Muslim Heretics Conference

Al-Qaida’s stance on women sparks extremist debate

By LAUREN FRAYER

Associated Press Writer

Karim Kadim, File

In this Feb. 1, 2008 file photo, Iraqi men mourn relatives killed after a pair of female suicide bombers blew themselves up in two Baghdad pet markets, killing at least 64 people and wounding dozens, in Baghdad, Iraq. Women Muslim extremists have posted Internet messages in recent weeks expressing frustration with the al-Qaida No. 2 leader’s refusal to give them a larger role in terror attacks - an extraordinary, emotional debate that offers rare insight into the tense gender politics lurking below the surface of al-Qaida’s severe strain of Islam.

Muslim extremist women are challenging al-Qaida’s refusal to include - or at least acknowledge - women in its ranks, in an emotional debate that gives rare insight into the gender conflicts lurking beneath one of the strictest strains of Islam.

In response to a female questioner, al-Qaida No. 2 leader Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman’s role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al-Qaida fighters.

His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists. The statements have also created some confusion, because in fact suicide bombings by women seem to be on the rise, at least within the Iraq branch of al-Qaida.

A’eeda Dahsheh is a Palestinian mother of four in Lebanon who said she supports al-Zawahri and has chosen to raise children at home as her form of jihad. However, she said, she also supports any woman who chooses instead to take part in terror attacks.

Another woman signed a more than 2,000-word essay of protest online as Rabeebat al-Silah, Arabic for “Companion of Weapons.”

“How many times have I wished I were a man … When Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahri said there are no women in al-Qaida, he saddened and hurt me,” wrote “Companion of Weapons,” who said she listened to the speech 10 times. “I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest…I am powerless.”

Such postings have appeared anonymously on discussion forums of Web sites that host videos from top al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. While the most popular site requires names and passwords, many people use only nicknames, making their identities and locations impossible to verify.

However, groups that monitor such sites say the postings appear credible because of the knowledge and passion they betray. Many appear to represent computer-literate women arguing in the most modern of venues - the Internet - for rights within a feudal version of Islam.

“Women were very disappointed because what al-Zawahri said is not what’s happening today in the Middle East, especially in Iraq or in Palestinian groups,” said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors militant Web sites. “Suicide operations are being carried out by women, who play an important role in jihad.”

It’s not clear how far women play a role in al-Qaida because of the group’s amorphous nature.

Terrorism experts believe there are no women in the core leadership ranks around bin Laden and al-Zawahri. But beyond that core, al-Qaida is really a movement with loosely linked offshoots in various countries and sympathizers who may not play a direct role. Women are clearly among these sympathizers, and some are part of the offshoot groups.

In the Iraq branch, for example, women have carried out or attempted at least 20 suicide bombings since 2003. Al-Qaida members suspected of training women to use suicide belts were captured in Iraq at least three times last year, the U.S. military has said.

Hamas, another militant group, is open about using women fighters and disagrees with al-Qaida’s stated stance. At least 11 Palestinian women have launched suicide attacks in recent years.

“A lot of the girls I speak to … want to carry weapons. They live with this great frustration and oppression,” said Huda Naim, a prominent women’s leader, Hamas member and Palestinian lawmaker in Gaza. “We don’t have a special militant wing for women … but that doesn’t mean that we strip women of the right to go to jihad.”

www.kansascity.com | 05/31/2008 | Al-Qaida’s stance on women sparks extremist debate

The US naming the religionist terrorists ‘Islamic’, ‘Islamist’ or ‘Jihadist’, includes many innocent Muslims into the terrorists networks. ‘Islamic’ for example means ‘something according to Islam’, or ‘something has no problem with Islam, OK for the Islam’. If you name Al Qaeda ‘Islamic’, you lose the vital public support against terrorism, because ‘Islamic’ covers all the Muslims yet Al Qaeda is a marginal group. The US has to separate very well the terrorists and the ordinary Muslims. Even ‘Islamist’ is a name of a group which is bigger than terrorists. Islamism is a political movement and all members of the Islamist group are not violent or terrorist. ‘Extremism’ or ‘radicalism’ also cannot reflect the real threat. A Muslim could be radical or extremist in one dimension of the religion yet he has not to be a terrorist or violent.

