Can Islam be reformed? (Daniel Pipes)

This is a very thought-provoking article by Daniel Pipes, behind Commentary's paywall but also on his website. Here are excerpts:

My argument has two parts. First, the essentialist position of many analysts is wrong; and second, a reformed Islam can emerge.

To state that Islam can never change is to assert that the Koran and Hadith, which constitute the religion's core, must always be understood in the same way. But to articulate this position is to reveal its error, for nothing human abides forever. Everything, including the reading of sacred texts, changes over time. Everything has a history. And everything has a future that will be unlike its past.

Only by failing to account for human nature and by ignoring more than a millennium of actual changes in the Koran's interpretation can one claim that the Koran has been understood identically over time. Changes have applied in such matters as jihad<>, slavery, usury<>, the principle of "no compulsion in religion," and the role of women. Moreover, the many important interpreters of Islam over the past 1,400 years—ash-Shafi'i, al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiya, Rumi, Shah Waliullah, and Ruhollah Khomeini come to mind—disagreed deeply among themselves about the content of the message of Islam.

However central the Koran and Hadith may be, they are not the totality of the Muslim experience; the accumulated experience of Muslim peoples from Morocco to Indonesia and beyond matters no less. To dwell on Islam's scriptures is akin to interpreting the United States solely through the lens of the Constitution; ignoring the country's history would lead to a distorted understanding.

Put differently, medieval Muslim civilization excelled and today's Muslims lag behind<> in nearly every index of achievement. But if things can get worse, they can also get better. Likewise, in my own career, I witnessed Islamism rise from minimal beginnings when I entered the field in 1969 to the great powers it enjoys today; if Islamism can thus grow, it can also decline.

Key to Islam's role in public life is Sharia and the many untenable demands it makes on Muslims. Running a government with the minimal taxes permitted by Sharia has proved to be unsustainable; and how can one run a financial system without charging interest? A penal system that requires four men to view an adulterous act in flagrante delicto is impractical. Sharia's prohibition on warfare against fellow Muslims is impossible for all to live up to; indeed, roughly three-quarters of all warfare waged by Muslims has been directed against other Muslims. Likewise, the insistence on perpetual jihad against non-Muslims demands too much.

To get around these and other unrealistic demands, premodern Muslims developed certain legal fig leaves that allowed for the relaxation of Islamic provisions without directly violating them. Jurists came up with hiyal (tricks) and other means by which the letter of the law could be fulfilled while negating its spirit. For example, various mechanisms were developed to live in harmony with non-Muslim states. There is also the double sale (bai al-inah) of an item, which permits the purchaser to pay a disguised form of interest. Wars against fellow Muslims were renamed jihad....

While the medieval synthesis worked over the centuries, it never overcame a fundamental weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or derived from the foundational, constitutional texts of Islam. Based on compromises and half measures, it always remained vulnerable to challenge by purists. Indeed, premodern Muslim history featured many such challenges, including the Almohad movement in 12th-century North Africa and the Wahhabi movement in 18th-century Arabia. In each case, purist efforts eventually subsided and the medieval synthesis reasserted itself, only to be challenged anew by purists. This alternation between pragmatism and purism characterizes Muslim history, contributing to its instability.

...If Islamism is to be defeated, anti-Islamist Muslims must develop an alternative vision of Islam and explanation for what it means to be a Muslim. In doing so, they can draw on the past, especially the reform efforts from the span of 1850 to1950, to develop a "modern synthesis" comparable to the medieval model. This synthesis would choose among Shari precepts and render Islam compatible with modern values. It would accept gender equality, coexist peacefully with unbelievers, and reject the aspiration of a universal caliphate, among other steps.

Here, Islam can profitably be compared with the two other major monotheistic religions. A half millennium ago, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all broadly agreed that enforced labor was acceptable and that paying interest on borrowed money was not. Eventually, after bitter and protracted debates, Jews and Christians changed their minds on these two issues; today, no Jewish or Christian voices endorse slavery or condemn the payment of reasonable interest on loans.

Among Muslims, however, these debates have only begun....


Reformist Muslims must do better than their medieval predecessors and ground their interpretation in both scripture and the sensibilities of the age. For Muslims to modernize their religion they must emulate their fellow monotheists and adapt their religion with regard to slavery and interest, the treatment of women, the right to leave Islam, legal procedure, and much else. When a reformed, modern Islam emerges it will no longer endorse unequal female rights, the dhimmi status, jihad, or suicide terrorism, nor will it require the death penalty for adultery, breaches of family honor, blasphemy, and apostasy.

Already in this young century, a few positive signs in this direction can be discerned. Note some developments concerning women:

•  Saudi Arabia's Shura Council has responded to rising public outrage over child marriages by setting the age of majority at 18. Though this doesn't end child marriages, it moves toward abolishing the practice.
• Turkish clerics have agreed to let menstruating women attend mosque and pray next to men.
• The Iranian government has nearly banned the stoning of convicted adulterers.
•  Women in Iran have won broader rights to sue their husbands for divorce.
• A conference of Muslim scholars in Egypt deemed clitoridectomies contrary to Islam and, in fact, punishable.
•  A key Indian Muslim institution, Darul Uloom Deoband, issued a fatwa against polygamy.
•  The Saudi government abolished jizya (the practice of enforcing a poll tax on non-Muslims).
•   An Iranian court ordered the family of a murdered Christian to receive the same compensation as that of a Muslim victim.
•  Scholars meeting at the International Islamic Fiqh Academy in Sharjah have started to debate and challenge the call for apostates to be executed.

Pipes' ideas for helping these changes occur seem a bit too simplistic to me - he advocates Muslim reformers find a way within Islam to implement their ideas, and non-Muslims should "support" the reformers, whatever that means.

In general, though,  I believe that outside pressure can and does have an effect on Islam.

To me, the key is to take advantage of the honor/shame mindset and continually shame the Muslims into increasing human rights. The examples that Pipes gives of slowly increasing human rights for women in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, for example, is only happening because Muslims were embarrassed to be seen as backwards by the West. On the flip side, the reason that there has been a rise in Islamism lately is because Muslims were shamed by the idea that they weren't adhering to the religion properly enough by the radicals. In both cases, it is shame that is the driving factor.

Similarly, it was only twelve years ago that Al Jazeera was making Bin Laden into a hero; that changed over time as the network wanted to be accepted as a proper new outlet worldwide. It simply was too ashamed to keep the same editorial position while seeking the approval of the West.

Pipes shows how Islam can reform itself given enough incentive. I think that using shame is the most effective leverage the West has to change Islam today. Unfortunately, it is a lever that many Westerners are too frightened to pull, because of fears of acting like elitists. This needs to change. Human rights applies to all humans and giving a free pass to some because they say their religious beliefs trump those rights does no one any favors.

(h/t MtTB)