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The Closing of the Muslim Mind

Ameer Ali
Published online: 31 Dec 2007.

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 Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 27, No. 3, December 2007

The Closing of the Muslim Mind

AMEER ALI

Abstract
Incendiarism, hooliganism, homicide, and even suicide have become the trademark
of Muslim protests in recent times. This has seriously damaged the image of Islam
and Muslims, especially in the Western world. This unacceptable behavior has no
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justification in the primary sources of Islamic shariah and is contrary to the

spirit of free thinking that was pioneered by Muslim thinkers of the classical era.
The rise of orthodoxy has crippled the healthy tradition of dialogue and rational
thinking that developed during the early caliphates and has produced an Islam
whose mass of believers has been kept deliberately ignorant of this glorious legacy
and has been led along a blind alley from where there seems to be no quick
return. The institutions that are usually expected to promote enlightenment and
socially acceptable behavior are desperately in need of reforms. In a contest
between taqlid (imitation) and ijtihad (interpretation), the former appears to
have won the day to the detriment of modernity and progress in the Muslim
world. This paper looks at the underlying reasons for the unwillingness of
Muslims to face criticisms with an open mind and to respond to those criticisms
in a rational manner.

Introduction
A predictable consequence of . . . (the Orientalist) . . . bias and hostility (towards
Islam and its civilization) has been the triggering of a defensive reaction and
hardening of attitudes among Muslims so that all critical scholarship tends to
get confused with malevolent scholarship. This has led to a certain closing of
minds, and has decreased the ability of many Muslims to appreciate the enor-
mity of the crisis which envelopes the Muslim world today.1

When Salman Rushdie published his Satanic Verses on 26 September 1988, the Muslim
ulema issued a death warrant on him, and there were riots in India, Pakistan, London and
some parts of the Middle East, ending in deaths and destruction. When a couple of car-
toonists drew a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad and published them in a Danish
newspaper, the Muslim agitators responded again with looting and burning in many
parts of Europe, Britain, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and
Indonesia. And when Pope Benedict XVI quoted a medieval Byzantine monarch who
equated Islam with “evil” and “violence,” once again there was violent reaction. Apart
from these instances of open violence there were also other cases where writers and
scholars have been forced to flee their country and even abandon their families. In
1994, Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladeshi writer, had to leave her country because of death
threats from some fanatics who did not agree with her views that some parts of the
Quran needed revision. Two years before that in Egypt, in 1992, Nasr Abu Zaid, a

ISSN 1360-2004 print/ISSN 1469-9591 online/07/030443-11 # 2007 Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs
DOI: 10.1080/13602000701737079
 444 Ameer Ali

university professor, was conspiratorially taken to court to make him divorce his wife
because it was judged that his writings about Islam showed that he had become an
apostate. He and his wife had to flee their country to escape the sentence.2 Faraj
Fuda, another Egyptian writer, was murdered in June of that year for his supposedly
anti-Islamic views.3 One could cite endless instances to show how Muslims have violently
reacted against controversial views and ideas. Why do these Muslims burst out with vio-
lence and vengeful anger when someone writes, draws, or says something that is allegedly
blasphemous? This question is now being asked by many and it strikes at the heart of the
Quranic injunctions to Muslims to act with freedom and respect when conducting a
debate or discussion. Abdelwahab Meddeb, modelling his analysis on Nietzsche’s
concept of ressentiment, sees in this violence the manifestation of a fanatical “sickness.”4
The habitual answer from the community that this violence is the work of a tiny minority
who hold extremist views does not satisfactorily resolve the issue, because the silence of
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the majority when violent protests erupt sends mixed messages to the wider world. The
time has arrived for Muslims to confront this question and look critically at their mode of
response to alleged blasphemy.
Ali Mazrui, the African thinker and scholar once wrote, that “reason is west and
emotion is east.” Whether this statement is universally true or not the latter half of it
appears to be a characteristic feature of the followers of Islam. Is this tendency
towards emotional outburst to respond to any verbal or visual provocation a new
phenomenon in the history of Islam? If it is so, when and where did it start? Or is it
innate to the very religion of Islam, as some non-Muslims assert?
To answer the last question first, associating Islam with violence and evil has a Western
origin beginning with Europe’s early contacts with Islam in the seventh century. Medieval
Christianity viewed Muhammad as an impostor, the Quran as a book of falsehood, and
Islam as a force of evil. The conquest of Christian lands by the early Muslim Arabs, the
re-conquest and liberation of those lands by Christian powers in later middle ages, a fresh
wave of conquest and colonization of Muslim lands by European powers in the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, and Muslim struggle for independence and liberation
from European colonialism in the twentieth century, have all left bitter memories on
both sides and, in spite of a plethora of new research and tomes of publications that
speak of the cordiality and cooperation amidst confrontation that prevailed between
Christian Europe and the world of Islam, those memories keep on surfacing now and
then whenever an incident like the ones referred to above hurts the feelings of
Muslims. The recent episodes of the American bombing of Afghanistan and the invasion
of Iraq by the so called “coalition of the willing,” all in the name of a never ending and
elusive War on Terrorism, have made the situation even worse.
Yet, these historical encounters, which Meddeb describes as “external factors”5
between the two sides, alone do not explain why Muslims have to respond violently
and emotionally to every trigger that threatens to destabilize their peaceful coexistence.
The disappearance of these factors may not remove the sickness of the fanatics, even
though as Meddeb believes, it may help to eliminate “a climate favorable for the flourish-
ing and propagation of its germs.”6 Neither in the Quran nor in the teachings of the
Prophet Muhammad can one find any exhortation to violent response whenever disputes
arise. In fact the Quran is very emphatic when it says, “do not dispute with the People of
the Book except in the best of ways” (29:46). Is violence “the best of ways” to dispute? In
another context the Quran, by referring to the Christians and Jews, indirectly instructs
the Muslims how to approach religious disputes with others. “The Jews said the Chris-
tians were misguided; and the Christians said it was the Jews who were misguided;
 The Closing of the Muslim Mind 445

