Muslim Heretics Conference

Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr al-Razi and Their Impact on Islamic Thought

Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr al-Razi and Their Impact on Islamic Thought (Leiden/Boston/Koln: Brill, 1999), ix+261 pp, HB, ISBN 90 04 11374 6

Denoting the period around the third-fourth century after the hijrah (migration) of the Prophet of Islam to Madinah as "medieval", "early medieval Islam" and "early Islam"–all treated as near synonyms–this book explores "two paradoxes" of this era: (i) the relative marginal position accorded to two "freethinkers" of this period; and (ii) the vehemence with which Muslim thinkers supposedly attacked freethinking even though this was a "marginal and short-lived" phenomenon of the medieval Islam.

The two protagonists of Sarah Stroumsa’s book are Abu Husayn Ahmad b. Yahya b. Ishaq ibn al-Rawandi (b. 205/815) and Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Zakariya’ al-Razi (b. 251/865). Given the contemporary social and political realities, the subject matter of this book is, indeed, explosive, and given the fact that the two original texts related to this inquiry have not survived intact, "the likelihood of misinterpretation becomes almost a certainty", as Stroumsa herself informs us in her Preface. Yet, she then puts herself on the line, setting out with a deliberate care worthy of a medievalist, only to let it be blown to pieces as the minefields around her inquiry start to explode due to ambitious over-arching definitions and concepts.

To begin with, the borrowing of the key term of her title–freethinking–from early modern European intellectual history opens the question of the legitimacy of her paradoxes, but this is a choice that Stroumsa has consciously made and justified–in her own manner, that is. The task of the critic, then, is to examine the justification, not the choice. For this, one has to first examine her definition of "freethinking", as applied to medieval Islam. "I suggest we limit the application of the term ‘freethinkers’ in early Islam to those Muslim intellectuals who, in opposition to other heretics, did not adhere to any scriptural religion" (p. 8). According to her working definitions, "one cannot really consider [these freethinkers] to have been ‘Muslim heretics,’ since they did not offer a new, heretical, interpretation of Islam". Rather, it was the very message of Islam, its very foundations–The Qur’an and the Prophet–which they rejected" (p. 8).

Having defined her term as well as what it does not denote, Stroumsa emphatically rejects any dilution of her definition and categorically labels as misleading all usages of this term which include those critically-minded intellectuals who accepted the presuppositions of the monotheistic religions; she only allows this term to be used for those who did not accept these presuppositions. Thus, even before she begins her own inquiry, she feels the need to weed out numerous other usages of the term and isolate her protagonists from all others who might stand next to them. Her "freethinkers" are not "atheists", she insists; it would be incorrect to call them atheists because "their criticism of religion never included the negation of God’s existence. What they did deny was the scriptural religion’s idea of God, His epithets, and His interference in the world through revelation" (p. 8).

They can also not be called "deists" in the sense in which this term is used in modern European thought, she contends, because, although

   the thinkers who are the subject of the present book did indeed
   have some traits in common with the deists; like them, they
   believed that natural reason was sufficient to attain truth; like
   them, they believed in the natural laws and science which
   should be the only guide to human conduct; and like them,
   they regarded with suspicion all established religions. But other
   central components of deism, and primarily the belief in the
   goodness of divine providence, were missing in the thought of
   some of the freethinkers of Islam. In the search for a term that
   will identify the common traits of these people, 'deists' thus
   seems unsuitable (p. 9).

They cannot also be called "materialists", she informs us, for the same reasons. Thus, having weeded out the extraneous matter, she reaffirms that her term "freethinkers" only denotes "the advocates of autonomous reflection on the major metaphysical and human issues, with no commitment to the monotheist tradition" (p. 9); a little later, she rephrases her definition: "the term ‘freethinking’ is used here solely to denote the rejection of the authority of both revelation and of the revealed religions" (p. 9). But in spite of her consideration that the precise meaning of the term is essential for her project, there appears an internal consistency in her variously stated definitions when she comes to examine the phenomenon of freethinking in Islam. Here, she makes two self-contradictory claims: (i) this phenomenon entailed a total rejection of prophecy; and (ii) it rejected all but one manifestation of prophecy–the initial, primal mode that cannot be abrogated by a succession of prophets; hence, in this second mode, freethinking involved rejection of succession of prophets, not of prophecy.

This inconsistency not withstanding, she rejects numerous other contemporary usages of this term by such scholars as Dominique Urvoy, Majid Fakhry, and Josef van Ess, and makes her two protagonists stand alone in the spotlight. She disagrees with Fakhry, for instance, in his categorization which puts al-Nazzam (d. 845) and al-Razi "on the same footing" (p. 11); with H. S. Nyberg, who lumped ‘Amr b. ‘Ubayd and Ibn al-Rawandi together; and with a host of other scholars–Kraus, Kraemer, Abrahamov, Goodman, Calder–anyone who diluted the definition to include independent thinkers of classical Islam in this category. Thus, so far as she is concerned, Ibn al-Muqaffa’, Abu ‘Isa al-Warraq, Abu’l-’Alab al-Ma’arri do not qualify for the distinction of being "freethinkers", although she does clarify that Ibn al-Rawandi and al-Razi were not the only "freethinkers", she yet insists that the number of freethinkers was extremely small, without telling us who else could stand next to her protagonists.

