When I was admitted to the University of Leiden, I expected to be presented with a single narrative of events and their significance and one explanation for why everything had happened as it did. Instead, the professors began every course with a central question; spent a lot of time on definitions and their importance; then presented key thinkers and their critics over time. My job as a student was to grasp the central question; to learn about the thinkers, their theories of power, political elites, mass psychology and sociology, and public policy; the methods by which they got to their conclusions; their critics and their methods of criticism. The point of all these exercises was to learn to improve on old ways of doing things through critical thinking. We were graded not just on our factual knowledge, but on our ability to scrutinize any given idea. In this context religion was just another idea, another belief system, another hypothesis, another theory. A critical approach to the words of Jesus was to be no different from a critical approach to the words of Plato or Karl Marx.
My next course, Western Political Thought, included a discussion of the Catholic Church, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation. We examined the debate over man-made versus God-made laws. I remember listening, half fascinated and half terrified, because at the time I didn’t even want to entertain the idea that man-made laws could supersede God’s. I sometimes justified this fascination by saying, well, if it wasn’t God’s intention for me to be at Leiden then I wouldn’t be at Leiden, so I might as well read on.
The more I considered the world around me, the more I began to take issue with all that I had been taught in my previous life. In the Netherlands, for example, I was stunned by the near-total absence of violence. I never saw Dutch people engaging in physical confrontations. There were no threats or fear. If two or three people were killed, it was considered a crisis of the social order and spoken about as such. Two or three violent deaths in my Somali homeland were considered completely ordinary and unremarkable.
Along with the absence of violence, I was overwhelmed by the level of human generosity. Everybody in the Netherlands had medical insurance. In the early 1990s, when I first came to Holland, the Dutch centers where asylum seekers were received were like resorts, with tennis courts, swimming pools, volleyball courts. All our needs—food, medicine, shelter, warmth—were attended to. And on top of that we were also offered psychological assistance and support as part of the universal health-care package that covered every Dutch citizen. The Dutch, I saw to my amazement, took care of everyone who ended up inside their borders, including people who had no connection to Holland, other than hoping it would be a place of refuge.
But the thing that stunned me the most was Holland’s approach to gender relations. There were women on television, and they did not wear headscarves, but instead donned fashionable clothes and makeup. Parents raised their girls in exactly the same way as their boys, and girls and boys mingled in school and on the streets. It was the kind of gender mixing that, in the culture I came from, was deemed to be a catastrophe and a sure sign of the approach of the end of days. Here it was so routine that the Dutch people I knew were surprised at my surprise.
Life in the West wasn’t perfect, of course. I saw people who were unhappy: white, wealthy people who were disgruntled with their lives, with their work, with their friends, and with their families. But I wasn’t much interested in abstract notions like happiness back then; I was simply fascinated by how it was even possible to achieve this level of political stability and economic prosperity.
After 9/11, I began to reexamine the world I had grown up in. I began to reflect that all over this world—in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and even inside the Muslim immigrant community in Holland—Islam represented a barrier to progress, especially (but not only) for women. Besides, expressing my doubts about Islam meant that I had no spiritual home: in Islam you are either a believer or a disbeliever. There is no cognitive room to be an agnostic. My family and some of my Muslim friends and acquaintances gave me that stark choice: you are either one of us, in which case you quit voicing your thoughts on Islam, or you are one of the infidels and you get out. And ultimately that was why I could not stay in the religion of my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, and my grandmother.
I was not surprised at all that the Medina Muslims condemned me and wanted me to suffer the “appropriate” punishment for leaving the faith: namely, death. Twelve years before, after all, I had wanted no less for Salman Rushdie. What was far more confusing and grating was the outright hostility of individuals who, just like me prior to my apostasy, had routinely violated other central tenets of the hudood in their personal behavior, but who now saw fit to brand me as a traitor to their faith because I no longer wanted to be a sham Muslim. Many secular non-Muslim intellectuals were also quick to dismiss me as a “traumatized” woman working out my own personal demons. (Some continue to make that patronizing claim, like the eminent American journalist who once speculated that my family was “dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: ‘I love you.’ ”)
I was stunned and disheartened to discover that, in this particular debate, one of the core principles of Western liberal achievements—critical thinking about all belief systems—was not to be applied to the faith I had grown up in.
Why I Am Not Exceptional
For years I have been told, condescendingly, that my critique of Islam is a consequence of my own uniquely troubled upbringing. This is rubbish. There are millions of impressionable young men and women like me who have succumbed to the call of the Medina Muslims as I did when I was sixteen. And I believe there are just as many who now yearn to challenge the ultimately intolerable demands that ideology makes on them. In this chapter, I have briefly recounted the story of my early life not because it is exceptional but because I believe it is typical.
