Muslims and Liberals

Council for Research in Values and Philosophy
Chapter XV in the 1996 publication entitled: ‘Civil Society and Social Reconstruction‘

Two-thirds of America’s 5 million Muslims have immigrated from Third World countries during the last three decades. Some American scholars and journalists are concerned that the “Islamic wave” augurs a “culture clash” in this “Judeo-Christian society.”¹ Muslims, like other waves of immigrants, doubtless will have their share of adjustment problems in America. But like most others they also are contributing to the well-being of American society. In this paper, I propose to examine the Muslim role in an important task that is increasingly drawing many Americans’ attention: the moral regeneration of society.

The chapter begins by focusing on some of the cultural values that Muslims bring to this society. Then it examines the social and economic crisis liberalism has spawned in America and the world. Finally, it argues that Islamic values help overcome this crisis by bolstering an inchoate American movement to reinforce a moral, communal lifestyle.

Islamic Cultural Values

Muslim immigrants are not easily excited over racial issues, but resent slurs against their faith. Race has not played a major role in their history. We have not suffered race-based slavery, segregation, apartheid or holocaust. We have had religious feuds and warfare and are sensitive, or even defensive, about our faith. But more pertinently, Muslims have theologically and historically been color-blind.

The community originated in the town of Medina, in today’s Saudi Arabia, as an amalgam of nomadic and settled Muslims of different tribes and regions. Muhammad united them into a powerful social and military force under the concept that “faith replaced blood as the social bond.”² Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and his immediate successors as head of the 7th century Islamic polity set the example of a multiracial community by freeing African slaves and appointing some of them to positions of authority. Later on former slaves formed ruling dynasties in Egypt and India.

Communal brotherhood is a basic Islamic tenet. For all their ethnic and cultural differences, Muslims are enjoined to consider themselves “close to one another” as though they “form one body.” They are told to support one another and “be responsible for one another” in their joys and sorrows; charity for one’s kin and community has been emphasized over and over in Islamic scripture.³

The Muslim concept of the individual and of communal solidarity is profoundly influenced by a seminal Islamic doctrine about the purpose of life and man’s relationship with the transcendent. God, according to the Quran, created man as his “viceregent on Earth,” to take care of the creation and to answer directly and individually to the Creator for his deeds.⁴ Man is an autonomous being, superior to all others and even the angels, but he is required by the Creator to conduct himself according to moral principles. The Muslim never felt the need for liberation from a church hierarchy. Islam does not have a priesthood. All Muslims are of equal status in the eyes of God. Hence conceptually, they are a classless community of equals tied by a common bond of brotherhood.

Communal solidarity, too, provided the impetus for territorial and cultural expansion during the Muslim imperial age. The Muslim was then proud to identify himself as a Muslim (rather than a Meccan, Yemeni or Syrian). Ever since Muslim lands came under colonial occupation, Islam became the mobilizing force against foreign rule. Today it is a rallying cry against repressive autocracies and the foreign powers that support them.

Empire building, defense against colonialism, struggle against autocracies and their foreign collaborators are all noble enterprises. Hence, the Muslim feels proud to identify himself with Islam in the name of which he undertakes such efforts. No wonder that the most inveterate opponents of Muslim dictatorships today are the so-called “Islamic fundamentalists.” Ernest Gellner observed that among many of today’s young Muslim women:

Contrary to what outsiders generally suppose, the typical Muslim woman in a Muslim city doesn’t wear the veil because her grandmother did so, but because her grandmother did not. . . . The granddaughter is celebrating the fact that she has joined her grandmother’s betters. . . .⁵

Except for Arabs, who make up a fifth of the world’s nearly billion Muslims, Muslims in most other one countries are at least bi-racial. The bond of faith holds them together in communities. It has not, of course, stopped them from occasional internecine bloodletting. Yet the concept of an egalitarian, multiethnic community has been an effective force in Muslim struggles against social inequities and political tyranny. It has been the most powerful force behind the spread of Islam, especially among the socially estranged and economically disadvantaged.

In the Indian subcontinent, for example, Islam is the only religion that has gained and retained a large body of converts from Hindus, most of them from the lower castes that were excluded from the Hindu social mainstream. A similar phenomenon is happening in the United States today. Each year an average of 12,000 Americans convert to Islam (while more than 90,000 other Muslims immigrate to the United States).⁶ The overwhelming majority of the converts are African Americans from the lower economic and social strata.

