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Bin
Laden’s violence is a heresy against Islam
In what sense were the World Trade Centre
bombers members of Islam? This question has been sidelined by many Western
analysts impatient with the niceties of theology; but it may be the key to
understanding the recent attacks, and assessing the long-term prospects
for peace in the Muslim world.
Certainly, neither bin Laden nor his
principal associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are graduates of Islamic
universities or seminaries. And so their proclamations ignore 14 centuries
of Muslim scholarship, and instead take the form of lists of anti-American
grievances and of Koranic quotations referring to early Muslim wars
against Arab idolators. These are followed by the conclusion that all
Americans, civilian and military, are to be wiped off the face of the
Earth.
All this amounts to an odd and extreme
violation of the normal methods of Islamic scholarship. Had the authors of
such fatwas followed the norms of their religion, they would have had to
acknowledge that no school of traditional Islam allows the targeting of
civilians. An insurrectionist who kills non-combatants is guilty of baghy,
“armed transgression”, a capital offence in Islamic law. A jihad can
be proclaimed only by a properly constituted state; anything else is pure
vigilantism.
Defining orthodoxy in the mainstream
Sunni version of Islam is difficult because the tradition has an
egalitarian streak which makes it reluctant to produce hierarchies.
Theologians and muftis emerge through the careful approval of their
teachers, not because a formal teaching licence has been given them by a
church-like institution.
Despite this apparent informality, there
is such a thing as normal Sunni Muslim doctrine. It has been expressed
fairly consistently down the centuries as a belief system derived from the
Muslim scriptures by generations of learned comment. Until a few decades
ago, a Koranic commentary containing the author’s personal views would
have been dismissed as outrageous. In the 19th century, the Iranian
reformer known as “the Bab” was declared to be outside the pale of
Islam because he ignored the accumulated discussions of centuries, and
wrote a Koranic commentary based on his own direct understanding of
scripture.
The strangeness as well as the extremity
of the New York attacks has been reflected in the strenuous denunciations
we have heard from Muslim leaders around the world. For them, this has
been a rare moment of unity. Mohammed Tantawi, rector of Cairo’s Al-Azhar
University, the highest institution of learning in the Sunni world, has
bitterly condemned the outrages. In Shi’ite Iran, Ayatollah Kashani
called the attacks “catastrophic”, and demanded a global mobilisation
against the culprits. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, normally
well known for its indecision, unanimously condemned “these savage and
criminal acts”.
Why should apparently devout Muslims have
defied the unanimous verdict of Islamic law? The reasons - and the blame -
are to be found on both sides of the divide which, according to bin Laden,
utterly separates the West from Islam.
On the Western side, a reluctance to
challenge the Israeli occupation of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem has
unquestionably contributed to the sidelining of mainstream Muslim voices
in the Middle East. Those voices, speaking cautiously from ancient
religious universities and venerable mosques, have been reluctant to
exploit, rather than calm, the hatred of the masses for Israeli policy,
and thus for the United States. This perceived failure to make a
difference has allowed wilder, more intransigent voices to gain
credibility in a way that would have been unimaginable before the capture
of Arab Jerusalem in 1967.
It is unfair and simplistic, however, to
claim that it is Western policy that lit the fuse for last month’s
events. Without a theological position justifying the rejection of the
mainstream position, the frustration with orthodoxy would have led to a
frustration with religion - and then to a search for secular responses.
That alternative theology does, however,
exist. While Saudi Arabia itself has been consistent in its opposition to
terrorism, it has also on occasion unwittingly nurtured revolutionary
religious views. Before the explosion of oil wealth in the 1960s, its
Wahhabi creed was largely unnoticed by the wider Islamic world. Those
erudite Muslims who did know about Wahhabism typically dismissed it as
simple-minded Bedouin puritanism with nothing to add to their central
activity - exploring Muslim strategies of accommodation with the modern
world.
When I myself studied theology at Al-Azhar,
we were told that Wahhabism was heretical - not only because of issues
such as its insistence that the Koranic talk of God’s likeness to
humanity was to be taken literally, but also because it implied a radical
rejection of all Muslim scholarship. Grey-bearded sheikhs departed from
their usual imperturbability to denounce the tragic consequences for Islam
of the claim that every believer should interpret the scriptures according
to his own lights.
This sort of radical move leads to
liberal re-readings of the Koran, as in the case of the South African
theologian Farid Esack, who has horrified traditionalists by advocating
homosexual rights among Muslims. Much more commonly, however, it allows
young men whose anger has been aroused by American policy in the Middle
East to ignore the scholarly consensus about the meaning of the Koran, and
read their own frustrations into the text.
Another result of this rejection of
traditional Islam has been the notion that political power should be in
the hands of men of religion. When he came to power in 1979, Ayatollah
Khomeini remarked that he had achieved something utterly without precedent
in Islamic history. The Taliban, by ruling directly rather than advising
hereditary rulers, have similarly combined the “sword” and the “pen”.
Far from being a traditionalist move, this is a new departure for Islam,
and mainstream scholarship regards it with deep suspicion.
Islamic civilisation has in the past
proved capable of, for the times, extraordinary feats of toleration. Under
the Muslims, medieval Spain became a haven for diverse religions and
sects. Following the Christian reconquest, the Inquisition eliminated all
dissent. The notion that Islamic civilisation is inherently less capable
of tolerance and compassion than any other is hard to square with the
facts.
Muslims none the less have to face the
challenge posed by the new heresies. The Muslim world can ill afford to
lapse into bigotry at a point in history when dialogue and conviviality
have never been more important.
It is a relief that the mainstream
theologians have come out so unanimously against the terrorists. What we
must now ask them is to campaign more strongly against the aberrant
doctrines that underpin them.
Both “sides”, therefore, have a
responsibility to act. The West must drain the swamp of rage by securing a
fair resolution of the Palestinian tragedy. But it is the responsibility
of the Islamic world to de- feat the terrorist aberration theologically.
Abdul Hakim Murad, a Muslim, is lecturer
in Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge
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