as a basic unit on which the community and society is built is a good example. Or the way in which traditional societies have engaged with nature. They don’t see nature as something that needs to be conquered. Nature, to them, is something that you work and live with. So, if traditional societies are allowed to follow their traditions, they tend to be ecologically sound. Look at Fez in Morocco, for example. It’s built along a river, but in such a way that the water is not polluted as it flows downstream. Traditionally, they also allowed certain parts outside the city to be ‘haram’ so that people could not cut the trees of the woodlands.

The tragedy of the Islamic tradition is that we’ve lost the positive life-enhancing aspects of it. Sadly enough, we trap ourselves in those aspects of tradition that are often deathly.

So what does the future have in store for us?

Given the global trends, I believe that all too narrow-minded thought will become obsolete. It can, of course, do much damage in the short run, but in the long run, the fundamentalist and literalist rhetoric will eventually prove itself to be totally insufficient and disappear. There will always be fundamentalists and literalists – in fact, we need them in order to have a complete human society with all shades of opinion – but they will not be dominant. They will lose their engine. The engine at the moment is Saudi Arabia. And the engine will only be running as long as the oil is flowing — not much longer in other words. Therefore, Muslim fundamentalism doesn’t have much of a future. It’s just a bunch of slogans without many pragmatic solutions. It’s the people who produce pragmatic solutions who will eventually win the day.

Quite an optimistic outlook for a continuously critical person like you.

A religious person has to be optimistic by nature, because religion is all about hope.

[1] Tafsir is the explanatory interpretations of Qur’anic verses.

[2] A particular form of Salafism. It bases itself on the teachings of Muhammad Ibn Abdal Wahhab. It eventually became the official ideology of the Saudi state. Wahhabis do not like the term ‘Wahhabism’ and, instead, will simply call themselves Salafis or Muwahhidun, the latter meaning ‘unitarians’.

A very recommended book from Ziauddin Sardar’s long list of published works is his autobiography ‘Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim‘. For his personal website, see ziauddinsardar.com and for the website of the Critical Muslim Magazine, which he edits, see criticalmuslim.com.

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.

Someone like Amir Sulaiman is an exception, and a very solid exception for that matter. Amir is an accomplished poet, activist, recording artist and a two time HBO Def Poet. He began writing poetry at the age of twelve, and by now, his widely acclaimed slam poetry, which oozes his rap roots, has brought him to perform all over the world.

When I saw one of his performances for the first time, I was thoroughly impressed. His voice is strong, his spirituality deep and his performance intense. I sat down with him to talk about the importance of words, the poetry of creation and the sneaky Sméagol in all of us.

Considering the importance of words in Islam because of the central place of the Qur’an as the revelation, one could expect to find ‘artists of the word’ wherever Islam can be found. How come there aren’t more Islamic poets who are born and raised in the West?

When Islam engages in a certain culture, it takes some time before the language is able to support the spiritual concepts. It may take a generation or two before people are able to express in their own language what Islam has brought to them. The Western Islam is still a baby nation. I’m sure that we’ll see more poetry as it develops into maturity.

Your poetry has a lot of hip hop and slam poetry influences. Do you also relate to the traditional poetry of the great icons of Islamic poetry?

Definitely. They’re a profound influence and their writing boggles my mind. Take Rumi and his Masnavi, for example, to write that much is one thing, but to write that much and make every verse a whole world in itself is simply incredible. However, when I was young, I didn’t know there was such a rich tradition. I got introduced to those poets when I was already in my twenties. But nowadays, I read more of that than contemporary stuff.

The language of the Qur’an, however, has always been a strong influence on me. When I was ten years old, it gripped me because it felt so lofty and majestic, but at the same time, I was listening to hip hop, which uses street language. So, my art form is a marriage of the very lofty and the very street. It wasn’t like I found Islam at a certain point and that it gradually influenced my poetry. It has always been one and the same. Islam was my faith and poetry was my personal means of expressing it. My poems also became more profound when I deepened my Islam. The centre of both is that I’m seeking to know God. Poetry is just a means to help me on that path.

In what measure, then, do you see the Qur’an as a book of poetry?

There’s a hadith that, after the death of the Prophet, someone asked his wife Aisha about his character. She described him as a ‘walking Qur’an’. For me then, the Qur’an is the sitting Muhammad and Muhammad is the walking Qur’an. Also, there is something about the symmetry and mathematics of the Qur’an beyond its surface beauty, which makes you realize that it couldn’t have merely come out of human inspiration. So, I don’t think of it as poetry. It’s a lot more.

On the other hand, I can sometimes see the whole of creation as one big poem. It’s interesting to realize, for example, that the beginning of creation is seen as a verbal act. In your Christian tradition, it’s in words like, “Let there be light!” And the Qur’an recounts that God said “Be” and it was. The revelation could have said God built the universe with His hands or that He poured the universe into shape, but no, he ‘spoke’ the universe into existence. And in the English language, the word ‘universe’ perfectly accords to this because it consists of ‘uni’, which means ‘one’, and ‘verse’, which means ‘poem’. So, to me, all of creation is just one divine expression.

There is also a hadith which states that Muhammad said that the pen was the first thing created. Another hadith mentions that the intellect was the first thing created. But those two accounts don’t conflict since they describe the same reality. It’s all about the words. There’s something very powerful in there. There was the spiritual reality and the material reality and the bridge between them is language. The mechanism that God created to bring things from non-existence into existence is the word.

