Muslim Heretics Conference

To Westerners and moderate Muslims shocked by the radical form of Islam now topping nightly newscasts, the efforts of liberal-minded Muslims like Tawfik Hamid, Italian Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi and a handful of others may seem like the perfect solution. Not so for Ali Sina, who has a different suggestion: destroy Islam.

Sina, who runs Faith Freedom International - an Internet forum dedicated to debunking Islam - calls himself “probably the biggest anti-Islam person alive.” The publication of his latest book, Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah’s Prophet, will likely cement that position. In it, Sina suggests that Islam’s central figure suffered from a series of mental disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy and obsessive compulsive disorder.

“These disorders,” he says via telephone, “can explain the phenomenon known as Islam… which is nothing but one man’s insanity.”

Sina grew up a non-practicing Muslim. Raised in Iran, educated in Pakistan and Italy and now living in Canada, he began jousting with believers in the 1990s. What bothered him, he tells The Jerusalem Post, was not the penchant for jihad and intolerance that certain fanatical Muslims displayed, but the foundation for such ills in the Koran and core Islamic texts.

(Through the Faith Freedom Web site, Sina lists canonical references to Muhammad’s actions and offers $50,000 to anyone who can disprove Sina’s charge that Islam’s prophet was “a narcissist, a misogynist, a rapist, a pedophile, a lecher, a torturer, a mass murderer, a cult leader, an assassin, a terrorist, a mad man and a looter.” Respondents relentlessly attack Sina’s motives, but none has won the prize.)

With violent conquest and contempt for non-believers central to the tenets of the faith, Sina argues, attempts to forge a moderate form of Islam are doomed.

“The idea that Islam can be reformed is a fallacy,” he scoffs. “It’s like saying we can reform Nazism and it will be a wonderful party.”

No, says Sina, “The only way to reform Islam is to throw away the Koran; 90 percent of it should be thrown away. You also have to throw away the history of Islam, and you have to completely disregard the Sira” - the Arabic term used for the various traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad, from which most historical information about his life and the early period of Islam is derived.

For this reason, Sina says, Western suggestions that extremism in Islam can be eradicated if certain imams are quieted, or if Muslims are encouraged to embrace the universalist elements of their faith - but without addressing the extremism inherent in the religion’s texts - are based on a mistaken comparison of Islam to Christianity.

“In the West, people ask whether Islam can undergo a reformation like the one that Christianity underwent. That’s a poor parallel,” he says. “In Christianity, it wasn’t the religion that needed to be reformed, but the church; what Jesus preached was good.”

On the other hand, Sina continues, “In Islam, it’s not the community that is bad, but the religion. Islam has nothing like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Islam is full of hatred, and the hatred is in Muhammad himself. I argue in my book that Muhammad was insane - and that Muslims, by emulating him and by emulating his ways, his insanity is bequeathed to them.”

BY NOW, CRITICS of Islam are fairly common in the West. And there are more than a few former Muslims who have rejected Islam in favor of Christianity, citing the difference between their former religion’s overwhelming focus on hatred and their newfound faith’s central teaching of love and forgiveness. But, like Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the handful of other apostate Muslims demanding that Muslims reject the negative aspects of their religion, Sina’s critiques are especially problematic.

“People have to dismiss me some way, they have to put me down in one way or another. I’m a Jew, I’m a Christian, I’m a Hindu. I’m whatever people want to say in order to discredit me,” says Sina, who closely guards his true identity because of the death threats he receives. “But they can’t ignore my questions.”

Sina has little patience for those who believe they can temper Islam with reason and mutual respect, or for those who remain cowed by the masses of Muslim devotees around the world.

“Islam is the biggest hoax, the biggest lie,” he says. “Yes, a billion people believe it. But truth is truth. People will eventually see it. Believe me, there is no other answer. We will pay a great price until we realize that this is the solution - to undermine Islam itself, to show Muslims that this religion is not from God, that Muhammad was a charlatan and a liar.”

Sina knows that his blunt, outspoken approach can be “problematic.” But he is confident nonetheless that the force of his arguments will ultimately prevail.

“I am sure that, with time, I will convince millions and millions of Muslims, and the foundations of Islam will collapse,” he says.

