Hamid Dabashi - Being a Muslim in the World

Being a Muslim in the World

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Being a Muslim
in the World

Hamid Dabashi

BEING A MUSLIM IN THE WORLD

Copyright Hamid Dabashi, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

in the United Statesa division of St. Martins Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 9781137301291 EPUB

ISBN: 9781137301291 PDF

ISBN: 9781137301284 Hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

First edition: 2013

www.palgrave.com/pivot

DOI: 10.1057/9781137301291

For the memories

of my mothers silent prayers

and my fathers loud protests

In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful

Hast thou observed him who belieth religion?

That is he who repelleth the orphan

And urgeth not the feeding of the needy.

Ah, woe unto worshippers

Who are heedless of their prayer;

Who would be seen (at worship)

Yet refuse small kindnesses!

The Holy Quran, chapter 107, Al-Maun/Acts of Kindness

Contents

Introduction: Muslims in the World

Civilization: The West and the Restwho would write a book with a title like that today, and what could it possibly mean? The British historian Niall Ferguson has made a reputation for himself for theorizing the West as the defining disposition of humanity at large. But like many other latter-day ideologues of the beleaguered empire, Niall Ferguson is more a panegyrist of the West than its prognosticator.

If the idea that science, medicine, or work ethic were the virtues and achievements that civilizations around the globe lacked before the West appeared on the horizon was offered in a sophomoric essay in any half decent college, the idiocy would earn a much-deserved F for the student. But why is it that when offered by an historian it receives a bravura publication? The answer has to be in the realm of the mass hysteria that these sorts of ideas generate at the world-historic moment when this very West, as an idea, is witnessing its own demise. That we are living through the end of Western ascendancy, so far as Ferguson thinks he is the harbinger of that good tiding, is a splendid thingfor that ascendency was predicated on mass murder and mayhem from one end of the earth to the other (including the European Holocaust), and on the global plundering of planetary resources. The word civilization in Fergusons title is the giveawaythe unabashedly racialized self-congratulation that before this West there was no civility, and that after the Wests demise it will die. As a categorical imperative, the West is dying, and that is a good thingfor that means the world is delivered from one of the ghastliest imperial projects ever historically coined and experienced. As for science, medicine, literature, philosophy, and suchwhat the West picked up from previous empires and expanded upon will survive its demise and be carried over into the new global formations of the world. Upon that world, peopleincluding Muslimswill now have to imagine themselves in a post-Western history that is finally delivered from one particularly troublesome delusion.

To be in the world

The West is no moreand nor are, a fortiori, all the binaries it has coined and crafted over the last two hundred years pluschief among them the notion of Islam that Orientalism invented for the West. The West and the Rest was the language of the European and American imperialism at the height of the normative hegemony that crafted the West and subjugated the Rest. Niall Ferguson and his ilk come at the tail end of that narrative fiction. Financially bankrupt (look at Greece, the fictive birthplace of the West); politically corrupt (look at presidential elections in the US); economically stagnant (look at the US debt to China); and diplomatically inept (look at the Iranian nuclear issue), all signs indicate that this thing Niall Ferguson still calls the West has long since implodedwith post-modernism and post-structuralism as its paramount philosophical eulogies.

What does it mean to be a Muslim in this post-Western world? What world will Muslims inhabit in post-Western societies, in or out of the Muslim world as we have hitherto understood, defined, and located it? In what way can even we talk about a Muslim world, and how is that world different, integral, or embedded in other worlds? Doesnt the end of the West as a self-asserted criterion also mean the end of Muslim world as it was manufactured in liaison with that divisive category?

To have a world means to have an attitude toward it, as Gadamer noted in Truth and Method