Salman Rushdie on London Bombings and Islam

[Guest guest]

LONDON (August 11, 2005): When Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the

Muslim Council of Britain, admitted that "our own children" had

perpetrated the July 7 London bombings, it was the first time in my

memory that a British Muslim had accepted his community's

responsibility for outrages committed by its members.

 

Instead of blaming US foreign policy or "Islamophobia", Sacranie

described the bombings as a "profound challenge" for the Muslim

community. However, this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said

that "Death is perhaps too easy" for the author of The Satanic

Verses [i.e. Rushdie himself]. Tony Blair's decision to knight him

and treat him as the acceptable face of "moderate", "traditional"

Islam is either a sign of his Government's penchant for religious

appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Mr Blair's options

really are.

 

Sacranie is a strong advocate of Mr Blair's much-criticised new

religious hatred bill that will make it harder to criticise

religion, and actually expects the new law to outlaw references to

Islamic terrorism. He said as recently as January 13: "There is no

such thing as an Islamic terrorist. This is deeply offensive. Saying

Muslims are terrorists would be covered [i.e., banned] by this

provision." Two weeks later his organisation boycotted a Holocaust

remembrance ceremony in London, commemorating the liberation of

Auschwitz 60 years ago. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair

can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.

 

The Sacranie case illustrates the weakness of the Government's

strategy of relying on traditional, but essentially orthodox,

Muslims to help to eradicate Islamist radicalism. Traditional Islam

is a broad church that certainly includes millions of tolerant,

civilised men and women, but also encompasses many whose views on

women's rights are antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as

ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who

routinely express anti-Semitic views, and who, in the case of the

Muslim diaspora, are — it has to be said — in many ways at odds with

the (Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish) cultures among which

they live.

 

In Leeds, from which several of the London bombers came, many

traditional Muslims lead lives apart, inward-turned lives of near-

segregation from the wider population. From such defensive,

separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a

moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks.

 

The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots

in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but

the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are

places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen. What is

needed is a move beyond tradition — nothing less than a reform

movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a

Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadi ideologues but also

the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open

the windows of the closed communities to let in much-needed fresh

air.

 

It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the

Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this

idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement will

require, above all, a new educational impetus whose results may take

a generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist

diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim

thinking.

 

It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the

revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not

supernaturally above it.

 

It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam

is the only religion whose birth was recorded historically, its

origins uniquely grounded not in legend but in fact. The Koran was

revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the 7th-

century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban

patriarchal system. Muhammad, as an orphan, personally suffered the

difficulties of this transformation, and it is possible to read the

Koran as a plea for the old matriarchal values in the new

patriarchal world, a conservative plea that became revolutionary

because of its appeal to all those whom the new system

disenfranchised, the poor, the powerless, and, yes, the orphans.

 

Muhammad was also a successful merchant and heard, on his travels,

the Nestorian Christians' desert versions of Bible stories which the

Koran mirrors closely (Christ, in the Koran, is born in an oasis,

under a palm tree). It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere

to see how deeply their beloved book is a product of its place and

time, and in how many ways it reflects the Prophet's own

experiences.

 

However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious

book in this way. The insistence within Islam that the Koranic text

is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical

scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be influenced

by the socioeconomics of 7th-century Arabia, after all? Why would

the Messenger's personal circumstances have anything to do with the

Message?

 

The traditionalists' refusal of history plays right into the hands

of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in

their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the

Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be

legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of

successive new ages. Laws made in the 7th century could finally give

way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin

here, with an acceptance that all ideas, even sacred ones, must

adapt to altered realities.

 

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the

sibling of peace. This is how to take up the "profound challenge" of

the bombers. Will Sir Iqbal Sacranie and his ilk agree that Islam

must be modernised? That would indeed make them part of the

solution. Otherwise, they're just the "traditional" part of the

problem.

 

SOURCE: The Times Online, "Muslims unite! A new Reformation will

bring your faith into the modern era" by Salman Rushdie.

URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1729998,00.html