 |
|||||||||||
|
Join Daniel Pipes in Cyprus in October 2013. For
more information, click here.
|
|||||||||||
|
Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and
submit your city & country location. We will use this information in
future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area.
Dear Reader:
Commentary requested an internet supplement for this article
and I chose the key passage on the Medieval Synthesis from my 1983 book, In
the Path of God; Islam and Political Power. If follows below, after the
main article.Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes
Can
Islam Be Reformed?
|
|
Share:
   |
Be the first of your
friends to like this.A growing body of analysts believe that no, the Muslim faith cannot do these things, that these features are inherent to Islam and immutably part of its makeup. Asked if she agrees with my formulation that "radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution," the writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali replied, "He's wrong. Sorry about that." She and I stand in the same trench, fighting for the same goals and against the same opponents, but we disagree on this vital point.
My argument has two parts. First, the essentialist position of many analysts is wrong; and second, a reformed Islam can emerge.
Arguing Against Essentialism
Rumi (1207-73), a
leading mystic of Islam.
|
Only by failing to account for human nature and by ignoring more than a millennium of actual changes in the Koran's interpretation can one claim that the Koran has been understood identically over time. Changes have applied in such matters as jihad, slavery, usury, the principle of "no compulsion in religion," and the role of women. Moreover, the many important interpreters of Islam over the past 1,400 years—ash-Shafi'i, al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiya, Rumi, Shah Waliullah, and Ruhollah Khomeini come to mind—disagreed deeply among themselves about the content of the message of Islam.
However central the Koran and Hadith may be, they are not the totality of the Muslim experience; the accumulated experience of Muslim peoples from Morocco to Indonesia and beyond matters no less. To dwell on Islam's scriptures is akin to interpreting the United States solely through the lens of the Constitution; ignoring the country's history would lead to a distorted understanding.
Put differently, medieval Muslim civilization excelled and today's Muslims lag behind in nearly every index of achievement. But if things can get worse, they can also get better. Likewise, in my own career, I witnessed Islamism rise from minimal beginnings when I entered the field in 1969 to the great powers it enjoys today; if Islamism can thus grow, it can also decline.
How might that happen?
The Medieval Synthesis
Shah Waliullah
(1703-62) a leading thinker of Indian Islam.
|
To get around these and other unrealistic demands, premodern Muslims developed certain legal fig leaves that allowed for the relaxation of Islamic provisions without directly violating them. Jurists came up with hiyal (tricks) and other means by which the letter of the law could be fulfilled while negating its spirit. For example, various mechanisms were developed to live in harmony with non-Muslim states. There is also the double sale (bai al-inah) of an item, which permits the purchaser to pay a disguised form of interest. Wars against fellow Muslims were renamed jihad.
This compromise between Sharia and reality amounted to what I dubbed Islam's "medieval synthesis" in my book In the Path of God (1983). This synthesis translated Islam from a body of abstract, infeasible demands into a workable system. In practical terms, it toned down Sharia and made the code of law operational. Sharia could now be sufficiently applied without Muslims being subjected to its more stringent demands. Kecia Ali, of Boston University, notes the dramatic contrast between formal and applied law in Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, quoting other specialists:
One major way in which studies of law have proceeded has been to "compare doctrine with the actual practice of the court." As one scholar discussing scriptural and legal texts notes, "Social patterns were in great contrast to the 'official' picture presented by these 'formal' sources." Studies often juxtapose flexible and relatively fair court outcomes with an undifferentiated and sometimes harshly patriarchal textual tradition of jurisprudence. We are shown proof of "the flexibility within Islamic law that is often portrayed as stagnant and draconian."
While the medieval synthesis worked over the centuries, it never overcame a fundamental weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or derived from the foundational, constitutional texts of Islam. Based on compromises and half measures, it always remained vulnerable to challenge by purists. Indeed, premodern Muslim history featured many such challenges, including the Almohad movement in 12th-century North Africa and the Wahhabi movement in 18th-century Arabia. In each case, purist efforts eventually subsided and the medieval synthesis reasserted itself, only to be challenged anew by purists. This alternation between pragmatism and purism characterizes Muslim history, contributing to its instability.
