Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (20 page)

The potential weaknesses of this approach can be seen in the comments of one of its regional managers, Farooq Siddiqui, who in 2014 used a Facebook chat to offer his approval to Britons who wanted to travel to Syria to fight against the regime of President Assad, saying that these men had “walked the walk.” He compared these fighting jihadists to British Jews who might join the Israel Defense Forces and could then return to the United Kingdom, arguing on that basis that jihadists returning from Syria should not face automatic arrest. “If a man describes himself as wanting to help the oppressed and dies,” Siddiqui wrote, “in that case he is a martyr.”
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It is not immediately obvious what a man like Siddiqui is going to prevent, aside from a serious discussion of the problem Britain faces.

Ghaffar Hussein, the managing director of Quilliam, a British think tank working on combatting terrorism, notes that jihad is appealing because of its “one size fits all” set of answers to complex problems. Introspection is not required, he notes, because all blame is shifted to outside enemies and “anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.” The jihad narrative has therefore become “the default anti-establishment politics of today. It is a means of expressing solidarity and asserting a bold new identity while being a vehicle for seeking the restoration of pride and self-dignity.” In response, “mainstream Muslim commentators”—not to mention non-Muslims—have failed to articulate a positive narrative that does not simply reinforce the idea that Muslims are somehow victims. In short, Hussein’s argument is that the jihadists have the more compelling narrative. To understand the power of that narrative, let’s look more closely at what motivates young Western-educated Muslims to sign up for jihad.

In 2013 Umm Haritha, a twenty-year-old Canadian, traveled to Syria via Turkey to join Islamic State. Within a week, she had married an IS fighter, a Palestinian national who had been living in Sweden. He was killed five months later and Umm, a widow, turned to blogging, offering advice to others who wished to move to Syria, marry jihadists, and create families inside the IS caliphate.

Her words make for interesting reading. In an interview with Canada’s CBC via text messages, Umm described herself as “middle class,” adding that her decision to join jihad was made by a desire to “live a life of honor” under Islamic law rather than the laws of the “
kufar
,” or unbelievers. She had begun her journey to jihad in Canada, where she donned the niqab, a veil that exposes nothing more than the wearer’s eyes. She told her interviewer that she felt “mocked” and harassed by her fellow Canadians, adding, “Life was degrading and an embarrassment and nothing like the multicultural freedom of expression and religion they make it out to be, and when I heard that the Islamic State had sharia in some cities in Syria, it became an automatic obligation upon me since I was able to come here.”
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Umm’s online postings describe life in Manbij, an IS-controlled city of 200,000 close to the Turkish border, and show images such as the white loudspeaker van that patrols the city streets to remind residents of their daily prayers. She notes approvingly that a man was recently crucified and beheaded for the crime of robbing and raping a woman. And she adds that many of those who have moved to the caliphate have “ripped up their passports.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS leader, who has renamed himself “Caliph Ibrahim,” has called on Muslims worldwide to move to the caliphate, saying, “Those who can immigrate to the Islamic State should immigrate, as immigration to the house of Islam is a duty.” As the stepbrother of a radicalized British man explained, the purveyors of jihad know what their recruits “are craving—identity, respect, empowerment. They push all the right buttons—make them feel special. And once you’re in the door, it’s like family. They look after each other.”

Consider, too, a 2014 BBC 5 Live interview with a man calling himself Abu Osama, who claimed to be from the north of England and said that he was training with the Al-Nusra Front in Syria with the ultimate goal of establishing a caliphate (
Khilafah
in Arabic) across the Islamic world. Osama told the BBC: “I have no intention of coming back to Britain, because I have come to revive the Islamic Khilafah. I don’t want to come back to what I have left behind. There is nothing in Britain—it is just pure evil.” And for emphasis he added: “If and when I come back to Britain it will be when this
Khilafah
—this Islamic state—comes to conquer Britain and I come to raise the black flag of Islam over Downing Street, over Buckingham Palace, over Tower Bridge and over Big Ben.”
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(Anjem Choudary has promised the same, predicting that the black flag of IS will fly over both 10 Downing Street and the White House after the conclusion of the great global battle that is now under way.)

