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Email articleFor Berman the martyrdom logic of Qutb is not just scriptural, based on an interpretation of certain verses from the Holy Qur'an. It is also cultural, reinforced by political events of the past fifty years. While Bin Laden and his suicide warriors came from Saudi Arabia, their broader roots came from Egypt via Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda, notes Berman, was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions - bin Laden's circle of Afghan Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from a school of thought within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim brotherhood, in the 1950s and 60s. At the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb - the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide.
Berman has no answer for the martyrdom logic of Qutb. "The terrorists speak insanely of deep things," he laments. "The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse." It is left to philosophers and religious leaders to speak up, loud and clear. The challenge, in other words, is to articulate what it means to be antiterrorist, to defend religion as a force for collective good and preservation of life, and not as a motive for violent destruction and the end of the world. We must be willing to engage the enemy, and to fight the real enduring battle of ideas.
Berman's diagnosis is apt but it needs a prescriptive sequel. If the real battle is the battle of ideas, then surely there must be Muslim warriors who also join in this combat. To fight a war to end war, the contestants must gather like-minded Muslims, Christians, Jews and Buddhists together against other religionists equally drawn to divine guidance but mistakenly intent on apocalyptic doomsday brands of scriptural truth.
In this anti-Armageddon battle a formidable Muslim warrior is the Shi'i activist and university professor, Abdul Aziz Sachedina. For Sachedina, as for a growing number of Muslim pluralists, the Qur'an must be read as a whole book of coherent intent and not as a scrapbook of conflicting messages. The largest intent is inclusive: to marshal all humankind on the path to peace, and that message prevails despite the contexts of aggression that evoked Chapters 8 and 9. The Qur'an presents Islam as the affirmation and the summation, not the denial, of earlier religions. Even later Medinan Chapters declare that Muslims have no monopoly on divine grace, either in this world or the next (2:62, 5:69); they also invite Jews and Christians to join Muslims in emphasizing the essential similarities in their beliefs (e.g., 3:64).
In his most recent book, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (Oxford 2002), Sachedina shows how Qur'anic ideals are formulated and also how historical developments rather than initial intent has limited their application. Again and again, the key interpretive move is not to dwell on individual verses but to read and understand all verses in their full context. To counter the verses used by medieval jurists to rationalize discrimination against non-Muslims, Sachedina discloses how the Qur'an projects an overriding concern with justice, as in the following passage:
God does not forbid you, with regard to those who do not fight you because of your faith, nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them, for God loves those who are just (60:8).The linchpin of Qur'anic logic is the universal scope of humanity. There may be separate tribes and languages, races and polities, yet all humankind was created to be one community, linked together and sustained by prophecy:
The people were one community (umma), then God sent forth the Prophets, good tidings to bear and warning, and He sent down with them the Book with the truth, that He might decide among them touching their difference. (2:213)Difference is therefore not social waywardness, but divine prescription. Within the overarching notion of a common community, above all marked through Abraham, the Transcendent intended there to be differences among the children of Abraham, Jews, Christians and Muslims. Those who could have been one united community are instead destined to be linked communities, each with its own law and its own way, in order that God might be the judge. In the meantime, believers are instructed not to fight each other, but to compete with one another in good works.
Looking Ahead
In all, there are three broadly divergent perspectives that claim the mantle of Muslim legitimacy. First, there are the ones whom Berman and other media mavens depict as the militants. For them Islam is self-empowerment in a world where Muslims are bereft of power. They invoke links to a scripturalist purity that they alone defend; they assert its truth in order to confront a shattered present with apocalyptic solutions. Only Armageddon is the answer, the route is different but the answer is the same, for Muslim terrorists as for their Christian counterparts. Second, there are devout Muslims those do identify with their own past but see that past as sacrosanct and not subject to debate or to change. Democracy for them is a Western power play, human rights are a US-backed ploy of the United Nations, women's liberation or feminism is an American subversion of Muslim women's dignity. These traditionalists are no less anti-American than terrorists, but they are opposed to physical violence or armed conflict except when authorized by extant Muslim governments. And finally, there are pluralists. Are they a minority? Perhaps. But they are not a belligerent minority like the Jihadists or Islamic extremists. Sachedin, with other Muslim pluralists, prize universal values, ascribing them to Qur'anic sources and applying them to contemporary contexts. The pluralists may be in the minority of all Muslim spokesmen but they are a zealous, restless minority. We do need religious voices to speak to the current fault line between East and West, Islam and America, and it is Muslim pluralists who are the philosophers and religious thinkers with whom non-Muslim others can and should make common cause.
