Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Islam is at a crossroads. Muslims, not by the tens or hundreds but by the tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions, need to make a conscious decision to confront, debate, and ultimately reject the violent elements within their religion. To some extent—not least because of widespread revulsion at the unspeakable atrocities of IS, Al-Qaeda, and the rest—this process has already begun. But ultimately it needs leadership from the dissidents. And they in turn stand no chance without support from the West.

  Imagine if, in the Cold War, the West had lent its support not to the dissidents in Eastern Europe—to the likes of Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa—but to the Soviet Union, as the representative of “moderate Communists,” in the hope that the Kremlin would give us a hand against terrorists such as the Red Army Faction. Imagine if a “Manchurian candidate” president had told the world: “Communism is an ideology of peace.”

  That would have been disastrous. Yet that is essentially the West’s posture toward the Muslim world today. We ignore the dissidents. Indeed, we do not even know their names. We delude ourselves that our deadliest foes are somehow not actuated by the ideology they openly affirm. And we pin our hopes on a majority that is conspicuously without any credible leadership, and indeed shows more sign of being susceptible to the arguments of the fanatics than to those of the dissidents.

  Five Amendments

  Not everyone will accept this argument, I know. All I ask of those who do not is that they defend my right to make it. But for those who do accept the proposition that Islamic extremism is rooted in Islam, the central question is: What needs to happen for us to defeat the extremists for good? Economic, political, judicial, and military tools have been proposed and some of them deployed. But I believe these will have little effect unless Islam itself is reformed.

  Such a Reformation has been called for repeatedly—by Muslim activists such as Muhammad Taha and Western scholars such as Bernard Lewis—at least since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent abolition of the Caliphate. In that sense, this is not an original work. What is original is that I specify precisely what needs to be reformed. I have identified five precepts central to the faith that have made it resistant to historical change and adaptation. Only when these five things are recognized as inherently harmful and when they are repudiated and nullified will a true Muslim Reformation have been achieved. The five things to be reformed are:

  1.Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Qur’an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina;

  2.The investment in life after death instead of life before death;

  3.Sharia, the body of legislation derived from the Qur’an, the hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence;

  4.The practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong;

  5.The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.

  All these tenets must be either reformed or discarded. In the chapters that follow I shall discuss each of them and make the case for their reformation.

  I recognize that such an argument is going to make many Muslims uncomfortable. Some are bound to say that they are offended by my proposed amendments. Others will no doubt contend that I am not qualified to discuss these complex issues of theological and legal tradition. I am also afraid—genuinely afraid—that it will make a few Muslims even more eager to silence me.

  But this is not a work of theology. It is more in the nature of a public intervention in the debate about the future of Islam. The biggest obstacle to change within the Muslim world is precisely its suppression of the sort of critical thinking I am attempting here. If nothing else comes of it, I will consider this book a success if it helps to spark a serious discussion of these issues among Muslims themselves. That, in my opinion, would represent a first step, however hesitant, toward the Reformation that Islam so desperately needs.

  For their part, many Westerners may be inclined to dismiss these propositions as quixotic. Other religions have undergone a process of reform, modifying core beliefs and adopting more tolerant and flexible attitudes compatible with modern, pluralistic societies. But what hope can there be to reform a religion that has resisted change for 1,400 years? If anything, Islam today seems, from the Western point of view, to be moving backward, not forward. Ironically, this book is written at a time when many in the West have begun to despair of winning the struggle against Islamic extremism, and when the hopes associated with the so-called Arab Spring have largely proved to be illusory.

  I agree that the Arab Spring was an illusion, at least in terms of Western expectations. From the outset, I regarded parallels with the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Velvet Revolution of 1989 as facile and doomed to disappointment. Nevertheless, I think many Western observers have missed the underlying import of the Arab Spring. Something was—and still is—definitely afoot within the Muslim world. There is a genuine constituency for change that was never there before. It is a constituency, I shall argue, that we overlook at our peril.

  In short, this is an optimistic book, a book that seeks to inspire not another war on terror or extremism but rather a real debate within and about the Muslim world. It is a book that attempts to explain what elements such a Reformation might change, written from the perspective of someone who has been at various times all three kinds of Muslim: a cocooned believer, a fundamentalist, and a dissident. My journey has gone from Mecca to Medina to Manhattan, and to the idea of a Modified Islam.

  The absence of a Muslim Reformation is what ultimately drove me to become an infidel, a nomad, and now a heretic. Future generations of Muslims deserve better, safer options. Muslims should be able to welcome modernity, not be forced to wall themselves off, or live in a state of cognitive dissonance, or lash out in violent rejection.

  The Muslim world is currently engaged in a massive struggle to come to terms with the challenge of modernity. The Arab Spring and Islamic State are just two versions of the reaction to that challenge. We in the West must not limit ourselves solely to military means in order to defeat the jihadists. Nor can we hope to cut ourselves off from contact with them. For these reasons, we have an enormous stake in how the struggle over Islam plays out. We cannot remain on the sidelines as though the outcome has nothing to do with us. If the Medina Muslims win and the hope for a Muslim Reformation dies, the rest of the world will pay an enormous price. And, with all the freedoms we take for granted, Westerners may have the most to lose.

