Speaker says goal of Islam is freedom
Speaker says goal of Islam is freedom
BECCA BONTHIUS
Special to The Messenger
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Progressive Muslim thinker Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im argued against the notion of the Islamic state during his lecture “Imagining and Realizing Progressive Islam: A Framework and Call to Action,” Tuesday night in Bentley Hall.
“If you leave the possibility of an Islamic state alive, then someone is always going to try to make it happen. And when they do, you’ve got disasters, like what happened to Sudan,” An-Na’im, who is from Sudan, said.
An-Na’im is a Professor of Law at Emory University and is the author of “Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a.” His lecture was the first of the Mohmoud Mohamed Taha Progressive Islam Lecture Series, put on by the Centers for African Studies and Southeast Asian Studies and supported by a two-year Social Science Research Council grant.
The public lecture series honors Taha, a Sudanese Islamic social reformer “who sacrificed his life in the name of tolerance, women’s rights in Islam and a universal message of peace,” Steve Howard, Ohio University Director of African Studies, said. Taha was executed in 1985, and next year marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Taha, as An-Na’im explained, said the goal of being a Muslim is absolute individual freedom, which is “to think as we choose, and to speak as we think, and to act as we speak.” An-Na’im, who was a student of Taha, used that concept of consistency of thought, speech and action as the basis of his lecture.
“I am trying to evoke a vision of Islam…that will inspire Muslims out of their current state of…regression,” An-Na’im said. He defined “progressive Islam” as “improving the quality of our lives…provided it is we who decide that it improves our lives and how it improves our lives.” The way to honor Taha, who serves as a model for “living the values of transformative Islam,” is to “facilitate that ability to live, to think freely, to speak as we think and to act accordingly,” he said.
States must be secular, or neutral to religious doctrine, An-Na’im said, and must allow Muslims the options of belief and disbelief. He said that framework for individual freedom can only be achieved when people accept responsibilities and negative consequences and work collectively to make transformations based on their convictions.
“We can start making things go right immediately here and now. Wherever we are. Whoever we are. It is not a matter of waiting for regime change, for perfect conditions, in order to achieve transformation,” he said.
Howard said the way Islam is described in the West leads to “misunderstanding, perpetuation of stereotypes and ignorance of many possibilities for East-West dialogue and mutual communication.” The lecture series aims to dispel some of these misconceptions by increasing people’s exposure to the subtleties of Islam, and will address the possibilities for progressive change and reform.
“This is the first time that I have clearly heard a Muslim talking about - I’ll use the Christian language - separation of church and state,” Art Gish of Athens said of An-Na’im’s lecture. Gish has worked for 12 years with Christian peacemaking teams in Iraq and Palestine. “I so deeply appreciate a progressive Muslim voice. So often religious people are reactionary, and I’m a religious person myself,” he said.
Sri Murniati, a political science graduate student from Indonesia, has followed An-Na’im’s work for several years, and took his Human Rights and Islam class when she studied in Jakarta. “To listen to it in person, it’s much more compelling, and I had an opportunity to ask my own questions,” she said, adding she thought he addressed the audience’s questions very carefully.
Howard said he considers An-Na’im a mentor. They met 30 years ago when Howard was working on his dissertation in Sudan. “He’s saying things that take a lot of courage to say and, in a lot of these contexts, they’re very dangerous things to say,” Howard said.
An-Na’im’s lecture was the first and last of this academic year. The rest of the Progressive Islam Lecture Series will start in the fall.