although both are readers of the Book (the Torah and the Gospel). Those who know
nothing said the same. Allah will judge between them on the Day of Resurrection con-
cerning that wherein they differ” (2 : 113). Thus if one blasphemed Islam, shouldn’t
the Muslims leave it to Allah to decide after expressing their condemnation of it?

The Historical Perspective

During the time of the Prophet, a delegation of Christians is said to have arrived from
Najran to Medina. They were brought to the mosque to stay, and were allowed to
conduct their religious service inside the mosque in accordance with their own
customs. It is said that while they prayed in one part of the mosque, the Prophet and
his companions prayed in another part. When these people presented to the Prophet
their own faith, putting forth arguments in its support, the Prophet is said to have listened
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to them attentively and gently with great respect.7 Did he burst out emotionally and with
violence? The reason why some Muslims behave in the way they do while others remain
silent cannot be sought in the primary sources of the Islamic religion, namely the Quran
and the sunnah. The answer lies elsewhere in the history of Islam and Muslims. In fact,
“the passionate temper” that breaks out in Muslim protests is one of the characteristics of
jahiliyah that prevailed in the tribal pre-Islamic Arabia.8
What happened to the tradition of reasoning, rational argument and debate among
Muslims? Was there not a rationalist movement in Islamic history which through critical
thinking and rational analysis arrived at invaluable truths and contributed immensely to
intellectual progress and civilization? If there was such a rationalist movement once, why
did it fail to grow and when did it disappear? Was its disappearance accidental or delib-
erate, and if deliberate by whom? In answering these questions one may throw some light
on the present predicament of the Muslim society.
Reasoning, rationalism and critical thinking in Muslim history had a long and tumul-
tuous past. At the outset it was among the Muslims that a group of theologians called the
Mutazilites (those who separate themselves, who stand aside) gave birth in the ninth
century to a rationalist movement, long before the philosophers of European renaissance
and enlightenment discovered rationalism. The Mutazilites were the free thinkers in
Islam who utilized the tools of Greek philosophy to renounce taqlid or emulating tradition
and embraced ijtihad or “committed critical thinking based on disciplined but indepen-
dent reasoning, to come up with solutions to new problems.”9 These thinkers questioned
the dogma that the Quran, like God, is uncreated and has descended from heaven as it is
in itself and in eternity. According to them this dogma has installed an Islamic equivalent
of the Christian sense of the incarnation of God. They accepted the divine origin of the
Quran and argued that all the truth contained in the Quran could be arrived at through
logical argument and reasoning. In the course of that argument the Mutazilites intro-
duced the concept of the “duality of truth,” one religious and the other metaphysical.10
The Mutazilites believed that the truth could be reached by using reason based on what
is given in the Quran, and in this way they reached answers to the questions already pre-
sented. If any contradiction arises between what the Quran said and what reason con-
cluded then, according to these rationalists, the Quranic verses should be interpreted
metaphorically and not literally.11 The intellectual revolution initiated by the Mutazilites
produced, after the death of its founders,12 a galaxy of Muslim thinkers starting with al-
Kindi (c. 801–866), al-Khwarazmi (c. 800–847), al-Razi (865–925), and al-Farabi (d.
950) to Avicenna (980 –1037) and Averroes (1126 –1198). The last two names are
well known to the West but long forgotten by Muslims themselves. The Muslims publicly
 446 Ameer Ali

