The Daniel Pipeses of the ninth century

Islam is whatever Muslims say it is, Daniel Pipes blandly asserted in response to my 2005 article, “The Search for Moderate Islam,” in which I argued that there was and could be no such thing as moderate Islam. According to Pipes, if Muslims say that the Koran does not command war on infidels, then the Koran does not command war on infidels. Thus a “moderate” Islam, even if it has never existed, could readily be brought into existence.

Unfortunately for Pipes, such hopes and beliefs in a re-interpreted Koran are not new, but have kept springing into being since the early days of Islam, and they never get anywhere. In Islam Unveiled (pp. 25-26), Robert Spencer tells about the Mu’tazilite movement in the Abbasid Caliphate in the ninth century. The Mu’tazilites held that the Koran was created, not eternal. This view “allowed the Mu’tazilites to develop a method of Qur’anic interpretation that diverted further from the literal meaning of the text than most Muslim divines dared to venture.” When the Mu’tazilites took power under a series of pro-Mu’tazilite caliphs, they attempted to force their non-literal interpretation of the Koran on the entire Muslim world, requiring all Muslim judges to swear an oath that the Koran was created, not eternal. But the Mu’tazilites were fiercely resisted by the common people, and after 15 years a new, anti-Mu’tazilite caliph took power who made it a capital offense to say that the Koran was created. Subsequently the anti-Mu’tazilite view, that the words of the Koran are literally and absolutely true, became entrenched. Spencer continues:

The marginalizing and discrediting of the Mu’tazilites has cast a long shadow over “moderate Islam.” For it stand as a historical precedent that literalists can use to dismiss any interpretation of the Qur’an that doesn’t take all its words at face value. If today’s moderates stray too far from a literal reading of the sacred book (including its ferocity toward unbelievers), they risk being accused of trying to revive a long-discredited way of thinking.

Thus Pipes, Gaffney, and all the cheerleaders for a moderate Islam not only ignore the Islamic schools of jurisprudence which have established the authoritative interpretation of the Koran since the ninth century; they ignore the history of reform movements within Islam which have periodically sprung up and been rejected ever since the ninth century.

The lesson is that words, whether the words of the Koran, or the words of the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate (see my response to a reader who challenges my interpretation of that document), have consequences.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2007 09:55 AM | Send