Free A Quiet Revolution by Leila Ahmed

beliefs and practices of Islam in this country.
    So powerful and effective have Islamist definitions of Islam become today in America and the West (and elsewhere), that even Muslims who grew up thinking they were believing Muslims and for whom Islam was above all a spiritual and ethical resource might well come to doubt their own sense and understanding of Islam. Finding themselves alienated by and feeling no empathy with the views and practices of this now domi- nant form of Islam—from its obligatory hijab to its activist social and political agendas—they perhaps begin to wonder if they are in fact Mus- lim after all: if this is Islam. I recall being told by an American Muslim friend that her twelve-year-old niece who attended Islamic school on weekends came home one day to inform her Sufi-practicing grand- mother that the way she was practicing Islam was “wrong” and “not Islam.” Although this is merely a personal anecdote, it would not surprise me if future researchers were to find that similar scenes of Islamist-in- fluenced youngsters challenging their families’ form of Islam were being played out in these years all across America.
    Not uncommonly in our times this larger group of American and Western Muslims, whether secular or non-Islamist, feel—much as their non-Islamist Muslim predecessors did in Cairo as Islamism was gaining power—a degree of suspicion and even hostility toward the Western Is- lamists whose institutions and definitions of Islam now dominate the West’s landscape.
    Many, for example, are thoroughly irked at the way that Islamists have “hijacked the mike,” as Kabbani had put it. And they are put off by its activist commitments to causes that non-Islamists see as essentially political. Altogether they often seem to feel a deep antipathy toward this Islamist form of Islam now so widely proclaimed and accepted in the West as Islam tout court.
    Ahmad succinctly articulates many of these specific peeves in his column. He complains, for example, that on those few occasions when he attended meetings at Islamic centers there were invariably speeches “about the Palestine conflict, the Kashmir conflict, the Chechnya con- flict, the Bosnian conflict,” issues which, he writes, “secular” Muslims such as himself who make up (he notes) the majority of Muslims in America, are in fact quite “dispassionate” about. “We certainly have no interest,” he explains, “in civilizational battles.” Moreover, he continues, “we are loathed” by this dominant Muslim minority who now loudly speak for Islam and Muslims. Despite constituting the majority, he con- tinues, “we have no clear voice, no representation and no one in the Western world appears to be aware of our existence.” And indeed this is surely an extraordinary situation: a situation in which one form of Islam ‌
    —a form that just four or five decades ago was marginal in most Mus- lim-majority countries and which at that point constituted just one strand within the multiple strands of Islam—is today globally dominant in the West as elsewhere.
    Other non-Islamist Western Muslims also sometimes give vent to their dislike for Islamism. The prominent British journalist Yasmin Al- ibhai-Brown, for example, wrote, “I am but Muslim lite, a non-con- formist believer who will not be told what and how by sanctimonious religious sentinels for whom religion is a long list of rules to be obeyed by bovine followers.” 56 Alibhai-Brown differs from Ahmad in that she is by no means “dispassionate”—as her work and the positions she takes make clear—about political issues, including those affecting Muslims
    and other minorities, whether at home or abroad. Appointed to the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2001 , Alibhai-Brown returned the award in 2003 in protest in part against the Labour government’s con- duct with respect to the Iraq war. All the same, though, as her words here (and most obviously, of course,