Rethinking Islamic Reform

Notes from the event by Yusuf Patel, Rethinking Islamic Reform, Wednesday 26th May 2010, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.

Note to the reader from Yusuf Patel: the statements of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Professor Tariq Ramadan are in bold to distinguish them from my own thoughts. They are not verbatim transcripts of what was said and are not necessarily in the order they were spoken. Please refer to the original audio for the exact contents of both speeches. Any errors are my own and as a result of the deficiencies of my own notes, which I would welcome being corrected on. Any observations are not meant to disparage either speaker but are merely my thoughts which can be freely challenged in the comments section.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf began by stating that it is always difficult to address an audience of Muslims and non-Muslims.

Muslims believe in a 1400 year old text, whilst non-Muslims do not.

Muslims believe in the impact of human actions on what happens around us.

He quoted Arnold J Toynbee, the Oxford educated British historian who wrote ‘a Study of History’ charting the rise and fall of civilizations,

Toynbee refers to the reaction of Muslims following the destruction of Islamic rule, he points to the two extremes of people in the aftermath of invasion and occupation,

Herodianism: Imitates the culture of the occupier, the example is of the vanquished Japanese after World War Two, they have imitated and overtaken American culture for example in their adoption of Rock ‘n Roll and their idolisation of Elvis Presley.

Zealotism: Falling back on the past with nostalgia. Saudi Arabia, Yemen & Afghanistan.

The former leads to a pale imitation of the occupiers whilst the latter is a dead end.

Reformation is from Islam, Islah is centred on rectifying something that has been corrupted.

The term reform is problematic. The better term is Islah, meaning reform. It stems from the hadith of the strangers. The Messenger salAllahu alaihi wasallam said, “blessed are the strangers, blessed are the strangers.” And who are the strangers? The people that rectify what has been corrupted of my sunnah (my way).

The shariah has the propensity to be corrupted by the people.People can repair Islam.

Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah preferred to use the term ‘renovation’, rather than ‘reformation’, because it is closer to tajdid. It is not about reformulating or restructuring Islam, because it already has a sound foundation, but requires renovation. This process has been ongoing for centuries.

He mentioned how there are competing interests calling for reform. You have gay Muslims, progressive Muslims all looking for a reform of Islam.

Lord Cromer, the British governor of Egypt, and a close friend of Muhammad Abduh, said: “A reformed Islam is not Islam” (“Islam reformed is Islam no longer.”)

Islam was a reformist movement to begin with, it challenged Christian sectarianism and the Jewish rejection of Jesus.He talked about how the Islam practiced today would be unrecognizable to the Muslims of the 19th Century. The Arabs (Muslims) believe in Ghairah (jealousy), of women, a want to protect them. If you look at Arab MTV it is just as racy as MTV, this is incredibly traumatic to see something like this happening in your culture.

The Muslim world has lived through an entirely different history to the west.
A few years back there was a big controversy surrounding the issue of women leading the prayer. Imam Tabari and Ibn Taymiya held the view that it is permissible for women to lead men in salah, Ibn Taymiya allowed this in nafilah salah if she had more knowledge than the men present and she led the prayer from behind the men so as not to distract them.

A minority of scholars believe it is permissible for a woman to lead men in salah, some argued that it is valid only for supererogatory prayers where the woman has greater knowledge than any man present.

This is based upon a weak hadith that has been misinterpreted to suggest the Messenger salAllahu alahi wasallam consented to a woman leading men and women in prayer.

The minority opinion of eminent scholars such as Imam Tabari and ibn Taymiya that accepted the legal permissibility of women leading men in prayer are not definitive. This is due to the fact that their schools did not continue after their deaths, therefore the transmission of this opinion and the process used to derive them cannot be fully verified. Imam Zaid Shakir discusses this in great detail.

The other point is that we do not seek out the opinions of the a’immah in minority opinions unless we are searching for a loophole. In the case of the Amina Wadud initiative in America that was replayed in Oxford last year, this was nothing more than the politicization of the salah. There was a fringe movement that wanted to challenge ahkaam in Islam about women, it was the Muslim re-enactment of the age old debates of feminism that men and women should be equal in everything, there should be no glass ceilings and if they exist, they should be challenged.

