Isaias was 16 when he escaped from Sa’wa, the military training camp for final-year high school students in Eritrea. His parents came to know of his whereabouts only a few weeks after. From Sudan he tried to cross the Sinai to reach Israel. But he was kidnapped by bandits. His family paid a high ransom to save him.

An Eritrean migrant leaves a detention facility near Nitzana in the Negev Desert in Israel, near border with Egypt. EPA-EFE/Jim Hollander

Isaias returned to Addis Ababa, the capital of neighbouring Ethiopia, where I met him when he was 17. His family was supporting him financially and wanted him to remain there. But Isaias had different plans. A few months later he disappeared. As I was later to learn, he had successfully crossed from Libya into Europe.

This young man is part of a worrying statistic. Since around 2010, the flow of unaccompanied minors from Eritrea has significantly increased and has become the subject of international concern. In 2015, over 5000 unaccompanied minors from Eritrea sought asylum in Europe according to the Mixed Migration Centre. In 2018, the number was 3500.

Minors are only part of a wider exodus that involves mostly Eritreans in their twenties and thirties. The UN refugee agency calculates that at the end of 2018 there were over 500 000 Eritrean refugees worldwide – a high number for a country of around 5 million people.

Initially driven by a simmering border conflict with Ethiopia, this mass migration continues to be fuelled by a lack of political, religious and social freedom. In addition, there are little economic prospects in the country.

And generations of young people have been trapped in a indefinite mandatory national service. They serve in the army or in schools, hospitals and public offices, irrespective of their aspirations, with little remuneration. Even though Ethiopia and Eritrea have struck a deal to end their border conflict, there is no debate over the indefinite nature of the national service.

Brought up in a context where migration represents the main route out of generational and socio-economic immobility, most young Eritreans I met decided to leave. While unaccompanied minors are usually depicted as passively accepting their families’ decisions, my research illustrates their active role in choosing whether and when to migrate.

I explored the negotiations that take place between young migrants and their families as they consider departing and undertaking arduous journeys. But the crucial role of agency shouldn’t be equated to a lack of vulnerability. Vulnerability, in fact, defines their condition as young people in Eritrea and is likely to grow due to the hardships of the journey.

Context of protracted crisis

Young Eritreans often migrate without their family’s approval.

Families are aware that the country can’t offer their children a future. Nevertheless, parents are reticent about encouraging their children to take a risky path, a decision that can lead to death at sea or at the hand of bandits.

Young Eritreans keep their plans secret due to respect, or emotional care, towards their families. One 23-year-old woman who had crossed to Ethiopia a year before told me:
 

It is better not to make them worry for nothing: if you make it, then they can be happy for you; if you don’t make it, they will have time to be sad afterwards.

Adonay, another 26-year-old man, said:
 

If you tell them they might tell you not to do it, and then it would be harder to disobey. If they endorse your decision then they might feel responsible if something bad happens to you. It should be only your choice.

But that is not all. As a young woman told me,
 

The less they know the better it is in case the police come to the house asking questions about the flight.

Migration from Eritrea is mostly illegal and tightly controlled by the government, any connivance could be punished with fees or incarceration.

The journey

Eritrean border crossings are based on complicated power dynamics involving smugglers, smuggled refugees and their paying relatives, generally residing in Europe, US or the Middle East.

In this mix, smuggled refugees are far from being choice-less or the weak party.

Relatives are often scared of the dangers of border crossing through Libya to Europe. Moreover, some may not be able to mobilise the necessary funds. But young refugees have their ways to persuade them.

As payment to smugglers is typically made at the end in Libya and then after migrants have reached Italy, refugees embark on these journeys without telling their potential financial supporters in the diaspora. Once in Libya, they provide the smugglers with the telephone number of those who are expected to pay. This is an extremely risky gamble as migrants are betting on their relatives’ resources and willingness to help them.

Those who do not have close enough relatives abroad cannot gamble at all. Sometimes relatives struggle to raise the necessary amount and have to collect money from friends and larger community networks. Migrants then have to spend more time – and at times experience more violence and deprivation – in the warehouses where smugglers keep them in Libya. Migrants are held to hide them from authorities and ensure their fees are paid.

Even in these conditions, migrants don’t necessarily give up their agency. It has been argued that they,
 

temporarily surrender control at points during the journey, accepting momentary disempowerment to achieve larger strategic goals.

Moving beyond the common framing

Analysing the interactions between Eritrean families and their migrant children at different stages of their journeys can contribute to moving beyond the common framing of the “unaccompanied minor” characterised by an ambivalent depiction as either the victim or the bogus migrant.

These opposing and binary views of unaccompanied minors implicitly link deserving protection with ultimate victimhood devoid of choice. Instead, the stories of Eritreans show that vulnerability, at the outset and during the journey, does not exclude agency.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir at the 2015 AU Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. EPA/Kim Ludbrook

Thus far the president has managed to resist the anger of his people. But Sudanese have a long history of overthrowing unpopular regimes. Twice before – in 1964 and then again in 1985 – revolts led to changes of government. On each occasion the armed forces abandoned the regime and sided with the people. This has not occurred during the current protests for good reasons, as university lecturer and author of Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan Willow Berridge points out:
 

Al-Bashir’s regime clearly learnt from the mistakes of its predecessors. It has created a much stronger National Intelligence Security Services (NISS) as well as a host of other parallel security organisations and armed militias that it uses to police Khartoum instead of the regular army. This set up, combined with various commanders’ mutual fears of being held to account for war crimes if the regime falls, means an army intervention will not occur easily as in 1964 or 1985. This is one reason the current uprising has already lasted longer than its precedents.

But the regime’s survival cannot simply be seen as a domestic issue. He has strong international allies. The West once reviled Omar al-Bashir as an indicted war criminal. However, more recently they have begun to view him as a source of stability and intelligence in a troubled region. The president also has the backing – both political and financial – of key Arab allies.
 

Arab support

Sudanese have traditionally been said to look North to Cairo for support. This crisis is no exception. In December Egypt’s foreign minister and intelligence chief visited Khartoum, pledging their support for Al-Bashir.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, who flew to Sudan with intelligence chief General Abbas Kamel, confidently stated:
 

Egypt is confident that Sudan will overcome the present situation.

This was followed earlier this month during a reciprocal trip to Cairo by the Sudanese president at which President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi commented:
 

Egypt fully supports the security and stability of Sudan, which is integral to Egypt’s national security.

But political support alone wouldn’t be enough to keep the Sudanese regime in power. There is also financial backing from across the Red Sea. In return for Sudan entering the Yemeni war Khartoum is reported to have received investments worth US$2.2 billion. More than 10,000 Sudanese troops are fighting on the Yemeni frontline. Some are said to be child soldiers who were recruited by the Saudis, with offers of US$10,000 for each recruit.
 

Other allies

The rehabilitation of al-Bashir in the US goes back to President Barack Obama’s era. As one of the last acts of his office, he lifted a range of US sanctions against the Sudanese regime. The CIA’s large office in Khartoum was cited as one of the key reasons for his policy shift.

Nor is Washington alone in this view. As Europe battles to restrict the number of Africans crossing the Mediterranean it has seen the Sudanese government as an ally. The “Khartoum Process”, signed in the Sudanese capital, is critical to this relationship. In November 2015 European leaders met their African counterparts in the Maltese capital, Valletta, to try to put flesh on the bones of this agreement. The aim was made clear in the accompanying EU press release which concluded that;
 

The number of migrants arriving to the European Union is unprecedented, and this increased flow is likely to continue. The EU, together with the member states, is taking a wide range of measures to address the challenges, and to establish an effective, humanitarian and safe European migration policy.

