Insightfully unpacking Islam

WHAT IS A MADRASA?

Ebrahim Moosa Edinburgh University Press ALL with a sense of Islamophobia ought to read this book. Islam faces a bad press in the West and countries influenced by the western media, despite the distinction between the mainstream Islamic religious traditions and the latest manifestations of jihadist extremism in the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula and parts of Africa.

Inherent to monotheism is a proselytising reality which easily spills over into the will to convert or persecute “pagans”, “heretics” and “infidels”. Religious crusaders and zealous evangelists, primarily Christians and Muslims, are essentially persuaded that their particular norms and values are of divine origin – rather than the product of human whims and agreements.

Since the invitation by Emperor Constantine to the hitherto persecuted church to co-exist within the Roman Empire in 312 CE, followed by the crowning of King Charlemagne by Pope Leo lll on December 25, 800 CE, Christians slaughtered more fellow Christians, Muslims, Jews and others than the polytheistic Roman Empire had done in its entire existence.

Catholics and Protestants have killed each other in the hundreds of thousands. The habits of Judaism underlies much of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, apartheid was driven by a racist brand of neoCalvinism and the fight involving the self-styled Islamic State is underpinned in different ways by a not-too-restrained layer of Christian, Islamic and Jewish motivation.

The struggle for human decency and religious “purity” is deeply embedded in the religious histories of the three religions of the book (Christianity, Islam and Judaism). This is what makes Ebrahim Moosa’s What is a Madrasa? a book to be read by all those who seek to understand the ongoing theological struggle in Islam.

A graduate of Madrasa education, Moosa later studied the humanities and social sciences, earned a PhD at UCT and is currently professor of Islamic studies in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame – a leading Jesuit university in the US. He describes himself as a “friendly critic of madrasa education”.

The book addresses the nexus between orthodox and reformist traditions of Islam, introducing the reader to influential scholars in the history of Islam. These include Sayyid Qutb, a formative member of Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, and Abu A’la Madudi, who organised society around Islamic norms at the time of the creation of the separate Islamic state of Pakistan. Moosa’s earlier experience as a journalist in Britain and as a reporter for the Cape Times equips him to unpack the complexities of Islam in a lucid and readable manner.

He argues that it is on the “margins of the Madrasa tradition” that an intelligible and enlightened Islamic orthodoxy is beginning to emerge.

It is here, he says, that the metaphysical legacy of the past, as the dominant carrier of Islamic learning and traditional piety, is brought into conversation with the contemporary thinking of science and secularism.

The book testifies to theological reform within Islam as the most viable corrective to the religious excesses of ideologues who promote what Moosa aptly identifies as “rank scripturalism and toxic versions of do-it-yourself Islam that jettison tradition in order to make self-serving instruments out of tenets of faith and the teachings of scripture”.

This is the brand of Islam that leads to political, tribal and ethnic wars within Muslim states and elsewhere in the world.

What is a Madrasa? reminds this reviewer of similar theological struggles over the years with Christian theological seminaries and churches, as well as the formative theological intervention into the church and the South African state in the form of the Kairos Document, published in 1985.

Thirty years later, the struggle for theological lucidity continues to divide Christians. This poses the question whether Moosa’s cautious and well-argued optimism that religion can save itself and the world from itself, as personified in its most reactionary advocates of self-deception, is a valid assumption.

Villa-Vicencio is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and visiting professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC.