A Discussion with Patrice Brodeur, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism, and Globalization, University of Montreal
With: Patrice Brodeur Berkley Center Profile
November 27, 2007
You are intensely involved in both dialogue work and in reflecting on the Islamic world. Can you give us some idea of the path that brought you to your current place, and how has it involved you in working with faith-based organizations and international development?
I clearly trace my early interest in these issues to my time at Pearson College, where I completed the International Baccalaureate equivalent to the last year of American high school and the first year of university. It imprinted me with a very strong sense that the key element in intercultural relations and dialogue is face to face encounters, properly facilitated. That is what is truly transformative, far more than books, film, television, and so on, however important these can be, especially in terms of academic books that give more precise information. Creating sustained spaces for respectful human to human encounters, over protracted periods of time, can truly alter perceptions of reality towards a clearer understanding of commonalities and differences between oneself and a variety of other people.
I spent two years at the Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific near Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. It was then a very secular organization; religion was something on the side. But at the core of the college was a search for intercultural understanding and a commitment to dialogue. The experience was transformative. I found myself sharing a four person room with a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza. Through our growing friendship, I became keenly interested in Israeli-Palestinian issues as well as the beginnings of an interest in Islam. The next year my Palestinian friend was inadvertedly put in a different room with a Frenchman, who turned out to be a strong Zionist Jew. Through my growing friendship with him as well, in part due to our common French language, I came to appreciate Judaism and his perspective on Israeli-Palestinian issues. Both of them helped me discover just how widely different, most of the time, the perspectives are on this recent historical relationship between two peoples who claim historical ownership over the same land. I then returned to my native city of Montreal, to enroll at McGill University where, from the first day of classes, I began to study both Arabic and Hebrew. After two years at McGill, I went on to the University of Jerusalem, studying Judaism and Islam, as well as Eastern Christianity, Living on green border lands both years, I spend a lot of time learning further about Israeli-Palestinian issues with people of various perspectives. During my two years, I volunteered at the Israel Interfaith Association in particular, discovering more about Jewish-Christian dialogue, albeit discovering how Western it was for the most part then and how Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians were not yet integrated well into their activities.
From the beginning of my university years, I discovered my passion: studying religions. After my return from the two years spent in Jerusalem, I added interreligious relations and dialogue in particular. I concentrated on Islam for my first Master's Degree at the Institute of Islamic Studies, continuing with one foot in the academy and one in the world of practice and dialogue. During my doctoral studies, I focused on Islam with a minor in Judaism, while being the youth coordinator for the World Conference on Religion and Peace, having the incredible experience of participating as a full executive committee member for almost six years. It shaped many questions I brought to my academic studies, which informed in turn the way I became involved in promoting interreligious activities among youth and young adults in many small groups around the world.
Over the years, I came to look beyond interreligious dialogue, as I came to appreciate that one of the main dialogue challenges of our time is that between those who feel they are religious and those who are not and I now call the approach I have developed an inter-worldview dialogue. I believe it is a more inclusive terminology. Indeed, it helps overcome the tension between the concept of “culture” and “religion” as they came to develop in a particular Western European context of interreligious tensions, where secular ideologies came to win the day over three centuries. This explains why there are those who practice inter-cultural dialogue and those who practice interreligious dialogue, the two rarely integrated. On the one hand, interreligious dialogue can be particularly difficult for those who do not share a religious worldview. On the other, religious people with strong commitments often feel that intercultural dialogue reduces their religious worldview to a relative cultural framework, not understanding often that religious worldviews can coexist and develop in multicultural contexts. On both sides, the sense of exclusion can cause great frustration. The solution I propose is to talk about inter-worldview dialogue, since everyone has a worldview, whether religious or otherwise, clearly articulated or not. Moreover, I came to appreciate that the key to many of our tensions and conflicts is the lack of imaginative and patient processes to create spaces of inclusion, where all those directly affected by a problem can feel welcome and part of the decision-making relative to finding transformative solutions. Choosing words that can include the largest number if not all people is therefore a important part of creating those inclusive spaces. Finally, I am now studying how important identity and power dynamics are to human relations, both in terms of cooperation and conflicts. I have therefore integrated this approach into how I practice inter-worldview dialogue.
