Muslim Heretics Conference

By Khalid Chraibi

In a memorable scene in Ingmar Bergman’s movie Wild Strawberries, Isak, the central character, dreams that he is standing in court, waiting to be sentenced. But he has no clue as to the charges against him. When the judge declares him guilty, he asks, bewildered: “Guilty of what?” The judge replies flatly: “You are guilty of guilt”. “Is that serious?” asks Isak. “Unfortunately,” replies the judge.

The verdict in the case of the ‘Girl of Qatif’, as the incident has become known worldwide, is as bewildering to most people as the judge’s verdict was to Isak. How can a young bride of 18 who has been subjected to the harrowing experience of being blackmailed by a former ‘telephone boyfriend’, then gang-raped 14 times in a row by seven unknown assailants, be further brought to trial for the offence of khalwa and condemned to 90 lashes? How does one justify raising the punishment to 200 lashes and 6 months in jail when she appealed the first sentence?

The case had all the necessary ingredients to become an instant cause célèbre, when word of it reached the global news agencies. It received very large coverage in the media, with the verdict being criticized by commentators, politicians and citizens in all walks of life, within the region and in far away countries.

Amnesty International protested against the flogging verdict (which was also applicable to the men involved in the case), observing that “the use of corporal punishment constitutes cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” It added that “the criminalisation of khalwa is inconsistent with international human rights standards, in particular, an individual’s right to privacy.” The sentence against the ‘Girl of Qatif’ and the boy who sat with her in the car “should therefore be declared null and void”.

The Saudi authorities were perplexed and incensed by such criticisms. As far as they were concerned, the court sentence against the ‘Girl of Qatif’ was made in application of the Shari’ah as it has traditionally been interpreted in the country, and raised no particular or unusual issues.

The Saudi Ministry of Justice observed, in a statement, that the girl went out to meet her male acquaintance “without a mahram, a legal guardian, and exchanged with him forbidden affairs through the illegal khalwa. She knows that khalwa with an unrelated man is forbidden by Shari’ah and by doing this she has broken the sacred matrimonial contract.” Her punishment is thus perfectly justified in Islamic law.

But, the ‘Girl of Qatif’, her husband and her lawyer questioned several points in the Ministry’s statement, as well as the legal grounds on which the sentence was based.

According to them, the girl had not put herself in this situation of khalwa out of her own free will. She and the boy who was raped with her had been chatting regularly on the phone for two years, since they were both 16, but without meeting. Somehow, the boy obtained her picture. When she got married at age 18, she wanted her picture back, and the boy agreed to do that, if she met him in his car, in a public mall. After returning her picture to her, the boy volunteered to drive her home but, on their way, they were overtaken by another car, which compelled them to stop. They were kidnapped and taken to a deserted place, where the boy and the girl were separately subjected to a gang-rape.

The girl’s husband insisted that there was no adultery involved in this case, nor was there any sexually-oriented activity between the couple in the car. The meeting only took place to allow the girl to retrieve her picture which, moreover, was harmless and did not show her in any compromising position. In his opinion, it had been bad judgment on the part of the girl to go to this meeting, but there was nothing more to it.

The lawyer of the ‘Girl of Qatif’, Abdul Rahman al-Lahem, argued, for his part, that there was no khalwa between the girl and the ex-boyfriend, in the legal sense, “because they met in a public place”. Moreover, the boy was trying to blackmail the girl with the picture, and she wanted to retrieve it… She was forced to meet him in a “khalwa”, which invalidates the rule of “personal will” in Shariah. As Saudi jurists agree, the legal definition of khalwa doesn’t apply to the situation when a person is in dire need to attend such a meeting, or does so under duress.  

The Saudi judiciary accepted to review the case, but before it began looking into it, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah decided, on December 17, to pardon the ‘Girl of Qatif’, bringing the dramatic story of this girl to a compassionate ending. 

Despite this humane conclusion to the case, many Muslims would agree with Amnesty International, that “the criminalisation of ‘Khalwa’ is inconsistent with international human rights standards, in particular, an individual’s right to privacy.”

Of course, if any human rights organization in the area were to present the political/religious authorities of the Gulf States with a proposal to suppress any sanctions for khalwa, they would reject it out of hand, on the grounds that it was “inconsistent” with Muslim law. But this only demonstrates the important differences which continue to exist between Muslim countries in their interpretation of the prescriptions of the Shari’ah.

Everybody agrees that there are no Qur’anic verses which forbid khalwa, or define any sanction applicable to it. The main text of reference on the subject is a hadith of the Messenger, which states:

“’Whosoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, let him not be alone with a woman who has not a Mahram (male relative who she cannot marry) with her. Indeed, the third (person) is al-Shaytan!” [Ahmad].

