You think your house is rotting away. Do you then:

(a) tear it all down and rebuild, thereby forcing the inhabitants to sleep under a tree in the rainstorm, or
(b) work on only the parts that ail the house, so that everyone can continue to live there while the restoration work is going on?

These are two choices facing the liberal Muslims' project to wrest control of Islam from the traditionalists. If they are not careful, they might end up with the same mess that America inadvertently kicked up in Iraq. How many millions of innocents would be dislocated by an ambitious project this time? How many children killed? I'm not sure if the liberals are really bothered with this detail. "Collateral damage" is a handy term, for either side; freedom at any cost, the nymph of revolution can be as alluring as the seventy virgins.

The battle

Muslim liberals have been mounting a challenge on what they see as the autocratic rule of the ulama since as early as the final decades of the 19th Century. It seems to have gained momentum and support in recent times, mainly (as I see it) as a backlash to the violence and hatred spewed by people whom they see as having hijacked their beautiful religion.

The irony, perhaps, is that the traditionalists' iron grip was probably made tighter itself in reaction to the earlier liberal threat it perceived against it, both by forces from within and without. One affects the other equally, so it would not be wise to say that the liberal backlash is understandable whereas the traditionalists' is not.

That said, this liberal movement is both good and bad, in the way that I am either liberal nor conservative, but rather is a bit of both. Does that mean I don't have enough balls to commit fully to the liberal cause? (It is not sexy to be grey in a world now used to black and white extremes, on both sides. Such is life.)

I would prefer to think of it as my not being entirely convinced that the liberal cause will give rise to the benevolent Islam that the liberals seem to believe it
will.

Many of the Muslim liberals I have come across seem to make much of the European Age of Enlightenment, begun in the 18th Century, which has led to a period of unprecedented knowledge and wealth. They seem to think this is a good thing, that democracy is the ultimate form of human freedom, that freedom itself must be necessarily good.

What they seem to forget is that, despite the proliferation of philosophers and advancements in knowledge, 20th Century Europe was the cradle of two of the most destructive wars the world has ever known, and the birthplace of two of the most oppressive regimes the world has ever endured.

And 200 years after the advent of the age of reason, the Western world is giving birth to what seems to be the most awesome totalitarian entity in the known history of the human race.

So much for wisdom.

Who's to blame?

100 million people dead in 100 years. And what did the battery of grand philosophers amount to? Nothing. They'd probably do more damage if they threw their heavy tomes at their homeland forces marching out to slit the throats of people in distant lands.

"Oh", the Muslim liberals wail, "but how fair can it be to put the blame on the philosophers' shoulders, if the people would not read their books and the leaders would not hear their pleas?" Heck, I don't know; how fair is it for you to blame the traditional ulama for everything that ails us Muslims? (And it's not like all of the philosophers were not complicit in the murderous acts.)

There is a certain naivete in the air, and it is disturbing. That the purest intentions can be hijacked by the most diabolical forces can be seen from a casual study of history.

And what, we can only wonder, would the liberal reaction be if, once given the freedom to choose, the people should turn around and choose the traditionalists? Didn't they make this choice in Algeria, and then again in Iraq last year?

And the Islamic countries that did choose Westernisation did not so much as choose it, as had it imposed on them by just another form of an authoritarian government, except this one wore suits rather than the jubah.

Let's put it in simpler terms: there are liberals who cannot countenance the idea of women who wear the hijab. Even when those women choose to wear them. It is evident, to me, that the extremists among the liberals, would have nothing less than total subservience to what they say. Now how is this different than what it is now?

This liberal Muslim project, as I have mentioned to someone and will mention it again, is a most arrogant one, not to mention ambitious. What I see is not so much as the want to create many flavours of Islam, but rather the total handover of Islam by the traditionalists to the liberals.

If the liberals are thinking rationally, as they claim they do, this must set the alarm bell ringing; absolute power is never a good thing.

The other big concern I have for the time being is the seeming lack of morality that underpins the liberal project. Whose code of morality are they going to uphold, given their argument that everything - including the Quran - is questionable, subjective and non-absolute?

What bugs me also is this idea, sussed from history, that in order to have intellectual advances worthy of merit, an environment of decadence is required.

By all means, indulge in your wine, women and young boys in your personal capacity if you wish; our intellectual predecessors of the 10th Century were
known to partake in the same. But when you deign to impose a moral conduct on the people, then it behooves you to have good morals yourself, too.

Or are the verses banning such things also subject to interpretation?

RUHAYAT X is a writer, publisher, thinker and sometime philosopher himself. Visit his blog Neohikayat Press.