This, too, helps explain the notorious underrepresentation of Muslims as scientific and technological innovators. To be sure, the medieval Arabic world gave us its numerals and preserved classical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost when Rome was overrun by the barbarian tribes. In the ninth century, the Muslim rulers of Córdoba in Spain built a library large enough to house 600,000 books. Córdoba then had paved streets, streetlamps, and some three hundred public baths, at a time when London was little more than a collection of mud huts, lined with straw, where all manner of waste was thrown into the street and there was not a single light on the public thoroughfares.23 Yet, as Albert Hourani points out, Western scientific discoveries from the Renaissance on produced “no echo” in the Islamic world. Copernicus, who in the early 1500s determined that the earth was not the center of the universe but rather revolved around the sun, did not appear in Ottoman writings until the late 1600s, and then only briefly.24 There was no Muslim Industrial Revolution. Today, there is no Islamic equivalent of Silicon Valley. It simply is not convincing to blame this stagnation on Western imperialism; after all, the Islamic world had empires of its own, the Mughal as well as the Ottoman and Safavid. Though it is unfashionable to say so, Islam’s fatalism is a more plausible explanation for the Muslim world’s failure to innovate.
Significantly, the very word for innovation in Islamic texts, bid’a, refers to practices that are not mentioned in the Qur’an or the sunnah. One hadith translated into English declares that every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation takes one down a misguided path toward hell. Others warn against general innovations as things spread by Jewish and Christian influences and by all those who are ruled by misguided and dangerous passions. Those who innovate should be isolated and physically punished and their ideas should be condemned by the ulema.25 It was precisely this mentality that killed off astronomical research in sixteenth-century Istanbul and ensured that the printing press did not reach the Ottoman Empire until more than two centuries after its spread throughout Europe.
Zakir Naik, an Indian-born and -trained doctor who has become a very popular imam, has argued that, while Muslim nations can welcome experts from the West to teach science and technology, when it comes to religion, it is Muslims who are “the experts.”26 Hence, no other religions can or should be preached in Muslim nations, because those religions are false. But look more closely at his point: Naik is implicitly acknowledging the success of the West in this world. All Muslim nations have to offer, he concedes, is a near-total expertise on the subject of the next world.
Reasons to Live
There must be an alternative. In some ways, the words of Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel are even more true today than when she spoke them: “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” I would only substitute for the word “Arabs,” “Medina Muslims.” For while the phenomenon of murderous martyrdom was once a peculiar feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has now spread throughout the Muslim world. This exaltation of the afterlife as a tenet of Islam is in desperate need of reform.
In the early fall of 2013, more than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world signed an open letter to the “fighters and followers” of Islamic State, denouncing them as “un-Islamic.”27 Their letter, originally written in classical Arabic, makes the point that it is forbidden in Islam to kill emissaries, ambassadors, and diplomats, as well as the innocent. It even says it is “permissible” in Islam to be loyal to one’s country. But the letter does not question the overall concept of martyrdom or challenge the primacy of the afterlife. Predictably, it has had a very limited impact. There are no IS fighters laying down their arms as a result of it; no would-be Western jihadists have been persuaded by it to abandon the search for martyrdom in Syria.
We need to go much further. Until Islam stops fixating on the afterlife, until it is liberated from the seductive story of life after death, until it actively chooses life on earth and stops valuing death, Muslims themselves cannot get on with the business of living in this world.
Perhaps Islam can take a page from the Protestant Reformation in this respect. As we have seen, the sociologist Max Weber theorized that Protestantism, though still focused on the afterlife, fostered a more constructive engagement with the world with the doctrine of “election,” whereby the “godly” were deemed to have been preselected to be saved in the afterlife. Simply put, certain Protestant sects tended to encourage the decidedly capitalistic virtues of diligence, frugality, hard work, and deferred gratification. According to Weber, the Protestant ethic gave rise to a distinctive and transformative “spirit of capitalism” in North America and northern Europe.
Might a similar process be possible within the Islamic world? Could there be a comparable “Muslim ethic”—one that might lead in time to a greater engagement with this world? Perhaps. There is no doubt that Islam has its own commercial tradition. Muhammad himself was a caravan trader. There are entire chapters of sharia devoted to things such as contracts and rules for trade. And, as Timur Kuran has shown, sharia is not overtly hostile to economic progress; in the Ottoman Empire it established commerce-friendly legal rules and institutions. It was just that European legal systems were more conducive to capital formation.28
Explanations abound for the relative economic backwardness of many Muslim countries, ranging from corrupt governance to the “resource curse” of plentiful oil. But I am not one of those who think Muslims are condemned to economic failure. On the contrary, in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, there is ample evidence that a capitalist ethic can coexist with Islam. Anyone who takes the time to walk through a North African souk will see how readily Muslims engage in trade. As Hernando de Soto has noted, it was frustrated entrepreneurs, driven to self-immolation by the depredations of corrupt dictatorships, who launched the Arab Spring.
