| Submit your comments on this article |
| Olde Tyme Religion |
| Losing My Jihadism |
| 2007-07-22 |
| By Mansour al-Nogaidan Islam needs a Reformation. It needs someone with the courage of Martin Luther. This is the belief I've arrived at after a long and painful spiritual journey. It's not a popular conviction -- it has attracted angry criticism, including death threats, from many sides. But it was reinforced by Sept. 11, 2001, and in the years since, I've only become more convinced that it is critical to Islam's future. Muslims are too rigid in our adherence to old, literal interpretations of the Koran. It's time for many verses -- especially those having to do with relations between Islam and other religions -- to be reinterpreted in favor of a more modern Islam. It's time to accept that God loves the faithful of all religions. It's time for Muslims to question our leaders and their strict teachings, to reach our own understanding of the prophet's words and to call for a bold renewal of our faith as a faith of goodwill, of peace and of light. I didn't always think this way. Once, I was one of the extremists who clung to literal interpretations of Islam and tried to force them on others. I was a jihadist. I grew up in Saudi Arabia. When I was 16, I found myself assailed by doubts about the existence of God. I prayed to God to give me the strength to overcome them. I made a deal with Him: I would give up everything, devote myself to Him and live the way the prophet Muhammad and his companions had lived 1,400 years ago if He would rid me of my doubts. I joined a hard-line Salafi group. I abandoned modern life and lived in a mud hut, apart from my family. Viewing modern education as corrupt and immoral, I joined a circle of scholars who taught the Islamic sciences in the classical way, just as they had been taught 1,200 years ago. My involvement with this group led me to violence, and landed me in prison. In 1991, I took part in firebombing video stores in Riyadh and a women's center in my home town of Buraidah, seeing them as symbols of sin in a society that was marching rapidly toward modernization. Yet all the while, my doubts remained. Was the Koran really the word of God? Had it really been revealed to Muhammad, or did he create it himself? But I never shared these doubts with anyone, because doubting Islam or the prophet is not tolerated in the Muslim society of my country. By the time I turned 26, much of the turmoil in me had abated, and I made my peace with God. At the same time, my eyes were opened to the hypocrisy of so many who held themselves out as Muslim role models. I saw Islamic judges ignoring the marks of torture borne by my prison comrades. I learned of Islamic teachers who molested their students. I heard devout Muslims who never missed the five daily prayers lying with ease to people who did not share their extremist beliefs. In 1999, when I was working as an imam at a Riyadh mosque, I happened upon two books that had a profound influence on me. One, written by a Palestinian scholar, was about the struggle between those who deal pragmatically with the Koran and those who take it and the hadith literally. The other was a book by a Moroccan philosopher about the formation of the Arab Muslim way of thinking. The books inspired me to write an article for a Saudi newspaper arguing that Muslims have the right to question and criticize our religious leaders and not to take everything they tell us for granted. We owe it to ourselves, I wrote, to think pragmatically if our religion is to survive and thrive. That article landed me in the center of a storm. Some men in my mosque refused to greet me. Others would no longer pray behind me. Under this pressure, I left the mosque. I moved to the southern city of Abha, where I took a job as a writer and editor with a newly established newspaper. I went back to leading prayers at the paper's small mosque and to writing about my evolving philosophy. After I wrote articles stressing our right as Muslims to question our Saudi clerics and their interpretations and to come up with our own, officials from the kingdom's powerful religious establishment complained, and I was banned from writing. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave new life to what I had been saying. I went back to criticizing the rote manner in which we Muslims are fed our religion. I criticized al-Qaeda's school of thought, which considers everyone who isn't a Salafi Muslim the enemy. I pointed to examples from Islamic history that stressed the need to get along with other religions. I tried to give a new interpretation to the verses that call for enmity between Muslims and Christians and Jews. I wrote that they do not apply to us today and that Islam calls for friendship among all faiths. I lost a lot of friends after that. My old companions from the jihad felt obliged to declare themselves either with me or against me. Some preferred to cut their