Prophecy and Power. Houria Abdelouahed

and traducing religion’,⁴ or ‘perverting words from their meanings’.⁵ In relation to what truth is there twisting? And when it says of Jesus, ‘they did not slay him, neither crucified him’,⁶ it’s not just the basis of Christianity that is thereby attacked, but the event itself.

      A: This points to the huge contradictions that are strewn throughout the Text and that merit a study that’s not just theological but also anthropological and historical. We need to reconsider the relationship between Islam and the other religions of Arabia, to revisit and analyse the conflicts within Islam itself, and also to proceed to a linguistic analysis. That way, we might be able to see how God became a Muslim property. The logic that dominates the Text and the corpus of the sunna⁷ is this: if God exists, he can only be Muslim. Doesn’t the verse say precisely, ‘The true religion with God is Islam’?⁸

      H: Is that any different from Judaism, which chooses itself a people?

A: It’s very different from Judaism, as the God of Islam has nothing more to say since he’s said his last word to his last prophet, who, towards the end of his life, states: ‘Today, I have perfected my good deeds and chosen [raḍītu],⁹ for you, Islam as religion.’ And: ‘You are the best nation ever brought forth to men.’¹⁰ God thereby becomes part of Islam and not the other way round. This internal contradiction puts Islam in a bind. Because saying that God is a Muslim makes God, and consequently the truth, a possession of Muhammad’s. Where was God for fifteen centuries? How come he didn’t show himself earlier, given that man has been on Earth for millions of years?

      H: Adonis! There’s historical time and there’s mythical time. Religion is tied up with the second. And one could retort that God had sent other prophets, well before Islam.

      A: It’s good to raise the question because it allows us to clear up a very important point: the verses refer to the Jews, not because of their doctrine, but because they fought Muhammad.

      H: In Ṭabarī’s commentary, we read that the Jews perverted their Holy Book,¹¹ but he doesn’t say what the taḥrīf (the perversion of meaning) consists of, or in relation to what. Apart from that, we find ourselves confronting an extremely problematic and very violent act of appropriation in terms of theory because Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, becomes a Muslim.¹² The Jewish prophets are given as Muslim and this, even before the advent of Islam.

      A: You’re right to talk about violence because Islam, in theory, adopted what came before it but cancelled it out, in practice, at the same time. The religions all became Muslim. Just read the verse we mentioned above: ‘The true religion with God is Islam’.¹³ As I said a moment ago, God himself became a Muslim. And the world was thus turned into a property of Islam. That goes against the truth, against humankind and against God himself. It’s the height of violence.

H: Yet while cancelling out all that came before it, the Qur’an makes use of Babylonian and Sumerian myths and legends, such as the Flood, which is in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It also took up narratives from the Bible, such as the story of Job, the story of Noah, of Moses …

      A: Unlike Christianity, which can be considered a revolution, since it transformed the very idea of God, Judaism doesn’t contain anything new, except the idea of the chosen people. Islam is like Judaism, and the shar‘ (Muslim law)¹⁴ is a bit too much like Jewish law for comfort. There are differences in the details, but the core remains the same. Yet Judaism evolved compared to Islam for it became 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