Surah Al-Hajj (22: 3-4):
Wa minan-nasi many-yujdilu fil-lahi shahid. Wa minan-nasi many-yujadilu fil-lahi bighayri
ilminw-wa yattabi’u kulla Shaytanim-marid.
And yet, among men there is many a one who argues about God without
having any knowledge [of Him], and follows every rebellious satanic force about
which it has been decreed that whoever entrusts himself to it, him will it lead
astray and guide towards the suffering of the blazing flame!
The latest round of attacks
by Muslim extremists in Europe gave rise to new levels of introspection in the
broader Muslim community. Mainstream Muslims
and mosque leaders decried the killing of the cartoonists at France’s Charlie
Hebdo and the Jews at the Kosher grocery, calling the perpetrators extremists
who are acting in the name of Islam, but who are not true Muslims. The Council of Islamic
Organizations of Greater Chicago (CIOGC), denounced the murders. “It is despicable that they
shouted God is Great in Arabic as they took lives,” said Dr. Mohammed
Kaiseruddin, chairman and co-founder of the CIOGC. Statements of condemnation against the
attacks have also been issued by well-established national Muslim organizations
including ISNA, CAIR, USCMO, as well as numerous Muslim groups across the
United States. On CNN’s “State of the Union” on
January 18, Yahya Hendi, Muslim Chaplain at Georgetown University in
Washington, DC said “Islam cannot support terrorism in any way, shape or
form. The terrorists are kidnapping my
name, using my name, my beautiful religion.”
The host of the show responded, “They do use religious
justification. They are steeped in the
texts, they quote the texts.” Imam Hendi
answered, “They are misquoting the text.
They are not using the text. They
translate it in their own way. They
misinterpret it to justify their own violence.”
Azeem Ibrahim, a lecturer
in international security at the University of Chicago, wrote an article
published in the Chicago Tribune titled, “The Battle Within Islam.” He asks, “How did Islam come to this
point?” He describes how when
non-Muslims write about radicalization, they stop at the point of looking
inside religious doctrine for the answers, “and for good reason. They stand at the threshold of the internal
theological debate of a great world religion.
To advance further means going into a territory about which even
commentators don’t feel they can bluff their way through. It means engaging with 12 centuries worth of
theological debate and risking offending millions with a slip of the pen.”
I would argue that most
Muslims stop at the point of examining doctrine as well, and for the same
reasons. In fact, most Muslims do not
even allow themselves to think about
examining doctrine. And that, Ibrahim
argues and I agree, has opened the door for the propagation of Wahabi
conservatism by the only player wealthy and audacious enough to build mosques
and madrasas, train religious leaders, print and distribute free pamphlets and
books worldwide for the past 40 plus years – Saudi Arabia. As Ibrahim explains, “Wahabism emphasizes
anti-Semitism, misogyny, interacting with non-Muslims only in cases of
necessity and ex-communicating any Muslims who do not subscribe to its deeply
conservative and culturally isolationist ideology. It lays the intellectual foundations for
jihadism, a rogue offshoot of Wahabism which encourages the terrorism we see on
our own TV screens.”
Saudi Arabia has condemned
the Paris attacks, and other terrorist attacks, and outlawed any affiliation
with ISIL within its borders. The Saudis
have even started constructing a 600 mile fence along their entire border with
Iraq in an effort to keep out ISIL militants.
On the other hand, we have had an example of Saudi Wahabism in action
again these past two weeks. A liberal
Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, kick-started a public discussion about
Islam and modernity on his blog. A Saudi
court sentenced Badawi to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for “insulting
Islam.” The first 50 lashes were delivered in a public flogging on Friday, Jan.
9th. Badawi was scheduled to
receive 50 more every Friday until he reaches 1,000, but the floggings were
suspended, presumably due to public outcry and demonstrations in the West.
