Difference is everywhere. It is always at work. We make difference as much as we encounter it. We practice it, perform it, and embody it in how we choose to live in the world. The ethical dilemma, of course, is what do we make of these differences?
Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference
In the The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, Youshaa Patel adroitly directs our attention to the many differences in ritual performance, cultural practice, and sartorial preferences that have emerged as Muslims have sought to define themselves against the religious Other. Over the course of eight chapters, Patel traces the currents and counter-currents that Muslims across the centuries have, in various ways, attempted to understand, define, and embody what it means to be “Muslim.” He does so by guiding us through how different religious and cultural distinctions—from funeral prayers to European-brimmed hats—have figured in this ever-shifting identity discourse. As Patel observes, these carefully studied windows into the past reveal that “change is built into the architecture of Islamic tradition” (220).
Moreover, in our times when discussions of identity are increasingly fraught, I believe Patel’s turn to supposedly “minor” differences to be especially salient. What might we learn, then, if we move beyond the lens of the religious Other? How might Patel’s vector of analysis inform our understanding of other varieties of othering? What can we say about the differences that divide our Muslim communities or those that divide our own selves? Put another way, what can difference disclose for us theologically and ethically?
Patel answers some of these pressing questions in a notable transition from the analytical to the ethical in the epilogue. He presents a constructive vision of how contemporary Muslims, in all of their heterogeneity, might engage with other social divisions and structures of oppression. He has us imagine how we might “heal and repair” and even expand “the circle of belonging” that emerges from “the darker side of difference: conflict” (228). It is on this last point that I take inspiration for my own work on religion, race, and systemic evil. Beyond the religious Other, how might we use difference to understand othering more broadly experienced and conceived?
The Darker Side of Difference
The discernment of difference, I argue, is an innate trait that human beings share with other biological entities. We make sense of the world through this divinely endowed ability to distinguish and categorize similarities and differences. The Qur’an repeatedly attests to this intrinsic sensibility for difference: Humankind was but one community, then they differed (Q. 10:19), But they have fragmented their affair among themselves (Q. 21:93), truly you are of differing claims (Q. 51:8), joined with the continual refrain that wherein they differed (Q. 10:19) that wherein they used to differ (Q. 10:93, Q. 32:35, Q. 45:17), that wherein you used to differ (Q. 22:69). Our sense of safety and danger, and hence our ability to survive and thrive, depends upon it. Yet, in our case of human beings—as servants of God—how does difference figure into the larger spectrum of our activity, a spectrum that encompasses acts of personal transgression (individual evil) to socially instantiated forms of oppression (systemic evil)? To understand these degrees of wickedness, I would have us return to that “darker side of difference.” This same divinely endowed sense of discernment also has the potential to end in divisiveness and death. Our ability to differentiate can easily be arrogated into a sense of subjugating supremacy. This is especially evident, for instance, in the hierarchical differentiations born out of the modern concept of race first formulated by European colonizers, scientists, and writers and then continued and further developed by many others.
More fundamentally, the Qur’anic story of Satan attests to the possibility of this social human impulse. When the figure Iblīs, who would become Satan, is presented with the creation of the first human being by God and then commanded to prostrate before him, we are told that Iblīs waxed arrogant (Q. 2:34, Q. 38:74), claiming his existential superiority over the human being (and by extension, us): I am better than him. You created me from fire, but him You have created from clay (Q. 7:12, Q. 38:76). In effect, we are being cautioned against succumbing to a similar sense of superiority based on difference.
When a notion of supremacy prevails within the human self, a rippling disfiguration occurs. The personal seeps into the social. We transpose differences in identification into hierarchies, which are then taken to structure society itself. It marks a tragic human pattern. Seeking to order the world, a group envisions itself as categorically superior to others in a gross misapplication of difference. The ancient Greeks set themselves against all others who they named barbarians (barbaros), a pejorative reference to their inability to speak “clearly.” Likewise in Late Antiquity, the Arabs named all non-Arabic speakers ʿajamī, a pejorative based on the incomprehensibility of their speech. For some, sentiments such as this transformed into an idea of Arab preeminence as demonstrated by the range of positions taken in works of jurisprudence (fiqh) or more literary apologetics like Ibn Qutayba’s The Excellence of the Arabs. It is to such particular sets of differences—phenotypical, socio-cultural, ideological, linguistic, religious—that we often attribute hierarchical lines of division. Ethno-centrism, nationalism, colonialism, and racism among other hierarchical orientations are born from and fed by this social predilection to differentiate with prejudice. The theological utility of difference is hardly restricted to religious identity. In fact, as Patel rightly states, “it is not necessary to construct the non-Muslim as a foil to forge the ideal Muslim” (222–23). We should turn our ethical gaze introspectively in order to more keenly apprehend what it means to be human from the horizon of Islam. In other words, what is disclosed when we seek to understand the fine line of difference within us all? What separates that which makes us human from that which makes us otherwise?
The Difference Between Cain and Abel
Consider the Qur’anic story of the two sons of Adam (Q. 5:27-32), which the Muslim commentarial tradition identifies as Cain (Qābīl) and Abel (Hābīl), the first generation to follow the initial creation of humankind. In the account, each brother offers a sacrifice to God. For one, Abel, the sacrifice is accepted, while for the other, Cain, it is rejected. After this rejection, he declares his commitment to slaying his brother. Recite to them, with truth, the account of the two sons of Adam. When they each made a sacrifice, it was accepted from one of them, but it was not accepted from the other, who said, “Surely I will kill you.” [The other] said, “God only accepts from the reverent” (Q. 5:27). On one level, it is a tale of fratricide that explains how murder first entered the world. On another, it is a bitter disclosure about human nature. While the biblical account of Cain and Abel makes much about what each brother offered in sacrifice (Genesis 4:1–18), the Qur’an is altogether unconcerned with that difference. What it emphasizes instead is the manner in which each brother presents himself. Cain proclaims a commitment to deadly violence—Surely I will kill you (la-aqtulannaka)—using the socially differentiating language of “I” and “you.” Abel, meanwhile, responds with words aimed at restoring the primacy of the Divine—God only accepts… (innamā yataqabbalu Allāhu)—obviating entirely the distinction between “I” and “you.”
Ethno-centrism, nationalism, colonialism, and racism among other hierarchical orientations are born from and fed by this social predilection to differentiate with prejudice.
For the Iranian revolutionary thinker Ali Shariati, this Qur’anic narrative was significant for what it revealed about human potential: “Cain is not inherently evil. His essence is the same as that of Abel, and nobody is inherently evil, for the essence of everyone is the same as the essence of Adam” (107). Cain might have acted otherwise. Instead the brothers represent something more fundamental within ourselves. Cain represents an inner impulse focused solely upon the self—a self (nafs), the Qur’an warns elsewhere, that commands to evil (Q. 12:53). In contrast, Abel represents an impulse that takes God as its center instead. Each brother embodies a different way of being human: one of violence-unto-death, the inhuman, and another of devotional reverence (taqwā), the human. Through this story of the first generation to follow, revelation is calling us to recognize that we each bear within ourselves the capacity for the human and the inhuman.
Discerning Differences Today
What does this mean for Muslims today living in a world wracked by war, suffering, and interlocking forms of structural oppression? It concerns how a person of faith ought to understand and confront the injustices of the world. It concerns the ethics of faithful response. All too often, as Viet Thanh Nguyen describes in his ethics of recognition, we are quick to identify the inhumanity of others, while remaining blind to our own inhumanity:
Identifying with the human and denying one’s inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one’s own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities. Reminding ourselves that being human also means being inhuman is important simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans. (72)[1]
The failure to recognize the fullness of who we are, the human and inhuman, renders us susceptible to re-inscribing division and violence ourselves. The path of social complicity in oppression is the path of least resistance. It takes very little to cross into the inhuman. A similar sentiment underlies Paulo Freire’s warning in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn the oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both” (44). To be human is to recognize that we might one day do the same as the oppressor, the colonizer, the occupier, and the dehumanizer. To be human is to recognize that we might, at any turn, descend into the fallenness of Cain.
Indeed, Patel invites us in his epilogue to consider the United States as “an imagined community,” given the polarizing divisions wracking the nation (228). I feel compelled, however, to think more broadly, even if more abstractly, on the scale of humankind. Our history testifies to how easy that descent of Cain is: a continual history of complicity in war and colonialism, slavery and subjugation, displacement and exploitation, and apartheid and genocide. The challenge lies in maintaining the fine line between our humanity and inhumanity. Indeed, we would be mistaken to conceive of humanity and inhumanity as diametric opposites or inversions of each other. Rather, they are, like Cain and Abel, brothers to one another separated by only “minor” differences. They are deceptively alike. Inhumanity does not lack in love, conviction, or a sense of justice. Like our humanity, our inhumanity has its share of intimacy and empathy, relationality and community, creativity and artistry, even faith and righteousness. But our inhumanity holds each of these differently—more selectively and narrowly—in contortions and distortions of how they ought to be. Inhumanity loves its own dearly, but only its own. It draws its arms tightly around its beloved community in disregard of others. Its dreams extend to sustain a select few. Its imagination is exercised for its own exclusive ends. It believes in itself so deeply that it will even fight and die for itself. It is precisely in this proximity of our inhumanity to our humanity that we are most challenged and tested. God calls us to recognize our potential for inhumanity—our capacity to be Cain—because it is nothing more than the subtle disfigurement of our humanity, a difference of but a little. It is to this “Muslim difference” that I believe greater work in theological ethics is called to disentangle. How ought that fine line between them be understood and maintained? How exactly ought our humanity be made to subsume and circumscribe the darker side of difference? How can we work instead to restore and sustain the humanity of all?
[1] With respect to identity politics, I follow Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s critical engagement in Elite Capture. Identity politics may have begun as a concept for “fostering solidarity and collaboration” by those in positions of subjugating power, a sentiment with which Viet Nguyen’s comments are aligned.
