I have said that self-criticism is absolutely unknown to Islam; that is not
surprising since criticism is apostasy and the penalty for apostasy for
1400
years has been death for a man and life imprisonment for a woman. I have
found an exception that falsifies the generalization: an unflinching
critic
who manages to remain a Muslim. This is Professor Ziauddin Sardar, a
British
Muslim, cultural critic and writer whose article "Rethinking Islam" can be
found at http://www.islamfortoday.com/sardar01.htm.
His theme is that the duty of reasoned criticism and reform has been
****rked
by Muslims for more than a hundred years and that consequently Muslims are
painfully uncomfortable in the modern world.
"Just look around the Muslim world and see how far we have travelled away
from the ideals and spirit of Islam. Far from being a liberating force, a
kinetic social, cultural and intellectual dynamics for equality, justice
and
humane values, Islam seems to have acquired a pathological strain. Indeed,
it seems to me that we have internalised all those historic and
contem****ary
western representations of Islam and Muslims that have been demonising us
for centuries. We now actually wear the garb, I have to confess, of the
very
demons that the West has been projecting on our collective personality."
His most powerful observation is that Islam has acquired a "pathological
strain". Disappointingly he manages by an intellectual sleight to hold the
West responsible for projecting Islam's demons onto Islam.
Sardar argues that the freezing, the fossilizing of Islam in an
ahistorical
past has had disastrous consequences:
"The freezing of interpretation, the closure of 'the gates of ijtihad',
has
had a devastating effect on Muslim thought and action. In particular, it
has
produced what I can only describe as three metaphysical catastrophes: the
elevation of the Shari`ah to the level of the Divine, with the consequent
removal of agency from the believers, and the equation of Islam with the
State."
Sardar's attempt at Muslim self-criticism can only go so far: he can
question the Shariah, but not the Koran - he claims that only that can be
considered Divine by Muslims, but he has a liberal get-out: the Koran can
be
constantly re-interpreted in different contexts.
Sardar accuses Islamism of reducing Islam to a totalitarian ("totalistic"
is
his term) ideology that leads to totalitarian states in the case of the
Taliban, Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia:
" Islam does not provide ready-made answers to all human problems; it
provides a moral and just perspective within which Muslims must endeavour
to
find answers to all human problems. But if everything is a priori given,
in
the shape of a divine Shari`ah, then Islam is reduced to a totalistic
ideology. Indeed, this is exactly what the Islamic movements - in
particularly Jamaat-e-Islami (both Pakistani and Indian varieties) and the
Muslim Brotherhood - have reduced Islam to. Which brings me to the third
metaphysical catastrophe. Place this ideology within a nation state, with
divinely attributed Shari`ah at its centre, and you have an 'Islamic
state'.
All contem****ary 'Islamic states', from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan to
aspiring Pakistan, are based on this ridiculous assumption. But once
Islam,
as an ideology, becomes a programme of action of a vested group, it looses
its humanity and becomes a battlefield where morality, reason and justice
are readily sacrificed at the alter of emotions. Moreover, the step from a
totalistic ideology to a totalitarian order where every human-situation is
open to state-arbitration is a small one. The transformation of Islam into
a
state-based political ideology not only deprives it of its all moral and
ethical content, it also debunks most of Muslim history as un-Islamic.
Invariably, when Islamists rediscover a 'golden' past, they do so only in
order to disdain the present and mock the future. All we are left with is
messianic chaos, as we saw so vividly in the Taliban regime, where all
politics as the domain of action is paralysed and meaningless pieties
become
the foundational truth of the state."
I salute this as perhaps the best piece of Muslim thought about the
current
problems of Islam that I have come across. Sardar is a man to whom I would
very willingly extend the hand of friend****p.
Sardar points out that:
"The most significant answers to the contem****ary plight of the Muslim
people are buried deep within the history, social practice and
intellectual
and political inertia of Muslims themselves. Muslims, on the whole, are
very
reluctant to look at themselves or to examine the process through which
they
have transformed Islam into a suffocating and oppressive ideology."
He observes that recent debates have produced
"a narrow, intolerant, obscurantist, illiberal, brutal and confromtational
interpretation of Islam." (BBC News 6 Sept 2005)
Sardar is a clear sighted critic who holds to a humane version of Islam;
those such as he seem very rare birds nowadays.
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