At War With Itself

It is not only in the shocking news reports and even more shocking images from Syria and Iraq or Afghanistan where the Quran is held aloft at every outrageous act and ‘Allahu akbar’ shouted at every beheading. In many other, if not most, countries of the Muslim world, state authorities, state-affiliated institutions, religious schools and insurgent groups also invoke Islam when they oppress their own people, discriminate against women, persecute, expel or massacre those who think, believe or live differently. Islam is invoked to justify stoning women in Afghanistan, murdering entire school classes in Pakistan, enslaving hundreds of girls in Nigeria, beheading Christians in Libya, shooting bloggers in Bangladesh, detonating bombs in marketplaces in Somalia, killing Sufis and musicians in Mali, crucifying dissidents in Saudi Arabia, banning major literary works in Iran, oppressing Shiites in Bahrain, and setting Sunnis and Shiites against each other in Yemen.

A War to Freedom

It is true that the vast majority of Muslims reject terror, violence and oppression. I have learnt on my travels that people only truly value freedom when they do not have it. All the mass protests of recent years in the Islamic world have been in favour of democracy and human rights. This not only includes the attempted, though mostly failed, revolutions in the majority of Arab countries, but also the protest movements in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan and, last but not least, the uprising at the ballot boxes in the last Indonesian presidential election.

And let’s not forget that on the front lines, it is Muslims themselves who are fighting against the ‘Islamic State’.

Likewise, the flow of refugees highlights where many Muslims are seeking a better life than at home – anywhere that isn’t a religious dictatorship. The reports reaching us from Mosul and Rakka do not suggest enthusiasm, but panic and despair. Every religious authority of significance in the Islamic world has rejected IS’s claim that it speaks for Islam and given detailed explanations of how its practices and ideology contradict the Quran and the basic tenets of Islamic theology. And let’s not forget that on the front lines, it is Muslims themselves who are fighting against the ‘Islamic State’: Kurds, Shiites, Sunni tribes and soldiers in the Iraqi army.

At War with Itself

Sponsored by billions of oil dollars, over the years a way of thinking has been disseminated via mosques, books and television that declares all those of other faiths to be heretics without exception and that insults, terrorises, belittles and insults them. When, day after day, one systematically and publicly disparages other people, it is only logical – and how well we know this from our own German history – that eventually their lives are also declared worthless. The fact that such religious fascism became conceivable at all, that IS was able to find so many fighters and even more sympathisers, that it was able to overrun entire countries and capture cities with millions of inhabitants largely without a fight, is not the beginning, but rather the preliminary end point of a long decline, a decline also and especially in the religious mindset.

Loss of Creativity and Freedom

When I began studying Oriental Studies in 1988, my subjects were the Quran and poetry. I think everyone who studies this subject in its classical form reaches the point where they can no longer bring the past and present together. And they become hopelessly, hopelessly sentimental.

Of course, the past was not just peaceful and multi-hued. But as a philologist, I had to deal primarily with the writings of the mystics, the philosophers, the rhetoricians, and likewise the theologians. And I, no, we students, could and can only marvel at the originality, the spiritual breadth, the aesthetic power and human greatness that we encounter in the spirituality of Ibn Arabi, the poetry of Rumi, the historiography of Ibn Khaldun, the poetic theology of Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, the philosophy of Averroes, the travel descriptions of Ibn Battuta, and also in the stories of the Arabian Nights, which are secular, yes, secular and erotic and also feminist, and at the same time permeated on every page by the spirit and verses of the Quran.

It was once conceivable and even self-evident that the Quran is a poetic text that can be comprehended only by the means and methods of poetology, not unlike a poem.

These were not newspaper reports, no, the social reality of this high culture, like any reality, looked greyer and more violent. And yet, these testimonies say something about what was once conceivable or even self-evident within Islam. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be found within the religious culture of modern Islam that is even remotely comparable, that exerts a similar fascination, that is as profound as the writings I came across during my studies. And that is without mentioning Islamic architecture, Islamic art, Islamic musicology – they no longer exist. I would like to illustrate the loss of creativity and freedom in terms of my own field of expertise. It was once conceivable and even self-evident that the Quran is a poetic text that can be comprehended only by the means and methods of poetology, not unlike a poem.

It was conceivable and even natural that theologians were also literary scholars and connoisseurs of poetry, in many cases poets themselves. Yet today, my own teacher Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid was accused of heresy in Cairo, expelled from his chair, and even forced to divorce because he saw Quranic studies as a literary science. This means that an approach to the Quran that was obvious and for which Nasr Abu Zaid could refer to the leading scholars of classical Islamic theology is not even recognised as conceivable today.

Despite its tradition, such an approach to the Quran is persecuted, punished and branded as heresy. Yet the Quran is a text that does not merely rhyme, but speaks in disturbing, ambiguous, mysterious images; it is also not a book, but a recitation, the score of a song that moves its Arab listeners through its rhythm, onomatopoeia, and melody. Islamic theology has not only incorporated the aesthetic characteristics of the Quran but has declared the beauty of its language to be the miracle that authenticates Islam.

But today, throughout the Islamic world, we are seeing what happens when the linguistic structure of a text is disregarded, no longer even adequately understood or registered. The Quran becomes a mere vade mecum that is checked using a few keywords in the search engine.

The linguistic power of the Quran becomes political dynamite. It can often be read that Islam has to go through the fire of enlightenment or that modernity must prevail against tradition. But this is perhaps a little too simplistic when, in the past, Islam was so much more enlightened and traditional scriptures sometimes seem more modern than contemporary theological discourse.