Likewise ‘jihad’ is not the right word for naming the terrorists. What the US does not know that ‘jihad’ is a good term for almost all Muslims and does not mean ‘armed war’. ‘Jihad’ according to Islamic sources means ‘struggle against the evil’’ and this struggle could be done by any tools, peaceful tools or arms. Even when it is used as ‘armed conflict’ it means ‘legitimate war’ not terrorism. The US and its allies have to name terrorists ‘terrorist’ without mentioning any religion. This will be the first step in overcoming terrorism. Otherwise the front would be enlarged. In Turkey, Turkish security authorities name terrorists as terrorist and blame them of abusing religion. They cannot get support from the mosques and respected religious authorities. Turkey has tried to get public Muslim support in its fight against the religionist terrorists.
Second, the US’ terrorism combat is mainly based on fear caused by 9/11, and the struggle became a ‘revenge campaign’ in the eyes of many experts and layman. Many Americans told me that “the US would not have occupied Iraq and Afghanistan if there was no 9/11”. It means that the terrorists can harm anyone but the Americans. If the terrorists declare that they will not attack the Americans but the others, we understand that the US will not fight against terrorism. It is unfortunate that the perception of the US among the Muslim peoples is not good enough to get their support in fighting against global terrorism.
Third, the US security forces do not respect enough the holly Muslim places in operation areas. They arrogantly enter the mosques and houses of the Muslims. Each terrorist killed or arrested in these holly and special places by the US soldiers create more and more terrorists. In Turkey’s struggle against religionist Hezbollah case however the Turkish police decided not to make any security operation in the holy places, like mosques. No police was allowed to enter the mosques even to arrest or capture Hezbollah members, although the police officers time to time knew some of the militants hid among the cemaat (mosque community). The aim was not to alienate the ordinary religious people from the State and security authorities. The Hezbollah was propagandizing that Turkish State was atheist and against Islam, and an operation in a mosque would may strengthen this propaganda. The police was careful not to be seen as anti-Islam during these operations. Unfortunately the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan provide abundant evidences to be abused by the Al Qaeda. When some of the American politicians suggest to occupy the holiest Muslim places like Mecca and Medina, Al Qaeda need no more poof to prove the US’ anti-Islam stance.
Fourth, the US has no close partner in the Muslim world in its combat. Strangely the US politicians do not give enough importance to the ideas of the legitimate Muslim leaders. As a result, US is alone in its combat and its anti-terror campaign has been perceived as an anti-Islamic attack against the Muslim peoples. As a matter of fact that Al Qaeda foremost challenges the Muslim states including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt etc. There is no Islamic State in the world has good relations with the Al Qaeda. So, if the US cannot find a close partner in this picture, it means that there is some problem with the US anti-terror strategy.
Another problem is that the US aims to change the borders, leaders and regimes in the Middle East, heart of the global terror according to the US. However the main target should have been the terrorists’ ideological challenge and the environment causing terrorism. The Iraq case vividly showed that changing the leaders do not put an end to terrorism, but nourishing and spreading terrorist movements.
The US needs a combat philosophy and internal partners in its struggle. Turkish Islam provides the needed ideological tools and the Turkish security forces could be the insider partner for the Americans in their global terror ‘war’. Even Muslim Turkey searched partnership of the religious authorities. For instance one of the measures taken by the police against the religionist terrorists in Turkey was co-operation with Turkish Department of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). The religious experts analyzed the Hezbollah’s claims and prepared the anti-dote of these arguments. All these documents were put on the educational web sites of the Diyanet. The imams were trained to face the Hezbollah challenge. No Hezbollah name was mentioned in the anti-Hezbollah training materials.
Fundamentals of political democracy (separation of Mosque and State, and the political sovereignty of the people) have roots in some Muslim countries. The Muslim intellectuals in Istanbul, Damascus etc. have long struggled to co-exist Islam and modernity. Progressive political reform is actually within the tradition of the whole region. But encouragement and co-operation between the US and the Middle Eastern countries needed for success stories. In order to encourage the moderate and peaceful Islam the security men have to be in co-operation with the religious authorities and they should get internal support.
Turkey also may lead the anti-terror campaign at institutional level too. Turkish security forces, in co-operation with the US, may train the police and special departments in other Muslim countries. As a matter of fact that Turkish, Egyptian, Pakistani etc. police can overcome the terrorist movements if the Western financial and technical supports are provided. The leading actors in combating terrorism should be the Muslim police not the ‘Christian American soldiers’. Turkey attempts to open police offices in Pakistan and Afghanistan, yet the financial problems slow down the initiative. Turkish Police Academy and security institutions also give training and anti-terrorism courses to high-ranked police officers from the Balkans, Middle East and the Central Asia. However the financial limits again do not allow greater projects on combating religionist terrorism.
* slaciner@gmail.com

JTW News - Lessons from the Turkish Experience for the US’ Fight against ‘Global Terrorism’

What began as a peaceful screening of the documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”, Monday afternoon at Columbus (Ohio) State Community College turned to shouts and intimidation as Muslim students confronted students in attendance and Islamofascism Awareness Week event organizers. The video screening was part of Columbus State’s Islamofascism Awareness Week activities hosted by the campus chapter of the Terrorism Awareness Project (TAP), which runs through Wednesday.

