The Rising Muslim Elite
We live in an age of identity. Our politics, social conventions, and conversations are inextricably tied up in concerns about whether we, as individuals with unique and distinct compositions, are faithfully represented. In public settings, these debates center on a handful of identities that take center stage — one’s gender (or lack thereof) is manifestly important of course, as is one’s race, “religious identity,” and sexual predisposition(s) (or, perhaps, orientation). In woke circles, articulation of identities serves as a precursor to discussions, providing the necessary context through which dialog can meaningfully take place at risk of “otherizing” or rendering invisible the all-important “I” that must be attended to. “Safe spaces” are often organized to cater to these sensibilities, and it is increasingly common to hear the cries of “individual authenticity” as they promote programs and circles where people can arrive and “be themselves.”
As important as identities can be (and often are), a frequently overlooked dimension of our relationship to society is that of class, which is to say that where we find ourselves economically matters a great deal. Nancy Isenberg bring this significance of class distinction into focus in her work White Trash, which chronicles in scrupulous detail the centuries-long experience of the underprivileged in America. Isenberg’s chronology begins rather early with Enlightenment thinker John Locke and his use of “Leet-men” to designate and describe a permanent and potentially productive peasant class that would emerge to counter the abysmal vagrants of England. After Locke and others in his era, Isenberg presents a shift in attitude towards the poor, one that saw the poor as redeemable provided they commit to hard work. The impoverished in this reading languish in destitution on account of their poor work ethic, not structural inability — a little ambition and you too can occupy the halls of elite society! Benjamin Franklin embodied this attitude when he wrote: “Up sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.”
What becomes evident in reading Isenberg’s work is how consistently contempt was directed towards the have-nots. Jefferson referred to them as “rubbish,” while Robert Byrd of West Virginia called those on welfare “fornicating deadbeats.” Language evolved and new terms were coined to refer to the poor, but the underlying derision was always unmistakable. Degenerates, waste people, offscourings, lubbers, hillbillies, clay-eaters, trailer trash, and squatters are but a few of the many pejoratives applied to the economically depressed.
Somewhere in the late twentieth century, attitudes towards the poor changed once again. Poor became chic, and subcultures developed exoticizing lower-class life with politicians running on purportedly “relatable” platforms. Coming from modest means became a credential in and of itself (today’s wealthy continue to cite their example as one of “rags to riches”), though the politics of these politicians paradoxically reinforced class distinction and widened the gap between rich and poor. The great rhetorical trick was in appropriating the cause of the poor as mascots and symbols for their political aims while encoding in the very fabric of our society attitudes and cultural pieties that would ensure a stable and unaffected status quo.
This invoking of the poor as mascots dominates our modern politics as well, as does the derision of our elite political class towards the disposessed. Hillary Clinton referred to some non-trivial number of Americans as “deplorables” (her later embarrassment was not true remorse of course, but mere regret that others discovered her unfiltered feelings), while Barack Obama spoke of jobless midwestern Americans in old industrialized towns as “bitter” and clinging to “guns or religion” as a “way to explain their frustrations.” The current executive is the paradigmatic elite. Hailing from inherited wealth, Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon and owns a cadre of resorts while routinely boasting his enormous fortune as proof of his competence.
Responding to this class is a new breed of leftists (the “New Left” or “Justice Left” as they are often called). Birthed by the failed (successful?) candidacy of Bernie Sanders, this new political faction displays resolute political convictions and demands an all-or-nothing commitment to their party platform, one that will “work for the people” and not simply those on Wall Street or Capitol Hill. However comforting this political rhetoric, it is merely the latest iteration of trojan-horsing elite interests in the name of the poor. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, has been an avowed supporter of automation, remarking that any potential job loss would be easily mitigated once people discover that they can live unbonded by wage. Without jobs, millions of Americans will find comfort in receiving a Universal Basic Income with which they can spend more time doing art, learning, or “going to space.” Ironically, it is the old-world elitist Trump who has managed to back industry and protect middle-American careers, siding with coal and admonishing companies like Carrier for offshoring production.
