The Foreign Service Journal, November 2011

of a divinity school would establish professorships in Bud- dhism, women’s studies, and the role of religion in inter- national conflict, as Father Bryan Hehir did at Harvard. In Islamic cultures, the foreigner’s extended hand receives no response; indeed, the gesture is likely to be rebuffed or misconstrued. Similarly, a Muslimmight try to proselytize a Christian or a Jew. But for him to engage in a genuine dialogue with them would suggest that their faiths contained some frac- tion of truth not found in the Koran, and fromwhichMus- lims might benefit for the more perfect worship and understanding of God. And such a possibility is literally in- conceivable to a true Islamic believer. I’ll never forget King Faisal’s polite but frosty dismissal of my naive suggestion — as a young chargé d’affaires in Jeddah in 1973— that much benefit might accrue to both theWest and to the Arab world, were Saudi Arabia to send some young Islamic scholars to divinity schools in the United States. A royal adviser afterwards reproached me for raising the question: “You were asking His Majesty to mingle truth with falsehood!” Terms of Engagement What could Muslims themselves do to rejoin the mod- ern world on terms consistent with our times and with Is- lamic revelation? Some thoughts follow. First and foremost, Muslims must try to escape from the flies-in-amber position in which history has placed them. What was revealed ever so long ago as canonical for Islam’s secular and spiritual life has become its prison. Islam, like other religions dazzled and overwhelmed by the Deity’s transcendent force, has elaborately sought to tame and to confine it so that it may be safely observed, or even put to useful work, by mortals. Or to put it another way: not unlike the clerical class of other faiths, the Islamic ulama has made of religion a sort of divine “containment vessel” — a rule book, a mechanical code that promises power and salvation to true believers. The various Muslim clerics and their supporters throughout the Arab world will naturally fight any chal- lenge to the lucrative monopoly of interpreting the Koran they have enjoyed for well over a millennium. But mean- while, the world is changing ever faster about them; it is leaving them, and the societies they purport to guide, fur- ther and further behind. The latest catastrophic failure of militant, political Islammay represent the death throes of a crusade that went badly astray. After Sept. 11, and after the Taliban’s destruction in Afghanistan, will many young Muslims still want to emulate Osama bin Ladin? Who now remembers the Mahdi, defeated at Omdurman by Kitchener in 1898, or the much-feared Assassins of Ala- mut, destroyed by Hulagu Khan in 1256? One may hope that the Taliban’s destruction, in partic- ular, will clear the way for Muslims to look again at where they are headed. At the “macro” level, young Muslims may begin to see the heretical nature of aggressive, “po- litical” Islam, which diverts its followers from the worship of God, and the pursuit of social justice, to a distracting crusade for power in this world. There is an idolatrous quality to political Islam that makes earthly power the principal object of Muslim aspiration. One thinks of Livy’s denunciation of any religion “in which the will of the gods is offered as a pretext for crimes.” And at the “micro” level, one sees young Muslims not refuting, but simply ignoring, the dysfunctional aspects of their tradition. Many sincere, pious Muslim men and women, are making their own “right reason” accommo- dations to modernity. They are acting as many Catholics do, following their own consciences on birth control and other social issues —despite papal claims to infallibility in faith and morals. With the Koran widely accessible to more-or-less edu- cated Muslims, Sunni Islam may be ready for its own “Protestant Reformation.” God in Islam has always had a personal, direct relationship with His believers: “I am closer to you even than the artery of your neck,” says the Koran. Might Muslims — from the ground up — be ready to break from the orthodoxy fastened upon them so long ago? The present moment may be right for the ap- pearance of a chastened, realistic, more flexible Muslim approach to the 21st century. If individual Muslims can strike out for themselves and, if necessary, reopen the “Gates of Ijtihaad” to legitimize new interpretations by contemporary scholars, there may be hope for their community’s reconciliation with our time. In Islam’s Arab heartland—Egypt, Syria and Jordan — such an initiative might creatively be led by educated, assertive, Arab professional women. Elsewhere, such an effort might occur in the Muslim diaspora — in Indone- sia, or India, or even the United States. And what about the Shiite branch of Islam? It would be ironic if Shiites, who accord great interpretive authority to their juricon- sults, the Great Ayatollahs, should lead the Islamic world to a more relevant and better adapted form of Islam. U.S. - I S L A M R E L A T I O N S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1