Rashid Shaz is a well-known Islamic scholar based in New Delhi. He is the author of numerous books and edits an Islamic web-magazine (www.futureislam.com). In this interview with Yoginder Sikand he talks about his work , particularly his views on on-going debates on Islam and Muslims.
 
Q: In your latest book, ‘Islam: Negotiating the Future’, you raise a number of new issues that were absent in your previous writings, including a critique of certain aspects of traditional Muslim thinking and the need for inter-community solidarity. How do you explain this shift?

A: I won’t call it a shift. It is more like an expansion or development in my thinking based on reflection on the way the world is heading. Recent and current events have forced me to realise that we must stop obsessing about the welfare of our own communities alone, which inevitably leads to antagonisms and conflict. Instead, we have to start thinking in terms of the welfare of all of humanity. This is precisely what most Muslims, Hindus, Christians and others are not doing. Religion has been reduced, for many of us, to the cult of a particular person and as the project of a particular community, rather than as something that is concerned about the welfare of humankind as such. This, as I said, is as true of the Muslim case as it is of other communities. There is terrible confusion among Muslims as to the actual import and message of Islam. This realisation began to dawn on me when, as editor of the ‘Aligarh Magazine’ in the mid-1980s I visited Pakistan and met with leaders of various mujahidin groups who were active in the war against the Soviet occupiers. They talked enthusiastically about Islam, but once the Soviets were expelled, they began fighting among themselves. They could force the mighty Soviet empire to its knees but they could not establish a system of justice which Islam speaks about and which they claimed to champion. The same thing happened in the case of the Taliban. Or, for instance, the sectarian strife in Pakistan, between Shia and Sunni groups and between different groups within the Sunni fold. The different sects are unable to tolerate differences or to dialogue among themselves without descending into fierce polemics. How can you think of the unity and welfare of humankind that the Qur’an talks about, leave alone that of the followers of Muhammad, if you cannot relate to others without having to brand all of them as ‘enemies’?

Thinking about all this, it struck me that one of the major causes of this malaise were certain intellectual problems, certain faults in our own way of thinking and of understanding Islam which, if allowed to go unaddressed, would not only prove grievous for Muslims themselves but would also severely impact on what I believe to be the Islamic mission of justice for all and the universalistic message of the Qur’an.

Q: What exactly do you mean by this?

A: For Muslims, the Qur’an alone and the authenticated sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are the only reliable sources to understand the faith. This is sufficient for the project of global justice that Islam speaks of. However, instead of relying on these sources, for centuries most Muslims have been relying on humanly-constructed interpretative material, the books of the different imams and scholars, whom they see as the last word on religion. Instead of examining this material in the light of the Qur’an, they’ve been doing the reverse. Because of this, the Qur’anic message of universalism has been somewhat overshadowed in popular Muslim thought. Of course, one must respect the elders and the scholars of the past and their commitment, but they were also human beings, capable of making mistakes. They were not immaculate or perfect. Being products of their times, naturally their opinions, as reflected in
their books, were shaped by their own spatio-temporal conditions. Hence, their views cannot be taken as the last word on any subject. Although the Qur’an is fiercely opposed to the notion of any intermediary between God and humans, this is precisely how these imams and ulema of the past, and even of today, are treated by many Muslims. So, as I was saying, because of all this the true universal message of Islam has been overshadowed, and for many Muslims Islam has now been reduced to little more than what I have called in my latest book the ‘cult of Muhammad’. And this way of approaching Islam actually prevents Muslims from realising the Qur’anic mandate of global justice and mercy.

Q: Could you elaborate on that point?