How did you come to be so interested in and involved with the Islamic world?
I was deeply impressed from my first encounters with the diversity of the Islamic world while at Pearson College. But I was even more taken during my academic studies of Islam and later experiences in Jerusalem by the great strength of the Islamic heritage, which continues to this day in a variety of forms. The pluralist dimensions of sharia jurisprudence among Sunnis in particular is fascinating. Pluralism is reflected also in the coexistence of many mystical schools of thought for centuries (the sufi tariqahs). Building on this heritage not only of intra-islamic diversity but of different dimensions and examples of Islamic pluralism can contribute to the creation of more stable societies. Finally, I have been struck also by the fact that Muslims have often over their history been minorities, that over time became majorities. But because the initial encounters were often one of a Muslim minority controlling only the politics of a region otherwise managed by a majority of non-Muslims, the initial approach of tolerance for the people of the book in particular was not only politically pragmatic: it set the stage for many precedent of tolerance even when Muslims later on became numerical majorities. There is much more to learn from these and other various historical dynamics in Muslim/non-Muslim relations throughout history.
In my research and involvement in Islamic studies and interreligious dialogue, I want to avoid the two extremes of being an apologist for Islam or being overly critical of it, consciously or not, for various possible ideological reasons. Moreover, I also want to avoid thinking that I can remain neutral or so-called “objective,” in so far as any perception I may have of Islam or of any other religion or worldview is conditioned by my own set of multiple identities (Western, Christian, male, etc.) and social framework within which I carry out my research and activities. I remain keenly aware of the legacies of paternalism linked to past colonial and present postcolonial neoliberal frameworks that often frame and shape much of my interactions today, whether I like or not.
Where do these perceptions take you?
From these many personal experiences and studies, the central insight I wish to share is that worldviews other than our own, which can be both real and very different, do demonstrate and open up quite different perspectives on self-understanding and transformation. This openness to others is clearly a source of enrichment and creativity, which remains at the heart of dynamic human societies. It allows self-enrichment and new options, including those of imagining a different future, a future built on cooperation rather than competition, on mutual enrichment rather than depletion. An inter-worldview dialogue approach helps make this possible in a constructive way.
Several examples of successful tolerance exist in Islamic history. They have given rise to remarkable creative synergies. Parts of the histories of Umayyad Andalusia, early Abbasids, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire are examples of various forms of de facto pluralism. A common element in all these cases was that during these pluralistic periods, Muslim political control faced no significant threats. Another is that the boundaries were quite clearly defined. There was explicit acceptance of some non-Muslims (especially the people of the book), but not of others. There was an active drawing of the boundaries of tolerance and there is much to learn from those experiences of political and jurisprudential management of some degree of identity differences. On the social front, with sometimes political and legal overlaps, the Sufis also contributed to pluralistic realities in daily life during various periods of Islamic history.
These represent different examples of systems of human rights that had different premises in comparison to “western” concepts. These differences need to be understood further today. To be a non-Muslim scholar of Islam today therefore means to be constructively critical in light of the best canons of academic thinking, leaving open various doors of cooperation with many kinds of Muslims, no-prejudging areas of common action and academic production. These ways of promoting shared learning and creative thinking and action have helped me become more and more self-critical of how my Western upbringing personally and academically is relative to power dynamics whose values and aims I must constantly assess in order to reach a greater and greater degree of coherence within myself between my values and my actions.
Can you give some examples?
