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Abstract: This article addresses the fundamental need for Muslims to consciously establish and renew new, unique cultural identities. To lay down roots and survive, Islam must reflect the good in the world's diverse races and ethnicities. Historically, Islamic jurists have upheld the Prophet's legal precedent for respecting non-Arabs' ethnic and cultural differences as long as they did not contravene his teaching. In this article, many of the different tools of Islamic law are highlighted, and the opportunities that they provide are emphasised, in an effort to show how cultures can be established and renewed. Due to those tools, Islam's spread and triumphant past reflects this glorious global culture. Like a crystal clear river, Islam and sacred law are pure but colourless, until they reflect the Chinese, African, and other bedrock over which they flow.
Introduction
For centuries, Islamic civilisation harmonised indigenous forms of cultural expression with the universal norms of its sacred law. It struck a balance between temporal beauty and ageless truth and fanned a brilliant peacock's tail of unity in diversity from the heart of China to the shores of the Atlantic. Islamic jurisprudence helped facilitate this creative genius. In history, Islam showed itself to be culturally friendly and, in that regard, has been likened to a crystal clear river. Its waters (Islam) are pure, sweet, and life-giving but - having no colour of their own - reflect the bedrock (indigenous culture) over which they flow. In China, Islam looked Chinese; in Mali, it looked African. Sustained cultural relevance to distinct peoples, diverse places, and different times underlay Islam's long success as a global civilisation. The religion became not only functional and familiar at the local level but dynamically engaging, fostering stable indigenous Muslim identities and allowing Muslims to put down deep roots and make lasting contributions wherever they went.
By contrast, much contemporary Islamist1 rhetoric falls far short of Islam's ancient cultural wisdom, assuming at times an unmitigated culturally predatory attitude. Such rhetoric and the movement ideologies that stand behind it have been deeply influenced by Western revolutionary dialectic and a dangerously selective retrieval and reinterpretation of Islamic scripture in that light. At the same time, however, the Islamist phenomenon is, to no small degree, a by-product of the grave cultural...