Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Kashgari, a newspaper columnist from the port city of Jeddah on the Red Sea, promptly deleted his tweets and fled to Malaysia, where he was detained in the departure hall of Kuala Lumpur International Airport by police as he tried to board a flight to New Zealand. He was soon thereafter repatriated to Saudi Arabia.

  What had he written in 140 characters that was so blasphemous? The answer is this:

  On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity surrounding you. I shall not pray for you.10

  He also posted: “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.” And finally: “I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”11

  For these innocent words, clerics rose up to demand Kashgari’s death for the crime of apostasy, and King Abdullah ordered a warrant for his arrest. It did not matter that Kashgari had apologized and erased his tweets. He was jailed. And although he was freed some eight months later, he has effectively been silenced.

  This is a young man who grew up in a conservative religious home, who was doing no more than testing and feeling about the contours of his faith. He did not reject Islam, Allah, or the Prophet. His words merely sought to humanize a religious icon. And for this he was jailed.

  The Unexpected Reformation

  For many years, Western writers have dreamed of a Muslim Reformation. None has come. Accordingly, most observers of the Islamic world today have given up on the idea. But I believe that a Reformation is not merely imminent; it is now under way. The Protestant Reformation itself erupted quite suddenly. With Islam, with equal suddenness, the change has already begun and will only accelerate in the years that lie ahead.

  Recall the three factors that were crucial to the success of the Protestant Reformation: technological change, urbanization, and the interests of a significant number of European states in backing Luther’s challenge to the status quo. All three are present in the Muslim world today.

  Modern information technology, like the printing press in Luther’s time, can certainly be used to promote intolerance, violence, and millenarian visions. But it can also act as a channel for the very opposite things, just as the printing presses of seventeenth-century Europe went from publishing tracts about witchcraft to treatises about physics. The case of Hamza Kashgari in fact perfectly illustrates the way the Internet has the opportunity to be to the Muslim Reformation what the printing press was to the Protestant Christian one. Raised a religious conservative, Kashgari is said to have become a “humanist” under the influence of what he read online.

  There is also a constituency for a true Reformation in the Muslim world, just as there was a constituency receptive to Luther’s message in sixteenth-century Germany. Muslim city-dwellers are much more likely to be resistant to the people I have called Medina Muslims than people living in the countryside—not least because in practice the imposition of sharia is highly disruptive of a whole range of mainly urban businesses (among them, tourism).

  In 2014, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 14,000 Muslims in fourteen countries. In only two nations, Senegal and Indonesia, was concern about Islamic extremism felt by fewer than 50 percent of the surveyed population.12 The numbers in the Middle East and North Africa were astounding: fully 92 percent of Lebanese, 80 percent of Tunisians, 75 percent of Egyptians, and 72 percent of Nigerians—huge majorities of people—said they were worried about Islamic extremism. There is good reason to think that it is city-dwellers who are doing most of the worrying.

  Moreover, Islam is now a global religion with what might even be called a global diaspora. As a result of postwar migrations, there are more than 20 million Muslims living in Western Europe and North America. These Muslims are, as we have seen, confronting the daily challenge of existing in the modern secular West while still remaining Muslim. In short, there is a rapidly growing potential audience for ideas about a new direction for Islam.

  Finally, just as in sixteenth-century Europe, there is now a political constituency for religious reform in key states of the Muslim world. On New Year’s Day 2015, to mark the approaching birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, gave an astonishing speech at Al-Azhar University itself, in which he called for nothing less than a “religious revolution”:

  Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible!

  I am saying these words here at Al-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.

  All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

  I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move . . . because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.13

  El-Sisi is by no means the only Muslim leader who sees the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk as posing a fundamental threat to his country’s political stability and economic development. Similar encouragement of religious reform is being given by the government of the United Arab Emirates.

  It is, of course, conventional to argue that el-Sisi’s election as president was a symptom of the failure of the Arab Spring. But that is to misunderstand the process unleashed by the revolutions that began in Tunisia in late 2010. The revolutions there, as well as in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, were directed against corrupt dictators; they were then hijacked by Medina Muslims such as the Muslim Brotherhood, whom the dictators had long held in check. When that became clear to Egyptians—especially city-dwellers—they took to the streets once again to oust the Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi.

  As a challenge to authority—as a revolution against dictators who had once seemed immovable and all-powerful—the Arab Spring was actually a success. It showed that the mighty could be challenged. When another form of authority—religious authority—sought to exploit the opening, there was a second revolution, at least in Egypt (and civil wars in other countries). Eventually, I believe, refusal to submit to the authority of secular rulers will be followed by a more general refusal to submit to the authority of the imam, the mullah, the ayatollah, the ulema.

