A Quiet Revolution Read Free Page B

went on to declare in a statement that ISNA was an organization that strove to represent the “diversity of North American Islam.” Affirming the “validity of different schools of Islamic thought,” ISNA also did not recognize, Mattson’s statement continued, that “any particular scholar, school of thought or institution,” was “nec- essarily authoritative for all Muslims.” Pointing out that an Islamic
    scholar had in fact advanced a similar thesis to Bakhtiar’s regarding verse 4 : 34 in the pages of ISNA’s own magazine, Islamic Horizons, in 2003 , Mattson’s statement also declared ISNA’s support for all “schol- arly enquiry and intellectual discussion on issues related to Islam,” and its support and encouragement of “honest debate and scholarship on issues affecting the Muslim community. In particular, we have long been concerned with the misuse of Islam to justify injustice towards women.” ISNA “expects its administrators,” her statement concludes,
    “to promote ISNA’s values and mission.” Although she takes a clear po- sition on freedom of thought and speech, Mattson notably does not take a position as to the accuracy or religious acceptability of Bakhtiar’s translation. 7
    ISNA, like other American Muslim organizations, has been under- going palpable changes in the post- 9 / 11 era, as I described in Chapter 10 , regarding dress and speech, and the group has exhibited signs of gener-
    ational change. The Ashraf-Mattson exchange symbolically captures key and telling elements of the processes of transition as a new, American- born generation begins to take the reins.
    Ashraf ’s comments reflect a worldview that is confidently grounded in a sense of the absolute rightness of male dominance and of readings of the Quran that embody that view. Clearly they are grounded too in the assumption that banning dissenting views from circulation, at least in
    ISNA-sponsored bookshops, is a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with divergent opinions. Such notions, entirely normative in most Muslim- majority societies, are obviously not notions that would necessarily have much purchase in America or Europe. ‌
    As Mohammed Ayoob has pointed out in his study The Many Faces of Political Islam, Islamist organizations in different countries, even when they are branches of the same mother organization, commonly evolve in profoundly different ways in response to the local situation. 8 ISNA, with its Islamist Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage, is evidently developing along lines shaped by its American context, lines that dis- tinctly bear the imprint of that context: it is becoming, that is, an Amer- ican -Muslim organization. The Mattson-Ashraf exchange, taking place some twenty-five years after the founding of ISNA, can be seen as one clear sign of this evolution. As I mentioned earlier, even the fact that ISNA has a female president may not have been something that ISNA’s founders had ever envisioned. At any rate, no Islamist organization in the home countries is headed by a woman. 9

    Andrea Useem, the young Anglo-American convert to Islam we en- countered earlier as the spokesperson and interpreter at the open house meeting at a Boston mosque in the weeks after 9 / 11 , now a working jour- nalist, interviewed Bakhtiar about her translation of the Quran and in particular her rendering of verse 4 : 34 . Useem also interviewed Bonita McGee, the community activist also mentioned earlier who worked with ISNA on domestic violence, as well as Hadia Mubarak, the former pres- ident of the MSA, regarding this verse, inviting them to reflect on the significance of Bakhtiar’s translation from their own professional and personal perspectives.
    What impact, Useem asked McGee, might this new translation have on the community that she served, and did she think that this verse as conventionally translated had “actually result[ed] in abuse.” McGee said she did not believe that the verse caused domestic