Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (7 page)

For positing these ideas, Abdel Raziq was dismissed from Al-Azhar. The university’s Supreme Council condemned and denounced his book, and expelled him from the circle of the ulema. He lost his title of
alim
, or learned man, and was forced into domestic exile, escaping a worse fate thanks only to his family’s prominence.

Three years later, a new group began to emerge in Egypt under the leadership of a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Disgusted by what he believed was an excess of materialism and secularism, as well as the sight of Egyptians laboring for foreign bosses, al-Banna wanted a return to a precolonial era, when religion had been a comprehensive way of life—although he himself was largely self-taught and did not come from a learned, clerical background. Instead of fostering a new secular nationalism consistent with developments in Europe and elsewhere in the modern world, al-Banna wanted Muslims everywhere to join together in a larger community founded upon Islam and Islamic religious law. In al-Banna’s vision of the Islamic state, there would be no political parties, sharia would form the legal code, and only those who had a religious education would rule or administer the government. Schools themselves should be attached to mosques. In this way, Islam would be the guiding, unifying principle across the Arab Muslim world.

Hassan al-Banna is hardly a household name in the West, but the organization that he helped to found has become one: the Muslim Brotherhood. And his writings inspired some of the most familiar names of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, among them Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.
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The triumph of al-Banna over Abdel Raziq—in essence, the triumph of theocracy over reform—can also be seen in the fates of other twentieth-century Islamic reformers. The Sudanese intellectual Mahmoud Mohammed Taha argued that Muslims should embrace the spiritual Islam of Mecca and let go of the Islam of Muhammad’s more warlike and political Medina period, which, Taha argued, applied only to that specific moment in time and not to subsequent generations. Taha also campaigned against introducing sharia in Sudan. Though he still believed there was no god but Allah, and that Muhammad was his messenger, Taha was nonetheless hanged for apostasy in 1985.

More recently, Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian thinker, argued that human language had at least some role in shaping the Qur’an, thus making it not completely the uncorrupted word of Allah. For proposing a reinterpretation of the sacred text, he was deemed an apostate by an Egyptian court in 1995, and then forcibly divorced from his wife against his (and his wife’s) will, because he was now a non-Muslim, and a non-Muslim man cannot be married to a Muslim woman. After receiving death threats, Abu Zayd fled Egypt and went into exile in the Netherlands.

In Iran, the Islamic thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, though he supported the Islamic revolution of 1979, later argued that political power should be far more separate from religious leadership than it is today. For making this argument, Soroush received numerous threats, was forced to end his university teaching, and eventually found life so intolerable that he, too, moved abroad.

All of these would-be reformers based their arguments on Islamic theological grounds. But the ulema have not only resisted all such attempts at reform; they have time and again successfully threatened and bullied the reformers into silence or exile, where they have not actually secured their execution. And the method has been to return, always, to the Qur’an. Because the Qur’an is inviolate, timeless, and perfect, they argue, what is written in it cannot be criticized, much less changed.

That explains why, in Islam, reform has never had positive connotations and innovation is at all costs to be avoided. As Albert Hourani explains, after the appearance of Muhammad, “History could have no more lessons to teach, if there was change it could only be for the worse, and the worse could only be cured not by creating something new but by renewing what had once existed.”
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In other words, “reform” is simply not a legitimate concept in Islamic doctrine. The only accepted and proper goal of a Muslim “reformer” is a return to first principles. The hadith, the text containing the words and deeds of Allah’s Prophet, credits Muhammad with saying that his generation would be the best of all, the one that followed him the next best, and so on down.
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It is the precise opposite of the Western narrative of progress: in this version of history, instead of improving, each generation is worse than the one before. Only when, at the turn of every century, a renovator arrived, a
mujaddid
, could Islam revert back to its moment of perfection at the time of its founding, the time of Muhammad.
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In those terms, it is only the Medina Muslims who can represent themselves as the agents of a Muslim Reformation.

Today, the most notorious exponent of this kind of “reform,” in the sense of restoration, is the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which proposes to create a new caliphate where the only law is sharia. Adulterers there are stoned to death, infidels beheaded, and thieves mutilated. Indeed, much Islamic State propaganda is like a YouTube upload of a time-travel trip back to the seventh century. If these are the people who claim to be purifying Islam, what chance does real reform stand?

Who Speaks for Islam?

Luther’s Reformation was launched against a hierarchical ecclesiastical establishment. When the pope sought to anathematize him, Luther could retort: “I am called a heretic by those whose purses will suffer from my truths.” Islam is different. Unlike Catholicism, Islam is almost entirely decentralized. There is no pope, no College of Cardinals, nothing like the Southern Baptist Convention—no hierarchical structure, no centrally controlled system of ordination. Any man can become an imam; all it takes is a self-professed knowledge of the Qur’an and followers.

I am always intrigued when on college campuses there are heated demands that an imam or scholar of Islam be present when I speak to offer the “correct” interpretation of Islam. That was the demand of Yale’s Muslim Student Association in September 2014, when I was invited to the university’s campus to give the Buckley Lecture. But whom did they have in mind for this role? A Saudi cleric? An American convert? An Indonesian? An Egyptian? A Sunni? A Shiite? A representative of Islamic State, perhaps? Or how about Zeba Khan, an American Muslim of Indian descent, who was educated at a Jewish day school while also attending a mosque in Toledo, Ohio, where men and women prayed side by side, and who in 2008 started the group Muslims for Obama? Or perhaps they would prefer the British-born lawyer turned imam, Anjem Choudary, who favors the imposition of sharia in Britain and has looked forward to seeing the black flag of IS flying over Parliament? All can legitimately claim to speak for Islam. There is no Muslim pope to say which of them is right.

