A contemporary Muslim is an anguished being preoccupied with mediaeval concerns. Never before in the history of Islam has it faced a danger such as this. For the first time, Muslims en masse are reclaiming their place in humanity and rejoining history. Islam has always relied on Muslims being unequivocally Muslim in clear contradistinction to the kafir, the unbeliever, treating the values and mores of the infidel with utter disgust and contempt. But history has played a trick on Islam and increasing numbers of Muslims find the values and mores of the infidels growing within their own hearts, gradually forcing out the Qur’an so firmly lodged there during their early childhood. This drama plays out as Islam struggling against Muslims and Muslims struggling against themselves, leaving an ummah in meltdown. This short series explores aspects of that complex struggle. Here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.
Part 7: Autonomous individual
Freedom is as meaningless without the autonomous individual as the autonomous individual is meaningless without freedom, since one is but an instantiation of the other.
Let’s consider the current civil unrest in Baghdad and Beirut, as well as in Tehran and Khartoum. The unrest, excluding Khartoum, is variously characterised as, on the one hand, disenchantment with the oppressive Iranian theocratic regime and its malign activities in the region, as per the Israeli Government, and, including Khartoum, as a second “Arab Spring,” as per everyone else. In the latter case, while the majority of Iranians are not Arabs, the idea of the oppressed Muslim populations of the Middle East rising against their unelected autocratic rulers to attain democracy is the general idea. In this perspective, the Arab Spring is seen as having run into the sand by the time it reached the Levant and the Gulf, with rulers either introducing pre-emptive reforms that would draw the sting of the revolts and keep them in power, or double down in the way they know best: brutal repression, whatever the cost. Another perspective sees the string of regime-toppling uprisings that spread across North Africa and the Middle East as the machinations of the Muslim Brotherhood to topple the old regimes and take advantage of the resulting chaos to get themselves into power. Where they did succeed, it proved short-lived.
Singularly absent from these analyses and commentaries is any understanding of political economy, and the same mistakes that were made during the first Arab Spring is now made in the second: the people rising against their oppressive rulers. But the error is more obvious now than it appeared the first time around, when indeed, it was a combination of bread riot, peasant revolt, middle-class discontent, religious revivalism and cries for freedom, the latter being the odd one out. In Tehran, people are asserting their right to hold the government to account. In both Beirut and Baghdad, people are asserting their right to choose their own government without interference from anyone. In Sudan, people are rejecting attempts at imposing a supervisory control over their choices. Cries for freedom is the odd one out because all the hitherto types of unrest in the Islamic world was associated with those living in dependent subordination demanding either better treatment from their masters, or masters who would treat them better. No matter how dire the situation and how desperate and determined the population, freedom was not even conceivable, let alone demanded. In the world of Islam, thus has it ever been. Whatever the constellation of factors that made it impossible for, say, Kemal Ataturk to modernise Turkey, this will have been the determining component of it, a population wallowing under dependent subordination, kept in their place by Islam.
The cry for freedom, much as it was drowned out during the first Arab Spring (more discernible in some places and less so in others), heralded the generalisation of the kind of person that had hitherto been largely confined to the local strata closely associated with Western colonial settlers, administrators, service personnel, and, significantly, teachers. In other words, the Arab Spring, regardless of who was taking advantage of it or how it finally turned out, announced the presence in Islamic society of significant numbers of people who were not interested in better masters, but wanted freedom, which begins with the right to think for themselves, doubt in religion and the right to choose their own leaders. As an aside, this is not the same as the simplistic freedom à la George W Bush: freedom to do business. If that were the case, then China would be freer than the United States.
The revolts on the streets of Beirut, Baghdad and Khartoum are not bread riots. They are not cries for masters who will treat them better. They are, unlike in Round One of the Arab Spring, unequivocally demands for control over their own lives, the right to choose their own leaders who must be accountable to none but their electors. In all three cities, especially in Beirut, the revolts explicitly targeted corruption.
I was twenty-two when I sat my parents down and explained to them that I was no longer a Muslim. They reacted calmly, as I had expected, my mother accepting it right away (she was a convert from Christianity). The exchange with my father then went something like this:
“If you are not a Muslim, are you now a Jew?”
“No.”
“Are you a Christian?”
“No.”
“Are you a Hindu?”
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“I am just me. I have no religion.”
“But when people come to your house, how will they know what kind of people live there?” (Religious affiliation was displayed with a window sticker).
“They will just find out that the people who live there have no religion.”
