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| In this Friday, Jan. 9, 2015 photo, an Egyptian Muslim pauses inside Ibn-Tulun Mosque, one of the oldest mosques in Cairo, Egypt. Amid violence like the attack in Paris on a satirical newspaper over its depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, there’s been increasing discussions among Muslims who say their community must re-examine their faith to modernize its interpretations and sideline extremists. There is a growing debate within Islam about whether and how to reject a radical minority that some fear is dragging them into conflict and wrecking the faith. |
CAIRO (AP) --
After gunmen in Paris killed 12 people, Saudi Arabia's top body of
Muslim clerics quickly condemned the attack and said it could have no
acceptable justification. It was a signal from some of the Islamic
world's strictest voices that cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad
in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were not a reason to kill
the artists.
Only days later, Saudi Arabia
sent an opposing message: On Friday, a young Saudi was whipped 50 times
in a public square in the city of Jiddah, the first of what will be 20
such weekly rounds of lashes. That, along with 10 years in prison, is
his sentence from the kingdom's religious-based courts for insulting
Islam, based on posts on his blog criticizing prominent clerics close to
the monarchy.
The contradiction points to the
difficulties at a time of a growing debate within Islam about whether
and how to reject a radical minority that some fear is dragging them
into conflict and wrecking the faith.
Western
critics are increasingly brazen about suggesting there is something
inherent in Islam that is sparking violence by some of its adherents.
Most Muslims reject this, arguing that the tumult of the post-colonial
Middle East has created fertile ground for radicalism among people whose
faith is fundamentally one of peace.
Nonetheless,
the past year has seen increasing voices among Muslims saying their
community must re-examine their faith to modernize its interpretations
and sideline extremists. As much as recent attacks in the West, the rise
of startlingly vicious violence by Sunni Muslim militants in the name
of Islam against fellow Muslims, including Sunnis, brought it home for
many Muslims that something must change in religious discourse.
In
Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State group has butchered entire families
of Sunnis and beheaded Sunni soldiers, as well as Western hostages. In
Pakistan, a Dec. 16 militant attack on a school that killed 150 people,
mostly children, stunned the country. It made many Pakistanis question
any empathy they felt in the past toward militant groups - the attitude
of "even if they're wrong, they're still fellow Muslims."
"Now
I hear more people talking openly against extremism and militancy,"
said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, an independent political analyst in Pakistan.
When
people ask "why Islam?", much of the answer has little to do with the
religion itself. The Arab world has seen decades of bloodshed and
foreign intervention unlike any in any other region - long entrenched
dictatorships, regime suppression, two Iraq wars, the Syrian civil war
and Libya's turmoil.
Those conflicts have
stirred up hatreds - against the U.S., against the West, against Shiites
and other communities - that rebound back into religion. Some youth
angered by the conflicts find the answers in the version of "true Islam"
touted by extremists like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group and
promoted on the Internet. Those groups tell them Islam requires them to
use violence to defend the faith, then provide whole networks to make it
easy for them to do so.
Notably, Cherif
Kouachi, one of the French brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo killings,
appears to have been first radicalized by hearing of abuses of Iraqi
inmates by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison.
The
attack on Charlie Hebdo prompted condemnations from across the Muslim
world -and fueled voices in the West contending that Islam fuels
violence. Social media feeds bristled that insults to other religions do
not tend to spark murders.
That frustrates
many Muslims who tire of apologizing for an extremist fringe they view
as distorting their religion. Still, Muslims are also turning inward for
change in the community.
The most prominent
call came days before the attack, when Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah
el-Sissi gave a speech to Muslim clerics saying interpretations
developed over centuries have made the Muslim world a "source of worry,
danger, killing and destruction in the whole world." He called for a
"religious revolution" to modernize the faith.
The
Paris attack added a complication to the debate, because of the
magazine's extremely broad lampooning of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
Muslims who denounced the killings were often clearly discomfited by the
content and defended their right to be upset over cartoons even some
Western critics said crossed into racism.
In
Egypt and Lebanon, political cartoonists published cartoons expressing
solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, with images of pens standing up to
gunmen. On Twitter, some pointed to Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim policeman of
Algerian heritage killed by the attackers. "I am Ahmed the dead cop.
Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to
do so," was a tweet of solidarity circulating among Muslims.
"Obviously
the act of terrorism is a far greater evil that the question of
satirical comments," Khalid Samad, a lawmaker from an Islamist political
party in mostly Muslim Malaysia, said.
But some in the religious establishment struggled with the issue.
On
pan-Arab satellite channel al-Arabiya Thursday night, an official from
al-Azhar, the state-run Egyptian institution that is one of the most
prestigious centers of Sunni Islam, said al-Azhar is working to
modernize religious discourse, in part by interpreting texts in light of
the context in place and time as opposed to literally.
"But
we can't exonerate the West for its insulting of the prophet. I'm not
justifying what happened, but these are causes," Sheikh Ashraf Saad
said. "Just as we condemn extremists, we must also condemn these
freedoms that have reached the point of insulting the prophet."
He
was countered by a Saudi journalist on the panel, Mshari al-Thaydi.
"But the question is, why is it Muslims who get so angry and kill and
blow things up? The French magazine insulted the pope, the Dalai Lama.
... Why do we express our anger in this way?
"We
have 1,436 years in the history of Islam," he said. "Why do we hand
ourselves over to a particular person who picks what he wants from that
heritage and says that's Islam and accept it or you've left the faith?"
That
hits to the issue of who speaks for Islam, where in the Sunni branch in
particular, individual clerics build on centuries of scholarship to
argue what the faith requires.
Al-Qaida and
the Islamic State group roughly take elements from two relatively modern
strands. One is the writing of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood thinker
Sayed Qutb, with its tenets that Muslim society has fallen from faith
and violent jihad must be waged to bring "God's rule." The other is
Wahhabism, a reform movement with a strict, literal and uncompromising
interpretation of texts aimed at purging Islam of innovations. Wahhabism
became the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia, which has promoted it
around the Muslim world.
State religious
institutions across the region, meanwhile, are widely criticized as
stagnant. Government control has undermined their credibility among both
liberal Muslims and militants. That was clear when Saudi Arabia's top
religious body, the Council of Senior Scholars, condemned the Paris
attack and called it "unacceptable under any justification."
That
prompted a torrent of derision on Twitter from militant sympathizers
who accused the clerics of doing the bidding of the U.S.-allied Saudi
monarchy and protecting those who insult Muhammad. "The masks fall and
reveal those who lick the boots of dictators," one proclaimed.