However, we aren’t God and, as such, what we say isn’t always what we bring into existence. I mean to say that our words and actions aren’t always coherent because it is often difficult to practice what we preach. I’m sure that as a poet you have thought about this dilemma a great deal.

I teach a poetry workshop and the very first thing I always mention is sincerity. It’s the prerequisite for good poetry. And sincerity means two things: to know yourself and to be yourself. Reconciling what we believe and what we do is the basic question of our life. It’s what we’re here for. That’s why rituals are important. Sometimes when people go deeper into spirituality, they start to look down upon rituals as mundane, archaic and backwards, but the reason why religions have them is exactly to keep the coherence between your acts and your words. They help to reign yourself in when you drift away. Take the five prayers, for example. If we could be fully devoted and really engrain within ourselves what we’re saying, one prayer would suffice. But the truth is that we believe it when we’re saying it, yet our heart shakes fifteen minutes later when we get a certain email or phone call. So, the prayer sustains our faith several times during the day. The congregational prayer, every Friday, sustains it for the week. The Ramadan sustains it for the year. And the Hajj sustains it for the lifetime. All of these practices are meant to reign the heart and the mind back in and to get rid of the distractions. And all of it is to know God. Even in the straying there is knowledge of God.

This human dilemma of always trying to get back to the divine actually is the topic of my poem ‘Hallelujah’. A part of it goes like this:

My death is my birth
my spirit is divine but my ego is Sméagol
my precious,
ruthless and restless
foolish and reckless
the only way to truly live is to die.
Meet me back in the essence.

I used the metaphor of Sméagol, the little white creature of the Lord of the Rings, because he’s just a perfect example of raw ego. He’s a fearful, manipulative, greedy and maniacal little creature – he’s all of it simply because he can’t let go of that one thing – that power, that ‘precious’. And we’re all the same. We all have this one thing that we really can’t let go of and it hinders us to truly reconcile our belief and our actions.

You say the hajj is one of the rituals that has the power to reign us back in. The poems you collected in your trilogy, ‘The Meccan openings’, ‘The Medinan openings’ and ‘The openings’, are also meant as a sort of ‘thank you project’ because your hajj was unexpectedly provided for by someone else. Did the hajj bring a fundamental change in your life?

It did. It was a profound change and it certainly deepened my spirituality. What struck me most was the possibility to see the whole world gathering at the same place, like a mini-version of humanity. Not just because all the nationalities were there, but also because it brings together every type of person. It made me realize that, literally, everyone is searching for God – even those of whom you wouldn’t think so at first. Even addicts, for example, seek a deeper connection. Whether we seek God or not, all of us are in need of a deeper connection. It’s just that some are unclear about the correct direction and end up looking the wrong way, but they are looking for it nonetheless. This realization enlarged my capacity for compassion. In one of my poems, I wrote: “We are drawn to the light, like an addict to the pipe.” Like an addict is being pulled towards his addiction, we are all being pulled towards God.

Is there a verse in the Qur’an that ‘pulls’ you to God more than others?

Different verses inspire me at different times in my life, of course, but right now it’s verses one to three of Surah An-Nasr: “When God’s help comes and He opens up your path; when you see people coming into the way of God in huge droves, then glorify Him, praise Him and ask forgiveness for He’s the one who can accept repentance.” I find myself repeating this in my daily prayers. There’s the literal meaning on the one hand of many people coming to Islam, but on the other hand, I interpret the ‘droves’ as all the beings, the states and personalities that are living inside of myself. And I pray that all of them would be coming into the way of God — even my Sméagol.

You have said a lot about the importance and the power of words, but when you speak of the effort to focus the whole of our being on God, we can easily reach a point where words become insufficient.

True. To know about God is not the same as to know God. You can know much about the Prophets and their teachings, about how God revealed himself, at what times, and so on, but to really know Him is something different. It’s the same in human relations. You can know someone’s history and character, but that’s different than knowing someone through a marital bond or like a father relates to his son. There’s a level of intimacy beyond words.

In the end, all the words of the saints are a bit like running in place since they try to express their experiences of God even though it’s unutterable. Whatever we say about God, God is beyond it all. Even when we let our mind expand tremendously and imagine the most sublime things, God is still beyond it. But the poet can’t resist; he has to try to express it nonetheless.

Amir made a collection of def poetry albums called ‘The Meccan Openings’, ‘The Medinan Openings’ and ‘The Openings: Love, Gnosis & Other suicide attempts’. The first two can be downloaded for free on www.amirsulaiman.com

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.

If she had to place herself within a certain strand of Western psychology, it would be Jungian psychology, although she can be quite critical about the Jungian approach as well. In fact, being critical is a general aspect of Dr. Latifa’s character and, as such, instead of just having a chat for an hour or two, I ended up spending three days with her, discussing various topics related to religion and society. When I eventually headed back home, it was in high spirits and with new insights.

What follows is just a small extract of one of our conversations.

One of the things I noticed while traveling in Pakistan is how closely the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam interlock. I already knew that the current conflicts between the different groups are a very recent development fuelled by the geo-politics of the last fifty years,[2] but I was nevertheless surprised to see how intertwined they were on a daily and spiritual level. Sunni and Shia live side by side, attend each other’s festivities and pray at the same shrines. It all makes the current violence seem even more absurd. Do you, as a Pakistani, actually still see a difference between the two?

