THE STRAITS TIMES, Wednesday January 15, 2003
Commentary
Mystery and militancy in Islam
By Chua Lee Hoong
THERE'S something about Islam... Half declaration, half question, that remark is
heard often these days. Confronted with rampaging Muslims who burn down
churches, Muslims who commit mass murder, and Muslims who insist that a woman
who cries rape must produce four male eyewitnesses, the temptation is to find in their
common denominator - the religion of Islam - the root cause of such senseless
behaviour.
Well-meaning persons, Muslim and non-Muslim, try to assure the world that that is
not so; that Islam forbids violence, that Islam means peace. Those who resort to terror
are wrong; they are not good Muslims; they are betraying the true religion.
Would that things were so simple.
A new book out paints it starkly. British philosopher Roger Scruton's The West And
The Rest - the title derived from Samuel Huntington's Clash Of Civilisations - contains
two key points that make it clear it will require more than guns and butter to rein in
Islamic militancy.
First, he reminds us that 'Islam' means not 'peace', but 'submission' - specifically,
submission to the will of Allah. 'The Muslim is the one who has surrendered,
submitted, and so obtained security.'
The Singapore Government's White Paper on the arrests of Jemaah Islamiah (JI)
members for terrorism-related activity offers a chilling corroboration. Many JI
members, it says, 'continued studying (under the radical teacher Ibrahim Maidin) not
only because of the search for religious knowledge, but also the sense of Muslim
fraternity and companionship'.
Searching for a 'no-fuss path to heaven', these would-be terrorists wanted to be
convinced that in the JI they had found 'true Islam', and thus freed themselves 'from
endless searching, as they found it stressful to be critical, evaluative and rational'.
To be sure, Islam is not the only religion providing refuge from the stresses of
modernity; most religions do.
In Islam, however, today's practitioners are confronted with compelling teachings and
teachers that make it hard for them to figure right from wrong, orthodox from
unorthodox, mainstream from deviant.
As Prof Scruton shows, Islam's murky ideological swamp predates the Al-Qaeda or
Taleban. Wahhabism, the radical sect named for an 18th century zealot, was one
important precursor. Another precursor was the formation in Egypt in the late 1920s of
the Muslim Brotherhood, whose avowed aim was to rid Egypt of foreign powers. The
Muslim Brotherhood established a pattern of violence and insurrection that was
followed elsewhere, including in Indonesia, where the Darul Islam - inspirational father
to the JI - fought with the revolutionary army against Dutch colonial rule.
Then there was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, who showed that a radical,
violent Islam was not only possible in the modern world but also exportable to the
West.
He said in 1984: 'War is a blessing for the world and for every nation. It is Allah
himself who commands men to wage war and to kill.'
Killing them, indeed, was doing them a service: 'If one allows the infidels to continue
playing their role of corrupters on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the
stronger. Thus, if we kill the infidels in order to put a stop to their (corrupting)
activities... their eventual punishment will be less.'
That logic, however perverse, continues to resonate with and inspire young men
across the Islamic world.
The greatest danger, however, is in the periphery of Islam moving to the centre. As
intelligent, educated Muslims sympathise with the radicals, they bring with them a
level of intellectual and operational sophistication that in time to come will render
Islamic militancy as potent a threat as communism was 50 years ago.
The story of Yazid Sufaat, reported in the Asian Wall Street Journal on Monday, is
instructive. Son of a poor Malaysian rubber tapper, Yazid was a scholarship student
sent by the Malaysian government to California in 1982 to study biochemisty. He was
meant to return a progressive professional, a poster boy for Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad's social engineering towards a prosperous modern society.
Instead, the 38-year-old sits today in a Kuala Lumpur prison. The middle-class
militant is suspected of abetting two Sept 11 hijackers and of being involved in the
Bali blasts.
Like the 'conscientisation' sessions of 1960s liberation theology, militant Islam
combines religious precepts with those of social justice - or what it deems as social
justice. As the JI White Paper notes, JI teachers employed 'the tactic of inserting into
lectures quotations from the Quran and Hadith, discussion on jihad and the plight of
suffering Muslims worldwide'.
The other chilling point from Prof Scruton is that unlike Western individualist
secularism, Islam is in a very fundamental sense a totalitarian doctrine: It seeks to
embrace and subordinate to its dictates the totality of life. The ulama ('those with
knowledge') have their authority directly from God. The syariah, the revealed will of
God, is the only sanction for law.
The point is affirmed by Iraq-born Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri, who wrote in The
Islamic Conception Of Justice that Muslims took for granted that political justice was
'an expression of God's will as interpreted and put into practice by the Prophet', and,
after the Prophet's death, by his legitimate successors.
Such an ideological framework is not only devoid of church or holy orders; taken to its
logical conclusion, it also denies any official compact with the state and regards
secular authority, by definition, as being without legitimacy.
'Like the Communist Party in its Leninist construction,' Prof Scruton says, 'Islam aims
to control the state without being a subject of the state.'
What does this all mean for the war against radicalism?
The secular prescription is obvious. For the sake of peaceful and sustainable
co-existence, Islam's best hope is under the same framework that binds other
religions to the state, in which religious institutions are subordinated in temporal
matters to temporal authorities.
Some scholars, including Muslim ones, have noted that Islam is today at the point
that Christianity was when the Reformation took place. They postulate that the throes
the religion is undergoing are not dissimilar to those that Christianity went through
before the separation of church and state became accepted within Christianity.
As Islam awaits its equivalent of Martin Luther, however, national governments have
only one option: tough, strong and secular leadership that heads off exclusivist
tendencies before they take deeper root.
Even the Malaysian government is coming round to that: Defence Minister Najib Tun
Razak warned yesterday that growing intolerance towards non- Muslims and an
Islamic religious school system that preaches extremism and hatred threatened the
Malaysian way of life. Singapore is no exception.
* The writer is Features Editor of The Straits Times.
E-mail: leehoong@sph.com.sg
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