Tharwalizations

Myth of the Golden Age

One of the main myths that seems to hamper all efforts at modernizing religious faiths, especially with regard to Islam, is the insistence on the concept of the Golden Age. This myth keeps the Muslim Community focused in its basic outlook on the past. As such, any effort at changing and modernizing Islam is often billed as an attempt at retrieving its erstwhile purity.

The essence of this predilection is captured in the often-used term these days of Salafiyyah or Salafism. The whole purpose of the Salafi thought is to draw lessons from the Holy Past in order to help us navigate our way through the troubling waters of the unholy present, and head towards a future that should be nothing more than a recreation of the Golden Age ofthe times of yore. 

But how can one live up to ideals that are often tied to particular forms and ways of being? Because such an insistence on the past and the holiness of its guidance, leaves no room but to fall into the trap of formal, if not formulaic conformity.

To me, this tendency seems more and more to fly in the face of individual experiential wisdom, that is, the wisdom derived from one’s own experiences in life.

People usually strive continuously to live up to their ideals. Their lives are often nothing but a constant struggle to perfect themselves. But how could they do that, when they are constantly asked to filter the data derived from their own particular experiences through the prism of a sanctified past, and without being assigned the parallel legitimacy of filtering that very past through the prism of their own individual experiences (not to mention their collective experiences as well, as seen through their individual minds)?

If Islam is perfectible, or, at the very least, if our interpretation of it is perfectible, then such a lack of interactibility with the past, and with time ad being as a whole, is more commensurate with degradation than perfectibility.

In short, if Islam is perfectible, then the Past cannot be viewed as perfect, not to mention holy. As such, a Golden Age might perhaps await us in the future, but it has definitely never existed in the past.

Copts, Women & Beer

In a conference on civil dialogue that took place a few years ago, participants discussed the possibility of conducting a serious dialogue between Islamists and secularists. I remember that, at the time and in response to an Egyptian colleague who advocated dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood in his country, we coined the term “Copts, Women and Beer” to reefer to three main issues that one needs to deal with, which are: diversity issues, gender issues and privacy issue.  

But perhaps, the three issues boil down to one thing really: the issue of boundaries and intersections between the public and private spheres. For so long as Islamist tend to expand the boundaries of the former at the expense of the latter, secularists will have a major problem. The slogan “the Quran is our constitution” is not the problem in itself. The problem is in how the Islamists tend to define the pronoun “our.”

Their tendency to include in this “our” of theirs all the citizens of Egypt, not to mention what they would describe as the Muslims World takes away the element of free choice from the formula, as those who don’t believe in the slogan of the Brotherhood find themselves included in this “our,” whether they like it or not. This does not create much room for establishing common grounds.

For this reason, all dialogue that has so far taken place between Egyptian Islamists and secularists tended to be of a tactical nature. The real issues separating the two sides have never been seriously dealt with. Meanwhile, freedom of conscience, despite statements to the contrary, remains unacknowledged by all major Islamist groups. For when one moves beyond the general affirmation towards the discussion of specific issues related to “Copts, women and beer,” that is, to issues of diversity, gender and privacy, specific objections voiced by the Islamists tend to belie any commitment to the general principle of freedom.

Unless, ways are found to commit those Islamists that present themselves as moderate to certain clear public stands on such “details,” no dialogue between Islamists and secularists could be considered viable , and no agreement could be expected to prove lasting.