Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (37 page)

Converts to Islam don’t face such treatment in the Western world, because the West has embraced freedom of religion, which includes freedom from their own religion as well. Muslims need to do the same.

R
EVISITING
B
LASPHEMY

If one aspect of freedom from Islam is the right to apostatize from it, another is the right to criticize it. And this “criticism,” sorry to say, can sometimes come in the form of satire, mockery, and even insult.

Insult, of course, is never acceptable. When a non-Muslim curses God, the Qur’an, the Prophet, or any other sacred value of Islam, he is, at the very least, being disrespectful. Muslims would be considered disrespectful, too, if they insulted other people’s faiths. “Do not curse those they call upon besides God,” the Qur’an warns them, “in case that makes them curse God in animosity, without knowledge.”
²⁵

If we were living in an ideal world, everyone would listen to this fair advice and respect each other’s religion. In real life, however, people do satirize, mock, and insult each other’s religion, including ours. Moreover, what other people put forward as a fair criticism sometimes might sound offensive, simply because of the differences between perspectives and cultures. What, then, should Muslims do?

This matter has grown testy in the past few decades, as some Muslims’ reactions to real or perceived insults to Islam have made global headlines. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death
fatwa
on author Salman Rushdie for his contentious novel,
The Satanic Verses.
In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a militant Muslim who was offended by van Gogh’s film
Submission
. A year later,
Jyllands-Posten
, a Danish newspaper, published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist, sparking attacks on Danish embassies and death threats to the newspaper and its cartoonists.

In all these cases, the Muslims who reacted with anger and violence probably were sincere in their zeal to defend their faith. Yet, alas, the practical result of their actions was to vindicate the very accusation brought against them—that Islam is an intolerant and aggressive religion. So, if they really want to change that negative perception about their religion, they must begin by changing their course of action.

But, common sense aside, one needs to accept that those Muslims who react violently against perceived offenses are not devoid of religious justification. Traditional schools of the Shariah have a concept called
kufr
(blasphemy), which is considered a crime punishable by death. It is to this concept to which angry Muslims who want to “behead those who insult Islam” refer.
²⁶

To put matters in perspective, one should recall that other Abrahamic traditions also used to follow the same concept. The Torah clearly states that those who speak blasphemy “shall surely be put to death.”
²⁷
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that blasphemy, “a sin committed directly against God, is more grave than murder.”
²⁸
Yet, in modern times, both Judaism and Christianity have abandoned earthly punishment for blasphemy, whereas Islam, as with some other aspects of the Shariah that we have examined, has remained largely unchanged.

Of course, adapting to the modern world simply because it is modern would not make sense to a Muslim—or to anyone else who believes in a moral law unbound by the fluctuations of time. But the same believer does not have to insist on preserving the elements of his tradition that are historical rather than divinely mandated.

In the case of Islam, these two separate categories roughly correspond to, as we have seen, the Qur’an and the post-Qur’anic tradition. All elements of the latter are somehow “manmade.” And, tellingly enough, on the issue of blasphemy, as with the matter of apostasy, the Qur’an is surprisingly lenient. Its verses threaten blasphemers with God’s punishment in the hereafter but do not impose on them any earthly punishment.

As with apostasy, the punishment for blasphemy comes from certain narratives in the Hadith literature and the way they were interpreted by classical scholars. These narratives are about certain individuals, mostly satirical poets, who mocked the Prophet Muhammad during his mission and claimed that the Qur’an was a fraud. Some of them, the narratives go, were executed by the nascent Muslim community for being “enemies of God and the Prophet.” But besides the fact that the very accuracy of these historical accounts can be challenged, they can also be regarded as limited by their specific context. As Muslim scholar Mohammad Kamali shows, the executions of the satirists were political, rather than religious, events. At a time when the early Muslim community was battling for survival with hostile pagans, mockery had become a part of war propaganda.
²⁹
But “blasphemy today can in no sense threaten the existence or continuity of Islam as a great religion, a legal system and a major civilisation.”
³⁰

J
UST
“D
O
N
OT
S
IT WITH
T
HEM
. . .”

Beyond the Hadith literature, a response to blasphemy that is more compatible with the liberal standards of the modern world actually comes from the Qur’an. The Muslim scripture not only lacks any suggestion of earthly punishment for blasphemy, it also advises a nonviolent response: “When you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.”
³¹

What is described here is a clearly peaceful form of disapproval: Muslims are not supposed to be part of a discourse that mocks Islam, but all they have to do is stay away from it. Even then, the withdrawal should last only until the discourse changes into something inoffensive. Once mockery ends, dialogue can restart. (We should note that this verse is from a chapter of the Qur’an that was revealed in the “Medinan” phase. In other words, it reflects a time when Muslims had political and military power. So its nonviolent character can’t be explained, and explained away, as resulting from necessity.)

