Muslim Heretics Conference

American Public Diplomacy in the Islamic World
Remarks of Andrew Kohut to The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing

Released: February 27, 2003

I am delighted to help this committee achieve a better understanding of how the United States is perceived in the Islamic world. I am not here to make recommendations about how to solve America’s image problems, but rather to give you as much as I can on the nature of the problem.
While this committee is primarily interested in the image of United States in the Islamic world, I will put my remarks in context by also discussing attitudes toward the United States around the world more generally. The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed 38,000 people in 44 countries. We released our results, "What the World Thinks in 2002," in December and you all should have copies of our report.
Despite an initial outpouring of public sympathy for America following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, discontent with the United States has grown around the world over the past two years. Images of the U.S. have been tarnished in all types of nations: among longtime NATO allies, in developing countries, in eastern Europe and, most dramatically, in Muslim societies.
Since 2000, favorability ratings for the U.S. have fallen in 19 of the 27 countries worldwide where trend benchmarks are available. While criticism of America is on the rise, however, a reserve of goodwill toward the United States still remains. The Pew Global Attitudes survey finds that the U.S. and its citizens continue to be rated positively by majorities in 35 of the 42 countries in which the question was asked.¹ True dislike, if not hatred, of America is concentrated in the Muslim nations of the Middle East and in Central Asia, today’s areas of greatest conflict.
The most serious problem facing the U.S. abroad is its very poor public image in the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East/Conflict Area.² Favorable ratings are down sharply in two of America’s most important allies in this region, Turkey and Pakistan. The number of people giving the United States a positive rating has dropped by 22 points in Turkey and 13 points in Pakistan in the last three years. And in Egypt, a country for which no comparative data is available, just 6% of the public holds a favorable view of the U.S.
Fully three-quarters of respondents in Jordan, the fourth largest recipient of U.S. assistance, have a poor image of the United States. In Pakistan and Egypt, an even-larger aid recipient, nearly as many (69%) have an unfavorable view and no more than one-in-ten in either country have positive feelings toward the U.S. In Jordan, Pakistan and Egypt, the intensity of this dislike is strong – more than 50% in each country have a very unfavorable view.
Public perceptions of the United States in Turkey have declined sharply in the last few years. In 1999, a slim majority of Turks felt favorably toward the U.S., but now just three-in-ten do. As is the case in Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt, the intensity of negative opinion is strong: 42% of Turks have a very unfavorable view of the U.S. The same pattern is evident in Lebanon, where 59% have a poor opinion of the U.S.
Uzbekistan, a new U.S. ally in the fight against terror, is a notable exception to this negative trend. By nearly eight-to-one (85%-11%) Uzbeks have a positive opinion of the United States and more than a third (35%) hold a very favorable view of the U.S.
Dislike of America undoubtedly reflects dislike of U.S. policies in the Middle East. In a survey of opinion leaders released by the Pew Research Center in December 2001 ("America Admired, Yet its New Vulnerability Seen as Good Thing, Say Opinion Leaders"), a majority in Islamic countries told us that U.S. support of Israel is the top reason that people in their countries dislike America.
But backlash against the U.S.-led war on terror is also a big part of the problem. Unlike in much of the rest of the world, the war on terrorism is opposed by majorities in 10 of the 11 countries predominantly Muslim country surveyed by Pew. This includes countries outside the Middle East/Conflict Area, such as Indonesia and Senegal where majorities still held favorable opinion of the US. While they still like us, they don’t like our war on terrorism. The principal exception is the overwhelming support for America’s anti-terrorist campaign found in Uzbekistan, where the United States currently has troops stationed.
Jordanians, in particular, are overwhelmingly opposed to the war on terror (85%-13%). Majorities in Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey and a plurality in Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the region, also oppose the U.S.-led war on terror. In Pakistan, Lebanon and Egypt, Muslims are more likely to oppose these efforts to fight terrorism than non-Muslims.
The prevailing opinion among people in this region is that the United States ignores the interests of their countries in deciding its international policies. This view is as dominant in Turkey (74%), a NATO ally, as it is in Lebanon (77%). More specifically, the Pew survey finds a strong sense among most of the countries surveyed that U.S. policies serve to increase the formidable gap between rich and poor countries. Moreover, sizable minorities feel the United States does too little to help solve the world’s problems.
The Gallup Poll, which conducted nationwide surveys in nine predominately Muslim countries in January 2002, summed it up well. They concluded that "the perception that Western nations are not fair in their stances toward Palestine fits in with a more generalized that the West is unfair to the Arab and Islamic worlds…it is one of several examples of Western bias that might extend to Afghanistan, Iraq Gulf oil and other situations"
‘Americanization’ Rejected
But it is all not one way - even in Muslim countries, opinions about the U.S. are complicated and contradictory. As among other people around the world, U.S. global influence is simultaneously embraced and rejected by Muslim publics. America is nearly universally admired for its technological achievements and people in most countries say they enjoy U.S. movies, music and television programs.
Very large majorities of the publics in most of the world admire U.S. technology. This is the case even among people with a low regard for the United States generally. In Jordan, where just a quarter have a favorable opinion of the U.S., 59% say they admire U.S. technological achievements. Even in Pakistan, where one-in-10 have a positive image of the U.S., a 42% plurality says they admire U.S. scientific advances.
Opinion of American popular culture is mixed, but more positive than one might expect. In Lebanon, where most have an unfavorable view of the U.S., 65% say they like American music, movies and television. In African countries with significant Muslim populations such as Senegal and Nigeria, majorities say they like American popular culture. But majorities in Jordan and Cairo dislike U.S. culture, as does a plurality in Turkey. Pakistan stands alone in the extent of its dislike of American popular culture. Eight-in-ten Pakistanis dislike American music, movies and television.
Although people in some Islamic countries like American popular culture while others reject it, there is more of a consensus that people do not like the spread of "Americanism." In general, the spread of U.S. ideas and customs is disliked by majorities in almost every country included in this worldwide survey. In the Middle East/Conflict Area, overwhelming majorities in every country except Uzbekistan have a negative impression of the spread of American ideas and customs. Just 2% of Pakistanis and 6% of Egyptians see this trend as a good thing. Even in generally pro-American Uzbekistan, 56% object to the spread of American ideas and customs.
War in Iraq
The unpopularity of a potential war with Iraq can only further fuel hostilities—almost no matter how well such a war goes. At the Pew Research Center, we got some sense of this when we conducted another survey in addition to our 44-nation poll. In November, we also surveyed the people of five countries Britain, France, Germany, Turkey and Russia, about their attitudes toward a potential U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Unlike western Europeans and Russians, Turkish respondents were divided on whether the regime in Baghdad is a threat to the stability of the region, and were divided over whether ending Saddam Hussein’s rule would be good or bad for Turkey. Further, and of particular interest to this committee, a 53% majority of Turkish respondents believe the U.S. wants to get rid of Saddam Hussein as part of a war against unfriendly Muslim countries, rather than because the Iraqi leader is a threat to peace.
Summary: Opinion of U.S. Linked to Views of Policies
In summary, antipathy toward the U.S. is shaped by how its international policies are interpreted. Gallup’s findings reflected that clearly in showing that large majorities in their nine-nation survey said the West doesn’t respect Muslim values, nor show concern for the Islamic and Muslim worlds.
Improving America’s image is a tough charge unless we can prove that our critics in the Muslim world are wrong about our intentions and the consequences of our policies. Until that happens, U.S. communication efforts in the region can only be defensive, doing the best possible in a bad situation – correcting misinformation, softening hostility by playing to aspects of America that are still well regarded. But in the end, we will only be affecting opinions on the margins.
However, I think there are some bigger opportunities down the road as I look at the second wave of the Pew Global Attitudes polling. We will show a very substantial level of democratic aspirations among Muslim people. People in Muslim countries place a high value on freedom of expression, multi-party systems, equal treatment under the law – in fact, higher than in some nations of eastern Europe. Our upcoming release this spring will detail these aspirations, and show how they exist side-by-side with a desire for a strong role for Islam in governance.
American policies that are seen as encouraging democratization might help establish, or bolster, constituencies for the U.S. in Muslim countries, especially outside of the Middle East–in Africa, particularly, where America’s Palestinian policies have not so inflamed opinion. In the Middle East, the establishment of democratic institutions in Iraq after Saddam Hussein could prove to be an important first positive step in that most problematic part of the Muslim world.

