(+++) BIG QUESTIONS, SMALL ANSWERS

Being Muslim Today: Reclaiming the Faith from Orthodoxy and Islamophobia. By Saqib Iqbal Qureshi. Rowman & Littlefield. $25.

     A scholarly First World work that never quite comes to grip with issues playing out daily, mostly in Third World countries, Being Muslim Today assiduously avoids the world’s numerous religion-fueled (or religion-stoked) geopolitical crises in favor of a “return to basics” approach that is extremely unlikely to make any headway against the forces of intolerance to which its subtitle refers.

     Saqib Iqbal Qureshi, a fellow at the London School of Economics, says the book is for people such as his 15-year-old son, who hear constant messages about the inherent violence of Islɑ̄m and do not know what to think about their own religion and its practitioners. Qureshi attributes the issue to non-Muslim Westerners who deliberately misrepresent Islɑ̄m; to “a handful of Muslims themselves” who feed the mislabeling; to “much of the Muslim establishment itself,” specifically “the orthodox leadership who demand unthinking adherence”; and to the “tiny minority,” the “lunatic fringe,” those who “seem obsessed with making Islɑ̄m live up to its reputation of cartoon villainy in the West.”

     To “reclaim” the religion, Qureshi returns to its roots in an exploration with 56 pages of small-type footnotes elucidating (for his fellow academics) a great deal that is abstruse, coupled with some genuinely helpful scholarship. He explains that the Qur’ɑ̄n is an assemblage over time of material passed down through oral traditions – not a carefully curated book. He points out that “nobody alive uses the vernacular Quraysh Arabic dialect [of the Qur’ɑ̄n], nor knows how it was used during the Prophetic era,” and therefore “the meaning of the Qur’ɑ̄n’s words aren’t [sic] obvious.” He discusses the messy emergence of Sharī’a (“the path”); the way Muhammad “initiated one of the most profound gender revolutions in history” that was later systematically undermined by a growing orthodoxy that suppressed women; the current insistence on killing anyone who is a murtadd (apostate), vs. what he says was originally a far more benign and nonviolent approach to ridda (apostasy); and many more specifics that mean, collectively, that “orthodoxy has crafted its own Islɑ̄m, out of shape from what we had some fourteen hundred years ago in ways that affect us across our entire lives.”

     Well, this is scarcely a surprise. Christianity, another ancient and widespread faith, has changed dramatically from the days of antipopes, priests fathering children with nuns, uncounted murders that included such abominations as guaranteeing safe conduct and then slaughtering people (notably Jan Hus), and to-the-death battles over rituals and interpretations – and Christianity at least had the formative doctrinal Council of Nicaea in the year 325, plus multiple successors, while Islɑ̄m had nothing comparable. It is a bit surprising that Qureshi appears to a be a bit surprised at the extent to which modern Islɑ̄m deviates from that in its formative centuries.

     Qureshi really dislikes the West on many levels. Media deliberately misrepresent Islɑ̄m, he says, because their “primary motivation” is attention, which they get by “demonizing different communities.” Although he does not overtly endorse terrorist mass-murder organizations that hide behind Islɑ̄m, such as Hamas – he is far too urbane for that – Qureshi states that “most of the Muslims I’ve met are incensed at the United States’s funding of Israeli brutality against Palestinians, and many resent the United States for propping up nasty dictators in Muslim countries.” And Qureshi certainly has his own thoughts on specific Western political figures, calling London mayor Sadiq Khan “the most successful London mayor in modern history” and Boris Johnson “the most embarrassing British prime minister in memory.”

     Qureshi seems to have more of an identity crisis than a crisis of faith. He goes into considerable detail about the depredations that the West has visited upon many countries at many times, even as he insists that “far from feeling foreign in the West, a Muslim should feel right at home, even inside a cathedral,” given the cross-pollination of civilizations in the distant past. He is right both about those interrelationships and interdependencies and about the horrors that have been committed both by and against Muslims. He frequently argues that misunderstanding of verses of the Qur’ɑ̄n – exaggerated, he says, by those with various axes to grind, sometimes literally – is responsible for misinformation that can lead to deadly encounters. Thus, he says verse 5:51, which warns against taking Jews or Christians as allies, refers only to “Muslims who took the protection of Jewish clans” and “is blown out of proportion.” And he adds, “The broader point the conspiracy theorists take from this – that Muḥammad or his followers should henceforth treat all Jews or Christians with suspicion – is simply not born [sic] out.”

     Qureshi is clear on where he stands about intransigent geopolitical situations: “The US political elite is quite good at closing its eyes, as we know, from Israel’s seven-decade illegal occupation of Palestine.” (Dodging a major issue, he does not opine on whether Israel has the right to exist.) He says “friction is inevitable” as Muslim populations grow in the West, since “first-generation immigrants in particular don’t wear jeans and T-shirts” and the West is quite judgmentally superficial about such matters. And he points approvingly to the lower homicide rate per capita in the most-populous Muslim countries, compared to that in the United States.

     All this may well make readers wonder if perhaps Qureshi would be happier if he lived in Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh or Nigeria. Certainly he never fully explains why he remains in the West. Indeed, he specifically makes a distinction between religion-driven (or rather orthodoxy-driven) violence, which he condemns, and the politically motivated sort, which he at least understands: “Many former colonized countries thus not only failed to develop meaningful indigenous and inclusive political systems but lacked resources to deliver jobs, education, and all the rest of it. And the combination of those problems has resulted in political violence.”

     So why not live where Muslims are in the majority and are not shunned for everything from their beliefs to their clothing? “There is a lot of content in this book alone that if you were to publicly state in a Muslim-majority country, you could easily end up behind bars, beaten, or killed.” But would that not be understandable, perhaps even acceptable, since it would be political violence, not religious violence? The whole thing becomes a bit mixed-up, right down to the book’s very last, confusing words urging readers to “develop a deeper, cleaner, and more robust faith…and one which leads to you [sic] become [sic] a better human.”

     For all its erudition, which is attractively melded with narrative plainspokenness, Being Muslim Today has some obvious lacks if it is to be used as any sort of primer or spiritual map by Qureshi’s son or other young Muslims. There is nothing in it about the consequences (up to and including death) of mocking Muhammad or even portraying him – he was, after all, a real human being, and the reasons for disallowing his representation (given his status as the last Prophet, not an incarnation of divinity) are difficult to fathom (even more so in light of the innumerable portrayals of Christ, many of them far from respectful, despite the fact that Christ is deemed an incarnation of divinity by numerous faithful Christians). And why exactly do Muslims pray five times a day? The 16-page index has no entry for salah or salat. It would seem logical that “reclaiming the faith” would start with, or at least include, some analysis of its outward manifestations and expectations. Being Muslim Today is, in the final analysis, a curious book: extensively researched, clearly written within its self-defined limits, but ultimately conveying only the message that today’s Muslims would do better to return to the roots of their religion (despite those roots lying in an unknowable oral tradition, elements of which were later written down in a language that no one speaks anymore) than to accept what has grown from those roots through varying interpretations since the seventh century. The book basically uses 320 pages to admonish readers to “go back to basics” – and to be very careful how, when, where, and in what context they do so.