polite_gandalf wrote on Apr 2
nd, 2014 at 8:01am:
The Spectator article is paywalled and I can't find it reproduced anywhere
Is someone with a subscription able to post the article?
It's time to reclaim Islam from the fanatics. Here's how
Can my religion be reconciled with free expression? The answer is yes
351 Comments Irshad Manji 29 March 2014
I am not a moderate Muslim, I am a reformist. Rooting out corrupt practices can never be an act of mere moderation. Restoring integrity, or wholeness, is always a radical act. It transcends notions of left and right, emphasising the need to think independently. In Islam, independent thought has a strong history, not that you’d know it from the news about bombings, beheadings and bloodshed. ‘Jihad’ has become part of the West’s vocabulary and with good reason. But there is a lesser-known term in Islam — one that has the capacity to change the world for good.
The idea is ‘ijtihad’, Islam’s tradition of questioning and reinterpreting. And it is absolutely fundamental to the spirit of the Qur’an. Islam’s scripture contains three times as many passages urging Muslims to think and rethink than verses promoting blind worship.
That’s nice in theory, but what about in fact? In the Islam of a millennium ago, ijtihad flourished. It was no coincidence that Islamic civilisation led the world in curiosity, creativity and ingenuity. But then the sun set on Islam’s golden age. Invaders from North Africa pillaged the pluralism of Muslim Spain. From Cordoba to Baghdad, much of the Islamic empire lapsed into defensiveness. Out of 135 schools of Sunni thought, just four survived. The gates of ijtihad narrowed and in some places closed, legitimising rigid readings of the Qur’an. To this day, Muslims still struggle with the idea of independent thought.
But a new generation of Muslims are pushing the boundaries. In growing numbers, we are speaking our truths to self-appointed authorities, be they our parents or their imams. I can attest to this because young Muslims have been sharing their stories with me since I wrote my book, The Trouble with Islam Today. It was published ten years ago, with the predictable noise from offended Muslims drowning out the support from many others.
Those others, often the children of conservatives, wrote to me about their desperation for a Muslim community that accepts their interfaith relationships. In 2007, I used my blog to publish a blessing of Muslim-Christian love, written in English by a scholarly imam who reinterpreted the Qur’an. It was downloaded so often that I had it translated into 20 more languages.
Last year, Al Jazeera aired an intense debate about Muslim reform between me and the British commentator Mehdi Hasan. Hate mail followed. So did love bombs. But I did not receive any death threats. To be sure, the reality remains that those who shatter age-old taboos within Islam do have to fear for their lives. While it is true that every religion has its extremists, in no other religion do mainstream believers routinely shrug off the murder of dissenters. This is a life-and-death difference. All the more reason for ijtihad to be revived in the 21st century.
Nowhere does the necessity of ijtihad seem more urgent than in the wars over freedom of expression. One might say that the UK led the way. More than 25 years ago, a puny hive of British Muslims demanded the death of novelist Salman Rushdie even before Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa.
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Earlier this year, I watched the British brouhaha over my friend Maajid Nawaz, the prospective Liberal Democrat candidate for Kilburn and co-founder of the counter-extremism outfit Quilliam. Nawaz had tweeted a cartoon called Jesus and Mo. Jesus to Mo: ‘Hey!’ Mo: ‘How ya doing?’ The end. That was it. Two top-tier prophets swapping props.
The problem for some Muslims is that, according to tradition, Muhammad cannot be depicted in image lest he become an object of worship. But by insisting that he cannot be drawn under any circumstances, these Muslims make the prophet off-limits to anyone who does not believe as they do. They thus turn Mo into, well, an object of worship. It leaves a lot of us wondering what, if anything, has been learned since the Danish cartoons fiasco eight years ago.
Then, you will recall, a handful of journalists, politicians, diplomats and mullahs in Denmark engineered an epic cultural crisis. Months earlier, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten had published images that supposedly mocked the Prophet Muhammad. Even after the paper apologised, the controversy grew. In different parts of the world, Muslims who rioted against Danish insensitivity silenced the more reasonable voices within their faith.
At the time, I received a lot of emails, mostly from young Muslims. ‘I am even more offended by the riots than by the cartoons!’ exclaimed Mahmood, a student whose reaction typified many others’. Fed up with one upheaval after another, the Muslims who contacted me channelled their frustration into an urgent sense that Muslims need to reform ourselves.
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