Muslim Heretics Conference

Jill Rowbotham and Richard Kerbaj | April 30, 2008

GRIFFITH University’s Muslim scholar Mohamad Abdalla has vowed not to “chase” any more Saudi government funds and admitted that accepting money from Riyadh was not a good look for his Queensland institution.

Dr Abdalla, who helped Griffith University obtain a $100,000 Saudi embassy grant for his Islamic Research Unit, yesterday also praised a controversial Islamic group, which has a Brisbane arm, but said he was not its leader.

Queensland’s Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson last night intervened to support the Islamic scholar, who, The Australian revealed last week, had in 2006 sought $1.37 million from the Saudi embassy and offered to keep elements of the deal secret.

Mr Atkinson praised Dr Abdalla for engaging with the authorities and promoting harmony between Brisbane’s Muslims and the rest of the community.

He dismissed Dr Abdalla’s links to Tablighi Jamaat, whose overseas members have been linked to al-Qa’ida and the 2005 London bombings, saying the Griffith academic was a role model for young Muslim men.

“His stance, from what I have seen of him, is in terms of being a moderate person, a sensible person, a person who encourages the Islamic community to engage with the broader Australian community,” Mr Atkinson said.

“(He) works extremely well with youth and has a very positive influence on youth.”

Mr Atkinson said Dr Abdalla had encouraged young Muslims to join Queensland’s police force.

Dr Abdalla admitted that if the Saudi embassy were to approve the remaining $1.27 million in funding sought by Griffith, he would advise the university against accepting it.

“I would say: no, don’t take the money,” he said.

Dr Abdalla, the director of Griffith’s Islamic Research Unit, played down accusations that the Saudi grant would influence the university’s agenda.

“(The argument) that Saudi money would affect us is farcical,” he said.

“I will not chase them - Saudi or non-Saudi.

“We would like to be seen as doing work that is not going to be influenced.”

Asked if he accepted that receiving Saudi funding was a bad look for the university, Dr Abdalla said: “Yes, it is”.

He said he would not return the $100,000 grant and would not rule out accepting unsolicited Saudi funds in the future.

The Australian yesterday revealed that Muslim leader Fadi Rahman, who is close to Dr Abdalla, said the academic was the leader of the Tablighi in Brisbane.

Experts say the group’s non-violent teachings about the importance of the afterlife had left some of its young followers susceptible to recruitment as suicide bombers.

Dr Abdalla denied he was the leader of the Tablighi in Brisbane. However, he was sympathetic to its ideals and the group was represented at the Kuraby Mosque - in Brisbane’s southeast - where he is one of the leaders.

Queensland District Court judge Clive Wall last week accused Griffith University of becoming an “agent” through which the Saudi embassy was propagating hardline Islam.

He also compared Griffith to Pakistan’s madrassas, which are notorious for breeding radicals.

When Vice-Chancellor Ian O’Connor defended the university’s pursuit of Saudi funding in an opinion article published in The Australian last week, he came under fire for using Wikipedia as a source of his material and for his confused interpretation of Islam.

Islam scholar ends Saudi cash chase | The Australian

ATLANTA (Map, News) - About 75 activists, educators, students and others gathered this weekend to discuss what they see as a “crisis over the intolerance of difference” in the Muslim faith.

During the three-day Celebration of Heresy Conference, panelists debated such issues as sharia, critical thinking and democracy and Islam - issues organizers of the conference say are central to Islamic reform, but which Muslims are not free to discuss within many contemporary Islamic societies.

Abdullahi An-Na’im, a professor at Emory University’s School of Law and co-organizer of the conference, which he said was a grassroots, spontaneous initiative grown from a concern that the Islamic tradition of open debate has narrowed.

“Heresy is creative,” An-Na’im said. “It reaffirms the need to create space for disagreement. If our religious values are strong, heresy will not hurt us. If they are weak, heresy will remind us what we need to be doing.”

The topic of democracy and Islam was debated for more than an hour on Saturday. An-Na’im pointed to factors like poverty, a lack of education and underdevelopment as reasons why democracy has not taken root in more Muslim-based societies around the world.

“Islam is not the problem,” he said. “If Islam is consistent with Democracy, why are most Muslim societies not Democratic? The religion is not opposed to it.”

Fereydoun Taslimi, a Muslim activist in Atlanta, said that not many Middle Eastern countries can claim that they are operating under a representative form of government, with theocracy or less inclusive elections being the order of the day. Ensuring certain rights - like equality between the sexes and freedom of speech - can be attained through democracy.

An-Na’im said that Muslims must figure out how to legitimize and reinforce Democratic values from an Islamic perspective.

Taslimi said the goal of the conference is to connect more like-minded Muslims so that discussions like those happening this weekend can happen more often. He said that emotional reactions by Muslims to minor issues have been a distraction and that more criticism and self-reflection is needed in the faith.

“It is a cry … that there is something wrong and we need to do something,” Taslimi said. “We want to create a network of people who are willing to discuss different issues to the end that they can address subjects that may have been taboo.”

The Heresy Conference continues through Sunday.

Muslims organize conference to encourage openness, dialogue - Examiner.com

Homeland Security Report Sharply Rebukes McCain’s ‘Islamic Extremism’ Rhetoric» 

Earlier this week, The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) launched a campaign to persuade Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to drop the adjective “Islamic” when describing terrorists and extremists. Indeed, one of McCain’s favorite talking points is railing against “Islamic” extremists and terrorists. But the McCain campaign has refused to budge, saying that he will continue to refer to Islam when talking about terrorism.

Now, the AP has learned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agrees with the ISNA. A recent DHS report has concluded that linking Islam to terrorism offends moderate Muslims and gives extremists “religious legitimacy,” adding any such language should be avoided:

Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates. […]

U.S. officials may be “unintentionally portraying terrorists, who lack moral and religious legitimacy, as brave fighters, legitimate soldiers or spokesmen for ordinary Muslims,” says a Homeland Security report. […]

“We should not concede the terrorists’ claim that they are legitimate adherents of Islam,” the report said.

