Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (26 page)

Second, Muslims often hear from the West only its most hostile rhetoric. When Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo suggested on Fox News in 2005 that America could “bomb Mecca” as an “ultimate response” to Islamist terrorism, most Americans probably did not even notice. But the next day, I looked at Islamic newspapers and websites in Turkey and read the headline: “America now dares to threaten Islam with the destruction of the Ka’ba!” This tendency to perceive the most radical elements in the other civilization as its mainstream, unfortunately, is widespread in both civilizations. The media, on both sides, focus on the lunatics.

Similarly, when Switzerland banned minarets in a nationwide vote in 2009, it created an iconic double standard for many Muslims. “Look at the West that you keep praising,” a Turkish reader of mine wrote to me angrily; “their freedom is only for atheists and gays, not Muslims.” I tried to explain that Switzerland’s vote did not represent all of Europe, let alone America, but I am sure there were millions who thought as he did whom I could not reach. On the other side, there are millions of Americans who learn that Saudi Arabia allows not a single church on its territory and wrongly assume that this is what “Islam” commands. The fact that churches exist in almost every other Muslim-majority country gets little notice.

The gap between the East and the West is even wide with regard to the way we perceive time. Americans often think in terms of current events, which are constantly changing, whereas people in the Middle East think in terms of history. When U.S. troops occupied Iraq in 2003, many Americans thought that this was an unprecedented initiative, based on the vision of the neoconservatives and the military strategies of Donald Rumsfeld. For most people in the region, though, it was yet another invasion—after those of the Crusaders, the Mongols, Napoleon, and the European colonizers.

On the cultural level, there is also a huge gap between the materialistic and hedonistic pop culture of the West and that of traditional Muslims. But the West has another face that looks approachable to those same Muslims. I remember from my childhood that my pious grandparents and their like-minded neighbors loved watching
Little House on the Prairie
, which was then aired on Turkish television, dubbed in Turkish. The family values portrayed in that series, although Christian, looked admirable to the Islamic faithful. (
Sex and the City
, of course, would be scandalous.) Unless expressed as hostility to Islam, what offends conservative Muslims is really not the West’s Christianness. Rather, it is the lack of it.

The “Romans” of our era would be wise to consider these points if they want to help calming down the “Zealots” on our side. But there are also things that we as the “Jews” (I mean of course, Muslims) also can do. And one of them is exactly what a wise Nazarene did two thousand years ago: show the Zealots, and their base, the Pharisees, that with their zeal for an earthly kingdom of God, they have lost the heavenly connection with Him.

I
NCORPORATING
M
ARXISM-
L
ENINISM

To explain what I mean, let me go back to 1992, my second year in college. One day, I encountered a distant friend I had known in high school. He had not been a particularly observant Muslim, and, like most youngsters of our age and milieu in Istanbul, he used to be more interested in girls and cars than in mosques and prayers. So I was somewhat surprised when I learned that he had recently started to pray five times a day. “That’s really nice,” I said, over coffee in the school’s cafeteria. “But, if I may ask, how come?”

His answer was surprising. “On TV, I saw those American planes bombing Baghdad,” he said. “I was so pissed that I wanted to do something to resist.”

The war to which my friend was referring was the First Gulf War. (God knows what he did after the Iraq War, which turned out to be far more dreadful.) He also told me he had some Arab roots and a few distant relatives in Baghdad. Watching that city bombarded live on CNN had apparently triggered feelings in him that translated into a sudden burst of religiosity.

This political motive for prayer was new to me, though. Daily prayer, as I learned many summers ago from my grandparents, was done for religious reasons—to worship God, gain His blessing, and purify the soul. Not to protest events playing out on the evening news.

My friend’s story, I believe, sheds light on a larger phenomenon that emerged in the Muslim world in the twentieth century. As Islamic liberalism waned, and resistance arose against the West and its influence, that very resistance started to replace genuine religiosity as the basis of Islam. The creators and the followers of this trend—Islamism—began to define Islam not as a path to God’s blessings and eternal salvation, as it is defined in the Qur’an, but instead as a political ideology that will help Muslims fight the Western-dominated world system. “Islam is a revolutionary doctrine and system that overturns governments,” wrote Mawdudi in 1941. “It seeks to overturn the whole universal social order . . . and establish its structure anew. . . . Islam seeks the world.”
⁴²

This “Islam” sounded very much like Marxism-Leninism—no wonder, since Mawdudi was heavily influenced by that ideology. Although he denounced both liberalism and Marxism as products of the secular West, he had to fill his new “Islam” with some ideological content. Since liberal Europe was the real enemy, and he needed something totalitarian, he borrowed freely from Marxist terminology and practice.
⁴³
In the 1940s, some of his admirers openly, and proudly, pictured him as the father of “a synthesis between socialism and Islam.”
⁴⁴
In fact, Mawdudi himself openly acknowledged that the “Islamic state” he envisioned “bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states,” in the way it dominates the whole society.
⁴⁵

The main mission of this totalitarian state would be to impose the Shariah on Muslim society—and, in the Islamist utopia, on the whole world. But which Shariah? In the premodern period, this question was not answered by the state. As we have seen, diverse schools of the Shariah were developed by various scholars, and individuals and communities could choose among them. Non-Muslims in Islamdom, for that matter, already had laws of their own. In that premodern age, after all, law was personal, not territorial. The Ottomans changed this in the nineteenth century by adopting the modern principle that law is territorial and equally binding on all citizens—and they standardized the Shariah by codifying it via the Mecelle. But they did this by reforming the Shariah and conceding the need for further reform by accepting the legal maxim, “Changing times legitimize the amendment of the law.”

