My apologies - I gave my original response to aklon and Alan the wrong
subject header. The JISC mail told me to alter the etxt and resubmit.

Submission? What am I going on about?
to borrow from Benjamin Zephaniah.

The power, emotional zeal, and clarity of expression in Alon's very
fine and choate writing invites me to doubt, for a moment, the will of my
submission and the integrity of my will.

The compelling and factual scenario of the Christian message cited in
Alan's posting reminds me of my Uncle Sydney's (now Sadiq) account of his
abandonment of a Eurocentric and white Christianity of deceit for the
transgressive politicisation of Islam in apartheid Cape Town.

I do not believe that Christianity is a religion of deceit. Though in
apartheid
South Africa my uncle Sadiq believed he had been deceived by whiteness
to the point of betrayal. In this he included white people, white
government, and white suzerainty.
Of course, the Christian Dutch Reformed Church was an ideological and
cultural 'agent' of the State.

People may say: but apartheid was a long time ago, move on. If only it was
as simple
as that for the peoples of South Africa. The future of South Africa is
being shaped out of the holocaust
and deceits of the past. This requires negotiation with the past (Nuttall
and Coetzee, 1998).
Today's identities are etched livid with yesterday's scars in
the 'Coloured community' with whom I identify (Erasmus, 2001). I am
drawing into my account the pervasiveness of power relations in cultural
reproduction.

I hear you thinking. So what? So what if Yaqub's uncle Sadiq swapped one
form of submission for another form of submission? Swapping a white
representation of God for a desert-brown prophecy of Allah. What's the
difference? Who cares anyway? One form of slavery of the will relinquished
in the embrace of another demand to submit to an invisible presence.

Held in the synonym of slavery, submission to God/Allah binds my Uncle
whether he is a Christian Sydney or a Muslim Sadiq. Oh, I hear the
muttering. Submissive sub-personalities under the skin. The suzerainty of
His overlordship holding the person in thrall. However, submission is not
as black and white as this.

What Alon and Alan's postings do for me is this.

They make me think. Deep and hard. I think about my rejection of
submission to whiteness, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. I do not submit
to the new imperialisms. I do not submit to the new world order. My
defiance to submission surfaces in my will to practice my postcolonial
critical pedagogy. Producing my doctoral thesis, a living educational
theory account of my postcolonial critical pedagogy, is to contribute to
the 'tipping point' (after Malcolm Gladwell) through power relations that
contribute to alterity among social formations in the Academy. In this way
I contribute to something much bigger than me alone. While satisfying my
belief that it is fair and just that my account of my self-knowledge finds
its place in the Academy. An academy of amazing whiteness. This is not to
accuse. This is merely an observation. My presence chips away at
whiteness, at Eurocentricity, at neo-colonialism.

Thinking about Alon's and Alan's posting I notice in the practicalities of
my educational relationships how I submit my imagination and ideation,
willingly, to the delight I encounter in the unique novelty of my
student's own ideas. I can instruct in technique, and do. I can inform in
respect of the availability of multiple literatures, and I do. This is
unsurprising given the way my cognitive range has been extended,
eclectically. As Paulo Freire suggests in his own pedagogy there is a
timely place and space for sharing insights on hegemonic practices with
students. There is a matter of the honing and focusing of the critical
gaze.  Though such honing should not erase the texture of a students own
knowing.

So in reading Alon and Alan's superb postings, I find myself acknowledging
my submission to Allah.
But I do not submit to colonialism, and I do not submit to a colonial
education (after Macedo, or after Razak). I refuse to submit to
the 'vampire archetype' in respect of the artistry of my educational
relationships with students. And I refuse to attempt to brow-beat students
and colleagues into submission. In the past I have come close. Always in
those moments when I have believed, perhaps mistakenly, that a student
would enhance her/his learning by engaging with Labour Process Theories,
or Critical Management Studies, or by reading Foucault or Jean McNiff, or
Hardt and Negri.

Next Wednesday I'm inviting my Action Masters students next week to read
Mohamed's posting. I imagine my students will engage with the way Mohamed
presents his theoretical constructions about his practice. When Mohamed
writes, " I feel honoured by your interest in using the material in your
seminar discussions with your MA students. Yes of course you can use it
for that purpose Yaqub", I feel myself, regarded, in a quality of mutual
availability in the way Marcel frames his idea. I feel educational
relationship. I sense, in some way that remains a mystery to me, my ego-
defences melt in the face of Mohamed's brilliance. My ego submits to
humility, and humility is the key to the fertile space of inclusion of the
other.

