Against the Imperialist Impulse: An Interview w/ Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im

Daniel is joined by renowned Sudanese Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im for a wide-ranging conversation on human rights, spirituality, and inter-cultural justice. Professor An-Na’im is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, specifically from cross-cultural perspectives, and teaches courses in international law, comparative law, human rights, and Islamic law.

With intensifying human rights violations around the world, and longstanding failures from international bodies to curtail state and corporate impunity, how do we understand protecting human rights today? Abdullahi brings decades of experience as an activist, scholar and jurist to the table, drawing on cross-cultural prisms and critical religious thought.

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Credits

Host: Daniel Voskoboynik
Producer: Ayman Makarem
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Ayman Makarem
Episode design: Elia Ayoub

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

To instill despondency and despair in our inability to change, we are seduced into thinking that nothing makes any difference, there is no change happening. There is change. We can make it faster and sooner, and more radical and global, by deploying the maximum force and power of our tools.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: As-salamu alaykum. I am from Sudan, and usually that’s how I start introducing myself. Once from Sudan, always from Sudan—even if you have to live somewhere else. I have been in exile for decades now. Unfortunately, the reasons I had to leave Sudan are still the reasons for the current conflict in Sudan. But I believe very much in being a global citizen, not just a Sudanese or an African or a Muslim. All of these are true for me, but there’s everything else that other people are: I am a father, a grandfather, a student, a scholar. Also an activist—I take very strong pride in that. I wish that I will never lose the gift of being an activist, and feeling the conviction and the fire in the belly that makes us act, because that’s the only way we can change the world.

As a Muslim, I believe that God is in command, and I think Jews have similar convictions. In my work I have discovered that Muslims and Jews have much more in common than we would tend to think (in terms of current relations and problems). But there is a deep commitment to certain values; a deep understanding of the value of knowledge, and the conviction and drive of knowledge in our lives.

I was born in a village on the Nile about two hundred kilometers north of Khartoum. Khartoum is the point where the Blue and the White Nile meet; one hundred miles further you will come to my village. It is right on the Nile, and the consciousness of the river and the desert was very deep and profound in my upbringing and early life. Because the Nile was a source of life; it was life itself—and yet it was so precariously flowing through a desert, one of the harshest deserts in the world. Therefore the contrast between the green, life-giving Nile and the forbidding, harsh desert was a combination that I negotiated in my early life.

I was born in the village, but my father worked in the towns at that time, in the 1940s and 50s, so I moved with him to a couple of places, like Atbara, which is a city north of Khartoum (and north of my village too) where the railway works at the time were headquartered. Atbara is right at the point where the river Atbara, which comes from the Ethiopian mountains, flows into the Nile, and that’s where the name comes from, the river’s name. That’s my main growing-up experience, where I went to elementary and secondary school; then I moved to Omdurman for my higher secondary school, and then the University of Khartoum.

So the experience of growing up in the village but living mostly in the towns and coming to the village every summer for three months—it is from there that much of the tensions and conflicts, as well as the saving grace of the ability to negotiate and mediate, have come from. The contrast is really deep-rooted in my own consciousness and upbringing, and the environment in which I grew up also reflected that.

Daniel Voskoboynik: We’re going to talk about mediation quite a bit in the interview. Linking that to the ecologies that you grew up in, seeing these contrasts and the need for mediation, is particularly poignant.

This might be a difficult question, but I’ve heard you speak about an interest and commitment to justice as being something that’s in your earliest memories. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about where this comes from. You’ve spoken beautifully also about the impact of your mother and many of the lessons you’ve brought from your parents. But how do you trace the genealogy of your own path of justice? Where does that come from? Where does that begin?

AN: Justice is a core value for me, and it is a very selfish commitment, because one of the driving forces in both my thinking and my life is the golden rule. The idea of Do unto others is universal. In fact, to me, it is the foundation of human rights. As the Jewish scholar Hillel said, Everything is in the golden rule; the rest is just commentary. I think you’ll be familiar with that quote, which is profound. Everywhere, in every culture, this is a core value. But also it is a very demanding value. Often we tend to cheat, in a way. We claim commitment to the value but we don’t live it.

We’ll talk more about Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha as we go on, the teacher I joined in his movement. He was an engineer by profession, but he was a Sufi Muslim scholar and master of the field and of everything else, to my knowledge and understanding. To me, Ustaz Mahmoud drives the value of living your values, that it is never good enough to preach without living the values. To him, the idea of unity of thought, speech, and action—we must think freely, and we must speak truthfully to our understanding and thoughts, and we must live the values in our actions and our daily lives.

So says Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, but my father and especially my mother—a child is closest to the mother and that’s where we get most of our values. Especially in our cultures where the father is absent most of the time, and not very closely intimate with children—in our culture it is rare that parents, the father in particular, would show intimacy or affection. Although they do feel it, but the culture is supposed to be austere and removed, somewhat. So my mother was the core anchor of our family.

