What happens when you mix politics with religion? One answer is: something like what happened in Doha, Qatar, the other day when a group of Muslim theologians gathered to tackle some ” burning issues.”
The group calls itself the Assembly of Islamic Theology (Majma’a al-fiqh al-Islami) and, backed by the government of Qatar, pursues the ambition of rivaling the al-Azhar institution as an authority for Sunni Muslims. (A junior Iranian Shiite mullah was also included for good measure.)
To start with, the very structure of the assembly was political rather than religious.
The statement issued at the end of the gathering sounds more like the final communiqu? of a political party conference than a well-argued set of opinions (fatawi) on the issues discussed.
As any student of Islamic theology knows, the first step towards forming an opinion is to clearly define the issue at hand. In theology you cannot take a position on what you have not defined. In politics you can. For example, a politician does not need to tell you what terrorism is in order to express one or more opinions on it.
In theology the descriptive precedes the prescriptive. In politics leadership means prescription, while punditry is left to commentators.
A theological opinion is evolved through a chain of argumentation that encompasses all available research and debate that ultimately refer to a sacred text. When any of the complex ingredients is missing, the wise theologian either counsels caution (ehtiat) or endorses the view that has achieved the broadest measure of consensus (ijmaa).
The dogmatic theologian, however, digs out some ancient text and hangs onto it for dear life. The lazy theologian, for his part, will beat about the bush and equivocate until he chokes. The political theologian will always come up with something that sounds good on Al-Jazeera television without necessarily offending the ruling elites who hold the purse strings.
The Doha conferees had little difficulty in coming out with an opportunistic and ultimately counterproductive statement on Iraq.
The issue was presented as “American and British aggression against Iraq.”
No mention at all of the fact that Iraq has been in dispute with the entire United Nations for almost 13 years, and that it has reneged on its commitments under the 1991 ceasefire accords. Nor was there any acknowledgement of the fact that many Iraqis, from all religious and ethnic backgrounds, are actively working to overthrow the present regime in Baghdad.
The Doha conferees did not feel the need to define the issue about which they were offering an opinion.
More disturbing was the fact that the conference seemed to be abolishing all categories of good and evil. It assumed that it was enough for a regime, or a political group, to declare itself Islamic in order to be exempt from moral judgment.
Many of the participants in the conference had welcomed and praised the United States when it had intervened to save the Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo from Serbian repression. But when it comes to the even more brutal repression of the Muslim people of Iraq by the present regime in Baghdad, the same theologians see the United States as “the enemy.”
This is clearly a political and not a theological position. A theological position would condemn all oppression regardless of who conducted it, and would support anyone who tried to put an end to it.
The Doha conferees were equally political when they avoided taking a position on a recent al-Azhar opinion that allows banks to charge interest.
The most dogmatic theologians cling to the fact that Islam expressly forbids usury (riba). But the more intelligent and imaginative theologians acknowledge that bank interests and usury are two different categories. Islam also forbids forced labor but values working in the normal sense of the term. One cannot use the excuse of the ban on forced labor to forbid all labor.
The Doha theologians shot themselves in the foot on the issue of terrorism. To avoid a definition of terrorism they had recourse to the ancient scholastic technique known as “proof by contradiction” (borhan al-khulf). They offered a list of activities that cannot be regarded as terrorism, such as defending one’s homeland, and resisting an aggressor.
The problem, however, is to establish who decides that an act of terror is a legitimate instance in a national liberation struggle or resisting oppression.
For example, do the Chechens who are obviously oppressed, and fighting for national liberation, have the right to do absolutely anything they wish as long as the victims are Russians?
And should the terrorists who blew up 200 tourists in Bali be regarded as Islamic heroes because they wished to rid their land of “heathen visitors”?
The position taken at Doha was, in this opinion, totally un-Islamic. This is because terrorism is a form of violence, and Islam imposes strict rules on the use of violence – and, even then, only as the last resort.
Some of those who spoke at the conference appeared to believe that the way to deal with a mad dog is to stroke it.
Some in the West believe that anyone who grows a beard and wears folkloric clothes has the right to declare jihad, which is wrongly equated with the Christian concept of “Holy War.”
The equivocation at Doha is likely to reinforce that false assumption.
Even more disturbing was the failure of Doha to take a position against suicide bombers. Some participants danced around the issue with the help of the demagogic tricks used by politicians. None had the courage to come out and state Islam’s position that regards life as a supreme value and expressly forbids suicide for whatever reason.
A good part of the conference was devoted to ” the problems of globalization.”
Rather than assuming that the Muslims could, and should, have a growing role in globalization, in both cultural and economic domains, the Doha theologians depicted the phenomenon as “something done by others to us.”
This defeatist position in which Muslims are regarded as the object of history, rather than its makers, led one Doha theologian into the farcical position of calling for a boycott of hamburger and pizza joints as a form of “jihad” against globalization.
The good news is that there are no popes and cardinals in Islam, and no believer is obliged to accept the opinion of anyone, least of all the sheikhs who gathered at Doha.
When an opinion is well argued and reasonable, such as that of al-Azhar on banks, a majority follows it. When it is patently ridiculous, it is laughed at and soon forgotten.
Amir Taheri is author of “The Cauldron: The Middle East Behind the Headlines.” Taheri is reachable through Benador Associates.
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