The Future of Islam

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2005.

In recent weeks, a young Iranian-American author has been making his rounds of the talk show circuit. Turn on the TV and you might catch a glimpse of him on "Meet the Press" or more recently Jon Stewart's "Daily Show". Reza Aslan is a man in demand these days.

Aslan's new-found popularity is hardly surprising since his latest book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, offers a surprising answer to the question on every American's mind since the Sept. 11 attacks: Why do they hate us? As it turns out, says Aslan, it's really not about "us" at all. Islamic terrorism, he argues, is for the most part a symptom not of a clash of civilizations but an internal conflict within the Muslim world -- a centuries-old battle over the future of Islam.

In offering a rich, nuanced, and insightful history of Islam, the book challenges dogmatic views on both sides of the political divide, be it the right-wing conflation of the battle against terrorism with a Christian crusade or liberals' fear of Middle Eastern groups that call for the establishment of a religious state. More shocking for progressives: he is also optimistic about the future of Iraq as the first successful experiment in Islamic democracy.

Reza Aslan spoke to AlterNet from his home in Santa Barbara.

Lakshmi Chaudhry: Let me start out by asking you what motivated to write this book? What were you trying to achieve?

This book was actually a result of a series of courses that I taught at the University of Iowa. I was a visiting assistant professor there, and taught the religion and politics of the Middle East. After Sept. 11, the course became so popular that it occurred to me that it’s information that most Americans don’t have. Most of the western world is fairly ignorant when it comes to the faith and practice, and history and political culture of Islam and of the Muslim world.

It also occurred to me that there were few people who were explaining this from a perspective of faith, as well as from an objective scholarly perspective -- as a Muslim and as a scholar of comparative religion.

The most startling claim you make in the book is about the Sept. 11 attacks. According to you, they did not, in fact, mark the moment of a clash of civilizations between the West and a pan-Islamic Jihad, but rather a moment in an internal conflict within Islam -- a 14-century-long internal conflict within Islam. Could you talk about that?

We are now living in the twilight of that era of Arab-Islamic reformation. This is a process that began around the time of the colonialist experience, some 100-150 years ago, when Muslims were, for the first time, forced to respond to not just the realities of the modern world -- secularism and modernization, and industrialization -- but also the western cultural hegemony that came part and parcel with the colonialist experience.

So naturally there were two broad reactions to it. One, there were those groups of modernists, reformists, and moderates who eagerly accepted these enlightenment principles that the colonialists were preaching -- concepts such as human rights, individualism, constitutionalism and rule of law -- and to a far lesser degree, democracy and popular sovereignty. They not only adopted [these principles], but strove to create an indigenous vision of these principles, and an indigenous Islamic enlightenment.

Then there were those Muslims -- who at that time I would say represented the majority of the Muslim population -- who responded to colonialism by reacting violently against it, by rejecting that western cultural hegemony, including these wonderful principles, as being a part of colonial oppression. They wanted to respond to modernity by reverting instead to what we would now refer to as the fundamentals of their faith. They wanted to go back to a purely and distinctly Islamic identity.

What we’re seeing now is a natural evolution of this reformation that began then, and which, in essence, is coming to a close. I call Sept. 11 a part of that internal clash because that precisely was the reason for the attacks on New York and Washington. Whatever we want to say about bin Laden, the savagery of his followers and their murderous inclinations, they’re not stupid people. They recognized quite clearly that this kind of spectacular attack on U.S. soil was going to engender an exaggerated response. That is precisely what they were hoping for as an opportunity to galvanize support for what was a losing cause before Sept. 11.

So they hoped that the U.S. response -- which would necessarily be bloody and violent -- would then create a counter-response. And they could then channel that anger and rage at the U.S. into support for their version of fundamentalism.

That’s right. Before Sept. 11, those of us who studied the region were predicting quite confidently that this was the end for these movements towards traditionalism and fundamentalism. Regardless of the enormous impact that Wahabbi Islam -- this puritanical vision of Islam from Saudi Arabia -- was having on Muslims throughout the world, including Europe and the United States, there was still every indication that the tide of reform and modernism was going to wash away these small factions of traditionalism, militantism, and extremism.

Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of AlterNet.

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