Excerpts from the Transcript

In this excerpt from "Violence and Crisis in Islam," Vincent Cornell discusses some of the religious and human factors behind escalating violence in the name of Islam.

Mr. Cornell: I think for Muslims this is really the crisis for us. The Islam that I accepted through the Qur'an and through now over 30 years of study of classical Islamic works throughout Islamic history is, to a large extent, not the Islam that I see on TV and being expressed by many people in the Muslim world.

Tippett: Vincent Cornell is watching the present escalation of violence in the name of Islam with a sense of personal grief. He paints a bleak picture of chaos and drift within Islam which may bring renewal or the continued decay of the religion he loves. He converted to Islam in the late 1960s after studying comparative religion at Cornell. He became a leading American scholar of Islamic studies and comparative religions. He taught at Northwestern and Duke and has also spent extensive time teaching in many Muslim countries including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia. He currently directs the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas, which was endowed by the Saudi Arabian government and dedicated to the international vision promoted by the late Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.

Vincent Cornell says that a crisis within Islam has been building for 300 years, since the 18th century origins of the Wahhabi movement, a movement closely associated with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though Wahhabism remains a small sect in terms of formal adherence, it has tapped into powerful structures of globalization to gain inordinate influence in the way Islam is transmitted across the world. I asked Vincent Cornell what within Islam lends itself to manipulation by extremists, what makes it a ready vehicle for terrorism at this moment in time?

Mr. Cornell: I think the first thing I should do is to say at the outset that I'm going to try very hard not to be an apologist. I think that, in today's situation, is a mistake. It's not time to cover up and to try to whitewash the problem, but to face the problem directly and to deal with it. And one has to make a distinction between Islam as an ideal, as a religion, a way of life, a way of thought that is supposed to lead human beings to the acme, to the highest point of human nature and the highest level of understanding and Islam as it has been practiced historically through the centuries and Islam as it is practiced and understood today. What we see today — and here I have to speak both as a believer in Islam and as a theologian of Islam — we see what I call a radical superficiality of theology. And what I mean by a radical superficiality is that there's a tendency today for many Muslims to look at statements that can be found in the Qur'an without regard to their context, without regard to the historical tradition that may have interpreted these statements in different ways, and to take them as unchanging truths having to do with a sort of enmity between Muslims and believers in religions apart from Islam. It also applies to people, particularly people who belong to the secular, what we might call the non-religious world.

Tippett: I mean, we can say this about people who practice any religion, right? That there's a lot of superficial practice of religion. At other times in history, it's been Christians who were burning people at the stake and cutting people's heads off. But right now what is it in Islam that is making a superficial practice or understanding of the religion a violent phenomenon? You know, where do you start with that?

Mr. Cornell: Well, where do you start with the violence? In a sense the question is phrased in the wrong way, "What is it about Islam that makes it violent?" You know, Islam is whatever Muslims make of it. If they want to make it violent, it's violent. If they want to make it peaceful, it's peaceful. You know, as I said, it goes back to the 18th century. You know, people since 9/11 have talked about the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia. For example, in the case of Wahhabism, Wahhabism is an extremely literalistic interpretation of religion. It takes the Qur'an at face value. Now, in the past, there were any number of Muslim scholars. Perhaps one of the best known is the 11th century theologian al-Ghazali who, in a number of works, pointed out that it's absolutely impossible for anyone to take the word of God literally at all times. There are passages in the Qur'an that can only be read or understood metaphorically.

Tippett: Right. And that's true of other scriptures as well.

Mr. Cornell: It happens in any scripture.

Tippett: Yes.

Mr. Cornell: There's even a tradition among medieval scholars in Islam that every verse of the Qur'an has 70,000 meanings. And they said it had 70,000 meanings because every word in the Qur'an, being a Semitic word with a nested set of meanings, the way Semitical languages are structured, every word has multiple meanings. Now today, through the influence of Wahhabi doctrine, which has been disseminated throughout the world partly as a result of petrol dollars, partly as a result of the creation of organizations such as the Islamic World League, partly through alliances between Saudi Arabia — not so much the government of Saudi Arabia, but the Wahhabi intelligencia of Saudi Arabia, along with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood — this literalistic sort of corporate form vs. content view of religion has become more widespread than it ever was in the history of Islam.

Here in Arkansas it's a little bit easier to talk about these kinds of ideas and these kinds of things because we have a group, about 20 miles north of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is a group that's called "The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord." This is a Christian extremist group that is fundamentalist in orientation, is potentially violent and has been considered for a long time by the United States government as a terrorist organization, or potentially a terrorist organization. What's happening in Islam, if it could be understood, perhaps, most easily this way, is to imagine groups like "The Covenant and the Sword" suddenly taking over the religious discourse of American Christianity to the point where they have become, if not the majoritarian discourse, they've become very nearly the majoritarian discourse. It's also important, I think, to point out that, you know, today Muslims are infamous for cutting off people's heads. Well, in the past this didn't happen.

Tippett: Does that have something to do with Islam? Or is that a cultural practice that…

Mr. Cornell: It's a cultural practice that's become Islamized. This is not a medieval response. This is new. Cutting off of the heads of people is a practice that most likely has migrated to Iraq through the influence of the revolt that had been going on for the past 20 years, essentially since the late 1980s, but especially since the beginning of the 1990s, in Algeria. Algeria was the one Muslim country where hostages were taken, people's throats were cut, heads were cut off.

Tippett: But how did that migrate, do you know? What is the connection between Algeria and Iraq?

Mr. Cornell: The Muslim world, for better or worse, is a cosmopolitan world, and terrorism is just as cosmopolitan as intellectual activity or art. And what one had over a long period of time was an interaction among Muslims of various types of extreme views in places like Afghanistan fighting the Soviets.

Tippett: Muslims from different places together there.

Mr. Cornell: Muslims from different places coming from everywhere in the Muslim world. They would then go back from Afghanistan to Algeria. They would meet at other times in other places in Europe, in the United States, everywhere in the world they might travel. Ideas travel, tactics travel, extremism travels, doctrine travels. This is very, very much a global phenomenon. And so what we're seeing today, this danger that Islam presents to many people, is a particular danger that I think is real. It's a threat. It should not be minimized, but it's particularly a phenomenon of the times we live in today, the early 21st century.

Tippett: And accelerated, exacerbated by all of the aspects of globalization, the tools of that. Is that what you're saying?

Mr. Cornell: Absolutely, including the media. And including, I would say, global capitalism to the extent that much of Islam today is beginning to appear in a sort of corporate guise. And when I say corporate, I mean not only the fact that it's highly institutionalized and politicized, but that it also is becoming, in a sense, a brand. The Islamic violence and extremism that we saw maybe in 1991 or 1992 in Algeria has now appeared in Iraq. Before that it's appeared in Chechnya. And there is a tendency because of the heavy politicization of the Islamic world partly as a result of the conflict in Palestine, but partly as a result of other factors, we're seeing more and more a homogenization of Islamic forms, whether they're extreme or not.

Tippett: American Muslim and scholar of Islamic studies Vincent Cornell. He's describing how the non-hierarchical nature of Islam, which many Muslims experience as a spiritual virtue, can also be manipulated when extremists claim authority. The inordinately influential Wahhabi doctrine, for example, isolates individual hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, disconnects them from the spiritual center of the Qur'an, and declares them as definitive. Islamic law, or sharia, Cornell says, has also been reduced to a state of what he calls radical superficiality. Historically, the idea of Islamic law was not legalistic in a modern sense. It set out to trace how the spirit and teachings of Islam might shape the whole of life, individual and communal. Many schools of thought and opinion grew up over time, making Islamic jurisprudence a force for intellectual vigor and cultural diversity. But in the Muslim world today, Vincent Cornell says, Islamic law has become a blunt instrument. It is too often imposed without reference to the disciplines of thought and debate that once guided its interpretation. In Arabic this discipline is referred to as fiqh. It means "understanding."

Mr. Cornell: Fiqh has been, in a sense, eliminated as an authoritative voice within Islam. In almost 20 years that I've been teaching on the university level, I've had a lot of Muslim students in my classes who would say, `I believe in the sharia, but I don't believe in fiqh.' Now, from the point of view of understanding Islamic law, that's an oxymoron. You just can't say that. Because the sharia, literally it means "the way, the road to God." This is sort of the general path that a person follows in life as a virtuous Muslim. But you can only know how to follow the road by practicing fiqh, by using the intellectual tools that have been developed in Islamic history to reason through the sharia and decide, for example, what things are recommended, what things are obligatory, what things are truly forbidden, what kinds of things and what kinds of practices are only disapproved. And historically, four major schools of Islamic law fit the jurisprudence developed in the Sunni Muslim world. And it used to be that you could follow any one of them, it was all the same. You were following an authentic road to God.

Tippett: Even if those roads were making different conclusions along the way?

Mr. Cornell: Absolutely.

Tippett: OK. I wonder if you, as an American Muslim, can reconcile the concept of Islamic law with notions of justice and liberty as Americans understand them. Or is that an important exercise for you?

