by Reza Aslan
Ultimately, an Islamic democracy must be concerned not with reconciling popular and divine sovereignty, but with reconciling “people’s satisfaction with God’s approval,” to quote Abdolkarim Soroush. And if ever there is a conflict between the two, it must be the interpretation of Islam that yields to the reality of democracy, not the other way around. It has always been this way. From the very moment that God spoke the first word of Revelation to Muhammad—“Recite!”—the story of Islam has been in a constant state of evolution as it responds to the social, cultural, political, and temporal circumstances of those who are telling it. Now it must evolve once more. Because the fight for Islamic democracy is merely one front in a worldwide battle taking place within Islam, between those who seek to reconcile their faith and traditions with the realities of the modern world and those who react against those realities by reverting—sometimes violently—to the “fundamentals” of their faith.
Despite the tragedy of September 11 and the subsequent terrorist acts against Western targets throughout the world, despite the clash-of-civilizations mentality that has seized the globe and the clash-of-monotheisms reality underlying it, despite the blatant religious rhetoric resonating throughout the halls of governments, there is one thing that cannot be overemphasized. What is taking place now in Islam is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West. The West is merely a bystander—an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.
All great religions grapple with these issues, some more fiercely than others. One need only recall Europe’s massively destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) between the forces of the Protestant Union and those of the Catholic League to recognize the ferocity with which interreligious conflicts have been fought in Christian history. In many ways, the Thirty Years’ War signaled the end of the Christian Reformation: perhaps the classic argument over who gets to decide the future of a faith. What followed that awful war—during which nearly half of the population of Germany perished—was a gradual progression in Christian theology from the doctrinal absolutism of the pre-Reformation era to the doctrinal pluralism of the early modern period and, ultimately, to the doctrinal relativism of the Enlightenment. This remarkable evolution in Christianity from its inception to its Reformation took fifteen vicious, bloody, and occasionally apocalyptic centuries.
Fourteen hundred years of rabid debate over what it means to be a Muslim; of passionate arguments over the interpretation of the Quran and the application of Islamic law; of trying to reconcile a fractured community through appeals to Divine Unity; of tribal feuds, crusades, and world wars—and Islam has finally begun its fifteenth century, and with it, the realization of its own long-awaited and hard-fought Reformation. Yet this is a reformation that is not going to be resolved in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, where the message of Islam was first introduced to the world, but in the developing capitals of the Islamic world—Tehran, Cairo, Damascus, and Jakarta—and in the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe and the United States—New York, London, Paris, and Berlin—where that message is being redefined by scores of first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants fed up with the dominance of Traditionalism and militancy in their faith. By merging the Islamic values of their ancestors with the democratic ideals of their new homes, these Muslims have formed what Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born intellectual and grandson of Hasan al-Banna, has termed the “mobilizing force” for the Islamic Reformation.
Like the reformations of the past, this will be a terrifying event, one that has already begun to engulf the world. But out of the ashes of cataclysm, a new chapter in the story of Islam is emerging. And while it remains to be seen who will write that chapter, even now a new revelation is at hand which, after centuries of stony sleep, has finally awoken and is slouching toward Medina to be born.
11. Welcome to the Islamic Reformation
THE FUTURE OF ISLAM
IN THE HEART of the aged city of Cairo stands an institution as old and as triumphant as the city itself. For more than a millennium, the famed al-Azhar mosque and university has served as the locus of Sunni Islamic scholarship for millions of Muslims around the world. If there were such a thing as a Vatican in Islam, this would be it. Founded in 972 C.E. by the Caliphs of the Fatimid Dynasty, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima—nicknamed al-Zahra, or “the Radiant”—al-Azhar literally means the most radiant, and, indeed, one need only visit in the evening, when the sun sets behind its towering, mud-hued minarets, to see just how much brighter even than the stars in the hazy sky this blooming structure shines.
The campuses of al-Azhar sit beside the city’s central bazaar, known as Khan el Khalili, whose cobblestone paths and labyrinthine walkways teem with local bargain hunters and weary tourists. In the summer months, when the raucous energy of Cairo becomes too much even for Cairenes to handle, men and women, young and old, Christian and Muslim huddle together in the cool, calming silence of al-Azhar’s vast open courtyard. Barefoot old men sit on the marble floor, backs pressed against the crumbling columns, seeking shelter in the shade of the covered porticos. Young students cluster around the intricately carved inlets and corner coves of the main prayer hall, some here to study, most to gossip. On particularly hot days, the only movement in the entire complex belongs to the pigeons, and to the white-capped peasants in dusty, gray galabiyas who sweep the floors with dried-out husks of palm branches.
Everything within these hallowed walls, including the walls themselves, echoes with tradition. On my first visit to al-Azhar I asked an Egyptian friend how long the clerical institution had been in Cairo. “It has always been here,” he replied.
