The Guardian’s Sarfraz
Manzoor was on Aled Jones’s show on Radio Two this morning (titter ye not – it’s great Sunday music) discussing how members of his Muslim family shunned him after he married a
Christian. He had this to say:
“It hasn’t made me doubt my faith. What it’s made me do is feel angry that some people are so closed-minded that they don’t even understand their faith. Before our wedding I spoke to a Muslim expert, an imam. He told me that a Muslim can marry a Jewish person, a Christian person – we’re all children of Abraham. It’s all fine. The problem is that parents and families are not experts in religion. They’re just experts in their own opinion. And so, actually, it made me conclude that people don’t understand faith. It’s not the religion I became angry with, but tradition and closed-mindedness.”
He makes a good point. Islam, in my view, is susceptible to this because of its lack of hierarchy. Christian faiths have their doctrinal conferences and – most importantly – their Catechism which
outlines the church’s teaching in great detail. Errant priests are booted
out frequently if they start to spout their own doctrine – for Catholics and others it applies worldwide. But there is no similar rule book, or disciplinary process, for Islam. A couple
of years ago, we had a Muslim girl and an atheist boy in for work experience. The girl didn’t wear a veil, and was taking heat from her family about it. The boy told her that there was
nothing in the Koran about the veil, that it was an Arab fashion. She was shocked, and sought to disprove him – but couldn’t. “You’re the journalist,” she told me,
“Where can I find something like this?” As far as I can work out, she can’t.
It is precisely this lack of definition within Islam which allows its contortion by the jihadis. A striking factor about jihadis is that they move to a different country, where they are not
challenged: they may be proscribed by their local Muslims, but there is no global jurisdiction. So they move along – whereas a priest excommunicated in Austria could not start preaching in
Mexico. And the jetset jihadis claim that the madness they spout is somehow justified by the Koran. They’d be sent packing in their own countries, just as the IRA would if they tried to find
Biblical support for their murderous campaign.
I am – to put it mildly – no expert in Islam but have long thought that if there were the equivalent of excommunication, and a global hierarchy to enforce it, then mainstream Muslims would be better-empowered to root out the extremist strains in their own ranks.
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