In my own Harvard seminar room, a Muslim woman from Egypt became very argumentative. She came to some sessions of my study group and not to others, but was always ready to contradict whatever I was saying. Finally, I asked her about a point that had been made in the assigned reading. She replied: “I haven’t done the assigned reading. I don’t need to. I already know everything.” This goes to the heart of the matter. Paradoxically, Islam is the most decentralized and yet, at the same time, the most rigid religion in the world. Everyone feels entitled to rule out free discussion.

One of the fiercest critics of my course was a female Sudanese student. Despite never actually attending a single session of the study group, she was completely convinced that everything being said in the classroom was a serious affront to Islam. She was one of a number of Muslim students who lobbied the Kennedy School authorities to have my study group terminated. When one of my colleagues made the point that academic freedom—the freedom to teach and learn about viewpoints and ideas that are fundamentally at odds with others’ beliefs—is the cornerstone of the Western university, she reacted with perplexed hostility. Academic freedom was a concept that seemed to her deplorable if it permitted any questioning of her faith.

To understand this hostility, it is important to recognize that the long traditions in Judaism and Christianity of passionate debate and agonizing doubt are largely absent in Islam. There are no great schisms within the Sunni or Shia branches (a division that was not originally theological in nature, but was essentially a dispute over succession). Instead, there is conformity. There is no Reform or Reconstructionist Islam, as there is in Judaism. Rather, like the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, Islam is still persecuting heretics.

Consider this admonition from a Roman Catholic professor of theology, David Bonagura, who notes that Catholic worship is often considered more “stoic” compared with the “energy” of Protestant services, but who goes on to say that these “different styles are pathways to faith,” adding that “we need not think our preferred religious experience should be shared by everyone else.”
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How many Muslim clerics today would dare say such a thing?

In no other modern religion is dissent still a crime, punishable by death. When a conservative Jewish rabbi said in a Modern Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Washington, D.C., that Orthodox Judaism needs female rabbis, he was not denounced. A few people in the audience even applauded. When Pope Francis broached the idea of toleration for homosexuals within the Catholic Church, there was heated disagreement, but no violence, and no one called for his overthrow or death.

By contrast, consider the case of Hamza Kashgari, a twenty-three-year-old Saudi man, who in 2013 was accused of blasphemy and threatened with death for having openly challenged the authority of the Prophet Muhammad. What did Kashgari do that was so reprehensible? On the eve of the Prophet’s birthday, he addressed a series of tweets directly to Muhammad. In an almost immediate response, Saudi sheiks took to YouTube to demand his execution; a Facebook group demanding his death had ten thousand “friends” within one week—not surprising perhaps when one considers that Saudi Arabia’s homegrown Twitter heroes are clerics such as Muhammad al-Arifi, who cannot enter any European nation because of his unabashed support for wife-beating and his hatred of Jews. (Al-Arifi has 10.7 million Twitter followers.)

Kashgari, a newspaper columnist from the port city of Jeddah on the Red Sea, promptly deleted his tweets and fled to Malaysia, where he was detained in the departure hall of Kuala Lumpur International Airport by police as he tried to board a flight to New Zealand. He was soon thereafter repatriated to Saudi Arabia.

What had he written in 140 characters that was so blasphemous? The answer is this:

On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity surrounding you. I shall not pray for you.
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He also posted: “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.” And finally: “I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”
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For these innocent words, clerics rose up to demand Kashgari’s death for the crime of apostasy, and King Abdullah ordered a warrant for his arrest. It did not matter that Kashgari had apologized and erased his tweets. He was jailed. And although he was freed some eight months later, he has effectively been silenced.

This is a young man who grew up in a conservative religious home, who was doing no more than testing and feeling about the contours of his faith. He did not reject Islam, Allah, or the Prophet. His words merely sought to humanize a religious icon. And for this he was jailed.

The Unexpected Reformation

For many years, Western writers have dreamed of a Muslim Reformation. None has come. Accordingly, most observers of the Islamic world today have given up on the idea. But I believe that a Reformation is not merely imminent; it is now under way. The Protestant Reformation itself erupted quite suddenly. With Islam, with equal suddenness, the change has already begun and will only accelerate in the years that lie ahead.

Recall the three factors that were crucial to the success of the Protestant Reformation: technological change, urbanization, and the interests of a significant number of European states in backing Luther’s challenge to the status quo. All three are present in the Muslim world today.

Modern information technology, like the printing press in Luther’s time, can certainly be used to promote intolerance, violence, and millenarian visions. But it can also act as a channel for the very opposite things, just as the printing presses of seventeenth-century Europe went from publishing tracts about witchcraft to treatises about physics. The case of Hamza Kashgari in fact perfectly illustrates the way the Internet has the opportunity to be to the Muslim Reformation what the printing press was to the Protestant Christian one. Raised a religious conservative, Kashgari is said to have become a “humanist” under the influence of what he read online.

There is also a constituency for a true Reformation in the Muslim world, just as there was a constituency receptive to Luther’s message in sixteenth-century Germany. Muslim city-dwellers are much more likely to be resistant to the people I have called Medina Muslims than people living in the countryside—not least because in practice the imposition of sharia is highly disruptive of a whole range of mainly urban businesses (among them, tourism).

In 2014, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 14,000 Muslims in fourteen countries. In only two nations, Senegal and Indonesia, was concern about Islamic extremism felt by fewer than 50 percent of the surveyed population.
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The numbers in the Middle East and North Africa were astounding: fully 92 percent of Lebanese, 80 percent of Tunisians, 75 percent of Egyptians, and 72 percent of Nigerians—huge majorities of people—said they were worried about Islamic extremism. There is good reason to think that it is city-dwellers who are doing most of the worrying.