Two excellent articles which appeared in the past week:

The Lucidity of Madmen: Andrew Bolt, Waleed Aly and the Myth of the ‘Model Moderate Muslim’

Scott Stephens

ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS UPDATED 16 MAY 2014

IN A TRIUMPH OF BIPARTISAN NIHILISM, MADMEN ACROSS THE IDEOLOGICAL SPECTRUM HAVE CONSPIRED TO ENSURE THAT NO MATTER REQUIRING A MODICUM OF NUANCE CAN BE THE SUBJECT OF SUSTAINED PUBLIC DEBATE.

SEE ALSO
Related Story: Injustice in God’s name: The corruption of modern Islam
KHALED ABOU EL FADL 24 SEP 2012

Related Story: Human Rights as State of Grace: Against Terrorism and Secular Nationalism KHALED ABOU EL FADL 14 MAR 2014

Related Story: Free speech, vilification and power: The 2013 PEN Free Voices lecture WALEED ALY 27 MAY 2013

Related Story: Can Muslims ever be one of ‘us’? Thinking differently about difference ASMA BARLAS 11 SEP 2013

Related Story: Confused and confusing: What Paul Sheehan and Michael Adebolajo have in common SUSAN CARLAND 28 MAY 2013\

Related Story: The heart of the matter: Extremism, the media and the faith of Muslims in Sydney AFTAB AHMAD MALIK 29 AUG 2013

Related Story: Islam and human rights: Beyond the zero-sum game
ABDULLAHI AHMED AN-NA’IM 3 JUN 2013

Related Story: What’s in a name? Christians, Muslims and the worship of the One God MIROSLAV VOLF 19 OCT 2013

~~

At the beginning of the twentieth century, with characteristic foresight G.K. Chesterton predicted that civilisation would find itself under threat from madmen. But the particular threat he had in mind was not that of the proverbial barbarians at the gates – in the form of, say, the “Muslim hoards” or Raspail’s debauched armada of immigres. Rather, Chesterton warned against the madness of the materialist, who, by shrinking the cosmos and human experience to the limits of his desiccated reason, would in turn doom humanity to a shrunken, imaginatively impoverished existence.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason,” Chesterton insisted. “The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” It is this heedless, unmoored quality that makes the materialist view of the world at once grim and seductive, just to the extent that it flattens out complexity and renders all reality bare before reason’s austere gaze. Everything is thus explicable within what Chesterton calls the insane simplicity of materialism’s “clean and well-lit prison of one idea” – but its explanatory power comes at the expense of the transcendent Good, the sublime in and of nature, the irreducible depth of human experience. This is why, Chesterton concludes, “The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.”

The media is, of course, full of such lunatics. It courts them, fashions them, panders to them. Their maddening simplicity lends itself to the culture of complacent ignorance enshrined in the media and encouraged in its audience. In a triumph of bipartisan nihilism, madmen across the ideological spectrum – aided and abetted by their media patrons – have conspired to ensure that any matter of consequence, any topic requiring even a modicum of nuance, simply cannot be the subject of patient, sustained public conversation.

Instead, these often delicate matters are quickly buried ‘neath the sheer tonnage of inane trivia and pseudo-intellectual thuggery that today constitute the popular press. This is nowhere more evident than when it comes to religion.

And this brings me to Andrew Bolt. Despite the near fetishistic obsession with him among the bunyip alumni (to crib Nick Cater’s felicitous phrase), I do not regard Bolt as an especially egregious example of our present madness, but rather as a thoroughly representative instance of it. Indeed, I find myself in the somewhat discomfiting position of having been praised on a number of occasions by Bolt – though, I suspect that particular honour may well now be a thing of the past. He seemed to like my principled objection to Kevin Rudd’s brand of conviction politics. He applauded my on air rebuke to Peter FitzSimons, whose philistine rants against religion had, I felt, gone unchecked for too long. He apparently finds me occasionally perceptive despite being a “man of the Left” (though I’m hardly that – of the Left, I mean) and even promoted me as the “tiniest crack in the ABC groupthink” (whatever that means).

