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Book of the month

Islam and Liberty:

The Historical Misunderstanding

 

By Mohamed Charfi

Translated from French by Patrick Camiller (London: Zed Books, 2005). Buy this book >

 

Book review by Andrea L. Stanton

Andrea Stanton is a final stage doctoral student in modern Middle Eastern history at Columbia University, and an affiliated researcher at the American University of Beirut's Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES).

 

With Islam and Liberty: the Historical Misunderstanding, Mohamed Charfi has produced a carefully considered argument for the separation of Islam as a religion (unchanging, eternal, and divine) from the corpus of law and legal reasoning known as shari`a (produced in time, outmoded, and human) that developed under its auspices. His greatest contribution is his elucidation of how this occurred, and why it persists today. It persists in the Arab world because the public schools pass along its teachings to each new generation: these nominally “modern” education systems put in place by nationalist governments around the Arab world were given over to traditionally (kuttab or madrasa) educated, religiously conservative cadres of teachers. The result has been a disjuncture between what Arab state citizens learn in the classroom and witness in the street regarding the proper locus of their primary identity: the nation-state centered life of the modern citizen versus the shari`a focused Islamic state ideal of the medieval believer. This deep rupture within the souls of the past two generations of Arab world Muslims has contributed to the alienation of Arab youth from the modernist, dictatorial regimes under which they live, and has sent them instead into the arms of a rigid, legalistic, anti-modern, and religiously suspect Islam.

 

Islam and Liberty was first published in French in 1998 as
Islam et liberté: le malentendu historique. The title of the English publication, a 2005 revised and updated version of the original, translates the subtitle as “the Historical Misunderstanding”. But in French, “historique” can also mean “historic” – and the misunderstanding that Charfi wishes to rectify in the minds and hearts of his fellow believers is one not only historical (that is, lived in time) but also historic (of great consequence). What Charfi sees in the history of Islam is a harmful mis-recognition of the religion as defined by the shari`a and the caliphate. This historic mis-understanding has enabled the ulema of generations past and today’s Islamists to claim that Islam is a ‘total’ religion which can admit no separation between the political and the religious spheres. Instead, as Charfi asserts in his conclusion, “Islam is a religion not a politics, a question of conscience not of belonging, an act of faith not of force” (166).

 

The internalization of this mis-understanding among many of the Arab world’s Muslims has in turn enabled the mis-recognition of Islamism as the essence of Islam – a mis-recognition made as often by non-Muslims as by Muslims themselves. This confusion has locked ‘Islam’ into a rigid set of behaviors, social structures, and legal practices from which it is forbidden to evolve. Worse, it has kept Muslim and Arab Muslim peoples in particular from developing culturally, politically, philosophically, economically, and technologically as European (and Asian, though Charfi does not mention the Asian world) peoples have. Charfi faults the Arab world’s nationalist regimes for operating by half-measures: establishing modern structures and institutions while on the one hand, as with elections and other signposts of democracy, bankrupting them of their substance, and on the other hand being unwilling to own up to the consequences of their actions regarding the application of shari`a. What Charfi terms a “hesitant modernity” characterizes the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria, Nasserist Egypt, and even Bourguiba’s Tunisia to a degree. The modern institutions established in each state, which rested on the de-linking of Islamic and state law, were unsupported by the national education systems, which continued to teach children that shari`a and an Islamic state were the only legitimate structures for organized Muslim life. The result of this hesitation has been the production of two generations of adults whose belief in shari`a and the caliphate has made them doubt the legitimacy of the modern nation-state. When this doubt is reinforced by modern Arab nation-states’ conflation of “modern” with “authoritarian” (and, in many cases corrupt) states, the worldview inherited from their education make them increasingly receptive to Islamist ideologies (12).

 

Charfi’s purpose in writing is two-fold: to elucidate what Islam is, in opposition to what Islamists consider it, and to lay out both a rationale and a program for rebuilding the educational systems of the Arab world so that they work to reinforce, rather than undermine, an understanding of Islam that links it harmoniously with the principles of the modern world – and gives it the tools for further evolution in the future. He does so by turning to the past and the historical circumstances from which this unproductive joining of Islam to “Islamic law” and the “Islamic state” emerged. Arguing that the Arab Muslim world was colonized by European states because it had become “colonizable” (20), he asks how it came to pass. After all, there is nothing natural about Muslim ‘stagnation’: it was the result of a historical, and historic, choice – one that now must be un-done before it condemns the Muslim world (and particularly the Arab Muslim world) to the unhappy fate of falling culturally, economically, politically, socially, and technologically further behind. Ulema and caliphs together made the choice to declare that the essence of Islam was bound up in a certain relationship with law and the state; Charfi turns to both the Qur’an and early Islamic history to demonstrate the falseness of this claim.

 

Charfi notes that the history of Islam has seen moments of great productivity and creativity, and moments in which those elements have been stifled in favor of rigidity and dogmatism. “If the fundamentalists wanted to carry us back to the golden age of Islam, with its great translations of Greek and Indian scholars or philosophers and its peaceful yet exciting debates between Mutazilites and traditionalists, they would find much greater acceptance” (46), he suggests. But they do not: their preferred era is the medieval, which favored repetition and imitation of the practices of early Islam over reflection and scholarly inquiry into its principles. The practices established in the 7th and 8th centuries were far more progressive than the older practices they replaced. Yet the advances that early Islam offered then – the toleration of religious minorities, for example – have been superseded by the developments of the past 1000 years, and now appear retrograde. Charfi argues that the principles underlying tolerance, and not the same laws of dhimmitude, should be re-articulated in contemporary terms. Unlike those laws, Islam’s principles mesh with the modern world’s conception of human rights, and replace tolerance with equality. Charfi criticizes constitutions in countries like Syria that require the president to be Muslim, arguing that countries have “everything to gain by entrusting the highest office to the best candidate of the day” irrespective of his (or her) religious affiliation. Countries like Lebanon, which list individuals’ religions on their identity papers and passports, also encourage inequities among their citizens (47). He advocates for a state whose constitution and laws are religion-blind.

 

Charfi defines the two fundamental elements of Islamism as the calls for a return to shari`a and an Islamic state in the model, if not the actual return, of the caliphate. Regarding shari`a, he notes that Islamists themselves take three approaches to its various prescriptions. They have no trouble abandoning its outdated regulations regarding land ownership, which over the centuries have fallen out of use. They gloss over those aspects of shari`a that appear embarrassingly inapplicable to the contemporary world: its extensive body of laws relating to slavery and the taking of concubines. Despite their flexibility with respect to these first two categories of shari`a, Islamists insist on the full un-reflective application of shari`a in matters of penal law, personal status, and freedom of conscience – a major contradiction, as they say on the one hand ‘shari`a can be ignored when out-moded’ and on the other ‘shari`a is legislated for all time’. Charfi identifies this as “the real bone of contention between modernists and Islamists, since shari`a law is conspicuous for its anti-feminism, its inhumane penal provisions, and its blows against freedom of conscience” (41). Seen in the light of contemporary understandings of human freedom, shari`a’s treatment of women regarding divorce and remarriage, custody of children, public leadership, inheritance, and violence exercised against them by husbands and other male family members (44) is unjust.

 

By today’s standards, the shari`a’s position on freedom of conscience is equally outdated – and worse, Charfi explains, it is un-Islamic. He takes as his primary example for this the historical emergence of the death penalty as the shari`a punishment for apostasy, noting that it has no Qur’anic basis and only one weak hadith qudsi to justify it. Moreover, it was introduced only after the Prophet’s death, during Abu Bakr’s caliphate, where it served as “a religious cover for a political choice”, applied to tribes who refused to pay zakat regardless of whether they identified as Muslim (50). Putting people to death for ‘apostasy’ continued to be used as a political tool through the medieval and early modern era for silencing opposition or differing ideas, religious as well as political, but fell out of use in the past few centuries. Contemporary Islamists, however, have worked to bring it back – in the courts, as with Egypt’s condemnation of scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd as an unbeliever; or outside, as with the Algerian GIA’s assassinations in the late 1990s. For Charfi, this revitalization of a religiously suspect shari`a injunction provides “ample proof that Muslim law stands in need of deep and thorough revision” (54) – a revision that recognizes human freedoms, especially freedom of conscience. Actual apostasy is one concern, but the critical issue is freedom of conscience for individual believers to follow Islam’s teachings as they see fit, without unjustly being branded kaffireen (apostates): “the most urgent struggle is for Muslims to have the freedom to understand and interpret Islam according to their own lights” (55).