A: Well, what I mean is that, as the Qur’an says, Islam, which means ‘the Surrender’, is the religion taught by all the prophets, from the first, Adam, to the last, Muhammad. The Qur’an very specifically instructs Muslims not to make any distinctions between the Prophets, to treat them equally. But what has happened is that each community, whether because of the human urge for identity or for political and economic reasons or in order to compete with other communities, comes to see its own prophet on a higher pedestal than others. So, you have the cult of Jesus among Christians, the cult of Moses among the Jews and what I call in my latest book a cult of Muhammad among many Muslims. In this way, the universal message of religion has been subtly subverted. In the Muslim case, stories began being circulated after the death of the Prophet Muhammad that he was the best among the prophets or, as in the case of some
Sufis, that the entire cosmos was created out of his light (nur-e muhammadi) and so on. Similar stories also began being concocted and passed off as hadith, as reports attributed to the Prophet himself. In this way, the Qur’an’s point that Muhammad was sent by God to revive or to spread the religion of Abraham, true monotheism, was overshadowed. Qur’anic universalism was then replaced by Muslim communitarianism. Islam as a global project was reduced to a Muslim communitarian project in the minds of many Muslims. This is a sort of ‘tribalism’ or what in Arabic is called asabiyyat that the Qur’an sternly warns us against.

I do not subscribe to the position of the Ahl-e Qur’an, who believe that the Hadith literature as a
whole is suspect. Yet, I would be very circumspect in analysing reports that are thought of as hadith, because there are numerous such reports that are plainly concocted and that go against the intention of the Qur’an. Such reports include negative references to people of other faiths or to women, for instance, and have been used to justify patriarchy and hostility towards others. Before accepting any report as a genuine hadith of the Prophet it needs to be seen in
the light of the Qur’an and the Qur’anic spirit of justice and the universalism of the deen or faith, and if the narrative goes against it, it cannot be said to be genuine. But, unfortunately, this is not generally done. From an Islamic perspective, only the Qur’an is perfect, all other texts are history and are not an essential part of the faith and so should not be considered as divine revelation. And this is the case with much of the corpus of what is called Hadith. It is a fact that some people competed with each other to narrate, and even to manufacture, statements which
they sought to pass off as hadith, and in this the quest for prominence and recognition must also have played, at least in some instances, some role. There are numerous problems with several such narratives. Some of them are based only on one narrator and so are not fully reliable. Others are narrated by people whose veracity is doubtful. And then, these narratives have to be seen in their spatio-temporal context, and the occasion on which the Prophet is said to have made a particular statement or done a certain deed, about which the narrative reports, needs also to be seen, so that something that is meant only for a particular context is not made
into a generalised command. In several cases, reports were fabricated for clearly political purposes. For instance, the Abbasids gave Jews top positions in their administration. This was not liked by some people and so stories began being conducted in order to defame all Jews as an entire people. So, Ibn Ishaq, whose biography of the Prophet is the earliest one currently available, mentions that the Prophet slaughtered the entire Jewish tribe of Banu Quraiza and enslaved its women. Ibn Ishaq is not considered to be very reliable about all that he says. Before this there is no mention of the story of the Banu Quraiza, which shows that this story was probably concocted to justify hatred against all Jews and to critique the Abbasids for giving them top posts. Now, obviously, this hatred against the Jews as a people is not warranted in the Qur’an itself, which, while it criticises some Jews, at the same time also mentions that among them there are genuinely pious and God-fearing souls. So, this sort of blanket condemnation of all Jews, Christians or other non-Muslims that certain narratives seek to promote is certainly anti-Qur’anic and, therefore cannot be said to be genuine. The Qur’an admonishes certain members of the Quraish tribe for their virulent opposition to the Prophet, and does the same in the case of certain Jews. But today no one says that the living descendants of the Quraish of Mecca are all condemned by God. But why is it that in the twentieth century you have some thinkers who begin to proclaim that all Jews, the Jews as an entire people, are ‘enemies of God’? Obviously, this is linked to contemporary political events and cannot be said to have any Qur’anic sanction. Such stories, to repeat, go against the Qur’anic notion of universalism.

