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The Roots of Jihad (long, but interesting)
from Haaretz.com
By Ehud Ein-Gil
PARIS - Friends and supporters of Al-Afif al-Akhdar are convinced: the life of the veteran fighter for secularism and democracy in the Arab world is in danger. A year ago, the Tunisian Islamic movement Al-Nahdha, which is persecuted by the authorities in its country, condemned him as the author of the scandalous book "The Unknown in the Prophet's Life." A Tunisian citizen, Akhdar has for decades been waging a stubborn campaign to expose the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, including those espoused by Sheikh Rashed al-Ghanoushi, the leader of Al-Nahdha, who has been in exile in London since 1991. In an unsigned declaration on its Internet site, Al-Nahdha referred to Akhdar, without naming him.
Two years earlier, the fingers of Akhdar's right hand became paralyzed, and the paralysis gradually spread almost to his whole body. He published the details of his illness in order to explain why he had stopped writing. Akhdar and his supporters are convinced that Sheikh Ghanoushi backed the declaration, even if he did not write it himself, which speaks of divine punishment being inflicted on the "true author" of the book that vilifies the prophet Mohammed.
In response to the declaration, which was construed as a fatwa condemning Akhdar to death, the Arab organization for the Protection of Freedom of Expression and the Press organized a petition "against obscurantist religious extremism," which called for the protection of Akhdar's life and freedom. Within two months, the petition was signed by more than 600 intellectuals and academics, most of them Arabs. Akhdar, who in the meantime regained his capacity for movement thanks to medical treatment (though he is still unable to write, because his fingers remain too stiff), recently contacted the London solicitor Daniel Machover about the possibility of taking legal action against Sheikh Ghanoushi.
It was not by chance that he turned to Machover, an expert in international law who gained fame last year when he tried to bring about the arrest of an Israeli officer, Major General (res.) Doron Almog, who had just landed in London, on suspicion that he had perpetrated war crimes while serving in the Gaza Strip. Akhdar wants Islamic terrorists to get the same treatment as people who have committed crimes against humanity. In October 2004 he was one of three Arab intellectuals who asked the UN secretary-general and the Security Council to establish an international tribunal to try such terrorists, including clerics who issue fatwas for the liquidation of "infidels."
Machover is the son of Prof. Moshe Machover, one of the founders of the radical socialist organization Matzpen, which was active in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Akhdar and Moshe Machover were members of a collective of Arab and Israeli revolutionaries who published the journal Khamsin in Paris and afterward in London. Already then, Akhdar had identified the danger inherent in Islamic fundamentalism and assailed the support of many left-wing activists for the "anti-imperialist" Islamic revolution in Iran. In 1981 Hamsin published an article by him entitled "Why the Reversion fo Islamic Archaism?" In the search for an analysis of the motivations and origins of Islamic terrorism following the events of September 11, 2001, the article was republished on several anarchist and left-wing Web sites. The article is signed Lafif Lakhdar, the author's user-friendly name for non-Arabs.
An Arab Spinoza
Akhdar, who is 72, conducts his struggle from an apartment in a poor Paris neighborhood, many of whose residents are immigrants. He lives alone, "but with my 4,000 books I don't feel alone." Until 2002 he wrote a weekly article for the London-based Arabic paper Al-Hayat, but was fired after he gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he condemned the barbarism of the corporal punishments that are meted out in Saudi Arabia, such as amputation of limbs.
Since then, only a few Arab Web sites agreed to publish his articles, mainly Ilaf, a liberal Arabic Web site whose owner pays him a modest monthly salary. Still, says Akhdar, whose first name, Al-Afif, means "the modest one," his economic situation now is better than it was during most of his life. Just a few years ago he was on the brink of starvation and traveled to the center of Paris every day (pensioners can ride the Metro free) to have a free hot meal in a "restaurant for the poor."
His supporters believe that he deserves a great deal more. Dr. Shaker al-Nabulsi, a Jordanian researcher who three months ago published (in Beirut) a book entitled "The Devil's Advocate," the first comprehensive study of Akhdar's thought, wrote an ironic article about Arab society, which worries about ill and aging singing stars but ignores the misery of an intellectual of Akhdar's stature. The article likens Akhdar to the "prophet of liberty," Thomas Paine, who fought for human rights and secularism in the American War of Independence and in the French Revolution. Yigal Carmon, head of the Washington-based MEMRI Institute, which studies the Middle East media - the institute has translated and published several of Akhdar's articles - likens him to Spinoza, who like him was persecuted and ostracized because he insisted on grounding his thought, including his critique of religion, on reason.
"If we were living in a normal world, the entire world left would acclaim him," Carmon says. "He is an amazing person, deeply immersed in Arabic and French culture, an intellectual with broad, diverse and up-to-date knowledge, not only in philosophy, Islam and history, but also in psychology, and he is thoroughly humane. The French, or the Europeans in general, who are coping with problems of immigration, should have placed him at the head of an advisory council on integration, where he could explain, educate and serve as a role model."
Akhdar, who is completely immersed in his present struggles, objects to the focus on him and his life. "Seven lines are enough to present me to readers in Israel," he says. "It is far more important to concentrate on explaining the dangers that inhere in jihadist Islam."
He was born to a poor Muslim family of fellahin; they lived in a hovel 13 kilometers from the nearest village. Seven of his eight brothers and sisters died in childhood (his only surviving brother is a lawyer in Tunisia). Apart from half a year in a French school, which was shut down during World War II, he received no formal education, only Koran studies in the village, and he chose a religious university because it was tuition-free and offered free lodgings and a modicum of food. ("For two weeks during the religion lessons, I secretly read Darwin.') He then studied law and afterward worked for three years as a lawyer.
In 1958 he represented an opponent of the regime who was convicted and executed. The authorities then issued an order restricting Akhdar's movement. In 1961 he fled Tunisia with the help of Algerian freedom fighters and spent nearly 20 years wandering the world using forged passports. He became a socialist in Algeria ("First of all from the gut, because of the hunger - I didn't understand why others had and I didn't - and then I found philosophical justification for the message of egalitarianism"). He was close to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, and was present at the meeting of Abu Jihad and Che Guevara, but in 1965 had to flee Algeria after Ben Bella was deposed in a military coup.
He spent some time in Germany, both East and West, and visited the Middle East, where he formed an unfavorable impression of the Baath regime in Syria, in part because of its attitude toward the Jewish community. In 1968 he was a guest of the Fatah leadership in Amman, which housed him in the same apartment as Yasser Arafat, rather than in a hotel, in order to protect him from Algerian intelligence agents. Over the years he has incurred the wrath of nearly every Arab regime, and thus the danger of death is nothing new to him. He has also been highly critical of the "progressive" national movements and of the Arab Communist parties, which supported dictatorial regimes of oppression and feared to confront the clerics.
"He is in the vanguard," says Prof. Emmanuel Sivan, an expert in Islamic history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who corresponds regularly with Akhdar and visited him during his illness. "Earlier, he was in the vanguard with regard to the Marxist camp and now, after the turnabout he experienced, he is in the vanguard of the Arab liberal camp. He takes sacred cows and deals with them. He was the first who dared to compile and publish in Arabic everything Lenin wrote about religion, and thus drew the enmity of the Arab Communist parties. He was also one of the first who acknowledged the need to study Israeli society methodically, and in recent years he has written much about what can be learned from Israeli democracy."
Akhdar was soon disappointed in the Fatah leaders, some of whom were influenced by the ideas of the Muslim Brothers. "Abu Jihad told me that there is no chance of overcoming Israel by force of arms, but 'if enough Palestinians are killed maybe the world will hear about us.'" He was far more impressed by Nayef Hawatmeh, founder of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "Hawatmeh argued that the only justification for forming a fighting force is to topple the Arab regimes," he says. "He convinced me. Hawatmeh also contributed a great deal to the entrenchment of the idea that the Israeli people and its rights must be recognized, and of the need to arrive at a compromise with Israel, but since then there was a great regression in his attitude toward the armed struggle."
Akhdar spent the next few years between Paris and Beirut, with a foray to socialist South Yemen. The civil war in Lebanon induced him to stay in Paris for good. At the end of the 1970s he received a Tunisian passport again, and for the first time in years emerged from the underground. He retranslated the Communist Manifesto into Arabic, based on the German source (he insisted that the cover declare that it is "the first genuine translation" and found a publisher only in the Israeli radical left), to which he appended a sequel of his own, "The Origins of the Arab Bourgeoisie." Some readers discerned a Koranic influence in his writing, to which he admits: "I integrate the poetic spirit of the early parts of the Koran, which are all poetry, with the logical, spare and synonym-less structure of the French sentence."
During this period, he met the Israeli writer Shimon Ballas in Paris. In 1984, Ballas published his novel "Last Winter," in which one of the protagonists is based on Akhdar. In the novel he is called Bashir Halimi, a revolutionary of Moroccan origin.
Terror from Islam
The book that reveals "secrets" from the life of Mohammed, which was written by a certain Dr. Al-Makrizi - though Al-Nahdha accused Akhdar of being the author - can be read in Arabic on a Christian Web site. A perusal of the book shows clearly that its goal is to "prove" to Muslim believers that Mohammed is not exactly the prophet who appears in their sacred writings and to persuade them to join the "true religion," namely Christianity. "The book was apparently written by an anti-Muslim Christian Egyptian who is not very smart," Akhdar says. "It is Christian religious propaganda. How can they accuse me, when they say I am a secular infidel atheist, of writing such a book? Am I a stupid Christian?"
And does the real author deserve to be the subject of a fatwa?
"No. The culture should be free, and every artist and every researcher should be free to write about all religions without any restriction."
Does that include the Danish cartoonist?
"Yes. It includes humor and satire. In the history of Islam you have the poet Abu Nawas, who joked about the Koran. He wrote, for example, "Your Lord did not say woe to the drunkards / But woe to the worshipers." That is a secular principle: separation between religion and politics, and between religion and artistic and literary creation, and between religion and scientific research. This is the greatest achievement of modernity. The clerics must not be allowed to intervene in these matters.
"As for the cartoons, one has to see which Arab and Islamic forces protested the affront to Mohammed and used it for their purposes. Syria was the first country to recall its ambassador from Denmark - the same Syria which in 1982 killed 30,000 'Mohammeds' at Hama. Its protest intended to make people forget its responsibility for the assassination of [former Lebanese prime minister Rafik] Hariri. Iran is the same Iran that prevents the Sunnis in Tehran from building a mosque. It protested in order to divert attention from its nuclear program.
"Saudi Arabia is the same Saudi Arabia that, as part of its plan to turn Mecca into a modern city, decided to demolish the building in which Mohammed married Khadija - a rare historic site - in order to build a public lavatory in its place. It protests in order to make [Muslims] forget its war against Al-Qaida. Sheikh Yusuf al-Kardawi, who stirred up the Arab world against the cartoon in his television program on Al Jazeera, did what all the Islamic movements did: He used the protest against the cartoon in order to show Muslims why it is necessary to break relations with the 'infidels' and in order to foment an interreligious war.
"One has to see who is using the cartoon for his purposes. The workers? The fellahin? No. It is those who are demolishing Mohammed's house and protesting a cartoon."
Many Muslims are protesting the identification of Mohammed, and hence of Islam as such, with terrorism. Is terrorism in fact ingrained in Islam?
"This is what the Islamists themselves say, like the spiritual mentor of Ayman al-Zawahiri , who is not second in importance in Al-Qaida, but first in terms of religious law, as well as planning and thought. His mentor is Sheikh Abed al-Qadr bin Abed al-Aziz (whose real name is A-Sayed Imam Abed al-Aziz a-Sharif), who asserted, 'Terror is from Islam and anyone who denies this is a heretic'. He and others rely on a few verses from the Koran, and I will give you, as an example, only one of them, from the Surah of the Spoils of War [Surah 8:60]: 'Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into [the hearts of] the enemies of Allah and your enemies' [translation from Abdullah Yusuf Ali, "The Meaning of the Holy Qur'an"]."
On what, then, do Muslims who deny the identification of Islam with jihad and terrorism rely on?
"There are two Islams from the period of Mohammed. There is Meccan Islam [referring to Mohammed's period in Mecca], which is a 'Christian' Islam - that is, under Christian influence - and is essentially peace-seeking. The use of violence, even for self-defense, was prohibited. In this Islam, jihad was prohibited. This Islam was the basis for the mystical Sufi movement.
"When Mohammed was forced to move from Mecca to Medina, a second Islam - jihadist Islam - was born. And it is this Islam that the contemporary terrorists have adopted. To justify the passage from the 'conciliatory' peace of Mecca to the militant peace of Medina, Mohammed told the Muslims that jihad is permissible only for self-defense [Surah of The Pilgrimage - Surah 22:39]: 'To those against whom war is made, permission is given [to fight], because they are wronged.' Mohammed was wronged - he was expelled from Mecca, and the purpose of the defensive jihad is to enable his return.
"Medinaist Islam is terrorist Islam. Sheikh Yusuf al-Kardawi says that terrorism in Islam is positive and should be welcomed. Here he is drawing in part on verse 12 in the Surah of the Spoils of War: 'I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: Smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them.' Osama bin Laden, in a speech on the occasion of Id al-Adha in 2003, said that it is best to follow the blessed terror about which al-Kardawi speaks."
Is there anything that can be done so that Meccan Islam will be strengthened and overcome Medinaist Islam?
"My answer is my plan for the reform of Islam, a reform of the Islamic discourse, of religious education, the religious media, the sermons in the mosques, and so forth. The plan is to remove from the textbooks all the violent and jihadist verses and leave them only in the source, in the holy writings."
Censorship?
"To a certain extent, yes. In Tunisia, this has been done since 1999. The plan is that instead of the violent verses, schoolchildren will be taught the universal verses of peace which exist in the Mecca period. For example, Verse 62 of the Surah of the Heifer, which says, 'Those who believe [in the Koran], and those who follow the Jewish [Scriptures], and the Christians and the Sabians, any who believe in Allah and the Last Day and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.' And there are another two similar verses. The sages of the Sharia all said that these are 'annulled' verses. We have to annul the annulment of these three verses and declare that it is the verses against the Jews and the Christians that are 'annulled.'
"The plan I proposed includes the introduction of modern sciences in the institutions of religious education, as well as comparative history of the religions and psychology and sociology of the religions, so that students will be able to understand the religious text in terms of modern logic. And also courses in philosophy and human rights, in order to instill modern values into Islam, in which there are now only values of permitted-prohibited.
"Several Arab regimes have already begun to implement this plan, or parts of it. In Morocco, for example, philosophy is now being taught in high schools. In Algeria, a year after I sent an open letter to President Bouteflika, calling on him to eliminate Sharia instruction in high-school education, a law in this spirit was enacted last October. And in October 2005, Libya, too, canceled the teaching of jihadist Islam and of the verses that justify violence."
The roots of jihad
By Ehud Ein-Gil
PARIS - Friends and supporters of Al-Afif al-Akhdar are convinced: the life of the veteran fighter for secularism and democracy in the Arab world is in danger. A year ago, the Tunisian Islamic movement Al-Nahdha, which is persecuted by the authorities in its country, condemned him as the author of the scandalous book "The Unknown in the Prophet's Life." A Tunisian citizen, Akhdar has for decades been waging a stubborn campaign to expose the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, including those espoused by Sheikh Rashed al-Ghanoushi, the leader of Al-Nahdha, who has been in exile in London since 1991. In an unsigned declaration on its Internet site, Al-Nahdha referred to Akhdar, without naming him.
Two years earlier, the fingers of Akhdar's right hand became paralyzed, and the paralysis gradually spread almost to his whole body. He published the details of his illness in order to explain why he had stopped writing. Akhdar and his supporters are convinced that Sheikh Ghanoushi backed the declaration, even if he did not write it himself, which speaks of divine punishment being inflicted on the "true author" of the book that vilifies the prophet Mohammed.
In response to the declaration, which was construed as a fatwa condemning Akhdar to death, the Arab organization for the Protection of Freedom of Expression and the Press organized a petition "against obscurantist religious extremism," which called for the protection of Akhdar's life and freedom. Within two months, the petition was signed by more than 600 intellectuals and academics, most of them Arabs. Akhdar, who in the meantime regained his capacity for movement thanks to medical treatment (though he is still unable to write, because his fingers remain too stiff), recently contacted the London solicitor Daniel Machover about the possibility of taking legal action against Sheikh Ghanoushi.
It was not by chance that he turned to Machover, an expert in international law who gained fame last year when he tried to bring about the arrest of an Israeli officer, Major General (res.) Doron Almog, who had just landed in London, on suspicion that he had perpetrated war crimes while serving in the Gaza Strip. Akhdar wants Islamic terrorists to get the same treatment as people who have committed crimes against humanity. In October 2004 he was one of three Arab intellectuals who asked the UN secretary-general and the Security Council to establish an international tribunal to try such terrorists, including clerics who issue fatwas for the liquidation of "infidels."
Machover is the son of Prof. Moshe Machover, one of the founders of the radical socialist organization Matzpen, which was active in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Akhdar and Moshe Machover were members of a collective of Arab and Israeli revolutionaries who published the journal Khamsin in Paris and afterward in London. Already then, Akhdar had identified the danger inherent in Islamic fundamentalism and assailed the support of many left-wing activists for the "anti-imperialist" Islamic revolution in Iran. In 1981 Hamsin published an article by him entitled "Why the Reversion fo Islamic Archaism?" In the search for an analysis of the motivations and origins of Islamic terrorism following the events of September 11, 2001, the article was republished on several anarchist and left-wing Web sites. The article is signed Lafif Lakhdar, the author's user-friendly name for non-Arabs.
An Arab Spinoza
Akhdar, who is 72, conducts his struggle from an apartment in a poor Paris neighborhood, many of whose residents are immigrants. He lives alone, "but with my 4,000 books I don't feel alone." Until 2002 he wrote a weekly article for the London-based Arabic paper Al-Hayat, but was fired after he gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he condemned the barbarism of the corporal punishments that are meted out in Saudi Arabia, such as amputation of limbs.
Since then, only a few Arab Web sites agreed to publish his articles, mainly Ilaf, a liberal Arabic Web site whose owner pays him a modest monthly salary. Still, says Akhdar, whose first name, Al-Afif, means "the modest one," his economic situation now is better than it was during most of his life. Just a few years ago he was on the brink of starvation and traveled to the center of Paris every day (pensioners can ride the Metro free) to have a free hot meal in a "restaurant for the poor."
His supporters believe that he deserves a great deal more. Dr. Shaker al-Nabulsi, a Jordanian researcher who three months ago published (in Beirut) a book entitled "The Devil's Advocate," the first comprehensive study of Akhdar's thought, wrote an ironic article about Arab society, which worries about ill and aging singing stars but ignores the misery of an intellectual of Akhdar's stature. The article likens Akhdar to the "prophet of liberty," Thomas Paine, who fought for human rights and secularism in the American War of Independence and in the French Revolution. Yigal Carmon, head of the Washington-based MEMRI Institute, which studies the Middle East media - the institute has translated and published several of Akhdar's articles - likens him to Spinoza, who like him was persecuted and ostracized because he insisted on grounding his thought, including his critique of religion, on reason.
"If we were living in a normal world, the entire world left would acclaim him," Carmon says. "He is an amazing person, deeply immersed in Arabic and French culture, an intellectual with broad, diverse and up-to-date knowledge, not only in philosophy, Islam and history, but also in psychology, and he is thoroughly humane. The French, or the Europeans in general, who are coping with problems of immigration, should have placed him at the head of an advisory council on integration, where he could explain, educate and serve as a role model."
Akhdar, who is completely immersed in his present struggles, objects to the focus on him and his life. "Seven lines are enough to present me to readers in Israel," he says. "It is far more important to concentrate on explaining the dangers that inhere in jihadist Islam."
He was born to a poor Muslim family of fellahin; they lived in a hovel 13 kilometers from the nearest village. Seven of his eight brothers and sisters died in childhood (his only surviving brother is a lawyer in Tunisia). Apart from half a year in a French school, which was shut down during World War II, he received no formal education, only Koran studies in the village, and he chose a religious university because it was tuition-free and offered free lodgings and a modicum of food. ("For two weeks during the religion lessons, I secretly read Darwin.') He then studied law and afterward worked for three years as a lawyer.
In 1958 he represented an opponent of the regime who was convicted and executed. The authorities then issued an order restricting Akhdar's movement. In 1961 he fled Tunisia with the help of Algerian freedom fighters and spent nearly 20 years wandering the world using forged passports. He became a socialist in Algeria ("First of all from the gut, because of the hunger - I didn't understand why others had and I didn't - and then I found philosophical justification for the message of egalitarianism"). He was close to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, and was present at the meeting of Abu Jihad and Che Guevara, but in 1965 had to flee Algeria after Ben Bella was deposed in a military coup.
He spent some time in Germany, both East and West, and visited the Middle East, where he formed an unfavorable impression of the Baath regime in Syria, in part because of its attitude toward the Jewish community. In 1968 he was a guest of the Fatah leadership in Amman, which housed him in the same apartment as Yasser Arafat, rather than in a hotel, in order to protect him from Algerian intelligence agents. Over the years he has incurred the wrath of nearly every Arab regime, and thus the danger of death is nothing new to him. He has also been highly critical of the "progressive" national movements and of the Arab Communist parties, which supported dictatorial regimes of oppression and feared to confront the clerics.
"He is in the vanguard," says Prof. Emmanuel Sivan, an expert in Islamic history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who corresponds regularly with Akhdar and visited him during his illness. "Earlier, he was in the vanguard with regard to the Marxist camp and now, after the turnabout he experienced, he is in the vanguard of the Arab liberal camp. He takes sacred cows and deals with them. He was the first who dared to compile and publish in Arabic everything Lenin wrote about religion, and thus drew the enmity of the Arab Communist parties. He was also one of the first who acknowledged the need to study Israeli society methodically, and in recent years he has written much about what can be learned from Israeli democracy."
Akhdar was soon disappointed in the Fatah leaders, some of whom were influenced by the ideas of the Muslim Brothers. "Abu Jihad told me that there is no chance of overcoming Israel by force of arms, but 'if enough Palestinians are killed maybe the world will hear about us.'" He was far more impressed by Nayef Hawatmeh, founder of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "Hawatmeh argued that the only justification for forming a fighting force is to topple the Arab regimes," he says. "He convinced me. Hawatmeh also contributed a great deal to the entrenchment of the idea that the Israeli people and its rights must be recognized, and of the need to arrive at a compromise with Israel, but since then there was a great regression in his attitude toward the armed struggle."
Akhdar spent the next few years between Paris and Beirut, with a foray to socialist South Yemen. The civil war in Lebanon induced him to stay in Paris for good. At the end of the 1970s he received a Tunisian passport again, and for the first time in years emerged from the underground. He retranslated the Communist Manifesto into Arabic, based on the German source (he insisted that the cover declare that it is "the first genuine translation" and found a publisher only in the Israeli radical left), to which he appended a sequel of his own, "The Origins of the Arab Bourgeoisie." Some readers discerned a Koranic influence in his writing, to which he admits: "I integrate the poetic spirit of the early parts of the Koran, which are all poetry, with the logical, spare and synonym-less structure of the French sentence."
During this period, he met the Israeli writer Shimon Ballas in Paris. In 1984, Ballas published his novel "Last Winter," in which one of the protagonists is based on Akhdar. In the novel he is called Bashir Halimi, a revolutionary of Moroccan origin.
Terror from Islam
The book that reveals "secrets" from the life of Mohammed, which was written by a certain Dr. Al-Makrizi - though Al-Nahdha accused Akhdar of being the author - can be read in Arabic on a Christian Web site. A perusal of the book shows clearly that its goal is to "prove" to Muslim believers that Mohammed is not exactly the prophet who appears in their sacred writings and to persuade them to join the "true religion," namely Christianity. "The book was apparently written by an anti-Muslim Christian Egyptian who is not very smart," Akhdar says. "It is Christian religious propaganda. How can they accuse me, when they say I am a secular infidel atheist, of writing such a book? Am I a stupid Christian?"
And does the real author deserve to be the subject of a fatwa?
"No. The culture should be free, and every artist and every researcher should be free to write about all religions without any restriction."
Does that include the Danish cartoonist?
"Yes. It includes humor and satire. In the history of Islam you have the poet Abu Nawas, who joked about the Koran. He wrote, for example, "Your Lord did not say woe to the drunkards / But woe to the worshipers." That is a secular principle: separation between religion and politics, and between religion and artistic and literary creation, and between religion and scientific research. This is the greatest achievement of modernity. The clerics must not be allowed to intervene in these matters.
"As for the cartoons, one has to see which Arab and Islamic forces protested the affront to Mohammed and used it for their purposes. Syria was the first country to recall its ambassador from Denmark - the same Syria which in 1982 killed 30,000 'Mohammeds' at Hama. Its protest intended to make people forget its responsibility for the assassination of [former Lebanese prime minister Rafik] Hariri. Iran is the same Iran that prevents the Sunnis in Tehran from building a mosque. It protested in order to divert attention from its nuclear program.
"Saudi Arabia is the same Saudi Arabia that, as part of its plan to turn Mecca into a modern city, decided to demolish the building in which Mohammed married Khadija - a rare historic site - in order to build a public lavatory in its place. It protests in order to make [Muslims] forget its war against Al-Qaida. Sheikh Yusuf al-Kardawi, who stirred up the Arab world against the cartoon in his television program on Al Jazeera, did what all the Islamic movements did: He used the protest against the cartoon in order to show Muslims why it is necessary to break relations with the 'infidels' and in order to foment an interreligious war.
"One has to see who is using the cartoon for his purposes. The workers? The fellahin? No. It is those who are demolishing Mohammed's house and protesting a cartoon."
Many Muslims are protesting the identification of Mohammed, and hence of Islam as such, with terrorism. Is terrorism in fact ingrained in Islam?
"This is what the Islamists themselves say, like the spiritual mentor of Ayman al-Zawahiri , who is not second in importance in Al-Qaida, but first in terms of religious law, as well as planning and thought. His mentor is Sheikh Abed al-Qadr bin Abed al-Aziz (whose real name is A-Sayed Imam Abed al-Aziz a-Sharif), who asserted, 'Terror is from Islam and anyone who denies this is a heretic'. He and others rely on a few verses from the Koran, and I will give you, as an example, only one of them, from the Surah of the Spoils of War [Surah 8:60]: 'Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into [the hearts of] the enemies of Allah and your enemies' [translation from Abdullah Yusuf Ali, "The Meaning of the Holy Qur'an"]."
On what, then, do Muslims who deny the identification of Islam with jihad and terrorism rely on?
"There are two Islams from the period of Mohammed. There is Meccan Islam [referring to Mohammed's period in Mecca], which is a 'Christian' Islam - that is, under Christian influence - and is essentially peace-seeking. The use of violence, even for self-defense, was prohibited. In this Islam, jihad was prohibited. This Islam was the basis for the mystical Sufi movement.
"When Mohammed was forced to move from Mecca to Medina, a second Islam - jihadist Islam - was born. And it is this Islam that the contemporary terrorists have adopted. To justify the passage from the 'conciliatory' peace of Mecca to the militant peace of Medina, Mohammed told the Muslims that jihad is permissible only for self-defense [Surah of The Pilgrimage - Surah 22:39]: 'To those against whom war is made, permission is given [to fight], because they are wronged.' Mohammed was wronged - he was expelled from Mecca, and the purpose of the defensive jihad is to enable his return.
"Medinaist Islam is terrorist Islam. Sheikh Yusuf al-Kardawi says that terrorism in Islam is positive and should be welcomed. Here he is drawing in part on verse 12 in the Surah of the Spoils of War: 'I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: Smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them.' Osama bin Laden, in a speech on the occasion of Id al-Adha in 2003, said that it is best to follow the blessed terror about which al-Kardawi speaks."
Is there anything that can be done so that Meccan Islam will be strengthened and overcome Medinaist Islam?
"My answer is my plan for the reform of Islam, a reform of the Islamic discourse, of religious education, the religious media, the sermons in the mosques, and so forth. The plan is to remove from the textbooks all the violent and jihadist verses and leave them only in the source, in the holy writings."
Censorship?
"To a certain extent, yes. In Tunisia, this has been done since 1999. The plan is that instead of the violent verses, schoolchildren will be taught the universal verses of peace which exist in the Mecca period. For example, Verse 62 of the Surah of the Heifer, which says, 'Those who believe [in the Koran], and those who follow the Jewish [Scriptures], and the Christians and the Sabians, any who believe in Allah and the Last Day and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.' And there are another two similar verses. The sages of the Sharia all said that these are 'annulled' verses. We have to annul the annulment of these three verses and declare that it is the verses against the Jews and the Christians that are 'annulled.'
"The plan I proposed includes the introduction of modern sciences in the institutions of religious education, as well as comparative history of the religions and psychology and sociology of the religions, so that students will be able to understand the religious text in terms of modern logic. And also courses in philosophy and human rights, in order to instill modern values into Islam, in which there are now only values of permitted-prohibited.
"Several Arab regimes have already begun to implement this plan, or parts of it. In Morocco, for example, philosophy is now being taught in high schools. In Algeria, a year after I sent an open letter to President Bouteflika, calling on him to eliminate Sharia instruction in high-school education, a law in this spirit was enacted last October. And in October 2005, Libya, too, canceled the teaching of jihadist Islam and of the verses that justify violence."
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