Branding the iSlam

The other day, I came across an essay by a user-experience designer called Designing The Experience of Islam. It’s something I’ve been thinking about on and off, myself. Basically, the question it brings up is how Muslims experience the story or essence of being Muslim today, and how that is expressed.Storytelling has always been a powerful means for human beings to capture complex ideas. We encapsulate the meaning of those ideas in parables. Today, there is no more pervasive type of storytelling than marketing.

It’s common knowledge that after the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, al-Qaeda evolved from a distinct organization into a kind of global “brand”, an ideology. Propaganda is intimately linked with mass media, just as contemporary commerce is. What’s going on now in this era of globalization is an exercise in branding. The reality is that the effectiveness of ideological brand marketing directly attacks Islam where it is weakest. What do I mean by that?

What we tell ourselves about Islam

One of the wonderful things we tell ourselves about Islam is that it has no clerical authority. No one is mediating between us and the Divine. We don’t need to entrust our salvation to some other person. Instead, our relationship with the Divine is our own. We are each accountable. We walk into life with a clean slate, and life is ours to make what we will of it.

But there is also a weakness there. The lack of a central authority has hurt Islam in the past few hundred years. It’s about leadership. It’s about a central message. The reality of having local narratives and a self-defined relationship has a flip side, one that ideologues of all stripes understand well. It’s simple business: you identify a market by looking at a problem, asking yourself if that problem is being addressed, and if it isn’t, you have yourself a business opportunity, a potential market, a possible niche.

In an era of information abundance and cultural fragmentation, there are markets for ideology and centralization. The loudmouths have identified the need: a desire to have a clear, concise voice that speaks to (and for) Muslims who are sick and tired of living in corrupt, under-developed countries, and/or are tired of having violence as part of the conversation around Islam. The other need that’s being tapped into is the Islamic idea of a worldwide community, that it’s possible to unify the disparate peoples across the Muslim world under one banner.

The mirage of the global community

What we ultimately have to accept is that the ideal of a unified global Islamic community—the ideal of the ummah—is, in reality, impractical or delusional in today’s historical circumstances. It’s one thing to talk about a unified ummah when it’s the year 630 and there are a couple of thousand adherents. But it’s impractical to imagine that one global, unified community of 1.4 billion people around the globe is possible. Yet this is precisely the myth that ideologues—Muslim, Western, whoever—are pushing. It’s a kind of Utopian, Star Trek-type thinking: in the future, every single “culture” will be completely cohesive and monolithic. Anyone pushing The Utopian Truth™ says, “Hey, we have The Truth™, we embody The Truth™, and follow us and we’ll empower that community of 1.4 billion people.”

There are so many different issues on the table, but it all gets reduced to “clash of civilizations.” And let’s face it: the media isn’t listening to what everyday Muslims have to say, because it’s not sexy enough. Real change and evolution occurs incrementally, and not with the blunt force of headlines. Even 9/11—an event designed to be televised—was only a symptom of changes that happened outside of the media’s eye.

So, now, in the absence of anyone explaining what is going on, we assume that it’s all this wave of Islamic fundamentalism, like the fear among the European powers of a Communist wave overtaking Europe in the wake of the Russian Revolution, or the later Red Scare during the Cold War.

The media is looking for a Muslim to get on a pulpit and use a really, really big microphone. But the only ones who do that are the nutcases. Old media eats that right up. But that older style of broadcast marketing is slowly coming to an end. The new model is built on social networking. It’s about memetic propagation: creating an infectious idea and letting it spread like a virus, instead of using that big microphone. So now people are doing just that: creating great little infectious ideas and letting them spread. It’s a quiet process, though.

Meanwhile, if an ordinary Muslim speaks in an overcrowded, polarized media landscape, does he or she make a sound?

What the consumer wants

There is a market of millions upon millions of Muslims who have grown up in the West, who can practice their faith with a degree of freedom and customization that is unprecedented. We can, quite literally, each practice our own private religion. The market I’m talking about is the market of soul-searching, critical Muslims who want to satisfy these needs:

  1. To approach life with a sense of transcendent wonder
  2. To live a meaningful, ethical life
  3. To take pride in the towering accomplishments of Islamic culture, because it’s part of our cultural DNA
  4. To take pride in the towering accomplishments of Euro-American culture, because we live here, grew up here, and this culture’s symbols are our cultural mother tongue
  5. To step outside the polarizing cultural “debates” about “Islam” and “the West”
  6. To step outside the polarizing cultural “debates” about Faith and Reason
  7. To be critical of unethical and belligerent behavior perpetrated by cultural, political, religious, or artistic leaders
  8. To be nice to other people and to ourselves
  9. To be intellectually dynamic
  10. To laugh, love, and be human

Heck, with a few minor changes, I think that list pretty much corresponds to everyone I ever met in my life who had/has a creative, artistic, philosophical, or intellectual spirit. And by no means do I think that’s any kind of “ideal.” It’s just the way some people approach life, myself included.

Marketing the Western Muslim identity

As artists know, being a successful artist requires not just artistic genius, but marketing know-how. You can’t have an effect on culture if nobody sees your work. And religion is an art as well, one that is being marketed in a very clumsy way.