I met another victim of the strict Wahabist-style interpretation
of Islam a few weeks ago. Leaving a
House of Representatives meeting of CIOGC in Chicago, I was approached by the
father of Hamza Khan, the 19 year old who was arrested before Christmas trying
to take his younger siblings with him on a flight to Istanbul, allegedly to
cross the border into Syria and join up with ISIL. The father was trying to raise money for his son’s
defense. I was caught between my
sympathy for a father in such obvious emotional pain, and my anger that a young
man’s mind had been so vulnerable to the extremist rhetoric on the
internet. Hamza Khan was trained as a
“Hafiz” – someone who memorizes the whole Quran. How could he go through that training, and
even lead his mosque congregation in evening prayer during the whole month of
Ramadan this past summer, and not have absorbed the Quran’s messages of peace
and mercy? Somehow he got sucked into
the cultish rhetoric about Islamic values being possible only in an idealized
Islamic state, and that any country, group or individual perceived as trying to
stop its creation is fair game for attack.
We don’t know Hamza Khan’s whole story, but we do
know this. The Muslim community is very
good at venerating the Quran. But the
project of examining doctrine for its relevance and applicability in our lives
has been woefully lacking. Every Muslim
has, by definition, a relationship with the Quran. Most Muslims follow others’ interpretations –
the classical scholars and the clerics who study them - either through ignorance,
or conviction that those others know better than they, or because of reverence
for history and religious leaders, or because they are intimidated by the
prospect of trying to understand an ancient text in what is for most Muslims a
foreign language. Even native Arabic
speakers are not fluent in Quranic Arabic.
And this is a text that Muslims believe contains messages from the
ultimate Judge who will decide whether they spend eternity in heaven or
hell. It is not surprising that most
Muslims abdicate from the interpretive project and just try to be good people,
recite Quran as best they can, revere its sacredness, and hope for the
best. But there come times like this,
when blindly following the interpretations of the medieval past is no longer an
option for those of us who believe that we must use our critical minds to
understand our faith.
Pause
The tribal mentality of the
Wahabists and the barbarism of the extremists have invoked counter movements
among Muslims who live in countries where freedom of religion and expression is
guaranteed. These movements take many
forms. One of them, a different form of
self-proclaimed Islamic radicalism, is described in an article on the website
vice.com by Gavin Haynes. He writes
about a don at Oxford in England, Dr. Taj Hargey, who took part of his salary
and started his own mosque in South Africa late last year. The five founding principles of Dr. Hargey’s
mosque are: Qu'ran-centric, gender equality, non-sectarian, inter-cultural, and
independent. The place of worship, he
says—unlike most mosques around the world—is both gay-friendly and
woman-friendly. His "Open
Mosque" in Cape Town has been firebombed three times since it commenced
operations in September. Hargey is a self-proclaimed
hardcore “fundamentalist,” in that he rejects the Hadith and unsurprisingly,
Sharia law (which uses Hadith as a primary source). Hargey posits that “Islam is about the
Qur'an, and it is from the Qur'an that he will preach, ignoring all the other
footnotes beloved of [most contemporary] clerics. All of that stuff, he says, has no pertinence
to the Qur'an: It's a book that rejects violence, doesn't mention the burqa,
embraces a role for women, and doesn't explicitly ban images of Muhammad or
encourage Muslims to murder satirical cartoonists.”
Hargey is not the only
Muslim who has found refuge from harsh applications of Islam by adopting a
Quran only approach. Look up “Quranism”
on Wikipedia, and you get a whole list of organizations and individuals
reflecting different manifestations of the Quran only approach, as well as a
very succinct guide to the differences between Sunni/Shia Islam and Quranism on
a list of articles of faith. I am
greatly encouraged by all attempts to challenge unhealthy, repressive
doctrine. I share the goals of the Quranists, but not
their method. My study of the Quran has
shown me that there are many references in it to specific circumstances and
events in the lives of the Prophet and his companions. It is impossible to understand Quran without
reference to the context of the revelations. And the only source we have for understanding
the history and culture in which Quran was revealed - however flawed and
subject to personal and historical bias - is Seerah (stories of the life of the
Prophet) and Hadith (collections of narrations from the Prophet’s companions
about what he was supposed to have done and said). These texts need to be
studied with a critical mind, but the story of revelation is not complete
without them.
