Tomorrow's Islam: The Power of Progress and Moderation Where Two Worlds Meet

By Geraldine Doogue

September 11. Bali. Iraq. The threat of extremism has made many in the Western world fearful of Islam. But should they be? Geraldine Doogue and Peter Kirkwood set out to ask the hard questions.
Originating from the acclaimed ABC television Compass special of the same name, tomorrow's Islam is a thoughtful and highly accessible insight into Islam from the perspective of two curious - and at times critical - Western journalists. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with leading progressive Muslim thinkers and leaders from around the world who are grappling with an accommodation between modernity and Islam, this compelling work considers the following issues: How does the world move on from September 11? Are most Muslims for or against terrorism and jihad? Is there really a clash of civilisations? Can the Muslim world embrace democracy? Are Muslims in the West ghettoised or leading reform? Are Islamic women repressed or autonomous? And regarding the future - is there cause for optimism or pessimism? At a time of grave unease and confusion in the world, tomorrow's Islam addresses some of the most complex questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780730498292

Geraldine Doogue

Geraldine Doogue is the presenter of ABC television's Compass program. She is a renowned journalist and broadcaster, who has won two Penguin Awards and a United Nations Media Peace Prize. Peter Kirkwood has a degree in theology and has been a producer with Compass for a number of years.

Book preview

Tomorrow’s Islam

HOW IT ALL STARTED

GERALDINE:

Amidst all the sturm und drang around possible clashes of civilisations, the words ‘moderate Islam’ are gaining ground. This is the way ahead, most Western commentators quickly agree. Others suggest the idea is an oxymoron, beyond reach. Others, particularly Muslims, find the description quite insulting, with its implications of acceptable and unacceptable attitudes. To whom, they plead? Would Christians willingly accept being called ‘moderate Christians’? In the circles in which the term is blithely used, it serves as a convenient summary, with barely a thought to related sensitivities. Newspaper headline-writers and conference speakers allocated five minutes to outline their case for intercultural relations revert to it as a default position. That Western polemicists and power-brokers are extremely comfortable with it has undoubtedly made things worse in the eyes of the Muslim world. Yet even middle-of-the-road Westerners reach for the term with real goodwill, attempting to prove their credentials as searchers for a shared future. The tag is clearly complicated, at best. Maybe ‘progressive Islam’ is more acceptable all round and more accurate. Accordingly, this is our choice throughout the book. We understand it as a subset of moderate Islam, including Muslims who oppose fundamentalism and militant religion; people who are open, flexible and want to rework their age-old beliefs to engage with the modern world. We do not seek to imply that they are a pushover or totally accommodating. They are also critical of modernity and the West from their faith perspective but crucially, seek to live peacefully within their communities. This is the great hope, surely an ideal twenty-first century quest, with the aim of averting a new round of energy-sapping hostilities between peoples. No wonder people reach for any term that is pregnant with hope when so much other analysis is filled with despair.

But our motivation for writing comes from the fact that the discussion virtually stops right there, at the theoretical and aspirational. Any sense of systematic engagement between mainstream Western audiences and the people who are progressive Muslims does not really occur. The household names that the West know well are generally perceived to be threatening, sometimes acutely.

This book aims to change that. It aims to join the complex debate about the future of genuinely plural societies in the contemporary world. It seeks to be constructive … the missing quality, it seems to us. Hand-wringing is much more common. Accordingly, alongside Western analyses, Muslims will outline their views in the coming pages. These contributors reveal themselves to be practical in the ways of the West yet also challenging because of their inherent difference, none of which we dodge. Above all, we have tried to search out common ground while avoiding the familiar trap of much current writing: an approach that ends up essentially blaming the West and asking little of Muslims for fear of causing offence. We are genuinely curious about the practical how-tos of getting along, now that our pluralist communities are maturing and no longer novelties.

