FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 634 3 June 15

Should Islam's Prophet be re-radicalised? In order to construct a Muhammad acceptable to Western secularism? An arrogant and one-sided view.
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TOM HOLLAND’S MUHAMMAD

‘De-radicalising Muhammad’. Writer Tom Holland – a lanky, lantern-jawed, aristocratic-looking Englishman - is after that. Muhammad has been misinterpreted, he claims. Eradicating Islam’s Prophet from the grip of Jihadis and other naughty boys is the mighty task. Not all Muslims will be overjoyed, methinks.

The Muhammad Holland wishes to expunge you find in the Prophet’s canonical biographies. When ISIS smashes ancient sculptures, enslaves females and kills blasphemers – all practices abhorrent to the liberal West - Muhammad’s example can be invoked in justification. This dangerous Prophet must be eradicated or re-engineered. A more appealing, mystical, cosmically spiritual Muhammad, a beloved of God, ‘a ruby amongst stones’ must replace him.

Holland’s argument relies on epistemology. We are actually ignorant about the real, historical Prophet, he contends. Indeed, despite the mountains of Islamic collections of reports about what he said and did, ‘we know less about the historical Muhammad than we do about the historical Jesus.’ A statement that will annoy Muslims quite a bit – and Christians, too. Yet, this ignorance is a window of opportunity. A happy chance, thanks to that nescience, to de-radicalise or ‘tame’ the radical Muhammad. To construct a better, less threatening, more nice and acceptable (to the West) prophetic figure.

Holland fingers one tradition about Muhammad that sticks in the gullet of our culture. It is his child bride, Aisha. Marriage was consummated when she was a girl of nine. Were this tradition historically untrue, of course the problem or scandal would evaporate.

In fact Aisha’s age was never an issue in the eyes of Muslims. The marriage was a political alliance sanctioned by the girl’s father, Abu Bakr. There is no evidence Aisha ever resented the union, quite the opposite. Being wedded to the Prophet, Allah’s Messenger: what honour could be greater? Nonetheless, given the current European obsessions with underage female abuse, this is a stick many gleefully wield to beat Muslims about the head. It is a Western Zeitgeist thing, as Holland himself acknowledges. It is certainly not a sin in the Bible or in Church teaching. I surmise future generations will be nonplussed, intrigued by our epoch’s feminist, gender-equality fixations on such sexual mores.

Not any kind of de-radicalised Prophet would do for Tom Holland. A Muhammad, however spiritual, who preached the Incarnation and the Trinity (like in Harry Turtledove’s daring Agent of Byzantium) would be odious to Muslims. Holland’s preference is for a type of Sufi Prophet, hence the hint at Muhammad’s cosmic role, his transcendent beauty and the like, somewhat evoking the abstruse ideas of that supreme Sufi fountainhead, Ibn Arabi. Still, if he assumes that Sufis are necessarily quietist and peace-loving, Holland is badly mistaken. Many Sufi brotherhoods are fiercely warlike. The terrible Mahdi of Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad, was a Sufi all right but he fought the British like a tiger, being just as fundamentalist as any caliphate warrior.

That is not to say that some Sufis – genuine ones, not Downing Street-remote controlled ones - might not surprise you. Muhammad Mahmoud Taha, the Sudanese martyr, championed the ‘Second Message of Islam’. He distinguished between different Qur’anic Surahs, prioritising the more spiritual ones over the overtly political and legalistic ones. In a way, he was looking for the mystical Prophet. He also founded a political party meant to implement his programme. Infortunately the dictator Nimeiri, anxious to court fanatics, accused Taha first of apostasy and then of treason and had him publicly hanged in Khartoum. Taha remains interesting, however, because his ideas were not cranked up by Western interference but originated from within Islam.

An aside. Why isn’t there a drive to de-radicalise biblical leaders like Moses and Joshua? Moses, the prophet who led the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage towards the Holy Land, was pretty violent. He had three thousand people who had worshipped the Golden Calf slain. The Mosaic Law, the Torah, is just as fierce as the Sharia’ on idolaters and apostates. And any genocidal ruler would admire Joshua’s wars of extermination in Canaan. But of course no one today takes Moses or Joshua as models to imitate in that respect…

Holland also displays a touching naivety concerning the power of scholarly opinions in matters of faith. If, by hypothesis, Muslim savants swallowed Orientalist ideas about the non-historicity of what they have hitherto believed about their Prophet, does it follow that it would sway the Muslim masses? After all, Christian evangelical preachers keep breathing fire and brimstone before large congregations, regardless of learned and dull books by Bultmann and Don Cupitt. Maybe that is as it should be: Christianity was established by confessors, not professors.

What bugs the priest about Tom Holland’s argument is its unmitigated arrogance and one-way perspective. Not for a fraction of a moment does he seem to doubt the universal, absolute values of his culture. Western liberal, secular democracy is the inflexible standard by which Islam and Muhammad must be judged. That is incredibly limited and provincial. Has the thought ever occurred to him that Planet Earth might house traditions, cultures and religions whose values might be different from his own and yet still possess validity? The Russian thinker Alexander Dugin has strongly attacked the hegemonic and imperialistic and aggressive character of Western universalism. He is right.

De-radicalise the radical Muhammad? It is up to Muslims. For myself, I am happy to puncture and deflate Western secular parochialism.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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