Islam: The Triumph of the Fundamentalist
By Emran QureshiThe Globe and Mail, Saturday, July 16, 2005
No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
By Reza Aslan
Random House, 310 pages, $35.95
Faith at War:A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu
By Yarsolav Trofimov
Henry Holt, 312 pages, $36.95
In recent years, a vast cottage industry of books on Islam -- some good, some bad, some ugly -- has emerged. A search on amazon.ca reveals more than 600 such titles published this year alone. Two of the most thought-provoking recent arrivals are by Reza Aslan and Yaroslav Trofimov. Aslan is a young Iranian-born American writer with a deft pen; he surveys the origins, evolution and future of Islam in No God but God. In Faith at War, Trofimov, a Wall Street Journal reporter, goes looking for jihadis and finds plenty of them wherever he treks.
Aslan begins his story in pre-Islamic Arabia with the rise of the Prophet Mohammed in the seventh century, retelling his life, his message and how the nascent community of Muslims (those who submit to God) came into being and endured against the existing tribal order. It is this formative period, that of the Prophet and the first three generations, that later Muslims felt they had to emulate.
Thus, both Muslim liberal modernists and fundamentalists turn to this period in order to find justification for their interpretations of Islam. Islamic fundamentalists for the most part wish to return to a more pure, restrictive and in many respects imaginary past; liberal and modernist Muslims seek a reformed Islam legitimated by scriptural roots but freed of the dead hand of ossified traditionalism.
As Aslan points out, the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia puts forth a stripped-down, puritanical and supremacist interpretation of Islam, which its followers call Salafism. The essence of this Wahhabi Salafi version of Islam is that all Muslims are obliged to follow the Wahhabis' own literalist interpretation, while all other practices are to be shunned as unlawful "innovations." Wahhabis are not conservative Muslims, but true radicals. They reject out of hand 1,000 years of Islamic thought and customs (such as speculative theology, or traditional celebrations of the Prophet's birthday) as heretical innovations. Wahhabis do not consider Sufis or Shiites to be "real" Muslims, but apostates whose blood can be shed with impunity.
Writing on Islam and gender, Aslan offers some fascinating insights: For 15 centuries, religious authority was the domain of Muslim men who interpreted scripture. Now Muslim women are challenging this male hegemony by applying a feminist reading based on a strong ethos of social egalitarianism within early Islam. He notes that these egalitarian tendencies were rolled back by the Prophet's successor, the Caliph Umar, whom he labels a misogynist who wished to confine women to the home, preventing them from attending mosque prayers.
According to Aslan, it was Umar who instituted gender-segregated prayers and forbade the Prophet's widows from pilgrimage rites. This despite the fact that the Prophet's wife Aisha had lectured in a mosque and compiled his sayings, and that early Muslim women participated as religious and community leaders. Women and men prayed side by side during the lifetime of the Prophet. Furthermore, veiling was only applied to the Prophet's wives, and is nowhere in the Koran applied generally to women. One can only marvel at what has since transpired; Islam as practised today in many Muslim countries hews to either a misogynist or heavily patriarchal interpretation.
Muslim fundamentalists place a great ideological distance between Islam and other monotheistic religions. But Aslan states unequivocally that Islam and the Koran emphasize the connectedness of Islam to Christianity and especially to Judaism: "We believe in God, and in that which has been revealed to us, which is that which was revealed to Abraham and Ismail and Jacob and the tribes [of Israel], as well as that which the Lord Revealed to Moses and to Jesus and to all the other Prophets. We make no distinction between any of them: We submit ourselves to God" (Koran, 3:84).
To be sure, there are theological differences, but Aslan emphasizes that Christians and Jews are "people of the book." In an illuminating footnote to Islamic history, Aslan points out that early Muslims, unlike modern fundamentalists, read the Torah alongside the Koran.
