How Fringe is Islamic Fringe?

If Muslim extremists constituted the fringe of that community, how come courts of countries that run on  Shari’ah laws reflect extremism, too? It is intellectually dishonest to categorise something as mainstream as a court under the fringe. The other deceit is passing off torture and murder as a ‘cultural difference’.

If one thought Islamism was something at the fringes of Muslim society, manifest in stray individuals and groups, the flogging of Raif Badawi, a blogger, ordered by the Saudi Arabia government should point at the extent of its spread. Badawi was arrested in June 2012 for organising a conference marking what a small group of liberals in Saudi Arabia called its “day of liberalism”.

Badawi was charged with “adopting liberal thought” (yes, you read it right) and, by extension, “insulting Islam”. He was found guilty and sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison, though mercifully spared of a death sentence for an apostasy charge.

First fifty of the thousand lashings were carried out last Friday in a public square in front of hundreds of onlookers who had gathered there after the noon prayers. The remaining lashings will follow suit in the same quantum every Friday for the next 20 weeks.

Raif’s lawyer Walid Abulkhair has been imprisoned, too, for trying to mobilise international human rights support in favour of Badawi. The convict faced all this and more for starting a website called Free Saudi Liberals, which sought to encourage free and frank discussion on religion. The evidence presented against him was such as pressing the “Like” button on a Facebook page dedicated to Arab Christians.

Raif’s wife Ensaf Haider has rightly compared his trial to Inquisition in medieval Europe. She has been served court orders, which intend to force a separation between the husband and wife on the ground that Raif is an apostate. Saudi embassy in Lebanon, where she was living until a few months ago, threatened to kidnap her children and deport them to Saudi Arabia.

Badawi’s is not an isolated case. The Muslim world is rife with stories of free thinkers, non-believers, heretics, women and ethnic minorities being oppressed — many a times under state sanctioned laws. But for the hypocrisy which surrounds voluble intellectual circles demanding “respect for the differing social mores of Islamic nations”, it would be clear that a large part of the Muslim world has got Islamism institutionalised in the form of Shari’ah-compliant statute books.

Interestingly, even when Shari’ah based laws have resulted in a second class status to minorities and women in these nations, even when it has led to deaths of apostates and blasphemers; even when it has meant condoning the kidnappings and conversions of young non-Muslim girls to get them married forcibly, there is a tendency to treat the whole thing as a cultural issue, dissociating it carefully from another expression of Islamic extremism — jihadi terror, which we are told is “on the margins of Muslim world”.

A lot of possibilities, many who support the worldview of Jihadis may not have the stomach for, are discounted.

That there exists a continuum in the whole thought is best expounded by Pakistani human rights activist Fouzia Saeed when she says “it is a fallacy to assume that only suicide bombings and bomb blasts are extremism whereas these are in fact the culmination of a particular ideological drift. I consider the whole gamut of this ideology which leads to blasts as associated with terrorism. Our people are happy to walk along with the first steps of this extremism and condemn only when the same leads to a bomb blast”. Truer words were never said.

There are other indicators that point to the spread of fundamentalism in the Muslim world. The democracy movements in Arab spring have rallied around ultraorthodox organisations such as Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan is becoming progressively Islamic.

Pakistan is seeking its restitution in a more and more radicalised polity. What is particularly disturbing is the fact that while scenes of celebrations after 26/11 and mourning of Osama bin Laden’s death from Peshawar to Palestine can be attributed to unsophisticated mobs, Raif Badawi is not a concern even for the supposed intellectual moderates like Reza Aslan or the otherwise vocal apologists of Islam such as Ben Affleck and Nathan Lean.

To ignore Badawi’s flogging as a law-of-the-land compliance issue is missing the woods for the trees. Shari’ah and jihad are two sides of the same coin. While the most visible and practiced interpretation of jihad aims at coercing the non-believers into surrendering before Islam, the Shari’ah seeks enforcement of the writ of Islam over those brought into faith by accident of birth. Both flow from the same source and have a common agenda — Islamism.

To turn away from critics of Islam by labelling them as Islamophobes or to put forth apologies such as conflating Islam-specific problems as problems of religion in general, is not just intellectual dishonesty but also abetment of Islamism.

The contention is not that everyone in Muslim society is a fanatic, but that the extent of radicalisation is greater than what ‘jihadis are a fringe’ apology by certain intellectuals will like us to believe. It is just that a different standard is used every time an issue concerns the Muslim society.

An intellectual professing absolute freedom of expression to thumb his nose at religious beliefs turns cold when cartoonists or satirists lampoon Islam. Activists, otherwise champions of feminism, wouldn’t see it as anything to do with the oppression of women in Islam. In the latter case, they would rather respect the ‘cultural differences’.

People in every society and on every side of opinion are passionate about positions; many would also take offence on provocations, but nowhere outside the Islamic community would one see lashing, stoning or death sentences by court orders for ‘offences’ such as blasphemy, apostasy, sorcery or the more fanciful “adopting liberal thought”.

That majority of people in the Muslim world condone Badawi’s sentencing under the Shari’ah is evident from the total lack of protests over this incident or promulgation of the Islamic law at large anywhere and anytime. Remember, despite the despotic nature of most Islamic dispensations, protests are something not entirely unheard of. In fact, the last few years have seen quite a number of them.