* Department of Sociology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Loving America and Longingfor Home: Isma’il al-Faruqi
and the Emergence of the MuslimDiaspora in North America
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi*
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I weave the experience of an emerging community of Muslimdiaspora around a biographical narrative of the Muslim activist and scholarIsma’il al-Faruqi. Through this narrative, I illustrate that the diasporicexperience begins in the place of origin and it does not inevitably leadtoward a perpetual hybridization. The latter point is particularly significantbecause notions of diaspora and hybridity are conceptually linked and areoften understood as a unidirectional cutting and mixing between the Westand the East, or between the modern and the traditional. Al-Faruqi’sexperience shows that, in a Fanonian sense of colonialism, diasporicexperience conveys living as a “stranger”, at and away from home.
The postcolonial condition has made it possible for ethnically diversecommunities of Muslims to reside in the West, but maintain strongconnections with their place of origin. Adopting the allegory of the Prophet’smigration or hijra, al-Faruqi constructed a fantastic notion of the ummahand a normative homo islamicus subject. Although he was profoundlyinfluenced by the diversity of the Muslim Student Associations’constituency, al-Faruqi encouraged Muslims to transcend their differencesand sought to conceive a discursively homogenous ummah. Ultimately,however, his project failed because it did not correspond to real lifeexperiences of Muslims of the West. Historically, Muslim communities havenegotiated the boundaries of Muslimhood and the social responsibilities itentails, both in their homelands and in their new home in the West – a newhome that increasingly becomes hostile to their presence, and therebyfurther complicates their triangular diaspora/host society/homelandrelationship.
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INTRODUCTION
Each generation of immigrants or diasporic communities generate their own“identity entrepreneurs” (Lal, 1997), those who situate themselves in the pos-ition of constructing and disseminating new forms of identity, who take it uponthemselves to define and give meaning to the experience of living away fromhome. For a large number of American Muslim immigrants, Isma’il al-Faruqisymbolized how an emerging Muslim diaspora community’s attempt to constructa Muslimhood which remains in perpetual tension between displacement andsettlement, between rupture and continuity. Through his biographical narrative,I shall argue that al-Faruqi’s experience of displacement and his “Islamization”project neither represented an “intentional hybridity”, nor led to the emergenceof an “organic hybridity” (Werbner and Modood, 1997). That is to say thathe neither intended to intentionally disrupt the sense of order and continuityin Muslims communities (à la Salman Rushdie), nor did he integrate “uncon-sciously” new elements of culture and language of everyday life experiencesinto his new discourse of Muslimhood. He navigated between the two withoutever belonging to either tendency.
For communities of Muslim immigrants, the question of assimilation, or theirlack of, has been entangled, on the one hand, with the perceived incommen-surability of imagined or actual “Islamic ways of life” with Western culturalnorms and social order (Esposito and Haddad, 1998), and on the other hand,with questions about their loyalty and commitment to their new home (Pipes,1990, 2002). This predicament became more central and controversial inMuslim communities of the West particularly after the collapse of the SovietUnion and the emergence of the “War on Terror” with its antagonistic civiliza-tional overtones.
Not only does the Muslims’ presence in the West disturb the aesthetic sensi-bilities of the European and American social landscape, their religious practicescall into question foundational premises of secular liberalism in their host soci-eties. In France, for example, Dominique Schnapper (1991) put it bluntly thatsince Muslims’ social praxis is not informed by the principle of distinctionbetween the private and public, Islam poses a dilemma with regard to the “Frenchnational tradition”. “Koranic rules concerning individual rights”, she argued,“not only contradict French common law but are also in conflict with socialcustoms and dominant values.” She stressed that limits ought to be imposed onthe “principle of respect for particularlisms in the national context” (Schnapper,1991: 360-361). The French experience points to a more general conceptual aswell as practical issue of how the boundaries of the particular is negotiated andhow it is situated in a national/global frame (Wayland, 1997).
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The Rushdie Affair of 1986 brought to the surface the predicament of Muslimimmigrants more than any event in recent history. While the Affair becamesynonymous with Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa (religious edict) calling forRushdie’s death, nevertheless, and more importantly, it was a dramatic manifes-tation of the cultural politics of British Muslims. During riots and rallies in Bradfordand Birmingham, Salman Rushdie’s “cultural translation” (Bhabha, 1991) becamethe target of the wrath of émigrés whose cultures were supposedly translated inhis book.1
The Rushdie Affair epitomized what Edward Said had described as thecontradiction between “plurality of terrains, multiple experiences and differentconstituencies” (Said, 1986: 228) versus commitment to “a fundamental humanand intellectual obligation” to the freedom of expression (Said, 1984: 30). Onemight plausibly argue that this contradiction could have been easily avoided.There should be enough room for intellectual obligations of any sort in a pluralterrain – room for both Salman Rushdie and his Muslim critics (Prakash, 1992).But as James Clifford (1988) once wrote, “the privilege of standing above cul-tural particularism, of appealing to the universalist power that speaks forhumanity, for universal experience of love, work, death, etc., is a privilegeinvented by totalizing Western liberalism” (1988: 263).
Stuart Hall (1992) and Homi Bhabha (1991) located the émigré experience in theWest as suspended between two totalizing positions: religious/ethnic absolutistsand the liberal universalists. Neither, according to Bhabha (1991), “represent thevalues of the multiracial society that we [?] identify with, either as political idealor as a social reality” (1991: 10). The Rushdie Affair prompted British liberalsto defend the ideals of integration, and to warn against the transgressions offundamentalism. They asked Muslims not to isolate themselves in the host soci-ety, and invited them to “integrate” into British society “properly” without“abandoning their faith” (Asad, 1990).
Muslim immigrants’ experience in the United States is historically and politicallydistinct from Europe, particularly in the context of the American assimilationistideology of the “melting pot”. Despite these differences, Muslim immigrantshave faced the same institutional barriers and cultural conflicts in the UnitedStates. For example, John Esposito and Yvonne Haddad (1998) have organizedtheir recent collected volume around the central question: “Will [the recentimmigrants] remain Muslims in America or become American?” In the intro-duction of the book, Esposito raised the following pointed questions:
Can Muslims become part and parcel of a pluralistic American society withoutsacrificing or losing their identity?...The primary question facing Muslims inAmerica is whether or not they can live Muslim lives in a non-Muslim
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territory...Especially for immigrants raised in Muslim-majority countries, this isa particularly vexing question...They continue to differ, debating questionssuch as whether they should vote, whether they are bound by Islamic (divine)or secular (man-made) laws, and whether they should participate with non-Muslim neighbours in community life and fully accept and defend a non-Muslimhomeland (Esposito and Haddad, 1998: 3-7).