Such seemingly wild narratives are not out of the mainstream; rather, they present jihad just in the way it has always been taught. “If you look at the history of Islam,” as the young jihadist Osama put it, “you will see that the Prophet fought against those who fought against him. He never fought those that never fought against the Islamic state. Where I am, the people love us, the people love the mujahideen, the warriors.” As for Osama’s family, at first they had found it “hard to accept,” but he had won them over to his “good cause.” As he put it: “They are a bit scared but I tell them we will meet in the afterlife. This is just a temporary separation. They said, ‘We understand now what you are doing,’ and my mother said, ‘I have sold you to Allah. I don’t want to see you again in this world.’ ”
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Is Jihadism Curable?

The Harvard Kennedy School scholar Jessica Stern has spent years studying counterterrorism and, in particular, efforts to prevent the spread of jihad. Indeed, she was consulted on the development of an anti-jihad effort in the Netherlands after the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh ten years ago. In a recent article, she describes in detail a Saudi Arabian jihadist rehabilitation program that has “treated” thousands of militants, and claims that the graduates have been “reintegrated into mainstream society much more successfully than ordinary criminals.”
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The Saudi approach, Stern notes, is inspired by the efforts of other governments in other regions of the world to “deprogram” everyone from neo-Nazis to drug lords. The goal is to get them “to abandon their radical ideology or renounce their violent means or both.” The method is a full-time residential program that includes “psychological counseling, vocational training, art therapy, sports, and religious reeducation,” along with “career placement” services for themselves and their families, if needed. Upon completion, the program’s graduates—some of whom have been previously incarcerated in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay—receive housing, a car, and even funds to pay for a wedding. The Saudis will even assist them with finding a wife.

But the program doesn’t end there. There is what Stern describes as “an extensive post-release program as well, which involve[s] extensive surveillance.” Rather like convicted sex offenders in the West, ex-jihadists will be monitored for most if not all of the rest of their lives. Stern goes on to explain that the “guiding philosophy” behind the program is that “jihadists are victims, not villains, and they need tailored assistance.” Accordingly, the Saudis have a very specific term for the program’s participants. They are “beneficiaries.”

Stern maintains that, while terrorist movements “often arise in reaction to an injustice, real or imagined,” that the supporters “feel must be corrected,” ideology generally plays a limited role in someone’s decision to join the terror cause. She writes: “The reasons that people become terrorists are as varied as the reasons that others choose their professions: market conditions, social networks, education, individual preferences. Just as the passion for justice and law that drives a lawyer at first may not be what keeps him working at a law firm, a terrorist’s motivations for remaining in, or leaving, his ‘job’ change over time.” Stern also argues that the terrorists who “claim to be driven by religious ideology are often very ignorant of Islam.” The Saudi “beneficiaries” have, she writes, little in the way of formal education and a limited understanding of Islam.

I am deeply skeptical about all this, for two reasons. First, as part of the Saudi program Stern describes, clerics are brought in to teach the beneficiaries that only “the legitimate rulers of Islamic states, not individuals such as Osama bin Laden, can declare a holy war. They preach against
takfir
[accusing other Muslims of apostasy] and the selective reading of religious texts to justify violence.” One participant in the program told her: “Now I understand that I cannot make decisions by reading a single verse. I have to read the whole chapter.” No matter how well intentioned this approach may be, it leaves the core concept of jihad intact.

Second, we should not forget that the global jihadist network would not exist on anything like the scale it does today if it had not been for Saudi funding—to say nothing of the millions that have flowed to terrorist organizations from other Gulf states. As Nabeel al-Fadhel, a liberal member of Kuwait’s Parliament, told
The
Christian Science Monitor
, “There isn’t a bomb that explodes anywhere [inside Syria] without some of its material financed by Kuwait.” Noting the vast number of Kuwaitis who have donated to the jihadist cause, he added that while they may “think they are getting closer to God by giving this money,” instead, “it is going to places [they] never dreamt of.”
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The last people we should expect to develop an effective counterforce to jihad are the rulers of those countries that, over the past thirty years, have played the biggest role in funding the Medina Muslims who have been jihad’s most ardent advocates.

Decommissioning Jihad

In one of the many IS videos that can be found online, a British man who identifies himself as Brother Abu Muthanna al Yemeni extolls the virtues of jihad. He encourages foreign Muslims “to answer the call of Allah and His Messenger when He calls you to what gives you life. . . . What He says gives you life is jihad.”
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This is not empty rhetoric. We need to answer these words. We need more than just a counternarrative. We need a theological reply.

