The long-simmering internal debate over political violence in Islamic cultures is swelling, with seminars like that one and a raft of newspaper columns breaking previous taboos by suggesting that the problem lies in the way Islam is being interpreted. On Saturday in Morocco, a major conference, attended by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, will focus on increasing democracy and liberal principles in the Muslim world.
On one side of the discussion sit mostly secular intellectuals horrified by the gore joined by those ordinary Muslims dismayed by the ever more bloody image of Islam around the world. They are determined to find a way to wrestle the faith back from extremists. Basically the liberals seek to dilute what they criticize as the clerical monopoly on disseminating interpretations of the sacred texts.
Arrayed against them are powerful religious institutions like Al Azhar University, prominent clerics and a whole different class of scholars who argue that Islam is under assault by the West. Fighting back with any means possible is the sole defense available to a weaker victim, they say.
The debate, which can be heard in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, is driven primarily by carnage in Iraq. The hellish stream of images of American soldiers attacking mosques and other targets are juxtaposed with those of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheading civilian victims on his home videos as a Koranic verse including the line “Smite at their necks” scrolls underneath.
I don’t think that this debate is essentially about the Iraq war or provoked by it — that’s just a subset of it, and perhaps a distracting one considering that from an Arab (and international) standpoint the war was after illegal. There are, for instance, organizations in Italy (old-style communists mostly) who are encouraging the Iraqi insurgency as legitimate resistance.
But the problem to a deeper rethinking about the liturgy of Islam has more to do with a fossilized and increasingly irrelevant institutionalized Islam such as that of Al Azhar.
Without wishing to enter into the debate over who has the right to interpret the Quran and how, it is worth bearing in mind that those wanting to defang extremist versions of Islam are barking up the wrong tree if they think they that breaking a clerical (sic) monopoly of interpretation will enable them to do this. The most extreme interpretations are not those propounded by ulama but by people fiercely critical of the failure of the ulama as a group to call for offensive jihad against anyone – ‘the West’, other Muslims – who stands in the way of their desire to ‘recreate’ the original khilafa. Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are not ulama. Nor, apart from a few rogue figures, are most of those who populate the ‘salafist-jihadist’ current of Islam. This is not to say that there are not important issues to be raised regarding the intepretation of Islam by the ulama, or that al-Azhar does not need reform, just that any debate on reform needs to take closer account of the realities of the situation.
I agree with Philip Grant that the radical voice in Islam has not come from the traditional ulama but from figures that are peripheral to it. Even Ayman Zawahri, allegedly the “brain” behind Al Qaeda, is not really a theologian, even if he comes from a family with an ulama tradition. Al Qaeda is unusual among Islamist groups in that it is relatively unintellectual, usually these groups love publishing the justification for their ideology.
Where Al Azhar and the traditional ulama are important to this debate is that they have been unable to provide a strong leadership against Al Qaeda type extremism or even address comprehensively some key questions that face the umma today. Theirs is a failure of leadership and vision, and it has allowed people who in the end of the day are not really intellectually equipped for the heavy intellectual work of ijtihad to claim the mantle of reformist Islamic thinkers like Mohamad Abdou.