Will an “Islamic Reformation” Ever Come?
Filed under: Feature, Islam, Lead Story, Middle East, Opinion — Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on December 4, 2007 @ 6:11 pm CET
Shadi Hamid, Middle East expert, is our second guest blogger. “Will an ‘Islamic Reformation’ ever come? Read it.
First of all, I want to say thank you to Michael van der Galien for inviting me to contribute a guest post to this excellent new blog. A few words about myself and what I do: I’m the director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington-DC based nonprofit that examines how the U.S. can more effectively support democracy and democrats in the Middle East. You can see my bio here. My blogging home is Democracy Arsenal, a progressive group-blog on foreign affairs. Check it out!
Anyway, there has been an interesting discussion in the blogosphere recently on “moderate Muslims” and the broader issue of whether there is or will be a “Muslim reformation” (see here, here, here, as well as Matthew Yglesias’s response here). Often, the conversation takes on a patronizing tone. What’s up with these Muslims, and why can’t they get their act together? It is a bit ironic that it’s those on the American Right (and far-right) - the very people who have so indulged Christian fundamentalism – who seem to think that Ataturk-style secularism should be the ultimate end-point for Muslim civilization.
So what is meant by this so-called “Islamic reformation”? If Western observers would like to see Muslims declare that they no longer believe the Quran is the exact word of God, then they are likely to be disappointed. To be a Muslim, theologically-speaking, you have to believe that every letter of the Quran is from God. This is Islam 101, and that part of it is non-negotiable. I kind of thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not. What is negotiable, however, is the matter of how to interpret the Quran (ijtihad), of whether to emphasize the spirit of the law (maqasid al-shariah), or the strict letter of the law. Is the Quran to be contextualized and understand as a reflection of a particular set of historical circumstances, or is it to be seen as something that must be copied-and-pasted onto our present reality without any attention to how the modern period requires a different approach to religion than, say, the 7th or 8th century? These questions are already being vigorously debated by a whole host of scholars (among them Khaled abou el Fadl, Abdul Karim el-Soroush, Tariq el-Bishri, Abdel Wahab el-Messiri, Farid Esack, Amina Wadud, Heba Raouf Ezzat, Abdullah an-Naim).
This is why it’s quite frankly mind-boggling that people like AEI fellow and former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali are treated in some quarters as the second-comings of Martin Luther. This is pretty stupid when you think about it. Hirsi Ali isn’t even Muslim. She renounced her faith and, by her own admission, is an atheist. Not to mention the fact that she recently declared war on Islam. Anointing Hirsi Ali as the next great Islamic reformer is sort of like inviting Christopher Hitchens to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. She’s a bit of an outlier though. Even if you think the U.S. should be aiding “moderate” secularists in the Middle East, again, you’re likely to be disappointed. Secularism is more or less dead in the Middle East. If those are your “allies,” than you won’t have any. But, then again, some people are much more interested in making enemies than finding friends.
Now, the other question is how this state of affairs came to be. Why has religion in the Middle East become so dominant, particularly in its more politicized forms? It’s weird to read these posts on The Corner, where Jonah Goldberg, Lisa Schiffren and others seem to be genuinely baffled as to why the Muslim world has gotten wrapped up in literalism, fundamentalism, and jihadism. Rarely is there any mention of the effects of U.S. policy, as if America has been a helpless bystander over the last several decades. People who talk about the Muslim reformation are getting the direction of causality wrong. What we’re facing in the Middle East today is not a religious problem, but a political one. As Lisa Schiffren says, “I, like many who went to college in the 70s and 80s, knew plenty of moderate Muslims back then. The Arab, Pakistani, and Turkish women I went to school with at Bryn Mawr were about as moderate as you could imagine.” Yes, back then, secularism was still the dominant ideology in the Muslim world. But something changed.
This “secularism,” we should note, wasn’t particularly liberal. It was authoritarian, exclusivist, and, sometimes, quite brutal. It was top-down modernization without the consent of the people, who had to suffer as this process unfolded. We were fine with this, of course, and we did very little, at that stage, to promote democracy in the region. The rise of political Islam was, in part, a reaction to this sad state of affairs. Arab nationalism was perceived as having failed (it was a failure). And so people started looking for alternatives. The other thing to keep in mind is that intellectual pluralism, religious tolerance, and liberalism, rarely prosper under authoritarian regimes. For liberalism to prosper, you need open societies and a free press, where intellectual inquiry is encouraged, rather than punished. On the other hand, where the marketplace of ideas is restricted, it is much easier for extremists to gain the upper hand, and for moderates to be sidelined, and this is gradually what would happen in the Middle East. The elites were schooled in Western secularism, but no one else was. After all, there wasn’t much civil society to speak of. There weren’t political parties. And the authoritarian structure at the governmental level was replicated on the local and familial levels.
This is where American policy comes in. The U.S., sadly, has rather consistently supported autocracy in the Middle East. There was the CIA-sponsored coup in 1953, where we helped overthrow a democratically-elected prime minister in Iran. Who replaced him? The “moderate” Shah, the same Shah who would preside over one of the most brutal regimes the region had yet seen. Which led to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. Actions have consequences. Exhibit #2: Everyone complains about Saudi Arabia. And they’re right. The Saudis have exported their extreme ideology throughout the Muslim world with their endless petro-dollars. But, of course, successive U.S. administrations have been strong supporters of the al-Saud family. Saudi Arabia, quite literally, has gotten away with murder. (For more on this, see a recent article I co-wrote for The New Republic).
The list goes on. People often bring up Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA), a terrorist group that knows few competitors. But it’s not like the GIA rose to prominence out of nowhere. Until 1991, Algeria had been home to the Arab world’s most promising democratic experiment. But, then, the U.S. and France tacitly (and actively) supported the military coup that annulled the results of what was, up until then, the most freest parliamentary elections the Arab world had seen for quite some time. Canceling elections when you don’t like results in a time-tested way to start a civil war, and Algeria was no exception. Out of the ashes of democracy, the GIA would come to be.
Let us look go further and take a closer look at the roots of today’s jihadism. Central to Islamic extremism is the idea of takfir– the act of declaring a Muslim to be an infidel, which then legitimates the shedding of his or her blood. Takfir, in its modern form, was born in the prisons of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Sayyid Qutb, who many consider to be the intellectual godfather of jihadism, was radicalized in prison. He was brutally tortured by prison guards, while many of his associates were executed (this would eventually be his fate as well). For Qutb, this introduced an element of cognitive dissonance. How could his fellow Muslims be doing such things, resorting to such brutality? This demanded some kind of rationalization. His answer was that his tormentors were not and could not be Muslims. They came to be seen as part of a world separate from Islam. These were kafirs, people who had renounced their Islam and chosen the path of jahilayya (ignorance). This is – waterboarding enthusiasts take note – what torture can do. For more on the torture-terror link, see Lawrence Wright’s seminal article on the evolution Ayman al-Zawahiri. He wasn’t always a full-blown terrorist, but he became one. The question is how and why?
In short, the Muslim world has become a tragic, dangerous place. This much we can agree on. But it’s much important to understand how this came to be. What is, in essence, a political problem demands political solutions, not unrealistic talk about an “Islamic reformation” that will likely never come, at least not in the way we envision it.
1 PatHMV
December 4, 2007 @ 6:40 pm CETI’m certain the U.S. does need to stop practicing the real politik which we practiced during the cold war. Of course, we often didn’t have a lot of other options then, as many of the folks seeking to overthrow particular middle eastern governments at the time were avowedly Marxist revolutionaries, intent on imposing a different kind of totalitarianism. But it is not today the West nor “Christian fundamentalists” who are threatening the execution of a teacher because she named a teddy bear “Mohammed” in response to her class’s wishes. It is not Christin fundamentalists who kill thousands of innocent people. It is not the West which rioted because some cartoonists offended our God.
If no “Islamic reformation” is coming, then I’m going to be for sealing the borders and letting that world stew in its own juices. As you point out, our previous interference hasn’t revealed us to be adept at it.
2 PatHMV
December 4, 2007 @ 6:47 pm CETI would add that your reference to the Algerian civil war seems to be a declaration that the world must accept the election of an Islamist government which will impose sharia law on its population. Leaving aside the pros and cons of supporting coups, I’m not prepared to philosophically accept the appropriateness of an Islamist state. No modern government should have as the basis of its existence and all laws, a religious text. The West cannot tolerate this, because it will inevitably work against us. We promote tolerance of religions and allow people of all religions to immigrate within our borders and practice and promote their faith. The Islamic, Arabic world does not. Terrorist Muslims are provided, by our government, with copies of the Koran. Innocent Christians are arrested, by most of their governments, for simply possessing their own copy of the Bible. Those two philosophies are, ultimately, fundamentally incompatible.
3 Michael van der Galien
December 4, 2007 @ 7:50 pm CETThe post has been updated. When I copy pasted it links got lost. These links have now been put back where they belong. I apologize for the inconvenience.
