IF ONLY QUTB HAD NEVER VISITED A LIBERAL SOCIETY:

We are making a fatal mistake by ignoring the dissidents within Islam: Some critical Muslim intellectuals think their faith is compatible with a liberal society. It's dumb to prefer Bin Laden (Timothy Garton Ash, March 15, 2007, The Guardian)

Take Gamal al-Banna, for example, whom I visited in Cairo, in a cavernous, dark apartment lined from floor to ceiling with Islamic literature. He is the younger brother of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their father, a learned imam, spent 40 years cataloguing some 45,000 reports of alleged sayings and doings of Muhammad (hadith). Now 86 years old, Gamal al-Banna has devoted his whole life to studying Islam and its relations to politics. A man of tranquil clarity, he became mildly agitated only when denouncing the perversion of Islam by Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian apostle of extremist, takfiri Islamism and a hero to al-Qaida.

Gamal al-Banna argues that "there is no contradiction between total freedom of thought and religion" and that "Islam does not pretend to a monopoly of wisdom". Critical ideas about Islam should be fought "by words and not by confrontation, terrorism or takfir - passing anathema on someone by pronouncing them an infidel". As for apostasy, the Muslim has the right to withdraw from Islam, the verses of the Qur'an are very explicit concerning this issue: "There is no compulsion in religion" (al-Baqara, The Cow, II, 256). Withdrawal from religion is mentioned at least five times in the Qur'an, none of which is related to a penalty. In the period of the prophet, many people withdrew from Islam; one of them was a scribe of the Qur'an. The prophet did not punish any of them.

The saying often attributed to the prophet - "Whoever changes his religion must be executed" - is rejected as inauthentic by Imam Muslim, one of the earliest and most respected compilers of collections of hadith, but Imam al-Bukhari, another respected compiler, included it in his version. "The signs of falsification are very clear in this saying," comments Banna, "and it contradicts many verses in the Qur'an that confirm freedom of faith."