Muslim Heretics Conference

From The Economist print edition

With some exceptions, an increasingly hard line across the Muslim world

“CAN a person who is Muslim choose a religion other than Islam?” When Egypt’s grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, pondered that dilemma in an article published last year, many of his co-religionists were shocked that the question could even be asked.

And they were even more scandalised by his conclusion. The answer, he wrote, was yes, they can, in the light of three verses in the Koran: first, “Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion”; second, “Whosoever will, let him believe, and whosoever will, let him disbelieve”; and, most famously, “There is no compulsion in religion.”

Illustration by Garry Neill

The sheikh’s pronouncement was certainly not that of a wet liberal; he agrees that anyone who deserts Islam is committing a sin and will pay a price in the hereafter, and also that in some historical circumstances (presumably war between Muslims and non-Muslims) an individual’s sin may also amount to “sedition against one’s society”. But his opinion caused a sensation because it went against the political and judicial trends in many parts of the Muslim world, and also against the mood in places where Muslims feel defensive.

In the West, many prominent Muslims would agree with the mufti’s scripturally-based view that leaving Islam is a matter between the believer and God, not for the state. But awkwardly, the main traditions of scholarship and jurisprudence in Islam—both the Shia school and the four main Sunni ones—draw on Hadiths (words and deeds ascribed with varying credibility to Muhammad) to argue in support of death for apostates. And in recent years sentiment in the Muslim world has been hardening. In every big “apostasy” case, the authorities have faced pressure from sections of public opinion, and from Islamist factions, to take the toughest possible stance.

In Malaysia, people who try to desert Islam can face compulsory “re-education”. Under the far harsher regime of Afghanistan, death for apostasy is still on the statute book, despite the country’s American-backed “liberation” from the tyranny of the Taliban. The Western world realised this when Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who had lived in Germany, was sentenced to die after police found him with a Bible. After pressure from Western governments, he was allowed to go to Italy. What especially startled Westerners was the fact that Afghanistan’s parliament, a product of the democracy for which NATO soldiers are dying, tried to bar Mr Rahman’s exit, and that street protests called for his execution.

The fact that he fled to Italy is one of the factors that have made the issue of Muslim-Christian conversion a hot topic in that country. There are several others. During this year’s Easter celebrations, Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born journalist who is now a columnist in Italy, was publicly baptised as a Catholic by Pope Benedict; the convert hailed his “liberation” from Islam, and has used his column to celebrate other cases of Muslims becoming Christian. To the delight of some Catholics and the dismay of others, he has defended the right of Christians to proselytise among Muslims, and denounced liberal churchmen who are “soft” on Islam.

Muslims in Italy and elsewhere have called Mr Allam a provocateur and chided Pope Benedict for abetting him. But given that many of Italy’s Muslims are converts (and beneficiaries of Europe’s tolerance), Mr Allam says his critics are hypocrites, denying him a liberty which they themselves have enjoyed.

If there is any issue on which Islam’s diaspora—experiencing the relative calmness of inter-faith relations in the West—might be able to give a clearer moral lead, it is surely this one. But even in the West, speaking out for the legal and civil right to “apostasise” can carry a cost. Usama Hasan, an influential young British imam, recently made the case for the right to change religions—only to find himself furiously denounced and threatened on Islamist websites, many of them produced in the West.

Islam and apostasy | In death’s shadow | Economist.com

“We Muslims Have No Church!”

Human rights and secularism, says Ahmed An-Na’im, create a space for protest. And, surprisingly, the lawyer, who is originally from Sudan, sees in the Muslim law system, the Sharia, the third pillar of a humane civil society. Interview by Edith Kresta
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Ahmed An-Na’im: “Every orthodoxy began as heresy” | The Sudanese born Abdullah Ahmed An-Na’im teaches law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Active in the fields of civil, human and international rights, he sees the Islamic Sharia as an important point of reference for him. The Muslim law system, which dates back to the seventh century, must, in his opinion, always be open to being questioned.
It can, however, even today, provide answers through fresh interpretations, which each person must be prepared to carry out for him or herself. The Sharia is not, according to him, to be thought of as a national law, but rather as a frame of moral values similar to that provided for Christianity by the Ten Commandments.
“One must engage with a situation as it actually is,” says An-Na’im, “so religion is certainly going to play an important role in social development in Islamic countries”. The lawyer is currently working on a project entitled “The Future of the Sharia”, which is looking at the effects of modern global conditions on Islamic societies. He has come to Berlin at the invitation of the Irmgard Coninx Foundation.
Professor An-Na’im, you are very much involved in human, civil and international rights issues; at the same time, however, you also like to turn to the Sharia for guidance. Do the two things go together?
Ahmed An-Na’im: I do not distinguish between secularism and religion because I believe that in the secular there is much that is religious and it is difficult to separate them. I do think, however, that religion is a very strong social and mobilising force. If you exclude religion from the social and political processes, you will find yourself being cut off from those who are religious.
And that would mean, in your country, Sudan, very many!
An-Na’im: Yes, human rights and secularism need political support. If you fail to convince people that secularism and human rights are good for them, and if you do not manage to convince them of this in terms of their own religious beliefs, then you leave the field to the fundamentalists. You then give them the opportunity to mobilise the power of faith for their own political purposes. And, by the way, religion has not disappeared from Europe either! Those values which society chooses to uphold, whether in national institutions, or laws, are all religious values.
Is religion to you then the ethical-cultural tradition?
An-Na’im: Yes, in one sense. I do not believe that secularism has any ready answers to profound ethical problems. In order to fulfil its function, secularism needs to be ethically minimalist. There are many questions in which it cannot interfere. It can handle the basics about how we can live with and maintain respect for one another. But answers to questions on things like abortion or the right to take one’s own life must be sought elsewhere. For most people, it would be religion that they would turn to.
In Europe, the word Sharia is associated with hands being cut off, with stoning or the oppression of women.
An-Na’im: First of all, I believe that religion and the state should be separate, institutionally. If one looks at Muslim history, one sees that the two have always been treated as separate entities. The idea that politics and the state go together is postcolonial. In Muslim history, this came about only in the 20th century. Before then an Islamic state, like the one in Iran, was something unknown.
What is it then that you mean by Sharia?
An-Na’im: The Sharia appears in the Koran in the sense that believers look at the sources of their faith in order to find guidance. The Sharia is not a law. The state cannot decide to make a family law out of it. It would then no longer be the Sharia, but rather the political will of the state.
But the Sharia does, nevertheless, affect the justice system. Take the case of the law of succession, for example, where women in Muslim countries, as in many others, do not have equality.
All that is only a legitimising discourse for the existing power relations. If you look at the Islamic world then you see that there is an enormous difference in the interpretation of individual points. It is always, in the final analysis, the political will to get something done that is decisive. Islam, Marxism or nationalism can all be made to work for one’s own cause.
So religion should not be treated any differently to other ideologies that serve to legitimate claims to power?
An-Na’im: That’s right. But the right of every Muslim to live his or her life in accordance with the Sharia must be accepted. One must be sure to guard against any authorities that assume the right of interpretation for themselves. A Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a Christian man. Why not? It is the Muslim’s duty to ask why. We do not accept any single religious body as authority. We have no Church.
In Germany an attempt is being made to set up a Muslim association with which the state can negotiate on behalf of Muslims living here.
An-Na’im: I believe this to be completely misguided. I have difficulties with the idea of someone else defining what my religion should mean to me. No one should be given the power of deciding what is right or wrong.
What would the alternative be?
An-Na’im: Civil participation. Full civil participation. Whether I am a Muslim or not is irrelevant to me as a citizen. It is the duty of the state to treat me as a citizen. If I am in need of money so that my children can receive religious education, then the state must help me. These are civil rights. Without this you get a clergy which will accentuate difference. This, in turn, makes integration of Muslims more problematic because they are then identified as Muslim, while their fellow citizens are defined through their nationality, not their religious affiliations.
For you then it’s about deconstructing what lies behind the veil. So, what is behind it?
An-Na’im: Power, privileges, hegemony. These things are all the result of human actions, in religion as in politics. There is no divine in the abstract.
Do you believe in Revelation?
An-Na’im: It is always human beings who tell us what God says. This cannot be separated from questions of power. It all has to do with human relations. When we talk about Muslims rather than about Islam, then we are talking about the social context. And it is people who form, or fail to change it. Human rights and secularism are so important to me because they create a space within which I may protest.
Does your religion help you to find answers to your questions?
An-Na’im: Yes, but I reserve the right to answer them myself. There is much that religion gives me. There are some Muslims who see me as a heretic; that’s okay, as long as they don’t kill me.
This all sounds very modern, very individualistic. Does the Sharia, for you, rank among the legitimising bases of modern thought?
An-Na’im: There is nothing that has not already been thought, debated or rejected in the 1500-year history of Islam. My thinking is part of a long tradition.
How do those who lack your education go about finding their own answers in religion?
An-Na’im: If you want to have control over your own life, there is no alternative but to pursue education. If you want the power of self-determination, you cannot have anyone as guardian of your religion or your values. Whatever your value system is, it is you, not the Imam who must decide what is relevant and what isn’t. It is about taking responsibility for yourself. What I want to say is, heresy is necessary if you want a living religion.
Every orthodoxy began as heresy. All religions have their roots in heresy. Christianity began as a Jewish heresy; Islam was once a Christian-Jewish heresy. It is in breaking with tradition that we strike the vein of greatest creativity. This is true of all societies. So celebrate heresy! In Europe you have both the right and the opportunity to do so.
It is not so easy for many Muslim women, though, who find themselves oppressed or threatened in the name of honour or religion. What is your advice to them?
An-Na’im: Protest! Fight! There is no progress without struggle, not even for women in Europe. Just think about it: For how long have women in this country had the vote? Less than ninety years. One always has to fight against particular interpretations of one’s own culture. There is no other alternative.
Interview conducted by Edith Kresta
© TAZ/Qantara.de 2006
Translated from the German by Ron Walker