The report also stressed that “lingo like ‘Islamo-fascism’ is out, too,” a term that conservatives — including President Bush — consistently use to rally the country around a militant response to terrorism and terrorists. For example:

– Rush Limbaugh: “Patriotism is rallying behind the country, regardless of party affiliation, to defeat Islamofascism.”

– David Horowitz: “The term ‘Islamo-fascism’ describes the agendas of the jihadists with perfect accuracy.”

– President Bush: Terrorists “try to spread their jihadist message - a message I call…Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism.”

Muslim leaders in the U.S. have long argued that such language “offends the vast majority of moderate Muslims,” but the McCain campaign thinks it knows better. Senior adviser Steve Schmidt recently said “the reality is, the hateful ideology which underpins bin Ladenism is properly described as radical Islamic extremism. Senator McCain refers to it that way because that is what it is.”

Think Progress

Muslim Rebel Sisters: At Odds With Islam and Each Other

By BARRY GEWEN

AYAAN HIRSI ALI and Irshad Manji are two of the most prominent and outspoken critics of what they and others see as “mainstream Islam.” Brilliant, dynamic women — the overused word “charismatic” is not inappropriate for either one — they have each rebelled against a Muslim upbringing to become public figures with large and devoted followings. Both are successful authors: Ms. Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, “Infidel,” was a New York Times best seller; Ms. Manji’s combination memoir-polemic, “The Trouble With Islam Today,” has been published in almost 30 countries. They are firm and unyielding in their support for the West, feminism, reason, freedom — and they have paid a price: both have been targets of death threats and have required protection; in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s case, around-the-clock protection.

Yet though they are allies on one level, their approaches to Islam are strikingly different, with one working outside the religion and one within. Neither one can be considered a spokeswoman for a significant Muslim constituency in the Middle East. (Indeed, their most sympathetic audiences are probably Western.) But their differences have implications for all the big issues the West grapples with in considering the Muslim world. How much popular support do terrorists have? Is a secular Middle East possible, and what’s the best way to promote it? Is Islam itself an enemy of the West?

Ms. Hirsi Ali is an avowed atheist whose criticisms can be seen as attacks not only on radical Islamism but on the religion of Islam over all. George W. Bush was wrong, she says, when he announced that Islam was being held hostage by a terrorist minority: “Islam is being held hostage by itself.” About the 9/11 attacks, she declared: “This is Islam,” and “not just Islam, this was the core of Islam.” The attacks forced her to decide “which side was I on?” she writes in “Infidel.” And further, “Where did I stand on Islam?” Her book is the story of how she chose the West.

For Ms. Manji, there has been no such either-or choice. She is a practicing Muslim who — though she can be as caustic about her coreligionists as Ms. Hirsi Ali — seeks to change her faith from within. As founder and director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University, she assists other maverick writers and scholars who dissent within their communities. “What I want,” Ms. Manji has said, “is an Islamic Reformation,” and in contrast to Ms. Hirsi Ali, she adds, there is “no need to choose between Islam and the West.”

Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of “Infidel,” says the positions of the two women “can’t possibly be reconciled.”

Both Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Manji come from non-Arab Muslim backgrounds. By itself, this may be one reason for their opposition to Islamic orthodoxy, which they see as inherently Arab, or Arab-dominated. Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Somalia, and lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya before fleeing to the Netherlands when she was 22 to avoid an arranged marriage. When her family was in Saudi Arabia, she remembers her father’s complaining that the Saudis had perverted the true Islam. “He hated Saudi judges and Saudi law,” she writes. “He thought it was all barbaric, all Arab desert culture.”

Ms. Manji was born in 1968 in Uganda, but her family, part Egyptian and part Indian, moved to Canada when she was 4 to escape Idi Amin. She is even more insistent than Ms. Hirsi Ali in drawing a distinction between Islam and Arab tribal culture, its “dictatorship from the desert.” Who elected the Saudi monarch “to be Islam’s steward?” she asks. “We’re not in the Saudi sand dunes anymore.”

Ms. Manji has a broader and more flexible idea than Ms. Hirsi Ali of what Islam is and can be. Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence.” Ms. Manji, on the other hand, is convinced that her religion can escape what she sees as its Arab domination. “We need a take-no-prisoners debate about Saudi Arabia, a cauldron of duplicity.”

The writer Paul Berman suggests that the difference between them may be due to the fact that Ms. Manji was raised in the warm, liberal, welcoming precincts of British Columbia, where religion could be a comfort rather than a burden, where pluralism was an assumption, a fact of life. (Ms. Manji was kicked out of her Islamic religious school for asking too many questions, but before that she had been cared for at a Baptist church, and at age 8 even won its Most Promising Christian of the Year award.) Ms. Hirsi Ali’s early years, by contrast, consisted of dictatorship, war, patriarchy, genital cutting, confinement and beatings so severe that she once ended up in a hospital with a fractured skull. Ms. Manji offers her own support for Mr. Berman’s conjecture: “Had I grown up in a Muslim country, I’d probably be an atheist in my heart.”

No element more thoroughly informs the work of both women than feminism; its influence on their thinking can hardly be overstated, and in this sense they might be considered crown jewels in the history of the modern women’s movement. Yet because they are risking their lives for their beliefs — constantly, every day — they may have more in common with antitotalitarian dissidents like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn than with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. As feminists, Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Manji are demanding more than equality; they are very self-consciously challenging the foundations of an entire way of life.

“The most important explanation for the mental and material backlog we Muslims find ourselves in,” Ms. Hirsi Ali has said, “should probably be sought in the sexual morality that we were force-fed from birth.” Her first book, a collection of essays, was entitled “The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.” In the Netherlands, she devoted herself to helping Muslim women, in her words, “develop the vocabulary of resistance,” and she continues the fight from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she is a resident fellow.

Ms. Manji, too, sees feminism as the linchpin for Islamic reform. “Empowering women,” she says, “is the way to awaken the Muslim world.” But she is not only a committed feminist (bad enough in the eyes of Muslim conservatives). She is also an open lesbian — a rebel twice over. The difference between them “really is between those outside of a faith and those still within it,” says Ms. Manji’s friend the writer Andrew Sullivan. “Hirsi Ali has abandoned faith for atheism. Irshad has taken the harder path, I believe.”