How does one reconcile what Aslan suggests is a pluralist Koranic outlook with the narrow views that now dominate Islam? Part of the problem is that the most widely read commentaries on the Koran are written by latter-day fundamentalists. Among the most popular are those by the Egyptian Sayyad Qutb (his works were translated into Persian by Ayatollah Khomeini and into a multitude of other languages) and the Pakistani Abu'l-Ala Mawdudi. Their popularity is due to their accessible, intellectually undemanding style; unlike medieval commentaries, they are easy to read. Mawdudi and Qutb present an apocalyptic analysis of the Koran, one that is at war with the Infidels. For instance, Qutb refers to the "wicked ambitions of international crusading forces and world Zionism concerning the Holy Lands."
Aslan also explores Sufism, Islam's extremely popular mystical current, and provides moving tales from a rich Sufi literary and poetic tradition. In a chapter entitled Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine, he retells the love story of Layla and Majnun, two lovers united after death. Eric Clapton's classic song Layla was directly inspired by it. One consequence of fundamentalism and an increasingly polarized world is that this pluralistic, humane face of Islamic civilization is now endangered.
Yaroslav Trofimov has written a political travelogue in which he attempts to explain the violence erupting in the Muslim world. He begins with a trip to the Ground Zero of Islamic fundamentalism, Saudi Arabia, where he meets with members of the al-Sheikh family, who trace their descent from the 18th-century religious leader Muhammad Ibn Abdel Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect that controls religion, education and daily life in the Saudi kingdom.
He meets Justice Minister Abdullah Muhammad al-Sheikh. who explains that democracy or political debate is un-Islamic, as is religious freedom. The minister says, "The duty of the kingdom is to spread real Islam -- not by fire, not by money -- but first of all by setting an example as a country that strictly adheres to the Sunna and the Quran." As part of his outreach, he explains that Saudi Arabia is a tolerant and benevolent society. He cites a legal precedent that Saudis convicted of murder while committing robbery should be crucified. This, he muses, is cruel, so the solution is first to kill the malefactor and then crucify him.
Another al-Sheikh, a professor in Mecca, explains that Saudi strictures against women driving have nothing to do with Islam, but rather with Bedouin tribal customs. He heeds the ban, but still has his wife learn how to handle a steering wheel in case of an accident. One consequence of these taboos is that thousands of foreign men are imported to ferry around Saudi women whose families can afford it -- a practice that, oddly, does not raise eyebrows among the Saudi guardians of public morals.
Circuitously, to avoid Saudi handlers, Trofimov travels to the Shiite heartland of Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province. There he meets bitter, long-suffering Shiites who confide that they will soon be willing to fight for their rights. Trofimov is told that Shiite children are taught in Saudi schools that they are infidels. Officials forbid sharing food, charity and even cemeteries with Shiites. The author might have noted that earlier in the 20th century, Saudi Shiites were forcibly converted to Wahhabi Islam. At times, the account feels like a depressing description of apartheid-era South Africa.
In neighbouring Yemen, he visits Iman University. The university's founder, Abdelmajeed Zindani, is a powerful parliamentarian in the Islah neo-fundamentalist political party, who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Among fellow foreign alumni is American John Walker Lindh. The university, founded with Saudi financing, teaches a form of Salafi-Jihadi ideology: the idea that today's Muslim rulers aren't really Muslim but apostates, and need to be fought along with the West. The university has radicalized politics in that troubled country, and moved it in a more violent direction.
Trofimov does falter badly at times. Incredibly, while discussing Bosnia, he parrots Serb nationalist canards about the alleged Islamist tendencies of Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian Muslim leader. Serb nationalists claimed that they were bravely defending Europe from an Islamic fundamentalist threat, which needed to be eliminated. Thus ensued the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, and the genocide at Srebrenica.
