Oral Statement by Sultan Shahin, Founding Editor, New Age Islam, on behalf of Asian-Eurasian Human Rights Forum; UNHRC, Item 9, General Debate, September 26, 2017

Mr. President,
Sixteen years after 9/11, the issue of Jihadi terrorism has become even more complex and widespread.

First, though Jihadism is a violent offshoot of Wahhabism and Salafism, the international community has allowed the fountainhead of Wahhabi/Salafi ideology to continue to spend tens of billions of dollars to Wahhabise the world Muslim community.

Second, we recently saw with horror, but without any protest from the international community, the sight of a UN-designated terrorist, with a ten-million-dollar bounty on his head, launch a political party and nominate another US-designated terrorist to contest democratic elections in Pakistan. Apparently, some countries can ignore UN directives with impunity.

 Third, the Muslim community has failed to grasp that Jihadism spread so rapidly around the world because at its core it is not very different from the theology of consensus that informs the religious beliefs and practices of all Muslim sects. That is why Jihadis are not impressed when we Muslims either proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace and pluralism or when we try to wash our hands off Jihadism by claiming that it has nothing to do with Islam. If we Muslims want to live as honourable citizens in the 21st century’s globalised world, we must rethink our consensus theology in all its dimensions and make revolutionary changes to bring it in line with the needs of present times.

Let me elaborate a little on the similarities in the core theologies of Jihadism and mainstream Islam as well as suggest the contours of an alternative theology of peace and pluralism, inclusion and acceptance of diversity, respect for human rights and gender justice. What are the fundamental elements of theologies of all sects including Jihadism that are the same and what can be done about them. Let us discuss a few here briefly.

1.   Infallibility, universality and uncreatedness of all verses of Quran, regardless of the context in which some of these instructions came from God to guide the Prophet and his followers on matters that needed to be urgently taken care of then, but are no longer relevant in the vastly different circumstances today.

This belief is common to all sects and sub-sects of Islam today. There is a consensus around it. So Jihadis are not inventing a new theology if they say that those Muslims who do not follow the war-time verses of Quran literally by fighting the kuffar constantly or staying away from all non-Muslims in day-to-day matters are hypocritical, and that a good, honest Muslim is one who is perpetually engaged in offensive Jihad against non-Muslims. After all, this is what is taught in all religious schools or madrasas, regardless of the sect. We are told in our theological books that the only relationship between a Muslim and a non-Muslim is that of war, and that it is the religious duty of all Muslims to bring Islam to power in all corners of the world, either by persuasion or force.

A new theology would seek to break this consensus and try to convince Muslims that war-time verses of the Prophet’s time maybe important as a historical account of the near insurmountable difficulties the Prophet had to face to establish Islam but do not apply to us today in the 21st century. We cannot possibly be fighting similar wars. Muslims were fighting existential battles in the early seventh century. Islam was in its infancy and infants do need to be taken special care of. Now the seed that Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) planted in the inhospitable terrain of the Arabian desert has grown into a giant tree with branches across the world. There is no need for us to be fighting offensive Jihad “at least once a year” as Imam Ghazali advised in late 11th and early 12th century CE.

2.   There is a consensus among ulema (religious scholars) of all sects that Hadith narrations (the alleged sayings of the Prophet) are akin to revelation, even though these were collected up to 300 years after the demise of the Prophet and contradict many of the core teachings of the Quran, the exhortations of God whose messenger the Prophet was. This theology of consensus implies that the Prophet spent the better part of his prophetic career preaching against the messages revealed to him in the holy Quran.

What has actually happened is that in the 48th year of the demise of the Prophet, his entire family was massacred and reins of power taken over by scions of the inveterate enemies of Islam who had fought battles against the Prophet and joined Islam only after his victory at Mecca, in a clear bid to subvert Islam from within when they failed to destroy it from outside. But they had to rule Muslims for whom Quran was the only holy scripture, which they understood, as well as had mostly memorized and written down. To undermine Quran, and create a distance between Muslims and the Quran, they evolved over the coming decades and centuries two institutions that remain very powerful until today. One was Hadith, that was called akin to revelation, and the other was that of Ulema or clerics who were proclaimed to be of the status of heirs to the Prophet, much better able to explain religion to Muslims than they themselves could.

The new theology will have to bring the focus back to Quran, and seek to dislodge both Hadith and Ulema from their present position of pre-eminence. These institutions evolved in the era of dynastic, despotic rulers, called Khalifas. It was natural for them to look for scriptural justifications for their exploitative, tyrannical, imperialist, expansionist, and supremacist policies. Not able to find justification for their policies in the Quran, which essentially guided Muslims on a spiritual path to salvation, they naturally created another scripture and put that on the same pedestal as Quran. The ulema were also deployed to subvert the meaning of Quran’s verses of war and make contextual verses into universally applicable instructions for permanent war.