The summit led to the drafting of an Action Plan which has guided the EU’s policy objectives on migration and mobility ever since.

The plan detailed how European institutions would cooperate with their African partners to fight
 

irregular migration, migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings.

Europe promised to offer training to “law enforcement and judicial authorities” in new methods of investigation and
 

assisting in setting up specialised anti-trafficking and smuggling police units.

These commitments were an explicit pledge to support and strengthen elements of the Sudanese state. A Regional Operational Centre (ROCK) has been established in Khartoum whose chief aim it to halt people smuggling and refugee flows by allowing European officials to work directly with their Sudanese opposite numbers. The counter-trafficking coordination centre in Khartoum — staffed jointly by police officers from Sudan and several European countries, including Britain, France and Italy — will partly rely on information sourced by the Sudanese national intelligence service.

Finally there is some evidence of Russian involvement in the Sudanese crisis. Russian troops, working for a private contractor, are reported to have been seen on the streets of Khartoum, suppressing the uprising.

Given the range of support for al-Bashir it isn’t surprising that he’s managed to resist popular pressure to step down. Much depends on how long demonstrations can be maintained, and how much force the regime is prepared to deploy to crush its opponents.
 

Martin Plaut, Senior Research Fellow, Horn of Africa and Southern Africa, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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One of the religious deliberation sessions. Photo: Dr Nur Rofiah. (Images courtesy openDemocracy)

Can women interpret Islamic law? This question would have been a ‘no-brainer’ to a Muslim from Damascus in the 12th century, when women served as renowned teachers of the Islamic tradition, and the opinions of women jurists on questions of Islamic law carried weight comparable to that of male jurists.Yet, if one asks a Muslim today: have you ever asked a woman for an interpretation of Islamic law?, the answer from Dakar to Dhaka, from Sarajevo to Cape Town, from Jakarta to Ann Arbor will usually be “no”.

Women are not asked to interpret Islamic law, and few expect them to do so. Very often, this is because women are not sufficiently trained for this work. If they are, they tend to be consulted only on so-called ‘women’s issues’ such as child rearing, a wife’s duties towards her husband and towards others in the family, household organisation, and hygiene.

In recent years, however, Muslims in different parts of the world have started to address gender imbalances in juristic expertise. In India, Turkey and Morocco, programs have been set up to train women as muftis (jurists who can issue fatwas or expert legal opinions). Judicial bureaucracies in Malaysia and the Palestinian Authority have begun to hire female judges in their sharia courts.

Recently, Indonesian organisations also joined forces to convene the Muslim world’s first congress of ulama perempuan: women Islamic scholars.

This historic event, held in late April in Cirebon, West Java, was nothing short of a breakthrough in terms of re-establishing the long-lost juristic authority of women to produce Islamic legal recommendations and rulings. It concluded with the issuance of three historic fatwas – against sexual violence, child marriage, and environmental degradation exacerbating gender inequality.  
Between us, we have studied Islamic authority and gender for decades. We interviewed several of the women scholars, as well as some of the male attendees, involved in the event to learn more about it and the deliberations process. We have also been able to analyse some of the copious explanatory material issued by the congress.

It was nothing short of a breakthrough in terms of re-establishing women's juristic authority

Women’s juristic authority was squarely on the agenda. Such authority can manifest itself in Islam in several ways including by leading prayer, reciting the Qur’an, delivering a sermon, transmitting a hadith (a saying of the prophet). The pinnacle of this authority is the ability to interpret Islamic sources to make recommendations of behaviour in the here and now.

Also read: How Muslim women clerics are increasingly challenging traditional narratives.

In most contemporary Muslim societies, this is exercised in two main ways. The first is by issuing fatwas. These are legal recommendations based typically on interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith. (Different sects in Islam regard different hadiths as authentic, and therefore the specific source material differs from sect to sect.)

A person trained to issue a fatwa is called a mufti, with the feminine form in Arabic muftiya. Fatwas are only recommendations and they are not binding. But they can carry great weight. In some countries, policy makers take fatwas of leading Islamic authorities into account when, for example, considering reforms to family law, inheritance, Islamic finance or food and medicines regulations.  

The second way this authority is exercised is by serving as a judge in an Islamic court. This requires deep engagement and expertise interpreting religious sources, and the needed erudition and experience can take decades of study and training to acquire.

In Indonesia, for instance, family courts for the Muslim majority apply Islamic law (non-Muslims are subject to civil family law). Since the 1950s, judges for these courts have been trained in the country’s Islamic state institutes.

Although female judges of Islamic law were unheard of at the time – and remain a minority – admission to these institutes was not restricted to men. And so women also completed this advanced training and, from the 1960s, some have been appointed judges in Indonesia’s Islamic courts.
 

Women ulama visit the Indonesian minister of religious affairs before the congress. Photo: Dr Nur Rofiah.

In 1970, Sudan also appointed women as judges in courts applying what’s known as “non-codified” Islamic law (under which judges must interpret original sources, as there is no codified text issued by the state, like a statute or book of law).However, it would take another 35 years before women would be appointed to Islamic courts in other countries. Malaysia did so in 2005, the Palestinian Authority in 2009, and Israel just a few months ago appointed the first woman judge to its Islamic courts.

The congress in Indonesia aimed to raise awareness about these developments and strengthen local initiatives to promote women’s juristic authority in Islam. Importantly, it showed that it’s not only women who stand behind this struggle. Male scholars, while a minority, were also among the speakers and attendees.

It’s not only women who stand behind this struggle. Male scholars were also at the congress.

It’s not only women who stand behind this struggle. Male scholars were also at the congress.  At the congress’s core was “musyawarah keagamaan” (religious deliberation) to formulate fatwas. In many Muslim countries fatwas are associated with individual Islamic leaders, but Indonesia has a long tradition of fatwas issued by Islamic institutions’ ‘fatwa commissions.’

The women ulama at the congress issued three fatwas. This in itself was historic as fatwa issuing has long been monopolised by male clerics. (There are, for example, only seven women ulama out of 67 members of the fatwa commission of Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI) – a prominent Islamic organisation, set up by the government in the 1970s).

The first fatwa issued focused on sexual violence. It emphasises that such violence including within marriage (marital rape) is forbidden under Islamic law (haram). It also distinguishes zina (adultery and fornication) from rape. It emphasises that victims must receive psychological, physical and social support – not punishment.

The second fatwa concerns child marriage. It says these practices bring harm (mudarat) to society. The ulama’s accompanying commentary calls for raising the Indonesian legal marriage age for girls from 16 to 18 years. Importantly, as most child marriages are not registered with the state in the first place, the fatwa also tells ordinary Muslims and imams that it is obligatory (wajib) to prevent them.   

The third fatwa links environmental destruction and social inequality. It describes environmental degradation for economic gain as haram and says it has in recent decades in Indonesia exacerbated economic disparity with women the most affected. It notes how drought, for example, adds to the burdens of rural women typically responsible for preparing food and fetching water.

Participants told us that deliberations on this fatwa also touched on issues of land and forest governance, and how deforestation affects women in particular. It demanded that the Indonesian government should impose strict punishments on perpetrators of environmental destruction. Among other things, the discussion noted illegal deforestation campaigns in Indonesia to make space for vast palm oil plantations.

