Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (3 page)

The dissidents include people such as Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, the former dean of Islamic law at Qatar University, who disavows the hatred of religions other than Islam. He has quoted at length a Saudi woman who asked why her daughter should be taught to hate non-Muslims: “Do they expect me to hate the Jewish scientist who discovered insulin, which I use to treat my mother? Am I supposed to teach my daughter that she should hate Edison, who invented the lightbulb, which lights up the Islamic world? Should I hate the scientist who discovered the cure for malaria? Should I teach my daughter to hate people merely because their religion is different? Why do we turn our religion into a religion of hatred toward those who differ from us?” Al-Ansari then quotes a response by a leading Saudi cleric, who replied, “This is none of your business” and “cooperation with the infidels is permitted, but only as a reward for services, and not out of love.” Al-Ansari’s plea is to “make religious discourse more human.”

And that is precisely the thing Western-based reformers such as Irshad Manji, Maajid Nawaz, and Zuhdi Jasser are seeking: what they have in common is an attempt to modify, adapt, and reinterpret Islamic practice in order to
make religious discourse more human
. (For further details on the Modifying Muslims, see the
Appendix
.)

How many Muslims belong to each group? Even if it were possible to answer that question definitively, I am not sure that it matters. On the airwaves, over social media, in far too many mosques, and of course on the battlefield, the Medina Muslims have captured the world’s attention. Most disturbing, the number of Western-born Muslim jihadists is sharply increasing. The UN estimated in November 2014 that some 15,000 foreign fighters from at least eighty nations have traveled to Syria to join the radical jihadists.
10
Roughly a quarter of them come from Western Europe. And it is not just young men. Between 10 and 15 percent of those traveling to Syria from some Western countries are female, according to estimates from the ICSR research group.
11

But there are more troubling statistics. According to estimates by the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population of the United States is set to increase from around 2.6 million today to 6.2 million in 2030, mainly as a result of immigration, as well as above-average fertility. Although in relative terms this will still represent less than 2 percent of the total U.S. population (1.7 percent, to be precise, compared with around 0.8 percent today), in absolute terms that will be a larger population than in any West European country except France.
12

As an immigrant of Somali origin, I have no objection whatever to millions of other people from the Muslim world coming to America to seek a better life for themselves and their families. My concern is with the attitudes many of these new Muslim Americans will bring with them (see
table 1
).

Approximately two fifths of Muslim immigrants between now and 2030 will be from just three countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iraq. Another Pew study—of opinion in the Muslim world—shows just how many people in these countries hold views that most Westerners would regard as extreme.
13
Three quarters of Pakistanis and more than two fifths of Bangladeshis and Iraqis think that those who leave Islam should suffer the death penalty. More than 80 percent of Pakistanis and two thirds of Bangladeshis and Iraqis regard sharia law as the revealed word of God. Similar proportions say that Western entertainment hurts morality. Only tiny fractions would be comfortable if their daughters married Christians. Only minorities regard honor killings of women as never justified. A quarter of Bangladeshis and one in eight Pakistanis think that suicide bombings in defense of Islam are often or sometimes justified.

Medina Muslims can exploit views such as these to pose a threat to us all. In the Middle East and elsewhere, their vision of a violent return to the days of the Prophet potentially spells death for hundreds of thousands and subjugation for millions. In the West, it implies not only an increasing risk of terrorism but also a subtle erosion of the hard-won achievements of feminists and campaigners for minority rights.

Medina Muslims are also undermining the position of those Mecca Muslims attempting to lead a quiet life in their cultural cocoons throughout the Western world. Yet those under the greatest threat are the dissidents and reformers: the Modifying Muslims. They are the ones who face ostracism and rejection, who must brave all manner of insults, who must deal with the death threats—or face death itself. So far, their efforts have been diffuse and individual, compared with the highly organized collective action of the Medina Muslims. We owe it to the dissidents—to their courage and their convictions—to change that.

Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that the only viable strategy that can hope to contain the threat posed by the Medina Muslims is to side with the dissidents and reformists and to help them a) identify and repudiate those parts of Muhammad’s moral legacy that stem from Medina and b) persuade the Mecca Muslims to accept this change and reject the Medina Muslims’ summons to intolerance and war.

This book is not a work of history. I do not offer a new explanation for the fact that more and more Muslims have embraced the most violent elements of Islam in my lifetime—why, in short, the Medina Muslims are in the ascendant today. I do seek to challenge the view, almost universal among Western liberals, that the explanation lies in the economic and political problems of the Muslim world and that these, in turn, can be explained in terms of Western foreign policy. This is to attach too much importance to exogenous forces. There are other parts of the world that have struggled to make democracy work or to cope with oil wealth. There are other peoples besides Muslims who have complaints about U.S. “imperialism.” Yet there is precious little evidence of an upsurge in terrorism, suicide bombings, sectarian warfare, medieval punishments, and honor killings in the non-Muslim world. There is a reason why an increasing proportion of organized violence in the world is happening in countries where Islam is the religion of a substantial share of the population.

The argument in this book is that
religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform
. Non-doctrinal factors—such as the Saudis’ use of oil revenues to fund Wahhabism and Western support for the Saudi regime—are important, but
religious doctrine is more important
. Hard as it may be for many Western academics to believe, when people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are not trying somehow to dignify their underlying socioeconomic or political grievances.

