Shariah and American Jazz

by Mahmoud Andrade Ibrahim

Several years ago I penned an essay entitled IT’S A JAZZ THING. The thrust of that piece was a partial lament about missed opportunities. It was about opportunities that had come knocking on doors that refused to open. It was about the manipulation of innocents by unscrupulous handlers, religious sheikhs and scholars, who trampled upon the good intentions of newly converted BlackAmerican Muslims, in order to gain wealth and prestige that they would have otherwise been unfit to shoulder.

In that essay, I used the BlackAmerican Classical art form, Jazz, as a metaphor for Islamic practice. Quite frequently in Jazz, the musicians take a standard composition and transforms this piece by changing the tempo or the key of music into a different key…placing some parts of the original sheet music into a different register and often placing accents on some notes that were left unaccented in the first place. Exploiting space and time intervals all the while being keen to improvise in order to exhibit creativity and a sense of ownership and, this is important, maintaining a clear relationship to the original musical composition. An example of this is the classic Rogers & Hammerstein composition of My Favorite Things, and the jazz rendition by John Coltrane.

The innocents, the newly converted BlackAmerican Muslims, were unaware that the dynamic nature of Islam, meaning, the fully energetic and explorative qualities of ‘Muslim inquiry’ had imploded, that is, destroyed itself by the middle of the 16th century. Islam’s curious personality that led the Muslims to explore the universe and be the beacons of knowledge in medicine and math and virtually all of the intellectual disciplines had been crushed internally by conservative religious scholars seeking to please their caliph’s ambitions.

What these new handlers didn’t tell us was that their predecessors, the classical sheikhs and scholars of Islam, were guilty of intellectual and scientific repression. They condoned book burnings, beheadings, inquisitions and torture in order to quell any perceived opposition to ‘orthodox’ religious and secular authority. Muslim philosophers and scientific truth seekers were branded apostates and persecuted. The Muslim Implosion dwarfed by 100 fold the European Inquisition. And yet, we the innocents, remained unaware of all this.

The darkness that was created by the decline in intellectual pursuit is what passes today as ‘religiosity’. The same Ash’ari ideas that were championed by prominent scholars such as al-Ghazali, imprisoned and stifled scientific and philosophic curiosity, and today passes itself off as a’qeedah in Sunni Islam. And it’s been this way in the Muslim world since at least 1492.

But we are here in America, in the 21st Century, we do not need to carry the baggage of a failed Muslim world into our practice. We have a blank blackboard on which to write our own practices. We are not locked into any ‘one school of thought’. We can cherry pick Islam’s Best Practices that fit our situation and discard the rest . And then if need be, rework some interpretations to fit our circumstances. This is what made Islam a dynamic force in the universe.

So for example, Imam al-Ghazali in his work, The Revival of Religious Sciences, says of a wife’s duty, “She is his slave, she should obey the husband absolutely in everything he demands of her.” Well, I ask you, is your wife a slave, are you grooming your daughters to become slaves ? Another Imam of that era suggests that women are like donkeys, void of intellectual abilities. This is the basis of many Shariah rulings, this misogynistic disposition should not be placed on our black board as this does not fall in line with the idea of justice described by the quote above by Imam Jawzziya as to what is shariah. Re-interpretation in this case is must. Remember Imam Jawzziya was the student of Imam Ibn Tamiyya. Imam Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya is the author of Zad-ul-Ma’ad fi Hadyi ( Provisions of the Hereafter ), he was a scholar of Fiqh, Tafsir and Aqeedah among other disciplines and his realization was that attitudes and customs contrary to the spirit of justice, mercy and good found itself into the body of rulings we call Shariah.

Another classical scholar, Ibn Rushd, was a scholar of Fiqh, jurisprudence, lingustics, mathematics and medicine, who also found time to destroy the anti-philosophical tract of al-Ghazali’s INCOHERENCE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS with his own, item by item refutation entitled THE INCOHERENCE OF THE INCOHERENCE. In the estimation of this extraordinary juristic genius, as it pertains to medieval Arab attitudes and customs that have leaked into the shariah, his opinion is that women are the absolute intellectual equals to men, only lacking in physical strength, and there is nothing in the text of the Qur’an to suggest that women could not be utilized in the affairs of state. An enlightened position, no doubt. One that should be on our black board. These ‘new’ particularly American positions will make up the characteristics of a reinvigorated contemporary Islamic practice.

I am convinced that this is the work for contemporary BlackAmerican Muslim Scholars, an equal number of men and women, not a few Imams. Scholars who are committed to the standard chords of Islam but willing to explore a change in tempo and perhaps playing these chords in a different register to suit the needs of an ever changing world.

While I believe that there are a few forward thinking BlackAmerican Imams, most of the ones that I know are busy trying to fit a real size 10 foot into a hypothetical size 3 shoe. In other words, trying to take our circumstances and make it fit into a model that existed 1300 yrs ago, and then complain that its tight.

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Addendum: Did you know that Islam has been in China for 1300 years and since the 1700’s there have been women only masjids, complete with women Imams that officiate the five daily prayers and the jummah prayer. These women imams are on salary by the muslim community. The masjids were the natural extension of a separation between the sexes observed by the Chinese muslims that began as schools for women and by the mid-1700’s morphed into full-blown women’s masjids. The American revolution had not even begun yet. This is how the Chinese took care of their own business !