Prophetic fallacies

Tariq Ramadan, the leading Muslim scholar, thinks that Islamic law should be reinterpreted in the light of modern social conditions. There are two primary sources for Islamic law: the Koran, which was revealed to Muhammad, and the words and deeds of the Prophet himself, which are set out in a series of early biographies. Writing a new biography of Muhammad offers a reformist like Ramadan the opportunity to place Islamic precepts drawn from both sources in their historical context. It is, perhaps, the first step in a larger juris-prudential project: once Ramadan has rinsed off the original context of various pieces of legal and moral guidance, he can immerse those pieces in the here and now.
Muslims reading this piece may have noticed that I have written Muhammad several times without adding "peace be upon him," usually abbreviated as "pbuh." In most mosques and even scholarly works, it is unacceptable to drop the pbuh. When it is used, listeners and readers are expected to repeat it along with the speaker or writer. Ramadan, notably, doesn't use the pbuh. He is writing as a scholar, not as an imam. He isn't assuming that we have a high regard for Muhammad—he plans to persuade us.

Ramadan lays out the narrative of Muhammad's life in short sections with titles such as "Personality and Spiritual Quest" and "Trials, Elevation, and Hopes." The Prophetic story can be an arresting one: Muhammad is a young, successful trader drawn into Allah's confidence; an astute politician moving within a net of tribal alliances and enmities that shift frequently; a general without the force of numbers. But Ramadan's pedagogic ambitions peek out everywhere from behind the story. In a chapter titled "Teachings and Defeat," he begins to write about Muhammad's wife, Aishah. He relates an incident when a Persian neighbour invited the Prophet to a meal. Muhammad answered "What about her?" pointing to Aishah. When the man admits that Aishah is not invited, Muhammad declines the dinner. It is only on the third invitation that the Persian includes Aishah.

Ramadan's point is that, "through steadfastly maintaining a position" in encounters with the traditional Arab and Bedouin culture that surrounded him, the Prophet sought to reform customs and practices to do with the status of women. In the same section, Ramadan addresses the issue of the veil. He explains that it was only the Prophet's wives who were ordered, by the Koran, to address men from behind a protective screen (al-hijab). Prior to the revelation, Aishah, in particular, was very active in public life. By stressing such facts, Ramadan is challenging other, more conservative interpretations of the Islamic tradition. The Muhammad that emerges from his account is a reflective leader, open to the views of his friends and colleagues, generous in his personal dealings—or, as Ramadan puts it: "He prayed, he contemplated. He loved, he gave. He served, he transformed."

This is an important biography—at times, quite beautifully written—and I hope that it will be widely read as a corrective to some other versions. Nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid an element of disappointment. Even as Ramadan sets out the proper historical context for the Koranic verse about the veil, any reader who isn't totally committed to the truth of Islam is bound to wonder why Muhammad had wives, rather than a wife; why it was necessary for even the wives to retreat behind al-hijab; and, more broadly, why the life of Muhammad ought to serve as a basis for law and obligation rather than as a looser source of guidance or inspiration. If the tradition is to be interpreted in the light of modern social and cultural conditions, this is a crucial distinction. Does the tradition provide specific rules or general principles? These questions are at the core of recent disputes between Ramadan and other Islamic scholars.

Ramadan has, of course, selected episodes from the Prophet's life that are important to him. Others, however, will select and present episodes that do not reveal the same spirit of egalitarianism or mercy or contemplation. Ramadan is well aware of this; he has often admitted that the majority of Islamic scholars take positions radically different to his own. But this leaves Ramadan two options: to state that the life of Muhammad is not a source of law, but only of guidance, which allows him to pick and choose; or to address directly the most problematic and negative episodes in the Prophet's life and teachings.

The former option is controversial. Islamic thought does not treat Muhammad as being himself an element of the Divine, but it does state that God chose Muhammad to receive his final revelation, the Koran, and Muhammad's sayings and doings have always been regarded as "Rightly Guided." Many Muslims have an intense devotion to the Prophet, which can at times border on worship, and it would take a brave and perhaps foolhardy scholar to whittle Muhammad's legacy down to just a few inspiring stories. By contrast, the latter option leads to a lengthy process of rebuttal, and I can appreciate that Ramadan may prefer to write his own version of the Prophet's life than spend much of the book embroiled in interpretive disputes.

Unlike Tariq Ramadan, Samir Kassir doesn't skirt over controversy; his approach in his essay Being Arab, translated from the French following his assassination in June 2005, is far more confrontational. Kassir was an important Lebanese journalist, writing for the leading Arabic daily, An-Nahar. He died, many people believe, because of his fearless criticism of the Syrian government, especially in the wake of the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, whose murder may also have been committed by Syrians. In what became his last book, Kassir presents a manifesto to the Arabs.

Kassir's main aim is to challenge the standard version of the Arab narrative, which charts a steady decline since the Islamic golden age that began with Muhammad and his political successors. The problem with this version, according to Kassir, is that the middle ages become seen as the source of the Arab malaise, thus absolving modern Arabs of any responsibility and creating the conditions for advocating Islamic revivalism as the only solution. Yet, Kassir argues, "there was a time not long ago when Arabs could look to the future with optimism." This, he says, was the cultural renaissance of the 19th and even 20th century, the very era when, because of colonisation and then the humiliating creation of Israel, the Arabs were supposed to be at their most wretched. As Kassir demonstrates, during this time there was a growing interest in painting; French playwrights such as Molière, Feydeau and Labiche were all "Egyptianised" as theatre became enormously popular; the violin, cello and electric guitar became the new backbone of Arab music; and Egypt grew to be the third largest producer of films in the world, following the introduction of cinema by the Italian minority.

All of this suggests that the Arab-Muslim world did not shrink from modernity. Even Arab nationalism, preaching the cause of the nation state in a region lacking historic or natural borders, and often socialist in rhetoric, drew extensively on European modernity. This fruitful encounter with the west was, Kassir argues, finally arrested by "the absence of democracy and the excesses of state control." Today, there are two further obstacles: Islamic jihadists, who "as good messianists, see the Arab malaise just as a bad moment to be got through"; and the cult of victimhood, which treats the west exclusively as an adversary, thus precluding the possibility of seeing it also as a repository of culture and ideas that may aid renewal, as in the recent past.

The account that emerges from these two books is of an Arab-Muslim culture that must come to an accommodation with its past. In this regard, Arab culture is no different from any other. However, I fear that Ramadan fails to address what may be the most fundamental difficulty for any contemporary Islamic scholar: the status of early Prophetic history. Kassir, on the other hand, airs the "guilty secret" within the most recent period of Arab-Muslim renewal: the critical importance of the west.