Glenn, I’ve never met you, but I just read your new book, It IS about Islam. Congratulations to you and your team for a well-written book, with good sources (though very selective), and a great passion for the welfare of our country!
Can we talk about it? As someone who lived for sixteen years in Algeria, Egypt, and Israel/Palestine, and as a scholar of contemporary Islam, I see much that is true, but also much that is skewed, mostly because you were so intent on proving that “the world is going over the cliff,” and that Muslims are pushing us over it. If we don’t speak out loud and clear, you warn us, America is next. It’s that serious, you believe.
Let’s take a deep breath and consider the evidence. Let’s start with what you get right.
Classical Islamic Law, Jihad, House of Islam and House of War
Islam, indeed, is unique among the three monotheistic faiths, in that its founder was both prophet and statesman. But it’s less unique than you think. The Israelites coming out of Egypt under Moses’ leadership functioned as a theocracy. After much chaos and some divine reticence, God allowed them some kings, though it turned out badly for them in the long run. Still, King David is revered in all three faiths, and for us Christians he foreshadowed the Messiah, Jesus Christ, whose kingdom was “not of this world,” but will become a comprehensive rule of justice and peace over a New Heavens and a New Earth when he comes again. So the picture of just rule is actually common to these faiths, though playing out very differently in each case.
Here are some points worth reiterating about classical Islamic law:
1. Muhammad did initiate military conquests, which his successors continued with astonishing success.
2. The “sword verses” in the Qur’an that you cite were deemed by the consensus of scholars/jurists from all five schools of law to have abrogated the more peaceful, “live and let live” ones.
3. As a result, by the 10th century Muslims assumed a binary view of the world – the House of Islam versus the House of War, implying that through jihad they should strive to bring the whole world under the authority of Muslim rule.
4. You rightly single out the 18th-century Wahhabi revolution in Arabia as the launch of the modern Islamist revolution, which was then given ideological and practical expression as an urban mass movement by Hasan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood (MBs) in Egypt and Mawdudi’s parallel movement in India/Pakistan. Sayyid Qutb, a latecomer to the MBs, nevertheless spearheaded the radical jihadi ideology picked up by many splinter groups starting in the 1970s.
5. You emphasize the Shia millenarian stream (the coming of the Hidden Imam as the Mahdi), the powerful influence of the Iranian Revolution across the Islamic spectrum, and the eschatological fervor evident in the ideology of ISIS, along with its horrific record of bloodshed, ruthless authoritarianism, and religious persecution of all who disagree with them, starting with other Muslims.
6. You’re right about the classical formulations of Islamic law butting against current norms of human rights – for women’s rights, freedom of expression, and especially freedom of religion in Muslim-majority states like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and others (though each case is different).
I do have some sharp disagreements with your book, however.
Religious interpretations evolve with changing times
Islam is like any other faith tradition – it evolves over time, as people come to the texts and customs of the past with new questions borne out of the worldview and concerns of their day. So you wrongly equate “political Islam” (Islamism) with “Islam.” You acknowledge that most Muslims are “moderate,” but then add: “But increasingly I fear these Muslims are the exception” (p. 9).
Here you rightly point to a fact picked up by social scientists studying religion. Muslims have become generally more religiously conservative over the last few decades. But there are reasons. Among the three most important ones:
1. Globally, people of all religions have gotten a lot more religious since the 1970s (see the Fundamentalism Project, five volumes coming out in the late 80s and early 90s, and my blog on fundamentalism).
2. Saudi Arabia's petrodollars bankrolling the spread of their Wahhabi/Salafi ideology all over the world since the 1960s. This ultraconservative and literalistic reading of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sayings (the Sunna) is a huge factor working in conjunction with Qutb’s writings.
3. Most Muslims feel angry about all kinds of perceived injustices against Muslims in Bosnia (1990s), Palestine and Kashmir, and Western (mostly American) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including US drone attacks killing scores of civilians. Glenn, you yourself recognize in your book that the US war in Iraq helped to create ISIS.
Sharia and American Muslims
Your description of Sharia (p. 121ff) is skewed. You define it as the “codification of the rules of the lifestyle (or deen) ordained by Allah.” Sharia was never codified – that’s a modern, nation-state term implying law codes drafted by a country’s legislative body.
