Date Posted: Monday, November 29, 2004

By Siraj Mufti

A recent policy document published by the well-known Rand Corporation, entitled “Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and strategies”, purposes to align Muslims against one another to suit a post-9/11 neo-conservative global agenda for the United States.

In it, author Cheryl Benard embarks on “rebuilding” Islam, despite acknowledging the impossibility of such a venture. In the effort, she proffers her analyses by consulting with like-minded neo-conservatives while ignoring reputable Islamic scholars, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, in devising the document.

The most ironic part of the report is that an unqualified Benard positions herself as the self-appointed interpreter of both Qur’an and Hadith for Muslims. In doing so, she makes a mockery out of the rigid qualifications and rigorous religious training required of scholars who are experts in the field. As such, Benard should admit that such expertise is beyond her knowledge and the specialized domain of reputed Islamic scholars, as acknowledged by the global Muslim community.

Nevertheless, like others of her ilk, Benard pursues her study by arrogantly questioning the authenticity of the Qur’an. However, the Qur’an stands alone among revealed books in that it was committed to memory as it was revealed, over a 23-year period, and which is repeated in the five daily prayers and recited at other times by Muslims. At the death of the Prophet Muhammad (saw) ten thousand Muslims had memorized the Qur’an in its entirety, a practice that continues to this day. In fact, today there are millions of Muslims worldwide who can recite the Qur’an word-for-word, and every one of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims is able to recite at least part of it.

Moreover, as it was revealed through Prophet Muhammad (saw), some of his companions and scribes wrote it down during his lifetime. Within a year-and-a-half of his death, these were compiled into the first written Qur’an, which became the official version of the Qur’an - written and spoken – under Caliph Uthman in 651. At least two of these Qur’ans – and possibly a third (with Caliph Uthman’s seal on them), still exist today.

Regarding the Qur’an currently in use, the well-known non-Muslim Orientalist Qur’anic scholar William Muir had this to say: “Uthman’s version has passed on to us from hand-to-hand without alteration. It has been so scrupulously preserved that there are no variation of any note – one might say no variations whatever – in the innumerable copies of the Qur’an for all the warring factions, and this unanimous use of the same text, accepted by everyone right up to the present day, is one of the irrefutable proofs of the authenticity of the text which we now possess, and which dates back to the unfortunate Caliph Uthman (who died by assassination).”  Other Orientalists, among them Leblois and Theodor Noedelke have made similar comments. 

Also, for Benard, “there is little doubt that the use of hadith is at best a dubious, flawed instrument.” Muslims are constantly involved in “hadith wars” of attrition. “The process is, to borrow a term from another religion, Talmudic” – thus denigrating the rigorous scientific research methodology followed and left for posterity by the God-conscientious (Muhaddithun - hadith experts). 

Instead of suggesting a plan to remedy the main cause of the Muslim world’s enmity towards the U.S., generating extremism in the Muslim world (e.g., a self-serving U.S. foreign policy) Benard superficially looks at its symptoms. Here she attempts to divide Muslims into categories of fundamentalists, traditionalists, modernists and secularists. Her hope is that traditionalists do not help radical fundamentalists or become them. However undesirable, this may very well occur, as the U.S. continues to support the appropriation and colonialization of Muslim lands and resources, turning thousands into millions of those opposed to the hegemonic designs (for example, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, 2004).

The objective of Benard’s project is to build a secularist Islamic group. She does this in spite of acknowledging that “many important secularists in the Islamic word are unfriendly or even extremely hostile” to the U.S. This is due in whole or in part to ”their anti-Americanism and aggressive nationalism.” Again, acknowledging that they are only a minority, the “magic” is to turn this minority into a majority subservient to the neocolonialist designs of the United States.

As for Muslim fundamentalists, Benard not only includes those who are hostile to the West, and to the United States in particular, but also leaders of mainstream Islamic movements. These include those who are concerned about their countries, advocate non-violence and are committed to bringing about change from repressive regimes through legal and democratic means.

Contrary to the current rhetoric emanating from Washington, and despite the Middle East initiative of President George W. Bush, these very repressive regimes are those U.S. administrations have backed and help to maintain their status quo. According to Amnesty International, after September 11, the United States supplied these regimes with record sales in torture tools and equipment, to be used against the opposition.

Yet not content with the above-noted divisions, Benard advocates another ploy – the creation of localized Islams for Europe and America. Thus it is nothing more than a Machiavellian manifesto to enforce American hegemony and Western cultural imperialism on the Islamic world through a universally condemned policy of “divide and rule.”

Finally, it is interesting to note Benard’s intolerant attitude toward traditional Islamic women’s dress code: the headscarf, or hijab. Her antipathy to hijab is all too apparent in several places in her work. She seems to place great importance on ridding the world of hijab-wearing women as an important part of her scheme to rebuild Islam, through her criticism of the practice and any seeming endorsement of it. In one such example referring to a U.S. State Department website, she writes:

When U.S. government agencies appear to endorse the headscarf, for example, considering it to be a minor matter of preference in dress code that cheaply enables to signal tolerance, they are in fact unwittingly taking a major stand on a central, widely contested symbolic issue. They are aligning themselves with the extreme of spectrum, with the fundamentalists and the conservative traditionalists, against the reformist traditionalists, the modernists, and the secularists.

Siraj Mufti, Ph.D. is a researcher and freelance journalist, who serves as a staff writer for The American Muslim magazine.