Major Acid's E-Rag
It Strikes Me...
70 White Raisins is a Poor Wage
It strikes me that 70 white raisins is a poor wage for suicidal Islamic
martyrdom. Irshad Manji thinks so, too. Manji is a Canadian feminist,
lesbian journalist. She’s Islamic, too, which helps explain hew new
book, “The Trouble With Islam”. She is also a person in search of a way
to justify persisting in her faith, so the book is not a ‘damn the
torpedoes and damn Islam, too’ diatribe. She tries to find comfort and
value in her religion. Unfortunately for Islam, she fails even as she
tries to convince herself she succeeds.
Most of “The Trouble With Islam” presents Manji’s search for the
underlying sources of what many in the Western world perceives of as the
nasty face of Islam – an apparent abhorrence (or hysterical fear) of
women, religiously driven violence, hatred of Jews in particular and
non-Muslims in general. Are these truly reflections of Islam or are
these aberrations? Manji chooses aberrations and lays the blame on what
she calls “desert Islam”.
The Wahhabist Islamic tradition that sprang from the harsh Arabian
desert seems to be, for Manji, the genesis of the violent edge of Islam.
Austere, protective of the tribe over the individual, demanding of
unwavering and absolute acceptance without thought – of the Koran, of
authority, of the Koran interpreted by authority – Wahhabist Islam does
seem to be the source of much of Islamic violence. Manji doesn’t like
this violence any more than the rest of us. She also doesn’t like the
way women are treated or how slavery is condoned and practiced or how
“mainstream” Muslims are so bent on excusing away the hate and the
violence.
The standard apologist line is that Islam is by definition peaceful;
that violence is done by fundamentalist fanatics; that these fanatics
are violent; that therefore these fanatics are not Islamic. Manji
doesn’t buy this bogus reasoning, nor should she. After all, Islam’s
main man and, like Mormonism’s founder, self-styled receptacle of the
word of god, Mohammed was quite willing to do violence. It would be
tough for any apologist to argue that the Prophet is not Islamic.
Religion manifests in practice, not in public relations. This is as true
of Christian religions as of Islam. In many religions the practice has a
deadly edge. In the Christian, Western world today that edge is
variously white supremacists or homicidal lunatics like Jim Jones or
doctor killing anti-abortion fanatics or those American Anglicans who
have made it necessary for a newly designated gay bishop to travel with
police protection.
In contemporary Islam it is al Qaeda and 9-11; it is Egyptian Islamic
students who throw offending professors out of classroom windows; it is
religiously led Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah whose publicly stated aim is
genocide; it is a bearded Ayatollah who pronounces a death sentence on
any who differs from his religious hard line.
Violence is unlikely to descend on Gene Robinson, the gay
bishop-designate. He could refuse his appointment, but he won’t, and his
life is likely to continue more or less peacefully*. The same cannot be
said as confidently of Manji who may find herself on the wrong end of a
fatwa – an Islamic religious decree like that visited on Salman Rushdie
by the late and unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini.
Newspapers already have Manji installing bulletproof glass in her home
and warning those close to her of potential danger – the danger of
becoming the collateral damage of religiously driven hate.
In her quest to retain her religion, Manji does the unthinkable – she
questions the dogma of the literal truth of the Koran. Along the way she
questions how Islam manifests in its treatment of women, its acceptance
of slavery, its demand for thoughtless obedience. Other critics question
all these, too, but Manji is a Muslim. For her it is virtually a mortal
sin to ask such questions, and she may be called upon to answer for her
temerity with her life.
Yet Manji persists. She wants, apparently, the comfort of the
supernatural, the assurance of religious belief in the face of human
mortality. She believes she can find this in what she calls a lost
tradition of Islam – ijtihad. Not jihad, ijtihad – independent thought.
If Muslims, she says, practiced independent thought, quested for
spiritual perfection through independent thought, studied the Koran for
independent understanding, then all would be well. It would be even
better if the Western world helped this along, especially Western
Muslims.
As a curious example of ijtihad, Manji questions the concept of literal
truth by looking at a passage that has had plenty of buzz of late in
some (mostly Western) intellectual circles. Islamic martyrs, at least
according to their cheerleaders, can look forward to an afterlife of
ease and plenty including 70 willing virgins.** It seems this passage
may be a terrible case of mistranslation. The 70 dark-eyed virgins might
actually have been, originally, white raisins, apparently a highly
prized delicacy in days past.
This thought is based on recent work by Christof Luxenburg. A
translation of Syriac into Arabic may have mistaken a particular word
meaning white raisins for dark-eyed virgins. Translation is a difficult
business, and this is also complicated by a tendency for religious texts
to be allegorical, or at least metaphorical, in their intent. The Syrian
original may have meant “white raisins” of “crystal clarity” which
suggests something rather more gem-like than either virginal women or
tasty fruit. Maybe the martyred faithful will find themselves lounging
around the afterlife in the company of a small hoard of 70 diamonds.
Manji limits herself to the fruit, but the effect is the same.
Ultimately, this type of questioning leads Manji to offer up some
practical ways to start the ijtihad process, but frankly she falls
short. She may have convinced herself that things Islamic can be better,
that women and slaves can be freed, that independent thought can
prevail, but it is wishful thinking.
Independent thought is no guarantor of peaceful results. After all, the
fundamentalist, austere, violence prone Wahhabist tradition – Manji’s
dreadful desert Islam – was a breakaway from more traditional Islam.
Wahhabism and the terror it has sown throughout the world is the blood
drenched spawn of ijtihad, the direct result of the application of
independent thought Manji offers up as a way to save Islam, and her
personal faith, from the plague of violence and hate that currently
bedevils it.
* The same cannot be said for Anglicanism. Schism seems imminent, around
the gay Robinson in the US and with charges and counter charges in
western Canada around gay marriage.
** The passage in question comes from the Hadith, collected sayings
attributed to Mohammed, not from the Koran directly. It is sort of a
second level of absolute truth to be accepted by the faithful. The
correct number is 72, but 70 seems to have become the discussed number.
