Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2 page)

If I had needed fresh evidence that violence in the name of Islam was spreading not only across the Middle East and North Africa but also through Western Europe, across the Atlantic and beyond, here it was in lamentable abundance.

After Steven Sotloff’s decapitation, Vice President Joe Biden pledged to pursue his killers to the “gates of hell.” So outraged was President Barack Obama that he chose to reverse his policy of ending American military intervention in Iraq, ordering air strikes and deploying military personnel as part of an effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.” But the president’s statement of September 10, 2014, is worth reading closely for its critical evasions and distortions:

Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents. And the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state. . . . ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.

In short, Islamic State was neither a state nor Islamic. It was “evil.” Its members were “unique in their brutality.” The campaign against it was like an effort to eradicate “cancer.”

After the
Charlie Hebdo
massacre, the White House press secretary went to great lengths to distinguish between “the violent extremist messaging that ISIL and other extremist organizations are using to try to radicalize individuals around the globe” and a “peaceful religion.” The administration, he said, had “enjoyed significant success in enlisting leaders in the Muslim community . . . to be clear about what the tenets of Islam actually are.” The very phrase “radical Islam” was no longer to be uttered.

But what if this entire premise is wrong? For it is not just Al-Qaeda and IS that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death. It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed, and where beheadings are a legitimate form of punishment, so much so that there was almost a beheading a day in August 2014. It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their “crime.” It is Brunei, where the sultan is reinstituting Islamic sharia law, again making homosexuality punishable by death.

We have now had almost a decade and a half of policies and pronouncements based on the assumption that terrorism or extremism can and must be differentiated from Islam. Again and again in the wake of terrorist attacks around the globe, Western leaders have hastened to declare that the problem has nothing to do with Islam itself. For Islam is a religion of peace.

These efforts are well meaning, but they arise from a misguided conviction, held by many Western liberals, that retaliation against Muslims is more to be feared than Islamist violence itself. Thus, those responsible for the 9/11 attacks were represented not as Muslims but as terrorists; we focused on their tactics rather than on the ideology that justified their horrific acts. In the process, we embraced those “moderate” Muslims who blandly told us Islam was a religion of peace and marginalized dissident Muslims who were attempting to pursue real reform.

Today, we are still trying to argue that the violence is the work of a lunatic fringe of extremists. We employ medical metaphors, trying to define the phenomenon as some kind of foreign body alien to the religious milieu in which it flourishes. And we make believe that there are extremists just as bad as the jihadists in our own midst. The president of the United States even went so far as to declare, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012: “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam”—as opposed, presumably, to those who go around killing the slanderers.

Some people will doubtless complain that this book slanders Muhammad. But its aim is not to give gratuitous offense, but to show that this kind of approach wholly—not just partly, but wholly—misunderstands the problem of Islam in the twenty-first century. Indeed, this approach also misunderstands the nature and meaning of liberalism.

For the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.

It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been “hijacked” by extremists. The killers of IS and Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct. And instead of letting them off the hook with bland clichés about Islam as a religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.

At the same time, we need to stand up for our own principles as liberals. Specifically, we need to say to offended Western Muslims (and their liberal supporters) that it is not we who must accommodate their beliefs and sensitivities. Rather, it is they who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech.

Three Sets of Muslims

Before we begin to speak about Islam, we must understand what it is and recognize certain distinctions within the Muslim world. The distinctions I have in mind are not the conventional ones among Sunni, Shia, and other branches of the faith. Rather, they are broad sociological groupings defined by the nature of their observance. I will subdivide Muslims. I will not subdivide Islam.

Islam is a single core creed based on the Qur’an, the words revealed by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, and the hadith, the accompanying works that detail Muhammad’s life and words. Despite some sectarian differences, this creed unites all Muslims. All, without exception, know by heart these words: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah; and Muhammad is His messenger.” This is the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.

The Shahada may seem a declaration of belief no different from any other to Westerners used to individual freedom of conscience and religion. But the reality is that the Shahada is both a religious
and
a political symbol.

In the early days of Islam, when Muhammad was going from door to door trying to persuade the polytheists to abandon their idols of worship, he was
inviting
them to accept that there was no god but Allah and that he was Allah’s messenger, much as Christ had asked the Jews to accept that he was the son of God. However, after ten years of trying this kind of persuasion, Muhammad and his small band of believers went to Medina and from that moment Muhammad’s mission took on a political dimension. Unbelievers were still invited to submit to Allah, but, after Medina, they were attacked if they refused. If defeated, they were given the option either to convert or to die. (Jews and Christians could retain their faith if they submitted to paying a special tax.)

No symbol represents the soul of Islam more than the Shahada. But today there is a contest within Islam for the ownership of that symbol. Who owns the Shahada? Is it those Muslims who want to emphasize Muhammad’s years in Mecca, or those who are inspired by his conquests after Medina? There are millions upon millions of Muslims who identify themselves with the former. Increasingly, however, they are challenged by fellow believers who want to revive and reenact the political version of Islam born in Medina—the version that took Muhammad from being a wanderer in the desert to a symbol of absolute morality.

On this basis, I believe we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims.