In my eyes, one of the great aspects of the Shia tradition is its enormous contribution to passion and love within Islam. In some ways, I actually see this as the main rift between the two branches. As you know, their conflict never was about the Qur’an or the Prophet, but it also wasn’t simply about the choice of who would be the next caliph, as it is always presented. According to me, it was also about the way Islam should be lived. Of course, every aspect of the Islamic religion can be found in every branch; that is to say, love, fear, jurisprudence, the unity of God and all other core concepts are present in both the Sunni and the Shia theology. However, in a way, the ‘psychological approach’ of the Shias had a somewhat stronger emphasis on passion while the Sunnis focussed somewhat more on the fear of God, which is, of course, also needed.

I already discussed the concept of taqwa with Imam Feisal[3] and his spiritual interpretation of it made much sense, but not a lot of your Western psychologist colleagues would easily say that fear is needed – and most certainly not in relation to God.

There is a cluster of ways to relate ourselves to God. We can do so through fear, love, justice or many other aspects. And within the monotheisms, the aspect of fear also gets a strong emphasis. Look at the Ten Commandments for example; seven of them are about what you will not do.

The emphasis in Christianity is on love. In Islam, as a whole, it’s on knowledge, if you ask me.

It’s not that there’s no love in Islam, no knowledge in Judaism or no fear in Christianity, but it’s what’s emphasized as a profile. It’s bland to say that all religions are the same, but when we speak of the differences between different religions, it’s not so much about theory or dogmas. It’s about the emphasis on a certain aspect of relating to the divine. And whether emphasized or not, fear has its place. It teaches us limits. It makes us recognize that there are lines that we shouldn’t cross. One of the biggest examples of the absence of fear is the disastrous situation of the environment, for example. So statements like Roosevelt’s, “The only thing you should fear is fear itself”, are nonsensical to me. You can’t explain to a one year old not to put his fingers in an electrical socket; only fear will teach him not to do it.

I personally think that the West certainly made phenomenal contributions in the realm of the hard sciences, but when it comes to psychology, it’s a complete disaster. Western psychology really hasn’t gotten far in terms of explaining what human beings are or in grasping the fullness of what they’re all about. So, this modern idea that there is no need to fear, for example, is actually an impoverished look on the world.

Also, if you think about it, what has really happened? We are surrounded by fear! Everywhere you go. The present day fear of terrorism is the multiplied version of it. First there was a denial of fear and now we can’t escape it. To paraphrase Carl Jung, whatever you deny eventually comes to face you.

I agree that fear can sometimes give us a proper and even necessary sense of boundaries. But fear, certainly in a religious context, can also be quite stifling.

Of course context, gender, etc. are very important, but I also think that age is very critical. To encourage a sixteen year old to be fearless is a good thing. To do the same in the case of a fifty year old, I’m not so sure. (Dr. Latifa laughs.) Past forty, a lot of issues are actually moral issues, for example. As a psychologist, I think it’s important to realize this if you properly want to address certain psychological problems. But modern psychology has no room for that.

Generally speaking, modern psychology is overwhelmingly modelled on the psyches of young males. That is to say, the model of the young male is the archetype. It was Freud’s archetype as well, which is all fine for young males, but it simply doesn’t work to impose that on women or on men who are in the later stages of life. It doesn’t leave enough room for the soul.

So does religion often come up in your work as a psychologist?

Again, it depends on the person and his age. There’s mostly no point talking religion to a sixteen year old. In fact, it might often be wrong to do so. It’s a bit unnatural. But later on, it can certainly come up. Though when people come to me, expecting a psychologist who has studied in Western countries, they mostly don’t come to talk about religion.

Sure, but I also suppose that underneath all their questions, there is some sort of embedded religion and spirituality. At least a lot more than in the West I would think, where religion is, by and large, not at all as embedded in people’s minds as it is in the minds of the Pakistanis.

You’re right, but then again, a lot of Christian concepts are strongly anchored in the unconscious of Western people — and not always in a pleasant way. So, when dealing with people who had a highly Western education and who are asking questions about religion, the first task is to get rid of their ‘Christianist’ unconscious. 

I’ve been fortunate because I spent my schooling first in Anglican schools, in a Catholic convent, an American Presbyterian college – all in Lahore by the way – and, therefore, got to know the whole spectrum. So, I probably know the bible better than most Europeans. And, as such, I think I can fairly judge the depth of the critique of people like Jung. He was right when he said that it’s a critical issue today to make people aware of how they think about religion. For our view on religion has fundamentally changed. In the Islamic world as well – because the tragedy is that we’re now seeing the worst form of Protestant Christianizing of Islam, though it’s dreadfully politically incorrect to say this. (Dr. Latifa laughs.)

Don’t bother about political correctness. A good bit of political incorrectness brought about quite a lot of justice throughout history. So, by all means, explain further.

Well, then, if you ask me, the West is stuck in some sort of ‘Cartesian Christianism’. Essentially, it’s this Protestant mindset, combined with Cartesianism. By Cartesianism, I mean the rational approach to things, the mental, disembodied and purely analytical way of looking at reality and knowledge.

Combine this puritan ‘scientific’ approach with a Protestant mindset that holds, at its core, the conviction that only faith in Jesus saves a soul, and what you get is the idea that every question can only have one answer and that everything in existence can be brought back to specific essential parts. In such a worldview, religion becomes something that must, by definition, consist of certain strictly organized convictions and beliefs. But this isn’t at all the case in most religions. Also not in Islam, even though the Muslim world, by now, has come to see religion in the same terms.

This of course relates to your idea that people in the West have lost the capability to think mythologically. You have written about this in some of your essays in which you explain that there are different types of knowledge of which ‘logic’ is but one. You see ‘mytho-logic’ as another type. And I must admit that in the West we, indeed, tend to see ‘real’ knowledge only in logical terms. We ask: “Where do people come from?” and the only answer we expect is: “Out of the fusion of an egg and sperm cell.” But many people, me included, derive knowledge about life by relating to stories. As a Christian, for example, I find much more truth and answers about life by ‘mirroring’ my personal experiences to stories in the Gospels then by reading scientific magazines.

Indeed. It’s the capacity of the symbolic. Science, as it was filtered through modernity, is literal. But when you’re drinking water, you’re not thinking of it as H₂O. It’s your experience that matters and that experience can be multiple. So, the meaning of water can be multiple. H₂O has no meaning; it just tells you what the elements in the product are. The tendency is, therefore, to reduce the meaning of everything into its most literal aspect because of the conviction that there is only one answer to things.

Look at the way we nowadays deal with homosexuality, for example. It’s clear that the West has brought in a particular view of homosexuality. I guess it partly originates in the way Christ was severed from sexuality in the Christian tradition, as he was considered to be an unmarried celibate. But in certain regions, homosexuality had a place, particularly in those areas that were once a part of Alexander the Great’s empire and where the Greek influence was, therefore, evident. In such places, homosexuality could exist side by side with family life. Men simply had certain gatherings – sort of stag nights – once a month or so, in which they could meet other men and have a lot of experiences of male bonding, sometimes also sexually. As long as it didn’t threaten the family existence, everyone, including the wife, was okay with it. Again, for the West, you can be only one thing: either homosexual or heterosexual, but here you could have different experiences of reality and sexuality could change during certain life stages.

I keep joking among my friends that within Islamic jurisprudence, people can only be punished for having extramarital sex when there aren’t just four witnesses, but four adult, well-respected citizens who are eye witnesses. Now, if you’re going to copulate in front of four well-respected citizens, you probably should be stoned. The punishment is more for stupidity than for sin. (Dr. Latifa laughs.)

All joking aside, Islam just takes human nature for what it is. So, in Islam, the concept of sin has more to do with hubris and arrogance. When you look at the parameters of the punishment, it seems to me that it says: “Okay, you’re going to do this probably, but if you do it, can you please be a bit discrete about it?” So, along with the basic message of ‘don’t do it’ there is also a strong message of ‘don’t mess with the social order’.

In the non-Western world, then, it has often not been an issue. It even always existed in Arab society. But the minute you ask the question, people will have an opinion and create a ‘problem’.

The same happened with family planning and abortion. That wasn’t an issue in the Muslim world before, but it became one after that bizarre coalition in Cairo with the Catholics and the Muslims, because the Catholics went into overdrive and started asking Muslim scholars what their view on abortion was. And, of course, once they were asked, they started to exert their patriarchal views. But that doesn’t mean women didn’t do it.

Yet another example is the debate about creation versus evolution. I keep telling people that these are false debates that we have internalized. It’s not as if Muslims and Hindus didn’t have science. These debates stem from mainstream Christian dogmatism, but they were internalized by the Muslim community. In our history, science and religion always went together. But suddenly, certain Muslims feel the need to have an opposite opinion about it — an opinion that coincides with the views of conservative Christians.

Isn’t it remarkable, then, how quickly this ‘rational-scientist’ and single-minded approach to reality was taken over by other cultural groups in the world? If we look at the modern fundamentalist forms of Islam, for example, we can see that they have taken up the same rhetoric of one single and literal answer to everything. Yet, that sort of contemporary Muslim extremism is an evolution of the last fifty years or so. It is interesting to see, therefore, how quickly people have taken up the Western way of looking at their own religion and how quickly they have forgotten their traditional ‘mytho-logical’ approach. How come it all happened so fast?

Well, that’s modernity, colonialism and its educational system.

In my own family, religion was always very much a part of our lives. We were encouraged to be modern and get an education, but unlike many middle and higher class Pakistanis and Indians who were enthralled by the Marxist and scientistic worldviews, which were also prevalent in the West, my parents never turned their backs on religion. So, in the nineties, I could see that things had changed quite a bit and that something very wrong was creeping up on us. A rigid mindset that knows only one way of dealing with religion started to take root in our society. Only one particular form of Islam was promoted more and more as the correct form of Islam, even though this wasn’t the way we traditionally looked at religion.

Even today, a research showed that if you ask people in India: “What is your religion?” almost three to four million people will name you at least three. So, the fact of the matter is that, as you go down the literacy ladder, there are still huge numbers of people whose self-image, though mostly unconscious, is “I’m a Hindu, I’m a Muslim and I’m a Christian.”

That’s indeed something I noticed during my trip through the Punjab and Kashmir region. Religions really get mixed up. And not just as a fact of history, but also in today’s reality. Here in Lahore, for example, there’s the shrine of Baba Shah Jamal. Every Thursday, people smoke bhang[4] and dance into a trance to the loud beats of the dhol.[5] When I went there, I noticed it actually has a very ‘Hindu’ feel to it. It’s a bit like a loud, colourful Hindu gathering but in honour of a Muslim saint. It made me remember how you once wrote about Lal Ded, the female saint of whom no one actually knew whether she was Muslim or Hindu. In that text, you explained how nobody really cared either and that only now, in the last few decades, many academics suddenly feel the need to prove to which religion she belonged.

For my generation, such things have been traumatic. My parents were in love with the West and didn’t bother any bit about the Christianity they encountered in their lives. Until my father died, in the seventies, my parents still said that if you wanted to see Islam, you had to go to the West. The people there perhaps don’t recite the shahada, he said, but they pay their taxes, they’re clean, there is social security, and so on. So there was a tremendous admiration for the West. They were devout Muslims, but they never thought twice about me singing Christian hymns at my convent school. They were very happy that good education was given to their children, and they had tremendous respect for the nuns and so on. Nowadays, however, that type of flexibility is being threatened.