Like their co-religionists in the subcontinent, many American converts to Islam see their new faith as a refuge from social alienation. Most cite Islamic concepts of community, brotherhood, equality and social justice as reasons for their change of faith while, of course, expressing their belief that Islam is God’s true religion.

Before his conversion to Islam, Talib Abdullah of Hagerstown, Maryland, was “fascinated as [he saw] Egyptians, Saudis, Blacks, Pakistanis, Indonesians—all praying together shoulder to shoulder” at a mosque in New York. “The simple, straightforward message,” said Abdullah, an African American who leads prayers at mosques, “that there is one God, no Trinity . . . and equality, brotherhood and justice, all this make a powerful appeal. Most of all, what especially appeals to African Americans is [that] there is no racism in Islam.” Abdullah spent nine years in Saudi Arabia studying Islam and Saudi society. He complained that many overseas and immigrant Muslims do not live up to the Islamic tenets of equality and brotherhood. That, he said, reflects on them, not on Islam.⁷

Many view the Islamic communal support system as a vehicle to put their lives in order. Typically, Sam Bennett, an African American in his late 20s, had made several unsuccessful attempts to give up drugs. Then he came in contact with a group of converted Muslims. Some of them had troubles with the law but were now living “decent lives.” What impressed Bennett most about these new Muslims was that “they stick together, spend time together, support each other. . . . If one is sick everybody visits him.” Bennett realized that he needs “that kind of support.” Group solidarity did not exist among the “people I used to hang out with.”⁸

Group solidarity is an element of civil society. The term has been given a variety of definitions. Generally, it refers to the social and economic arena that humans share with fellow humans outside the direct control of the state. It includes social institutions such as markets, voluntary associations and a public sphere.9 The idea is as old as Aristotle’s civil society, koinonia politike.¹⁰ In plain language, Aristotle referred to voluntary group activity in a political community, which the chapter of George F. McLean aptly terms free human group interaction in public space in “righteous harmony.”11 In modern usage civil society is a feature of secular democracy. The ends of civil society remain the same as conceived by Aristotle, namely voluntary interaction among—and between—groups within a polity. But in today’s Western conception of the term, such institutions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Cuba would not qualify as part of civil society, for citizens’ public activities are not supposed to reflect the exercise of their free will There governments control much of the public sphere, whereas freedom is a seminal ingredient of modern civil society.

The Liberal Crisis

The concept of freedom, as understood in the West, is traceable to the 16th century Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Enlightenment. The Reformation “freed” the Christian individual from the jurisdiction of the Catholic ecclesiastical order, making the individual directly accountable to God. Martin Luther’s Reformation was reinterpreted by John Calvin to mean that while man cannot attain salvation except by performing God’s will, his performance does not guarantee his salvation: God already has predetermined whom he will save. There are signs, the argument went, which could help identify those chosen to be saved: they will be seen constantly doing good deeds and resisting the devil’s temptation toward evil-doing and pleasure seeking. Because the Protestant could never be sure of God’s will, good works and austerity became his mission in life. Thus industry and frugality turned out to be the hallmarks of Calvinist Puritanism.

Lutheran-Calvinist individualism was given a further interpretation by the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophers proclaimed that the individual does not need to attend to God or Scripture for instructions about good works, but can identify the good and the moral through reasoning. Morality, declared Immanuel Kant, calls for obedience to a universal law dictated by human reason. Hence, Kant construed individual freedom in a universal moral context. He even said, “It is morally necessary to believe in the existence of God” as the highest good, the fountain of a moral order.¹²

But another line of Enlightenment thinkers gave the idea of individual freedom the mother of all twists, turning the whole Protestant moral paradigm upside down. This school—identified by such terms as liberals, rationalists and humanists—has transformed our world more profoundly than any other since the Athenian philosophical school. The liberals, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Herder, Victor Hugo, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine and others did not have any use for the transcendent or for universal morality in the human perception of the good; on its own human reason can judge what it is good. Thus liberalism shifted “the entire basis of society . . . from obligations to rights and from community to individual.”

