 Good evening. Thank you all for joining us this evening for what promises to be a very engaging discussion and lecture. First, I wanted to say that in many ways, this talk entitled, Interpreting Islam Today, Rethinking Theology and Ethics, is exceedingly important. And that the expertise that Professor Ibrahim Musa brings, well, I think, would be enlightening and quite thought-provoking for all of us. I mean, given the headlines that we constantly see in which Islam Muslims are dragged into the spotlight, I think it behooves us to take some time to have a better understanding of where trends in Islamic thought are headed, the state of the Muslim world, in a sense. But before we come to our speaker, I simply wanted to also thank the various parties at Fairfield University who have made this talk possible. My colleagues who are serving with me on the steering committee of the Islamic world studies, minor proposal rights have gotten together and realized that we need to raise a level of discourse on this university about Islam and the Islamic world. In many ways, this is a debut forum in which we can take on that immense task. I would also like to thank the Center for Catholic Studies. Both Michelle and Paul Lakeland have been incredibly helpful in putting this event together, as well as Yale University, in which we've been working conjunction to bring Professor Ibrahim Musa here today. Now to introduce our August speaker, Professor Ibrahim Musa comes from the University of Notre Dame and is a professor of Islamic studies there in the center of international peace studies, the Department of History, and the Keo School of Global Affairs. He also serves as the co-director for contending modernities, which is a cross-cultural research and education initiative examining the interactions among Catholic Muslim and other religious and secular forces within the world. He was born in South Africa, where he earned his MA and PhD from the University of Cape Town. And prior to that, he earned a degree in Islamic and Arabic studies from the Darul Olum, Nadu al-Olamah, in Lucknow, India. He also has a BA from Kanpur University and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the city university in London. And prior to joining the University of Notre Dame, Professor Musa also taught at the University of Cape Town, where he received his PhD, Stanford University, and most recently Duke University. Musa's expertise, his research spans both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics, and theology. And he's the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of the Imagination, which won the American Academy of Religion's best first book in the history of religions category, as well as the more recently published What is a Madrasa, which appeared this past year from the University of North Carolina Press. These are, of course, among many other prominent scholarly collections, volumes, and articles. Please join me in welcoming Professor Musa. Thank you very much, Professor Wen, and good evening. Thank you for inviting me to Fairfield University. It's not always that I get to visit another Catholic university, so I feel that I'm amongst my own people, so to speak. This evening, I want to talk about interpreting Islam today. And most of you know from news media images about developments in different parts of the world, the reportage and the stories about Islam are always in very negative light. You see it in the electoral campaigns, and people use the term radical Islam and argue with other politicians that they're not using the word radical enough. But those politicians who do use the term radical Islam are actually trying to communicate the message that there is no other version of Islam but a radical one, and they will always be used by certain politicians with a very right-wing inclination. The biggest challenge of Islam as a religious tradition and discourse today is an elusive attempt to find a cadre of scholars and interpreters who at a mass scale can give leadership at the intellectual and the spiritual level. That's possibly in a nutshell my complaint as an insider. And the biggest challenge is the absence of a religious discourse that can provide for Muslims a interpretation of Islam that will make sense in the world in which they live today. Now, of course, it's just not only, many of you know, it's not only about interpreters and scholars, but it's also about politics and conditions. It's about failing states. It's about invasions of certain territories. It's about what many Muslims believe and attacked by the West in trying to exterminate Islam and Muslim societies. It's about globalization. It's about poverty. All these things overlap. And when all these things overlap, then to become an interpreter under those conditions is a very different thing. So it's very comfortable and very easy for someone like myself sitting at Notre Dame or Duke and pontificating from this end what ought to change, which I've written about and many other people have written about people from Muslim majority societies and elsewhere have also made those same kinds of cases. But of course it takes time for ideas to percolate and conditions in some places enable radical ideas to flourish and the more sane ideas to be buried in the sands. And so I think that this is important to keep in mind. I remember some years ago, sitting just after 9-11, a few years after 9-11, sitting in a New York restaurant having my sushi and it's a very small New York restaurant and next to me was sitting a couple, sitting an elderly man with a young man sitting next to him and talking about world affairs. And I was kind of partly overhearing this, but my ears perked up when he said to this young man who seems to have come from overseas told him, you know, look at Islam today. Once upon a time, can you imagine that in Muslim civilization, algebra was born in that civilization. And so I just dug my head further deep into the plate because I didn't want to be drawn out by this guy or I didn't want to say anything to have a conversation because he was gonna ask me the next question, what is happening to Islam today? So as a scholar who supports contextual interpretation of Islam as someone who takes social, moral, and legal evolution of societies and the place of religion seriously, I and many others of my generation are troubled by these challenges. As a constructionist, as someone who offers kind of theological and ethical options to communities, I always say that in the past, we used to argue in support of say for instance, the big issue about the status of women in Islam and women's leadership and women's accession to different kinds of positions. In the past, I used to argue that even though the Islamic scriptural teachings, the Quran, the prophetic tradition, and some of the interpretations were written in a world in which patriarchy was rife, there was clearly a moral arc emerging out of the teachings that envisaged that there could be a possibility that patriarchy would not be the only option in which societies evolved in and you can evolve out of patriarchy. And when I used to make those kinds of arguments, myself and others, we always used to say that look at Islam and the issue of slavery. Slavery no longer exists in Islam because Muslims never thought that slavery is something that should be permanent and it was considered to be ethically abominable until 2013 and ISIS takes over parts of Iraq and Syria and decides that the prisons of war that it receives or it takes are going to be treated as slaves. Not only it shocked the world but it also shocked inside as a great deal. And so what does this tell you? And so here's the problem. Let me just give you the size of the problem. That this issue of how come slavery can be reenacted again by these obviously marginalized, radical, brutal actors called ISIS? But what do other Muslim scholars say about it? And this is a difficult conversation within Islam and I'm sharing that with you. At a mosque in Indiana, in the month of Ramadan, where there are additional prayers at night, the Imam invites women to come to the front of the mosque and share a meditation and a thought and give some reflections. This is huge. This is a big deal. That in a very traditional mosque, the Imam allows the women to come out of the cordoned off section to the front of the mosque and give a talk, even better than that. When the San Bernardino killings took place, the same Imam gave an