 

In shari`a’s treatment of the related matters of apostasy and freedom of conscience, as well as fundamentalists’ harsh interpretations of the hudoud punishments, Charfi sees three aspects: the original, liberatory intent of the ulema in formulating laws from Qur’anic principles, the erosion of its relevance over time, and the negative, holding back effect of the shari`a when applied today. To understand shari`a as the epitome of Islam ignores the reality that law, like social mores, is a snapshot of one culture’s norms at a particular moment in time. It also denies what is “immutable and eternal” about Islam: the foundational principles (62) it lays out to serve as a guide for believers in organizing their lives. The movement from general principles to particular applications was made by the ulema of Islam’s “golden age”; subsequent generations have erred in taking these applications as valid for all time. Charfi explains that these medieval ulema drew up the laws of shari`a by taking

considerable account of the economic, social, cultural, and political circumstances of their age. [However,] the legal system they elaborated is a human creation, one that was useful in its time and sometimes worthy of admiration but which has been overtaken in today’s much-changed circumstances (74).

After considering the various approaches used today by those who try to re-interpret the laws of shari`a for today (talfik, hermeneutics, and the elevation of the Meccan over the Medinan suras), Charfi concludes that none succeed. The task for contemporary Muslims is to free laws – human creations, applicable in a particular time and place – from the claim of immutability properly reserved only for the religion itself. Twisting the shari`a to serve modern mores defers, but does not resolve, the larger issue.

 

The second Islamist objective is the restoration of the caliphate and/or the institution of an “Islamic state”. However, there is no Qur’anic basis for either institution. The Qur’an is silent on matters of state and political organization, from which Charfi concludes that “the state and politics are not part of religion” (105). Moreover, the Prophet Muhammad did not create a state; nor did he appoint successors or outline any type of political structure, so there is nothing in the sunnah or the hadith qudsi to suggest the contours of an Islamic polity. Islam is agnostic on human political organization – it has no preference for the caliphate, regardless of what Islamists claim. Nor was the caliphate itself ever a truly “Islamic state”. It was a political system that used religion in service of purely political ends, whose linkage with Islam was solidified during Mu’awiya’s caliphate. Seeing the role that ulema unhappy at `Uthman’s consolidation of the Qur’an had played in his assassination, Mu’awiya took pains to conciliate them. He established the precedent of treating the ulema as the Islamic world’s sovereign legislators, with the caliphal government serving as a respectful executive branch (116). In return, they gave him their loyalty as well as a host of laws proclaiming the necessity for Muslims to submit to a Muslim ruler, and valorizing even tyranny (dhulm) over disorder (fitna).

 

The result, as Charfi notes, was the condemnation of Muslim society to be “stuck between a regime that represses people without restraint in the name of religion and ulema subservient to the regime” who will not jeopardize their position by criticizing it (117). The negative effects of the calcification of shari`a law and the joining of the ulema class with the political authorities in the Islamic world have produced the situation that prevails today, in which outdated, medieval laws and political structures are taught to students as if these are God’s eternal ideals for the organization of human life (84). Worse, this legitimization of state power by Islam’s religious professionals has inhibited the Islamic world’s intellectuals and philosophers from developing theories of human rights and democratic practices – not because Islam does not support these theories, but because the repression of them was carried out in its name (126). But what is the best solution? Must today’s Muslims now choose between the establishment of a national church, French laïcité, or an American style separation of church and state?

 

None of these models fits well in the Islamic world. If Charfi dismisses the claim that Islam is a total religion that does not admit the separation of powers, he also takes issue with the suggestion that Islam must fit itself into a pre-fabricated model of Western secular democracy. The Arab Muslim world must develop a new form, one that respects Sunni’s Islam’s refusal to establish a church-like structure of religious hierarchies. Charfi calls for a ‘fourth authority’ (after the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive) to be established in Muslim countries as a politically neutral “moral authority, whose decision-making powers would be confined to the running of mosques” and whose leadership would, like the judiciary, be independent of the other branches and its members elected by their local communities (129). (Imams would be elected in a manner like that of district and state judges in the United States, though perhaps without the same party affiliations.) Government legislations and constitutional amendments would provide the structure, while a supreme court free from political vicissitudes would guarantee the neutrality of this fourth authority.

