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| Dialogue with Orthodox Islam |
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Orthodox Islam receives at worst a hysterical response and at best an ambivalent one. It would be futile to argue that there are not important points of difference between Orthodox Islam’s views and those who hold liberal secular values. However Dr Salman Ahmed argues that moderate Islam is largely a myth and that if the West wants to entertain a serious dialogue it should realise Orthodox Islam is the only game in town. Imposing a western doctrine of what Islam should be in the Muslim world is doomed to failure.
If many media commentators and politicians are to be believed then we are engaged in a struggle to the death with Islamic fascists and nihilists who hate Western societies for their freedoms and who will not be satisfied until they have destroyed Western civilisation. Others claim that Islamic radicals want to drag Muslim societies back to medieval times by returning them to the imagined purity of a seventh century Islamic society. We are told that there is nothing to discuss with these extremists. President Putin when asked by a reporter after the Beslan school massacre if he would now start political dialogue with the Chechen guerrillas replied, "Would you invite Osama bin Laden to the White House or to Brussels and hold talks with him and let him dictate what he wants?" In the war on terror, it seems there will be no dialogue with Muslim insurgents and guerrillas and what remains is to hunt them down and kill them.
Traditional Muslim thinkers, scholars and leaders also find that the Western press and politicians are eager to label them as being homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynists and supporters of terrorists and suicide bombers. Whether or not this is a deliberate policy is a debatable point, but the net result is to intimidate and frighten traditional Muslims from speaking publicly.
When Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi came to Britain in July 2004, the print and broadcast media kept on running the story as to why the Sheikh, who they claimed was a "supporter of suicide bombers" and a person who was against homosexuality, had been allowed into the UK. These attacks on the personality of the Sheikh were not only limited to the media. The Labour MP Louise Ellman said it would be "an outrage" to let him visit and create "enormous security problems". Tory leader Michael Howard demanded to know why the cleric had not been refused entry to the UK. Recently, some members of the London Assembly have questioned why London Mayor Ken Livingstone met the Sheikh formally and what his links were with him.
What happened to Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi was not an isolated case but rather a reflection of the treatment that religious or traditional Muslims can expect from much of the Western media and many of its politicians. Some Western intellectuals argue that there is no place for Muslim orthodoxy and traditions in today's world, because it intellectually underpins the behaviour of Muslims fighting in Iraq, Palestine and Chechnya; it keeps Muslims from accepting their place in modernity. They point out that the West should be concerned with the reformation of Islam itself so that Muslims will eventually leave their outdated traditions and values and become modern. It was reported that the US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 that "We need an Islamic reformation", and later in the same statement he mentioned that he thought "there is real hope for one". Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia based Middle East Forum is another prominent figure who calls for the reformation of Islam and is closely aligned to the current US administration - President Bush appointed him to the board of directors of the US Institute of Peace in June 2003. In July 2004 Daniel Pipes stated that the "ultimate goal" of the war on terrorism had to be Islam's modernisation, or as he put it, "religion-building".
There have been changes amongst some Muslims in their interpretation of Islam over the last fourteen centuries; for example when Muslims came into contact with people with differing traditions and philosophies such as the Greeks, Persians or Indians, some Muslims tried to integrate the best of the local philosophies and traditions into their understanding of Islam. But throughout the centuries, the majority of Muslims have maintained an attachment to a common set of reference points - the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) - and were in close agreement on most doctrinal and legal issues. The five most influential schools of Islamic thought (madahib) - Hanafi, Shafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Jafari - named after their founding scholars, were established on this approach and defined much of the body of Islamic interpretations and opinion over many centuries, and still do so today. Although some have termed this attachment ’traditionalism’, ultimately it has been this approach that has won the argument in the sphere of Muslim public opinion.
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