(I’m going to write this in two parts: for today, a summary of the book; tomorrow I’ll tell you more of what I thought of it.)
From the subtitle alone, “Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now,” I was predisposed to agree with this book. (For new readers, here’s my post from January, “Islam needs a ‘Jewish Enlightenment‘”, in which I argued that the model for the development Islam is in need of is the Jewish Enlightenment, the movement that brought about Reform Judaism, and here are my comments on a similarly-themed book from March.)
So here’s the scoop: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a well-known (in conservative circles, anyway) critic of Islam; she was born in Somalia, and lived for a time in Saudi Arabia and Kenya before fleeing to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage; in the Netherlands, she came to abandon the very strict practice of Islam for atheism. In her new book, she says that if she had had the option of a “reformed Islam,” maybe she wouldn’t have felt the need to abandon the faith altogether. (p. 51)
She identifies three types of Muslims:
Mecca Muslims practice the faith with devotion but without militancy; Medina Muslims are aggressive in their belief that Islam should be dominant; Modifying Muslims are her ray of hope, a small, but not impossibly small number of Muslims who support reform.
And she lists five principles — her version of Luther’s 95 theses (from page 24):
1) Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along iwth the literalist reading of the Qur’an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina;
2) The investment in life after death instead of life before death;
3) Sharia, the body of legislation derived from the Qur’an, the hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence;
4) The practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong;
5) The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.
Why has there been no reform to now?
Innovation of faith is one of the gravest sins in Islam, on a par with murder and apostasy. . . . It is important to grasp the extent to which religion is intertwined with politics and political systems in Islamic societies. . . . This fusion of the spiritual and the temporal offers an initial clue as to why a Muslim Reformation has yet to happen. For it was in large measure the separateness of church and state in early modern Europe that made the Christian Reformation viable. (p. 56 – 57)
On Islam and modernity:
The golden age of Islamic science and philosophy, which predated the European Enlightenment, lies a thousand years in the past. While many Muslim nations have benefited from advances in science and economics, while they now have their gleaming skyscrapers and infrastructure, the philosophical revolution that grew out of the Protestant Reformation has largely passed them by. . . . Islam is content to use the West’s technological products . . . but resists the underlying values that produced them. (p. 59).
Any attempts at change, even early in Islam’s history, were shut down. More recently, in the 19th and early 20th century, reformers proposed, well, reform, but were condemned and denounced. Reformers in the late 20th century were, in one case, hanged (in Sudan) and, in other cases, had to flee to the West.
Because the Qur’an is inviolate, timeless, and perfect, what is written in it cannot be criticized, much less changed. (p. 64)
Optimism for the future:
I believe that a Reformation is not merely imminent; it is now underway. The Protestant Reformation itself erupted quite suddenly. With Islam, with equal suddenness, the change has already begun and will only accelerate in the years that lie ahead.
Recall the three factors that were crucial to the success of the Protestant Reformation: technological change, urbanization, and the interests of a significant number of European states in backing Luther’s challenge to the status quo. All three are present in the Muslim world today. (p. 69)
Example of el-Sisi’s speech.
The Qur’an, and the thesis to abandon its being sacrosanct:
The Allah of my childhood was a fiery diety. (p. 91)
Allah is not a benevolent father figure (p. 92) . . . In its scripture, Islam is also fundamentally different. It places more emphasis on divine omnipotence and less on human free will.
As to the violent verses that we’re told have to be seen in context, and don’t really promote violence, she says that
The 25 leading approved Quran Interpretations (commentaries) — that are usually used by Muslims to understand the Quran — unambiguously support the violent understanding of the verse. (p. 94)
Also note that there have never been the same sort of textual studies of the Qur’an as have occurred with the Bible, analysis of the development of the book over time; it’s simply verboten.
Changing central aspects of Islamic doctrine became even more difficult in the tenth century. At that time, jurists of the various schools of law decided that all the essential questions had been settled and that permitting any new interpretations would not be productive.
2nd problem: the centrality of life after death, to the point of motivating jihadists.