But Bolt’s latest diatribe against Waleed Aly – whose very presence, prominence even, in the Australian media is enough to give the most despondent among us hope – exemplifies everything that is wrong with the way that religion, and especially Islam, is presently handled in public debate. For this reason, I felt this particular display of madness ought not to go unanswered.

Using a rather hackneyed line of attack, even by his standards, Bolt condemns Aly’s seeming reticence to use the descriptor “Islamic” for the grotesque melange of separatists, criminals, thugs and terrorists that have opportunistically huddled under the banner of Boko Haram and wrought chaos and death in northeast Nigeria over the last decade. For Bolt, the more recent abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls makes Aly’s sleight of hand all the more problematic. In fact, Bolt pronounces, it is yet further evidence that Aly is a “pet of the establishment Left,” a “model moderate Muslim, used by the media to persuade us we have little to fear from Islam.” His role, in other words, is to sanitise the public image of Islam, to reassure the credulous Left that Islam is basically benign and that Muslims represent little more than an exotic ornament about the neck of liberal multiculturalism. Thus consoled, those inner-city progressive types are free to drift back into their near permanent state of moral somnolescence.

What Bolt wants from Waleed Aly, it would seem, is the same maniacal lucidity that Abubakar Shekau exhibits. Without the slightest hesitation, the leader of Boko Haram can claim to speak in the name of God, invoking divine sanction for their wanton barbarism (“Allah says slaves are permitted in Islam … I will sell [your girls] in the market, by Allah”) and their practice of forced conversion (“these girls … we have indeed liberated them … [they] have become Muslims”). Moreover, Shekau can confidently enjoin “real Muslims” – namely, he says, those “who are following Salafism” – to fall in behind his death-worshipping pogrom against Christians and other Muslims in northern Nigeria. No ambiguity here, Bolt insists.

But that is precisely the problem. Boko Haram is, at best, a kind of bastard Salafism. Perhaps more accurately, it represents the still-born offspring of Salafist ahistorical restorationism and unprincipled political opportunism, on the one hand, and Wahhabist anti-intellectual supremacism, on the other. This corrupted and all-corrupting Salafabist hybrid (to use Khaled Abou El Fadl’s neologism) has been aggressively disseminated and massively funded throughout the Muslim world – including Nigeria – by Saudi Arabia, who promote it, not as one expression or sect of Islam, but as Islam tout court. Such a claim can only be made, however, on the back of the Wahhabist rejection of the vast Islamic tradition of jurisprudential and moral reasoning, and in the wake of the disintegration of the traditional institutions of Islamic authority that historically identified and marginalised such heretical departures from Islamic teaching.

According to Abou El Fadl, these developments over the last half-century, along with the widespread nationalisation of religious endowments (awqaf) across the Muslim world, have occasioned:

“a descent into a condition of virtual anarchy with regard to the mechanisms of defining Islamic authenticity. It was not so much that no one could authoritatively speak for Islam, but that virtually every Muslim was suddenly considered to possess the requisite qualifications to become a representative and spokesperson for the Islamic tradition, and even shari’a law. This was primarily because the standards were set so low that a person who had a modest degree of knowledge of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet was considered sufficiently qualified to authoritatively represent the shari’a, even if such a person was not familiar with the precedents and discourses of the interpretive communities of the past.
Consequently, persons – mostly engineers, medical doctors, and physical scientists – who were primarily self-taught, and whose knowledge of Islamic text and history was quite superficial, were able to position themselves as authorities on Islamic law and theology. Islamic law and theology became the extracurricular hobby of pamphlet readers and writers. As such, Islamic intellectual culture witnessed an unprecedented level of deterioration, as self-proclaimed and self-taught experts reduced the Islamic heritage to the least common denominator, which often amounted to engaging in crass generalizations about the nature of Islam, and the nature of the non-Muslim ‘other’.”
As a result, the conscientious humility, the devout hesitation before the inscrutability of the Divine that has so defined the Islamic intellectual tradition for more than fourteen hundred years, the studied attentiveness to the dynamic interplay between Qur’anic texts, historical circumstance and the aesthetics of Divine mercy bound up with the very concept of Islamic authority – these have all been largely substituted in our time for the authoritarian pronouncements of illiterates and despots, of hadith hurlers and idolaters. No ambiguity here, either.