When I speak to people in Pakistan about my work, they all say that they are very religious. Often they add that they’re of the Sufi tradition, but above all, they tell me how they respect all religions, how they think all faiths are fine and so on. When I continue the conversation, however, I’ll eventually get to a point where they present Islam as the best religion in the world. As such, it quickly became clear to me that they weren’t conveying a literal message about the equality of all religions. They above all wanted to distance themselves from the radical Islamists who are, in their eyes, destroying the country. That is to say, they simply don’t relate to that single-minded type of Islam that has been imported into Pakistan during the last forty years. How come the Pakistani type of ‘blended’ Islam with an open-ended view on reality wasn’t resilient enough? Why did it not withstand the fundamentalist type?

On one level, it is still resilient. If the rituals at Shah Jamal can still go on every Thursday, that means it’s in fact still very alive. It’s our roots. It’s the ground beneath our feet.

This is also why I must admit that this whole ‘Sufi’ business drives me a bit crazy. I first heard the word ‘Sufism’ when I was forty years old. We saw ourselves simply as Muslims. The word Sufi – or Sufiya, the plural in Arabic – was always traditionally used to describe the saints. But the saints themselves would never say: “I’m a Sufi”. They would say: “I’m a Muslim” or “I’m a believer”. So, it was a title that expressed respect, but it wasn’t a part of our self-definition. So, for me, it makes no sense to say: “Hello, I’m Dr. Latifa, I’m a Sufi.”

What is now called Sufism simply was the normative form of Islam. The norm is taken for granted. You don’t have to label it. Calling it Sufism only started in the nineties. So it started once the demonizing of Islam began, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And now, in the same way that children play doctor-doctor, we are now playing Sufi-Sufi. But all this, “oh life is nice, I can listen to music and smoke my dope”, that simply isn’t what religion is about. It only tries to make it more acceptable to the West.

I readily agree on this. Sufism is often sold as the ‘nice type of Islam’, but in the end, it’s a term that is used by the West to throw a whole bunch of religious sentiments into one big pot. If it’s mystical and Islamic, then it must be Sufism and a bit ‘different’, so it seems. Yet, as I have come to realise by now, mysticism has always been an essential part of general Islam all over the world and, therefore, knows a huge variety of expressions.

These are the critical issues that people need to realize because it’s all about the lens through which we see religion and it stems from the dominance of Protestant Christianity, which is tied up with the history of religion in the West.

Of course, there has been patriarchy in all religions, but show me one religion that has something comparable to the Inquisition. Or show me one thing that is comparable to the witch hunts. In scale, it is mind blowing when you start reading about it. Wouldn’t you say there is something hugely wrong there?

So what’s your answer to that rhetorical question?

Well, what went wrong was the way they wiped out mysticism in Christianity. And once it was wiped out, the scholars became very surprised when they came across mystical aspects in other religions. Because they marginalised many mystical aspects within Christianity, people today can’t understand that those aspects were actually normative to all religions.

The same happens when people think of the way a religion should be structured. In most religions, there simply is no centralized institution. Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, they’re decentred religions. The centre is the individual. So, concepts and words like ‘doctrines’, ‘heresy’, ‘dogma’ all come from Christianity, but then they wanted to apply them to other religions like Islam and say: “Oh, this is the ‘dogma’ of Islam.” Yet decentredness was the natural state of all religions. Yes, you have the Dalai Lama, but he’s only there for the Tibetans. He’s not there for the Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Protestant Christianity is also decentralized. But eventually, every splinter group of Protestants created its own structures and often held on to very ‘single-minded’ approaches to reality. Protestants killed a lot more ‘witches’ than the Catholics did, for example.

And now, vast numbers of Muslims have internalized notions like heresy, doctrine and dogma without wondering: “Is our history the same?”

The export of the Petro-Islam of the Gulf seems essential in all of this. Even though Islam is still a decentred religion in nature, because of the present day geo-politics that part of the Islamic world has become, to say the least, a very dominant power. I don’t think that one could deny that its ideology has widely spread in recent years, and that this ideology contains such a single-minded approach to Islam. But do you think it also holds a true ‘structural power’ within the broader Ummah? Does it really threaten the decentredness of Islam?

Yes. They’ve created the priests since the fifties. Now they will declare Mecca as the Rome of Islam. Perhaps I won’t live to see it anymore, but you will.

I’m reluctant to agree on that one. After all the people I’ve talked to, I feel that those in power won’t be able to hold on to their power like they do now since the dissenting voices are also getting stronger. And not only are their voices getting stronger, they are also becoming a part of the top layers of the ulama.

They won’t be able to extinguish the normative Islam or the dissent of certain intellectuals, but slowly, the space is shrinking and I’m not hopeful at all. This whole region of Southeast Asia will eventually be ‘niqabed’. Their work is done. Their mission was to destroy the expressions of normative Islam and they’ve succeeded.

Of course, in their own minds they don’t see their destruction as something harmful. Quite the contrary, from within their own ideology, they see it as a way of setting things straight.

Sure. They feel that they’re very right, but this is not an ordinary debate of ideas. Where I draw the line is the imposition of a certain lifestyle and way of thinking through brute force. In their case, it’s the brute force of money. Their Islam has become a money-theism instead of a mono-theism.

