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AFTER THE SUICIDE bombing in Islamabad last week that killed 17
civilians, I picked up a slick hardbound book called "The Islamic
Shari'ah of Jihad" in a local bookstore. As I read through the
first few pages it became clear to me that this was no apology for
Islamic holy war. The book analyzed every verse of the Koran that
mentions the word "jihad" and related it to its precise social
context in seventh-century Arabia in order, it said, to "remove
some grave misconceptions."
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I opened to the chapter titled "Suicide Bombers." I was
disturbed by the events in the city -- the joyous mood of a
pro-democracy rally, with thousands swaying to anthems, snuffed
away in a moment of scattered body parts -- and I wondered about
the Islamic basis for what I had witnessed. The chapter was brief,
barely two pages long, and it focused on one verse (5:32) of the
Koran: "He who killed a human being without the latter being guilty
of killing another or being guilty of spreading disorder in the
land should be looked upon as if he has killed all mankind." There
was little else left to say. The book was written by Javed Ahmad
Ghamidi. Like anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or even watched
Pakistani television, I recognized the name of the slightly built,
graying Muslim religious scholar, or alim. It is typical of Ghamidi
to speak -- at conferences, on television, on the radio -- about
the most politically charged issues with calm religious authority.
The popular media gravitates to him for his impeccable oratory and
the ease with which he makes common sense out of millennium-old
religious texts. Of late he has become a bit of a rock star --
adored, hated, popular, and notorious all at once -- thanks to his
extraordinary interpretation of Islamic Law. At a time when many
pin their hopes on "moderate" secular Muslims to lead the charge
against radical militant Islam, Ghamidi offers a more forceful and
profound deconstruction of the violent and bitter version of Islam
that appears to be gaining ground in many parts of the Muslim
world, including Pakistan. He challenges what he views as
retrograde stances -- on jihad, on the penal code of rape and
adultery, on the curricula in the religious schools, or madrassas
-- but he does so with a purely fundamentalist approach: he rarely
ventures outside the text of the Koran or prophetic tradition. He
meticulously recovers detail from within the confines of religious
text, and then delivers decisive blows to conservatives and
militants who claim to be the defenders of Islam. His many
followers are fond of comparing his influence in South Asia to that
of Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim Islamic thinker of global
repute, in Europe. "Mr. Ghamidi has had a huge role in shaping
Islamic laws in the country," said Khalid Masood, the chairman of
the Islamic Ideology Council in Islamabad. "And his debates on
television have made a profound impact on public views." Ghamidi
first appeared on the popular radar after being handpicked by
President Pervez Musharraf last year for the Islamic Ideology
Council, an independent constitutional body that consults for the
Pakistani legislature. Soon after Ghamidi joined, the council moved
to roll back Islamic sharia laws regarding rape and adultery that
required, among other things, four witnesses to a rape for a
successful conviction. Ghamidi worked overtime, throwing himself
into classical Islamic texts, spending hours on the air in the
popular media, and churning out documents from the Al-Mawrid
Institute of Islamic Sciences, a think-tank and publishing house he
founded in the city of Lahore. In every possible
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forum, he invoked his religious authority to make the case that
the "Islamic laws" themselves were "un-Islamic." The old laws were
finally amended. Along with a few like-minded scholars, he had
managed to pull the rug out from under the political Islamists at
the peak of their post-9/11 power. Even more incendiary than his
specific position on questions of Islamic law, though, is Ghamidi's
vision for the future of Islamic politics. Ever since the
Islamization campaign in Pakistan in the 1970s, religious parties
have been making deep inroads into political power. But their real
glory days came after September 2001, when a coalition of religious
political parties led by the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami landed a
majority in two of the four provincial governments in Pakistan.
Pakistan, which began as a secular republic, has increasingly
Islamized thanks to shrewd realpolitik maneuvering by some
religious leaders. Ghamidi expounds a different ideal: Muslim
states, he says, cannot be theocracies, yet they cannot be divorced
from Islam either. Islam cannot simply be one competing ideology or
interest group that reigns supreme one moment and is gone the next.
He instead argues for the active investment of the state in
building institutions that will help create a truly "Islamic
democracy." "I challenge liberal and conservative thought at the
same time," he told me recently at his home in Lahore. "The
liberals in Pakistan are confused by me. The religionists are
fuming and have called me everything short of an infidel."