I was the oldest of eight children—actually our mother gave birth to eleven children, but three of them died in infancy. I was the eldest of all the children; it was a large household, and although our means were very limited, my father, of his generation, had to keep his house open to other children to come. Because when we lived in town, people would come for medical treatment, young people come for education, and they would stay with us. So we always had this extended family, and that sense of solidarity and understanding the conditions and the reasons people have for moving away from their familiar environment. This is very early in my own childhood.

So in terms of influences, I would say Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, but my father and mother had a very profound influence on my own values. What I emphasize about Ustaz Mahmoud is the notion of living your values.

So much that is wrong in the world, so much injustice, so much violence, so much destructive instability, in all societies, comes from this notion, this sense of privilege, that we are somewhat exceptional—we are the Elite, we are the Chosen People, God’s choice. Muslims have it, as well as Jews have it, and others. But now we have secular, Western, so-called “liberal” capitalists who also think they are privileged and entitled to squander the wealth and resources of the world, because they are the Chosen People, the privileged people.

I mentioned earlier “fire in the belly.” The anger and frustration I feel! How can people be so selfish and narrow-minded and think they are exceptional? There are no exceptional people or country or society. If anything, those who think they are exceptional are in fact exceptionally unexceptional! They are so wasteful, arrogant, destructive. I don’t like to mention names at this point, but the occasion may come when I am more specific about this.

But that is, for me, the key for global coexistence and for any future for humanity. To materialize is injustice. Without justice, there is no possibility of almost anything that is of significance and value. And because it’s a universal value, it is so easy to present issues in those terms. If any of us would just reflect for a minute, we will see that in fact, yes, justice is the anchor to our coexistence. But because of that, it requires constant nurturing and nourishing, development and advancement. We can never take it for granted, and we will lose it by the very act of taking it for granted.

The point is, the impulse, which is part of our arrogance and exceptionalism, is to think that—we fail to see, we have these moral blind spots; there is such glaring injustice and fundamental inhumanity, and yet we fail to see it. In fact we are skilled in hiding the problems from our own sight, but in plain view for everybody else. This is one of the challenges that I find myself drawn to raise and to take on.

DV: Thank you. So many threads to pull on. I want to bring you back to your first encounter with Ustaz Mahmoud Taha. From hearing some of your interviews and looking back at your biography, I know that your teacher in intermediate school in Sudan nicknamed you Socrates, for all the questions you would ask. In Islam and the Secular State, you talk about how a lot of your later work is the continuation of many of the questions you had when you were very young.

For the audience who may not be familiar with the context of Sudan in the sixties: as you arrived at the University of Khartoum, what are the questions that you are carrying with you, the contradictions, the paradoxes you’re struggling with?

I know you describe your encounter with Ustaz Mahmoud Taha as a moment of tranquility, a moment of things coming together—I wonder if you could paint a picture for the audience. What’s happening in Sudan at the time? What does Ustaz Mahmoud Taha mean in that moment? And what happened with you in that moment that compelled you to become who you are today?

AN: The notion of justice is actually crucial to that, too. Growing up in Atbara and coming to the village for the summers, and also going to school, I felt tension about justice in relation to sharia, and Islam, and human rights (what I later came to understand and to speak of as human rights). In the fifties, the notion of human rights, for a child growing up in northern Sudan, was not really that familiar.

When I came to University of Khartoum from Atbara, I used to go to Atbara where my parents were still living with my siblings, for the summers—but our summers were really wasted in very silly activities. Maybe the equivalent of video games these days. At least we would go to the library in the town, but the library was just our drop point and where we would rendezvous. Mainly we’d sit outside and play cards and waste time. We thought that was living up, what life is like.

I remember one time—of course, cinema was a crucial part of our summers. There were three cinema theaters in the town of Atbara. At that time of course there were very limited communications, so we’d have to go to the center of town where there are boards that explain which movies are playing in the three cinemas. I remember I was looking and I couldn’t see anything worth seeing. I was frustrated; what can I do if there’s no movie to see? And a friend of mine from the same intermediate school came by and I was telling him, There is no movie to see, what can one do? And he said, Why don’t you come with me to this lecture by Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha?

I had heard the name, I knew the name as an almost legendary Muslim intellectual and nationalist activist at the time. But I had never heard him or read him. So I said, Okay, since there is no good movie to see, I will come with you to the lecture. And that lecture transformed my life forever. A single hour and a half, of his presentation and the discussion that followed, and I could never walk away. Still I remain enchanted and totally mesmerized.

Because Ustaz Mahmoud was not only speaking truth and common sense and compassionate humanity—he was not just talking to me, but talking for me. Whatever he was saying, I immediately felt, Oh yes, that’s how I feel. That’s how it started. That was in the summer of 1968, when I was in Atbara. And when I went back to the University of Khartoum, I continued to go to Taha’s seminars and lectures around town, and gradually became part of the movement.

