part of Western civilization. We find Jewish intellectuals who don’t believe in the Bible and don’t concede that it’s sacred in any way. This liberty is not available to Muslims. You could even say that the Jewish spirit is more alive and well in the Muslim religion than it is in the Bible. But we need to go further: unlike Jews or Christians, who have the right to change religion, Muslims don’t have the right to change religion. Assassination awaits anyone who is tempted to leave Islam. He is counted among the apostates, and his murder, consequently, becomes lawful.
H: I’d just like to make it clear that, when you say ‘Assassination awaits anyone who is tempted to leave Islam’, you’re actually talking about someone born into a Muslim family or a Muslim environment, or on Muslim soil. Since there is no baptism, the child is born a Muslim, even if the parents are atheists or communists. And he or she is not free to change faith later on in life. From the moment Islam becomes a ‘genetic’ inheritance, there is no freedom.
A: I’ve often talked about this issue, as you know. I see Islam as a political and economic coup d’état – just like Judaism, in fact. Islam needs to go through an internal revolution.
H: Any such revolution comes up against a corpus that produced the figure of a prophet as an absolute authority. And this human corpus itself became an absolute authority. Our task consists in reminding people of this and analysing it.
A: How come the heaven of prophecy closes forever after? And how come the ḥadīth becomes the absolute authority? We might even say that you can criticize God but not Muhammad. Criticizing Muhammad boils down to cancelling out the authority. That’s one reason why the words used to describe Muhammad’s greatness reveal themselves to be a political construct. This latter – which has been promoted to the same rank as the divine Text – becomes the essential origin of the shar‘, and so the sunna15 can then be imposed as the essential principle of jurisdiction and thought.
H: Yet when we manage to get out from under this ban on thinking and we read the corpus with a critical eye, we very quickly see it’s a text that’s human, all too human. The jurisprudence that has governed us to the present day, and which draws largely on the sunna, arose as a way of legitimizing practices that saw the light of day when the religion was founded.
A: But what is the sunna? What is this corpus that was to create such discord between Muslims? Conflicts over the sunna have sparked a political war within Islam. There were a great number of dissident groups in the beginning, when it was founded: seventy, more or less, such as Al-Ḥarūriyya, Al-Qadariyya, Al-Jahmiyya, Al-Murji’a, Al-Rāfiḍa, Al-Jabriyya, Al-Khawārij, Al-Shī’a, Al-Bāṭiniyya … All these groups were exterminated. No other religion has had so many divisions that were literally spread and dominated by the jamā‘a.16 When Shāfi’ī17 says: ‘He who gives his view on the subject of the Qur’an is in error, even if what he says is true’, he says this in the name of the jamā‘a. This rules out the notion that an individual can choose for himself, based on his experience or the extent of his knowledge, for example. Interpretation henceforth requires some kind of a political power. In the eyes of the jamā‘a, the individual has no existence as a free autonomous being in control of himself and of his thoughts.
H: There have also been divisions and schisms within Christianity.
A: Not with the same degree of violence. In Islam, such divisions are over the divine essence.
H: In Christianity, too. Much was written about the issue of the divine essence by the Church Fathers. Tertullian, among others.
A: In Islam, political power has always triumphed. From the moment Islam was founded, civil society has always been under the domination of the political power. So, when people talk, today, about change, it’s not so much about changing the social or political structure as about a succession of individuals exercising power.
H: In Christianity, you also had the despotism of the Church. Only, the West has seen secularization, whereas we come up against something unthought-of, something that cannot let itself be thought, by virtue of the fact that everything that touches either closely or remotely on prophecy is regarded as sacred.
A: In Islam, there is no thinking outside religion. When the verses incite us to reflect, what you have to understand by this is that we need to reflect based on what the Qur’an says. Just as there is no truth outside the Qur’an, so there is no thought outside the Text. Thinking comes down to thinking through the Text based on the Text and not based on the world.
H: Ignorance plays an undeniable role in the maintenance of this lockdown on the Text, and even its idealization. Many Muslims don’t know that the word ḥanīf,18 which refers to their religion, is an epithet that predated Islam and was only applied to Islam by Muhammad much later on. The ḥanīfiyya religion was preached by Maslama – who was actually known as Maslama al-Ḥanafī – in southern Arabia, namely Yemen, which is under bombardment today.
A: Indeed, as a religion ḥanīfiyya was spread widely throughout South Arabia.
H: In today’s Muslim imagination, Muhammad was born a Muslim. Since there’s a ban on thinking, people don’t even ask themselves what a Muslim could possibly have been before Islam came along. Well, the hagiographical texts claim he was wathanī (a pagan). In his excellent book, Muhammad Mahmūd19 cites Al-Kalbī as saying that Muhammad, like the people of his tribe, was an idolater. We read: ‘For the Quraysh,20 Al-‘Uzzā was the greatest god. It has come down to us that the Messenger of God one day said that he’d made an offering to Al-‘Uzzā.’21 Certain ḥadīths cited in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī22 fit in with that.23
A: Of course. Muhammad was born into a pagan context. But do the works make reference to his religious practices from the time before Islam?
H: Laqad ’ahdaytu li-l‘uzzā shātan wa ’anā ‘alā dīni qawmī (I made an offering to Al-‘Uzzā when I practised the faith of my community). That’s a ḥadīth cited by Al-Kalbī and by Al-Bukhārī. The latter goes further, stipulating that Muhammad was a wathanī, whereas other people in Mecca were ḥanafiyyūn. He converted later to ḥanīfiyya.
A: The fact that he was a pagan and that he converted to Islam might encourage Muslims to see this as a positive point: God chose him.
H: Al-Jāḥiẓ24 reports what Muhammad said to Zayd ibn ‘Amrū bin Nufayl: Yā Zayd! Innaka fāraqta dīna qawmika wa shatamta ālihatahum (O, Zayd! You have cut your ties with the religion of your community and you have insulted their divinities). There are two things we might say about that. First, Muhammad defended paganism as a faith and practice in Quraysh. Second, people in his tribe went on to renounce paganism.
A: Muhammad converted to ḥanīfiyya under the influence of Waraqa ibn Nawfal, his wife Khadīja’s cousin, who was a man of immense erudition, a man who knew all about the religions and religious practices of Arabia.
H: The Qur’anic verse fits in with Muhammad’s conversion:
Did we not expand thy breast for thee,
and lift from thee thy burden,
the burden that weighed down thy back?25
The commentator Al-Ḍaḥḥāk26 says that wizr (burden) is the associationism Muhammad lived surrounded by. Ṭabarī, for his part, explains that God expanded Muhammad’s breast, opening his heart