The two women have known each other for four years, since Ms. Hirsi Ali interviewed Ms. Manji for a Dutch newspaper, and they discussed their continuing relationship in e-mail interviews. They immediately bonded — understandably enough. “I could not believe she was not an atheist,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “and she could not believe that I had become one.” When Time magazine named Ms. Hirsi Ali one of its “100 most influential people” for 2005, it was Ms. Manji who wrote the comment on her. Ms. Manji admires Ms. Hirsi Ali’s determination to speak truth to power, saying that “Ayaan’s defiant distrust of Muslim authorities can help generate debates that move us closer to honesty.”

But, inevitably, the differences between them create tensions since, in their eyes, what is at stake is nothing less than the future of Islam. Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “Irshad is the most admirable person I know who is trying to achieve change from within,” but she agrees with Mr. Hitchens that “from an intellectual, logical perspective,” Ms. Manji’s religious faith and her own secularism can’t be reconciled. Mr. Hitchens himself believes that it’s a self-defeating exercise for a declared lesbian to try to bring about an Islamic Reformation.

Ms. Manji detects a certain incoherence in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s views: “She wants Muslims to reform, but she also seems to believe that Islam is inherently retrograde.” Ms. Manji says her own position “is that Muslims can reform while remaining faithful precisely because the Koran has the raw materials to be thoughtful and humane. It’s we Muslims who must develop the courage to change.”

For her part, Ms. Hirsi Ali replies, “I make a distinction between Islam and Muslims.” That is, “I picture the defeat of Islam as large swaths of Muslims crossing the line and accepting the value system of secular humanism. This is not a matter of one religion defeating another, it’s a matter of value systems which cannot coexist.”

Clearly, this is a debate of importance not only to Muslims but to non-Muslims as well, and for a Westerner listening in, the best way to understand it may be to translate it into the language of European history. Irshad Manji sees herself as moving Islam into the 16th century; Ayaan Hirsi

Muslim Rebel Sisters: At Odds With Islam and Each Other - New York Times

Muslim extremists target Jemima Khan with death threats

By DAN NEWLING - More by this author » Last updated at 10:37am on 23rd April 2008

Comments (17)

Islamic fundamentalists have threatened Jemima Khan with death for supporting a Muslim think-tank which preaches religious tolerance.

Mrs Khan is a patron of the Quilliam Foundation, recently set up by two reformed members of the outlawed extremist organisation Hizb ut Tahrir.

The organisation has received death threats by phone and email for all involved - one has even referred to Mrs Khan by name, it is believed.

Meanwhile, comments on fundamentalist websites have condemned the 34-year-old’s decision to get involved with the group.

At the think-tank’s launch yesterday, Mrs Khan admitted that since the threats she had been “a little wobbly” about voicing her support for the foundation.

But she added: “If there was no response from the dark side, then we would be failing.”

The organisation was set up by Maajid Nawaz, 30, a former extremist who spent four years as a political prisoner in Egypt.

Glamour: Jemima attending a party in London

It is named after William Quilliam, a 19th century Liverpudlian who converted to Islam, and says it aims to reflect mainstream, moderate, British Muslim opinion.

Other backers include the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown and the Tory MP Michael Gove.

However, the group has been criticised on some Muslim websites - an apparent attempt to strangle it at birth.

One site labels Mrs Khan a “fujiar” - an Arabic word meaning someone who unashamedly and publicly commits sin.

Posting pictures of Mrs Khan in a bikini and kissing a female friend at a nightclub, the site says: “This is the same ’socialite’ Jemima who is regularly pictured in chick-mags in miniskirts and low-cut dresses hopping in and out of nightclubs - and she is going to be lecturing us on true Islam?!”

It continues: “Getting unmarried, public fujiar, clad in miniskirts and bikinis, to lecture us on true Islamic values, man what has the world come to?”

The site also criticises Mr Nawaz for engaging in “un-Islamic” behaviour, such as visiting nightclubs and being friendly with a former girlfriend.

Mrs Khan, who was married to Imran Khan, the former cricket captain of Pakistan, was accompanied by a bodyguard at the launch in London.

She said: “I can’t claim to speak for Muslims. I am certainly very far from most people’s image of what a good Muslim is and that makes me an easy target for those who don’t want Quilliam to succeed.

“Someone has to stand up and tell the truth that there is no conflict between being British and being Muslim. Someone has to give moderate Muslims a voice and I believe that Quilliam is that organisation.”

The group’s co-director Ed Husain, who wrote an award-winning book about his experiences as an extremist, said: “All of this is designed to discredit us in the eyes of members of the Muslim community.

“The leaders of these movements are fearful because they know that members have been in touch with us and they want help in order to leave.”

Mr Nawaz also revealed that he was threatened two weeks ago by disgruntled members of Hizb ut Tahrir.

“It was in Copenhagen, in Demark. I was just walking down the street and suddenly three cars full of guys pulled up. They said they were from Hizb ut Tahrir.

“They accused me of supporting democracy, which is a crime for them. I felt threatened but luckily managed to get away.”

Muslim extremists target Jemima Khan with death threats | the Daily Mail

The War of Ideas
Finally, a debate occurred between an Islamist and an anti-Islamist Muslim
Part One of Two
M. Zuhdi Jasser

A public debate between two devotional Muslims occurred on April 5, 2008 at Edison College in Naples, Florida. We shared deeply conflicting ideas on Islam, political Islam, terrorism, and morality. Arguments so far seemingly relegated to “Muslim vs. non-Muslims” debates due to the Muslim activist predominance of the Islamist mindset were finally debated from a position deep within a Muslim consciousness.

Already a tired phrase, call it what you will, “the battle,” “the war,” “the contest” of ideas between the West (secular democracies) and the Muslim world (Islamist theocracies) remains an elusive target for many of us in the thick of the fight. As an American, the concept of debate and intellectual argumentation runs to the core of who I am. So many other anti-Islamist Muslims and I can imagine no other method of getting our ideas across to the “other” side whether discussing the political, religious, legal, social, or spiritual realm. But when it comes to our current target – the threat of political Islam within the devotional Muslim consciousness – leading Islamist figures in the U.S. have remained slippery targets, unwilling to engage anti-Islamists openly in the public square.