There’s a whole subgenre of Islam-related books about formerly oppressed Muslim women who are now empowered to stand up in the swirling chaos of Islam today and have the courage to critique Islam (to a “Western” audience). There’s no hotter commodity in our hijab-obsessed culture that the uncovered Muslim woman. “Wow, she’s converted to modernism! Yay! Gosh, she’s courageous!”

But it’s all about branding, right? There’s a market. In the case of the publishing world, that’s not even me being metaphorical. There is an actual market, hard numbers, circulation figures, bestseller lists—Oprah, for crying out loud! Oprah! Meanwhile, the more interesting intellectuals and scholars, both female and male (I myself know only a few of them), are not nearly as well publicized.

The ridiculous thing is that no one in our culture wants to listen to a woman who has a piece of fabric over her hair. Who’s being exclusionary now? Again, everything is reduced to an either/or choice: you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists; you’re secular or you’re religious. We desperately need to get beyond these pointless divisions and start working toward a more inclusive public conversation.

A few years ago, several Muslim activists in North America tried to create a new product called Progressive Islam. It started out as the Progressive Muslim Union, which apparently died a horrible death, according to activists who know all about this stuff. But the idea of a lowercase-p progressive movement within Islam is fabulous, and I’m wholeheartedly behind it. Heck, I am it, I’m part of it, even though I do agree with the idea that to call Islam “progressive” is redundant. But in the Age of Persuasion, we have to be aware of positioning.

“I’m the cool, hoody-wearing hipster doofus computer that you would love to use, but that old business stiff over there, oh boy, he so whack, yo. He is so square, isn’t he? Oh, what a nerd—he wears glasses! And what is with the suit? Have you heard of What Not To Wear?”

Right now, the whole “progressive” approach is positioning itself as that doofus, painting stodgy, old, institutional religion as the Windows PC. Meanwhile, the radicals are hackers and phone phreaks and warez-site operators, crashing government servers and seducing us with pirated copies of Spider-Man 3. I’m reminded of the hacker rebels of The Matrix, and how real-life militants and radicals see themselves in such reductive, embattled, heroic light. Storytelling, right?

Commodity versus communion

If it sounds like I’m calling for the commercialization of religion, I certainly am not. But I can see the dangers of getting carried away with the metaphor. It turns the transcendent experience of faith, of sitting quietly, of experiencing the breath of life, of simple acts of kindness, into a commodity.

But that’s exactly the problem—religion today often is a commodity, not just in the sense of cents. It went from being about ideas to being about identity and ideology. It’s about those clichéd “hearts and minds.” Most people need to have a readily digestible brand. It’s why the more mystical approaches to monotheism (Gnosticism in Christianity, Sufism in Islam, Kabbalah in Judaism) never became institutional norms. They are simply too subtle and too complex to be put into a box with a sexy logo. Ideally, we would like to think that all approaches to faith are subtle and complex. But subtle and complex are the Unix of religion. People don’t use Unix. They use Windows. Windows crashes.

We acknowledge that prophets and messengers like Muhammad were revolutionary leaders, but also that they had a smaller audience to address. Charismatic leadership can exploit big media broadcasting. That old model of broadcasting is predicated on selling dramatic acts of revolution rather than subtle acts of reform.

Here I’m borrowing the term “reform” from leftist/activist vocabulary, not that conversation of an “Islamic reform.” Not that I don’t think Islam (the culture? the religion? the people?) doesn’t have its work cut out for it. If Islam emerged from a society wracked by in-fighting, tribalism, and social inequity, and if Islam was the response to those conditions, it certainly worked in its time but it’s not working in ours. We have allowed it to fail because we haven’t lived up to its ideals.

Oh, I can go on and on for hours and hours about how Western colonialism is at the root of the world’s problems today, but that conversation has been had. We understand that rationale. It’s correct, but it’s not enough. The needs of the market remain.

There are many, many people working to resolve the different wars around the world. Those who are trying sincerely have my utmost admiration. My own sphere of influence will be different from theirs. As much as I talk about these lofty ideals, I recognize that I’m no righteous crusader. I also recognize that I do have a responsibility as a human being to do what I am capable of doing, whatever that may be, and it’s something that is evolving slowly over the course of my life.

What brand am I? I don’t know. I know you want me to tell you, but I wish I knew myself. When it comes to my own religious brand, I’m pretty much “no logo.” Many of the people I admire seem uncomfortable explaining exactly where on the spectrum they fit in. I understand that impulse to shy away from naming this thing inside me.

I also realize that there is plenty of paradox in what I’m writing in this post. That’s fine. Unlike the ideologues and their seductive certainty, I can admit that I don’t have it all figured out yet. But I will let a recent poem by Abdur Rahman do some of the talking:

“The Maker of All Cloth”

If this world is a marketplace,
then take care
when you enter
the spirit’s bazaar,

for though you will find
wares both colourful and exotic,
bright colour and foreign fragrance
are not guarantees of authenticity.

My friend, you must fashion
the cloth you buy there
into Love-garments
of your own design.

Many will offer to help you
and claim to work for naught,
but be on your guard, O beloved soul,
lest their cloth becomes a straightjacket to trap you.

But be not downcast,
for tailors of goodness and skill,
of honest blood and bone,
exist in all places.

And, beyond them
stands the Maker of All Cloth,
who will fashion all your longings
into never-ending brocades of Love.