Muslim Heretics Conference

By C. HOLLAND TAYLOR
FROM TODAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA
June 24, 2008

My Friend the Fanatic
By Sadanand Dhume
(Text Publishing, 271 pp., A$34.95)

Terrorist acts perpetrated in the name of Islam have dominated news headlines for years, yet Western readers are often left wondering what motivates such radicalism, and how it spreads. Few nations are more strategically vital to the struggle for the “soul” of Islam than Indonesia. Home of the world’s largest Muslim population and democracy, Indonesia’s ancient traditions of pluralism and tolerance are under siege by a well-organized and heavily financed extremist movement.

The current radical trends in Indonesia are inextricably linked to Islam’s 700-year history in the East Indies. Sunni Islam arrived peacefully in what is now Indonesia, brought by Arab, Indian and Chinese merchants active in the fabled spice trade. Once they acquired sufficient economic power, such merchants established Islamic city-states that rebelled against, and ultimately destroyed, the pre-existing Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit. It was only the subsequent military and political triumph of indigenous Javanese in 1586 – following a bloody, century-long struggle – that preserved the region’s pluralistic and tolerant traditions, in the form of a deeply spiritual understanding of Islam that did not conflict with pre-existing faiths.

In “My Friend the Fanatic,” journalist Sadanand Dhume guides the reader deftly through the whirlpool these currents have created. Descriptions of a young, charismatic author titillating avant-garde audiences in the nation’s capital – with her sexually provocative short stories and performance art – alternate with on-the-scene reportage of Muslim radicals’ success at mobilizing grassroots support throughout the vast archipelago. Mr. Dhume took an unusual trek through Indonesia’s lush, tropical landscape with Herry Nurdi, the “fanatic” of the book’s title and editor of Sabili, a mass-circulation extremist magazine whose explicit goal is to undo radical Islam’s history of failure in Indonesia and assure its final triumph.

By some counts at least, Mr. Nurdi and his ilk are winning. In recent years, extremists have taken advantage of regional autonomy to impose Shariah-based regulations in nearly 70 of Indonesia’s 364 local regencies. These laws, among other things, compel women and girls to wear so-called “Muslim” clothing that reveals only the face, hands and feet, even if they are Christian; require students, civil servants and even couples applying for marriage to demonstrate an ability to read the Quran; and effectively restrict women from going out at night without a male relative.

Mr. Dhume’s description of the extremists’ rise will be dispiriting to those who view democracy as an antidote to radicalism. Indeed, one of the most striking facts he reports is the extent to which those leading the charge to institutionalize radicalism in Indonesia today are directly linked to postindependence rebellions and failed extremist movements from the past. Whereas their ideological forebears (and literally, in many cases, their fathers or grandfathers) were crushed by Indonesian nationalists committed to upholding Indonesia’s secular constitution and pluralist state ideology, the new generation of radicals use democracy and the symbols of Islam to erode and ultimately destroy Indonesia’s heritage of religious pluralism and tolerance. This phenomenon is rendered possible and dramatically accelerated by the tendency of opportunistic politicians and political parties – often corrupt and lacking in Islamic legitimacy – to engage in a “chase to the lowest common denominator” of Islam, in a cynical attempt to prove their Muslim bona fides.

Unfortunately, the current government in Jakarta – led by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – has done little to retard the rapidly metastasizing phenomenon of political Islam. This threatens not only religious minorities such as the Muslim Ahmadiyah sect and Christians, but also the safety and security of the Indonesian nation-state itself. Just this month, in fact, religious extremists beat a group of moderates marching for religious freedom on the grounds of the national monument, in full view of onlooking police and the nearby state palace.

While Mr. Dhume argues convincingly about the radicals’ current strength and momentum, he is strangely silent about their most vocal and effective opponents, who represent the world’s best hope for a truly democratic and tolerant Islam. Virtually absent from Mr. Dhume’s book are the valiant efforts of Indonesian Muslim leaders to stem the Arab petrodollar-funded tide of radical Islam, and thereby uphold the secular foundations of the Indonesian nation-state. Former President Abdurrahman Wahid, a member of the LibForAll Foundation which I head, has vigorously opposed the Islamist agenda and succeeded at blocking many of their initiatives. So, too, have other key leaders of the Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, the world’s biggest Muslims organizations, which are based in Indonesia and boast 70 million followers.

