Quran underscores complete equality

Saturday, September 27, 2008

By Mohammed Elfiki

This article is in response to a column entitled “Sharia law spreads influence,” by Cal Thomas, which you published in July.

Once again, Mr. Thomas is spreading misunderstanding about Islam. He has written a piece that takes a naive view about Sharia law. He has made Islam look like a religion that is against women’s rights. In fact, Islamic law protects women more than any other laws.

The Quran provides clear evidence that woman is completely equated with man in the sight of God in terms of her rights and responsibilities. (”Whoever does good, whether male or female, and he is a believer, we will most certainly make him live a happy life, and we will most certainly give them their reward for the best of what they did.”)

Woman, according to the Quran, is not blamed for Adam’s first mistake. Both were wrong, both repented, and both were forgiven. In one verse, Adam was specifically blamed. (”Then they both ate of it, so their evil inclinations became manifest to them, and they both began to cover themselves with leaves of the garden, and Adam disobeyed his Lord, so his life became evil (to him).”)

Islam gave women a variety of rights 1,400 years ago. In Islamic law, women have an unqualified right to own property, a right that does not change in marriage. She is also free to dispose of her property in any way she likes, without consulting anyone. A Muslim woman is not required to change her maiden name in marriage, a symbolic demonstration that even in marriage, Islam recognizes her independence. It was not until the late 1870s in England (and later elsewhere in Europe) that married women achieved the right to enter contracts and own property.

In most cases in Islamic law, the female’s share of inheritance is half that of the male’s share. However, women are less burdened financially. Men are financially responsible for all the female dependents in the family. Women do not have any financial obligations. Even if the wife is rich, she is not required to spend a penny on the household. The full responsibility for her food, clothing, housing, medication, recreation, etc., is her husband’s.

Domestic violence is rare in a typical Muslim family. Every husband knows that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, never hit a woman in his life. He actually said, “The most perfect believers are the best in conduct, and the best of you are those who are best to their wives.”

In Islam, a woman cannot be forced to marry anyone without her consent. A woman can also marry without parental approval according to the Hanafi school, which is taking place in Muslim countries such as Egypt. When the continuation of marriage relationship is impossible for any reason, men are still taught to seek a gracious end for it.

A divorced woman has the right to custody of the children. If she gets remarried, custody goes to her mother, if she is alive. If not, then custody goes to the mother of the father, then to the adult sisters of the children, then to the aunts.

No wonder three-quarters of those who revert to Islam in a country like Britain are women. No wonder, also, why the most senior judge in England, Lord Phillips, declared Islamic legal principles in Sharia law may be used within Muslim communities in Britain to settle marital arguments and regulate finance.

Mohammed Elfiki, of Syracuse, is a graduate of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, and an Islamic studies scholar.

Women and Islam- Syracuse.com

Europe’s Sharia question

A poster in Whitechapel reads: “Shariah the only option for the UK”

In recent weeks, the European Commission and the UK have made apparent concessions to Islamic law, and with confrontations in Cologne over a proposed mosque, the role of Muslims in a future Europe is again in the spotlight, writes Simon Roughneen for ISN Security Watch.