Take the case of Shiraz Maher, an idealistic young man who was studying in Leeds, England, on September 11, 2001. Maher had spent his first fourteen years in Saudi Arabia, where the act of wearing a Daffy Duck T-shirt with the words “I Support Operation Desert Storm” (to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait) earned him a lecture on the American plot to establish military bases on “holy soil.” In 2001, having learned his lesson, he joined Hizbut Tahrir—Arabic for “The Party of Liberation”—which advocates the creation of a caliphate, and duly rose to become one of its regional directors. Maher later described Hizbut Tahrir’s philosophy: “It applauds suicide bombers but believes suicide bombing is not a long-term solution.”1
Where had he learned this philosophy? The answer is that in 1994 Maher had attended a Hizbut Tahrir conference in London where Islamists from Sudan to Pakistan came to talk about forming a caliphate. At the time, no one in the West objected, if indeed they noticed, and certainly no one within the immigrant Muslim community resisted. The result, according to Maher, was that soon the “idea of having an Islamic state had been normalized within the Muslim discourse.”2 This message was spread by a new wave of preachers, who laid an uncompromising emphasis on Muhammad’s message in Medina about what Islam was and how it should be practiced. As within my own Somali community in Nairobi, young Muslims in the West were quite easily seduced by the Medina Muslims and their violent call to arms.
Just as I left Islam after 9/11, Maher left Hizbut Tahrir after the 2005 bombing of the London Underground. (He didn’t personally know the subway bombers but, like him, they came from Leeds.) My mind had been opened at Leiden; Maher, by contrast, says he had encountered a more pluralistic view of Islam as a graduate student at Cambridge University. Today he is a senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, King’s College London, researching the lives of young jihadists.
The problem is that, right now, too many young Muslims are at risk of being seduced by the preaching of the Medina Muslims. The Mecca Muslims may be more numerous but they are too passive, indolent, and—cruci
ally—lacking in the intellectual vigor needed to stand up to the Medina Muslims. When individuals are lured away from their midst by preachers calling for jihad and those individuals then commit an atrocity crying “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), the Mecca Muslims freeze in denial, declaring that the atrocity is un-Islamic. This attempt to decouple the principle from its logical outcome is now something of a joke not only among non-Muslims who mock the “religion of peace” (or the “religion of pieces”) but also among Medina Muslims, who openly express contempt for those Muslim clerics who declare that the “peaceful” Meccan verses of the Qur’an somehow abrogate the later and more violent Medina ones.
Consider Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the accused Boston Marathon bombers. Growing up, the brothers were typical of Mecca Muslims: they rarely observed Islamic strictures: one had dreams of becoming a boxing champion and spent most of his days training while the other had a busy social life, dated girls, and smoked pot. The parents—at least in their early years in the United States—do not seem to have been very devout. When Dzhokhar, a graduate of the prestigious Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote a bloodstained note in the final hours before his capture, the first words he invoked were the same words that I first learned from my grandmother as a very small child: “I believe there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger.”3 As we have seen, that is the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith, and it is the most important of the five pillars of Islam. Today the Shahada is the banner of IS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram. It is also the banner of Saudi Arabia, the country that has used so much of its wealth to spread to every corner of the world the practice of Islam in Medina fourteen centuries ago.
Embracing violent jihad has become an all-too-common means for young Muslims to resolve the cognitive pressures of trying to lead an “authentic” Muslim life within a permissive and pluralistic Western society. As we saw earlier, many first-generation Muslim immigrants to the West opt to cocoon themselves and their families, trying to put a wall between themselves and the society around them. But for their children this is simply unsustainable. For them, the choice becomes a stark one between abandoning their faith or embracing the militant message of Medina. “If I were younger and instead of 9/11 it was the Syrian conflict,” Maher recently admitted, “there’s a very, very good chance I would go. Instead of studying them, I would be the one being studied.”4
These pressures are not going away. The question is whether or not a third way exists. Must all who question Islam end up either leaving the faith, as I did, or embracing violent jihad?
I believe there is a third option. But it begins with the recognition that Islamic extremism is rooted in Islam itself. Understanding why that is so is the key to finding a third way: a way that allows for some other option between apostasy and atrocity.
I left Islam, and I still think it is the best choice for Muslims who feel trapped between their conscience and the commands of Muhammad. However, it is unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from Islam. This fact leads me to think of the possibility of a third option. A choice that might have enabled someone like me to remain a believer in the God of my family. A choice that might somehow have reconciled religious faith with the key imperatives of modernity: freedom of conscience, tolerance of difference, equality of the sexes, and an investment in life before death.
But in order for that choice to become possible, Muslims have to do what they have been reluctant to do from the very beginning—and that is to engage in a critical appraisal of the core creed of Islam. The next question that has to be addressed is why that has proved so incredibly difficult. After all, I am far from being the first person to call for a Reformation of the religion of my birth. Why have all previous attempts at a Muslim Reformation come to nothing? The answer lies in a fundamental conflict within Islam itself.
CHAPTER 2
WHY HAS THERE BEEN NO MUSLIM REFORMATION?
