Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (8 page)

Moreover, Islam is now a global religion with what might even be called a global diaspora. As a result of postwar migrations, there are more than 20 million Muslims living in Western Europe and North America. These Muslims are, as we have seen, confronting the daily challenge of existing in the modern secular West while still remaining Muslim. In short, there is a rapidly growing potential audience for ideas about a new direction for Islam.

Finally, just as in sixteenth-century Europe, there is now a political constituency for religious reform in key states of the Muslim world. On New Year’s Day 2015, to mark the approaching birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, gave an astonishing speech at Al-Azhar University itself, in which he called for nothing less than a “religious revolution”:

Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible!

I am saying these words here at Al-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.

All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

I say and repeat again that
we are in need of a religious revolution
. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move . . . because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.
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El-Sisi is by no means the only Muslim leader who sees the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk as posing a fundamental threat to his country’s political stability and economic development. Similar encouragement of religious reform is being given by the government of the United Arab Emirates.

It is, of course, conventional to argue that el-Sisi’s election as president was a symptom of the failure of the Arab Spring. But that is to misunderstand the process unleashed by the revolutions that began in Tunisia in late 2010. The revolutions there, as well as in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, were directed against corrupt dictators; they were then hijacked by Medina Muslims such as the Muslim Brotherhood, whom the dictators had long held in check. When that became clear to Egyptians—especially city-dwellers—they took to the streets once again to oust the Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi.

As a challenge to authority—as a revolution against dictators who had once seemed immovable and all-powerful—the Arab Spring was actually a success. It showed that the mighty could be challenged. When another form of authority—religious authority—sought to exploit the opening, there was a second revolution, at least in Egypt (and civil wars in other countries). Eventually, I believe, refusal to submit to the authority of secular rulers will be followed by a more general refusal to submit to the authority of the imam, the mullah, the ayatollah, the ulema.

The ferment we see in the Muslim world today is not solely due to despotic political systems. It is not solely due to failing economies and the poverty they breed.
Rather, it is due to Islam itself and the incompatibility of certain key facets of the Muslim faith with modernity
. That is why the most important conflict in the world today is between those who will defend to the death those incompatibilities and those who are prepared to challenge them—not to overthrow Islam, but to
reform
it.

The initial work of challenging authority has already begun—tragically exemplified by the note written by the son of the newly elected Iranian president shortly before his suicide in 1992: “I hate your government, your lies, your corruption, your religion, your double acts and your hypocrisy.”
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Yet a Reformation cannot be achieved by suicide notes. Like Luther’s Reformation, it needs theses: calls for action.

Five Theses

What does one do with a timeworn but historically valuable house? One approach is simply to knock it over and build a new house in its stead. This is not going to happen with Islam, or any other established religion. A second approach is to preserve the place exactly as it was when first built, unstable and in danger of total collapse though it is. This is essentially the thing that groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, and IS agree on: a restoration of the seventh-century original.

The third choice is to keep as much as possible of the historic details, make the outside look a lot like the original, but change the house radically from the inside, equipping it with the latest amenities. That is the kind of Reformation or Modification I favor. Extending the metaphor, another term for what I have in mind might be an Islamic Renovation.

I am no Luther. Nor do I have ninety-five theses to nail upon a door. In fact, I have only five. They refer to the five basic tenets of the Islamic faith that those who preach jihad and destruction use with such lethal success. Amending them will, I know, be exceedingly difficult. But for Islam to coexist with modernity, for Islamic states to coexist with other nations on our ever-shrinking planet, and especially for tens of millions of believing Muslims to flourish in Western societies, these five concepts must be amended. Reason and conscience demand it. These changes, I believe, can be the basis of a true Islamic Reformation, one that progresses to the twenty-first century rather than regresses to the seventh.

Some of these changes may strike readers as too fundamental to Islamic belief to be feasible. But like the partition walls or superfluous stairways that a successful renovation removes, they can in fact be modified without causing the entire structure to collapse. Indeed, I believe these modifications will actually strengthen Islam by making it easier for Muslims to live in harmony with the modern world. It is those hell-bent on restoring it to its original state who are much more likely to lead Islam to destruction. Here again are my five theses, nailed to a virtual door:

1.
Ensure that Muhammad and the Qur’an are open to interpretation and criticism.

2.
Give priority to this life, not the afterlife.

3.
Shackle sharia and end its supremacy over secular law.

4.
End the practice of “commanding right, forbidding wrong.”

5.
Abandon the call to jihad.

In the chapters that follow, I will explore the source of the ideas and doctrines in question and evaluate the prospects for reforming them. For now, we may simply note that they are closely interrelated. The main problem for us is obviously the promotion of jihad. But the appeal of holy war cannot be understood without factoring in the prestige of the Prophet himself as a model for Muslim behavior, the insistence on a literal reading of the Qur’an and the attendant rejection of critical thinking, the primacy of the afterlife in Muslim theology, the power of religious law, and the license bestowed on individual Muslims to enforce its codes and disciplines. These issues overlap to the extent that they are sometimes hard to separate. But all must be addressed.