There is much for the West itself in all this. If anything, we’ve been through the easiest part of a process that began in earnest around thirty years ago. Now comes the harder stage, of digging deep and asking: what do we stand for? Ideally, the poets should be more to the fore than the lawyers, although some areas will need rigour. Which words, for instance, are we prepared to admit and which are off-limits? Which guiding stories will continue to matter and which won’t? Who’ll be the respected narrators and who might be seen as the charlatans? How will we debate that question in a civilised way?

It is also a discussion about modernity. As the respected American specialist on Islam John Esposito suggests: All the children of Abraham continue to struggle with modernity — meaning the religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.’¹ Islam is clearly struggling most but it is not alone. That should never be overlooked. This acknowledgement could even be re-imagined as a genuine plus; if all believers are allowed to struggle, visibly, with modernity then fewer will be dismissed as ‘recalcitrant’. The encouragement of a type of cordon sanitaire along these lines would be helpful.

James Kurth, the American political scientist who writes so originally about the overlap between culture and foreign policy, believes there is a great misreading about fundamentalist revivals. Rather than being a reaction against modernisation, a sort of irrational reversion to the past, he sees ‘revivalist Islam and even revivalist Hinduism … as … reactions not just to the successes of modern, secular ideologies and projects, but also to their failures … Such revivals are not merely anti-modern religious reactions but post-modern political religions. Revivalist Islam is a response to the failures of Arab nationalism and socialism and of Iranian nationalism and modernisation.’²

Secular society has to look within for some answers, as well as examining the violent reactions. Fresh new questions should emerge about how we will progress. How will we live together in long-term harmony: Christians living cheek-by-jowl with devout Muslims, Hindus, atheists, ambivalent Muslims, couldn’t-carelessers, New Agers, Buddhists, Johnny-come-lately searchers, anti-religion campaigners, Christian fundamentalists, and all the other permutations of thought permitted in the postmodern West? This discussion could fill the gap so commonly identified by many observers: what are the codes by which the pluralist West will live in this new century? Here’s a thought: is it possible that Osama bin Laden forced on Westerners a much-needed internal conversation? And that it, in turn, will influence the Muslim world partly because Muslim people have joined in the original conversation? This is the book’s great hope.

What are the codes that might start to develop within the Muslim world view that don’t currently exist? The practical answers to all these questions, let alone the rhetoric, are not easy. The generalised desire for people to ‘just love one another’ is surely hopelessly naïve or even arrogant. Do we delude ourselves that in the twenty-first century, we have happened upon some miraculous blindfold, unavailable to previous generations, that somehow shields us from all the cultural and taste differences that proliferate in our mixed communities? In fact, our research led us to wonder if something rather different was under way in the West: that underneath a veneer of increased tolerance was a preference for sameness, not immediately obvious but a powerful undertone.

Coincidentally, the children of first-generation émigrés to the West from traditional Muslim countries are emerging into their communities as adults. Without their parents’ often submissive, semi-withdrawn approach to the wider community, they are rethinking what citizenship of the West really means. Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim thinker, is completely absorbed in this question. He sees it as the major breakthrough in shifting the internal mind-set of Muslims living in the West. Further, he predicts it could be the break in the dam wall that so many seek, cracking open fixed stereotypes that exist on both sides of the Muslim–Christian fence. He suggests it could be the great gift on offer from the Muslim diaspora to the rest of the Muslim world.

Others in our collection of voices, notably the Egyptian–American Imam Feisal and the Indian–American Muqtedar Khan, agree. They are both examples of people whose mind-set has shifted, opening them up to a wide range of new possibilities. As well, their moves have been steady and thoughtful rather than impetuous. These emerging agents of change are neither brittle nor pushovers. They are as susceptible as anyone to being invited into the community’s elites and talking hubs, but at this stage, to our eyes, they are focused on the need to keep faith with their own communities and to bringing a different sensibility to the table. They are confident — newly confident — that they have something valuable to contribute. They believe essentially in an authentic Islamic identity that sits amid a modern world and consciously welcome its religious base. In our opinion, this is the optimum combination of attitudes likely to produce real change for the future. Significantly, none of our interviewees believed this could be effortlessly transported to the traditional Muslim countries.

