Islam and terrorism: a humanist view

Humanist, May-June, 2002 by David Schafer

"Leaders of the Muslim community in the United States, and even President Bush, have routinely asserted that Islam is a religion of peace that was hijacked by fanatics on September 11. These two assertions are simply untrue. First, Islam--like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion--is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about absolute belief in its own superiority and the divine right to impose its version of truth upon others."

--Dr. Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy

In the January 8, New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote, "There s just one thing that most Americans and Osama bin Laden seem able to agree on: that the attacks on the World Trade Center arose somehow from Islam."

But is Islam an inherently violent religion? With good reason many of us have been turning to acknowledged experts for help in clarifying what turns out to be a complex issue. In particular, three highly respected humanist writers of great courage and persuasiveness, with roots in the Muslim community, have been widely read and quoted: ibn Warraq (a pseudonym), Salman Rushdie, and Pervez Hoodbhoy. Their views deserve our closest attention.

PERVEZ HOODBHOY AND ISLAMIC DIVERSITY

First, let's consider Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy, an outstanding Pakistani nuclear physicist, whose December 30, 2001, Washington Post article, "How Islam Lost Its Way" (expanded in the spring 2002 Free Inquiry), strikes at the heart of the matter. Insisting on the fundamental diversity of Islam, Hoodbhoy writes:

   Maulana Abdus Sattar Edhi, Pakistan's preeminent social worker, and the
   Taliban's Mohammad Omar are both followers of Islam, but the former is
   overdue for a Nobel Peace Prize while the latter is an ignorant, psychotic
   fiend. Palestinian writer Edward Said [of Christian background, teaching at
   Columbia University], among others, has insistently pointed out that Islam
   holds very different meaning for different people. Within my own family,
   hugely different kinds of Islam are practiced. The religion is as
   heterogeneous as those who believe and follow it. There is no "true Islam."

Every essentialist statement ever made about Islam should be weighed against this paragraph, with which virtually all objective scholars of Islam would agree. In practice, there is no "true Islam"; there are only Islams--as many as there are individual Muslims. Moreover, the differences among Islams are sometimes vast. Uniformity is concentrated more or less in five "pillars": the confession of faith; the prayer ritual; fasting during Ramadan; giving alms for the poor; and the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one's lifetime. Some Islams add a sixth pillar--jihad, the internal or external "struggle in the path of God"--while still others substitute it for one of the other five. There is also great disagreement among Muslims as to the practical meaning of jihad--particularly as to whether it refers primarily to inner struggle, directed against one's worst impulses, or to outer struggle, directed against a society that refuses to allow Muslims to worship.

The history of Islam is replete with accounts of divergences in the theory and practice of the religion. In the first 300 years--from 632 CE to around 950 CE, the so-called formative period of Islamic thought, according to W. Montgomery Watt in a book of that name--a transition occurred from the original oral traditions of Islam to a written tradition that came to be widely accepted by Muslim scholars. There is much controversy today about exactly what happened during this period, since the territory of Islam was at that time expanding enormously and many special arrangements were made by Muslim conquerors with local leaders throughout the conquered lands, permitting the orderly conduct of life to continue.

Different schools of Islamic law sprung up in different regions, with varying implications for future development. When the Quran (the words of Allah as dictated by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad), the Hadith (stories of the Prophet), and the Sunna (the ethos of Islam as practiced by the Prophet) were finally articulated, there were already many conflicting interpretations of these texts. With the subsequent further migration of the faith to as far away as China, the Americas, and Indonesia, Islam found itself taking on a multitude of forms and nuances, with no single authority to determine which among them was "correct." The introduction of new languages, living styles, and technologies further complicated the problem of uniformity.

Today Islams comprise an enormous variety of beliefs and behaviors. What is routinely practiced by one group may be forbidden by another. For instance, some Sufis employ verse, music, and dance to achieve mystical "union with God." In a panel discussion at Yale on October 3, 2001, Professor Lamin Sanneh told of his research on the Jakhanke Muslims, a pacifist sect of Nigeria.

Understanding the diversity of Islams gives those of us who aren't Muslim a valuable tool to facilitate our dealings with Muslims and is therefore much too important for us to ignore or deny. Nearly everybody knows a Catholic who almost never attends mass or who practices birth control, or a Protestant who believes in heaven but not in hell. Many of us who are familiar with variations in religious practice and belief among both Christians and Jews may not realize that similar variations exist among Muslims. The obvious reason is lack of personal contact with Muslims. However, if you have lived where Islam is common, and especially if you have Muslim friends, you probably have observed some of this diversity and may even take it for granted.