By Simon Roughneen for ISN Security Watch

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Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis made his famous prediction in 2004: “Current trends show that Europe will have a Muslim majority by the end of the 21st century at the latest […]. Europe will be part of the Arab West-the Maghreb.”
Similar claims have been made by other authors, with European countries featuring below-replacement birth rates, while Muslim immigrants and their descendants predicted, in some quarters, to reach over 20 percent of the population of Europe by 2020.
A low fertility rate of 1.47 babies per woman, according to the 2005 estimates for the EU as a whole, is far below the 2.1 needed to keep a population constant, and with newspapers reporting “Muhammed” as the most popular baby’s name in London, the swing toward Mecca has some popular culture branding to match the statistics.  Europe’s Muslim population has tripled in the past 30 years, fuelled by immigration from North Africa, Turkey, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
No one knows whether or not he reads Lewis, but not to be outdone, Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gadhaffi speculated in February 2006 that “we have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are other signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe, without swords, without guns, without military conquests. The 50 million Muslims in Europe, will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
Thus an apparently ineluctable demography suggests that Europe, if it does not automatically become Islamic, will have to reframe its political and social norms to address growing and increasingly assertive Muslim community, which is making its presence felt in Europe’s three largest and most powerful states - Germany, the UK and France, as well as in Belgium, The Netherlands and elsewhere, including Russia, which on current trends will be majority Muslim by 2050.
Multiculturalists believe that Muslims can integrate into Western European culture: As they become wealthier and more assimilated, Muslims will shed vestiges of their imported identity and adopt the ways of their hosts, and a “European Islam” will form. However, with newspaper reports in the UK suggesting that Islamic law, or “Sharia,” was being implemented selectively in various parts of the country, and a dispute over the construction of a mosque in Cologne leaving the city divided after a weekend of riots, the debate around Sharia in Europe, as well as the broader issues of Muslim-Christian relations in Europe, is once more headline news with the prospect of continued division looming.
In many ways, “Muslim-Christian” might be a misnomer. With most Europeans now graphed somewhere along the atheist-secularist-agnostic-lapsed axis, “Muslim-Euroskeptic” might be a better phrase, if the latter epithet had not already been applied to political views critical of the EU. Either way, Islam’s potential in Europe, present and future, might be drawing strength from Western cultural trends, as noted by Muslims elsewhere. The Srinigar-based Greater Kashmir  newspaper published a report summing-up various views on “how Islamic” Europe could possibly become, noting, with reference to the atrophying of Europe’s Christian culture:
“Most observers believe that the fast erosion of the religious and cultural values in the [W]estern societies is pushing its people toward Islam, [which] offers a more comprehensive, well-knit and value-oriented cultural, social and family structure.”
Law of the land vs ‘man-made’
Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani - perhaps the world’s pre-eminent Shi’ite cleric - recently called for Muslims “to respect the laws of the countries in which they live,” echoed by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, Executive Director of the Centre of Islamic Pluralism, and conductor of a recent survey of British Muslim’s views on Islamic law, which outlined that 65 percent of them “brusquely repudiated the imposition of Sharia.”
However, that is not to say that pro-Sharia activism does not exist. In 2001, German-based Turkish organization Mili Gorus, which has over 200,000 members, said in its August 2001 Gazete
“a religious Muslim is also at the same time an advocate for Sharia. The state, the media, the courts have no right to intervene. The allegiance of a Muslim to Sharia cannot be questioned.”
Meanwhile the allegedly disbanded London-based Al-Muhajiroun, banned under UK law for terrorist links, has made the case against “man-made law,” at different times declaring that its members did not recognize British law, which prompted some to point out that this snub did not extend to returning welfare benefits claimed under the same system.
Shifting toward Sharia?
Danish Radio reported on 17 September that Muslims living in EU countries will in the future be able to divorce according to Sharia, according to an online translation of the report:
“This is the belief of the EU Commission, which recommends that a couple be able to choose which country’s law they will follow if they divorce - as long as they have some kind of connection to the country they choose.”
While senior officials and politicians in the UK have asserted that no parallel legal system, Islamic or otherwise, will be implemented in the UK, claims to the contrary are being made by Islamic jurists, not least that the British government has elevated five Sharia courts to the level of tribunal hearings.
Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, barrister and head of the Muslim Action Committee, told the London Times newspaper that the Arbitration Act 1996 allows rulings by his Muslim Arbitration Tribunal to be enforced by country and high courts.
