The Islamic Reformation Ali Eteraz September 28, 2007 11:00 AM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali_eteraz/2007/09/the_islamic_reformation.html Since 2001 a plethora of writers have made calls for an Islamic "Reformation". Many hopes (and careers) are pinned on the idea, but there is no such thing coming. The Islamic reformation has already happened. The Muslim equivalent of nailing the 95 theses was the desecration of a graveyard and the stoning of a woman for adultery. According to 18th century records, the Ottoman empire - Islam's ruling power - had not flogged, imprisoned, or passed the death sentence on adulterers for nearly 400 years. Under the kanun - secular Ottoman imperial law - the highest punishment for adultery had been a fine. The traditionalist Ottoman jurists had relied on the Quran's "four witnesses" rule, which had made proving adultery virtually impossible. Along came a self-professed Islamic reformer named Abdul Wahhab. He was trained classically but attracted to Ibn Taymiya - who 400 years earlier had broken away from Sunni traditionalism. Wahhab said that procuring a confession was enough to stone someone to death and proceeded to do so. At the time, the Ottoman sultan, backed by a class of traditionalist jurists in Istanbul, was considered the equivalent of the Muslim pope - "the shadow of God on earth". Wahhab (just like Luther in Germany) accused the religious elite of materialism, corruption and decadence, and rejected the "tradition-based" approach to Islam. He then found political protection under a rebel leader named Ibn Saud and instituted further "reforms" - which linked up nicely with Ibn Saud's expansionist agenda. Ibn Taymiya, who had once accused the ruling Muslim kings of hypocrisy in order to justify rebellion against them, guided Wahhab and Ibn Saud through the course of their rebellion. It was eventually put down militarily, but not theologically. Wahhab's "reformation" started Sunnism's unmooring from traditionalism. The Quran and the hadith, long bound together in a legal system (and hierarchy) so complex that, according to the orientalist John Makdisi, it gave birth to British Common Law, were now left wide open for Wahhab and his followers to access. What they now had was the power to do ijtihad. Except, in their distaste of Ottoman scholarship, they made up their "method" as they went along. It was a mixture of Quranic literalism and deference to Hanbal's hadith corpus (which was much larger than competing versions). Philosophers concur that when a text, any text, can be interpreted by anyone using any means at their disposal, the most likely result will be for the text to become subservient to ideology. Wahhab was a rebel; his ideology was intolerance, patriarchy and violence. It coloured what kind of ideological direction Muslim dissenters of the future would take. Here is an example of where they have ended up: Recently, I congratulated the Muslim Canadian congress for writing a good press release about freedom of speech and Salman Rushdie. They disapproved of Rushdie's views but vowed to defend his right to speech. An extremist arrived to question my support, quoting one solitary hadith which according to him made it legitimate to kill someone who insults the Prophet. The hadith relates to an incident where an old man fighting with his concubine (not wife) was driven to rage when she insulted Muhammad. The old man killed the concubine. The hadith says that the case was brought to Muhammad. He ruled that the old man did not have to pay blood money for the concubine. A person who ideologically hates Salman Rushdie concludes that Muhammad gave implicit permission to kill those that insult him. If such an individual has the opportunity he might even kill a Rushdie, or a Theo Van Gogh. Yet that is no way to read that hadith. Informed by traditionalist understanding, I clarified that the narration did not demonstrate that killing those that insult the Prophet was permissible. Instead, the text stood only for the idea that concubines were not considered equivalent to free people (for whose death Islam mandated blood money), and since concubines were impermissible and illegal, the hadith did not apply today. The young man did not return to discuss the matter further. The incident of this hadith should demonstrate what unchecked ijtihad, coloured by violent ideologies, can unleash. This seemingly insignificant incident is the microcosm of the story of Islam in the 20th century. External factors - the creation of Israel, US foreign policy, the cold war and the US-funded Saudi state - have played a great part in providing political cover for this brand of Islam. The American proclivity for direct and indirect alliances with extremist Muslims is indeed unnerving. However, as iI demonstrated in two earlier posts for Comment is free (here and here), the intellectual trends of extremism were already in Islam, otherwise the US and its dictatorial allies in the Middle East would not have been able to exploit them. Even if in this global world Islam were somehow fully separated from the actions of the US, the problem of the Islamic reformation which unleashed the jihad nightmare, would still have to be dealt with. While there has been some attempt by the Salafis - such as Tariq Ramadan and Salman al-Audah, Bin Laden's former (now repentant) mentor - to contain the excesses of this "total" Wahhabism, they have proven unable to do so. Not only that, but the best that even the moderate wing of the Salafi organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood can do is turn a jihadist into an Islamist - ie someone who wants to have the power to veto all legislation under the authority of a certain kind of Sharia. That simply won't do. Not when Islamist organisations (except for the anomalous one in Turkey) have exhibited no compatibility with international human rights norms or dominance-free communication or for that matter learning pluralism. So now that we know how extremists came to dominate Muslim dissent (and Salafism failed to check it) what are we to do about it? Three things. First, reject all juvenile calls for so-called reformations. Second, consider the necessity of a Sunni pope. Third, consider the possibility of a liberal literalism (a sort of ideological inverse of extremist literalism). These, and not the specious open-ended concepts of "Islamic reformation" or ijtihad, are the ideas worth learning about, and I will discuss them in my forthcoming posts. This article is part of a series by Ali Eteraz on Islamic reform: Article 1: The roots of Islamic reform Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