This hadith implies that, when a man and a woman are alone in a secluded place, there may be temptation lurking. But, at the same time, Islam teaches moral responsibility and individual accountability, underlining the fact that each person is individually responsible for their actions before God.

Therefore, in North African countries, for example, the hadith on khalwa is viewed as merely indicating ethics of conduct, in order to avoid committing sins of the flesh. Some people may frown on a situation of khalwa but, as long as no fault has been committed there is no reason to apply any sanction. Punishment is only called for when actions which are forbidden by law actually take place, such as adultery, prostitution, and the like.

In other countries, such as the Gulf States, the hadith has been interpreted by the ulema as forbidding khalwa. But, even in that case, the Messenger did not define any punishment to be applied to those who put themselves in such a situation. It was the ulema, through their own ijtihad – their personal reflection – over the centuries, who studied the ‘offence’ in its various aspects, defined its nature and decided on the applicable sanctions (under the ta’azir approach, in which the judge has latitude to decide on the applicable sanction).

When a case such as that of the ‘Girl of Qatif’ gains worldwide publicity, most Muslim people find themselves at a loss to understand why different Muslim countries, applying the same Islamic law, implement it with such strikingly different results. How can the same action be a punishable offence that is severely sanctioned in one region, whereas in another region it is no offence at all, and carries no punishment?

The situation becomes even more perplexing when a Saudi judge explains, in an interview published by a major Saudi daily newspaper, that the Courts have shown “compassion and pity” for the girl (when she was condemned to 90 lashes, later raised to 200 lashes plus 6 months in jail). If that had not been the case, it was his opinion, as a judge with 30 years experience, that the judges “should have condemned the girl of Qatif to death”, together with the other people involved in the case.(1)

One is reminded of Ali ibn Abu Talib’s observation that it is human beings (with all their frailties) who interpret the Shari’ah. In the Gulf States, personal status law has not yet been codified into a mudawwana, and both the judges and the people have some difficulty at times, distinguishing between tribal ‘law’ and customs and the prescriptions of Islamic law, especially in ta’azir situations.

One would think, in these conditions, that there is latitude for change in the judicial system’s view of khalwa in the Gulf States, if the political authorities were inclined to do so. The only major obstacle to be confronted is the weight of traditions.

“Unfortunately,” says Suhaila Hammad, a writer who supports women’s rights, “tradition and customs control many people here (in Saudi Arabia) and they confuse them with Islamic law. As for the argument that we should introduce women’s rights gradually, I say Islam came 1,428 years ago. Are all these centuries not enough to understand it?” (2)

---

Notes:

(1) Okaz newspaper, Nov 27, 2007 : an interview with judge Ibrahim al-Khodhairi (in Arabic)

(2) Heba Saleh, ‘Women’s rights: Barrier of silence has been broken’, Financial Times, December 4, 2007

---

Technorati Tags: Qatif,Saudi Arabia

ArabLife.org - Saudi judge ignores Quranic rights in harsh decision over the ‘Girl of Qatif’

Wikipedia Islam Entry Is Criticized

By NOAM COHEN

Published: February 5, 2008

An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts.

In addition to numerous e-mail messages sent to Wikipedia.org, an online petition cites a prohibition in Islam on images of people.

The petition has more than 80,000 “signatures,” though many who submitted them to ThePetitionSite.com, remained anonymous.

“We have been noticing a lot more similar sounding, similar looking e-mails beginning mid-January,” said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, which administers the various online encyclopedias in more than 250 languages.

A Frequently Asked Questions page explains the site’s polite but firm refusal to remove the images: “Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.”

The notes left on the petition site come from all over the world. “It’s totally unacceptable to print the Prophet’s picture,” Saadia Bukhari from Pakistan wrote in a message. “It shows insensitivity towards Muslim feelings and should be removed immediately.”

The site considered but rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the page with images.

Paul M. Cobb, who teaches Islamic history at Notre Dame, said, “Islamic teaching has traditionally discouraged representation of humans, particularly Muhammad, but that doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent.” He added, “Some of the most beautiful images in Islamic art are manuscript images of Muhammad.”

The idea of imposing a ban on all depictions of people, particularly Muhammad, dates to the 20th century, he said. With the Wikipedia entry, he added, “what you are dealing with is not medieval illustrations, you are dealing with modern media and getting a modern response.”

Wikipedia - Prophet Muhammad - Internet - New York Times

Muslim Backing Of Al-Qaeda Wanes

Friday, February 8, 2008; Page A13

The violent attacks by al-Qaeda and by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq have led people and religious groups

in the Muslim world to reduce their financial support for Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and to question its leadership, senior U.S. intelligence officials told Congress yesterday.