Among four other locations, Islamic tribunals have been set up in the UK West Midlands to resolve disputes among the Muslim community. Special panels, comprising an Islamic scholar and a lawyer, are hearing arguments before making legally binding rulings, and a judge has been appointed to advise the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT) on how to make these rulings fit with English law.
According to Shamim Qureshi, a district judge who works closely with the tribunals, “MAT is arbitration and that exists in this country. Any two people can agree to it, just like a contract with an insurance company for home insurance,” British newspapers reported.
The UK Conservative Party’s legal spokesman, Dominic Grieve, begged to differ, saying in a statement that “arbitration tribunals can settle some disputes and have their judgments enforced. But they must act within the principles of English law.
“They can’t forbid girls to attend mixed classes in school or award sons the bulk of inheritances merely because the parties agreed in advance to accept the verdict - any more than a regular court can enforce a voluntary contract of slavery or prostitution.”
Whatever the legal status of these tribunals, it is clear that Islamic norms are being moved closer to the mainstream of the British legal system.  A cynic might wonder if the secular UK had temporarily forgotten itself, given that this comes mere months after Church of England head Rowan Williams called for the implementation of Islamic law for Muslims in the UK.
“We believe that ‘politically-correct’ non-Muslims like Rowan Williams have formulated inept and patronizing suggestions for what they believe would benefit Muslims. Sharia is not a ’sound-bite’ issue and the discussion does not benefit from light-minded political comments,” Schwartz told ISN Security Watch.
Toward confrontation
Outside the law, no pun intended, are broader political and cultural issues surrounding the place of Muslims in Europe. One school of thought holds that many Muslims move to Europe to flee the oppressive dominant regimes which enforce Islamic law, or aspects of same, to varying degrees, and therefore do not want Islamic law. Beyond this, the conventional wisdom is that various grievances, such as the war on terror, papal discourse on religious relations, and the Danish cartoons controversy are the drivers of Muslim anger, abetted by what the head of France’s Great Mosque, Kamel Kabtane, described to the German magazine Der Spiegel as discrimination, high unemployment and social exclusion.
Schwartz sees these as “ephemeral to the real problem, radical Islamist ideology,” which is alive and well in Europe. The hatching of the 9-11 plot by a Hamburg-based al-Qaida cell is well-known, and despite the successful prevention of any major terror attack in Europe since July 2005, hardliners are often dominant in Muslim communities, even if often subterranean to public awareness.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Dr Barham Salih apparently claimed some mosques in Blackburn, England would be banned in Iraq for the extremist messages they preach, after visiting the town to campaign for long-time Labour cabinet member and former foreign secretary Jack Straw in 2005. According to Conservative Party culture spokesman Tobias Ellwood, Salih told him that: “I am not surprised that you British are facing so many problems with extremists after what I saw in those mosques in Blackburn.”
This all has prompted reaction from some European politicians. Usually derided as far-right, the Vlaams Belang Flemish separatists, the Lega Nord in Italy, the Danish People’s Party and Geert Wilders Dutch Party for Freedom have been focusing more and more on Islam’s role in Europe in recent years.
Some of these convened in Cologne 18-20 September to discuss the imminent construction of a mosque with a 55-meter high minaret in the city, whose population is now one-third Muslim. The “Pro-Cologne” gathering brought a storm of protest from some city officials and left-wing politicians, while Iran asked France, as president of the European Council, to block the conference, as it reflects “a growth of anti-Islamic sentiments in Europe.” The German Council of Muslims called it “an unparalleled abuse of the freedom of opinion.”
Media reportage on the events differed, and itself has already become a source of controversy. Some accounts describe thousands of people gathered in a counter-demonstration in front of the city’s world-famous gothic cathedral, while others state that no more than 1,000 gathered, and of these, many were left-wing activists, rather than ordinary Cologne citizens.
Converging opinions
The optimism peddled by multiculturalists - perhaps including some of those involved in the anti Pro-Cologne demonstration - whether well-intentioned or merely naive, does little to practically address the issue of Islam’s role in Europe, now or in the future, as the demographic balance between Muslims and Europeans changes.
Whether European Muslims and Europeans can be categorized separately however, remains a moot point. Integration proponents believe such demarcations to be irrelevant and/or discriminatory, though the boundaries are often self-evident, even if an often-silent cohort of Muslims do not adhere to hardline or extremist views.
However, a recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey alluded to some common threads between European and Muslim public opinion when the US is included as a factor.
A slight majority of British blame al-Qaida for 9-11 (57 percent), but another 26 percent say they don’t know who the perpetrators were. The numbers were roughly the same for French and the Italians, with 8 and 13 percent, respectively thinking the US authored the act. Among Germans, almost one-quarter - 23 percent - the US itself staged 9-11. In Turkey, 36 percent of respondents blame the US for the attacks, while in Indonesia, less than a fourth of all respondents 23 percent think al-Qaida orchestrated 9/11, while over half claims they have no idea.
With such a harmonizing of public opinion, Gadhaffi might be on the right track.