4 David
December 4, 2007 @ 8:29 pm CETNasser and most of the Arab dictators of his day were backed by the Soviets and opposed by the US. Insinuating that Nasser’s treatment of the early leaders of the Muslim brotherhood to US policy seems quite a stretch.
5 no guff
December 4, 2007 @ 11:19 pm CETThe excuses for Islamic atrocities is becoming soooo tiresome. Especially the “It’s the fault of US foreign policy” meme.
How does US policy account for the killings in Holland, Denmark, Argentina, Bali, Spain, England, Indonesia and scores of other places? How does US policy account for the deaths by burning of Muslim school girls who were unable to flee their school because of ‘improper dress’?
You would have us believe that if we just did as you wish us to, that all would be well. Sorry, but subjugation is not in the cards. Instead of just being dhimmies, we’d be slave dhimmis.
How is it that when an infidel travels to a Muslim country, they MUST conform to the cultural values of that society, yet when a Muslim immigrates to a non-muslim country, that society is expected to ‘reform’ it’s own values to conform to the Muslim sensibilities?
Hypocrisy, thy name is Islam.
6 PatHMV
December 4, 2007 @ 11:34 pm CETIt often seems as if apologists for the Islamic extremists, those who want to look at “root causes,” only ever want to go as far back in history as necessary to find an American or Western cause of the problems. How far back in history do we go when examining the “justness” of current causes? Why is it that other nations and cultures get a free pass for overreacting or violently reacting toward some provocation, but the U.S. and the West do not? Before the 1950s-era incidents which you describe, many Arab nations seemed to choose up sides with Hitler. Might that explain some Western hostility to those regimes in the aftermath of WWII? Of course, they chose up sides with Hitler because they thought that might help them rid themselves of British or French domination. But why did that British or French domination come about? Could the expansionist desires of the Ottoman Empire have played a part?
Reverting to history in such disputes is a losing game. We can only judge the people by what they are currently doing. Currently, the Muslim world appears to be led by, or cower in fear of, violent extremists. That’s the reality in which we live, and with which we must deal. Understanding how that happened may inform our tactics, but does not alter the basic facts. The people in Sudan who advocated the execution of the teacher are barbarians. The government officials who merely wished to lock her up are tyrants. The laws of most Western nations are open and welcoming to all religions, including Islam. The laws of most Arabic nations are hostile to non-Muslims. The revolutionary forces opposing the dictatorships in place in most Arab Muslim nations are not in the slightest secular; they are profoundly and nearly universally jihadist whose main complaint is that the government does not impose a harsh enough version of sharia law.
7 C Stanley
December 4, 2007 @ 11:35 pm CETThe reason many people are calling for an Islamic reformation is that the Reformation in the Christian West was a defining moment for the Church itself to take stock of its beliefs and moderate itself by applying reason to its teachings- and because it led to the concept of separation of Church and state which the Muslim world has not come to terms with.
You point out that the secularism that was prevalent in the Muslim world in the past was a top down, authoritarian secularism- and you seem to say that we shouldn’t have supported that. I’d agree with that- but then the only way for Islam and Christianity to coexist peacefully is to ask the moderates in Islam to speak out against the extremists. Even if the policies of the West have led to the rise of the extremists, it’s still going to be up to the moderates in Islam to reclaim their religion.
8 C Stanley
December 4, 2007 @ 11:52 pm CETI wonder too if the author would apply the same logic to the time of the Christian Reformation and say that it was not necessary because the extremists in Christendom were just reacting to interference by the “Moslems”? If the comparison doesn’t hold up, why not? In my view, in both cases the outside interference was a propogating factor but not the initial cause of the rise of fanaticism, and in both cases I think the religious leaders themselves have to put out the fires of extremism.
9 Xel
December 5, 2007 @ 12:01 am CET“How does US policy account for the killings in Holland, Denmark, Argentina, Bali, Spain, England, Indonesia and scores of other places?”
All I know is that Denmark, Spain and England all sent troops to Iraq, so I dunno how many people actually chalk the attacks in those countries up for anybody except the morons in charge of those countries who got the notion that the invasion of Iraq could be justified in any way.
As for the idea that careless, insulting, immoral, violent, arbitrary or otherwise malevolent actions on the US part against muslim countries could make muslims all over the world a little cranky, it is not so dumb either. What matters is of course that said crankiness have been fuelling acts equally immoral if not worse than the blows landed by the US against muslim countries.
