Free Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

and scientific journals through which it was possible to exchange ideas and import advances from the West. The mid-nineteenth-century Syrian political thinker Francis Marrash, who hailed from Aleppo and studied medicine in Paris, had published writings about the importance of freedom and equality and the vital role to be played in the modernization of Arab society by education and “a love of country free from religious considerations.” 4 This was not completely delusional. By the end of World War II, the central features of sharia had been replaced in many Muslim countries by laws based on European models. Polygamy was legally abolished, civil marriage introduced. Arabs were also embracing nationalism as well as a belief in the importance of pre-Islamic Arabic culture.
    At the same time, Islam itself was increasingly being reinterpreted as part of a long continuum in man’s attempts to achieve social justice, even being used at times to validate socialist doctrines of redistribution and other efforts to remake society. An Egyptian thinker named Khalid Muhammad Khalid declared that true religion was possible only when social and economic justice existed, and he proposed among other things nationalizing natural resources, dividing up large estates, instituting labor rights, and fixing agricultural rents, as well as emancipating women and providing birth control. Other early-twentieth-century Muslim thinkers sought to reassess the linkages between seventh-century Islamic law and the modern state. In the twentieth century, men such as Ali Abdel Raziq, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, Nasr Abu Zayd, and Abdolkarim Soroush—all Islamic thinkers—proposed fundamental reforms.
    Though few people today know the names of these men, their proposals and the ensuing responses have much to teach us.
    Ali Abdel Raziq, an Oxford-educated Egyptian scholar and a professor at Al-Azhar University, was a devout Muslim and religious judge who argued that Islam should be completely separated from politics so as to protect it from political corruption. In his 1925 book, Islam and the Foundations of Governance , Abdel Raziq argued that Muslims could use their innate powers of reason to devise the political and civil laws best suited for their times and circumstances. What is more, he specifically rejected the idea of restoring a Muslim caliphate, so dear to modern radicals. “In truth,” he wrote:
    This institution which Muslims generally know as the caliphate has nothing to do with religion. It has . . . more to do with . . . the lust for power and the exercise of intimidation that has been associated with this institution. The caliphate is not among the tenets of the faith. . . . There is not a single principle of the faith that forbids Muslims to co-operate with other nations in the total enterprise of the social and political sciences. There is no principle that prevents them from dismantling this obsolete system, a system which has demeaned and subjugated them, crushing them in its iron grip. Nothing stops them from building their state and their system of government on the basis of past constructions of human reason, of systems whose sturdiness has stood the test of time, which the experience of nations has shown to be effective.
    For positing these ideas, Abdel Raziq was dismissed from Al-Azhar. The university’s Supreme Council condemned and denounced his book, and expelled him from the circle of the ulema. He lost his title of alim , or learned man, and was forced into domestic exile, escaping a worse fate thanks only to his family’s prominence.
    Three years later, a new group began to emerge in Egypt under the leadership of a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Disgusted by what he believed was an excess of materialism and secularism, as well as the sight of Egyptians laboring for foreign bosses, al-Banna wanted a return to a precolonial era, when religion had been a comprehensive way of life—although he himself was largely