Muslim Heretics Conference

Chris Hedges
Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian colleges-a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy-to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world’s population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called Why We Want to Kill You, promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how “Muslim terrorists” invaded America 30 years ago and how “perseverance, recruitment and hate” have fueled attacks by Muslims.
These men are frauds, but this is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims, including the some 6 million Muslims who live in the United States. These men stoke these irrational fears. They defend the perpetual war unleashed by the Bush administration and championed by Sen. John McCain. McCain frequently reminds listeners that “the greatest danger facing the world is Islamic terrorism,” as does Mike Huckabee, who says that “Islamofascism” is “the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced.” George W. Bush has, in the same vein, assured Americans that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, not, of course, for anything we have done. Bush described the “war on terror” as a war against totalitarian Islamofascism while the Israeli air force was dropping tens of thousands of pounds of iron fragmentation bombs up and down Lebanon, an air campaign that killed 1,300 Lebanese civilians.
The three men tell lurid tales of being recruited as children into Palestinian terrorist organizations, murdering hundreds of civilians and blowing up a bank in Israel. Saleem says that as a child he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights, although no incident of this type was ever reported in Israel. He claims he is descended from the “grand wazir” of Islam, a title and a position that do not exist in the Arab world. They assure audiences that the Palestinians are interested not in a peaceful two-state solution but rather the destruction of Israel, the murder of all Jews and the death of America. Shoebat claims he first came to the United States as part of an extremist “sleeper cell.”
“These three jokers are as much former Islamic terrorists as ‘Star Trek’s’ Capt. James T. Kirk was a real Starship captain,” said Mikey Weinstein, the head of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The group has challenged Christian proselytizing in the military and denounced the visit by the men to the Air Force Academy.
The speakers include in their talks the superior virtues of
Christianity. Saleem, for example, says his world “turned upside down when he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.” “A Christian man tended to Kamal at the accident scene, making sure he got the medical treatment he needed,” his Web site says. “Kamal’s orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist were also Christian men whom over a period of several months ministered the unconditional love of Jesus Christ to him as he recovered. The love and sacrificial giving of these men caused Kamal to cry out to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob acknowledging his need for the Savior. Kamal has since become a man on a new mission, as an ambassador for the one true and living God, the great I Am, Jehovah God of the Bible.”
This creeping Christian chauvinism has infected our political and social discourse. It was behind the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Obama reassured followers that he was a Christian. It apparently did not occur to him, or his questioners, that the proper answer is that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, that persons of great moral probity and courage arise in all cultures and all religions, including Islam. Christians have no exclusive lock on virtue. But this kind of understanding often provokes indignant rage.
The public denigration of Islam, and by implication all religious belief systems outside Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the country since the 9/11 attacks. It makes dialogue with those outside our “Christian” culture impossible. It implicitly condemns all who do not think as we think and believe as we believe as, at best, inferior and usually morally depraved. It blinds us to our own failings. It makes self-reflection and self-criticism a form of treason. It reduces the world to a cartoonish vision of us and them, good and evil. It turns us into children with bombs.
These three con artists are not the problem. There is enough scum out there to take their place. Rather, they offer a window into a worldview that is destroying the United States. It has corrupted the Republican Party. It has colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichés we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and racist, but it is also deadly. It grossly perverts the Christian religion. It asks us to kill to purify the Earth. It leaves us threatened not only by the terrorists who may come from abroad but the ones who are rising from within our midst. (Truthdig)
(Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.)

The New Nation - Internet Edition

Foreign Minister Ali Babacan triggered another debate concerning the involvement of the European Union in the promotion of individual freedoms in Turkey by touching a very sensitive nerve.

Babacan came under fire for at least two interrelated reasons. He angered Turkey’s secularists for overstepping his boundaries and claiming that not only religious minorities recognized by international conventions but also the religious majority face restrictions on their enjoyment of religious freedoms in Turkey. Moreover, he did so by criticizing his country in Europe. “How dare Turkey’s foreign minister and chief EU negotiator grumble about his country in this manner” was the common theme of numerous commentaries seeking almost to lynch Babacan.

‘Rights of the religious majority’: a welcome contribution

I believe Babacan’s frank remarks are welcome, since they could help break several taboos on the subject. For one, to the extent that European institutions are responsive to and accommodative of the thrust of Babacan’s argument in their assessment of Turkey’s progress in the membership process, it could represent a significant leap forward. EU insensitivity to the concerns of the conservative segments of Turkish society has been one of its shortcomings in the accession process. Lately, EU reports have begun to take up this issue, and the EU’s re-evaluation of its position on religious freedoms in Turkey may contribute to its establishment of bridges with wider sectors of Turkey. These remarks also are important to the extent that they signify a change in the Turkish state’s attitude toward religiosity. Compared to then-Prime Minister Tansu Çiller’s arguments in the mid-1990s that the West — including the EU and the United States — had to choose between herself and Islamic fundamentalism, Babacan’s remarks are a courageous acknowledgement of his country’s reality: that the scope of religious freedoms is not permissive for certain segments of the country and that there is nothing to be ashamed of raising this as an issue of concern.