The movement was not a political party, was not something that was formally organized. There is not even any record of membership—people just come as they feel the benefit of the experience, and they go away or stay away when they don’t feel it. Spontaneity, honesty of conviction, and freedom were the values that Taha lived by. That kept me going until I went on to study graduate school in Britain and then went back to teach in Sudan for ten years, and then I had to leave Sudan by the mid-eighties.

Throughout, the same fundamental tension between sharia and human rights remained, driving my experiences—negative and positive. I felt drawn to Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha’s ideas because they resolved that tension in my own experience. Sometimes I say this: his words were like water on the fire in my heart. He was putting out the fire; he was resolving the tensions. So I could never walk away.

But I continued to teach and to live abroad and in Sudan and then had to leave again, especially when Ustaz Mahmoud himself was subjected to the ultimate injustice of being convicted and executed publicly for apostasy—the only Muslim I know in my life. If Ustaz Mahmoud was not a Muslim, there is no Muslim in the entire human population. Sorry to be so strong about this. The irony of a man of that caliber and that lifestyle and that generosity and courage and wisdom and insight to be put on a show trial for apostasy and executed publicly (in January of 1985) was unbearable.

So I had to leave Sudan. I left by April ’84, and I have lived outside ever since. Now recently I have been able to go back a couple of times to Sudan. And maybe it was ironic, but it was also poignant that Ustaz Mahmoud, who ultimately represented the mediation of all tension and conflict about my culture, about my values, about my religion, was the one to pay with his life as the price for his courage and conviction. So he remains my role model. Everything I do is shaped and influenced and anchored in Ustaz Mahmoud’s ideas.

That is the extent of his influence on my life.

DV: Thank you so much for sharing, and today we carry on his memory through your work, and some of the water that you’ll be bringing to tame some of the fires, resolve some of the tensions.

I want to bring us to a very clear idea that you bring. Something I appreciate about your work comes from being grounded in spirituality and coherence; you talk on so many different scales but always bring it back to the human relationship at the end of the day. In your work you talk about the imperialist impulse, or the impulse towards imperialism that is at the root of a lot of injustice, and how this builds up from interactions, from me and you to the largest institutions.

With activists, you can get in conversations that are so macro, so abstract—everything at the highest level—that we lose the spiritual dimension that comes from the human, or the humane. So coming back to the roots of injustice: how do you unpack this idea of the impulse towards imperialism, or the imperialist impulse?

AN: The human person is really the anchor of everything. Nothing changes except through the agency of human beings. No justice or injustice can be perpetrated or achieved except through the agency of the human person. The abstractions that we make—about nation, about so-called civilization, this civilization or that—really hide the reality of individual responsibility. We have to bring it back always to that. That’s where the source of all evil is, and that’s where the source of all goodness is. We have to bring it to the person, to the responsibility of the individual person, if we are to expect any significant change or improvement in conditions around us.

The idea of the imperial impulse, as I try to explain in an article by that title—there was a series of lectures I gave at Berkeley in 2010, and it is published in a volume of essays that came out of that series of lectures. It’s also available at my website, and people can download it. The point is that it is the individual person who is responsible for the imperialism and the humanity of their society and their culture. We tend to bury, in our arrogance and evasiveness of responsibility, that we are the source of it all. There is an expression I remember Ustaz Mahmoud used to say (I don’t know if he was quoting someone or if he was the author of the expression): Human relationships are the supreme value in the universe. That’s how he put it. Everything—good and bad—is drawn from that.

A recent book I published is called Decolonizing Human Rights, in which I was very critical of the so-called international protection of human rights as a total sham. It is really a confidence trick. It is a neocolonial project; nothing to do with human rights in their essence and value. For me, to uphold human rights I have to oppose the hypocrisy and double standards in the way human rights are used in public discourse, especially geopolitical discourse, as a pretext for invading and dominating, and for the so-called “civilizing mission” of west European and North American societies, believing they are the saviors of humanity, although in fact they are the exact opposite.

The point, therefore, is how to bring responsibility to the individual person. Of course, I start with myself. That’s one of the values that Ustaz Mahmoud emphasized: that if we don’t live our values, we cannot really have any credibility in trying to advocate or present them to anybody else. In my work called Decolonizing Human Rights, I have come to the idea that it is only through cultural transformation and political organization that we can hope to change attitudes and behavior in the interest of human rights globally, in every society and on a larger scale. The point is that it has to be within the individual experience, and that it has to be something we do before we ask anybody else to.

Now that I am so critical and disillusioned by the so-called international community: there is no international community. It is not a community, and it is not international. It is really the same colonial powers assuming leadership of global politics, human relationships, and economies in order to continue their domination and exploitation. The so-called imperial impulse continues in that guise. Therefore the challenge has to come from within those societies, as well as from others who have to stand up and reject and refuse to accept the neocolonial impulse, the imperial impulse of colonial powers.