Perhaps the best example is the understanding of democracy. In my view it should not and need not be defined only in terms of parliamentary, electoral systems. These forms may not always be the best option, depending on the social context. I hold for myself because of my up-bringing and social location to the principle of one person, one vote as a very important principle, but I also see openings for more communal approaches than the norm of individuality upon which Western notions of democracy rely upon. I can also appreciate that a strong leader who truly has a sense of non-paternalistic responsibility for his or her people and who feels and manifests that responsibility in the daily improvement of all the people who live within his or her area of leadership, can play a critical role in specific circumstances and societies. This other approach to political leadership builds on long traditions that link authority and responsibility, especially in tribal societies. It is always challenging for Western political leaders who work within short term electoral systems to play such roles, protecting groups with genuine commitment that transcend the contingencies of time and competitive party politics. Such structures, often tribal, are not necessarily patriarchal. Matriarchal tribal societies do exist, such as in Indonesia for example, as well as tribal societies where women play a major role in the exercise of power, though this is not direct and visible (Berber and Mohawk traditional communities, to name but two). The point of my argument is that, from the outside, many of these systems can appear to be very patriarcal, but this is not always the case. Even more importantly remains the test of meeting the real needs of the society and community on the ground. To the extent that a leadership system achieve this ends, or comes close to it, then it practices the values behind the contemporary notion of “good governance.” The form it takes on the ground remains, in my opinion, secondary. In short, “modern” political party politics need not be the only system. We need a pluralistic understanding of individual and collective leadership so as to allow the rich diversity of various regional histories to shape their respective colors and forms. The challenge today is that these local heritages too often remain prey to the global power dynamics in our present period of human history.
What is your perspective on how social challenges and organizations are viewed in Muslim societies?
A first major point to emphasize, in my opinion, is that the notion of justice is at the center of Muslim understandings about social roles and obligations in Islamic societies. An Islamic worldview allows both freedom for individuals and collective ownership and responsibility of wealth. An underlying principle is that any kind of wealth needs to be used for the common good; it must yield its true fruits for the common benefit of the society as a whole (fructifier, to use the French term). Wealth is a pot of gold that needs to be made good use of. There is also a built-in mechanism to take special care of the weak and suffering in Islamic societies (zakat), although the disparities between rich and poor have also affected majority Muslim countries in recent years, as well as across oil-producing majority countries versus non-oil producing ones. These themes enter into discussions of interest, where the Islamic approach in theory is built on this notion of spreading benefits and sharing, though there is much debate within Islamic circles on what this means in practice. Much critical thinking and reexamination of wealth and finance is currently underway in various contemporary majority Muslim countries and Muslim intellectual circles beyond.
But the key point to remember is that Muslim societies are rooted in the principle that work is central to human life, and its purpose is to make the community grow in both material and spiritual wealth, the two never fully distinguishable or separated. To live up to God's expectation of our human purpose requires working hard and giving blessings for the small and large gifts in our lives. People need to be thankful, to appreciate life, to be good trustees of what is given to them by God on earth. This is the responsibility of every individual.
What do you see as some best practices in this area?
The Aga Khan Development Network stands out as a remarkable international organization. It works from an ethical basis which incorporates these core Islamic principles, among others. They also focus on excellence and on making the best use of all resources, stressing that there services and activities are non-sectarian. They use funds to build networks with local people and enhance the value of wealth. They present their messages to Western secular audiences as well as both Sunni and Shi'i communities, depending on where they work.
Another important example is the Nahdatul Ulama in Indonesia, the organization led by Gus Dur (Abdurahman Wahid). It is a large organization that has been remarkably successful in a wide range of activities. The movement is clearly Sunni Muslim, deeply rooted in tradition. But they also prize and advance modern education. Indonesia's other major movement, the Muhammadiya, is more modernist (though this distinction between traditional and modern can obscure the complexity of blending old and new in both movements).
Turkey today is another interesting example of Islamic principles infusing politics and approach to social issues and policies. The current party in power, the AKP goes well beyond traditional understandings, far more than its predecessor party. It has strong links to the Islamic world and traditions, and its worldview is much inspired by community values.
Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Egyptian brotherhood are examples of movements with a strong Islamic ethos, with an Islamically inspired sense of working for social welfare and justice. It is a real tragedy that in the West we can barely distinguish between all of them, with their various branches and leanings often changing and reflecting the fluidity of much of these Islamist movements. They often provide vital responses to social needs in ways that can not be reduced simply to political manipulation. Unless their many grievances in the face of today's injustices are recognized as often valid, which can only happen through a humanizing dialogue with their members, stereotypes and fears will continue to reproduce misunderstandings that feed the support for exclusivist and often extremist wings and groups.
The Said Nursi movement in Turkey is another interesting and positive example of a group plainly founded on core Islamic principles and pursuing social action in that spirit. I have seen them doing remarkable work in the Balkans and in Central Asia. Their schools are really excellent.
