10 December 2005: on reading the Koran

Following on from my piece on the Left and anti-Muslim racism, a friend sent me a quote from Sam Harris, 'Those who say that Islam is a religion of peace simply have not read the Koran and the Hadith.' He continued, 'I do think that Islam as a belief, like all superstitions, does harken back to a much earlier time in our development as a species, when we didn't know any better.' For me, this was a pretty classic example of the sorts of unhelpful thinking that I wanted to challenge with my last piece. The following paragraphs are from my response:

I have read the Koran in three translations, getting different things out of it each time, but I don't think it's helpful to read the Koran and kid yourself that in doing so that is the best way to understand religion, as its followers understand it, today.

I'd make the same point for Christianity, if you want to understand George Bush then I think it's better to begin with CS Lewis than Leviticus. Narnia captures sufficiently the trend within Christianity that says: you should obey absolute power. If it was as simple as to say 'the Christian right hate gay marriage because it says something bad in Leviticus' - then why don't they have it in for shellfish?

Surely, it's the other way round, there are problems in the world today that send religious people back to texts, looking for solutions. I agree that people need to have something in the text to justify their positions: a person in 2005 AD reads a book written 1200 years later to find statement X (which needs to be there), and then duly finds it. But you need to understand some of the complexities of the process:

1) For Sunnis, the Hadith is almost as central a part of the religious tradition as the Koran. Once you include interpretation, then almost all social positions can find authority to justify them. EG homosexuality - if you want, I can send you the transcript of the discussions at this year's conference of the Gay Muslim network Imaan which prove on the basis of scriptural reading that homosexuality is not just tolerated but encouraged in Islam. They did so on the basis of two quotes from the Koran and several from the Hadith. (At least one imam was present and concurred).

2) By contrast for Shia, neither the Hadith nor the Koran play the same role: if you think you understand their religion by analogy with Christianity, then you won't get it at all. Shia still live in an age of interpretation: their Islamic is much less based on textual
authority, and much more determined by the personality of the charismatic leader (everyone is expected to chose a religious leader to be their authority). Hence the importance in one era of Khomeni and in another of the first Moqtada.
 
If you read people like Sayd Qutb you see that the problems with which they are dealing (however badly) are not remotely the ones of the stone or iron ages, but of present times: racism, imperialism, social inequality, alienation. It follows that if you want to understand Islam (even from a position of opposing it) then you should actually read what political Muslims and Arabs are writing in the present.

It also follows, pretty clearly to me, that once you accept a need to read - the voices to encourage aren't necessarily the ones that exist only at the leftmost edge of a spectrum that goes from secular to believer. Rather, the most interesting and useful ones are the ones that have the clearest answer to questions like - how can we have a vibrant social democracy in the Middle East?

It just is a matter of long historical record that secularism and faith are weak predictors of political positions. In Morocco, sufism provides the leadership of the main Islamist party. In other countries in the Middle East, sufism has often been associated with Communism. In the 1970s, most of the Kurds called themselves atheists, today most call themselves Sunni: I doubt their political views have changed that profoundly.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist left supported and sometimes collaborated in a number of generals' regimes: Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, etc. They allowed themselves to be seen to be cheerleading for the persecution of Islamists: in the present day, when the Islamists are challenging American power, and the generals aren't, everyone in the region remembers the left's former complicity. No matter how 'secular', the left is assumed to be a weak defender of individual rights - and bizarrely, in many countries, even the Islamists are seen as better.

To respond to that complex political debate by either saying 'all religion bad' or 'all secularists good' is to put a barrier of comprehension between you and the people on the ground. If the long-term issue is democracy or (preferably) social democracy, you need to understand that history. Otherwise, you end up being yet another Westerner saying 'hey, I've read the Koran, I know what these guys think'.