My Perspective on Islam

Personal Preface

In this note, I spell out my perspective on Islam. It was written as a background paper for a book I have been writing with the working title: Islam and Modernity/Transforming a Tradition from Within. I shall soon be e-mailing this along with the book’s Outline and its Table of Contents to interested publishers here in India and abroad.

So far I have only e-mailed an inquiry to Prometheus Books of New York asking whether they might be interested in my somewhat radical thesis summed up in the book’s principal chapter entitled ‘Situating the Quran in History’.

Why Prometheus Books? Because I came across on the Internet recently the following comment put out by a fellow-Muslim, Ibn Warraq, but now a renegade from Islam. Here in two bracketed paras is the essence what he has to say:

[Ever since the infamous ’fatwa’ on Rushdie, most publishers in the West have carefully avoided books that might even remotely be critical of Islam. Though often disguised as some higher moral principle, the real reason for avoiding such books is fear. They have such a book first carefully scrutinized by experts or even Muslims themselves and insist on the removal of offending passages — self-censorship, in short. I have in mind the case of Paul Fregosi, the author of Jihad in the West, a history of Islamic Holy War in Europe from the 7th to the 20th centuries. According to Fregosi, the publisher who commissioned his book is too frightened of Islamic fundamentalists to publish it. It seems the manuscript of his book was carefully examined by a minor British academic who has converted to Islam and was found insulting to his newly adopted religion. Whereupon its publication was cancelled. The publishers are afraid of Islamic fundamentalists, says Fregosi; but Richard Beswick who commissioned the book insists the controversial book is unpublishable because it is not good enough . . .

[The only publisher in the world that dares publish books critical of Islam is Prometheus Books, based in New York State].

Given the defensive state of the Muslim mind today, my book, if and when published, is bound, I know, to run into controversy for the simple reason that it touches on as delicate and sensitive a subject as the Quran. The Quran, as you know, is regarded by Muslims to be above and beyond any scrutiny since the time that the official doctrine of the "closing of the doors of ijtihad" (innovative interpretation of the scriptures) was accepted some time between the 10th and 12 centuries being replaced by the clergy-inspired doctrine of "blind imitation of the past".

I believe - and anyone who reads the book will agree - that my central thesis about the Quran is not radical in the sense that either Salman Rushdie’s in the late 1980s or Taslima Nasreeen’s in the mid-1990s was. Its ‘controversial’ section, if it may be called that, seeks to revive and reconstruct a glorious chapter from the intellectual history of Islam during which lively theological discussions took place upon the very issue about the Quran that my book brings into focus - namely whether it is timeless or historically specific scripture.

I am referring here, as some of you would know from my previous writings, to the debates between the radical Mutazitlite and the conservative Asharite schools of theology, both of which were regarded as mainstream and "within the tradition". These debates continued for nearly two centuries without any clerical protest from the orthodoxy of the time. Even so, I am aware, my innocuous exercise to revive this grand story can be and will be misrepresented by vested interests with a view to castigating me and also perhaps my publisher. While I myself am willing to run that risk, I would not like the publisher to do so – unless he/she knowingly wishes to, in the interest of upholding the right to freedom of expression.

Hence this long apologetic preface to a book which is still in its final-draft stage. I feel, what it still lacks is the finishing touch of a good and sympathetic editor and/or publisher. I shall be grateful if any of you can put me in touch with him/her.

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Background paper

The Muslim world has served as a convenient whipping boy for analysts in the West seeking to explain the complex and multi-dimensional reality inappropriately called ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. Few of them have paused to ask, however, what the term means and what precisely it implies.

Fastidious scholars point out that the term ‘fundamentalism’, applied to any faith other than Christianity, is a misnomer. This was the name originally given to a movement among 19th century Protestant Christians who held everything written in the Bible to be the literal truth. The term has long since been used in the media as well as in academic writings to describe a parallel situation in any faith where scriptural literalism prevails. It seems unnecessary now to give up this convenient shorthand reference.

Muslim critics usually make the point there is nothing wrong if one believes firmly – and rigidly - in the ‘fundamentals’ of one’s faith. Nor is there anything wrong if a Believer holds his scriptures to be literally true. These are, at best, a matter of individual preference and, at worst, a sign of extreme conservatism in the interpretation of one’s religious texts – in neither case a subject of much societal concern.

Is fundamentalism then more appropriately described as religious extremism? Religious extremism does not, in my view, offer a sufficient explanation for this peculiar phenomenon. Fundamentalism, as generally understood today, is much more than religious extremism. One way to define it is to say it is religious extremism, plus a political motivation to exploit differences between peoples, communities and nations, plus an arrogant intolerance of ’the other’. Historically, such extremist ideologies have been known to degenerate into militancy and violence in the case of any religious faith, including such quietist ones as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Yet, Islam’s case, it needs to be said, is somewhat different. Here, a ‘literalness’ doctrine more readily transforms an otherwise peaceful faith into a militant, even sanguinary one. Responsible for this is the fact that Islam has from its very inception been a religio-political ideology: religion and politics mix more easily in it than in other religions.

