To Mufti or Not? Lessons from Australia

Several years ago, as I was touring Istanbul, I took to performing my daily prayers at the Blue Mosque. During several visits I noticed an expensive dark blue Mercedes saloon, parked ostentatiously in the gardens of the masjid, and guarded by a machine gun armed solider. When I asked him who the car belonged to he replied, “Allahhu akbar”, raised his hands to his ears, and pointed to the imam coming down the steps. Clearly there were both threats and blandishments in ascending the minbar at Turkey’s most famous mosque.

In the old city, our hotel sat adjacent to a madrassa where young children were taught Qur’an and Tajweed by a group of very kindly old sheikhs. After Fajr, one of the boys would take turns to lead the Salat and afterwards he would recite a long chapter of the Qur’an until the sun came up.The other boys would fall asleep at the back; the Sheikhs always pretended not to notice. Unlike the Blue Mosque, the madrassa, an engine room for Islam, was sinking into genteel poverty and survived on public charity alone. It was the target of periodic police harassment, as were the scholars who tutored for free.

In the West, Turkey is seen as the secular blueprint for modernizing the Muslim world. But rather than secularizing Islam, the Turkish state has appropriated it and desecrated religious worship by replacing it with an elaborate theatre of the absurd. This has required the creation of a compliant priestly class from amongst the Muslims, atop of which sits the Mufti. Many European democracies are now considering the institution of a chief mufti alongside other measures to regulate Islam.

European Muslims might look to the salutary example of Australia, where Muslims there stumbled into creating the post of Mufti of Australia in the late 1980s. Taj El-Din Hilaly, then the Egyptian Imam for the Lebanese community of Western Sydney, was to be deported for visa violations. An intervention by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC), the nominal umbrella body for Australian Muslims, contrived a way for Hilaly to prolong his stay — with the hastily cobbled-together title of Mufti of Australia. The Federal Labour government used this pretext to grant him permanent residence in Australia against the express advice of their own Minister of Immigration, who thought him profoundly unsuitable, an opinion that has been vindicated with hindsight.

Notwithstanding his visa issues, Hilaly has always been a controversial figure in Australia, both to Muslims and, more recently, to wider society. He has repeatedly made serious anti-Semitic remarks, has failed to develop substantive links with other religious groups, and his Masjid in Western Sydney — the largest in Australia — is widely criticised in the media. Hilaly, who does not speak English, communicates via an interpreter, which often leads to slightly absurd media interviews.

His tenure as Mufti of Australia has been extremely controversial. Yet, even if a more likely candidate were chosen, the creation of an office of Mufti is deeply problematic for many reasons.

The most obvious is that the office of Mufti ought to uphold excellence in scholarship of the sacred sciences, an excellence that is widely recognised by one’s peers. Where is that standard of scholarship today? One cannot look at the state of the Muslim community in the West and believe that from amongst its religious leadership one should be justly rewarded with such an accolade. Nor would any thoughtful sheikh be quick to assume the title of Mufti with its many weighty demands and responsibilities.

The second reason is that Mufti, in its modern connotations, is a title born of the modern world’s tension between the sacred and the secular, a vice that we have inherited from another civilization. Typically it is awarded to compliant religious leaders by the irreligious regimes that rule in the Muslim world. The modern muftiship has become a post for Muslim scholars where they can be systematically seduced, rewarded or manipulated as required.

The third reason springs from a question that we must answer ourselves, what do we want from our scholars? Who will write the great religious opinions of our time? Where are the Ahmad bin Hanbals or the al-Ghazalis of today? Who will take up Hasan al-Basri’s mantle of the ascetic, to stand apart from society and to be a fearless critic of it? All of these ulema have stood aloof from officialdom, and their remoteness from it energized their scholarship, freed undoubtedly from the endless train of interfaith marathons, and the perpetual release of captive birds “for peace”.

When we look to the future for religious leadership we must be entirely selfish in our aspirations. Whilst the selection of an appropriately moderate Mufti may (temporarily) placate sections of the wider community, it does not represent the goals and aspirations of Muslims themselves, nor does it advance the cause of Muslims in the West.

Whilst the imposition of a respectable order over the rowdy umma may seem the ideal solution for the times, it is the perpetual tension — of the free expression, of differing religious opinion — that has preserved the heart of Islamic orthodoxy.

This was originally published at Muslimstan.