Islam and Freedom of Thought

Riwayat Attubani-"What was once an occasional event -- silencing scholars -- increasingly has become a way of life in most Muslim countries. From South Asia to North Africa, an entire generation of Muslim intellectuals is at this moment under threat: Many have already been killed, silenced, or forced into exile."
By Akbar Ahmed and Lawrence Rosen

As America and its allies have set about building coalitions that include many of the Islamic nations, it is easy to lose sight of the issue of intellectual freedom within the Muslim world. While the safety of Western countries may depend on alliances with other regimes, those alliances should not come at the price of abandoning scholars and intellectuals in the Middle East, whose ability to speak out is no less under attack, often by these same governments. Our concern is that scholars in Muslim countries will be overlooked in the rush to forge expedient alliances.

The image shown to the world on the cover of the June 17, 2001, New York Times Magazine, of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a respected Egyptian sociologist, caged and on trial for the exercise of his intellectual freedom, ought to send a chill through both the Muslim world and the West. Before his arrest for alleged homosexuality, embezzlement, and spying for the United States and Israel, he was conducting research on Cairo voters' sentiments about why Muslims join militant groups. From South Asia to North Africa, an entire generation of Muslim intellectuals is at this moment under threat: Many have already been killed, silenced, or forced into exile.

Consider Pakistan. The late nuclear physicist Abdus Salam, Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, was pressured to leave early in his career, in the late 1950s, because he belonged to a sect not recognized by most Pakistani Muslims. Fazlur Rahman, instrumental in starting Islamic studies at the University of Chicago in the late '60s, was chased out earlier in that decade by Islamic religious parties.

There is considerable irony in the fact that Pakistan's record in relation to freedom of thought is not good, given the nature of its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah believed in human rights, women's rights, minority rights, and the rule of law. Along with his followers, he hoped to create a modern Muslim nation, one that would respect Islamic tradition but at the same time be part of a modern community of nations.

Jinnah so respected women's rights that he insisted that his sister, Fatima Jinnah, be with him publicly in his struggle for the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Fatima Jinnah herself became a role model for women. And Jinnah deeply loved his wife, Ruttie, who was a non-Muslim (and half his age), and his only child, Dina, who, as a young woman, refused to marry a Muslim. The women in Jinnah's family thus created problems for those who wished to portray Jinnah as a straightforward religious extremist.

That view of Jinnah was pushed most strongly after General Zia-ul-Haq took power in 1977 through a military coup and launched a campaign to "Islamize" Pakistan. But how do you explain a wife who is not a Muslim, and a daughter who refused to marry a Muslim? The historian Sharif al-Mujahid -- whose 1981 biography of Jinnah, Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah, is perhaps the best known in Pakistan -- did not mention either woman in his 806-page volume. Nor do Pakistan's official archives, pictorial exhibitions, or official publications contain more than a picture or two of them.

To portray the real Jinnah, Akbar Ahmed, one of the authors of this essay, along with several friends and colleagues, spent the 1990s on several related projects, which came to be called the Jinnah Quartet. They included the feature film Jinnah (released in English and Urdu in 2000); a television documentary, Mr. Jinnah -- The Making of Pakistan (released in 1997); an academic book called Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (published by Routledge in 1997); and a graphic novel (published by Oxford University Press in 1997).

The Jinnah Quartet attempted to answer a crucial question about Muslim society that many scholars and intellectuals -- Muslims and non-Muslims alike -- are asking in their respective countries: Can Muslim countries produce moderate leaders? Do Muslims have leaders who care for human rights, women's rights, minority rights, and the sanctity of law, and who can lead their nations to the international community with honor? The authors of the quartet believe that Jinnah was one such leader who provides a relevant, contemporary model. The Jinnah Quartet attempted not only to challenge images and ideas of the last days of the British Raj, but also communicate ideas about leadership, the nature of the Islamic state, and the compassionate and tolerant nature of Islam.

The Jinnah Quartet project was controversial. Once the filming started in 1997 -- in England, where the author was living, and on location in Pakistan -- the Pakistani press and various political parties launched a disinformation campaign, claiming that Salman Rushdie had written the script for the film, or that it was part of a Hindu or a Zionist conspiracy.