These elusive Islamists include a host of “political imams” (imams who use their pulpit to preach an Islamist domestic and foreign policy agenda) who are apparently a majority of imams in mosques around the U.S. Not only are political imams in the majority of mosques but the salafist orientation seems to predominate mosques also. This is augmented in the public place with their supporting and collaborating Islamist organizations which include ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), MAS (Muslim American Society), ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), MSA (Muslim Students Association), the North American Imams Federation, The Assembly of American Muslim Jurists, and the MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Council) to name a few. That, in and of itself, is telling. However, the obvious nature of their avoidance behavior in engaging anti-Islamists is not enough or even a start in the effort to win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims.

The entirety of mosques and Islamist and anti-Islamist Muslim organizations do not represent all American Muslims. Most American Muslims are actually unaffiliated with any element of the organized Muslim community. Some, if not most, are unaffiliated simply because they separate religion and politics. In fact, statistics would show that only a small minority of American Muslims maintain membership in any “Muslim” organizations.

The ideas expressed in this debate will possibly expose why. Most Islamist organizations and imams have little to no moral leadership or credibility when they espouse apologetics and excuses trying to convince the world that moral imperatives have exceptions. Hopefully the mainstream media, government officials, and the average non-Muslim American will begin to see that “Islamists” are in no way synonymous with “Muslims.” The “battle for the soul of Islam” between Islamists and anti-Islamists needs to be forged expeditiously or the Islamists will assiduously continue their grand scheme of eventual and total domination.

Since its inception, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy was created by anti-Islamist Muslims upon a foundation that our guiding ideologies simply need to be heard in the Muslim community. Then, let the chips fall where they may. With that public hearing, or “forum,” we will begin to openly challenge the ossified precepts of salafism, Wahhabism, Islamism, and various pre-modern identifications of eastern Muslim culture. With that challenge we pray that an awakening – possibly very similar to the modernization of the West, which ushered in “enlightenment” – may occur within the consciousness of Muslims everywhere, forever separating spiritual Islam or the domain of God (faith) from the domain of government and the state (reason).

It is direct forays between Islamists and anti-Islamists which highlight the profound areas of disagreement. For example, when AIFD sponsored the nation’s first Muslim rally against terrorism in 2004 entitled “Standing with Muslims Against Terrorism” and invited the local Islamist Politburo (also known as the “Valley council of imams”) to join us in a universal unqualified condemnation of terrorism, they explicitly refused citing a host of morally defunct explanations. As a group, they refused to make a public moral imperative without qualifications (apologetics) about American foreign policy as an excuse for terrorism. They not only stayed home from the rally despite repeated public calls to join us, but the imams have also repeatedly refused to go on record regarding AIFD’s mission of ideologically engaging Islamism, let alone directly engage anti-Islamists. In fact in the 2007 controversial documentary by ABG Films Islam v Islamists, local imam, Ahmed Shqeirat described our work as “liberal extremism.”

The debate this week against an imam in Naples proved that these apologetics are apparently and most unfortunately common across the nation (from Arizona to Florida) in many imam circles as a litmus test for Islamists who believe in political Islam and the Islamic state. Make no mistake: my opponents in the clerical realm try to brush off our work as “anti-imam” or anti-scholarship in Islam. A cartoon in a local Islamist publication tried to portray just such propaganda against me in 2005. The reality is quite the contrary. Many humble scholarly imams have provided the intellectual underpinnings for our anti-Islamist Muslim precepts at AIFD. In fact it is the persona of the morally corrupt imam who has been the greatest liability for the real scholars of Islam who are the anti-Islamist, anti-Wahhabi imams of virtue which are so marginalized in the American public square.

This challenge of opening this debate and even acknowledging its existence is no small undertaking, considering the number of Islamist forces working within the Muslim community against such an awakening. Further challenges include tendencies of the general public to accept minority and identity politics in the U.S. and the inherent Islamist exploitation of that in order to further tribal behavior and foment divisiveness in America. By doing so, they craftily avoid self-critique, not to mention the collaborating forces outside the Muslim community (mainstream media and many U.S. Government officials) that are all too ready to accept Islamist ideology as the de facto consensus of the orientation of the faithful.

Yet, frustratingly, many anti-Islamist Muslims have been standing alone ready to challenge the Islamist position within the Muslim community, unable to gain any traction against the conventional wisdom that Islam is Islamism and Islamists are the only devotional Muslims. Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, Ayaan hirsi Ali’s Infidel and other expressions exposing radical Islamist ideology are able to conflate Islam with political Islam and militant Islam because they have been almost inarguably unable to find a palpable debate within the Muslim community concerning the ideas they critique. Islamists often whine in an oversimplified denial immersed in pathetic victimology, while anti-Islamist Muslims remain unheard and unable to find a forum.

Certainly, many anti-Islamist Muslims have been writing and speaking out all over the world. But we have generally been “preaching to the choir” and past the Islamists and their collaborators who disagree with us. Why have we have often ended up speaking “past” them? The answer is their unwillingness to engage openly in a debate over our central differences on Islam and the Muslim consciousness. Theirs is a strategy cloaked in deliberately ignoring the debate and deliberately clouding Islam with Islamism – much to the chagrin of the average non-Islamist Muslim.

The Islamists conveniently call internal challenges to their theology a manifestation of a societal ill which they equate with “division” (fitna in Arabic). They feel that their moves to politically collectivize the Muslim community, or the “ummah,” can never be challenged. They ignore the fact that the political collectivization of Muslims runs contrary to the national interests of our collective nation and our citizenship. For the few who do accept the challenge they do so only on their terms, privately, within the community, away from media and away from any accountability to the greater American community.

This blind collectivism is the exact reason the Muslim mind in so many mosques and activist organizations is hopelessly and cowardly paralyzed in apologetics and victimization. The Islamists are thereby easily able to muster the courage of their faulty convictions enough to champion political Islam and secure its stranglehold upon the public manifestation of the Muslim consciousness.

