In mid-April, both Imam Zaid and Shaykh Hamza were at the vast National Theatre in Abu Dhabi for a major presentation entitled The Forgotten Debt: The Islamic World’s Contribution to the West. The event was organized by the Zayed House for Islamic Culture and gave both scholars the opportunity to reach out to the Arab world.

Imam Zaid was back in Berkeley on April 22 to participate in an important panel discussion about the costs of the five-year-old war in Iraq. The panel featured several prominent speakers, including Matthew Gonzalez, a U.S. vice-presidential candidate (Independent), Dr. Ramon Grosfoguel, an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at UC–Berkeley, and Joe Wheeler, an Iraq War veteran.
In his presentation, Imam Zaid focused on the fragmentation of the social fabric of both Iraq and America that has been caused by the war. He also talked specifically about the sectarian violence occurring in Iraq currently:

“We get excuses that give us everything except the brutal reality of the occupation. ‘Well, that’s just the Sunni and Shia, they’ve always fought each other.’ So it’s not our occupation that leads to the sectarian violence. It’s the propensity of Sunni and Shia to fight each other. If we look beyond the hype and the headlines, they weren’t fighting each other during the twentieth century; during the Ottoman days Sunni and Shia lived together; during World War I and the subsequent British occupation and mandate they lived together and in fact they joined together to try to expel the British out of their land; during the Monarchy period they lived together; during the time of Abd al-Karim Qasim they lived together; during the socialist dictatorship, pre-Ba’ath they lived together; during the pre-Saddam Ba’ath they lived together; during the Saddam Ba’ath they lived together; during the first Gulf War they lived together; even during the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians thought the Shia would rebel and come to their aid against the Sunnis.

At the end of the month, Shaykh Hamza was at New York City’s Columbia University for a Zaytuna Contemporary Issues Series discussion with the historian Dr. Richard Bulliet. The event, Misreading History: What Islam and the West Can Learn from the Other, was held on April 28 and moderated by the Emmy award-winning journalist Anisa Mehdi.
In front of a packed house, both scholars engaged in a robust discussion about how Islam is—and should—be perceived in the West. Dr. Bulliet, author of the acclaimed The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, focused on how “master narratives” of history are constructed, and pointed out that they are rarely true. Shaykh Hamza concurred and expanded on Dr. Bulliet’s assertion:

Finally, in Chicago on May 31, Zaytuna presented its Alexander Russell Webb Award to two Muslims who have spent the better parts of their lives working for the betterment of Muslims in America: Imam W. Deen Mohammed, who guided his community from his father’s Nation of Islam to normative Islam, and Dr. Umar F. Abd-Allah, the scholar-in-residence of the Nawawi Foundation.
The awards were presented during a special fundraising event at the Museum of Science and Industry that caught the eye of Dr. Eboo Patel, the executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core. On his Washington Post/Newsweek blog, Dr. Patel wrote that Muslim organizations have historically seen themselves as other immigrant communities have, on the margins of American society. But, he continued, its time for that narrative to shift:

“The Zaytuna Institute…believes that both America and Islam will be poorer if American Muslims continue that narrative. So for their recent event in Chicago, they chose a location which told a very different story—the magnificent Museum of Science and Industry, just blocks away from the University of Chicago. The message was clear—Muslims need to place themselves at the heart of what is happening here and now, to conceive of themselves as citizens who contribute to matters at the center of things, not people who pass through on the margins.

More than five hundred years ago, Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq, a Moroccan jurist, scholar, and saint, sought to combine correct adherence to the Muslim legal tradition with tasawwuf, the tradition of inner spirituality or spiritual psychology. Living during a politically tumultuous age, Zarruq was a critic of “opportunistic jihad” and was exiled from his hometown of Fes for criticizing Moroccan revolutionaries on Islamic and political grounds.
Now comes a book about Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq, titled Rebel Between Spirit and Law: Ahmad Zarruq, Sainthood, and Authority in Islam, written by Dr. Scott Kugle. The book notes that Zaytuna Institute’s Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is one of a few twenty-first century Muslim voices who rely on Zarruq’s legacy to craft a coherent intellectual approach to contemporary challenges.

“Five centuries earlier, Zarruq wrestled with many of the same problems of constructing an authoritative voice of ‘integral Islam’ in which Islamic law was balanced with the cultivation of virtue,” writes Dr. Kugle. “Zarruq’s goal was, like Hamza Yusuf’s goal is, to limit opportunistic rhetoric of jihad and prevent Muslims from making scapegoats of other communities in order to increase their own communal strength.”

Dr. Kugle, who teaches Islamic Studies at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, opens the book by juxtaposing two seemingly unconnected scenes: one of Shaykh Hamza sitting at the White House shortly after September 11, 2001, and the other of Shaykh Hamza three years earlier at the historic al-Qarawiyyan University in Fes, sitting on the floor and teaching a group of American and European Muslims a text by Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq.
“These two sittings may seem disconnected,” writes Dr. Kugle. “Yet as we juxtapose these two snapshots we notice that the sittings are, in fact, integrally connected. They are connected by Hamza Yusuf himself and his search for a voice of Islamic authority that is both effective in contemporary contexts and authentic to tradition. As he speaks out against the authoritarian voices of Muslim extremists and radicals, he is forced to creatively reconstruct the nature of authority in Islamic societies, which has been fragmented into decentered dimensions of legal, scriptural, political, and saintly authority.” 

The book describes Shaykh Hamza’s mission, along the lines of Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq’s mission, as one of restoring an “integral” Islam that combines all three dimensions—submission (islam), faith or belief (iman), and doing what is beautiful (ihsan)—that were articulated in the famous Hadith of Gabriel.

Dr. Kugle contends that teaching an integral Islam is, in fact, a pointed critique of some contemporary Muslim movements:

“Hamza Yusuf does not just critique fundamentalists directly. Rather, he does so by citing Zarruq. He does this to show that fundamentalists who condemn Sufism as a religious innovation or deviation and reject sainthood as ‘un-Islamic’ are actually excising one-third of the integral religion of Muslims as taught by the Prophet Muhammad.”

The author also analyzes Shaykh Hamza’s statements about jihad and compares them to those of Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq, who was a severe critic of what he termed “opportunistic jihad” during his time. While Dr. Kugle notes that Shaykh Hamza never uses that particular term, he sees it reflected in Shaykh Hamza’s consistent criticism of those “fighting in the name of Islam without endorsement and leadership from the legitimate rulers and without following the guidelines of Islamic law.”

Both Shaykh Hamza and Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq, Dr. Kugle concludes, articulate a creative conservatism.