Muslim Heretics Conference

“We Muslims Have No Church!”

Human rights and secularism, says Ahmed An-Na’im, create a space for protest. And, surprisingly, the lawyer, who is originally from Sudan, sees in the Muslim law system, the Sharia, the third pillar of a humane civil society. Interview by Edith Kresta
| Bild:
Ahmed An-Na’im: “Every orthodoxy began as heresy” | The Sudanese born Abdullah Ahmed An-Na’im teaches law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Active in the fields of civil, human and international rights, he sees the Islamic Sharia as an important point of reference for him. The Muslim law system, which dates back to the seventh century, must, in his opinion, always be open to being questioned.
It can, however, even today, provide answers through fresh interpretations, which each person must be prepared to carry out for him or herself. The Sharia is not, according to him, to be thought of as a national law, but rather as a frame of moral values similar to that provided for Christianity by the Ten Commandments.
“One must engage with a situation as it actually is,” says An-Na’im, “so religion is certainly going to play an important role in social development in Islamic countries”. The lawyer is currently working on a project entitled “The Future of the Sharia”, which is looking at the effects of modern global conditions on Islamic societies. He has come to Berlin at the invitation of the Irmgard Coninx Foundation.
Professor An-Na’im, you are very much involved in human, civil and international rights issues; at the same time, however, you also like to turn to the Sharia for guidance. Do the two things go together?
Ahmed An-Na’im: I do not distinguish between secularism and religion because I believe that in the secular there is much that is religious and it is difficult to separate them. I do think, however, that religion is a very strong social and mobilising force. If you exclude religion from the social and political processes, you will find yourself being cut off from those who are religious.
And that would mean, in your country, Sudan, very many!
An-Na’im: Yes, human rights and secularism need political support. If you fail to convince people that secularism and human rights are good for them, and if you do not manage to convince them of this in terms of their own religious beliefs, then you leave the field to the fundamentalists. You then give them the opportunity to mobilise the power of faith for their own political purposes. And, by the way, religion has not disappeared from Europe either! Those values which society chooses to uphold, whether in national institutions, or laws, are all religious values.
Is religion to you then the ethical-cultural tradition?
An-Na’im: Yes, in one sense. I do not believe that secularism has any ready answers to profound ethical problems. In order to fulfil its function, secularism needs to be ethically minimalist. There are many questions in which it cannot interfere. It can handle the basics about how we can live with and maintain respect for one another. But answers to questions on things like abortion or the right to take one’s own life must be sought elsewhere. For most people, it would be religion that they would turn to.
In Europe, the word Sharia is associated with hands being cut off, with stoning or the oppression of women.
An-Na’im: First of all, I believe that religion and the state should be separate, institutionally. If one looks at Muslim history, one sees that the two have always been treated as separate entities. The idea that politics and the state go together is postcolonial. In Muslim history, this came about only in the 20th century. Before then an Islamic state, like the one in Iran, was something unknown.
What is it then that you mean by Sharia?
An-Na’im: The Sharia appears in the Koran in the sense that believers look at the sources of their faith in order to find guidance. The Sharia is not a law. The state cannot decide to make a family law out of it. It would then no longer be the Sharia, but rather the political will of the state.
But the Sharia does, nevertheless, affect the justice system. Take the case of the law of succession, for example, where women in Muslim countries, as in many others, do not have equality.
All that is only a legitimising discourse for the existing power relations. If you look at the Islamic world then you see that there is an enormous difference in the interpretation of individual points. It is always, in the final analysis, the political will to get something done that is decisive. Islam, Marxism or nationalism can all be made to work for one’s own cause.
So religion should not be treated any differently to other ideologies that serve to legitimate claims to power?
An-Na’im: That’s right. But the right of every Muslim to live his or her life in accordance with the Sharia must be accepted. One must be sure to guard against any authorities that assume the right of interpretation for themselves. A Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a Christian man. Why not? It is the Muslim’s duty to ask why. We do not accept any single religious body as authority. We have no Church.
In Germany an attempt is being made to set up a Muslim association with which the state can negotiate on behalf of Muslims living here.
An-Na’im: I believe this to be completely misguided. I have difficulties with the idea of someone else defining what my religion should mean to me. No one should be given the power of deciding what is right or wrong.
What would the alternative be?
An-Na’im: Civil participation. Full civil participation. Whether I am a Muslim or not is irrelevant to me as a citizen. It is the duty of the state to treat me as a citizen. If I am in need of money so that my children can receive religious education, then the state must help me. These are civil rights. Without this you get a clergy which will accentuate difference. This, in turn, makes integration of Muslims more problematic because they are then identified as Muslim, while their fellow citizens are defined through their nationality, not their religious affiliations.
For you then it’s about deconstructing what lies behind the veil. So, what is behind it?
An-Na’im: Power, privileges, hegemony. These things are all the result of human actions, in religion as in politics. There is no divine in the abstract.
Do you believe in Revelation?
An-Na’im: It is always human beings who tell us what God says. This cannot be separated from questions of power. It all has to do with human relations. When we talk about Muslims rather than about Islam, then we are talking about the social context. And it is people who form, or fail to change it. Human rights and secularism are so important to me because they create a space within which I may protest.
Does your religion help you to find answers to your questions?
An-Na’im: Yes, but I reserve the right to answer them myself. There is much that religion gives me. There are some Muslims who see me as a heretic; that’s okay, as long as they don’t kill me.
This all sounds very modern, very individualistic. Does the Sharia, for you, rank among the legitimising bases of modern thought?
An-Na’im: There is nothing that has not already been thought, debated or rejected in the 1500-year history of Islam. My thinking is part of a long tradition.
How do those who lack your education go about finding their own answers in religion?
An-Na’im: If you want to have control over your own life, there is no alternative but to pursue education. If you want the power of self-determination, you cannot have anyone as guardian of your religion or your values. Whatever your value system is, it is you, not the Imam who must decide what is relevant and what isn’t. It is about taking responsibility for yourself. What I want to say is, heresy is necessary if you want a living religion.
Every orthodoxy began as heresy. All religions have their roots in heresy. Christianity began as a Jewish heresy; Islam was once a Christian-Jewish heresy. It is in breaking with tradition that we strike the vein of greatest creativity. This is true of all societies. So celebrate heresy! In Europe you have both the right and the opportunity to do so.
It is not so easy for many Muslim women, though, who find themselves oppressed or threatened in the name of honour or religion. What is your advice to them?
An-Na’im: Protest! Fight! There is no progress without struggle, not even for women in Europe. Just think about it: For how long have women in this country had the vote? Less than ninety years. One always has to fight against particular interpretations of one’s own culture. There is no other alternative.
Interview conducted by Edith Kresta
© TAZ/Qantara.de 2006
Translated from the German by Ron Walker

