An Islamic reformer who almost gets it

Michael E. writes:

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, a reformed Muslim terrorist, Tawfik Hamid, argues that the problem with Islam is that there is no “liberal” or “peaceful” interpretation of it. Only the interpretation of Islam that adheres to shariah is to blame. He writes:

The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace.

So the problem is not Islam, but the way all of the major scholars, theologians and adherents of Islam have practiced and understood it for the past 1,400 years. The mind boggles. I wish the author well in his quest to establish an Islam that teaches peace while remaining true to Islamic texts and traditions.

LA replies:

But at least Hamid is admitting the problem, which very few “moderate” Muslims do. And the paragraph immediately following the above paragraph is heart-rending:

Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals—who unceasingly claim to support human rights—have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah’s inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western “progressives” pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

What he says about the liberal West removing any external incentive for Islam to reform itself is certaintly true; it is an evocative summary of what I have called the West’s non-Islamic theories of Islamic extremism.

However, while Hamid’s criticisms of the leftist West are painfully true, a strange thing becomes evident in his article. He ends by placing all the blame for the obstacles in the path of Islamic reform on the West’s excuse-making for Islam. He never admits to the inherent impossibility of the task that he implicitly outlined earlier in the article. Thus he wrote:

While there are many ideological “rootlets” of Islamism, the main tap root has a name—Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.

Now, that sounds like the usual line, “radical Islam is the problem, moderate or traditional Islam is the solution.” But in Hamid’s next sentence he erases any distinction between the “violent, ultra-conservative version” of Islam and Islam itself:

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the “end of days.” The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

So, violent Islam is rooted in Islamic law and tradition, and moderate Islam such as Sufism is not, and there is no meaningful opposition within Islam to Islam’s barbaric practices. What then can be the basis of Hamid’s hoped for “theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace”? There is none. That is why he turned his article into a complaint about the West. He glanced off the horrible truth that Islam cannot be reformed, but couldn’t face it fully, so he escaped the truth by blaming the West for undermining Islamic reform.

I am not denying that serious criticism of Islam coming from the West is vitally needed. But it is needed most vitally for the West’s own self-defense. The West cannot help create the conditions for a theologically-rigorous moderate Islam, because such a thing is impossible by the very nature of Islam. Therefore the only “reform” of Islam that should be of interest to us, the only “reform” of Islam that is possible in the real world, is that Muslims cease being Muslims. The only serious reformers are the apostates.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 04, 2007 07:22 PM | Send