set fire to their works just as orthodox Christians in the sixteenth century burnt Giordano
Bruno (1548–1600) alive accusing him of heresy. During his last days Averroes was
virtually under house arrest imposed by the Almohads.13 However, it was the efflorescence
of free thinking under the influence of the Mutazilites that ushered in the era of the
Hellenization of Islam that was largely responsible for the intellectual and scientific
achievements of Islam during the medieval period. Unfortunately, this movement of
rationalism came to an abrupt end within a period of roughly 100 years. Averroes was a
late comer and he was probably the last of the rational thinkers in Medieval Islam. There-
after it was the anti-philosophic orthodoxy that reigned supreme in the Muslim world.
The Mutazilite doctrine received even state support for about 40 years under the
Abbasid caliphate. In fact, Caliph al-Mamun (813–833) went to the extent of carrying
out an inquisition (minha) against those scholars and thinkers who did not support this
doctrine. The Hanbalites, the followers of ibn-Hanbal (c. 780–855) and the Hanbali
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School, fell victim to this repression in particular. Eventually, the Mutazilites themselves
had to endure the same fate when another Abbasid ruler, al-Mutawakkil (847–861), with-
drew his support to their philosophy. With this and with the gradual ascendancy of reli-
gious orthodoxy the doors of ijtihad were said to have been closed perhaps until the
nineteenth century, which meant the freezing of “dispersed discourse and diffused
opinion” in the interaction with the divine texts. From thereon it was largely taqlid that
came to rule Muslim thought and action. The Mutazilite doctrine lingered but marginally
for another two centuries before it disappeared totally after the towering influence of al-
Gazzali (1059–1111), the most renowned scholar and thinker in orthodox Sunni Islam.

The Demise of Free Thought

What is the link between this short history of free thinking in Islam and current violent
reactions to challenges? It is, in fact, in the demise of free thinking that one sees the birth
of blind faith; and when faith is based solely on imitating the past meticulously, uncriti-
cally and passionately, that faith breeds ignorance and the mind of the faithful stagnates
to become a repository of outdated facts and information. The mind loses its creativity
and vibrancy. Not only stagnation rules the Muslim mind but even the dogma that is
entrenched in it finds its very survival threatened when challenges emerge from
outside its cocoon. Without any internal stimulus to act creatively and unable to confront
new challenges, the mind reacts with emotional outbursts and violence. This indeed is
the tragedy of the Muslim world. How did the Muslim community get to this situation?
The fact that the Mutazilites questioned the uncreated nature of the Quran, the very
foundation and essence of an accepted dogma, sent shock waves through the religiously
orthodox. Ibn-Hanbal and the followers of his school of thought unleashed a campaign
against uncontrolled rationalism. Although Ghazzali’s refutation of the Mutazila doc-
trine almost two centuries later in his Tahafat al-falasifa (Incoherence of the Philoso-
phers), and Averroes’ rebuttal of Ghazzali after yet another half a century and in
another seminal work entitled Tahafut al-tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence),
marked the pinnacle of rational debate in medieval Islam, yet the tradition set by these
savants failed to permeate through the middle and lower layers of Muslim society, con-
trary to what happened in Europe after the era of Enlightenment. According to Bassam
Tibi, the tradition of Islamic rationalism initiated by the Mutazilites “was unfortunately
rigid and dogmatic and could not establish itself on a permanent basis”14 and, as
Meddeb says, it “failed to develop into an enlightenment.”15 Even the attempt by
al-Ashari (d. 935) to strike a compromise between rationalism and revealed truth did
 The Closing of the Muslim Mind 447