The Challenge of Modernity
The de facto solution offered by the medieval synthesis broke down with the arrival of modernity imposed by the Europeans, conventionally dated to Napoleon's attack on Egypt in 1798. This challenge pulled most Muslims in opposite directions over the next two centuries, to Westernization or to Islamization.Muslims impressed with Western achievements sought to minimize Sharia and replace it with Western ways in such areas as the nonestablishment of religion and equality of rights for women and non-Muslims. The founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), symbolizes this effort. Until about 1970, it appeared to be the inevitable Muslim destiny, with resistance to Westernization looking rearguard and futile.
Their views of Islam
differed as much as their appearances: Atatürk (left) and Khomeini.
|
Though rejecting the West, these movements—which are called Islamist—modeled themselves on the surging totalitarian ideologies of their time, Fascism and Communism. Islamists borrowed many assumptions from these ideologies, such as the superiority of the state over the individual, the acceptability of brute force, and the need for a cosmic confrontation with Western civilization. They also quietly borrowed technology, especially military and medical, from the West.
Through creative, hard work, Islamist forces quietly gained strength over the next half century, finally bursting into power and prominence with the Iranian revolution of 1978–79 led by the anti-Atatürk, Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-89). This dramatic event, and its achieved goal of creating an Islamic order, widely inspired Islamists, who in the subsequent 35 years have made great progress, transforming societies and applying Sharia in novel and extreme ways. For example, in Iran, the Shiite regime has hanged homosexuals from cranes and forced Iranians in Western dress to drink from latrine cans, and in Afghanistan, the Taliban regime has torched girls' schools and music stores. The Islamists' influence has reached the West itself, where one finds an increasing number of women wearing hijabs, niqabs, and burqas.
Although spawned as a totalitarian model, Islamism has shown much greater tactical adaptability than either Fascism or Communism. The latter two ideologies rarely managed to go beyond violence and coercion. But Islamism, led by figures such as Turkey's Premier Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954-) and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), has explored nonrevolutionary forms of Islamism. Since it was legitimately voted into office in 2002, the AKP gradually has undermined Turkish secularism with remarkable deftness by working within the country's established democratic structures, practicing good government, and not provoking the wrath of the military, long the guardian of Turkish secularism.
The Islamists are on the march today, but their ascendance is recent and offers no guarantees of longevity. Indeed, like other radical utopian ideologies, Islamism will lose its appeal and decline in power. Certainly the 2009 and 2013 revolts against Islamist regimes in Iran and Egypt, respectively, point in that direction.
Toward a Modern Synthesis
If Islamism is to be defeated, anti-Islamist Muslims must develop an alternative vision of Islam and explanation for what it means to be a Muslim. In doing so, they can draw on the past, especially the reform efforts from the span of 1850 to1950, to develop a "modern synthesis" comparable to the medieval model. This synthesis would choose among Shari precepts and render Islam compatible with modern values. It would accept gender equality, coexist peacefully with unbelievers, and reject the aspiration of a universal caliphate, among other steps.Here, Islam can profitably be compared with the two other major monotheistic religions. A half millennium ago, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all broadly agreed that enforced labor was acceptable and that paying interest on borrowed money was not. Eventually, after bitter and protracted debates, Jews and Christians changed their minds on these two issues; today, no Jewish or Christian voices endorse slavery or condemn the payment of reasonable interest on loans.
Among Muslims, however, these debates have only begun. Even if formally banned in Qatar in 1952, Saudi Arabia in 1962, and Mauritania in 1980, slavery still exists in these and other majority-Muslim countries (especially Sudan and Pakistan). Some Islamic authorities even claim that a pious Muslim must endorse slavery. Vast financial institutions worth possibly as much as $1 trillion have developed over the past 40 years to enable observant Muslims to pretend to avoid either paying or receiving interest on money, ("pretend" because the Islamic banks merely disguise interest with subterfuges such as service fees.)
The planned building
for the Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, one of the world's largest no-interest
financial institutions.
|
Already in this young century, a few positive signs in this direction can be discerned. Note some developments concerning women:
Darul Uloom Deoband,
a bastion of Islamist thinking in India.
|
- Saudi Arabia's Shura Council has responded to rising public outrage over child marriages by setting the age of majority at 18. Though this doesn't end child marriages, it moves toward abolishing the practice.
- Turkish clerics have agreed to let menstruating women attend mosque and pray next to men.
- The Iranian government has nearly banned the stoning of convicted adulterers.
- Women in Iran have won broader rights to sue their husbands for divorce.
