Liberal Islam Speaks Out: The St. Petersburg DeclarationIn a ground-breaking example of Muslim self-analysis and critique, around 500 Muslim delegates attended an inaugural “Secular Islam Summit,” held March 4 and 5, 2007, in St. Petersburg, Florida. The summit culminated with an official declaration,1 signed by such luminaries of Muslim liberalism as Ayaan Hirsi Ali,2 Wafa Sultan,3 and Ibn Warraq.4
This statement represents a breath of fresh air. At last a group of prominent “secular Muslims” has come out and shown the kind of unconditional willingness to engage in self-criticism which is so well-established in the non-Muslim West.
The secular Muslim group points the finger at some of the very pillars of institutional Islam, calling on governments to “reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms” and to “oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights.”
Rather than trumpeting the message of Muslim conservatives, who call for respect for and obedience to established authority structures, the secular Muslim group demands “the release of Islam from its captivity to the totalitarian ambitions of power-hungry men and the rigid strictures of orthodoxy.”
In perhaps the most controversial statement of all, the group calls for “a fearless examination of the origins and sources of Islam.” Thus, the very scriptural foundations of Islam, the Qur’an and Hadith, must be subject to scrutiny. This is unlikely to win them many friends in the hallowed corridors of Al-Azhar University in Cairo or the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia.
This group of brave secular Muslims will be lambasted by conservative Islamic groups and will inevitably be dismissed as Western lackeys and subjected to threats of various kinds. Of course, there must be some doubt about the extent to which they will have any impact in Muslim-majority countries. Yet theirs is a voice which is long overdue and, with the right combination of circumstances, a process of self-examination among some Muslims might be triggered by this declaration.
Opposition to this secular Muslim group will not just come from conservative Muslims. They are also likely to be dismissed by some Western Christian commentators who trumpet the same message as the Muslim conservatives: “Islam cannot be blamed for terrorism; it’s really all the fault of the West and its jackboot policies in the Muslim world.”5
Such voices tend to ignore the plight of Christian minorities living in difficult situations in Muslim countries, because to raise that issue produces tensions in the Christian-Muslim relationship. Such voices also discourage a critical engagement with the Islamic primary texts, because Muslim conservatives do not like it when you do, and, they say, the roots of Christian-Muslim tensions do not lie in Islamic scripture but in Western foreign policy.6
Such voices in the Church play into the hands of Muslim conservatives who are the target of the St. Petersburg Declaration. This produces an interesting scenario. On one side is an alliance of Muslim conservatives and Christian (both liberal and evangelical), both of whom insist that the West is to blame for the problems in the Christian-Muslim relationship today. But fortunately there is another side—an alliance between Muslim secularist liberals and Christian conservatives who are both committed to posing hard questions to institutional Islam. With the combined efforts of this latter group comes a measure of hope.
Footnotes:
1The declaration can be seen online at “The St. Petersburg Declaration,” Secular Islam Summit Website, March 5, 2007, http://secularislam.org/blog/post/SI_Blog/21/The-St-Petersburg-Declaration (accessed April 2, 2007).
2For an interview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Danish cartoon controversy, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Everyone Is Afraid to Criticize Islam: Interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” by Gerald Traufetter, Spiegel Online International, February 6, 2006, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,399263,00.html (accessed April 2, 2006).
3Wafa Sultan (interview on Al-Jazeera TV, February 21, 2006), The Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project, http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1050.htm (accessed December 24, 2007).
4The transcript of an interview with Ibn Warraq, “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” interview by Lyn Gallacher, The Religion Report, at ABC.net.au, September 10, 2001, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s386913.htm (accessed April 2, 2007).
5Peter Riddell, “A Breath of Islamic Fresh Air,” Church Times, March 30, 2007, http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=36785 (accessed November 20, 2007).
6Cf. Colin Chapman, “Christian Responses to ‘Islamic Terrorism’” (Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, November 1, 2006), Wycliffe College Website, November 2, 2006, http://www.wycliffecollege.ca/news_details.php?nid=88 (accessed April 2, 2007).