give more weight to uncritical acceptance of revealed truth than to reason. Consequently,
the Quran and the sunnah of the Prophet, as compiled by various luminaries, soon
became, in the words of Muhammad Arkoun, the “Official Closed Corpus”16 and was
removed from critical inquiry. The Quran’s opening verse in its longest chapter, “The
Cow,” which proclaims that “This is the Book; in it is guidance for sure, without
doubt, to those who fear Allah” (2 : 2), reaffirmed to its believing readers that there is
no need to question anything in the holy scripture because it is one without any
doubt. It is not the idle mind, as the popular adage goes, but the doubting or inquiring
mind that became the devil’s workshop in orthodox Islam. It was also taught by the ulema
(religious scholars) that every possible interpretation of the Quran and sunnah had been
undertaken and completed by the four renowned imams of the classical era in the Sunni
school namely, al-Shafii (767 –820), Abu Hanifa (c. 699–767), Ibn Hanbal, and Malik
ibn Anas (c. 715–795). All that was left to the ordinary faithful is to follow what those
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imams have instructed in their renderings. The choice to the faithful therefore is to
follow one of those four madhahib or schools named after each of the four imams.
Thus, uncritical imitation or taqlid became the assured path to paradise to the vast
majority of the Muslim masses. Ijtihad remained a monopoly of the elite ulema and
was often used to find compliance with the views of the caliphs.
The consequence of this development was tragic. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a British
orientalist of the last century, categorizes from an unknown Turkish source three varieties
of Muslim religion: the religion of the Quran, the religion of the ulema, and the religion of
the masses.17 Of the three, the religion of the masses or popular Islam “is superstition,
obscurantism, fetishism.”18 The religion of the ulema or legal Islam “is bogged down
with the whole weight of out-of-date legalism . . ..”19 But what happened to the first one?

Whatever Happened to the Religion of the Quran?

The religion of the Quran remained embedded in the Quran, for centuries largely unex-
plored and beyond the intellectual reach of a vast majority, partly because of the high rate
of illiteracy among Muslims and partly because of the Arabic language in which the
Quran appeared which was alien to all non-Arab Muslims who are the majority. Even
to the Arabic speakers the Quran for all intents and purposes remained a book to be
read and not to be studied and critically analysed. Tens of thousands of Muslims all
over the world, including children as young as ten, committed the entire scripture to
memory purely on the belief that memorizing the Holy Book brings the highest reward
from Allah. Those who could not become a hafiz (one who memorizes the entire
Quran) were expected to memorize at least some parts of it. Reading the Quran itself
was taught to be meritorious, and the more often and the more melodiously one read
it, the more benefits one was deemed to earn. Rules were stipulated as to the manner
in which one should carry the Quran (preferably on one’s shoulder and holding it by
the right hand after taking a pre-prayer ablution), the way to place the Quran on a book-
shelf (preferably covered with a silk or clean cloth and kept on top of all other books), and
the way to respect the Quran (for example, one is not to sit on a chair if the Quran is
placed on the floor). When someone was to recite the Quran the listeners were expected
to maintain silence because it was told that even listening to the recitation carries thawab
or merit. In short, all respect and veneration that an idol worshiper shows to the idol are
shown by the Muslims to the Quran. In this sense, the Quran has virtually become an idol
to most Muslims.
 448 Ameer Ali

