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

The power, emotional zealotry, 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 hear you thinking. So what? Giving up a white representation of God for
a desert-brown prophecy of Allah. What's the difference? Who cares? One
form of slavery of the will relinquished in the embrace of another demand
of submission. Held in the synonym of slavery, submission binds my Uncle
whether he is a Christian Sydney uncle or a Muslim Sadiq uncle. I hear the
muttering. Submissive sub-personalities under the skin. The suzerainty of
His overlordship holding the person in thrall.

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

They make me think. Deep and hard.

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 commodifying argot of the academy in Britain, to the deceit
that is Iraq, to the New World order, the new imperialism of the US. How
much easier it would be if those nasty Falesteen 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 when 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. This is
what the Business Studies curriculum 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 of the West and elsewhere. I use my role as College
Diversity officers to speak with vampires, critically. Let me begin with
state violence as racism. I can't handle the rest just yet. I have to make
a small and modest contribution. Let me 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 them,
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. More like my
imagination, that glimmer of creatively defiant artistry in my
consciousness.  My rich heritage of 'once were masters and once were
slaves'. The blood of omission is on my hands, too. Yet I am an educator
who teaches, publicly, avidly, and cogently against capitalism. despite
the blood lust and my own bloody complicity. Rather than permit this
negation to disenable me, I draw on the negation to enliven me.

I am an imperfect Muslim. A striving Muslim. I clear my path to Islam for
myself, holding my self accountable to Allah in the other for the quality
of my practice in my human encounters. I don't 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.  Not for me an
Islam that has a unity in my imagination with no correspondence in earthy
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 particular ground of my life with
others in learning and 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 as long as
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 at the centre
is a vampire. Critical pedagogy means teaching to dissolve. Student and me
as solute. I have supervised about 120 undergraduate and taught Masters
dissertations over a fourteen year period of loving learning,
accoutrements and all. Theirs and mine. A student, Danny Solomon (not real
name), even brought his Israeli paratrooper accoutrements with him to
supervision and supper. Some kind of accoutrement. Born in Manchester,
killing in Ramallah, reflecting on life and humanity's meanings with me in
Cirencester.

I am a Progressive Muslim because I am 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 educational theory of
my postcolonial criitcal practice. And I believe I am showing in this
posting what counts for me in the construction of my edcuational 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 edcuational
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, Mohamed, Samia, Harriet, Jack, Jean, Pip,
Chris, Andrew, Steve, Peter, Sarah, Rachel, Jane, Brian, Moira,Branko,
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. Thanks Jack.