Hamza Yusuf and the Religion of Palestine

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf was recently in the news again.  Yusuf, born Mark Hanson in 1958, is probably the best-known Muslim leader in the USA.  (I know the word “leader” is loaded, so substitute “cleric” or “theologian” or “scholar” or “imam” or “hype man” if you wish.)  Controversy is an inevitable feature of that position, so a journey through the social media cycle isn’t unusual, but Yusuf exhibits a talent for empty provocation.  A good controversy pushes people to rethink common assumptions; those provoked by Yusuf impose orthodoxy on audiences who crave daring and meaningful ideas. 

His recent controversies are twofold:  in July, he announced a collaboration with the Trump administration; two months later, somebody turned up comments he’d made in 2016 belittling Syrian refugees and Palestinian resistance.  While the hot-take on refugees was a bit shocking, Yusuf’s views on Palestine have long ranged from tepid to cowardly and his propensity to court racist (and specifically Islamophobic) politicians is a prerequisite of his position.  Leftist Muslims in North America have long criticized Yusuf for anti-Black racism, political opportunism, and normalization of Israel. 

Arguments about Yusuf almost always return to Islamic theology and to matters of knowledge and representation in the Muslim American community.  Considering the degree to which Muslims are demonized and physically threatened in the USA, a reluctance to discuss Zionism, racism, and imperialism is understandable, but the reluctance also inhibits our ability to comprehend the nature of Yusuf’s celebrity.  Being uninterested in theology and having only a passing interest in representation, I don’t see much else but punctilious conciliation in Yusuf’s popularity.  It’s pretty obvious to anyone unmoved by the USA’s grandiose myths of religious leadership, in which individuals supposedly possess a unique dispensation that transcends socio-economic context. 

Accepting those myths can produce misapprehension about structural conditions of faith and prominence in the United States.  (The misapprehension can also reify the racism and imperialism its purveyors superficially oppose.)  Many who dislike Yusuf’s political opinions, for example, defend him on pedagogical grounds, noting that his prominence is due to a deep understanding of Islam.  Spiritual issues supersede the material. 

Yusuf’s learning isn’t in question.  But every mosque in North America has at least one person with spectacular proficiency in both the orthodox and the esoteric.  Yusuf’s prominence owes more to ambition than knowledge.  He’d be just another convert with an impressive command of Arabic if the ruling class didn’t find him so useful.  His function is to pacify and depoliticize a community that has every reason to revolt against the US government.  Purity of religion is secondary to collusion with power.  Unless the religion in question is capitalism. 

It’s easy to imagine a ton of objections to what I’ve said, so let me clarify an ethic that both limits and broadens my point.  Yusuf’s stature derives from being a Muslim public figure; despite the italicized adjective, he’s not limited to a self-contained community.  He is, after all, public.  As such, he is accountable to his beliefs among audiences disinclined to proffer theological exculpation.  More important, it’s problematic to imagine that devotion to Islam automatically grants expertise on Palestine (or Kashmir, Syria, Iran, and Indonesia).  That notion subsumes the hardboiled objectives of state power to fantasies of spiritual uplift.  It likewise reduces collectivism to individual prestige:  a person having achieved the status of leader gets to decide, through subjective decree, how the oppressed pursue their liberation.  Replacing political engagement with religious authority furnishes the rationale for hucksters like Wajahat Ali and Rabia Chaudry to claim Palestine as a native concern.  Corporate media elevate their voices not because they’re Muslim, but because they facilitate Zionist ethnic cleansing under the guise of authenticity. 

Put more simply, Yusuf’s authority is contingent on affiliation.  I’m not Muslim.  I have no reason to view him as anything but a white interloper. 

Many people are motivated by Islam (or a particular interpretation of Islam) to support Palestine.  About that motive I have no objection.  And Islamism undoubtedly is an important feature of the Palestinian political landscape, although I would urge readers to engage the long history of multi-confessionalism at the heart of Palestine’s national movement (including many of its “Islamic” variations).  The problems I point to have little to do with personal religious practice, but with the social force of belief.  I’m warning against investing piety in leaders whose ultimate devotion is to the ruling class.  Surely there are better ways to pursue divine succor than by following a luminary who seems unable, or unwilling, to fight for the least powerful among his community. 

The problem of spiritual-cum-political authority goes well beyond Islamic leadership practices.  We see similar tendencies among North American Jews, though the discourses and histories differ.  Zionism continues to maintain tremendous appeal as an atavistic feature of Jewish life, even among people who reject the ideology.  Spend time in the Palestine solidarity movement and you’ll quickly notice heavy focus on the omnipresent specter of Israel in relation to Jewish identity. 

I’ve had numerous private conversations with Arab, Black, Native, and/or Muslim friends about the preponderance of white angst in our spaces.  I suspect, albeit without empirical evidence, that others similarly positioned share the experience.  These conversations happen in closed environments (direct messages, face-to-face interaction, and so forth).  Here’s a crude summary:  “Why does every goddamn conversation about Palestine seem to turn into a referendum about how Israel’s brutality makes Jewish people feel?” 

How Jewish people feel is a worthwhile topic, but there’s a pronounced sense among the unchosen that such feelings override concern for the actual targets of Israeli brutality.  Likewise with the assumption that sorting those feelings is a useful aspect of decolonization.  Israel, observers come to understand, is the wellspring of Jewish peoplehood, which nurtures an exceptional self-image that obliterates Palestine’s Indigenous population.  Even rejecting Israel arises from a specifically Jewish orientation, a voluntary disavowal of birthright that proffers a kind of credibility unavailable to the natives.  

There are numerous problems with this discourse, increasingly common in an era that prioritizes diasporic identities as Zionism loses favor.  By dislodging Israel from narratives of ethnic destiny, dissident Jews seek to create a future unaffixed to ethnocracy.  The project tends to overwhelm already-puny efforts to support and develop Palestinian nationalism.  (Meanwhile, Palestinians are either taking up for politicians who likewise elide nationalism or fighting for space within our own movement.) 

With Israel treated as a special concern of Jewishness, it becomes easier to defame Zionism’s detractors as anti-Semitic.  This tactic constantly conflates cultural survival with adherence to the logic of settler colonization; in turn decolonization becomes an act of racial hostility.  Conferring jurisdiction over Zionism to people who perceive it as a devotion is a prelude to Palestinian disappearance.  We don’t need to make the world even more convenient for zealots like Bari Weiss and Jill Jacobs. 

Few communities, however, are more vigorous about imposing subjectivity on Palestine than Christians in North America, especially Protestant dispensationalists.  Evangelical Zionism differs significantly from Yusuf’s supposedly nonpartisan spiritualism and from Jewish ties to the idea of Israel.  Megachurch leaders with astronomical incomes and considerable influence keep nudging the almighty toward rapture by reducing a living geography to mistranslated snippets of scripture.  They needn’t learn anything extraneous to their core identities; biblical literalism supplies all the education they need.  Results have been disastrous for people throughout the Global South.  And Israel enjoys the lucre of serving as an avatar of US settlement. 

I’m Christian.  I have no reason to view dispensationalists as anything but white interlopers. 

I don’t seek to conflate these monotheistic relationships with Israel, but to suggest that the ruling class, not the flock, most benefits from uncritical cultures of reverence.  Geopolitical expertise isn’t contingent on spiritual rectitude.  Nobody should seek to make decolonization esoteric.  The erudite sheikh, the dissident Jew, and the rapturous preacher are incapable of supplanting the native as arbiter of Palestine’s destiny.  The native, who catalogues the relentless tyranny of Zionism simply by existing, knows better than anybody the boundless value of land to the human spirit. 

Returning to Yusuf, it’s useful to conceptualize him as a political creature precisely because he purports to be apolitical.  That Muslims (devout and secular) tend to explore his theological significance is understandable.  Spectators of other faiths should refrain from interfering in those discussions.  But there’s not a single valid reason why Yusuf’s eminence ought to inoculate him from criticism of his terrible opinions about Black people, Syrians, and Palestinians, or his association with the bloodstained managers of US Empire. 

We don’t need spiritualists anointed by the elite to mediate our devotion to Palestine.  We needn’t render Palestine a disembodied backdrop for the self-doubt of Jewish apostates.  And we owe only scorn to the disciples of messianic wish-fulfillment.  Palestine isn’t a celestial souvenir, but providence for ordinary humans with no claim to heavenly insight, only a history that supersedes the fantastic and a future that will be reshaped and unsettled by the prosaic rigor of earthly determination.