by Ed Husain
The recent rise in literalism among those unwilling to interrogate texts, and dismissive of the contextual approach of most Muslims past and present, feeds and is fed by broader trends beyond religion. Today, most students in the Arab world want to pursue medicine or engineering. Scientific and technical subjects carry the highest status and attract the brightest undergraduates. Politics, sociology, history, poetry, philosophy and the liberal arts offer no future. Nuance, context, colour, metaphor and diversity of interpretation are losing ground. Creating independent minds and a pluralist outlook is seen by authoritarian governments as a threat to social and political stability.
This mentality is also being applied to matters of religion. More and more educated young Muslims approach Islam and scripture with the formulaic methodology of a trained scientist, doctor or engineer: right path vs. wrong path; heaven vs. hell; black vs. white. The subtle, spiritual ways of Rumi (see Chapter 6) or the sophistication of Ibn Arabi (see Chapter 17) risk becoming blasphemous. And from this milieu radicals and terrorists are born.
Osama bin Laden was an engineer. Ayman al-Zawahiri is a doctor. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, holds a degree in mechanical engineering. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie, has a degree in veterinary medicine. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s global leader, Ata Abu Rishta, is an engineer, as is the deputy leader of the Brotherhood, Khairat al-Shater. Hamas’s chief bomb maker, Yahya Ayyash, was an electrical engineering student. It is now documented that the rank and file of Islamist and jihadi organisations are filled with doctors and engineers.6
Before the 1940s and Arab independence from European powers, engineering as a profession did not exist in the Arab world, except in Egypt. With decolonisation and state-led development of Arab cities and economies, and mass migration of populations to urban centres, socialist state projects were suddenly in desperate need of engineers, and they needed to come in large numbers from poor and middling backgrounds. In the 1960s, the existing city elites were established merchants, or part of a religious or political order, and had been for generations. Engineering degrees offered the new arrivals and their children funded training, access to a state-sponsored elite, security, high salaries, social advancement, and opportunities to travel to prestigious international conferences.
But within a generation, in the 1980s, engineers’ prospects began to fade as socialism gave way to economic liberalisation and privatisation, led by Sadat in Egypt and widely followed in the region. States could no longer absorb the products of their own universities. Unemployment rates for Arab graduates began to soar. Many turned to protest politics to find new meaning in their lives – and Islamism and Salafism found willing recruits.
The engineering mindset is one that is ripe for jihadism. In a study of graduate jihadis, almost 45 per cent were found to be engineers. When all the ‘elite degrees’ were included (medicine, science, engineering), that figure went up to 56.7 per cent of the sample. If business and economics were also included, the proportion rose to 63.4 per cent of graduate jihadis.7
When the engineers and doctors of Salafism created their own ‘state’ in parts of Iraq and Syria in October 2014 (ISIS territory), they closed down the archaeology, fine arts, philosophy and politics faculties at universities in areas under their control. They banned all study of human rights, drama and novels. Women, who had to wear black face covers, headscarves and abayas outside their homes, had to attend separate educational facilities from men in ISIS-held territory.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram is not known by its longer, Salafi, Arabic name (Jamaat ahl al-sunnah lid-da‘wah wal-jihad, the Sunni Group for Preaching and Jihad), but by its Hausa moniker, meaning ‘Books are Haram [outlawed]’. ‘Boko’, in Hausa, the main language of northern Nigeria, is the word for ‘books’, and to extremist Salafi Nigerian minds these represent Western education and secular culture. (In traditional African societies, teaching and learning was conducted using hand-held slates and chalk.) Boko Haram’s obsession with keeping Western-style modern education at bay through violence and killings is no accident: it is designed to force the Salafi understanding of religious purity on Nigeria’s Muslims.
In Pakistan, the schoolgirl Malala Yusufzai came to global prominence because she was shot by the Taliban on her journey home from school, but there are millions of other Malalas in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere who dare not step outside their homes for fear of persecution by the mullahs. Educating girls and giving them the key to freedom from the control of the clerics causes fear among extremists. The primary motivation for Islamist extremists is to gain political power, and their first act in power is almost always to change the education system – particularly female education.
As well as liberal or modern education, the Salafis are also opposed to manifestations of culture, even Islamic heritage. Muslim societies once abounded in freethinking writers, poets, craftsmen and artists, architects and calligraphers. They beautified city centres with mosques surrounded by schools and universities, where students could freely debate and disagree with their teachers. This is why there exists pluralism and ikhtilaf, difference of opinion, within the sharia. Early Muslims believed this ikhtilaf to be one of God’s clemencies.8
Hospitals and orphanages, too, found their place in this thriving cultural order, all decorated with Muslim and scriptural calligraphy and art. That heritage still flourishes in the old quarters of Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul and Delhi, but the descendants of the masters who created it now have no knowledge of its origins. Worse, the literalist mind of the modern engineer, shunning cultural tradition, wants to blow up these edifices and build tower blocks.
