Islam and heresy: Where freedom is still at stake
Wanted: Islam’s Voltaire
From The Economist print edition
Aug 6th 2009
TO MOST Western ears, the very idea of punishing heresy conjures up a time four or five centuries ago, when Spanish inquisitors terrorised dissenters with the rack and Russian tsars would burn alive whole communities of ultra-traditionalist Old Believers. Most religions began as heresies. Today the concept of “heresy” still means something. Every community built around an idea, a principle or an aim (from fox-hunting enthusiasts to Freudian psychotherapists) will always face hard arguments about where the boundaries of that community lie, and how far the meaning of its founding axioms can be stretched. But one of the hallmarks of a civilised and tolerant society is that arguments within freely constituted groups, religious or otherwise, unfold peacefully. And if those disputes lead to splits and new groups, that too must be a peaceful process, free of violence or coercion.
How depressing, then, to find that in the heartland of one of the world’s great religions, Islam, charges of heresy are still being bandied about in a violent and threatening way, in the hope of silencing critical voices. The latest figure to face such an accusation is an Egyptian scholar, Sayed al-Qimani, whose profile has risen since he agreed to accept a prize from his country’s semi-secular cultural authorities (see article below). Mr Qimani’s work—which would be unremarkable in any Western context—applies the familiar techniques of empirical research to early Islamic history.
As so often these days, he faces not punishment by his own government but the potentially lethal consequences of being denounced as a heretic by several influential groups in the quarrelsome world of Egyptian Islam. To the ears of a zealot, such a denunciation sounds like an invitation to go out and claim a heavenly reward by slaying the offender.
The deadly effects of heresy charges are only part of the broader problem of fundamentalist Islam’s incompatibility with human rights. At its sternest, Islamic law prescribes the death penalty for anybody who commits “apostasy”—or abandons the faith. In its most obvious sense, that refers to people who openly convert to another religion. In many Muslim countries, law or social pressure makes such a choice almost impossible. That is a severe limit on religious freedom.
An insidious charge
But liberty is abused in an equally insidious way when accusers conflate apostasy with heresy—by alleging that somebody claiming to be a Muslim has erred by advancing false interpretations. This is almost impossible for the “offender” to disprove. However strongly the accused may protest that he or she remains loyal to Islam, the accusers can still find some ground on which to prove guilt.
So who will speak up for Mr Qimani and similar outcasts? Statements in his defence would carry huge weight if they came from prominent Muslim figures, especially those who happened to disagree with his ideas on Islamic history.
Perhaps people living in the repressive atmosphere that prevails in much of the Islamic world can be forgiven if their courage falters. But what of the Muslim diaspora? So far, just a handful of Muslims living in the West have spoken out unequivocally for the rights of coreligionists with dissonant views to live in safety (see article below). There should be more of them. Indeed, there is an opportunity here for somebody. It turns out the French thinker Voltaire probably never uttered the words so often ascribed to him: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” So the way is clear. Let some Western Muslim sage be the first philosopher to make that pronouncement, and mean it.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14172611
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A bold Muslim voice
From harsh terrain
Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition
We should love heretics, not kill them, says an unconventional scholar
ON THE face of things, Sudan is stony ground for Islamic reformers. It is a country where allegations of apostasy—departing from Islam, or merely straying slightly from the received interpretation of the faith—have often been deployed as a lethal weapon in political power struggles. In 1985 a leading opponent of the regime was hanged after a court declared him to be an apostate. In recent years Sudan’s best-known Islamist, Hassan al-Turabi, has been decried as an apostate by certain greybeards, simply because he dared to suggest that men and women were equal.
But that is not the whole story of Sudan and Islam. That country has also produced a passionate advocate of the view that you can be a faithful Muslim while also supporting the right of more than one reading of the faith to exist.
Abdullahi an-Na’im is now a law professor at Emory University in Georgia—and when he returns to his native Sudan, it is as an American passport-holder. That is just as well, given what he practises and preaches.
For theocrats, the professor says, “heresy charges have always been an easy way out, a way to explain difficult problems.” And, one might add, to eliminate difficult people. Last year, he co-organised a conference (in Atlanta, a city that calls itself “too busy to hate”) that was provocatively devoted to the “Celebration of Heresy”.
“Dissident views are healthy for the religion,” he insists. “To keep the religion honest, it is very important that somebody should take the risk of being denounced as heretical.”
And if anybody (in America, at least) applies the H-word to him, he does not mind: “Only God can judge that—so let me take my chances with God.” In any case, he insists that his liberal reading of Islam is closer to the roots of the faith than the theocrats’ interpretations are.
In its core theology, he maintains, Islam is radically democratic; for example, it is an important principle that no earthly or religious authority can come between the believer and God. The problem is simply that “sociologically, the world of Islam is conservative.” He is trying to break that mould.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14183053
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Egypt and global Islam
The battle for a religion's heart
Aug 6th 2009 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition
In an ideological contest between radicals, populists and moderates, speaking out can still carry a heavy personal cost
And the good news, from Islam-watchers in Egypt, is that the appeal of the most violent kind of Islamist radicalism has been waning for some time. That decline is also noticeable in many neighbouring countries—and indeed in most Muslim places, apart from bloodstained peripheries like Pakistan’s Swat Valley.