It is not at all clear to me that Waleed Aly was being purposefully evasive in his description of Boko Haram. If anything, his attempt to characterise so impossibly diffuse and promiscuous an “organisation” suffered from too much detail. Moreover, he has rarely, if ever, proven reluctant to label a movement or an ideology “Islamist” as a properly sociological designation. But that is not what Andrew Bolt wanted from him. He wanted Aly directly to implicate Islam as constitutive of the identity and demands of Boko Haram, and thereby to hold up Boko Haram as somehow disclosing the truth of Islam: “is Islam a threat? What have we imported and what danger would we run by importing more?”

What Bolt wants, in other words, is for Aly to admit the “obvious”: that Islam is defined by the conduct of those who purport to be Muslims. Like Chesterton’s lunatic, the “obvious” explanation Bolt demands might explain a large number of things, to his mind at least, but it cannot explain them in a large way. It would be unconscionable – nay, idolatrous – to reduce the vast moral architecture and rich theological symmetries of Divine Instruction to the weakness and sometimes wickedness of Muslims. Or, as Abdal Hakim Murad wisely puts it, Muslims are Muslims because they practice Islam, not vice versa. Thus the Qur’an repeatedly warns that God’s covenant with Muslims is no entitlement, but hangs on their preparedness to bear living witness to the beauty of Divine mercy and justice.

This line of theological reasoning will undoubtedly strike Andrew Bolt as far too ambiguous, much too complex for his “clean and well-lit prison of one idea” – namely, that Islam is evil. But the lunatic certainties and vulgar generalisations peddled by Bolt and his media confreres not only do violence to the lives and experience of others; as Chesterton foresaw, such lunacy also condemns us to an imaginatively impoverished existence, a cultural half-life. For without what Chesterton called “healthy hesitation and healthy complexity,” we leave no space for the formation of the kind of moral grammar necessary for the identification and confession of idolatry, pride and malice in our own souls, and thus the opening of our lives to God and to others.

Can the maniacal clarity of Andrew Bolt or Peter FitzSimons or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris – or Abubakar Shekau, for that matter – come close to producing the sort of deeply affective, searingly self-critical prayers we read in Khaled Abou El Fadl’s theological masterpiece, Search for Beauty in Islam (the book which, to my mind, represents perhaps the closest modern analogue to St. Augustine’s Confessions)?

“God, look at Your people! Look at those who have wrapped themselves in Your religion like a cloak of hypocrisy. Look – are they Your people? On their splattered banners, bombastic slogans, and rolling banter, do You see or hear beauty? Does their labor carry the fragrance of Your breath – do their acts resonate in mercy and bliss? Is the bliss of Your touch found in the misery of their follies? Can the agonies they spread, and the suffering they inflict possibly represent Divinity? … No, they are not Your people for with certitude and conviction, I know that Your people are known by the love they earn, not by the hearts and minds they mutilate and burn, as they convince themselves that they are the bearers of Your majesty.”
Yet without capacity to speak thus, to pray thus, we are condemned to the idolatrous isolation of our own ego, and cut off from that penitent, generous life in shared pursuit of mercy, charity and beauty. It has often seemed to me that what gives Waleed Aly’s political and cultural analysis its incisiveness, its uncanny ability to expose that unacknowledged contradiction upon which an entire ideological edifice hangs, but without a hint of hubris, stems from the fact that he has learned to pray thus. If only Andrew Bolt understood this, he would realise that the danger posed by Aly is far more serious than if he merely represented some kind of covertly anti-Western Islamism with a human face: by learning to pray thus, Waleed Aly has learned to speak as though the greatest struggle is not against one’s political enemies, but against the idolatry in one’s own heart.

***

Abdal Hakim Murad once remarked, with biting concision, “The New Atheism is built on three pillars: human ego, priestly pederasty, and the Wahhabis of Mass Destruction.” Like a once seemingly insuperable empire, the “New Atheism” itself has now all but collapsed from its own rapaciousness. It sought to conquer too many kingdoms too quickly, never realising that it had neither the philosophical underpinnings nor the imaginative resources to sustain itself amid the wastelands of late-modernity, until it was too late. Much like the mythical “spirit of Vatican II” (which never was), the “New Atheism” now exists only as a media epiphenomenon, an ambient irreligiosity that has mistaken visceral cynicism for a kind of professional virtue.

And yet there is no denying that Waleed Aly and I belong to the two religious traditions on account of whose hypocrisy “the name of God is blasphemed” throughout the West. The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and the torrent of revelations of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the first half of 2002 produced the ideal conditions of possibility for the emergence of the stridently antitheistic rhetoric and materialist reductionism that would come to be synonymous with the “New Atheism.”

I am at least consoled that, within the vast folds of the Islamic and Christian intellectual traditions, the inherent potential for repentance, reform and rebirth is always present, as the unending internal struggle to reflect the Divine beauty in common life goes on. But what resources, I wonder, exist within secular liberalism for the struggle against human ego?

Scott Stephens is the Religion & Ethics Editor for ABC Online.

~~

And this by Mark Durie:

Boko Haram and the Dynamics of Denial: Islam is not the victim here

Posted: 16 May 2014 03:11 AM PDT

It is a common refrain of pious Muslims in the face of atrocities done by other Muslims in the name of Islam that Islam must not be shamed: whenever an atrocity potentially dishonors Islam, non-Muslims are asked to agree that ‘This is not Islamic’ so that the honor of Islam can be kept pristine. However the real issue is not what would be good or bad for Islam’s reputation.  … Islam is not the victim here. The pressing issue here is not to get people to think well of Islam, but how these girls can be rescued, and above all how Boko Haram’s murderous rampage is to be halted.

This article was first published by Front Page Magazine.

Qasim Rashid, an American Muslim, published on FoxNews a heart-felt expression of deep distress at the kidnapping of Nigerian girls by Boko Haram (‘What would Muhammad say to Boko Haram’).  He declared that Muhammad himself would not recognize this group as acting in line with his teachings:

“Boko Haram’s claim that Islam motivates their kidnappings is no different than Adolf Hitler’s claim that Christianity motivated his genocide. This terrorist organization acts in direct violation of every Islamic teaching regarding women.”

Qasim Rashid is not the only Muslim who has been speaking out in support of the kidnapped girls, while denying that their plight has anything to do with Islam (see here).

Qasim Rashid is a member of the Ahmaddiyah community, which is regarded as unorthodox by most Muslims.  Indeed Ahmaddiyahs are often severely persecuted for their beliefs in Islamic nations.  Although Qasim Rashid does not speak for mainstream Islam, he is nevertheless to be commended for speaking up against Boko Haram’s repugnant acts.

But does the claim that Boko Haram is not Islamic hold up to scrutiny?

What counts as a valid manifestation of Islam? Ahmaddiyah beliefs can be considered Islamic, in that those who hold them do so on the basis of a reasoned interpretation of Islamic canonical sources, even if the majority of Muslims reject them as Muslims. By the same token, the beliefs of Boko Haram must also be considered a form of Islam, for they too are held on the basis of a reasoned interpretation of Islamic canonical sources.

It needs to be acknowledged that Boko Haram has not arisen in a vacuum.  As Andrew Bostom has pointed out, violent opposition to non-Islamic culture has been a feature of Nigerian Islam for centuries. Today this hatred is being directed against Western education and secular government, but in the past it was indigenous Africa cultures which were targeted for brutal treatment, including enslavement and slaughter.  The modern revival of absolutist sharia-compliant Islam in the north of Nigeria is a process which has deep roots in history.  It has also been in progress for decades.  Khalid Yasin, an African American convert to Islam and globe-trotting preacher waxed lyrical about the advance of sharia law in Nigeria on Australian national radio in 2003:
“If we look at the evolution of the Sharia experiment in Nigeria for instance. It’s just a wonderful, phenomenal experience. It has brought about some sweeping changes, balances, within the society, regulations in terms of moral practices and so many things. …What did the Sharia provide? Always dignity, protection, and the religious rights?”

But let us consider the evidence Qasim Rashid gives for his view that Muhammad would disown Boko Haram.  His arguments can be summarized as follows:

‘Boko Haram violates the Koran 24:34 [i.e. Sura 24:33] which commands, “and force not your women to unchaste life,” i.e. [this is] a condemnation of Boko Haram’s intention to sell these girls into prostitution.’
‘They violate Koran 4:20 [i.e. Sura 4:19] which declares, “it is not lawful for you to inherit women against their will; nor should you detain them,” i.e. a specific repudiation of Boko Haram’s kidnapping and detention.’

‘Prophet Muhammad’s dying words embodied these commandments. He implored, “Do treat your women well and be kind to them, for they are your partners and committed helpers.”’

The seeking of knowledge is an obligation on all Muslims, including ‘secular  knowledge’.

‘Islam … commands female education.’

Although Qasim Rashid’s views are sincerely held, his reasoning is weak. Let us consider his points in order.

Compel not your slave-girls — Sura 24:33

Contra Qasim Rashid, Sura 24:33 does not say ‘force not your women’ but:
“… compel not your slave-girls to prostitution when they desire to keep chaste, in order to seek the frail goods of this world’s life. And whoever compels them, then surely after their compulsion Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.” (The Quran translation used here is cited from a translation by Ahmaddiya scholar Muhammad Maulana Ali).

The word translated ‘slave-girl’ here can also mean a young woman, but in this passage it clearly refers to female slaves. A standard interpretation of this verse by Sunni commentators – such as Ibn Kathir – is that if someone owns a slave girl, he should not prostitute her, but if he does, Allah will forgive her.

Strictly speaking, this verse does not appear to apply to the situation of the Nigerian girls taken by Boko Haram.  The outrage is that they were taken captive and enslaved in the first place, becoming what the Koran refers to as ‘those whom your right hand possesses’.  That they may have been raped by their captors seems highly likely, but this is not the same thing as being prostituted to produce income for their owners. Islam permits men to have sexual intercourse with their slave women, and also to sell them into the service of another, but it frowns on hiring them out for prostitution.

In Sura 33:50 of the Koran it is stated that it was permissible for Muhammad to have sex with his female slaves:

“O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowries, and those whom thy right hand possesses, out of those whom Allah has given thee as prisoners of war”, and in verse 23:6 this prerogative is extended to Muslim believers:
“Successful indeed are the believers … who restrain their sexual passions except in the presence of their mates [their wives], of those whom their right hands possess.”

The actions and teaching of Muhammad also support the practice of sexual slavery for women taken captive in jihad.  Chapter 547 of the Sahih Muslim, a revered collection of sayings of Muhammad considered reliable by most Muslims, is entitled ‘It is permissible to have sexual intercourse with a captive woman…’. Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, the translator and editor of the Sahih Muslim, added the following footnote to this chapter:

“As for the expression malakat aymanukum (those whom your right hands possess) [it] denotes slave-girls, i.e. women who were captured in the Holy War … sexual intercourse with these women is lawful with certain conditions.”

Boko Haram is reported to be intending to sell the girls at a slave market.  This is no doubt based upon the precedent of Muhammad’s own practice. There are many examples from Muhammad’s actions and those of his companions which could be cited.  For example, after putting the men of the Jewish Quraiza tribe in Medina to the sword, Muhammad’s biographer Ibn Isaq reports that he sold some of the Jewish women and used the money to buy horses and weapon:

“Then the apostle divided the property, wives, and children of B. Qurayza among the Muslims, and he made known on that day the shares of horse and men, and took out the fifth. … Then the apostle sent Sa‘d b. Zayd al-Ansari brother of b. ‘Abdu’l-Ashhal with some of the captive women of B. Qurayza to Najd and he sold them for horses and weapons. (Sirat Rasul Allah, by Ibn Ishaq)

The rest of the Jewish slaves were divided among the Muslims.  Muhammad himself took one of the leading Jewish women, Rayhana, for his concubine, but she refused to marry him:

The apostle had chosen one of their women for himself, Rayhana d. ‘Amr b. Khunafa, one of the women of B. ‘Amr b. Qurayza, and she remained with him until she died, in his power. The apostle had proposed to marry her and put the veil on her, but she said: ‘Nay, leave me in your power, for that will be easier for me and for you.’” (Sirat Rasul Allah, by Ibn Ishaq).

Rayhana, who became Muhammad’s concubine by capture in warfare, is revered to this day as one of the ‘wives’ of the prophet of Islam.

In addition to the support for this practice found in the Islamic canon, historical sources give ample evidence that enslavement of women as captives of war and resulting sexual servitude has been a persistent feature of Islamic warfare conducted by pious Muslims.  Consider for example the report of Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, Saladin’s chronicler, of the fate of 8,000 Christian women in Jerusalem who were unable to pay a ransom for their release after the conquest of that city by Saladin:

“Women and children together came to 8,000 and were quickly divided up among us, bringing a smile to Muslim faces at their lamentations. How many well-guarded women were profaned, how many queens were ruled and nubile girls married, and noble women given away, and miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden stripped of their modesty, and serious women made ridiculous, and women kept in private now set in public, and free women occupied, and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonoured and proud women deflowered, and lovely women’s red lips kissed, and dark women prostrated, and untamed ones tamed, and happy ones made to weep!” (Arab Historians of the Crusades, ed. by Francesco Gabrieli, pp. 96-97).

It is has been widely accepted by Islamic jurists down the ages that Islam permits Muslim men to have sex with women who have come into their possession through being taken captive in war, either because they personally captured them, or because they acquired them by purchase or gift from another.  Indeed this was the legal basis in Islam for the harem system: the women of the harem were mainly sourced from jihad campaigns waged against non-Muslim communities.

It is simply incredible that Qasim Rashid would quote a verse which prohibits Muslim men from hiring out their concubines for sex as evidence that Islam is against the use of sexual violence against captive women.  If we are supposed to deny the label ‘Islamic’ to Boko Haram, are we also to conclude that Saladin and even Muhammad himself cannot be called Muslims?

Inheriting and troubling wives — Sura 4:19

Sura 4:19 is another passage cited by Qasim Rashid.  Maulana Muhammad Ali’s translation throws a different light on this passage:

“O you who believe, it is not lawful for you to take women as heritage [i.e. to inherit them] against their will. Nor should you straiten them by taking part of what you have given them …”

The standard explanation of this verse is that it prohibited two practices: a man ‘inheriting’ the wife of his male relative, which had apparently been a pagan Arab custom before Islam; and oppressing one’s wife in order to make her seek a divorce, so that she will pay back the bride-price. This latter practice had been occurring in Muhammad’s time, because if a Muslim man divorced a wife, he was not entitled to any financial compensation, but if a woman initiated divorce proceedings, she had to compensate him for her bride-price.  (See Ibn Kathir and also Muhammad Ali’s explanation in footnotes which both concur with the explanation given here.)

Sura 4:19 is thus not a prohibition against detaining women: it has absolutely nothing to do with the situation of the captured Nigerian girls.

Treating your women well

With regard to Muhammad’s command to Muslims to treat their wives well, these words could apply as an instruction for the men who have married the captured girls, taking them as their wives.  It says nothing, however, about the issue of their capture, enslavement or sale.

On seeking secular knowledge

With regard to Qasim Rashid’s next point, most pious Muslims would agree that seeking knowledge, including Western scientific knowledge, is an obligation for Muslims.  Most Muslims do not agree with Boko Haram’s desire to banish all learning apart from Islamic instruction.  However antipathy to non-Islamic education and knowledge has had a long history in Islamic thought.  This is not a new idea, nor even a particularly aberrant one, but is part of the broad range of Islamic theological perspectives.

Learned Muslim women in the past

With regard to Qasim Rashid’s fifth argument, it is of course possible to find examples in history of capable Muslim women who were well-educated.  On the other hand there are traditions of Muhammad which denigrate the intellectual capacity of women, such as the following:

Once Allah’s Apostle went out to [to pray] … Then he passed by the women and said, “O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women).” They asked, “Why is it so, O Allah’s Apostle ?” He replied, “You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you …” The women asked, “O Allah’s Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?” He said, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?” The women replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her religion.” (Sahih Bukhari, Book 6, Hadith 301)

In any case, asking what Muhammad would say on the subject of educating women is irrelevant to what Boko Haram has done. It did not attack the girls’ school because Boko Haram believes women should not be educated.  They did it because they are opposed to secular, non-Islamic education per se, and they believe they have the right to kill, enslave and plunder people who they count as their enemies.  They also wish to terrorize their enemies by stirring up as much fear and emotional trauma to them as possible.

Islam is not the victim here

Qasim Rashid writes: “Do not give the terrorists known as Boko Haram the dignity of attributing any religion to their name.” This is a common refrain of pious Muslims in the face of atrocities done by other Muslims in the name of Islam: whenever an atrocity dishonors Islam, non-Muslims are asked to agree that ‘This is not Islamic’ so that the honor of Islam can be kept pristine.

However the real issue is not what might be good or bad for Islam’s reputation.  The sight of Boko Haram’s leader saying on video that ‘by Allah’ he will go to market and sell the captive girls, because his religion permits him to do so, has already dishonored Islam.  Muhammad and Saladin, by their actions, could equally be considered to have dishonored Islam, but this is beside the point. The real challenge here is not preserving the honor of Islam, but what can be done to counter Boko Haram.

What is crystal clear is that nothing can be gained by denial of the truth about the jihadis’ religious ideology. Other Muslims may — and do! — disagree with Boko Haram’s beliefs. That is a not a bad thing.  But what will not help anyone – least of all the victims of this outrage – is putting forward weak arguments that no-one should judge Islam on the basis of Boko Haram’s actions.  That line of thought is completely irrelevant to addressing the problem.

Islam is not the victim here. The pressing issue here is not to get people to think well of Islam, but how these girls can be rescued, and above all how Boko Haram’s murderous rampage can be halted.

To achieve progress with this second goal it is necessary first and foremost to acknowledge the theological character of the challenge.   In historical contexts, such as colonial India and the Dutch East Indies, colonial governments were able to turn the tide on long-running and costly Islamic insurgencies by acknowledging the religious character of the challenge they were facing – that they were up against a jihad.  This enabled them to pursue appropriate strategies, such as:

Getting leading mainstream Muslim scholars to issue credible rulings (fatwas) which declared the specific jihad insurgency to be sinful and forbidden by Islam.  (Such fatwas continue to be used by Islamic regimes today to counter their home-grown insurgents.)

Making it a primary military objective to pursue and take out the ideologues – Islamic clerics – who were driving the insurgency through recruitment and religious formation of the jihadi combatants.  It is essential to cut off the flow of ideology.  US Navy Seals may be able to go in and rescue the kidnapped girls, but many more girls will continue to be kidnapped until the transmission of the ideology is disrupted.

Attempting to persuade non-Muslim Westerners that Islam is not the problem actually makes it much harder to formulate an effective strategy for countering jihadi insurgencies.  The aversion of the US State Department to acknowledge that Boko Haram was an Islamic religious movement – they only classified it as a banned terrorist organization in late 2013 – has had a crippling effect on America’s ability to make a difference in Nigeria (see Nina Shea’s analysis).

Boko Haram will not be contained by sending in hostage negotiation experts, or making public statements about poverty, disadvantage and ‘poor government service delivery’. These are not the cause of all this hatred.  Acknowledging the potent religious roots of the insurgency movement is the basic first step in shaping a credible response.  To accept this is not the same as saying that Boko Haram’s interpretation of Islam is correct.  One can be completely agnostic about what is or is not true Islam but yet grasp that Boko Haram is an interpretation of Islam, which at least for its followers has become the most compelling interpretation around.  Finding a solution to the challenge of Boko Haram can only start from this premise.

=========

Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum, and director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor and Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

Subscribe to markdurie.com blog by email.

This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.