Which one is Islam?

While I was away in Ethiopia I rented my house to a Muslim family. They were quiet, friendly, reasonable, reliable.

Being Muslims, they were different, of course, but very nice people. But then I open my newspaper, listen to the news, turn on the TV, and I meet a violent, unreasonable, belligerent people: Muslims, of course, but not at all like the family who lived in my house. So, why the difference?

A divided Islam

Iraq has showed us all that there are two Islams: Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam. They really do dislike one another. That’s mainly because the Shi’a Muslims have al-Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, as their great hero, and he was killed by the Sunnis. Every year the Shi’a remember this terrible event, the battle of Karbala, and that keeps the fires of hatred growing. And that partly explains why Muslims kill Muslims in Iraq.

But there’s another kind of division in Islam: between the traditionalists, the violent Islamists, and the modernists. The traditionalists want to get back to what Islam was at the beginning. The Islamists want the same, but see their main task as getting rid of the obstacles standing in the way of getting back to the past. The Modernists are ready to let Islam change to fit into the 21st century. You don’t find many modernists in Muslim countries, and until recently you didn’t find many traditionalists in Britain. But that is changing, and now the number of Islamists in Britain is increasing, especially among younger Muslims.

Four authorities: the quadrilateral

The problem is that a Muslim can find justification for what he does and believes by pointing to their ‘quadrilateral’. Let me explain. It isn’t true that Muslims depend only on the Qur’an for their beliefs. There are four authorities, not one. First, of course, is the Qur’an. But Muhammad was not a systematic theologian and some parts of the Qur’an contradict other parts. To solve this they have the doctrine of ‘abrogation’: any verse of the Qur’an can cancel out, abrogate, any verse that was written earlier. For example, Sura (chapter) 9, verse 5 of the Qur’an says: ‘fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them’, but Sura 2, verse 256 says: ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion’. Abrogation should be able to decide which is earlier and so which can be ruled out. In this case we don’t know exactly when either verse was written! Those are two parts of my quadrilateral: Qur’an and Abrogation. Thirdly, there is Tradition (Hadith). The traditions are written accounts of what Muhammad is believed to have said and done, and they provide an example for Muslims to follow. There are thousands of these traditions (Bukhari produced the most trusted collection, and there are nine volumes of traditions!).

Fourthly, there is the Muslim Law, Shari’a. This covers things like marriage and divorce, inheritance tax, criminal law, and includes a law forbidding a Muslim to change his religion.

With four places to look, and thousands of pages to read, it’s not surprising that Muslims can find justification for almost anything: it’s a real Woolworth’s pick’n mix. And then, of course, any one group of Muslims can point the finger at another group and accuse them of being heretics. But it is true that Sunnis and Shi’a, modernists, Islamists and traditionalists all claim to follow that quadrilateral.

And that’s the point. The violent Muslims can point to the many violent parts of the Qur’an and the Traditions, and, of course, to the example of Muhammad, to show that what they are doing is right. It is not politically correct at the moment to say so, but the fact is that Muhammad was most decidedly not a man of peace: according to the earliest biography of Muhammad (written by ibn Ishaq, a Muslim), he was personally engaged in 26 or 27 battles!

Two kinds of jihad

The Islamists, the Muslim radicals, believe that it is the destiny of Islam to dominate the whole world. And they believe that it is the duty of every Muslim to fight to make it happen. This, as they see it, is the real meaning of jihad, ‘struggle’. But Muslims recognise two kinds of struggle: higher jihad, the struggle with myself, to make me a better Muslim, and lower jihad, the struggle with the world, to bring about worldwide Islam. Obviously the Islamists concentrate on lower jihad, where all other Muslims concentrate on higher jihad. Unfortunately, there is much more support in the quadrilateral and in Muslim history for lower jihad than there is for higher jihad. And again, unfortunately, the only Muslims to have definitely ruled out lower jihad are the Ahmadis (a fairly recent movement, started about 100 years ago), and the rest of Islam counts them as heretics.

It would certainly help if Islam were to have only the Qur’an as its authority. Colonel Qaddafi of Libya made an even more radical suggestion, that only the early parts of the Qur’an, that came from Mecca (about two thirds of the Qur’an), should be authoritative, not the parts that were given in Medina. But that idea would take a lot of swallowing, and Islam has not got that much of an appetite for change.

A divided Islam

Four authorities: the quadrilateral

Two kinds of jihad

Peter Cotterell

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