The Principle of Integration

A study of the three notions of al-maslaha, ijtihad, and fatwa, though rather technical, is unavoidable if we are to think from the inside about the presence of Muslims in the West, with their legitimate hope of remaining faithful to their religion and its scriptural sources. We hear in the West of intellectuals and scholars […]

A study of the three notions of al-maslaha, ijtihad, and fatwa, though rather technical, is unavoidable if we are to think from the inside about the presence of Muslims in the West, with their legitimate hope of remaining faithful to their religion and its scriptural sources.
We hear in the West of intellectuals and scholars calling for a new ijtihad or for the formulation of innovative fatawa without integrating or even connecting this demand with the more general fundamentals of Islam concerning tawhid, the concept of humanity, and the Sharia (with the universal principles it contains). This approach, which almost naturally tries to resolve the problems of integration faced by Muslims through attempts at legal adaptation that are based on circumstance, could soon prove to have serious limitations.
First of all, because it is built on a dualistic vision of two universes that do not mingle and that make compromises at their boundaries, or in the limited area where they intersect, it assumes that it is Muslims, being in the numerical minority, who must adapt by force of circumstances. This approach also implicitly carries the idea (even if the discourse says the complete opposite) that Muslims must think of themselves as a minority, on the margin, in their societies, which will continue to be the societies of “the Other” and in which they will live somewhat as strangers, their belonging at best being confined to symbolic “acts”: expressions of solidarity, voting, for example. And finally, and perhaps most serious, the vision that undergirds this approach is clearly the concern only that Muslims should integrate into their new environment, and not that they should contribute.
It is certainly quite normal that, during the first decades of their new presence in the West, Muslims should have sought principally to protect themselves; they had no choice, and it was as much about the survival of their religious identity as about the preservation of the richness of their culture.
This is how all the initial steps toward adaptation undergone by all immigrant populations should be understood. For Muslims, the process went from the building of mosques to the establishment of Islamic associations via the elaboration of a way of thinking, a discourse and, little by little, a legal reference framework in the various continents and countries. The various meetings of ulama in the West (from the 1980s in the United States to the beginning of the 1990s in Europe), which tried to address the new questions faced by Muslims in industrialised societies, were part of this trend. The institutionalisation of this dynamic with the establishment of the Fiqh Council (Council of Islamic Law and Jurisprudence) in the United States and the European Council for Research and Fatwas, in 1997, made possible the formulation of a series of legal opinions in step with Western societies and available to the public. There was then talk of a “fiqh al-aqalliyyat” (law and jurisprudence of minorities), which was to allow Muslims in the West to live their faith and religion more peacefully.
These achievements were, without a shadow of doubt, fundamental and particularly necessary; they constituted a new and important stage in the establishment of Muslims in the West. We must nevertheless be aware that it was just a stage and that we should rethink our presence in the West more comprehensively. Indeed, our own sources come to our aid and press us to go beyond three staging posts, which are in the long term to be considered as traps: the dualist approach, minority thinking, and integration thought of only in terms of adaptation.
Doubtless the coming generations will be better equipped to understand and take up these challenges, but the need to reformulate from the inside is already being felt. To think of our belonging to Islam in the West in terms of Otherness, adaptation to limitations, and authorised compromise (rukhas) cannot be enough and gives the impression of structural adjustments that make it possible to survive in a sort of imagined borderland but that do not provide the means really to flourish, participate in, and fully engage in our societies.
In his book On Law and the Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities, Yusuf al-Qardawi adds a telling subtitle: The Life of Muslims in Other Societies. In his mind, Western societies are “other societies” because the societies normal for Muslims are Muslim-majority societies. But this is no longer the case, and what were once thought of as some kind of “diasporas” are so no longer. There is no longer a place of origin from which Muslims are “exiled” or “distanced,” and “naturalized,” “converted” Muslims—“Western Muslims”—are at home, and should not only say so but feel so.

-TariqRamadan.com