To the unenlightened, idol worship represents the essence of religion. Any disrespect
or insult to an idol could instantaneously provoke riots and violence. The destruction of
the Bamian statue by the Taliban created anti-Muslim riots in Buddhist Sri Lanka;
Muslim insults to Hindu religious processions that carry idols on a chariot perennially
provoke ethnic riots in India. It took a very long time for the Quran to appear in one’s
native tongue because, as Arberry says, “from earliest times orthodox opinion has
rigidly maintained that . . . [the Quran] . . . is untranslatable, a miracle of speech which
it would be blasphemous to attempt to imitate.”20 In fact the first translation of the
Quran in a foreign language appeared not in the Muslim world but in Europe and in
the Latin language in c. 1148. Thus, being unable to read and understand the Quran
Muslim masses depended for their Islamic knowledge solely on the preaching of the
local ulema, and the ulema reduced Islam into what some Europeans describe as “Boy
Scout religion,”21 a set of dos and don’ts which the masses are expected to follow
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without questioning. The true meaning of the Quran remained hidden to the vast
majority and controversial to the elite. Oliver Roy sums up the situation quite succinctly:
“A sacred book is not Napoleon’s Civil Code or an insurance policy, where everything is
put in unequivocal terms. By definition it has various meanings and is subject to argu-
ment and interpretation. If there is still a debate about what the Quran really says, it
means that nobody really knows, or at least that the people who think they know disagree
among themselves—thus we find ourselves back to square one. The key question is not
what the Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the Quran says”.22 With constant
disagreement among the ulema about what the Quran actually says and being unable
to read and understand the Holy Book by themselves, the Muslim masses found
solace by remaining content with the blind piety that merely reciting the Arabic Quran
is enough for salvation.
Just as the Quran became an idol to be venerated and paid homage to, the very physical
qualities of Muhammad the Prophet also received similar status. “From the moment
when Islam began to bring the personality of Muhammad within the sphere of the super-
natural, the scenes among which his earthly life had been passed naturally began to
assume a higher sanctity in the eyes of his followers.”23 True, Islam prohibits any
drawing or a statue to be carved representing the figure of the Prophet. Still that has
not prevented the Muslims from imitating the physical features of Muhammad. The
long dress that Muslim men wear; the beard they grow; their manner of eating (with
the right hand) and drinking (at least with three breaks), are all to follow the examples
set by the Prophet. While the men try to model themselves after the Prophet, the
women do the same after his wives. The fact that one’s dress is partly conditioned by
the climate in which one lives and partly by the culture that surrounds one’s life does
not enter the minds of many mortals. Imitation is all that matters and any obstacle to
that imitation provokes emotional outburst.
From the time of the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt (969 –1094), celebrations in memory
of the Prophet, his wives and his companions took the form of mawlid (panegyric poems
of legendary characters) recitations. In the Ottoman Empire from 1910 onwards, the
Prophet’s birthday celebrations became an annual national event. These celebrations
have taken a variety of forms in a number of Muslim countries including those where
Muslims live as minorities. Public speeches on the life of the Prophet, recitation of
mawlid at homes and mosques, religious processions along city streets, and public com-
munal feasts are some of the forms these celebrations have taken. Although this tradition
has died down in several places in the wake of puritanical Wahhabism—named after
Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahab (1703 –1792),24 it still lingers in many parts of the
 The Closing of the Muslim Mind 449

world. Muslim attachment to the personality of the Prophet is so passionate that even a
minor criticism of his character, let alone a malicious cartoon, provokes frenzied
reaction.

Models for Reality

To the Muslims, the Quran is absolute truth, the Prophet is the most perfect model and
the shariah (laws of Islam) is immutable. These represent not models of reality but for
reality as Tibi convincingly differentiates.25 This implies that there is no room for any
change or improvement in the models, and while the reality outside these models has
changed and is changing inexorably the models by definition remain impervious to
these changes. To accommodate the changes would mean a tacit admission of imperfec-
tion of the models which would be outrageous to the orthodox. While legal Islam con-
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demns any changes to the models and denies flexibility, popular Islam reacts to
changes with emotional outburst and violence.
Even if one accepts the Muslim belief that the Quran is the word of God, one cannot
ignore the fact that the interpretation of that word was not God-given but left to
the Prophet. Muslims believe that the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad
were the perfect and practical illustration of the Holy script. However, one cannot
escape the truth that the interpretation of God’s word by the Prophet was constrained
by the needs and circumstances of his time, companions and community. When ques-
tions were raised with the Prophet regarding a particular issue or a particular verse
from the Quran, the Prophet explained and elaborated in the light of his prophetic knowl-
edge. This means that in spite of the prophetic knowledge there was a contextual
constraint in the textual interpretation. This necessitated further interpretation when
time and circumstances changed and the scholars who came later continued that task.
Interpretation of the Quran therefore has to be a permanent feature of the faith.
The high rate of illiteracy in the Muslim world and centuries of indoctrination by the
orthodox have crippled the ability to rationalize issues. One of the basic objectives of
modern education is to develop a critical mind that could approach and analyse problems
with rationality and come out with possible and practical solutions. The questions how
and why rather than who, what, and when are the bedrock of critical thinking. Whereas
the second set of questions demand the brain to function as a mere repository of infor-
mation, only the first set makes the brain inquire and analyze the information that it
receives. The system of education that developed in the Islamic madrasas for over 800
years worked brilliantly to answer the first set of questions but failed miserably to
answer the second. This is why the classical innovative Islamic scholarship and the
spirit of Muslim inquiry stagnated and lost their brilliance after the thirteenth century.
The seminal works of ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century should be considered as
an exception to this stagnation. As Tibi writes, “The Islamic madrasa is not concerned
with a process of investigation or unrestrained inquiry but with a learning process in
the sacral sense.”26 How did this happen? Why did the Muslims fail to grab the oppor-
tunity that was presented to them after the Europeans introduced modern education in
the Muslim colonies? Once again orthodox Islam has a lot to answer for this mishap.

