Why Should the UN Consider It Its Duty to Protect Islam from Criticism?

TALK GIVEN AT SEVENTH INARAH CONFERENCE IN TRIER, GERMANY, 4 MAY 2022

Good afternoon, welcome to the seventh Inarah Conference. My name is Ibn Warraq. I played, as Dr Markus Gross has adumbrated, a modest part in helping launch the Inarah Institute and the attendant Inarah conferences. I fear some of you may now have an irresistible urge to rush for the exit, since I remain, in the words of Lady Caroline Lamb referring to Lord Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

March 15 was designated by the UN as the official day for combating so-called Islamophobia. Even though Christians are persecuted in North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Eritrea, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria and India, there is no such day for combating Christianophobia. Indeed, the very word “Christianophobia” does not exist, whereas “Islamophobia” has entered all the dictionaries of European languages. According to Vatican News ^[1] 13 Christians are killed every day because of their faith. I do not wish to trade figures, figures that should of course be verified, and are always open to dispute and revision; that is not my major point. What I wish to question is why the UN should consider it its duty to protect Islam from criticism, and Muslims from physical violence but not any other religious group.

We are witnessing an extraordinary moment in the history of Islamic lands. A historic moment which I tried to record in my latest book, “Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind. Atheism and Freethought in Islam.”

We cannot afford to ignore the profound implications of the rise in atheism in the Islamic world. These, largely though not exclusively, young atheists cannot be dismissed as of some fringe fanatics of uneducated rebels. The members of atheist Facebook groups in nearly all the Islamic countries are all Internet savvy, and well-versed in the Islamic sciences (Koran, Sira, hadith, tafsir, and so on), educated with a knowledge of the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, geology and biology. They are well aware of the wider consequences of the Theory of Evolution, and the materialist implications of cosmological theories of the origins of the Universe. They are thus well-placed to critically examine the tenets of the religion they were forced-fed at an extremely young age. Their self-liberation is an achievement all the more remarkable for that, requiring not only alert minds but extraordinary courage, for atheism remains punishable by death in many Islamic countries. Their critical inquiring minds are in admiration of the scientific achievements of the West. As a whole they do not have any ideological reason to hate the West, unlike the terrorists and Islamic Republic of Iran. The ideological foundation of the conflicts in the Middle East are often downplayed, instead we are told it is all about “the oil” or “poverty” or “American imperialism”. It is Islam and its ideology which is responsible for Islamic terrorism. Thus ex-Muslims should be seen as allies to be cultivated, not dismissed as “Islamophobes.”

In early 2019, in Britain the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, a cross-party formation of around two-dozen MPs in the British Parliament, tried to institutionalize the definition of Islamophobia in racial rather than religious terms. The APPG, in a November 2018 report titled, ‘Islamophobia Defined,’ proposed the following one-sentence definition of Islamophobia: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ The definition, the result of six months of consultations, was endorsed by hundreds of Muslim organizations, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as several political parties, including Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Conservatives. As the Spectator, a British journal, wrote, “There is wide public support for freedom of speech and it is unlikely to be officially ended by an act of parliament, but it can be chipped away bit by bit. Giving official recognition to the APPG definition of Islamophobia will be a giant step towards an arbitrary police state.” This is an insult to millions of ex-Muslims from different ethnic communities who reject a set of beliefs, rituals and rites, and cast doubt on an ideology. How could they possibly be accused of racism? Islam is not a race.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “phobia” as “Fear, horror, or aversion, esp. of a morbid character. In Psychology, an abnormal and irrational fear or dread which is caused by a particular object or circumstance.” However, it seems to me to be perfectly rational, healthy, and normal to fear an ideology that is likely to curtail or eliminate my liberties if it prevails. If I were gay, lesbian, transgender or non-believer, or simply a woman, I should be more than alarmed, I should be terrified at the thought of Islam becoming the religion of the state where I was living, I would battle Islam with all my might. As a set of ideas, as an ideology, Islam is fair game; one is morally obliged to criticize its beliefs and principles. We are not targeting individuals, individual Muslims; in fact, most ex-Muslims have close relatives and family members who remain Muslim. Far from promoting bigotry, we clearly distinguish between Muslims and Islam. Islam like other religions is fair game for criticizing, making fun of etc. It would be more coherent to coin a new term; perhaps MISOISLAMIC, “hating what is Islamic.“ The Oxford English Dictionary gives „misocatholic“ as “hating what is (Roman) Catholic.“ The prefix “miso-“ comes from the Greek word to hate, and is found in, for example, misanthropy, misogamy, misogyny, misology. In the history of the West, those who have criticized various aspects of Christianity are admired, revered as cultural heroes, and hailed as philosophers responsible for the secularization of the West – from Spinoza, to Camus. They are not labelled and dismissed as “Christianophobes.”