 

Charfi’s proposal might seem to suffer from what Ambassador Javad Zarif described during the November 29, 2006 Dialogues panel on “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?” as “the trap of speaking to ourselves”: the false comfort that comes from assuming that moderate Muslims represent (and lead) the majority of believers. After all, none of today’s Arab states could be said to have independent judiciaries. What will prevent this religious authority from falling under the sway of either the Islamists or the authoritarian government that creates it? But Charfi is the first to recognize the frailties of a fourth authority established before fundamentalism has been defanged (and, though he does not stress this element, before the current authoritarian regimes are willing to cede their claims to total control of state and society). Before this authority can be firmly established, the Arab world requires the careful overhaul of its public education systems, and the passage of enough time for its teachings to take hold in a new generation of students, reducing the appeal of Islamism and its retrograde insistence on shari`a and an Islamic state.

 

Since Islam lacks the church-ly hierarchy of Christianity, it falls to governments to institute the Muslim world’s “cultural and educational revolution” (131). Charfi sees education generally as the critical influence on an individual’s life, with lessons learned in childhood determining the paths taken in adulthood (132). Hence Arab world public school educations that teach children that Islam, not the nation-state, is their identity, and that shari`a and an Islamic state are requirements for Muslim life, cannot help but contribute to the rise of Islamism and its rigid understanding of Islam. Nor do these lessons come only from religion classes: history courses, for example, that pass over the history of the nation-state (especially its pre-Islamic eras) in favor of a salafist Islamic history that begins with Muhammad and emphasizes conversion by force and the glories of the caliphate promote a “’religious’ rather than a ‘national’ patriotism” (67). Yet if the Arab world states commit to this overhaul, and

education is reformed so that it spreads modern ideas in keeping both with the essence of Islam and with the evolution of social and political structures in most Muslim countries, then the fundamentalist temptation will disappear once a majority of believers have been educated in the new system (134).

In other words, educational reform has the potential to bring a truly new kind of Islamic revolution to the Muslim world.

 

Charfi does not content himself with general statements about the need for educational reform. His suggestions address the content and attitude of the various social sciences and humanities as well as religion classes proper. He addresses the need to refurbish the curriculum and educational principles operative within the subjects of religion, history, and philosophy – while also paying attention to the ‘indirect’ lessons taught by the selection of texts and examples in other subjects. For example, primary school textbooks that show mothers in the kitchen and fathers in the office convey a very different message than those that show all family members contributing to both home and society (p. 158). Educational reform must include the teaching of the hard sciences as well. Too many Islamists have pointed to the engineers in their ranks as proof of their modernity. They have learned ‘science’ as a set of techniques, rather than internalizing the scientific method, with its combination of curiosity, inquiry, and productive skepticism about material phenomena (159). It is this latter that must be stressed by its inclusion in the education of all primary and secondary school students.

 

Charfi has outlined a bold proposal, with a program for action far more concrete than the vague prescriptions offered by other scholars writing on ‘Islam and modernity’ today. His reading of Islamic history is at once bold and sincere, and his focus on education is well supported by historical developments in the region over the past three decades. However, his prescription for change rests not with the individual believer but with the authoritarian governments who dominate the Arab world. He has made his case for the de-coupling of Islam from the outdated notions of shari`a and the Islamic state that hobble Muslims in today’s world. Now, he will need to sell these regimes on the benefits of the long hard slog that will be required in order for them to re-establish control over the educational systems they had ceded to centers of traditional Islamic learning, much as al-Azhar. He will need to convince them that the battles they will fight against well-positioned clerics and a pro-ulema judiciary will be worth their while – in the long run. Few states are willing to sow their seeds in fields whose fruits will require years to ripen. If Charfi can succeed, though, the world – and especially the Muslim world – will be the better for it.

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¹Remarks by Ambassador Javad Zarif, report of the “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West” panel discussion. Read the Report>.

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