American Public Diplomacy in the Islamic World

The Truth About Islam in Europe

From the desk of Fjordman on Sun, 2008-02-24 14:32

This essay was inspired by Joan Acocella’s review of David Levering Lewis’ book God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215. Lewis is an American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Acocella’s review is not bad, but she reveals little evidence that she has read authors such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or or Andrew G. Bostom. She refers to Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, but not Ibn Warraq’s excellent criticism of him in the recent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

According to Acocella, "The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as ‘the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior’ to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe." This was "one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire."

Abd al-Rahman I, a Syrian-born prince who took over in 756, is the hero of "God’s Crucible." According to Acocella, "It was he who built the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the most spectacular extant example of Muslim Spain’s architectural achievements. He also botanized, and imported to Spain its first date palms, its first lemons, limes, and grapefruit, as well as almonds, apricots, saffron, and henna."

In a digression, I would like to qualify that statement. Apricots were known in the Mediterranean world already in Antiquity. The apricot is called armeniaca vulgaris in Latin because many Europeans thought it originated in Armenia, where it was grown in the Ararat Valley. However, apricots come from China or nearby regions in Central Asia and were cultivated there in prehistoric times. They were later brought to Armenia and the Mediterranean world via Persia through the Silk Road trade.

Citrus fruits originate in south-eastern Asia, and certain types were known in the Mediterranean in ancient times as the Romans did participate to some extent in the Indian Ocean trade. However, the use of citrus fruits was limited at the time and was disrupted after the fall of Rome. It is true that various citrus fruits were reintroduced via Arabs, who brought sour oranges from India. The drink lemonade may have been invented in Egypt.

