• By Syed Hamad Ali, Special to Weekend Review

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad was voted Britain's most influential Muslim by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Jordan

For a man who is apparently Britain’s most influential Muslim, Shaikh Abdul Hakim Murad has rather unorthodox views on the way Islam is presented in the Western media. “I don’t think Islam is ever covered,” he tells Weekend Review.

“I have never actually seen an article in a Western newspaper that covers the core aspects of Islamic religion that are of significance to Muslims themselves. The focus is exclusively on social, economic and political dimensions of the religion. I have done interviews with journalists who say they don’t want to talk about the religious dimensions of Islam. That’s just the nature of modern Britain, unfortunately — we are going through a very secular period.”

Is there an Islam fatigue in Britain? “I think it’s not just an Islam fatigue,” he says. “It’s that people have been told everything about Islam except what makes it significant to Muslims themselves, which is often why they are so mystified.”

I am sitting with Murad — also known as Dr Timothy Winter — in his office at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. Around us on both sides are shelved an ocean of books, including many on Islam and religion with titles such as Ibn Batuta and Islam and Taoism, some in distant foreign languages (Murad speaks Arabic, Persian and Turkish).

While he is speaking, I wonder whether this rather bookish, almost quintessential scholar of the Oxbridge type could really be Britain’s most influential Muslim, as voted by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, based in Jordan. It has compiled a list of 500 most influential Muslims in the world.

Murad himself dismisses his lofty new title. “It’s a little bit of silliness, isn’t it?” he asks. “I don’t know how you could rank such people. I am sure if you would ask most Muslims in England they would certainly name other people. They wouldn’t have heard of me.

“My interests are rather abstract, philosophical and academic. Most Muslims in Britain are interested in more practical bread and butter issues. So I think it was probably a curious misunderstanding that led them to put my name on the list.”

A Muslim celebrity he may not be like the boxer Amir Khan or singer Yousuf Islam, but Murad is certainly a well-respected figure among Muslims, not only in Britain but also internationally, as a leading Islamic scholar. He holds a number of prestigious titles, including director of the Sunna Project, secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust and director of the Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe.

Last year he helped set up the Cambridge Muslim College, which trains imams for mosques in the United Kingdom. Murad is also very active in the local community and is heading a new mosque-building project in Cambridge, set to replace the present one which is stretched to capacity, with worshippers being forced to pray on the street outside.

Born in 1960, Murad converted to Islam at the age of 19. Back then, many people in Britain did not know much about the religion. The reaction from others to his new faith was one of curiosity. “The main concern was that I might have joined a cult,” he says. “That I was being manipulated by some evil puppet master, which was a fear among middle-class parents at the time. It was an age when cults were spreading very fast in Western countries. But as soon as it became clear that’s not what I was interested in, I think their anxieties receded.”

Compared to Britain’s total Muslim population, estimated at 2.4 million, converts form a small percentage at an estimated 60,000 to 70,000.

However, one odd bit of fact about converts in this country is that they sometimes keep their Islamic faith a secret by not telling others, according to Murad.

He attributes this strange phenomenon partly to an English sense of reticence. “We call them submarines,” he explains. “People who are under the surface and are practising the religion, including praying and fasting. But their close friends and family don’t know.”

For instance, Murad knows one professor at Cambridge University who has been a Muslim for 30 years and comes to the mosque when he can but his colleagues at the university aren’t aware he is a Muslim. Then there is a Christian clergyman who converted to Islam but hasn’t told his wife because he is sure she wouldn’t understand and would divorce him and he would end up losing the children.

But while the case of some converts can at times be rather awkward, Murad himself has lived quite a colourful life as a Muslim. Since graduating from Cambridge University with a first-class honours in Arabic in 1983, he travelled to Egypt, where he studied Islam at the renowned Al Azhar University. He lived for three years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before returning to London to study Turkish and Persian. Murad is at present the Shaikh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University.

Muslims are sometimes criticised for apparently having developed a “victim mentality” — and some prominent Islamic thinkers have also kind of agreed with this. Does Murad concur?
“I don’t find that particularly among Muslim communities,” he says. “The kind of Muslim leaders who the media notice may well think that Muslims are being unfairly singled out. That the West didn’t come to their rescue in Bosnia, the West has been indifferent to their fate in Palestine, the West did something to Iraq that it would never have done to, say, Spain under General Franco. That it is behaving in a cavalier fashion in Afghanistan. That it supports unpopular autocratic regimes throughout the Muslim world — and therefore the West is generically hostile to Muslims and victimises them. I think that is a ridiculous oversimplification.

“There are some Muslims who resent the fact that so many of the victims of Western foreign policy have been Muslims. But I don’t think that is the prevailing view of most mosque-going Muslims in the UK. They are more interested in immediate bread and butter issues of getting jobs, educating their children and finding their way into society.”

Alongside his passionate defence of Britain’s Muslim community, Murad is known for speaking eloquently about those who have gone to the extreme within the religion. I ask him how he would argue, using religion, against these people who find themselves at the radical fringe?

“Well, one has to do it using the traditional instruments of Muslim debate, which are Quran and Hadith quotations with reference to the past consensus of the scholars of the religion,” he says. “That debate is easily won because the radicals very seldom have a very proper religious education.

“Bin Laden is an engineer, Zawahiri is a medic. The typical profile of the radical Islamist is not that he is an expert on Islam, rather it is that he is somebody with a Western technical type of education who is sufficiently incensed by Western policies that he is using an Islamic language misunderstood to justify what is essentially a temper tantrum.”

In Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism, Murad argues that an Islamist suicide bomber is very much a by-product of a Westernised mindset and is in fact an alien phenomenon to the religion of Islam when viewed from a historical context. In the book, he notes how many on both sides will furiously deny an “Islamism with Western roots”. Suicidal militancy is, he points out, entirely absent from the Islamic scriptures. But shouldn’t one be weary of labels such as “moderate” Islam because it gives the impression of some type of “Islam lite” that people should be following? In other words, it is as if there is something wrong with following the religion in its fullness.

“Yes, you may say we have two alternatives,” he says. “We have the alternative of being Muslim extremists or being extremely Muslim. And I don’t accept the category of moderate at all because it is far from clear. Because when it is used usually by Western pundits and politicians, what is intended is anything other than a form of Islam that politically doesn’t obstruct present Western policies. And I don’t think that is a helpful way of developing a meaningful sense of priorities within a religion. So I don’t use this category ‘moderate’ Muslims at all. I think the ongoing face-off between radicals and the mainstream is a face-off between heresy and orthodoxy. Those are the terms which are more indigenous and authentic than ‘moderation’ and ‘extremism’.”

This brings the discussion back to where this interview started: the great Islam debate in the media. Murad believes there is little point in expecting a more accurate account of Islam in the British tabloid press. Instead, he tells me what worries him is that among the educated classes in the UK, who, to some extent, conduct their conversation through the more respectable broadsheets, there is an unwillingness to acknowledge that non-Western cultures may have definitions of happiness and human flourishing which could be worthy of respect and have a right to exist.

“There is something implicitly totalitarian about the assumption that the value set esteemed by Westerners must alone be right,” he says. “This comes from the universalism of the Enlightenment, which thought that ‘man’ was a single sort of subject and about whom large generalisations could always be offered.”

More recently, he acknowledges, such thinking has come under a good deal of attack. “But that does not seem to have percolated to the public sphere,” he says, “where it is assumed that the West alone can define ‘universals’, such as ‘universal human rights’, even though philosophically Western thinkers have an increasingly hard time establishing any universals at all. Some thinkers, such as Gavin D’Costa, Geoffrey Stout — and, I think, Slavoj Zizek — are very aware of this paradox. D’Costa’s new book holds that everything Westerners say to other cultures can be reduced to variations on ‘Be like us’. That’s not entirely accurate, of course.”

Clearly, it would be wrong to put the entire burden of blame on the shoulders of the West. Murad believes part of the problem is the reluctance so far of Muslim states and agencies to encourage a broader and more thoughtful cultural discussion in the West which is rooted in a better understanding of Muslim culture.

He gives the example of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan, whose Alliance of Civilisations at times seems to attempt such an effort. But if Middle Easterners really wish to be better respected in the West, he believes they need to engage in deep and extensive cultural investment. “The Arab League, or the OIC, should direct resources to creating something like the British Council,” he says, “or the Goethe Institute, with landmark institutions in Western capitals which promote a correct understanding and a healthy dialogue. At the forefront should be teaching the Arabic language. Unless the Muslim world engages in better public diplomacy on behalf of its culture, it cannot expect to be better understood and respected.”

Syed Hamad Ali is an independent writer based in Cambridge.

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Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

From: The Guardian 12 October, 2009

O you who believe! Let not your wealth nor your children distract you from remembrance of Allah. Those who do so, they are the losers. (63:9)

This verse in the Qur’an is an invitation for humanity to make a relatively small effort in this world, in return for the eternal reward of the hereafter. It is a call to save ourselves from becoming fixated on our wealth and on providing our children with the latest gadget and games, which ultimately are mere distractions from our remembrance of the creator.

But humans are short-termist; we think primarily of our pleasures now rather than the harmony and serenity of the world to come. Chapter 102 of the Qur’an says that we are distracted by competing in worldly increase, until we finally end up in our graves where we will be questioned about our excesses.

Does this mean that it is wrong to own things? Of course not, as money and offspring can be positive things in the life of a believer, and we do of course have basic needs which need to be met. But we must remember that the pleasures of consumption are quickly gone, while lasting benefit comes only from using our wealth to uphold the rights of others; namely the orphan, the traveller, and the needy. Wealth is thus truly ours only once it has been given away.

Those who are genuinely distracted by worldly increase, and who make it an end in and of itself rather than as a means towards something better are in effect guilty of a form of idolatry. Ours is an age that has made idols of the great banks and finance houses, driven to frenzy by competition amongst billionaires who are kept awake at night by the thought that a rival might make a business deal more quickly than them. A banker who can asset strip companies and throw its employees out onto the street is someone who is in the grip of an obsession that has thrown him beyond of the normal frontiers of humanity.

Neo-classical economics has traditionally focused on four things: land, labour, capital and money, the first three of which are finite, while the fourth, money, is theoretically infinite, and is therefore where human greed has been particularly focussed. Thus arose a system where someone could, with approval, set up a bank with only £1, and then lend £100 using property and other assets promised by others as security.

The lender now has £100 including interest, which they earned by just sitting there and doing nothing. On the basis of this £100, they can then lend £1000, and on and on, until the cancerous growth lubricated by greed becomes so huge that it leads to a fundamental breakdown in the system. Such a system based on usury, with interest as the bizarre “price of money” which itself becomes a commodity, was once prohibited by all faiths. People had a simple and natural intuition that the commoditisation of a measurement of value would open the door to trading in unreal assets, and ultimately to a model of finance that would destroy natural restraints and even, potentially, the planet.

In the classical Islamic system, by contrast, money is the substance of either gold or silver. With a tangible and finite asset being the only measure of value, there is a great deal more certainty about the value of assets and the price of money. This basic wisdom was though not just a theoretical ideal; it succeeded. Muslim society at its height was mercantile, and it was successful. Never was money assigned its own value and never was it seen as an end in and of itself.

Since the abolition of the gold standard however, theoretical limits on the price of money were removed. Last year’s meltdown, whose final consequences were unguessable, was a sign of the inbuilt dangers of a usurious world. Humans are naturally short-termist but in times of crisis we must take stock. As with the related environmental crisis, now is the time to be smarter and more self-restrained. The believer is in any case allergic to the mad amassing of wealth, since he or she expects true happiness and peace only in the remembering of God and in the next world.

Now is the time to think seriously about finding an economic system to replace the one whose dangers have just been revealed. Upon the conquest of Mecca, a verse of the Qur’an was revealed commanding people to give up what remained of their interest-based transactions, upon which a new system based on the value of gold and silver was initiated.

Those who relied so heavily on the old system would of course have been unable to understand a system without banking charges, but not only was such a system created but a successful civilisation was created using these ideas.

Last year we peered into the abyss; now we must apply self-restraint and wisdom, before complete catastrophe ensues.

by

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad (Tim Winter)

[Based on a lecture given to a conference of British converts on September 17 1997]

It is said that the 19th century French poet Mallarm can only be fully understood by those who are not French, because they read him more slowly. Converts to Islam, the subject of this essay, can perhaps claim the same ambiguous advantage in their reading of the Islamic narrative. Several consequent questions impose themselves: can the clarity of vision brought by novelty outweigh the absence of a Muslim upbringing? Is adoption a more culturally fertile condition than simple son ship? Has the dynamism of Islamic culture after the initial Arab era owed everything to the energy of recent converts, with their own ethnic genius: the Persians, and then, pre-eminently, the Turks; and if so, might the appearance of converts in the West presage a larger revival of the fortunes of an aged and tired Islamic ummah.

I hope to return to these interesting queries at a later date. Here, I shall confine myself to the issue that presents itself most sharply to those British people who, like myself, have boarded the lifeboat of Islam. The issue is the question of British Muslim identity.

Who is a British Muslim is an easy question: it is anyone who follows Islam and holds a U.K. passport. This is at once the easiest and probably the only workable definition. The more teasing question, which I wish to raise in this article, is: what is a British Muslim? The query raises two problems related to belonging. What does it mean to be a British person who belongs to Islam? And, what does it mean to be a Muslim person who belongs to Britain? How do we map the overlap zone in a way that makes sense, and is legitimate, in terms of the co-ordinates of both of these terms?

Clearly, by virtue of the first definition, the British Muslim population, all 1.5 million of it, divides into three groups. Firstly, and least problematically, there are men and women whose cultural formation was not British, but who have migrated to this country. This essay will not touch centrally on their own particular struggle for self-definition, which is quite different to that addressed by converts.

Secondly, there are the children of the first group, and occasionally now their grandchildren. These people are usually seen to be torn between two worlds, but in reality, the British world has shaped their souls far more profoundly then they often recognise. Modern schooling is designed for a culture that puts an increasing share of acculturation and upbringing, as opposed to the simple inculcation of facts, on the shoulders of schoolteachers rather than of parents. Muslims who have moved to this country have done so at precisely the time when British education is also going into the business of parenting; most Muslim parents do not recognise the fact, but Muslim children in this country always have a third parent: the Education Secretary. Even those second-generation Muslims here who claim to have angrily rejected Britishness are in fact doing so in terms of types of radicalism, which are deeply influenced by Western styles of dissent. Most noticeably, they locate their radicalism not primarily in a spiritual, but in social and political rejection of the oppressive order around them. Their unsettled and agitated mood is not always congenial to the recent convert, who may, despite the cultural distance, feel more comfortable with the first rather than the second generation of migrants, preferring their God-centred religion to what is often the troubled, identity-seeking Islam of the young.

Thirdly, we have the smallest group of all: the convert or so-called revert community. This group is highly disparate, and it is not clear that one can make any meaningful generalisations about it at all. Almost by definition, a British person who is guided to Islam is an eccentric of some kind: one of the virtues, perhaps, of the British is that eccentrics have always been nurtured or at least more or less tolerated here. But the overall pattern is confusing. One can offer certain sociological generalisations about British people who become Buddhists, or evangelical Christians, or Marxists. But the present writer’s experience with new Muslims is that no discernable patterns exist which might shed light on the routes by which people awaken to the truth of Islam. This failure to discern patterns can only be described as lamentable, for were we to discern such patterns, they could immediately be exploited for d’awah purposes. The most we can say is that a clear majority of converts to Islam in Britain are from Catholic rather than Protestant or Jewish backgrounds. Within this group, in my experience the only clergy that convert are Jesuits; I am not aware of a single member of another religious order that has become Muslim.

Other than this very general and not terribly helpful observation, few patterns are discernable, and our missionary efforts, never very coordinated, flounder accordingly.

But whatever the processes, and we may be wise to accept traditional invocations of divine providence and guidance, which transcend and make irrelevant any sociological pattern-finding, this third group among British Muslims confronts certain sharp problems of self-definition. Egyptian, or Indonesian, or Indian Muslims becoming British do so slowly, perhaps over two or three generations. The identity problems can be sharp: in particular, there can be painful challenges to the hopes and expectations of parents. But the process is gentle in comparison with the abrupt jolt, which typically welcomes the convert. The signposts of the universe are not adjusted slowly, but all at once.

The initial and quite understandable response of many newcomers is to become an absolutist. Everything going on among pious Muslims is angelic; everything outside the circle of the faith is demonic. The appeal of this outlook lies in its simplicity. The newly rearranged landscape upon which the convert looks is seen in satisfying black and white terms of Them versus Us, good against evil.

This mindset is sometimes called “convertitis.” It is a common illness, which can make those who have caught it rather difficult to deal with. Fortunately, it almost always wears off. The only exceptions are those weak souls who imagine that the buzz of excitement caused by their absolutist, Manichean division of the world was a necessary part of Islamic piety, or even that it has some spiritual significance. Such people are often condemned to wander from faction to faction, always joining something new, in an attempt to regain the initial excitement engendered by their conversion.

Most new Muslims, however, soon see through this. A majority of people come to Islam for real spiritual or intellectual reasons, and will continue with their quest once they are inside Islam. Becoming Muslim is, after all, only the first step to felicity. Those individuals who adopt Islam because they need an identity will be condemned to wander the sectarian and factional hall of mirrors, constantly looking for the perfect group that will give them their desperately needed sense of specialness and superiority.

But actions are by intentions. A hundred years ago the founder of the Anglo-Muslim movement, Imam Abdallah Quilliam in Liverpool, was writing that those British people who convert for Allah and His Messenger would, by the grace of God, be rightly guided. Those who convert for any other reason are in serious spiritual trouble. Just as the namaz [salaat] prayer is invisibly invalidated if the niyya [intention] at its outset is not correct, similarly, Islam will not work for us unless we have entered it in faith, out of a sincere questing for God’s good pleasure. If things are not going right for us, if we find no delight in our prayers, if Ramadan simply makes us hungry, if we cannot seem to find the right mosque or the right company to take us forward, then we would do well to start by examining our intentions. Did we become Muslims only, and purely, to bring our souls to God? Other reasons: solidarity with the oppressed, admiration for Muslims we know, desire to join a group, the love of a woman – none of these are adequate foundations for our lives as Muslims deserving of Allah’s grace and guidance. Imam al-Qushayri says that spiritual aspirants are only deprived of attainment when they neglect the foundations. So we need to look within, and if necessary, renew our faith, following the Prophetic Sunnahh. Renew your iman, a celebrated hadith enjoins.

So what are we? Statistically, perhaps fifty thousand people. But once we have taken the plunge, and enjoyed the feel of Islam, and come to know through experience, rather than through reading books, that Islam is a way of sobriety, dignity, poise and rewarding spirituality, what exactly is our self-definition? When we meet family and friends who are not Muslim, how do we carry ourselves? Do we treat Islam as a great secret? A discreet eccentricity that we hope people will not be so crude as to mention? Or, on the contrary, something we wear on our sleeves, feeling that it is our duty constantly to steer the conversation back into sacred quarters, confronting people with Islam, that they might have no argument against us at the Resurrection?

More generally, what is our view of the wider world of unbelief, which, despite the breathless predictions of some of our co-religionists, continues to grow more powerful and more prosperous? How much of it can we affirm, and how much of it must we publicly or privately disown?

We can, of course, take the easy way out, and avoid engaging with these questions, by retreating from the mainstream of society, and consorting only with Muslims. But this is not so easy. We need to be employed, since this is pleasing to God; and we need to maintain good ties with our relations, since this is also enjoined in the Sunnah. Wa sahibhuma fi dunya m’arufan. Keep company with them both in the world in keeping with good custom, says the Qur’an to converts who have unbelieving parents. And the Sunnah explains that non-Muslim parents have significant rights over their Muslim children.

But more significantly even than this, to solve the problems thrown at us and at our identity by the real world outside the mosque gates, we need to engage regularly with non-Muslim society. But for this, there would be no effective d’awah. People do not hear the word of Islam, generally, by being shouted at by some demagogue at Speakers Corner, or by reading some angry little pamphlet pushed into their hand by a wandering distributor of tracts. They convert through personal experience of Muslims. And this takes place, overwhelmingly, at the workplace. Other social contexts are closed to us: the pub, the beach, the office party. But work is a prime environment for being noticed, and judged, as Muslims.

There is nothing remotely new in this. Islam has always spread primarily through social interactions connected with work. The early Muslims who conquered half the world did not set up soapboxes in the town squares of Alexandria, Cordoba or Fez, in the hope that Christians would flock to them and hear their preaching. They did business with the Christians; and their nobility and integrity of conduct won the Christians over. That is the model followed by Muslims, particularly the Sufis, down the ages; and it is the one that we must retain today, by interacting honourably and respectfully with non-Muslims in our places of work, as much as we can.

If this is clear, then my initial question still begs a response. What is a British Muslim? What manner of creature is he, or she? The public consensus has clear ideas about other British identities: British Anglican, British Jew, British Asian Muslim or Hindu: all these are recognised categories and a certain community of expected response governs interactions between the majority and these groups. The Anglo-Muslim, however, is not a generally recognised type.

My own belief is that the future prosperity of the Anglo-Muslim movement will be determined largely by our ability to answer this question of identity. It is a question mainly for converts, but which many of whose dimensions will come to apply also to second-generation immigrant Muslims here, who have their own questions to ask themselves and this culture about what, exactly, they are.

To frame a response, I think it is useful to step back a little, and consider the larger picture of Islamic history of which we form a very small part. I mentioned earlier that Islam usually spread through the utilisation of commercial opportunities as opportunities for d’awah. That picture is one of the most extraordinary success stories in religious history. Compare, for instance, the way in which the Muslim world was Islamised to the way in which the Americas were Christianised. Islamisation proceeded with remarkable gentleness, at the hands of Sufis and merchants. Christianisation used mass extermination of the native Americans, the baptism of uncomprehending survivors, and the baleful scrutiny by the Inquisition of any signs of backsliding. A more extreme contrast would be impossible to find.

Perhaps no less extraordinary than this contrast is its interesting concomitant: Christianisation brought Europeanisation. Islamisation did not bring Arabisation. The churches built by the Puritans or the Conquistadors in the New World were deliberate replicas of churches in Europe. The mosques constructed in the areas gradually won for Islam are endlessly diverse, and reflect and indeed celebrate local particularities. Christianity is a universal religion that has historically sought to impose a universal metropolitan culture. Islam is a universal religion that has consistently nurtured a particularist provincial culture. A church in Mexico City resembles a church in Salamanca. A mosque in Nigeria, or Istanbul, or Djakarta, resembles in key respects the patterns, now purified and uplifted by monotheism, of the indigenous regional patrimony.

No less remarkable is the ability of the Muslim liberators to accommodate those aspects of local, pre-Islamic tradition, which did not clash, absolutely with the truths of revelation. In entering new lands, Muslims were armed with the generous Koranic doctrine of Universal Apostleship; as the Koran says:

“To every nation there has been sent a guide.”

This conflicts sharply with the classical Christian view of salvation as hinging uniquely on one historical intervention of the divine in history: the salvific sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Non-Christian religions were, in classical Christianity, seen as demonic and under the sign of original sin. But classical Islam has always been able and willing to see at least fragments of an authentic divine message in the faiths and cultures of non-Muslim peoples. If God has assured us that every nation has received divine guidance, then we can look with some favour on the Other. Hence, for instance, we find popular Muslim poets in India, such as Sayid Sultan, writing poems about Krishna as a Prophet. There is no final theological proof that he was one, but the assumption is nonetheless not in violation of the Koran.

Even among Muslim ulema, who had not been to India, we find interestingly positive appraisals of Hinduism. For instance, the great Baghdad theologian al-Shahrastani, in his Book of Religions and Sects, had access to enough reliable information about India to develop a very sophisticated theological reaction to Indian religion. He accepts that the higher forms of Hinduism are not polytheistic. He notes that that although the Hindus have no notion of prophecy, they do have what he calls ashab al-ruhaniyat: quasi-divine beings who call mankind to love the Real and to practice the virtues. He names Vishnu and Shiva as examples, and speaks positively of them. He focuses particularly on the veneration of celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, and the planets. The reason why he fixes on these practices is that they seem to situate Hinduism within a recognisably Koranic paradigm. The Koran mentions quite favourably a group known as the Sabeans, who were by the second century identified with various star-worshipping but still vaguely monotheistic sects in Mesopotamia. The Sabeans are tolerated in Islamic law, although they are less privileged than the Jews and Christians, a position reflected in the ruling in Shari’ah that a Muslim may not marry their women or eat their meat.

Shahrastani explicitly assimilates many Hindus to this category of Sabeans. They are to be tolerated as believers in One God; and will only be punished by God if, having been properly exposed to Islam, they reject it.

Another example is supplied by the great Muslim epic in China. Those who believe that Muslim communities can only flourish if they ghettoise themselves and refuse to interact with majority communities would do well to look at Chinese history. Many of the leading mandarins of Ming China were in fact Muslims. Wang Dai-Yu, for instance, who died in 1660, was a Muslim scholar who received the title of Master of the Four Religions because of his complete knowledge of China’s four religions: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Many of the leading admirals in the navy of the Ming Empire were practising Muslims.

In China, mosques look very like traditional Chinese garden-temples, except that there is a prayer hall without idols, and the calligraphy is Koranic. In some of the most beautiful, you will find, as you enter, the following words in Chinese inscribed on a tablet:

Sages have one mind and the same truth. In all parts of the world, sages arise who possess this uniformity of mind and truth. Muhammad, the Great Sage of the West, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, the Sage of China. Though separated by ages and countries, they had the same mind and Truth.

In these examples from India and China, we see a practical confirmation of Islam’s proclamation of itself as the final, and hence universal, message from God. In a hadith we learn:

“Other prophets were sent only to their own peoples, while I am sent to all mankind.”

It is not that the Koranic worldview affirms other religions as fully adequate paths to salvation. In fact, it clearly does not. But it allows the Muslim, as he encounters new worlds, to sift the wheat from the chaff in non-Muslim cultures, rejecting some things, to be sure, but maintaining others. In Islamic law, too, we find that shara’li man qablana, the revealed laws of those who came before us, can under certain conditions be accepted as valid legal precedent, if they are not demonstrably abrogated by an Islamic revealed source. And Islamic law also recognises the authority of urf, local customary law, so that a law or custom is acceptable, and may be carried over into an Islamic culture or jurisdiction, if no Islamic revealed principle is thereby violated. Hence, we find the administration of Islamic law varying from country to country. If a wife complains of receiving insufficient dower from her husband, the qadi [judge] will make reference to what is considered normal in their culture and social group, and adjudge accordingly.

All of these historical observations have, I hope, served to make quite a simple point: Islam, as a universal religion, in fact as the only legitimately universal religion, also makes room for the particularities of the peoples who come into it. The traditional Muslim world is a rainbow, an extraordinary patchwork of different cultures, all united by a common adherence to the doctrinal and moral patterns set down in Revelation. Put differently, Revelation supplies parameters, hudud, rather than a complete blueprint for the details of cultural life. Local mindsets are Islamised, but remain distinct.

This point is obvious to anyone who has studied Islamic thought or Islamic history. I reiterate it today only because some Muslims nowadays reject it fiercely. Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.

These young people, who haunt our mosques and shout at any sign of disagreement, are either ignorant of Muslim history, or dismiss it as a gigantic mistake. For them, the grace and rahma of Allah has for some reason been withheld from all but a tiny fraction of the Ummah. These people are the elect; and all disagreement with them is a blasphemy against God.

We cannot hope easily to cure such people. Simple proofs from our history or our scholarship will not suffice. What they need is a sense of security, and that, given the deteriorating conditions of both the Muslim world and of the ghettos in Western cities, may not come readily. For now, it is best to ignore their shouts and their melodramatic but always ill-fated activities. Our psychic problems are not theirs; and theirs can never be ours.

Islam is, and will continue to be, even amid the miserable globalisation of modern culture, a faith that celebrates diversity. Our thinking about our own position as British Muslims should focus on that fact, and quietly but firmly ignore the protests both of the totalitarian fringe, and of the importers of other regional cultures, such as that of Pakistan, which they regard as the only legitimate Islamic ideal. So far, however, we have been too busy restating the initial question with which this chapter opened, and defending its legitimacy, to propose any substantive answer. It is time now to attempt a brief sketch of what I construe our cultural position and prospects to be.

As I have tried to emphasise, Islam’s presence in Britain is not an Islamic problem. Islam is universal, and can operate everywhere. It is not an Islamic problem, but it may be a British problem. Europe, alone among the continents, does not have a longstanding tradition of plurality. In medieval Asia or Africa, in China or the Songhai Empire, or Egypt, or almost everywhere, one could usually practice one’s own religion in peace, whatever it happened to be. Only in Europe was there a consistent policy of enforcing religious uniformity. The reason for this lay of course in the Church’s theology: unless you had some part in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, you were in the grip of original sin, and hence were an instrument of the devil. Medieval Catholics were even expected to believe that unbaptised infants would be tormented in Hell forever. Given that absolute view, it was only natural that Europe constantly strove for religious uniformity.

Britain, as part of the European world, has traditionally suffered the same totalitarian entailments in its history. Hence, although it has always been possible to be a Christian in a Muslim country, it was against the law to be a Muslim in Britain until 1812, with the passage through parliament of the Trinitarian Act. Nonetheless, three centuries before that, with Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, England cut itself off from formal submission to Vatican doctrines; and from that time a type of religious diversity has been, within severe constraints, at least a possibility. In fact, Britain was the first major European country to break with the medieval European tradition of absolute religious conformity. Perhaps it is because of this fact that exclusivist and xenophobic political manifestations are less common in Britain today than in most Continental countries. The National Front is a lunatic fringe party in the U.K., whereas its equivalents regularly scoop twenty percent of the votes in some regions of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Austria.

When England threw off the Papist yoke, opportunities arose for questioning ancient errors of understanding, which had been introduced into Christianity by the Church Fathers. These opportunities, however, were not properly grasped. The English Reformation was an attempt not to extirpate bid’ah in the Muslim sense, and return to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, which had been distorted by the Church on the basis of the Hellenising agendas of the anonymous gospel authors, but to reform the doctrines and liturgy of the medieval church. Hence the reformers did not attempt to return to the simple monotheistic worship of the Apostles, but, in the Book of Common Prayer published in 1549, created a new vernacular liturgy based largely on medieval trinitarian and incarnationist precedents.

This English willingness to challenge tradition, however, was to have immense repercussions. Despite the lack of awareness of the instability of the gospel texts, as revealed by 20th century scholarship, for the first time Europeans, and notably Britons, were questioning the innovations of the Church magisterium, and attempting to grope back towards the faith revealed by God to His prophet Jesus, upon whom be peace.

One repercussion of the Reformation on our ancestors was the revival of a mystical tradition, whose most obvious manifestation was the Cambridge Platonists. English mysticism has usually been of a moderate type: one thinks of the Cloud of Unknowing, or Julian of Norwich. Extreme feats of asceticism, or extravagant and obsessive preoccupations with visions and miraculous happenings, have never been part of the English style of spirituality. The Cambridge Platonists drew on this moderate mysticism, but insisted that mystical inspiration must work hand in hand with rational judgement, and with sound doctrine derived from the Scriptures. This position, which influenced John Locke in particular, again evinces the English style of religion: profound but not verbose, rational but not rationalistic, and scriptural but not literalistic.

This very English approach to religion in due course led to serious questions being asked about the centrepiece of medieval Christian dogma: the Trinity. Milton, and later John Locke himself, are known to have held discreetly Unitarian beliefs, having been unable to find convincing justification for trinitarian and incarnationist views in the Scriptures. Locke’s close friend Newton was even more frank, writing of the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the Trinity … Let them make good sense of it who are able. For my part, I can make none.

The period around the Civil War threw up many Englishmen who were likewise concerned about the distortion of the teachings of Jesus by the Church; and the term Unitarian comes into being sometime during this period. But side by side with this tradition of dissent, and in often obscure ways interacting with it, went an even more revolutionary change: improved information about the Blessed Prophet of Islam.

The medievals chose to remain in ignorance about Islam. For them, Muslims were summah culpabilis: the sum of everything blameworthy. Knights from Britain had been at the forefront of the Crusades. The sack of the Muslim city of Lisbon in 1147 during which perhaps 150,000 Muslims were massacred, was largely the work of soldiers from Norfolk and Suffolk. But the same quest for simplicity and honesty which made the Reformation possible, also made of England the first country in Europe where medieval images of Islam could be challenged.

To an extent, which we cannot now determine, largely because an excess of sympathy with either Islam or Unitarianism could result in the dissenter being hung, drawn and quartered, new perspectives on Islam informed and reinforced the discreet Unitarian movement. This is implied by the title of Humphrey Prideaux’s hate-filled book of 1697, which he called, The true nature of Imposture, fully displayed in the life of Mahomet … offered to the consideration of the Deists of the present age.

Prideaux is clearly implying that some radical Dissenters were being drawn towards Islam, and he is writing his polemic to hold back that tide. But a far clearer insight into this process is supplied by another author, a certain Henry Stubbe.

Stubbe is the first European Christian to write favourably of Islam. In fact, he writes so favourably that we can only conclude that he had thrown off the heritage of Christianity, and privately adopted it. He was educated at Westminster and Oxford, and worked as a physician in Warwick, and as personal physician to King James. His biographer Anthony Wood described him as the most noted person of his age that these late times have produced. He died in 1676, after being accused of heresy, and spending some time in prison.

Stubbe was a child of the Civil War, and the spiritual chaos of the Interregnum prompted him to question the official tenets of his inherited Anglicanism. He was also a scholar, who had mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and was fully conversant with the new critical scholarship on the Bible. Putting all these gifts together, and thanks to his friendship with Pococke, the Laudian Professor of Arabic in Oxford, he wrote a book, which for the nineteenth century would have been advanced, but which for the seventeenth is positively astounding. Just the title alone gives some hint of this:

“An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, and a Vindication of him and his Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians.”

The book begins with a chapter demonstrating how the message of Jesus Christ has been perverted by the Church. He stresses the fact that Jesus, upon him be peace, had remained faithful to the Mosaic Law, and would have been horrified by the idea that later generations might use his name to justify the eating of pork, for instance. He says, of the Disciples:

They did never believe Christ to be the natural Son of God, by eternal Generation, or any tenet depending thereon, or prayed unto him, or believed the Holy Ghost, or the Trinity of persons in one Deity … The whole constitution of the primitive Church Government relates to the Jewish Synagogue, not to the Hierarchy. The presbyters were not Priests, but Laymen set apart to their office by imposition of hands . . . Nor was the name of Priest then ever heard of. He concludes that the sacraments of the Church, particularly baptism and the Eucharist, are pagan rituals introduced into Christianity several decades after Christ.

