The Right Time
For An Islamic Reformation
By Salman Rushdie
12 August, 2005
The Washington Post
When
Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, admitted
that "our own children" had perpetrated the July 7 London
bombings, it was the first time in my memory that a British Muslim had
accepted his community's responsibility for outrages committed by its
members. Instead of blaming U.S. foreign policy or "Islamophobia,"
Sacranie described the bombings as a "profound challenge"
for the Muslim community. However, this is the same Sacranie who, in
1989, said that "Death is perhaps too easy" for the author
of "The Satanic Verses." Tony Blair's decision to knight him
and treat him as the acceptable face of "moderate," "traditional"
Islam is either a sign of his government's penchant for religious appeasement
or a demonstration of how limited Blair's options really are.
Sacranie is a strong
advocate of Blair's much-criticized new religious-hatred bill, which
will make it harder to criticize religion, and he actually expects the
new law to outlaw references to Islamic terrorism. He said as recently
as Jan. 13, "There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist. This
is deeply offensive. Saying Muslims are terrorists would be covered
[i.e., banned] by this provision." Two weeks later his organization
boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London commemorating the
liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best
Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.
The Sacranie case
illustrates the weakness of the Blair government's strategy of relying
on traditional, essentially orthodox Muslims to help eradicate Islamist
radicalism. Traditional Islam is a broad church that certainly includes
millions of tolerant, civilized men and women but also encompasses many
whose views on women's rights are antediluvian, who think of homosexuality
as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who
routinely express anti-Semitic views and who, in the case of the Muslim
diaspora, are -- it has to be said -- in many ways at odds with the
Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish cultures among which they
live.In Leeds, from which several of the London bombers came, many traditional
Muslims lead inward-turned lives of near-segregation from the wider
population. From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have
indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks.
The deeper alienations
that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections
to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional
Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily
deepen. What is needed is a move beyond tradition -- nothing less than
a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern
age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues
but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing
open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.It would be good to
see governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world as well
as outside it throwing their weight behind this idea, because creating
and sustaining such a reform movement wil lrequire above all a new educational
impetus whose results may take a generation to be felt, a new scholarship
to replace the literalist diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague
present-day Muslim thinking. It is high time, for starters, that Muslims
were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside
history, not supernaturally above it.
It should be a matter
of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is the only religion whose
origins were recorded historically and thus are grounded not in legend
but in fact. The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the
Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture
to an urban patriarchal system. Muhammad, as an orphan, personally suffered
the difficulties of this transformation, and it is possible to read
the Koran as a plea for the old matriarchal values in the new patriarchal
world, a conservative plea that became revolutionary because of its
appeal to all those whom the new system disenfranchised, the poor, the
powerless and, yes, the orphans.
Muhammad was also
a successful merchant and heard, on his travels, the Nestorian Christians'
desert versions of Bible stories that the Koran mirrors closely (Christ,
in the Koran, is born in an oasis, under a palm tree). It ought to be
fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply their beloved book
is a product of its place and time, and in how many ways it reflects
the Prophet's own experiences.
However, few Muslims
have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence
that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders
analytical, scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be
influenced by the socioeconomics of seventh-century Arabia, after all?
Why would the Messenger's personal circumstances have anything to do
with the Message?
The traditionalists'
refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists,
allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging
absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document,
then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions
of successive new ages. Laws made in the seventh century could finally
give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin
here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred
ones, must adapt to altered realities.
Broad-mindedness
is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace. This
is how to take up the "profound challenge" of the bombers.
Will Sir Iqbal Sacranie and his ilk agree that Islam must be modernized?
That would make them part of the solution. Otherwise, they're just the
"traditional" part of the problem.
The writer is a
novelist and essayist whose works include "The Satanic Verses."