Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now Read Free Page B

Medina Muslims who prescribe beheading for the crime of “nonbelief” in Islam, death by stoning for adultery, and hanging for homosexuality. It is Medina Muslims who put women in burqas and beat them if they leave their homes alone or if they are improperly veiled. It was Medina Muslims who in July 2014 went on a rampage in Gujranwala, Pakistan, setting eight homes on fire and killing a grandmother and her two granddaughters, all because of the posting of an allegedly blasphemous photo on an eighteen-year-old’s Facebook page.
    Medina Muslims believe that the murder of an infidel is an imperative if he refuses to convert voluntarily to Islam. They preach jihad and glorify death through martyrdom. The men and women who join groups such as Al-Qaeda, IS, Boko Haram, and Al-Shabaab in my native Somalia—to name just four of hundreds of jihadist organizations—are all Medina Muslims.
    Are the Medina Muslims a minority? Ed Husain estimates that only 3 percent of the world’s Muslims understand Islam in these militant terms. But out of well over 1.6 billion believers, or 23 percent of the globe’s population, that 48 million seems to be more than enough. Based on survey data on attitudes toward sharia in Muslim countries, I would put the proportion significantly higher; 8 I also believe it is rising as Muslims and converts to Islam gravitate toward Medina. Either way, Muslims who belong to this group are not open to persuasion or engagement by either Western liberals or Muslim reformers. They are not the intended audience for this book. They are the reason for writing it.
    The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence. I call them Mecca Muslims. Like devout Christians or Jews who attend religious services every day and abide by religious rules in what they eat and wear, Mecca Muslims focus on religious observance. I was raised a Mecca Muslim. So were the majority of Muslims from Casablanca to Jakarta.
    Yet the Mecca Muslims have a problem: their religious beliefs exist in an uneasy tension with modernity—the complex of economic, cultural, and political innovations that not only reshaped the Western world but also dramatically transformed the developing world as the West exported it. The rational, secular, and individualistic values of modernity are fundamentally corrosive of traditional societies, especially hierarchies based on gender, age, and inherited status.
    In Muslim-majority countries, the power of modernity to transform economic, social, and (ultimately) power relations can be limited. Muslims in these societies can use cell phones and computers without necessarily seeing a conflict between their religious faith and the rationalist, secular mind-set that made modern technology possible. In the West, however, where Islam is a minority religion, devout Muslims live in what is best described as a state of cognitive dissonance. Trapped between two worlds of belief and experience, these Muslims are engaged in a daily struggle to adhere to Islam in the context of a secular and pluralistic society that challenges their values and beliefs at every turn. Many are able to resolve this tension only by withdrawing into self-enclosed (and increasingly self-governing) enclaves. This is called cocooning, a practice whereby Muslim immigrants attempt to wall off outside influences, permitting only an Islamic education for their children and disengaging from the wider non-Muslim community. 9
    To many such Muslims, after years of dissonance, there appear to be only two alternatives: either leave Islam altogether, as I did, or abandon the dull routine of daily observance for the uncompromising Islamist creed offered by those—the Medina Muslims—who explicitly reject the West’s modernity.
    It is my hope to engage this second group of Muslims—those closer to Mecca than Medina—in a dialogue