Who are genuine Muslim moderates? Separating the wheat from the chaff
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If you think Islamic scholars
discussing the religious legitimacy of the United Nations and the nation-state
will put you to sleep, think again.
The call,
launched on Tuesday at a mass rally in the Indonesian city of Surabaya
commemorating the Indonesian group’s centennial and a gathering a day earlier of
Islamic scholars from across the globe, lays down a gauntlet for the Muslim
world’s autocratic and authoritarian leaders.
Anchoring
the United Nations and its charter in religious law would legally oblige
non-democratic regimes to respect human rights.
The charter compels
states to honour “fundamental human rights…the dignity and worth of the human
person, (and)…the equal rights of men and women” and makes it legally binding
for its Muslim signatories, according to religious law.”
Indonesian
President Joko Widodo seemingly endorsed the call by speaking at the rally
immediately after senior Nahdlatul Ulama leaders read it in Arabic and Bahasa
Indonesia at the gathering.
The call
constitutes the latest move in a sustained Nahdlatul Ulama effort to spark reform
of Islamic jurisprudence and inspire other faiths to take a critical look at
their potentially problematic tenets as a way of countering extremism and
religiously motivated violence.
“Nahdlatul
Ulama believes it is essential to the well-being of Muslims to develop a new
vision capable of replacing the long-established aspiration, rooted in Islamic
jurisprudence (fiqh), of uniting Muslims throughout the world into a single
universal state, or caliphate,” the group said in the declaration read out at the
rally.
“It is
neither feasible nor desirable to re-establish a universal caliphate that would
unite Muslims throughout the world in opposition to non-Muslims. As recently
demonstrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, attempts to do so
will inevitably be disastrous and contrary to the purposes of Sharia (Islamic
law): i.e., the protection of religion, human life, sound reasoning, family,
and property,” the declaration went on to say.
Yahya Cholil
Staquf, the chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama’s executive council, framed the group’s
proposition in questions about the need for jurisprudential reform that he
posed at the scholars’ conference.
Mr. Staquf’s
questions were based on an unpublished discussion paper that asserted that the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 attitude
towards non-Muslims described in the paper is at the core of the response of
the Muslim world to religious extremism and jihadism.
An open
letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the late leader of the Islamic State,
written after he declared in 2014 a caliphate with himself as caliph, signed by
126 prominent Islamic scholars, including participants in this weeks, insists
that “there is agreement (ittifaq) among scholars that a caliphate is an
obligation upon the Ummah (Muslim community).”
The letter
was typical of Muslim leaders, parroted by their Western counterparts, who, for
more than two decades since 9/11, have 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
jurisprudence that justify violence stymies criticism of the justification of
autocracy as a necessary means to combat violence and promote moderate Islam.
As a result,
the Nahdlatul Ulama challenge goes to the core of a battle for the soul of
Islam that involves a competition for religious soft power and leadership in
the Muslim world as well as who will define what constitutes moderate Islam.
The
ideological rivalry pits Nahdlatul Ulama’s concept of Humanitarian Islam,
which calls for religious reform and unambiguously endorses pluralism, the
United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights against an
autocratic definition of moderate Islam that rejects religious and political
reform but supports a formalistic, ceremonial form of inter-faith dialogue and
the loosening of social restrictions long advocated by orthodox Islam.
Among the
letter's signatories were proponents of autocratic forms of moderate Islam.
They
included Egyptian Grand Mufti Shawqi Allam; Egypt's former grand mufti, Ali
Goma, who religiously
endorsed the killing on a Cairo square in 2013 of some 800 Muslim Brotherhood
protesters by security forces; several members of Egypt’s state-controlled
Fatwa Council; and scholars At Al Azhar, Cairo’s citadel of Islamic learning.
Also among
the signatories were Abdullah Bin Bayyah, the head of the fatwa council of the
United Arab Emirates, and one of its other members, popular American Muslim
preacher Hamza Yusuf, men who do the Gulf state’s religious bidding.
The strength
of the Nahdlatul Ulama challenge was evident in the fact that some of the
world’s foremost opponents of the Indonesian group’s reformism felt the need to
be represented at this week’s conference in one way or another, even if some backed
out of the conference after initially suggesting that they would attend.
Messrs. Bin
Bayyah and Goma chose not to attend. Mr. Allam used his video remarks to
express opposition to Nahdlatul Ulama's call for replacing the caliphate with
the notion of the nation-state and endorsing the United Nations.
Muhammad
Al-Issa, the head of the Muslim World League, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman's vehicle for propagating his autocratic version of moderate Islam,
chose to ignore Nahdlatul Ulama's proposition. Mr. Al-Issa made his remarks on
video after cancelling his attendance.
Nahdlatul
Ulama threw down its gauntlet by asserting that Muslims need to choose between
maintaining the obligation to create a caliphate or reforming Islamic
jurisprudence so that it would “embrace a new vision and develop a new
discourse regarding Islamic jurisprudence, which will prevent the political
weaponization of identity; curtail the spread of communal hatred; promote
solidarity and respect among the diverse peoples, cultures, and nations of the
world; and foster the emergence of a truly just and harmonious world order,”
according to the declaration.
In its unpublished paper, Nahdlatul Ulama asserted that “Muslims
should acknowledge that a socio-political construct (or imperium) capable of
operationalizing these normative views across the Muslim world no longer
exists" and that "as a consequence of choosing to retain the
established fiqh view and norms associated therewith…would automatically be a
religious duty incumbent upon Muslims to revive the imperium. This, in turn,
would necessarily entail dissolving any and all existing nation-states, under
whose governance Muslims currently live."
With
one-third of Indonesia's 270 million inhabitants identifying themselves as
Nahdlatul Ulama and a religious authority of its own, the group is likely to
formally announce its reform of relevant Islamic jurisprudence, potentially
supported by various non-Indonesian scholars, mosques, and other Muslim
associations, irrespective of opposition to its moves.
While the
group's legal move would not be binding in a Muslim world where legal authority
is decentralised, it lays down a marker that other Muslim legal authorities
will ultimately be unable to ignore in their bid to be recognised as proponents
of a genuinely moderate Islam.
Thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the
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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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