Muslims should welcome criticism

It’s an unfortunate sign of Islam’s stunted intellectual development that vast majorities of its adherents regard any questioning of the status quo as blasphemy, apostasy, hatred, or “Islamophobia,” and now are trying to characterize it as a human rights violation. The Forward has run an insightful story on this phenomenon in an article noting that the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is pushing the UN to recognize that freedom of speech ends where religious sensitivities begin.

Certainly there are cases in which criticism of Islam crosses the line into disrespectful, even hateful, discourse. But to categorize it as a violation of the rights of Muslims is so absurd as to be laughable.

If my religion is mocked by a cartoonist in Denmark, a novelist in London, or a blogger in Minnesota, how have my rights been affected? More importantly, how could those perceived insults possibly have any bearing on the life of one of the OIC’s citizens? Does a Bangladeshi farmer feel his human rights diminished by Salman Rushdie’s novels? If so, how?

What the OIC’s effort really targets is the preservation of the power of “Islamic scholars” (known as “Ulama” in the Muslim world) to dictate orthopraxy to hundreds of millions of people. If we, as Muslims and well-intentioned adherents to other faiths, are unable to critique Islam (as currently defined and practiced) without being branded rights-violators, then the status quo is maintained indefinitely, and the power of the Ulama continues to grow.

If I am unable to say what I believe about the Hadeeth and the Sunna (the alleged words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) for fear of being branded a hate monger, that’s one more pressure that reformers have to endure, on top of the charges of “apostasy” leveled by our co-religionists.

From my point of view, the Sunna and the Hadeeth are predominantly lies made up by people after the Prophet’s death in order to reinforce their own worldviews, which often were in direct conflict with the Qur’an. This is bolstered by the claims of some Ulama that not only do the Hadeeth and Sunna help explain the Qur’an, but that they can, at times, supplant it.

This, in my view, is heretical and designed strictly to put power in the hands of misogynists, bigots and power-hungry zealots. So I criticize it.

If the Ulama are correct in their interpretations, then they should have no fear of taking on such controversy. The Qur’an, in fact, admonishes us all to use our logic and to argue well with each other. The Ulama, on the other hand, respond to such criticism by calling for executions and saying that such things must not be said. And now they’re trying to get the UN to agree.

If they succeed, they will prolong their already-protracted death throes. But in the end, they cannot and will not win. They are on the losing end of history, and the rest of the world’s Muslims will leave them behind.