Theocentrism disappeared; in its place was substituted anthropocentric humanism, the belief that the individual human being is the measure of all things.¹³

Modern capitalist market economy is the product of this “anthropocentric humanism.” The individual now does not need a heaven to attain fulfillment; he can fulfill his life here on earth. Accordingly, the American Constitution substituted “pursuit of happiness” for that of the meaning of life. The market economy created by the workaholic, frugal Protestant is uniquely suited for the creation of the liberal’s heaven on earth, filled with material goods for the pleasure of the flesh.

Although liberalism has been the outcome of the European Enlightenment, consumerism is quintessentially an American phenomenon. As noted, European Enlightenment thinkers who identified the individual’s reasoning with “natural law” viewed the individual as part of a universal moral order. Some, of course, did not draw such a link, but their view was not reflected in any of the European political or social systems.

Rugged Individualism

It is in America that the individual was institutionally dissociated from a universal moral order. This was done in a two-pronged process. First, the country was envisioned by Puritans as well as some of the framers of the Constitution as a new “Holy Community” liberated from the corrupt Old World. Benjamin Franklin wanted to have the Great Seal of the United States bear the image of Moses crossing the Red Sea with the Israelites. Thomas Jefferson preferred the symbol of Israelites lumbering through the wilderness to the Holy Land. The American in this Holy Land, though “invested with a strong moral dimension,” was considered divorced from the “universal principles of the Enlightenment” espoused in the old sinful world.¹⁴

Not surprisingly, the political system “of the people, by the people, for the people” essentially asks Americans to “respect the self-created authority and the self-created law.”¹⁵ The law has become the substitute for morality, the glue that binds man to man in civil society. Hence America’s “rugged individual,” among the most broadminded and tolerant in the world, generally has lukewarm interest in kindred, in social and communal relationships. This peculiar American individualism also defined Americans’ approach to religions. President Dwight Eisenhower expressed it best:

Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what that is.¹⁶

The American’s religion, as a purely personal matter, usually does not evoke a feeling of fellowship for his co-religionists as it does in the believer of many other faiths. The freedom of the “rugged individual,” guaranteed by his “self-created laws” and suited to his religious disposition, is not conducive for intergroup and intragroup relationships—the hallmark of civil society. It is these relationships that give the free individual a context, make his life part of an orchestra of meanings rather than an irrelevant, solitary monotone.

American liberalism which has created the consumer, also has created the capitalist to cater to the former’s needs. The Protestant work ethic valued hard work and frugality—in other words, accumulation of capital and its productive use. In fact, the Puritans believed they had a covenant with God and their productive enterprise was sanctioned by him. In contrast the liberal philosophy, coupled with the Protestant work ethic, propelled Americans into a binge of production that has made the nation an economic and military superpower. Production and exchange in this economic order is regulated by the rules of market economy: maximizing profit by minimizing prices and maximizing output. Adam Smith, the prophet of this market economic system, argued that it would achieve maximum social good, which he defined as the aggregate of individual self-interests of its
members. Such a system, according to him, would benefit even the economically disadvantaged because scarcity throughout society would be overcome by surplus.

The Smithian market economy also has made economic powerhouses out of some of the smaller North Atlantic and East Asian nations. Generations of men and women have enjoyed material comforts that their forebears could hardly imagine. With the collapse of the communist command economic model, the rest of the world, too, is lurching toward the market economy. Internet and World Wide Web are spearheading a communications revolution moving this stampede into still higher gear.

But at what cost?
And to what end?

Consumerism

Adam Smith reminds me of the estate manager of my 19th century ancestor in the Indian state of Assam. The manager’s family dealt in opium and got my fun-loving ancestor to try opium until he became addicted. Then the manager began to supply him with abundant quantities of opium at high prices from his family shop. Under an arrangement the manager worked out with his family, my ancestor would pay his opium bills in periodic installments clearing up the arrears at the end of each Bengali year. At year ends, my ancestor’s unpaid opium bills would far exceed his cash savings. On the manager’s advice, he would sign off a chunk of his estate to clear up the arrears. Once a reputable man in public life, my ancestor now spent much of his time in stupor and isolation. Years later when my ancestor’s son returned home after completing his studies at a religious school, he was aghast. His father was nearly broke, having transferred most of his estate to the manager’s family. The son chased away the manager and took charge of the remainder of
the estate—and his old father.