One senses that Trofimov views the entire Muslim world as an enraged homicidal monolith. Clearly, there is a pathological jihadi threat, first to the Muslim world and then to the West. But is it not possible, or in fact necessary, to demarcate that pathology from the broader, less ideologically defined Muslim polity? Moreover, Trofimov seems to lack in-depth knowledge of Islam or Islamic history, or jihadi ideology. Chief among his errors is the assumption that the Salafi interpretation of Islam is in fact the authentic "pure, harsh" teaching practised by Mohammed and his followers. He thus accepts at face value the Saudi argument that their interpretation of Islam is traditional Islam.
The most visible example of this rupture with tradition is the treatment of Sufis, Shiites and traditional non-Salafi Sunnis as manifestations of unbelief/apostasy in a manner previously unthinkable. Where once Sufi saints' shrines would be built and visited by Sunnis, Shiites and Sufis (and also by Hindus and Sikhs within India), they are instead being blown up by suicide bombers. Ironically, when Trofimov travels to Bosnia, he stumbles across this literal destruction of Islamic tradition, but is unable to see the broad trends of this globalization phenomenon. After the Bosnian genocide, Saudi relief organizations arrived and offered to "correct" Bosnian Muslims in their errant understanding of Islam. In some cases, Saudi aid agencies in the Balkans literally gutted existing Ottoman mosques and bulldozed Muslim cemeteries.
It is this Salafi literalist, puritan, supremacist interpretation of Islam that is the principal combustible compound for the violence emanating from the Sunni Muslim world. It is an error to assume that it was always this way. Islamic fascism appropriates the garb of tradition while eviscerating it at the same time.
Modern radical religious justifications for suicide bombing ("martyrdom operations," in jihadi terms) or the indiscriminate killing of civilians can be traced to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to the idea that suicide bombings against Israel are permissible. Both suicide and attacks on non-combatants are explicitly forbidden in Islam. However, in the context of the Palestinian struggle, the tactic was seen as justified by almost all institutional and populist media voices in Islam. But martyrdom operations have become a more blood-stained, slippery and treacherous moral slope: 9/11, Americans in Iraq, Iraqi "collaborators" including medical doctors and barbers, synagogues in Turkey, Sufi shrines, Shiite mosques, Bali, Madrid and now London.
The theory and practice of jihadis requires that there be an enemy. At times it has been a "near" enemy (the "apostate" regimes); at other times the "far" enemy (the West). In the absence of a Western enemy, the enemy has been found within Muslim society: non-Muslim minorities (Copts, Jews, Hindus), democrats, feminists, secularists, artists, writers, musicians and, above all, those who "Westernize." It is a terribly facile and naive assumption to assume that the response of the jihadis is "blowback" for past and present Western imperialism. It denies the assailant any moral agency, and is also a classic case of blaming the victim. What crimes have unveiled Kashmiri Muslim women committed to deserve having acid thrown in their faces by Islamist thugs?
The struggle for the soul of Islam that is taking place is an intramural contest that is being played out irrespective of Islam-West relations. In this, al-Qaeda is likened to the Kharijites, the first sectarian fanatics within Islam, who were eventually beaten back and repudiated. Aslan argues, "The West is merely a bystander, an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter."
At this fateful juncture, Aslan has provided a masterful interpretative reading of Islam, its evolution, especially its early sacred history, and resources within its tradition that can be used to promote a more plural and cosmopolitan order. He is optimistic about the future of Islam because the vast majority of Muslims yearn for the freedoms that are denied them.
By contrast, Trofimov describes the convulsive anti-intellectualism, seething anger and violence that afflict many contemporary Islamic societies. Ironically, a detailed investigation of al-Muhajiroun, an Islamic radical organization based in London, has just been published. Quintan Wiktorowicz's impressive study, Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West, examines al-Muhajiroun's ideology, modes of recruitment and advocacy of violence.
The late Eqbal Ahmad, one of the most astute observers of the modern Muslim world, observed, "This is the dark age of Muslim history." One hopes that the dark age Trofimov illuminates today will be replaced by the more peaceful and plural future that Aslan predicts for tomorrow.
Canadian Emran Qureshi is a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Goverment, Harvard University.