A champion of secular Islam looks to harness 'heresy' - Lynda Hurst

It was billed as the first-ever "Muslim Heretics Conference."

Provocative? To be sure.

But when Sudanese-American scholar Abdullahi An-Naim organized it in Atlanta this April, what he really wanted to do was ignite some innovative thinking – brainstorm the predicament of traditional Islam in the modern world.

"I deliberately wanted to shock people into seeing `heresy' as a creative force," he laughs.

Naim may describe himself as a Muslim heretic (his conservative critics certainly do), but his peers in academia prefer the rather more admiring designation of public intellectual. Either way, the Emory University law professor has become famous throughout the Muslim world for championing the concept of secular Islam. The case he makes for it is simple but, given the political tenor of the times, paradigm-changing. To wit: Human rights are universal and trump religious dictates. The state must be secular because neutrality protects all religions. Faith belongs in the private, not the public, domain.

Perhaps even more contentiously, Naim calls for sharia, the Islamic code of laws for living, to be "renegotiated" and brought into the present: Regarding sharia as "an immutable body of principles universally binding on all Muslims would have been inconceivable," he says, "to those who created it in the 8th and 9th centuries."

Even as a boy in Sudan, Naim says he contested sharia because its rules, particularly relating to women, seemed manifestly unconnected to the true nature of Islam.

The son of an illiterate mother and self-educated father, he was a law student at the University of Khartoum in 1968 when he joined a reform movement called the Republican Brothers. It was led by Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a Sufi reformer, regarded by many as a mystic, but by Naim as a mentor.

He was profoundly affected by Taha's belief that a balance must be struck between the individual's need for absolute freedom and the state's need for total social justice.

Taha recognized the state of Israel, says Naim, and inveighed against all violence, warning years before 9/11 that it had to be checked in certain Muslim societies. He argued that sharia rules were archaic and that the Qur'an must always be understood in its historical context.

Those views guaranteed trouble when a sharia-enforcing Islamist dictatorship took control in Sudan. In 1985, Taha was hanged, his books burned. Naim fled the country.

"But you can't kill an idea by killing the author," he says.

In 1989, he became head of the Africa bureau of Human Rights Watch and made his first foray into shark-infested waters with his book, Towards an Islamic Reformation. Since 1995, he's taught law at Emory in Atlanta ( a school he praises for having gone to court in the early `60s to end racial segregation).

As director of its Religion and Human Rights Program, he has overseen a global study on how sharia family law is applied in the non-monolithic, hugely diverse Islamic world – and was heartened by some of the results. In several states where sharia law is the public law, changes and adaptations are happening, he says: A man wishing to take a second wife, for example, now requires judicial approval.

That may not seem much to the Western eye, but to him, it's a critical start. He's convinced that modern communications will accelerate progress. Reform will come.

Naim's latest book, Islam and the Secular State (Harvard University Press) is the culmination of his life's work, he says. At 61, he's spent 40 years working through the seeds planted by Taha and reaching his own considered conclusions.

"Taha's great lesson was to be yourself, not a carbon copy of him. He would approve of the book because I am standing my own ground."

What criticisms Naim makes of religious tradition are made as a devout, observant Muslim, he stresses: "When I protest the inequality of women, I do it as a Muslim, as the fulfilment of Islam."

The book argues that sharia can become a relevant code for living if it is reworked to include modern democratic principles as well as Islamic values. And secularism, despite its bad press among Muslims, should be welcomed by them. It is not a refutation of true Islam, as many assume, but the reverse: a protection.

A champion of secular Islam looks to harness 'heresy' - Lynda Hurst