c. 1997 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ South African Muslim theologian Farid Esack listened intently last month as his good friend retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission responsible for investigating human rights abuses committed during apartheid.
The archbishop apologized in the name of Christianity for the discrimination non-Christians suffered. But Esack’s eyes were fixed on the cross above the purple-robed cleric and the Christians who sat beside him.”I said, `Father, the past is not the past,'”Esack said. “The past is right above your head with this huge crucifix.” No one religious perspective on forgiveness should dominate the proceedings, Esack contended. So he called for the “de-Desmond-Tutu-fication” of the truth commission.
At a time when Muslim fundamentalists dominate the news, Farid Esack is part of a new generation of progressive Muslim theologians. At 38, he has been a proponent of pluralism for more than two decades in a country that weans its activists young.
He’s best known for his no-holds barred critiques of Muslim practices he considers unjust, such as using the Koran to legitimize illegal governments. And his record on women’s issues earned him a full-time position on the South African Commission on Gender Equality _ one of two Muslims and the only man.
To his detractors he might as well be Unitarian.
“Esack has become closer to the New Testament than the Koran,” according to Muslim author Abdul Hakim Murad. And at least one South African Muslim organization protested the truth commission’s choice of Esack to represent Muslims on the grounds he wasn’t a Muslim.
Supporters, however, say his theology is an authentically Islamic alternative to fundamentalism offering a radical challenge to people of all faiths.
“Farid brought the Muslim voice to the apartheid struggle,” said Ebrahim Moosa, director of the University of Cape Town’s Center for Contemporary Islam,and now he’s “trying to deal with critical issues Muslims face at the end of the 20th century: women, pluralism … what is the meaning of jihad?”
His progressive ideas, Moosa said, “are part of a growing trend in the Muslim world.”
During the November meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago, Esack discussed his life and theology with the effusiveness of a man who loves to talk and the weariness of a man who remembers too much. One moment he laughed with boyish exuberance as he recalled a recent reunion between the Dali Lama and Tutu. “They were holding each other and the one was lifting the other!”
The next moment he seemed a far older man recounting his losses in the colored township on the flatlands of Cape Town.
“Our family was forcibly moved under the Group Areas Act,’ he wrote in his new book,”Qur’an Liberation & Pluralism.””My father abandoned my mother when I was 3 weeks old, and my mother was left with six sons.” Working in a factory from “can’t see to can’t see,” his mother died at age 56 on the factory floor.
Religion was his way of coping. “I was madly religious in school,” he said. “I prayed during lunchtime in the classroom.” While other children joined street gangs, at age 9 he joined “a religious gang,” an Islamic revivalist movement. If he called people to Islam, he reasoned, God would save South Africa. “That was my cheap kind of logic, but as a kid it worked.”
At 12, he became part of a movement for non-racial education, which led to his first arrest. Two years later, he sequestered himself in a Muslim seminary in Pakistan. “It was absolute hell,” he recalls. “The place was so cold, like an 18th-century Catholic seminary. Everything was about penance and self-hatred.”
Life outside was little better. “I saw Muslim women being treated exactly like the blacks were treated in South Africa, and dark-skinned Christians denied drinking water at the taps of Muslims,” he said. Against his teachers’ wishes, he joined a group of young Christians teaching street sweepers how to read.
“I was crying my guts out,” he said “for God’s intervention in the world.”
He returned to South Africa in 1984 to become principal of a theological seminary, but politics intruded again. The government was instituting a tricameral parliament with houses for whites, colored and Indians.
“This was an historic attempt,” said Esack,“to co-opt coloreds and Indians and alienate them from the black majority. I said, `I’m sorry Farid, you cannot be sitting in a seminary.’ I left my post and went to Cape Town.”
The following summer, he and four friends founded the Call of Islam, an affiliate of the United Democratic Front. The Call would become the most active Muslim movement mobilizing against apartheid, gender inequality and environmental degradation. In August 1984, Esack was among 19 religious leaders arrested for ignoring a ban on entry to a black township. In their common cell, he wrote, “We experienced dialogue between religions on the highest plane.”
Many traditional Muslims in South Africa saw Esack as “a dangerous gadfly,” noted Murad. They objected to both the intermingling of the sexes and the “sinfulness of interfaith solidarity” in the anti-apartheid movement, according to a local newspaper. But young people, said Moosa, flocked to the youthful mullah who discussed a theology of liberation in terms they could understand. The point, Esack said, was to “place the concerns of those who hurt at the center of our thinking about God (and) how we interpret our religious texts.” God chooses sides, he said, “not just with those who utter the correct words, but with those whose hearts are broken.”
The movement had its roots in Latin American liberation theology and the Catholic bishops’ now famous “preferential option for the poor.” But while “the Christian liberation theologians’ tools were the personality of Jesus Christ and the Bible,” Esack said, the Muslim’s tools “were the Koran and the life of Muhammad.” Esack pointed to Koranic verses on justice, but like other progressive theologians, he rejected a literalist interpretation.
Readers, he said, bring their own “baggage” when interpreting texts. And passages on such subjects as women’s roles have to be understood in the cultural context in which they were written.
Ultimately, he said, the liberation theologian is less interested in finding the “correct” meaning of the text “than reading the Koran from the point of view of the suffering,” be they Muslim or Christian.
“When you end up in jail for resisting, they don’t ask who is Muslim and who is Christian,” he said “There is something fundamentally wrong with your theology if you cannot understand that you cannot appropriate God for yourself and your group only.”
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The Islamic jihad, a holy struggle to defend Muslim faith, also required a radical rethinking. It was not, he said, merely an act of self-defense.
“Jihad is today any comprehensive struggle against all forms of injustice. I think when your rights are trampled on, when you cannot live in full dignity, you are under obligation to engage in jihad. In South Africa, we talk about gender jihad. It’s a sacred struggle.”
He hesitated when asked if he condones violence.
“In the South African context,” he said, “I was one of the people who consistently argued for the right of South Africans to resort to armed struggle. At the same time, I’ve seen how the armed struggle and the ready use of legitimate violence dehumanized us. I have seen the price we have paid in terms of the dreadful cheapening of lives, the rise of crime in South Africa and the lack of respect for human rights. We legitimated the armed struggle and I think we have to own responsibility for it.”
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Esack left South Africa in 1990 to study for a doctorate in Koranic theology at the University of Birmingham in England. And when he returned to his country, he found that many people had no interest in post-apartheid liberation struggles.
Still, adherents of a progressive Muslim theology are emerging in such countries as Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United States, where young Muslim intellectuals and feminists are looking for a way to reconcile their faith and politics.
Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is among those who believe progressive theologies like Esack’s will gain more ground.
“I think the impact will be very great in the future,” she said. “At the moment, the Muslim majority is in a reactive state, but Islam has the capacity to evolve.”
MJP END LIEBLICH
