A Pacifist Uncovered (Abdul Ghaffar Khan / Pakistani Muslim)

[struggle4progress]

By Amitabh Pal
February 2002

... A devout practitioner of nonviolence and social reform, Khan worked to spread his ideals in the region. Eluding at least two assassination attempts and surviving three decades in prison, he remained committed to nonviolence to the day he died in 1988 at the age of ninety-eight ...

The British thus reacted with a singular ferocity to the Khidmatgar desire for independence from British rule, subjecting Khidmatgar members throughout the 1930s and early 1940s to mass killings, torture, and destruction of their homes and fields. Khan himself spent fifteen of these years in prison, often in solitary confinement. But these Pashtuns refused to give up their adherence to nonviolence even in the face of such severe repression ...

"There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence," Ghaffar Khan is quoted in Easwaran's biography. "It is not a new creed. It was followed 1,400 years ago by the Prophet all the time when he was in Mecca." For Khan, Islam meant muhabbat (love), amal (service), and yakeen (faith).

Khan once told Gandhi of a discussion he had with a Punjabi Muslim who didn't see the nonviolent core of Islam. "I cited chapter and verse from the Koran to show the great emphasis that Islam had laid on peace, which is its coping stone," Khan said. "I also showed to him how the greatest figures in Islamic history were known more for their forbearance and self-restraint than for their fierceness. The reply rendered him speechless." ...

http://www.progressive.org/mag_amitpalabdul

[Hoping4Change]

1. Please reserve final judgement about non-violence platitudes

until you read about "Mahmoud Muhammad Taha who was executed, in 1985, for sedition and apostasy, after protesting the imposition of Sharia in Sudan by President Jaafar al-Nimeiri. In death, Taha became something rare in contemporary Islam: a moderate martyr..." Taha did not mouth platitutes about Islam being non-violent, he wanted to reform it by admitting the truth about its darker side.

The article is a long read by definitely an eyeopener.




THE MODERATE MARTYR
by GEORGE PACKER
A radically peaceful vision of Islam.
Issue of 2006-09-11 New Yorker Magazine



snip


For any Muslim who believes in universal human rights, tolerance, equality, freedom, and democracy, the Koran presents an apparently insoluble problem. Some of its verses carry commands that violate a modern person’s sense of morality. The Koran accepts slavery. The Koran appoints men to be “the protectors and maintainers of women,” to whom women owe obedience; if disobeyed, men have the duty first to warn them, then to deny them sex, and finally to “beat them (lightly).” The Koran orders believers to wait until the holy months are finished, and then to “fight and slay the Pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).” These and other verses present God’s purpose in clear, unmistakable terms, and they have become some of the favorite passages in the sermons, fatwas, and Internet postings of present-day fundamentalists to justify violence and jihad. An enormous industry of reform-minded interpreters has arisen in recent years to explain them away, contextualize them, downplay them, or simply ignore them, often quoting the well-known verse that says there is “no compulsion in religion.” Not long ago, I received one such lecture from a Shiite cleric in Baghdad, who cited the “no compulsion” verse while sitting under a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. In confronting the troublesome verses head on, Taha showed more intellectual honesty than all the Islamic scholars, community leaders, and world statesmen who think that they have solved the problem by flatly declaring Islam to be a religion of peace.


snip


The Koran was revealed to Muhammad in two phases—first in Mecca, where for thirteen years he and his followers were a besieged minority, and then in Medina, where the Prophet established Islamic rule in a city filled with Jews and pagans. The Meccan verses are addressed, through Muhammad, to humanity in general, and are suffused with a spirit of freedom and equality; according to Taha, they present Islam in its perfect form, as the Prophet lived it, through exhortation rather than threat.

snip

As Taha puts it in “The Second Message of Islam,” whereas Muhammad propagated “verses of peaceful persuasion” during his Meccan period, in Medina “the verses of compulsion by the sword prevailed.” The Medinan verses are full of rules, coercion, and threats, including the orders for jihad, and in Taha’s view they were a historical adaptation to the reality of life in a seventh-century Islamic city-state, in which “there was no law except the sword.” ...


snip


What’s truly remarkable about Taha is that he existed at all. In the midst of a gathering storm of Islamist extremism, he articulated a message of liberal reform that was rigorous, coherent, and courageous. His vision asked Muslims to abandon fourteen hundred years of accepted dogma in favor of a radical and demanding new methodology that would set them free from the burdens of traditional jurisprudence. Islamic law, with its harsh punishments and its repression of free thought, was, Taha argued, a human interpretation of the Medinan verses and the recorded words and deeds of the Prophet in Medina; developed in the early centuries after Muhammad, it was then closed off to critical revision for a millennium.



http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060911fa_fact1

[struggle4progress]

2. OK article. It shows that the liberal reformers of the Islamic world ..

.. operate under the same constraints as the liberal reformers in any other religious context. But perhaps the assertion "What’s truly remarkable about Taha is that he existed at all" is dishonest.

The old Judaic texts are bloodthirsty documents, calling for people to be put to death horribly for any number of minor infractions. Why would we judge our Judaic friends on the basis of their texts rather than on the basis of how they live their texts?

Any number of vicious extremists, including the Klan, have claimed to be Christian and have cited bits of scripture to support their hatred of life. This has been true since ancient times: the mobs that murdered Hypatia called themselves Christian. But so did Francis of Assissi call himself Christian. Against ugliness, Christian reformers have always struggled. Why would we judge our Christian friends on their texts, rather than how they live their texts?

Have you ever examined any Buddhist tantric writings? Some are full of invocations to commit all manner of bloody licentious crimes. A standard response from Buddhists has been that the texts must be understood rightly, and that if they are taken literally they do more damage than good. Why would we judge our Buddhist friends on their texts, rather than how they live their texts?

Islam is not alone in having scriptures suggesting things that no modern person of goodwill considers acceptable. Nor is Islam alone in having vicious extremists who will do all manner of vicious evil in the name of their supposed religion. Nor is Islam alone in having a long history including many tolerant people of fundamental decency who contributed to the human cause. Why would we judge our Islamic friends on the basis of their texts rather than on the basis of how they live their texts?

On a practical level, what is the real difference between a group of insane Islamic fundamentalists killing thousands of people at the WTC to make a visible political point and a group of insane Christian fundamentalists launching an unnecessary war against Iraq, killing thousands of people in Iraq to make a visible political point? My friends and enemies are not delineated by their nominal religious beliefs, nor by the scriptures they clutch or reject, but by their attitude towards this world in which we live and the relationships they construct with the people in this world.

What's wrong with noting the existence of particularly humane interpretations of difficult old documents or remembering people who made an effort to understand the humane lessons of their own cultural history?