Saudi columnists bolster calls for reform of Muslim religious law.
By James M.
Dorsey
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Taliban bans
on women’s education and employment by foreign aid
organisations
operating in Afghanistan are having unintended consequences.
The bans have
sparked calls for reform of Muslim religious law in Saudi Arabia, a country
that wields moral authority in the Muslim world because of its custodianship of
Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina.
The irony is that the Taliban's repression of women's
educational, professional, and freedom of movement rights rather than decades
of indiscriminate jihadist violence and brutality prompted the calls.
Even so,
calls by prominent Saudi opinionmakers for reform of Muslim religious law, long
the preserve of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama or Revival of Islamic Scholars, the
world’s largest and arguably most moderate Muslim civil society movement, are
likely to not only bolster moves to bring Islamic law into the 21st-century
but also fuel debate about what constitutes 'moderate' Islam.
Potentially,
the commentators put on the spot Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and
other leaders of Muslim-majority states like United Arab Emirates President
Mohammed bin Zayed as well as religious establishments, including Al Azhar, the
Cairo-based citadel of Islamic learning.
Contrary to
popular perceptions, recent wide-ranging Saudi and Emirati reforms involved
social change rather than jurisprudential reform.
Similarly, state-aligned Muslim religious figures failed to
appropriately anchor in religious jurisprudence their two decades of lofty declarations and charters promoting
non-violence, interfaith dialogue, respect, tolerance and minority rights.
In Saudi
Arabia, the reforms included lifting the ban on women's driving, enhancing
women's social and professional rights, developing a Western-style
entertainment sector, and cutting the religious police down to size. At the same
time, the UAE has emerged as one of the Muslim world's most socially liberal
countries.
The Saudi
and Emirati leaders recognised the need for social
change to fortify their image as moderate Muslim leaders and create conditions
that would enable them to diversify their oil-dependent economies but saw religious
legal reform as a step too far.
In an interview last April, Mr. Bin Salman
implicitly accepted responsibility for applying and/or changing religious law
by nominating himself as the leading interpreter of Islamic law.
“In Islamic
law, the head of the Islamic establishment is wali al-amr, the ruler,” Mr. Bin
Salman asserted. He has adopted that role literally. In contrast to most Muslim
rulers, Mr. Bin Salman seldom, if at all, solicits the opinion of Muslim
scholars to justify his policies.
“Bin Salman
puts religion at the service of his politics while protesting against the use
of religion by his opponents,” said Louis Blin, a scholar, in a forthcoming
book on the Muslim World League.
In contrast
to Nahdlatul Ulama’s humanitarian vision of Islam that advocates reform of religious jurisprudence
to deprive militants of the ability to use Islamic law to justify their
supremacy and violence and ensure pluralism and an unambiguous embrace of human
rights, Messrs. Bin Salman and Bin Zayed advocate social reforms bolstered by
autocratic rule.
To that end,
Muslim clerics and scholars aligned with the Saudi and Emirati leaders
emphasise religious legal texts that demand absolute obedience to the ruler.
The problem
for autocrats is that reform of Islamic jurisprudence challenges a key pillar
of their survival strategy.
Muslim
leaders, parroted by their Western counterparts, have for more than two decades
since 9/11 insisted that Islam and Islamic jurisprudence need no reform.
Instead, they assert that jihadis misrepresent and misconstrue the faith.
In doing so,
autocrats drown out criticism of their brutal, repressive rule that brooks no
dissent and potentially provokes violence.
Moreover, casting
jihadists as deviants rather than products of problematic tenets of Muslim jurisprudence
that justify violence stymies criticism of autocrats’ insistence that autocracy is necessary to
combat jihadism and promote moderate Islam.
However,
recent columns in largely state-aligned Saudi media suggest that autocrats may have
begun to realise that promoting moderate Islam with declarations, largely
ceremonial interfaith dialogue, social change, counterterrorism, and fierce
opposition to non-violent political Islam is lacking without anchoring in
religious jurisprudence.
“The Taliban
government’s decision suggests a crisis of thought, the extent to which jurisprudence needs to be revised and developed, and our urgent need for
contemporary jurisprudence with modern rules and principles. All religious
institutions must work to create contemporary jurisprudence… (that) instill(s) a
spirit of tolerance, love of life…, and standards of quality of life,” said
Okaz newspaper columnist and Jeddah-based lawyer Osama Al-Yamani.
“The Islamic
world is waiting for (Saudi Arabia) to lead it towards contemporary
jurisprudence,” Mr. Al-Yamani added.