It is not just Osama bin Laden who has been holed up in remote exile. His ideology of global jihad has also retreated. Stung by public disgust with nihilist terror, and seeing the radicals’ failure to consolidate tangible gains, some prominent preachers of endless jihadhave repented their ways.
Jihadist ideology has also been facing what may prove to be bigger threats than those posed by military setbacks or defections. Clerics from the broader ideological mainstream of Islam, where most Muslims put themselves, are condemning nihilist extremism with greater boldness.
Also, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are Muslim doubters, revisionists and reformers, who have had to mute their voices for fear of being branded apostates. Some of them are again speaking out, though it still takes a lot of courage.
If ultraradicals are in retreat, and bold moderates are finding their voice, that reflects several converging factors. There is a fading of the anxiety, which reached a peak under the Bush administration, that Islam itself was the target of a concerted Western campaign. Barack Obama’s outreach to Muslims, and America’s intent to withdraw from Iraq, have reduced the pressure on clerics to posture as tough defenders of the faith who excuse jihadism. Also, the spread of freer media in some places has emboldened modernisers and exposed a wider public to their thinking.
The strongest recent critique of global jihadism has come from a figure who is himself controversial in the West: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an 82-year-old Egyptian who lives in Qatar, and a familiar figure, through his broadcasts, to Muslims across the world. He is a canny, theologically conservative populist, whose scathing references to Jews and homosexuals have made him persona non grata in America and, as of 2008, Britain.
The range of reactions that Mr Qaradawi evokes is vast. At a meeting of Muslim scholars in Istanbul last month, he was idolised, outshining establishment figures from several countries. People queued to have their photographs taken with him and gushed with delight when he regaled them with songs during a boat trip. But for sceptical Western observers of Islam, his justification of suicide attacks in Israel makes him an odious figure.
The author of scores of books, the sponsor of a popular Islamist website, and the star of religious programming on the Arabic-language al-Jazeera satellite channel, Mr Qaradawi takes full advantage of his scholarly stature and his bully pulpit.
In a hefty new book, titled “The Jurisprudence of Jihad”, Mr Qaradawi restates his belief in the right of Muslims to resist “aggression”, and “foreign occupation”. But he castigates al-Qaeda’s notion of global jihad as “a mad declaration of war on the world” that seeks to “drive believers shackled towards paradise”. Repeating his call for a “middle path”, away from either defeatism or destructive zeal, Mr Qaradawi suggests that the best arena for today’s jihad may be the “realm of ideas, media and communication.”
Within Islam, these are not new positions: most mainstream clerics blasted the 9/11 attacks, even as they praised “resistance” in Iraq, Palestine and other conflicts seen as pitting Muslims against alien invaders. But coming from Mr Qaradawi, they put a seal of orthodoxy on the rejection by many ordinary Muslims of all-out worldwide jihadism. Guerrillas inspired by al-Qaeda may fight on in the wilds of Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Algeria, but in the slums and universities that once supplied fodder for jihad, fashions are trending elsewhere.
For some Muslims, the rejection of global jihad has led to a more individualistic, pacifist fundamentalism that emphasises “Islamic” behaviour in everyday life. But personal piety has been growing for a generation, and some are jaded by it; they are looking for new ideas.
Significant, in this light, is the recent award by Egypt’s culture ministry of a prize to one of the country’s most combative secularist writers, Sayed al-Qimani. The Egyptian authorities would hardly have dared to offer such a prize a decade ago. Beleaguered then by Islamists and a tide of public piety, the ostensibly secular government was prone to posing as a defender of orthodoxy. Book bannings, charges of blasphemy, and death threats against secularists (one of which, against the writer Farag Foda, was carried out by Islamist militants in 1992) all served to silence criticism of the conservative line.
Qimani, eyes nervously on the prize
Mr Qimani, the pugnacious son of a provincial cleric, has himself been subjected to death threats, to the point where, fearing for his safety, he publicly repented of his purported sins in 2005, and abandoned writing for some years. Several of his dozen books, most of which are daringly revisionist accounts of early Islamic history, have been banned at al-Azhar’s orders, despite Mr Qimani’s protests that he remains a believer, albeit of a relatively non-doctrinaire sort.
Predictably, the prize has left Islamists fuming, with several filing lawsuits demanding that it be rescinded. Mr Qimani says his life is once again in danger, after a chorus of denunciations from several different strands of Egyptian Islam, ranging from establishment clergy to radical ones.
Such threats have worked in the past, most notoriously in the case of Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid, a Koranic scholar who fled Egypt after a court decreed him divorced from his wife, on grounds that his revisionist views rendered him an apostate, and therefore ineligible to be married to a Muslim woman. Yet so far the government has stood unusually firm on Mr Qimani’s side, partly because intellectuals have rallied to his defence, but perhaps also in a sign that it senses growing public impatience with the Islamists’ cries of blasphemy. More unusually still, Mr Qimani has been invited to air his views on television, including on one programme where he challenged any cleric to an open debate. None took up the offer.
In a land where pious words saturate airwaves and canonical texts fill bookshelves, the prominence of relatively secular types like Mr Qimani marks a trend.
Their following may be tiny compared with the adulation enjoyed by Mr Qaradawi. But it may be that on his declared jihad-ground of modern communications, the preacher will be facing not infidel crusaders, but fellow Muslims who want change and refuse to be intimidated.
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