One has to exercise such caution even in the case of what most Sunnis consider the six canonical collections (sihah sitta) of Hadith. No one really knows when the notion that these are ‘canonical’ came into being. There is also no consensus on precisely which six collections of report the sihah sitta consist of. Even in the case of the Sahih of al-Bukhari, which most Sunnis consider as the most authentic collection of Hadith, there are some reports that are of doubtful veracity. Al-Bukhari never himself knew that the collection of reports that he was compiling would be taken by most Muslims as the most holy book after the Qur’an. I mean, if the books of Hadith were considered by God to be an integral part of the faith, then how is it that before al-Bukhari there were some 25 or so other collections of reports that were believed to be Hadith but which have been lost? Or, why did the first Caliph of the Sunnis, Hazrat Abu Bakr, order that the collection of statements attributed to or about the Prophet that someone had made be burnt? He obviously feared that there was a danger that Muslims would make such reports an integral part of their faith, in addition to the Qur’an.

Q: In the light of what you have said, how do you look at the tradition of fiqh or Muslim jurisprudence?

A: Again, I see similar sorts of problems with the fiqh tradition. The Qur’an is a book of the spirit
essentially, calling people to surrender to the one God. It isn’t really a book of legal prescriptions. The intention and scope of the Qur’an cannot be limited just to rituals and fiqh, as many people have sought to inadvertently largely reduce it to. But many Muslims have this erroneous notion that Islam can be understood largely through legal categories, and that is why what is taught in the madrasas is basically fiqh. Consequently, the universalistic message of Islam has been overshadowed by this obsession with fiqh details and rules. So, the imams of the fours schools of Sunni law and those of the Jafari school of Shia law have come to be treated as sacrosanct, and it is now generally believed that whatever they said was the gospel truth and that to think or do differently is heresy. Shah Waliullah, the seventeenth century scholar from Delhi who is held in high regard in Indian Sunni circles, even went to the extent of claiming that the four schools of Sunni fiqh were provided by God (min janib ullah). How can that be, when these schools developed long after the demise of the Prophet? If these schools were really provided by God directly, why is it that they were not mentioned in the Qur’an? Doesn’t this notion go against the Qur’anic concept that the Qur’an is the final revelation? It is like in the Christian case, where the sayings attributed to Paul are now considered as an integral part of the Bible, or the Jewish case, as described in the Qur’an, where rabbis were thought to be virtually infallible spokesmen of God. The emergence and development of the different schools of fiqh has to be historically understood, and not just accepted as something divinely ordained. Rulers patronised different schools of fiqh and there was considerable competition between the scholars of the different schools to win the favour of the rulers. This naturally led to inter-school rivalry, which went to such lengths that in the mosque in Mecca there were, till recently, separate places to pray for Muslims of the different schools! And then the tradition of fiqh came to include numerous rules that clearly set Muslims apart and above others, thus seeking to distort Islam’s universal message and turn it into a simple Muslim communitarian project, as concerned basically with the welfare of Muslims and not of others. Obviously, such an interpretation of Islam has no attraction for people of other faiths.

Q: In your writings, you have stressed the importance of dialogue between followers of the ‘Abrahamic’ faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But what about dialogue between Hindus and Muslims, particularly in the Indian context?

A: The Qur’an specifically mentions Christians and Jews as fellow ‘People of the Book’ (ahl-e kitab) and exhorts Muslims to appeal to them to work together for God’s purposes. The Qur’an does not specifically mention the Hindus, because it was revealed in Arabia, where there were no Hindus at that time. But the Qur’an does say that God has sent every nation a prophet, and India, being such an old civilisation, must certainly had one or more prophets. This is why, for instance, the tenth century Arab writer al-Biruni, mentions that among the Hindus, too, there is a notion of monotheism. Some Muslim writers even argued that certain Hindu religious personages may well have been prophets of God, whose message was distorted over time and who gradually began being considered by their followers as incarnations of God. So, they argued that Hindus, too, could be considered similar to the ‘people of the Book’, for purposes of social relations, etc..