In Search of Ilm
It is said that the second most popular word in the Quran after the name Allah is ilm
(knowledge); but nowhere does the scripture define or qualify this word. Even the
 450 Ameer Ali

Prophet is said to have urged his followers to seek ilm even if one were to go to China, but
he never specified what that ilm was or should be. However, the Arabs took the Prophet’s
advice seriously, went to China and learned from that country not religion but the art of
making paper, gun powder, ceramic ware and about other things relating to material
needs. In the later years, the ulema began to categorize ilm into two parts, ilm al akhira
(knowledge for the hereafter or spiritual) and ilm al dunya (knowledge for this world
or secular). Unfortunately this division continues even to this day in the Muslim
world. The madrasas concentrated solely on the first and shunned the second, and edu-
cation imparted by the Europeans was perceived largely as secular in content with a
Christian bias. Very few Muslim children and only the male children attended the Euro-
pean schools. Until the Muslim countries achieved political independence and until their
governments began providing free education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels,
modern education remained closed to a majority of Muslims. Of course there were
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centers of higher learning in Muslim countries such as the al-Azhar University in

Egypt, Zeituna in Tunis and Qarrawiyin in Fez, but their chief objective was to
produce theologians and train religious functionaries rather than to turn out modern
scientists and critical thinkers. In spite of some expansion into other disciplines in
recent decades, they still remain basically as institutions of religious education.
Whereas institutions such as Al-Azhar, Zeituna and Qarrawiyin produced graduate scho-
lars in Islamic sciences, the majority of Muslims received their basic knowledge about
religion at the Quranic schools in the Muslim villages and towns. In these schools children
learned how to read the Quran, and learned the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the
basics of Islamic law from their barely literate teachers. Neither the teachers nor the stu-
dents had any formal grounding in other subjects such as history, mathematics or geogra-
phy. Even today many Muslim professionals and qualified people owe their religious
knowledge to these village schools. It was also from these madrasas that “God’s invisible
soldiers”27 came out to preach and practice the narrow Islam that they had learned.

Islamization of Knowledge
Since the end of the 1970s, with the publication of Al-Attas’ Islam and Secularism 28 there
developed an intellectual movement towards the Islamization of knowledge branching
into the Islamization of science, Islamization of economics, Islamization of finance and
so on. The International Institute of Islamic Thought based in Virginia, USA,29 and
the international Islamic universities in Malaysia and Pakistan have played a leading
role in promoting this movement. The writings of some leading Muslim scholars such as
the late Ismail Al-Faruqi, Seyyed Hussein Nasr and Ziauddin Sardar, all of whom are
émigrés in the West, helped to advance this cause. The Islamization enterprise criticized
both the ultra-secularization of knowledge in the West and the stifling of individual criti-
cal thought in the traditional system of Muslim education. The West was criticized for
elevating “doubt and conjecture to the ‘scientific’ rank in methodology and (for)
regard (ing) doubt as an eminently valid epistemological tool in the pursuit of truth.”30
The visionary objective of this movement was to remove the artificial dichotomy
created by the orthodoxy between the mundane and the spiritual, to treat knowledge
as a holistic unity, and to bring back that intellectual environment which made Islam
the torchbearer of civilization during the European Dark Ages. This movement
however is only about 30 years old and it is too soon to measure its success or failure.
However, some observations could be made on recent progress. A new phenomenon
has emerged in the Muslim intellectual world that is somewhat distorting the original
 The Closing of the Muslim Mind 451

