You Can't Reform Islam Without Reforming Muslims
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Every few years the debate over reforming Islam
bubbles up from the depths of a culture that largely
censors any suggestion that Islam needs reforming.
But Islam does not exist apart from Muslims. It
is not an abstract entity that can be changed
without changing its followers. And if Islam has not
changed, that is because Muslims do not want it to.
Mohammed and key figures in Islam provided a
template, but that template would not endure if it
did not fit the worldview of its worshipers. Western
religions underwent a process of secularization to
align with what many saw as modernity leading to a
split between traditionalists and secularists.
The proponents of modernizing Islam assume that it
didn’t make the jump because of Saudi money,
fundamentalist violence and regional backwardness.
These allegations are true, but also incomplete.
If modernizing Islam really appealed to Muslims, it
would have taken off, at least in the West, despite
Saudi money and Muslim Brotherhood front groups.
These elements might have slowed things down, but a
political or religious idea that is genuinely
compelling is like a rock rolling down a hill.
It’s enormously difficult to stop.
Muslim modernization in the West has been covertly
undermined by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood,
but for the most part it has not been violently
suppressed.
It suffers above all else from a lack of Muslim
interest.
Muslims don’t spend much time fuming over a
progressive mosque that allows gay members or lets
women lead prayers. Such places occasionally exist
and remain obscure. They don’t have to be forcibly
shut down because they never actually take off. The
occasional death threat and arson might take place
and the average ISIS recruit would happily slaughter
everyone inside, but even he has bigger fish to fry.
The best evidence that Muslim modernization has
failed is that even the angriest Muslims don’t take
it very seriously as a threat. The sorts of people
who believe that Saddam Hussein was a CIA agent or
that Israel is using eagles as spies have trouble
believing modernizing Islam will ever be much of a
problem.
They know instinctively that it will never work.
Instead Muslims are far more threatened by a cartoon
mocking their prophet for reasons that go to the
heart of what is wrong with their religion.
Islam is not an idea. It is a tribe.
Talking about reforming the words of Islam is an
abstraction. Islam did not begin with a book. It
began with clan and sword. Even in the modern
skyscraper cities of the West, it remains a religion
of the clan and the sword.
The left has misread Islamic terrorism as a response
to oppression when it is actually a power base. It
is not the poor and downtrodden who are most
attracted to the Jihad. Instead it is the upper
classes. Bin Laden wasn’t a pauper and neither are
the Saudis or Qataris. Islamic terrorism isn’t a
game for the poor. It becomes the thing to do when
you’re rich enough to envy the neighbors. It’s a
tribal war.
To reform Islam, we can’t just look at what is
wrong with the Koran or the Hadiths. We have to ask
why these tribal calls for violence and genocide,
for oppression and enslavement, appealed to Muslims
then and why they continue to appeal to Muslims
today.
The modernizers assume that Western Muslims would
welcome a reformation of Islam. They are half right.
The reformation that they are welcoming is that of
the Wahhabis trying to return it to what it was.
It’s hard to deny that ISIS touches something deep
within Muslims. The gay-friendly mosques don’t.
Understanding Islam only in terms of the Koran makes
it seem as if Muslims are unwillingly trapped by a
tyranny of the text, when the text is actually their
means of trapping others into affirming their
identity.
There is no reforming Islam without reforming
Muslims. The reformers assume that most Muslims are
ignorant of their own beliefs, but even the most
illiterate Muslim in a village without running water
has a good grasp of the big overall ideas. He may
hardly be able to quote a Koranic verse without
stumbling over it, he may have added local customs
into the mix, but he identifies with it on a
visceral level.
Its honor is his honor. Its future is the future of
his family. Its members are his kinfolk. Like him,
it ought to have been on top; instead it’s on the
bottom. Its grievances are his grievances.
The rest is just details.
The progressive diverse mosque is the opposite of
this tribal mentality. It is the opposite of Islam.
Its destruction of the tribe is also the destruction
of the individual. The Western Muslim who already
has only a shaky connection to the culture of his
ancestral country is not about to trade Islamic
tribalism for anonymous diversity. Islam tells him
he is superior. The progressive mosque tells him
nothing.
Whether he is a Bangladeshi peasant watching soccer
matches on the village television or a Bangladeshi
doctor in London, it is the violent, racist and
misogynistic parts of Islam that provide him with a
sense of worth in a big confusing world. That is how
Islam was born.
Islam began in uncertain times as empires were
tottering and the old ways were being displaced by
strange religions such as Judaism and Christianity,
when its originators mashed bits of them together
and then founded their own crazy wobbly murderous
empire built around a badly plagiarized religion.
It was horrible and terrible for everyone who wasn’t
a Muslim man, but it worked.
Islam is less of a faith and more of a set of honor
and shame responses. It’s a cycle of oppression and
victimhood. It’s the assertion of identity by people
who see themselves as inferior and are determined to
push back by making themselves superior. The
responses are familiar. We saw it in Nazi Germany as
the defeated nation became a master race by killing
and enslaving everyone else.
But it’s not those at the bottom most driven by such
dreams. It’s the desert billionaires who have money,
but no culture. It’s the Western Muslim doctor who
still feels inferior despite his wealth. It’s a
merchant named Mohammed with a lot of grudges who
claims an angel told him to kill all his enemies in
Allah’s name.
It’s Islam. And it’s Muslims.
The things that we believe, bad or good, reflect
the bad or good inside us. When Muslims support
killing people, it’s simplistic to assume that they
are robotically following a text and will follow any
other text slipped in front of their faces, instead
of their passions and values. Religions may make
people kill, but it starts when people make
religions kill.
The good devout Muslim may kill because the Koran
tells him to, but he would not do so if the Koran’s
justifications of violence did not speak to him on a
deeper level. The Nazis were following orders, but
they wouldn’t have followed them if Nazism didn’t
connect with their fears, hopes and dreams.
The text is only half the problem. The other half is
in the human heart.
Reforming Islam is not a matter of crossing out
certain words and adding others. Religions carry a
powerful set of values that appeal to people on a
deep level. To change Islam, we would have to
understand why its ugliness still speaks to Muslims.
To change it, we have to change them.
When we talk about reforming Islam, what we are
really talking about is reforming Muslims.