Muslim Heretics Conference

West ‘In a Slough Ignorance of Islam’

Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of Al-Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association.
US presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a leadership to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: The threat of radical Islamic terrorism.
And the words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington’s treatise, “The Clash of Civilizations”, the book that in many ways triggered this paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public discourse. “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam”, he wrote.
Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al-Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world (commentators seems to overlook Hitler’s early speeches calling on Catholic principles). But Islam has a much better record over the ages of dealing with its deviants who take violence to excess. Islamic culture has never been tolerant of Nazism, fascism or communism. Christianity has spawned all three. Buddhism failed to resist Japanese militarism and Confucianism provided hospitable to Maoism. Yes, there was Saddam Hussein but he was an atheistic brute without an ideology.
Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of Islam when there have been large-scale losses of life. The massacres and starvation of the Armenians in 1915 still stirs the waters of contemporary debate. But Islam has never spawned anything comparable with Hitler’s systematic genocide of the Jews - indeed throughout its history Islam has been protective of the Jews, regarding them as “people of the book” to whom it had a special responsibility. Nor has it settled other parts of the world and systematically obliterated other civilizations as did Christian Spain with the Aztecs and Incas. Nor have Islamic societies created anything equivalent to South Africa’s apartheid or the racist culture of the old American South. Unlike many Christian churches, the mosque has never separated people by race. Even today Americans confess that nowhere is there more segregation in their society than at the Sunday noon hour.
Western memories are highly selective. When at Easter time the Greek peasants of the Peloponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the land there was silence. But fifty years later when there were mass killings of Christians in Bulgaria there was a great outpouring of moral outrage. Delacroix immortalized the massacre in his painting, “Massacre of Chaos”, with Christian women pursued by Turkish lancers and Gladstone wrote a best-selling pamphlet in which he described the Ottomans as leaving “a broad line of blood marking the track behind them, and as far as their domination reached civilization vanished from view”.
Almost forgotten today is that it was the Ottomans who gave refuge to the Jews when they were expelled from Iberia, as were fleeing German, French and Czech Protestants, but every cultivated Westerner knows Voltaire’s “Fanaticism or Muhammad the Prophet” or Dante’s portrayal of Muhammad in hell.
Christianity has always been led or dominated by people of European descent. But the leadership of the Muslim world has been much more fragmented - between AD 661 and 750 it was the Arab Umayyad dynasty. Between 750 and 1258 it was the multiethnic Abbasid dynasty. And from 1453 to 1922, the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire. In India there was the separate Moguls and in Persia the Safavids. In sub-Saharan Africa there were the Muslim empires of Mali and Songhai.
Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like Cairo, Dakha and Jakarta, criminal violence is much, much lower than in Christian-influenced societies.
Muslim countries, according to the UN’s annual Human Development report, have the world’s lowest murder and rape rates. In Tehran, the capital of Iran, and according to the CIA (allegations) the most important single source of terrorism today, you can go out at 11 or 12 pm at night and find families with children picnicing in city parks. When my daughters’ friends ask me where can they safely travel alone in an interesting Third World city I say Cairo. Certainly not Catholic Rio or Protestant Cape Town. Not only are murders and muggings comparatively rarer, there is much less prostitution and hard drug use. Neither is there that much AIDS.
The Western debate about Islam is frankly infantile. Even Barack Obama, with his own personal experience to go off, either is ignorant or just scared of going into battle on these issues. I have not read one speech by one Western politician who seriously attempts to educate public opinion. We live in a slough of ignorance.
ARAB

Alalam News

BARACK OBAMA has emerged as a classic example of charismatic leadership — a figure upon whom others project their own hopes and desires. The resulting emotional intensity adds greatly to the more conventional strengths of the well-organized Obama campaign, and it has certainly sufficed to overcome the formidable initial advantages of Senator Hillary Clinton.

One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.

This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.

But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.

For example, in Iran in 1994 the intervention of Pope John Paul II and others won a Christian convert a last-minute reprieve, but the man was abducted and killed shortly after his release. Likewise, in 2006 in Afghanistan, a Christian convert had to be declared insane to prevent his execution, and he was still forced to flee to Italy.

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic.

Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.”

President Apostate? - New York Times

By Nesrine Malik 

A recent article in the New York Times refers to the “Muslim rebel sisters”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji and aims to compare and contrast their respective campaigns against their “Muslim upbringing”.

The tendency to lump together Muslim females in exile who have rather unsavoury views about Islam makes the voices of moderate females difficult to hear. From a position of relative ignorance when it comes to Islam in general, the west post-9/11 has had to familiarise itself with a religion, culture and ideology which so alarmingly appear to despise all that is western.

The post-9/11 crisis also created an audience which was eager to hear about the depravity and barbarity of the Muslim world but also not keen on subtlety. A quick, convenient, stereotypical picture was needed, and the “sisters” certainly paint that. There seems to be more of a platform for the angry disenchanted Muslim female. Male exiles from the faith do not seem to attract the same sympathetic open-armed treatment as the damsel in distress who has liberated herself from the shackles.