According to TAP president Josiah Lanning, commotion began during the first screening of the documentary film and continued to escalate throughout the afternoon. According to Lanning, an individual who identified himself as an Iraqi Muslim began loudly arguing with audience members. After continuing to disrupt the discussion period following the screening, the individual complained that the group was allowed to show the film and warned Lanning not to show the film again.

Three screenings of the Fox News documentary, “Jihad USA: Homegrown Terror” are planned for today (Tuesday), and screenings of both “Obsession” and “Jihad USA” planned for Wednesday afternoon.

Lanning expressed concerns that more confrontations might be forthcoming this week, as the school hosts a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Muslim Student Association. Columbus State, which reportedly has one of the highest Muslim student body representations of any public higher education institution in the country, has previously been the site of threats of violence and intimidation by Muslim students.

In November 2001, campus preacher Jed Smock was evicted from the Columbus State campus on orders from administrators over concerns that his vocal criticisms of the Quran would lead to violence by Muslim students. Columbus State president Val Moeller told the Associated Press that she feared for Smock’s safety just weeks after 9/11. Moeller had refused Smock a “speaking permit” to allow him to continue preaching in a designated “free speech” area.

The confrontation on Monday is not the first time that Islamofascism Awareness Week events at Columbus State have been marked with controversy. As I reported here at FrontPage last October, “Censorship State”, Columbus State Director of Student Activities and Athletics Timeka Rashid attempted to censor IAW promotional materials, stating concerns about “campus climate”. After the FrontPage article appeared, Rashid relented and allowed the events to go on as scheduled and permitting the posting of promotional fliers around campus.

As I reported a few days later in a follow-up FrontPage article, “A Former Congresswoman Tries to Censor Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”, Columbus State administrators attempting to censor the student events were acting at the behest of Mary Rose Oakar of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who sent a letter to Columbus State president Val Moeller saying that IAW events “should not be tolerated”.

Representatives of the extremist brand of Islam have no trouble getting a hearing at the school, however, as evidenced last July when Columbus State administrators convened a “discussion on Islam” for faculty and staff led by local Islamic extremist Mohammad Dini. Before moving to Columbus, Dini had been a regular speaker at the infamous Dar Ul Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, which was home to two 9/11 terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, and was led by Yemeni Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Aulaqi. Dini is also a former Muslim Student Association official and attended the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America (IIASA), run by the Saudi government and described in one report as “largest source of Saudi hate literature in the Washington area”. IIASA was raided by the federal government in July 2004 as part of a terrorism investigation, and a number of staff had their diplomatic visas revoked and were deported to “protect the homeland”.

Lanning reports that Rashid and other administrators have been cooperative in approving this term’s IAW events, but he had not spoken with them since the confrontation by Muslim students on Monday. He said he hopes that the incident will not used by administrators as a pretext to censor the scheduled IAW activities later this week.

FrontPage will continue to monitor the situation at Columbus State and report on any further interference of Islamofascism Awareness Week events or acts of intimidation against Terrorism Awareness Project student leaders.

FrontPage Magazine

Last week, the Dutch police raided the home of Gregorius Nekschot (a pseudonym meaning “Gregory Deathblow”). Mr. Nekschot makes rude and often sexually explicit cartoons that poke fun at the multicultural society and at religious people, especially Muslims. The police confiscated his computer and a number of drawings. The cartoonist was also arrested and jailed for 36 hours but has been released until his court case is due.

“Gregory Deathblow” — the first name refers to Pope Gregory IX who established the Papal Inquisition — hides behind an alias. The cartoonist was a collaborator of the late Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. He made drawings for Mr. van Gogh’s Web site until it ceased publication in 2004, after its owner was assassinated by a fanatic Muslim.

The police harassment of Mr. Nekschot follows a 2005 “islamophobia” complaint by Abdul Jabbar van de Ven, a Dutchman who converted to Islam and subsequently became an imam. This was the same Abdul Jabbar van de Ven who, three weeks after Mr. van Gogh’s assassination, told Dutch television that he had felt happiness when he heard of the murder and that he hoped that anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders would soon die, too. Mr. Nekschot subsequently made a cartoon of the imam, depicting him with sticks pricking out his eyes.