“There seems to be a greater indication on the part of people within Islam to question the vision of al-Qaeda and the future that they’re holding out,” CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during a hearing on worldwide threats. He said al-Qaeda’s leaders are “being forced to enter into a frankly open dialogue . . . with the body of believers.”

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told the panel that “the brutal attacks unleashed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and the other al-Qaeda affiliates against Muslim civilians have tarnished al-Qaeda’s self-styled image as the extremist vanguard.” He told the panel that “al-Qaeda has had difficulty in raising funds and sustaining themselves” over the past year since the Saudi government began arresting alleged al-Qaeda terrorists following attacks in that country.

Despite those signs, McConnell said, al-Qaeda remains “the preeminent terrorist threat to the United States here at home and abroad.”

– Walter Pincus

Muslim Backing Of Al-Qaeda Wanes (The Washington Post)

By JONNY PAUL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT, LONDON

The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, sparked controversy on Thursday when he said the introduction of Shari’a (Islamic law) for British Muslims was “unavoidable.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Photo: AP

Speaking on BBC Radio, Dr. Rowan Williams said that Muslims should be able to choose whether to have matters such as marital disputes dealt with under Shari’a law or the British legal system.

He said that the introduction of Shari’a law would mean that British Muslims would no longer have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.”

The Anglican leader advocated giving it official status in the UK on the grounds that it would help maintain social cohesion, as some Muslims do not relate to the British legal system.

“Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Shari’a court,” he said, for example.

“It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Shari’a are already recognized in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system,” he said.

A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain confirmed that many British Muslims already use Shari’a in their day-to-day lives, such as banking and marriage, and added that the same principle of separate laws could easily be accepted for other faiths.

The archbishop said introducing Shari’a law for marriages would combat the problem of forced marriage because Islam required the consent of both parties.

“We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognized by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances,” he said. “There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.”

The archbishop said he was not proposing the adoption of extreme interpretations of Shari’a, as practiced in some repressive regimes. “But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them. In some cultural and religious settings they would seem more appropriate.”

The National Secular Society criticized his comments and said it was another example of Britain “sleepwalking to segregation… You can’t have a country where you have separate laws for separate faith groups.”

Williams said his proposal would only work if Shari’a law was properly understood, rather than seen through the eyes of biased media reports that “cloud” the issue.

The archbishop is joint president of the Council of Christians and Jews in the UK.

Williams: UK should adopt sharia law for Muslims (The Jerusalem Post)

By Marwan KabalanSpecial to Gulf News
Published: February 08, 2008, 01:04

In many previous articles we criticised some Western writers and academics for attempting to portray Islam as the next “ism” for the West. Fairness and objectivity oblige us however to shed light on the other side of Western academia, one that has been trying hard to defuse the crisis between Islam and the West.

Last week, Graham Fuller, a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA and an adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, wrote an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Policy Magazine.

In his “World without Islam” essay, Fuller wondered if the world would have been a safer place had Islam never existed. He did not give a straight answer to this question, but tried intelligently to portray a picture of how the world would look like had Islam not emerged.

As a point of departure, Fuller tried to analyse the internal dynamics of the region independently from religion. He quickly discovered, however, that a Middle East without Islam would still remain complex and conflicted.

The dominant ethnic groups - Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, Jews, even Berbers and Pashtuns - would still dominate politics. The struggle between and among these groups - over power, territory, influence and trade - existed long before Islam and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Taking the external factors into account, Fuller argues that there is no reason to believe that a Middle Eastern reaction to the European colonial ordeal would have differed significantly from the way it actually reacted under Islam.

After all, it wasn’t Islam that made Middle Eastern states powerfully resist the colonial project, with its drastic redrawing of borders in accordance with European geopolitical preferences.

Nor would Middle Eastern Christians have welcomed imperial Western oil companies, backed by their European viceregents, diplomats, intelligence agents and armies, any more than Muslims did.

Indeed, the resistance of Christian Latin America, Hindu India, Confucian China and Buddhist Vietnam to Western domination of their oil, economics and politics was not milder than the resistance of Muslim Middle Easterners.

And then would the Middle East have been more democratic without Islam? Not necessarily, Fuller answers. Spain and Portugal ended harsh dictatorships only in the mid-1970s. Greece only emerged from church-linked dictatorship a few decades ago.

Christian Russia is still not out of the woods. Until quite recently, Latin America was riddled with dictators, who often reigned with US blessing and in partnership with the Catholic Church. Most Christian African nations have not fared much better. Why would then a Christian Middle East have looked any different?