He was not exaggerating. Egypt’s modern capital may sit upon the detritus of half a dozen long-forgotten cities, but the city whose name in Arabic, al-Qahira, means “the Victorious”—the city of a thousand minarets that began as the seat of the Shi‘ite Fatimid Empire and is now universally recognized as the cultural center of the Arab world—that city was constructed with al-Azhar as its backbone. In the twelfth century, when the inimitable Muslim warrior Saladin conquered and cleansed Egypt of Shi‘ite imperial control, he stripped al-Azhar of funding and left it to ruin, only to have the institution rise out of the ashes of his Ayyubid Dynasty stronger than before. In the eighteenth century, Napoleon Bonaparte shelled al-Azhar into submission; his troops rode into the great mosque on horseback and sacked it, killing three thousand in the process. Three years later it was al-Azhar that led the uprising against the French, forcing Napoleon back to Europe in defeat. In the twentieth century, at the twilight of British colonial rule, al-Azhar’s Ulama provided the theological basis for the strikes and boycotts that ultimately expelled the foreign invaders from Egypt. During the socialist revolution of Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1950s, al-Azhar first endorsed the ideals of Pan-Arabism, then turned against it when Nasser transformed the school into a secular university controlled by the state. In the post-revolutionary period, al-Azhar became a tool both to legitimize secular dictatorship and to foment the Islamist backlash against it. As the war on terror raged in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, al-Azhar served simultaneously as the bulwark against the West’s “crusade against Islam,” and the model of calm conservatism in the face of the zealous extremism that had gripped the country’s youth.
It is the connection to what is spoken of with hushed reverence inside al-Azhar’s walls as “tradition” that confers upon the institution and its scholars the authority to act as sole arbiters in all matters of faith and morality. Indeed, the entire foundation of the Ulama—whether here at al-Azhar or anywhere else in the world—is tied to their ability to regurgitate what has been said, written, or thought by men just like them who have sat in these very same classrooms studying the very same texts and commentaries for more than a thousand years.
In Shi‘ism, religious authority is derived from the Ulama’s spiritual link to the Prophet
and the Imams. In Sunni Islam, religious authority is created solely through the Ulama’s ability to be fully subsumed by tradition. Shi‘ah authority is considered eternal and divinely inspired. Sunni authority is impermanent and anchored to the past. It is self-conferred, not divinely ordained. Like a Jewish rabbi, a Sunni cleric is a scholar, not a priest. His judgment is followed not because it carries the authority of God (it does not), but because the cleric’s scholarship, his intimate knowledge of tradition, and his unbreakable bond with the past grant him special insight into God’s will. Thus, if a rupture occurs that severs the Ulama’s connection to the authority upon which it is built, if some social or political or religious crisis suddenly shakes the very foundations of Muslim society, then the entire institution begins to crumble.
There have been many such ruptures in the fourteen-hundred-year history of Islam: the death of the Prophet, the expansion into empire, the conflict with Europe, the Crusades, colonialism, the destruction of the Caliphate. Yet no previous rupture has had a greater impact on Islam’s evolution, or so thoroughly breached the Ulama’s bond with the past, than the Muslim encounter with modernity and globalization.
For fourteen centuries, the venerable scholars of al-Azhar and their cohorts in similar institutions around the world have claimed a total monopoly over the meaning and message of the Muslim faith. Everything from how to pray to when to fast, from how to dress to whom to marry, has been the sole prerogative of a group of learned old men cloistered inside dozens of clerical institutions and schools of law, whose self-appointed task it has been to divine the future of Islam by controlling its past. No longer.
Today, if a Muslim in Egypt wants legal or spiritual advice on how to live a righteous life, he or she is more likely to pass over the antiquated scholarship provided by the stately Egyptian institution of al-Azhar for the television broadcasts of the wildly popular Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled. Amr Khaled’s weekly shows, through which he dispenses advice on religious and legal matters, are watched by tens of millions of young Muslims across the globe, from Jakarta to Detroit. His Facebook page has over two million fans. His YouTube channel boasts more than twenty-six million visits. His DVDs sell better than many Hollywood hits. In 2007, Time magazine named him the thirteenth most influential person in the world. He is without doubt one of the most prominent, most sought-after, most authoritative scholars of Islam on the planet.
Except that Amr Khaled is not a scholar. He is not a cleric. He has never studied at al-Azhar or, for that matter, at any recognized clerical institution. In fact, he has never studied Islam or Islamic law in any official capacity; he is an accountant. According to the strictures of Islamic law, he has no right to expound his theories on the meaning and interpretation of Islam. Nevertheless, through his ubiquitous television and Internet presence, Amr Khaled has utterly usurped the role traditionally reserved for the Ulama as the sole interpreters of Islam. And he is not alone. All over the world, a slew of self-styled preachers, spiritual gurus, academics, activists, and amateur intellectuals have begun actively redefining Islam by taking its interpretation out of the iron grip of the Ulama and seizing for themselves the power to dictate the future of this rapidly expanding and deeply fractured faith.