Qantara.de - Interview with Ahmed An-Na’im - “We Muslims Have No Church!”

Thursday, 24 July 2008 00:00 www.daily.pk

Before addressing the subject of Muslim chemistry, however, one crucial matter needs to be raised. It concerns the use of the word Alchemy instead of chemistry. This is another instance of historical corruption fooling so many who have no perception of the depths some scholarship can descend to in order to convey distorted images of aspects of history, such as that of Islamic science. Alchemy, indeed, is a corrupt translation of the Arabic word Chemia (chemistry,) preceded by the article Al (which means: the), and which the Arabs always use (like the French and others for that matter) in front of their subject such as Al-Tib (medicine) al-Riyadiyat (mathematics) etc… If this was applied to other subjects, it would become al-medicine; al-mathematics, al-geography and so on… Only Baron Carra de Vaux had had the presence of mind to pointing to this, however briefly. Somehow al-Chemy should be translated literally The Chemistry and not Alchemy in English; and La Chimie and not l’alchimie in French. The fact that only Westerners translated or dealt with the subject, followed by rather very respectful or shy Muslim scholars means that this corrupt word of al-chemy has remained, and has become the norm.

The reason why alchemy is used instead of chemistry might have another motive behind it. Chemistry means a modern science; alchemy means the amateur, the occult, the second or third rate. Alchemy belongs to the Muslims; chemistry, of course, does not; instead is the realm of the good. This notion conveyed by some Western scholars, that alchemy ended with the Muslims and chemistry began with the Westerners has no historical ground. The reason is simple: all sciences began in some part of the world, most likely China or the Ancient Middle East, or India, at level: 1, the most basic, and then graduated to levels 2, 3, 4, and higher, through the centuries, until they reached us at the level they are, and will evolve in different places in the future. This is the story of every science, and of every sign of our modern world. Thus, it was not that we had alchemy at one point, and then, with the Europeans it became chemistry. This is a crass notion like much else coming from scholars holding such a view. Chemistry began under one form, associated with occult and similar practices, and then evolved, gradually becoming more refined through the centuries until it took our modern forms and rules. Many elements concourse to support this point. Here they follow.

Muslims Revolutionised Chemistry
First and foremost many of the products or discoveries made by the Muslims have become part of our modern chemical world; in fact were revolutions in the advance of the science. Mathe summarises the legacy of Muslim chemists, which include the discovery of alcohol, nitric and sulphuric acids, silver nitrate and potassium, the determination of the weight of many bodies, the mastery of techniques of sublimation, crystallization and distillation. Muslim chemistry also took many industrial uses including: tinctures and their applications in tanning and textiles; distillation of plants, of flowers, the making of perfumes and therapeutic pharmacy. More specifically, some such advances that have revolutionised our world are expertly raised by Multhauf. Thus in the De aluminibus, composed in Muslim Spain, (whose author Multhauf does not recognise) but could be Al-Majriti, are described experiments to obtain the chloride of mercury, corrosive sublimate (Hg Cl2), process and outcome which mark the beginning of synthetic chemistry. Multhauf notes indeed that the chloride of mercury obtained did not just become part of the chemist’s repertoire but also inspired the discovery of other synthetic substances. Corrosive sublimate is capable of chlorinating other materials, and this, Multhauf, again, notes, marks the beginning of mineral acids. In the field of industrial chemistry and heavy chemicals, Multhauf notes again that one of the greatest advances of the medieval times was the manufacture of alum from `aluminous’ rocks, through artificial weathering of alunite, which he describes. And in the same context the Muslims managed to perform the crystallisation of `ammonia alum’ (ammonium aluminium sulphate). Multhauf, however, falls in the same trap as many of his colleagues, asserting in his conclusion that it was European Renaissance which gave chemistry a secure and significant place in science, and that with the Muslims all that was, was `alchemy;’ and Multhauf states this in full contradiction of what he had just described, and so expertly, and he had himself classified under modern chemistry.

Fair Historians of Chemistry
A scholar who from the initial point gave Islamic chemistry its due, and hardly failed to call it so, was Holmyard. Holmyard, indeed, has the right qualifications to discuss Islamic che mistry, and more than any other scholar, with the exception of Ruska, and also Levey. Holmyard is indeed both a chemist with great reknown, and also an Arabist in training, rightly qualified to look at the science from the expert angles, unlike others, who are either Arabists and so understand little in chemistry, or are experts in chemistry and understand nothing in Arabic. Holmyard notes that the rise and progress of Islamic chemistry is given very little space, and whatever information exists is erroneous and misleading, a fact due partly to Kopp’s unfavourable opinion of Islamic chemistry, and the hasty conclusions drawn by Berthelot from his superficial studies of Islamic material. And neither Kopp, nor Berthelot were Arabists, which, as Holmyard notes, makes their conclusions on Muslim chemistry unable to stand the test of criticism as more information is available. Of course, today’s scholars can always ignore evidence that has come out since Kopp and Berthelot, and still stick with their misinformation, errors, or distorted statements, and blame such on either one of them. This tactic is in fact very common amongst scholars writing in any field of history, who shape and reshape events at will and have all the necessary sources and references to justify their writing. Some `scholars’ even go as far as blaming the material in the library of their university, stating in their preface or conclusion that any shortcoming in their work was the result of their access to such limited material.
To return to Holmyard, in his Makers of Chemistry, tracing the evolution of the science from the very early times until our century, and even if not having at his disposal the vast amount of information many of today’s scholars have, he produced an excellent and encompassing, thorough work. It includes none of the usual gaps of centuries one finds with other historians; nor does it include the discrepancies caused by ’sudden’, ‘enlightened’ `miraculous’ breakthroughs out of nothing.

Transmission of Chemistry to Europe
Of course Muslim chemistry, like other sciences was heavily translated into Latin, and also into local languages, which explains its spread to Europe (more on this in the chapter on the transfer of Muslim science to Europe). Many of the manuscripts translated have anonymous authors. Of the known ones, Robert of Chester, a twelfth century scholar, translated Liber de compositione alchemise. At about the same time, Hugh of Santalla made the earliest Latin translation of lawh azzabarjad (the Emerald table). Alfred of Sareshel translated the part of Ibn Sinna’s Kitab al-Shiffa (the Book of Healing) that deals with chemistry. It is, however, as per usual, the Italian, Gerard of Cremona, who made the more valuable translations of Al-Razi’s study and classification of salts and alums (sulphates) and the related operations the De aluminibus et salibus, whose Arabic original is preserved. The many versions of this work had a decisive influence on subsequent operations in the West, more generally on mineralogy; as did others in the formation of the foundations of such science. In fairly recent times, Holmyard, Kraus, and above all Ruska, have devoted considerable focus to Muslim chemistry, much of which, unfortunately, is not accessible to non German speakers, who thus will be deprived from forming a truest picture of Islamic chemistry.

Conclusion
After such an expose, however brief, should we still consider Muslim chemistry as an occult practice called alchemia? Are not many aspects of such science exactly what we have in our modern chemistry? And if this is not enough, here is what Muslims thought of the occult alchemia. Both Ibn Sina and Ibn Khaldoun attacked the experimentalists who sought to turn ordinary metals into precious ones, gold in particular. Ibn Sina, for instance, in The Book of Minerals, denounces the artisans who dye metals in order to give them the outside resemblance of silver and gold. He asserts that fabrication of silver and gold from other metals is `practically impossible and unsustainable from a scientific and philosophical point of view.’ Ibn Khaldoun, for his part, denounces the frauds who apply on top of silver jewelry a thin layer of gold, and make other manipulations of metals. To Ibn Khaldoun, the Divine wisdom wanted gold and silver to be rare metals to guarantee profits and wealth. Their disproportionate growth would make transactions useless and would `run contrary to such wisdom.’
It is, thus, time to give Muslim chemistry its due place in history. For that to happen, the concentrated effort of Arabic speaking, able scholars, with some honesty, ought to get on with the task of writing truest accounts of Islamic chemistry in history, do for this science what Rashed, Djebbar and Yuskevitch did for Islamic mathematics, or what al-Hasan and Hill did for Islamic engineering, and what King, Saliba, Kennedy and Samso seek to do for Islamic astronomy, bringing Islamic chemistry out of the slumber others have dug in for it. 

