Karn Armstrong:
In an Islamic Forum Speaking about her Latest Book "Muhammad: A Prophet For Our Time"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It's a great pleasure to be here with you, and as we say at this turbulent juncture of history: How did I get interested in Islam in the first place. After all, my ambition in life was not to write about religion at all, but to be a university professor teaching English literature.
But after a series of career disasters, I found myself in television, and I said that once to Bill Moez, and he said: we take anybody! I found myself in Jerusalem making a program about early Christianity. There, I had a personal revelation. Until that time, despite the fact that I had a very strong religious background, I found nothing about either Judaism or Islam. I'd never thought about Judaism as anything but a kind of prelude to Christianity. And I'd really never considered Islam at all.
On her Introduction to Studying Islam
But once you’re living in the Holy City, seeing the three religions jostling sometimes uneasily together around the same sacred sites, you become aware of not only the antagonism that is unfortunately developed between them, exacerbated by political factors, but also of the great affinity and affection that they have between them.
So I started to study all three, and I must say that it was my study of both Judaism and Islam that brought me back to a set religion. It enabled me see what my own tradition had been trying to do at its best. I was increasingly disturbed to find the current opinion of Islam, and we’re talking about way back the early 1980s, was so much in variance with the facts. This disturbed me for two reasons:
I've been trained at Oxford, and I'm sure this would be the same of any of your great American Universities too, always to see both sides of a question, that you couldn't just write an essay presenting one side of the question.
You had to include and seriously consider the other side. You had to be prepared to change your mind. You had to be accurate and build your theories and ideas on the facts.
It offended me intellectually to hear what people are saying about Islam, that it was an inherently violent intolerant faith wasn't true. It disturbed me because in Europe we have had a long history of bigotry. It was this kind of bigoted lazy prejudice thinking that it had led to the death camps in the 1930s, and we don't seem to have learned from this dreadful catastrophe.
And so I started to talk about trying to correct the stereotypes. I found that our Islam phobia is very very old in the western world. It dates back to the time of the crusades. A time when Europe was beginning to crawl out of the long period of barbarism known as the dark ages in the 10th/11th and back into the international scene. Islam and Judaism both became the shadow-self of Europe. A symbol of everything that we hoped we were not and feared that we might be.
On early Christian Perception of Islam.
It was during the crusades, for example, when it was Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims in the holy land that scholars in Europe in the 12th Century began to describe Islam as the violent religion of the sword.
It was a kind of projection of a buried worry about their own behavior. Jesus, after all, had in one gospel told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. Worries about the intensely un-Christian nature of their hatred made them push that religion of the sword onto the other.
Also, at a time when the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the extremely reluctant clergy, Mohammad the Prophet was described with a great deal of ill-conceived envy as a lecher and a sexual pervert. Islam was described as a religion that encouraged Muslims to pander to their basest instincts. And it was at a time when Europe was extremely hierarchical, against the egalitarian ethos of the Gospel.
That Islam was described as giving too much power and respect to menials, to the lower classes and to woman. So, Islam was becoming the shadow-self of Europe. As we were trying to redefine ourselves, redefine a new style of western Christianity, very different from the eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam became the boggy and the shadow-self.
Judaism too! It was during the crusades, when very often, people who couldn't go to the Middle East to fight would attack Jews at home, as part of the crusading effort. It was at this time that Jews were first described as child slayers.
It was said that every year at Passover, Jews would kill a Christian child and use the blood in the manufacture of matzo enliven bread. This image of the Jew, the child killer, reflects again an almost eadiple fear of the parent faith, an inability to accept the Jewish roots of Judaism.
So these prejudices are very deep. So please forgive me if I start by talking about Jehad and violence. This is the thing, as I say, that has been said about Islam for nearly a millennium. And I'm Apologetic to you, because a lot of you are Muslims and know the facts of the matter. But also to western members of the audience, because since September 11, I've been saying this so often that I feel I ought to apologize for saying it again because surely people have got the point by this time.
But unfortunately what happens, every time there is a crisis like the Danish cartoon crisis, all the old skeletons come out of the cupboard and we have to start from scratch. So deeply ingrained are these ideas, its rather like that child's game: snakes and ladders where you suddenly land on a snake and then it goes sliding down right back to the beginning and off you go again, explaining that Islam is not the religion of the sword.
Is Islam a Pacifist Religion?
So forgive me if I -sort of- launch into that right now. The Quran proposed a religion that was not a pacifist religion. It was not the religion that Christianity was supposed to be, which was supposed to be pacifist, but turned out not to be pacifist at all. Islam had a more realistic view, sometime it was unfortunately necessary to fight, in order to preserve decent values, but only in self-defense. There must be no aggressive warfare, and there were strong rules developed that for example in Sharia Law, you could never kill civilians. It was illegal for a ruler to attack a country where Muslims were allowed to practice their religion freely. It was forbidden to use fire in fighting as it was too cruel. Again the blazing towers of Sep 11 come to mind, and entirely illegal and heretical, not to say inhumane act was committed in the name of Islam.
The Quran insists that Muhammad was fighting a war of self-defense. The powerful city of Mecca was attacking Muslim community and had the Meccans prevailed, according to the customs of the pre-Islamic Arabia, they would have slaughtered all the men and sold the woman and children into slavery. The Muslim community was fighting for survival.
But as what always happens in warfare, as we find in our own day, warfare has its own awful dynamics. Atrocities are committed on all sides. And that, in the end I think, pushed Mohammad to initiate a peaceful nonviolent riposte. When the tide just beginning in Arabia as a whole, though not in Medina, where he had a great deal of opposition, he announced to his followers that he wanted to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
On the Hajj as you know, you may not carry any weapons, you may not fight, you may not even kill an insect or speak the cross word. So for Muslims in the height of this lethal war in Mecca, to ride unarmed into the holy city of Mecca was going unarmed to the lion’s den.
Nevertheless, a thousand Muslims from Medina, volunteered to go on this highly dangerous campaign. When they heard they were coming, the Meccans sent their cavalry out to kill the pilgrims. But with the help of a friendly local Bedouin, Mohammad managed to elude them and get into the sanctuary of mecca where all violence was forbidden.
And so he sat down. It was a demonstration. It the 60s we used to call it a sit-in. He basically attracted the eyes of Arabia on him. He was a brilliant man, and he knew he was putting the Meccans on the spot. Because if they slaughtered peaceful pilgrims who were punctiliously pursuing the rites and denying them a right of every Arab to perform the rites of the hajj at the Kaaba. They would have violated the sanctities that they had been fighting for, and would've lost enormous prestige. They were the guardians of the Kaaba, so they negotiated. And Mohammad accepted terms, as the Quran says Muslims must do. That seemed utterly appalling to his followers, because it seemed to give away to Mecca, everything they fought for.
His accompanying pilgrims almost mutinied. Nevertheless, he persisted. On the way home he had a revelation, whereby he said this was a manifest victory, it was not a defeat. That the Meccans had behaved with all the chauvinism and violence of Jahiliya, the pre-Islamic period, A word I'm going to talk more about in a minute. Whereas, the Muslims had experience Sakina, the spirit of peace, which descended upon them.
It was this spirit of peace that linked them with the Jews and the Christians, the people of the book. The spirit that characterizes the human attitude towards god. The early historians of Islam agree that this was indeed a victory. It was a turning point. Two years later Mecca opened its gate voluntarily to the prophet. Nobody was forced to convert to Islam. And Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn, war-weary Arabia.