This process in accommodating Hindus into Islamic theology would have gone further but for certain political factors. One particular factor was the syncretic religion of Din-e Ilahi that the Mughal Emperor Akbar sought to promote, which many ulema felt was a threat to Islam. This led to a sort of defensiveness and a growing unwillingness to extend the earlier process of reaching out to the Hindus. This was exemplified, for instance, in the harsh statements of Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Shah Waliullah about the Hindus and their insistence on the Arab aspects of Muslim culture, which they presented as ‘Islamic’, in order perhaps to clearly distinguish Muslims off from others and in the mistaken belief that Arabic culture is integral to Islam.

Q: How do you see the conflation of Arab culture with Islam as impacting on what you see as the universal message of the Qur’an?

A: Islam is meant for all of humanity so how can it promote any particular culture? Yes, we need to study the Arab language to understand the Qur’an, but this does not mean Arabic has any special place in God’s eyes. After all, God sent revelations to prophets before Muhammad in various other languages, so how can Arabic be privileged in the eyes of God above other languages? Yet, some Muslims go so far as to insist that Arab is the language that is spoken in heaven!

By privileging Arab culture in this way we have developed a ‘cultural Islam’ that really goes against Qur’anic universalism. So, people think that to become a Muslim you have to adopt Arab ways. For instance, I know of a Hindu woman called Shanti who converted to Islam and took the name Ayesha. Why couldn’t she retain her previous name? There was no harm in that. Shanti is a perfectly Islamically acceptable name. It means ‘peace’. But because it is wrongly thought that to become a Muslim you must abandon your own culture she decided to take an Arabic name. Or, for instance, Cat Stevens, on becoming a Muslim and changing his name to Yusuf Islam, now dresses in an Arabic gown. It’s similar to Indians who convert to Christianity and then adopt European names. This sort of equation between Islam and Arabic culture that many Muslims make is wrong and it sends out the message that if one wants to become a Muslim one will have to abandon one’s own culture completely. How can this be reconciled with the Qur’an’s insistence that Islam is universal, that it is the ‘religion of nature’ (din al-fitrah)? If Islam is a universal faith, as we believe, surely it must have enough room to accommodate local cultures.

I think one major factor behind this erroneous conflation of Islam with Arab culture lies in history, when this ‘Arabised Islam’ was used by Caliphs and Sultans, beginning with the Abbasids, to promote the project of Arab empire-building. As a result, non-Arabs came to be seen as somehow inferior, and as requiring to conform to Arab cultural norms to be considered as good Muslims. If you weight this against the Prophet’s statement that in Islam there is no distinction between Arabs and non-Arabs, and the Qur’an’s insistence that the only criterion for superiority in God’s eyes is piety, you can understand how this goes against Qur’anic universalism. And also, you can understand why this sort of Arabised ‘Islam’ won’t interest other people.

It was this ‘Arabised Islam’ in the service of empire-building that led to the un-Qur’anic notion of the world being divided into two rival camps: dar ul-islam (‘the abode of Islam) and dar ul-harb (the abode of war), the latter being thought of as all territories that were not under Muslim rule and which needed to be brought under Muslim imperial domain. Now, this notion is not found at all in the Qur’an, but some scholars developed it in order to justify Abbasid imperialist expansionism. This imperialist quest has left an indelible influence on the thinking of Muslim scholars, who therefore tend to see other communities in a negative light. One major task before us today is to re-evaluate this cultural and historical baggage that has eclipsed the universalism of the Qur’anic message, and its appeals for mercy, love and justice for all and not just for a certain community.

Q: In the contemporary context what role do you think Muslims can or should play in promoting inter-faith dialogue?

