In light of the heartbreaking situation of Mariam Yahya Ibrahim – a pregnant young woman who married a Christian man sentenced to hanging for apostasy in Sudan- I have seen a number of posts on atheist and humanist pages condemning Islam as “evil” and as is typical of me, I ended up in a lengthy facebook debate on the matter with people who’s main argument was that “as you move towards the people who practice the most extreme forms of Islam, the closer to the text those forms tend to be”.

I don’t want to address the issue of Mariam in this post, although I find her situation to be incredibly sad and I would urge all who aren’t aware of her story to look it up and speak out where possible. I also don’t want to talk specifically about Islamic extremism in this post – what I want to do is question this notion that the fundamentalists are following the ‘truest’ form of a religion and that this therefore makes religion an inherently evil thing – brushing aside the fact that this is a completely abrahamic-centered approach to criticising religion, I see a number of problems with it.

First of all, to claim that religious fundamentalists are ‘truer’ to a religion because their actions seem to closely reflect the guidance of their holy book is to put the religious text at the centre of the religion. Putting aside the theological terms in which the religious text is often the centre of the religion and taking a social-science, or ‘outsider’, standpoint to trying to understand religion it is essential that we take the adherents of a religion to be its centre. A religious text is static* whereas human beings are fluid and under constant influence from the changing social and cultural ideas to which we are subjected and it from understanding them that we can begin to understand a religion in all its technicolour.

Secondly, the argument that “as you move towards the people who practice the most extreme forms of Islam, the closer to the text those forms tend to be” is entirely reliant on the presumption that one knows exactly what the text says and how one should adhere to it. Fundamentalists take a ‘literal’ approach to a holy text, generally reading it within their own social setting with little regard for the context in which it was written – certainly not close adherence to a text in my book. Most religious texts were written centuries, if not millenia, ago in languages now dead and full of words with unclear meanings and cultural references that we will never understand – all this to say, if you assume that you know what a text says or what close adherence to it looks like, then you are sorely mistaken.

So, lets not conflate Mariam’s sad state if affairs with Islam as a whole – let’s recognise the huge diversity which Islam encompasses and the social and cultural pressures which also played their part in Mariam’s sentencing. Let’s define religious beliefs and practices by the people who follow them, and not by their text.

*Again, noting that this is not the typical theological stance, but is such from this perspective