On the True meaning of Jehad
There is a very important Hadith that describes the attitude to war. It said that on returning from a battle, a very important one, Mohammad said to his followers: We are returning from the lesser Jehad, that is the battle, and going to the greater Jehad, the greater struggle to reform our own society and our own hearts.
Jehad of course, I say, having said this so many times since 9/11 does not really mean holy war, whatever the extremists or the media tells us. It means efforts or struggle of endeavor. And Muslims are enjoined to struggle on all fronts to put the word of god into practice in a violent and traumatic world.
Sometimes it may be necessary to fight, but you must also engage in an intellectual Jehad, a social Jehad, an economic Jehad, to ensure there is justice and decency in your society. A spiritual Jehad as you struggle with the egotism and hatred that mars human relationship.
Now the so called "wars of conquest" need to be addressed. After Muhammad's death, the leaders of Islam, the Arabs came out of the peninsula at a very extraordinary moment. The great powers of the region, Persia and Byzantium had been at war with one another, and were both destroyed and exhausted by this war effort. They just keeled over before the Arab armies, much to their surprise. They soon found that they had an empire that stretched, a hundred years after the prophet's death, from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees.
But these wars, at the time, had no religious significance. The people who were waging these wars were politicians. They were generals and soldiers. There were clearly practical difficulties about living peacefully in Arabia, where the culture of acquisition raids, the “Ghazu”, was part of the economy. What were they to do with people who were inherently aggressive, which want to go back to fighting, so let’s take them out on a war!
It wasn't until later, that these wars were regarded as somehow sacred. No body among the subjects was forced to convert to Islam. In fact in the first hundred years after the prophet, Conversion was actually frowned upon. It was thought that Islam was a religion for the Arabs, for the Children of Ismail, as Judaism was for the sons of Jacob and Israel. And Christianity was for the followers of Jesus.
The Plurality of the Quran
This brings me to my next point, that is, the extraordinary pluralism of the Quran. It was the things that first drew me to Islam. We’re always being told that Islam is not only violent but also an intolerant religion. The Quran insists that there must be no compulsion in religious matters, but also that all rightly guided religion comes from god. The Prophets of the Jews and Prophet Jesus is honored and respected. You cannot be a Muslim unless you acknowledge the prophecy of Jesus, Moses and Abraham.
There are Muslim scholars today who say that had the Arabs known about the Buddhists and the Hindus, or indeed the Australian aborigines, or the American Indians, the Quran would've praised their religious leaders too. Because every people on the face of the earth has been sent a prophet form god and a scripture in their own language, according to their own cultural tradition.
Crucial to this is the story of the night’s journey, the Archetypal spiritual experience of Muslims. Sufi's Spirituality is based on this story of Mohammad's night journey to Jerusalem, followed by the ascent to heaven. You know the story of course. One night Mohammad was sleeping beside the Kabaa, and was conveyed, perhaps in spirit, to Jerusalem, to the temple mount.
There, he was greeted by all the great prophets of the past, who welcomed him into their midst. Then they asked the prophet Mohammad to preach to them. Then he ascended like a Jewish mystic through the seven heavens to the divine throne, meeting on the way other great prophets.
Adam, Moses, with whom he conversed about the number of times Muslims should pray. Mohammad wanted them to pray around ten times and Moses said don't even go there, this is quite so unrealistic. And kept sending Mohammad back to god to get the number of obligatory prayers reduced.
The importance of this story is that it’s a story of pluralism. It shows first of all that Mohammad yearning to bring the Arabs who felt left out of the divine plan because they haven't had a prophet before, to bring the Arabs from far off Arabia right into the heart of Monotheistic family there in Jerusalem.
The prophets listened to one another, the prophets of the past don't re vial Muhammad as a charlatan, and he doesn't tell them that he is superseding them all. It’s absolutely clear that they listen to one another's incites as the prophets are all brothers, all of them, whoever they may be, this vast multitude of messengers from god.
The fact that this is the Archetypal spiritual experience of the Muslims, it gives indication of the path that we all have to make when we turn to the divine source of our being. The fact that this pluralism is built into this Archetypal Paradigmatic spiritual experience shows that pluralism is essential to the Quran. This is the voice of Islam that we want to hear in the World today, to counter the voice of the extremists.
Who are the Kaferoon and Jahiloon?
Constantly in the Quran, in an English translation, we're hearing dreadful things about Infidels, which means unbelievers; this is a very bad translation of "kaferoon" or "Jahiloon".
A Kafer is not an unbeliever as such! The people who Mohammad was criticizing as Kafers in fact had a quite correct theology. They believed all right that Allah had created the world. The trouble was, they weren't acting on this belief. A Kafer means the ungrateful. It has the connotations of somebody who is proud, self-sufficient and when something wonderful is offered to them all but spits in the face, and there were a lot of Meccans who were highly contemptuous of Mohammad's message.
The same with Jahiliyah, it is a term used by extremists and it’s also used to describe the pre-Islamic period in Arabia before the coming of the prophet. But it’s usually translated: the Age of ignorance. Now Jahel does have connotations of ignorance, but it also means irascible, violent, chauvinist, somebody who thinks that his "Sunna", his way of life, is superior to everybody else's, somebody who believes in pre-preemptive strike, rather than waiting to be attacked first.
Now, there is an awful lot of Jahiliyah around at the moment. Not only in the Muslim world, and not only in the religious world either. When Mohammad is talking about a verse, remember that Mohammad is a general and in some of these passages, he says go after the Kaferoon, go after the Jahiloon.
When a general is dispatching his troop into battle, I'm sure this is happening in Iraq every day, the American and British generals do not tell them: look guys, go in there and turn the other cheek. A general will urge his troops on. But at the end of these adjurations to fight bravely in battle, The Quran nearly always finishes saying: but forgiveness is better for you. Peace is better for you. The moment the enemy asks for peace, lay down your arms. And those verses are not quoted by either the extremists or the enemies of Islam.
It’s like people in Christianity who support the idea of capital punishment by saying the lord Jesus says an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth, omitting to mention that Jesus goes on then to say: but I say to you love your enemies, don't retaliate, don't judge. The Quran insists that you must not quote things out of context. You must always wait and see how each verse, how each revelation, each Ayah fits in with the whole.
So Mohammad was not giving a blanket approval for Muslims everywhere to slay unbelievers, people who don't follow Islam. The Muslim community was a very small community, and the first Muslims knew exactly who Muhammad was talking about. They were people like Abu Sufyan, Abu Jahal, their kinsmen, people known to them all in Mecca, with whom later Muhammad made piece. It was rather like in Mrs. Thatcher's day, there were a bunch of conservative members of parliament known as the wets. Mrs. Thatcher called them... wet, a British idiom for feeble minded. And everybody knew exactly who those wets were.
Similarly in John Major's time, if you'll excuse the not very polite language, there were a whole bunch of other conservative MPs, known as the bastards. And everybody knew these 3 or 4 people and it’s the same in the Quran. This is not a blanket command to go and slaughter anybody who does not accept Islam. People knew who these Kaferoon were and later, there was piece with them and some of these Kafers accepted very high office indeed in the Islamic community.