Let me give you an example of how they gradually ‘Arabized’ our Islam and started to destroy the local normative expressions of our religion. The standard goodbye for people like me and other Pakistanis of about fifty is “Khudahafiz”. Khuda comes from Persian and means ‘God’ in a very general way. It can imply Allah, but not necessarily. Pakistanis below forty, on the other hand, will say Allahafiz. That’s typical Salafi influence and their indoctrination.

So, because of many small things, like how you suddenly say hello and goodbye, I feel like I’m living in an alien place.

As a Western Christian, I don’t easily notice such things, of course. I only see the influence of the Gulf when I pass some mosque that clearly has a different architecture and that is visited by more Salafi-oriented people.

I have my mad theories, you know. One of them is that the changing mosque architecture shows the change in ideology and spiritual outlook. Not only are those Arab-funded mosques completely un-Pakistani, they’re also macho and masculine. The Faisal mosque in Islamabad, which is the biggest mosque in Pakistan, is a good example. It has no curves at all. It has only straight lines with phallic rockets for minarets. You just have to compare it to the old Ottoman mosques in Turkey that have huge beautiful domes. The dome and the minaret were a perfect balance. It’s the feminine and the masculine. And often we forget that perhaps the call for prayer is done from the minaret, but it asks you to go into the feminine part of the mosque to actually pray. So, what we’re seeing now is the disappearance of the feminine elements and all that we’re left with is these jagged lines. You can see the same in the growing use of the Kufic script.

All this Arabizing of our culture is everywhere and it runs very deep.[6]

I do agree that architecture is very important. I had a teacher once who claimed that trees and complex natural objects like them have some mathematical ‘formulas’ behind them, but that those ‘formulas’ are equations that create infinitely irregular forms. He added that today’s city architecture takes away our capacity to deal with such complex and irregular forms and formulas. According to him, it impoverishes our minds when our surroundings only consist of straight lines because all our streets are straight and our buildings are nothing but cubes put on top of each other.

I call such buildings anorexic. They reflect the state of the anima. The feminine is starving in the modern world. It’s dying — as is nature.

We can see the same in interior design. It’s all minimalist, clean, cold, straight lines. It’s often sold as Zen, but it’s not the same. Zen is a state of mind, but this modern style is often simply soulless.

True. Real Zen is about inner peace. In its art, one can, therefore, see many curves, circles and waves . . . But to come back to the ‘Arabisation’ of Pakistan, it might be very visible in the architecture and art, but does that necessarily mean it also has a strong impact on daily life? Does it truly also take away certain ‘feminine’ aspects of society?

Of course. That’s exactly what’s under attack. Mysticism is a female dimension of every religion, while the scriptural is the more masculine. And this is yet another example of how the Christian Cartesian mindset has taken over the Islamic world as well. The scriptural, the literal and the puritan become the norm. Everything else is considered ‘pagan’ – and again, paganism is, of course, a Christian term for what used to be indigenous, natural religions lived and practiced without a structure being imposed on them.

So, my problem is how to get out of that vocabulary and reclaim a different view on religion because there are a lot of Muslims these days who say that several traditional elements aren’t a part of ‘pure’ Islam. Certainly, in the diaspora you can often hear it, because the migrants have been cut off from their culture. But the very reason why Islam took wings and spread so rapidly is because it could adapt itself to different cultures.

If we look at history, we can see that Islam had reached its borders within a hundred years. So, it only took a century for Islam to spread out to Spain, Asia and China. I often joke that that this means that God wanted to say: “Get out of the Middle East as fast as you can!” (Dr. Latifa laughs.)

But seriously, even today, only fifteen per cent of Muslims live in the Middle East. Eighty-five per cent are elsewhere. And if we look at the art and architecture, we can see how it has flourished because of the way it always bonded with culture. If Islam didn’t have that openness and simplicity, we wouldn’t have had the Alhambra or Sultan Ahmet Mosque. They’re so different, but both are Islamic. And this multiplicity of expressions of the same faith is, in fact, the strength and beauty of Islam.

[1] As Dr. Latifa tries to keep a low profile, certainly considering her stance on certain issues, I changed her name per her request.

[2] Throughout the centuries, conflicts between (subgroups of) Sunni and Shia would often surface, but, in spite of what many people think, Sunni and Shia have most often lived peacefully together. As previously mentioned in the explanation on the sharia, the best example thereof is the fact that both Sunni and Shia have always come together for the hajj in Mecca. Because of the geo-politics of the last decades, however, the division has often been rekindled and strengthened to serve other purposes. This can, for example, be seen in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in the doctrinal radicalisation of the Taliban during the 1990s, and in the insurgences in Syria and Iraq in the 2010s.

[3] See p. 35 in the Halal Monk book.

[4] The local cannabis variation.

[5] A dhol is a big barrel-shaped drum. It is a prominent instrument in a lot of Punjabi folk music as well as in contemporary bhangra.

[6] Dr. D. Latifa talks about Pakistan here, but the same phenomenon of ‘Arabisation’ can be witnessed in many parts of the Muslim world from Somalia to Indonesia and certainly within migrant communities as well.

Picture by Mohammed Anwerzada

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.

For seven years, they got their initial training in classical music and Qawwali from their father. When he died they joined Nusrat’s group as a student and learned his ‘tricks of the trade’ for one year, until he died as well in 1997. So when I visited Muazzam in his home in Faisalabad, I first wanted to know how much they’re uncle still influenced their own music.

How ‘present’ is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, when you perform your Qawwals?

