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Summary: Does tolerance have a place in Islam?
Review: What a refreshing departure from the largely vacuous and incredibly simplistic discussions about Islam in the mass media! In this remarkable collection of biting, pithy essays, a number of prominent academics and intellectuals conduct a lively debate on the question of tolerance in Islam in light of the horrifying, sobering events of September 11, 2001. Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl, a scholar of Islamic law at UCLA, presents and defends his case for tolerance in Islam. Contributing essayists include Tariq Ali (an atheist and Trotskyite), Abid Ullah Jan (a rigidly conservative Muslim), Amina Wadud (a Muslim feminist), Stanley Kurtz (a rightwing American), Qamar-ul Huda (a partisan of Sufism), as well as such prominent academics as John Esposito, Milton Viorst, R. Scott Appleby, and others.Abou El Fadl opens with a moving essay on the place of tolerance in Islam. He is resolute in his opinion that tolerance does indeed have a rightful place in Islam and that fanaticism, particularly of the sort propagated by such monsters as Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, is the product of subjecting Islam?s sacred texts to totally ahistorical, decontextualized readings. He argues that extremist groups have always existed in the history of Islam. However, extremists had always been marginalized by the mainstream of Islamic legal thinkers, not a few of whom considered holier-than-thou terrorism an outright criminal offense against Islamic law. Furthermore, classical Islam thrived on an astonishing diversity of opinions, largely made possible because doctors of the law were free of state control. "The reality," says Abou El Fadl, "is that when compared to the puritans of modern Islam, classical Muslim scholars look like raving liberals." It is only after the colonization of the Muslim world that traditional institutions of law were dismantled and that Islam's doctors of the law were absorbed into the power structure of the recently imposed nation-state system. Such an alliance between the state and the religious establishment effectively ruled out divergent legal opinions and superimposed an obdurately conservative and narrow interpretation of Islam. Abou El Fadl understandably attributes the suffocation of contemporary Islamic legal thinking to this unholy alliance between religion and power. Furthermore, he reserves decidedly acerbic criticism for Saudi Arabia's notorious brand of puritan Islam, Wahhabism. Abou El Fadl introduces some startling facts about Islamic history, such as the classical debate concerning Islamic imperial expansionism and the poll tax. Apparently, the Prophet of Islam did not impose a universal system of poll taxes on non-Muslims and 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Caliph, made an agreement with certain Arab Christian groups for them to pay the zakat (charitable tax) just like Muslims. The responses to Abou El Fadl's essay are equally engaging, but I only want to mention the more interesting of these. Tariq Ali expectedly relegates the role of religion to an inferior place, exuberantly foretelling the rise of agnosticism and atheism in Muslim countries, and focuses on geopolitics to explain the rise of Muslim fanaticism. Stanley Kurtz, of the (neo-) conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford University, seeks to blame the population explosion and economic failure of Muslim societies for the rise of extremism - an argument that conspicuously avoids addressing the disastrous role of US foreign policy on the Middle East. John Esposito presents a careful analysis of the struggle between conservatives and reformers in contemporary Islam, and observes the pressing need for Muslims to reappropriate religious authority from the fanatics by way of classical Islamic legal theories. The most disappointing response of all is that of the Pakistani Muslim conservative Abid Ullah Jan. In his essay, audaciously titled, "The Limits of Tolerance", Jan turns the entire discussion upside down and directs belligerent questions about tolerance against the West instead. He absolutely rejects any designation of any Muslim group whatsoever as fundamentalists and puritans, insisting that they are all (he doesn?t bother to name them) engaged in "principled resistance", a rather bizarre description for what often constitutes terrorist activities. Jan also defends the integrity of the Taliban, without bothering to comment on their indiscriminate massacres of Shi'ite Muslims and their horrifying treatment of women, religious minorities, and foreign aid workers. Nowhere does he condemn the killing of innocent civilians by terrorist groups. He insists that Muslims who promote tolerance are simply self-hating, Anglophilic sellouts. It is not surprising then that Abou El Fadl returns the criticism in his concluding essay. It is unfortunate that many conservative Muslims, of whom Jan is but acutely symptomatic, are psychologically incapable of self-criticism where self-criticism is long overdue. As John Esposito says, "If Western powers need to rethink and reassess their foreign policies and their support for authoritarian regimes, mainstream Muslims worldwide will need to address more aggressively the threat from religious extremists." Looking in the mirror is apparently the greatest challenge for everyone. The need for Muslim introspection is precisely where Dr. Abou El Fadl has played so impressive a role before and after 9-11. Irrespective of whatever view one has on the question of tolerance on Islam, this book is a must read. A more diverse collection of essays on this topic, packed into so modest a number of pages, will be impossible to come by. This book highly recommended, no question about it.
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