Esposito’s questions point to several problems pertaining to Muslim commu-nities in North America: (1) do Muslims want to “become part and parcel of apluralistic American society?” (2) if so, what parts of their identities would theyneed to reconsider and what kinds of identities would they need to re-articulate?(3) are Muslims in America coming from societies in which they are bound intheir civic and political life by Islamic laws? If so, are they unfamiliar withsecular (“man-made”) laws? (4) does participation in community life and corpor-ate politics undermine their “Muslimhood”?
Esposito and Haddad, and many of the contributors to their books (Esposito andHaddad, 1998; Haddad, 1991) base their conception of Muslims’ experience inNorth America on an assimilationist national ideology. They address immigrants’experience of loss and nostalgia, “but only en route”, to borrow from JamesClifford (1997), “to a whole new home in a new place” (1997: 250). The advo-cates of this assimilationist approach, on the one hand, reduce Muslims’ lifeexperience prior to their migration to their religious praxis, and therebyproblematize the processes of their integration into a “secular” society. And, onthe other hand, they neglect the dual orientation of diaspora communities,(Werbner, 2000a, 2000b), a common feature of postcolonial immigration inwhich transnational bonds and alliances persist through global transportationand communication networks.2 As Pnina Werbner argued, while diaspora commu-nities fight for citizenship rights and inclusion in the host society, they “continueto foster transnational relations and to lie with a sense of displacement andof loyalty to other places and groups beyond the place of settlement” (2000a: 5).In contrast to this postcolonial diasporic notion of migration, assimilationistapproaches “are designed to integrate immigrants, not people of diasporas”(Clifford, 1997: 250).
Invoking the language of diaspora carries different kinds of political, cultural,and historical currencies, the most important of which is identification with apoint of origin. Clifford (1997) puts it nicely: “Transnational connections breakthe binary relation of ‘minority’ communities with ‘majority’ societies – a depend-ency that structures projects of both assimilation and resistance” (1997: 255).In the case of Muslims, however, this identification with a point of origin goesbeyond the “homeland”, or any other constitutive myths of homeland and
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return. Rather, in contrast to “place-centred” conceptions of diaspora (Safran,1991), in the case of Muslim diaspora the idea of “return” (to the roots) refersto a state of being in which the attachment to a place becomes only incidental.
Indeed, one of the main predicaments of Muslim diaspora communities in theWest has been the difficulty of navigating between the imagined global space ofthe ummah with local life experiences of Muslims both in the West and in theirhomelands. This duality is not simply a matter of traditional Muslims facing thechallenges of the modern world. Rather, these dualities have been made possibleby certain disjunctures compellingly argued by Arjun Appadurai (1996) as therelationship between five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed“(a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and(e) ideoscapes” (1996: 33).
Appadurai’s -scapes model allows us to understand Muslims’ diasporic experi-ences not within the immigration/assimilation paradigm, but rather through thedialectics of rupture and continuity within the context of a flowing cultural andpolitical space. That is to say that Muslims in North America do not necessarilyrepresent a community of peoples who have migrated to the West from a “trad-itional” society, with “traditional” commitments to non-hybrid identities. Thesimple assertion that diasporic displacement generates hybridity is often mis-leading and historically inaccurate. Rather, as I shall illustrate through a bio-graphical narrative of Isma’il al-Faruqi, the diasporic experience of continuityand rupture neither begins away from home nor does it inevitably generate orperpetuate hybridity.
ISMA’IL AL-FARUQI: THE ACTIVIST SCHOLAR
On 27 May 1986, Isma’il al-Faruqi and his wife Lamya’ were brutally murderedin their Wyncote, Pennsylvania home. According to the police report, an uniden-tified intruder broke into their home at 2:30 am and stabbed Professor al-Faruqi,his wife, and their daughter with a 15-inch knife. Although the Federal Bureauof Investigation (FBI) initially suspected that the murders were politically moti-vated, only 48 hours later they halted their investigation arguing that the incidentwas a burglary gone awry.3 In order to politicize the murders, one of the mostprolific members of al-Faruqi’s brainchild International Institute of IslamicThought (IIIT), Louay Safi, directly pointed to two Jewish groups, the JewishDefence League and the Jewish Defence Organization, as the prime suspects.
More than 4,000 people attended al-Faruqi’s funeral organized by the IslamicSociety of North America (ISNA) and held at the Masjid Muhammad in West
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Philadelphia. In a memorial service in Washington, DC, prominent scholars andpoliticians, such as Jesse Jackson and Clovis Maksoud, the UN observer fromthe League of Arab States, paid tribute to the family for their “honourable questto restore cooperation and peace to a divided world” and “their commitment toestablish a foundation for a religious, ethnic and cultural renaissance duringtheir lifetime” (Kashif, 1986: 2). The assassination of the al-Faruqis promptedthe US Congress to hold its first hearing on terrorism waged against Muslimsand Arab-Americans.
Gutbi Mehdi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, remarked,al-Faruqi’s death was “a landmark in the progress of the Islamic da’wa [calling]in this country. Now people are taking us seriously” (Mehdi, 1987). Regardlessof how and why he was murdered, his peers and followers immediatelyelevated him to a martyr of a cause: Muslims’ da’wa in the West. Al-Faruqiwould be remembered for his leading role in the emerging movement of theMuslim diaspora in North America.
Along with two other Muslim scholars in America, the Pakistani philosopherand theologian Fazlur Rahman and the Iranian mystic philosopher and theologianSeyyed Hossein Nasr, al-Faruqi was instrumental in giving scholarly significanceto Muslim scholars’ study of Islam, which hitherto was the exclusive provinceof the “disinterested” and “objective” Orientalist scholars. But among these three,al-Faruqi was distinct in his quest for turning a scholarly agenda into an institu-tional mission for da’wa. Much of his efforts were concentrated on Muslimstudents coming to the United States for higher education. He believed thatliving as a minority in the West afforded the best opportunity for these studentsto realize that they are a part of global community of Muslims (the ummah).This was a place in which they could transcend their ethnic and national loyal-ties for the sake of a universal commitment to Muslimhood. His vision was to alarge extent autobiographical, for he was a Palestinian refugee who discoveredthe world of Islam in the West.
