Review of Islam in NYT Book Review
The edition aims to highlight some of the most relevant historical, literary, political and theological issues informing contemporary discourse around the topic of Islam, as it is found in recent literature. The effort to shed light on such an important subject is laudable. What follows are my comments on the various articles and essays. They follow the order presented in the Book Review. 1. This issue of the Book Review begins with Tariq Ramadan’s excellent essay Reading the Koran. Ramadan is able to capture in a concise essay both the simplicity and the nuanced complexity of the Koran (Qur’an). Its simplicity is rooted in its ability to singularly address the believing heart. At this level the Qur’an is simple and universally accessible. Each person finds in its message, filtered through the prism of his or her personal experiences, knowledge, joy, pain, triumphs and setbacks, a distinct intimacy.
At this level, the message requires “no intermediary.” This is the basis of what Ramadan refers to as the dialogue that exists between the Qur’an and its reader. Ramadan beautifully captures the spirit of that dialogue.
However, the Qur’an is also nuanced and its message can be quite complex at another level, a more complex one that seeks to accurately understand the legal, social, and moral implications of the message. Here, the challenge, Ramadan informs us, is “to derive the Islamic prescriptions that govern matters of faith, of religious practice, and of its fundamental precepts.” Here literalism and dogma do not take one very far, although they inform much of the contemporary polemics surrounding discussions of the Qur’anic messages in the pontification of both Muslims and non-Muslims.
As Ramadan mentions, this is a domain that requires the specialized methodological tools of the Qur’anic scholar. It is those tools that allow for the productive application of reason to the divine text. That such an application is possible is illustrated throughout the long history of Islam, and captured in the rich literate we have inherited from the great Qur’anic exegetes. These methodological tools, would include a deep knowledge of the poetry and language of the Arabs, grammar, rhetoric, logic, knowledge of the Meccan and Medinan verses (signs) of the Qur’an, and other sciences that Ramadan does not mention.
Possession of those tools is augmented by the possession of a final, critical one that Ramadan does expound on-a deep spirituality that creates an inseparable fusion between the heart and the mind. It is this fusion that really opens the door to a faithful and deep understanding of the guidance contained in the Qur’an. In Ramadan’s words, “Reason opens the Book and reads it-but it does so in the company of the heart, of spirituality.”
In our day the need for a deeper reading of the Qur’an has perhaps never been greater, for the vast difference between the society that witnessed the original revelation of the text and the time we live in has never been greater. Hence, there is a tremendous need for a harmonizing between the text and our context, a harmonization that is impossible as long as there is not a deep harmony between the heart and the mind. Ramadan makes this point quite emphatically. If we Muslims are able to effect a reconciliation between our hearts, which are oftentimes blinded by the sometimes luminous, sometimes dark glare of the modern condition, and our minds, which are oftentimes numbed by the seductive illusion of certitude, then perhaps we can help to effect a reconciliation between not only the text of the Qur’an and the context we endeavor to apply its guidance in, but also between the various people vying for preeminence, or simply trying to survive in an increasingly interconnected world.
2. Irshad Manji’s review of John Kelsey’s, Arguing The Just War in Islam, is plagued by two of the tendencies that characterize her own works-namely, a strong ideological bias and the lack of a deep understanding of Islamic Law, exegesis, and methodology. Both of these tendencies work to undermine the seriousness of her scholarship and the veracity of her conclusions.
An example of the former is illustrated by her comment on Kelsay’s statement that in the light of classical Islamic legal reasoning civilian deaths may be justifiable “when an enemy’s military resources are deployed in the midst of a civilian population. …Soldiers whose actions take place under such conditions are excused from the guilt associated with unjust killing.” Manji comments, “That ruling would let Israeli Defense Forces of the hook for collateral damage in their 2006 war in Lebanon, since Hizbollah deliberately operated in residential Beirut.” Manji’s defense of the IDF would be more credible, but no more acceptable, if the destruction caused by the IDF during the war was restricted to the slums of southern Beirut. However, it does little to excuse the killing of hundreds of Lebanese civilians in areas where there was no Hizbollah presence, the wanton destruction of Lebanese civilian infrastructure, and the dumping of hundreds of thousands of cluster bombs on Lebanese fields and arable farmland. Are these to be glibly dismissed as forms of collateral damage that Muslims have no moral or theological authority to question because of a perceived loophole in classical Islamic strategic thinking?