Sweet oranges had been cultivated by the Chinese for many centuries and were introduced in Europe by the Portuguese, who probably got them from Indians, in the fifteenth century. Sweet oranges quickly replaced sour oranges. Christopher Columbus in 1493 brought with him seeds of orange, lemon and citron from Spain’s Canary Islands to Hispaniola in the Caribbean. Oranges were abundant in Haiti by the sixteenth century and were introduced to Florida while the Portuguese brought them to Brazil. Oranges were for many Native Americans one of the more welcome things Europeans brought with them, certainly more so than smallpox. The juice of citrus fruits was used as a cure for scurvy. James Lind of the British Royal Navy conducted the first clinical trial in 1747 to prove this effect.

George Vancouver of the Royal Navy accompanied Captain James Cook, the British explorer and cartographer, on two of his voyages in the Pacific Ocean in the 1770s while exploring the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. Cook’s voyages are often seen to mark the beginning of colonialism in the region, and Cook himself died fighting native Hawaiians in 1779. Captain Vancouver later explored the north-western coast of North America, from California to Alaska. The city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, is named after him. During a visit to California, then a part of Mexico and thus still a Spanish colony, he mentioned seeing oranges. With the growth of the transcontinental railway in the United States during the nineteenth century production grew, and boomed after the American Civil War. Oranges are still grown in the Mediterranean region, in Spain, Portugal, Israel and other countries as well as in Asia, but the largest production is in Brazil, Florida and California.

David Levering Lewis spends a lot of time demonstrating how the Franks were less civilized than Muslims and that their economy was "little better than the Late Neolithic." Their neighbors were supposedly even worse. The Vikings who invaded Frankland were "the filthiest race that God ever created," according to a Muslim ambassador. Being Scandinavian myself, I have no problems admitting that the Vikings did possess a number of barbarian traits, but history is more complex than that. Scandinavians of this age gradually became integrated into the civilized mainstream of European culture. Christian European culture, that is.

Vikings from Denmark went to England and France, Norwegians went to the British Isles and the North Atlantic and Swedes went east, though there was always considerable overlapping between these nations. Some went via the Volga and other rivers in Russia and the Ukraine to the Black Sea engaged in trade and piracy, and a few even settled in Kiev and Volgograd. They occasionally fought Byzantine forces, but the Byzantines had the advantage of Greek fire. Vikings were still respected for their fighting skills and were employed as mercenaries, even as personal bodyguards for the emperors. The Scandinavians called Constantinople Miklagard, "the Great City."

As Timothy Gregory says in A History of Byzantium, during the eleventh century the Byzantine Empire suffered from a decline in its conscript army. Because of this, "the state had to rely more and more on foreign mercenaries, at first Varangians from Russia but increasingly Normans from Sicily and France, Anglo-Saxons from England, and others. The most famous of these was the Varangian Duzina, attested from 1034 onward, which enrolled Vikings from Russia and eventually Anglo-Saxons. This elite guard, whose members had distinct arms and uniforms, had its quarters in Constantinople but also took part in field campaigns. In addition, Byzantium had to rely more than before on its alliances with foreign peoples who might be used to fight the empire’s wars."

The Varangian Guard defended Constantinople against other Westerners during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. One of their most prominent members was the future king Harald Hardråde, "Hard-ruler," from 1035, whose story was told by Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson ca. 1230 in the Heimskringla. Harald participated in a number of battles against Muslims and returned to Norway with great wealth. He wasn’t the only one to do so. Large quantities of Byzantine gold coins have been found in Scandinavia. He is most remembered, however, for his invasion of England in 1066 with several hundred longships. Harald Hardråde was killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England on 25 September 1066, a date which is often seen to mark the end of the Viking Age. The victor Harold Godwinson was himself soon defeated by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings the same year. This remarkable story has been immortalized in the beautiful Bayeux Tapestry.

It is interesting to notice, though, that much of the contact that did take place between the Byzantine Empire and north-western Europe at this point happened through backdoor channels like the rivers of Eastern Europe, linking the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The Mediterranean was still plagued by Muslim pirates.

Women enjoyed greater freedom in the Norse society than they did in Islamic societies even then, and this continued into Christian times. In What went Wrong?, historian Bernard Lewis writes: "The difference in the position of women was indeed one of the most striking contrasts between Christian and Muslim practice, and is mentioned by almost all travelers in both directions. Christianity, of all churches and denominations, prohibits polygamy and concubinage. Islam, like most other non-Christian communities, permits both…. Muslim visitors to Europe speak with astonishment, often with horror, of the immodesty and frowardness of Western women, of the incredible freedom and absurd deference accorded to them, and of the lack of manly jealousy of European males confronted with the immorality and promiscuity in which their womenfolk indulge."

Bernard Lewis has also, in my view correctly, suggested that the concept of "Holy War" was originally alien to Christianity and was imported to Europe after Europeans had been confronted with Islamic Jihad. The Reconquista, the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic rule, is traditionally seen to have begun with Pelayo in 718. Although initially slow, it speeded up from the eleventh century onwards. The Portuguese had been liberated in 1249 under King Afonso III.