What is starting to emerge among diaspora Muslims is a real identification with some core values of what might be called ‘the Western project’. As Tariq Ramadan says, ‘My point is not only to be accepted by the West or to be understood by the West. Much more than that, I want my fellow citizens to understand that I am a richness for this country. I am a richness for Western societies … in this plurality. And this is a question I have to ask my fellow citizens: do you think Muslims are giving something or do you feel that Muslims are only problems?’³ Few might wish to be confronted with that question in polite society these days. Identification on whose terms remains a vexed point.

Attitudes at different ends of the spectrum seem to have hardened in the wake of September 11, and maybe even more so since Spain’s ordeal and some of the Iraqi hostage-taking horrors. My co-author Peter Kirkwood and I have been subject to several ‘character-building’ dinner conversations with friends and acquaintances since announcing this book. We have identified, more or less, two clear strands of strong conviction bordering on outright prejudice — and these from often highly educated people whom one might imagine to be relatively well-fortified against easy judgement. (Or maybe that’s our prejudice!)

One strand contends there is no compact possible between the West and Islam, that Muslims and Christians have faced each other as two armed camps throughout history and are destined to do so indefinitely. An Australian Jesuit specialist in Islam, Father Dan Madigan, has heard some people suggest that we stopped our ‘centuries-old battle only to take on communism … now that communism is no longer a threat, it’s back to the mutual blood-letting’.⁴ Others had begun to suspend time-honoured fears about Islam, only to see them return with a vengeance after the wretched New York ambush in 2001. It’s almost as if they feel ‘duped’ by what they now see as a naïve hope.

The other strongly voiced opinion is surprising. Full of ferocious hope, this second group simply won’t admit any doubts or fears about Islam. Pluralism must survive, they assert. What else is there? All doubters are dismissed as hopeless victims of right-wing shock jocks and malign forces. This view chooses to hear only the best and averts its gaze, relentlessly, from any disturbing community elements related to Islam. In a sense, this is the new conspiracy theory, amidst all-pervading fears about dark Western forces coalescing to prevent harmony. Any honest suggestions about constructive help from the West towards a Muslim search for its own Enlightenment brings you face-to-face with incredulity. For some Westerners, the bona fides of all their compatriots on this score are suspect. Yet surely a new dawn of peace will require some new ‘true believers’ who are informed, realistic and unsentimental.

In the coming era, these new rules of engagement will require a fundamental shift in one’s approach. The respected American economics commentator, Peter Drucker, offers what might be an interesting analogy from economic history. In a famous Atlantic Monthly article in 1998, he compared and contrasted the impact of the industrial and contemporary techno-revolution on broader society and individual attitudes. He suggested that while major advances in woollen mill machinery (spinning jennies, power generation) formally began the industrial era, the arrival of the railway half a century later really ushered in the seismic shifts to our communities. Why? Because people could literally leave their communities and think beyond their small circle of commitments. This, he asserted, ushered in the truly profound development: what he called the ‘shift in people’s internal geography’. After this, nothing was quite the same again.⁵

Among the progressive Muslims we met, their mental geography had shifted when they experienced the freedom to simply live in the West, within their skin, straddling both Islam and a Christian-based system. Then, and only then, could they discover whether accommodating the West robbed them of identity. Was living under secular governments, devoid of a godhead, self-annihilating? Essentially, the answer was no. If anything, it forced a critical reexamination of their religious tradition in its entirety. Most had found this refreshing. Some rediscovered permission for a broader religious observance; some re-encountered the sacred notion of ijtihad, or regular renewal. Above all, most began imagining how a personal spirituality might remain powerful and relevant despite cultural compromise — a powerful shift.

What is required of the West and Westerners in the midst of these fundamental shifts? First, we need to treat this process with great respect but also rigour. Westerners, as a group, have no cause to be either triumphalist or apologetic, in our view.

Second, we should watch our language. We should be careful about cavalier references to Islam, the religion itself, when substituting the word Muslim may be more helpful. The best analogy is with the Christian gospels. Even when savage criticisms are made of Christian behaviour, rarely if ever are the words of Jesus Christ attacked. Father Dan Madigan goes further. What Mohammed is for Muslims (the human channel through which the Word of God entered the world) Mary is for Christians, he says; although Mohammed is also a Moses figure, as the leader of the community and its lawgiver.⁶ The Quran devotes significant attention to Jesus Christ but it does not believe he is the son of God, or God. One of its chapters is named after Mary, probably the only woman mentioned by name in the Muslim scriptures. Of course, Christianity, like Judaism, encourages debate around interpretation of the gospels, whereas currently in Islam this is problematic. Overall, on the question of etiquette it comes down to this: accuse individual Muslims, if necessary, of serving Islam poorly; but don’t excoriate the entire philosophy. It leaves adherents nowhere to go.

Third, Westerners could provide safe venues for Muslims to think aloud about change. Professor Abdullah Saeed, from Melbourne University, emphasised this crucial point during a Christian–Islamic colloquium held in Melbourne in February 2004. Amidst an array of Muslim scholars from around the world, Professor Saeed gave the keynote address on understandings of apostasy: the great sword of Damocles that hangs in the ether of the Muslim world. To be dubbed an apostate — literally a betrayer of Islam — is a terrible fate. Punishment ranges from death to ostracism from one’s community, and it acts as a strong sanction against what might be called ‘independent thought’. But at this event there was no question time allowed, which was a pity.

Fourth, we should not be glib about the interaction between politics, religion, poverty and affluence. Father Madigan suggests that many of today’s politicians and commentators — Christians, Muslims and others — offer a view of the world in the old ‘primary colours of kindergarten blocks’, once beloved of antique maps showing imperial territories: pink for everything British, yellow for the Dutch, and so on. These depictions are designed to make everything understandable, yet they actually obscure the complexity of the issues.⁷ This is illustrated by the work of David Martin-Jones, from the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, who also draws heavily on Ernest Gellner’s respected research on religion in Indonesia. Both men caution against easy assumptions about Muslim citizens’ readiness to ‘buy’ the Western model of success, on Western terms. Gellner focuses on what he calls ‘Islamic neo-orthodoxy’, which he sees as a crucial phenomenon. During the twentieth century there was a massive movement from the illiterate folk Islam of the countryside throughout much of the Islamic world, particularly South-East Asia, a type of piety associated with upward mobility. These moves were susceptible to the religious purists precisely because they had become more bourgeois, more separated from their village elders with their oral traditions and established authority structures. ‘Thus, across South-East Asia and the Middle East, it is typically urban male university graduates who find in the strict formalism of fundamentalist teaching the simplicity and certitude to cushion their eduction in science and technology, which is necessarily an education in contingency and doubt. Outlining the belief that science can be civilised only through faith, Sayyid Qutb — the twentieth century prophet of Islamism — maintained that only the genuine practice of a pure Islam could heal the unnatural breach between religion and scientific materialism.’⁸

Nonetheless, despite this fairly pessimistic view of South-East Asian Islam, we found in our travels and research that Indonesia seemed to offer great surprise and hope. This is a society in transition, trying to adapt traditional practices and customs to a modern, globalised world. Having thrown off the Soeharto autocracy, it was also grappling with its own roadmap towards democracy. Progressive Islam in Indonesia represented a skilful search for spiritual enlightenment via the Quran, but always with an eye to people’s everyday needs. Embedded within a Sufi tradition there, it manifests a spiritual confidence that is deeply felt. Leaders stride forward confidently, bringing their religion to the civil realm, amazed at any onlookers’ caution. There is a strong intellectual strand with well-developed public networks for discussion. All in all, this little-discussed populous area of Islam left us wanting to know more.