Qantara.de - Interview with Ahmed An-Na’im - “We Muslims Have No Church!”

Thursday, 24 July 2008 00:00 www.daily.pk

Before addressing the subject of Muslim chemistry, however, one crucial matter needs to be raised. It concerns the use of the word Alchemy instead of chemistry. This is another instance of historical corruption fooling so many who have no perception of the depths some scholarship can descend to in order to convey distorted images of aspects of history, such as that of Islamic science. Alchemy, indeed, is a corrupt translation of the Arabic word Chemia (chemistry,) preceded by the article Al (which means: the), and which the Arabs always use (like the French and others for that matter) in front of their subject such as Al-Tib (medicine) al-Riyadiyat (mathematics) etc… If this was applied to other subjects, it would become al-medicine; al-mathematics, al-geography and so on… Only Baron Carra de Vaux had had the presence of mind to pointing to this, however briefly. Somehow al-Chemy should be translated literally The Chemistry and not Alchemy in English; and La Chimie and not l’alchimie in French. The fact that only Westerners translated or dealt with the subject, followed by rather very respectful or shy Muslim scholars means that this corrupt word of al-chemy has remained, and has become the norm.

The reason why alchemy is used instead of chemistry might have another motive behind it. Chemistry means a modern science; alchemy means the amateur, the occult, the second or third rate. Alchemy belongs to the Muslims; chemistry, of course, does not; instead is the realm of the good. This notion conveyed by some Western scholars, that alchemy ended with the Muslims and chemistry began with the Westerners has no historical ground. The reason is simple: all sciences began in some part of the world, most likely China or the Ancient Middle East, or India, at level: 1, the most basic, and then graduated to levels 2, 3, 4, and higher, through the centuries, until they reached us at the level they are, and will evolve in different places in the future. This is the story of every science, and of every sign of our modern world. Thus, it was not that we had alchemy at one point, and then, with the Europeans it became chemistry. This is a crass notion like much else coming from scholars holding such a view. Chemistry began under one form, associated with occult and similar practices, and then evolved, gradually becoming more refined through the centuries until it took our modern forms and rules. Many elements concourse to support this point. Here they follow.

Muslims Revolutionised Chemistry
First and foremost many of the products or discoveries made by the Muslims have become part of our modern chemical world; in fact were revolutions in the advance of the science. Mathe summarises the legacy of Muslim chemists, which include the discovery of alcohol, nitric and sulphuric acids, silver nitrate and potassium, the determination of the weight of many bodies, the mastery of techniques of sublimation, crystallization and distillation. Muslim chemistry also took many industrial uses including: tinctures and their applications in tanning and textiles; distillation of plants, of flowers, the making of perfumes and therapeutic pharmacy. More specifically, some such advances that have revolutionised our world are expertly raised by Multhauf. Thus in the De aluminibus, composed in Muslim Spain, (whose author Multhauf does not recognise) but could be Al-Majriti, are described experiments to obtain the chloride of mercury, corrosive sublimate (Hg Cl2), process and outcome which mark the beginning of synthetic chemistry. Multhauf notes indeed that the chloride of mercury obtained did not just become part of the chemist’s repertoire but also inspired the discovery of other synthetic substances. Corrosive sublimate is capable of chlorinating other materials, and this, Multhauf, again, notes, marks the beginning of mineral acids. In the field of industrial chemistry and heavy chemicals, Multhauf notes again that one of the greatest advances of the medieval times was the manufacture of alum from `aluminous’ rocks, through artificial weathering of alunite, which he describes. And in the same context the Muslims managed to perform the crystallisation of `ammonia alum’ (ammonium aluminium sulphate). Multhauf, however, falls in the same trap as many of his colleagues, asserting in his conclusion that it was European Renaissance which gave chemistry a secure and significant place in science, and that with the Muslims all that was, was `alchemy;’ and Multhauf states this in full contradiction of what he had just described, and so expertly, and he had himself classified under modern chemistry.

Fair Historians of Chemistry
A scholar who from the initial point gave Islamic chemistry its due, and hardly failed to call it so, was Holmyard. Holmyard, indeed, has the right qualifications to discuss Islamic che mistry, and more than any other scholar, with the exception of Ruska, and also Levey. Holmyard is indeed both a chemist with great reknown, and also an Arabist in training, rightly qualified to look at the science from the expert angles, unlike others, who are either Arabists and so understand little in chemistry, or are experts in chemistry and understand nothing in Arabic. Holmyard notes that the rise and progress of Islamic chemistry is given very little space, and whatever information exists is erroneous and misleading, a fact due partly to Kopp’s unfavourable opinion of Islamic chemistry, and the hasty conclusions drawn by Berthelot from his superficial studies of Islamic material. And neither Kopp, nor Berthelot were Arabists, which, as Holmyard notes, makes their conclusions on Muslim chemistry unable to stand the test of criticism as more information is available. Of course, today’s scholars can always ignore evidence that has come out since Kopp and Berthelot, and still stick with their misinformation, errors, or distorted statements, and blame such on either one of them. This tactic is in fact very common amongst scholars writing in any field of history, who shape and reshape events at will and have all the necessary sources and references to justify their writing. Some `scholars’ even go as far as blaming the material in the library of their university, stating in their preface or conclusion that any shortcoming in their work was the result of their access to such limited material.
To return to Holmyard, in his Makers of Chemistry, tracing the evolution of the science from the very early times until our century, and even if not having at his disposal the vast amount of information many of today’s scholars have, he produced an excellent and encompassing, thorough work. It includes none of the usual gaps of centuries one finds with other historians; nor does it include the discrepancies caused by ’sudden’, ‘enlightened’ `miraculous’ breakthroughs out of nothing.

Transmission of Chemistry to Europe
Of course Muslim chemistry, like other sciences was heavily translated into Latin, and also into local languages, which explains its spread to Europe (more on this in the chapter on the transfer of Muslim science to Europe). Many of the manuscripts translated have anonymous authors. Of the known ones, Robert of Chester, a twelfth century scholar, translated Liber de compositione alchemise. At about the same time, Hugh of Santalla made the earliest Latin translation of lawh azzabarjad (the Emerald table). Alfred of Sareshel translated the part of Ibn Sinna’s Kitab al-Shiffa (the Book of Healing) that deals with chemistry. It is, however, as per usual, the Italian, Gerard of Cremona, who made the more valuable translations of Al-Razi’s study and classification of salts and alums (sulphates) and the related operations the De aluminibus et salibus, whose Arabic original is preserved. The many versions of this work had a decisive influence on subsequent operations in the West, more generally on mineralogy; as did others in the formation of the foundations of such science. In fairly recent times, Holmyard, Kraus, and above all Ruska, have devoted considerable focus to Muslim chemistry, much of which, unfortunately, is not accessible to non German speakers, who thus will be deprived from forming a truest picture of Islamic chemistry.

