The Muslim Moderator
Hamza Yusuf grew up a California surfer, then became a
cleric. Now he bridges the cultural divide
By Carla Power
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Aug. 19 issue — When Sheik Hamza Yusuf was
summoned to the White House after the World
Trade Center attack, he brought President
George W. Bush two books. The first was a
Qur’an, bristling with Post-It notes marking key
verses. The second was “Thunder in the Sky,” a
book on the art of war by a first-century Chinese
Taoist
THESE TWO GIFTS—Islam’s holy book and a tract on
the humanistic use of power—suggest the two poles
orienting the California-based Islamic scholar. He speaks to
Americans as a Muslim, and to Muslims abroad as a
member of that most powerful tribe on earth: Americans.
Since September 11, the 43-year-old Muslim convert has
taken up a post at the cultural crossroads between the
Islamic world and the United States. Among young Western
progressive Muslims, he’s fast becoming the most
prominent Islamic cleric of his generation. His speeches at
home draw standing-room-only crowds. Moreover, says
Fuad Nahdi, publisher of the British Muslim periodical Q
News, “he can fill a hall anywhere in the Muslim world.”
Born Mark Hanson, the son of California intellectuals,
Yusuf was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church and
raised on a ’70s diet of surfing and spiritual eclecticism. At
18, having narrowly survived a car crash, he started reading
intently about Islamic spirituality. Over the next 10 years, he
studied classical Islamic law and theology in Algeria,
Mauritania and Morocco. Today he is as comfortable
speaking Arabic on Al-Jazeera as he is expounding on
American TV. His dazzling dexterity with Qur’anic
knowledge and thinkers from Aristophanes to Mark Twain
has made him a great popularizer of the faith.
Until the 1990s, American Muslim immigrants tended
to follow intellectuals from the Old World; they put their
hearts into political struggles back in Egypt or Kashmir or
Palestine. Yusuf is among a clutch of Muslim intellectuals
stressing American concerns. After September 11 he was
quick to condemn the terrorists, not as a humanist but as a
Muslim scholar. Under Muslim law, he pointed out, any
Muslim with a U.S. passport or green card had signed a
treaty, effectively, to obey American laws, making support
for acts of violence on American soil unIslamic.
It’s not just Muslims who are listening to him. During
his White House visit, Yusuf told Bush that the original name
for the Afghan war, Operation Infinite Justice, would offend
Muslims. Justice being one of Allah’s attributes, the title
suggested the Americans were like God. ”[Bush] was
shocked,” Yusuf recalled in a late-September sermon. The
name was later changed to Operation Enduring Freedom.
As a professor at the Zaytuna Institute, his San Francisco
Bay Area madrasa, he has stressed a classical Islam, one
stripped of the cultural baggage and prejudices that have
crept in over the centuries. He wants Westerners to reform
their relationship with the Islamic world, and Muslims to
reform their own society. “Hamza and other Muslims have
realized they need to address the theology of hate that exists
among Islam,” notes Georgetown professor John Esposito,
author of “Unholy War.” “They’ve had to fast-track their
own reformist thinking.”
It’s a crucial but
uncomfortable position. “I
get a lot of flak, because
people want to get into a
Manichaean world view,”
Yusuf admits. Some
Muslims consider Yusuf a
Western stooge. At the
same time, Western
reporters have dug up
strident speeches from his
past, including an
uncomfortably prescient
address on Sept. 9, in
which he said that America had “a great tribulation” coming
to it. He has since said he regretted the speech.
In the months following the World Trade Center
tragedy, he’s been critical of the Bush administration’s
Afghan war and Washington’s seeming inability to listen to
Muslim criticisms of its foreign policy. At the same time,
he’s been baldly critical of Muslims, particularly those who
peddle the politics of hate and corrupt Muslim regimes.
“The Muslim world is a mess,” he says. “Muslims know
this, and it’s soothing to say that it’s a mess because of the
West. That’s partly true, but the West doesn’t bear all the
responsibility.” That’s a sober and evenhanded perspective.
When an ex-surfer from the Bay Area can become a
Muslim authority, it’s a sign that the West is now part of the
Muslim world, too.
msnbc.com
( a fascinating person - worth Googling for some more of his ideas ) |
