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WillowOne's Positions

Islam

My Positions

  1. I apply to Islam exactly the standard I apply to Christianity. The Qur'an is a human text, Muhammad was a human founder, and the claims made for both are unsupported. Declining to say so out of fear is a failure of nerve, not an act of courtesy.
  2. The doctrines that do the most harm today (apostasy as a capital offence, blasphemy as a crime, the legal subordination of women, the Qur'an as uncreated and beyond criticism) are doctrinal, not cultural accidents. Reformers within Islam are fighting them at real personal cost, and they deserve support rather than the accusation of self-hatred.
  3. Muslims are people and are owed every protection anyone else is owed: against discrimination, violence and collective blame. Criticising the religion and defending its adherents are not in tension. They are the same liberal principle applied twice.

Notes

  1. The claims. The Qur'an is held to be the verbatim speech of God, perfectly preserved, inimitable in its Arabic, and confirmed by scientific knowledge its author could not have had. The Sana'a palimpsest, found in 1972, carries a lower text with variant readings that was scraped off and overwritten. The caliph Uthman standardised the text in the 650s and ordered the alternatives burned, which is not what one does with a text that has no alternatives. Seven canonical "readings" still differ. The "scientific miracles" are retrofitted: the embryology in 23:12–14 follows Galen, errors included. The hadith, on which most of the law rests, were collected two centuries after the events by scholars who themselves rejected most of what they were offered as forged. The biography of the Prophet survives through an edition made a century and a half after his death. This is the same evidential situation as the New Testament (Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy), and I treat it the same way.
  2. The doctrines with victims. Apostasy carries the death penalty in around a dozen states and, according to Pew's 2013 survey, is favoured as a punishment by large majorities of Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Jordan. Blasphemy is a capital offence in Pakistan and a lynching offence in several others. In classical law a woman's testimony counts half a man's (2:282), her inheritance is half (4:11), and her husband may strike her (4:34); in Iran women are beaten to death by the state for showing their hair, as Mahsa Amini was in 2022. These are not fringe readings. They are the mainstream of the schools of law, and the reformers who argue otherwise are arguing against the texts and their tradition, which is why it is hard.
  3. Neither "religion of peace" nor "religion of war". Both slogans cherry-pick. The Qur'an says there is no compulsion in religion (2:256) and it says to fight the unbelievers wherever you find them (9:5), and the doctrine of abrogation, by which later verses override earlier ones, is traditionally read in favour of the second. Islam is a tradition of nearly two billion people and contains the full range of human conduct, from the Sufi poets to the Islamic State, and the texts can be made to license either. What one may say is that the violent reading is textually available in a way the apologists deny, and that the moderate reading requires exactly the selective, humane, extra-textual judgement that I describe under Biblical Morality.
  4. Why the subject is treated differently. For the reasons set out under Atheism, the attacks of 2001 and 2005 made Islam the religion I could not ignore. Since then the response of much of the liberal left has been to treat criticism of Islam as racism, to accept "Islamophobia" as a category that fuses the two, and to leave ex-Muslims and Muslim dissidents, who are the people actually in danger, to fend for themselves. Ayaan Hirsi Ali lives under guard; Salman Rushdie was stabbed thirty-three years after the fatwa. The right, meanwhile, has used criticism of the religion as cover for hostility to immigrants. Both postures are failures of the same principle, which is to argue with ideas and protect people.
  5. What is admirable. The intellectual culture of Baghdad and Córdoba when Europe had none; the obligation of charity; the hospitality; the communal discipline of Ramadan; the fact that the Ahmadis and the Sufis exist, persecuted mostly by other Muslims. I am aware that religion as identity and religion as doctrine come apart here as everywhere (Religion), and that the Muslim at the mosque on the corner is no more responsible for 9:5 than the Anglican is for Leviticus. The argument is with the doctrine, and with anyone, of any faith or none, who wants it enforced.

Sources

  • Pew Research Center, The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (2013)
  • Sadeghi, B. and Goudarzi, M., "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān", Der Islam 87 (2012)
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015)
  • Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
  • Humanists International, The Freedom of Thought Report — https://fot.humanists.international

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