(May/June 2006)
The following speech was given at a forum at the
Winchevsky Centre in Toronto on Dec. 11, 2005.
Thank you for inviting me to speak this morning.
Before I say anything else, let me confess that I
am envious of your community and the Winchevsky
Centre; a place where you can openly profess your
identity as secular Jews. Trust me, there is no
such reprieve for secular Muslims. In fact, the
word "secular" has been so maligned in the Muslim
world-an attack aided and abetted by the U.S.
during the Cold war-that it has come to mean
automatically being outcast as an enemy of the
community, a communist, and of course, a Zionist
agent. So today, some of the brightest and most
enlightened Muslims have given up on their faith
and are quite reluctant to even associate the
word Muslim with their identity.
I could go on, but this may require another
Bagels and Banter session; perhaps you could add
Biryani and Baqlavas to the menu.
Fundamentalism is not the monopoly of the Jewish
or Islamic faiths, but its practice among Jews
and Muslims has a far more pronounced effect on
and implications for the rest of the world than
other fundamentalisms. Rabbi Moshe Reiss, who has
taught at Columbia University and was Assistant
Rabbi at Yale University, says that
fundamentalism can take many forms, but in
today's world it is pertinent to look at it in
the Jewish and Muslim religions. According to
Rabbi Reiss, the three themes that Judaic and
Islamic fundamentalists share are the belief in
the absolute supremacy of religious law; the
contention that secular regimes, though they may
pay lip service to religious law, have rejected
this law and rely instead on outside, and
particularly Western, influences to guide the
state; and the insistence that the only way to
restore the people to their rightful status is to
wrest control of the state and implement a
"return" to the divinely inspired code.
But at the core of these beliefs of Jewish and
Islamic fundamentalists lies the notion that
public and political life must be determined by
divine texts, not humanly created laws. And if
laws are to be made by men and women, such laws
are subservient to the laws enshrined in divine
texts that are beyond amendment.
Therein lies the challenge that religious
fundamentalism poses to our world. Let us look at
the similarities between Jewish and Islamic
fundamentalists.
God's law is Supreme
Both former Sephardic chief Rabbi Mordecai Eliahu
and former Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira
have called for an Israeli state governed by
Halakha-Orthodox Jewish religious law-in the same
manner that Islamists have called for Islamic
states to be governed by Sharia, Islamic law. (An
Islamist is a person who uses Islam as a tool for
achieving political power and shuts out debate or
dissent by invoking the supposed divine authority
he derives from the holy text. By contrast, a
Muslim is one who lives his or her life according
to the teachings of the Quran and the life of the
Prophet Muhammad to the best of his or her
ability.)
Each group goes so far as to say that without
their particular recipe, the state has no lawful
authority. As far as they are concerned, these
are God's laws, and when the state doesn't act in
accordance with the sacred law, state laws are
not valid. Here are samples of what Muslim and
Jewish fundamentalists have to say:
The late Abul Al'a Maududi, a major Pakistani
Islamist, wrote, "The principle of the oneness of
God altogether negates the concept of the legal
and political sovereignty of human beings,
individually or collectively .... God alone is
the sovereign and His commandments are the law of
Islam .... Legislation in an Islamic state will
be restricted within the limits prescribed by the
law of the Sharia."
Now here are the words of Rabbi Avraham Shapira:
"All aspects of our lives are determined
according to the Torah. It is clear to every Jew
that religious observance is above any directive
or law that contradicts Torah law ... and it is
unthinkable that an act forbidden by Halakha
shall be made permissible because of a military
order of one kind or another. In every debate
between the majority and minority, the majority
decides. However, in decisions which contradict
Halakha, there is no force in the world which the
majority can muster against the minority to
compel it to act against Halakha."
Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu agreed. He writes that the
state cannot pass laws that contradict the Torah,
and that, in order to be considered binding, any
law must be ratified by "a highly reputable
contemporary Torah scholar".
