354 AFTERWORDThis sort of well-meant simplification won't get us very far.
On the other side, I often hear liberal Muslims in the United States say
that ''jihad just means 'trying to be a good person,"' suggesting that only
anti-Muslim bigots think the term has something to do with violence. But
they ignore what jihad has meant to Muslims in the course of history dat-
ing back to the lifetime of Prophet Mohammed himself. Anyone who
claims that jihad has nothing to do with violence must account for the
warfare that the earliest Muslims called "jihad." Anyone who wants to say
that early Muslims felt a certain way but we modern Muslims can create
whole new definitions for jihad (and other aspects of Islam) must wrestle
with the doctrine Muslims have fleshed out over time: that the Qur'an,
Mohammed's prophetic career, and the lives, deeds, and words of his com-
panions in the first Muslim community were the will of God revealed on
Earth and no mortal human can improve on the laws and customs of that
time and place. This doctrine has forced all Muslim reformers to declare
that they are proposing nothing new, only restoring what was originally
meant. They must deny that they are forging forward, must insist that they
are going back to the pristine original. That's a trap Muslim thinkers must
break out o£
The modernist Egyptian theologian Sheikh Mohammed Abduh wrote
famous books showing that the Qur'an actually prescribed science and cer-
tain (but not other) modern social values. He cites scriptural declarations
to show that in marriage the Qur'an actually favors monogamy over
polygamy. His case is convincing but he clearly came to his task intending
to find support for monogamy in the Qur'an. It was a conclusion he had
already reached. The question is, from what other source did he derive this
conclusion? Was it not rational thought applied to the deepest principles
of shared human life?
The role of women in society is no doubt the starkest instance of the
incompatibility between the Islamic world and the West, an issue much in
need of intellectual unraveling and deconstruction. Every society in every
era has understood the powerful potential of sexuality to disrupt social
harmony and every society has developed social forms to check that
power. On this point, the disagreement between Islamic and Western cul-
ture is not about whether women should be oppressed, as is often repre-
sented in the West. Well-meaning folk on both sides believe that no