vision of the pioneers of the Islamization movement. Michael Cook describes this as “a
widespread and well-funded industry which consists of reading the truth of modern
science back into the Koran.”31 In fact, one of the key objectives of a large-scale inter-
national conference entitled Scientific Miracles of Quran and Sunnah held in Islamabad
in Pakistan in 1987 was to prove that “all known scientific facts can be traced back to
either the Quran or Sunnah.”32 While the world outside Islam has been proactive in
pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge and comes out with new discoveries and
path-breaking scientific inventions, Muslims, on the other hand, have a tendency to
look into the Quran to find a word or a verse or verses that could be interpreted to
prove that these discoveries and inventions have already been foreseen by the Holy
Book and the Prophet. This tendency towards retrospection has created, on the one
hand, a mood of complacency among the believers and even a sense of false pride. On
the other, however, the need to interpret the Quran to conform to new realities has led
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to the re-birth of a set of religious innovations that was a novelty in the classical era of
Islam.
In the days of “High Islam” while the Muslim Empire expanded into alien territories
and cultures and achieved a level of development that was far more advanced than that in
the then contemporary Europe, it faced a novel problem of providing religious sanctity to
changes that were taking place simultaneously and were secular in nature. For example,
in the field of business and finance, the development of banking brought the issue of riba
(usury) into focus. The Quran, the sunnah and the shariah, the immutable sources of
Islam, banned riba unequivocally but economic development demanded its necessity
and created a dilemma. Just as the Schoolmen in Christianity surrendered to rising capit-
alism by inventing legal means within Christian theology to permit the practice of receiv-
ing and paying usury, so too the religious scholars in Islam came out with legal
interpretations to circumvent the issue. Without changing the immutable, a solution
was found within the Islamic law through the application of a new type of law known
as the hiyal (singular hila), which means legal dodge in Arabic, a way of circumventing
legal norms by legal means. The Islamic banking and insurance that is in practice
today in certain parts of the Muslim world is made possible through the medieval hiyal.33
On an operational level the Islamization of knowledge project has unfortunately
limited itself and not gone beyond the infusion of Islamic moral and ethical values into
different academic disciplines. The unrestrained spirit of inquiry that has been the cru-
cible for the trajectory of modern scientific progress lies somewhat muted in the Islami-
zation debate over rationalism and tradition. The arguments advanced by Hoodbhoy to
repudiate the claims of the so-called “Islamic Science” could well be leveled at the
general notion of Islamization of Knowledge.34 The Muslim world is yet to see the
rebirth of “High Islam.”

The Messages from the Pulpit

While the Muslim institutions of learning are caught up in this dilemma of how to
respond to changes and challenges without losing their Islamic identity, the other
major source of knowledge (i.e. the sermons in mosques by the ulema) is appears to be
totally oblivious to this predicament and is relentlessly promoting the path of taqlid.
The sermons are supposed to be about issues and problems that are relevant to the
day-to-day life of the community and the imams are expected to provide guidance to
the listeners through their sermons. For a very long time even these sermons were deliv-
ered only in the Arabic language and were read from books written hundreds of years ago.
 452 Ameer Ali

While many did not understand the language of the sermons, those who did saw no con-
nection between what was said and what they experienced in life. While the institutions
of higher learning do not impact upon the majority of Muslims but only on a selected few,
the mosques, on the other hand, influence the thinking and actions of the masses. The
mosques are the bastion of legal and popular Islam, and it is from there and through
the ulema that the majority of Muslims receive their stock of religious knowledge. For
centuries the message from the pulpit has been the same: taqlid and not ijtihad is the
path to follow. The word of God, the model of the Prophet and the immutable shariah
are the bedrock of the Muslim path to salvation. Too much questioning and too many
doubts are dangerous and could lead the faithful astray. Not to question how and why
but to listen and follow was the mantra taught from the pulpit.
Centuries of indoctrination from the madrasas and the pulpit has culminated in produ-
cing a voluntary army of Islamic foot soldiers whose mind is closed but emotions are let
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loose to react when challenges become unpalatable. While a minority takes to the streets
to protest violently against any criticism of Islam or an insult to its scripture or its
Prophet, the majority remain helplessly passive because enforced ignorance has made
them ill-equipped to counter extremism, and as a result the majority becomes the unin-
tended victims of world anger. The “institutionalized ignorance”35 in the Islamic world
as Arkoun describes it is paralyzing rational thought.