Stubbe then provides a chapter on a brief History of Arabia and the Saracens, followed by four on the Prophet. Chapter Eight is a vindication of the Prophet; chapter 9 is a vindication of Islam, and chapter 10 explains the moral necessity of the doctrine of Jihad.

His polemical intentions throughout are clear: he constantly shows Islam to be a purer and more rational form of religion than Christianity. Here is Stubbe, for instance, summahrising the Prophet’s teaching:

This is the sum of Mahometan Religion, on the one hand not clogging Men’s Faith with the necessity of believing a number of abstruse notions which they cannot comprehend, and which are often contrary to the dictates of Reason and common Sense; nor on the other hand loading them with the performance of many troublesome, expensive and superstitious Ceremonies, yet enjoining a due observance of Religious Worship, as the surest Method to keep Men in the bounds of their Duty both to God and Man.

And a little further on he adds:

Let us now lay aside our prejudices … Their Articles of Faith are few and plain, whereby they are preserved from Schisms and Heresies, for although they have great diversity of opinions in the explication of their Law, yet, agreeing in the fundamentals, their differences in opinion do not reach to that breach of Charity so common among the Christians, who thereby become a scandal to all other Religions in the world. Their Notions of God are great and noble, their opinions of the Future State are consonant to those of the Jews and Christians. As to the moral part of their Religion . . . we shall see that it is not inferior to that of the Christians. And lastly, their religious Duties are plainly laid down, which is the cause that they are duly observed, and are in themselves very rational.

He allocates an entire chapter to show the moral significance of the Jihad. This chapter is perhaps the most remarkable in the entire book, since it had long been a Christian ide fixe that Islam could only spread by the sword. He goes to some length, quoting travellers to the Ottoman Empire, to show that Christian minorities are usually protected better under Muslim rule than under the rule of their fellow Christians. He observes, for instance:

It is manifest that the Mahometans did propagate their Empire, but not their Religion, by force of arms . . . Christians and other Religions might peaceably subsist under their Protection . . . it is an assured truth, that the vulgar Greeks live in a better Condition under the Turk at present then they did under their own Emperors, when there were perpetual murders practised on their Princes, and tyranny over the People; but they are now secure from Injury if they pay their Taxes. And it is indeed more the Interest of the Princes & Nobles, than of the People, which at present keeps all Europe from submitting to the Turks.

Having sung Islam’s praises in these terms, Stubbe could hardly expect to publish his book. He published several others, but this one languished discreetly in manuscript form until 1911, when a group of Ottoman Muslims in London rescued it from obscurity and published it.

At least six manuscripts did, however, circulate in a more or less clandestine fashion. No fewer than three of them were preserved in the private library of the Revd John Disney, who at the beginning of the 19th century shocked the established church by publicly converting to Unitarianism. Some historians have suggested also that Gibbon was familiar with the work. For instance, Stubbe observes:

When Christianity became generally received, it introduced with it a general inundation of Barbarism and Ignorance, which over-run all places where it prevailed.

And Gibbon, several decades later, closes his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the words:

I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion. Gibbon himself was known for his private scepticism about Trinitarian dogma.

Stubbe’s book, as I have said, is the work of a brave pioneer. But it is also a considered reflection upon the religious instabilities of the interregnum period, which generated it. It shows a sensitive and immensely cultivated English mind shaking off the complications of old dogma, using modern scholarship to reconstruct the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and of the Prophet Muhammad. Instead of something exotic, we see here a very English kind of religion expressing itself. Stubbe is spiritual, but not superstitious. He likes simplicity: the blank, Puritan wall of the mosque rather than the elaborate stone metaphors of Catholicism or of the dizzyingly high Anglicanism of Charles. He values wholesome morality that is pragmatic rather than irresponsibly idealistic: so he commends polygamy, and shows the moral dangers of legally imposed monogamy. He regards with distaste traditional Christian strictures on the flesh – a century beforehand, Englishmen had rejected the arguments for a celibate clergy and had firmly quashed monkery as both unnatural and parasitic. For Stubbe, the Prophet’s approach was in accord with nature: the love of woman is as natural as the love of God. The Prophet, like the great Hebrew patriarchs, showed that sacred and profane love can and indeed must go together.

A generation earlier, John Donne had suffered passions for both woman and for God; and found his religion finally unable to reconcile the two. His early poems are among some of the most touching, and also sensual, love poems in the English language. Later, as Dean of St Paul’s, he realised that he must renounce the flesh as the instrument of the Fall and the perpetrator of original sin. Hence his agonising, tragic spiritual career, renouncing the flesh to serve God, composing poems wrapped in his winding sheet: Donne’s great Muslim soul caught in the flawed dialectic of a theology that regarded spirit and body as eternally at war.

Stubbe is also drawing on a particularly English pragmatism in his treatment of the Jihad. Far from regarding the Islamic institution of the just war as a reproach, he extols it, contrasting it with what he regarded as the insipid and irresponsible pacifism of the unknown New Testament authors. Stubbe is an English gentleman of a generation that had known war, and knew that there are some injustices in the world that cannot be dissolved through passive suffering, through turning the other cheek. He had sided with Parliament during the civil war, holding, with Cromwell, that the righteous man may sometimes justly bear the burden of the sword. An admirer of Cromwell, he became an admirer of the Prophet. For him, the Prophet was not a foreign, exotic figure: his genial vision of human life under God exactly conformed to what a civilised Englishman of the seventeenth century thought necessary and proper. In Stubbe’s work, in other words, we find a vindication of Muhammad as an English prophet.

There is more that can be said about the convergence of Islamic moderation and good sense with the English temper. Tragically, the rise of Dissent in England coincided also with the rise of nationalism and xenophobia, which reached its intoxicating heights with the empire of Queen Victoria and the Edwardians. Under such Anglocentric and frankly racist banners, sympathy with Islam became once more a receding possibility. But there were exceptions. Perhaps the most celebrated was that most English of intellectuals, Carlyle. Carlyle, like Stubbe two centuries before, was a free spirit, unhampered either by obsessions with Trinity, or modern delusions about the ability of material progress to secure human happiness.

On May the 8th 1840, in a stuffy lecture room in Portman Square, London’s intellectual elite were hearing Carlyle speak about the Prophet. They had anticipated the usual invective; and they were astonished to watch him holding up the Prophet as a heroic, adventurous figure, whose sacrifices had brought a natural theism to his people, and had much to teach a materialistic Victorian England. The climax came when the lecturer cried:

Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God’s world to a dead brute Steam-engine . . . if you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier and falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer, it is not Mahomet.

Stung to the quick, John Stuart Mill leaped to his feet, and cried out:

No!

Carlyle was lecturing on The Hero as Prophet; and again we see the English realism towards the use of force, which had made possible the creation of the British Empire, inspiring a more positive appreciation of the Prophet of Islam. The great Christian blindness towards Islam has always been the belief that there can be only one type of perfection, namely the pacifist Jesus, who taught men to turn the other cheek, and who said, Resist not him that is evil. For minds nurtured on such an image, the hero-Prophet is a difficult figure to comprehend. In the Far East, of course, there is no such mental block. Spirituality and the cultivation of the martial arts there went hand in hand. The love of women was also seen as a necessary part of this ethos. The samurai tradition in particular, of the righteous swordsman, a meditator who was also a great lover of women, ensures that a Japanese, for instance, will have few difficulties with the specific genius and greatness of the Prophet of Islam. But for Christians, there is no such model, although knightly ethics in the early Middle Ages, learned from Muslims in Spain and Palestine, dimly suggested it. But even for the Crusader knights, the ideal of celibacy was often accepted: the Knights Templar, for instance, a monastic warrior order, who were influenced enough by Islam to comprehend the importance of a sacred warriorhood, but who never quite got the point about celibacy.

With Carlyle, the Hero as Prophet, or the Prophet as Hero, reveals itself as a credible type for the English mind. And Carlyle’s insistence on the moral exaltation of the Prophet who transcended pacifism to take up arms to fight for his people was understood by at least one later British writer: George Bernard Shaw. For Shaw, as for Carlyle, there was no doubt about the correct answer to Hamlet’s question.

Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

Edmund Burke had already pointed out that “for evil to triumph, it is enough that good men do nothing.” Shaw, like Carlyle, recognised that this principle calls into question the Gospel ethic of passivity in the face of suffering and injustice. Let me read to you a few words from Hesketh Pearson’s biography of the generally post-Christian Shaw:

For many years (this was 1927), Shaw had been meditating a play on a prophet. The militant saint was a type more congenial to his nature than any other, a type he thoroughly sympathised with and could therefore portray with unfailing insight. In all history the one person who exactly answered his requirements, who would have made the perfect Shavian hero, was Mahomet.

In his diary for 1913, Shaw himself wrote:

I had long desired to dramatise the life of Mahomet. But the possibility of a protest from the Turkish Ambassador – or the fear of it – causing the Lord Chamberlain to refuse to license such a play, deterred me. And so, as Pearson records, he wrote Saint Joan instead.

Perhaps we can close this brief parenthetic summary of the convergence between British martial theory and traditions and Islam, with a final insight; this time offered by Colin Morris, former head of the BBC in Northern Ireland:

The false prophet is a moralist, he tells the world how things ought to be; the real prophet is a realist, he tells the world how things really are.

Let us try to sum up the above arguments. Firstly, Islam is a universal religion. Despite its origins in 7th century Arabia, it works everywhere, and this is itself a sign of its miraculous and divine origin. Secondly, the British Isles have for several hundred years been the home of individuals whose religious and moral temper is very close to that of Islam. To move from Christianity to Islam is hence, for an English man or woman, not the giant leap that outsiders might assume. It is, rather, simply the logical next step in the epic story of our people. Christianity, formerly a Greek mystery religion advocating a moral code against the natural law, is in fact foreign to our national temperament. It is an exotic creed, and it is now fatally compromised by its positive view of secular modernity. Islam, once we have become familiar with it, and settled into it comfortably, is the most suitable faith for the British. Its values are our values. Its moderate, undemonstrative style of piety, still waters running deep; its insistence on modesty and a certain reserve, and its insistence on common sense and on pragmatism, combine to furnish the most natural and easy religious option for our people.

I should close by saying that nothing in what I have said is intended in a jingoistic sense. That the British have a convergence with Islam is to the credit of our people, certainly. But I am not commending any smug ethnocentrism; precisely because Islam itself came to abolish a tribal mentality. Islam is the true consanguinity of believers in the One True God, the common bond of those who seek to remain focussed on the divine Source of our being in this diffuse, ignorant and tragic age. But it is generous and inclusive. It allows us to celebrate our particularity, the genius of our heritage; within, rather than in tension with, the greater and more lasting fellowship of faith.

[Currently, he is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He studied at the universities of Cambridge and al-Azhar, Egypt, and has also translated a number of Islamic works including Imam al-Bayhaqi's The Seventy Seven Branches of Faith (Quilliam Press, 1992).]

The initial and quite understandable response of many newcomers (to Islam) is to become an absolutist. Everything going on among pious Muslims is angelic; everything outside the circle of the faith is demonic. The appeal of this outlook lies in its simplicity. The newly rearranged landscape upon which the convert looks is seen in satisfying black and white terms of: them versus us; good against evil.

This mindset is sometimes called convertitis. It is a common illness, which can make those who have caught it rather difficult to deal with. Fortunately, it almost always wears off. The only exceptions are those weak souls who imagine that the buzz of excitement caused by their absolutist, Manichean division of the world was a necessary part of Islamic piety, or even that it has some spiritual significance. Such people are often condemned to wander from faction to faction, always joining something new, in an attempt to regain the initial excitement engendered by their conversion.

Most new Muslims, however, soon see through this. A majority of people come to Islam for real spiritual or intellectual reasons, and will continue with their quest once they are inside Islam. Becoming Muslim is, after all, only the first step to felicity. Those individuals who adopt Islam because they need an identity will be condemned to wander the sectarian and factional hall of mirrors, constantly looking for the perfect group that will give them their desperately needed sense of speciality and superiority.

But actions are by intentions. A hundred years ago the founder of the Anglo-Muslim movement, Imam Abdullah Quilliam, in Liverpool, was writing that those British people who convert for Allah and His Messenger would, by the grace of God, be rightly guided. Those who convert for any other reason are in serious spiritual trouble. Just as the salah (i.e. prayer) is invisibly invalidated if the niyyah (i.e. intention) at its outset is not correct, similarly, Islam will not work for us unless we have entered it in faith, out of a sincere quest for God’s good pleasure. If things are not going right for us, if we find no delight in our prayers, if Ramadan simply makes us hungry, if we cannot seem to find the right mosque or the right company to take us forward, then we would do well to start by examining our intentions. Did we become Muslims only, and purely, to bring our souls to God? Other reasons: solidarity with the oppressed, admiration for Muslims we know, desire to join a group, the love of a woman – none of these are adequate foundations for our lives as Muslims deserving of Allah’s grace and guidance. Imam al-Qushayri says that spiritual aspirants are only deprived of attainment when they neglect the foundations. So we need to look within, and if necessary, renew our faith, following the Prophetic Sunnah. Renew your iman, a celebrated Hadith enjoins.

So what are we? Statistically, perhaps, fifty thousand people. But once we have taken the plunge, and enjoyed the feel of Islam, and come to know through experience, rather than through reading books, that Islam is a way of sobriety, dignity, poise and rewarding spirituality, what exactly is our self-definition? When we meet family and friends who are not Muslim, how do we carry ourselves? Do we treat Islam as a great secret? A discreet eccentricity that we hope people will not be so crude as to mention? Or, on the contrary, something we wear on our sleeves, feeling that it is our duty constantly to steer the conversation back into sacred quarters, confronting people with Islam, that they might have no argument against us at the Resurrection?

More generally, what is our view of the wider world of unbelief, which, despite the breathless predictions of some of our co-religionists, continues to grow more powerful and more prosperous? How much of it can we affirm, and how much of it must we publicly or privately disown?

We can, of course, take the easy way out, and avoid engaging with these questions, by retreating from the mainstream of society, and consorting only with Muslims. But this is not so easy. We need to be employed, since this is pleasing to God; and we need to maintain good ties with our relations, since this is also enjoined in the Hadith. “Keep company with them both in the world in keeping with good custom”, (31:15) says the Qur’an to converts who have unbelieving parents. And the Hadith explains that non-Muslim parents have significant rights over their Muslim children.

But more significantly than this fact, to solve the problems thrown at us and at our identity by the real world outside the mosque gates, we need to engage regularly with non-Muslim society. But for this, there would be no effective d‘awah. People do not hear the word of Islam, generally, by being shouted at by some demagogue at Speakers Corner, or by reading some angry little pamphlet pushed into their hand by a wandering distributor of tracts. They convert through personal experience of Muslims. And this takes place, overwhelmingly, at the workplace. Other social contexts are closed to us: the pub, the beach, the office party. But work is a prime environment for being noticed, and judged, as Muslims.

There is nothing remotely new in this. Islam has always spread primarily through social interactions connected with work. The early Muslims who conquered half the world did not set up soapboxes in the town squares of Alexandria, Cordoba or Fez, in the hope that Christians would flock to them and hear their preaching. They did business with the Christians; and their nobility and integrity of conduct won the Christians over. That is the model followed by Muslims, particularly the Sufis, down the ages; and it is the one that we must retain today, by interacting honourably and respectfully with non-Muslims in our places of work, as much as we can.

If this is clear, then my initial question still begs a response. What is a British Muslim? What kind of creature is he/she? The public consensus has clear ideas about other British identities: British Anglican, British Jew, British Asian Muslim or Hindu: all these are recognised categories, and a certain community of expected response governs interactions between the majority and these groups. The Anglo-Muslim, however, is not a generally recognised type.

My own belief is that the future prosperity of the Anglo-Muslim movement will be determined largely by our ability to answer this question of identity. It is a question mainly for converts, but, which many of whose dimensions, will come to apply also to second-generation immigrant Muslims here, who have their own questions to ask themselves and this culture about what, exactly, they are.

To frame a response, I think it is useful to step back a little, and consider the larger picture of Islamic history of which we form a very small part. I mentioned earlier that Islam usually spread through the utilisation of commercial opportunities as opportunities for d‘awah. That picture is one of the most extraordinary success stories in religious history. Compare, for instance, the way in which the Muslim world was Islamised to the way in which the Americans were Christianised. Islamisation proceeded with remarkable gentleness at the hands of Sufis and merchants. Christianisation used mass extermination of the native Americans, the baptism of uncomprehending survivors, and the baleful scrutiny by the Inquisition of any signs of backsliding. A more extreme contrast would be impossible to find.

Perhaps no less extraordinary than this contrast is its interesting concomitant: Christianisation brought Europeanisation. Islamisation did not bring Arabisation. The churches built by the Puritans or the Conquistadors in the New World were deliberate replicas of churches in Europe. The mosques constructed in the areas gradually won for Islam are endlessly diverse, and reflect and indeed celebrate local particularities. Christianity is a universal religion that has historically sought to impose a universal metropolitan culture. Islam is a universal religion that has consistently nurtured a particularist provincial culture. A church in Mexico City resembles a church in Salamanca. A mosque in Nigeria, or Istanbul, or Djakarta, resembles only in key respects the patterns, now purified and uplifted by monotheism, of the indigenous regional patrimony.

No less remarkable is the ability of the Muslim liberators to accommodate those aspects of local, pre-Islamic tradition, which did not clash, absolutely with the truths of revelation. In entering new lands, Muslims were armed with the generous Qur’anic doctrine of Universal Apostleship; as the Qur’an says: “To every nation there has been sent a guide”, (35:24).

This conflicts sharply with the classical Christian view of salvation as hinging uniquely on one historical intervention of the divine in history: the salvific sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Non-Christian religions were, in classical Christianity, seen as demonic and under the sign of original sin. But classical Islam has always been able and willing to see at least fragments of an authentic divine message in the faiths and cultures of non-Muslim peoples. If God has assured us that every nation has received divine guidance, then we can look with some favour on the Other.

Those who believe that Muslim communities can only flourish if they ghettoise themselves and refuse to interact with majority communities would do well to look at Chinese history. Many of the leading mandarins of Ming China were in fact Muslims. Wang Dai-Yu, for instance, who died in 1660, was a Muslim scholar who received the title of Master of the Four Religions because of his complete knowledge of China’s four religions: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Many of the leading admirals in the navy of the Ming Empire were practising Muslims.

In China, mosques look very like traditional Chinese garden-temples, except that there is a prayer hall without idols, and the calligraphy is Qur’anic. In some of the most beautiful, you will find, as you enter, the following words in Chinese inscribed on a tablet:  “Sages have one mind and the same truth. In all parts of the world, sages arise who possess this uniformity of mind and truth. Muhammad, the Great Sage of the West, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, the Sage of China. Though separated by ages and countries, they had the same mind and Truth.”

In these examples from India and China, we see a practical confirmation of Islam’s proclamation of itself as the final, and hence universal, message from God. In a hadith we learn: Other prophets were sent only to their own peoples, while I am sent to all mankind.

It is not that the Qur’anic worldview affirms other religions as fully adequate paths to salvation. In fact, it clearly does not. But it allows the Muslim, as he encounters new worlds, to sift the wheat from the chaff in non-Muslim cultures, rejecting some things, to be sure, but maintaining others. In Islamic law, too, we find that shara‘ liman qablana, the revealed laws of those who came before us, can under certain conditions be accepted as valid legal precedent, if they are not demonstrably abrogated by an Islamic revealed source. And Islamic law also recognises the authority of ‘urf, local customary law, so that a law or custom is acceptable, and may be carried over into an Islamic culture or jurisdiction, if no Islamic revealed principle is thereby violated. Hence, we find the administration of Islamic law varying from country to country. If a wife complains of receiving insufficient dower from her husband, the qadi (judge) will make reference to what is considered normal in their culture and social group, and adjudge accordingly.

All of these historical observations have, I hope, served to make quite a simple point: Islam, as a universal religion, in fact as the only legitimately universal religion, also makes room for the particularities of the peoples who come into it. The traditional Muslim world is a rainbow, an extraordinary patchwork of different cultures, all united by a common adherence to the doctrinal and moral patterns set down in Revelation. Put differently, Revelation supplies parameters, hudud, rather than a complete blueprint for the details of cultural life. Local mindsets are Islamised, but remain distinct.

This point is obvious to anyone who has studied Islamic thought or Islamic history. I reiterate it today only because some Muslims nowadays reject it fiercely. Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.

These young people, who haunt our mosques and shout at any sign of disagreement, are either ignorant of Muslim history, or dismiss it as a gigantic mistake. For them, the grace and rahmah (mercy) of Allah has for some reason been withheld from all but a tiny fraction of the ummah (Muslim community). These people are the elect; and all disagreement with them is a blasphemy against God.

We cannot hope easily to cure such people. Simple proofs from our history or our scholarship will not suffice. What they need is a sense of security, and that, given the deteriorating conditions of both the Muslim world and of the ghettos in Western cities, may not come readily. For now, it is best to ignore their shouts and their melodramatic but always ill-fated activities. Our psychic problems are not theirs; and theirs can never be ours.

Islam is, and will continue to be, even amid the miserable globalisation of modern culture, a faith that celebrates diversity. Our thinking about our own position as British Muslims should focus on that fact, and quietly but firmly ignore the protests both of the totalitarian fringe, and of the importers of other regional cultures, such as that of Pakistan, which they regard as the only legitimate Islamic ideal.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad graduated from Cambridge University with a double-first in Arabic in 1983. He then lived in Cairo for three years, studying Islam under traditional teachers at Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world. . Since 1992 he has been a doctoral student at Oxford University, specializing in the religious life of the early Ottoman Empire. Shaikh Abdal Hakim is the translator of a number of works, including two volumes from Imam al-Ghazali’s Ihya Ulum al-Din He appears frequently on BBC Radio and writes occasionally for a number of publications, including The Independent; Q-News International, Britain’s premier Muslim Magazine; and Seasons, the semiacademic journal of Zaytuna Institute

http://www.monthly-renaissance.com/issue/content.aspx?id=66

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/default.htm

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I’ve been considering some of the larger features of the architecture of the Sīrah recently and I find – and I’m sure most Muslims find this when they open its pages – an extraordinary immediacy to the story that it tells.

Some stories – classic stories – of course are timeless; people are still enthralled by Homer, by Shakespeare, but the Great North Legends. There’s something different when we look at the Sīrah of the Prophet (saw) as well as being a great yarn, it seems to leap out of the pages at us with an alarming immediacy.

Sometimes when I get a moment or two to think, I try to work out what it is that makes that story so immediate. In the context of this meeting one might invoke most obviously, something that’s very obviously there – hard wired into the logic boards of the Prophetic drama – but which we tend not to think about, which is that we take the story to a cosmic struggle between ‘The One’ – la ilaha ill Allah – and the superstitious many of the Arabs.

We take it to the heroic story whereby selfishness in terms of local, tribal vendettas which had been plaguing Arabia for a thousand years are replaced by the principle of a single law applicable to everybody. We tend to think of it in those terms – in terms of Tawhīd and in terms of sharī’a. But there’s another dimension that was clearly important to many of the protagonists themselves which is an economic dimension to the sīrah.

When you consider the divine wisdom in sending the seal of the Messenger (saw) to that, then and there you recognize first of all, the magnitude of the divine estimation of the man (saw) because he really was up against it. Sent to a people mā unthira abā’uhum – whose forefathers had not been warned, taking them from one end of the religious spectrum – polytheism – to the other end – monotheism; taking them from lawlessness to strict lawfulness; taking them from a belief in nothing in particular to a belief in life after death, so, many extraordinary challenges he met and successfully faced. But one of them that we tend not to focus on is the fact that the divine wisdom sent him to a community that was mercantile.

We think of the 7th Century Arabs as wondering Bedouin hanging about the desert, stories around the campfire not caring too much about higher things. But the reality of the sīrah is that it’s essentially an urban story, and it’s a tale of two cities, and the hijra is a city from a mercantile, plutocratic immoral elite, to a new space that is to become a zone for the muhājirīn and for the masākīn and for the poor and for the mustad’afīn. We tend to ignore this as Muslims frequently, that the reason for the struggle is for the mustad’afīn, not for waving a particular flag, but for the mustad’afin – for those who are made weak.

So he sent the Prophet (saw) to – we can’t really use the word ‘capitalist’ because it’s so long ago – but to a strongly mercantile, selfish, detribalising community – the Qureysh. That is where the divine wisdom has chosen to place this final, Jewel – like soul.

And we find this is a community where tribal ties are breaking down; religion is not taken seriously by too many people. It’s kind of like modern, Western religion – it’s a civic religion – you have your own faith, your own little community, and your own little festivals, and your funny little superstitions stories. In the public space, what counts is money and certain types of civic relationships. The religious thing is kind of like ‘your tribe does this, and your deity does etc. we don’t care if you’re worshipping Al-‘Auza Armanāt or Hubal, it’s really the public concern. What really is the centre of the city of Mecca and what people really worry about is the economic reality. If you threaten that then you’re really a trouble maker.

Mecca before Islām is the city in where Umāya ibn Khalaf can walk past the Ka’ba with his entourage of feudal servants and slaves, and there be no legal contract at all between them.

The Prophet (saw) is sent to that people, and it’s no coincidence that his message begins among the victims of that unjust economic order. Who are the victims? The woman and the slaves are the ones being trampled upon – they’re at the bottom of the heap and they’re the ones who first start to respond. That is axiomatic in Prophetic religion. That’s where the truth tends to spread – not with the rich and the powerful and the prestigious and the famous, but it’s the broken-hearted – the munkasirāt Al-Qulūb – whose hearts are broken by the weight that is pressed upon them by people whose main concerns are farming an extra dollar.

That’s why sometimes in the West – in America for instance – sometimes you hear Arabic expat communities saying ‘why don’t white people become more Muslim?’ because they see all these black people and Hispanics coming into the mosque and they get anxious – they’d really like to see more kind of people like me [Audience laugh]. When you ask them why, they don’t have a terribly good way of expressing what’s actually in their hearts. There are issues of race there, there are issues of self-esteem, and there are some not very nice attitudes that bring that about. But the reality is, if you look at the sīrah and you look at the Prophetic nature of divine providence in the ages, that’s where the spiritual wealth is distributed.

In an unrealistic, competitive, cruel, computer-obsessed society – it’s amongst those people that you will find the soft hearts that will respond to the truth. The African – Americans, the Hispanic Muslims, in Australia there are more Aboriginal converts to Islām than there are white converts to Islam despite the demographic disparities. Latin America – it’s in the flabella’s that the religion prospers, that’s the reality of Tawhīd. Those are the people to whom it appealed, primarily only of course become its destiny is universal. And sometimes those Arabic ex-patriot communities driving their Mercedes and living in the exurbs and really hoping that people assume they’re white – don’t really like to be told that. Often Muslims are just as uncomfortable to be told what the sīrah is really about, as non-Muslims. Because it isn’t about Middle class complacency it doesn’t say you can’t have a car and you can’t have a decent income, and you can’t succeed. It’s not a monastic aesthetical tradition that turns its back on the world. But it does say very sternly that it’s with the people, whose hearts are broken that Allah is with, anā ‘aind Al-munkasirāti qulūbahum – ‘I am with the broken hearted’, as He says (swt) in the hadīth qudsī. That’s where you expect truth to exist.

And in this country that’s what a lot of people can’t understand. They can’t get that some middle=class guy in a big cathedral who goes to Church once a year on Easter Day, might actually not be who God is interested in. And that God is actually interested in precisely the people whom the establishment, ethos and all of the media are least respectful of, which is the toothless old Bangladeshis in the mosque in Brick Lane, which is really where the deep process of spiritual self- noting and the remembrance of Allah (swt) is taking place.
That’s the radicalism of the Prophetic vision. It doesn’t say revolution; it does say, revolutionise the way in which you categorise people. A luminous heart is much more likely to be the old Bangladeshi housewife in the tenement building than the stock broker in his BMW, who sometimes goes to a revivalist Christian Meeting.

That’s the nature of Tawhīd and this is a stern, absolute, Prophetic teaching. Allah is with the oppressed Israelites, not with Far’ūn. Again and again these stories are to remind us of that uncomfortable fact. I find it uncomfortable.
I recently calculated that I’m endlessly grumbling about my academic salaries – we always do – because we work so hard and we do such important things and we get so much less than the doctors, so it’s obviously wrong, but actually I’m in the top 1% of global earners; I told my children and they kind of respected me a bit more when they heard that [Audience laugh] although it didn’t affect their pocket money.

That’s the reality, but where the divine regard truly is, is with those people whom the system really has no time for at all, or regards them as backward people, sexists, homophobes, fundamentalists, useless immigrants, asylum seekers – the most despised people are likely to be where the divine pleasure is most likely to be found.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us contemplating the fact of the hijra: the Prophet (saw) is sent to this mercantile community and his opponents are all millionaires of their time; hard hearted plutocrats. What they really want is not for him to say ‘you can worship your God, as long as you let us worship ours.’ But their deities are linked inextricably to this oppressive system. Their deities are unable to inspire them with the long term vision and the humanity and softness of heart that enables them actually to do something about the people in the street selling the Big Issue.
In our context we have the same sort of Umay ibn Khalaf-type of arrogance, except in our system which is so brilliantly designed; we tend to sweep away from our sight, the reminders that there are victims of the system we have created.

One of the consequences of globalization is that we don’t see the poor; the poor are the ‘third world’ doing the jobs which we have farmed out to them. Why have call centres in London when you can open one in Bangalore and pay them 5% of what you pay them in the UK? And it doesn’t matter if they burn out because they’re being worked too hard, they’re not unionized, they have mental problems, you never get to see that, you just get the nice Indian voice selling you a mortgage, saying ‘Hello, I am Sebastian’ [Abdul Hakim Murad imitates an Indian voice; Audience laugh].
You don’t know that he’s probably really suffering and he’s not allowed to talk to you because there’s an inspector wandering to see they’re on the case all the time and there’s a million other Indians outside waiting to take that job. It’s not very nice.

We all know about Nike shoes and the consequences of globalization. Occasionally these break surface in order to prick our complacency, but generally not enough to make a real difference. We talk about ‘trickle-down economics’ and eventually the ‘third world’ will become like us, but there is the other paradox: the other obsession of Umay on khalaf is that ‘I have a million dinars, next year in shā’ Allah, I’ll make another million,’ and it goes on forever.
And we Muslims tend to be the same. In Abu Dhabi we’ve got a seven star hotel so is it possible to have an eight star hotel? How many more stars can there be? It’s an infinite process because human ambition, human vanity is endless, and we’re never really satisfied.
The hadīth says, low kana lil insāni wādin min dthahab l’temenna an yukūna lahu wādiyan.

If a man had a valley of gold, he would wish that he had two valleys. That’s our nature.
The process of wealth-creation is halāl because it’s Allah’s rizq and we’re grateful for it – there are adāb – and we have a great mercantile civilization has Habib Ali indicated. These are people who couple the da’wa with making a living, but there are limits. There are limits.

The problem with the modern system is that there’s nothing about it that can ever suggest that there’s a limit. Somebody comes up with a book sometimes, like Fred Hirsch’s book Social Limits to Growth, which points out that after a certain point people don’t get happier, as they get richer. And some of you might have seen the headline just two weeks ago where everybody was trying to figure out why it is that although we’re twice as wealthy in this country as we were in 1968, by the conventional indices which of course is basically material indices even, we’re actually less happy.
So what exactly do we mean by progress? How much further can it go before we get even less happy and we’re working much harder are messing up the environment at an ever-increasing rate. Is there something in the system that can genuinely put the brakes on that, and push as into a new, less-greedy, less crazy circle of destruction and increasing  – it seems – unhappiness?

Secularity can’t because secularity only knows matter, and take matter away from it, it’s diminishing. Religion is the alternative to that. All the world’s great religions are alternatives to that.

The sīrah gives you a particular vision because of all of the foundation stories of the world religions, the one that is clearly couched in terms of doing something practical for the mustad’afīn and for the outcast, doing something practical about an oppressive economic order doing something practical about the fact that human beings eventually become diabetics and it’s not ideal. That there is an alternative and the alternative is the hijra to Medina, where an extraordinary different image of humanity is created.

Not a welfare state or the state taking over things that should be a free gift of soft human hearts, not that at all; but rather a society where you don’t see the mustad’afīn unsupported. Where the muhājirīn, when they came from Mecca, immediately the Ansār give them half of what they have; half of my house is yours, half of my wealth is yours, extraordinary things that you would never consider. That’s the vision he had (saw) the hijra is an economic and social fact, as well as a political and ‘tawhīdic’ fact. It’s about moving from unrestrained consumerism and greed, to a social vision in which people genuinely have a reason to make social sacrifices.

Now, it’s time to pray Maghrib and I’m not going to detain you much longer. But the moral of what I’m saying is clear. The internal logic of the system, however efficient, and however ethically sensitive it may claim to be, the internal logic of an ultimately material system is one of endless expansion, and more growth.

We know that there are physical and environmental limits to how much more growth there can be because the resources of the planet are finite.

There is something insane about a model of growth: the West is endlessly pressing on the ‘third world’ because if those third world countries and Thailand and Zimbabwe and Malawi and all of those places had Western lifestyles and levels of consumption, the global environment would collapse over night. We are urging on the third world something that if they actually did, it would kill us all. That’s the lunacy of the system. So we need a long term wisdom – a Prophetic wisdom – we need a prophetic wisdom that is based in these two great principles of the sīrah, one of which is zuhud – us being happy with little – a very, very un-modern ethic – but something that all of us detect at certain times. At Ramadan for example, and genuinely make a sacrifice, and somehow when we lose something and we’ve given it to a good cause – when we’ve not experienced a pleasure – we feel something deeper, more calm in ourselves.

The other principle is the principle of the mustad’afīn – the weak and the outcast who have always been at the centre of the monotheistic message, because Allah (swt) is God of Justice as well as a God of Mercy, and for both of those reasons, He commands us however successful we might be, in our legitimate halāl, mercantile pursuits, to put them at the centre rather than the margins of our concerns. And if the Muslim World, particularly, wealthy people in the Muslim World, actually put this into practice, rather than just endlessly getting angry about the American Empire building or Palestine – if they put that into practice, if even 1/10 of the wealthy in the Muslim World actually paid their zakat – most of the problems in the Muslim World would be overcome and you would see something of the beauty of the Medinan alternative that would overcome so many difficulties in our communities and the knots in our hearts.

