Ave, Muhammad: a plea for reason in the debate about Islam

Illustration by Ruben L. Oppenheimer: http://www.rubenl.nl/. Text reads "Once upon a time..."

This essay, written together with my brother, was published on the front page of NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch national newspaper, on Tuesday 14 August 2007. The above title is ours; the title under which it was published is "'We invented our own Islam'" ["'We verzonnen onze eigen islam'"]. It was reprinted in a shorter form in NRC.Next the following day, under the title "Don't remain stuck in bickering about age-old verses" ["Blijf niet steken in gezever over eeuwenoude verzen"]. The full article in Dutch can be found here. The translation below is mine, and may contain errors.

We were raised in a Roman-Islamic fashion. Before going to sleep, we would say our nighttime prayers in the direction of Mecca. During Christmas, traditionally the dinner ended with a cognac-soaked Christmas Pudding. God, wise and merciful, sat on His white cloud and smiled at us benevolently. Occasionally, whenever our mother deemed it necessary, a little devil appeared to warn us. That's how we were taught the manners of the middle class.

At our Roman Catholic football club and primary school we were treated as friendly outsiders. Our friends went to communion and took their mysterious Confirmations. We were given days off from school during Eid ul-Fitr, and we undertook a minor pilgrimage wrapped in towels. Religion was a natural part of our youth. Everyone was religious in this picturesque Dutch village bordering the river Maas. We, those odd Muslims with beautifully curled black hair, were more or less understood and accepted.

After primary school we went to the city. At grammar school, being religious suddenly was no longer self-evident: nearly everyone there was atheist. Students and teachers questioned us. Each day promised fantastic debates. Of course we refused to become secular and give up our youth that easily. We defended ourselves. Our words and our curious form of religion were quickly accepted as its only genuine incarnation. Thus, we became religious authorities in the eyes of the lost and the heathens. To our dear classmates, it was as if we opened the mightily heavy door to the Orient for them.

Naturally, we could not slam this door shut in their faces. After all, that would have been impolite. So we invented our own Islam. At the same time, we became dogged apologists. We endlessly repeated Quranic verses that we found convenient. Verses that promoted the suppression of women were put into their seventh-century context, or simply forgotten. We created a mould into which we poured our belief. Just like Christians when they were confronted with midwinter celebrations. Just like Muslims who incorporated local traditions in their religion on each island of the Indonesian archipelago. We welded Islam into any form we desired. A grain of sand thus grew into a shiny pearl. Mohamed became a holy virgin. Our Dear Sir. Amen.

This couldn't go well for long. Journeys to our father's city of birth, Alexandria, showed us that the Islamic world as we had dreamed it up did not really exist. Rules were stricter than we thought. The pope was clearly less influential on the Egyptian mainland. We had become the true Orientalists. Edward Said could have made an interesting study of us.

September 11th came. Our story was no longer believed by our classmates. Both Muslims and non-Muslims no longer held us in full regard. The nauseatingly apologetic stories started to make us sick as well. We collectively decided we were no longer interested. We evaded religious discussions. It was quiet.

At the same time, the world was boiling. More than ever before, Islam became a study object. Text analyses popped up like mushrooms. Gray men, artists, imams from faraway mountains in Morocco, even math teachers: suddenly everyone had an opinion about Islam. Somehow, these opinions always had the same foundation: the Quran and the hadith.

It's always about the text. In itself, this is not surprising: the Quran is about the holiest of holy things in Islam. To Muslims, the Quran is God's son on Earth. Nonetheless, too much value is attached to the literal Quran. Both critics and pious believers find themselves in the same position, having completely lost any sense of depth. Both groups limit the study of Islam to a simple literature study. This can only lead to two conclusions: either the Quran shows that Islam is a violent and oppressive religion, or it proves that Islam is superior and immune to criticism. The grounds for an endless exegetic battle of opinions have thus been prepared.

