Usual Disclaimers: I'm an American atheist (and a fairly militant/grumpy one) who has lived/worked in Egypt for more than a year now. And this was supposed to be a "temporary work assignment..."
In the English-language press here in Egypt, I often read an editorial column by a Mr. Tarek Heggy, who is a real breath of fresh air.
He's not only a liberal (presumably) Muslim thinker, but a leader in the fight for women's rights in the Islamic world. And an expert in gas/oil production.
I hate people like this. They make me realize how little I've accomplished. :-)
But enough of my rambling. You can read more of Heggy's writing at his website, which is a valuable source of Middle Eastern history, culture and religious thinking:
http://www.heggy.org/Here's example of his writing. One of Heggy's theories is that Islam can be roughly divided into two models--the outward-looking, more liberal Turkish-Egyptian model, and the inward-looking, fanatical Wahhabi model:
In the course of a journey extending for over twenty years, I developed a strong aversion for those I call “worshippers of the word” and “prisoners of tradition”, and a profound admiration for the proponents of reason, most notably, of course, Ibn Rushd (Averoess), whose championship of the primacy of reason was adopted by Europe and rejected by the Muslim world.
Europe’s gain was our loss: in turning our backs on Ibn Rushd, we lost a historic opportunity for development. A close reading of all Ibn Taymeya’s works, as well as the works of his disciples, from Ibn Qaiym Al-Juzeya to Mohamed bin Abdul Wahab at the end of the eighteenth century, only deepened my aversion towards this trend and my admiration for the Mu’tazalites, who emphasized human responsibility in matters of religion, and for liberal thinkers who chose the path of reason over that of dogma, like Ibn Sinna (Avicenna), Al-Farabi and the leading exponent of this school, Ibn Rushd.
I spent years trying to understand why the Muslims had chosen to follow the line advocated by Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, the proponent of orthodoxy and tradition for whom knowledge meant only knowledge of religion and who cancelled the role of the mind altogether by denying the possibility of acquiring knowledge through intuition, over the line advocated by Ibn Rushd, who upheld the primacy of reason and sowed the seeds of a renaissance we chose not to reap.
Why were Al-Ghazali’s ideas so readily accepted while Ibn Rushd’s were rejected? I believe the answer to this paradox can be summed up in one word: despotism. At a time despotism in our part of the world was at its height, it is not surprising that Muslim rulers should have found Al-Ghazali’s ideas more appealing than those of Ibn Rushd.
The orthodox line was also more appealing to their subjects who, under the yoke of tyranny, found it safer and less demanding to go along with the views of those who required nothing more from them than a suspension of their critical faculties.
In Europe, where the forces of enlightenment were locked in a confrontation with the clericalism that stifled intellectual initiative and rational thought, despotism was in retreat. This explains why, in the thirteenth century, a prestigious centre of learning like the University of Paris supported the ideas of the Arab Muslim Ibn Rushd over those of the European Christian Thomas Aquinas, the scholastic philosopher famous for his two-swords doctrine.
But the winds of change were blowing throughout the region, and the years that followed were not kind...
The proponents of the model of Islam which demanded a strict adherence to the letter of scripture and slammed the door shut in the face of rationality, suddenly found themselves in control of vast wealth unprecedented in history.
This gave them an enormous edge over their moderate rivals and allowed them to extend their influence into the traditional strongholds of the Turkish- Egyptian model of Islam, where they waged a systematic campaign to co-opt establishment personalities and institutions.
The success of this campaign found its most salient expression in the emergence of fanatical movements like the Taliban, who interpreted the doctrines of religion on the basis of tradition alone and imposed a scholastic, doctrinal brand of Islam that left no room for the exercise of reason.
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