Islamic history is the story of two competing powers – the caliph, sultan, shah, warlord or dynastic king versus the thick network of Islamic scholars/jurists (ulama) and their institutions, including a powerful network of endowed mosques, schools (madrassa), sharia courts, and Sufi centers. The latter generally supported the political status quo, but more often than not looked the other way, resisted political appointments to the state courts, and sometimes even opposed regimes they considered iniquitous. Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), whom you mention, spent a good deal of his life in prison.
So no, in practice Islamic societies experienced a near constant tug of war between religion and state, with a large space for what we call today “civil society.” Religion and state were never automatically welded in Islamic societies. Further, Sharia was very weak on constitutional law, even if you choose to call the political theory writings in that context by that name. It was more an exercise in justifying the less than ideal status quo by jurists who sought to curry favor with the rulers.
Now to the present day. First, the binary view of the world fell off a cliff, to use your terms, in the 18th century among the ulama establishment. Seeking to make their peace with Western colonial hegemony over their territories and lives (most puppet rulers put in place by the West also imported Western law codes and limited Shari’a courts to family law). Jihad now became a defensive ideology in the service of a modern nation-state eager to at least seem to be fitting in with the new world order, and this especially after WWII and the birth of multiple new nations.
That’s why many Muslims resisted, like Hasan al-Banna and his ilk, especially after the Ottoman caliphate was dissolved by Kemal Attatürk in 1924. No, they said, let’s get back to the classical theory of the House of War and the House of Islam. “To h… with the defensive jihad of the ulama!,” roared Sayyid Qutb, “We cannot rest till the whole world comes under the dominion of God’s law!” And so the modern jihadi movement was launched (he was executed by Egypt’s Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1966).
Second, with the redefinition of jihad came an acceptance of democracy as the best way to rule a modern state. Among the 48 nations that signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) were Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey and Syria. No Muslim country opposed it; only Saudi Arabia abstained. Naturally, one has to point out the irony here – in practice most of these countries have never been able to establish a working democracy. But then, you cannot blame “Islam” for that. Look at the postcolonial states in Africa! And recall too that it took us over 200 years to get our democracy working, in spite of a bloody civil war that just about destroyed us!
This is why, Glenn, I cannot accept your statement, “Democracy itself is un-Islamic … Sharia does not respect individual rights.” I’ve written a great deal about Islam and democracy (see, for instance, this most recent publication). The largest Gallup poll ever conducted was from 2001 to 2007 in 35 different Muslim countries. Vast majorities said they wanted to be able to elect their government and that civil and political freedoms were important to them. Specifically, when asked whether they would guarantee freedom of speech if drafting a new constitution (defined as, “allowing all citizens to express their opinion on the political, social and economic issues of the day”), 94% answered yes in Egypt, 93% did so in Iran and 90% in Indonesia.
What also comes out clearly from this poll is that substantial majorities want both democracy and sharia – with majorities only in Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh wanting it as “the only source of legislation.” Most others want it as “a source.” Also, both men and women score within a similar range on the issue of women’s civil and political rights. Having the same rights as men was chosen by 90% of respondents in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey and Lebanon; 85% in Iran. So obviously, their definition of sharia is quite different from yours!
Third, your statement that all the major US Islamic organizations are beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood is completely overblown. There were certainly students who have come to the US over the years who were related to this movement – it’s been so very influential all over the ME since the 1930s, and because Hamas is popular with at least a third of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, it has representation in this country as well. But from there to say that political Islam dominates the US Islamic landscape is an impossible leap.
You make a lot of Ismail Elbarasse’s arrest in 2004, but apart from a Washington Post article following the incident of the filming of the bridge and subsequent search of their home, I could find no more articles on this affair except on the various sites that purport to “expose jihad”: “global Muslim Brotherhood watch” and counter jihad report. He was never indicted for wrongdoing, let alone convicted.
The closest to a juridical body that most Muslims see as authoritative in this country is the Fiqh [jurisprudence] Council of North America (FCNA, see my blog showing that on the basis of the 2011 Gallup poll in the US we see that most American Muslims distrust their own organizations). It’s closely associated with the conservative, but also mainstream, Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). If you point to “About ISNA” on their website, you will see “ISNA’s position on terrorism and religious extremism,” which is taken from a fatwa (legal opinion) handed down by FCNA. Here I quote one of the paragraphs, which follows an exposition of jihad that is the classic modern one I mentioned above.
“Third, it is a disingenuous and misleading tactic to focus exclusively on verses that deal with the contingencies of legitimate self-defense, and to ignore the repeated and consistent statements of the Qur’an that emphasize the sanctity of human life [5:32], respect for human dignity [17:70], acceptance of plurality, including plurality of religious convictions [5:48, 11:118], peaceful co-existence with all [60:8-9], universal and unbiased justice even with the enemy [4:135, 5:8], universal brotherhood [49:13] and mercy to all creation [21:107]. The Qur’an is a whole and cohesive book, and should not be interpreted in a piecemeal fashion” (emphasis theirs).
One last example … Imam Sayyid M. Syeed, one of ISNA’s top leaders for decades and also a personal friend of mine (we’ve worked together on several dialogue initiatives) said this to the press about Pope Francis’ recent visit to the US: “Francis’ visit is even more important for Muslims than it is for Catholics.” He explained that in contrast to the pope who 1,000 years ago helped to launch the First Crusade against Muslims, “now there is a pope who wants to destroy hatred the world over, a pope who named himself for a 13th-century saint who counseled Christians to cease their violence against Muslims.”
He concluded, “This pope is our pope.”
Your ranting about the threat of Muslims IS an infringement on religious freedom
I’m guessing that in reading these statement made by American Muslims you thought, “but that’s taqiya, or lies; they just say that …” I reply, based on just the little evidence I’ve presented here, that you’ve bought into conspiracy theories that are warranted by your version of right-wing politics. You constantly rail on the liberal Washington establishment and mainstream media, but that also makes it very difficult for you to listen to any other voice.
Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, wrote a telling column in USA Today. Reacting to Donald Trump’s refusal to question the man who said Obama was Muslim and Ben Carson’s stating just like you that Islam and our freedom were incompatible and that therefore no Muslim should be president, he reminded his readers that religious freedom in this country has a checkered past. Muslims are just the latest bogeyman.
Thomas Jefferson was the first president to have been called a Muslim (an atheist and more), Catholics, almost until Kennedy was elected, were denounced as “fake Christians, amoral villains and traitors to the nation.” Jews have suffered at least that much discrimination and rancor. But also your own people, the Mormons, “were targeted as slaves of a religious despot whose liberty was incompatible with our own. Before this culture war was over, Mormon leaders would be sued, jailed, beaten, stripped naked, tarred and feathered, and murdered.”
Glen, you emphasize the good example of the Nazarene. Jesus surely would want us to speak kindly and truthfully about one another. His first commandment was love.
I challenge you to make friends with fellow Americans who are Muslims, as many of us have done. They are wonderful people you and I can learn a lot from. Yes, they will continue to work out their beliefs and practices within the context of this pluralistic, democratic society (that’s the thrust of my own academic work). And yes, law enforcement will bear down without mercy on all of those who threaten the security of our nation, whether Muslim or Christian extremists, or militia members like Timothy McVeigh. And by the way, terrorism specialists are not nearly as worried as you are about global jihad.
Glenn, I hope we can keep talking about these issues.
How does the youngest of ten in a poor, remote Tunisian village, became at age 70 his nation’s most influential politician and thinker in the wake of the revolution that had just toppled its dictator of 24 years? Rached (or Rachid) Ghannouchi’s islamist party Ennahda (or al-Nahda, with the article, “Renaissance”) won the most votes in 2011, ruled in a coalition with a secular party, then in 2013, stepped down so it could play a constructive role in drawing up Tunisia’s Constitution promulgated in 2014 – plainly the most progressive and pluralist constitution in the MENA region (North Africa and the Middle East). Without Ghannouchi, the one success story of the Arab Spring would not have happened (see this March 2015 article for a balanced perspective).
Ghannouchi’s picture at the top is taken from a BBC article taking a little pride in Ghannouchi’s 20-year exile residing on a leafy street in West London. This was a year after he had returned triumphant to his home country and the author celebrates his stay in London:
The green lawns of suburban London appear to have been more than just a base for Mr Ghannouchi. He once famously declared that Britain embodied the values of his ideal Islamic state more than most Muslim-majority nations - a shocking statement at a time when many Muslim ideologues saw the West as a mortal enemy.
"We consider that a state is more Muslim, more Islamic, the more it has justice in it," he says.
"When people asked me why I came to Britain, I explained that I was going to a country ruled by a queen where people are not oppressed and where justice prevails."