In 2012, the Harvard Kennedy School invited me to lead a study group dealing with the intersection of religion, politics, society, and statecraft within the Islamic world. I have now done this for three years. Its focus is on Islamic political theory. The seminar is geared toward mid-career students ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their forties, but undergraduates can also participate. Our meetings last for ninety minutes, and there is an ample reading list.
As must now be clear, I have been an uncompromising critic of political Islam for more than a decade. But in recent years I had come to feel that rather than simply inveighing against it, I must reengage with Islam—the religion as well as the ideology—not only to deepen my understanding of its complex religious and cultural legacy, but also for the sake of those who find themselves, as I once did, trapped between the demands of a rigid faith and the attractions of a modern society. This book is one of the fruits of that decision. As such it represents a continuation of the personal and intellectual journey I have chronicled in my previous books. The study group was a crucial preliminary step.
From the start, I was curious about the students who signed up for my study group. The first class list that I received from the registrar’s office provided a range of names, some clearly Anglophone, some clearly Arabic. About half were Americans, two of whom were members of the U.S. military, and most of whom had worked or served in Islamic countries. At least three of the Americans were Jewish. The rest of the class were nearly all Muslim: men from Qatar, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Senegal, along with a young woman from Niger. In many ways, the class’s Muslim students were a microcosm of the modern Muslim elite: they were educated, mobile, frequently wealthy, and held a variety of views on Islam. However, it quickly became clear that some of the attendees thought that there could be no other view than their own.
On that first afternoon, the students assembled, we made our introductions, and I began to speak. I got as far as the first few sentences when the Qatari student raised his hand and began addressing the rest of the room. He said that he needed to “clarify” what I was saying. Then another—the Pakistani—interrupted. A third and then a fourth chimed in. For any remark that I made involving Islam, one of them had a clarification. And, almost from the first word, they got personal. According to one of them, I was a “traumatized woman projecting my personal experience and brainwashing people.” Another wanted everyone to understand that I was just “an Islamophobe telling lies.”
Most of the other students (including the other Muslim students) were stunned. It was, for a while, a bit of a tennis match—heads swiveled, following their verbal volleys and my efforts to return. But, as the minutes passed, the tension within the class grew greater. It was not necessarily that the other students did not want to speak; it was that they could not get a word in. And it was not just the first session that went like this. It was the same week after week—until the fourth week, when the malcontents ceased to attend.
I have no problem with discussion and debate. That was the point of the course. Yet these days it is too short a journey from preemptively challenging any critic of Islam, to correcting them, implying threats, and silencing them outright. To my mind, nothing could be more “clarifying” of the fundamental problem facing Islam today than those painful early sessions in the seminar room.
I had not designed the course to be a seminar on my personal vision of Islam. I had been careful not to assign my own writings. Instead, I had drawn up a balanced list of scholarly articles and academic books, points and counterpoints around the nature of political theory in Islam. This material was what I had intended to discuss in class. Yet it was as if the objectionable students had not even looked at the syllabus. For them, simply to ask a question about Islam was a grave offense.
So, to start with, we need simply to ask: Why is it so hard to question anything about Islam? The obvious answer is that there is now an internationally organized “honor brigade” that exists to prevent such questioning. The deeper historical answer may lie in the
fear of many Muslim clerics that allowing critical thought might lead many to leave Islam. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a staunch Medina Muslim and a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said: “If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment Islam would not exist today. Islam would have ended with the death of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Opposing apostasy is what kept Islam to this day.”1 The clerics fear that even the smallest of questions will lead to doubt, doubt will lead to more questions, and ultimately the questioning mind will demand not only answers but also innovations. An innovation in turn will create a precedent. Other minds that question will build on these precedents and more concessions will be demanded. Soon people will be innovating themselves out of their faith altogether.
Innovation of faith is one of the gravest sins in Islam, on a par with murder and apostasy. Thus it is perfectly intelligible why the leading Muslim clerics (the ulema) have come to the consensus that Islam is more than a mere religion, but rather the one and only comprehensive system that embraces, explains, integrates, and dictates all aspects of human life: personal, cultural, political, as well as religious. In short, Islam handles everything. Any cleric who advocates the separation of mosque and state is instantly anathematized. He is declared a heretic and his work is removed from the bookshelves. This is what makes Islam fundamentally different from other twenty-first-century monotheistic religions.
It is important to grasp the extent to which religion is intertwined with politics and political systems in Islamic societies. It is not simply that the boundaries between religion and politics are porous. There scarcely are any boundaries. Seventeen Muslim-majority nations declare Islam the state religion and require the head of state to be a practicing Muslim, while in the Christian world only two nations require a Christian head of state (although the British monarch is required to be the “Defender of the Faith,” the heir to the throne intends to be “Defender of Faith”).2 In countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, or within mounting insurgent movements such as IS and Boko Haram, the boundaries between religion and politics do not exist at all.
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