Soon after 11 September, 2001, the left-wing British weekly journal The New Statesman published an article provocatively entitled “The Great Koran Con Trick” by Martin Bright. Bright rehearsed the familiar theories of the revisionists, centered on the work of John Wansbrough of the School of African and Oriental Studies [SOAS], and those influenced by him, scholars such as Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Andrew Rippin, and Gerald Hawting. The article resulted in many letters to the Editor, and six of them were published the following week [17 December, 2001]. The longest was from Patricia Crone,. She wrote, “modern historians are not interested in the truth and falsehood of the religion they study at all. They study religions as historical factors shaped by their environment and acting back on it in turn, much as scientists study the formation of dust clouds or the evolution of plants. Religious beliefs shape the world they interact with, whether the person studying them happens to share them or not; all that matters is what they meant at the time, not what they mean now”. A little further, Crone continues, “[Historians] have no intention of making the Muslim house come down, nor indeed could they even if they did. Religion does not belong in the domain open to proof or disproof by scholarship or science”.

Michael Cook, Crone’s one-time colleague and co-author of Hagarism, also wrote to the journal. Here is the full text of his letter: “It is perfectly true that some of various academic theories about the origins of Islam are radical. But it would be wrong to suggest that they ‘prove’ the traditional Islamic account of the beginnings of the religion to be false. They don’t. Neither, so far as I know, do the early Koranic fragments found in Yemen prove anything like that. They are exciting to experts, they scatter a few apples over the cobbles, but they don’t upset the apple-cart. In any case, it is hard to see why academic theories about the origins of Islam should be any more ‘devastating’ than theories about Jesus have been to Christianity. Academic work does occasionally enliven the halls of learning, but it doesn’t devastate world religions. They don’t play in the same league”.

Now the remarks of both Cook and Crone are misleading to say the least. First, Crone seems to imply that all historians are only engaged in historical sociology of religion, investigating what it meant to be Muslim, and how Muslims saw and experienced their own religion, and are not interested in the truth and falsehood of the religion studied. Not only does this not characterize the work of all historians, it does not even characterize her own. In Hagarism [1977], co-written with Michael Cook, Slaves on Horses [1980], God’s Caliph [1986] written with Martin Hinds, Roman Provincial and Islamic Law [1987], Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam [1987], Crone challenged the accepted views on early Islam. Hagarism, for instance, Cook and Crone exploded the “the academic consensus and demolished deference to the Muslim view of things, thus making it possible to propose radical alternative hypotheses for the origins of Islam”, in other words, alternative accounts of what really happened. Cook and Crone clearly rejected the Islamic tradition.

Second, Cook and Crone imply that academic research has no consequence for the religion or the believer, but they themselves clearly saw the implications of their own scholarly work, for they admit in the preface to Hagarism, that without exposure to “the skeptical approach of Dr. John Wansbrough to the historicity of the Islamic tradition . . . the theory of Islamic origins set out in this book would never have occurred to us” (p. viii), and that this approach led them to a theory which is “not one which any believing Muslim can accept: not because it in any way belittles the historical role of Muhammad, but because it presents him in a role quite different from that which he has taken on in the Islamic tradition. This is a book written by infidels for infidels, and it is based on what from any Muslim perspective must appear an inordinate regard for the testimony of infidel sources” (pp. vi–viii). Why the recourse to the “infidel sources”, that is, the non-Muslim historians of the period of the Islamic conquests? Their reply: “Virtually all accounts of the early development of Islam take it as axiomatic that it is possible to elicit at least the outlines of the process from the Islamic sources. It is however well known that these sources are not demonstrably early. There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century, and the tradition which places this rather opaque revelation in its historical context is not attested before the middle of the eighth. The historicity of the Islamic tradition is thus to some degree problematic: while there are no cogent internal grounds for rejecting it, there are equally no cogent external grounds for accepting it. In the circumstances it is not unreasonable to proceed in the usual fashion by presenting a sensibly edited version of the tradition as historical fact. … The only way out of the dilemma is thus to step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again”(p. 3).