Islam’s future – as a religion of peace and tolerance, or of hatred, violence and supremacy – may well hinge upon Indonesia’s destiny, as Middle East financial backers and their indigenous allies well know. Mr. Dhume is pessimistic, sensing that the “totalitarian cast” of the extremist movement will “grind what remained of a once proud culture to a hollow imitation of Arabness.” Yet while the situation is undoubtedly grave, it is far from hopeless. Indonesia boasts a moderate public and self-confident Muslim leaders who do not conflate Islam with arrogance, extremism, supremacy or violence. Mr. Dhume’s book shows that the battle is raging, but its conclusion is far from preordained.

Mr. Taylor is the chairman & CEO of the LibForAll Foundation, a nonprofit that works to reduce religious extremism worldwide and discredit the use of terrorism.

Unfriendly Fanatics - WSJ.com

By By Atif Nadeem
6/24/2008

LAHORE
A Muslim girl who had converted from Christianity seeks protection of the government for her life and her husband from her family members who have threatened to kill the couple on the grounds of converting to Islam.
Asghar, a Muslim boy and Qaisra, a Christian girl, both were working in a local garments factory where they developed an emotional relationship compelling them to tie the wedding knot. Qaisra, a resident of Nishtar Town, while talking to The News said that she and her husband, Asghar, were earning their livelihoods while fixing zips to the sewn shirts and trousers at a local garment factory where they were acquainted with each other.
She said, as their religions were different so they did not think about getting married that time. “Later on, we started working in different factories situated next to each other and our relationship developed into a deep love affair,” she said. “I realised that I was deeply in love with Asghar and his feelings for me were also the same,” she added.
Qaisra who had now adopted a Muslim name, Rabia Fatima, said that she revealed her emotional feelings to her aunt, Rubina, ands told her that she had decided to accept Islam and marry a Muslim boy, Asghar.
“My mother warned me not to get married a Muslim boy but I kept on convincing my mother,” she said. My sisters were also aware of my attachment with Asghar as I used to talk to him until late night on mobile phone, she added.
She said that she had decided to elope with Asghar so that they could get married. “I stayed with Asghar’s family for one night at his home in Chunian and his family whole-heartedly welcomed her as their daughter-in-law,” she added.
Qaisra said that she had also got a certificate for acceptance of Islam at the hands of a religious figure hailing from District Bahawalnagar in April in which it was stated that she had converted to Islam from Christianity on her own will. The couple reached Bahawalpur where they got their marriage registered and Qaisra through her counsel filed a writ petition in The Lahore High Court Bahawalpur Bench pleading the Court to may issue directions to the respondents, Inspector General of Police, Punjab, SHO Police Station, Ameen s/o Fouja and others not to harass and humiliate the petitioner, Qaisra and her husband, Asghar, while saying that the couple were leading a happily matrimonial life and no one should be allowed to interfere into the personal legal rights of the petitioner, Qaisra, as well as of her husband, Asghar.
The counsel also pleaded that if any case of abduction had been registered by SHO Police Station Nishtar that case should be quashed as no offence was made out against the petitioner, Qaisra and her husband.
The Court ruled that the couple should not be harassed or humiliated by any person, as they had married after their own will. The Court disposed of the case while ruling that in case there was some criminal indictment against either of two, their statements should be recorded and investigation be carried out on those lines.
Earlier, Nishtar Police Station had registered an abduction case against Qaisra’s husband, Asghar, and conducted many raids at his house located in Chunian while harassing and humiliating his family members, she said.
She said that her father, brother and uncle were inveigling her to come back and stay with them while on the other hand they were harassing and humiliating Asghar’s family members. She said that her family had threatened to kill her as she had converted to Islam from Christianity.
Asghar said that Qaisra’s family members including her father, brother and other relatives along with the police officials had raided his house repeatedly while harassing his family members and other relatives. The police officials kept my uncle and younger brother, Ashraf, 10, under unlawful custody while asking them about my whereabouts so that they could seize me. He said that Qaisra’s family would kill my wife and me as they were constantly threatening my family in collaboration with the police.
He said that his family also had an abduction case registered against him for which the police had been humiliating his family members. He said that his wife, Qaisra, had stated in the court that she had got married after her own will and nobody had compelled her to accept Islam. The couple demanded of the provincial government to provide them protection from Qaisra’s family besides quashing abduction case against Asghar.

