Christopher Hitchens, in whose memory I am honoured to be giving this talk,

was nothing if not an enthusiast for free speech. Asked once by a Muslim why
the title of his most famous book, God Is Not Great, made sacrilegous play with
the Arabic formula Allahu akbar, he did not pull his punches. The most toxic
form that religion takes, he answered, is the Islamic form. Even though he
was quick to add that other religions, in other periods of history, had been
equally pernicious, it is rare for a public intellectual to make quite so blunt a
statement. The proposition that Islam is especially intolerant, especially prone
to violence, is one that has come to possess for liberals as well as Muslims the
authentic quality of blasphemy. The possibility that sanction might exist
within the Quran for the brutal crimes committed by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic
State is an upsetting one for all decent and generous-hearted people nonMuslim as well as Muslim to countenance.

Which is why, no doubt, whenever there is some particularly monstrous jihadi

atrocity, Western leaders can be relied upon to pose as experts on Islam, and
insist that the perpetrators are either distorting the religion, or else do not
rank as Muslims at all. Typical was US Secretary of State John Kerry earlier
this year, when he declared flatly that the hateful ideology of the Islamic
State has nothing to do with Islam. Much the same presumption underlies
our own governments policies on de-radicalisation. The very phrase is telling.
De-radicalisation implies both that there is a normative, authentic Islam,
compatible with the standards of a liberal, secular Britain, and that there are
misinterpretations of it distortions that are not really islamic at all.

There are, though, immense problems with this strategy. When Western
governments deny the title of Muslim to the Islamic State, they play the same
lethal game as the jihadis themselves, who condemn their Muslim opponents

as heretics or apostates, the better to justify their elimination. It is not for a

Prime Minister or a Home Secretary to play at being a theologian. Politicians
who take it on themselves to define what is and is not authentic Islam are
buying into the notion that such a thing actually exists. But unless one is a
fundamentalist believer it does not. A religion, like any other manifestation
of human culture, is a porous and variable thing, forever mutating, a
continuously evolving dialogue between the present and the past, made up of
multitudes of voices. Rather than a single radio station, it is a whole series of
points on a bandwidth. Naturally, then, the definition of an extremist will
depend where on that bandwidth one is.

Which is why, of course, jihadis do not tend to think of themselves as

extremists at all. Rather, they see themselves as paragons of righteous
behaviour: doing Gods will as expressed in the Quran, and obedient to the
example of Muhammad. In the Messenger of God you have a beautiful
model of behaviour. So proclaims the Quran. It matters, then, to jihadis, no
less than to Muslims who would never in a million years contemplate
smashing up antique sculptures, taking sex slaves, or killing those who mock
the Prophet, that sanction for what they do is indeed to be found in
biographies of Muhammad. To close our eyes to this, and to imagine that
what Western governments characterise as Islamic extremism owes nothing
to the example of the Prophet, is wilful blindness. When beheading an infidel
seems to have been enshrined as the one deed to which every jihadi aspires, it
is surely not irrelevant that Muhammad himself is said to have owned a
sword that can be translated as Cleaver of Vertebrae. Why try to deradicalise jihadis without also attempting to de-radicalise the prophet who
as the beautiful model of behaviour set before them by God is bound to
serve them as their surest inspiration and role-model?

It wld be disingenuous of me, of course, to pretend that I did not know the
answer to this question. If there is one thing that every non-Muslim has
learned about Islam over the past twenty-five years, it is that questioning the
moral perfection of Muhammad is akin to poking a hornets nest with a stick.
From The Satanic Verses to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, there has been no surer
way of provoking pain and anger among Muslims than to suggest that his
career might not have been an unmitigatedly estimable one. Indeed, it can
sometimes seem that many are readier to protest an insult to their prophet
than to their god. Even though, obviously, the strictures of Islams traditional
schools of jurisprudence which mandate execution for any unbeliever who
insults the Prophet, unless at that juncture he accepts Islam do not apply
in Britain, a nervous sense now exists among many non-Muslims that talking
about Muhammad is off-limits to them. Like it or not, an unspoken blasphemy
taboo has been imposed upon the West. As a result, the inspiration that jihadis
draw from Muhammads example remains largely unexplored.