It is indicative of the current situation in the Netherlands that the authorities have not pursued the threatening imam, but arrested the cartoonist following a complaint from that same imam. It took them three years to do so because, as Ernst Hirsch Ballin, the Dutch minister of Justice, a Christian-Democrat, explained last week, it took the police three years to discover the cartoonist’s real identity. He will now be charged with the hate speech crime of drawing cartoons of “an insulting and/or discriminating nature.”

Mr. Nekschot’s reaction to his arrest, however, was equally indicative. He attacked the Christians. In an interview in Monday’s newspaper Sp!ts he said: “I think it is urgent that we democratically limit the influence of parties such as the Christian Democrat Party, the Christian Union and other religiously inspired parties. These parties are disastrous in all respects.”

Europe is in the middle of a three-way culture war between Christians, secularists and Muslims. Both the secularists and the Christians feel threatened by radical Islam. Anti-religious secularists hold that Islam is dangerous for one reason only, namely that, like Christianity, it is a religion. They fail to grasp that Islam, rather than being a transcendental religion, resembles a totalitarian political ideology in the guise of a religion. It aims to impose Islamic law on everyone, including non-Muslims. Christian values, on the contrary, have long ceased to define society in the Netherlands. Unlike America, Western Europe is a post-Christian society with secularism as its state ideology. The secularists have created a religious vacuum in the heart of European society — which Islam is filling.

Most European secularists consider Islam a useful ally in their attempt to eradicate Christianity. Hence, they facilitate Islamization, confident that they will be able to secularize the Muslims in due course. Some, however, like Mr. Nekschot, recognize the danger of Islam but still regard Christianity as equally dangerous. Europe’s ruling establishment has criminalized every criticism of Islam, though not of Christianity or other religions. Perhaps Mr. Nekschot is hoping for some leniency if he can argue that he was so harsh on Islam because he failed to distinguish it from Christianity — that other “disastrous religion.”

Of interest, last week, Human Rights Watch, an international rights organization adhering to the politically correct secularist mindset, criticized the Dutch authorities for the “integration test” which was introduced in 2006 for immigrants and which they must pass before being allowed to settle in the country.

Human Rights Watch considers the test to be discriminatory because immigrants from Western countries, like the United States, are exempt from taking it. The test includes a film which exposes the would-be immigrants to scenes of kissing homosexual men and topless women. The message, as the Associated Press pointedly summarized two years ago, is that “If you can’t tolerate gay lifestyle and public nudity, you can’t come.” Human Rights Watch wants the Dutch authorities to abolish the test for everyone or to impose its message on Christian Westerners as well.

The dire state Europe is currently in, however, is not caused by the fact that there are so many Muslims, but that there are so few Christians left. Islamization is not the cause but the consequence of Europe’s collapse. As Michael Nazir-Ali, the Anglican bishop of Rochester (UK), and himself of Muslim descent, recently said: “The real danger [] is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. [] If people are not given a fresh way of understanding what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a Christian-based society then something else may well take the place of all that we’re used to and that could be Islam.”

Paul Belien is editor of the Brussels Journal and an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute.

The Washington Times Islamofascism in the Netherlands

ON May 12, The Times published an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Muslim world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that Obama had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult.

Chuck Kennedy/McClatchy-Tribune

Clark Hoyt

Op-Ed Contributor: President Apostate? (May 12, 2008)

Under “Muslim law as it is universally understood,” Luttwak wrote, Obama was born a Muslim, and his “conversion” to Christianity was an act of apostasy, a capital offense and “the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit.” While no Muslim country would be likely to prosecute him, Luttwak said, a state visit to such a nation would present serious security challenges “because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards.”

At a time when fears about Obama’s security keep bubbling to the surface and an online whispering campaign suggests that he is secretly a Muslim — call him by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, some Times readers demand — the Luttwak thesis was a double whammy: Obama cannot escape his Muslim history, and a lot of Muslims might want to kill him for trying.

Many Times readers saw the article as irresponsible (“gasoline on the fire,” said Paul Trachtman of Tierra Amarilla, N.M.) or false (“Islam is not like our hair or the color of our skin, which we inherited from our parents,” said Ali Kamel of Rio de Janeiro). The blogosphere lit up with assertions that Luttwak did not know what he was talking about.