Most of the goods that modern industry is churning out in their endless varieties— automobiles, television sets, video cameras, lawn mowers, automobiles, frozen foods, cosmetics, paper products and so on—are not essential for a healthy life. But modern man is hooked on them as my ancestor had been on opium. The price people have been paying for this unbridled economic expansion has been prohibitive.

The capitalistic orgy of production and the market economic distribution system are based on the assumption that Earth’s resources are inexhaustible. The assumption appeared to be holding for several centuries because the New World was new and bountiful, and it encouraged the notion that “the sky is the limit” for capitalist expansion. “Nothing seemed unattainable—” as one observer captures the mood, “even the moon, on which American astronauts set foot in the summer of 1969.”¹⁷ Besides, industrialized Europe had agrarian colonies that supplied its industries with raw materials and served as captive markets for its finished products.

Today the “sky-is-the-limit” assumption no longer holds. As the decolonized world begins to industrialize and the New World approaches the limits of its resource base, industry and commerce have begun to yield diminishing returns. The manufacturing bases of industrial societies are shrinking fast to make room for expanding service sectors. In 1900 the American service sector accounted for 30 percent of the American work force; by the 1980s it employed 70 percent.¹⁸ The industrial assault on resources and the environment has been accelerated in recent decades. At the present rate of the exploitation of resources, by 2050 the United States will have run out of “all extractable quantities” of tin, commercial asbestos, columbium, fluorspar, high grade phosphorus and many other mineral resources.¹⁹

Meanwhile, “pursuit-of-happiness” is fast replacing with consumerism the traditional Protestant frugality—and the habit of saving. The shift from a manufacturing to service economy and the preponderance of consumption over saving have increased Americans’ dependence on larger financial and government institutions: government-secured mortgage loans, credits from banks, Montgomery Wards, Sears, AT&T, auto companies, and so on.

Like the resources and environment, many social institutions, including those of civil society, have fallen prey to the forces of capitalist economy. The capitalist division of labor has wiped out many traditional social institutions. Its effect has been catastrophic on the family, the most important of all:

The universal marketplace has taken over functions and prerogatives long held by the family. Both the private and public (government) service sectors have increasingly expropriated even the most private parts of family life onto themselves. If a family member is facing emotional problems, he or she is immediately sent to a professional psychologist. If the parents’ sexual life is not what it could be, they are encouraged to seek “professional” help and instruction. If a child wants to learn tennis, he is signed up for instruction at a professional sports clinic. Parents are no longer guides or instructors. They are merely monitors in the home. Their job is to keep tabs on potential need areas and then locate the right kind of service in the marketplace or government to deal with them. . . . A recent survey asked three-year-old children whom they liked best, Daddy or TV? Forty percent answered TV.”²⁰

American divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birthrates are the world’s highest. The Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis and Zonta clubs are little more than momentary refuge for the overworked, divorced and unemployed.

Industrial Onslaught

The effects of the unbridled exploitation of resources and the scramble for material goods have been at least as severe in the rest of the world. Cropland, pastures, fisheries and forests are becoming scarce all over the surface of the Earth. Between 1600 and 1950 an average of one animal species was dying out every decade. By 1980 one species died every hour. By the year 2000, about one of every six animal and plant species will have disappear from Earth.²¹

I nurture many fond memories of the Pakistan city of Karachi. It is Pakistan’s business capital and the abode of some of Asia’s wealthiest families. Residents of Washington’s Georgetown area would envy those living in Karachi’s posh residential districts where my friends and I used to enjoy strolling on summer nights along spacious boulevards savoring the cool Arabian Sea breeze. Today, residents of those districts, like many Washingtonians, have stopped their nightly strolls. The more prosperous among them have private security guards to protect their furnishings, computers, fax machines and VCRs from looters. Murder, robbery, mugging and other violent crimes have proliferated in Karachi at almost the same rate as in the U.S. capital.

