Several writers challenged me to take the
next step and hypothesise the content of such a reform movement. The
nine thoughts that follow form an initial response to that challenge,
and focus primarily on Britain.
It may well be that reform will be born in the Muslim
diaspora where contact (and friction) between communities is greatest,
and then exported to the Muslim majority countries. It would not be the
first time such a thing has happened. The idea of Pakistan was shaped
in England, too. So were the history-changing characters of Mahatma
Gandhi, Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the pro-British
Indian Muslim leader Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.
British Muslims, who are mainly of South Asian origin,
should remember their own histories. In India, Muslims have always been
secularists, knowing that India’s secular constitution is what protects
them from the dictatorship of the (Hindu) majority. British Muslims
should take a leaf out of their counterparts’ book and separate
religion from politics.
Remembering history, part 2. Within living memory,
Muslim cities such as Beirut and Tehran were cosmopolitan, tolerant,
modern metropolises. That lost culture must be saved from the radicals,
celebrated, and rebuilt.
The idea that all Muslims are kin to all others should
be re-examined. The truth is that, as the bitter divisions between
Iraqi Sunnis and Shias demonstrate, it is a fiction, and when it
deludes young men such as the British 7/7 bombers into blowing up their
own country in the name of an essentially fantastical idea of Islamic
brotherhood (few British Muslims would find life in conservative Muslim
countries tolerable), it is a dangerous fiction.
Pan-Islamism, part 2: the people most directly injured
by radical Islam are other Muslims: Afghan Muslims by the Taleban,
Iranian Muslims by the rule of the ayatollahs; in Iraq, most people
killed by the insurgency are Muslims, too. Yet Muslim rhetoric
concentrates on the crimes of “the West”. It may be that Muslims need
to re-direct their rage against the people who are really oppressing
and killing them.
In the 1970s and 1980s the politics of British peoples
of South Asian origin were largely organised around secular groups,
mostly run by activists of Left-Marxist persuasion. The Black/Asian
unity of that period was broken, and then replaced, by the
mosque-based, faith-determined radical Islam that grew in part out of
the protests against The Satanic Verses. That ground needs to
be reclaimed (not necessarily by Left-Marxists) by creating truly
representative bodies. Then the increasingly discredited “leaders” of
the Muslim Council of Britain can be relegated to the fringes where
they belong.
Reformed Islam would reject conservative dogmatism and
accept that, among other things, women are fully equal to men; that
people of other religions, and of no religion, are not inferior to
Muslims; that differences in sexual orientation are not to be
condemned, but accepted as aspects of human nature; that anti-Semitism
is not OK; and that the repression of free speech by the thin-skinned
ideology of easily-taken “offence” must be replaced by genuine, robust,
anything-goes debate in which there are no forbidden ideas or no-go
areas.
Reformed Islam would encourage diaspora Muslims to
emerge from their self-imposed ghettoes and stop worrying so much about
locking up their daughters. It would emerge from the intellectual
ghetto of literalism and subservience to mullahs and ulema, allowing
open, historically based scholarship to emerge from the shadows to
which the madrassas and seminaries have condemned it.
There must be an end to the defensive paranoia that led
some Muslims to claim that Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks and, more
recently, that Muslims may not have been behind the 7/7 bombings either
(a crackpot theory exploded, if one may use the verb, by the recent
al-Jazeera video).
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