Already, he continues, Faith Freedom has attracted an impressive amount of attention.

“In Iran, my site is banned. In many parts of Pakistan, it is banned. The list goes on,” he says. “Despite this, I have over 10 million readers in just over two and a half years. And I have received letters from Muslims from all over the world. Muslims everywhere are paying attention. I believe that Muslims everywhere are realizing that something is amiss.

“If I didn’t have so much success in convincing people, then I would not be so confident. But I see that truth works. So many people who are now writing for me and putting things up on Youtube; seven or eight years ago, we were having fierce debates. Now, they are my greatest allies. There are many people who have seen the light after reading FFI and many of them are now working on my side, trying to help others to see the truth.

“This is the way to fight evil. I do not want to kill the enemy. I want to win them as friends and allies. That is the real victory. In this way, we win because we eliminate our enemy, and our enemy wins by eliminating his ignorance and hate. That is why I believe in my cause. That is why I think I am an instrument of peace.”

Muslim Mindset: ‘The hatred is in Muhammad himself’ | Jerusalem Post

Generation Faithful

In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds

ALGIERS — First, Abdel Malek Outas’s teachers taught him to write math equations in Arabic, and embrace Islam and the Arab world. Then they told him to write in Latin letters that are no longer branded unpatriotic, and open his mind to the West.

Generation Faithful

Islam and Education

This is the fifth in a series of articles examining the lives of the young across the Muslim world at a time of religious revival.

 

 

Slide Show

The Education of Algiers

Malek is 19, and he is confused.

“When we were in middle school we studied only in Arabic,” he said. “When we went to high school, they changed the program, and a lot is in French. Sometimes, we don’t even understand what we are writing.”

The confusion has bled off the pages of his math book and deep into his life. One moment, he is rapping; another, he recounts how he flirted with terrorism, agreeing two years ago to go with a recruiter to kill apostates in the name of jihad.

At a time of religious revival across the Muslim world, Algeria’s youth are in play. The focus of this contest is the schools, where for decades Islamists controlled what children learned, and how they learned, officials and education experts here said.

Now the government is urgently trying to re-engineer Algerian identity, changing the curriculum to wrest momentum from the Islamists, provide its youth with more employable skills, and combat the terrorism it fears schools have inadvertently encouraged.

It appears to be the most ambitious attempt in the region to change a school system to make its students less vulnerable to religious extremism.

But many educators are resisting the changes, and many disenchanted young men are dropping out of schools. It is a tense time in Algiers, where city streets are crowded with police officers and security checkpoints and alive with fears that Algeria is facing a resurgence of Islamic terrorism. From 1991 to 2002, as many as 200,000 Algerians died in fighting between government forces and Islamic terrorists. Now one of the main terrorist groups, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or G.S.P.C., has affiliated with Al Qaeda, rebranding itself as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

There is a sense that this country could still go either way. Young people here in the capital appear extremely observant, filling mosques for the daily prayers, insisting that they have a place to pray in school. The strictest form of Islam, Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia, has become the gold standard for the young.

And yet, the young in Algiers also appear far more socially liberal than their peers in places like Egypt and Jordan. Young veiled women walk hand in hand, or sit leg to leg, with young men, public flirtations unthinkable in most other Muslim countries.

The two natures of the country reflect the way in which Algerian identity was cleaved in half by 132 years of French colonial rule, and then again by independence and forced Arabization. Once the French were driven out in 1962, the Algerians were determined to forge a national identity free from Western influence.

The schools were one center of that drive. French was banned as the language of education, replaced by Arabic. Islamic law and the study of the Koran were required, and math and science were shortchanged. Students were warned that sinners go to hell, and 6-year-olds were instructed in the proper way to wash a corpse for burial, education officials said.

There is a feeling among many Algerians that they went too far.

“We say that Algeria’s schools have trained monsters,” said Khaoula Taleb Ibrahim, a professor of education at the University of Algiers. “It is not to that extent, but the schools have contributed to that problem.”