As Joan Acocella says, "Toledo fell to Alfonso VI of León and Castile, a Catholic king, in 1085. Four more centuries passed before the expulsion of the last emir from Granada, in 1492, but [David Levering] Lewis gets through them fast. He doesn’t want to talk about it."

Lewis also fails to explain why Spaniards and Portuguese repeatedly rebelled against this glorious Islamic culture in favor of an "almost Neolithic" culture. He writes that Muslims did not enslave their co-religionists, only infidels. Yes, but exactly why is that better?

As Robert Spencer writes in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t: "The Qur’an says that the followers of Muhammad are ‘ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another’ (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the ‘worst of created beings’ (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the laws of Islam, the same courtesy is not to be extended to unbelievers. That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus, or pagans. Most slaves were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare."

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history. When it was finally abolished this was due to Western pressure, especially through the efforts of the British Empire: "Nor was there a Muslim abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. When the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that slavery continues beneath the surface in some Muslim countries - notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals. There are even slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven years to life in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For his part, al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias."

Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever Jihadists conquered a territory, "there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain, and populace of the place." When Muslim armies invaded India, "its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country."

The most comprehensive book on the subject to date, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom. Bostom writes about how Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as ambassadors, met in 1786 with the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of Jihad piracy – murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. However, the spirit of the young Republic came to be embodied in the slogan "Millions for defense, not a penny for tribute." Bostom notes that "By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates."

Robert Davis’ methodical enumeration in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters indicates that perhaps one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by Barbary Muslims from 1530 through 1780. In his book White Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in Europe extended as far north as Iceland. Even during the time of Queen Elizabeth I, while William Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems, young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of Muslim pirates showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea:

"By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of villagers carried off into slavery." Such events took place across much of Europe, also in Wales and southern Ireland: "In 1631…200 Islamic soldiers…sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They) carried off 237 men, women, and children and took them to Algiers…The French padre Pierre Dan was in the city (Algiers) at the time…He witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. ‘It was a pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market…Women were separated from their husbands and the children from their fathers…on one side a husband was sold; on the other his wife; and her daughter was torn from her arms without the hope that they’d ever see each other again’."

Englishman Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716. He was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to "burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner."

Scholar Bat Ye’or is an expert on dhimmitude, the oppressive system for non-Muslims under Islamic rule, described in the book Islam and Dhimmitude. She writes this about the Jihad slave system: "When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana [Iranian central Asia], Sijistan [eastern Iran], Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants."

According to Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, "The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only…A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery…In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam."

As Robert Spencer says: "Although the strictness with which the laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the Qur’an mandates that both Jews and Christians must ‘feel themselves subdued.’ One notable instance is recounted by Arab historian Philip Hitti: ‘The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e., yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves…and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.’"

In 1888, a Tunisian Jew noted: "The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom from time immemorial."

Maimonides, the renowned Jewish philosopher and physician, stated that "the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us…Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they." Jews could teach rabbinic law to Christians, but Muslims he said, will interpret what they are taught "according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason…..they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them." But the Christians "admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact."

Richard Fletcher states in his book Moorish Spain that: "Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch."

In the essay Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality, Bat Ye’or and Andrew G. Bostom examine the myth of the supposed "tolerance" enjoyed by Christians and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula: "Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing."

This humiliating status provoked many revolts, punished by massacres. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa in 781 and 881, Cordova (805, 818), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and in 868), and again in Toledo (811-819). Many of the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33:
"The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women."

In Granada, up to five thousand Jews perished in a pogrom by Muslims in 1066. The Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on the Jewish and Christian populations. Suspicious of the sincerity of converts to Islam, Muslim "inquisitors" (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslims. A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims.

According to Joan Acocella, "In view of Lewis’s high opinion of learning in Al Andalus, it is amazing how little space he gives it." In the twelfth century, Averroes (Ibn Rushd) wrote his commentaries on Aristotle, and Moses Maimonides produced his Aristotle-inflected Guide to the Perplexed. However, both these men had to flee Andalusia. Averroes, despite being an Islamic judge, was banished, his books burnt, and he was forced to emigrate to Morocco (in 1195) where he died in 1198. Maimonides had to flee in order to escape the Almohad Jihad.

It is true that the highly influential Christian scholar St. Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century quoted both these men, but he was critical of the way Averroes used Aristotle and had at his disposal a more complete body of Aristotelian writings than any of the Muslim philosophers ever did. Another Catholic, the Flemish Dominican Friar William of Moerbeke, was heavily involved in translating Byzantine manuscripts into Latin. According to scholar John Dunn in his book Setting the People Free, the word demokratia entered modern Western discourse in the 1260s in William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics, "the most systematic analysis of politics as a practical activity which survived from the ancient world."

Iranian intellectual Amir Taheri states that: "There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.…It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle’s Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle’s Politics in Persian until 1963."

