Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (9 page)

Prior to the rise of Islam, Arab tribes had fought one another, through raiding expeditions and perpetual feuds. Salzman notes that Islam imposed a measure of unity while retaining the traditional tribal habit of the feud “by opposing the Muslim to the infidel, and the
dar al-Islam
, the land of Islam and peace, to the
dar al-harb
, the land of the infidels and conflict.”
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What had been tribal raiding now “became sanctified as an act of religious duty”: holy war, or
jihad
.
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What mattered to Muslims was conquering as much territory as possible and bringing it under Islamic sovereignty, ruled through Islamic holy law.
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Muhammad also left behind—true to tribal form—detailed instructions on the division of the bounty gained by Muslim troops through conquest. In Qur’an 8:1 such spoils of war are legitimized. The hadith are full of detailed instructions on what are really norms of tribal conquest. In the authoritative collection Sahih Bukhari alone, there are more than four hundred stories describing military expeditions led by the Prophet Muhammad, and more than eighty stories containing instructions on the appropriate division of booty.
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These various residues of tribalism matter because even if Islam is reformed, they are likely to persist. A separation of religion from politics—a distinction between Mecca and Medina—would not do away with the problems created by these inherited tribal norms.

The Honor/Shame Dynamic

Among the most crucial features of the tribal system institutionalized by Islam is the concept of honor. This requires careful explanation for Western readers, whose understanding of terms like “family” and “honor” is fundamentally different. The family structure to keep in mind is an extended kinship group (or clan) whose numbers are increased through practices such as polygamy and child marriage. By having boys marry when they are as young as fifteen or sixteen, the space between generations shrinks, and the number of descendants grows. This kind of family is much like an old
talal
tree, with a deep main root, a solid stem, and myriad branches. Leaves bud, grow, and fall off; branches may be cut and new ones take their place; but the tree stands. Each of its components is dispensable, but the tree itself is not. That is the most important “family value” instilled into children. The individual barely registers in this scheme.

Each person within the kinship group has value to the tribe as a whole, but certain members are more valuable than others: young men who can go into battle to defend their kin are more useful than young girls or old women. Marriageable girls are more highly valued than older women because they are necessary to produce sons, and can also be traded. Each family’s worst nightmare is to be uprooted and destroyed. Given all the possibilities for destruction, the longer a kinship group survives, the stronger it is. Families draw a sense of pride from their history of resilience, passed on through oft-repeated stories and poems about the bloodline.

That pride was what made my grandmother teach me my line of descent back so many generations and hundreds of years. She made it clear to me that it was the duty of young people not only to bask in the inherited glory of their bloodline, but also to maintain it above all else, even if that might cost them their property or their lives. I was also taught to regard anyone outside the bloodline with extreme wariness.

Before Islam was founded, the various extended families of Arabia collaborated and also competed through a network of complex commercial and marital alliances, sometimes allying in battle, sometimes fighting against one another. In this world, conflicts within the clan had to be defused as quickly as possible to preserve the image of strength; infighting would lead to the perception of weakness and make the clan vulnerable to attack. Honor was all-important. Anyone who insulted or humiliated the bloodline must be punished. If one man killed another, for example, the victim’s father, brother, uncle, cousin, or son must take revenge, to uphold the clan’s honor. And this revenge might be inflicted not just on the killer, but also on his entire family.

Anthropologists since Ruth Benedict’s study of Japan in World War II have made a distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures. In the former, social order is maintained by the inculcation of a sense of honor and shame before the group. If our behavior brings discredit on our tribe, it may punish or even expel us. In a guilt culture, by contrast, a person is taught to discipline himself by means of his own conscience—sometimes backed up by the threat of punishment in the life to come. Most Western societies went through a thousand-year transformation from shame to guilt, a process that coincided with the gradual breakup of tribal family structures. Europeans underwent a long process of detribalization, beginning with subjection to Roman law, conversion to Christianity, the imposition of monarchical rule over baronial power, and the gradual rise of nation-states with their concept of individual citizenship and equality before the law.