There is no better way for Muslims to generate credibility and speed up our growth than to encourage and participate in an open public debate. Once anti-Islamist and pro-Islamist Muslims intellectually engage one another, the rest of the world can finally see that the most effective means to counterterrorism is a devotional Muslim counter to political Islam and the religious validity of the Islamic state. The determination of whose version of Islam is closer to the central message of Islam is vital to countering the visceral drive of militant Islamism.

By avoiding debate, the Islamists are not only ignoring the Prophet Mohammed’s tradition of intellectual engagement with all those who disagreed with him inside and outside the faith community, but they are falling lockstep with the fascist precept that supremacist ideologies have to be superior by virtue of their own standing and should never be challenged by other non-conforming Muslims.

Engagement can be a tenuous and possibly dangerous endeavor. Many Islamists by virtue of their apologetics for terrorism and facilitation of the Islamist ideology end up associated (if not hatched from) international and often militant Islamist organizations like Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. But debating them is still quite helpful and infinitely revealing.

The most important element to be underscored is that debate and confrontation cannot be equated with endorsement and facilitation. It is far more dangerous to ignore these organizations and Islamist thought leaders and hand them the intellectual reins of the Muslim community unchallenged than to engage them and highlight the ideas which put them at odds with reason, spirituality, and modernity.

Recently on February 23, 2008, while I was participating in a panel on radical Islam’s threat to the West in Naples Florida, a local imam, Mohamed Al-Darsani of the Islamic Center for Peace challenged my ideas and cast me out with little substantiation as being “outside the mainstream Muslim community.” It seemed that my orthodox adherence to traditional Sunni Muslim worship and spiritual devotion made little difference to him. His charge about my position in the Muslim community was made concerning my stand on terrorism and political Islam.

I immediately responded with an open challenge to engage him in a debate on the threat of Islamism (the desire to form an Islamic state) to American security. To my surprise (and thanks to the Florida Security Council), he agreed.

With the tenacity of the local Florida Security Council, within six weeks, I had an official debate with Imam Mohammed Al-Darsani, with Michael Cromartie of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy moderating. We agreed to debate the question: “Is the Establishment of the Islamic State a Clear Ideological Threat to the United States?” I debated the affirmative and Mr. Al-Darsani the negative.

The two-plus hour long debate covered a lot of ground. Most poignantly, it highlighted the great chasm between the corruption of Islamist apologetics and the struggle to renew the moral truth of spiritual Islam separated from Islamist demagoguery. A review of the debate demonstrates the wide abyss which separates so many faithful anti-Islamist Muslims from Imam Al-Darsani and other similar Islamist apologists. One has to give the imam credit for showing up and having the courage of his convictions. Sadly, it is those very convictions which are the primary fuel for terrorism worldwide. Once we understand the relationship of political Islam and its various permutations from Wahhabism to salafism to deobandism to militant Islamism and its terror, we will be able to effectuate and progress a global anti-Islamist movement.

Debates like the one which occurred last week in Florida are the beginning of a “contest” of ideas which will herald either the victory of post-modern Islam over theocratic Islam or the converse. Global security and the continuation of American society as we know it hangs in the balance.

The debate was videotaped by both sides – ours (AIFD) and theirs (Imam Al-Darsani and the Islamic Center for Peace of Fort Myers, Florida). Our copy is in production and will not be available for a while. A Muslim member of Mr. Al-Darsani’s mosque, Greg George, has posted the entire debate online in six parts. He is apparently also a documentary producer and an unconventional (to say the least) candidate for Congress in his district. I refer you to his video links of the debate which he posted. But that is certainly no endorsement of Mr. George or Mr. Al-Darsani and his Islamic Center for Peace.

Watch the debate at these links at Google Video.

[Part 1 (Introductions and Al-Darsani Opening)]

[Part 2 (Jasser opening, Rebuttals]

[Part 3 Cross-Examinations]

[Part 4 Audience Q+A]

[Part 5 Audience Q+A and Al-Darsani Closing]

[Part 6 Jasser Closing- End of Debate]

As you watch the debate, know that this is one of the first of its kind publicly that I know of in the West between two devotional Muslims over the topic of political Islam and terror.

Human beings may often err as we engage in the confrontation of ideas. But to err is human. The only thing worse than an occasional misstep or misspeak in the public contest of ideas is the apathetic indifference and avoidance of any challenge to our own ideas. Such avoidance comes from individual weakness and the inability of many Islamists to muster the courage of their convictions. Those unwilling to withstand a public challenge to their ideas deserve neither the respect of their convictions nor the leadership of the communities which they purport to represent. In fact, their failure to do so points to a murkier Islamist plot of silencing discourse and stifling criticism to evade accountability, not only to Muslims, but to America as a whole.

In Part II of this column I will review my own perceptions of the obvious ideological demarcations made in the debate between the Islamist (Al-Darsani) and the anti-Islamist (Jasser).

Family Security Matters

Daniel Pipes: Islam and democracy can coexist

Posted: April 22, 2008, 11:08 AM by Marni Soupcoff

Daniel Pipes

There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs and various other strongmen - and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?) concludes, “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”

The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.

I disagree with that conclusion. Today’s Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than innate features of Islam. Put differently, Islam, like all pre-modern religions is undemocratic in spirit. No less than the others, however, it has the potential to evolve in a democratic direction.

Such evolution is not easy for any religion. In the Christian case, the battle to limit the Catholic Church’s political role was painfully long. If the transition began when Marsiglio of Padua published Defensor pacis in the year 1324, it took another seven centuries for the Church fully to reconcile itself to democracy. Why should Islam’s transition be smoother or easier?

To render Islam consistent with democratic ways will require profound changes in its interpretation. For example, the anti-democratic law of Islam, the Shari’a, lies at the core of the problem. Developed over a millennium ago, it presumes autocratic rulers and submissive subjects, emphasizes God’s will over popular sovereignty and encourages violent jihad to expand Islam’s borders. Further, it anti-democratically privileges Muslims over non-Muslims, males over females and free persons over slaves.

