Reflections on the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie as it relates to widespread perceptions and characterizations of, and generalizations about, “Islam.” See too this statement from Suzanne Nossel of PEN America. Update: Nossel’s opinion piece for The Guardian.
Perhaps not surprisingly, more than a few folks on the internet are using the occasion of the assault/attempted murder on Salman Rushdie in New York to spread or reinforce rash or hasty generalizations (and the informal fallacy of ‘converse accident’) that serve to confirm their ignorance of Islamic traditions and embolden their biases and prejudices about “Islam” while also indulging in a kind of virtue signaling that brings virtual applause in its wake. These generalizations concern “Islam” as a religious worldview and philosophy as well as those who are self-described or identified as Muslims. There is nothing peculiar about Islam vis-à-vis other religious worldviews and ideologies or other secular worldviews and ideologies that stands apart in this case provided we understand that individuals, groups, movements, sects, authorities, institutions, and so forth will often invoke their worldviews or ideologies to motivate, justify or excuse actions that we generally hold to be immoral and criminal. In other words, these ideologies and worldviews can be used for good or ill, rightly or wrongly, for peace or violence, and so forth: there is a spectrum of reasonable and rational rationalizations at one end, and irrational, immoral, or perverse rationalizations at the other end (‘rationalization’ in a pejorative sense).
To be sure, some ideologies are morally problematic ab initio, so to speak, such as fascism or Stalinism or Maoism. At other times and places, religious and secular worldviews (examples of the former: Poland, India, the U.S., Sri Lanka, Myanmar, etc.; …of the latter: Party-State Socialism /Communism, Nazism, etc.) become paired with forms of nationalism, and in such cases we find religious beliefs and identity harnessed toward non-religious, non-spiritual and immoral or unethical goals or ends (and thus we have a manifest contradiction between means and ends, wherein there is a failure to recognize the choice of means can distort or destroy otherwise justifiable ends). And of course in the history of religious and secular worldviews and ideologies, we are likely to find occasional currents, periods, places, etc. in which what occurs in the real world, on the ground as we say, bears little or no relation to a normative model or picture of the principal beliefs and values and virtues found in these worldviews. It is simply unavailing and uninformative to refer to these ideologies and worldview in toto without the necessary distinctions and specifications that history and the social sciences can provide alongside the relevant immediate conditions and circumstances that allow us to make sense of an action or event. In short, there is nothing significant or important or meaningful we can infer about “Islam” as such from the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. And nothing I have said diminishes our horror and disgust over this egregiously immoral and criminal act of personal violence.
Alas, fatwas have become a fairly indiscriminate legal category, with opposing religious authorities and jurists formulating fatwas that suit their interests and the majority of Muslims are left to their own devices, so to speak, when it comes to acknowledging or assessing their validity or significance. The Wikipedia entry has some excellent discussion of this in the latter half of the article. The young men (and occasionally women) that resort to these acts of violence around the world suggest, it seems to me, that this is not, strictly speaking or peculiarly, about religion, but about their sense of individual and collective identity, moral psychology, recognition and self-worth, in which case one can find justification, warrant, rationalizations, what have you in any number of ideologies and worldviews, secular or religious, political or nationalist, for such acts of violence (hence the many mass shootings in this country). On occasion of course, ideologies and worldviews appear to be altogether missing from the motivational structure, in which case one looks closer to home and upbringing for causal variables (some grievance, slight, disrespect, abuse, and so forth). This is not to say some fatwa or prospect of reward played no role whatsoever in the attempted murder of Rushdie, but we need to account for why some individuals choose to go this route while many others would never even consider doing such things: what sorts of individuals are readily moved to the tipping point?
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As for fatwas [fatāwā] (an incredibly complex topic in Islamic jurisprudence), this snippet from the Wikipedia entry on same is informative:
[….] “In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini used proclamations and fatwas to introduce and legitimize a number of institutions, including the Council of the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian Parliament. Khomeini’s most publicized fatwa was the proclamation condemning Salman Rushdie to death for his novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini himself did not call this proclamation a fatwa, and some scholars have argued that it did not qualify as one, since in Islamic legal theory only a court can decide whether an accused is guilty. However, after the proclamation was presented as a fatwa in Western press, this characterization was widely accepted by both its critics and its supporters, and the Rushdie Affair is credited with bringing the institution of fatwa to world attention. Together with later militant fatwas, it has contributed to the popular misconception of the fatwa as a religious death warrant.
Many militant and reform movements in modern times have disseminated fatwas issued by individuals who do not possess the qualifications traditionally required of a mufti. A famous example is the fatwa issued in 1998 by Osama bin Laden and four of his associates, proclaiming ‘jihad against Jews and Crusaders’ and calling for killing of American civilians. In addition to denouncing its content, many Islamic jurists stressed that bin Laden was not qualified to either issue a fatwa or declare a jihad. The Amman Message was a statement, signed in 2005 in Jordan by nearly 200 prominent Islamic jurists, which served as a ‘counter-fatwa’ against a widespread use of takfir (excommunication) by jihadist groups to justify jihad against rulers of Muslim-majority countries. The Amman Message recognized eight legitimate schools of Islamic law and prohibited declarations of apostasy against them. The statement also asserted that fatwas can be issued only by properly trained muftis, thereby seeking to delegitimize fatwas issued by militants who lack the requisite qualifications. Erroneous and sometimes bizarre fatwas issued by unqualified or eccentric individuals in recent times have sometimes given rise to complaints about a ‘chaos’ in the modern practice of ifta [to give an (often legal or religious) explanation].