For me, the question is really how to bring the challenge to each of us individually. Imperialism and capitalism are extremely devious and shrewd, and they know how to cover up and hide, through sports, through entertainment, through luxury and privilege. They are very seductive in their ways of hiding the real issues and suppressing the truth everywhere. This consciousness, for me, is almost as if I’m waking up in the middle of the night: Oh my God, how could I not see this? How could I not understand this?

That is the challenge for me: now in my retirement, whatever is left of it, I have to find ways of making this real, not just preaching it, but standing for it and living by it in a way that makes it real and possible.

DV: I have two questions that come out of your reflections. The first is, why is it so important to not leave human rights to the imperialists? Why is it so important to defend, given that human rights has been so co-opted by the international community and used as an instrument of power? Why is it so important not to cede the ground on the discussion of human rights?

That’s one question I have. Another is: in a highly capitalist world, where there are corporations loading responsibility onto individuals to reduce their “footprint” of pollution, for example, or an overly liberal discussion which emphasizes the role of the individual, underplaying community ties, how do you understand this idea of individual responsibility at the core of human rights protection as something where we protect each other without ending up in a place where we’re just atomized people “protecting” each other as individuals?

AN: Human rights are too valuable to leave to global powers and to capitalism and other forms of imperialism. I believe that the idea of human rights may have had its origins in human thought through the centuries, but it came to be possible to realize by the end of the Second World War precisely because of the revulsion, anger, and frustration that people felt about the brutality and destructiveness of war, with nuclear weapons at hand. When it really became a matter of life and death for humanity globally, that was the moment of birth of the human rights movement.

But because of its moral power, because of its extreme value, states had to hijack it—especially the former colonial states. It is so powerful in motivating and driving people to action that those who worried about the outcome of that action attempted, and succeeded, in hijacking the movement, and dressing it up in the will and resources of nation-states. It’s ironic, because of the contradiction and paradox of expecting the state to protect us from the state.

The state is the primary source of violations of human rights, globally. Everywhere, including Spain (with all due respect), including every country you can think of. No exceptions. And yet the states manage to hide—that’s why I said earlier that imperialists are so shrewd and manipulative. They hide the reality of the contradiction in expecting the United Nations and international relations among states to protect human rights of individuals everywhere. It cannot happen. It’s a contradiction in terms.

But therefore we have to break away from this. For me, human rights is the end and the means. That is, we have to understand that we use human rights in order to achieve human rights. I have to have them immediately. I cannot look to anybody else to protect my human rights unless I am willing to struggle and to stand up for my own rights to begin with. There are many who are too disempowered and marginalized and disenfranchised to be able to act effectively. But whatever it takes, whoever we are, there is something we can do—if only to keep the fire in our hearts and souls going for justice, freedom, and self-determination. What is most fundamental to me is: the ability to be a self-determining human agent has to be paramount, and has to be kept alive.

There is something I think about—I call myself a “post-colonial subject.” It is ironic that I am so fundamentally anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, but I am a part of colonialism. I was born in Sudan in 1946. Sudan was an Egyptian-British colony at the time, and continued to be until 1956 when Sudan became independent. So for the first ten years of my life, Sudan was a colony. But to me, the perpetuation of colonialism goes much deeper than physical occupation. It is domination and exploitation, wherever that happens, whatever relationships or institutions that may exist or whatever resources that are used.

For me, the challenge is to keep seeing the reality of the fact that colonialism persists. Now we call it neocolonialism. For me, the post-colonial itself is in fact a perpetuation of colonialism. The point here is: colonialism of course comes with this notion of a “civilizing mission,” and they persuade the colonized to think that we have to depend on the colonial to be able to live a human life that we deserve. But in fact they are giving up that life in the very act of submitting to the colonial model.

I find that ironically, as I get older, I get more radical, and more angry, and more impatient with my own ability to present my ideas clearly enough to be persuasive. Therefore, everything I say is about myself as well as anybody else. I’m not exempting myself from any of this, but trying at least to be able to see clearly, to speak honestly, and to act with integrity. These are the values that I hope to have acquired in my own early childhood and through my association with Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha.

To your point about individual responsibility: the University of Bergen is having a seminar which will convene in about four weeks from now, celebrating the long relationship between the University of Bergen and the University of Khartoum. I’m giving a talk there which looks at the question of the civil war in Sudan. It’s ironic—and it’s always like this—that we never realize how vulnerable we are until we are overtaken by the same vulnerability that we failed to see coming. All along we looked at all our neighbors: war in Chad, war in Libya, war in Ethiopia, war everywhere. And we think that somehow we are exempt, that Sudan is so kind, so nice, people are so pleasant that they can’t possibly engage in these atrocities. Yes, now we do. And we do with viciousness and amazing brutality.

So the question I wish to discuss is: I want to get out of this mindset and to break the pattern of violence. The nation-state is the problem. But again, the nation-state is so seductive and manipulative that we never see it as the problem. We tend to think of everything else. And who is the nation-state? It is the elites who compose the state, of course. There is no human institution called nation or religion that is autonomous of human agency. It’s always the agency of individual persons responsible for actions.