Like the best judges in any society, the women ulama are also experts in diverse contemporary issues.

The women ulama based their religious interpretations on four sources: the verses of the Qur’an, hadith, aqwal ‘ulama (views of religious scholars), and the Indonesian constitution. They used a methodology called “unrestricted reasoning” (istidlal), with stated aims to maximise maslaha (public interest) and reduce mudarat (harm) to arrive at rulings.

The three fatwas show that women ulama also have the ability and the expertise in Islamic sources to formulate these recommendations. They also show that the ulama perempuan do not restrict themselves to the Qur’an, hadith, other classical Islamic texts, and talking about the past. Like the best judges in any society, they are also experts in diverse contemporary issues.

Indeed, Nur Rofi’ah, an expert in Qur’anic and gender studies who took part in the congress, told us that it produced more than fatwas, which usually consist of only a few pages of argumentation.

The congress considered a larger range of sources during its deliberations, including evidence of conditions and challenges faced by women. It also produced far longer and more in-depth textual explanations.

Some Indonesian gender rights activists, and Indonesian fatwa committees themselves, use the term sikap keagamaan (religious views) for recommendations that come out of this more complex deliberation process and outcome.

But whether one calls these fatwas or sikap keagamaan, their significance was clear: This congress was a historic step towards reestablishing the long-lost juristic authority of women to produce Islamic legal recommendations and rulings.

Dr. Mirjam Künkler is senior research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and author of Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, (Columbia University Press, 2013). She has recently published a special journal issue on female Islamic authority in southeast Asia, in the Asian Studies Review 40, 4 (December 2016).

This article was first published on openDemocracy.
 

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The classification of a famine as man-made is applied to severe hunger arising from a set of foreseeable, and therefore avoidable, circumstances. According to criteria set down by the United Nations a famine is declared in an area when at least 20% of households are viewed as being exposed to extreme food shortages, 30% are malnourished and deaths from hunger has reached two persons a day for every 10,000.

Famines can result from natural or man-made causes. Natural causes include droughts, plant disease, insect plagues, floods and earthquakes. A prolonged drought is behind the recent warning of potential famine in Somalia by the World Food Programme.

The human causes of famine include extreme poverty, war, deliberate crop destruction and the inefficient distribution of food. South Sudan’s predicament falls square under this category. There have been no major droughts, flooding or other natural catastrophe reported. Instead a three year conflict that has engulfed the country, combined with high food prices, economic disruption and low agricultural production has resulted in UN and the government of South Sudan declaring a famine in the country.

According to the head of the World Food Programme, the avoidable conflict between the main political protagonists is solely to blame. Years of conflict have created a situation in which many women, children and the elderly are suffering needlessly and have no access to food or water.

High food prices, economic disruption and low agricultural production have resulted in the large areas becoming “food insecure”. The situation could not have come at a more difficult time. Years of conflict have crippled the economy and hammered the value of its currency. Severe inflation has seen the value of its currency plummet 800% in the past year alone. This has made food unaffordable for many families.

Despite the deteriorating situation the government of South Sudan has been using its limited resources to buy weapons, increase the number of states, pay military wages and wage war on civilians.

Conflict sows seeds of hunger

Significant progress in reducing global hunger has been achieved over the past 30 years. But the impact of conflict on food production and citizens ability to feed themselves is often underestimated. This was highlighted in a study that found that

“civil wars and conflicts are detrimental to food security, but the negative effects are more severe for countries unable to make available for their citizens the minimum dietary energy requirement under which a country is qualified for food aid”

This is true of South Sudan, which can feed itself in peace time. Just six months ago, many parts of the country were bustling with agricultural activity, producing enough food for the local populations.

The medium sized town of Yei is a good example. Locals report an inability to cultivate their land since the recent escalation of fighting. A town once seen as a place where coffee bean production was on the rise is now a place where farmers no longer venture out.

It’s also likely that Yemen, Nigeria, and Somalia, could declare a famine in the next few months. It’s no coincidence that those countries are also embroiled in widespread or localised armed conflict.
 

Deteriorating situation

More than 100,000 people in two counties of Unity state are experiencing famine. This number could rise as an additional one million South Sudanese are on the brink of starvation. Central Equatoria state, traditionally South Sudan’s breadbasket, has been hit by ethnically targeted killings that have disrupted agricultural production.

Between 40%-50% of South Sudan’s population are expected to be severely food insecure and at risk of death in the coming months. Over 250,000 children are severely malnourished according to UNICEF and these are number where UNICEF has access to.

Yet the government does not seem to want to address the underlying causes of the famine. In fact it’s unclear what its overall plan is.

It is relocating by air internally displaced people through Juba into Malakal. The Dinka-controlled government’s strategy is not entirely clear. But some of my informants claim that the objective is to rid the capital of rival ethnic groups that could pose a direct threat to the seat of government in Juba.

Adding to this, the new Special Representative for South Sudan has raised concerns over some 20,000 internally displaced people on the West bank of the Nile in the Upper Nile region as a “real problem.” These fleeing civilians are victims of government efforts to consolidate power centrally and push certain ethnic groups who are not aligned to the government away from the centre.
 

Food aid restricted

The UN has repeatedly warned that government forces are blocking the delivery of food aid to affected areas.

South Sudan’s government wouldn’t be the first to have done this. In 2012 the Rohingya in Myanmar who were left to starve amidst sectarian violence with local Buddhist communities. In 2011 it was Sudan starving its people in the Nuba mountain region. More recently in Syria the government was allegedly targeting bakeries, hitting civilians waiting to buy food.

According to the Geneva Convention treaty on non-international armed conflicts a government can legally restrict food access for a short-term period if it is militarily necessary. This is a very narrow exception. It cannot and should not be used to punish civilians for their affiliation to the conflict and it cannot be used on a biased basis. And such restrictions must not result in starvation of the civilians.

Famine and political unrest

The situation in South Sudan is likely to get worse. The ongoing conflict is likely to escalate as the number of smaller armed groups rises on the back of more localised self-militias being set up. In the light of this government military action will escalate.

This new dimension in South Sudan’s conflict increases in the chances of further political turmoil and further narrows the window of peace for the world’s youngest nation.

Andrew Edward Tchie, Conflict Advisor, Ph.D. candidate and Associate Fellow, University of Essex

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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South Sudan refugee camp, 2011. Maximilian Norz/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

Judging by the millions protesting against president Trump’s policies on behalf of the vulnerable and voiceless, empathy is alive and well. Or is it? Trump’s recent immigration ban exempts Christians from Muslim-majority countries, recognizing their status as the world’s most persecuted faith. But how much empathy do Christians feel for their brothers and sisters in Africa? And why do Muslims who care about the plight of the Palestinians lose so little sleep over the systematic elimination of their black African co-religionists in Darfur? Is skin colour still a significant stumbling block to empathy?
 

Who exactly is my neighbour?

For years, African Christians have been persecuted for their faith. For the purposes of this article, persecution is not litigation against bakers who refuse to make cakes for gay weddings, or pharmacists declining to sell contraceptives. Rather, persecution is the deliberate and deadly targeting of Christians because of their religious identity, whether it is the terrorist group Boko Haram bombing churches in northern Nigeria, or the Sudanese armed forces killing their non-Muslim citizens, or Islamic State brutally erasing 2000 years of Middle East sectarian diversity. 

