Islam and Freedom of Thought
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 modem 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
l4th- century writer Ibn Battutah; and the I I th-century writer Abu Raihan
Muhammad A]-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 Mus
lim 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 praise 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 con-
cerned with freedom except for their
own citizens. Meanwhile the lack of
clarity and stability in Muslim society will further en-
- courage those who interpret Islam to
mean violence and anarchy.