Sayyid Qutb of Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood
said, "We pay little heed to our native spiritual
resources and our own intellectual heritage;
instead, we think first of importing foreign
principles and methods, or borrowing customs and
laws from across the deserts and beyond the seas
.... We turn our eyes to Europe, America or
Russia, and we expect to import from there
solutions to our problems."
In the leadership of the traditional Muslim
communities of Canada, both Maududi and Sayyid
Qutb hold a special position and prestige, and
such respect was showered on these two
personalities by the Islamists and their American
backers during the Cold War, that even Muslim
youth born in Canada consider these two Islamists
as their gurus.
The Question of Land
If you take the belief in the immutability of
religious law and throw in the question of land,
you have a problem, to say the least.
Relinquishing land is a very important issue for
Muslims as well as Jews. Dar al-Islam (areas
under Muslim control) and Dar al-Harb (areas
under foreign control) are determined by control
of the land. Islamists believe Muslims must first
control the land, and then their kind of Muslims
must be in charge.
Jews believe God gave the Land of Israel to
Abraham and his specific descendant Isaac. Jewish
fundamentalists concentrate their energies on the
holiness of land, while Islamic fundamentalists
concentrate on Sharia law. It is obvious that
Sharia law can only be implemented in lands
controlled by Muslims.
As much as these two groups may hate each other,
it is incredible how close they are. Given the
similarities, it is not surprising that
individuals who live their lives according to
Jewish law will have ideologies that overlap with
those who live their lives according to Islamic
law.
Moshe Feiglin, an extreme-right-wing Israeli
opponent of the Oslo Accords, has stated: "I
reject this term 'Religious Zionist', I am not
'religious' and I am not a Zionist. I am Jewish."
He could have taken his words from a statement
made by the Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist, the
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan
al-Banna, who stated: "We are not socialist, we
are not capitalist, we are Muslim."
Rabbi Reiss observes that when Feiglin rails
against the relatively secular Israeli
government, its military might and its "corrupt"
leaders, he uses the same language that Abul
A'la Maududi used in urging an Islamic political
revolution in Pakistan. When Feiglin calls for
"an authentically Jewish reality in Israel" ruled
by a Torah-motivated leader and free of foreign
ideological influences, he mimics the battle cry
of the Egyptians Banna and Sayyid Qutb, the key
thinkers behind the Muslim Brotherhood, in their
rejection of "anti-Muslim Western" political
systems and its agents.
While these sentiments are similar to those found
in other, non-religious revolutionary ideologies,
they are unique in that they present Judaism and
Islam as comprehensive political rather than
religious systems. They claim that modern
secular societies are sick and inherently evil,
and that the only solution is a state guided by
religious elites who can put it on track toward a
messianic utopia.
Maududi and Qutb both blame the state and its
institutions for every ill in society, from the
lack of physical security to all kinds of moral
depravity. Qutb has said, "We should not despair
of the ability of the Sharia to govern modern
society. Rather, our summons is to return to our
own stored-up resources .... Our mission is to
call for a renewal of Islamic life, a life
governed by the spirit and the law of Islam,
which alone can produce that form of Islam that
we need today, and which is in conformity with
the genuine Islamic tradition."
Now let us hear what Feiglin stated: "The Zionist
movement, which founded the modern State of
Israel, [based] itself on secular 19th-century
Western values. Geopolitics has ruled its every
move .... acceptance by the world has received
the highest order of priority .... It negates
holiness [and] in doing so, it has stripped
itself of the tools necessary to reflect the
Jewishness of Israel and its ultimate holy
purpose. There is only one way to truly imbue the
State of Israel with the meaning it deserves and
needs: to promote an alternative leadership for
the State of Israel that is based on Jewish
belief. Only leadership motivated by an
authentically Jewish vision will be capable of
meeting all the challenges currently facing the
State of Israel and the Jewish people. Only
leadership of this kind will be capable of
reinvigorating the State of Israel and the Jewish
people and leading it toward the realization of
the vision of the prophets."