Muslim convert harassed by family, seeks protection

As Senator Barack Obama courted voters in Iowa last December, Representative Keith Ellison, the country’s first Muslim congressman, stepped forward eagerly to help.

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Alex Brandon/Associated Press

Barack Obama spoke at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago on Fathers’ Day. Mr. Obama has visited churches and synagogues, but he has yet to appear at a single mosque.

Mr. Ellison believed that Mr. Obama’s message of unity resonated deeply with American Muslims. He volunteered to speak on Mr. Obama’s behalf at a mosque in Cedar Rapids, one of the nation’s oldest Muslim enclaves. But before the rally could take place, aides to Mr. Obama asked Mr. Ellison to cancel the trip because it might stir controversy. Another aide appeared at Mr. Ellison’s Washington office to explain.

“I will never forget the quote,” Mr. Ellison said, leaning forward in his chair as he recalled the aide’s words. “He said, ‘We have a very tightly wrapped message.’ ”

When Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign, Muslim Americans from California to Virginia responded with enthusiasm, seeing him as a long-awaited champion of civil liberties, religious tolerance and diplomacy in foreign affairs. But more than a year later, many say, he has not returned their embrace.

While the senator has visited churches and synagogues, he has yet to appear at a single mosque. Muslim and Arab-American organizations have tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with Mr. Obama, but officials with those groups say their invitations — unlike those of their Jewish and Christian counterparts — have been ignored. Last week, two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred by campaign volunteers from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit.

In interviews, Muslim political and civic leaders said they understood that their support for Mr. Obama could be a problem for him at a time when some Americans are deeply suspicious of Muslims. Yet those leaders nonetheless expressed disappointment and even anger at the distance that Mr. Obama has kept from them.

“This is the ‘hope campaign,’ this is the ‘change campaign,’ ” said Mr. Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota. Muslims are frustrated, he added, that “they have not been fully engaged in it.”

Aides to Mr. Obama denied that he had kept his Muslim supporters at arm’s length. They cited statements in which he had spoken inclusively about American Islam and a radio advertisement he recorded for the recent campaign of Representative Andre Carson, Democrat of Indiana, who this spring became the second Muslim elected to Congress.

In May, Mr. Obama also had a brief, private meeting with the leader of a mosque in Dearborn, Mich., home to the country’s largest concentration of Arab-Americans. And this month, a senior campaign aide met with Arab-American leaders in Dearborn, most of whom are Muslim. (Mr. Obama did not campaign in Michigan before the primary in January because of a party dispute over the calendar.)

“Our campaign has made every attempt to bring together Americans of all races, religions and backgrounds to take on our common challenges,” Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman, said in an e-mail message.

Mr. LaBolt added that with religious groups, the campaign had largely taken “an interfaith approach, one that may not have reached every group that wishes to participate but has reached many Muslim Americans.”

The strained relationship between Muslims and Mr. Obama reflects one of the central challenges facing the senator: how to maintain a broad electoral appeal without alienating any of the numerous constituencies he needs to win in November.

After the episode in Detroit last week, Mr. Obama telephoned the two Muslim women to apologize. “I take deepest offense to and will continue to fight against discrimination against people of any religious group or background,” he said in a statement.

Such gestures have fallen short in the eyes of many Muslim leaders, who say the Detroit incident and others illustrate a disconnect between Mr. Obama’s message of unity and his campaign strategy.

“The community feels betrayed,” said Safiya Ghori, the government relations director in the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Even some of Mr. Obama’s strongest Muslim supporters say they are uncomfortable with the forceful denials he has made in response to rumors that he is secretly a Muslim. (Ten percent of registered voters believe the rumor, according to a poll by the Pew Research

In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Mr. Obama said the rumors were offensive to American Muslims because they played into “fearmongering.” But on a new section of his Web site, he classifies the claim that he is Muslim as a “smear.”

“A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim, by the way,” Mr. Ellison said.

Mr. Ellison, a first-term congressman, remains arguably the senator’s most important Muslim supporter. He has attended Obama rallies in Minnesota and appears on the campaign’s Web site. But Mr. Ellison said he was also forced to cancel plans to campaign for Mr. Obama in North Carolina after an emissary for the senator told him the state was “too conservative.” Mr. Ellison said he blamed Mr. Obama’s aides — not the candidate himself — for his campaign’s standoffishness.

Despite the complications of wooing Muslim voters, Mr. Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, may find it risky to ignore this constituency. There are sizable Muslim populations in closely fought states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia.

In those states and others, American Muslims have experienced a political awakening in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. Before the attacks, Muslim political leadership in the United States was dominated by well-heeled South Asian and Arab immigrants, whose communities account for a majority of the nation’s Muslims. (Another 20 percent are estimated to be African-American.) The number of American Muslims remains in dispute as the Census Bureau does not collect data on religious orientation; most estimates range from 2.35 million to 6 million.

A coalition of immigrant Muslim groups endorsed George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign, only to find themselves ignored by Bush administration officials as their communities were rocked by the carrying out of the USA Patriot Act, the detention and deportation of Muslim immigrants and other security measures after Sept. 11.

As a result, Muslim organizations began mobilizing supporters across the country to register to vote and run for local offices, and political action committees started tracking registered Muslim voters. The character of Muslim political organizations also began to change.

“We moved away from political leadership primarily by doctors, lawyers and elite professionals to real savvy grass-roots operatives,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a political group in Washington. “We went back to the base.”

In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for 53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the election, according to data collected by the committee.

The committee’s president, Mukit Hossain, said Muslims in Virginia were drawn to Mr. Obama because of his support for civil liberties and his more diplomatic approach to the Middle East. Mr. Hossain and others said his multicultural image also appealed to immigrant voters.

“This is the son of an immigrant; this is someone with a funny name,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, who is a Christian who has campaigned for Mr. Obama at mosques and Arab churches. “There is this excitement that if he can win, they can win, too.”

Yet some Muslim and Arab-American political organizers worry that the campaign’s reluctance to reach out to voters in those communities will eventually turn them off. “If they think that they are voting for a campaign that is trying to distance itself from them, my big fear is that Muslims will sit it out,” Mr. Hossain said.

Throughout the primaries, Muslim groups often failed to persuade Mr. Obama’s campaign to at least send a surrogate to speak to voters at their events, said Ms. Ghori, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Before the Virginia primary in February, some of the nation’s leading Muslim organizations nearly canceled an event at a mosque in Sterling because they could not arrange for representatives from any of the major presidential campaigns to attend. At the last minute, they succeeded in wooing surrogates from the Clinton and Obama campaigns by telling each that the other was planning to attend, Mr. Bray said. (No one from the McCain campaign showed up.)

Frustrations with Mr. Obama deepened the day after he claimed the nomination when he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel. (Mr. Obama later clarified his statement, saying Jerusalem’s status would need to be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians.)

Osama Siblani, the editor and publisher of the weekly Arab American News in Dearborn, said Mr. Obama had “pandered” to the Israeli lobby, while neglecting to meet formally with Arab-American and Muslim leaders. “They’re trying to take the votes without the liabilities,” said Mr. Siblani, who is also president of the Arab American Political Action Committee.

Some Muslim supporters of Mr. Obama seem to ricochet between dejection and optimism. Minha Husaini, a public health consultant in her 30s who is working for the Obama campaign in Philadelphia, lights up like a swooning teenager when she talks about his promise for change.

“He gives me hope,” Ms. Husaini said in an interview last month, shortly before she joined the campaign on a fellowship. But she sighed when the conversation turned to his denials of being Muslim, “as if it’s something bad,” she said.

For Ms. Ghori and other Muslims, Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach is not surprising in a political climate they feel is marred by frequent attacks on their faith.

Among the incidents they cite are a statement by Mr. McCain, in a 2007 interview with Beliefnet.com, that he would prefer a Christian president to a Muslim one; a comment by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton that Mr. Obama was not Muslim “as far as I know”; and a remark by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to The Associated Press in March that an Obama victory would be celebrated by terrorists, who would see him as a “savior.”