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Simon Roughneen is a senior correspondent, reporting from across Africa, southeast Asia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Northern Ireland since 2004.

Europe’s Sharia question / ISN

Caryle Murphy

Riyadh // When the head of Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court recently declared that media officials responsible for airing immoral television programmes could be killed, his remarks provoked what has become a familiar response around the world.
Ridicule and scorn for Saudi Arabia, and more “proof” for Islamophobes of the “backwardness” of Islam.
Sheikh Lihedan’s remarks were not the only ones in recent months to trigger a spate of global eye-rolling.
In March, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al Barrak declared that two Saudi writers, whom he accused of expressing heretical ideas, should be put to death unless they recanted.
Another elderly sheikh, Abdullah bin Jibreen, told an interviewer on Al Majd TV, a conservative Riyadh-based religious station, that journalists “who insult scholars to shame or discredit them or undermine their authority … should be punished”.
Sheikh Jibreen’s suggested chastisements included “imprisonment for a long time”, being “removed from the positions they hold, or … flogging”.
There were other less frightening, but sometimes silly, pronouncements that caused non-Muslims to wonder why representatives of such a profound and spiritual religious tradition as Islam concern themselves with trivialities.
The most famous was a declaration by a member of the Saudi religious police, officially known as the Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice, that dog-walking had become an unacceptable “phenomenon” in Riyadh. He demanded enforcement of 14-year-old ban on selling cats and dogs.
Then came a Saudi cleric bemoaning the fact that young children have become enamoured of such cartoon figures as Mickey Mouse even though Islamic law stipulates that mice should be killed.
Sheikh Mohammed al Munajid told Al Majd TV last month that sharia regards a mouse as “one of Satan’s soldiers”.
According to a translation of Sheikh Munajid’s statements by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, the cleric then said: “How do you think children view mice today – after Tom and Jerry? Even creatures that are repulsive by nature, by logic, and according to Islamic law have become wonderful and are loved by children. Even mice. Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.”
Saudis who do not follow the austere, narrow-minded version of Islam that prevails in their country’s religious establishment love to publicise comments such as these to embarrass the clerics.
But the press coverage, both in Saudi Arabia and abroad, often disregards some important aspects of religious discourse in the kingdom.
First of all, the press almost always refers to any comment from a religious figure as a fatwa. But in most cases, their comments do not rise to the level of a fatwa, and are therefore not worthy of the deference normally accorded such religious opinions.
One only has to look at the YouTube video of Sheikh Munajid’s Mickey Mouse comment (youtube.com/watch? v=bnhQjk7T478) to see that it was an offhand remark, perhaps an attempt to make a joke. It was not a researched, carefully worded fatwa.
Indeed, a more pertinent criticism of such comments is to ask why sheikhs do not spend their religious capital on more important moral concerns, such as demanding badly needed reforms to the Saudi court system, and urging kindness and justice for the poor, including the expatriate workers who do most of the manual labour in the kingdom.
Also, the press rarely notes if the sheikh making the controversial comments is associated with the government or not. Sheikhs Barrak, Jibreen and Munajid, for example, do not hold government jobs.
By contrast, Sheikh Lihedan does. And this was why his comments about television executives prompted a rapid government rebuttal.
Sheikh Abdul Mohsen al Obaikan, a moderate religious scholar who advises the justice ministry, denounced Sheikh Lihedan’s remarks, and said they would encourage terrorists by giving them “a reason” for “taking lives, attacking television stations and targeting the localities where TV owners may be”.
He made clear that Sheikh Lihedan’s statements should not “be considered as the opinion of the Saudi Muslim scholars or even of the state”.
Lastly, those who publicise controversial remarks by Muslim scholars rarely raise the bigger question prompted by such comments: Who speaks for Islam?
Actually, this is the burning ember stoking almost every controversy in Islam in these volatile times. What the ultra-conservative sheikhs – and often their critics too – fail to note is that the voices of authority in Islam have become far more numerous than at any previous time in modern history.
Rising education levels of all Muslims in the past 50 to 100 years means that today the realm of who is qualified to interpret Islam’s holy texts has expanded greatly. Religious scholars who spend their whole lives poring over ancient scriptural texts used to have unchallenged authority to interpret Islam. Not any more.
Today, those clerics are being asked to share that authority with other Muslims in a wide variety of occupations – professors, journalists, artists, film-makers – who have their own ideas about Islam’s role in intellectual pursuits, governmental affairs and even just plain everyday life.
Muslim clerics generally do not like and even feel insulted by this challenge to their monopoly on interpreting Islam. During the Al Majd TV interview, for example, Sheikh Jibreen said the punishments he recommended for his critics were “so that they can concede to the superiority of scholars and clergymen who are held in high regard in the state and otherwise”.
And Sheikh Munajid, in a television interview in March that was translated by MEMRI, addressed the question of clerical authority directly.
“Some of these heretics say, ‘Islam is not the private property of anyone.’ So what do they want? … They say, ‘We want to issue rulings.’ Someone who is ignorant, who does not know any Arabic, or who has no knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence wants to issue rulings?! They say, ‘We reinterpret the texts’,” Sheikh Munajid said.
“There is a very dangerous conspiracy against the religion of Islam in newspapers and in what these people say,” he continued. “A journalist, or one of those low lifes, wants to … These people are a mixture of western, local and imported ideologies, but they want to express their views with regard to religious rulings. This is the prerogative of religious scholars, not of ignorant people – the prerogative of knowledgeable people, not of fools or heretics.”
So what to do?
The Arab world needs more freedom of speech, not less. So as long as ultra-conservative clerics do not incite violence, they should be allowed to publicly say what they please.
Those who disagree with them ought to have the same right.
I asked one Saudi government employee recently what he thought King Abdullah felt about Sheikh Lihedan’s comments.
“Disappointment,” he replied. “The king just made a big effort and spent a lot of money to hold an interfaith conference in Madrid as a way to improve Saudi Arabia’s image,” he said. With one sentence, he added, Sheikh Lihedan destroyed the king’s efforts.
In a meeting with Islamic scholars in Mecca on Monday, King Abdullah spoke frankly about the challenges facing Islam, saying that “unfortunately, the image of Islam is being tarnished by none other than Muslims themselves”.
“If we want to be honest with ourselves,” he said, “we have to accept this reality that the sons of Islam are the ones desecrating this pure religion. Islam disowns them and disowns anyone who tries to give it a bad name.”
Of course, he was speaking about suicide bombers and their terrorist handlers.
But was he also thinking about others whose words harm Islam?
cmurphy@thenational.ae

Saudi clerics’ outbursts hurt image of Islam - The National Newspaper

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Two of the Arab world’s most prominent Muslim theologians have waded into a bitter exchange of barbs, engaging in a debate that is a small-scale rendition of the worsening animosity between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam.