Actually, that statement is also in the book of his I’m translating, and this is the second blog out of three I’ll be writing on him. In the first one, I set the stage by giving a brief history of Egyptian and North African Islamic thought in the last century, with a little primer on political Islam (“islamism”). Here I’m answering a question I posed in the first blog relative to the Algerian philosopher, Malek Bennabi, Ghannouchi’s mentor:
How does a secular-leaning Muslim anti-colonial activist become an inspiration to a nascent islamist movement in neighboring Tunisia?
An improbable web of influences
I’ll list them in chronological order with a minimum of commentary:
1. A strong traditional Islamic upbringing: his father was the village imam. He had memorized the Qur’an and expected his boys to do so as well. The extended family cultivated their land and Rached had to quit school for four years till he was 15 to help his ailing father. At 18 he followed his brothers and from 1959-62 attended the oldest Islamic college in the Maghreb (built in 732), al-Zaytuna, in the capital, Tunis. But by then this traditionalist Islam only convinced him it had nothing to contribute to the modern world and he stopped practicing and even believing.
2. An admiration for Nasser’s Arabism: this started during the many evenings he spent with others at his uncle Bashir’s house, an influential man who had fought for independence with Bourguiba (Tunisia’s first president and dictator, 1975-87) and still involved in his ruling party. They would listen to broadcasts from Egypt and talk with great enthusiasm about President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s policies. This love for the Arab East (Mashreq, as opposed to Maghreb) is what sent him later to Egypt and then to Syria.
3. A disillusionment with Nasser’s ideology: this happened, starting with his three months in Egypt. He had begun to study agriculture, but an accord was signed between Nasser and Bourguiba and all the “fugitive” (read “anti-Bourguiba”) students were to be repatriated by force. Rached managed to escape to Syria, where he stayed 7 years (1961-68), obtaining a BA in philosophy, among other things. He also spent 7 months in 1965 traveling and working odd jobs in Europe. But he came back mostly shocked at how decadent the youth were there. He was starting to shed his socialist and Arab nationalist ideology and was moving closer to the islamist groups that were springing up at the time (especially after the 1967 humiliating Arab defeat at the hands of Israel). The ringleader of a small group of students like himself, Rached directed them to enter into dialog with several islamist groups. It was with the Muslim Brotherhood, especially, that he realized that their Islam was more authentic (it was “comprehensive,” encompassing all of life including politics) than the Islam he had grown up with.
4. A conversion experience: that gradual attraction to Islam in his mid-twenties culminated with a profound experience in the night of June 15, 1966:
“That night I shed two things off me: secular nationalism and traditional Islam . . . That was the night I was overwhelmed by an immense surge of faith, love, and admiration for this religion to which I pledged my life. On that night I was reborn, my heart was filled with the light of God, and my mind with the determination to review and reflect on all that which I had previously conceived” (in Azzam S. Tamimi’s Rachid Ghannouchi: A Democrat within Islamism, p. 22).
5. His Salafi stage: this should be qualified – not technical salafism as we know it today (the ultraconservatives with women completely covered in black and men in white robes half way down from the knees), but as he came to France in 1968 to work on a doctorate in the philosophy of education, he ended up joining a Tabligh community, a very conservative apolitical group started in India in the 1920s, whose members go door to door to get Muslims to practice their faith and follow their particular teachings. For the next few years (remember, his conversion experience was still fresh), he felt pulled in the direction of a very literalistic, ritualistic spirituality. In fact, when word got to his family that he was going door to door in Paris with a long beard, a long white robe and cap, they thought he had gone mad and sent the older brother to Paris to bring him home, under the pretext that his mother was very sick and needed to see him. That was the end of his stay in France, just over a year.
Bennabi’s influence on Ghannouchi
You’re probably wondering, how did Rached Ghannouchi move from this very conservative, apolitical religious practice to an intellectual and politically active one?
First, there was this serendipitous encounter he made at the al-Zaytuna mosque in Tunis on his way back to France. He spotted an unusual sight: a shaykh with a large circle of students around him, mostly children and old people. But there was one young man. Intrigued, he spoke to him and the latter led him to a small Tabligh circle, recently started by a Pakistani man. There he met a law student who would become a life-long friend and collaborator, Abdel Fattah Moro. Then and there Ghannouchi decided to stay in Tunisia.
