What are the basic beliefs and practices of Islam, and what is "Islamic fundamentalism"?

Paul Powers, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Thanks---to the administration for convening this forum, to you all for coming, and to President Mooney for his opening remarks.

I am new to the faculty and this is not the circumstance under which I would have liked to find myself standing before you all for the first time. Under the complex and sober circumstances, I won't be able to follow my own rule for public presentations: make one point and try to be funny. But I will try to stick to my 15 minutes.

One factor in my own decision to enter the field of Islamic Studies was the Gulf War some ten years ago, when I keenly felt my own ignorance about Islam and Muslims, and the similar ignorance of many people around me. I felt that no matter what one's stance toward that war was, greater understanding of Islam and Muslims could only help.

I stand before you now with the same hope that, whatever one's position on recent events and future possibilities, greater understanding of Islam and Muslims can only help.

I will confine my remarks to three general matters:

I will start with an overview of some aspects of Islamic religion and history that seem especially relevant today.

Second, I will discuss several elements of Islam of central importance to what we call "Islamic fundamentalism."

Finally, I will reflect on the nature of religious fundamentalism more generally, seeking to provide a broader conceptual framework.

Behind these remarks is the following two-part thesis:

First, Islam did not cause the events of September 11. Islam is not inherently violent, and the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people who had nothing to do with this. I trust you all know this, but it bears emphasizing.

Second, the people who did do this apparently were Muslims, and their religion matters on some level. Religion helped form their idioms of thought and action, their self-understandings and identities.

Islam did not make them do this, but understanding Islam better might help us better understand what they thought themselves to be doing.

Part 1: Basic Overview of Islam

Islam is a rich and varied religious tradition, with well over a billion adherents spread across the globe.

About 20 percent of all Muslims are Arab (nearly 50 percent of Arab Americans are Christian); most Muslims live in South and Southeast Asia and Africa. America has some 8 million Muslims, a rather small percentage of them Arab.

Muslims see Islam as a continuation and completion of the same prophetic, monotheistic religious tradition as Judaism and Christianity. Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, lived from 570 to 632, and was the last in a line of prophets that included Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, among others.

Contrary to popular opinion, Islam did not spread primarily by the sword. The rapid early expansion occurred as a thin veneer of political authority linked to a central Islamic state, and only gradually did populations convert. This expansion involved some military force, but almost no forced conversion. In fact early Muslim tax policies placed higher taxes on non-Muslims, creating a disincentive regarding conversion--more converts meant less revenue.

The spread of Islam took place gradually, often via Muslim merchants introducing the new religion. Many areas witnessed a slow process that one scholar has called "accretion and reform" (Richard Eaton)--local religious practices at first melded with Islam, especially Islamic mysticism, and periodic reform movements pushed toward a more "orthodox" Islam. South and Southeast Asia, and much of Africa, followed this pattern. (Some would say this describes the emergence of Islam among African-Americans.)

Islamic history involves a wide range of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, ranging from peaceful coexistence to occasional serious, even violent clashes.

The basic beliefs of Muslims center on the Quran, a rich, nonnarrative, poetic text.

For all its sophistication, the basic message of the Quran is unmistakably clear. There is one God ("Allah" is simply Arabic for "the one God"), one God who requires just and righteous conduct from people, and will assign them to an afterlife of paradise or fire accordingly. The Quran repeatedly calls on Muslims simply "to promote the good and resist evil."

Reflecting on the Quran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslim scholars produced Islamic law, a detailed guide for behavior in many areas of religious and social life, including ritual obligations (prayer, almsgiving, pilgrimage, fasting), as well as civil laws and criminal ordinances.

However, classical Islamic law presents less a list of lock-step rules than a record of scholarly thought and discussion establishing surprisingly broad parameters of conduct. Islamic law is more like Rabbinic Judaism than like the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

Muslims see all life as inherently valuable, among the best of God's creations, and thus cannot legitimately take it, except under very few specific circumstances. Murder is roundly condemned in Islam.

There is no consensus among Muslims that any one form of government is the necessary expression of Islam. Muslim communities have thrived under a wide range of governmental forms, from theocracy to democracy. Since shortly after the Prophet's death, most Muslim communities have treated religious and political authority as separate spheres.