extraordinary sermon in which he talked about a tradition and experience in the Prophet Muhammad's life when a funeral passed him and he got up in respect to honor the dead. His companion says, why are you standing up? He said, why should I not? He said, the person being buried and taken there in the funeral is not of our community, belongs to another faith community. So the Prophet Muhammad's answer was, is that not a human being? And using that sermon, this Imam made the entire mosque stand up for a moment of silence for the victims of San Bernardino. I have not heard of anything like this happen in the middle of the sermon, make people stand up. Now, where am I going with this? There's two events of this very, what I would think a great, a very caring Imam, someone who's beginning to think about other faith communities in a very integral way about Islam and people of other faith communities, thinking about citizenship, thinking about how the best ethical teaching of Islam can be applied to the context of America. In a book reading discussion, the topic of slavery came up, and the same Imam told me, but no one can shut down the door of slavery. Now, of course, I need to have a long conversation with him, and I'm waiting for him to come back from holiday so we can have this ongoing conversation, but I just want to tell you what the dilemma is. What is the dilemma? The dilemma is a paradigm of Orthodox Islam's interpretation. Islamic Orthodoxy has created a paradigm of interpretation that is so canonized, that is so strong, that is so rock solid, and has been applied for so many centuries that it almost becomes impregnable to attack that interpreter framework. Now, without going into the details, that interpreter framework is the one in one that this Imam has bought into, and many, many followers of Orthodox Islam also hold on to that interpreter framework. That interpreter framework goes like this. It is a construction, it is an interpretation, but it's the interpretation of varieties of Islamic law schools and theological schools that believe that certain kinds of, certain interpretations that were made, and these interpretations, one they have a doctrinal certainty that you can no longer challenge them, and to challenge them, these doctrines of certainty, if you challenge them, you risk being placed outside the fold of the faith community itself. So for instance, there are some teachings that Muslim Orthodoxy believes that these are a priori beliefs in Islam that there's been agreed for centuries that you can no longer challenge and question it. So for instance, a friend of mine who is now passed on in Egypt, famous man by the name of Nasser Hamoud Abuzaid, Abuzaid, for instance, was a professor of Arabic literature and did a lot of interpretation of classical Islamic texts and the interpretation of words and meanings, and tried to show that there's lots of ambiguity in the number of these teachings and so on, and when he started doing that and writing on these topics, there were objections, and he did not get promotion at Cairo University, and the issues landed up in the Egyptian court, and the way in which his opponents attacked him was to say that the way he's interpreting certain teachings of Islam, basically renders him no longer a person within the faith, and because he's no longer a person within the faith, his wife, he can no longer be legally married to his wife, in other words, his marriage is automatically invalid. And so after several court cases and several years, Abuzaid's marriage was deemed by the highest Egyptian court to be invalid because he ceases to be a Muslim, and hence, he was kind of technically separated from his wife. He and his wife then went into exile into the Netherlands, and a few years later, a few years ago, he passed on. Now, this is only one instance of that. There are myriads of instances of blasphemy charges in places like Pakistan and also nowadays in Egypt and several places where people might be doing certain kinds of interpretations. Other, some of these interpretations are obviously provocative like cartoons and the Danish cartoon issue and so on, but whether Muslims really should be responding to this on the basis of those old rules, those rules that talk about that you need to, that there should be capital punishment for someone who insults the Prophet Muhammad. Those issues are not being revisited precisely because of the paradigm. The interpretive paradigm that Muslim orthodoxy holds is one in which some of these issues cannot change. Now, when these events do happen, some representatives of Muslim orthodoxy would argue that that is not the way to go about, but none of them are prepared to rewrite the rules. None of them are prepared to reinterpret the Sharia notions regarding that. Just a few days ago, it was a big conference in Morocco and the conference was about Muslim minorities, sorry, non-Muslim minorities in Muslim majority societies and the press release after this conference did show some movement in which they argued that some of those early practices that non-Muslims must be, should give some taxes to the Muslim government, that was a doctrine of the past called jizya, that that should no longer be applicable. But that doctrine is not even applicable today. Wherever non-Muslims are living in Muslim majority societies, whether it's in Egypt or Syria or Pakistan, no one pays those taxes. But this supposed to be a movement forward in that at least theoretically they're trying to rid themselves of this practice. So the biggest challenge that we have today is this question of interpreting Islam. Let me put it this way. There's one way that we can think about what we call sharia and this is a movement forward that I believe that I'm talking about that in recent years, Muslims have begun to think about this question of sharia which sharia is about certain kind of moral values and practices that are authorized through a process of interpretation. That people have argued given there are two versions of the sharia as I call it. One is the kind of telephone directory version of the sharia. That is where all kinds of rules in detail and in fine print are available in great amount of detail in thick books. Now I know many of you will not understand what I'm talking about telephone directory because most of you might not have seen a telephone directory. Most people today would go, you Google your telephone numbers and you're looking for somebody, right? But in the old days, nowadays you might still find at your homes and in your dorms the yellow pages. Now every city in every town used to have a telephone directory with the full and detailed address was that. So you have interpretations of the sharia that go into minute details, into minute details about all kinds of practices based on a particular kind of historical experience based on the interpretation of scholars hundreds of years ago and the way they saw how those texts work and they provide those kinds of details. Now this is a very difficult process and a very difficult exercise in order to do that effectively and to know that you need to undergo long periods of training. I spent six years in a madrasa in India studying how to do this kind of interpretation. You acquire expertise in language, in theology, in multiple ways of interpretation and studying these classical books before you get a handle on that. And that is not, but that is where the real power lies. That's where the interpreter's power is at its utmost and at its highest, that kind of interpretation. But many scholars realize that those interpretations carry a lot of cultural baggage of historical Islam because these interpretations by jurists also carry the life-wills of those jurists together with them. So when we study books by Hidayah, by Marginani and Arthur in the 13th century, we study the books of Ibn Taymiah. We study the books of scholars of an earlier generation. What you get packaged in the interpretations are their life experiences. What they consider to be honorable, what they consider to be dishonorable, what they consider to be dignity, what they consider to be indignity, what they consider to be lawful, cultural exchanges and practices, that's what it's packaged in. Secondly is that those interpretations also carry within the imprint of the politics in which Muslim societies were generated. The politics there was a politics of empire. And all imperial societies, Islam was an empire that it collapsed in with the Ottoman Empire. But all these writings happened under imperial conditions in which there was a hierarchy of Muslims at the top and the male at the top and then the female and then slaves and then other religious communities were in a subservient position to the hierarchy. But the same was also true of other empires, the Byzantine Empire and other empires were all in a hierarchical fashion. So Islam was nothing new. But the theology was written in that idiom, a theology of empire. So for instance, you would find rules written by the majority of schools, except for one school, let's say for instance, if normally the rule is that if you kill somebody, then you have the, the aggrieved has the right to demand the death of the offender. Or there can be compensation, right, for that. But no, but the rule for three of the Sunni schools specifically is this that if a, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, the non-Muslim cannot ask for the life of the Muslim. They must settle for money or exchange. Okay, that is the theology of empire. Okay, that's the theology of empire. The Hanafi school of the four Sunni law schools, the Hanafi school says no, you can. If a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, a non-Muslim's family can ask for the death of the Muslim offender. And there are many such instances that can give you that basically documents the theology of empire. Now, of course, we have now entered a phase in which some of these presumptions and the ways of interpretation are no longer valid. And part of the theology of empire also thinks of the male at the hierarchy and at the upper level of the societal organization and therefore you have patriarchy. No longer acceptable to modern Muslims and there have been a lot of interpretation happening if there's one area and one field that a lot of reinterpretation has taken place by women scholars and men scholars, it's in the domain of reinterpreting the status of Islam, of women in Islam. And that for me is always a kind of a good reference point to show changes. I no longer go back to the question of slavery. I thought slavery had ended and I'll come to that. That's really what I call the kind of telephone directory version of Sharia interpretation with all these presumptions. In order to get away from this kind of complication, I think a number of scholars have taken some pages out of history of some trends that were already evident in the 11th century, what I call the big picture version of the Sharia, the Mona Lisa version of the Sharia, the big picture. What do I mean by that? By that I mean that early scholars like Al Ghazali who died in 1111 and scholars like Ibn Salam al-Sulami or later on someone like Al Shaltibi in the 14th century and Shaltibi actually crystallizes this whole trend and writes the most definitive volumes on that is that these scholars begin to argue already in the 11th century someone like Al Ghazali began to say that we need to think about what are the major purposes of the Sharia. So one thing Al Ghazali said that Sharia rulings are based on what is in the best interest of the community. That is the driver behind all Sharia rulings. What is in the best interest of the community, what they call the Maslaha, the public interest. That's the one thing Al Ghazali said. In that discussion on the public interest, Al Ghazali also argued that if you look at all the rulings about the Sharia, those that are documented in the Quran, those are documented and provided by the Prophet, you will see that the Sharia tries to preserve certain purposes and protects certain purposes. The preservation of religion, the preservation of life, the preservation of intellect, the preservation of property and the preservation of family. So these are the kind of the big picture. If you want to get away from the telephone directory and you want to now say that is too complicated, that is too antiquated, that is too historically embodied. So people are now going to people like Al Ghazali, Sulemi and Shartibi. Shartibi was in Muslim Spain who wrote extensively of how you can make this understanding of the purposes of the Sharia as to be the kind of new frame question and the new paradigm. Now many Muslim, modern Muslim reformers like Muhammad Abdul, Jamaluddin Afghani and other scholars at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, began to circulate this kind of understanding of Sharia and say we need to think about Sharia in terms of the big picture and to push this. So this is a new current that doesn't contest but operates side by side with the telephone directory. And so many modern, modern educated Muslims gravitate towards this interpretation that think that is easy to handle. It is also, you can summarize it. But I believe that that is a version, that is kind of a band-aid version of Remedying, the Sharia issue. It's a band-aid because what it does, while it gives you the end goal, a lot of the kind of fine print of interpretive work has yet to be done. So for instance, you need to begin to think about the question of blasphemy of people who insult the Prophet Muhammad that might have been offence in his time but he's no longer a living person. Yes, his memory is dear to Muslims today and Islam does believe and does advocate and does tell us how important the memory of the Prophet Muhammad is to Islamic teaching. You have to love Muhammad as part of your teaching. But would it still be necessary to execute or kill people who offend Muhammad through cartoons, whatever else devices they use? Why do you think ISIS attacks Charlie Hebdo or attacks for questions of blasphemy? Why do they attack those kinds of targets or apostates for that matter or people whom they declare to be apostates and kill them? Because they know that Muslim orthodoxy and the mainstream does not have a new rule on this and that they're not going to say anything about it. They're only going to issue some kinds of statements of condemnation but they're not going to rewrite the rule. So these are the kind of soft targets that ISIS seeks out in order that they can re-inscribe their version of Sharia, a very antiquated version of Sharia in the eyes of most right-thinking people but Muslim orthodoxy have not worked out this with the way Muslim orthodoxy deals with the question of blasphemy and those kind of stuff by saying, well, we don't have a proper Islamic authority therefore these rules cannot be enforced. So let me turn to the question of slavery that ISIS made current. Just a couple of days ago in the month of January, a leading female scholar at Al-Azhar, which is the important Islamic university in Egypt, has great prestige and authority. A woman by the name of Suad Saleh, she has been presented as the female face of Al-Azhar, not only men, there's also women scholars and so on, but she made this remarkable and very sad commentary on television in which she retells the story that under what circumstances can slavery be enforced? And she says, when you have a just Islamic ruler under a legitimate jihad that is a holy war against people who threaten Islam, then the prisoners of war that you have, you can take as slaves. Now the classical Islam, why she had to say this, I don't understand. I wish Al-Azhar would fire her for saying stupid stuff, but I don't have the authority, my authority doesn't reach beyond Notre Dame. And so, you know, well, I might be too optimistic to say Notre Dame too, but for that matter, I can't even deal with my local Imam. But nevertheless, the question is that, you know, these kinds of statements are extremely disheartening. And the way in which when I began to look at this question of slavery, which once upon a time was my knockout argument about Islam's evolution, remember that, right? When I started looking at the text of contemporary writers on this topic, I'll take two, I was very much surprised. Yusuf Qaradawi is a very, very important Egyptian-born cleric belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, a non-Muslim version of Khomeini, but not as brutal as Khomeini, he never had power, but he's based in Qatar and a few years ago, he had a great show on Al-Jazeera television called Sharia and Life. By all accounts, Qaradawi is a Orthodox liberal, okay? His positions on women are very accommodating. His positions on Muslim coexistence with non-Muslims is very, very conciliatory, all kinds of stuff. He's even done some radical things of reinterpreting the rules for people living