It is hard to convey to a non-Muslim how the recitation of the Qur’an embeds the text socially. In the middle of the twentieth century, for example, ordinary Egyptians riding public trams would move their lips, silently mouthing scripture as they traveled from stop to stop.
36 I can well remember how when someone in my family lay sick or dying—like my aunt when she contracted breast cancer—the Qur’an was chanted by the bedside, in the belief that its words alone would cure the patient. Analogies with Christian prayer are misleading because the reciter of the Qur’an is voicing God’s words, not appealing to God for intercession.
Does the Qur’an Inspire Violence?
If the Qur’an were used only to heal the sick, there would be less need for a Muslim Reformation. Unfortunately, as we have seen, it is also very commonly cited today to justify acts of violence, including all-out war against the infidel.
David Cook, a professor of religious studies at Rice University who has carefully studied jihad, notes that in the Qur’an, “the root (the verbal derivatives) of the word jihad appears quite frequently with regard to fighting (e.g., 2:218, 3:143, 8:72, 74–75, 9:16, 20, 41, 86, 61:11) or fighters (mujahidin, 4:95, 47:31).”
37 Most verses in the Qur’an, Cook emphasizes, “are unambiguous as to the nature of the jihad prescribed—the vast majority of them referring to ‘those who believe, emigrate, and fight in the path of Allah.’ ”38 In the historical evolution of Islam, “the armed struggle—aggressive conquest—came first, and then additional meanings became attached to the term [jihad].”39
To be sure, there are stories of violence and brutality in the Torah and Bible. When King David’s daughter, Tamar, is raped by her half-brother, David imposes no punishment and Tamar is discarded and shamed. But Talmudic and biblical scholars today do not sanction sibling rape. Instead, they are most likely to express grief for Tamar and revulsion at the crime, and to show how this one act led to the unraveling of David’s family. Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad’s decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today.
The literal reading of the Qur’an is a central part of what animates the bloody battles of jihad playing out across Syria and Iraq. Many of today’s Sunni and Shiite fighters believe they are participating in battles foretold in seventh-century prophecies—the accounts in the hadith that refer to the confrontation of two massive armies in Syria. “If you think all these mujahideen came from across the world to fight Assad, you’re mistaken,” a Sunni Muslim jihadist who uses the name Abu Omar explained to a Reuters reporter in 2014. “They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised—it is the Grand Battle.”
40 “We have here mujahideen from Russia, America, the Philippines, China, Germany, Belgium, Sudan, India, and Yemen and other places,” a journalist was told by Sami, a Sunni rebel fighter in northern Syria. “They are here because this is what the Prophet said and promised, the Grand Battle is happening.”41 In much the same way, the leader of Boko Haram cites the Qur’an as his excuse to sell 276 kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls into slavery.
Reason and the Qur’an
If Muhammad and the Qur’an are providing justifications for so much wrongdoing in the world, then it must be of more than scholarly interest to apply the tools of reason to both Prophet and text. The problem is that Islamic scholars arguing in favor of human reason have long been on the losing end of doctrinal conflicts. When rationalists squared off against literalists during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, they lost. The rationalists wanted to include in Islamic doctrine only principles based on reason. The traditionalists countered that the human intellect is “defective, fickle, and malleable.”
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Changing central aspects of Islamic doctrine became even more difficult in the tenth century. At that time, jurists of the various schools of law decided that all the essential questions had been settled and that permitting any new interpretations would not be productive. This famous episode is referred to as the closing of “the gates of ijtihad.” The gates of reinterpretation were not suddenly slammed shut: it was a gradual process. But once shut, they proved impossible to reopen. The late Christina Phelps Harris of Stanford University summarized the impact as creating “a framework of inexorable legal rigidity.”
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In this process a key role was played by the imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, who died in AD 1111. Al-Ghazali detested the ancient Greek philosophers. He regarded human reason as a cancer upon Islam. His most famous work is Incoherence of the Philosophers, which attacks and refutes the claims of the ancients. Against their pretensions, al-Ghazali posits an all-knowing God. Allah knows the smallest particle in heaven and on earth. And because Allah knows everything and is responsible for everything, he already knows and has fully formed every part of the world and every action, from whether an arrow reaches its target to whether a hand is waved. Thus, al-Ghazali writes, “Blind obedience to God is the best evidence of our Islam.” Those, such as the Andalusian scholar Ibn Rushd, who disagreed with al-Ghazali found themselves exiled, or worse.
Nine hundred years have passed, and yet al-Ghazali is still considered by many in Islam to be second only to Muhammad. He provided the standard answer to almost any question posed in Arabic: “Inshallah,” meaning “If Allah wills it” or “God willing.” The latest flowering of al-Ghazali’s concepts can be found today in the teachings of groups such as Boko Haram (whose very name means “Non-Muslim teaching is forbidden”), Islamic State, and Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah. They adhere to the principle of “al-fikr kufr,” that the very act of thinking (and along with thinking, education, reason, and knowledge) makes one an infidel (kufr). Or as Taliban religious police have written on their propaganda placards: “Throw reason to the dogs—it stinks of corruption.”
