A Declaration of Independence

If asked to describe my own religiosity, I would have to confess to being a border intellectual perched on the creative and often perilous edge of the Muslim religious imagination (see Richard Bulliet’s Islam: The View From the Edge). Like the Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111) one meets in Ebrahim Moosa’s 2005 study Ghazali & the Poetics of Imagination, I espouse “a subjectivity that celebrates a threshold position, shares certain features with life in exile … neither insider nor outsider [I occupy] a permanent in between-ness” (275).

Tolstoyan by conviction, “Muhammadan” by literary immersion, devotional sympathy, and taste, I am what the sociologist Peter L. Berger calls an “ecstatic,” i.e., an individual “enabled to jump from world to world in his social existence” (Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 136). As such, I pose a threat to settled social and cultural expectations of religious identity. This is regrettable, but the alternative is to forfeit my own hard-won individuality—a concession I am unwilling to make. Consequently, I insist on the human right to exercise my freedom of self-determination, limited though it may be, in the face of those institutions, liberal and illiberal, that would alienate me from it for their own ends (ibid, 145).