  The ferment we see in the Muslim world today is not solely due to despotic political systems. It is not solely due to failing economies and the poverty they breed. Rather, it is due to Islam itself and the incompatibility of certain key facets of the Muslim faith with modernity. That is why the most important conflict in the world today is between those who will defend to the death those incompatibilities and those who are prepared to challenge them—not to overthrow Islam, but to reform it.

  The initial work of challenging authority has already begun—tragically exemplified by the note written by the son of the newly elected Iranian president shortly before his suicide in 1992: “I hate your government, your lies, your corruption, your religion, your double acts and your hypocrisy.”

  14 Yet a Reformation cannot be achieved by suicide notes. Like Luther’s Reformation, it needs theses: calls for action.

  Five Theses

  What does one do with a timeworn but historically valuable house? One approach is simply to knock it over and build a new house in its stead. This is not going to happen with Islam, or any other established religion. A second approach is to preserve the place exactly as it was when first built, unstable and in danger of total
collapse though it is. This is essentially the thing that groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, and IS agree on: a restoration of the seventh-century original.

  The third choice is to keep as much as possible of the historic details, make the outside look a lot like the original, but change the house radically from the inside, equipping it with the latest amenities. That is the kind of Reformation or Modification I favor. Extending the metaphor, another term for what I have in mind might be an Islamic Renovation.

  I am no Luther. Nor do I have ninety-five theses to nail upon a door. In fact, I have only five. They refer to the five basic tenets of the Islamic faith that those who preach jihad and destruction use with such lethal success. Amending them will, I know, be exceedingly difficult. But for Islam to coexist with modernity, for Islamic states to coexist with other nations on our ever-shrinking planet, and especially for tens of millions of believing Muslims to flourish in Western societies, these five concepts must be amended. Reason and conscience demand it. These changes, I believe, can be the basis of a true Islamic Reformation, one that progresses to the twenty-first century rather than regresses to the seventh.

  Some of these changes may strike readers as too fundamental to Islamic belief to be feasible. But like the partition walls or superfluous stairways that a successful renovation removes, they can in fact be modified without causing the entire structure to collapse. Indeed, I believe these modifications will actually strengthen Islam by making it easier for Muslims to live in harmony with the modern world. It is those hell-bent on restoring it to its original state who are much more likely to lead Islam to destruction. Here again are my five theses, nailed to a virtual door:

  1.Ensure that Muhammad and the Qur’an are open to interpretation and criticism.

  2.Give priority to this life, not the afterlife.

  3.Shackle sharia and end its supremacy over secular law.

  4.End the practice of “commanding right, forbidding wrong.”

  5.Abandon the call to jihad.

  In the chapters that follow, I will explore the source of the ideas and doctrines in question and evaluate the prospects for reforming them. For now, we may simply note that they are closely interrelated. The main problem for us is obviously the promotion of jihad. But the appeal of holy war cannot be understood without factoring in the prestige of the Prophet himself as a model for Muslim behavior, the insistence on a literal reading of the Qur’an and the attendant rejection of critical thinking, the primacy of the afterlife in Muslim theology, the power of religious law, and the license bestowed on individual Muslims to enforce its codes and disciplines. These issues overlap to the extent that they are sometimes hard to separate. But all must be addressed.

  As readers of my previous books will realize, this represents a new approach. When I wrote my last book, Nomad, I believed that Islam was beyond reform, that perhaps the best thing for religious believers in Islam to do was to pick another god. I was certain of it, not unlike the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, who wrote in 1987 of his absolute certainty that the Berlin Wall would endure. Two years later, the Wall fell. Seven months after I published Nomad came the start of the Arab Spring. I watched four national governments fall—Egypt’s twice—and protests or uprisings occur in fourteen other nations, and I thought simply: I was wrong. Ordinary Muslims are ready for change.

  The path forward will be hard, even bloody. But unlike previous waves of reform that foundered on the monolith of religious and political power, today it is possible to find a fellowship of people who desire a separation of religion from politics in the Muslim world.

  I am not a cleric. I have no weekly congregation. I simply lecture, read, write, think, and teach a small seminar at Harvard. Those who might object that I am not a trained theologian or historian of Islam are correct. But it is not my purpose singlehandedly to engage the Muslim world in a theological debate. Rather, it is my purpose to encourage Muslim reformers and dissidents to confront obstacles to reform—and to encourage the rest of us to support them in whatever way we can.

  For me there can be no going back. It is too late to return to the faith of my parents and grandparents. But it is not too late for millions of others to reconcile their Islamic faith with the twenty-first century.