Islam is at a crossroads. Muslims, not by the tens or hundreds but by the tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions, need to make a conscious decision to confront, debate, and ultimately reject the violent elements within their religion. To some extent—not least because of widespread revulsion at the unspeakable atrocities of IS, Al-Qaeda, and the rest—this process has already begun. But ultimately it needs leadership from the dissidents. And they in turn stand no chance without support from the West.

Imagine if, in the Cold War, the West had lent its support not to the dissidents in Eastern Europe—to the likes of Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa—but to the Soviet Union, as the representative of “moderate Communists,” in the hope that the Kremlin would give us a hand against terrorists such as the Red Army Faction. Imagine if a “Manchurian candidate” president had told the world: “Communism is an ideology of peace.”

That would have been disastrous. Yet that is essentially the West’s posture toward the Muslim world today. We ignore the dissidents. Indeed, we do not even know their names. We delude ourselves that our deadliest foes are somehow not actuated by the ideology they openly affirm. And we pin our hopes on a majority that is conspicuously without any credible leadership, and indeed shows more sign of being susceptible to the arguments of the fanatics than to those of the dissidents.

Five Amendments

Not everyone will accept this argument, I know. All I ask of those who do not is that they defend my right to make it. But for those who do accept the proposition that Islamic extremism is rooted in Islam, the central question is: What needs to happen for us to defeat the extremists for good? Economic, political, judicial, and military tools have been proposed and some of them deployed. But I believe these will have little effect unless Islam itself is reformed.

Such a Reformation has been called for repeatedly—by Muslim activists such as Muhammad Taha and Western scholars such as Bernard Lewis—at least since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent abolition of the Caliphate. In that sense, this is not an original work. What is original is that I specify precisely what needs to be reformed. I have identified five precepts central to the faith that have made it resistant to historical change and adaptation. Only when these five things are recognized as inherently harmful and when they are repudiated and nullified will a true Muslim Reformation have been achieved. The five things to be reformed are:

1.
Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Qur’an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina;

2.
The investment in life after death instead of life before death;

3.
Sharia, the body of legislation derived from the Qur’an, the hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence;

4.
The practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong;

5.
The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.

All these tenets must be either reformed or discarded. In the chapters that follow I shall discuss each of them and make the case for their reformation.

I recognize that such an argument is going to make many Muslims uncomfortable. Some are bound to say that they are offended by my proposed amendments. Others will no doubt contend that I am not qualified to discuss these complex issues of theological and legal tradition. I am also afraid—genuinely afraid—that it will make a few Muslims even more eager to silence me.

But this is not a work of theology. It is more in the nature of a public intervention in the debate about the future of Islam. The biggest obstacle to change within the Muslim world is precisely its suppression of the sort of critical thinking I am attempting here. If nothing else comes of it, I will consider this book a success if it helps to spark a serious discussion of these issues among Muslims themselves. That, in my opinion, would represent a first step, however hesitant, toward the Reformation that Islam so desperately needs.

For their part, many Westerners may be inclined to dismiss these propositions as quixotic. Other religions have undergone a process of reform, modifying core beliefs and adopting more tolerant and flexible attitudes compatible with modern, pluralistic societies. But what hope can there be to reform a religion that has resisted change for 1,400 years? If anything, Islam today seems, from the Western point of view, to be moving backward, not forward. Ironically, this book is written at a time when many in the West have begun to despair of winning the struggle against Islamic extremism, and when the hopes associated with the so-called Arab Spring have largely proved to be illusory.

I agree that the Arab Spring was an illusion, at least in terms of Western expectations. From the outset, I regarded parallels with the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Velvet Revolution of 1989 as facile and doomed to disappointment. Nevertheless, I think many Western observers have missed the underlying import of the Arab Spring. Something was—and still is—definitely afoot within the Muslim world. There is a genuine constituency for change that was never there before. It is a constituency, I shall argue, that we overlook at our peril.

In short, this is an optimistic book, a book that seeks to inspire not another war on terror or extremism but rather a real debate within and about the Muslim world. It is a book that attempts to explain what elements such a Reformation might change, written from the perspective of someone who has been at various times all three kinds of Muslim: a cocooned believer, a fundamentalist, and a dissident. My journey has gone from Mecca to Medina to Manhattan, and to the idea of a Modified Islam.

The absence of a Muslim Reformation is what ultimately drove me to become an infidel, a nomad, and now a heretic. Future generations of Muslims deserve better, safer options. Muslims should be able to welcome modernity, not be forced to wall themselves off, or live in a state of cognitive dissonance, or lash out in violent rejection.

The Muslim world is currently engaged in a massive struggle to come to terms with the challenge of modernity. The Arab Spring and Islamic State are just two versions of the reaction to that challenge. We in the West must not limit ourselves solely to military means in order to defeat the jihadists. Nor can we hope to cut ourselves off from contact with them. For these reasons, we have an enormous stake in how the struggle over Islam plays out. We cannot remain on the sidelines as though the outcome has nothing to do with us. If the Medina Muslims win and the hope for a Muslim Reformation dies, the rest of the world will pay an enormous price. And, with all the freedoms we take for granted, Westerners may have the most to lose.