How to keep that insight of the centrality of self-determination and human agency in action at every level? Look around the world, listen to or read the news every day: everywhere it is about the stupidity and the arrogance of thinking that there’s something called the “nation” or the “state” that we have to protect at every cost, and this is the only way to progress and civilization—in fact it is the exact opposite. But it is seductive enough to have co-opted all our thinking and imagination into thinking that this is the way to go. We have to uphold nationalism. Look at it! It’s everywhere. Spain (with all due respect), Britain, France, United States, Russia.

The word immediately evokes images of manipulation, greed, and war-mongering. And yet we fail to see that, and we think, Oh yes, we are the exception to human experience globally and historically! Nobody is that exception. It’s just that we don’t see our lack of exceptionalism.

For me, therefore, the key has to be the individual responsibility of the citizens of the major powers, the citizens of the so-called developed countries, to realize that all of this is being covered in layers of deceptive discourse, and we have to throw it open and look and see the real issues. We’ll always find that if an individual person is not willing to stand up to this, nothing will happen. No change has ever been made in human history except through the agency of individual human beings.

I say that orthodoxy always starts as heresy. It’s always about how at some point, some individual person was willing to stand up and say No, and that became the orthodoxy of tomorrow by being hijacked by the powers that be. Therefore we have to keep uncovering the deceptiveness and manipulation of nationalism, of religion, of politics on all of these human institutions and values.

DV: Thank you. There’s so much richness, so many threads we can go down. I’m curious—we have the situation of intense seductions, of many kinds, from elites—whether they are national elites, corporate elites, however we want to frame that. How does an individual go about reckoning with the density of seductions?

And also, what does it mean, then—to go back to what you were saying about cultural transformation coming through political mobilization on the backs of individuals pushing agency by standing up for human rights—to be, in the best sense, heretics for justice? I’m curious how you think that through. Also, something that comes across in your work is the importance of consensus and how to build collectively. Even though we come as individuals, we need to build this from a position of consensus.

Something you’re not afraid of is to sit with paradoxes. You bring up Albie Sachs’s wonderful definition of human rights as “the right to be the same and the right to be different.” A hunch I have is that individuals need to learn to live with those paradoxes to be able to know that we are part of a context, and yet think very critically about that context all the time—but I’m curious what advice you might have to people, activists (young activists in particular but activists of all kinds) struggling with their own identity, with understanding who they are in this moment in time, seeing the intensity of global crises, inequality, violence, war, planetary crisis, intensification of systemic racism?

How would you suggest an individual goes about the process of grounding themselves, challenging some of the seductions, and situating themselves in how they can navigate what it means to act towards justice?

AN: The key has to be consciousness, and thoughtfulness. Whatever it is, it’s going on as we speak. It’s not something that comes openly and says, Here I am to use you, selling your labor and destroying your environment and killing your fellow human beings in the name of nationalism or cultural identity. It is constant, but also that means that each one of us is in fact a witness of this. Anywhere we don’t see it, it is almost like—I’ll use a metaphor: if I am wearing glasses and they are dark, or dirty, I have to clean them; I take them off and clean them and put them back to see. It doesn’t have to be glasses—I can see without glasses, because it is in the mind and heart, not in the eyes, physically.

To see it, and to see possibilities of transformation—without that imaginary of transformation, we can’t do anything. We are just doomed to defeatism and helplessness. But to be able to understand and to see, and to act accordingly—wherever we are, and whoever we are, there is something that we can do. One of the tools of imperialism and nationalism is to seduce us into thinking we are incapable of action except through collectivities. But collectivities are collectivities of human individual persons. That is hidden from us—at least not explicit. We tend to fail to see it happening.

Therefore, when we say nation-state, or we say religious community—it is always human beings who manipulate the consciousness of other human beings in order to realize their greed and ambition. So it is the ability to see, constantly. With recent events in the world (I mean the question of global warming and environmental disasters, or the problem with war and weapons and all the destruction that goes on) it is always ironic to see how good causes are initiated and developed and presented, and they penetrate through all sorts of difficulties, only to be hijacked at a later stage.

The global warming discourse, as you mentioned earlier, is the same problem in a different disguise, or a new style and model. We have to realize that it is the same struggle, and it is a struggle for justice, for human dignity, for individual freedom—and the state is the quintessential enemy of all of this. Global international inter-governmental institutions and organizations are really simply the tool of global imperialism. And that imperialism is not only Western! In fact, Western is simply the latest manifestation of an ancient global human experience of exploitation and manipulation by elites over everybody else. And that includes socialism.

The point I was beginning to make earlier is that whenever an idea is credible and serious enough to challenge the dominance of the global imperial impulse, it’s hijacked. Whether it’s social or environmental issues, or even activities like banning land mines, for example, which is a good example of how a global movement caught the imagination of so many persons that they were able to achieve—but then they were hijacked. It is not addressing our domestic politics in those terms, it’s running out to draft a treaty and call it the elimination of landmines globally, and then the question becomes ratification, and reservations against obligations, and questions of budget. It’s almost like it eats itself, like a fire eating itself. It eats itself into these distractions.

