26 Mar Prosecution of Christian Highlights Deeper Conflict Between West and Islam
“[T]wo worlds often confront each other across the gulf between the West and Islam, worlds that the West would characterize as modern and anti-modern. To ignore this seems treacherous. But Western leaders have striven to confine the scope of the conflict. They talk of being at war with Islamic fundamentalists who have “perverted” their religion in the name of a murderous and fanatical ideology. They insist their quarrel is not with Islam itself. This is understandable: Islam is a great world religion followed by more than a fifth of humanity. No Islamic text exhorts the random slaughter of civilians, although every violent and fundamentalist group of the bin Laden school has tried to sanctify its actions through references to jihad against the infidel and claims to represent a purer, more authentic Islam. In reality, it seems, there is an overall conflict and there is a war. The war has been declared by Bush against Islamic extremism, the kind that produced the 9/11 attack. The overall conflict is illustrated in the Rahman case. Here, over the fate of a Christian Afghan, the values of the West and the values of Islam fight each other. They are violently at odds.”
Second, is Cohen right that traditional Islam accepts that someone who renounces Islam and converts to Christianity should be punished, even by death? This is a critical question for Rahman, for the Afghan Constitution guarantees the rights of followers of other religions to freely exercise their faith, but also provides that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” The BBC reports that the mood on the Afghan street is that Rahman should be executed. And this blog agrees with Cohen and argues that the death of Rahman would comport with mainstream Islamic orthodoxy. By contrast, an Islamic Council in Australia describes the prosecution of Rahman as “un-Islamic.” Which view is correct?
Informed comments on both questions are most welcome.
UPDATE: Andrea Elliott has a nice article in today’s New York Times that highlights just how rare apostasy executions are in the Middle East: just four in twenty years.
UPDATE: The case against Rahman reportedly has been dropped. Details here.
UPDATE: The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has this letter to President Bush on the Rahman case. It includes the following: “With no guarantee of the right to religious freedom for all individuals, together with a judicial system instructed to enforce Islamic principles and Islamic law, the door is open for a harsh, unfair, or even abusive interpretation of religious orthodoxy to be officially imposed, violating numerous human rights and stifling political dissent for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”
I think one of the issues is that there is little or no consensus about what is “Islamic”, so it;s very difficult to tell someone that their interpretation is right or wrong. What is Islamic appears, from my experience, to equate to ‘that which the dominant group in this particular organisational relationship has decided is Islamic”.
I have two questions: 1) Why might one be looking for ‘someone who speaks Arabic’ to answer the question? Many Indonesian Muslims, for example, do not ‘speak Arabic’ (some may read it). Are they thereby less qualified to answer the question? 2) And why are only political leaders in the Middle East sought for identification? The majority of Muslims live outside the ‘Middle East,’ are they thereby less qualified to treat this topic? Even generously defined, all the Muslims in the Middle East still amount to less than one-third of the total population of Muslims in the world (although of course it is true that the vast majority of those in the Middle East are Muslim). As I stated in the comment to another post: Islam speaks with a number of voices, there is no essence of or nature to Islam, ‘traditional’ or not. There are, to be sure, a set of beliefs we might ascribe to someone who calls himself or herself Muslim, but they do not include beliefs as to what to do in the case of apostasy. And one grows weary of the obsessive attempt to find this or that instance of some action, event, occurrence (what have you) as somehow revealing, instantiating, or exemplifying some pre-existing prejudice regarding a putatively ‘deep fission’ or divide between ‘the West and Islam.’ Richard Bulliet has made it quite clear that Islam was and is very much a part of the West (certainly the religious character of Islam is ‘Semitic’ in origin and its monotheism best placed in the historical and socio-religious context that includes Judaism and Christianity, rather than, say, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism…). To speak of ‘mainstream Islamic orthodoxy’ is to confuse the oranizational structure of Islam with something on the order of the Catholic Church. If indeed the case has been dropped and the issue goes away, we no doubt will soon be informed of yet another example that purportedly illustrates some deep fission between Islam and the West.
I think Patrick’s first question is somewhat..well…unnecessary, but as to the point about making Catholic comparisons I think he’s dead on. Catholicism is easy in this way – there is a Pope. Now we mightn’t always agree with the Pope but we always now what th Catholic line is. Islam is not like that, and we are hideously uninformed about its true nature in the West.
