Andrew L. Urban
The evil baddie of B movies seeks global domination, defeated only by the righteous and resourceful hero. The baddie is driven by a twisted hatred of the (western) world and its various perceived moral failings and/or past injustices against the baddie and his ‘tribe’. I dare to draw the analogy that we are now in a giant B movie, with increasingly tense and violent scenes across the globe, where Islam is the disgruntled but dangerous baddie. And, like the movie baddie, Islam has some defenders – for a variety of reasons, including political ambition and self interest. Casting agent would call Australian Labor …
In an open letter* to the Muslim world, French Muslim philosopher Abdennour Bidar writes that Islam has given birth to monsters and needs reform – from within. “Many believers have so internalized the culture of submission to tradition and to the ‘masters of religion’ (imams, muftis, sheikhs etc.) that they don’t understand us when we talk to them about spiritual freedom or personal choice vis-à-vis the ‘pillars’ of Islam. This is a ‘red line’ for them – so sacred to them that they dare not allow their own conscience to question it. And there are so many families in which this confusion between spirituality and servitude is implanted from such an early age, and in which spiritual education is so meager, that nothing concerning religion may be discussed.
“ … what I have described here – a tyrannical, dogmatic, literalist, formalistic, macho, conservative, and regressive religion – is too often the mainstream Islam, the everyday Islam, which suffers and causes suffering to too many consciences, the irrelevant Islam of the past, the Islam that is distorted by all those who manipulate it politically, the Islam that always ends up strangling the various Arab Springs and the voice of the young people who are demanding something else. So when will you finally bring about this revolution in society and conscience that will make spirituality rhyme with liberty?”
But while recognising his diagnosis, many within and without the Muslim world disagree with Abdennour Bidar that reform from within Islam is a realistic possibility, precisely because of the very elements he describes. Besides, the notion of liberty in this context is diametrically opposed to Islam.
In the age of postcolonialism, Muslims have become largely preoccupied with the attempt to remedy a collective feeling of powerlessness and a frustrating sense of political defeat, often by engaging in highly sensationalistic acts of power symbolism. These are not my words, but those of Khaled Abou El Fadl #, professor of Islamic Law, who adds, “It is not an exaggeration to say that Islam is now living through its proverbial dark ages.” He says “There is a profound vacuum in religious authority, where it is not clear who speaks for the religion and how.” Hamas would disagree, claiming leadership despite its status as a blood stained fringe element.
Instead of Islam being a moral vision given to humanity, says El Fadl, “it becomes constructed into the antithesis of the West. In the world constructed by puritan modes of thinking and their groups, there is no Islam; there is only opposition to the West. This type of Islam, which the puritan orientation offers, is akin to a perpetual state of emergency where expedience trumps principal and illegitimate means are consistently justified by invoking higher ends.”
El Fadl provides a powerful insight: “With the deconstruction of the traditional institutions of religious authority emerged organizations such as the Jihad, al-Qa’ida and the Taliban, who were influenced by the resistance paradigms of national liberation and anti-colonialist ideologies, but also who anchored themselves in a religious orientation that is distinctively puritan, supremacist and thoroughly opportunistic in nature.
“This theology is the by-product of the emergence and eventual primacy of a synchronistic orientation that unites Wahhabism and Salafism in modern Islam – what I call ‘Salafabism.’ The consistent characteristic of Salafabism is a supremacist puritanism that compensates for feelings of defeatism, disempowerment, and alienation with a distinct sense of self-righteous arrogance vis-a-vis the nondescript “other” – whether the “other” is the West, non-believers in general, or even Muslim women.”
Segue to Islam’s unforgiveable subjugation of women, enough to demonstrate the absence of humanity at its core. All religions are man made, but not all religions are so overbearingly and violently misogynistic. What’s to respect? Respect for a religion cannot be morally blind; we cannot be expected to respect a moral code that is immoral in our Judeo-Christian view.
Respect cannot be genuine if the recipient is morally un-respect-able; respect for a religion can only be justifiably extended if the religion connects with the notions of human decency that propel an enlightened and tolerant world. We don’t respect the profile of Christianity that brought forth the inquisition, for example. Nor do we expect our leaders to urge respect for religions that are nothing but manipulative cults, some of whose members have had to flee for their lives, as another example.
It is the irony of ironies that the religion of Islam demands respect when it is only because Islam is tolerated amongst non-Muslim nations that its adherents are able to so demand. That tolerance is increasingly reviled and receding with the experience in the rise of Islamic violence. Differentiation between ‘radical Muslims’ and ‘moderate Muslims’ is fading into insignificance when surveys show Muslims overwhelmingly (70% or more) concur with Islamic violence, from the Hamas butchery of October 7 in the kibbutz or the self-propelled butchery of December 14 in Bondi.
We don’t need a Royal Commission to recognise how the political ambition and self interest of the Albanese government portrayed its antisemitism and encouraged the father and son terrorists, propelled by a sense of Islamic mission and its glorified embrace of death. Why we do need a Royal Commission is to establish on the official record the tragic, unacceptable price of such political malfeasance.
* This open letter was first published on October 3, 2014, in the French publication, Marianne, and re-published on November 5, 2014 as Special Dispatch No 5873 in The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8206.htm#.VF_HstlgqKI.facebook
# Khaled Abou El Fadl is the Alfi Distinguished Professor of Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law where he teaches International Human Rights, Islamic Jurisprudence, National Security Law and Political Crimes and Legal Systems.