It is this "search for authenticity" that is
engulfing not only the minds of Muslims and
Islamic fundamentalists, but also the small "l"
liberals and left in North American and Europe.
Our former President of the Muslim Canadian
Congress, a Vice-Principal of a Toronto school,
had to ask one prominent women's rights activist,
"Am I not ugly enough to be considered [by you]
an authentic Muslim?"-a sarcastic reference to
many on the Left who have developed a stereotype
of Muslim women draped in cloth and with their
faces hidden, so that any woman who is not
ashamed of herself or her looks is considered an
"inauthentic" Muslim. This after she was barred
from speaking at an anti-war rally because the
organizers said, "you cannot be a Muslim
woman--you are not wearing a hijab [head
scarf]?We want an authentic Muslim woman to be a
speaker? sister," they added for effect.
In the words of Rabbi Reiss, "Fundamentalism,
whether violent or not, is a political ideology
and not a religion. Fundamentalists from all
religions exhibit a similar mutant strand of a
religious disease, a virus that sometimes seems
like a pandemic. In Christianity this virus
became anti-Semitism; in Islam they became
suicide bombers. The reason different strains of
fundamentalism seem so alike is, to paraphrase
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, that they speak the
same language because they come from the same
country."
Where I differ with the good Rabbi is that the
impact and consequences of unbridled Islamic
fundamentalism have a far more serious
consequence than, say, right-wing religious
fundamentalists taking over the government in
Israel or dominating the Jewish narrative in the
Diaspora. In this case, size does matter. Sikh
and Jewish fundamentalism, even in their worst
form, may be able to inflict tremendous pain on
their own people and of course their adversaries
of other faiths, but if Christian or Islamic
fundamentalism is allowed to reign supreme in
the consciousness of the world's one billion
Catholics and one billion Muslims, human
existence itself could be at stake.
So the question remains: How do we combat this
phenomenon? Within the nascent secular Muslim
movement, we feel not enough has been done to
promote the strict separation of religion and
state as a fundamental first step towards the
guarantee of universal human rights.
In this 21st century, citizenship cannot and
should never be based on one's inherited race or
religion. Without this enshrined as the starting
point of our discussion, religious fundamentalism
and its encroachment into the public legal system
cannot be stopped. Of course, this can have
serious implications for the State of Israel or
Pakistan, both founded on religious principles
and at the same time in history.
That is the challenge. However, we secular
Muslims feel that if these principles are not
fought for tooth and nail, we are risking a
serious setback to human civilization.
This problem has become seriously acute since the
fall of the Berlin Wall, where it is not
ideologies or political thinking, or the Left or
the Right, that divide us, but increasingly,
race, religion and ethnicity. Suddenly, what we
built together from the ashes of the French and
American revolutions and the great struggles of
the Left in Europe is threatened by a dismal
spiraling downwards of human intellect combined
with a serious paucity of leadership.
In this era of political dwarves, the challenge
to fight religious fundamentalism lies at the
feet of those of us forgotten by our gods and
rebuked by our priests-the secular and the
humanists. Our principal slogan must be a strict
separation of religion and state, because if we
don't achieve this, we put our common humanity at
risk.
Let me conclude with quotations from two
thinkers; one Muslim, the other a Jew. Two giants
and contemporaries of 12th-century Spain, whom we
could use today in this era of mediocrity.
Moses Maimonides, or Ibn Maimon, as we Muslims
know him, said in the Misneh Torah: "If one has
the means to provide either the [Sabbath] lamp
for one's household or the Chanukah lamp, then
the household lamp takes precedence because it
contributes to domestic peace...."
And this is what Averroes, or Ibn Rushd as we
Muslims call him, said in his Fasl al-maqal, the
Decisive Treatise: "Philosophers are best able to
understand properly the allegorical passages in
the Qur'an on the basis of their logical
training. There is no religious stipulation that
all such passages have to be interpreted
literally."
To fight religious fundamentalism, what we need
today is not a Martin Luther, but Averroes and
Maimonides.
Thank you.