Islam cannot be reformed. Something in the theory and practice of this religion makes reform difficult.

By: Tarek Abi Samra

Source: L'Orient Littéraire Magazine, Beirut, Lebanon

What is the relationship between Islam and the terrorism that plagues the world? Since the September 11 attacks (the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York), this question has often been highlighted in the press and provokes heated controversies, if not outright hate speech. Some argue that terrorism is an aberration, unrelated to Islam as such; these people are called blind. Others believe that it is an intrinsically violent religion; these people are usually called Islamophobes.

Both sides invoke this or that verse from the Quran, thus seeking to demonstrate either the barbarity of Islam or its tolerant nature. But this is to forget that a religion can never be reduced to a founding book, since it is above all a millennial practice that has crystallized into a great number of institutions and cultural forms; it would be like reducing all communist regimes solely to Karl Marx's *Das Kapital*.

Ali Harb refuses to make this kind of return to the founding texts in order to discover the essence of the religion there. According to this Lebanese writer and philosopher, a simple reading of the Quran shows that this sacred book says both everything and its opposite. It will therefore be necessary to adopt a different method, to approach Islam from a perspective: as a doctrine of salvation, that is, as a system of thought that claims to possess absolute truth, similar to Christianity and Judaism, as well as the "political religions" of the 20th century, such as communism or fascism.

A similar approach reveals a very real terrorist potential inherent in Islam, an idea that Harb develops in his most recent book, Al-Irhab sunna'ihi wa Al-Murshed, Al-Taghiya, Al-Muthaka (Terrorism and its Creators: The Preacher, the Tyrant, and the Intellectual), Arab Scientific Publishers, 2015.

 The implicit definition of terrorism behind the theses in your book seems quite broad and applies to both acts of violence and philosophical systems...

That's true. I consider terrorism to be essentially an intellectual attitude, that of the man who believes he is the sole possessor of an absolute truth, the only one authorized to pronounce it. This truth can be in the social, religious, political, or moral domain; it may have to do with God, the nation, socialism, freedom, or humanism.

Terrorism is also a way of acting: those who believe they are the sole possessors of the truth behave towards the other, the different, or the antagonist, according to a logic of exclusion, whether at a symbolic level through... takfir (Declaration of apostasy) and excommunication, or other declarations of treason – whether at the physical level – exile or murder. The motto of terrorism is: think like me, otherwise I will accuse and condemn you. It is in this sense that terrorism is practiced by the preacher who has a religious project, by the tyrant with a political project, or by the intellectual who drives a revolutionary project to transform reality. The preacher excommunicates, the tyrant condemns and declares anyone a traitor, the intellectual theorizes, and the militant or jihadist acts or kills.

Has Islamic terrorism been influenced by totalitarian regimes?

The proponents of new religious projects were undoubtedly influenced by the examples of Franco, Hitler, or Mussolini, by their forms of government and their techniques for controlling men through mobilization and reshaping them, in order to create a flock that tirelessly reproduces the same preconceived ideas. This dualism of the deified leader.

The worship of a single leader by a population that adores him is a relatively recent creation. Totalitarian regimes, regardless of the modernity and secularism of their projects, are reminiscent of religious thought, as evidenced by the sacralization of their respective doctrines and the creation of the figure of the sole leader.

In what sense are you saying that a moderate and tolerant Muslim is something that doesn't exist?

Any monotheistic religion, by definition, is an inexhaustible reservoir of violent practices. It is one of its inexhaustible potentialities, a kind of virus lodged within its cultural genes. Since religion is based on the exclusion of the other, it leads to a dualism between the believer and the impious, the faithful and the apostate. It is impossible to understand the issue in any other way. In Islam, violence is aggravated by an additional dualism, that of purity and impurity. This is the great scandal of Islamic religious thought: the non-Muslim is a defiled, impure being; it is one of the vilest forms of symbolic violence. Hence my assertion that there are no moderate or tolerant Muslims who are faithful to the dogmas and practices of their religion, unless they are hypocrites, ignorant of their doctrine, or ashamed of it.

The most striking example is the relationship between Sunnis and Shiites. After centuries of conflict and hostility, the peaceful coexistence of these two groups results not from supposed values ​​of moderation and tolerance inherent in their doctrines, but from the integration of both into institutions of modern society: the school, the university, the market, the company... Whenever one of them

If one side reverts to the original doctrine, the conflict erupts again, in an increasingly cruel and destructive manner. This leads me to say that we are in the presence of two “religions” more hostile to each other than to the West or to Israel.

You argue that religions only become tolerant after they have been defeated. Is the only solution for our societies to defeat Islam, as Europe defeated Christianity during the Age of Enlightenment? Or can Islam be reformed?

Islam cannot be reformed. The attempts at reform that have followed one another over the course of a century, in Pakistan, Egypt, or elsewhere, have all failed and only generated terrorist models. That is why I do not trust the renewal of religious discourse, propagated by some Muslims and even by some laypeople. The only way out is the defeat of the religious project as embodied by Islamic institutions and powers, with its mummified ideas and sterile methods. Furthermore, I am very critical of the concept of tolerance, one of the scandals of religious thought in general, since it implies a kind of indulgence on the part of the believer towards the other who is different from him. The former piously believes that the other is a sinner, an impious person, and a renegade, if not even a shame to humanity. Tolerance thus nullifies any possibility of dialogue; only the full recognition of the other allows someone to break their narcissism and enter into dialogue with them.

Could the current increase in terrorism be interpreted as a sign of dynamism and vitality in Islam?

To speak of the vitality of the religious phenomenon brings to mind a famous phrase attributed to André Malraux about the “return of religiosity.” Religion is clearly resurging. But it is a frightening return, one that has transformed the jihadist into a monster and an executioner. It is unwise to be bewitched by words like “return” or “vitality.”

Any phenomenon or activity has two aspects: something that began as beneficial can degenerate and produce harmful effects if we fail to modify it and make it evolve. This is what is happening in France: its social and economic model, the best in Europe, has become worn out and needs to be renewed, something that France seems incapable of doing. Thus, I consider that the religious project of Islam, as it was reformulated more than a century ago, exhibits neither vitality nor creativity; it is reduced to a simple regression to the past, a reaction motivated by the desire for revenge against the West that awakened Islamic civilization from its lethargy.

I also argue that the project of contemporary Islam has failed wherever Islamists have seized power, and where terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic State and others like it, work toward their own destruction and that of the religious project in general. By this I mean that Arab societies need to endure all the calamities, disasters, massacres, and civil wars to become convinced that Islam is no longer valid for building a developed and modern civilization. There is no possible reconciliation between Islam and modernity or the West.

Why do you say that intellectual elites contributed to the rise of religious fundamentalism?

They contributed in two ways. Firstly, through the failure of their modernization and reform projects. Their attitude was utopian. They behaved simplistically regarding the ideas they proposed, taking them as absolute truths, pre-established models, without the need for any modification to be applied to reality. Now, an idea, when passing from one society to another, must undergo a kind of creative transformation in order to be effectively put into practice in any domain. Secondly, some intellectuals supported despotic regimes, in their secular or theocratic versions, under the pretext that they were fighting against the hegemony of the United States. The most famous of those who defended this position is probably Chomsky, who considers that the credibility of the intellectual is measured by his opposition to American politics.

In doing so, they paved the way for many Arab intellectuals, who then threw themselves into the arms of the tyrants.