by Ed Husain
There is no greater touchstone of civilisation than the way it treats its minorities. And in our case, the Muslim world’s treatment of Israel and the Jews, that beleaguered minority of only 20 million people, is among the greatest of tests for Muslim civilisational coexistence. The second caliph of Islam, Omar, a friend of the Prophet Mohamed, entered Jerusalem in the year 637 to receive the keys to the city from the Byzantines who had recently lost Jerusalem to the Muslims. The Christian patriarch, St Sophronius, invited Omar to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the key-handing-over ceremony. While there, the time for the midday Muslim prayer arrived. As the host, Sophronius insisted that the caliph pray inside the church. Omar declined, fearing and saying that Muslims of the future would demand that the church be converted to a mosque because he had prayed there. Omar excused himself and prayed on the streets nearby. Today, a mosque stands on that spot and is known as the ‘Mosque of Omar’.
Upon accepting the keys to Jerusalem, as the new ruler of the city, he invited Jews back to live, pray, and be among the people of Jerusalem. After 500 years of being banished by the Romans, it was Omar and the pluralist spirit of Islam that brought Jews home to Jerusalem. Today’s Muslims would do well to remember the ways of these early Muslim luminaries.
Israel has responsibilities, too.
When I visit Jerusalem and the West Bank, I frequently ask young Arabs about their views on Hamas. In almost every discussion, Christians and Muslims alike refuse to label Hamas a terrorist organisation. When I raise criticism of Hamas and its targeting of innocent civilians, my comments never register. The responses are always some variant on: ‘Israel has taken our land and killed thousands of Arab civilians over the years. Hamas is only resisting occupation and fighting for our rights.’
I hear similar sentiments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even non-Arab Pakistan. Al-Jazeera Arabic has allowed the pro-Muslim Brotherhood Qaradawi to promote the view that suicide bombings against Israelis are not terrorism but ‘martyrdom’. He used to claim that since all Israelis serve in the military, they cannot be classed as civilians. Even children, he argued, are not innocent, as they will one day grow up to serve in the military. However, when I met Shaikh Qaradawi in Qatar in 2015, he insisted that he had changed his position and no longer advocated the killing of Israeli innocents.
I can name dozens of Muslim clerics, important formulators of public opinion in a region dominated by religion, who will readily condemn acts of terrorism against the West but fall silent when it comes to condemning Hamas. From radical Iran to moderate Tunisia, Hamas’s prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, is welcomed by vast cheering crowds during visits.
Israel is a nation in the Middle East, and it needs to find a home and place among its neighbours. To do so, the onus is on Arabs and Muslims to accept Israel and Jews as a nation that belongs firmly in the region.
Jews in Israel are accused constantly of occupation and apartheid. Granted, full equality between all citizens in Israel is yet to be realised, but the United States stands accused of similar inequalities in rights and economic opportunities between blacks and whites, southerners and northerners. Australia’s treatment of its aboriginals is unjust: why is Australia not accused of apartheid? India is accused of being in occupation of Kashmir: where is the global movement to boycott India? Israel, in contrast, is forced to combat the rise of a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the Muslim world and parts of the West. Singling out Israel for constant criticism is the epitome of anti-Semitism.
Beyond terrorism and hostility, the Arab world desperately needs to embrace the culture of creativity and commercial flair that Israel brings to the Middle East. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of patents registered from Saudi Arabia was 171; from Egypt, 77; from the United Arab Emirates, 32; from Kuwait, 52; from Syria, 20; and from Jordan, 15 – compared with 7,652 from Israel.7 Israel boasts the highest density of business start-ups in the world: a total of 3,850 new businesses in 2009, one for every 1,844 Israelis.8 After the United States, Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any other country in the world, including India, China, Korea, Singapore and Ireland. Israel leads the world in the percentage of the economy that is spent on research and development.