Islam’s Contribution to Chemistry

NEW YORK (CNN) – Ads promoting Islam are to be placed on New York subway cars in September, but a U.S. congressman finds people sponsoring the messages unacceptable.

Siraj Wahhaj is imam of a Brooklyn mosque and a backer of pro-Islam ads on New York subway cars.

“I have no problem with the ad itself, but I have a very, very real problem with those behind it,” Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, said Tuesday. He is urging the Metropolitan Transit Authority to reject the ads.

The campaign is to feature ads on 1,000 of the subway system’s roughly 6,200 cars. The main sponsor is a grass-roots organization, Islamic Circle of North America.

The ads, simple black-and-white panels, will feature key words or phrases about Islam on one side of the panel such as “Head Scarf?” or “Prophet Muhammad?” and the words “You deserve to know” along with the Web site address WhyIslam.org on the other side.

“The idea is to evoke certain thoughts in the mindset of the person who is looking at the ads and get them to a point where they can reflect upon certain words that one could define as hot words or keywords that get thrown around a lot but are not necessarily defined in the most proper context,” said New York University’s Imam Khalid Latif, a cleric who is promoting the project in a YouTube video created by the Islamic Circle. Watch the controversy surrounding the subway ads »

Another of the backers of the advertising campaign — which will launch in September to coincide with the monthlong Islamic holiday of Ramadan — is Siraj Wahhaj, imam of a Brooklyn mosque.

Wahhaj was the first Muslim to lead a prayer before the House of Representatives, but King objects to him because he was a character witness for convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

“He is a known Islamic extremist, and you would be giving him credibility and stature through a known government facility,” said King, ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee.

Don’t Miss

• Islamic Circle of North America

Wahhaj also appeared on a list of 170 potential unindicted co-conspirators in the 1993 bombing case. A prosecutor said that not everyone on the list was considered a co-conspirator.

On Monday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did not join in King’s outrage about the ads.

“If you were to advocate becoming a Muslim, I assume the First Amendment would protect you,” he said.

But King, noting that the ads would be up during the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, said, “I’m calling on the MTA not to have these ads, not to go forward with them, and I don’t see this as a free speech issue at all.”

King said he sent a letter to the MTA on Monday night demanding that it reject the ads.

The New York Post has reacted strongly to the ads, running a cover photograph of Wahhaj on Monday with the headline “Jihad Train” and posting an article on its Web site with the headline “Train-ing day for jihadists” and the first paragraph saying, “Allah aboard!”

Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy for their role in a plot to bomb the United Nations, FBI headquarters in Manhattan, two tunnels in New York and a bridge connecting New Jersey with Manhattan, all in one day.

The government said the group also was responsible for the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in that case, said Wahhaj’s name was included in a filing that prosecutors were required to provide to defense attorneys in the case, a list of all the names of people who could possibly be foreseen to come up in the evidence. The filing, McCarthy said, has been called a “co-conspirator list.” But Wahhaj was never named by the prosecution.

“The only time he came up in a meaningful way before the jury is when the defense called him as a witness,” McCarthy recalled.

McCarthy said that although the list named anyone the government might allege during the trial was a co-conspirator, not everyone on the list was so labeled.

Wahhaj said Monday that he was a character witness for Abdel-Rahman in the context of “what we knew about him before the incident,” citing him as a “scholar in Islam” and “a great reciter of the Quran.”

“People try to make the connection as if I’m endorsing some bad deeds that [were] done by Sheik Abdel-Rahman,” he said. “That had nothing to do with it.”

He added, “not only have I never been charged with anything, not one FBI agent has ever asked me one question in relationship to that bombing.”

Wahhaj also said that he regrets some of his more controversial statements, such as calling the FBI and the CIA “terrorists.”

“What I was saying is that not all the FBI or CIA are terrorists, but there are some elements in there,” he said. “So if you want to accuse some Muslims [of being terrorists], OK. These Muslims did that, but don’t undermine the entire faith. That’s what the message is.”

Wahhaj said the New York Post’s “cheesy” and “anti-Islam” reaction to his participation in the Subway Project is “the very reason the young Muslims want to put out this ad campaign.”

Islamic Circle spokesman Azeem Khan called the situation a “perfect microcosm” of what the ads seek to address: that Wahhaj’s portrayal in media reports is similar to how Islam is often depicted.

“I think that even more so reinforces the idea as to why a project like this is necessary, where Muslims have to be more pro-active in terms of educating people about their religion, by no means proselytizing the faith in any capacity, but really setting a standard and defining what mainstream Islam stands for,” Latif said.

The project is the Islamic Circle’s first such advertising campaign. The group has run ads before but not on New York’s subways.