Occasionally, the western media reports on Egyptian mobs destroying Coptic Churches, or ISIS beheading Syrian and Iraqi Christians. But coverage of Africans being subjected to massive ethnic cleansing is relatively rare. African Christians are left wondering if their co-religionists in the comparatively wealthy white world take the commandment about loving their neighbour so literally that they empathise only with people like themselves, as Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene.

The Africans interviewed for this article do not come from the ranks of intellectuals who blame colonialism for the continent’s problems. Yet, they believe that even though most westerners deny it, at a subconscious level a black African Christian life isn’t quite as valuable as a white one.

“Christians in Europe and America are not talking much about the killings of fellow Christians in Africa because to some, Africans do not matter, just like during the genocide, when our people were killed,” a survivor of the Rwandan genocide explained to me. “The west did not care much, but when they are attacked by terrorists they make measures to stop terrorists and it is in the world news”. In the words of another Rwandan, who provides training for genocide survivors: “My take on this? It is pure racism, and there has never been any brotherly love”.

A retired British bishop recalled attending a conference at Lambeth Palace (home of the Anglican Church worldwide) where an American bishop said the African Anglicans were, “only just out of the jungle.” “He failed to realize that more of the African Bishops had earned doctorates than he or most of those American Bishops who complained!” The retired bishop continued: “I was a bit shocked when Archbishop Justin Welby said he lost sleep over homophobia, at the same time as fellow Christians were being massacred in Northern Nigeria, which he didn’t mention”.

According to Bill Andress, an American who has been campaigning against the persecution of Sudanese Christians for decades, “whether consciously or subconsciously, we do not value the lives and welfare of black people as we value those of white people, and we assume that tragedy in Africa is just part of the picture and cannot be stopped”.

Another American campaigner, Marv Steinberg, of Genocide No More, believes Christians in the US are split in their interpretation of the commandment to love thy neighbour, “meaning your immediate neighbour, if he agrees with you. I really think race enters into it”.  

And Rod Brayfindley, a pastor in northern California, blames “the difficulty of overcoming both deep and latent racism in the western press.” He adds, “news rooms argue African conflicts are too expensive and risky to cover, but if a similar group of white folk were being attacked, they would absolutely have the funds to cover them”.

Many European and American Christians insist people of faith should be concerned about all humankind, and not just their co-religionists. Yet, this does not account for the widespread ignorance among western Christians about black African Christians who are being killed precisely because they practise their faith, rather than converting to Islam or agreeing to live by Islamic rules.

According to Ann Buwalda of the Jubilee Campaign, a UK charity which advocates for persecuted Christians worldwide, “when I speak or share in American churches, I find there is interest in the suffering in Africa. But when people are not given anything to do in response to hearing the horrors, they will shut down and tune out because of the emotional side of learning and then not knowing what to do with the information”.

The awareness gap persists, despite the best efforts of several western NGOs like the Jubilee Campaign. It is unlikely many Jewish people have not heard of the Holocaust, or that most literate Muslims would not know about the Palestinians. Both ‘sides’ in the Palestine-Israel conflict have efficiently politicised their co-religionists across the globe. Arguably, some Muslims and Jews living beyond the Holy Land may pay lip service to the cause represented by their imperiled brothers, but, in contrast to Christians, they are at least aware of the issues.

Perhaps, as Barbara, an Anglican stalwart in California, put it, people feel so overwhelmed by the misery of Africa that they do not distinguish between the victims of famine, AIDS, natural disasters, civil wars and jihad. If this is the case, then, in the view of one British aid worker I spoke to, development charities and NGOs may be partly to blame for painting such a negative picture of the continent in order to raise money.
Andy Warren-Rothlin, an academic living in Nigeria, echoes this, when he argues that “western media has tended to present suffering Africans in ways which do not engender engagement (‘she’s just like me!’), but rather paternalism (‘I must help the poor thing’). The result is that western audiences don’t see a village in northeast Nigeria as somewhere they might live, or a Nigerian church as somewhere they might have been when Boko Haram rolled into town”.

It was not always like this, points out Sam Totten, an American academic with decades of human rights and humanitarian experience in Africa. Less than 20 years ago, the evangelical supporters of George W Bush pushed him to press the Sudanese regime to allow ten million southern Sudanese Christians to secede in 2011, forming South Sudan. That widely-shared concern seems to have shrunk to a few NGOs and activists.
One of president Obama’s final acts was to ease Sudanese sanctions. Yet, the Khartoum regime continues to bomb the Christian areas in what remains of Sudan. Villages, schools and hospitals have been targeted as recently as January 2017, while, according to Amnesty, Sudan used chemical weapons against its Muslim civilians in Darfur in September 2016. But instead of outrage at Obama’s appeasement of Sudanese leader Field Marshall Bashir, the only sitting head of state indicted for the crime of genocide, there has been near silence from American politicians who otherwise flaunt their Christian values.
 

The wrong kind of Muslim?

The Islamic world is similarly unmoved by the fate of Muslims in Darfur, prompting some Middle Eastern commentators to observe that black African Muslims suffer from the same indifference as black African Christians. “Are the people of Darfur not Muslim as well?” demands Tareq Al-Hamed of the Asharq Alaswat paper. And the former fundamentalist, now Washington think-tank expert Ed Husain asks, “Are Darfuris the ‘wrong’ kind of Muslim because they self-identify as black Africans rather than Arabs?”.

I spoke to a canon in northern Nigeria who believes that most Arabs still view Africans as slaves, even when they share the same Muslim faith. His view is supported by anecdotes from Sudanese who describe being routinely and publicly addressed as abid (slave) when working in North Africa and the Middle East. In Libya, Human Rights Watch has documented the alarming extent to which black African Muslims have been bullied, tormented, attacked and killed by Arabs. The Canadian academic Salim Mansur believes, “Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long and turbulent history”.

Andy Warren-Rothlin sees the situation differently. “This is clearly not a race issue, since it’s even harder to get interest from London-based southern Nigerians in the suffering of their northern Nigerian compatriots. Or if it is race (if you use such terms!), you must recognise that each of the 500 or so ethnic groups in Nigeria is one ‘race’.” His views are shared by American Christian activists who are disappointed by the lack of concern shown by southern Nigerian Christians towards their fellow Christians in the northeast of the country. “Nigeria is so delicately balanced between Muslim and Christian, that the Christians living in relative peace don’t want to stir up trouble,” admitted one campaigner.

Richard Cockett, a regional editor at The Economist, argues that the Rohingya people of Myanmar have, until very recently, suffered the same invisibility as African Muslims. Because the Rohingya are “mildly Sufi”, he tells me, they have not attracted support from Muslims further afield. Now, thanks to a recent UN report, their persecution has been noticed, but for decades they suffered ethnic cleansing in obscurity. They might not have been African, but it seems they were the wrong kind of Muslim.

Meanwhile, Muslim countries that consider themselves as defenders of the faith have been silent following the Trump Administration’s ban on Muslim immigrants. And it has been widely noted that three million Syrian refugees could be given shelter in the 100,000 air-conditioned tents standing empty in Saudi Arabia.

What can be done? Each time a Christian or Muslim leader or politician piously invokes their faith, they should be challenged by the faithful and the non-faithful alike in their community to make good on the pledges of equality and shared identity explicit in the roots of both religions. If a church or mosque does not have a partner or link with a church or mosque in Africa, then members of their community should ask why not. In addition, our governments should recognise the vital role played by African churches and mosques as arbiters of local reconciliation, because they often represent the only genuine civil society in repressive countries; and our aid programmes should therefore support those grassroots peace-building efforts.

