Muslims and Liberals

Middle East Policy
Summer 2005

This book is a sociohistorical narrative of Islam in which author Reza Aslan debunks many Orientalist myths about the faith. Then he argues that the uplift of Muslim societies calls for their democratization and “the interpretation of Islam that yields to the reality of democracy” (pp. 265-66)–which leaves you wondering what the book was all about! Is democratization really the most important task awaiting Muslim societies?

No god but God will hurt the feelings of many devout Muslims. A sell-described (Shiite) “apostate,” Aslan dismisses the Muslim belief that the Quran is the word of God revealed directly to the Prophet Muhammad. He mentions Muhammad’s continual bouts with “aural and visual hallucinations” and suggests that his “attainment of prophetic consciousness [might have been] a slowly evolving process” (p. 37). Salman Rushdie also challenged the authenticity of the revelation of the Quran in his novel The Satanic Verses, and it triggered Muslim protests in many countries. No god but God may not send Muslims parading in the streets, however. For, while Rushdie, besides questioning the revelation, crudely maligned the Prophet and his wives, Aslan extols Muhammad as the epitome of morality and human sensitivity and the “message of the Quran [as the] message of revolutionary social egalitarianism” (p. 71).

In No god but God the author rebuts the Orientalist characterization of Islam as a backward, misogynist faith that has spawned terrorism and political repression. Islam was the first confessional creed, he says, to proclaim human equality and women’s rights and to institutionalize charity for the poor. It also was the first religious tradition to introduce popular government. Recalling the selection of Abu Bakr as the first caliph through consultation among Muhammad’s associates, Aslan says that “from the Nile to the Oxus and beyond, nowhere else had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined, let alone attempted” (p. 118).

Echoing Emile Durkheim, he argues that all religions have evolved from their social environments to answer moral questions and set social standards. Prophets had historically “redefine(d) and reinterpret(ed) the existing beliefs and practices.” Muhammad was “influenced as a young man by the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia” (p. 17), where monotheistic Judaism, Christianity and Hanifism coexisted with polytheism.

Revolutionary as the Prophet was, he was “still a product of Meccan society” (p. 63). He knew that in order for his reforms to take hold, they could not make a total break with the Arab social paradigm. This fact gets lost on many Westerners, who criticize Muhammad for having several wives, not establishing total equality of the sexes and allowing revenge to settle crimes. Aslan points out that Hebrew prophets from Abraham to Jacob to Moses to Hosea, Israelite kings from Saul to David to Solomon, and “nearly all” Christian and Zoroastrian monarchs of the time “had either multiple wives, multiple concubines or both” (p. 64).

The Quranic verses allowing polygamy, the author says, were meant partly to provide for women’s sustenance and the continuation of the Muslim community when the male population had been decimated by wars. In reality, Islam’s marriage reforms were pioneering. In pre-Islamic Arabia, a man could have as many wives as he wished. The Quran not only barred Muslim men from having more than four, but set such stringent conditions for polygamy as to make it practically impossible. Women in Arabia used to be considered men’s personal property. Muhammad took the momentous step of stipulating women’s marital and property rights, which enraged many Arab men.

Muhammad continued the law of retribution as the only tool available to deter crime and protect society. But he reformed the law as part of his plan to build a society “on moral rather than utilitarian principles” (p. 59). The Quran, while allowing retribution, proclaimed that God prefers and will reward forgiveness. And in a breathtaking departure from the practice followed around the world, Islam equalized criminal penalties across class boundaries. The Quran declared that retribution for an injury cannot be more than “an equal injury,” even if the injured is a king and the offender a pauper. The Prophet did not budge from the principle of equal justice, despite protests from powerful Arabs, at least one of whom renounced Islam over the issue.

Aslan is amazed by Western scholars’ proclivity to portray Islam as a “military religion [with] fanatical warriors” (Bernard Lewis), “a warrior religion” (Max Weber) and, more commonly, a religion that promotes “holy wars.” He says the Quran only allows defensive wars and that jihad, which Western writers misconstrue as “holy war,” actually means one’s struggle to overcome sinful impulses and other forms of offense to one’s self and society. “In fact, the term ‘holy war’ originates not with Islam but with Christian Crusaders…. War, according to the Quran, is either just or unjust; it is never [emphasis in original] ‘holy'” (pp. 78-81).

The author looks into Islamic theological and philosophical schools through the same sociohistorical lenses and argues that, although Islam is meant to promote moral and spiritual living, Muslim societies need to evolve by adapting Islam’s social principles to changing times and environments. He insists on adapting Islamic values, not jettisoning them. He says reformist campaigns of Muslim modernists such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan of India (1817-98) failed because they discounted the importance of Islamic values to Muslim life. On the other hand, ultra-orthodox Islamic “fundamentalists” such as the followers of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1703-66), known as the Wahhabis, are also doomed to fail because they refuse to evolve.

Aslan gives pan-Islamists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) the credit for realizing that Muslim societies need to modernize without forswearing Islam. He argues, however, that the pan-Islamists erred in thinking that Muslims could transcend their ethnic and national roots and organize into a global polity. Arab nationalists saw that religion alone could not galvanize Muslims into a strong enough force to roll back Western colonialism and “opted for the more pragmatic goal of racial unity.” But the movement failed because “there is simply no such thing as a single Arab ethnicity. Egyptian Arabs had practically nothing in common with, say, Iraqi Arabs” (pp. 233-34).

