Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (35 page)

The Taliban represent an extreme case, of course. Most things that they deem
haram
(illicit) would be just fine for many other Muslims. Even the most conservative Muslims in Turkey would find a headscarf and a long skirt sufficiently modest for females and certainly would see nothing wrong with flying kites or playing chess. The Taliban’s list of bans and obligations, in other words, is just too long for most other Muslims.

But the length of the list of religious injunctions is not the only issue. Is it ever right to impose those injunctions on a fellow Muslim? If one Muslim sees another drinking wine, or skipping prayer, as the man in the park did, does he have the right to intervene? Is such behavior justified or even required under the Qur’anic obligation of “commanding right and forbidding wrong”?

Traditionally, yes, the Qur’an was interpreted in this way. But the Qur’an is far from being specific on what to command and what to forbid, and its earliest interpretations were much more modest and limited in the scope that they attributed to the obligation.
⁶

For example, Abu al-Aliya, an early commentator on the Qur’an, argued that the verse that specifies “commanding right” was simply “calling people from polytheism to Islam.” The parallel duty, “forbidding wrong,” he believed, was all about “forbidding the worship of idols and devils.”
⁷

There is, of course, a huge difference between calling people to accept the basic tenets of a faith and imposing on them that faith along with all its detailed rules. And the early interpretation of the duty—which we can safely consider as the more authentic interpretation—had apparently focused on calling rather then imposing. Yet, as time went by, and as the Sunni orthodoxy crystallized, the scope of “commanding right” and “forbidding wrong” expanded more and more. Writing two centuries after Abu al-Aliya, the famous scholar Tabari argued “that ‘commanding right’ refers to
all
that God and His Prophet have commanded, and ‘forbidding wrong’ to
all
that they have forbidden.”
⁸
Tabari had clearly realized that if the scope of the duty was “restricted to enjoining belief in God and His Prophet, then it [would have] nothing to do with reproving other Muslims for drinking, wenching and making music.”
⁹

It was, in other words, not the Qur’an’s clear injunction but the preference of interpreters such as Tabari to reprove other Muslims for activities such as drinking, wenching, and making music. (The last one was not declared illicit in the Qur’an, by the way, but rather by the scholars who constantly expanded the list of bans.) The willingness to enact punishments for supposedly illicit behavior grew gradually, and Traditionist scholars such as the great Imam al-Ghazali listed sanctions for almost all forms of perceived sinful behavior.
¹⁰

V
IRTUE UNDER
T
YRANNY
?

This inflation of sanctions was part of the general tendency toward strictness and rigorism that emerged in the third century of Islam, as we saw in chapter 4. It was also the product of an age in which the idea of individual freedom was little noticed and was overshadowed by the will to enforce the creation of a pious society.

In fact, other verses of the Qur’an could have prevented medieval scholars from expanding the verses about “commanding right” and “forbidding wrong” into a system of coercion. One such verse is the oft-quoted “There is no compulsion in religion.”
¹¹
Some scholars from the Rationalist camp
did
focus on this verse, arguing that in this world—which they defined as an Abode of Trial in which God tests men—people should be free to make their own religious choices. But this liberal attitude remained marginalized, and the “no compulsion” verse attracted little attention among classical scholars.
¹²

That medieval lack of focus on liberty was unfortunate but also understandable. The idea of individual freedom was seldom emphasized in any premodern society. Hence, until fairly recently, the idea that a pious society can be created and preserved through coercion did not appear terribly wrong to most believers, including those in the West. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, popes were still condemning religious freedom as “a heresy that no Catholic can accept.”
¹³
In 1927, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld a law against professional basketball on Sunday, ruling that it was an “unholy activity that defiled the Christian Sabbath.”
¹⁴
In the same era, America was trying the “Noble Experiment” (the prohibition of alcohol), which proved that imposing virtue via the state’s coercive powers not only fails but also creates other problems, such as the black market and organized crime.

The Muslim world needed to come to a similar conclusion in the modern age, but the Islamist movement did the opposite—not just preserving the classical interpretation of “commanding right” and “forbidding wrong” but also pushing it to new extremes. Classical scholars had at least acknowledged the privacy of homes, a right strongly guarded in the Qur’an.
¹⁵
The Islamists, though, paid little attention to privacy and advocated a much more concerted and systematic effort to command and forbid, “something like industrial planning.”
¹⁶

Meanwhile, though, Muslim societies in the modern world have moved in the exact opposite direction. As Muslims grew more individualistic, their reaction to repression came not as acceptance but defiance. The Iranian author of a popular book advocating the duty of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” complains about this widespread resistance. The duty inevitably means interfering in other people’s affairs, he says, but “people with their heads stuffed full of Western ideas don’t like it.”
¹⁷

Those “Western ideas” are not exclusively Western but rather universally modern—they emerge from the strengthening sense of individualism, which is a product of wider literacy, education, technology, and exposure to other cultures. In medieval times, only a tiny group of Muslim elites, such as the Mutazilites, had the chance to find a library to study foreign philosophies. Now, almost everyone can do that—it just takes an Internet connection. The world now has many individuals who have both the mindset to think independently and the means to act accordingly.