So we ask Allah (swt) to soften our hearts, soften the hearts of the wealthy, and to give us true inspiration from this economic dimension of the sīrah of the chosen one (saw).

Al-salām ‘alaykum wa rahmat Allah

Globalised Before Globalisation: The Forgotten History of the Muslim Trader

Date: Wednesday, 7th May 2008
Time: 18:30 – 20:30
Venue: Buckingham Suite, The Britannia International Hotel, Marsh Wall, Canary Wharf, London E14 9SJ

Details: Public Lecture by Habib Ali and Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad. By caravan, sea and on foot, Muslim traders spread wealth and faith throughout the world – from the Silk Road to the Sahara and beyond. Their good conduct and savvy business acumen helped create great societies.  Their peaceful ways won people over. In an age of so-called “disaster capitalism” what is the role of Muslim business people in bringing good ethics and a spiritual consciousness back to what has become a dog-eat-dog world?

Partners: This event is co-organised with Islamic Circles and Wharf Muslim Association.

]]> http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2009/10/globalised-before-globalisation-inspirational-khutbah/feed/ 0 http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2007/06/worship-with-understanding-inspirational-khutbah/ http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2007/06/worship-with-understanding-inspirational-khutbah/#comments Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:46:50 +0000 KhutbahBank http://www.khutbahbank.co.uk/?p=263 “As-salámu ‘alaikum wa rahmatul láhi wa barakátuh!”

“A-úthu billáhi minash shaytánir rajeem. Bismilláhir rahmánir raheem.

Al hamdu lillahi nahmaduhu wanasta’eenahu, wanastagh-firuhu, wanatoobu ilayhi, wana’oothu Billaahi min shuroori an-fusinaa, wamin sayyi aati a’maalinaa. May- Yahdillahu fa huwal muhtad, wa may- yudlill falan tajidaa lahu waliyan murshida. Wa ash-hadu an Laa ilaaha ill-Alláh, wahdahoo laa shareeka lah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan ‘abduhoo warasooluh”

All Praise is due to Alláh, We praise Him and we seek help from Him. We ask forgiveness from Him. We repent to Him; and we seek refuge in Him from our own evils and our own bad deeds. Anyone who is guided by Alláh, he is indeed guided; and anyone who has been left astray, will find no one to guide him. I bear witness that there is no god but Alláh, the Only One without any partner; and I bear witness that Muhammad, sws, is His servant, and His messenger.

Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem! Ya Ay-yuhal-latheena ‘aamanut taqul-laaha, haqqa tuqaatihee wala tamu tun-na, il-la wa antum Muslimoon.”

O You who believe, – Fear Allah, as He should be feared, and die not except as Muslims.

Ya Ay-yuhal-latheena ‘aamanut taqul-laaha, wa qooloo qawlan sadeedaa. Yuslih-lakum a’maalakum wa yaghfir lakum thunoobakum, wamay yu-til-laaha warasoolah, faqad faaza fawzan atheemaa.”

O You who believe, – Be aware of Allah, and speak a straightforward word. He will forgive your sins and repair your deeds. And whoever takes Allah and His prophet as a guide, has already achieved a mighty victory.

My respected brothers and sisters,

Our worldwide family of Islam, the Muslim Ummah, is over one billion strong. How many of us speak Arabic as our mother-tongue? Do you know? Can you guess? The answer is less than 20%. To be precise, it’s 18%. That means that the vast majority of Muslims, 82% including you and me, are non-Arabic speakers. We must make a special effort to understand what we read in the Quran and what we recite in salaah, du’ah and dhikr.

Brothers and Sisters, I hope no-one will take offence, and I mean no disrespect to anyone. But I have to say that too many of us do not appreciate the importance of understanding the meaning of our salaah, our du’ah and dhikr. We’re quite satisfied to recite without knowing the meaning, without caring to learn the translations. I’m sure Allah swt enjoys listening to us reciting His holy Words with such tremendous passion, with meticulous pronunciation of every haraf in [tajweed]. But, how much more will Allah swt not appreciate our efforts, if we actually knew what we are saying? Imagine, we are speaking to Allah in the most elegant language of the Quran, our lips are moving and creating the most beautiful sounds, but our thoughts and our feelings are disconnected because we don’t really feel the full impact of what we are saying. We don’t really understand. And sadly, many of us make no real effort to understand. If only we could memorise a few short suras in our own language. If only we could think about the meanings when we recite the Arabic, then we could put meaning and feeling into those beautiful and soul-stirring words. If we did this regularly and systematically, then the true power and influence of Allah’s sacred words will touch our hearts. And when this happens, it will change us, it will transform us from what we are to what Allah wants us to become.

Brothers and Sisters, if we can allow Allah’s words to polish our hearts and improve our actions, then I guarantee you, Allah will enable us to put right many of the problems we see around us in our community and in our wider society. It must begin within ourselves, as Allah will not change our condition until we change what is within ourselves. Let us make a start, by learning the meaning and reciting with feeling, passionate feeling, our salaah, du’ah and dhikr.

I must admit, I was a big man in my 20’s when I first understood the meaning of the words that we say several times a day when we pray:

“Innas salaatee, wanusukee, wamahiyaaya wamamaatee, lil Laahi Rabbil aalameen”

“Truly, all my prayers, my sacrifice, my life and my death is for Allah, the Lord of all the worlds.”

When I realised the meaning of those words, I thought, Wow! That’s heavy stuff! I never knew that I was taking on such a huge responsiblility every time I made my salaah! I was actually promising and re-affirming that all my prayers, my sacrifice, my life and my death belong to Allah! These words cannot be taken lightly. It’s a complete, lifelong commitment and it affects everything we say and do. And you know, the more we think of the meaning, the more our salaah our du’ah and dhikr will change our lives for the better. Imagine if we really understood every du’ah and every dhikr and we reflected deeply on the meanings. This understanding will generate a complete transformation in the way we think and feel about ourselves and our responsibilities to others. True faith, true iman, does not enter someone’s heart without improving it, without beautifying it. So, if we want our lives to be improved, to be beautified, than we can begin by learning the meanings of all that we recite in Arabic with so much skill and elegance.

If you want proof of this power of Allah’s words to transform human beings from half savages to leaders of great civilisations, then look to the history of every people before their contact with Islam, and afterwards. This is what happened to the sahaaba so many years ago, and to all the awliyah-Allah, the Friends of Allah, throughout the ages. They understood every word of their salaah, du’ah and dhikr, so that they could put meaning and feeling into their worship. They could be absolutely sincere to Allah swt. Unless we know what we’re saying, feeling and doing, our efforts will lack complete sincerity.

So, for those of us who do not speak Arabic, let us make a sincere effort to memorise the meanings of our salaah, du’ah and dhikr. Let us think and reflect on these meanings so that our hearts can be moved and our behaviour improved. This will bring us closer to Allah swt. Thinking, reflecting and contemplating the words of Allah is highly recommended in the Holy Quran. Those who do so are referred to as “yatafak-karoon” or, people of understanding.

These inspiring and soul-stirring words come from the last verses of Sura Al-‘Imraan:

“Inna fi khalqis samáwáti wal ardi wakhtilá fil laili wan nahári la’áyátil lil’úlil albáb.

Allatheena yath-kurúnalláha qiyámaw wa qu’údaw wa ‘alá junúbihim wayata fakkarúna fí khalqis samáwáti wal ard, Rabbaná má khaqta háthá bátilan. Subhánaka faqiná athában nár.

190 “Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of night and day there are indeed Signs for men of understanding.

191 Men who celebrate the praises of Allah standing sitting and lying down on their sides and contemplate the (wonders of) creation in the heavens and the earth (with the thought): “Our Lord! not in vain have You created (all) this! Glory to You! give us salvation from the penalty of the fire.”

In Islam people who think and reflect are highly valued above those who simply follow without thinking, without reflection and therefore without insight into the deeper meanings of life. [Check Malik Badri’s book] “Contemplation is worth much more than xxx nights of prayer….”

All praise is due to Alláh, the Lord of all the Worlds; may the greetings and peace be upon the best messenger, Muhammad, the unlettered prophet; and upon his family and upon all of his companions. Amma ba’ad, And, after this,

Behold, Alláh and his angels shower blessings on the Prophet. O you who believe! Ask for blessings on him, and salute him with a worthy greeting.

O Alláh! Send your greetings upon Muhammad and his family, just as you sent your greetings on Abraham, and his family. O Alláh, send your blessings on Muhammad and his family, just as you blessed Abraham and his family. In both worlds, you are praiseworthy and exalted.”

Alhamdu lillahi Rabbil ‘Aalameen. Was-salaatu was-salaamu alaa Khairil mursaleen. Muhammadin-nabeey-yil Ummiy-yee, wa-‘alaa aalihee, wasah-bihee, aj-ma’een.

Ammaa ba’ad:

Innalláha wa malaaikata yusallúna alan nabi. Yá ay yuhal latheena ámanu sallú alayhi wasalli mú tas leema. Allahumma salli alá Muhammad, wa ala áli Muhammad, kama salayta ala Ibrahim, wa ala ali Ibrahim. Allahumma barik ala Muhammad, wa alaa áli Muhammad, kama barakta ala Ibrahim, wa ala ali ibrahim. Fil ála meen, innaka hameedun majeed.”

Part Two:

Sub’ hanallahi wal hamdu lillah, wala hawla wala quwwata illah billah yu althi yual theem.

“All glory is for Allah, and all praise is for Allah; There is no power and no strength except with Allah.”

Brothers and Sisters, let us through a deeper understanding of our faith become those whom Allah calls, yatafak-karoon, ‘­people who contemplate,’ people who reflect, people who understand.

I ask Allah to give us all some of his divine wisdom, hikma, so that we have a light to illuminate our way through the confusion in the world out there. May Allah help us and all our future generations to know and love the beautiful Way of Islam. May we all hold fast to the rope that Allah extends for us. May we all set a good example for others, a justly balanced community, ummatan wasatan, and a witness to the nations [Quran 2:143]

Our Lord! Accept (this service) from us: For Thou art the All-Hearing, the All-knowing [2:127]

Rabbana taqabbal minna innaka antas Sameeaul Aleem

O my Lord! Grant unto us wives and offspring who will be the comfort of our eyes, and give us (the grace) to lead the righteous [25:74]

Rabbana Hablana min azwaajina wadhurriy-yatina, qurrata ‘ayioni wa-jalna lil-muttaqeena Imaama

Our Lord! Forgive us, and our brethren who came before us into the Faith, and leave not, in our hearts, rancour (or sense of injury) against those who have believed. [59:10]

Rabbana-ghfir lana wa li ‘ikhwani nalladhina sabaquna bil imani wa la taj’al fi qulubina ghillal-lilladhina amanu

Our Lord! Thou art indeed Full of Kindness, Most Merciful. [59:10]

Rabbana innaka Ra’ufur Rahim

Our Lord! In Thee do we trust, and to Thee do we turn in repentance: to Thee is (our) Final Goal [60:4]

Rabbana ‘alayka tawakkalna wa-ilayka anabna wa-ilaykal masir

Ameen. Aqeemus salaah!

Let me start by telling you something I saw recently on a Hertfordshire estate agent’s website. There was a house being sold, generally an indifferent 1920s structure, whose sole feature of note was that at the end of its garden it had an ancient chestnut tree. The chestnut tree, according to the estate agent had been dated by scientists to the early seventh century. Really ancient. That of course means that the tree is as old as our religion. So possibly planted perhaps during the life of our prophet (s#alla Allahu’alayhi wa sallam) and down the generations of Muslims through all the tempestuous events and all the great triumphs of our history, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the conquests, Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, the conversion of Java, that tree every year shed its leaves in the autumn, and gained them again in the spring.

Another tree is rather closer to where I am living at the moment, and it’s a tree that grows in the courtyard of the mosque of Abu Ayyub Al Ansari (rad#i’ Allahu ‘anhu) in the city of Istambul. And the tree has been there we know exactly since the year 1453, we know because the chroniclers report that it was planted by the hand of the city’s conquer Sultan Mehmet II. And it’s still there, and of course it’s enormous. Seven or eight grown men could not embrace its girth. In recent years of course, the tree has needed a certain amount of help. Some of the branches have seemed dangerously close to falling so they have to be propped up. It was hit by lighting, and it had to be filled with cement. Its very ancient, but it still every year, bursts into leaf and provides an important sense of continuity with a past that many modern Turks seems increasingly remote and difficult to relate to.

Now there’s a series of verses in the Qur’an which relate to the significance of the tree and its symbolic possibilities. Well known verses, Surah Ibrahim,

A‘uthu billahi min al-Shaytani al-Rajīm. Bismillahi al-Rahmani al-Rahīm

14:24

أَلَمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ ضَرَبَ اللّهُ مَثَلاً كَلِمَةً طَيِّبَةً كَشَجَرةٍ طَيِّبَةٍ أَصْلُهَا ثَابِتٌ وَفَرْعُهَا فِي السَّمَاء

14: 25

تُؤْتِي أُكُلَهَا كُلَّ حِينٍ بِإِذْنِ رَبِّهَا وَيَضْرِبُ اللّهُ الأَمْثَالَ لِلنَّاسِ لَعَلَّهُمْ يَتَذَكَّرُونَ

Which means something like: “Have you not seen how Allah coins a metaphor, a good word is like a good tree whose root is firm, whose branches are in the sky. Every season it gives its fruit with the permission of its Lord. And your Lord coins metaphors for humanity that perhaps they may remember.”

We have in Sahih al-Bukhārī a comment on this from sayidna Al Bara bin Aazib (rad#i’ Allahu ‘anhu) in which the Prophet (s#alla Allahu’alayhi wa sallam) explains that this does in fact refer to the kalimah of tawhid, the shahāda. The religion itself is like a tree. It has roots and branches. And the ‘ulama of fiqh lost no time in using precisely those botanical terms to describe the two great subdivisions of Islamic Law. The Usūl, the roots and the furū’ the branches. The Usūl, the sources; how do we derive nourishment from the Qur’ān and the Sunnah. And the branches, what are the implications of that nourishment for the way in which the shari‘ahand the Muslim life develops and provides shelter and nourish to human beings.

Now, the word radical that comes from a word, a root, that means a root precisely. That which is Islamic is in a sense obviously that which is radical because it is rooted. Our’s is a time when to be rooted in the past, to be part of an organic entity that goes back centuries has become the strangest and the most unusual thing. The normal condition of modernity is to be disconnected, to the uprooted, to be rootless, to be a nomad. The great gift of Islam, one of its great gifts, is that because its forms are unchanged, we are genuinely part of a living organism, that is nourished by roots that are sunk deep in the revelation of God and in a great age of faith. No other ummah can quite make this claim. You can go into any of London’s myriad places of worship and you will see thousands of different things. But generally if you want to see something that is truly unchanged from a great age of faith you will go to the mosque. The new Pope has claimed that the great crises which are overtaking the Catholic Church, the fact that in many countries nobody wants to be a priest or a monk or a nun any longer, that much of Catholic Europe is effectively secularized. Problems of abuse of every unimaginable kind. He says it’s because we no longer have a consistent liturgy, form of worship. The crisis in the Church is a crisis in liturgy. Forty years ago they decided to get rid of Latin Mass and to allow local communities to worship in their own languages. And as it were, the tree was sliced off. Something new that inexorably was dominated by the brilliant mediocrity of modernity took its place. It will be very interesting to see whether this current papacy can heal the wound that was done to the catholic tree forty years ago.

But nobody has done that to the Islamic tree. Whatever the political, and economic, and strategic and often cultural mess of any given Muslim country, the forms of worship, the ‘ibadat are in tact. You go into a mosque, you know roughly what you’re going to get. And this is possibly Islam’s greatest, perhaps most miraculous cultural achievement over the last hundred years. That alone it has passed into modernity with its fundamental forms intact and therefore can be a point for new growth and for renewal.

Nonetheless there are those who wish to prune the tree or encourage it in certain directions, and this is why we need expert gardeners. Something as magnificent as that is also quite vulnerable. A tree can be a mighty thing that gives shade and fruit to generations but it only takes a couple of men with axes and it is no more. That’s the responsibility of the ‘ulama. This is why they are truly the heirs of the ambiya, warathat al-Ambiya. Because while the process of wahi, of revelation, has certainly come to an end, nonetheless the tree is still growing. It was watered by sayyidna rasulillah (s#alla Allahu’alayhi wa sallam) the one who planted it. It continues to need watering and nurturing and protection.

Now we are told that as time goes by, and indeed as the end times approach, scholars will become fewer and its probably one of those markers of our times that whereas in the first few generations of Islam the ‘ulama were many and those who gave fatwas^.were few. Today the ‘ulama, the real ‘ulama in a classical sense are few, but everybody is giving a fatwa. That’s our condition. People convert to Islam and ten days later they are telling you well this group is not right and this view is not correct and this tafsīr has a problem, ma sha Allah^. That’s a sign of grave decadence. Now those people, when they look at the tree don’t quite know what they are looking at because they haven’t studied with gardeners who have been part of a tradition of maintaining that tree and its environment since it was planted. They don’t know its ways and they can be lethally dangerous. And the most dangerous amongst them are those who say the tree at its most vigorous and its most promising and its freshest and its best when it was really young. If it’s in trouble now, the branches are falling down, they need propping up and it’s not what it was, then the obvious solution is to cut the tree down to ground level and it will be as good as new. Cut the tree down and you go back to a time when Islam was new or when the sultan planted it in the company of his spiritual guide in 1453.

That’s the mark of the non-‘ālim, who thinks he understands the process of ijtihād. We need renewal, every Muslim accepts that. The religion has become old, doddery, cantankerous. The sole source of renewal is that which was good for the earliest generations of this ummah, that’s established, nobody will deny it. But the difference between ‘ālim the and the amateur is that the ‘ālim says we’ll deal with the tree as it is, we keep it going, alhamdulillah, we still have it and over the years it has acquired a certain magnificence, that in itself has the right to be respected and enjoyed. The amateur scholar says no, the best thing is to cut it down and well be back in 1453 again, or indeed back at the time of the hijra, in the time of the prophet (SAWS). This is really what is at stake. We have a tree that is more intact than the trees of the other ummahs. But we have, given the nature of the age, an increasing proliferation of people who misunderstand it; who are not grateful for it, who can’t see its current beauty, who have not trained with those who have been looking after it, and think that the solution is actually to cut it down. The great calamity in our age is not that Islam needs a reformation, or that we need a liberal Islam, the great calamity is that we are not being true to our own traditions of scholarship.

The way to be true to the earliest generations of Muslims, is to be true to those who alone are authorized to teach the religion, because they have it had it from those, who have had it from those who have had it from those who actually held the hands of the sahāba (radi’ Allahu ‘anhum). That’s the only way back. That is the rope that brings the bucket up from the well. Get rid of the rope and the water stays in the well. To say well the rope is something that was, well old, and we just need the water from the well. You won’t get water from the well that way, the only way to knowledge of fiqh and shari’ah and fatwa is through the authorized ‘ulama and through the four schools of fiqh, energized and made wise by a process of inner enlightenment.

And I think we all detect that we are living in momentous times. We are living in times, when although sometimes unfortunately through lack of imān, faith I think we don’t acknowledge it, there are also many very good things. A hundred years ago, Muslims were twelve percent of the world’s population, now we are twenty four percent and counting. Many of the things that were worrying Muslims a hundred years ago have actually been resolved. The integrity of our basic doctrines and practices is our greatest achievement and alhamdulillah, it comes ultimately from Allah’s desire that this ummah will not go astray in its forms, that it will always be acceptable, and accessible.

وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ

Wa Inna Lahu La Hafizun (12:12), that is from His guarantee to preserve the Qur’an that means that the interpretation will also be intact.

Alhamdulillah. By all historical standards, this has been a successful century or two. Considering the calamities that have befallen other ummahs, that might well have overtaken us. But at the same time, we know that this is a time in which there are fundamental crises, and challenges. And the challenges posed from within are the most threatening ones. Islam has proved impervious to attacks from outside. Islam  just becomes stronger. It became stronger as a result of the Crusades. It was strengthened by the Mongol invasions. Each time it grew stronger. We learned something. We were made humble and Allah raised us up to another level. This time however, matters seem less clear because there are internal subversions: subversions driven essentially by those people who say that the tree should be cut down so that things can be new again. So that we have the Islam of the first generation and all of the problems of the ummah will vanish like a mirage. That is the real threat.

Another threat which is often closely related to those same people, is the threat provided by those who mistake their own anger, for a righteous indignation and zeal for the defense of Allah’s religion. The munafiq the hypocrite, is afraid; he is terrorized. The believer is not afraid,

وَلاَ خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلاَ هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ

Wa la khawfun ‘alayhim, wa la hum yah#zanun (2:262). The mark of the real believer, the wali’ is that “he fears not, neither does he grieve.” In other words he’s not afraid really, of the future, neither does he grieve for the past. Because he knows future, past, it’s all in the hands of and the decree of the One who is perfect in His disposition of history. The one who worries and the one who panics is the one who is not that wali’ and is indeed possibly allied to the demonic forces: the awliyau al-Shaytan. And his temper is one of fire and disturbance and agitation, a yearning for revenge, a defense of the self, a sense of outraged pride. That is the real subversion that religion faces today. Not external enemies, not conspiring superpowers, evil plots. Islam has dealt with that and worse in the past. The real threat that we are now facing that possibly can endanger the huge achievements that the ummah has been given in the past century or so, the real threat comes from this demonic phenomenon from within. The rage, the frustration, the fear, the jaza’ the panic.

And every particular type of spiritual psychology has a precedent in the Qur’an and in the hadith.

(الَّذِينَ قَالَ لَهُمُ النَّاسُ إِنَّ النَّاسَ قَدْ جَمَعُواْ لَكُمْ فَاخْشَوْهُمْ فَزَادَهُمْ إِيمَاناً وَقَالُواْ حَسْبُنَا اللّهُ وَنِعْمَ الْوَكِيلُ (3:173

Those who say “people have ganged up on you, so be afraid of them”. But it increased them in Imān. And they said, “Allah is enough for us and an Excellent Guardian.” That’s the one who’s in this state of wilāyah. He’s relaxed, whatever the threats, he’s relaxed because he trusts in the disposition of his Lord. He doesn’t lash out in angry vindictiveness like the undisciplined child in the playground, who hits the boy who he is envious of, or whose won the game, or if he can’t get hold of him, he bullies someone younger than himself or finds somebody innocent to hit out at. No, Hasbuna Allahu Wa ni‘mal wakīl, this is what he says. Allah is enough for us, and He is the best guardian, the Best Trustee.

This is the real challenge that the Muslim Ummah is facing. Are we to be awliya of the shaytan, worshippers of the lower fiery possibility, slaves at the alter of anger, or are we to say, Hasbuna Allahu Wa ni‘mal wakīl, trusting that Allah’s intention towards this ummah is always unfailingly good. We need to ask ourselves this question, because if we get it wrong, then extremism results: extremism that comes through simple despair of many Muslims, a kind of wandering away from religion now because, what a mess! That’s a form of extremism, moving away from the tree of tawhīd.

The other extremism is to give way to the lower desires, revenge, anger, venting one’s sense of outraged pride, which is a reversion to the days of the jāhiliyya. Remember the old suicide warfare of the pagan Arabs, the ittifād, one of the phenomona of the furious rage, the h’amiyya, of the people of the jāhiliyya, who couldn’t stand it when their honor and their pride was challenged by others, was a ritual suicide on the battlefield and to show them that these people were not afraid of death. One of the jahili practices that were abolished by Islam. Unfortunately this practice has come back in some contexts, but it is alien to our tradition. Think of earlier ages of the occupation of Palestine for instance, however much we stretch our imagination, can we imagine somebody in the Palestine occupied by King Baldwin in the time of the Crusaders, walking into the now substantially Christianized market place in Jerusalem and engaging in act of suicidal terrorism against the men, women and children there? Before explosives, how would one have done it? Blindfolding oneself perhaps and lashing out with a sword at whoever happened to be near. Because our history is a history of futuwa, of honorable warrior-hood, it records no such thing.

This is a decadence that is profound. And that it happens in the holy land is particularly worrying. Near the muqadsāt, where we are particularly required to conform entirely to the adāb of the Shari’ah. This is a deep subversion. And as for those who think that for reasons of masfahah that the door can be opened there, but somehow that door will remain closed elsewhere in the world, that this door can be opened because the Palestinians are so oppressed and somehow it’s going to help them, but of course we keep it closed in Chechnya and Kashmir and certainly in London, that logic doesn’t seem to have worked too well. That rage, that desire to self annihilation, to lash out and the men, women and children, whoever in the vicinity, is now becoming a global epidemic. And the ‘ulama who opened that little door now see these legions rushing through it in every place. They don’t know what to do about it. That door has to be closed. Islam is too good for such practices, for such baseness, for such wild expression of futility and despair and vindictiveness.

Last year I was in Jerusalem and I spent sometime looking at the new wall, one of the consequences of the suicide bombers. Then in the afternoon, I was visiting the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem who is a great upholder of Palestinian rights, and while I was there, the phone went. He picked up the phone and he found out that his nephew had died in a suicide attack. His nephew, a Christian Palestinian worked in a coffee shop in Jerusalem. Somebody, claiming to be a Mujahid had walked in, pressed the button and had killed one Palestinian Christian, One Palestinian Muslim, and two Israeli Jews and himself. This has nothing to do with futuwa. “Fa tabayanu” is the Qur’anic commandment. “Be sure whose life you are taking”.

This arbitrary brutality that has now come to the streets of London and has caused such despair and confusion and division and bafflement amongst Muslims and such joy and celebration amongst those who really wish we weren’t here at all. This has to stop. And we should have a policy of zero tolerance of those who try to fudge the issues, and say, well in some places its all right, but here it isn’t, because this is a moral absolute. The practice is qabeeh, it is ugly, and Allah is Jamīl yahibbu al-Jimāl. “He is beautiful and He loves beauty.”

So we ask Allahu (subhānahu wa ta‘āla) to make us supporters of the true gardeners of this great tree that is the religion of Islam. To make us thankful that He has preserved this tree for us. And to helps us faithfully to protect it and to pass on its blessings and its joy and its shade and its fruit to our children and to future generations. Wa salamu Alaikum wa rahmatullah.

Attention deficit disorder seems to flourish under conditions of late modernity. The past becomes itself more quickly. Memories, individual as well as collective, tend to be recycled and consulted only by the old. For everyone else, there are only current affairs, reaching back a few months at most. Orwell, of course, predicted this, in his dystopic prophecy that may have been only premature; but today it seems to be cemented by postmodernism (Deleuze), and also by physicists, who are now proclaiming an almost Ash‘arite scepticism about claims for the real duration of particles.

This is a condition that has an ancestry in the stirrings of the modernity which it represents. Hume anticipated it in his stunning insistence on the non-continuity of the human self: we are ‘nothing but a collection of perceptions which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement;’ or so he thought.[1] Modern fiction may still explore or reaffirm identities (Peter Carey) and thus define human dignity as the honourable disposition of at least some aspects of an accumulated heritage. But this is giving way to the atomistic, playful, postmodern storytelling of, say, Elliot Perlman, which defines dignity – where it does so at all – in terms of freedom from all stories, even while lamenting the superficial tenor of the result. It is against the backdrop of this culture that the scientists, now far beyond Ataturk’s ‘Science is the Truest Guide in Life’, raise the stakes with their occasionalism, and, for the neurologists, the increasing denial of the autonomy of the human will – a new predestinarianism that makes us always the consequence of genes and the present, not the remembered past.[2]

Our public conversations, then, seem to be the children of a marriage of convenience between two principles, neither of them religious or even particularly humanistic. The elitist mystical trope of the moment being all that is, significantly misappropriated by some New Age discourses, has become the condition of us all, albeit with the absence of God. Journalism thus becomes the privileged discourse to whose canons the public intellectual must conform, if he or she is to become a credible guide. More striking still is the observed fact that amidst our current crisis of wisdom it also seems to provide the language in which the public discussion of faith is carried on. Thus Catholicism becomes the humiliated cardinal of Boston, not St Augustine. Its morality is taken to be that which visibly clashes with the caprice of characters in Home and Away, not a severe but ultimately liberating cultivation of the virtues rooted in centuries of experience and example. Judaism, in its turn, becomes the latest land-grab of a settler rabbi, not a millennial enterprise of faith and promise. Of course, our new occasionalism does invoke the past. But it does so with reference either to scriptures, stripped of their normative exegetical armature, or to those events which remain in the consciousness of a citizenry raised on enlightenment battles with obscurantism. So again, we recall Galileo, not Eckhart; we recall the interesting hatreds of the Inquisition, not the charity of St Vincent de Paul. Otherwise, our culture is religiously amnesiac. Winston Churchill, near the end of his life, began to read the Bible. ‘This book is very well-written,’ he said. ‘Why was it not brought to my attention before?’

It is in this frankly primitive condition that we seek to discuss religious acts which, against all the predictions of our grandparents, claim to interrupt the progress of history towards a world in which there will be no continuity at all. To our perplexity, history, despite Fukuyama, does not seem to have ended. Humans do not always act for the economic or erotic now; Tamino still seeks his Sarastro. A residue of real human diversity persists. For the human soul is not yet, as Coleridge wrote,

Seraphically free,
From taint of personality.[3]

This failed ultimacy, this sense that we, the Papageni, have to dust down the armour of an earlier generation of moral absolutes, when history was still running, when the victory of the corporations and of Hollywood was not yet assured, accounts for the maladroit condition of the world’s current argument about terrorism. The most active in seizing the moment, as they elbow impatiently past the fin de siécle multiculturalists and postmodernists, are the oddly-named American neoconservatives, who invoke Leo Strauss and roll up their sleeves to defend Washington against Oriental warriors who would defy the dialectics of history and seek to postpone the apotheosis of Anglo-Saxon consumer society, which they see as the climax of a billion years of evolution.[4] But despite such ideologised adversions to the longue durée, secularism seems to have little to offer that is not short-termist and reactive, and determined to reduce the globe to a set of variations on itself.

Traditionalists, who should be more helpful, seem paralysed. Much of the fury and hurt that currently abounds in the Christian and the Muslim worlds reveals a sense that the timetable which God has approved for history has been perverted. Christendom is not a virgin in this respect; in fact, it was first, with scholastic and Byzantine broadsides against Christian sin as invitation to Saracenic chastisement (Bernard, Gregory Palamas). Then it was the turn of Islam, when, from the seventeenth century on the illusion of the Muslims as materially and militarily God’s chosen people was dealt a series of shocking blows. Now it is, once again, the turn of Christendom (if the term be still allowed), which is currently wondering why history has not yet experienced closure, why a former rival should still be showing signs of life, either as the result of a misdiagnosis, or as a zombie-like revenant bearing only a superficial resemblance to his medieval seriousness. Certainly, the American president and his frequently evangelical team see themselves in these terms. Architects of a society which, Disney-like, appropriates the past only to emphasise the glory of the present, these zealots appeal to a prophecy-religion in which the Book of Revelation is the key to history. For them, too, the promised closure is imminent, and its frustration by the Other an outrage.

President Reagan, while less captivated by end-time visions than his successors, could offer these thoughts to Jewish lobbyists:

You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that is going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of these prophecies lately, but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.[5]

The protagonists of the current conflict, then, are unusual in their confidence that history has not ended, although millennialism seems to hover in the background on both sides, helped along by the frequently Palestinian scenery. The triumph of the West, or the resurgence of an Islam interpreted by bestselling Pentecostal authors as a chastisement and a demonic challenge, signals the end of a growing worry about the religious meaninglessness of late modernity. Tragically, however, neither protagonist seems validly linked to the remnants of established religion, or shows any sign of awareness of how to connect with history. Fundamentalist disjuncture is placing us in a kind of metahistorical parenthesis, an end-time excitement in which, as for St Paul, old rules are irrelevant, and Christ and Antichrist are the only significant gladiators on the stage. Fundamentalists, as well as mystics, can insist that the moment is all that is real.

2. Sunna Contra Gentiles

In such a world of pseudo-religious reaction against the postmodern erosion of identity, it follows that if you are not ‘with us,’ you are with the devil. Or, when this has to be reformulated for the benefit of the blue-collar godless, you are a ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’. Where religion exists to supply an identity, the world is Augustinian, if not quite Manichean. The West’s ancient trope of itself as a free space, perhaps a white space, holding out against Persian or Semitic intruders, is being coupled powerfully, but hardly for the first time, with Pauline and patristic understandings of the New Israel as unique vessel of truth and salvation, threatened in the discharge of its redemptive project by the Oriental, Semitic, Ishmaelitic other. In the West, at least, the religious resources for this dualism are abundant and easily abused. Take Daniel Goldhagen, for instance, who in his most recent book suggests that the xenophobia of the Christian Bible is qualitatively greater than that of any other scripture. New Bibles, he urges, must be printed with many corrections to what he describes as this founding text of a lethal Western self-centredness.[6] Semites of several kinds would be well-advised to beware a culture raised on such a foundation.

It is remarkable that both sides, in constructing themselves against a wicked, fundamentalist rival, mobilise the ancient trope of antisemitism. The Self needs its dark Other, preferably nearby or within. That Other has standard features: in the case of Christian antisemitism it is that it stands for Letter rather than Spirit, for blind obedience rather than freedom, for an discreet but intense transnational solidarity in place of Fatherland and Church. It is sexually aberrant (hence the Nazi polemic against Freud). It hides its women (who should, instead, join the SS, or practice nacktkultur). It imposes archaic and unscientific taboos: diet, purity, circumcision. Such are the categories in which an almost dualistic West historically defines its relationship to its nearest and most irritating Other.[7]

Antisemitism is, in Richard Harries’ words, a ‘light sleeper’. But part of its strength is that it is not asleep at all; and never has been. As Christendom seeks its identity, the Dark Other today is now more usually Ishmael. Torched mosques, terrified asylum-seekers, bullied schoolchildren, and, we may not unreasonably add, a journalistic discourse of the type that is now being labelled ‘Islamophobic’, are less new than they seem. They represent a vicarious antisemitism. ‘Islamic law is immutable’ is a chorus in the new Horst Wessel song. ‘Circumcision is barbaric.’ ‘Their divorce laws are medieval and anti-woman.’ ‘They keep to themselves and don’t integrate.’ Such is the battle-cry of the resurgent Western right: Pim Fortuin, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jorg Haider, Filip de Winter. It has become startlingly popular, though always volatile at the polls. Thus is the old antisemitic metabolism of Europe and its American progeny being reinvigorated by the encounter with Ishmael. Again, history has started up again, and again our amnesiac culture ignores the vast cogwheels, deep beneath the surface, which move it.