These movements and approaches play an important role in helping to counter the cancer of extremism. It is a cancer whose traces are evident everywhere, across all cultures and religions today, but to different degrees. I choose my words carefully when talking about the phenomenon, and also take care to stress that it is far more than a cancer of religious worldviews: it is very obvious in secular circles too. It represents a philosophical framework of analysis rooted in a particular epistemology, one that essentially holds that the only reality, the only truth, is the one that I see and hold, interpreted through a literalist and essentializing hermeneutics. This reduces greatly the complexity of any issues today to a point of often simplistic binary opposition that only fuel fears and miscomprehensions, expanding the vicious cyclones of intolerance that legitimize, for some, the use of various forms of violence.
How do you see these Islamic approaches and issues of education?
It is striking how poor education indicators are in many Muslim countries and societies. The value that traditional Islamic societies gave to education can be seen in many currents in the Islamic world, and are evident for example in the approaches of the Ismailis and of the Fetiye Gulen movement in particular, a branch of the Said Nursi movement. But the problems around education are real. In my view, the issues have deep historical roots, especially in the Saudi and Kuwaiti Wahabi influence. When these societies were flush with oil money prior to 2001, they were prepared to spend millions of dollars to combat what they saw as the unfortunate influence of secular, nationalist states across the Islamic world as well as invest in the growth of their own form of Islam in minority Muslim communities worldwide. The investments they have supported, for often extended periods, reflects a long term political aspiration to control a particular kind of interpretation of Islam. But many of these investments did not necessary come directly from the governments themselves. Many wealthy individuals, with their own private wealths, also contributed to this situation. Sadly, the education provided in this context was often far from the highest standards of the day in terms of academic knowledge about Islam, or even of the variety of traditional Islamic schools of thought. The poverty of many of these institutions in the twentieth century have helped created a basin for Islamist thinking in many parts of the Muslim world, including a wide range of institutions and universities in majority Muslim countries.
At the same time, we may also note how many new or relatively new postcolonial national governments often failed to serve the educational needs of their populations, especially in rural areas. This phenomena has occurred throughout the world in fact, not only majority Muslim countries. There was also a failure for education systems and investment to respond to the surge in population growth across the regions of majority Muslim countries. From the 1950s on, rapid increases in population growth ate up relative improvements in GNP, making relative spending in the education sector often decrease per capita. Egypt and Pakistan used to be large importing nations, and are now net importers. GDP growth has simply been insufficient for maintening, let alone increasing the quality of education for the vast majority of newly literate peoples, often first generation urbanized too. This explains, in part, the many huge pockets of poverty around the Muslim world. In some places the problems are linked to failures of countries that do have resources to adjust to changing circumstances. Iran, for example, has billions in resources and has invested in education, but not as much as they could have. Qatar is one of the few more positive examples, having invested heavily in education as part of a long term special strategy to differentiate itself from other Gulf countries by thinking about long term investments. Overall, education systems in oil producing countries are at a fairly high standard, though the investments have not yet translated fully into results. The relative failure to share those resources in improving educational systems in poorer majority Muslim countries is also a critique that is often heard, both inside and outside the Muslim world.
The Saudi and Kuwaiti investments in education have often followed a parallel track and come with complex ties attached to them, in both real and perceived ways. The narrative of people I work with in the Balkans is that the offers of help from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait came early after the breakup of former Yugoslavia. At first, they were accepted gratefully. But it became apparent within the first few years that these funds ought to have been used in certain ways, and that they (in the Balkans) did not have full freedom to develop their own Islamic curriculum. Once they realize the situation, they began to refuse to this financial aid.
What about other key social areas? Health, microcredit?
I do not know enough about health to comment meaningfully. Microcredit is an obviously important area where Islamic principles have much to bring and where sound development could make major contributions. Microcredit responds to many key Islamic values, notably supporting those who are in greatest need, and it has the potential to empower and improve welfare. It is a promising area to focus on. The management of waqf funds also seems a promising avenue to explore.
As you look at the Berkley Luce FBO project and December conference, what are the issues you would most like to see addressed?
The Millennium Development Goals seem an excellent starting point for the discussion.