Second, Ghannouchi soon founded a clandestine organization that grew out of that cell, but with a mission much wider than Tabligh ideas and practice. These were Muslim intellectuals with a bent for political activism and because of the books he had read by Bennabi, he took some of these to Algeria to attend Bennabi’s yearly Annual Islamic Thought Seminars. They attended three years in a row (1970-72), just a years before Bennabi died.
This is what Bennabi loved to do at this stage – inspire and train young leaders. He took these Tunisians under his wing and gave them a vision for what could happen in Tunisia through their concerted efforts. They would sow the seeds of an enlightened Islam that would bring out the best of their heritage from the past, speak out against tyranny, and find solutions to the cultural, economic and political morass now plaguing their nation.
The fruit of that mentorship would be seen in Ghannouchi’s and Moro’s co-founding of the Movement for the Islamic Tendency (MTI) in 1981.
What Bennabi taught them, above all, is the dynamic interchange between faith and reason. Yes, you start with the sacred texts (Qur’an and Sunna) and then you look at your particular context and study the specific cultural, historical, economic and political elements that make up the personality of your nation. Islam is a comprehensive system, but not a cookie-cutter model you impose everywhere willy-nilly. No, God created human beings to build civilizations, inhabiting the earth and shaping human societies in creative and just ways.
I leave you now with two excepts from the book he mostly wrote from prison, which was then reviewed and enlarged after arriving in London, The Public Freedoms of the Islamic State. Just remember this translation is still a draft. My editor, Andrew March, a Political Science professor at Yale, told me that Ghannouchi himself wants to be involved, and possibly his daughter, who is finishing a PhD at the prestigious Sciences Politiques university in Paris.
This is from Chapter 3, “Basic Democratic Principles.” This is a very Bennabian way of dealing with history and civilization. Islamic civilization, though it is superior (because as a Muslim you see it inspired by the last and most authoritative revelation), builds on previous ones, learning from them, developing that knowledge and research, and thereby enriching human collective civilization. That touches on the idea of creation and human trusteeship, a topic I take up next time. But here, a discussion about the historical appearance of the democratic system of governance:
“It wasn’t theoreticians, legal specialists, or political scientists who came up with the democratic system; rather, it evolved out of far-reaching historical developments. Many of its laws derive from political systems that prevailed in the Middle Ages or simply from the common legacy of human civilization, and gradually evolved to become the foundation for the new system that incorporated old elements that agreed with its logic. The development of science had its impact on the growth of production and the advancement of the means of transportation, while Europeans in the course of their pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Crusades came into contact with Muslims, something which upended their social structure and values. A fruit of all of this was the free democratic political system. In fact, the European contact with the Islamic world caused a psychological shock that awakened it from the slumber of feudalism, the stupor of the church’s religion, and the dictatorship of the aristocratic kings” (al-Hurriyat al-‘amma fi-l-dawla al-islamiyya, Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-Arabiyya, 1993, pp. 73-4).
You may not agree with the last sentence, because if anything, the Islamic contributions to Western civilizations up till now have been seriously downplayed in our Western educational systems. That’s changing, and it’s at least plausible that because of the Crusades, but especially the commercial and intellectual exchanges with Umayyad Spain from the 8th to the 11th centuries, a good deal more than just mathematics, science and philosophy were passed on from Muslims to Europeans.
Then the same chapter ends with this interesting paragraph. Note that democracy for him is a neutral set of institutional and political mechanisms applicable in a variety of settings and therefore infinitely adaptable:
If the said democratic apparatus had functioned within the framework of Christian values, it would have produced Christian democratic characteristics; if in the framework of a socialist philosophy, it would have produced socialist democratic characteristics; if in the framework of Jewish values, it would have produced a Jewish democracy. So is it impossible for it to function within the framework of Islamic values and produce an Islamic democracy? We support that perspective and see in it a great good, not just for Islam’s umma and those oppressed by tyranny, but for all of humanity. Even an Islamic regime that excludes the democratic apparatus offers no sufficient guarantees. This does not make the Islamic alternative a break with the heritage of contemporary civilization, but rather an extension of it that preserves the best of that heritage and transcends its destructive flaws, since this is the path of development, as it was the work of the Prophet (PBUH) as he fulfilled the work of the prophets before him, may God’s prayers be upon all of them!” (al-Hurriyat al-‘amma, p. 88).