Responses to Babacan range from accusations that he betrayed his country to claims that he misrepresented the problem by giving false information about the conditions of average Turkish Muslims. I do not want to go into detail about responses to Babacan, but it suffices to underline that despite critics’ demagogical statements that “all mosques are open in Turkey,” “no one is prevented from fasting at Ramadan or performing their daily prayers,” “the AK Party cannot teach Turkey what Islam is,” the fact of the matter remains: Turkey’s track record in individual rights in general and religious freedoms in particular is far from promising. Those clichés do not negate the fact that significant barriers exist before at least some people, which deny them equal access to public life. Not only the EU, but also other human rights watchdogs took notice of the problems encountered in this regard. For instance, Freedom House and the US Department of State’s International Religious Freedom reports recorded on many occasions how women wearing headscarves were not allowed in public universities and government offices, and men known to be observant Muslims were dismissed from the military on the grounds that they were involved in fundamentalist activities. So Babacan is not claiming to reinvent the wheel.

Intolerance to multiplicity in religious experience

I would rather like to emphasize a fundamental fallacy that underpins most of these responses to Babacan, which I believe is reflective of Turkey’s secular neighborhood’s intolerance of diversity. It is interesting to observe this paradoxical situation, because the very same circles have been behind the intellectual crusade against those conservative people, which was waged around ?erif Mardin’s concept of “neighborhood pressure” that questions Turkey’s conservative neighborhood’s commitment to toleration of different lifestyles. What is often ignored, however, is whether Turkey’s secularists tolerate diversity. Reading through responses to Babacan’s remarks, both by Turkey’s leading columnists and reader comments left on Web sites, one is shocked by the resistance to acknowledgement of the multiplicity of religious experience and appreciation of the demands of conservative people, veiled women in particular.

What is more worrisome is that those critics deny even the very possibility that a Muslim could be subjected to certain denial of rights in the first place. Critics do so through their notion of Turkish Islam. According to their own definition of Islam, “true Muslims” are doing just fine — remember the clichés abovementioned. What about those who claim to face limitations on religious freedoms, then? Critics’ definition of Turkish Islam is so tautological that those dissenters are left outside the definition, because they are either insincere or enemies of the state, anyway.

Secularist church of ‘Turkish Islam’

I believe, therefore, that the real issue at stake is not mere recognition of the right to religious practice. The problem that this mindset suffers from is its denial of the right to define one’s religious beliefs. One may trace this back to the very foundation of the republican ethos: the conception of a homogenous nation composed of secular(ized) Turks. However just as Turkey’s official nationalism reveres a harmonious and homogenous nation that hardly exists, advocates of Turkey’s secularist ideology also claim to respect a monolithic and utopian conception of religion — Islam — which, however, has little connection to the actual religious practice(s) of Turkey’s ordinary citizens.

What is troubling, therefore, is the daring attitude of Turkey’s secularists: They reserve to themselves the right to define the “true Islam,” provided that there is any. This is ironic because on the one hand, they are wary of any religious authority issuing statements concerning the practice of Islam in social life. It suffices to remember the reaction to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s remarks that, as a matter pertaining to religious affairs, the headscarf issue better be consulted to ulema — religious scholars. On the other hand, they act like the self-declared clerics of an interpretation of Islam that they idealize and expect the entirety of Turkish society to subscribe to.

What is the Turkish Islam Turkey’s secularist ulema preach, then? A Turk who may observe Islamic precepts but does not do so dogmatically — meaning that he or she may sometimes give up certain religious requirements and ignore religious prohibitions. This person is a Turk who, first and foremost, will never challenge the authority of the state based on religious references. For them, religion is an artifact of most Turks’ cultural and historical heritage, which is best reflected in the arguments concerning the headscarf. It is tolerated as part of traditional Anatolian women’s attire, but not as an attribute of a modern lifestyle. Those who insist on wearing religious dress in urban life, especially highly fashionable kinds, do not receive the same sympathy as rural women, because for the secular clerics of Turkish Islam, they do it because they are brainwashed, they are hypocrites, they want to get their husbands a better job or promotion, they are being paid to wear scarves, they are pressured by their families, etc. Everything but sincere religious observance; hence they are outcasts with no rights to be denied, anyway.

