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Symposium: A revised Qur’an?

Apr 18, 2008 9:04 am By Robert Spencer

Today at FrontPage a panel discusses the effort by the organization Muslims Against Sharia to create a new Qur’an with the violent verses removed, and other efforts to reform Islam. The participants are Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims Against Sharia; Edip Yuksel, a Kurdish-Turkish-American Islamic reformer; Thomas Haidon, a Muslim commentator on human rights, counter-terrorism and Islamic affairs who has often commented here at Jihad Watch; Abul Kasem, an ex-Muslim who is the author of hundreds of articles and several books on Islam including Women in Islam; Bill Warner, the director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI) and spokesman for politicalislam.com; and me.

It’s a lengthy, fascinating, and illuminating discussion. Read it all, but here are my concluding remarks, which give some hints of the tenor of the whole:

Spencer: Nothing I have read in this elephantine and contentious exchange has led me to modify my view that, as Mr. Haidon has said, “Muslims will never accept, on any level, removal of parts of the Qur’an.” Not only are large numbers of Muslims ever likely to accept a drastically edited Qur’an, but they are also unlikely ever to flock to a wholesale reevaluation of Islamic theology involving the dismissal of the Hadith and Sira as “hearsay stories.”

Mr. Warner is correct: “And there is no mechanism for reform. Our results–good, bad or indifferent””do not make any difference. There is no body or group that could vote or agree on any change.” Many strange things have happened in history and I would never say that Islamic reform is absolutely impossible, but Westerners are extraordinarily foolish when they harbor any hopes of it actually happening on a large scale. We need instead to focus on efforts to defend ourselves both militarily and culturally from the jihadist challenge, and to continue to call the bluffs of pseudo-reformers who intend ultimately only to deceive Western non-Muslims — many of whom are quite anxious to be deceived.

Because of the entrenched nature of Islamic orthodoxy, and its willingness to commit violence to enforce conformity, I am skeptical of the claims put forward by both Mr. Massoud and Mr. Yuksel to the effect that Muslims are flocking to their reform efforts.

Mr. Warner’s insight is excellent — that “all scholarship in Islam is either from the viewpoint of the kafir (kafir-centric), the dhimmi (dhimmi-centric) or believer (believer-centric).” In a world in which dhimmi-centric and believer-centric studies dominate the universities and media treatments of Islamic issues, Mr. Warner and others have stepped into the breach and begun to provide kafir-centric analyses to help non-Muslims understand exactly what we are dealing with. I myself have tried to fill a gap in kafir-centric scholarship on Muhammad with my book The Truth About Muhammad, and on the Qur’an in my Blogging the Qur’an series at hotair.com. At this point, which such a fog of ignorance and propaganda enveloping us and impeding our understanding of the jihad threat, to be informed is an essential first step.

And Mr. Warner is also quite right, of course, that “for the believer, Allah is wise, forgiving, knowing, and so forth. But for the kafir, Allah is a hater, a torturer, a plotter, a sadist, and an enemy. Allah makes us kafirs. Then he goes ahead to tell the Muslims what filthy scum we are.” This dualism is deeply rooted in the Qur’an, which tells Muslims to be merciful to one another but harsh or ruthless to unbelievers (48:29), and tells them that they are the “best of people” (3:110) while the unbelievers are the “vilest of created beings” (98:6). Even worse, unbelievers have no control over their fate — while there are many verses in the Qur’an that assume that human beings have free will, early in Islamic history the proponents of this idea, the Qadariyya, were defeated, and human free will was declared a heretical infringement of Allah’s absolute sovereignty.

The guiding principle on this issue in Islamic theology has been Qur’an 10:99-100: “And if thy Lord willed, all who are in the earth would have believed together. Wouldst thou (Muhammad) compel men until they are believers? No soul can believe, except by the will of Allah, and He will place doubt (or obscurity) on those who will not understand.” Allah even boasts that he could have made everyone a believer, but instead will fill hell with humans and spirit beings: “If thy Lord had so willed, He could have made mankind one people, but they will not cease to dispute, except those on whom thy Lord hath bestowed His Mercy, and for this did He create them. And the Word of thy Lord shall be fulfilled: “˜I will fill Hell with jinns and men all together.– (11:118-119).

This put the unbeliever in the position of being a victim of Allah’s decision not to make him a believer — a decision over which the unbeliever has no control, but for which he will suffer. This only reinforces the idea that the unbeliever — hated by Allah, more vile than any other creature, is not to accorded basic human respect. The presence of such material in the Qur’an first demonstrates, along with the Islamic supremacist and violent material that is also in the Qur’an, that a Qur’an-only Islam would not necessarily be an Islam in which Muslims respect and live in peace with their neighbors as equals

When, however, Mr. Warner makes his excellent observations about the position in which Islam puts the kafir, the inimitable Mr. Yuksel responds by scratching his head in wonder that anyone would want to be classed as an unbeliever. “There is variety of kafirs (ingrates),” he informs us, “and each treated according to the severity of their hostility, aggression and crimes. For instance, the Quran condemns the ingrates (kafirs) for attacking weak men, women and children (4:75-76), and Warner’s feelings are hurt because we are asked to stand against those Kafirs.” But unless Mr. Yuksel is postulating that anyone who doesn’t believe in Islam will inevitably attack weak men, women and children, he is putting the cart before the horse.

