Battle for Islam

Can Muslims reform Islam? Can Islam be disentangled from Islamism as a political ideology? Who are the leaders of change in Islam? Ziauddin Sardar set out to answer these and other questions in his film, Battle for Islam, which was aired on BBC 1 TV on Monday 5 September.

I went to a screening yesterday evening at Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs), of which I am a member. Sardar was there to answer questions, as was Paul Jenkins, the producer. We saw the full 90 minute version of the film, which I found quite fascinating. Sardar deliberately went to what he described last night as the fringes of the Islamic world - countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Turkey - as opposed to the Middle East heartlands of Islam.

Whom did he interview?

Technorati Tags: inter-faith, Islam, Muslim, religion

A range of Muslims from conservatives and fundamentalists to people with quite radical views, radical in the sense that they were prepared to challenge the religious opinions of the ‘ulama and to think and act in ways that challenge the restrictions imposed particularly upon women. Particularly some of these women - and some men too - took the view that the sharia is not divinely ordained or that it needs to be reformed.

Some of the most interesting responses came from Muslim women, amongst them some - like the fashion model in Turkey, the hairdresser in Malaysia, the women in Morocco running a voluntary organization for single mothers and (perhaps most notably) Asma Jahangir, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief - who do not wear the jilbab or even the hejab. It is these women, and women who do choose to cover up, who are challenging the dominant interpretations of Islam that assign them second class status.

Sardar showed that the Muslim world, far from being the monolith so often portrayed in the Western media, is diverse and, in many respects, vibrant. He was setting out to demonstrate that change and development are possible within Islam, that Muslims can take a tolerant approach to other faiths. However, I feel that he generally avoided showing the vast weight of opposition to change that exists in the Muslim world, except in one telling passage in which a demonstration by Muslim women in Morocco in favour of the new family laws passed by parliament at the insistence of the king, was set against a very much larger demonstration by Muslim women opposed to any change to the traditional sharia laws governing families and relations between women and men.

The central question is: does Islam have within it the capacity for change and modernization? In my view, all the great faiths have come successively, like the chapters of a book, from one Divine Source to guide and teach and heal humankind. I see their Founders as divine physicians who bring remedies for the ills of humankind for a particular period. One might say they start as seeds, become saplings and then mighty trees that bear fruit, before entering their declining years. Think of an ancient oak: it may be hollow within, but it still carries a richness of life, providing a home to a diversity of insects, fungi, lichens, birds; it puts out leaves in Spring and acorns in the Autumn; in many ways it still flourishes. But the trajectory is downwards. The heart has gone. It will never be a young tree again. We are amazed and pleased by its age and the fact that it is still standing against the gales. But around it, new, young saplings are growing, and some of them may, in time, come to be venerable oaks.

During the Q&A session after the screening I asked Sardar his view about religious freedom in Islamic states, particularly with respect to post-Qur’anic religious such as the Baha’i Faith. He said he thought there would have to be considerable changes to the sharia. He referred mostly to relations with Jews and Christians and did not, I thought, give a satisfactory answer to the question.