The West is largely ignorant of Islam and the Muslim world. Today, only Muslim progressive intellectuals are bridging the Islam-West gap. The West should engage a dialogue with moderates, but what is a moderate? And what do they have to say about Islam?

The West is largely ignorant of Islam and the Muslim world. Today, only Muslim progressive intellectuals are bridging the Islam-West gap by their education in the West and their passion for modernism, humanism, reason and the Enlightenment. Western intellectuals should similarly engage in a dialogue with them. These Muslim intellectuals are threatened by extremists who have no interest in having competitive views on Islam. By the same token, Western enemies of Islam also have an interest in keeping them silent, so to impose their neo-orientalism.

The good moderate Muslim

But how to recognise a moderate Muslim? It is not as easy as it seems, because there are different categories of Islamic reformists, and they are not all true moderate Muslims. Magdi Khalil (10) explains that there are three categories of reformists: the “seducers” who only try to give Islam a new look, but are in fact integrists trying to render texts more acceptable (e.g. Tariq Ramadan); the “modernisers” who are submitting texts to science and will interpret them according to the spirit and not the letter in the texts if there is any contradiction with history or science, and separate religion from government (e.g. Averroès, Ali Abdel Razek, Taha Hussein); finally, the “radical laics” who consider impossible to reform Islam (e.g. Egyptian Galal Amin: “reforming Islam means the end of Islam”) (11).

So, according to Khalil, a true moderate Muslim is someone who: first, does not think that jihad implies violence, be it defensive or offensive and condemns it unequivocally; second, interprets dogma in a way that is compatible with human values, and interprets in this way any text; third, does not believe that Islam is “religion and government”; and fourth, considers Islamic extremists responsible for international terrorism.

The problem: too few!

The problem for Khalil is that, whereas on the lands of Islam the majority of religious authorities are extremists, there are no organisation to represent the millions of moderate Muslims. And as to political authorities, they are only interested in religion when it serves their interests to manipulate it. It is therefore up to the moderates to organise themselves.

Nonetheless, it is also up to Westerners to learn more about the Islamic world and Islam, in order to get rid of prejudices and misperceptions that are the fuel of neo-orientalism. Perhaps the first step to make is to realise that Islam is not only the Middle East, which represents a minority, but also Asia, which is the majority. In particular, Indonesia, with 87% of the population being Muslim and the third largest democracy in the world (after India and the USA), is the proof that Islam is not incompatible with modernity and democracy.

The bad critics

The task is not easy though, as some famous critics of Islam can be overemphasising the negative side of Islam. For instance, Ziaudin Sardar considers Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan as wrongly conveying the idea that Islam is a danger for the West (12).

Unfortunately, we are too ignorant of Islam in general, and thus more prone to listening to disenchanted deserters of Islam. We are wrong though, as Timothy Garton Ash notes (13). Listening to Laden rather than Banna as a “truer” representative of Islam makes us stupid, and thus not free.

The Modernists

One prominent figure to read among modernists is Gamal Al-Banna, an Egyptian theologian born 1920, one of the most prolix liberal Muslims who reinterprets the Qumran according to modernity and humanism. He considers that freedom of speech must not be restricted and framed by any legal text or constitution because there would never be any constitution in the first place if there was limited freedom of speech. Freedom of speech must find its own limits but inside itself and not from the outside (11).

On the question of the veil, for him there is no issue: the Qumran does not impose the niqab, burqa, hijab, boshiya, chador or any veil to cover women; it only requires women to be prudish and virtuous in accordance with khimar (the principle of dressing modestly). The headscarf is a piece of clothe and clothes are a matter of custom and local traditions.

Gamal and the modernists criticise the dominating position in the Islamic world of salafism (return to the origins). It is a literal interpretation of the Qumran that tethers any progressive interpretations. Salafists narrow-mindedly consider that four centuries of development are minor in comparison to respecting the conceptions of an Islam in days of yore. For Gamal, and others, it is more important to study languages, and IT than old texts and their old interpretations: one hour of IT rather than one hour of prayer.

Know thy enemy

It is important to identify clearly who and/or what the enemy is. For this, the West must first fight its own neo-Orientalist imaginary that biases any clear definition of problems, and, second, learn about Islam and the Muslim world. Then, the West can and must help moderates fighting fundamental Islamism, without spreading islamophobia anymore. In this discursive battle, it is up to each and every one of us to inform ourselves, engage in conversations with moderate Muslims, and urge governments to help moderates in their fight.

Notes: 

(10) Political analyst, researcher, author, executive editor of the Egyptian weekly Watani International, and a columnist for Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper.

(11) This article was originally published in an arabian newspaper, but appeared translated into French in the weekly newspaper Courrier International, which collects articles from the world, in a special edition on “Islam and the West”, 1 February 2007, n. 847. See its website: http://www.courrierinternational.com/gabarits/html/default_online.asp
(12) Journalist, writer, member of the Commission for the equality of human rights in the UK: http://www.newstatesman.com/200612110045
(13) Timothy Garton Ash, "We are making a fatal mistake by ignoring the dissidents within Islam",Thursday March 15, 2007, The Guardian.

Vorschau Bild: Maqâmât (Versammlungen) des al-Harîrî, Szene: Abû Zayd spricht zu einer Versammlung in Najrân (42. Maqâmât). Maler von 1222. Buchmaleri. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale. Quelle: The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.

Bild 1: Averroes, detail of the fourteenth-century Florentine artist Andrea Bonaiuto's Triunfo de Santo Tomás.

Bild 2: Gamal Al-Banna in his office, Ashraf Talaat.