Change agents: the voices of Muslim reformers

MOST MUSLIM leaders in England responded to the terrorist bombings in London with unequivocal condemnation. Yet the Muslim community in England and elsewhere is pulled in conflicting directions. On one side are street activists preaching literal adherence to the Qur'an, shariah and hadiths, and calling for separation from, if not overthrow of, the West. On the other side are those who want to re form Islam.

Although Muslim reform may seem like an oxymoron to those who see Islam only through the lens of graphic violence, Muslim reformers have been in the sights of jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda for years. Their increasingly bold public stance has made them the natural enemy of those who seek to squeeze followers of Islam into a tight-fisted sectarianism at war with the entire infidel world.

At the start of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Islamic scholars Iyad Jamaleddine (an Iraqi Shi'ite) and Hossein al-Khomeini (a grandson of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini) lived under the protection of U.S. troops in a Baghdad mansion because of death threats from Muslim extremists. Their crime? They see true Islam as a flexible, non-dogmatic religion that is adaptable to the modern world with all of its plurality, and they call for the separation of mosque and state.

"We have failed as a civil society by not confronting the historical, social, and political demons within us," a Pakistani businessman wrote in a letter to the Pakistan daily the Nation. "Without a reformation in the practice of Islam which makes it move forward not backward, there is no hope for Muslims everywhere." Striking a more literary note from Egypt, poet and playwright Ali Salem wrote after 9/11 an open letter of apology to Americans: "Extremism may claim God as its redeemer, but it's really the selfish product of lunacy.... These extremists are pathologically jealous. They feel like dwarfs, which is why they search for towers" to destroy.

The growing literature of the Muslim reform movement has played an especially significant role since 9/11 shifted the earth's geopolitical axis. Western governments were bewildered about what efforts Islam itself would initiate to help prevent another 9/11 or worse from happening. The urgency of Muslim reform has become central to this concern, especially given the up-tick of democracy in the Middle East.

Use of the words Muslim reform and Islamic reform, however, arouse mixed feeling in many Muslims. In his introduction to Progressive Muslims, a collection of essays by 15 Muslim scholars and activists, Omid Sail notes the essayists' ambivalence about using the word reform or reformation to describe what they envision. "Serious economic, social, and political issues in the Muslim world ... need urgent remedying," Sail writes, and if "one is talking about a reformation that would address all of those levels, then I would suspect that most progressive Muslims would readily support that usage of the term." Yet the words Islamic reformation carry baggage about "the Protestant reformation initiated by Martin Luther" which makes the essayists uneasy, according to Sail, who is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Colgate University.

"Ours is not a project of developing a 'Protestant' Islam distinct from a 'Catholic' Islam," writes Safi.

   Many of us insist that we are not looking to
   create a further split within the Muslim
   community so much as to heal it. Furthermore,
   embedded in the very language of
   "Reformation" is the notion of a significant
   split with the past.... It might be an easier
   task to start with a tabula rasa, but that
   would not be an Islamic project. Being a
   progressive Muslim, at least in the view of
   this group, mandates a difficult, onerous,
   critical, and uneasy engagement with the
   tradition.

FROM WITHIN what Sail prefers to call "the progressive Muslim project," voices of reform in North America and Europe are addressing constituencies and concerns relevant to their contexts. In the U.S., Muqtedar Khan emphasizes the need for Muslims to become more liberally democratic without losing their basic faith. Working out of his small, cluttered office at Adrian University, where he teaches political science, the seemingly indefatigable Khan stepped into the role of public intellectual for the U.S. Muslim community after 9/11 with incisive articles such as "Memo to Mr. Bin Laden: Go to Hell," which was picked up by more than a dozen news agencies around the world. His Web site, called "Ijtihad" (the Islamic word for "independent reasoning" or "innovative thinking"), carries his prolific writings and is a much-visited resource for the media and for Muslims seeking a philosophically oriented approach to Muslim life.

An Indian Muslim frequently on the lecture circuit, Khan believes that his flexible, liberal voice offers an alternative to those of traditionalist Islamic theologians who furnish the reasoning for conservative fatwas. Muslims must become more involved in the American political process locally, regionally and nationally, Kahn argues in American Muslims, and his use of American as an adjective before Muslims is instructive.