Muslim Heretics Conference

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated before she could achieve her dream of leading her country again. But she left a legacy - a book ironically titled Reconciliation. In this exclusive extract, the former Pakistani Prime Minister argues how the West and the Muslim world can attack the economic, social, and political roots of extremism.

There are two historic clashes unfolding in the world today that appear inexorably intertwined. The resolution of one could determine the immediacy of the other.

The internal clash within the Muslim world is not merely over theology. The real fight is not over the succession to the Holy Prophet that divides the Shiite and Sunni communities. It is certainly not about the language of the Holy Quran. It is not really about the interpretations of Sharia. The extremism and militancy of Muslim-on-Muslim violence is a long battle for the heart and soul of the future, not only of a religion but also of the one billion people who practice it. Fundamentally, it is also about whether the Muslim people can survive and prosper in the modern era, or whether linkages with traditional interpretations of the 16th century will freeze them in the past.

If Muslims can adjust to changes in the political, social, and economic environment we will not only survive but flourish.

If modernity is dogmatically resisted, the existence of Muslims as a viable community will become vulnerable. In the extreme, Muslims will attempt to impose themselves in a messianic union of Muslim states that could provoke the external clash between Islam and the West that the world is focusing on today.

It is an ambitious undertaking, but it can be done.

Muslim scholars and leaders have bemoaned the community’s loss of power - political, intellectual, scientific, and economic - since the colonial era. Although Westerners are not fully aware of its dimensions, an important debate has raged among Muslims over how to deal with modernity.

Just as some have called for rejecting modern ideas, and in the most extreme cases have advocated an endless war with the West as the source of modernity, others have proposed strategies for reconciling the Islamic world with modern scientific ideas and with the modern political, economic, and social environment.

At the beginning of the 20th century, reformist ideas appealed to the Muslim intelligentsia. Even unlettered farmers paid attention to speeches and poems by Islamic reformers stressing the need for improving the fortunes and influence of Muslims through mass education, democracy, and economic progress.

But then, tragically, most of the Muslim world fell under the sway of dictatorial regimes. Irrespective of whether the dictators espoused secular or religious ideas, the stifling of debate undermined the pluralist environment necessary for an Islamic reformation. Dictatorship choked the oxygen of innovation.

In making the case that much of the Muslim world’s future depends on whether democracy can replace authoritarianism and dictatorship, my premise is that democracy weakens the forces of extremism and militancy. And if extremism and militancy are defeated, our planet can avoid the cataclysmic battle that pessimists predict is inevitable.

Thus much of what I think needs doing to defeat Islamic extremism centres around what I think must be done to strengthen democracy among Islamic states.

Democracy cannot be sustained around the world in the absence of a stable and growing middle-class. Huge economic disparities between social classes in a society strain national unity, creating a gap between the rich and the poor. Educated and rich elites dominating illiterate masses are not a successful prescription for building a democratic society.

BUILDING A MIDDLE-CLASS

The first key is to build an educational system that allows children to rise to a higher social and economic status than their parents, in other words an educational system that delivers hope and real opportunity is a prerequisite for democracy. Good public educational opportunity is the key to the economic and political progress of nations, and it can be so in the Islamic world as well.

Building a strong, compulsory educational system requires two key elements. First, compulsory public education for all citizens, all classes, and both sexes must be a priority. But one needs more than the will to make it a priority. One also must have the means. It is essential that budgets for Muslim countries be prioritised by social need, not outdated political or military history.

In Pakistan, for example, $4.5 billion is spent on the military each year. This is an astounding 1400 per cent more than is spent on education. Military versus social sector foreign assistance is even more disproportionate.

Pakistan has a strong military with plenty of tanks and missiles, but it lacks a dynamic and technologically educated workforce. The key to investing in the future is to invest in people’s educational opportunities. As Prime Minister, I attempted to put as much funding into the social sector and education as I could. Overburdened with the debts run up by dictatorship, my Government still built almost 50,000 elementary and secondary schools around the country, and especially in the rural areas. I wish our debts had been rescheduled so we could have done more.

The fundamental constraint upon my Governments in prioritising our budget was the enormous percentage of our GNP that was diverted to debt repayment and defence.

To complicate matters, the military came under the President and not the Prime Minister. It was difficult to ask for more transparent accounting of the huge funds made available to the military without constitutional authority. Moreover, as in many developing countries, the military was an institution that had been insulated from civilian control and direction for decades under one military dictatorship or another.

From the tenuous fortnight between my party’s victory in November 1988 and the time I formed a Government, I was under pressure from the public, the military, and key international players, all of whom expected a chunk of the federal budget, which was already burdened with debt.