For Muslims to build fully functioning democracies, they basically must reject the Shari’a’s public aspects. Turkey’s first president Mustafa Ataturk frontally did just that in his country, but others have offered more subtle approaches. Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a Sudanese thinker, dispatched the public Islamic laws by fundamentally reinterpreting the Koran.

Ataturk’s efforts and Taha’s ideas imply that Islam is ever-evolving, and that to see it as unchanging is a grave mistake. Or, in the lively metaphor of Hassan Hanafi, professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo, the Koran “is a supermarket, where one takes what one wants and leaves what one doesn’t want.”

Islam’s problem is less its being anti-modern than that its process of modernization has hardly begun. Muslims can modernize their religion, but that requires major changes: Out go waging jihad to impose Muslim rule, second-class citizenship for non-Muslims and death sentences for blasphemy or apostasy. In come individual freedoms, civil rights, political participation, popular sovereignty, equality before the law and representative elections.

Two obstacles stand in the way of these changes, however. In the Middle East especially, tribal affiliations remain of paramount importance. As explained by Philip Carl Salzman in his recent book, Culture and Conflict in the

Middle East, these ties create a complex pattern of tribal autonomy and tyrannical centralism that obstructs the development of constitutionalism, the rule of law, citizenship, gender equality and the other prerequisites of a democratic state. Not until this archaic social system based on the family is dispatched can democracy make real headway in the Middle East.

Globally, the compelling and powerful Islamist movement obstructs democracy. It seeks the opposite of reform and modernization — namely, the reassertion of the Shari’a in its entirety. A jihadist like Osama bin Laden may spell out this goal more explicitly than an establishment politician like Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but both seek to create a thoroughly anti-democratic, if not totalitarian, order.

Islamists respond two ways to democracy. First, they denounce it as unIslamic. Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna considered democracy a betrayal of Islamic values. Brotherhood theoretician Sayyid Qutb rejected popular sovereignty, as did Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, founder of Pakistan’s Jamaate-Islami political party. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Al-Jazeera television’s imam, argues that elections are heretical.

Despite this scorn, Islamists are eager to use elections to attain power and have proven themselves to be agile vote-getters; even a terrorist organization (Hamas) has won an election. This record does not render the Islamists democratic but indicates their tactical flexibility and their determination to gain power. As Erdogan has revealingly explained, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”

Hard work can one day make Islam democratic. In the meanwhile, Islamism represents the world’s leading anti-democratic force.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the Taube/Diller Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©All rights reserved by Daniel Pipes.

Daniel Pipes: Islam and democracy can coexist - Full Comment

The notion of ethical investing goes back at least to 1758, when the Quakers banned profiting from the slave trade. But the market for ethical investments has always remained a niche. The goals of maximizing profit and fulfilling a moral agenda conflict more often than they complement one another, and investors who want to put ethics first have turned out to be relatively few. “Socially responsible investing,” or SRI, as it is called these days, has never captured the heart of Wall Street.

That could be changing. Finance that complies with Sharia, or Islamic law, is still a niche within the ethical investing niche. In all, there are at least $500 billion worth of Islamic finance assets worldwide. That’s not much in terms of global banking–U.S. banks alone hold about $12.7 trillion in assets, according to the American Bankers Association.

But the industry’s growth is eye-catching: Islamic banking has expanded by more 10% annually over the past decade, according to Standard & Poor’s. It’s grabbing the attention of some of the biggest banks in the world, and changing how they do business.

In the 1990s, HSBC (nyse: HBC - news - people ) and Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ) established global Islamic finance divisions. Far beyond just offering a few mutual funds to suit religious investors, they and stand-alone Muslim banks are creating instruments that parallel many of the Western world’s financial products, from consumer loans to insurance to bonds.

Central banks and corporations in other industries are likewise feeling the demand. The governments of Japan and Great Britain–whether in an attempt to lure Muslim investors or impress Muslim voters–have announced plans to issue sukuk, which behave like bonds but conform to Islamic law.

Ford Motor’s (nyse: F - news - people ) $848 million sale of Aston Martin to Investment Dar, a Kuwait-based Islamic bank, required Sharia-compliant financing, and Caribou Coffee (nasdaq: CBOU - news - people ), America’s second-largest specialty coffee chain, after Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX - news - people ), is owned by a Sharia-compliant private equity firm based in Bahrain.

So just what does Sharia-compliant banking entail? Some of it is simply prohibiting things seen as immoral. Investing in casinos, pornography and weapons of mass destruction is out.

The animating religious goal behind other restrictions is to achieve greater social justice by sharing risk and reward. Islamic finance bans people from selling what they don’t own, which rules out short selling, and from engaging in contracts deemed to have excessive uncertainty on either side. That rules out traditional insurance, so Islamic banks have instead developed takaful, in which a group of people pool risk.

The Sharia stipulation banning interest, though, is the one that poses the most problems for modern finance. To be sure, from the Bible to Buddhism, most of the world’s faiths have issued warnings against usury, and theologians through the ages have debated the line between permissible and excessive interest rates. But ultimately, in the West, governments and religious authorities deemed some amount of interest permissible.

Not so in Islam, in which most scholars (Islam has no central authority) deem fixed-interest payments forbidden. So, for example, a sukuk issuer does not sell a debt, as a traditional bond issuer would, but rather sells a portion of an asset, on which the buyer is then entitled to receive rent. Likewise, rather than take out an interest-bearing loan, a business in need of financing might enter a musharaka, a partnership with profit-and-loss sharing.

Why the growth in Islamic finance now? After all, Islam’s rules have been around since the seventh century, and some Muslim countries have been rich since the discovery of oil.

One important factor has been the recent rise in religiosity in Muslim countries, says Ibrahim Warde, author of Islamic Finance in the Global Economy and an adjunct professor of international business at Tufts University. He dates the rise to shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, “there was a feeling in many countries that Islam was a religion under siege,” he says.

Some observers date the rise in religious observance back even further, to the 1980s, when guest workers in Saudi Arabia from across the Muslim world began returning to their own countries, re-importing with them the strict Wahhabi subsect of Islam for which the desert kingdom is known.