The Islamist project, however, aimed at imposing “the original Shariah,” the one developed according to the norms of a dozen centuries ago. Moreover, unlike the classical period, in which the Shariah was a check on the powers of the executive, it now became an instrument of the executive. This combination of the powerful tools of the modern state and premodern standards of law would create a quite brutal and repressive system. The question of whether this tyranny would make people more devout—the Qur’an’s foremost concern—was not even asked. That wasn’t the issue. Establishing a “perfect system” that supposedly would bring earthly victory to Muslims was the issue.

T
HE
I
SLAMIST
R
ETREAT FROM
G
OD

Despite all its religious brouhaha, then, Islamism was in fact a “secular” political project—as is apparent in its slogans. Egyptian activist Hasan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood, which would become one of the two pillars of Islamism (along with Mawdudi’s Jamaat-e-Islami), contrasted “Islam” to both socialism and capitalism and, of course, argued that it was superior to both.
⁴⁶
The problem was not only the shallowness of this rhetoric—Islam does not provide a blueprint for governance—but also its relegation of Islam to a collectivist “system,” devoid of personal religiosity.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the late professor of religion, observed this strange trade-off between God and politics in his study of the evolution of the Egyptian journal
Majallat al-Azhar
from 1930 to 1948. During that time, the journal had two editors. The first, from 1930 to 1933, was al-Khidr Husain, a traditional Muslim. He saw religion as “a transcendent idea rather than a political and historical entity,” and he was confident enough to criticize Muslim behavior. The journal’s articles were full of either moral instructions or theological contemplations. The sublime beauty of nature, for example, was interpreted as a sign of God’s majesty. God, apart from everything else, was the object of veneration.
⁴⁷

In 1933, Farid Wajdi, an Islamist, took over the magazine, and the content became increasingly political. Wajdi’s main goal was to assure his readers that Islam as a “system” was perfect, especially when compared to Western systems. “The human reality of Islam,” in other words, was the new object of veneration, and “this earthly value had in some sense replaced the transcendent God.” According to Smith, a “profound irreligiousness” pervaded Wajdi’s journal, and God appeared remarkably seldom throughout its pages.
⁴⁸

Quite tellingly, this retreat from God did not bring any happiness on earth. In every country where they came to power—Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan—Islamists failed to create the heaven they promised. For it was not “Islam” in power, but totalitarianism in Islamic garb, and any totalitarianism is doomed to fail.

Allowing Islamists to engage in this trial-and-error process is perhaps better than allowing them to cling to an untested utopia. In places where they were not allowed to compete politically, they grew more radical, and ultimately violent. In Egypt, the brutal suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood by the country’s successive Herods—Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak—created more radical offshoots of the organization. Sayyid Qutb, the Arab counterpart of Mawdudi, grew more and more strident as a result of the torture he suffered in Egypt’s terrible prisons. His consequent call for
jihad
would inspire many radicals, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, after having had his own share of Egyptian torture, became the mastermind of al-Qaeda.
⁴⁹

The stories of these modern-day Zealots are now well known in the West—ever since some of them decided to attack the very heart of modern-day Rome on September 11, 2001. Since that tragic day, concerned Americans and other Westerners have focused on and discussed “the trouble with radical Islam.”

An equally important discussion should be held on how the more inspiring interpretations of Islam will be able to flourish. We have seen that the secularist project is a part of the problem, and not the solution. The attempt to push religion out of Muslim minds creates, in its worst forms, authoritarian regimes. Even its mild forms are unhelpful, for they fall short of addressing the religious aspirations of Muslim societies, something that is here to stay in the foreseeable future. We, after all, live not in a secularizing world but a de-secularizing one.
⁵⁰

But we have also seen that these two extremes—secularist and Islamist authoritarianism—were not the only options facing Muslim societies a century ago: there was also an emerging Islamic modernism that synthesized liberal politics with Muslim values. Was that an oddity of a bygone age? Or is it still a promising idea?

This is a question many minds from all over the world, Muslim and non-Muslim, are pondering these days. And the most interesting answer comes, again, from good old Turkey.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Turkish March to Islamic Liberalism

Perhaps the reason why we have not seen the proposal of a liberal development paradigm for the Middle East is because we have assumed that it must counter the Islamic trend.

—Leonard Binder,
Islamic Liberalism
¹

T
URKEY BEGAN 2008
in the shadow of a very heated debate. The issue was whether female university students could cover their hair with a headscarf—a practice allowed in the whole free world, except in Turkey, where it was banned by the staunchly secularist Constitutional Court in 1989. The incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP, with its Turkish initials) was a “conservative” party led by devout Muslims. They had just won a sweeping election victory six months earlier, in July 2007, and were willing to permit the headscarf—which most of their wives and daughters wore—at least on campuses.

In February, the AKP, with the support of two other parties in the Turkish parliament, passed an amendment that inserted two clauses into the constitution. One of them stated that all citizens, regardless of their religion, race, or ethnicity, would “benefit from public services equally.” The other amendment provided a guarantee: “No citizen can be barred from the right to higher education.”