All this occurred while international financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund, were pressing me to cut national expenditure to reduce the budget deficit. This undermined my ability to govern effectively.

If education is to succeed in a nation like Pakistan, or the Islamic world and developing world, new democratic leaders need the international and political support to withstand militaries destabilising them with ambitious generals keen to rule once again.

Armies should protect borders, not rig elections or blackmail elected leaders. And a military that is subservient to civilian rule would strengthen the ability of democratic institutions to take hold. Democratic governance can take place when Governments are safe from the sword of Damocles of military takeover constantly swinging over Parliament’s head.

Often, when the military does leave Government, it leaves behind a constitution in which power is divided between the president and the Parliament. The Parliament is the voice of the people. The President becomes the voice of the military. In the clash, the people are the casualties.

MILITANT MADRASAS

Another important way in which education can build democratic infrastructure in the Islamic world concerns the real threat from militant madrasas. Many of the madrasas across Pakistan and other parts of the Islamic world make a significant contribution to education for the nation that is not dissimilar to that of parochial educational institutions in the West.

These political and military training camps invest little time and resources in primary education. Rather they manipulate religion to brainwash children into becoming soldiers of an irregular army. They conduct hours upon hours of paramilitary training.

They teach hatred and violence. They breed terrorists, not scientists. Militant madrasas undermine the very concept of national identity and rule of law.

These militant madrasas did not flourish because Pakistani citizens suddenly became more religiously orthodox than ever before in our history. They took advantage of parents from low-income social classes who wanted a better life for their children. If parents are so poor that they cannot house, clothe, feed, and provide healthcare for their children, and the state fails to provide such basic human needs through public services, they will seek an alternative.

Militant madrasas are dangerous to all societies. They should be stopped, not just in Pakistan but all over the world where they produce the child soldier. If a viable state educational alternative existed that would provide both education and social services to the children of the poor, the militant madrasas, breeding grounds of violence, would shrivel and dry up.

THE PLACE OF WOMEN

The next fundamental change needed within Islamic states to equalise society and opportunity deals with women’s rights.

In any society, gender equality is a prerequisite for democracy to thrive. This is especially true in Islamic societies, where gender inequality has been used to promote political subordination and domination for centuries. It stifles social growth and opportunity. Societies with gender equality have without exception been pluralistic, tolerant, economically viable, and democratically stable.

As a person growing up in an environment of gender equality, in which daughters and sons were treated equally, I have found it difficult to tolerate gender inequality in any form. I find it offensive both as a woman and as a Muslim.

In 1997 the Taleban shut down girls’ schools in Afghanistan and kept women off the streets. In Pakistani territory now ceded by the Musharraf Administration to the Taleban and al Qaeda, girls’ schools are being shut down, sometimes even burned, and women stripped of their constitutional rights.

Democracy cannot work if women are subjugated, uneducated, and unable to be independent.

I worked hard as Prime Minister to eradicate illiteracy among grown women in Pakistani society. It is known that literate mothers raise literate children.

One of the most efficient ways to dent illiteracy in society is to educate mothers.

Islamic societies that fail to educate women condemn their children to a vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty. From illiteracy and poverty stem hopelessness. And from hopelessness come desperation and extremism.

An important way in which women’s rights, economic development, and the building of a middle class come together is the economic empowerment of women. My father encouraged his daughters to be as well educated as our brothers and also to be economically independent.

A true measure of liberation from traditional roles and traditional subordination by men is the extent to which women are economically self-sufficient.

If the Prophet’s wife could work outside the home, all Muslim women should be free to work. Economic independence brings political independence, and political independence within the family encourages pluralism and democratic expression and organisation outside the family.

A CIVIL SOCIETY

Political and social reforms are often interrelated. Women’s rights groups have been at the vanguard of the fight for human rights and building a viable civil society.

The development of a strong civil society is a basic building block of democracy. Non-governmental organisations that deal with women’s rights, human rights, and the rule of law are key to democracy. There can be no democracy without a stable and protected civil society. The fact that General Musharraf, in the first moments of his second declaration of martial law in November 2007, arrested thousands of activists, lawyers, and judges, demonstrated that he knew full well that a thriving civil society is incompatible with dictatorship.

Civil society is a concept intrinsically linked to strong democratic traditions, giving real meaning to the concept of pluralism in society.

Non-governmental groups, community organisations, women’s organisations, student unions, trade unions, environmental organisations, professional associations and religious groups each represent the interests of particular constituents. Collectively, they form the foundation of democracy in theory and practice. The groups making up civil society are often at the vanguard of political reform and demands for governmental transparency. They are the internal election monitors.