- A conference of Muslim scholars in Egypt deemed clitoridectomies contrary to Islam and, in fact, punishable.
- A key Indian Muslim institution, Darul Uloom Deoband, issued a fatwa against polygamy.
- The Saudi government abolished jizya (the practice of enforcing a poll tax on non-Muslims).
- An Iranian court ordered the family of a murdered Christian to receive the same compensation as that of a Muslim victim.
- Scholars meeting at the International Islamic Fiqh Academy in Sharjah have started to debate and challenge the call for apostates to be executed.
Nadin al-Badir and
the first lines of her 2009 call for polyandry.
|
Like its medieval precursor, the modern synthesis will remain vulnerable to attack by purists, who can point to Muhammad's example and insist on no deviation from it. But, having witnessed what Islamism, whether violent or not, has wrought, there is reason to hope that Muslims will reject the dream of reestablishing a medieval order and be open to compromise with modern ways. Islam need not be a fossilized medieval mentality; it is what today's Muslims make of it.
Policy Implications
What can those, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who oppose Sharia, the caliphate, and the horrors of jihad, do to advance their aims?For anti-Islamist Muslims, the great burden is to develop not just an alternative vision to the Islamist one but an alternative movement to Islamism. The Islamists reached their position of power and influence through dedication and hard work, through generosity and selflessness. Anti-Islamists must also labor, probably for decades, to develop an ideology as coherent and compelling as that of the Islamists, and then spread it. Scholars interpreting sacred scriptures and leaders mobilizing followers have central roles in this process.
Non-Muslims can help a modern Islam move forward in two ways: first, by resisting all forms of Islamism—not just the brutal extremism of an Osama bin Laden, but also the stealthy, lawful, political movements such as Turkey's AKP. Erdoğan is less ferocious than Bin Laden, but he is more effective and no less dangerous. Whoever values free speech, equality before the law, and other human rights denied or diminished by Sharia must consistently oppose any hint of Islamism.
Second, non-Muslims should support moderate and Westernizing anti-Islamists. Such figures are weak and fractured today and face a daunting task, but they do exist, and they represent the only hope for defeating the menace of global jihad and Islamic supremacism, then replacing it with an Islam that does not threaten civilization.
Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum.
Islam's Medieval Synthesis
by Daniel Pipes
In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power
1983
In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power
1983
Excerpted from In the Path of God: Islam
and Political Power (1983), pp. 48-49, 57-58
Islam's ideals are manifold and they are clear; but how do they work in
practice, how fully have adherents implemented them? … a distinction must be
drawn between private and public precepts. Premodern Muslims generally
considered themselves successful at living in accordance with regulations concerning
private life. Vastly disparate peoples around the world adopted stringent
Shar'i restrictions, even where these conflicted with their own inherited
customs. Polytheists became monotheists, monogamists became polygamists,
matrilocals became patrilocals, matrilineals became patrilineals,
cow-worshippers became beefeaters, bride prices replaced dowries, and fruit
juices replaced alcohol.Local customs rarely gave way entirely, but Muslim peoples did come widely to share Islamic practices such as marriage customs, holiday celebrations, and butchering techniques. Shar'i customs fulfilled less well were usually the less personal, for example, the ban on interest fees or the dividing of inheritance shares. The success of precepts regulating the private sphere added greatly to Islam's hold over individual believers. As a result, the appeal of Islam lay largely in [what Patricia Crone and Michael Cook call] "the world of men in their families"; by satisfying personal needs, the sacred law became closely identified with a whole way of life.
Muslim experience with the public precepts was another matter, however. The study of any period or region of premodern history shows that Muslims persistently failed to live up to the public regulations to their own satisfaction. From the seventh-century caliphate to the fundamentalist movements of the eighteenth century, the Islamic state proved elusive. If premodern Muslims were able rigorously to implement the Shari'a here and there for brief periods, their overall experience was one of frustration; in general, Shar'i public ideals remained beyond the umma's reach. Dramatic contrasts between the implementation of private precepts and the non-implementation of public ones led Joseph Schacht, foremost historian of the Shari'a, to write:
We can distinguish three different kinds of legal subject-matter ... according to the degree to which the ideal theory of the shari'a succeeded in imposing itself on the practice. Its hold was strongest on the law of family (marriage, divorce, maintenance, &c.), of inheritance, and of pious foundations (wakf); it was weakest, and in some respects even non-existent, on penal law, taxation, constitutional law, and the law of war; and the law of contracts and obligations stands in the middle.
…
Non-implementation of the Shari'a confronted Muslim peoples with a choice of two responses, one conservative, the other radical: they could acknowledge human foibles, resign themselves to the imperfect circumstances in which they lived, and accept the status quo; or they could struggle relentlessly to suppress these failings, align Muslim society with Islamic ideals, and create a Shar'i utopia. Because the latter option meant rising up against existing governments and violently overthrowing them, bringing massive unrest and possibly destroying the Islamic way of life, Muslims rarely took this route, more often preferring to accept things as they were. Through most of Muslim history, the urge to rebel against unrighteous governments was rejected in the interests of avoiding fitna. [As H.A.R. Gibb explains,] "So long as the secular governments did not interfere with the social institutions of Islam and formally recognized the Shari'a, the conscience of believers was not outraged and the task of building up a stable and universal Muslim society could go on."
A balance between Shar'i goals and human realities emerged; this is what I call the medieval synthesis, an immensely stable and attractive combination of ideal goals and pragmatic actions which held in several continents and over many centuries. This willingness to accept imperfect conditions will be referred to as traditionalist Islam. Traditionalists were Muslims who, finding the medieval synthesis satisfactory, did not attempt to implement the sacred law in its entirety. For them, the preservation of Muslim society took precedence over complete implementation of the law. They did pressure for improvements, but in careful, gradual ways, making sure not to ruin a tolerable situation in the pursuit of a better one.
An Ottoman member of
the 'ulama' with a student.
|
On the public level too, no serious attempt was made to effect the Qur'anic or Hadith doctrines in their entirety. Muslims came to terms with the fact that many kings ruled, not one caliph; that the umma was irrevocably split; that Shar'i-sanctioned taxes did not suffice; and so forth. The scriptures may have "a strong tendency to put the collectivity above the individual and to treat individual believers as equals," [Elie Kedourie notes,] but "these tendencies have not usually had political or economic consequences in traditional Islam." Specifically with regard to wealth, "no serious, sustained attempt was made to translate the Brotherhood of Believers into economic terms."
In politics, the 'ulama came to accept almost any ruler[, as Bernard Lewis notes]:
Successive jurists made [sundry] accommodations with a deteriorating reality, until finally the whole system of juristic constitutional theory was tacitly abandoned, and a new approach devised, based on the principle that any effective authority, however obtained and however exercised, was better than unrestrained private violence. "Tyranny is better than anarchy," became a favourite theme of the jurists.
This eventually became the prevailing attitude of Muslim subjects toward their governments. Among Muslims living in Dar al-Harb, similar realistic attitudes developed and they endured kafir rule far more often than they rebelled.
Non-implementation became so universal that the more a Muslim appreciated the sacred law per se, the less he expected it to be applied. According to Snouck Hurgronje, "all classes of the Muslim community have exhibited in practice an indifference to the sacred law in all its fulness, quite equal to the reverence with which they regard it in theory." Knowledgeable about the law as they were, the 'ulama were "the last to contradict" the general awareness that the Shari'a had "never been put in practice"; instead, they emphasized "the fact that the laws expounded by them are only fitted for a better society than that of their contemporaries" and relegated the fully Shar'i society to the remote future. Discussions about the law "are full of sighs of despair over the ever-wider cleavage between ideal and reality," yet the Muslim legal experts accepted this condition as normal and natural.
Acceptance of the medieval synthesis meant that Muslim peoples, whether in Dar al-Islam or Dar al-Harb, usually submitted to the control of existing governments, however deficient these might be from a Shar'i viewpoint. As Shar'i goals were subordinated to the need for stability, obedience to the political authorities became the norm and preservation of the status quo became an end in itself, creating an overwhelmingly conservative political environment.
To subscribe to this list, go to http://www.danielpipes.org/list_subscribe.php
Sign up for related (but non-duplicating)
e-mail services:
Middle East Forum (articles and event reports)
Campus Watch (articles, blog posts)
Islamist Watch (articles, blog posts)
Legal Project (articles, blog posts)
at http://www.danielpipes.org/list_subscribe.php
Middle East Forum (articles and event reports)
Campus Watch (articles, blog posts)
Islamist Watch (articles, blog posts)
Legal Project (articles, blog posts)
at http://www.danielpipes.org/list_subscribe.php
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment