Schwartz on the "Islamic Reformation"

I once thought reform was the way to go with Islam, but I have since become so convinced that Islam is the most vile lie thrust upon humanity. I can not therefore in good conscience seek to see the reform of a cult that never should have existed in the first place.

Whatever happens to Islam in the future, its the past that still needs light shed upon it in order to cure this plague and free the minds of millions of Muslims that have been swept up in it all, to their sorrow.

Stephen Schwartz is blowing smoke. He is invoking the logical fallacy of ad hominem against all who support Islamic reformation. He decries them as something akin to being instant scholars, as though getting up to speed about Islam without devoting a lifetime to it makes one's knowledge inferior. Only persons steeped as deeply as himself should have an opinion, he implies. In fact, Islam is not excessively hard to understand. And, given the outstanding books available, including Mr. Spencer's two and even Schwartz's, anyone willing to read can get up to a working knowledge in a reasonable time

He also dives into "reformation" by obscuring the main point. He talks of Protestant Reformation in excessive detail, as though this is the main point, and he tries to make a square Islam fit questionably into a round Protestant or Catholic hole. The form Islam would take after Reformation should be irrelevant to the fundamentals of reformation.

To reform is to correct errors, abuses, evils, etc., according to any standard dictionary. Islam must be subordinated to the Rights of Man, namely the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness--the fundamental, philosophical four. This subordinates might to right and frees Muslims from within and ends the threat to non-Muslims without. Such a change puts Islam into the same legal and philosophical status as Christianity and Judaism in America. From there on out, it matters not at all what form or forms Islam takes internally.

The foregoing is what must be done from a philosophical, particularly ethical, perspective as well as an existential perspective. It can be done, not easily, of course, nor quickly. It is possible.

Islam is as Islam was. Schwartz seems to think that reformation should be abandoned in favor of returning to the good old days of Islam before it turned nasty. When, exactly, Mr. Schwartz, was that? His assertion makes me think (a) he does not know the history of Islam, or, (b) he wants to blow smoke up himself while smoke insufflating everyone else.

Islamic doctrine has been fundamentally static since about 900 A.D. when Islamists locked out reason and buttoned down Islam. During the very brief period when reason and philosophy could flourish in Islamia, things of science and beauty also flourished. When philosophy and freedom of thought perished, so did the science and beauty.

I do not know whether Islam can be reformed, i.e., whether Muslims will permit it. It needs to get off the backs of the world and out of our faces, and concern itself with itself only. If we have to beat Islam into plowshares to nullify its threat to us, that works for me, and the faithful can reform the pieces leftover.

Mr. Schwartz is a self-confessed convert to Sufi Islam, the most mystical of the varieties of Islam. It seems that his dedication to Sufism has fogged his reason in that he maintains objectivity only about Wahhabism.

"Non-Muslim "Islam experts" now abound in the West, many of recent mintage and superficial knowledge, and it is usually they who are loudest, most aggressive, and least respectful in demanding that Islam undergo a "Reformation"..."

I am getting so tired of this idiotic assumption that you are not allowed to criticize Islam if you are not a Muslim - or if you do, your criticism can be legitimately dismissed with no need for arguments.

Because Islam is not just a religion, but also a political ideology, Muslims can't keep pretending that it can only be discussed by religious specialists in a theological framework. Do I need to be a totalitarianist, in order to criticise totalitarianism? If one can criticize Communism without being a communist, liberalism without being liberal, Catholicism without being Catholic or feminism without being a feminist, then why on earth should one be Muslim in order to be able (or allowed) to criticize Islam?

Schwartz says,

"Beauty needs to be recaptured...as it was for the troubadors."

Where is the direct, self-conscious influence of paganism and pagan literature, and traditions of female power (literature like Sappho, traditions of the matriach, roles of women in the Gospels) and the simple appreciation for the delightful experience of human lust, male and female, in Islam? Where is Ovid? Where is Petronius? Where is Catullus? Where is Plautus? Aristophenes? Euripides?

Hyperbole seems to be some kind of acceptable scholarly practice for those who wax philosophical about 'Islamic reform' and 'recapturing Islam'.

What Schwarz must mean to say is that 'some' beauty needs to be recaptured in Islam, and that this 'recapturing' (whatever that will entail) should be something like what the troubadors did, but (disclaimer) that the beauty 'recaptured' and 'created' by the troubadors, and just about everything the troubadours did, have absolutely nothing to do with 'whatever' this beauty is. (You know, even with the disclaimer this looks like an exaggeration...)

And hence we arrive at the questions: what beauty are we talking about and what methods will we use to interpret that beauty?

I am confused.

I just wanted to tell you, the regular posters of JihadWatch, that a LOT of people read you avidly. Keep up the good work and thank you.

Islam doesn't need a Luther. It needs a Spinoza.

A few weeks ago one Muslim apologist, Mustafa Akyol, from Turkey, managed in an essay at www.frontpagemag.org to admit that there was something wrong with some of the canonical texts of Islam. He further conceded that if a modus vivendi with the non-Muslim world were to be possible, it would require changes in the canonical texts. But, said Akyol, it was only some bad apples among the collection so f hadith that needed to be re-examined and thrown away. Of course, he did not tell us just what latter-day Muslim or Bukhari would arise, and on what authority would perform this mighty task, nor did he explain why hundreds of millions of Muslims would take seriously such an undertaking – what, if not “Shaytan” (Satan) , would lead them to jettison those hadith that expressly encourage murderous hostility toward Infidels. If it was good enough for the last thousand years of Islam, does anyone think that Muslims everywhere are going to think the way Mustafa Akyol, or the naïve Irshad Manji, or the Muslim professors now making such a good living as “experts” for television networks, and even for the Pentagon and the C.I.A., especially those law professors with their grand and hollow schemes for “reformation” of Islam that merely serve to delude the unwary Infidels just a bit longer, all claim to believe? What “scientists” versed in the “science” of isnad, the study of the chain of transmission of stories about Muhammad, all the way back to the Companions, will dare to poke around and declare this or that isnad-chain unsound?

But even with this determination to rescue Islam from its growing army of informed skeptics and detractors, by offering the entirely impractical, essentially rhetorical concession that "something" in those texts had to be changed, needs further investigation. So often have we been told that the history of Islam, over the past 1400 years, has been one of “peace,” “tolerance,” and almost “lovingkindness” ----.so why is there all of a sudden a problem with this wonderful belief-system? Or could it be that Islam was never like that, that the murderous Jihad-conquests, and the persecution, and the reduction of non-Muslims to that permanent state of degradation and humiliation and insecurity known as dhimmitude in fact did go on, everywhere, and for centuries, but it all took place far behind Muslim lines, and went unremarked and unreported in the non-Muslim world, though occasionally some information did make its way to Western Christendom, which as a result of these stories, and of the unceasing Muslim raids along European coasts, kept Western Christendom properly fearful of Islam for more than a millennium – that is, until the last few decades, when constant Muslim propaganda, and non-Muslim confusion, and pusillanimity, managed to disguise this continuing reality. Mustafa Akyol thinks of himself, as a decent fellow, not a fanatic. But he remains unwilling to confront everything – including what is contained in the Qur’an itself. He has expressed a willingness to throw overboard – as the flotsam and jetsam and laban of what he may fear is otherwise the sinking boat of Islam -- some of its cargo: to wit, some of the hadith. But like Barbara Fretchie protecting the American flag from Stonewall Jackson’s troops, he will not allow anyone to touch a hair on the head of the verses in the Qur’an. He argues for “sola scriptura” – a phrase taken of course from the history of Protestantism, and Mr. Akyol must have been well-pleased to employ, for Islam, such a phrase, ludicrous as it may be. For the hadith, too, are in writing, and so is the sira (the biography of Muhammad). What he means, of course, is not “sola scriptura” in the sense of “only what is written” – and not the accretions of Catholic councils and customs, but “only what is written in the Qur’an.

So Akyol does concede that there is something wrong with the hadith. He even wishes to concede that some of the stories about Muhammad (e.g. the execution of the prisoners from the Bani Qurayza) may be untrue, or come from “inauthentic” hadith. But he refuses to admit that the hadith and the sira, in fact, are woven out of whole cloth of the Qur’an itself. And hee fails to tell us just who will be the new Bukhari, the new Muslim, and with authority from what source, and afterwards commanding belief from what Believers, to throw out some hadith now to be declared inauthentic because, in current circumstances, they are inconvenient for Islam, and dangerous to its health. And how will we know that these hadith are really the flotsam and the jetsam, and not the laban that is thrown overboard, only to be retrieved, for future use, later?

Now comes another apologist for Islam, whose personal spiritual journey may be likened to a ball that rolls under various items of furniture marked “Trotskyism” and “Summer of Love” and finally comes to rest under a cozy chair named “Sufism,” from which cozy chair Stephen Suleiman Schwartz is disinclined to get up and appears to have settled in for good. He calls himself a follower of “Sufism.” Now when most non-Muslims hear the word “Sufism” of what do they thinkf? Do they think of bad men doing bad things? Not at all. They think of youthful idealists, andof Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and The Bead Game, and attempting to find themselves, perhaps by looking in Afghanistan, or in an ashram, or on a commune on the “curvaceous hills” of California. Perhaps they think of whirling dervishes. Surely they think of those exquisite verses – for so many people have told them they are exquisite in the original, and how else would they know? – of Rumi, the great poet of Sufism. Schoolgirl gush and misinformation, most of it, as we immediately understand..

The word “Sufi” is misunderstood. Sufis do not only sit around amidst the roses and bulbuls of Gulistan in direct communion with God. Sufis can fight and Sufis can kill, and Sufis are instructed, as all Muslims are instructed, to treat non-Muslims with contempt or even hatred. Does Schwartz think there is a special peaceful and tolerant “Sufi” Qur’an? That “dreamy, mystical” Sufi Al-Ghazali insisted that Muslims, should participate in the Jihad at least once a year. In Schwartz’ own, private Islam, all the bad stuff is associated with Wahhabism, and only with Wahhabism.

Schwartz alludes to some ill-informed people, pseudo-experts on Islam, now calling for “reformation” of Islam. Who could these people be? The only people who seem to be calling for “reformation” in Islam are Muslims and ex-Muslims (the latter with great skepticism, out of despair). What non-Muslims are calling for “reformation” – are insisting, as he put it, that there be actual changes in the teachings of Islam, and therefore in the texts from which those teachings are derived? He does not name names. Schwartz himself does not exactly inspire confidence. His main claim to being an expert on Islam seems to rest on the fact that he is a “revert” to Islam within the past decade. So what? This does not turn him into Arthur Jeffery, or Snouck Hurgronje, or Patricia Crone, or Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, or any other real scholar either of Islam, or of Muslim history. He is just Stephen – Suleiman – Schwartz, one more Muslim among many.

Schwartz does not agree with Akyol that any “reformation” is necessary. He ismore akin to Bunthorne in Patience. He worries that if those bad Wahhabis have their way, all the wonderful creations of poetry, art, architecture that have come out of Islam will be destroyed, and beauty – ah, Beauty – will within Islam become the insect of an hour.

What can he be thinking of? Artistic expression in Islam is almost entirely limited to the architecture of mosques – and he certainly knows or should know the Byzantine models, such as that of the martyrium, that was copied for so much of that architecture, and to calligraphy, especially of texts taken from the Qur’an. No scultpture, no paintings of living beings. Mughal miniatures of mythical creatures, Majnoon-and-Layla, or assorted warriors and kings, are only partial exceptions – and they exist despite Islam, not because of it. Does Stephen Schwartz think for one minute that had Islam never been inflicted on Sasanian Persia, never come to Coptic Egypt, or Chrtistian North Africa, or Syria or Mesopotamia, that the artistic production from those lands would have been less? Does he think, knowing what he surely must know about Byzantium and its riches, that without Islam whatever civilization would have existed in Byzantium would have been less, or more full, of art works? Had the forces of Islam successfully conquered what is now Italy – say, by sea – in the year 900 A.D., and Islam remained triumphant there, what does Stephen Schwartz think Italy would look like now? Evben more beautiful and wonderful? Or would it look like Saudi Arabia? Or Algeria? Or Iraq?

