Irshad Manji says what too many non-Muslims won't:
Although the vast majority of Muslims aren't extremists, it is important to start making a more important distinction: between moderate Muslims and reform-minded ones.Moderate Muslims denounce violence in the name of Islam but deny that Islam has anything to do with it. By their denial, moderates abandon the ground of theological interpretation to those with malignant intentions, effectively telling would-be terrorists that they can get away with abuses of power because mainstream Muslims won't challenge the fanatics with bold, competing interpretations. To do so would be admit that religion is a factor. Moderate Muslims can't go there.
Reform-minded Muslims say it's time to admit that Islam's scripture and history are being exploited. They argue for reinterpretation precisely to put the would-be terrorists on notice that their monopoly is over.
Reinterpreting doesn't mean rewriting. It means rethinking words and practices that already exist, removing them from a 7th-century tribal time warp and introducing them to a 21st-century pluralistic context.
I've been listening tonight to an interview I did in Istanbul with Mustafa Akyol, a Western-oriented Muslim journalist, who said that the ideas of the late Fazlur Rahman -- a hugely important Islamic scholar of the 20th century -- regarding modernizing Islam have a lot of currency among leading Muslim theologians in Turkey. He also pointed to the more tolerant Islam of Fethullah Gulen and his spiritual/intellectual mentor, Said Nursi, both of them Turkish citizens with significant followings.
It can be done. But it can't be done by non-Muslims, any more than that Christianity can be reformed by non-Christians. Ideas have consequences -- and the failure to challenge bad ideas has consequences too.
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Good morning, Harvey.
We don't disagree. I think you are pushing too hard in the wrong direction... that being another way of saying you are being too narrowly focused. Naturally, I am the Grand Poobah of All Wisdom. You may call me Grand PAW... ;-)
I also think you are getting alot of help with that pushing. My objection and premise is this: religion for too long has been looked to as a foundational structure, something that drives society, informs culture and governs behavioral patterns. As an atheist, I think you will find this exceedingly ironic coming from a devout religionist: religion is an expression of human endeavor, a result of those processes, not vice versa.
For those reading, do not jump to conclusions. I am not minimizing religion and its part in human civilization. No, I am positing (actually, I am asserting, but today is a rare day where my less polite thoughts are not necessarily going to come forth) religion is a development of civilization. Cart before the horse, that sort of thing. I will skip the anthropology lecture, that being my way of acknowledging the many questions my statements raise. I will say this: civilizations all exist in a paradox of positive feedback; engineers know that the best and fastest way to destroy a machine is to feed it its own output. The best civilizations, the ones that last the longest and are most constructively positive to its generations, find and maintain ways to control and mitigate the negative results of feedback. Sorry, I did say I'd skip the lecture... :-D
Harvey, I've walked through houses that were part of the Underground Railway. Some of them were still occupied by the same families since that time. Almost without exception, they were devoutly religious people in those houses, and the unifying aspect, the common ground they shared with the escaping slaves, was their Christian faith.
That's just one example. It was a time of great social upheaval, of shifting pressures and expectations. We live in a similar time, today, and our societal reactions are pretty much the same as they were then: alot of fear, alot of behaviors stemming from fear, and a subtle but strong undercurrent of wanting to do the right thing. It's not just an American thing. Some can, arguably, call it a Christian thing. I know, as in it takes one to know one, that it is undoubtedly a human thing.
Do the many living in fear define the rest? Do we focus on one subset and call the other one invalid? I can't and won't impose my own conclusions on you, Harvey, but I will pressure you a bit by writing that you are one of the deepest feeling men I've ever met. You articulate your feelings clearly, and without ever having met you I feel certain that you have both eyes open, and you do not flinch at the truth.
The truth I see is a human truth. It applies no matter what faith group is the identity du jour, or of the place. Xenophobia is a species affliction. Generosity, compassion, charity, sacrifice and (true) patriotism are the species' balance to that fear. There will always be local imbalances. Overall, I think I like where the species is going, and I just wish I could be around for the next 1,000 years to see which set of impulses are prevalent, and whether the species has learned any of the lessons of the last few centuries.
Unsuprisingly, I disagree with Paul there. Faith is the repository of acceptance, of both the good and the bad, while our evolved trait of control of our environment catches up to our desires for stability, safety, and satisfaction. God is the anthropomorphic image of the human in ultimate control. Is it any wonder that Human worships it, strives to be like it, blames it for all things including the ones we have no one else to rightly blame for but ourselves? From my never humble perspective, atheists are no different from theists. They have found the same balance between knowable and unknowable. They just have outgrown the need to put a human face on the unknowable, or even give it an independent identity of any sort.
Theological reinterpretation in itself is not adequate. There is need for a social basis to sustain and spread that interpretation. This piece by John L. Allen, Jr. discusses Nursi/Gulen movement originating from Turkey: "These two Islamic movements bear watching" (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1188).
Said Nursi was influenced by Islamic scholars such as Imam Rabbani, al-Ghazali, and Rumi. He tried to dissociate politics from religion. He was critical of the atheistic and materialistic philosophy of the 19th century. In this respect he can be considered in the same camp as the traditional conservative critics of modernity.
Mr. Lacey
I limited my comments to formative Christianity, as it appeared in the first 2-3 centuries after Christ.
Any religion, however fine, can be hi-jacked by evil persons, whackos, and misguided persons. Your diatribe about Christianity simply documents a commonplace: there are no pearls so precious that swine will not trample them and corrupt them.
But these abuses you describe can easily be shown to be contrary to the explicit teaching and practice of formative Christianity and condemned as corruption and aberration. I am not so sure that is possible with Islam. In part this has to do with the fact that Christianity always understood itself to be a parallel culture, the city of God co-existing with the City of Man, as it were. Islam has a very profound, but very grave linkage of the two: to the extent that Muslims are obedient, the "umma" or Islamic community will be independent, unified, and the dominant culture in the world. As far as I can discern, muslims do not have a concept of being a minority culture and still somehow being pleasing to God.
The Christian church has certainly had its flirtation with the idea of merging the City of God and City of Man, but even a person with only a rudimentary knowledge of, say, the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Actcs could see that as a distortion.
I certainly understand your anger at the Christian church for its failures, and I share it. But that failure, and that anger, does not change the facts of history, and the facts of what essential Christianity teaches.
Mr. Stone,
That was well said, sir.
Why thank you, Mr. Evans.
It is always a pleasure to disagree with someone who is so agreeable in the disagreement. Thanks for your comments overall, which reminded me that imprecision is the seed of outright error.
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