Guarantees of peace from governments and peoples of Israel’s neighbours will be reciprocated by Israel. For now, the violence of Hamas and Hezbollah has failed, but there is no certainty where their war of attrition will lead. Is there a Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela who can lead Palestine to making peace with its neighbour? To do so, what is taught in the schools and universities of the Middle East needs serious, sustained attention.
14
Education
‘Knowledge and wisdom are the lost properties of the believer,’ taught Imam Ali, ‘so seek them even if they be with infidels.’ Wherever there was new intelligence and discoveries to be made, Muslims were to have the confidence and curiosity to learn from other civilisations and cultures – all understanding and awareness was inherently the possession of a believer. This bold, self-assured mentality was borne out in reality: the Muslims absorbed with confidence new knowledge and ideas from the Greeks, Persians, Indians and Byzantines, and this cultural fusion was once the hallmark of Muslim civilisation. The seventh-century Byzantine emperor Justinian II, a Christian, was asked by Caliph Abd al-Malik to send craftsmen to cut the coloured stone and glass tesserae for the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The Byzantine contribution to this stupendous Islamic monument stands to this day. An inscription 240 metres long, including Quranic verses glorifying God, runs round the base of the dazzling cupola.
‘We should not be ashamed to acknowledge the truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself,’ wrote al-Kindi (801–66), the thinker with whom the history of Islamic philosophy begins.1
How things have changed. Today, many young Muslims memorise large tracts of the Arabic Quran, and recite prayers in Arabic, even though they do not understand the language. The average Muslim child spends three to five years in evening classes and at weekends learning Arabic, but still not learning to speak it. Memorisation is seen as more important than comprehension.
A decade ago, the Arab Human Development Report warned that ‘curricula taught in Arab countries seem to encourage submission, obedience, subordination and compliance, rather than free critical thought’.2 ‘Man ‘allamani harfan, kuntu lahu ‘abdan’ – ‘Whoever teaches me a letter, to him I am a slave’ – is a popular Arabic saying. Muslim communities across the globe, like their Jewish counterparts, venerate teachers. But I am not sure if the word ‘teacher’ is always relevant. Too often, the correct word in Muslim educational circles might be ‘transmitter’.
Modern Western education focuses on training students to ask ‘how’ and ‘why’, and teachers are seen as facilitators of learning. Continuing in the ways of instruction in ancient Greece, teaching and learning in the West take place through dialogue and mutual exchange. Education is about curiosity and asking questions, and probing multiple sources for answers: books, friends, parents, mentors and life experiences in addition to classroom teachers. The Prophet Mohamed taught his companions the same method of reciprocal questioning and reaching conclusions together. The hallmark of an open mind is to be able to ask and answer an array of questions.
Socrates preferred to understand the intellectual level of an individual or a small group of people before proceeding to impart wisdom and ideas on the meaning of life. He taught his students to avoid repeating the same concept because it could be received without full comprehension unless questions and discussions accompanied teaching. Plato built on this dialectical method. The Prophet Mohamed taught his companions khatibunnasi ‘ala ‘uqulihim – ‘address the people in accordance with their understanding.’ Underlying that teaching was the Prophetic model of enlightening lives with knowledge and enhancing their existenc
e. He constantly questioned and rebelled. The Quran itself testifies to the public scrutiny of Meccan life with verses such as these uttered by the Prophet in public on multiple occasions:
‘Do you not think, O Pagans?’
‘Why do you not reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth?’
‘For what crime do you kill the innocent?’
That spirit of asking, answering, and asking again made Muslims the greatest intellectuals of the medieval world. Aristotelian thought was preserved and further developed by the great Muslim philosophers, including most prominently Al Farabi in Damascus (872–950), and later Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in Córdoba (1126–98). The first five hundred years of early Islam welcomed this culture of questioning.
By contrast, the orthodox Muslim today adopts a position on studying theology known as ‘bila kaif’ – ‘without asking how’ – an approach that carries over in general education into blind veneration of teachers, learning by rote, and an aversion to asking questions. Large Muslim nations such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and Algeria have education systems in which students prepare for exams by memorising answers to expected questions.