They stand up against violations of human rights. They work with international groups that promote democracy to guarantee a fair political process but not a guaranteed political outcome. Such civil society groups can be both powerful and credible.

Although civil society cannot replace political parties in the democratic process, it complements political parties by ensuring a level playing field in politics. Civil society is invaluable to building democratic systems that isolate extremists.

Extremism, militancy, terrorism, and dictatorship feed off one another, thriving in an environment of poverty, hopelessness, and economic disparity among social classes. This symbiotic relationship of extremism, militancy, terrorism, dictatorship, and poverty is a direct threat to international and national stability and a clear danger to world peace.

Targeted economic development can help reduce poverty and violence in Muslim-majority states. Alleviating poverty is a fundamental responsibility of all Muslims, wherever they live, as part of the basic principles of Islam. It would be far more Islamic in its true sense to declare a jihad on poverty, illiteracy, hunger, and poor governance. That is exactly what I am proposing.

Islam’s first generations produced knowledge and wealth that empowered Muslim empires to rule much of the world.

But now almost half the world’s Muslims are illiterate.

The combined GDP of the member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is about the same as that of France, a single European country. More books are translated annually from other languages into Spanish than have been translated into Arabic over the past 100 years. The 15 million citizens of tiny Greece buy more books annually than do all Arabs put together.

The World Bank comparison of average incomes demonstrates a disquieting pattern. In the United States, the average per capita income is almost $38,000; in Israel it is almost $20,000. Pakistan, on the other hand, has an annual per capita income that barely crosses the $2000 mark.

No Muslim nation that is a non-oil producer has an annual per capita income near or above the world average. I find this pattern, these statistics, unacceptable.

The chain must be broken. One direct way to do that would be for the Gulf states to jump-start economic and intellectual development in the rest of the Islamic world.

This is what my father tried to do for Pakistan in the 1970s, and this is what I tried to do as Prime Minister in my two terms in office. Norway and Kazakhstan, as examples, provide models of committing oil revenues to internal economic development and foreign investment that can be refined to address the economic, social, and political realities of the non-Gulf Islamic world.

In other words, oil can break the chain of poverty, hopelessness, dictatorship, and extremism that often ruptures into international terrorism.

21ST CENTURY MARSHALL PLAN

The lessons of history help us plan for the future. The conditions, threats, and opportunities that confronted Europe at the end of World War II can give us guidance on how to intelligently and effectively address the current situation we find ourselves in with respect to Islam and the West. For this, I turn to the words of US Secretary of State General George Marshall, delivered at my alma mater, Harvard University, on June 5, 1947.

From that commencement speech at Harvard emerged a $20 billion commitment by the United States to rebuild Europe and, in doing so, to preserve its own security. The Marshall Plan was both moral and self-serving, which is the key to defining national interest.

That same formula could be applied to the Muslim world by North America, Europe, Australia, China, and Japan. This would comprise a new commitment pledging to eliminate terrorism within Muslim nations by systematically attacking the economic, social, and political roots of extremism.

I propose a new programme by the developed world similar to the Marshall Plan, specifically using tangible and identifiable means to improve the lives of people in deprived areas of the Muslim nations. I am looking for programmes whose success can be measured and evaluated.

When ordinary people in a country identify assistance improving their lives and the lives of their children, they bond with the source of that aid.

The Marshall Plan’s $20 billion commitment in 1947 would now be equivalent to $185 billion. It is a formidable sum of money. However, if the plan were to be shared by North America, the European Union, Japan, and China, the funding would become less prohibitive.

Moreover, it is estimated that the United States has already spent $500 billion on the Iraq War without improving the image of the United States or the West abroad, especially in the Muslim community. The total costs of the war, including care for injured soldiers for the rest of their lives and a continued US presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future, could total $2 trillion when all is said and done. A Marshall Plan level of commitment of $185 billion in 2007 dollars pales by comparison.

I am not proposing a programme of writing cheques to Governments. I am proposing specific and tangible people-to-people projects that will directly improve the quality of life of ordinary people, in the form of humanitarian aid from the West.

I recall that as Prime Minister I was able to accomplish much good by the personalisation of the anti-polio campaign that I introduced in my country. I was absolutely shocked to learn that Pakistan and Afghanistan together accounted for three-quarters of new polio cases in the world in 1993.

I determined to do something about it. I administered the anti-polio drops to my daughter, Aseefa. I invited Pakistani mothers with children born at the same time as Aseefa to join me at the Prime Minister’s house to administer their children’s drops.

