You can imagine my further disappointment when the most controversial things Tariq Ramadan, the source of the controversy, said, would be more likely to offend some Muslim sensibilities than the non-Muslims in attendance. In fact, Ramadan, who is an incredibly engaging and charismatic speaker, presented his very sensible points softly but with clear conviction. There was absolutely nothing that might require monitoring by authorities.

Admittedly, the Brisbane conference on the “challenges and opportunities” of Islam in Australia was my first true introduction to Ramadan and his thesis. I understood the following: he is a “reformist”; he believes Muslims need to try harder to reconcile their beliefs with those surrounding them in their particular Western nation; he is dubbed Islam’s Martin Luther; he lacks mainstream appeal; he is more successful in Europe than Australia and the US.

Most of this was confirmed in his keynote speech. Ramadan covered a lot of material, but not before addressing the news reports circulating prior to his arrival. He was disappointed that the Australian media was adopting such an exaggerated fear-mongering stance: focusing on his grandfather, Hassan al Banna (founder of Egypt’s the Muslim Brotherhood) and the revocation of his US visa a couple of years ago, which prevented him from taking up a post at the University of Notre Dame. He called these reports “unacceptable” and noted that there were several factual mistakes in the articles he read (four in one, eleven in another); apparently journalists had visited his website and attributed things to him that Tariq Ali had said (fair enough: having the same first name could confuse even the most intelligent of our species).

Ramadan’s discussion centred on citizenship and a sense of belonging. He acknowledged the practical challenges facing pluralistic societies, and also for Muslims in terms of their faith. He suggests that we are lacking discourse on spirituality and universal ethics (politics, etc). He wants to see more Muslims taking up academic positions, writing literature, learning and teaching Islam within their Western nations and, overall, participating socially and politically. He advocates commonality — in other words, send your children to state schools and provide strong supplementary guidance at home. I thoroughly enjoyed his talk and struggled to remember the last time I was so interested and, at times, moved, by what a Muslim scholar had to impart.

Ramadan does not hold back in his critical assessment of the issues plaguing Muslims today. While I took many notes, rather than write them all up (I was told the audio of Ramadan’s speech would eventually be available online), I’ll set out his closing remarks, which reflect his essential arguments. Ramadan concluded with the following:

- Shed the ‘victim mentality’; psychological isolation is what caused the UK bombers to undertake their crimes.
- Rid yourself of the minority mindset; there is no minority citizenship, the law applies equally to all and Muslims are not second-class citizens.
- Women have to be more involved practically in society.
- Social and economic problems should not be “Islamicised” and “culturalised”. Deal with these problems in their appropriate social and political realms. While there are overlapping realities (ghettos), many of these issues are simply not Islamic or cultural.
- Move from integration to contribution.
- Move from contribution to culture.
- Do not focus on the ones who are destroying, focus on the ones who are building.

All of this, Ramadan argues, will be the “silent revolution” of Muslims in the West.

One thousand years later, little has changed in the dynamic between the Rum and the Muslims. Now however, the western consensus is that it is the Islam at the heart of the Muslim world that is antithetical to “progress”, that Muslims must therefore be separated from a coherent understanding of Islam, and that the only person who can achieve this is someone from within the faith. A theological Saracen version of the Prester John fable.

Over the last 30 years several “Muslims” have been auditioned for the part. The first was the Bengali author Taslima Nasreen, who was immediately attractive because of her gender, her somewhat confused but resolutely secular views and the riots against her in her homeland. Unfortunately for her neo-liberal boosters, Nasreen was a dunce, her poetry was so bad that she sank like a stone helped along by her repellent personal qualities.

My life, like a sandbar,
has been taken over by a monster of a man
who wants my body under his control
so that, if he wishes,
he can spit in my face,
slap me on the cheek,
pinch my rear;
so that, if he wishes,
he can rob me of the clothes,
take my naked beauty in his grip;
so that, if he wishes.
he can chain my feet,
with no qualms whatsoever whip me,
chop off my hands, my fingers,
sprinkle salt in the open wound,
throw ground-up black pepper in my eyes,
with a dagger can slash my thigh,
can string me up and hang me.

More recently she has tried to re-enter the public debate about Islam with an autobiography in four parts (one would ask why such an august personage should limit their biography to only four parts?). Surely the public has a right to a more detailed description of every dump she took.

She was rapidly overtaken by a more serious academic figure who used the nom de plume Ibn Warraq. He is an Urdu speaking Muhajir from India to Pakistan who was schooled in the UK at the University of Edinburgh. Ibn Warraq is initially plausible as an academic, although the more one reads him, the more his works degenerate into a polemic, unforgivable for a supposed work of scholarship. His work also suffers from his poor grasp of classical Arabic (Fusha) causing him to make frequent errors. In the references he includes works without any scholarly value but rather solely because of “their hostility to Islam“.

More serious still is the compiler’s heavy-handed favoritism for certain revisionist theories (particularly those of John Wansbrough), resulting in a thoroughly one-sided selection of articles and translations that constitute the bulk of the volume. These include works, mostly well-known, by Ernest Renan, Henri Lammens (including a complete translation of his monograph “Fatima and the Daughters of Muhammad”), C. H. Becker, Arthur Jeffery, Joseph Schacht, Lawrence I. Conrad, Andrew Rippin, J. Koren and Y. D. Nevo, F. E. Peters, Herbert Berg, and G. R. Hawting. Most of these were landmark contributions to the lengthy debate on the origins of Islam, by scholars who had (have) strong opinions about it and were possessed of full mastery of the primary languages (especially Arabic) and sources. “Ibn Warraq’s” bias, however, causes him to omit fine contributions that pose challenges for some revisionist ideas—by H. Motzki, U. Rubin, and many others. This lopsided character makes The Quest for the Historical Muhammad a book that is likely to mislead many an unwary general reader.

Titling his book Why I am not a Muslim served only to highlight that the author was not of the caliber of Bertrand Russell.

But it was not his sloppy scholarship that was his undoing as secularism’s brown knight, rather his gender and his anonymity; it’s hard to be on the lecture/book tour circuit without a face. A more attractive candidate is Ayan Hirsi Ali, the fraudulent Somali asylum seeker turned anti-immigrant MP. Recently her “infidel” tour came down under. Ali’s thesis, if it can described as such, is that she had her genitals mutilated, that she grew up in Somalia and that she was a woman in an illiterate tribal society at war with itself, and that this was entirely and solely because she and her society were Muslim. When she arrived in Holland, she was perplexed by its perfection which sent her on an intellectual journey to secularism.

As a thesis it’s pretty lame, but it’s popular. One can reasonably ask, why her appalling life story is not caused, for example, by being a black African, rather than being a Muslim? The reason is, of course, beyond the white-pride community, there is not an audience for such a view. Similarly, one may ask that when Islam was at its zenith, the Muslim world was the most prosperous and innovative part of the classical world, why her argument cannot be deployed in favor of Islam, rather than against it.

The Ali thesis is preposterous, but like Prester John’s epistle, it fits neatly into the West’s imagination of the other. The world however, is now much more skeptical and multi-polar, and tripe like this does not stay unexamined for long (as Irshad Manji discovered) and more recently reviewers have asked some obvious questions of it.

In a similar vein, another “Muslim” who experienced a secular epiphany coincident with visa and financial problems, is Wafa Sultan. Fortunately her secularism has afforded her a more attractive and rewarding career path.

More recently and more importantly Eddie Husain’s personal narrative of his time as one of Lenin’s vanguard October revolutionaries in The Islamist has become the new work from a Muslim with which to club 1.3 billion Muslims. Given my previously expressed views on the modern religious innovation of Islamism, one would expect us to be sympathetic to Husain, but you would be mistaken. Husain’s narrative is a deeply flawed account of his life from a man who is unable to accept that the core of his problem is himself, and the poor choices that he has made. He now presents himself as another of Islam’s self-styled liberal reformers. Although the product has changed, Husain’s earnestness and enthusiasm for his newfound ideology (much like that of the nighttime TV shopping channel spruiker) has not.

Reading his words one is struck by how little Islam Eddie actually understands. Husain’s failure as a Muslim remains the most damming (but unintended) reflection on the group who “trained” him. For us within the Muslim community, it is unsurprising that an Eddie Husain figure would arise from the ranks of HT. I don’t wish to recount the flaws in this work, which have been well documented here, here, here, here and here. But essentially it is that Eddie has mistaken his experience with HT for an experience with Islam.

In the wake of the recent Glasgow self-immolation/bombing more ex-HT wallas have come out of the woodwork to denounce Islam, when really they should be denouncing themselves. Whilst they seem to offer the truth of the ex disciple turned whistle-blower, I have not seen or read anything that encourages me to believe that their personal megalomania and narcissism has in any way diminished.

Whilst all of these authors may offer some insights, with varying degrees of faithfulness, the uselessness of this genre in literature is equivalent to the ‘I was ravished by an Arab, ravish me again” school of writing. They offer the easy conformation of our pre-existing beliefs, but as an instrument to navigating the wider encounter with the Muslim world, they are as irrelevant.

On both sides of the isle, much more nuanced scholarship is now long overdue.

As for the revisionistic views, many theories have been proposed as to how the Qur’an/Islam came about. According to these various revisionistic schools of thought, Islam was originally a Jewish sect (pace Hagarism);[2] the Qur’an was contemporaneous with the sira (pace Wansbrough);[3] Islam arose in the Negev desert somehow allegedly validating Wansbrough’s hypothesis (pace Nevo);[4] the Qur’an came after the sira and ḥadith (pace Rubin);[5] the Qur’an was an Iraqi product and predates the sira (pace Hawting)[6] and, recently, the Qur’an is a product of Syriac Christianity (pace Luxenberg).[7] It seems that these revisionistic schools often follow methodologies that do not agree with each other (whether in whole or in part) and none of them seem to agree on any one particular scenario, be it historical, social, cultural, political, economic or religious. Something that appears to be more fundamental in their analyses is that the revisionists are willing to formulate any theory to lend verisimilitude to their opinions concerning the Qur’an/Islam, no matter how much it contradicts all of the available well-established evidence, documentary or otherwise.

For those with an interest in such matters or who have come across the Luxenberg thesis, the piece is worth reading and bookmarking for future reference.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One happy outcome of this tragic situation was the voluntary exodus of Muslim intellectuals to the West. From an inhospitable environment of political tyranny and ideological oppression Muslim scholars migrated to find refuge in the West, where the mind enjoys more freedom to think, debate and express. As a result, the migrant Muslim intellectuals are now producing a new genre of publications, many of which are questioning centuries-old interpretations of the primary texts in Islam. A new era of ijtihad (independent thinking) rooted in scientific, objective reasoning is spreading from the West and is beginning to make its mark in the Muslim mind-set.

These intellectuals are not necessarily religious scholars by training, like the graduates from al-Azhar University in Egypt or Zeituna from Tunis or Qarawiyin in Morocco, but scholars trained in other fields such as social sciences, medicine, engineering, physical sciences and law.

For example, Mohammed Arkoun, an Algerian Muslim, is an emeritus professor of Islamic thought at the Sorbonne, Paris, who approaches the Koran and other classical texts in Islam from historical, social, psychological and anthropological angles. The methodology of his research, the sharpness of his arguments and conclusions of his writings are dynamite to traditional Islam. Laleh Bakhtiar, a Chicago-based American female convert to Islam, is not a classically trained Arabic scholar, but has translated the Koran after years of research and is questioning the conventional meanings of some of the Koranic concepts.
Bassam Tibi, a political scientist, who writes mostly in German, applies sociological and anthropological theories to study Islam and finds that the cause of Muslim underdevelopment lies not in the West but in Islam as understood and preached by the orthodox clerics. Amina Wadud, an Afro-American Muslim convert from Bethesda, Maryland in the US, has a PhD in Islamic Studies and Arabic from the University of Michigan and is pioneering the research on gender relationship in Islam and retheorising Koranic hermeneutics. Abdelwahab El-Affendi, a former Sudanese diplomat based in London, published Who Needs an Islamic State? in 1991, in which he questions the theological arguments advanced by the protagonists of an Islamic caliphate.

And finally, Abdullahi An-Naim, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, questions the inadequacies of Islamic sharia and its suitability for a pluralistic society.

There are too many of these scholars to enumerate and the number is increasing. All these cases underline the revolutionary thinking among Muslim intellectuals that is setting the pace for a new wave of Islamic rationalism radiating from the West.
Even writers from Muslim countries who are afraid to publish their works at home are doing so abroad. For example, The Book and the Quran [Koran]: A Contemporary Interpretation by Muhammad Shahrur, a civil engineer from Syria, is banned in his country. He argues that human understanding of the Koran is relative and changing and that it requires the continuous exercise of human reason.

His appeal to apply tools of modern epistemology and objective scientific reasoning to the study the Koran is anathema to hardline Islamists. Similarly, Hassan Hanafi, an Egyptian professor of philosophy, is well known for his rationalist views on Islam throughout the intellectual circles in the US, Japan, Germany and Morocco but is frowned upon by the al-Azhar establishment in Egypt. In short, scholars such as Shahrur and Hanafi have become intellectual prisoners in their own countries.

The situation is changing fast. The internet and electronic communication technology have revolutionised the production and distribution of knowledge. Sources of information that were only remotely accessible to a selected few are readily available to many at the click of a mouse. Inquisitive Muslim minds do not have to wait for a cleric to arrive for consultation on theological issues. With the help of the internet any verse or chapter of the Koran and any sayings of the Prophet can be accessed from multiple sources and the reader has the luxury of choosing from among a variety of interpretations, meanings and elaborations.

This revolution in information gathering has become a subversive tool and is eroding the power base of traditional clerics. The authority of the pulpit is collapsing by the hour. The traditional argument that one should be a trained Islamic scholar or an imam to interpret the Koran does not carry weight any more. There is a rising tension between the traditional guardians of Muslim orthodoxy and a new crop of secular educated Muslims, many of whom are better equipped with advanced methodological tools to handle the primary religious texts. An Islamic spring is dawning from the West.

While Western governments and the media are too preoccupied with fighting militant Islam and its terrorist offshoot, the more positive developments that are taking place within the Muslim intellectual world are being ignored. The wave of critical thought emanating from a new breed of Muslim scholars in the West is one of those positive changes. It is a good omen for a long-awaited Islamic renaissance. The hated West has become the surrogate mother of this wave of Islamic rationalism.

Ameer Ali, a former chairman of the Muslim Community Reference Group, is a visiting fellow at the business school at Murdoch University in Perth.

UPDATE: The article is online here.