For a long time I thought that my father was unable to imagine anyone except in some or other religious box. But recently I’ve come to think that his asking me those questions so pointedly might have made it easier for him to continue holding onto his child. No one had heard of anyone who did not have a religion, and he would have been able to simply deny that I had become “one of them,” whichever “them” the questioner might have in mind, as being without a religion was simply inconceivable to any Muslim in our community at the time.
It all started six years earlier, when I was sixteen. Our neighbour, a gentle Christian lady, assured me that we all pray to the same god. It was perhaps as little as a week after that conversation that the Yom Kippur War broke out. In school, a secular state school, we all assembled and the Principal lead a (Christian) prayer asking God to help Israel prevail against the enemies that had attacked her. That night in mosque, we said a special prayer asking Allah to grant the Muslims victory over the Jews. Thus, with both sides appealing to the same god, began my six-year journey from religion to atheism.
Over that period, the word “but” became the most important word in my inner struggles, as I tried to defend Islam and preserve my Muslim identity against the rising onslaught of my wakening senses and sharpening perception. I found that I could only find comfort in more tenaciously repeating to myself that I believe in Allah and that Muhammad was his messenger. There was a catchy song at the time that had the chorus,
Do I believe? Do I believe?
Yes, I believe
In love.
I liked this song and sang along with it at the same time as repeating to myself, “I believe in Allah! I believe in Allah!”
Those were years when many earlier experiences came up for reprocessing. From my earlier childhood madrassa experiences: questions fobbed off or shut down; my failure to manage a single sentence of the Qur’an without bursting into tears; children admired for reading Arabic that they did not understand a word of; the howls of that boy having the bare soles of his feet caned; my drunken aunt and criminal cousins (Muslims) who were better people than our kindly Christian neighbours; the books that my father’s Jewish employers gave him to give to us; the full-on brawl that broke out in our half-built mosque when someone suggested a Christian architect be engaged to finish the job that the Muslim architect had abandoned; dirt-poor Muslims extracting hard-earned cash from their dirt-poor Muslim relatives so that some vain aunt or uncle could go on hajj; my Muslim friends learning that I was making new Christian and Jewish friends at university and their first response being, “How do you know what they eat?”; all this and more until the first big jolt in 1979. Up to that point, Muslims have always been a bit weird, but after the Iranian Revolution, they went positively insane. Some of my closest friends went to Mecca, Cairo, or Islamabad and came back totally MUS-LEEM, the worst was an acquaintance who had gone to Iran and returned an altogether different person and not in a good way. Of course it was also a time of intense debate during which Islam threw the spotlight on what people are capable of when they abdicate reason for faith, and abandon our innate sense of ethics in favour of a god dictating to us what we must and must not do.
In the midst of this sensory overload came the incident in the madrassa (recounted in Part 6), in which my teacher so savagely beat his daughter for holding hands with a boy across the gate, that splintered bits of plank littered the floor. That was when something inside me said, “Enough!” It was not a matter of being persuaded by arguments or evidence. I can’t even honestly say that I was filled with horror and revulsion (sometimes I doubt that I actually remember what I felt while that girl screamed under the blows, and wonder whether I did not subsequently fill in the blanks to try to make sense of that moment). My first conscious thought after witnessing such brutality, was that I was done with religion — it had already happened. There was no decision. It could be, and probably was the case, that I had left Islam long before I had even realised it, having numbed my senses for years just so as to remain Muslim. Quash the human, protect the Muslim. How many Muslims have long ago apostatised from Islam and don’t even know that they had done so? How many Muslims are unaware that deep in their hearts, they have already left Islam? How many Muslims have become their own jailers and torturers, and have no idea?
Many who have never known unfreedom imagine that a police state is one in which the police is basically a gang of legalised thugs who do anything they want to anyone with impunity. This is not so. A police state is a state in which everyone is the police. Robert Spencer often describes Britain as a “shabby police state”. This might well once have been the case, but it is no longer so. Somewhere in the closing chapters of 1984, Winston Smith reflects on how far back the police knew about him what he didn’t yet know about himself. “There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer.”
When the British police asked the citizens of Orwell’s island to report “hateful behaviour” even if it isn’t a crime and even if they have no evidence, Britain graduated from a shabby police state to a decent, respectable one; one that can claim its rightful place and hold its head high amongst the top tier of police states, right up there with the Soviet Union, with the People’s Republic of China, with the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, with the Syrian Arab Republic, with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and of course, with Oceania. When they come to kick your door down and arrest you for “Islamophobia”, you may have no idea why. You may not even know that you are an “Islamophobe”. You may be baffled, confused, insulted even; some of your best friends are Muslims. This cannot be; there must be some mistake. There has to be —No. There was no mistake. The police knew, have known for a long time. The train of thought had been inferred. You flinched at the thought of Muhammad’s penis tearing into the pre-pubescent vagina of a nine-year-old girl. You flinched because you thought of yourself at nine, when you looked up to many men, uncles, teachers, your father’s friends, your father even – they must have been in their fifties. Yes, you flinched at the thought. Not that there was any obvious physical manifestation of that flinch. It was just… something. Perhaps a split-second distraction in your eyes, or your voice dropping a fraction of an octave, or that minute stalling in your breath… Someone had been vigilant… it wasn’t a crime, no evidence, evidence not required. Someone had been a good citizen. That’s all. Someone had done the right thing and reported “Islamophobia”. And don’t worry; since there is need for neither crime nor evidence, you are already guilty.
The onslaught on the autonomous individual is underway. Erode freedom and you erode the autonomous individual, and step by slow step, the autonomous individual is reduced to the dependent subordinate. Step by slow step the free individual of the free world is reduced to the mindless, soulless, obedient slave made ready for Islam, when he will have to choose between slave of Allah and slave of Muslims. Either way, it will be slavery or death.
And while so many citizens of the free world, autonomous individuals all, rush headlong into a condition of unfreedom, of political correctness and multiculturalism and knowing deep in their gut that it is wrong to criticise Islam, and feel themselves virtuous for virtue-signalling their submission, feel themselves subdued, they are baffled, they are confused at the phenomenon of all these ex-Muslims saying all these awful things about Islam and Muslims, things that could not possibly be true about a religion of peace, about jihad which is an inner struggle, and about the nice Muslim lady down the road, things one would expect from racists, bigots and Islamophobes. Why are they so angry?
The ex-Muslim who is disappointed that such people are not supporting them, are not their “allies”, are as much victims of the multicultural thought trap that has ensnared the West as the Western victims themselves. This is a phenomenon particularly prevalent amongst ex-Muslims in the United States, who seem to have fallen lock, stock and barrel for identity politics and find themselves paralysed when confronted with the greatest elephant in the room of all: Muslims themselves. Islam, such ex-Muslims will insist, is a set of ideas. True enough, but a set of ideas remains exactly that until operationalised. People who operationalise the catastrophic set of ideas known as Islam are Muslims, and only Muslims.
In the great identity politics game of “oppressed groups” and “oppressor groups,” the last thing such ex-Muslims want is to seem like or sound like anti-Muslim bigots. So they steer clear of criticising Muslims and Muslims are never held to account for the consequences of their operationalising what ex-Muslims all agree is a terrible set of ideas.
This ambivalence towards Muslims is one of the Muslim’s inner struggles that transcend the apostasy barrier. It is a self-inflicted malaise that cannot be resolved until ex-Muslims recognise that they emerged from Islam as freely-associating and mutually-supporting autonomous individuals, i.e., a community in the traditional sense, in pursuit of the rights and freedoms that all individuals are entitled to under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To instead form a “community” in the corrupted, identity politics sense of the group as basic social unit, ex-Muslims being one more “oppressed group”, they unwittingly subsume their autonomy as free individuals into the formulaic group-think of identity politics. They may not realise it, but all they have done is to substitute one terrible form of unfreedom for a less terrible form. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness still lie somwhere ahead of them.
Not so ex-Muslims from the Islamic world, who know unfreedom when they see it, and will not hold back from criticising that which has to be criticised, regardless of who will do what with the truth they speak. This wisdom was already crystal clear to the Persian philosopher Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Kindi, who counselled:
“We ought not to be embarrassed of appreciating the truth and of obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself, and there is no deterioration of the truth, nor belittling either of one who speaks it or conveys it.” (1)
There is no deterioration of the truth concerning Muslims, nor belittling either of one who speaks it or conveys it. Ex-Muslims are uniquely placed to show the emancipating and uplifting power of Al-Kindi’s insight, but it requires first that we be brutally honest with ourselves and about the people we grew up amongst and whom we love. That might prove be one of the toughest inner struggles to overcome.
Notes
(1) Peter Adamson, Al-Kindi, OUP, 2007, quoted in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam, Volume 1, p509.