Muslims inherited a great deal of accumulated knowledge when they conquered the Middle East, and most of the translations of earlier works were done by non-Muslims.

According to Robert Spencer, "The Christian Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873) translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac [in Baghdad], from which they were translated into Arabic by his son. The Jacobite Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote his own; his treatise The Reformation of Morals has occasionally been erroneously attributed to various of his Muslim contemporaries. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also made Arabic translations of Aristotle and other Greek writers from Syriac. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital, another source of pride among Muslims and often a prominent feature of Islamic accomplishment lists, was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate by a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians."

Greek or other pre-Islamic learning was never integrated into the regular curriculum at Islamic schools, as it was in European universities. The German-Syrian writer Bassam Tibi points out that "science" in the madrasa meant the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc.: "Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism, the cast of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university as a seat for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European innovation in the history of mankind."

In The Rise of Early Modern Science, second edition, scholar Toby E. Huff warns that if Islam had taken over Europe, later Western scientific achievements would have been impossible: "If Spain had persisted as an Islamic land into the later centuries - say, until the time of Napoleon - it would have retained all the ideological, legal, and institutional defects of Islamic civilization. A Spain dominated by Islamic law would have been unable to found new universities based on the European model of legally autonomous corporate governance, as corporations do not exist in Islamic law. Furthermore, the Islamic model of education rested on the absolute primacy of fiqh, of legal studies, and the standard of preserving the great traditions of the past. This was symbolically reflected in the ijaza, the personal authorization to transmit knowledge from the past given by a learned man, a tradition quite different from the West’s group-administered certification (through examination) of demonstrated learning. In the actual event, the founding of Spanish universities in the thirteenth century, first in Palencia (1208-9), Valladolid, Salamanca (1227-8), and so on, occurred in long-established Christian areas, and the universities were modeled after the constitutions of Paris and Bologna."

Apparently, David Levering Lewis doesn’t care much about art, as he devotes little space to the subject in God’s Crucible. Pictorial arts are banned in Islam. Images have been made at certain times, but paintings, and certainly not sculptures, never had anything remotely resembling the importance they enjoyed in Western art. The Islamic world could produce some good poets, for instance the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) whose works are still popular, but they tended to be unorthodox Muslims.

Jihad piracy and slavery remained a serious threat to Europeans for more than a thousand years. As historian Ibn Khaldun proudly proclaimed about the early Middle Ages: "The Christian could no longer float a plank upon the sea." The reason why the West for centuries didn’t have easy access to the Classical learning of the Byzantine Empire was because endemic Muslim raids made the Mediterranean unsafe for regular travel. It has to be the height of absurdity to block access to something and then take credit for transmitting it, yet that is precisely what Muslims do. As stronger states slowly grew up in the West, regular contact with their Christian cousins in Byzantium was gradually re-established, especially with the city-states of northern Italy where during the Renaissance the printing press – an invention aggressively rejected by Muslims – made Greco-Roman texts, with translations aided by Greek-speaking Byzantine refugees from Islamic Jihad, available to future generations. Westerners eventually gained access to the Greco-Roman manuscripts preserved in Constantinople, the Second Rome. Consequently, they no longer needed to rely on limited translations in Arabic, which had often been made from Byzantine manuscripts in the first place, and frequently by Christian or Jewish translators.

The Middle East had for thousands of years been more advanced than most of Europe. This situation didn’t begin with the introduction of Islam. On the contrary: it ended with Islamization. The region we today call the Greater Middle East, which includes Egypt, Palestine, Syria, south-eastern Anatolia, Iraq, Iran and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the seat of the oldest known civilizations on the planet and the source of many of the most important inventions in human history, including writing and the alphabet.

It is surely no coincidence that the first major civilization on the Indian subcontinent, the Harappan Civilization, arose in the Indus Valley in the northwest, i.e. closest to Sumerian Mesopotamia. A little understood culture at the Mediterranean island of Malta has left us with megalithic temples that may be the oldest freestanding stone structures in the world. Dating back to 3600 BC, they predate the pyramids of Egypt with a thousand years. Still, it is not a coincidence that literate European civilizations took root in lands that were geographically close to Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia: The Minoan civilization at the island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome. Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part was more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved more durable.

Contrast this with modern times, when southeast Europe (the Balkans) is Europe’s number one trouble spot. So is the original seat of the first Indian civilization, in Pakistan and Kashmir. The Greater Middle East thus went from being a global center of civilization to being a global center of anti-civilization. This change largely coincided with the Islamization of the region.

Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has asked in her book The Trouble with Islam what caused the earlier "golden age" of Islam, and concludes, with a few reservations, that "tolerance served as the best way to build and maintain the Islamic empire." In light of the evidence quoted above I disagree with her, and even more so with David Levering Lewis. Islam’s much-vaunted "golden age" was in reality the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed. The brief cultural blossoming during the first centuries of Islamic rule owed its existence almost entirely to the pre-Islamic heritage in a region that was still, for a while, majority non-Muslim.