The nuclear arms race of the Cold War was not won by the proponents of unilateral disarmament. No matter how many thousands of people turned out for antinuclear marches in London or Bonn, missiles were still deployed in NATO countries and pointed at the Warsaw Pact countries, which had their own missiles pointed right back at the West. The only way the arms race ended was with the ideological and political collapse of Soviet communism, after which there was a large-scale (though not complete) decommissioning of nuclear weapons. In much the same way, we need to recognize that this is an ideological conflict that will not be won until the concept of jihad has itself been decommissioned. We also have to acknowledge that, far from being un-Islamic, the central tenets of the jihadists are supported by centuries-old Islamic doctrine.

The IS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani recently called on Muslims to use all means to kill a “disbelieving American or European—especially the spiteful and filthy French—or an Australian or a Canadian.”
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“Please don’t” is not an adequate reply. As Ghaffar Hussain, himself a former Islamist, has said, “You need to stand up, challenge them, and rubbish their ideas.”

It is obviously next to impossible to redefine the word “jihad” as if its call to arms is purely metaphorical (in the style of the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”).
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There is too much conflicting scripture, and too many examples from the Qur’an and hadith that the jihadists can cite to bolster their case.

Therefore I believe the best option would be to take it off the table. If clerics and imams and scholars and national leaders around the world declared jihad “
haram
,” forbidden, then there would be a clear dividing line. Imagine the impact if those hundred imams in Great Britain had explicitly renounced the entire concept of jihad. Imagine if the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holy shrines, itself renounced jihad, rather than turning the jihadists into beneficiaries of (yet more of) its largesse.

And if that is too much to expect—if Muslims simply refuse to renounce jihad completely—then the next best thing would be to call their bluff about Islam being a religion of peace. If a tradition truly exists within Islam that interprets jihad as a purely spiritual activity, as Sufi Muslims tend to do, let us challenge other Muslims to embrace it. Christianity was itself once a crusading faith, as we have seen, but over time it abandoned its militancy. If Islam really is a religion of peace, then what is preventing Muslims from doing the same?

T
he first time I stood up to speak in a public setting was shortly after September 11, 2001. It was a public forum, a “discussion house,” which is a relatively common institution in the Netherlands. I was working at a small but well respected social democratic think tank, and my boss suggested that I go.

The discussion was being hosted by a Dutch newspaper, a publication that was originally religious (Protestant), but now was very secular, and the topic was “Who Needs a Voltaire, the West or Islam?” The auditorium was packed to capacity. People who couldn’t find seats were standing along the walls. And in many ways it was an interesting and unusual gathering because there were so many Muslim participants in the audience. Normally these things were almost all white because the discussion topics would be things like “How Much Control Do We Cede to the European Union?” or “Why Should We Give Up the Guilder for the Euro?” On this night, however, the usual members of the Amsterdam elite were rubbing shoulders with Muslims from Turkey, Morocco, and other nations, nearly all of them immigrants or the children of immigrants to the Netherlands.

There were six speakers for the evening, and five of them essentially said that it was the West that needed a Voltaire, meaning that the West was the place most in need of reform. Their argument was that the West had a blind spot, that it had a long and wicked history of exploitation and imperialism, that it was tone deaf to what went on in the rest of the world, and it needed another Voltaire to explain all of this.

I was sitting in the middle of this sea of faces, white, brown, and black, and just listening, increasingly aware that I disagreed with what was being said. Finally, the sixth panelist spoke, a man from Iran, a refugee, a lawyer. “Well,” he said, “look at these people in this room. The West has not one Voltaire, but thousands if not millions of Voltaires. The West is used to criticism, it’s used to self-criticism. All the sins of the West are out there for everyone to see.” And then he said: “It’s Islam that needs a Voltaire.” He discussed a list of all the things that are wrong or questionable about Islam—points that resonated with me. And for this he was booed; he was shouted down. (Ironically, ten years later, Irshad Manji, a staunch advocate of Islamic reform, spoke in this same hall. By then, the crowd had completely changed. It was packed not with curious observers, but with hard-line, fundamentalist Islamists, and that night the audience grew so combative that Irshad had to be hustled out by security.)

