Cairo Magazine - Call to change

Source: Adam Bernstein

While “political reform” and “economic reform” have become popular buzzwords in the Middle East, vociferously avowed goals of ruler and opposition alike, religious reform remains the arena of an embattled but increasingly visible few. They argue that, whether the goal of change in the Middle East is the spread of democracy and human rights, the development of economies, the creation of knowledge, or the defeat of extremism, a radical change in the dominant discourse of Islam is necessary.

“Look at Europe; when Europe began to progress, the first progress was religious reform,” says the 84-year-old Gamal Al Banna (whose more conservative brother, Hassan, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928). “It came before all the other reforms. Why? Because it liberated the soul, the conscience, the mind ... this is a necessary element for political and economic reform.”

Al Banna, the author of numerous books on Islamic reform, however, remains among a tiny minority of religious scholars willing to defy Islam’s powerful orthodoxy. Inside Egypt, religious thinkers who are willing to think outside the box have endured all sorts of persecution, from economic boycott, to exile, to murder. As a result, the vast majority of those who seek change in Egypt and the Arab world are content to confine their efforts to the political realm.

Islam and democracy

In the past, some have argued that Islam and democracy simply don’t mix. Though recently it has been the reformers voicing these concerns, in the 1980s some Islamic groups denounced democracy. The Egyptian-born sheikh and professor at King Saud University in Riyadh, Muhammad Mandoura, said in Al Sharq Al Awsat in 1985 that the “sanctification of individual freedom and guarantees like the freedom of religion, freedom of opinion, freedom of ownership and personal freedom; all this violates Islam in every respect.” Sheikh Shaban, then head of the Movement for Islamic Unification in Lebanon told Al Safir newspaper in 1985 that, “We in Lebanon do not demand half the parliament because we do not believe in parliamentary rule, since democracy... is a heretical form of government.”

Twenty years on, however, one is unlikely to find many religious leaders openly touting such ideas. For one thing, the idea of democracy is unassailable in the global community today. For another, Islamic movements of all stripes long ago realized that democracy is their friend, and their most likely route to power. Realizing this, the Brotherhood is a crucial partner in the current political reform movement in Egypt. Essam Al Erian, one of the leading moderate figures of the Muslim Brotherhood, defended the Brotherhood’s commitment to democracy in the Al Ahram Center’s The Democracy Journal in Spring 2003. “The Muslim Brotherhood,” he wrote “considers that the system of constitutional rule is, of all the systems of rule present in the world today, closest to Islam, and it is not equaled by any other system.”

They came under fire in January, however, when the Supreme Leader, Mahdi Akef, told Al Masry Al Youm that the Muslim Brotherhood did not object to a fifth presidential term for Hosni Mubarak, not because of their commitment to the principles of constitutional democracy, but simply because “he is the guardian of the state, and Islam in the holy Quran obliges us to obey him.”

“What is democratic about blind obedience to a dictator?” asks Sayed Al Qemani, an Egyptian writer who has published 15 books promoting a reinterpretation of Islamic texts, and who writes critiques of traditional Islam in the weekly Rose Al Youssef.

“The government goes and makes an alliance with them [the religious establishment] because the governments are fascist governments, and in order to rule the people, they want to continue the Islamic idea that the ruler is in place for all his life, and he rules with Islam, and thus he should be obeyed,” says Al Qemani.

The history of the past 50 years in Egypt, as seen by Al Qemani, is the history of the state forging its legitimacy through the exploitation of religion. The rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser, commonly portrayed as a relatively secular period in Egyptian history, was in fact “the golden age for the revival of Islam and its men,” according to Al Qemani.

Source: Adam Bernstein

Nasser, he points out, established the High Council for Islamic Affairs in 1960 and then the Islamic Research Council, a conservative bastion with Al Azhar, and gave it wide-ranging censorship powers. In addition, says Al Qemani, under Nasser the number of Azhari institutes in the governorates of Egypt grew from seven in 1952 to over 2,000 at the time of Nasser’s death.

That Sadat allowed the Brotherhood back into Egypt and allowed them to operate openly in the street and on university campuses to counter the Marxist left is well known. More recently, President Mubarak has given significantly expanded censorship power to Al Azhar.

Reshaping Islam

Thinkers like Al Banna and Al Qemani claim to be reinterpreting Islamic texts, seeking to bridge the gap between the text and modern society. They say that, instead of recycling the religious interpretations of Islam’s earliest thinkers, interpretations that have come to occupy a sacrosanct and unassailable position in traditional Islam, they are remolding Islam to fit with today’s values. In doing so, they are—controversially—claiming the right to proffer their own interpretations.