  Nor is my dream of a Muslim Reformation a matter for Muslims alone. People of all faiths, or of no faith, have a great interest in a changed Islam: a faith that is more respectful of the basic doctrines of human rights, that universally preaches less violence and more tolerance, that promotes less corrupt and less chaotic governments, that allows for more doubt and more dissent, that encourages more education, more freedom, and more equality before a modern system of law.

  I see no other way forward for us—at least no other way that is not strewn with corpses. Islam and modernity must be reconciled. And that can happen only if Islam itself is modernized. Call it a Muslim Renovation if you prefer. But whatever label you choose, take these five amendments as the starting point for an honest debate about Islam. It is a debate that must begin with a reconsideration of the Prophet and his book as infallible sources of guidance for life in this world.

  CHAPTER 3

  MUHAMMAD AND THE QUR’AN

  How Unquestioning Reverence for the Prophet and His Book Obstructs Reform

  A key problem for Islam today can be summarized in three simplifying sentences: Christians worship a man made divine. Jews worship a book. And Muslims worship both.

  Christians believe in the divinity of Jesus while also stating that the Christian Bible was written by men. Jews believe in the sanctity of the Torah, which they kiss and treat with reverence during their services; but they traditionally ascribe its authorship to Moses, a prophet who, like other Hebrew prophets, is presented as human and fallible. However, Muslims believe in both the superhuman perfection of Muhammad and the literal truth and sanctity of the Qur’an as the direct revelation of God. Indeed, while even Orthodox Jewish rabbis argue that it is impossible to defile the Torah, Muslims believe the opposite—so much so that the charge of disrespecting Muhammad or the Qur’an is enough to incite violent protests, riots, and, frequently, death.

  For example, erroneous charges in 2005 that U.S. guards had flushed a Qur’an down the toilet in the Guantánamo Bay detention center resulted in violent riots in many Muslim nations. Seventeen people died in Afghanistan in the ensuing rage and frenzy. More recently, in November 2014, a Christian man and his wife living in Lahore, Pakistan, were beaten and burned alive in a brick kiln after they were accused of burning pages of the Qur’an. (The couple protested their innocence.) Likewise, a series of twelve satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet, which were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, triggered a paroxysm of outrage across the Muslim world that resulted in more than two hundred reported deaths as well as attacks on Western embassies.

  These episodes reflect a key distinction between the West and the Muslim world. While an irreverent approach to religious figures and beliefs is tolerated and even encouraged in Western societies, Muslims regard any “insult” to the Prophet or the Qur’an as deserving the ultimate penalty. And this is not an extreme position. As I mentioned earlier, as a teenager I myself unthinkingly agreed that Salman Rushdie deserved to die for writing a novel that very few people in the Muslim world, myself included, had read.

  To understand the roots of the problem, and why I believe that it is not in fact insoluble, we need to reexamine Islam’s two most sacred elements: its Prophet, and its holy book. Muslims need to understand Muhammad as a real man, in the context of his times, and the Qur’an as a historically constructed text, not as a divine instruction manual for life today.

  Who Was Muhammad?

  He is the greatest lawgiver of all time. The revelations he received, along with the facts of his life, form the foundation of a legal code that governs hundreds of millions of pe
ople. Yet scholars cannot agree on which year or on which date he was born. The most commonly accepted time is 570 years after the birth of Jesus Christ. His father died before he arrived in the world; by the age of six he had become an orphan. An uncle raised him. He met his first wife when she hired him to act as her commercial agent on a trading mission to Syria. A servant informed her that two angels had watched over the young agent as he slept, and that he had rested under a tree that was known to offer shade only “to prophets.”

  The young agent was twenty-five, his employer was forty. It was his first marriage and her third, and she initiated the wedding proposal. It would be another fifteen years before the words that would eventually become the Qur’an were first revealed to him. His wife, Khadija, was his first convert.

  Over the next twenty-two years, the man known as Muhammad would establish the world’s last great religion, create an intertwined religious, political, and legal order, and plant the seeds of an empire that would stretch from the Asian steppes to northern Africa and up through the Iberian peninsula. Today, more than a billion people profess their faith by saying the Shahada—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger.” In nearly fourteen hundred years, that message has remained unchanged.

  What made this message revolutionary was not simply the belief in one God, as opposed to the worship of many. This was hardly original, and indeed Muhammad presented his religion as the extension and fulfillment of the monotheistic revelations of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. What made Islam revolutionary was its vast scope, extending well beyond theology. Islam, as Muhammad devised it, is not simply a religion or a system of worship. It is, as the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner has put it, “the blueprint of a social order.”1 In its very name, “Islam” means submission. You subsume yourself to an entire system of beliefs. The rules as set down are precise and exacting.