Conclusion
After such an expose, however brief, should we still consider Muslim chemistry as an occult practice called alchemia? Are not many aspects of such science exactly what we have in our modern chemistry? And if this is not enough, here is what Muslims thought of the occult alchemia. Both Ibn Sina and Ibn Khaldoun attacked the experimentalists who sought to turn ordinary metals into precious ones, gold in particular. Ibn Sina, for instance, in The Book of Minerals, denounces the artisans who dye metals in order to give them the outside resemblance of silver and gold. He asserts that fabrication of silver and gold from other metals is `practically impossible and unsustainable from a scientific and philosophical point of view.’ Ibn Khaldoun, for his part, denounces the frauds who apply on top of silver jewelry a thin layer of gold, and make other manipulations of metals. To Ibn Khaldoun, the Divine wisdom wanted gold and silver to be rare metals to guarantee profits and wealth. Their disproportionate growth would make transactions useless and would `run contrary to such wisdom.’
It is, thus, time to give Muslim chemistry its due place in history. For that to happen, the concentrated effort of Arabic speaking, able scholars, with some honesty, ought to get on with the task of writing truest accounts of Islamic chemistry in history, do for this science what Rashed, Djebbar and Yuskevitch did for Islamic mathematics, or what al-Hasan and Hill did for Islamic engineering, and what King, Saliba, Kennedy and Samso seek to do for Islamic astronomy, bringing Islamic chemistry out of the slumber others have dug in for it. 

Islam’s Contribution to Chemistry

NEW YORK (CNN) – Ads promoting Islam are to be placed on New York subway cars in September, but a U.S. congressman finds people sponsoring the messages unacceptable.

Siraj Wahhaj is imam of a Brooklyn mosque and a backer of pro-Islam ads on New York subway cars.

“I have no problem with the ad itself, but I have a very, very real problem with those behind it,” Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, said Tuesday. He is urging the Metropolitan Transit Authority to reject the ads.

The campaign is to feature ads on 1,000 of the subway system’s roughly 6,200 cars. The main sponsor is a grass-roots organization, Islamic Circle of North America.

The ads, simple black-and-white panels, will feature key words or phrases about Islam on one side of the panel such as “Head Scarf?” or “Prophet Muhammad?” and the words “You deserve to know” along with the Web site address WhyIslam.org on the other side.

“The idea is to evoke certain thoughts in the mindset of the person who is looking at the ads and get them to a point where they can reflect upon certain words that one could define as hot words or keywords that get thrown around a lot but are not necessarily defined in the most proper context,” said New York University’s Imam Khalid Latif, a cleric who is promoting the project in a YouTube video created by the Islamic Circle. Watch the controversy surrounding the subway ads »

Another of the backers of the advertising campaign — which will launch in September to coincide with the monthlong Islamic holiday of Ramadan — is Siraj Wahhaj, imam of a Brooklyn mosque.

Wahhaj was the first Muslim to lead a prayer before the House of Representatives, but King objects to him because he was a character witness for convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

“He is a known Islamic extremist, and you would be giving him credibility and stature through a known government facility,” said King, ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee.

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• Islamic Circle of North America

Wahhaj also appeared on a list of 170 potential unindicted co-conspirators in the 1993 bombing case. A prosecutor said that not everyone on the list was considered a co-conspirator.

On Monday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did not join in King’s outrage about the ads.

“If you were to advocate becoming a Muslim, I assume the First Amendment would protect you,” he said.

But King, noting that the ads would be up during the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, said, “I’m calling on the MTA not to have these ads, not to go forward with them, and I don’t see this as a free speech issue at all.”

King said he sent a letter to the MTA on Monday night demanding that it reject the ads.

The New York Post has reacted strongly to the ads, running a cover photograph of Wahhaj on Monday with the headline “Jihad Train” and posting an article on its Web site with the headline “Train-ing day for jihadists” and the first paragraph saying, “Allah aboard!”

Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy for their role in a plot to bomb the United Nations, FBI headquarters in Manhattan, two tunnels in New York and a bridge connecting New Jersey with Manhattan, all in one day.

The government said the group also was responsible for the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in that case, said Wahhaj’s name was included in a filing that prosecutors were required to provide to defense attorneys in the case, a list of all the names of people who could possibly be foreseen to come up in the evidence. The filing, McCarthy said, has been called a “co-conspirator list.” But Wahhaj was never named by the prosecution.

“The only time he came up in a meaningful way before the jury is when the defense called him as a witness,” McCarthy recalled.

McCarthy said that although the list named anyone the government might allege during the trial was a co-conspirator, not everyone on the list was so labeled.

Wahhaj said Monday that he was a character witness for Abdel-Rahman in the context of “what we knew about him before the incident,” citing him as a “scholar in Islam” and “a great reciter of the Quran.”

“People try to make the connection as if I’m endorsing some bad deeds that [were] done by Sheik Abdel-Rahman,” he said. “That had nothing to do with it.”

He added, “not only have I never been charged with anything, not one FBI agent has ever asked me one question in relationship to that bombing.”

Wahhaj also said that he regrets some of his more controversial statements, such as calling the FBI and the CIA “terrorists.”

“What I was saying is that not all the FBI or CIA are terrorists, but there are some elements in there,” he said. “So if you want to accuse some Muslims [of being terrorists], OK. These Muslims did that, but don’t undermine the entire faith. That’s what the message is.”

Wahhaj said the New York Post’s “cheesy” and “anti-Islam” reaction to his participation in the Subway Project is “the very reason the young Muslims want to put out this ad campaign.”

Islamic Circle spokesman Azeem Khan called the situation a “perfect microcosm” of what the ads seek to address: that Wahhaj’s portrayal in media reports is similar to how Islam is often depicted.

“I think that even more so reinforces the idea as to why a project like this is necessary, where Muslims have to be more pro-active in terms of educating people about their religion, by no means proselytizing the faith in any capacity, but really setting a standard and defining what mainstream Islam stands for,” Latif said.

The project is the Islamic Circle’s first such advertising campaign. The group has run ads before but not on New York’s subways.

The transit authority said the cost of the monthlong campaign is about $48,000.

Islam subway ads cause stir in New York - CNN.com

By Ron Kampeas
Published: 07/23/2008

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The choir danced a hora, the fiddler played a hoedown, Joe Lieberman cited scripture and Pastor John Hagee said his enemies would never draw him away from Israel.
Thousands of followers of Christians United for Israel, the movement Hagee founded, traveled this week

from across the United States to pack the cavernous Washington Convention Center in a defiant show of strength.

In the signature “Night to Honor Israel” on Tuesday, Hagee depicted himself as emerging from a lion’s den of media dissimulation and political iniquity.
“There have been a great many misrepresentations and a great deal of confusion sown,” Hagee said, his baritone booming over a constant swell of cheers and blessings.
Hagee was referring to the intense and at times outright hostile scrutiny he suffered this year after he endorsed the presidential candidacy of U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
Within weeks Hagee withdrew his endorsement, unwilling to suffer a depiction of himself — some of it distorted — as a bigot who reviled Catholics, gays and Muslims and who was insensitive to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.
The experience clearly scarred Hagee. His speeches are usually optimistic prophecies of an Israel thriving against the odds, but on Tuesday night his sermon was peppered with dark, wistful humor.
His routine litany of “Never agains” punctuating pledges to protect the Jews from terrorists, Iran and anti-Semites was rounded out with a new promise Tuesday night: “What will I say the next time I’m asked to endorse a presidential candidate? Never again.”
Hagee described a “vicious media firestorm” — not surprisingly, the media was barred from much of the four-day conference. During the parts open to the press Tuesday, CUFI volunteers rushed to abort any attempts to interview conference attendees.

“You are not covering our dark motives, you are expressing your dark motives,” Hagee told reporters.

Hagee’s strident support for Israel and the settlement policies of Israeli hawks has been controversial since he launched his first “Night to Honor Israel” in San Antonio, the hometown of his Cornerstone megachurch, in the early 1980s.
Since then, he claims to have raised $30 million — a portion of it for building in West Bank settlements — and in 2006 went nationwide by founding CUFI with an array of other popular evangelical preachers.
Hagee said the attacks he suffered subsequent to his McCain endorsement were nothing less than a campaign to separate Americans from their beliefs.

“We need to be careful that we don’t allow belief in the Bible to be unacceptable,” he said.
It was clear that the most hurtful episode for Hagee was the emergence of out-of-context excerpts of sermons in the mid-1990s in which he attempted to offer a theological explanation for how God would allow the mass murder of the Jews.

Adolf Hitler, he said at the time, was a demonic agent of God driving the Jews back to their historic homeland.
Such a “theology of suffering” is not inconsistent with an evangelical outlook that seeks a divine explanation for even the most incomprehensible historical events. In the heat of the presidential campaign, however, a few liberal bloggers and media commentators twisted this relatively commonplace exegesis into Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.
In an issue of The Torch, the movement’s magazine distributed at the conference, Gary Bauer, a leading political evangelical, said the attacks were “obscenely distorting.”

David Brog, CUFI’s Jewish executive director, likened Hagee’s suffering during the episode to a “new inquisition.”
“Breathe in deeply and you can still smell the embers smoldering around Pastor Hagee’s public persona,” Brog wrote.
Bruce Wilson, a progressive blogger, posted the video of the Holocaust sermons. That led Hagee’s lawyers to force YouTube to pull down any video depicting his preaching, citing copyright infringement.
Some of the defiance on Tuesday night masked a conciliatory tone, however.

