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

self-taught and did not come from a learned, clerical background. Instead of fostering a new secular nationalism consistent with developments in Europe and elsewhere in the modern world, al-Banna wanted Muslims everywhere to join together in a larger community founded upon Islam and Islamic religious law. In al-Banna’s vision of the Islamic state, there would be no political parties, sharia would form the legal code, and only those who had a religious education would rule or administer the government. Schools themselves should be attached to mosques. In this way, Islam would be the guiding, unifying principle across the Arab Muslim world.
    Hassan al-Banna is hardly a household name in the West, but the organization that he helped to found has become one: the Muslim Brotherhood. And his writings inspired some of the most familiar names of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, among them Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden. 5
    The triumph of al-Banna over Abdel Raziq—in essence, the triumph of theocracy over reform—can also be seen in the fates of other twentieth-century Islamic reformers. The Sudanese intellectual Mahmoud Mohammed Taha argued that Muslims should embrace the spiritual Islam of Mecca and let go of the Islam of Muhammad’s more warlike and political Medina period, which, Taha argued, applied only to that specific moment in time and not to subsequent generations. Taha also campaigned against introducing sharia in Sudan. Though he still believed there was no god but Allah, and that Muhammad was his messenger, Taha was nonetheless hanged for apostasy in 1985.
    More recently, Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian thinker, argued that human language had at least some role in shaping the Qur’an, thus making it not completely the uncorrupted word of Allah. For proposing a reinterpretation of the sacred text, he was deemed an apostate by an Egyptian court in 1995, and then forcibly divorced from his wife against his (and his wife’s) will, because he was now a non-Muslim, and a non-Muslim man cannot be married to a Muslim woman. After receiving death threats, Abu Zayd fled Egypt and went into exile in the Netherlands.
    In Iran, the Islamic thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, though he supported the Islamic revolution of 1979, later argued that political power should be far more separate from religious leadership than it is today. For making this argument, Soroush received numerous threats, was forced to end his university teaching, and eventually found life so intolerable that he, too, moved abroad.
    All of these would-be reformers based their arguments on Islamic theological grounds. But the ulema have not only resisted all such attempts at reform; they have time and again successfully threatened and bullied the reformers into silence or exile, where they have not actually secured their execution. And the method has been to return, always, to the Qur’an. Because the Qur’an is inviolate, timeless, and perfect, they argue, what is written in it cannot be criticized, much less changed.
    That explains why, in Islam, reform has never had positive connotations and innovation is at all costs to be avoided. As Albert Hourani explains, after the appearance of Muhammad, “History could have no more lessons to teach, if there was change it could only be for the worse, and the worse could only be cured not by creating something new but by renewing what had once existed.” 6 In other words, “reform” is simply not a legitimate concept in Islamic doctrine. The only accepted and proper goal of a Muslim “reformer” is a return to first principles. The hadith, the text containing the words and deeds of Allah’s Prophet, credits Muhammad with saying that his generation would be the best of all, the one that followed him the next best, and so on down. 7 It is the precise opposite of the Western narrative of progress: in this version of history, instead of improving, each generation is worse than the one before. Only