reform

I am a cultural imperialist. Yes, I am. No, I won't get tangled in webs of deconstructionist doubt. Change needs to happen, but how? Such things as fearing women's voices, disregarding women's desires and so on are all deeply ingrained in the culture. So is a seeming disregard for cause and effect: refuse to work against extremism = being blamed for standing by. Yet how can we convince others to change?

We agree that such cultural attitudes are disfunctional at best and morally wrong and sinful at worst. But, lately I've been approaching the problem as one of cultural engineering and social change: what strategies and tactics can we devise and perform to effect cultural change? Female led prayer is one such tactic, but what is the overall strategy and what other tools do we have at our disposal? This web site and others which write sanely about our insanities is a good start, but writing and speaking (categories of communiticaing) only go so far. The Prophet preached but he also performed. Last week I learned about a concept in anthropology called performativity, which means that Muslim identity is what we do and what we agree to say it is. It took a while to wrap my head around that one because it sounds far too much like the Quranic quoting of how God creates, "Be! and it Is" (kun fa-yakun). But, apparently this is how human minds construct culture.

This is mostly a response to some items in my past post's comments. Its too long to stay there, so here it is...keep in mind I prioritize by proximity and by the expected success of my efforts.

Center, I think you're living in the past, basking in ancient glories. Your understanding of a9azza is certainly interesting; framing it in terms of the modern humanistic ideal of fulfilling one's potential is novel. I will tell you that I get a distinctly opposite impression from when people say it in our era. I have no idea what was in peoples' hearts when they said that hundreds of years ago. I do know that phrases can carry different meanings over time and that people commonly back-ascribe motives to past persons and customs. Thus, I understand its current meaning to be triumphalist and supremacist. For example, what else can it possibly mean when its most often used in conjunction with "fee afghanistan, fee l-9iraq, fee [insert victimized country here] ..."? The fact that it has most often reached my ears combined with places where Muslims and non-Muslims are in conflict leaves me with few other conclusions. This kind of apologetics may work with unsuspecting non-Muslims, but it won't work with me, niether will revisionist Muslim histories.