The transit authority said the cost of the monthlong campaign is about $48,000.

Islam subway ads cause stir in New York - CNN.com

By Ron Kampeas
Published: 07/23/2008

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The choir danced a hora, the fiddler played a hoedown, Joe Lieberman cited scripture and Pastor John Hagee said his enemies would never draw him away from Israel.
Thousands of followers of Christians United for Israel, the movement Hagee founded, traveled this week

from across the United States to pack the cavernous Washington Convention Center in a defiant show of strength.

In the signature “Night to Honor Israel” on Tuesday, Hagee depicted himself as emerging from a lion’s den of media dissimulation and political iniquity.
“There have been a great many misrepresentations and a great deal of confusion sown,” Hagee said, his baritone booming over a constant swell of cheers and blessings.
Hagee was referring to the intense and at times outright hostile scrutiny he suffered this year after he endorsed the presidential candidacy of U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
Within weeks Hagee withdrew his endorsement, unwilling to suffer a depiction of himself — some of it distorted — as a bigot who reviled Catholics, gays and Muslims and who was insensitive to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.
The experience clearly scarred Hagee. His speeches are usually optimistic prophecies of an Israel thriving against the odds, but on Tuesday night his sermon was peppered with dark, wistful humor.
His routine litany of “Never agains” punctuating pledges to protect the Jews from terrorists, Iran and anti-Semites was rounded out with a new promise Tuesday night: “What will I say the next time I’m asked to endorse a presidential candidate? Never again.”
Hagee described a “vicious media firestorm” — not surprisingly, the media was barred from much of the four-day conference. During the parts open to the press Tuesday, CUFI volunteers rushed to abort any attempts to interview conference attendees.

“You are not covering our dark motives, you are expressing your dark motives,” Hagee told reporters.

Hagee’s strident support for Israel and the settlement policies of Israeli hawks has been controversial since he launched his first “Night to Honor Israel” in San Antonio, the hometown of his Cornerstone megachurch, in the early 1980s.
Since then, he claims to have raised $30 million — a portion of it for building in West Bank settlements — and in 2006 went nationwide by founding CUFI with an array of other popular evangelical preachers.
Hagee said the attacks he suffered subsequent to his McCain endorsement were nothing less than a campaign to separate Americans from their beliefs.

“We need to be careful that we don’t allow belief in the Bible to be unacceptable,” he said.
It was clear that the most hurtful episode for Hagee was the emergence of out-of-context excerpts of sermons in the mid-1990s in which he attempted to offer a theological explanation for how God would allow the mass murder of the Jews.

Adolf Hitler, he said at the time, was a demonic agent of God driving the Jews back to their historic homeland.
Such a “theology of suffering” is not inconsistent with an evangelical outlook that seeks a divine explanation for even the most incomprehensible historical events. In the heat of the presidential campaign, however, a few liberal bloggers and media commentators twisted this relatively commonplace exegesis into Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.
In an issue of The Torch, the movement’s magazine distributed at the conference, Gary Bauer, a leading political evangelical, said the attacks were “obscenely distorting.”

David Brog, CUFI’s Jewish executive director, likened Hagee’s suffering during the episode to a “new inquisition.”
“Breathe in deeply and you can still smell the embers smoldering around Pastor Hagee’s public persona,” Brog wrote.
Bruce Wilson, a progressive blogger, posted the video of the Holocaust sermons. That led Hagee’s lawyers to force YouTube to pull down any video depicting his preaching, citing copyright infringement.
Some of the defiance on Tuesday night masked a conciliatory tone, however.

Hagee again expressed his skepticism of land-for-peace formulas, but added, “We do not decide — the Israelis decide and they alone have the right to make that decision.”

The reference apparently was to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the Reform Jewish leader who earlier this year urged Jewish groups to cut off Hagee in part because of his strident advocacy of settlement building and concerns that he would seek to undermine Israeli peace moves.
Hagee also was careful when he referred to Islamist terrorists, describing them as hewing to a “radical interpretation of Islam” — a moderation of his earlier, more sweeping condemnation of the religion.

He also had as guests at the event Roman Catholic lay leaders who had criticized Hagee for his denunciations of anti-Semitism in which he used language once associated with radical Vatican-hating Protestants.

Asking Catholic League leader Bill Donohue to rise to applause, Hagee said they had settled their differences.
The thrust of the evening’s message was that if anything, the events have driven Hagee and his Jewish friends closer together. The 3,000 CUFI followers waved Israeli and American flags throughout the event. Hagee’s choir and orchestra slid from a traditional hora-driven rendition of “Hava Nagila” into a country western version complete with soaring fiddle.
His longtime friend from San Antonio, Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, blessed the evening’s events.

Dan Gillerman, the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told Hagee’s followers that their love for Israel sustained him during his six years in the post.