But AOC and her acolytes are not merely advancing an elite economic agenda, but an elite social agenda as well. The refashioning of religion as a tool of progressive justice campaigns (without any reference at all to specific beliefs except in the most generic form), redefinition of the family, prizing of sexual autonomy and an open sexual marketplace, and radical deracination of gender from having anything to do with biological sex is entirely in keeping with the attitudes of the ultra-wealthy. Progressives espouse government services for the poor (and, at times, wealthy) in order to “unencumber” them from the duties of family life — government sponsored day care, after care, and elder care is all part of the program. Soon enough, one will be able to have a child with only minimal obligations towards him or her; the state will take care of the rest. Declining fertility rates, collapsing family life, and a simultaneous decline in marriage alongside rising ages for the married characterizes this new socio-familial paradigm. Political affiliations now refract these attitudes. The twenty wealthiest congressional districts are all Democratic in party affiliation, while the poorest districts overwhelmingly affiliate with Republicans. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are now self-consciously redesigning their platform behavior to favor certain (invariably liberal) perspectives and disfavor others, while sanctioning those who dare contravene what good and polite people have determined as acceptable. Sadly, neither the “Trumpian” Right nor the Justice Left has a genuine platform that can address the ailments and anxieties of middle America and the under class. Trump’s elitism is white, country club, and high brow (trophy wife, two kids and a dog, etc.), while AOC’s elitism is multi-ethnic, gender and sexually diverse (and nonconforming), and independent. But they are, at the end of the day, both elites. Both groups promote a politics that pushes us closer and closer to a global monoculture that will be presided over by a narrow liberal oligarchy. This impending Western hegemony will not be forestalled by our political class.
The Muslim community in America has always had an uneasy time navigating this environment. As far back as I can recall, Muslim leaders have sought to justify the existence of Muslims in America on the basis of wealth, intelligence, and prosperity. Public proclamations of American Muslims being more educated and wealthy than the average American sought to assuage Western elite concerns of a Muslim “fifth column.” On the rare occasion that they were brought into contact with one of their own transgressing these pieties, American Muslim leaders opted to disown or discredit those people and groups rather than admit any reasonability to the attitudes and ideas of the Muslims occupying the lower class or violating elite sensitivities.
In 1996 Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf generated one such public controversy. A professional athlete in a visible position, Abdul-Rauf famously refused to stand for the National Anthem at the start of a game — an action that would eventually lead to his blackballing from the sport a few years later. Abdul-Rauf explained his refusal by referring to the Quran. It was the Islamic teachings of justice that he could no longer turn a blind eye to, and his convictions demanded that he sit instead of standing for a flag that represented evil and tragedy in so much of the world.
In responding to this controversy, Muslim organizations were virtually unanimous in refuting Abdul-Rauf’s understanding of the Quran. He was a convert, did not understand the complexity of the tradition, and was in violation of Quranic edicts to obey those in leadership. Islam encouraged a healthy patriotism (or so we were told), and Muslim conferences swiftly ramped up their own jingoism to reassure those unsettled by Abdul-Rauf’s protestations.
Nearly a decade later another incident brought Muslims into the public eye with the refusal of Muslim cab drivers in Minnesota to transport riders carrying liquor. Worried about the fallout, Muslim organizations quickly denounced this refusal as violating a public trust, and organizations like the ACLU decried the decision of these cab drivers as fundamentally anathema to secular society. Keith Ellison was more sympathetic to these men, seeing in them a failure of “immigrant adjustment” that would eventually be resolved through greater assimilation. In commenting on the cab drivers, Ellison remarked, “Some of these people come from places that had no pork or alcohol,” while a Muslim math teacher quoted in a CAIR press release said “I’m sure our children will be better off in developing tolerance.”
By comparison, just a few years ago Khizr Khan was quickly thrust into the center of our political debates for flashing a pocket constitution at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. He was quickly conscripted into the American Muslim speaker circuit and was featured prominently on stage after stage lecturing the community about what it means to be patriotic and good Muslims. The message was of course clear: notoriety gained by currying favor with elites leads to embrace, while crossing elites results in shunning.
The emergence of a new generation of social justice oriented American Muslims has ruptured this status quo. Once a celebrity in high demand, Khan is no longer a person of serious interest. Abdul-Rauf, once a pariah, is now featured as a keynote speaker in Muslim events. BDS, once derided as meaningless and unhelpful, now functions as a yardstick for determining good activism. The list could go on. In these shifting attitudes, the one constant remains the same: our positions adjust with the tides, and whatever is fashionable will be papered over with religious justification the moment it is en vogue.
This unwillingness to stand with those contravening bourgeois conventions came to the fore once again recently with a controversy in Birmingham. Andrew Moffat, a teacher at Parkfield Community School in Birmingham, elected to teach LGBT lessons in a school that is well over 90 percent Muslim in composition (a detailed summary of events and related factors can be found here). Outrage quickly ensued, and Muslim parents took to the streets objecting to these teachings, vowing to pull their children out of school rather than see them indoctrinated by an illicit moral agenda. These parents have, unsurprisingly, been pilloried in the media. They have been caricatured, treated with utmost hostility, and told to adjust to liberal society or get out.