in Europe and North America, that a Muslim woman, if in a marriage of two people and the wife converts to Islam, she can stay in that marriage. Under the classical law, if a woman becomes Muslim, she cannot remain married to a non-Muslim man. That's a classical law. Qaradawi and his team of people reinterpret that. That is huge. That is one of those things that he breaks the paradigm. He broke the paradigm in that interpreter framework and there are fatwas or heresy against him from ultra-radical Salafi scholars in Saudi Arabia, okay? So one of the few times that scholars do break the paradigm that I told you about, remember at the beginning? So Qaradawi breaks the paradigm and they accuse him that you broke the paradigm and you're outside the fall of Islam. That is deserving of takfir. It deserves anathematization. So when I look at Qaradawi's two-volume book called The Laws of Jihad, which is kind of religiously sanctioned war, on the section of this question of prisons of war and the enslavement of prisons of war, there's an interesting conversation happening between Qaradawi who's arguing with a Salafi. A Salafi is a, let's say, how do I describe a Salafi for you? A Salafi is someone who's extremely literal, does not believe in a kind of a sophisticated paradigm of interpretation and everything must be literally interpreted the way the unvarnished text says it. So in other words, if the text says, you know, do this, you have to do that with minimal interpretive leeway. There's no contextual interpretation as, say, the other schools of thought in Islam and schools of law had done. So he argues with a Salafi in Saudi Arabia, whose name is Uliani, and he argues and tells the scholar in his writing that, listen, there are four options in Islamic law regarding prisons of war. Two are justified by pre-Islamic customary war rules of war, which is enslavement or execution. And two teachings are provided by the Quran. That is, you can either ransom your prisons of war or you can let them go. So those four become the four options in classical Islamic law of how you deal with prisons of war. So it's a combination of the cultural practices of Arabia of war and the Quranic provisions. The Quranic provisions say you can either free or ransom. The cultural provisions are execution or enslavement. But historically, these are known as the four options in Islamic law, both of them have been combined. Again, to remind you that Islamic law historically is an amalgam of sanctioned Quranically, prophetically sanctioned practices and cultural practices. It's an embodiment, it's a kind of amalgam. And it's how to dissect those that is a big challenge. But once the paradigm is made within that amalgam, to break that paradigm is to challenge a whole lot of people and therefore that is the big issue. So Qardawi tells his interlocutor, listen, in Islamic teachings, for instance, there are clear indications that the prophet Muhammad himself freed his slave that he had. He encouraged other people to free their slaves. There are teachings that says that if you free a slave, then every limb of your body will be immune from the fire of hell. You get a certain kind of immunity from punishment because you're freeing a human being from slavery. And in Islamic teachings, on a whole variety of offenses, if you break your fast intentionally and you have a slave, you have to free a slave. There are all kinds of expiations in Islamic teaching that you have to free a slave. Qardawi tries to explain to this woodheaded interlocutor that, listen, there is a moral arc in Islam that desires the freedom of all human beings and that slavery should not be a permanent position. That's all that he says. But it does not, in my view, make a knockout ethical position, doesn't explicitly say that slavery is no longer desirable and that it is abominable. He doesn't say that. What does he go to? He says, well, today Muslim societies and Muslim countries all have signed up to the Geneva Conventions and the Geneva Conventions tie your hands that you can no longer execute or enslave your prisoners of war. And he stops it right there. Okay? So there is, I don't see in a prominent Muslim theologian and someone who's very, very prominent doesn't do that. Look at South Asia, Taki Usmani. Taki Usmani is a graduate of South Asia's madrasas, those institutions that I studied at and Professor Wen said that I must say something about the madrasas. The madrasas are institutions. These are in American parlance. Madrasas are viewed as kind of readouts of terrorism. You should not believe that. There are two madrasas that I involve, allied to the Taliban and do horrible things. But the majority of madrasas in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are doing traditional Islamic theology and Islamic law. Yes, are they favorable towards the Western America? No. Are they cheerleaders for the United States? No. Do they see, view the United States as a certain amount of agendas and prejudice? Yes, because of what's happening globally. So that's aside from the fact that these are, most of these places are very poor places where people live in a very austere budget and these institutions produce scholars who know traditional Islamic learning. Don't mistake madrasas as only being the equivalent of Sunday schools. Every town and village in South Asia has a Sunday school where kids go to learn on a daily basis how to read the Quran for one or two hours. That's something different. And in the Middle East and Arabic speaking countries, secular schools are also called madrasas because that's the Arabic word for school. What I'm talking about madrasas are these theological seminaries that specialize in studying classical Islamic texts, very little of modern Islamic, modern learning, and that's the endeavor that they are engaged in is to continue this classical tradition and this paradigm that I talked to you about of interpreting Islam in an orthodox manner. So Taki Usmani comes from that vintage of scholarship and he's quite an important figure in Pakistan. Taki Usmani also writes in a commentary on an important book of Hadith that is prophetic sayings. He deals on the chapter of the emancipation of slaves. So in all classical Islamic books, there are chapters on the emancipation of slaves. At some point he comes to a discussion that in the late 19th, early 20th century, in India, in pre-partition India, there was a man by the name of Chirag Ali. Chirag Ali does not belong to the clerical class. He's not a traditional theologian, but he is a kind of a autodidact and someone who has an interest in the study of Islam. He is framed to be considered to be a modernist. Chirag Ali argues that the Quranic provisions of freedom or ransom abrogates the customary practice of enslavement and execution. He says that the Quran comes with a humane message to stop the cultural practice, and therefore the Quran and Islamic teachings humanizes the consequences of war, of presence of war. Taki Usmani, in his opening of his conversation, makes the idea of the emancipation of slaves almost as if he was going to go in that direction. For instance, he quotes early Muslim scholars and authorities who say things like slavery is symbolic death. So he shows that classical Muslim thinkers in the past already thought that slavery is not a good position to be in. But suddenly he makes this turn, and then he says, Chirag Ali, who made this position, who made the argument that execution and enslavement is abrogated by Quranic provisions, he laughs him out of court and said, how can you say that? That is not how the tradition operates. And then he makes the argument that slavery can never be abrogated, okay? So he then also concludes, like Karadawi, taking refuge in a Geneva Conventions and says, because the Geneva Conventions prevents countries like Pakistan and all others, if they ever engage in a war, because of international conventions, they will not enslave or execute the prisons of war. Well, ISIS would say, we have not signed to any Geneva Convention and we are then open to do and we are then free to do what we do with our slaves and we're going to apply this our version of Sharia. It's only in recent times, in modern times, there is a man called, by the name of Muhammad Abdullah Daraz, Daraz from Egypt. He's one of the few Orthodox traditional scholars who made the argument that slavery is completely abhorrent in terms of Islamic ethics. And he says, there's no way that