Patrick,
Nice clarification. I was thinking of those countries that impose Islamic law on its people, a majority of which are in the Middle East. It is their views of “Islamic orthodoxy” that is critical for this issue. But you are correct that not all Islamic states are in the Middle East, and even some that are, such as Iran, do not declare Arabic as their official language. But in my view there is such a thing as orthodox Islam, at least in declared Islamic states. To the extent the government imposes Islamic law on its people those obligations represent orthodox Islamic law.
Roger Alford
But those obligations change from country to country and even between regions in the same country. It all depends on how originalist/radical the mullahs at the time are and how much power the Mosque is given in such circumstances
Roger,
If the State is the de jure embodiment of Islamic orthodoxy, this in no way negates the contention that what counts for Islamic law will differ in the region (confining ourselves, as you prefer, to the Middle East): Islamic law in Egypt differs from Islamic law in Afghanistan, which differs from Kuwait, which differs from Saudi Arabia, which differs from Yemen, which differs from Iran, which differs from Libya…. What is more, Islamic law in modern nation-states has invariably been uneasily and unevenly conflated or integrated with civil and criminal codes of secular orientation, and it is not always the case that one can easily distinguish the two within a particular country. In any case, fiqh in one country is never identical to fiqh in another country. What is one to make of the fact that the traditional Islamic juristic discourses on rebellion (ahkām al-bughāh) ‘[have] been excluded from the legal systems of all Arabic-speaking Muslim countries’? Here there is agreement across nation-states in this part of the Islamic world, does that render this state of affairs normative (i.e., orthodox)? How does one justify privileging the modern situation over the traditional state of affairs as found in the classical Islamic world? Is the latter no longer ‘orthodox’ simply because it has not gained favor among those holding State power? The juristic culture in the classical period was, as Abou El Fadl explains, ‘semi-autonomous—influenced by the paradigms and institutions of the law, influenced by a variety of social forces and political powers but not entirely shaped by any of them. Significantly, Muslim jurists did not make a direct claim to power despite their position as the representatives to the Divine Law. They argued that the rulers should consult with and rely on the jurists as they formulated and executed the law, but did not claim that they (the jurists) should govern or rule society directly.’ How do we account for the fact that ‘Islamic history is replete with examples of jurists who were persecuted for their refusal to accept any judicial or governmental positions’? Does this render their juristic discourse ‘un-orthodox’ simply because it was not wedded to State power? From where does one derive the criteria by which the decision is made in favor of the modern predicament? The instant case is germane as well: ‘Contemporary Muslim jurists and scholars…differ as to whether apostasy simpliciter in the form of a person denouncing the Islamic faith is a hadd-type offence at all, and also as to whether it attracted rebellion against the State, where a Muslim-subject of the Islamic State after denouncing Islam joins with those who take arms against the Islamic state and thus commits a political offence against the State. [that would be reminiscent of the counter-revolutionary fears of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Maoists] The contention is that apostasy simpliciter, in the sense of an individual denouncing Islam without more, wherever mentioned in the Qur’an does not stipulate any worldly punishment but is only described as attracting severe punishments in the hereafter. The death punishment for apostasy was based on a reported Tradition [hadīth] of the Prophet that said: “Anyone who changes his religion, kill him.” Some Muslim scholars have however identified this Tradition as a solitary (āhād) Tradition while others allege weakness in its [chain of] transmission (isnād). It has been contended also that there is no precedent of the Prophet compelling anyone into Islam or sentencing anyone to death for apostasy simpliciter.’ [Mashood A. Baderin, International Human Rights and Islamic Law (2003), p. 124] As Baderin goes onto note, this meant that, in effect, the matter was placed ‘within the legislative discretion of the Islamic state.’ How, in any but the most stipulative (hence arguable) sense, does this license the ascription of ‘Islamic orthodoxy’ to such legislative discretion? Are there plural orthodoxies? And if they conradict one another? This would appear to render the notion of orthodoxy otiose. Where is the Islamic warrant for such a move? It certainly does not derive in any straightforward sense from Islamic juristic discourse. We might, if you prefer, call this ‘de facto’ Islamic orthodoxy (thus historically and geo-politically variable), but it’s another matter altogether to define this as de jure Islamic orthodoxy. The failure to make the distinction here amounts to an indiscriminate fusion of the positive with the normative. Much, much more could be said here. Instead, I would ask that you read Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (2001).
Patrick S. O’Donnell (March 26, 2006)
And, in any case, and perhaps most importantly, none of the above licenses the sort of grandiose and rather flippant generalizations about an alleged gulf between ‘Islam and the West’ that have become the stock-in-trade of pundits profoundly ignorant of the requisite scholarly literature.