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By
Maha Shahba
Hamza Yusuf
Hanson was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and raised in northern
California. He became Muslim in 1977 in Santa Barbara, California
and subsequently moved to the Middle East and studied Arabic
and Islam for four years in the United Arab Emirates and later
in Medina, Algeria, Morocco, and West Africa. He received teaching
licenses in various Islamic subjects from several well-known
scholars in those countries. After a ten-year sojourn for studies
abroad, he returned to the United States and took degrees in
Nursing from Imperial Valley College and Religious Studies at
San Jose State University. He is the co-founder of Zaytuna Institute,
which is dedicated to the revival of traditional study methods
and sciences of Islam. He has translated several classical texts
from Arabic and presently teaches at Zaytuna Institute in Hayward,
California.
"I
sincerely believe that until the Palestinian issue is recognized
as the festering sore on the body of this planet until the USA
rises up to her responsibility in addressing a grave crime against
the Palestinian people, who, for over 50 years, have been suffering
in humiliation, in abject poverty, at the hands of the current
government that could be called nothing less than a Fascist
government. For Palestine IS the issue…and while I hold
no enmity in my heart for Jewish people, for the children of
Jacob…I call on the Jewish people of this country to rise
up and condemn the oppression that they see with their own eyes."
At this point of
Hamza Yusuf's speech in the Fourth Annual ISNA Convention in
the USA, under the title "ISLAM: Dialogue, Devotion &
Development," the audience, mostly Muslims, cheered as
did the group of Arab youth I was sitting with watching the
young, foreign sheikh on TV. Yusuf's remarks to ISNA aired as
part of The Journey with Hamza Yusuf, an occasional series
on Saudi-owned, private satellite channel MBC devoted to Yusuf's
travels through Europe to the US, which has proved a major,
if also highly controversial, success for the new style of religious
broadcasting.
Yusuf will
sing you a song of love and hope, elaborate on a philosophical
theory, humor you with a funny story, or dig for the historical
origin of a term or a word of Arabic vocabulary. Tears will
fill his bright eyes when speaking of the Prophet Muhammad,
or he will explain to you a complicated point in fiqh
(jurisprudence) in such a simple way that will take it to your
heart and mind, whatever the level of your learning. The bottom
line is, he'll get to you. And he has a lot to talk to you about,
whether you are a devout Muslim or not, whether young or old.
When asked what motivated him, at 17 years old, to convert to
Islam, he said, "I don't know. I have been asked this same
question forever. All that I can say is that I heard about Islam,
and my heart opened for it immediately."
When he was accused of being biased to the West, he could not
offer any compromise. From one point of view, he is a self-hating
American who revolts at the worst in Western tradition, and
from another point of view he is a self-hating Muslim revolting
against what is worst in the Islamic world. The truth lies somewhere
in between.
"We
as Muslims should abandon tribalism, we must reject the concept
of many Islams. I did not join a tribe. We cannot fall victims
to the tribal mentality, we have to reject in our hearts vengeance
and revenge for the sake of pride. We must begin to read the
Qur'an as it was clearly intended by the Author, who we believe
is the Lord of this world ... He says in the Qur'an time and
again that, yes you can indeed redress the wrongs as you choose,
but if you show patience, if you forgive, that is better for
you." This time he evokes only murmurs among the young
TV audience.
A young
fan of the 45-year-old preacher defended his favorite da'iya
("one who calls others to Islam") to his friends when
they accused the Western sheikh of being "a double agent."
It is a charge commonly used by the detractors of Yusuf, among
others, ranging from criticism that he is too politicized, to
assertions that he is soft in religious values and forming a
cult-like movement.
"The irony of the matter is overwhelming. He himself is
iconoclastic while his followers worship him like a nabi (prophet)
re-incarnate," bursts out one furious young man. "But
I always wonder what is it about him that makes him so appealing
to the younger generation?" he adds, voicing a question
that is being extensively discussed now, both among the public
who are attracted to the charismatic, eloquent public speaker,
as well as by experts and analysts who are trying to address
the "Hamza Yusuf phenomenon" as part of a media age
when divergent religious opinion is rampant in print and television,
and "religion is expressed in the media as a basis for
every aspect of one's daily life," as one expert puts it.
"I joined what I believed to be a religion of truth, and
wherever that religion tells me to stand with, I will stand
with it, whether with the Muslims or against them," preaches
Yusuf to his American-Muslim audience, as he always tells those
who question, suspect, or interview him .
