Mary Jane Deeb: Thank you so much for being here this afternoon. We are starting a whole program, a series on Islam and the debates that are taking place in the Muslim world today, contemporary debates. And it goes beyond Islamism. It goes looking at major issues that affect young people and the way they're approaching their world today. And anyway, to kick off this program we have today Dr. Shireen Hunter, one of the top experts in this field worldwide. Dr. Shireen Hunter is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University since 2005. She's also a Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., with which she has been associated since 1983 as Director of the Islam Program between '98 and 2005, as Senior Associate '93 to '97 and as Deputy Director of the Middle East Program between 1983 and 1992. She is consultant to the RAND Corporation and she was Academic Fellow at Carnegie Corporation between 2000 and 2002. While at CSIS in the 1980s she also taught courses as Professor Lecturer at Georgetown University. She taught at George Mason University, and she had the Louis Goldstein Chair at Washington College in 1989. Prior to joining CSIS Dr. Hunter was Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution and Research Fellow at Harvard University Center for International Affairs. She has also -- she's also been an Onassis Foundation Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European Foreign Policy in 2000 and Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in 2004. Dr. Hunter was educated at Tehran University, where she holds a B.A. and then went on to London School of Economics, where she took her Masters Degree in International Relations, and then has completed a Ph.D. at the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva. She has written extensively. Her books include, among the many, many books she has written, Islam and Human Rights: Advancing a US-Muslim Dialogue, which she edited in 2005; Modernization, Democracy and Islam, which she co-edited with -- in 2005 as well; Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security; Islam: Europe's Second Religion, published in 2002; The Future of Islam-West Relations: Clash of Civilizations or Peaceful Coexistence? published in 1998; Central Asia Since Independence; The Transcaucasus in Transition; Iran After Khomeini; Iran and the World: Continuity in a Revolutionary Decade; The Politics of Islamic Revivalism; the world -- and the Third World: Politics of Aid. These are only some of the titles of the many books that Dr. Hunter has written. And I'm going to stop now because there's much, much more to say, but you'd rather hear from her. Dr. Shireen Hunter. [applause] Dr. Shireen Hunter: Good afternoon. Now it is afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you very much, all of you, for taking time to come here. Dr. Mary Jane Deeb, on old friend and as ancien combatant [spelled phonetically] we call her -- we were in Washington for some time working on various Middle Eastern issues and subjects, and I don't have to say anything about her. You all know her, how wonderful she is, not as a scholar and -- but also as a person. I, first of all, have to give a disclaimer here. I am not actually an Islamic scholar as such. In other words, you know, if people want to get with me about the details of [Arabic], and so on and so forth, I am not going to be able to answer them or let alone enter into any kind of [Arabic] or even [Arabic] with them. I am essentially a student of these issues, and generally the way I study them is in relation to the other forces in society and how they interact with other forces in society with the issues of power and so on and so forth. And also, you know, in the international affairs, things that are my basic disciplines, political science and international relations. Having said that, when you are studying law and been to law and political science, those days anyway, moons -- I mean, God knows how many years, I don't want to even remember -- ago when I was studying that it was inevitable that you did study a certain amount of Islamic law because that was the foundation of the legal system. So I'm not totally illiterate but by no means -- so don't please take me to task on that. And the work that I have done also in this book that hopefully I have been promised that it will be out by June, and so I am still holding them to that. If not June, then hopefully July or whatever, is essentially -- I am the overall editor and, you know, including the conceptual framework, and I have written the chapter on Iran, but there are other people who have -- because there's no way that a single person can cover the entire Islamic world, and whoever claims that, obviously, it has to be very superficial. And I think that it is -- the scholars that are writing about it are all extremely well established, and I think that it would be a very useful book to read, but at the same time, both useful, inspiring but in some ways, as the reporters would say at the same time to some extent also disappointing. The basic focus on this is the question of reformist Islam. Now, first of all, I have to say that even the very word reform is obviously a very contested term in Islam. What do you mean by reform? We have these concepts of reform, [Arabic] or a renewal, [Arabic] or whatever in Islam from early time. But like many other concept in Islam, which this is the beauty of it in some ways but also the problems that it causes, is that there is not 100 percent agreed upon understanding what all these things mean, and so there are different conceptions of reform. For example, if you are a very conservative, literalist Muslim, you want by reform you mean that any kind of exogenous influence that might have come into Islam which they considered contamination by other cultures and so on, whether it was local practices or whatnot, you have to take them away. That is one wave of reform that you see. But that is not the kind of reform that here I am talking