[One of the arguments that
the Quranists use to support their position is that the Prophet Muhammad himself,
pbuh, as well as Abu Bakr and Umar, his closest companions, are said to have
warned against recording and collecting Hadith, and even burned them. But how do we supposedly know this? Hadith.
And how could Abu Bakr and Umar have burned them if they were not recorded
and collected until 100 years (Seerah) to 150 years (Hadith) after the
Prophet’s death – a fact some Quranists cite as an argument against them?]
I appreciate that there can be value in studying
the linguistic construction of the Quran. I leave that to those with a mastery
of Quranic Arabic. It’s vocabulary and phraseology - in Arabic and in translation - is not addressed to
a liberally educated 21st century woman, to say the least. I have to
remind myself every time I pick up a Quran that it's messages come to me
indirectly, through the filter of language and culture. Rejecting Seerah
and Hadith out of hand would deprive me of an invaluable interpretive
tool. At their best, the most reliable
Hadith are useful in helping me understand why the ayat were revealed when they
were - to whom they were addressed, and for what purpose. I do this
knowing all the while that the Hadith themselves are a product of the time and
culture of those who recorded them. They
are not only subject to the possibility of human error – memory is the most
fickle of filters – but they are also subject to cultural irrelevance. I therefore read Seerah and Hadith with an
analytical, interpretive mind.
I understand the first injunction of Prophet
Muhammad’s revelation – “Read, in the
name of your Creator,” as an affirmation that reading and studying are
required to discern what is true from what is false.
I cannot say who is a Muslim and who is not a
Muslim. If someone who identifies as
Muslim commits atrocities in the name of Islam, I can condemn their acts and
the way they interpret their faith, and I do – categorically. And I can make myself feel better by
believing that they will get their due in kind in the hereafter for their
hatred and barbarous acts. But I cannot
presume to know their ultimate destiny; that is God’s call. At the same time, no human being has the
power to decide that I am not Muslim,
even though they may profoundly disagree with the way I understand the
faith.
What is sure is that all of us human beings are
subject to the lure of false promises
of justice, or riches, or fame and glory, or a martyr’s paradise – all that
falls under the rubric of what Quran calls “Shaitan” – Satan.
From Surah An-Nisaa (4):
But all who take Satan rather than God for their master do indeed, most
clearly, lose all: he holds out promises
to them, and fills them with vain desires:
yet whatever Satan promises them is but meant to delude the mind. Such as these have hell for their goal: and they shall find no way to escape
therefrom. [119-121]
These are challenging times for Muslims. As we grapple with the consequences of
extremism, we Muslims who have the luxury of freedom of religion and speech
will explore every approach we can to reinforce the balance and rationality of
our faith. We must use the reasoning capabilities God gave us,
along with what we know in our hearts, to discern the false from the true. We can learn from each other, and overwhelm
the voices of the violent extremists.
But as we devote our hearts and minds, time and resources to this
endeavor, we must be ever mindful of the pitfalls. As much as we formulate answers for ourselves,
we must never lose our humility. We must
support each other. We must rise above
the tribalism, retribution, and sanctimonious arrogance that God’s revelation
came to dispel – and that unfortunately have hijacked the very religion that
came to liberate us from that past. We
must, above all, practice “Islam,” doing everything we can to promote God’s
peace in ourselves and with each other.
From Surah Al-Baqara, God’s message to the Children of Israel
rings true to us today:
Wa la talbisul-haqqa bilbatili wa taktumul-haqqa wa antum ta’lamun. Wa aqimus-Salata wa ‘atuz-Zaqata war-ka’u
ma’ar-raki’in.
Ata murunan-nasa bilbirri wa tansawna anfusakum wa antum
tatlunal-Kitab. Afala ta’qilun. [42-44]
Do not overlay the truth with falsehood, and do not knowingly suppress
the truth; and be constant in prayer, and spend in charity, and bow down in
prayer with all who thus bow down.
Do you bid other people to be pious, the while you forget your own selves
– and yet you recite the divine writ?
Will you not, then, use your reason?
[42-44]