At a time
when the world is witnessing what might be called a "mediation"
approach to Islam, following the world-changing 9-11 attacks,
it is prime time for religious programming on television. The
way is paved now, with so much talk about cultural dialogue,
for the bilingual, charismatic da'iya. Trained for more
than a decade by the best Islamic scholars in the United Arab
Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania, Yusuf excites considerable
respect, particularly among the English-speaking elite of traditionally
Muslim states. He can easily shift from an eloquent, literary
style to the popular and sometimes funny vernacular used by
man of the street, a factor that contributes to his appeal.
Though research
in Islamic media is still in its infancy--at least in English--it
is widely recognized that television and print media in different
parts of the world, including the Muslim world, have demonstrated
a capacity to bring issues of racism, religion, and discrimination
into the mainstream, offering a healthy interaction between
different groups. Hamza Yusuf's unique religious program can
be viewed as an example of religious expression promoting coexistence
and peace, using media as an effective tool, especially as satellite
televisions are thought to be "reformulating the Arab-Muslim
mind and constructing a unifying culture making the people aware
of their role in the socio-political and economic development,"
as one expert explains.
Throughout
his journeys, first in Europe and later in the United States,
Hamza Yusuf is thought to be establishing a unique media movement
that seeks to strengthen coexistence without avoiding religion,
escaping the apparent mix-up in concepts evident from the writings
of some researchers who consider media and da'wa ("calling
to Islam") as one and the same, and without looking at
the "Islamic media" idea with a narrow historical
or geographical perspective. He seems to have realized that
it is not acceptable to restrict Islamic media within the limits
of "closed" history, since Islam is not just about
history or about belief. It transcends the limits of time and
sets rules for Muslims' everyday-life issues.
In this
light, Hamza Yusuf's journey attempts at one level to take Muslims,
all over the world, back to the "real" Islam, as well
as to bridge the gap between what is dubbed as "the Muslim
world," and the rest of the world. Hence his obvious interest
in politics:
"I
was with the parents of Rachel Corrie, who lost their daughter
in Palestine when she was run over and crushed by a Caterpillar
tractor that was built in the USA and given as aid to Israel
to be used as a weapon of destruction against the Palestinian
farmers who had nothing to do with any violence against the
state of Israel, but were being punished for collective guilt
that is a crime against any legal system on this planet…The
idea that one holds the sins of another is alien to the Abrahamic
tradition.
The Qur'an says, and its reiterated in the Bible, that no soul
bears the burden of another soul…" There were murmurs
again, of approval and objection. But when Yusuf addressed the
issue of the then-approaching US presidential elections crying
out, "anything but Bush!" there was apparent uniformity
of reaction, and the conflicting murmurs gave way to applause.
This man could not be easily dismissed as a Western patsy, a
"collaborator," as his detractors have dubbed him,
and certainly not as Bush's "pet Muslim."
Yusuf paid
US President George W. Bush a visit in the White House days
after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks
represented a sort of second conversion for him, after his youthful
conversion to Islam.
In an interview
published at that time in the British Guardian, he said
that he regretted speeches he himself had made in the past,
peppered as they were with the occasional angry statements about
Jews and America that are a staple of much Muslim oratory. "September
11 was a wake-up call to me," he said. "I don't want
to contribute to the hate in any shape or form. I now regret
in the past being silent about what I have heard in the Islamic
discourse and being part of that with my own anger."
His expressed
then, and still does, concern about Muslim thinking being steeped
in a theological shallowness that allows violent fundamentalists
to fill the vacuum He holds the ulama (religious scholars)
responsible for this, along with colonialism and successor powers,
which he thinks dismantled the great Islamic learning institutions,
leaving to a poverty of great scholarship.
"We Muslims have lost theologically sound understanding
of our teaching," he said. "We are living through
a reformation, but without any theologians to guide us through
it. Islam has been hijacked by a discourse of anger and the
rhetoric of rage. We have lost our bearings because we have
lost our theology."
That was
what he said back in 2001, and today he still voices the same
ideas, though with a slight change. He does not give advice
to the US president anymore, but rather condemnation "because
this country has to send a message to the rest of the world
that the last four years were a mistake, that Abu Ghraib was
a mistake."
The message--and
he certainly sees himself as a man with a message--is not only
for the people of the US, but for the Muslim and the world at
large. "I want to stand by the truth," he says, "and
I want you all to stand by the truth and look into your hearts.
As the Prophet said, take a fatwa from your heart even if people
give you fatwa."
If Hamza
Yusuf is a self-assigned prosetylizer or da'iya, satellite
media for him is certainly a tool too tempting to resist.
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