In the words of the Al Azhar-educated Qatari writer, Abdel Hamid Al Ansari, “We’re talking about reason, rationality and critical thinking with regards to Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic history.”

Prominent Syrian writer Muhammad Shahrour puts it another way, saying “what was good for 1,000 years ago, might not be appropriate today in this time and civilization.”

In the years that followed the death of Muhammad, as Islam spread across much of the Middle East and North Africa and became an empire, the religion expanded to address the changing needs of empire, and to respond to the internal differences inside Islam, principally between the Sunni and Shia sects.

The sheer volume of texts that resulted—texts regarded by the orthodoxy with a reverence similar to that of the Quran—has made the religion’s intricacies inaccessible to all but a specialized elite. These texts include pillars of the Islamic canon such as the hadith and early tafseer, or interpretations of the Quran, written by thinkers during the first centuries of Islam.

Important parts of the reform movement have been aimed at stripping these writings of their hallowed status. Educational reformers at Al Azhar, going back to the 19th century, have criticized the system of education that simply re-explained the previous explanations of old explanations without creating new interpretations.

Today, one of the more persecuted reform movements in Egypt, the Quraniyoon, is calling to get rid of the hadith entirely and make the Quran the only source for Islamic jurisprudence.

With regards to both the hadith and early Islamic legal rulings, many were created to suit the distinctly political needs of the sultan, argue many. The popular notion of a golden age of Islam where sharia ruled is a fabrication, says Othman Muhammad Ali, an Egyptian pharmacist and author on reforming Islam.

“The first school of Islam, the Malaki school, came about because the [Abassid] Caliph Abou Gafar Al Mansour asked for a book that he could use to lead the people,” he says. “This was a political request, not a religious request.”

The Malaki school is one of the four schools of Islam which still dominate Sunni Islamic thought to this day. The founders of the four schools all lived and died in the eight and ninth centuries and their vision of Islam reflects and responds to the needs and circumstances of that era, and in many respects they emphasize a starkly undemocratic relationship to the state, says Muhammad Ali.

Ibn Taymiyya, a 13th century thinker, is credited with spreading Islam’s rigid Hanbali school and freezing the ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation of Islam, what is known as the closing of the doors of ijtihad. Ibn Taymiyya, writing during the chaos brought on by the Mongol invasions, is commonly credited with the opinion that it is better to live for 60 years under tyrant than one day in the absence of authority.

“Islamic jurisprudence was created in an environment of oppression, where there was no freedom,” argues Shahrour, the Syrian reformist. “They don’t speak about freedom at all. They speak about the relation with the ruler, and the people’s inferiority to the ruler.”

The era referred to by Shahrour was a period of great instability in the Islamic world, when the community was divided and coming under assault from Crusaders, Mongols and others. Religious thinkers the world over often advocate close relationships with authority during such periods.

The problem is that there has been little change to prevalent Islamic thought since that period. As a result, many modern liberal concepts are not easily meshed with the traditionalists’ Islamic message, rooted as it is in the early centuries of the last millennium. For example, the power given to institutions like Al Azhar to confiscate books—84 since 1990 according to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights—and Egypt’s own legal code, which makes “contempt of heavenly religion” punishable by imprisonment, contradict principles of freedom of thought, expression and creation.

“Where is our society that will achieve and realize political reform if the mentality is like this?” asks the reformist author Al Qemani.

Early reform efforts

Bahey Eddin Hassan is director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights, which will be hosting a second summit on religious reform next summer. The reform movement in Islam is an old phenomenon, stresses Hassan. What has changed, he adds, is the burgeoning interest of the West.

“Religious reform began 150 years ago,” says Hassan. “But the progress has been very slow, and sometimes retrogressive.”

The regression referred to by Hassan has been one of the more troubling characteristics of the reform movement over the past century and a half. Jamal Eddin Al Afghani, a pioneer and icon of contemporary Islamic thought, was one of the early Islamic reformists to appear in the latter half of the 19th Century. Over the course of the ensuing century, his disciples, and his disciples’ disciples, expanded on his teachings and formed their own philosophies under the influence of external events like colonialism in the region.

Al Afghani’s revolutionary and reformist vision of Islam turned inward and became about resistance to outside attack—eventually spawning the militant jihadism that has added much fuel to the flames of modern religious debate.

Struck by the discrepancy between Western technological and economic progress and progress in the Arab world, the revolutionary Al Afghani advocated sweeping reforms in Islam in order to resist Western interference and invasion. Among his students were the future Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, and perhaps Egypt’s first modern feminist, Qassem Amin.

His most prominent student, however, was Muhammad Abduh. Abduh would carry on Afghani’s revolutionary and reformist mantle until the failed anti-British Orabi Revolution of 1881. Jaded by the failure, Abduh’s ambitions for Islamic reform grew less revolutionary in the latter half of his life. He was even appointed to that most non-revolutionary of posts, mufti of Egypt, in 1899.

Abduh’s most well known student was Muhammad Rashid Rida. Similar to the effect that the Orabi Revolution had on Abduh, the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924 and the colonization of much of the Middle East by European powers would significantly change Rida’s reformist ideas. Once a strident reformist, he later became a proponent of the Hanbali School of Islam, the strictest of the four schools, and supported the revival of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia.

Rida taught Hassan Al Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. In 1951 Sayyid Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood as its official spokesman. Following the wave of imprisonments and torture of the Brotherhood in the 1960s, Qutb wrote from his jail cell the treatise that would earn him the title of the Godfather of Islamic Militancy. He also shared a cell with Shukry Mustapha, who in 1977 founded one of the first violent jihadi groups in Egypt.

Under siege

Today’s Islamic reformists are under siege. They have had their books banned, been branded as infidels, arrested, threatened, exiled or even killed. There are several widely publicized incidents such as the murder of writer Farrag Foda in 1992, and the forced divorce and eventual exile of Nasser Hamed Abu Zayd. There are also numerous other lesser known examples.

Al Qemani has had to move to a remote Cairo suburb, where he lives under 24-hour security, after the preacher at his local mosque in Al Haram repeatedly singled him out as an infidel during Friday sermons.

Muhammad Ali’s neighbors have boycotted his pharmacy because of his ideas. He says his children are harassed daily coming and going from school. Three of his colleagues were sentenced to three years in jail in 2001 because of similar ideas about Islam. As for Al Banna, he is among the most recent victims of Al Azhar, with the August 2004 banning of his book, The Responsibility for the Failure of the Islamic State.

A conference on religious reform in October 2004—attended by Al Banna, Shahrour, Al Qemani and other reformist thinkers from many countries including Syria, Qatar and Indonesia—was broken up by protesters. The following day the Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar called the conference’s attendees “apostates” in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper.

It is simply further evidence, say reformists, of the contradictions in the rhetoric of the Islamic orthodoxy, which supports democratic reform in one breath, while undermining it in another.

Source: Adam Bernstein

The traditionalists

Gamal Eddin Mahmoud is a member of Al Azhar’s Islamic Research Council, the body charged with, among other things, determining which books should be banned. Mahmoud, dressed like a prep-school headmaster in a blue blazer, a v-neck sweater and loafers, is the author of a number of books on moderate Islam.

He is moderate in the context of of Al Azhar, and adamantly professes his support for such liberal values as tolerance, women’s rights and free expression. His elaboration of these concepts, however, challenges the listener to reevaluate their very meaning.

Women’s equality, Mahmoud says for instance, does not mean absolute equality in every field. Rather it is an equality on balance, a balance that plays out across the spectrum of social issues. While in Islam the man inherits twice as much as a woman, this is weighed against the man’s obligation to support the woman financially. He also criticizes the extremists who “transgress the right of others to express their own opinion, and try to impose their opinions on others,” but defends censoring Islamic reformists, calling their way thinking “not right in Islam.”

“The thoughts of these people are not right in Islam,” says Mahmoud. “They understand Islam in a way that I think is wrong. And because of their thoughts, some people can be affected and religious organizations must try expose this.”

He goes on to argue that freedom must be tempered. “There is a need for restrictions. My understanding of freedom does not include sexual freedom and it doesn’t include the freedom to deny religion,” he says.

Al Banna, is blunt in his criticism of Al Azhar’s position, accusing the institution of stifling debate that might undermine its hold on power.

“From the perspective of their private position, Al Azhar doesn’t want reform and they strangle all who talk about Islam without being Azhari,” says Al Banna. “This is the powerful religious authority that enjoys the care of the state and the cooperation of the state. Reform cannot happen as long this traditional thought controls the Islamic world.”