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The Qur'an Comes to America: Pedagogies of Muslim Collective Memory

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The Qur'an Comes to America: Pedagogies of Muslim Collective Memory The Qur'an Comes to America: Pedagogies of Muslim Collective Memory Timur Raufovich Yuskaev A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by: Professor Carl W. Ernst Professor Bruce B. Lawrence Professor Omid Safi Professor Yaakov Ariel Professor Charles Kurzman ©2010 Timur Raufovich Yuskaev ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Abstract Timur Raufovich Yuskaev: The Qur‘an Comes to America: Pedagogies of Muslim Collective Memory (Under the direction of Carl W. Ernst) This dissertation examines contemporary American Muslim exegesis of the Qur‘an. I argue that local interpretations of the Qur‘an are shaping a new Muslim culture of global importance, where English serves as a Muslim tongue and the Qur‘an as an American sacred text. The dissertation is organized in four sections, each exploring the rhetoric of a prominent Muslim American intellectual who represents a distinct stream of Muslim discourse. The first two chapters focus on written exegesis and highlight the work of Fazlur Rahman, a Pakistani-American modernist scholar, and Amina Wadud, an African- American Muslim feminist. I analyze how Rahman and Wadud translate the modern notion of gender to resonate with the Qur‘an. The next two chapters present oral interpretations advanced by two preachers, Warith Deen Mohammed, the leader of the largest African-American Muslim movement, and Hamza Yusuf, the most recognizable spokesperson to the second generation of immigrant Muslims. Mohammed and Yusuf serve as examples of the discourse of Islam as an American public religion. I address written and oral modes of interpretation as pedagogies of Muslim collective memory and argue that the Qur‘an emerges as an American sacred text when it becomes a locally resonant spoken word. iii To Nadya and Adam iv Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Translations in Writing and in Time ......................................................................................... 4 A Spoken Qur'an: American Voices ........................................................................................ 16 I. Teaching Time: Fazlur Rahman in Dialogue with Muhammad Iqbal .......................... 23 II. Translating Gender: Amina Wadud in Scholarship and Activism .............................. 54 III. Redemption in African-American Qur'anic Exegesis: Oral Tafsir of Warith Deen Mohammed .................................................................................................................. 78 IV. Toward an American Qur’an: Collective Remembrance in Hamza Yusuf’s Pedagogy of an American Muslim Counterpublic ....................................................................... 137 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 195 Selected Bibliography ................................................................................................. 198 v Introduction But I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them. 1 She frowned but did not turn away. She was an Egyptian-American Qur'an teacher at a suburban immigrant mosque who graciously agreed to be my interviewee for a project, unrelated to this dissertation, which examined American Muslim efforts to prevent possible radicalization. She was taken aback when I asked her: ―What do you think about some Muslim radicals claiming that their actions are inspired by the Qur‘an?‖ "Well," she said, "my Qur‟an never told me to be a terrorist. My Qur‟an never told me to kill other people.‖2 I have heard Muslims say variations of this phrase - ―my Qur‘an‖ - many times. There is something strange about this expression. Isn‘t the Qur‘an, as most Muslims believe, an eternal and inimitable speech of God? If it is God‘s, how can the humans possess it? For this question to have a meaningful response, it has to be contextually 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences: Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern W. McGee (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 169. 2 Anonymous, interview by author, Cary, NC, August 12, 2008. As she said this, her tone stressed ―my Qur‘an‖ and ―never told me.‖ specific. My main concern in this work is an exploration of how the Qur'an, through its human agents, becomes a part of local American Muslim discourse. In other words, how does the Qur'an come to be an American sacred text? The people who bring the Qur'an to America are its interpreters. They make the global sacred text local. This dissertation is their story. Or rather, it is a collection of analytical essays that reflect on elements of American Qur'an-based Muslim discourses. To truly outline the story of the Qur'an in the U.S. is a herculean task outside of this dissertation. (A more comprehensive story would have to give sufficient attention to the enslaved Africans who were the first speakers and interpreters of the Qur'an in North America.) Instead, I offer an exploration of examples that highlight the two key ways in which public intellectuals have brought the Qur'an into American Muslim religious discourse: I examine written and oral interpretations. My subject is the authoritative side of the ongoing, everyday Muslim dialogue revolving around the Qur'an in the U.S. Specifically, I examine the rhetoric of four American Muslim interpreters of the Qur‘an: two writers, Fazlur Rahman and Amina Wadud, and two preachers, Hamza Yusuf and Warith Deen Mohammed. These four personalities have become the focus of my analysis because of their prominence and potential to illustrate distinct, though connected, streams in American Muslim religious thought. Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988), was a Pakistani-American scholar known globally as a leading architect of modernist Qur'anic exegesis. His interpretative methodology of Qur'anic interpretation has had many followers, including Amina Wadud (1952-), an African-American feminist Muslim author. My first two chapters address Rahman's contribution to American Muslim discourse. I approach 2 Rahman as an intellectual who bridged cultures. I search for what he made thinkable in American Muslim discourse and propose that this new, Rahmanian thinkable is partly a reflection of his lifelong engagement with the Indian Subcontinent's key modernist intellectual, Muhammad Iqbal. The first chapter is about Rahman's creative translation of an Iqbalian approach to the Qur'an. My second chapter is about Wadud, who is perhaps the most recognizable American interpreter of the Qur'an. I examine her gender-based interpretions of the Qur'an, expressed both in her writings and sermons. The third chapter examines the rhetoric of W. D. Mohammed (1933-2008), an African-American Muslim leader who transformed his father's Nation of Islam into an orthodox Sunni Muslim movement. I analyze his preaching as a part of a local African-American tradition influenced by the legacy of the Nation of Islam and African-American Christianity. Hamza Yusuf's preaching is the subject of the final chapter. Yusuf (1960-) is an example of "traditionalist" discourse, a relative newcomer on the American scene. He is now perhaps the most visible American Muslim preacher. His current prominence is due in part to his entry into the Muslim political discourse in the U.S. after September 11th, 2001. I explore how he uses the Qur'an as he teaches American Muslim participation in public life. Rahman, Wadud, Mohammed and Yusuf are public intellectuals, who have been engaged in cultural translation of the Qur'an with the purpose of instructing their audiences on how to understand themselves as Muslims in America. In this process, they have attempted to reshape local Muslim collective memory. How do they teach Muslims to remember the Qur‘an? I argue that they carry out a double translation in language and time: in addition to translating the Qur‘an into American idioms and 3 placing it within the framework of American cultural references, they also guide their readers and listeners across epistemological rifts between seventh-century Arabia and contemporary United States. The structure of the dissertation reflects the two most prominent ways in which such translation work is carried out: in writing and in speaking. What follows are detailed previews to the chapters that address written and oral ways of making Qur'anic sense. Translations in Writing and in Time A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life.3 Modern time has a peculiar outline. In his 1951 autobiography, Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov narrated his life as a spiral marked by a series of coincidences. Each coincidence signaled a new twist in the spiral. He called this a ―cosmic synchronization.‖ This gave the movement meaning. Yet, like many modern depictions of time, Nabokov‘s spiral reflects a movement in time that leaves the past behind and progresses to an ever-open future. Coincidences with the past are very meaningful, yet the future is never a repetition of the past. There is a telling, strikingly modern, echo of such a perception of time in the writings of Fazlur Rahman. In the United States, Rahman is best known by his book Major Themes of the Qur‟an, which was first published in 1980. 3 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage International,
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