The failure of the authoritarian Arab nation-states to win their wars and to guarantee economic development, social justice, and cultural integration mobilized a religious opposition against the secular state that called for a return to Islamic law through what is called "the codification of Islamic law" (taqnin al-shari'a). The states reacted to this demand in giving the form of legislative texts to classical or postclassical fiqh rules and in integrating them into their codes. In this way, apostasy laws were integrated, in 1991, in the Sudanese penal code; in 1994, in the Yemenite penal code and also, in 1982, in a penal code approved by the Egyptian parliament but never promulgated by the Egyptian president.
This development was accompanied by an increasing number of apostasy trials in the Arab world. These trials have been led against intellectuals, scientists, artists, and writers suspected of defending the political, legal, and religious culture of the secularizing state. They are led to establish the non-Islamic and heretical character of books, publications, university teaching, or public speeches. The apostasy trials form part of a political effort to deny suspect intellectuals the right to express their thought in public.
This mechanism is well exemplified by the apostasy trial of Cairo University professor Abu Zayd. Abu Zayd, a prolific writer, has published a series of books on classical Islamic subjects, ranging from the interpretation of the Koranic text to the teaching of ninth-century fiqh scholars. In his books he uses methods taken from modern linguistics to analyze the relationship between texts and readers. This approach forms the foundation for his thesis that each new generation of Muslims understands the Koran in the light of its own historical experience and thus discovers new dimensions of its meaning that allow the new generation to grasp aspects that were hitherto neglected.
In 1993, a group of lawyers, all of whom were known activists in Islamic movements, filed a legal proceeding against Professor Abu Zayd, accusing him of apostasy and asking the court to dissolve the professor's marriage with his Muslim wife. They pretended to have legal standing for such a plea because the fiqh orders every Muslim "to command the good and forbid the evil." In other words, they base their plea on the hisba rule of the classical fiqh. The court of first instance refused to accept their case because they did not prove their personal interest in it.
The pious lawyers appealed this judgment to the Cairo Court of Appeal. The court accepted the appeal and on June 14, 1995, condemned Professor Abu Zayd for apostasy and ordered him to separate from his wife. The Court of Cassation confirmed this judgment on August 5, 1996. Professor Abu Zayd and his wife left Egypt the same year. Abu Zayd is presently teaching at Leyden University.
The intolerance in Islam is new and still developing while in Christianity, it has been on the decline for 100s of years. The problem I see is that there aren't any quick fixes to Islamic intolerance, just as there was no quick fix to Christian intolerance. Indeed, we have also seen a rise in Christian intolerance in the United States by the religious right composed of the followers of Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Land.
1 Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliot Friedman, Prentice Hall, 1987, pp. 18-21:
Six Hundred Years of Investigation
At the first stage, investigators still accepted the tradition that Moses wrote the Five Books, but they suggested that a few lines were added here or there. In the eleventh century, Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish court physician of a ruler in Muslim Spain, pointed out that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named kings who lived long after Moses was dead. Ibn Yashush suggested that the list was written by someone who lived after Moses. The response to his conclusion was that he was called "Isaac the blunderer."
The man who labeled him Isaac the blunderer was Abraham ibn Ezra, a twelfth-century Spanish rabbi. Ibn Ezra added, "His book deserves to be burned." But, ironically, ibn Ezra himself included several enigmatic comments in his own writings that hint that he had doubts of his own. He alluded to several biblical passages that appeared not to be from Moses' own hand: passages that referred to Moses in the third person, used terms that Moses would not have known, described places where Moses had never been, and used language that reflected another time and locale from those of Moses. Nonetheless, ibn Ezra apparently was not willing to say outright that Moses was not the author of the Five Books. He simply wrote, "And if you understand, then you will recognize the truth." And in an-other reference to one of these contradictory passages, he wrote, "And he who understands will keep silent."
In the fourteenth century, in Damascus, the scholar Bonfils accepted ibn Ezra's evidence but not his advice to keep silent. Referring to the difficult passages, Bonfils wrote explicitly, "And this is evidence that this verse was written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it; rather one of the later prophets wrote it." Bonfils was not denying the revealed character of the text. He still thought that the passages in question were written by "one of the later prophets." He was only concluding that they were not written by Moses. Still, three and a half centuries later, his work was reprinted with the references to this subject deleted.