Is it worth contacting our elected officials and faith leaders about these matters? The late American Senator Paul Simon said that if only he had heard from 100 constituents demanding action during the Rwanda genocide, he would have felt empowered to contact the Secretary of State. Politicians know that for every one person who makes a phone call or writes a letter or an email, there are hundreds of thousands who share their views but haven’t quite got around to taking action. It is never a waste of energy.

Rebecca Tinsley is the founder of Network for Africa, a charity that trains local people to become lay counsellors for the survivors of conflict and genocide. She also founded Waging Peace, an NGO campaigning for human rights in Sudan.

This article was first published on Open Democracy

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Sudanese police fired tear gas and beat women protesting outside a Sudanese court during the trial of a female journalist accused of violating the Islamic dress code by wearing trousers in public, 2009. Press Association/ And Raouf.

It was July 2012 and I was standing with an acquaintance inside the Haj Yousif court-house as we were waiting to attend the trial of several activists. The acquaintance, a young woman, had just been released from detention by the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) and was telling me her story. As I took mental notes, I kept thinking of my best friend who was asked during an NISS interrogation if she was a lesbian.

This was because they had seen pictures of us together on a boat on my birthday. In 2012 and 2013, as a wave of mass protests swept Sudan, a number of tweeps confirmed that pornography websites, which were normally blocked by the National Telecommunications Council (NTC), had been unblocked. Pornography was a tool the NTC started to use to control the masses. It was as if they were saying: stay home and get off, but don't go out and protest!

Sudanese civil society was painted as a world of debauchery and this debauchery was documented in pictures that were shown inside the courthouse, violating the privacy of the defendants and their friends. The NISS wanted to put the entire civil society on trial and in Sudan, the worst kind of trial is a moral one.

Over the past few years, one of the tools used to suppress women activists has been the threat of their images being pornographized. But it seems that this tactic has reached a whole new level.

The TRACKS trial

The courthouse was full that day, September 4, 2016. It was the second session of a long-awaited trial, one that began six months after the Khartoum Centre for Training and Human Development (TRACKS) was raided by the NISS.

This centre was one of Sudan's few remaining civil society organizations; they provided training on human rights as well as language and IT diplomas. It had also been raided the year before, in February 2015. 

For most of 2015, the centre’s director, administrative manager and a trainer, who had been conducting a workshop at the time of the raid, were embroiled in a legal battle facing capital charges. By late February 2016, the State Crimes Prosecution Office had found no evidence to continue the investigation and the director of the centre was called in to retrieve the confiscated equipment.

The honeymoon only lasted a few days. Another raid took place in February 2016, and the 2015 case was re-opened in addition to another case being filed against the director of the centre, the centre’s female administrative manager as well as two volunteers, one freelance accountant and a visitor who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were all arrested at the time of the raid and summoned for several weeks after.

The six civil society actors, including a Cameroonian student who is studying in Sudan, sat in the courthouse that Sunday waiting to be tried for the 2016 case. It felt as if Sudan’s entire civil society was on trial that day, with pornography being used as a political tool. The personal is always political in Sudan.

During the session, the plaintiff exhibited a pornographic film that was allegedly found on the laptop of one of the defendants, Mustafa Adam. They accused another defendant, Midhat Afif Al-Deen of also having pornographic films on his laptop.

To the defendant’s lawyers, the film was irrelevant to the case as charges of waging war against the state and undermining the constitutional authority were being brought against them. They also argued that the plaintiff had not shown evidence on whether the films had been downloaded before or after their arrest.

I personally understood this tactic in a completely different manner. 

First of all, the plaintiff was fully aware that this case would arouse public interest and that the international community would also be interested as human rights defenders were on trial. They seem to have believed that damaging the defendants’ public image and presenting them as immoral, as understood by conservative Sudanese society, would sow confusion within the solidarity movement.

This tactic is very dangerous. Their goal was to initiate a smear campaign that would change the entire course of the trial and result in the lawyers being distracted from the actual charges brought against their clients. As a result, both the lawyers and the solidarity movement would waste precious time defending the defendants instead of actually campaigning against the bogus charges against them, regardless of the fact that many do not believe the state should have the right to persecute anyone for material found on personal devices.

Secondly, as the NISS confiscated personal laptops, phones and other equipment from the defendants, their personal lives came under scrutiny from a state that enjoys these so-called public order articles it hides behind. It is not uncommon for the state to criminalize, control and persecute the behaviour, dress-code and personal attitudes of Sudanese men and women. However, the court case used personal files to persecute civil society at large by showing personal pictures of Midhat Afif Al-Deen and his family and friends. 

A picture of me with a close friend at her farewell party was also shown as part of the evidence. Midhat was there, he either took the picture or it had been shared with him on Facebook. I honestly can’t remember. We were not naked, but our headscarves were around our shoulders. This picture was shown as pornography because the state pornographizes women's bodies regardless of the dress-code and for this reason, the article on "dress-code", article 152 , is vague and does not explain anything.

Our pictures were shown to reiterate their point that these were the women of Sudanese civil society. Their goal was to portray civil society actors as individuals who watch pornography and the women as especially immoral because they are uncovered and even smiling in pictures.

Sudanese civil society was painted as a world of debauchery and this debauchery was documented in pictures that were shown inside the courthouse, violating the privacy of the defendants and their friends. The NISS wanted to put the entire civil society on trial and in Sudan, the worst kind of trial is a moral one.

We hear about political detainees and see their pictures circulating on social media, but in a country where lawyers believe that thousands of women and men are persecuted for morality crimes, under Article 152, by the public order police (also called the community security police) we don't see or hear their stories, because society becomes the prosecutor if morality is in question.

The trial came down heavily on everyone. If we don't fight this new kind of persecution, Sudanese civil society will be doomed. Organizations have been shut down and civil society actors have been put in jail, and this last debacle was an attempt to discredit civil society at large. We cannot let this happen.

This article was first published here.
 

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The media coverage of the terrorist atrocities of Friday November 13, 2015 in Paris would seem to promote an almost mythical image of the Islamic State (ISIS). What humanity needs, however, is to demystify ISIS as a criminal organization. And that need is particularly important in my community – the Muslim community.

The vast majority of Muslims almost certainly (we do not have exact figures) feel moral revulsion and outrage about the violence perpetrated by ISIS. Indeed, Egypt’s top Sunni cleric, to name just one example, was quick to denounce the perpetrators of Friday’s “hideous and hateful” attacks. However, the truth of the matter is that ISIS leaders and supporters can and do draw on a wealth of scriptural and historical sources to justify their actions.

Traditional interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law, approved aggressive jihad to propagate Islam. They permitted the killing of captive enemy men. They allowed jihadis to enslave enemy women and children, as ISIS did with the Yazidi women in Syria. I am a Muslim scholar of Sharia. It is my contention that ISIS' claim of Islamic legitimacy can be countered only by a viable alternative interpretation of Islamic law.

Consensus leading to deadlock
The key to understanding the role of Islam in politics is that there is no one authoritative entity that can establish or change Sharia doctrine for Muslims on any subject.

There is no equivalent of the Vatican and papal infallibility. How Sharia is interpreted by the many different communities of Muslims (from Sunni and Shia to Sufi and Salafi) is, at base, the product of an intergenerational consensus of the scholars and leaders of each community.
Islamic belief and practice is fundamentally individual and voluntary in its nature. A Muslim cannot be accountable for the views and actions of others.

One positive consequence of this absence of any one religious authority is the fact that it is possible to contest and reinterpret Sharia principles.

On the negative side, however, any Muslim can make any claim about Sharia if he or she can persuade a critical mass of Muslims to accept it.

 One example of this is how Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used the doctrine of “wilayat al-faqih”(or guardianship of the jurist) to claim the authority to launch the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.

This was controversial because in doing so, he went against the consensus that authority for such a decision resided in the person of the 12th and last “living” Shia Imam, who disappeared (but did not die) in 874 and, it is believed, will reappear at the end of time as al-Mahdi. A more recent example is the creation of ISIS by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his self-appointment as Caliph or successor of the Prophet Muhammed, divinely charged with resurrecting a state that ended 1,400 years ago.

Things changed in the 10th century
For the first 300 years of its existence, Islamic thought can be characterized as dynamic and creative, with differing interpretations of the scriptures being discussed and debated among communities and generations. Ijtihad, or independent juridical reasoning, was explicitly endorsed by the Prophet Muhammed.

Zainah Anwar, the executive director of Sisters in Islam. Albert Gea/Reuters

Some modern Muslims, like the Sisters in Islam organization in Malaysia, are exercising ijtihad today to promote the human rights of women from an Islamic perspective. To those, then, who accept the Sisters' interpretation, women are accorded equal rights according to Sharia.
But the Sisters and others like them are in a minority.

For the first 300 years of its existence, Islamic thought can be characterized as dynamic and creative, with differing interpretations of the scriptures being discussed and debated among communities and generations. Ijtihad, or independent juridical reasoning, was explicitly endorsed by the Prophet Muhammed.

By the 10th century, a highly sophisticated body of Sharia principles, methodologies and schools of thought had taken shape and put down roots among Muslim communities across the ancient world, from West Africa to Southeast Asia. This phenomenon came to be known as “closing the Gate of Ijtihad,” to indicate that there is no theological space for new creative juridical thinking.

There was, of course, no “Gate of Ijtihad” to be closed, and nobody had the authority to close the gate even if one had existed. The metaphor, however, highlighted the contrast between the cultivation of diversity in the first three centuries of Sharia and the stalemate and rigidity of the study of Islamic law since then.

The “silver lining” of ISIS is that it is forcing Muslims to confront the consequences of archaic interpretations of aggressive jihad.

Moving from Mecca to Medina
The Prophet Muhammad was born and raised in Mecca, a town in western Arabia, where he proclaimed Islam in AD 610. In AD 622 he had to move with a small group of his early followers to Medina, another town in Western Arabia, in order to escape persecution and threats to his life. This migration not only affected where the revelations were made to the prophet – a fact that is noted in the Quran. It also marked a shift in the content of the Quran.

ISIS' harsh and regressive interpretation of Sharia draws on the Quran of Medina, which repeatedly instructed Muslims to support each other and to separate themselves from non-Muslims.

For example, in verse 3:28 (and 4:144, 8:72-73, 9:23, 71 and 60:1M), Muslims are prohibited from taking unbelievers (pagan or polytheist) as friends and supporters. Instead, they are instructed to look to other Muslims for friendship and support.

The whole of Chapter 9 – which is among the last revelations – categorically sanctions and authorizes aggressive jihad against all non-Muslims, including People of the Book or Christians and Jews (verse 9:29).

Yes, the term jihad is used in the Quran to mean nonviolent efforts to propagate Islam (see verses 29:8, 31:15 and 47:31). But that does not change the fact that the same term was also used to mean aggressive war to propagate Islam.

This latter interpretation was, in fact, sanctioned by the actions and explicit instructions of the prophet himself, and by his most senior followers, who subsequently became his first four successors and the rulers or Caliphs of Medina.

Legitimate or illegitimate?
A related difficulty in this whole discussion is that according to Sharia, jihad can only be launched by a legitimate state authority.

ISIS claims to have Islamic legitimacy, but what is the basis of that secretive claim? Who nominated them, and why and how should the Caliph of ISIS have authority over the global Muslim community?

Since this authority is based on an entirely open and free process of individual choice, ISIS’ claim may succeed to the extent it is supported by a critical mass of Muslims.

The danger is that passive acquiescence can be used by ISIS leaders as evidence of positive support.

After all, only a handful of Muslim majority states – and then only under Western leadership – have shown willingness to resist the military expansion of ISIS.

Meanwhile, the masses of Muslims and their community leaders are not – tellingly – turning to Sharia to justify their opposition to ISIS claims. Many Muslims have condemned ISIS for moral or political reasons, but this, likely, is discredited among ISIS supporters as “Western” reasoning.

An alternative view
What then is needed is an alternative view of Sharia, one that argues that the scriptural sources that ISIS relies on must be seen in their wider historical context.

These principles, in other words, may have been relevant and applicable 1,400 years ago, when war – wherever it was being waged in the world – was much more harsh than it is now. Exclusive Muslim solidarity (wala’) then was essential for the survival of the community and success of their mission.
But today, the opposite is true.

Modern international law as stated in Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations of 1945 (a universally binding treaty) affirms equal sovereignty of all states regardless of religious belief, and prohibits the acquisition of territory through aggressive war.

While these principles have been violated by the major powers – recent examples include the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in 2014 – it is impossible for any state, including those with a Muslim majority, to accept being forced into a self-proclaimed Islamic state, as ISIS claims to have an Islamic mandate to do.

But for an alternative view of Sharia to emerge and take root through modern consensus, Muslims must first acknowledge and confront the problem of having acquiesced to a traditional interpretation of Sharia and ignored alternatives that would condemn ISIS as un-Islamic.

One place to start is with the writing of the Sudanese religious thinker Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who proposed repudiating the specific principles of Sharia authorizing aggressive jihad, slavery and subordination of women and non-Muslims by relying on the earlier revelations from Mecca. For example, verse 16:125 says: “Propagate the path of your Lord in wisdom and peaceable advice, and argue with them in a kind manner” (see also verses 17:70,49:13 and 88:21-22).

As Taha explained in his book The Second Message of Islam, the Sharia principles based on the Medina revelations came about in response to the historical conditions of seventh-century Arabia.

Taha argued that today it is the earlier message of Islam based on the Mecca revelations that is applicable because humanity is ready to live up to those standards.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the desperate need for alternatives to traditional Sharia interpretations, Taha was executed for apostasy in Sudan in 1985, and his books in Arabic continue to be banned in most Arab countries.

And ISIS continues to recruit.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State can survive only by fighting a permanent war. It is my contention that it will either implode or collapse in a total civil war because it has no viable political system for peaceful administration or transfer of power.

But whenever it collapses and for whatever cause, the world can only expect a new ISIS to emerge every time one disappears until we Muslims are able to discuss openly the deadlock in reforming Sharia.

(The author is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University , USA; the piece appeared on November 16, 2015 on https://theconversation.com/how-islamic-law-can-take-on-isis-50113; we are grateful for the Creative Common license that allows its re-publication)
 

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It is now obvious that Islam itself has to be re-thought, idea by idea. We need to begin with the simple fact that Muslims have no monopoly on truth, on what is right, on what is good, on justice, nor the intellectual and moral reflexes that promote these necessities. Like the rest of humanity, we have to struggle to achieve them using our own sacred notions and concepts as tools for understanding and reshaping contemporary reality.

Serious rethinking within  Islam is long overdue. Muslims have been comfortably relying, or rather falling back, on age-old interpretations for much too long. 
 

