Gaza to Smriti: Islam at war with itself as Arabs reform, neo-covert Muslims regress

Samuel Huntington’s prophecy of a clash of civilisations is playing out in strange ways. In the Islamic world, we now have a clash within a civilisation.

The Arab world, where the source code of Islam was written, is in the crosscurrents of change, brought about by technology and shifting economic realities. Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and the United Arab Emirates led by Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) — aged 38 and 62 respectively — are leading the transformation.

The Persian world led by Iran, which is also the main seat of Shia Islam, has seen bloody convulsions of a revolution against orthodoxy led by its brave and angry scarf-flinging women. It all started there with the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the Ayatollah regime’s morality police for not wearing hijab.

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Increasingly, several regressive and violent tenets and practices of Islam have been unable to withstand the sharp light of technology, especially the internet. Millions of Muslim youth have been disillusioned the world over by the incompatibility of the teachings of the Quran or the Hadiths with modern concepts like gender equality, sexual choice, accepting differences of opinion, reforms in punishment, food without cruelty and environmentalism. Their faith has failed to offer them any new ideas, innovations, or solutions which do not involve violence.

Coupled with it looms the inevitability of the ‘end of oil’ on the global economic horizon. Big Arab states like Saudi, UAE, Kuwait and Oman have been smart to preempt it and open up culturally, start freeing its societies from orthodoxy, and invite the world to come and do business. MBS dreams of making the Arab world the new Europe in a couple of decades.

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But these startling and overdue reforms in the Islamic world have ironically started facing a bitter challenge from the places where Arabs and Persians had spread the faith chiefly by the sword. These are Islam’s poorer catchment areas like the Indian subcontinent or sub-Saharan Africa and their diaspora, where the faithful are keen to prove they are more Muslim than the Arabs.

Two recent events have brought Islam’s internal conflict out in the open, especially on social media.

First is the Gaza war. While the rest of the Muslim world promptly sported the Palestinian flag on their Twitter or Instagram profiles and got on to fierce keyboard activism against Israel and trying to whitewash Hamas’s barbaric crimes, the entire Arab world including Egypt and Jordan refused to accept even a single Palestinian refugee trying to flee the conflict. The Arabs are pragmatic. They realise that the Palestinians who voted in a terror organisation like Hamas in Gaza could be bad news if allowed inside their homes. They have even secretly or tacitly approved Israel’s pounding of Hamas targets in Gaza and the West Bank.

While making perfunctory noises in the UN or the International Court of Justice, Saudi wants to sign the Abraham Accords with Israel, a treaty which promises lasting peace and prosperity in the Middle East.

This pragmatism of the Arabs has been met with intransigence and rage from their country cousins in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and elsewhere. Pro-Palestinian Muslim social media handles have seethed over the aloofness of the Gulf states.

The second instance was the visit by Indian Union minister Smriti Irani to the Islamic holy city of Medina. She met the local priests and politicians modestly dressed in an Indian sari, but refused to cover her head or wear an abaya. The Saudis were cool about it.

But the Muslim internet erupted with anger. How could she be allowed in one of Islam’s holiest sites? Why did she not cover her head?

What is a Hindu politician from India doing in Medina? Let alone a BJP politician which is known for promoting Hindutva ideology?

The Prophet ﷺ explicitly forbade the presence of idol worshippers in the Hejaz region.

The Two Holy Cities are for Muslims alone. No one else. https://t.co/DPWBYNnEhu

— OJ Smoke (@OJ_Smoke_) January 8, 2024

Saudi Twitter reacted with casual disdain. Several accounts snubbed the overzealous and advised them not to stretch and meddle with their national affairs. They showed the ‘neo-converts’ their place. (Interestingly, Muslim men from the Indian subcontinent who had gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS came back and complained that their Arab masters only used them for menial work like cooking, washing utensils or cleaning toilets.)

These cultural clashes point to a possible inflection point in Islam. It could finally be reforming. Saudi Arabia has ordered the compilation of one Hadith from the many additions made long after their Prophet Mohammed’s death, weeding out violent and problematic references which extremists gratuitously use.

Indonesia’s biggest Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama has called for a ban on the word ‘kafir’ or infidel to describe non-Muslims.

Egypt has banned face veil or niqab in schools.

A massive Hindu temple of the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) will be inaugurated next month in UAE’s Abu Dhabi, the city that also hosts the country’s largest masjid, the Grand Mosque.

These developments were once unthinkable. To think that these would pass without outrage is foolish.

But as the richer and more influential part of the Islamic world reforms, the excitable hinterland of relatively newer converts is bound to follow.

The author is contributing editor, Firstpost. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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