Over the years, the government has pushed back, reintroducing French, removing the most zealous religious teachers and trying to revise the religious curriculum. Seven years ago, a committee appointed by the president issued a report calling for an overhaul of the school system — and it died under intense political pressure, mostly from the Islamists and conservatives, officials said.

But this year, the government is beginning to make substantive changes. The schools are moving from rote learning — which was always linked to memorizing the Koran — to critical thinking, where teachers ask students to research subjects and think about concepts.

Yet the students and teachers are still unprepared, untrained and, in many cases, unreceptive.

“Before, teachers used to explain the lesson,” Malek said. “Now they want us to think more, to research, but it’s very difficult for us.”

Malek says he hopes to graduate from high school next year and now wants to join the military, just like his father. He is a long way from being the person who had accepted what he says the terrorist recruiter told him — that soldiers, like his own father, are apostates and should be killed. His resolution lasted for three days, until his imam found out and persuaded him not to go.

Generation Faithful - In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds - Series - NYTimes.com

As a country, we can spend countless hours discussing rival teams of men kicking a piece of plastic into a net. But we are all supposed to be shame-faced about discussing the fantastically complex dramas called Reality TV. Well, I’m not.

Have the sinews of racism and snobbery been more truthfully traced than in the showdown between Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody? Has the reality of sexism in the workplace been laid out more rivettingly than in Alan Sugar’s annual picking of amiable, malleable men over competent, dynamic women to be his apprentice? Now this glorious genre has dramatised the clash within British Islam – between secularisers and fanatics – with the same concision.

Reality TV has long shown a face of British Islam that contrasts with the murderous smirk of the Tube-bomber Mohammed Sidiq Khan. It gave us Chico Slimani, the buff, rippling ex-Chippendale who blagged his way through The X-Factor; Kemal Shahin, the smart, tart young gay man who dominated Big Brother 5; and Saira Khan, the feminist entrepreneur from The Apprentice who refuses to let her religion be hijacked by “bearded old men from the Middle East”. They represent the first fragile shoots of a secularised Islam that – like most Christianity and Judaism in Europe – can be shrunk until it is a matter of custom and private conscience.

But on our reality TV shows, this has always been a one-sided fight. Fundamentalists, by their you’re-all-damned nature, are not inclined to take part in reality TV. Until now.

If you were told the biographies of Big Brother contestants Mohamed Mohamed and Alex De-Gale, you wouldn’t find it hard to guess which one is the fundamentalist. Mohamed was born in Somalia in 1985. When he was five years old, he saw his mother being held at gunpoint, and thought she was going to die. Since then, he has spent most of his life fleeing from one civil war to another – until, finally, he was granted asylum in Britain. De-Gale was born in the same year in south London, to black British parents. She is now a lithe accounts executive with high cheekbones, short skirts, a BMW, and a seven-year old daughter she brings up on her own.

You guessed wrong. They wouldn’t use these terms, but Mohamed became a convinced secularist on the run from Somalia, while Alex learned a Wahhabbi interpretation of Islam on the streets of Tottenham. This emerged, as everything does on Big Brother, through a thicket of trivia. Mohamed’s birthday fell a week into his stay in the Big Brother house, so the producers threw him a party, and let him pick the theme. Remembering a fun night he’d had at university, he said he wanted the male housemates to dress as women, and vice versa. Everyone cheered and howled for alcohol.

Except Alex. “First and foremost,” she said, “I am a Muslim.” And that meant the idea of a man dressing as a woman “made me feel sick”. Jabbing her finger and shouting, she said to Mohamed: “Tell it to Allah [that] it’s all in the name of fun. It’s bad enough that we drink and smoke … You’re supposed to be a Muslim man, someone I can look up to for guidance. You will have my friends and family in uproar. I am disgraced by you … 85 per cent of the people I know are Muslims. And trust me – the sheer horror they would have experienced … [You have] disgraced Islam.”

“You can’t tell me I’m a bad Muslim,” Mohamed replied. “I am old enough to be responsible for myself. Don’t bring religion into it!” She snapped back: “It is! There’s nothing else!” Alex was so enraged she announced she has “gangster friends” and, if she was evicted, “I get to go out [and] see everyone’s friends, I get to see their family. I get to do the shit that I wanna do. Pow, pow, pow.” This threat wasn’t necessarily idle: Alex has a restraining order against her after she waged a “hate campaign” against a former friend.