What an extraordinary avowal: a history “written by infidels for infidels”. What on earth do they mean? Do they mean Muslims should not read it? Why? Because the account in Hagarism is not true? Or more simply, they believe it is true but it is an account no Muslim will find acceptable. Are Muslims not capable of accepting the truth? Must Muslims be always protected from the truth? Why are their sensibilities more important than, say, those of the Christians or Jews? What about Clio, who in Greek mythology, was one of the nine Muses, and the patroness of history? What about objective truth?

Pace Cook and Crone, the implications of their theses are indeed “devastating”. Any research that casts doubt on the traditional Muslim account of the Koran, the Rise of Islam and the life of Muhammad is totally unacceptable to Muslims. The two final letters reveal the enormous gulf between the attitudes to research in Islam and Christianity. The pen-ultimate letter writer, Robin Oakley-Hill, remarked that, “It is hardly fair to characterise western Koran scholarship as neo-colonial given that western academics subject Christianity to far more rigorous- frequently destructive-examination….Perhaps Islam could do with a [Pope] John XXII and some liberation theology”.

Oakley-Hill’s point had been made by John Wansbrough himself over thirty years earlier:

“As a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques if Biblical criticism [the Koran] is virtually unknown. The doctrinal obstacles that have traditionally impeded such investigation are, on the other hand, very well known. Not merely dogmas such as those defining scripture as the uncreated Word of God and acknowledging its formal and substantive inimitability, but also the entire corpus of Islamic historiography, by providing a more or less coherent and plausible report of the circumstances of the Quranic revelation, have discouraged examination of the document as representative of a traditional literary type.”

The last letter to the Editor of the New Statesman was from a Christian clergyman, and clearly reveals that Christianity has absorbed the lessons not only of the Enlightenment, but Biblical Criticism. The Reverend Richard Craig wrote, “In spite of huge advances in biblical scholarship, Ann Widdicombe [a Conservative Member of the British Parliament] can still assert in her review of [the book] Mary: The Unauthorized Biography, that St. John’s Gospel is an eyewitness account of the life of Christ. Most scholars reject such a view. Martin Bright’s report is welcome evidence that scholarly investigation of the origins of Islam is beginning the long and painful path trodden by Christian theologians’ inquiry into our sacred texts. Widdicombe’s acceptance of the literalist view of the gospels is till widely held by many sitting in church pews, even though the clergy have been taught otherwise for 50 years or more”.

Cook, in his letter, also claims that the Koranic fragments from the Yemen do not “prove” a great deal. But they do. As Gerd Puin told Toby Lester, “So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God’s unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana‘a’ fragments will help us to do this.”

If what Puin says is correct, then the consequences are again “devastating”, a fact recognized by R. Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who argued, “To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community”.

In brief, pace Cook and Crone, historians do try to establish what really happened and their research has profound implications for the believer and the religion’s own traditional view of itself. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are particularly vulnerable to the historical sciences, since the validity of their respective dogmas are closely predicated on or anchored in putatively historical events, in a way that Buddhism, for example, is not. The historical Buddha, that is if he is indeed a historical figure, only said “follow my argument”, and if his life proved to be a pious legend, his argument would still remain, and “Buddhism” would not be shaken in its foundations. As Van Harvey [1923-2021], professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, who died recently at the age of 95, said in his classic The Historian and the Believer, the deontology, as the French would say, of the historian, that is to say the moral obligation of the historian as historian and hence the critical historical method “has the profoundest of implications for religious belief in general and Christian belief in particular”.

As R.G. Collingwood who was a British philosopher and a historian wrote, “History has this in common with every other science: that the historian is not allowed to claim any single piece of knowledge, except where he can justify his claim by exhibiting to himself in the first place, and secondly to any one else who is both able and willing to follow his demonstration, the grounds upon which it is based”.

This principle immediately rules out the Genetic Fallacy, whereby the contingent characteristics of the historian are often used to exclude, a priori, the validity of his arguments or conclusions. Muslims tend to dismiss Koranic criticism if it emanates from a European as neo-colonialism; the work of Israeli or Christian scholars are willfully neglected as biased. Only a Muslim, it is argued can criticize Islam; it must be scrutinized from the inside. This argument leads to the absurd conclusion that only a Marxist can criticize Marxism, a Stalinist Stalinism, and fascist fascism; though, of course, Muslims themselves are happy to avail themselves of any opportunity to criticize Christianity. Undoubtedly, historians are no different, no better no worse than the rest of the human race, they exhibit all sorts of predilections and prejudices that we find reprehensible. But these are irrelevant in our assessment of their work as historians, as Islamologists. Lawrence Conrad has shown, for instance, that Theodor Nöldeke was an anti-semite “whose publications and private correspondence flaunt bigotry and prejudice of a level [that was]…highly offensive”. I hardly need to spell out the importance of Nöldeke for Islamic Studies. The provenance of an argument is not relevant, as long as it is submitted to rigorous examination. The letter from the Reverend Richard Craig underlines decisively the point made by Van Harvey, namely, “the battle of the independence of the Biblical historian has been largely won”. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Koranic scholars. The rights established by Ernest Renan and other nineteenth-century European scholars to examine critically and scientifically the foundations of Islam-whether of the Koran or the life of the Prophet—have been squandered in a welter of ecumenical sentimentality resulting in a misplaced concern for the sensibilities of Muslims. For instance, very recently in an essay entitled “Verbal Inspiration? Language and Revelation in Classical Islamic Theology,” Professor Josef van Ess expressed his concern for the tender susceptibilities of Muslims by stopping short, being a non-Muslim himself, his critical analysis out of respect for the way that Sunni Islam treats the history of thought! Mohammed Arkoun very sensibly replied that such an attitude was unacceptable scientifically, for historical truth concerns the right of the human spirit to push forward the limits of human knowledge; Islamic thought, like all other traditions of thought, can only benefit from such an epistemological attitude. Besides, continues Arkoun, Professor van Ess knows perfectly well that Muslims today suffer from the politics of repression of free thought, especially in the religious domain. Or to put it another way, we are not doing Islam any favors by shielding it from Enlightenment values.

Some Western scholarship has moved from objectivity to Islamic apologetics pure and simple; a trend remarked in 1968 by Maxime Rodinson: “In this way the anticolonialist left, whether Christian or not, often goes so far as to sanctify Islam and the contemporary ideologies of the Muslim world. . . . A historian like Norman Daniel has gone so far as to number among the conceptions permeated with medievalism or imperialism, any criticisms of the Prophet’s moral attitudes, and to accuse of like tendencies any exposition of Islam and its characteristics by means of the normal mechanisms of human history. Understanding has given way to apologetics pure and simple”.

“ Respect for the faith of sincere believers cannot be allowed either to block or deflect the investigation of the historian. . . .One must defend the rights of elementary historical methodology.”

It is certainly disgraceful that, what Karl Binswanger called, the “dogmatic Islamophilia” of modern Islamicist scholars helped to deny Gunter Luling a fair hearing and destroyed his academic career. German Islamicists are to quote Arabist Gotz Schregle wearing “spiritually in their mind a turban,” practicing “Islamic scholarship” rather than scholarship on Islam. Equally reprehensible has been the imputing of various “suspect” motives to the work of Wansbrough and those influenced by him. Western scholars need to unflinchingly, unapologetically defend their right to examine the Islam, to explain the rise and fall of Islam by the normal mechanisms of human history, according to the objective standards of historical methodology (which relies on conjectures and refutations, critical thought, rational arguments, presentation of evidence, and so on). The virtue of disinterested historical inquiry would be fatally undermined if we brought into it the Muslim or Christian faith. If we bring subjective religious faith with its dogmatic certainties into the “historical approximation process, it inevitably undermines what R. G. Collingwood argued was the fundamental attribute of the critical historian, skepticism regarding testimony about the past.”

Sir Isaiah Berlin once described an ideologue as somebody who is prepared to suppress what he suspects to be true. Sir Isaiah then concluded that from that disposition to suppress the truth has flowed much of the evil of this and other centuries. The first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth. By suppressing the truth, however honourable the motive, we are only engendering an even greater evil.

We are all beholden to all historians for helping us to see more clearly, and more honestly past events that have such an important bearing on present travails. In the words of Albert Schweitzer, “Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances”.

1. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2021-01/report-open-doors-christians-persecuted.html ↑