August 27 , 2010

“No God but God”: A Rational Account of Islam & a Call for Reformation

 

The tragedy of 9/11, the bomb attacks in Madrid, London and elsewhere, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, the uprisings in Iraq and Afghanistan against foreign military presence, and the interpretation of these and similar other developments as a clash between Muslim and Christian civilizations, have all combined to generate an intense interest in Islam that has become the fastest growing religion of the world now.

Reza Aslan’s book “No god but God”, published a few years back, continues to provide logical and convincing answers to most of the queries that such developments are likely to raise in the minds of the world intelligentsia. His is a thoroughly rational account of Islam, its origin, evolution, and future. And, above every thing else, he makes an impassioned call for the reformation of the religion to effect its reconciliation with the modern world.

Born in Iran, Aslan reached the US as a young boy with his parents following the Islamic revolution in Iran in February, 1979. A precocious student, he studied religion at three universities in the US including Harvard and has also served as an Assistant Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Iowa. He enjoys considerable prestige in academic circles.

He maintains that the process of reformation in Islam has already commenced. The July 7, 2005 bomb attacks in London, for instance, were as much “the result of the civil war raging in Islam, as they were a part of the Jihadist war against ‘the West’ ”. The London bombs were not detonated in the posh neighborhoods but in the poor Muslim localities. This reflected the Muslim youths’ disillusionment with the fanatic and reactionary Islam preached by their elders and Imams rather than a clash between their religion and Christianity.

The monopoly of the Islamic clerical class has already started breaking with the dramatic increases in education and media facilities that have fueled debates and discussions among the Muslim youth. The orthodox interpretations do not satisfy their queries prompted by the challenge and impact of modernity. The Jihadists like Osama bin Laden have also become, perhaps not consciously, a part of the process of Reformation by giving a call for purifying their own communities first by eliminating all those who do not endorse the narrow interpretations of religious tenets by reactionaries like Osama and his cohorts.

The Taliban of Afghanistan provided vivid pictures of how such fanatic views would play out in practice – the demolition of Bamian statues of Buddha, ban on music and incarceration of women, for instance. The extremist clerics of Pakistan have likewise agitated against the Women’s Rights Bill passed by the parliament and endorses fully by the Islamic Ideology Council.

It is a fact of history that by the end of the tenth century, Islamic religious scholars arrived almost unanimously at the view that the system of independent juristic reasoning (Ijtehad) was no longer valid for deciding an issue on which the Qur’an or Sunna had no explicit opinion. This ‘closing of the gates of Ijtihad’, Aslan wrote, ‘signaled the beginning of the end for those who held that religious truth, as long as it did not explicitly contradict the Revelation, could be discovered through human reason’.

The door of Ijtihad was shut, according to the Ulema, to do away with the cropping up of hundreds of schools of thought creating a cacophony of dissident voices in the Muslim world causing it to fracture and weaken. Yet, it also marked the end of debates, discussions and syntheses and consensus. Islam went into a hermitage.

The spirit of enquiry, the distinctive feature of Muslim intellectual life, was picked up by Christian reformers, Martin Luther, Calvin and others. Reformation, Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution, placed Europe in fast forward mode. Muslim empires –Turkish, Iranian and Indian - started a slide down till one by one all of them were occupied by Western colonial powers.

Aslan projects Sir Syed of British India as an outstanding intellectual of the colonial period. Sir Syedwas convinced, according to Aslan, that if he could shine the light of European rationalism and scientific thought upon traditional Muslim beliefs and customs, the result would be an indigenous Islamic Enlightenment that would propel the Muslim world into the 20 th century. Among the reformers, Aslan gives justifiably a high place to Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-97). Afghani agreed with Sir Syed that the ulema bore the responsibility for the decline of Islamic civilization.

In Turkey, the reformist movement was being led by the Young Turks with Namik Kemal, poet and playwright, in the forefront. In Cairo, a young student, Muhammad Abdu (1845-1950) was encouraged by Al-Afghani to be the voice of Muslim reform in that important seat of Muslim culture and education. Like Sir Syed, Abdu too pleaded for the reopening of he gates of Ijtihad and demanded that every man-made source of law - the Sunna, Ijma, Qiyas - must be subject to rational discourse.

Aslan talks in some detail about the efforts of Hasan Al-Banna (1906-49), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, about his efforts for the reformation of the Arab society and his assassination at the behest of the Egyptian ruler and perhaps with the blessings of the British imperial power.

The leadership was then taken over by Syed Qutb (1906-66) who had been languishing in a prison cell in Cairo. He was released in 1964 and soon afterwards he published his manifesto for Muslim states, called Milestones, on which he had been working in his jail cell. The manifesto presented a radicalized vision of political Islam and advocated the replacement of all secular governments, with force if required, including that of Gamal Nasser. He was rearrested and hanged for treason.

Aslan devotes several pages to the emergence of Wahabism in Saudi Arabia, its fundamentalist approach and forceful measures taken to eliminate Sufism, demolish religious shrines and set up a puritan system but with a monarchy at the top that willingly catered to the Western interests in its enormous oil reserves.

In early 1990s, writes Aslan, a group of young Saudis picked up the basic Wahabi principles and launched a campaign for the purification of the Saudi society. They called themselves Al-Qaeda and were led by Osama bin Laden. They regarded the Saudi royal family as “a corrupt bunch of gluttonous degenerates who had sold the interests of the Muslim community to foreign powers”.

The plane-bomb attacks of 9/11, participated by 15 Saudi nationals, out of a total of 19, reflected an expression of rage over the crutches provided by the US to the royal family.

Aslan sums up the situation in the following words: “What is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West. The West is merely a bystander – an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.”

The tragic events of September 11 have initiated a vibrant discourse among Muslims, not only in their own lands but also among the Diaspora in Europe and America, about the meaning and message of Islam in the 21 st century.

Aslan concludes his thought-provoking thesis with the assurance that bigotry and fanaticism will have to yield to the tide of reforms. “The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living it.”

The book is available at all major bookstores.

arifhussaini@hotmail.com