Shiraz Janjua

I’m in the middle of writing and researching my article on the Muslim community of Montreal. It’s going well, but just as the wider conversation about modern Islam has become infected with politics (or, rather, politicized), I find that in conversations I’ve had so far, the same issues inevitably come up without my having to ask about them.

I ask, “Why is it important for you to do what you do?” referring to various types of engagement different people have in their expression of faith. But every conversation I’ve had—and seemingly so much of the blogosphere—somehow touches on one of two themes: “Since September 11th…” or “The media is so…”

Can religion exist outside of politics? Does every religious conversation we have need to be a sociopolitical or geopolitical one as well? I stopped reading certain popular blogs and sites because it’s all become a feedback loop, an echo chamber, of the quintessential American religion of talk-politics.

There are volumes of intelligent writing on prominent “young Muslim intellectual” blogs and sites, but I’d love to see some variation, some broaching of actual spiritual matters as opposed to political ones. And I’m not talking about getting some alim [Islamic law scholar] to tell me whether my forehead or the tip of my nose should be first in touching the prayer space below me. I’m talking about inspiration and beauty.

I’ve turned to poetry blogs like Darvish and Abdur Rahman’s Corner because they explore the beauty of human experience through artistic means, not just long, drawn-out diatribes (the kind I’m so fond of writing as well). It’s a necessary part of my spiritual landscape. In fact, instead of making those kind of blogs a “break from” political analysis blogs, they have become the blogs I turn to first, because they are fruits of spiritual nourishment.

It’s not just the political blogs, either, but what they represent, the idea that being Muslim is limited somehow to identity politics in the post-9/11 era. I admit that the political conversation is the “sexy” conversation, and the temptation to throw one’s two cents in is high. It is a necessary conversation, but it can’t be the only conversation we’re having. We need to talk about how to be on a daily basis, because the majority of our daily activities are not political ones—they are human ones.

In one of the featurettes of the Children of Men DVD, philosopher Tzevetan Todorov posited that the major political drives of our time are fear and humiliation: fear on the part of the powerful toward the masses, and humiliation on the part of those masses under the effects of the fearful power of the powerful. I feel like a lot of the current Islamic “renaissance” especially in the West is fueled by a sense of belonging to some collective righteous indignation, of being swept up in the management of cultural humiliation.

As Sami Zubaida so succinctly put it on openDemocracy.net, “Islamic religiosity, under current conditions, almost invariably entails an ideological vision.” Ali Eteraz offered on his community site [link now unavailable], “Ultimately, in a pluralist society, trying to get people to give a shout out to your religion just because it happens to share a vision of a just society with the mainstream discourse, does nothing more than affirm your identity. It is not an act of sovereignty. It is nothing more than empty pride.”

The issues facing the Western Muslim community are tangible. People—policy makers and, just as importantly, ordinary people—do buy into this Orientalist clash of civilizations, “war on terror” business on both sides. It’s incredibly difficult to turn the other cheek, as Jesus said, while striving for social justice, as Muhammad did. One tradition, two radically different prophetic voices. But the ideas of compassion and mercy go hand-in-hand with that of social justice. As always, it’s not a question of either/or, but a question of integrating the two ideas, of striking that balance in our discourse.

That’s difficult to do when you are feeling like a downtrodden and culturally humiliated individual. We have to admit, as Muslims, that these feelings do exist. We also have to admit that the feeling exists as much in radical, militant, suicide-bomber types as it does in basement bloggers and activists and silent-majority mosque-goers.

What’s different is what these different people do about it. But the feeling is the same. That’s why I’ve made it a point to ask people I’ve interviewed about what inspires them. Those sources of inspiration are something we never, ever, hear a thing about. All we hear are, “Well, ever since 9/11, the media has been very…” Hell, I’ll be the first to admit that I invoke 9/11 as a source of urgency in my own life, but it wasn’t the only source, and people were self-reflective about faith before the Towers fell, and will continue to be so after. 9/11 was six years ago. So what informs me or anyone during the 364 days of the year that aren’t September 11?

I want to sit by the road now and again and be appreciative and be inspired and watch the universe in motion. If the feeling of humiliation is the same across the board, then how do we remedy that feeling?

Sometimes, we do need to be critical, discerning, political, active. But we should not forget that sometimes the feeling of fatigue needs to be remedied not by a critical post-colonial analysis of the sources of that fatigue, but with talk of love, of beauty—breathtaking, heartbreaking beauty—and of humanity. Otherwise, we’re just walking manifestos, and our faith is nothing but political sloganeering. What is that sloganeering actually protecting? Because what it protects is that which we ought to draw sustenance from daily, and that which should inform the majority of our blogging or writing or activism—not the other way around.

[Editorial note: This post was imported from a previous blog of mine. It appears now with minor edits and without the original comments.]