As soon as she finishes with the task of creating her watertight compartment to hold her freethinkers, Stroumsa’s whole project becomes a spider’s web: having incessantly worked to establish the boundaries of her framework, she becomes trapped in it. The very first objection that can be raised is none other than her own objection against Majid Fakhry’s categorization: How can one lump two individuals as different as Ibn al-Rawandi and Abu Bakr al-Razi in this watertight compartment? Believing in her own construction with a single minded tenacity, Stroumsa foresees this objection to her framework of inquiry and attempts to justify it. She acknowledges the enormous "difference in their intellectual backgrounds and tastes", but insists on keeping her two "freethinkers" together on the premise that "they had in common a vociferous rejection of all religions based on revelation", a rejection founded "on the assumption that the human intellect should be, and indeed is, a sufficient source for all knowledge" (p. 13).

Whether or not one can lump together Ibn al-Rawandi and al-Razi may not be the most important issue here; however, because the main problem is the fact that the whole edifice of Stroumsa’s daring enterprise rests on two fragmentary texts, the K. al-Zumurrud (B. of the Emerald) of Ibn al-Rawandi and K. Makhariq al-anbiya’ (The Trickery of the Prophets) of al-Razi, which she needed to reconstruct from a host of secondary, often mutually contradictory, sources. But before launching into this enormously difficult task, she presents "the Muslim dogma which is the backdrop to freethinking in Islam" in the first chapter of her book, which is divided into two parts; the first part consists of five chapters which deal with the phenomena of freethinking in medieval Islam; the last three chapters, constituting the second part of the book, explore its repercussions in Islamic thought.

In order to reconstruct the two salient texts of her "freethinkers" in the religious-historical context in which they lived, Stroumsa first outlines the central position of prophecy in Islam in her first chapter, "The Signs of Prophecy: The Touchstone of Muslim Prophetology". As soon as she begins, one can sense a deliberate sense of steering the discourse toward a peculiar goal through selective use of source material. Even the first sentence is problematic: "The basic Islamic position toward other religions is reflected in the two ‘testimonies’ (al-Shahadatayn) which constitute the Muslim declaration of faith: the belief in the unity of God and the belief in the prophecy of Muhammad" (p.21). How does this statement reflect Islamic position toward other religions? It can only be said to have an indirect connection with the basic Islamic position toward other religions outlined in the Qur’an. The Qur’an constructs a coherent account of the prophetic chain, initiating with Adam and ending with Muhammad. It makes use of historical data connected with the mission of these prophets in order to reaffirm the centrality of its message, Unicity of God. But Stroumsa does not refer to any of this; instead, she begins her study on a linear historical plane, using selected source material from Arabic literature.

It is, however, with her reconstruction of the two primary texts of her protagonists–The Book of the Emerald and The Trickery of the Prophets–in the second and the third chapters of her book that her whole project starts to fall flat due to internal contradictions in her source material as well as in her own usage of these highly complex and problematic texts. Since the extant material does not present the position of her two freethinkers in a coherent manner and since this material is full of mutually exclusive claims, extrapolations, additions, deletions and distortions that make these two "freethinkers" schizophrenic personalities who devote all their strengths to espouse one position only to dismantle it as soon as it has been proclaimed, Stroumsa’s attempt to present their peculiar "freethinking" as a coherent, thoroughgoing affair is fraught with internal inconsistencies. This renders her task of making sense of this diverse source material extremely challenging. In her self-assumed task of imparting coherence to the self-contradictory statements of her protagonists, she accepts and rejects historical data arbitrarily. Thus, against Paul Kraus, she equates the historical Indian Brahmins with Ibn al-Rawandi’s Brahima, who accept and reject prophecy at the same time, just as she describes the Sabeans of Harran as a community believing in messengers, but messengers who, "on closer examination … do not fit exactly the biblical or Qur’anic notion of a succession of prophets" (p. 165).

The zeal with which Stroumsa has constructed her freethinkers is then transferred to the second part of her book in which she examines their repercussions in Islamic thought. If one were to believe her construction, it would appear that the impact of her freethinkers infiltrated the whole spectrum of Islamic thought; no one–from sufis to philosophers–seems to have remained unaffected by them. She even makes al-Ghazali’s self-reflection "reminiscent of that of the freethinkers" (p. 169) and misreads his autobiographical description of his epistemological dilemma as evoking "the familiar theme of the equivalence of religions (takafu’ al-adyan)", claims that al-Ghazali "struggles to counter this dangerous notion with a belief that enjoys perfect certainty" (p. 169). Her claim is based on a passage from al-Munqidh min al-dalal, in which, according to Stroumsa "Ghazali recycles the argumentation of the freethinkers against the prophets’ miracles…. like the freethinkers, Ghazali refuses to accept the evidentiary power of miracles" (p. 170).