The consequences of this are pernicious in the extreme. On the one hand,
claims trumpeted by Islamic State propagandists themselves go unexamined:
that when they bulldoze Assyrian antiquities, for instance, they are inspired
by Muhammads destruction of idols in Mecca, or that when they take Yazidi
girls as sex-slaves, they are emulating the Prophets relations with Mariyya,
his Christian concubine. Simultaneously, the field is left free for those
determined to put the most hostile spin on Muhammads life. The image of
him as a violent warlord, ever-ready to execute Jews and order the
assassination of his critics, is not exclusive to jihadis. It is one that lies at the
heart of polemics against Islam as well. As a result, between those who claim
the sanction of Muhammads example for their violence, and those who claim

that violence and Islam are synonymous, there exists an unholy alliance. Both,
from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, share the same presumptions:
that the truth about Muhammads life can be known, and that they alone have
arrived at the truth.

In fact, though, there are and always have been as many versions of
Muhammad as there are varieties of Islam. What is the split between Sunnis
and Shia, after all, if not a disagreement over his intentions? His biography
has never been something stable. It has always been evolving. The battle to
save Islam from the horrors that are currently cannibalising it is also a battle
to define the Prophet. Jihadis cannot possibly be de-radicalised unless
Muhammad is de-radicalised as well. Non-Muslims, whose stake in the
project is far from merely academic, have a perfect right to contribute to it; but
the wellsprings for reclaiming Muhammad from the jihadis must ultimately
be located within Islam, and the traditions of Islamic scholarship. Otherwise,
in the long run, they cannot possibly be effective.

The challenge that faces Muslims in the West is as simple to state as it can
seem difficult to resolve: what to do with the traditions about Muhammad
that are incompatible with the mainstream values of a liberal, secular
democracy? The issue has been rendered particularly pressing by the sheer
pace of moral and ethical change that has taken place over the past few
decades. As recently as the seventies, for instance, biographers of Muhammad
seem not to have been unduly perturbed by the proposition that an older man
might sleep with a young girl. In 1970, John Glubb, erstwhile chief of staff to
the King of Jordan, published a book called The Life & Times of Muhammad. In
it, he detailed the marriage of the Prophet to Aisha, a girl almost fifty years
younger than him. This information derived from Aisha herself, who

narrated that the Prophet married her when she was a girl of six and he
consummated the marriage when she was a girl of nine. Glubb, far from
raising an eyebrow at this, seems to have found it all rather sweet. When she
was married, he wrote fondly, she brought her toys with her to her room in
the Apostles house. Glubb was heir to a long tradition. No one before him,
reaching right the way back through the Middle Ages, seems to have had any
problem at all with Muhammads taking a nine year-old to bed.

Since Glubbs book was published, though, of course, there has been a
profound sea-change in attitudes towards what has come to be defined as
underage sex. Online, where hostility to Islam is often expressed in venomous
forms, the charge that Muhammad was a paedophile has become a staple of
anti-Muslim polemic. The discrepancy in age between him and Aisha has
become a difficult and painful topic for many Muslims to handle. What
previously, even four decades ago, was barely seen as a problem at all has
since come to rank as an almost existential one for Islam. How is the Prophets
status as a model for humanity to be squared with his marriage to a six yearold?

Various answers have been suggested. In the Caliphate of the Islamic State,
the very question is disdainfully brushed aside: what was good enough for
Muhammad, so its ideologues argue, is good enough for all those devout
Muslims who may wish to sleep with a nine year-old girl. Outside the living
hell of Raqqa and Mosul, though, responses have been more considered and
anguished. One solution has been to relativise the marriage: to argue that it
reflected the cultural assumptions of the time. This, while perfectly true,
naturally renders problematic any notion that the Prophet is a model blindly
to be copied in 21st century Britain. A second strategy, which questions the

reliability of our sources for Aishas marriage, raises similar questions for any
Muslim wedded to a literalist understanding of Muhammads biography. The
account of her marriage attributed to Aisha was recorded some two centuries
after the supposed event, and few historians today would credit its reliability
as an authentic record of what actually happened. It is intriguing and
potentially momentous, though, that Muslim scholars are now prepared to do
the same. Discarding a previously canonical detail of Muhammads biography
is akin to tugging on the thread of a carpet. If Aishas marriage age can be
rejected as unreliable because it scandalises contemporary moral standards,
why not sayings attributed to Muhammad which mandate the death penalty
for apostasy and homosexuality, or divine approval for violence? Why not, in
short, finesse away anything in the Prophets biography that offends against
contemporary standards?