This is why we feel so painful in the contemporary world, so uncomfortable with modernity. Scholars and thinkers have been suggesting for well over a century that we need to make a serious attempt at ijtihad, at reasoned struggle and rethinking, to reform Islam. At the beginning of the last century, Jamaluddin Afghani and Mohammad Abduh led the call for a new ijtihad; and along the way many notable intellectuals, academics and sages have added to this plea — not least Mohammad Iqbal, Malik bin Nabbi and Abdul Qadir Audah. Yet, ijtihad is one thing Muslim societies have singularly failed to undertake. Why?
 

The why has now acquired an added urgency. Just look around the Muslim world and see how far we have travelled away from the ideals and spirit of Islam. Far from being a liberating force, a kinetic social, cultural and intellectual dynamic for equality, justice and humane values, Islam seems to have acquired a pathological strain. Indeed, it seems to me that we have internalised all those historic and contemporary western representations of Islam and Muslims that have been demonising us for centuries. We now actually wear the garb, I have to confess, of the very demons that the West has been projecting on our collective personality.
 

But to blame the West, or a notion of instrumental modernity that is all but alien to us, would be a lazy option. True, the West, and particularly America, has a great deal to answer for. And Muslims are quick to point a finger at the injustices committed by American and European foreign policies and hegemonic tendencies. However, that is only a part, and in my opinion not an insurmountable part, of the malaise. Hegemony is not always imposed; sometimes, it is invited. The internal situation within Islam is an open invitation.
 

We have failed to respond to the summons to ijtihad for some very profound reasons. Prime amongst these is the fact that the context of our sacred texts — the Qur’an and the examples of the Prophet Muhammad, our absolute frame of reference — has been frozen in history. One can only have an interpretative relationship with a text — even more so if the text is perceived to be eternal. But if the interpretative context of the text is never our context, not our own time, then its interpretation can hardly have any real meaning or significance for us as we are now.
 

Historic interpretations constantly drag us back to history, to frozen and ossified contexts of long ago; worse, to perceived and romanticised contexts that have not even existed in history. This is why while Muslims have a strong emotional attachment to Islam, Islam per se, as a worldview and system of ethics, has little or no direct relevance to their daily lives apart from the obvious concerns of rituals and worship. ijtihad and fresh thinking have not been possible because there is no context within which they can actually take place.
 

The freezing of interpretation, the closure of ‘the gates of ijtihad’, has had a devastating effect on Muslim thought and action. In particular, it has produced what I can only describe as three metaphysical catastrophes: the elevation of the Shari`ah to the level of the Divine, with the consequent removal of agency from the believers, and the equation of Islam with the State. Let me elaborate.
 

Most Muslims consider the Shari‘ah, commonly translated as ‘Islamic law’, to be divine. Yet, there is nothing divine about the Shari‘ah. The only thing that can legitimately be described as divine in Islam is the Qur’an. The Shari‘ah is a human construction; an attempt to understand the divine will in a particular context. This is why the bulk of the Shari‘ah actually consists of fiqh or jurisprudence, which is nothing more than legal opinion of classical jurists. The very term fiqh was not in vogue before the Abbasid period when it was actually formulated and codified. But when fiqh assumed its systematic legal form, it incorporated three vital aspects of Muslim society of the Abbasid period.
 

At that juncture, Muslim history was in its expansionist phase, and fiqh incorporated the logic of Muslim imperialism of that time. The fiqh rulings on apostasy, for example, derive not from the Qur’an but from this logic. Moreover, the world was simple and could easily be divided into black and white: hence, the division of the world into Daral Islam and Daral Harb.
 

Furthermore, as the framers of law were not by this stage managers of society, the law became merely theory which could not be modified – the framers of the law were unable to see where the faults lay and what aspect of the law needed fresh thinking and reformulation. Thus fiqh, as we know it today, evolved on the basis of a division between those who were governing and set themselves apart from society and those who were framing the law; the epistemological assumptions of a ‘golden’ phase of Muslim history also came into play. When we describe the Shari`ah as divine, we actually provide divine sanctions for the rulings of by-gone fiqh.
 

What this means in reality is that when Muslim countries apply or impose the Shari‘ah — the demands of Muslims from Indonesia to Nigeria – the contradictions that were inherent in the formulation and evolution of fiqh come to the fore. That is why wherever the Shari‘ah is imposed – that is, fiqhi legislation is applied, out of context from the time when it was formulated and out of step with ours — Muslim societies acquire a medieval feel.
 

We can see that in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and the Taliban of Afghanistan. When narrow adherence to fiqh, to the dictates of this or that school of thought, whether it has any relevance to the real world or not, becomes the norm, ossification sets in. The Shari‘ah will solve all our problems becomes the common sentiment; and it becomes necessary for a group with vested interest in this notion of the Shari‘ah to preserve its territory, the source of its power and prestige, at all costs. An outmoded body of law is thus equated with the Shari‘ah, and criticism is shunned and outlawed by appealing to its divine nature.
 

The elevation of the Shari‘ah to the divine level also means the believers themselves have no agency: since The Law is a priori given, people themselves have nothing to do except to follow it. Believers thus become passive receivers rather than active seekers of truth. In reality, the Shari‘ah is nothing more than a set of principles, a framework of values, that provide Muslim societies with guidance. But these sets of principles and values are not a static given but are dynamically derived within changing contexts.
 

As such, the Shari‘ah is a problem-solving methodology rather than law. It requires the believers to exert themselves and constantly reinterpret the Qur’an and look at the life of the Prophet Muhammad with ever changing fresh eyes. Indeed, the Qur’an has to be reinterpreted from epoch to epoch — which means the Shari‘ah, and by extension Islam itself, has to be reformulated with changing contexts. The only thing that remains constant in Islam is the text of the Qur’an itself — its concepts providing the anchor for ever changing interpretations.
 

Islam is not so much a religion but an integrative worldview: that is to say, it integrates all aspects of reality by providing a moral perspective on every aspect of human endeavour. Islam does not provide ready–made answers to all human problems; it provides a moral and just perspective within which Muslims must endeavour to find answers to all human problems. But if everything is a priori given, in the shape of a divine Shari‘ah, then Islam is reduced to a totalistic ideology. Indeed, this is exactly what the Islamic movements — in particular Jamaat-e-Islami (both the Pakistani and Indian varieties) and the Muslim Brotherhood — have reduced Islam to.
 

Which brings me to the third metaphysical catastrophe. Place this ideology within a nation state, with the divinely attributed Shari‘ah at its centre, and you have an ‘Islamic state’. All contemporary ‘Islamic states’, from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan to aspiring Pakistan, are based on this ridiculous assumption. But once Islam, as an ideology, becomes a programme of action of a vested group, it looses its humanity and becomes a battlefield where morality, reason and justice are readily sacrificed at the altar of emotions.
 

Moreover, the step from a totalistic ideology to a totalitarian order where every human situation is open to state arbitration is a small one. The transformation of Islam into a state-based political ideology not only deprives it of all its moral and ethical content, it also debunks most of Muslim history as un–Islamic. Invariably, when Islamists rediscover a ‘golden’ past, they do so only in order to disdain the present and mock the future. All we are left with is messianic chaos, as we saw so vividly in the Taliban regime, where all politics as the domain of action is paralysed and meaningless pieties become the foundational truth of the state.
 

The totalitarian vision of Islam as a State thus transforms Muslim politics into a metaphysics: in such an enterprise, every action can be justified as ‘Islamic’ by the dictates of political expediency as we witnessed in revolutionary Iran.
 

