Tolerating the intolerance in Islam

Mun'im A. Sirry, Los Angeles, California

In his article titled Is there a place for intolerance in Islam? (The Jakarta Post, March 26, 2005), Sukidi Mulyadi makes the argument that intolerance is not rooted in the Koran. He concludes that "Though the Koran does not provide a specific term for tolerance, the core idea of tolerance and pluralism is firmly grounded in the Koran." He further argues that the Koran espouses tolerant and pluralistic views.

To support his point, he frequently refers to Khaled Abou El- Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I have been studying for the last two years. Abou El-Fadl is well-known scholar, whom the LA Times crowned as "a leading critic of Islamic radicalism." But the book Sukidi referred to (The Place of Tolerance in Islam, 2002) is not his masterpiece, and Sukidi even failed to catch his main contentions.

This book was written in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy as a response to the ambiguous attitude of many Muslims toward the attacks. As we know, many Muslims condemned the attacks as un- Islamic. But Abou El-Fadl felt that this response amounted to an evasion. In his opinion, the attacks didn't represent a deviation from mainstream Islam, rather they reflected a crisis at the core of the faith, the logical conclusion of "a puritanical and ethically oblivious form of Islam [that] has predominated since the 1970s."

From this stand point, he launches a fierce criticism of what Sukidi calls "the Wahhabi creed," a rigidly puritanical branch of Islam exported from and subsidized by the government of Saudi Arabia. What is so distinct about Wahhabism is its destructive nature when religion is used by the state for political ends. And, unlike other traditions that accommodate dissenting views, the Wahhabis claim to possess an undebatable vision of "true Islam."

This is the kind of political intolerance that Abou El-Fadl wanted to stop. Centuries of Islamic intellectual development had been destroyed by the "rampant apologetics" of Muslim thinkers, which had produced a culture that eschews self-critical and introspective insight and embraces the projection of blame and a fantasy-like level of confidence and arrogance. I do think Abou El-Fadl's message is clear: Don't ever tolerate intolerance!

Abou El-Fadl had for years been making essentially the same argument in his scholarly writings, particularly the books And God knows the Soldiers (1997) and Speaking in God's Name (2001). With imams justifying suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq, Abou El-Fadl voiced concerns that Islam had been "rendered subservient to political experience and symbolic displays of power."

The question now arises: how to envision pluralistic and tolerant Islam?

I think Abou El-Fadl only provides a half answer, that is, by suggesting an emphasis on the role of human agency. "The text will be authoritarian," he contends, "if the reader is authoritarian." In fact, it is not a new approach. Ali bin Abi Talib (d. 661) is recorded as having said, "The Koran does not talk by itself, but human beings make it talk (al-Qur'an la yantiq bi lisanin, wa innama yantiqu bihi al-insan)."

The other half part of the answer lies in the fact that Islamic texts (whether the Koran or those from the prophetic tradition) lack a coherent vision about Islam's attitude toward other religions. It is not merely because the Islamic texts do not contain a specific term for tolerance (tasamuh), as Sukidi suggests, but mostly because they build the construction of tolerance on ambiguous foundations.

Even a superficial perusal of the Koranic passages that deal with Jews, Christians, and (occasionally) other monotheists, including the passage referring more generally to the ahl al- kitab (people of the Book), will reveal a lack of uniformity in the Koranic attitude toward these groups. That is to say, some passages are quite positive in their evaluation of the ahl al- kitab or some specific groups of them, whereas others are quite negative. When the Koran refers to the ahl al-kitab as a whole, the tone of the passages are usually positive, whereas verses with negative overtones usually occur when the Koran talks about them by name.

This lack of uniformity is not exclusively related to the Islamic texts. All other religions suffer the same textual problem. Prof. Johan Galtung, a renowned scholar and director of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, refers to the conflicting elements within each religion as the "hard and soft elements." In his thoughtful essay, Religion, Hard, and Soft, he says, "Every religion contains, in varying degrees, elements of the soft and the hard. For the sake of world peace, dialogue within religions and among them must strengthen the softer aspects" (Cross Currents, Winter 1997).

Herein lies the problem. Those who are in favor of religious dialogue and peace tend to use "the soft elements" of the Koranic verses to support their claim, such as "O humankind. We (God) have created you male and female, and made you into communities and tribes, so that you may know one another. Surely the noblest amongst you in the sight of God is the most God-fearing of you" (QS. 49:13), or "Those who believe, those who follow Jewish scripture, the Christians, the Sabians, any who believe in God and the Last Day, and do good, all shall have their reward with their Lord and they will not come to fear or grief" (QS. 5: 72).

On the other hand, those who hold a fundamentalist world-view tend to impose their religious vision on others based on the "hard elements," such as the jihadi verses: "Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in God nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which God hath forbidden by His Messenger, and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low" (QS. 9:29).

I would argue that this textual problem will remain unresolved as long as both the pluralist and fundamentalist camps embrace their own favorite verses and avoid an intellectual and constructive discussion on this very issue. It is also worth noting here that the failure of the pluralist camp to promote a new approach to the understanding of the jihadi verses makes their version of (liberalized) Islam less appealing to a wider audience.

It is not sufficient to say that the exclusivist interpretations of the Koran that are premised on the hegemony of Islam over non-Islam are outdated in a global society in which relations between different people are best fostered on the basis of equality and mutual respect. For Muslims to participate in the multi-religious and multi-cultural world of the twenty-first century, it is essential that they fully understand the nature of this modern (or even postmodern) world by actively advocating reform in religious texts and practices to make Islam more relevant to the demands of the contemporary world.

I think Abou El-Fadl has tried to apply a new approach involving the re-reading of certain hard elements of the Koranic injunction, such as the issue of jihad, jizya (poll tax), etc., even though he has not been very successful. We should never stop rethinking our religion so as to bring it into line with the changing circumstances of a new age. Otherwise, I am afraid that Western critic Robert Spencer's book, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (2005), will be found to contain some element of truth.

The writer is a Fulbright student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA. He can be reached at masirry@yahoo.com.