By Lee Kim Chew

PROGRESSIVE Muslim intellectuals are caught between a rock and a hard place today, says Malaysian academic Farish Ahmad Noor. They run smack into authoritarian governments and religious orthodoxy, and they are locked in a precarious spot he calls 'the third space'.

'That's an uncomfortable place to be in,' he said last week in a talk at Singapore's Institute of South-east Asian Studies. 'Independent thinkers are forced to flee to one or the other to avoid persecution or death. They are forced into the arms of the opposition or the state.'

But need this be so?

If progressive Muslim thinkers are at the cutting edge, as he says they are, then they should be leading the charge to redefine Islam despite the problems they face. After all, they are seen as the vanguard of a modern and progressive Islamic movement concerned with rights, freedom and justice.

Unless they act, Muslim extremists will hijack the rising religiosity of the Islamic community. This has been fertile ground for political Islam, where religion is used to serve political ends.

The new religiosity, a recent phenomenon, was a potent force even before the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. This makes the ground even more fertile for Islamic extremists when the US attacks Iraq.

The problem, Dr Farish says, is that Muslim intellectuals are vulnerable - they are not part of a ruling order, which only wants to use them as a barrier against an Islamic resurgence that threatens state authority.

Post-Sept 11, they are also in danger of being hijacked by autocratic regimes which want to present a 'moderate' face of Islam to placate the West and attract foreign investors.

Malaysia's Sisters in Islam movement was accused of working hand in glove with the state when it managed to get the law on women's rights amended.

'This is the dilemma faced by progressive Islamic groups,' he notes.

To be sure, Muslim intellectuals face an uphill task to establish their credibility. They have to confront not just autocratic states but also radical and orthodox movements which want to control the discourse on Islam.

There is yet another problem. Religious extremism has cast a deep pall over the Islamic world. The suspicions about Islam, deepened by the Sept 11 attacks, have reinforced the false notions of Western superiority. How else to account for the bigotry in Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's contention that Islam is incapable of becoming a part of modernity?

Dr Farish believes that Muslim intellectuals must set their own agenda to emplace Islam in the modern world. 'There must be questioning and critique to unchain ossified ideas, a rational interpretation to liberate Islam from any group,' he says.

'Failure to do this will leave the discourse on Islam ossified. There must be freedom of interpretation, the need to revive thought and break the intellectual monopoly of political groups. This is the challenge in a free discourse of Islam. Whatever progress that is made, whether pushing for reinterpretation or getting a reappraisal of Islam from the women's perspective, this is a quest for progressive Islam.'

He believes that the post-Sept 11 world has created new openings for progressive Islam and forces Islamic movements to take up new challenges.

Malaysia's Islamic youth movement Abim, once regarded as an exclusive Malay/Muslim group, has transformed into a movement for civil society, human rights and gender issues.

Last year, it campaigned for the protection of all religious sites. 'It should be commended for this. It marks a shift of position since Sept 11,' he says.

But Dr Farish is no starry-eyed idealist. 'The long march of progressive Islam is not over,' he declares. 'Islamic progressives are a brave constituency doing something difficult under difficult circumstances.'

British writer Salman Rushdie, who lives with a death sentence over his head for blaspheming Islam, observes that the outcome of the battle between progressive and regressive elements in the Muslim world could shape the next phase of human civilisation.

If this is true, then surely the world will be better off when progressive Muslim intellectuals take a firm and unequivocal stand against religious zealotry of any form.

Edward Said, an Arab-American professor at Columbia University and acclaimed author of Orientalism, cited the late Eqbal Ahmad who, writing for a Muslim audience, analysed what he called the roots of the religious right.

Ahmad came down hard on 'the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants' whose obsession with regulating personal behaviour promotes 'an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests and spiritual devotion'.

'The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds,' Ahmad wrote. He concluded: 'The modern Islamists are concerned with power, not with the soul; with the mobilisation of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda.'

This just as well describes the agenda of the Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who praises Osama bin Laden as a true Islamic warrior.

America's National Security Strategy, which spells out President George W. Bush's doctrine to maintain US superpower dominance, says the war on terrorism is not a clash of civilisations, but goes on to state: 'It does, however, reveal the clash inside a civilisation, a battle for the future of the Muslim world. This is a struggle of ideas and ... an area where America must excel.'

Islam's modernist thinkers must take up the challenge and not allow the orthodox ulemas to define Islam. But, in Ahmad's words, the progressives like Dr Farish are 'stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity'.

There is only one way out of the predicament for them: Speak up and act now.

Articles extracted from Straits Times, 30 September 2002