Q. I am
Indian, and every so often these days, some of my non-Muslim friends comment
that in countries where Muslims are in the majority, they force other
communities to follow their rules and where they are in the minority, they cry
foul about discrimination against them. My friends believe that the flaw is
with the Islamic belief that it is the most superior religion – in fact the
only true path to God. Indeed the news we hear about the treatment of
minorities in Muslim countries is not encouraging.
Also, some say that even if
not all or most Muslims are terrorists, still most terrorists of today are
Muslims, so they must be deriving their inspiration from somewhere in the
Islamic scripture. In this day and age, it is difficult for me to understand this,
along with the association between religion and state. The Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) was the
final Messenger of God, so why the need to have Islamic kingdoms or states?
A. First
of all, instead of disagreeing with your friends, you agree with what is true:
that as far as we know, those designated as terrorists are indeed Muslims. But
then you ask: do such beliefs come from the religion, or is it from the
geopolitics? And why is it that we allow Christians to say that their religion
should be the main one in Christian majority countries, but not Islam in Muslim
majority countries? What we see now is a culmination of what happened after
1798 when Napoleon's invasion started colonization of the Muslim majority
areas. This was followed by the British doing the same. The Muslims reacted,
and as part of the fight against foreign domination, they resort to religion
vocabulary.
The problem is that the very
colonization that destroyed the Muslim centers of learning took away the power
of the trained scholars, and so today we see doctors and engineers all speaking
for Islam while the trained jurists are relegated to being silent onlookers.
The loudest voices in the Muslim world are not trained jurists, but activists.
In India you have one, Zakir Naik,
who without any formal training in Islamic Law, has now taken it upon himself
to misrepresent Islam as well as other religions. The modern Islamic state is based on medieval
polity, and most Muslim states have not made the leap from the medieval time to
modernity. If you read Karen Armstrong's "Islam," her chapter on
"The Coming of the West" is amazingly astute, so too, Khalid Abou El Fadl's "The Great
Theft."
Religionists, regardless of their faith,
typically tend to believe that their religion is the only one that provides redemption. The Indonesian scholar Nurcholish Madjid showed that
the Qur’an, when properly understood, is universalistic and accommodating of
other religions, which also lead to salvation. He cited Ibn Rushd
who maintained that all religions were equal, and all were valid paths to God. Nurcholish felt that once tawhid (monotheism) was understood as an inclusive, overarching
concept, within which every religion has a place, there is no scope for any one
religion to claim superiority over another, let alone wage war in defense of
its unique claim to truth. The Egyptian intellectual Nasr
Abu Zaid believed that the idea of Islam as a blend of religion and state is
a modern concept and was absent from the seventh to ninth centuries. He felt
that there must be a clear separation between religion and state in order for
religion to blossom and progress. In the absence of this, creed becomes a
religious and political weapon with which to persecute minorities and those
with differing religious and political views. Furthermore, Abu Zaid believed that
Shari'a law is human law and there is nothing divine about it.
Posted
April 20, 2016