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Permalink Why We Can't Expect Consistency from ClericsBy G. Willow Wilson When I interviewed Sheikh Ali Gomaa in the fall of 2004, he seemed primed to become one of the great pragmatist leaders of modern Islam. Intelligent, blunt and keenly aware of the way information can be dishonestly predigested to support an agenda, he was far less rhetorical and far more practical than is fashionable among twenty-first century shayukh. He had held his state-appointed post as Grand Mufti of Egypt for less than a year, but in that time he had managed to overcome the suspicions of the Arab capitals ultra-conservative imams and enjoyed widespread popularity. He was one of the onlyand certainly the most powerfulmainstream Sunni clerics to support the Amina Wadud prayer. A year later, things had changed: when I ran into him at a social function, he was cynical and removed, disinterested in further discourse with the West, having been burned by a European paper that printed a skewed version of a fatwa he had issued about the practice of yoga. Today, his popularity is waning: after issuing a controversial legal opinion on Egyptian state television, in which he stated that protests and demonstrations against a politically confirmed leader are un-Islamic, some see him as a cats-paw of the Mubarak regime. In response, he has run to the right, issuing several fatwas at odds with his relatively enlightened views about women.
Gomaa is far from the only Muslim cleric whose public remarks have been ideologically erratic. Former Egyptian Grand Mufti Mohammad Es-sayyid El Tantawy, who famously confirmed the Islamic legality of sex-reassignment surgery in the late 1980s, has also made statements supporting jihad against Israeli civilians; Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran wrote Sufi poetry before launching his career as a despot. Modern clerics, it seems, cannot be relied upon to provide ideologically consistent legal opinions from year to year and even from week to week. The reasons why are complex, and if sustainable change is to occur in modern Islam, understanding them is vital.
Clerics, especially state-appointed clerics (all of whom run the risk of appearing illegitimate in the eyes of the disenfranchised public) live and die by public approval. Unlike Catholic bishops, Tantric lamas and Jewish rabbis, Muslim clerics do not have to undergo any specific training or be anointed by any specific authority to obtain their position; sheikh, in many countries, is simply a title of respect. In poorer areas of
Thus, ambitious shayukh must constantly cater to the street in order to advance their influence. At the same time, they must balance the expectations of local governments that are often hostile to religious figures with public influence. And they must always be aware of the power of the western press--too little sympathy from that quarter and they run the risk of western intrusion into local politics; too much sympathy will ruin their credibility in the eyes of Muslims who view the western media with suspicion. Modern clerics play an ongoing and dangerous game; few have the luxury of speaking their minds allor even mostof the time.
This effectively means that movement toward a practical, tolerant and socially responsible vision of modern Islam must begin with ordinary Muslims. Modern Islam suffers from the handicap of an informal democracy; its leaders are beholden to popular opinion, and typically reflect the values of only the most vocal, organized and persuasive segment of the societies they represent, with an occasional hat-tip to the opposition. Today, that most influential segment is the ultra-conservative bloc. To produce and sustain shayukh who will champion a vision of Islam suitable for a truly global era, forward-thinking Muslims must be more vocal, more organized and more persuasive than their ultra-conservative counterparts. It is not to the clerics, but to ourselves that we must look for progress; if we do so, the clerics must and will follow.
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Tags: Politics, Islam, mullahs (all tags) Why We Can't Expect Consistency from Clerics | 15 comments (15 topical, 0 hidden) Why We Can't Expect Consistency from Clerics | 15 comments (15 topical, 0 hidden)
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