Ridiculing
and questioning Islam, Muhammad, the Qur'an and religion in general is an
ancient tradition in Muslim countries.
July 2007
The
reaction to Salman Rushdie’s sellout knighthood by the more reactionary elements of the
Muslim world was somewhat to be expected. After all, Rushdie became a household
name and object of notoriety when the fanatical Ayatollah Khomeini
issued an apostasy fatwa condemning the Indian-born British author for his 1988
novel, The Satanic Verses and calling for his death.
My
objections to The Satanic Verses – which Katleen, my wife, “smuggled” into
Egypt for me wrapped in the cover of another book, just in case it was banned –
are purely literary. I find it to be one of his weaker efforts, given how it
limps, crawls and staggers along in places, intentionally trying to be clever,
obscure and confusing to the reader. Far superior, in my humble view, was Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh.
However,
much of the Muslim world does not share my a-religious view. Although the vast
majority of Muslims are uncomfortable with the Ayatollah’s fatwa and do not
wish death upon Rushdie, there is a strong sense of anger and offence,
particularly among Pakistani Muslims. Ironically, despite his iconoclasticism,
Rusdhie betrays a profound admiration and respect for the person of Muhammad in
the novel.
The
Satanic Verses, for those unfamiliar with it, is an allegory employing magical
realism. It is about two Indian Muslim actors who miraculously survive the
explosion of a hijacked plane. The Bollywood superstar suffers apparent
delusions and begins to have visions of being the angel Gabriel and encounters
a thinly veiled prophet “Mahound” while he is spreading his message in Jahilia
(the name commonly attributed to pre-Islamic Arabia). The most controversial
part was the section dealing with the prophet's authorship of a series of
verses - which he later expunged as “Satanic” – that sought to appease the
pagan Querishis of Mecca by recognising two of their favourite goddesses,
alongside their pre-Islamic father, also called Allah.
But, like
other examples of book burnings – and cartoon rage – throughout history, the fury had
little to do with Rushdie or his book, since none of the angry mobs have ever
actually read it. It is a reaction to western hegemony, socio-economic
stagnation, poverty, dictatorship and the slow death of the modern Muslim
secular dream.
Islam
being mocked by a “Muslim” may have been a novel achievement in the English
language, but it followed in the footsteps of a well-established tradition in
the Islamic world.
Three
decades before Rushdie, the Egyptian Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, published an allegorical novel. Set in
a poor imaginary Cairo
suburb rather like the traditional one Mahfouz was born and grew up in, Awlad
Haretna (Children of the Alley) traces the history of God, the
Abrahamic faiths and their relationship with modern-day secularism by depicting
them as neighbours in one alleyway.
Way before
the conservative Islamic wave that began to sweep through the country in the
late 1970s, the editors of Egypt's
largest daily al-Ahram felt confident enough to serialise
Mahfouz’s as yet unpublished novel in 1959. Muslim conservatives were up in
arms and – rather like their Christian cousins who managed to get Life of Brian banned in many parts of the west when
it was first released – they bullied the government into banning the book
version, forcing Mahfouz to go and publish it in liberal Beirut.
However,
Arab secularism was still alive and kicking, Iran’s fire and brimstone brand of
revolutionary Islam had not yet emerged, Saudi Arabia had not yet successfully
exported its reactionary form of Wahhabi Islam and no Egyptian youth had yet
gone to fight the communists in Afghanistan – and so Mahfouz felt no fear or
compulsion to go into hiding like Rushdie. In fact, the late novelist is still one
of Egypt's best-loved sons.
So relaxed
was he in generally placid Egypt that the exact movements of this creature of
habit were known to millions of Egyptians. When I was at university in the
early 1990s, a friend and I, after a late night out, decided to catch the newly
crowned Nobel laureate at the downtown cafe where he went for his morning
coffee to write. Approaching him sheepishly, we managed to exchange a few words
with the great man. Sadly, in 1994, the 82-year-old was stabbed in the neck by
two extremists, ironically spurred on by the call of an Egyptian firebrand
cleric inspired by the Satanic Verses fatwa. As a journalist, I met Mahfouz
once more some five years after the stabbing at a literary salon where – with
his failing hearing and near-blind eyes – his presence was a ghostly symbol of
a fading age.
Retroactive
condemnation of published works is coming into vogue, as was demonstrated by
the controversystirred up by the republishing of
the talented Syrian novelist Heidar Heidar's melancholy novel, A Banquet for Seaweed, which - besides its treatment of the
dashed post-colonial dreams of independence and freedom as dictators replaced
former colonial masters – deals with themes of atheism and religious
scepticism.