Anyone familiar with al-Ghazali would find this juxtaposition highly problematic. The quest for certainty underlying al-Ghazali’s so-called spiritual crisis, so poignantly narrated in his al-Munqidh, has absolutely nothing to do with the impact of freethinkers and there is no reference to the "familiar theme of the equivalence of religions (takafu’ al-adyan)" in al-Munqidh; rather, al-Ghazali is systematically leading his readers to the inner processes that led him to examine the epistemological foundation of certain knowledge. Furthermore, the immediate reference to the quoted passage, which Stroumsa does not mention, is to a saying of the Prophet–upon whom al-Ghazali invokes God’s blessings and peace. This hadith, which al-Ghazali quotes, says:

"Every child is born endowed with the fitrah, then his parents make him Jew or Christian or Magian". He then goes on to explain: "I felt an inner urge to seek the true meaning of the original fitrah, and the true meaning of the beliefs arising from blind imitation (taqlid) of parents and teachers … So, I said to myself: what I seek is the knowledge of true meaning of things (al-’ilm bi haqa’iq al-’amur), therefore I must begin by inquiring into the true nature of knowledge". (2) It is in this connection that al-Ghazali cites the arithmetical example quoted by Stroumsa and it has nothing to do with the impact of freethinkers. Likewise, her passing remark about the mystical experience of sufis posing a threat to the mission of the prophets (p. 169) is totally unsubstantiated.

What remains, then, is a confusing account of "freethinking" and its impact on Islamic thought, a muddle produced by reading into the classical Islamic texts what Stroumsa wants to read, against all other scholars, as if she herself aspires to do what her protagonists supposedly did: freethinking. Yet, one cannot be a free thinker in vacuum; after all, there is a solid core of literature with its power of influence from which no mind can remain detached. All attempts to ignore this historical contingency merely produce illusive flights of self-delusion that may convince one that he or she is a freethinker. Such fanciful flights may lead one to believe in one’s own conclusions, but they remain a personal tragedy, rather than a generally accepted perception. In her "Conclusion", Stroumsa extends her freethinking to the poetry of Jalal al Din Rumi, whose poetic expression of mystical states are construed as blunt expressions of freethinking!

All that can be said about the book’s merit is its scattered testimony to, and a fragmentary account of, the intellectual effervescence of that era of Islamic thought during which so many currents were flowing through its fabric–a period that deserves to be studied in much more detail and in its proper context; Stroumsa’s book adds only a few disjointed strands to our understanding of that century.

(2.) Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al-dalal (Beirut: Mubassah al-kitab al-thaqafiyah, 3rd ed., 1991), p. 18.

Muzaffar Iqbal

Center for Islam and Science

Sherwood Park, AB,

Canada

COPYRIGHT 2004 Center for Islam & Science

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

Islam & Science: Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr al-Razi and Their Impact on Islamic Thought

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Alliance looks to bridge the gap between Islam and the West

The Alliance of Civilizations aims to heal the wounds of conflict through education, viable integration policies and better-informed dialogue with the media

By Shlomo Ben-Ami
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
Sunday, Feb 17, 2008, Page 9

The first International Forum of the Alliance of Civilizations, conceived as an antidote to the idea that the world is doomed to a "clash of civilizations," recently met in Madrid and revealed that there is more than a grain of truth in Robert Kagan’s idea that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. Ever since Sept., 11, 2001, the US has been engaged in a crusade against the forces of evil in the Muslim world. By contrast, the March 11, 2004, terrorist attack on Spain, which left 200 dead, triggered an "anti-crusade" that seeks to disarm extremism by building bridges of understanding and reconciliation with Islam.

Co-sponsored by Spain and Turkey, the Alliance of Civilizations initiative is not devoid of political calculation. To the Spaniards, it helps to justify their abrupt withdrawal from Iraq in 2004; for the Turks, it is yet another vehicle in their struggle, as the vital bridge between Islam and the West, for admission into the EU.

A loose and somewhat confused project, the Alliance of Civilizations aims to heal the wounds of conflict between Islam and the West through education, viable integration policies and a better-informed dialogue with the media. But it suffers from the major global players’ profound skepticism, with the US, Russia and, for that matter, the EU showing no real enthusiasm for it.

However vague, the alliance of civilizations idea certainly cannot do more harm than war against Islamic extremism. After all, none of the Muslim world’s problems and conflicts with the West are susceptible to a military solution. Moreover, the alliance is not an entirely incoherent proposal if the objective is that the West disengage from the politics of hubris and establish a genuine sphere of cooperation with the Muslim world in economics, culture and science.

Of course, the idea is held back by the inner workings of both parts of the proposed alliance. Many in the West question whether Islam is compatible with human rights and Western concepts of liberty. Many Muslims who have been fighting for years for ?their countries’ modernization have so far failed to find a lucid response to the progressive wave of radical Islam.

To claim that Islam is incompatible with human rights is to consider it a civilization too hidebound to change. This is a historic fallacy. Nor is the claim that Islam is intrinsically inimical to innovation viable, because Muslim civilization has contributed mightily to science and art throughout history.