The Shia’ Perspective

What has been said so far covers mostly the Sunni sect of Islam but the situation is no
better in the Shia’ sect. After all, the death warrant against Salman Rushdie was issued
not by a Sunni alim but by the Shia’ imam Khomeini. Street protests and martyrdom
are inborn to Shia’ Islam. The annual Ashoura celebrations to commemorate the martyr-
dom of the Prophet’s grandson, Hussain, killed by the Umayyad ruler Yazid in the battle-
field of Karbala in 680, “defines shiism’s ideals” and as Vali Nasr claims, Karbala “is the
motif around which faith has been shaped.”36 However, unlike in Sunni Islam where the
imams are mostly religious functionaries, the Shia’ “mostly rely on the ulema not only to
interpret religion but to make new rulings to respond to new challenges and push the
boundaries of Shia law in new directions.”37 Ijtihad once again is the monopoly of
the Shia’ imams and in popular Shia’ Islam, as in Sunni Islam, taqlid is the norm for
the vast majority. As Arkoun explains, “taqlid is not only the acceptance by the lay
believer in emulating of a living jurist’s rulings (fatwa), in all fields of applied law; it is
more significantly the recognition of the spiritual, moral and legal authority attached
to the rulings mediated by the marja.”38 Thus, the control of the Shia’ ulema over the
masses is tighter than in the Sunni world. This is why any call for jihad by Shia’ imams
receives spontaneous response from the masses. We are witnessing this phenomenon
more clearly in present day Iraq as well as in Iran.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the Muslim world has to develop modes of response to blasphemy and
religious vilification in the true Islamic spirit of tolerance, compassion and understand-
ing. Those with differing views should be listened to or allowed to hold their views, just as
Prophet Muhammad did with the Christians from Najran. Violent outbursts have no
place in a religion like Islam that condemns compulsion in religion and says “To you
be your Way, and to me mine” (Quran, 109 : 6).
 The Closing of the Muslim Mind 453

NOTES
1. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991, p. 51. The first part
of the title is derived from Pervez Hoodbhoy’s reference to the ‘closing of minds’.
2. Caryle Murphy, Passion for Islam, New York: Scribner, 2002, pp. 200– 211.
3. Ibid., pp. 227–228.
4. Abdelwahab Meddeb, Islam and its Discontents, London: William Heinemann, 2003, pp. 6, 12.
5. Ibid., p. 7.
6. Ibid.
7. Dr Mustafa Siba’I, The Islamic Civilization, Milpitas, CA: Awakening Publications, 2002, p. 79.
8. Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico Religious Concepts in the Qur’an, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2002, p. 29.
9. Omid Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims, Oxford, England: One World Publications, 2003, p. 8.
10. Bassam Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, Boulder, CO, San Francisco,
CA, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991, pp. 38–39. Also see, Albert Hourani, A History of the
Arab Peoples, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, pp. 63–64; Karen Armstrong, A History of God,
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New York: Mandarin Paperback, 1993, pp. 198–241. Also, D. Gimaret’s comprehensive account
in Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edn, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993.
11. Albert Hourani, A History, op. cit.
12. On the founders of Mutazilism, see W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962, pp. 58–71.
13. On Averroes, see Maria Rosa Menocal, Ornament of the World, Boston, MA, New York and London:
Little, Brown and Company, 2003, pp. 208 –214.
14. Bassam Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation, op. cit., p. 104.
15. Abdelwahab Meddeb, Islam and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 17.
16. Mohammed Arkoun, Islam: To Reform or Subvert, London: Saqi Essentials, 2006, p. 81.
17. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957,
p. 180.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, London: Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. ix –x.
21. Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man, Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2001, p. 28.
22. Oliver Roy, Globalised Islam, London: Hurst & Company, 2004, p. 10.
23. Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edn, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991.
24. The followers of Wahab do not call themselves Wahhabis as popularly understood, but call them-
selves, often self-righteously, muwahiddun, literally meaning unifiers. See, As’ad Abukhalil, The
Battle for Saudi Arabia, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004, p. 52.
25. Bassam Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation, op. cit., p. 8.
26. Ibid., p. 103.
27. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, London: Pan Books, 2000, p. 31.
28. Syed Muhammad Al-Naquib Al-Attas, Islam and Secularism, Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth
Movement of Malaysia, 1978.
29. International Institute of Islamic Thought, Islamization of Knowledge, Islamization of Knowledge
Series No. 1, Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1989.
30. Syed Muhammad Al-Naquib Al-Attas, Islam and Secularism, op. cit., p. 127.
31. Michael Cook, The Koran, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 29.
32. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, op. cit., p. 46.
33. On hiyal literature, see J. Schacht’s contribution in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Leiden, E. J. Brill, Vol. III,
1971, pp. 510– 513.
34. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, op. cit.
35. Mohammed Arkoun, Islam: To Revert or Subvert, op. cit., pp. 314, 333.
36. Vali Masr, The Shia Revival, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006, p. 49.
37. Ibid., p. 69.
38. The marja’ are the living supreme legal authority. Mohammed Arkoun, Islam: To Revert or Subvert,
op. cit., p. 259.