I think it is a death-dance where US actions have made Islam take a turn for the worse or where Islam’s wrong turns have made terrorism more frequent - thus making the US public allow a less regulated and therefore less moral foreign policy affecting the middle east, thus angering more muslims, making them more extreme and less capable of creating decent societies that denounce terrorism etc. I dunno if Islam went sour first or whether the sickening acts committed by France, Spain, the UK, the US etc. did, but I do know that the US is dealing with a lot of problems it did not create in the first place, but that US actions may have exacerbated things.
“How does US policy account for the deaths by burning of Muslim school girls who were unable to flee their school because of ‘improper dress’?”
Well, European colonialism gave reactionary strains of Islam nutrition and a rationale. In short, more extremism, less respect for individuality and strict use of the Qur’an.
Compare with today; IX XI made Americans so fearful, angry and willing to prevent it ever happening again that they gave people they normally would not support the mandate to launch badly thought-out and unnecessarilly violent actions abroad and also push through radical and authoritarian legislation at home. No, I am not comparing Saudi Arabian policy with that of the US in a qualitative or quantitative sense, but I do think the causality has worked in a similar manner if you look at the US and some muslim countries.
In short - the occassion you referred to is the result of a society that has been mistreated by nations with more real-world strength to the degree that they turn to the divine world and a less forgiving attitude in general: piety, machoism, violence, paranoia and deferrence to dieties, mullahs and violent leaders in order to cope and prevent future abuse. The horrible acts committed by the SA police in your above example is the result of a region, people and religion having received the notion that only force and dedication to force can keep them safe or at least capable of attaining something good in the afterlife (considering the world around them wasn’t that appealing or inspiring). What is going on in many muslim countries is because of the policy of Western Europe in the past (of course, this isn’t stopping some Europeans from blaming the US only).
However, what the US has done is to sometimes act as “Western Europe 2.0.”, thus making muslims all over the middle east feel that they have to turn to extremism and a “force over freedom”-paradigm again. After all, if the US can cause bloodshed both here and there and unconditionally supports Israel, then some mulsims will perhaps feel that if they do not act with extra piety in such times of antagonism their god will cast them into hell. Maybe they’ll feel that if they do not defer to the Qu’ran or their mullahs then there will be no glue to their society and the US can harm them. Now I am just speculating, but think about what 9/11 did to America, and then transfer all that to a more religious, poorer, less stable third-world region with a history of abuse at the hands of rich white people.
When the US continued the tradition of either making justified but poorly thought-out plans in the middle east (sponsoring the mujahedeen in Afghanistan but then forgetting about them) or conducting utterly wrong projects (the whole meddling with Iraq and Iran period) they tapped in to this anger and got what the French and the British would have gotten if the people Europe hurt back then had the same methods of asymmetrical warfare.
“You would have us believe that if we just did as you wish us to, that all would be well. Sorry, but subjugation is not in the cards. Instead of just being dhimmies, we’d be slave dhimmis.”
Yes, I agree that many muslims are asking for more than they deserve and that they use the US as a malevolent and immoral alpha in order to get an underdog role even as they use threats and violence against others. However, some of their demands and complaints are more than worthy of respect. If we just treated muslims as humans then things would improve, but unfortunately many morons in the west prefer treating them differently, often with preferential treatment and molly-coddling that only masks underlying racism and contempt.
“How is it that when an infidel travels to a Muslim country, they MUST conform to the cultural values of that society, yet when a Muslim immigrates to a non-muslim country, that society is expected to ‘reform’ it’s own values to conform to the Muslim sensibilities?”
You use “travel” and “immigration” in each example, making it difficult to see your point. But yes - allowing muslims to do bad things because it is their culture is racist and devalues their humanity. After all, a society is meant to raise people and if you don’t ask one group of people to, say, be quiet at the dinner table because they didn’t do that in their home country then they’ll misbehave more.
“Hypocrisy, thy name is Islam.”
Such blanket statements are unfortunately very useless.
10 Nihat
December 5, 2007 @ 1:42 am CETAlways an interesting topic of discussion, from which I learn little. Foreign relations and historical aspects of it mingled with cultural, theological aspects and all… It’s a mess.
Does modern Islam embrace the freedom to choose, for example? The problem with Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not that she made herself a Western tool of sorts, but that her life is danger because of her choice. What is so hard to understand if this fascinates the West?
I don’t know, I am sick of apologies, too.
11 Talking About An Islamic Reformation | Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)
December 8, 2007 @ 11:05 pm CET[…] relationship between authoritarian secular regimes and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East as it impacts the development of jihadist thought in the region. Also posting on the subject, Ali Eteraz discusses the roots of Islamic reform. […]
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