I’ve recently been re-reading some of the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, including Guns, Germs, and Steel. What strikes me is how Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit or Mayan, became the global lingua franca. His most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a center of civilization to being a center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Yet is striking to notice how Diamond totally ignores the influence of Islam. This demonstrates clearly that any historical explanation that places too much emphasis on material issues and too little on the impact of human ideas is bound to end up with false or misleading conclusions.

The Truth About Islam in Europe | The Brussels Journal

Apostasy and Death Penalty

Published:
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23/1/2008

Meanwhile, no single verse of Quran declare that apostates should be killed. Allah would certainly have included this important penalty in the Quran if he wanted it performed. In fact, Quran clearly guarantees freedom of religion. Jawdat Said observed that the above hadith is dla?if (weak), since it conflicts with the fundamental Islamic teaching: namely freedom of religion.

By: Abd Moqsith Ghazali

I heard that several Muslim leaders in Indonesia have been considering the possibility of enforcing death punishment upon Muslim who leave Islam and convert to other religion (apostate). In the past, the Melaka Empire/ Malacca Sultanate under Sultan Muzaffar Shah?s reign (1450-1458) prescribed death penalty for Muslim who commits apostasy based on Melaka Constitution: Undang-Undang Darat Melaka, Undang-Undang Melayu, Undang-Undang Negeri dan Pelayaran (Laws of Melaka, Malay Constitution, the Maritime Laws of Melaka). Article 36 of the constitution mentioned, ?death penalty must be applied upon the apostate?. This exclusive view is based on a hadith (prophet Muhammad?s sayings) , "man baddala dinahu faqtuluhu" (Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.).
A question arises: is it possible to punish a Muslim who commit apostasy based on the above hadith? The answer is certainly not. Unlike the Melaka Empire which refers to the Islamic jurisprudence, the modern and democratic Indonesia is based on Pancasila and 1945 Constitution (UUD ?45), which guarantee the right to exercise freedom of religion in Indonesia. Anyone who convert religion is not a criminal and therefore not to be punished. Hence, prescribing death penalty upon Indonesian Muslim who commit apostasy violated the 1945 Constitution and UU RI No. 39/1999 on human rights which guarantee full freedom for every citizen whether to take or leave any religion.
Besides, the above hadith canot be simply used as justification, since it is doubtful from every aspects. Status of this hadith is ahad (which has been narrated by few people) instead of mutawaatir (which has been narrated by a number of people in every level of the chain such that it is impossible for all of them to make a mistake or error). Imam Abu Hanifah argued that dalalah or the meaning of hadith ahad is zhanni (non-definite or indecisive) instead of qath?I (conclusive or decisive). Khudlari Bik, an expert of principle of Islamic jurisprudence (ushul fiqh), explained that hadith ahad cannot abrogate the general verses of Quran. While the general verses of Quran is qathi, hadith ahad is zhanni therefore Tajuddin al-Subki in Jam`u al-Jawami argued that the zhanni cannot abrogate the qath`i.
Meanwhile, no single verse of Quran declare that apostates should be killed. Allah would certainly have included this important penalty in the Quran if he wanted it performed. In fact, Quran clearly guarantees freedom of religion. Jawdat Said observed that the above hadith is dla?if (weak), since it conflicts with the fundamental Islamic teaching: namely freedom of religion. Hence, the dalalah or justification of hadith is weak and therefore cannot abrogate the general principle of Quran which support freedom of religion.
Furthermore, Jamal al-Banna questioned about the integrity of the narrator of hadith. The chain of narration ended on Ikrimah, whose hadith narration often rejected by Imam Muslim. Imam Muslim quoted from ikrimah only a hadith on pilgrimage, which he narrated together with Sa?id bin Jubair. Sahih Muslim (Muslim?s hadith collection) did not mention hadith on death penalty for the apostate. It is reasonable because Ikrimah was known as a liar (kadzzab) among the experts of hadith. Doubt on the existence of hadits goes on, since the narrators including Ikrimah had never explained about sabab al wurud, or in which context and what for the Prophet stated that.
Apart from that, even if the hadith does really exist, history indicated that prophet Muhammad had never kill the apostates. Several classical literatures mentioned that in the days of prophet Muhammad, at least twelve Muslims reverted from Islam, like al-Harits bin Suwaid al-Anshari, and moved away from Medina to Mecca. Ubaidullah bin Jahsy, for instance, went to Habasyah where he converted to Christian and died as Christian. However, during his lifetime, the Prophet did not command his companions to chase them although they committed apostasy.
People who want to enforce death penalty for Muslim who commit apostasy do not realize the defects of the above hadith. Hopefully, as this explanation arrives before them, their eagerness to kill the apostate will be reduced.

Liberal Islam Network

‘Reformed Muslim Terrorists’ Preach Christ to College Kids

Columbia students among those proselytized at a screwy Colorado confab

by Maria Luisa Tucker

February 19th, 2008 12:00 AM

• The Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs came under fire earlier this month for inviting to a conference on terrorism three men who make questionable claims to being former terrorists, and whose message was more about religious conversion than counterterror strategies.