Sarcastically
taking Al-Azhar scholars to task for not excommunicating the Taliban or the
Islamic State, Saudi journalist and novelist Abdullah bin Bakhit implicitly called for judicial reform by arguing that jihadist ideology
was grounded in Islamic teachings and rulings.
“Every time
you ask one of our revered preachers: ‘Why were Islamic countries not at the
forefront of nations condemning (the Islamic State), he answers you ‘because we
did not implement the correct Islam,’” Mr. Bin Bakhit said.
“Praise be
to God, and thanks be to Him…the dream has come close to realisation. After the
world lost ISIS (the Islamic State), history gave the honour of applying Sharia
to the Taliban to carry out this duty… The Taliban have no excuse for hesitating
in applying Sharia law as our honorable preachers wanted it,” Mr. Bin Bakhit
went on to say.
Arguing that
neither military nor economic pressure would persuade the Taliban to alter
their ways, prominent Saudi journalist Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed couched the need for
reform in terms of ideological and cultural change.
"The
weapon of economic starvation will not work with the Taliban; neither will the
Marine Corps or nuclear weapons deter them…. The most powerful weapon capable
of changing (the Taliban) is education and spreading the concept
of moderate Islam,”
Mr. Al-Rashed said.
Eighteen
months earlier, Mamdouh AlMuhaini, Mr. Al-Rashed’s colleague from his days at
the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya television network, proposed top-down Martin Luther-like religious
reforms that would
be led by Mr. Bin Salman, even though the writer stopped short of identifying
the crown prince by name.
“There are
dozens, or perhaps thousands, of Luthers of Islam… As such, the question of
'where is the Luther of Islam' is wrong. It should instead be: Where is Islam's
Frederick the Great? The King of Prussia, who earned the title of Enlightened
Despot, embraced major philosophers in Europe like Kant and Voltaire and gave
them the freedom to think and carry out scientific research,” Mr. AlMuhaini
said.
“We could
also ask where is Islam's Catherine the Great…? Without the support and
protection of these leaders, we would have likely never heard of these
intellectuals, nor of Luther before them,” he added.
Although
most likely unwittingly, the Saudi columnists echoed Nahdlatul Ulama's argument
that jurisprudential reform is a prerequisite for developing a genuinely
moderate Islam.
A
soon-to-be-published Nahdlatul Ulama discussion paper asserts that the view that
Muslims "should have a default attitude of enmity towards non-Muslims, and
that infidels…should be subject to discrimination is well established within
turats al-fiqh (the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence).”
The
columnists’ call for reform potentially contributes to an environment in which
Mr. Bin Salman may feel compelled to embrace the notion of reform of religious
jurisprudence in his bid to be recognised as the undisputed leader of the
Muslim world.
So far, he
has relied on Saudi Arabia’s custodianship of the Muslim holy cities, the
impact of his social and economic reforms, his interfaith outreach, and the
kingdom’s financial muscle to bolster his claim.
Even so, in
religious terms, Mr. Bin Salman would be playing catch-up with Nahdlatul Ulama.
The group
set an initial precedent in 2019 when 20,000 Nahdlatul Ulama Islamic scholars eliminated the category of the kafir
or infidel in their
interpretation of Islamic law. Instead, they replaced it with the word muwathinun
or citizens.
Last week,
Nahdlatul Ulama laid down a gauntlet for Mr. Bin Salman and other Muslim autocrats
and authoritarians by calling at an international conference of Islamic
scholars for replacing in Islamic law the notion
of a caliphate or single universal Muslim state with the concept of the
nation-state and
anchoring the United Nations and its charter in Islamic jurisprudence.
The group
argued that this was the only way to undermine jihadism’s roots in current
Islamic law.
Moreover, anchoring
the UN charter in religious law would legally oblige non-democratic regimes to
respect human rights.
“Obsolete and problematic elements of
fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) are still taught by most orthodox Sunni and Shi‘ite
institutions worldwide as authoritative and correct. These teachings…retain
considerable religious authority and social legitimacy among Muslims,” said
Nahdlatul Ulama chairman Yahya Cholil Staquf.
Driving home
the challenge to both jihadists and the Muslim world’s autocrats, Mr. Staquf
added: “The fundamentalist/supremacist view of Islam that these obsolete and
problematic tenets of Islamic orthodoxy endorse may be readily harnessed to
serve the interests of those with a political agenda.”
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Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological
University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of
the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East
Soccer.
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