The Legacy of the Muslim Boomers

Young Muslims are grappling with their faith in new ways

There is a kind of global Muslim middle class. I’m thinking here of my parents’ generation, the Muslim “boomers” born sometime between the 1940s and 1960s, anywhere from Turkey or Pakistan, Senegal to Malaysia. These people came up in pretty religious households, many acquired a university education and made it into high-skilled professions like engineering and academia. Some just built successful businesses. Moving up usually entails moving home, to the big cities or even to Europe or North America.

By the time this generation was raising their kids (us!), it was the 1980s and 1990s, the heyday of liberal internationalism, and the Muslim boomers got a little more secular in their tastes. The core Islamic practices that take up a lot of cognitive energy, like the five daily prayers and Quranic study, were toned down, but the things that maintain cultural bonds, such as Friday prayers, the Ramadan fast, halal, and the holidays, remained. Like baby boomers in Western countries, the Muslim boomers kind of took the edge off their religion.

Our generation grew up in this transitional environment. We were taught to lean in at school, and not worry too much about heaven and hell. Our morality was a distilled version of religious dogma. Beyond that, life was about getting ahead. The Muslim boomers - like most parents - wanted us to have the opportunities they never had. They wanted us to make it into the most prestigious secular, Western, institutions we could get into. They saw us carrying a bit of their culture into the heart of the West.

I don’t think that’s unusual, nor even undesirable. The problem was that we weren’t as smooth about slipping from the religious frame of mine into the secular one. Islam has some built-in expectations regarding daily practice, and while our parents had learned to ignore those (or earned the right to), we really hadn’t. They were still there in the doctrine, staring us in the face. We weren’t studying the Quran. We weren’t praying. And even if some of us were, it wasn’t the most important thing for us. Our lives were taking place in a web of norms that made that level of practice and devotion very difficult. This unusually wide gap between dogma and reality made us pretty anxious, and of course, instilled a sense of guilt.

I think bookish people felt it more intensely. I certainly worried about it in my teens, and had a first-degree cousin who felt the same. We both felt a fork in the road, and set college as a time to make a firm decision on the direction of our lives.

I thought I’d eventually walk the way of the good Muslim. I remember my parents helping me settle me into my college dorm room, and amidst the excitement, I kept asking my dad where the qibla was, and whether my bed was pointing the right way (your feet aren’t supposed to point to the Qaaba). My father, who is an imam hatip graduate, and came up through the Islamist movement, gave me a look of utter puzzlement. What was I doing? Here I was, launching into a future he always wished for, and all I could do was rummage around in the past. His past.

It’s a story for another time, but by my second year of college, I had become fairly agnostic. My cousin chose to become a pious Muslim. We both graduated around 2010, when the Erdoğan revolution was hitting its stride. I couldn’t stomach what I gradually recognized as high-octane reactionary nationalism, but my cousin became an unwavering supporter.

“Brother Hüseyin, am I coming at a bad time?… BROTHER HÜSEYİİİİN”

I don’t think either one of our experiences was unusual. We fell on different sides of a generational pattern. I’m not going to pretend I fully understand how and why we made our decisions, and it doesn’t matter much in our story.

That pattern though, continues.

Shadi Hamid

recently wrote a self-reflective piece entitled The dilemmas of Living in a post-religious world. Here, I thought, was the dream son of any Muslim boomer: a Washington Post editorial board member, a Brookings scholar, author of many books, host of successful podcasts, a powerful “Muslim voice” in the Washington policy establishment! Hamid was a highly credentialed and successful member of the liberal world. The degree of his “Muslimness” may have been anyone’s guess, but he did maintain the religion’s identity markers. It made him a rare color in the mosaic of the multicultural society that contemporary liberalism aspires to.

In the column, however, Hamid seemed disillusioned with his decisions. He was thinking back to the fork in the road:

I can imagine being both more religious and religiously conservative, but I suspect it would have required an upbringing that was less encouraging of education, ambition and intellectual curiosity. It doesn’t work this way for everyone, but I have often felt a certain tension between the comfort of religious rules and ritual and the excitement and wide-openness that come with the removal of constraint. I got older. The more I learned, the more I knew. And the more I knew, the more I had doubts about what I had known before.

This trade-off might have been worth it, but it was a trade-off nonetheless. Once you are exposed to the secular world — a world where personal autonomy and experience eclipse tradition — it becomes harder to return, even if you wish to.