The fight began early this month when Youssef al-Qaradawi, a Sunni who is one of the best known Islamic television clerics, called Shiites “heretics” and accused them of seeking to infiltrate Sunni societies.

Lebanon’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, shot back that Qaradawi was trying to incite “fitna” — the word for internal civil strife among Muslims that is anathema to followers of Islam.

Centuries-old tensions between Islam’s two main branches in the Middle East have flared into the open in recent years, following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the eruption of sectarian killings there.

Though sectarian violence has eased in Iraq this year, it has boiled over in other places, particularly Lebanon, which saw dozens killed in fighting in May between Sunni groups and the Shiite militants of Hezbollah.

Periodic reconciliation efforts, such as a Sunni-Shiite dialogue conference in June in the holy city of Mecca, have done little to ease the deep suspicions of the Mideast’s Sunni majority toward Shiites, seen by some Sunnis as a tool for spreading the influence of Persian Iran.

Although many Sunnis in the Arab world had shown admiration for Hezbollah’s confrontations with Israel, much of that good will evaporated after the Shiite group turned its guns on Lebanon’s Sunnis.

The verbal clash between the clerics started with a Sept. 9 interview that al-Qaradawi gave to Egypt’s independent newspaper Al-Masri Al-Youm.

“Shiites are Muslims but they are heretics and their danger comes from their attempt to invade the Sunni society,” said the Egyptian-born cleric, who lives in Qatar. “They are able to do that because of their billions (of dollars) and trained cadres of Shiites proselytizing in Sunni countries.”

“In this period, we should protect the Sunni society from the Shiite invasion,” added al-Qaradawi, who is widely respected throughout the Middle East and has a popular weekly TV show on Islamic law on the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera.

A few days later, Fadlallah responded in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai Al-Amm. “If what has been attributed to Sheik al-Qaradawi is true, then this amounts to fitna,” he said.

Al-Qaradawi replied with a statement saying: “We Sunnis know that we are the only group that will survive. All other (Muslim) groups have been involved in heresy.”

The eruption of the fight has puzzled some in the region, particularly since al-Qaradawi has participated in numerous Muslim and interfaith reconciliation dialogues.

Ibrahim Bayram, a political analyst at Lebanon’s leading newspaper, An-Nahar, said Wednesday that he found al-Qaradawi’s statements strange, “because he is considered a moderate cleric and he used to call for closer relations between Sunnis and Shiites.”

“The time when any cleric can decide who is a Muslim, and who is not, is gone,” Bayram said.

Mideast countries are overwhelmingly Sunni, except for Iraq, Iran and Bahrain, which have Shiite majorities. Shiites also are the largest single community in Lebanon, which has numerous ethnic and religious groups.

The 14-century-old bitterness grew out of the dispute over the succession of Prophet Muhammad, which split the Muslim world into Sunni and Shiite branches. Both follow the same basic tenets, but important differences include commemorations of rival historical figures.

The Associated Press: Clerics’ debate underlines Sunni-Shiite divide

During Ramadan, the Islamic holy month that started Sept. 1, believers are urged to control their tempers — a special challenge for Safiah Khan when she opened her newspaper last week.
Out popped a DVD titled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, a controversial film about a small portion of radical Muslim terrorists.
“The timing is so bad. Ramadan is supposed to be a joyous time for us,” said Khan, of Fort Lauderdale, one of thousands of residents who got the video delivered along with their newspaper. All three South Florida major daily newspapers — the Sun Sentinel, Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post — delivered the DVD.
The distribution of 28 million copies of the film has caused a stir among South Florida Muslims who are concerned it will spark another round of hate. Muslims in South Florida say they will try to counter the anti-Muslim sentiment sparked by the DVD.