According to its critics, Islam has never passed through a period of Enlightenment, so that Muslims still take the Quran at face value. In 2005, the influential weekly newspaper Elsevier published an article by Gerry van der List. While Christians interpret their Bible in a humanist fashion nowadays, "Muslims…are not capable of approaching the Quran in this fashion. They take everything literally and absolutise the word of Allah." The prominent Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse stated the following in 2004: "Islam upsets me because I am not too fond of a religion with a holy book that calls for the creation of a theocracy, by violent means if necessary." These and many other opinion leaders believe that the Quran should be understood literally, if only because that is apparently what Muslims do.

In the meantime, the pleas are becoming ever more aggressive and ridiculous. This year, a number of members of the Dutch liberal party VVD called for strictly allowing only a censored version of the Quran to be spread. Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, went a step beyond this as usual. He recently called for the Quran to be banned in its entirety.

Time and again, critics of Islam receive the chance to score points in front of a wide open goal. They are gladly assisted by figures such as Mohamed Bouyeri, the murderer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. After his crime, Bouyeri pinned Quranic verses on Van Gogh's body. Moderate Muslims have so far been incapable of providing a meaningful answer to these extremists, who are inspired by the same Quran as them. Instead, they evade any criticism by stubbornly maintaining that the Quran does not approve of violence, and that Islam is therefore a peaceful religion. The holy text and the prophet who preached it are not to be criticized. The indignant reactions after the showing of "Submission" and the publication of the Danish cartoons have shown that Muslims are still too easily offended. Mohamed Arkoun, an Islamic scholar at the Sorbonne University in Paris, already noticed it six years ago: "there is no intellectual development whatsoever in the Dutch Islamic community."

It is remarkable how much unrest, pain, and misunderstanding can be caused by theoretical text analyses. Naturally then, the discussions are going nowhere. It has been six years since the debate about Islam took off in the Netherlands, and we are still talking about burqas and veils. Those are boring and fatiguing. There is no noticeable progress at all.

While the discussions about Islam ground to a heated halt, we crossed the world's oceans in search of adventure and a place to breathe. One of us saw how Muslims united in the Indonesian Liberal Islam Network profess a constructively critical approach to Islam. Instead of literally interpreting the Quran, they appeal to human reason in order to translate Islam to modern times. In the east of Jakarta, they have joined forces with journalists, freethinkers and artists in promoting freedom of expression, freedom of press and freedom of religion.

Interestingly, many of Indonesia's most liberal Muslims have a traditional background, and have completed highly religious forms of education. From a very young age onwards, they have become familiar with the fact that Islam is experienced in many different ways. Instead of concentrating on the literal Quran in a monomaniacal fashion, they know the different traditions and interpretations of Islam. They view pluralism as normal, and even desirable.

Let us compare this to fundamentalist Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia. These people often have a modern background, having been raised in the city and often having studied science. Habitually, they only become deeply acquainted with Islam during their studies at secular universities. The organizations that introduce them to Islam are often radical and financed from Arab states. They offer social networks as well as a simplistic version of Islam, in which good and evil are easily distinguished from one another. The pious Muslim sticks to the rules, the deserter and the heathen do not. Ironically, these young and very modern people 'secularize' their own minds by refusing to apply critical and scientific methods beyond their academic discipline. That way, they shield their religion from any critical approach. This far-reaching reality cannot be explained by only looking at the Quran or the hadith.

At the same time, the other co-author of this essay was in the United States. He found that religion is far more accepted as a public identity in the United States than it is in Europe. This self-evidence of public religious life is an important reason why the integration of Muslim immigrants is far less problematic in the United States than it is in Europe. The sociologist José Casanova has observed that publicly accepted religious identities have been very important in helping new immigrants to adapt.

While immigrants in the United States discover that being religious improves their chances, Europe views them as a double problem. Not only are they poor, they are also religious. This can only further obstruct integration in European eyes. The ideal immigrant to Europe would politely leave his or her religion behind at the border. The fastest way in which Muslims can create truly equal opportunities for themselves is by radically secularizing, or even better: by becoming atheists.