I have met university students in Egypt with 8,000 students in their class – 8,000 students registered with one professor – and this is not infrequent. But no, they do not all need to attend lectures. The course textbooks on sale in the university bookshop are often solely the writings of the same professor, and they are vastly popular among the students because they can safely be memorised to guarantee favourable marks from their author. Regurgitation brings reward, and the larger the class, the higher the book sales and thus the greater the income for the professor.
The first commandment of the Quran for Muslim civilisation was: ‘Read!’ The archangel Gabriel conveyed the order from God to the Prophet Mohamed to ‘read in the name of your Lord ...’ (96:1). Reading, reflecting and writing were central to early Islam. The first generations of Muslims were taught that ‘the ink of the scholar’s pen is weightier and more worthy than the blood of a martyr’. The Quran reprimands those who acquire learning without comprehension for being like ‘donkeys who carry the burden of books (but understand nothing of them)’ (62:5). Memorising texts was meant to be only the beginning of learning, with critical evaluation doing the rest.
Today, book-reading culture (except for religious material) is nearly absent in most Arab countries. An Arab individual reads on average a quarter of a page a year, compared with the eleven books read by an American or seven by a British person. The average Arab child reads for six minutes a year, as against the 200 hours of reading by his or her Western counterpart.3 In European countries, 21 out of 100 people read books regularly, while in Turkey the figure is one in 10,000.4
The ancient Arabs were renowned for memorising vast tracts of poetry. They also memorised their genealogies, back through multiple generations to Abraham and his son Ishmael, the founder of the Arab line. These lineages are preserved in books of early Muslim biographies, but even today this culture thrives in the Gulf Arab countries and Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula. I have met young Arabs in their twenties in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Qatar who can reel off their ancestry simply by saying ‘my name is Mohamed, son of Ahmed, son of Ali, son of Omar of the tribe of Shammar, son of Salman, son of Fahd’, all the way back to the time of the Prophet. This ease and precision of reference is particularly strong among those who are descendants of the Prophet Mohamed (sayyids or sharifs in Arabic). This is not seen as a prodigious feat, but as completely normal. The fact that women are almost entirely left out of such lists appears to be equally normal.
In addition to lineage and ancestry, the Arabs of the peninsula (the ‘original’ Arabs, not the peoples they conquered in Egypt and the Levant or Africa, who then adopted the Arabic language) also produced and preserved poetry by oral transmission. ‘Al-shi‘r diwan al-‘Arab’, runs an old adage: ‘Poetry is the record of the Arabs’. In the Arab world there are poetry-reciting competitions on Friday night television that attract audiences of over 70 million, rivalling American Idol or The X Factor in the West. Winners of the Sha‘ir al-Milyoon (Millionaire Poet) show receive prizes worth up to 1.3 million dollars – more than the Nobel Prize in Literature. This kind of talent show is exactly designed to appeal to the Arabs, descendants of the proud and hospitable Bedouin people of the desert.
The richness of the Arabic language, and the ability of the Arabs to memorise so much of it, formed the basis of early Muslim culture. The 114 chapters of the Quran, more than 6,000 verses, are still committed to memory by millions of Muslims even in our time. A hafiz, someone who has memorised the Quran in its entirety, has a special and honoured position in the Muslim community. There is no village, town or city, no mosque or madrasa (Islamic school) in the Muslim world, without at least one hafiz helping to preserve the Quran in oral form by reciting parts of it at daily prayers. With the advance of Islam, the culture and habits of the Arabs, including that of committing the Quran to memory, spread to new lands in India, Africa, Indonesia and the Turkic sphere.
Internalising the Quran in this way has spiritual benefits for a believer standing at night in prayer before God, but to extend the technique of bulk memorisation to all spheres of learning is a mistake. When an examination system tests the capacity for rote learning rather than the ability to reflect and critically analyse, we create citizens who are not equipped for the modern world or to contribute to the global economy. That then breeds isolation and separatism.