The Times Op-Ed page, quite properly, is home to a lot of provocative opinions. But all are supposed to be grounded on the bedrock of fact. Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture.

Did Luttwak cross the line from fair argument to falsehood? Did Times editors fail to adequately check his facts before publishing his article? Did The Times owe readers a contrasting point of view?

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, said Luttwak’s article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because “we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors,” he said.

That’s a pity in this case, because it might have sparked a discussion about whether Luttwak’s categorical language was misleading, at best.

Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. He wrote, “You seem to be describing some anarcho-utopian version of Islamic legalism, which has never existed, and after the birth of the modern nation state will never exist.”

Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father’s religion always determines a child’s, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama’s “conversion” to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

Obama was born in Hawaii to a mother from Kansas with Christian roots and a Kenyan father whose own father had converted to Islam. When Obama was a toddler, his father left the family. His mother later married an Indonesian Muslim, and Obama spent five years in Jakarta, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools and, according to The Los Angeles Times, was enrolled in the third and fourth grades as a Muslim.

Luttwak wrote that given those facts, Obama was a Muslim and his mother’s Christian background was irrelevant. But Sherman A. Jackson, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Michigan, cited an ancient Islamic jurist, Ibn al-Qasim, who said, “If you divorce a Christian woman and ignore your child from her to the point that the child grows up to be a Christian, the child is to be left,” meaning left to make his own choice. Jackson said that there was not total agreement among Islamic jurists on the point, but Luttwak’s assertion to the contrary was wrong.

Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, said the majority opinion among Islamic jurists is that the law of apostasy can apply only to individuals who knowingly decide to be Muslims and later renege. One school of thought, he said, is that an individual must be at least a teenager to make the choice. Obama’s campaign told The Los Angeles Times last year that he “has never been a practicing Muslim.” As a young adult, he chose to be baptized as a Christian.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a professor of law at Emory University, said that Sharia, or Islamic law, including the law of apostasy, does not apply to an American or anyone outside the Muslim world. Of the more than 40 countries where Muslims are the majority, he said, Sharia is the official legal system only in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and even there apostasy is unevenly prosecuted, and apostates often wind up in prison, not executed.

Several of the scholars agreed that, in classical Sharia, apostasy is a capital crime, but they said that Islamic thinking is evolving. Mahmoud Ayoub, a professor of Islamic studies and comparative religion at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif., said, “Whether (apostasy) is punishable by death or not, there are different opinions.”

Last year, Egypt’s highest Islamic cleric, Sheik Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti, spoke out against killing apostates. He said punishment for those abandoning the religion would come in the afterlife.

All the scholars argued that Luttwak had a rigid, simplistic view of Islam that failed to take into account its many strains and the subtleties of its religious law, which is separate from the secular laws in almost all Islamic nations. The Islamic press and television have reported extensively on the United States presidential election, they said, and Obama’s Muslim roots and his Christian religion are well known, yet there have been no suggestions in the Islamic world that he is an apostate.

Luttwak said the scholars with whom I spoke were guilty of “gross misrepresentation” of Islam, which he said they portrayed as “a tolerant religion of peace;” he called it “intolerant.” He said he was not out to attack Obama and regretted that, in the editing, a paragraph saying that an Obama presidency could be “beneficial” was cut for space.

Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.

I do not agree. With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

The Public Editor - Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

The New Face of Islam

A critique of radicalism is building within the heart of the Muslim world.

Christopher Dickey and Owen Matthews

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:07 PM ET May 31, 2008

Back in the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden had a problem, and it was Islam. He wanted to say the Qur’an gave his followers license to kill innocents—and themselves—in the cause of “jihad.” That was how he could justify his global campaign of terror. But that’s not what the Muslim holy book says, and that’s not the way it was interpreted by any of the great scholars and preachers of the faith.

So bin Laden set about spinning the revelations contained in the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the Hadith, which provide much of the context for actual religious practice in the Muslim world. The Saudi millionaire wrote a diatribe that he called a declaration of war and then a fatwa, or religious edict, cherry-picking quotations from Islamic Scripture and calling on dubious scholars to back him up. The tracts were political propaganda, not theology, but for his purpose they worked very well. The apocalyptic notion of holy war he promoted—and the reality of it that he demonstrated on 9/11—became the dominant vision of Islam for those with little understanding of the faith, whether in the West or, indeed, the Muslim world. Even many religious scholars were intimidated.