Whenever this burgeoning religious observance began, it’s now visible across the Muslim world in the increasing number of women in the street wearing head scarves, the number of Islamist parties that have made electoral gains in recent years (in Morocco and Egypt for instance), and now, in an increasing appetite for Sharia finance. In some cases, Warde says, Middle Eastern governments have embraced Islamic banking to advertise their religious chops.

There are, of course, glaring exceptions to this growing demand. Saudi billionaire (and member of the ruling sect) Alwaleed Bin Talal owns big stakes in Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), The Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ), and Planet Hollywood. But Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family is trapped delicately between reform and radical extremism, may prove Warde’s point.

“The government did not encourage Islamic finance there at all. It was a grassroots movement,” says Warde. Now, many banks and financial products there are Sharia-compliant. “Once there was nothing they could do about it, they accepted it,” he says.

Some of the growth in Islamic finance has also been due to clever marketing by Malaysia. After Sept. 11, U.S. authorities froze the bank accounts of several prominent Saudis, which triggered other wealthy Arabs to withdraw their funds from the United States. Ultimately, some $200 billion left the U.S. Many of the investors were from tiny Gulf states whose economies were too small to absorb their funds, and so they looked to Malaysia, a Muslim country with a relatively sophisticated financial system.

Malaysia issued the first sovereign sukuk in 2002, and made a point of appointing Sharia scholars from the Gulf to monitor compliance. “They marketed it all over the world, and especially in the Arab world,” Warde says. Today, Kuala Lumpur rivals traditional hubs like Dubai and Bahrain as a global center of Islamic finance. (See: “Contenders For The Crown.”)

In the end, the math behind the growth of Islamic banking may be pretty simple: There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world–roughly a fifth of the world’s population. Some live in quickly developing economies like India and Indonesia, some sit on vast oil wealth and some are newly middle-class Americans and Europeans.

No one can say for sure how many will seek out banking that complies with Islamic law, or even pay a premium for it. But even a small fraction of 1.3 billion is a market no one wants to ignore.

God And Mammon - Forbes.com

London, Apr 21: Jemima Khan, the ex-wife of Pakistan’s cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, will be backing reformed jihadists as she has become the patron of “Quillium Foundation”, an organisation to be launched later this week to combat terrorism.

Ed Husain, a former member of Hizbut-Tahrir, is one of the founders of the organization, while another patron is Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader.

Jemima, who formed a group of other reformed Muslim radicals like Hassan Butt who will work for her, said that the challenge to Islamism could only legitimately come from within the Islamic community if it is to have any i

Technorati Tags: former jihadist,jemima khan

mpact.

Butt was once a member of the Britain’s extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, who is so exasperated at still being the target of police investigations that he is willing to plead guilty to past crimes and take his punishment - if that is what is required to escape his former life.

Hassan Butt claims Greater Manchester police were harassing him over suspicions that he is secretly still a jihadist. Through now he works to woo Muslim extremists away from violence - and that the British Home Office encourages his efforts.

His predicament reflects a wider dilemma for the government: how far should it use draconian legal measures to combat terrorism and how much should it trust moderate Muslims and reformed jihadists to win over extremists? He rejected extremism and jihad after he was horrified by the London bombings in July 2005. “I also began to discover deeper theological flaws in the jihadi world view. These doubts drove me to begin a battle of ideas with my former associates. Slowly, I began to recruit over a dozen young British Muslims, who used to be hardened radicals, out of the network,” The Nation quoted him as saying.

When Butt flew to Pakistan while preparing a BBC documentary about his journey from extremism he was questioned on departure and return. Police then demanded him to hand over the BBC material relating to the documentary. They also demanded that a freelance journalist, Shiv Malik, hand over the manuscript of a book about Butt. Since Hassan Butt has not been arrested, the police demands were seen by Malik and media organisations as excessive.

Last week, Malik won the right to appeal against the “production order” to hand over material. Lawyers said in court that part of the investigation is “designed to determine, among other things, whether Butt’s renunciation of terrorism is in fact genuine”.

Butt protested that he had nothing to hide. “I’m shocked. Why all this cat and mouse stuff? I’m not trying to run,” he said.

The former jihadist claims that the investigation is ruining his attempts to convert radicals. “People don’t want to see me. Obviously they know I am under surveillance,” he said.

However, he admits there is a problem for the authorities in whom to trust. He claims various Muslim bodies have taken government money to combat extremism, but have done little. The Quilliam Foundation, which has not received any government funding, is now intent on promoting the view that mainstream Islam does not condone violence or jihad. (AN

Jemima Khan decides to back reformed jihadists | Top News

The Third Jihad
When radical Muslims distort Islam.
by Stephen Schwartz
04/28/2008, Volume 013, Issue 31

Jihad and Jew-Hatred
Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11
by Matthias Küntzel
Telos, 180 pp., $29.95

Army of Shadows
Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948
by Hillel Cohen
California, 352 pp., $29.95

Hitler’s New Disorder
The Second World War in Yugoslavia
by Stevan K. Pavlowitch Columbia, 256 pp., $34.50

The German historian Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred is an important contribution to the analysis of radical Islam. Like Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (2003), but with greater attention to historical detail, Jihad and Jew-Hatred argues that present-day Islamist extremism is, in great part, directly imitative of Nazism and other European fascist movements. Also like Berman, Küntzel appears to have crafted his discourse to appeal to Western liberals and leftists for whom fascism was anathema.

Further, as with Terror and Liberalism, Jihad and Jew-Hatred is concerned with the political aspects of Muslim radicalism rather than its theological background, or alleged justifications, in Wahhabism and other fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. Küntzel, echoing Berman, correctly assumes that, in the longer scheme of Islamic history, radical interpretations are newer rather than older, and modern rather than ancient. Islamist extremism is also utopian rather than conservative, and reformist or “purificationist,” rather than traditional. All these insights should be implicit in any serious discussion of Islamofascism.

Unlike Berman, however, Küntzel concentrates on that aspect of radical Islamist ideology with the highest profile in the West: Muslim Jew-baiting. Not all Muslim radicals have selected the Jews or Israel as a single or even main enemy. Extremists claiming the legacy of Muhammad find the greatest number of their victims among Muslims who do not accept their interpretation–only then followed by the believers in other faiths, including Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus, as well as Jews and the nonreligious.