you can ever envisage that Islam would hold on to the teaching that slavery is desirable. And then he makes the very strong argument on what basis and the basis that he, the argument that he makes is on the basis of human dignity. That God has endowed all human beings with dignity and it is against human dignity to enslave people. And he makes a very powerful and forceful argument. And though therefore, one of the things that a study of Islamic ethics brings, that a study of Sharia fails to bring, is precisely this. Sharia interpretations are very much mechanistic and very much based on precedent and very much based on missing the ethical objectives and rather is insistent and more concerned of maintaining a certain kind of consistency and a certain kind of adherence to the rules rather than dealing with the purposes. And therefore, as I told you, the one trend was to think about the purposes of Sharia to sideline this telephone directory version of it, but it's not entirely successful. That's the one thing. And ethical, ideally Sharia historically and people like Ghazali did already object in the 11th century and 12th century that Sharia interpretation has become lifeless and is minus the ethical imperative and the ethical imperative must remain part of it. But of course, as the juristic tradition grew and the power and authority, that message was lost by the wayside and only takes courageous jurists and courageous individuals within the Islamic tradition to begin to ask that question about where is the ethical in Sharia? And so therefore, a number of practitioners today are beginning to argue and drawing on arguments like Al Ghazali, but also on arguments, for instance, like scholars like Averroes, who died in 1198. Averroes writes a big book on the Sharia, one of the most important books on the Sharia, enumerating all these rules and regulations in the telephone directory version, okay? Very detailed arguments. But at the end of his book, in his conclusion, he says the following. He says that, I've given you the details and outlines of all these interpretations, but you should know that all these rules, all these rules that I've enumerated here, they are based on certain norms. And the preeminent norm is the norm of dignity. The preeminent norm that underwrites these rules is a norm of dignity. And then he enumerates the norms of dignity and under that heading is the virtue of chastity that you must abstain from undignified habits, the virtue of justice, which is self-explanatory. The third is the virtue of courage, also self-explanatory, and the virtue of generosity. So four, so the norms of dignity is the big headliner and under the norms of dignity are the four, other virtues, the virtues of chastity that you must abstain from undignified habits, the virtue of justice, the virtue of courage, the virtue of generosity. You also see the same thing in the work of the 18th century, Indian thinker by the name of Shawa Leula, who makes similar kinds of arguments in his book called God's Conclusive Argument. He writes that the foundations of morals were based on numerous virtues of which four are important for him, the virtue of purity, the virtue of humility, generosity of the self and justice. And he elaborates saying that purity makes one resemble angelic forces and humility draws one towards the omnipotent creator. And thirdly, generosity of the self is to ensure that one's angelic dimension, your angelic self within you does not capitulate to the appetites of animality. And then fourth justice is a capacity that enables the management of a justice system that is beneficial in arranging the domestic sphere and public governance. And so you see here that the earlier Aristotelian forms of thinking are meshed into Islamic teachings and these are the kind of issues that are very clear. Now these kinds of virtues and this kind of thinking was available throughout the centuries and we can retreat to them as ways of reinterpreting and putting Al Ghazali, Ibn Rushd and also Waliullah to work to create a new paradigm for interpreting the Sharia in conversation with ethics. But already within 15 years of Prophet Muhammad's death, the second caliph Omar for instance, Omar began to argue that slavery is not desirable. So the one of the ways that Omar began to shut down without any statement from the Prophet no direction from the Quran but based on the idea of human dignity, he began to argue and it was a rule that he passed was that a slave woman who gives birth to the master's child the moment she becomes the mother of a child as they call it, umul walad. The moment she becomes the mother of a child she can no longer be sold into slavery. She can no longer be resold. That giving birth to the master's child ends her status as a saleable status. Once the master dies she should be released into freedom. These are the acts of generosity, the understanding of what a world is, what human dignity is that was evident in Islamic teachings. You will find for instance in the writings of say someone like Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziya who dies in 1350 for instance, an important scholar who makes a very eloquent argument, he writes, the foundation of the Sharia is wisdom and the safeguarding of people's interests in this world and the next. In its entirety it is justice, mercy and wisdom. Every rule which transcends justice to tyranny, mercy to its opposite, the good to evil and wisdom to triviality does not belong to the Sharia although it might have been introduced into it by implication. The Sharia is God's justice and mercy amongst his people. Life, nutrition, medicine, light, recuperation and virtue are made possible by it. Every good that exists is derived from it and every deficiency in being results from its loss and dissipation. For the Sharia which God entrusted his prophet to transmit is the pillar of the world and the key to success and happiness in this world and the next end of quote. And so therefore you can see that Sharia properly applied, Sharia properly interpreted can enable one to begin to see the ethical values within Sharia and that version unfortunately is absent from the scenes that I talked about at the beginning of this conversation given the various and varying climates in different parts of the Muslim world, the political instability, the adherence to wanting to hold on to a certain kind of fixed Islamic identity, the fear to begin to rethink some of these questions are all part of that. One of the people that gave me a lot of inspiration to think about this more besides Daraz that I quoted to you is Al Ghazali whom I had studied a great deal and someone that I continuously go to for inspiration. Ghazali as I told you died in 1111 and one of the things that I find that Ghazali in one of his works tell us that one of the ways that we should be interpreting anything but especially on theological and moral matters is the following. He says that in order to interpret you must keep three things in tension. You must hold on to humility, you must foster reason and you must cultivate a plurality of interpretations. You must keep that in that kind of triangle. He says that you have to show interpretive humility because you cannot know everything. If you claim to know everything, it is a sign of intellectual deficit, not a sign of intellectual richness. This point is similar to what Karl Popper had made centuries later. If you have all the answers, how will you know you are wrong? The difference between humility and ideology is the following. Humility means that you are open to being wrong and you can be error and you are prone to error and you can be falsified and that means you are open to contingency. New facts, new ideas change everything. Ideology means you are not open to contingency and have all the answers up front and unfortunately some trends in Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic law and ethics are highly ideological projects. Second says Ghazali do not refute the authority of reason. In Ghazali's view, reason certifies revelation. In his view it is reason that confirms that there is some person by the name of the Prophet Muhammad. Reason is not the ground on which prophecy is founded but it confirms the veracity and truthfulness of a prophet. So that's Ghazali's second point. His first point was interpretive humility. Second point was do not refute the authority of reason and his third point was foster a plurality of views. Do not settle on a single answer. Language is capacious he says and the possibility of restricting the divine intention to a singular reading is to claim to fully know the divine intention when it might be much more complex. In short Ghazali says rejoice in the interpretive bounty of the text. And so my friends I've tried to share with you some ideas about the big problems and the small problems in Islamic thought in the realm of Islamic law and ethics and theology and I look forward to your questions and your comments. Thank you very much for your attention. At this point we actually have quite a bit of time for questions so I invite people from the audience to raise your hands and perhaps pose whatever questions have come to mind during the course of this lecture. Well I guess I'm seduced by Saqqal Popper. I'm a Popperian in that sense. Because you know... Is it everybody ideological to a certain extent? Pardon me? Is it everybody ideological to a certain extent? Yeah I mean we are all ideological but you know you are ideological and I got opinions or I'm more informed and so that's the way we dismiss. So that's a good point. I think that part of... I think the same thing can go with capitalism but I think the way in which we frame for instance communism and socialism as kind of ideological. See I think one of the ways... This is the Popperian idea that we have reality and we have the appropriation of reality. So we try to appropriate reality with our minds and so on. So Popper has an interesting idea of what he calls... his particular version of what he calls historicism. And so in his view historicism is a bad notion. And so he argues that when you have your ideas and you then shape your society if you say that the ideas that we have have now been fully implemented and we've now reached our utopia he said that is bad ideology. That is what he calls historicism because you're not open to falsification. That is Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued that liberal capitalism has reached a point with all these institutions and everything and it's all been fulfilled and it's now been realized. We now have a liberal capitalist paradise on earth. That's what Fukuyama argued. He said the institutions are no longer going to change. We can tinker it around there. Of course Fukuyama later changes mind. Popper and others obviously argue that you never can appropriate reality totally. There's always a gap. There's always something that can be falsified and that's precisely what I think the ethics of humility brings. And so maybe that could be an ideology that caters for that humility. And I don't know Adorno well enough. He's a bit impregnable to me. Yes. Because technically through the deductive processes of the scientific process and reasoning and all these great other enlightenment values that we would hold up these can then be turned into absolutes it could become an ideology in itself. It could be the anti-humility type thing. But as Ali says you have to keep it together in attention. So you have to keep humility if I had a board but I think you can see my triangle here. Humility at the top, plurality of views on the right and the third one was do not refute the authority of reason. You keep all these things going. You keep them in a flow. In a sort of productive tension. In a productive tension. It's a productive tension. So the moment you think that you have now got it through reason you have discovered you should always be open to the possibility that there could be another view and that you must be. So it's a productive tension. That's what I find appealing in this 11th century tied in 12th centuries think Ghazali. But I do understand that sometimes we especially politicians in this country they always like to say that other people got ideology. Radical ideology as if there's no Christian right and his ideology or liberals have ideologies too. The end of history. There's no more change. Exactly. Muslim orthodoxy. So how do you try and bridge that gap between how Christians interpret the Bible literally and then obviously you have groups like ISIS who do that. How do you try and have an educated conversation with someone on how there's kind of like two ends to that. Just Muslims interpreting something literally. It happens on both ends of the spectrum. Do you have a million dollars in your pocket? I mean I'll give you the answer. That's a million dollar question. That is one of the biggest challenges. So if you look at the Islamic legacy the kind of things that I shared with you these kind of highlights of very kind of ethical thinking highly sophisticated forms of thinking. You must be you would ask like that man in a New York restaurant in a diner who said you know look at Islam today. So what has happened to all these libraries of thought and the sophisticated learning. A couple of things have gone on. One is given the kind of industrialization of the Muslim world and things that have been happening everybody wants to become one of three professions an engineer and an engineer and an engineer. So that's what everybody wants to become. No one is studying the humanities or studying with sufficient mass attention to the humanities in a sophisticated way. Number two is that the greatest amount of wealth and the resources go to the kind of natural sciences and to technology and so on to keep up with modernization. So humanities education suffer. Secondly is that the education of the religious classes is one of the biggest challenges in the Muslim world. So places like Egypt, Morocco, Syria the government there has taken charge of religion right the control religion. So they have they train the clerics in the al-Azhar and then the Zaytuna in Tunisia Zaytuna has been shut down but reopened or the Dar al-Hadeed Hassaniya in Morocco or at Damascus University in Syria or at universities of Iraq before Iraq became a no country. All those kind of those institutions used to do things but the state controlled the scholarship there. So there was kind of marginal improvement marginal improvement in what the religious scholars were taught. Marginal but not substantial. In other words, do they have to take causes in economics and anthropology, political science as a precursor to understanding do they do very complicated historical understanding of these texts? No. So it's basically how to gain mastery over some theological texts and be able to speak authoritatively in the frame of that paradigm. In South Asia, Indonesia situation quite slightly different. In South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh the states of Pakistan, of India or Bangladesh have not been able to take control of the madrasas. So the madrasas are very much self funded, community funded. Again there the big kind of controversy has been for more than 100 years there have been debates about curricular change and how to improve the curriculum. So there's some institutions did do some change for instance one major change was to ensure that students know Arabic very well so that they can master the classical heritage and they can access it better and the hope is that if they can access the classical heritage they can become slightly sophisticated but only few institutions have done that and few have gone into teaching history. But this question when I wrote my book what is the madrasas I went back to my institutions that I studied when I put to them the question for instance can you, are you thinking about taking the knowledge we have of today of science of the social sciences humanity as part of your learning tools to interrogate your tradition it's almost as if they didn't understand the question. So the one answer I got is that listen we don't stop any of our graduates to go from after madrasa train to go to a secular university and study we don't stop anybody but the truth of the matter is that you must be extremely courageous that once you finish your madrasa curriculum that you will set your foot in a secular institution only the brave and the foolhardy like myself do it. So it's a catch-22 in Indonesia and Malaysia you have pesantran also kind of traditional Islamic schools part of those are state funded and there is a kind of a track out of those pesantran into modern universities okay so these but not in all places Turkey the situation you have you have you know Imam Hatip schools where you can get this traditional education and then there's a taproot out into universities you know most people go then go to divinity schools and so on but the big challenge is the content of that theological education the substance of it and the tools with which that is not being addressed so you can have conference after conference in my views and say we're going to strike down you know all these penalties all these rules and regulations that have been dealt with with non-muslim majorities or condemn the way in which some Muslim people blaspheme but if you don't have a handle on the world in which you are doing theology if you don't have a handle on understanding how knowledge works in the modern world the knowledge that regulates your cell phone that regulates your architecture around you all this kind of stuff so it's almost a kind of what I called in my book the counter-utopia and oftentimes these traditional madrasas operate like the heterotopia that Foucault talks about the counter-utopia, the alternative world and many of them are extremely proud of that and many of them see themselves as a bulwark against modernity in that way or that they will selectively deal with modernity that's the outcome now for many one of the things that when I speak to Catholic audiences and speak to some of my Christian friends they say what's wrong with that I mean you know we have to keep the modern world out because people in the west some people in the west are tired of modernity they want some kind of alternative right but the question here is that modernity is important because it's the option we have in front of us there are better options there are no better options about how to do governance than the nation state that we have we don't have a better model there are better models that are still in the making but how to create accountability how to do all this kind of distribution of wealth and those kind of things are important to entire Muslim communities look at a place like Egypt I'll take another question after this take a country like Egypt they have elections in whatever it was in 2012 I think right Morsi comes into power they write a script of a constitution that's going to regulate the rules of how governance takes place right those are the rules when Morsi gets overthrown by the military regime the theologians jump in to argue no Morsi against Morsi for the military against Morsi what do they argue about they retreat to pre-modern Muslim political theology that who is a legitimate ruler and who's not a legitimate ruler and how does legitimacy get established and not established but guys you guys agreed on this document called the constitution no one refers to the constitution everybody retreats to pre-modern political theology because that is still the justifying narrative and so what is absent is to create nation states and political systems that will take on board the subjectivities of Muslims because that's what they relate to that the Islamic heritage and Islamic civilizational production of knowledge of political theology and political science and those kind of teachings must become part of the organizing narrative otherwise it becomes a false narrative otherwise by which you are being regulated becomes a false narrative they would see that the nation state is an import or they don't have sufficient justification of the nation state model so that's what needs to be done that requires very very a great deal of work in schooling and education but also altering those paradigms so they can work today and those are some of the challenges that we are faced with so it's not only about interpretation but it's also about governing societies there is a certain kind of tension between governance and people and people being governed and the way people understand legitimacy I just gave you an example of the argument in Egypt of how it played out but I can give you many more arguments I mean the country like Turkey for instance the modern nation state has been accepted by say the ruling Islamic party the AK party and so on but you know there again the big challenge is the emerging despotism that is coming through now through this kind of democratic framework and so on so yes my question is kind of in where do we go from here you know one time the ethical framework of Islam was transferred kind of from the moizen through the imam in the mosque and then outward and then in the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th centuries you had interpretations that were written down and the literate could look at the interpretations and they could understand them and that got a richer contextual thing and you begin to get these strains I think as you said of recognizing that you cannot just take the historical culture you've got to take the modern at least the modern at the time context into account but now you seem to have gotten to a point where and I hesitate to kind of use the dichotomy between the moizen and the internet or the moizen and Twitter but you've got literally you have a a mu'twazin what's a mu'twazin? a mu'twazin and Twitter it's a mu'twazin but no I mean you literally have a mutant form of Salafi a mutant Salafism that is being broadcast loudly that is being broadcast provocatively that caters to some cultural issues among young unemployed people around the world whether the Muslim or not is the religion up to the challenge of countering that very modern communicative situation communication situation that's a tough question I think everybody's you know thinking through and wondering how that can be solved look one can think about this on a big scale but you also that will make you despondent because where do you start I believe that you need small success stories one has to look at places like places like Indonesia, India, Malaysia parts of sub-Saharan Africa where societies are pulling things together or I think the great hope is that the wish that many people in the Middle East and South Asia always say to me when I go and talk to them that you know people in North America and Europe maybe they can you know be you know pioneers in charting out a new way a new way forward and that can become a kind of a model that they can use that's what they say I think they kind of if you want to go for the kind of macro questions and so on I think that you know the West and we as the United States we need to take a lot of responsibility for the kind of messes we make all over the world we support despots and dictators and so on and that is a question Americans just don't want to discuss that is not a question for conversation of our responsibility in this kind of globalized world all the hands of all the despots and then they overthrow them and then we leave those countries as in a mess and that's where these extreme ideologies then take advantage of but it's not only that problem the problem is not only one side it is multiple and so I think the big problem within Islam is how do you upgrade the literacy of Muslim societies at large okay so religious literacy Muslim society is being dumbed down by a certain kind of Salafism Salafism is the kind of easy do-it-yourself version of Islam what I call the Home Depot version of Islam quickly you have to do this it all operates according to some kind of algorithm and if you put women in hijab and you put women in certain kinds of ways all kinds of licentiousness and wrong kinds of practices regarding sexuality and is going to disappear not true if you're going to enforce certain kinds of banking regulation or you're going to use corporal penalties to punish people for certain kinds of offenses things are going to improve doesn't happen in that way but Salafism sells that to people or sells the idea to people that the situation only improve if Muslims take out a carve out a piece of land call it a caliphate that's where Islam's going to be ready and they're going to conquer the whole world and make the whole world look like themselves that's going to be an ugly world but that's what they believe in so how do you challenge that many people want to put all the blame on Saudi Arabia I don't say Saudi Arabia is innocent the government of Saudi Arabia is in one place and then the religious classes in Saudi Arabia with all these universities and instruments is a kind of a game they play so they produce all the kinds of toxic interpretations that then go out in different parts of the world they subsidize some of these active actors and so on and so Saudi Arabia if you're going to see a country that's going to collapse I don't know when but at some point