The greatest works to come out of what is called high Islamic civilization were seldom encouraged by Islam. More often, they were produced despite the strictures of Islam. Schwartz knows just hw free, and un-Islamic were so many Persian poets, including Firdowsi the linguistic defender of Farsi, and pleasure-loving Omar Khayyam, What about art? Many of the earliest and greatest mosques and related structures were based on Byzantine models, and were the product of Byzantine craftsmen – including the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (a Byzantine martyrium), and the Great Mosque in Damasucs. He knows, from Ettinghausen and Grabar, how narrow, and how unoriginal, was Islamic architecture, compared to that of any other comparable civilization.

Yet, because Schwartz will not go to the texts, and he will not study the history of the treatment of non-Muslims by Muslim conquerors, and under Muslim rule, he refers us to some irrelevancy – the putative greatness of Islamic artistic achievement, which those dour puritanical Wahhabis would, if they could, destroy (and it is true that the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia have destroyed, razed to the ground, a great many edifices in Mecca and Medina, to the horror of many non-Wahhabi Muslims). But does this ever get close to addressing the matter at hand – to wit, the tenets of Islam, as they pertain to, and endanger, non-Muslims. That is the only thing, in the end, that non-Muslims have to worry about. We don’t agonize over what the Saudis did to an Ottoman fort in Mecca two years ago. But we do agonize over what the growing Muslim population in Europe, should it come to Islamize Europe in the next few decades, will do – not because of Wahhabi Islam, but because of Islamic tenets shared by all Muslim strains and strands – to the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, the Alte Pinakothek, the National Gallery. Not a theoretical problem, not a crazy hypothetical – a real problem, posed realistically.

.Kindly pass the poetry, and the Mughal miniatures, and the postcards of the Blue Mosque, and some Iznik tulip-tiles – and spare the art, says Stephen Schwartz, that in Islam is threatened by, and only by, those bad bad bad Wahhabis. No reform of Islam, obviously, is called for. Case closed.

No. Not at all.

I agree with Foehammer.Any one out there that thinks that Islam can be reform answer me this question.Are Irshad Manji,Stephen Schwartz and moderate muslim in general are willing to strap on bombs,cut off heads,kill for the reformation of islam because their opponents {the real muslim the nonreformers} are willing to do that and much more.To hope that moderates will reform islam is shear folly.It's like saying do'nt worry about Hitler and Nazism because the moderate nazi is going to take care of it.Dump all of islam into the dustbin of history.It belongs there with communism,nazism and slavery.

Correction on the Reformation and the Greek Old Testament: the Reformation rejected II Maccabbees because it wasn't in the HEBREW Old Testament--the source (along with the Greek New Testament) to which Protestantism sought to return. Note that its interest in the urtexten of Scripture also led it question the Latin Vulgate as well.

Dear Kepha1:

"Rejecting the Greek Old Testament" and "rejecting books that are not in the Hebrew Old Testament" are two ways of saying the same thing.

The question is which came first: did Luther reject the Greek OT because it was late, or because, as I stated above, it contained doctrines he disliked? Actually, the answer is both, as he himself equated the two.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

red makes a very interesting point. imagine an islamic martin luther w/ a following. would not the islamic counter-reformers engage in a jihad to eradicate the heretics?

Paul says,

"Islam doesn't need a Luther. It needs a Spinoza."

True--but Islam missed a much earlier "big boat" when it rejected Ibn Rushd, one of their own. Many of Ibn Rushd's treatises on the work of Aristotle leaked out of Spain into the hands of Europeans, including Thomas Aquinas, where they ultimately led to the Renaissance, and the Constitution of the United States. Because of his fondness for Aristotle, Ibn Rushd fell out of favor with his Muslim colleagues, his books were destroyed, and he barely qualified for entry into Paradise. Some even believe he died under "suspicious" circumstances.

olencratz says:

"I just wanted to tell you, the regular posters of JihadWatch, that a LOT of people read you avidly. Keep up the good work and thank you."

Thank YOU, olencratz--I sure hope we can make a difference.

Islam, we regret to say, grew out of the Middle Eastern region's human sacrifice cults. It was given a Judeo-Christian facade to hide its true nature. But, sad to say, Islam is designed to kill human beings. No reformation-- no matter well-intentioned-- can change this and neither will anything else ever be able to salvage Islam for the same reason. It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle--or, more appropriately, to remake a needle into a camel. 'A leopard cannot change its spots.'