What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself. It is not just al Qaeda and Islamic State that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death.
It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed and where beheadings are a legitimate form of punishment. As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.
As it turns out, the West has some experience with this sort of reformist project. It is precisely what took place in Judaism and Christianity over the centuries, as both traditions gradually consigned the violent passages of their own sacred texts to the past.
Many parts of the Bible and the Talmud reflect patriarchal norms, and both also contain many stories of harsh human and divine retribution. Yet today, because their faiths went through a long, meaningful process of Reformation and Enlightenment, the vast majority of Jews and Christians have come to dismiss religious scripture that urges intolerance or violence. There are literalist fringes in both religions, but they are true fringes.
Regrettably, in Islam, it is the other way around: It is those seeking religious reform who are the fringe element. Despite some sectarian differences, this creed unites all Muslims. The Shahada might seem to be a declaration of belief no different from any other. But the reality is that the Shahada is both a religious and a political symbol. Unbelievers were still invited to submit to Allah, but after Medina, they were attacked if they refused.
If defeated, they were given the option to convert or to die. Jews and Christians could retain their faith if they submitted to paying a special tax. No symbol represents the soul of Islam more than the Shahada. But today there is a contest within Islam for the ownership of that symbol. Who owns the Shahada? On this basis, I believe that we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims. The first group is the most problematic. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version.
What is more, they take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else. I shall call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Shariah as their religious duty.
Even if they do not themselves engage in violence, they do not hesitate to condone it. If religious authorities are forced to impose a state-sanctioned version of Islam on their communities they risk being viewed as mere mouthpieces of the state, which would severely compromise their legitimacy and present radical actors with an opportunity to gain more ground to advance their cause.
In the first Friday prayers after Ben Ali left the country, preachers who used to praise him were prevented by the people from entering mosques. At the same time, about mosques are believed to have come under Salafi control , with around 50 under Salafi jihadist control. The wiping out of legitimate religious actors under the regime meant that the religious field was almost empty when the regime fell. Radical religious groups took advantage of this vacuum to spread their ideas and recruit new members.
Reforming Islam — or any other religious tradition for that matter — cannot be dictated by the state. It must be the result of a long process of ideological exchange between Muslim leaders and their followers, and must respond to the specific political and socio-economic context.
In her courageous way she opens a pressing issue and demands we think seriously about it. Not looking to cloud your day but winter is knocking! No need to wait until next weekend to score sweet sales on gadgets, gear.
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Sign up. Read the Shopping Essentials newsletter for unbiased, unsponsored product recommendations every week. Read the Shopping Essentials newsletter for unbiased product recommendations every week. Reforms are of course needed across the crisis-ridden Muslim-majority world: political, socio-economic and, yes, religious too.
It is much easier for them, it seems, to reduce the complex debate over violent extremism to a series of cliches, slogans and soundbites, rather than examining root causes or historical trends; easier still to champion the most extreme and bigoted critics of Islam while ignoring the voices of mainstream Muslim scholars, academics and activists.
Hirsi Ali, for instance, was treated to a series of encomiums and softball questions in her blizzard of US media interviews, from the New York Times to Fox News. Those who cry so simplistically, and not a little inanely, for an Islamic reformation, should be careful what they wish for. This article is more than 6 years old. Mehdi Hasan.
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