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Born to a rich, land-owning, religious family, Ghamidi grew up
studying the Koran, Arabic, and Persian, and found a special
interest in Western philosophy. He began his formal study of Islam
only after completing his Masters in English Literature in 1977
from the prestigious Government College in Lahore. It was a chance
meeting with Amin Ahsan Islahi, an Islamic theologian best known
for his 6,000-page Urdu commentary on the Koran, which drew Ghamidi
into the realm of religious scholarship. "If you want to study
Islam," he recalled his mentor warning him, "you will have to leave
dreams of leadership and become a servant of knowledge." Ghamidi
followed Islahi into the Jamaat-e-Islami, the first major
organization of Islamists in Pakistan, and got the chance to work
closely with Sayyid Abul-Ala Maududi, who is considered, along with
Sayyid Qutb, to be the main ideologue of the modern Islamism that
is said to have inspired Al-Qaeda. But serious differences emerged
between the Maududi and Islahi, two founding members of the Jamaat.
The organization was becoming increasingly politicized, and Ghamidi
and Islahi split. Ghamidi's Al-Mawrid Institute has already
published 16 volumes of his work on Islam. In "The Penal Shari'ah
of Islam," for example, Ghamidi argues against the prevalent
interpretation of the laws on rape, which require four witnesses to
the crime. Since the Koranic word zina, on which the law is based,
refers to consensual sex, Ghamidi suggests it applies only to
adultery. Rape, on the other hand, is subject to tazir, the Islamic
legal sanction that allows discretionary judgment for crimes not
described in the Koran. Ghamidi also went against centuries of
scholarly consensus, arguing that a woman's testimony is always
equal to a man's. It was during the public debate around the laws
in 2006 that Ghamidi began receiving death threats for the first
time. When the editor of Ishraq, the journal published by
Al-Mawrid, was shot by some hard-liners outside his office late
last year Ghamidi became guarded for a while, but he didn't back
down. He continued to broadcast his understanding of the most
controversial aspects of sharia: women are not required to cover
their heads in public; they are allowed to lead prayer; there is no
obligation on Muslims for jihad. Ultimately, Ghamidi wants to see
Muslim religious scholars, or ulema, restored to their classical
role: as prestigious, independent intellectual theorists of
religious text who are above politics and power, as they were for
more than a millennium. In Egypt the ruling elite depended on the
ulema for legitimacy throughout the medieval period, and in the
Ottoman Empire the ulema were given a leading role in the judiciary
as qadis, or judges. But the concept of ulema getting involved in
the business of actually running a state came with the Shia Islamic
revolution in Iran. Ever since, in the Sunni world -- in Pakistan,
Indonesia, and now in Somalia and Iraq -- religious scholars have
sought the power of the state. It was two such ulema who led the
battle at the Red Mosque that ended this month in violence. Two
brothers -- one a lay religious scholar and the other formally
trained -- led
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an armed rebellion against the state a few blocks from the
president's residence, demanding the implementation of sharia.
Becoming a scholar of Islam used to be a choice, Ghamidi said, like
becoming a doctor. Now it is destiny from the moment a child is
enrolled in a madrassa. "Just like the Industrial Revolution
created a class of workers in the West," he said, "now we have a
class of 'scholars' that is lashing out for its place in society."
Many of these students, isolated in the madrassas, are becoming the
foot soldiers for movements like Al Qaeda, which is now said to be
reestablishing itself in Pakistan's border regions. This month
Ghamidi is publishing a commentary on Islam entitled "Mizan," or
"Balance," a 1,000-page treatise 17 years in the making that deals
with many of the issues around Islam facing Pakistan and other
Muslim countries. But in a country where most ulema are now seeking
office or leading urban insurgents, he doubts any will have the
time or the desire to consider his scholarship. But the power of
the alim has never rested with his scholarly contemporaries, he
said. The alim's influence rests, instead, on his (or her) moral
appeal to the masses. "Mohammed was able to convert one Jewish
clergy[man] with his word," he said. "And Jesus -- we all know what
the Jewish clergy thought of him. So I surely don't have a chance
of converting any of the ulema. The people -- they are my real
target. Because, whatever they might think,at least I know they
listen." Shahan Mufti is a graduate student in the Journalism and
Near Eastern Studies program at New York University.