對一本研究美國穆斯林專書的評論
It is an unexpected consolation that the Trump era, while
offering unusually severe levels of polarization, has also produced
fascinating, even groundbreaking writing on the difficulties of living in a
diverse, plural society. I believe that diversity is a good thing, but many
of my fellow Americans seem to disagree.
This diversity skepticism might be problematic in moral terms, but it is
not entirely unfounded. Early on in the new book Out of Many Faiths, the
Muslim interfaith leader Eboo Patel notes that “the higher the diversity,
the more people distrust their neighbors and the less they volunteer and give
to charity.” So, whether or not we like it, diversity has become a
“problem” that at the very least demands more creative ways of thinking and
acting. The central task of Patel’s book—and the three welcome commentaries
that accompany it—is to ask how we might move from mere diversity to a
deeper pluralism and to understand the role that religion can play in the
process. Diversity, Patel writes, “is simply a demographic fact; pluralism
is a hard-won achievement.”
In taking on the challenge of pluralism, Patel focuses on American
Muslims, since “the controversies swirling around Muslims are clearly the most
salient, and they raise the sharpest questions about America’s traditions,
values, and identity.” That 1 percent of the population should matter so
much for such foundational questions is itself interesting; it is also
something that the founders realized at the very start, with Thomas
Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin explicitly
addressing the question of Islam. Muslims—because they
seemed to offer the strongest contrast to Christianity (at the time) and,
relatedly, because they have been weaker in terms of political influence—are a,
and perhaps the, critical case for
the limits of toleration in today’s America.
In addition, focusing on one faith community allows us to consider the
positive role that religion has played and can continue to play in American
democratic life—a simple, basic notion that was long taken for granted but is
now questioned by many, if not most, on the left. It is difficult to imagine
the United States developing as it did into a participatory, civic society in
the absence of strong religious sentiment. As the political scientist Robert
Putnam argued in Bowling
Alone, “Faith communities in which people worship together
are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America.”
As various
studies suggest, including Putnam’s own work, Americans who
regularly attend religious services are significantly more likely to volunteer
for charity activities and secular causes alike.
How Muslims make their place in a changing America, then, isn’t just
about Muslims but about how to hold to the ideal of religious communities
making America great. It is also about challenging the spread
and normalization of Islamophobia. This rise in anti-Muslim bigotry has led
many to see this as the worst period yet
for American Muslims, exceeding even the immediate aftermath of the September
11 attacks. But looked at another way, Donald Trump has unwittingly
propelled Muslims into the cultural and political mainstream. According to polling by
my colleague Shibley Telhami, few things predict partisan affiliation more than
attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. In practice, this means that there are few
better ways to signal your anti-Trump bona fides than by being pro-Muslim. (川普時代 黨派立場高於對穆斯林的態度)
I watched, somewhat in awe, the images of citizens rallying around
American Muslims who protested Trump’s first travel ban by
praying at airport baggage claims in January 2017. Scenes
such as that would have been hard to imagine after 9/11. In Washington, DC,
where I live, various cafés and restaurants feature welcome signs at their
entrances with a picture of a woman wearing a headscarf. A new crop of Muslim
candidates are running and winning elections, including the first two Muslim
congresswomen in American history. A Muslim comic, Hasan Minhaj, headlined the
White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time in 2017. Meanwhile,
Muslim characters are showing up in prominent films and television shows,
including, perhaps most interestingly, a transgender,
observant Muslim in HBO’s Here
and Now.
Patel captures this mainstreaming of American Muslims in considerable
detail, and this alone makes the book a worthwhile primer on the
role Muslims are playing in a more plural America. To his credit, though, he
goes several steps further, capturing something many of us have observed but
only now are starting to fully appreciate: This cultural mainstreaming may
come at a cost, particularly for more conservative Muslims, who, like their
evangelical Christian and Orthodox Jewish counterparts, have tended to view
popular culture as corrupting.
The Muslim character in the first episode of Amazon’s The
Romanoffs, for example, is a practicing Muslim who wears the
hijab, or headscarf. She also finds herself in a steamy sexual entanglement
with an older, non-Muslim man, which builds to an amusing if somewhat ludicrous
conclusion. But it is Here and Now, with its Muslim, black, Asian, and gay
main characters, that seems to go out of its way to reflect a now dominant
intersectional reality among Democrats.