Hagee again expressed his skepticism of land-for-peace formulas, but added, “We do not decide — the Israelis decide and they alone have the right to make that decision.”

The reference apparently was to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the Reform Jewish leader who earlier this year urged Jewish groups to cut off Hagee in part because of his strident advocacy of settlement building and concerns that he would seek to undermine Israeli peace moves.
Hagee also was careful when he referred to Islamist terrorists, describing them as hewing to a “radical interpretation of Islam” — a moderation of his earlier, more sweeping condemnation of the religion.

He also had as guests at the event Roman Catholic lay leaders who had criticized Hagee for his denunciations of anti-Semitism in which he used language once associated with radical Vatican-hating Protestants.

Asking Catholic League leader Bill Donohue to rise to applause, Hagee said they had settled their differences.
The thrust of the evening’s message was that if anything, the events have driven Hagee and his Jewish friends closer together. The 3,000 CUFI followers waved Israeli and American flags throughout the event. Hagee’s choir and orchestra slid from a traditional hora-driven rendition of “Hava Nagila” into a country western version complete with soaring fiddle.
His longtime friend from San Antonio, Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, blessed the evening’s events.

Dan Gillerman, the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told Hagee’s followers that their love for Israel sustained him during his six years in the post.

“I pray that God will continue to bless you with success,” Gillerman said.
The biggest “get,” however, was U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the first Jew to land a spot on a major national presidential ticket when he ran for vice president with Al Gore in 2000 as a Democrat.
J Street, a new left-wing pro-Israel lobby, on Monday had delivered a petition with 42,000 signatures to Lieberman’s office urging “Don’t Go Joe.” It cited Hagee’s inflammatory statements about Muslims and gays, as well as his backing for settlements.
Lieberman, who appeared to a hero’s welcome, cited the petition only to say that he ignored its pleadings. He said he recognized Hagee as flawed, but that was mitigated by the greater good he helped bring about.

Citing scripture, Lieberman said the same could be said of Moses and Miriam, whose flaws of anger and pettiness are noted in the Bible.
“I can only imagine what the bloggers would have to say about Moses and Miriam,” Lieberman said. “Judge each other with the humility that comes from the certainty that each and every one of us is imperfect.”
The presence of Lieberman, a leading surrogate for McCain, also underscored a political tinge to the proceedings, despite Hagee’s assurances that he was out of politics for good.
Hagee’s praise for President Bush was drowned out by cheers and applause. Bauer, introducing Lieberman, likened him to President Ronald Reagan and praised him for standing up to the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and running as an independent in 2006 after he was ousted in a primary.

Lieberman described an amendment he sponsored last year declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group as a “no-brainer” that drew the votes of 76 senators. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, opposed the amendment.

Lieberman, whose approval rate in Connecticut and among Jews is plummeting, clearly enjoyed the moment. He loved CUFI, he said, because “I can go back to scripture more than with many other groups — frankly, including many Jewish groups.”

Lieberman, Hagee hook up at CUFI parley - JTA, Jewish & Israel News

The king of Morocco knows women can lead the way in moderating the messages of Islam. Britain should adopt his approach

• Wednesday July 23, 2008

The British government’s announcement about tackling religious extremism by giving young Muslims “citizenship lessons” among other things is an interesting one. It’s easy to sneer at initiatives in the face of the omnipresent threat of Islamic extremism worldwide, but Britain is not the only country pursuing such an approach. So too is Morocco, where I live some of the year. On the edge of Europe, Morocco stands proudly in the Arab Muslim world. Islam is the state religion but King Mohammed VI has placed Morocco firmly in alliance with the west.

His approach has provoked reaction. On May 16 2003, suicide bombers in Casablanca killed 45 people heralding a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism and signalling a wake-up call for the king. Terrorism touched Moroccan citizens and also put at risk his strategy for foreign investment and tourism.

The parliamentary elections in Morocco last September had a record low turnout of only 37% especially among the young. The implications are not lost on Mohammed VI. Neighbouring Algeria casts its dark violent shadow over this small country. The king knows he must give Moroccans – especially young unemployed men – a reason to invest in his country’s political and economic future. Otherwise, Islamist extremists will find new recruits just as they did in Algeria. Some will find their way to Europe and the west, just as others will stay in Morocco itself. That’s why Mohammed VI needs to bring jobs and foreign investment if he is to curtail the threat.

But he is not content to rely on economic growth alone. The king understands that it is in civil society that the battle to contain Islamic extremists will be won. Education is therefore also essential. As Islam is the state religion, the kind of controversies that muddy the waters in Britain are less apparent. Not that his initiative is without controversy. For the king has gone beyond traditionalists and is feminising the face of Islam and embracing Islamic feminism. Women, he believes, can be the purveyors of a moderate humanitarian Islamic message.

At the heart of Mohammed VI’s initiative is the recruitment and education of mourchidat (”female guides”). The mourchidat first made news in April 2006 when the Moroccan government announced that the first 50 had graduated. The second intake – another 50 – are currently being prepared for their role in the capital, Rabat. They will work in local communities helping women with religious questions and giving support in schools and prisons. By working face-to-face in the community, women (still the primary care givers and nurturers in Moroccan society in their role as mothers, sisters, aunts, friends and community guardians), will present a moderate face of Islam and curtail fundamentalist violent excesses.

September 11 2001 showed that in an increasingly global interconnected world, terrorism, like trade, knows no boundaries. Mohammed VI’s initiatives are leading the way in understanding another implication – namely that cross-cultural understanding is vital, and that women can lead the way in moderating the messages of Islam.

The British government and leaders of the Muslim community should adopt his approach. In Britain, the paucity of women speaking on behalf of and for the Muslim community is striking, yet education starts inside homes and families, and continues in the informal spaces of civil society like voluntary groups, schools, and mosques.

To tackle the terrorist threat, and stop the subversion of Islam in its name, the face of Islam must be feminised in the public, and private sphere in Britain as well. And initiatives which promote inter-faith communication and cross cultural understanding must be supported. Without this, as Asim Siddique points out, in a culture where religion and the state are separate, Muslims and others will distrust initiatives which target one sector of the community without reaching out to others

Helen Wilkinson: Britain, like Morocco, should feminise the face of Islam | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Andrea Useem

The Emergent Islam I Want

I hate to admit it, but I don’t like going to mosques. Whether it’s the crudely written signs informing me I must cover myself, or the awkward way men and women avoid each other, or the Friday preaching that is just so irrelevant to my life, I usually feel happiest when I’m walking out the door.

I long for a Muslim environment that is spiritually fresher, deeper, and, perhaps most importantly, untainted by a Saudi-style conservatism or bitterness over the war on terror. With a small but growing number of “emergent Christians” – and now “emergent Jews” – reinventing the very idea of religious communities, I have also begun to hope for the emergence of a post-modern, post-9/11 Muslim faith life.

Emerging Christians struggle with stale ways of “doing church” they say are left over from the 1950s, or even the beginning of the Reformation, wrote Sam Crum, pastor of The River, a small emerging congregation in Florida, in a Facebook discussion with me. Emerging congregations – including a number of Jewish ones – emphasize authenticity and deemphasize hierarchy; both of these qualities, coincidentally or not, overlap with the values of the Web 2.0 world, where everyone – not just the anointed, institutional leaders – are content creators.

At The River’s MySpace blog, a husband-and-wife team describe their earlier life in a mainstream evangelical congregation. “We oddly enough began to learn some bad habits of a duty-driven life and became very religious, hypocritical, and hungry for something more,” they write. “Although we had both come to know Jesus Christ, we were still trying to unlearn and deconstruct some religious systems that were not only damaging to our ministries, but to our marriage.”

My journey isn’t about Jesus, but I sure can relate. My husband and I also lived through a “duty-driven” period of near-fundamentalism, when we were immersed in Muslim communities that emphasized conformity to a particular interpretation of Islam. That interpretation was largely inspired by Salafism, the fundamentalist version of Islam that hails from Saudi Arabia.

We weren’t alone in this experience. “Anyone who coverted to Islam in the 1990s came under the spell of Salafism,” Muslim blogger and ex-Salafi Tariq Nelson told me recently.

After ardor comes burnout, and many Muslims, and converts in particular, don’t survive the transition. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, now a Christian and conservative counter-terrorism expert, described his own journey out of a soul-numbing Salafism in his recent memoir, “My Year in Radical Islam.” Long-time convert Jeffery Lang has warned fellow Muslims for years that many converts and young people are leaving Islam; a recent report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that for every person who joins the faith, another leaves – challenging the common assertion that Islam is the “fastest-growing religion” in the U.S.

