Abstract
In contemporary Europe and North America, Islam is often depicted as an alien religion and distinct civilisation, a fount of ‘jihadi’ suicide bombers implacably hostile to Christian or Judaeo-Christian western civilisation. Many perceive Islam as a stagnant traditional religion and culture, mired in medievalism with no Martin Luther in sight. Some scholars, however, view Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism as a modern phenomenon, a reaction to the challenges of colonialism, secularism, capitalism and democracy. Liberal or ecumenically minded westerners point out the considerable challenges which Muslim reformers and political leaders have faced, not without successes, over the past two centuries. Islamism, Pan-Arab nationalism, territorial nationalisms and even small communist movements have all received their scholarly due.
Ralph Coury’s welcome new anthology concentrates instead on ‘sceptics of Islam’ who have raised ‘provocative challenges, not only to the ideas of Islamists, but also to much of the standard intellectual repertoire of religious liberals who have constituted the Islamists’ primary opponents’ (p. 3). Coury sensibly leaves a majority of the world’s Muslims – from Turkey and Iran through to the Philippines – largely off stage in order to focus in on the Arab world. Tightly written introductions sketch the lives and ideas of seventeen writers. Most of the translations from Arabic are by Coury; several are by R. Kevin Lacey; and the remainder are reprints of translations by others.
Although Egypt’s Nawal El Saadawi is the lone woman among the seventeen, it is her portrait that appears on the dust jacket. A single text (Muhammad ‘Abduh, 1897) catches the tail end of the nineteenth century, and two texts (al-Qusaymi, 2001 and El Saadawi, 2006) tack on a post twentieth-century coda. ‘Abduh’s 1849 birthdate is the earliest, and three authors, born in the 1930s and now in their eighties, are still living. Seven were Egyptian-born – a reflection of Egypt’s demographic, political, and cultural weight. Two are Syrians, two each Lebanese and Iraqi, and one each Algerian, Sudanese and Saudi Arabian. Two are of Christian background (Shibli Shumayyil and Ameen Rihani), one is an ‘Alawite Muslim (‘Ali Ahmad Sa’id-Adunis), and the rest Sunni Muslims. One (Algerian Mohammed Arkoun) was a native speaker of Berber before learning Arabic. Shumayyil and Rihani also represent the Lebanese diaspora, spending most of their respective careers in Egypt and America.
In Rihani’s Aesopian fable published in New York in 1903, a horse, a mule and a donkey try to roll back the threat to their livelihoods presented by the steamship, locomotive, automobile and electricity. A free-thinking fox, however, urges: ‘Revise your current religious law so that it is in accordance with the laws of nature. Build your creed on the laws of electricity and steam and you will find yourself close to God’ (p. 46). Put on trial for heresy, the fox denies belief in miracles, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the divinity of the animals’ god – the lion. The donkey splits open the fox’s head with a crucifix and, after other tortures, the fox is burned to death. In the wake of an ensuing thunderstorm, the lion drives down in an automobile to rebuke the persecutors: ‘I told you to love your enemies … When did I tell you to burn your brethren for my sake’ (p. 56). Trudging off along a railway track, the donkey, horse and mule are run over by the train of modernity, ‘wagons of steam’ and of ‘electricity’, and their dismembered bodies ‘scattered on the road of modern civilization’. Though Rihani skewered Christian more than Islamic doctrine, he had no patience with either. His fable earned him excommunication from his natal Maronite Church.
Alexandria-born Isma’il Adham published his article ‘Why I am an Atheist’ in 1937, and several others either embraced atheism or danced on the edge of it. Adham’s friend Isma’il Mazhar – along with Shumayyil an ardent Darwinist – cited Epicurus: God either wants to prevent evil but cannot or does not want to; but if he cannot, he is not God.
Muhammad ‘Abduh, the famous pioneer of modernist Islam, leads off the anthology. His doctrinal clashes with al-Azhar, his alma mater, did not prevent him from becoming Grand Mufti of Egypt. Convinced that contemporary Islam was stagnant, he prescribed revival through return to the spirit of pious early Muslims (al-salaf) and insisted that true religion did not clash with science.
After ‘Abduh, three Cairo University scholars included here stirred up successive storms several decades apart. Taha Husayn’s On Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926) suggested that Biblical and Quranic stories about Abraham and Isma’il (Ishmael) were literary, not historical. The pair’s building of the Ka’abah in Mecca was a legitimising myth linking Islam and the Quraysh tribe to primal monotheism, not unlike the Romans’ embrace of Aeneas, son of Priam of Troy, as their legendary forebear. Surviving the outrage that greeted his book, Husayn became the grand old man of Egyptian letters and minister of education.
In 1947 Cairo University rejected Muhammad Ahmad Kalaf Allah’s dissertation ‘The Art of Storytelling in the Qur’an’ for similarly treating Quranic stories as literary rather than historical narratives. Although he earned his Ph.D. two years later for a different dissertation on a non-religious literary topic, his advancement at the university was blocked and he taught instead at the Arab League’s Higher Institute. In round three, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd published The Concept of the Text: a study in the sciences of the Quran in 1992: ‘I treat the Qur’an as a text (nass) given by God to the Prophet Muhammad. The text is put into a human language, which is the Arabic language. When I said so, I was accused of saying that the Prophet Muhammad wrote the Qur’an’ (p. 157). Convicting him of apostasy, a court annulled his marriage. Fleeing calls for his execution, Abu Zayd found refuge at the University of Leiden.
In Nawal El Saadawi’s play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting (2006), Moses, Abraham, Christ, Muhammad and Satan assemble to lay their complaints before God, but women – including Eve, Virgin Mary, Isis and Bint Allah (Daughter of God) – push their way in to complain about patriarchal monotheism. Admitting to having made mistakes, God resigns to live as a human: ‘I am tired of being eternal, isolated in the heavens from people, and lonely’ (p. 210).
Readers of Race & Class and others will find much to ponder in this rich collection of texts. Although several writers were committed Darwinists, there is little explicit attention here to racial aspects of European imperialism or to Arabs’ own ideas about race. Did it matter that Isma’il Adham’s father was a Turkish army officer and his mother a European, that Khalaf Allah’s mother was Sudanese, or that Taha Husayn’s wife (not mentioned here) was French?
As for class, Coury draws attention to the effendiyyah – trouser- and fez-wearing professionals and officials whose ‘modern’ state or private schooling set them apart from the robed and turbaned ‘shaykhs’ from the religious schools. Class backgrounds ranged from the rural poverty that kept Adunis out of school for much of his childhood to Sadiq al-’Azm’s birth into a family of Damascus notables. Many of the authors worked as professors, journalists or public officials; two were medical doctors.
‘Abduh may have become Grand Mufti, neo-classical poets Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi and Ma’ruf al-Rusafi Iraqi MPs, and Taha Husayn a cabinet minister, but there was often a high price to be paid for radical scepticism. In Sudan, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was executed, though more for his politics than his religious radicalism. Several others were threatened with execution or assassination. Most had their books banned at one time or another, some were jailed, and several fled or chose exile from their homelands. Nevertheless, many of these daring sceptics found significant support among their readers, and their influence lives on. I highly recommend this excellent anthology.