ISLAM-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE

52 8. Evolution attempts Various voices have been raised lately to try to interpret the Koranic laws in the light of modern law. We cite for example Ro- ger Garaudy, a French convert to Islam, Sudanese Abdullah Ahmed El Naim, the late Egyptian Minister of Education Taha Hussein, Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel laurea- te. Together with them many other pre- stigious representatives of Muslim culture propose revisions and changes. These intellectuals propose to read the Koran with the eyes of the twentieth century, purifying it from the literalism advocated by fundamentalists. They ar- gue that the sharia would contain a true inflation of hadith, that is, of rules derived from alleged sayings of Muhammad. Ac- cording to them they would have been in- troduced by the first caliphs to give a form of sacredness to their own government. According to them, the violations of hu- man rights in contemporary Islam would not derive from the religious message it- self, but from a series of perversions and contaminations entered into the juridical corpus through particular traditions deve- loped in the Near East and Arabia. The attitudes to be reviewed, according to them, are essentially these: 1) the closure on the past, with the stiffening of the interpretation of the Koran and the prohibition of a new exegesis which, al- though not distorting the principles, may be more adherent to the times; 2) the discriminatory attitude towards other religions by the mere fact of con- sidering Islam the only and true religion, ignoring their message and denying that there are other ways that lead to God; 3) the legalism that deprives Islam of its dimension of interiority and love, and caused the ostracism and persecution of Sufism by the Sunni communities; 4) the impossibility of religious expression in Islamic countries, where those who publicly express opinions contrary to the Muslim one risk severe penalties, when not lynching; 5) criticism of the West for asylum offered to extremist Muslims under repression in their country. Then there is the knot of communication and the free circulation of ideas, so that every man develops his own opinions. According to these modernist Muslims it is possible to review sharia so that it re- sponds to the needs of the contemporary world without losing the originality of the religious message of Islam. The funda- mentalists make the mistake of applying a thousand-year-old rules and concepts, born in completely different historical cir- cumstances. As regards human rights, many steps re- main to be taken, such as the possibility of freely choosing his religion even with the abandonment of Islam without incurring blackmail and the risk of being killed, the possibility for a Muslim woman to marry a a man of another religion, the possibility of accessing the highest public functions regardless of their religion. A commu- nication and free information effort and television and other media debates are desirable to create a free circulation of ideas, and that every man can freely de- velop his fundamental life choices. According to the modernists, it is neces- sary to give life to an Islamic shari'a that responds to the needs of the contempo- rary world while not discussing the firm heads of faith and human values that every religion seeks to enhance. The error of the fundamentalist currents and the de- fenders of the return to the ancient (sala- fiyin) is in the "insistence to want to apply to the world of today systems and con- cepts codified in the X century. According