There is so much to say, I can’t dwell too much on the position of women in another of those endless chestnuts. I just say passing, that none of the great world religions has proved to be good for Women.
Some of them like Christianity and Islam start with a very good message for woman. Then a few generations later, the men hijack the faith and drag it back to the old patriarchy and that's what's happened in Islam. But we can go back to that in question time, if you like, because there is so much to talk about.
On Fundamentalism, adapted by Muslim Extremists
Now there is a phenomenon that is always associated with Islam and it has caused fundamentalism. This is a most unsatisfactory term as I'm sure you know. It doesn't apply to Muslims. It was coined by Christian Protestants at the turn of the 20th Century, to describe their reform movement. They were going back to the fundamentals of Christianity, but this doesn't translate well into Arabic and people understandably resent having this Christian western term foisted on their movements.
But if I occasionally caught mention of fundamentalism, I hope you can forgive me, because we're galloping towards the end of this lecture and The word has come to stand in common parlants for a group of militant sort of piety that has erupted every single major religion in the course of the 20th century.
Of the 3 monotheistic religions, Islam was the last to develop a kind of fundamentalist strain in the late 1960. The first fundamentalist movement, as I say, was here in the US, founded in about the 1920s. Every single one of these movements, whether we're talking about fundamentalists in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Confucianism in China, all these movements are rooted in profound fear.
Fundamentalism and Modernity
Every single movement of these that I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is convinced that modern western society wants to wipe them out. Even here in the states, many Christians in small town America feel colonized by what is to them the alien ethos of Harvard or Yale or Washington DC.
So there is a fear. Fundamentalists are disturbed by the secular society in every region of the world, where a modern secular western society has been established, a religious counter cultural movement has grown up alongside it, in conscious rejection. They want to drag god and/or religion from the side lines to which they've been relegated in modern secular culture and back to center stage.
In this, they've achieved some considerable success because in the middle of the 20th century, it was generally taken for granted that secularism was the coming ideology, and that never again, would religion play a major role in international events. Well that was proved not to be a correct prophecy.
What is it about modernity that fills people with such dread? In the 16th Century, the countries of Western Europe began to create an entirely different kind of civilization, one that had no precedent in world history. It was based on a different kind of economy. Instead of relying on a surplus of agricultural produce, which you could sell and trade with to fund your cultural enterprises, the new western society was increasingly based on technology and the technological replication of resources and the constant re-investment of capital.
This changed everything however dry and dull this sounds. In order to fund and make these societies productive, we had to change entire ways of living, thinking and social systems in the West. Therefore, there were bloody revolutions. In these turbulent centuries when Europe and later the United States were modernizing, there were bloody revolutions succeeded by reigns of terror, succeeded by dictatorships, succeeded by horrible wars of religion in the 17th century. And what are we seeing today when other parts of the world are modernizing, but bloody revolutions, wars of religion, sectarian strife, dictatorships,.. etc.
The modernization process, like any major social change of this level, is extremely traumatic. And for many of the Muslim countries, the conditions have been very difficult, because instead of having 300 years, in which to modernize, they had to do it yesterday. Far too rapidly, and that has caused all kinds of social stress.
Modernization and Democracy
Democracy was not conceived in the West simply because we were good people who wanted to give the plebs a share in the governing process of the country. It was found to be essential to a modern productive society. As modernization proceeded, more and more people had to be brought into the production process, even at a quite humble level, as office clerks or factory workers or printer. And that meant they had to have a little bit of education. And the more they were educated, the more inevitably they began to demand a voice in government. And it was found by trial and error, that those countries that did democratize, went ahead and were more productive and successful than those who tried to hog the benefits of community and confine it to a small elite.
So democracy, as I said, was part of modernization and we are still fighting for it. As you know, in the early 20th century, woman weren't fully emancipated, and didn't get to vote until the 1930s, after they had been brought into the production process themselves during the two world wars. So all this talk about democracies, as though it descended from Mount Sinai or something, is part of modernization. It’s not always easy to impose on modernizing countries that have still not completed the painful rite of passage from pre-modern to modern society.
Prerequisites of Modernity
Every single modern society has to have two characteristics. The modern spirit has to have 2 characteristics, and however many sky scrapers or computers or fighter jets you have, if you don't have these 2 mental qualities, you’re not really modern.
First is independence. Modernization in Europe was preceded by declarations of independence on all fronts. Political: on the fourth of July, the declaration of independence was a typical modernizing document. Religious: Luther for example, declared independence of the Roman Catholic Church. Intellectual: Inventors and scientists demanded the freedom to think for themselves without being supervised or penalized by the hierarchical church. And Intellectual independence was as crucial as economic independence represented by free markets.
The second quality was innovation. Even though the process of modernization was very traumatic from the 16th to the 19th century, causing great suffering and warfare, as we modernize, it was exciting because we were always doing something new, achieving something fresh, putting ourselves against unprecedented problems and coming up with holy novel solutions.
Modernization in the Third World
Now in the Muslim world, the new modern economy and modern society did not come with independence but with colonial subjugation. So instead of independence you have dependence. And instead of innovation you have imitation, because we were so far ahead, and you could only copy us. This means that the wrong kind of ingredients have been going into some of these societies.
It's rather like a cake. If you are told to make a cake, but you don't have all the ingredients, what will you have? So instead of flour you only have ground rice. Instead of fresh eggs you have only powdered egg and you don't have the correct kind of oven. You’re not going to get this lovely fluffy black chocolate gateau you found in the cook book. You could end up with something very nasty indeed.
And because modernization has proceeded so rapidly, secularization has been experienced with horror in some of these countries. When Ataturk modernized Turkey, for example, he closed down the Madrasas and forced all men and women into western dress. These reformers wanted their countries to look modern, never mind the fact that the vast mass of the population were not acquainted with modern society, it had no understanding of the new secularized institutions.
The Shahs in Iran used to have their soldiers go out with their bayonets out taking off the women's veils and ripping them to pieces in front of them. On one occasion Shah Reza Pahlavi gave his soldiers orders to shoot at hundreds of unarmed demonstrators at one of the holiest shrines of Iran who were peacefully protesting against obligatory western clothes and hundreds of Iranians were killed that day.
In Egypt, President Nasser interred thousands of members of the Muslim brotherhood. Often, these young men had done nothing more inflammatory than handing out leaflets of attending a meeting. But in these prisons, they developed what we call a fundamentalist ideology.
One of the people who were in these prisons was Sayed Qutub, who is the founder of many of these schools. Usama ben Laden follows his kind of school of thought. And when he looked around this camp, going into it as a moderate, he heard at the same time Nasser vowing to secularize Egypt on the Western model, separating religion and politics, Secularism did not seem lovely, it seemed Jahili. It seemed barbarous and aggressive and evil.
Are Fundamentalists Orthodox?
But interestingly, Sayed Qutub did not declare war on the west. All these movements began as inert religious movements, fighting against their own people and fellow countrymen, and only at a second stage, if at all, do they turn against a foreign foe. It's very important to note that these movements whether they're Christian, Jewish or Muslim are not orthodox. We often say: Obviously with people like Usama ben Laden around, this proves that Islam is a violent religion. These movements are unorthodox, in fact, anti-orthodox. They are highly innovative.
