Posted: 22 Oct 2014 07:39 AM PDT
Every few years the
debate over reforming Islam bubbles up from the depths of a culture that
largely censors any suggestion that Islam needs reforming.
But
Islam does not exist apart from Muslims. It is not an abstract entity that
can be changed without changing its followers. And if Islam has not changed,
that is because Muslims do not want it to.
Mohammed and key figures in Islam provided a template, but that template
would not endure if it did not fit the worldview of its worshipers. Western
religions underwent a process of secularization to align with what many saw
as modernity leading to a split between traditionalists and secularists.
The proponents of modernizing Islam assume that it didn’t make the jump
because of Saudi money, fundamentalist violence and regional backwardness.
These allegations are true, but also incomplete.
If modernizing Islam really appealed to Muslims, it would have taken off, at
least in the West, despite Saudi money and Muslim Brotherhood front groups.
These elements might have slowed things down, but a political or religious
idea that is genuinely compelling is like a rock rolling down a hill.
It’s enormously difficult to stop.
Muslim modernization in the West has been covertly undermined by the Saudis
and the Muslim Brotherhood, but for the most part it has not been violently
suppressed.
It suffers above all else from a lack of Muslim interest.
Muslims don’t spend much time fuming over a progressive mosque that allows
gay members or lets women lead prayers. Such places occasionally exist and
remain obscure. They don’t have to be forcibly shut down because they never
actually take off. The occasional death threat and arson might take place and
the average ISIS recruit would happily slaughter everyone inside, but even he
has bigger fish to fry.
The best evidence that Muslim modernization has failed is that even the
angriest Muslims don’t take it very seriously as a threat. The sorts of
people who believe that Saddam Hussein was a CIA agent or that Israel is
using eagles as spies have trouble believing modernizing Islam will ever be
much of a problem.
They know instinctively that it will never work. Instead Muslims are far more
threatened by a cartoon mocking their prophet for reasons that go to the
heart of what is wrong with their religion.
Islam is not an idea. It is a tribe.
Talking about reforming the words of Islam is an abstraction. Islam did not
begin with a book. It began with clan and sword. Even in the modern
skyscraper cities of the West, it remains a religion of the clan and the
sword.
The left has misread Islamic terrorism as a response to oppression when it is
actually a power base. It is not the poor and downtrodden who are most
attracted to the Jihad. Instead it is the upper classes. Bin Laden wasn’t a
pauper and neither are the Saudis or Qataris. Islamic terrorism isn’t a game
for the poor. It becomes the thing to do when you’re rich enough to envy the
neighbors. It’s a tribal war.
To reform Islam, we can’t just look at what is wrong with the
Koran or the Hadiths. We have to ask why these tribal calls for violence and
genocide, for oppression and enslavement, appealed to Muslims then and why
they continue to appeal to Muslims today.
The modernizers assume that Western Muslims would welcome a reformation of
Islam. They are half right. The reformation that they are welcoming is that
of the Wahhabis trying to return it to what it was. It’s hard to deny that
ISIS touches something deep within Muslims. The gay-friendly mosques don’t.
Understanding Islam only in terms of the Koran makes it seem as if Muslims
are unwillingly trapped by a tyranny of the text, when the text is actually
their means of trapping others into affirming their identity.
There is no reforming Islam without reforming Muslims. The reformers assume
that most Muslims are ignorant of their own beliefs, but even the most
illiterate Muslim in a village without running water has a good grasp of the
big overall ideas. He may hardly be able to quote a Koranic verse without
stumbling over it, he may have added local customs into the mix, but he
identifies with it on a visceral level.
Its honor is his honor. Its future is the future of his family. Its members
are his kinfolk. Like him, it ought to have been on top; instead it’s on the
bottom. Its grievances are his grievances.
The rest is just details.
The progressive diverse mosque is the opposite of this tribal mentality. It
is the opposite of Islam. Its destruction of the tribe is also the
destruction of the individual. The Western Muslim who already has only a
shaky connection to the culture of his ancestral country is not about to
trade Islamic tribalism for anonymous diversity. Islam tells him he is
superior. The progressive mosque tells him nothing.
Whether he is a Bangladeshi peasant watching soccer matches on the village
television or a Bangladeshi doctor in London, it is the violent, racist and
misogynistic parts of Islam that provide him with a sense of worth in a big confusing
world. That is how Islam was born.
Islam began in uncertain times as empires were tottering and the old ways
were being displaced by strange religions such as Judaism and Christianity,
when its originators mashed bits of them together and then founded their own
crazy wobbly murderous empire built around a badly plagiarized religion.
It was horrible and terrible for everyone who wasn’t a Muslim man, but it
worked.
Islam is less of a faith and more of a set of honor and shame responses. It’s
a cycle of oppression and victimhood. It’s the assertion of identity by
people who see themselves as inferior and are determined to push back by
making themselves superior. The responses are familiar. We saw it in Nazi
Germany as the defeated nation became a master race by killing and enslaving
everyone else.
But it’s not those at the bottom most driven by such dreams. It’s the desert
billionaires who have money, but no culture. It’s the Western Muslim doctor
who still feels inferior despite his wealth. It’s a merchant named Mohammed
with a lot of grudges who claims an angel told him to kill all his enemies in
Allah’s name.
It’s Islam. And it’s Muslims.
The
things that we believe, bad or good, reflect the bad or good inside us. When
Muslims support killing people, it’s simplistic to assume that they are
robotically following a text and will follow any other text slipped in front
of their faces, instead of their passions and values. Religions may make
people kill, but it starts when people make religions kill.
The good devout Muslim may kill because the Koran tells him to, but he would
not do so if the Koran’s justifications of violence did not speak to him on a
deeper level. The Nazis were following orders, but they wouldn’t have
followed them if Nazism didn’t connect with their fears, hopes and dreams.
The text is only half the problem. The other half is in the human heart.
Reforming Islam is not a matter of crossing out certain words and adding
others. Religions carry a powerful set of values that appeal to people on a
deep level. To change Islam, we would have to understand why its ugliness
still speaks to Muslims. To change it, we have to change them.
When we talk about reforming Islam, what we are really talking about is
reforming Muslims.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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