At last I understand, more clearly, what Bakhtin had in mind when he
suggested the other is a prerequisite for dialogue. Submission of some
part of my self is necessary for the other to move toward me.
Etymologically, I believe the word obedience shares a root with the Latin
word for listen, audere. Obedience is a submission to listen. This is at
the heart of many helping professions, especially therapy. The submission
isn't total and unconditional. In this sense it isn't like 'slavery' at
all.  Refusing to submit can be an effective strategy for a hermetic life,
though. My submission to the idea of a loving family of partner, children
and grandchildren provides me with the source of loving life -affirming
energy that radiates, and illuminates my educational relationships.
Ubuntu, for example, requires a submission of the priapic 'I' in the
phrase, 'a person is a person only through other persons'. I part company
with Alon's heuristics of the hermit at this point, and celebrate my
pedagogy of 'we~i'.

My Cape Town so-called 'Coloured' father was Othered by apartheid. My
adopted Dad, who was Irish, was Othered by the English colonial presence.
My South African family was Othered as 'nie-blanke'. My educational
artistry is in the service of processes that defy Othering. I have been
slow to learn how I other, and despite my beliefs, I have housed
the 'vampire archetype'. Yet with nearly a hundred supervisions of student
creativity I also have a long history, reaching from then to now, of
emancipatory educational relationships.

Coco Fusco (2001), in her book, 'the bodies that were not ours', explains
how as a performance artist she uses her artistry to mimic, to defy,  and
to abhor slavery. She also wants to creatively discomfort her audience.
Fusco's grandmother was a slave. I use my performance artistry in my
educational relationships to celebrate my freedom. In an act of defiance
of the shadowy presence of the 'vampire archetype' I submit to the unique
meanings, voices, aspirations and artistic energies of those students I
supervise.

In my scholarship that informs the theoretical construction of my practice
I tend to focus my critical gaze on the 'vampire archetype' of Western
hegemonic practices and new imperialism. I undoubtedly bring my 'bias' for
scholarship into the space of my educational relationships.  This is part
of my 'gift'. My 'gift' to the struggle (of the educational Left) is to
influence the education of the social formation of my College through my
role as Diversity officer. This role enables me to hold open a discourse
of race talk and ethnicity.

My educational vocation is achieved in my responsiveness to the call of
those students who want to critically examine the realization of their
lives through questioning the legitimacy of knowledge. Through my own
scholarship and research I influence the education of students who
participate in the Critical Issues in Organization module. My first step
is to encourage them to engage with Critical Theory. Gradually we focus on
theories that identify and deconstruct social, political and cultural
practices in a wider context (after Derrida). The majority of students in
my College do not want to do this kind of work. In a College where there
is a culture of right-wing, reactionary, normative, prescriptive and a-
social science teaching I provide a 'critical space'. Yes, do read
critical in several ways. It can be a lonely space. Sustaining hope in the
educational encounter with students in my college requires a form of
submission. While I am unable to explain this feeling precisely I know
that I submit to the reality of educational practicalities. This is how it
is here. What can I do to make this space meaningful with others? How it
this meaning linked to educational goals? Submission to the earthy
practicalities of educational practice seems to inform my living standard
of judgement of humility. In turn this seems to connect with my desire for
truthful acceptance of the other.

I marvel, admire and in some part envy the quality of Mohamed's writing.
Though I will not allow my ego to subvert my personal and educational
ethic. In the face of Mohamed's theoretical constructions of his practice
I submit my ego to Mohamed's brilliance. I wish I had written such a piece
to offer my students as they write up their Masters theses. I like the
educational significance of this insight. Through the practice of
submission in Islam, I am heightening my interpersonal and spiritual
awareness of the intrinsic value of the precious 'gifts' of the other. By
framing this as a way of supporting my students education, I am engaged in
submission of my ego. Without this sense of submission there could be
hubris. I have in mind the colonial and imperial hubris of the European
that many postcolonial writers are in touch with. I aspire to an
appropriate educational humility. A humility through which I submit my
will to the compelling  worth of my students meanings. Humility seems to
be a pedagogic matter doesn't it? Though it was not always like this with
me. People in this e-seminar can say more about that. But as Chinua Achebe
writes, things fall apart. And this is as it should be. Like the Berlin
Wall, like the social construction of apartheid, like in a future space
when Western hegemonic practices cease. I believe that a living standard
of judgement of humility is key to the nature of my living educational
theory.

