By Sultan Shahin, Founding Editor, New Age Islam
26 March 2017
Is this Islam? Could
this be the Islam of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) who was sent as a blessing
for mankind? Could Islam convert a British-born into a mass killer of
his own people, plowing a car into innocent pedestrians, as happened
this week in a London attack on British Parliament?
Questions like this
are asked everytime there is an Islamist terrorist outrage. This
question was asked recently in India when a young radicalised Muslim
Saifullah was killed in Lucknow, preferring what he called “martyrdom”
to life, despite hours long pleadings of his brother as well as a cleric
and other elders.
The same question was
put in an even more poignant scene by a lady in Peshawar, crying over
the blood-spattered dead bodies of her school-going children in December
2014. The proud killers of 132 innocent children and scores of female
teachers were the Pakistan Taliban, students of Islamic madrasas,
supposedly well-versed in the teachings of Islam. The Taliban claim to
kill in the name of Islam. They claim to glorify Islam by doing so. They
believe they are trying to establish the sovereignty of Allah over the
world. So, the question is inevitable. Is this Islam, indeed?
Only a fortnight ago, I
was forced to ask this question in a slightly different mode. Is this
pure Islam or true Islam, as Salafis, Wahhabis claim? Not for the first,
nor for the last time, to be sure, over hundred devotees of Sufi saint
Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sindh, Pakistan, had been killed in the name of
what Salafi-Wahhabis consider true, pure Islam. Salafi-Wahhabis abhor
Sufism because they believe that Sufi practices resemble pre-Islamic
polytheistic Hindu traditions. Any Muslim who strays from the path of
what Salafis consider true Islam is an apostate and deserves to be
killed. The murderer has been brainwashed by Wahhabi ulema into
believing that he can be assured of a place in heaven if he kills
apostates and kuffars.
Questions galore. But
no real answers. Sufism-oriented Ulema and Mashaikh in India and the
Sahel region of Africa are becoming more and more vociferous in
denouncing Wahhabism-Salafism. No doubt Islamist terrorism is a result
of the indoctrination of sections of Muslims by Wahhabi-Salafi ulema
around the world. This has been possible owing to the induction of tens
of billions of Saudi petrodollars over the last 40 years. Even after
9/11, in which 16 of the 19 terrorists were products of Saudi education
system, the West has allowed Saudi Arabia to continue spending billions
in the propagation of an extremist, desiccated version of Isam, shorn of
all its beauty and benevolence.
So it is good that
Sufi ulema, under attack from Wahhabi militants, are coming out to
denounce the Salafi understanding of Islam. But is this enough? Do they
not need to ask why it’s Salafis who are winning this ideological war?
Have Sufi ulema been able to bring back to the Sufi fold even a single
Islamist terrorist? After all, all the terrorists of today, at least
from the South Asian and African Sahel region were part of a
Sufism-oriented Islam until recently. Wahhabism existed mainly in the
Arab regions. There were very few Salafis anywhere else. Easy
availability of petrodollars for the propagation of Salafism has
certainly played an important role. But can money alone bring about this
kind of transformation? Why is the Sufi counter-narrative not effective
enough to make a difference?
Writing in this space,
almost exactly a year ago, I had made an earnest appeal to the Sufi
Ulema and Mashaikh gathering in Delhi for an international conference. I
had asked them to go beyond the usual shibboleths and utilse this great
opportunity to consider this most urgent question: why is the Sufi
focus on positives of Islam not working? The more Sufis and other
moderate Muslims denounce terrorism, the more followers this Satanic
ideology finds. I had pointed out the basic reason behind this
conundrum: the radical theology of violence and exclusion and the
current theology of consensus of all ulema, including Sufi ulema, are by
and large one and the same. Any differences are cosmetic. ISIS and
other terroist organisations may be militarily defeated tomorrow but the
problem of radicalisation and violent extremism in Islam will still
remain. Islam supremacism, xenophobia, intolerance and exclusivism as
well as gender inequality are inherent in the current Islamic, including
Sufi, theology. It is this that should concern us most.
I had an opportunity
on the eve of that last March’s conclave in Delhi to meet Maulana
Tahirul Qadri, a Sufi-Barelvi scholar from Pakistan, renowned for his
600-page fatwa against Islamist terrorism. I asked him two questions.
One: are holy Quran’s war-time instructions, intolerant and xenophobic
in nature, still applicable to us Muslims in the 2st cenury, though we
could not be possibly fighting 7th century wars of the Prophet’s time?
His answer: There are no intolerant verses in Quran and yes, all of them
are applicable to us for ever. My second question was: by quoting a
profusion of ahadith (plural of hadith, so-called sayings of the
prophet) in your presentation, and considering them akin to revelation,
are you weakening Khalifa Baghdadi’s terrorist ideology, which is
largely based on ahadith, or strengtening it? He remained silent.
There is a hadith,
according to which Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) himself ordered his followers
to attack a town called Taif by showering stones with Minjaneeq (i.e. a
catapult) despite the possibility of innocent civilians being killed.
When a companion ponted out that this could result in civilian killing,
the Prophet is supposed to have said: “They are also from them.” A
Taliban scholar, under interrorgtion from a Pakistan Army officer,
quoted this hadith to justify terrorism. Having watched the video on
internet, I asked an Indian Sufi scholar, if the Prophet, in his view,
could have said something that contradicts several verses of Quran and
his own previous statements. He simply said: “I have checked, this
hadith is in the sihah-e-sitta (six so-called authentic books of ahadith
including Bukhari and Muslim).” To all my questioning, if this meant,
he believed that the Prophet himself justified killing of civilians, the
Sufi scholar just remained silent. So, regardless of what your
rationality may tell you, hadith, as collected even centuries after the
Prophet’s demise, in the age of Arab imperialism, is believed to be akin
to revelation and cannot be questioned.
It is this thinking on
the part of all our ulema, of whatever school of thought, that must
change, if we are going to fight violent extemism in Islam. Sufi
fulminations against Wahhabism-Salafism are hypocritical until the core
of their theologies remains the same. It is sheer hypocrisy to quote
peaceful, pluralistic verses of Quran and teach in a madrasa books like
Tafsir-e-Jalalain which say that these verses have been abrogated by
later war-time verses asking Muslims to kill the kafir wherever they are
found.
The fact is these
verses were meant for a particular situation and do not apply to us any
more. Similarly many ahadith were concocted to justify imperialist,
expansionist wars fought by monarchical, dynastic khalifas, in the name
of Islam. It is irrational to call them akin to revelation. The same
holds true of Sharia that was first codified 120 years after the demise
of the prophet and has been changing since from time to time and place
to place. It simply cannot be considered divine. These aspects of the
consensus core theology of Islam constitutes the root of the problem.
Clearly, moderate
ulema, from whichever sect, must realise the need to introspect deeply
and honestly and go far beyond their present positions, if they are
serious about rescuing Islam from extremism. This should not be a
sectarian endeavour. There are Muslims in all sects who want to live in
peace and favour pluralism. They all need to get together and
brainstorm.
Sultan Shahin is the
Founding Editor of a Delhi-based progressive Islamic website,
NewAgeIslam.com. He can be reached at sultan.shahin@gmail.com
(This article first appeared in The Sunday Guardian, New Delhi, on 26 March 2017)
7:23 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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