All of these are tactics of hijacking. Every single person on the planet is able to see, if they just take a moment to think about what is really going on. For me, I’m not in the least pessimistic. In fact, I call myself a pragmatic optimist. I believe there is no limit, absolutely no limit to what human beings can do. But we have to be pragmatic about it, to go one step at a time, to plan and think and act accordingly.

DV: I guess you can call them tactics of hijacking—but I’m curious, building on this pragmatic optimism: what do you think are pragmatic tactics that, as an activist and also as a scholar, you feel more drawn to, or inspired by, or hopeful about in these years?

I see a few in your work that I think are very interesting. One thing that I really appreciate about your academic work (and feel free to correct me if I’ve got this totally wrong) is that you criticize the idea of academia trying to “accumulate knowledge” and “prove” something, and then post facto, once it’s finished, to go out and confirm it. There’s this method you use, of persuasion, of consensus-building, where through the process of research itself, you try and build the outcomes that you are looking towards. You don’t wait to be finished to try and do something. You do it through the process itself. Like the idea of human rights as the means and the end.

Another very important one is the defense of pluralism and diversity and cross-cultural conversation. I think this, as a tactic—it sounds very obvious, but it is deeply, deeply radical and anti-hegemonic. Those are just some that I am drawn to in your work, but I’m curious: against the tactics of hijacking, what could be the tactics of authenticity (or however we might want to call them), tactics that you think advance justice and tap into this pragmatic optimism?

AN: For me, it’s what I call diffusion of power—to understand that power is not necessarily in the hands of the so-called “powerful,” it’s in fact equally in the hands of the so-called “powerless,” if only they could see their power, if only they could understand the dynamic and the potential of the power they already have. For me, the reason I say that there is absolutely no limit to human imagination and human agency and transformative power is in global communication, universal communication—but that too has been hijacked! Now we call it “social media.”

That is the thing. Every time we invent something that is a tool for empowering ourselves and communicating, and sharing our power with others, it gets hijacked. The hijacking is in itself a testament to its potential. Because it is so challenging and dangerous to the powerful and the privileged and the capitalist imperialist elements in our societies, that’s why they are being hijacked.

The term “hijacked” is being used in order to hide the fact that they are being taken over. There is something I call human rights dependency, which is the idea that we have to document and publicize human rights violations—go to Geneva, go to New York; publish in this journal and that newspaper and so on—in order to publicize the reality of human rights violations. But nothing is said about what it takes to dismantle that power. That’s why the hijacking can happen, because power is hidden. The privileged few manipulate power, hide what they are doing in the very language that we use to express our aspirations and our dreams and visions.

We have to be able to see through the fog of media, and understand the fundamental power that we already have—and that we are squandering over petty issues that preoccupy our selves and are being rendered more seductive for us, to distract us from what we have to do—we already have it; it’s there.

The question of the environment, the question of countering the transnational corporations and major powers and how they manipulate our crises to perpetuate their power—by the way, without in any way undermining what you do: what you are doing now is exactly what needs to be done. This act, the act that you approached me to have this conversation—that’s all the source of power that we need. To communicate these ideas, and to inspire each other in their realization. That is all it takes.

Because the powerful cannot really coerce us physically into doing anything—of course they can coerce a few, but they cannot really achieve the degree of manipulation they require without hijacking and dressing up their power grab and power-mongering in language and terms and processes like this conversation and the way it goes through the internet to anybody in the world.

These are the insights that we need to have: that we already have what we need; and that we are already part of the way. My generation is two or three generations back, but your generation and the next generation—every generation is a step forward. But we don’t see the achievements that we make. In fact, to instill despondency and despair in our inability to change, we are seduced into thinking that nothing makes any difference, there is no change happening. There is change. We can just make it faster and sooner, and more radical and global, by deploying the maximum force and power of our tools.

Conversation, language, arts. It is all within the grasp of individuals to make the difference that they need to make.

DV: Thank you so much, Abdullahi. I have a few more questions I’d like to ask before we wrap up. So much of your wonderful work, of course, is focused on sharia and on thinking through liberatory possibilities—which, going back to your language, really challenges the way a lot of the seductions and manipulations are used to hide behind religion.

So I’d like to open up this conversation for you to talk a little bit about some of the questions that remain with you now on sharia. Looking back at your work over the last decades, what are some of the achievements—I know a lot of the work you have done is in translation in many languages and has been behind a lot of projects of intense and inspiring reformation and rethinking. But I’m curious to hear you looking back on what some of the achievements of the work have been, to think through liberatory possibilities for sharia. And where do you see the future of sharia in the next decades?