In the fifteenth century, Tostatus, bishop of Avila, also stated that certain passages, notably the account of Moses' death, could not have been written by Moses. There was an old tradition that Moses' successor Joshua wrote this account. But in the sixteenth century, Carlstadt, a contemporary of Luther, commented that the account of Moses' death is written in the same style as texts that precede it. This makes it difficult to claim that Joshua or anyone else merely added a few lines to an otherwise Mosaic manuscript. It also raises further questions about what exactly was Mosaic and what was added by someone else.
In a second stage of the process, investigators suggested that Moses wrote the Five Books but that editors went over them later, adding an occasional word or phrase of their own. In the sixteenth century, Andreas van Maes, who was a Flemish Catholic, and two Jesuit scholars, Benedict Pereira and Jacques Bonfrere, thus pictured an original text from the hand of Moses upon which later writers expanded. Van Maes suggested that a later editor inserted phrases or changed the name of a place to its more current name so that readers would understand it better. Van Maes' book was placed on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books.
In the third stage of the investigation, investigators concluded outright that Moses did not write the majority of the Pentateuch. The first to say it was the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century. Hobbes collected numerous cases of facts and statements through the course of the Five Books that were inconsis¬tent with Mosaic authorship. For example, the text sometimes states that something is the case "to this day." "To this day" is not the phrase of someone describing a contemporary situation. It is rather the phrase of a later writer who is describing something that has endured.
Four years later, Isaac de la Peyrere, a French Calvinist, also wrote explicitly that Moses was not the author of the first books of the Bible. He, too, noted problems running through the text, including, for example, the words "across the Jordan" in the first verse of Deu¬teronomy. That verse says, "These are the words that Moses spoke to the children of Israel across the Jordan...." The problem with the phrase "across the Jordan" is that it refers to someone who is on the other side of the Jordan river from the writer. The verse thus appears to be the words of someone in Israel, west of the Jordan, referring to what Moses did on the east side of the Jordan. But Moses himself was never supposed to have been in Israel in his life. De la Peyrere’s book was banned and burned. He was arrested and informed that in order to be released he would have to become Catholic and recant his views to the Pope. He did.
About the same time, in Holland, the philosopher Spinoza published a unified critical analysis, likewise demonstrating that the problematic passages were not a few isolated cases that could be explained away one by one. Rather, they were pervasive through the entire Five Books of Moses. There were the third-person accounts of Moses, the statements that Moses was unlikely to have made (e.g., "humblest man on earth"), the report of Moses' death, the expres¬sion "to this day," the references to geographical locales by names that they acquired after Moses' lifetime, the treatment of matters that were subsequent to Moses (e.g., the list of Edomite kings), and various contradictions and problems in the text of the sort that ear¬lier investigators had observed. He also noted that the text says in Deuteronomy 34, "There never arose another prophet in Israel like Moses...." Spinoza remarked that these sound like the words of someone who lived a a long time after Moses and had the opportu¬nity to see other prophets and thus make the comparison. (They also do not sound like the words of the humblest man on earth.) Spinoza wrote, "It is...clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by .someone who lived long after Moses." Spinoza had been excommunicated from Judaism. Now his work was condemned by Catholics and Protestants as well. His book was placed on the Catholic Index, within six thirty-seven edicts were issued against it, and an attempt was made on his life.
A short time later, in France, Richard Simon, a convert from Protestantism who had become a Catholic priest, wrote a work that he intended to be critical of Spinoza. He said that the core of the Pentateuch (the laws) was Mosaic but that there were some addi¬tions. The additions, he said, were by scribes who collected, ar¬ranged, and elaborated upon the old texts. These scribes, according to Simon, were prophets, guided by the divine spirit, and so he regarded his work as a defense of the sancity of the biblical text. His contemporaries, however, apparently were not ready for a work that said that any part of the Five Books was not Mosaic. Simon was attacked by other Catholic clergy and expelled from his order. His books were placed on the Index. Forty refutations of his work were written by Protestants. Of the thirteen hundred copies printed of his book, all but six were burned. An English version of the book came out, translated by John Hampden, but Hampden later recanted. The understated report by the scholar Edward Gray in his account of the events tells it best: Hampden "repudiated the opinions he had held in common with Simon.. . in 1688, probably shortly before his release from the tower."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment