How and Why Muhammad Made a Difference?

TRANSCRIPT: How and Why Muhammad Made a Difference?

By Michael Cromartie Posted: Sunday, July 16, 2006

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: Faith Angle Conference

How and Why Muhammad Made a Difference Monday, May 22, 2006

Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Florida, in May 2006 for the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle conference on religion, politics and public life. Conference speaker Michael Cook, widely considered among the most outstanding scholars on the history of Islam, is the author of several classic works on Muhammad and early Islamic theology, including A Brief History of the Human Race (2005) and Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2001) In this presentation, Cook vividly described the merging of politics and religion in the life of Muhammad and how this legacy shapes the Muslim world today.

Speaker:
Michael Cook, Cleveland Dodge professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Adviser, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In Mr. Cook's presentation, he refers to a packet of visual aids he provided to the audience, which are relevant to his remarks. We recommend the reader download the pdf file before reading the transcript.




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Michael Cromartie
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Welcome to Key West. We’re delighted you could be here. We have a group of your colleagues who meet twice a year for lunch to talk about what the next conference should be about, and what topics we should cover. When we met last time, it was at the height of the cartoon controversy, and we wanted an expert on Islam and Muhammad to speak. Everybody in the room agreed that if we could get Professor Michael Cook, it would be great because Dr. Cook is one of the leading authorities, not only in this country but in the world, on the subject.
Professor Cook holds the Cleveland Dodge chair of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, a chair formerly held by his teacher, Bernard Lewis. He’s the author of many books. One of his most recent books is called A Brief History of the Human Race. One of our first questions to him will be: How does one write a brief history of the human race? I hope he’ll tell us.

MICHAEL COOK: I ought to start by apologizing for the fact that I am bringing you stale news. I’m a card-carrying medievalist. I’m here to talk about how and why Muhammad made a difference. Just about everything I’m talking about will be events that happened in the seventh century -- (laughter) -- but don’t get the idea that those events are therefore irrelevant to the present day. I suspect that some of them are deeply relevant, though sometimes in ways that I’m not good at articulating. I’ll try and come back to that at the end.



Michael Cook
I’m not going to drop you straight into the seventh century. That would be unkind. I want to back up a few centuries and give you some background about the rise of monotheism. Maybe you know all about that already. In that case, I’m just reminding you.

The rise of monotheism happened late in the day. For something like a thousand years, you had monotheism, and it didn’t make a significant dent on world history. For many centuries, it was the religion of the ancient Israelites, a small Near Eastern people, and of their descendants, the Jews. Even when it started to spread to non-Jews in significant numbers in the form of Christianity, Christianity remained for the best part of three centuries the religion of a persecuted minority. But that changed dramatically in the fourth century, and the guy who changed it was the Roman Emperor Constantine.

Constantine adopted Christianity as his religion and, by extension, as the religion of the Roman Empire. At that point, monotheism, in its Christian form, for the first time became a bandwagon. Down until the time of Constantine, you had to be pretty strongly interested in your eternal salvation for it to make sense to convert to Christianity. After Constantine, people like you and me are jumping on the bandwagon. Well, I shouldn’t speak for you, but people like me are jumping on the bandwagon. It makes excellent sense in this world to convert to Christianity.

What’s relevant from my point of view, from our point of view, is that this bandwagon effect is not confined to the Roman Empire. It’s very strong there, but it’s also pulling and tugging on peoples outside the empire. From the fourth century onward, a whole series of peoples around the Roman world decide to give up their ancestral paganism and convert to Christianity. It’s the Franks; it’s the English; it’s the Irish; it’s the Goths; it’s the Armenians, the Georgians, the Ethiopians -- you name them. This is a big historical trend. But whenever you have a big historical trend, there’s going to be somebody out there bucking the trend.

For example, you have pagan holdouts -- people like the Lithuanians who are so incredibly obstinate that 1,000 years after Constantine, they still insist on worshiping their pagan gods. Or you have people who like to play the field, like the Khazars. The Khazars turn up their noses at Christianity, and they decide to take their monotheistic medicine in the form of Judaism.

Both those peoples are of some consequence if you study the history of the regions they lived in. But they didn’t, either of them, make a significant dent on world history; the Arabs did. How did the Arabs do it? First and perhaps most important of all, the Arabs did not convert to Christianity like everybody else. Neither did they cling obstinately to their ancestral paganism. Nor did they turn up their noses at Christianity and adopt Judaism. What they did was to come up with a monotheist religion of their own. That initiated an extraordinary series of events.

The Arabs, in their Arabian homeland, came together to form a state. Then they set out from their homeland and conquered an empire that stretched all the way from Spain to Central Asia and northwestern India. That empire was the crucible in which the Islamic world as we know it began to come into existence.

It’s an extraordinary sequence of events, and lots of people are involved in it. But the most crucial person is Muhammad, because he was the one who gave the Arabs their new monotheism and established their state.

How and why did he manage to make that difference, a difference that has made an enormous dent on the history of the world and continues to dent the world as we know it today? The prosaic answer is that he was 1) a successful prophet and 2) a successful politician.

First, Muhammad as a prophet. Muhammad was born about 570. Forty years later, around 610, he began to receive revelations from on high. He continued to receive those revelations for something like 20 years, and collectively, those revelations constitute the Koran. The Koran was put together in the exact form in which we have it today something like 20 years after his death in 632. Some time around 650 —--give or take a few years -- the Koran is put together the way it is now.

What I have to do now is give you the message of the Koran. How do I do that? In a talk of this length, I have reduced the Koran to a sound bite. I feel bad about that. What authority do I have to reduce God’s message to a sound bite? Fortunately, the early Muslims come to my aid. They didn’t have the concept of a sound bite, but they did develop by the end of the seventh century a concept to which I can give the name of a “coin bite.”

Let me show you a typical coin, a completely non-Islamic coin, an American quarter (Page 3). Does that look vaguely familiar? This is a classic recipe for a coin. One side is political; the other side you could call religious. On the political side, you have a guy’s head, and he’s your king, or if not, then some equivalent figure. This side, you have an eagle, because either you guys worship an eagle god, or else maybe the eagle is a national symbol.

Here is a seventh century coin, and it’s exactly the same recipe (Page 4). This is typical of the design of coins minted by the Persian Empire, which is the empire the Arabs knocked down when they set out to conquer the world. This style is a little different, but it’s the same recipe. You’ve got the guy’s head there -- that’s the Persian emperor. Unlike George Washington, he has a crown on his head. Over here, we have a Zoroastrian fire altar and a couple of attendants on either side. There’s the political side and the religious side -- same basic design.

But the odd thing about this coin is, as some of you may have noticed, we have a bit of Arabic script. What’s that doing here? This coin was minted long after the Persian Empire disappeared, some time in the 690s, and it was minted not under Persian rule but under the rule of the Arabs -- the Muslims. What on earth were the Arabs doing making propaganda for an empire they had destroyed and for a religion theirs had superseded? It’s a good question, and eventually they started to ask themselves that question. They decided it was time for something different (Page 5). It’s recognizable as a coin: It’s round, has two sides, but everything else is changed. There is nothing but words here. Nobody’s head, nobody’s symbol, just words. In fact, 45 words in Arabic script, and those 45 words are the coin bite.

I guess you guys don’t readily decipher Arabic script on seventh century coins, so let me make it a bit easier. If you can’t read it, never mind; I can.

First, there are eight words used for a purely business purpose. This dirham -- that’s the kind of coin this is -- was minted in 733 or 734. That’s all we get. No name of any ruler is mentioned. Everything else on this coin is made over to God, and the words are derived from the Koran. Here we have the Koran reduced to a coin bite, and let’s see what the Muslims in the late seventh century decided to put there.

“There is no God but God alone without companion.” That’s good: no-compromise, no-nonsense monotheism -- very clear. We flip to the other side, and here in the center we have a rather longer passage: “He is God, One. God, the everlasting refuge, who has not begotten and has not been begotten and equal to him is not anyone” (Koran, chapter 112.) That’s the same uncompromising monotheism, but note also a side swipe at the Christians. The Christians are notorious for believing that God has a son; hence, the denial here that God has begotten anyone.

Finally, down here around the margin, we have: “Muhammad is the messenger of God” -- that’s a parting of the ways with the Jews and Christians, who don’t believe that Muhammad is a prophet -- “whom He has sent with the guidance and the religion of truth” -- so Muhammad’s religion is the religion of truth, Islam is the religion of truth, and this Jewish and Christian stuff is not -- “that He may uplift it above every religion, though the unbelievers be averse” -- that’s what, in religion departments, is called triumphalism.

There might be things I personally would have liked to see included on their coin, but let’s just leave it at that; that’s what they chose to put there. That’s as much as I wanted to say about Muhammad as a prophet, so you’ve got his message.

Now, Muhammad as a politician. In the timeline I’ve given you (Page 1) there are three events from the career of the prophet as a politician: the migration from Mecca to Medina, the raid on the Banu ’l-Mustaliq and the submission of Mecca. Two of those events are very important -- the migration to Medina and the submission of Mecca -- but they’re not the ones I’m going to talk about at any length.

The migration from Mecca to Medina is the central political event of the prophet’s career. The prophet has a problem in Mecca, and he finds the solution in Medina.

The problem in Mecca is he and his followers are unpopular with the pagan population. Why? Because of their monotheist incivility: They go around trashing pagan gods, and that’s not appreciated. Muhammad has to get his followers out of Mecca and find somewhere where they’ll be more secure. The answer, after a long search, is Medina.

Medina is an oasis about 200 miles north of Mecca that is in an awful political mess. Some of the Medinans had a hunch if they brought in Muhammad, he could clear up the mess, get things together and life could be more tolerable for them. They invite Muhammad to come, and they let him bring his followers along, too.

Muhammad establishes himself in Medina, and once he’s established in Medina, he starts to build a state -- a rudimentary, rather tribal state. This is the depths of Arabia, but it’s a real state. Between 622 and 632, he is expanding the power of his state. One of the milestones in the expansion of that power over Arabia is the submission of his own hometown of Mecca in 630.

What about this raid on the Banu ’l-Mustaliq? By the standards of the other events just mentioned, this is a trivial event. That’s exactly why I’m going to tell you about it: Because I can use it to give you a sense of the texture of Muhammad’s political career. The map on Page 2 shows you Arabia -- in context -- Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Roman Empire up there, Persian Empire up there, and here is Medina where the prophet in 622 is beginning to establish his state.

Who are these Banu ’l-Mustaliq? They are a small tribal group that lives in the desert between Mecca and the sea. Why does Muhammad decide to attack them? He gets intelligence that they’re about to attack him, so it’s a preemptive strike. Of course, we don’t have their account of it. That’s how the story is told in our sources: that this is a preemptive strike.

Muhammad comes down from Medina with his troops, his followers, and he catches the Banu ’l-Mustaliq -- the tribe -- by surprise at a watering place, and there’s a battle. I think 10 members of the tribe get killed. Two hundred of them are taken captive; that means they are slaves. Some of those 200 are men, but many of them are women and children.

Muhammad has scored a victory. What has it cost him? Very little. Only one Muslim has been killed on the battlefield. Only one of his followers has been killed, and I’ll come back to that.

At this point, the military operation is over, and Muhammad turns around and takes his followers back to Mecca. At least that’s the military side of it. What about the politics?

First of all, there’s the Muslim that got killed in the battle. What I didn’t tell you is he didn’t die heroically fighting the enemy. It was a case of friendly fire. Another of Muhammad’s followers mistook him for the enemy and killed him, and this creates problems. The family of the slain man, under Muslim rules, has a claim to blood money. The slain man has a brother who lives in Mecca. Mecca at this time is pagan -- the brother is pagan -- but he comes to Muhammad’s camp, and he pretends that he’s converted to Islam. Muhammad thinks that the guy is playing by Muslim rules, and he makes arrangements for the guy to get the blood money. But when nobody is paying attention, the guy, who’s actually playing by pagan rules, kills the killer of his brother and absconds. He goes back to Mecca, extemporizing poetry about how now he’s through with being a Muslim and is going back to being a good old-fashioned pagan.

Muhammad has been had, and there’s nothing he can do about it. But not quite nothing. A few years later in 630, when Mecca submits to him, Muhammad behaves magnanimously, but he does have a hit list of certain people that he’s not going to forgive. This guy who had pretended to be a Muslim and killed the killer of his brother is one of them.

Now let me tell you about an incident that was much more threatening and dangerous. First, two bits of background. One, we’re still by the watering place, and a watering place in western Arabia is a pretty small affair. This is a very arid part of the world. If people are crowding around the watering place, there’s going to be pushing and shoving. Two, you may tend to think of Muhammad’s followers as being a band of brothers who will fight for each other to the death, who are totally loyal to each other, etc., and, at a certain level, you may be right. But it could be more accurate to think of Muhammad’s followers as a shaky coalition. One of several fault lines that runs through this coalition is the distinction between the prophet’s Meccan followers and his Medinan followers. The Medinans don’t like the Meccans that much. They feel resentful. Their view is: “We were so decent to these Meccan guys. We let them come here as refugees, and look at them! Now they’re taking over our oasis. Why are we putting up with this?”

So what happens at the water hole? Two men get into a shoving match. These two men are not people of any particular consequence, but they do have some connections, and one of them is connected to the prophet’s Meccan followers; the other is connected to the prophet’s Medinan followers. The shoving match escalates into a fight, and the two men then call out for help from their people.

I should mention here a character called Ibn Ubayy. He is a Medinan, and he’s a lukewarm Muslim. He goes along, but he’s not happy. The reason he’s not happy is before the prophet came to Medina, Ibn Ubayy was a powerful man with ambitions to make himself king of the oasis. When Muhammad comes, his ambitions disintegrate, and he’s sulky about it. He will never miss an opportunity to go to the prophet’s Medinan followers and say, “Why are you putting up with these Meccans?” That’s exactly what he’s doing on this occasion of the shoving match at the water hole. He’s going around, out of earshot of the prophet, saying to the prophet’s Medinan followers: “The first thing we should do when we get back to Medina is throw those Meccans out.” It’s not a good situation, and the prophet hears about it.

What is Muhammad to do? Like any sensible politician, the first thing he does is ask for advice. He gets advice from one of his Meccan followers who says: “You’ve got to take Ibn Ubayy and kill him right now.” But Muhammad is not happy with that idea because he’s afraid of the backlash. He gets advice from one of his Medinan followers, and the guy says: “You should be nice to this guy, because the bottom line is you are in a stronger political position than him.”

What does Muhammad actually do? As politicians often do, he does nothing. No, that’s not quite right. He does do something. He orders his followers to march back to Medina on the double. The result is they’re so exhausted they don’t have any energy left for bickering. Luckily, they don’t encounter a hostile armed force; that could have been a disaster. The plan works -- Muhammad gets them back to Medina. After that, Ibn Ubayy fades out; he loses credit with his own people and dies soon after. Muhammad can’t resist congratulating himself for making the right decision.

I’ve given you lots of detail. Let’s stand back from the trees and see if we can find a wood here.

The first one is the extraordinary success of Muhammad in initiating a chain of events that establishes the Islamic world. We’ve seen he has a message from on high. He has skill as a military leader and a politician. But how does he make the leap from a being a guy with a message and political skill to having this enormous impact on world history?

Let’s go back and think for a minute about Arabia. I’ve mentioned before that Arabia is an arid part of the world. Before the days of oil, Arabia is also poor. Very poor compared to the densely settled agricultural lands outside Arabia, and immensely poor compared to, say, northwestern Europe or southern China or the eastern United States. Poor environments are an unfriendly place for states. If you want to establish a halfway decent state, you need a nice, fat tax base, and you’re not going to find that in Arabia. Instead of states in Arabia, what you find are tribes. Because of the impoverished environment, these tribes tend to be rather flat -- they don’t have steep social hierarchies. That means in Arabia basically every adult male has to be a warrior and a politician in his own right. It’s a society with a high level of military and political skill and activity, but it’s also a society without any central coordination. The result is, through the centuries, the Arabs fritter away their military and political energy in small-scale conflict among themselves. That’s why, before the seventh century, the tribes are never a big danger to their neighbors outside Arabia. Sure, they come and raid and steal the chickens and kidnap a few people, but it’s nothing big.

What Muhammad somehow did -- using not only his political skills but also his monotheist message that came from outside the tribal system -- was to get the Arabs on the same page. If you could do that, even temporarily, you could send the Arabs out to conquer the world. Not in Muhammad’s lifetime, but a couple of years after his death, starting in 634 -- that’s when his followers conquer this empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia. They had never done it before, and they never did it again. Muhammad, in his dual role as prophet and politician, is the absolutely crucial factor that made it possible.

That’s one angle. For the other angle let me go back to what I was saying about Christianity becoming a bandwagon in the fourth century. Any world religion must have become a bandwagon at some stage in its history, or it wouldn’t be a world religion. But world religions vary with regard to the timing of the bandwagon effect. In the Christian case, you have to wait until the fourth century for the Christian bandwagon to start rolling. Before the fourth century, you have to be pretty concerned about your eternal salvation for it to make sense to become a Christian.

In the Muslim case, the timing is quite different. Once the prophet gets to Medina, once he establishes this state, there is already the beginning of a bandwagon. In other words, the bandwagon effect in Islam comes extremely early. What does this mean? It means three things. One is that the historical experiences of early Christianity and early Islam are completely different. In the Christian case, you have a religion that remains the religion of a persecuted minority for the best part of three centuries. All the basic shapes of the religion are already set before the bandwagon starts. By contrast, in the Islamic case, you have less than 12 years in which the Muslims are a persecuted minority in Mecca. From that point on, once they get to Medina, and the prophet starts building his state, the bandwagon is rolling.

If, as you listen to my stories of the prophet, you have the Gospels in mind, you must have a sense that these stories are very, very different. They not only relate different historical circumstances, but they are told to a different audience. The audience of the Gospels is people who are seriously concerned about their salvation. The audience of the stories I’ve told you -- well, the salvation-minded might be listening, too -- but these stories cater to the military and political elite of the Arab-Islamic Empire. They address people who are interested in military operations, who like to know about preemptive strikes and incidents of friendly fire. These stories are told for people extremely interested in politics, who are fascinated by the judgment calls required to keep a shaky coalition together.

I hope you see this difference, this interest in military and political affairs, which makes the life of Muhammad, as it is written, so different in texture from the life of Jesus, as it’s written in the Gospels. Think what it means that you have, at the present day, these two utterly different heritages, these two utterly different ways of approaching and describing the life of the founder of the religion. I think that helps explain both why Islamic fundamentalism has been such a relative success in recent decades, and why people coming from a Christian background find it incredibly hard to understand it.

(Applause.)

MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you very much. Now we’ll take questions.



Kathleen Parker
KATHLEEN PARKER, TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES: Could you talk about how the phenomenon of Osama bin Laden evolved out of this phenomenon of Muhammad. Every time you talked about Muhammad, I’m seeing Osama bin Laden in my head.

MR. COOK: I know you are. I’m not going to make any judgment about whether Osama bin Laden is making a correct use of his (Islamic) heritage. But certain features of that heritage are relevant to him. Like the prophet, Bin Laden is a political character, and he is involved in intense military activity. So those aspects of the prophet’s heritage do a lot for bin Laden.

JOHN COCHRAN, CQ WEEKLY: You said you didn’t want to talk about whether Osama bin Laden had perverted his history. Why not? In the American political context, it is a sound bite that bin Laden has severely perverted a great religion, so your view on that would be interesting.

MR. COOK: That’s a fair question. Shortly after 9/11, there was a book published called How Did This Happen? that included an essay by Karen Armstrong in which she said a world religion has been hijacked by this band of fanatics. I don’t buy that for a minute. I think there are genuinely things present in this heritage that Osama bin Laden can legitimately use.

It gets tricky where you start asking exact questions about what he does. What is justified in terms of the heritage and what is not? That’s controversial in the Western academe. It’s also very controversial in the general Islamic fundamentalist milieu, too. For example, I understand that after 9/11 there was a great deal of discussion among Salafis -- that is, among Muslim fundamentalists of that streak -- about what in 9/11 was and wasn’t justified. You had a whole series of positions, including one that sticks in my mind, which said that the people in the building had it coming to them, but the people in the plane that was hijacked, they should not have been killed. I asked my source if that meant Osama bin Laden would go to hell because those people in the airplane had been killed. The answer was no, that was just an error of judgment.

E.J. DIONNE JR., THE WASHINGTON POST: Could you talk about the roots of the Koran in two ways. One, how closely does it parallel the Arab paganism in which Muhammad was raised, and how much did it break with it? Secondly, how aware was Muhammad of Christian and Jewish sources, and how do those play into it?

MR. COOK: The thing the Koran most obviously shares with the pagan tradition -- particularly in the early parts of the Koran, or what are taken to be the early parts of the Koran -- is a rhyming prose. Pagan soothsayers, according to the tradition, used to deliver their -- what do soothsayers deliver? -- sooths. Anyway, they used to deliver them in a certain style of rhymed prose, and there are parts of the Koran that are in a similar style of rhymed prose. The whole of the Koran tends to have an element of rhyme running through the verses. That’s something that looks like a pagan heritage. There’s not much else, apart from occasional references to particular pagan gods, but that’s what you’d expect.

Turning to Jewish and Christian sources. If you don’t think that the Koran was revealed by God, then it’s obvious Muhammad had Jewish and Christian sources. What people since the 19th century and long before have noticed is the accounts you find in the Koran of, say, the career of Noah tend to diverge from accepted narratives in Jewish and Christian sources. The question is why. One possible explanation would be Muhammad got it wrong. He misquoted his sources. The other possibility is he wasn’t getting it direct from Jewish and Christian sources. He was getting it downstream, by some chain of transmission. Nobody has a way of proving it’s one or the other, but the Jewish and Christian influence is unmistakable.

MR. DIONNE: Are there explicit references in the Koran to Christianity and Judaism?

MR. COOK: The Koran is full of references to Christianity and Judaism. The question is whether the information came from a Jew or a Christian, but got garbled, or whether it’s a downstream source that has already been through several transmissions.

MR. DIONNE: Could you elaborate on that? Muhammad was aware of Christianity and Judaism. He had various options; this is assuming the Koran is not purely divine revelation. He might have adopted Christianity or Judaism wholesale or in larger part than he did. Do we know why he chose his course instead of sticking with the two forms of monotheism he had available to him?

MR. COOK: The tradition tells he initially saw himself simply as the latest monotheist prophet and expected Jews and Christians to follow him. Christians weren’t relevant because there weren’t any in Mecca or Medina. Or if there were, they were in very small numbers. The Jews were relevant because there was a substantial Jewish population in Medina, and they rejected him. You can follow the tradition and see his decision to come up with a new form of monotheism as a reaction to being rejected by the Jews in Medina.

To give you one example: There’s a series of confusing Koranic passages about the direction in which Muslims should pray. As the tradition explains it, the prophet originally told his followers in Mecca to pray towards Jerusalem. That’s a good Jewish thing to do. But then, when he starts having bad relations with the Jews, he receives a revelation that says turn around and pray towards Mecca.

This event is a nationalization of monotheism. It links to the belief that Mecca -- that is, the sanctuary known as the Kaaba -- was not originally a pagan sanctuary but a monotheist sanctuary established by Abraham and Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs. So the Kaaba becomes a national monotheist sanctuary.

TERRY EASTLAND, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Somewhere, Bernard Lewis wrote about the famous story in the Gospels regarding the tribute money and Jesus (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.”) You made the observation that Christianity had within its original material that distinction, which later matured in the West. I think Lewis said this distinction was not present in the original materials of Islam.

If Muhammad and his followers were acquainted with that story, what was their reaction to it?

Since then has there been any movement in Muslim thought towards discovering that distinction?

MR. COOK: I don’t know of any early Muslim reaction to that particular passage in the Gospels. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, but I haven’t seen it. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were no recorded reaction because the early Muslims had their Koran; they regarded that as the definitive revelation. As far as they were concerned, the New Testament and the Old Testament were suspect -- originally revealed texts but corrupted by subsequent followers of Moses and Jesus. You couldn’t rely on them, and they tended to ignore them.



Michael Cook
That said, a lot seeped through from Christian and Jewish circles into Islamic circles. They had knowledge of things that went on in the Gospels. In the later Middle Ages, some Islamic scholars became extremely knowledgeable about the Gospels and the Old Testament. But neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament is part of the mainstream Islamic tradition as texts. The main thing the early Muslims dwell on is passages in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament they interpret as predictions of Muhammad’s coming. Anything else doesn’t get too much attention.

Your second question: Did they develop something like that distinction later on, without having it in such a neat form as established by the founder of the religion? The answer is definitely yes. The Islamic state starts off being ruled by Muhammad, who is both a prophet and a politician. He then has successors who rule it after him. They are not prophets; they are Caliphs. But the Caliphs are nevertheless occupying an intrinsically religious office as well as an obviously political one. They have a religious authority as well as political power, so we still have the Islamic state here.

But at some point that nobody has exactly agreed upon, the Caliphate falls apart. It falls apart in material historical terms: The Islamic world breaks up into numerous distinct states. But it also falls apart morally in the sense that people ceased to recognize those who claimed to be Caliphs as having anything like the prestige, the rectitude, the authority of the early Caliphs who came immediately after Muhammad.

By the 11th century, Muslims are talking in terms of what you could call a dichotomy between religion and the state. In doing that, they are partly echoing a pre-Islamic Iranian Persian tradition, in which that dichotomy was a familiar dictum.

By the way, the pre-Islamic Persians are damnable unbelievers. They go to hell, they burn. But they were very good at certain things, and one of the things they were good at was statecraft. If you hear something they said about statecraft, you ought to pay attention. One of the things they said was that religion and the state are twins. They’re not the same thing, but they’re very closely connected. That became a paradigm. It didn’t have the authority of the prophet or the Koran. But nevertheless, it became accepted as a paradigm in the Islamic world, particularly the Eastern Islamic world, on the ruins of the Persian Empire.

By the 13th century, people are saying things like: “The people in power are sultans, not Caliphs.” The Caliph has to be a descendant of the tribe of the prophet. “The guys who are ruling now, they’re a bunch of Turks who have come from Central Asia. All they’re good at is warfare, and thanks to that, they’ve taken over. They don’t have any intrinsic religious status. The best we can hope is they at least defend Islam against its enemies and behave in a reasonably just fashion, as much as you can expect Turks to do that.”

When I talked about the contrast between the Gospels and the life of the prophet, as it was written up in the eighth century, one of the things I stressed about the prophet was the smartness of his judgment calls. That Gospel passage about the tribute money is perhaps the one place in the Gospels where one might say about Jesus, “That was a smart thing to say.” I mean it was a politically savvy thing to say.

JAMES HUNTER, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: I wanted you to elaborate on the difference between Persia and Arabia. Iran -- Persia -- is part of the pan-Islamic world, but it’s not part of the pan-Arab world. There are deep cultural differences that trace back into medieval times. Could you talk about those differences, but also talk about the contemporary relevance of those differences in global politics today?

MR. COOK: One fundamental difference is language. The Arabs of Arabia and all the other peoples we classify as Arabs today -- from Morocco to Iraq -- speak Arabic, whereas the people of Iran speak Persian. That may sound trivial, but it is actually quite significant. When the Muslims conquered Iraq, Syria, Egypt and later North Africa, the populations at the time of the conquest were speaking all sorts of different languages, but they all came within a few centuries to speak Arabic. You have an enormous historical process of Arabization in those areas. But after the Muslims conquered Iran, that did not happen. You might imagine over the centuries the people of Iran would have come to speak Arabic, but they didn’t. They held onto their ancestral language. That’s one thing, and it’s fairly obviously linked to something else.

Medieval Egyptians, just to give you one example, don’t have much memory of what Egypt was like before the Islamic conquest. They know there were the pharaohs and then the Greeks came and the Romans, that Egypt was converted to Christianity. In fact, they have a lot of information and misinformation about it. But they have no identification with the pre-Islamic past of Egypt. By contrast, there always survives in Iran an identification, albeit a qualified identification, with the pre-Islamic past: “Yes, those guys were damnable pagans, but they had a great tradition, and we want to hang on to some of that tradition, even though we are now Muslims.”

In the 10th century, you have scruffy military leaders who come from the mountains of northern Iran with their mercenaries and take over, trying to present themselves as heirs of the pre-Islamic Persian emperors. Presumably they’re trying to make themselves look good by identifying with the pre-Islamic Persian emperors. That tradition continues, though on a smaller scale, in Iran right down to the present day. It’s even taken out and dusted off in the middle of the 20th century by Iranian nationalists.

I think those two things -- hanging onto Persian and retaining a strong identification with the land’s pre-Islamic past -- make Iran different from Arabia.

MR. HUNTER: What about some of the extraordinary cultural accomplishments of the Persian Empire? Is that part of the historical consciousness it’s retained? Does that have any bearing in terms of openness to other cultures?

MR. COOK: It’s not the cultural achievements of the Persian Empire that get valued. It’s the military and political achievements. That’s what they’re seen to be good at. Yes, learned people do know something about the cultural side, but I think it’s much less prominent in the general public image.

CLARE DUFFY, NBC NIGHTLY NEWS: You talked about the fact that Islam did not share with Christianity a sense of being a persecuted minority, at least in its developmental stage. That sense can be a unifying force for any religious group. When did a sense of persecution develop? I feel like it did at some point; Shi’ism relies on a sense of being a persecuted. At some point, this did develop in Islam, did it not?

MR. COOK: Absolutely. Here we have a big distinction between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, the Sunnis being -- over most of the Islamic world, most of the time -- a people who were ruled by a state of their own kind. They had very little reason to develop a sense of being persecuted. By contrast, the Shi’ites lost out early on.

Down the centuries, Shi’ites have been ruled by non-Shi’ites, typically by Sunnis. The Shi’ites develop a strong sense of being a persecuted minority, and that sense is entirely pre-modern and traditional. All that happened in modern times is, it is dusted off and used for political purposes.

By contrast, a sense of being done in by the world is something Sunnis have only developed in the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

MS. DUFFY: Back to the coins you showed us. Why did they make these coins? Who was reading them? Was that the way the religion was spread? How literate were people? Would they look at their money and go, “Hey, no God but God?”

MR. COOK: We don’t have a clue what literacy rates were like in this period. Some people could read and some couldn’t. My guess would be a substantial proportion of the political and military elite could read, and they could read these coins if they wanted to.

The crucial question, to my mind, is non-Muslims. This is obviously a message beamed at non-Muslims. It’s telling them to listen up and pay attention. Could they read these Arabic inscriptions on the coins? Initially, when most of them didn’t know Arabic, they couldn’t. But it does seem that early on in the Islamic period and maybe by about 700 -- actually, I shouldn’t say anything definite about the chronology because I don’t have the facts in my mind. But I think on the Christian side by about 700, certainly by the early eighth century, you’ve got evidence of Christians who knew and read Arabic.

One definitive piece of evidence is Christian ecclesiastic canons saying that Christians are not to have their sons taught the Koran by Muslim teachers. The point is not that these teachers are converting the kids. The point is that primary education in the Islamic community consisted of learning to read the Koran, and if you wanted to learn proper Arabic and be able to move in elite circles, as many of these Christians wanted to do, you had to learn your Koran. The church was getting worried about this and saying it has to stop. But the fact they’re saying you can’t do this obviously means that people were doing it. So those people -- Christians -- could definitely have read what was on the coins.



Nina Easton
NINA EASTON, FORTUNE: Professor, I wonder if you could address a question this conference has wrestled with in the past -- that very delicate question of whether violence, or evangelism by violence, is an inherent piece of Islam, which seems to boil down to the question of: What is the definition of jihad?

MR. COOK: Is it inherent? You could certainly minimize it. What I mean is this: There are two kinds of jihad. One is defensive, and the other is offensive. Defensive jihad is straightforward. If the unbelievers are attacking you, then you have to fight back. Offensive jihad is going off and invading the territory of unbelievers who haven’t done anything to you.

What does the law say about offensive jihad? It says that some Muslims somewhere ought to do it, but provided some Muslims somewhere are doing it, no other Muslims have to do it. In other words, yes, a certain element of offensive jihad is inherent in the religion. But you can minimize it easily if you want to. You can also maximize it. If lots of Muslims go off and do it, then by the criteria of Islamic law, that’s a good thing.

MR. CROMARTIE: Is it in the Koran that it [jihad] can be preemptive or offensive?

MR. COOK: In the Koran, it’s hard to figure out whether the text refers to defensive or offensive warfare. There are certain passages the medieval scholars always cite, saying they show jihad should be offensive. But if you look at the passages carefully, it’s not that obvious. On the basis of the Koran alone you could mount a decent argument for saying offensive jihad is never a duty.



Michael Cook
In Islamic law, it’s different. From things the prophet said or is said to have said, Islamic law develops the doctrine that it is a duty but, as I say, a duty you can minimize.

The other question here is that of coercion. Jihad means you go out and conquer people. But does it mean you’re actually going to force them to convert to Islam? The basic answer is no. This is straightforward in the case of Jews and Christians, because everybody recognizes that Jews and Christians, provided they submit to the Islamic state, can have a protected status in which they carry on being Jews and Christians. They still have to follow certain stipulations, and you could argue about the small print, but the basic conception is very clear.

There is also a strong stream of Islamic law that says that you can give the same protected status to any unbeliever with the single exception of Arab pagans. Arab pagans are not a big deal because they don’t exist after, say, the middle of the seventh century. So when you go and conquer India, you can give the Hindus protected status. There are other schools of Islamic law that say, no; you shouldn’t give the Hindus protected status because their idolatry is so way out you can’t tolerate it. But the Muslims who actually conquered large parts of India adhered to the school that said no problem tolerating Hindus.

Actually forcing people to convert is a different question. I can remember one medieval scholar who says forced conversions are the best thing ever: The person converted at the point of a sword -- all right, he doesn’t like it at the time, but after a while he gets used to it and becomes as good a Muslim as anybody else. That view does exist. But the general view is no, you don’t coerce people to enter Islam.



Rod Dreher
ROD DREHER, DALLAS MORNING NEWS: Given how intimately and radically connected church and state are in Islam, is it just wishful thinking on the part of the West that we can impose, or at least lead, the Arab Muslim world into accepting our post-Enlightenment ideas of political structure -- i.e., separation of church and state? Would it not be the case that the Islamists are right: The more to which Muslim populations come to accept Western ideas of liberal democracy, the less truly Islamic they are?

MR. COOK: Partly you’re asking me for a policy recommendation about whether a certain policy is likely to work. I tend to be skeptical of that, but I’m not the person best qualified to set out an argument there.

But coming closer to my own turf, I would say it’s absolutely right that there is, in principle, a doctrinal incompatibility between Islam and democracy, and it’s a very straightforward incompatibility: if you believe the single most important thing in the world is God’s will, and if you believe that you know what God’s will is, then what on earth are you doing with elections? This is an argument that in principle would extend to Jews and Christians. But Jews and Christians don’t seem to have a whole lot of problems with democracy. I’m not sure the Islamic case is in principle all that different.

Let me give you an analogy. If you go back something like 100 years and take Catholicism and Catholic anti-modernism -- who was that pope in the first two decades of the 20th century who launched an anti-modernist crusade that said the church can have no truck with the corrupt values of the modern world? And there’s the document that says it must shore up its medieval tradition in the face of all these temptations and abominations? Isn’t it actually --

MR. CROMARTIE: The Syllabus of Errors.

MR. COOK: The Syllabus of Errors, exactly. Isn’t that where it says it is an error to believe the pope can accommodate himself to modern values such as blah, blah, blah, and democracy?

MR. CROMARTIE: Liberalism as well.

MR. DIONNE: That was the last error on the list and the culmination of the list.

MR. COOK: In that late 19th century, early 20th century period, it made good sense -- and a lot of people were saying it, both on the Catholic side and the anti-Catholic side -- to say Catholicism and democracy are incompatible; there’s no way they could be reconciled. When I tell this to my undergraduates in the early 21st century, and quite a few of them are Catholics, this sounds really bizarre. It corresponds to nothing in their experience.

Occasionally, the word comes out from Rome that contraception is banned, and the Catholic laity more or less ignores what they’re told by their hierarchy. There are some questions about whether the Catholic hierarchy should be telling Catholics not to vote for certain people. Yes, there’s friction. But a sense of a fundamental incompatibility between Catholicism and democracy -- I just don’t see it in our time. For all I know, in another 100 years, the idea of an incompatibility between Islam and democracy will be equally bizarre.

MR. CROMARTIE: Do we have to wait 100 years? That’s the question also.

MR. DREHER: To follow up: Just how will they do it? Because you can point to the foundational Christian documents, the scriptures, and you don’t find explicit support for the church and the state being one. But in your account, that was there from the beginning with Islam, and it is inherent to the nature of the religion. If one is a Muslim reformer and wants to see more Western-style liberal democracy that the West in the Muslim world, they’re going to have to make their case on the basis of the Islamic scriptures, right?

MR. DIONNE: Here’s a related question. The Second Vatican Council was instrumental in overturning The Syllabus of Errors. What mechanisms could there be [in the Islamic tradition] for a reformation? I use that term in this context with a small “r.”

MR. COOK: I can’t resist throwing in a comment about the idea of an Islamic reformation being a good thing. If you look at the European and the Christian Reformation, it ushered in a period of extraordinary bloodshed and fanaticism. It was not nice in the ways we like a political system to be nice. I’m not sure I would wish that on the Islamic world, and I’m not sure we even have to wish it on them. They’ve got it already. I think Wahhabism is the Islamic reformation, and we don’t like it. But yes, we’re talking about some kind of a change.

It is true Islam is unlike Christianity in not having this fundamental church-state dichotomy written into the original scriptures. Instead, if you look back to the beginnings, you have this unity of religion and politics.

But for most of Islamic history, that unity did not exist. I described the situation where the real holders of power are like Turkish sultans, and they’re clearly distinct from the religious establishment. Let us make a distinction between two ideas being logically or doctrinally compatible, and two ideas being able to live together in the minds of messy, incoherent humans. For most of Islamic history, some degree of recognition of a distinction between church and state was present and, therefore, could be again.

The problem seems that, in the present epoch, Islamic fundamentalism is on a high horse. That necessarily gives the moral high ground to the view that religion and politics are inseparable. That’s how it was in the beginning when everything was right; that’s how it should be again.

I would see a major change coming about not through people thinking up clever arguments. You can always think up clever arguments from a heritage that will get anywhere you want. But the fundamental thing that would have to change is Islamic fundamentalism would have to either be discredited or at least become much less appealing than it is at the present day.

MR. CROMARTIE: We did have the French scholar Gilles Kepel speak here a couple of years ago on this very question. He thought Islamic fundamentalism was on the wane, and that 9/11 was actually a last, desperate attempt get attention before it faded away. The question was: Will that be in 10 years or a hundred years?

Do you think Kepel is right that radical Islamic fundamentalism is actually going down rather than up?

MR. COOK: The shortest answer is I don’t know. I have read Kepel’s book [The Trail of Politicial Islam] (2004), and I am impressed by it. He has made a case, and he may be right, but I would prefer to wait another 10 or 15 years -- (laughter) -- before saying something on the record.

MR. CROMARTIE: So the short answer is --

MR. COOK: Kepel knows a great deal and is not a frivolous commentator. If he says that it is on the wane, then that is a serious possibility we have to consider.

MR. CROMARTIE: The question is, how long is it going to take?

MR. COOK: I bet in 500 years Islamic fundamentalism will have gone way down.



Lisa Anderson
LISA ANDERSON, CHICAGO TRIBUNE: When you talk to Muslims in the Arab world, you quickly realize there is an awareness -- from the lowliest peasant up to the political scientist -- that there was once greatness. This seems to inform the anger and resentment and humiliation felt in the Arab world: That they were once great, they are no more, and clearly someone is to blame, and it is probably us.

You said Muhammad found a way to unify the Arabs, to pull them together and lead them to this greatness. Can you talk about how Muhammad did that, or how you believe this was achieved, since this is clearly an aim with Osama bin Laden, the restoration of the caliphate and Sharia law and an Islamic world?

MR. COOK: I don’t have a confident answer to this, but my sense would be you have to look at the way somebody armed with a doctrine, and a transcendental authority, and the necessary political skills, can do an end-run around tribal fragmentation.

A while back I was reading a book about liberation theology in Venezuela and Colombia, and there was a chapter describing some particular village in Venezuela. This priest -- was he a Jesuit? -- a Catholic ecclesiastical figure -- comes in from the outside, bearing this liberation theology doctrine. He starts to do social work in an environment where none of the locals trust each other but if they could get together, they could do great things.

By virtue of being somebody with a transcendental authority, this Jesuit -- or whatever he was -- was able to use his authority to create trust in the community. It may not have mattered much what liberation theology actually said. He got them together to organize social projects that actually worked and did things for them.

That’s an analogy to what we’re looking at here. You have an authority that comes from outside a fragmented social system, and if you can get people’s attention and trust, you can start creating trust among them. Muhammad had a hard time getting his Meccans and Medinans to trust each other, but eventually they did. It is political engineering based on a transcendental mandate you can sell to people.

MS. ANDERSON: Do you think another figure could arise out of this crucible of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism around the world; another figure that might unify Muslims again, not in the same sense as Muhammad but in a similar way?

MR. COOK: Definitely not in the same sense because Muslims wouldn’t be operating in a pre-modern tribal context. I can imagine somebody acquiring immense moral authority, but to convert that into political authority is something else because you bump up against the geopolitics of the situation.

The only example I can think of in modern items is a bad example: Khomeini. He built up tremendous moral authority for himself in Iran, and he would have liked to project that authority onto the rest of the Islamic world. But the moment Khomeini tried to exert his moral and political authority in neighboring countries, the people in power in those countries got worried because Iran is a big country in that neighborhood. They can’t just think of Khomeini as somebody with the authority of a saint. They have to think of him as the boss of a rival outfit. They have to think geopolitically. What messes up that example is the Sunni/Shi’ite division that reinforced Khomeini’s failure.

I’ll give you an analogy of the international communist movement. At one stage, people had the sense it was one big movement. They were all together on the same page. Then the Russians and Chinese fell out, then the Chinese and Vietnamese; in other words, geopolitics took over. My guess would be that geopolitics would take over in this case, too.

MICHAEL PAULSON, BOSTON GLOBE: I wanted to ask about the state of Islamic studies in American universities.



Michael Paulson
First, what’s happening with folks who are teaching it; and second, who exactly is studying it? I had this sense, post-9/11, there might be some tension between Muslim scholars of Islamic studies in the U.S. and non-Muslim scholars. I would periodically get emails when I would quote non-Muslims saying, “Why are you quoting an orientalist; what’s wrong with Muslim scholars?

I also sensed there was a rush into classrooms to study Arabic and maybe contemporary Middle-Eastern issues, but I don’t know whether it has continued. At the time, I thought many universities were not prepared to deal with this and that the level of scholarship was not mature enough.

MR. COOK: Let me try to answer without taking swipes at the people I dislike locally in my own university. (Laughter.) There’s no question that 9/11 has meant a rapid increase in the level of demand. My sense is that level of demand has fallen off a bit but not drastically, so this was the window of opportunity for a small, rather despised field to get in there and be mainstream. At Princeton -- and my impression is probably other places too -- one side of this has gone well, and that’s the language teaching.

At Princeton we now have about three or four times as many undergraduate students who are interested in taking Arabic. Persian, Turkish; forget it. I’m devastated to see the nuclear crisis with Iran has not done anything for enrollments in Persian. Somehow it doesn’t seem to have the same effect, and I’m not sure why. But Arabic, yes, -- it’s a mixture of kids who are troubled and interested, and kids who see a career opportunity. I had one student who announced as a freshman she planned to take Arabic so she could become a spy. Actually, she didn’t take Arabic; she went and did geosciences and is now at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Many people change their minds. Maybe she didn’t. (Laughter.) That could be her cover.

Then there is the analytical side of the field. I’m a medievalist, and, as Islamic studies go, I’m in a quiet part of the field. The beginnings of Islam, yes, that can get hot, but all those centuries in between, nobody gets that excited about them. It’s the study of the modern Islamic world and modern Middle East where the problems are. There you find a real tendency towards polarization in the field.

On the philo-Islamic side, you have two categories of people. One may be Muslim scholars -- that is, scholars of Muslim background -- though they shouldn’t be stereotyped. But you do get academics who feel in this very American way they have to represent an ethnical religious constituency.

There’s also an element of philo-Islamic or philo-Arab academics who have no particular roots in either Islam or the Arab world or the Middle East, but who, by ideological conviction or whatever, have come to be strongly inclined that way. For example, I can refer to NYU. Our counterpart Near Eastern Studies Department at NYU is famous or notorious, depending on where you’re coming from, for its attitude. Such people are leftist, anti-Zionist, which doesn’t mean quite a few of them aren’t Jewish.

At the other extreme you have a few neo-cons and people inclining towards that end of the spectrum. But neo-cons are a sparse phenomenon in the academic world in general. In terms of who persecutes who, my own experience is it tends to be the leftists who persecute the neo-cons in the academic environment. It may be different out there in the real world, but that’s what happens within academia.

There are two fundamental problems of the field as I see it now. One, this boom of interest is different from the boom in East Asian or Japanese studies 15 or 20 years ago. That boom happened because, yes, the Japanese had an interesting culture and history, but they also had one of the world’s top economies. That is a healthy combination. In the case of Near Eastern studies, it’s not based on that. There is an attractive culture, although the features of it most often highlighted these days are not particularly attractive ones, but there isn’t a great world economy there. Instead there is oil and a lot of poverty. This is not a solid basis for a buildup of interest. Japanese studies have gone down quite a bit, but it’s still a real presence. And of course China is a rising star.

The other problem, as I see it -- and I spend enormous amounts of time sitting on search committees -- is that good people are scarce in the field, particularly under current market conditions. Why that is I don’t really know, but somehow the imaginations of good people are much more easily fired by East Asia, say, than by the Islamic world, and that just seems to be a fact.

MR. PAULSON: Can you tell me three scholars who study Islam in America whose work you respect? For completely pragmatic reasons, I’m looking for people to call. I’m always looking for good experts. I find a tremendous amount of both politicization and scholarly un-readiness.

MR. COOK: If I had a question about Salafis -- the Saudi strain of Islamic fundamentalists and also Salafis in other parts part of the world -- the first person I would go to would be Bernard Haykel who is currently at NYU. He combines knowledge of the pre-modern tradition and history with hands-on research on Salafis of the present day. He’s a native Arabic speaker as well as a native English and French speaker. He’s been spending a lot of time in Saudi Arabia. He’s very good at hanging out with people. He’s also hung out with Salafis in India. That’s somebody who’s well informed, and who is not marketing some political line.

CARL CANNON, NATIONAL JOURNAL: When you were showing the coins, you were focusing on one aspect of it -- the coin bite, how they spread religion. But the other thing I was struck by was: There’s no picture on that coin. It replaces the picture with words. Did the cartoon riots have their origins that far back in Islam?

MR. COOK: They have two origins that go pretty far back. One is a prohibition of images. When you start developing small print about that prohibition, there’s lots of room for disagreement about which kind of images are prohibited. Are they all prohibited or just some? The consensus is if any image is forbidden, it is images that depict humans. Depicting a human is already extremely questionable, and depicting the prophet is a whole lot worse than depicting any other human. Let me back up here.

The prohibition of images has a Koranic foundation, and it’s well developed by the eighth century. There’s plenty of evidence for that. The additional sensitivity about depicting the prophet, I don’t know how far that goes back, but there’s an interesting genre of miniature painting in the late Middle Ages, where you have representations of Mohammad, but always shown with a blank face, whereas other people in the picture have proper faces. There’s a clear sense there that when it comes to depicting people, the prophet is in a different category from other people.

MS.EASTON: Why are images prohibited? Is it an anti-pagan thing? What’s the root of that?

MR. COOK: In one sense, the root is simply that God and his prophet have said so, and if they said so, that’s it. But the underlying anxiety is idolatry; that once you have images, people are going to worship them.

To come back to the previous question: Defaming or slandering the prophet is a very serious offense; in Islamic law it incurs the death penalty. What’s more, you can’t get out of the death penalty even by repenting. The cartoons, in addition to depicting the prophet, were clearly insulting. The cartoonists did a pretty good job of covering all bases there. (Laughter.)



Bill Adair
BILL ADAIR, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES: Could you talk about Mohammad personally -- what he was like before his revelation, which I guess didn’t come till he was about 40. What did he do? What his life like? Were there signs he would be a leader? Was he a charismatic person? In spite of the prohibition on images, do we have any sense of what he looked like? Was he handsome?

MR. COOK: To take the last point first: Yes, of course, the tradition tells us he was handsome. In addition, we get detailed descriptions of his features and body build. Whether those descriptions should carry any authority, I don’t know. Whether they go back to eye witnesses or whether they’ve just been embroidered later, I have no way of telling.

To pick out another thing you’re asking about, are there signs that point to his future greatness? Lots of them. There are stories about his birth that explain how at the moment when he was born supernatural events took place. His mother saw the castles of Syria by magic illumination. The evil spirits who used to listen in on conversations in heaven suddenly found they were no longer wired up; they couldn’t hear what was going on up there.

You have a lot of supernatural dimension to the birth of the prophet, and later on, various things happen. When he’s in early adolescence, his uncle takes him to Syria, and on the way they encounter a Christian monk, and the Christian monk says, ah ha, this guy’s going to be a prophet. Did any of that really happen? Your guess is as good as mine.

The other part of your question: Do we get a credible sense of his character as opposed to just the fact that he had all virtues? I’m not sure we do. I’d be hard put to it to give you a vivid thumbnail sketch of what the man was like. It’s partly that the sources tend not to be explicit, but partly also that they’re so concerned to talk about his virtues you don’t get much sense of a real personality.

MR. CROMARTIE: One of the journalists that couldn’t be here said: “Oh, you’re having Professor Cook, that’s interesting. I think I read his biography of Muhammad. He suggests” -- and tell me if he got this right -- “that Muhammad may not have existed.”

MR. COOK: No, no. I have never had any doubts about his existence. I have held some heretical views in the past about what he did --

MR. CROMARTIE: He confused you with someone else, then, about that point?

MR. COOK: It’s more likely he got my views wrong. (Laughter.) I never suggested that the prophet didn’t exist. There’s as good evidence as you’re going to get that he did. He’s mentioned in non-Muslim sources within two or three years of his death, and that’s good enough for me.

MR. CROMARTIE: Everybody’s eager to hear some of your heretical positions.

MR. COOK: There are some early non-Islamic sources that suggest that, in its origins, Islam was closer to Judaism for longer than the traditional account indicates. That essentially was the nature of my heresy.

MR. CROMARTIE: You agree with that account?

MR. COOK: I no longer subscribe to it because I think the non-Islamic evidence wasn’t sufficiently coherent.

WILLIAM GALSTON, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Let me preface my question by saying that among Jews, although Moses is the highest and most nearly perfect prophet, there are still extensive discussions of his imperfections and his errors, at least one of which was serious enough to deprive him of his ultimate objective. It is a matter of some cultural significance that Moses is depicted as an imperfect human being, although the highest prophet. That raises some interesting questions: Are there, in the Hadith, for example, any stories pointing towards his imperfections or serious errors of judgment?

But my larger question has to do with the monotheistic triad. You pointed out that the Constantinian tradition was a latecomer in Christianity. So there’s always an oppositional stream of Christianity where faith can be a counterweight to public authority and not necessarily fused with it.

Rabbinic Judaism, and in particular Jewish law, developed in circumstances of political marginality and powerlessness. Therefore, Jewish law is not really public law. When the issue arose, in the founding of Israel, as to whether Jewish law should be the law of the state, there were people who took that position, but the realists won out; namely, that it is impossible to turn this into a body of public law. That decision has created the basic structure of legal argumentation in Israel ever since.

What strikes me as so important about Islam, and so distinctive, is that it is law that developed in circumstances of political majority and political power and not political marginality. That re-raises the question of whether Islamic law, authentically understood, can be private law, or does it inherently tend to be public law backed by the coercive power of the state? Let me raise two examples here for you to comment on. The first is the idea of religious liberty, out of which liberal democracy developed; namely, that you may change your religion, and the state may not intervene to prevent you. As I understand it, Islam has a different view of the matter.

The other question -- and I’m astonished I’m the first person to mention it this morning -- has to do with the public law of gender relations, which I happen to believe is the principal flashpoint between Islam and the West right now. It is not clear to me that Islamic law can accommodate the core of what the West believes to be non-negotiable on that question.

MR. COOK: When I was responding on the character of the prophet, I should have addressed that issue you raised about perfection and prophethood. The prophet in the earlier sources -- the Koran and early biographical accounts, and also in the Hadith -- is not depicted as a perfect human being. There are clear passages in the Koran where God is telling off his prophet: You did this wrong and undo it.



Michael Cook
In that sense, our starting point is similar to the biblical account of Moses: Yes, a great prophet, the greatest ever, but he has his flaws; he can stumble.

Over the course of the centuries, a theological doctrine developed that prophets possess immunity to sin or error. Different people asserted it in different ways. For example, you could take a line that prophets are totally immune to sin or error, or you could take a line that they’re immune but only in matters directly concerning their prophetic role. As one medieval theologian interpreted it, they’re immune from error, not in the sense that they can’t commit error or sin, but only in the sense that they’re guaranteed to see their error and repent. There’s a spectrum of interpretations on this doctrine of immunity.

But there’s no question the drift over the course of Islamic history is towards a stronger and stronger assertion of prophetic immunity. It creates enormous problems when it collides with the evidence in the earlier sources -- a confrontation that generates reams and reams of small print.

Let me mention the single-biggest episode -- maybe you know it already. There is an account in the life of the prophet that ties up with a verse in the Koran. The verse says that while the prophet was still in Mecca, he was unhappy about the fact he was on such bad terms with his pagan fellow tribesmen. Being a nice guy, he wanted to be nice; he wanted everyone to be friends. On one occasion when he was receiving a revelation, he allowed Satan to get him to insert a verse that said to the pagan Meccans, my god is okay, and your gods are okay, and they’re a team together.

According to these accounts, the next thing that happens is Gabriel -- Gabriel is the intermediary between God and the prophet -- Gabriel comes down and says: “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re a prophet, and you’ve gone and stuck this verse of Satan’s into God’s revelation.” Mohammad gets upset, and Gabriel feels sorry for him and says: “Don’t worry too much; God will sort it out.” And God indeed knocks the offending verse out of the revelation and puts the right one in.

So you have this story that the prophet compromised with idolatry on one occasion. It’s told in a human kind of way. You feel tremendously sympathetic towards the guy. Wouldn’t you have done the same in the circumstances? But when that clashes with the doctrine of prophetic immunity, you’ve got a real problem.

Just to take the story through to the present: The medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya -- I mentioned his opinion on immunity before -- is one of the gurus, to misapply a term, of the modern fundamentalists. They think he’s the greatest thing since the prophet. But Ibn Taymiyyah said a whole load of things the modern fundamentalists simply can’t take. One of them was: “Why shouldn’t this episode have taken place; it’s perfectly plausible, and we’ve got plenty of accounts of it. The only immunity that the prophet has is that he’s going to repent of it, and it’s going to be put right. No big deal.”

This view is something the modern fundamentalists cannot stomach, and they represent the other end of the development where prophetic immunity has become absolute. There’s a rich theological mess there. In a couple of years there should be a fine book out on this topic by a young professor at Harvard.

Back to your other questions. I think your fundamental point is well taken on a crucial difference between Sunni Islam and Rabbinic Judaism; that one develops in a situation of deprivation of political power, and the other develops in close association with political power. All I would do is qualify what you said.

On the Jewish side, you do have those tractates in the Talmud -- Nezikin and things like that -- that talk about matters of public law. Equally, if you go to Maimonides and the Mishneh Torah-- it’s a digest of Jewish law, and it sets out marriage and divorce and that kind of stuff, but you also get a blueprint for how we would run a Jewish state.

It’s plausible to me Maimonides put it there because he was so familiar with the Islamic case that he was influenced by it. Even if only a counterfactual basis, he felt, we’ve got to have it on our side of the fence. But it is there. If somebody were to come out of Meah She’arim (an Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem) and dominate the state of Israel, there is a program to bandy about for having a Jewish public law. But I agree with you that for practical purposes Rabbinic Judaism is well adapted to not having a state.

On the Muslim side, the qualification I would make is -- well, it’s true that we do have evidence the early caliphs made law. They respect what God and the prophet had said, but they make decisions and say, “This is the way it’s going to be.” This gets played down in later tradition but it’s there in the sources. The classical authorities of Islamic law, however, are not rulers legislating; they are scholars who say, “In my opinion, this is the way it ought to be.” In other words, they’re figures much like rabbis.

You also have the phenomenon of legal pluralism, with four distinct schools of Islamic law. Judaism and the Pharisees had Hillel and Shammai (two sages and, later, two schools). The four Muslim schools of thought were all founded by scholars, jurists who are private persons. Despite the presence of a Muslim state, there is something happening analogous to what the rabbis are doing. So I would moderate your contrast, but I would accept the fundamental contrast.

On the question of changing religion: Yes, absolutely; in Islamic law, that’s out. It’s not just that you can’t get away with apostatizing from Islam: that if you’re a Jew you can’t convert to Christianity. If you want to exit Judaism, the only way you can do it is by converting to Islam. But let’s compare that to the Christian and Jewish traditions. On the Jewish side, I’m thinking of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah where he talks about Rabbanites and Karaites. There’s a fierce bit where he says Karaites are apostates from Judaism and should be killed. Then he says, “I’m not talking about the descendents of those Karaites -- it’s not their fault, we get along fine with them -- but the people who actually apostatized from Judaism, they should be killed.” Certainly there is an illiberal attitude towards change of religion.

On the Christian side I’m sure if one went looking in canon law and whatnot, one would find plenty of cases of illiberal attitudes.

The final thing you asked about: gender relations. I agree with you that this is one of the points of maximum friction. In Islamic terms you have a religious law that is very different from the attitudes that pass today in the United States or any part of the Western world. There’s a real incompatibility. It’s not surprising: Gender relations touch on extremely intimate aspects of life; the issue is bound to stir up deep emotions.

When Muslim women buy into Western feminist attitudes, even if they’re repackaging them in Islamic dress, this is acting up. Muslim men then are squeezed between Muslim women acting up on the one side and the West on the other. That’s not a good place to be.

How is this likely to play out? My answer would be similar to what I said when asked about Islam and democracy: As long as you have fundamentalism riding high, and you take all this stuff in the religious law seriously, you’ve got an insoluble problem. But let me give you two comparative examples. One is Hindu India: Hindu law must be about as un-modern in its attitudes to women as Muslim law. I couldn’t give you a detailed comparison, but if you could do the comparison, I wouldn’t want to bet that Hindu law would come out ahead in liberal terms.

But in India at present, nobody pays much attention to those aspects of Hindu law. There may be a few traditional, isolated Brahman families that still keep this stuff going, but to a large extent, in modern circles in India, this is dead letter, and people aren’t being bothered by pietists coming and saying, “Hey, but in this text it says….”

In the same way, you go to Israel and spend 10 minutes on the beach at Eilat -- nothing Maimonides said about how women should behave is being observed there. (Laughter.) My sense is, yes, while fundamentalism lasts, this is going to be a major problem, but the problem could dissipate in due course.

AMY SULLIVAN, WASHINGTON MONTHLY: I’d like to return to the issue of Jewish and Christian traditions influencing the development of Islam. What would exposure to Jewish and Christian text and stories have been in the Arab world? Would the man on the street have known much about these traditions, or is this something that was limited to the elite? What would the cultural understanding have been of those traditions?

MR. COOK: We’re talking about Arabia because the Arabs were in Arabia then. I didn’t mention this before, but around the edges of Arabia you had a fair amount of conversion to Christianity. Not in the area where Islam begins, but in the north and east. The Arabs were always traveling, and I would reckon there must have been some knowledge of Christianity even among people who didn’t live in those edge regions. Christianity couldn’t have been completely off their radar.

In the case of Judaism, you have a substantial Jewish community in Medina. According to the traditional account, they were there before the Arabs, and then some Arab tribes moved in on top of them. The traditional account tells us there were two reasons why the Medinans invited Muhammad to Medina. One was they thought he could sort out their problems, but the other was that having lived side-by-side with Jews, they knew what a prophet was. They could recognize one when they saw one.

So people are not clueless. Do they actually read texts? That’s a different question. One of the prophet’s companions headed the committee that produced the final edition of the Koran, and he was put in charge because he was incredibly learned. The sources say he knew Syriac, Hebrew and you name it, he knew it. But he’s regarded as an exceptional figure. We don’t characteristically get Arabs shown to us reading Jewish or Christian texts.

AUDREY TAYLOR, ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT: I work in television, the world of sound bites, and the one we always hear is that Islam as a religion has been hijacked by a few who are crazy, and it’s only a few. But you’ve been saying, in terms of jihad, that necessarily isn’t the case. We try to simplify it, saying there are only a few crazy people out there, and this is not indicative of the Islamic world as a whole. How do you address that because it doesn’t seem to be accurate?

MR. COOK: One of the things about being an academic is that I don’t have to be a diplomat -- that would really bother me. As I see it, my role is simply to tell the way it is.

MS. TAYLOR: In terms of culture, is the Islamic world really outraged by what they’re seeing?

MR. COOK: Let me quote Gilles Kepel on that. The analysis I heard him give recently is that public opinion -- he was speaking specifically about the Arab world but it would apply elsewhere, too -- is immobilized by the present situation because on the one hand they don’t like the stuff bin Laden does. They think it’s nasty. They don’t think it is representative of their religion and -- no, perhaps I shouldn’t say that. They feel it’s way out, too nasty. But on the other hand, they don’t like the Americans, and bin Laden is socking it to the Americans. The result is they’re immobilized; they don’t know what to think.

If you say there is nothing in the original text of the religion that gives any comfort to jihadis, you’re lying. It’s not true. There is stuff there. What I would say, though, is that doesn’t for a moment mean you can predict the behavior of Muslims from what’s in their scriptures.

To give you an analogy I use with my students, there are three verses in the Gospels where Jesus says, you want to be my disciples, you’ve got to hate your parents. Now, it’s not just that moderate, wishy-washy liberal Christians in this country don’t believe they ought to hate their parents; even the Christian fundamentalists don’t think they should hate their parents, and yet Jesus said it. I’m sure they have ways of getting off the hook in the same way Muslims can find all sorts of ways of getting off their hooks. The fact it’s there in scripture doesn’t have much predictive value -- maybe none at all. So much comes down to the context in which people are doing things with scripture.


TERRY MATTINGLY, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE: The New Republic ran a piece a couple of weeks ago on what’s happening in Iran. Could you tell us some of the differences within the Sunni and the Shi’ite as illustrated by thousands of Shi’ites walking through the streets holding images of the Hidden Imam and the martyrs? Is this a part of the conflict in Iraq that the U.S. press is not describing at all?

MR. COOK: The first question I can answer. You go to Shi’ite religious law, and the attitude towards images is pretty much the same as in Sunni law. In terms of what you’re supposed to be doing, I don’t think there’s a real difference. But there is an enormous cultural difference, and it’s exactly what you described, that for a long time Shi’ites have had images.

There are things going on there (Shi’ites marching with images) that would make Salafis in Saudi Arabia extremely unhappy. It’s part of a whole milieu, particularly of popular Shi’ism, that Khomeini made effective use of and so couldn’t wholly disown; nor do his successors want to disown it. Popular piety among the Shi’ites is very different from what it is among the Sunnis.

What’s happening in Iraq -- I’m sure if you talk to Salafis, they would make a big deal of that and other differences. Whether that is actually fueling the conflict, I very much doubt it.

MR. MATTINGLY: What I meant was, it’s clear that the Sunnis consider the Shi’ites heretics: they’re almost worshipping the descendents of Muhammad and breaching the concept of absolute monotheism, and now they’re walking around in the streets carrying these huge pictures.

I haven’t read a single mainstream media report that explains these differences between Sunni and Shi’ite, and it seems to me to be an important story in Iraq.

MR. COOK: It is a very important story in Iraq.

One thing I find striking about the Islamic world is the extent to which you have an unreconstructed sectarianism of a kind you don’t have, say, between Protestants and Catholics outside particular ethnic contexts like Northern Ireland. Sunnis and Shi’ites do not get along in Pakistan, they don’t get along in Iraq, et cetera, et cetera. There is a long tradition of differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites. It starts off with a political disagreement about who should have been the immediate successor to the prophet, and it blossoms into all sorts of other things, some of which are cultural, some of which are theological, some of which are legal. It’s a whole array of differences.

To a lot of Sunni Muslims who aren’t zealots, those differences don’t matter a lot, but they do matter to Salafis, and to the extent that Salafis are driving the current conflict, or a significant element in the current conflict in Iraq, that does matter.

If you take Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, to the best of my knowledge, nobody cares about transubstantiation — the difference between Protestants and Catholics on that issue. It’s not what they’re fighting about. They’re fighting about something else, which is a matter of two communities that are going hammer and tongs against each other in this world, for worldly reasons.

In the case of the Islamic world, I suspect much of the dynamic is similar, but the transubstantiation issues still get bandied about on a considerable scale. That’s not much of an answer, and it would take too long to give a proper answer.

MICHAEL LUO, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I have a basic question about terminology. We keep referring to “Islamic fundamentalism,” and in the short time I’ve been on the beat, it comes up a lot with sources that when we equate Islamic fundamentalism with extremism, it’s not really fair. It’s taking a term applied to American Christians and applying it to this situation. I wonder if there is a distinction, and how you address that question.

MR. COOK: A lot of people snipe at the term “fundamentalism.” I personally don’t have a problem with it, and I don’t have a problem with the fact it’s originally a Christian concept, because when it comes to words, we always transfer them from one context to another.

I also don’t have a problem with the concept of fundamentalism insofar as I understand it: It’s not just being pious or zealous, or for that matter fanatical; it’s specifically that you want to go back to the roots of your tradition. There are plenty of people who don’t want to go back to the roots of their tradition; they want the tradition as it came down to them. Hindus are typically like that. Fundamentalism is when you want to go back.

The term applies easily in the Islamic case in that you want to go back to the Koran and the sayings of the prophet. There is a corpus of texts you can point to as a fundamentalist and say, here’s where the real authority is in my religion, and what happened later is bunk. It seems to me the term applies quite well.

The term goes astray when the only context in which the public hears about Muslim fundamentalists is when they’re doing nasty, violent things, and therefore the public thinks that fundamentalism is a nasty, violent thing. I would caution against that and give the example of Christian fundamentalists. I don’t think the violent people in American politics are Christian fundamentalists, in the same way there are a lot of Muslims I would describe as fundamentalists who are not violent. There are people who are betwixt and between. For example, in India, I understand, you get the phenomenon of Salafis -- that is, people of the Wahhabi persuasion -- who say, “Yes, bin Laden, great guy, doing good stuff; get the Americans.” Then you say, “So do you want to engage in a bombing campaign here in India?” They say, “Oh no, no, no; we don’t want anything like that here. We Muslims are a vote bank. Democracy is good for us here.”

They’re schizophrenic about the question of violence. And lots of people there don’t have the violent side at all.

MR. LUO: There are people we would probably call moderate who are actually fundamentalists in your definition of wanting to go back to --

MR. COOK: Right. There are two different dimensions here, and one is whether people are violent or non-violent, and the other is whether or not they’re keen to go back to their foundations and be very pious about it. You might have a guy who is, from a Western liberal point of view, totally repressive of his daughter, but who doesn’t have the slightest interest in violence. They’re two different things there, and they tend to get conflated.

MR. HUNTER: It’s important to make a distinction between historic orthodoxy and fundamentalism. It seems to me that fundamentalism is orthodoxy in confrontation with modernity.

Fundamentalists all share a common narrative, which is that history has gone awry, and what went awry was modernity; in this case, Western modernity. Wahhabism has roots that go back a long way in this light. The goal of the fundamentalists, across the board, is to make history right again.

MR. COOK: Yes. The context here is Muslim societies trying to adapt to the rise of the West. One of their options is to adopt Western culture, but that obviously has a down side. In identity terms it’s pretty bad. Another option is to stay the same, but that doesn’t work either. Another option is to go fundamentalist, and fundamentalism isn’t stupid in the sense that the moment you become a fundamentalist, you have access to a way you used to do things but no longer do them. You have something that is de facto new. Who knows, maybe it will work.

MR. HUNTER: It’s possible to be orthodox and attached to the traditions of historic orthodoxy within a faith tradition and yet not be a fundamentalist in the way that we think about them today.

MR. COOK: There’s a nice principle in Jewish law, if I remember it right, that says the law is according to the later scholars. In other words, you can’t go behind the later scholars and say, hey, but the early ones said something different. You have to take it as it comes through the later scholars. I think that is the anti-fundamentalist attitude you are talking about.

JOHN SINIFF, USA TODAY: I was curious whether you’ve seen in academia a fear of candid discussion of some facets of Islam for fear of retribution.

MR. COOK: My sense is that people who don’t want to talk about the difficult stuff have actually internalized the attitude, and they think one shouldn’t talk about it, or they want to repackage it in such a way it appears not to be there. I’m betting people are doing a lot of kidding themselves.

MR. SINIFF: Is there a chilling effect in academia? What have you seen in academic discussions among colleagues?

MR. COOK: My sense is it’s not a chilling effect. It’s not that people are afraid to say things. You have the people that say them, and the people that think you shouldn’t say them and don’t say them. If you are an untenured professor at an academic institution, you have to be careful. You have to be careful about a whole load of things you don’t have to be careful about once you get tenure. But I don’t think in the kind of discussion we’re talking about any tenured member of an American university faculty has a good reason for being chilled.

MR. SINIFF: What was your view of the largely universal decision of the American press not to publish the Mohammad cartoons?

MR. COOK: I thought that was very sensible.

MR. DIONNE: Two quick questions. What I’d like to ask for is a Mort Saul routine: a two-minute university on the origins of the Sunni-Shi’a split. But the question I really want you to answer, if you want to pick one, is a Time Magazine-style question. Your account of Mohammad was fascinating, and I wanted to know: Was he the right man at the right moment, or was he the man who shaped the moment? Your account suggests a lot of people at the time were looking for something like what he had to offer.

MR. COOK: It’s a good question, and I don’t have a good answer. In some alternative universe I would run the beginnings of Islam in my lab dozens of times with different values for the variables.

The quick answer would be I see a window of opportunity; if Mohammad had been born in the second century B.C. he’d have gotten nowhere. The rise of Islam presupposes the rise of monotheism outside Arabia. There was a sense seeping into Arabia: “Our paganism -- it’s what we’re used to but it’s not state of the art.” (Laughter.) I would see Constantine as a necessary condition for Mohammad.

As to closing the window, I would bet if Mohammad, or somebody like him, had not come along, then the Arabs would have converted to Christianity sooner or later, and the window would have closed that way.

TERRY EASTLAND,THE WEEKLY STANDARD: I’ll take you back to your century, the seventh century, for this last question.

MR. COOK: I appreciate that.

MR. CROMARTIE: But tie it into today if you could.

MR. EASTLAND: When the Arabs went out to conquer after the death of the Prophet, was there a doctrine of providence -- maybe that’s the wrong word -- a doctrine of eschatology that gave them confidence they could conquer the world, and this would be their destiny? How extensive was the definition of the world back then? Bringing us up to the present moment: Do we see such a confidence-building doctrine today, and what does it mean today to conquer the world?

MR. COOK: That’s a good question. I don’t think there is more than simply this doctrine of jihad that says offensive jihad is a good thing. In principle, the more you conquer, the better, and beyond that, I don’t detect in the sources anything like a doctrine of manifest destiny.

MR. EASTLAND: Today, what does it mean to conquer the world? Just the same answer, I guess: with jihad, the more the merrier.

MR. COOK: Yes. If you take seriously the foundations in Islamic law -- not necessarily in the Koran but in Islamic law -- of the doctrine of offensive jihad, then not only should Muslims defend themselves, but they should also be expanding the frontiers of Islam through jihad.

If you go to contemporary Muslim thinkers of a fundamentalist and extremist disposition, you will find that, from time to time, they do refer to offensive jihad and say it’s a good thing. In doing that, they’re essentially acting up against the rules of the international system as conceived in the West. Just about every jihad we actually witness in the Islamic world, perhaps every one, is conceived as defensive. The attack on the Twin Towers may have looked to us uncommonly aggressive, but in the minds of the people who justified it, it was self-defense; it was just a particularly daring example of self-defense.

There are reasons for this, for the fact that the emphasis is on defensive jihad. One is a human point, that if you want to motivate people, then telling them “these guys are out to get us” is a much more effective way to mobilize them than to say, “No, those guys aren’t out to get us but nevertheless we ought to go and conquer their country.”

But second, there is a significant difference between the obligations involved in aggressive and defensive jihad. In offensive jihad, provided somebody is doing it, nobody else has to bother. By contrast, with defensive jihad, anybody in the area that’s being attacked by the unbelievers -- any adult male has a duty, prima facie, of participating in that jihad. There is a much higher degree of obligation that you can appeal to if you declare a defensive jihad than if you declare an offensive one.

MR. CROMARTIE: Professor Cook, a sign of a good session is one we don’t want to end, and there are certainly more questions. We should thank one of our colleagues who could not be here today. Jay Tolson is the one who emphatically said, if you’re going to do that session, you’ve got to get Professor Michael Cook. We should thank Jay when we see him next because he was right, and let’s thank Dr. Cook. (Applause.) --Speakers at Pew Forum events are given an opportunity to review and approve their remarks. This transcript also has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar.

Islam and Constitutionalism

A Conversation with Sohail Hashmi Posted: Friday, June 6, 2003

Event transcript from the the November 22, 2002 conference with Professor of International Relations at Mount Holyoke College, Sohail Hashmi.

Hillel Fradkin: Our speaker today is Professor Sohail Hashmi. A graduate of Harvard and Princeton Universities, he is Professor of International Relations at Mount Holyoke College.

He has written a very great number and variety of articles on Islamic political thought and ethics, especially in the area of international affairs and international conflict. He is currently shepherding two and perhaps more books to publication.

Professor Hashmi has drawn attention in a number of his writings to one source of contemporary problems in Islamic history: Not only does Islamic political and intellectual culture lack a tradition of democratic political thought, but political thought altogether, once a vibrant field of Islamic intellectual endeavor, has fallen on hard times in the past several hundred years. Islamic political thought is ill prepared, in terms of its present resources, to guide Islamic political life period, let alone towards a democratic future.

Sohail Hashmi: What I would like to speak to you about today is Islamic constitutionalism and the prospects for democracy. This is a topic occupying a lot of my time at the moment, in the form of an edited volume entitled Islam and Constitutionalism. It’s an attempt by myself and my co-editor, Professor Houchang Chehabi, as well as some thirty-three other collaborators, to discuss the evolution of constitutional ideals in Islamic societies starting with the classical period of Islamic thought back in the time of the prophet Muhammad and the earliest community itself, then working our way up to the modern time and surveying in a very systematic way the experience of constitutionalism among Muslim peoples.

A Muslim engagement with formal constitutions and the ideology of constitutionalism dates back more than a century and a half. Today virtually all of the 57 or so Muslim majority states have promulgated written constitutions. Indeed the writing of a constitution is one of the first tasks upon which they embarked soon after independence.

But as we all know, its one thing to promulgate a constitution and quite another to develop a constitutionalist order able to support liberal democracy. Thus far in their political history, modern Muslim states have generally failed to realize either constitutionalism or liberal democracy. The record of those states that have sought to apply Islamic principles in their political structures -- for example by proclaiming that the Koran is our constitution, as in Saudi Arabia; or by declaring that sovereignty belongs to God, as in Pakistan and Iran -- is particularly disheartening for those who look to Islamic constitutionalism to provide a basis for liberal democracy.

These three countries’ experiences and those of many others -- for example, Sudan and Afghanistan -- prompts the question, "Is there something inherently authoritarian in the vision of an Islamic state?" This is something that can be illuminated by studying the process of writing a constitution and later in the struggle to interpret and apply it. This is a very complicated and indeed a very controversial question, a proper answer to which would take much more time than I have with you today. So I will, with your indulgence, examine this question with reference to the understanding and application of sharia, or divine law, as it is understood by many Muslims, and the tension that such an understanding creates with constitutionalism.

Before we look specifically at this issue, it may be useful to step back a bit and examine the relationship between constitutionalism and religion more generally. Constitutionalism is the idea that the political order is subject to a higher authority beyond arbitrary human changes -- either those of an autocrat or a democratic mob. Western constitutional theory may be traced back to roots in the natural law tradition of the ancient Greeks and Romans, particularly the Stoics. In medieval Christendom, this natural law was upheld by Catholic scholastics as being congruent with divine law, which was an aspect of the eternal reason, God, that nevertheless was discernable by all human beings exercising right reason.

Later theorists would diminish the divine element in natural law -- and instead of emphasizing the obligations inherent in natural law, they emphasized the rights of the individual in the face of society or the state. Still, constitutionalism remained wedded to natural law in the sense of holding human beings accountable to a relatively stable, one could say timeless, set of prescriptions on what government may or may not do toward its own people and what citizens may or may not do toward each other.

Although modern constitutionalism is often linked to liberal democratic regimes that operate according to the will of the majority while guaranteeing the equal rights of their citizens, this linkage does not theoretically have to be so. In the broadest sense, any regime that provides for limited and accountable government, adherence to the rule of law, and the protection of fundamental rights, may be said to embrace constitutionalism.

Today, formal written constitutions are so frequently an expression of democratic principles that we tend to forget the early democratic opposition to them. We tend to forget that it was an Anti-Federalist, Brutus, who defended popular sovereignty against the Federalist, Publius, who championed a constitution establishing a strong central state in the United States. It was Brutus who lobbied for the insertion of the Bill of Rights and thus strengthened the American Constitution as a genuine expression of constitutionalism. In general then, we could phrase the relationship thus: constitutionalism doesn’t require liberal democracy, but liberal democracy does require constitutionalism.

Now the relationship between constitutions, constitutionalism and democracy is one that has already been widely explored in the scholarly literature. The relationship between constitutionalism, democracy and religion, however, is one that has received scant scholarly attention. We don’t need to look far in the history of Western political thought or practice to understand the reasons why. Constitutionalism arose as part of a package of enlightenment ideals in which secularism occupied a very prominent place. Modern constitutionalism has generally been seen as a means of formalizing the secular quality of the political arena. The framers of the seminal documents of modern constitutionalism -- that is, the American constitution and the French revolutionary constitutions -- took great pains to either separate religion and politics or subordinate the church to the state. And political theory largely upheld the increasing secularization of politics as a defining characteristic of modernity.

Yet constitutionalism has never been entirely devoid of religious influences and significance. The debates in American constitutional law, centering on the interpretation of the First Amendment clauses respecting religion, testify amply to this fact. Even the apparent linkage between secularism and constitutionalism is extremely problematic in terms of both the process of constitution-making and the written constitutional documents themselves. This is because religiously motivated individuals and groups have frequently engaged in the process of constitutionalism in what we may characterize as both supportive and oppositional rules. And religion is frequently a part of written constitutional documents, again in both negative and positive expressions. This is true of some Western countries, but it is especially true for non-Western countries where constitutionalism spread along with other ideologies in the tracks of imperialism. In short, religion and constitutionalism have played extremely important inter-related roles in the political history of the past two centuries all over the world.

Based on the three characteristics of constitutionalism that I gave earlier, it’s not at all apparent or a given that religion and constitutionalism would necessarily conflict. The conflict arises to the extent that constitutionalism proposes a higher law, based upon rational deduction, that challenges the higher law based on divine command. The conflict is inevitable to the extent that divine law cannot be reconciled or accommodated with conceptions of natural law.

The legitimating appeal to religion reintroduces a source of tension which is perhaps the oldest in human nature: that between transcendent and manmade law. This tension between natural law and divine law -- or, phrased differently, between the conception of law and ethics as a sphere of rational interpretation versus more literal application of scripture -- is, of course, not at all unique to Islam. Controversies in Israel over the place of secular versus Jewish law in the life of the Jewish state have prevented, thus far, the adoption of a constitution in that country.

So now, I will turn to look specifically at the case of Islam. Controversies over this question that we have been discussing -- manmade versus divine law -- date back to the formative period of Islamic thought, perhaps to the time of the prophet Muhammad himself. The Koran was viewed in part as an expression of divine laws; as the Koran commands: "O believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you." Naturally the problem that confronted the Muslim community immediately after the death of the prophet was how to interpret the Koran and the sunna, the traditions of the prophet, when they are silent, ambiguous or seemingly contradictory. The legal controversies that inevitably arose on this point in turn fueled a broader theological controversy centering on the question, "What makes God’s laws good or right?"

Although the debate was conducted by a range of writers over some two centuries, it centered by and large on the ethical objectivism favored by the school of Mutazilites, and the ethical voluntarism argued by their rivals, the Asharites. Let me say a little bit about this. The earliest schools of Islamic jurisprudence were established by men who advocated ijtihad al-ra’I -- that is, legal judgment based on reason, on human reason. The advocates of right found support in the ethical objectivism of the Mutazilites. Revelation could be supplemented by reason, the Mutazilites argued, because truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are objective categories independent of God’s will. Revelation supplements reason in confirming the value of certain actions, particularly those involving human beings obligations toward God, such as, for example, prayer, fasting, and other religious obligations. Nevertheless, reason unaided by revelation is adequate in confirming the specific dictates of revelation. And therefore, theoretically, even a conscientious non-Muslim could arrive at the right moral conclusions. It is clear that the Mutazilites were trying to reconcile Greco-Roman natural law arguments with Islamic conceptions of divine law.

This approach was challenged by later schools who espoused another form of ijtihad, another form of legal interpretation. This ijtihad was known as ijtihad al-qiyas, legal interpretation based on analogy. Instead of being guided by the public welfare, or principles of equity, the jurist according to this view was to deduce law through strict analogy with cases that were already to be found in the Koran and in the sunna of the prophet. This shift away from an emphasis on human reason and legal interpretation was mirrored by the rise of the Asharite school in theology, which fiercely denounced the ethical objectivism of the Mutazilites. The Asharites held that God’s power could not be subject to any objective ethical values; rather, ethical value was derived entirely from God’s command. Human beings discovered right action through God’s grace to his creation, through the scriptures, and the actions of divinely inspired prophets. These sources of divine law are the only arbiters of the moral content of specific actions. "He who does not validly know the law," Abu-l-Qasim al-Ansari wrote in the 12th century, "does not validly know that a bad action is bad."

By the end of the 12th century -- due in part to political reasons that had nothing to do with the intellectual merits of either of these contending viewpoints -- it was the Asharite position that emerged as the orthodoxy in Sunni intellectual circles. The triumph of the Asharites had profound consequences for the evolution of Islamic conceptions of ethics, of philosophy, and of law. Emphasis on revelation over reason places those most familiar with revelation -- the ulama, the religious scholars -- in an obviously privileged position, while increasing political instability coupled with pressures from various Abbasid Caliphs of the time forced these ulama toward greater and greater conservatism in their legal interpretations. In the 10th and 11th centuries, further development of the law was seriously curtailed with a fabled closing of the gates of ijtihad. This event is more mythical than real because of course legal interpretations certainly did continue, but the ethos that gripped Islamic scholarship was deeply resistant to change or critical inquiry.

As the sharia became more and more closed to fresh interpretation, while Muslim societies continued to change and encounter new problems, extra-sharia legislation developed parallel to it. This siyasa-sharia, or qanun as it was labeled, was treated by the jurists as the realm of manmade laws tolerated by them for pragmatic or utilitarian purposes. But their qualified acceptance of such manmade laws is clearly reflected in the statement of one of the greatest thinkers of his time, none other than Ibn Khaldun, who wrote in the 14th century, and I quote, "That state, therefore, whose law is based on violence and coercion, and gives full play to the irascible nature, is tyranny and injustice and, in the eyes of the law, blameworthy, a judgment in which political wisdom also concurs. Furthermore that state whose law is based upon rational statecraft and its principles, but lacks the supervision of the revealed law, is likewise blameworthy, since it is the product of speculation without the light of God. For the Lawgiver knows best the interest of men in all that relates to the other world, which is concealed from them. The principles of rational government aimed solely at apparent or worldly interests whereas the object of the Lawgiver (God) is man’s salvation in the hereafter. It is imperative therefore by the very nature of revealed laws to bring the whole people to conform themselves to their ordinances in all matters of this world and the next. And this rule is the rule of the Lawgivers (the prophets and of their successors, the Caliphs). And this is the true meaning of the Caliphate."

Beginning in the early 19th century, constitutional ideas began to creep into Muslim states as more and more Muslims traveled and studied in Europe. But what impressed early Muslim visitors about constitutionalism was not so much the secular foundations of Western constitutions as it was the orderly procedures of government, that constitutionalism provided. For example, one of my favorite examples, Mirza Abu Talib Khan -- I believe he is the third known Indian who visited Europe at the turn of the 19th century -- records in his famed travel log, the Masir-i-Talibi, how impressed he is with the rules for succession to the English throne. The wars of succession that had repeatedly racked the Mogul Empire no doubt influenced his views. He wasn’t however favorably impressed with Parliament, which reminded him of a flock of parrots incessantly squawking at each other as they debated. Mirza Abu Talib noted rather incredulously, that the British parliament legislated according to its own wits without the assistance or the constraints, as he observed it, of divine law.

As the 19th century wore on, the need to reopen the sharia to reinterpretation and reform was one of the driving forces underlying the advocacy of constitutionalism among various Muslim reformers. For these men, constitutionalism was the supreme manifestation of the new ijtihad; it was a legitimate vehicle for the reconceptualization of Islamic polity and the creation of new and more effective political institutions that reflected the true purposes of the Islamic ethical sources. But from the beginning, the reformers faced concerted opposition from the ulama and other conservatives who viewed constitutionalism as human tampering with the sacred law. According to this view, the sharia is the immutable Islamic constitution, so humans are limited to law-finding rather than law-making. Significant differences also arose over the credentials of those who may engage in this process of law-finding and the extent to which this effort may be taken.

These serious differences in understanding of the constitutional process and the meaning of the constitution in national life have obviously had profound consequences for Muslim societies. They have often stymied the development of genuine constitutionalism or they have led to the demise of the constitutional enterprise altogether. Let me provide some illustrative examples.

The first comes from Tunisia, which in 1861 became the first Muslim state to promulgate a constitution. The constitution itself was preceded by a document known as the `aqd al-aman, the Pact of Security, which enumerated the rights of Tunisian subjects -- particularly of those of non-Muslims. The committee set up to write this particular document, the Pact, initially consisted of both nonreligious scholars as well as a number of the leading Tunisian ulama. In the middle of the drafting process, the ulama bolted from the committee en masse. The reasons for their abrupt departure are still unclear and I know because I have probed them and asked various people to probe this issue on my behalf. The reasons are unclear, but one explanation that is widely given is that these ulama felt uncomfortable participating in an enterprise they considered alien to their role as defenders of the sharia. Some ulama did participate later in the judicial system that was created by the constitution, but the leading ulama made no attempt at ijtihad, no attempt to interpret Islamic laws according to their current conditions. Instead they persistently appealed to legal rulings that had been rendered by the classical jurists in earlier centuries. They thus undermined the spirit in which the constitution had been drafted and they contributed significantly -- through their acts of both omission as well as commission -- to the abrogation of the constitution in 1864.

The second example comes from Iran. The constitutional movement of 1905 to 1911 resulted in bitter disputes among the Shiite ulama over their role in the process of drafting the constitution and over the role of the constitution itself in the life of the faithful. A glimpse into the rival positions is provided in two tracts. The first by the pro-constitution alim Shaykh Muhammad Na’ini: "The soundness and completeness of the constitution," Na’ini writes, "arises from its dealing with all affairs necessary to the well being of society, with the proviso that none of the constitution’s provisions should be in contradiction of the holy law of Islam." For Na’ini, legislation under the constitution must be restricted to the limits established by the sharia. But he doesn’t specify exactly what those limits are. What’s really noteworthy about Na’ini’s tract is that he doesn’t limit the legislative function to any particular group. He writes only very generally, "There must be reliance on the elements of perfect stewardship or guardianship, calculation and responsibility and the entrusting of a group of people gathered in a consultative assembly which is composed of those who are the enlightened ones of the country and the good intentioned. Thus the whole intellectual power of the country is put into the service of the people within the official setting of the national consultative assembly."

In marked contrast to Na’ini’s views are the opinions of Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri, a leader of the anti-constitution camp among the ulama. What particularly aroused Nuri’s ire were the legislative provisions of the constitution. Nuri characterizes them as "an innovation and downright aberration," because in Islam no one is allowed to legislate or to establish a provision. Islam does not have any shortcoming that requires completion. Concerning new incidents that may emerge, it would be necessary to refer to the ulama, who would then deduce the relevant provision from the Koran and the sunna -- but they cannot make law.

Similar controversies erupted in 1979 when the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was being drafted. This constitution was framed entirely in light of Ayatollah Khomeini’s notion of the vilayat-i faqih, the direct role of the Shiite jurisprudent. And so the Iranian constitution today incorporates into its framework an explicit guardianship role for not just the Shiite ulama as a whole, but for one of them in particular, the guide, as he is referred to in the constitution. The supreme guide is assisted in the task of insuring that no law passed by the parliament, the Majlis, contravenes the principles of Islam by a 12 member Council of Guardians. The council proves such an impediment to the Majlis’s legislative functions that Khomeini himself established what has come to be known as the Expediency Council to arbitrate disputes between these two institutions. Upon Khomeini’s death in 1989, this Expediency Council was formally instituted by amending the Iranian constitution, but its existence has not broken the logjam between the elected reformers in the Majlis and the appointed conservatives on the Council of Guardians.

Another prime example comes from Pakistan. Pakistani constitutionalism has grappled with the complexities of framing an Islamic constitution ever since the 1949 Objectives Resolution of the first Constituent Assembly proclaimed that the state would be built on Islamic principles. Very quickly, the reform of sharia emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the new Islamic republic. In 1955, by act of the Pakistani National Assembly -- which was still meeting without a constitution because the Pakistani constitution was not promulgated until 1956 -- a commission on marriage and family laws was formed consisting of six lay members, nonreligious experts and one representative of the ulama. Its purpose was exploratory and advisory. The commission was to consider the applicability and the possible revision of Islamic family law in light of the modern conditions of the Pakistani people. The commission’s investigations and recommendations were released the following year, but in two separate reports.

The majority report reflected the consensus of the committee’s lay members and it begins with the traditional acknowledgement of the "comprehensive and all embracing nature" of Islamic law, the sharia. But then it very quickly proceeds to argue that since no code of law can comprehend the infinite variety of human relations for all occasions and for all ethics, the commission was justified in proposing the reform of laws pertaining to such fundamental issues as marriage, divorce and inheritance. The Islamic rationale presented for this revision was, once again, the principle of ijtihad, which the majority report enshrines not only as the dynamic force underlying the sharia, but indeed as a basic right of each Muslim generation. The discussion of ijtihad concludes with a ringing expression of the modernist position: "No Muslim can believe that Islam is an outworn creed incapable of meeting the challenge of evolutionary forces. Its basic principles of justice and equity, its urge for universal knowledge, its acceptance of life and all its aspects, its worldview, its view of human relations and human destiny, and its demand for an all-around and harmonious development, stand firmly like a rock in the tempestuous sea of life."

Very poetic and eloquent, but it didn’t sway the sole religious representative on the committee. The lone dissenting opinion from the majority’s claimed right of legal revision came from the committee’s only religious scholar. Maulana Ihtisham ul Haq writes that the institution of a committee comprised of individuals ignorant of Islamic jurisprudence negates the very possibility that the commission’s detailed inquiry into technical points of the sharia could be valid. A far more vigorous attack on the majority position focuses upon the lay members’ claim to be conducting ijtihad. Ihtisham ul Haq writes, "To consider personal and individual whims to be a legitimate form of sharia interpretation is not ijtihad, it’s only a distortion of the religion of God and the worst type of heresy ... Certain recommendations, which reflect subservience to the West of some of the members and their displeasure with Islam, constitute an odious attempt to distort the holy Koran and sunna with a view to giving them a Western slant and a Western bias."

The majority report was eventually pushed through the Pakistani National Assembly, but it didn’t happen through any kind of democratic process. It happened under the dictatorship of General Ayub Khan. Under the Zia ul-Haq government, Muslim personal law had to be explicitly singled out as the one area of legislation beyond the purview of the federal sharia court. But the ulama and other conservative elements have lobbied incessantly that this exception to the court’s jurisdiction be lifted and the true sharia be applied. And many of the leading ulama in Pakistan with whom I’ve spoken are confident that it is only a matter of time before they are able to have this exception lifted.

So to conclude, how can we think about resolving this tension that I have been discussing? What possible ways are there to accommodate liberal constitutionalism with Islam when so many Muslims view sharia as divine law, in opposition to manmade law which is inherent in the notion of constitutionalism?

One obvious path is to embrace secularism outright. The experience of Turkey under the newly elected AKP and the politics of moderate Islamic parties in Malaysia and Indonesia will be quite important in the years to come, if these experiments are allowed to continue that long. It will be quite important to see if religious parties that are based on claims to be applying Islamic principles to their national life can, in fact, accommodate to secular politics. A number of prominent Muslim activists and theorists do in fact argue for precisely that. But I think that the secular path, the path that attempts to divorce Islam completely from political life, will be a difficult one if not an impossible one for other countries to follow. In other countries, the experience of the past fifty years has shown that Islam must be incorporated into the constitutional order or the risk is that it will be a source for agitation and challenges to that order. So in my opinion, the task for Muslim constitutionalists is not to discard Islam -- it is to find the resources within Islamic thought that permit the development and sustaining of constitutionalism.

How can we do that? One of the first tests in the process is to assert the possibility of natural law and especially natural rights within an Islamic framework. This will require, to some extent, a resurrection and a dissemination of the early Mutazilite emphasis on ethical objectivism -- that all human beings possess this important rational faculty as a God-given faculty to discern right from wrong and to form moral conclusions on how to order their lives apart from one or another revelation. Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina has recently suggested in a book called Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism that a conception of natural law is evident in the Koranic concept of fitra, which basically means that all human beings are united in sharing a basic moral awareness, a moral consciousness.

The second task is to develop a societal consensus that ijtihad is indeed the birthright of all Muslims. And that each Muslim generation has not only the right but the duty to understand the Koran and the sunna in light of their own needs and their own circumstances. Far from being heretical, some Muslim scholars -- such as the late Professor Fazlur Rahman -- have argued that this view was in fact the understanding of sharia for the earliest Muslim generations. It was certainly, as I’ve tried to show, the methodology embraced by the earliest legal scholars, the ones closest to the prophetic community. These scholars gave as much importance to istislah, the notion of public welfare, and istihsan, equity or fairness in law, as they did to custom or dogma.

The third possibility is to reopen an old, old idea and to give it new content in the twenty-first century. This is the idea of divine sovereignty as a check against human tyranny. I mentioned earlier that many of the classical ulama of the Abbasid period resisted tampering with the sharia because of the theological argument that to do so would be to tamper with divine law. Well that is certainly one motivation, the ideological, theological motivation. There was another very practical political reason involved as well. By upholding the immutability of the sharia, the jurists were not seeking to enforce any specific legal points that comprised the sharia; they were instead trying to uphold the rule of law. They were trying to prevent the transformation of the sharia into an instrument of tyranny at the hands of what were already widely considered at the time to be corrupt rulers.

Modern Muslims can likewise embrace the same conception of sharia and apply it to their own political realities, which are, objectively speaking, not so far removed from those of the early centuries. They must start by approaching the Koran as a book of practical morality, not as a compendium of legal minutiae. The sum total of the Koran’s morality can be conceived of as the sharia. So sharia must be disentangled from the notion that it is divine law, because divine law in this case is, as many Muslim modernists have pointed out, not God’s revelation but fiqh, the human interpretation provided by the early jurists that came over the centuries to be enshrined as God’s will. If the sharia is understood not as a law book or code of law, not as a set of detailed legal requirements, but as the moral foundation for constructing a political order, if it is understood as fundamentally enjoining the principles of justice, equality and the submission of human beings to a transcendent authority, then in fact it can serve as a check upon arbitrary human rule, upon authoritarian regimes that dictate laws to their people. Sharia in this conception can play the role that in fact constitutions play in a constitutional order.

DISCUSSION

Hillel Fradkin: You mentioned my teacher, Fazlur Rahman. He was appointed under Ayub Khan to mediate the tension between the sharia and the constitution by being head of Pakistan’s Central Institute of Islamic Research in the 1960s. That effort failed in a very dramatic way; he was driven out of the country and exiled. Is there something to be learned from that failure about how the modernizing change that you described might come about in the Islamic world?

Sohail Hashmi: I think the most profound and revolutionary changes are happening gradually on the so-called Islamic periphery. By that I mean Malaysia and Indonesia, where I really have high hopes for some kind of model to be developed over time. I would include in the periphery Muslims in Europe and the United States, where it is a whole brave new world for Islam. And here I think there are a number of Muslims who are very much American but feel strongly committed and grounded to their native societies. Certainly there are a number of potential candidates to aid the process of this intellectual revival who live in and were educated in the United States, but who could easily be influential back in their own countries. So as Fazlur Rahman said, the key is education. And he devoted the end of his life to discussing the problems of Islamic education.

And as we all know, constitutionalism itself is a very gradual process. We know that from our own experience here in the United States. Constitutionalism doesn’t spring full bloom into existence. It’s learned sometimes by very terrible mistakes.

Abdulwahab Alkebsi: There are other examples of Islamic constitutionalism, including the constitution of the prophet himself in Medina. It was a secular constitution -- a constitution for Muslims, Jews and atheists to live together as one nation under a secular regime.

Sohail Hashmi: The constitution of Medina is a very good example of a fusion of secular and religious ideas because it was not a single written document. More than likely, it was a series of contracts that the prophet forged first with the Muslims who had migrated from Mecca to Medina in 622, and later with the Jews and also some pagans who had not converted to Islam in Medina. So it’s a series of contracts which are compiled together in what is referred to by Muslim historians as the "Sahifa," the document -- that is, the foundational document of the community of the prophet.

It doesn’t really provide for details in terms of the political structure of the Medinan state, but it does fuse the Muslims into a transcendent sort of identity -- the identity of a Muslim umma, an umma that is superior to but does not necessarily destroy the tribal identities of the Muslims. Of course as you know, the tribal identities were paramount before the rise of Islam. So it creates an ethical basis for Muslim action.

In the past, the ethos of pre-Islamic Arabian tribes was "my tribe, right or wrong." The Islamic ethos is now: the umma when it is right, but go with your own conscience if the umma is wrong. The constitution of Medina is an assertion of a higher authority, divine law, above any kind of manmade assertions of what is right and wrong.

What is really quite intriguing is that the Jewish tribes were incorporated into this document. As the document itself says, the Muslims are an umma and the Jewish tribes are an umma. Muslim scholars have debated back and forth: Were the Jews integrated into the Muslim umma or were they conceived by the prophet as a separate community enjoying autonomy alongside the Muslim umma? My own view tends towards the latter conclusion because, as the document says, the Muslims had their religion and their laws, and the Jews had their religion and their laws -- but nevertheless they are all part of one overarching confederacy.

David Abramson: These sorts of transformations are also influenced by Western concepts. Would it be possible to discuss these matters in a way other than in terms of a West, anti-West dichotomy?

Sohail Hashmi: I think that is an important point that certainly Muslims should feel free to borrow from what is best in other traditions. And in the case of democracy, I think the strongest case that can be made for democracy by Muslims is not that the Koran is a democratic document, as we often hear. It strikes me as a very polite kind of statement that you can find in one verse of the Koran the notion of shura, or consultation and therefore claim that the Koran is a democratic document. That is a bit of a stretch. I think the way to really argue for compatibility of democracy and Islam is on the basis of what human experience is shown to be in the best interest of human beings. What allows them to flourish? What allows them to become good moral decent people? And I think democracy has shown itself, with all of its faults, to be the political system that allows that to happen.

So one can argue for that on utilitarian grounds as well as natural law. The resources are there. One of the exciting parts of our project on Islamic constitutionalism is that we have asked our contributors to try as much as they can to identify how classical Islamic thought might have influenced and greatly contributed to the development of constitutionalism among Muslims beginning in the nineteenth century. It’s obvious the West influenced constitutionalism in Islam but there are also indigenous sources that influenced the rise of these movements.

Participants

David Abramson, Office of International Religious Freedom, U.S. Department of State
Abdulwahab Alkebsi, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
Hillel Fradkin, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Sohail Hasmi, Mount Holyoke College

First Muslim in US Congress and Bigotry

On Dec. 22, Michael McElroy wrote an interesting post on the political blog of the New York Times, "The Caucus", regarding the announcement of the newly elected first Muslim member of US House of Representatives, Keith Ellison, who have said that he would take oath on the Quran in a private ceremony in January, and the bigoted reaction the announcement received from Rep. Virgil Goode, Virgina Congressman and others. "Blogtalk: The Koran Debate".

Then I stumbled upon this blog and found it thought-provoking so I put my two cents in the comments section. My comment was published on Dec. 24th and was numbered 213 on the comments list. Then next day, on Dec 25th, someone named C. J. MacAlpine quoted my comment and commented on it and the original blog. It was nunbered 241.

I am reproducing the blog, my comment and C. J. MacAlpine's comment:

Blogtalk: The Koran Debate

In an age of instantaneous electronic mail, text messages and video-conferences, a typed letter has caused a political frenzy. The letter sent by Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia warning his constituents about Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has stirred up dust on both sides of the street, with Mr. Goode getting his fair share of derision from left-leaning blogs. But, some conservative sites supported the Representative.

While many of the more prominent conservative blogs and bloggers — Redstate, Michelle Malkin, and the former Congressman, Tom Delay, veered away from the issue — Powerline took it on.

The blog qualified a bit — “I personally don’t think that the issue of Ellison taking his oath of office on the Koran is a good one for conservatives to emphasize” — but broke down for its readers the important parts of the letter. “The key point here is the MSM’s unthinking acceptance of Ellison’s reassurance that the separation of church and state applies to Muslims just as naturally as it does to members of other faiths. The problem is that, to my knowledge, there is no significant branch of Islam that recognizes anything like a separation of church and state.

The Virginia based Nova Town Hall tackled a couple of issues raised by Mr. Goode.
“As to the question of whether one should be allowed to take an oath on the Koran rather than the Bible, … the Koran appears to permit quite a few additional behaviors one would not hope to see in a courtroom.”
The blog then questioned why any religious text should be used in the swearing in of public officials at all.

Later, the blog addressed Mr. Goode’s fears of Mr. Ellison’s influence on immigration.

My Comment

213.December 24th, 2006 1:21 pm

Is it going to be another “Muhammad Ali Episode”, this time in politics, all over again? I hope not. Is Keith Ellison going to be the one who will break the barriers against Musllim’s involvement in mainstream political process in America as Muhammad Ali did in sports? I hope he is.

There were Virgil Goodes of Muhammad ALi era who nobody cares to know about. I believe this Virgil Goode will be just a foot note in the book of American political history while Mr. Ellison will claim at least a chapter in it.

— Posted by Khalid Masood Butt

C. J. MacAlpine's Comment

241.December 25th, 2006 11:43 pm

“Is it going to be another “Muhammad Ali Episode”, this time in politics, all over again? I hope not. Is Keith Ellison going to be the one who will break the barriers against Muslim’s involvement in mainstream political process in America as Muhammad Ali did in sports? I hope he is.”

This is hardly an enlightened viewpoint. Someone whose spiritual axis lies with a religion who approves of killing non-believers, throwing black African children alive into fire and committing gang rape upon their mothers does not bode well for assuming any kind of political power in this country. You may not want to admit it, but there really are people in the world who do not like you and you need top recognize them for what they are. I have no problems with Mr. Ellison’s religion, I have problems with it assuming political power in my country. I doubt that he or any other Muslim would appreciate myself - a descendant of New England Puritans seeking political office in their country.

— Posted by C. J. MacAlpine

Pakistanis and Manto's Sakeena!

Sakeena is a 17 years old girl in Sa'adat Hassan Manto's masterpiece short story "Khol Do" – Open!. She falls victim to communal riots on her way from Amritsar to Lahore and gets separated from her father and mother.

Sirajuddin, her father finds himself alone in the refugee camp of Mughalpura and cannot recall where he had seen her last time. He remembers, however, his wife dying with her guts out on the road to Pakistan.

When he can't find her for many days and is at the verge of total disappointment he finds eight gun carrying volunteers who vow to find his daughter. It turns out that they do find her but never bring her back to her father. They rape her for so long and so often that she loses all consciousness and they abandon her to die next to the rail tracks.

Her body is found by some good people and Sirajuddin sees them carrying it to the camp hospital not knowing this is his own daughter, Sakeena. Still he follows them hoping that she could be her.

When she is left on a gurney in a dark hospital room he approaches her to find out. At the same time a doctor walks into the room and turns the light on. Sirajuddin recognizes her from a black mole on her cheek. The doctor asks him who he was and he says he was dead girl's father.

Doctor while checking her pulse for any sign of life asks him to "open the window". Sakeena recognizes the now familiar words "Khol Do" so well that her hands unconsciously but limpidly move, untie and lower down her 'Shalwar'. Doctor is mortified with shame but Sirajuddin is happy to see her alive.

Now read the following news piece and think why it has conjured up Sakeena's image in my mind. Is there any resemblance in the characters on the political scene of Pakistan and the ones in this eternally poignant short story, or it is just me?

Six out of 10 Pakistanis favor army rule while people in other South Asian countries overwhelmingly support democracy.

The Third Deadliest Country for Journalists - After Iraq & Afghanistan

Gen. Musharraf’s Pakistan has earned another dubious distinction. According to a report compiled and released by a US-based “Committee to Protect Journalists”, Pakistan has become the third deadliest country for journalists who dare to reveal official corruption, crimes, extra-judicial killings and human rights violations. Iraq and Afghanistan were the first and second deadliest countries respectively. Some other courtiers that made the list are Philippines, Russia, Mexico and Columbia.

But Pakistan, I believe, has been deprived of the first position it rightfully deserved as far as the manner of the crime committed is concerned. Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan where almost all the journalists have been targeted, kidnapped, and executed by insurgents for working with the organizations affiliated to the Iraqi government or sponsored by the US, in Pakistan it is the government or its agencies or its allies who have targeted, kidnapped, and executed journalists.

Though apprehensible and unacceptable even in Iraq and Afghanistan I fail to understand why Pakistani government has become an enemy of truth and wish to wrap up its citizens in a blanket of ignorance if it is not committing any corruption or crime? We don’t have the insurgents or the foreign occupiers in Pakistan at least in the recognized sense of the terms. Why would, then, an indigenous military junta become an enemy of pen and its holders in Pakistan?

In Iraq the journalists, at least, have a green zone to work from. Where is that green zone in Pakistan where the journalists can go if they feel threatened? But reporting the truth can be fatal Ask 38-year-old Dilawar Wazir Khan who works for the Urdu language service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Pakistan's English daily the ‘Dawn' and was kidnapped from Islamabad, the capital, blindfolded, fettered, and tortured for 30 hours before he was released. His fate was different from his colleagues who had been murdered after they were similarly kidnapped because protests from journalists' unions been launched for his release. The journalists in Islamabad had threatened to boycott parliamentary proceedings. International media organizations also raised an outcry. The BBC Urdu service carried the story of his abduction for two consecutive days and World Service director Nigel Chapman called on the Pakistani government to ascertain his whereabouts. He was released but he says: "Many of my colleagues have given up their profession and others have left the area."

Dilawar had escaped two earlier attempts on his life in which two of his colleagues, Allah Noor Wazir and Amir Nawab, were left dead. His 15-year-old brother Taimur was kidnapped and murdered in 2005. At that point Dilawar moved out of his hometown of Wana, in South Waziristan, to Dera Ismail Khan.

After his abduction he said, he did not "know where to find refuge. No place seems safe enough. This time I was lucky and came home almost unscathed but I am not sure if I'll be this lucky the next time."

Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said in a statement on Nov. 21, after Dilawar's release: "The disappearances and deaths of several Pakistani journalists have gone unexplained, uninvestigated, and unreported by the authorities. Police and courts must bring to justice the people who harm and intimidate journalists." But unfortunately it is the police, government agencies and courts who have become partners in these crimes.

Hamid Mir is a well-known Urdu language columnist for the Jang newspaper and anchor of a popular Geo TV current affairs talk show 'Capital Talk'. He has been termed, in his words, "an anti-state element" by the Pakistan army and has been receiving numerous threats for his coverage of the insurgency in Balochistan province and for writing about the assassination of his friend Hayatullah Khan, another journalist from North Waziristan. He said about Dilawar Khan that: "Dilawar was abducted because his story in Dawn about the peace deal in North Waziristan proved that it was signed by militants not by local tribal elders. He was released because Dawn published the vehicle number that belonged to the ISI in which he was taken away."

Dilawar says that he has "been threatened with dire consequences" if he divulges who had kidnapped him. He says that he has "caused enough trauma and pain" to his family because of his profession and he has "fear for their lives". He thinks it was because of his journalistic work that his brother was killed. "It was to teach me a lesson and to bring me down to my knees", he says.

Mazhar Abbas, secretary of Pakistan Federation of Unions of Journalists (PFUJ), said the first kidnapping incident took place in the 1990s when a senior Islamabad-based reporter Humayun Fahr was detained by the ISI for "working against the national interests". Humayun was sentenced to death by court martial. He was released when his health deteriorated but died shortly after his release.

Kamila Hayat, joint director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) calls these abductions as "harassment and intimidation", and says "it is part of a broader campaign to stifle dissent, opposing opinions and embarrassing news through intimidation."

While the government boasts of giving media freedom of expression but it has subjected journalists to kidnappings, tortures, executions and other terror tactics for reporting the truth. Hamid Mir says that initially Musharraf gave full freedom to the media so it may criticize the prime minister Nawaz Sharif he had overthrown. "But the situation changed after 9/11, when Musharraf became an ally of the United States and he was given a free hand by the West", says Mir.

The hoax of media's freedom of expression is exposed when you see that Geo and ARY (another private TV channel) have their transmission centers not in Pakistan but in Dubai where they have bear heavy expenses to keep their freedom away from the clutches of eve present government agencies. Hamid Mir gives the reason for these TV channels being out of Pakistan: "... they don't have permanent uplinking license for Pakistan. They get an uplinking license on monthly basis. The government can ban any channel anytime, like they banned Sindh TV recently."

Is it the legacy Gen Musharraf promised when he illegally took over power in 1999?
The journalists used to be considered neutral observers and portrayers of the facts but in foreign occupier-run and dictator-run countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan they have become an endangered species.

The state terrorism and murder is not the only tool Pakistan’s dictator is using in its war against truth. The courts and the laws are also being brought to the fore in this war of words against guns. A coalition partner of the military junta, MQM, filed a criminal, rather than a civil, case under the highly controversial 'Pakistani Criminal Defamation Law', and the district and session court in Karachi on Thursday indicted three journalists of evening daily The Star, Kamal Majidullah, Syed Saleem Shahzad and crime reporter Ralph D. Cruze. They could face imprisonment because their paper ran a front page story last year about the alleged linkage of Shoaib Khan, a underworld crime king pin and MQM. The 53-year-old newspapers was shut down on 2 December, 2006, under pressure from the government coalition partner MQM.

The case, the indictment, and the law have been criticized by national and international journalist and human rights organizations.

How far military is willing and able to go in deteriorating the situation in Pakistan? I know it has the wherewithal, the will and weapons. Why it does not have a consciousness, a rein, a check, on its un-opposable, unbridled power?

Pakistanis deserve to know the vital story, the truth. A free press is the only window to the facts and its ability and freedom to report the news as is vital to maintain an informed and aware public and a check on officials to make responsible decisions. If the government wants to limit its ability to provide the real story what recourse, the citizens of Pakistan have left than to leave the pen and pick up the gun? Why government wants to leave the press crippled and on its mercy to operate? By declaring an unannounced war on journalists the military government and its callous allies are working together to create an environment of fear and setting a dangerous precedent in this tormented nation to prevent the factual reporting.

Rubbing Elbows with Gouty Kings

I can only write this post because the pain in 'my left foot' is not at its peak level at this time. Thank God! The indomethecine capsule I have taken with a full glass of water couple hours ago has somehow choked some of cells in my brain somewhere and they are not transmitting their signals. To be more precise, the cells meant to transmit may still be, foolishly, sending their signals not knowing that no one is receiving them on the other end.

The numbness induced by Indomethcine may also be the reason for the thought coming to my mind of writing a lighter post about, of all things, gout. But I don't know how long the humor will last.

When I read the biography of Benjamin Disraeli a years ago I found out that he was a gouty. Today when I was surfing internet I came across some other celebrities who were also gouties. I feel a kind of pride that, after all, the company I keep is not a bad one.

But that does not mean that I will be known by the company I keep because probably gout is the only characteristic I have common with them.

Actually the first book I ever read about any American was the autobiography of the First American, Ben Franklin. It was an abridged little book whaich I had bought from Hero's Old Book Shop in a side alley of New Anar Kali Bazar, Lahore, sometime in late seventies.

At that time, somehow, I did not notice that Ben had gout. May be it was the part abridged. Publisher did not deem it important? Too painful? It is impossible Ben himself abridged it. Gout is too painful to ignore. It assumes centrality and every thing else kind of recedes to the peripherial spaces, especailly when it flares up.

May be it was there. It did not register because I had no clue at that tender age that one day I will be rubbing elbows with him and other celebrities of past.

Later on when I read Disraeli's life only thing which stuck out was gout.

Matter of fact, gout was known as the “Disease of Kings” due to its association with rich foods and alcohol consumption and kings. Henry VIII, Charles V, and George IV had it.

So did Nostradamus, John Milton, Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, , Pablo Neruda, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Jefferson, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham William B. Finneran, Kirk Reuter and Benjamin Franklin.

The Weakest as the Most Popular

Two amazing, back to back, pieces of news in two days about the same person: General Musharraf. Both from America. One, a survey conducted in Pakistan in September by the research wing of the US Republican Party says
Musharraf is ahead of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in popularity among Pakistanis.

No wonder the Republican Party was routed in recent American elections. Its research wing must have been doing surveys of American voters and finding the Republican candidates more popular than the Democratic candidates.

The second news piece contradicts what the first one claims. The American magazine 'National Journal' in its current issue quotes some observers that Musharraf is at his weakest he has ever been and the "only friend in the world" Musharraf has is US President George W. Bush.

Even More interesting piece of news is hidden in the first one. The survey found out that 70 per cent of the Pakistanis said their personal economic conditions remained unchanged or worsened over the past four years; and they want both exiled former prime ministers to be allowed to return home to contest the next general election. Majority of the respondents also said that Pakistan was heading in the ‘wrong direction’.

I don't know which one of the two statements Musharraf is going to believe. I hope he believes the first one and in his excitement sheds off his uniform and runs in some kind of election, such as a Nazim of some Union Council.

According to the survey, the PML-Q is at the top in Punjab, followed by Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N. I hope ruling League also believes in the first statement as it always follows "his master's voice". I see good signs. On Saturday, Punjab's Law Minister Basharat Raja applauded the survey's findings.

Is Musharraf more popular for taking Pakistan in the wrong direction, not improving or making worse the lot of an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis?

The Journal says that Musharraf's core constituency is the military, and there are indications that he has started to lose that as well. "There's a lot of anxiety about Musharraf's reckless behavior", one of experts says.

There is a little bad news for Musharraf too. Analysts have advised that Washington should abandon the tendency to support the military "strongmen" and instead have more faith in civilian leadership. They have also asserted that even if Musharraf were to leave the scene, "Pakistan is not likely to descend into anarchy nor will its nuclear weapons fall into terrorist hands, or its government come under the control of mullahs and militants". South Asia expert Marvin Weinbaum who says that if Musharraf is "taken out tomorrow, there would be strong continuity" because the vice chief of the army would step up.

Pakistan's ambassador to the US Mahmud Ali Durrani is quoted acknowledging that the military is growing weary of ruling the country. Freedberg writes: "Sooner, not later, he will lose his footing".


According to Alexis Debat, a former French counter-terrorism office, who quotes Stephen Cohen of Brookings Institute that "there’s a lot of anxiety about Musharraf’s reckless behavior".

All Set To Surrender Kashmir

President General Pervez Musharraf told a private Indian TV channel NDTV on Tuesday, December 5, that Pakistan would give up its claim over Kashmir if India accepted his "four-point solution" to the long-festering Kashmir disputed between India and Pakistan. Asked whether he was really prepared to give up his country's claim on Kashmir, he reassured the interviewer: "We will have to, yes, if this solution comes up."

This is not the first time Gen Musharraf has made "out of the box" proposals on Kashmir in media interviews. Ever since he toppled the democratically elected government of Nawaz Sharif, he, in all his impetuous urgency, has been spewing out in a rapid-fire mode what the Pakistani Foreign Minister called "endless proposals".

General Musharraf has done this diplomatic drill so often that it has become a well-rehearsed routine.

This is how he does it: he comes up with a novel proposal, presents it in some media interview, preferably in India. He waits India to accept it. India ignores it; makes a demand of some kind; or an unimportant official in India's foreign ministry makes an ambiguous sound. He expects and asks some US or other foreign government to pressure India to accept his proposal. He expresses his frustration at the lack of any response from India or any pressure from US. In frustration makes another proposal, more novel than the previous one which, coincidently, happens to be a little closer to India's position. Same lack of Indian response or US pressure; another Indian pre-condition or demand; or an ambiguous sound. His frustration grows. In desperation he makes another proposal a little more closer to India's position. And the cycle starts all over again.

Now, I believe, he doesn't have to do it any more because his drill has brought his position on Kashmir to coincide with India's position to such an extent that an Indian analyst C. Raja Mohan calls, Musharraf's latest proposal "closest to India's negotiated position". India has dexterously brought, by a combinations of myriad diplomatic maneuvers, Pakistan's position very close to its own without showing its hand or offering any quid pro quo.

Mushahid Hussain Sayed, the ruling Muslim League (PMLQ) general secretary, on Friday said that General Pervez Musaharraf’s recent offer for resolving the Kashmir issue has put the ball in India’s court.

Mushahid should know it is not India's court where General Musharraf has put the ball. He has given it in Manmohan Singh's hands. All he has to do is to run with it.

Musharraf is all set to surrender Kashmir.

The question is why Musharraf in his dual capacity as a chief of army staff and the president is striking at an issue that has been used by the army as its raison d'etre and an excuse for ever increasing defense expenses?

A couple of reasons: the army is so entrenched in every aspect of the civilian, political, and business life of Pakistan that it does not need Kashmir as an excuse any more; greatly improve economic relations with India could help the army retain its position as the dominant power in Pakistan; General Musharraf faces elections next year and would want to present himself as the architect of a new India-Pakistan accord and a statesman.

Standing With The Losers

The voice of the youth is the voice of future. An overwhelming majority of them now believe the 'war on terror' is already lost. At least in their minds, the real battleground!

The BBC World Service hired a research agency to conduct a survey. 300 or more youngsters aged 15 - 17 were interviewed October this year in ten cities of the world: New York, Nairobi, Cairo, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Baghdad, Delhi, Jakarta, Moscow and London.

71% of respondents said the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were making the world not a safer place. Only 14% of said they were. The remaining 15% did not know or declined to answer.

Negative views of the "war on terror" were strongest in Baghdad (98%) and Rio (92%). Nobody asked Afghanis or Pakistanis.

Had Lahore, Karachi or any other Pakistani city been included in this list I don't think the result would have been different.

The writing on the wall is very clear for anyone willing and able to see. But the lucre-blinded military junta in Pakistan, the 'proud' but forced partner of the aggressors, cannot see.

The war is already lost. The resistance in America against this unnecessary war is growing every day. Even the most adamant proponents and supporters of this war are slowly but steadily crumbling. Rumsfeld left for Bush a 'cut and run' memo only one day before he resigned. The neo-cons, the sires of this foolish war, who had pushed Bush towards this hell are now hastily scurrying of this sinking ship and are turning on Bush. Kennedy was right when he said victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan.

Kofi Annan is saying that the life for ordinary Iraqis is now more dangerous than it was under Saddam Hussein and the country has descended into violence "much worse" than civil war.

How long will it take for Musharraf and his partners in crime to realize that they will be standing with losers once the fog of war evaporates? Or, are they already pulling their hand out gingerly by giving mixed signals to NATO to make deals with Taliban and htting hard on Madrassahs?

Who Will Trace The Chief Justice If He Goes Missing?

I think the Supreme Court Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, is entering the dangerous territory now.

Locating the missing girls is a different matter altogether. Their kidnappers and abductors are lowly lawless individuals or groups. They can be brought to the book with impunity. But asking the Eternal Ruling Party of Pakistan (the military) to go find the missing Pakistanis is not a course I will recommend anyone who does not want to go missing himself. Especially if the military agencies (Inter Services Intelligence and military intelligence) are the ones who made these missing Pakistanis disappear in the first place.

Now the Chief Justice is asking the agencies, actually the military, to go fish the missing Pakistanis out of the damp, dreary and dark dungeons run by the agencies.

If military can rule Pakistan uninterrupted why it has no right to make the irritating or “marked” Pakistanis vanish. After all it is military’s Pakistan. Not the other way around.

The army colonel and the Operations Director (simultaneously) of the Interior Ministry who had to provide a list of the missing Pakistanis showed his claws a little when he asked the court “to close the case”. But the chief justice did not listen and rather “rebuked” him saying: “Who are you to tell us to dispose of the case? It’s a question of our authority. You are responsible for tracing out the missing people”.

What about the military authority or the martial law? Or lack of any law for that matter? Lawlessness, in other words?

Come on Chiefie! You know the game. They can wrap you up real fast. Who will locate you when you go “missing”. Who do you have on your side? They have Bush and his extra-legal powers. You say it is the government’s duty to trace the missing people and the Interior Ministry should contact all intelligence agencies to know the whereabouts of people taken by the agencies. Which government you are talking about? You must have some school book, idealistic ideas about governments which listen and respond to people. It is military, dude! This is no ordinary political government. Not in Pakistan.

Who the hell are provincial home secretaries or the Interior Ministry? They have no power to contact intelligence agencies and ask them questions regarding whereabouts of people abducted by them.

You are asking the agencies to “find” them. They don’t have to find them. They “have” them. Who are you to order them around? Be careful. I am telling ya!

Do you know what they have told the 10 people they have set free? They had been warned not to talk to newsmen about their detentions, or else they will be arrested and never freed.

By the way, did you ask them where the 10 they have not released are? What do they mean they have “traced” them? Ask them who had abducted them in their own country? Where they had been in the intervening years? Why were they abducted? What was their crime? What about those who are still missing? What do they mean when they say they were able to locate only 20? Do you think they will “trace” the rest in two weeks? I mean release them?

You are already stepping on their toes. It is their territory. Their Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah just worked for them. Millions of people gave up their homes and hearths for them to enjoy the choice lands and perks in and out of service so they can make millions. Now the same people, or their descendants must pay with their freedom and liberty.

If you want to be free and live the rest of the days of your life out of some military dungeon then stay out of their way. Go locate missing girls. Don’t mess with them.

Don’t you know this is war of terror? Why do the people ask for their basic rights? Don't they know Military comes first. And its rights start with the right to rule Pakistan. Pakistanis are just their chattels. They can do whatever they want with them.

Don’t take any action against their military abductors as some people are urging you to. You may go missing too, if you do. Who will trace you if that happens?