The first group is the most problematic. These are the fundamentalists who, when they say the Shahada, mean: “We must live by the strict letter of our creed.” They envision a regime based on sharia, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version. What is more, they take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.

I was tempted to call this group “Millenarian Muslims,” because their fanaticism is reminiscent of the various fundamentalist sects that flourished in medieval Christendom prior to the Reformation, most of which combined fanaticism and violence with anticipation of the end of the world.
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But the analogy is imperfect. Whereas Shiite doctrine looks forward to the return of the Twelfth Imam and the global triumph of Islam, Sunni zealots are more likely to aspire to the forcible creation of a new caliphate here on earth. Instead, then, I shall call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the
forcible
imposition of sharia as their religious duty. They aim not just to obey Muhammad’s teaching, but also to emulate his warlike conduct after his move to Medina. Even if they do not themselves engage in violence, they do not hesitate to condone it.

It is Medina Muslims who call Jews and Christians “pigs and monkeys” and preach that both faiths are, in the words of the Council on Foreign Relations Fellow (and former Islamist) Ed Husain, “false religions.” It is Medina Muslims who prescribe beheading for the crime of “nonbelief” in Islam, death by stoning for adultery, and hanging for homosexuality. It is Medina Muslims who put women in burqas and beat them if they leave their homes alone or if they are improperly veiled. It was Medina Muslims who in July 2014 went on a rampage in Gujranwala, Pakistan, setting eight homes on fire and killing a grandmother and her two granddaughters, all because of the posting of an allegedly blasphemous photo on an eighteen-year-old’s Facebook page.

Medina Muslims believe that the murder of an infidel is an imperative if he refuses to convert voluntarily to Islam. They preach jihad and glorify death through martyrdom. The men and women who join groups such as Al-Qaeda, IS, Boko Haram, and Al-Shabaab in my native Somalia—to name just four of hundreds of jihadist organizations—are all Medina Muslims.

Are the Medina Muslims a minority? Ed Husain estimates that only 3 percent of the world’s Muslims understand Islam in these militant terms. But out of well over 1.6 billion believers, or 23 percent of the globe’s population, that 48 million seems to be more than enough. Based on survey data on attitudes toward sharia in Muslim countries, I would put the proportion significantly higher;
8
I also believe it is rising as Muslims and converts to Islam gravitate toward Medina. Either way, Muslims who belong to this group are not open to persuasion or engagement by either Western liberals or Muslim reformers. They are not the intended audience for this book. They are the reason for writing it.

The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence. I call them Mecca Muslims. Like devout Christians or Jews who attend religious services every day and abide by religious rules in what they eat and wear, Mecca Muslims focus on religious observance. I was raised a Mecca Muslim. So were the majority of Muslims from Casablanca to Jakarta.

Yet the Mecca Muslims have a problem: their religious beliefs exist in an uneasy tension with modernity—the complex of economic, cultural, and political innovations that not only reshaped the Western world but also dramatically transformed the developing world as the West exported it. The rational, secular, and individualistic values of modernity are fundamentally corrosive of traditional societies, especially hierarchies based on gender, age, and inherited status.

In Muslim-majority countries, the power of modernity to transform economic, social, and (ultimately) power relations can be limited. Muslims in these societies can use cell phones and computers without necessarily seeing a conflict between their religious faith and the rationalist, secular mind-set that made modern technology possible. In the West, however, where Islam is a minority religion, devout Muslims live in what is best described as a state of cognitive dissonance. Trapped between two worlds of belief and experience, these Muslims are engaged in a daily struggle to adhere to Islam in the context of a secular and pluralistic society that challenges their values and beliefs at every turn. Many are able to resolve this tension only by withdrawing into self-enclosed (and increasingly self-governing) enclaves. This is called cocooning, a practice whereby Muslim immigrants attempt to wall off outside influences, permitting only an Islamic education for their children and disengaging from the wider non-Muslim community.
9

To many such Muslims, after years of dissonance, there appear to be only two alternatives: either leave Islam altogether, as I did, or abandon the dull routine of daily observance for the uncompromising Islamist creed offered by those—the Medina Muslims—who explicitly reject the West’s modernity.

It is my hope to engage this second group of Muslims—those closer to Mecca than Medina—in a dialogue about the meaning and practice of their faith. I hope that they will be one of the primary audiences for this book.

Of course, I recognize that these Muslims are not likely to heed a call for doctrinal reformation from someone they regard as an apostate and infidel. But they may reconsider if I can persuade them to think of me not as an apostate, but as a heretic: one of a growing number of people born into Islam who have sought to think critically about the faith we were raised in. It is with this third group—only a few of whom have left Islam altogether—that I would now identify myself.

These are the Muslim dissidents; call them the Modifying Muslims. A few of us have been forced by experience to conclude that we could not continue to be believers; yet we remain deeply engaged in the debate about Islam’s future. The majority of dissidents are reforming believers—among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence.

I shall have more to say in what follows about this neglected—indeed largely unknown—group. For now, it is enough to say that I choose to identify myself with the dissidents. In the eyes of the Medina Muslims, we are all heretics, because we have had the temerity to challenge the applicability of seventh-century teachings to the twenty-first-century world.