In that little exchange, you see the contrast between two understandings of Islam. I live in the middle of the Muslim East End, and I see this raw, rubbing conflict being played out every day.

Alex believes that Islam offers Absolute Judgements, immutably cast in stone in the Koran. These are (of course) hellishly patriarchal, since they were formulated by illiterate desert merchants in the seventh century AD. She has been taught there is “nothing else”. Later, she explained to another housemate that Islam forbids drinking and smoking. “What can you do then?” he asked. “Pray.” That’s all. If you see somebody acting in a way your pre-modern system judges to be “sick”, is it perfectly moral to threaten to kill them?

Mohamed, by contrast, sees the religion as consisting of metaphors and moral guidance – and he thinks it has limits. There are places it shouldn’t go. “She always brings religion into an equation that religion has nothing to do [with],” he said angrily. But what makes this argument even more fascinating – turning it from a scene by George Bernard Shaw into one by David Mamet – is the ambiguities within Alex’s character. She howls about the morals of seventh-century Arabia, when they would have her stoned to death. Almost every Islamist I have met has this dissonance running through them. The 9/11 hijackers went to a strip-bar and got drunk before staging their cry for the construction of a Caliphate that would kill them for doing just that. The “moral” vision they believe in is so inhuman even they can’t follow it.

So how do we make sure relaxed secularists like Mohamed, Chico, Kemal and Saira beat Alex’s wing of Islam? They have answers of their own. They all start with us ceasing to show multicultural politeness towards fanatical theocrats. Saira Khan – who as a teenager was whipped by her father with a coat-hanger for letting her legs show – says we need to call misogyny and gay-bashing by their proper names. Muslims are not a homogenous block represented by the elderly Saudi-trained Mullahs who taught Alex their totalitarian model of Islam.

But we are handing more and more Muslim children over to them to indoctrinate. Faith schools herd the kids of Muslim parents away from the rest of us and pickle them in stale dogmas. Khan – who has spoken at many Muslim schools – says they “encourage segregation and women to be submissive”. When I called Kemal, he was even more emphatic, saying: “I would have died in one of these Muslim-only faith schools.” There, the Alexes can mass and shout down the Mohameds with the backing of their teachers. (Our oil-addicted foreign policy makes it easier to tell them the democratic society outside is evil.) Yet the Government is not dismantling faith schools – it is building more of them.

So watch that row between Mohamed and Alex again. It is a shouting match – “This is nothing to do with religion!” “Tell it to Allah!” – playing out in a million variations in souqs and madrassahs and Muslim homes across the world. Now that’s what I call reality television.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Johann Hari: When two sides of Islam go head to head - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

Campaign’s Efforts to Dispel Rumors
Risk Offending a Base of Support

By AMY CHOZICK
June 23, 2008; Page A10

It is inaccurate to call Barack Obama a Muslim. Is it a slur?

The Obama campaign suggests it is. A new campaign Web site designed to air and rebut potentially damaging Internet rumors reads in one part: “Smear: Barack Obama is a Muslim… Truth: Sen. Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim and is a committed Christian.”

Associated Press

Barack Obama greets supporters at a rally in Michigan, a battleground state with a large Muslim population.

The characterization highlights a tricky balance the campaign is trying to strike: to tamp down false rumors — intended by some to link the Democratic presidential candidate to radical Islam — without offending Muslims and harming his image of inclusiveness.

Muslim-Americans have made up one of Sen. Obama’s most loyal bases of support since he announced his candidacy last year. But lately some Muslims, concentrated in several battleground states, say they are having second thoughts over his campaign’s ardent defense of his religious background.

“If he were a Muslim, so what? That insinuates that if he were a Muslim, he’s automatically a jihadist. That’s incredibly insulting to people of the Muslim faith and Arabs who are Christian,” says Tony Kutayli, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and a Christian.

The issue flared up at a rally in Detroit last Monday, when two Muslim women in hijab, or traditional clothing, were asked to move when they sat behind the podium, where their headscarves would have appeared in photographs and on television with the candidate.

