ONE thousand four hundred years ago, a new faith burst out of the Arabian desert and exploded like forked lightning onto three continents.
Under the oasis green banner of the prophet Muhammad, the worriers of Islam converted whole civilizations to their holy book.
Their way of life and their world view. Today a reconstrued idea of Islam is spreading at what appears to be the same speed over the same territory .
From the north African coast to the steppes of central Asia, Muhammads precepts interpreted as a code of earthly behaviour are galvanizing Muslim societies with hope for renewal and fear of upheaval.
The whole world, infect, is watching and wondering about the impact of this tectonic shift, just as medieval Europe crouched when Islam reached the apogee of its power.
It seems al-Qaeda, Isis and Boko Haram have been instrumental in promoting Islamic fundamentalism (a term rejected by Muslims as a misnomer) therefore shaping up as the next millenial threat to liberal democracy.
A good place to start to understand the theories with the ideas of Sayyid Qutb, a literary critic in the 1930s and 1940s and later an activist in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood before being executed in 1966.
In the late 1940s Qutb spent two years living in America, an experience he hated and which appears to have turned him against what most people in the west would call modernity but which he saw as something much worse.
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On returning to Egypt, Qutb wrote a series of books, many from prison ,denouncing Jahiliyya (ignorance) a state of affairs categorised as the domination of man over man, or rather a subservience to man rather than to Allah.
Such a state of affairs he said had existed in the past, existed in the present and threatened to continue in the future.
It was the sworn enemy of Islam “in any time and place human beings face that clear-cut choice to observe the law of Allah in its entirety or to apply law laid down by man of one sort or another”.
“That is the choice modern style Jahiliyya in industrialised societies of Europe and America is essentially similar to the old. Time Jahiliyya in Pasaw and Nomadic Arabia for both systems, main is under the dominion of man rather than Allah.”
How representative are such views? Around one four of the people in the world are Muslims. Only a small fraction of these 1,5 billion Muslim will have heard of let alone subscribe to the ideas of theorist such as Qutb.
Many religious use rhetorical figures metaphors and images that can be interacted in many ways. Religions does not function as a code of law. Even law it’self gives rise to interpretation.
To a large extent however Islamic thought today is a closed system that admits no analysis, no debate of what are today common interpretations of the revealed word
There are two views of Islamic law. They correspond to the two potions of the Koran revealed Mecca and Medina.
In Mecca where prophet Muhammad’s religion was fighting for survival, the precepts were more militant while in Medina where Islam ruled, the messages became more tolerant of minority views and other faiths. Medina maybe the Islamists ideal State but the stricter codes of Mecca are what they tend to consult for inspiration.
Even as it seems a monolithic ideology today, Islamism wears many faces. Most Sunni Muslims for example cannot accept Shi’ite Iran’s allegiance to the principle of rule by the clergy not only on doctrinal grounds but also because so many official clerics in Sunni nations have been compromised by ties also with Government.
Also while many of the Sunni faithful unwittingly hark back to the policies of the Ottoman caliphs as the touch stone of a unitary mosque and state, Arabs with longer historical memories recall that the ottoman sultans resorted to this practice as a none – too success full way of legitimating their imperialistic rule.
Democracy is based on the idea that men makes laws Islam contains in the Koran a set of laws, dictated directly to Muhammad and therefore not open to revision.
However, it is no less obvious to Muslim than to other people that some of God’s orders leave gaps to be filled in and that others require interpretation.
This opens the way for men to make plenty of rules for themselves. The Koran for example does not prescribe any particular system of government requires rules who must be chosen by some method that is open to argument.
Modern State also require many more laws that are inscribed in the unalterable Koran. In fact, only about 80 of the Koran’s 6 000 verses lay down public law, and not rules of public law an not many of those have much application in the modern world.
Much of what is loosely called Sharia derives from other sources: The Sunna (the teaching of the prophet ) the Ijuma (the consensus of religions scholars) and the Qiyas (legal reasoning).
So here is example room for interpretation (what Muslims call Ijithad).
Even some explicit laws laid down in the Koran are routinely circumvented by Islamic judges. The Koran, for example, says pretty plainly that a thief should be punished by losing his hand.
However, the number of crimes requiring these so called Hudud punishments is small and most Muslim countries with Hudud laws on their statute books have found ways to ensure that the punishments are seldom if ever carried out.
Almost nobody agrees with anybody else about what these terms mean or how they overlap. The devout Muslim feels that Islam is just a more successful religion than its competitors.
It is indeed the world’s fastest growing religion, however, it is the atrocities carried out by renegade Islamic groups that is producing big consequences.