Mr. Cornell: That happens to be something I've been working on quite seriously and quite intently over the past year. If you look carefully at the way the Qur'an prioritizes issues such as rights and duties, one finds that the Qur'an, indeed, can be found to agree, in broad, general philosophical terms, with the very premises of justice and mercy that we have in our own society.

Tippett: Why, then, is there such a huge gap between Americans' notions of justice — and we'll admit that that's a large concept and interpreted probably in many different ways — but the impression is that that is going to be at odds with the imposition of Islamic law in a Muslim country. As you watch what's happening in Iraq now as that new democracy is formed, what are you going to be watching for that will correspond to this sort of hopeful, generous vision that you just outlined for me?

Mr. Cornell: Well, you know, Islam, despite the claims of many, Islam does not have a single form of government. It had a developing form of what you might call prophetic government during the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself, but that lasted for only 10 years, and the debate started as soon as the Prophet Muhammad died. So, to me, what I try to look for in a developing Muslim society is whether or not the society upholds the fundamental rights that one finds in the Qur'an itself. And the fundamental rights that are really paramount above everything — and these are reflected in Qur'anic verses that stress them as such — are the right to life, freedom of choice. Freedom of choice in Islam is necessary because, according to the Qur'an, we're on this earth as a sort of test, and how we lead our lives is a test in which we can succeed or can fail, and eventually God will judge us in the afterlife. You can't have a true judgment if you don't have freedom of choice. There's also the right to respect and dignity of the human being which comes about in the Qur'an, again, specifically stated in the Qur'an as a result of the fact that all human beings are created by God and we come from one common ancestor. And finally, of course, the duty that comes from these rights is the duty of mercy, which is paramount above all other duties in the Qur'an itself.

Well, what has to be done, first of all, is that the whole issue of the application of Islamic law needs to be reopened in most areas of the Muslim world. You cannot go back to the old schools as they were in the past because they no longer exist. So new schools of Islamic law have to be formed that take account of what happened in the past, but at the same time move forward with new forms. This cannot happen in conditions of political and social instability.

Tippett: I think you also make the observation that reformist Muslims in many cultures tend to focus on issues of social justice. And I wondered then if that doesn't still keep them from reforming this politicized Islam.

Mr. Cornell: In a sense, I think you're talking about the creation of new traditions and more just traditions. I think it's important for Muslims to realize that tradition is not something that's fixed, that tradition is always on the move, always in transformation, always changing. There's a very interesting point here. Let me give you another little linguistic illustration of this. There are two related words having to do with creativity and change in Arabic. The word for creativity in Arabic is ibadah. Ibadah, interestingly enough, in the Arabic language today is almost exclusively — this is creativity — is almost exclusively seen as a product of secularization and is something that exists in secular society. When applied to Islam, the word ibadah is not used. Instead, the word that is used is bid'a, a word that comes from the same root which means "innovation," but in contemporary Islamic society tends to be seen as negative in and of itself. In other words, innovation, the very concept of innovation, goes for many people against the spirit of Islam. Now, that's very telling. Is it really true that creativity today in the Arab world, in the Arabic speaking world, is only something that can be considered in a secular context? If that were the case, where did the great advances of Islamic art and architecture and thought, philosophy, science, astronomy, where did this come from in the past if there was not creativity?

Tippett: I mean, those are such good questions, and I hear the passion that you have for them as you articulate them. And again I'm wanting to ask, and I'm thinking that my listeners are going to want to ask, are you able to say that in places where it can make a difference? Or are there many people like you saying this in different contexts?

Mr. Cornell: Well, not a majority, but many. Let's put it that way. Muslims are beginning to get together to discuss these ideas more openly, not only in the United States, but around the world. It seems to me that many Muslims are waiting for somebody to say this kind of thing because in the depths of their hearts they know as rational human beings that much of what passes for Islamic tradition today is irrational. Now, there are conferences being held. For example, there's going to be a major conference held in Indonesia around Christmas time in this year 2004 that will bring together Muslim scholars from Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, the United States and elsewhere to specifically talk about these kinds of problems, to open these kinds of issues.

But, again, I think it's significant that, you know, the invitation comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, from the Far East of the Islamic world, and not from what we would consider, say, the Arab and Middle Eastern center. But again, that also is a new reality. The demographic center of balance of the Muslim world today is Lahore, Pakistan. In other words, half of all Muslims live east of Lahore, Pakistan, half of all Muslims live west. Islam is very much an Asian world religion. And so perhaps the fact that these invitations are coming from Indonesia and Malaysia is simply a new reflection of the fact that they're beginning to see themselves as the center rather than the periphery.