“Apostate” that he is, Aslan would disappoint neocons and other Islamophobes. He appreciates Islamist movements, which he says strive for social justice in Muslim societies and freedom from foreign domination. These movements include the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia and the eighteenth-century Indian Sufi movement led by Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762). He differentiates these modernizing Islamists from the Wahhabis and Taliban, who seek to shield Islam against modernity. He does not have much use for the traditional Sufi (mystic) movements that preach that “if the world does not agree with you, you agree with the world.” Aslan admires the Sufi reformer Wall Allah because of his principle that “if the world does not agree with you, arise against it” [emphasis original] (p. 219). If the author criticizes Muslim fundamentalists and some Muslim modernists, he also denounces the rapacious European colonialists for taking advantage of the weaknesses of Muslim societies–conquering and plundering them and massacring their citizens, while hypocritically proclaiming these crimes as part of their “civilizing mission” (p. 223).

So what should Muslims do now? Aslan’s answer is a disappointing anticlimax to his instructive work. Muslim societies, he says, should usher in the democratic political process based on “religious pluralism” and engage in “rational interpretation of Islam that yields to democracy, not the other way around” (pp. 262, 265-66). He draws this recipe from the writings of Iranian scholar Abdolkarim Soroush, whom he quotes admiringly over and over. To his credit, Aslan’s diagnosis of Muslim societies is more realistic than that of Soroush, who discounts Islam’s role in Muslim political and social life. Soroush advocates the rationalist interpretation of scripture that led to church-state separation in the West. Aslan rejects the notion of separating Islamic values from Muslim statecraft. He says secularism, which assumes the separation of a “religious” sphere from a worldly one, is alien to the Muslim worldview. But his prescription for the rationalist explanation of Islamic texts would inevitably lead to secularism.

Hence Aslan leaves me confused. For rationalism deals only with facts and phenomena that can be examined by rationality; it rejects “irrational” comprehensions such as love, empathy, imagination and other inexplicable perceptions. Religious beliefs are based on “irrational” understanding. Muslim philosophers from Al-Kindi (d. 866) to Al-Farabi (870-950) to Ibn Sina (980-1037) to Ibn Rushd (1126-98) struggled mightily to reconcile the two categories of understanding. Eventually they all failed. Soroush appears to be reinventing the wheel.

Soroush’s argument–quoted by Aslan–is that “people’s satisfaction,” supposedly achieved rationally, signifies “god’s approval,” and that it makes democracy a veritable synonym for “religious government” (pp. 253,265-66). This is nothing but sophistry. I am disappointed by Aslan’s reliance on it in an attempt to give a rationalist basis for what he calls “Islamic democracy” (p. 264). He does so perhaps out of epistemological schizophrenia: he intuitively understands the basic dynamics of Muslim societies because of his upbringing in Iran. But he is repelled by Iran’s revolutionary Islamic regime, which he calls “Fascist.” This may partly explain his foray into rationalism, if not apostasy. Or he may simply be trying to couch his thesis in the idiom of the rationalists, who, though a dwindling breed, still abound among the Western intelligentsia. In either case, the rationalist argumentation tends to undercut his otherwise cogently developed thesis that Islam cannot be rinsed out of Muslim polities.

The idea that democracy is what Muslim societies need most desperately confuses me the most about No god but God, an otherwise serious study. The argument puts Aslan in the company of American neoconservatives, among the last people with whom he would wish to associate. Democracy in everyday parlance means choosing governments through free and fair elections. The system originated in the West, and in its early stages it produced non-egalitarian governments that suppressed women and racial, ethnic and religious minorities. It did not prevent slavery, racism or the Civil War in America. It still fails to prevent Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay or to alleviate interethnic tensions in Northern Ireland, Belgium or Spain. In most Western countries, however, economic prosperity and the evolution of the institutions of freedom through centuries of trial and error have led to the maturation of democracy, which most of the rest of the world is now trying to emulate.

Democracy is America’s political religion as much as Islam is Iran’s. Most Americans like it to be promoted among other peoples. The neocons and other American “empire builders,” capitalizing on these American sentiments, are peddling democracy to justify the overthrow of inconvenient Muslim regimes and make Arab Muslim societies amenable to U.S. and Israeli hegemony. They believe, if naively, that democratic America and israel would find it easier to manage democratically elected Muslim governments because democracies supposedly hate to fight among themselves. The argument reminds you of the Crusaders’ campaign to save Arab souls as they invaded the Levant and built their states there. And it conjures up the slogans of European colonialists to which Aslan has alluded: “civilizing” their subjects. Of course, thanks to globalization and the information revolution, Muslim societies are modernizing and developing economically, and their literacy rates are increasing steadily. As a result, democratic movements in these societies are picking up steam, albeit at different speeds in different countries. The process will take time to mature, though not nearly as long, one may hope, as it did in the West.

The most important challenge facing the Muslim Middle East today is not just democracy, but freedom. A democratically elected government can be repressive, as in Russia, where the press is muzzled, political repression abounds and oligarchs loot resources while the public wallows in poverty. Democracy can also be the tool of foreign occupation or hegemony. My native India was ruled by freely and fairly elected ministries for two centuries while British colonialists held us in subjugation and exploited our wealth. Today Afghanistan and Iraq are under foreign occupation but ruled by democratically elected governments, protected around the clock from their own people by foreign troops. These are classic examples of democracy without freedom. Aslan and other Muslim-world intellectuals need to focus their attention on Muslim freedom from foreign hegemony and domestic repression, not just the “free and fair election” of Muslim governments, the slogan of hegemonist neocons.