Continuation of my Contentions Series.

Link to Shaykh Abd al Hakim Murad’s Contentions part 1.

33. ‘Judaism is dead; but we are going to give it a magnificent funeral’. (Rabbi Zunz, fount of liberal Judaism.) Is Islam the reverse? And if so, what are the grounds for dialogue?

This contention reminds me of an event that occured when I was in my teens. I attended an interfaith dialogue with some members of the community, and as part of that we visited a Jewish center.

I got to speaking to the Rabbi there. He started his conversation with me by asking, “So… you believe in God?”, slightly incredulously. I followed up with, “Yes… why, don’t you?”

His startling answer was, “No!”

So here was a leader of a Jewish community who did not even believe in God. I was truly flabbergasted! As you may guess the conversation didn’t get much farther than that.

At that point I had not been truly exposed the various forms of Judaism including reform, liberal, orthodox. Although I knew such classifications existed, I had no idea that the differences ran so deep that one group did not even accept God’s existence.

Therefore, I find the comment from the Rabbi that Shaikh Abdal Hakim quotes to be quite spot-on, in the sense that Judaism has become much more of a racial identity than a faith for what seems to be a vocal majority of them.

Is Islam the reverse?

Judaism has thrived, in a worldly sense, when it has abandoned much of the particulars of its faith-based law. On the other hand, historically, Islam has seen great worldly success (as well as spiritual success), when it has remained true to the core principles of its traditional understanding. In this way, it seems to me that Islam is the reverse.

However, to truly determine the answer to that question we may want to look at groups within Islam that might mirror the relationship of some of the liberal groups to traditional/orthodox Judaism. The main question to ask is whether Islam could succumb to the same sort of liberalization that occurred within Judaism.

So far, the answer seems to be a resounding, “No!”. Movements such as “Progressive Islam” have not had much success within the Muslim community, though they have received much media attention.

Furthermore, Islam is protected inherently from becoming any sort of racial or cultural identity as it has already spread to a wide variety of humanity.

Grounds for dialogue:

My little attempt at dialogue, described above, failed miserably… But maybe Muslims can have a meaningful dialogue by appealing to the humanistic nature of reform/liberal Judaism, and also discussing the general issues that Islam has with humanism. It may help to discuss how Islam suggests a unified humanity and the problems that extreme tribalism (hence their emphasis on their racial identity) can create.