Now that’s starting to change. Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, “Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda’s vision of the future.” At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden’s nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

Intellectually and theologically, a lot of the most ambitious work is being done by a group of scholars based in Ankara, Turkey, who expect to publish new editions of the Hadith before the end of the year. They have collected all 170,000 known narrations of the Prophet’s sayings. These are supposed to record Muhammad’s words and deeds as a guide to daily life and a key to some of the mysteries of the Qur’an. But many of those anecdotes came out of a specific historical context, and those who told the stories or, much later, recorded them, were not always reliable. Sometimes they confused “universal values of Islam with geographical, cultural and religious values of their time and place,” says Mehmet Gormez, a theology professor at the University of Ankara who’s working on the project. “Every Hadith narration has … a context. We want to give every narration a home again.”

Mehmet Aydin, who first conceived the Hadith project four years ago, when he was Turkey’s minister of state for religious affairs, says it is obvious that in the seventh century, the time of the Prophet, life was very different. One Hadith, for instance, forbids women from traveling alone. In Saudi Arabia, this and other sayings are given as a reason women should not be allowed to drive. “This is clearly not a religious injunction but related to security in a specific time and place,” says Gormez. In fact, the Prophet says elsewhere that he misses those days, evidently in his recent memory, when women could travel alone from Yemen to Mecca. In its first three centuries “Islam was interacting with Greek, Iranian and Indian cultures and at every encounter [scholars] reinterpreted Islam according to new conditions,” says Gormez. “They were not afraid to rethink Islam then.”

Liberal Muslim thinkers have made similar arguments in the past, but they were outliers and often not theologians. The Turkish project, on the other hand, has the quiet backing of the ruling AK Party, the world’s most successful, democratically elected party with Islamist roots. The professors involved are quick to deny that their work represents some sort of Islamic Reformation—there is no Martin Luther among them, no theses are being nailed to a door. They call what they’re doing a “rethinking” or a “re-understanding” of the sacred texts “according to modern concepts like democracy, human rights, women’s rights and universal values,” says Gormez. Yet their work has far-reaching potential, given the credibility of the source.

Many states, even those like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia that have tolerated radicalism in the past, have come to see that their own stability depends on encouraging greater moderation. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has moved to curb the zealous excesses of some 10,000 imams on the government payroll. The government isn’t rethinking basic doctrines, one of the king’s advisers, who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record, told NEWSWEEK: “Let’s say there is a theological debate about how to present their ideas and advice to the public.” If a woman dresses a little immodestly by Saudi religious standards, it should be enough simply to say that without calling her a harlot, threatening her with punishment or worse. The idea is to tone down the fire and brimstone, which has inspired young Saudis to sign up for jihad in Iraq and elsewhere.

Across the Muslim world, people appear ready for this new message. Growing middle classes are no longer willing to accept the pieties of peasant life as guides for public and private conduct. “The rules of religion stay the same, but people’s attitudes toward religion have changed,” says Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government is working to bring Turkey into the European Union. “The urbanization of the country has brought increased wealth and a different understanding of life.” Even in theocratic Iran, police frequently cancel speeches by 49-year-old mullah Mohsen Kadivar because, authorities say, “they may cause traffic and public disturbances outside.” Kadivar’s message? That the Iranian system of velayat-e-faqih, in which a cleric has the final say on all matters of state, is fatally flawed. “It is a centralized interpretation of Islam that is not democratic,” says Kadivar. “The government should be answerable to ordinary human beings who live on earth!”

Bin Laden’s prescription for change, meanwhile, has led to nothing but death and destruction. Radicals have turned their anger and their bombs against other Muslims whom they deem apostates or simply inconsequential. As a result, they’ve found themselves isolated. In Iraq, Al Qaeda’s forces are on the ropes and largely indistinguishable from gangsters. In Pakistan, polls show public support for suicide bombings has dropped from more than 30 percent five years ago, to less than 9 percent today. In an open letter last year, a Saudi scholar bin Laden had long revered, Sheik Salman al-Oudah, demanded, “Brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocents among children, elderly, the weak, and women have been killed and made homeless in the name of Al Qaeda?”

The most ferocious attack on bin Laden’s version of holy war has come from one of the few really respected religious thinkers within jihadist ranks, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif. Now imprisoned in Egypt, he has known Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, since they were in university. In a book his Egyptian jailers allowed him to publish last year, al-Sharif writes about the way the Sharia, Islamic law, has been tarnished by Al Qaeda’s actions: “There are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of Jihad!” That, said al-Sharif, is unacceptable in the eyes of Allah, of his law and of his people. Once again bin Laden has a problem, and it is Islam.

The New Face of Islam | Print Article | Newsweek.com