Born to affluent Palestinian parents in 1921 in Jaffa during the British Mandate,al-Faruqi was exposed to French and English cultures and languages early in hislife. He received his elementary education at the mosque school, and laterattended College des Frères, a French Catholic school in Palestine. He earned abachelor’s degree in philosophy at age 20 from the American University in Beirut.In 1945, he was appointed the governor of the province of Galilee in Palestine.However, with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, his career ingovernment came to an abrupt end.
Al-Faruqi migrated to the United States to pursue a life in academia. He attendedIndiana University and after completing his master’s degree he went to Harvard
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for a second master’s degree. In 1952, he received his doctorate in Philosophyfrom the University of Indiana. His dissertation, On Justifying the Good: Meta-physics and Epistemology of Value (1952) was deeply influenced by the phe-nomenology of Max Scheler (1874-1928), particularly the latter’s notion ofaxiological intuitionism. Al-Faruqi argued that Scheler’s axiological intuitionismprivileged feeling as knowing, thus recognizing the logic of the heart as an apriori emotional intuition of value. Such recognition could justify carving out aconceptual as well as practical space for the emergence of a critique of post-Enlightenment Reason from the standpoint of a non-Western philosopher.4
Al-Faruqi’s studies in the United States stimulated in him a new appreciation ofIslam, to which he responded by deciding to go to Cairo where he studiedIslamic theology at al-Azhar from 1954 to 1958.5 His al-Azhar years supplantedhis earlier interest in phenomenology. He was influenced by revivalist ideasof early Muslim reformers who emphasized the Islamic roots of all modernsciences and rationality.
In 1958, al-Faruqi was offered a position as a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty ofDivinity at McGill University in Canada. During his two-year tenure at McGillhe studied Christian theology and Judaism, and became acquainted withthe famous Pakistani Muslim philosopher Fazlur Rahman. During these years,al-Faruqi was preoccupied with his anti-Zionist Arab identity. Rahman reminiscedin 1986 that al-Faruqi’s blunt anti-Zionism and his refusal to play the detachedscholar “frightened” his McGill colleagues. Although he was soft-spoken withunfailing smiles, at McGill he was considered to be, in Rahman’s words, “anangry young Muslim Palestinian”.
In order to challenge al-Faruqi’s Arabo-centric views of Islam, and to broadenhis scope of understanding the ummah (the global community of Muslims), in1961, Rahman arranged a two-year appointment for him in Pakistan at the Cen-tral Institute of Islamic Research. Rahman intended to expose al-Faruqi to thecultural diversity of Muslims and their contributions to Islam. “Except”, Rahman(1986) later recalled, “it was his Arabism which drew a great deal of fire bothinside and outside the Institute, as well as his academic preference for Cairo”(1986: 42).
AL-FARUQI: FROM ARABISM TO ISLAMISM
In 1963, after returning to the United States, he was hired as a Visiting Profes-sor at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Between 1964 and 1968,al-Faruqi established himself as an Associate Professor at the Department of
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Religion at Syracuse University, where he initiated its programme in IslamicStudies. In 1968, he accepted a position at Temple University as a Professor ofReligion, where he also founded the Islamic Studies Programme. He held thatposition until his death in 1986.
Much of al-Faruqi’s early thought is associated with what he called urubah(Arabism). In his 1962 book, On Arabism: Urubah and Religion, he argued thaturubah comprises the core identity and set of values which embrace all Mus-lims, a single community of believers (ummah). Al-Faruqi formulated the notionof urubah in contradistinction to two other hegemonic ideologies: Arab national-ism and non-Arab Islamic revivalism. Adopting an overtly essentialist position,he argued that more than merely the language of the Qur’an, Arabic providedthe only possible linguistic structure within which the Islamic conception of theworld could be apprehended. Therefore, he asserted that urubah captured thecore of Muslim consciousness, its values and faith – it was inseparable from theidentity of all Muslims (al-Faruqi, 1962: 2-30).
He also maintained that urubah was the only context within which the non-Muslim Arabs countries could integrate into their larger societies. Even non-Muslim Arabs, according to al-Faruqi, could identify with urubah expressed inthe Qur’an. In effect, urubah left non-Muslim Arabs and non-Arab Muslims atthe mercy of combined linguistic and religious essentialisms. Any other form ofconsciousness and identity was a distortion created by colonial penetration(al-Faruqi, 1962: 211). As John Esposito observed:
Though few would question Arab influence on non-Arab Muslim faith andculture or Arab Muslim influence on non-Muslim Arabs, the implication thatthey both find their ultimate expression and fulfilment in al-Faruqi’s interpretationof Arabism might be regarded by some as an attempt to establish the hegemonyof Arab Islam or, more precisely, Arab Muslim culture (1991: 67).
Both Arab nationalists and non-Arab Muslim intellectuals shunned al-Faruqi’sagenda to bring non-Arab Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs together throughurubah. While many Muslim intellectuals such as Fazlur Rahman agreed withal-Faruqi’s assertion that the Qur’an could not achieve the same eloquence andexpressiveness in any other languages except Arabic, they were critical ofal-Faruqi’s blatant Arab chauvinism. Al-Faruqi’s sojourn in Pakistan did little toalter his doctrine of urubah.
Interestingly, it was in the United States several years later that he began toquestion the foundations of his earlier position. In 1968, for the first time heencountered members of the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) at Temple
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University. The convergence of Muslim students from diverse cultural back-grounds dramatically swayed his perception of Arab versus Islamic identity. Inthe spring of 1968, while a patient at the Johns Hopkins Ophthalmology Centre,al-Faruqi confided in one of the active members of the MSA, Ilyas Ba-Yunus,“Until a few months ago, I was a Palestinian, an Arab, and a Muslim. Now I ama Muslim who happens to be an Arab from Palestine” (Ba-Yunus, 1988: 14).
In his narrative of his own intellectual development, al-Faruqi often shared withhis close associates the significance of this moment of transformation. He movedfrom his initial desire to carve out a legitimate conceptual location in the West, toa notion of Muslim identity constituted in a bifurcated system of classificationsbetween the West and Islam. In response to a colleague’s inquiry about his“conversion” to Islam, al-Faruqi replied:
There was a time in my life […] when all I cared about was proving to myselfthat I could win my physical and intellectual existence from the West, that Icould succeed as a man of the West. But, when I won it, it became meaningless.I asked myself: “Who am I? A Palestinian? A philosopher? A liberal humanist?”My answer was, “I am a Muslim” (cited in Quraishi, 1986: 24).
