We are not yet ready to understand 'Islam'

Ramadan (1999) begins:

As we have indicated in our general introduction, the question of the Muslim presence in Europe necessarily requires that one has a clear idea about the fundamental teachings of Islam and also about the juridical tools which are at the Muslims disposal. This is so as to address the challenges we encounter nowadays.
(p9)

This seems to me to presuppose two possibilities: that we are capable of understanding ‘the fundamental teachings of Islam’ and that we are capable of understanding the challenges presented by ‘Europe’.

Suppose that we can challenge these presuppositions. Suppose that the ‘we’ in the last sentence above refers to the Muslims in Europe (there is also the ‘we’ that refers to the author and the ‘one’ that refers to the general human subject, the ‘unidentified other’, but this is another issue).

It is not simply a matter to looking at ‘Europe’ as if we understood what that was and then looking at ‘Islam’ as if we, if only potentially, understood what that was – and it was something different from ‘Europe’ – so that we are merely faced with the task of aligning these two elements of discourse in some harmonious way, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which we have yet to orientate correctly.

Suppose that we are all already ‘Europeans’, but that we do not understand what that is, and that ‘Islam’ is something we are unable to understand from the ‘European’ perspective which is the only perspective available.

What would be the effects of this? Firstly, we would find ourselves in a place (‘Europe’) that we were unable to engage with effectively – intellectually, socially, personally, politically, economically, morally, spiritually – and hence we would find apparently insoluble problems on all sides, with matters becoming increasingly unstable, fragmented and confusing. Does this sound familiar? And bear in mind that ‘Europeans’ understand ‘Europe’ no better than ‘Muslims’.

Secondly, we would have no means of understanding ‘Islam’ (or any other non-‘European’ discourse) and appropriating it for ourselves other than as a theory within an illusion. Consequently, ‘Muslims’ would find themselves increasingly estranged from ‘Islam’ while multiple new ‘theories’ abound; meanwhile the non-‘Muslim’ ‘Europeans’ would be unable to understand ‘Islam’ and it would be rejected as an outmoded, medieval ‘religion’ along with ‘Christianity’. Again, not an unfamiliar scenario.

No one is yet ready to understand Islam.

To understand Islam, we, however we label ourselves, have first to understand ‘Europe’ since that is where we are coming from. When we have understood ‘Europe’, we can turn to ‘Islam’ in a real way. What we will find, I believe, is something that has not been understood within living memory except by a very few: the ‘elite’ if you will. These elite have consistently understood what we will only find out when we are able to divest ourselves of our false understanding of who we are (in our case, as ‘Europeans’). These elite appear to have always existed and are sometimes labelled ‘mystics’. Do not think for a moment however that we yet understand what that means.