At long last, a book that presents the Islam of the optimistic, socially compassionate critical thinker! I'd always known that Islam was not the malicious, vengeful, monolithic bloc that it is often seen to be in the West, but I now know much more about what it IS like, at least through Sardar's eyes -- he illustrates its rich diversity of thought and practice, past and present, and teases out its complexities with elegance and deftness of touch, peppering it liberally with hilarious anecdotes from his many 'journeys'. As such, despite the gravity of the issues he and his friends wrestle with in such heartfelt fashion, the whole thing is both enlightening and eminently readable.
Sardar is a deeply religious, indeed a passionate Muslim. He repeatedly excoriates secularism, of which he gives a highly subjective and partisan definition, and his account of its history (pp.249 to 251) is deeply flawed. He accepts the Qur'an as a revealed text (p.341), albeit one that has to be understood metaphorically rather than literally. He reveres Muhammad, and describes how emotionally shattered he was by Salman Rushdie's treatment of the Prophet in The Satanic Verses: "I felt that every word, every jibe, every obscenity [in it] was directed at me - personally" (p.281). Yet, as a liberal, he was equally horrified by the Ayatollah's fatwa calling for Rushdie's death.
Our media do not often tell us that there are religious Muslims who also espouse modern knowledge, pluralism, and the principles of western democracies; so it is good to see in the book of this prominent Muslim journalist that such Muslims do exist, and we need to hear a lot more from and about them than we do. But it must be said that the picture which Sardar paints of most of the contemporary Muslim organizations, whether they are sects or the states he has visited, will provide ample evidence of how widespread is the rejection of modernity, pluralism and democracy in the Muslim world. Sardar sees all these as a perversion of Islam, as cases of rigidity and of arrested development and as a betrayal of the spirit of its golden age under the early Abbasids (roughly from the 9th to the 12th century) and from which the West learnt so much.
In the course of his Search for Paradise Sardar engaged with one Muslim sect after another and visited one Islamic country after another. He paints a devastating picture of almost all of them. Even modern Sufism, to which he felt most attracted, has strayed from its original nature and tends to go in for the unquestioning cult of the local Sufi sheikh. Here, as elsewhere, he found a disturbing authoritarianism at work. Besides, he was troubled by the mystics' belief that a state of grace could be found only by withdrawing from the modern world, whereas for him the challenge was to bring a state of grace into the modern world.
The Iranian Revolution obviously failed to provide the paradise Sardar was looking for; and the atmosphere in Ba'athist Iraq and Syria was equally oppressive, though in a different way.
Sardar's devotion to Islam can be deduced from the fact that he had five times made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Each time he was more distressed at what was happening to Mecca: sacred old buildings were being torn down to make way for six- or eight-lane roads and new concrete buildings, out of the construction of which the Bin Laden family made huge amounts of money. These physical changes and the mass-tourism technology which was applied to these sacred areas, Sardar thought, increasingly destroyed the centuries-old rhythm of the hajj. "The Saudis," he writes, "approached technology as though it was theology. And in both, complexity and plurality was shunned", for of course the Wahhabi brand of Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia is as narrow, intolerant and antiquated as the fanatical brand of Shi'ism which dominated Iran.
Disillusioned with all these experiences, Sardar was involved in setting up an institution and a journal devoted to working out an approach to a more liberal but still essentially Islamic approach to the intellectual disciplines of the modern world. They could make no headway against "Islamization", the name given to the attempt to force these intellectual disciplines into an Islamic straitjacket, and which Sardar describes as "an uncontrollable forest fire that consumed everything in its path." (p.213)
What depresses Sardar is the realization that in so many parts of the world the rigidities and cruelties of the Sharia cannot be said to be imposed on the unwilling masses by the mullahs. Even in countries like China, which do not have Islamic governments, it appears that the desire of most Muslims is to be governed by the Sharia: they see it as defining their identities as Muslims.
Only in post-Kemalist Turley and in Malaysia does Sardar find Islamic governments that accept pluralism, though he implies that in Malaysia it is under threat after its leading exponent, Anwar Ibrahim was forced out of office on trumped-up charges, imprisoned and tortured.
Sardar is frequently depressed by the current state of the umma of which he cannot help but feel a member, and his book must be equally depressing for those readers who would like the efforts of the like of him to succeed. His book unfortunately confirms the impression of today's Islam which is presented to us by the media and which many of us would so much like to dismiss as illegitimate stereotyping. He presents himself and the little group of intellectuals around him as a gallant minority struggling against overwhelming odds (p.331) to shape a gentler, more tolerant, more pluralistic and above all a more intelligent Islam. If he is right, the outlook for convivencia, for a peaceful coexistence between Islam and the West, is bleak indeed. But perhaps he over-dramatizes: perhaps there are millions of devout but tolerant Muslims like himself. Perhaps especially in the West, many devout Muslims, just like devout Jews and devout Christians, have absorbed its respect for pluralism and a democratic society. But they would need to speak out, to assert themselves vigorously and openly against those who preach narrowness and intolerance. And if and when they do so, our media must report it, if only to give the lie to the vicious idea floated on p.311, that the West has a vested interest in demonizing Islam.