What is this submission to the will of God/Allah? Not very different to
submission to the will of neo-liberal thinking, to neo-conservative market
idols, to the argot of commodification in British schools, in the British
academy,
to the deceit that is Iraq, to the New World order, the new imperialism of
the US and West.

How much easier it would be if only those nasty Falasteen would submit to
Israeli
colonialism with the mellifluous ease that they bend their necks to their
Allah, I hear the Israeli soldier with blood on his hands muttering to the
Israeli liberal. Two great communities separated by narratives. Jew
killing Muslim, Arab killing Israeli, self and other. The world suffers
and humanity pays the price. Saada and Rachel both pay heavy prices for
the hubris of nationalism and supremacy at the moment  their umbilical
creativity is
mashed into pieces too small to be collected for burial. Like it or not:
they have tasted their maternal submission. We submit to behavioural tests
to grade us in schools, we submit to the institutional racism that allows
Stephen Lawrence's murderer's to roam the land, we submit to the authority
of discipline in the academy, and we submit to the judgements of the
doctoral pontificate. We are all in submission, without remission, in
subjugation and conflagration.

I like my own complex multiplicity in this matter.

My postcolonial critical pedagogy strikes out for emancipation of
consciousness. Domesticated consciousness and desiccated politics have no
place in my curriculum.
Though this is what the Business Studies curriculum of my college offers.
I teach against capitalism.
I use the great artistry of my educational relationships to 'name'
the 'Vampire Archetype' within me, within others, within institutions, and
within the hegemonic practices of the West, and elsewhere.
It is not only the West that colonises free spirits.
Post-colonial states mimic their former Masters very well.

I use my role as a College Diversity officer to speak with 'vampires',
critically.
My focus begins with state violence as racism. I can't handle the rest
just yet!
I try to deliver a small and modest contribution. Let me first see how
state violence as racism
is culturally reproduced through discourses and discursive practices of
higher education. Then let me awaken students to the 'vampire' within,
flowing through, and between us all as we feed the 'vampire archetype',
emboldening it through our bloodlessness.

I am not a bloodless educator. A bloody educator is who I am.
The blood of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid is in my veins.
The bloody-mindedness of the agonistic critical theorist.
My rich heritage of 'once were masters and once were
slaves' mans that I have the blood of omission and commission on my hands,
too.

Yet I am an educator who teaches, publicly, avidly, and cogently against
capitalism.
Despite my blood lust and my own bloody complicity. Rather than permit this
negation to disenable me, I draw on the negation to enliven me.
Like Hegel, one framing I bring to my educational life is the negation of
negation.

I am an imperfect Muslim. A striving Muslim. I clear my path to Islam for
myself. I hold my self accountable to Allah, through my belief that I
glimpse Allah in the other.
I hold myself accountable only to Allah for the quality of my practice in
my human encounters.
I refuse to tread anybody else's prescriptive, normative path to Islam.
I submit my will in belief of Allah - bismillah ur rahman ur rahim - and I
ground myself in Islam within
the mundane practicalities of life. Smiling at my neighbour, cooking my
friends a curry, letting a car out at the junction, supporting my lived
one's in their life projects, supporting Asma in her racial discrimination
case as she fights the 'Vampire Archetype' of whiteness in her Social
Services department.
Not for me an Islam that has a unity in my imagination with no
correspondence in earthy,
earthly practicality. Being a Muslim means getting my hands dirty in the
soil of a
loving humanity. I submit to Allah, I abhor slavery.

In my pedagogy of the postcolonial particular I work from the axiomatic
belief of the divine
in others and strive to remain faithful to the emergence of my student's
realization of her/his transgendered/in-
between/liminal/dispraxic/white/brown/Christian/tree-hugging/alterity of
personhood. I have room for those who have room for me, as Alan puts it.

I can make room for the existential accoutrements of the other and hope
the other's preconception of me in my Islam doesn't Other me. I work from
the margins to shrink the centre, not to swap positions. For the centre
could be a miasma.
The centre could be a 'vampire archetype'.