“I pray that God will continue to bless you with success,” Gillerman said.
The biggest “get,” however, was U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the first Jew to land a spot on a major national presidential ticket when he ran for vice president with Al Gore in 2000 as a Democrat.
J Street, a new left-wing pro-Israel lobby, on Monday had delivered a petition with 42,000 signatures to Lieberman’s office urging “Don’t Go Joe.” It cited Hagee’s inflammatory statements about Muslims and gays, as well as his backing for settlements.
Lieberman, who appeared to a hero’s welcome, cited the petition only to say that he ignored its pleadings. He said he recognized Hagee as flawed, but that was mitigated by the greater good he helped bring about.

Citing scripture, Lieberman said the same could be said of Moses and Miriam, whose flaws of anger and pettiness are noted in the Bible.
“I can only imagine what the bloggers would have to say about Moses and Miriam,” Lieberman said. “Judge each other with the humility that comes from the certainty that each and every one of us is imperfect.”
The presence of Lieberman, a leading surrogate for McCain, also underscored a political tinge to the proceedings, despite Hagee’s assurances that he was out of politics for good.
Hagee’s praise for President Bush was drowned out by cheers and applause. Bauer, introducing Lieberman, likened him to President Ronald Reagan and praised him for standing up to the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and running as an independent in 2006 after he was ousted in a primary.

Lieberman described an amendment he sponsored last year declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group as a “no-brainer” that drew the votes of 76 senators. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, opposed the amendment.

Lieberman, whose approval rate in Connecticut and among Jews is plummeting, clearly enjoyed the moment. He loved CUFI, he said, because “I can go back to scripture more than with many other groups — frankly, including many Jewish groups.”

Lieberman, Hagee hook up at CUFI parley - JTA, Jewish & Israel News

The king of Morocco knows women can lead the way in moderating the messages of Islam. Britain should adopt his approach

• Wednesday July 23, 2008

The British government’s announcement about tackling religious extremism by giving young Muslims “citizenship lessons” among other things is an interesting one. It’s easy to sneer at initiatives in the face of the omnipresent threat of Islamic extremism worldwide, but Britain is not the only country pursuing such an approach. So too is Morocco, where I live some of the year. On the edge of Europe, Morocco stands proudly in the Arab Muslim world. Islam is the state religion but King Mohammed VI has placed Morocco firmly in alliance with the west.

His approach has provoked reaction. On May 16 2003, suicide bombers in Casablanca killed 45 people heralding a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism and signalling a wake-up call for the king. Terrorism touched Moroccan citizens and also put at risk his strategy for foreign investment and tourism.

The parliamentary elections in Morocco last September had a record low turnout of only 37% especially among the young. The implications are not lost on Mohammed VI. Neighbouring Algeria casts its dark violent shadow over this small country. The king knows he must give Moroccans – especially young unemployed men – a reason to invest in his country’s political and economic future. Otherwise, Islamist extremists will find new recruits just as they did in Algeria. Some will find their way to Europe and the west, just as others will stay in Morocco itself. That’s why Mohammed VI needs to bring jobs and foreign investment if he is to curtail the threat.

But he is not content to rely on economic growth alone. The king understands that it is in civil society that the battle to contain Islamic extremists will be won. Education is therefore also essential. As Islam is the state religion, the kind of controversies that muddy the waters in Britain are less apparent. Not that his initiative is without controversy. For the king has gone beyond traditionalists and is feminising the face of Islam and embracing Islamic feminism. Women, he believes, can be the purveyors of a moderate humanitarian Islamic message.

At the heart of Mohammed VI’s initiative is the recruitment and education of mourchidat (”female guides”). The mourchidat first made news in April 2006 when the Moroccan government announced that the first 50 had graduated. The second intake – another 50 – are currently being prepared for their role in the capital, Rabat. They will work in local communities helping women with religious questions and giving support in schools and prisons. By working face-to-face in the community, women (still the primary care givers and nurturers in Moroccan society in their role as mothers, sisters, aunts, friends and community guardians), will present a moderate face of Islam and curtail fundamentalist violent excesses.

September 11 2001 showed that in an increasingly global interconnected world, terrorism, like trade, knows no boundaries. Mohammed VI’s initiatives are leading the way in understanding another implication – namely that cross-cultural understanding is vital, and that women can lead the way in moderating the messages of Islam.

The British government and leaders of the Muslim community should adopt his approach. In Britain, the paucity of women speaking on behalf of and for the Muslim community is striking, yet education starts inside homes and families, and continues in the informal spaces of civil society like voluntary groups, schools, and mosques.

To tackle the terrorist threat, and stop the subversion of Islam in its name, the face of Islam must be feminised in the public, and private sphere in Britain as well. And initiatives which promote inter-faith communication and cross cultural understanding must be supported. Without this, as Asim Siddique points out, in a culture where religion and the state are separate, Muslims and others will distrust initiatives which target one sector of the community without reaching out to others

Helen Wilkinson: Britain, like Morocco, should feminise the face of Islam | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Andrea Useem

The Emergent Islam I Want

I hate to admit it, but I don’t like going to mosques. Whether it’s the crudely written signs informing me I must cover myself, or the awkward way men and women avoid each other, or the Friday preaching that is just so irrelevant to my life, I usually feel happiest when I’m walking out the door.