Historically, most Muslims have viewed Islam as a nonhierarchical, egalitarian community, with no central religious authority. There is no Islamic Pope. Religious authority is usually a local matter, based on education in religious sources and voluntary recognition by the local Muslim community. Religiolegal scholars, called "ulama" ("learned ones"), such as those being consulted in Afghanistan recently, traditionally play an important but informal role as religious advisors to a community. Islamic religious authority is generally local, flexible, and diverse.

The basic beliefs and practices shared by Muslims everywhere are the backbone of a large, and largely happy and healthy, body of religious traditions. Various elements are here emphasized and there deemphasized, and interact with myriad cultures in myriad ways.

I hope this tiny bit of information helps clarify some of the ideas floating around us recently about Islam and Muslims. Islam as a religion is not the necessary cause or simple explanation of the events of September 11.

Part 2: Islamic Fundamentalism

That having been said, I want to focus on how religion does matter in some movements and events of recent decades, perhaps broadly related to the events of September 11.

I now turn to the second part of my remarks, addressing Islamic fundamentalism. The term "fundamentalism" could simply denote belief in a set of fundamental tenets of a given faith, though that is not how we use the term.

I want to highlight some specific aspects of how we might use and misuse the term "Islamic fundamentalism." I have heard the term misused in reference to the pervasive sense of piety common among many Muslims (a piety that sometimes seems to make non-Muslims uncomfortable and suspicious, but which is not only genuinely harmless, but perhaps quite admirable).

The term also gets used for more sweeping stances involving literalism in reading religious texts and an active effort to deepen and widen the embrace of Islam. Here we enter a gray area, where Muslims themselves are often wary of a shift from being what Arabs call "mutadayyin" (strongly religious) to "mutatarrif," (extremist).

Finally, the term may mean an organized group that melds being mutatarrif with various political agendas.

In this last form, Islamic fundamentalism mixes religion and politics, defining problems and solutions in both idioms simultaneously. Though these movements tend to look back to a golden age in the past, this is a postcolonial phenomenon, in fact mostly an oil-era phenomenon, characterized by what Bruce Lawrence calls "protest against Muslim rulers who seemed to accept the dominant and un-Islamic global order." (Shattering the Myth, 51)

Lawrence's mild-sounding statement conveys several important points: Organized, politicized Islamic fundamentalism is primarily directed against governments in Muslim countries, and decries both their perceived moral failings and their acquiescence to external (read European, American, and Russian) influences. That is, local and national reform is often the primary goal, to be achieved by combining religion and politics in a way that has seldom been seen in Islamic history since the time of the Prophet.

Now to focus briefly on two concepts relevant to Islamic fundamentalism of the organized religiopolitical variety, terms recently much discussed, namely martyrdom and jihad.

Martyrdom is a pretty straightforward concept. Martyrdom is simply the valorization of suffering and death in a good and Godly cause.

This is seen by some Muslims, as by some Christians, as such a good deed that it outweighs a heavy load of sin. Martyrdom is the ultimate sacrifice of self for God.

The Islamic model of martyrdom comes from the lifetime of the Prophet, when the nascent Muslim community faced violent persecution from pagan Arabs. The term largely dropped from use after the early expansion period, and has reemerged to prominence only in recent years.

It is not required of any Muslim, and it is not a "free ticket to heaven"--if a death is deemed by God to be a martyrdom, and only God can make that judgment, then God decides if it outweighs one's sins.

The question is, What constitutes a good and Godly cause? I can't answer that question, and Muslims disagree. There is no generic and universal Islamic definition.

On the other side of the line from martyrdom is suicide. A would-be martyr not seen as such by God is a suicide. Suicide is widely condemned among Muslims as illegitimate interference with God's will.

The other prominent term here is jihad.

The term does not mean "holy war," it literally means "striving" or "struggle." Muslim scholars observe [Rabia Nizamani of Holy Cross College observes] that the Prophet Muhammad described two kinds of jihad, the "greater jihad," incumbent on all Muslims, is the individual spiritual struggle against temptation and sin. The "lesser jihad" is a narrowly defined struggle against religious oppression.

Jihad in this second sense has always been interpreted as a defensive struggle. The Quran and Prophet considered defense of Islam from outside threats to make jihad a duty incumbent on Muslims.

The question here is, What constitutes a legitimate defensive struggle to save Islam? Again, not a question I can answer, and one on which Muslims disagree. However, rightly or wrongly, any Muslim who describes his or her acts as part of a jihad probably would describe them as defensive acts meant to save Islam and Muslims.

There is, recall, no central authority among Muslims. In fact, the suggestion that Islam is somehow inherently antidemocratic misses this important fact. The legitimacy of any given call for jihad rests on the authority that the person calling for it has in a given community of Muslims. It is more a matter of conscience and social pressure than of papal decree.

A quick note on the term "fatwa":

A fatwa is a nonbinding legal opinion, on any religiolegal topic, from ritual purity to inheritance and so forth, issued by any Muslim with sufficient knowledge of Islamic law. Its legitimacy rests on the perceived extent of the issuer's knowledge of Islamic law.

As Rabia Nizamani notes, "A scholar may write a fatwa justifying terrorist acts, and he may be condemned by the consensus of Muslim scholars. But if anyone wants to rely on that fatwa, it is acceptable to do so." Osama bin Laden issued such a fatwa in 1998, but few Islamic legal scholars consider him an authoritative voice on Islamic law.

Part 3: Religious Fundamentalism

Finally, I want to turn to my last topic. I want to briefly contextualize Islamic fundamentalism, especially of the more formal religiopolitical type, within the framework of religious fundamentalism more generally.

Fundamentalisms arise in the context of problems, real and/or perceived. Fundamentalisms generally exhibit three important features:

1. Literalism and inerrancy--there is one right way to read scripture, one right form of a religious tradition. In a word, "There is one truth, and we have it."

2. Belief that in the past a given religious community was closer to the truth than people are in the present.

In a word, "In the past, in some golden age, people knew and followed the truth and were better off."

3. Current problems are the result of straying from this truth.

In a word, "If we return to the truth, which means returning to previous ways, things will be better, our problems will be solved."

In short, fundamentalisms of many stripes, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and so forth, are problem-solving methodologies. They are means of dealing with evil, or what we in religious studies call theodicies.

Some Christians in America in the wake of the September 11 attacks have faced the same issue. Last week, the Rev. Billy Graham, in addressing a gathering that included President Bush, said, with Job-like wisdom, that he does not know why God allows such terrible things to happen.

On a radio call-in show I heard a caller push this issue further, asking of the attacks, "What do you expect in a country where the most profitable industries are gambling and pornography?" That is, our problems--even terrorist attacks--are due to our moral failings, and the solution to our problems is a return to the true right way.

The formal, organized Islamic fundamentalism of recent years has several specific features: It tends to take the flexible and decentralized view of authority historically common to Islam and make it more centralized, with a simpler code of conduct to reassure its followers. Islamic law is traditionally full of recommendations; Islamic fundamentalism takes these and deems them obligations. The wearing of beards is one example; it is traditionally a recommended act, a way of emulating the Prophet, but many fundamentalists deem it obligatory, an example too of taking onto themselves the authority to decide what had previously been left to the individual conscience.

An important aside: Muslim women covering their hair and wearing Islamic dress is not a case in point. The dynamics of Muslim women's identities and actions is far more complex than this, and many nonextremist women, here and abroad, freely choose to cover for a wide range of reasons.

Since the medieval period, when Islamic civilization was the envy of any on earth, Muslim populations have spent much time under foreign domination, from the Ottoman empire, to the European colonial period, to the postcolonial regimes many see as illegitimate and corrupt. The fall from power, seen by some in religious terms, presents a dilemma--how can these patently immoral societies gain power over the Muslim world?

Some answer that the problem is, first, a straying from Islam. Thus the primary goal is a more properly Islamic community, as they define it. Second, the impious invaders must be resisted and expelled. Finally, to become and remain strong, the community must return to the true state of Islam witnessed in the golden age of the past, often seen as the lifetime of the Prophet and his immediate successors, when religion and politics were one.

Like all explanations, mine is partial at best. Religious factors are hardly the only ones in play here, but my goal has been to focus on these.

Finally, as for the events of September 11, and those who piloted planes full of people into buildings full of people: What problems did they see and what solutions did they seek? I do not know exactly.

Many Muslims hold that these terrorists violated the basic moral principles of Islam.

The historian can add that they also alter many Islamic institutions and selectively read from their religion and history, as their quest for a golden past leads to a radical simplification of present woes.

I hope I may have helped add complexity to our own understanding of the present, so that oversimplification does not lead us, too, astray.

Thank you.