The programme spread across the country with great fanfare, into every town and village. I am very proud that the programme helped eradicate polio in Pakistan. There were no new cases of polio in my country last year, and this success is the result of a specific, tangible programme that I initiated.

This is the model I propose for a 21st-century Marshall Plan to assist the Islamic world to leap into modernity.

Why Islam must Modernise or Die: Bhutto (New Zealand Herald) 

Published: February 22, 2008

Slouching Toward Sharia
M. Zuhdi Jasser

On February 7, 2008, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sparked a global discussion on Sharia after his address entitled, “Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective.” He and others have tried to backtrack his comments from any implication towards the application of Sharia in Britain for Muslims also providing reassurance that it would not trump British law. Hardly reassurance in a nation which submitted to Sharia already by recognizing polygamous marriages. In fact, the Archbishop’s BBC interview before the speech was more clear where he implied that the application of Sharia law in Britain for Muslims was unavoidable.

Commentaries both supporting and decrying the implications of the Archbishop’s ideas about the UK slouching toward Sharia have been ubiquitous over the past week.

Should we be concerned about the Western Islamist organizations that basked in the empowering glow of validation from the Archbishop of the Church of England? The Muslim Council of Britain released a press release on February 8, 2008 stating that, the MCB is “grateful for the thoughtful intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury on the discussion of the place of Islam and Muslims in Britain today.” They then had the temerity to try and clarify what the Archbishop intended in his remarks stating, “[T]he Archbishop sought in his speech to explore the possibilities of an accommodation between English law and some aspects of Islamic personal law.” This statement should immediately demonstrate the exploitation of such accommodations by Islamists in order to solidify their attempt to represent and control the Muslim community.

Should we, on the contrary, be reassured by the number of reform-minded Muslims in the UK, Canada, and the U.S. who have since expressed outrage that the nations they chose as home in order to escape archaic Sharia laws in Muslim majority nations were contemplating allowing Islamist imams the “freedom” to methodically “integrate” into British society? Perhaps not, since many in the majority appear to be listening to the Islamists and ignoring the anti-Islamists.

Yet in all the international discourse surrounding the Archbishop’s lecture, what remains virtually absent is any meaningful debate between Islamist and anti-Islamist Muslims concerning the relevance and implementation of Sharia law by Islamists. While the Archbishop may have been well-intended, his laborious apology for Sharia law – quoting Tariq Ramadan as a leading authority and completely ignoring the anti-Islamist devotional Muslim movement – makes the assumption that the debate is between the “primitivists” and modernists within the realm of Islamism. Some post-modern “enlightened” Muslims would say that the challenge is quite the contrary – not to modernize Islamism as the Islamists would have you believe — but rather to bring Islamic interpretations into the post-Enlightenment ideology and defeat Islamism (governmental Sharia). By critically exposing the supremacist orientation of Islamism regarding universal religious liberty, freedom, natural law and reason, political Islam and the quandary the Archbishop and others are trying to address will disappear.

The Archbishop would have Muslims continue in their legal paralysis and avoid this debate altogether. It is not the head of the Church of England who should be dissecting the nuances of Sharia for the 21st Century, but rather diverse Muslims who should be given platforms to openly debate the dangers of Sharia implementation as it exists today. Before looking for ways to accommodate Sharia law into the far more tested Western secular laws, perhaps institutions should be created which pit anti-Islamist Muslims against Islamist Muslims in debating the harms and benefits of Sharia as pronounced by the clerics of today.

To “accommodate,” “implement,” or seek to “apply” Sharia law, no matter which way it is massaged into place, is to skip entirely the internal debate for control, expression, and application of what Sharia is, and hand it over as is to the current Islamist infrastructure. To empower current Islamist jurists and benevolently seek an understanding of how British law can come to terms with it is to dangerously accept the financial, theocratic, and political underpinnings of this backward ideology, which has dominated the theological Muslim community for the past seven centuries or more, generating the body of law which is Sharia today.

While many Muslims may practice a post-Englightenment personal Sharia in our own homes, there is a dearth of accepted texts and Islamic scholars which reject the pre-Enlightenment elements of Sharia while accepting those which are post-Enlightenment. This, in the reality of Muslim practice, is very different from what is preached by the current Islamist leadership and infrastructure. One should, for example, do a study comparing the legal details of the marriage contracts and Last Will and Testaments of Muslims living in the West compared to the actual legal details recommended by most Islamist imams and the established texts of Islamic jurisprudence of today. I would hazard to guess that the majority of Muslims living in the West have modernized the legal framework of their marriage contracts and wills making them in terms which are post-Enlightenment and more in synergy with today’s Western law than today’s Sharia, while also staying true to the spirit of their own interpretation of Islamic teachings. And I would also venture to guess that the vast majority of clerics and Islamic jurists lag centuries behind in their willingness to reinterpret laws and scripture which, for example, often empower men and misogynistically devalue women.

