Confessing Evangelical

This week's New Statesman has an excellent cover story by Ziauddin Sardar entitled The struggle for Islam's soul (free for the next few days, then £1 for 24-hour access). And I'm not saying that just because Sardar's article backs up the basic thrust of the argument in my post from a couple of days ago, Would the real Islam please stand up? :-)

Sardar writes:

Most Muslims abhor violence, yet the terrorists are a product of a specific mindset that has deep roots in Islamic history. If Muslims refuse to confront this, we will all be prey to more terror.

He continues by highlighting some of the statements from Islamic groups in the UK that tend to promote the view that "these are the acts of pathologically mad people; Islam has nothing to do with it", before asserting:

But Islam has everything to do with it. As Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, director of the Muslim Institute, points out: "The terrorists are using Islamic sources to justify their actions. How can one then say it has nothing to do with Islam?"

Sardar writes:

It is true that the vast majority of Muslims abhor violence and terrorism, and that the Koran and various schools of Islamic law forbid the killing of innocent civilians. It is true, as the vast majority of Muslims believe, that the main message of Islam is peace.

Nevertheless, it is false to assume that the Koran or Islamic law cannot be used to justify barbaric acts. The terrorists are a product of a specific mindset that has deep roots in Islamic history...

The terrorists place a unique burden on Muslims. To deny that they are a product of Islamic history and tradition is more than complacency. It is a denial of responsibility, a denial of what is really happening in our communities. It is a refusal to live in the real world.

He goes on to look at three characteristics of the tradition of Islam "that nourishes the mentality of the extremists".

Firstly, it is ahistoric, so that it sees Islam not as "a religion interpreted in the lives and thoughts of people called Muslims", but rather as "a utopia that exists outside time". This is illustrated by the fact that the Wahhabi sect that runs Saudi Arabia has spent much of the past 50 years bulldozing more than 300 historic sites in Mecca and Medina, "especially those related to the Prophet":

Why? Because other Muslims will relate to the history of the Prophet, and they will then see him as a man living in a particular time and space that placed particular demands on him and forced him to act in particular ways.

The Wahhabis want to universalise and eternalise every act of the Prophet. For them, the context is not only irrelevant but dangerous. It has to be expunged.

Secondly, this tradition is monolithic. Anyone who disagrees with it is, ipso facto, not a true Muslim. This is illustrated by the following shocking story from India:

Imrana Bibi, the 28-year-old wife of a poor rickshaw puller in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, was raped by her father-in-law. The religious scholars of Deoband, an influential seminary with Wahhabi tendencies, issued a fatwa: her marriage is nullified, her husband is forbidden to her for ever, she will have to separate for life from him and her five children. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board endorsed the "punishment".

When Imrana Bibi herself, along with women's rights groups, complained about the double injustice, the clerics at Deoband declared: "She had a physical relationship with her father-in-law. It does not matter whether it was consensual or forced. She cannot live with her husband. Any Muslim who opposes our fatwa is not a true Muslim and is betraying Islam."

"So no complaint or opposition is allowed," observes Sardar. "A perfect tradition can only produce perfect fatwas. And those who are seen as betraying Islam can themselves become subjects of other perfect fatwas."

Third, this tradition is aggressively self-righteous, with many terrorist targets (eg in Bali) chosen specifically as symbols of a moral decadence that deserves to be resisted with violence.

Sardar goes on to argue (as my earlier post did, following Malise Ruthven) that this tendency within Islam is not a modern aberration, but goes right back to the Kharjite sect that emerged in the earliest decades of Islam:

The Kharjites developed a radically different interpretation of what it means to be a Muslim. To be a Muslim, they argued, is to be in a perfect state of soul. Someone in that state cannot commit a sin and engage in wrongdoing. Sin, therefore was a contradiction for a true Muslim - it nullified the believer and demonstrated that inwardly he was an apostate who had turned against Islam. Thus anyone who did any wrong was not really a Muslim. He could be put to death.

"It just won't do," continues Sardar, "to argue that [neo-Kharjite Islamists] are 'not Muslims'":

We must acknowledge that the terrorists, and their neo-Kharjite tradition, are products of Islamic history. Only by recognising this brutal fact would we realise that the fight against terrorism is also an internal Muslim struggle within Islam. Indeed, it is a struggle for the very soul of Islam.

In his concluding paragraph, Sardar quotes Dr Najah Kadhim of the Islam21 network of Muslim intellectuals, who says:

The best way to fight the Kharjite tradition is with the humanistic and rationalist traditions of Islam. This is how they were defeated in Islamic history. This is how we will defeat them now.

In other words, something akin to the Enlightenment in the west (a better parallel than the Reformation, as Chris Atwood pointed out in the comments to my earlier post). Or as Boris Johnson puts it in his cover story for this week's Spectator (free registration required):

When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass?