Articles of faith

When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in 1979, he was welcomed by the coalition of merchants, intellectuals and clergy who led the shah’s ouster. The ayatollah would swiftly disillusion many of them as he consolidated his power in the name of Islam, ordering women to wear veils and adopting a violent vision of jihad that paved the way for the Hezbollah suicide bombers.

In the eyes of Los Angeles-based religious scholar Reza Aslan, Khomeini’s rise is a metaphor for the hijacking of his faith by power-hungry demagogues, self-serving clergy and the radical fundamentalists behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In Aslan’s new book, “No god but God,” he has become the latest of an emerging group of scholars who are turning to the Koran and the origins of Islam to oppose what they see as its misuse.

Aslan writes that the Koran, unlike the Iranian government, doesn’t require women to veil. He points out that one of the prophet Muhammad’s wives, Khadija, was said to be a merchant, and another, Aisha, led an army into battle -- high-profile roles that he and other scholars say call into question the religious basis for a number of repressive laws that, in Saudi Arabia, don’t even allow women to drive. Proponents of the ultraconservative creed of Wahhabism, which is braided into the foundations of the Saudi state, might cast themselves as Islamic purists, but their Koranic interpretations are neither literal nor pure, Aslan and his fellow scholars say.

“What is taking place in the world right now is an internal battle of Islam,” says Aslan, 33, a vivacious, curly-haired, blue-jeaned scholar in wire-rimmed glasses and a paisley shirt. “If we are going to have a reformation in the Muslim world, there must be a new interpretation of the Koran.”

Many of the most repressive interpretations of Islam are not found in the Koran at all, Reza says. The edict calling for the stoning of adulterers, for example, was written by a follower of Muhammad named Omar in a hadith, a companion’s account of Muhammad’s actions -- something akin to the four gospels of the New Testament. Within two centuries of Muhammad’s death in 632, there were 700,000 such hadiths, “the great majority of which were unquestionably fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs,” Aslan writes.

Most Shiites, the minority school of Islam that predominates in Iran, reject many of the hadiths because they discount the authority of the narrators, including Omar. The Sunni majority, however, revere Omar and have faith in most of the hadiths, and as such, the narrations played a great role in the creation of Islamic law.

Some experts find it optimistic, at best, to think that greater understanding of the Koran will temper the complex social and economic forces behind religious fundamentalism. Iran’s much-celebrated reformist movement of the last decade did not preclude the election Friday of an ultraconservative, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- who, as mayor of Tehran, introduced separate elevators for men and women in municipal buildings -- amid widespread frustration over unemployment and corruption.

But scholars who are fighting scripture with scripture at the front lines believe the debate is posing a challenge to autocratic interpretations of Islam.

“There is quite a discussion right now in the Islamic world, a confrontation between modernity and tradition,” says Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, in a translated telephone interview. “Many undemocratic governments are abusing Islam and Islamic teachings in order to justify their abuses of human rights and the principles of democracy.

“Many Islamic governments have tried to suffocate this debate, but they haven’t been successful. It is growing every day, from Saudi Arabia to Algeria.”

One of the factors fueling tension in the Muslim world, Aslan says, is the inevitable progression toward modernization and reform. In his view, the Sept. 11 terrorist attack was not primarily a clash with the West. It was an attempt by militant Islamic extremists to use the West as a polarizing force to galvanize support in a century-old struggle with Muslim moderates over the future of Islam.

“There’s always going to be a backlash against modernism,” he says.

The self-serving distortions of Islam espoused by terrorists and abusive governments are partly manipulative covers for such destructive forms of social control as fascism and authoritarianism, Aslan says.

“You have these small groups of extremists who, because they have such a loud voice, are allowed to frame the discussion,” he says. “If [Osama] bin Laden wants to use the Koran to justify his murderous agenda, I’m going to use the same Koran as a counter-argument.”

Saudi petrodollars have helped to underwrite the proliferation of the once-marginal strand of Islam, Wahhabism -- the creed that informed Bin Laden’s conception of Islam.

“I wouldn’t call them purists. I would call them puritans,” Aslan says. “In their mind, they are living the true form of Islam, but where that interpretation comes from is a mystery.”

To Aslan, the Koran, the key scriptural document of Islam, is as open to selective interpretation as the Bible, which has been used to justify such things as the second-class status of women and the enslavement of blacks.

“Just remember, 150 years ago in the United States, U.S. slave owners used the same Bible to justify slavery that abolitionists used to oppose it,” Aslan says. “Sometimes they used the same scripture.”

“Their Koranic interpretation is filtered through the lens of these Arab social traditions that have become intertwined with religion, in the same way that a Catholic can read the scriptures and say, ‘Oh, well, there’s 12 male disciples so women can’t be priests,’ ” he says. “Nowhere in the New Testament is there any indication that women cannot be leaders of the church. Quite the opposite.”

The issue, Aslan believes, is who is empowered to interpret the holy books. Today, in countries and regions with high rates of illiteracy, like Afghanistan, many people must rely on the clerics’ interpretations of the Koran, which was codified into a book in the 7th century.

“If the only one in the village who can read and write is the imam, he gets to decide what the scripture means,” Aslan says.

In Iran, for example, a striking rise in female literacy set off a cultural earthquake, enabling women to interpret the Koran for themselves, Aslan says. “Muslim women are no longer content to sit around and have the Muslim mullah tell them what their faith should be,” he says. “As literacy rates soar, that is playing a very large role in change.”

Aslan argues that many of the cultural practices that sought backing in Koranic verses are refuted by Islam’s egalitarian roots. A Koranic verse telling believers “not to pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded” has been used to prevent women from inheriting their husband’s property upon his death, though in Muhammad’s Islamic community of Medina, women had the right to inherit property and to keep their dowries, he says.

Perhaps the most misinterpreted Koranic verses, in Aslan’s view, are some ambiguous passages that suggest the wives of the prophet covered themselves when visitors arrived at his house, which was also the community mosque. In Muhammad’s day, Aslan asserts, the veil was an upper-class status symbol, and few women in his community were veiled. “Although long seen as the most distinctive emblem of Islam, the veil is, surprisingly, not enjoined upon Muslim women anywhere in the Quran,” Aslan writes in “No god but God.” In fact, the Koran calls on both men and women to dress modestly.

Many of the cultural practices affecting women predated Islam and are not mandated by the Koran, Aslan says. Unsurprisingly, he adds, many of the moderates currently calling for new interpretations of the Koran, most notably in Iran, are women.

“You see these women who, rather than allow the male-dominated clergy to tell them what the Koran says, are going to the Koran itself and reengaging it from a much more gender-neutral position,” Aslan says.

Ultimately, however, the status of women is subject to the powerful forces roiling the Islamic world, he says. “Women have become the symbols of Islam. They have been used as scapegoats for Muslim men who feel emasculated, not just by the Western world but by the forces of modernism in their own societies. They feel the only thing they can control is women.”

For the author of such a scholarly work, Aslan’s ideas are finding a wide audience. He has opined on “Meet the Press” and exchanged witticisms on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” on Comedy Central. The other night he was on “Hardball.”

Other scholars have met with less favorable receptions, highlighting the deadly seriousness of the debate taking place.

UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, one of the leading critics of Wahhabism, has received death threats, and his books were banned in Saudi Arabia.

A Muslim professor at Cairo University, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, was branded a heretic and forced to flee Egypt in the 1990s for suggesting that the Koran was limited by its origins in 7th century Arabia. In 1985, a highly regarded Sudanese legal reformer, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, was executed for apostasy after he suggested that the two leading Koranic texts differed because they had been created for different historical audiences.

Aslan has arrived at his destination via a smoother path. His family left Iran when he was 7 in 1979 at the triumph of the Iranian revolution, and he grew up in the Bay Area. He has a master’s from Harvard Divinity School and is now a doctoral student at UC Santa Barbara. He spends his time between his Santa Monica apartment and a pied-a-terre in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

But just as the struggle in the Islamic world has spilled into the West, Aslan believes Western emigres like himself will play a key role in shaping the conversation over the future of Islam.

“The debate is going to be framed in North America and Europe. It’s going to be up to Muslim immigrants to provide a voice for voices that have been drowned out by the fundamentalists and puritans and hatred.”