links to me silently, but others fought me publicly, issuing statements filled with curses and lies. Once again, the paper came under great pressure to ban my writing. And I became a favorite target on the Internet, where my writings were lambasted and labeled blasphemous. Eventually I was fired. But by then, I had started to develop a different relationship with God. I felt that He was moving me toward another kind of belief, where all that matters is that we pray to God from the heart. I continued to pray, but I started to avoid the verses that contain violence or enmity and only used the ones that speak of God's mercy and grace and greatness. I remembered an incident in the Koran when the prophet told a Bedouin who did not know how to pray to let go of the verses and get closer to God by repeating, "God is good, God is great." Don't sweat the details, the prophet said. I felt at peace, and no longer doubted His existence. In December 2002, in a Web site interview, I criticized al-Qaeda and declared that some of the Friday sermons were loathsome because of their attacks against non-Muslims. Within days, a fatwa was posted online, calling me an infidel and saying that I should be killed. Once again, I felt despair at the ways of the Muslim world. Two years later, I told al-Arabiya television that I thought God loves all faithful people of different religions. That earned me a fatwa from the mufti of Saudi Arabia declaring my infidelity. But one evening not long after that, I heard a radio broadcast of the verse of light. Even though I had memorized the Koran at 15, I felt as though I was hearing this verse for the first time. God is light, it says, the universe is illuminated by His light. I felt the verse was speaking directly to me, sending me a message. This God of light, I thought, how could He be against any human? The God of light would not be happy to see people suffer, even if they had sinned and made mistakes along the way. I had found my Islam. And I believe that others can find it, too. But first we need a Reformation similar to the Protestant Reformation that Martin Luther led against the Roman Catholic Church. In the late 14th century, Islam had its own sort of Martin Luther. Ibn Taymiyya was an Islamic scholar from a hard-line Salafi sect who went through a spiritual crisis and came to believe that in time, God would close the gates of hell and grant all humans, regardless of their religion, entry to his everlasting paradise. Unlike Luther, however, Ibn Taymiyya never openly declared this revolutionary belief; he shared it only with a small, trusted circle of students. Nevertheless, I find myself inspired by Luther's courageous uprising. I see what Islam needs -- a strong, charismatic personality who will lead us toward reform, and scholars who can convince Islamic communities of the need for a bold new interpretation of Islamic texts, to reconcile us with the wider world. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #16 If Mansour believed Allah wanted him to kill people, then some real doubts on the existence of the "killing god" are justified and right. He would be better to lose his faith in a "killing god" and then search with his soul for the God of Abraham. He's not talking himself into anything, he is searching for the better nature of his angels. |
| Posted by: whatadeal 2007-07-22 22:29 |
| #15 What kind of God wants you to kill other people who are, after all, every bit His children as much as you are? One that's told Islam the sun shines out of its ass. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-07-22 20:06 |
| #14 How do you reform a death cult? Walk away from it. Turn your back on it. Your prophet was an alcoholic, pedophilic warlord who invoked the name of Allah to bamboozle a bunch of ignorant, superstitious goat herders into fighting his wars for him. He learned to read and write well enough to write a book. So what? The only notable element here is that 1400 years later billions of muslims still don't understand that the joke is on them. Christians could have a Reformation because the basic teachings of Jesus don't need to be explained away or reinterpreted. Some of the old passages in Leviticus, maybe, but not the New Testament. It was abuse of power by the Vatican that sparked Luther's protest, not the Bible. I can understand that muslims are looking for some spirituality, some meaning in their lives but Mohammed ain't it. Ask yourselves: Moses gave us the Ten Commandments; Jesus gave us the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule. What, besides, jihad, did Mohammed have to add? What kind of God wants you to kill other people who are, after all, every bit His children as much as you are? Where is the love? What has your culture given to the world? What great universities? What technology? What art, music or literature? Huh? What? Are we meant to do nothing but live in sand, tend goats, kill each other and study the Koran? Free yourself, Mansour. Walk away from it and don't look back. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque6305 2007-07-22 18:42 |