While filming in Pakistan, the author and others involved in the project were verbally attacked and threatened by journalists and "concerned citizens," and important officials repeatedly warned them not to portray a tolerant Jinnah and the tolerant Islam he represented. Journalists demanded money to publish positive articles about the project or threatened to write slander; bureaucrats tried to stop the project through delays and denials of permissions necessary for filming. (Eventually, the government of Pakistan reneged on a written agreement and pulled out almost one-third of the budget it had committed during the shooting of the film.) The project was completed, and the film won several awards at international film festivals. But despite gratifying responses in the West, Africa, and even Pakistan, the Jinnah model appears to have failed in the Muslim world. Even those political leaders who believe in democracy, once in power, fall back on tyranny and corruption to stay in office.

Ordinary citizens have little idea that an indigenous democratic model is available to Muslim society, because the scholars and intellectuals who can articulate that vision are being silenced.

When Muslim scholars and intellectuals -- those who seek and foster knowledge -- are silenced, Muslim citizens are cut off from part of who they are. Islam places enormous emphasis on knowledge. It charges humans to use their God-given reason to better themselves and their dependents, and throughout history ordinary Muslims have cherished that expectation and the benefits such knowledge has produced. They appreciate the control that knowledge gives them over their destiny, the connections it allows them to form with people different from themselves, the insight it gives them into their faith, and the limits it may place on those who exercise power. For that multifarious search for knowledge to be jeopardized is to risk not only the loss of information but a crucial element of who Muslims know themselves to be.

We think of knowledge in this information age as readily accessible to all. When we see an Internet cafe in a dusty town of South Asia or a satellite dish hooked up to a car battery in the countryside of North Africa, we assume that authoritarian regimes can no longer control the flow of communication. But being hooked up and online may make it easier to know what is happening across the world than to know of events in the next town or district.

In many Muslim regimes, intelligence agencies with their own agendas and presidents who exercise their powers capriciously create a constant state of uncertainty that spreads well beyond the challenge of any one thinker's ideas or proposed reforms. When the scholar is silenced it is not useless knowledge that is lost: It is the sense that pursuing knowledge, wherever it may be found, is no longer part of the expression of God's will.

Pressures on intellectual freedom come from many sources.

Throughout much of the Muslim world, university students are among the most ardent fundamentalists, fueled by the literal interpretation of Islam taught at madrassahs (Muslim religious schools). The network of madrassahs in turn links up with religious political parties across national boundaries. In Muslim countries, madrassahs are seen as a legitimate Islamic alternative to unaffordable private schools patronized by the westernized elite.

Professors, particularly in the liberal arts, are often cowed by their own students into silence, both in their teaching and in their writing. Like some postmodernist gone mad, the student of literature may see fiction as nothing but the expression of the writer's politics, while the science student is not concerned with questioning fundamentals, but with applying technologies to religious and political ends.

The results for intellectuals range from a denial of the finest traditions of open debate to working in an environment of omnipresent threat. (In Islamabad, a professor at a medical college this year was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death, after students complained about him to the local religious leader.) It is impossible to ignore the discrepancy between the Islamic emphasis on knowledge and the questionable climate for scholars and intellectuals in Muslim countries. Great scholars of the past, men like Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab historian; the 14th- century writer Ibn Battutah; and the 11th-century writer Abu Raihan Muhammad Al-Beruni may have made the rulers of their day uncomfortable, but they continued the Islamic tradition of the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of all. That such renowned Muslim thinkers might today be placed in a cage or threatened with physical harm undermines the Islamic belief that any person may develop his or her intellect to the fullest, yielding a diminished and alienated sense of Islam itself.

