Saturday, Feb 21, 2015 01:30 AM +0900
This stupidity needs to end: Why the Atlantic & NY Post are clueless about Islam
Pundits claiming that ISIS is emblematic of Islam ignore the intellectual traditions at the heart of the religion
H.A. Hellyer
ISがイスラム教なのか、否かについては、海外でも問題にされているようである。やっていることが、コーランなどの教典に基づいているので、イスラム教であり、そこを見失うと、彼らのやっていることの本質を見失う、という人がいる一方、最大の被害者がイスラム教徒であること、大半のイスラム教徒が反対していること、また、イスラム教の正統派の権威からは異端視されて、イスラムではないと、非難されていることから、イスラム教ではない、という人たちもいる。
キリスト教のカソリックのように、正統と異端を区別する機関があるわけではないが、一部で言われているように、バラバラで、どれもが権威がある、というものでもなく、師匠によって評価され、相伝、伝承されていくような系樹の一部をなしていないと正統派とはいえないようではある。
任意の何かついて、なにをもって、それと呼ぶかについて、そう簡単に決着がつく問題ではないが、本件の場合、あいつらといっしょにされたくない、という気持ちはわかる。
日本では、イスラム教についてほとんど、知られておらず、イスラム国としても、「イスラム国」としても、あれは国で、あれがイスラムなのか、と思う人が出てくるのは当然で、そこから在日のイスラム教徒についての偏見が拡大するのも予想できることではあり、「イスラム国」という呼称を避けるのは理由のあることだというのが私見である。
This stupidity needs to end: Why the Atlantic & NY Post are clueless about Islam
Pundits claiming that ISIS is emblematic of Islam ignore the intellectual traditions at the heart of the religion
H.A. Hellyer
The easy answer is to say “Islam” – but it is also a rather lazy answer. There are around 1.5 billion Muslims around the world. The vast, overwhelming majority of them, needless to say, are not members of ISIS — and, in fact, Muslims actually make up the majority of ISIS’s victims, its most active enemies on the battlefield, and its most prominent detractors.
Surely ISIS would have far more recruits than a tiny minority of Muslims worldwide if “Islam” were the crucial factor. Moreover, if the Islamic credentials of ISIS were so widely considered as valid, even if most chose not to actually follow them, surely there would be a large numbers of Muslim jurists and theologians that would vouch for as much. In reality, the vast majority declares in no uncertain terms that, indeed, those credentials are void and invalid — a long, condemnatory open letter last year to the head of ISIS included more than a hundred well known religious authorities.
When assessing the role of religion in ISIS, there is also another option, which some posit: Islam lacks an ecclesiastical, hierarchical authority structure. There is no equivalent to a papal authority, such as in Catholicism, to define religious authority — so, essentially, everyone is entitled to define religion as they see fit within the Islamic faith. Essentializing “Islam” as “good” or “bad” thus misses the point; there is no way to essentialize Islam. ISIS is as “Islamic” as its detractors — the only difference is popularity (which heavily favors the latter).
While this is a more nuanced argument – certainly more than the one that claims ISIS represents mainstream Islam – it is rather problematic when put up against the background of Muslim history. On the one hand, it is very correct that for Sunni Muslims there is no hierarchical ecclesiastical structure. But a community with more than 1,400 years of history does not survive as a recognizable community without some edifice of religious authority — even if it is one that we as Westerners are unfamiliar with.
At the root of such systems is the sanad, or the “chain.” Contemporary exemplars of this tradition take great pride in being able to say that any text they teach in the religious sciences is a text that they have read with someone, who read it with someone, who read it with the author of the text, who would have read previous texts with someone who read… and so on and so forth, back to the Prophet himself in the 7th century.
Over the past couple of centuries, Muslims have seen two types of reformation processes take place: One version, in what would later become Saudi Arabia, gave rise to purist Salafism, which many now call “Wahhabism.” The other version, in Egypt, became “revivalist modernism,” which later was politicized in the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood. In both cases, from the outset, the more established religious authorities of the day chastised the proponents of reforms as either disavowing major parts of the traditional methodology in their understandings and interpretations of the wide and vast corpuses of religious texts – or they accuse such “reformers” of cutting corners, intellectually.
When scores of religious authorities in the Sunni and Shi’a Muslim worlds disparage ISIS as being “un-Islamic,” they’re not being facetious. They can see, plainly, that ISIS is citing religious texts – the Qur’an itself, the sayings of the Prophet, and pre-modern religious authorities. These citations, however, don’t establish authenticity. Rather, the ability to interpret the primary texts as the Prophet did, and secondary texts as their authors did, is what establishes authenticity. As far as religious authorities are concerned, such discernment can only come via these systems of training through chains of transmission
For the scholar, interpretative credibility came about through connecting yourself to that system of authority.
No Kung-Fu master becomes as such without a master, or sifu of his own, it seems. For the likes of ISIS, the very system of producing a sifu is null and void. That’s part of the point.
The question is: Why is ISIS not Islamic? And that comes back to credibility and pedigree in interpretation.
It’s entirely likely that just as pre-modern heterodox movements disappeared, so too will ISIS – but only after a lot of damage has been done in the meantime.
ISがイスラム教なのか、否かについては、海外でも問題にされているようである。やっていることが、コーランなどの教典に基づいているので、イスラム教であり、そこを見失うと、彼らのやっていることの本質を見失う、という人がいる一方、最大の被害者がイスラム教徒であること、大半のイスラム教徒が反対していること、また、イスラム教の正統派の権威からは異端視されて、イスラムではないと、非難されていることから、イスラム教ではない、という人たちもいる。
キリスト教のカソリックのように、正統と異端を区別する機関があるわけではないが、一部で言われているように、バラバラで、どれもが権威がある、というものでもなく、師匠によって評価され、相伝、伝承されていくような系樹の一部をなしていないと正統派とはいえないようではある。
任意の何かついて、なにをもって、それと呼ぶかについて、そう簡単に決着がつく問題ではないが、本件の場合、あいつらといっしょにされたくない、という気持ちはわかる。
日本では、イスラム教についてほとんど、知られておらず、イスラム国としても、「イスラム国」としても、あれは国で、あれがイスラムなのか、と思う人が出てくるのは当然で、そこから在日のイスラム教徒についての偏見が拡大するのも予想できることではあり、「イスラム国」という呼称を避けるのは理由のあることだというのが私見である。
