Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (22 page)

There were, of course, the usual craven editorials and press statements by moral idiots arguing that the editors of the magazine had lacked “common sense” in offending Muslims, and that nevertheless the violence had nothing to do with Islam. But for the millions of people who took to the streets bearing “Je Suis Charlie” signs, these arguments clearly were not reassuring.

As of this writing, ten thousand military and security personnel have been deployed across France as authorities brace for more attacks. Even to me, just a week ago, such a militarization of policing in one of the West’s largest and oldest democracies would have been unthinkable. France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, said three days after the attack that France was at war with “radical Islam.” The French, once so critical of the United States after 9/11 (not least for the sweeping scope of the Patriot Act), are now following in the footsteps of George W. Bush. Stephen Harper, the prime minister of the other great French-speaking democracy, Canada, explicitly connected the
Charlie Hebdo
attack to the “international jihadist movement.” “They have declared war on anybody who does not think and act exactly as they wish they would think and act,” Harper said. “They have declared war and are already executing it on a massive scale on a whole range of countries with which they are in contact, and they have declared war on any country, like ourselves, that values freedom, openness and tolerance. We may not like this and wish it would go away, but it is not going to go away.”

At a time like this, the claims that the “extremists” have nothing to do with the “religion of peace” simply cease to be credible. The enemy in this war is saying just the opposite. Consider, for example, the book written by the Al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Suri, entitled
The Call to Global Islamic Resistance
. As the enemies of Islam, al-Suri lists: the Jews, America, Israel, the Freemasons, the Christians, the Hindus, apostates (including established Muslim leaders, officials, and their security apparatus), hypocritical scholars, educational systems, satellite TV channels, sports, and all arts and entertainment venues.
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This would be comical if it were not so deadly serious.

Western leaders who insist on ignoring such explicit threats run two risks. Not only do their words (“Islam belongs to Germany”) embolden the zealots. They also create a political vacancy. Even before
Charlie Hebdo
, Germans were protesting under the banner of Pegida (short for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West”) in Dresden, Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig. All over Europe, populist parties are mobilizing voters in increasing numbers against immigration and Islam, from the National Front in France to the Sweden Democrats. It can be in nobody’s interests for Europe to slide in this way down a perilous path of polarization.

Instead, as briefly happened in Paris in the days after the massacre, we in the West need to unite. But we need to be clear about what we are uniting for, and what we are uniting against.

In all holy books, in the Bible as well as the Qur’an, you will find passages that sanction intolerance and inequity. But in the case of Christianity, there was change. In that process of change, the people who wanted to uphold the status quo made the same arguments that present-day Muslims are giving: that they were offended, that the new thinking was blasphemy. In effect, it was
through
a process of repeated blasphemy that Christians and Jews evolved and grew into modernity. That is what art did. That is what science did. And yes, that is what irreverent satire did.

The Muslim Reformation is not going to come from Al-Azhar. It is more likely to come from a relentless campaign of blasphemy. So when a Muslim sees you reading this book and says, “I am offended, my feelings are hurt,” your reply should be: “What matters more? Your sacred text? Or the life of this book’s author? Your sacred text? Or the rule of law? Human life, human freedom, human dignity—they all matter more than any sacred text.” Christians have been through this, Jews have been through it. It’s now time for Muslims to go through it. In that sense—in the sense that I passionately believe in the world-changing power of blasphemy—
je suis Charlie
.

Yet we need to do more than merely blaspheme. We need to reform.

The Five Amendments, Restated

The tenth- and eleventh-century Islamic legal scholar al-Mawardi, writing in
The Ordinances of Government
, says: “If an innovator appears or a holder of suspect views goes astray, the imam should explain and clarify the correct view to him, and make him undergo the penalties appropriate to him, so that the religion may be preserved from flaws and the community preserved from error.”
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I know that anyone who advocates reforming Islam runs a risk. So let me be unambiguously clear. I am not advocating a war—quite the contrary. I am explicitly arguing for peaceful reform: for a cultural campaign aimed at doctrinal change.

As I have argued, there are five core concepts in Islam that are fundamentally incompatible with modernity:

1.
the status of the Qur’an as the last and immutable word of God and the infallibility of Muhammad as the last divinely inspired messenger;

2.
Islam’s emphasis on the afterlife over the here-and-now;

3.
the claims of sharia to be a comprehensive system of law governing both the spiritual and temporal realms;

4.
the obligation on ordinary Muslims to command right and forbid wrong;

5.
the concept of jihad, or holy war.

My “five theses” are simply that these concepts must be amended in ways that make being a Muslim more readily compatible with the twenty-first-century world. Muslim clerics need to acknowledge that the Qur’an is not the ultimate repository of revealed truth. They need to make explicit that what we do in this life is more important than anything that could conceivably happen to us after we die. It is just a book. They need to make clear that sharia law occupies a circumscribed role and is clearly subordinate to the laws of the nation-states where Muslims live. They need to put an end to the practice of delegated coercion that inflicts conformity at the expense of creativity. And they need to disavow completely the concept of jihad as a literal call to arms against non-Muslims and those Muslims they deem apostates or heretics.

This Reformation would not only benefit women, gays, and religious minorities. I believe it is also in the interests of Islam itself. In order to avoid eventual collapse, even the most revered structure requires renovation. Mere restoration is no longer a plausible option for Islam, no matter how much blood the Islamists shed. Indeed, the more blood they shed, the more they risk bringing the entire structure crashing down upon their heads.

How long will the rest of us have to wait for this Reformation to succeed in transforming Islam as deeply as the original Reformation transformed Christianity? In the last decade, many thousands of innocent people have lost their lives in an escalating sectarian conflict that rages across borders. Tens of millions of decent men and women and their children remain trapped within failing states, stagnating economies, and repressive societies. Will the Muslim Reformation be widespread or localized (after all, the Protestant Reformation did not succeed in all of Christendom)? Will the Muslim Reformation produce wars of religion, like its Christian predecessor, before its more beneficial effects make themselves felt?

The answers to these questions depend above all on Muslims and the choices they make. But they also depend to some extent on the choices we in the West make. Do we help the Reformation? Or do we unwittingly undermine it?

It will not be easy to bring about this change. But perhaps the words of two thinkers, one an Islamic heretic and one a master of the Western Enlightenment, can give us encouragement.

In 1057, the Syrian poet and philosopher Abul ‘Ala al-Ma’arri died. In his lifetime, for the act of forgoing meat and being a vegetarian, he was branded a heretic. He was also branded a heretic for his poetry and other fictional writings, including
The Epistle of
Forgiveness
, in which he imagined a journey to heaven and to hell.
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Although he is largely unknown in the West, his work is regarded as a forerunner of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, and over the years, statues of him have been erected around his home region, south of Aleppo. In 2013, jihadists, primarily with the Al-Nusra Front, began attacking and beheading his statues. There are multiple theories about the attacks, including one that perhaps al-Ma’arri is related to President Assad. But the more plausible explanation is that nothing—not even the passage of a thousand years—can expunge the guilt of the heretic. The stigma of heresy is eternal.
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And what did al-Ma’arri write that was so heretical? Here are a few of his lines: “Shall I go forth from underneath this sky? How shall I escape? Whither shall I flee?” And: “God curse people who call me an infidel when I tell them the truth!” And: “I lift my voice whene’er I talk in vain, / But do I speak the truth, hushed are my lips again.”
15

I find those lines almost unbearably moving. And yet, nearly a thousand years after they were written, I am certain that the time for heretics to speak the truth with impunity has at last arrived. And for those still unsure how they should react to the words of a heretic, I turn again to Voltaire, the freest of freethinkers. “I disapprove of what you say,” he is said to have written to Claude Helvétius, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The dawn of a Muslim Reformation is the right moment to remind ourselves that the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion.

The best evidence that a Muslim Reformation is actually under way is the growing number of active dissidents and reformers around the world. It would be quite wrong of me to publish this book without acknowledging them and their often courageous contributions. Broadly speaking, they can be grouped into three broad categories: dissidents in the West, dissidents in the Islamic world, and clerical reformers.

Dissidents in the West

There is a growing number of ordinary Muslim citizens in the West who are currently braving death threats and even official punishment in dissenting from Islamic orthodoxy and calling for the reform of Islam. These individuals are not clergymen but “ordinary” Muslims, generally educated, well read, and preoccupied with the crisis of Islam.

Among them are Maajid Nawaz (UK), Samia Labidi (France), Afshin Ellian (Netherlands), Ehsan Jami (Netherlands), Naser Khader (Denmark), Seyran Ateş (Germany), Yunis Qandil (Germany), Bassam Tibi (Germany), Raheel Raza (Canada), Zuhdi Jasser (U.S.), Saleem Ahmed (U.S.), Nonie Darwish (U.S.), Wafa Sultan (U.S.), Saleem Ahmed (U.S.), Ibn Warraq (U.S.), Asra Nomani (U.S.), and Irshad Manji (U.S.).

These individuals are not clerics, but informed citizens speaking out on the basis of reason and conscience. They are urging either a fundamental reinterpretation of Islam or a change in the core doctrines of Islam. Some of them have left the faith, seeking reform from the outside, whereas others seek to reform Islam from within.
1
Their arguments focus on the importance of viewing the Qur’an and the hadith in a historical context and on respecting man-made civil laws as legitimate, overriding sharia religious law.

Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim physician, is the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona. Jasser has embarked on the “Jefferson project” for Islam. He favors the separation of mosque and state, which will “include the abrogation of all blasphemy and apostasy laws” currently used to stifle Muslim reformers. His aim is to reform Islam and place civil law above sharia law:

If government enacts the literal laws of God rather than natural law or human law, then government becomes God, and abrogates religion and the personal nature of the relationship with God. Governmental law should be based on and debated in reason, not from scriptural exegesis.
2

Saleem Ahmed, a Muslim now living in Hawaii, was born in India and raised in Pakistan. Ahmed founded the Honolulu-based All Believers Network in 2003, promoting genuine interfaith dialogue. Its board has individuals from numerous religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, and Islam. Ahmed argues that the more political and violent verses of the Qur’an are superseded by spiritual passages having universal applicability.
3
He has written a book arguing for a fundamental reform of Islamic doctrine. A number of fellow Muslims have called Ahmed a
kafir
(nonbeliever) and his local imam has criticized him for “diluting our religion.”
4
Ahmed says that his role model is Gandhi.

Yunis Qandil, now living in Germany, was born in Amman, Jordan. He is the son of Palestinian refugees. In his later youth he became closely involved in a Salafi mosque for five years before turning to the Muslim Brotherhood for another four years. He moved to Germany in 1995 and increasingly “sought to combine his spirituality with a secular stance regarding politics.”
5
Qandil is critical of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood that seek to create a “parallel society” of European Muslims, preventing individual Muslims from fully integrating into their host societies.
6
Even if Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood oppose the use of violence in the short term, they are not true partners for genuine integration and peaceful coexistence in a pluralist democracy. Qandil continues his work for the separation of mosque and state.

Samia Labidi, now living in France, was born in Tunisia in 1964. She attended an Islamic school and grew up in a traditional but tolerant family.
7
When she was eleven, her sister married one of the founders of the Islamist group MTI, known as El Nahda (the Renaissance). Her family then became Medina Muslims and Labidi began wearing the veil.
8
Labidi’s mother found the situation too confining and left Tunisia to live with her brother in France. Labidi, too, felt that she could barely breathe:

My mind was sterilized gradually, unable to have access to freedom of thought, to myself. . . . Women continued to be treated like incapable beings who need to be systematically under the guardianship of a close male relative in order to move, to exist, or even to breathe.
9

