October 19, 2007
FOR WANT OF A POPE...:
How to Understand Islam (Malise Ruthven, 11/08/07, NY Review of Books)
As Kelsay explains, "statements by al-Qa'ida are best understood as attempts to legitimate or justify a course of action in the terms associated with Islamic jurisprudence." He usefully terms this discourse "Shari'a reasoning."The word sharia, usually translated as "law," refers to the "path" or "way" governing the modes of behavior by which Muslims are enjoined to seek salvation. The way may be known to God, but for human beings it is not predetermined. A famous hadith (tradition) of Muhammad states that differences of opinion between the learned is a blessing. Sharia reasoning is therefore "an open practice." In Islam's classical era, up until the tenth century, scholars exercised ijtihad—independent reasoning—in order to reach an understanding of the divine law. Ijtihad shares the same Arabic root as the more familiar jihad, meaning "effort" or "struggle," the word that is sometimes translated as "holy war." Ijtihad is in effect the intellectual struggle to discover what the law ought to be. As Kelsay remarks, the legal scholars trained in its sources and methodologies will seek to achieve a balance between the rulings of their predecessors and independent judgments reflecting the idea that "changing circumstances require fresh wisdom." The Sharia is not so much a body of law but a field of discourse or platform for legal reasoning. Recently, it has become an arena for intellectual combat.
It is therefore open to question whether the hijackers and the terrorists automatically put themselves beyond the bounds of Islam by killing innocents, as statements by Bush, Blair, and dozens of Muslim leaders and scholars suggest. With no churches or formally constituted religious authorities to police the boundaries of Islam, the only universally accepted orthodoxy is the Sharia itself. But the Sharia is more of an ideal than a formally constituted body of law. While interpreting the law was once the province of the trained clerical class of ulama, any consensus governing its correct interpretation has broken down under pressure of regional conflicts and the influence of religious autodidacts whose vision of Islam was formed outside the received scholarly tradition.
None of the three most influential theorists behind Sunni militancy, Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903–1979), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Sayyid Qutb, (1906–1966), received a traditional religious training. Yet both they and the authors of the landmark texts examined by Kelsay in his admirably lucid book (including the Charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and bin Laden's 1998 Declaration) claim the mantle of the Sharia, as did the terrorists responsible for the atrocities in New York, Madrid, and London.
Like it or not, these terrorist campaigns were inspired by the example of the Prophet's struggle—his "just war"—against the Quraysh, the pagan tribesmen of Mecca. In the context of the original conflict between the early Muslims and the Meccans, the sources, including the Koran and the narratives of Muhammad's life, suggest that "fighting is an appropriate means by which Muslims should seek to secure the right to order life according to divine directives." In militant readings of the Sharia, the historical precedents are not so much interpreted as applied. For ultra-radicals such as bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri there is, as Kelsay observes, "little room for a sustained process of discerning divine guidance" along the lines enjoined by traditional scholars. An even more striking absence is evident in the criticisms of militant readings advanced by official Islamic authorities, including the widely respected Sheikh al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university in Cairo and once the single most important voice in Sunni Islam. While questioning the methods of the militants on grounds of practical ethics—will the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?"—their criticisms usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy. Conservative Muslim critics of militancy
do not in fact dissent from the militant judgment that current political arrangements [in most Muslim majority states] are illegitimate.... In its broad outlines, the militant vision articulated by al-Zawahiri is also the vision of his critics.
The core of this consensus—shared by traditionally trained scholars and more populist leaders such as al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Maududi, his South Asian counterpart, is the belief that the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey in 1924 must not mean the end of Islamic government. In this vision, which is also shared by Shia jurists such as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, parliaments and elections are only acceptable within the frame of Islamic supremacy. They "cannot compromise on Muslim leadership," Kelsay writes. Full-blown democracy, where the Muslim voice might simply be one among many, implying a degree of moral equivalence between Islam and other perspectives, would be "dangerous, not only for the standing of the Muslim community, but for the moral life of humankind."
In the majority Sunni tradition this sense of supremacy was sanctified as much by history as by theology. In the first instance, the truth of Islam was vindicated on the field of battle. As Hans Küng acknowledges in Islam: Past, Present and Future—his 767-page overview of the Islamic faith and history, seen from the perspective of a liberal Christian theologian—Islam is above all a "religion of victory." Muslims of many persuasions—not just the self-styled jihadists—defend the truth claims of their religion by resorting to what might be called the argument from manifest success.
Which is why it is not enough for us just to winning the WoT, we really need to be taunting the jihadists about their failure.