As readers of my previous books will realize, this represents a new approach. When I wrote my last book,
Nomad
, I believed that Islam was beyond reform, that perhaps the best thing for religious believers in Islam to do was to pick another god. I was certain of it, not unlike the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, who wrote in 1987 of his absolute certainty that the Berlin Wall would endure. Two years later, the Wall fell. Seven months after I published
Nomad
came the start of the Arab Spring. I watched four national governments fall—Egypt’s twice—and protests or uprisings occur in fourteen other nations, and I thought simply: I was wrong. Ordinary Muslims
are
ready for change.

The path forward will be hard, even bloody. But unlike previous waves of reform that foundered on the monolith of religious and political power, today it is possible to find a fellowship of people who desire a separation of religion from politics in the Muslim world.

I am not a cleric. I have no weekly congregation. I simply lecture, read, write, think, and teach a small seminar at Harvard. Those who might object that I am not a trained theologian or historian of Islam are correct. But it is not my purpose singlehandedly to engage the Muslim world in a theological debate. Rather, it is my purpose to encourage Muslim reformers and dissidents to confront obstacles to reform—and to encourage the rest of us to support them in whatever way we can.

For me there can be no going back. It is too late to return to the faith of my parents and grandparents. But it is not too late for millions of others to reconcile their Islamic faith with the twenty-first century.

Nor is my dream of a Muslim Reformation a matter for Muslims alone. People of all faiths, or of no faith, have a great interest in a changed Islam: a faith that is more respectful of the basic doctrines of human rights, that universally preaches less violence and more tolerance, that promotes less corrupt and less chaotic governments, that allows for more doubt and more dissent, that encourages more education, more freedom, and more equality before a modern system of law.

I see no other way forward for us—at least no other way that is not strewn with corpses. Islam and modernity must be reconciled. And that can happen only if Islam itself is modernized. Call it a Muslim Renovation if you prefer. But whatever label you choose, take these five amendments as the starting point for an honest debate about Islam. It is a debate that must begin with a reconsideration of the Prophet and his book as infallible sources of guidance for life in this world.

A
key problem for Islam today can be summarized in three simplifying sentences: Christians worship a man made divine. Jews worship a book. And Muslims worship both.

Christians believe in the divinity of Jesus while also stating that the Christian Bible was written by men. Jews believe in the sanctity of the Torah, which they kiss and treat with reverence during their services; but they traditionally ascribe its authorship to Moses, a prophet who, like other Hebrew prophets, is presented as human and fallible. However, Muslims believe in both the superhuman perfection of Muhammad and the literal truth and sanctity of the Qur’an as the direct revelation of God. Indeed, while even Orthodox Jewish rabbis argue that it is impossible to defile the Torah, Muslims believe the opposite—so much so that the charge of disrespecting Muhammad or the Qur’an is enough to incite violent protests, riots, and, frequently, death.

For example, erroneous charges in 2005 that U.S. guards had flushed a Qur’an down the toilet in the Guantánamo Bay detention center resulted in violent riots in many Muslim nations. Seventeen people died in Afghanistan in the ensuing rage and frenzy. More recently, in November 2014, a Christian man and his wife living in Lahore, Pakistan, were beaten and burned alive in a brick kiln after they were accused of burning pages of the Qur’an. (The couple protested their innocence.) Likewise, a series of twelve satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet, which were published in the Danish newspaper 
Jyllands-Posten
 in September 2005, triggered a paroxysm of outrage across the Muslim world that resulted in more than two hundred reported deaths as well as attacks on Western embassies.

These episodes reflect a key distinction between the West and the Muslim world. While an irreverent approach to religious figures and beliefs is tolerated and even encouraged in Western societies, Muslims regard any “insult” to the Prophet or the Qur’an as deserving the ultimate penalty. And this is not an extreme position. As I mentioned earlier, as a teenager I myself unthinkingly agreed that Salman Rushdie deserved to die for writing a novel that very few people in the Muslim world, myself included, had read.

To understand the roots of the problem, and why I believe that it is not in fact insoluble, we need to reexamine Islam’s two most sacred elements: its Prophet, and its holy book. Muslims need to understand Muhammad as a real man, in the context of his times, and the Qur’an as a historically constructed text, not as a divine instruction manual for life today.

Who Was Muhammad?

