A â€å“virtueã¢â‚¬â Was Defined in the Reading as:
"Throughout the pages of this volume, I have done my best to understand the world that I see earlier me through the lens of my religion and my politics. I have always considered my faith to exist emancipatory and fresh, one that is able to confront the bug of the earth with mercy and justice. Simply what would my virtue of defiance look like more formally. Where does this disobedience find its ethic and its power? I want to observe the source of our resistance, so that information technology does not but become a strategy, but becomes office of the way that nosotros alive our lives and becomes part of the mode in which we find organized religion."
[Asim Qureshi, A Virtue of Disobedience, p.139]
This commodity is non a "review" of Asim Qureshi's A Virtue of Disobedience. I practise not comment on the book's show or arguments. I practise not locate its place in the literature or where it fits amongst others. For i, whatsoever attempt in this short piece would do the book's uniqueness an injustice, writes Yassir Morsi.
I wish simply to say that I recognise the volume'due south importance and the author's brilliance, and how the task of writing such a book is worth writing about. Everything from the Developmental Editing, to the language used to the research they"ve washed to the true stories it tells, is perfect. Thus, I would prefer to see my article equally an open and unashamed thanks. And, I hope that while showing my gratitude A Virtue of Disobedience'due south endearing qualities volition show themselves
To read Qureshi is to understand a life lived by a military-anile Sunni male person. It is a life drawn in by the traps and by the gravity of the state's "counter-terrorism". Every Muslim either through words or silence confronts the opportunity to prove to this fight that marks us. Qureshi is a loud witness, and a needed 1, whose fight accumulates into words well-nigh resistance. Words that pursues a necessary human relationship to virtue and Islam. Yes nosotros all know, a fight, our fight, this ongoing fight, but to reverberate on it demands me to recognise on why and non how Qureshi his book. Why? Considering as a Muslim I need it.
What is meant by "virtue"?
If I may overstep the boundaries of my cognition, Qureshi'south pursuit of virtue is the pursuit of Ihsan. We discover in the volume's pages tempered anger in an author discussing the racism that ended Trayvon Martin's life. We find a passion that leads to promise every bit Qureshi finds truisms in the Quranic stories of Prophet Moses (peace be upon him). Together they interlink with further debates almost the racism that drove the Holocaust and the endearing resistance of Malcolm Ten. All relate back to the need to disobey the violence of the State, but with a further call. To employ a most relevant term, at the centre of this volume is an Islamic aim of pursuing justice. An aim to pursue it as believers who know God watches all.
A growing gap is widening between two sides of the Muslim conversation. It is sometimes defined (reduced) to a conflict between Muslim activists and traditionalists. Debates between these ii sides often centre on the relationship Islam ought to accept with politics, or specifically "radical" politics (sometimes misnamed as "leftist" or "postmodern"). A gap that is particularly wide in the young diaspora Muslim growing up in the shade of the War on Terror.
Traditionalists and "radical" politics
On one side of this gap, the traditionalists argue that an epistemic tradition binds together Islam. We must protect its borders. Islam has all the solutions. We should defend our deen from the corruption of whatsoever alien and secular westernese political language. The west is the west, and Islam is Islam, their politics is theirs, our is ours; a traditionalist argument that often finds it difficult to locate tradition across texts, or known names, and which often erases an African-American feel of Islam, and other expressions from beneath.
On the other side of the gap then come the activists who highlight this. They come across traditionalists as out of touch with the ways violence works. In full general they charge them with having a profound ignorance to the way power produces silence. Activists tend to shun warnings about Muslims losing themselves to the supposed traps of feminism or anti-racism, and run across it every bit 1 course of this silence. They meet it is simply a frail conservatism hiding behind religious spoken communication.
With this gap in sight, I read Qureshi. His is every bit an attempt to build a span of sorts, but really to recall that Islam needs to have this gap. His works articulates itself into a necessary and potent question: 'What might information technology mean to resist the state as a Muslim with the virtue of Islam? What might civil disobedience hateful for the believer?'
Resistance in low-cal of the War on Terror
So from one bending, A Virtue of Disobedience begins the argue, sets information technology trajectory and canvasses the crisis of idea and youth on how nosotros should respond to the War on Terror. For, Qureshi's book wants to paradoxically both reach out as a Muslim to the multiple political traditions of resistance, and notwithstanding stand solid every bit a Muslim, to build walls and bridges.
A passage that pops out from the opening few pages recalls the raw tone of a James Baldwin writing to his nephew in The Fire Next Time:
"My sons. I hope y'all will read these words one day and observe that they help you to confront whatsoever world you lot find yourself in. This book may end up seeming a contradiction to you. Surely your mother and I have ever taught you to be obedient and respectful to your elders, to your teachers, to all those around you who have a commonage care for you? Yet here I am…thinking about how disobedience might exist a thing of virtue."
[Asim Qureshi, A Virtue of Disobedience, p.18]
A commencement and foremost beautiful read, as a disquisitional theorist, as an auto-ethnographer, and writer, I find Qureshi'south personal tone profound and loud, and it does what all good works of politics and anti-racism should. It makes visible the virtually intimate ways white power impacts united states, destroy us, and has us dream virtually our futures.
"My sons …" Such a powerful evoking paragraph that captures the book's phone call for responsibility to our time to come, to our daughters, to our sons, to each other. It demands an awakening at what is at stake here.
In the same opening pages, Qureshi gives a reflection on Shaker Aamer, a Muslim detained for 13 years in Guantanamo bay:
"It is these years…these 13 years that were stolen from the released Guantanamo Bay detainee, Shaker Aamer, now home with his British family in the Uk. Aamer lost that unabridged period of time due to his unlawful kidnapping by the US. He was deprived of a life that might have otherwise been lived."
[Asim Qureshi, A Virtue of Defiance, p.25]
thirteen is non just a number. Inquire yourself, Qureshi speaks to the reader: what is the significance, precisely, of the loss of those years from your life?
"For me information technology means that I was never married to my wife. Information technology means that none of my three boys would accept existed – that I would never have witnessed them developing through all the small and large stages of their babyhood. It would mean that I would never accept graduated from my police degree, or my masters. I would never travelled large parts of the world, written a volume or had the opportunity to see my heroes, the survivors of terrible violations who resist being victims of their corruption."
[Asim Qureshi, A Virtue of Disobedience, p.24]
Qureshi reminds us of the "long-lasting and deep touch on of trauma that results from unlawful detention". He tells us of Aamer's struggle to hug his children again later on such an absence. They were his children and returned to him as boyish strangers.
At that moment, I breathe and pause to think of my children. May Allah protect us from such that which makes hugging our own children a trauma, ameen.
Qureshi carries the Muslim through story afterward story, proper noun afterwards name. The reader flips through a catalogue of injustices and a man who stood against information technology. No testimony speaks louder on the value of a book than the writer's own clemency in giving his life to a cause. And so, this book not only outlines how we might all discover virtue in our activism and tradition, it is in a nigh poetic way it embodies a well-nigh cute virtue: bravery.
Then thank you Asim, a thanks said out loud by me, a Muslim to a Muslim, like y'all who has given his life to fighting and witnessing an unjust War on Terror.
You tin can follow Yassir Morsi on Twitter @YMorsi
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Source: https://5pillarsuk.com/2018/03/20/book-review-a-virtue-of-disobedience-by-asim-qureshi/
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