Today, Western universities are replete with distinguished Arab scholars in almost every field — the result of a brain drain that itself reflects the Islamic world’s centuries of decline. In 2005, the 17 countries of the Arab world produced 13,444 scientific publications, fewer than the 15,455 achieved by Harvard University alone.

Enemies of reason, however, are also to be found in the West. We live in an age in which many people are disillusioned with secular politics and are turning to religion instead, not only throughout the Muslim world, but in the core of Western civilization, Christian Europe and Evangelist US. Nor is the Jewish state of Israel, where Messianic fanatics and religious nationalists have embraced a political theology that questions the very legitimacy of the democratic institutions, immune from this phenomenon.

The current crisis of Islam might not be congenital, but Islam’s predicament is acute. The question is this: Are Muslims ready to accept Khomeini’s dictum that "Islam is politics or it is nothing" is wrong, that Islam is a religion and not a form of government and that, as in the Christian world, there is a sphere for Caesar and a sphere for God? Those in the Muslim world who want to embrace reform must be driven by the conviction that theocracy has never served as a vehicle for human progress.

Of course, the Alliance of Civilizations should not attempt to bridge differences by defending moral relativism. If it is driven by a Western guilt complex that assumes that the solution simply lies in greater empathy for the Muslim predicament, then the skeptics are bound to be vindicated.

For the alliance to have any chance of success, the emphasis must be on reciprocity. Tolerance and religious freedom must be mutual. Islam’s part in the deal must include a guarantee of human rights and civil liberties, improvement in women’s status and realistic policies to stem the Islamic world’s demographic explosion.

Some, as usual, will claim that the Arab-Israeli conflict lies at the root of the problems that exist between Islam and the West and that resolving the Palestinians’ plight will contribute immensely to smoother relations. But Arabs and Muslims must stop deluding themselves that the Israel-Palestine dispute is what is holding them back. Ending the US occupation in Iraq and imposing an Arab-Israeli peace would help, but they are no panacea. The fight to eradicate misery, illiteracy and corruption, and Islam’s embrace of science, do not depend on the results of the Middle East peace process.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, now serves as the vice president of the Toledo International Center for Peace in Spain.

Taipei Times - archives

Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West by Benazir Bhutto

Reviewed by Patrick French

How will Benazir Bhutto be remembered? Discussing Reconciliation on Radio 4’s Start the Week, the presenter Andrew Marr got so excited by her legacy and achievement that he said, “At the risk of straying across lines of neutrality, I think the more people that read this book, the better.” The book comes garlanded with acclaim from the likes of Senator Edward Kennedy and Madeleine Albright. But does the praise lavished on Benazir since her assassination bear any relation to what she actually did during her life?

Let me tell you about the former Pakistani prime minister, Mohammed Mohammed, an ugly man with a thick beard.

During his first term in office he failed to pass a single piece of legislation, and when he returned to government he and his family became extremely rich from kickbacks on official contracts. He bugged and harassed independent journalists. In the mid1990s, his paramilitary death squads eliminated activists from the rival MQM in Karachi and he was implicated in the murder of his own brother, as well as the deaths of three family retainers in his mother’s entourage. He funded a proxy war against India in Kashmir using Arab jihadis, and backed the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan; indeed, if he had not given cash, fuel, training and military spare parts to the Taliban, it would not have been able to rise to power.

Mohammed Mohammed never, of course, existed: I am talking here about Benazir Bhutto. She was brave, glamorous, feisty and articulate – and the midwife of the Taliban. To a western audience (which she always handled impeccably, flattering reporters with access) she came across as a secular democrat and a committed campaigner for women’s rights. On David Frost’s sofa, Benazir could change from cute to solemn in a moment. As the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country, she offered huge symbolic hope. Since her death, she has been praised extensively: a television anchor even wrote an article about introducing Benazir to the joys of buying lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. Ironically, it was left to the socialite Jemima Khan to puncture the balloon. Khan concluded from her own years of living in Pakistan – as the wife of Imran Khan, Benazir’s political rival – that Benazir was “as ruthless and conniving as they come — a kleptocrat in a Hermès headscarf”.

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Reconciliation is an odd book. It seems to have been put together by a variety of people. Parts of it are readable and well argued, and deserve to be remembered as Benazir’s last testament, a statement of the ideals she aspired to but did not always fulfil. Other bits are tendentious and irrelevant. The first chapter is vintage Benazir, written in the same tone as her autobiography, Daughter of the East. She describes her return to Pakistan from exile at the end of last year, and her triumphal homecoming procession: “I must confess I felt safe in the enormous sea of love and support that surrounded me,” she wrote.

It was obvious to anyone in Pakistan at the time that she would be targeted as an American stooge, but she went ahead with the procession. A suicide bomber struck, leaving nearly 200 people dead, but Benazir survived. She made much in the book of the fact that the dictator General Pervez Musharraf did not provide her with sufficient security, asserting: “Had the jammers worked, the bombs could not have gone off.” But suicide bombers use toggle switches, which are not blocked by jammers. Either way, another terrorist killed Benazir only weeks later on December 27, 2007.