The three metaphysical catastrophes are accentuated by an overall process of reduction that has become the norm in Muslim societies. The reductive process itself is also not new; but now it has reached such an absurd state that the very ideas that are supposed to take Muslim societies towards humane values now actually take them in the opposite direction.
 

From the subtle beauty of a perennial challenge to construct justice through mercy and compassion, we get mechanistic formulae fixated with the extremes repeated by people convinced they have no duty to think for themselves because all questions have been answered for them by the classical ‘ulema, far better men long dead. And because everything carries the brand name of Islam, to question it, or argue against it, is tantamount to voting for sin.
 

The process of reduction started with the very notion of ‘alim (scholar) itself. Just who is an ‘alim; what makes him an authority? In early Islam, an ‘alim was anyone who acquired ‘ilm, or knowledge, which was itself described in a broad sense. We can see that in the early classifications of knowledge by such scholars as al–Kindi, al–Farabi, Ibn Sina, al–Ghazali and Ibn Khuldun. Indeed, both the definition of knowledge and its classification was a major intellectual activity in classical Islam.
 

So all learned men, scientists as well as philosophers, scholars as well as theologians, constituted the ‘ulama. But after the ‘gates of ijtihad’ were closed during the Abbasid era, ilm was increasingly reduced to religious knowledge and the ‘ulema came to constitute only religious scholars.
 

Similarly, the idea of ijma, the central notion of communal life in Islam, has been reduced to the consensus of a select few. Ijma literally means consensus of the people. The concept dates back to the practice of Prophet Muhammad himself as leader of the original polity of Muslims. When the Prophet Muhammad wanted to reach a decision, he would call the whole Muslim community – then, admittedly not very large — to the mosque. A discussion would ensue; arguments for and against would be presented. Finally, the entire gathering would reach a consensus.
 

Thus, a democratic spirit was central to communal and political life in early Islam. But over time the clerics and religious scholars have removed the people from the equation – and reduced ijma to ‘the consensus of the religious scholars’. Not surprisingly, authoritarianism, theocracy and despotism reign supreme in the Muslim world. The political domain finds its model in what has become the accepted practice and metier of the authoritatively ‘religious’ adepts, those who claim the monopoly of exposition of Islam. Obscurantist mullahs, in the guise of the ‘ulema, dominate Muslim societies and circumscribe them with fanaticism and absurdly reductive logic.
 

Numerous other concepts have gone through a similar process of reduction. The concept of ummah, the global spiritual community of Muslims, has been reduced to the ideals of a nation state: ‘my country right or wrong’ has been transposed to read ‘my ummah right or wrong’. So even despots like Saddam Hussein are now defended on the basis of ‘ummah consciousness’ and ‘unity of the ummah’.
 

Jihad has now been reduced to the single meaning of ‘Holy War’. This translation is perverse not only because the concept’s spiritual, intellectual and social components have been stripped away, but it has been reduced to war by any means, including terrorism. So anyone can now declare jihad on anyone, without any ethical or moral rhyme or reason. Nothing could be more perverted, or pathologically more distant from the initial meaning of jihad. It’s other connotations, including personal struggle, intellectual endeavour and social construction have all but evaporated.
 

Istislah, normally rendered as ‘public interest’ and a major source of Islamic law, has all but disappeared from Muslim consciousness. And ijtihad, as I have suggested, has now been reduced to little more than a pious desire.
 

But the violence performed to sacred Muslim concepts is insignificant compared to the reductive way the Qur’an and the sayings and examples of the Prophet Muhammad are bandied about. What the late Muslim scholar, Fazlur Rahman called the ‘atomistic’ treatment of the Qur’an is now the norm: almost anything and everything is justified by quoting individual bits of verse out of context.
 

After the September 11 event, for example, a number of Taliban supporters, including a few in Britain, justified their actions by quoting the following verse: ‘We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. They serve other gods for whom no sanction has been revealed. Hell shall be their home’ (3: 149). Yet, the apparent meaning attributed to this verse could not be further from the true spirit of the Qur’an.
 

In this particular verse, the Qur’an is addressing Prophet Muhammad himself. It was revealed during the battle of Uhud, when the small and ill–equipped army of the Prophet, faced a much larger and well–equipped enemy. He was concerned about the outcome of the battle. The Qur’an reassures him and promises the enemy will be terrified with the Prophet’s unprofessional army. Seen in its context, it is not a general instruction to all Muslims; but a commentary on what was happening at that time.
 

Similarly hadiths are quoted to justify the most extreme of behaviour. And the Prophet’s own appearance, his beard and clothes, have been turned into a fetish: so now it is not just obligatory for a ‘good Muslim’ to have a beard, but its length and shape must also conform to dictates! The Prophet has been reduced to signs and symbols — the spirit of his behaviour, the moral and ethical dimensions of his actions, his humility and compassion, the general principles he advocated have all been subsumed by the logic of absurd reduction.
 

The accumulative effect of the metaphysical catastrophes and endless reduction has transformed the cherished tenets of Islam into instruments of militant expediency and moral bankruptcy. For over two decades, in books like, The Future of Muslim Civilisation (1979) and Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (1985), I have been arguing that Muslim civilisation is now so fragmented and shattered that we have to rebuild it, ‘brick by brick’.
 

It is now obvious that Islam itself has to be rethought, idea by idea. We need to begin with the simple fact that Muslims have no monopoly on truth, on what is right, on what is good, on justice, nor the intellectual and moral reflexes that promote these necessities. Like the rest of humanity, we have to struggle to achieve them using our own sacred notions and concepts as tools for understanding and reshaping contemporary reality.
 

The way to a fresh, contemporary appreciation of Islam requires confronting the metaphysical catastrophes and moving away from reduction to synthesis. Primarily, this requires Muslims, as individuals and communities, to reclaim agency: to insist on their right and duty, as believers and knowledgeable people, to interpret and reinterpret the basic sources of Islam: to question what now goes under the general rubric of Shari‘ah, to declare that much of fiqh is now dangerously obsolete, to stand up to the absurd notion of an Islam confined by a geographically bound state.
 

We cannot, if we really value our faith, leave its exposition in the hands of under educated elites, religious scholars whose lack of comprehension of the contemporary world is usually matched only by their disdain and contempt for all its ideas and cultural products. Islam has been permitted to languish as the professional domain of people more familiar with the world of the eleventh century than the twenty–first century we now inhabit. And we cannot allow this class to bury the noble idea of ijtihad into frozen and distant history.
 

Ordinary Muslims around the world who have concerns, questions and considerable moral dilemmas about the current state of affairs of Islam must reclaim the basic concepts of Islam and reframe them in a broader context. Ijma must mean consensus of all citizens leading to participatory and accountable governance. Jihad must be understood in its complete spiritual meaning as the struggle for peace and justice as a lived reality for all people, everywhere. And the notion of the ummah must be refined so it becomes something more than a mere reductive abstraction.
 

As Anwar Ibrahim has argued, the ummah is not "merely the community of all those who profess to be Muslims"; rather, it is a "moral conception of how Muslims should become a community in relation to each other, other communities and the natural world". Which means ummah incorporates not just the Muslims, but justice–seeking and oppressed people everywhere.
 

In a sense, the movement towards synthesis is an advance towards the primary meaning and message of Islam — as a moral and ethical way of looking at and shaping the world, as a domain of peaceful civic culture, a participatory endeavour, and a holistic mode of knowing, being and doing. (June 2002). 
 

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 9  No, 84, Forum

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