The West's best hope of dealing with the rise of Islamic extremism is to challenge the doctrines manufactured by religious scholars past and present, argues Ziauddin Sardar.
Independent 21 January 2015
1 thought on “Islamic history is full of free thinkers – but recent attempts to suppress critical thought are verging on the absurd -Independent”
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Maybe. The harsh repression of many Islamic milieux is inseparable from their residents’ outrage that we do not censor and punish as they do. (A possible parallel– the North Korean cyberattack on Sony for The Interview.) Most human beings assume that their local sense of right is universal.
Would Islam would still be Islam without repression? Muslim students in the US that I have known have again and again praised our relative freedom of political speech, while criticising the analogous freedom of cultural speech. Americans tend to see free speech as indivisible; to an engineering student from Yemen, a state that allows meretricious, blasphemous ‘entertainment’ has traveled a bridge too far.
Just because Islam is a public realm ruled by Allah through human enforcers, one can somewhat understand why Islamic states ruling whole nations of enforcers resort to intimidating them. Even constitutionally secular states with Muslim citizens resort to counter-enforcement of freedom that can itself be ironically repressive. Outside the University of Istanbul, I saw riot police with paddy wagons, shields, and gas defending a Turk’s freedom to study in secular dress from a peaceful feminist protest– secularist women in see-through tops and leather micro-miniskirts alongside other women in full black chador, all protesting in favour of a woman’s right to cover her head in class. The idea that to be a believer is to be an enforcer seems to erase the lines we customarily draw between private and public, citizen and state, legality and legitimacy. Can it be otherwise?