http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4625_132/ai_98253299
The agony of a
21st-century Muslim
"Islam is a religion that
devours all that is most humane and open-minded." How has this
happened? Ziauddin Sardar on the delusion and intolerance of his
fellow believers. . - Books - book review
New Statesman, Feb 17, 2003 by Ziauddin Sardar
Islam Explained
Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Franklin
Philip The New Press, l20pp, [pounds sterling]9.95
The Prophet Muhammad: a bioqraphy
Barnaby Roqerson
Little, Brown, 240pp, [pounds sterling]14.99
"Believing Women" in Islam: unreading
patriarchal interpretations of the Koran
Asma Barlas
University of
Texas Press, 272pp, [pounds sterling]16.95 pbk
It
is not easy to be a Muslim. Believers like me live on the edge,
constantly having to just if your very existence. As the French
Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun. discovered, the situation
became infinitely worse after the events of 11 September 2001.
Having watched the spectacle unfold on television, his daughter
declared that she did not want to be a Muslim: "Muslims are bad;
they killed a lot of people." 'The loving father explained that
the attacks on America were the work of "fanatics" and "crazy
people". They did not represent Islam.
But
what is Islam, the children ask. So Ben Jelloun here sets out to
explain Islam to his children. "Once upon a time, very, very long
ago," he begins, "a little boy was born in Mecca." He traces the
life of the Prophet Muhammad, describing the tenets of Islam in a
simple, graceful style. Adults often assume that children are
incapable of grasping the complexity of life, an assumption that
has led Ben Jelloun to keep things simple. In doing so, he evades
the biggest problem of all, which is the self-delusion that we
Muslims have turned into a fine art - the reality that much of the
agony of being a Muslim in the 21st century is self-inflicted.
Ben
Jelloun's simplistic but compassionate interpretation of Islam is
far removed from the Islam of the Taliban or the Revolutionary
Guards in Iran. It is the Islam conventionally invoked by the
liberal defenders of the faith, who believe that, as Muslims, it
is their duty to present a more humane, tolerant Islam.
In
truth, while humane representations of Islam ease our conscience,
they do little to address the problems within Islam itself. The
problem with all varieties of Islam as it is practised today, not
as it is envisaged by liberals, is that it has lost its humanity.
Our religion has become a monster that devours all that is most
humane and open-minded. Instead of retreating to an imagined
liberal utopia, we Muslims need to ask some tough questions about
our faith. What, for example, makes so many pious Muslims such
nasty and intolerant individuals? Why is it that every time a
country enforces the shariah - the so-called Islamic law - it
retreats into medieval barbarity? Why do Muslims still insist on
treating women as though they were an inferior race, sent to earth
only to deprave and spread corruption?
Not
surprisingly, Ben Jelloun's children do not ask such questions.
And the answers will not bring much comfort for any kind of
Muslim, child or adult, liberal or otherwise.
It
is easy to dismiss the followers of all the non-liberal verities
of Islam as fanatics and fundamentalists. It is much harder and
much more painful to see them as a natural product of what
contemporary Islam has become. Their paranoia is located within
Islam. All Muslims, no matter how liberal they perceive themselves
to be, are in danger of becoming infected. For, at the very heart
of Islam, there are four category mistakes of catastrophic
proportions. (By which I mean, Muslims have elevated what is
clearly human to the category of the divine.) These have
transformed Islam into an authoritarian creed.
Ben
Jelloun alludes to the first without realising what he is saying.
"The Muslims owe their Prophet Muhammad, God's messenger, their
worship and love," he tells the little girl. In this unconscious
slip, Ben Jelloun reveals how Muslims perceive the Prophet. He
equates the Prophet with God, for in Islam only God can be
worshipped. The Koran insists, and the Prophet himself emphasised,
that Muhammad was only a man. What made him human was that he
could make mistakes and he was a product of his own time. But in
reality, Muslims have fetishised the Prophet so much that all his
human qualities have evaporated; his time and context have been
transformed into eternal time.