Such individuals not only dislike coercion but respond in rebellious ways. Some upper-class Iranians and Saudis, for example, are famous for flying to European capitals to indulge in wild nightlife. When they return home, they may appear to be pious, continuing to condemn what the regime considers as sin, but all the while they may be continuing to sin in secret. Private drinking and pornography are common examples of this. Reportedly, the obsessive seclusion of women in Saudi Arabia even has led to lesbianism.
¹⁸

What coercion produces, in other words, is not genuine piety but hypocrisy—something the Qur’an considers to be worse than disbelief. Perhaps this is not a big problem for the regimes that I mentioned, for they seem more concerned about how people
appear
. The Saudi regime especially takes great pride in, and justifies itself by, not allowing any “un-Islamic” practice on its soil. From this political perspective, a puritan demeanor might be good enough, but from a religious perspective, what should matter most is what people have in their hearts.

And that’s why Muslims need to reconsider how we interpret “commanding right” and “forbidding wrong” in today’s world.

S
IN VERSUS
C
RIME

Let us go back to the story of the man in the park. Most of us would agree that he should be left alone with his choice of not praying, despite realizing that, by abstaining from daily prayer, as a Muslim he would be committing a sin. But what if we saw that he was hitting a child, or trying to start a fire in that park? We would be more than justified in trying to stop him, for he would be committing a crime.

Instinctively, then, we understand that sin and crime are two different things. The former is about the violation of the individual’s responsibility to God. The latter is about the violation of his responsibility to other individuals. Most crimes, such as murder, theft, and fraud, are also sins according to most religions, including Islam, but this overlap should not blur the basic difference between the two categories.

Traditionally Islamic scholars have also made this distinction by separating “the rights of God” from “the rights of men.” As a Muslim, if I do not fast during Ramadan, for example, then I am disobeying God and violating His “rights” over me. If I refuse to repay a debt to my neighbor, though, it not only is a sin but also is a violation of his property rights.

Although this distinction was made in classical Islam, the scholars of the Shariah enacted punishments for both violations, according to the duty of “commanding right” and “forbidding wrong.” But what does the Qur’an, the core of Islam, say (or at least hint) about this?

The answer is quite interesting. The Qur’an bans gambling, usury, and intoxicants and forbids eating carrion, blood, pork, and animals sacrificed to idols. It also orders Muslims to perform certain duties, such as daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan, a pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime, and giving alms (
zakat
) to the poor.

Violating any of these bans, or failing to perform any of the duties without good reason, would be a sin—which is serious, because it may bring punishment in the world to come. But in this world, the Qur’an prescribes no punishment at all for the sins mentioned above.

It does, however, specify punishments (
hudud
) for four specific sins: theft, brigandage, calumnious accusation of adultery, and adultery.
¹⁹
The penalties are all corporal, which is quite understandable, given the milieu in which the Qur’an was revealed—a desert-based tribal society with no correctional facilities. Today, though, we can interpret these penalties less literally, as some modernist theologians are already arguing.

Yet what is crucial for us at this point is the nature not of the penalties but of the sins for which they stand. Here is the curious point: These four punishable sins are categorically different from the other ones that the Qur’an leaves unpunished. For, in these four cases, not just the rights of God but also the rights of men are violated. Someone, in other words, gets wronged.

This is quite obvious in the first three cases—theft, brigandage, and calumnious accusation of adultery, so we should take a closer look at adultery (
zina
). Traditionally, Muslim scholars tended to consider adultery as any form of sex between unmarried persons. But a rereading of the Qur’an suggests that the term might be limited to extramarital sex—which is “cheating” on a spouse, and thus hurtful to a second person.
²⁰
There is another Qur’anic term, after all, for sexual indecency in general (
fahsha
), and although the Qur’an denounces that as sin, that does not prescribe a specific punishment for it.

If this interpretation is true—that the Qur’an penalizes extramarital sex but not the premarital kind
²¹
—then we can safely reach a remarkable conclusion: The Qur’an only penalizes crimes that are violations of the rights of men. The consequences of sins, which are violations of the rights of God, are left to God, to be dealt with in the afterlife.
²²

And this makes it possible to argue, with Islamic justification, for “freedom to sin.”

V
IRTUE UNDER
F
REEDOM

“Freedom to sin” might be an appalling concept for some Muslims, but it is gaining acceptance in Turkey. In 2008, Dr. Ali Bardakog˘lu, the top cleric as the head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, said on TV: “We, as the Directorate, communicate the known rules of Islam. It is free to observe or not to observe them, no one has the right to interfere.”
²³
Other Turkish figures, including the minister of culture, a popular theologian, and a female Muslim pundit have also publicly defended the freedom to sin.
²⁴

The reasoning behind their recognition of this freedom is purely theological. The Qur’an teaches that, in the afterlife, God will judge the life led by every individual in this world. It is the responsibility of the individual to obey God’s commandments and refrain from actions that He prohibits. But all individuals quite often will fail this test, so the Qur’an calls on them to repent and to appeal to God’s forgiveness. It also says that the test goes on for life, and no sin, no matter how deadly, cuts it short. “If God had destroyed men for their iniquity, He would not leave on the earth a single creature,” says one verse. “But He respites [postpones] them till an appointed time.”
²⁵
Since this “appointed time” is assigned to each person by God, it would be wrong to interfere in any individual’s life and shorten or terminate his test.