Two things have roughened Karachi’s once agreeable social life. First, the city’s population has increased from 400,000 in 1947 to more than nine million, creating a frantic struggle for resources and opportunities for living. Secondly, the struggle has been heightened since Pakistan made a transition from a mixed to a free market economy. This created a new breed of conspicuously consuming, often unscrupulous, nouveaux riches who excite the jealousy of those languishing in the lower economic echelons. The anarchy that has gripped Karachi fits the thesis that unrest in industrializing societies is caused not so much by poverty, as by relative poverty accentuated by the modernization process. Some sociological researchers warn that we are approaching an “age of anarchy . . . more in states that are experiencing unprecedented economic growth than economic decline.”²²

Parts of the Middle East and Africa seem especially prone to the Karachi syndrome. In much of the Middle East, unemployment is above 20 percent and rising, while populations continue to explode at the rate of three percent or more. The situation is expected to worsen as modernization picks up and more and more rural youth stream to urban shantytowns in pursuit of material prosperity. By the year 2000, more than 40 percent of North African youth will remain unemployed.²³ The age of anarchy, if it comes, will be a gift of liberalism and the capitalist market economy.

The liberal mind alone is not to blame for this frightful omen. Fertile flesh is equally responsible for it. The human population took two million years to reach the first billion mark. The second billion came in just 100 years. In the next 30 years—between 1930 and 1960—we had the third billion. The fourth billion was added in just 15 years, by 1975. The growth rate has since slowed a bit, but hardly enough to avert catastrophes unless humanity changes its ways. Our planet is now buzzing with a population of nearly six billion, and is expected to reach the eight billion mark in the next 15 years.²⁴

Islamic Values and the American Crisis

Humankind is fast losing the Earth’s resources in order to pay for the goods from the Smithian economic model. Moreover, we are losing ourselves in the process: Many of the values that make life meaningful—close family ties, friendships, voluntary group activities, leisure and reflection, and, yes, spiritual pursuits—have been sacrificed in the relentless stampede for material goods. The drug culture in zones of urban blight and the rapacity in the corporate headquarters are but two forms of the Smithian “pursuit of happiness.” Can human life be put back together again? Can society restore Koinoiaor moral harmony to help humankind use their freedom to make life more fulfilling?

Hindus have a goddess named Lakshmi to bring them prosperity. In olden days when they did her due homage, India was one of the world’s most bountiful lands. As Hindus became indifferent to the goddess, harder times befell it. Today, India’s per capita income of $500 is one of the world’s lowest. Yet the Indian social mainstream retains its vibrant cultural rhythm set in motion nearly half a millennium before nomadic Israelites, under David and Solomon, began trying to make the transition to a settled, agrarian culture. This is because, the Hindus could argue, India is also blest with Lakshmi’s husband,Vishnu, the Preserver god, to keep a vigilant watch:

He watches from the skies, and whenever he sees values threatened or the good in peril, he exerts all his preservative influence on their behalf.²⁵

The Abrahamic traditions do not have the equivalent of a Vishnu to preserve the values underpinning society when it is periled by the sins of the Enlightenment prophets. But the children of Abraham—Jews, Christians and Muslims—have abundant social glue in their own traditions.

Judaism began as a tribal religion and the Jews have stood unswervingly by one another during exile, pogroms, the Holocaust and lately in their confrontation with the Arab world. “Love thy neighbor” is the heart of Jesus’ message. Its unique social import lies in the fact that “the love Jesus proposed . . . is to be absolutely free, geared entirely to our neighbor’s needs, not his due.”²⁶

Islam accepts the essentials of the Torah and the Gospels; Muhammad emerged as a reformer of those two earlier Abrahamic traditions. In fact, American Muslim scholar Ali Mazrui terms Islam “the first Protestant revolution.”²⁷ The Islamic concepts of community, brotherhood and charity, praised by the converts to the faith quoted above, are variations of Judeo-Christian precepts.

Apparently, liberalism and the market economy have had a lot to do with the erosion of th communitarian Abrahamic values in America and the West. Liberalism appears to have had a much greater effect on Christian societies than on Jewish or Muslim ones. The Muslim world has been away from the theater of the Enlightenment and, for most of its history, hostile to the nations that participated in it. One may cite this as the reason for Muslims being less affected by the Enlightenment’s mischiefs (consumerism, erosion of communal relationships and values, damage to the environment) and blessings (freedom, democracy, scientific and technological advances). It is argued the relatively stronger community bonds among Muslims are little more than a feature of a premodern lifestyle.