Running throughout this entire discussion is the challenge of stepping inside another world view. We discovered that for most Muslims, politics is like a sacrament, whereas in the West it is seen as more instrumental. Politics permeated Islam’s birth and was inextricably bound up with efforts to bring political and spiritual sustenance to warring tribespeople in the seventh century and beyond. Compare and contrast too, the two prophets at the core of the different traditions: Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, a reformer, the world’s best-known victim whose death at the hands of the Roman Empire ranks among the most horrible in history; and Mohammed, a holy man, politician, skilled military strategist, victorious in war and peace. Whatever similarities lie between the broad principles of Christianity and Islam, the legacies cast by these men’s giant shadows are surely inherently different. Inevitably, they much influence the internal geography of individual adherents to the respective faiths.

For many Australian Muslims, reconciling the sometimes contradictory demands of loyalty to Islam with integration in Australia can prove tricky. They are such a small proportion of the Australian population (1.5 per cent, around 300,000, 36 per cent born here) and are not even a single community. They include Suni and Shia, some are migrants, some second or third-generation Australians; there are different ethnic and linguistic groupings, some are conservative and others liberal-minded. Some are observant and others not, just like the broad mass of Australians. Dr Shahram Akbarzadeh, who teaches at Monash University, contends that on most socio-political issues, Australian Muslims are far less conservative than their brothers and sisters in their ancestral homelands. And they are not happy about international developments that tar them with a violent brush. Australian Muslims face a difficult choice. They are being eaten from inside. They are repulsed at the way their faith is being dragged into mud by terrorist groups that target unsuspecting civilians going about their daily business. They feel overwhelmed by the constant media coverage of their affairs. Some wish the media would leave them alone so that they could go back to their inconspicuous lives and practise their faith without having to justify themselves ad infinitum.’⁹ But that would be a mistake, he suggests. Australian Muslims owe it to themselves and their children to reject other Muslims as evil, where necessary, even though this is extremely difficult to perform before a Western audience. Oddly enough, a striking feature of most of the progressive Australian Muslims we met was their efforts to avoid politics, both within their own communities and in the wider society.

We were left wondering about this whole idea of the separation of church and state, the supposed litmus-test of post-Enlightenment politics. Father Dan Madigan believes we need to ask whether what we really believe in is the separation of religion from politics rather than the separation of church from state? Modern political authority does not belong, it’s clear, to clerics. ‘However we must question the value of any faith that has no bearing on our politics, that is on how we organise our life together. What use is a religion that has nothing to offer on the subject of justice, rights and responsibilities? What does it profit us to have a religion with no realisable vision of human community?’¹⁰ If this is deemed a useful distinction, some good ends might be in sight. The West’s own conversations could be expanded; the Christian church establishments could be forced to refresh their arguments; and conscientious Muslims could be reassured that religion and society would not continue to sit in entirely separate realms. Of course, re-emergent religion could also invite sectarianism and self-righteousness back onto centre stage and encourage the attributes that so enrage atheist scientists like Professor Richard Dawkins. It is not without dangers and some are already apparent. But he and others like him must surely recognise that what flows into and out of values-vacuums when religion is discouraged from respectable engagement may pose considerable risks too. The challenge of the immediate future is securing moderation and the price is eternal vigilance.

PETER:

At 3.59 p.m. on Thursday, 6 February 2003 an email arrived on my computer from Geraldine titled ‘Proposal — Voices of Progressive Islam’. This was the genesis of the idea that over the next month or so became the outline for a documentary for ABC TV’s Compass program called Tomorrow’s Islam, and began five months of intensive research into the faith, culture and world of Muslims. Geraldine’s email that February afternoon read:

This is a proposal for a documentary on progressive Islam around the world.

Who are the people who represent it? What are their views? What is their context, i.e. where they live, interests, influences, work, education, family? What do they have to say about the current climate where the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis is gaining credibility? How do they straddle the requirements of their faith and identity while dealing with the West? What are their dreams? How do they form a framework for life which enables them to see a way forward in which their Islamic selves are not at odds with modernity?

The idea would be to introduce to a mainstream audience the faces of progressive Islam; to be accessible in tone; to be curious about not only their theological and spiritual tendencies, but what makes them, the individual person, tick; to draw viewers towards an ongoing interest in how Christianity and the West and Islam might make common cause in the twenty-first century. In other words, to be constructive about what lies ahead by above all stressing the PEOPLE involved. At the moment, part of the gloom is caused by the void of information about progressive Islam. We only hear details of what doesn’t work.

Executive Producer George Pugh came up with the title Tomorrow’s Islam, and the idea fairly quickly gained approval from management. Formal research was slated for April and May, and filming to be for almost four weeks from 30 May till 23 June. This began a steep learning curve, fed by reading, surfing the internet, telephoning and emailing contacts in Australia and overseas. Geraldine and I are from Christian backgrounds and, while we may have been better informed than most on Islam, we had had minimal contact with Muslims and really knew very little about their religion.

What quickly became apparent from just reading alone was that the TV documentary would only be able to skate across the surface of the topic, that we could only give viewers a bare introduction to the complexity and depth of the issues. We felt that if our audience could get just a feel for these progressive Muslims as people, and see some of the questions they were grappling with and how they handled the ideas, this would be a substantial beginning.

In formulating the structure of the documentary, we decided that in an hour-long program we could only comfortably meet six to eight people. We worked out criteria to help make the hard choice of who would represent tomorrow’s Islam: they had to describe themselves as Muslim and preferably be devout practising members of their faith, that is, they would speak from inside the Muslim fold rather than be disaffected outsiders; they had to be well and truly on the public record with their views, and most particularly they must have denounced the violence and terrorism of Muslim extremists; and we decided to focus on Muslim leaders and thinkers living in the West, who have already had to adapt to pluralist secular societies. Many commentators are now saying that deep reform in Islam globally may be led by progressive Muslims in the West. Traditional Muslim countries, by and large, have become hidebound by conservative Muslim clerics and repressive governments. It is mainly in Western countries that Muslims have the freedom and resources to do truly innovative thinking. These people might offer genuine models for the future, models that could be exported back to the traditional Muslim world.

From a list of around twenty possible interviewees, we finally decided on the eight who are introduced in Chapter 1. After sometimes tortuous negotiations with interviewees about their availability, working and reworking dates, times, places, flights and accommodation, by the day before departure we had our trip more or less organised. Our schedule was to fly first to Washington DC to film with Muqtedar Khan, then to New York for Faiz Khan and Imam Feisal, then London to meet Baroness Uddin and Ridwan Al-Killidar, then to Paris and Geneva for Tariq Ramadan, and finally to Istanbul for Ayse Oncu and Ayse Bohurler.

The documentary was completed by mid October, and was aired on ABC TV on Sunday, 26 October. We recorded Geraldine’s introduction in New York, under the Brooklyn Bridge looking across the East River to the dramatic Lower Manhattan skyline. If they were still standing, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre would have risen behind the buildings over her right shoulder. Her words sum up the approach of the documentary, and the aim of this book:

Hello, I’m Geraldine Doogue. Welcome to Compass, tonight from a very different location: New York City. We’re going to take you on a journey to some of the world’s great cities on a particular quest, to meet leading Muslim thinkers. Since the traumatic events here on September 11, 2001, the spotlight has been on Islam, mainly on the fanatics and on the problems besetting this great world faith. Well, we want to do something rather different: our focus will be on leading Muslim thinkers and intellectuals living in the West who are trying to find a constructive way forward. They’re pioneers in what might be tomorrow’s Islam.¹¹

The program was well reviewed by TV critics and well received by viewers. What the critics said highlights media concentration on the fanatics and the problems, and the novelty of hearing the progressive voice of Islam. Following is a sample of some of the reviews:

From the Sydney Morning Herald review by Guy Allenby:

It was an audacious task: to look at the future of one of the world’s greatest religions — primarily in the West — in the space of a one-hour telly program. But this ABC TV production manages to cast a reflective and constructive eye over the Islamic faith at a time when it has never been more maligned, feared or misunderstood. ‘Tomorrow’s Islam’ talks to devout yet progressive Muslims in the US, Turkey, Britain and France and finds a religion that bears little resemblance to the fanatical interpretation being practised elsewhere. Aunty has allowed presenter Geraldine Doogue out of the studio and come up with a timely and well-researched program. Fascinating stuff.¹²

From the Sun Herald review by Annmaree Bellman:

In ‘Tomorrow’s Islam’, capable Compass host Geraldine Doogue interviews leading Muslim thinkers in four Western countries and asks how they see the future of their religion. Doogue’s fascinating and diverse subjects include liberal New York clerics searching for an American–Muslim identity, two very different activists in Turkey, a ‘European Muslim’ promoting ijtihad (independent reformist thinking) and the first Muslim woman in Britain’s House of Lords, the wonderfully titled Baroness Pola Manzila Uddin of Bethnal Green. It is thought-provoking and intensely relevant.¹³

From an extended feature article titled ‘Western Muslims Are Speaking Out’ in the Financial Review, by Lyndall Crisp:

Recent events have put the spotlight on Islam, but there are many voices in this religion. In the fragmented world of Islam where fanatics dominate the headlines and conservative Muslims faced with an increasingly Westernised society struggle to balance an unfamiliar culture with their religious traditions, there is a new breed of intelligentsia which is producing global stars. Since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, and more so since the invasion this year of Iraq, they are much sought after around the world to explain where Islam is headed in its time of reformation.¹⁴

This book gives us the opportunity to present in much more detail our interviewees’ views on a broader range of issues than we were able to cover in a one-hour documentary, and to provide a more extensive background. It is not a scholarly work by experts, nor is it a comprehensive survey of Islamic history or theology, though along the way it will outline some history and explain some beliefs and religious practices. Rather, it is an introduction to some key progressive Muslim thinkers and leaders, what they are like as people and their views on major issues facing Islam. It will summarise some of the major debates about Islam, and the present unease about it in the West, with an emphasis on where Islam intersects with basic life issues here and now rather than esoteric aspects of history, belief or practice.

Chapter 1 introduces in detail the Muslims whose voices form the spine of this exploration of tomorrow’s Islam. Chapter 2 looks at Muslim terrorism and violence, and the question of whether they are supported in any way by Islam. Chapter 3 examines some of the social, economic and political problems besetting most countries in the Muslim world and how they have fuelled the rage that leads to violence and terrorism. In Chapter 4 we look at the history of pluralism in Islam and how that might apply to today’s concept of democracy in the West; and in Chapter 5 hear how progressive Muslims understand their position as citizens within the democratic West and look at the problems and obstacles they are dealing with, and some directions for a positive future. Chapter 6 explores some of the issues about the role of women in Islam: how is it that in some Muslim countries women are treated as second-class citizens, but in others they are involved in politics at the highest level? Why do some progressive Muslim women choose to wear the hijab (headscarf) and others see it as a symbol of oppression? Chapter 7 looks at the possibility of reform in Islam, and explores the concept of itjihad, independent reasoning, which is crucial to the process.

Chapters 8 and 9 are different to the rest of the book: they introduce progressive Muslims in Indonesia and Australia who were not included in the original TV documentary. The research and interviews for these chapters were done separately, and may form the basis for a future treatment on television. Chapter 8 does not offer a systematic examination of the history of progressive Islam in Indonesia; rather it presents the views of some of the key thinkers and leaders on the basic important issues. Similarly in Chapter 9, a selection of progressive Muslims talk about the benefits of practising Islam in Australia, but also discuss the problems facing what is still a relatively new Muslim community and one still affiliated with its many and diverse countries of origin.

Tomorrow’s Islam — both the documentary and now this book — represents the view of two curious journalists who had the good fortune to be able to go on both a literal and an intellectual journey around the globe, which took us from almost complete ignorance to some understanding and insight. We hope to share this journey with readers.

1

Voices of progressive Islam

PORTRAITS OF KEY INTERVIEWEES

GERALDINE:

And so our journey