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THE MUSLIM INDIVIDUAL
Habeebie Saif,
In all the letters I have written to you I touch on the idea of responsibility and choice. Sometimes I am
overt about it, and sometimes I leave these ideas in the background. Responsibility for our actions
and choosing which actions to undertake are central to the idea of being an individual. Of course,
community is important. Family, clan, and tribe all play their roles in helping us to locate ourselves in
the world. But I do not want you to hide behind the achievements or positions of others. I want you to
be able to stand on your own as an individual and be able to state clearly what you believe, what you
choose to do with your life, and what actions you will take in the future. I want you and your
generation to be able to take a step back from all the traditions, customs, rites, and rituals you are told
are cast in stone, and I want you to consider what you might think is reasonable. What do you think of
all of these injunctions and commands? Does any of it make sense? If it does not, then what does? It is
up to you to decide.
More broadly, I believe we are in need of a vision of an improved Muslim individual and an
improved Muslim world. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the individual today has no place in the
calculations of the major groupings of the Muslim world—except perhaps as cannon fodder in the
various jihadist campaigns called for by some of our more extreme religious leaders.
Tell me, Saif, when have you ever heard of the Muslim individual, or of Muslim Individualism?
You hear of the Arab Nation, the Islamic Ummah, the Rightly Guided People, the Arab Street, but do
you ever hear of the Muslim individual as a separate entity, a living being, a person with a character
and a personality that is separate and distinct from those around him or her?
The Islamic Ummah—or community—is a term used by the Prophet Mohammed for the tribal
communities of the early Islamic period that were ultimately unified by the religion. The Prophet
spoke about the Ummah, or the Muslim community. This makes sense. He had built a sufficiently large
group of followers that at some stage it became big enough to be called a community. As the idea of
the community developed, something changed, and almost without noticing, we Muslims began to talk
about the Ummah as something separate from ourselves as Muslims—as though there was a sense in
which the community was more important than the members that made it up. In today’s world the idea
of the Ummah has become very powerful. So powerful that we often aren’t even aware that there are