3.   Sharia Laws were first codified 120 years after the demise of the Prophet and have been changing since from time to time and place to place. It is only marginally based on Quran, most of it has been borrowed from pre-Islamic Arab practices. But the theology of consensus insists on calling it divine.
The new theology will go strictly by the spirit of Quran and allow Muslims to formulate their laws according to the needs of their time and place. Laws are and should remain dynamic and just.

4.   The theology of consensus propounds a Doctrine of Abrogation, whereby earlier Meccan verses preaching peace and pluralism, patience and perseverance, religious freedom for all, etc., have been abrogated by later Medinan verses of war, asking Muslims to fight, and talking about virtues and rewards of contributing to war efforts in the way of God.  It is said that the so-called sword verse (9: 5) alone has abrogated 114 verses of peace and pluralism revealed in early Islam at Mecca.

The new theology of peace should emphasise that the Meccan verses are the foundational and constitutive verses of Islam. They cannot be abrogated by any later verses of war. The Doctrine of Abrogation will need to be rejected in toto. It is the latter Medinan verses of war that have lost their relevance not the original Islam preaching peace and pluralism as revealed at Mecca.

5.   The concept of Caliphate has no basis in Quran, but our theology considers it almost mandatory. This consensus view needs to be corrected in the new theology.

6.   The theology of consensus is of the view that Muslims should migrate from Land of Conflict (Darul Harb) which is dominated by non-Muslims to Darul Islam (land of Islam). This has no basis in Quran. This is not even practical in contemporary world, though ulema keep using these terms. Even individuals have great difficulty getting visas to visit any country, these days, what to speak of millions of Muslims settling down in, say, Saudi Arabia, the pre-eminent Darul Islam. Saudis did not take even one Syrian refugee despite their horrible situation, though Germany (so-called Darul Harb) took a million Muslim refugees out of compassion for the suffering humanity. The new theology will have to reject such medieval ideas as completely irrelevant and un-Quranic.

Clearly Muslims have much hard work to do. We will need to bring about revolutionary changes in our theology to make it compatible with the holy Quran as well as the needs of modern times.

Republished with permission from NewAge Islam.
 

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Among the gravest threats facing humankind today is extremism resulting from erroneous interpretations of religious teachings. Almost every religion has some teachings or the other that if not understood and practiced in the right manner can have disastrous effects, at both the individual as well as collective level. For instance, many religions underscore the need to protect society from anti-social elements, call for eradicating injustice, advocate establishing justice, and sanction self-defence in exceptional circumstances.

All of these things are part of our basic human duties. But if ignorance and immorality leads some people to develop distorted and deviant perspectives about these issues, it can easily lead to violent conflict in society. If this happens, religious teachings that were meant for promoting goodness and human welfare come to be used as a means to foment violence and destruction.

In this regard, Islam is faced with a particular predicament—of being viewed through a distorted lens by both those who claim to follow it as well as others. That it is misunderstood by others is not as surprising as the fact that it is misunderstood by many of those who claim to be its adherents, who are themselves destroying the religious and cultural bases of the tradition that they say they follow. These people are projecting their own religious teachings as a grave threat to the world.

The source of this distorted understanding of Islam is the intellectual crisis that Muslims have fallen prey to over the last three or four centuries. Several factors are responsible for this crisis, and unless these are properly understood, no meaningful efforts can be made to help Muslims come out of the morass in which they find themselves and to turn Muslim  thought back in the right direction. 

In part, the intellectual crisis of present-day Muslims can be traced to the suppression of the movement of Islamic rationalism by the traditionalist, orthodox Ulema in the early centuries of Islam. In the conflict between reason (Aql) and text (Nass), the suppression of reason played a major role in the ensuing intellectual stagnation of Muslims.

In part, the intellectual crisis of present-day Muslims can be traced to the suppression of the movement of Islamic rationalism by the traditionalist, orthodox Ulema in the early centuries of Islam. In the conflict between reason (Aql) and text (Nass), the suppression of reason played a major role in the ensuing intellectual stagnation of Muslims.

A second factor for this intellectual crisis of Muslims was the supposed closing of the ‘doors’ of Ijtihad’, creative reflection on and application of Islamic teachings in new contexts, in the 4th century AH following the establishment of the various schools of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Who closed these ‘doors’ and when is a separate issue, but the fact is that, for all practical purposes, meaningful Ijtihad did come an end and its ‘doors’ remain closed till this very day.