Are Muslims, then, different, or are they the same—“just” one among many
minority communities, each with their own secular grievances? This question is
weightier than it might seem. For conservative Muslims, Islam has
traditionally been defined not by identity, but by a particular set of beliefs
and the outward practice of the faith. However, if Muslims are
increasingly embraced on the left as a group notable primarily for its
marginalization, then this will have long-term secularizing effects. The
distinctive theological commitments that practicing Muslims bring to public
life will be diluted. They already are. The intermittent grumbling of
conservative Muslims over this shift has stayed largely under the radar, in
part because the most prominent American Muslims are either not
traditionalists or have chosen to deemphasize their traditionalism in the
interest of intersectional solidarity. (主流知名美國穆斯林有世俗化傾向 因為選擇與左派合作)
Then there are the growing number of Muslims who are what
Patel calls “social” Muslims—those who aren’t necessarily theologically
Muslim but still identify with aspects of Islamic culture and value their
own Muslim origins. In this way, Islam becomes more akin to an ethnicity
than a religion. One example is the actor and comedian Aziz Ansari, who
previously described himself as an atheist or
“not
religious.” However, more recently—with Ansari speaking out about
identity, Islamophobia, and his own
Muslim background—it feels as
if Ansari is Muslim, and Muslims have generally been more than happy to include
him in their ranks, theological commitments aside. As Patel notes, we may have
Trump to thank for this (or to blame depending on your perspective): “A
consequence of powerful outsiders attacking an identity is that people with
even the slimmest connection to that identity will feel offended, find that
once-small part of themselves growing in personal significance, then seek to
reconnect with that identity.” (美國的回族)
In short, Muslims are becoming more integrated, but they are becoming
more integrated within only one half of the country, the Democratic one. This
might be an improvement (for those who live in majority Democratic areas) but
it’s not exactly a solution. There may not be a “solution,” at least not a
conclusive one, to any of this, and perhaps this is why Patel is less
persuasive when he points to civil
religion as a path out of polarization. These more prescriptive
parts of the book suffer from the weaknesses of much interfaith discourse:
a falling back on aspirational rhetoric of “we”-ness; that we are more similar
than we are different; and that the good-heartedness of ordinary Americans will
somehow win the day, because it should, and if it should, it must. Patel takes
heart in the fact that the Christian tradition was nimble enough to incorporate
Jews, becoming “Judeo-Christian” in the process: Why shouldn’t the
Judeo-Christian tradition be able to continue a natural, and distinctly
American, evolution and broaden itself to include Muslims too?
In answering Patel’s question, the scholar of religion Robert Jones,
in one of the book’s three excellent commentaries, reminds us that it might be
different this time, in part because Muslims are different. First,
Muslims look different, and “the
acceptance of religious diversity has always been entangled with perceptions of
race.” A large
majority of American Muslims are Arab, Asian, or black, so
being accepted in the pantheon of whiteness is simply not an option for many. Second,
the idea of an American “melting pot” has always been dependent on the dominant
group—white Protestants and later White Christians—assimilating new groups on
the condition that these groups were willing to conform to the prevailing
culture. White Christians were willing to extend these benefits from a
position of both privilege and confidence. They couldn’t imagine that their
cultural and political dominance would soon be weakened. This ignorance of
their own future status allowed for a sort of paternal generosity.
White cultural decline—whether real, perceived, or both—has another
important implication: There is no longer a predominant culture for minorities
to assimilate into assuming they even wanted to. As Jones explains, “With fewer
and fewer goods exclusively reserved to be granted from white Christians in
power, religious minority groups are finding that the sacrifices assimilation
often involves are no longer worth it.”
In the second response to Patel, the political theorist John Inazu shares a similar pessimism
over the prospect of a common culture that might bring Americans together. “In
the face of less unity, I argue for reinforcing our differences,” writes Inazu.
“In one sense, this tension points to the tragic dimension of politics: despite
our yearnings for peace and unity, those elusive goals inevitably escape us in
this life.” This view of human nature—drawing on Christian notions of brokenness
and being fallen by sin—might be a dark one, but it is also liberating. The
fear of difference, on both left and right, has spread through the body
politic, but what if we came to see religious and political difference as
something to be accepted and even embraced? Freed from the desire, or need, to
search for sameness or similarity, Americans could come to terms with a new
reality and one that is likely to remain: that there isn’t a common good to
be found; that, because we believe strongly in different things from
different premises, politics will be inherently
conflictual; that there isn’t necessarily a resolution to political
divides. If we come to terms with this, then we can better resist the urge to
impose our own preferences on others. (「大家」本來就是不同)
This is a pluralism
that is modest, and one might argue that pluralism, in any form, is impossible
without humility about what can be achieved in this world and in this life. As
the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper put it, “Nothing should be forced and
nothing united which is not organically one.” One of his intellectual heirs,
the American theologian Matthew Kaemingk, has updated Kuyper’s “Christian pluralism”
for modern politics in an important new
work, writing that “ideological fragmentation and division is
simply the reality of life lived after the fall into sin.” Meanwhile, the
scholar of Asian religions Laurie Patton, in the book’s third commentary,
writes of a “pragmatic pluralism,” which she defines as when “one religion
needs another tradition to be itself.” This is part of what makes the
American experience of religion—and the American experience of
Islam—exceptional. My engagement with Kaemingk, for example, has deepened my
understanding of Islam’s own pluralistic precedents. While I
cannot always fully grasp their complexity and power, the Christian concepts of
brokenness and sin and grace have given me a language I didn’t know I had to
speak about conflict, pluralism, and diversity in American life. I can’t say
that learning about Christian theology has made me a “better” Muslim; but it
has, I think, made me a better American. This is a blessing.
沒有留言:
張貼留言