Still, Küntzel finds a rationale for his own focus on the Egyptian Muslim -Brotherhood, or Ikhwan–as Berman did before him. Founded in 1928 by a then-obscure figure called Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood proclaimed the revival of an imaginary original purity in religion, asserting that a diluted and distorted Muslim devotion had undermined Islamic resistance to European imperialism. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood was modernistic in its reaction against modernity, adopting the characteristics of competing leftist and rightist militias in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It flourished as an aggressive, paramilitary formation, and established a network in the Arab East, India, Turkey, and Indonesia. While some of these branches were no more than fantasies typical of radical conspiracies, the Muslim Brotherhood did become an open ally of Hitler in seeking enhanced German influence in the Islamic world. Decades later, its Palestinian wing gave birth to Hamas, one of its most successful offshoots, and it has grown very powerful in many Muslim countries.

The Muslim Brotherhood introduced an innovation to the concept of jihad in which civil/political organization assumed priority over military action. While it has been common in Islam to distinguish between a “lesser jihad” of armed combat and a “greater jihad” of spiritual discipline, the Brotherhood looked toward an entirely novel “third jihad.” This entry into the world of ordinary politics was a predictable development in an Egypt governed within the British Empire. (The failure of the 1857 Indian mutiny against the British similarly gave rise to the fundamentalist Deoband school of Islam, which eventually produced the Taliban in Afghanistan.) The Muslim Brotherhood’s third jihad also found imitators in Iran.

Unfortunately, the political jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood, replacing military means, has fooled some Western commentators into support for the jihad of the ballot over the bullet, with arguments for Western accommodation of the Brotherhood as well as the disastrous welcome granted Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian general election. The principle of a third, political jihad is also visible in radical Islamist agitation in some Western countries, including the demand for introduction of sharia law in Britain. While there are differences in tactics between the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their aim–a purificationist Islamic state–remains identical.

Still, distinctions persist in the universe of radical Islam, and should be neither ignored nor exaggerated. While the Muslim Brotherhood doubtless embodies a nearly undiluted political Islam, Saudi Wahhabism and Pakistani-Afghan Deobandism (mainly seeking influence in the religious life of Muslims) also have recourse to politics through the Saudi monarchy, the “emirate” of the Taliban, and in its most virulent form, the terrorism of al Qaeda. In addition, the Khomeini regime in Iran has long provided the quintessential realization of this third jihad.

Küntzel has performed an exhaustive search through German sources to establish the links between the Third Reich and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the various forms of propaganda employed by each. He has emphasized the appeal of Nazism to Arab subjects of the British, and the general spread of political radicalism in the Middle East as seen in the secularist Baath movement in Syria and Iraq. Finally, he has given considerable attention to a prominent figure, Haj Amin al–Husseini (1895-1974), who was appointed the grand mufti of Jerusalem by the British but became a notorious German agent and anti-Jewish figure in the Middle East.

Much of this material has been previously worked over by historians, but Küntzel has rendered a service in presenting this fresh summary. You have to wonder whether the liberals/leftists to whom his work is addressed have not become too compromised to pay serious attention to him, through their alliance with isolationists, neofascists, and Islamists, and their opposition to the global democratization of the Bush administration–and, especially, the Iraq war. But Küntzel makes several important points that will be unfamiliar to many Western readers. One is that the Muslim Brotherhood’s hostility to Jews was novel in Egypt, which had a history of good relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Another point is that, notwithstanding broad Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionism, many village sheikhs in today’s West Bank opposed anti-Jewish campaigns in the 1920s and signed petitions favoring increasing Jewish immigration.

In dealing with this issue -Küntzel cites the important work of Hillel Cohen in Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, which has just appeared in English. Cohen’s book is a treasury of data suggesting new approaches to the history of Arab-Jewish relations. His work is epitomized by one stunning disclosure: In 1947-48, while the Grand Mufti al-Husseini and others called for Arab war against the new state of Israel, Palestinian “Arabs were in no hurry” to join the battle: “Only a minority of Arabs were involved in offensive activities,” writes Cohen. “This unwillingness to fight was frequently buttressed by agreements with Jews in nearby settlements.” The main Arab leader in Baqa al-Gharbiya, for example, offered a peace agreement to the Jewish settlements in his district–and Baqa today is home to the Al-Qasemi Academy, a Muslim school and college organized on the spiritual principles of Sufism.

Drawing, like Küntzel, on official sources, Cohen reveals a substantial Muslim record of cooperation with Jewish immigrants to Palestine. And his style is more precise, as well as less polemical, than that of Küntzel’s, who occasionally falls into minor factual or interpretative errors. (Küntzel recycles a commonly accepted canard that Amin al-Husseini was a significant figure in recruitment of a Waffen SS unit in Axis-occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina during World War II.)

Stevan K. Pavlowitch, a leading historian of the Balkans, has never been accused of understating the crimes of the Germans and their collaborators in Yugoslavia. Hitler’s New Disorder, like Küntzel and Cohen, benefits from new access to archives. Pavlowitch notes that Bosnians were exhorted by al-Husseini to volunteer for the German armed forces, but those who did were sent for training to southern France, where they mutinied, and their distaste for Nazi mobilization was backed up by a series of declarations by Bosnian Muslim clerics protesting German atrocities.

The practical lesson of all three of these volumes is that recent archival work will redefine many historical presumptions. (In this way they join Robert Satloff’s useful Among the Righteous, which touches on opposition to Nazi anti-Jewish crimes among Arab Muslims in North Africa during the Holocaust, and which was reviewed by Roger Kaplan in the Jan. 1, 2007 WEEKLY STANDARD.) But the important consequence of this new historiography is a recognition that Islam is neither monolithic nor uniformly radical, providing hope that the “clash of civilizations” may be avoided, and the “long war” against terror shortened–and won.

Stephen Schwartz’s latest book, The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony, will be published by Doubleday this summer.

PREVIEW: The Third Jihad