religion – Page 10

The Islamic reform debate

Neil MacFarquhar of the NYT has a story about the debate on interpretation of the Quran that Charles mentioned in his recent post:

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.

Follow up on Coptic-Muslim tensions

Al Hayat reported today that 34 Copts have been detained by Egyptian authorities in connection with the demonstrations that followed the conversion of a vice-bishop’s wife to Islam. Among the seven charges against them: inciting unrest, exploiting religion to incite ethnic discord, resisting authorities, and using force and violence. Also, implications or accusations that the woman’s conversion was less than voluntary appear to be unfounded. Al Hayat reports that church officials have spent the past two days trying to convince the woman to renounce her conversion– but in vain.

Religious discourse in Egypt

This is the key paragraph in Maria Golia’s Daily Star column:

That [popular preacher Amr] Khaled and others like him have found scores of followers suggests less the emergence of a new breed of religious guides than proof of the lack thereof. Imaginative leadership – secular or religious – is not the forte of paternalist autocracies like Egypt. The job of eliminating competitors and ensuring the populace’s dependency has been so thoroughly done that individuals capable of mobilizing energies and talents, or providing constructive outlets for their expression, are rare indeed.

This is the crux of the issue. Religious discourse and debate here is dominated by a conservative elite, Al Azhar being the most obvious and influential bastion for this elite (in Egypt at least). The permissible scope of religious debate here is kept within narrow confines, where opposing views are aggressively silenced. No where has this silencing been more visible than in the case of Nasser Hamed Abu Zeid, the Cairo University Islamic thinker who fled Egypt in the mid-1990s after Islamist lawyers forced him to divorce his wife on the grounds that he was not a true Muslim. (The outrageous ideas he had the gaul to propogate: that the Koran should be interpreted in the context of place and time.) For more on this issue see Tunisian journalist Kamel Labidi’s recent column in the Daily Star. Of course it’s also evident in Al Azhar’s continuing efforts to ban books (80 in the past decade, according to Labidi).

The absence of true debate on religious issues, and the muffling of those thinkers whose views extend beyond the acceptable confines of debate is a significant factor in the increasing visibility of public religiosity in Cairo and elsewhere. Take for instance the example of the hijab, one of the more frequently cited indications of this increasing public religiosity. An average Egyptian Muslim girl who is considering whether or not to start wearing the hijab (head scarf) has few, if any, public religious figures to turn to in Egypt who will tell her that the hijab is NOT a religious obligation. There are simply no voices (that I know of) in Al Azhar or elsewhere in the religious establishment here that argue that the hijab is not a religious duty. This despite the fact that a very reasonable, and in my opinion convincing, argument exists that the Koran and the sunna do not require women to veil. Of course, disagreement in interpretations of the text are a fundamental part of any religion, but those differences should be debated publicly. That is not happening here. The Egyptian girl debating whether or not to wear the veil has no one telling her she can remain an obedient Muslim, and also remain unveiled.

The Islamic reform debate

Neil MacFarquhar of the NYT has a story about the debate on interpretation of the Quran that Charles mentioned in his recent post:

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.

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.

Golia on religiosity

My friend Maria Golia, who lately has been contributing a series of columns on Cairo to the Beirut Daily Star, has a new piece on religiosity in Cairo. It’s a topic I’ve written about in the past and find fascinating. While the world is busy talking about Al Qaeda and other Islamists who are relatively marginal to Arab society, all these transformation are happening that are mostly going unnoticed.

Golia also recently published a book on Cairo, City of Sand, which is fantastic. I’ve been meaning to post a full review, but suffice it to say that it is the best impressionistic book on contemporary Cairo that I’ve, by a true lover of the city.