Let’s assume that Islam is indeed not just about wearing the headscarf or practicing a set of rituals, but about leading a virtuous and ethical life — as secularist argue. Let’s assume that headscarf is a product of an agrarian lifestyle and a part of Turkey’s rich historical and cultural heritage that has no place in modern day Turkey. So what? Let’s call those conservative Turks who insist on wearing headscarves and adapting it to the metropolitan lifestyle “modern-day heretics.” Don’t they have the right to heresy? Do they have to conform to the kind of “Turkish Islam” defined by Turkey’s secularists? What’s more important, do they deserve to be denied access to basic rights and services due to this heresy?

Individual autonomy in defining religious beliefs

For Turkey’s secularist clerics, Islam is an archaic folkloric religion at best; it is good if it is practiced by grandparents. They don’t see religion as a living reality or as a part of daily life that is practiced and redefined through the inter-subjective interaction of Muslim agent(s) with their social environments and with their secular and religious counterparts. For them, demands to enjoy religion in modern spheres of life are incomprehensible because they deny an individual’s autonomy to define one’s own religious beliefs in the first place. How could one expect them to take the next step and be tolerant of religious practices outside the official church of “Turkish Islam”?

At the heart of religious freedom lies the right to define one’s own religious beliefs. Whether ascribers to a religious belief are entitled to a right to practice their particular choices and beliefs is quite another issue. Obviously, no state and society will have a complete “hands off” approach to all religious interpretations. Nor will any society be entitled to impose the majority interpretation on the dissenting minority. Whether and under what conditions society can interfere with those choices and how the boundaries between the individual and society are to be drawn can be debated. This is where the debate on “neighborhood pressure” might be justified to question Turkey’s conservative neighborhood.

But Turkey’s secularist neighborhood also has to admit that it fails to grant many segments of the society the right to define how to understand religion — Islam. Unless Turkey’s secularist neighborhood grows tolerant of others with diverse life experiences and religious beliefs, it is difficult to be optimistic about the future of religious freedom.

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* ?aban Karda? is an instructor at the University of Utah, the chairman of the Middle East and Central Asia Conference Committee and a research assistant at Sakarya University.

In the years since 9/11 two broad narratives have emerged in the West to explain the nature of the so-called war on terror.

On the right it has become commonplace to equate Islamism - the ideology that seeks to order 21st century societies by the medieval norms enshrined in Islamic Shariah law - with a long line of totalitarian threats to liberal democracy. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, for instance, calls it a “foul apparition that has succeeded fascism, Nazism, and communism as the world’s next bane.”

The left sees the issue as a product of poverty or flawed policies toward the Middle East. Robert Fisk of The Independent blames Islamist terrorism on “political situations and injustice in various parts of the world.”

Both views are flawed. Conservatives rightly emphasize the power of Islamism as an idea and the global ambitions of its adherents, but fail to acknowledge the movement’s lack of military and intellectual heft, or its limited global appeal compared to communism in its heyday. Liberals correctly point out that talk of a Muslim takeover of Europe is delusional, or at the very least premature. But they fail to see that in the Muslim-majority societies of Asia and the Middle East Islamism remains a powerful and growing force. Better organized, better motivated, backed by the threat of violence and protected by cultural norms that prohibit any criticism of Islam, Islamists are able to alter the nature of society even where they don’t hold formal power.

Unless beleaguered moderates from Iraq to Indonesia can find a way to broaden the war of ideas they’ll continue to lose ground to a tenacious movement that believes it has both God and history on its side.

At first glance the familiar comparison of the war on terror with the Cold War appears reasonable enough. Like communists, Islamists value the group over the individual, justify the use of violence for political ends and nurture an almost visceral antipathy to a world order dominated by wealthy liberal democracies. The threat within - once symbolized by Western communist parties and their sympathizers - is now represented by such Islamist-friendly groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain. Moreover, the argument goes, whereas communist and capitalist proxies skirmished in such remote corners as Angola and Afghanistan, Islamists have brought their battle to the heart of the West. Suddenly New York, London and Madrid are as much battlegrounds as Beirut and Baghdad.

Plausible though it appears, this formulation exaggerates Islamist strength and underestimates the effectiveness of the West’s institutions and the resilience of its societies. True, Islamist intimidation has curbed free speech in some places: The Dutch and the Danes must tread lightly when criticizing Islam or contemplate a life of bodyguards and safe houses. But it has also spawned a generation of bold Muslim thinkers in the West - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani to name just three - who are willing to ask the uncomfortable questions that tend not to be asked in their countries of origin.

