Concilium

2005 / 5

Islam and Enlightenment New Issues

Introduction: Islam and Enlightenment — Enlightened Islam — Islam as Enlightening

Erik Borgman and Pim Valkenberg

The events of 11 September 2001 have become a worldwide symbol. The images of two aircraft flying into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, repeated over and over again in the media worldwide, have come to symbolize the supposed threat of aggressive Islam to the peaceful West. The bomb attacks in Madrid on 11 March 2003, and in London on 7 July and 21 July 2005, confirmed to many observers that Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations has become reality. There is a professed religious defence of Christian values over against Islam, represented by President George Bush. But the new phenomenon is the polemics against Islam and the way it is currently judged in terms of the liberal Enlightenment and is seriously found wanting.

Recent developments in the Netherlands, some of which made the international headlines, are a case in point. First populist politician Pim Fortuyn broke the taboo on attacking the Muslim faith because it represented a ‘backwards culture’. After Fortuyn was murdered on 6 May 2002, this came to be considered as courageous and a long overdue breaking away from a repressing political correctness. Columnist, media personality and film director Theo van Gogh routinely referred to Muslims as to ‘geiteneukers’ (people having sexual intercourse with goats). The same Theo van Gogh made the movie Submission, together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch politician from Somalian Islamic background, very present in the media and very outspoken in accusing Islam of misogyny and tyranny, and an obstacle to human freedom and dignity. Submission charges the Islam and the Koran with promoting violence against women. Theo van Gogh was savagely murdered in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004, by Mohammed Bouyeri, a self-proclaimed defender of Islam who left a note on Van Gogh’s body [8] explaining mainly why he had not murdered Hirsi Ali, although that in a sense for him was apparently the obvious thing to do. In the course of all this, with Hirsi Ali together with other Members of Parliament being secretly moved around to different houses and body guarded around the clock for months, the almost proverbial Dutch tolerance for religious differences has turned into what sometimes seems like blatant Islamophobia, and not seldom hatred of all things religious.

In the first part of this issue of Concilium, the question is asked what happened to the Western approach to Islam and Muslims, and why. Theo de Wit presents the developments in the Netherlands and the way it attracted attention internationally. He makes clear that the issue of a politics of tolerance is on the agenda again, after an easy multiculturalism has proved to be an illusion. Marcel Poorthuis analyses and criticizes the image of the Islamic and the Western worlds in the influential book What Went Wrong? by the American Islam-scholar Bernard Lewis. Lewis’s approach seems exemplary for the current presentation of Islam and its history in the Western world. Marc De Kesel unearths the fundamentalist logic present in the letter Mohammed Bouyeri left on Theo van Gogh’s body, making clear that fundamentalism is not so anti-modern as it is usually presented and showing how an obsession with death is at the heart of it. Karin Vintges deals with the way Islam is contrasted with Enlightenment and especially feminism in the self-presentations and the media-presentations of influential female critics of Islam like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands and Chandor Djavan in France. We should not think about Islam and feminism as alternatives, she argues, but engage in a process of mutual learning with the growing movement of Islamic feminism.

Contrasting a free, peaceful and secularized Western modernity to a tyrannical, violent and religiously backward Islam seriously twists reality. Not only does this mask the violence of Western modernity and its unsettling consequences worldwide, but it also marginalizes the plurality and the intense discussions within Islam. The relations between religion and violence, religion and oppression, religion and politics, religion and democracy, and religion and liberation are debated at least as hotly in the Islamic world as they are in the Christian world. From this debate, Islam has a contribution to make to attempts at shaping the world’s future and this contribution deserves to be taken seriously. This is not to deny that there are violent tendencies in the Islamic world - as there are in other religions, that there are groups of Muslims defending discrimination and violence against [9] women and preaching war against modern civilization. But the strange alliance between Islamists and secularists, claiming that this is typical for religion in general and an inalienable part of Islam in particular, needs to be challenged.

The second part of this issue of Concilium presents new developments within the Islamic tradition that are not commonly known. Nelly van Doorn-Harder presents female and feminist interpretations of the Koran and shows how women use it as a charter for their rights. Asma Afsarudin shows how the Hadith-literature, the Islamic traditions on the words and deeds of the Prophet, is interpreted. Thomas Michel presents the neo-Sufi spirituality of Turkish scholar Fethullah Gillen and his followers as directed to dialogue and ethical responsibility. Erik Borgman introduces the three intellectuals from a Muslim background that were awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize in 2004 for their humanist contribution to today’s culture: Fatema Mernissi, Sadik Al-Azm and Abdulkarim Soroush.

As a journal, Concilium is dedicated to the idea that religious traditions are important because they can offer fruitful and liberating visions on the human condition and the world, on what liberation might mean and on how to reach it. An important point of this issue is to show Islam as an important religious tradition in this respect, making clear that Christian theologians should re-enforce the dialogue with it, notwithstanding the current climate and without denying the various problems we are confronted with. The third part opens with Hans Küng, who recently published a highly praised book on Islam, giving his view on the meaning of the Muslim tradition in today’s world. Pim Valkenberg discusses in what sense the concept of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as ‘Abrahamic religions’ still has a future. Erik Borgman defends the idea that Christianity and Islam can help each other to become a space of liberating Enlightenment by keeping on searching for the transcendent and hidden but nevertheless present God they confess.

This issue of Concilium closes with a documentary section in which Theodore Gabriel contrasts the way Islam and Muslims are presented in the media to the way Muslims understand themselves, and Lucinda Ory documents reactions from British religious leaders and institutions to the bomb attacks in London.