The campaign apologized to the women and noted that they were asked to move by volunteers, not campaign staffers. “This is of course not the policy of the campaign. It is offensive and counter to Obama’s commitment to bring Americans together,” said spokesman Bill Burton.

As for the “Fight the Smears” Web site, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor says it was designed to “dispel any and all misinformation,” and the Muslim rumor is misinformation. The “smear,” he wrote in an email, is that “most of these attacks allege that he is a radical Muslim who attended a madrassa.”

The handling of Islam in American politics, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, has become a delicate issue. Politicians from President Bush on down have wrestled with how to attack radical Islam without seeming anti-Islam.

Sen. Obama, who says he has always been a Christian, has been grappling with the accusations for more than a year, when Internet rumors began to emerge that he was educated in a radical madrassa in Indonesia and that he took the oath of office with his hand on the Quran instead of the Bible.

“The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out, what better way than to start at the highest level, through the president of the United States — one of their own!!!” reads one email chain, evoking the communist plot to take over the presidency in the 1962 movie, “The Manchurian Candidate.”

A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll conducted in March shows the rumors have only stuck with a small portion of mostly conservative, noncollege-educated voters: 79% of respondents said they had heard the rumor that Sen. Obama is a Muslim, but only one in 10 said they believe it. A separate poll from the Pew Forum last September showed the liability of the perception. In the survey, 45% of respondents said they would have reservations about voting for a presidential candidate who is Muslim, compared with 25% for a Mormon candidate and 11% for a Jewish candidate.

John McCain has had his own struggles addressing Islam. In April, the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign replaced Ali Jawad, a prominent Arab-American businessman, from his Michigan finance committee because of unsubstantiated claims that Mr. Jawad is an “agent” of Hezbollah. The move cost the Republican support in Dearborn, an area both candidates will fight hard to capture in November.

According to the latest Census data, there are 2.3 million Muslims in the U.S. Two-thirds are foreign-born; about 20% of U.S.-born Muslims are African-American. According to the Arab-American Institute, there are about 3.5 million Arab-Americans living in the U.S. About three-quarters are Christian and a quarter Muslim. Voter turnout among Arab-Americans is up to 30% higher than that of the general population, and they are concentrated in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, states seen as among the most competitive this fall.

So far, Sen. Obama has enjoyed the support of both Christian and Muslim Arab-Americans who are partly drawn to what they perceive as a more diplomatic approach to the Middle East and his diverse background. Sen. Obama’s father was a nonpracticing Muslim from Kenya, and for a brief period of his childhood the senator lived in Indonesia, a Muslim country.

But recently some Muslim voters interviewed in swing states say they have noticed the disparity between his outreach to them and to other religions. The Obama campaign has embarked on a national effort to win support from devout Christian voters and make known the candidate’s Christian faith. He visited a Boca Raton, Fla., synagogue, and he made a pro-Israel group his first stop after claiming enough delegates to secure the nomination earlier this month.

An Obama aide says that the campaign currently doesn’t have any effort targeting Muslims and that campaign officials are relying on the Arab-American outreach efforts at the Democratic National Committee.

“The majority of our faith outreach, by and large, with some exceptions, is not faith specific. It is holistic,” Mr. Vietor says.

Ginan Rauf, 46 years old, a secular Muslim and teacher in Franklin Lakes, N.J., is rethinking her support for the Democratic candidate. She volunteered to make calls on his behalf ahead of the March 4 Texas primary. Now she says she isn’t sure she will vote for him.

“We’re so hardened to Islamic-phobia, but a lot of us were surprised and hurt” by how Sen. Obama has responded to the Muslim rumors, Ms. Rauf says.

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, one of two Muslim members of Congress and an Obama backer, says he would like to see the campaign more directly address the Muslim community. “I know his campaign is a little worried about how that could be twisted,” Mr. Ellison says. “But I think you have to be careful not to start letting your detractors dictate who you talk to. Then you’re not the captain of your own ship anymore.”

Write to Amy Chozick at amy.chozick@wsj.com

Obama Walks a Fine Line With Muslims - WSJ.com

The award-winning novelist Ian McEwan has launched an outspoken attack on militant Islam, accusing it of “wanting to create a society that I detest”.

