The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists (35 page)

And that is all. To God goes the credit and the gratitude (not the responsibility) for the religion and all that is accomplished and done in its name.

For moderates, the puritan position is not only naive, but problematic. What makes up a religion is more than text and ritual, and what takes place because of the text and ritual is not a full manifestation of Divinity. God and God’s will are too magnanimous to be fully expressed in text and ritual, and what takes place because of them is fully human. The respon- sibility for what humans do in God’s name must fall on the shoulders of human beings.

Puritans and moderates both seek to be fully engaged with God. Both are not willing to live their lives on earth without Divine guidance, and both think of God as Ever-Present, and fully engaged in what human beings do or do not do. Both be- lieve in God as the Supreme, the All-Powerful, the All-Knowing, the Benevolent, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Giver and Taker, the Judge and Punisher, and the Just.

Yet what separates the puritans and moderates is vast. Much of what separates them has to do with trust and accessi- bility. Moderates believe that God entrusted humans with the power of reason and the ability to ascertain between right and wrong. But the trust placed in human beings is enormous—so enormous that human beings and human beings alone bear the responsibility for their own actions. This in turn justifies accountability in the Hereafter. The trust placed in human be- ings is not just to enforce or implement the set of instructions given to humans by God. Rather, God provided human beings with guidelines and goals, and left it up to them to discover the necessary and adequate laws.

Puritans, on the other hand, do not believe that the trust placed in human beings was so vast and indistinct. God gave human beings the law, which in most instances is specific and

detailed, and trusted them to enforce it. Thus the true Divine gift to human beings was not the ability to reason but the abil- ity to comprehend and obey. Not surprisingly, then, puritans are convinced that God micromanages the affairs of human beings by giving concrete and specific laws that regulate a great deal of what human beings say and do. Moderates be- lieve the exact opposite: most matters of the affairs of life are left to human discretion with which they are to do the best they can provided that they observe general moral guidelines.

At the core of the dispute between puritans and moderates is not just the accessibility of God but what kind of accessibil- ity. Moderates are skeptical that God’s will is fully accessible to human beings—human beings can make their best efforts to know what God wants, but they can rarely be absolutely sure that they have succeeded in knowing what God wants. To do so, moderates believe, is dangerous because there is a risk that human beings will arrogantly impute to God their own flawed and limited knowledge. But while moderates believe that God’s will is not easily accessible, they believe that God’s benevolence, mercy, compassion, and love are accessible to many. By becoming engaged in the search to know God, to submit body and soul to God—in this highly personal interre- lationship—God reciprocates the human effort, and the human being could love God and be loved by God.

With puritans, it is nearly the opposite—God’s will is ac- cessible through God’s law, not love. God’s law is the full ex- pression of God’s will. One is not engaged in
knowing
God; one is engaged only in
obeying
God. Puritans hardly mention love as a desirable or even possible engagement between God and human beings. As a pure act of benevolence, God might love his servants, but there is no reciprocity in this relation- ship. In the puritan framework, people should properly fear God, not love Him. And even if they do love God, they gain

no special knowledge, intimacy, proximity, or familiarity from that love. God remains the emotionally inaccessible Supreme Commander that expects obedience, not love. Ironically, how- ever, puritans also believe that God is completely accessible through law. If one knows the laws of the Supreme Comman- der, one knows the Supreme Commander. Moderates believe that this is belittling toward God—as if all there is to know about the Divine is His laws, or as if this is the only part of God that is relevant to human beings and the rest of God is simply irrelevant.

Moderates, perhaps unlike Sufis, do not believe that loving God can lead to a complete unity with God. For moderates, while one should privately build a partnership with God, it is dangerous and wrongful to pretend that through law the Di- vine Will can achieve complete unity with the human will.

To pretend that the human and Divine could be one and the same does not lead to the elevation of either and, in fact, dep- recates both. Moderates believe that puritans cling to a set of inaccessible and unaccountable rules, and pretend that such rules are the soul and heart of Islam. This creates the false im- pression of being in control of the Heavens but, meanwhile, the command of the earth slips away. In periods of intense fluctua- tion and insecurity, clinging on to a system of rules for security and stability is sociologically understandable. The problem, however, is that history is relentless in its progress, and the high cost of this false sense of security is marginalization and irrele- vancy to a constantly moving and developing world.

If these were theological disputes without practical effects as to the way Islam is lived and experienced today, perhaps these issues would not be so urgent. But they
do
make a dif- ference, and the difference is often monumental and tragic.

Those who have traveled in Muslim countries will find that the lived Islam—the Islam that people actually practice and

experience—is very much consistent with what I have de- scribed as the moderate view. In most countries, women have the choice to wear the veil or not to wear it; in most Muslim countries, women attend colleges at all levels, and serve as lawyers, doctors, and judges; in most Muslim countries, women are partners in their households, not servants or slaves; people enjoy all types of non-Western and Western music; in most countries, women mix freely with men in schools, markets, workplaces, and theaters; most countries don’t force their citizens to worship or fast; most people be- lieve that they can love and be loved by God; and most Mus- lims associate whatever is harsh and cruel with that which is un-Islamic. If you tell most any Muslim a story of misery and suffering and then ask them if they believe that it is consistent with Islam, instinctively most Muslims will give you an un- equivocal no.

