Abdal Hakim Murad interview

[Fouad Haddad]

Transcript of interview of Abdal Hakim Murad, by Dr Enes Karic, Minister of
Education, Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Recently published in Ljliljan, a Bosnian-language newspaper.

_______________________________

EK: Can I start by asking about your belief that Imam al-Ghazali's
books must play a central role in the current campaign to revivify
Islam?

AHM: Imam al-Ghazali's significance is manifold. He not only
understood philosophy, but he showed the dangerously speculative
nature of its basic premises in a way which anticipates much modern
positivism. This awareness led him to develop a Muslim epistemology
rooted in 'tasting' (dhawq), i.e. the illuminative fruits of
systematic and divinely-assisted introspection, as the only sure path
to knowledge. This makes him a figure of profound and immediate
relevance to Westerners of my generation who often feel that
post-modernism and the notion of the 'equality of all discourse' have
thrown humanity into what is in effect, despite all the information
cascading from the universities and science laboratories, a state of
ideologically rigorous ignorance. We are now grasping what Ghazali and
his school were explaining nine hundred years ago: no universal
statements about the world or the human condition can be reached by
purely ratiocinative or inductive methods, because these cannot
transcend the material context of the world in which they are framed.
Ghazali, in short, through his manifesto the Ihya, offers the only
intellectually rigorous escape from the trap of postmodernity.

EK: Could you say a little about the West's relationship with Ghazali?

AHM: In the medieval period Ghazali was known in Europe as 'Algazel',
through Latin translations by Guindisalvi and others of a few of his
books, particularly his 'Intentions of the Philosophers' and his
'Incoherence of the Philosophers' in which he famously demolishes Arab
Aristotelianism. Scholastic thinkers such as Aquinas, Robert
Grosseteste and Hugo of St Victor were materially influenced by these
books. Medieval Jews such as Maimonides, his commentator Moses of
Narbonne, and particularly the pietist writer Bahya ben Paquda, were
also profoundly indebted to his ideas on epistemology and logic.


His Ihya however appears to have been unknown. In the present century
about twenty of the forty volumes have been translated into various
European languages, mainly French and German, but also Italian, Dutch
and Russian. It is a curious fact that although he is recognised as
the most influential Muslim thinker of all time, there are very few
serious studies of his thought in the West, with the exception of
Richard Frank's recent Al-Ghazali and the Asharite School, which is of
limited compass.

EK: What about Ghazali's academic influence in the East today?

AHM: Ghazali's Ihya continues to be reprinted constantly in many
countries. It is particularly popular in Turkey, and is also known in
Iran in the Shiite version of Muhsin Fayz Kashani. In Malaysia he has
a particular influence because he followed the Shafi'i rite in law,
which is practiced by almost all Malaysians. Of course, his
intellectual approach has provoked the anger of some literalists at
the Saudi universities, where any systematic theology is regarded as
blasphemous. Saudi Arabia, unfortunately, is a country where most
people until recently lived in extremely simple conditions, and have
not recognised the need to speak to the modern world in a
sophisticated idiom. Literalism and anti-intellectualism may appeal to
desert people, but will not survive long in the global academic and
intellectual arena. Similarly, Ghazali's interest in Sufi mysticism is
regarded with suspicion by members of the Wahhabi sect, which has its
headquarters in Saudi Arabia, because it interferes with their vision
of Islam as a purely legalistic, superficial religion with no
possibilities of nuanced spiritual or literary discourse. Nonetheless,
even in Saudi Arabia, many more educated and sensitive people now seem
to be rejecting the Wahhabi sect and are turning to Ghazali for a more
thoughtful and advanced understanding of their religion.

EK: Can we turn now to the wider issue of the mutual incomprehension
of the Islamic and Western worlds?

