ABSTRACT
I write this chapter under the bright light of a single shining star – the
memory of Malcolm X and his dazzling flash of memorial insight into our collective predicament – not just as Muslims, or Americans, but for the
historically disenfranchised and the defiantly determined peoples around the
globe, and all of that from a decidedly Muslim perspective. To pave my way
to this point, my principal concern in the previous chapter was for us to see
through the false binaries – such as the Sunni-Shi’i divide – that have suc-
ceeded that of ‘‘Islam and the West’’ and continue to maim and mark the
terms of a new revolutionary dispensation in which Islam (re-imagined) will
have a positive role to play. Today Islam – in its global public perceptions – has been effectively degenerated into a whimsical plaything between Bush
and Bin Laden, Blair and Berlusconi, Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi, Irshad
Manji and Ibn Warraq – defining the terms of an ancient civilization and
the pieties that define millions of human beings around the globe. Islam
though at the very same time is also a freed and emancipated signifier (a
moment that we should happily embrace and celebrate) – waiting to be
renamed, reclaimed, resignified, placed squarely at the service of a legit-
imate resistance to an illegitimate imperial disposition that uses and abuses native informers and their white supremacist employers alike. Today, Islam
has been narratively placed outside the world, in the contested rhetorical
domain of the American neoconservatives and their terrorist cohorts –
Bernard Lewis and Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi are the mirror image of each
other, as are Osama bin Laden and Hirsi Ali. Islam though at the very same
time is also the emerging sign of a Muslim participation in a global strug-
gle – from Asia to Africa to Latin America to the very heart of the US and
Europe – that will have to abandon all its absolute and absolutist terms of
self-righteous assertions if it is to reach for a more open-ended and cosmo-
politan conception of itself, of the very foundation of any religion, any
culture, any claim to worldly reason and social justice.