Those
Muslims who condemn such literature and views as un-Islamic and new-fangled
western imports are obviously unaware of their own history. Some 12 centuries
before these modern writers, Ibn al-Rawandi was establishing a controversial
reputation for himself as the Richard Dawkins of
ninth-century Baghdad
(probably the wealthiest and most advanced city in the world at the time).
Belonging,
as he did, to a more poetic age, his most famous work was not entitled The
Allah Delusion, but had the more colourful title of The Emerald Book (Kitab
al-Zumurrud). Nevertheless, he was no less sparing than Dawkins would be in his
indictment and rejection of the divine authorship of the Qur'an, Muhammad's
status as a prophet and organised religion. He argued that humans possess the
gift of intellect, by which they can judge right and wrong, rendering the
prophets and scripture superfluous.
A century or
so later, Abu al-Ala al-Ma’ari captured Ibn al-Rawandi’s sentiments in eloquent
verse:
Of all the doctrines
that I have heard
My heart has never
accepted a single word
The prophets, too, among
us come to teach
Are one with those who
from the pulpit preach
They pray, they slay,
the pass away – and yet
Our ills remain as
pebbles on the beach
Ibn
al-Rawandi’s fellow Mu’tazalites
did not share the depth of his scepticism and a bitter intellectual dispute
ensued.Nonetheless, the Mu’tazalites –
unlike the traditionalist schools of sunna and hadith – held reason above all
else. “The status of rationality among the Mu’tazalites is a magnificent page
in the history of Islam and the Arabs,” writes Muhammad Emara in his Islam and
the philosophy of government.
They made the
valiant attempt to reconcile reason with religion so that their leap of faith
would be a learned one. They also stepped back from the political clashes
subsuming early Islam and tried to build bridges between the atheists,
polytheists, non-Muslims, the orthodox, the political shi’ia and sunna
factions, as well as Arab and Persian nationalists.
They were
also the first to fuse Islamic theology with Greek philosophy and the paradigm
shift they set in motion away from general philosophy and towards specialised knowledge
paved the way for the emergence of modern ‘science’ as we know it with all its
multifarious branches, many of which were born in the Muslim world.
For more than
700 years, ‘Islam’, founded on the power of the intellect and underwritten by
the spice and silk trade, would blossom. Then, a reawakening ‘Christendom’
borrowed wholesale from Islamic science and rationality, began to close the gap
with the Renaissance. Then, the wealth generated by its smashing of the Muslim
monopoly on the spice trade, the bounty of the Americas and European global
colonialism would, by the 18th century, cause the Muslim world and
the West to trade relative positions.
According
to Dawkins, most of the modern scientists who talk of “God” do so in the
loosest possible sense of the word. Likewise, many of the greatest scientists
of Islam's golden age sailed pretty close to the wind and, like their modern
counterparts, were often deists rather
than theists.
Like
Einstein, the 10th century Persian scientist and philosopher IbnSina (Avicenna) who established many of the
logical principles upon which the modern scientific method is based had such an
abstract conception of “God” that it bore no resemblance to the one we know
from scripture. His was a “big bang” kind of God who appears to have no will.
Ibn Sina viewed existence not as the work of a capricious deity, but of a
divine, self-causing thought process.
Islam’s
glory was a secular one based on knowledge and science. This is what makes the
current drift towards scripture, ritual and conservatism in many Muslims so
alarming. Just because dictators and foreign meddling spoiled the modern
secular experiment, that does not mean we should throw the baby out with the
bathwater.
Muslims
could draw lessons from Europe’s Renaissance and learn and embrace the
“western” sciences while drawing pride from their own ancient heritage, rather
like the Europeans did with the ancient Greeks.
June 2007 – It is time to dispel the myths
surrounding Muslims – namely, that we are all terrorist anti-feminist
teetotallers. Read on
A war on error (2)
June 2007 – It is time to dispel the myths that
conservative Muslims often propagate about 'the west'. Read on
Conversion is not a crime
December 2005 – Muriel Degauque has the dubious
distinction of being the first white European female suicide bomber. Shocking
as this is, suggestions that we have reached a dangerous turning point and that
converts are brainwashed fanatics and their partners are comic-book villains
are unfair to the vast majority of converts and to non-converts married to
Muslims.Read on
A revision of Salman Rushdie’s vision –
We need ijtihadis, not jihadis
September 2005 – Salman Rushdie’s proposed
Islamic Reformation touches on the urgent need for reform in most Muslim
societies. But his vision needs serious revision if it is to work. Read on
Islam and Europe:
Clash and mash
April 2005 –
Khaled Diab and Katleen Maes examine the myths driving anti-Islamic fervour in
the EU. Read
on
ã2007 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.
