Heretic: Why Islam Needs A Reformation Now

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Heretic: Why Islam Needs A Reformation Now” Harper, 2015 250 pp.

Author Hirsi Ali came from a deeply religious Islamic upbringing, escaping when her Father arranged an unsought marriage for her.  She now has a post at Harvard and has written books critical of Islam, warning the west that Islam is not a peaceful religion and the few courageous Islamic dissidents must be protected, not labelled as troublemakers.  The book clearly brings attention to the repression of women and minorities as well as the sectarian warfare within the Islamic world.

The author argues that the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam and there is no denying that some of its key teachings—not least the duty to wage holy war—are incompatible with the values of a free society.

Even though the Arab Spring appears to be a failure—it is certainly no 1989 Berlin Wall—Hirsi Ali believes that a Muslim Reformation reconciling the religion with modernity is possibly beginning.  It would be immensely helped if the dissidents were treated and supported as the South Africans were in their struggle with apartheid.  The US government's current stand in which the President continues to insist that the terrorists have nothing to do with Islam, is badly misplaced.

My Notes:

Pg. 10:  After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the White House went to great lengths to distinguish between ‘the violent extremist messaging that ISIL and other extremist organizations are using to try to radicalize individuals around the globe’ and a ‘peaceful religion.’  The very phrase ‘radical Islam’ was no longer to be uttered.  But what if this entire premise is wrong?  For it is not just Al-Qaeda and IS that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice.  It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death.  It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed, and where there was almost a beheading a day in August 2014.  It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their crime.  It is Brunei, where the sultan is reinstituting Islamic sharia law, again making homosexuality punishable by death.

Pg. 12:  The fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.

Pg. 13:  Islam is a single core creed based on the Qur’an, the words revealed by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, and the hadith, the accompanying works that detail Muhammad’s life and words. 

Pg. 21: 

Attitudes in Muslim countries with a large current and projected migration to the United States
Percentage of Muslims who…	Pakistan	Bangladesh	Iraq
.Favor the death penalty for leaving Islam	75	43	41
Say it’s necessary to believe in God to be Moral	85	89	91
Agree that converting others is a religious duty	85	69	66
Say sharia is revealed word of God	81	65	69
Say religious leaders should have some or large influence	54	69	57
Say Western entertainment hurts morality	88	75	75
Say polygamy is morally acceptable	37	32	46
Say honor killings are never justified when female committed the offense	45	34	22
Say suicide bombing in defense of Islam is often or sometimes justified	13	26	7
Say a wife should be able to divorce her husband	26	62	14
Say they would be comfortable with their daughter marrying a Christian	3	10	4

Pg. 24:  The author lists five items that are central to Islam that have made it resistant to historical change and adaptation that have to be reformed:

1.      Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Qur’an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina;

2.      The investment in life after death instead of life before death;

3.      Sharia, the body of legislation derived from the Qur’an, the hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence;

4.      The practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong;

5.      The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.

Pg. 56:  Any Islamic cleric who advocates the separation of mosque and state is instantly anathematized.  He is declared a heretic and his work is removed from the bookshelves.  This is what makes Islam fundamentally different from other twenty-first-century monotheistic religions.

Pg. 57:  Three crucial points stand out concerning the history of the Protestant Reformation:

1.      Unlike previous European heretics, Luther was able to exploit a new technology to spread his message: the printing press.  (Note: today the internet serves as a similar radically new device)

2.      Luther’s key ideas—such as ‘justification by faith alone’ and ‘the priesthood of all believers’—appealed strongly to a new and growing class of city-dwellers, whose literacy and prosperity made them impatient of the corrupt practices of the Roman Church.

3.      It was in the interest of a significant number of European states—among them England—to back Luther’s challenge to the pope’s ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Pg. 69:  These three factors that were crucial to the success of the Protestant Reformation: technological change, urbanization, and the interests of a significant number of European states in backing Luther’s challenge to the status quo.  All three are present in the Muslim world today. 

*The Internet has the opportunity to be to the Muslim Reformation what the printing press was to the Protestant Christian one. 

*There is also a constituency for a true Reformation in the Muslim world, just as there was to Luther’s message.  Muslim city-dwellers are much more likely to be resistant to the radical Muslims than people living in the countryside—not least because in practice the imposition of sharia is highly disruptive of a whole range of mainly urban businesses (among them tourism).

*Just as in the sixteenth-century Europe, there is now a political constituency for religious reform in key states of the Muslim world.  (Look at Egypt where the Islamic Brotherhood were ousted by the population that took again to the streets).

Pg. 58:  The liberation of European’s individual conscience from hierarchical and priestly authority opened up space for critical thinking in every field of human activity.  Centuries later, Islam has had no comparable awakening.

Pg. 88:  Europeans underwent a long process of detribalization, beginning with subjection to Roman law, conversion to Christianity, the imposition of monarchical rule over baronial power, and the gradual rise of nation-states with their concept of individual citizenship and equality before the law.  The world of Islam did not undergo a similar transition.  Muhammad created a new monotheism fitted to the contemporary needs of tribal society.  The effect was to perpetuate tribal norms by freezing them in place as holy writ. 

Pg. 92:  Allah’s imperatives for the faithful are not exhortations, such as love thy neighbor, or a covenant, as between God and the Jews, or even a wider moral code, like the Ten Commandments, which address everything from adultery to murder.  Rather, first and foremost, Islam commands its followers to perform five religious duties, all of which remind the believers through word and deed that they must above all else submit 

to the faith and its rules:

1.      Have faith in the one God, Allah and Muhammad, His Prophet;

2.      Pray five times a day;

3.      Fast during the day for the entire ninth month of Ramadan;

4.      Provide charity;

5.      Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a life-time, if possible.

In its scripture, Islam places more emphasis on divine omnipotence and less on human free will.

Pg. 117:  The first modern ‘martyrdom operation’ was carried out in November 1980 by a thirteen-year-old Iranian boy who strapped explosives to his chest and blew himself up underneath an Iraqi tank during the early part of the Iran-Iraq War.  Khomeini declared the boy a national hero.  Another early operation was the 1983 suicide bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, which left 241 American military personnel dead.

Pg. 139:  The modern trend for Islamic states to adopt more hardline legal codes began with the formation of the Saudi kingdom, but it accelerated after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.  Iran became the first fully fledged modern Islamic theocracy.  Today, sharia has spread to a point where it has found near universal acceptance across the Muslim world.  To be precise, 72 percent of Indonesian Muslims, 84 percent of Pakistani Muslims, 82 percent of Bangladeshi Muslims, 74 percent of Egyptian Muslims, and 71 percent of Nigerian Muslims supported making sharia the state law of their respective societies.  In two Islamic nations that are considered to be transitioning to democracy, the number of sharia supporters was even higher.  It was found that 91 percent of Iraqi Muslims and 99 percent of Afghan Muslims supported making sharia their country’s official law.  Support for sharia is also rising among Muslims living in the West.