Moreover, Islamism, steeped in a joyless literal reading of Islam, cannot hope to extend its appeal in the West beyond a minority of a minority - those Muslims drawn to its stark utopian vision. Osama bin Laden’s visage will never grace nearly as many T-shirts as Che Guevara’s.

The weakness of Islamists in the West is matched by the backwardness of the Muslim world. In its prime the Soviet Union could reasonably claim to match the United States in such varied fields as Olympic sports, aviation technology and space exploration. Strip away the accident of oil wealth from Muslim lands and we’re left with societies that cumulatively boast fewer achievements than a single mid-sized Asian power, albeit an exceptional one, such as Korea.

This reality makes it easy to dismiss the Islamist threat, as do most Western liberals, or to shrink its dimensions to the activities of a handful of terrorist groups - Al Qaeda or Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah. Yet, paradoxically, it’s precisely the sorry state of Muslim societies that makes Islamism such a formidable force. Reminded daily that they are recipients of God’s final revelation, a large minority of Muslims - perhaps between 10 and 15 percent - embrace the Islamist idea that the cause of their backwardness lies not in a failure to embrace modernity but in a failure to fully embrace their faith. Many more, while not Islamists themselves, are broadly sympathetic to a world view that is steeped in conspiracy theories and compulsively blames Muslim failures on outsiders. Jews and Americans are favorite bogeymen.

Of course, neither religious obscurantism nor a lack of self-criticism is a Muslim monopoly. India has its Hindu fundamentalists who riot against Muslims; America its Christians waging war against Darwin in the classroom.

Nonetheless the danger to liberal democracy that Islamists pose in Muslim countries is of an entirely different order.

Islamists - although almost always a minority - tend to be better motivated and better organized than their opponents. Weak or sympathetic courts and police officials allow them to use violence or the threat of violence to control the public square. Cultural norms - even in relatively open countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia - put any public criticism of Islam out of bounds.

Even where they have not claimed formal power Islamists have led their societies in an illiberal direction. In Egypt, female university students come under greater pressure to wear the head scarf today than they did a generation ago. In parts of Pakistan, Islamists have declared war on music and soap operas. In Indonesia Christians and heterodox Muslims often find their churches and mosques under siege.

In each of these countries those who reject the Islamist message - who believe that gender equity, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are universal values and not merely Western ones - must do so with one hand tied behind their backs.

So while talk of Islam’s inroads in Washington, London and Paris may indeed be overblown, the special conditions in the Muslim world ensure that the threat to liberal democracy in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Islamabad is not about to disappear any time soon.

Sadanand Dhume is the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist,” about the rise of radicalism in the world’s most populous Muslim country. Reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal.

The paradox of Muslim weakness - International Herald Tribune

The Indonesian government is facing growing pressure to ban a group known as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) after its members were accused of attacking a rally in support of religious freedoms.

The calls follow what marchers say was an unprovoked assault on a demonstration in Jakarta on Sunday organised by the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Faith.

At least a dozen people were injured, including three who required hospital treatment after being attacked, reportedly by FPI supporters wielding bamboo sticks.

The march took place amid an ongoing debate over whether a minority group, the Ahmadiyah sect, should be banned for what critics say is its “deviant” interpretation of Islam.

The attack on Sunday’s rally has drawn widespread condemnation, including from Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, the Nahdhatul Ulama, which claims some 40 million members.

“We are ready to fight a war against Ahmadiyah with all our followers whenever, wherever”

Habib Riziek Syihab,
FPI leader

Yenni Wahid, director of the Jakarta-based Wahid Institute, told Al Jazeera that it was up to the Indonesian security forces to take decisive action.

“As long as the security forces are still acting as they do now, it won’t change anything,” she said.

“The key thing is the government, the government needs to make sure that stern measures that groups like that are not tolerated in Indonesia, whatever names they take up.”

Warning

The attack also drew a warning from the US embassy which issued a statement on Tuesday condemning the violence.

“This type of violent behaviour has serious repercussions for freedom of religion and association in Indonesia,” it said.

But on Tuesday Habib Riziek Syihab, the leader of the FPI, was unrepentant telling his supporters to prepare for war.

“We are ready to fight a war against Ahmadiyah with all our followers whenever, wherever,” he said.

“We will not accept Islam to be defiled by anyone. I prefer to be in prison or even be killed than accepting Islam to be defiled.”

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia’s president, has called for those behind Sunday’s violence to be punished, but so far the police have taken no action against the group.

Late on Monday Yodhoyono told ministers to examine options for banning the FPI under a 1985 law that allows for the dissolution of groups that “disturb public security and peace.”

With some 230 million people, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim state and has a long history of religious pluralism and tolerance which is guaranteed under the constitution.

Al Jazeera English - News - Calls To Ban Indonesia Muslim Group