HUMANISTIC ISLAM: An opportunity not to be squandered.

As a Roman Catholic and a scholar whose research focuses on Islam, I am frequently involved in interfaith dialogue. In the past few months the need to engage in such dialogue has acquired fresh relevance. In the Christian-Muslim gatherings I have attended, Muslims often voice a particular worry. September 11 was a great tragedy, they remind me, not only for the nation and for those who were killed. September 11, these Muslims say, was also a tragedy and a great setback for Islam in America. For years to come, they realize, American Muslims will be struggling with the legacy of violence left by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. "September 11 is always there in the background when we try to tell other Americans about Islam's message of peace," one acquaintance said to me. "It's a real burden."

A burden, yes; but also an opportunity. September 11 challenges Muslims to reexamine their own tradition. A vision of Islam opposed to that promulgated by bin Laden needs to be articulated. Here in the United States, more freely than anywhere else, Muslims have the power to develop a humanistic form of their faith. Such a tolerant and progressive Islam has authentic roots in the Qur'an, and constitutes a form of Islam that has the potential to champion the rights of religious minorities and other groups that have been the target of discrimination, not only in Afghan society, but in many Muslim-majority countries throughout the world.

In negotiations for forming a post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan, participants in Bonn agreed to the outline of a government that would recognize the rights of persons previously unrecognized or persecuted under the Taliban regime, including women and minority populations such as Tajiks and Hazara Shiites. That's a step in the right direction. But such freedoms should be widened to include groups and individuals who have suffered not only in Afghanistan but elsewhere in the Islamic world. Specifically, Islam must protect those Muslims who choose to convert to another faith.

The question of religious conversion made headlines last year, when the Taliban arrested foreign aid workers and charged them with Christian missionary activities. The arrests highlighted a number of controversial issues. First, it exposed the risks run by foreign proselytizers, not only in Afghanistan but in other Muslim countries. Second, it made known the special plight of and dangers faced by Muslim converts to Christianity, who are labeled murtadds (apostates).

In Islamic societies, the term murtadd is one of the worst that can be applied to a human being. To renege on one's Islamic faith is to abandon one's identity. For their perceived disloyalty to the ummah (the Muslim community), apostates are regarded with loathing. Shunned by friends and family alike, they suffer social death. In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, apostates were also subject to the death penalty in the form of state-sponsored execution, as they are in Saudi Arabia.

For perspective on this issue consider a recent apostasy trial that took place in Kuwait and has been written about by the anthropologist Anh Nga Longva. The trial resulted in a recent convert to Christianity being stripped of his home and job and the right to remain married to his Muslim wife (Islamic law forbids the marriage of non-Muslim men to Muslim women). To understand the harshness of this punishment, Longva argues, members of Western secular societies should consider the revulsion directed against those found guilty of treason (such as government employees in America who sell state secrets to foreign powers). Guilty of betraying their communal identity, apostates are vilified for endangering the survival of an entire society.

In recent years a small number of courageous Muslim intellectuals have challenged the harsh penalties for apostasy specified in the shari'ah (the Islamic legal system). One opponent, the Tunisian scholar Mohamed Talbi, has argued that although the Qur'an warns of punishment for apostates in the afterlife, it specifies no penalty for such unbelievers in our present life on earth. Why is this? Because to do so would infringe on the religious liberty and moral autonomy human beings are endowed with. To justify the Qur'an's emphasis on freedom of choice in matters of faith, Talbi cites chapter 2, verse 256 of the Qur'an, which states, "La ikraha fi al-din" ("There is no place for compulsion in religion").

Another Muslim intellectual, the Sudanese scholar Abdullahi An-Na'im, goes further. Wherever Islamic law conflicts with basic freedoms--whether in issues involving religious identity, gender discrimination, or enslavement--traditional interpretations of shari'ah, he argues, must yield to recognized principles of universal human rights: that is, the concept that individuals are entitled to a fundamental dignity not because of their religious affiliation but simply because they are human beings.

Sadly, in many Islamic societies today, any Muslim who publicly advocates such views runs the risk of imprisonment or worse. Na'im's spiritual mentor, the courageous reformer Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, was hanged in Khartoum in January 1985 by order of the self-proclaimed Islamic government of the Sudan. His crime? Publicly protesting against the Islamic shari'ah laws that limited the rights of non-Muslim citizens. Taha argued for a reinterpretation of qur'anic passages that would maximize rather than restrict human rights in his country.

The Sudanese government condemned Taha as an apostate, not realizing that it is often the so-called heterodox, the spiritual renegades, who renew a religious tradition when it grows rigid and intolerant. Consider Martin Luther, whose protests against corruption in the church triggered a reformation that renewed religious life and challenged Christians everywhere to re-examine the meaning of their faith.

I referred earlier to a "humanistic Islam." It is my conviction that the kind of qur'anic understanding advocated by risk-taking intellectuals such as Taha, Na'im, and Talbi is an authentic form of the Muslim tradition. Such a humanistic Islam will not lose sight of the worth of all human beings regardless of their religious identity. It will welcome pluralism and diversity as worthwhile in themselves rather than as forces to be feared. A reformed Islam will recognize that the choice to convert from one faith to another involves the exercise of one's moral autonomy, the encounter between the individual and the sacred, an encounter that ultimately takes precedence over societal attempts to impose a rigid group allegiance.

Public discussions of the possibility of shaping a humanistic Islam are difficult to conduct in many Islamic societies. Such religious reform is often seen as a capitulation to the secular-minded West, commonly exemplified by the United States. There is a measure of truth in this charge. Ironically, the freest arena today for exploring alternative but faithful visions of Islam may well be the United States.

I have witnessed this fact in my own work. Most of my students are not Muslim. I often take these non-Muslims to Friday prayer services at local mosques and encourage them to interview members of the congregation. The Muslims we interview frequently express the idea that "America is the most Islamic country in the world." "How so?" my students ask in surprise. Because, they are told, in America there is freedom of prayer and freedom of thought, and the opportunity for persons to pursue their chosen form of worship without government interference. Such rights, my students are told, reflect Islamic values. Muslims who have emigrated from countries where the Islamic faith is hijacked to suit the agenda of authoritarian regimes especially prize these rights. Such regimes, among them the Taliban, have used religion to encourage political conformity at the expense of religious minorities. Thus the Taliban, during their time in power, persecuted Afghanistan's Shia Muslim minority as well as Afghan converts to Christianity.

Many American Muslims are understandably sensitive to negative representations of Islam in the media. Unaddressed, however, is the fact that the persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries contributes to Islam's negative image. American Muslims have too often remained silent in the face of human-rights abuses committed in the name of religion. This silence, I think, derives from a historical tradition emphasizing solidarity, a reluctance to break ranks. But such solidarity comes at a high price: the unchallenged claim of groups such as the Taliban to represent the highest ideals of Islam.

Increasingly, American Muslims are becoming aware of the need to speak out against extremists who call themselves Muslim while harnessing Islam in the service of intolerance. Despite the current tension between the United States and various Islamic countries, the United States may well be the best place in the world for Muslims to debate alternative visions of their faith.

David Pinault, an associate professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University, is the author of Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (Palgrave/Saint Martin's Press).