To continue

The reverberations continue from the Chalabi affair. There will be more to say – but for now I want to pick up with a theme from last week’s post on Irshad Manji’s May 20 oped in the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s where I left off: “Al Qaeda and its ideological supporters are rejecting a thousand years of interpretation - interpretation that has tended to soften the often harsh Koranic text - to return to the bald words of Islamic scripture.

And this last brings us to a very difficult problem ….”

The difficult problem that I was referring to forms the main theme of Irshad Manji’s oped and also of her book, The Trouble With Islam, and it is this: Why do Islam’s softer traditions seem to be losing out to the harsher versions of the faith?

We in the Western press often praise “moderate Islam.” But in practice, “moderate Islam” often turns out to be moderate in its actions only. As decent human beings, moderate Muslims will of course refrain from committing acts of oppression, cruelty, and terrorism. But intellectually, moderate Muslims have a difficult time explaining why these acts are “un-Islamic.” Take a look at Memri.org’s interesting posts on the important Sunni cleric, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi.

Qaradhawi adamantly opposes terrorism. Yet his objections to terrorism are practical rather than moral, as in this sermon that Qaradhawi preached in Qatar in the summer of 2003 to denounce recent terror attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco:

“Therefore, I say that there is no use in operations of this type, because they kill peace-loving, innocent people. Not everyone who was killed in Riyadh was American and not everyone who was killed in Casablanca was American or foreign. Not every foreigner deserves to be killed. Killing has specific conditions. There are people whom we call ‘under Muslim protection’ who have entered our country. They must not be harmed and their blood must not be spilled. The brothers harmed, among others, a Belgian club, even though Belgium's opinion was good – it opposed the war on Iraq and wanted to try Sharon and some American officers …”

Qaradhawi thinks the terrorists have gone too far, have damaged their own cause – but he cannot find ground to condemn them utterly. He rejects their actions, but he will not reject their intellectual and moral premises, not at least in public.

Or consider this. In 1997, one of the leading religious authorities of the Islamic world, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Ahzar university, met with the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Tantawi was subsequently criticized for this meeting, and he gave a series of interviews to explain his actions:

“The Prophet’s stance, which is my own stance as well, was that anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews. You should know that you are interviewing a person who wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation. …

“I did not ask to meet with the rabbi; he was the one who asked to meet me and when he left the meeting, his face looked like his behind. …

“On the personal level, I attacked him, and proved to him that Islam is the religion of truth.”

The sheikh of al-Ahzar is by definition about as mainstream a figure as a Muslim can be – and yet he recoils as if from a libel the suggestion that he might have even been ordinarily civil to a visiting rabbi.

What Westerners are really yearning for is not a “moderate” Islam, but a “liberal” Islam – one that accepts peace and tolerance on principle, and not just as unfortunate necessities.

Yet such a “liberal” Islam, if it ever came to be, would pose a very serious challenge to the whole elaborate structure of Islamic thought and practice.

Socrates once posed a brain-twister to his disciples. “Is a good action good because it is approved by the gods? Or is it approved by the gods because it is good.” In other words – do the categories of right and wrong have an existence apart from divine will?

Islam’s answer to Socrates’ puzzle has been emphatic: An action is good because it is approved by Allah. There is no independent criterion of morality outside of the will of God. And since the Koran is an absolutely literal and accurate account of that will – since indeed in a deep sense the Koran itself actually incarnates that will – there is no independent criterion of morality outside the text of the Koran.

In other words: If the Koran says or teaches something that seems morally offensive, it is morality that is mistaken, not the Koran.

Intellectually, traditional Islam forms a closed system. You can exit the system (although the penalty for exit – apostasy – is death). But so long as you remain within it, the intellectual system forbids its own reform.

A liberal Islam would have to begin by challenging the system. It would have to begin by submitting the Koran itself to human inquiry and reason. Where did this book truly come from? How was it in fact assembled? What do we genuinely know historically about Muhammad and early Arabia? It will be a very painful exercise. And there’s no telling in advance where it will end.

Canadian Election Watch

Prime Minister Paul Martin yesterday called an election for June 28. His party’s standing immediately slumped four points. This may prove a very interesting month for Canadian politics. I will be a regular panelist on the CTV network’s news channel’s nightly election show, “Countdown,” 8-9 pm Eastern time.

I’ll be blogging more about Canadian affairs in the coming days. In the meantime, those who follow Canadian affairs might be interested in the following:

The province of Ontario recently established a sharia court – an arbitration tribunal that Canadian Muslims can use to adjudicate certain kinds of family and personal disputes. An Iranian exile named Homa Arjomand has formed a protest movement against this court, the first of its kind in the Western world. She has a website and has posted a lengthy explanation there of her objections to the court. One excerpt:

“While, technically, all Muslim women have access to Canadian laws and courts, and while the Canadian legal system would reject the oppressive decisions made under Shari’a as being contrary to Canadian Law, the reality is that most women would be coerced (socially, economically and psychologically) into participating in the Shari’a tribunal. Women are told that the Shari’a Tribunal is a legal tribunal under the Arbitration Act 1991. The women would take that to mean that whatever is decided by the Tribunal would be considered as lawful. Even women who know that Canadian law would not uphold the decisions, would not challenge the decisions for fear of physical, emotional, economic and social consequences. Therefore, it is most unlikely that decisions that are contrary to Canadian law would ever come before the courts.”