Although al-Faruqi raised questions which pointed to the diversity of his lifeexperiences, in his response he eschewed the incorporation of that diversity intohis notion of Muslimhood. He depicted the different stages of his intellectualdevelopment and identity formation as emerging successive totalities, ratherthan incessant processes hybridization. That is to say that for al-Faruqi, hecould either be an Arab who happened to be a Muslim or a Muslim whohappened to be an Arab, either a liberal humanist or a Muslim. He spoke ofhis predicament from the standpoint of the internal development of hisconsciousness rather than a historically specific and culturally diverse trans-national experience.
Al-Faruqi remained oblivious toward the diasporic contingencies of these iden-tity questions and desired to transcend the location from which these they werearisen. He lived in diaspora, but refused to “disaporize”, for the lack of a betterword, his identity. I borrowed this awkward concept from Boyarins’ accountof Rabbi Sa’adya which offers striking resemblance with al-Faruqi’s strugglewith multiple identities.
“Diasporized”, that is disaggregated, identity allows the early medieval scholarRabbi Sa’adya to be an Egyptian Arab who happens to be Jewish and also aJew who happens to be an Egyptian Arab. Both of these contradictorypropositions must be held together (Boyarin and Boyarin, 1993: 721).
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In contrast to this “disaggregated” identity, al-Faruqi considered his transform-ations to be the result of competing aggregated identities. For him, identity andthe consciousness of one’s self was the result of the replacement of one totalitywith another. He intended to “protect” the integrity of his convictions, but failedto realize that “cultures are not preserved by being protected from ‘mixing’ butprobably can only exist as a product of such mixing” (Boyarin and Boyarin,1993: 721). In its atemporality, therefore, he developed his Muslimhood as amirror image of his conception of urubah. He shifted from one to the otherwithout acknowledging their contingencies or how either could emerge outsidea diasporic location.
AL-FARUQI AND THE MUSLIM STUDENTS’ ASSOCIATION
Established in 1963 on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, the MSAhas been the most successful Muslim immigrants association in America.Although predominantly comprised of Arab students, MSA was influential inestablishing itself as the premier organization of Muslims in America, “regard-less of their ethnicity”.6 The growth of the MSA, especially after the mid-1970soil boom, was exceptional. By 1983, the MSA had already established 310student chapters with more than 45,000 members (Arabia: The Islamic WorldReview, May 1983: 63).
Al-Faruqi became one of the MSA’s most efficacious advocates and played amajor role in the realization of its stated mission as the organization for “pre-venting the disintegration of Muslims in this country”. Through his involvementin the MSA, al-Faruqi met ‘AbdulHamid Ahmad AbuSulayman, a Saudi studentof political science with whom he began a long-term cooperation. His connec-tion with AbuSulayman was a turning point in his career; it transformed hisindividual search for Muslimhood into an institutional effort which resulted firstin the formation of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS, estab-lished 1971), and later to the establishment of the IIIT in 1981.
Whereas earlier al-Faruqi’s concern was mainly “changing things through hisindividual scholarship and by participating in ecumenical dialogue”,7 as a found-ing member and the first president of AMSS (1971-1976) he embarked on anew institutional activism. Al-Faruqi’s institutional engagement emerged fromhis rejuvenated interest in Islam generated through his encounter with the MSA.More importantly, AbuSulayman’s ability to raise funds from patrons in SaudiArabia, and later Pakistan and Malaysia, made this new institutionalism finan-cially possible.
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Retracting his idea of urubah, al-Faruqi intended to lay the foundation for auniversal, homogenous identity in the context of which the diverse global com-munity of Muslims could be unified. Accordingly, he vehemently opposed whathe considered to be sectarian activities of the MSA. In a keynote speech to theAnnual Convention of the Federation of Islamic Associations (FIA), he calledfor the “confluence of Muslims from all over the world into a new body whichtranscended the barriers of nationalism and ethnocentrism” (1969: 2). He chastisedthe establishment of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) and MalaysianIslamic Study Group (MISG), both of which emerged from the rank and file ofthe MSA. “In their separate activities”, as Tariq Quraishi (1986) remarked, “andthe assertion of their identities, [al-Faruqi] saw the death of an idea. [...] MSA,to him, was more than a body, it was the spirit of the Muslims” (1986: 25).
Although al-Faruqi was profoundly influenced by the MSA, he could nevercomprehend its cultural diversity and historical specificity. He believed that theMSA could afford the students an institutional context within which they couldtranscend their cultures and history and construct a universal homogeneousMuslimhood. Neither was he attentive to the cultural and historical contingen-cies of the MSA, nor was he mindful of MSA’s emerging fundamental demo-graphic changes. Although the MSA was conceived as a student organization,from the very beginning non-students joined the MSA. While at its inceptiononly 1 per cent of Muslim students remained in North America after obtainingtheir degrees (Lovell, 1992: 71), the expansion of professional associations inthe late 1970s and 1980s indicated the rapid growth in the number of peoplewho stayed in the United States after their schooling. By 1983, the number oflocal community groups affiliated with the organization was nearly as great asthe campus chapters. “Such a diversity”, as Larry Poston (1991) observed,“became increasingly difficult to manage and the very name ‘Muslim StudentAssociation’ became a misnomer” (1991: 132). The growing number of non-student members of the MSA, the establishment of several other Muslim pro-fessional associations, most notably the AMSS, American Muslim Scientistsand Engineers (AMSE), and Islamic Medical Association (IMA) demanded neworganizational forms and a reconsideration of its original platform.
The MSA devoted its entire 1976 Annual Meeting to address the growing disparitybetween its mission statement and the actual composition of its membership.After the convention, in February 1977, several Muslim associations (MSA,AMSE, IMA, and AMSS) formed a joint task force to re-evaluate the institutionalforms and the objectives of the emerging Muslim community in North America.The task force recommended the establishment of the Islamic Society of NorthAmerica (ISNA), a plan which was finally approved in 1981 by the generalassemblies of the affiliated organizations (Ahmed, 1991).
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AL-FARUQI AND THE ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE PROJECT
Although al-Faruqi supported the establishment of ISNA, he maintained his prac-tical distance from its organizational and logistical needs. For him, organizationssuch as ISNA were too closely involved in the everyday concerns of Muslimcommunities. That type of involvement could disturb his ambition of articulat-ing a universal conception of Muslimhood. In 1981, the same year that ISNAwas founded, al-Faruqi embarked on a new institutional form of the ongoingdiasporic project called the “Islamization of knowledge”. The idea of the Islam-ization of knowledge was initially introduced by al-Faruqi in the Second AnnualConference of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS) in 1972. Inhis presidential address he observed:
As social scientists, we have to look back at our training and reshape it in thelight of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. This is how our forefathers made their ownoriginal contributions to the study of history, law and culture. The Westborrowed their heritage and put it in a secular mold [sic]. Is it asking for toomuch that we take this knowledge and Islamize it? (al-Faruqi, 1972).
