And We have sent down the Book [the Qur’an] to you with truth, confirming and conserving the previous Books. . . . We have appointed a law and a practice for every one of you. Had God willed, He would have made you a single community, but He wanted to test you regarding what has come to you. So compete with each other in doing good. Every one of you will return to God and He will inform you regarding the things about which you differed.
This striking Qu’ranic passage clearly describes a world in which Islam is one religion among others, not the only one. The differences between them will be reconciled only in the afterlife. Meanwhile, people of different faiths—Muslims, Christians, Jews, and all others—are expected to “compete with each other in doing good.
To be able to realize this pluralist vision, what we would need is a world in which all faiths could freely express and advance themselves.
Granted, such a pluralist world sounds different from the ideal of the medieval Muslim scholars—the Abode of Islam. This term, referred to lands ruled by Muslims and governed according to the Shariah. Only such places then looked safe for practicing Islam. The rest of the world was either hostile (Abode of War—i.e., lands ruled by non-Muslims) or only conditionally safe (Abode of Treaty—i.e., lands ruled by non-Muslims who made treaties with a Muslim state).
Yet none of these medieval categories can explain the modern world. Today, in fact, some Muslims seem to find it easier to live by their religion in the non-Muslim countries of the West, which grant more safety and freedom than some of the Muslim-majority countries with dictatorial regimes.
So it is time to stop seeing the world as divided between an Abode of Islam versus an Abode of War. Rather, what exists now is an Abode of Freedom versus an Abode of Tyranny. The former is what Muslims should seek.
In this free world, there surely will be ideas that Muslims, including me, will not like. What we need to do is to respond to them with reason and wisdom—an effort that might help us revitalize the intellectual dynamism of our earliest generations, as in the way the Mutazilites dealt with the challenges, and the contributions, of Greek philosophy.