AN: Sharia is a specific problem for Muslims, but it has equivalent or corresponding values and institutions in other contexts too. It’s organized religion, and how organized religion will use whatever discourse is most effective in seducing people into thinking that we already have what we need—in fact we don’t.

When I was a child, and growing up and going to school and university, the reason I came to join Taha’s movement is the injustice of sex discrimination and racial discrimination, religious discrimination—the injustice of it all and how I have to do whatever it takes to transform that. But that is not happening from without; it has to happen from within. So for me, the earliest work I was doing about human rights was a general discourse on cross-cultural dialogue, the tool of consensus-building through internal discourse and cross-cultural dialogue. By that I mean: we have to expand the scope of our consensus and our shared vision—expand and deepen it.

It has to be powerful enough to inspire change, to inspire transformation in individual persons and their attitudes through life: how men treat women, how people treat unbelievers in so-called religious communities, and so on. It is constantly working at that level of consensus-building through shared visions. And through the golden rule, as we were saying earlier on.

But for me as a Muslim, I realized I can’t really change Muslims’ attitudes about anything without addressing the fundamental misconceptions of what sharia is about and why it is the way that it is. The point for me, which I came to through working with Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha’s ideas, is that any understanding of sharia is human. It is never divine. It is the agency and experience and context of individual persons who interpret and render these maxims and doctrines as if they are divine. But in fact these are just human devices to reflect the nature of existing power relations.

Therefore, to speak of sharia is not to speak about what is wrong with Islam—it is that, but it is also to speak about what is right about Islam. There is a point I often make: I say that Islam is a radically democratic religion. It is Muslims who are the problem, not Islam in the abstract. By that I mean that it is Muslims who submit, who surrender their agency and their vision and their religious conviction to the powers that be.

Early on, you said that my teachers used to call me Socrates in intermediate school. I remember the teacher who invented the term was the teacher of Islamic studies, because I was constantly raising embarrassing questions about how this, why that, and so on. He would say, Shut up, you are just like Socrates—implying, of course, that I could also be killed, actually, if I don’t look out. But the point is to say that it is very deep and it is very early—it goes to our education. We have to transform our education.

When I say “transform,” I don’t mean Wait for the state to transform it for us. Because that is defeating the purpose. I’m saying that every community and every person, with other persons in collective political will and cultural will and vision, must transform the education of their own children—which requires transforming their own self-understanding and education.

Sharia is human. There is nothing divine about it. We Muslims believe that the sources are divine, but the sources have no possibility of penetrating into human consciousness through the agency of human beings. It has to be language, it has to be communication strategies, instructive strategies, in order to reach people’s consciousness and ability to act. Understanding that, I think, is key to opening the door.

For me, forty years later, I am thinking, Okay, what is it that I missed in this long quest for theoretical understanding of sharia in a way that is transformative? What is missing is the ability to communicate that, and how to communicate—honestly and candidly, that’s why I was so eager to accept your invitation: because this setting, this conversation, is reaching thousands of people in all sorts of cultures and situations and levels of consciousness, reaching all these people and opening the door for conversation with all of them, and among themselves as well. The tools of change are in our hands!

Except that every time we realize the value it is hijacked from us. The irony is that it is hijacked by hijacking our will, hijacking our imagination. Nobody can take away my vision except through my acquiescence. Therefore, refusing to acquiesce to the hijacking of values and institutions and power is the way to stand up and to keep going forward.

DV: I want to ask you two final questions. The first one is: I’d love to invite you, if you feel comfortable, to share a little bit about spirituality and your own spiritual practice. As you said from the beginning, this starts with individuals; this starts with us. I remember hearing you speak about Ustaz Mahmoud Taha and his teachings on power as something you renounce, that spirituality is the renunciation of power, in a way.

I’m curious what spirituality means to you in the day-to-day, how it informs your political practice, and whatever you feel comfortable sharing about how you live your spirituality.

AN: With spirituality and religious experience and practice, it’s very contextual. And often it is hidden or involved in the same type of power struggle that we see in the political field and the economic field and elsewhere. For me as a Muslim, raised as a Muslim, and coming to understand Islam in a radically different manner through the work of Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, is what enables me to reconcile my global human impulse to be humane, to be compassionate, to be accepting of the other on their own terms.

That is absolutely crucial: there is no acceptance that does not accept on their own terms. What is going on most of the time is that we accept them on our terms. They are human to the extent that they are like us. They are equal to the extent that they are people like us who are equal. So it is that ability to accept—you mentioned Albie Sachs’s expression about human rights and the right to be the same and the right to be different. The right to be the same is on that other person’s terms, not on my terms. If I insist that you can be equal to me only if you are like me, or you are “one of us,” then we defeat the purpose.

It is that ability to share and to understand, and to transcend our narrow conceptions of self and the other. I mentioned earlier the term global citizenship. I think that is the only way forward. There is no possibility of humanity really surviving, let alone thriving, except through renouncing narrow-minded, egoistic nationalism and sexism and other forms of accumulation and consolidation of power. What I called earlier on the global sharing of power, the diffusion of power—to understand that whatever it is that drives our action can drive other people to action too. It is our failure to communicate, more than it is the others’ failure to be inspired by what we are saying.