When she was eighteen, Labidi left Tunisia and went to Paris, earning a master’s degree in philosophy from Université de Paris X Nanterre. Labidi’s brother, meanwhile, became radicalized before abjuring terrorism. Labidi has written about her brother’s radicalization
10
and now argues for reforming Islam: “Ultimately,” she writes, “the solution lies in separating religion from politics, particularly in that part of the globe that is still suffering from this amalgam between . . . temporal . . . and spiritual power.”
11
Labidi remains highly active in groups that are seeking to give secular French Muslims a voice.
12

Seyran Ateş is a German lawyer of Turkish descent. Ateş moved with her family from Turkey to Germany as a six-year-old in 1969. Just before she turned eighteen, she left her parents’ home, moved in with a German man, and studied law.
13
As an attorney specializing in family law, Ateş represented numerous Muslim women for two decades in cases involving abusive marriages, forced marriages, and divorce proceedings.

Through her work, Ateş has seen the dark side of excessively tolerant multiculturalism. According to Ateş, forced marriages are locking up German-born Muslims in separate Islamic enclaves to the point that tens of thousands of women are so isolated from German society that they are unable even to call an ambulance. There has been excessive tolerance for the repressive side of Islam, something Ateş calls the “multicultural mistake,” the title of one of several books she has written.

Before she was pressured to stop her public appearances by security threats, Ateş argued that Islam needs “a sexual revolution” to emancipate women as equals: “Part of the process is that sexuality [in Islam] has to be recognized as something that every individual determines for himself or herself.”
14
She has proposed creating a mosque that would welcome Sunnis and Shiites and treat men and women equally, allowing men and women to pray together and women to serve as imams in mixed congregations.

Ateş argues that Islam must be completely separated from politics: “If we are going to stop that movement and separate politics from religion,” Ate
ş
says, “then we will have chance for Islam to be compatible with democracy.”
15

Citizen Reformers in the Islamic World

In the Islamic world, too, a growing number of ordinary citizens are calling for reform. These voices include the Egyptian Kareem Amer, the Palestinian Walid Husayin, the Turk Aylin Kocaman, the Iraqi Nabil al-Haidari, the Pakistani Luavut Zahid, the Saudi Arabians Hamza Kashgari and Raif Badawi, and the Bangladeshi Taslima Nasrin.

Kareem Amer (real name Abdel Suleiman) is an Egyptian and a former student at Al-Azhar. In 2005, after Muslims attacked a Coptic church, Amer called Muhammad and his seventh-century followers the
sahaba
—“spillers of blood”—for their teachings on warfare.
16
Amer criticized Al-Azhar as being a force for Islamic orthodoxy and intolerance of reformist views. Early in 2006, he was expelled for criticizing the extreme dogma of his Islamic instructors, writing on his blog that “professors and sheikhs at al-Azhar who . . . stand against anyone who thinks freely” would “end up in the dustbin of history.”
17
Amer also criticized the autocratic rule of then-President Hosni Mubarak. He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2007 before being released in 2010 after being beaten in confinement. He exemplifies those young Egyptians who question not only political but also religious authoritarianism.

Walid Husayin, about thirty years old, is a Palestinian skeptic who has described the Islamic God as “a primitive, Bedouin and anthropomorphic God.”
18
On Facebook, Husayin also satirized various Qur’anic verses. Husayin is in every sense an irreverent freethinker who in the West might have found work as a comedian or satirist. Many Palestinians, however, responded with anger to Husayin’s criticism of Islam, accusing him of working for the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Some residents of his hometown called on him to be killed “as a warning to others.”
19
Husayin responded that his critics “actually don’t get that people are free to think and believe in whatever suits them.”
20
After being jailed for a month, and under heavy pressure, Husayin apologized.
21

Luavut Zahid, a Pakistani writer and women’s rights advocate, wrote in April 2014 that Muslims had to make some significant changes to their religion, and that the crisis of Islam could not be blamed on outsiders:

The tactics of terror used by Islamic countries and Muslims at large in general ensure that people will either put up with them, or shut up and leave. There is no concept of freedom of speech, and there is furthermore no concept of criticism. . . . A more pertinent question instead would be why people never spring into action when someone passes a fatwa allowing and requiring female genital mutilation. If it is not real Islam to circumcise young girls, then why did people realise it only after [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali spoke about it? . . . Does she at times sound too extreme? Definitely. But stop for a second and ask yourself this: how many Muslims has she killed? How many Muslims have had to go into hiding because of her? The onus for change lies with Muslims alone. If they are so hell bent on proving that this extreme interpretation of their faith is wrong, then they need to come forward and start transforming things from the inside. Hirsi Ali cannot and should not be called an Islamophobe only because she loudly repeats the things that she has experienced, and continues to see happening around her, and all in the name of God.
22

Taslima Nasrin, an apostate born in Bangladesh currently living in India, has said that “what is needed is a uniform civil code of laws that is not based on religious dogmas, and that is equally applicable to men and women.”
23
The rule of civil law rather than sharia law will ensure all citizens are treated as equals, regardless of their private religious affiliation. This would entail a full separation of mosque and state.

Dissident Clerics

My own sense is that a Muslim Reformation will not come from within the ranks of the Islamic clergy. In the current crisis of Islam, however, there is a growing chorus of Muslim clerics calling for reform of existing Islamic doctrine. Such reformers can be found among both Sunni and Shia clerics, in the Islamic world as well as in the West. These clerics ought to be distinguished from what I would call “fake” reformers, who may condemn the violence used by Al-Qaeda and Islamic State while fervently working toward the imposition of sharia through nonviolent means. That is not what a real “reformer” is, though Western governments—including the U.S. government—have often made the mistake of partnering with such individuals.
24
A
real
reformer is a cleric who not only rejects violence in the short term but
also
favors changing certain core religious doctrines of Islam.

These clerical reformers differ on the specific substance of reforms. Some (such as al-Ansari) favor reinterpretation of Islamic doctrine while respecting, for example, the integrity of the text of the Qur’an. Others (such as al-Qabbanji) view the Qur’an as a human-influenced text subject to far-reaching reinterpretation.

A description of some clerical reformers will reveal that there are meaningful efforts at present to reform Islam from within, though my own sense is that citizen-reformers will ultimately be more powerful than clerics in reforming Islam.

Imam Yassin Elforkani, a Sunni preaching in the Netherlands, has argued that “a new theology must arise in a Dutch context.”
25
Though Elforkani views the Qur’an as a divine text (in that regard adhering to orthodoxy), he insists that “all interpretations of the Qur’an are the work of human beings” and subject to change. About young Dutch Muslims who leave the Netherlands to join IS, he says, “We [Muslims] can’t permit ourselves to look away, we’ve got to think critically about ourselves. . . . These young people left with ideals that did not fall from the sky. Those ideals coincide with elaborate theories, with concepts from Islamic theology that have been taught for decades.”
26

Elforkani has expressed himself critically about the theory of the Caliphate and the activities of IS: “The concept of the Caliphate, of the global rule of Islam—sorry, but that is not of this era, is it? But if we do not develop alternatives to this, IS will only gain more and more ground.” Elforkani has received numerous death threats in the Netherlands for explicitly calling for theological reforms within Islam.

In the Islamic world, a number of clerics are publicly calling for theological reforms within Islam. The Sunni ‘Abd Al-Hamid al-Ansari is a former dean of Islamic law at Qatar University. Born in Doha in 1945, al-Ansari has defended liberal Muslims for years. Rejecting calls by Islamic preachers for young Muslims to love death, Ansari has said: “I would like the religious scholars, through their religious discourse, to make our youth love life, and not death.”
27
Al-Ansari has called for a fundamental overhaul of educational systems in the Islamic world to encourage critical thinking. He has called for Arab freethinkers to be able to sue inflammatory Islamic preachers for harm that befalls them as a result of their sermons.
28