Fadlallah and a forgotten liberal

The death of Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah brought on a veritable riptide of praise for the departed cleric from all quarters. Whatever one thinks of Fadlallah – and he was not someone easily encapsulated in a sound bite – the reaction was a trifle odd, only underscoring the difficulties faced by Arab liberals.

Why was the effusiveness odd? Because what made Fadlallah interesting, namely his innovative views on Islamic doctrine (for example his sanctioning of therapeutic cloning), were likely unknown to most of those extolling his qualities; while the views he was known for – his approval of suicide bombings and his antagonism toward Israel and the United States – were not particularly original, at least in revealing a man at stimulating odds with his environment.

You have to admire, for example, the acrobatics of elision that Britain’s ambassador in Beirut, Frances Guy, engaged in when writing this passage on her blog: “When you visited [Fadlallah] you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person… Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon’s shores… The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace.” (As the blog post provoked mounting criticism in numerous Western media outlets, the British Embassy in Beirut took it off the website.)

My friend and colleague Rami Khouri was equally generous in an article penned for the Daily Star. He argued that Fadlallah’s greatest achievement “was to provide a living example of the combination of the best qualities that any Arab or Muslim could aspire to in this era of great mediocrity, corruption, materialism, mindless violence and abuse of power throughout much of the Arab world. Fadlallah was – as Americans are fond of saying of sports figures who are talented, smart, humble, generous and personable – ‘the complete package.’”

In the United States, CNN’s Middle East editor, Octavia Nasr, paid a steep price for putting out a complimentary tweet on Fadlallah after news of his death. She had announced: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” Earlier this week she was fired by the company despite having issued a statement clarifying her views, which included a compulsory denunciation of his endorsement of suicide attacks.

These reactions were less suggestive than those from Iran and from within the Lebanese Shia community pointing to Fadlallah’s contentious relationships with Tehran and with Hezbollah. But in their own way they did tell us something quite disturbing, and we can accentuate that something by noting the low-key response, especially among Westerners and Westernized Arab liberals, to the death on Monday of the Egyptian scholar of Islam Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid.

In 1995, Abu Zeid made headlines when the Cairo Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a plaintiff who sought to forcibly divorce him from his wife, on the grounds that he was an apostate. What had angered Abu Zeid’s detractors was that he advocated an interpretive approach to the Quran, treating it as a text worthy of discussion, against a more rigid approach that deals with the holy book as the inviolable word of God. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad called for Abu Zeid to be killed, and because of the increasingly intimidating atmosphere prevailing in Egypt he left the country, eventually resettling in Holland.

What the tributes to Fadlallah show us, against the backdrop of the relative silence surrounding Abu Zeid’s death throughout the Middle East, is that things are out of kilter when it comes to liberalism in the region. An essentially conservative cleric has been played up as the vanguard of progressiveness and dialogue, while a scholar who sought to introduce a freethinking outlook toward religion, who had to go into exile to escape possible assassination, departed from this world with little comment – certainly not from the British ambassador to Egypt, Dominic Asquith, who also hosts a personal embassy blog.

Who is guilty of this state of affairs? Spread the blame around. When those who shape Arab opinion – foreign representatives and Arab journalists and academics – can’t get their priorities straight, don’t expect others to get theirs straight either. Fadlallah was a fascinating individual, worthy of study and, at times, esteem. But in reading the passages used to describe him, you get a powerful sense that the accolades were really directed at an imagined Fadlallah, the product of the authors’ yearning to conjure up a tolerant Islam in clerical garb.

That’s where the problem lies. Why should diplomats and publicists strive so hard to seek the higher liberal virtues, above all dialogue and broadmindedness, in what is among the most insular recesses of Muslim societies, the clergy, while habitually ignoring those Arabs who display such virtues in their everyday life – in their scholarship, lifestyle or profession? Are the clerics and the Muslim traditionalists perceived as more authentic? Does giving rare courageous liberals their due mean taking something away from the Arab world in general, which so many Westerners and Westernized Arabs want to believe in, usually against the West, the source of imperialisms past?

These questions merit an answer, if only so that the Nasr Hamed Abu Zeids of this world are left with more choices than banishment.