Some Muslim values will never fit in with secular democracy

The proposition that Islam is especially intolerant, especially prone to violence, is one that has come to possess for liberals as well as Muslims the authentic quality of blasphemy. The possibility that sanction might exist within the Koran for brutal crimes committed by the Islamic State is an upsetting one for all decent and generous-hearted people – non-muslim as well as Muslim – to countenance.

Which is why, no doubt, whenever there is some particularly monstrous atrocity, such as those we have just seen in London and Manchester, Western leaders can be relied upon to pose as experts on Islam, and insist that the perpetrators are either distorting the religion, or else do not rank as Muslims at all.

But it is not for a prime minister or a home secretary to play at being a theologian. Politicians who take it on themselves to define what is and is not “authentic Islam” are buying into the notion that such a thing actually exists. But – unless one is a fundamentalist believer – it does not. A religion, like any other manifestation of human culture, is a porous and variable thing. Rather than a single radio station, it is a series of points on a bandwidth. The definition of an extremist will depend where on that bandwidth one is.

This is why jihadists do not tend to think of themselves as extremists. Rather, they see themselves as paragons of righteous behaviour. “In the Messenger of God you have a beautiful model of behaviour.” So proclaims the Koran. It matters, then, to jihadists, no less than to Muslims who would never contemplate taking sex slaves, or killing those who mock the Prophet, that sanction for what they do is indeed to be found in biographies of Muhammad.

To close our eyes to this, and to imagine that what Western governments characterise as “Islamic extremism” owes nothing to the example of the Prophet, is wilful blindness. When beheading an infidel seems to be the one deed to which every jihadi aspires, it is surely not irrelevant that Muhammad himself is said to have owned a sword that can be translated as “Cleaver of Vertebrae”.

The challenge that faces Muslims in the West is as simple to state as it can seem difficult to resolve: what to do with the traditions about Muhammad incompatible with the mainstream values of a liberal, secular democracy? In the last two centuries, Islam has been transformed. “Texts written symbolically,” the scholar Kecia Ali put it, “came to be read literally.” Returning to an appreciation of Muhammad’s role that is mystical rather than legalistic, and cosmic rather than earthbound, should do much to facilitate the emergence of an Islam that is both true to its own traditions and compatible with Western norms.

There are trends in scholarship that can help. Where jihadists locate the radiant light of certainty, scholars of early Islam have tended to find the opposite. The consensus among scholars now would probably be that we know less about the historical Muhammad than about the historical Jesus. In time, this understanding is bound to have an impact upon the literalism with which many Muslims today are tempted to interpret their scriptures. Recognising that the stories told about Muhammad are largely fictions bred of a particular context and period should facilitate the emergence, over the course of the next century, of a clearly Western form of Islam.

This is an updated and edited version of a lecture Tom Holland gave to the Hay Festival