A liberal education (unlike a technical education) mostly ruins one’s chances of being deeply pious. There are exceptions, but not many of them.

It’s worth refining my analogy of a fork in the road here. Maybe it suggests a choice where there really isn’t one. Our previous experiences have already primed us to go in a certain direction, and what we’re sensing isn’t so much a choice as a barrier to overcome.

So Hamid kind of found himself in the liberal world by virtue of being exposed to a liberal education, but he’s now thinking back, and wondering whether that was the best outcome.

Hamid describes this as escaping the confinement of rituals and rules, and walking into a world of choice, where one can be an individual. He ends up arguing that the world of choices isn’t what it’s made out to be, and that we do better ensconced in rules and rituals. The moral framework of a good Abrahamic tradition helps us to orient our lives:

As the hold of religion weakens, it becomes harder to understand whether our choices have been the “right” ones. Our standards and judgments no longer refer to traditions; they become self-referential. This sense of endless choice injects into our lives an undercurrent of nearly perpetual panic, of never knowing whether we’re living as we should. Yet we become so used to our freedom to choose that we insist on retaining it regardless of the consequences.

Hamid ends the piece by saying that he’s going to try and re-introduce Islamic practice into his life in the new year, and hope that things improve.

Could that work? I think it’s useful to look at the other two Abrahamic religions here. In some sense, Christianity was born as a more universal and less rigorous form of Judaism. Throughout most of its history and in most of its denominations, it has already been pretty light on daily practice and rituals. Aside from Sunday mass and Bible reading, most of the religion is pretty simple.

Judaism is different. It entails learning an ancient language, rote memorization, significant amounts of doctrine, the performance of prayers, dietary restrictions, and, for most Jews in the world, maintaining a separate calendar. Ultra-Orthodox Jews also understand that raising religious children requires them to be kept ignorant of most of the secular world. They don’t use smartphones, the internet or TV, they only expose their young to a very narrow range of math and history, and generally expect them to have very little contact with the outside world. (There are some groups of highly orthodox Muslim that do this, but I’d guess there’s fewer, especially when looking at the total populations.)

And that’s why there’s Reformed Judaism, which adapts the religion to contemporary norms. Islam doesn’t do that. It makes a point of not doing that. There are people like

Mustafa Akyol

who seek to develop the contours of a Liberal Islam, but I’m not sure how wide and how much traction that has in the Muslim world. There may also be pockets of progressivism in hip Western cities, but again, those are tiny, they look more like heretical sects than accepted branches of the religion.

I wonder if those movements will continue. The post-9/11 search for “moderate” Islam is probably over, bookended by the Gaza War.

Fellow Substacker

Dragoman

, a second-generation Muslim in the US, has also had a liberal education, but has been pulling hard towards Muslim exceptionalism. He recently moved his family to Istanbul, mostly for political reasons. (My post on that here.)

Here’s part of his commentary on geopolitics amidst the Gaza War:

We Muslims have played our part in this horror. Millions of us immigrated and continue to immigrate to the West for money and opportunity, losing din and brain-draining our native lands in the process. Through our economic activity, we dream of living luxurious lives. But these lives will always at some level be undergirded by the bones of dead Muslim men, women, and children. And we accept that. Very few indeed are those who come to the lands of kufr solely for da'wa or (non-kinetic) jihad—perhaps the only noble reasons for residing outside Darul Islam. And among those who have made this uncomfortable realization, there are only a precious few who, like myself, find themselves in a privileged enough position economically to go back to (highly imperfect) Muslim societies with an eye to build up our power in our lands.

The reaction here is not just against the Western elite, but against Muslim boomers. They now look like they’ve thrust their children into the world of liberalism, and they ignored the civilizational war they well knew was happening.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I think there’s a pattern emerging in the culture. I think our generation of Muslims, especially those of us who were sensitive to these questions, are thinking back to the decisions we made in early adulthood, and we’re thinking about our parents.

I can’t say I’m too critical of the boomers. I’ve come to enjoy respectfully transitioning away from dogma. It was certainly more tasteful than hard Kemalist laïcité or new atheist disdain. These days people take on faith positions like a suit of armor in a culture war, or prescribing it for mental health problems. I think the boomers had it right. They moderated their ways, but held on to the things they found warm and comforting. Life’s short. You have to meet your beliefs where they are, messy though it might be.