“All you have to say is Barack Hussein Obama,” said Arsalan Iftikhar, a human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Islamica Magazine. “You don’t even have to say ‘Muslim.’ ”

As a consequence, many Muslims have kept their support for Mr. Obama quiet. Any visible show of allegiance could be used by his opponents to incite fear, further the false rumors about his faith and “bin-Laden him,” Mr. Bray said.

“The joke within the national Muslim organizations,” Ms. Ghori said, “is that we should endorse the person we don’t want to win.”

Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama - NYTimes.com

LAMIA QAZI
As a liberal Muslim, my feelings towards religious Islamic organisations, where women congregate like droves of sparrows wearing abaiyas and hijabs, has always ranged somewhere between bemused tolerance and slight impatience.

It seems to me quite understandable that such groups would make their neighbours feel slightly insecure with so many Muslims gathering together - especially in today’s political climate.

Al-Meezan is an organisation run by Muslim women focusing on women’s Islamic education, situated in a large detached house in the Southside of Glasgow.

The centre had created some tension in the locality - objections have included the fact that it is an educational organisation in the middle of a residential area; and parking issues when large numbers get together for annual events.

The house in Dumbreck is what estate agents would call a very large well-maintained period property. On the inside it has been sectioned into classrooms and office facilities, along with a well-run cafeteria, a crèche and play areas for children.

The Al-Meezan student body is comprised of women of all ages, starting from three month-old infants to classes for children and adults with no upper age limit. (The children’s classes are for boys as well as girls).

It began a decade ago as an informal group of 20 women who would get together to study the Quran. The student body expanded and different venues had to be hired to accommodate the large number of participants.

Eventually they bought their current premises in 2005 for £1.1m, a sum raised completely through participant donations.

My feeling was: “Why couldn’t they be less obtrusive, tone down the overtly religious symbolism and blend in with the rest of us?” Were the participants oblivious to such sensitivities?

Perhaps the organisation was the reaction of a community under attack, unable to face the world except by retreating into the shadows of hijab and women-only congregations?

Considering these and other very real prejudices I decided to approach Al-Meezan. My understanding prior to going was that there was a strict uniform of white hijab with a black abaiya. What reaction would my jeans and cropped top get in a place where all participants wore these black cloaks and white scarves?

Later I discovered that it was only the uniform for the longer-running courses and was not compulsory for the short courses or other social activities like the mother and toddler group.

I was expecting disgust at the sight of me - clearly an Asian Muslim, sans hijab. Instead I was struck by the warm welcome I received. The committee were also quite willing to talk about their apparent role in exacerbating local divisions, and address my concern that they might discourage Muslims, particularly women, from taking part in mainstream society.

Indeed, they had very well-formed opinions on these subjects. They were certainly aware of the critical position they occupy within the current political climate.

So, is Al-Meezan a symptom of Muslim “extremism”? These women were adamant in their condemnation of “so-called” Muslims who espouse violence.

“We are trying to redress the weaknesses of previous generations where an ignorance of the teachings of Islam created a vacuum for children to be misled into committing crimes in the name of Islam,” explained Salma Sheikh, retired social worker and Al-Meezan chairperson. “We focus on women, as they are responsible for the religious beliefs that are imparted to children.

“Suicide bombings are haram wrong, and punishable in the next life and any act that is against the law and social norms of the society in which you live is condemned in Islam,” she adds. “But the religion doesn’t need to be abandoned because of a few miscreants - in fact it needs to be re-appropriated and returned to its true, purely peaceful, spirit.”

But my view of such organisations is that they are outdated. Couldn’t groups such as Al-Meezan offer Asian women tools for dealing with modern life?

The committee see what they do as empowering the women who attend. They argue that prior to Al-Meezan, religion was the prerogative of men residing in mosques and through this religious monopoly they were able to control the life choices offered to women.

“Lack of knowledge of Islamic values has resulted in the cultural oppression of women and their marginalisation,” reads one Al-Meezan leaflet.

By educating themselves these women are breaking free from misconceptions that are commonly used to suppress women in a number of social situations. I have heard men say, with the utmost religious authority, that Islam has no room for female equality, arguing that for women to work is in direct contradiction to Islamic teachings.

It isn’t a view that is given credence at Al-Meezan. When I asked about opposition from within the Muslim community they immediately assumed I was referring to early opposition to the centre from Muslim clerics. “Men can’t deal with the fact that these women have managed to create and run this organisation completely without their help,” says Mahnoor Campbell, Primary School teacher and student at Al-Meezan.

At Al-Meezan most of the teachers hold full-time jobs and teach here on a part-time basis. This example alone gives the women who attend positive role models who manage to reach an equitable balance between their religious, worldly and social duties.

Muslims like me who are seen by some as having given up fundamental aspects of our religion by abandoning hijab, can insist until we’re blue in the face that Islam does guarantee rights for women. We will be disregarded and will have no real impact. But Al-Meezan and organisations like it may offer a platform through which to address such issues.

I end up feeling that an Islamic organisation that is setting the record straight and in a non-controversial way about the rights and life choices available to Muslim women is like rain in the desert.

But I still wonder if it isolates its students, denying them social opportunities? The participants I spoke to were adamant that their dress code or strong religious beliefs have no impact on their social interactions.

“There might be an initial hesitancy when people see that you wear a Hijab but once you approach them and start a conversation they deal with you as a person” says Asma Sheikh, a pharmacist and teacher at Al- Meezan.

However there are two opinions on whether society at large is accepting of Muslims. The Scottish Asians I interviewed who were born and brought up here have a very secure sense of belonging and inclusion; however Pakistani Muslims who immigrated here for education or through marriage speak of a very different experience. These women talk of living in extreme isolation before they came to Al-Meezan; of a feeling that Scottish society was completely closed to them.

For some, the reason for joining Al-Meezan was to meet people; the religious interest was secondary. They have become part of a huge social network with a large number of friends from all ages and social groups. “We were speaking before class about how it happens that a person has been dead for weeks and no-one has noticed,” says Mahnoor Campbell. “This could never happen at Al-Meezan.If I miss one Sunday class I receive at least half a dozen phone calls to find out if I’m alright.”

Sheikh adds: “I encourage my students to reach out to people around them. There is no harm in attending social events with non-Muslims - this is something which a lot of my students had regarded as being taboo.”

Al-Meezan has broken a lot of the stereotypes I had regarding Asian women. Organisations that are focused around educating women so that they are able to be better carers for their children along with providing them with a social network have a clear value for the whole of society.

Al-Meezan itself points to the value of such work. Another leaflet reads: “We recognise that lack of knowledge of Islamic values has resulted in the breakdown in communication between parents and young people; the collapse of the family unit due to strain in relationship between youth and parents; feelings of disenchantment amongst Muslim youth; and depression and isolation faced by parents dealing with these problems.”

It is interesting that if you remove the words Islam and Muslim, these are the very same problems which are faced by wider society.

A Place To Learn About Islam And Much More Besides (from The Herald )

RIYADH, June 23 (Reuters) - The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a league of 57 Muslim nations, said on Monday a Danish court’s rejection of a suit against a paper for printing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad could provoke “Islamophobia.”
The High Court for western Denmark on Thursday rejected a suit against Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that first published cartoons of Islam’s prophet, leading to deadly protests in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The court said the editors had not meant to depict Muslims as criminals or terrorists, the cartoons had not broken the law, and there was a relationship between acts of violence and Islam — comments that provoked outcry among Muslim groups in Denmark.
“It is a known fact that acts of terror have been carried out in the name of Islam and it is not illegal to make satire out of this relationship,” the court said.
The Saudi-based OIC, the largest grouping of Muslim countries, said the ruling could encourage “Islamophobia”, a fear or dislike of Islam, which the group has identified as existing in the West.
“The Danish ruling came as a surprise to the OIC at a time when almost all Western governments including the USA had made categorical statements rejecting any linkage between Islam and terrorism,” an OIC statement said.
“The linkage drawn by the Danish court … could create a precedent for exacerbation of Islamophobia.”
Many Muslims regard depictions of the Prophet as blasphemous. The Islamic Faith Society, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit against the Danish newspaper, said it might take its case to the European Court of Human Rights. (Writing by Andrew Hammond; Editing by Tim Pearce)

Danish cartoon ruling may prompt “Islamophobia”-OIC | Reuters

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