Book cover of Islam: Context and complexity, by Paul Stenhouse
Islam: Context and complexity, by Paul Stenhouse
Author: Paul Stenhouse. Review by Reg Naulty
Paul Stenhouse came into prominence because of the work he did on medieval Samaritan texts. That work required research into Middle Arabic, on the grammar of which he became an authority. He was also fluent in contemporary Arabic and Hebrew, so he was in a good position to write about Islam until he died last year.
This book is explicitly a history of political Islam, not religious Islam. It is exceptionally good on the world into which Islam first came, in about 625CE, when the two great regional powers, Byzantium and Persia, were exhausted by 126 years of on-and-off warfare.
Stenhouse’s thesis is that militancy and violence were part and parcel of mainstream Islam. He supports the thesis by reference to key texts and historical events. Whatever the truth of that, the future of a religion is not bound by its past, and Stenhouse provides enough material to show that the future of Islam can be different.
Islam is a religion of law and obedience. In 2014 a group of twenty-five prominent Malaysians – former secretaries-general, directors-general and ambassadors – were concerned at the increasing assertion of Islamic law in Malaysia. They wrote an open letter saying that ‘We want Islamic law, even more than civil law, to meet the highest standards of justice precisely because it claims to reflect divine justice.’ As it happens, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), Islam’s leading historiographer, had expressed a similar view: ‘[He] foresaw a time in a secular future, when political Islam would survive only if its sovereignty were based on rational laws which would enable citizens to leave a primitive way of living and change to a more civilized way of living.’ The secular future is here. Signs of encroaching secularism are already visible in Islam: the prestige professions are now medicine, engineering and science. The doctors of the law, the Ulema, once so powerful, are losing status.
What are the ‘rational laws’ that might be the foundation of modern law? The nature of God, the beneficent, the merciful, offers some clues. There should be adequate beneficence for all – food, shelter, health, work, leisure, and freedom from bondage. The Muslim diaspora can help in the articulation of these. Open, critical discussion is still dangerous in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, but it is possible elsewhere. For example, Ed Husain, formerly a Muslim radical, is now a member of international thinktanks and is a co-founder of Quilliam, the world’s first counter-extremism thinktank. There is now an established Muslim middle class in Western countries to support these endeavours.
Friends show that it is possible for religious groups to discern their own way to divine guidance, even in a secular society. As our closest kindred in Islam appear to be the Sufis, one is encouraged to read of a Sufi-like sect among the Shia, the Alevi, with twenty-five million members, in Turkey. But all of the book is informative and easy to read. I recommend it.