PHILIP HOLLIS

Ian McEwan has been criticised by the Muslim Council of Britain

The author said he “despises Islamism” because of its views on women and homosexuality.

But predicting a backlash against his comments, which were made in an Italian newspaper, he insisted he was not a racist.

The writer of Atonement and Enduring Love condemned religious hardliners as he defended his friend, the writer Martin Amis, against charges of racism.

Amis was accused last year of being Islamaphobic after he said that “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”.

In an essay written the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of New York’s Twin Towers, the novelist suggested “strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”, preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation.

In The Age of Horrorism, Amis argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between Islam and Islamism.

McEwan, 60, said it was “logically absurd and morally unacceptable” that writers who speak out against militant Islam are immediately branded racist.

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist,” he said in an interview in Corriere della Sera.

“This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on - we know it well.”

McEwan recognised that similar views were held by some Christian hardliners in America.

“I find them equally absurd,” he said. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised McEwan’s defence of Amis.

“Mr McEwan is being rather disingenuous about his friend, Martin Amis’s remarks. Of course you should be allowed to criticise the tenets of any religion. However, Amis went much further than that,” he said.

“He was advocating that the Muslim community be made to suffer ‘until it gets its own house in order’. And what sort of suffering did Amis have in mind? In his own words, ‘Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’”

He added: “Those were clearly very bigoted remarks and the fact that McEwan prefers to whitewash them tells us much about his own views too.”

Ian McEwan: I despise militant Islam - Telegraph

As gay and lesbian couples begin to wed across California, people of faith are renewing a passionate debate over whether homosexuality is sanctioned by God.

Christians, Jews and Muslims on both sides of the issue cite the holy writings of their religions. Some note that the Bible depicts man-lying-with-man as an “abomination,” while others say that it speaks of God’s love for all people created in his image.

Both sides defend their positions with the zeal of the biblical warriors who inhabit their scriptures. “Homosexual intimacy is out of bounds. It’s not what God created us for,” said Richard Mouw, the president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Mouw cites Romans 1 in the New Testament that decried men and women abandoning “natural relations” and men who were “inflamed with lust for one another” committing “indecent acts with other men” — behavior that carried death as punishment. “Sexuality within the context of marriage,” he said, “is the order of creation.”

Nonsense, says the Rev. Mel White, a former Fuller professor and evangelical author who married his partner of 27 years during a ceremony Wednesday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.

White calls the Bible a living document that must be understood in its historical context — a view shared by reform-minded clergy and theologians from other faiths.

Early Jews and Christians, White says, defended a heterosexual ethic to ensure the continuity of tenuous tribal communities. These religious pioneers, he adds, had no way of foreseeing modern advances in psychology and other fields that would reveal homosexuality as an orientation rather than a deviant choice.

“The Bible says as much about sexual orientation as it does about toasters or nuclear reactors,” White said. “We have to grow with the times.”

A decision by the California Supreme Court in May allowed weddings to go forward starting Tuesday and set the stage for a statewide referendum in November aimed at reinstating the ban.

Theologians and biblical scholars trace the origins of that dispute to a handful of passages in the Torah, New Testament and Quran.

Perhaps the most frequently cited is Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman, it is an abomination.” The passage from the Torah is repeated, with slight variations, in Christian scripture, which, like the Jewish text, orders death for violators. The Quran also denounces homosexuality, in Chapter 7, Verse 81: “For you practise your lust on men in preference to women: you are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds.”

Conservatives in the three religions largely interpret the passages the same way. There is nothing wrong with being gay, they say. Acting on homosexual impulses, however, is another matter.

“The church says that homosexuals should be treated with love and respect, but redefining the natural and divine institution of marriage is simply something we are not able to do,” said the Rev. Marcos Gonzalez of St. John Chrysostom, a Catholic parish in Inglewood that serves 9,000 families. “From all time, it is obvious, for the species to procreate, it requires a man and a woman. The bodies are made to fit with each other. We do not have the authority to redefine it.”

But other clergy decry what they call a selective analysis of the texts. Jesus condemned divorce and remarriage, they point out, but that hasn’t stopped legions of Christians, including priests in some cases, from splitting and remarrying.

