Heretic

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  In short, I agree with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Pakistani schoolgirl whom the Taliban tried to kill:

  The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. That is why they are blasting schools every day—because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society. They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school.2

  Here, surely, is the authentic voice of a Muslim Reformation.

  Change is also under way in the Muslim communities of the Western world. True, further Muslim immigration to Europe and North America will very likely increase the tensions between Westerners and Muslims. Yet even as the probability of such conflict increases, so too does the exposure of second- and third-generation Muslims to Western values and freedoms. Yes, some will withdraw into a cocoon of denial, and others will become Medina Muslims in reaction against the dissonances they experience. In the long run, however, these options are far less appealing than the third option of religious reform.

  Finally, there is the horrified reaction of many Muslims to the atrocities committed by Al-Qaeda, IS, and Boko Haram, which has led some Muslim political leaders to get serious about taking Islam back from the extremists. The government of the United Arab Emirates has called the threat posed by “Islamic extremism” a “transnational cancer” requiring an “urgent, coordinated and sustained international effort to confront” it.3 The fight against radical Islam, the UAE ambassador to the United States insisted, “must be waged not only on the battlefield but also against the entire militant ideological and financial complex that is the lifeblood of extremism.”4 Before an audience of Muslim clergy, as we have seen, the president of Egypt himself has called for a “religious revolution.” That is the kind of support a Reformation cannot do without if it is to succeed.

  The fact that President Sisi elected to make his call for religious revolution at Al-Azhar—the preeminent institution of Sunni religious learning in the world—was highly significant. For Al-Azhar has long been the citadel of clerical conservatism, ruthlessly resisting even the discussion of meaningful reforms to Islam.5 In June 1992, for example, an Egyptian academic and human rights activist named Farag Foda was shot dead as he left his office. For years, Foda had defended secular policies and criticized sharia law, arguing for a separation of religion and politics. Two weeks before Foda’s death, the widely respected cleric Muhammad al-Ghazali, a senior figure at Al-Azhar, had declared Foda to be an apostate, knowing full well that under Islamic religious law, the punishment for apostasy is death.6 Activists of the Islamic group Gama’a al Islamiyya subsequently killed Foda, heavily injuring bystanders (including Foda’s son) in the process. “Al-Azhar issued the sentence and we carried out the execution,” the group stated.7 Al-Ghazali, the cleric who had declared Foda an apostate, subsequently testified on behalf of Foda’s killers, arguing that the presence of an apostate inside the community constituted a threat to the nation.8 Though now deceased, al-Ghazali remains a venerated figure among Islamic scholars,9 while Al-Azhar as an institution has never expressed any contrition for its role in Foda’s death.

  It is precisely institutions like Al-Azhar that stand in the way of a Muslim Reformation. If the Egyptian government is prepared to take on Al-Azhar, the times are indeed changing.

  Je Suis Charlie

  There is one final reason I am optimistic. I begin to hope that the West may finally be coming to its senses.

  Over the past twenty years, terrified of appearing culturally insensitive or even racist, Western nations have bent over backward to accommodate the demands of their Muslim citizens for special treatment. We appeased the Muslim heads of government who lobbied us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. We appeased leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies, who asked universities to disinvite speakers deemed “offensive” to Muslims. Instead of embracing Muslim dissidents, Western governments treated them as troublemakers and instead partnered with all the wrong people—groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.10 And we even subsidized the jihadists. (For example, the man who killed Theo van Gogh was living off Dutch welfare benefits.)

  Yet I dare to hope that what happened in Paris in January 2015 may prove to be a turning point. It was not that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was especially bloody. Many more people had died in the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, in December 2014. Many more people died in the Boko Haram attack on Baga in Nigeria in the same week as the attack in Paris. Rather, it was the fact that more than a dozen people were murdered because they had drawn and published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

  There were, of course, the usual craven editorials and press statements by moral idiots arguing that the editors of the magazine had lacked “common sense” in offending Muslims, and that nevertheless the violence had nothing to do with Islam. But for the millions of people who took to the streets bearing “Je Suis Charlie” signs, these arguments clearly were not reassuring.

  As of this writing, ten thousand military and security personnel have been deployed across France as authorities brace for more attacks. Even to me, just a week ago, such a militarization of policing in one of the West’s largest and oldest democracies would have been unthinkable. France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, said three days after the attack that France was at war with “radical Islam.” The French, once so critical of the United States after 9/11 (not least for the sweeping scope of the Patriot Act), are now following in the footsteps of George W. Bush. Stephen Harper, the prime minister of the other great French-speaking democracy, Canada, explicitly connected the Charlie Hebdo attack to the “international jihadist movement.” “They have declared war on anybody who does not think and act exactly as they wish they would think and act,” Harper said. “They have declared war and are already executing it on a massive scale on a whole range of countries with which they are in contact, and they have declared war on any country, like ourselves, that values freedom, openness and tolerance. We may not like this and wish it would go away, but it is not going to go away.”

  At a time like this, the claims that the “extremists” have nothing to do with the “religion of peace” simply cease to be credible. The enemy in this war is saying just the opposite. Consider, for example, the book written by the Al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Suri, entitled The Call to Global Islamic Resistance. As the enemies of Islam, al-Suri lists: the Jews, America, Israel, the Freemasons, the Christians, the Hindus, apostates (including established Muslim leaders, officials, and their security apparatus), hypocritical scholars, educational systems, satellite TV channels, sports, and all arts and entertainment venues.11 This would be comical if it were not so deadly serious.

  Western leaders who insist on ignoring such explicit threats run two risks. Not only do their words (“Islam belongs to Germany”) embolden the zealots. They also create a political vacancy. Even before Charlie Hebdo, Germans were protesting under the banner of Pegida (short for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West”) in Dresden, Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig. All over Europe, populist parties are mobilizing voters in increasing numbers against immigration and Islam, from the National Front in France to the Sweden Democrats. It can be in nobody’s interests for Europe to slide in this way down a perilous path of polarization.

  Instead, as briefly happened in Paris in the days after the massacre, we in the West need to unite. But we need to be clear about what we are uniting for, and what we are uniting against.

  In all holy books, in the Bible as well as the Qur’an, you will find passages that sanction intolerance and inequity. But in the case of Christianity, there was change. In that process of change, the people who wanted to uphold the status quo made the same arguments that present-
day Muslims are giving: that they were offended, that the new thinking was blasphemy. In effect, it was through a process of repeated blasphemy that Christians and Jews evolved and grew into modernity. That is what art did. That is what science did. And yes, that is what irreverent satire did.

  The Muslim Reformation is not going to come from Al-Azhar. It is more likely to come from a relentless campaign of blasphemy. So when a Muslim sees you reading this book and says, “I am offended, my feelings are hurt,” your reply should be: “What matters more? Your sacred text? Or the life of this book’s author? Your sacred text? Or the rule of law? Human life, human freedom, human dignity—they all matter more than any sacred text.” Christians have been through this, Jews have been through it. It’s now time for Muslims to go through it. In that sense—in the sense that I passionately believe in the world-changing power of blasphemy—je suis Charlie.

  Yet we need to do more than merely blaspheme. We need to reform.

  The Five Amendments, Restated

  The tenth- and eleventh-century Islamic legal scholar al-Mawardi, writing in The Ordinances of Government, says: “If an innovator appears or a holder of suspect views goes astray, the imam should explain and clarify the correct view to him, and make him undergo the penalties appropriate to him, so that the religion may be preserved from flaws and the community preserved from error.”12 I know that anyone who advocates reforming Islam runs a risk. So let me be unambiguously clear. I am not advocating a war—quite the contrary. I am explicitly arguing for peaceful reform: for a cultural campaign aimed at doctrinal change.

  As I have argued, there are five core concepts in Islam that are fundamentally incompatible with modernity:

  1.the status of the Qur’an as the last and immutable word of God and the infallibility of Muhammad as the last divinely inspired messenger;

  2.Islam’s emphasis on the afterlife over the here-and-now;

  3.the claims of sharia to be a comprehensive system of law governing both the spiritual and temporal realms;

  4.the obligation on ordinary Muslims to command right and forbid wrong;

  5.the concept of jihad, or holy war.

  My “five theses” are simply that these concepts must be amended in ways that make being a Muslim more readily compatible with the twenty-first-century world. Muslim clerics need to acknowledge that the Qur’an is not the ultimate repository of revealed truth. They need to make explicit that what we do in this life is more important than anything that could conceivably happen to us after we die. It is just a book. They need to make clear that sharia law occupies a circumscribed role and is clearly subordinate to the laws of the nation-states where Muslims live. They need to put an end to the practice of delegated coercion that inflicts conformity at the expense of creativity. And they need to disavow completely the concept of jihad as a literal call to arms against non-Muslims and those Muslims they deem apostates or heretics.

  This Reformation would not only benefit women, gays, and religious minorities. I believe it is also in the interests of Islam itself. In order to avoid eventual collapse, even the most revered structure requires renovation. Mere restoration is no longer a plausible option for Islam, no matter how much blood the Islamists shed. Indeed, the more blood they shed, the more they risk bringing the entire structure crashing down upon their heads.

  How long will the rest of us have to wait for this Reformation to succeed in transforming Islam as deeply as the original Reformation transformed Christianity? In the last decade, many thousands of innocent people have lost their lives in an escalating sectarian conflict that rages across borders. Tens of millions of decent men and women and their children remain trapped within failing states, stagnating economies, and repressive societies. Will the Muslim Reformation be widespread or localized (after all, the Protestant Reformation did not succeed in all of Christendom)? Will the Muslim Reformation produce wars of religion, like its Christian predecessor, before its more beneficial effects make themselves felt?

  The answers to these questions depend above all on Muslims and the choices they make. But they also depend to some extent on the choices we in the West make. Do we help the Reformation? Or do we unwittingly undermine it?

  It will not be easy to bring about this change. But perhaps the words of two thinkers, one an Islamic heretic and one a master of the Western Enlightenment, can give us encouragement.

  In 1057, the Syrian poet and philosopher Abul ‘Ala al-Ma’arri died. In his lifetime, for the act of forgoing meat and being a vegetarian, he was branded a heretic. He was also branded a heretic for his poetry and other fictional writings, including The Epistle of Forgiveness, in which he imagined a journey to heaven and to hell.13

  Although he is largely unknown in the West, his work is regarded as a forerunner of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and over the years, statues of him have been erected around his home region, south of Aleppo. In 2013, jihadists, primarily with the Al-Nusra Front, began attacking and beheading his statues. There are multiple theories about the attacks, including one that perhaps al-Ma’arri is related to President Assad. But the more plausible explanation is that nothing—not even the passage of a thousand years—can expunge the guilt of the heretic. The stigma of heresy is eternal.14

  And what did al-Ma’arri write that was so heretical? Here are a few of his lines: “Shall I go forth from underneath this sky? How shall I escape? Whither shall I flee?” And: “God curse people who call me an infidel when I tell them the truth!” And: “I lift my voice whene’er I talk in vain, / But do I speak the truth, hushed are my lips again.”15

  I find those lines almost unbearably moving. And yet, nearly a thousand years after they were written, I am certain that the time for heretics to speak the truth with impunity has at last arrived. And for those still unsure how they should react to the words of a heretic, I turn again to Voltaire, the freest of freethinkers. “I disapprove of what you say,” he is said to have written to Claude Helvétius, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

  The dawn of a Muslim Reformation is the right moment to remind ourselves that the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion.

  • APPENDIX •

  Muslim Dissidents and Reformers

  The best evidence that a Muslim Reformation is actually under way is the growing number of active dissidents and reformers around the world. It would be quite wrong of me to publish this book without acknowledging them and their often courageous contributions. Broadly speaking, they can be grouped into three broad categories: dissidents in the West, dissidents in the Islamic world, and clerical reformers.

  Dissidents in the West

  There is a growing number of ordinary Muslim citizens in the West who are currently braving death threats and even official punishment in dissenting from Islamic orthodoxy and calling for the reform of Islam. These individuals are not clergymen but “ordinary” Muslims, generally educated, well read, and preoccupied with the crisis of Islam.

  Among them are Maajid Nawaz (UK), Samia Labidi (France), Afshin Ellian (Netherlands), Ehsan Jami (Netherlands), Naser Khader (Denmark), Seyran Ateş (Germany), Yunis Qandil (Germany), Bassam Tibi (Germany), Raheel Raza (Canada), Zuhdi Jasser (U.S.), Saleem Ahmed (U.S.), Nonie Darwish (U.S.), Wafa Sultan (U.S.), Saleem Ahmed (U.S.), Ibn Warraq (U.S.), Asra Nomani (U.S.), and Irshad Manji (U.S.).

  These individuals are not clerics, but informed citizens speaking out on the basis of reason and conscience. They are urging either a fundamental reinterpretation of Islam or a change in the core doctrines of Islam. Some of them have left the faith, seeking reform from the outside, whereas others seek to reform Islam from within.1 Their arguments focus on the importance of viewing the Qur’an and the hadith in a historical context and on respecting man-made civil laws as legitimate, overriding sharia religious law.

  Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim
physician, is the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona. Jasser has embarked on the “Jefferson project” for Islam. He favors the separation of mosque and state, which will “include the abrogation of all blasphemy and apostasy laws” currently used to stifle Muslim reformers. His aim is to reform Islam and place civil law above sharia law:

  If government enacts the literal laws of God rather than natural law or human law, then government becomes God, and abrogates religion and the personal nature of the relationship with God. Governmental law should be based on and debated in reason, not from scriptural exegesis.2

  Saleem Ahmed, a Muslim now living in Hawaii, was born in India and raised in Pakistan. Ahmed founded the Honolulu-based All Believers Network in 2003, promoting genuine interfaith dialogue. Its board has individuals from numerous religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, and Islam. Ahmed argues that the more political and violent verses of the Qur’an are superseded by spiritual passages having universal applicability.3 He has written a book arguing for a fundamental reform of Islamic doctrine. A number of fellow Muslims have called Ahmed a kafir (nonbeliever) and his local imam has criticized him for “diluting our religion.”4 Ahmed says that his role model is Gandhi.

  Yunis Qandil, now living in Germany, was born in Amman, Jordan. He is the son of Palestinian refugees. In his later youth he became closely involved in a Salafi mosque for five years before turning to the Muslim Brotherhood for another four years. He moved to Germany in 1995 and increasingly “sought to combine his spirituality with a secular stance regarding politics.”5 Qandil is critical of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood that seek to create a “parallel society” of European Muslims, preventing individual Muslims from fully integrating into their host societies.6 Even if Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood oppose the use of violence in the short term, they are not true partners for genuine integration and peaceful coexistence in a pluralist democracy. Qandil continues his work for the separation of mosque and state.