Indeed, knowledge, for Muslims, is integral to justice, for how, from the Muslim perspective, is one to determine what balance is to be struck among alternatives if one lacks the knowledge to assess choices in the first place? How is one to attach oneself to reliable others if there is no way to tell how they comported themselves in other contexts or made use of the other connections they have forged? How, indeed, is one to achieve the Islamic ideal of knowledge if one is not free to inquire, probe, and appraise the world, for which Allah has told the believer he bears responsibility? When Abdus Salam needed to be protected by riot police on his first visit home after winning the Nobel Prize in 1979, when the co-author of this essay, on returning home after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was asked by a Pakistani general, "Why have you returned home? We don't need scholars and intellectuals in Pakistan," when researchers like Professor Ibrahim must risk their freedom to publish a survey of voter sentiment, the loss to ordinary Muslims is far greater than each individual case may appear to suggest.

What was once an occasional event -- silencing scholars -- increasingly has become a way of life in most Muslim countries. Along with the appearance of open information -- access to e-mail and the Internet, for example -- in Muslim countries like Egypt and Indonesia has come a more intense denial of intellectual freedom than at any time in recent history. Large numbers of the educated middle class are trying to leave, or have already left, their home countries.

Their exit further weakens the equation of knowledge and Islamic virtue, leaving the field to those, like the followers of Osama bin Laden, who see injustice, but have stilled or lost the voices that could assess it in terms both objective and Islamic. The prophet Muhammad said, "The death of a scholar is the death of the universe." And the president of the American University of Beirut, Malcolm Kerr, gunned down in his office in 1984, once wrote: "If ideas are not available to shape events, then by default events will shape ideas, in keeping with their own unplanned and, perhaps, grotesque course." At a time when it is easy to ignore intellectual freedom while concentrating on combating terrorism, we must remember that only when Muslims have a full range of options freely and openly available to them can creative alternatives to extremism be entertained; only when we in the West support the same openness of thought in the Muslim world that we expect in our own societies can the hopes of ordinary people for improvement in their lives become the basis for a common bond. Saad Ibrahim remains behind bars in Egypt, the quiet American pressures to gain his release obscured by the needs of momentary alliance with that country's government.

If Ibrahim and others like him are, like truth itself, further casualties of a war on terrorism, the victory that will be gained will only fertilize the seeds of perpetual disaffection in Muslim countries and reinforce the image that Westerners are not concerned with freedom except for their own citizens. Meanwhile the lack of clarity and stability in Muslim society will further encourage those who interpret Islam to mean violence and anarchy.

Muslims in the West

Professor Akbar S Ahmed considers the younger generation, the American versus the European Experience plus Muslim integration in Western nations.

For the last thousand years the West treated Islam as the 'other,' as 'over there.' In the main this is still true: the bulk of the Muslim population lives in Africa and Asia. But today this simple world-view has been complicated by the presence in the West of over ten million Muslims. About five or six million Muslims live in Europe and about four or five million in America; the exact numbers tend to be somewhat unreliable, since immigrants and converts sometimes do not wish to declare their identity or register and are therefore difficult to enumerate. Muslims living in the West are theologically in harmony with the Quranic position. Again and again the Qur'an has emphasized that God's domain is not restricted by East or West: it is everywhere. "To Allah belongeth the East and the West. Whithersoever ye turn there is Allah's countenance" (Surah 2: verse 115). So Muslims can practise their religion whether in Cairo or California, in London or Lahore.

We need therefore a new frame of reference. It can no longer be seen as Islam versus the West; it is Islam and the West or Islam in the West. The growth of this Muslim community has been impressive to judge by the mosques: both Germany and France have about a thousand, Britain about 500 (although many may only be a room or two). The central mosques in London and in Washington symbolize this growth: the mosques are full of worshippers, they are beautifully constructed and are the hub of Muslim social and religious activity.

But if there are no theological obstacles for Muslims in the West there are certainly sociological and political ones. The Muslim presence in the West has added fuel to anti-Islamic sentiments. Young girls wearing the hijab in France have become the subject of hostile national news; Muslims wanting separate schools in England are at the centre of a heated national debate; the Salman Rushdie controversy continues to involve Muslims and the majority in a virulent confrontation.

This charged atmosphere encouraged the growth of European racism dramatically in the 1980s. It was symbolized by Le Pen in France. So rapidly did his popularity escalate that few politicians could ignore his message. Soon, even the distinguished offices of the French Prime Minister were talking of 'smelly and dirty immigrants.' It had become fashionable to speak of immigrants with open contempt. Politicians called for rigid immigration controls, even for deportation. This kind of public position was quite unthinkable only a generation ago when the figleaf of European humanism would have covered such racist expressions.

