BY
Islam is not a hieratic mystery, which only the initiated, a
special priesthood, can possibly understand. It is, rather, sufficiently
grasped by more than a billion people who, save for a handful, have been born
into it, and have grown up in societies suffused with it, societies where it is
impermissible to question Islam, to ponder whether its directives make moral or
intellectual sense, and where any open display of questioning is punished, and
any putative blasphemy or any open admission of apostasy, can result, in many
cases, in a death sentence carried out not only by the Muslim state, but also
by the informal meting out of Muslim justice by Believers who can, on
their own, enforce Islamic law.
The written accounts
upon which Islam rests are three: first, the Qur’an, believed by Muslims
to be outside of history, exempt from any historical study (which can be
punished), Uncreated and Immutable; second, the collections of stories of
what Muhammad said and did (and these have been assigned levels of authenticity
after careful study by the muhaddithin — Muslim scholars who centuries
ago studied the chains of transmission, or isnad-chains,
of each story, and on the basis of such study assigned ranks of “authenticity”
to each Hadith); third, the Sira, that is, the biography of Muhammad, which of
course overlaps the Hadith considerably (and may have been woven out of the
Hadith, or vice-versa). Together the Hadith and the Sira constitute what is
called the Sunnah, that is, the manners and customs of the earliest Muslims,
that offer a gloss or guide to the meaning of the Qur’an, and to the way a
Muslim should behave in every aspect of his life. Some believe, or claim to
believe, that the Sunnah is more ferocious than the Qur’an, and responsible for
the co-called “radicalisation” of Muslims. There are those who claim that the
way out for Muslims is to somehow jettison both the Hadith and the Sira,
and – as one young Turk, Mustafa Akyol, a self-consciously Brave Young
Reformer, used to argue — Muslims need to keep only the Qur’an, that is, rely
on “sola scriptura.” (Akyol is not alone
in trying to assimilate terms taken from the history of Christianity and the
Reformation, and misleadingly apply them to the case of Islam.) To this notion
of doing away, in Islam, with any reliance on the Hadith and Sira, to getting a
billion Sunnis (a word derived from the “Sunnah”) to accept this, one can only
reply: Fat Chance.
These written works
— Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, and commentaries on all three — are easily available.
You can find them online, a click away, and can also find online hundreds or
thousands of websites, in English and other European languages, as well as in
the languages most associated with Islam and Muslims (Arabic, Urdu, Farsi,
various forms of Bahasa) devoted to answering queries of all kinds, websites
where ordinary Muslims ask questions of clerics — about all the matters of
daily life, food, dress, personal hygiene, sexual behavior, family law. You,
too, can eavesdrop on these. And you can find out, again by such eavesdropping,
how Muslims are taught to regard, and to treat, Unbelievers, especially in the
pronouncements on Infidels from high-ranking clerics, including the Sheik
Al-Azhar, from Saudi clerics, from Iranian clerics, from Muslim clerics from
all over the world. All of this is available. You might start online with the
excellent translation services of Muslim material — including what political
figures, clerics, diplomats, officials from the Muslim world are saying to
their own people — to be found at www.MEMRI.org.
But how many people
will take the time to avail themselves of such material, available in such
plenty? Among those who keep reassuring us about Islam — Obama or Cameron or
Merkel — how many of our leaders do you think have even once gone to
MEMRI.org, or to Jihad Watch, or read a single one of the books by the
Defectors from Islam? I kept hoping Obama might meet with Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
whose personal testimony as to Islam, delivered with such relentless
indignation, just might, I dreamed, have some effect on Obama. Such a meeting
was not to be; it would have been politically incorrect. Still, I think it
would be useful to ask aloud (perhaps some Republican candidate might do the
asking): “Why, President Obama, could you not have met with Ayaan Hirsi Ali?” —
even if we know the answer, and know we won’t be given it.
Aside from the
distraction that the Internet provides, when we do start to look up Muslim
websites, we find the very names off-puttingly foreign. If you are the
kind of person who cannot make it through War
and Peace because of
all those Russian names and patronymics you cannot keep straight, then you
might have some initial difficulty with reading about Islam – think just of
such words as “Hadith” and “Sira,” or “dhimmi” and “jizyah,” and what barriers
to mental entry they pose to so many. And there is also the question of the
sheer surpassing boredom of it all, as the Total Belief-System of Islam, is, in
its details, horribly uninteresting. Think only of having to read through a recital,
before every hadith, of the relevant isnad-chain
– the chain of oral transmission of the particular story, right back, if
possible, to the time of Muhammad, with all the various human links on that
chain, as A said to B said to C, solemnly imparted, when we all know, if we are
non-Muslims, what a large amount of fantasy and make-believe goes into the
claims for these isnad-chains
and their solemn studiers.
But at least you can
learn about how Hadith were winnowed by the muhaddithin (Hadith scholars), and which muhaddithin (Bukhari, Muslim) are regarded as most
authoritative by Muslims, and why, and just how the study of the isnad-chains, and the
assigning of rank of “authenticity” to each of the putative Hadith through such
study, is accomplished. In learning about all this, there is difficulty,
there is boredom, but there is no mystery.
And you have
available, as well, the great non-Muslim scholars of Islam, those who
began to subject Islam to the same kind of approach as, beginning in the latter
part of the 19th century, was given by German and English Protestant
historians to the study of Christianity, a study known as the Higher Criticism.
That is, instead of accepting the Muslim narrative about Islam, Western
scholars tried to study Islam as they would anything else, with the Qur’an and
Hadith “put back into history.” Among those who studied and wrote in such
uninhibited fashion were such scholars as C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht,
David Margoliouth, Georges Vajda, Arthur Jeffrey, Henri Lammens, Samuel Zwemer,
St. Clair Tisdall, K. S. Lal. But this golden age of Western scholarship came
to an end when Arab money bought up so many academic departments, or was
responsible for the opening of “Centers for the Study of Islam” (think only
John Esposito at Georgetown and his Saudi backers), where the Islamic narrative
about Islam ruled the roost, and critical study of Islam in universities was no
longer possible. Still, the work of those scholars of Islam from that Golden
Century of Scholarship — from about 1870 to 1970 — is available not only in
large libraries, but for sale in cheap Indian editions, and can also be found
online.
You, an Unbeliever,
now have easily available not only Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, but the most
important Qur’anic commentators, jurisconsults, historians (Muslim and
non-Muslim) of 1400 years of Muslim conquest of and interaction with many
different non-Muslim peoples. There should be no mystery about Islam.
But mystery about
Islam there still seems to be, all over the Western world. Why should this be
so, and what are the consequences of the failure of so many in the West to
learn about, or to know about, or to make sense of, the Total Belief-System of
Islam, needs to be pondered.
