The Place of Tolerance in Islam - Softcover

9780807002292: The Place of Tolerance in Islam
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Khaled Abou El Fadl, a prominent critic of Islamic puritanism, leads off this lively debate by arguing that Islam is a deeply tolerant religion. Injunctions to violence against nonbelievers stem from misreadings of the Qur'an, he claims, and even jihad, or so-called holy war, has no basis in Qur'anic text or Muslim theology but instead grew out of social and political conflict.

Many of Abou El Fadl's respondents think differently. Some contend that his brand of Islam will only appeal to Westerners and students in "liberal divinity schools" and that serious religious dialogue in the Muslim world requires dramatic political reforms. Other respondents argue that theological debates are irrelevant and that our focus should be on Western sabotage of such reforms. Still others argue that calls for Islamic "tolerance" betray the Qur'anic injunction for Muslims to struggle against their oppressors.

The debate underscores an enduring challenge posed by religious morality in a pluralistic age: how can we preserve deep religious conviction while participating in what Abou El Fadl calls "a collective enterprise of goodness" that cuts across confessional differences?

With contributions from Tariq Ali, Milton Viorst, and John Esposito, and others.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:
Khaled Abou El Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law at UCLA and author of Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Editor"s Preface

Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague

Since September 11, Western discussions of Islam have typically been
conducted through a contest of caricatures. Some analysts present Islamic
extremism as a product of a "clash of civilizations" that pits Eastern
despotism against Western individualism. Others see such extremism as a
grim "blowback" of America"s cold-war foreign policy. Engagement with
Muslim faith commonly takes the form of simplistic pronouncements
about "essence" of Islam: Osama bin Laden either represents the true
message of the Prophet or corrupts a "religion of peace."
As Khaled Abou El Fadl points out, these discussions are driven more by
Western concerns—"are Muslims dangerous or not?"—than by a serious
effort to understand Islam and the place of toleration and moral decency in its
conception of a proper human life. In his lead essay for this volume, Abou El
Fadl opens such a conversation. A professor at UCLA, theorist of Islamic
law, and prominent critic of Islamic puritanism, Abou El Fadl works to reclaim
the "moral trust" of Islam by recovering the Qur"an"s universal principles from
the historical and social context in which the text was received. He interprets
Qur"anic verses about the treatment of women and non-Muslims in light of
scriptural passages that call for mercy, kindness, and justice, and that
emphasize the essentially plural nature of the human community.
Abou El Fadl"s engagement with these theological issues is enriched by
a broad historical perspective. He points out that intolerant sects have
traditionally been marginalized by Islamic civilization. But Islam, he argues,
currently faces a crisis of religious authority owing to the political exploitation
of Islamic symbols and the stagnation of civic and economic life in Muslim
societies. That crisis has facilitated the rise of puritanical sects who interpret
the Qur"an literally and ahistorically. Abou El Fadl acknowledges that the
Qur"an itself, like other ancient religious texts, cannot forestall such
interpretations: interpretation is an act for which readers must take moral
responsibility. In the end, religious texts provide rich "possibilities for
meaning, not inevitabilities," so "the text will morally enrich the reader, but
only if the reader will morally enrich the text."
While a majority of respondents accept Abou El Fadl"s critique of Islamic
puritanism, they take issue with this general conception of the debate and
with his specific arguments. Some respondents contend that Abou El Fadl"s
brand of Islam will only appeal to Westerners and students in "liberal divinity
schools" and that religious dialogue in the Muslim world will be useless
unless it is accompanied by dramatic social and political reform. Other
respondents argue that theological debates are irrelevant and that the focus
should be on the Western sabotage of such reforms. A different group of
respondents criticizes these same policies as part of an exploitative program
of Western secularization, and argues that calls for Islamic "tolerance" betray
the Qur"anic injunction for Muslims to struggle against their oppressors.
These disagreements demonstrate that a discussion of tolerance in Islam
cannot take place in isolation from debates about the distribution of political
power and economic resources. But they also underscore the enduring
challenge posed by religious morality in a pluralistic age: how can we retain
the richness and intensity of conviction provided by a religious outlook while
participating in what Abou El Fadl calls "a collective enterprise of goodness"
that cuts across confessional differences?

1

The Place of Tolerance in Islam
Khaled Abou El Fadl

The terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon have focused public
attention on the state of Muslim theology. For most Americans, the utter
indifference to the value of human life and the unmitigated hostility to the
United States shown by some Muslims came as a great shock. Others were
confirmed in their belief that we face a great struggle between civilizations.
Islamic values, they say, are fundamentally at odds with Western liberal
values. The terrorist attacks are symptomatic of a clash between Judeo-
Christian civilization, with its values of individual freedom, pluralism, and
secularism, and an amoral, un-Westernized, so-called "authentic Islam."
Indeed, Islamic civilization is associated with the ideas of collective rights,
individual duties, legalism, despotism, and intolerance that we associated
with our former civilizational rival, the Soviet bloc. We seem to project onto
the other everything we like to think that we are not.
This intellectual trap is easy to fall into when we deal with the theology of
Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, and the Jihad
organization. The theologically based attitudes of these Muslim puritans are
fundamentally at odds not only with a Western way of life but also with the
very idea of an international society or the notion of universal human values.
They display an intolerant exclusiveness and a belligerent supremacy vis-à-
vis the other. According to their theologies, Islam is the only way of life, and
must be pursued regardless of its impact on the rights and well-being of
others. The straight path (al-sirat al-mustaqim) is fixed, they say, by a
system of divine laws (shari"a) that trump any moral considerations or ethical
values that are not fully codified in the law. God is manifested through a set
of determinate legal commands that specify the right way to act in virtually all
circumstances. The sole purpose of human life on earth is to realize the
divine manifestation by dutifully and faithfully implementing God"s law.
Morality itself begins and ends in the mechanics and technicalities of Islamic
law (though different schools of Islamic law understand the content of those
laws differently).
A life devoted to compliance with this legal code is considered inherently
superior to all others, and the followers of any other way are considered
either infidels (kuffar), hypocrites (munafiqun), or iniquitous (fasiqun).
Anchored in the security and assuredness of a determinable law, it becomes
fairly easy to differentiate between the rightly-guided and the misguided. The
rightly-guided obey the law; the misguided either deny, attempt to dilute, or
argue about the law. Naturally, the rightly-guided are superior because they
have God on their side. The Muslim puritans imagine that God"s perfection
and immutability are fully attainable on earth—as if God"s perfection had
been deposited in the divine law, and, by giving effect to this law, we could
create a social order that mirrors divine truth. By attaching themselves to the
Supreme Being, puritan groups are able to claim a self-righteous
perfectionism that easily slips into a pretense of supremacy.

Extremism in Islamic History

Perhaps all firmly held systems of belief, especially those founded on
religious conviction, are in some way supremacist: believers are understood
to have some special virtue that distinguishes them from adherents of other
faiths. But the supremacist creed of the puritan groups is distinctive and
uniquely dangerous. The supremacist thinking of Muslim puritans has a
powerful nationalist component, which is strongly oriented toward cultural and
political dominance. These groups are not satisfied with living according to
their own dictates, but are actively dissatisfied with all alternative ways of life.
They do not merely seek self-empowerment but aggressively seek to
disempower, dominate, or destroy others. The crux of the matter is that all
lives lived outside the law are considered an offense against God that must
be actively resisted and fought.
The existence of Muslim puritanism is hardly surprising. Most religious
systems have suffered at one time or another from absolutist extremism, and
Islam is no exception. Within the first century of Islam, religious extremists
known as the Khawarij (literally, the secessionists) slaughtered a large
number of Muslims and non-Muslims, and were even responsible for the
assassination of the Prophet"s cousin and companion, the Caliph Ali b. Abi
Talib. The descendants of the Khawarij exist today in Oman and Algeria, but
after centuries of bloodshed, they became moderates if not pacifists.
Similarly, the Qaramites and Assassins, for whom terror became a raison
d"être, earned unmitigated infamy in the writings of Muslim historians,
theologians, and jurists. Again, after centuries of bloodshed, these two
groups learned moderation, and they continue to exist in small numbers in
North Africa and Iraq. The essential lesson taught by Islamic history is that
extremist groups are ejected from the mainstream of Islam; they are
marginalized, and eventually treated as heretical aberrations to the Islamic
message.
But Islam is now living through a major shift, unlike any it has
experienced in the past. The Islamic civilization has crumbled, and the
traditional institutions that once sustained and propagated Islamic
orthodoxy—and marginalized Islamic extremism—have been dismantled.
Traditionally, Islamic epistemology tolerated and even celebrated divergent
opinions and schools of thought. The guardians of the Islamic tradition were
the jurists (fuqaha), whose legitimacy rested largely on their semi-
independence from a decentralized political system, and their dual function of
representing the interests of the state to the laity and the interests of the laity
to the state.
But in Muslim countries today, the state has grown extremely powerful
and meddlesome, and is centralized in ways that were inconceivable two
centuries ago. In the vast majority of Muslim countries, the state now
controls the private religious endowments (awqaf) that once sustained the
juristic class. Moreover, the state has co-opted the clergy, and transformed
them into its salaried employees. This transformation has reduced the
clergy"s legitimacy, and produced a profound vacuum in religious authority.
Hence, there is a state of virtual anarchy in modern Islam: it is not clear who
speaks with authority on religious issues. Such a state of virtual religious
anarchy is perhaps not problematic in secular societies where religion is
essentially reduced to a private matter. But where religion remains central to
the dynamics of public legitimacy and cultural meaning, the question of who
represents the voice of God is of central significance.

Puritanism and Modern Islam

It would be wrong to say that fanatic supremacist groups such as al-Qaeda
or al-Jihad organizations now fill the vacuum of authority in contemporary
Islam. Though they are obviously able to commit highly visible acts of
violence that command the public stage, fanatic groups remain sociologically
and intellectually marginal in Islam. Still, they are extreme manifestations of
more prevalent intellectual and theological currents in modern Islam.
Fanatic groups derive their theological premises from the intolerant
puritanism of the Wahhabi and Salafi creeds. Wahhabism was founded by
the eighteenth-century evangelist Muhammad ibn "Abd al-Wahhab in the
Arabian Peninsula. "Abd al-Wahhab sought to rid Islam of the corruptions that
he believed had crept into the religion. He advocated a strict literalism in
which the text became the sole source of legitimate authority, and displayed
an extreme hostility to intellectualism, mysticism, and any sectarian
divisions within Islam. According to the Wahhabi creed, it was imperative to
return to a presumed pristine, simple, straightforward Islam, which could be
entirely reclaimed by literal implementation of the commands of the Prophet,
and by strict adherence to correct ritual practice. Importantly, Wahhabism
rejected any attempt to interpret the divine law historically or contextually,
with attendant possibilities of reinterpretation under changed circumstances.
It treated the vast majority of Islamic history as a corruption of the true and
authentic Islam. Furthermore, Wahhabism narrowly defined orthodoxy, and
was extremely intolerant of any creed that contradicted its own.
In the late eighteenth century, the Al Sa"ud family united with the
Wahhabi movement and rebelled against Ottoman rule in Arabia. The
rebellions were very bloody because the Wahhabis indiscriminately
slaughtered and terrorized Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Interestingly,
mainstream jurists writing at the time, such as the Hanafi Ibn "Abidin and the
Maliki al-Sawi, branded the Wahhabis the modern day Khawarij of Islam, and
condemned their fanaticism and intolerance.In 1818, Egyptian forces under
the leadership of Muhammad Ali defeated this rebellion, and Wahhabism
seemed destined to become another fringe historical experience with no
lasting impact on Islamic theology. But the Wahhabi creed was resuscitated
in the early twentieth century under the leadership of "Abd al-"Aziz ibn Sa"ud,
who allied himself with Wahhabi militant rebels known as the Ikhwan, in the
beginnings of what would become Saudi Arabia. Even with the formation of
the Saudi state, Wahhabism remained a creed of limited influence until the
mid-1970s when the sharp rise in oil prices, together with aggressive Saudi
proselytizing, dramatically contributed to its wide dissemination in the
Muslim world.
Wahhabism did not propagate itself as one school of thought or a
particular orientation within Islam. Rather, it asserted itself as the
orthodox "straight path" of Islam. By claiming literal fidelity to the Islamic
text, it was able to make a credible claim to authenticity at a time when
Islamic identity was contested. Moreover, the proponents of Wahhabism
refused to be labeled or categorized as the followers of any particular figure
including "Abd al-Wahhab himself. Its proponents insisted that they were
simply abiding by the dictates of al-salaf al-salih (the rightly-guided
predecessors, namely the Prophet and his companions), and in doing so,
Wahhabis were able to appropriate the symbolisms and categories of
Salafism.
Ironically, Salafism was founded in the early twentieth century by al-
Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida as a liberal theological
orientation. To respond to the demands of modernity, they argued, Muslims
needed to return to the original sources of the Qur"an and Sunnah (tradition of
the Prophet), and engage in de novo interpretations of the text. By the 1970s,
however, Wahhabism had succeeded in transforming Salafism from a liberal
modernist orientation to a literalist, puritan, and conservative theology. The
sharp rise in oil prices in 1975 enabled Saudi Arabia, the main proponent of
Wahhabism, to disseminate the Wahhabi creed under a Salafi guise, which
purported to revert back to the authentic fundamentals of religion uncorrupted
by the accretions of historical practice. In reality, however, Saudi Arabia
projected its own fairly conservative cultural practices onto the textual
sources of Islam and went on to proselytize these projections as the
embodiment of Islamic orthodoxy.
Despite its intolerance and rigidity, ho...

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  • PublisherBeacon Press
  • Publication date2002
  • ISBN 10 0807002291
  • ISBN 13 9780807002292
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages128
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