about when I talk about reformist Islam, what they mean by reform. The concept that I talk about reform and all the authors also are approaching it in this form is that essentially the debate that emerged in the Islamic world in the 19th century, I would say that by the mid-19th century. And the reason for that essentially was the encounter, and, of course, Islam was not the only religion that had to face this. I think Christianity also faced this, the theology and Reformation and other, other issues that, again, I'm not enough knowledgeable about it to talk here. But basically this was because of the challenge that if you want to call it modernity essentially posed both to Islam as a religious but intellectual and civilization construct, and at the same time, the carriers of modernity, the European powers and the way they entered into the Islamic world, it actually also posed an extensile challenge to the survival of Muslim societies as independent entities. And I think that this is -- this generated in the Muslim world, I think, a process, a process of intellectual questioning, self-criticism, other criticism. In other words, criticizing the other and trying to find out, to begin with, why has this happened to the Muslim countries because when you look at the Islamic world and the western world, I'm not going to talk about the Dark Ages and Golden Age of Islam because everybody knows this and it has become a bit hackneyed to talk about that. But when you really look to see that up until about, I would say, the beginning of -- up until about earlier, almost I could say, that 18th century, you see that basically the Islamic world and the Muslim world are more or less of the same strength, those parts that were in contact with the West. I mean, the Ottoman Empire was still a power to be reckoned with. They almost took over Vienna, there, if the Poles had not come to rescue, which they did, to their credit. The Safavid Empire was still standing, weakened but still standing, and the Europeans were quoting them and on and so forth. And other areas, of course, you know that they were not in the heartland of Islamic world, the situation was different. But what is it that as some of the later reformists, thinkers in Islam ask is that why is it that this Islamic world became, as they call it, colonizable. Because there has been a lot of criticism of colonialism and how it affected -- and it did affect very negatively the Islamic world. But one question that has not been often asked, although frequently asked but perhaps not as often as it should, is that why was that the Muslim world colonized because it's like, you know, it's like if you are, why do you catch cold and somebody else doesn't while you're exposed to the same virus? Because one's immune system is strong, and the other person's immune system is not strong. And so this is essentially what was that -- the questions that they were asking. And I think that this is still the question that Muslim world has not really yet even gotten an answer to that. And we see in this context that you see a different kind of debate occurs within the Islamic world, and obviously, you have those that I don't want to talk about them right now because they're not out of the context of this talk, but which said that the only way Muslim countries can remedy their situation is that to 100 percent emulate the West, you know, and going as far as like Ataturk did, changing even to some degree the language and alphabet and so on and so forth. And other countries that had for a long time what I call this sort of modernizing projects but without, however, accepting the fundamental, philosophical foundations of modernity, you know, the more emancipatory dimensions of modernity, the rule of reason and the freedom of this and that and so on. This, of course, took a long time to establish, even in Europe itself. Now, at that time, however, there were another kind of Muslim reformers, and then you had the so-called rejectionists. Those were saying that the reasons Muslims became like that was because they had abandoned Islam. And if they could only go back to the true teachings of Islam, what Islam was, later on we have, you know, people like Sayid Qutb and others and Hadudi [spelled phonetically] and others say the same thing. They existed in the early 19th century as well. But then you have this more sophisticated, if I may say so, Muslim intellectuals, some of them among clerics and they come up, and some of them, frankly, did this -- adopted this discourse out of, I think that realized that no other discourse is going to succeed. And what they said, they said that we have to, yes, we have to go back to the true Islam. But what was the true Islam? The true Islam, they said, is not the ossified Islam and the closed Ishtihad and so on that was since, well, I mean, at least 10th century, but if you want to be very generous you could say that definitely since 14th century has been fed to Muslim people, which we have no idea that what is its direct relationship with actually with the Qur'an. Is this we have to take [Arabic] of the views of [Arabic] as really being the also equal to the word of God and so on. And this is where you came into this new thinking, the reformist thinking and that was to say that we have to look in a different way to Islam and to realize that Islam is a very rational religion and that Islam is a very scientific religion and that so on and so forth and so on. And this is where you have people like, for example, Jamali bin Afghani [spelled phonetically] or you have, of course, Sheikh Muhammad Abdul who is probably -- although he was the disciple of Afghani but they parted company later on, but definitely so they come and say that if Islam wants to be revived, but also, most importantly, if Islam wants to survive, that is what their view was, that we have to reform it in a sense of not, as even some of the current reformists think, to mend it because there's nothing been corrupted that needs to be mended but just to rediscover what the true meaning of it was. And they kept saying is that why is it that the religion that produced those scholars, those philosophers, those scientists and so on, I mean, you know, Alhara Asme [spelled phonetically], for example, and nobody knows that the word logarithm [spelled phonetically] comes from the corruption of the name of Alhara Asme, for example, or [unintelligible] or whatever. I mean, you know, there's so much of it. And so what happened that they didn't -- they just -- and they came to conclusion that part of it was because they closed the gate or the Abwab [spelled phonetically] of Ishtihad, they closed those because they did not allow anymore. They said whatever [Arabic] that's it, and you can only a little bit here and there to find out which one of the interpretation is correct, but you can't move either. So what we are seeing that is happening now, which has started since the 19th century, this new spirit of reform means a much more rational, rationalist approach to study of Islam and to the interpretation of Islam. So here we have, of course, this is nothing new. We have had this from the early beginning of Islam. We had the differences between, you may call it Ahlur Hadiz [spelled phonetically] or [Arabic] but essentially the difference between [Arabic] or [Arabic], which is something that has been said that the Prophet said and so on and so forth through various things. And the other thing is that to really look at the text to Qur'an and to read it as God told you read, [Arabic], and to find out with reason what is it that it is telling to you right now. And so this is one thing and I think that we could see -- Female Speaker: [inaudible] Dr. Shireen Hunter: Oh, yes, sorry. I apologize. That this is one thing that we see was started quite early on in Islam, was forgotten for a while, and in fact, I don't want to get into details because I'm running out of time, but the fact is that it's starting already and it -- nevertheless this rationalist thinking within Islam remained. It's not like that it suddenly had been completely closed, it existed, it remained. But it really began to acquire a new life with [Arabic] because Afghani later became more of a political agitator than really a scholar. But anyway, and their followers and so on and so forth and it's all right. So what we are seeing that the reformist Islam as opposed to the Islamist particular reading of Islam which is a very narrow, very literalist and sometimes also even selective. I don't want to get into details of it, but sometimes when I see people who want to give credence to their opinion and they quote a verse of the Qur'an, then I go and check it against the verse itself, I see that they have omitted part of it because if they had given the full verse it would not have support their position. You know, so this type of things they are doing. Against that we have this more rationalist which is one of the characteristics of the reformist discourse today is a more rationalist thing. And the, the view that the Qur'an is an eternal book but that you have the reading of the Qur'an is not an eternal thing because it has to be done within the, within the -- by people, true people. And so this is one element that the reformists maintain that if you want to see what we should do, what the Qur'an really is saying, we have to apply reason, rationalism but also particularly the rationalism of the time. This is one element of that. And I think this is started then, and I'm not going to say why this thing did not continue. Part of it was that basically, certainly since the 1920s secularizing, authoritarian secularism and top-down secularization and developmentalist projects to halt. And unfortunately, one of the characteristics of this developmentalist projects was that they concentrated on physical sort of modernization, but they did not take the other elements of modernity together which was freedom of speech, freedom to think, freedom to reason and they narrowed the field of discourse. And consequently, I think that you couldn't have any other discourses, whether it was traditional Islam or reformist Islam and I think that this in many ways, I don't want to get into too much, maybe somebody ask the question, I be happy to answer, this really in a way nipped in the bud a lot of the Islamic reformist discourse that was going on at the time, and they were kind of silenced, and I think that also led to other reactions that strengthened the conservatives up. The other question that has been very important, again, historically, obviously, is that what aspects of that we have even in the Qur'an but obviously much more so in the Islamic law. How much of those are eternal and are really God saying, and in fact, if some people, you know, believe that it existed even before the advent of the age of prophesy and certainly the prophesy of Prophet Muhammad, the peace be upon him, and, and the other thing is obviously is how much of it, some of it is indeed eternal, everlasting, no compromise on others and how much of it was bound by a particular time and bound by a particular space? And including regarding the number of the [Arabic] in the Qur'an is that which one of them really address to questions that are eternal, principles that are eternal and how much of it was revealed to the Prophet because of certain circumstances. And this is called, depending, [Arabic], whatever you want to say. This basically making the Qur'an as well as an eternal and divine text, nevertheless also historical text has been one of the issues that has, again, was indeed since the time of early Islam and, of course, the much maligned, [Arabic] and all that. But the issue is nevertheless to these days is very, very important. And this comes whether, for example, somebody like some literalist or say that even if you are in Indonesia, and for centuries you have been dressing according to your local customs, suddenly after 600 years since you have been Muslims they tell you to be true Muslim you have to dress in the particular way, in white or whatever, and your beard has to be a certain length, otherwise -- now this neither reason really justifies this because if Islam is a universal religion, you know, it was not -- Prophet of Islam did not come only to the Arabs of Hijad [spelled phonetically] because maybe in Najj [spelled phonetically] they were dressing differently or in other places, even in [Arabic] Arab they were dressing differently, let alone -- plus, we don't know exactly how the Prophet was dressing. There is no record of saying that what was the size of Prophet's beard. You see what I'm tying to say? So these are the issues, but unfortunately this may sound very kind of a very trivial subject but this is very, very important because if some aspect of Islam were bound by time and space and also in number of Islamic law, including stuff that is in the Qur'an where essentially the ratification of the [Arabic] of the time. So do they have the same kind of divinity which means that you cannot touch them even though the circumstances have changed, although in Islam text at least in Shia text, you have the rule that if the subject happened has changed, the [Arabic] has changed, [Arabic] changed as well. So for instance, you know, if a woman didn't work so consequently she didn't have any, you know, like her -- what they call it, inheritance had to be have. But what if today in Muslim world you have woman who not only work but they are the sole supporter of their family. Can you deal with this woman the same way that you dealt with, you know, other kind of things? And the other thing is that this is, of course, something that is very disturbing to many very, very orthodox or strict Muslims is that, you know, this element of historical kind of history boundedness or context boundedness of some of the element of Islam. But, for example, though that if you wanted, let's say, to run an economy, a lot of people talk about Islamic economy and so on but if you wanted to run an economy really based on only Islamic rules about whether it is ownership and other things, a whole number of things cannot be done, and this is some of it is now even in Iran, I have to add in here, the reason because they have a government who is claiming that wants to run everything according to Islam. These are the debates are coming up and are causing obviously, a lot of debate and so forth. So the reformist that we have now is that we cannot really understand Islam unless we have to keep in mind the context and the time within which some of its revelation has come about. And this particularly reflect not the things that relate to the matters of worship, obviously. If you don't believe in the Prophecy of Muhammad you cannot say I'm a Muslim. If you don't believe that Qur'an is a divine book, then you cannot be a Muslim. Or if you don't believe in the Day of Judgment and so on and so forth, you cannot be a Muslim. So there are some things that, you know, are. And you cannot also deny that there are certain duties demanded from you, you have to fast, you have to -- but that doesn't mean that you will not be a Muslim if you didn't fast, but it means that you will be a bad Muslim and then, of course, you will get your -- now, even here people are saying that there are some conflicts also in some of the injunctions of Islam which, again, this debates existed in the early days of Islam as well. One of the things, and then I'm going to try to limit it to maybe another few minutes and wrap it up. But from the very beginning we have in Islam a very important, in my opinion, concept which means that there is no compulsion in faith. [Arabic] I mean, in general Islam does not -- it's not -- although, you know, the view is that Islam is a sword, and they keep it there and say you either become a Muslim or you die. But when you go beyond the earliest part of Islam, Islam is spread mostly by the, you know, traders and by, I don't know, preachers and so on and so forth. It was not the element of -- compulsion in Islam is not true. For example, the question of forced marriage. I know this because we studied at faculty of law in one of our classes the question of Nikah, forced marriage, that Nikah is illegal. If a woman is forced to accept a man, really forced, you know, and has no say in that and they say it because the father likes it and so on, that man still will be [Arabic] to her because woman has to do it with her own free will. So there isn't compulsion as such. And yet we have even today the problem of apostasy and the fact that, you know, somebody can be -- again, you know, this depends what of -- what aspect of Islam, particularly in this day and age which whether we like it or not certain concepts of human rights and human dignity and so on has become part of -- I'm not saying that it always is respected but has become part of what some of the Iranian reformists thinkers say has become part of the humanities oath. And since Islam says we have to take into account oath, so these are also to be incorporated within Islam and so on. So the problem becomes here is that you have this very open thing. It says that there's no compulsion in faith. You cannot -- we have shown you this is the road and you are free to choose. If you want to choose damnation, that's your business. And I can tell you -- I can, you know, enjoin you to good and say that, please, choose this and don't do the other thing, but I cannot force you, and then you say you are kaffir. This is what's -- this is to God. So these are some of the issues that are actually are debated today among the Muslim thing, and there are other aspects as well. And it says that, for example, what is more important in Islam? Is it merely the ritualistic dimensions of it, some of which we don't know how actually was earlier or is it that what was the purpose of Islam? What was the goal of the Prophet? He wanted to create a society of justice. He wanted to create a society, relatively egalitarian society. There are, as