Claiming to be reformed Muslim jihadists who have since embraced evangelical Christianity, the three men are being criticized for telling a gathering of cadets and other students that one way to fight terror is by converting the planet’s Muslim population—about a fifth of the world’s people—to Christianity.

Among the surprised recipients of that message were 18 New York–area college students, some from Columbia University.

Omar Khalifah, a Columbia student who is studying Asian and Middle Eastern languages and culture, was among more than 200 international students and Air Force cadets who attended the four-day conference. Khalifah, who is from Jordan, says he was shocked and offended by the proselytizing he saw. "We left our study for one week to try to find solutions, not to listen to a person who is speaking as a preacher, as if he is in a church," Khalifah says.

Critics question whether the three speakers—Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem, and Zachariah Anani—really engaged in the terrorist activities they claim. Shoebat says he’s a former PLO operative who terrorized Jews, gave his ex-wife "Muslim-style beatings," and planted a bomb in a bank. Saleem, a Christian minister, says he was a PLO child soldier who transported weapons into Israel via underground tunnels. Anani says he’s killed at least 223 people and was "almost beheaded" in Lebanon for converting to Christianity.

The three were paid $13,000 to explain the terrorist mind-set at the conference, which was co-sponsored by the American Assembly, a policy forum affiliated with Columbia University. But instead of educating their audience, Khalifah and other grad students say, the speakers denounced Islam and promoted Christianity.

Khalifah and other New Yorkers say they were initially annoyed at the trio’s alarmist rhetoric, including claims that jihadist ideology is being taught in 90 percent of American mosques, and the characterization of Islam as an inherently violent religion. But they were truly offended by Shoebat’s announcement that converting Muslims to Christianity was a good way to defeat terrorism.

Columbia law student Ernest Jedrzejewski compares the presentation to a Christian tent revival. "All we needed was a light from above and someone to suddenly get over an incurable illness," he says.

After the speakers left the stage, Khalifah approached Saleem and challenged statements that he considered offensive and inaccurate. Saleem claims that Khalifah went even further, addressing a death threat to him in Arabic: "You are an enemy of Islam and you must die." Police questioned Khalifah but didn’t charge him. "All the allegations were proved to be unsubstantiated, and I was free to go," Khalifah says. But it didn’t end there.

Once the contentious presentation made national headlines, the self-proclaimed ex-terrorists put out a press release about Khalifah’s supposed death threat and the "smear campaign" orchestrated against them by Muslim groups and the "liberal media." The three have also vehemently denied accusations by journalists and Muslim groups that they are "stooges of the Christian right," saying that they were explaining their personal experiences in the jihadist underground, not proselytizing. "We are terrorism experts coming in to talk about terrorism. . . . Christianity worked for us, but that was not the theme of the speech," Shoebat tells the Voice. "It’s racist to say a Christian is not allowed to be an expert on terrorism."

But questions about the credibility of the three men’s terror claims aren’t going away. The New York Times pointed out that the FBI is actively seeking anyone with a history of terrorist activity in the U.S., but the Times called the bureau and confirmed that there were no warrants out for any of them. But even if law enforcement doesn’t appear to be taking their claims very seriously, that hasn’t kept Shoebat, Saleem, and Anani from being in demand as speakers on CNN and Fox, and at universities and synagogues.

Muslim groups have repeatedly complained about their rhetoric. The Council on American-Islamic Relations accuses them of inciting hatred against Muslims. Last year, Shoebat’s speaking engagements prompted protests by student groups at both the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin. When Columbia University hosted Shoebat and Anani in 2006, university officials were so afraid of protesters that they barred 100 guests from the auditorium where the two men spoke. Shoebat’s spokesman says he has also spoken at Yeshiva University and has recently been courting NYU to host him.

Academics have challenged several of Saleem’s claims, including his statement that he is a descendent of "the grand wazir" of Islam, which is a nonsensical title. (Saleem says he made up the term "grand wazir" to obscure, for safety reasons, the real title and location of the cleric that he’s actually related to.) In Canada, where Anani lives, a terrorism expert has publicly expressed doubt that Anani could have been a Muslim terrorist in Lebanon in 1970 or 1971, since the fighting there didn’t begin until 1975. Shoebat’s claim that he belonged to a U.S. sleeper cell in the early 1980s, described in his book Why We Want to Kill You, has also been challenged by both academics and his own cousin, Kamal Younis.

In response, the men have spent significant time trying to prove that they actually did kill people, and that they used to hate Jews as much as the next Muslim extremist. "I planted a bomb in a bank!" insists Shoebat, whose handler, Keith Davies, has threatened a libel suit against The Times over the article that questioned his claims.

As the controversy waxed last week, Columbia University’s American Assembly distanced itself from the whole affair. "They did not come across to me as credible representatives of anything," says Megan Wynne, program coordinator at the American Assembly. She called the choice of speakers a "giant failure of oversight" by the Air Force Academy.

Meanwhile, some of the New York students continue to wonder how it is that the three alleged former terrorists are still at large, without being brought to account for any of their past crimes. "When I was listening to them, the only thing I could think of is, ‘Why are they not in jail somewhere? Why are they out?’ " says Haider Hamza, a New School student of global security. "I thought it was really inappropriate to bring us halfway around the world to sit down and make us listen to men who [claim to have] killed hundreds of people, and listen to them tell us what is right and wrong."

village voice > news > ‘Reformed Muslim Terrorists’ Preach Christ to College Kids by Maria Luisa Tucker

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.

# #

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

Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

At a session of the Muslim Students Association West Conference last weekend in San Jose, Calif., men and women sat opposite each other.

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Published: February 21, 2008

SAN JOSE — Amir Mertaban vividly recalls sitting at his university’s recruitment table for the Muslim Students Association a few years ago when an attractive undergraduate flounced up in a decidedly un-Islamic miniskirt, saying “Salamu aleykum,” or “Peace be upon you,” a standard Arabic greeting, and asked to sign up.

Amir Mertaban has pointed out that hypocrisy can factor into some conservative responses by association members.

Mr. Mertaban also recalls that his fellow recruiter surveyed the young woman with disdain, arguing later that she should not be admitted because her skirt clearly signaled that she would corrupt the Islamic values of the other members.

“I knew that brother, I knew him very well; he used to smoke weed on a regular basis,” said Mr. Mertaban, now 25, who was president of the Muslim student group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 2003 to 2005.

Pointing out the hypocrisy, Mr. Mertaban won the argument that the group could no longer reject potential members based on rigid standards of Islamic practice.

The intense debate over whether organizations for Muslim students should be inclusive or strict is playing out on college campuses across the United States, where there are now more than 200 Muslim Students Association chapters.

Gender issues, specifically the extent to which men and women should mingle, are the most fraught topic as Muslim students wrestle with the yawning gap between American college traditions and those of Islam.

“There is this constant tension between becoming a mainstream student organization versus appealing to students who have a more conservative or stricter interpretation of Islam,” said Hadia Mubarak, the first woman to serve as president of the national association, from 2004 to 2005.

Each chapter enjoys relative autonomy in setting its rules. Broadly, those at private colleges tend to be more liberal because they draw from a more geographically dispersed population, and the smaller numbers prompt Muslim students to play down their differences.

Chapters at state colleges, on the other hand, often pull from the community, attracting students from conservative families who do not want their children too far afield.

At Yale, for example, Sunnis and Shiites mix easily and male and female students shocked parents in the audience by kissing during the annual awards ceremony. Contrast that with the University of California, Irvine, which has the reputation for being the most conservative chapter in the country, its president saying that to an outsider its ranks of bearded young men and veiled women might come across as “way Muslim” or even extremist.

But arguments erupt virtually everywhere. At the University of California, Davis, last year, in their effort to make the Muslim association more “cool,” board members organized a large alcohol-free barbecue. Men and women ate separately, but mingled in a mock jail for a charity drive.

The next day the chapter president, Khalida Fazel, said she fielded complaints that unmarried men and women were physically bumping into one other. Ms. Fazel now calls the event a mistake.

At George Washington University, a dodge ball game pitting men against women after Friday prayers drew such protests from Muslim alumni and a few members that the board felt compelled to seek a religious ruling stating that Islamic traditions accept such an event.

Members acknowledge that the tone of the Muslim associations often drives away students. Several presidents said that if they thought members were being too lax, guest imams would deliver prayer sermons about the evils of alcohol or premarital sex.

Judgment can also come swiftly. Ghayth Adhami, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled how a young student who showed up at a university recruitment meeting in a Budweiser T-shirt faced a few comments about un-Islamic dress. The student never came back.

Some members push against the rigidity. Fatima Hassan, 22, a senior at the Davis campus, organized a coed road trip to Reno, Nev., two hours away, to play the slot machines last Halloween. In Islam, Ms. Hassan concedes, gambling is “really bad,” but it was men and women sharing the same car that shocked some fellow association members.

We didn’t do anything wrong,” Ms. Hassan said. “I am chill about that whole coed thing. I understand that in a Muslim context we are not supposed to hang out with the opposite sex, but it just happens and there is nothing you can do.”

Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

Khalida Fazel, center, a chapter president, said she received complaints after an event with unmarried men and women.

But as Saif Inam, the vice president of the chapter at George Washington put it, “At the end of the day, I don’t want God asking me, ‘O.K. Saif, why did you organize events in which people could do un-Islamic things in big numbers?’ ”

The debate boils down to whether upholding gender segregation is forcing something artificial and vaguely hypocritical in an American context.

“As American Islam gets its own identity, it is going to have to shed some of these notions that are distant from American culture,” said Rafia Zakaria, a student at Indiana University. “The tension is between what forms of tradition are essential and what forms are open to innovation.”

American law says men and women are equal, whereas Muslim religious texts say they “complement” each other, Ms. Zakaria said. “If the law says they are equal, it’s hard to see how in their spiritual lives they will accept a whole different identity.”

The entire shift of the association from a foreign-run organization to an American one took place over arguments like this.

The Americans won out partly because the number of M