The Salafi worldview is committed to destroying, not treasuring, the past. The assault has been most sustained in Mecca and Medina, at the heart of the homeland of Islam. And an educational upbringing that does not honour its own heritage certainly has no respect for any other, as we have seen from the blowing up of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan and Greco-Roman Palmyra in Syria, as well as fourth-century monasteries and museums to past civilisations.
Textbooks that promote such views have gone unchanged for decades. Pakistan’s hatred for minority Christians and others comes from the culture imbibed in its schools; the Saudi authorities’ hatred for Shi‘a Muslims is right there in school textbooks.
Against this background, private language schools are proliferating across the Muslim world. After school hours, you see young adults in Turkey, the Arab world, Bangladesh and elsewhere heading for English-language classes, hoping these will lead to better job opportunities. Within a few years they will be applying in their thousands to study in the West. But there are three disturbing factors in this leaning toward the West.
First, the Arabic language, the pure language of the Quran, is coming under pressure. In university bookshops, as we have seen, engineering manuals and medical textbooks reign supreme – and they are almost all in English. Near the medical and engineering faculties in much of the Middle East there are shops with photocopiers busy breaking copyright laws. It is through English, not Arabic, that the latest research and scientific thinking are accessed. Classical Arabic is nowadays reduced to poetry, the Quran, news, and cartoons for children. In the real, contemporary world of study, work, debate and daily encounters it is nowhere to be found. The language does not sit comfortably with modern life, and feels detached, irrelevant. What must that do to the self-esteem of young Arabs – the idea that the way to get ahead is to master the language of the British – the very people who subjugated Muslims and the Arabs, from the Crusades to the Empire?
Second, Western education carries the virus of a lack of veneration for ancient values, and the moral relativism that says nothing is absolutely right or wrong, the individual is sovereign, and religion is a cause of backwardness. When a young Muslim enters this environment, he or she is again deeply challenged. The prayer rooms in Western universities are full of Arab and Muslim students seeking refuge from the ideological bombardment o
f liberal individualism. Where does the contemporary Muslim belong? Neither at home nor in the West.
Amid the uncertainties for the future of Arab countries, there is the supremacy of Arabic in religion but inferiority in the sciences, the prestige of the West and the appeal of its technological innovations in daily life yet relentless verbal attacks by mosque preachers on America – all this inevitably creates cognitive dissonance. Against the confusion of identity and lack of a sense of belonging anywhere, Salafism offers an uncompromisingly clinical approach to puritanical Islam, and provides a shelter from the insecurities of living in dictatorships.
As we have seen, however, in the allocation of university places by school grades, with engineering and medicine taking the highest-achieving students and Islamic studies for those apparently least gifted, the status and prestige of traditionally trained clerics has declined. In the long term, there is a high risk that the literalist Islam of engineers and doctors will come to appear more authoritative and attractive than the more gentle, subtle and nuanced faith of the low-grade traditional ulama.
And third, in the formal educational setting of secondary schools and the informal cultural setting of mosques, the relegation of women to the status of second-class human beings is not preparing young Muslims to recognise the worth of half the human race. Gender segregation in classrooms, and putting women at the back of mosques or, in many countries, barring them from entering at all, is completely at odds with the early notions of Islam, and with the current and future state of the world.
An adviser to the Saudi monarchy explained to me in 2014 in Riyadh that he had made great progress in raising educational standards among Saudi students, and young women in particular. He pointed out that over 200,000 Saudi students were studying in Australia, the UK, the US and other countries at the king’s expense, and highlighted the creation, to much fanfare, of nineteen new universities in Saudi Arabia.
In the West, however, the advance of education, and progress in general, was not based only on increasing the number of graduates and universities. The underlying premise of education, to train curious minds to ask questions and conquer new intellectual terrain, was once the hallmark of the Muslim world, but in most places has now been abandoned. Teaching practical skills and transmitting factual information are now seen to be more valuable than fostering an environment of freedom for ideas, innovation and inquisitive intellects.
But this freedom also requires an open society, in which a dissenting thinker is not locked up or killed. The government’s view cannot be the only legitimate view in the Arab public space. Breakdowns in education are also failures of politics. The multilayered malaise in the education systems of the Muslim world is set to produce tens of millions of young people who are torn between Islam and the West. Why should they cherish independence of thought when it results in prison or being an outcast? Why think critically about a text if the government and clergy will label you a disbeliever or a deviant? Why study politics, philosophy or history when no worth is attached to these subjects, and the courses, if available at all, are empty of critical content?
The retreat from literature and the liberal arts into the sciences and technology poses problems not only for the development of vibrant open societies but also on university campuses across the Muslim world and among Muslim communities in the West. Student bodies in engineering faculties and medical colleges are dominated by Islamists and Salafis. In large countries such as Egypt, previous generations of engineers and doctors who have turned to the Islam of Salafism now dominate the professional bodies, syndicates and unions that provide powerful networks for career advancement and job-seeking.
Meanwhile, in almost every Arab Muslim country almost half of the university student population is female, and in Saudi Arabia now more than half – the Saudi kingdom’s top university has 57 female students for every 43 males.9 What, then, are the challenges and opportunities for women in the modern Muslim world?