If you look at the Christian right for example, here in the United States, who've got this idea with rapture, that people are going to be taken up to heaven and watch the tribulation of the last days, and anti-Christ will descend to earth and slaughter all the Jews, ... etc. This is an entirely novel interpretation of the book of revelation. I'm afraid it was launched on the world by a Brit. But it has to be said for my own people, that he had no fans in England. But he did very well when he crossed the Atlantic and came to the United States. But you could define this rapture as heresy.
Similarly, Ayatollah Khomeini was highly unorthodox as a Shiite. For centuries Shiites had, as a matter of sacred principle, separated religion and politics, and did not take part in politics. So for a cleric to declare that there should be an Imam at head of state was a shocking to Shiite sensibility, as though if the Pope should abolish the mass.
Similarly, Qutub's ideas were entirely unorthodox. This idea that Usama ben laden has of converting the whole world to Islam is entirely new. Similarly, putting Jihad, meaning holy war, at the center of your ideology was a new and a controversial step. There have been some idiots and fanatics beforehand who'd occasionally done this, but not a major thinker. The first major thinker to do this was the Pakistani ideologue Mawdudi in the 1950s. He was very aware that this was a very controversial step, occasioned by the current emergency of the rising tide of colonialism and Western domination.
And when said to Qutub, how can you have this hard line ideology, when the Quran specifically said, "there must be no compulsion in religion", How can you reconcile this. Again, Qutub said this is an emergency until we've got a better style of leadership and government, we can't afford this kind of tolerance. They were aware that this is controversial and are stepping out into new uncharted territory.
Thereof, it's very important to note all fundamentalist movements, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh are unorthodox. In fact they are heretical in the sense of the original meaning of the Greek word, meaning "going your own way". There are modern developments that could've taken root in no time other than our own.
Of course, History also shows, and I'll just throw this in, that when you attack these movements, they become more extreme. That has happened in the Christian right and in Judaism. For example, Jewish fundamentalism took 2 major steps forward, one after the Nazi holocaust when Hitler had been trying to exterminate European Jewry. And Second, after the 1973 war of Yom Kippur, when you had a new style of religious Zionism. Religious Zionism had once been an unthinkable thing, because in the early days of the Zionist movement, the orthodox Jews, nearly all with one notable exception regarded Zionism as heretical and a great evil.
Because these movements are rooted in fear and dread of annihilation, fighting for survival, when you attack them, even verbally, they become more extreme. It's because it fulfills their expectation of annihilation: "We're right, they really are out to get us!" So that is something to bear in mind.
Modernity’s Approximation to The Quranic Ideals
Of course there is no inherent clash of civilizations. At the turn of the 20th Century, nearly every single leading Muslim intellectual, again with one notable exception - Alafghani, was in love with the West and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France, who at that time, were the chief purveyors of modernity.
There is a very famous story of the grand Muftee of Egypt, Mohammad Abdu, a great reformer, who hated the British occupation of his country, but was very much at home in European culture and among Europeans. After a visit to Paris, he returned to Egypt and said: In France, I saw Islam but no Muslims. In Egypt, I see Muslims but no Islam. What he meant that was in their modernized economies, the Europeans were better able to create the kinds of equal conditions that approximate to the Quranic Ideals than the un-modernized Muslim countries.
In Iran, secular intellectuals and leading clerics in 1906, joined forces to demand a constitution and representational government, a constitutional revolution! And They got their constitution, but unfortunately, parliament was never able to function properly until after the Arabian revolution, because a couple of years after the revolution, the British discovered oil in Iran and they weren't about to allow an Iranian parliament to scupper their plans for Iranian oil to be used to fuel the British navy.
Nevertheless, after the constitution had been achieved, one of the leading Ayatollahs, at that time living in Najaf said that the new constitution was the next best thing to the coming of the Shiite Messiah, because it would limit the tyranny of the Shahs, and therefore, it was a project worthy of the Shia.
It's poignant to look back on this early enthusiasm. Muslims saw and understood the whole democratic representational ideals of modernity and recognized it as deeply congenial with their own traditions. Unfortunately, politics, especially our foreign policies wrecked this, the questions of Palestine for example.
Religious Nationalism
It’s important to say that fundamentalist movements, sorry for this word as we come to the end, are not inherently violent. Among all the people who take part in these groups and ideologies, only a tiny proportion takes part in acts of terror and violence. Most are simply trying to live what they regard as a good religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to religion.
But where, that there has been, for good or ill, a religious revival in the 2nd half of the 20th century? There's certainly one going on here in the US. Western Europe is the only place that is resisting this trend. But we are beginning to look endearingly old fashioned in our secularism and we're losing it. The rest of the world is showing that they want, in all kind of ways - some good, some not so good, some (as the Buddhists would say) highly unskillful, some even lethal, are showing in all kinds of ways that they want to see religion reflected in public life.
Many often these movements can be described as a new form of nationalism or patriotism. That's certainly true of the Christian right who has a very different ideal from that of Thomas Jefferson for example. They want to see, not a secular nation but a Christian nation. Religious Zionism in Israel is deeply patriotic and sees the secular state of Israel as sacred and holy. Similarly, in the Muslim world when nationalism was a foreign idea, and actually not a very good idea of the 19th century in Europe, as we're retreating from nationalism and at the same time we're hoisting it on other parts of the world. It caused 2 world wars this national Jaheliyah, chauvinism.
The people who never felt en tuned with the nationalist ideal are trying to find other religious pre-colonial ways of expressing their identity.
Is Religious Violence a Product of Ideology?
Furthermore, however, when violence becomes entrenched and warfare becomes chronic in a region, as say in Palestine-Israel, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in all that troubled region which had the trauma of partition, this is where religion becomes violent.
Warfare and violence affect everything that we do. If you live, say, in Gaza or Afghanistan and every day you see shootings and soldiers and tanks and bulldozing and suicide bombings, this is going to affect you relationships, your aspirations, your dreams and it's going to affect your religion too. In these societies, religion gets sucked in and becomes a part of the problem, because very often these movements, in their anxiety to defend their traditions, often distort it in a gross and a terrible way.
What we need on all sides are several things, among which we need to learn to listen respectfully to other people’s narratives. There are an awful lot of competing narratives in the world at the moment. Say the Israelis have one narrative of what happened and the Palestinians have another, the Americans another, Europeans... and theirs is the only right one.
Second, what we need is self-criticism. We all need, whether we're Westerners or Arabs or Iranians, to look critically at ourselves. It always takes two to tango. The right is never all on one side and Muslims have a fabulous tradition of self-criticism. You can read all about that in my Short History of Islam. But in the early years of Muslim history, when there were these terrible disasters, the “Fitna”, the wars, the killing of the Caliphs, Muslims did not say "this is how the cookie crumbles", what can you do? They sat down and agonized about this. And out of these anguished discussions about what had gone wrong with Muslim history came the Sharia Law, Sufism, Shia and a lot of the pieties that have been deeply formative.
We need to think that there are things wrong with all of our societies. And before we point a finger at the other, let’s also take a long hard look at ourselves. Thank you very much for your attention.
In an Islamic Forum Speaking about her Latest Book "Muhammad: A Prophet For Our Time"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Transcribed, edited and translated to Arabic by Almokhtar Bukhamsin
الترجمة العربية
الترجمة العربية
Outline:
- On her Introduction to Studying Islam
- On early Christian Perception of Islam
- Is Islam a Pacifist Religion?
- On the True meaning of Jehad
- The Plurality of the Quran
- Who are the Kaferoon and Jahiloon?
- On Fundamentalism, adapted by Muslim Extremists
- Fundamentalism and Modernity
- Modernization and Democracy
- Prerequisites of Modernity
- Modernization in the Third World
- Are Fundamentalists Orthodox?
- Modernity’s Approximation to The Quranic Ideals
- Religious Nationalism
- Is Religious Violence a Product of Ideology?
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It's a great pleasure to be here with you, and as we say at this turbulent juncture of history: How did I get interested in Islam in the first place. After all, my ambition in life was not to write about religion at all, but to be a university professor teaching English literature.
But after a series of career disasters, I found myself in television, and I said that once to Bill Moez, and he said: we take anybody! I found myself in Jerusalem making a program about early Christianity. There, I had a personal revelation. Until that time, despite the fact that I had a very strong religious background, I found nothing about either Judaism or Islam. I'd never thought about Judaism as anything but a kind of prelude to Christianity. And I'd really never considered Islam at all.
On her Introduction to Studying Islam
But once you’re living in the Holy City, seeing the three religions jostling sometimes uneasily together around the same sacred sites, you become aware of not only the antagonism that is unfortunately developed between them, exacerbated by political factors, but also of the great affinity and affection that they have between them.
So I started to study all three, and I must say that it was my study of both Judaism and Islam that brought me back to a set religion. It enabled me see what my own tradition had been trying to do at its best. I was increasingly disturbed to find the current opinion of Islam, and we’re talking about way back the early 1980s, was so much in variance with the facts. This disturbed me for two reasons:
I've been trained at Oxford, and I'm sure this would be the same of any of your great American Universities too, always to see both sides of a question, that you couldn't just write an essay presenting one side of the question.
You had to include and seriously consider the other side. You had to be prepared to change your mind. You had to be accurate and build your theories and ideas on the facts.
It offended me intellectually to hear what people are saying about Islam, that it was an inherently violent intolerant faith wasn't true. It disturbed me because in Europe we have had a long history of bigotry. It was this kind of bigoted lazy prejudice thinking that it had led to the death camps in the 1930s, and we don't seem to have learned from this dreadful catastrophe.
And so I started to talk about trying to correct the stereotypes. I found that our Islam phobia is very very old in the western world. It dates back to the time of the crusades. A time when Europe was beginning to crawl out of the long period of barbarism known as the dark ages in the 10th/11th and back into the international scene. Islam and Judaism both became the shadow-self of Europe. A symbol of everything that we hoped we were not and feared that we might be.
On early Christian Perception of Islam.
It was during the crusades, for example, when it was Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims in the holy land that scholars in Europe in the 12th Century began to describe Islam as the violent religion of the sword.
It was a kind of projection of a buried worry about their own behavior. Jesus, after all, had in one gospel told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. Worries about the intensely un-Christian nature of their hatred made them push that religion of the sword onto the other.
Also, at a time when the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the extremely reluctant clergy, Mohammad the Prophet was described with a great deal of ill-conceived envy as a lecher and a sexual pervert. Islam was described as a religion that encouraged Muslims to pander to their basest instincts. And it was at a time when Europe was extremely hierarchical, against the egalitarian ethos of the Gospel.
That Islam was described as giving too much power and respect to menials, to the lower classes and to woman. So, Islam was becoming the shadow-self of Europe. As we were trying to redefine ourselves, redefine a new style of western Christianity, very different from the eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam became the boggy and the shadow-self.
Judaism too! It was during the crusades, when very often, people who couldn't go to the Middle East to fight would attack Jews at home, as part of the crusading effort. It was at this time that Jews were first described as child slayers.
It was said that every year at Passover, Jews would kill a Christian child and use the blood in the manufacture of matzo enliven bread. This image of the Jew, the child killer, reflects again an almost eadiple fear of the parent faith, an inability to accept the Jewish roots of Judaism.
So these prejudices are very deep. So please forgive me if I start by talking about Jehad and violence. This is the thing, as I say, that has been said about Islam for nearly a millennium. And I'm Apologetic to you, because a lot of you are Muslims and know the facts of the matter. But also to western members of the audience, because since September 11, I've been saying this so often that I feel I ought to apologize for saying it again because surely people have got the point by this time.
But unfortunately what happens, every time there is a crisis like the Danish cartoon crisis, all the old skeletons come out of the cupboard and we have to start from scratch. So deeply ingrained are these ideas, its rather like that child's game: snakes and ladders where you suddenly land on a snake and then it goes sliding down right back to the beginning and off you go again, explaining that Islam is not the religion of the sword.
Is Islam a Pacifist Religion?
So forgive me if I -sort of- launch into that right now. The Quran proposed a religion that was not a pacifist religion. It was not the religion that Christianity was supposed to be, which was supposed to be pacifist, but turned out not to be pacifist at all. Islam had a more realistic view, sometime it was unfortunately necessary to fight, in order to preserve decent values, but only in self-defense. There must be no aggressive warfare, and there were strong rules developed that for example in Sharia Law, you could never kill civilians. It was illegal for a ruler to attack a country where Muslims were allowed to practice their religion freely. It was forbidden to use fire in fighting as it was too cruel. Again the blazing towers of Sep 11 come to mind, and entirely illegal and heretical, not to say inhumane act was committed in the name of Islam.
The Quran insists that Muhammad was fighting a war of self-defense. The powerful city of Mecca was attacking Muslim community and had the Meccans prevailed, according to the customs of the pre-Islamic Arabia, they would have slaughtered all the men and sold the woman and children into slavery. The Muslim community was fighting for survival.
But as what always happens in warfare, as we find in our own day, warfare has its own awful dynamics. Atrocities are committed on all sides. And that, in the end I think, pushed Mohammad to initiate a peaceful nonviolent riposte. When the tide just beginning in Arabia as a whole, though not in Medina, where he had a great deal of opposition, he announced to his followers that he wanted to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
On the Hajj as you know, you may not carry any weapons, you may not fight, you may not even kill an insect or speak the cross word. So for Muslims in the height of this lethal war in Mecca, to ride unarmed into the holy city of Mecca was going unarmed to the lion’s den.
Nevertheless, a thousand Muslims from Medina, volunteered to go on this highly dangerous campaign. When they heard they were coming, the Meccans sent their cavalry out to kill the pilgrims. But with the help of a friendly local Bedouin, Mohammad managed to elude them and get into the sanctuary of mecca where all violence was forbidden.
And so he sat down. It was a demonstration. It the 60s we used to call it a sit-in. He basically attracted the eyes of Arabia on him. He was a brilliant man, and he knew he was putting the Meccans on the spot. Because if they slaughtered peaceful pilgrims who were punctiliously pursuing the rites and denying them a right of every Arab to perform the rites of the hajj at the Kaaba. They would have violated the sanctities that they had been fighting for, and would've lost enormous prestige. They were the guardians of the Kaaba, so they negotiated. And Mohammad accepted terms, as the Quran says Muslims must do. That seemed utterly appalling to his followers, because it seemed to give away to Mecca, everything they fought for.
His accompanying pilgrims almost mutinied. Nevertheless, he persisted. On the way home he had a revelation, whereby he said this was a manifest victory, it was not a defeat. That the Meccans had behaved with all the chauvinism and violence of Jahiliya, the pre-Islamic period, A word I'm going to talk more about in a minute. Whereas, the Muslims had experience Sakina, the spirit of peace, which descended upon them.
It was this spirit of peace that linked them with the Jews and the Christians, the people of the book. The spirit that characterizes the human attitude towards god. The early historians of Islam agree that this was indeed a victory. It was a turning point. Two years later Mecca opened its gate voluntarily to the prophet. Nobody was forced to convert to Islam. And Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn, war-weary Arabia.
On the True meaning of Jehad
There is a very important Hadith that describes the attitude to war. It said that on returning from a battle, a very important one, Mohammad said to his followers: We are returning from the lesser Jehad, that is the battle, and going to the greater Jehad, the greater struggle to reform our own society and our own hearts.
Jehad of course, I say, having said this so many times since 9/11 does not really mean holy war, whatever the extremists or the media tells us. It means efforts or struggle of endeavor. And Muslims are enjoined to struggle on all fronts to put the word of god into practice in a violent and traumatic world.
Sometimes it may be necessary to fight, but you must also engage in an intellectual Jehad, a social Jehad, an economic Jehad, to ensure there is justice and decency in your society. A spiritual Jehad as you struggle with the egotism and hatred that mars human relationship.
Now the so called "wars of conquest" need to be addressed. After Muhammad's death, the leaders of Islam, the Arabs came out of the peninsula at a very extraordinary moment. The great powers of the region, Persia and Byzantium had been at war with one another, and were both destroyed and exhausted by this war effort. They just keeled over before the Arab armies, much to their surprise. They soon found that they had an empire that stretched, a hundred years after the prophet's death, from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees.
But these wars, at the time, had no religious significance. The people who were waging these wars were politicians. They were generals and soldiers. There were clearly practical difficulties about living peacefully in Arabia, where the culture of acquisition raids, the “Ghazu”, was part of the economy. What were they to do with people who were inherently aggressive, which want to go back to fighting, so let’s take them out on a war!
It wasn't until later, that these wars were regarded as somehow sacred. No body among the subjects was forced to convert to Islam. In fact in the first hundred years after the prophet, Conversion was actually frowned upon. It was thought that Islam was a religion for the Arabs, for the Children of Ismail, as Judaism was for the sons of Jacob and Israel. And Christianity was for the followers of Jesus.
The Plurality of the Quran
This brings me to my next point, that is, the extraordinary pluralism of the Quran. It was the things that first drew me to Islam. We’re always being told that Islam is not only violent but also an intolerant religion. The Quran insists that there must be no compulsion in religious matters, but also that all rightly guided religion comes from god. The Prophets of the Jews and Prophet Jesus is honored and respected. You cannot be a Muslim unless you acknowledge the prophecy of Jesus, Moses and Abraham.
There are Muslim scholars today who say that had the Arabs known about the Buddhists and the Hindus, or indeed the Australian aborigines, or the American Indians, the Quran would've praised their religious leaders too. Because every people on the face of the earth has been sent a prophet form god and a scripture in their own language, according to their own cultural tradition.
Crucial to this is the story of the night’s journey, the Archetypal spiritual experience of Muslims. Sufi's Spirituality is based on this story of Mohammad's night journey to Jerusalem, followed by the ascent to heaven. You know the story of course. One night Mohammad was sleeping beside the Kabaa, and was conveyed, perhaps in spirit, to Jerusalem, to the temple mount.
There, he was greeted by all the great prophets of the past, who welcomed him into their midst. Then they asked the prophet Mohammad to preach to them. Then he ascended like a Jewish mystic through the seven heavens to the divine throne, meeting on the way other great prophets.
Adam, Moses, with whom he conversed about the number of times Muslims should pray. Mohammad wanted them to pray around ten times and Moses said don't even go there, this is quite so unrealistic. And kept sending Mohammad back to god to get the number of obligatory prayers reduced.
The importance of this story is that it’s a story of pluralism. It shows first of all that Mohammad yearning to bring the Arabs who felt left out of the divine plan because they haven't had a prophet before, to bring the Arabs from far off Arabia right into the heart of Monotheistic family there in Jerusalem.
The prophets listened to one another, the prophets of the past don't re vial Muhammad as a charlatan, and he doesn't tell them that he is superseding them all. It’s absolutely clear that they listen to one another's incites as the prophets are all brothers, all of them, whoever they may be, this vast multitude of messengers from god.
The fact that this is the Archetypal spiritual experience of the Muslims, it gives indication of the path that we all have to make when we turn to the divine source of our being. The fact that this pluralism is built into this Archetypal Paradigmatic spiritual experience shows that pluralism is essential to the Quran. This is the voice of Islam that we want to hear in the World today, to counter the voice of the extremists.
Who are the Kaferoon and Jahiloon?
Constantly in the Quran, in an English translation, we're hearing dreadful things about Infidels, which means unbelievers; this is a very bad translation of "kaferoon" or "Jahiloon".
A Kafer is not an unbeliever as such! The people who Mohammad was criticizing as Kafers in fact had a quite correct theology. They believed all right that Allah had created the world. The trouble was, they weren't acting on this belief. A Kafer means the ungrateful. It has the connotations of somebody who is proud, self-sufficient and when something wonderful is offered to them all but spits in the face, and there were a lot of Meccans who were highly contemptuous of Mohammad's message.
The same with Jahiliyah, it is a term used by extremists and it’s also used to describe the pre-Islamic period in Arabia before the coming of the prophet. But it’s usually translated: the Age of ignorance. Now Jahel does have connotations of ignorance, but it also means irascible, violent, chauvinist, somebody who thinks that his "Sunna", his way of life, is superior to everybody else's, somebody who believes in pre-preemptive strike, rather than waiting to be attacked first.
Now, there is an awful lot of Jahiliyah around at the moment. Not only in the Muslim world, and not only in the religious world either. When Mohammad is talking about a verse, remember that Mohammad is a general and in some of these passages, he says go after the Kaferoon, go after the Jahiloon.
When a general is dispatching his troop into battle, I'm sure this is happening in Iraq every day, the American and British generals do not tell them: look guys, go in there and turn the other cheek. A general will urge his troops on. But at the end of these adjurations to fight bravely in battle, The Quran nearly always finishes saying: but forgiveness is better for you. Peace is better for you. The moment the enemy asks for peace, lay down your arms. And those verses are not quoted by either the extremists or the enemies of Islam.
It’s like people in Christianity who support the idea of capital punishment by saying the lord Jesus says an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth, omitting to mention that Jesus goes on then to say: but I say to you love your enemies, don't retaliate, don't judge. The Quran insists that you must not quote things out of context. You must always wait and see how each verse, how each revelation, each Ayah fits in with the whole.
So Mohammad was not giving a blanket approval for Muslims everywhere to slay unbelievers, people who don't follow Islam. The Muslim community was a very small community, and the first Muslims knew exactly who Muhammad was talking about. They were people like Abu Sufyan, Abu Jahal, their kinsmen, people known to them all in Mecca, with whom later Muhammad made piece. It was rather like in Mrs. Thatcher's day, there were a bunch of conservative members of parliament known as the wets. Mrs. Thatcher called them... wet, a British idiom for feeble minded. And everybody knew exactly who those wets were.