The fundamental reason why the Qur’an demonizes kafirs is because they are kafirs, and any evil they do other than disbelieve in Allah flows from that disbelief. This is the sort of attitude, as Mr. Yuksel’s demeanor here abundantly demonstrates, that militates against establishment of the basic respect that is required for people of differing views to live together in peace. For orthodox Muslims, and even unorthodox ones like Mr. Yuksel, to be able to have that respect would require that they first reject all this demonization. But it is deeply embedded in the Qur’an.

Mr. Yuksel errs when he attributes to the estimable Abul Kasem this statement: “He accuses Jamie Glazov of relying on ‘unreliable hearsay stories’ for information about Muhammad, but fails to inform us that the great majority of Muslims around the world rely on those same ‘unreliable hearsay stories,’ and offers no program for convincing those hundreds of millions of Muslims of the historical weakness of these stories.” Actually, I said that, and I stand by it. Mr. Yuksel responds to this by saying, “If you had read the Reformist Translation or Manifesto for Islamic Reform you would learn that we offer a theologically consistent and very powerful argument to trash all those hearsay stories.”

That’s great, if it’s true, but that’s only part of what I said. Since Mr. Yuksel doesn’t deign to share his “theologically consistent and very powerful argument” with us, but only asserts that it exists, I can’t evaluate the chances of its gaining wide acceptance among Muslims worldwide, but that remains the key question. I haven’t heard of any of the established Islamic sects or jurisprudential schools or the ulama of any Muslim country embracing his vaunted Reformist Translation. Perhaps Mr. Yuksel would be so kind as to provide us with a list.

Mr. Yuksel again errs by attributing to Abul Kasem my objection to his Qur’anic numerology. I pointed out that another Muslim writer had noted the forced and artificial character of Mr. Yuksel’s apologetic, and concluded that “When Mr. Yuksel’s fellow Muslims so readily notice such inaccuracies in his presentation, it’s unlikely that many will accept his program for reform.” Mr. Yuksel, however, now tells us that his “opponents finally accepted their error.” In this, however, he did not simply ask us to take his word for it, but gave us a link — and I went there, only to find the Muslim source to which I had referred earlier saying this about Mr. Yuksel: “He is the man who published a list, supposedly of all occurrences of the word “˜day” in the Qur’an, and this list was false on its face, and even more false when examined in detail. If I have erred in my publication, I invite correction, something Yuksel does not do; in fact he hates it.”

This is Mr. Yuksel’s opponent eating crow? It is in fact illustrative of a trait Mr. Yuksel shares with the Islamists he abhors: an inability to engage in self-criticism, and the displacement of one’s own faults onto another, as in his complaint about Mr. Warner’s alleged “diatribes and vitriolic attacks,” when he himself is the only one who has actually engaged in such attacks. I am not saying, after all the squabbles above, that Mr. Yuksel is an Islamist; however, his attitudes are still redolent of the supremacism and contempt that characterizes Islamists. I respectfully suggest that his reform efforts would find better reception were he to rid himself of such attitudes.

Finally, he tells us that in his Reformist Translation we will “learn that the Quran justifies fighting against aggressor and violent Kafirs, that is warmongering ingrates, not peaceful ingrates like Kasem and Warner.” Unfortunately, given the widespread Muslim belief that a resistance to or even a simple rejection of Islamic proselytizing constitutes “aggression,” or that non-Muslims are aggressors against Allah for having rejected Islam, this is not enough to establish a framework for peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims as equals on an indefinite basis.

Finally, Abul Kasem’s question is highly pertinent and brilliantly put: “Mr. Yuksel, please tell me why must I not trust the most celebrated exegetes of the Koran, such as Jalalyn, ibn Abbas, ibn Kathir, Maududi and so on? Are you claiming they are inferior to you, or that they did not understand the Koran?”

To this, Mr. Yuksel answers only by telling us that he has answered this question elsewhere. Great. But in a symposium discussing the reform of Qur’anic ideas and Islam in general, it would have been nice if he had deigned to favor us with his wisdom on this all-important question. And his ridiculous finger-pointing Bible quotes, which are used today by no Jewish or Christian group to justify violence, have already been well answered by Jamie Glazov. But they put the coup de grace to any hope I might have had that we will see any real reform effort coming from such quarters.

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