Is Islamic Jihad beginning to fizzle out? The announcement of Sheikh Mohammad Hassan, head of the Jammu and Kashmir Jamaat-e-Islami, earlier this month that his organisation would participate in the Assembly election and the heavy electoral blow dealt by the Awami National Party founded by late Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khar (Frontier Gandhi) on fundamentalist coalition Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal in the Pakistani election in North West Frontier Province and Balochistan are enough to trigger this question which assumes that Muslims will be getting wearied of Jihadi Islam.
This assumption may sound presumptuous at the moment. But signs of a new breeze of freethinking among intellectual sections of Muslims cannot be underestimated. In the forefront of this reform-minded and sceptical section are a few courageous women: Ayan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Irshad Manji and Taslima Nasreen. You had better turn your back on these writers if you are a Muslim who has a chip on your shoulder about the supremacy of your religion. Because that is exactly what these writers challenge. Irshad Manji stands out because, unlike the others, she believes that Islam can be reformed and made compatible with contemporary spirit of democracy.
Her book The Trouble With Islam Today, written in the form of an open letter to fellow Muslims is a critique of Islam in its present form. To quote her words, she is taking the trouble of launching a global campaign for rediscovering Islam’s lost tradition of Ijtihad (independent reasoning). Nothing else could have explained, according to her, the emergence of 135 schools of thought in Islam in the early centuries of its history
Islam became a dogmatic and closed religion that it is today, she argues, as a result of its obsession with the `glory of its founding moment’, a trait that began after Islam led by Arabs started facing defeats in battles against non-Arabs including Crusaders, Berbers, Mangols and Ottoman Turks. Gates of Ijtihad were closed by 12 th century and mullahs became gatekeepers. Bin Laden’s brand of Jihadi Islam is a re-enactment of this founding moment: “New York City is bin Laden’s pre-Islamic Mecca. To him, World Trade Centre workers were conscious combatants in the march of secular materialism”. (p. 165)
You want to know the impact of this gate-closing on the Arab world? A UN report in 2003 revealed that over the past 1000 years the entire Arab world had translated only as many books as Spain translated every year.
Irshad Manji has been dubbed an iconoclast, rebel and self-proclaimed Muslim Refusenik. She was four years old when her family migrated from Uganda to Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, in 1972 when large number of South Asian Muslims escaped from that country after Idi Amin launched `Africa for the blacks’ policy. Daughter of a violent father and a mother who was struggling to sustain the household, Manji started asking difficult questions to her madrassa teacher whose stock reply was `Read the Quran’. Instead of leaving Islam, she wants to `discover Islam’s personality’, she says.
She has found post-9/11 Muslim narrative that Islam has been hijacked is an excuse for mainstream Muslms to evade self-criticism. The book traces the birth of modern Jihadi Islam to the humiliation suffered by the secular and socialist Arab establishment led by Egypt in the 1967 war with Israel. Political Islam stepped in after secular Arab governments suffered defeat and it was followed by a world-wide campaign, bankrolled by Saudi oil money, for revival of the Wahabi brand of puritan Islam to prepare for the final victory.
Manji says that tribal mindset of desert Arabs is dominant in Islam today. Muslims are being taught to become religious `robots’ by a system driven by this mindset. Prevalence of practices such as wearing purdah by Muslim women across the world is an example of what she calls Arab cultural imperialism.
Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish and Taslima Nasreen are sceptical of any attempt to reform Islam. Islam cannot be reformed as long as it claims supremacy over other religions and keeps the Quran and the Hadith outside the purview of criticism, according to them. For Manji, the Operation Ijtihad involves questioning `superstition that we can’t question the Quran’. She exudes the confidence that the operation can restore Islam’s humanity.
2 comments:
Islamic fundamentalism is the flavor of the day and age. Instaed of citing examples from abroad, let us look in our own backyard.
Paloli Mohammed Kutty, our veteran Left wing leader and minisster has announced that he would sanction an Arab Madrassa right here in God's Own Country - where else? Anything new here? No way. All Madrassas over here teach Arabic as well. The point to be noted here is that there is not a single person here whose mothertongue is Arabic. So whom is this Madrassa meant for?
Many a time have I found a condescending attitude from Muslim women towards girls of other religions, engaged in that noblest of professions - nursing. Muslim women who partake in any extra curricular activities are marginal. The heavily patriarchal and Mullah oriented community is dead against their women doing 'lowly' jobs such as nursing,sports, singing, writing and so on. That is why they hurl abuses and fatwas against Sania Mirza. Sania Mirza is so hurt that she has refused to play in the Hyderabad Open held recently.
Islamic fundamentalists get an upper hand only when their community remains ignorant of the vast opprtunities that lie ahead of them. As with the Left wing's policy of keeping the poor and the lesser mortals, eternally poorer and lesser open, so that their tribe may thrive, so do the Mullahs strive to keep down their community in the darkness. It is the women who are the worst sufferers.
Womens Day which falls on 8th March will see umpteen women who are decapacitated by men's laws. The sadder part is that the comfy nest that the girls themselves do not show the will or interest to look beyond, the satin cocoon of nest that is prepared for them at home in the name of marriage and children, do not think nothing of those women who toil to make those material edifices happen.
They simply look down on the those women who swab their wounds, who give DPT at the ESI or Goverment Hospitals, and also on those women who make their umpteen deliveries simpler and less painful.
I salute those angels who work for their living.
You want to know who the new madrassa is meant for? C'mon, don't pretend to be stupid. That is meant for minority votes. Ours is not a democracy based on informed citizens. Political parties think that Mullahs and Maulavis represent Muslims. They don't. I will give you a good example. Recently clerics of Dar ul Uloom Deoband condemned terrorism as unislamic. The media in the country gave wide coverage to the event. But nobody asked the question whether the maulanas of this Islamic seminary represented Muslims in the country. It is time Muslims in the country ignored these mullahs whether they condemn or endorse terrorism. Did any of these clerics come out in the streets to protest against acts of Islamic terrorism in the country, the way they did to protest against Salman Rushdie? No. I think the media should disabuse itself of its misconceptions about retrograde Islamic bodies as they do about reactionary saffron outfits. Emancipation of Muslim women is the worst nightmare of male-chauvinistic mullahs of Islam. That will put an end to Islam as a dogma.
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