The
measure of piety for Muslims is thus how closely one imitates the
Prophet's physical appearance: his beard, his clothes, the way he
walked and brushed his teeth. Even the way the Prophet came to be
described - his human qualities, his character, his struggles to
shape a humane and lust society in his particular epoch - was
underplayed at the expense of superhuman attributes, such as his
victories in battles against tremendous odds. All biographies of
the Prophet, from the earliest, written by ibn Ishaq in the early
eighth century, to those produced today, follow a standard
formula.
The
story is told chronologically. We move from one battle to the next
until we reach the conquest of Mecca and the death of the Prophet
himself. But this is absurd; the battles of the Prophet occupied
less than a month of the 63 years of his life on earth. The two
most celebrated confrontations -. the Battles of Badr (624) and
Uhud (625)-were over with in a day. The other main conflict, the
Battle of Trenches, never took place . And apart from one minor
skirmish, no one fought during the conquest of Mecca. The Prophet
simply entered the city with a large army, declared a general
amnesty and forgave all his bitter enemies. Yet the standard
biographies of the Prophet contain little other than fighting and
conflict.
This is largely why Muslims cannot relate to the Prophet as a man
struggling to do the right thing in exceptionally difficult
circumstances. Instead, they relate to an abstract construction;
they aim to imitate an impossible person devoid of all human
attributes and virtues. In the words of the celebrated Muslim
philosopher and poet Mohammad Iqbal, they want to be "superman",
or a Momin, the technical term for the perfect Muslim. The quest
for this status, the absolute imitation of the Prophet in every
eighth-century detail, then becomes a pathological end in itself.
And all forms of violence and oppression are justified to achieve
the end in the name of the Prophet.
The
genius of the Prophet, as Barnaby Rogerson notes, was "to
transform his own religious experience, which was by its very
nature highly individual, and create from it something of
relevance to a whole society". It is the relevance of the
Prophet's example, the spirit, the ethics, the morality that
shaped his outlook and behaviour that Muslims have discarded in
favour of fetishising his personality and his times.
Rogerson aims to capture the spiritual and moral framework that
guided the actions of the Prophet. It is an indication of the
importance of his book that the Battles of Badr and Uhud are
hardly mentioned. Rogerson concentrates on the Prophet's
character, and the texture of the period in which he lived. We can
almost smell and feel the Arabia of the seventh century. The end
product is more than enchanting: it is a closer representation of
what Muslims really should be emulating.
The
second category mistake concerns the shariah. Ben Jelloun
tells his children that the shariah is not obligatory. The
liberals can ignore it. But Asma Barlas has no such illusions.
Women living in "Islamic states" do not have such luxuries. Most
Muslims consider the shariah to be divine. Yet as Barlas
shows, in reality there is hardly anything in the shariah
that is based on the Koran and hence can be taken as divine. The
Koran has remarkably few rules and regulations. Most of the Holy
Book is devoted to elaborating the attributes of God and the
virtues of reason. So where does the shariah come from?
The
bulk of the shariah consists of the legal opinion of
classical jurists. It was formulated in the Abbasid period, when
Muslim history was in its expansionist phase. It incorporates the
logic of Muslim imperialism of the eighth and ninth centuries.
Hence the black-and-white division of the world into "the abode of
Islam" and "the abode of war" - the ruling on apostasy which,
contrary to the unequivocal declaration of the Koran that "there
is no compulsion in religion", equates apostasy with treason
against the state. Or the dictate that says non-Muslims should be
humiliated and cannot give evidence in a Muslim court.
It
was largely men who formulated the shariah, says Barlas--good
men, but firmly rooted in their time. It is not surprising that
they were misogynistic. The shariah treats women and men
unequally, particularly when it comes to criminal justice. By
treating the testimony of women with what Barlas calls the
"two-for-one formula", the shariah promotes the
view--contrary to everything that the Koran teaches--that a woman
is only half a man.
Being a product of male perceptions, the shariah cannot
distinguish between adultery, fornication and rape. As a result,
victims of rape and sexual abuse can find themselves charged with
a crime and sentenced to being stoned to death--an aberrant law,
because the Koran does not sanction stoning to death for any crime
whatsoever. Even though the Koran gives women's testimonies
privilege over men's in the case of sexual offences, the
shariah chooses to ignore them.