Our admiration for Nusrat is enormous and our love for him remains strong. I’m not talking about the ‘normal’ type of love . In Urdu we call that ‘pyar’. But I’m talking about ‘ishq’, a devotional type of love in which you forget yourself.

Nusrat was an incredible teacher. Even more so, he still teaches us. Whatever we need, we get it. Sometimes he comes to us in our dreams, sometimes we’re inspired during live performances. In one way or another we receive help from him. So we feel like he’s always around us.

It makes me think of what Abida Parveen told me. She said she can’t sing if Ali isn’t there. Is that the same for you?

You know, there are certain personalities like the Panjtan Pak (An Urdu word that combines Prophet Mohammad, Ali, Fatimah, Hassan and Hussain) who transcend us all but it depends how you yourself ‘go’ to them. If you love, admire and follow them, you will feel that they’re with you. If not, you won’t feel them. So in the case of Ali, yes, he got the title ‘lion of God’ and whenever you need help and call him, he will help you.

In a sense, to call upon the saints is one of the functions of Qawwali, is it not?

Indeed. Every music has its own worth but what makes Qawwali into Qawwali is the fact that it’s the music which is linked to the Sufi saints. The great saint Moinuddin Chishti, for example, was told by his pir to go to Ajmer to spread Islam to the people living there. He used Qawwali to do so and it is said that he converted nine million people like that.

Is there any saint or poet who is particularly dear to your heart?

There are some songs from Amir Khusrao which I like a lot and I really love to sing parts of the Masnavi. One particular phrase that is very dear to me is for example: “Main to piya se naina mila rahi”, which you could translate as “I’m going to have eye contact with my Lover.” Though whatever I sing, the moment I sing it, it fills my spirit. In Qawwali we often sing a mix of languages. It can go from Urdu to Panjabi to Persian. The audience often doesn’t understand the language, but they can feel the spirit if it’s properly performed. And you can only perform it properly if you are completely ‘involved’ in the words. You have to be devoted to the saint and his messages at the moment you’re singing in order to truly convey the words.

I’ll give you an example of how deeply the words can penatrate one’s soul. One day, Fateh Ali Khan, the father of Nusrat, was singing with Mubarak, my grandfather. All of the sudden he closed his eyes, his face became red and he started shaking like a bird. He then tore off his clothes and left the Qawwali group while the rest played on. He ran for one kilometer at 2 am at night and jumped into a canal. People took him out and noticed his body was still burning hot. They took him home and after one and a half hour he awoke. They asked him what had happened but he said he didn’t know, that he was in a different state of mind. Our father was also present that night. He told us the story.

In the last few decades more and more people have heard of the trance inducing effect of Qawwali music. But these days Pakistan is not often linked to such beautiful art forms. When Pakistan is mentioned in the news, it is often related to terrorism and violent extremism. I have met many Pakistanis who felt very frustrated about this. I guess you, as a traditional Qawwali singer, know this frustration as well.

Absolutely. If Muslims would be terrorists, that would be a huge problem, would it not? If all those hundreds of thousands of people that go to shrines of the great Saints like Data Ganj Bakhsh or Lal Shahbaz Qalandar would all be terrorists, that would be terrifying.

But the Sufis are the people who ‘pleased God’ and God was with them. God asked people to go to the saints before you go to Him. God says that if you want to recognize Him, you have to recognize the Panjtan Pak. This is the real Islam and this is the right message. So if all those people go to the shrines of saints and pray to the prophet and his family who were spreading God’s message, they can’t all be terrorists.

The prophet also said that you cannot convert someone to be a Muslim by force. If you think Islam is wrong, you don’t have to except it. If you think it’s right, you have to. That’s the reality of Islam. The prophet asked for love and peace and the ummah should follow what he asked for. So Islam brings a message of peace. All the terrorism has nothing to do with real Islam. It’s all planned by people who are interested in other things than real religion.

Is Qawwali itself under threat of the fundamentalists and violent extremists? Since many of them hold the opinion that music is haram, their violence might be directed at artists like you as well.

We don’t have a problem yet, but when they would start criticizing what we do, we’ll have a very good answer ready for them. Our answer comes from the hadith. When the prophet (pbuh) migrated to Medina, the girls of Medina made tambourines, came out of their houses and sang songs. Some people asked the prophet whether it wasn’t shirk (a form of worshipping something other than God). The prophet replied: “Keep quiet. They’re doing this because they’re so happy and because they want to make the prophet happy. Their happiness is more important for me than your objection.”

If music would be haram, the prophet should have stopped the girls at that time. The prophet and the saints followed God, so if it would be wrong, they would have gotten rid of it. But, by now, Qawwali is in practice for the last thousand years. It was important before and will have a bright future long after we died.

Does that mean that Qawwali is still alive among the young people in Pakistan? Or is it slowly becoming something ‘old fashioned’ like some other aspects of your traditional culture?

Qawwali doesn’t come from normal people. It stems from the Sufis and the Prophet. The first aspect of Qawwali is the praise of God and the second is love and peace. The younger people nowadays are still listening and they still sense it’s something special. It feels like a miracle to them.

Young people in the West are also very intrigued. Often, during festivals, when we start our sound check, people come closer to listen. They are surprised of what they see. We don’t have a lot of instruments – only tabla and harmonium – but our music intrigues them. So one day in Seattle, when we were performing with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the famous Michael Brook heard us and was so impressed by it that he wanted to do something with it. When he did, the project received a lot of attention and lots of people started to love the music.