These discussions are nothing but a disease that left unchallenged would encourage weak/invalid opinions in order to bridge the gap between western liberalism and Islam. Although it is well know that Sheikh Hamza has a particular style of speaking that leans heavily on anecdotes and digressions, but how should the audience respond to the claim of a minority opinion allowing a woman to lead men in prayer? Should they encourage the sisters to lead or should they merely be tolerant of the opinion? Does the latter mean this should not be challenged? It is difficult to see how this fits into the discussion.

Sheikh Hamza talked about the existence of many ayaat that were non-qat’ii (not clear-cut in meaning), therefore there are many interpretations of the qur’an. He also said in the west we are very liberal in our tolerance of different interpretations as opposed to the Muslim world.

He did not say whether this was a good or a bad thing.

He quoted Ibn Qayyim’s prohibition of calling a fatwa of a scholar the rule of Allah. It is the mujtahid’s understanding based upon time and place.

Once the mujtahid exerts his effort to understand the text with sincerity, he considers this as the strongest opinion obtained through effort and is for him the hukm of Allah, this does not mean other opinions are not possible for other mujtahideen, who may prioritise some Islamic texts over others and reach a different opinion. It is well known that the mujtahid who reaches the correct answer after striving achieves two rewards and one who strived and did not achieve the correct answer gets one reward. If we trust in the ability of Imam Abu Haneefah and the ahnaaf in salah for example, we are trusting them to reach the hukm of Allah, this does not take away the correctness of the madhab of Imam shafi’i. In the current day and age these quotes have been misused by people that play fast and loose with the Islamic texts in order to bridge the gap between Islamic ahkaam and western liberal norms. I am by no means inferring this is what Sheikh Hamza was saying, because it isn’t, as is illustrated from the rest of what he mentioned, but in a time where there are competing pressures to accept every wacky opinion as Islamic from the legitimization of homosexuality to the acceptance of riba transactions to the permissibility of consuming alchohol that is derived from other than grapes and dates, scholars that have a following must exercise caution in how some of what they say may be interpreted or misinterpreted for spurious ends by the insincere.

He mentioned how there have always been reformist trends, Hasan al-Banna, Muhammad Abduh and Wahhabi reformers.

Sheikh Hamza focused some time on Al-Qaeda. Firstly he talked about a conference held in Makkah after the destruction of the Uthmani Khilafah in 1924, in which Ayman al-Zawahir’s grandfather, Muhammad, participated. The aim of the conference was to elect a khaleefah for the Muslims. After it was clear that consensus on a khaleefah could not be reached Muhammad suggested they should commence the janazah prayer in recognition of the death of the ummah. His grandfather was a scholar who helped write the Egyptian constitution and was from an aristocratic family. What happened in the inventing period for his grandson?

He also recounted being continually asked what his opinion of “sheikh” Osama bin Laden is? He commented he did not know how to answer, “he is a great guy”? Instead he rounded on the lack of Islamic credentials of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, the former is an accountant and the latter a paediatric surgeon. Who gave them the authority to give fataawa.

In a candid part of his speech, Sheikh Hamza spoke about his regrets at how his visit to George W Bush was used for nefarious ends. He made it clear he was invited to speak to Bush, he was not paid, and he was advised by his Sheikh to do it. George W Bush addressed a joint session of the Congress and the wider audience throughout the world, 9 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf was asked to attend. When Bush used his speech to assuage the Muslim world that the war to come was not a war on Islam by calling Islam a religion of peace and the terrorists blasphemers against god, the camera focused on Sheikh Hamza. Sheikh Hamza said that he was used and he showed regret.

He delivered this in his discourse on how scholars should not visit rulers. He said nothing taints your reputation in the Muslim community more than being attached to a government. He talked about the scholars of the past who ran away from working for the state. If leaders want to see scholars they should visit them and not the other way round. He highlighted that government’s are not altruistic, there are strings attached with government support.

He mentioned the Mardin Fatwa of Ibn Taymiyah, which was used as a justification for killing Anwar Sadat. Ibn Taymiyah was asked in the year 1302 about the status of the city of Mardin which had been overtaken by the Mongols. He was asked whether it was considered Dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) or Dar al-Harb (the abode of peace), as there was a question mark over whether the Mongols had embraced Islam faithfully and were adhering to it or did so to legitimise their occupation. Research by Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah suggests that the fatwa has been misapplied and suffers from mistranslation. It was meant to answer the question about occupied land where resistance is necessitated rather than terrorist actions seven centuries later.

Sheikh Hamza was happy with Obama being elected, when he was inaugurated, his hijab wearing grandmother, on his maternal side, was with him. He tried to illustrate this was good for Muslims living in America, a positive view of Muslims would be shown.

I found this very disappointing, my view of Obama from the beginning, if you take away the euphoria that followed his electoral victory, is that he is Bush with a smiling face. He has inherited and continued many of Bush’s policies such as the increase in drone attacks on Pakistan, the sabre rattling against Iran, the surge in Afghanistan that replicates the Iraq surge etc. He is nurturing the next generation of terrorists. As I took the train back to London from Oxford, I read an article in the Independent that summed up my feelings of Obama.

One of my problems with praising Obama is, that to do so prioritises the local and sacrifices the global. The Obama foreign policy of killing in the Muslim world is far more important than making life more comfortable for Muslims in the west. You cannot take a perspective which prioritises the latter in favour of the former. Unfortunately much of the discussion about what Muslims should do downplays global problems Muslims are facing and focuses instead on furthering parochial British Muslim community interests

His answer to the question about the khilafah was just as perplexing. He argued that the Islamic state is a dream, and that it was only envisaged for 30 years. The problem with these types of statements is that they are perplexingly vague.

Firstly, claiming that the khilafah is a dream is to discount a great deal of ayaat and ahadith that would be abandoned without a state that implements them, whether you choose to call this the khilafah, imamah, riyasah etc. It is not what you call it that matters but what is at stake is the standing of an age old consensus institution. Do we believe the shariah in its entirety ought to be implemented? If not we should edit the Qur’an, the ahadith, ijma and the mass of traditional scholarship that establishes the norm of implementation of the shariah and the unity of the Muslims as an ummah. The narrations which mention 30 years refer to the Khilafah Rashida, the rightly guided khulafa’a not the khilafah per se.

The fact that Sheikh Hamza chose to abstain from providing an opinion on the ‘work’ of the Quilliam Foundation is also disappointing, but this has been dealt with elsewhere. Although Tariq Ramadan did say 90% of the Foundation’s work is useless, I wonder which 10% he was referring to.

Tariq Ramadan talked about there being many interpretations of the Qur’an.

He mentioned that our motivation for reform must be driven by faithfulness.

Radical reform is not to adapt to the west but to return to fundamentals.

It is not Islam that needs reforming, it is people that needs reforming.

Tajdeed al-Fahm – reforming our understanding.

We cannot reform the pillars of Islam, its injunctions and duties or its prohibitions.

How can we live in 21st century Britain whilst remaining faithful to Islam.

We have to reform ourselves.

Reform is not to please the people of power, there has to be faithfulness of our intention.

There are people accepting money to call for a fake reform.

We have to have knowledge of the text and the context.

We need to understand the context in which we live.

The scholars of nussus (texts) need to work closely with the scholars of the Waaqi’ (reality).

The event as a whole was interesting for what was not mentioned rather than what was. No one could disagree with the thrust of what was mentioned, so what was the hype all about?
The topic was skated over rather than dealt with head on. Why is reform necessary? What does it look like?

The question and answer session was not very clear. Tariq Ramadan came across as sincere but with all due respect, his speech and his answers to questions from the audience seemed like he was thinking about the answers whilst he was answering, this seems like an experiment whose parameters, red lines and modus operandi have yet to be determined let alone a conclusion reached with clarity. Is Islamic reform/renewal/revival driven by the west, which seeks Muslims that reject the uncomfortable Islamic baggage of shariah, affinity to and with the Islamic ummah and a closer fit with western liberalism and the values that correspond with that? Or is it driven by a reaction to Al-Qaeda’s twisted interpretations of the texts, thereby justifying the targeting of civilians? Surely the pressure from the west needs to be resisted and the latter position has been challenged ad nauseam.

Those that attended the event to listen to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf’s unique spoken style will have been satisfied, those that came to listen to Tariq Ramadan’s academic thoughts on the subject will have left with a small summary of an aspect of his book on the subject. Those that attended to understand the subject will have left with more questions than answers.

[Taken from: http://yusufpatel.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/islam-to-reform-or-not-to-reform-that-is-the-question/]