Apart from an increasingly hostile environment in some Western countries, several other factors have sharpened the Muslim sense of identity. It is for this reason that so much alarm is being caused. It explains the platform for politicians like Le Pen. The international political climate which changed dramatically in the 1970s struck a chord among Muslims in the West. This was the period when King Faisal of Saudi Arabia used oil as an Islamic weapon and Imam Khomeini in Iran and General Zia in Pakistan talked of Islamic revolution and Islamization. This kind of political leadership triggered Islamic revivalism throughout the Muslim community, wherever they lived in the world.

The younger generation

A younger generation of Muslim immigrants has come of age in the West; about half are now born in the West as distinct from their parents, who migrated here in the 1950s and 1960s. The young people rejected the integration and assimilation that their parents often desired. They were no longer the meek, invisible immigrants grateful to be allowed in at all; they wished to assert themselves. In this situation issues of race and religion often fused, as growing racism forced them into a greater sense of religious identity.

In the mid-1960s, when I was in Cambridge, there was no place for Friday prayers. Now, in the 1990s, there are three and they are invariably overflowing with worshippers on Friday. At various sessions of Seerat-un-Nabi conferences (in honour of the Prophet) organized by the Pakistan Cambridgeshire Association, which I chaired, around 200-250 Muslims, entire families, turned up. This type of phenomenon appeared to be happening all over the world. In 1989 on my way to Hawaii for a conference, I was invited to speak at the recently constructed mosque in Seattle after the evening prayer. There were about 200 Muslims present; many were women - again a sign of our times. The questions were sharply focused on the role of Muslims living as a minority.

There is also an economic factor. The younger generation are better educated than their parents, who in the UK, for example, had arrived largely to take up menial jobs as bus conductors or factory workers. Young Muslims now compete for places at university with ambitions of becoming doctors and engineers. They wish to share the good life of the West, to own smart homes and cars.

Not all analysts are convinced that the signs of Muslim activity are evidence of Islamic health. Some of the trends among the younger generation of Muslims cause pessimism in certain Muslim quarters. Older Muslims living in the West are worried that their culture will be weakened over time. For example, Dr Muzammil H. Siddiqi refers to a recent study of immigrant Muslim communities in the West which showed that with each succeeding generation there was a decline in strict adherence to specific Islamic values:

Thus it is observed that few Muslims care for five daily prayers. Some do not feel bad about drinking, dating and dancing. Some Muslim girls feel there is nothing wrong in marrying non-Muslims as long as they love and care for each other. Seventy to eighty percent of all Muslims do not belong to any Islamic centre or mosque, and do not care about them. Many think that Muslim countries (especially the oil-rich countries) should build mosques for them, and they do not even contribute one percent of their income to the Islamic centres and organisations. (Siddiqi 1991:12-13)

The American versus the European experience

There are some interesting differences between the USA and Europe which help us to understand better the phenomenon of Muslims living in the West, and which also highlight the broader historical differences between the USA and Europe. The main difference is the social and economic composition of the Muslim community. In the USA it is largely middle class doctors, engineers, academics. This gives the community a greater social confidence and a positive sense of belonging. In Europe, by and large, the community remains stuck in the working class or even the underclass. Its failure on the political scene is spectacular: although Britain has almost two million Muslims they have not been able to win a single seat in Parliament. Worse, their leaders tend to be divided, particularly over where to draw the line between integration and traditional Muslim identity; they seem more interested in attacking each other than representing the community. Another difference is that in the USA there is a greater geographical spread; Muslims are not concentrated in one state or city. In Europe there is a tendency to concentrate; Bradford in England is an example. The concentration allows the leaders of that particular city to emerge as spokesmen. During the Rushdie crisis the leaders of Bradford were constantly consulted by the media and, it was assumed, spoke for the entire community. It allowed the media to simplify questions of leadership, values, strategy and organization among Muslims. Only subsequently did people realize that although the Bradford spokesmen broadly reflected the general opinion of Muslims they were by no means elected or unanimously accepted leaders of the entire Muslim community of the UK.

