The autocracy of Islamic thought calls for revolution

Religious radicalisation in the Muslim world in recent decades and the recent rise in the number of terrorist groups has prompted currents of thought that are crying out for an urgent renewal of Islamic religious thought, calling for a revolution against its rigidity and autocracy.

The road will not be easy, as voices of enlightenment have existed for decades, but they have been branded apostates, accused of conspiring with the West, and murdered outright.

In the 1970s and 1990s, Egypt was the scene of both these voices and the tragic deaths of individuals who stood up to the rigid discourses of the then emerging Al Jamaat al-Islamiyya (Islamist groupings) preachers.

Faraj Fouda (1945-1992) was one of the pioneers of the Enlightenment in Egypt, a controversial writer, one of the most active secular thinkers in Egypt and the Arab world. He lived a life full of scientific and intellectual activity. An agricultural engineer by profession, he played an important role in contemporary Arab creative life and thought, and devoted his writings to defending freedom of expression, as well as freedom of cultural and artistic creation.

He always believed that the future was for rationality and enlightenment, rejecting obscurantism and the rigid interpretation of religious texts in both the Koran and Islamic Sharia.

He wrote a series of books and several articles defending the principles of the civil state, secularism, human rights and the separation of religion and state. 
In his book 'Al-Nadhir', which means warning (1989), he addressed the growth of the Islamist trend and stated: "To deny secularism is ignorance of modern civilisation, the description of disbelief of secularism is a disregard of the term".

In this book he made it clear that a return to political Islam is a return to an era of defeat, the creation of a religious state is to ignore human rights, and that the return of the caliphate means ignoring history.

His courage and bravery in debating the rigid thinking of the Islamist groups and the clerics of the Al-Azhar Scholars' Front (a grouping of clerics who studied at Al-Azhar University of Islamic Theology) provoked their anger, and they united to launch major attacks on him as an unbeliever and apostate, This culminated in the fatal outcome on 8 June 1992, as he was leaving his office at the Egyptian Enlightenment Association, which he chaired, accompanied by his son and a friend, when he was fatally shot by two people on a motorbike.

During lengthy discussions held by the court to investigate this crime, a number of thinkers and personalities from the Al-Azhar Scholars' Front, including Muhammad al-Shaarawi, and Muhammad al-Ghazali, were questioned, the latter voluntarily came to testify, one of the questions the court asked him among others: What is the legal ruling on an apostate? Al-Ghazali answered by focusing on the generalities of the provisions of the Shari'a and stated - an apostate who urges people to leave Islam is like a germ that spreads its toxins in society, so the authority must kill him, the blood of an apostate is permissible, and added, in any case the accused must be tried, but not for murder, but because they acted above justice (took justice into their own hands).

This view was shared by a wide spectrum of Salafist and Jamaat al-Islamiyya groups; Indeed, five days before Fuda's assassination at a symposium organised by the Al-Azhar Scholars' Front, several Islamist preachers and imams, including Al-Ghazali himself, signed a statement agreeing to the atonement of Faraj Fouda, and calling on Egypt's Party Affairs Committee not to approve the establishment of his (Future) political party (Fuda intended to compete democratically for a secular state in his country, he was awaiting the resolution).

Investigations revealed that Fouda's murder was based on a fatwa of the Mufti of the Jihad Organisation and the Islamic Group, Dr. Omar Abdel-Rahman.

It has been 29 years since then and many people are still being deprived of their lives on the basis of fatwas of clerics, moreover, with the rise of Jamaat al-Islamiyya, and terrorist organisations such as Al-Qeda and Daesh, the killings have multiplied in hot spots of tension such as Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. and from there the death and destruction in the name of God has transcended the borders reaching Europe, the United States and others. I cite the massacres of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York that killed 2,996 people and injured more than 25,000. The 11 March 2004 attacks in Spain in which 193 people died and around 2,000 were injured, etc.

Jihadists did not emerge like this overnight, but have long been cementing a nefarious ideology and creating strategies based on annihilating the other. And their thinking is undoubtedly not inspired by the Koran, the holy book of Islam, but by the interpretation of clerics belonging to different schools of Islamic thought, the Hanbali, for example, being the most rigid.

Daesh and Al-Qaeda assume that nothing is changeable in their theologians' interpretation of religious texts, because it is not a cognitive position that can be corrected, or at least disputed, but they have a firm belief that they are delegated from heaven to protect those texts as they are and whoever contradicts them must be eliminated. They are incapable of debating ideas with arguments and logic, they prefer to murder through terrorism and destruction because they fear that the fragility of their arguments will be exposed, thus they assassinated Fuda and before him Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt (1981), and many others.

There is a growing awareness in Muslim societies today that something is wrong with religion, and many are asking, why are we lagging behind in progress? The answer to this question will take time to come, because the Muslim mind is immersed in contradictions that make it oscillate between heritage and modernity, interpretation from one source and another, between state secularism, or religious state, and so on.

It is not easy to dismantle deep-rooted cognitive constants in a short period of time; this requires intellectual and cultural mobility that encourages people to be complicit in constructing critical thinking capable of opening the way to a future. The best ally for the current of enlightenment lies in societies, the more cultured they are, the more possibilities they will have to dare to free themselves from conventional and archaic thinking.

To affect a process of change does not entail breaking with Islam as a religion, but with a certain vision of Islam, a vision that it is in the interest of rigid religious groups to maintain in order to continue manipulating Muslims and disassociating them from progress, in the name of God.