He is the greatest lawgiver of all time. The revelations he received, along with the facts of his life, form the foundation of a legal code that governs hundreds of millions of people. Yet scholars cannot agree on which year or on which date he was born. The most commonly accepted time is 570 years after the birth of Jesus Christ. His father died before he arrived in the world; by the age of six he had become an orphan. An uncle raised him. He met his first wife when she hired him to act as her commercial agent on a trading mission to Syria. A servant informed her that two angels had watched over the young agent as he slept, and that he had rested under a tree that was known to offer shade only “to prophets.”

The young agent was twenty-five, his employer was forty. It was his first marriage and her third, and she initiated the wedding proposal. It would be another fifteen years before the words that would eventually become the Qur’an were first revealed to him. His wife, Khadija, was his first convert.

Over the next twenty-two years, the man known as Muhammad would establish the world’s last great religion, create an intertwined religious, political, and legal order, and plant the seeds of an empire that would stretch from the Asian steppes to northern Africa and up through the Iberian peninsula. Today, more than a billion people profess their faith by saying the Shahada—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger.” In nearly fourteen hundred years, that message has remained unchanged.

What made this message revolutionary was not simply the belief in one God, as opposed to the worship of many. This was hardly original, and indeed Muhammad presented his religion as the extension and fulfillment of the monotheistic revelations of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. What made Islam revolutionary was its vast scope, extending well beyond theology. Islam, as Muhammad devised it, is not simply a religion or a system of worship. It is, as the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner has put it, “the blueprint of a social order.”
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In its very name, “Islam” means submission. You subsume yourself to an entire system of beliefs. The rules as set down are precise and exacting.

Islam became so multifaceted and all-encompassing in part because Muhammad and Islam were a prophet and a faith for their place and time. Muhammad is usually understood in his familiar roles as warrior and prophet. But it is in some ways more revealing and interesting to view him in another role—that of a tribal leader. Muhammad’s achievement in this capacity was to create a new religiously based community out of the loosely organized elements of tribal Arab society. In short, he was as much the founder of a “supertribe” as a religious and military figure.

There is general agreement that Muhammad existed, though little is known for certain of his life. But while we cannot verify the facts of his biography, what can be surmised is that he was a product of the kin-based social order that then prevailed throughout the Middle East.

Before Islam, there was kinship. Families, clans, and tribes are the basis of organization in all pre-state societies. The basic social unit is the lineage, a group of families united by their descent from a common ancestor. Each family is part of a lineage; many lineages make up a clan; many clans make up a tribe. All in turn are thought to be descended from a single (mythological or semidivine) founder.

But while they are united by the fiction of common descent, these kin groups are decentralized and fractious, frequently riven by feuds that can go on for generations. Strong leadership is needed to unite them if they are not to degenerate (as they did in the West) into mere shared names with next to no bonds of mutual allegiance. This was the case in Muhammad’s time. It was still the case fourteen hundred years later when T. E. Lawrence united the Bedouin tribes against the Turks in World War I. It was also true of my own native Somali environment.

In this world of shifting interests and allegiances, tribal leaders arise through personal qualities of strength, cunning, and innate magnetism. The tribal leader plays many roles: he is lawgiver and judge, businessman, war chief, and head of the tribe’s religious cult. He is also a source of patronage and distributes the bounty of commerce and war. Honor and personal loyalty (often reinforced by strategic marriages) are the primary bonds that support the tribal leader and hold the system together. Based on what we know of him from Islamic sources, Muhammad fulfilled all these roles. He transcended tribal disorder by claiming the leadership position for himself alone and demanding complete submission.

We are told that Muhammad was born a member of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh, a powerful mercantile tribe that controlled the Arabian trade routes through Mecca. The Quraysh were a typical corporate kin group: subdivided into many clans, the tribe was itself a subdivision of the larger Banu Kinanah tribe. All these clans and tribes were loosely united by their supposed descent from the mythical wanderer Ishmael. This gave them a remote connection to the Jewish descendants of Abraham. It is therefore not an accident that the new Islamic “supertribe” incorporated Abraham and Jesus into its lineage.

The Quraysh rose to prominence when a tribal leader named Qusai ibn Kilab obtained control of the Kaaba, an ancient pagan shrine that attracted numerous pilgrims. This was a lucrative franchise and Qusai ibn Kilab placed family members in control of it, distributing responsibilities (and profits) among the clans of his tribe. Their rivalries continued, however, apparently growing more intense during Muhammad’s lifetime.

Muhammad was a religious revolutionary who introduced Abrahamic monotheism into a polytheistic culture. Arabs at that time believed in a supreme deity but also in various lesser gods or tribal deities. Mecca was the center of this polytheistic system. Muhammad’s revelation attracted many followers but also drew opposition from powerful clan leaders, whose authority (and income) relied on control of the pilgrimage trade.