The most prominent of the “refuseniks“, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Wafa Sultan have caused a stir for allegedly being “brave enough” to criticise Islam and nail their colours to the west’s mast of values. Each, in her own way, has either deliberately or inadvertently (but inevitably), placed herself in an antithetic position to the religion and the religion’s followers; realistically, focusing on a lesbian, an atheist and a secularist “who does not believe in the supernatural” - all of them earnestly seeking to bring about reform in Islam - is a self-defeating exercise.

For me, as a Muslim female, the three women all represent false dawns. Wafa Sultan’s debut on al-Jazeera , where she bleated hysterically about the irredeemable retardation of the Islamic faith, made her conservative Muslim opponent seem positively temperate. What is to be gained from this comprehensive assault other than an alienation of those whom you are allegedly trying to reform?

Hirsi Ali has made a spiritual decision to reject all religion but preoccupies herself solely with the “defeat of Islam” to the exclusion of other monotheistic religions.

Irshad Manji mocks and calls the chador a “condom”, while claiming to have taken the harder path of changing Islam from within.

Even the titles of their seminal works sound confrontational and antagonistic: Infidel (Ali), The Trouble with Islam Today (Manji), and Sultan’s upcoming The Escaped Prisoner; When God is a Monster. If one has a genuine desire to expose Islam’s ills and reform the religion, that is not only legitimate but commendable, but in marketing oneself as a Crusader speaking on behalf of the mute Muslim millions (but to a predominantly Western audience and rarely engaging positively with the Muslim community) there is more than a hint of self-promoting opportunism.

I have nothing but admiration for those who shoulder the risks involved in taking on one’s family, culture and heritage irrespective of faith, but media-courting one-woman-roadshows pitting themselves against the Muslim world do little more than create western media darlings. Furthermore, the (sometimes faux) extremity of their views spoils the appetite for more nuanced, considered, opinion. So, you are a young disfranchised Muslim female but have had no epiphanic realisation that Islam is misguided and evil? You have no bite-size catalogue of atrocities, no stereotypical anecdotes of abusive overbearing men, no death threats, no fatwas? Move on, there’s nothing to see.

The “sisters” have set the mould and any address that is not predicated on a complete acceptance of western values and a rejection - nay, abhorrence - of Muslim ones is too dilute, too bland for the numbed palate.

I should have a natural synergy with these women but I am appalled at how cavalierly they have appropriated the very limited opportunity to capture attention and raise awareness; how they merely ride the zeitgeist and milk it for all it’s worth. Their personal histories exhibit a disturbing ruthless tendency to twist half-truths into a media-friendly tale of woe.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s account (the particulars of which have fallen under serious doubt) chronicles many stereotypical buzz-stories, including genital mutilation and an unhappy arranged marriage, and culminating in a fatwa on her head.

Wafa Sultan recounts a tale of witnessing an assassination with a convenient “God is Great” soundtrack (denied by others who were there at the time).

This chameleonism offends me. Their abuse of the religion and its mores is unconstructive and gratuitous, reminiscent of usage of the “n” word by black people, still offensive, unnecessary and - above all - counterproductive. Manji and Hirsi claim to be insiders but have no understanding of Arab culture and how it complements and colours Islam. They all view (or at least present) Islam and the Muslim world as one obsidian monolith of submission and ignorance.

There is a paucity of credible, reasoned argument when it comes to the discourse between Islam and the west. Therefore when voices are heard, it is a tragic waste that they are pitched at a hysterical shriek supporting an irreconcilable “clash of civilisations” paradigm. What do these enlightened, brave souls hope to achieve? What end is justifying these means? If the ultimate goal is to capture the attention of strategic partners in the Muslim world in order to bring about reform, they are estranging the very people who have standing and influence in the community. Rather a fundamental miscalculation by such intelligentsia.

What is most exasperating is that due to the intense media coverage and exposure of Hirsi et al, Arabs/Muslims have been so antagonised that other Muslim women, passionate about their cause but more moderate in their discourse, struggle to be heard without either falling under suspicion or being expected pathetically to appeal to western advocacy.

The essence of the refuseniks’ campaigns is a feminist one, women’s rights in Islam being the most inflammatory and least defensible of the repertoire of grievances. An ironic side-effect is that they have robbed the Muslim woman of her independence and free will, pigeonholing and victimising her as a “Caged Virgin“. It is undeniable that much needs to be said about the state of women in Arab/Muslim society and this needs to be done delicately, responsibly and with sensitivity to diversity in culture, heritage and religious practice.

The vanguard of reform in Islam is a pious middle class, slightly suspicious of the west but capable of free and subtle thought. Engaging with those who can best bring about change in the Arab and Muslim world is difficult enough without western audiences desensitised to all except the most extreme of anti-Islam views, and Muslim audiences disillusioned by telegenic articulate women cynically exploiting the naivety and polarisation of a terrorised post-9/11 world.

Islam’s refuseniks | Comment is free