Will the true Islam please stand up?

Do Osama bin Laden and his murderous associates speak for all Muslims? Or are there many voices of Islam?

If you want to understand Islam in the modern world, you have to do your homework. Newspapers splash spectacular and terrifying images of Islamic militancy on their front pages. But it is impossible to make sense of Islam and the Middle East from these snapshots. That is where books like Gilles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West and Roger Scruton’s The West and the Rest are invaluable.

Kepel stresses that Islam is not homogeneous. One of the reasons for this is that there is not one body which speaks for Islam. Islam is very much like fundamentalist Christianity. They have a Scripture but lack an authoritative interpreter. Consequently, like Protestantism, it tends to splinter. In Islam the cracks in the edifice are as old as the generation immediately after the Prophet’s death. The Sunnis follow the example of the “four rightly guided caliphs” who were his immediate successors, while the Shi’ites revere the fourth caliph, Ali, and his martyred son Hussain. Osama bin Laden, as a Wahhabist, a small and uncompromisingly rigid sect of Sunni Islam, quotes some sections of the Koran which other Muslims would prefer not to emphasise. But the Sufi sect emphasises piety and mysticism. Recent interviews with Western converts to Islam suggest that these converts did not join so that they can blow up New York skyscrapers; they found a spiritual home in Islam.

Kepel insists that Westerners must first distinguish between the religion and its followers before they can assess whether authentic Islam is implacably hostile to the West.

For the majority of Muslims Islam is a spiritual home. As Roger Scruton has pointed out in his book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, the attraction of Islam and its strength is its adherence to transcendent values and its sense of community. According to Scruton that is what the West has been losing ever since the 1960s and 70s and the birth of the “culture of repudiation”. Core Western values and institutions which created the West and its political, scientific and technological superiority are repudiated by the very people who enjoy them, sometimes in favour of Islam.

What about the uglier side of Islam: the suicide bombers, theocracy, and polygamy?

Kepel insists that Westerners must first distinguish between the religion and its followers before they can assess whether authentic Islam is implacably hostile to the West. Contrary to his media image, bin Laden is an ugly thug, not a pious Muslim, he argues. His blood-curdling exhortations to jihad have more to do with power than piety. Osama comes from a wealthy Arabian family, but he is not a member of the royal family and is therefore unable to get his hands on its enormous cache of petrodollars. Within the last week, bin Laden warned that the Saudi government could be toppled like the Shah of Iran was in 1979.since they had violated God’s rules. Regime change in Saudi Arabia, it seems, is bin Laden’s ultimate goal.

Bin Laden’s main accomplice and perhaps the brains behind al-Qa’ida is Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Zawahiri is a radicalized middle class Egyptian Muslim whose family lost its comfortable place in Egypt under the socialist Nasser regime between 1952 and 1970. It is not hard to see behind both men a resentment against those who have paid lip-service to Islam while feathering their own nests. Even though both men appeared in the video outside the cave after 11th September 2001 dressed like faithful Muslims and rebels against the “Great Satan”, Kepel is not convinced by the show. “Despite their beards and the soap opera costumes they donned for Arab television audiences, they had ambitions and interests in common with hackers and cosmopolitan golden boys everywhere,” he writes.

Kepel feels that bin Laden and his cronies are exploiting simple Muslims’ religious zeal, anger at Palestinian oppression, rankling folk memories of the Crusades, and resentment of the West’s power. But what is the true Islam? President George W. Bush told the US Congress shortly after 9/11 that “[Islam’s] teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.” (1) This provoked a spokesman for the Taliban to respond, “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?” (2) Who is right?

Scruton’s book tries to find authentic Islam in its legal system. He concludes that: “Islamic jurisprudence does not recognise secular, still less territorial, jurisdiction as a genuine source of law. It proposes a universal law that is the single path (shri’) to salvation. And the shari’a is not understood as setting limits to what can be commanded, but rather as a fully comprehensive system of commands — which can serve a military just as well as a civilian function. Nor does Islam recognise the state as an independent object of loyalty. Obedience is owed first to God, and then, below him, to those situated at greater or lesser remove in the web of personal obligations. Nor is there any trace in Islamic law of the secular conception of government that Christianity inherited.”

If this is correct, and not even the apologists who most try to ingratiate themselves with the West deny it, then Islam is incompatible with democracy, or indeed any form of secular government.

The apologists deny that Islamic women are oppressed. They point to their legal rights (amongst which they can count female initiated divorce, for example), their becoming more educated and their understanding of supposed symbols of oppression, like the veil, as liberating not enslaving. Female circumcision for example, does not seem to be a part of Islamic law, just as quasi-pornographic billboards in the West are no part of Christianity. Nevertheless, there are stumbling blocks. One is the punishment for female adultery. There is no ambiguity. It is in the Koran and some of the apologists for Islam simply do not address the problem.

Polygamy is another obstacle. The justification of polygamy on the basis that it is better for a girl to have a half a husband (or a quarter of one) to protect her than none at all is hardly going to convince well-educated and financially independent women.

The West has to deal with the terrorism of al-Qa’ida and it also has to figure out its relationship with the growing numbers of Muslims in its midst. If this is going to happen, the West needs to understand Islam better, not just as a religion, but as a socio-political reality. It also needs to listen to how Islam perceives itself and the West. Eventually it will probably have to apologize for some of the misery it has caused in the Middle East Muslim. Books like Kepel’s and Scruton’s don’t give answers to all the conundrums, but they make a valuable contribution to this understanding. If you only read the newspaper headlines, you will never understand.

Martin Fitzgerald is a teacher at Redfield College in Sydney.

Notes

 

(1) George W. Bush. Address to Joint Session of Congress and the American People, Sept 20, 2001.
(2) Daniel Pipes, “What’s True Islam? Not for U.S. to Say”. New York Post. Nov 26, 2001.