On Van Gogh’s murder

I haven’t commented on the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland last month, partly because I thought the incident was blown out of proportion by many on the blogosphere and elsewhere, particularly on the right but also on the left. I also did not feel that sorry for Van Gogh, who was after all a racist, and did not think he deserved the martyr status that many have now bestowed upon him. It’s rather strange that Americans, who live in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of homicides (and inter-racial gang violence), are so passionate about this one. Obviously he did not deserve to die and I am horrified at the religious fundamentalist motives that seem to have driven his murderer. But let’s keep things in perspective here.

One person who did just that this week in Salama Ahmed Salama, an Al Ahram columnist. I don’t particularly agree with Salama generally, but he hit the nail in a recent piece translated and published by the Al Ahram Weekly:

Antagonistic approaches to religion are not helpful to women, either inside or outside Europe. And Van Gogh was an extremely controversial figure, a member of an extreme rightwing party that Muslims see as a threat to Dutch society, a party that calls Muslims a fifth column of “sheep-buggers”. Since the murder mosques and Muslim schools have been attacked in the Netherlands while the Dutch government has cracked down on those it calls a terrorist threat, closing down meeting places and deporting many. [sic]

It may well be the right of the Dutch director to express his opinion. But incitement to hatred can easily backfire, particularly when xenophobia is the order of the day. Most European governments have done little to help minorities fit in. Discrimination is common when ethnic minorities seek jobs, housing, schooling and other social services. As a result entire districts have been turned into Muslim ghettos, into breeding places for extremism.

Immigrants went to Europe as cheap labour. There are 15 million immigrants in Europe, including five million in France, three million in Germany and one million in the Netherlands. These minorities needed help from the state, which they did not receive. More than three decades have passed since the first wave of immigration began during which the governments concerned did little to help the immigrants integrate. And now a number of emerging rightwing parties want the immigrants thrown out.

The immigrants are not entirely blameless. They should have done more to integrate. But the governments’ fault is worse, for it is the responsibility of the state to promote cultural and social harmony.

With Islamophobia on the rise Europe wants Islam to adapt to European values, rather than for Muslims to fit in. Recent statements made by a Belgian archbishop are a case in point. No one is calling on the Jews to alter their religion. No one wants Christians of various denominations to change their beliefs. But Muslims are asked to rethink their tenets. A European, or American, Islam is the solution, we are told. And several Arab intellectuals and writers seem to agree.

So Van Gogh, who’s become something to a hero in the West, was a racist. People are comparing him to Salman Rushdie, a great author whose critique of his own religion is much more subtle than Van Gogh’s shock-flicks. To me it seems he hardly deserves our compassion. He didn’t deserve to die, and if he hadn’t he would have remained a marginal filmmaker with a following among Dutch racists if some Moroccan idiot hadn’t decided to kill him. Instead, because of his act of insanity, his name is a rallying cry for racism. I can understand European intellectuals being worried about the rise of Islamist extremism among Arab immigrants — so am I — but Arab intellectuals, as Salama points out, don’t need to go about taking every opportunity to talk about a crisis in Islam or some other vague conceit every time a hate crime takes place. There are enough real problems about.

Christian-Muslim tensions

An interesting news item that most probably won’t make the Egyptian press: Al Jazeera reported yesterday [arabic] that there had been a demonstration inside Cairo’s Abbassiya cathedral, a key church in the capital. According to their report, the demonstration took place during the funeral of Said Sonbol, an important columnist, which many prominent personalities attended. The demonstrators, who were Christians, were protesting the conversion of a Christian woman (and possibly a priest’s wife) in the province of Beheira in the Delta. They said that she had been kidnapped and forcibly converted and that the local police had ignored their pleas for help. One of the dignitaries who was there, presidential advisor Osama Al Baz, reportedly pacified the crowd by telling them that the authorities would look into it.

At the same time, they were Muslim-Christian riots in a village in the Minya region in Middle Egypt after a Christian community center was built, which Muslims in the village feared would become a mosque. These tensions can be explosive in the south of Egypt, where there are many mixed communities and the politics of church and mosque construction are very delicate.

