ENLIGHTENMENT OR REFORMATION?

Losing his religion: Apostate Ibn Warraq campaigns for the right not to be a Muslim (Lee Smith, 8/17/2003, Boston Globe)

The Indian-born and English-educated Ibn Warraq, 57, is among the most prominent and outspoken Muslim apostates alive today. His 1995 book "Why I Am Not a Muslim'' was an impassioned polemic against almost 1,400 years of Muslim dogma and its effect on the Islamic world. The more recent collections he has edited–"What the Koran Really Says'' (2002) and this year's "Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out''–present less confrontational, more scholarly lines of attack.

Still, Warraq (the name is a pseudonym) aims to skewer the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of a faith that commands the allegiance of a billion people–as well as the hypocrisies of those Western defenders of Islam who would not tolerate its strictures in their own cultures.

To his admirers in the West and in the Muslim world, Warraq is a latter-day Voltaire who may herald an Islamic enlightenment. "He wants to open it up for people who are born into a religion they can't leave,'' says Patricia Crone, a scholar of Islam at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

To his critics, Warraq is an intolerant pseudo-scholar whose bitter polemics set back the very possibility of modernizing the faith. "If you already know what Islamophobes and Orientalists believe, this author has nothing original to add,'' says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA and the author most recently of "The Place of Tolerance in Islam'' (2002). "It's good propaganda, but not good scholarship.'' [...]

Warraq is particularly critical of Noah Feldman, the NYU law professor whom the US government has enlisted to assist in the drafting of Iraq's new constitution. If Feldman's new book "After Jihad'' is any indication of what that document will look like, Warraq is concerned.

"How can Feldman believe there is any compatibility at all between Islamist movements and democratic principles?'' he asks. "They are democrats only in that they will use elections to take power. One man, one vote, one time. The first people who suffer are women, and after that non-Muslims. The level of denial from Western liberals renders me speechless.''

Khaled Abou El Fadl, who attempts to use traditional canons of interpretation to bring out the tolerant and democratic aspects of the Koran, contends that democracy and Islam are both "defined in the first instance by their underlying moral values.''

One can only hope that El Fadl is right. But Warraq emphasizes that essential aspects of democracy, such as freedom of speech and freedom of belief, are best exemplified in Islam by those thinkers and writers it calls apostates.

Though he has little regard for Warraq's work, El Fadl himself recognizes the crucial importance of apostates and other religious dissidents. "The freethinkers pushed the limits of orthodoxy, and they were a point of attachment for many Muslims later on,'' he says. ``If all you had was orthodoxy all the time, Islamic civilization wouldn't have existed over 1,000 years. They dragged people along kicking and screaming.''

That Islam has a few structural problems is cause for a Reformation, not wholesale abandonment of the religion. It is not necessary to rid the Islamic world of God, but to create a space there for Man to govern himself. Khaled Abou El Fadl seems to have the better case, as see here: Islam and the Challenge of Democracy: Can individual rights and popular sovereignty take root in faith? (Khaled Abou El Fadl, Boston Review)


MORE:
-ESSAY: Islam and Intellectual Terrorism: Turbans of the mind are disallowing and disavowing proper intellectual engagement with Islam. (Ibn Warraq, New Humanist)
-INTERVIEW: Ibn Warraq: Why I Am Not A Muslim (The Religion Report, 10/10/2001)
-INTERVIEW: Islam and apostasy (The Religion Report, 02/07/2003)
-REVIEW: of Why I am Not a Muslim (MAXIME RODINSON, February 2000, Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society)
-ESSAY: Holy War (Chris Mooney, 12.17.01, American Prospect)
-ESSAY: When Ibn Warraq met Edward Said (Adil Farooq, January 16, 2003, Winds of Change)

-ESSAY: Islam and the Challenge of Democracy: Can individual rights and popular sovereignty take root in faith? (Khaled Abou El Fadl, Boston Review)
-ESSAY: Islam and the Theology of Power: "Supremacist puritanism in contemporary Islam is dismissive of all moral norms or ethical values." (Khaled Abou El Fadl, Islam for Today)
-ESSAY: Khaled Abou El Fadl: Reformer or Revisionist ? (Andrew G. Bostom, April 9, 2003, Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Khaled Abou El Fadl: Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong ( "Ideas and Issues", Hugh LaFollette)
-ESSAY: Is Khaled Abou El Fadl a Moderate? (Little Green Footballs, 8/15/2003) Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2003 7:50 AM