In Pakistan, the proliferation of madrasas and free education is generating a mass of graduates who can memorise and transmit knowledge, but can neither understand it nor reflect on it in context. Furthermore, Islamic studies is one of the easiest subjects to study at undergraduate level, because it doesn’t require very high grades for entry – and this is also true elsewhere. The absence of critical thinking skills in the curriculum is thus producing vast numbers of ulama, or clerics, who are ill-equipped to take on the challenges posed by their real-world congregations.
Hadith literature, collections of sayings attributed to the Prophet, forms the second-most important primary source for the sharia, after the Quran. As we have seen, each of these hadiths (traditions) consists of two parts: the matn, content, or actual statement, and the sanad, or chain of authority. The sanadis a list of names of those who received the saying orally, one from another, tracing it all the way back to the source, the person who heard it directly from the lips of the Prophet. Over time, scholars started paying attention only to the sanad, without critically examining the matn by cross-referencing it with the Quran, other hadiths, the historical and cultural context, logic and the public interest. Whether referring to hatred of Jews, or misogyny, or considering dogs unclean, or strange, self-serving hadiths advanced for political reasons by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, the desertion of critical thinking has resulted in contemporary Muslims being willing to accept any doubtful hadith as long as it is backed by a reliable sanad. Critical examination of the content has been lost. Only in Turkey, under the leadership of Professor Mehmet Görmez, the country’s leading Islamic authority and a longstanding hadith specialist, is there today a rigorous attempt to scrutinise hadiths and bring them into line with the Quran, human logic, and the spirit of the Prophet, thus understanding the texts in their proper contexts.
It was argued in late medieval times, and is still widely held today, especially among Sunni Muslims, that ‘the gate of ijtihad [the scope for applying the intellect] has closed’. In the first five centuries of Islam there was no mention whatsoever of ‘Insidad bab al-ijtihad’, this closure of the gate of academic endeavour and free thinking. Through the ijtihad of well-qualified and thoughtful scholars, Muslim values found fresh expressions and a means of renewal with the passage of time. But during the following centuries the idea of the closure of the gate of ijtihad gained currency; all the essential questions in life had, it appeared, already been answered, and it only remained for
current and future generations to apply and hand down this fixed body of knowledge.5 The consequence of this was that Muslims were encouraged to practise Taqlid (copying, or imitation) in their worship and social intercourse.
The argument for the extinction of ijtihad came to be widely accepted. Egyptian Muslim theologian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, in his History of Egypt in the nineteenth century, named multiple religious freethinkers who met the specification for being called mujtahids (those who practise ijtihad), without recognising them as such. In al-Jabarti’s mind, no doubt a reflection of his time, ijtihad had ceased, and all were now committed to blind pursuit, or Taqlid.
With the perceived closure of the gate of ijtihad, Muslims lost their zeal to question and innovate. Worse, the rise of Arab Salafism among Muslims globally reinforced the dogma that Islam’s best days were over with the passing of the Prophet and the first three generations of Muslims, the Salaf. Literalists cited a hadith of the Prophet warning that bid‘ah (innovation) was deviant, and all deviancy led to hellfire. If he said that, what was the context? And did it only apply as a warning against claims of new deities for worship? Among literalist Muslims the word bid’ah itself has become a dirty word; innovation is feared and shunned. Historically, Muslim thought leaders taught that bid‘ah applied only to creed and matters of personal worship (not adding new compulsory prayers, for instance), and that in many aspects of life Muslims could embrace bid‘ah hasanah, positive innovation. Celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Mohamed was one example of such bid‘ah hasanah, agreed upon by the vast majority of Muslim scholars and observed, with joyful songs and the distribution of sweets, across much of the Muslim world, though banned in Salafi and other hard-line mosques.
