The House of Islam
Page 1
THE HOUSE OF ISLAM
For my daughters, Camilla and Hannah: may you and your generation carry forth divine love, light and faith of the ancient prophets and philosophers.
When zealous Muslims burnt the books of Averroes, a disciple of his began to weep. Averroes said to his student, ‘My son, if you are lamenting the condition of the Muslims, then tears equal to the seas will not suffice. If you are crying for the books, then know that ideas have wings and transcend aeons to reach the minds of thinking people.’
(Averroes/Ibn Rushd, 1126–98)
Contents
Introduction: Inside the House
PART ONEA MILLENNIUM OF POWER
1What is Islam?
2Origins of the Quran
3Who is a Muslim Today?
4The Sunni–Shi‘a Schism
5What is the Sharia?
6Who is a Sufi?
PART TWOTHE RISE OF ANGER
7A Hundred Years of Humiliation
8Who is an Islamist?
9Who is a Salafi? Or a Wahhabi?
10Who is a Jihadi?
11Who is a Kharijite, or Takfiri?
PART THREETHE RISE OF THE WEST AND THE LOSS OF MUSLIM CONFIDENCE
12Dignity
13The Jews
14Education
15Women
16Sex
PART FOURISLAM’S GLOBAL STAYING POWER
17God is Alive
18Rights of the Sacred
19The Family Table
20The Next Life
Conclusion: The Way Forward
Appendix: Middle Eastern Thinkers’ Calls for a Regional Union
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
A Note on the Author
Introduction: Inside the House
Muslims are shaping world events and constantly feature in the news, yet few among us genuinely understand them, so that our behaviour tends to be based on ignorance at best, or half-truths at worse. This book surveys the foundations of the faith of Muslims and explains the design of the House of Islam. It describes how Muslims feel, practise and perceive Islam, and sets out to explore their minds and their worldview. I write as one born and raised as a Muslim in Great Britain. I am a Westerner and an observant Muslim. Caught between two worlds, I have learned to dovetail the two facets of my identity. This book is a reflection of that inner bridge between Islam and the West.
Globally, the Muslim population is 1.7 billion strong – that is to say that one in every five human beings is a Muslim – and there are fifty-nine Muslim-majority countries. By 2050, the Muslim populace is projected to grow twice as fast as the overall world population. After 2050, Muslims will probably surpass Christians as the world’s largest grouping of humans based on a faith identity. While the global population is projected to grow by 35 per cent by 2050, the Muslim population is expected to increase by 73 per cent to nearly 3 billion, according to the Pew Research Center. Muslims have more children than members of other faith communities. Muslim women give birth to an average of 2.9 children, notably higher than the average of all non-Muslims at 2.2.
A convergence of five facts explains this worldwide surge in Muslim birth rates. Firstly, Pew estimates that Muslims in large numbers are approaching the stage of their lives in which to have children. The median age of Muslims in 2015 was 24, while the median for non-Muslims was 32. Secondly, more than a third of Muslims live in the Middle East and Africa, regions of the world expected to witness the largest population growths. Thirdly, most Muslim countries still retain a very traditional understanding of the role of women as wives and mothers. Therefore the emphasis on motherhood is stronger than for others. Fourthly, the firm Muslim belief in sustenance for children coming from God means that there is often reliance on God for food, clothing and shelter. Finally, the cultural value placed on the birth of boys is, sadly, still greater than girls. Therefore, many families will continue to have children until a boy is born to carry the family name to the next generation. Unlike Catholicism, Islam does not prohibit birth control.
With the mass movement of people globally, and since refugees and workers come to Europe mostly from Muslim-majority countries, what happens inside Islam will have an impact on us all. Extreme forms of politicised Islam will act to disrupt the peace in our societies through increased tendencies of social separatism, confrontation, attempts at domination, and political violence inflicted through terrorism.
Currently, there is a global battle under way for the soul of Islam. Why? What and where are the battle lines? Who will win? And how does this affect the West? In different ways, my life has been spent at the forefront of this struggle.