The latter tendency is illustrated by her concluding remarks surrounding the Qur’anic verse that “tells believers that slaying an innocent is like slaying all of mankind unless it is done to punish villainy.” She goes on the mention the incumbency of “reform-minded Muslims” reinterpreting this verse. She then concludes that the nature of that reinterpretation “could well be the next chapter in reclaiming Shariah reasoning and the richness of Islam itself.” To reduce the reform of Islamic legal thought to the reinterpretation of a single verse, particularly the one is question is a highly untenable proposition.
Although Kelsay’s work is probably quite insightful, it is indicative of a genre of writing about Islam that is highly problematic. That literature seeks to explain developments in the Islamic world based on easily sensationalized cultural variables that pale in the face of the analytical strength of other more nuanced ones. In this case the cultural variable is religion. Manji quotes Kelsay as saying, “Those who wish to argue that Islam has nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11 or the tactics of Iraqi ‘insurgents’ will find no comfort here…”
The implicit assumption underlying this statement is that if we can understand Islam, specifically its legal reasoning, then we can understand why 9/11 occurred or why the Iraqi insurgents choose the tactics they do. I would argue that Islamic legal reasoning has little to do with understanding either. If suicide terrorism is the issue to be explained then Islam would give us little insight into what motivated the Tamil Tigers when they were engaging in arguably the prototypical-and to date the most successful-suicide terror campaign in history. If car-bombing is the tactic to be explained then Islam will do little to explain the ruthless campaigns of the Zionist Stern Gang in Palestine during the 1940s, or the highly effective campaign of the Viet Cong and their supporters during the American campaign in Viet Nam during the 1960s. How does Islam inform the tactics of contemporary Islamic radicals who employ such methods in ways that differ fundamentally from the two groups mentioned above? As Robert Pape demonstrates in the case of suicide bombings it would be far more productive to consider other variables.
If any one thinks that the application of “premodern precedents” goes further in explaining contemporary acts of violence in the Muslim world than globalization, foreign occupation, economic marginalization, inadequate education, and a host of other factors, then that misunderstanding will not only inform flawed policies for dealing with the current crisis, it will also help to perpetuate the type of ignorance that lends public support to those policies.
It is interesting the Book Review did not choose to highlight a publication that deals with the types of explanations I mention above. Pape’s, Dying to Win, Michael Scheuer’s, Imperial Hubris, and Olivier Roy’s Globalized Islam are examples of works that could have been mentioned in this regard. This is not to argue that Kelsay’s thesis has no validity. However, its true relevance is highly questionable.
3. Jeffrey Goldberg’s, Seeds of Hate, is a review of Matthias Kuntzel’s, Jihad and Jew Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11. Goldberg echoes Kuntzel is seeing the poorly packaged nonsense that is at the basis of Jew-hatred that does exist in the Muslim world as “scandalously ubiquitous.” The Muslim world is quite expansive, and it would be a stretch of the imagination to think that the sort of anti-Jewish hatred that appears in pamphlets littering some of the bookstores of the Arab heartland of Islam is widespread in places like Muslim West Africa, the Muslim nations of Central Asia, or the Southern Philippines. Even Goldberg realizes that we are not talking about a ubiquitous phenomenon and more accurately states at the end of his article, “Still Kuntzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East…”
The dubious nature of Kuntzel’s claim along with an indication of the nature of the scholarship supporting it is found his allegation that (in Goldberg’s words) “two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses.” These two leaders are the Palestinian, Amin al-Husseini, and the founder of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna. During his lifetime, to say nothing of today, it would be difficult to find a Muslim