How far are they understood by senior leaders (in all sectors, including religion)? How are they understood and what is the consensus or issues on priorities? Is there anything in the various Muslim worldviews that would be against the MDGs in any way? What are current commitments and needs?
It would seem to me that MDGs might offer a promising and near-consensus route forward among Muslims from a wide ideological spectrum, in part because working towards the MDGs appeals to the best in human beings. Its offers the potential for clear and manageable standards. They can become solid building blocks for both intra-Islamic and interworldview consensus building towards minimum standards for our common humanity.
A discussion about the issues around defining and discussing faith-based organizations in an Islamic context could be productive too. There are special sensitivities which could be articulated and defined more clearly. It would also be useful to explore the different strategies that different regions and groups are adopting. Exploring the work of different movements, especially those that are most successful, could be useful too. It would be useful to probe their concrete strategic approach and thinking.
In discussing the potential of networks in helping to implement the MDGs, our conversation needs to be focus on what is achievable in terms of human cooperation and networking, focusing on different needs in different regions of the world. The Balkans, Indonesia, India, the Arab World, and West Africa present very different challenges and ethos which are worth comparing.
More broadly, the questions about the meaning of development to different communities and traditions are worth exploring. My sense is that for many Islamic groups, the distinction between material and spiritual development is hard to make. Development challenges have a deep meaning and significance. This, in turn, raises questions about the significance of a deeper empowerment, and that is likely to be difficult if not impossible to measure. It seems to me that there is much thinking about this within many Islamic circles, though I must admit that much is under the radar screen and rather difficult to pinpoint for me at this time.
How do you think we might encourage a constructive and open dialogue about gender issues?
This topic is very important nowadays. One way to make headway is to try to get away from a fixation on equality and look more towards equity. That means that there can be different models, and also willingness to recognize role differentiation based on biological differences. Freedom of choice is of course a basic right but, beyond that, there is the potential to reframe objectives in ways that can be better accepted simply by appreciating the potential and in some cases real validity of different models that respect the valid elements of traditional notions of gender balance. We also need to understand better ways to balance equality and equality and the rights of the individual versus the community as well as divisions of labor within the family. The merits of a strong responsibility and decision role for the father need to be recognized together with appreciation for balance and equity within the family. There can be rich discussions around complementarity of roles. There is also a great need to be critical of how Western approaches that essentialize Islam as supposedly always patriarchal can only create greater misunderstandings and slow down the process of improvement the status of women in general.
Equality should mean equality of access, to be sure, and recognition of basic rights that are and should be common to all societies. There are changes taking place on the ground too: in Iran, 60 percent of university students are women and 50 percent or more are primary household bread winners! And there is a wide recognition that the sharia traditions must change and in many places this is taking place. The trap is to link too tightly equality and equity as it blocks understanding and dialogue. The concepts of justice which are so strong in Islam and rooted in the teachings of the Prophet support such approaches and change towards greater empowerment of women in any case. Again, the issue is balancing debate and dialogue within Islam with that coming from the outside remains a careful balance to achieve.
What kinds of questions might this suggest for discussion and research?
I need more time to reflect on this question.
Any comment on environmental issues?
There is definitely a greening of Islam happening, especially among Western Muslims. Hopefully, with the present Bali conference on Climate Change, the largest Muslim country of the world will be particularly sensitize to this question, with rippling effects elsewhere.
Any special lessons from Canada?
The September/October 2006 Trudeau Foundation survey on Islam in the West and Canadian perceptions of Muslims has revealed positive results. It would seem to active engagement with difference through multicularism as official Canadian policy has helped in this respect, as greater numbers of Muslims have been actively engaged in responding constructively to negative stereotype that followed 9/11. Importantly, by working hand in hand with many kinds of governmental officials, the changing levels of ignorance and misperceptions allow for interventions that can greatly improve public reactions and perceptions. For example, in the Toronto case of alleged Canadian Muslim terrorists discovered in the summer of 2006, the police carefully orchestrated when and how the news became public, that to cooperation with various Muslims. This approach greatly helped reduce what could have been a very difficult negative media impact on Canadian Muslims and beyond.
And concluding thoughts?
I look forward to our conversations and follow-up decisions in Doha.