I was born in London to Muslim migrants from British India. Mine was the first generation of Muslims born and raised in the West. My first book, The Islamist, recounts my teenage journey into international, religious radicalism and my subsequent rejection of it. I have lived through Islamism, Salafism and Sufism. Seeking to better understand Islam, away from militant Muslims, I spent two years studying Arabic and Islam with mainstream Muslim scholars in Damascus, Syria, from 2003 to 2005. I lived in a dictatorship where I was free to study for as long as I did not express political views in public. In private, we were continually suspicious of fellow students and even of our teachers – who was the informant? The deep knowledge of Islamic theology, history and philosophy of Syrian scholars was second to none. Without freedom, however, our education always felt partial, compromised, and lacking in the full rigour of students entitled elsewhere to ask tough questions.
Yearning to be closer to the source of Islam, in 2005 I moved to live and work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I worked as a teacher with the British Council during the week, and at weekends I spent time in worship at Islam’s holiest sanctuaries in Mecca and Medina. There, I prayed and interacted with Muslims from all over the world. My immersion in Arabic language, religion, culture and peoples was fulfilling to me, but back home in Britain my youngest sister escaped death on the London underground bombings on 7 July by minutes. When my Saudi students reacted by saying to me that Britain deserved this terrorism, that this was jihad against the infidels, I felt angry and a visceral need to return home to London. I knew that we had a battle of ideas ahead of us. When Saudis in their twenties, followers of the holy Quran, could not commiserate, but actually celebrated the misfortunes of the West; when young Muslims born and raised in the West killed themselves and their fellow citizens on London’s public transport, the sentiments and convictions that led to such actions would not easily subside. Indeed, in recent years the thousands of radicalised European Muslims who have turned to terrorism in their attacks on France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Norway, Canada and Denmark are offshoots of that same trend.
Back in Britain, I completed a postgraduate degree in Islam and Middle East politics. I then established a think tank in 2007, Quilliam, named after a Victorian-born Muslim, Abdullah Quilliam, to illustrate that Islam should not be associated in Britain with immigration or recent radicalisation. Led by Muslims to research and renounce radicalism, Quilliam was the the first of its kind in the world. It was controversial work, but it was necessary to take the lead and show how Islam was being politicised by Arab political anger. I believed it was my religious and civic duty to speak out against the political hijacking of Islam, my faith. Quilliam was successful in its countless media appearances, helping to change British government policy, briefing multiple European governments, speaking on university campuses across the Continent, and thereby compelling Muslim activists to rethink their confrontational anti-Western politics. But the backlash from objectors was strong. Death threats and physical intimidation are the default recourse of bullies who cannot win an argument. I felt that I needed to le
ave Britain for a while.
In late 2010 I became a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at America’s leading foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations. I lived in New York and Washington DC for four years, researching and writing about politics in the Arab world, national security, Islam and Muslims. The Council’s members included professionals at the highest level of the US government, media, business and universities. I found myself in a unique position: a Brit, a Muslim, and an Arabic speaker explaining the challenges of the modern Middle East, and advising on America’s policy options, to powerful audiences at the height of the Arab Spring uprisings. Conversely, I was interpreting the actions of the West for Arab and Muslim governments and civil society when I travelled to Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf and Pakistan.
I have the rare privilege of being an insider both in the West and in the Muslim world. This book draws from that source: the conversations, reflections and experiences of the last decade enabled me to better understand the House of Islam from the inside. A story I was told in Nigeria helps explain further.
An American billionaire arrived in a large West African village. Rather than announce donations from his philanthropic office, he was keen to see, feel, smell and assess Africa for himself. It was a Friday morning. He parked his jeep by the home of the local tribal chief, and they sat outside the simple house, which was dusty and dwarfed by the shiny black vehicle.
As the African chieftain and the billionaire exchanged pleasantries and drank coconut water, the American saw groups of children carrying large, empty plastic bottles off into the distance.
‘Where are those kids heading?’ he asked, struck by the sight. ‘Shouldn’t they be at school?’
‘They are going to get water from the river for their families,’ the chief replied. ‘They go every week around this time. An hour to the river, and an hour back. School will begin when they come back in two hours.’
This was a eureka moment for the American. He identified a need, and thought like a Western businessman: his unique selling proposition would be to build water-well pumps in this and other nearby villages. The children would be able to go to school, get an education, and prosper. He kept his thoughts to himself, and when he returned to New York he instructed his charity to install the pumps with central government cooperation.
The charity employed consultants, engineers, and local experts to implement this ‘strategic initiative’. It was strategic because, they kept reiterating at meetings, it would facilitate education and prosperity – the pumps were a vehicle for change.
A year later, the American returned to the African village on another Friday morning. The chief welcomed him, as did the village elders. With true African warmth of spirit, they thanked him for his contribution. But that was not enough. In the language of the corporate and charitable sectors of the West, this was an ‘M&E’ visit (monitoring and evaluation).
The water pumps looked new and clean. The American sat and made polite conversation with the villagers. Soon enough, throngs of children started to emerge from their homes with empty plastic bottles and the billionaire watched as they headed toward the pumps. But then they kept on walking. They continued walking as they had the year before: toward the river.
‘But why?’ protested the billionaire. ‘Now they have water in the village!’
‘Let us speak in confidence,’ said the chief. He beckoned the American inside his house, away from their staff.
‘My friend,’ said the chief, ‘your intentions are noble, but you did not ask us if we needed water in the village. Have you seen our tiny houses? Our families are large and many live together in the same bedroom. We send the children away to get water so that the husband and wife can be alone for a while and service their marital relationship!’
Even from his front-row seat, the American billionaire missed the insider knowledge, nuance, and realities of life in West Africa from within, and it did not occur to the chief to express them. In much the same way, the West today does not understand Islam and Muslims for who they are.
Western liberal individualism is all-pervasive: to question the West is perceived as backward and primitive. While the West prides itself on being progressive, Islam is now seen as the ultimate retrogressive religion. This is made worse by the daily provision of headlines from within Islam of extremism, terrorism, misogyny, and even slavery, which reinforce feelings of Western superiority.
When the Arab uprisings of 2011 took the world by surprise, overthrowing Western-backed dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, we were rightly in awe of a young generation of Arabs. They shouted that they sought hurriyah, karamah, adala ijtima’iyah meaning ‘freedom, dignity, and social justice’ across the region. Our impulse was to assume that these uprisings were secular. Our elites were programmed to think of 1789 and the French Revolution – at long last democracy had reached the Middle East. How wrong we were.
For those familiar with the Muslim world, the indicators were there. The Arab Spring protests were not held on Saturday nights, but on Friday afternoons. Why? Because that is the day for communal prayers. Every Friday Muslims went in their millions from the mosques to protest against their politicians. These were not radicals, but ordinary Muslims. The dead youth in Egypt and elsewhere were called shahid (pl. shuhada), martyrs, a word from the Quran that means those who died as witnesses for God. Verses from the Quran accompanied the photos of the dead.
Soon, Christians and Muslims were praying in public squares on Sundays and Fridays. In Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Christians formed a protective ring around their Muslim brethren. We overlooked this religion-based energy until extremists appeared and hijacked the protests by burning churches and attacking the Israeli embassy in Cairo. In Tunisia they attacked the American embassy; in Libya they killed the American ambassador. That whirlwind of radicalism sweeping the Middle East found a home in the sectarian spaces of Iraq and Syria, in what our media mistakenly refers to as the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’, or ISIS. We award the self-styled caliphate a PR victory by referring to it as ‘the Islamic State’, even though we in the West do not feel we can pronounce on whether ISIS is Islamic or not.1
The West’s miscalculations are widespread: whether it was mistakenly amplifying Khomeini’s support base, tolerating intolerance from Muslims in the West after Rushdie, standing by and watching in Algeria as the military forbade Islamist democrats from taking power, failing to understand the religious sensitivities of basing US troops in Saudi Arabia, or ignoring warnings that removing a Sunni Saddam Hussein would invite a stronger Iranian Shi‘a presence into the Middle East. The West is again blundering by supporting the imprisoning of Islamists en masse in Egypt after the ousting of the country’s first Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013. Did we learn nothing from the terrorism born of Egypt’s torture prisons in the 1960s? We armed and supported Arab and Afghan Islamists to fight Soviet communists in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and they turned into al-Qaeda. Now we are supporting Kurdish communists killing Islamists in Syria.
Lawrence of Arabia promised the same Arab kingdom to multiple tribal leaders to encourage them to rebel against the Ottoman Turks. We actively buttressed Wahhabism in the last century against Turkish Sufism (did we know the difference?), and now we tear our hair in despair as Wahhabist intolerance spreads across the globe. More fighters are joining jihadist conflicts and targeting our own Western Muslim populations.
Again and again the West misreads the political trajectory in the Muslim world. The British government promised in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 a ‘Jewish homeland’ in Palestine. What peace have we brought to Jews or Arabs since then? The Hussein–McMahon correspondence of 1915–16 colluded to partition Arab lands and depose the Ottoman Turks from their territories. What peace have Arabs in Iraq, Syria or Egypt known except to live under nationalist–socialist dictators? The Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 gave birth to nation-states that we carved in Europe reflecting Westphalia. What do these border
s mean today as transnational Islamists and jihadists override them in their organisations and operations? We helped popularise ‘Ayatollah’ Khomeini – there was no such formal title as Ayatollah, meaning ‘sign of God’, until the nineteenth century. He called himself Ayatollah, so we did, too. Why? He claims authority; we publicise, amplify, and help consolidate his position. We do not judge. The same principle is at play with ISIS today as in 1979. It matters not that the vast majority of Muslims recognise neither the authority of the Ayatollah nor of ISIS.
Religious extremism has gripped Iran’s government since 1979. The West does not understand Iran’s messianic creed of Wilayat al-Faqih (Rule of the Cleric), a form of caretaker government while waiting for their promised messiah, known as the infallible Mahdi. In the name of preparing for this perfect Mahdi, the clerical government justifies its tyrannical rule. For a thousand years, Shi‘a Muslims had no such concept of clerics governing in absence of their Mahdi. They patiently waited for its utopia. Khomeini invented this power trick and now Iran seeks to influence other Shi‘a communities around the world with this dogma of Wilayat al-Faqih. Iran’s support for terrorism through its proxies Hezbollah or Hamas against Israel, or its attempt to acquire nuclear weapons are driven by an imaginary apocalyptic war with the West and its allies. The Iranian government has gained each time the West has blundered. In Iraq, after the removal of Saddam Hussein, today it is Iran that is strongest and controls several cities, including Baghdad. In Syria, after the West called for Assad’s removal but failed to act, Iran murdered civilian protestors in the hundreds of thousands to consolidate the pro-Iran government in Damascus. If the West does not have the strategic stamina for the long fight necessary in Iraq or Syria, why take half measures and strengthen Iran? It is not only in the Middle East that the West falters.
We kill our own citizens with no recourse to the rule of law. In 2015, the UK’s prime minister defended his decision to kill British Muslims in ISIS ranks with drone attacks. In 2012, the United States led the way by killing the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, again with drones – in yet another case, the presumption of innocence was waived, the rule of law ignored, and trial by jury denied. If we valued these hallmarks of civilisation, our armed forces would be prepared to die in their defence. With no arrests or trials and this new summary execution, the line between dictatorship and democracy grows thinner. Worse, in this way we fuel the fury of fanatics by confirming their global narrative: that they have no rights and no dignity, and must kill or be killed.