The film, from a New York organization called The Clarion Fund, uses clips and interviews to say that leaders of “radical Islam” brainwash many Muslims to hate the West.
The distribution is part of a campaign called the Obsession Project, led by the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a pro-Israel think tank in Washington, D.C.
Khan, a member of the Masjid Al-Iman mosque in Fort Lauderdale, objects to the way Obsession singles out terrorist acts by Muslims.
“This just incites the fears of people who have doubts about Islam,” said Khan, a marketing manager for an insurance company.
She also wondered why the DVD was being mass distributed now, two years after it was produced.
“People are already talking about Barack Obama’s roots, thinking he must be a Muslim,” said Khan, who wondered if the distributors were attempting to taint Islam and Obama.
Ari Morgenstern, Endowment for Middle East Truth’s spokesman, said his group was not trying to influence the presidential election. Nor, he said, was the mass distribution timed for Ramadan.
“It was no one thing,” he said. “It’s just an important issue that Americans should be aware of, regardless of the season.”
As for singling out Muslims, Morgenstern said the film was about terrorism, not Islam in general. “It makes a very clear distinction between the majority of Muslims and a minority who subscribe to radical ideology. And I think Americans can make that distinction.”
Altaf Ali, executive director of the South Florida Council on American Islamic Relations, said his organization has received hate mail as a result of the film’s distribution.
“The film vilifies Islam,” he said. “It’s a propaganda tool used to influence and coerce people and appeal to their fears.”
He also said local Muslims would participate in forums to counter anti-Muslim sentiment.
Following the release of Obsession in 2006, the Muslim Public Affairs Council launched a campaign to counter the film. Since the campaign, dubbed “Truth Over Fear: Countering Islamophobia,” the Muslim Public Affairs Council has held more than 50 workshops across the country critiquing Obsession.
A Lake Worth coalition, the Florida Security Council also distributes Obsession. Tom Trento, the coalition’s founder, first saw it in 2006, then lined up a viewing for legislators and staff members in Tallahassee.
“It’s a good analysis that would take a lot of people a lifetime to get,” said Trento, a self-avowed evangelical Christian who said he has studied the matter for years. “I decided to show it to a lot of people.”
Trento said he and his volunteers passed out 10,000 copies at each presidential nominating convention this year. They plan to give out more at the vice presidential debate on Oct. 2 in St. Louis.
Gregory Lewis can be reached at glewis@SunSentinel.com or 954-356-4203.

Local Muslims fear controversial DVD could spark backlash against Islam — South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

As the daughter of firebrand cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, Yasmin Fostok might be expected to share his fanatical beliefs.

But the radical Muslim’s daughter has ditched his extreme interpretation of Islam  -  as well as most of her clothing.

The busty blonde has been revealed as a topless, tattooed pole dancer.

The 26-year-old single mother has been displaying her charms in London clubs and touring as a ‘podium’ dancer with a troupe called Ibiza Untouched.

Hundreds of youngsters go wild over the daughter of the preacher of hate who rants against Western ‘depravity’.

Yasmin shrugged off the secret life that her father would abhor. ‘I don’t agree with his views  -  I just get on with my life and that’s it,’ she said.

Parents: Radical Muslim Omar Bakri Mohammed and his wife Hanan Fostok

Perhaps predictably Bakri, now exiled to Lebanon, dismissed the news as a ‘ fabrication’ and described it as an attack on him and Islam.

‘The more you put pressure on me, the stronger I become. Islam will conquer Britain,’ he said.

Galmour girl: Yasmin Fostok in Catford yesterday; she grew up a devout Muslim and wore a veil in her teens

‘I have not seen my daughter for nine years, but because she is a member of my family people want to make things up about her.

‘You are going to pay a heavy price. You can read it any way you like. The time is now.’

Bakri, who said the British people brought the 7/7 outrages on themselves and praised the ‘ magnificent’ September 11 hijackers, raised his six children on benefits totalling £300,000, and his daughter is following suit.

She lives with her three-year-old son in a ground-floor flat in Catford, South East London. Her rent and council tax are paid by the state and she receives child benefit and income support.

She grew up a devout Muslim and in her teens wore a veil. She left school in Enfield at 16 after her parents arranged a marriage to a Turk but the couple separated.

She told The Sun: ‘I’ve done pole dancing, but I like to keep it quiet.

‘I don’t normally do topless work, but I’m willing to go topless if the venue is right.’

She said she did not get on with her father. ‘His views are nothing to do with me,’ she added. ‘I am an adult, my own person. I do my business and he does his.’

One friend told the newspaper: ‘Bakri would have a heart attack if he saw his daughter on stage.

‘She was brought up a strict Muslim and had all of his extreme teachings about morality drummed into her head.

‘But she has been leading a wild double life thrashing about on stage in pole dancing clubs and drinking and partying like there’s no tomorrow.’

Bakri initially reacted with horror when confronted with Yasmin’s lifestyle. ‘If this is true I am deeply shocked,’ he said. ‘She was brought up properly in the Muslim faith, but she is free to make her own choices in life.