The preeminence of the hereafter get[s] drummed into Muslims. . . (p. 113)
with a very fixed, literal conception of heaven, and
Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons. (p. 117)
Fixation on the afterlife also produces fatalism about this one. Minor examples: in the Netherlands, she observed that the immigrant Muslims littered without hesitation, and shrugged it off as “God’s will.” Same with polygamy and large families beyond their capacity to care for, who “run about, wild and unsupervised, at all hours”: “God’s will.”
There is a fatalism that creeps into one’s worldview when this life is seen as transitory and the next is the only one that matters. Why pick up trash, why discipline your children, when none of those acts is stored up for any type of reward? Those are not the behaviors that mark good Muslims; they have nothing to do with praying or proselytizing. (p. 124)
In other words, if I follow this and prior comments, she’s saying that Muslims don’t have the same conception of what it means to lead a good or sinful life as we imagine as Christians/Westerners.
This, too, helps explain the notorious underrepresentation of Muslims as scientific and technological innovators. . . . Though it is unfashionable to say so, Islam’s fatalism is a more plausible explanation for the Muslim world’s failure to innovate. (p. 125)
The Chapter 5 title: “Shackled by Sharia: How Islam’s Harsh Religious Code Keeps Muslims Stuck in the Seventh Century” pretty much sums up the whole next chapter. Its features are well-known by now: beheadings and amputations, and for “crimes” that are not even crimes at all: apostasy, “blasphemy”, adultery or non-marital sex, homosexuality. Plus, sharia prescribes all manner of mistreatment of women, from spousal abuse to unequal laws on divorce and child custody. And Sharia as law of the land has wide support among Muslims.
There is probably no realistic chance that Muslims in countries such as Pakistan will agree to dispense with sharia. However, we in the West must insist that Muslims living in our societies abide by our rule of law. . . . Moreover, under no circumstances should Western coutries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong int he seventh century.
Yet that is not enough. We must also address and reform Islam’s most powerful social tool: the informal grassroots enforcement of its strictest religious principles in the name of commanding right and forbidding wrong. (p. 152)
Which is the subject of chapter 6 — the rigorous social control, the determination of the “Medina Muslims” to regulate every aspect of life for those around them, even to the point of honor killings. Even when not at the extreme of killing, this social control takes away from any privacy in one’s home or family.
The last topic is Jihad: she points out that the jihadists are not fleeing poverty, but come from middle-class, even wealthy families. She identifies the passages in the Qur’an that call for jihad, and points to the fact that jihadists are becoming celebrities on social media. She traces the origins of jihadi leaders and groups, a script followed by Boko Haram, and by her experiences as a child and teen: they begin by preaching a fundamentalist, but not explicitly violent message of a more pure practice of the faith, and gain followers, then confront the established community leaders and move into a more aggressive, violent phase.
And the West, reluctant to be seen as confronting “Islam,” has been tolerant of radical groups and indifferent to the threat they pose.
Is Jihad curable? There are efforts among various groups to define jihad in a way that precludes terrorist groups: the Saudi “deprogramming” effort, for instance, says, that only “the legitimate rules or Islamic states, not individuals such as Osama bin Laden, can declare a holy war. (p. 204) — but this still leaves room for groups such as ISIS to say, “we are a ‘state’ and therefore legitimate jihadists.”
It is obviously next to impossible to redefine the word “jihad” as if its call to arms is purely metaphorical (in the style of the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”. There is too much conflicting scripture, and too many examples from the Qur’an and hadith that the jihadists can cite to bolster their case.
Therefore I believe the best option would be to take it off the table. (p. 206)
The Twilight of Tolerance — chapter 8 — largely says the West is blind to the issue. But what can the West do? Openly support reformist groups within Islam, in the same way as we supported anti-communist groups during the Cold war. (p. 218 ff)
Then Ali restates her call, and, in her final chapter and in an appendix, provides some detail on Muslim reformers and dissidents, most of whom, unfortunately live in the West or, if in Muslim countries, have faced jail time or worse.
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