“Everybody without exception reads the Bible selectively,” said Jay Johnson, a theology professor at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. “The question is, how do we decide that one portion is critical to our lives while others are not?

“These texts come from a different culture, a different society,” added Johnson, who also serves as research director at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry. “They need to be interpreted.”

That is precisely what leaders in Judaism’s Conservative Movement tried to accomplish — with admittedly mixed results.

Eighteen months ago, the movement’s law and standards committee split over whether to allow seminaries to enroll gays as rabbinical students and to let rabbis preside over commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples.

Half of the committee adopted an opinion that called for ordaining gays, as long as they refrained from anal sex, which the panel interpreted as the prohibition expressed in Leviticus.

The panel argued for the importance of restoring dignity and honor to the gay and lesbian community.

But the other half said they could find no basis in Jewish law to remove a long-standing ban against gay rabbis.

As a result, the movement’s seminaries and its 850 affiliated synagogues have been left to decide which opinion to obey.

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, who co-wrote the more liberal of the opinions, said that the divide reflects an “honest and appropriate response” to a subject that has provoked controversy among broad segments of the American public.

“It’s not pretending that things are neater and cleaner than they are,” said Dorff, a philosophy professor at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles and one of the Conservative Movement’s most respected scholars. “The reality is that people have very different opinions on this.”

The same tension has played out in Islam.In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision, the Islamic Shura Council, an umbrella organization for mosques and Muslim groups in Southern California, issued a statement that called the ruling “a violation of God’s law as clearly given in the Quran and the Bible.”

The group said that sexual relationships are to be “enjoyed within the framework of matrimony only,” even as it registered its opposition to “all forms” of discrimination.

“We do believe that the traditional family structure has passed the test of time in keeping societies strong and humanity secure,” the group said.

One small Muslim group voiced objections, calling on the faithful to embrace a more pluralistic view of gays and lesbians.

“We’re not reinventing the faith,” Ani Zonneveld, the president of Muslims For Progressive Values, a group that claims about 1,500 members nationwide. “The Quran says that it is a book for all times and all generations. It is not a stagnant text.”

If Muslims cannot interpret the Quran, she said, “then it is irrelevant to how we live our lives today.”

PASSIONATE: Religious debate over gay marriage heats up as couples wed in California

Ifdhal Kasim’s article which appeared in The Jakarta Post on June 16, stating that the anti-Ahmadiyah decree is a human rights violation, will surely get the support of many.

Law No. 12/2005 ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, stating that the government can restrain a group’s religious rights only for the sake of maintaining public order, public morality and people’s rights and freedom.

Ahmadiyah has indeed never violated the above-mentioned law. No government has the right to forbid a certain religion. This is done in communist countries, but Indonesia is a democratic country, upholding human rights.

This decree, however, reflects the hostile stance of the Indonesian government against a particular religious affiliation. Who will be next? The Christians, Balinese Hindus, the Toradjans with their unique death culture, the Sunda Wiwitan religion of the Badui?

The government should realize that this is a pluralistic multi-cultural country with a number of different religions that should be respected by all. By issuing the anti-Ahmadiyah decree, religious tolerance has now gone down the drain.

Members of the Islam Defenders Front (FPI) have committed crimes and have violated human rights using Islam as an excuse to justify their criminal actions ever since 2001, regularly destroying private property, carrying out “sweeps” in hotels, threatening and beating up people, yet they are protected by the government.

Why are these criminals not being prosecuted? Why is the government stalling and what is the political motive behind all this? Is the current government using Ahmadiyah as a political scapegoat? Are they afraid that they will lose votes if they make the wrong decision? Well, with this decree the current government has already lost many votes, including mine.

Ahmadiyah has been in Indonesia since 1926, to restrict them now is absolutely ridiculous. Religion is a very private and personal matter, it is between the believer and God. No human has the right to judge a certain religious group because that is the prerogative of Allah. Let us pray for Indonesia because we are back on the road to communism.

LYNNA VAN DER ZEE-OEHMKE
Bogor, West Java

The Jakarta Post - Ahmadiyah: political scapegoat