Most urgent issue

But what of terrorism - the most urgent issue the West most immediately associates with Islam today, Fuller asks? For the US academic, September 11, 2001, was not the beginning of history.

“In the West’s focus on terrorism in the name of Islam, memories are short. Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine.

Dozens of major assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were carried out by European and American “anarchists” sowing collective fear.

The Irish Republican Army employed brutally effective terrorism against the British for decades, as did communist guerrillas in many places around the world terrorism - the list goes on. It doesn’t take a Muslim to commit terrorism”.

For Fuller, peoples who resist foreign oppressors seek banners to propagate and glorify the cause of their struggle. The international class struggle for justice provides a good rallying point. Nationalism is even better. But religion provides the best one of all, appealing to the highest powers in prosecuting its cause.

In such cases, religion ceases to be primarily the source of clash and confrontation, but rather its vehicle. And even here, terrorism is often the chosen instrument of the weak, Fuller argued. It already stymies the unprecedented might of US armies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

And thus Osama Bin Laden in many non-Muslim societies has been called the “next Che Guevara”. It’s nothing less than the appeal of successful resistance against dominant American power, the weak striking back; an appeal that transcends Islam or Middle Eastern culture, Fuller concluded.

Fuller’s argument is brilliant, indeed. One may need perhaps to read the entire article in order to appreciate its significance. After all, this is not the argument of an apologetic Muslim scholar, trying to defend his beliefs, values and the actions of his own people.

Rather, it is an excellent attempt by a Western scholar to provide a fair account of the relationship between Islam and the West.

Dr Marwan Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations, Faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Syria.

Understanding the Islam-West divide (Gulf News)

By ALICIA COLON
February 8, 2008

Every time I write a column mentioning Islam, my words are taken out of context or misquoted, and the hate mail rolls in branding me a bigot and hatemonger. So when I was asked to meet the CEO and co-founder of a foundation representing moderate Muslims, I tried to pass it on to my chief editor. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and my meeting with Holland Taylor of LibForAll Foundation turned out to be most illuminating. In this election year, it is vital for all Americans to recognize where the threat to our freedom is coming from and that there does exist a strong counter-extremist network in the Muslim community.

Mr. Taylor and the former president of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid (popularly known as “Gus Dur”) have founded a group whose ultimate goal is to help ensure the triumph of a pluralistic and tolerant understanding of Islam, at peace with itself and the modern world. That sounds all well and good, but along with the hate mail I get, I receive just as much correspondence from those who believe that the problem is Islam itself. Religion of peace, my eye, is the gist of these e-mails. For many Americans, the videos of jihadists beheading the innocent are confirmation that Islam advocates barbarism. Likewise, the stonings and ritual honor killings in the daily press cannot easily be explained away as peaceful.

Much of this type of correspondence came as the result of my objection to the opening of the Arabic language public school, Khalil Gibran International Academy. I wrote that there was a real need for studying the language, but I objected to a public school with a board of directors composed of religious clergy. In addition, the Department of Education never released detailed information about the proposed curriculum to a group with concerns about it becoming a possible madrassa.

I found it comforting to learn from Mr. Taylor that, of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, 85% to 90% are traditional, non-radical believers. They belong to different ethnic groups, and only 20% live in Arab countries. This is the silent majority that is the target audience of the LibForAll Foundation, and it must face up to the fact that the Islamic extremists are the greatest threat not only to the West but to the Muslim world. Imagine a nuclear strike here and what repercussions we’d be forced to consider against Muslim nations.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Wahid wrote: “An extreme and perverse ideology in the minds of fanatics is what threatens us (specifically, Wahhabi / Salafi ideology) — a minority fundamentalist religious cult fueled by petro dollars). … All too many Muslims fail to grasp Islam, which teaches us to be lenient toward others and to understand their value systems, knowing that these are tolerated by Islam as a religion.” Mr. Wahid is the Muslim leader who issued a firm condemnation of Holocaust denial and in another article for the Wall Street Journal called for the world’s religious leaders to “not only refute the claims of terrorists and their ideological enablers, but also defend the rights of others to worship differently.”

The mission of the LibForAll Foundation (www.libforall.org) is to generate understanding in the Muslim community on the differences between the right and wrong Islam. Non-Muslims are in need of a history lesson as well. In the 1920s, when Great Britain was deciding which group of Muslims to support, T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, recommended the Hashemites, descendants of Muhammed, but diplomat Harry St. John Philby, father of Kim Philby, persuaded the British to support the Saudis, who had risen to power through the radicalism of Wahhabism, which preached its own violent interpretation of Islamic Law, transforming Islam from a personal faith into an authoritarian political system. The majority of the September 11, 2001, hijackers were Saudi Arabian.