As Jack Sheehan demonstrated in his seminal Reel Bad Arabs, elite groups manufacture prejudice against weak and disempowered communities when they resist cultural programming. Though Sheehan’s subject is Hollywood’s Arab villain, terrorist, or bearded heathen, he and other critics of media representations point to the consequences of sustained dehumanization. Communities lacking political and economic power while remaining noticeably unassimilated will bear the brunt of demeaning media portrayals, and this is more so for those openly defying liberal dogma.
The specter of Muslim parents standing on the streets demanding their right to determine appropriate moral instruction for their children has been met largely with silence by Muslim leaders in the West. Those constantly beating the drums of “strong” and “unapologetic” Muslim women have done nothing to promote and support Muslim mothers on the streets objecting to the program of liberal moral conditioning. The sisters who took to the streets — knowing full well they would be mocked for standing up for truth — will not be heroes in the modern Muslim community. The Muslims of Birmingham are, if anything, a source of immense embarrassment for many Western Muslims, a group that can only more sympathetically be seen, like their taxi driving forebears, as simply needing more time to integrate. Perhaps over time their children will learn the values of “tolerance” that their parents failed to inculcate.
Dilly Hussain appeared on Piers Morgan defending the Birmingham Muslim community. Though it was not a perfect interview, when asked pointedly about Islam’s moral commitments Hussain did not equivocate. We as a community should be proud of our brothers and sisters in Birmingham, and I would rather Hussain serve as my representative over the many “unapologetic” Muslims who cannot bring themselves to exhibit a fraction of his moral courage.
A community comprised of leadership continuously longing for the acceptance of the cultural elite will not stand. This disconnect is growing ever more evident as days pass. Less integrated imams (especially those with accents), masjids, and Islamic schools find themselves on the receiving end of repeated ridicule. They are mocked and jeered, while at times being spoken about as the “problem with our ummah” today. Meanwhile, those Muslims who have been initiated into culturally affluent settings are quickly celebrated. Entertainers, politicians, and activists provide liberal elites with Muslims who do not hesitate to support even the most extreme elements of their political program (“trans rights” is sacrosanct in these circles), while an ounce of concern over their public commitments and sentiments is met with tidal waves of hostility — don’t you know who that is? What they’ve had to overcome to get where they are? Why are you being so pedantic? And so the program of assimilation grows.
Like other religious communities in the West, it is likely that Muslims in America will at some point fracture into denominations. The fault lines have yet to be determined, but I am increasingly convinced that class will play a pivotal role. Those communities that have yet to enter the melting pot, subsisting in inner cities or low-income neighborhoods without the secularity of cosmopolitan life will, I suspect, hold tight to Islam as normatively understood, while a notable portion of suburban upper-class young professionals will slowly distance themselves from masjids and no longer find compelling a life of worship and belief that does not “speak to their identities.” Those ministering to these youth do them a disservice by reconfiguring Islam to their upper class intuitions while abandoning the very people who can provide for an ethical community.
These developments cannot go unchecked. The first to follow the prophets were the poor and weak. When the pompous confronted the weak among the Prophet Salih asking, “Do you [actually] know that Salih is sent from his Lord?” They replied, “Indeed we, in that with which he was sent, are believers.” (al-A‘raf:75) Likewise with the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Upon visiting Heraclius, Abu Sufyan was asked by Byzantine Emperor about the Prophet’s (pbuh) followers, to which he replied that the poor followed him. The first Companions included men with little tribal backing, slaves, and others living in abject poverty. The first martyrs - the family of Yasir - were poor and destitute. The Companions were persecuted and tortured often for this very reason — the Quraysh could treat them how they wanted with little fear of reprisal.
In the Quran, Allah instructs us to help the weak (mustad‘afin), while those held in esteem, possessing inordinate wealth and power, are regularly described as arrogant, defiant, self-assured, and egotistical. When a group headed for the Fire is asked about their worldly life, they respond by saying, “We obeyed our masters and our chiefs, and they led us astray.” (al-Ahzab: 67) In Surat al-An‘am, the Prophet (pbuh) is instructed not to “drive away those who call upon their Lord morning and evening, seeking nothing but His Face.” (al-An‘am: 52). In explaining this verse, al-Tabari and other mufassirin mention an occasioning incident wherein a few nobles from the Quraysh expressed the possibility of sitting with the Prophet (pbuh) to consider Islam — provided, that is, that he cast out the poor from his gatherings (i.e., Bilal, Khabbab, Suhayb, ‘Ammar, etc. — may Allah be pleased with them all). In other reports, the Qurashi nobles exhibit indignation at the very sight of these poor Companions, asking, “Are we to follow them? Are these the ones God as favored over us?” It was at this suggestion that Allah revealed the aforementioned verse telling the Prophet (pbuh) to remain in the company of the poor. In a separate report, the Prophet (pbuh) is reported to have said, “Indeed, Allah helps this ummah by its weak. [It is helped] by their supplications, prayers, and sincerity.”
How can a din with such overt commitments to the weak and poor then become an instrument of the elite? An ummah whose faith is predicated on pillars, one of which is the act of giving in charity (zakah), should not so easily allow itself to get wrapped up in a political moment and lose its way. Perhaps Ramadan will give us the motivation to rediscover our moral bearings.
Other notes:
On zakah: soon, we will be inundated by organizations soliciting our zakah. Many of these organizations will purport zakah-eligibility when they are nothing of the sort. In recent weeks we have seen Muslim civil rights organizations celebrating a Muslim drag queen, others that explicitly state they are not beholden to the teachings of Islam, and yet other Masajid and Muslim organizations that use zakah on superfluous expenditures (aesthetic improvements and renovations for things like chandeliers, etc.). Mind you, these same organizations justify their zakah-eligibility under the rubric of operating fi sabilillah.
Zakah is a pillar of Islam. Do not be careless with those you entrust it to, and search for those who understand the relevant rulings related to zakah appropriation, making sure that they prioritize above all else the poor and needy.
On “Ramy”: I have not seen the show, but have read reviews of it online. Sadly, it appears that the show contains all manner of vice — including, but not limited to, profanity, narcotics use, and gratuitous sex. In one particularly disturbing scene, a Muslim woman requests that Ramy choke her while she masturbates.
This sort of degeneracy is commonplace in Hollywood, of course. We should not be completely surprised, even if it is a Muslim playing lead. What is surprising, however, has been the support offered to the show by some Muslim activists. Mind you, these same activists elsewhere toil over Muslim “representations” and recognize that sexual violence has precursors, chief among them being media depictions of sexual violence carried out against women. It seems all of that can be swiftly overlooked and disregarded when it is a Muslim playing the lead role. What happened to #metoo? Concerns over the predations of men? The ways in which Muslim women are fetishized as sexually deviant? The real world consequences of objectifying women and depicting men as lecherous animals?
I cannot respect a man who would, even theatrically, choke a woman while she ‘gets off.’ Muslim women should object to this as well. For too long the most vocal Muslim women have been those that care little about the types of degradations that undermine our ability to see in our sisters dignity and respect. We must stop promoting these women. People morally confused enough to see silver linings in this sort of debauchery cannot preach to our community. Thankfully, we have alternatives, and I have been encouraged by the work of many sisters anchored in the din. Shaykha Nuriddeen Knight, Shaykha Fatima Barkatulla, and Sister Nour Goda are worth following and supporting (among others). May Allah preserve and protect them, and may He guide our brother Ramy. Ameen.
Alan Jacobs writes about Adrian Vermeule’s review of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed:
“What Vermeule is overlooking, it seems to me, is the simple fact that the liberal order catechizes. One of the wings of the liberal order that does this especially effectively is graduate school. Time and again over the years I have seen idealistic young scholars-in-training say, “Oh, I don’t really believe all that stuff they try to inculcate you with in grad school; I’ll just learn the language and use it until I get my PhD, and then I’ll be free to be myself.” But then “until I get my PhD” becomes “until I get a job”; and then “until I get tenure”; and then “until I get promoted to full professor.” Sooner or later — and often sooner — the face becomes indistinguishable from the mask. And this kind of gradual transformation of personal sensibility happens in a thousand different ways, in a thousand different cultural locations.
So a key question arises: If you need people who are sufficiently skilled in negotiating the liberal order to work effectively within it, but also committed to its transformation, and who can sustain that difficult balance over decades, you have to figure out how to form such people. And it is just this that the churches of the West — all the churches of the West — have neglected to do, have neglected even to attempt. With the (in retrospect quite obvious) result: the accelerating collapse across the board of participation in church life.
What is required, in the face of a general culture that through its command of every communications medium catechizes so effectively, is the construction of a powerful counter-catechesis. Who will do that, and how will they do it? The likely answer, it seems to me, brings us back to the very localism that Deneen and Dreher advocate and that Vermeule rejects. Though I also might reject certain elements and emphases of the communities that Deneen and Dreher advocate, I don’t see a likely instrument other than highly dedicated, counter-cultural communities of faith for the Josephs and Mordecais and Esthers and Daniels to be formed.”
On a brighter note: Ramadan is around the corner. I intend to go on a ‘social media fast’ and encourage the same for others. Deactivate social media, remove yourself from WhatsApp groups, and strive to increase your worship. May Allah accept from all of us in this coming month and forgive us all for our shortcomings. Ameen.
Allah Knows Best.
