Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (21 page)

Anyone for Apartheid?

One of the early suffragettes, Alva Belmont, said that American women must serve as a beacon of light, telling not only the story of what they have accomplished, but also representing a lasting determination that women around the world shall be “free citizens, recognized as the equals of men.” Too often, when it comes to women’s rights (and human rights more generally) in the Muslim world, leading thinkers and opinion makers have, at best, gone dark.

I cannot help contrasting this silence with the campaign to end apartheid, which united whites and blacks alike all over the world beginning in the 1960s. When the West finally stood up to the horrors of South African apartheid, it did so across a broad front. The campaign against apartheid reached down into classrooms and even sports stadiums; churches and synagogues stood united against it across the religious spectrum. South African sports teams were shunned, economic sanctions were imposed, and intense international pressure was brought to bear on the country to change its social and political system. American university students erected shantytowns on their campuses to symbolize their solidarity with those black South Africans confined to a life of degradation and impoverishment inside townships.

Today, with radical Islam, we have a new and even more violent system of apartheid, where people are targeted not for their skin color but for their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, or, among Muslims, the form of their personal faith.

I have spent more than a decade fighting for women’s and girls’ basic rights. I have never been afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight. As I have repeatedly said, the connection between violence and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to Muslims when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect. We need to ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Should it be blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Why, when I have made these arguments, have I received so little support and so much opprobrium from the very people in the West who call themselves feminists, who call themselves liberals?

I do not expect our political leadership to take the lead in directly challenging the inequities of political Islam. The ideological self-confidence that characterized Western leaders during the Cold War has given way to a feeble relativism. Instead, this campaign for female, gay, and minority rights needs to come from elsewhere: from the men who built Silicon Valley’s social networks, whose instincts are deeply libertarian; from our entertainment capital, Hollywood, where at least the old hands still remember the era of blacklists and witch hunts; from our civil society, from human rights activists, from feminists, and from lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender communities; as well as from organizations like the ACLU who, if they still stand for anything, can hardly ignore the way civil liberties are being trampled all over the Muslim world. They must remember Alva Belmont’s words. They must light their beacons.

A Unique Role for the West

Whenever I make the case for reform in the Muslim world, someone invariably says: “That is not our project—it is for Muslims only. We should stay out of it.” But I am not talking about the kind of military intervention that has got the West into so much trouble over the years.

For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against “terror” and “extremism” that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving them the necessary platforms and resources to counter that vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing that vast network—the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis—as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it.

Yet here is another conflict that we can take inspiration from as we embark on this process: the Cold War.

Islam is not communism, of course, but in certain respects it is just as contemptuous of human rights, and Islamic republics have proved almost as brutal toward their own citizens as Soviet republics once were. Yet we have welcomed fundamentalist preachers into our cities and have stood idly by as thousands of disaffected young people have been radicalized by their rantings. Worse, we have made almost no attempt to counter the proselytizing of the Medina Muslims. If we continue this policy of nonintervention in the culture war, we will never extricate ourselves from the actual battlefield. For we cannot fight an ideology solely with air strikes and drones or even boots on the ground. We need to fight it with ideas—with better ideas, with positive ideas. We need to fight it with an alternative vision, as we did in the Cold War.

The West did not win the Cold War simply through economic pressure or building new weapons systems. From the beginning, the United States recognized that this was also going to be an intellectual contest. Aside from a few “useful idiots” on leftist campuses, we did not say the Soviet system was morally equivalent to ours; nor did we proclaim that Soviet communism was an ideology of peace.

Instead, through a host of cultural initiatives funded directly or indirectly by the CIA, the United States encouraged anti-Communist intellectuals to counter the influence of Marxists and other fellow-travelers of the Left. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, dedicated to defending the non-Communist Left in the battle of ideas in the world, opened in Berlin on June 26, 1950. Leading intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to serve as honorary chairmen. Many of the members were former Communists such as Arthur Koestler who warned against the dangers of totalitarianism on the basis of personal experience.
8
Magazines such as
Encounter
(UK),
Preuves
(France),
Der Monat
(Germany), and
Quadrant
(Australia) were made beneficiaries of American support.
9
The Free Europe Press mailed numerous books to dissidents in Eastern Europe, sneaking their materials past the censors wherever they could. By the end of the Cold War, “it was estimated that over ten million Western books and magazines had infiltrated the Communist half of Europe through the book-mailing program.”
10

How much did these efforts cost? In the case of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, surprisingly little. In 1951, the budget of the Congress for Cultural Freedom seems to have been about $200,000, or approximately $1.8 million in 2014 dollars.
11
Contrast the small budget of the Congress for Cultural Freedom with the enormous sums the United States has spent since 2001 against what policymakers call “terror” or “extremism.” A 2013 analysis of the so-called black budget suggested that the United States has spent more than $500 
billion
on various intelligence agencies and efforts from 2001 to 2013.
12
The economist Joseph Stiglitz has calculated the cost of the military intervention in Iraq to be between $3 and $5 trillion.
13

This strategy is unsustainable. For one, the United States cannot afford to continue fighting a war of ideas solely by military means. Second, by ignoring the ideas that give rise to Islamist violence we continue to ignore the root of the problem.

Instead, modeled on the cultural campaigns of the Cold War, there must be a concerted effort to turn people away from fundamentalist Islam. Imagine a platform for Muslim dissidents that communicated their message through YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Imagine ten reformist magazines for every one issue of IS’s
Dibaq
or Al-Qaeda’s
Inspire
. Such a strategy would also give us an opportunity to shift our alliances to those Muslim individuals and groups who actually share our values and practices—those who fight for a true Reformation and who find themselves maligned and marginalized by those nations and leaders and imams whom we now embrace as allies.

In the Cold War, the West celebrated dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Václav Havel, who had the courage to challenge the Soviet system from within. Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam—former Muslims, and reformers—but the West either ignores them or dismisses them as “not representative.” This is a grave mistake. Reformers such as Tawfiq Hamid, Irshad Manji, Asra Nomani, Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Saleem Ahmed, Yunis Qandil, Seyran Ate
ş
, Bassam Tibi, and many others must be supported and protected. They should be as well known as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel were in the 1980s—and as well known as Locke and Voltaire were in their day, when the West needed freethinkers of its own.

T
oday there is a war within Islam—a war between those who wish to reform (the Modifying Muslims or the dissidents) and those who wish to turn back to the time of the Prophet (the Medina Muslims). The prize over which they fight is the hearts and minds of the largely passive Mecca Muslims.

For the moment, measured by four yardsticks, the Medina side seems to be winning. One is the scale of individuals leaving the Mecca side and joining the Medina side (what in the West we call “radicalization”). The second metric is attention: the Medina Muslims attract media attention through statements and acts of violence that shock the world. The third metric is resources: through
zakat
(charity), crime, the violent seizing of territory and property, support from rogue states, and petrodollars, Medina Muslims have vast resources. The Modifying Muslims have virtually none. Pushed to make a choice between earning a living and campaigning for religious reform, most Modifiers soon opt for the former. The fourth metric is one of coherence. In many ways this is the most important advantage the Medina Muslims have over the Modifier Muslims. The latter are faced with the daunting—and dangerous—task of questioning the fundamentals of their faith. All the Medina Muslims have to do is pose as its defenders.

Yet I believe a Muslim Reformation is coming. In fact, it may already be here. I think it is plausible that the Internet will be for the Islamic world in the twenty-first century what the printing press was for Christendom in the sixteenth. I think it is plausible that the violent Islamists I have called the Medina Muslims are the modern counterparts to the millenarian sects of pre-Reformation Europe and that a quite different reform movement is already taking shape in the cities of the Middle East and North Africa. Above all, I believe that the upsurge of popular protest that we call the Arab Spring contained within it some of the seeds of a true Muslim Reformation, despite the obvious and predictable failure of the political revolution to live up to Western hopes of a Middle Eastern 1989.

Much at this early stage is uncertain. The only real certainty about the Muslim Reformation is that it will not look much like the Christian one. There are such fundamental differences between the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad, to say nothing of the radically different organizational structures of the two religions—the one hierarchical and distinct from the state, the other decentralized yet aspiring to political power—that any analogy is bound to break down.

When I first conceived of writing a book about a Reformation of Islam, I imagined it as a novel. Entitled
The Reformer
, it was going to tell the story of a charismatic young imam in London who would emerge as a modern-day Muslim Luther. I abandoned the idea because such a book was bound to be dismissed as fanciful.