Similarly in John Major's time, if you'll excuse the not very polite language, there were a whole bunch of other conservative MPs, known as the bastards. And everybody knew these 3 or 4 people and it’s the same in the Quran. This is not a blanket command to go and slaughter anybody who does not accept Islam. People knew who these Kaferoon were and later, there was piece with them and some of these Kafers accepted very high office indeed in the Islamic community.
There is so much to say, I can’t dwell too much on the position of women in another of those endless chestnuts. I just say passing, that none of the great world religions has proved to be good for Women.
Some of them like Christianity and Islam start with a very good message for woman. Then a few generations later, the men hijack the faith and drag it back to the old patriarchy and that's what's happened in Islam. But we can go back to that in question time, if you like, because there is so much to talk about.
On Fundamentalism, adapted by Muslim Extremists
Now there is a phenomenon that is always associated with Islam and it has caused fundamentalism. This is a most unsatisfactory term as I'm sure you know. It doesn't apply to Muslims. It was coined by Christian Protestants at the turn of the 20th Century, to describe their reform movement. They were going back to the fundamentals of Christianity, but this doesn't translate well into Arabic and people understandably resent having this Christian western term foisted on their movements.
But if I occasionally caught mention of fundamentalism, I hope you can forgive me, because we're galloping towards the end of this lecture and The word has come to stand in common parlants for a group of militant sort of piety that has erupted every single major religion in the course of the 20th century.
Of the 3 monotheistic religions, Islam was the last to develop a kind of fundamentalist strain in the late 1960. The first fundamentalist movement, as I say, was here in the US, founded in about the 1920s. Every single one of these movements, whether we're talking about fundamentalists in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Confucianism in China, all these movements are rooted in profound fear.
Fundamentalism and Modernity
Every single movement of these that I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is convinced that modern western society wants to wipe them out. Even here in the states, many Christians in small town America feel colonized by what is to them the alien ethos of Harvard or Yale or Washington DC.
So there is a fear. Fundamentalists are disturbed by the secular society in every region of the world, where a modern secular western society has been established, a religious counter cultural movement has grown up alongside it, in conscious rejection. They want to drag god and/or religion from the side lines to which they've been relegated in modern secular culture and back to center stage.
In this, they've achieved some considerable success because in the middle of the 20th century, it was generally taken for granted that secularism was the coming ideology, and that never again, would religion play a major role in international events. Well that was proved not to be a correct prophecy.
What is it about modernity that fills people with such dread? In the 16th Century, the countries of Western Europe began to create an entirely different kind of civilization, one that had no precedent in world history. It was based on a different kind of economy. Instead of relying on a surplus of agricultural produce, which you could sell and trade with to fund your cultural enterprises, the new western society was increasingly based on technology and the technological replication of resources and the constant re-investment of capital.
This changed everything however dry and dull this sounds. In order to fund and make these societies productive, we had to change entire ways of living, thinking and social systems in the West. Therefore, there were bloody revolutions. In these turbulent centuries when Europe and later the United States were modernizing, there were bloody revolutions succeeded by reigns of terror, succeeded by dictatorships, succeeded by horrible wars of religion in the 17th century. And what are we seeing today when other parts of the world are modernizing, but bloody revolutions, wars of religion, sectarian strife, dictatorships,.. etc.
The modernization process, like any major social change of this level, is extremely traumatic. And for many of the Muslim countries, the conditions have been very difficult, because instead of having 300 years, in which to modernize, they had to do it yesterday. Far too rapidly, and that has caused all kinds of social stress.
Modernization and Democracy
Democracy was not conceived in the West simply because we were good people who wanted to give the plebs a share in the governing process of the country. It was found to be essential to a modern productive society. As modernization proceeded, more and more people had to be brought into the production process, even at a quite humble level, as office clerks or factory workers or printer. And that meant they had to have a little bit of education. And the more they were educated, the more inevitably they began to demand a voice in government. And it was found by trial and error, that those countries that did democratize, went ahead and were more productive and successful than those who tried to hog the benefits of community and confine it to a small elite.
So democracy, as I said, was part of modernization and we are still fighting for it. As you know, in the early 20th century, woman weren't fully emancipated, and didn't get to vote until the 1930s, after they had been brought into the production process themselves during the two world wars. So all this talk about democracies, as though it descended from Mount Sinai or something, is part of modernization. It’s not always easy to impose on modernizing countries that have still not completed the painful rite of passage from pre-modern to modern society.
Prerequisites of Modernity
Every single modern society has to have two characteristics. The modern spirit has to have 2 characteristics, and however many sky scrapers or computers or fighter jets you have, if you don't have these 2 mental qualities, you’re not really modern.
First is independence. Modernization in Europe was preceded by declarations of independence on all fronts. Political: on the fourth of July, the declaration of independence was a typical modernizing document. Religious: Luther for example, declared independence of the Roman Catholic Church. Intellectual: Inventors and scientists demanded the freedom to think for themselves without being supervised or penalized by the hierarchical church. And Intellectual independence was as crucial as economic independence represented by free markets.
The second quality was innovation. Even though the process of modernization was very traumatic from the 16th to the 19th century, causing great suffering and warfare, as we modernize, it was exciting because we were always doing something new, achieving something fresh, putting ourselves against unprecedented problems and coming up with holy novel solutions.
Modernization in the Third World
Now in the Muslim world, the new modern economy and modern society did not come with independence but with colonial subjugation. So instead of independence you have dependence. And instead of innovation you have imitation, because we were so far ahead, and you could only copy us. This means that the wrong kind of ingredients have been going into some of these societies.
It's rather like a cake. If you are told to make a cake, but you don't have all the ingredients, what will you have? So instead of flour you only have ground rice. Instead of fresh eggs you have only powdered egg and you don't have the correct kind of oven. You’re not going to get this lovely fluffy black chocolate gateau you found in the cook book. You could end up with something very nasty indeed.
And because modernization has proceeded so rapidly, secularization has been experienced with horror in some of these countries. When Ataturk modernized Turkey, for example, he closed down the Madrasas and forced all men and women into western dress. These reformers wanted their countries to look modern, never mind the fact that the vast mass of the population were not acquainted with modern society, it had no understanding of the new secularized institutions.
The Shahs in Iran used to have their soldiers go out with their bayonets out taking off the women's veils and ripping them to pieces in front of them. On one occasion Shah Reza Pahlavi gave his soldiers orders to shoot at hundreds of unarmed demonstrators at one of the holiest shrines of Iran who were peacefully protesting against obligatory western clothes and hundreds of Iranians were killed that day.
In Egypt, President Nasser interred thousands of members of the Muslim brotherhood. Often, these young men had done nothing more inflammatory than handing out leaflets of attending a meeting. But in these prisons, they developed what we call a fundamentalist ideology.
One of the people who were in these prisons was Sayed Qutub, who is the founder of many of these schools. Usama ben Laden follows his kind of school of thought. And when he looked around this camp, going into it as a moderate, he heard at the same time Nasser vowing to secularize Egypt on the Western model, separating religion and politics, Secularism did not seem lovely, it seemed Jahili. It seemed barbarous and aggressive and evil.
Are Fundamentalists Orthodox?
