Published: Sunday, December 2, 2001 2:30 a.m. EST

Who speaks for Islam today?
A Muslim world in ferment

By CHARLES KURZMAN

CHAPEL HILL - If you want the Catholic position on terrorism, ask the Vatican. If you want the Southern Baptist position, refer to the Executive Committee and the resolutions of the annual convention. There may be dissent, as in all faiths. But these offices have the authority to speak on behalf of their religion.

 Islam has no organized church to speak with such authority. As the world confronts terrorism, no single Muslim or Islamic organization can tell us definitively what Islam says on the subject.

Rather, we face a plethora of competing statements. For example, Shaykh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, the leader of Cairo's al-Azhar mosque -- home of the world's oldest seminary -- denounced the mass murders of Sept. 11: "Attacking innocent people is not courageous. It is stupid and will be punished on the Day of Judgment." Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the jurist-ruler of Iran, condemned the killing of civilians, "whether such massacres happen in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Qana, Sabra, Shatila, Deir Yassin, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, or in New York and Washington."

By contrast, Osama bin Ladin, self-appointed leader of the radical al-Qaeda coalition, praised God for the attacks, calling them minor compared with the losses the Islamic world has suffered over the past 80 years: "One million Iraqi children have died thus far in Iraq, though they did not do anything wrong. Despite this, we heard no denunciation by anyone in the world or a fatwa (religious judgment) by the rulers' ulama (Islamic scholars)."

Bin Ladin's reference to 80 years of suffering offers one clue to the diversity of Muslim statements on terrorism. In 1924 -- 80 years ago, according to the lunar Islamic calendar -- the newly founded Republic of Turkey abolished the Ottoman caliphate. The Ottoman caliph claimed to be the sole successor to the Messenger Muhammad as religious leader of the Muslims -- caliph, or "khalifa," means "successor" in Arabic. Muslims did not universally accept the caliph's judgment, but the office of the caliphate provided the Islamic world with a symbol of unified leadership.

This symbol disappeared in the competing claims to succession, all ultimately dropped, that followed the abolition of the caliphate. Today each Islamic country has a separate religious hierarchy, or even multiple hierarchies, and none is bound to acknowledge the leadership of any other. Mullah Muhammad Omar, until very recently the leading religious official in Afghanistan, competed for Islamic authority with Shaykh Tantawi of Egypt, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and other leading scholars.

There is a time-honored precedent for this diversity of religious authorities in Islam. Soon after Muhammad's death, faced with the fallibility of human efforts to interpret revelation, leading Muslim scholars agreed to disagree. Not all approaches were tolerated, but a form of pluralism became institutionalized in the 9th century through the four schools of Islamic law, which most seminaries in the Islamic world have recognized and taught alongside one another for centuries. In the 1950s, the rector of al-Azhar even agreed to recognize and teach Shi'ism -- the sect of Islam that predominates in Iran -- as a fifth legal school.

Disagreement and debate among Muslim scholars is thus expected and accepted, even as the boundaries of toleration have on occasion been enforced with expulsion or death.

But bin Ladin is no religious scholar. His higher education is in secular subjects -- his university degree is in civil engineering -- and he has only elementary training in religious studies. Historically, a Muslim religious scholar must have a license, granted by a properly licensed scholar, in order to issue religious judgments. Bin Ladin has no such license, so his 1996 declaration of war and the 1998 fatwa on which he was the lead signatory must be considered the work of a layperson and autodidact.

Bin Ladin is not alone in this. The past century has witnessed an explosion of do-it-yourself theology and jurisprudence in the Islamic world. With the rise of secular education, particularly higher education, many laypeople have turned their hands to the sacred sources and announced their own findings. Those with access to personal computers can now search and sort these sources in minutes -- tasks that used to require years of training.

In short, the traditional seminaries have lost their monopoly on religious interpretation. Some of the most influential Islamic scholars of the 20th century were college graduates, not seminarians. Bin Ladin, like many other radical Islamists, is contemptuous of most traditionally-trained seminary scholars -- "the rulers' ulama," he calls them. The seminaries are in the pocket of oppressive governments, according to this view, too timid to speak boldly and preoccupied with doctrinal minutiae rather than the pressing issues of the day.

The profusion of religious authorities outside of the seminaries has generated a large body of liberal Islamic thought, as well as radicalism, including Islamic arguments for democracy, human rights, gender equality and the like. As a result, the diversity of Muslim opinion has widened considerably over the past century, making it even harder to identify a single authoritative position as representing "the" Islamic take on virtually any contemporary issue.

Who speaks for Islam? More and more Muslims do. As they compete with one another for the support of their fellow believers, there is debate even over the criteria by which they ought to be measured: scholarly insight, personal piety, political efficacy or other grounds.

The U.S.-led "war on terrorism," wading into this complex arena, faces three dangers. First, the bombing of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan or elsewhere -- whether intentional or not -- tilts Islamic debates toward the radicals, who point to the West's double standards in the valuing of human life.

Second, the Western equation of Muslims with radicalism -- as expressed through ethnic profiling, hate crimes, and longstanding hostility towards Islam -- inflates the radicals' importance and alienates moderates and liberals.

Third, the occasional embrace of "friendly" Muslims is sometimes too tight, making them look like puppets. They need the autonomy to criticize the United States for steps they feel are mistaken. This is especially true now, in a time of global crisis -- and it is just as true for Americans as it is for America's allies.

Charles Kurzman, a sociologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, is editor of "Liberal Islam: A Source-Book" and the forthcoming "Modernist Islam: A Source-Book, 1840-1940."