And we have the tools for that. The tools are within our grasp. But we allow them to be hijacked, as I said, by not realizing the full potential of their power. Therefore, for me, spirituality is a tool of self-gratification and coming to peace within myself, but also to communicating effectively with others. The term spirituality is attractive over religion, because religion is a power relations issue. It’s a question of accumulation of power, whereas spirituality is a diffusion of power.

There is spirituality in every religion, but they are not synonymous. Therefore, to be able, as a Muslim, to accept every other religious belief or lack of religious belief as equally valid and justified and empowering—that takes more than my conviction as a believer. I also speak about belief being a choice: that I cannot believe unless I am equally able to disbelieve. The very idea of belief immediately raises the question of choice in the belief. If I don’t have the choice, I cannot have belief, really, to speak of.

Therefore, upholding the fundamental need for disbelief is a way of securing my need for belief. I cannot believe in my own articles of faith or belief or practices unless I am equally committed to upholding other peoples’ choice in all of that, or destroying or blocking the lack of choice in their experiences. The idea is to turn the question of power and the question of human relationships on its head. To refuse to acknowledge the powerful despite the temptation or seduction to do so, and to realize I am as powerful with you and every other individual person everywhere—more than the powerful would like us to believe; they would like us to believe that they are powerful beyond our challenge.

DV: Thank you so much. This brings me to my final question, before we ask you for a recommendation. This podcast is called The Fire These Times, after the quote from James Baldwin, and when we started this conversation you spoke about how the fire in your belly was the beginning. And we have listeners listening from dozens of countries, people with many different mother languages, mother tongues, all bound together by a commitment to act upon the fire in our bellies in these times of intense inequality and injustice.

So my invitation is to offer you—if you have any message you want to share with everyone, the microphone is yours.

AN: Thank you. An idea that comes to mind is that for me, the only category that there is, is the human. Everything else is the product of experience and context. What is universal is humanity. Therefore, to address that humanity and to reach for that humanity is the only way to bring all visions together into a shared future of sustainability and justice and prosperity and security for everyone.

Language is a problem, in that it has been a tool of imperialism, and it is still a tool of division and sectarianism and violence in many societies. Again, to think of the Basque in Spain—language can always be a problem. At the same time, ironically, it is also very empowering, if we take a correct attitude about the role of language in our discourses. In other words, English came to its position through imperialism, but it is no longer an imperial language, in the sense that it has been co-opted and hijacked, you might say, by so many societies and so many activists and freedom fighters in their own struggles that it is no longer the privy of the imperial.

But we have to realize too that we have to transcend the limitations of language in order to achieve true global communication and conversation. The dominant languages often come to their positions through imperial practices. Arabic is the dominant language in the region of north and west Africa and the Middle East through imperialism, Islamic imperialism that came to dominate and impose this language on everybody else.

But now that people have come to a consciousness that realizes the full potential of their ability to organize and to hijack or to co-opt the language itself into their own struggles, we can’t do without it. But we don’t have to be limited by it in a way that denies us the ability to see beyond the immediate context. How do we keep using languages that have come to prevail through imperial practices in anti-imperial struggles, in order to reach out?

An example is Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha: the limitation is that his work was in Arabic, and as such it was inaccessible to the vast majority of humanity who do not read or study or know this language. At the same time, there are some who have mastered the Arabic language who can translate it into other languages. But it is more than simply translation in the sense of technical conveyance of meaning; it is conveyance of value. It is how to communicate the value of a shared language despite the lack of a shared language, by creating possibilities of vision and understanding.

You asked for a recommendation; my struggle is that the only human being that I find really worth citing as an example is Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha; the only limitation is that his work is in Arabic. But there is always translation that could open the door for many possibilities. I translated Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha’s main book, The Second Message of Islam, and it was a charge that Ustaz Mahmoud himself gave to me hand in hand. He said, Abdullahi, translate this. That was around 1979 or ’80. And I took it from his hand; I translated from the same copy, actually, that he gave me. And that book has been published in English, but from there into other languages too. Now there are more than twenty doctoral dissertations on Ustaz Mahmoud’s work and life and experience.

This groundswell of compassion and interest and understanding is growing rather than diminishing. And it’s growing despite the execution of the author. Here I say that you can’t kill an idea by killing its author. If anything, human history shows that killing the author is in fact the proclamation of the idea rather than its diminishing influence and extinction.

There are so many ideas—I’m sure your audience and people who listen and share your conversations already have all of this. I’m only touching on points here and there to remind us of the shared ground that we have.

DV: Thank you so much, Abdullahi, for illuminating that shared ground, and watering it today. I want to thank you on behalf of The Fire These Times for joining us today and for sharing all your insights and life’s work.

AN: Thank you so much, Daniel, thank you.

Ayman Makarem

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