A third factor for the present-day intellectual crisis of Muslims is the inability of Muslim leaders to understand the social political challenges that have emerged as a result of various socio-cultural processes. This, and a desperate clinging to the past, meant that Muslims were unable to relate intellectually with the present. Related to this is the fact that in seeking to preserve their intellectual heritage in the face of modernity, they uncritically continued to hold fast on to even those aspects of that heritage that were not a part of Islam as such, but, rather, reflected the influence of particular historical and socio-cultural contexts in which that heritage emerged.
Because of all of these inter-related factors, Muslim thought has strayed far off from the straight path.

The greatest need of the ‘Muslim world’ today is the reconstruction of Islamic thought so that Muslims can appropriately relate to contemporary socio-political demands. The poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) attempted to do precisely this through his monumental work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), but the book failed to have any noticeable impact on the traditional ulema class, even though they counted themselves among Iqbal’s greatest admirers. While they were all praise for his poetry, they rebutted this serious academic work of his that raised many questions about traditional Muslim religious thought.

With regard to the renewal and reconstruction of Islamic thought, one dimension that needs particular attention is Muslim political theory. This urgently needs to be re-looked at. Aspects of this political theory that have now become irrelevant, and, more than this, have turned into a threat to the world of today, must be completely renounced so that the younger generation of Muslims can be protected from falling prey to deviant thinking and thus going astray.

Controversial and completely un-Islamic notions such as the global political hegemony of Islam, offensive jihad, considering other people’s lack of faith in Islam as a sufficient cause to wage war against them, and regarding war, not peace, to be the basis of relations with people of other faiths regrettably remain deeply entrenched in some Muslim quarters despite the fact that they can in no way be proven from the Quran and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

These notions fuel conflictual relations with people of other faiths. Islamic scholars must clarify that these notions have actually no Islamic legitimacy at all, contrary to what radical extremists claim. The enormous confusion in Islamic circles about these issues has resulted, on the one hand, in great misunderstandings about Islam among non-Muslims, and, on the other hand, has facilitated the emergence and rapid spread of extremism and radicalism among a section of Muslims.

The major share of the blame for the enormous misunderstandings about Islam that abound today, particularly with regard to the issues mentioned above, lies with the traditionalist Ulema, and, more than them, the Islamists or votaries of a politics-centric interpretation of Islam, who dream of imposing and enforcing their particular interpretation or version of the Shariah and establishing global what they regard as Islamic political dominance—or, in other words, their own rule.

The traditionalist ulema are mired in stagnation, while the Islamists are a victim of literalism. These two classes seek to establish the political theology that emerged in the Middle Ages, when Muslims enjoyed political dominance in large parts of the world, word for word, without making any changes in it. The only difference between the two is that the former gives stress to ‘patience’ and ‘waiting’ as a means to realise its dream of establishing this political ideology, while the latter is driven by a frenzied zeal to revive the past political glory of Muslims at any cost and without any delay. Because of this, the image of Islam is being terribly stained and in such a way as has never happened before. All across the world, there is a rapid escalation of hate for Muslims, and, moreover, Muslims themselves are killing each other.

While much has been written on various other aspects of Muslim jurisprudence, very little work has been done on an issue of immense contemporary import—Islamic political jurisprudence. Because this issue has not received the attention that it deserves, there is a huge vacuum in Islamic political theology, which is being taken advantage of by radical Islamists, who falsely claim to speak for Islam.

 In this regard, it is truly lamentable that the mindset of traditional ulema is such that they are not interested in taking up the task of addressing this vacuum, although this work of rethinking Islamic political theory is something that they would be more effective in doing because of the great influence that they have on general Muslim thinking. On the other hand, there are relatively few modernist Islamic scholars who can combine both traditional wisdom and modern perspectives and fill this enormous gap. One hopes that this issue will receive the attention that it so sorely deserves.

Today’s world is a closely interlinked ‘global village’. A saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “All God’s creatures are His family’’ reflects this reality, and we all, Muslims and everyone else, have to learn to live together in harmony, like members of one large, well-knit family. It is for each one of us to try to unite this family, through love, not to divide it, through hate. There is a very urgent need today for interfaith dialogue on a vast scale in order to promote mutual understanding, which is simply indispensable for peaceful coexistence at every level.

In this way, the external nearness between religious communities across the world that has come about through new communications technologies can evolve into an authentic, inner nearness. Today, this is the most urgent task for those who have true love for Islam to undertake and another major responsibility for Islamic scholars, besides other Muslims.

A graduate of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband, Waris Mazhari did a PhD from the Department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, where he is currently teaching.

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