I long for a Muslim environment that is spiritually fresher, deeper, and, perhaps most importantly, untainted by a Saudi-style conservatism or bitterness over the war on terror. With a small but growing number of “emergent Christians” – and now “emergent Jews” – reinventing the very idea of religious communities, I have also begun to hope for the emergence of a post-modern, post-9/11 Muslim faith life.

Emerging Christians struggle with stale ways of “doing church” they say are left over from the 1950s, or even the beginning of the Reformation, wrote Sam Crum, pastor of The River, a small emerging congregation in Florida, in a Facebook discussion with me. Emerging congregations – including a number of Jewish ones – emphasize authenticity and deemphasize hierarchy; both of these qualities, coincidentally or not, overlap with the values of the Web 2.0 world, where everyone – not just the anointed, institutional leaders – are content creators.

At The River’s MySpace blog, a husband-and-wife team describe their earlier life in a mainstream evangelical congregation. “We oddly enough began to learn some bad habits of a duty-driven life and became very religious, hypocritical, and hungry for something more,” they write. “Although we had both come to know Jesus Christ, we were still trying to unlearn and deconstruct some religious systems that were not only damaging to our ministries, but to our marriage.”

My journey isn’t about Jesus, but I sure can relate. My husband and I also lived through a “duty-driven” period of near-fundamentalism, when we were immersed in Muslim communities that emphasized conformity to a particular interpretation of Islam. That interpretation was largely inspired by Salafism, the fundamentalist version of Islam that hails from Saudi Arabia.

We weren’t alone in this experience. “Anyone who coverted to Islam in the 1990s came under the spell of Salafism,” Muslim blogger and ex-Salafi Tariq Nelson told me recently.

After ardor comes burnout, and many Muslims, and converts in particular, don’t survive the transition. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, now a Christian and conservative counter-terrorism expert, described his own journey out of a soul-numbing Salafism in his recent memoir, “My Year in Radical Islam.” Long-time convert Jeffery Lang has warned fellow Muslims for years that many converts and young people are leaving Islam; a recent report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that for every person who joins the faith, another leaves – challenging the common assertion that Islam is the “fastest-growing religion” in the U.S.

For me, Islam has remained compelling for the same reasons that attracted me in the first place: the simplicity of God’s oneness, the effectiveness of daily prayer, the discipline of fasting, the compassion of charity, and the magnificence of pilgrimage – in short, the five pillars of Islam.

While fundamentalism was probably destined for a short stay in my own life, 9/11 made that transformation irreversible. Today I have an almost physical aversion to anything Muslim that smacks of Salafi fundamentalism. I am equally impatient with American Muslims’ insistence on their own victimhood at the hands of “the media,” as if suicide bombers and cartoon-rioters were somehow an invention of Fox News. The last time I attended Friday prayers at my mosque, I walked out half-way through when an Egyptian-born preacher lamented how hard it is to raise children with “Islamic values” instead of “Western values” – with the obvious implication that the former was good and the latter was bad.

So while emerging Christians gather around a narrative of dissatisfaction with status-quo church life, so I imagine American Muslims finally repudiating Salafism and all its trappings, realizing that fundamentalism can – and often has – lead down a dark road to hatred and violence. And while I’m re-imagining American Muslim life, I’d also like to order up a come-as-you-are, online-friendly, community experience where I can be myself and deepen my faith.

Yes, I know, it’s a too-tall order. Not because there aren’t other American Muslims dissatisfied with status-quo mosque life – in my experience there are many – but because, initially at least, the numbers may be small.

From my perch, however, I do see lights twinkling across the country, people like author Sumbul Ali-Karamali or media entrepreneur Shahed Amanullah or activist Saleemah Abdul Ghafur, and communal venues like TalkIslam.info or the Progressive Muslim Network in my own backyard of Washington D.C.

The emerging church movement came about because a bunch of regular folks got off their duffs and did something; that’s inspiring. The challenge for Muslims like myself is to create rather than just critique, and, hopefully, build a faith life we can live with.

Andrea Useem publishes the website www.ReligionWriter.com. A journalist, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and a Muslim, she is currently writing a booklet on religious congregations and Web 2.0 technologies for the Alban Institute’s Congregational Resource Guide.

On Faith: Guest Voices: The Emergent Islam I Want

What jihad really means

Instead of condemning extremists, too many Muslim leaders are protecting them by hiding behind the supposed peaceful nature of ‘jihad’

Tarek Fatah and Salma Siddiqui

Citizen Special

Thursday, July 24, 2008

‘Had there been Nobel Prizes in 1000, they would have gone almost exclusively to Muslims.” These are the words of Martin Kramer, a Jewish scholar of Islam and Arab history, published in the Jerusalem Post on Dec. 31, 1999.

The question that perplexes the world today is not just, “what happened to Muslim civilization and what caused its catastrophic decline in the millennium that followed?” but also, “why can’t Muslims recover?”

The recent exchange in the Citizen between two Muslim letter writers provides us with an answer.

The exchange was a window into the ongoing debate within the Muslim community for the very soul of Islam. Akbar Hussain had observed, “When the non-Muslim world says with clear conviction that Islam propagates extremism, Muslims all around the world, even the terrorists, cry foul, and declare that they are maligning Islam.”

Respondent Safaa Fouda protested: “Islam as a faith never made (its) followers extremists, extremism is an ideology that can emanate from any background be it religious, political, or cultural.” Ironically, she proved Akbar Hussain’s point by invoking Islam and quoting from the Koran to deflect criticism of Islamic extremists who openly march with an AK-47 in one hand and the Koran in the other.

Today, as Muslims struggle to find their bearings in a world that is leaving them behind in almost every aspect of life, a knee-jerk defensiveness will simply not work. The veil of deception that is being thrown over the actions and ideology of jihadis in our midst needs to be ripped off.

Instead of condemning the jihadis, too many Muslim leaders are defending them by hiding behind the supposed peaceful nature of “jihad.”

At every opportunity they get, Muslim leaders take to the pulpit and state with disarming smiles and polite language that jihad is a peaceful exertion of spiritual warfare waged against oneself — against one’s ego and against one’s evil intentions, a sort of a cleansing of the soul. This is all true, because the Prophet after returning from a battle told his colleagues: “You are returning from a lesser jihad to a greater jihad,” and when asked to clarify, he said the greater jihad “is the jihad against your passionate souls.”

However, make no mistake: the jihad that Osama bin Laden has launched against all of us is, unfortunately, the lesser jihad.

The jihad that Momin Khawaja talks about in his musings is the jihad of warfare as clearly enunciated by such 20th-century Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood as Syed Qutb and Hassan al-Banna and Pakistan’s Syed Maudoodi.

This triad are ideological gurus of the world jihadi movements and their apologists in Canada. It is not what the Koran says that matters; it is how Mr. Qutb, Mr. Banna, and Mr. Maudoodi interpret the Koran for the jihadis that needs to be discussed.

In the fall of 2007, Islamists set up a stand at Toronto’s annual “Word on the Street” book festival where they distributed a free booklet titled Towards Understanding Islam, written by Mr. Maudoodi. In the booklet, Mr. Maudoodi exhorts ordinary Muslims to launch jihad, as in armed struggle, against non-Muslims.

“Jihad is part of this overall defense of Islam,” he writes. In case the reader is left with any doubt about the meaning of the word “jihad,” Mr. Maudoodi clarifies: “In the language of the Divine Law, this word [jihad] is used specifically for the war that is waged solely in the name of God against those who perpetrate oppression as enemies of Islam. This supreme sacrifice is the responsibility of all Muslims.”

Maudoodi goes on to label Muslims who refuse the call to armed jihad as apostates:

“Jihad is as much a primary duty as are daily prayers or fasting. One who avoids it is a sinner. His every claim to being a Muslim is doubtful. He is plainly a hypocrite who fails in the test of sincerity and all his acts of worship are a sham, a worthless, hollow show of deception.”

If Muslim countries do not go to war against the enemies of Islam, Mr. Maudoodi says a worldwide uprising by ordinary Muslims is the answer. He writes: “Muslims of the whole world must fight the common enemy.”

Does it surprise anyone that ordinary Muslims in Britain and Canada have rallied to his call and declared jihad against their own countries of birth?

If Mr. Maudoodi’s exhortations to jihad are not enough, we have the words of the late Hassan al-Banna being distributed in our schools and universities. Mr. Banna makes it quite clear that the word “jihad” means armed conflict. He mocks the concept of the lesser and greater jihad, suggesting that this theory is a conspiracy so that “Muslims should become negligent.”

In addition, here is what Mr. Qutb, another Egyptian stalwart of the Islamist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, writes in his classic book Milestones:

“Any place where Islamic Shariah is not enforced and where Islam is not dominant becomes the Home of Hostility (Dar-ul-Harb). … A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it, whether it be his birthplace or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located.”

Syed Qutb reduces the message of Islam to the rejection of all laws made by parliaments. He says: “The basis of the message [Islam] is that one should accept the Shariah without any question and reject all other laws in any shape or form. This is Islam.”

Unless the leaders of Canadian mosques as well as the Islamic organizations denounce the doctrine of jihad as pronounced by the Muslim Brotherhood, and distance themselves from the ideology of Mr. Qutb, Mr. Banna and Mr. Maudoodi, the propaganda that “jihad means peace” will be meaningless.

It will merely reinforce the suspicions of many Canadians who feel some overseas groups are pulling the strings in this carefully staged puppet show.

Tarek Fatah is the author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.

E-mail: tarekfatah@rogers.com.

Salma Siddiqui is an Ottawa businesswoman and vice-president of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

Print Story - canada.com network