Article:"Islam and the Unveiled Photograph" by Edward Rothstein in THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - 14 June 2003 - Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID)

CSID in the News

"Islam and the Unveiled Photograph"
By Edward Rothstein
The New York Times
June 14, 2003

Florida judge ruled last week that a Muslim woman could not pose for a
driver's license photograph in a veil, with only her eyes peering out. The
state, the judge wrote, had a "compelling interest" in identifying its
drivers; she rejected the arguments, supported by Muslim organizations,
that the decision threatened "religious liberty."

But what still puzzled Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at
the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law who had been a
witness for the government, was why it had been so difficult to get any
other Muslims to admit that the government had a plausible case.
Although the evidence wasn't permitted in court, the woman, Sultaana
Freeman, was convicted of aggravated battery in Illinois, The Chicago
Tribune reported, in the beating of her twin 3-year-old foster children.
According to police reports, child welfare workers said she invoked
religious modesty to hinder investigators from looking under the
children's Muslim garb, where one daughter had a broken arm, and both were
covered with bruises. The mother's mug shot was taken without a veil. At
any rate, even religious pilgrims to Mecca have to have uncovered faces in
their passport photographs.

So why, Mr. Fadl asked, was this case given such widespread support in the
Muslim communities? And why was his cross-examination so "bizarre," he
wondered, as it had focused solely on whether he was sufficiently orthodox
in his own religious beliefs. What the American Muslim culture seemed to
be demanding, as he described it, was absolute loyalty to an extreme
position.

Mr. Fadl has become a liberal dissident in the American Muslim world. In
the April/May issue of Boston Review (bostonreview.net) his argument for a
common ground between Islam and Western democracy spurred 10 responses by
other scholars. A similar symposium based on his work can be found in "The
Place of Tolerance in Islam" (Beacon Press, 2002).

At a recent conference in Washington on American Islam that was sponsored
by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Mr. Fadl argued that there had
been "obfuscation" in public statements by American Muslims, who he said
had not made a serious commitment to American democracy. He also
complained about "a consistent exclusion of voices" representing moderate
Islam by Muslim organizations.

So the case in Florida, for him, displayed not a contest between state
interest and religious freedom but the absence of contest in the American
Muslim world. That was also one of the recurring themes of the Washington
conference, which was organized by Hillel Fradkin, the president of the
center, and Peter Berger, the director of the Institute for the Study of
Economic Culture at Boston University.

Many participants agreed that the relationship between American Islam and
American democratic society was troubled because of what one Muslim
scholar called "the failure of the liberal modernist tradition in Islam"
and its "normative hostility" toward the West.

In one paper Qamar-ul Huda of Boston College described such a diverse
range of background and belief in American Islamic communities that he
wondered if it were possible to generalize at all. But that only made the
uniformity described by other speakers more disturbing. The Sufi scholar
Sheik Hisham Muhammad Kabbani objected to what he called a monopoly
control over Islamic textbooks, the effects of Saudi money and the
stifling of dissent.

But how are things to change? Abdou Filali-Ansary, who directs an
institute for the study of Muslim civilizations at Aga Khan University in
London, said he believed that American Muslim intellectuals should realize
that in their encounter with the United States they were "for the first
time in a different position."

Last month at another conference in Washington, the Center for the Study
of Islam and Democracy (islam-democracy.org), presented another symposium,
"Why Democracy and Why Now?" at which speakers attempted to map out
liberal political views consistent with Islamic belief. Abdulaziz
Sachedina, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia,
said in his keynote address: "There has not been any other time in the
history of the Muslim peoples when they were required to evaluate their
political heritage critically in the context of modern political
developments."

Radwan A. Masmoudi, an M.I.T.-trained engineer who founded the Center for
the Study of Islam and Democracy, has argued that new organizations are
needed. "How do you reform from within?" he said at the ethics center
conference. "It takes a lot of patience."

Many of these problems were anticipated by Fazlur Rahman, who taught
Islamic thought at the University of Chicago and was invoked by many
speakers. In his book "Islam and Modernity" (University of Chicago Press),
written 25 years ago, Rahman, who died in 1988, explored the tensions in
Islam between the heritage of the immutable text and the challenges posed
by ever-changing experience. He saw interpretations of religious law as an
evolving series of dialogues with the religious text, and he urged that
Islamic education be reshaped to become a dynamic enterprise.

This ideal is actually not all that different from the ideal that evolved
in varieties of Christianity or Judaism in their encounters with America.
Religious authority is transformed by democratic pressure; absolutism is
tempered; horizons shift. Neither the religion nor the nation remain
unchanged. Along the way, there is much anxiety over loyalty and much fear
of dissolution, but ultimately a new confidence develops.

But many speakers seemed to fear that American Islam is still locked in a
mode of fundamentalist opposition. Sohail Hashmi, a professor in
international relations at Mount Holyoke College, even worried that
Islamic elementary education in the United States no longer resembles his
own Islamic education, which aimed to create Muslims who were
"well-rounded Americans."

"I grew up thinking that one of the greatest Muslims who ever lived," he
wryly recalled, "was Ibrahim Lincoln."

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