For me, Islam has remained compelling for the same reasons that attracted me in the first place: the simplicity of God’s oneness, the effectiveness of daily prayer, the discipline of fasting, the compassion of charity, and the magnificence of pilgrimage – in short, the five pillars of Islam.

While fundamentalism was probably destined for a short stay in my own life, 9/11 made that transformation irreversible. Today I have an almost physical aversion to anything Muslim that smacks of Salafi fundamentalism. I am equally impatient with American Muslims’ insistence on their own victimhood at the hands of “the media,” as if suicide bombers and cartoon-rioters were somehow an invention of Fox News. The last time I attended Friday prayers at my mosque, I walked out half-way through when an Egyptian-born preacher lamented how hard it is to raise children with “Islamic values” instead of “Western values” – with the obvious implication that the former was good and the latter was bad.

So while emerging Christians gather around a narrative of dissatisfaction with status-quo church life, so I imagine American Muslims finally repudiating Salafism and all its trappings, realizing that fundamentalism can – and often has – lead down a dark road to hatred and violence. And while I’m re-imagining American Muslim life, I’d also like to order up a come-as-you-are, online-friendly, community experience where I can be myself and deepen my faith.

Yes, I know, it’s a too-tall order. Not because there aren’t other American Muslims dissatisfied with status-quo mosque life – in my experience there are many – but because, initially at least, the numbers may be small.

From my perch, however, I do see lights twinkling across the country, people like author Sumbul Ali-Karamali or media entrepreneur Shahed Amanullah or activist Saleemah Abdul Ghafur, and communal venues like TalkIslam.info or the Progressive Muslim Network in my own backyard of Washington D.C.

The emerging church movement came about because a bunch of regular folks got off their duffs and did something; that’s inspiring. The challenge for Muslims like myself is to create rather than just critique, and, hopefully, build a faith life we can live with.

Andrea Useem publishes the website www.ReligionWriter.com. A journalist, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and a Muslim, she is currently writing a booklet on religious congregations and Web 2.0 technologies for the Alban Institute’s Congregational Resource Guide.

On Faith: Guest Voices: The Emergent Islam I Want

What jihad really means

Instead of condemning extremists, too many Muslim leaders are protecting them by hiding behind the supposed peaceful nature of ‘jihad’

Tarek Fatah and Salma Siddiqui

Citizen Special

Thursday, July 24, 2008

‘Had there been Nobel Prizes in 1000, they would have gone almost exclusively to Muslims.” These are the words of Martin Kramer, a Jewish scholar of Islam and Arab history, published in the Jerusalem Post on Dec. 31, 1999.

The question that perplexes the world today is not just, “what happened to Muslim civilization and what caused its catastrophic decline in the millennium that followed?” but also, “why can’t Muslims recover?”

The recent exchange in the Citizen between two Muslim letter writers provides us with an answer.

The exchange was a window into the ongoing debate within the Muslim community for the very soul of Islam. Akbar Hussain had observed, “When the non-Muslim world says with clear conviction that Islam propagates extremism, Muslims all around the world, even the terrorists, cry foul, and declare that they are maligning Islam.”

Respondent Safaa Fouda protested: “Islam as a faith never made (its) followers extremists, extremism is an ideology that can emanate from any background be it religious, political, or cultural.” Ironically, she proved Akbar Hussain’s point by invoking Islam and quoting from the Koran to deflect criticism of Islamic extremists who openly march with an AK-47 in one hand and the Koran in the other.

Today, as Muslims struggle to find their bearings in a world that is leaving them behind in almost every aspect of life, a knee-jerk defensiveness will simply not work. The veil of deception that is being thrown over the actions and ideology of jihadis in our midst needs to be ripped off.

Instead of condemning the jihadis, too many Muslim leaders are defending them by hiding behind the supposed peaceful nature of “jihad.”

At every opportunity they get, Muslim leaders take to the pulpit and state with disarming smiles and polite language that jihad is a peaceful exertion of spiritual warfare waged against oneself — against one’s ego and against one’s evil intentions, a sort of a cleansing of the soul. This is all true, because the Prophet after returning from a battle told his colleagues: “You are returning from a lesser jihad to a greater jihad,” and when asked to clarify, he said the greater jihad “is the jihad against your passionate souls.”

However, make no mistake: the jihad that Osama bin Laden has launched against all of us is, unfortunately, the lesser jihad.

The jihad that Momin Khawaja talks about in his musings is the jihad of warfare as clearly enunciated by such 20th-century Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood as Syed Qutb and Hassan al-Banna and Pakistan’s Syed Maudoodi.

This triad are ideological gurus of the world jihadi movements and their apologists in Canada. It is not what the Koran says that matters; it is how Mr. Qutb, Mr. Banna, and Mr. Maudoodi interpret the Koran for the jihadis that needs to be discussed.

In the fall of 2007, Islamists set up a stand at Toronto’s annual “Word on the Street” book festival where they distributed a free booklet titled Towards Understanding Islam, written by Mr. Maudoodi. In the booklet, Mr. Maudoodi exhorts ordinary Muslims to launch jihad, as in armed struggle, against non-Muslims.

“Jihad is part of this overall defense of Islam,” he writes. In case the reader is left with any doubt about the meaning of the word “jihad,” Mr. Maudoodi clarifies: “In the language of the Divine Law, this word [jihad] is used specifically for the war that is waged solely in the name of God against those who perpetrate oppression as enemies of Islam. This supreme sacrifice is the responsibility of all Muslims.”

Maudoodi goes on to label Muslims who refuse the call to armed jihad as apostates:

“Jihad is as much a primary duty as are daily prayers or fasting. One who avoids it is a sinner. His every claim to being a Muslim is doubtful. He is plainly a hypocrite who fails in the test of sincerity and all his acts of worship are a sham, a worthless, hollow show of deception.”

If Muslim countries do not go to war against the enemies of Islam, Mr. Maudoodi says a worldwide uprising by ordinary Muslims is the answer. He writes: “Muslims of the whole world must fight the common enemy.”

Does it surprise anyone that ordinary Muslims in Britain and Canada have rallied to his call and declared jihad against their own countries of birth?

If Mr. Maudoodi’s exhortations to jihad are not enough, we have the words of the late Hassan al-Banna being distributed in our schools and universities. Mr. Banna makes it quite clear that the word “jihad” means armed conflict. He mocks the concept of the lesser and greater jihad, suggesting that this theory is a conspiracy so that “Muslims should become negligent.”

In addition, here is what Mr. Qutb, another Egyptian stalwart of the Islamist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, writes in his classic book Milestones:

“Any place where Islamic Shariah is not enforced and where Islam is not dominant becomes the Home of Hostility (Dar-ul-Harb). … A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it, whether it be his birthplace or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located.”

Syed Qutb reduces the message of Islam to the rejection of all laws made by parliaments. He says: “The basis of the message [Islam] is that one should accept the Shariah without any question and reject all other laws in any shape or form. This is Islam.”

Unless the leaders of Canadian mosques as well as the Islamic organizations denounce the doctrine of jihad as pronounced by the Muslim Brotherhood, and distance themselves from the ideology of Mr. Qutb, Mr. Banna and Mr. Maudoodi, the propaganda that “jihad means peace” will be meaningless.

It will merely reinforce the suspicions of many Canadians who feel some overseas groups are pulling the strings in this carefully staged puppet show.

Tarek Fatah is the author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.

E-mail: tarekfatah@rogers.com.

Salma Siddiqui is an Ottawa businesswoman and vice-president of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

Print Story - canada.com network

Filed under Middle East, World News, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Jewish diaspora, Opinion Editorials, Jewish Muslim dialogue, Islamic fundamentalism, EU and UK, Saudi Arabia & the Gulf, Interfaith dialogue, Family life, Zionism - on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 - By: Lerner, Rabbi Michael

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I had expected the World Conference on Dialogue convened by the King of Saudi Arabia to be little more than a photo op for the King, a cheap way to buy good public relations for a regime that has refused to increase production of oil as a way to reduce the current surge in the price, provided haven and support for the Wahabist form of Islam that has fostered extremists like Saudi-born and raised Osama bin Ladin and many others, and has done far too little with its wealth to alleviate the poverty and suffering of many in the Middle East.
Imagine my surprise, then, to hear the Saudi King in a language that, as one Muslim observer pointed out to me, sounded more like the New Bottom Line of the Network of Spiritual Progressives than it did like a speech of a self-absorbed monarch.

King Abdullah started with a strong affirmation of the goal of a new kind of tolerance between religions. Religions have not caused wars, said the king, but rather extremists who have misused religion in a hurtful and harmful way. A truly religious person would not resort to war, the King reminded us. But why do people respond to the extremists? Because there is a deep spiritual crisis in the world, and it is that crisis which creates the conditions in which exploitation, crime, drugs, family breakdown and extremism flourish.
The king went on to explain that it should be the task of the various religious communities of the world to work together to overcome that spiritual crisis. But that will require religious cooperation, which must begin with mutual respect and tolerance. We need to emphasize what all religions have in common — the ethical message that permeates every major religion. That message is that hatred can be overcome through love. We in the religious world need to choose love to overcome hatred, justice over oppression, peace over wars, universal brotherhood over racism.
To me, this didn’t sound like the King I had come to expect from Western media. Just as the media has frequently distorted our message of Spiritual Progressives, and the Jewish community media has for 22 years consistently represented me and the peace-oriented position of Tikkun as anti-Israel or as New Age posturing, so the Western media has portrayed the Saudis as backward reactionaries. I can’t remember hearing either Bush or Carter speaking like this or, for that matter, any Israeli Prime Minister including Rabin.
The overwhelming majority of people in the room were leaders from Muslim countries around the world. It appeared as if they were the King’s primary audience. He was introducing a new language into the Islamic religious discourse, and it was a language that has in the past largely been rooted in Western humanism and human rights. Many Muslims in the room mentioned to me or to others that they felt that this speech was actually a significant breakthrough, because the King is one of the more influential figures in Islam, since his role as “Protector of the Two Mosques” (in Mecca and Medina) gives him immense influence in the Islamic world.
The Saudi King was followed by the King of Spain who talked about tolerance as an old Spanish tradition, presumably referencing the period when Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in Spain in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. He made no mention of (or apology for) the Spanish expulsion of all Jews in 1492, nor the forced conversions and expulsions of Muslims in the following decades. He made a point of stressing, however, that today Spain is a democracy (presumably to acknowledge that unlike the King of the Saudis, the King of Spain no longer rules Spain in the way that the King of the Saudis actually does rule Saudi Arabia).
Next, the leader of the Muslim World League spoke about the common values held by all humanity that should be a foundation for transcending our political differences. Instead of rejoicing at the possibility of a clash of civilizations, as some right-wingers in America have preached (like Norman Podhoretz in his most recent book World War IV), we actually need to be seeking cooperation between the various global civilizations. Islam, he insisted, believes in the equality of all. There is no legal foundation for the prevalence of any given community or race within Islam.
Here too was an incredibly hopeful message. It wasn’t relevant, really, whether this is an accurate description of Muslim practice. It was, as was the King’s talk, an obvious attempt to change the thinking in his own community, a change that could have profound political effects if it is taken as seriously as the people here seem prone to do.
After hearing the King of Saudi Arabia speak, there was a reception line in which each of us was to give our name and shake the hand of the King. I was in one of my more irrepressible moods, so when it was my time I broke protocol and said to King Abdullah “I represent the many Jews in the world who wish to see cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians and a peace that provides security and justice for both sides (and I pointed to the Tikkun pin I was wearing which has the Israeli flag and the Palestinian flag both with the words Peace, Justice, Life, TIKKUN). I hope that you will use some of your huge oil-generated billions of dollars to help Palestinians build decent housing and plumbing in the refugee camps.” By this point the people surrounding the King were moving to push me forward, and the King merely gave me a big smile (it was being translated for him by his US Ambassador) and I moved on into the dining area.
To my surprise, I was seated at a table with eight members of the King’s cabinet and his closest associates (I was the only non-Muslim or non-Saudi at the table). I sat next to the Secretary of Labor, and next to him was the Secretary of Finance, and then the others I remember included the Secretary of Communications and one person who was introduced as the King’s main counsel and another as a close personal friend of the King and another was one of the major corporation heads in Saudi Arabia.

To my surprise, several people knew about Tikkun and it turned out that these men had mostly been educated in the US or England, several at Oxford, some at the University of Southern California or at University of California. Whereas at almost all of the other tables in the huge dining room there were several conversations going on at the same time, these people stopped their separate conversations and focused on me and wanted to know my perspective on American politics and on Israel/Palestine. I told them the Tikkun perspective, particularly the need for a new consciousness based on open-heartedness, mutual repentance, and compassion.
A few embraced this, others argued that certainly I couldn’t ask for equal repentance given that the Palestinians had been made homeless by the 1947-49 conflict and were living in terrible conditions. I said that it was a shame that the Saudis with all their wealth had not done more to help the Palestinians. The Finance Minister smiled and said that that was simply not true, but that Israel was not letting their aid come through. I pointed out that Palestinian refugees lived in Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon and particularly in Lebanon their conditions were appalling and that the Saudis could rectify that. He responded by saying that they had done more than was known, but that the particulars he was not going to discuss.

I then pointed out that Gaza and the West Bank were in the hands of the Arabs from 1948-1967 and that their Arab hosts and the Saudis had done nothing to improve their slum-like conditions. Several people pointed out to me that the Palestinian leadership that existed at that time (prior to the emergence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization) did not want to accept that the expulsion from their homes was permanent, and hence did not want to begin anything that would appear to be a resettling in the refugee camps. Didn’t I agree that the refugees had suffered a huge humanitarian disaster?

Yes, I said I did agree with that, but that Israelis were fearful that if Palestinians were to return now with their millions of people, that would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. And I referenced my article on ‘Israel at 60′ in Tikkun in which I had analyzed the situation in terms of the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome facing both Jews from our long history of oppression culminating in the Holocaust and the Palestinian people as a result of their displacement for the past sixty years.
My even-handedness was challenged by some who said that certainly the suffering of the Palestinian people couldn’t be excused by reference to the suffering of Jews in Europe, since it was not the Palestinians who had participated in the Holocaust. I replied that the Palestinians had played an important role, along with the Saudis and other Arab states in convincing the British to cut off immigration of Jews to Palestine.

They responded that this policy was understandable, given the explicitly stated goal of the Zionist movement leaders to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and thus, Palestinians feared, to exclude or evict Palestinian settlers (and as several pointed out, Israeli revisionist historians had uncovered documents and letters from Zionist leaders saying indeed that their intent in accepting the UN resolution of 1947 to partition Palestine was only a first step in their larger intent to eventually take over all of Palestine–and that goal was clear to the Arabs as well as to the Zionist movement and accounted for their resistance to the partition agreement).

I pointed out that whatever their fears, the reality was that they had chosen an immoral path in pushing the British to close immigration to Jews, and that a majority of my larger family had died in Europe during the Holocaust and might have been saved had there been a place to escape to, and that Palestine was the nearest place in which Jews had some historical claim.
At this point the Saudis challenged my contention that the Palestinians or Arabs had had much of an impact on the British in their decisions. I argued that the British in the 30s and 40s were following policies shaped by their concern for steady oil supplies for their coming war (either with Hitler or Stalin). The Saudis responded by telling me that they (the Saudis) were not a major source of oil for the British and that in any event the British were a colonial power that was shaping the policies of other Arab states, and not vice versa.

I was not sure that that was true, but then switched my line to point out that wherever colonial authorities ruled, they always tried to set the native populations against their minority groups, and that this is what had happened in Palestine and more generally in the Middle East. The Jews, I argued, were the minority in Palestine at that time, and the potential Arab revolt against colonialism had been weakened by the distraction onto opposing Zionism.
But was it a distraction or were the Zionists really agents of colonial rule? The Saudis pointed to the Balfour Declaration in 1917 proclaiming Britain’s commitment to supporting the Jews in establishing a state in Palestine. I argued that a. the British had no right to determine the future of the area, since it wasn’t theirs in the first place (a point that showed the Saudis that there were indeed Jews who did not identify with the colonialist perspective) and b. that most Jews coming to Palestine were fleeing oppression, most form Europe but some from Arab countries. They responded that Jews had lived in harmony with their Arab hosts until the colonial period and the rise of Zionism.
At that point, rather than pursue that argument (I disagreed with them and would have pointed out that the conditions were akin to apartheid for Jews in most of those countries through much of that history), I turned instead to the larger frame of our discussion and said, “Wouldn’t it be better if we really wish to build a future of peace that we stop trying to get a triumph on the issue of guilt? There are two national discourses here, and each has lots of facts to back it up, but it is futile and destructive to follow the path now being followed in which each side tells the story as though they are the righteous victims and the other side are the evil oppressors!

Let’s move beyond that to ask what we can do to build peace now, and start by each side acknowledging that the other has a legitimate though partial view, and that each side has sinned and gone off course.” I then explained the Jewish view of “sin” as similar to an arrow going off course, implying that the sinner was fundamentally good, not evil, but had lost his or her way. They seemed happy with that notion.