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There is in fact no good reason al-Ghazali and his ilk should have the last word in defining Islam. Muslims around the world cannot go on claiming that “true” Islam has somehow been “hijacked” by a group of extremists. Instead they must acknowledge that inducements to violence lie at the root of their own most sacred texts, and take responsibility for actively redefining their faith.
The crucial first step in this process of modification will be to acknowledge the humanity of the Prophet himself and the role of human beings in creating Islam’s sacred texts. When Muslims tell us that the Qur’an is the immutable and unchanging word of God, that it is entirely consistent and infallible, and that none of its injunctions and commandments can be treated as in any way optional for true believers, we need to retort that, by the lights of scholarship and science, this is simply not the case. In truth, Islamic doctrine is adaptable; certain parts of the Qur’an were abrogated over time. So there is no reason to insist that the militant verses of the Medina period should always be given priority. If Muslims wish their religion to be a religion of peace, all they have to do is “abrogate” those Medinan verses. Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who was executed in 1985 for “apostasy” in Sudan, proposed to do just that.
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The next step in dismantling the ideological foundation of Islamist violence will be to persuade Muslims raised on an alluring vision of the afterlife to embrace life in this world, rather than actively seeking death as a path to the next.
CHAPTER 4
THOSE WHO LOVE DEATH
Islam’s Fatal Focus on the Afterlife
On October 4, 2014, inside Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, three American-born teenagers were apprehended by the FBI. The two brothers, aged nineteen and sixteen, and their seventeen-year-old sister were on their way to Turkey, where they planned to cross the border into Syria and join Islamic State. The three left behind letters for their parents, devout Muslims who had immigrated to the United States from India. The eldest, Mohammed Hamzah Khan, explained that “M
uslims have been crushed under foot for too long,” adding that the United States is “openly against Islam and Muslims,” and that he did “not want my progeny to be raised in a filthy environment like this.”1
But the sister took a different tack. She wrote to her parents: “Death is inevitable, and all of the times we enjoyed will not matter as we lay on our death beds. Death is an appointment, and we cannot delay or postpone, and what we did to prepare for our death is what will matter.” In a striking irony, the girl who wrote those lines celebrating the primacy of death was planning to become a physician.
Like her brothers, she had attended a private Islamic school for nearly all her educational life. There she had demonstrated the highest facility with the Qur’an, becoming “Hafiz,” meaning that she had memorized the entire text in Arabic.
In short, the decision of these siblings to join IS was not the result of knowing too little about Islam, much less of ignorance of the sacred texts. Nor can we ascribe their choice to poverty, social deprivation, or limited opportunity. The family lived in a comfortable Chicago suburb, the children attended private school, they had computers and cell phones—although, in a classic example of cocooning, the parents got rid of their television when their eldest child was eight because they wanted to “preserve their innocence.”
Rather, this was a choice directly underpinned by contemporary Islamic philosophy and, in particular, its contempt for many of the central values of the West. In the words of a local Islamic community leader, Omer Mozaffar, who teaches theology at the University of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago, Muslim parents “think ‘American’ equals ‘immoral.’ ”2
And it is not simply our American shopping malls, chain restaurants, movies, and music downloads. It is our values, our social fabric, our very way of life. Americans are raised to believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Muslims such as the Chicago Three, by contrast, are educated to venerate death over life—to value the promise of eternal life more highly than actual life here on earth. They see their primary purpose in this life as preparing for death: in the words of that Chicago teenager, “what we did to prepare for our death is what will matter.”3 Death is the goal, the event that matters because it leads to the prize of eternal life.
Many Muslims today believe this with a fervor that is very hard for modernized Westerners to comprehend. By contrast, the leaders of IS and similar organizations know exactly how to exploit the Islamic exaltation of death—to the extent that three American teenagers would spend $2,600 on plane tickets with the ultimate goal of hastening their own deaths.
Life and Afterlife
The afterlife is as central to the Islamic mind as the clock has become to the Western mind. In the West, we structure our lives according to the passage of time, what we will accomplish in the next hour, the next day, the next year. We plan according to time and we generally assume that our lives will be long. Indeed, I have heard Westerners in their eighties talking confidently as if they have decades still to live. The old Christian preoccupations with mortality—so vividly expressed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or in the poetry of John Donne—have receded in the face of rising life expectancy, actuarial calculation, and increasingly secular thinking. In the Islamic mind, by contrast, it is not the ticking of the clock that is heard, but the approach of the Day of Judgment. Have we prepared sufficiently for the life that will come after death?
The problem before us, then, is not simply one of better education: the people who hold this belief are not ignorant laborers but highly educated and skilled engineers and doctors. Focusing on death is what they are taught from the beginning of their lives. It was what I was taught from the beginning of mine.
From the time I could learn the most basic lessons, I was taught that our life on this earth is short and that it is temporary. During my childhood, countless people died: relatives died, neighbors died, strangers died—from disease, from malnutrition, from violence, from oppression. Death was on our lips all the time. We got so used to it and it became such a part of us that we wouldn’t speak without mentioning it. I could not make the simplest plans with a friend without saying, “See you tomorrow, if I’m alive!” or “If Allah wills it.” And the words made perfect sense because I knew that I could die at any time.