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, a group of Middle Eastern Islamic scholars issued a fatwa permitting Muslims serving in the U.S. army to participate in military action against Muslim countries, in response to a query from a U.S. Army Muslim chaplain. This fatwa illustrated two increasingly widespread practices. First, it drew directly on the Quran and hadith without referencing the body of jurisprudence from any of the traditional schools of Islamic law. Secondly, questions from Western Muslims directed to muftis in Muslim-majority countries have become increasingly common, as about one-third of Muslims now live in Muslim-minority countries.
Institutions devoted specifically to issuing fatwas to Western Muslims have been established in the West, including the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA, founded in 1986) and the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR, founded in 1997). These organizations aim to provide fatwas that address the concerns of Muslim minorities, helping them to comply with sharia, while stressing compatibility of Islam with diverse modern contexts. The FCNA was founded with the goal of developing legal methodologies for adopting Islamic law to life in the West. The ECRF draws on all major schools of Sunni law as well as other traditional legal principles, such as concern for the public good, local custom, and the prevention of harm, to derive fatwas suitable for life in Europe. For example, a 2001 ECRF ruling allowed a woman who had converted to Islam to remain married without requiring her husband's conversion, based in part on the existence of European laws and customs under which women are guaranteed the freedom of religion. Rulings of this kind have been welcomed by some, but also criticized by others as being overly eclectic in legal methodology and having potential to negatively impact the interpretation of sharia in Muslim-majority countries.
The needs of Western Muslims have given rise to a new branch of Islamic jurisprudence which has been termed the jurisprudence of (Muslim) minorities (fiqh al-aqallīyāt). The term is believed to have been coined in a 1994 fatwa by Taha Jabir Alalwani, then the chairman of FCNA, which encouraged Muslim citizens to participate in American politics. This branch of jurisprudence has since been developed primarily, but not exclusively for Muslim minorities in the West.
[….] In the pre-modern era, most fatwas issued in response to private queries were read only by the petitioner. Early in the 20th century, the reformist Islamic scholar Rashid Rida responded to thousands of queries from around the Muslim world on a variety of social and political topics in the regular fatwa section of his Cairo-based journal Al-Manar. In the late 20th century, when the Grand Mufti of Egypt Sayyid Tantawy issued a fatwa allowing interest banking, the ruling was vigorously debated in the Egyptian press by both religious scholars and lay intellectuals.
In the internet age, a large number of websites has appeared offering fatwas to readers around the world. For example, IslamOnline publishes an archive of ‘live fatwa’ sessions, whose number approached a thousand by 2007, along with biographies of the muftis. Together with satellite television programs, radio shows and fatwa hotlines offering call-in fatwas, these sites have contributed to the rise of new forms of contemporary ifta. Unlike the concise or technical pre-modern fatwas, fatwas delivered through modern mass media often seek to be more expansive and accessible to the wide public.
Modern media have also facilitated cooperative forms of ifta. Networks of muftis are commonly engaged by fatwa websites, so that queries are distributed among the muftis in the network, who still act as individual jurisconsults. In other cases, Islamic jurists of different nationalities, schools of law, and sometimes even denominations (Sunni and Shia), coordinate to issue a joint fatwa, which is expected to command greater authority with the public than individual fatwas. The collective fatwa (sometimes called ijtihād jamāʿī, ‘collective legal interpretation’) is a new historical development, and it is found in such settings as boards of Islamic financial institutions and international fatwa councils.
As the role of fatwas on strictly legal issues has declined in modern times, there has been a relative increase in the proportion of fatwas dealing with rituals and further expansion in purely religious areas like Quranic exegesis, creed, and Sufism. Modern fatwas also deal with a wide variety of other topics, including insurance, sex-change operations, moon exploration, beer drinking, abortion in the case of fatal foetal abnormalities, or males and females sharing workplaces. Public ‘fatwa wars’ have reflected political controversies in the Muslim world, from anti-colonial struggles to the Gulf War of the 1990s, when muftis in some countries issued fatwas supporting collaboration with the US-led coalition, while muftis from other countries endorsed the Iraqi call for jihad against the US and its collaborators. In the private sphere, some muftis have begun to resemble social workers, giving advice on various personal issues encountered in everyday life.
The social profile of the fatwa petitioner has also undergone considerable changes. Owing to the rise of universal education, those who solicit fatwas have become increasingly educated, which has transformed the traditional mufti–mustafti relationship based on restricted literacy. The questioner is now also increasingly likely to be female, and in the modern world Muslim women tend to address muftis directly rather than conveying their query through a male relative as in the past. Since women now represent a significant proportion of students studying Islamic law and qualifying as muftiyas, their prominence in its interpretation is likely to rise. A fatwa hotline in the United Arab Emirates provides access to either male or female muftis, allowing women to request fatwas from female Islamic legal scholars.
The vast amount of fatwas produced in the modern world attests to the importance of Islamic authenticity to many Muslims. However, there is little research available to indicate to what extent Muslims acknowledge the authority of various fatwas and heed their rulings in real life. Rather than reflecting the actual conduct or opinions of Muslims, these fatwas may instead represent a collection of opinions on what Muslims ‘ought to think.’”
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Readers wanting to investigate or explore some of the relevant material brought up in this post might look at the terms “fiqh” and “Sharī‘ah” in my study guide for Islam as well as my essay on “Democracy and Islam” (the latter is a bit dated here and there), both of which are freely available (to read or download) on my Academia page. It also helps to be conversant in the cross-cultural and comparative study of worldviews (religious and secular), a subject I have broached several times over the years at this blog.
Relevant Bibliographies
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