The concentration of Muslims in specific communities has another consequence. The community can import and perpetuate its sectarian and ethnic characteristics from home. The traditional sectarian tensions in Pakistan between the Barelvis and Deobandis were lifted en bloc to the UK. For the outsider the differences between these sects are confusing and difficult to understand. Let me explain by an example. For the Barelvis, (who are mostly from the Pakistan province of Punjab) the holy Prophet is a superhuman figure whose presence is all around us at all times; he is hazir, present; he is not bashar, material or flesh, but nur, light. The Deobandis, who also revere the Prophet, argue he was the insan-i-kamil, the perfect person, but still only a man, a mortal. This explains why Kalim Siddiqui in the UK, demanding the implementation of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for insulting the Prophet, found his most sympathetic audience among the Barelvis, especially in the network of mosques that they have organized.

Europe itself has changed dramatically in relation to its immigrants and their culture. For example, from the early 1950s to the early 1990s a number of developments took place in Britain on all levels of society: from seven curry restaurants to seven thousand, from a few mosques to 500, from no African or Asian television presenters and journalists to dozens, from only a few African or Asian authors writing in English to a number of Booker Prize winners. All this was to the good; British culture was that much richer. But it is easy to understand the British fear that perhaps too much may have been happening too fast. After all, Britain is a deeply conservative and insular society, and no such foreign influences - and from such far lands - had made themselves felt before. The fear fed easily into feelings of racial animosity. Muslims in the USA are conscious that they are there by choice. They have opted to be American. America is, after all, the land of the melting pot, where everyone is ideally equal. This contrasts with Muslims in Europe. Many feel that they are in Europe simply because their parents migrated or were forced to migrate for economic reasons. This makes for disenchanted and alienated citizens.

Muslims in Europe have a direct relationship to the colonial period. The UK ruled South Asia (British India), and therefore most of its Muslim immigrants tend to be from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh (of about two million the biggest single national group is Pakistani). Moroccans and Algerians drifted to France (about half a million of the former and one million of the latter of France's three million Muslims). Because Germany and Turkey had a relationship going back to the First World War, Turks went to Germany (most of Germany's one and a half million Muslims are Turks). The Netherlands has about half a million Muslims who are mostly from Surinam. In Portugal most Muslims are from the former colonies in India or southern France; in Spain they are from Morocco or Algeria. In Italy, where there are estimated to be about 200,000 Muslims, they are mostly from Libya.

In both the USA and Europe, ideas of local ethnicity also affect Muslim self-awareness. The rise of black power in the USA helped to create a mood of assertiveness, of identity, of exaggerated self-importance in the Muslim community. Black Muslims like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali in the 1960s became symbols of Muslim pride. This did not happen in Europe. There were no superstars to rally behind. The vast majority of the Muslims were marginalised in low-paid jobs and there were few intellectual or media figures speaking on their behalf.

There is also the geo-political factor. The USA is, by and large, neutral in its dealings with Muslims. So, while it is seen as anti-Libya, anti-Iran or, more recently and more famously, anti-Iraq, it is also seen as an ally of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Its relationships, therefore, depend on its geo-political strategy. Racial or imperial prejudices which often colour the view of the European powers are less visible.

Muslim integration in Western nations

It is a common assumption that the Muslim presence in Europe began after the Second World War; it is fed by media stereotypes and racist polemics of Muslims invading and flooding Europe. But the roots of Muslim immigration go back much further (Nielsen 1992). The origins of the Muslim community in Germany lie in the close relationship between Germany and the Ottoman empire through periods of war and peace. Even earlier, Muslims had settled in the southern German states after the second siege of Vienna in 1683. After that period Prussian kings often employed Muslim soldiers. It is the same link that allowed the Ottoman sultan to patronize the mosque built in a Muslim cemetery in Berlin in 1866. The economic and diplomatic relationship between Turkey and Germany thus has deep roots. The picture is the same for France and Britain, where many immigrants arrived during the last century. Seamen from Africa and Asia settled in London and other ports. We know of the early Yemeni settlements (Halliday 1992). The first mosques were opened for these seamen, and mosques were then opened in Woking in 1889 and Liverpool in 1891. The Liverpool mosque did not survive the outbreak of the First World War. In 1935 the mosque in Woking declared its adherence to SunniJslam (earlier it had been associated with the Ahmedis). Marmaduke Pickthall and Abdullah Yusuf Ali, whose translations of the Qur'an into English continue to be read all over the world, were both associated with this mosque. In 1944 King George VI inaugurated the Islamic Cultural Centre on a site near Regent's Park in London, in exchange for a site in Cairo for a new Anglican cathedral. In due course Britain's main mosque would be built there.

