Muslim Reformation
Philip Collins makes a good point with this opinion piece in The Times in which he argues that Islam should return to its roots as a religion of enlightenment.
A Muslim Reformation is what's needed, no less, a commitment to pluralism and universal human values, and Salman Rushdie speaks a lot of sense if you ask me with his comment that:
“Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.”
There is no peace unless Muslims can reform
By Philip Collins - The Times
Islam was once a religion of enlightenment. It must turn its back on terrorist radicals and rediscover its true roots
Everyone has said the same thing, the right thing. We will not be cowed. We will publish because we know we will not be damned. To capitulate to the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists by limiting freedom is to do the devil’s work.
Many Muslim voices have joined the concord of disgust. “Nothing is more immoral, offensive, insulting against our beloved Prophet than such a callous act of murder,” said the Muslim Council of Britain. The Arab League issued a condemnation. Even Dar Al-Ifta, the Egyptian institute that in 2005 issued a fatwa against the Danish cartoonists for their effrontery in drawing satirical images of the Prophet, managed to find words of disapproval.
It is hard to find anything heartening in the aftermath of such a brutal murder as this but there may be some consolation if it redoubles the determination of liberal democracies to stand up to tyranny. It is a moment to face and state hard truths and one that, through sheer liberal politeness we are apt to gloss over, is that the poisonous influence of religious belief cannot be subtracted from this dismal event.
Salman Rushdie has more cause to lament this than most. The fatwa was revived by Iranian clergy last year; Mr Rushdie has a bounty on his head. So his bravery commands respect and attention when he said yesterday exactly what needs to be contemplated: “Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.”
It is no accident that, as they stormed the editorial meeting of Charlie Hebdo seeking out the paper’s editor Stéphane Charbonnier by name, Said and Cherif Kouachi proclaimed: “Allahu Akbar”, “God is great”. They did not shout, nor could they have: “In the name of pluralism” or “All hail John Stuart Mill”.
Some ideas, taken to their emotional extremes, grant an alibi for murder and some do not. A “perversion” of Islam is a toxic form of religious certainty while a perversion of liberalism is not liberalism, whose freedoms extend to everyone. That is why the Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary is free to use the liberty that he wants curtailed to publish a piece in USA Today in which he accuses the French government of provoking the killers.
This, to be clear, is a pathology shared by religious thought everywhere. It is not unique to Islam, nor is it even historically most common there. The egregious history of the Christian church shows that when people lay claim to certainty about ultimate questions, sooner or later there is going to be trouble. If the truth has been in some way vouchsafed to you by the divinity then dissent is not reasoned disagreement, it is blasphemy. I am no longer an interlocutor, I am an infidel.
Religious belief, in the wrong heads, can be devastating. It is therefore to the practice of the religion that we need to look for insurance against terrorism, and there was a time when Islam was exemplary in this respect. Under the enlightened caliphate of Harun al-Rashid between 786 and 809, Arabic scholarship led the world. Thinkers came from all over the globe to Baghdad, their task to translate all the world’s knowledge into Arabic and preserve it in a vast library known as the House of Wisdom.
Many of the classic works of antiquity, particularly the texts of Plato and Aristotle that were “rediscovered” in the Italian renaissance, were only available because of the ecumenical devotion of the great scholars of Baghdad. Defeated foreign rulers would often be told to relinquish not their gold but their books. While Europe was in the intellectual dark ages, the Islamic Golden Age, as it is still known, inspired the most extraordinary flourishing of intellectual life.
There were notable advances in scientific method, in astronomy, optics and in biology the first observation of the “struggle for existence”, as a contemporary Islamic scholar put it. The idea that celestial bodies such as the Moon were subject to the same laws as physics as exist on Earth was first postulated then. Islamic scholars gathered medical knowledge from all over the world. No doctor would today swear the Hippocratic oath were it not for the scholars in the House of Wisdom.
In mathematics progress was made in elementary calculus and the general law of sines in trigonometry. It is to this period that we owe the words and concepts of the algorithm and algebra and through the House of Wisdom that the Hindu decimals and the idea of zero were transmitted to Europe. Baghdad was the centre of the thinking world. For 700 years the language of science was Arabic.
How different is the Islamic world today. Of course the violent tendency of every denomination is a nastily vociferous minority. It has to be said, though, that moderate Islam puts up too weak a protest against the radicals in its midst. Even though the victims of these poisonous crusaders are mostly Muslims in the Sunni versus Shia conflict, liberal Muslim thinking is weak and enervated. It is notable, for example, that there is no concerted popular movement among Muslims for peace in the benighted countries in which their fellow devotees are slaughtering one another.
After the London bombings Rushdie said that Islam needs “a Muslim Reformation . . . throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air”. It will have to be, as the Christian Reformation was, in part a dispute about doctrine (the merits of the saints) and in part about power (papal authority over purgatory). Reform Islam has to be a campaign for education free from the fetters of scripture and a return to the scientific ethos of the Golden Age.
The lesson of Paris is not the simple one that the sword is mightier than the pen, or even vice versa. It is that cartoonists armed with a pen have no defence against killers armed with both a pen and a sword. In other words, they were slaughtered by idiots bearing both a Kalashnikov and a stupid idea.
Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, said: “I would rather die standing than live kneeling.” There is an echo there of Luther, before his accusers at the Diet of Worms: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” The task now is to do the algebra, which is an Arabic word meaning “reunion of the broken parts”. The healing can only happen when the idea is won. The battle though, is not between Islam and the rest but within Islam itself.
Islam was once a religion of enlightenment. It must turn its back on terrorist radicals and rediscover its true roots
Everyone has said the same thing, the right thing. We will not be cowed. We will publish because we know we will not be damned. To capitulate to the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists by limiting freedom is to do the devil’s work.
Many Muslim voices have joined the concord of disgust. “Nothing is more immoral, offensive, insulting against our beloved Prophet than such a callous act of murder,” said the Muslim Council of Britain. The Arab League issued a condemnation. Even Dar Al-Ifta, the Egyptian institute that in 2005 issued a fatwa against the Danish cartoonists for their effrontery in drawing satirical images of the Prophet, managed to find words of disapproval.
It is hard to find anything heartening in the aftermath of such a brutal murder as this but there may be some consolation if it redoubles the determination of liberal democracies to stand up to tyranny. It is a moment to face and state hard truths and one that, through sheer liberal politeness we are apt to gloss over, is that the poisonous influence of religious belief cannot be subtracted from this dismal event.
Salman Rushdie has more cause to lament this than most. The fatwa was revived by Iranian clergy last year; Mr Rushdie has a bounty on his head. So his bravery commands respect and attention when he said yesterday exactly what needs to be contemplated: “Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.”
It is no accident that, as they stormed the editorial meeting of Charlie Hebdo seeking out the paper’s editor Stéphane Charbonnier by name, Said and Cherif Kouachi proclaimed: “Allahu Akbar”, “God is great”. They did not shout, nor could they have: “In the name of pluralism” or “All hail John Stuart Mill”.
Some ideas, taken to their emotional extremes, grant an alibi for murder and some do not. A “perversion” of Islam is a toxic form of religious certainty while a perversion of liberalism is not liberalism, whose freedoms extend to everyone. That is why the Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary is free to use the liberty that he wants curtailed to publish a piece in USA Today in which he accuses the French government of provoking the killers.
This, to be clear, is a pathology shared by religious thought everywhere. It is not unique to Islam, nor is it even historically most common there. The egregious history of the Christian church shows that when people lay claim to certainty about ultimate questions, sooner or later there is going to be trouble. If the truth has been in some way vouchsafed to you by the divinity then dissent is not reasoned disagreement, it is blasphemy. I am no longer an interlocutor, I am an infidel.
Religious belief, in the wrong heads, can be devastating. It is therefore to the practice of the religion that we need to look for insurance against terrorism, and there was a time when Islam was exemplary in this respect. Under the enlightened caliphate of Harun al-Rashid between 786 and 809, Arabic scholarship led the world. Thinkers came from all over the globe to Baghdad, their task to translate all the world’s knowledge into Arabic and preserve it in a vast library known as the House of Wisdom.
Many of the classic works of antiquity, particularly the texts of Plato and Aristotle that were “rediscovered” in the Italian renaissance, were only available because of the ecumenical devotion of the great scholars of Baghdad. Defeated foreign rulers would often be told to relinquish not their gold but their books. While Europe was in the intellectual dark ages, the Islamic Golden Age, as it is still known, inspired the most extraordinary flourishing of intellectual life.
There were notable advances in scientific method, in astronomy, optics and in biology the first observation of the “struggle for existence”, as a contemporary Islamic scholar put it. The idea that celestial bodies such as the Moon were subject to the same laws as physics as exist on Earth was first postulated then. Islamic scholars gathered medical knowledge from all over the world. No doctor would today swear the Hippocratic oath were it not for the scholars in the House of Wisdom.
In mathematics progress was made in elementary calculus and the general law of sines in trigonometry. It is to this period that we owe the words and concepts of the algorithm and algebra and through the House of Wisdom that the Hindu decimals and the idea of zero were transmitted to Europe. Baghdad was the centre of the thinking world. For 700 years the language of science was Arabic.
How different is the Islamic world today. Of course the violent tendency of every denomination is a nastily vociferous minority. It has to be said, though, that moderate Islam puts up too weak a protest against the radicals in its midst. Even though the victims of these poisonous crusaders are mostly Muslims in the Sunni versus Shia conflict, liberal Muslim thinking is weak and enervated. It is notable, for example, that there is no concerted popular movement among Muslims for peace in the benighted countries in which their fellow devotees are slaughtering one another.
After the London bombings Rushdie said that Islam needs “a Muslim Reformation . . . throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air”. It will have to be, as the Christian Reformation was, in part a dispute about doctrine (the merits of the saints) and in part about power (papal authority over purgatory). Reform Islam has to be a campaign for education free from the fetters of scripture and a return to the scientific ethos of the Golden Age.
The lesson of Paris is not the simple one that the sword is mightier than the pen, or even vice versa. It is that cartoonists armed with a pen have no defence against killers armed with both a pen and a sword. In other words, they were slaughtered by idiots bearing both a Kalashnikov and a stupid idea.
Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, said: “I would rather die standing than live kneeling.” There is an echo there of Luther, before his accusers at the Diet of Worms: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” The task now is to do the algebra, which is an Arabic word meaning “reunion of the broken parts”. The healing can only happen when the idea is won. The battle though, is not between Islam and the rest but within Islam itself.
