I’ve been sitting on this for a while, after hastily writing up my summary of Heretic before returning the book to the library.
In the first place, it seems a bit silly to say that Ali is persuasive, since I was predisposed to believe what she wrote and it was in line with my own thinking anyway, having, back in January (pre-patheos) been on a bit of a kick of writing about Islam, from wildly speculating about how a “moderate Muslim” might reconcile the “sword verses” to a belief in peace, to my post on the Jewish Enlightenment as a model (I thought this was a pretty good post, and was peeved that I couldn’t get any traction from it), as well as my more recent summary of a book by a Modifying Muslim, to use Ali’s terminology.
But Ali’s point is this: the problem with Islam is not simply the “sword verses” but several big, all-encompassing elements of the religion: the demand that the Qur’an and other founding documents must be interpreted in line with one or another of the historical schools of thought, firmly in place a millennium ago; the insistence that the Qur’an is, in every last word, the word of God precisely transcribed, with no room for historical analysis; the demand that the dictates of Islam be all-encompassing and prescribe all aspects of one’s life; and the dangerous focus on the afterlife and the fatalism about this life — plus, of course, the belief that Islam should properly dominate everyone and everywhere.
Now, that may not be how Islam plays out in the daily lives of every last one of its adherents; I’ve read that in Malaysia and Indonesia, Islam is more “moderate,” though I don’t know exactly how that plays out. (Maybe something for later reading?) But these core ideas are fundamental to Islam, at least as it exists in the Middle East and Africa, and as it’s been transplanted to Europe and the Americas.
We in the West tend, with our desire for ecumenism, to believe that all religions are basically the same, that the dual commands to love God and love your neighbor, and the idea that God loves us, his creation, are not just core to Christianity but to all religions. When Obama gave his Prayer Breakfast speech, I observed that his denial that ISIS is “Islamic” seemed to be this sort of reasoning: “religions are about love, ISIS isn’t loving, therefore ISIS isn’t a religion but something else, and if ISIS isn’t any kind of religion, then it can’t be Islamic.” That’s nonsense. The core idea of Islam is not “God is love” — it’s very name itself communicates that the core idea is “God demands your submission.”
And, to the best of my understanding, it is key that violent jihad is not just some wild idea that’s quite disconnected from Islam, but, to the contrary, the idea of peaceful coexistence has been, you might say, grafted onto Islam only very recently, and without much success. In my “Jewish Enlightement” post, I link to an article profiling Muslim religious leaders in Chicago trying to combat the appeal of extremists, but they really appear to have have few tools at their disposal other than “don’t join ISIS because we said so.”
But bypassing all this:
Ali profiles reformers and expresses optimism that they will ultimately convert their comrades. In the same way as the developers of Reform Judaism said, the religious laws of the Torah and Talmud are particular to a given time and place, but “Central and changeless is the belief in the one and holy God, who is to be served through righteousness and mercy.” (The latter is a quote from the book I referenced in the prior post.) — in that same way, these new Islamic reformers begin with a fundamental belief about God as Good, and are willing to either discard, or reinterpret (with alternate translation of Arabic words with multiple meanings, or with placing certain texts as applicable only to the fixed circumstances they were written in — e.g., the Sword Verses as a sort of pep talk never intended to encourage literal wholesale slaughter) any text that doesn’t conform.
Which is all well and good. But the challenge for us who are not Muslim is this: what role, if any, can we play? And what role should the government play? Ali suggests that the government put more effort into supporting reformers, in the same way as we supported anti-communists. And it is clear that Obama, and Bush before him were too eager to accept into the “moderate Muslim” fold anyone who was willing to claim that they “opposed terrorism” without any due skepticism of what the so-called moderates had in mind. Ali, indeed, profiles some of these individuals who were welcomed into the “moderate” fold despite words and deeds demonstrating quite the opposite. (I’d give you specifics but the book is back at the library now.) And at the same time, neither Obama now nor Bush then, were willing to confront Middle Eastern governments for the violations of human rights that imprisoned reformers there, and certainly prevent reform movements from taking root — Bush being concerned about maintaining Saudi Arabia’s support and Obama with blinders on or simple indifference with respect to Iran.
So it seems clear that support for these reformers ought to be part and parcel of support for human rights abroad.
But beyond that, given that we have all manner of community outreach programs for Muslim immigrant communities in the United States, should we be more demanding in what qualifies one as a “moderate Muslim” in terms of how the grant money is distributed?
Here’s the problem: how far can we go before crossing a line, into religious discrimination?
Hillary Clinton’s statement that for women to enjoy full freedom, via “reproductive health care,”
deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed
rightly upset conservatives; so, too, the efforts of the gay rights movement to convince Christian denominations to eliminate gay sex from the “sin list” (see this old post).
Much as I’d like for Muslims to adopt a more “enlightened” form of their religion, I don’t know what the right role is for non-Muslims to play.
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