So then, what is the problem? Why can’t we claim the puri- tan phenomenon as ineffective and move on? The problem is several-fold. Puritans do not care for the lived Islam—either Islam as it is lived now, or what lived in history. The sociolog- ical and anthropological forms of Islam, whether of today or of the past, are declared irrelevant and even deviant. Puritans do care, however, about an
imagined
Islam—either as an imagined past in the form of mythology, or an imagined future in the form of a promised utopia. Puritans believe that people should be made to fit the law and not the other way around. In other words, Muslims should be coerced to live according to the law, and that the law should not be made to serve the people. This has been the experience with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the experience currently with Saudi Arabia. The problem is that this puritan orientation has been nur- tured and spread by the country in control of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and that with the financial backing the

puritans have received, they have been able to make alarming inroads throughout the Muslim world. It is not an exaggera- tion to say that there is a real danger that the puritans will be able to redefine the nature of the Islamic religion. Worst of all, puritans have managed to commit remarkably horrific acts of violence that have shocked the conscience of all people, Mus- lim and non-Muslim. The traditional forces that used to con- front and marginalize such extremist groups were the jurists. At one point in time, these jurists played a critical role in defin- ing the power dynamics within civil society, but today that role has become marginal, subservient, and entirely dependent on the government’s will.

So what of the future? Which way will Islam go? If history is any indicator, then it should provide us some comfort. De- spite the historical mistakes made in the religion’s name, Islam founded a great civilization that inspired the humanistic revo- lution that took place in the West. In fact, without the accom- plishments of the Islamic civilization, it is doubtful that the European Reformation and all that followed from it would have ever taken place. Furthermore, if one were to compare all the humanistic accomplishments achieved in Islam’s name in the premodern age with the abuses committed in Islam’s name today, the latter would pale in comparison. If one assesses the overall contributions of the Islamic faith to humanity, it would be clear to any fair-minded and objective observer that the good inspired by this religion far outweighs the bad.
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There- fore, when we think about the future, shouldn’t this provide us with grounds for optimism?

Well, yes and no. It is painfully obvious that regardless of how rich, humanistic, and moral the Islamic tradition was in the past, this will be of very limited usefulness if it is not be- lieved and acted upon by Muslims today. The future depends on how modern Muslims choose to understand their past, and

how they will develop and assert it. The real issue is not whether the Islamic legacy was humanistic; the issue is whether Muslims believe that the impact of Islam upon the world today ought to be humanistic. By
humanistic,
I mean characterized by a religious orientation that focuses on ending human suffering and that believes that human well-being and progress is a Godly task.

In my view, religious humanism is exemplified in the belief that the pursuit of goodness on earth is part of realizing the goodness of God, and seeking beauty in life is part and parcel of reflecting the beauty of God. Imperatively, generating and spreading love is inseparable from the Qur’anic instruction to come to know one another. Religious humanism means that through the act of loving God, the believer radiates compassion and care toward all creation. As early theologians like Ibn Abi al-Dunya used to put it, love is but a luminous state, and in this luminous state, it is as if the believer glows with compassion and mercy toward all of creation. Therefore, the act of loving God transforms the Divine command to “come to know the other” (
ta’aruf
) into an ethical imperative to strive to create the necessary moral and material conditions in which people can come to love one another. God’s appeal to human beings to en- gage in
ta’aruf,
or knowing the other, is not a call for a heartless process of collecting data about other human beings. It is, how- ever, Divine guidance and an exhortation to believers to realize that essential to knowing and loving God is to know and love God’s viceroys on earth. According to the Qur’an, human be- ings inherited the earth and are charged with preserving and protecting this Divine inheritance, and as such, human beings occupy the lofty status of being the viceregents of the Divine. This theology is at the heart of the religious humanism of Islam. Secular humanism and modernity are powerful universal forces that pose their own challenges to all religious convictions.

The universal challenge and obligation that confront all reli- gions in the modern age is how to harness and direct the pow- erful force of religion toward the pursuit of goodness and beauty in life. The modern age, with its aggressive secular movements, poses numerous challenges to all religions by threatening to marginalize and extinguish the role of religion altogether. Modernity embodies pervasive and insistent uni- versalisms such as human rights, self-determination, prohibi- tions on the use of force, basic rights for women, and ethnic, national, and religious rights; complex global economic sys- tems; and many other international institutions that compose the structure of our modern world. Unless religions can con- tribute to and enrich human life in decisive and clear ways within this existing universal structure, religion will either be forced to the sidelines of history, or be forced into a con- frontation with the powers of modernity—powers that will often be violent and destructive.

Puritans and moderates are opposite poles that are
both products
of modernity and that also
respond
to modernity. Both orientations react to modernity, the one by rejecting it and the other by embracing it. There are some orientations in Islam that do not seem to be touched by modernity and do not respond to it, such as the conservatives or traditionalists, but I do not believe that they are significant in shaping the future of Islam. I believe that the future of Islam will be shaped by ei- ther the puritans or the moderates. I hope that Islam is not doomed to suffer the megalomania of pretenders who claim to rule on God’s behalf or those who assume the pretense of ap- plying a set of objective rules that claim to embody the Divine Will.

In part because of the forces of secular humanism and modernity, Islam is forced to confront powerful and formidable challenges. But there is also no question that Islam

is going through a transformative period that grows increas- ingly acute. It grows more acute mostly because in the case of Islam, the natural and inevitable process of growth and change keeps getting postponed. In every period—colonial- ism, modernity, and postmodernity—there were changed real- ities, circumstances, and meanings that were constantly shifting, mutating, and evolving. Each period confronted Mus- lims with stark challenges that mandated change and reform. For many reasons, all that changed was the rhetoric and dogma used, but the realities of the religion remained the same. Now enough pressure has built and we have reached a truly transformative point because the ever-increasing pressure that has not been properly dealt with has now produced an aggressive malignancy known as puritanism. With this malig- nancy, there is no longer a question of whether there
will
be a change. The only question is what direction the coming change will take. Will the compass bear toward the puritan di- rection or the moderate direction? That is the question.