I was also told that all of your life is a test. To pass that test, you must follow a series of obligations and abstain from all that is forbidden, so that when it comes to the final trial of judgment before Allah, you will be admitted to paradise, an actual place with water and date trees heavy with fruit. Thus, from the beginning, as a Muslim child, I was taught to invest my actions, my thoughts, my creativity not in the here and now, but in the hereafter. The ultimate lesson I learned was that your real, eternal life starts only after you die.
I believed all of this without question—until I reached Holland. There no one talked about death, let alone life after death. Without equivocation they said, “See you tomorrow!” And if I replied, “If I’m alive!” they would look at me quizzically and say, “Of course you’ll be alive. Why ever not?”
Martyrdom vs. Sacrifice
What are the origins of the Muslim cult of martyrdom? After Muhammad’s hegira to Medina, he and his small armies faced far larger, more powerful forces. Both the Qur’an and the hadith describe how Muhammad and his cohorts defeated them because Allah was on their side. Allah blessed their wars as jihad—holy war—and declared that the most glorious Muslim warriors were the shaheed, the martyrs. So the men on the field not only welcomed war, they welcomed death in war because it elevated their status in paradise.
The belief that this life is transitory and that it is the next one that matters is one of the core teachings of the Qur’an. For the believer looking to find glory in death, there are numerous passages like this: “Only he who is saved far from the Fire and admitted to the Garden will have attained the object (of Life): For the life of this world is but goods and chattels of deception” (3:185). Elsewhere, the Qur’an emphasizes the transitory nature of the world. “Thou seest the mountains and think them firmly fixed, but they shall pass away as the clouds pass away” (27:88). Everything on earth is temporary; only Allah is permanent.
Such is the importance of martyrdom in Islam that martyrs have all their sins forgiven and automatically ascend to the highest of the seven levels of paradise. One sentence in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought drily captures this concept. After burying martyrs, usually in the clothes in which they had fought, “most jurists were of the opinion that there was no need to say the funerary prayers over the martyr’s body, the assumption being that all his sins had been forgiven and that he would ascend to heaven right away.”4
The Qur’an includes a very vivid depiction of paradise for the believing, repentant Muslim, far more precise than any visions of heaven in Christianity or the even more nebulous versions of a possible hereafter in Judaism:
There will be two Gardens containing all kinds (of trees and delights); In them (each) will be two Springs flowing; In them will be Fruits of every kind, two and two. The Fruit of the Gardens will be near (and easy of reach). In them will be (Maidens), chaste, restraining their glances, whom no man or Jinn before them has touched; Like unto Rubies and coral. Is there any Reward for Good—other than Good? (55:46–60)
As if that were not detailed enough, here is a hadith narrated by the famous scholar al-Ghazzali:
These places [in paradise] are built of emeralds and jewels and in each building there will be seventy rooms of red color and in each room seventy sub-rooms of green color and in each sub-room there will be one throne and over each throne seventy beds of varied colors and on each bed a girl having sweet black eyes. . . . There will be seven girls in each room. . . . Each believer will be given such strength in the morning as he can cohabit with them.5
These virgins “do not sleep, do not get pregnant, do not menstruate, spit, or blow t
heir noses, and are never sick.”6
Significantly, there is relatively little in this Qur’anic discussion of paradise for women. It is also unclear whether a woman’s paradise is the same as a man’s, or what a woman’s paradise might be like. Even in death, there is an assumption that a woman is less than a man. Nouman Ali Khan, who is listed by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, Jordan, as one of the world’s five hundred most influential Muslims, is a very Westernized (and very glib) cleric who also heads the Bayyinah Institute in Dallas. Wearing a crisp blue dress shirt, he explains on YouTube that, once in heaven with Allah, all of a wife’s annoying traits are removed. “So don’t get depressed,” he says, joking that when you first encounter your wife, you will say, “So you’re here too? I thought this was . . .” Only in jannah, in paradise, does your wife have the traits that you actually want.
For Christians, heaven is simply a place without suffering, a place of peace. The precise nature of that peace is seldom spelled out. For Muslims, by contrast, paradise is a goal, a destination, a place infinitely preferable to the one where we reside. “Dear wise brother,” says the Egyptian imam Sheikh Muhammad Hassan in an online sermon, “your real life starts with your death, and so does mine.”7
How exactly does the preeminence of the hereafter get drummed into Muslims? To start with, it is invoked five times a day in ritual prayer. Then there are the constant reminders. The next life is the life that matters, not this one, you are told. You will not please God by going to your job and working hard. You will please God by spending more time praying, more time proselytizing, by fasting during Ramadan, by journeying to Mecca. You can be redeemed, you can salvage whatever you have lost, not by devoting yourself to improving your life in the here and now, but by following religious dictates and achieving entry into paradise. And the most spectacular way to enter paradise is as a martyr, by the open embrace of an early death.
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