Religious Limits in the Muslim World

IF THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT AUTHORITIES IN ISLAM, the Quran and the Hadith, do not curb religious freedom, then where do the restrictions in the Muslim world come from?

This is a question leading scholar of Islam and religious freedom Prof. Abdullah Saeed has spent much of his career trying to answer. Saeed (pictured in center above) informed an audience of graduate students, lawyers and journalists at a recent seminar on religious freedom that his research has found very little historical or theological evidence to support any ongoing religious restrictions.

In fact, the restrictions that countries such as Saudi Arabia impose on Muslims as well as non-Muslims “serve no Quranic or Prophetic purpose,” stated Prof. Saeed, who is Muslim himself and teaches Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

The professor, who spent his early education at conservative Islamic seminaries in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, was one of the speakers at the Witherspoon Institute's seminar on Islam and Religious Freedom at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

An often-overlooked aspect of this issue is that Muslims who do not subscribe to a country’s official version of Islam face greater restrictions than non-Muslims, noted Saeed, who holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Melbourne. The main issue concerning non-Muslims, he went on, is not belief per se, but its manifestation.

The Maldivian-born scholar explained that the first restrictions emerged in the early first and late second centuries of Islam.

The Prophet lived for 12 years in Mecca and then 10 years in Medina, said Saeed, co-author of Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam. The 114 suras of the Quran are broadly classified as Meccan and Medinan, according to their place and time of revelation.

When the Prophet was teaching and preaching in Mecca, he attracted a few hundred converts, many of whom were themselves persecuted. But “the Quran kept emphasizing again and again that the Prophet’s job was to preach. He did not have the authority to force anybody…No violence was allowed,” Saeed emphasized.

In 622 CE, the Prophet and his followers had to flee to Medina because their condemnation of idol worship had angered powerful groups of Meccans, and conversions into Islam were seen as a threat to local tribal leaders.

Medina, where the Prophet spent the next 10 years, had very different politics. Large numbers of people converted to Islam, but there was a significant Jewish community that did not convert, Saeed added. In the first five years, “the Muslim community was struggling, trying to defend itself from outside repression from the opponents [Meccans and Jews who allied with them].”

“During this period, the Quran justified the use of violence in defense of their religion. In fact, one of the first verses in the Quran which gave the permission went on to say, 'The permission to fight is given to you… because you are driven out of your homes.'…But no one was to coerce anyone to believe in Islam,” said Saeed, whose research includes contemporary approaches to interpreting the Quran, reform of classical Islamic law, and Islam and human rights.

The Quran, which Muslims believe was verbally revealed through the angel Gabriel from God to Muhammad, went on to say that mosques, monasteries, churches and synagogues were to be protected from attacks, Saeed added, indicating that the permission to use violence was meant to protect religious freedom.

“In the early period, the emphasis was on self-defense...There was no discrimination against Jews and Christians,” Saeed observed. However, the last two years the Prophet spent in Medina were different.

“It is in this period that the language of the Quran begins to change. The Prophet is told, you go after these people who are at war with you… A lot of texts that are harsh in language were included during this time. Jizya [a per capita tax levied on an Islamic state’s non-Muslim subjects], for instance, was included," Saeed recounted. "Even then, non-coercion was important.”

After the death of the Prophet, Muslims conquered much of what is now the Middle East, the old Sassanid Empire, a large part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, modern day Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and parts of North Africa. The Muslim armies took territory town by town, and within a very short period, many parts of the world were brought under their control.

“By and large, permission to maintain a non-Muslim religion was allowed with payment of taxes…The practice of non-coercion was still maintained,” Saeed explained.

The restrictions on non-Muslims that emerged during the late first century and the early second century of Islam resulted from the convergence of many separate events.

“This is the period when Muslims consolidated their confidence in relation to the control of large territories. They also began to develop a sense of superiority of Islam, which led to discriminatory practices", Saeed claimed.

"This is also the period when Muslims were developing the Islamic law, which was based on the Quran, the practice of the Prophet [Hadith], what early Muslims did, and existing practices of the time. When the jurists were forming laws, they had to think of it in that context, where a sense of superiority of Islam was very prominent.”

This idea of superiority, Saeed pointed out, got translated into laws restricting religious freedom, particularly on manifestations of non-Muslim faiths, and it is these laws that persist today. Many restrictions are called for in the classical legal tradition, but very few appear in the Quran or the Hadith.

Modern-day jurists justify ongoing restrictions using texts mostly from that very early, post-Prophet era, Saeed explained. One such commonly used text is believed to be an agreement between Muslims and Christians in Syria. The text, which is attributed to Umar, the second successor to the Prophet, advises Muslims to segregate Christians, saying the latter must not look like Muslims or use Muslim-sounding names, nor speak the language or the name Allah.

The text also says Christians must not be allowed to put crosses on their buildings or raise their voices when they read their scriptures.

“But it’s very hard to say it is actually from this period,” Saeed cautioned. “The kinds of things mentioned here had no relationship with what was happening at the time.”

“My sense is that it is coming from the time towards the late first century or early second century of Islam, around 100 years after the death of the Prophet… [At the time] Christians there were forbidden to build churches or monasteries in the cities or nearby areas,” he said.

Saeed said Muslims should acknowledge that the restrictions in the past were meant for their unique contexts and do not hold for modern life. Even when there is a text that seems to justify restrictions, he went on to say, it can be argued that it was meant for a particular time and a particular context that no longer exists.

“There is an Islamic thought developed by people like Imam ash-Shafi’i, considered the founder of Islamic jurisprudence, that says the text is ambiguous and needs to be interpreted,” Saeed asserted.

A concept that Saeed does believe honors Islamic history and still holds for today is the idea of human rights itself. Human rights, Saeed argued, does not belong only to the West.

“It is a concept that existed in the Quran 14 centuries ago and was emphasized again and again,” Saeed remarked.

If you look at history, he added, Muslims were not alone in imposing restrictions. Christians also did so in the 15th and 16th century. Christians, he noted, have since moved away from that practice. And, textually and historically, he argues that modern Muslims should abandon those practices, too.

“But," Saeed observed, "some Muslims are still obsessed with those ideas.”