A few other Qur’anic verses, too, order similar acts of nonviolent disapproval in the face of blasphemous talk. “When you see those who enter into false discourses about Our communications,” one of them commands the Prophet, “withdraw from them until they enter into some other discourse.”
³²
Another verse describes Muslims as quite nonconfrontational: “When they hear idle talk they turn aside from it and say: We shall have our deeds and you shall have your deeds; peace be on you, we do not desire the ignorant.”
³³

I believe that the Muslim response to blasphemy in the modern world should be based on the spirit of these verses. For example, Muslims can boycott anti-Islamic rhetoric by refusing to join conversations, buy publications, or watch films and plays that mock the values of their faith. They can also organize peaceful protests. All of that is right, but trying to silence the anti-Islamic rhetoric with threats and attacks is not.

Meanwhile, the Muslims who are willing to resort to violence in the face of mockery should reflect on the source of their motivation: a genuinely religious commitment or a nationalistic zeal? The latter option comes to mind because of a curious pattern. In the modern era, the Muslim response to mockery has been most zealous when the subject is the Prophet Muhammad, rather than other prophets and, most strangely, God. According to the Qur’an, though, Muslims should “believe in God and His messengers, and make no distinction between any of the messengers.”
³⁴
Therefore, they should stand up for Abraham, Moses, or Jesus Christ as passionately as they do for the Prophet Muhammad. And, to be sure, they should stand up most passionately for none other than God Most High.

I suspect that the selective attention to the Prophet Muhammad comes from the fact that he is revered only by Muslims, which makes him an exclusive symbol of the Muslim community. In other words, the offense to the Prophet Muhammad comes off as an offense to the Muslims’ own selves. A reaction to such a personal offense certainly is an understandable human phenomenon, but it is a secular phenomenon, not a religious one—and one that has the tendency to go to extremes, especially in the Orient. The secular Turkish Republic, for example, used to have laws banning “insulting Turkishness,” and the courts prosecuted intellectuals—such as the novelist Orhan Pamuk—for offending the honor of the nation simply by making critical remarks about its history.
³⁵
Some ultra-nationalists in Turkey have even assassinated liberal critics for the same “crime.”
³⁶
All this nationalist zeal looks quite similar to that of the Muslim militants who attack those who offend the Prophet. Their motivation, one might say, is just another form of nationalism—the nation being the
umma
.

On the other hand, more theologically minded Muslims have reacted to insults to other sacred figures as well, and they have done this peacefully. When a blasphemous picture of the Virgin Mary was painted in Adelaide, Australia, in 2007, a representative of Muslim communities voiced a protest, with restraint and civility, receiving praise in Turkey from none other than Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
³⁷

Besides all that, those Muslims who are prone to react with fury to criticism or mockery should also see that this only helps portray them as immature and insecure. If all they can do in the face of an antagonistic book, film, or cartoon is to destroy it by brute force, then what they really display is a lack of self-confidence. They will serve Islam much better if their response is solemn and sensible. The power of any faith, after all, comes not from its coercion on critics and dissenters but from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers.

W
ILL
I
SLAM
C
ONQUER THE
W
ORLD
?

Finally, we should rethink what the ultimate goal, and the destiny, of the
umma
should be on this earth.

The answer given by the Islamist movement is often a triumphalist one: Islam will simply conquer the whole world; sooner or later, the whole world will be Muslim.

Yet this ambitious rhetoric might be reflecting the ambitions of the people who happen to be Muslims, rather than the intentions of the Divine. The Qur’an, in fact, clearly states that the whole world will
not
be Muslim. “What has been sent down to you from your Lord is the Truth,” a verse tells the Prophet, “but most people have no faith.”
³⁸
Another verse refers not to the lack of faith but to the variety of faiths, explaining that this diversity is exactly what God desired for mankind:

And We have sent down the Book [the Qur’an] to you with truth, confirming and conserving the previous Books. . . . We have appointed a law and a practice for every one of you. Had God willed, He would have made you a single community, but He wanted to test you regarding what has come to you. So compete with each other in doing good. Every one of you will return to God and He will inform you regarding the things about which you differed.
³⁹

This striking Qu’ranic passage clearly describes a world in which Islam is one religion among others, not the only one.
⁴⁰
The differences between them will be reconciled only in the afterlife. Meanwhile, people of different faiths—Muslims, Christians, Jews, and all others—are expected to “compete with each other in doing good.”

To be able to realize this pluralist vision, what we would need is a world in which all faiths could freely express and advance themselves.

Granted, such a pluralist world sounds different from the ideal of the medieval Muslim scholars—the Abode of Islam. This term, as we saw in chapter 4, referred to lands ruled by Muslims and governed according to the Shariah. Only such places then looked safe for practicing Islam. The rest of the world was either hostile (Abode of War—i.e., lands ruled by non-Muslims) or only conditionally safe (Abode of Treaty—i.e., lands ruled by non-Muslims who made treaties with a Muslim state).

Yet none of these medieval categories can explain the modern world. Today, in fact, some Muslims seem to find it easier to live by their religion in the non-Muslim countries of the West, which grant more safety and freedom than some of the Muslim-majority countries with dictatorial regimes.