December
08 , 2006
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,
the interpretation of these and other such developments
involving Muslim populations 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 recently published book “No
god but God” provides 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 sparked
debates and discussions among the Muslim youth.
The orthodox interpretations do not satisfy their
queries raised 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 their own narrow interpretations
of religious tenets. 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 are right now agitating, in a similar vein,
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 Quran 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 picket 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 Syyed of British India as an
outstanding intellectual of the colonial period.
Sir Syyed was 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 20th century. Among the reformers, Aslan
gives justifiably a high place to Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani
(1838-97). Afghani agreed with Sir Syyed 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 Syyed,
Abdu argued 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 21st 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.”
A paperback version of the book has been recently
published by Random House and is priced at $14.95.
- arifhussaini@hotmail.com