The central principle of this project was similar to that of early salafiyyah move-ment.8 They believed in the Islamic roots of the Enlightenment and that theEuropeans borrowed the basic principles of modern scientific knowledge fromMuslims and now Muslims needed to reclaim it. Accordingly, in order to re-appropriate the scientific knowledge, al-Faruqi proposed a “de-alienization” move,characteristic of most Islamic modernist movements. However, unlike the earliermovements, al-Faruqi coupled the “de-alienization” with an epistemologicalcritique of Western science. He argued that Muslims will not “reclaim” thepast glory of Islam merely by learning new sciences and acquiring moderntechnology from the West. Rather, Muslims needed to scrutinize the metaphysicalpresuppositions upon which modern sciences were constructed (al-Faruqi andAbu-Sulayman, 1989). Al-Faruqi considered Muslim students in the West to bethe ideal agents for the realization of this project. They were exposed to thelatest scientific and technological achievements, while at the same time, they wereculturally inclined to accept an Islamic critique of its philosophical foundations.
Following al-Faruqi’s lead, both MSA and AMSS decided to choose Islamizationas the theme of their conventions in 1975 and 1976. In August 1975 and April1976, the AMSS published the proceedings of the convention in two volumesunder the title From Muslim to Islamic. The title of the proceedings captured theAMSS’s new epistemological critique of earlier Muslim reformers’ uncritical re-appropriation of what they called “Western knowledges”. Gaafar Sheikh Idris, afounding member of the AMSS and MSA, addressed both conventions and laidout the general lines of what he called “The Process of Islamization”. According
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to Idris, knowledge does not become Islamic merely because it is acquired by aMuslim – Islamization requires a radical epistemological shift. However, in histhesis, what this shift entails remained unexplored. Although in his call for Islam-ization, Idris emphasized the importance of an organized effort for the realizationof this process, until the establishment of the IIIT, these calls remained at anabstract and general level.
In 1981, al-Faruqi and 30 of his close associates established the IIIT in Herndon,Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. From the beginning, the Governments ofPakistan and Malaysia showed enthusiasm for the Project of Islamization ofKnowledge and patrons from Saudi Arabia demonstrated willingness to financethe endeavour. Hundreds of Muslims intellectuals participated in the first inter-national conference of the IIIT held in Islamabad, Pakistan in 1982.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 and its subsequent influence among young Mus-lims around the world gave a sense of urgency to the establishment of an organ-ization that could offer competing Muslim discourses of modernity. With thesupport of “petro-Islam”, the IIIT sponsored numerous conferences aroundthe world and published hundreds of monographs and journal articles, encour-aging the new generation of Muslims to engage with the Islamization of virtuallyevery academic discipline. The Islamization project began as an endeavour toconstruct a disciplined, normative Muslim, unaffected by the degenerate West.But al-Faruqi and other founders of the project expanded the objectives of theproject as the Westerners’ only hope for redemption.9
The new organization was neither a political response – in terms of participationin corporate politics or in any militant form of political activism – nor was it anattempt to engage Muslims in the cultural politics of the West. Rather, from itsinception, the project embarked on a contradictory agenda. On the one hand,al-Faruqi and other proponents of the Islamization project intended to articulatean Islamic response to modernity for the consumption of Muslim studentsstudying in the West who would eventually transfer this articulation to theirhome countries after the completion of their education. On the other hand, theyconfronted the fact of a growing population of Muslims whose “return home”increasingly became a symbolic expression of longing rather than an actual planfor relocation. Rather than young educated travellers passing through the West,al-Faruqi’s audience turned into permanent residents of American neighbourhoods.
AMERICAN MUSLIMS AS AL-FARUQI’S IMAGINED UMMAH
The number of Muslims in America increased sharply after the oil boom of themid-1970s. Although there are no reliable numbers available to show the actual
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number of new Muslim immigrants, the share of Muslims among the total num-ber of immigrants entering the United States rose from 4 per cent in 1968 to10.5 per cent in 1986 (Stone, 1991: 31). This trend continued its exhilaratedgrowth during the 1990s with the massive migration of high-tech engineersfrom South and South-East Asia. As the rapid rise in the number of mosquesbuilt in the United States indicates (see Figure 1), from the early 1980s Muslimcommunities began to assert themselves as a permanent feature of the culturaland political landscape of their host society. Mosques were rapidly transformedinto community-building institutions, both in the places of their operations withthe establishment of schools and outreach programmes (CAIR, 2001: 34-38),as well as in the cyber space with extensive reach and services.
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s
The diversity and conflicts between these emerging diasporic Muslim commu-nities have not represented a movement toward the realization of the ummah(Johnson, 1991). Not only do Muslims remain ethnically divided, they offercompeting views in their political loyalties, gender politics, and in the under-standing of their historical position in the West. As Table 1 demonstrates, only14 per cent of mosques in the United States are ethnically integrated. The samestudy found that a significant number of the immigrants’ mosques are located insuburban areas and middle class neighbourhoods, while African-American
FIGURE 1
NUMBER OF MOSQUES FOUNDED IN THE UNITED STATES
Source: CAIR, 2001.
75Loving America and longing for home
mosques serve inner-city working class communities (CAIR, 2001: 26). More-over, no women serve on the executive boards of more than 86 per cent of allmosques in the United States (CAIR, 2001: 57).
TABLE 1
MOSQUES GROUPED ACCORDING TO DOMINANT ETHNICITY
2000 study 1994 study
African American 27% 29% South Asian 28% 29% Arab 15% 21% Mixed South Asian/Arab 16% 10% All others 14% 11%
Source: CAIR, 2001: 19.
Despite the demographic and political realities of Muslim communities in NorthAmerica, in these emerging communities, al-Faruqi saw the possibility of tran-scending nationalism and forging an ummah reconnected with its “authentic”aspirations. Moreover, he came to believe that not only could Muslims in NorthAmerica realize the ideal ummah, but through doing so, they could rescue theWest from its own vices. Addressing Muslims living in the West a few monthsbefore his death, al-Faruqi asserted:
If you look upon this as an event in world history, you will see that Allah,subhanahu wa ta’ala, has prepared the course of history to welcome you inthe West...By bringing you here...Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, has carvedout a vocation for you, a new mission, and this mission is to save the West(1987: 55).
Often in his public lectures, al-Faruqi compared North American Muslims’experience to that of Prophet Mohammad’s hijra (migration) from Mecca toMedina – the beginning of Islamic calendar. “We want to live as if we were”, heobserved, “…the companions of Mohammad from Makkah [Mecca] to Madinah[Medina]… This is our Madinah, we have arrived, we are here” (al-Faruqi,1987: 56). Through his allegory of hijra (migration), al-Faruqi constructed adiscourse through which he inverted the trauma of displacement into the pos-sibility of transcendence from the place of origin. In his narrative, for the firsttime since the colonial encounters and the formation of modern nation states,the emergence of diasporic and transnational communities has brought Muslims
76 Ghamari-Tabrizi
closer to the realization of the ummah. Al-Faruqi (1980) argued that the newhijra signified not only migration from the place of origin, but also the abandon-ment of and transcendence from tribalism and nationalism (shu’ubiyah).
Through his symbolic language of depicting Muslims of North America as thecompanion of the prophet in Medina, al-Faruqi, on the one hand, emphasizedthe permanence of this experience, and on the other hand, intended to inventa homogeneous community with shared aspirations and common ambitions.Al-Faruqi’s discourse of hijra recognized diversity and hybridity at the point oforigin, but encouraged uniformity and non-hybridity.
Not only does al-Faruqi’s discourse of hijra advance a conception of homo-genous ummah, it also neglects to include the ansar, the community of thosewho protected and welcomed the Prophet and his companions after their departurefrom Mecca. As Aminah McCloud, one of the most respected African-AmericanMuslim scholar/activists has pointed out, Muslim immigrants’ identity politics ispredominantly informed by “white discourses of race relations in the US”. Ratherthan black Muslims, she asserted, “the ansar of Muslims immigrants haveparadoxically been white Christians” (cited in Mattingly, 2001). Al-Faruqi andother leaders of new Muslim immigrants engaged in ecumenical dialogue andinstitutional cooperation with the dominant white American society rather thantheir African-American fellow Muslims. McCloud sorely castigated Muslim immi-grants for being “reared the way the majority of white Americans are reared todespise blackness” (cited in Mattingly, 2001).
Frederick Thaufeer al-Deen, an African-American community leader who con-verted to Islam in the late 1970s and then served as an imam in Oklahoma City,put forward another critique of al-Faruqi’s allegory of hijra and its homogeniz-ing presuppositions. He argued that rather than transcending it, the ummah needsto embrace diversity and difference as its foundational feature. Accordingly, hespeculated that the growing number of Muslims of different ethnic and nationalorigins in the United States has created a simulacrum of the Hajj, the annualMuslim pilgrimage to Mecca. In a recent interview, he compared America to“the city of Mecca during the Hajj […] when Muslims from all over the worlddialogue, talk through problems, offer solutions, engage one another, and sharethings” (cited in Mattingly, 2001). Through the powerful symbolism of Hajj,eloquently articulated by Malcolm X in his autobiography, rather than an un-desirable haven of hedonism, Thaufeer al-Deen regarded America as the Meccaof a global Muslim community. As Shabbir Mansuri, the founding director ofthe Council on Islamic Education, remarked: “There is no other place on earthoutside of the US where dialogue of the sort we’re experiencing is happening…And I see God’s hand in it” (cited in Mattingly, 2001).
77Loving America and longing for home
EMERGING MUSLIM COMMUNITIESAND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW MUSLIMHOOD
Appropriating the symbolic power of al-Faruqi’s loss, six months after his death,in December 1986, the Planning Committee of the ISNA filed a report in a publichearing in Plainfield, Indiana about the condition and responsibilities of Muslimsin North America. Acknowledging the changes in the composition of its con-stituents, over the objection of many of the participating organizations, the com-mittee strongly endorsed the political participation of Muslims as an emergingminority group in American politics:
In order to exert influence on the political decision-making and legislation inNorth America, ISNA should launch a campaign to educate Muslim citizensabout their voting rights and mobilize them to vote on issues affecting Islamand Muslims. On a longer-term basis, ISNA should develop communicationwith and among politically active Muslims and establish a separate politicalorganization in due course (Johnson, 1991: 111).
Objections to this new policy were voiced from two opposing groups. First,those who expressed a separatist view, fearing that participating in Americanpolitics would result in the inevitable assimilation of Muslims. The chief spokes-person of this tendency was Tariq Quraishi, a close associate of al-Faruqi, andthe director of the North American Islamic Trust, one of the most influentialconstituent organizations of ISNA. The second group sought to limit the activ-ities of Islamic associations to religious rituals; it was suspicious of any attemptto politicize Islam, citing the Iranian and Afghani experiences. The TablighiJama’at, with a primarily Indo-Pakistani membership, represented the mostpowerful organization in this tendency (Haleem, 1987).
Fear of association with political Islam has always been a central feature ofMuslim organizations of North America. On the one hand, militant political Islamhas always generated a strong appeal to Muslim students, and such militancycould undermine the leadership and the legitimacy of many of these organ-izations. On the other hand, in the American political landscape, being Muslimand politically active could inevitably be interpreted as a sign of hostility towardAmerican global interests. Many American politicians consider Muslims’ sup-port to be a political liability.10 Because post-cold war American foreign policyhas been driven by the substitution of the green (the sacred colour of Islam)peril of Islam for the red threat of communism, any participation of Muslims inAmerican politics inevitably raises suspicions of sabotage and disloyalty.11
Finally, in 1987, the ISNA announced the establishment of the ISNA-PoliticalAction Committee (PAC). While al-Faruqi’s murder became a medium through
78 Ghamari-Tabrizi
which ISNA advanced the cause of the constitution of Muslims of the West,al-Faruqi himself was at best ambivalent toward community activism and thecollective participation of Muslims in American corporate politics. His notion ofnew Muslimhood had less to do with political action or community activism,and more with an elitist endeavour of soul-searching and a return to rationalfoundations of Islamic theology.
With the growing number of Muslim immigrants in North America and Europe,al-Faruqi’s Islamization Project became subject to increasingly strident criticism.According to many Muslim critics, the fact that the IIIT was exclusively con-cerned with plans for higher education demonstrated the elitist character of itseducational reform project. Moreover, others suggested that the Projectassumed a corporate institutional form which undermined its intention toencourage innovative and creative contributions of all Muslims to the process ofIslamization.
In his appraisal of the first decade of the Islamization project, Louay Safi (1993)suggested that the implementation of the project required an organization of“highly qualified scholars working in unison under a unified command”. Thisrequirement was neither available nor desirable, for “bureaucratic organizationstend to suppress the very elements that make science possible, viz. creativityand originality” (1993: 40-41). Another critic, V.R. Nasr (1992), voiced thesame concern, arguing that Islamization “should not begin with, [but] ratherend in institutions and organizational expressions” (1992: 18). Finally, as theformer President of the MSA, Ilyas Ba-Yunus (1988) criticized al-Faruqi andargued that “the eminent professor continued to ignore [the fact that] educationhas to start from the bottom up” (1988: 22). Ba-Yunus argued that without acommunity which supports and initiates Islamic educational institutions, no projectof Islamization could be fruitful. He chastised the IIIT for its failure to acknow-ledge the necessity of the community’s involvement in its project. He criticizedal-Faruqi, AbuSulayman, and the IIIT movement:
[They] seemed to have ignored another important principle of institutionalizededucation; namely that these are the communities which make educationalinstitutions, not that educational institutions make and shape communities(Ba-Yunus, 1988: 23).
Neglecting the significance of community activism and its relation to the Islam-ization project, the hierarchical “educationist” standpoint of al-Faruqi dominatedthe IIIT/AMSS. This became more evident, according to Ba-Yunus (1988),after the establishment of the ISNA in 1981, when al-Faruqi distanced himselffrom the community-based activities of Muslim organizations. “This happened”,Ba-Yunus (1988) recalled, “at the time that these organizations [...] needed Isma’il’s
79Loving America and longing for home
eloquence, his motivating power and his ability to raise funds more than ever”(1988: 23-24).
Both al-Faruqi and his critics, however, remained committed to the construc-tion of a new homo Islamicus in the West, one from the top down, and the otherfrom bottom up. The elitism of organizations such as the IIIT or ISNA sprangfrom their conception of the ummah as a community of Muslims which tran-scended residual ethnic, national, linguistic and gender differences. While at thesame time, they remain hostile to and sceptical of the emergent hybrid identitiescharacteristic of the Muslim diaspora.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, I wove the experience of an emerging community of Muslimdiaspora around a biographical narrative of Isma’il al-Faruqi. I chose al-Faruqito illustrate that the diasporic experience begins in the place of origin and it doesnot inevitably lead toward perpetual “intentional” or “organic” hybridization.The latter point is particularly significant because notions of diaspora andhybridity are conceptually linked and are often understood as a unidirectionalcutting and mixing between the West and the East, or between the modern andthe traditional. Al-Faruqi’s experience shows that, in a Fanonian sense of colonial-ism, diasporic experience conveys living as a “stranger”, at and away from home.He attended a French/Catholic school in his Palestinian homeland and “discov-ered” Islam in the United States. At home, he experienced hybridity through theinterplay of British and French colonialism and Palestinian/Islamic cultures, butabroad, he imagined an ummah which presupposed normative, homogeneousMuslimhood. Al-Faruqi’s transformation from a Palestinian Arab into a Muslimwho happens to be a Palestinian was distinctly a diasporic experience.
Unlike earlier experiences of minority immigrants, al-Faruqi and other Muslimsof diaspora do not define their cultural and political predicament throughassimilation/segregation paradigm. Muslims participate in American corporatepolitics, but they refuse to be regarded as a minority group contained in itsborders. As William Safran (1991) observed, diaspora communities pose a moreserious challenge to host societies than do other minority communities: “theytest the efficacy of the process of integration and the outer limits of freedom[…] and the limits of pluralism” (1991: 97). Although they unremittinglynegotiate and re-imagine these limits, for Muslims, the ongoing “War on Terror”has dented the agility of these boundaries. The “War on Terror”, with itscivilizational accent, has further solidified these borders, and contributed to theadvancement of homogenizing reactive identities.
80 Ghamari-Tabrizi
Al-Faruqi navigated the postcolonial world but jettisoned his own hybridity toconceive a discursively homogenous ummah. In the final instance, the failure ofhis Islamization project, and his ambivalence toward the diversity of the emerg-ing Muslim diaspora, made him and his ideas marginal in the ways Muslimcommunities negotiate the boundaries of Muslimhood in the triangular relation-ship of diaspora/host society/homeland.
NOTES
1. For a discussion of the Rushdie Affair in the context of British multiculturalism,see Asad (1990). I shall emphasize here that Rushdie himself never intended towrite a book which “represents” the experience of a whole community. He wrote,“Do not ask your writers to create typical or representative fictions. Such booksare almost invariably dead books. The liveliness of literature lies in its exception-ality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which,to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own image reflected” (Rushdie,1991: 412).
2. As James Clifford (1997) argued, there are important differences between con-ceptions of diasporas in relation to their place of origin, as it was evident in thedebate between Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy. Clifford wrote: “Mercer’s ver-sion is rigorously anti-essentialist, a site of multiple displacements and rearticu-lations of identity, without privilege to race, cultural traditions, class, gender, orsexuality. Diaspora consciousness is entirely a product of cultures and historiesin collision and dialogue. For Mercer, Gilroy’s genealogy of British ‘blackness’continues to privilege an ‘African’ origin and ‘vernacular’ forms – despite hisstress on historical rupture and hybridity and his assault on romantic Afro-centrisms. For Gilroy, Mercer represents a ‘premature pluralism’, a postmodernevasion of the need to give historical specificity and complexity to the term‘black’, seen as linked racial formations, counterhistories, and cultures of resist-ance” (Clifford, 1997: 266).
3. The information regarding Isma’il and Lamya’ al-Faruqi’s murder is based on thereports in the Spotlight, a Washington-based weekly paper, and two specialissues of Islamic Horizon, a journal of the Muslim Student Associations (July1986 and September 1986).
4. Notably, since the turn of the last century, many non-European intellectualshave articulated their critique of Western [instrumental] rationality in a phenom-enological frame, thus the significance of Heidegger in modern philosophicaldiscourses of non-Western intellectuals. For a discussion in the Iranian case seeBoroujerdi (1996); in the case of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb see Euben(1999); and in the case of Japanese phenomenological philosophers influencedby Heidegger see Feenberg (1995).