But the Ashkenazi Jews were all over Europe since long before the Enlightenment, and especially the German Jews have become secularized and modernized under its impact. In the United States, beginning in the early 19th century, Jews have made it an individual and communal goal to accommodate American society and culture. They have followed the caveat of Reform Judaism’s early champion, Isaac Mayer Wise: “America is our Zion and Washington is our Jerusalem.”²⁸

And yet Jewish Americans, unlike Irish or Italian (Catholic) Americans, retain strong communal bonds and identity. Irish Americans, for example, occupy many positions of power in America as do Jewish Americans. But the festering turmoil and terrorism in Northern Ireland has hardly created a ripple in American politics. Israel’s security interests, on the other hand, have frequently influenced the American political agenda, because of the vigilance of the communally conscious Jewish Americans. Is it simply because the Reformation and Enlightenment were launched to reexamine Christian doctrines that their impact has been the most profound on Christian peoples?

The Muslim Community

The Muslims’ community life cannot, of course, be divorced from their historical experience. Conceptually, the individual in Islam is as autonomous as proposed by Kant. Historically, however, the Muslim individual freedom has been far more inhibited by the weight of moral order than the Kantian doctrine would allow. The assertion of freedom, says E.F. Schumacher, has been a feature of periods of growth, while the quest for order is associated with those of decline.²⁹ Except for the latter half of the Abbasid period (A.D. 750-1258), Muslim societies have rarely experienced periods of growth (growth should not be confused with prosperity from gifts of nature such as the current oil boom in the Persian Gulf), and hence intellectual ferment. Traditionally, Muslims have practiced their faith under tribal, feudal socioeconomic structures. Besides, Muslims have interpreted the doctrine of viceregency, or the responsibility to take care of God’s creation, as a heavenly mandate to be responsive to the environment and local culture.

Thus, Arab Muslims retain their Bedouin social structure that prizes allegiance to the tribal chief. This accounts partly for the resilience of the Arab autocracies in the face of the whirlwind of democratic movements. South Asian Muslims follow their local cultural and social idiom and share the freer political ethos of the land. Hence, democratic institutions are growing faster in Pakistan and Bangladesh than in the Muslim polities of the Middle East and Africa. African American Muslims, on the other hand, nurture much of the cultural markers and social outlook of their American community. Naturally, affirmative action and social welfare programs are among their priorities.

In America, these and other ethnic Muslim groups retain their distinctive cultural identities within a broader American Islamic community. John Esposito aptly calls them “communities within a community.”³⁰ During the past three decades, as the American Muslim population has tripled, community activities have increased manifold. Islamic schools, retreats, picnics and other activities are being organized by most of North America’s 1,046 mosques and student groups.³¹ Besides, three country-wide Islamic organizations and numerous smaller ones organize periodic conferences and put out numerous publications to foster Islamic religious, moral and cultural institutions in America.32 These organizations are carrying on vigorous campaigns to preserve Islamic values among American Muslims: prohibition of promiscuity, alcoholic and other intoxicants; respect for parents and community elders; mutual support in hardships; aid for the needy; building Islamic institutions and so on.

Also during the last three decades, Christian America is pulsating with a resurgence of Christian spiritualism. Although mainline churches have lost following, evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist Christian movements have caught on. Even after several “televangelical ministries” were disgraced and shut down, the “re-Christianization” movement retains its momentum. Evangelical ministers and others are telling Christians that the country’s many economic and social problems are God’s warning against heeding Godless liberals. Their admonition is falling upon increasingly receptive ears. The common man may not reflect on the philosophical inadequacies of liberalism, but he sees and suffers its outcome each day:

In the 60s and 70s liberals promised they could end poverty, crime and a host of other social blights by tinkering with the system, and they failed. The public watched as liberals ushered in a proliferation of new legislation, government agencies and bureaucratic red tape. After it was over, the sweeping and unrealistic promises went unfulfilled. The American people, in turn, began to equate liberalism with incompetence, naivete and the squandering of public moneys on every social problem in sight.³³

Christian Re-awakening

Just as Islam is attracting some alienated Americans, Christian evangelical and fundamentalist movements, too, draw their share of the socially disillusioned: Paul Stockey, the 1960s protest singer; Eldrige Cleaver, the former Black Panther leader; and Watergate figure Charles Colson are among the many prominent Americans who have turned to evangelism after high-profile forays into secular social and political movements. The overwhelming majority of the born-again Christians (like Muslim converts) are mainstream Americans in quest of spiritual answers to their lives’ predicament.

The growing surge toward Christian spiritualism is demonstrated in the increased attendance at evangelical and fundamentalist forums and rallies. Membership in these organizations has increased dramatically over the decades. In 1978, for example, a Christian Century magazine survey found 22 percent of Americans to be evangelicals. A 1986 Gallup Poll listed 33 percent of Americans as evangelicals.³⁴ A 1994 Newsweek survey found 58 percent Americans yearning for spiritual growth while one in every three Americans reported some religious or mysterical experience.³⁵

One does not need these statistics to learn about Americans’ deepening and widening search for a moral sheet anchor. It is visible in one’s surroundings. Gregorian chant is a feature of many music stores. Bookstores abound with religious and spiritual titles. Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II have been on the New York Times bestseller list. More and more Americans are joining religious retreats and courses on spiritual themes. References to the divine increasingly are creeping into creative writing and Hollywood scripts.

And of course our political life is taking on a spiritual ambiance. In 1994 Republicans led by Newt Gingrich tapped the country’s “conservative mood” to seize congressional leadership. Two years later the Christian Right was no longer the extremist GOP fringe that it has been in the 1988 election. It was now embraced by the party’s mainstream in the Robert Dole presidential campaign and by and large the news media and intelligentsia acquiesced. The Christian Right, argued aWashington Post columnist, had been “expanding its influence” and deserved “a place at the table” of American national politics:

A lot of Americans, have a vague but strong sense that what is going wrong in American life is not just about economics. It also entails an ethical or moral crisis. Evidence for this is adduced from family breakdown, teen pregnancy, high crime rates (especially among teenagers), and trashy movies, television and music.³⁶

The Christian Right may or may not have the answer to today’s “ethical and moral crisis”. To be sure, it is not yearning for the Holy Roman Empire or even the New England village green where the church and the meetinghouse collaborated in each other’s agenda. Neither does any other religious movement propose a religion-based political order. Muslim theocratic fervor, epitomized by the Iranian revolution, has peaked in much of the Muslim world.³⁷ And American Muslims, despite their campaigns for the pursuit of Islamic morals and idiom, are as committed to the American secular, pluralist democracy as anybody else. The religious and spiritual currents stirring America today reflect, if anything, many Americans’ realization that material goods are inadequate to lend meaning to life.

And the search a meaningful life is not confined to the Abrahamic religious traditions and spiritual schools. Many Americans are seeking it in Buddhist, Hindu and Bahai faiths and a variety of esoteric cults and creeds. Others do not care to belong to a particular faith or creed, but cluster around personalities who claim to know the answers to their spiritual inquiries. One such group— mostly from Jewish and Christian denominations—has gathered around Swami Sachidananda and learned Hindu-style meditation. Some have no interest in Hinduism or meditation, but are impressed by the holy man’s advocacy of peace and social harmony. The group is now collecting funds to build a pyramid-shape “peace monument” in the vicinity of Washington where people can meditate or pursue spiritual growth in some other fashion.

The industrial damage to nature and the fatigue from martial pursuits also have triggered a proliferation of environmental movements in America and other parts of the world. These movements draw support from both the religious and the secular. Apparently, they are aimed at stemming the erosion of Earth’s resources and preserving its ecological balance. Environmental issues are debated vigorously by the news media, voluntary groups, the environmental lobby and an increasingly vocal public. Deep down, all of them are inspired by the desire to connect their lives to something larger, represented by nature. As religious philosopher Loyal D. Rue put it, “The Epic of Evolution tells us whence we have come, what our fundamental nature is and what possibilities are open to us.”³⁸ Indeed, some of the world’s oldest religions are based on the perception of the sacredness of nature and prescribe the worship of natural forces and icons. It is no surprise that some of the environmentalist literature calls for the preservation of “Mother Earth,” a term used in Hindu scripture and Andean lore.

The quest for “something larger” has been innate for humanity. The driving force behind human enterprise is self-expansion—pursuit of wealth and glory, participation in community life, raising children and hope for an eternal life in heaven. Man now has begun to realize that liberalism threatens to shortchange him on all these counts. It is dwindling the economy and thereby decreasing one’s chances for fame and fortune. By reducing his means of livelihood it has diminished his capacity to raise children. By atomizing society it has nearly destroyed community life. And for many, it has abolished a blissful heaven.

The quest for new spiritual and secular vistas stems from a recognition that consumerism does not fulfill life, but threatens to destroy it by eroding its material and moral support systems. Naturally, it also spotlights the need for a transition from the consumptive to a preservative lifestyle—one that values frugality, conservation and appreciation of inner resources. A lifestyle cannot, however, be changed without a change in social priorities. The individual cannot do it. In a free society the state cannot do it. And if the fate of the Communist, Fascist and Nazi models are any indication, neither can an authoritarian state. It is a communal task—the job of civil society of which spiritual and secular voluntary groups are a vital part. Of late, civil society seems to be waking to the challenge. Can it restore the meaning of human life and save the remainder of the human “estate” from the market economy “managers”?

Notes

1. Judith Miller, “The Islamic Wave,” The New York Times Magazine, May 31, 1992; Daniel Pipes, “Fundamental Questions about Muslims,” The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 1992; Amos Perlmutter, “Wishful Thinking about Islamic Fundamentalism,” The Washington Post, January 19, 1991; Martin Kramer, “Islam and the West (including Manhattan),”Commentary, October 1993; Charles Jacobs, “Arab PR: How the Arab Viewpoint Is Promoted in America,” Moment, June 1991; American Attitude toward Islam: A Nationwide Poll (Washington, D.C.: American Muslim Council, 1994), Taking America’s Pulse: A Summary of the National Conference Survey on InterGroup Relations (New York: The National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1994).
2. Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History, revised edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 43.
3. Quran, 2:177; 3:103; 9:71.
4. Ibid., 2:30.
5. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 16.
6. Ihsan Bagby, Muslim Resource Guide (Fountain Valley, Calif.: Islamic Resource Institute, 1994), p. 22.
7. Author’s interview with Imam Talib Abdullah, Laurel, Md., June 18, 1995.
8. Author’s interview with Sam Bennett at Masjidun Nur al-Thani, Detroit, November 8, 1995.
9. Victor M. Perez-Diaz, The Return of Civil Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 56-57.
10. Manfred Riedel, “In Search of a Civic Union: The Political Theme of European Democracy and Its Primordial Foundation in Greek Philosophy,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. X # 2, (1983), p. 104.
11. George F. McLean, “Philosophy and Civil Society: Its Nature, Its Past and Its Future”, Chapter I above.
12. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson of London, 1960), p. 25.
13. Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, The Emerging Order: God in the Age of Scarcity (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1979), p. 24.
14. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1993), p. 25.
15. Georg Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979), p. 61.
16. One Nation under God, p. 25.
17. Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 9.
18. Emerging Order, p. 191.
19. U.S. Long-Term Economic Growth Prospects: Entering a New Era, Studies for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, January 25, 1978), p. 75.
20. Emerging Order, p. 206.
21. Eric Eckholm, “Disappearing Species: The Social Challenge,” Worldwatch Paper 22 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, June 1978), p. 7.
22. Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Sources of Conflict: Highlights From the ‘Managing Chaos’ Conference(Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1995), p. VII.
23. Ibid., p. 10.
24. Eric Eckholm, “Disappearing Species: The Social Challenge,” Worldwatch Paper 22 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, June 1978), p. 6.
25. David S. Noss and John B. Noss, Man’s Religions, 7th Edition (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1984), p. 202.
26. Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 308.
27. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and the End of History,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 10 (993) p. 525.
28. One Nation Under God, p. 25.
29. E.F. Schumacher, A Guide to the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 127.
30. Author’s interview with John L. Esposito at Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., January 17, 1996.
31. Muslim Resource Guide, p. 20.
32. The three largest North American Muslim organizations: the Islamic Society of North America based in Plainfield, Ind.; Ministry of Imam Warith Deen Muhammad based in Chicago, Ill.; and Islamic Circle of North America with head offices in Brooklyn, N.Y. Emerging Order, p. 6.
33. Cited in James Davidson Hunter, American Evangelism, Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity(Newark, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), p. 49; and Larry Martz and Ginny Carroll, Ministry of Greed (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 23.
34. “In Search of the Sacred,” Newsweek, November 28, 1994, p. 54.
35. E.J. Dionne Jr., “Spirit Over Morality,” The Washington Post, March 26, 1996, p. A13.
36. John Lancaster, “Calmer Mideast Weighs Signs of Less Militant Islam,” The Washington Post, March 25, 1996, pp. A1.
37. “In Search of the Sacred,” p. 62.