The Arab world in which Islam first triumphed did not undergo a similar transition. As Antony Black writes in
The History of Islamic Political Thought
, “Muhammad created a new monotheism fitted to the contemporary needs of tribal society.”
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The effect was to perpetuate tribal norms by freezing them in place as holy writ. Arabs could see themselves as “the chosen people” with “a mission to convert or conquer the world.” According to Muhammad, each of the great monotheistic religions was an
ummah
—a community or nation defined by its adherence to the teachings of its prophet. Jews were defined as an
ummah
through their adherence to the book of Moses. Christians were an
ummah
united by adherence to the teachings of the prophet Jesus. The Islamic
ummah
, however, was meant to supersede these other groups. Within the
ummah
, all Muslims were brothers and sisters. Yet this notion did not displace the older ties of the bloodline. As it is set down in the Qur’an: “Blood relations among each other have closer personal ties in the Decree of Allah than (the Brotherhood of) Believers” (33:6). Despite the rise of a pan-Islamic religious identity in which all individuals notionally submitted to Allah, Islam therefore retained elements of the shame culture.

From its origins as a new faith community, Islam had the overwhelming need to remain unified or risk reverting back to tribal fragmentation. The first schism over the question of succession nearly led to the collapse of the religion. Within Islam,
fitna
—strife or disagreement—was therefore seen as fundamentally destructive. Dissent was a form of betrayal; heresy as well. These individualistic impulses had to be suppressed to preserve the unity of the larger community. Those who wonder at the ferocity of Islamic punishments for dissent fail to grasp the threat that skepticism and critical thinking were believed to pose.

In a clan setting, shameful behavior constitutes a betrayal of the bloodline. In the wider Islamic setting, heresy constitutes a comparable threat, as does outright unbelief—apostasy—both of which are punishable by death. Those who betray the faith must be weeded out to maintain the integrity of the
ummah
.

This belief in the danger of dissent has had powerful consequences, but perhaps the greatest has been to suppress innovation, individualism, and critical thinking within the Muslim world. Muhammad himself, as both the messenger of God and the founder of the Islamic “supertribe,” is revered as an irreproachable source of wisdom and a model of behavior for all time. To question his authority in any way is considered an unacceptable affront to the honor of Islam itself.

It is not fashionable today in academic circles to discuss the legacy of Arab clan structures in the development of Islam. It is considered ethnocentric, if not downright orientalist, even to bring it up. But today the Middle East and the wider world are increasingly at the mercy of a combination of the worst traits of a patriarchal tribal society and unreformed Islam. And because of the taboos over what can and cannot be said—taboos backed up by the threat of violent reprisals—we are unable to have an open discussion of these issues.

The Sacrosanctity of the Qur’an

If Muhammad is unique among the prophets, the Qur’an is unprecedented among religious texts. Muslims today are taught that the Qur’an is a complete and final revelation that cannot be changed: it is literally God’s last word.

The Qur’an and its related texts are the fundamental source of the Islamic veneration of the afterlife, as well as the call to jihad. They make explicit the concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong and the specific dictates of sharia. In turn, these concepts would not have such enduring power were they not so entwined with the belief in the timeless, all-powerful, and immutable words of Allah and the deeds of Muhammad. Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done—question, critique, interpret, and ultimately modernize its holy scripture—it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices.

My first memories of the Qur’an are of my mother and grandmother kissing its cover, of the admonition never to touch it without having first washed my hands, and of sitting on the hot Somali ground as a small child of four or five while the book seemed to tower above us on a high shelf. As I memorized its verses, I was taught simply to obey it. The Qur’an, I learned, was the book sent down “explaining all things” (16:89). It had been revealed to Muhammad by Allah through the Angel Gabriel, beginning when Muhammad lived in Mecca and continuing when he moved to Medina. Gabriel spoke the words one by one to Muhammad, who in turn recited them before scribes. Islamic orthodoxy—not
radical
Islam, but
mainstream
Islamic doctrine—thus insists that the Qur’an is God’s own word. Questioning any part of the Qur’an therefore becomes an act of heresy.

The Allah of my childhood was a fiery deity. “On the Day that the enemies of Allah will be gathered together to the Fire,” it is written in chapter 41 of the Qur’an, “their hearing, their sight, and their skins will bear witness against them, as to (all) their deeds.” Of Abu Lahab, Muhammad’s uncle who persistently opposed Islam, it is said in chapter 111: “Burnt soon will he be in a Fire of Blazing Flame! His wife shall carry the (crackling) wood—As fuel!—A twisted rope of palm-leaf fiber round her (own) neck!” Fire is a recurring theme of the Qur’an, and the heat of the desert and the scalding sun, like the crackle of fires at night outside their tents, made these punishments exceedingly vivid to most Arabs, as well as to me. When my mother spoke of “hellfire,” she would point to the flaming brazier in our kitchen and tell me: “You think this fire is hot? Now think about hell, where the fire is far, far hotter and it will devour you.” The thought gave my sister nightmares. Small wonder I strove to submit to Allah’s will.

Later, I learned what it was that made Allah different from the Christian God and Hebrew Yahweh. Allah is not a benevolent father figure, to be depicted in flowing robes with a white beard. In fact, Islam requires that neither God nor Muhammad be depicted in any physical form. Unlike the mosaics of medieval chapels or the frescoes of churches in the Renaissance, every Muslim house of worship from the Grand Mosque down has no human images, only geometric adornments featuring nothing more figurative than enormous flowering plants.

This abstract Allah also reigns supreme as the sole divinity; in Islam there is no Jesus-like son or Holy Ghost. Association of any other god or entity with Allah is considered
shirk
and is one of the gravest sins in Islam—punishable by death according to some scholars. The Qur’an pointedly says, “no son has [Allah] begotten, nor has He a partner in His dominion” (25:2). In Islam, Jesus is recognized as being in the tradition of major Old Testament prophets like Noah and Abraham, but Muhammad is revealed as the last and greatest prophet and the Qur’an is the last word spoken by God. According to Islamic teachings, each prophet up to and including Muhammad opened a window onto the unseen, but after Muhammad’s death that window was declared shut until Judgment Day and the end of time. Muhammad was thus the bearer of the last word of God’s revelation.
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In a similar way, Allah’s imperatives for the faithful are not exhortations, such as love thy neighbor, or a covenant, as between God and the Jews, or even a wider moral code, like the Ten Commandments, which address everything from adultery to murder. Rather, first and foremost, Islam commands its followers to perform five religious duties, all of which remind the believers through word and deed that they must above all else submit to the faith and its rules:

1.
Have faith in the one God, Allah, and Muhammad, His Prophet;

2.
Pray five times a day;

3.
Fast during the day for the entire ninth month of Ramadan;

4.
Provide charity;

5.
Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.

In its scripture, Islam is also fundamentally different. It places more emphasis on divine omnipotence and less on human free will. “God leads astray whom He will and guides whom He will,” it is written. There is even a suggestion in the Qur’an that just as Allah has created what is good, He has also created evil. Chapter 25 says He “created all things, and ordered them in due proportions.” This suggests that each person’s fate and future have already been established.
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Of course, such concepts can also be found in some versions of Christianity. John Calvin was especially insistent on the idea of “double predestination,” that God had already chosen who was damned and who saved. The difference is that throughout the history of Christianity there has been intense debate about the relationship between divine omnipotence and human agency. Early debates in Islamic history were eventually won by champions of a heavy determinism, both pertaining to the destiny of one’s soul as well as to one’s actions in this life.
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Thereafter, debate on these issues was effectively shut down by zealots who argued that asking such questions was akin to
shirk
, if not to heresy.