5. His experience is not uncommon among Muslim intellectuals. Many prominentthinkers in the Islamic world used their Western education to enhance and deepen
81Loving America and longing for home
their commitment to Islam. For example, French existential Marxism profoundlyinspired one of the influential ideologues of the Iranian revolution, Ali Shari’ati,during his study in Paris in the early 1960s. An outspoken critic of the IslamicRepublic, Abdolkarim Soroush studied the philosophy of science at theUniversity of London in the mid-1970s, on the basis of which he developed hisepistemological critique of orthodoxy, both Marxian and Islamic. Sayyid Qutb,the Egyptian revolutionary theologian, came to the United States in 1949 tostudy educational administration. He witnessed American support of theestablishment of the state of Israel, underwent a transformation, and becamemore committed to his Islamic consciousness. More recently, during an inter-view I conducted with the Egyptian social critic Abdulwahab el-Massiri in Cairoin April 1996, he confided in me that during his student years in the United States“he rediscovered the Qur’an in literary criticism classes of Susan Sontag”.
6. Information from the “Know your MSA” brochure, n.d., IIIT Archives.7. Interview with Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Fall 1996, Herndon, VA.8. An Islamic modernist reform movement during the second half of the nineteenth
century, led by the Iranian ideologue and political activist Jamal al-Din Afghani(1838-97) and his Egyptian protégé Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905).
9. Many conservative pundits, such as Daniel Pipes, interpret this allegoricalromantic discourse as the as the conspiracy of militant Muslims to transformfundamentally the American social order. In several postings in his web site,Pipes particularly targeted al-Faruqi as one of the proponents of “conqueringAmerica”. See for example his posting http://www.danielpipes.org/article/83.
10. George W. Bush’s and Al Gore’s presidential campaign committees as well asHillary Rodham Clinton’s senate campaign returned contributions from variousMuslims organizations citing the contributors’ defence of the Palestinian cause.
11. See Lewis (1999) and Pipes (1990). For the issues of foreign policy, see USCongress, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa, 1993, IslamicFundamentalism in Africa and Implications for US Policy, Hearings, Washing-ton: US G.O.P. Also, US Congress, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommitteeon Europe and the Middle East, 1985, Islamic Fundamentalism and IslamicRadicalism, Hearings, Ninety-ninth Congress, Washington: US G.O.P.
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85Loving America and longing for home
AMOUR DE L’AMÉRIQUE ET NOSTALGIE DU PAYS D’ORIGINE:ISMA’IL AL-FARUQI ET L’ÉMERGENCE DE LA DIASPORA
MUSULMANE EN AMÉRIQUE DU NORD
J’introduis ici l’expérience de la communauté émergente de la diaspora musul-mane autour du récit biographique du militant et érudit musulman Isma’ilAl-Faruqi. Dans ce récit, je montre que l’expérience diasporique commencedans le lieu d’origine et qu’elle ne mène pas inévitablement à une hybridisationperpétuelle. Ce point est particulièrement important du fait que les notionsde diaspora et d’hybridité sont liées d’un point de vue conceptuel et sont sou-vent perçues comme une coupure et un mélange unidirectionnels entre l’Occi-dent et l’Orient, ou entre les sociétés modernes et traditionnelles. L’expérienced’Isma’il Al-Faruqi montre, comme au sens où Franz Fanon entendait lecolonialisme, que l’expérience diasporique amène à vivre comme un « étranger »à la fois dans le pays d’origine et loin de lui.
La situation post-coloniale a permis à des communautés de musulmans ethnique-ment diverses de vivre en Occident, mais celles-ci conservent des liens fortsavec leur lieu d’origine. En adoptant l’allégorie de la migration du prophète(l’hégire), Isma’il Al-Faruqi a construit une notion fantastique de la Ummah etun homo islamicus sujet normatif. Bien que profondément influencé par ladiversité des membres des associations d’étudiants musulmans, Isma’il Al-Faruqia encouragé les Musulmans à dépasser leurs différences et tenté de concevoirune Ummah homogène. Mais son projet a finalement échoué parce qu’ilne correspondait pas à l’expérience réelle des musulmans vivant en Occident.Les communautés musulmanes ont traditionnellement négocié les frontièresentre l’Islam et les responsabilités sociales qu’il entraîne, tant dans leur paysd’origine que dans leurs nouveaux pays en Occident, des nouveaux paysqui deviennent de plus en plus hostiles à leur présence et compliquent de cefait davantage la relation triangulaire entre diaspora, société d’accueil et paysd’origine.
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QUERIENDO A AMÉRICA PERO EXTRAÑANDO A SU PAÍS: ISMA’IL AL-FARUQI Y LA EMERGENCIA DE UNA DIÁSPORA
MUSULMANA EN AMÉRICA DEL NORTE
En este documento se aborda la experiencia de una comunidad emergente dela diáspora musulmana entorno a una narrativa biográfica del activista musulmány estudioso Isma’il al-Faruqi. A través de esta narración, se ilustra que laexperiencia de la diáspora comienza en el país de origen y no conduce inevitable-mente a una hibridación perpetua. Este punto es particularmente importantepuesto que las nociones de diáspora e híbrido están conceptualmente vinculadasy a menudo se comprenden como interrelacionadas y como mezcla unidirec-cional entre el Occidente y el Oriente, o entre lo moderno y lo tradicional. Laexperiencia de al-Faruqi demuestra que, en un sentido fanoniano del colonialismo,la experiencia de la diáspora implica vivir como un “extranjero”, en el hogary lejos del mismo.
La condición poscolonial permite que comunidades étnicamente diversas demusulmanes residan en el Occidente pero mantengan fuertes lazos con su lugarde origen. Adoptando la alegoría de la migración del profeta o hijra, al-Faruqiconstruyó una noción fantástica de la ummah y un tema normativo homoislamicus. Si bien tuvo una gran influencia de las diversas asociaciones deestudiantes musulmanes, al-Faruqi alentó a los musulmanes a ir más allá de susdiferencias e intentó concebir una ummah homogénea. Sin embargo, y en últimainstancia, este proyecto fracasó porque no correspondía a las experiencias devida reales de los musulmanes en el Occidente. Históricamente, las comunidadesmusulmanas han negociado las fronteras de su “musulmanismo” y las respon-sabilidades sociales que ello entraña tanto en sus países de origen como deresidencia en el Occidente – un nuevo hogar que cada vez es más hostil a supresencia y, por consiguiente, complica la relación triangular entre la diáspora,la sociedad de acogida y el país de origen.
