Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith

by Robert Spencer

  • "Modernizing autocracies. These are regimes-one thinks of Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco in particular-that have their roots in traditional autocracy but are taking significant steps toward modernization and democratization. None really fits the description of liberal democracy as given above, but none is anything like a total autocracy, either." These states are caught on the fault line between the Western world and Islam, having bought into Western notions of how to constitute a society, and paying the price for it. All of these states currently suffer from increasing violence by radical Muslim groups that want to make them over into full-fledged Islamic states.

  • "Fascist-style dictatorships," found today in Syria and Iraq. Radical Muslims of bin Laden's ilk hold Syria's Bashar Assad (and his late father) and Iraq's Saddam Hussein in contempt for their un-Islamic ways. According to journalist Dilip Hiro, Muslim radicals have been "murderously hostile" to the Assad regime in Syria.18 This is chiefly because the present Syrian and Iraqi regimes are an odd hangover from the occupation of Muslim lands by European colonizers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time many Muslims adopted Western styles of dress and Western ways of thinking (while others reacted in the opposite fashion, by returning to the pure religion of the Qur'an and Sunnah). Saddam Hussein with his rumpled uniform and cult of personality is a sartorial and ideological stepchild of mid-twentieth-century Europe's uniformed strongmen: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini.

  • "Radical Islamic regimes. There are two of these so far, Iran and Sudan.... Egypt has a potent radical Islamic movement, but the Egyptian political class also has a remarkable knack for maintaining itself in power. Moreover," Lewis concludes, writing before the Taliban and Osama bin Laden had burst into the world's awareness, "the threat to the sovereign state posed by pan-Islamic radicalism has been greatly exaggerated."19

  • The Muslim former Soviet republics of central Asia, which Lewis characterizes as being in a period of transition. These republics are a way station from Soviet autocracy to Islamic autocracy (or perhaps secularism), and all display to varying degrees the tensions of Islamic states the world over: the tug-of-war between secularism and the Sharia.

  In Azerbaijan, for example, Shi'ite Muslims from neighboring Iran have fomented discord against the secular government; in May 1996 the nation's Islamic Party leader was arrested in espionage charges. Kyrgyzstan is another secular state. It has taken stern measures against militant Muslim groups (which it refers to collectively as "Wahhabis"), but it also shows indications of adopting the political aspects of Islam: for example, the government frowns on conversions from Islam to Christianity.

  Fifty-three states, one struggling democracy. The judgment of one experienced observer of the Arab world, is devastating.

  Arabs have been organizing their society for half a century or so of independence, and have made a wretched job of it. A whole range of one-man rulers, whether hereditary monarchs or presidents, have proved unable or unwilling to devise political regimes that allow their people to have any say in their destinies....

  Perhaps Islam and representative democracy are two beautiful but incompatible ideals. Arab states have not built the institutions that are indispensable for dealing with contemporary problems. In Islam, state authority and religious authority have always gone together. Nobody so far has been able to devise some way of separating them and thus laying the foundations of a civil society.20

  Can Islam Be Secularized

  and Made Compatible with

  the Western Pluralistic

  Framework?

  MAYBE BEFORE THE WEST IS ISLAMICIZED, Islam will be secularized.

  Can this happen? In a certain way this question recalls Mark Twain's celebrated remark when he was asked if he believed in infant baptism. "Of course I believe in infant baptism!" Twain replied. "I've seen it with my own eyes.

  Of course Islam can be secularized. You can see it with your own eyes. There are millions of secularized Muslims in the world today. The Egyptian reformer, secular nationalist and political theorist Muhammad Abduh, whose influence is still felt in the House of Islam, was anxious to reconcile Islam with the modern world. He went so far as to assert that polygamy and easy divorce (as well as slavery) were not fundamental elements of Islam, and could be discarded.' He revived the ancient Mu'tazilite respect for human reason, and even asserted that women's rights and religious freedom were core Islamic ideas.

  Although during his lifetime his influence was felt mostly among academics, many Muslims have followed Muhammad Abduh's lead. As Bill Clinton put it,

  A quarter of the world's population is Muslim-from Africa to Middle East to Asia and to the United States, where Islam is one of our fastestgrowing faiths. There are over 1,200 mosques and Islamic centers in the United States, and the number is rapidly increasing. The six million Americans who worship there will tell you there is no inherent clash between Islam and America.'

  In Clinton's view there is no inherent clash because he believes in the lure of secularism, and in its power to draw Muslims (and Christians and Jews, and everyone else) away from their religion.

  That lure is real. When American journalist Charles Glass was kidnapped and held hostage in Beirut by the Hezbollah in 1987, he experienced firsthand how pervasive American pop culture has become, even among those who have dedicated themselves to destroying America as the Great Satan: "The guards were all young," Glass relates. "They liked Michael Jackson and Madonna. One of them was disappointed when I told him Madonna was American, but he said he liked her anyway."3 In this the terrorists reflect the ambivalence so well expressed by the twelfthcentury Persian poet Mujir:

  In one hand the Qur'an, in the other a wineglass, sometimes keeping the rules, sometimes breaking them. Here we are in this world, unripe and raw, not outright heathens, not quite Muslims.'

  Dinesh D'Souza reports that "in the Middle East, American dolls have become so popular that an official of the Arab League frets that Barbiewith her miniskirts and career aspirations-is not a suitable role model for Muslim children."5

  V. S. Naipaul noted the same ambivalence, remarking that attraction to the West in Islamic societies was "more than a need for education and skills. But the attraction wasn't admitted; and in that attraction, too humiliating for an old and proud people to admit, there lay distur- bance."6 This ambivalence is found even among the most ferocious proponents of terrorism:

  Jamia'at Ulama-e-Islam is one of the most extreme Islamic movements in Pakistan, and its leader-a ferocious old man with a white beard-is currently summoning the faithful onto the streets to overthrow the government of President Musharraf and launch a holy war. But two of his sons are studying in the United States. He says that they will be better able to understand their enemy. This humbug reveals the inner ambiguity common to his kind. He knows, and we know, that he is supplying them with a brighter future, as any father would.7

  Secularization brings other concepts with it. The idea of human rights, born in Christianity, has now become virtually universal. Muhammad Abduh and other Islamic modernists such as Jamal al-Afghani and Muhammad Iqbal have helped such Western ideas find a welcome in the Islamic world. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the populace that overthrew the hated shah for growing too Western and un-Islamic is showing signs of growing restive after twenty-plus years of Islamic orthodoxy and absolutism. When the Taliban withdrew from Kabul, Afghanis joyfully played music for the first time in years.' Just as in the nineteenth century the arrival of Western ideas led to the emancipation of the dhimmis, so now the House of Islam is home to all sorts of Western notions, including feminism and secularism.

  Some even go so far as to call for the adoption of secularism as the only way out of increasingly intractable interreligious squabbles. Shi'ite minorities, for example, after suffering under the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia and other Sunnis in Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, might find secularism welcome-or at least so goes the argument.

  The Western Model

  In What Went Wrong:
Approaches to the Modern History of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis proposes that Muslim states follow the Western secularist model in order to solve some of these difficulties. He invites Muslims to learn from Christian experience:

  Secularism in the Christian world was an attempt to resolve the long and destructive struggles of church and state. Separation, adopted in the American and French Revolutions and elsewhere after that, was designed to prevent two things: the use of religion by the state to reinforce and extend its authority; and the use of the state power by the clergy to impose their doctrines and rules on others. This is a problem long seen as purely Christian, not relevant to Muslims or for that matter to Jews, for whom a similar problem has arisen in Israel. Looking at the contemporary Middle East, both Muslim and Jewish, one must ask whether this is still trueor whether Muslims and Jews may perhaps have caught a Christian disease and might therefore consider a Christian remedy.9

  This advice is not acceptable to Mohamed Elhachmi Hamdi. "There is nothing new about this `remedy,' which is one that the West has tried before to impose on Islamic countries, albeit without major success," Hamdi writes. For him and other Muslims of like mind, the Sharia is not negotiable. "A secular government might coerce obedience, but Muslims will not abandon their belief that state affairs should be supervised by the just teachings of the holy law."'o

  Indeed, the assumption that Western cultural hegemony means the battle has already been won and Muslims can be secularized is premature. As Naipaul observed in Pakistan, "Every Friday every man, whatever his condition, heard from the mullahs that the laws of men were not to be obeyed if they went against the teachings of the Koran."" A Christian preacher might say similar words on any given Sunday from any pulpit in America, but they wouldn't mean exactly the same thing; for as we have seen time and time again, the Bible and the Qur'an are fundamentally different. Islam rejects the idea of a separation of church and state-a notion harmonious with Jesus' own words about rendering to Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God that which is God's. Anyone, therefore, who thinks that Muslims can become another species of Methodist or Presbyterian-the Middle Eastern analogue of civic-minded Americans, committed to democracy and tolerance-will be disappointed. The open-minded and tolerant Islam of Abduh and his followers repeatedly founders upon the plain words of the Qur'an, which every Muslim is continuously exhorted to read and love.

  Working from the words of the sacred book, many Muslims reject the notion that all human beings have rights-a cardinal principal of the secular state. As we saw earlier, Iran's delegate to the United Nations, Sa'id Raja'i-Khorassani, declared in 1985 that "the very concept of human rights was `a Judeo-Christian invention' and inadmissible in Islam.""

  Even so, it is one thing to call the concept inadmissible and another to expel it from the House of Islam. Today there are Muslim organizations dedicated to promoting secular Islam. The Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society (ISIS) declares boldly that "Islamic society has been held back by an unwillingness to subject its beliefs, laws and practices to critical examination, by a lack of respect for the rights of the individual, and by an unwillingness to tolerate alternative viewpoints or to engage in constructive dialogue." Consequently, the institute hopes to "promote the ideas of rationalism, secularism, democracy and human rights within Islamic society." The ISIS stands for the whole panoply of Western rights that are generally held in disfavor in the House of Islam: "freedom of expression, freedom of thought and belief, freedom of intellectual and scientific inquiry" and, most ominously of all for the mullahs, "freedom of conscience and religion-including the freedom to change one's religion or belief-and freedom from religion: the freedom not to believe in any deity." 'I

  As reasonable as all this may sound to Westerners, however, it is unlikely that such a program will find much support among Muslims. Because it would entail the abandonment or restriction of full enforcement of the Sharia, for many Muslims secularism is tantamount to apostasy. By standing for these ideas-ideas that are taken for granted everywhere in the West-the members of the ISIS risk death. Apostasy is a capital crime under the Sharia, and when these men stand for the "freedom to change one's religion or belief," they are placing themselves outside the law of Islam.

  They risk suffering the fate of Rashad Khalifa, an early victim of Islamic terror on American soil. According to Middle East expert Daniel Pipes,

  Khalifa, an Egyptian biochemist living in Tucson, Arizona, analyzed the Koran by computer and concluded from some other complex numerology that the final two verses of the ninth chapter do not belong in the holy book. This insight eventually prompted him to declare himself a prophet, a very serious offense in Islam (which holds Muhammad to be the last of the prophets). Some months later, on January 31, 1990, unknown assailants-presumably orthodox Muslims angered by his teachingsstabbed Khalifa to death. While the case remains unsolved, it sent a clear and chilling message: Even in the United States, deviancy leads to death.14

  Pipes relates this in his review of Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995). The ISIS website contains numerous reviews of this book and trumpets Ibn Warraq as a prime example of the secular Muslim. No doubt he is, and not just for his skeptical writings about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad; he is also an exemplary secular Muslim because his true identity is a secret. Secular Muslims, after all, risk death from hardliners who consider them to have fallen away from the faith. "Ibn Warraq" is a pseudonym that protects the author from those who are ready to carry out the Prophet's death sentence on apostates.

  Ibn Warraq's pseudonymous status is emblematic of the difficult challenge facing those who would call for the secularization of Islam, whether from within or from without. As soon as they mention looking at the Qur'an as a historical document, or mitigating the binding force of the Sharia, another vocal party is ready to denounce them as apostates and enemies of Islam. How, then, can the House of Islam ever implement Bernard Lewis's benign and well-reasoned prescription for secular ism, when a not inconsiderable party of Muslims will fight this prospect to the death as a nationwide apostasy?

  The Example of Turkey

  Consider the case of Turkey. In the aftermath of World War I, Mustafa Kemal, who called himself Ataturk, or Father of the Turks, established the first secular government in a Muslim society-leading the sheikh who famously visited Osama bin Laden on video in 2001 to refer to "infidels like the Turks."" Ataturk declared that "the civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up. It is time to stop nonsense, such as `should we or should we not wear hats?' We shall adopt hats along with all other works of Western civilization. Uncivilized people are doomed to be trodden under the feet of civilized people."" Hats were more than just a symbol: because of their brims, they interfered with the prostrations that were and are an essential element of Muslim prayer. By outlawing turbans and mandating hats, Ataturk was striking at the very heart of Turkish Islamic society.

  Within a relatively brief period the great Islamic empire that had been the seat of the caliphate and the lodestar of the Muslim world became a Western-style modern state. The unity of the polity was based on racial, not religious grounds (resulting in the murder and exile of millions of Armenians and a substantial number of Greeks, who fared better even as dhimmis than they did under the nationalistic and secular Turkish government). According to Islamic scholar Caesar Farah, Ataturk accomplished this transformation by rapidly "abolishing the caliphate, placing restrictions on the observances of the faith, introducing secular marriage procedures, and neglecting Islamic places of devotion and worship." He "pursued a deliberate policy of downplaying religion in the life of the state when under the Ottoman, the last Islamic empire, it was central.""

  This is exactly the dream of moderate, Western-influenced and Western-friendly Muslims and their non-Muslim patrons. Ataturk labored to erect a truly Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state. If the notion of a modernized, secularized Islam has any viability, it should show in Turkey, its pri
ncipal research-and-development project.

  But there was resistance to Ataturk's program in Turkey virtually from the beginning. Scholar Paul Dumont notes that "the expeditious secularization imposed on the country by Mustafa Kemal and his entourage created a shock wave through the country which has not yet died out."" The chief opposition to Kemalism, as secular rule in Turkey came to be known, was fundamentally religious. Rank-and-file Turks, according to Ataturk's biographer Andrew Mango, believed that "misery was the fruit of impiety, prosperity the reward of obedience to the law of Islam.""

  In this reaction to Ataturk's reforms, Turks were repeating an assessment of Turkish affairs that was common long before turbans were abolished. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, observes historian Philip Mansel,

  Islam itself presented one potential challenge to the Ottoman capital. Islam is a religion with revolutionary implications. Rulers are considered legitimate only if they enforce the sheriat [this is the Turkish form of the word sharia], the holy law of Islam based on the teachings of the Koran. The sheriat was considered above, rather than a product of, the state.... Conflict between dynastic power and Islam emerged throughout the history of the city.20

  Instances of this conflict fill Ottoman history. In the early seventeenth century, "extremist" preachers began, in the name of pure Islam, to inveigh against the secular elements of Westernized Istanbul. Mansel continues: "They denounced not only coffee, tobacco, silk and dancing, but also such dervish practices as pilgrimages to tombs." (The tombs of Sufi saints are popular objects of veneration in the Muslim world, especially among Shi'ites but also to varying degrees throughout Islam. This veneration is well established in Islamic practice, but has always been subject to attack from purists, who contend that even to pray in front of the tomb of a saint is to associate partners with Allah and compromise Islamic monotheism.) These preachers and their followers "were so threatening that for most of 1651 the Oecumenical Patriarch took refuge in the French embassy.""