Of course, for the younger generation, we’ve also worked with groups like Fun>Da>Mental and People’s Colony Nr. 1. They really appreciate the kind of music that comes out of such collaborations.

Do you plan any other collaborations like that?

I’d love to work with the great Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman. We were already planning to meet him when we were in Chennai but it didn’t work out this first time. Inshallah, in the future it will.

One more person I would love to collaborate with is Madonna. In fact, when Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was sick and in the hospital in London, we heard that Madonna contacted him and said she was interested to work with him. Nusrat wanted to do it. The contract was even signed. But soon after, he died. So perhaps, one day, I could make it come true, ’cause such a fusion would spread the message of the Sufi saints much further.

Rizwan and Muazzam studied Qawwali under their father, who died in 1996, after which they were tutored by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan until he also passed away. They continue the tradition of Nusrat with world wide performences of classical Qawwali although, just like their master, with an openness to modern collaborations. Works The Rizwan and Muazzam Qawwali group have published several CD’s under the Real World Label. Sacrifice to Love is one of their classical albums. People’s Colony 1 is a modern electronica-collaboration with Temple of Sound.

More info on www.rizwanmuazzam.com

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
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Iqbal had an enormous influence in the Islamic thinking of this region and his ideas ultimately led to the creation of the country named Pakistan. His intellectual legacy therefore continues even today in the many domains he wrote about. It should not wonder then that many scholars and academics continue to do extensive research on his elaborate writings and thoughts.

To learn more about Iqbal myself, I spoke with Tahir Hameed Hanoli, the assistant director of the Iqbal Academy in Lahore.

I only had to read a little bit about Pakistan’s history to realize that Iqbal’s influence in Pakistan was and is enormous. How come then that we don’t know much about him in the West? Those with a bit of interest in the Asian subcontinent do know about Jinnah, who was the first president of Pakistan, but seldom do we hear anything about Iqbal.

Jinnah has a specific character of course. He’s the political leader and the founding father of the country. It’s only normal that the founding father of a country becomes discussed much more than others. Iqbal, however, died before Pakistan came about. On top of it, Iqbal’s dominant part of his personality wasn’t as a political figure. He was a thinker and an inspirer. So if Iqbal was translated, it often was in the local languages, or the main languages of the Muslim world, but not so much in English or French.

How deep does his influence in Pakistani society reach? Is it a bit like Rumi, whose poems you can find hanging on the walls of many Turkish living rooms or whose sayings have sometimes become idioms in Turkic and Persian languages?

It’s the same indeed. His words will be on the tip of the tongue of the common man in Pakistan. That’s probably because he always was a poet as well. So, although he is the topic of many academic debates and although it’s not easy to do a full study of Iqbal’s thought, he could reach the heart of the educated elite as well as the uneducated masses.

He was also a thorough political thinker however. Do you think the Pakistan of today resembles the Pakistan Iqbal would have wanted?

Of course his vision of Pakistan was an ideal. And you know very well that an ideal is always within reach though at the same time never within reach. The foundations are certainly totally based on the thoughts of Iqbal. For example, Pakistan was created as a continuation of the Muslim civilization, but, when the country was founded, they also adopted a modern parliamentary state system. That goes back to Iqbal’s political vision. The same happened with his interpretations of sharia and fiqh. Iqbal often used the term ‘ijtihad’ and as such ijtihad has been adopted as a way of dealing with the classical concepts of Islam within the state.

Obviously there are many things that have yet to be done. Yet just like Iqbal is optimistic, we should be optimistic that there will be a time when it will be almost fully realizable. Though, in a way, it’s also a never ending process. One of the major things that Iqbal stresses is innovation and creativity because he always said that Islam and the Qur’an give us the instruction to explore the world, to innovate and to update. This principle applies to every domain of life and we have to do it constantly.

Is there some verse of Iqbal’s poetry that is, personally speaking, very close to your heart?

That’s a difficult question for me, because whenever there is a specific situation, a verse of Iqbal comes to my mind and in that context becomes the one that is closest to my heart. So I should say that Iqbal himself is the closest to my heart.

But I’ll give you one particular sentence that you might find beautiful: “You must live your life in such a way that when the almighty Allah decides your time to die has come, He will repent once you died, because you were in fact a man that didn’t deserved to die.”

A nice thought indeed. It sounds like something Rumi might have said as well.

There is a very deep spiritual and intellectual connection between Iqbal and Rumi. Iqbal himself claims that he was the continuation of Rumi’s work. He saw Rumi as someone that thought the people that the human being is not limited to what we see but has a spiritual foundation that goes far beyond our sight. He saw it as his role to teach this to people and to help them realize that there are different realties which we cannot experience with the five senses.

Nonetheless I’ve heard that Iqbal could also be very critical about Sufism.

For Iqbal there was absolutely no discrepancy between Islam and classical tasawuf. Quite the contrary. But he did attack the type of Sufism that makes you ‘actionless’. He is very critical of those philosophies that say that everything around us is an illusion, that life is but a dream, that our deeds don’t matter and that we can go about just floating around in some mystical experiences. In his eyes, Sufism makes you a man of action because it gives you a target and a destination. And that destination is balance. Balance within yourself and society. And you can’t achieve that balance without action.

Sir Muhammad Iqbal (November 9, 1877 – April 21, 1938), also known as Allama Iqbal, was a philosopher, poet and politician in British India who has greatly inspired and influenced the Pakistan Movement and consequently the ideology of the Pakistani state. He is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature. His most know English book is The reconstruction of religious thought in Islam.

Read more interviews like this in the Halal Monk book.
It’s available both in print and ebook.