However, Islam is not a monolith. Although the religion took birth in Arabia in the 7th century of the Christian Era (CE) - and while its basic tenets and teachings are held in common in the different countries to which it has been transplanted - in respect of the minutiae of observance, it takes on a distinctly local colour depending on the culture of its new location.

For example, Islam as practised in the countries of the South Asian subcontinent - Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – differs in respect of the detailed observance from Islam in Indonesia, while Islam in each of these regions differs from the Islam of their common homeland, Arabia. In fact, as one travels further east and west from the Arabian heartland, there is what Ira Lapidus observed about Islam in Indonesia a ‘shallow integration’ of Islamic values with the local culture.

There is also another difficulty about making a one-size-fits-all statement about Islam, as the eminent Pakistani scholar, Fazlur Rahman, pointed out. Most Muslims in the modern world adhere simply to what he called ‘practical Islam’. What does this imply? A vast majority of Muslims find it sufficient for the purpose of belief if they observe the teachings of Islam according to their own personal interpretation of it (‘according to its true spirit’, as they would like to put it).

Specifically, for a ‘practical’ Muslim no matter which part of the world he hails from in that vast swathe of territories that comprises the ‘Islamic Crescent’ – from Mauretania in the west to Indonesian the east and from Cypress in the north to the Sudan in the south – it is enough to be a Muslim if one observes the minimum Quran-ordained duties of daily prayer, a month-long fast, the annual payment of ‘zakat’ (charity), and possibly a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca (‘the hajj’).

Such regional and ideological expressions of Islam notwithstanding, fundamentalist Islam is the only variant of Islam that is uniformly and universally subscribed to by Muslim militants no matter which part of the world they come from. Read with the fact that an overwhelmingly large number of the terrorist acts that take place in the world today are either master-minded or carried out by groups of Muslim individuals or groups, most of whom are able to cite chapter and verse from the scriptures to justify the murder and mayhem involved, it is easy to see why most non-Muslims in the world today explicitly or tacitly believe that all Muslims - at any rate, all ‘literalist’ Muslims - are militants.

However, even a cursory glance at the facts shows that the vast majority of Muslims the world over, even those who believe in the literalness of their scriptures, are not militants baying for the blood of the ‘kafir’. There are of course a handful of fanatics among them who, like militants subscribing to any extremist ideology, believe in the tactical use of terror, essentially a weapon of the weak, often in the process staking their own lives in the misguided pursuit of a so-called religious cause.

Such Muslims constitute a class by themselves. And however much one may empathize with their often-just cause (a humanist can never endorse the terrorist’s targeting of innocent civilians to redress his/her grievance - no matter how grave the felt injustice; man’s instinct for self-preservation asserts itself: "If it is them today, it will be us tomorrow"), it is necessary for an objective study of the phenomenon to strip down the rhetoric behind the ideology that drives them and the methods they employ to their bare essentials. Before one does so, however, it is necessary to set the issue in some sort of perspective.

The terrorism of the fundamentalist Muslim today is only a little different from the terrorism indulged in by, say, ‘Naxalite-Communist’ youths in the Indian state of West Bengal in the mid-1970s, or by various militant ‘Maoist’ groups in other parts of the world, most recently in Nepal - except in one rather crucial respect. Muslim terrorism today, however, tends often to be cross-border and, after the 9/11 attack on US territory, one might say, even cross-oceanic; whereas in most other comparable instances, the terror is essentially domestic, confined to the borders of one’s own country.

It is this element that represents the real danger to Islam in today’s admittedly unjust world. The danger arises from the principle of ‘ummah’ solidarity (‘ummah’ is the Arabic word for the global community of Islam) which is a tenet too deeply embedded in the Islamic ethos to be easily separated from it. Such ‘extra-territorial’ terrorism naturally provokes a fiercer retributory response from the rest of the world because it seeks to undermine the international structures of peaceful coexistence laboriously and painfully set up in the post-Cold War years.

And so to the rationale behind the ideology of Islamic militants. Their ideology, if it can be called that, is made up of the following loose strands of thought. The primary objective is to attract the world’s attention to an injustice strongly perceived to be done to them or, at one remove, to the global Islamic community - an injustice that arises more often from political rather than religious causes. Sometimes, however, their sense of grievance assumes a millenarian character, as it seemed to do in Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 fulminations against the iniquities of Western modernity which, he felt, could only be put to rights through the advent of a global Islamic order – yet another instance of the distortion resulting from a literalist reading of the Quran.

So much for what passes off for their ideology. As for the method employed by fundamentalist militants, it is the classic one of creating a random regime of terror, with the consequential disruption of civilian life used as a bargaining counter to pressure the authorities to concede their tough and often impossible demands. Tragically, the loss suffered through terrorism of the lives of innocent men, women and children is sought to be explained away by the militant as ‘collateral damage’ – ironically, the very same plea the US government uses to rid itself of the guilt of civilian casualties caused by its trigger-happy wars.