What this means in reality is that when Muslim countries apply or
impose the shariah--the demand of Muslims from Algeria
through Pakistan to Nigeria--the contradictions that were inherent
in the formulation and evolution of this jurisprudence come to the
fore. The shariah's obsession with extreme punishment
generates extreme societies. That is why, wherever the shariah
is imposed, Muslim societies acquire a medieval feel. We can see
that in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
But this is what even the moderate elements of the Islamic
movement want. The alliance of Islamic parties that took over
Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province recently may describe
itself as "modernist", but it is still ready to lock up women,
flog thieves and stone adulterers in the name of divine justice.
The
reason Muslims are so reluctant to reform the shariah,
Barlas tells us in her brave and penetrating book, is that it
underwrites male privilege. But it does something more: it keeps
the interpretation of Islam firmly in the hands of a select group
of bearded obscurantists. The Koran declares unequivocally that no
one has any special privilege of interpretation. As a book of
guidance, it is open to all. But Muslims have created a whole
elite class of individuals who are the only ones with the right to
interpret the Koran.
In
Shia Iran, they go under the obnoxious rubric of "clergy"; in the
other, Sunni Muslim communities, they use the term "ulama", or
religious scholars. The repulsive notion that only the ulama and
the clergy can interpret the Koran is the third category mistake.
The
individual Muslim is thus denied agency. If the shariah is
a given, and only a select few can reinterpret the Koran, then
most believers have nothing to do except follow what we are told.
Believers thus become passive receivers rather than active seekers
of truth: that is why they can tolerate such injustice and
inhumanity while imagining they are carving some piece of paradise
for themselves.
Even the liberals have to defer to the superior knowledge of the
guardians of the faith for explanation of this or that verse of
the Koran. The pressing ethical questions of contemporary science
on issues such as human cloning and genetic engineering can be
addressed only by the ulama, who, by and large, know
nothing of science or contemporary society. Oppressed women have
to turn to their religious oppressors for justice. The
authoritarianism that has become so intrinsic to Islam is
reflected in Muslim societies themselves. How can Muslims
introduce democracy to their societies when there is no democracy
within their religion?
And
so, to the final category mistake. Everything about Islam, we
Muslims believe, is eternal. Everything that the Prophet did is
eternal. The shariah is eternal. The right of the ulama
to reinterpret the Koran is eternal. Indeed, Islam itself is
eternal. Thus, all human problems have been solved for all time.
The most common slogan among Muslims of all varieties, in every
part of the world, is that "Islam has all the answers". This from
a people who have forgotten how to ask questions!
What remains constant in Islam is the text of the Koran itself,
its concepts providing the ethical anchor for ever-changing
interpretations. Everything else is subject to change, including
the reinterpretations of the Koran and life of the Prophet
Muhammad. As far as the shariah is concerned, it neither
works as law nor contains much that any sensible person can
recognise as ethics. If the original formulators of the shariah
were to visit the 21st century, they would be appalled at the
injustices their opinions are propagating.
Islam cannot survive as a static faith, buried in history. It was
always meant to be a dynamic world-view, adjusting to change. In
reality, the shariah is nothing more than a set of
principles, a framework of values that provide Muslim societies
with guidance. But these sets of principles and values are not
givens; they are vigorously derived from within changing contexts.
As such, the shariah is a problem-solving methodology
rather than law. It requires individual believers and societies to
exert themselves and to reinterpret the Koran and the life of the
Prophet Muhammad.
If
Ben Jelloun was really interested in explaining Islam to his
children, he would have addressed the problems intrinsic to how
Muslims perceive their faith. For it is his children, and mine,
who will inherit the inhumanity of so much that goes under the
rubric of Islam today.
Islam, Postmoderism and Other Futures:
a Ziauddin Sardar reader, edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail
Boxwell, will be published on 15 March (Pluto Press, [pounds
sterling]14.99)
COPYRIGHT 2003 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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