After the Iranian lawyer spoke, there was a break, and then the audience was given a chance to ask questions. I waved my hand, and someone with the microphone saw my black face and probably thought, “for the sake of diversity”—the white organizers of such events were in fact quite keen to hear what went on in the heads, households, and communities of immigrants. He gave me the microphone. I stood up and agreed with the Iranian. I said: “Look at you guys. There are six people there, you’ve invited six speakers, and one of them is the Voltaire of Islam. You guys have five Voltaires, just allow us Muslims one, please.” That led a newspaper editor to ask me to write an essay, to which he gave the headline “Please Allow Us One Voltaire.”

In the months and years that followed, I read more and more widely. I read Western views of Islam and Muslim culture. I read more Western liberal thinkers. And I read about the Muslim reformers of the past. My conclusion remains that Islam still needs a Voltaire. But I have come to believe it is in dire need of a John Locke as well. It was, after all, Locke who gave us the notion of a “natural right” to the fundamentals of “life, liberty, and property.” But less well known is Locke’s powerful case for religious toleration. And religious toleration, however long it took to be established in practice, is one of the greatest achievements of the Western world.

Locke made the case that religious beliefs are, in the words of the scholar Adam Wolfson, “matters of opinion, opinions to which we are all equally entitled, rather than quanta of truth or knowledge.”
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In Locke’s formulation, protection against persecution is one of the highest responsibilities of any government or ruler. Locke also argued that where there is coercion and persecution to change hearts and minds, it will “work” only at a very high human cost, producing in its wake both cruelty and hypocrisy. For Locke, no one person should “desire to impose” his or her view of salvation on others. Instead, in his vision of a tolerant society, each individual should be free to follow his or her own path in religion, and respect the right of others to follow their own paths: “Nobody, not even commonwealths,” Locke wrote, “have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretense of religion.”
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What is often forgotten is that Locke restricted this freedom of religion to various Protestant denominations. He did not include the Roman Catholic Church because “all those who enter into it do thereby 
ipso facto
 deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince.” Were Locke alive today, I suspect he would make a similar argument about Islam. So long as there are some Muslims who regard Muhammad’s teachings in Medina as trumping their loyalty to the states of which they are citizens, there will be a legitimate suspicion that tolerance of Islam endangers the security of those states. The central question for Western civilization remains what it was in Locke’s day: What exactly can we
not
tolerate?

Let us begin with the oppression of half of humanity.

Rights in Retreat

Today, more than two hundred years after Voltaire and three hundred years after John Locke, the rights of women are in retreat throughout the Muslim world. Consider, by way of a simple illustration, the way that Muslim women are permitted to dress. It is not the most important human right, I admit. But it is a freedom most women care about.

Look at photographs of any of the Muslim cities of the world in the 1970s: Baghdad. Cairo. Damascus. Kabul. Mogadishu. Tehran. You will see that very few women in those days were covered. Instead, on the streets, in office buildings, in markets, movie theaters, restaurants, and homes, most women dressed very much like their counterparts in Europe and America. They wore skirts above the knee. They wore Western fashions. Their hair was done up and visible.

Today, by contrast, a mere photo of a woman walking on the streets of Kabul with a knee-length skirt becomes a viral happening on the Internet, and sparks widespread condemnation as “shameful” and “half-naked,” with the government criticized for “sleeping.” When I was a girl in primary school in Nairobi, those who covered their heads were the exceptions—fewer than half of all the girls. A few years ago, I googled my old primary school. In the photos posted, nearly every girl was covered.

This is not just about how we dress. If you are a woman living in Saudi Arabia, you want to drive, you want to go out of the house without a male guardian. You may well have money, but you have nothing to do except sit at home or shop under male supervision. In Egypt, you are battling against a rising tide of sexual harassment—99 percent of women report being sexually harassed and up to eighty sexual assaults occur in a single day.
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Especially troubling is the way the status of women as second-class citizens is being cemented in legislation. In Iraq, a law is being proposed that lowers to nine the legal age at which a girl can be forced into marriage. That same law would give a husband the right to deny his wife permission to leave the house. In Tunisia, your worries are about the imposition of sharia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, by contrast, you have to fear being gunned down for the crime of attending school. And for young girls all over North Africa and beyond there remains the threat of female genital mutilation, a practice that certainly predates Islam but which is now almost entirely confined to Muslim communities. UNICEF estimates that more than 125 million women and girls have been cut in African and Arab nations, many of them majority Muslim.
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As is gradually becoming clear, the practice is also widespread in immigrant communities in Europe and North America.