The next section of Reconciliation deals with the internal disputes within Islam. It is frank about the sectarian splits between Sunnis and Shias, and about the failure of the leaders of some Muslim countries to face down the distortions of Osama Bin Laden. Benazir noted the lack of interest on Arab television channels in the genocide of a Muslim population in Darfur, and the “unwillingness within the Muslim world to look inward and to identify where we may be going wrong ourselves”.

Using verses from the Koran, she has made a careful and reasonable case for seeing the ideology of Al-Qaeda as a profound distortion of original Islam, and has presented an alternative argument for believing in a reformist, pluralistic and modern Islamic society, and seeing it as closer to the real wishes of most of the world’s Muslims.

At this point, the tone of the book changes again, and the reader is treated to a brisk and baffling examination of the history of assorted countries including Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Mali and Congo; even Kazakhstan is mentioned. India (the elephant in the room when it came to Benazir’s view of the world) gets only a brief mention. The history of Pakistan that follows is like something out of a primary-school textbook, crossed with a party political broadcast. The achievements of the Bhutto family are exaggerated and lauded and their mistakes and hypocrisies are ignored. Benazir’s grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a feudal landowner and a pro-British politician of no great importance, is presented as a seminal figure in the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Benazir’s own backing of the Taliban is blamed on her successor, Nawaz Sharif.

The book ends with a prescription for a happier world, involving an equivalent of the Marshall Plan being applied to the poorer Muslim nations by rich countries, and a nuanced analysis of Samuel P Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations, an essay published in 1993 in the journal Foreign Affairs.

What are we to make of this strange book? I contacted Mark Siegel, Benazir’s point man in Washington, who helped her to research and write it. I asked him how it had been created, and he said that Benazir had been troubled by the way that extremists had hijacked the message of Islam. “She wanted me to compile all the assertions of extremist clerics and terrorists on democracy, pluralism, tolerance . . . Then she wanted me to confer with Islamic scholars and compile the Koranic references to the same subjects and line them out in an array, almost a spreadsheet, against the extremists.” He did his job well, and Benazir wrote a draft of the narrative.

Benazir was, by all accounts, a devoted patriot, a loyal friend and a loving mother. As a young woman at Harvard and Oxford universities, she imbibed idealistic ideas about democracy and feminism. But during the early 1980s she was to be cruelly mistreated by the dictator General Zia, taken from prison to prison and held for a time in a cage at a desert jail in Sindh, where temperatures would reach above 50C. This — and her father’s judicial execution — formed her political personality. Benazir was duplicitous to the point of being delusional, playing a constant multiple game, saying one thing to her supporters, another to the Pakistani army, another to the intelligence services, another to London and Washington, and something else again to the western media. She was a complex and brave woman, but she was no Joan of Arc, let alone a Margaret Thatcher, an Indira Gandhi or a Golda Meir.

Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West by Benazir Bhutto review | Non-fiction book reviews - Times Online

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star

Geert Wilders, the popular MP whose film on Islam has fuelled the debate on race in Holland, wants an end to mosque building and Muslim immigration. Ian Traynor met him in The Hague

Technorati Tags: hate islam,geert wilders,holland

This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday February 17 2008 on p40 of the World news section. It was last updated at 00:06 on February 17 2008.

Geert Wilders, the right-wing Dutch politician. Photograph: Jerry Lampen/Reuters

A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology,’ says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, ‘the ideology of a retarded culture.’

The Dutch politician, who sees himself as heir to a recent string of assassinated or hounded mavericks who have turned Holland upside down, has been doing a crash course in Koranic study. Likening the Islamic sacred text to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he wants the ‘fascist Koran’ outlawed in Holland, the constitution rewritten to make that possible, all immigration from Muslim countries halted, Muslim immigrants paid to leave and all Muslim ‘criminals’ stripped of Dutch citizenship and deported ‘back where they came from’. But he has nothing against Muslims. ‘I have a problem with Islamic tradition, culture, ideology. Not with Muslim people.’

Wilders has been immersing himself in the suras and verse of seventh-century Arabia. The outcome of his scholarship, a short film, has Holland in a panic. He is just putting the finishing touches to the 10-minute film, he says, and talking to four TV channels about screening it.

‘It’s like a walk through the Koran,’ he explains in a sterile conference room in the Dutch parliament in The Hague, security chaps hovering outside. ‘My intention is to show the real face of Islam. I see it as a threat. I’m trying to use images to show that what’s written in the Koran is giving incentives to people all over the world. On a daily basis Moroccan youths are beating up homosexuals on the streets of Amsterdam.’

Wilders is lucid and shrewd and the provactive soundbites trip easily off his tongue. He was recently voted Holland’s most effective politician. If 18 months ago he sat alone in the second chamber or lower house in The Hague, his People’s Party now has nine of 150 seats and is running at about 15 per cent in the polls. His Islam-bashing seems to be paying off. And not only in Holland. All across Europe, the new breed of right-wing populists are trying to revive their political fortunes by appealing to anti-Muslim prejudice.