One need only review, for example many of the recommendations and legal opinions of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America to find a plethora of apologetics for male-dominated Sharia. This “assembly” is comprised of a number of individuals who arise out of the global training network of Wahhabi ideology with a decidedly Salafist orientation. With few countervailing established, well-funded, and formidable anti-Islamist, anti-Wahhabi organizations, any movement toward formally recognizing Sharia in the West would empower ideas like that represented by this backward assembly of Islamist theocrats.

The necessary debate within the house of Islam will happen far less if Sharia is looked upon as a monolithic entity waiting to come into play in British society or the West as the Archbishop and his apologists suggest. However, if British society and law stands its ground and lifts up anti-Islamist thought within the Muslim community, the Islamists will be forced to contend with the ideas of the very society from which they continue to receive protection. Reform of archaic legal systems comes not on the heels of acceptance, but rather after repeated challenges and scrutiny.

This is also true with the overriding protection of religious freedom that the beauty of the separation of religion and government provides. Our religious laws should be enacted by choice and choice alone in their whole and in their parts – not as a system one chooses to enter or buck against. Religious practices are only of faith if they are entirely by choice. Establishing a formal legal framework for implementing Sharia may be advertised as “volunteer” in the West on its surface, but at the end of the day will become coercive for the ideological minorities within the Muslim community. The reformists, liberated women, and others seeking equal rights before the clerics will remain at the beck and call of the Islamist majority controlling the courts and the artificial interplay between secular and the Islamist legal system. The only way to prevent this is to maintain one legal system for all as currently exists. Allowing the application of Sharia will give more fuel and power over the minority segments within the Muslim community, further empowering what is already often an oppressive tribal dynamic within Muslim culture.

It is time for non-Muslims, especially those thought leaders speaking for the majority, to stop empowering the Islamists by giving them opportunities to establish deeper more suffocating networks of control over Muslims. It is time for non-Muslim thought leaders to begin demanding that the Muslim community, out of necessity, demonstrate the academic discipline and critical thought to begin the difficult task of bringing Islamic jurisprudence into the 21st Century and into a post-Englightenment ideology.

Rather than bring British law into an understanding of Sharia law, it is high time for Sharia law, as it is described by leading imams, to first enlighten itself and demonstrate its own broad-minded interpretation and synergy with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Is Sharia ready for primetime recognition in England if it has yet to even recognize the separation of religion and state? Perhaps the Archbishop’s own Church’s history of being forced into this separation by the reformist British is something to which he and other Sharia-philes should be reminded. How would Britain respond to a leading Muslim cleric’s lecture on the “need for Christian Brits to enact courts for the adjudication of Canon Law of the Church of England since secular law has lost its Christian identity?” Why should Western society accommodate itself to a minority faith and allow it to segregate and control its own community when the majority itself has not enacted such so-called religious freedoms?

In many respects, one could compare the current condition of the Muslim theology to the condition of the toxic mixture of religion and politics of 16th Century England. Ultimately, we are blessed to now live in a community that has borne the fruit of a society that finally separated its government from the control of its theologians. Are we going to forget this history and the wars of ideas which led to this separation? Or are we going to allow Muslims the opportunity to have this debate within our faith community without artificially lifting up and legitimizing the Islamist side?

To imply, as so many do, that it is clear where the debate in Islam resides belies the reality of a paralyzed discourse within the houses of Islam. Those who claim that the debate and discourse and critique of authority is alive are the hypocritical Islamists who feed off of the illusion of debate by allowing “Islamism-lite” to have a token voice all the while they deliberately smother, suppress, and marginalize the anti-Islamist movement.

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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a physician in private practice, and a community activist.
He can be reached at Zuhdi@aifdemocracy.org
read full author bio here

Family Security Matters

Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells Dallas crowd of Islam honor killings

Victim of abuse discusses the culture of Islam honor killings

08:14 PM CST on Thursday, February 21, 2008

By JOANNA CATTANACH / The Dallas Morning News
jcattanach@dallasnews.com

She’s been named one of the world’s most influential people, a traitor to her faith, a woman of the year and a target for terrorists.

