Battle for Islam
I just finished watching an excellent programme on BBC2 called Battle for Islam. This was a muslim’s journey round the muslim world, looking at the different ways Islam is engaging with the world and the different ways in which it is understanding itself. The fundamental message of the programme for non-muslims is that there is no single worldview that is “Islam”. Rather, there is a wide range of ways of understanding both Islam and the world.
The programme visited five Islamic countries, all outside the Middle East – Pakistan, Indonesia (home to a fifth of the world’s muslims), Malaysia, Morocco and Turkey – looking at how Islam is dealing with the tensions of the modern world and the pressures of new ways of thinking. A central point was the role of women and how this is being redefined. The most important thing, though, it seems to me, is that there are three things that are often confused when thinking about Islam: religion, culture and law. The three are often thought of together as a single package (“Islam”) but in reality they are separate but connected aspects of life. Islam exists within a huge diversity of cultures, from completely secular (as in Turkey) to rigidly commercialist (as in Malaysia) to theocratic (as in much of the Middle East). Even sharia law isn’t a static entity that remains fixed through time. There are many different legal systems that can be drawn from the Qur’an – Morocco, for instance, has recently changed its law in line with Qur’anic teaching so as to give women many of the same rights as men, especially in family law (marriages, divorces, children etc.).
The most dangerous thing that faces us, after recent terrorist outrages, is to imagine that all muslims are the same and that they are all terrorists. Fundamentalism isn’t a universal among muslims any more than it is among Christians or any other group. Rather, fundamentalism arises when culture and religion come into conflict; those who retreat from the external culture and take refuge in their religion become fundamentalists, basing their whole belief systems around excluding the world. In doing so, they invariably lose the heart of the religion they claim to follow. The very name of Islam derives from the Arabic word salaam, which means “peace”.
pax et bonum
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