On the other side, now, crossing the Mediterranean, or the Timor Sea, we generally find not a bloc of sincere fundamentalist regimes, but an archipelago of dictatorships, Oriental despots after the letter, which are in almost every case answerable not to their own electorates – for they recognise none – but to a distant desk in the State Department.[8] These are the neo-mamluks, ex-soldiers and condottieri of a system that penalises ethics. Ranged against them we observe the puritans, iconoclasts with El Greco eyes, whose claim it is to detest the modernity of the regimes. Such puritans, led by the memory of Sayyid Qutb, have no illusions about the nature of secular rule. They see clearly that the regimes are more modern than those of the West, because more frank in their conviction that science plus commerce does not equal ethics. Where the Western journalistic eye sees retardation, the Islamist sees modernity. Hitler and Stalin were more modern than Churchill and Roosevelt, more scientific, more programmatic, more distant from the past. The future is theirs, and it is neither Christ’s millennial reign nor the triumph of small-town America. It is Alphaville.

The Islamist, then, is not the caricature of the envious, uncomprehending Third Worlder. Typically he has spent much of his life in the West, and is capable of offering an empirical analysis, or at least a diagnosis. Sayyid Qutb, in his writing on what he calls ‘the deformed birth of the American man,’ sees Americans as advanced infants; advanced because of their technology, but puerile in their ignorance of earlier stages of human development.[9] There is something of Teilhard de Chardin in his account, which inverts Tocqueville to identify an American idiot-savant mania for possession. Technology made America possible, and ultimately, America need claim nothing else. Linked to Christian fundamentalism, it is an enemy of every other story; and unlike the East, it will not remain in its place. It must send out General Custer to subdue all remnants of earlier phases of human consciousness rooted in nature, spirituality or art. Its client regimes are therefore its natural, not opportunistic, adjuncts in its programme to subdue the world. They are not a transitional phase, they are the end-game.

Antisemitism forms part of this vision too, certainly. But since, as Goldhagen confirms, this is an essentially Christian phenomenon, to be healed by correcting the views of the Evangelists, in an Islamic context which lacks a letter-spirit dichotomy it seems a hazier resource for identity construction. Qutb was influenced by the Vichy theorist Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), through his odd, vitalist tract L’Homme, cet inconnu, which remains an ultimate, though unacknowledged, source text for much modern Islamism.[10] No medieval Muslim thinker of any note wrote a book against Judaism, although homilies against Christianity were quite common. If medieval Islam had a dark Other, it was more likely to be Zoroastrianism than Judaism, which, in Samuel Goitein’s phrase by which he summed up his magisterial work A Mediterranean Society, enjoyed a close and ‘symbiotic’ relationship with Islam.[11] But today’s Qutbian Islamist purges midrashic material from Koranic commentary, and studies the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and, even, Mein Kampf. Nothing can be discovered, it seems, in the Islamic libraries, so that this importation into an ostensively nativist and xenophobic milieu becomes inescapable – the fundamentalist’s familiar appeal to necessity.

As he surveys the wreckage of Istanbul synagogues and Masonic lodges, the journalist, as ibn al-waqt, is oblivious to the happier past of Semitic conviviality in the Ottoman Sephardic lands. And perhaps he is right, perhaps, under our conditions, the past is another religion. But the paradox has become so burning, and so murderous, that we cannot let it pass unremarked. The Islamic world, instructed to host Israel, was historically the least inhospitable site for the diaspora. The currently almost ubiquitous myth of a desperate sibling rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael is nonsensical to historians.

Here, at the dark heart of Islam’s extremist fringe, we find what may be the beginnings of a solution. No nativist reaction can long survive proof of its own exogenous nature. And no less than its Christian analogues, Islamic ghuluww, at least in its currently terroristic forms, betrays a European etiology. It borrows its spiritual, as well as its material, armament from Western modernity. This, we may guess, marks it out for anachronism in a context where intransigence is xenophobic.[12]

This is an unpopular diagnosis; but one which is gaining ground. It cannot be without significance that outside observers, when not blinded by a xenophobic need to view terrorism as Islamically authentic, have sometimes intuited this well. Here, for instance, is the verdict of John Gray, in his book Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern:

No cliche is more stupefying than that which describes Al-Qaida as a throwback to medieval times. It is a by-product of globalisation. Its most distinctive feature – projecting a privatised form of organised violence worldwide – was impossible in the past. Equally, the belief that a new world can be hastened by spectacular acts of destruction is nowhere found in medieval times. Al-Qaida’s closest precursors are the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth-century Europe.[13]

And Slavoj Zizek, a still more significant observer, is convinced that what we are witnessing is not ‘Jihad versus MacWorld’ – the standard leftist formulation – but rather MacWorld versus MacJihad.[14]

This implies that if ghuluww has a future, it will be because modernity has a future, not because it has roots in Islamic tradition. That tradition, indeed, it rules out of order, as it dismisses the juridical, theological and mystical intricacies of medieval Islam as so much dead wood. The solution, then, which the world is seeking, and which it is the primary responsibility of the Islamic world, not the West to provide, must be a counter-reformation, driven by our best and most cosmopolitan heritage of spirit and law.

A point of departure, here, and a useful retort to essentialist reductions of Islam to Islamism, is the fact that orthodoxy still flies the flag in almost all seminaries. The reformers are, at least institutionally, in the Rhonnda chapels, not the cathedrals. Perhaps the most striking fact about regulation Sunni Islam over the past fifty years has been its insistence that religion’s general response to modernity must not take the form of an armed struggle. There have been local exceptions to this rule, as in the reactive wars against Serbian irredentism in Bosnia, and Soviet intrusion into Afghanistan. But a doctrine of generic jihad against the West has been conspicuous by its absence.[15]

It is not immediately clear how we gloss this. In the nineteenth century Sunni Islam frequently elected to resist European colonial rule by force, giving rise to the figure of the Mad Mullah who formed part of the imperial imagination, in the fiction of John Buchan, or Tolstoy’s Hajji Murad. In the twentieth century, however, the traditional pragmatism of Sunnism seemed to generate an ulema ethos that was certainly not quietist, but had nothing in common with Qutbian Islamism either. Hence the Deobandi movement in India, and its Tablighi offshoot, supported the Congress party, and generally opposed Partition. Arab religious leaders sometimes resorted to force, as with the Naqshbandi shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in mandate Palestine; but the independence movements were overwhelmingly directed by secular modernists. The ancient universities, al-Qarawiyyin, al-Zaytuna, al-Azhar and the rest, regarded the modern period as a mandate for doctrinal retrenchment and the piecemeal ijtihad-based reassessment of aspects of Islamic law. In other words, mainstream Islam’s response to the startling novelty of a modernity that was forced on its societies at the point of an imperial or postcolonial bayonet was self-scrutinising and cautious, not militant.

Traditional wisdom and the texts, of course, were the reason for this. Sunnism, as inscribed by the great Seljuk theorists, had put its trust in prudence, pragmatism, and a strategy of negotiation with the sultan. So in British India, the Hanafi consensus decided that the Raj formed part of dar al-islam. In Russia, Shihab al-Din Marjani took the same view with regard the empire of the Tsars. But for Qutb, all this was paradigmatic of the error of classical Sunni thought. Islam was to be prophetic, and hence a liberation theology, challenging structures as well as souls, not by preaching and praying alone, but by agitation and revolution. Given his education and sitz im leben in the golden age of anti-colonialism, probably nothing could have extricated Qutb from his critique of what he saw as Sunni indifferentism, rooted, he suspected, in Ash‘ari deontology and a presumed Sufi fatalism. The prophetic is not meant to be accommodating; it fails, or it succeeds triumphantly. The normative political thinkers, Mawardi, Nizam al-Mulk, Ghazali, Katib Çelebi, and their modern advocates, had to be jettisoned. Technological empires had made the world anew, and, if it was to cope with an increasingly bizarre and offensive Other, Islamic thought had to be reformed in the direction of an increasingly unconditional insurrectionism.

Qutb’s resurrection of Ibn Taymiya, via Rashid Rida, became paradigmatic. In the fourteenth century this angry Damascene had attacked ulema who acquiesced in the rule of the nominally Muslim Mongols. Loyalty could be to a righteous imam alone. Rida and others had taken pains to dissociate this from the Kharijite slogan ‘No rule other than God’s’, for an unpleasant odour hung about the name of Kharijism. But de facto, the hard wing of Hanbalite Islam seemed vulnerable to a Kharijite reading. Prototypical al-Qaida supporters wrote to condemn the Syrian neo-Hanbali scholar Nasir al-Din al-Albani, when he released a series of taped sermons entitled Min Manhaj al-Khawarij, ‘From the Method of the Kharijites’, in the early 1990s.[16] Often the word used by less radical puritans in Saudi Arabia for those engaged in terrorism is, precisely, ‘Kharijite’.

What everyone agrees, however, is that al-Qaida is far, far removed from medieval Sunnism. For some, it is Kharijite; for others, an illicit Westernisation of Islam. As Carl Brown puts it, ‘it cannot be stressed too often just how much Qutb’s hardline interpretation departs from the main current of Islamic political thought throughout the centuries.’[17] For Brown, Qutbism is kharijism redux; but we would add, with Gray, that it is a Westernised kharijism. Like all identity movements, it ends with only a very arguable kind of authenticity.

The convergence between a malfunctioning Hanbalism and modern revolutionary vanguardism may owe its strength not to a shared potential for an instantiated xenophobia, although this will attract many party cadres; instead, I suspect, it relates to deeper structures of relationality with the world and its worldliness. The new Islamic zealotry is angry with the Islamic past, as Ibn Taymiya was. For Ibn Taymiya, the ulema had not adequately polarised light and dark. In the case of the mystics, they had disastrously confused them. There is something of the Augustine in Ibn Taymiya: a concrete understanding of a God who is radically apart from creation, or, in patristic terms, alienated from it, and a consequently high view of scripture that challenges Ash‘arite and Maturidi confidences in the direct intelligibility of God in the world, and revives essentially dualistic readings of the Fall narrative. It may be that Ibn Taymiya’s roots in Harran, scene of neo-Gnostic and astral speculations, parallel Augustine’s Manichean background. But there is certainly a furious, single-minded zeal in both men that expresses itself in a deep pessimism about the human mind and conscience, and hence the worth of intellectuals, poets, logicians, and mystics.[18] In such a cosmology, which deploys the absolute polarity abhorred by Deleuze’s Pli (his love of nomadic arts, with their ‘blocs of sensations’ is Islamically suggestive) gentilizing becomes first, not second nature.

Seljuk accommodationism, by contrast, had been driven by an ultimately Ghazalian moralism that feared the spiritual entailments of this crypto-dualism. Nizam al-Mulk, paradigm of high Sunni realpolitik, does not enforce a norm, but enforces the toleration of many norms. He finds that like all scripture, the Koran is super-replete, overflowing with meaning, and no exegete may taste all its flavours; this destabilising miracle may express itself in schism, historically the less favoured Islamic option, or in adab al-ikhtilaf, the forced courtesy of the scholar-jurist well aware of the ultimately unfixable quality of much of holy writ. The Sunni achievement, which was a moral as well as a pragmatic achievement, was to incorporate a wide spectrum of theological and juristic dispute into the universe of allowable internal difference. For zealotry, as Ghazali puts it, is a hijab, a veil.[19] It is a form of, in the Rabbis’ language, loving the Torah more than God. A besetting odium theologicum which can only be healed through self-scrutiny and a due humility before the often baffling intricacy of God’s word and world.

It was on the basis of this hospitable caution that non-Qutbian Sunnism engaged with modernity. Reading the fatwas of great twentieth-century jurists such as Yusuf al-Dajawi, Abd al-Halim Mahmud, and Subhi Mahmassani, one is reminded of the Arabic proverb cited on motorway signs in Saudi Arabia: fi’l-ta’anni as-salama – there is safety in reducing speed. Far from committing a pacifist betrayal, the normative Sunni institutions were behaving in an entirely classical way. Sunni piety appears as conciliatory, cautious, and disciplined, seeking to identify the positive as well as the negative features of the new global culture. Thus it is not the orthodox, but the merchants of identity religion, the Sunna Contra Gentiles, who insist on totalitarian and exclusionary readings of the Law and the state.[20]

If this is our curious situation, if al-Qaida is indeed a product and mirror not of the Sunni story, but of the worst of the Enlightenment’s possibilities, if it is, as it were, the Frankenstein of Frankistan (as Zionism is a golem), how effective can be America’s currently chosen antidote? This takes the form of killing, imprisoning and torturing the leadership, and many of the rank and file, using the methods which have been reported by British and other detainees released from Guantanamo Bay, and by Red Cross officials disturbed by news from Bagram air base in Kabul. Again, our occasionalism has allowed us to forget the history of revolutionary movements, which suggests that such measures are self-defeating, sowing the dragon’s teeth of martyrdom, and announcing to the world the depth of the torturer’s fear. A civilisation confident of victory would not resort to such desperate means. For after violence and internment, there is no last resort. Both moral advantage and deterrent threat have already been used up.

Traditional Sunnis intuit that al-Qaida is a Western invention, but one which cannot be defeated in a battleground where the logic is Western. This was one of the messages that emerged from the 2003 summit meeting of eight hundred Muslim scholars at Putrajaya.[21] Al-Qaida is inauthentic: it rejects the classical canons of Islamic law and theology, and issues fatwas that are neither formally nor in their habit of mind deducible from medieval exegesis. But it is not enough for the entire leadership of the religion to denounce al-Qaida, as it did at Putrajaya, and then to hope and pray that the same strange logic of modernity that bred this insurgency can spirit it away again. The West inseminates, but does not so easily abort. Faced with this, the Sunni leadership needs to be more alert to its responsibilities. Even the radical Westernisation of Islamic piety remains the responsibility of Muslim ulema, not, ultimately, of the Western matrix that inspired it. And it has to be said that the Sunni leadership has not done enough. Denunciations alone will not dent the puritan’s armour, and may strengthen it; this the Counter-Reformation learned by experience.

3. Jus in bello

The war against neo-Kharijite ideology can only be won by Sunni normalcy. Washington’s rhetoric of ‘religion-building’ disguises either a Texan missionary instinct or the triumphant relativism of the secular academy. Franklin Graham and the Ashcroft Inquisition will fail, as Christianity always does against Semitic monotheism, while liberalism, at once its rival and its hypocritical bedfellow, cannot be relied on to supply ethics under conditions of stress. For the Occidental energy all too often responds to such conditions either by apathy (remember the wartime Parisian intelligentsia), or by suspending the ethical teleologically, the classic revolutionary gambit since the days of the Paris commune, if not the English civil war.

The zealots of both sides insist that the validating of ‘soft targets’ is a representative Islamic act. How might they respond to evidence that it is, in fact, a representative secular-Western one? The evidence, as it turns out, is compelling, being a matter of historical record. Despite its claims in times of obese complacency to abhor the killing of the innocent, the secular West reverts with indecent haste to Cicero’s maxim, Silent enim leges inter arma – laws are silent during war. And it is in this Occidental culture, and not in mainline Islam, that we should seek the matrix of radical Islamism. Let us survey the record.

W.G. Sebald has been a recent and helpful contributor here. He writes lyrically of the vengeance visited by the RAF on Germany’s cities in the early 1940s, focussing on the thirty thousand who died in Operation Gomorrah (!) against the city of Hamburg. The object of such campaigns was military only in a very indirect way, for Churchill’s purpose in what he called ‘terror bombing’ (where it was not straightforward vengefulness) was to sap the morale of Germany’s civilian population. As Sebald shows, Parliament restructured the whole British economy to support the area bombing campaign, for one reason alone: it was the only way in which Britain could successfully strike back.[22]

In 1930, the British population had generally shared the view of one politician that to bomb civilians was ‘revolting and un-English.’[23] But with its back against the wall, the population changed its mind with impressive speed. In 1942, Bomber Command’s Directive No. 22 identified the ‘morale of the enemy civil population’ as the chief target. By the end of the war, a million tons of high explosive had rained down on German cities, and half a million civilians were dead. By that time a majority of Britons explicitly supported the bombing of civilian targets.[24] As the MP for Norwich put it: ‘I am all for the bombing of working-class areas of German cities. I am Cromwellian – I believe in “slaying in the name of the Lord”,’[25] while after Operation Gomorrah, a popular headline crowed that ‘Hamburg has been Hamburgered.’[26] A third of the war economy was directed to serve this onslaught, with the development of new weapons of mass destruction, such as incendiary bombs, designed specifically to maximise devastation to private homes.[27] Yet after Dresden, which the postwar official history hailed as the ‘crowning achievement’ of the bombing campaign, Churchill was forced to reconsider:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise, we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.[28]

This was no sort of repentance. To his last breath Churchill defended the terror campaign which he had instigated and which underpinned so much of his popularity. Mass destruction from the air of a target whose details were often obscured by clouds or the absence of moonlight, was not, for this icon of English defiance, a moral problem.

A largely secular person of the stamp of our wartime Prime Minister was clearly following a fairly standard Enlightenment philosophy which had replaced the wars of kings with the wars of peoples. Clausewitz, the chief architect of post-medieval military thought, was certain that ‘war is an act of force which theoretically can have no limits,’[29] a view that the most influential military theorists of the twentieth century extended to the use of airpower to terrorize civilians (Liddell Hart, Douhet, Harris). One might have hoped that this illustration of the moral calibre of secularity was found appalling by the Christian conscience of the day. But the stance taken by the leaders of British Christianity was already deeply influenced by modernism. The Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, followed by his brother bishop of York, consistently refused to join the anti-terror minority within the Anglican church. As a historian records, ‘only a handful of the clergy objected outright to area bombing;’[30] George Bell, the outspoken Bishop of Chichester, was a lonely exception in upholding earlier ideals of a just war which had regarded women and children as sacrosanct.

After the war, the victors reset the moral template to its rhetorical default position, and their earlier fatwas in favour of terror bombing were relegated to an outer, uncomfortable edge of the national memory. Once again, England and America (which had carried on its own targeting of civilians in Japan)[31] reverted to the traditional notion of civilian immunity, with its pre-Enlightenment roots. So five years later, the British press felt able to excoriate Menachem Begin as a terrorist, simply because, as he puts it in his memoirs: ‘our enemies called us terrorists […] but we used physical force only because we were faced by physical force.’[32] And today, who can claim that Al-Qaida’s logic is different? The 777 has become the poor man’s nuclear weapon, his own Manhattan Project. Again, he has turned traitor to the East by embracing the utilitarian military ethic of his supposed adversary. He, even more than the regimes, shows the cost of Westernisation.

In this light, how may we take the pulse of the West’s denunciation of ‘Muslim terror’? Let us recall Adorno’s First Law of sexual ethics: always mistrust the accuser.

4. Samson Terroristes

The targeting of civilians is more Western than otherwise; contemplating the Ground Zero of a hundred German cities, this can hardly be denied. Yet it will be claimed that suicidal terrorism is something new, and definitively un-Western. Here, we are told by xenophobes on both sides, the Islamic suicide squads, the Black Widows, the death-dealing pilots, are an indigenously Islamic product.[33] And yet here again, when we detach ourselves from the emotive chauvinism of the Islamists and their Judeo-Christian misinterpreters, we soon find that the roots of such practices in the Islamic imagination are as recent as they are shallow. The genealogy of suicide bombing clearly stretches back from Palestine, through Shi‘a guerillas in southern Lebanon, to the Hindu-nativist zealots of the Tamil Tigers, and to the holy warriors of Shinto Japan, who initiated the tradition of donning a bandanna and making a final testament on camera before climbing into the instrument of destruction. The kamikaze was literally the ‘Wind of Heaven’, a term evocative of the divine intervention which destroyed the Mongol fleet as it crossed the Yellow Sea.

Hindu and Buddhist tributaries of Middle-Eastern suicide bombing are conspicuous, and it is significant that the Islamists, driven as ever by nativist passion, recoil from them in fits of denial. (How happily, in the sermons, hunud rhymes with yahud!) Yet some scenic images may be instructive for those who take the philosophy of isnad seriously. After describing the Christian martyr Peregrinus, who set fire to himself in public, Sir James Frazier records:

Buddhist monks in China sometimes seek to attain Nirvana by the same method, the flame of their religious zeal being fanned by a belief that the merit of their death redounds to the good of the whole community, while the praises which are showered upon them in their lives, and the prospect of the honours and worship which await them after death, serve as additional incentives to suicide.[34]

But it was in South India that holy suicide seems to have been most endemic:

In Malabar and the neighbouring regions, many sacrifice themselves to the idols. When they are sick or involved in misfortune, they vow themselves to the idol in case they are delivered. Then, when they have recovered, they fatten themselves for one or two years; and when another festival comes around, they cover themselves with flowers, crown themselves with white garlands, and go singing and playing before the idol, when it is carried through the land. There, after they have shown off a good deal, they take a sword with two handles, like those used in currying leather, put it to the back of their necks, and cutting strongly with both hands sever their heads from their bodies before the idol.[35]

The atmaghataka, the suicidal Hindu, was a familiar sight of the premodern Indian landscape, where ‘religious suicides were highly recommended and in most cases glorified.’[36] Suicide often functioned as the culmination of a pilgrimage: ‘the enormous Tirtha literature (literature on pilgrimage) curiously enough describes in detail suicide by intending persons at different places of pilgrimage and the varying importance and virtues attached to them.’[37] Ibn Battuta and al-Biruni, among other Muslim visitors, had been particularly shocked by Hindu customs of sacred suicide, particularly bride-burning and self-drowning.[38] Altogether, in such a culture the development of suicidal methods as part of war is hardly surprising; they are deeply rooted in local non-monotheistic values.

Today’s Tamil extremists extend this tradition in significant ways. Each Tamil Tiger wears a cyanide capsule around his neck, to be swallowed in case of capture. The explosive belt, used to assassinate hated politicians as well as Sinhalese marines and ordinary civilians, predates its Arab borrowing: the first Tamil suicide-martyrs in modern times appear in the 1970s.[39] The Tiger’s Hindu roots[40] thus nourish the current Palestinian practice; as one observer notes: ‘the Black Tigers, as the suicide cadres are known, have been emulated by the likes of Hamas.’[41]

But there is also a strong Western precedent, in pagan antiquity, in early Judaism, and in Christianity.

Suicide had been a respectable option for many ancients. Achilles chooses battle against the Trojans, knowing that the gods have promised that this will lead to his death. Ajax takes his own life, in the confidence that this will not affect his honour. Chrysippus, Zeno, and Socrates all opt for suicide rather than execution or dishonour. Marcus Aurelius praises it to the skies. It was only the neo-Platonists and late Platonists (who not coincidentally became the most congenial Hellenes for Islam) who systematically opposed it.[42]

The Biblical text nowhere condemns suicide. (Judas is condemned for betrayal, not for taking his own life; although Augustine will claim otherwise.) On the contrary, it offers several examples of individuals who chose death.[43] Saul (the koranic Talut) falls on his own sword rather than be humiliated in Philistine captivity (I Samuel 31). Jonah (Yunus) asks the frightened mariners to cast him into the sea (Jonah 1.12), and begs ‘Take my life from me,’ (4.3) for ‘it is better for me to die than to live’ (4.8-9). Job (Ayyub) prays: ‘O that I might have my request, and that God would grant my desire; that it would please God to crush me’ (Job 6:8-13), and even ‘I loath my life’ (7:15). Later, during the Maccabean revolts, the hero Razis falls on his sword to avoid falling into the hands of the wicked (2 Maccabees 14:42, 45-6). A notion of vicarious atonement has developed, so that the militant’s suicide which enrages the enemy brings a blessing to the people (4 Maccabees 17:21-2). [44]

The early rabbis typically accept self-immolation in situations of military desperation, to avoid humiliation and to impress the enemy. The deaths of Saul and Samson were regarded as exemplary.[45] And in ‘the Jewish Middle Ages, enthusiasm for martyrdom (at least in Ashkenaz – northern Europe) became so great that it proved a positive danger to Jewish existence.’[46] Religious voices raised in support of 20th century Zionism could link this tradition to their own militancy.[47] Hence Avram Kook, the first Ashkenazy Chief Rabbi of mandate Palestine (in Walter Wurzburger’s words)

permitted individuals to volunteer for suicide missions when carried out in the interest of the collective Jewish community. In other words, an act that would be illicit if performed to help individuals, would be legitimate if intended for the benefit of the community.[48]

In the nascent Christian movement, Jesus came to be presented as a suicide, albeit one who knew that he would be resurrected. Some historians are convinced that Jesus, having armed his band with swords (Luke 22:36), formed part of the larger Zealot movement against Roman oppression,[49] while others adhere to the orthodox view that his deliberate death was to be a cosmic sacrifice for human sin; but in either case, the dominant voice in the New Testament presents him as going to Jerusalem in the awareness that this would bring about his certain death (see Mark 10:32-4). Hence the insistent courting of martyrdom by many early Christians praised by Tertullian (here in the words of a modern scholar):

In 185 the proconsul of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, was approached by a group of Christians demanding to be executed. The proconsul obliged some of them and then sent the rest away, saying that if they wanted to kill themselves there was plenty of rope available or cliffs they could jump off.[50]

And for Chrysostom, blasting the infidels, the Christians were better than the ancients, since Socrates had had little choice, while Christians volunteered for martyrdom. In fact, most orthodox Christian martyrs appear to have been volunteers, many of them appearing from nowhere to clamour for the death penalty, or emerging from the crowds to join the flames consuming one of their brethren. It was only with Augustine that this self-immolating behaviour came to an end, as involuntary martyrdom was established as the only acceptable Christian norm in the West.[51]

Orthodoxy, however, remained closer to the primitive tradition. As Frazier records (of sixteenth to nineteenth-century Russia): ‘whole communities hailed with enthusiasm the gospel of death, and hastened to put its precepts into practice.’ Although at first the volunteers were dropped into doorless rooms in which they starved to death ‘for Christ’, fire became the most popular method.

Priests, monks, and laymen scoured the villages and hamlets preaching salvation by the flames, some of them decked in the spoils of their victims; for the motives of the preachers were often of the basest sort. They did not spare even the children, but seduced them by promises of the gay clothes, the apples, the nuts, the honey they would enjoy in heaven. […] Men, women and children rushed into the flames. Sometimes hundreds, and even thousands, thus perished together.[52]

Combining the practice of suicidal martyrdom-seeking with the pursuit of warfare, resulted, for Europeans as well as for Tamils, in what would today be called suicidal warfare. This had the advantage of generating tremendous publicity for the cause in worlds such as the Indic and the Greco-Roman which, like today’s, had a penchant for the bizarre.[53] And for this, the most spectacular precedent was in the Bible. Brian Wicker, a modern Catholic interpreter, remarks that ‘to us, Samson just appears like a cross between Beowulf and Batman,’[54] while Bernhard Anderson in his book The Living World of the Old Testament, neutralises the Samson story by viewing him as the object of divine punishment.[55] Yet he is presented by the narrator of Judges 13 to 16 as an unambiguous hero, and traditionally the churches regarded his self-destruction and his massacre of three thousand Philistine men, women, and children, as a valid act of martyrdom. Augustine and Aquinas both pose the question: why is self-murder not here a sin, and answer: because God had commanded him, and the normal ethical rule was thus suspended.[56]

This suicide-warrior rises to the top of Western literature in Samson Agonistes. Milton is here smarting from the horror and shame of the Restoration. Once again, England is under the idolatrous law of king and bishops, a kind of jahiliyya, and Cromwell’s city of glass has been shattered. His poem, then, is autobiographical: Samson is a true hero, humiliated, blinded by an unjust king, kept captive in the world of the dark Other. Like the refugee-camp inmate he is

Exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own.[57]

His duty, confronted by a hypocritical War on Terror, is to take effective revenge by any means necessary. His father, recognising this grim necessity, makes the usual statement of fathers of suicide bombers everywhere:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail,
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair.
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.[58]

The theme continues, through Handel, to reach Saint-Saens. In the latter’s opera Samson and Delilah the Samson legend, far from falling by the wayside of progress and fraternité, seems the perfect icon for France’s contemporary humiliation before Prussian technology. The guns of Krupp have frustrated France’s destiny in her mission civilatrice, and the chosen people must be avenged. The story seems perfectly modern: there is the theme of the tragic power of sex – Delilah becomes a second Carmen – and we witness the inevitability of total destruction in a grand, cast-iron Götterdammerung. Ernst Jünger, Stalingrad, and the suicidal B-52 captain in Doctor Strangelove are not far behind.

But perhaps the most recent, and also the most fascinating, mobilisation of the Samson ‘ideal’ in Western literature is the novel Samson by the Zionist ideologue Vladimir Jabotinsky. ‘Homeland, whatever the price!’ is the captured Israelite’s slogan. Like the Islamist, the Zionist hero stresses the impossibility of conviviality:

The second thing I have learned in the last few days is the wisdom of having boundary–stones […] Neighbours can agree so long as each remains home, but trouble comes as soon as they begin to pay each other visits. The gods have made men different and commanded them to respect the ditch in the fields. It is a sin for men to mix what the Gods have separated.[59]

Like a good Islamist, the Zionist Samson combines this xenophobia with a passion to acquire the Other’s technology. When asked if he had a message for his own people, he cries:

They must get iron. They must give everything they have for iron – their silver and wheat, oil and wine and flocks, even their wives and daughters. All for iron! There is nothing in the world more valuable than iron. Will you tell them that?[60]

Like the Islamist, too, Jabotinsky’s suicide-hero is envious of the unbeliever’s skills at organisation:

One day, he was present at a festival at the temple of Gaza. Outside in the square a multitude of young men and girls were gathered for the festive dances [...] A beardless priest led the dances. He stood on the topmost step of the temple, holding an ivory baton in his hand. When the music began the vast concourse stood immobile [...] The beardless priest turned pale and seemed to submerge his eyes in those of the dancers, which were fixed responsively on his. He grew paler and paler; all the repressed fervor of the crowd seemed to concentrate within his breast till it threatened to choke him. Samson felt the blood stream to his heart; he himself would have choked if the suspense had lasted a few moments longer. Suddenly, with a rapid, almost inconspicuous movement, the priest raised his baton, and all the white figures in the square sank down on the left knee and threw the right arm towards heaven – a single movement, a single, abrupt, murmurous harmony. The tens of thousands of onlookers gave utterance to a moaning sigh. Samson staggered; there was blood on his lips, so tightly had he pressed them together [...] Samson left the place profoundly thoughtful. He could not have given words to his thought, but he had a feeling that here, in this spectacle of thousands obeying a single will, he had caught a glimpse of the great secret of politically minded peoples.[61]

Lest this be thought an aberrant, marginal use of the suicide-hero, let us recall the words of another Zionist thinker, Stephen Rosenfeld: ‘All our generation was brought up on that book.’[62]

Samson provides an important Biblical archetype for the national hero who is a semi-outcast among his own people, but who saves them nonetheless. In the dying months of Nazi Germany, selbstopfereinsatz missions were flown by Luftwaffe pilots against Soviet bridgeheads on the Oder.[63] In 1950, Cecil B. DeMille used Jabotinsky’s novel as the basis for his film Samson and Delilah. And a still more recent example is the film Armageddon, in which a group of socially marginalised Americans sacrifice their lives by detonating their spacecraft inside a comet that is on a collision course with Earth. In doing so they are defying tradition and even lawful orders, but they earn thereby the eternal gratitude of their people. As Robert Jewett and John Lawrence have shown, this image of the American hero as the ordinary man impatient of traditional authority who risks or destroys himself to save the world (John Brown, Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, Captain America, Superman, Spiderman, and Captain Picard in the final episode of Star Trek), is the great monomyth of today’s West.[64] In some Eastern parts, the popularity of magically vanishing Bin Laden figures, who emerge from undistinguished lives to break conventional laws in order to save the world, offers another suggestion of how deeply Westernised Arab culture has become.

Let no-one claim, then, that suicide bombing is alien to the West. It is a recurrent possibility of Europe’s heritage. What needs emphasizing, against the snapshot thinking of the journalists, is the absence of a parallel strand in Islamic thinking. For Islam, suicide is always forbidden; some regard it as worse than murder.[65] Many Biblical stories are retold by Islam, but the idea of suicidal militancy is entirely absent from the scriptures. Saul’s suicide is not present in the Koran, nor do we find it in Tabari’s great Annals (which wish simply to record that he died in battle).[66] The Koranic Jonah does not ask to be pitched overboard, and Job does not pray for death. Similarly, the suicidal istishhad of Samson is absent from the Koran and Hadith, no doubt in line with their insistence on the absolute wickedness of suicide. The same Islamic idealism that cannot accept David’s seduction of Bathsheba, or Lot’s incest, has here airbrushed out Samson’s killing of the innocent and his self-destruction.

Again, the point is clear: the scriptural and antique sensibilities which provided some cultural space for suicidal warfare in Western civilisation appear to have very thin foundations in Islam. Flying into a skyscraper to save the world is closer to the line which links Samson to Captain America, with a detour through the Book of Revelation, than to any Muslim conception of futuwwa.