France shows an even more pronounced pattern of immigration than Britain before 1945. Mohammad Ali of Egypt in the last century had encouraged Egyptian students, scholars and business people to go to France. Before the First World War immigrants from Algeria, mostly from the Kabyle tribes, were drifting to the Marseille region for jobs in the olive oil refining and related industries. During the First World War Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians joined the civil and defence industries. It was in recognition of this that the French allowed the opening of a mosque in Paris in 1926. During the Second World War the Vichy government in 1942 imported North African labour to help Germans in their war effort. By the time of the 1954 census there were 200,000 Algerians in France. Immigration was caused largely by the European governments themselves, who actively encouraged people from their former colonies to emigrate to the 'mother country' because of the need for labour in the post-war reconstruction. For example, in Britain, at a time of full employment in the 1950s it was difficult to recruit people to work in the most menial and arduous jobs; the governments therefore sought to attract Asians and West Indians to Britain and offered them the worst jobs, those that they could not fill with native British. This occurred throughout Europe. It is often forgotten by native inhabitants that Muslims were actually invited by the governments.

Most of these immigrants had no intention of staying permanently in Europe. But most did. At first their problems were not so severe. However, changes were taking place in Europe. The colonies had disappeared. The economy was stagnant and the oil prices began to rise sharply. The question of race was now in the air. European countries reacted by stricter immigration laws, Britain being the first with its Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1962. This did not prevent immigration from continuing and indeed increasing. But there was a difference: wives and children were now arriving.

As the governments had only wanted immigrants for their labour, they tried to restrict immigration when Muslim men started to bring their families over. By this time the governments had achieved their objectives and did not assume responsibility for the break-up of Muslim families as a result of migration.

When discussing Muslims in the West we often overlook the 'local' convert. Many Europeans and Americans are attracted to Islam, especially its Sufic strand. Small communities, such as that at Norwich in the UK, became famous for attracting British middle-class converts. In the 1970s they drew attention because many of their members were academics and intellectuals and some from influential families. Interestingly, these groups have now been marginalised by the more noisy, aggressive, turbulent and ethnic Muslim politics of the 1980s and 1990s.

What can Muslims do to improve their chances in the West? Some answers are provided by a sympathetic Christian scholar in the USA (Poston 1991). He believes that five main actions are crucial for the future well-being and expansion of Islam in America: (1) The need to develop an indigenous American leadership: American converts should be trained quickly and thoroughly for positions of leadership in order to avoid the categorization of Islam as a foreign 'cult'. (2) The stereotypical negative image of Islam must be transformed through proper use .of the media. (3) Provocative anti- Christian polemics should be avoided lest they provoke a strong reaction among Christians (whether practising or non-practising). (4) Muslims should attempt to reach more achievable goals by promoting co-operation among themselves instead of focusing their concern on homogenizing diverse Muslim ethnic groups. (5) Muslim individuals should become involved in dawah (social welfare and missionary) activities in order to overcome the powerful assimilative influence of the American mainstream. These are practical and sensible suggestions, and most Muslims will find little to argue in them. Many Muslims may have reached these conclusions themselves but as communities they are still some way from implementing them. Unless they do so, strife will result from their minority position. Muslim leaders and writers need to do more serious thinking.

In the midst of accounts of prejudice, alienation and anguish there is a success story of integration and harmony. It is located in the unlikely setting of the Outer Hebrides, off the Scottish coast.