by Jerome du Bois
There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. . . Whatever we hold precious, we cannot protect it from our curiosity, because being who we are, one of the things we deem precious is the truth. Our love of truth is surely a central element in the meaning we find in our lives.
. . . the only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it. -- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, page 22.
In an earlier post, "One Man, One Vote, Once," I called Islam a totalizing ideology that will be dragged down into oblivion because of its death-grip on the past. Perhaps I should have said, Islamism. Because Islam is made up of people, and people -- because of our curiosity -- are way more complicated, restless, and unsatisfied than any confining ideology. Also, I was reminded of something Dean Esmay wrote, in a comment thread on faith and politics: "the Enlightenment was made up primarily of Christian thinkers." That is, the only lasting change must come from within. It should be obvious that Islam is not monolithic, but we don't get exposed to much more than the writhing mustaches. Here are two quick glimpses of liberal possibilities in Islam from recent reading, one a whole nation, the other a single person.
The nation is Indonesia and its stubborn polytheistic undercurrents, perfectly described by Christopher Hitchens -- really, he's in fine form here -- in the January 2004 Vanity Fair (not available online.)
The person is the lesbian Muslim and self-taught Koranic scholar Irshad Manji, author of "The Trouble With Islam," in a short interview in the NYT (12/21/03) by John Glassie. I came away from both with at least a little more hope that ijtihad -- asking questions, being curious, thinking outside the Koran -- can show the complications in this tradition, and a way out of the dead end of puritanical fanaticism.
Let Ms. Manji go first, since she probably would anyway:
God gave me a thick skin, a big brain, and, I'll be the first to admit, a big mouth.
So all I'm asking of Muslims is to take ownership of the role we play in what ails Islam.
[John Glassie:] Some of your critics complain that you don't understand the Koran. You did get kicked out of the madrasa at age 14.
I got kicked out for asking questions, which is a very scholarly thing to do. And I spent the next 20 years studying Islam on my own. I acknowledge that the Koran is difficult and complicated. I celebrate that. The Koran is complicated precisely because of its contradictions and ambiguities. I challenge the men with fancy titles to acknowledge just how complicated the Koran is. You don't need credentials to be a simpleton.
. . . In the early decades of Islam, thanks to ijtihad, as many as 135 different schools of Islamic thought were allowed to flourish. In the city of Cordoba alone, there were 70 libraries. Seventy! Think about it. That's one for every virgin promised to today's Muslim martyrs. Books back then, and babes today. That's a telling contrast in priorities.
And she is a telling contrast in Islamic personalities, who are usually grim and nitpicky. (Think Ibrahim Hooper.) Mansour Ijaz, a formidable intellect and a fearless man, is an exception, and it will be interesting to track his continuing spiritual journey. And so it is with Ms. Manji, a sharp thin wedge in the obdurate obsidian wall of Islamist fundamentalism.
The Hitchens piece is rich, funny, and historically informative. I'll cover just a couple of points, and resist the temptation to regale you with details -- looking for a telltale blue bruise on the forehead, or flying to the wrong island and having a panic attack, or drinking at Paddy's Reloaded on Bali, or -- okay, okay.
The first point is that Indonesia is persistently anti-Arab, and especially anti-Wahhabist.
"There is a saying here," I was told by Bambang Harymurti, editor in chief of Tempo. "If you see a snake and an Arab, take care of the Arab first."
. . . Indonesian pilgrims, making the hajj to Saudi Arabia, did not much like what they saw of Saudi society, with its corruption and fanaticism.
. . . Islamic parties failed to get seven words calling for Sharia law inscribed in the Indonesian constitution in 1945, and they have failed dismally ever since, at every election, to have the seven missing words reinstated.
Perhaps because sharia is primarily an Arab concept. The second point follows from Hitchens characterization of this sprawling archipelago: "an ancient, ramshackle polytheistic civilization." He uses Amrozi, the Islamist Bali bomber, as an example. Amrozi made his Wahhabist bones by attacking an ancient non-Islamic shrine:
In the village of Tenggulun, in East Java, where he was born, Muslims have a syncretic relationship with older, animistic and traditional religions, and there are shrines and tombs consecrated to local "saints" and holy men. In 1987, Amrozi torched one these venerated places and thus touched off a bitter quarrel with the supporters of Nahdlatul Ulama, a strong centrist Muslim group. [My emphasis. Hitchens doesn't pursue this point, but by mentioning it he hints it's important. I think it's psychologically significant.]
It appears Indonesians are not afraid to entertain and explore alternative explanations of reality, the past, ancestors, nature spirits, and gods and goddesses. Which, of course, doesn't make them saints -- e.g., the horrifying coup of 1965, and the East Timor slaughters -- but it makes them less susceptible to singular fanaticism. As Hitchens puts it in a marvelously breathless interrogatory:
If Sukarno père could synthesize German stoicism and Italian Romanticism and stir in a bit of Communism, and if the Muslim incendiaries now want to impose Koranic uniformity and absolutism, but if the society itself can blend Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam and continue to hold elections, then which force will in the long run be the strongest?
Good question.
[CODA: Here are two Islamic web sites devoted to liberalizing Islam: Islamlib.com (the English main page), and ISIS, the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society. I'm sure there are others, but we non-Muslims, even active bloggers like me, don't hear about them much, do we? We need to hear more -- more loudly, more often -- moderate Muslim voices.]
Posted by Jerome at December 25, 2003 12:23 PM | TrackBack