The Muslim Reformation is not fiction. It is fact. Over the past few years, dozens if not hundreds of developments have convinced me that, while Islam’s problems are indeed deep and structural, Muslim people are like everyone else in one important respect: most want a better life for themselves and their children. And increasingly they have good reasons to doubt that the Medina Muslims can deliver it.

It is no accident that some of the most vocal critics of Islam today are, like me, women. For there is no more obvious incompatibility between Islam and modernity than the subordinate role assigned to women in sharia law. That subordinate role has long been the justification for a litany of abuses of women in the Muslim world, such as male guardianship, child marriage, and marital rape. Just as the surge of sexual assaults was one of the most disturbing features of the Egyptian Revolution, so the response of groups like Tahrir Bodyguard and Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment was one of the most heartening. We are seeing similar movements in Lebanon and Jordan, notably the protest against Article 308, the Jordanian law that allows rapists to marry their victims to avoid going to jail. Iran is an especially interesting case, for there thirty years of Islamist rule appear to have failed to prevent a significant shift in attitudes toward female sexuality.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of this movement in narrowly feminist terms. Although it is women who are spearheading change, there are other issues in play besides the status of women as second-class citizens. In some parts of Africa, we are seeing waves of conversion from Islam to Christianity. Another pioneer of change is Walid Husayin, the Palestinian skeptic jailed for antireligious agitation. Then there are the Muslims who speak out for toleration, such as the Turkish columnist and TV commentator Aylin Kocaman, who has defended Israel and rejected Islamist calls for violence against Jews, or Nabil al-Hudair, an Iraqi Muslim who has spoken up for the rights of his Jewish fellow countrymen.

There really are tides in the affairs of men—and women, too. I believe this is one of those historic tides.

Why the Tide Is Turning

Three factors are combining today to enable real religious reform:

•
The impact of new information technology in creating an unprecedented communication network across the Muslim world.

•
The fundamental inability of Islamists to deliver when they come to power and the impact of Western norms on Muslim immigrants are creating a new and growing constituency for a Muslim Reformation.

•
The emergence of a political constituency for religious reform emerging in key Middle Eastern states.

Together, I believe these three things will ultimately turn the tide against the Islamists, whose goal is, after all, a return to the time of the Prophet—a venture as foredoomed to failure as all attempts to reverse the direction of time’s arrow.

As we have seen, technology is empowering not only the jihadists. It is also empowering those who would oppose them in the name of human rights for all, regardless of religion. (Without the assistance of Google, for example, it would have been far harder for me to write this book.) In November 2014, an Egyptian doctor coined an Arabic hashtag that translates as “why we reject implementing sharia”; it was used five thousand times in the space of twenty-four hours, mostly by Saudis and Egyptians. In language that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, a young Moroccan named Brother Rachid last year called out President Obama on YouTube for claiming that Islamic State was “not Islamic”:

Mr President, I must tell you that you are wrong about ISIL. You said ISIL speaks for no religion. I am a former Muslim. My dad is an imam. I have spent more than 20 years studying Islam. . . . I can tell you with confidence that ISIL speaks for Islam. . . . ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. . . . They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam. They are following Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in every detail. . . . They have called for a caliphate, which is a central doctrine in Sunni Islam.

I ask you, Mr. President, to stop being politically correct—to call things by their names. ISIL, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Taliban, and their sister brand names, are all made in Islam. Unless the Muslim world deals with Islam and separates religion from state, we will never end this cycle. . . . If Islam is not the problem, then why is it there are millions of Christians in the Middle East and yet none of them has ever blown up himself to become a martyr, even though they live under the same economic and political circumstances and even worse? . . . Mr. President, if you really want to fight terrorism, then fight it at the roots. How many Saudi sheikhs are preaching hatred? How many Islamic channels are indoctrinating people and teaching them violence from the Quran and the hadith? . . . How many Islamic schools are producing generations of teachers and students who believe in jihad and martyrdom and fighting the infidels?
1

(Having been saying such things for more than thirteen years, I feel a surge of hope when I read words like those in
The
New York Times
.)