A few months ago the Swiss People’s Party of the pugnacious billionaire Christoph Blocher won a general election while simultaneously running a campaign to change the Swiss constitution to ban the building of minarets on mosques. Last month in Antwerp, far-right leaders from 15 European cities and from political parties in Belgium, Germany and Austria got together to launch a charter ‘against the Islamisation of western European cities’, reiterating the call for a mosque-building moratorium.

‘We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,’ argued Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium’s Flemish separatist party, the Vlaams Belang, who organised the Antwerp get-together. ‘Its minarets are six floors high, higher than the floodlights of the Feyenoord soccer stadium,’ he said of a new mosque being built in Rotterdam. ‘These kinds of symbols have to stop.’

Where a few years ago the far right in Europe concentrated its fire on immigration, these days Islam is fast becoming the most popular target. It is a campaign that is having mixed results. In Switzerland, the Blocher party has been highly successful. In Holland, Wilders is thriving by constantly poking sticks in the eyes of the politically correct Dutch establishment. But when Susanne Winter ran for a seat on the local council in the Austrian city of Graz last month by branding the Prophet Muhammad a child molester, she lost her far-right Freedom Party votes.

For the mainstream centre-right in Europe, foreigner-bashing is also backfiring. Roland Koch, the German Christian Democrat once tipped as a future Chancellor, wrecked his chances a fortnight ago by forfeiting a 12-point lead in a state election after a campaign that denounced Muslim ritual slaughter practices and called for the deportation of young immigrant criminals.

Wilders echoes some of the arguments against multiculturalism that have convulsed Germany in recent years. Like many on the traditional German right, he wants the European Judaeo-Christian tradition to be formally recognised as the dominating culture, or Leitkultur. ‘There is no equality between our culture and the retarded Islamic culture. Look at their views on homosexuality or women,’ he says.

But if Wilders shares positions and aims with others on the far right in Europe, he is also a very specific Dutch phenomenon, viewing himself as a libertarian provocateur like the late Pim Fortuyn or Theo van Gogh, railing against ‘Islamisation’ as a threat to what used to be the easy-going Dutch model of tolerance.

‘My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,’ he emphasises. ‘We’ll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I’m very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.’ Dutch iconoclasm, Scandinavian insistence on free expression, the right to provoke are what drive him, he says.

He shrugs off anxieties that his film will trigger a fresh bout of violence of the kind that left Van Gogh stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street and his estranged colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali in hiding, or the murderous furore over the Danish cartoons in 2005.

The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown. It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business. ‘Our Prime Minister is a big coward. The government is weak,’ says Wilders. ‘They hate my guts and I don’t like them either.’

And if people are murdered as a result of his film? ‘They say that if there’s bloodshed it would be the responsibility of this strange politician. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. They’re creating an atmosphere. I’m not responsible for using democratic means and acting within the law. I don’t want Dutch people or Dutch interests to be hurt.’

But he does want to create a stir. ‘Islam is something we can’t afford any more in the Netherlands. I want the fascist Koran banned. We need to stop the Islamisation of the Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more Islamic schools, no more imams… Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all terrorists are Muslims.’

Free speech or hate speech? ‘I don’t create hate. I want to be honest. I don’t hate people. I don’t hate Muslims. I hate their book and their ideology.’

For more than three years, Wilders has been paying for his ‘honesty’ by living under permanent police guard as the internet bristles with threats on his life. He has lived in army barracks, in prisons, under guard at home. ‘There’s no freedom, no privacy. If I said I was not afraid, I would be lying.’

There is little doubt that if Wilders’s film exists - and it’s shrouded in secrecy - and is broadcast, it will be construed as blasphemy in large parts of the world and may spark a new bloody crisis in relations between the West and the Muslim world.

He does not seem to care. ‘People ask why don’t you moderate your voice and not make this movie. If I do that and not say what I think, then the extremists who threaten me would win.’

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star | World news | The Observer

By Joseph Puder

Dr. Tawfik Hamid, 47, was born in Egypt into a secular Muslim family.  As a student at Cairo University medical school in the late 1970’s, Hamid joined the Jihadist-Muslim group-Jamaat Islamiyah.  He was deeply influenced by an older fellow student named Ayman al-Zawahiri, destined to become al-Qaida’s No.2 and Osama Bin Laden’s lieutenant.  Hamid described al-Zawahiri as “One of the fiercest speakers I had ever heard…His rhetoric inspired us to want to engage in a war against the infidels, Allah’s enemies.” 

Through the influence of his atheist father who had honed his son’s critical thinking, Hamid eventually rejected his Jihadi friends.  Before leaving Egypt 13 years ago he earned degrees in Cognitive Psychology and Masters Degrees in Internal Medicine and Education.  Hamid then went on to develop a unique cognitive psychological approach to improving the absorption process in student education. 

Dedicated to American values, Hamid has combined his expertise in Quranic studies with acquired skills as a psychologist, to combat radical Islam that seems to have hijacked normative Islam. 

This writer recently sat down with Dr. Hamid for an interview at his Washington home.

Joseph Puder (JP): There are some people in the West who question Islam’s ability to reform and transform itself, what would you say to these people?