far as I know, and this shows obviously my limited knowledge, there are few religions that in the Holy Book so openly says in the [Arabic] law the most noblest of you in the eyes of God are the most pious. In other words, no racism, no nothing. So they say, therefore, in our endeavors in our life what is it that we have to be concerned with? Whether woman shows her face which is actually open to be shown and -- or has to wear [Arabic] or rather to make sure that woman and man are treated fairly and that they have, you know -- so I think that today we are having this new discourse, new interpretation of Islam, which if I waiver to say that from Iran to Southeast Asia and so on and Turkey what are some of the common things that bring these people together, the reformists think, despite the differences that they may have? One is that we have to have a rationalist approach to Islam. As in Iran they call it Islam [foreign language]. The other thing is that we have to keep context in mind. And because otherwise Islam will become irrelevant to the current day. If you want to keep Islam alive you have to keep the context. And you have people like, for example, Mohammed [unintelligible] also the Tunisian who goes quite far in this thing. So it is rationalist, it is contextualist. The other most important thing which I think that this has been everywhere is that we have to look at what are actually the true goals of the Islamic path, Sharia, the Islamic path. And this is, again is nothing new goes to 14th century and so on. What are the [Arabic] Sharia? What is it that we want to achieve with this? So Sharia in itself as such is not sacred. If today you cannot establish justice by behaving the way the Halifa did in, I don't know, 10th century or 11th century, that it will not be following the Prophet's Sharia or the Qur'an's path if you apply the same rule. Because the [unintelligible], the goal of the Sharia was that it should be just, it should be merciful, it should protect the human [Arabic] and [Arabic] and [Arabic] and whatever and all that. So this is another thing, be goal-oriented, or as the Iranian reformist Kanivar [spelled phonetically] said, "Islam [foreign language]." The goal-oriented Islam rather than ritualistic Islam. And last but not least is the fact that they say we have also to create an Islam which is rights- centered, [Arabic], right-centered. Not merely duty-centered. We shouldn't just talk about what are man's duty towards God, but we also have to say what rights God has given to man. Now, there are various, you know, scholars approach this in a different way but this is what they are saying. Now, what do I see as outlook for this Islam -- reformist Islamic discourse? Unfortunately, I am not very optimistic. A few years back I would have been more optimistic. Reformists discourse suffers from I say three basic challenges or impediments. One, any kind of complex discourse is difficult to spread. Alexis de Tocqueville said that a false but simple idea will always have more weight than a correct but complicated idea. [French]. So the message of in general sentences which is the reformist Islam is very difficult. Black and white you can be extreme secularist, throw the Qur'an into the ash, whatever, dust of history or whatever or just nothing can be changed. This is one thing. The other thing is that reformists are suspected both by secularists and by conservatives. The secularists think that they are, you know, a wolf in sheep's cloths, and the reformists think that they are [Arabic] and, you know, they want to destroy ,and some of them are actually declared [Arabic] and have to go to exile and to live abroad and what have you. But the other thing is that in general the closed political systems of most Muslim countries doesn't allow enough room for discourse. And in many of the Muslim countries now Islamic institutions, Islam is either what you call official Islam, [unintelligible] and the ministry of religious affairs and this and that who will say whatever the government wants and they will give you any fatwa like in the old days, you know. Hadid wanted something and a jurist would find, you know, a [unintelligible], a religious hat for it and make it acceptable. Or if -- they are in absolute opposition be it whether Islamist or in active opposition or be it quiescent and a kind of a passive opposition. So the closeness of the discourse, the field of discourse, also I think that is working against the reformist. You just have to see to the fate of reformists in Iran to see how when you have, you know, not this rule of open debate is accepted how any kind of idea, including Islamic reform is discourse becomes it. The last thing is that I have to say is how we in the West can help the reformists. To begin with, we have to not to think that if the reformists' version of Islam gains influence in the whole Muslim world that a lot of the problems between the Islamic world and the West will disappear, because many of these have nothing to do with Islam. And so even if you have absolute, you know, secularists as we did, you know, 50 years ago, whatever, you're still going to have problem. This is one. The other thing is that the worst thing that could happen to reformist Muslims is to be seen that they are -- some have, already some people are saying this, attacking it. I read an article just about when I was finishing this that was attacking a sort of a hermeneutical, hermeneutics of the Qur'an and the other Islamic sources as being a colonialist design to undermine Islam. So I think that they are facing a lot of challenges but on the other hand, I think that this perhaps offers, I think, really the best way for Muslim countries to finally find a way of digesting, if I may put it that way, digesting and, and nativizing modernity without which they cannot really enter the modern age. And so I'm sorry I went on a bit long, but I hope that I could get at least some of the basic outlines of the debate. Thank you. [applause] [end of transcript]