I interpret and infuse my postcolonial critical pedagogy as teaching to
dissolve.
Student and me are solutes. I have supervised about 120 undergraduate and
taught Masters
dissertations over a fourteen year period of loving learning,
accoutrements and all. Theirs and mine.

I am a Progressive Muslim because I feel a part of the multiple critique
undertaken by progressive Muslims.

This multiple critique requires us to stand up to extremists and
apologists in Islam, to the increasingly hegemonic Western political,
economic and intellectual structures that perpetuate an unequal
distribution of resources around the world. This hegemony as Omid Safi
suggests includes environmental degradation, the Walmartisation of the
globe, neo-imperial practices and unilateral governments.

Without the 'brand' you wouldn't even imagine I was Muslim, would you?

No logo, perhaps? (after Melanie Klein). I don't proselytize or convert.
My Islam, my submission to Allah, actually inspires me to influence the
education of students in the realisation of their personhood without
imposing Islam on them. I don't claim to teach my students anything. I
encourage students to cut their critical incisors on spectator and
propositional theories. In this way they can access to their own critical
educational standards of judgement. This is a gem of a pedagogic tip I
picked up several years ago from Moira Laidlaw. Students who choose to be
supervised with me are not renowned for being spectators of their own
lives: they tend to 'verb/a-lize' their own lives as important and
sacred 'doings'. Just take a look at the email below and you may see what
I mean.

My Islam is fecund. Humanistic endeavour brings me closer to Allah: He is
so much bigger than me in the universe of things. Like Chinua Achebe, I
believe that things on earth fall apart. Pedagogising my educational
relationships in a doctoral thesis will eventually fall apart. But the
performative mystery that is artistic education could be carried forward
in the living possibility of my students, beyond mere words placed in
dusty text and ethereal web pages, and a critical possibility could
thrive. This is not an example of my imagination spiralling out of
control. This claim comes from the ground of my earthy 'project' of
practicality. Take a look, read and feel what I mean in this email sent to
me by a student, below:

30th June 2005, 20.09
Hi Paul,

How are you?

What a lovely email! Thank you for including me! Could have kissed the
external when she announced to E3 that the sort of work I had undertaken
in
my dissertation was what was going to get us all jobs. As you can imagine
their was a bit of negative feedback from the usual suspects regarding the
'critical management skills' module. However I was taken back at the
amount of
people who actually stood up and admitted that the module was of great
benefit to them and should be included in the curriculum at an earlier
stage. I naturally defended our corner and was delighted at the external's
enthusiasm regarding interpersonal development and self reflective
approaches to education/personal development.

Had an interesting chat with Caroline Mountain earlier who has said she
would support me whole heartedly if I wanted to peruse my
masters.....money
depending I look forward to starting it.
Hope you are knuckling down with the PhD and having a peaceful time at
work?
Hope the family all well and Asma's 'situation' a bit better now?
Got loads to catch up on and really looking forward to seeing you again
soon.
Love
Debs x


It is in my students own telling that the validation of my work resides.
This is the habitus of rigour and validation: 'dialogic validity' as Paula
Saukko puts it.

This is key to the nature of my living educational theory of
my postcolonial critical practice. And I believe I am showing in this
posting what counts for me in the construction of my educational theory,
and what counts as evidence of my educational influence in the learning of
student, and self.

I imagine that in the email above you can imagine my student feeling the
excitement of having participated in my 'critical issues in management'
module. She heard the external examiner's comments, felt elated, and
joined in, as did others. A chorus of garlic-breath voices contributing to
the dissolution of another manifestation of the 'Vampire Archetype'. As a
person with agency, as a being-in-the-pre-existing social world, I choose
to interpret my progressive Islam as loyalty to humanity in educational
relationships like the one above, which you are able to glimpse.

Alon expresses his commitment to his belief system convincingly, for him,

"And I do believe this makes the 'I' sufficient as it  includes the
immersed phenomenological, critical struggles of being-in-the-world",

and why shouldn't this be enough?

I am developing my heuristics of existence from Mohamed's self-critical
question, 'Is the I sufficient, even if necessary?' The 'I' is necessary
but not sufficient without a third person knowledge of the social, the
political, the militaristic and the hegemonic comprising a multitude of
forces, 'out there/in here' and beyond my particular, singular grasp to
change and transform through my agency alone. Though together we can enact
Gladwell's possibility of a 'tipping point'. I like Alan's posting because
it urges me to remain ever critical, to defy dogma and zealotry because
the 'Vampire Archetype' is as much latent and living in here, in me, as it
is procreative and prodigious 'out there' in institutions, governments and
the demonized Other.

I like the way Omid Safi suggests a progressive Islam in a way that I can
hold it in my outstretched palm with space aplenty for Alan's 'invitation'
to inclusion because -

"At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation is a simple yet
radical idea: every human life, female and male, Muslim and non-Muslim,
rich or poor, 'Northern or 'Southern', has exactly the same intrinsic
worth."

Especially in the face of the terrorism of the 'Vampire Archetype'.
Sometimes this vampire is visceral and snarling. Sometimes it creeps up on
us, taking us by surprise in the guise of a friendly old professor who
smiles but not from the eyes as your curriculum innovation
disappears: 'resources have been reallocated to the imperative of
university priorities; nothing personal you know.'

Back to Safi,

"The essential value of life is God-given, and is no way connected to
culture, geography or privilege. A progressive Muslim is one who is
committed to the strangely controversial idea that the worth of a human
being is measured by a person's character, not the oil under their soil,
and not their flag. A progressive Muslim agenda is concerned with the
ramifications of the premise that all members of humanity have this same
intrinsic worth because, as the Qur'an reminds us, each of us has the
breath of God breathed into our being....'Progressive', in this usage,
refers to a relentless striving towards a universal notion of justice in
which no single community's prosperity, righteousness, dignity comes at
the expense of another. Central to this notion of a progressive Muslim
identity are fundamental values that we hold to be essential to a vital,
fresh, and urgently needed interpretation  of Islam for the twenty-first
century. These themes include social justice, gender justice, and
pluralism."

As Jean has suggested in a posting elsewhere, these values seem to be
those embodied values that underpin Rousseau's democratic project as well
as the non-unified project of postcolonialism. Though the kind of
postcolonial praxis or definition one comes up with is largely determined
by the ontological take of the person who undertakes the praxis and
interpretation (to paraphrase Safi).

Returning finally to Safi

"Ours is a relentless effort to submit the human will to the Divine in a
way that affirms the common humanity of all of God's creation. We conceive
of a way of being Muslim that engages and affirms the humanity of all
human beings., that actively holds all of us responsible for a fair and
just distribution of God-given natural resources, and that seeks to live
in harmony with the natural world. To put it slightly differently, being a
progressive Muslim means not simply thinking more about the Qur'an and the
life of the prophet, but also thinking about the life we share on this
planet with all human beings

This is how I have been thinking. And it has brought me to a point where I
am asking, What am I going on about (after Zephaniah).

What I am going on about is how I enact hopes for humanity, like Safi's,
which I imagine we all share in essence, through my practice of humanity
as postcolonial critical pedagogy. Clarifying my practice of critical
pedagogy in the form of a living educational theory account in a way that
I clearly share my meanings is vitally important to me in my life. When I
waiver I only have to read Debbie's email above to restore my flagging
faith in my praxis, and my faculty to write clearly about it.

My postcolonial critical pedagogy as an expression of my progressive Islam
and expressed within my educational relationships demonstrates the nature
of my incontrovertible loyalty to humanity and to Allah. These goals do
not seem to be incommensurable. As I think Debbie's words attest.

Why I write (after George Orwell) -
I have not written about progressive Islam as a sneaky act of
proselytization. I do not wish to offend by sharing my views. I have not
written with an intention to exclude any colleague. Choosing self
exclusion is, however, to enact a human choice.

Instead I chose to share Omid Safi's writings because he clearly professes
a human project designed in the same pedagogic and educational spirit as
the projects of Alon, Alan and many others of us.
I wrote my posting because I am an inveterate educator.
This is who I am through what I educatively do.
My life as a performative verb, not a taxonomy of propositions.
I hope I am keeping Peter's level of tension in mind as I write this
posting.
In writing about the ontological and epistemological crafting of my living
educational
theory I am endeavouring to hold on to the original stated theme of the e-
seminar, i.e. 'The nature of educational theories: what counts as evidence
of educational influences in learning?'


Paul, Paulus, or Yaqub

- whichever you prefer to use, for I have no identity crisis. For my part
Yaqub feels good with my  commitment to non-scarification through
postcolonial practices and relationships.