Welcome to the Islamic Reformation.
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There is, admittedly, a great deal of religious and cultural baggage attached to the term reformation, which is why historians and scholars of religions so often shy away from using it. Beyond its obvious and unavoidable Christian and European connotations, for many the notion of a reformation necessarily implies something lacking or deficient, something requiring improvement or correction. But the term reformation contains no value judgment whatsoever. Stripped of its historical context, it signifies a universal religious phenomenon, one found in nearly all institutionalized religions. For however else one defines the Christian Reformation, it was, above all, an argument over who holds the authority to define faith: the individual or the institution. That argument ultimately led to the fracturing of Christianity into competing sects and schisms. But the underlying conflict of the Christian Reformation was by no means unique to either European or Christian history. On the contrary, the entire history of religions, and particularly of the so-called Western religions, can be viewed as a constant and sustained battle between institutions and individuals over religious authority. In times of social stress or political upheaval this ever-present conflict can explode onto the surface, often with catastrophic results.
That is what happened in the first century C.E., when a group of militant Jewish factions in Roman-occupied Palestine* began to vigorously challenge the authority of the Temple and its priestly hierarchy to define Judaism. What has been rightly called the “Jewish Reformation” ultimately led to the founding not only of Rabbinic Judaism, but also to a wholly new sect of Judaism called Christianity, sparked by a Jewish reformer whose principal message was that the authority to define the Jewish faith rests not with “the chief priests and the teachers of the law,” but with every individual believer. (It should be noted that the Jewish Reformation also led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews from the city.)
The reformation that gave birth to Christianity fractured it fifteen centuries later when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. Of course, the Christian Reformation did not arise with Luther, nor was it simply due to widespread disaffection with the corruption of the Catholic Church. The Christian Reformation was the result of a long and gradual process that began as early as the fourteenth century, when a number of influential Church leaders, most notably John Wycliffe in England, Jan Hus in Bohemia, and Jean Gerson in France, began aggressively trying to reform the Church from within. Long before Luther entered the austere monastic order of the Augustinians, the Christian Humanists had launched a renaissance in medieval theology by insisting on bypassing the Latin Vulgate for the original languages of the Bible. Desiderius Erasmus, perhaps the most influential intellectual of the sixteenth century, had already foretold much of Protestant ideology with his 1516 edition of the New Testament, in which the Virgin became “gracious” rather than “full of grace,” and John’s apocalyptic cry in the Gospel of Matthew to “do penance” was deliberately transformed to “repent.”
What separated Luther from Erasmus and the Humanists, and marked him in history as the instigator of the Christian Reformation, was that Luther had no interest in reforming the Catholic Church, which he viewed as the throne of the Antichrist. On the contrary, Luther wanted to tear down the Church, to take away its privilege as the sole agent of salvation and the sole authority on scripture. Hence his conception of sola scriptura, which emphatically stated that scriptural interpretation should rest, not in the hands of the Pope, but in the hands of individual believers.
That same reformation phenomenon, which forever altered the religions of Judaism and Christianity, has been taking place in Islam for nearly a century, ever since the era of European colonialism, under which some 90 percent of the world’s Muslims lived throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, however, Islam has never had a single religious authority. There has never been a “Muslim Temple” or a “Muslim Pope”—that is, a centralized religious authority that claims the right to speak for the entire Muslim community. The Caliphate, it will be recalled, was a political not a religious position. Particularly in the Sunni tradition, which represents some 85 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, religious authority is not localized within a single individual or institution (not even in the preeminent al-Azhar). It is, instead, scattered among a host of competing clerical institutions and schools of law that, as demonstrated throughout this book, have maintained total control over the interpretation of Islam since the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Yet over the last century—and especially since the destruction of the Caliphate, which, powerless as the institution may have become,
nevertheless served as the embodiment of Muslim unity—a great many Muslims have been compelled to regard themselves less as members of a worldwide community of faith, than as citizens of individual nation-states. The result of this geopolitical fragmentation has been the almost total breakdown of the communal ideals upon which Islam was founded. For a while, the ideologies of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism attempted to reunite the Muslim community across national boundaries. But as those ideologies collapsed, a new generation of Muslims came of age without any awareness of, or for that matter desire for, a unified Ummah. Meanwhile, the focus on modern schooling in many Muslim-majority states led to dramatic increases in literacy and education, shattering the Ulama’s privilege as the “learned men” of Islam, even as widespread access to new ideas and sources of knowledge resulted in the gradual devaluation of the kind of institutional learning claimed by the Ulama as uniquely theirs. Add to this the rise of alternative forms of Muslim identity such as political Islam (Islamism), Islamic socialism, or even Jihadism—all predicated on the notion that the Ulama are to blame both for the decline of Islamic civilization and for the moral corruption of Muslim society—and the result is a kind of “democratization” of religious authority, as anyone with a significant platform and a loud enough voice can now claim for himself the rights and privileges once reserved solely for Islam’s clerical class.