To do this need not necessarily be seen as surrendering to Western dictates.

Just the opposite, in fact. When Muslims today read Muhammads biography
as a record of historical fact, they are being truer to the traditions of 19th
century Victorian biography than to those of their own faith. In the Middle
Ages, it was less the historical facts of the Prophets life that concerned most
Muslims than his cosmic role in the divine scheme of things, his status as the
beloved of God, his spiritual beauty as a ruby among stones. Since the
Colonial Era, though, when European authors began to subject Muhammads
life to their own methods of inquiry, the influence of Western biographical
presumptions has profoundly transformed the way that Muslims relate to
their prophet. Indeed, there is a sense in which biographies of Muhammad
today remain the last redoubt of the Great Man school of history: one which
thrived back in the era of Thomas Carlyle, but has otherwise gone terminally
out of fashion.

All of which urgently needs to be appreciated when attempting to make sense

of the role that the Prophet has traditionally played in Islam. That Aisha is
reported to have been a virgin when she married, for instance, tells us nothing
about the sexual tastes of the historical Muhammad. Rather, it signifies the
potency of her status as the Mother of Believers, a woman so wedded to the
cause of Islam that her entire adult life was consecrated to the service of the
Prophet. Two hundred, even a hundred years ago, most Muslims would
instinctively have understood this. Since then, though, Islam has been
weathered and transformed by the same forces that have served to desacralise
the Western world. Texts written symbolically, as the scholar Kecia Ali has
succinctly put it, came to be read literally. The religion, as a result, is in the
midst of a process of transformation as significant and destablising as any in
its history what might almost, perhaps, be described as a reformation.

Certainly, in Islam today, as in Christianity during the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, the spectrum of those who practise the faith is
widening to convulsive effect. In the on-going battle for its soul, the figure of
Muhammad has a central perhaps the central role to play. The brutal
literalism of the jihadis is critically dependent upon their conviction that they
have pulled down the great scaffolding of tradition and commentary, and
penetrated to the supposedly luminous truth of the example that the Prophet
provides. How, then, is this conceit to be contested? The central role must
clearly be played by the traditions of Islam itself. For too long, the great
heritage of its medieval civilisation has been a critically under-utilised
resource. Returning to an appreciation of Muhammads role that is mystical
rather than legalistic, and cosmic rather than earth-bound, should do much to

facilitate the emergence of an Islam that is both true to its own traditions and
compatible with Western norms.

Simultaneously, there are trends in non-Muslim scholarship that can help

with the battle against jihadism as well. Over the past 40 years, these have
revolutionised the academic understanding of the origins of Islam. It is a
piquant irony that the jihadi impulse to tread down the weeds and briars of
tradition, and return to an understanding of Islams beginnings that does not
depend upon subsequent accretions and distortions to the historical record,
has had a close parallel in the departments of Western universities. Where
jihadis locate the radiant light of certainty, though, non-Muslim scholars of
early Islam have tended to find the opposite. The life of Muhammad,
dependent as it is on sources written centuries after he lived, has increasingly
come to seem a thing very difficult to define as fact. The consensus among
scholars now would probably be that we know less about the historical
Muhammad than we do about the historical Jesus. In time, this understanding
is bound to have an impact upon the literalism with which many Muslims
today are tempted to interpret their scriptures. When the evidence for what
the historical Muhammad said and did is so patchy and tendentious, it
becomes increasingly difficult to insist that the inheritance of writings about
him is not thoroughly contingent. At the moment, the notion that Muslim
beliefs are as historically conditioned as any other ideology inherited from the
past is seen by most Muslims as highly threatening but in the long run this
will surely change. Recognising that the stories told about Muhammad are
largely fictions bred of a particular context and period should facilitate the
emergence, over the course of the next century, of a clearly Western form of
Islam.

It is one, I hope and trust, that Christopher Hitchens would no longer find
quite so toxic.