A Muslim scholar has warned against what he calls “a grave threat to Islam’s moral centre” posed by extremists. Prof Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, argues in his book ‘The Great Theft’ that Muslims should wrest control of the discourse on defining what being a Muslim means in the modern world away from extremists. In a commentary on the book, Emran Qureshi, a fellow at the Labour and Worklife Programme of the Harvard Law School, credits the UCLA professor with retelling the tradition of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) as a moderate man who avoided extremes.Qureshi, writing in the Globe and Mail newspaper from Toronto on Saturday, says, “Abou El Fadl traces the rise of Islamic extremism to the rise of the Wahabi state, the precursor of modern Saudi Arabia. By now it has become something of a cliché, but here the author’s original contribution is actually to explore the ideas of the sect’s founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab through his writings, and the dislocations they produced. He calls Wahabis ‘puritans’ and demarcates their ethos and underlying worldview from the moderate centre of Islam. Some critics may consider this to be too reductive. But one needs to ask: Has this interpretation of Islam influenced modern Muslim understanding of their faith, and if so, how?”
According to Qureshi, in his teachings, ibn Abd al-Wahab emphasised a puritanical, punitive and literalist interpretation of Islam. He argued that Muslims had gone astray from the one true Islam. He thus sought to rid Islam of those “corruptions” that had crept into it: mysticism, rationalism, Shia theology and, essentially, all theological innovations other than those he preferred. In essence, he was waging war against Islamic tradition itself. His Islam is a closed, supremacist, metaphysical system.” He points out that the Shia theology was denounced by the Wahabis as a heresy, and all Shias and those that sheltered them were declared heretics.
Abd al-Wahab participated in the sacking of Karbala in 1801, in which thousands of Shia Muslims were massacred. A major factor in sectarian violence is the anti-Shia bias within this puritan strain of Islam, and the growing influence of its intolerant interpretation, the latest example being the destruction of the Al-Askariya shrine, he adds. Qureshi writes that Abou El Fadl asserts that Abd al-Wahab was “rabidly hostile toward non-Muslims,” and insistent that Muslims should not “imitate” or befriend them. However his real enemies weren’t Christians or Jews, but Ottoman Turks, whom he labelled a “heretical nation.” In spite of Wahabi loathing for the West, the Arabs co-operated with the British in fighting the Ottoman Turks. Thus it was the West that helped give birth to the present Saudi state.
He points out that the diffusion of Wahabi ideology began aggressively in the 1970s after the Shah of Iran’s overthrow and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He argues that contemporary puritans use religious text to regulate life, and use literalist readings of the Quran and the Hadith to shield themselves from criticism. The new puritans feel disempowered by modernity and react militantly and violently to it. Since many Muslim regimes are “ruthlessly authoritarian,” they contribute to the puritans’ feeling of powerlessness.
According to Qureshi, Abou El Fadl emphasises that oppression is a great offence against God, thus making a substantive contribution and positing a more humane interpretation of Islam, one consonant with the modern world. He uses the Islamic concept of ‘haqq’, which combines the meanings “rights/legal entitlement” with truth, and thus ties together the requirements for justice with the basis of religious belief. These rights, he shows, are sacrosanct and cannot be voided by the state. Abou El Fadl shows why sovereignty should rest with the polity, while the puritans insist that sovereignty rests with God and his interpreters on earth. Puritans look to an unsullied Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban for their vision of an Islamic utopia on Earth.
The UCLA academic considers “morally abhorrent” the Saudis’ “aggressive form of patriarchy in which they respond to feelings of political and social defeatism by engaging in symbolic displays of power that are systematically degrading to women.” He is afraid that the authority of the moderate centre in Islam has greatly diminished and apprehends that the puritans will be able to redefine Islam.
Muslims, according to Qureshi, perceive the war on terror as a war on Islam. Islamic radicals pose as defenders of Islam. While Muslims have been outraged by the Danish cartoons, the Saudi state and its religious establishment have been silently and systematically destroying Islamic heritage, especially that associated with the Holy Prophet (pbuh). A new magazine called ‘Islamica’ has chronicled that destruction. The grave of Amina bin Wahb, the Holy Prophet’s (pbuh) mother, was bulldozed. Latrines have been built on the birthplace of the Holy Prophet’s (pbuh) first wife, Khadija. It is said that the house where he was born will soon be levelled and turned into a car park. There have been no protests, no convening of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, “not a peep” from mainstream North American Muslim organisations.
Abou El Fadl suggests that the moderate voice of Islam has few champions within the diasporic Muslim population of the West or in the Muslim heartland. The puritans are well funded and entrenched. He cites the case of the late Dr Fazlur Rahman, a brilliant and deeply pious Muslim. Forced to leave Pakistan, Rahman taught at the University of Chicago, but his voice has been forgotten. Instead, the writings of Maudoodi, his fundamentalist contemporary and nemesis, are widely disseminated.