Only traditional Islam can do it...or can it?

A refreshing article written by Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst caught my attention today. It is provocatively titled, Only traditional Islam can do it. Here is the lead-in to the story:

The attempted bombings in London and the attack on Glasgow Airport last week underscore the continued and long-term Islamic terror threat that Britain and the world is facing. To date, all of those detained are highly educated foreign-born medical staff.

Far from being affronted by this incursion, young British Muslims are increasingly likely to support domestic jihad. The radicalization of British Muslim youth proceeds apace. According to a recent poll by Populus, growing numbers of Muslims aged 16-30 subscribe to extreme versions of Islam, and almost 40 percent want to live under Shariah law. Britain faces the prospect of a whole new generation of young people embracing extremism and religious fanaticism...

Crucially, current policies are not working because they fail to address the real cause of radicalization and fanaticism. Contemporary Islamic violence is religious in nature. Its origin lies in Islamic scripture and the destruction of the traditional medieval schools that dictated its interpretation.

It is gratifying to note that western commentators are getting closer and closer to the truth of the causes of Muslim extremism. Books like Joespeh Lumbard's Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition, Khaled Aboud Fadl's The Great Theft and Aftab Malk's With God on Our Side have certainly made an impact, inasmuch as they have clearly drawn a line between extremist Islam and mainstream Islam.

However, Phillp Blond's article is not without problems. For example, he says:

And since there were four traditional schools of religious interpretation, which themselves varied according to time and location, what constituted a proper Islamic practice varied according to local norms and customs. As such traditional Islam prohibits the very totalitarian state Al Qaeda seeks to impose.

For example, if Islam recovers the traditional practice of ijtihad, a process of textual reinterpretation that replaces the scriptural literalism of the fundamentalists with a more medieval allegorical reading of the Koran, this would enable the Muslim faithful to distinguish between immutable God-given laws and mutable human interpretations.

Blond not only furnishes a wrong definition of ijtihad, but also makes the rather mistaken assumption that literalism is bad, allegory is good. Ijtihad is the action that a qualified scholar (called a mujtahid) takes in determining Islamic laws. His sources are primarily the Quran and Sunna. Because mujtahids employ different methods in interpreting the sacred texts, there are differences between the four canonical schools of jurisprudence. Within individual methods, the degrees of literalism or allegorism varies. Imam Ahmad Hanbal, for example, was known to have interpreted certain Quranic verses literally, but that does not mean he had not also used reason in interpreting other verses.

No doubt, modern-day extremists do employ a literalist approach to the text, but their literalism is of an entirely different flavor. In an earlier article, I had commented:

Muslim extremists...have a quaint habit of seeing the Quran as totally self-explanatory. "It's not rocket science," they would declare. However, to live up to that claim, any interpretation of the holy scriptures done by them inevitably gravitates toward literalism. What's worse, most Muslims aren't even familiar with the Arabic language and the particular grammar that infuses the Quranic text, so what they end up being literal about are the translations of the Quran, be they English, Malay or Mandarin.

Moreover, I find that the greatest impact literalism has on Islam is where statements are made concerning theology (see my previous article, The Amman Message in light of Imam al-Ghazali's Clear Criterion), rather than on matters like huddud or state institutions (criminal punishments).

Thus, literalism per se is not evil, while excessive allegory, which found its strongest expression in an ancient group of Muslim ultra-rationalists called the Mutazilla (see my previous discussion on this at Mu'tazilla is not Godzilla), is unanimously rejected by all four schools of jurisprudence.

Blond goes on to say:

...the mere rebirth of classical Islam is not enough.

I find the word "rebirth" extremely incompatible with Islam, because it mirrors the idiolect of Muslim ideologues who like to use words like "reformation" for their interpretation of Islam. Reformation implies that the cumulative tradition which is the hallmark of traditional Islam is flawed. In the same vein, rebirth implies that traditional Islam has been lost for a time and needs to be brought back into the lives of Muslims again. Blond's mistake is in assuming that traditional Islam has given up significant ground to extremist Islam, when this is not the case, especially in Muslim populations outside the Middle East.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of positive signs in Britain. For one, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word "Muslim" in ­connection with the ­terrorism crisis.

While I support Brown's noble intentions, I have some reservations. By glossing over the label that most terrorists rigorously apply to themselves, Brown might be in danger of underestimating how much of a role Islam, or the extremist interpretation of it at least, plays in their ideology and lives. Making the subject taboo might ironically fuel bigotry against the whole Muslim community, since the dichotomy between what the terrorists claim themselves to be on television (i.e. true Muslims) and what the government is trying to push out (i.e. not Muslims) is simply too wide to ignore.