| #13 The justification for this among Muslims would be by pointing out that violent Muslims *always* fail, but peaceful Muslims usually prosper and lead good and long lives. Ergo, Allah favors the spiritual struggle, not the physical one. An even better justification would be to make sure that violent Muslims don't just fail—but that they die—frequently and in large numbers. I'd even go so far as to make sure that a few surrounding undecided Muslims get killed as collateral damage in order to discourage those who would even be in the proximity of any violent ones. This is because the typical shaman of any religion will generally go with prayer Or whatever else that doesn't involve any heavy lifting. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-07-22 15:44 |
| #12 Which is to say that Smith wasn't quite making things up as he went Mohammed wasn't quite making it all up by himself, either. There has to be some resonance with previous philosophy to attract disciples. |
| Posted by: KBK 2007-07-22 15:22 |
| #11 Human beings, religious or otherwise, can talk themselves into anything. That's why the discipline of the scientific method was developed: to bind unmoored thought to objective reality. Religious theories are eternal and unconfirmable. Scientific theories are verifiable and only as good as the next few experiments. |
| Posted by: KBK 2007-07-22 15:19 |
| #10 Frozen Al has the point spot on. Luther's reform was to go to the words of Jesus. The Wahabis emphasize the words of Mohamet. |
| Posted by: mhw 2007-07-22 15:11 |
| #9 I posited the reformation of Islam years ago, with the simple observation that Jihad should *only* be spiritual in nature, and never with acts of violence. The justification for this among Muslims would be by pointing out that violent Muslims *always* fail, but peaceful Muslims usually prosper and lead good and long lives. Ergo, Allah favors the spiritual struggle, not the physical one. It is hard to refute the power of prayer, even in Islam. This is because the typical shaman of any religion will generally go with prayer, as that is when the collection plate is passed around. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-07-22 13:28 |
| #8 Unfortunately, Islam has already had its "reformer" in the form of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahab. He has steered Islam away from reason and inquiry into a path of phony "certainty" and "truth". Anyone who tries to reform Islam now is not going to get very far because they are too influenced by outsiders (i.e. us). Al |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2007-07-22 13:20 |
| #7 it is critical to Islam's There, fixed that. Better how about outlawing or even better destruction? Patience, lad. Islam is hurrying this along as best it can. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-07-22 12:35 |
| #6 Once you go adrift, if you're still religiously inclined you can talk yourself into anything. As an example, I offer Joseph Smith. One could observe the same phenomenon at work in Paul's take on Christ's Judaism. Won't change a dot nor an I of the Law? It's pork time! Not that I am complaining, I am pro-bacon myself. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-07-22 12:08 |
| #5 "Once you go adrift, if you're still religiously inclined you can talk yourself into anything." This statement is too restrictive. Human beings, religious or otherwise, can talk themselves into anything. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2007-07-22 11:30 |
| #4 Once you go adrift, if you're still religiously inclined you can talk yourself into anything. As an example, I offer Joseph Smith. Smith's teachings have a direct lineage, through a chain of people as well as ideas, back to several strains of 16th century hermeticism in England. Brooke's book Refiner's Fire provides pretty solid documentation. Which is to say that Smith wasn't quite making things up as he went, any more than William Blake came up with the symbolism in his books and paintings out of thin air. |
| Posted by: lotp 2007-07-22 10:53 |
| #3 Islam needs a Reformation. This statement wins the "New Millenium Understatement Award." Better how about outlawing or even better destruction? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-07-22 10:27 |
| #2 God is light Nonesense, god is a spin network. This gentleman demonstrates why apostasy is considered such a great sin by all religions. Once you go adrift, if you're still religiously inclined you can talk yourself into anything. As an example, I offer Joseph Smith. "Islam is the problem" is a subset of "Religion is the problem". Some religions are more problematic than others. |
| Posted by: KBK 2007-07-22 09:20 |
| #1 Fatwa in 5...4..3 |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2007-07-22 06:40 |