Here are Buruma and Margalit, in their important study of Westernised anti-Westernism:

Bin Laden’s use of the word ‘insane’ is more akin to the Nazis’ constant use of fanatisch. Human sacrifice is not an established Muslim tradition. Holy war always was justified in defence of the Islamic state, and believers who died in battle were promised heavenly delights, but glorification of death for its own sake was not part of this, especially in the Sunni tradition. […] And the idea that freelance terrorists would enter paradise as martyrs by murdering unarmed civilians is a modern invention, one that would have horrified Muslims in the past. Islam is not a death cult.[67]

Let us now move on to consider other hints of the Western roots of radical Islamism. One symptom may be detected in a shared fondness for conspiracy theories. The messianic importance of the hidden deliverer is emphasised by the machinations of the forces of darkness which are ranged against him. The mu’amara, or Plot, is everywhere, as Robert Fisk, that dauntless lamentor of Mid-East fantasies, regularly observes.[68] A sadly typical example is given by Abdelwahab Meddeb:

When I was at Abu Dhabi in May 2001, a number of my interlocutors, of various Arab communities (Lebanese, Syrian, Sudanese, etc.), confirmed the warning, spread by the local newspapers, to the public of the countries of the Near East not to buy the very inexpensive belts with the label Made in Thailand. These belts, the people told me, were actually Israeli products in disguise and carried a kind of flea that propagated an incurable disease: one more Zionist trick to weaken Arab bodies, if not eliminate them. These interlocutors, otherwise reasonable and likable, gave credit to information as fantastic as that. Those are the fantasies in which the symptoms of the sickness of Islam can be seen, the receptive compost in which the crime of September 11 could be welcomed joyfully.[69]

Again, this is historically unusual for Muslims. Healthy communities far from Western influence find it incredible. The current prevalence of a kind of Islamic McCarthyism, often hysterical in its attempts to reduce a complex and enraging modernity to a monomaniac opposition, is simply another indication of how far the Islamists have travelled from the tradition. Religion makes us more attentive to reality, while secularity, bereft of real disciplines of self-knowledge and self-disdain, permits a dream-self. ‘They think that every shout is against themselves,’ says the Koran of the hypocrites (63:4), while praising the believers for their clearsighted faith that only God is simple, and it is only He that should be feared. The correct mindset is specified in scripture:

Those to whom the people said: ‘The people have gathered against you, therefore fear them!’ But it increased them in faith, and they said: ‘Allah is enough for us, an excellent Guardian is he!’

So they returned with grace and favour from Allah, and no harm touched them. They followed the good-pleasure of Allah, and Allah is of great bounty.

It is only the devil who would make [men] fear his allies. Fear them not; fear Me, if you are believers. (3:173-5)

The context is the aftermath of Uhud, when waverers warned of the strength of the combined enemies around Medina. Paranoia thus becomes the marker of imperfect faith and undue respect for the asbab. But despair is kufr: Islam’s Samson could never say:

Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless;
This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard,
No long petition, speedy death,
The close of all my miseries, and the balm.[70]

Moreover, it requires an apparently unbearable humility for the Islamist conspiracy theorist to recognise that until very recently Muslims have seldom been perceived by the United States as a noteworthy enemy. For most of its history, America has opposed and feared and stereotyped Englishmen, Rebels, Red Indians, Spaniards, Huns, Reds or Gooks. The current preoccupation with Muslims is shallow in the US memory, if we discount the brief and long-forgotten enthusiasms of the Decatur episode.

Again, as with the conspiracy theories which urgently needed to see 9/11 as the work of Mossad, and the utilitarian justification of the vanguard’s suspension of the ethical, the radical Islamists are an expression of the very Westernising alienation they profess to defy. In a sense, the West hates them because they are more modern than itself, and thus remind it of the unbearable risks it has taken by following the road of Enlightenment. It is as Meddeb reminds us: ‘Who are those who died while spreading death in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? [...] They are the sons of our times, the pure products of the Americanisation of the world.’[71]

Self-immolation in Gaza to bring down the unbelieving temple. This is tragedy in Wagnerian mode. It is suicide, selbstmord, not really prefatory to redemption, but to publicity and therapy. It was Nietzsche, not any Islamic sage, who wrote: ‘The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.’[72] After being ‘eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,’ Samson experiences ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’[73] – the English idiom begins with Milton’s ending, linking, as do some readings of the Samson legend, eros and thanatos, desire and death.

But it is Nietzsche who introduces the modern superhero. If ‘the splendrous blond beast, avidly rampant for plunder and victory’ cannot take the revenge which heals his heart, he will end his unworthy existence in a magnificent, Hitlerian funeral pyre. Samson thus becomes an anticipation of modernity.

Religion, if it has the right to exist at all, must consider this a spurious healing. Neither vainglory nor despair can have a place in the metabolism of a religion based on the idea of God’s unique mastery of history, the polar opposite of dualistic paganism, or of the romantic Enlightenment dream which found its tragic moods congenial. The scriptures denounce hamiyya, the feverish identity-politics of the pagan Arabs; the post-orthodox Islamist admits it to his heart. ‘Roots of Muslim Rage’ is the title of Bernard Lewis’ most notorious piece on Islamism.[74] His pathology of the roots is far astray; but the rage is undeniable. How are we to understand such rage in the heart of a religion built on submission to the Divine will, hulwihi wa-murrihi, the bitter and the sweet of it? Which insisted that ‘it is not the wrestler who is strong; it is the man who masters himself when angry’?[75] Why did the Blessed Prophet pray for ‘a certainty by which You render slight in our eyes the calamities of this world’?[76]

The roots are, as it turns out, instrumental reason, natural causality, and the enthroning of Aristotle over Plato, or Newton over St Denys. Without the certainty of an omnipotent God (and is not Islam here better at restraining passion than all other faiths?) the experience of adversity leaves us prey to wild emotion. It was this same jahili craving for revenge that led Churchill astray, as one historian suggests: ‘In this superheated and bloody time emotion may have masqueraded as political thinking in a rationalizing Prime Minister’s mind.’[77]

Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy. ‘Let the qadi not judge when he is angry,’ as it is said. But here is the reality of Gaza:

‘Hamas operations are not directed and have never been directed against children,’ says Hamas political leader Ismail Abu Shanaab. ‘It is directed at military targets.’ When pushed, however, he goes further. ‘To be frank with you, there are a lot of the moralities which got broken in this war,’ he says. ‘They are letting the Israelis kill Palestinians and they want the Palestinians to be moderate, to be moral. We cannot control the game because it has no rules, it has no limits.’[78]

Revenge, rage, the teleological suspension of the ethical. It is Churchillian, but also aromatic with a not-yet-dispersed Marxism. Here, for instance, is Mawdudi, a tributary of the Hamas vision:

‘Muslim’ is the name of the international revolutionary party which Islam organizes to implement its revolutionary program and Jihad is that revolutionary struggle which the Islamic party carries out to achieve its objectives.[79]

As Abdullah Schleifer goes on to remark:

Mawdoodi took as his enduring model a progression of dynamic relationships – the movement, the party, revolutionary struggle, the revolution – defined by one of the major desacralizing forces in contemporary times, in pursuit of a concept of state that draws its substance from non-Islamic sources, and all with that same innocence of the modern Muslim importing his ‘value-free’ technology.[80]

The antinomian quality of this furious insurrectionist method confirms Gray’s suggestion that Islamism is simply another modern weapon against religion. For theists, the ethical can never be suspended; on the contrary, it is needed most when most under strain. Yet the militant transgressions of radicals form only part of a much wider picture of covert but deep surrender to Enlightenment thought.

Islamism, that soi-disant hammer of the Franks, is ironically modern in very many ways. It is modern in its eagerness for science and its hatred of ‘superstition.’ It is modern in its rejection of all higher spirituality (Qutb recommends, instead, ‘al-fana’ fi’l-‘aqida’).[81] It is modern in its rejection of the principle of tradition, and, despite itself, cannot but impose the insecurities of Western-trained minds (and are they not all engineers and doctors?) on scripture. Intertextuality and the community of sages are barred. The theopolitics of classical Islam, where both scholarship and the state are invigorated by mutual tension (the Men of the Pen and the Men of the Sword), is replaced by the finally Western model of the ideological totalitarian state, with a self-appointed clerisy (albeit composed of technocrats) requiring absolute control over policy and the Shari‘a. The modular diversities of pre-modern Muslim societies, where villages, tribes, and millat minorities regulated themselves, give way to the Islamist appropriation of the machinery of centralised post-colonial etatism. Social subsets which flourished for centuries under, say, Ottomanism, already eroded by centralising colonial regimes, are finally liquidated by a vision that is purely Western, albeit camouflaged by loud religious language. As Maryam Jameelah puts it, in a courageous article in which she publicly announces her disillusionment with the Islamist model:

The tragic paradox of the life and thought of Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdoodi was his subconscious acceptance of the very same Western ideas he dedicated his entire life to struggling against.[82]

In such a system, those who should be serving God end up obeying the men of the state who are His all too fallible interpreters. They worship in fear of the police, not in fear of God. Dissidence becomes a simultaneous treason and blasphemy. The failure of this totalitarian model of the ‘Islamic State’, this ‘carceral Islamism’ which makes a Muslim land a prison rather than a landscape of options and regional variety, is today everywhere apparent, and is a sign, perhaps, that God will not allow victory to such a perversion. For the Muslims will not long be allowed to bow before any other than God.

6. Dies Irae

Is this attack on tradition a modernity with a future? Zealotry itself is not normally refuted, it has to subside. Often that subsidence is enabled by schism: Cromwell could not be replicated because of the powerfully fissiparous quality of Dissent. Calvin’s Geneva hardly outlived him. Hutterites, Levellers, Anabaptists, and the other fragments of the Protestant detonation could perpetuate themselves, but their energy source seemed to have a half-life. Islamic extremism, what has historically been called ghuluww, excess, and has occasionally, though not often, troubled the religion’s equilibrium, usually knows a similar deflation through internal factionalism and the disappointment which seeps into all annunciatory movements when the world does not either improve or come to an end. In the case of Muslim puritanism, we see, currently, infighting, as in Algeria, and on the streets of Riyadh. Apathy may not be long postponed.

This seems likely, to the extent that Islamism is the product of indigenous decay, a second Reformation. But will its porosity to Enlightenment thought prolong or accelerate this decay? (How ironic that Islam’s Reformation should come after its Enlightenment!) Here predictions about Islamism may not be so different from predictions about a certain kind of exhibitionist postmodernism. Take Foucault, for instance. On his death, he had been praised by Le Monde as ‘the most important event of thought in our century.’ He was an iconic Western iconoclast, but more honest about the consequences of modernity than most liberal seekers after virtue. He had been strongly pro-Khomeini, and had also praised the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. Like many Islamists, he was a lapsed Marxist, concerned with making a statement, with angering the middle-class West, with disruption. A second Bakunin, he was concerned not with advancing a detailed and realistic agenda, but with a passionate desire to shock. And like his hero Nietzsche, he died of a venereal disease, his immensely careless sexual habits indicating the powerful allure of suicide for the sake of making a statement. We need to ask: is this too close for comfort to radical Islamism, with its penchant for épater les blancs by whatever means? For how long can the West portray the Islamists as its own polar opposite? Will it be harder to forget the zealots than to forget Foucault?

This is less hopeful: Foucault has not been forgotten. The ambient vacuum which permitted a philosophy of the absurd in France and in the Middle East shows no signs of abatement. Capitalist shortsightedness wedded to postmodern philosophy may offer the only real life-support system that the Muslim reformation can hope for. Thus the defeat of the Muslim aberration may depend on nothing less than the defeat of the current global system, and its replacement with an order grounded in the ethical brilliance of the monotheisms. This diagnosis places us far beyond both Qutb’s chauvinism and the narcissism of the neocons. The same classical Islamic strength through cosmopolitanism that helped our ancient order to endure as a non-totalitarian expression of certainty must be remobilised to affirm the Other’s heart, in order to reconnect the global system with religious reality. That is, a successful ‘war on terror’ cannot be detached from a humanly consensual war on environmental loss, on unfair trade, on identity feminism, and on genetic manipulation. If it is so detached, it will be lost.

Blake portrays the spirit of the industrial age as Urizen, blind ignorance, fettered in laws of causality unveiled by Newton, and sunk in feral emotionalism. Religion is indispensable to the nurturing of a true humanism because it fights this, and insists that humanity has a telos, and that the soul is therefore sacrosanct.

To succeed, then we must be able to realise that self-judgement, that greatest and most irreplaceable gift of the Abrahamic religions, is more than an evolutionary confidence trick. Consider Jürgen Habermas’ latest book, which reflects on human nature as challenged by genetic science.[83] Postmodernism seems to problematise self-judgement; and its associated ethical practice seems to reduce Aristotle’s greatness of soul, which he, against later monotheist reaction, considered a virtue, to superbia, greatest of the seven deadly sins. But Habermas reminds us that confronted by genetic science, we are required, after a long hiatus, to judge ourselves. For science seeks our permission to rebuild our bodies to reduce the suffering of future generations; yet in the process it must ask us to define what we presently are. Liberal ethics, which resist both such definitions, and any exercise in using human beings for our own purposes, however idealistic, are thereby interrogated. Habermas is quite clear that the West’s conception of virtue is a Christian ghost, rooted in a Kantianism that has been the basis of liberal notions of individual autonomy. Yet he seems convinced that this ghost still lives, and can be maintained perpetually, and may even serve as the stable basis of ever more ambitious projects for universal codes of human rights, in the arena of bioethics, as elsewhere. This will include, presumably, the war on Carrelian Islamism.

John Gray, iconoclastically again, is unsure that this is as coherent as it is helpful. Gray, whose understanding of Al-Qaida as an Enlightenment project we noted earlier, would rather we revisited Schopenhauer’s deconstruction of Kant. Frightened ethicists have deceived themselves that there is no Christianity in this Christian ghost. Yet true Kantianism would reject the categoric imperative as a false projection upon the Noumenon. Our desperate desire to find a new moral anchorage after the sinking of Christian scholasticism blinds us to what is for Gray the unanswerable insight that without God, we are beyond good and evil. Schopenhauer saw, as Gray put it, ‘that the enlightenment was only a secular version of Christianity’s central mistake.’[84] There is no soul, only the individual will, and we have no reason to suppose that we are any more free in our decision-making than the animals from which religion taught us that we were so categorically distinct. Our consciousness is just one more part of the world. Heidegger turns out to be worse: he insists that he excludes Christian paradigms, but internalises them implicitly in his consideration of the human plight, suffering, guilt, and the paradox of being. And while Schopenhauer maintained a pure and private pessimism, Heidegger sought to intuit Being in his tribe. ‘The Führer himself and alone,’ he exclaimed, ‘is the present and future German reality and its law.’ Hitler’s xenophobia allowed the philosopher to repair his wounds, and reconnect with Being. Qutbian fundamentalism is not far away.

It is impossible to exaggerate the debt Giddens’ ‘runaway world’ owes to Christianity, for showing so much vitality even after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of its God. But for the Gospels, the Western empire would not have benefited from Kant’s conjuring trick, or Rawls’ benign adversion to ‘good people’. Yet the fact of its precariousness remains; and the risk of a tribal resolution is enormous.[85] Science harnessed to Geist dragged up Hitler; and something similar has beset Islam. Solidarity, mythologically voiced, technologically imposed, is to be the cure for our desperate alienation. Remember the words of the Furies in Aeschylus:

For many ills one attitude is the cure
When it agrees on what to hate.[86]

The danger, then, is that liberalism will prove too weak to prevent one form of Enlightenment chauvinism – carceral Islamism – from triggering a sudden revival of another such form – Hitlerian essentialism. The prosperity of the far-right across the liberal West shows how far this march has already come. Postmodernity is methodologically incapable of resisting this; and monotheism must step into the breach. A monotheism, however, which bears all the arms it has acquired and sharpened during its travels: its intellectual appropriation of Athens, its hospitality to the autochthonously non-Semitic, its insistence on diversity, all enabled and preserved by the centrality of spiritual purgation. The civil war within Enlightenment modernity that Gray identifies as the essence of the ‘war on terror’ is suicidal. Only a ressourcement in the anchored past can deliver us.

NOTES

[1] Cited in Joh n Gray, Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (London, 2002), 75.

[2] Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London, 1992); Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Bradford, 2002).

[3] Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

[4] For the neocons see now Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, 2004).

[5] Cited in Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2003), 131.

[6] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (London: 2002), 369-70; e.g. ‘The Catholic Church and other Christian churches […] could include in every Christian Bible a detailed, corrective account alongside the text about its many antisemitic passages, and a clear disclaimer explaining that even though these passages were once presented as fact, they are actually false or dubious and have been the source of much unjust injury. They could include essays on the various failings of the Christian Bible, and a detailed running commentary on each page that would correct the texts’ erroneous and libellous assertions.’

[7] Cf. Julia Lipton, ‘Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations’, Representations 57 (1997), 78: ‘Christian typologists also used Esau, Pharoah and Herod to couple the Jew and the Muslim as carnal children of Abraham facing each other across the world-historical break effected by the Incarnation.’

[8] See Fukuyama: ‘A country that makes human rights a significant element of its foreign policy tends toward ineffectual moralizing at best, and unconstrained violence in pursuit of moral aims at worst.’ Harper’s Magazine, August 2001, p. 36.

[9] Salah Abd al-Fattah al-Khalidi, Amrika min al-dakhil bi-minzar Sayyid Qutb (Beirut, 2002).

[10] Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999), 52; citing Qutb’s Khasa’is al-Tasawwur al-Islami; Youssef Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism (London 1990), 142-9. As Choueiri concludes: ‘What Qutb fails to inform his vanguard, however, is that the code of conduct he subsequently elaborated in his ‘commentary’ on the Koran matches that of Carrel much more than Muhammad’s own Traditions.’ The result is not an indigenous form of governance, but ‘a Third World version of Fascism.’

[11] Samuel Goitein, Jews and Arabs (New York, 1955), 130: ‘Never has Judaism encountered such a close and fructuous symbiosis as that with the medieval civilization of Arab Islam’.

[12] Many Muslims who have rejected the new radicalism in favour of authenticity will sympathise with the experience of Franky Schaeffer, who in the 1970s was an extreme Calvinist advocate of totalitarian government. In the 1980s, shocked by the reality of fundamentalist leaders, he joined the Greek Orthodox Church, denouncing the Protestant radicals as ‘a hybrid composed of fragments of ancient Christian faith and thoroughly modern, anti-traditional, materialist and often utopian ideas.’ Cited in Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism (Cambridge, 2000), 122.

[13] John Gray, Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London, 2003), 1-2.

[14] Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 146.

[15] See for instance Richard Martin, ‘The Religious Foundations of War, Peace and Statecraft in Islam’, in John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (eds), Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions. (New York, Westport and London, 1991.)

[16] Naqd Kalam al-Shaykh al-Albani fi Sharitihi Min Manhaj al-Khawarij. N.d., n.p.

[17] L. Carl Brown, Religion and State: the Muslim approach to politics (New York, 2000), 156-7. It needs to be added that Qutb’s aberration is typical of those who carry out radical ijtihad without the needful qualifications in shari‘a sciences. For instance, he develops his absolutist rejection of any conversation with the West in his Ma‘alim fi’l-tariq (Cairo, 1980), 145, on the basis of out-of-context Koranic verses (2:109, 2:120, and 3:100), which warn only of the dangers of cooperating with some of the ahl al-kitab. To try and force the issue, he then produces a hadith from Abu Ya‘la, ‘Do not ask the People of the Book about anything …’ (Abu Ya‘la, Musnad [Damascus and Beirut, 1985/1405], IV, 102), apparently unaware that this hadith is weak; see ‘Abduh ‘Ali Kushak, al-Maqsad al-A‘la fi taqrib ahadith al-Hafiz Abi Ya‘la (Beirut, 1422/2001), I, 83. In any case, who is more absurd than the radical who rejects all Western influence, and then writes books with titles like Khasa’is al-Tasawwur al-Islami (‘Special Qualities of the Islamic Conception’)? Qutb’s whole manner of expression would be unimaginable without modernity.

[18] Abdelwahab Meddeb, Islam and its discontents (London, 2003), 48-52. Qutb’s waning interest in literature is one symptom of this.

[19] Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Disciplining the Soul, tr. T. Winter (Cambridge, 1995), 86.

[20] ‘Asian Muslims in particular have come to reify the shari‘a as much as any Orientalist, converting the law into a symbol of ethnic identification.’ Lawrence Rosen, The Justice of Islam: Comparative perspectives on Islamic law and society (Oxford, 2000), 186.

[21] www.dfw.com/mld/bayarea/news/6281132.htm?1c.

[22] W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (London, 2004), 17.

[23] Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and airpower in World War II: the British bombing of German cities (New York and Basingstoke, 1993), 28.

[24] Garrett, 90; Harvey Tress, British strategic bombing through 1940: politics, attitudes, and the formation of a lasting pattern (Lewiston, 1988), 304.

[25] Garrett, 90.

[26] Garrett, 103.

[27] Tress, 335.

[28] Cited in Garrett, 20.

[29] Cited in Garrett, 132.

[30] Garrett, 96.

[31] General Curtis LeMay, who planned the Tokyo attacks which killed perhaps a hundred thousand civilians, remarked that they were ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death.’ (John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War [New York, 1986], 50.)

[32] Menahem Begin, The Revolt (revised edition, London 1979), 59-60.

[33] A substantial literature now exists seeking to identify suicide bombing as a paradigmatically Muslim act. See, for instance, Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (Transaction, 2003); also Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton, 2004). This forms part of a larger determination to show the radicals as authentic expressions of Islamic tradition (see, for instance, the works of Emmanuel Sivan). The level of Islamic knowledge present in this literature is usually poor; see for instance Reuter’s belief (p.22) that the Mu‘tazilites were founded by Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd! Reuter is a Stern journalist, whose patronage by Princeton University Press shows the fragility of the standards of American academic institutions in times of international crisis.

[34] Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough. Part III: The Dying God (London, 1913), 42. For a more recent study see Jacques Gernet, ‘Les suicides par le feu chez les bouddhiques chinoises de Ve au Xe siecle’, Mélanges publiés par l’Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises I (1960), 527-558. For Buddhist suicide in India see W. Rahula, ‘Self-Cremation in Mahayana Buddhism’ in his Zen and the Taming of the Bull (London, 1978), 111-6. Rahula amplifies (p.113): ‘Usually a self-cremation was done in public, but there were some monks who burnt themselves secretly. One monk burnt himself in a cauldron of oil. Some made a modest offering to a stupa by cutting off a finger or a hand, wrapping it with cloth drenched in oil, and setting fire to it.’ The practice is traced back to the time of the Buddha himself; as F. Woodward records: ‘The Buddha approved of the suicide of bhikkus; but in these cases they were Arahants, and we are to suppose that such beings who have mastered self, can do what they please as regards the life and death of their carcases’ (‘The Ethics of Suicide in Greek, Latin and Buddhist Literature’, Buddhist Annual of Ceylon [1922], p.8).

[35] Ibid, 54. See also the ritual described on page 47, in which the king of Calicut ‘had to cut his throat in public at the end of a twelve years’ reign.’

[36] Upendra Thakur, The History of Suicide in India: An Introduction (Delhi, 1963), xv-xvi.

[37] Ibid., 9. See also the section on ‘Religious Suicide’, on pp.77-111.

[38] Rihlat Ibn Battuta (Beirut, 1379/1960), 411-3, focussing on the practice of bride-burning, but referring also to Hindu self-drowning rituals. See also Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, Tahqiq ma li’l-Hind (Hyderabad, 1377/1958), p.480: ‘Those among them who kill themselves do so during eclipses; or they may hire a man to drown them in the Ganges. Such people hold them underwater until they die.’ For more on this practice see Thakur, 112.

[39] Edgar O’Ballance, The Cyanide War: Tamil Insurrection in Sri Lanka 1973-88 (London, 1989), p.13, for the first Tamil suicide martyrs in the 1970s. Other Tamil Tiger terrorist habits include beheading (p.10), taking Western hostages (p.40), and drug-dealing to fund operations (p.120).

[40] For the religious puritanism of the Tamil Tigers (no extramarital relations, no alcohol, etc.), see Dagmar Hellmann-Rajayanagar, The Tamil Tigers: armed struggle for identity (Stuttgart, 1994), 37. Sometimes considered to be Marxist, the Tamil Tigers are primarily inspired by national and religious tradition (ibid., p. 56).

[41] Amantha Perera, ‘Suicide bombers feared and revered,’ Asia Times, July 17, 2003. For more on Islamist borrowings from Tamil suicide warfare see Amy Waldman, ‘Masters of Suicide Bombing: Tamil Guerillas of Sri Lanka’ (New York Times, 14 January 2003).

[42] Cf. Plotinus, against the Stoics: ‘if each man’s rank in the other world depends on his state when he goes out, one must not take out the soul as long as there is any possibility of progress’ (Ennead I.9; cf. also the Elias fragment of Plotinus found after this section in Armstrong’s Loeb translation). This is similar to the Islamic virtue of praying for a long life in the service of God. (Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, VI, 23.)

[43] ‘Within Israelite society, as early as the period of the united monarchy, voluntary death, given the proper circumstances, was understood as honorable and even routine.’ (Arthur J. Droge and James D. Tabor, Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in antiquity [San Francisco, 1992], 56.)

[44] See J.W. van Henten, The Maccabean martyrs as saviours of the Jewish people: a study of 2 and 4 Maccabees (Leiden and New York, 1997).

[45] Droge and Tabor, 87, 100. See also Sidney Hoenig, ‘The Sicarii in Masada – Glory or Infamy?’ Tradition 11 (1970), 5-30; Sidney Goldstein, Suicide in Rabbinic Literature (Hoboken, 1989), 41-2.

[46] Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, 1999), 171. It is not insignificant that ‘during the Moslem period, mass suicides among Jews do not seem to have occurred’ (Goldstein, 49).

[47] The former Ashkenazy Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren, allowed suicide as an alternative to prisoner-of-war status, following the examples of Saul and Masada (Goldstein, 49).

[48] Walter S. Wurzburger, Ethics of Responsibility: Pluralistic Approaches to Covenantal Ethics (Philadelphia, 1994), 92. For more, see Goldstein’s chapter entitled ‘Suicide as an Act of Martyrdom’, pp.41-50.

[49] ‘In strictly historical terms it is unlikely that Jesus of Nazareth ever expected to give his life as “a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Rather, his intention was to bring about the restoration of Israel and to usher in the kingdom of God.’ (Droge and Tabor, 115.) Islam would probably be more impressed by the Lucan Jesus, who apparently never intended to die.

[50] Droge and Tabor, 136.

[51] Droge and Tabor, 134-9, 152-5; 167-83. Voluntary martyrdom continued in some places, such as early Muslim Cordova, where 48 Christians were beheaded between 850 and 859: ‘the majority of the victims deliberately invoked capital punishment by publicly blaspheming Muhammad and disparaging Islam.’ They were eulogised by the Church. (K. B. Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain [Cambridge, 1988], 1.)

[52] Frazier, 45.

[53] Glen Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995), 66-7.

[54] Brian Wicker, ‘Samson Terroristes: A Theological Reflection on Suicidal Terrorism’, New Blackfriars, vol. 84 no.983 (January 2003), 45. I am indebted to Wicker for much of the information in the next two paragraphs.

[55] Bernhard Anderson, The Living World of the Old Testament (London, 1958), 111.

[56] Droge and Tabor, 186.

[57] John Milton, Poetical Works (Edinburgh, 1853), II, 76.

[58] Milton, 125.

[59] Vladimir Jabotinsky, Prelude to Delilah (New York, 1945), 131. This is a translation of the original, published as Samson in 1926.

[60] Jabotinsky, 330.

[61] Jabotinsky, 200.

[62] Stephen Rosenfeld, ‘Straight to the Heart of Menachem Begin’, Present Tense (Summer 1980), 7.

[63] Antony Beevor, Berlin 1945, the downfall. (London, 2002), 238. Focke-Wulf fighter-bombers packed with explosives would deliberately ram Soviet bridges and command centres.

[64] Jewett and Lawrence, 35-9.

[65] ‘Abdallah ibn Qutayba, ‘Uyun al-akhbar (Cairo, 1348/1930), iii, 217.

[66] Tabari, History, Volume III: The Children of Israel, translated by William M. Brinner (Albany, 1991), 139.

[67] I. Buruma and A. Margalit, Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism (London, 2004), 68-9.

[68] Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (London, 1990), 78, 79, 85, 139, 166, 175, 178, 302, 320, 374, 408, 523, 530, 567, 603.

[69] Meddeb, 115.

[70] Milton, 93.

[71] Meddeb, 9.

[72] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Helen Zimmern (London, 1907, repr.1967), 98.

[73] Milton, 126.

[74] Bernard Lewis, ‘Roots of Muslim Rage,’ The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990

[75] Bukhari and Muslim from Abu Hurayra.

[76] Tirmidhi and al-Hakim (1, 528), from Ibn ‘Umar.

[77] Tress, 289.

[78] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2179606.stm

[79] Cited by S. Abdullah Schleifer, ‘Jihad: Sacred Struggle in Islam IV,’ The Islamic Quarterly 28/ii (1984), 98.

[80] Schleifer, 100.

[81] William E. Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Annotation of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden, 1996), p.xxxiii. Here we have, again, the phenomenon of ‘loving the Torah more than God’.

[82] Maryam Jameelah, ‘An Appraisal of Some Aspects of the Life and Thought of Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi’, Islamic Quarterly xxxi (1407-1987), 116-130, p.130.

[83] Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (London: 2003).

[84] Gray, Straw Dogs, 41.

[85] See Gray, Straw Dogs, 102-3: ‘The egalitarian beliefs on which Rawls’s theory is founded are like the sexual mores that were once believed to be the core of morality. The most local and changeable of things, they are revered as the very essence of morality. As conventional opinion moves on, the current egalitarian consensus will be followed by a new orthodoxy, equally certain that it embodies unchanging moral truth.’

[86] The Eumenides 996-7.

Sunday marks the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, a public holiday in almost every Muslim country. It is celebrated with drums, street parties, sweets for children, poetry competitions, and, in most British mosques, a startlingly incongruous display of tinsel and fairy lights.

This is fine, of course. Religion is meant to make people happy. Onlookers may frown, mystified, but believers rejoice. This time, the rejoicing is about nothing less than the healing of the torn human heart. God has sent a prophet to “heal hearts”, as the Koran puts it. From spiritual sickness, the Prophet brings his people into wholeness. The Prophet’s birthday is therefore on an emotional par with the party a cancer patient might throw when given the all-clear. There is a sense of relief and of exuberance, and also of gratitude.

All this sits well with Islam’s generally upbeat optimistic temper. The religion has no doctrine of original sin; sexuality is celebrated, private property is sacrosanct, and God is merciful. The risk, of course, is complacency, even smugness. If one has a delicious religion, and a generous Lord, who has promised that, despite all tribulations, goodness and justice will ultimately be victorious, what privilege could be more secure than Islam?

Yet this state of mind is in crisis. The Prophet taught optimism, but the Muslim world today looks hopeless. An array of shabby tyrants, most of them fortified by unshakeable Western support, watch as Palestine shrinks and Iraq implodes. Thanks to the Islamic virtue of patience, most of us stolidly persevere, hoping for the better times which we are promised. The West will stop interfering, and we will be free.

Such is one consolation of classical piety. As America’s finest trample like tyrannosaurs through ancient Muslim cities, most of us hunker down, and pray in hope. Yet classical piety tells us something less consoling as well. The Prophet brought healing, but the treatment itself was painful. In Turkish mosque decoration, the word “submission” is traditionally written with the Arabic dots painted red. This is, we are told, because submitting to God is so difficult that the believer weeps tears of blood. Religion juxtaposes hope with fear. The hope is in God, and the fear is of the ego. There may be no original sin, but there is certainly human perversity, waywardness, and a kind of gravitational attraction to selfishness.

The Prophet’s birthday announced the crushing of the Arabian ego. For centuries, the peninsula had been locked in tribal strife, fuelled by pride and mutually competing idolatries. In place of this, Islam brought brotherhood and unity. Reiterating the moral genius of Hebrew prophecy, the Koran does not vindicate its own people, but subjects them to a barrage of criticism. The Prophet emerged as an Arabic voice denouncing Arab ways, enduring extreme persecution from his own people. By endangering himself he gave them one of the great monotheistic gifts, the duty of collective self-criticism.

“Speak the truth,” says this voice, “though it be against yourselves.” God will only restore the believers’ fortunes “when they put themselves right”. The principle of divine justice should compel believers to blame themselves for their own misfortunes, rather than looking for external culprits.

Radical Muslim discourse of the type that is currently gaining ground seems to ignore this. Yet the conspiracy theories indulged in by many of our people are a secular intrusion into Muslim thinking. The ego tells us to blame others, when the scriptures insist that we have only ourselves to blame. The secular mind may blame enemies, but monotheism tempers this with the awareness that it is all, finally, our own silly fault.

The new sort of Islam that directs the finger of blame outwards, rather than towards the self, has been with us for only a very short time. Thirty years ago, no one had heard of it. Yet it is a sterile hopeless primal scream of desperation that can do no good to religion or to the world. It compounds Muslim grievances against our neighbours, and can lead to forms of self-destructive terrorism that are historically unprecedented for us.

The targeting of innocent bystanders is clearly a symptom of this. The Koran says: “Be steadfast witnesses for God in justice, and let not a people’s hatred make you swerve from justice.” Luckily, the Prophet was right to be optimistic. Such attitudes are not native to Islam, and cannot endure. The new generation, and teenagers in particular, are sick of the dishonour done to Islam by the zealots, and seem everywhere to be returning to the Koran’s own teaching. “Whatever misfortune descends upon you, comes from yourselves.” They, at least, recognise that the Prophet’s birthday is an invitation to be healed, not a claim that this has already happened.

* Abdal Hakim Murad is a Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University, United Kingdom.

Our silence in the face of evil differs from that of secular people. For traditional theists, the sense of loss which evil conveys, of the fearful presence of a void, comes with a personal face: that of the devil. But the devil, being, in the Qur’an’s language, weak at plotting, carries in himself the seeds of his own downfall. The very fact that we can name him is consoling, since understanding is itself a consolation. The cruellest aspect of secularity is that its refusal to name the devil elevates him to something more than a mere personalised absence. The solace of religion, no less consoling for being painful, is that it insists that when we find no words to communicate our sense that evil has come and triumphed, our silence is one of bewilderment, not despair; of hope, not of finality.

The world is at present in the grip of fear. We fear an unknown absence that hides behind the mundanity of our experience; perhaps ubiquitous and confident, perhaps broken and at an end. Symbols of human communication such as the internet and the airlines have suddenly acquired a double meaning as the scene for a radical failure of communication. Above all, the fear is that of the unprecedented, as the world enters an age drastically unlike its predecessors, an age in which the religions are fragmenting into countless islands of opinion at a time when their members – and the world – are most insistently in need of their serene and consistent guidance.

At a time such as the present, a furqan , a discernment , between true and false religion breaks surface. Despite the endless, often superbly fruitful, differences between the great world religions, the pressure of secularity has threatened each religion with a comparable confiscation of timeless certainties, and their replacement by the single certainty of change. Many now feel that they are not living in a culture, but in a kind of process, as abiding canons of beauty are replaced with styles and idioms the only expectation we can have of which is that they will briefly gratify our own sense of stylishness, then to be replaced by something no less brilliantly shallow. Postmodernity , anticipated here by Warhol, is occasionalistic , a series of ruptured images, hostile to nothing but the claim that we have inherited the past and that language is truly meaningful.