‘I have no control over her because as far as I know she is still married. Her behaviour should be the responsibility of her husband.’

Syrian-born Bakri, whose leave to remain in Britain was revoked after the 7/7 London attacks, changed his tune and claimed: ‘I have no daughter doing anything like this  -  all my children are practising Muslims.

‘I spoke to my daughter. She told me it was all lies.’ The ‘Tottenham Ayatollah’ then claimed the story was part of a plot to get back at him after police were forced by a judge to hand back £14,000 in cash they confiscated from his son Abdul.

‘They are using members of my family to get back at me, because I have won. They are jealous because my son Abdul has got back the money that the police stole from him.

‘Islam has prevailed and you are defeated. The lowest people on earth are non-Muslims and that is why we have to put up with these fabrications and lies.’

Miss Fostok was keeping a low profile yesterday at her dingy flat on the busy South Circular Road.

Police spent half an hour there and later said they were advising her on security.

They would not comment on whether she had received threats from religious fundamentalists.

One neighbour said: ‘She’s a very quiet girl, a good girl. I see her most days with her little boy and she seems like a very good mum.

‘She doesn’t smoke or drink so I’m surprised to learn that she has been pole dancing in clubs.’

Early years: Yasmin, pictured far right with father Omar Bakri, and brothers Mohammed and Abdul, admits to working as a pole-dancer

Yasmin told The Sun: ‘I’ve done pole dancing, but I like to keep it quiet.

‘I don’t normally do topless work, but I’m willing to go topless if the venue is right.’

One friend told the newspaper: ‘Bakri would have a heart attack if he saw his daughter on stage. She was brought up a strict Muslim and had all of his extreme teachings about morality drummed into her head.

‘But she has been leading a wild double life thrashing about on stage in pole dancing clubs and drinking and partying like there’s no tomorrow.

‘Yasmin has no time for Bakri’s evil views.’

One of a string of boyfriends Yasmin has apparently been with since her marriage break up told the paper: ‘She’s a million miles away from the daughter her daddy would have wanted and is very adventurous in bed.

‘She likes to dress up in kinky gear and has worn a police uniform, a French maid’s outfit and various office clothes.’

Bakri initially reacted with horror when confronted with Yasmin’s lifestyle.

‘If this is true I am deeply shocked. She was brought up properly in the Muslim faith, but she is free to make her own choices in life,’ he said.

‘She should not seek forgiveness from me, she should seek forgiveness from God.

‘It is his forgiveness which is important. If she has done these  things she will be judged on Judgment Day.

‘But God will forgive her anything except becoming a non-Muslim. I have no control over her because as far as I know she is still married. Her behaviour should be the responsibility of her husband.’

Yesterday Syrian-born Bakri, whose leave to remain in Britain was revoked after the 7/7 London attacks, changed his tune and claimed: ‘I have no daughter doing anything like this - all my children are practicising Muslims.

‘I spoke to my daughter. At first I told her I was shocked at the stuff I was hearing. But then she told me it was all lies.’

The ‘Tottenham Ayatollah’ then claimed the story was part of a plot to get back at him after police were forced to hand back £14,000 in cash they confiscated from Bakri’s son Abdul after a judge ruled the cash was not intended for ‘terrorist purposes’.

‘They are using members of my family to get back at me, because I have won. They are jealous because my son Abdul has got back the money that the police stole from him.

‘Islam has prevailed and you are defeated. The lowest people on earth are non-Muslims and that is why we have to put up with these fabrications and lies.’

Yasmin was keeping a low profile yesterday at her dingy flat on the busy South Circular Road in London.

The flat is in a row of Victorian terraces currently covered with scaffolding. Satellite dishes adorn the walls, the paint is peeling and the windows are dirty.

One neighbour, who did not wish to be named, said: ‘She’s a very quiet girl, a good girl. I was very surprised to learn of what she’s been up to. I see her most days with her little boy and she seems like a very good mum.

‘I had no idea that she was Omar Bakri’s daughter - all I knew was that she had returned to the UK from living in Turkey. She doesn’t smoke or drink so I’m even more surprised to learn that she has been pole dancing in those clubs.’

When first confronted by The Sun, Yasmin said she didn’t get on with her father.

‘He is not around here at the moment, is he?’ she asked. ‘His views are nothing to do with me. I am an adult, my own person. I am an individual. I do my business and he does his.’

But last night Bakri’s protests he know nothing about his daughter’s new lifestyle were undermined by claims he personally paid for her to have a breast enlargement operation.

According to The Sun, he paid £4,000 in cash to a clinic in London for the operation that launched her career as a pole dancer.