15
Women
Should women have the same legal rights as men? Ninety per cent of people in Indonesia and Turkey say ‘yes’, and in Pakistan 77 per cent agree, but in Saudi Arabia only 61 per cent concur, and 57 per cent in Egypt.
Should women have the right to vote? Turkish people are 93 per cent in favour, 80 per cent of Indonesians, 67 per cent of Pakistanis and 56 per cent of Saudis.
Do women have the right to hold any job for which they are qualified? In Egypt, 85 per cent think so, in Turkey 86 per cent, and in Saudi Arabia 69 per cent. When it comes to women holding leadership positions in cabinet and at national political levels, 50 per cent of Egyptians are supportive but only 40 per cent of Saudis.1
On purely religious grounds, these answers, in the largest-ever polling of Muslim nations, could and should have been above 90 per cent for every question asked. But there is an underlying attitude and a set of male assumptions, cultural impositions and interpretations of scripture that hold women back and deny them the freedom to prosper and flourish fully in the Muslim world. Taken to extremes, these views can have serious, and even fatal, consequences.
At a secondary school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, one hot spring day in 2002, the girls had taken off their oppressive black abayas and headscarves as usual. Saudi men wear flowing white robes that reflect back the searing desert heat, but women and girls must wear black, the most uncomfortable of colours for the climate. Islam sets no colour code for women’s dress, but black was the traditional women’s costume in the Najd region of central Arabia, from which the Al Saud tribe came, conquered the holy cities of Islam, and established its rule across the whole of what is now Saudi Arabia. Mecca was part of the colourful, urbane Hijaz region, but the puritan Najdis disliked its cosmopolitan ways. Colourful Hijazi clothing was banned in 1932, and now even these teenage girls were legally required to wear black. At least inside their all-girls school, with its all-female staff, they could take off their hijab and relax.
But on that day, 22 March 2002, a fire broke out in their school. The girls made a rush for the exit only to be met with resistance at the gates and forced by the Mutawwa’a, the Saudi religious police, back into the blazing building. They were not to be allowed out because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas. Firemen arrived at the site but were prevented from entering the building because there were teenage girls present with their hair uncovered. When parents arrived, the Mutawwa’a used their police powers forcibly to stop them getting in to rescue their children. Fifteen girls burned to death.
Their lives could have been saved, but Saudi Salafi Islam prioritised the rules on women’s dress over the sanctity of human life. And this happened in Mecca, the home and heart of Islam. The first key principle of the sharia, first of the five Maqasid – preservation of life – had been abandoned. Pedantry of the literalist rule trumped the reason for the law.
Six months prior to that, in September 2001, tens of thousands of people had poured out of two collapsing buildings engulfed in fire. In New York, the firefighters and police struggled valiantly to rescue those fleeing the Twin Towers, and did everything humanly possible to get them out alive. How could Muslim men – in Mecca, of all places – have responded so completely differently, with such callousness and cruelty toward girls and women – in the name of Islam?
A minority of Salafis, with their puritanical cast of mind, now dominate Muslim discourse and control public conduct in Mecca. Their preoccupation with being ‘right’ and ‘true’ is reflected most intensely in their obsession with women. Salafi clerics from Saudi Arabia have written extensive volumes on women’s periods, sexual habits and dress, whether and where it is permissible for them to work, limits on their travel, pregnancy and divorce.
Nowhere is the battle for women’s identity and freedom more apparent than inside the Grand Mosque, or Sacred Mosque, in Mecca, the global nerve centre of Islam. In just 150 years the Salafis from Najd have gone from being forbidden to enter the mosque, to occupying it, then being ejected, to now b
eing in control of it. They have knocked down ancient architecture, imposed gender segregation in prayers, removed the teaching corners of non-Salafi Muslim schools and denominations, rejected local imams from the Hijaz and imposed only Najdi prayer leaders, and forbidden gatherings of other Muslims inside Islam’s holiest place of worship. Immune from international scrutiny, Salafism reigns supreme.
Within these holy precincts, my wife Faye was beaten by a Salafi with a stick for wearing a long dress that showed her ankle when we first went on pilgrimage. This was in 2005. It was only when I roared at him that he backed off, but I dare not think about the plight of any woman on her own.
When I lived in Saudi Arabia, Faye began to wear the black abaya out of respect for local custom. Why stand out and attract the attention of the woman-beaters? The sharia forbids women on pilgrimage to cover their faces while circumambulating the Ka’bah, the cubic structure at the centre of the Grand Mosque that Muslims face when praying. This is contradicted by the Salafi laws for Saudi women, who are still expected to wear the abaya and cover their faces. Faye did both, and yet, inside the Grand Mosque, in the shade of the holy Ka’bah, Saudi policemen were eyeing her up and down with determined, lustful glances. It is from the eyes of Salafi men that Muslim women must be shielded. Faye and I already despised the male advances in Saudi shops and restaurants whenever she was on her own – the dropping of business cards, the requests for her phone number, the filthy whisperings in supermarket aisles. So we had learned to be together as often as possible to ward off this lecherous behaviour. But inside the Grand Mosque?