In such conditions, the timeless certainties of religious faith must work hard to preserve not only their consistent sense of self, but the very vocabularies with which they express their claims. The American philosopher Richard Rorty offers this account of the secularisation process:

Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using certain others. [1]

What has happened over the past century, in a steadily accelerating fashion, is that the series of mutations in values, often grounded in popular perceptions of scientific paradigm shifts, has placed the traditional vocabularies of religion under unprecedented stress. Against this background, we can see three large possibilities amidst the diversity of the world faiths. Firstly, the ‘time-capsule’ option, often embedded in local ethnic particularities, which seeks to preserve the lexicon of faith from any redefinition which might subvert the tradition’s essence. The risk of anachronism or irrelevance is seen as worth running in order to preserve ancient verities for later generations that might, in some hoped-for time of penitence, return to them. Secondly, there are movements, usually called ‘liberal’, which adopt the secular world’s reductionist vocabulary for the understanding of religion, whether this be psychological, philosophical, or sociological, and try to show how faith, or part of it, might be recoverable even if we use these terms. In the Christian context this is an established move, and has become secure enough to be popularised by such writers as John Robinson and Don Cupitt . In Islam, the marginality of Muhammad Shahrur and Farid Esack shows that for the present a thoroughgoing theological liberalism remains a friendless elite option, despite the de facto popularity of attenuated and sentimental forms of Muslimness .

The third possibility is to redefine the language of religion to allow it to support identity politics. Religion has, of course, always had the marking of collective and individual identity as one of its functions. However, in reaction against the threat of late modernity and postmodernity to identity, and in tacit acknowledgement of the associated problematizing of metaphysics and morality, this dimension has in all the world religions been allowed to expand beyond its natural scope and limits. Increasingly, religionists seem to define themselves sociologically, rather than theologically. The Durkheimian maxim that ‘the idea of society is the soul of religion’ [2] is not so far from the preoccupations of activists who are more eager to establish institutes for Islamic social sciences than to build seminaries.

The result has often been a magnification of traditional polarities between the self and the other, enabled by the steady draining-away of religiously-inspired assumptions concerning the universality of notions of honour and decency. Examples are many and diverse. Who could have thought that Buddhism, apparently the most pacific of religions, could have provided space for a movement such as Aum Shinrikyo , thousands of whose acolytes have been interrogated in connection with terrorist outrages against innocent civilians? Central to the cult’s appeal, it seems, has been a redefinition of Buddhism as a movement for the preservation of East Asian identity. [3]

In India, a vegetarian creed such as Hinduism, in Gandhi’s province of Gujarat, has now generated religious identity movements which, to the horror of more traditional practitioners, appear to recommend the expulsion, forced conversion, or massacre, of non-Hindu minorities. The process of the ‘ saffronising ’ of India , descending on the Ayodhya flashpoint, is seemingly well-advanced, and the prospects for regional peace and conviviality have seldom seemed less hopeful. [4]

In the universe of Islam, the same transposition of the vocabulary of faith into the vocabulary of identity is well underway. What would Averroes have made of the common modern practice of defining the Hajj as the ‘annual conference of the Muslims’? Why do social scientists increasingly interpret the phenomenon of veiling in terms of the affirmation of identity? Why does congregational prayer sometimes suggest a political gesture to what is behind the worshippers, rather than to what lies beyond the qibla wall?

The instrumentality of religion has changed, in important segments of the world faiths. God is not denied by the sloganeers of identity; rather He is enlisted as a party member. No such revivalist can entertain the suggestion that the new liberation being recommended is a group liberation in the world that marginalises the more fundamental project of an individual liberation from the world; but his vocabulary nonetheless steadily betrays him. In the Qur’an , the word iman (usually translated as ‘faith’) appears twenty times as frequently as the word islam . In the sermons of the identity merchants, the ratio usually seems to be reversed.

Neither does the instrumentality of identity advocate a return to the indigenous and the particular. Were it to do so, it would necessarily require a respectful engagement with the art, spirituality, and intellectuality of the religion’s cultural provinces. And it is a shared feature of all identity politicking in world religions today that whereas religious revivals in the great ages of faith invariably generated artistic and literary florescence, the revivalists seem to produce only impoverishment. Beauty must wait; because da‘wa , the Mission, is more urgent; an odd logic to premodern believers, who assumed that every summons to the Real must be beautiful, and that nothing transforms a society or an individual soul more deeply than a great work of art, a building, a poem, or the serenity of a saint.

Perhaps we could even invoke this as the nearest approximation we will find to an objective yardstick against which to judge the spiritual authenticity ( asala ruhiyya ) of religious revivals. Truth, as Plato taught, ineluctably produces beauty. The illuminated soul shines, and cannot confine the light within its own self. Whatever is done, or made, or said, or written, by such a soul, is great art, and this is part of our caliphal participation and responsibility in creation. As Abd al- Rahman Jami puts it:

Every beauty and perfection manifested in the theatre of the diverse grades of beings is a ray of His perfect beauty reflected therein. It is from these rays that exalted souls have received their impress of beauty and their quality of perfection. [5]

If we apply this measure, how much authenticity may we really attribute to the soi-disant Islamic revivalism of today? ‘Say: who has forbidden the adornment of Allah which He hath brought forth for His bondmen?’ (7:32) Who indeed?

The modern Muslim instrumentality of identity, then, does not seem to be about the affirmation of a culturally embedded self. The young radical activist does not really want to be a Pakistani, or an Algerian, or an American. Such a person requires what one might call a negative identity. He or she desperately desires not to be someone. The medievals knew God by listing all the things that God could not be; this is the strategy known as negative theology, richly deployed in both Muslim and Christian metaphysics. The moderns, it seems, being more interested in religion than in God, define religion by listing all the things that it cannot be. Hence Islam, we are loudly told, is a list of prohibitions. Everywhere we turn there is something we must not believe, and certainly must not do. The list of ideas entailing shirk or bid‘ a grows ever-longer; and no-one any longer takes pleasure and joy even in the diminishing list of things which are still allowed.

Islam, then, is about not being and doing things. What is left is one’s identity. Because the list of prohibitions is so desperately extended, and embraces most if not all the beloved practices of the village or the urban district, one is no longer allowably Sylheti , or Sarajevin . This is a questing for identity that denies real, embedded identity. As such, it often betrays its twentieth-century tributaries:

The type and forms of cultural valuations employed by the new fundamentalist movements cannot be explained by an analysis of the tradition of Islamic religion and history; it has to be seen as an effect of inter-cultural exchange, which is fundamentally based on a Western understanding of Islam as the culture of the Other . [6]

Long ago, the ever-insightful Hourani was no less frank in noticing the Western etiology of ‘movement Islam’:

Much has been written in recent years about modern movements in Islam, and the origins and direction of some of them are by now well-known: a new emphasis on virtuous activity, justified in terms of certain traditional sayings, but derived in fact from the European ‘scientific’ thought of the 19^th century, and tending sometimes towards a revolutionary nihilism. [7]

Other, more psychological tributaries might also be cited. The shift to a culturally disembedded radicalism is often malignantly driven by a desire to wreak revenge on one’s traditionalist parents or one’s community for frustrations suffered at their hands. Again, it appears as a Western social phenomenon, rather than as traditional tawba . Often, too, it is perversely responsive to a global discourse that may despise those countries or their diaspora ethnicities. It is, in short, a way of legitimising self-hatred; a religio -legal justification of an inferiority complex.

What, then, remains? Once the son of Pakistani migrants has stripped himself of his shalvar , his pir , his qawwalis , his gulab jamon , his entire sense of living as the product of a great civilisation that produced the Taj Mahal and the ghazals of Ghalib , what does he have left? Again, the negative theology option will define his identity as what-is-left-over; a religion of the gaps, a kind of void. That void he understands as the Sunna . The Sunna , that is, as figured negatively, as a list of denials, of wrenchings from disturbing memories, as a justification for the abandonment of techniques of spirituality that obstruct rather than reassure the ego.

Is this, then, a failure of religion? Is the young zealot so overwhelmed by his alienation, his humiliation, and sense of rootlessness , that the Sunna which is what-is-left-over cannot restore his spirit? Surely the scriptures insist that a turn to the Sunna must heal him, and help him to come to terms with his history and the trials of his life?

Actions, however, are by intentions. According to tradition, people tend to have the rulers they deserve, and the forces that rule the human soul are also in every case the appropriate ones for that person. The Sunna is a model of sacred humanity. That is to say, humanity bathed in sakina , the peaceable ‘habitation’ of God’s presence. ‘He is the one who sent down the sakina upon the believers’ hearts, that they might grow in faith.’ (48:4) This is in Sura al- Fath , which unveils to the believing community the nature of the test that they have just passed through, and which endured for several long years. The triumph at Mecca came about not through anger, anxiety, fear, and rage at the difficult, sometimes desperate situation of the Muslims, a small island of monotheists in a pagan sea. It came about through their serenity, their sakina , which, Ibn Juzayy tells us, means stillness ( sukun ), contentment ( tuma’nina ), and also mercy ( rahma ). [8] These are the gifts of reliance on Allah’s promise amidst apparent misfortune. The alternative is to be of those who are described as az-zannina bi’Llahi zanna’s -saw’: ‘Those who think ill thoughts of Allah’, which, the commentators explain, means the suspicion that He will let the believers down.

The monotheistic God, of course, does not let the believers down. ‘Weaken not; nor grieve. You are the uppermost, if you have iman ’ (3:139): the verse revealed in the aftermath of the shock of Uhud .

So the young zealot, driven half out of his mind by his sense of alienation and despair, reads the Sunna with the wrong dictionary. His view of the history of his community is one of khidhlan – that God has effectively abandoned it. Only a tiny, almost infinitesimal fraction of the scholars of historic Islam were even believers. The Ottomans, the Moguls, the Uzbek khanates, the Seljuks , the Malay states, the Hausa princedoms; all of these were lands of pure shirk and innovation; deserts with no oases of faith. And this conviction has to make him one of az-zannina bi’Llah zanna’s -saw – those who think ill thoughts of Allah. Their contention is that Islamic civilisation has been an atrocious, monumental, desperate failure; and the consequences of this conviction, for their religious faith, and for their ability to feel sakina , are no less disastrous. A God that has allowed the final religion to go astray so calamitously cannot, ultimately, be trusted. His policy seems usually to have been one of khidhlan , of the betrayal of the believers. Religion itself becomes, in Durkheim’s language, entirely ‘ piacular ’, it is an attempt at cathartic, ritualised breast-beating, a rite of atonement and mourning, that seeks to channel one’s fear of the uncontrollable and apparently blind forces which punish and threaten one’s tribe. A cathartic component of religion has here become co-extensive with faith itself.

What it feels like to worship such a God is hard to imagine. But today, in Islam, as at the fringes of other religions, there are indeed people who worship him. No peace can come of such worship, only a growing sense of being trapped inside a logic that leads only to fear and despair, unrelieved by anything more than the faintest glimmer of hope. Perhaps, the activist feels, worshipping his God, if we are pure enough, and angry enough, God will relent towards us; and we can anticipate the Second Coming by defying time itself, and creating a utopia for the pure somewhere on this earth. The piacular thus accumulates into an apocalypse.

Long ago, Toynbee saw that such projects invariably end in misery. In the end, even Herod serves the oppressed community better than does Bar Kochva . Toynbee wrote of

‘ Zealotism ’: a psychological state – as unmistakeably pathological as it is unmistakeably exaggerated – which is one of the two possible alternative reactions of the passive party in a collision between two civilizations. [9]

The zealot, Toynbee’s ‘barbarian saviour-archaist’, cannot imagine that faith might require the wisdom to recognise the capacities of individual human beings in different ages. Invoking a ferocious definition of amr bi’l-ma‘ruf , ‘Commanding the Good’, at a time when most people are weak and struggle even to honour the basic demands of religion, betrays an abject and disastrous lack of common sense. [10] ‘Forcing religion down people’s throats’ will induce many of them to vomit it up again; such is the resilience or perversity of human nature. States which impose severe moral codes in public will find that they cannot deal with the proliferation of private vice, which almost masquerades as virtue in a political context where religion has identified itself with a piacular rite of repression. States which behave in such a way as to be excluded from global trade will languish in poverty, further fostering disenchantment and exporting streams of refugees.

The sunna , brandished as a weapon of revenge against the sources of one’s humiliation, will not allow itself to be used in this way. The sunna , as pure form, as a structure of life, cannot be itself if the inward reality of sakina is absent. The Law is merciful when interpreted and applied by those who believe that God’s practice towards His people has been merciful. In the hands of the zealot, it may become the most persuasive of all arguments against religion.

Actions, then, are by intentions, and the interpretation of scripture is the proof of this. Scripture is a holy place; and we need to calm ourselves before entering it. If we march in, hearts blazing with fury, viewing the world with suspiciousness about the divine intention, then we violate that holy place. In earlier times, only the pure of heart, and those with decades of humbling scholarship behind them, were allowed to cross the threshhold into that space. Now the doors have been kicked open, and a crowd of furious, hungry, desperate men, stands quarrelling around the text.

*          *          *

I would like to move on now. Much of what I have said has been dismal; but religion is surely about facing reality. Too many of us today live amid delusions, no doubt because we find the reality of our times too disturbing to contemplate. Conspiracy theories, paranoia, fantasies about the past or the future; these abound in religious conferences; not just among Muslims, but among religionists everywhere. Religion, however, invites us to ‘get real’ – to use a very Muslim Americanism. Because we believe in God and an afterlife, and in the ultimate restitution for injustice, we should have souls great enough to look reality in the face without flinching.

My experience of the world of faith which we all inherit is, despite all that I have said about the sickness of identity mania, a positive one. I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture that there are three religious paths commonly taken today: the time-capsule, the liberal, and that of identity politics dressed up as scripturalism . The liberal option, despite the shallow purchase of its theology, is in practice widely followed among Muslims: these are the millions of individuals who may cherish the memory of a pious aunt, or perhaps a moment of religious insight earlier in their lives, or some vague sense of belonging to an inherited religious culture, but who seldom attend the mosque.

For most religiously-active Muslims, the conservative option, with a variety of variations, is the most commonly pursued. Almost all senior ulema in Sunni countries adhere to some form of conservatism, entailing adherence to one of the four Sunni madhhabs and to either the Ash‘ari or the Maturidi theology. Often, too, they will be actively involved in Sufism. This is a reality of which the West is largely unaware, given that it constructs its images of Muslim action from media images which inevitably focus on the frantic and the dangerous. [11]

What is needed, then, is for mainstream Islam to reassert its possession of tafsir . It remains in a strong position to do this. The zealots are everywhere a very small percentage of the total of believers. The masses are either too traditional or too religiously weak to want to follow them. Never will extremism triumph for long, simply because normal people do not want it. Already we find a growing sense around the Muslim world that zealotry damages only Islam, and serves its rivals. ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger’, as Nietszche observes.

A further reason why extremism has an uncertain future is that human beings are naturally religious. Secularisation theories are now everywhere in confusion; and religion prospers mightily in most countries of the world. Belief in the transcendent is, it seems, hard-wired into our species, and what most human beings crave is not a megaphone for their frustrations, but a voice for justice which also serves as a source of peace and serenity in a stressful world. Any religion that fails to supply this will soon be replaced by something else. There has never been an exception to this in human history. Christianity succeeded because pagan Roman religion failed to provide a sense of spiritual upliftment . Islam succeeded because the Eastern churches were spiritually debilitated by centuries of bitter polemic. New religious movements in the West succeed by offering techniques of meditation and alternative therapies which seem absent from established religions as they are presently formulated. Islam, wherever it degenerates into a primal scream of panic about one’s situation in the world, will certainly be replaced by any other religion that offers sakina .

The mainstream, then, must reclaim the initiative, and expel the zealots from the sacred place. It should not find it difficult to do this. It has, after all, a great civilisation behind it, which extremism cannot claim. It has, too, a rich tradition of spirituality, still vibrant in many countries, which, where made available to Westerners, can seem hard to resist. This was recently made plain to me by the director of the Swedish Islamic Academy. He told me that consistently, during his quarter-century as a Muslim in Stockholm , whenever he mentions that he is a Sufi, people lean forward to learn more. When he mentions Islam, they lean back, alarmed. Is this merely the expression of prejudice? Perhaps. But Muslims should also consider the possibility that educated Western people may be sincerely, rather than cynically, horrified by expressions of Islamic identity politics; and may be sincerely, rather than superficially, impressed by the literature and practice of traditional spiritual Islam. No-one who wishes to practice da‘wa in the West, or among Westernised Muslims, can afford to bypass that reality.

Once the sakina has been found again, once religion becomes a matter of the love of God rather than the hatred of our political and social situation, we can begin to extract our communities from the hole which we have dug for ourselves. Let us take, as a topical example, the question of suicide bombing. Historians might well wonder how this form of warfare could take root in any of the Abrahamic religions. One thinks of the kamikaze pilots of Shinto Japan, whose religious rituals, coupled with a final message read before a camera, provoked such horror and alienation in 1940s America . One thinks, too, of the self-immolation of Buddhist monks during the Vietnam war . The religious motivation behind many Tamil terrorists, rooted in a Buddhist South Asian culture, also springs to mind. Such a mentality is possible only for those who do not fully believe in a personal God, and hence have no notion of the human body as made, in some sense in God’s image. For Sunni Islam, however, in which even tattooing is a forbidden practice, such an activity is historically without precedent. Coupled with the policy of targeting the enemy’s civilians virtually at random, it is clearly the symptom of a deep-rooted sickness. It recalls the collectivist ethos (‘ asabiyya ) of the pre-Islamic Arabs, whose code of revenge ( tha’r ) authorised the taking of any life from a rival tribe to compensate for the loss of one of one’s own, a system decisively abrogated by the Qur’an’s ‘no soul shall bear the burden of another’ (6:164). [12] It is also, we may speculate, connected with the phenomenon of radical religion as a form of self-hatred of which I spoke earlier. The piacular believer is so alienated from his self that he can contemplate its physical destruction, thus replicating, in Toynbee’s words, ‘the melodramatic suicide of the Zealots who faced hopeless military odds’. [13]

This desperation is unworthy of the umma of Islam. Entirely traditional scholars speak out against it in the strongest terms, as a bid‘a in the most necessary sense of the term. But we need also to re-engage with the principle of rahma , of mercy, which flows from sakina . Why exactly do the hadith suggest that Muslims must not ‘destroy anyone with fire’? [14] Why are believers commanded so strongly to avoid taking the lives of civilians? One reason is because if we do this, we damage the lives of others whom we will probably never even meet. ‘Whosoever kills a human being for other than murder or corruption in the earth, it will be as if he had killed all mankind. ’ ( 5:32 ) Many suffer when one is killed. Orphans, widows, relations, friends, neighbours; all these are the victims of the single crime. Crime is never against an individual; it never has a single victim. War in the valid shari‘a sense targets only combatants, whose relatives recognise that such was their status. The targeting of civilians, however, is part of the barbarism of modern Western, Clausewitzian conflict, inflicting a deeper sense of loss and alienation; and it is entirely foreign to our heritage.

During the Second World War, my grandfather worked as a firefighter in the London Blitz. After the war, his behaviour grew erratic, and his marriage ended painfully, inflicting shock-waves on children and a wider world of relatives. Years afterwards the reason for it became clear. One night, after an air-raid, he had pulled from the rubble of a building the body of a small girl who looked exactly like his own daughter. The trauma of that moment never left him until he died, fifty years later. That trauma lives on, subtly, in the lives of all his descendants.

Those who take the lives of women and children, indiscriminately, and simply because they live on the other side of a frontier, should remember that they are inflicting wounds on other lives as well that can never properly be healed.

What is required, then, is an act of repentance, tawba . Our communities need to turn away from the utilitarian ethic that justifies even the worst and most inhuman barbarities as expedient means, and turn back to the authentic religious teaching that it is better to pray patiently than to descend into a tit-for-tat moral relativism that recalls the worst practices of the Jahiliyya . Religious patience, moreover, never runs out, because it knows that it will one day be crowned with glory. ‘True patience’, the Muslim proverb runs, ‘is never exhausted.’ And in the Qur’an : ‘the patient shall be given their full reward without reckoning.’ (39:10) The phrasing is superb. Yuwaffa suggests that they will be given a full, fair, proportionate reckoning; and then the phrase bi- ghayri hisab – it is to be without any reckoning at all. Patience, one of the supreme Qur’anic virtues, which led to the success of the peaceful entry into Mecca , is rewarded also in the next life, infinitely.

Here, then, is another possible yardstick against which to measure the authenticity of our Islam. Impatience is impiety, it is the way of the zannina bi’Llahi zanna’s -saw’. And those who cannot restrain themselves will be smacked down. Worse, they will bring misfortunes upon their communities. ‘Beware of a tribulation which will certainly not afflict only the wrongdoers amongst you,’ the Qur’an warns us. (8:25) To act impatiently on grounds of ‘ asabiyya , and to defy fundamental religious teachings about the sanctity of life, and to harbour ill thoughts about God’s providence – all these sins must lead, in the traditional Muslim understanding, to divine punishment. Those who regard them as a shortcut to a world in which their self-image will be healed are likely to be disappointed.

That disappointment is now palpable in the world of Islamic identity-politics. It is time that the great majority stopped being a silent majority, and raised its voice courageously. The sunna must be reclaimed as a via positiva . This is not, I believe, a heroic option; it is a fundamental religious duty. To uphold the honour of Islam, as a great world religion, and to defy the voices that would turn it into little more than a resentful sect, is a fard ‘ ayn – an individual obligation.

We need institutions and faces that can believably do this. A few of our mosques and Islamic centres are in the grip of a small minority of worshippers who care nothing for peaceful coexistence with their fellow citizens, and whose hearts and minds are overseas. Most Muslims here, however, wish to be accepted as full and respected partners in the project of building a just and prosperous society, and do not wish their places of worship to be directed by the representatives of other governments or zealot political movements. Neither are they at ease with the reinvention of religion as a ritual of distress. This majority must now speak out. Sullenness, jealousy, lack of tawakkul , lack of optimism, all these are vices which must be transcended. And that transcending can only take place where religion is once again centred on the love and fear of God, not on attempts to heal a wounded pride.

I am very optimistic that this will take place. As I have already indicated, the extremists remain numerically and intellectually on the extremes. Islam is, despite the headlines, a success story. Most Muslims prefer the spiritual to the frantic; patience to the primal scream. We must now make it clear to our institutions of learning, and to those who would help us from abroad, that the principle of shura demands that the extremes be excluded, and that the voice of majoritarian Islam be allowed its natural place.

*          *          *

This optimism must, however, be tempered with an awareness of the immediate tactical situation. Despite the alarmism of a few intransigent voices such as Daniel Pipes and Lamin Sanneh , [15] few if any of us respect the Middle Eastern mass-murderers who are currently inviting the world to regard Islam as the great political and moral failure of the new century. Nonetheless, we breathe the air that they have poisoned. And the poison exists here, as elsewhere, because of the aggression of a small minority of zealots.

Again, it is time to speak out in favour of normalcy. The message is a positive one: Islam is not intrinsically committed to violent reaction against the global consensus. Most scholars do not teach that globalisation obliges us to make hijra to a neighbouring planet. Of course we have our own distinctive assurances on moral matters, and a deep scepticism about the ability of a consumer society to increase human fulfilment and to protect the integrity of creation. But Muslims are not committed to jumping ship. In British India , a political context far less egalitarian than the one we inhabit here, there were few who chose the option of hijra to Afghanistan . The ulema overwhelmingly stayed in place, and were not prominent during the Mutiny. ‘Some scholars,’ as a historian of the period notes, ‘held that a country remained daru’l -Islam as long as a single provision of the Law was kept in force. [16] Once the bitterness of the Mutiny had subsided, the Muslims were a peaceful presence who contributed much to the deeply flawed but stable global enterprise that was the British Empire . Those Pathans who fought and died at Monte Cassino , the Hausas of the Nigeria Regiment who fought with the Chindits in Burma; the Bengali Lascars who died in the Battle of the Atlantic, were not conscripts, they were volunteers. Fighting against a common totalitarian enemy they were engaged, in the broad understanding of the term, in a jihad. One cannot deplore too strongly the attempt by a few Muslims, such as Ataullah Kopanski , to present Nazism as a potential ally for Islam. [17] Clearly, had National Socialism triumphed, its scientists would have aimed at the elimination or reduction to servile status of all the non-white races of the world, not excepting the followers of Islam. To fight for the Allies was unquestionably a jihad.

More recently, the struggle against communism effectively united Muslims and Christendom, a long alliance which both sides seem to have forgotten with astonishing speed and completeness.

English law, with its partial legal privileging of Anglican faith, is dimly theocratic, but does not make the totalising claims which the radicals make for their own various imams. Muslims in the United Kingdom are not being offered a choice between God’s law and man’s. God’s law, for the mainstream fuqaha ’, is an ideal for whose realisation we cherish a firm and ultimate hope. But it also includes the duty to act, out of maslaha , within the framework of laws drafted by majoritarian non-Muslim legislatures. This is, no doubt, why the tale of the prophet Joseph was so popular in pre-modern Muslim minority contexts. Some of the greatest Muslim poetical works written in Spain after the reconquista were based on the story of the monotheist prophet who accepted a senior post in a non-believing political order. The story is no less popular in the villages of Tatarstan , of Muslim Siberia, and of China .

Islam, therefore, supplies arguments for loyalty. Not because it regards the present state of affairs as ideal (a view commended by no-one) but because it recognises that it is the point from which one needs to begin working towards the ideal, an ideal which will itself be reshaped by the powerful instruments of ijtihad . The fundamental objects, maqasid , of the Shari ‘a are the right to life, mind, religion, lineage, and honour; and these are respected in the legal codes of the contemporary West. We may even venture to note that they appear to be better maintained here than in the hamfisted attempts at creating Shari ‘a states that we see in several corners of the Muslim world. Muslims may be unhappy with the asylum laws here, but would one wish to claim asylum in any Muslim country that currently springs to mind? We may not approve of all the local rules of evidence, but if we are honest, we will surely hesitate to claim that a murder investigation is better pursued in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia , than in English jurisdiction.

The radicals in our inner cities, of course, will at this point revert to their primal scream. They know full well that their movements have failed, and that despite decades of effort by them there is no Shari ‘a order in the world. They intuit that they are engaged in acts of collective religious suicide. Yet they protest and rail against the established political order, because for them religion has become nothing but the piacular rite of protest. Shouting at rallies and denouncing the mainstream are for them the most satisfying acts of worship. Were they to be denied these practices, they would be forced back on their own spiritual resources, and they are well-aware of how much they will find there.

Loyalty, then, is to the balanced, middle way, the wasat , which is the Sunna . Islam is a wisdom tradition that has seldom if ever generated extremes that have had a permanent impact. The current wave of zealotry will, I make no doubt, pass away as rapidly as it came, perhaps after some climacteric Masada . Some souls will have been damaged by it; the name of the religion will have been damaged by it, and the historians will note, with a regretful curiosity, how Islam was for a few years associated with terrorism. But the extremism will disappear, because no-one who has a future really desires it.

Can we accelerate this healing process? We are, I think, obliged to try. We have the advantage of knowing how to speak, and to whom to speak. The radical has to shout for a long time before anyone outside the Muslim community notices him. But the traditionally-committed Muslim who is part of society at large already possesses the network. He can claim membership in one of the world’s great traditions of art and literature, one that has already attracted many cultivated people in the West. Although the central mosques in most Western capitals are controlled by Saudis with no affection for the society around them, and no ability to speak to it, Islam’s non-hierarchical nature means that such people can simply be circumvented. Their cultural maladroitness will always work to the mainstream’s advantage. Alternative mosques and institutions of learning need to be established as matrices for the proclamation of authentic, mainstream, spiritual, moral Islam. There are strong reasons why this must succeed. Firstly, because everyone who has an interest in social cohesion wants it to succeed. Secondly, because unlike the Islam of those who distrust the divine purposes in history, traditional Islam is optimistic and brings sakina to the human soul. And finally, and most momentously, because this version of faith happens to be true.

NOTES

1. Richard Rorty , Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, ( repr . New Delhi , 1989), p.6.

2. Emile Durkheim , The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, tr. J Swain. (New York, 1915), p.419.

3. Robert Jay Lifton , Destroying the world to save it. Aum Shinrikyo , apocalyptic violence, and the new global terrorism. (New York, 1999.)

4. Brenda Crossman, Secularism’s Last Sigh? Hindutva and the ( mis )rule of law. New Delhi and (Oxford, 1999.)

5. Abdülkadir Emiroglu , Molla Cami’nin eserleri ( Ankara , 1976), p.70.

6. Mona Abaza and Georg Stauth , ‘Occidental Reason, Orientalism , Islamic fundamentalism: a critique’, in Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King (eds.), Globalization, Knowledge and Society (London etc., 1990), p.223. Carrell’s influence on Sayyid Qutb is frequently cited in this connection.

7. A. Hourani , ‘ Shaikh Khalid and the Naqshbandi Order’, in S.M. Stern et al., ( eds ), Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition ( Oxford , 1972), 89.

8. Ibn Juzayy al- Kalbi , Tafsir ( Beirut , 1403), 694.

9. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History ( Oxford , 1939), IV, 639. Cf. ibid., V, 331n: ‘The Jewish Zealots of that age, like the Wahhhabis at the present day, combine their puritanism with militancy.’

10. Here the question has been posed of the present-day appropriateness of Imam al- Ghazali’s strongly ‘ jihadist ’ stance. In his fiqh works, such as the Wasit , Ghazali suggests no more than a mainstream Shafi‘i understanding of the believer’s relationship to war and peace; but the Ihya ’ shows that jihad is integrated into the very centre of his understanding of Prophetic emulation (see for instance Ihya ’ ‘ Ulum al-Din (Cairo, 1347; = K. Adab al- ma‘isha , bayan shuja‘atih ), 338-9: ‘no-one was more vehement in war than him’, ‘he was always the first to exchange blows with the enemy’, etc. Reflecting on the Ihya’s ‘ jihadist ’ aspects, Michael Cook has shown that in comparison with the majority of ulema , Ghazali’s views on amr bi’l-ma‘ruf are ‘marked by a certain flirtation with radicalism … Ghazali is no accommodationist : he displays great enthusiasm for men who take their lives in their hands.’ (Michael Cook, Commanding the Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought ( Cambridge , 2000), p.456.) Modern Arab activists, even of the mainstream ‘Islamist’ variety, have frequently been embarrassed by Ghazali’s emphatic ‘ jihadism ’; and Cook shows (p.527) how several modern summaries of the Ihya ’ remove Ghazali’s remarks on changing evil ‘with the hand’. More radical writers, however, applaud Ghazali : the Algerian revolutionary Ali Belhajj ‘quotes Ghazali’s passage on armed bands with obvious relish’ (p.528). The response to such implicit accusations should surely be that Imam al- Ghazali adopted a stance within his own lifetime that he would not necessarily counsel for our own complex and fitna -ridden age and circumstances, in which the use of armed force against heavy odds is typically denounced by the ulema as an action against Muslim interests ( masalih ).

11. Blaming the West for this is sometimes, but not invariably fair; the newsmedia cannot be expected to focus on the pacific or the spiritual. Perhaps we need to be more frank in blaming our own Muslim communities for failing to engage in more successful and sophisticated public relations. My own encounters with television and newspaper journalists have confirmed that the mass media are only too happy to take articles from Muslims, or broadcast films made by Muslims; but that they cannot see where to find the contributions. In the United Kingdom , there is only one Muslim film production company, but several hundred cable and satellite TV channels. Major mosques and organisations have little or no public relations expertise. To accuse the West of misrepresentation is sometimes proper, but all too often reflects a hermeneutic of suspicion rooted in zealot attitudes to the Other .

12. For pre-Islamic Arab ‘pride’ suicide, see Mustafa Jawad , ‘Al- Muntahirun fi’l-Jahiliyya wa’l -Islam’, in Al- Hilal , 42 (1934), 475-9. For Islam’s understanding of suicide as an ‘Indian foolishness’ see Baydawi , Tafsir ( Istanbul , 1329), 109 (to Qur’an , 4:29 ). It is presumably not without significance that the deaths of Saul and Samson do not figure in the Muslim scriptures.

13. Toynbee, op. cit., VI, 128.

14. Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader ( Princeton , 1996), 36.

15. Lamin Sanneh , ‘Sacred and Secular in Islam’, ISIM Newsletter 10 (July, 2002), 6, makes the following incendiary claim about the September 11 attacks: ‘The West […] has sought comfort in the convenient thought that it is only a renegade breakaway group of Muslim fundamentalists who have struck out in violence. Most Muslims do not share that view.’

16. Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India : Deoband 1860-1900 ( Princeton , 1982), 51. For the muted role of the ulema during the Mutiny, see p. 82.

17. Ataullah Kopanski, Sabres of Two Easts : an untold history of Muslims in Eastern Europe ( Islamabad , 1995).

His Polish predecessor had certainly recognised Islam’s immense importance, and had sought to encourage a friendly Muslim view of the papacy. This bore fruit in a remarkable outpouring of Muslim commemorations upon his death. The Shaykh al-Azhar described his demise as ‘a great loss for the Catholic Church and the Muslim world. He was a man who defended the values of justice and peace.’ The then Iranian president Khatami praised John Paul as a master of three spiritual paths: philosophy, poetry, and artistic creativity. Yusuf al-Qardawi commended his opposition to Israel’s ‘apartheid wall,’ and asked Muslims to offer their condolences to Christians. In Afghanistan, a Taliban spokesman said that ‘even though some have launched a Crusader war against Islam, the pope’s voice was for bringing peace to the world.’ Overall, the Muslim world’s affection for John Paul was clear.

John Paul had earned this distinction in multiple ways. Often impulsive, he could not be said to have maintained a distinctive ‘Islam policy’, but he made several significant gestures which indicated his awareness of the religion’s growing importance and its spiritual integrity. In 1985 he became the first Pope to visit a Muslim country, and in 2001 the first to enter a mosque, where he annoyed ultra-conservative Catholics by kissing a copy of the Qur’an. ‘Your God and ours is the same God, and we are brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham,’ he told a Muslim crowd. His appeal, he said, was to ‘authentic religious Islam, the praying Islam, the Islam that knows how to join in solidarity with the needy.’ He distinguished this clearly from extremism, which he seldom failed to condemn.

To date, Ratzinger has shown few signs of continuing this theologically-unarticulated but sincere desire to reach out in affirmation. On the contrary, he has already shown himself to be sharply judgemental. He worried Muslims across Europe when, in an August 2005 meeting with imams in Germany who were worried about discrimination against their community, he made it clear that the only issue he wished to raise was ‘Islamic terrorism’. Apparently echoing a standard right-wing claim (made by Joerg Haider, Pim Fortuyn and Jean-Marie Le Pen in particular), he has said that ‘Islam is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.’ Another theme which he shares with the far right is his apparent belief that Muslims in Europe cannot be ‘assimilated’: ‘Islam makes no sort of concession to inculturation.’ (He does not seem to have noticed the immense differences in Muslim cultural style across the world.)

Such misunderstandings are the staple of Italy’s leading anti-immigration writer, Oriana Fallaci, who, at the time of writing, is in court on charges of incitement to religious hatred. Fallaci is the author of three anti-Muslim works popular in right-wing circles, and offers views of the usual xenophobic type: ‘Islam sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom.’ One of the most striking acts of Benedict’s papacy to date has been his unusual granting of a private audience to Fallaci in the papal palace at Castelgandolfo. The meeting was arranged discreetly, but was discovered by an Italian journalist, and later acknowledged by the Vatican press office. The content of the consultation was not made public, but Muslim sources noted that Fallaci, who had repeatedly condemned the previous pope’s commitment to dialogue with Muslims, has been consistently supportive of Benedict.

The Vatican’s apparent volte-face with respect to Muslims is not the work of Ratzinger alone. The sociologist Renzo Guolo, in his book Xenophobes and Xenophiles: Italians and Islam, notes a ‘turnaround in the Italian bishops’ conference in recent years.’ A new right-wing spirit has taken hold in many quarters. Cardinal Biffi of Bologna, for instance, has called for the closure of Italy’s mosques and for a new law banning Muslim immigration, ‘because these people are outside our humanity.’ So widespread is this kind of talk that even the traditionally anti-clerical party, the Northern League, is experimenting with the crusader’s sword. The Euro-MP Francesco Speroni, for instance, has called for a ban on allowing Muslims to enter Italy, prompting one human rights activist, Rinella Cere, to conclude that ‘a “pact with the devil” was clearly being made between sections of the Catholic church and the Northern League.’ And although the previous pope had made clear his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, many influential Church officials now seem to be supportive of Washington’s belief that Western models of government and society can be imposed through force of arms. Once, according to one Catholic journalist, Sandro Magister: ‘Vatican diplomacy did not separate itself from the policy of maintaining good relations with Arabic dictators, especially the secular and nationalistic ones. In the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, this policy obtained conditions of relative privilege for the Chaldean Christians.’ However, in the new atmosphere, ‘The Holy See … does not exclude the possibility that military forces could intervene as “missionaries of peace” when necessary. Present-day Iraq is one of these cases of necessity, in the judgment of Vatican leaders.’

That Ratzinger is part of this new hardening of attitudes towards Muslims may be deduced from some of his most significant reshuffles of Vatican officialdom. The generally eirenic Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, formerly head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and a well-known adversary of Ratzinger, has been sacked and demoted to run the papal mission in Egypt. Ratzinger has also moved to distance himself from Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the previous pope’s Secretary of State, who is widely regarded as pro-Palestinian, and remains a close friend of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah. Sodano’s likely successor is widely expected to be Cardinal Ruini, the former president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, who has been outspoken in insisting that Muslim children in Italian schools should not have the right to study their own religion, because, Ruini believes, this would involve ‘dangerous social indoctrination.’ In Palestine, two key appointments have added to the pessimism of the beleaguered Palestinians. Sabbah has been given a new auxiliary bishop, who will succeed him automatically in two years’ time: this is Fouad Twal of Jordan, regarded in Israel as far more acceptable than Sabbah, who has been a fearless critic of Israel’s policies in the occupied territories. No less symbolic has been the choice of Pierbattista Pizzabella as bishop of the Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel. Pizzabella has regularly outraged Palestinian human rights activists by his outspoken support for Israel, and his a
ppointment was loudly applauded in right-wing circles. One Anglican Palestinian leader calls him ‘very bad news’, and sees him as a sign that the Vatican is determined to draw a line under its former support for Palestinian rights, in favour of a pro-Israel strategy that will tie it in with wider right-wing aspirations for the Middle East. In making such an appointment, Ratzinger must have known very well the symbolic gravity of the step he was taking.

Ratzinger’s seeming harshness is regularly interpreted as a sign of a larger change of heart that has come over the Catholic church in recent years in response to the growing demographic significance of Islam in Europe, and the rise of Wahhabi terrorism. However he is not primarily a politician. His emerging Islam policy is ultimately rooted in a distinctive kind of theology. In particular, it should be taken in the context of his wider conservative conviction that Catholicism alone can guide human beings to true salvation, a view that his predecessor had seemed less anxious to advertise. Muslims may wince at his opinion of Islam, but his views on non-Catholic Christians have hardly been less trenchant. He was the leading contributor to the ‘definitive and irrevocable’ Catholic declaration Dominus Jesus in the year 2000, which insisted that non-Catholic churches ‘are not churches in the proper sense,’ and implied that non-Catholics are naturally destined for hellfire. He certainly subscribes to the traditional view that the ordination of Anglican priests is ‘utterly null and void,’ making most church-going in England a kind of theatre, a dim groping after a truth that may only be reliably found in Rome. In fact, his formal position, and his habit of mind, are far from any kind of pluralism, and his criticisms of Islam must be seen in this light. It is not quite correct to say, as some Muslims have done, that he has singled out Islam for a unique condemnation; he is, by the logic of his conservative theology, passionately critical of everything that fails to be ‘in communion with Rome’.

Among Muslim commentators there has as yet been little consideration of the ideas which drive this 78-year old Vatican insider, and which might supply a clue to understanding his view of Islam. Many Muslims think that Christianity in Europe ‘has lost its vision and is becoming a club for the elderly’ (Lord Carey’s allegation about the Anglican Church), in stark contrast to the American situation, where Christianity is politically dominant. Yet as the most significant survival from Europe’s religious past, and as an institution still immensely respected even by many secular Europeans, the Vatican is potentially an important interpreter of Islam to a Europe which now finds itself inhabited by twenty million Muslims, whose rights are increasingly under threat or actively denied by right-wing politicians and municipalities, and where Islamophobic violence is increasingly common.

Ratzinger’s knowledge of Islam is clearly patchy, and based on little practical engagement. The thinkers he prefers to hear tend not to be academic specialists in non-Christian religions, but activists and pastoral theologians. One advisor who has conferred with him on Islam, Joseph Fessio, believes, for instance, that ‘Islam is stuck. It’s stuck with a text that cannot be adapted, or even be interpreted properly,’ a view that Vatican Islam experts such as Daniel Madigan dismiss out of hand. Another rising star said to be close to Papal thinking is Piersandro Vanzan, a Jesuit professor at the Gregorian University in Rome. In early 2006, Vanzan co-authored a piece in the Catholic journal Studium which enthusiastically reproduced standard far-right discourse on Islam, complete with notions such as ‘moderate Islam, properly speaking, does not exist.’ Like Fessio, Fallaci and other self-appointed advisors on Islam, Vanzan has no expertise in Islamic studies, and is regarded as an embarrassment by the better-informed; yet this type of journalistic denunciation, unable or unwilling to distinguish the extreme from the orthodox, appears to be increasingly prominent in Ratzinger’s circle. The dismissal of Fitzgerald, a genuine Islam expert, is symptomatic of this tendency.

It helps to remember that Ratzinger is a European; more particularly, he is intensely Bavarian, and therefore not from a district with a long historic engagement with Islam (Poland, with its ancient and respected Tatar communities, seems to have been a different case). He is an accomplished pianist, a lover of Goethe, baroque sculpture and fine wine, who is less comfortable in other languages than his predecessor. The references in his many theological texts are mainly to the very introspective world of German theology; indeed, it is probable that he knows Lutheran theology better than he does the Catholic theology of the Third World. Bavaria lies at the heart of Europe; and indeed, was the beating heart of Nazism, the most intense of European attempts to reject non-white, non-European others.

Ratzinger is no Nazi; indeed, his thought is in large measure best understood as a reaction against the kind of modernity which produced the twentieth century’s great science-obsessed totalitarianisms. Yet he is deeply European. Faced with several Third World candidates, at the conclave in April 2005 the cardinals deliberately chose an icon of Europeanness, perhaps as an attempt to stem Europe’s drift away from Christianity. The appointment of a European was not really a surprise; what was more interesting was the choice of an icon of the anti-totalitarian reaction which saw the twentieth-century’s violence as a consequence of modernity, not as a strange aberration. Here Ratzinger parts company dramatically with other Catholic thinkers such as Hans Küng, a former friend, whose reading of the times is much more optimistic and upbeat than his own. Indeed, Ratzinger investigated and chastised such men during his time at the helm of his Vatican Congregation, the distant descendent of the Inquisition.

To understand the new pope, it helps to remember that despite this watchdog role he was once a leading light of the ‘moderate progressive’ wing of the Church. During the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s he collaborated with reformist figures such as Karl Rahner in pushing the Church roughly in the direction which had been urged by the Protestant reformers four hundred years before. The Tridentine Mass was scrapped, the notion of the clergy as a separate caste of human beings came under fire, many picturesque medieval traditions were banned, and space was given to lay Catholics in discussing issues once monopolised by the hierarchy. The backdrop was not, however, a stern bible-fundamentalism, but the curious idealism of the post-war years. Apparently oblivious to the threatening presence of a Soviet empire implanting nuclear warheads in silos across Eastern Europe, many in the West believed that it was time that religious conservatism gave way to a more ‘inclusive’ and affirmative attitude to human desires, which could allow Christians to participate in the playful culture of the modern West. Ratzinger, who in his early thirties cautiously committed to this view, repented suddenly when his students at the University of Tübingen’s Faculty of Catholic Theology, inflamed by Marxist ideas in the heady excitement of 1968, walked out of lectures shouting ‘Curse Christ! Curse Christ!’ From that time on he has solidified his position as a leading critic of what he saw as the naïve optimism of the 1960s, which had caused many in the church to read Vatican II as a populist moment. His abiding suspicion remains that Vatican II was a plughole through which faith and tradition drained, to be replaced by a liberal Protestant modernity.

Perhaps out of guilt at his own former flirtation with liberalism, for the remainder of his busy career as a bishop Ratzinger dedicated himsel
f to a crusade against subversion by the secular, egalitarian culture of the West. He came to oppose the principle that regional bishops’ conferences might take decisions separately from the Vatican hierarchy. Most conspicuously, he used his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to defend the fortress of the Church from the barbarian liberal hordes without. Theologians who, despite the recent lessons of Hitler and Stalin, and the example of materialist secular culture, were influenced by a naïve modern optimism, were reproached, usually in private, but on occasion in the eyes of the world. This is why Küng, after being stripped of his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian, compared Ratzinger’s Congregation to the KGB. Liberation theologians in Latin America were too optimistic about the possibility of successful revolutionary activism on behalf of the poor. Liberals trying to ‘update’ the Church only seemed to do so with reference to a surrounding secular culture of change and triviality. Hence the lethal danger, as Ratzinger saw it, of allowing popular preferences to shape worship. ‘I am convinced,’ he wrote, ‘that the crisis in the church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy.’

Ratzinger’s idealistic opposition to modernity found expression in the pages of the journal Communio, which he helped to launch in partnership with his friend, the Swiss anti-modernist Hans Urs von Balthasar. Abandoning the unpleasantly liberal atmosphere of Tübingen, he moved in 1968 to Regensburg to launch a new faculty where he energetically trained dozens of neo-conservative thinkers. Many of these, like the American Joseph Fessio, have served as staunch buttresses against the rise of Protestant agendas and modernising tendencies in the church, and were steadily recruited by John Paul II to fill the college of cardinals that one day would elect a new pope.

The theology which Ratzinger championed through this period was not the dusty repetitions of the thirteenth-century monk Thomas Aquinas that had dominated the Catholic world before Vatican II. Neither, however, was it the kind of subjective free-thinking which some feared would result from the Church’s convulsions in the mid-1960s. In common with many Catholics seeking renewal, Ratzinger returned to the fourth-century North African thinker St Augustine, and his medieval interpreter Bonaventure. Crisis, for Ratzinger, was not an excuse for inaction, but for a fearful recollection of human sinfulness; and Augustine and Bonaventure, with their heavy emphasis on original sin, the inherited defect with which they thought all humans are born, have often served as the foundation-stones of attempts to produce Catholic renewal. Ratzinger is certainly convinced of the radical sinfulness of human beings; and it is this conviction which underpins his onslaught on liberalism and liberation theology, and his scepticism about non-Christian religions. Without the sacraments of the Catholic Church, all is implicitly a form of wickedness, although it may contain broken fragments of the truth.

In his understanding of Judaism and Islam, Ratzinger is guided by the same Augustinian pessimism, which he finds ultimately in the letters of St Paul. Rituals of wudu and ibada are essentially worthless, as they lie outside the grace which is only mediated by God’s one true church. As he writes: ‘the law of Moses, the rituals of purification, the regulations concerning food, and all other such things are not to be carried out by us, otherwise the biblical Word would be senseless and meaningless.’ Such rituals are ‘slavery’, from which submission to the Church alone offers salvation. The Semitic principle is thus categorically inferior; Jews and Muslims, he seems to imply, are slaves, and their ability truly to please God must be Biblically doubted.

But it is not only ‘the Law’ which is ruled by sin; for Ratzinger, sin also dominates modernity, which represents the ‘human threat to all living things.’ It reduces everything, including religion, to blind cause and effect. Hence in modern eyes the Bible is not to be understood as a story leading to a conclusion, each of whose parts can only be read in terms of that conclusion, but as a series of disconnected fragments subjected to arguments over authorship. For the moderns, too, the idea of a medieval consensus as forming part of the sensus fidelium, the view of the community of believers (an idea resembling the Muslim principle of ijma’), is meaningless. But in the Pope’s eyes, the credibility of divine providence is hopelessly undermined by the Protestant idea that most past believers were radically mistaken. And if Catholics retreat from some previous certainties about doctrine and scripture, he believes, then there will inexorably be a retreat from others, until ‘finally, quite a number of people have the abiding impression that the church’s faith is like a jellyfish.’

Like many Muslim and Eastern Orthodox Vatican-watchers, the new Pope regards the Catholic Church as suffering from a deep crisis. Theology, despite attempts at firm control from the centre, has been wandering in the direction of subjectivism. The prohibition of the Tridentine Mass and its replacement with assorted forms of worship in local languages has not only cut congregations off from a source of unity, from centuries of devotion and from a language unpolluted by modernity, but has opened the floodgates to trivial experiments which can make worship resemble a form of entertainment. As he frankly says, ‘One shudders at the lacklustre face of the post-conciliar liturgy as it has become, or one is simply bored with its hankering after banality.’ Sexual abuse by clergy, and subsequent cover-ups by bishops, have gravely damaged the moral authority of the church in many places (two out of every seven graduates of one American seminary have died of AIDS; major newspapers claim that half of American priests are homosexual; several US dioceses have filed for bankruptcy in the face of claims for compensation by molestation victims). In Europe, the number of priests falls by one percent every year. All this amounts, in Ratzinger’s eyes, to ‘a dark and tragic night which has fallen upon the Church.’ ‘Everything,’ he feels, ‘is in a state of disintegration.’

There are Muslims who regard this as an opportunity for Islam; and it is certainly the case that conversions from Catholicism have increased in recent years, although numbers are still small in historic terms. Yet it is far from clear that the ‘crisis’, as the pope sees it, of the West’s most significant moral and spiritual institution, will be helpful to Muslim progress. Europe is sinking into a mood of increasing liberal intolerance of traditional values, as was shown earlier in 2005 when EU commissioner Rocco Buttiglione was forced to resign when he refused to condemn Catholic teachings on homosexuality. If liberalism is excluding religious believers from high office, there is reason to expect that a more thorough-paced persecution will follow, with the hounding of all those whose consciences prevent them from accepting homosexualist, feminist or other liberal beliefs. Ratzinger writes well about the ‘agnosticism which no longer recognises doctrinal norms and is left only with the method of putting things to a practical test.’ While he does not agree with his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, that the separation of church and state is a heresy, he is clear that the radical indifference of national governments to religiously-grounded morals may result in a slippage into tyranny. Terrorism was invented by the French Revolution; in Bonaparte’s anti-religious empire it became the political norm of the first European Union. The danger is that a deep-seated secular indoctrination of Europe may in the long term produce a similar re
sult. For Ratzinger, as in classical Muslim thought, the religious scholar is not to be the ruler; but neither is the ruler to be immune from counsel by the scholar or from the ethics set forth in revelation. Muslims may be nervous that religious authority in Catholicism is highly centralised and, in principle, monolithic (the point on which classical Muslim and Christian political theory most obviously diverge), but will need to welcome Catholic endeavours to hold rulers accountable to timeless moral absolutes. Catholicism is clear that the separation of church and state does not mean that governments are not allowed to be religious.

Sacred politics is the kind of area in which Ratzinger’s interpretation of Islam will need to be more fully informed. Perhaps assuming that Islam will take as long as Catholicism did to accept the idea of democracy, he is sceptical about the authenticity of popularly accountable government in Muslim societies. Here, again, he would benefit from studying major cases such as Turkey and Indonesia, where Muslim theologians were at the forefront of the democratisation process and of opposition to authoritarian military regimes. There is certainly a difficulty in the idea, implicit in right-wing Catholic discourse, that Islam’s scholars operate in a democratic way to produce political authoritarianism, while the Church operates in an authoritarian way to support the idea and practices of political democracy. A reading of Noah Feldman’s study of Islamic discussions of popular sovereignty, After Jihad, would help the Vatican to resolve this apparent conundrum.

Ratzinger can also seem to be in the grip of a latent contradiction when he considers Islam’s powerfully conservative social instincts. In his book Salt of the Earth (1997) he notes that ‘Islam is opposed to our modern ideas about society;’ yet elsewhere he is famous for his insistence that Catholicism is itself radically opposed to many such ideas, and to the intellectual habits of modernity of which they are the expression. The same tension reappears where he writes, explaining the recent Islamic revival, that ‘in the face of the deep moral contradictions of the West and of its internal helplessness … the Islamic soul reawakened.’ His reluctance to speak at length about Islam, as opposed to holding private sessions with anti-Muslim activists, probably stems from a deep internal ambiguity about a religion which has conserved its liturgy and its family morality intact, which has no significant ‘gay lobby’, which is clear about the nature of men and women, and which reads scripture as an integral and authoritative whole in the way all Christians once did. If, as he suspects, the relativism in Christian theology, liturgy and moral practice which has become so prevalent is a sign of distance from God, then how is one to interpret Islam’s massive success on the same issues? Particularly disturbing, one may guess, is the realisation that whereas Catholic decision-making since the First Vatican Council has been authoritarian and top-down, a method hardly challenged by John Paul II, Islamic ijma’ is a result of egalitarian debate among scholars over centuries of the kind Ratzinger would call ‘congregationalist’; and yet the internal integrity of liturgy and doctrine which an ultramontane, authoritarian church was meant to defend seems to have been better achieved, in many ways, by the apparently chaotic mechanisms of Islam. Catholic intellectuals who, in the wake of René Guénon, have converted to Islam often offer precisely this reason to justify their choice. Could it be that Vatican neoconservatism is hostile to Islam because it is privately impressed by it, not because it is primarily exercised by issues of ‘integration’ and democracy?

If so, we may be able to untangle one of the great mysteries surrounding Ratzinger’s Islam-talk. Rahner and the other script-writers of Vatican II approached Islam in terms of those issues that matter most to Muslims themselves. ‘Upon the Muslims, too, the Church looks with favour,’ they said, and the reasons they gave concerned Islam’s self-identification with Abraham, its reverence for Jesus and Mary, its concern with the Last Judgement, and its life of prayer and fasting. It is noteworthy that Ratzinger has hardly engaged with Islam on these levels, preferring, instead, to pick up the current rhetoric about the ‘crisis of Islam’. This is odd, given that he generally deplores the reduction of religious discussions to issues of sociology and politics. Here, perhaps, is a suggestion that Islam’s intactness is too large a fact for him to be ready to address, although he may well be preparing himself for some future statement.

Whatever the reasons for the new conservatism, Muslims must seek allies. The disliked and impoverished Muslim minorities of Europe, resembling in many ways fugitive monotheists in Roman catacombs, cannot muster the strength to campaign for a greater tolerance of non-liberal values. It is therefore crucial for Muslim communities to forge ties with other defenders of traditional humanity, and to wish them well. The Catholic church differs from Islam on some moral issues, such as contraception and divorce, but generally it advocates the set of ethics which is normal to sacred societies, and which underpinned the greatest cultural achievements of medieval Europe, both Muslim and Christian. Like Islam, it is not only a matter of private faith and worship, but of rules fixed in revelation (the pope has spoken against ‘the view that the Decalogue on which the Church has based her objective morality is nothing but a ‘cultural product’ linked to the ancient Semitic Middle East’). With Ratzinger holding the tiller, the church is unlikely to accept further concessions to the values of the secular establishment, still less to the Jacobin and Hitlerian demand that ‘priests should not meddle in politics’. The challenge will be to convince Muslim communities that it is conservatives, not liberals, who are our most natural partners in the great task of guiding Europe back to God, and that Ratzinger’s criticisms are grounded in respect, perhaps even in something approaching envy; not in any kind of racism or populist chauvinism. Whatever some Muslims may claim, the fact that far-right parties benefit from the new Vatican language about Islam does not mean that the Church is seeking to retrieve its former popularity in Europe by riding the tiger of the new xenophobia.

European Muslims are thus faced with an interesting dilemma. Should we support the Vatican because it advocates those traditional values which are the foundation of social and political stability, and develop the cooperation on social issues that Muslim and Catholic leaders have achieved in the past (the 1994 UN Population Summit was one example)? Such a collaboration might provide support to embattled traditionalists in bodies such as the Church of England, apparently on the brink of validating homosexual practices. This is an attractive notion; yet should we not be wary of a man whose sense of Europe’s true identity substantially excludes us? After all, if Turkey cannot join Europe because of its Muslimness, how far can Turks in Hamburg be accepted as Europeans? Tariq Ramadan has criticised the Pope’s Christian definition of Europe, on the grounds that ‘we must recognise that all the monotheistic faiths are part of Europe’s roots.’ His understandable fear is that Ratzinger’s ideas about Semitic religions will comfort the growing legions of European chauvinists and Islamophobes. However it is by no means clear that a generic monotheism of the kind Ramadan commends will be sufficient to defeat relativism in Europe.

Does this mean that Muslims stand to benefit more in an officially Christian Europe? American Muslims, ruled by an effectively theocratic administration in which presidential speeches are intensely Biblical and
the state provides massive funding for Christian social movements (but not Muslim ones) would probably resist this notion. An increasing number of American Catholic bishops denounce the ‘accommodationist’ Catholic politicians who do not follow the Church’s line. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, for instance, complains that ‘too many American Catholics – maybe most – no longer connect their political choices with their religious faith in any consistent, authentic way.’ Yet a larger alliance between Catholics and the politically-dominant Evangelicals, a scenario sometimes predicted by American Muslims, in reality seems unlikely. Support for a violent response to Saddam Hussein, for instance, was strongest in Bush’s Evangelical constituency; whereas the Catholic bishops opposed it. The theological tensions between the two large sects of American Christianity have been intensified by Dominus Jesus, and the cooperation in issues of religious politics (on the abortion issue, most notably) has probably progressed as far as it can.

Europe cannot be like America; and a strong religious presence here will not have the militaristic consequences which American Muslims have witnessed with such dismay. The Evangelicals in Europe are far weaker, and think differently on political matters. A Europe defined in Christian terms is more likely to take its guidance from Ratzinger than from any reformed thinker (there are few Southern Baptists here, and as for liberal Christian thinkers, these typically do not differ from the secular consensus on moral issues, and are hence irrelevant). Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the continent’s current coldness towards the claims of Christianity is a permanent condition. The increasing witness of Muslims may ironically trigger a Christian revival, as the Belgian novelist Jacques Neirynck has forecast. In that situation, the continent’s ethico-political domination by the Vatican would probably enhance the sense of security of the majority population, and this can only be in the interests of Muslims, for whom the threat is not the Church, but the far-right movements which may claim Christian principles, but will, we may reasonably hope, always be kept at a firm distance by Curial institutions that can never decisively reject the rulings of Vatican II.

Many Muslims have been uncomfortable with Ratzinger because of his public statements about Islam. Yet we should be wary of emotional responses; and act in our interests, which are also those of a well-integrated, tolerant and successful Europe. Benedict XVI may not quite intend it, but on balance, his policies are likely to be good for Islam.

* This article was taken from masud.co.uk and was first published in Q-News.

The new substitute for Antisemitism is resurgent in formerly Nazi regions as well. In Austria, the currently-triumphant Freedom Party seems no less mistrustful of the Muslim presence. ‘The increasing fundamentalism of radical Islam which is penetrating [Europe],’ it warns us, ‘is threatening the consensus of values which is in danger of getting lost.’ Far from stiffening [Europe’s] moral fibre, the new Turkish invaders form part of a relativising process which allegedly threatens Christian Austria with the confiscation of its identity and with social disaster. As the Freedom Party explains, it is not race, but culture, and hence religion, which defines legitimate belonging, which is why ‘the Freedom Party sees itself as an ideal partner of the Christian churches’. [3] Even though most local clergy have sharply denounced it, the party attracts a third of the vote of this stable, prosperous Catholic democracy, and may grow further. Minorities can only hope that Jorg Haider is wrong in his conception of his nation when he opines, ‘The Freedom Party is not the descendent of the National Socialist Party. If it were, we would have an absolute majority.’ [4]

A Conradian voice of sanity amidst this intensifying atmosphere of anti-Muslim feeling is supplied by the Catholic novelist Jacques Neirynck. His novel Le Siege de Bruxelles depicts events in the Belgian capital in the year 2007. In this nightmare of Europe’s near future, official Christianity has become a ghost, with its cathedrals reduced to the status of museums where Mass is celebrated only to satisfy the curiosity of Far Eastern tourists. The Cardinal-Archbishop bears the mock-eucharistic soubriquet of the ‘Real Absence’, as his hyperliberal theology, anxious to placate all sides, proves unable to mobilise Christian resistance to the new Flemish chauvinism.

In Neirynck’s future, the triumph of the New Right has presided over the opening of concentration camps and the expulsion of the country’s Jewish and Muslim communities, who are given twenty-four hours in which to shoulder their possessions and walk in single file towards the south.  This is a religious as well as cultural backlash, under the Crusading cry ‘Dieu le veut!’, blessed by a ‘cultural and religious restoration’ which favours the Jansenist crucifix, whose Jesus is suspended so low that his arms appear to embrace only a small elect. Nationalist priests call for ‘surgical strikes which will cut out the tumour’; and go on to bless the siege and bombardment of the Muslim ghetto, as Brussels is slowly transformed into a second Sarajevo. The drama ends with a Muslim counterattack to liberate a concentration camp, which provokes the panic-stricken flight of the Flemish militias, and thereby reveals the underlying fragility of the far right’s agenda. [5]

Neirynck’s fable seems alarmist and alien; but it is undeniable that the far right continues to gain ground in Belgium, where Turkish and Maghrebian immigrants, joined by a substantial convert community, provide a convenient lightning-rod for the insecurities of Belgians of all social classes, unnerved by unemployment, globalisation, political corruption, and the visibility of the non-Christian Other. The far-right Vlaams-Blok, the leading Flemish nationalist party, described by Stephen Fisher of Oxford’s Nuffield College, as ‘the most blatantly racist and xenophobic of the extreme-right parties in Western Europe’, has grown in strength from 1.3% of the electorate in 1984 to 14.8% in 1999, and has become the largest Flemish party in Brussels, and also in Antwerp, where it has gained control of the municipality. Vlaams-Blok politicians have not been reluctant to identify Muslims as the new threat. Filip De Winter, the party’s former leader, has called for the ‘hermetic closure’ of Belgium’s borders, and anticipates ‘the return of all immigrants, without exception, to their countries of origin.’ This is to be accomplished by the progressive deprivation of state benefits and citizenship rights, and the creation of specific immigrant areas with the cities to improve levels of surveillance. Islam itself is to be prohibited, ‘because this religion is anti-Belgian and anti-European.’ [6]

Until his assassination in May 2002 by an animal-rights fanatic, the growing popularity of the far-right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn sent shudders down the spine of Holland’s half-million strong Muslim population. In March polls, thirty-five percent of voters in Rotterdam deserted traditional Dutch liberalism and voted for Mr Fortuyn, bringing Holland into line with other European countries where anti-Muslim feeling has revived the fortunes of neo-Fascist tendencies which had been largely dormant since the Second World War.

Fortuyn’s religious views are detailed in his book Against the Islamisation of our Culture, published in 1997 to celebrate Israel’s fiftieth birthday. He believed that Islam, unlike his own strongly-affirmed Christianity, is a ‘backward culture’, with an inadequate view of God and an inbuilt hostility to European culture. He called for massive curbs on Muslim immigration, and for greater stress on Holland’s Christian heritage. A prominent homosexual activist, Fortuyn also condemned Islam’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

Fortuyn’s popularity was thought to be greatest among Dutch voters who feel strong sympathy for Israel, oppose greater European integration, and demand the refining of immigration and asylum laws to exclude people of Muslim cultural background. It is a package that is being studied very carefully by apparatchiks in more traditional parties, alarmed by the fact that one recent poll of Dutch 18-30 year olds showed that almost half want to see ‘zero Muslim immigration.’

Edgar van Loken, of Amsterdam’s Migrant Centre, fears that Fortuyn’s breakthrough may herald an even stronger showing for the far-right in May’s general election. Even the mainstream parties, he believes, are now considering the adoption of aspects of Fortuyn’s formula. ‘The real problem is that other political parties are starting to see Mr Fortuyn’s strategy as a vote winner and may start to follow suit.’ [7]

The crisis came at a particularly sensitive time for Holland. On April 16, the entire cabinet resigned following the publication of a UN report into the behaviour of Dutch peacekeepers in the besieged Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. Investigators had consistently suggested that Dutch troops, many of whom were recruited from inner-city areas with a strong neo-Fascist presence, were ideologically anti-Muslim.

In Norway, the 1997 election saw the sudden appearance of the anti-immigrant Progress Party of Carl Hagen, which now holds twenty-five out of a hundred and sixty-five parliamentary seats. Similar to Hagen’s group is the Swiss People’s Party, which commands 22.5% of the popular vote in Switzerland, and has been widely compared to the Freedom Party of Jorg Haider, which in 1999 joined the Austrian coalition government.

In Denmark, the rapidly-growing ultranationalist DPP has become the third most popular party, benefiting from widespread popular dislike of Muslims. Its folksy housewife-leader Pia Kiaersgaard opposes entry into the Eurozone, rails against ‘welfare cheats’, and is famous for her outbursts against Islam. ‘I think the Muslims are a problem,’ she stated in a recent interview. ‘It’s a problem in a Christian country to have too many Muslims.’ [8]

Here in Britain, the same tendency has to some extent been paralleled in the recent growth of the British National Party. A cassette recording issued by the party, entitled ‘Islam: A Threat to Us All: A Joint Statement by the British National Party, Sikhs and Hindus’, describes itself as ‘a common effort to expose and resist the innate aggression of the imperialistic ideology of Islam’. As with its Continental allies, the BNP is gaining popularity by abandoning racist language, and by attempting to forge alliances with non-Muslim Asians and Blacks. The result has been documents such as the October 2001 ‘Anti-Islam Supplement’ of the BNP newsletter Identity, which ended with an appeal to ‘Join Our Crusade’. The chairman of the BNP, Nick Griffin, wades in with discussions of ‘The Islamic Monster’ and the ‘New Crusade for the Survival of the West’. [9]

In July 2001, Griffin and his skinheads polled 16% of the votes in Oldham West: the highest postwar vote for any extremist party in the UK. Nonetheless, British fascism remains less popular than most of its European counterparts. An issue to consider, no doubt, as Muslim communities ponder their response to growing British participation in schemes for European integration, and the long-term possibility of a federal European state.

Let me offer a final, more drastic example of how such attitudes are no longer marginal, but have penetrated the mainstream and contribute to the shaping of policy, often with disastrous results. On the outbreak of the Bosnian war, the German magazine Der Spiegel told its readers that ‘Soon Europe could have a fanatical theocratic state on its doorstep.’ [10] (The logic no doubt appealed to the thirty-eight percent of Germans polled in [Brandenburg ]who recently expressed support for a far-right party’s policy on ‘foreigners’. [11]) The influential American commentator R.D. Kaplan, much admired by Bill Clinton, thought that ‘[a] cultural curtain is descending in Bosnia to replace the [Berlin ] wall, a curtain separating the Christian and Islamic worlds.’ [12] Again, those who travelled through that ‘curtain’ can do no more than record that the opposite appeared to be the case. Far from reducing to essences, in this case, a pacific, pluralistic Christianity confronting a totalitarian and belligerent Islam, the Bosnian war, despite its complexities, usually presented a pacific, defensive Muslim community struggling for a multiethnic vision of society against a Christian aggressor committed to preserving the supposed ethnic hygiene of local Christendom. In Bosnia the stereotypes were so precisely reversed that it is remarkable that they could have survived at all. Here the Christians were the ‘Oriental barbarians’, while the Muslims represented the ‘European ideal’ of parliamentary democracy and conviviality. Neither can we explain away the challenge to stereotypes by asserting that religion was a minor ingredient in the very secularised landscape of post-Titoist Yugoslavia. The Bosnian President was a mosque-going Muslim who had been imprisoned for his beliefs under the Communists. The Muslim religious hierarchy had been consistent in its support for a multiethnic, integrated Bosnian state. Ranged against them were all the forces of the local Christian Right, as the Greek Orthodox synod conferred its highest honour, the Order of St Denis of Xante, on Serb radical leader Radovan Karadzic. Ignoring the unanimous verdict of human rights agencies, the Greek Synod apparently had no qualms about hailing him as ‘one of the most prominent sons of our Lord Jesus Christ, working for peace.’ [13] As the Quaker historian Michael Sells concludes,

The violence in Bosnia was a religious genocide in several senses: the people destroyed were chosen on the basis of their religious identity; those carrying out the killings acted with the blessing and support of Christian church leaders; the violence was grounded in a religious mythology that characterized the targeted people as race traitors and the extermination of them as a sacred act; and the perpetrators of the violence were protected by a policy designed by the policy makers of a Western world that is culturally dominated by Christianity. [14]

The Bosnian conflict imposed such an intolerable inversion of stereotypes that Latin Christendom, for all its brave talk of a Common European Home, seemed paralysed. A Byzantine Holy War figured nowhere on its cultural map; certainly Christians were not meant to be Oriental barbarians. Here the rhetoric of Islamophobia and the threatening spectre of an essentialised, totalitarian Islam, stupefied whole chancelleries. As with [Europe]in the 1930s, prejudice and cultural impotence paved the road to genocide.

The Scottish poet Aonghas Macneacail trapped this silent rhetoric in bloody, unhesitant metaphors:

though there’s a brute on your back,

sapping you with blows

(while we observe)

though he’d rip your women apart -

he’s our brute.

help? If only we could -

it’s not your blood, or your deeds

but that we can see

a foreign weed in your heart -

the excuse we won’t declare. [15]

Macneacail describes the Serb chetnik as ‘our brute’; while Islam, [Europe[’s enemy, is the ‘foreign weed in your heart’. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, was no less scathing. ‘Can we stand’, he asked, ‘a bare half century after the Holocaust in a Europe that has replaced the word Judenrein with the equally repellant phrase “ethnic cleansing”, and not ask the question, “Were we wrong to say, Never again?”’ There are too many parallels between the mood of [Europe]now and the mood 100 years ago, and we have too much knowledge to ignore the line that leads from hatred to holocaust.’ [16] The noted Holocaust commentator and political scientist Richard Rubenstein was angry enough to write an article entitled ‘Silent Partners in Ethnic Cleansing: the UN, the EC, and NATO’. [17] Given his expertise in Holocaust studies, and that discipline’s frequent reluctance to allow any other act of collective mayhem into the same category, we should take with deadly seriousness his statement that Islam now occupies the unenviable position once belonging to Judaism within Europe. [18]

Even culprits could acknowledge the parallel. The former commandant of the concentration camp at Omarska where several thousand Muslim civilians were killed, reminisced as follows:

We knew very well what happened at [Auschwitz]or Dachau, and we knew very well how it started and how it was done. What we did was the same as [Auschwitz]or Dachau, but it was a mistake. It was planned to have been a camp, but not a concentration camp. I cannot explain this loss of control. [19]

A Bosnian Muslim reinforced the comparison:

Now we’re the Jews, the Muslims of Banja Luka. I see my friends lining up in front of the bus station here when there is a rumor that it’s possible to leave, and I think sometimes, ‘That is the way it was in the forties.’ But it’s in color now, and it’s not the Jews, it’s us. [20]

More could be said, but I wish to conclude here. It is difficult to deny that familiar European views of Muslims are a good deal more threatening than the communities they describe. One is forced to respect the pessimism of many European Muslims, threatened as they are by this new anti-Semitism which the white Christian majorities have, to be frank, failed to notice sufficiently. However my own conclusions are cautiously optimistic. Neirynck’s novel suggests that his Flemish zealots are overwhelmed not by superior force, but by the reality of a multicultural world whose logic ultimately forbids its own undoing. If English and Arabic are to be the languages of Brussels in the new millennium, then so be it. History is rarely merciful to nostalgia. Neirynck’s Fascists appear as relics of an obsolete age of European essentialism, and their political gamble a last roll of the dice, as they tacitly acknowledge, even during their brief moment of triumph, that there can be no decisive return to a monochrome demography in an inexorably globalising world , or to a political Jansenism whose theological exclusivism is no longer tenable. The churches damned by John Cornwell in his terrifying Hitler’s Pope [21] have now for the most part adopted inclusivist approaches to non-Christian religions. Muslims, not least because of our own optimism over the eventual triumph of Muslim orthodoxy over extremism, need to take seriously Neirynck’s insistence that while one Christianity is part of the problem, there is another which is likely to be part of the solution, advocating conviviality in a world which has never been in more need of a transcendently-ordained tolerance.

NOTES

[1] The Guardian, October 2, 2000.

[2] Japan Times, 7 August 2000

[3] http://www.fpoe.at

[4] http://www.adl.org/frames/front_haider.html

[5] Jacques Neirynck, Le siege de Bruxelles, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996, p.250.

[6] Frédéric Larsen, ‘En belgique, l’extrême droite s’installe dans les coulisses du pouvoir.’ Le Monde Diplomatique, February 1992.

[7] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1857000/1857918.stm

[8] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/europe/2000/far_right/

[9] http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles.html

[10] Cited in Andrea Lueg, ‘The Perception of Islam in Western Debate’, in Jochen Hippler and Andrea Lueg (eds), The Next Threat: Western Perceptions of Islam, London: Pluto Press, 1995, p.9.

[11] The Independent, 5 October 1999.

[12] Cited by Lueg, , op. cit., p.11

[13] Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, Berkeley: [University of California Press ], 1996, p.85.

[14] Sells, 144.

[15] In Ken Smith and Judi Benson (eds), Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia, Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993, 44.

[16] The Guardian, April 30, 1993.

[17] Published in In Depth: A Journal for Values and Public Policy 3/2 (Spring 1993), 35-58.

[18] Op cit.

[19] The Nation (Washington), 10 June 1996.

[20] David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the failure of the West, London: Verso, 1995, 94.

[21] John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. London: Penguin, 1999.

* This essay is based on a text first given as the Annual World Humanities Lecture, University of Leicester, 3 April 2000

And yet amidst this hideous visual cacophony, occasional insights can be observed; and these can be of an almost revelatory intensity. Almost all 20th century Western artists have been well aware of their cultural situation, as wreckers of a religious view of the world, and as the depictors of its chaotic, formless, ugly successor. A few, however, have recognised the persuasiveness of the alternatives. And a very few, those who have escaped the besetting racism and Islamophobia of European culture, have acknowledged the beauty and depth of Islam.

One such artist was the Russian, Kasimir Malevich. Malevich lived and worked around the time of the Russian Revolution, a time of the concatenation of the thousands of rival movements, religious, mystical, atheistic, or aesthetic, which collided in the early 1920s, only for the satanic force of Josef Stalin to emerge from the ruins. It was, for a few brief and heady seasons, a time when the dead weight of the country’s inherited hierarchies, both religious and royal, seemed to have been removed to make way for a vision that was not only more just, but also more spiritually sighted.

One manifestation of this was the demand by the young artists of the Left that the authorities abolish all representational forms of painting. Figurative art, they rightly pointed out, is inherently oppressive. It privileges youth over age; wealth over poverty. In its religious modes it attributes gender and race to the divine. Hence the revolutionary slogan:

A White Army officer
when you catch him
you beat himand what about Raphael
it’s time to make
museum walls a target
let the mouths of big guns
shoot the old rags of the past!

The Bolsheviks themselves were horrified by this. For them, representational art provided the foundation for all mass propaganda. And in due time, Stalin and his successors patronised and enforced the crude style of Socialist Realism, images of muscular peasant men and women gazing up at the new socialist dawn. The titanism and human-worship of the Renaissance had been restored; only the desire for greater freedom was removed.

But in the white-hot heat of the moment, when the old was crashing down with the Winter Palace and the Kazan Cathedral, and the new, in the form of Soviet gigantism had not yet had its triumph, a crack in European culture appeared that for a brief but remarkable instant admitted the light of Islam.

Most of Russia, of course, is built on the ruins of Muslim civilisations. More than any other European people, not excepting the Serbs, the Russians have seen themselves as holy warriors against Islam. In the early 16th century, almost all of what is today Ukraine was Muslim, ruled by the Kasimov emirs with their splendid capital to the south of Moscow. The Crimea, one of the most densely populated and prosperous regions on earth, was a Muslim state in alliance with the Ottoman caliphate. The steppeland between the Black and Caspian Seas had been Muslim for centuries, growing rich on the silk and carpet trade between Iran and Europe. To the east of Moscow, Muslim cities adorned the banks of the Volga river, culminating in their capital Kazan, a city perhaps twenty times the size of Moscow itself. In 1555 Ivan the Terrible, taking advantage of divisions between these European Muslim empires, invaded and sacked Kazan. The great White Mosque of Kul Sherif, with its eight minarets, was torn down, and its rubble used to build St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. Although the Kazan khans had always permitted the practice of Christianity, the Russian conquerors prohibited Islam, and forcibly baptised the remaining population. The Cossacks were let loose on the Muslim countryside, young men from the frozen north who captured and enslaved Muslim women, breeding from them a new type of crusading zealot. So strong was the sense of confrontation with the more civilised world of Islam that until the eighteenth century it was common for drums in the Russian army to be made from the skins of captured Muslims.

This legacy of hatred is the bedrock of Russian culture. Before Ivan the Terrible, about half of the land-mass of Europe was Muslim. And the Russian tsars saw themselves as the ethnic cleansers under whose hammer blows the surviving Muslims would bow their knees at the cross.

The Russian Revolution, and the years immediately preceding and following it, challenged every assumption of the traditional Russian mind; including the most fundamental assumption of all: the unworthiness of Islam. Intellectuals and poets begin to respect Muslim culture. Architects, bored and disgusted by the flamboyant rococo splendour of St Petersburg, turned their eyes to the architecture of Muslim Bukhara and Samarkand. Here, they thought, was a harmony of man and nature, a celebration of beauty that was not titanic, but contemplative. The blue tiles of the Friday Mosque and the Shah-i Zindeh tombs of Samarqand seemed not to raise up a fist of defiance to the skies, as did the art of Europe; but to call down something of the peace of heaven onto the earth. Russian architects such as Melnikov incorporated Uzbek themes into their houses. A spectacular example is Melnikov’s design for the Soviet pavilion at the 1925 International Exposition in Paris, which borrows from the design of Central Asian Islamic tomb towers. Through works such as these, Western architects such as Le Corbusier introduced Islamic themes into their own design.

In the visual arts, this influence is also marked. There were other, often quite demented movements in the air also, of course: Acmeism, Cubism, Constructivism, and the rest. But among some artists, those with an eye still on the spiritual, the attractions of the Islamic sense of beauty proved too radiant to resist. As one architect, Andrei Burov noted of his generation: ‘There was a strong Mohammedan influence; and orthodox Mohammedanism at that.’

At this point, Kasimir Malevich steps in. Malevich was a contemplative and a mystic, who found European representational painting to be little more than a crude and loathsome conjuring with flabby pink limbs against heroic landscapes.

Malevich’s greatest work is a painting called Black Square. This is a square, painted completely in black, against a white border. He called it his ‘absolute symbol of modernity’, a modernity which he hoped would be pure and spiritual, as opposed to the congealed decadence of 19th-century Western materialism.

He chose the image of a Black Square because it is the total inversion of the Western tradition of recording the writhing diversity of the manifest world. He wrote, later, that when painting it he felt ‘black nights within’, and ‘a timidity bordering on fear’, but when he neared completion he experienced a ‘blissful sensation of being drawn into a desert where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life.’

What on earth could this mean? The modern British writer Bruce Chatwin, who knew Islam well, commented as follows:

‘This is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart – or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich’s Black Square, his ‘absolute symbol of modernity’, is the equivalent in painting of the black-draped Ka‘ba at Mecca, the shrine in a valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before God.’

Here we have the key to understanding Malevich’s achievement. In this painting, which for Muslims must be the most significant work of 20th century art, a cultured Russian finally breaks through the carapace of solidified reality, and intuits the nature of truth. Simplicity is beauty. And it is depth, instilling awe, and an authentic rather than sentimental emotion.

Malevich, in a moment of cultural turmoil, and of intense, blazing realisation, had stumbled upon the principle of pure beauty. Only the Real is real; manifestation and its diversities are chimera. The line between the two is razor-sharp: Qul ja’ al-Haqq wa-zahaqa’l-batil, inna’l-batila kana zahuqa. ‘Say: Reality has come, and falsehood has vanished; falsehood was ever evanescent.’ This was, after all, the aya recited by the Prophet (s) as he rode around the Ka‘ba, pointing with his stick to each of the 360 idols in turn, upon which they fell over into the dust.

Malevich died, and Socialist Realism ruled triumphant. But for a second in Europe’s history, the truth had been glimpsed.

At the centre of the Islamic religion lies the Ka‘ba. Uniting the aspects of the divine beauty and the divine majesty, it is ‘a place of resort and safety for human beings’. It lies in a city protected by the prayer of Ibrahim al-Khalil, alayhi’l-salam: ‘My Lord, make this land a sanctuary.’

The Ka‘ba has many meanings. One of these pertains to the Black Stone, which is the point at which the pilgrims come closest to its mystery.

‘Ali ibn Abi Talib narrated that when God took the Covenant, He recorded it in writing and fed it to the Black Stone, and this is the meaning of the saying of those who touch the Black Stone during the circumambulation of the Ancient House: ‘O God! This is believing in You, fulfilling our pledge to You, and declaring the truth of Your record.’’

The Ka‘ba therefore, while it is nothing of itself – a cube of stones and mortar – represents and reminds its pilgrims of the primordial moment of our kind. Allah speaks of a time before the creation of the world:

‘when your Lord brought forth from the Children of Adam, from their reins, their seed, and made them testify of themselves, He said: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yea! We testify!’ That was lest you should say on the Day of Arising: ‘Of this we were unaware.’’ (7:171)

When we visit the House, we are therefore invited to remember the Great Covenant: that forgotten moment when we committed ourselves to our Maker, acknowleding Him as the source of our being. The Black Stone itself is, according to a hadith which Imam Tirmidhi declares to be sound, ‘yaqutatun min yawaqit al-janna’ – a gemstone from Paradise itself.

The Ka‘ba functions, in the imagination of those who visit it on Hajj, or turn towards it in Salat, as the centre and point of origin of all diverse things on earth. It is oriented towards the four cardinal points of the compass. Its blackness recalls the blackness of the night sky, of the heavens, and hence the pure presence of the Creator. Allah tells us that there are signs for us in the heavens and the earth; and recent astronomy affirms that the spiral galaxies are revolving around black holes. A powerful symbol, written into the magnificence of space, of the spiritual vortex which beckons us to spiral into the unknown, where quantum mechanics fail, where time and space are no more.

The yearning for the Ka‘ba which sincere Muslims feel whenever they think of it is therefore not, in fact, a yearning for the building. In itself it is no less part of the created order than anything else in creation. The yearning is, instead, a fragment, a breath of the nostalgia for our point of origin, for that glorious time out of time when we were in our Maker’s presence.

That yearning is the central emotion of Islam. It is of the heart: the heart knows the Ka‘ba’s splendour; the mind cannot understand it: it is, after all, only a cube 12 metres high. Hence Jalal al-Din Rumi says:

‘The intellect declares: The six directions are limits, and there is no way out.

Love says: There is a way, and I have travelled it many times.’

And later he says:

‘By the time the intellect has found a camel for the hajj, love has circled the Ka‘ba.’

This fundamental emotion of the Islamic religion, which is in fact part of the fitra – the primordial human nature, the state of grace into which we were born – is love, mahabba, a painful desire to return to the beloved. Wa’lladhina amanu ashaddu hubban li’Llah. ‘Those who have faith’, as the Qur’an insists, ‘have the greatest love for God’. (2:165) To know one’s origin is to love it.

This nostalgic yearning to return, to circle back to the point of origin, for which the Ka‘ba is no more than the earthly symbol and reminder, is the most common theme in the splendid and subtle poetic tradition of Islam. Here, for instance, is a poem by the 13th century Turkish poet and lover of Allah, Yunus Emre:

‘We need to serve a King who never may be driven from His throne
To rest within a place which we may ever feel to be our own.
A bird we need to be, to fly, to reach the very rim of things,
To drink that cordial whose joy we never may disown.
We need to be a diving bird, to plunge into the waters’ flow;
We need a gemstone to recover such as jewellers cannot know.
To enter in a garden, there to dwell in contentment’s shade;
To pass the summer as a rose – a rose whose petals never fade.
Mankind must lover be, must ever search to find the true Beloved;
Must burn within the flame of Love – nor burn in any other flame.’

Islam is hence the religion of the Alastu bi-rabbikum: ‘Am I not your Lord?’. We follow the Great Covenant, unlike adherents of previous religions who follow lesser, local, ethnic covenants. The Ka‘ba represents our way of centring ourselves directly on the divine presence, the origin of all manifestation.

We need to ponder the divine wisdom in this. Islam appeared in a time and place where there was no civilisation. If a Quraishite Arab had travelled five hundred miles north, south, east or west, he would have found a developed culture. But Arabia was a pocket of primordial simplicity. And Allah subhanahu wa-ta‘ala chose this vacuum for His final message, the one that would end all previous covenants with Him, and gather the nations of the earth to the restored Great Covenant itself.

One deep wisdom to be gained from this is the fact of Islam’s simplicity. Our doctrine could not be more straightforward. The most pure, exalted, uncompromising monotheism: the clearest idea of God there has ever been. A system of worship that requires no paraphernalia: no crosses, confessionals, priests or pews. Just the human creature, and its Lord. The Hajj and Umra also take us back to an ancient time, as we wear the simplest of garments, and perform primordial rites that reconnect us with the symbolic centre, around the purest building there has ever been. The fast of Ramadan is also timeless: bringing us into contact and continuity with one of the oldest of all religious devotions. In fact, some ulema say that fasting is the oldest religious commandment of all: for in the Garden, the grandfather and grandmother of humanity were under only one instruction: to refrain from eating from a particular tree.

By stepping inside the protecting circle of Islam, the human creature is thus reconnected to the ancient simplicity and dignity of the human condition. Islam allows us to reclaim our status as khalifas: Allah’s deputies on earth.

But this is not limited to the pattern of worship alone. To worship according to one vision of man, and to live according to another, will inevitably provoke conflict in the soul. Some religions today allow their followers to live a fully mainstream, 20th century lifestyle outside the place of worship. But Islam knows that this is absurd. The focussing on the divine presence during Salat relativises and transforms our vision of everything else. When we turn away from the Ka‘ba again, we say, to right and left, al-Salaamu alaykum. The reconnection with the exquisite and ancient sacred centre brings a new attitude to the rest of our lives. ‘The salat bars us from corruption and ugly behaviour.’ That is, if it is done well, with hudur – presence of mind and spirit – then the rest of our behaviour will be refined. Poor manners, crude language, lack of compassion for others, are all sure signs that we are offering salat incorrectly.

This means that Islam does not distinguish between our lives of worship, and anything else in our lifestyle. And it means that the starting point for putting our communities right, is the establishment of the prayer, which redirects us to the point on which we are all united. Not only through public observance in the mosque. It is possible to go through the motions of the prayer, and pay no attention; and this is almost worthless. The hadith says, ‘The worshipper in salat is credited only with that of which he was conscious.’ And al-Hasan al-Basri said: ‘Every prayer in which the heart is not attentive is nearer to punishment than it is to reward.’

A besetting problem we face, which symbolises all our other spiritual problems, is that of the mechanical prayer: we proclaim Allahu akbar, but immediately show that we don’t know what Allahu akbar means. We turn on a kind of autopilot, awakening from a vague somnolence some minutes later with the salaam.

This is no good. Moving the body, and letting the tongue dance cleverly around the palate, are of no help to us. The very word salat signifies connection. There is little point in having a lamp if we don’t switch on the electricity: and the electricity comes through khushu‘ – attentive humility, an awareness of the majesty and nearness of our Lord, and all the divine beauty and rigour of which the Holy Ka‘ba is the emblem.

The act of salat brings us home: to the earth. The name of Adam, alayhissalaam, is said to be derived from adim – earth, dust. And Allah says that ‘He created him of dust.’ By pressing the forehead to the ground we recall our created and fleeting lives. ‘From it did We create you, to it do We return you, and from it shall We bring you out one more time.’ Three encounters with the earth – and we can escape none of them.

‘The slave is closest to his Lord while he prostrates.’ This is a hadith. We are truly Allah’s khulafa – His deputies and representatives on this earth – when our foreheads, the symbol of Pharaonic pride and defiance, are pressed firmly down; when the heart is higher than the head.

No umma on the planet has a more intimate relationship with Allah’s creation than do we Muslims. We know it as a universe of signs, which revelation teaches us to read.

‘Truly in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the succession of night and day are signs for people of inner understanding. Those who make dhikr, who recall, Allah standing, and sitting, and upon their sides, and think about the way in which the heavens and the earth have been made.’ (3:190, 191)

Salat is a form of dhikr. Allah commands Sayyidina Musa alayhisalam, ‘And establish the Prayer for My dhikr’, My remembrance. (20:14) And remembrance of Allah is the recollection of that original source and direction of humanity, at the Great Covenant, and the Assembly of Am I Not your Lord – the bezm-i alast. Hence our physical turning to the Ka‘ba, which is pure beauty, represents and recalls our acknowledgement of our primordial home, and our affirmation, again, of our loyalty to that promise which we all have made.

Hence the beauty, and the dignity, and the timeless poise of the Salat. By the salat, we affirm the glory of our Lord, through tasbih and bowing and prostrating. By the salat we affirm the pledge which we have made to Him. And by the salat we acknowledge that we do this only because sayyidina Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa-sallam, taught us how to pray. The prayer thus becomes the culmination of the sunna. It is the pillar of religion – whoever tears it down, has demolished the religion. Without it our recollection of our primordial source and origin has no meaning, and no sign.

The prayer, of course, was gifted to humanity on the Night of the Mi‘raj. This was the culminating event of Rasulullah’s prophetic story: his greatest glory, as he rose into the very presence of his Lord in order to behold His greatest signs.

In the divine presence, the Prophet (s.w.s.) was offered a choice. He was brought wine, and he was brought milk. As he chooses the milk, Gabriel, upon him be peace, says, Hudiyta li’l-fitra – ‘you have been guided to the fitra’ – the primordial, pure, natural disposition of man.

This extraordinary event deserves careful consideration. At the summit of his prophetic career, and hence at the summit of humanity’s history of relating to Allah, a lesson is given about the fitra; and we are shown that this is part of, and indeed the essence of, the Sunna.

The choice between wine and milk is the choice between corruption and purity. Milk is described in the Qur’an as khalisan – pure. Wine, by the very process which produces it, is at one remove from nature. It is a natural fluid, but in a state of corruption. It is interesting that in the modern world, consumers are very reluctant to eat food that has rotted, but are only too happy to consume fluids that are rotted and corrupt. And the process of fermentation is nothing other than a process of rotting. Bottles of wine rarely advertise a sell-by date.

So: hudiyta li’l-fitra. The prophetic figure of the Mi‘raj is told by the angel that the fitra is one of his traits. And this, by extension, becomes the nature of his sunna, in which we must all try to partake.

The picture is a little clearer now. Rasulullah (s.w.s.) is born in Makka, a city of ancient desert simplicity. He migrates to Madina, a city of ancient agricultural, peasant simplicity. The rites of his religion, culminating in the salat, breathe something of that purity and ancient humanity. They are not of our time: they make the habits of our time seem puny and undignified.

The modern world is in a panic about its departure from nature. The seas, air and rivers are rendered impure by industries which are the expression of human greed and the hatred of simplicity. Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, AIDS and male infertility are spiralling hints of the collapse of the species. The Rio conference urged a reduction in emissions, and hence of certain forms of production, but failed to explain how the forgotten virtue of zuhd might be made attractive again to people whose religion has lost its appeal, and who hence worship their pleasures and themselves. Ordinary people indicate their unease by buying organic produce, using aloe-vera shampoo, and shunning the synthetic wherever they can. And yet this is a return to form, not to content. It is idle to recommend a ‘natural lifestyle’ if one adopts it only as a style rather than as a significant affirmation of a cosmos that has a source and a destiny, and has been created to support humanity in its life of worship and affirmation of the Real. As Muslims, we affirm a natural lifestyle: and this is no mere pose. The retrieval of the Great Covenant demands that we live in accordance with the created norm of our kind. Shah WaliAllah observes that God has appointed a shari‘a for every species. And every species, when not oppressed by modern man, remains faithful to that shari‘a. But humanity is capable of forgetting, and of violating the message of his genes, his hormones, his gender, and his innate yearning for his source. This dysfunctionality is the essence of kufr, the process by which we hide our true natures from ourselves.

The road to the reclamation of our natural norm is open only in the form of the Sunna. Only the Muslims worship as did the founder of their religion. Prophetic Madina was a primordial city; and by following the pattern of life exampled by its luminous inhabitants we can genuinely retrieve our essence. The sunna is hence a lifeboat which allows us to move safely through the toxic sea of modernity, while sustaining ourselves from provisions which were laid down in an age before such pollution occurred.

Let us remind ourselves of the lifestyle of the Prophet (s). We live in a time of ‘lifestyle choices’; but for us, in fact, there is only one appealing ‘lifestyle choice’. Modernity holds up to us a range of ideal types to imitate: we can be like Peter Tatchell, or Monica Lewinsky, or Alan Clarke, or Michael Jackson. There is a long menu of alternatives. But when set beside the radiant humanity of Rasulullah (s.w.s.), there is no contest at all. For the Prophet is humanity itself, in its Adamic perfection. In him, and in his style of life, the highest possibilities of our condition are realised and revealed. And this is beauty itself: the word jamil, beautiful, which is one of his names, refers also to virtue. Ihsan, the Prophetic state of harmony with God, means the engendering of husn, or beauty.

Here is a condensed recollection, a kind of verbal icon, of that Prophetic beauty. It is paraphrased from a passage by Imam al-Ghazali, in Book 19 of his Revival of the Religious Sciences, Ihya Ulum al-Din.

‘The Messenger of God (s) was the mildest of men, but also the bravest and most just of men. He was the most restrained of people; never touching the hand of a woman over whom he did not have rights, or who was not his mahram. He was the most generous of men, so that never did a gold or silver coin spend the night in his house. If something remained at the end of the day, because he had not found someone to give it to, and night descended, he would go out, and not return home until he had given it to someone in need. From what Allah gave him [...] he would take only the simplest and easiest foods: dates and barley, giving anything else away in the path of Allah. Never did he refuse a gift for which he was asked. He used to mend his own sandals, and patch his own clothes, and serve his family, and help them to cut meat. He was the shyest of men, so that his gaze would never remain long in the face of anyone else. He would accept the invitation of a freeman or a slave, and accept a gift, even if it were no more than a gulp of milk, or the thigh of a rabbit, and offer something in return. He never consumed anything given in sadaqa. He was not too proud to reply to a slave-girl, or a pauper in rags. He would become angered for his Lord, never for himself; he would cause truth and justice to prevail even if this led to discomfort to himself or to his companions.

‘He used to bind a stone around his waist out of hunger. He would eat what was brought, and would not refuse any permissible food. If there were dates without bread, he would eat, if there was roast meat, he would eat; if there was rough barley bread, he would eat it; if there was honey or something sweet, he would eat it; if there was only yogurt without even bread, he would be quite satisfied with that.

‘He was not sated, even with barley-bread, for three consecutive days, until the day he met his Lord, not because of poverty, or avarice, but because he always preferred others over himself.

‘He would attend weddings, and visit the sick, and attend funerals, and would often walk among his enemies without a guard. He was the most humble of men, and the most serene, without arrogance. He was the most eloquent of men, without ever speaking for too long. He was the most cheerful of men. He was afraid of nothing in the dunya. He would wear a rough Yemeni cloak, or a woolen tunic; whatever was lawful and was to hand, that he would wear. He would ride whatever was to hand: sometimes a horse, sometimes a camel, sometimes a mule, sometimes a donkey. And at times he would walk barefoot, without an upper garment or a turban or a cap. He would visit the sick even if they were in the furthest part of Madina. He loved perfumes, and disliked foul smells.

‘He maintained affectionate and loyal ties with his relatives, but without preferring them to anyone who was superior to them. He never snubbed anyone. He accepted the excuse of anyone who made an excuse. He would joke, but would never say anything that was not true. He would laugh, but not uproarously. He would watch permissible games and sports, and would not criticise them. He ran races with his wives. Voices would be raised around him, and he would be patient. He kept a sheep, from which he would draw milk for his family. He would walk among the fields of his companions. He never despised any pauper for his poverty or illness; neither did he hold any king in awe simply because he was a king. He would call rich and poor to Allah, without distinction.

‘In him, Allah combined all noble traits of character; although he neither read nor wrote, having grown up in a land of ignorance and deserts in poverty, as a shepherd, and as an orphan with neither father nor mother. But Allah Himself taught him all the excellent qualities of character, and praiseworthy ways, and the stories of the early and the later prophets, and the way to salvation and triumph in the Akhira, and to joy and detachment in the dunya, and how to hold fast to duty, and to avoid the unnecessary. May Allah give us success in obeying him, and in following his sunna. Amin ya rabb al-alamin.‘

This moving portrait by Imam al-Ghazali depicts our role model, and simultaneously our ideal of humanity lived in the form of absolute beauty. His was a life lived in fullness. There was no aspect of human perfection that he did not know and manifest. And his perfection also indicates the nature of specifically masculine perfection. He was a great warrior; a sound hadith narrated by Imam al-Darimi tells us, on the authority of Ali, that

‘On the day of Badr I was present, and we sought refuge in the Prophet (s.w.s.), who was the closest of us all to the enemy. On that day he was the most powerful of all the combatants who fought.’

One of the Companions described him riding his horse, wearing a red turban and holding his sword, and said later that never in his life had he seen a sight more beautiful.

In 23 years he became undisputed ruler of Arabia. Through his genius and charisma, and the attractive force of his personality, he united the Arabian tribes for the first time in their history. He took his people from the depths of idolatry into the purest form of monotheism. He gave them a law for the first time. He laid down, in his mosque in Madina, a system of worship, self-restraint and spiritual fruitfulness that provided the inspiration and the precedent for countless generations of later worshippers and saints. In affirming the Ka‘ba, he affirmed beauty; so that all else that he did was beautiful.

And in all this, he attributed his success only to Allah. He was, as Imam al-Ghazali records, the most humble of men. He was forbearing, polite, courteous, and mild. He paid no attention to people’s outward form, but assessed and responded to their spirits. He forgave constantly. He was indulgent with the simple Bedouin of Central Arabia, the roughest people on earth. When one of them. who wanted money, pulled his cloak so violently that it left a mark, he merely smiled, and ordered that the man be given what he wanted.

All of this came about through his detachment. The veil of self and distraction was gone: he saw by the Truth. He knew his own prophetic status, but was not made proud by this. He said: ‘I am the first around whom the earth shall split open at the Resurrection – and I do not boast’. He knew his worth, but because he knew his Lord, he was not proud.

His sunna entailed living in the world, not running away from it. After the overwhelming experience of revelation on Mount Hira, facing the Ka‘ba, he went down again into Meccan society. He had his solitary times with his Lord, in the long watches of the night, forms of tahajjud so long and exacting that he forbade his companions to imitate him. He fasted in rigourous ways that he would not allow to others. He was detached, and yet in his world, and, in the end, commanding his world. He was truly the khalifa: the one who has no ego, and hence speaks, and acts, and rules, by and for Allah alone.

Living the sunna therefore means emulating his inner as well as his outer perfection. The sunna has to come easily and naturally to us, as the normal lifestyle of our species. ‘Not one of you has iman’, he insisted, ‘until his desire, his personal preference, his hawa, is in accordance with what I have brought.’

Today, among our Muslim communities, there are many who have not learnt this lesson. There are some misguided fools who imagine that one can achieve spiritual excellence without adhering to the Sunna. This notion, that there can be ihsan without islam, is a falsehood, repudiated by all the Muslims and the Sufis, since the beginning of Islam. For instance, Imam Jalal al-Din Rumi says:

‘I am the servant of the Qur’an, for as long as I have a soul.
I am the dust on the road of Muhammad, the Chosen One.
If someone interprets my words in any other way,
That person I deplore, and I deplore his words.’

Conversely, we can make no claim to be following the outward sunna, unless we have some share in emulating his inner perfection also. There are many Muslims whose body language and manners betray their ignorance of this insight. To pray, fast, eat halal, and observe the other aspects of the outward sunna, will produce only a lopsided, partial type of Muslim, unless we have been working on our inward lives. We need to watch the nafs, the ego, like a cat watching a mousehole. We need to grind it down, so that we become like light.

The Sahaba converted millions of men and women, most of them devout Christians, Buddhists, Jews and Zoroastrians, even without speaking to them. The Qur’an was not translated, and few of them learnt the local languages. But the sheer radiance of their presence, and the natural beauty of the sunna, with its graciousness, dignity and poise, won over the hearts of those who saw them.

Today it is possible to meet Muslims who follow the outward aspects of the Sunna, and yet do not cause hearts to incline towards them; but to be repelled. ‘Had you been rough and hard of heart, they would have scattered from around you.’ (3:159) We seem to have edited that verse out of the Holy Qur’an. If some of our activists, with their flak jackets, their Doc Marten boots, and their aggressive demeanour, could be taken back to the seventh century, it is unlikely that the Christians, Buddhists and others would have found them very impressive. They, and the Sahaba themselves, would have regarded them as religious failures, driven by anger and a sense of marginalisation into a religious form marked by aggressiveness, not the hilm, the gracious clemency which was the hallmark of the Prophet (s.w.s.), and without which he could never have won so many hearts.

The conclusion, then, is very simple. Islam is very simple. It is the religion which reunites us to nature and to God. It celebrates rather than represses human nature. It discloses the splendour of our Adamic potential.

Those of us who have lived far from nature, and far from beauty, and far from the saints, often have anger, and darkness, and confusion in our hearts. But this is not the Sunna. The sunna is about detachment, about the confidence that however seemingly black the situation of the world, however great the oppression, no leaf falls without the will of Allah. Ultimately, all is well. The cosmos, and history, are in good hands.

That was the confidence of Rasulullah (s.w.s.). It has to be our confidence as well. There is too much depression among us, which leads either to demoralisation and immorality, or to panic, and meaningless, ugly forms of extremism, which have nothing to do with the serenity and beauty to which the Ka‘ba summons us. But Islam commands wisdom, and balance. It is the middle way. And for us, whatever our situation, it is always available, and can always be put into practice. We are the fortunate umma in today’s world. Fortunate, because unlike Westerners, we are still centred on beauty. In other words, we still know what we are, and what we are called to be.

* Abdal Hakim Murad is a Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University, United Kingdom.