Dr. Tawfik Hamid (TH): “I can fully understand the feelings of westerners about Islam when they see the beheading of innocent people, and the explicit violent verses of the Quran and the Hadith used by Islamists to justify violence.  The deafening silence of our Islamic scholars adds to the problem. 

I could however give you many examples on how this violent text could yield different meaning when interpreted in a different way.  Many religions were practiced in a barbaric manner when worshippers implemented its text in a literal way.  Thinking at a conceptual level and limiting certain meanings to the past and using a complex theological approach could make a true change.

It was said about the violent texts in other religious books that those religions could not be reformed as well.  The reality is that these texts are now interpreted differently and reformation of the violent text in a peaceful manner has already happened in other belief systems.  It is not an easy process when it comes to Islam, since the violent style of teaching became part of the mainstream teaching.  Reinterpretation of Islamic religious text is however possible.  Some examples:

Quran, Sura 4:101- the infidels are your sworn enemies

Quran, Sura 66:9- Prophet, make war on the infidels

Quran, Sura 28:86- never be a helper to the disbelievers

The above verses could incite a lot of hatred against non-Muslims.  Some Muslims might take them literally and inflict harm on innocent people.  Careful analysis of the above verses demonstrates that the Quran use of the suffix “the” in Arabic text AL-is connected to the words “infidels.”  The AL- makes the verse limited only to the time of the revelation of the verse (in the past) and only to specific groups of people in the early stages of Islam.  If the Quran meant to generalize or extend the meaning to our modern times it would have used the expression “Min kafar” rather than “Al-Kafereen.”  The former “Min kafar” means anyone who does not believe in God while the latter “AL-Kafereen” means a specific group of people who fought the Prophet Muhammad in the early stages of Islam.

Just by considering the meaning of “The” while reading the Quran has made all of these violent verses automatically limited to the past.  If someone had taught this concept to me or to many of my fellow Muslims in Jamaat Islamiyah, we would not have thought of becoming Jihadists.

JP: The Arab-Israeli conflict is less about territory (Israel returned all of the Sinai to Egypt) and more about dar al-Islam (the domain of Islam), and the refusal of Palestinians and Saudis in particular to recognize the right of the Jewish State to exist in the region.  What in your view can change that (short of Jews accepting Islam)?

TH: Different approaches must be taken. 

Hamas has to be defeated both militarily and economically to achieve this.  The defeat of Hamas is crucial because it will prove to the Palestinians that their violent approach does not work.  Israel and the civilized world need to use sufficient power (military and economic) to do this.  Using insufficient power in this situation is like a doctor using “half a dose of antibiotic” which does not cure but rather encourages the development of resistance to antibiotic.  Unfortunately, the use of power is sometimes essential to change the educational systems of violent regimes.  We have seen how this happened with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in WWII.

With regard to Saudi Arabia and their oil-related dominance, the use of alternative energy or more efficient engines that use less petrol can exert enough pressure to make them change their educational system and thus allow the acceptance of Israel. Moreover, the ideological approach should not be ignored.  For example, new theological analyses of verses that are used to promote anti-Semitism are required and entirely possible.  To summarize, using a multi-directional approach that includes military, economic, and an ideological/educational dimension could certainly assist in making a change in the Arab perception of Israel.

JP: Christianity and Judaism underwent reformation and adopted modernization of thought as well as technology, why is the Arab world resistant to change, reform and modernization, considering that the Arab Middle East is currently at the bottom of the Human Development Index scale?

TH: The reasons why the Arab/Muslim world is resistant to change are: 1. Muslim scholars made violent interpretations (such as killing apostates, beating and stoning women to death, declaring war on the innocent to spread Islam) and when they feel that someone is seeking to change these concepts they fear that their whole religion will collapse, so they resist change.

2. There is currently no theologically based teaching that interprets the violent Quranic passages in a different manner.  The mainstream books teach an extremely violent theology that is applicable to the past, and I have overwhelming evidence to prove this point.  I am working on providing a modern interpretation to avoid the inevitable clash of civilizations if Islamic teaching remains as it is now.

JP: As a Psychologist/Psychiatrist, you understand better than most of us the importance of teaching children tolerance.  Currently, Hamas in particular, and the Palestinians in general, are teaching their children to be suicide-bombers or martyrs (Shahids), and are indoctrinating children as young as 4 years old hate and intolerance towards Jews, Christians, Israelis and Americans, how would you go about changing that?

TH: The problem is unfortunately not limited to Hamas.  It is a widespread disease of anti-Semitism.  Once the words “Jew” or “Israeli” is mentioned it is immediately associated with negative feelings in the mind of Arab-Muslims.  This is called the “Spreading Activation Model.”  In order to stop this phenomenon, you need to use the power of religion itself to combat it, albeit, in the opposite direction.  This is what I call “`Reversed Religious Activation.”   It is a complex process that aims at weakening the negative links in the brain and creates positive links instead.  To be successful this process needs support from the media, the educational system, and other areas as well.