A: I don’t speak here of ‘cultural Muslims’ (thaqafati musalman), but am arguing from the point of view of the category of ‘Muslim’ as the word is used in the Qur’an to refer to ‘submitted souls’. And, as the Qur’an says, these can include people in other communities as well. Qur’anically speaking, the notion of the ‘ummat-e muslimah’, the ‘Muslim community’, includes those people in other communities who, too, have submitted to God and His Will and faithfully follow the teachings of the prophets that God has sent to their communities. Mere ‘cultural Muslims’, who happen to have ‘Muslim’ or Arab names, are not necessarily a part of this community. It is not for humans to judge who will or will not go to heaven. There are some ‘Muslims’ or ‘submitted souls’ among the Christians and Jews, the Qur’an says, with whom God is pleased. And so, too, in other communities as well, including Hindus. On the other hand, there are many Muslims who are merely ‘cultural Muslims’, who do not follow Islam in their own lives. So, we have to get rid of the notion that salvation is the monopoly of any community and the belief that ‘submitted souls’ are to be found only in one community. This notion has been deeply-rooted in the fiqhi or jurisprudential ‘Islam’, the Arabised ‘Islam’ that has been reduced to
yet another cultic tradition just like another other, and hence has little appeal for others.

Since Islam is a universal faith Muslims have to think of the welfare of all, not just of themselves. Islam calls for justice for all, so that everyone can realise himself or herself. This means that ‘submitted souls’ who are concerned about say human rights violations or war, imperialism and looting by multinational corporations or whatever should join hands in solidarity and struggle. So, there are people in the West, for instance, who are seriously committed to human rights and who are totally against war and capitalism. Some of them are, in their own ways, ‘submitted souls’, carrying on the agenda of the prophets, whether or not they realise it, and Muslims, by whom I mean ‘followers of the Prophet’ (mutabayeen-e muhammad) and not simply ‘cultural Muslims’, must join hands with them.

This way of understanding the Qur’an also impacts on what we understand as ‘conversion’ and Islamic mission (tabligh). Conversion is not simple verbal confession of a creed or adopting another culture. It has to translate into converting one’s will to do God’s work, to struggle to establish justice for all. And this has to be seen in the light of the Qur’anic statement that if God willed he would have created all of us as members of one community or ummah. He did not, however, do so. He created us in different communities because, as the Qur’an says, He wants us to compete with each other in good deeds. So, all ‘people of faith’ (ahl-e iman) have to work together to oppose injustice and promote what is good.

This struggle for justice should not take the form of demands for this or that community. So, when what I call ‘cultural Muslims’ (shaqafati or qaumi musalman) start demanding rights or benefits in the name of being members of the ‘Muslim community’ I don’t think it is an Islamic position. Demanding things on the basis of being members of a certain community is a sort of ‘tribalism’, in my view, that goes against the Qur’anic notion of justice for all, and it reduces Muslims to yet another community (qaum, firqa) instead of the ideological vanguard that the Qur’an sees true Muslims as. So, for instance, when people say Muslims, by which they mean ‘cultural Muslims’, must struggle along with other oppressed communities against say ‘upper’ caste Hindu dominance, it would, I fear, only result in replacing one set of oppressors by another and not challenge the system of oppression as such. This would, in my view, detract from Islam’s larger agenda. True Muslims, in the sense of ‘submitted souls’, are not just another community, like others, but, rather, deputies of the last prophet. As the khair al-ummat or the ‘best of nations’, they have a global mission of establishing justice and mercy and providing guidance for all. So, that is why I am opposed to this notion of ‘Muslim communitarianism’ and am critical of the tendency of ‘cultural Muslims’ to demand rights or benefits for themselves. It will only lead to Islam being wrongly interpreted as a project of simply a certain cultural community.

Q: How does the ‘cultural’ or fiqhi version of Islam that you have talked about get reflected in the
madrasas?

A: Fiqh forms the main core of the madrasa syllabus in India. The Qur’an receives relatively little attention in the dars-e nizami, the syllabus followed in most Indian madrasas. The Qur’an ought to have had primary place, but instead of examining fiqh and Qur’anic commentaries (tafasir) and the works of the ulema in the light of the Qur’an, the reverse is generally the norm. Texts that were taught in the medieval period to understand the Qur’an, such as books on philosophy and astronomy, are still being used in the madrasas. Students are not provided with adequate knowledge of the world around them, and so, I believe, they are not able to interpret Islam in the right manner, focussing mainly on the ritualistic aspects and on fiqh details.