Not just Islam, but religion per se is seen as backward by many prominent Dutch critics of Islam. They reject religion as a valid public identity. The age-old trauma of religious strife has still not been adequately dealt with. This explains why the debate about Islam is being waged in such absolute terms. The European solution, an almost holy form of secularism, is still interpreted as radically banning religion from the public sphere. It is therefore not possible to have an in-depth discussion about how religion is being practiced and experienced. This, after all, is a strictly private matter. Be that as it may, this 'strictly private matter' just so happens to determine why one Muslim becomes a radical while another does not. Text analysis in itself is inadequate in explaining this, because both radical and moderate Muslims read the same Quran.

In the meantime, we have both returned to the Netherlands. Admittedly, it was reassuring in a way to find the Netherlands in exactly the same state as when we left. But the lack of progress is starting to annoy and concern us. Too much depends on the debate about Islam to afford remaining stuck in bickering about age-old verses.

Everybody loses in a discussion monopolised by fundamentalists and critics, who all cite exclusively from the Quran to prove that they are right. The average Dutch person perceives a frightening black-and-white version of Islam. Moderate and liberal Muslims become estranged, and retreat from the discussions. Only the terrorist is happy, because he is taken at face value when he claims that he is only carrying out the will of Allah as stipulated in the Quran. Nonetheless, he also freely interprets the Quran: after all, we live in a modern society. If we continue to treat Islam as a colorless monolith, we are giving terrorists free reign.

Both Muslims and concerned Western intellectuals should start to de-sacralize the role of texts in the debate, so that we can arrive at a truly constructive dialogue. It is about time that we recognize and encourage different colors in religion. This also requires a less forced attitude towards religion in public spaces.

Muslims should guard against their religion becoming the victim of a uniforming type of globalization. It is already depressing that we can now eat the same tasteless hamburgers around the world. To sacrifice religion in the same fashion to a fundamentalist movement financed by petrodollars is not only sad, but also dangerous. Muslims, cherish the diversity in your religion! Critics in their turn should point out the differences within Islam to radicals, instead of always stressing the so-called "unbridgeable" differences between Islam and the West.

If God exists, He is probably not waiting for people to criticize or obey Him exclusively on the basis of His very own texts. He created people with a slightly more creative spirit, after all. The texts will always have a different meaning for each individual. That is why we could market our Roman-Islamic faith so successfully. Our religious beliefs may have been curious, but they were just as authentic as those of Muslims in Jakarta, Washington or Amsterdam. They were just as genuine as those of radical, orthodox or liberal Muslims. Not a single text has meaning in a vacuum. If Muslims only experience and defend their religion through its text, they are lost; if critics only attack religions based on their texts, nothing will change.

Timor El-Dardiry (1983) studied International Economics and International Relations in Maastricht and in Washington, DC respectively. He lives and works in the Dutch city of Maastricht.

Ramy El-Dardiry (1985) is a master student in Applied Physics at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He completed several months at the Jaringan Liberal Islam in Jakarta as part of his study. He is completing his graduate work in Amsterdam.

Sources

Arkoun, M. (27 October 2001). "In islamitisch Nederland ontbreekt elke intellectuele ontwikkeling". Interview in NRC Handelsblad.

Casanova, José (29 Juli 2004). "Religion, European secular identities, and European integration". First published in Transit (27): http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2004-07-29-casanova-en.html

Jaringan Islam Liberal (Liberal Islam Network): http://islamlib.com/

List, G. van der (18 June 2005). "De koran, een verontrustend boek." In Elsevier.

Pew Research Center (2002). "Among wealthy nations, U.S. stands alone in its embrace of religion": http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=167

Philipse, H. (30 September 2004). 'Scherpe denkers kom ik in Nederland helaas weinig tegen'. Interview in Utrechts Universiteitsblad: http://www.ublad.uu.nl/WebObjects/UOL.woa/4/wa/Ublad/archief?id=1010582

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