JP: Are the teachings of the Quran hateful towards non-Muslims, particularly Christians and Jews, or is this animus a matter of interpretation that is motivated by political and cultural considerations?

TH: If the Quranic verses are taken literally and understood traditionally, some verses could obviously create hatred towards Jews and Christians.  On the other hand, if these verses are understood in conjunction with other verses, the interpretation could yield different meanings.  Unfortunately, most of the current interpretations create hatred. The problem of hating non-Muslims is in my view a theologically based problem, and not necessary a political one.

A Conversation with Dr Tawfik Hamid (The American Thinker)

KUALA LUMPUR: Many of the crises faced by Muslims and the Muslim world were largely due to their own fault, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said.

The former prime minister said crises were not something new to the Muslim world as they existed since the Quran began to be interpreted in many ways by different groups.

“Crises and problems also began when Muslim scholars began to neglect subjects perceived to be secular such as science, mathematics, medicine and engineering, but focused only on religious studies.

“I would like to insist that the fault lies in ourselves. We are the people to be blamed, letting ourselves split by so many sects and different interpretations of the Quran,” Dr Mahathir said in his keynote address on “Global Peace: Crisis in the Muslim World” at the International Islamic University (IIU), Gombak, near here.

At one time, Dr Mahathir said, Muslims were leaders in science, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, engineering and medicine while the Western world lagged behind them and were in the dark ages.

However, the Europeans, noticing the knowledge acquired by Muslim scholars, began to learn Arabic to get access to the (various fields of) knowledge and got out of the dark ages and achieved the Renaissance.

He said while the Europeans developed powerful military forces, Muslims however, become less knowledgeable and less capable of doing things for themselves, including defending themselves.

 Muslims should blame themselves, says Dr M (The Star Online)

By Eric Messinger

The word “jihad” can cause uneasy feelings in America, but Muslim student groups on campus are aiming to reclaim the word’s meaning of “struggle” in a speaker series called “Jihad to Reform.” UCLA Law Prof. Abou El Fadl kicked off the talks last night in Cubberley Auditorium with a discussion about the history of intolerance of and from Muslims and the present-day imperatives for change.

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UCLA Law Prof. Abou El Fadl examined the meaning of intolerance last night in a talk about the Islamic faith put on by MSAN and ISSU.

“Jihad to Reform” is a dual effort of the Muslim Student Awareness Network (MSAN) and the Islamic Society of Stanford University (ISSU). Through speakers focusing on four separate contentious issues, student organizers hope to bring about dialogue concerning numerous problems confronting contemporary Islam, including instances and misperceptions about intolerance, terrorism, Shari’ah law and patriarchy.

In last night’s talk entitled “Towards Coexistence: Wrestling Islam from Intolerance,” Fadl emphasized the complexities of the problems faced in the faith.

“The argument for peaceful coexistence is all well and good, but it’s not sufficient,” Fadl said. “Ideas don’t exist in an abstract plane, and ideas don’t simply assert their dominance by virtue of the fact that they exist. Ideas can be wonderful, but, if they fail to engage in the right way, they could produce something that is far from wonderful.”

“We have to stand back and unpack the very notion of tolerance,” he said.

Fadl said a problem with claims that Muslims — or non-Muslims — are “intolerant” is the complexity inherent in the term.

“Every time we speak about reconstruction, one must tread carefully, especially with a concept such as tolerance,” said Fadl. “What is it exactly that they are reforming, and why?”

Fadl focused much of his address on the hypocrisy of non-Muslim critics regarding the Muslim world, explaining that he had talked a lot in the past about the problems of intolerance from Muslim Puritans.

“If we look at the literature of Islamophobes, it is remarkable how often they talk about tolerance and insistently harp upon the notion that Muslims are an intolerant people,” Fadl said. “But one can quite easily argue that if anyone epitomizes the notion of intolerance it is the Islamophobes. Their refusal to accept the legitimacy of, or to treat equally, or to love, or to in any way endorse any level of Islamic authenticity is intolerant.”

Fadl’s address was followed by a wide-ranging question-and-answer session, covering everything from Christian missionaries to the effects of colonialism on racist attitudes. In response to one question, Fadl emphasized the imperative for Muslim students to take pride in their heritage.

“It’s important for young Muslims, as they’re going to have to lead this struggle to reform, vis-a-vis the rest of the world, that you do not have a defeatist attitude,” he said. “You do not have to feel like you are carrying a huge guilt trip on your shoulders. If that happens, you will not do either Muslims or non-Muslims a favor.”

Event organizers were optimistic about the possibilities of the series and were pleased with the first talk.

“Often, when you want to confront issues within your own community, there’s a fear of coming off as un-politically correct, or even hateful,” said Zaid Adhami ‘10, vice president of MSAN. “We want to push people to think critically about these issues and to rethink a lot of their assumptions.”

But Adhami said that the series should not be seen as a response to outside pressure.

“We think it’s important that this be an internal effort,” Adhami said. “This isn’t an attempt to appease Western critics; it’s more about addressing issues critically on our own terms.”

Fadl addresses Islamic reform (The Stanford Daily)