Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement (November 2002)

		21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 Books	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Notions of Islamic freedom
Al-Hurriya fi Al-Islam: Al-Darura Al-Mahdhura (Freedom in Islam: The Forbidden Necessity), Nasha'at Gaafar, Cairo: samizdat, 2001. pp238

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Qur'anic manuscript in the Thulth script from Egypt/Syria c.15th century; a mushaf in the fine Ghobari script from Iran, 1833
Since the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Islam has come under scrutiny from many Western analysts. If Islam is as mellow as is sometimes claimed, these analysts ask, why is it that heinous crimes are committed in its name? And this is a question that has also crossed the minds of many Muslims, if in a different form. In this book, Nasha'at Gaafar, while not offering a direct answer to this question, argues that civil liberties are not the West's exclusive property but are deeply rooted in the Islamic ethos and heritage, correcting some of the misapprehensions about Islam that have circulated in the West at least since September 2001.
To lend credence to this view, the author addresses the concept of freedom, which has sometimes been ignored in discussions about Islam's core values, both by Muslims and by non-Muslims. This discussion has acquired added urgency over the past year, explaining why the book is significant, and the author offers interesting readings of the relevant Islamic literature as he traces the historical development of the concept of freedom in Islamic thought and its different meanings and interpretations.
According to Gaafar, the noun freedom is not found in the Qur'an, but the verb to free is found there in the context of freeing human beings from slavery, whether material or otherwise. In Islam, he says, the idea of freedom is not just a right for human beings, but it is also a duty and a commitment: according to the author's reading of the Islamic sources, there is a responsibility in Islam to spread, secure and protect freedom.
"A Muslim is not just entitled to freedom, and to keeping and protecting it, he also has a duty and a commitment to defend others' rights to it," Gaafar writes. Indeed, the concept of freedom, and freeing others and oneself, occupies a fascinating amount of space in the Qur'anic texts. This means that it is difficult to classify the kinds of freedom being referred to, but in addition to universally acknowledged freedoms Gaafar emphasizes several that are unique to Islam -- the freedom to pray, the freedom to err and the freedom to forgive. In other words, there is in Islam a basic freedom to practice trial and error.
The author feels that the esprit de corps of Muslim societies has weakened, and, in his efforts to diagnose the reasons for this, he looks at issues related to the concept of freedom. At the heart of the malaise, Gaafar feels, is an "intentional negligence" on the part of Muslims in developing concepts such as freedom. In Islamic history, Gaafar says, there has been little of the developing discourse on political freedoms that have marked other parts of the world. Indeed, there is a "huge shortage", and this he attributes to a long history of political despotism in Muslim societies, which started in the early Islamic period with the killing of Imam Ali, the fourth Caliph.
The political circumstance that prevailed after this event in the Muslim world, and the isolation of Muslim thinkers and jurists, is a primary reason why the concept of freedom has not been properly studied within an Islamic context. Historically, Islamic jurists focused the bulk of their work on drawing legislative rulings out of the Qur'an, without paying enough attention to political and social developments in Islamic societies outside the written text. In addition, he says, they placed too much emphasis on those verses that have to do with the law (ahkam), neglecting the bulk of the verses which consider other matters.
As a result, the Islamic commentators paid little attention to the historical development of civilisations and the processes of growth and change. This is strange, Gaafar comments, since during the first 13 years of the period that the Prophet Mohamed spent in Mecca he was concerned with laying the foundations of the Muslim community, which is why the Meccan verses of the Qur'an are concerned with the human and civil growth of the Muslim community, including political and social growth and development.
The legal verses are from a later period, something which, in the author's view, indicates that a strong civic life had priority. The legislative texts, Gaafar argues, do not contribute to the building of Muslim society; rather, they are concerned to regulate it, which explains why the legislative verses come from the Prophet's time in Medina, after he had migrated to that city from Mecca.
Gaafar laments the fact that Muslim thinkers and jurists of later times gave these legislative verses priority over the earlier civic ones in their study of the Qur'an, placing "special emphasis on the legislative jurisprudence, in other words on questions of the halal (licit) and the haram (illicit)...By giving the legislative verses priority, those in power were able to extract from Islam those elements that best served their interests," Gaafar writes, at the expense of other verses that stress the authority and strength of what would now be termed civil society.
For this reason, Gaafar says, ideas of political and social freedom governing the relationship between the ruler and the ruled developed in the West while they largely stood still in Muslim thought. However, this is not to say that Islamic thinkers did not occupy themselves with the question of the proper relationship between ruler and ruled, for they considered this relation from the point of view not of freedom but of justice. According to the Islamic tradition of political thought, what entitles the ruler to rule and lends legitimacy to it is that justice is maintained as a basis of government.Nevertheless, today the author says it is more important than ever to appreciate what the Qur'an and hadith have to say about the concept of freedom. While, he says, there is no "complete definition of individual freedom in the texts, and neither is there any elaboration of the relationship between political authority and the individual within an Islamic context", he offers a refreshing and new approach to the problem, avoiding the kind of opinionated writing that too often mars other such discussions. He also quotes extensively from the Qur'an, the Sunnah and from texts from the Islamic heritage to show that the idea of political and social freedom, as well as of other kinds, is very far from being absent from Islam. Indeed, this so-called Western value could be considered as a basic value of Islam.
One important point that Gaafar addresses is the question of who should have the right to speak in the name of Islam. He points out that while the "core values" of Islam are fixed and are the same throughout the Muslim world, aspects of practice change historically and geographically, as do people's perceptions. Freedom of thought, indeed, leads to a plurality and diversity of opinions. Therefore, Gaafar argues, a real problem is that some Muslims have allowed their perceptions of their religion, rather than the religion itself, to overwhelm their world view, causing them to hold erroneous notions.
"No human being could describe his or her perception of religion as the ultimate truth, since human perceptions and understanding are always relative and are always subject to error. Therefore, we should always be prepared to modify our views and not stick to dogmas." In fact, any individual's perceptions, Gaafar argues, should be understood as representing only a fraction of the truth, and therefore diversity and difference of opinion have to be accepted to bring us closer to it. Islam encourages respect for the points of view of others, realising that there is no monopoly on truth.
In his historical and philosophical survey of the concept of freedom in Islam Gaafar adopts a measured, balanced tone, which will be attractive to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. For this reason, it is to be hoped that the book will be translated, both for the use of non-Muslims hoping to gain further insight into Islam and for Muslims whose mother tongue is not Arabic.

Reviewed by Omayma Abdel-Latif

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