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ON NURTURING A MODERN MUSLIM IDENTITY:
The Institutions of the Aga Khan Development Network

by Eboo Patel

A few days after the beginning of the bombing in Afghanistan, the Taliban
organized a field trip for a handful of Western journalists to see the
devastation. I was in Oxford at the time, = and watched on Britain's Channel
Four News as the convoy of white news correspondents passed a group of
Afghan kids fixing a bicycle on the side of the road. One of the kids, who =
couldn't have been more than twelve, took a break from his work, stepped towards the convoy, flashed a menacing look and offered an insulting finger= .
Then he stepped back, smiled and waved.

With only this tidbit of evidence, we can extrapolate the story in several =
different directions. Perhaps this kid was frustrated by what he saw as yet=
another wave of foreign intruders in his land. Maybe he was just a scowly <= br> pre-adolescent.

I cannot help but think of him as an impressionable young Muslim. And as I =
watched him, I found myself wondering what he would consider an authentic <= br> Muslim identity as he grew up. Would he use his face to condemn other ways =
of being, believing and belonging, and his hands to attempt to destroy them= ?
Or would his face be open to and welcoming of modern pluralism and his hand= s
be able to contribute to it? The path he chooses has everything to do with =
the religious education he gets.

New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has written that <= br> World War III will be fought against religious totalitarianism. Religious <= br> totalitarianism is not just the belief that one religion is right, but also=
that there is only one correct interpretation of that religion and everyone=
should practice it or else. Violence is only one arm of this system.
Friedman argues that the real battleground is religious education, where th= e
ideology of religious totalitarianism is nurtured. Fifteen of the nineteen =
September 11 hijackers had Saudi passports. It's not too much a stretch to =
see them as products of an education system which wrapped an anti-modern ideology in Islamic rhetoric and injected it into impressionable young men.=

For people who have been reading the media on the contemporary state of the=
Muslim world, this will be a familiar story. The New York Times, The
International Herald Tribune, The New Yorker and other publications which <= br> pride themselves on being in the know have pointed out the influence of
religious totalitarians. In an article in the Sunday New York Times in
winter 2001, a Malaysian lawyer and writer said: "The Saudis have used= the
prestige attendant on the fact that they are the guardians of the two holy =
centers, Mecca and <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">Medina, and their enormous wealth, to propagate their own
interpretation of the Koran. An underlying tenet of the Wahhabi approach is=
this pan-Islamic sense that demands that converted people should be leached=
of their culture."

This is the same line that V. S. Naipaul has been pushing for two decades: =
Islam is a culture-crushing force. It will replace your language, your
buildings, your clothes and your prayers. Furthermore, in its most militant=
and virulent form, Islam will take your sons and turn them into human bombs= .
And you should be thankful for it.

Is this true? Yes and no. First of all, Islam in and of itself does nothing= .
It is a word which stands for a deep and complex idea-submission to the wil= l
of God. People who call themselves Muslims seek to interpret this idea of <= br> submission to the will of God in concrete ways in particular places and
times. Muslims do things.

The problem is that we live in a time when the Muslim totalitarians are
dominating. Why? Because they are building powerful institutions that
propagate their interpretation of Islam-just as the Christian totalitarians=
in America have powerf= ul institutions; and the Jewish totalitarians in
Israel have powerful institutions; and the Hindu totalitarians in India have
powerful institutions.

What do I mean by institutions? Lobbying groups that pass policies,
political organizations that get people elected, television and radio and <= br> magazines and publishing houses which articulate ideas, schools and
universities, youth organizations and women's groups, bodies which raise an= d
distribute money.

Al Qaida is a network of institutions: Schools and mosques which teach eigh= t
year olds a certain ideology; organizations which lead them to Afghanistan;=
training camps which make them soldiers; manuals which offer advice on the =
prayers to whisper while engaging in violence. The religious identity-which=
is to say, the ways of being, believing and belonging in relation with the =
transcendent-of too many young Muslims is being shaped by these
institutions.

Perhaps the best way to understand the influence of institutions upon
identity is to consider a food analogy. Many of my students come from small=
towns around the Midwest. Several became vegetarians when they moved to
Chicago= . When they return home, they find it difficult to refrain from
eating meat. The reason is simple: In Chicago, the institutions of
vegetarianism abound. There are several excellent vegetarian restaurants, <= br> many grocery stores have large sections of vegetarian items, vegetarian
cookbooks are readily available in bookstores and communities of vegetarian= s
are not hard to find. Such institutions are a rarity in Rantool and
Kankakee, and therefore a vegetarian identity is difficult to maintain in
those areas.

But as Susan Sontag said in her acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, =
"Whatever is happening, there is always something else going on."= We should
rightfully be concerned about the influence the Muslim totalitarians are having upon Muslim religious identity, but we should also be aware of
alternative efforts. I speak here of the progressive institution-building <= br> efforts of the Aga Khan Development Network, founded and led by Prince Kari= m
al-Husseini Aga Khan IV. The Aga Khan is the spiritual leader of the world'= s
15 million Ismaili Muslims, a Shia community that believes that Allah
provided the world the Prophet, the Qur'an and the continuous guidance of a=
living and present spiritual leader called the Imam. As an Ismaili, the Aga=
Khan is my spiritual leader. He is also recognized as one of the most
significant Muslim leaders in the world. He and Prince Hassan of Jordan = were
the two Muslim representatives to the World Faiths Development Dialogue, a =
group co-founded by the President of the World Bank and the Archbishop of <= br> Canterbury. He has given commencement addresses at <= st1:PlaceName w:st=3D"on">Brown University and
M.I.T., and been awarded honors from dozens of countries and universities <= br> around the world.

But the Aga Khan's most important legacy may be the thing he is known least=
for in the West: building institutions that will nurture a progressive
Muslim identity. The programs of these institutions are focused on Central =
and South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Though largely funded by the Aga
Khan and the Ismaili community, the programs of the Aga Khan Development Network are non-sectarian.

In areas of Pakistan= where militant madrassas turned out the likes of the
Taliban, Aga Khan schools give both boys and girls a broad and liberal
education. They take pride in their Muslim heritage, learning that Muslims =
made significant advances in mathematics, optics, urban development,
geography and navigation; that Islam inspired the poetry of Rumi and the science of Avicenna and the philosophy of al-Hallaj. They learn that Muslim=
states in the past such as the Fatimid Empire protected minorities such as =
Christians and Jews, and that pluralism is one of the glorious creations of=
Allah. They learn that jihad means trying to be a better person, which mean= s
being more generous and honest and kind.

The Aga Khan University (AKU) is the most ambitious Ismaili educational
project since the creation of Al-Azhar University in Fatim= id Cairo in the
tenth century. AKU started with a medical school that focused on training <= br> nurses. Not only did this greatly improve the medical capacity in Pakistan,
but it opened unprecedented professional opportunities for Pakistani women.=
In addition to a medical school, Aga Khan University now has a school of
education that trains teachers, again largely women. Two of my fellow
doctoral students at the Oxford University Department of Educational
Studies, Anjum and Razia, are faculty members in the School of Education at
Aga Khan = University. They were sponsored by= AKU to get their doctorates at
Oxford,= and will return as senior faculty members. Both are women, both are
Pakistani and Muslim, neither are Ismailis.

While Muslim totalitarians discourage or outlaw many Muslim artistic
traditions, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) recognizes the central role that culture plays in human and social development. In fall 2000, the =
AKTC sponsored a performance of Tajiki musicians doing interpretations of <= br> Rumi's work in Paris. This performance took place during the same time that
much of the world viewed Central Asia as= a convenient place to put military
bases rather than a land with a rich heritage inspired by Islam. And in
contrast to the Muslim totalitarians who are funding architectural projects=
which impose Middle Eastern architectural forms on Asia and Africa, the Aga
Khan Award for Architecture recognizes architects who use the Islamic
heritage in creative ways to improve the built environment in a culturally =
appropriate and respectful manner.

I think it was Edmund Burke who said that evil triumphs when good people do=
nothing. He could have added that the bad folks win when the good folks fai= l
to build institutions which nurture their vision. The attitudes and actions=
which the Muslim totalitarians call Islam is unrecognizable to me. The
institutions which nurtured my Muslim identity taught me something very
different; simply, that Islam is about the oneness of God, the unity of
humankind and the responsibility of humans to realize the original intentio= n
of the Creator in creation.

Which vision of Islam will that Afghan kid that I saw on Britain= 's news be
exposed to? Will he live in a neighborhood which allows women the
opportunity to learn to read and write, or forces them into the shadows? Will the mosques he goes to have Muslim preachers that define jihad as a holy war against non-Muslims or as an internal struggle to realize his
higher self? Will cultural organizations expose him to the great poets and =
architects and musicians whose art was inspired by Islam or will he
understand Islam as a narrow and austere religion which eschews beauty? Wil= l
schools encourage him to apply Allah's greatest gift-a creative and
independent mind-or will his teachers demand that he blindly follow their <= br> commands? Will he be surrounded by hospitals and relief organizations where=
he learns that the Muslim ethic is to heal and help or the guerrilla armies=
of warlords that teach brutality. Will his government seek to unite the
tribes of Afghanista= n and work together with the international community or
pit Pashtun against Uzbek and choose the path of isolation?

That twelve-year-old kid is powerful. All twelve-year-old kids are powerful= .
And, in the final analysis, all the work that we do is for them. The great =
Chicago= poet Gwendolyn Brooks knew how powerful kids were. I will leave you
with a few lines from her poem "Boy Breaking Glass": "I shall create!/ If
not a note, a hole / If not an overture, a desecration."

This article was first presented at the Interfaith Education for a Global <= br> Society Conference organized by CrossCurrents, the Temple of Understanding
and Auburn Seminary in New Yor= k City, January 2002.

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