Also Online

01/03/08: Lewisville cabdriver sought in slayings of 2 teen daughters

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a sleek, soft-spoken native of Somalia, does not shy away from accolades and accusations against her. She warmly greeted a crowd of more than 500 people gathered Thursday at the downtown Hyatt Regency Dallas as part of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth global philanthropy series.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, who travels under constant security because of death threats, calmly laid out her cause against female genital mutilation and honor killings.

She began her speech by pointing to the killings of Sarah and Amina Said, Lewisville sisters whose father, Yaser Said, disappeared after the two were shot and left to die in his parked cab at an Irving hotel in January.

"I want to tell you why their father killed them," Ms. Hirsi Ali said.

Mr. Said’s daughters were known to date non-Muslim men and dress in Western clothing, Ms. Hirsi Ali said, and in her estimation, the perceived loss of honor motivated Mr. Said, an Egyptian-born Muslim, to take his children’s lives.

Mr. Said is accused by police in connection with his daughters’ slayings. Family members have denied that his religion or culture had anything to do with the killings.

Ms. Hirsi Ali described a "cult of virginity" in Islam directed only toward women, wherein men are absolved of their sexual urges and are charged with protecting the honor of the family at all costs. The honor and shame code is an integral part of a culture that values virginity before marriage and fidelity afterward.

"The essence of a woman in this culture is reduced to the value of their hymen," she said. "In countries ruled by Islam, women are treated as slaves or pets."

She quickly pointed out, "I must add that not all Muslim men are perpetrators and not all Muslim women are victims."

Born in Somalia, she and her family moved to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, eventually settling in Kenya, where she practiced a strict form of Islam. A victim of genital mutilation, Ms. Hirsi Ali eventually sought asylum in the Netherlands after a forced marriage.

"There is no argument that can be made for tolerating the killing and abuse of women and girls," she said.

Yanina Vashchenko, an interfaith coordinator with Thanks-Giving Square, said Ms. Hirsi Ali’s story is compelling. "A childhood like that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy," she said.

But she said that Ms. Hirsi Ali, who is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, had been heavily influenced by her own negative experiences and expressed concern that as a public speaker she would encourage people to take an unfairly negative view of Islam.

"It’s very dangerous," she said. "They want somebody of the faith to talk bad about the faith."

Dr. Nia Mackay, a mother of two from Indonesia, said it was difficult to listen to the speech. "It makes me sad that she’s blaming one religion instead of emphasizing a problem."

Dr. Mackay, 46, a Muslim and part-time aerobics teacher, was featured in the documentary American Ramadan and is president-elect for the nonprofit organization Peacemakers Inc.

L.D. Bell High School senior Christina Miranda, 17, one of several students in attendance, said she appreciates Ms. Hirsi Ali’s contributions and courage to speak about the hardships women face in Muslim societies.

Clutching a copy of Ms. Hirsi Ali’s memoir, Infidel, she said, "I think she’s trying to make life better."

Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells Dallas crowd of Islam honor killings | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Religion | The Dallas Morning News

MARK MACKINNON

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail

February 21, 2008 at 4:39 AM EST

CAIRO — ‘Here comes the story of the world today,” sings the young man with the gentle voice, oblivious to the stares he earns from passing gaggles of tourists. “A world in which religion has learned to hate, a world in which justice has become a cliché.”

The young man crooning in the lobby of Cairo’s Marriott hotel is Moez Masoud, and he doesn’t mind the attention. He wants as many people as possible to hear his message: that religion, specifically his own Muslim faith, is being dangerously abused in the modern world.

The lines Mr. Masoud sang were the lyrics of a song he penned about Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher jailed in November in Sudan after allowing her students to give a teddy bear the name Mohammed. To Mr. Masoud, the absurd case proved how far some interpretations of Islam have drifted from his own reading of what’s in the Koran.

Though you might miss it if you were reading only the headlines out of the Middle East these days, Mr. Masoud’s more tolerant version of Islam is on the rise. In addition to being an aspiring pop star, the 29-year-old Egyptian is one of a new wave of Muslim “televangelists” who are reaching wide audiences across the region, converting many to an interpretation of Islam that encourages social contacts between men and women, compassion toward gays and lesbians and a rejection of the anti-Western fundamentalism.

It’s a message that’s reaching millions of people via television shows broadcast on satellite channels across the Middle East, and many more through Mr. Masoud’s slick website and a Facebook group that has more than 10,000 members.

Critics call his message “Islam lite,” but Mr. Masoud sees himself as helping reclaim a religion that for too long has been controlled by angry fundamentalists, people he says preach in the name of Islam without following its basic precept of loving other human beings.

“These people have presented views that are just blatantly wrong about women, about homosexuals, about Jews, about jihad,” he said, sipping at a cappuccino between fielding calls on his mobile phone. “There’s been a misconstrual of some [Koranic] verses and a decontextualization of others.”

Dressed in Western clothes and sporting a stylish goatee, Mr. Masoud hardly looks the part of an Islamic preacher. Nor does he have the traditional upbringing.

Raised in an affluent family and educated at the American University in Cairo, he said that as an adolescent, he drifted a long way from his current path. At university, he said, he distanced himself from his family, dated the wrong girls and “ingested too many substances.”

It’s those experiences, he said, that help him connect with young, Westernized Muslims who often are put off by what they see as Islam’s strictures. “It’s not about the rules, it’s about the love. The rules are supposed to save you, not harm you.”

That’s something he said he learned the hard way. He rediscovered his religion only after a series of scares that included a friend’s death in a car accident and a cancer scare. He woke late on the day of Jan. 1, 1996, not quite sure how he’d made it home after a night of heavy drinking at a New Year’s Eve party, and decided he needed to change.

From that day, he observed the Koranic proscription against alcohol and made a point of praying five times a day. He memorized the Koran, discovering that reading its passages gave him the same high he once got from drinking and partying.

After graduating, he took a marketing job with an American pharmaceutical firm and moved to the United States. One day, he was invited to lead the prayers at a mosque in Rochester, N.Y. By the time he finished speaking, it was apparent to everyone in the room that Mr. Masoud had found his calling.

“I didn’t preach, I shared my experiences,” he recalled of that night. “There was something happening.”

Someone made a videotape of the talk he gave, and soon afterward Mr. Masoud was contacted by a Saudi Arabia-based satellite channel about taping a series of shows. He agreed on the condition that he could do it his way.

His first series was called Parables of the Koran, a groundbreaking show because of its laid-back tone, in which a panel of young men and women chatted with Mr. Masoud about the issues of the day and the role of religion in the modern world. While some of the women on the show wore the Islamic hijab, others left their heads uncovered.

“Some people are afraid of new things. I’m not,” Mr. Masoud shrugged. “There’s no Islamic law barring [men and women] in the same place, though some people think there is. The only way to change things is to just do it.”

Parables of the Koran was a hit around the world and a staple on some Canadian cable channels. At first his shows were all in English, as Mr. Masoud was trying to appeal to Muslims living in the West. He warmed up his audience by telling his life story and kept them engaged by mixing quotes from the Koran with Bryan Adams and Aerosmith lyrics. More recently, he’s begun preaching in Arabic to get his message out to Muslims across the Middle East.

Abdallah Schleifer, a specialist in media and Islam at the American University in Cairo, said the new style adopted by Mr. Masoud and other Islamic televangelists like Amr Khaled is drawing the quasi-secular middle class - people put off by what he calls “nutty fundamentalism” - back to their faith. Many of today’s youth, he said, feel like they live in “another world” from the old-style imams in their traditional garb. Mr. Masoud’s style bridges a gap for them.

“We live in a world of television and lifestyle changes. Young people, young Muslims, want to be part of that world. Into that void have come people like Moez and Amr Khaled,” Prof. Schleifer said. “The message of these guys is very different. Being decent and compassionate, and at the same time being faithful to the tenets of their religion.”

Mr. Masoud personally rejects the “Islam-lite” label, insisting that he hasn’t added or subtracted anything from the Prophet Mohammed’s message. “All I’m doing is reading the faith in a contemporary way,” he said. “I’m just removing the extra baggage that extremists have put in.”

His message is a simple one: It’s all right for a Muslim to have fun, to enjoy life, to appreciate art and members of the opposite sex. “Engage in art, appreciate beauty. Don’t believe that if you commit to your faith, you’re going to be a depressed person,” he said. “If Islam says kill your neighbours, I don’t want to be a Muslim.”

It’s a message Prof. Schleifer, himself a convert from Judaism to Islam, appreciates. “You could say the style is light, which it is in the way TV is light compared to a newspaper. But the content isn’t. I certainly wasn’t attracted to Islam because it had hard edges, quite the contrary.”

Preacher Sings of a Tolerant Islam (The Globe and Mail)

DON’T BLAME ISLAM FOR THE LOWLY STATUS OF WOMEN
by Amir Taheri
THE TIMES OF LONDON
October 1, 2003

Muslim women are making progress in the Middle East, but life here is bleak

What’s wrong with Islam? Many will be asking this, a question prompted by the savage murder of Heshu Yones by her father for bringing "dishonour" on her family. Surely only a backward, hateful religion could inflame a father, an Iraqi Kurd, violently to end the life of a 16-year-old girl in Acton for the sin of exercising the freedoms that we expect young women to enjoy?

A different question was being asked this week in a Jordanian palace. Why does the West have such a negative view of the place of women in Muslim countries? asked Queen Rania of Jordan at a seminar held in Amman. The participants at this meeting, journalists and editors, failed to answer the question, preferring instead to indulge in anti-Western rhetoric or cry Islamophobia, rather than subjecting Islamic culture to criticism. It is this self-deception that stops the Muslim world from making peace with modernity. They did not discuss the failure of Islamic governments to grant women a measure of protection: not one constitution in the Muslim world upholds sexual equality.

Nor were "honour killings" mentioned. Nor was the tradition of stoning women to death on charges of adultery or fornication. Some estimates put the number of women murdered under those codes at more than 7,000 every year. Perpetrators are rarely punished or escape with merely symbolic prison sentences.

The gruesome subject of female genital mutilation, a crime committed against an estimated 400,000 children each year, was also ignored. Nor was there discussion of hijab, the hooded headgear designed in the 1970s and a symbol of radical Islam. A study by the Iranian Ministry of Education in September 2002 showed that hundreds of schoolgirls attempted suicide because they did not wish to wear the hijab.

The charge sheet is long and serious. But the defendant should not be Islam itself. None of those crimes is authorised by the Koran, or the hadith, the sayings attributed to the Prophet. And yet almost all Muslims try to justify these crimes by citing the defence of "cultural diversity".

Despite the legal, social and economic handicaps imposed on them, Muslim women are, nevertheless, fighting back. Their principal weapon is education. In many Muslim countries, notably Iran and Saudi Arabia, women form a majority of university students. Last July, Kuwaiti girls accounted for almost 70 per cent of secondary school graduates and won first places in all subjects ? yet they could not vote in the general election that followed a few days later.

In many countries women are finding their way into professions previously closed to them. Satellite TV beaming images of women in positions of authority into Muslim homes has been a spur. Thousands of women are active in law, banking, architecture and medicine. Today, women police are back on the beat in Iran for the first time since the 1979 revolution. In some countries, including Iran and Turkey, there are female fighter-bomber pilots. There is also a growing band of women novelists, playwrights and film-makers.

Studies by the International Labour Organisation show that the percentage of women in the workforce in most Muslim countries is increasing. In Iran, women now make up a quarter of the working population, almost twice the figure for 1979, no doubt partially accounted for by the necessities bred by the Iran-Iraq War.

Muslim women have also won the right to vote and stand for election in all but three of the 57 Muslim countries that form the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. The recalcitrant nations are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya. Women hold Cabinet posts in 32 Muslim states. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, has a woman President. Three other countries, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey, have had women Prime Ministers. Two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, are working on constitutions that will enshrine equal rights for women.

But the picture is mixed. The fierce civil war of ideas between radical Islamists and moderates has meant setbacks for women. They now have fewer rights in Pakistan because of the introduction of Sharia, and in Egypt the rise of religious conservatism has meant that the family and peer pressure keep more women subdued.

Nonetheless, while women in the Muslim world are slowly making advances, the story is more depressing among the diaspora, the 20 million Muslims now settled in Europe and North America. Often coming from the least developed parts of the Muslim world, especially from the poorer parts of the Indian subcontinent and North Africa, these Muslims use Islam as an expression of ethnic identity. They present pre-Islamic and para-Islamic tribal and ethnic practices as religious imperatives. These include not only honour-killing but also forced marriages and violence against women who refuse to wear the hijab. It is not an overstatement to say that in some cases Muslim women find themselves more threatened by male fanaticism in Britain and France than they do in Turkey and Iran.

The French Government is currently facing demands by sections of the Muslim community for measures that would be rejected in all but the most reactionary of Muslim states. These include the exemption of Muslim girls from attending classes on biology, group sports, swimming and nature day-trips. There are also demands for separate classes for girls or, where that is not possible, for classroom apartheid, with girls sitting in the back rows. Muslim parents have been jailed for keeping their daughters away from the "corrupting" influence of school.

The hope that these immigrant communities would transmit liberal ideas back into the Muslim world has been, as Heshu Yones’s death starkly shows, woefully misplaced optimism

DON’T BLAME ISLAM FOR THE LOWLY STATUS OF WOMEN - Amir Taheri - Benador Associates