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COMMENTARY
August 6, 2005
Marching
In an article calling for a “Million Muslim March” on Washington, published by the Wall Street Journal this week, the Iraqi-American, Ahmed al-Rahim, called attention to the fate of Sayyid Mahmud al-Qimany in Egypt. His case rocked Egypt in the time immediately before the recent terror strikes on Sharm el-Sheik.The march Mr. Rahim was calling for, would be a definitive demonstration by American Muslims that they are implacably opposed to violence in the name of Islam, and to the political ambitions of the world’s Islamist networks. “Where are the Muslims,” Mr. Rahim asked, “especially those living in the West, who have the freedom to organize and make their voices heard? It seems that the only time we hear from the Muslim masses is when there are alleged desecrations of the Koran, or prisoner abuse in Iraq.” Unfortunately, while there has been a great deal of positive response to the article, all that I have seen has come from non-Muslims. I think Mr. Rahim himself was using the case of Mr. Qimany in Egypt, in a backhanded way, to show the depth of the problem in Islam today. Mr. Qimany, who has been among my personal heroes, had been writing very bravely and brilliantly against Islamism, and calling for a kind of reformation in Islamic political thought, that would embrace the best of liberal modernity, including democracy, constitutional accountability, and some form of separation of “mosque and state”. To their credit, the Egyptian government had granted him police protection, though it is of little avail against Islamist death threats. (Remember Anwar Sadat.) Nor could police provide protection against the supposedly “moderate” authorities of Al Azhar, who routinely banned his works, so that Egyptian booksellers were disinclined to touch them. Cairo’s Al Azhar, for more than a thousand years the highest “minbar” or pulpit in Sunni Islam, combines higher learning with public moral instruction. Imagine something like Oxford University, the House of Lords, and the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, rolled into one. When the first formal fatwa, declaring him an apostate, was proclaimed against him, the Egyptian government warned it could still protect neither Mr. Qimany nor members of his family. All were now likely to be slaughtered, if Mr. Qimany did not renounce his works. This he did (as I understand, to spare his family); publicly declaring his life’s work to be erroneous in every detail, and promising that he would never again write a single word. We often hear the question, “Where is the Islamic Luther?” The question itself is an ignorant one, because the circumstances that produced Martin Luther are irreproducible under Islamic conditions, and Luther himself did not play the role popular history has assigned to him. Yet many non-Muslims, and Muslims too (Canada’s Irshad Manji for one example) cry out for a definitive internal Islamic movement of reform. In that sense, Mr. Qimany was a candidate for “Muslim Luther”. Note the past tense. (A preceding Egyptian candidate, Farag Fouda, was murdered in 1992.) Let me spell out what was most discouraging: not merely the silencing of Mr. Qimany, in one of the Middle East’s most Westernized states, but the way it was done -- beyond the reach of any secular political action. When the crunch came, the "official, moderate Islam" of Al Azhar, and the "Islamist terrorists" of the Afghan caves, were arrayed on the same side. No one should imagine that Sheikh Tantawi of Al Azhar, and Osama bin Laden, are working together. Their mutual despication is sincere. Yet on one, crucially important level, they are working from the same script -- the Koran. It is a book which condemns in advance every effort to separate worldly from spiritual power, with as little ambiguity as Christ said to separate them, in the Gospels. It is naïve on the part of Westerners to believe that various passages in the Koran can themselves be overlooked or forgotten, any more than passages in the Bible will cease to be read. And when they are read, by believing eyes, they will be acted upon. This is a fact of life which itself must never be overlooked or forgotten. We must always be willing to face reality whole. And in this light, we have every reason to be pessimistic about the prospects for Western-style democracy in Egypt -- or in Iraq, for that matter. But only for this reason. I hope to return to this topic, soon, for there is so much more to say. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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