AHM: The West sees itself as a fundamentally Christian civilisation,
despite many years of creeping but in many ways superficial
secularisation. In 1993, Jacques Delors, President of the European
Commission, announced that 'Membership of the European Community is
conditional on the possession of a shared Christian heritage' - a
remark which was not well received in Turkey, for instance, but
reflects a general assumption in Europe. And Christianity is
historically a religion which, thanks to its idea of the unique
salvific status of Christ, has often found it difficult to tolerate
large non-Christian minorities. In the middle ages, you could be a
Christian in Cairo, but you could not be a Muslim in London.
Christians and Jews lived under Muslim rule in Spain for eight hundred
years; but when Granada fell in 1492, the Inquisition soon demolished
the mosques, and burned and exiled the Muslim and Jewish population.
Since the Enlightenment, which was in fact the considered though
usually discreet rejection of Christianity by many educated people,
this situation has been changed, but even the present century has seen
'civilised Europe' supervise the massacre of six million Jews,
something which never happened in the Muslim world.

What is ironic is that this traditional contest - between the
exclusivist Christian world and the multi-ethnic world of Islam - has
been strangely inverted, so that the usual international discourse
today presents the Christian West as pluralist and the Islamic East as
totalitarian. This is largely untrue - for instance, there are many
Christian members of the Egyptian and Iranian parliaments, but no
Muslim members of the British, French, German or Italian parliaments.
Many Muslim countries support the schools of their Christian
minorities, whereas the Muslim schools in Britain are consistently
denied state funding, which is freely given to Christian and Jewish
schools. So while the media headlines may suggest that the Christian
West is somehow more tolerant and provides more equality of
opportunity for its minorities, the reality, both in the past and the
present, is quite otherwise. Of course, there are conspicuous
exceptions: one thinks of the poor minority rights situation in some
Muslim countries, for instance. But the fact is that an Eastern
Christian can become Secretary-General of the United Nations, a
position to which no Western Muslim could realistically aspire, given
the discreet but heavy cultural preferences which exists in our
societies.

EK: What about the much-touted growth of a contemporary dialogue of
civilisations, an 'East-West encounter'?

AHM: I do not believe that there is an East-West encounter. There are
in fact two contests presently taking shape in the modern world.
Firstly, there is the competition for resources between the
industrialised North and the poor South. Despite all the rhetoric of
'aid', the reality is that the net transfer of capital from the South
to the North now exceeds seven billion dollars every month. Secondly,
there is a contest between traditional religion and materialism. I
believe that in our time the major religions should postpone debates
on their doctrinal differences and recognise that they all face the
same enemy: the spirit of negation and greed which is the driving
force of modernity. The cooperation between the Muslims and the
Vatican delegation to the UN Population Conference in Cairo in 1994,
which resulted in the modification of many anti-religious and
anti-family provisions, proves that such a cooperation can be of
mutual benefit. We all have our backs against the same wall, and I
constantly urge Muslims to develop links with serious believers in the
earlier revelations to see how we can unite against the destructive
individualism of the modern world, which is increasingly the polemical
and activist agenda of the UN and similar world agencies.

EK: We hear much about Western converts to Islam. How powerful is the
movement in reality?

AHM: A few years ago I helped a couple of French journalists who were
writing a book on the phenomenon of conversion, and was interested to
learn from them that most conversions in Western Europe today are to
Islam, with Buddhism as a close second. They calculate that around
100,000 French people have joined Islam, with the number increasing
substantially if we include those who convert for purposes of marrying
a Muslim woman. In Britain, partly because of the English sense of
reticence, many educated converts do not make their conversion known,
even to close members of their families, and it is hence not possible
to speculate about numbers. I myself know, for instance, a professor
at my university who with his wife has practised Islam for thirty
years totally unknown to his colleagues at work. Some prominent
British cultural figures, such as Lord Northbourne, were only known as
converts after their death. In France the situation is rather
different: you have philosophers such as Roger Garaudy, and cultural
leaders such as the painter Alijs Mojon, or the Sorbonne professor of
Arabic Vincent Monteil, who are very public about their faith, and
defend Islam controversially in a public arena increasingly noted for
right-wing xenophobia and mounting support for neo-fascist parties.

EK: You have spent much time in Western universities. Do you think
that academic attitudes to Muslims are changing?

AHM: Islamic Studies departments in the West are an anachronism,
inasmuch as Jewish Studies are almost always taught by Jews, Christian
studies by Christians, feminist studies by feminists, and so on; while
Islamic studies are almost invariably taught by people indifferent to
the religion, and in some cases actively hostile. I have encountered
several cases of Muslim scholars excluded from jobs for which they are
well-qualified simply because appointments committees believe that
Muslims cannot be 'objective' when teaching Islam. Using that logic,
one would have to prevent Christians from teaching Christianity, and
feminists from teaching feminism, and so on! The only way around this
really is for British Muslims whose Islam is not conspicuous or even
known to enter university life. Oddly, there seems to be less
prejudice against converts than against native Muslims, perhaps
because converts understand how to be inconspicuous when the interests
of Islam require this. Most Muslim teachers of Islam in British
universities now are in fact from the convert community. They face an
interesting task, since Islamic studies, which was until recently a
minor academic ghetto, has taken on immediate and heavy political and
cultural significance in the past two decades. It is on the basis of
the advice and literary output of academics that politicians often
take their decisions in parts of the world about which they know
little. Hence it is of vital importance for Muslims to rectify the
current asymmetry in universities and play a central role.

EK: What is your experience of Bosnia?

AHM: I first visited Bosnia before going to university - I was one of
those long-haired teenagers with back-packs who wander around Europe
for no apparent reason. I remember how impressed I was at the age of
18, having spent a day in Belgrade, a city which I found to be of
intolerable greyness and ugly heaviness, waking up on a train near
Zavidovici, and being startled by the verdant green of the hills, the
yellow mounds of hay on the slopes, and the white minarets in the
villages. It was like seeing a beautiful woman for the first time
after leaving prison!

I visited Bosnia several times thereafter - I was in Sarajevo during
the trial of Alija Izetbegovic and the others, and was able to bring
some information to Amnesty International as a result. I spent time at
the offices of Preporod and at the Gazi Husrev-begova Biblioteka. I
was impressed by the conviviality of the three religious communities,
which I took to be proof of the fact that religious toleration in its
truest and most durable sense has only ever been able to flourish in
the Muslim parts of Europe. And in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the
fall of Granada to the forces of the Reconquista, the war launched by
the Serbian nationalists seemed to prove that my theory remained valid
even at the end of the twentieth century.

I visited Bosnia several times after the war began, and found myself
horrified by the violence of the Serbs, and also the Croats of the
HVO. Even if you are not a Christian, it is unpleasant to see
swastikas being sold side by side with images of the Blessed Virgin at
Medjugorje, and to see Ante Pavelic's portrait hanging in police
stations in 'Herzeg-Bosna'.

I also noted with alarm the presence and influence of some of our
brothers from the Arab world, who try to bring to Bosnia a rigorist
and exclusivist understanding of Islam which is alien to Balkan Islam,
and can have no true future in today's pluralistic and sophisticated
world. One of Islam's sources of strength is its cultural diversity:
Malaysians have their own style of Islam, so do Turks, Nigerians,
Uzbeks, and so on. The Arab aid workers should not imagine that the
Bosnian Muslims can become Arab Muslims. Their cultural context is
quite different. And there is a danger, I feel, that the intensity and
narrow-mindedness of some Middle Eastern aid workers will in fact
frighten young Bosnians away from Islam, rather than bring them back
to it. The Bosniaks have their own very fine style of being Muslim, as
expounded by men such as Mustafa Ceric and Ismet Spahic, and have a
right to be proud of their identity.

The future of Bosnia, as an island of Muslim toleration in a bigoted
corner of Europe, will depend on many things. But most importantly, it
will depend on the continued state of readiness of the Bosnian Army.
If the Jews had had an army in 1939, and had been fighting for their
lives, the Holocaust might never have happened. If the Chechens had
been better armed in 1994, they might now have won their independence.
The sad lesson is that non-Christian minorities in Europe, given the
absence of a medieval tradition of tolerance, must be constantly on
their guard. In 1992, the Bosniaks were caught by surprise, having
believed the silly rhetoric of the EU and the UN about the inalienable
rights of small peoples. They are wiser now; and in a stronger
position. I have every confidence that they will weather the storms
which still await them, and become a model of Muslim decency,
hospitality and tolerance.

[Fouad Haddad]

Transcript of interview of Abdal Hakim Murad, by Dr Enes Karic, Minister of

Education, Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, recently published in Ljliljan, a
Bosnian-language newspaper.

Full permission was given to post this transcript.

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