Brother Rachid is a Moroccan convert to Christianity who broadcasts on a television station, Al-Hayat, based in Egypt. His story perfectly illustrates how fast things are changing in North Africa and the Middle East. Religious minorities, as well as women and gay people, remain highly vulnerable in the Middle East and North Africa. But precisely because of their sufferings, I think it is ever more likely that they will ultimately unite against Islam’s religious apartheid. When I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating the conviction of a group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel more optimistic than I did a few years ago.

In short, I agree with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Pakistani schoolgirl whom the Taliban tried to kill:

The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. That is why they are blasting schools every day—because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society. They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school.
2

Here, surely, is the authentic voice of a Muslim Reformation.

Change is also under way in the Muslim communities of the Western world. True, further Muslim immigration to Europe and North America will very likely increase the tensions between Westerners and Muslims. Yet even as the probability of such conflict increases, so too does the exposure of second- and third-generation Muslims to Western values and freedoms. Yes, some will withdraw into a cocoon of denial, and others will become Medina Muslims in reaction against the dissonances they experience. In the long run, however, these options are far less appealing than the third option of religious reform.

Finally, there is the horrified reaction of many Muslims to the atrocities committed by Al-Qaeda, IS, and Boko Haram, which has led some Muslim political leaders to get serious about taking Islam back from the extremists. The government of the United Arab Emirates has called the threat posed by “Islamic extremism” a “transnational cancer” requiring an “urgent, coordinated and sustained international effort to confront” it.
3
The fight against radical Islam, the UAE ambassador to the United States insisted, “must be waged not only on the battlefield but also against the entire militant
ideological
and financial complex that is the lifeblood of extremism.”
4
Before an audience of Muslim clergy, as we have seen, the president of Egypt himself has called for a “religious revolution.” That is the kind of support a Reformation cannot do without if it is to succeed.

The fact that President Sisi elected to make his call for religious revolution at Al-Azhar—the preeminent institution of Sunni religious learning in the world—was highly significant. For Al-Azhar has long been the citadel of clerical conservatism, ruthlessly resisting even the discussion of meaningful reforms to Islam.
5
In June 1992, for example, an Egyptian academic and human rights activist named Farag Foda was shot dead as he left his office. For years, Foda had defended secular policies and criticized sharia law, arguing for a separation of religion and politics. Two weeks before Foda’s death, the widely respected cleric Muhammad al-Ghazali, a senior figure at Al-Azhar, had declared Foda to be an apostate, knowing full well that under Islamic religious law, the punishment for apostasy is death.
6
Activists of the Islamic group Gama’a al Islamiyya subsequently killed Foda, heavily injuring bystanders (including Foda’s son) in the process. “Al-Azhar issued the sentence and we carried out the execution,” the group stated.
7
Al-Ghazali, the cleric who had declared Foda an apostate, subsequently testified on behalf of Foda’s killers, arguing that the presence of an apostate inside the community constituted a threat to the nation.
8
Though now deceased, al-Ghazali remains a venerated figure among Islamic scholars,
9
while Al-Azhar as an institution has never expressed any contrition for its role in Foda’s death.

It is precisely institutions like Al-Azhar that stand in the way of a Muslim Reformation. If the Egyptian government is prepared to take on Al-Azhar, the times are indeed changing.

Je Suis Charlie

There is one final reason I am optimistic. I begin to hope that the West may finally be coming to its senses.

Over the past twenty years, terrified of appearing culturally insensitive or even racist, Western nations have bent over backward to accommodate the demands of their Muslim citizens for special treatment. We appeased the Muslim heads of government who lobbied us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. We appeased leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies, who asked universities to disinvite speakers deemed “offensive” to Muslims. Instead of embracing Muslim dissidents, Western governments treated them as troublemakers and instead partnered with all the wrong people—groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
10
And we even subsidized the jihadists. (For example, the man who killed Theo van Gogh was living off Dutch welfare benefits.)

Yet I dare to hope that what happened in Paris in January 2015 may prove to be a turning point. It was not that the
Charlie Hebdo
massacre was especially bloody. Many more people had died in the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, in December 2014. Many more people died in the Boko Haram attack on Baga in Nigeria in the same week as the attack in Paris. Rather, it was the fact that more than a dozen people were murdered because they had drawn and published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.