In the Islamic world, too many basic rights are circumscribed, and not only women’s rights. Homosexuality is not tolerated. Other religions are not tolerated. Above all, free speech on the subject of Islam is not tolerated. As I know only too well, freethinkers who wish to question works such as the Qur’an or the hadith risk death.

Islam has had schism; it has never had Reformation. Early disputes in Islam produced fierce sectarianism that often involved bloodshed, but largely over technical questions. The biggest was about who should succeed the Prophet as leader of the
ummah
: the Sunnis wanted to select a caliph (literally a deputy) on the basis of merit, while the Shia insisted on an imam who was a relative of the Prophet. A smaller division was sparked by the question of whether Allah spoke in dictating the Qur’an. (One school of Islamic thought, the Mu’tazilite, argued that Allah does not have a human larynx and that the Qur’an is therefore not Allah’s “speech.”)
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The idea of “reform” in Islam has largely centered on the resolution of such narrow questions. Indeed, the term “
ijtihad
,” the nearest thing to reform in Arabic, means trying to determine God’s will on some new issue, such as: Should a Muslim pray on an airplane (a new technological invention) and, if so, how can he be sure he is facing Mecca? But the larger idea of “reform,” in the sense of fundamentally calling into question central tenets of Islamic doctrine, has been conspicuous by its absence. Islam even has its own pejorative term for theological trouble-makers: “those who indulge in innovations and follow their passions” (the Arabic words
ahl al-bida, wa-l-ahwa’
).
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Tolerating Intolerance

Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that “religion,” however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. I can sympathize with that. In many respects, despite its high aims and ideals, America has found it difficult to make religious and racial tolerance a reality.

But that does not mean we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets this.

In the fall of 2014, Bill Maher, host of the HBO show
Real Time with Bill Maher
, held a discussion about Islam that featured the best-selling author Sam Harris, the actor Ben Affleck, and the
New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof. Harris and Maher raised the question of whether or not Western liberals were abandoning their principles by not confronting Islam about its treatment of women, promotion of jihad, and sharia-based punishments of stoning and death to apostates. To Affleck, this smacked of Islamophobia and he responded with an outburst of moralistic indignation. To applause from the audience, he heatedly accused Harris and Maher of being “gross” and “racist” and saying things no different from “saying ‘you’re a shifty Jew.’ ” Siding with Affleck, Kristof interjected that brave Muslims were risking their lives to promote human rights in the Muslim world.

After the show, during a discussion in the greenroom, Sam Harris asked both Ben Affleck and Nick Kristof, “What do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Qur’an on tonight’s show?” Sam then answered his own question, “There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating
a book
, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when IS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands—
all in the name of Islam
—the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag [#NotInOurName].”

Shortly after the show was broadcast, a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim woman (and gay rights activist) named Einah wrote an open letter to Ben Affleck that summed up my feelings precisely:

Why are Muslims being “preserved” in some time capsule of centuries gone by? Why is it okay that we continue to live in a world where our women are compared to candy waiting to be consumed? Why is it okay for women of the rest of the world to fight for freedom and equality while we are told to cover our shameful bodies? Can’t you see that we are being held back from joining this elite club known as the 21st century?

Noble liberals like yourself always stand up for the misrepresented Muslims and stand against the Islamophobes, which is great but who stands in my corner and for the others who feel oppressed by the religion? Every time we raise our voices, one of us is killed or threatened.

. . . What you did by screaming “racist!” was shut down a conversation that many of us have been waiting to have. You helped those who wish to deny there are issues, deny them.

What is so wrong with wanting to step into the current century? There should be no shame. There is no denying that violence, misogyny and homophobia exist in all religious texts, but Islam is the only religion that is adhered to so literally, to this day.

In your culture you have the luxury of calling such literalists “crazies.” . . . In my culture, such values are upheld by more people than we realise. Many will try to deny it, but please hear me when I say that these are not fringe values. It is apparent in the lacking numbers of Muslims willing to speak out against the archaic Shariah law. The punishment for blasphemy and apostasy, etc, are tools of oppression. Why are they not addressed even by the peaceful folk who aren’t fanatical, who just want to have some sandwiches and pray five times a day? Where are the Muslim protestors against blasphemy laws/apostasy? Where are the Muslims who take a stand against harsh interpretation of Shariah?
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