on its own thing is going to be a country like Saudi Arabia and that's one of our closest allies in the region so I mean I said it here first so remember that the thing is that but this trend is also not only from Saudi Arabia it's also a certain kind of mindset of modernity the kind of reductionist version of Islam the quick fix version of Islam so it's a kind of a modern mindset and that you know a push of the button you get an answer so why do you think groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat Islam this kind of revivalist movement thrived first of all they captured all the learned people so secular educated people are the biggest supporters of these organizations because these are people who have a modern scientific outlook and in their outlook this kind of quick fix version of Islam very superficial is very attractive this doesn't involve sophisticated learning and studying the virtues understanding complexity that one question could have 10 different answers they won normally their argument is or sister Islam is easy these scholars are making it difficult that's their response the simple version they're only looking for the simple version because they say Islam is easy or they would say in a particular accent brother Islam is easy so the issue is that you need to think about these issues in much more complex ways and that is not there so the Pharisees have taken over that's basically what we have but part of that will be to have a war on religious illiteracy part of the remedy is no more wars literally no more wars in the world that destabilize entire peoples I mean how do you think that these ideas that I'm talking about is ever going to get into Syria in the next 50 years how is this even going to resonate in Iraq how is it even going to you know land from 60,000 feet in the air in Yemen and how is it even going to make land fall in Libya and Egypt that is under military occupation so there's a lot to be fixed before any of these humane ideas even take and in the process there's dehumanization taking place so the outlook is bleak the outlook is bleak time for a final question so I'm just wondering what kind of networks exist to support the kinds of interpretation the pluralist complex sophisticated interpretation that people like you are doing what kinds of networks exist to support and give voice to that so you know the closest that I can think that we can have effective networks are you in North America United States and Canada people in western Europe who are interested in this I mean there are enough people who in western Europe are also tired about the lack of imperialism and the effects of it coming to Paris and London and came to New York and Washington more than a decade ago so how do we do this so the networks are here so you are finding for instance if you go to the American Academy of Religion Islam section today compared to say 20 years ago lots of heritage students people from within the community who are now studying 20 years ago and now it's a huge maturing of varieties of heritage students people from born in North America to people who are second and third generation that's all optimistic secondly a lot of work has been done on the heritage itself so people are doing serious graduate work in looking at the legacy interpreting and providing lots of lots of good resources so there's hope here some of these networks I mean people are connected through a variety of ways in social media to places like Indonesia where there's a great appetite for these kinds of things other parts of sub-Saharan Africa actually parts of Morocco and Tunisia there's great optimism there if you skip over Libya maybe but Tunisia is still a good place I mean if you think the way in which the Arab Spring has succeeded in Tunisia people, wise people guy like Rashid Ghannoushi whom I know personally pulling his party, the Renaissance party out of the thing when he saw that the secular are thinking that the Islamists are going to take over and avoiding that fear took the risk and Tunisia is making incremental progress is not ideal but it's progress at least stable it's not imploded Morocco has a monarchy but there's at least some amount of thinking Algeria very thoughtful people in Algeria also doing all kinds of interesting work so those networks are helpful a lot of interpretive work happening in North Africa I'm very energized by that and I take frequent trips and read some of those colleagues out there so there's good work going on there but Egypt used to be once upon a time a great place of Islamic learning military suppression suppresses people's energies and their enthusiasm Iraq used to be great also Syria too but Iran has become there's been a lot of reformers thinking for some time Abu Karim Surush Muchtaid Shabestari lots of others Mohsin Kadivar and important names and lots of scholarship that might also come to it but we also have a huge phenomenon that is like creating even bigger divisions is this emergence of the sectarian wars between Sunni and Shia and that is manifesting itself everywhere I mean here in North America and Europe I think some of the more thoughtful Muslim leadership is trying to push that away and creating consolation all the time because they're not allowed those viruses to take root here so that's a good news I mean you see the Islamic society of North America it's a powerful action in making sure that every year at the national convention there's this conversation they are largely a kind of a Sunni group but they invite participants they have that and there's a lot of traffic back and forth because people realize that this can be extremely dangerous but in places like Pakistan and so on it's just been extremely toxic but India is hopeful I mean India economically is doing better but you know there are challenges but Muslims in India are making progress even though the statistics show that Muslims in India are performing less underperforming compared to say the other scheduled class in India which is quite shocking but this is what happens in that context but I think at least the violence and those kind of things is less compared to its neighbors Bangladesh I worry in recent months and years there have been some really troubling features happening in Bangladesh societies freedom of speech or people who speak get murdered and killed and so on it's worrying but one has to be hopeful but I think to end on a hopeful note I think that there are opportunities and there are people who are thinking to work hard at multiple levels and I think at the political level we need to bring an end to wars globally we have to because that just destabilizes and you know no one wants to take responsibility but the invasion of Iraq and the dismantling of Iraqi army what is ISIS? ISIS is the bath party with the Islamic face this is bathism with the Islamic face that is the bath party so they've been doing it for decades in Syria and in Iraq they've been doing it under various despots and the leadership council of ISIS contains at least of the 44 I'm told at least 40 or 41 of them are these ex-bathers military generals and commanders and therefore they are so successful as a military force so the accountability global accountability is a huge thing and that is what is missing in this whole conversation about who takes account for what goes wrong in the world if you want to be the world's policeman then when you break something you have to pay for it and you have to fix it and our politicians is blind that is now integral to the Islamic reformers project see this thing about the role of the west is no longer an outside issue is not integral to the process because the stability of the societies and regions are dependent on these moves that we make and so yes Islam must become part of every student America's education or the Muslim world because that world is a floating world there's large numbers of populations of Muslims all over the world and to understand those communities and also have a better handle on what's happening is absolutely crucial and I think one of the things that why conversations like these are important is that you have the faith community can understand what's going on you might not understand everything but at least you have some empathy of what the size of the problem is before we even talk about the remedy and so therefore I came to share with you the size of the problem and maybe not the remedy thank you very much for your time thank you