Egyptian state media doesn’t like to report these things because of the importance it puts in maintaining the image of good sectarian relations. And while these tensions are not nearly as bad as some Coptic activists (notably the rather loony Copts.com), who see every zoning regulation as a conspiracy against church-building, but there is no denying that at a local level there can be discrimination. The Egyptian authorities tend to complicate matters by taking a rather heavy-handed approach to sectarian tensions, cracking down with paramilitary troops and closing off entire villages.

I just noticed that Copts.com has a story on this, including an appear by its president, the neo-con Michael Meunier: “Only President Bush’s personal intervention can help prevent the escalation of these hate crimes into full-fledged cultural genocide.” Talk about hyperbole.

Islam and the internet

Islam Online, the Sheikh Youssef Al Qaradawi-backed website that often has a surprisingly good content, ran an article on a recent talk on Islam and the internet. One interesting tidbit:

Amongst the top 150 most popular Arab Web sites, there are 50 religious ones. Arabs seem to have a vivid interest in religion. This number is not matched by any other country or region in the world, including the US, where religion plays an important role in many aspects of society.

The article’s author, Tarek Ghanem, concludes:

The Internet seems to prove itself as another ground for the individualistic and modernist “My Islam” to stand against the authentic “traditional Islam”.

There was also a similar article a few months ago.

Locust fatwa

If you need another proof of why putting faith in fatwas is stupid:

Faced with an invasion of locusts, the highest Islamic religious institution in Egypt has reportedly issued an edict allowing people to eat locusts.

The independent al-Masri al-Yawm newspaper said al-Azhar Institute has decreed it is permitted by religion to eat the red desert locusts that have invaded the country during the past week.

It said al-Azhar has urged all Egyptians to “hunt the locusts and eat them to combat the crisis.”

The newspaper quoted Abdul Hamid al-Atrash, the head of the Fatwa Commission in al-Azhar, as saying eating the locusts would “contribute actively in wiping them out, instead of the fear that has consumed the hearts of millions of people.”

Al-Atrash said insects that feed off plants are deemed pure for human consumption.

Come to think of it, this might not be true. But it sounds just plausible enough considering the drivel that’s been spouted by Al Azhar sheikhs lately.

Islam in the world

This is from last week, but worth mentioning. Jonathan Steele in the Guardian reviews a new book by Olivier Roy called “Globalised Islam.” According the the review, Roy offers a comprehensive snapshot of Islam as it is practiced (in Muslim and in European countries) across the world today, with all its contradictions, nuances and different gradations. Roy argues against reducing Islam to the “a religion of hate” stereotype, and argues that the problems and violence of the Middle East are not based in religion.

I’m not sure I agree with the argument that Islamic fundamentalism is in its death-throes. And I find the “Islam is really a religion of peace” argument used very disingenuously at times. While I can attest from my daily life here in Egypt that the great majority of Muslims have nothing extremist about them, the truth is that all religions contain a good dose of potential intolerance. What’s true is, as Roy apparently writes, that “The key question is not what the Koran really says, but what Muslims say the Koran says.” The Koran is an unescapable legitimizing reference point in Muslim debate, but it is used to argue very different points. If you read (Moroccan feminist Islamic scholar) Fatima Mernissi on the Koran, and you come away withe respect and fascination for a meaningful, multi-faceted text which contains the seed of some radical and inspiring ideas. Read some of the contemporary sheikhs handing out fatwas based on the Koran, and you come away thinking it’s one great compendium of bigotry.

It’s worth noting that Roy is French. The French may well end up being at the forefront of a movement to understand and integrate Islam into the West (10% of the population in France is Muslim). Europe in general is grappling with Islam in a much closer and I would say much more mature and nuanced way than America is. There are great perils ahead (racism on the part of Europeans, extremism on the part of immigrant Muslims) but if an educated, empowered Muslim community emergese in Europe they could have a real impact on world affairs and on their home countries.