But interestingly, Sayed Qutub did not declare war on the west. All these movements began as inert religious movements, fighting against their own people and fellow countrymen, and only at a second stage, if at all, do they turn against a foreign foe. It's very important to note that these movements whether they're Christian, Jewish or Muslim are not orthodox. We often say: Obviously with people like Usama ben Laden around, this proves that Islam is a violent religion. These movements are unorthodox, in fact, anti-orthodox. They are highly innovative.
If you look at the Christian right for example, here in the United States, who've got this idea with rapture, that people are going to be taken up to heaven and watch the tribulation of the last days, and anti-Christ will descend to earth and slaughter all the Jews, ... etc. This is an entirely novel interpretation of the book of revelation. I'm afraid it was launched on the world by a Brit. But it has to be said for my own people, that he had no fans in England. But he did very well when he crossed the Atlantic and came to the United States. But you could define this rapture as heresy.
Similarly, Ayatollah Khomeini was highly unorthodox as a Shiite. For centuries Shiites had, as a matter of sacred principle, separated religion and politics, and did not take part in politics. So for a cleric to declare that there should be an Imam at head of state was a shocking to Shiite sensibility, as though if the Pope should abolish the mass.
Similarly, Qutub's ideas were entirely unorthodox. This idea that Usama ben laden has of converting the whole world to Islam is entirely new. Similarly, putting Jihad, meaning holy war, at the center of your ideology was a new and a controversial step. There have been some idiots and fanatics beforehand who'd occasionally done this, but not a major thinker. The first major thinker to do this was the Pakistani ideologue Mawdudi in the 1950s. He was very aware that this was a very controversial step, occasioned by the current emergency of the rising tide of colonialism and Western domination.
And when said to Qutub, how can you have this hard line ideology, when the Quran specifically said, "there must be no compulsion in religion", How can you reconcile this. Again, Qutub said this is an emergency until we've got a better style of leadership and government, we can't afford this kind of tolerance. They were aware that this is controversial and are stepping out into new uncharted territory.
Thereof, it's very important to note all fundamentalist movements, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh are unorthodox. In fact they are heretical in the sense of the original meaning of the Greek word, meaning "going your own way". There are modern developments that could've taken root in no time other than our own.
Of course, History also shows, and I'll just throw this in, that when you attack these movements, they become more extreme. That has happened in the Christian right and in Judaism. For example, Jewish fundamentalism took 2 major steps forward, one after the Nazi holocaust when Hitler had been trying to exterminate European Jewry. And Second, after the 1973 war of Yom Kippur, when you had a new style of religious Zionism. Religious Zionism had once been an unthinkable thing, because in the early days of the Zionist movement, the orthodox Jews, nearly all with one notable exception regarded Zionism as heretical and a great evil.
Because these movements are rooted in fear and dread of annihilation, fighting for survival, when you attack them, even verbally, they become more extreme. It's because it fulfills their expectation of annihilation: "We're right, they really are out to get us!" So that is something to bear in mind.
Modernity’s Approximation to The Quranic Ideals
Of course there is no inherent clash of civilizations. At the turn of the 20th Century, nearly every single leading Muslim intellectual, again with one notable exception - Alafghani, was in love with the West and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France, who at that time, were the chief purveyors of modernity.
There is a very famous story of the grand Muftee of Egypt, Mohammad Abdu, a great reformer, who hated the British occupation of his country, but was very much at home in European culture and among Europeans. After a visit to Paris, he returned to Egypt and said: In France, I saw Islam but no Muslims. In Egypt, I see Muslims but no Islam. What he meant that was in their modernized economies, the Europeans were better able to create the kinds of equal conditions that approximate to the Quranic Ideals than the un-modernized Muslim countries.
In Iran, secular intellectuals and leading clerics in 1906, joined forces to demand a constitution and representational government, a constitutional revolution! And They got their constitution, but unfortunately, parliament was never able to function properly until after the Arabian revolution, because a couple of years after the revolution, the British discovered oil in Iran and they weren't about to allow an Iranian parliament to scupper their plans for Iranian oil to be used to fuel the British navy.
Nevertheless, after the constitution had been achieved, one of the leading Ayatollahs, at that time living in Najaf said that the new constitution was the next best thing to the coming of the Shiite Messiah, because it would limit the tyranny of the Shahs, and therefore, it was a project worthy of the Shia.
It's poignant to look back on this early enthusiasm. Muslims saw and understood the whole democratic representational ideals of modernity and recognized it as deeply congenial with their own traditions. Unfortunately, politics, especially our foreign policies wrecked this, the questions of Palestine for example.
Religious Nationalism
It’s important to say that fundamentalist movements, sorry for this word as we come to the end, are not inherently violent. Among all the people who take part in these groups and ideologies, only a tiny proportion takes part in acts of terror and violence. Most are simply trying to live what they regard as a good religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to religion.
But where, that there has been, for good or ill, a religious revival in the 2nd half of the 20th century? There's certainly one going on here in the US. Western Europe is the only place that is resisting this trend. But we are beginning to look endearingly old fashioned in our secularism and we're losing it. The rest of the world is showing that they want, in all kind of ways - some good, some not so good, some (as the Buddhists would say) highly unskillful, some even lethal, are showing in all kinds of ways that they want to see religion reflected in public life.
Many often these movements can be described as a new form of nationalism or patriotism. That's certainly true of the Christian right who has a very different ideal from that of Thomas Jefferson for example. They want to see, not a secular nation but a Christian nation. Religious Zionism in Israel is deeply patriotic and sees the secular state of Israel as sacred and holy. Similarly, in the Muslim world when nationalism was a foreign idea, and actually not a very good idea of the 19th century in Europe, as we're retreating from nationalism and at the same time we're hoisting it on other parts of the world. It caused 2 world wars this national Jaheliyah, chauvinism.
The people who never felt en tuned with the nationalist ideal are trying to find other religious pre-colonial ways of expressing their identity.
Is Religious Violence a Product of Ideology?
Furthermore, however, when violence becomes entrenched and warfare becomes chronic in a region, as say in Palestine-Israel, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in all that troubled region which had the trauma of partition, this is where religion becomes violent.
Warfare and violence affect everything that we do. If you live, say, in Gaza or Afghanistan and every day you see shootings and soldiers and tanks and bulldozing and suicide bombings, this is going to affect you relationships, your aspirations, your dreams and it's going to affect your religion too. In these societies, religion gets sucked in and becomes a part of the problem, because very often these movements, in their anxiety to defend their traditions, often distort it in a gross and a terrible way.
What we need on all sides are several things, among which we need to learn to listen respectfully to other people’s narratives. There are an awful lot of competing narratives in the world at the moment. Say the Israelis have one narrative of what happened and the Palestinians have another, the Americans another, Europeans... and theirs is the only right one.
Second, what we need is self-criticism. We all need, whether we're Westerners or Arabs or Iranians, to look critically at ourselves. It always takes two to tango. The right is never all on one side and Muslims have a fabulous tradition of self-criticism. You can read all about that in my Short History of Islam. But in the early years of Muslim history, when there were these terrible disasters, the “Fitna”, the wars, the killing of the Caliphs, Muslims did not say "this is how the cookie crumbles", what can you do? They sat down and agonized about this. And out of these anguished discussions about what had gone wrong with Muslim history came the Sharia Law, Sufism, Shia and a lot of the pieties that have been deeply formative.
We need to think that there are things wrong with all of our societies. And before we point a finger at the other, let’s also take a long hard look at ourselves. Thank you very much for your attention.
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