  That is why I am also addressing this book to Western liberals—not just to those who saw fit to disinvite me from Brandeis but also to all the many others who would have done the same if their university had offered me an honorary degree.

  You who call yourselves liberals must understand that it is your way of life that is under threat. Withdraw my right to speak freely, and you jeopardize your own in the future. Ally yourselves with the Islamists at your peril. Tolerate their intolerance at your peril.

  In all kinds of ways, feminists and gay rights activists offer their support to Muslim women and gays in the West and, increasingly, in Muslim-majority countries. However, most shy away from linking the abuses they are against—from child marriage to the persecution of homosexuals—to the religious tenets on which the abuses are based. To give just a single example, in August 2014 the theocratic regime in Tehran executed two men, Abdullah Ghavami Chahzanjiru and Salman Ghanbari Chahzanjiri, apparently for violating the Islamic Republic’s law against sodomy. That law is based on the Qur’an and the hadith.

  People like me—some of us apostates, most of us dissident Muslims—need your support, not your antagonism. We who have known what it is to live without freedom watch with incredulity as you who call yourselves liberals—who claim to believe so fervently in individual liberty and minority rights—make common cause with the forces in the world that manifestly pose the greatest threats to that very freedom an
d those very minorities.

  I am now one of you: a Westerner. I share with you the pleasures of the seminar rooms and the campus cafés. I know we Western intellectuals cannot lead a Muslim Reformation. But we do have an important role to play. We must no longer accept limitations on criticism of Islam. We must reject the notions that only Muslims can speak about Islam, and that any critical examination of Islam is inherently “racist.” Instead of contorting Western intellectual traditions so as not to offend our Muslim fellow citizens, we need to defend the Muslim dissidents who are risking their lives to promote the human rights we take for granted: equality for women, tolerance of all religions and orientations, our hard-won freedoms of speech and thought. We support the women in Saudi Arabia who wish to drive, the women in Egypt who are protesting against sexual assault, the homosexuals in Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, the young Muslim men who want not martyrdom but the freedom to leave their faith. But our support would be more effective if we acknowledged the theological bases of their oppression.

  In short, we who have the luxury of living in the West have an obligation to stand up for liberal principles. Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture’s intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women’s rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity. And we need to say unambiguously to Muslims living in the West: If you want to live in our societies, to share in their material benefits, then you need to accept that our freedoms are not optional. They are the foundation of our way of life; of our civilization—a civilization that learned, slowly and painfully, not to burn heretics, but to honor them.

  Indeed, one highly desirable outcome of a Muslim Reformation would be to redefine the meaning of the word “heretic” itself. Religious reformations always shift the meaning of this term: today’s heretic becomes tomorrow’s reformer, while today’s defender of religious orthodoxy becomes tomorrow’s Torquemada. A Muslim Reformation would have the happy effect of turning the tables on those I am threatened by—rendering them the heretics, not me.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE STORY OF A HERETIC

  My Journey Away from Islam

  I was raised a practicing Muslim and remained one for almost half my life. I attended madrassas and memorized large parts of the Qur’an. As a child, I lived in Mecca for a time and frequently visited the Grand Mosque. As a teenager, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood. In short, I am old enough to have seen Islam’s bifurcation in the latter half of the twentieth century between the everyday faith of my parents and the intolerant, militant jihadism preached by the people I call the Medina Muslims. So let me begin with the Islam in which I grew up.

  I was about three years old when my grandmother started teaching me what little she had memorized of the Qur’an under the feathery leaves of the Somali talal tree. She could not read or write—literacy began to be promoted in Somalia only in 1969, the year I was born—and had no concept of Arabic. Instead, she worshipped the book, picking it up with great reverence, kissing it and placing it on her forehead before carefully and gently laying it back down. We could not touch the Qur’an without first washing our hands. My mother was the same way, except she had memorized a bit more and spoke a little Arabic. She had learned the prayers by heart and could also recite fearsome incantations, warning me that I would burn in hellfire for any misdeeds.

  My mother was born under a tree and grew up in the desert, and she was a wanderer when she was young, making it as far as Aden in Yemen, across the Red Sea. She was subjected to an arranged marriage and sent to Kuwait with her husband. As soon as her own father died, she divorced this husband. She met my father through her older sister when he was teaching people in the Somali capital how to read and write. My mother was one of his best students, with a quick and clever way with words. My father already had a wife, so my mother became his second. My father was a political man, an opposition leader trying to change Somalia, which was then ruled by the dictator Siad Barre. When I was two, the authorities came for him and took him away to the old Italian prison, otherwise known as “the Hole.” So, for most of my early years, it was simply my mother, my brother, my sister, my grandmother, and me.

  My first real school was a religious dugsi—a shed offering shelter from the burning sun. Between thirty and forty children sat under a roof held up by poles, surrounded by a thicket of trees. We had the only spot of shade. At the front and center of the space was a foot-high wooden table on which rested a large copy of the Qur’an. Our teacher wore the traditional Somali man’s garb of a sarong and a shirt, and he made us chant the verses, much as American and European preschool students learn to chant short poems and nursery rhymes. If we forgot or we were simply not loud enough or our voices dipped too low, he would take his stick and prod or whack us.

  We chanted again when students misbehaved. If you were disobedient, if you failed to learn what you were supposed to have learned, you were sent to the middle of the shed. The worst offender was hoisted high in a hammock and swung back and forth in the air. The rest of us were given little sticks and we raised our sticks above our heads and stood underneath, hitting the disobedient child through the open holes of the hammock, calling out verses from the Qur’an, chanting about the Day of Judgment, when the sun goes black and the hellfires burn.

  Every punishment at school or at home seemed to be laced with threats of hellfire and pleas for death or destruction: may you suffer this disease or that, and may you burn in hell. And yet in the evening, when the sun had dropped below the horizon and the cool night air reigned over us, my mother would face toward Mecca and say the evening prayer. Again and again, three maybe four times, she would recite the words, the opening verses of the Qur’an, and other verses, moving from standing with her hand across her womb, to bowing down, to prostrating herself, to sitting, then prostrating, then sitting again. There was an entire ritual of words and movement, and it repeated itself each night.

  After her prayers, we sat with cupped hands under the talal tree, begging Allah to release my father from prison. These were supplications to God to make life easy, asking Allah to be patient with us, to give us resilience, to convey upon us forgiveness and peace. “I seek shelter in Allah,” she would chant. “Allah the most merciful, the most kind . . . My Lord, forgive me, have mercy upon me, guide me, give me health and grant me sustenance and exalt me and set right my affairs.” It became as familiar and soothing as a lullaby, as far removed as could be imagined from the clashing sticks and taunting words of the dugsi.

  The supplications seemed to work. Thanks to the help of a relative, my father was able to escape from jail and flee to Ethiopia. The obvious thing would have been for my mother to take us to Ethiopia, too. But my mother would not go to Ethiopia. Because it was predominantly Christian, to her it was nothing but a sea of infidels in an unclean land. She preferred to go to Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, seat of its holiest places, Mecca and Medina. So she got a false passport and airline tickets, and then, one morning when I was eight years old, my grandmother woke us before dawn, dressed us in our good clothes, and by the time the day was over, we were in Saudi Arabia.

  We settled in Mecca, the spiritual heart of Islam, the place to which nearly every Muslim dreams of making a pilgrimage once in his or her life. We could enact that pilgrimage every week by taking the bus from our apartment to the Grand Mosque. At eight years old, I had already performed the Umra, the little version of the full pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, the fifth pillar of the Muslim faith, which washes away the pilgrim’s sins. Now, moreover, we could study Islam as it was taught in Saudi religious schools, rather than in a Somali shed. My sister, Haweya, and I were enrolled in a Qur’an school for girls; my brother, Mahad, went to a madrassa for boys. Previously I had been taught that all Muslims were united in brotherhood, but here I discovered that the brotherhood of Muslims did not preclude racial and cultural prejudice. What we h
ad learned of the Qur’an in Somalia was not good enough for the Saudis. We did not know enough; we mumbled instead of reciting. We did not learn to write any of the passages, we just learned to memorize each verse, repeating it slowly again and again. The Saudi girls were light-skinned and called us abid, or slaves—in fact, the Saudis had legally abolished slavery just five years before I was born. At home, my mother now made us pray five times each day, performing the rituals of washing and robing each time.

  It was here that I encountered for the first time the strict application of sharia law. In the public squares, every Friday, after the ritual prayers, men were beheaded or flogged, women were stoned, and thieves had their hands cut off amid great spurts of blood. The rhythm of chanted prayers was replaced by the reverberation of metal blades slicing through flesh and hitting stone. My brother—who, unlike me, was allowed to witness these punishments—used the nickname “Chop-Chop Square” for the one closest to us. We never questioned the ferocity of the punishments. To us, it was simply more hellfire.

  But the Grand Mosque, with its high columns, elaborate tiles, and polished floors, was more beguiling. Here, in the cool shade, my mother could walk seven times around the Kaaba, the holy building at the center of the mosque. This tranquillity was interrupted only in the month of the Hajj, the Islamic ritual pilgrimage, when we could not leave our apartment for fear of being trampled by the masses of believers streaming down the streets, and when even the simplest conversations had to be shouted over the din of constant prayer.

  It was in Mecca that I first became conscious of the differences between my father’s vision of Islam and my mother’s. After my father came from Ethiopia to join us, he insisted that we pray not separated by sex in separate rooms of the apartment, as was Saudi tradition, but together as a family. He did not throw the specter of hell in our faces, and once a week he taught us the Qur’an, reading from it and trying to translate it, infusing it with his own interpretations. He would tell me and my brother and my sister that God hadn’t put us on earth to punish us; He had put us on earth to worship him. I would look up and nod, but then, the next morning or afternoon, if I disobeyed my mother, she would once again revert to hellfire and eternal punishment.