The sold out event was an essential part of NIAC’s mission to encourage Iranian Americans to “proactively present their image on their own terms.” Esteemed scholar and director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak served as a friendly foil to Aslan as the evening’s discussant.

Islam, according to Aslan, is a faith that is particularly conducive to interpretation because it is unencumbered by a ridged hierarchy in the form of theocratic institutions. “Islam is what Muslims say Islam is. It is not a creedal faith. Unlike the Catholic Church, there is no Muslim that speaks for God,” Aslan argued.

The ulemma, far from being an institutionalized hierarchy in Aslan’s terms, have, nevertheless, historically enjoyed a monopoly on religious learning. Clerically monopolized teaching instilled a certain degree of impotence among believers as patrimonial institutions tend to do: the inability to define ones own faith in the context of ones own life is at once alienating and subjugating. Muslim docility can be explained by a deficit of religious liberty, in Aslan’s view.

Technological advancement from the printing press through the internet has weakened the grip of the clerical classes’ control of religious education. Access to information and, in a sense, growing access to one another outside of the mosques has resulted, in Aslan’s words, in a “new sense of individualism in Islam.”

Aslan argues that Bin Laden is the most bombastic demonstration of the emergent liberalization of the Muslim faith: this “Islamic Reformation.” Aslan defends his not at all uncontroversial analogy, “Like the Protestant Reformation the fundamental conflict is over who gets to define religion: the institution or the individual? All great religious traditions go through this process.”

Aslan analysis on the inter-Islamic political, religious, and social reformation – or reformulation – of authority does not ignore the very real intra-“civilizational” blood letting that continues to dominate our attention. Instead, he implores the reader to dispel of the notion that September 11th represented the beginning of history for cross-cultural quarrel, and instead pay heed to imperialism’s lasting effects. The scars of colonialism fade slowly, Alsan argued, as “white man’s burden” has become the Muslim world’s bane. It is a bane that has by and large been wrestled with internally.

“The question of how to build an Islamic state after colonialism became a political movement in the Arab-Muslim world. There emerged a group of post-colonial reformers that were committed to promoting ‘Islamicized’ Enlightenment ideals. One must recognize that what is taking place today in the Muslim world is internal. The jihadists are not a counter to the reformation: they are the reformation,” Aslan concluded provocatively.

 

Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak opened his response by expressing appreciation for the opportunity to discuss these issues. “You are trying to tame the lion of passion in us; to reason with us. To provide a logical discourse about Islam; a statement that tries to calm the passions because there is nothing in Islam that can be essentialized,” Dr. Karimi-Hakkak exclaimed.

Karimi-Hakkak, who identifies himself as secular who approaches religion from the perspective of a scholar, praised Aslan’s narrative discussion from the colonial period to the contemporary, calling it nothing less than “superb.” But he was critical of Aslan’s treatment of the ontological status – or origin – of the Koran and felt that a more thorough discussion of Sufism would have been helpful; specifically the sect’s connection with Koranic passages, and its different orientations. Karimi-Hakkak closed with an appeal to the “power of reason” to “speed up” the reformation, and that he welcomed a dialogue between secular and religious communities.

Aslan expressed optimism about the prospects for dialogue between secular and religious communities.

“Religion is just a different way, or a different level of understanding the same issues everyone is dealing with. There are many more similarities in terms of interests between communities, than there are differences.”

Aslan then fielded several questions on critical issues. One participant questioned the need for the Islamic world to develop concepts such as Islamic democracy or Islamic human rights, when the existing models are not “Christian” democracy or “Christian” human rights? “Human rights are human rights,” the participant commented. Aslan argued, however, that this was part of a process for the Muslim world to internalize these values.

Aslan rejected the notion that the United States was not a “Christian” democracy, or that Israel for that matter was not a “Jewish” democracy. In his words, the reformation “must be framed in recognizable languages for all participants.”

The question of the inequality of women in much of the Islamic world, and what can be done, was also addressed. One participant questioned the ability to reform scriptures that essentially are sexist in nature.

Aslan responded that the discrimination against women in the Islamic has cultural, rather than religious roots. “The Islamic Reformation, and the subsequent individualization of Islam are due in part to women coming out and getting to the scripture itself,” Aslan noted.

 

© 2010 National Iranian American Council (NIAC)