Seeking the nature of Islam

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has tried to fight terrorists on several continents simultaneously. It does so in the defense of values it regards as universal. It is at pains to distinguish ordinary believers in the Koran from those it regards as having hijacked one of the world’s great religions in the name of a violent religious and political extremism. Nonetheless, in the popular mind -- the more so after last week’s beheading of a U.S. civilian in Iraq by avowed Al Qaeda supporters -- something seems to have gone awry at the heart of Islam itself. Large questions abound: Is Islam compatible with modernity? Is Islam inherently incapable of moderation? Do Muslim moderates even exist? Do Muslims want genuine democracy? Does the Koran -- so often invoked by terrorists -- condone violence? And, to put it bluntly: Why do they hate us?

Academicians, religious leaders, media commentators, government experts and policymakers have offered a range of diverse, even conflicting explanations: an irrational hatred; envy of U.S. power and economic success; a struggle between adherents of an atavistic religion in backward societies and an enlightened, democratic West; a clash of civilizations; or the inevitable result of hypocritical U.S. foreign policy.

Three recent books have joined the discussion, exploring these difficult questions that continue to affect relations between Muslims and Christians, the Muslim world and the West. “The Cross and the Crescent,” “Islam Without Fear” and “Preachers of Hate” offer light and heat, informed scholarship and ideological bias.

Since Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979-80, Islam often has been portrayed as a political, demographic and historic threat. Muslims and Christians, Islam and the West, it is charged, have been centuries-old enemies, locked in conflict and warfare. If some in the West see centuries of Muslim jihads against Christianity and Judaism, some in the Muslim world see a militant imperialist Christianity extending from the Crusades to the American-led fight against global terrorism as a war against Islam and Muslims, and an effort to create a new world order under U.S. hegemony.

In “The Cross and the Crescent,” medieval historian Richard Fletcher masterfully details Muslim and Christian relations from the birth of the Muslim faith in the 7th century through the 16th century. Most important, Fletcher emphasizes that those relations were marked not only by confrontation and conflict but also by social and cultural coexistence and cooperation, and periods of comparative tolerance. In contrast to Christianity, which had little tolerance for Jews and Muslims, or indeed for other Christian sects, Fletcher notes that the Koran requires Muslims to “respect the Ahl al-Kitab, the ‘people of the Book.’ ” In the Islamic world, Jews and Christians enjoyed legal (although by modern standards second-class) status and could practice their faiths.

Though the sword was an instrument of conquest and expansion for Muslim rulers -- as it was for Christians -- Fletcher writes that the religion of Islam generally proved more tolerant than Christianity, as much for practical realities as religious doctrine, because Christians had the needed administrative, bureaucratic and intellectual skills. Where Muslims ruled over formerly Christian lands, they tended to live apart in garrison towns. In general, neither showed interest in learning about the religion of the other.

A recurrent question is whether Islam is compatible with reason and science, and whether the religion is responsible for the great disparity in development between the West and the Muslim world. Fletcher paints a picture of a dynamic Islamic civilization that flourished, eclipsing a Europe mired in the Dark Ages. Muslim accomplishments, he shows, were not simply the result of conquest but of a voracious search for knowledge offered by other cultures. During the cosmopolitan and expansionist Abbasid dynasty (750-1258) based in Baghdad, Christian and Muslim businessmen engaged in brisk and prosperous trade. Rulers like Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid were in diplomatic contact; Muslim rulers employed Christian clergy who knew Latin on missions to Christian rulers. Though Christians -- who served as administrators, bureaucrats and artisans -- played a major role in the development of Arab and Islamic society, science and civilization, Muslims preserved the scientific and philosophical knowledge of the ancient world, translating from Greek, Latin, Syriac and Sanskrit into Arabic. They became the new masters, extending and developing what would come to be known as Arab or Islamic sciences (algebra, geometry, medicine, optics, astronomy) and philosophy. The West would appropriate this learning as Europe, looking to the libraries and thinkers of the East, retrieved its philosophical and scientific roots. Europe’s great theologians and philosophers -- Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus -- as well as European scientists and physicians were indebted to Muslim scholars such as Avicenna and Averroes.

Fletcher cites Andalusia, which included what is now Spain, from AD 756 to about 1000 as the best example of Christian-Muslim coexistence and tolerance (sometimes described as a convivencia, or “living together”), a period often idealized for its interfaith harmony. Tensions did exist, but Christians and Jews occupied prominent positions in the Arab courts of the 10th century, serving as engineers, physicians, architects and translators. Social intercourse and tolerance prevailed at the upper levels of society. Fletcher estimates that between AD 750 and 950, at least 70% of Christians in the cities eventually converted to Islam, mostly because of the “humdrum pressures [of] neighborhood, marriage, the need for employment and patronage.”

Because the Islamic empire had no rival in its day -- in wealth, technology, learning, culture and faith -- Fletcher notes that Muslims had a “lofty disdain” toward Christians. They were blinded to the rise of the West and its scientific, economic and military advances, which led in time to a dramatic reversal of power and subjection to European imperialism and hegemony.

But what of today’s Islam? What is its relationship to violence and terrorism committed in its name from Spain to Indonesia? Although President Bush has been careful in public to distinguish between the faith and Muslim extremism, some media commentators and leaders of the Christian right such as Franklin Graham, who is close to the president, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell say terrorism’s source is Islam itself, a religion they have contended publicly is evil and whose prophet was an extremist and terrorist.

In fact, the struggle of Islam today is between the competing voices and visions of a dangerous and deadly minority of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers and the vast majority of mainstream Muslims. Though the extremists grab the headlines, not incidentally threatening other Muslims as well as Western societies, Islam’s mainstream adherents, like believers of other faiths worldwide, pursue the everyday goals of the majority of humankind. “Islam Without Fear” by Raymond William Baker and “Preachers of Hate” by Kenneth R. Timmerman provide perspective on opposite sides of the coin, moderate and extremist Islam. Though quite different, both books underscore the need for Islamic reform. (Those who call for reform often forget the lessons of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation and, more recently, Vatican II, all of which demonstrate that religious reforms take time and are often fraught with conflict and even dangerous.)

Baker, a political science professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and Cairo’s American University, addresses the question: “Is there a moderate Islam?” In “Islam Without Fear,” the author of critically acclaimed studies of Egypt has written an engaging and thoughtful, even groundbreaking study of major Egyptian reformers whom he calls the New Islamists and their centrist Islam.

Egypt has long been a leader in politics, culture, education and religious studies, and home to the influential Islamic modernist movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Al Azhar University in Cairo, the world’s oldest university, is a center of Islamic learning, credentialing scholars and providing leadership to the international Muslim community. Al Azhar’s sheiks have issued authoritative statements or legal opinions (fatwas) on issues ranging from birth control, abortion and artificial insemination to the legitimacy of the Persian Gulf War, suicide bombing, extremism and terrorism.

For decades, quietly, persistently and effectively, Baker writes, a group of Egyptian professionals has articulated a progressive, constructive Islamic framework in response to social realities. These lawyers, journalists and religious scholars mirror other reform voices in Muslim societies from North Africa to Southeast Asia. He shows how they respond to the challenges of authoritarian regimes and secular elites, the dangers of religious extremism and the deadweight of well-meaning but often intransigent conservative religious scholars and leaders.

Baker deftly places these New Islamists within the broader context of Islamic reformism, demonstrating their links but also substantial differences with movements such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or the Islamic Assn. on the Indian subcontinent. The ideas and writings of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb, an influential militant Egyptian ideologue, have been disseminated globally, informing and shaping modern Islamic mainstream and extremist political and social movements from the Islamic Jihad to Al Qaeda.

Baker’s New Islamists include religious scholars such as the late Muhammad al-Ghazzaly and Yusuf al-Qaradawi (whom many regard as the most influential mufti in the Muslim world today), journalist Fahmi Howeidi, lawyers and intellectuals such as Selim al Awa, Tareq al-Bishry and Kamal Aboul Magd. They share a record of constructive engagement in Egyptian public life, seeking to identify and build on the common ground of shared beliefs and values. They critique government authoritarianism and repression, the excesses of religious and secular extremists and Western political or cultural imperialism.

The New Islamists emphasize change through the peaceful cultural and educational transformation of society rather than regime change. They distinguish, Baker writes, between the Koran’s condemnation of usury and acceptable forms of banking interest, advocate gender equality for Muslim women and full citizenship rights for Egypt’s Copts and other non-Muslims, denounce the use of violence by militants and others who are “remote from the spirit of Islam.” They condemn the violence of Egyptian militants in the 1980s and 1990s, and call for government reforms to address political, social and economic grievances.

If Baker’s book is a window on moderate mainstream Islam, Timmerman’s “Preachers of Hate” explores the dark side of Islamic extremism and terrorism. Regrettably, the journalist and author takes a simplistic approach to a complex reality. He identifies a deep-seated anti-Semitism that exists in the Arab and Muslim world and its alarming growth in Europe, as well as the failure of some nations to check extremists and terrorists. However, he ignores the root causes and reduces terrorist acts and anti-Americanism solely to anti-Semitism.

“Preachers of Hate” reads more like a collection of articles that uncritically pulls together a disparate collection of facts and fancies. Rather than a study of what extremists think and preach about America and the acts of terror they have committed in the name of Islam, it is a disconnected history of anti-Semitism, real and imagined. Timmerman provides no new or unique link between anti-Semitism and Sept. 11. True, the statements of Bin Laden and acts of Al Qaeda have been anti-Semitic. They also have been anti-Christian and anti-Muslim, targeting Christians and other Muslims as well as Jews, civilians and combatants alike.

With his inflammatory language, name calling and a tendency to overstate, Timmerman often sounds more like the preachers of hate he criticizes, opting for a black-and-white, “You are either with us or against us” worldview. He denounces moderate, not just militant, Muslims, Muslim organizations, European leaders, governments, intellectuals, U.S. universities and academics. He attacks Arabs and Palestinians; the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, is lumped with militants and falsely labeled a radical Islamic fundamentalist. Absent is any comparable treatment of Israel’s militant religious right or the excesses of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government or the military. The author condemns former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme for equating the pain he and others of his generation felt when seeing pictures of Jewish children in concentration camps with “the same pain when we see Palestinian children persecuted in exactly the same way,” decrying such opinions as “Holocaust denial by the Euro-Left.” He charges that “among European limousine liberals, it has become fashionable to talk of Israel as a ‘criminal’ state, responsible for all Middle East violence, that should be punished by the international community, if not simply eradicated.” With such unsubstantiated statements and gross oversimplification of the issues, Timmerman undercuts and trivializes what might have been an important analysis of the contemporary rise and threat of anti-Semitism.

Like other polemicists, Timmerman fails to realize that, rather than a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West or America and Islam, the real conflict today is between the civilized world and global terrorism. Moreover, as innumerable independent and U.S. government polls attest, anti-Americanism is a broad-based phenomenon not restricted to Arab and Muslim societies. It is not driven solely by the blind hatred or the religious zealotry of extremists, or anti-Semitism, but also by frustration and anger with U.S. foreign policy. America’s espousal of self-determination, democratization and human rights is often seen as a hypocritical double standard, especially in light of decades of past U.S. support for authoritarian regimes and more recent criticisms of U.S. unilateralism and neo-colonialism.

As we struggle in the wake of Sept. 11 to combat and contain global terrorism as well as to understand the struggles going on within Islam and the Muslim world, “The Cross and the Crescent” and “Islam Without Fear” are critical studies rich with valuable insights. Regrettably, the tendency to polemics rather than empirical analysis in “Preachers of Hate” adds to the problem rather than to the solution. *