In Mecca, Muhammad preached what in today’s terms was a religion: prayer to one God, charitable contributions, and the like. The rejection of his message by the polytheists is etched into Islam as a period of persecution of Muslims. To this day, followers of Muhammad’s example who encounter the slightest resistance to their preaching speak of persecution.

In 622, these rivals drove Muhammad and his small Muslim community out of Mecca. Muhammad fled to Medina, where he built up his power base through alliances with larger tribes such as the Bakr and Khuza’a. Strategic marriages strengthened his ties with these clans; he himself married the daughters of Abu Bakr and Umar, while Uthman and Ali (Muhammad’s cousin) married his daughters. Thus he had family ties with the first four caliphs who succeeded him after his death. During this time Muhammad also promulgated a comprehensive system of moral and political rules, known as the Constitution of Medina, which served to unite the tribes in a community of faith and practice. It was at this point that many tribal practices became an integral part of what evolved to become sharia.

Eight years later, having assembled a large army (known as the Prophet’s Companions), Muhammad marched on the Quraysh, who are said to have surrendered without a fight. He then returned to Mecca, married the daughter of the head of the Quraysh, and proceeded to incorporate the other tribes of the Arabian Peninsula into the new Islamic community.

After Muhammad died in 632, a series of lightning conquests by his successors extended Muslim control over an enormous territory—one of the largest empires the world had ever seen. These conquests were extremely brutal and the conquered populations were given a stark choice: convert, die, or (if they were Jews or Christians) accept second-class status as taxpaying
dhimmi
. Most chose conversion and were incorporated wholesale into the growing Muslim supertribe or
ummah
. Yet in many ways the social psychology of Islam remained that of a persecuted tribe, with a powerful “insider/outsider” mentality.

During Muhammad’s lifetime, tribal and nationalistic differences within the Islamic community were strongly discouraged. After his death, however, clan rivalries reemerged to shape dynastic struggles in the Caliphate. The Quraysh claimed control and supplied the first three ruling dynasties: the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid. The Sunni/Shia split was originally a war of succession between two rival lineages—unlike the schisms of Christianity, as we have already noted, it was initially not theological in nature. The passions aroused by this ancient tribal blood feud still divide the Muslim world today.

Medina welcomed Muhammad in part because the local tribal leaders believed their feuding residents might be able to unite around his teachings. Islam would defuse the discord within the city and become a rallying cry against enemies outside. Thus, from the start, Muhammad entered Medina charged not just with spreading his religious message, but also with creating a political order.

The other monotheistic religions were different. The Torah was recorded long after the kingdom of Israel had fallen into ruins. Christian doctrine evolved over centuries, always in the context of a preexisting Roman Empire, one of the strongest polities of the entire premodern period. In Islam, by contrast, the Qur’an was revealed in tandem with its rise and early conquests. In fact, Muhammad’s empire began to take shape before all of the verses were compiled in one book. Thus, for Islam, faith and power were from the outset intertwined—indeed inseparable.

Muhammad himself differed in a crucial way from Abraham and Jesus. He was not only a prophet but also a conqueror. He is said to have personally led numerous military campaigns and raiding expeditions. Sahih Muslim, one of the six major authoritative hadith collections, claims he undertook no fewer than nineteen military expeditions, personally fighting in eight of them.
2
Nor did he hesitate to mete out violent reprisals or to enjoy the spoils of war. In the aftermath of the 627 Battle of the Trench, for example, “Muhammad felt free to deal harshly with the Banu Qurayza, executing their men and selling their women and children into slavery.”
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In this way the Prophet became a conquering chieftain. Thus the Qur’an declares, “O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers;
and those whom thy right hand possesses [slaves] out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee
” (33:50).
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(It is, of course, passages such as these that groups like Islamic State or Boko Haram use to justify their actions.)

From a Muslim Reformer’s perspective, one of the main problems with Islam is that the tribal military and patriarchal values of its origins were enshrined as spiritual values, to be emulated in perpetuity. The Qur’an emphasizes that all Muslims form one community of believers, the
ummah
(2:143). Although this community superseded prior tribal allegiances, the new religion retained many traditional tribal customs and enshrined them as religious values. These values pertain especially to honor, male guardianship of women, harshness in war, and the death penalty for leaving Islam. As Philip Salzman explains, “Seventh-century Arab tribal culture influenced Islam and its adherents’ attitudes toward non-Muslims. Today, the embodiment of Arab culture and tribalism within Islam impacts everything from family relations, to governance, to conflict.”
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