A scholar (‘alim) in the Islamic sense of the term is quite different from what the madrasas generally produce. The Qur’an does not limit acceptable knowledge to fiqh alone or to those subjects that the madrasas now teach. A physicist, who, in doing research, realises the marvels of nature and then is led to further deepen his faith in God by being amazed at God’s glory is as much an ‘alim or scholar as someone who teaches fiqh in a madrasa.

Madrasas do not encourage debate, dissent or the critical use of the intellect and reason. This, I think, is not what the Qur’an wants. The Qur’an exhorts us to use our reason to ponder on the signs of nature, as a means of realising the glory of God. I mean, our heads are not just cap-stands that are not meant to be used for anything else. Ashraf Ali Thanvi, the well-known Deobandi scholar, says that we shouldn’t use our reason and that, instead, we should practise taqlid, strictly conforming to what the ulema of the past have said. But, the ulema were not free
from error, being human beings like the rest of us. They were products of their times, as we all are. So while we respect them for their dedication, why should we stop thinking and be bound by their prescriptions? To do so is actually against what the Qur’an, which tells us to exercise our reason. To accept the edicts and views of the scholars of the past as the last word is specifically condemned in the Qur’an, as for instance when it talks about some Jews and Christians taking their priests for gods, in the sense of infallible intermediaries between God and humans.

Another problem with the madrasas, which follows from their focus essentially on fiqh, is that that of sectarianism. In India, almost all madrasas are associated with one or the other school of thought (maslak) and each madrasa tries to seek to promote its own maslak, often at the expense of others. If students are taught from the very beginning that their own maslak alone is true and that others are false, how can you expect them to promote unity or to seriously search for truth?

Q: What do you feel about the notion of the ‘Islamic state’, as advocated by Islamists?

A: The aim of the state in Islam is to provide justice, and if a state does not do so it cannot be
called ‘Islamic’ even though it claims to be so. When you look at recent history, efforts to establish what their advocates call ‘Islamic states’ have resulted in what can be called Vaticanisation of religious authority, with some people who claim to be experts seeking to rule over the rest. Naturally, this leads to injustice and dissension, because rulers, even those who claim to speak for Islam, are, like other humans, not free from error. It also results in suppression of upholders of other interpretations of Islam. Different opinions are sought to be crushed with the might of the state, but that is not the proper way to deal with differences. The Qur’an, being in a human language, is understood humanly and so naturally there will always be differences on how to interpret it. Many verses in the Qur’an cannot be interpreted literally. They are intended to be taken metaphorically, and so naturally for this one has to exercise reason and there will always be differences in how to understand these. So we don’t have the right to denounce those who have different understandings as out of the fold of Islam. The proper way to deal with this is dialogue, not suppression by force. But, in the name of establishing an ‘Islamic state’ in a particular country, minority schools of Islamic thought and jurisprudence have been sought to be suppressed, leading to internecine strife with such tragic consequences.

Q: How do you see this talk of a global ‘clash of civilisations’? Do you buy this argument?

A: I don’t think this discourse has any validity. True, some people do see the world in this way, as Islam and the West being on a collision course, but I don’t agree. But, I would also say that erroneous ways of understanding religions are problems that need urgent attention. This is an issue that relates to all communities. Naturally, if people who believe that their religion demands them to hate others or to establish their global hegemony by subjugating and conquering others, as do some self-styled defenders of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and Hindutva ideologues here in India, this has to be combated. As long as we reduce religion to these narrowly-defined community projects the problem will remain, I fear.

Religion, I believe, is not the root of this so-called ‘clash of civilisations’. It is simply being marshalled for political purposes. The major causes of the so-called ‘clash’ are economic and political, particularly Western imperialism and capitalism. It is basically a clash over resources. This being the case, all ‘submitted souls’, no matter what community or religious label they might have, must join hands to protest, and struggle jointly for a just world order.
 

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