A Kinder, Gentler Islam?

That is the title of David Warren’s review (not available on-line), in the June 2007 issue of Commentary, of a new biography of Mohammed, In the Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan. The volume is far from the first to airbrush the traditional portrait of the founder of Islam. What’s noteworthy is that its author is not a Western “multiculturalist” like Karen Armstrong but a grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. has denied him entry because of his support for terrorist groups, and he has a long record of ill-disguised antisemitic animus. (For a thorough examination of M. Ramadan’s background and ideology, vide Paul Berman’s novella-length “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramandan?”.)

Yet the Prophet of Footsteps is like “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”, a man who would never have associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, much less its offspring al-Qa’eda.

[Ramadan] does everything he can to avoid controversy, delivering an apologetic for Islam’s messenger that is designed to appeal to those, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who are of a modern and “Enlightenment” cast of mind. . . . Indeed, the Muhammad of Footsteps often reminds me of childhood encounters with Protestant Sunday school, and particularly of the Jesus who said, “suffer the little children to come unto me.” . . .

In fifteen short, sermon-like chapters, Ramadan retells the prophet’s life with an emphasis not on events themselves but on the “teachings” that are said to emerge from them. Beginning with an “Encounter with the Sacred” that smoothly elides Islamic monotheism with the Judeo-Christian tradition descending from Abraham, he ends with “In History, for Eternity”, a gauzy vision of a loving and forgiving messenger from the heavens, calling us upward toward justice and equity, toward peace, faith, ethics, and hope.

Muhammad, it turns out, was also a pioneering environmentalist, and indeed almost an animal-rights activist . . . . Similarly, Ramadan shows [Muhammad’s lieutenants] observing the strictest principles of the Geneva Convention, fighting only against enemy combatants and taking great care to avoid harm to women, children, and slaves. . . . Ramadan is loath to dwell on the merely military aspect. Instead, rather as the British were said to have captured India in a fit of gentlemanly absent-mindedness, and after long and patient hesitation, Arabia appears to have been taken by the Muslims in one continuous, purely defensive action. . . .

And yet, Ramadan assures us, none of these unavoidable actions [such as “the elimination of three Jewish tribes settled around Medina”] altered in any way the pacific principles behind Muslim rule: the recognition of a common God, complete religious toleration, and the need to settle all inter-communal disputes peacefully, “according to the principles of the justice and honor codes”. There may have been no Jews left in Arabia at the end, but in principle they enjoyed perfect toleration. . . .

Delving directly into Islamic tradition, Ramadan is seeking common or universal religious themes, and doing so with a sensibility that is ultimately more Western than Eastern, emphasizing the need to distinguish between a religion and a culture, and between the duties of religious affiliation and the duties of citizenship.

All this stands in contradiction to the teaching of most other Muslim spokesmen. Ramadan expressly rejects the traditional “binary” opposition between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb (the abodes of Islam and of war, respectively), claiming it is not Qur’anic. He imagines the emergence of a distinctive European Islam, just as there are already distinctive Asian and African variations of Islam. In principle, if not always in practice, he is allergic to the binary opposition of “us and them”.

As the alert reader will have gathered, the reviewer has doubts about both the author’s sincerity and the possibility that his “universalizing project” can succeed. About the former, one can say nothing definitive, although M. Ramadan has a long history of double-speak. Will he, I wonder, publish this work in Arabic and other Islamic languages, taking its enlightened message to where it is most urgently needed?

It doesn’t really matter, though, whether In the Footsteps of the Prophet was intended to turn Moslems away from Islamofascism rather than gull Westerners into thinking that there is no extremism in Islam (as the openly pro-fascist Miss Armstrong tries to do). The book’s significance is that it does present an alternative Islam purged of violence and bigotry, one that conceivably could be embraced by Moslems who cannot reconcile their humane impulses with the foul deeds carried out under the cloak of jihad.

Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that there are two keys to any such Islamic “reformation” (not a very good analogy but serviceable for the moment).

The first is hinted at in M. Ramadan’s book: a separation of the text of the Koran, which Moslems believe abides eternally in heaven, from the human traditions that have hitherto informed the text’s interpretation.

Contrary to Ernest Renan’s famous but ignorant dictum, Islam was not “born in the full light of history”. The Koran was assembled within a few years after Mohammed’s death and may be an accurate source of his sayings, but it is almost barren of historical information. The incidents that fill biographies of the religion’s founder were set down two or three generations later. The author of the earliest known life of Mohammed, Ibn Ishaq, was born about 704 A.D. and died in the 760’s. Hence, he wrote a century or more after his subject’s death. Moreover, what he actually wrote is lost. Modern scholars reconstruct it from later writers.

The Ibn Ishaq tradition apparently had almost no written sources. It may preserve the essence of one authentic document, a treaty between Mohammed and the city of Yathrib. Beyond that, everything is drawn from oral tradition, that is, from reports of what old men are reported to have said about events in which their fathers or grandfathers took part.

Not surprisingly, the “life of Mohammed” fashioned from this evidence was, as Robert Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad details, congruent with 8th and 9th Century Islam: militant, aggressive, intolerant, contemptuous of women and infidels, and confident of its universalist destiny. That picture was convenient for the early Caliphs. Attacking infidels and reducing them to dhimmi status was “what Mohammed would do”. But did he? If modernist Christians are skeptical of the historicity of the Christ of the Gospels, all or most of which were composed within living memory of Our Lord’s earthly ministry, how much more scope is there for doubting the third or fourth-hand traditions about Mohammed?

Why would a pious Moslem entertain doubts? The key to that development is his recognition of the gulf between the fundamental moral precepts that every sane man knows in his heart and the actions of the mufsidun. The murders and tortures committed by al-Qa’eda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Fatah et al. may comport with an 8th Century mentalité, but do they please the creator of the universe? Is it possible that the historical Mohammed prevailed largely through peaceful means and that the warlike passages in the Koran have been misunderstood through the loss of their context?

Considerations like those could blossom into a genuine “religion of peace”, one that sees Mohammed as the enlightener rather than the conqueror of Arabia. Or they could fall onto stony soil. How the Islamic world reacts to Tariq Ramadan’s new Mohammed will tell us a lot about what the future holds.

Further reading: Daniel Pipes, “Who Was the Prophet Muhammad?”
Patricia Crone, “What Do We Actually Know About Mohammed?”