If imams started talking about making this world a paradise, rather than preaching that the only life that matters is the one that begins at death, we might begin to see economic dynamism in more Muslim-majority economies. Giving capitalism a greater chance to thrive in Islamic societies might be the most effective means of redirecting the aspirations of young Muslims to the rewards of life on earth instead of the promise of rewards after death. Such opportunities would give them a reason to live, instead of a reason to die. Only when Islam chooses this life can it finally begin to adapt to the modern world.
CHAPTER 5
SHACKLED BY SHARIA
How Islam’s Harsh Religious Code Keeps Muslims Stuck in the Seventh Century
In Sudan a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Meriam Ibrahim, who was at the time eight months pregnant, was sentenced to suffer one hundred lashes and death by hanging for the crimes of adultery and apostasy. This sentence was not passed in 714 or 1414. It happened in 2014.
Meriam’s crimes and my own are essentially the same under sharia. We both have been accused of leaving our religion. Like her, I married an infidel. I left religion entirely, whereas Meriam chose to follow the faith of her mother, an Ethiopian Christian, rather than her father, a Sudanese Muslim, and married a Christian man. Her “outing” by her family was an act of “commanding right and forbidding wrong,” a practice with which we will deal in the following chapter, but her treatment after her arrest was determined in accordance with sharia. One of Meriam’s own brothers told CNN that her husband had given her “potions” to convert her to Christianity and that, if she did not renounce her faith and repent, “she should be executed.”1
Under Sudan’s Islamic law code, and sharia in general, a father’s religion is automatically the religion of his children. And Muslim women are prohibited from marrying outside their faith, although that prohibition does not apply to Muslim men. Thus, to the Sudanese sharia court, it did not matter that Meriam Ibrahim was raised as an Orthodox Christian by her mother. It did not matter that her father was absent for most of her childhoo
d. It did not matter that she was married to an American citizen. In the strict application of Islamic law, apostasy is punishable by death, while adultery is punishable by one hundred lashes.
The sentence was not inflicted immediately because Meriam was pregnant when she was jailed—she gave birth to her daughter while shackled in leg irons to a wall in her cell. Sharia defers the imposition of the death penalty on a pregnant mother until her baby is ready to be weaned. Her only recourse, according to the Sudanese court, was to renounce Christianity and return to Islam. Indeed, in recent years, recanting and returning to Islam is how other apostates have avoided such a death sentence. But Meriam refused. Clerics were brought to visit her in jail, and she said she would not renounce Christianity for Islam. She said simply: “How can I return when I was never a Muslim?”
The U.S. State Department declared it was “deeply disturbed” by Meriam’s harsh sentence. Condemnation also came from Amnesty International, and the embassies of Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. It took months for the Sudanese government to grasp the scale of the public relations disaster it was inflicting on itself. Still the authorities sought to save face. Even after her death sentence was overturned, Meriam was accused of forging documents and was not allowed to leave Sudan. Instead, the “Agents of Fear,” an element of the Sudanese police apparatus, trapped her at the airport. There, they beat up Meriam as well as her lawyers.
Only negotiations by Italian diplomats finally persuaded the Sudanese to relent, and Meriam’s first stop after gaining her freedom was to meet with Pope Francis. (Here, incidentally, we see the stark difference between two faiths. In Argentina, the pope’s birthplace, where Catholicism enjoys financial support from the state, are those who leave the Church sentenced to death? Are those who marry outside the Catholic faith convicted of adultery and sentenced to one hundred lashes?)
Abuses like those committed against Meriam are not isolated incidents. Sharia is routinely invoked or applied in all manner of circumstances across much of the Islamic world. And each time, its authority comes ultimately from Islam’s sacred texts.
Here is a sampling of acceptable punishments under sharia:
Beheadings are sanctioned in chapter 47, verse 4, of the Qur’an, among others, which states, “when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks.”
Crucifixions are sanctioned in 5:33: “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land.”
Amputations are prescribed in 5:38: “As to the thief, Male or female, cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of example, from Allah, for their crime: and Allah is Exalted in power.”
Stonings are also permitted, according to the hadith Sunan Abu Dawud, book 38, no. 4413: “Narrated Abdullah ibn Abbas: The Prophet (peace be upon him) said to Ma’iz ibn Malik: Perhaps you kissed, or squeezed, or looked. He said: No. He then said: Did you have intercourse with her? He said: Yes. On the (reply) he (the Prophet) gave order that he should be stoned to death.”
The Qur’an specifically urges Muslims not to be moved by compassion in cases of adultery and fornication, and decrees a public lashing. Chapter 24, verse 2, instructs: “The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with a hundred stripes: Let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if ye believe in Allah and the Last Day: and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment.”