If the Islamic fundamentalists are being funded by petrodollars, as Mr. Wahid asserts, then we need to invigorate our efforts to decrease our dependency on foreign oil. Drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, off the coast of Florida, and in the Gulf of Mexico, and start building nuclear power plants and oil refineries are just a few of the steps I want to hear proposed by the presidential candidates.

Those who insist that we have nothing to fear from Islamic jihadists and can negotiate with Wahhabi Muslims are naive and unworthy of the presidency.

Islam’s Silent Majority (The New York Sun)

Islam in the Netherlands

Wild thing

Feb 7th 2008 | AMSTERDAM
From The Economist print edition

The Netherlands frets about the likely impact of a new anti-Islam film

AFP(Wilders ponders the Koran)

THE Netherlands is going through a “considerable crisis”, says the prime minister. The Iranians are musing publicly about cutting diplomatic ties. The grand mufti of Syria has issued grave warnings of war and bloodshed. Dutch citizens living in Muslim countries have been asked to report any worrying incidents.

The one thing missing is the cause of the fuss: an anti-Islamic film neither made nor shown by a Dutch member of parliament, Geert Wilders. In November Mr Wilders revealed his plan to air on television an exposé of the wickedness of the Koran, which he calls an Islamic “Mein Kampf”. The film is said to include shots of him desecrating the Koran. Dutch state television appears reluctant to show it, so Mr Wilders now talks of a private broadcaster, or using the internet. But the mere talk of his film has been enough to ignite a renewed debate about Islam in Europe and the limits on free speech.

The Dutch have reason to worry. Two years ago the publication of Muhammad cartoons in a Danish newspaper triggered anti-Danish riots around the Muslim world. Two years before that a film about Islam, “Submission”, was shown on Dutch television; soon afterwards its director, Theo van Gogh, was butchered in an Amsterdam street by a radical Dutch Islamist, who also threatened the screenplay writer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now living in America). Mr Wilders’s film could, some fear, have similarly violent consequences.

Mr Wilders’s anti-immigrant party has nine seats in parliament, too few to affect the government’s fairly tolerant policy towards the country’s Muslim minority. But he has jabbed his finger into several sore spots. He has publicly questioned the loyalty of two cabinet members with dual nationality (ie, Turkish and Moroccan as well as Dutch). He called a third minister “barking mad” because of her liberal integration policies. And he has demanded a ban on immigration from Muslim countries.

Mr Wilders might seem just a provocateur. But his power lies in the rhetoric that he uses to contrast such liberal notions as gay ri

ghts and female emancipation with the image of an intolerant and anti-modern Islam, says Paul Schnabel, head of a Dutch government social-science institute. Polls show that the Dutch rate freedom of speech as one of their most important values—and many see Mr Wilders as its champion. He is a “modern conservative”, argues Mr Schnabel, able convincingly to demand of immigrants that they should show full loyalty to Dutch values.

As important as Mr Wilders’s political talent is the absence of powerful countervailing voices speaking up for inclusiveness, pluralism and a more respectful public debate. Many Muslim immigrants suffer from relative poverty, from high levels of crime and from social segregation. The government focuses on policies to improve the education of second-generation Muslims, get more of them to work and find ways to reduce crime. The justice minister, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, insists that such measures offer the best hope of improving the sour relationship between Muslims and native Dutch folk. But the technospeak often used to describe them hardly matches the fiery one-liners launched from the right.

Islam in the Netherlands- The Economist

Join demonstration on
Friday, February 8, 2008, 12.00 to 2.00 pm
Afghanistan Embassy, 31 Princes Gate, London, SW7

Since October 2007, Parwiz Kambakhsh, a 23 year old Afghan journalist, has been in prison in Balkh province, Northern Afghanistan and sentenced to execution for blasphemy by a local Sharia court in Mazar-e-Sharif. His ‘crime’ was distributing articles downloaded from the internet that questioned the condition of women under Islam. The Afghan government has supported the Islamic court’s ruling.

On Thursday, January 31, 200 people demonstrated for his freedom in Kabul. International public opinion and pressure must join them to save his life.

The Iranian Secular Society calls upon groups and individuals to join the protest against this barbaric sentence and demand the immediate and unconditional release of Kambakhsh, including by joining the London protest, organising protests in various cities, writing letters of protest and more.

Fore more information, contact:
Fariborz Pooya
Telephone: 077 191 66731
Iranian Secular Society

The demonstration is endorsed by: Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, National Secular Society, the Worker-communist Party of Iran - UK Committee.