As a Muslim looking back at the year that was, I can't help but notice the transformations my community has gone through and continues to go through after that fateful September day. Muslim communities across the United States and across the world struggled to find answers to the questions everyone was asking. Was Islam responsible for the terror attacks, and if so why? Vehemently, the almost unanimous response was \Impossible! The very meaning of Islam is Peace."" Many western commentators and political leaders matched this response with an equally emphatic, ""Of course. The Quran requires Muslims to slay all non believers."" Both Muslim and Western voices flocked to either of these camps with equally plausible analyses and arguments.
In any case we must backtrack to the context of the challenge that Islamic tradition faces with respect to the rise of modernity and Western political, economic and cultural domination in recent history. It is the Islamic tradition that represents Islam, encompassing the sources of Islam (the Quran and the statements of the Prophet Mohammad) and the various schools of law, theology and Muslim thought emanating from the sources.
Historically, four major factors have maintained the vitality and dynamism of Islam's religious tradition, namely: pluralism within, an institutional framework for debate and dissent, maintenance of authority and authoritativeness in the various religious and secular discourses among Muslims and finally assimilating new cultures and civilizations that muslims encountered within an Islamic framework. The former three factors worked in tandem to establish multiple authorities and methodologies in interpreting scripture. This ensured the fallibility of the human discourse, giving people freedom to determine what they considered the Divine Will to be and preventing aberrations in the religion. Prophet Muhammad was the final and infallible authority due to his reception of Divine revelation, a claim that after his death no other human could make.
At the same time the Islamic tradition was open to the philosophies, and administration of other cultures and civilizations as it encountered them and appropriated them within. The intellectual heritage of the Greek and Indian civilizations, for example, were preserved and assimilated to carry the intellectual heritage of Islam to new heights. However, it is in the encounter with the modern West that Islam appears to have stumbled in playing its traditional role as ""synthesizer.""
It would take much scholarship and newsprint to discuss this decline of the Islamic tradition from many perspectives, the two luxuries that this author certainly lacks. In this civilization-based encounter that involves the two important and related components of grappling with the effusion of human creativity emanating from the West, and subsequent Western colonialist adventurism, the foundations upon which the Islamic tradition stood have been uprooted, and the Muslim societies have been left in a highly pathological state. Thus at present, the absence of widely acceptable legitimate authority that has the right to speak on various aspects of Islam, has increased the probability of many illegitimate authorities arising. The absence of pluralism has brought about rigidity and authoritarian tendencies in discussing and applying Islamic Law and the absence of debate and dissent has aggravated the ability to develop sound methodologies in interpreting the sources of Islam in today's world. This enables anyone to interpret the sources in a haphazard manner. At the same time the pathology of demonizing the ""other"" (the West / America) has irrationally focused rhetoric on blaming the West for the many political, social and cultural problems faced in the Muslim world, preventing both introspective discourses and adopting modernity to Islam.
It is this mix of developments within Islam and Muslim societies that enable Osama-bin-Laden and al-Qaeda to appear to fill a void in the discussion of how to address oppression and the aspirations of political autonomy of Muslims in various parts of the world in the Modern context. It is the responsibility of Muslim societies to the Divine and to the world to rectify these dangerous developments, so that a harmonious relationship can be cemented between Islam and America / West. Muslim reformers throughout the twentieth century have undertaken this task and have been both successful and unsuccessful at various times. Furthermore the recent emergence of an American Muslim identity can go a long way in rejuvenating the Islamic tradition, being the result of the closest encounter between Islam and the West.