But then they turned to the current situation and told me how surprised and outraged they were that the Saudi proposal to end the struggle and create peace based on a return to the 1967 borders, a proposal offered to Israel several years ago, had gotten zero response from Israel. I responded that if they really thought that there would be a full return to those borders, they were mistaken, because no Jew would ever agree to give up access to the Western Wall, which was part of Jordan before the 67 war.

They thought that could be negotiated, but the point, they said, was that they had gotten exactly ZERO RESPONSE to a gesture which they felt should have been perceived by Israel as giving Israel the recognition that Israel always claimed to be central to its needs. I could not justify the Israeli government’s behavior, but said that I opposed the current and past Israeli governments since the death of Rabin precisely because they had given up on peace and seemed more interested in holding on to the West Bank.

But, I argued, most American Jews and a large number of Israelis would accept major territorial compromises if they really believed that peace was possible. The Saudis said that it seemed impossible to believe that when the Saudis had made it clear that peace was indeed possible. I responded by pointing to the PTSD thesis coupled with the continuing fear of Israelis that they might be wiped out by a combination of the Iranians plus the sourrounding Arab states. Incredulously, they asked if any Jews in the US believed that that was possible. I responded that such fears were frequently voiced in the organized Jewish community, though many younger Jews did not share that fear.
At this point, the Saudis were so astounded they almost lost interest in the conversation. They found it impossible to believe that anyone could believe that Israel was in any danger of destruction. Israel, they pointed out to me, had close to two hundred nuclear bombs–no state would dare seek to destroy Israel for fear of being wiped off the face of the earth. Similarly, they perceived Iranian threats from Ahmadinejad to be a joke, since everyone knew that Iran did not have any nuclear capacity whatsoever and was unlikely to have anything in the next decade.

Many of the Saudis at the table felt that at this point they were listening to a typical Israeli propagandist (me) and that there was no point in continuing to talk since they believed that I knew and all Israelis and Jews knew that there was no possibility of Israel ever getting destroyed by the weak Arab or Islamic world, and that taking such concerns seriously were about as rational as thinking that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In any event, they asked what I thought they should do–was there anyone among Israelis leaders who had the power and inclination to build peace. When I talked about Yossi Beilin they said I had misunderstood–they wanted to know about anyone who was likely to actually have the power to implement a peace agreement, and I was not sure whom to suggest.
They then asked me about Obama and particularly his seeming capitulation to AIPAC immediately after securing the Democratic nomination. I told them about the divisions in the Jewish world, the way that the peace forces represented a majority of American Jews but were largely without the finances or access to media to make their presence known, and that the pro-AIPAC Democrats would likely make it difficult for Obama to provide strong leadership on Israel/Palestine unless there emerged a powerful grassroots force in the Jewish world and in the Christian world that would push in a different direction.

Many of them asked if that was not in part the role of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and I affirmed that but pointed out major problems we faced: a. lack of finances b. media power of the Jewish right and the willingness of the liberals in the media to assume that AIPAC and the Jewish establishment spoke for most if not all American Jews. c. turf battles that made groups like Brit Tzedeck unwilling to cosponsor Washington lobbying with NSP and Jewish Voices for Peace or any groups that were interfaith, the unwillingness of Christians for Middle East Peace to align in their lobbying with Jewish groups, the unwillingness of Jim Wallis’ Sojo group to work with the Network of Spiritual Progressives on Israel/Palestine issues, the fear that J Street people seemed to have about getting involved with any group that might appear too critical of Israel or even too explicitly critical of AIPAC, and the contrast with the Jewish right which had been willing to all work together to support AIPAC for the sake of maximizing their political power.

I also discussed the lack of political coherence of the Christian Left and their inability to join in any effective public political action with other groups with whom they disagreed theologically (so, for example, it was rare to see progressive Catholics joining with progressive Protestants on Middle East issues, or even on issues like the Global Marshall Plan), much less with Jewish groups, except in the narrow frame of specific legislative issues on Capitol Hill (but not in challenging the dominant political ideas that shaped American thought on the Middle East and made Obama reluctant to challenge the willingness of the American government to follow the lead of whoever happened to be in power in Israel).
But I also told them that all this could change. I pointed out that Obama had been close to Tikkun for many years, that his ideas on many issues closely aligned with the Tikkun perspective, and that he had signaled 8 years ago to our Chicago chapter of the Tikkun community that he was very sympathetic to our position on reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Still, I pointed out that the Clintons had been aligned with Tikkun before they took office, but our failure to mobilize enough public pressure on them had made it possible for AIPAC insiders in the White House and the Democratic Party to push them far from me or Tikkun perspectives, and the same danger existed for Obama unless the progressive forces in all the religious and secular communities could organize a serious and systematic alternative in every Congressional district.
But how could that help, the Saudis wanted to know. What could change the discourse in America or Israel. I then discussed the Global Marshall Plan. Many were very positive about it, but insisted that the initiative would have to come from the United States in the first instance. If that happened, they felt sure that Saudi Arabia and many others would join such an effort. They hoped that the Global Marshall Plan would gain traction, and they fully embraced the view that security would come through generosity more than through military domination.
That was my discussion with the Saudis. I consciously held myself back on several fronts. I felt it pointless to argue with them about the deficiencies of this conference–the fact that, though it was centered on the notion of “dialogue,” in fact the sessions were a series of presentations in which there was zero opportunity for dialogue with others in the room.

I several times tried to raise the issue of the de facto exclusion of women from the dialogue, though there were some women in attendance, but I got zero response or understanding on that. I got nowhere in pointing out the contradiction of holding an interfaith dialogue in Spain at a time when the Saudis themselves prohibit the practice of any other faith but Islam inside Saudi Arabia. Many of these sessions seem empty to me precisely because they are mere preaching about tolerance and dialogue, though the reality in Saudi Arabia provides so little dialogue or tolerance of other religions.
And yet, I realized that that point, though righteous, somehow missed the significance of this gathering, which was in fact more about advancing the idea of tolerance, peace, non-violence, mutual understanding and dialogue in the Islamic world and in particular in the religious community in the Islamic world. The handful of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and others who were in attendance here were props for this discussion, but what the King of Saudi Arabia was doing was nevertheless of historic significance. In a previous meeting in Mecca with Islamic religious leaders, he faced considerable opposition to his proposal for an interfaith conference around dialogue and mutual understanding. He had used his power and authority as the Guardian of the Sacred Mosques of Mecca and Medina to override opposition and go forward with this conference. Precisely because Saudi forms of Islam are perceived as the most conservative, taking this step is certain to reverberate for decades through the Islamic world and to be an historical marker in the process of modernization in Islam.
And there is also another dimension. The Saudis are implicitly taking religious leadership in the struggle with a reactionary version of Islam that has emerged in Iran. Though Iran was never mentioned, this gathering, plus the actions of the Prince of Jordan in calling for an Islam that works in cooperation with the Western world and with other religious communities, renouncing the “conflict of civilizations,” appears to be a major challenge to the growing appeal of Iranian forms of Islam among young Muslims who are filled with righteous indignation against the West in light of the devastation brought to Iraq by the US and the UK.
Finally, a word about the media. As I listened to the Saudis at my table I realized once again what I’ve known for four decades–how completely the media misrepresents who the people are with whom the powerful in the US are at odds. I have long known that about the Jewish media as well–I’m portrayed often as an enemy of Israel or a self-hating Jew! And ever since the Clintons embraced my Politics of Meaning, the American media has represented me as a New Agey thinker rather than as someone deeply rooted in Judaism, psychology, philosophy and still learning from all the other religious and spiritual traditions of the human race through its history. Still, with all that, I was amazed to find myself amazed at the humanity, intelligence, and shared commitment to rationality among all these leaders of the Saudi regime.

NO, I’m not giving up my skepticism, and no, I have not forgotten the barbarism of some Saudi legal practices, the strong misogyny of their culture, and the profound anti-Semitism that exists in their society. (I want to be clear that I am not surprised that I would find brilliant or loving people in the Islamic world. We print such people with regularity in Tikkun. The surprise is to find them in the leadership of a country that is reported to be the most reactionary, feudal and religiously fanatical country in the Islamic world.) But what I was discovering at lunch is that there is a modernizing elite that sees those reactionary aspects of their own society as equally problematic, and hopes to change that (indicated to me in many comments made during the two hours we sat together and which I’ve only partially summarized here).
I am not an advocate for the Saudi regime, but I now see its humanity, the fundamental decency of some who are engaged in an effort to “reform from within,” and am reminded once again of how ridiculous it is to talk about a whole society as though it represented a single perspective or shared a single worldview, the need to work with the most progressive elements, and the need to avoid “Othering the Other.” Another point about the media: this conference is a front page story in most of the world, but is being largely ignored in the US media who were notably absent from the hundreds of media covering this event. This is a willed ignorance about the world fostered by the US media establishment.
What was also clear to me in this conversation was that these very enlightened Saudis had NEVER met or been in a conversation with Jews who held progressive values and took those values seriously. For them, it was an exciting revelation, just as it was exciting to them to learn about the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives. They too had fallen for the media distortions and for believing that the American elites with whom they have had contact represent the democratic will of the American people, so they were happy to be disabused of that notion. I came away with the distinct impression that I had helped foster more positive notions about who Americans are, who Jews are, and what Israelis are about. For that, as for many other aspects of this set of conversations, I give thanks to God for the opportunity that I have had to serve the causes of peace and reconciliation!
Returning to the rest of the conference would be a downer in comparison with this conversation, but I soon realized that that too was a premature judgment. I felt richly rewarded by the opportunities to meet and chat with many other Muslims, and to realize how safe the place felt for us Jews even though we were a tiny minority in a hall filled with Muslims. But the actual formal presentations also raised some important issues and even a rather encouraging vision of the future, which I’ll translate somewhat into my frame.
I mentioned above that this conference is a significant step in the process of modernization in the Islamic world. But of course, modernization in the West has been deeply linked to a process of “de-mystification of the world” that we at Tikkun call “scientism,” the triumph of the worldview that the only things that count are those that can be measured or empirically verified, and that everything else is literally “non-sense.”

The result is the empty public square, a public life devoid of values. And as I’ve showed in our empirical research at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, and explained more fully in The Politics of Meaning and in Spirit Matters and The Left Hand of God, this has created a spiritual crisis that is at the root of family breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse, narcissism and alienation, loneliness and a sense of the meaninglessness of one’s life that has grown to monumental proportions.

While the poverty in the under-developed world is itself a major source of pain, one of the aspects of the West that is most resented and feared is the power of Western culture to uproot traditional cultures to replace them with the values of the marketplace and the demystification and scientism that is central to capitalist enterprise. Watching the spiritual suffering and degradation that we in the West take for granted and never connect with the values generated by a society that measures “success” primarily in material terms and encourages a world view of “looking out for number one” and “me-firstism” and “values that are kept out of our professions and out of our work world and only have a place on a weekend religious moment but not in daily life,” people in the Muslim world are particularly concerned about this aspect of Western imperialism and are committed to fighting it.
So what was said by some of the speakers was that the kind of modernization that should be welcomed into Islam, and the kind of tolerance that should be an important element of Islamic culture, should not include a tolerance for those kinds of values that shape the culture of capitalist imperialism and are reflected in the pop culture it has fostered. Instead, they envision a modernization that is respectful, inclusive, and based on affirming the value of spiritual and religious diversity, but that does not accept the secularism and the scientism of the modern world.
That, of course, is a vision closely aligned with ours. We do not at Tikkun or in the Network of Spiritual Progressives affirm any particular religious tradition, nor do we believe that one must be part of some religious tradition in order to deserve our respect or connection. But we do affirm that there is something in the spiritual worldview, even the “spiritual but NOT religious”

worldview, that is an essential part of a fulfilled life. While that spiritual element may manifest as play, art, music, dance, or even study of the wonders of the universe as experienced through the study of science, it is an irreducible element that cannot be accessed solely by scientism (though it could be by scientific investigation).

What the advanced-consciousness Muslims whose wisdom was in full flower at this conference seem to be promising us is that the coming spiritual renaissance of Islam may provide a foundation for precisely this kind of tolerant, loving, and generous form of religion that becomes a beacon for future generations who may be experiencing the crisis of spiritual emptiness of the contemporary world but are not willing to embrace fundamentalisms of any sort or give space to worldviews that do not include tolerance, mutual respect for others, and a true spirit of generosity. It may be hard for many of us to imagine a world in which Islam becomes identified with these values of love, generosity, kindness, tolerance, social justice and peace; it would certainly be an incredibly wonderful development.

For those of us who despair about Christianity or Judaism having gone astray so far from the loving elements in their founders’ visions that they now embody, in at least part of their practice, exactly the opposite values from those that made these religions catch fire in the hearts of their adherents (that may be what it means to see the Burning Bush), the notion that Islam might be the spark that generates a new religious revival based on mutual respect and spiritual intensity could dramatically expand our understanding of the endless potential for God to surprise us, un-do our conceptual certainties, and open our hearts to each other.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, July 17, 2008 Madrid, Spain

Israel News : My Talk with the Saudis, and What I Learned from Them

The disturbing trend in the never-ending duel of “Islam v. West”: women as the soft targets of both radical Muslims and secular governments, argues Mona Eltahawy.

NEW YORK - Are Muslim women more than the sum of their hymens and veils? Judging by two bizarre verdicts in France, the answer is a resounding “non.”

A verdict in April essentially punished a Muslim woman for not being a virgin before marriage. The second denied citizenship last month to a woman who wears a head-to-toe veil, or niqab, and who lives in “total submission” to the men in her family - punishing her for being a doormat.

So basically one woman wasn’t submissive enough and the other was too submissive.

Confused? Those cases in the country that’s home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim community highlight a disturbing trend in the never-ending duel of “Islam v. West”: women as the soft targets of both radical Muslims and secular governments.

My kindest explanation for the unprecedented rejection of a Moroccan woman’s citizenship application is that the French justice system was taken for a ride by that Muslim husband who pushed to annul his marriage because his wife wasn’t the virgin she’d claimed to have been. That verdict stunned France as a crude abuse of justice, ‘vindicating’ the hypocrisy at the heart of conservative religious views on women and chastity.

The Quran preaches chastity for men and women, but the ultra-conservative obsession with women, sadly prevalent in many Muslim countries (and the lack of a male hymen) means only women are expected to abide by the prohibition on extra-marital sex. This obsession with virginity is shallow at best and deadly at worst.

So the French court sent a message to Muslim women: Though they live in a secular democracy guaranteeing women’s rights, even in France their virginity is paramount. Instead of throwing the case out as antithetical to everything France is supposed to represent, the court sided with retrograde views of women, and the verdict - a coup for radical views - was cultural relativism at its worst.

Now, in what seemed a desperate bid to outdo the damage of the virginity verdict, the judicial system swung so far back they scored an own goal in the case of Faiza X, the woman deemed too “submissive” to be French.

Instead of going after the men who abuse the system - the husband in the virginity case and the men in Faiza X’s life to whom she was described as being in total submission - the immigration officials picked on her.

Her application for French nationality was rejected because she had “adopted a radical practice of her religion incompatible with the essential values of the French community, notably with the principle of equality of the sexes, and therefore she does not fulfill the conditions of assimilation” listed in the country’s Civil Code as a requirement for gaining French citizenship.

Yes, citizens should comply with principles of gender equality, but instead of going after this woman why not go after the men who have made sure “she leads a life almost of a recluse, cut off from French society,” leaving the house only to walk with her children or visit relatives, as her interview with immigration officials revealed.

Perhaps France should also go after the Muslim men who refuse to allow male doctors to treat their wives. Perhaps it should revoke the citizenships of the men who keep their daughters from school and ferry them back “home,” say, to North Africa, into forced marriages.

Faiza X, who is married to a French national, arrived in France in 2000, speaks good French and has three children born in France. She explained to immigration officials that she and her husband adhere to the Salafi form of Islam, an ultra-orthodox school practiced most infamously in Saudi Arabia - where women are prohibited from driving and are treated like minors who need a male guardian’s permission to do the most basic things.

Law professor Daniele Lochak told Le Monde that to follow Faiza X’s case to its logical conclusion would mean that women whose partners beat them were also not worthy of being French. Sadly, she’s right.

Faiza X’s life represents the radical male Islamists’ ability to have their cake and eat it too. They enjoy the advantages of secular democratic citizenship, but insist on keeping their wives and daughters suspended in a bubble of existence that crudely mimics “life back home.”

To a Muslim and a feminist like me, Faiza X’s life seems miserable. She lives “in total submission to the men in her family… and the idea of contesting this submission doesn’t even occur to her,” as her government case report reads. And she is shrouded inside a style of clothing that simply terrifies me.

The council’s ruling did not refer to Faiza’s niqab, or the face veil she adopted after arriving in France. But I must refer to it because as a defender of the right of women to wear a headscarf - I myself wore one for nine years - I will never defend the niqab which embodies the utter negation of a woman’s identity and is at the heart of radical Islamists’ hateful views of women.

The niqab does not belong anywhere - neither in a Muslim country nor a western one. And like the niqab, these two recent French judicial travesties veer close to negating women.

Secular democracies must not sacrifice hard-won women’s rights to a “culture” that demeans women. And these countries must not punish the very women they claim to be saving.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator, and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues.

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