The Curse of the Modern Age

The fact that Goethe and Proust, Lessing and Joyce were fascinated by Islamic culture does not mean they were mentally deranged. They saw something in the books and monuments that we, who are all too often brutally confronted with the presence of Islam, now find it difficult to perceive. Perhaps the problem of Islam lies not so much in its tradition as in its almost complete break from it, in its loss of cultural memory, its civilisational amnesia.

All the peoples of the Orient have experienced a brutal form of modernisation imposed from above through colonialism and secular dictatorships. An example is the headscarf, which Iranian women did not gradually discard. Instead, in 1936, soldiers swarmed the streets on the Shah’s orders to forcibly tear it from their heads. Unlike in Europe where, despite setbacks and crimes, modernity could be experienced as a process of emancipation that took place over many decades and centuries, in the Middle East it was essentially experienced as violence.

The Spirit of Mysticism

Apart from the Quran, I mainly studied the form of Islamic mysticism called Sufism. Mysticism sounds like something marginal, esoteric, a kind of underground culture. But nothing could be further from the truth when it refers to Islam. Until the 20th century, Sufism was the basis of popular piety almost everywhere in the Islamic world. It remains so to this day in Asian Islam.

Islamic high culture, especially poetry, the visual arts and architecture, was also permeated with the spirit of mysticism. As the most common form of religiosity, Sufism formed an ethical and aesthetic counterweight to the orthodoxy of the Islamic jurists. By emphasising God’s mercy, by looking behind every letter of the Quran, by always seeking beauty in religion, by recognising truth in other forms of faith as well, and by explicitly adopting the Christian commandment to love one’s enemies, Sufism permeated Islamic societies with values, stories, and sounds that could not have been derived from the kind of piety that followed Islam to the letter. Sufism as lived Islam did not abrogate legal Islam but complemented it, made it softer, more ambivalent, more permeable, more tolerant in everyday life, and made it possible to experience it sensually through music, dance, and above all poetry.

Barely a trace of it remains. Wherever the Islamists gained a foothold, starting as early as the 19th century in what is now Saudi Arabia and ending in Mali, they began by putting an end to Sufi festivals, banning mystical writings, destroying the tombs of the saints, and cutting off the long hair of Sufi leaders or even killing them outright. But not only the Islamists. Even the reformers and proponents of religious enlightenment of the 19th and early 20th centuries considered the traditions and customs of folk Islam to be backward and outdated.

All over the Islamic world, the destroyed, disregarded, scruffy old cities with their dilapidated monuments are as much symbols of the decay of the Islamic spirit as the world’s biggest shopping mall that has been built right next to the Kaaba in Mecca.

They were not the ones who took Sufi writings seriously. Rather, it was Western scholars, Orientalists such as the 1995 Peace Prize winner Annemarie Schimmel, who edited the manuscripts and thus saved them from destruction. And even today, very few Muslim intellectuals engage with the richness that lies in their own tradition. All over the Islamic world, the destroyed, disregarded, scruffy old cities with their dilapidated monuments are as much symbols of the decay of the Islamic spirit as the world’s biggest shopping mall that has been built right next to the Kaaba in Mecca. This has to be kept in mind, and photos also clearly show how the holiest place of Islam, this simple yet magnificent structure where the Prophet himself prayed, is literally dwarfed by Gucci and Apple. Perhaps we should have listened less to the Islam of our great thinkers and more to the Islam of our grandmothers.

Of course, some countries have begun restoring their buildings and mosques, but it took Western art historians or even Westernised Muslims like me to come along and recognise the value of tradition. And, unfortunately, we were a century too late. The buildings had already crumbled, the construction techniques were forgotten, and the books erased from memory. But we still thought we had time to study things thoroughly.

Where is the Islamic Culture?

Meanwhile, as a reader, I almost feel like an archaeologist in a war zone, hastily and randomly snatching up relics so that later generations can at least view them in museums. Muslim countries still produce outstanding works, as can be seen at biennales, film festivals, and this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. But this culture has little to do with Islam.

There is no longer any Islamic culture, at least none of any standing. What is now flying around our ears and onto our heads is the debris of a tremendous spiritual implosion. The shock generated by the news and images of the ‘Islamic State’ is enormous, and it has unleashed opposing forces. Opposition to violence in the name of religion is finally beginning to form within Islamic orthodoxy. And for some years now, perhaps less in the Arab heartland of Islam than on the peripheries, such as in Asia, South Africa, Iran and Turkey, and not least among Muslims in the West, we have been able to observe the development of a new religious thought.

European Utopia

Europe also recreated itself after two world wars. And, in view of the frivolity, contempt and open disregard that not only our politicians but we as a society have for years displayed towards the European unification project, the most politically valuable thing that this continent has ever produced, perhaps at this point I should mention how often people talk to me about Europe during my travels, seeing it as a kind of utopia.

Those who have forgotten why Europe is needed should look into the emaciated, exhausted, frightened faces of the refugees who have left everything behind, given up everything, risked their lives for the promise that Europe still offers. As a Muslim, it is not for me to accuse the world’s Christians of not caring – if not for the people of Syria and Iraq – but not even for their brothers and sisters in faith. Yet this is what I so often think when I witness the public’s apathy towards the already eschatological catastrophe in the East that we are trying to keep at bay with barbed-wire fences, warships, tales of the bogeyman and mental blinkers.

An organisation like ‘Islamic State’ is not invincible for the international community – it cannot be.

Ending the War