Nor are beheadings, crucifixions, amputations, stonings, and lashings considered to be antiquated punishments. Some or all of them remain fully operational in countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Sudan, where they are either sanctioned by the state or frequently imposed by the local faithful with tacit official approval. At the time of writing, the Saudi writer Raif Badawi is being subjected to the brutal punishment of public whipping because of blog posts judged blasphemous under sharia.
What Is Sharia?
Sharia formally codifies Islam’s many rules. It governs not just how you worship, but also the organization of your daily life, your personal behavior, your economic and legal transactions, your life at home, and in many cases even the governance of your nation. The nineteenth-century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, who was so astute in his understanding of American democracy, wrote: “Islam . . . has most completely confounded and intermixed the two powers . . . so that all the acts of civil and political life are regulated more or less by religious law.”2 Today, that same religious law remains the cornerstone of the Muslim world. It is exacting and punishment-centered. It prescribes what to do with unbelievers, both infidels and those who stray from the faith. It even contains rules on what types of blows are permissible when a husband beats his wife.
When we in the West think of the law, we conceive of it as a set of rules that govern the use of power and protect the rights of individuals. We have rules for everything, from driving to business contracts to the protection of private property, as well as rules to ensure fair treatment—to prevent individuals, corporations, and governments from acting recklessly, punitively, or without proper cause—and rules to punish those responsible for personal injury. The law evolves, a living thing that adapts to our changing society. The law also exists to resolve disputes. We settle in or out of court. But we settle peacefully.
Sharia arises out of an entirely different set of impulses. In early Islam, the state government was, as Patricia Crone describes it, “first and foremost about the maintenance of a moral order.” The first allegiance in the Muslim community was to the imam, because only with a religious leader could the people “travel along the legal highways revealed by God.” What separated Muslims from the infidels were not their laws; it was the God-given nature of their laws.3 And because these laws came ultimately from Muhammad’s divine revelations, they were fixed and could not be changed. Thus the law code dating from the seventh century continues to be followed today in nations and regions that adhere to sharia. Where Western laws generally set boundaries for what cannot be done, leaving everything else permissible, with sharia the system is reversed. The list of things that can be done is very small, while the list of what cannot be done overwhelms everything else—except for the list of punishments, which is even longer.
As a legal text, the Qur’an reflects its origins in a tribal or clan-based society, particularly on issues concerning inheritance, male guardianship, the validity of a woman’s testimony in court, and polygamy. This is even more obvious in the hadith, the compilation of sayings attributed to the Prophet or documenting his actions. This combination of the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad forms the basis of sharia. The derivation of these legal rules, known as fiqh, is the responsibility of Islamic jurists and takes place on the basis of ijma (consensus). When conflicts of interpretation arise, scholars consult the Qur’an and hadith. If both are silent on the subject, jurists rely on a method of analogy (qiyas) to reach consensus.
As Ernest Gellner points out in his classic work, Muslim Society, “In traditional Islam, no distinction is made between lawyer and canon lawyer, and the roles of theologian and lawyer are conflated. Expertise on proper social arrangements, and on matters pertaining to God, are one and the same thing.”4 In other words, it is as if our priests, ministers, and rabbis were also our judges and legislators, employing their religious theology to establish legal boundaries of acceptable conduct in our daily lives.
Over the years, I have engaged in many discussions and debates on the Qur’an and hadith and their role in sharia. A common reply from devout Muslims is that the Bible (particularly the Old Testament book of Leviticus, but other sections as well) contains rules and punishments that are strict and stringent and antiquated by modern standards; thus it is unfair to single out Islam.
It is
true that many parts of the Old and New Testaments reflect patriarchal norms. It is also true that the Hebrew scriptures contain many stories of harsh divine and human retribution. Even nonbelievers have heard of the concept of “an eye for an eye.” In Deuteronomy, Moses imparts a great many laws, governing everything from the removal of boundary stones to the muzzling of oxen, to prohibitions against marrying one’s stepmother, to the punishment of stoning for the crime of idolatry. The difference is that no one invokes these passages in modern-day jurisprudence, and their prescribed punishments have long since been set aside.
If there is one set of rules that is “timeless” in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible, it is the Ten Commandments, a relatively short list of prohibitions on killing, stealing, adultery, and so on. It was assumed that most laws were not religious in origin. Indeed, Judaism contains an ancient principle known as “dina demalkhuta dina,” which means, “The law of the land is the law.”5 This is the principle that has made it possible for Jews as a community to exist under civil laws that differed from their own religious laws.6 Christ, too, made it clear to his followers that they should “render up to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and not only where Roman imperial taxation was concerned. Islam, on the other hand, views any law not in harmony with its own as illegitimate (5:44, 5:50). And its own law—sharia—derives from the entire Qur’an and all hadith.
Nothing drove this home to me more than the session of my Harvard seminar in which we discussed the drafting of a new Egyptian constitution. The Egyptian student who had previously shouted that she hadn’t done the assigned reading declared: “It really doesn’t matter what you write in the constitution of Egypt. It’s not going to change anything. We are just going to carry on living the way we live.”