Daily Times

Every time a horrific attack occurs in the west, renewed calls are issued for “reforming Islam”. Every time those calls fall on deaf ears, conveniently ignored, and religious zealots ask for even bloodier attacks. Renewed calls to reform Islam after the horrific attacks on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo are reverberating all over the globe. Regardless of the ferocity of such attacks, it is unlikely that Islam will undergo the reformation its kindhearted and intelligent people have desired for centuries. Some well-intentioned Muslims are now calling on their fellow faith bearers to reform Islam “from within”. These voices, mostly western educated, are attempting to explore new avenues to reconcile Islamic teachings with the needs of the 21st century.

Is the Islamic world prepared for such a transformation? The 2002 UN report on Arab human development identified a discouraging number of translated works as an issue restricting Arab intellectual life. The Arab world translated about 330 books annually while Greece translates five times more books in one year. Only 100,000 books have been translated in the entire Arab world since the Caliph Maa’moun’s times (the ninth century). This deplorable situation is not much different in other Muslim majority countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

The Arab Spring has, by far, not yielded the results the west was yearning for. Instead, relative peace and tranquillity has given way to violence, radicalisation, and anti-west sentiments in the Middle East. The spirituality of Islam, which helped it spread into India, Central and Southeast Asia, has given way to bigotry, intolerance and obscurantism. Extreme reliance on dogmatism and limiting faith to performing rituals has rendered Muslim populations vulnerable to demagogues and racketeers who masquerade as mullahs, imams and caliphs.

The silence of Muslim communities is deafening when it comes to standing up to terrorists. Instead of analysing the root causes of violence using critical thinking, Muslim communities resort to conspiracy theories and there is a long list of “foreign hands” that are destabilising their countries. Somehow they feel that their religion is under threat and if they do not rise against the ‘infidels’, they will lose their identity. The identity crisis is at the root of Muslim communities living in the west.

Significant Muslim populations living in the west had been an integral part of their host societies until the present wave of fanaticism was unleashed in the Middle East. With more than 200,000 dead, the UN says, “The Syrian conflict is the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II.” Thousands of Muslims from Western Europe have participated in the Syrian ‘jihad’ and fresh returnees pose a serious threat to the domestic security of Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, France and the UK. How to integrate these communities is the key to domestic peace. Muslim communities are more educated on average than the US as a whole, with similar incomes. President Obama rightly pointed out to Prime Minister (PM) Cameron that the UK needs to do more to assimilate Muslim communities. In Germany, 60 percent of Muslims support gay rights and 90 percent believe in democracy while almost none of the Muslims support gay rights in UK and France.

Broader economic and social dislocation for French Muslims has led to enormous grievances and many predicted major attacks in France following the Syrian conflict. The response to the rise in the popularity of Charlie Hebdo, as they continue to publish cartoons despite horrific attacks, has just started to unravel with the burning of churches in Niger and Mali. It will get worse as it rolls over to other countries and will be used to divert attention from huge political, social and economic issues that have remained unaddressed for decades. Non-representative rulers in most Muslim-majority countries use Islam to further their political agendas.

There is no separation of state and church in the Islamic world. All laws are drafted in accordance with the teachings of the Quran and hadith. That in itself creates a dilemma, especially in countries with a colonial past, for local populations and minorities who want to live under their own customs and laws. Blasphemy is a natural corollary of such a legal conflict where the local clergy issues a fatwa and the blasphemers (invariably Christian minorities) are administered mob justice. Intra-Islam factional fighting started in the early days of Islam and continues to shape regional rivalries to this day. The Saudi-Iran contention is at the heart of this divide and reconciliation along the lines of the Westphalia Treaty may provide a starting point for meaningful reformation.

In its present state, the Islamic mind is a closed system: nothing goes in or leaves the system. The intellectual bankruptcy of an average Muslim has reached unprecedented levels and this fog must be cleared before any meaningful reformation will take place. The Islamic world has not contributed anything significant to the advancement of mankind in the past millennium. Under the present circumstances, it will be unwise to call for reforming Islam, which a majority of its followers consider offensive and repudiating. Campaigns are being organised in the US to silence any debate on Islam. Furthermore, the Islamic world has no capacity to initiate the much-needed change. Erstwhile schools, such as Al-Azhar of Egypt and Deoband of India, are not equipped to elevate Islamic teachings to the needs of the 21st century.

Whether Islam is reformed internally or under duress from external factors is yet to be seen. However, the world is now faced with jihadis who are already on the path of global destruction to create, in their words, a “Muslim caliphate”. Except using sword power, no other effort has been undertaken to unite the bitterly divided Muslims around the world. Instead of attacking the west and hindering the development of democratic societies, one and a half billion Muslims can come forward and play their part. We live in a complex world with seven billion people who have real problems that require real solutions.

The writer is a geo-political analyst at the University of Maryland. He is the author of the book Afghanistan: From Cold War to Gold War and tweets @asimusafzai