A friend told the newspaper: ‘Her dad’s ashamed of her behaviour but she’d never have become a pole dancer if he hadn’t paid for her bigger boobs.

‘She was always self-conscious about her size and managed to convince him she should have it done.

‘She played the daddy’s girl and said it would make her feel more of a mother when she was breast feeding her children.

‘He went along with it and even went to the top London clinic with her where he paid for the surgery in cash. The rest of the family were set against it but he insisted she should have her way if it would make her a better mother.’

The friend said it backfired when she developed the courage to flaunt her body and become a lapdancer.

The friend said: ‘She’d never have done it if it wasn’t for those boobs - which were paid for by her father. It’s all his fault.’

Revealed: Radical cleric Bakri’s pole-dancer daughter | Mail Online

Next year is the big Darwin anniversary. Two hundred years after his birth and 150 after the publication of On the Origin of the Species, millions will celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin, one of the most brilliant scientists in history, and a man who was thoroughly decent, honourable and likeable.

Unfortunately, he has become caught up in the crossfire of a battle in which Darwin exhibited little personal interest. On one side of this cartoonish debate are the creationists. Their precise numbers, in the UK, are uncertain, although the major survey Theos /ComRes are conducting into the public’s beliefs about Darwinism, creationism and ID, which will be published next year, should help us find out more. Numbers aside, the point is that creationists dislike Darwin and regularly criticise him for supposedly undermining their religious beliefs.

In the other trench lie the militant Godless who – bizarrely – wholly agree with the creationists. Darwinism, they proclaim, does indeed undermine religious belief and a good thing too. Darwin is their icon and they frantically genuflect before his image, in a way brilliantly parodied by the satirical magazine The Onion.

The truth is, as ever, more complex. Darwin was too interesting, too careful a thinker to be caricatured in these ways. He was a Christian and yes, he did lose his faith. But he was never an atheist. He engaged in religious debate with friends but confessed to being in a hopeless “muddle”. He agonised over whether the exquisite beauty of life on earth was worth the pain of natural selection. He hated religious controversy and was deeply respectful of others’ views. He took upon himself the duties of a country parson whilst living at Downe and contributed to the South American Missionary Society. And, to top it all, he often doubted whether, his mind being evolved, he could even trust it in such matters. All in all, he was too complex, too subtle a man to be left to the polemicists.

Times Archive, 1887: The life of Darwin

It has been said with truth that we must go back to Newton before we meet with Darwin’s peer

• So, in the interests, of rescuing him from the no-man’s-land in which he has become trapped, here are 10 Darwin quotations, from his later years, which you are unlikely to hear from the mouths of either creationists or atheists in 2009.

1. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” (Autobiography)

2. “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

3. “I hardly see how religion & science can be kept as distinct as [Edward Pusey] desires… But I most wholly agree… that there is no reason why the disciples of either school should attack each other with bitterness.” (Letter to J. Brodie Innes, November 27 1878)

4. “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

5. “I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

6. “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.” (Letter to Frederick McDermott, November 24 1880)

7. [In conversation with the atheist Edward Aveling, 1881] “Why should you be so aggressive? Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of mankind?” (Edward Aveling, The religious views of Charles Darwin, 1883)

8. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Letter to Graham William, July 3 1881)

9. “My theology is a simple muddle: I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent Design.” (Letter to Joseph Hooker, July 12 1870)

10. “I can never make up my mind how far an inward conviction that there must be some Creator or First Cause is really trustworthy evidence.” (Letter to Francis Abbot, September 6 1871)

Nick Spencer is director of studies at the public theology think-tank Theos which is conducting, in partnership with the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion a project on evolution, faith and Charles Darwin. Mr Spencer’s book, Darwin and God, will be published in 2009 by SPCK.

God, Evolution and Charles Darwin -Times Online

Muslim spiritual leaders could be denounced publicly by their own community as part of a campaign to expose imams whose silence on domestic abuse is leading to women being burnt, lashed and raped in the name of Islam.

Muslim scholars are to present the Government with the names of imams who are alleged by members of their own communities to have refused to help abused women. Imams are also accused of refusing to speak out against domestic abuse in their sermons because they fear losing their clerical salaries and being sacked for broaching a “taboo” subject.

Some of Britain’s most prominent moderate imams and female Muslim leaders have backed the campaign, urging the Home Office to vet more carefully Islamic spiritual leaders coming to Britain to weed out hardliners. A four-month inquiry by the Centre for Islamic Pluralism into domestic abuse has uncovered harrowing tales of women being raped, burnt by cigarettes and lashed with belts by their husbands, who believe it is their religious right to mistreat them.

At least 40 female Muslim victims and many social workers from northern England - including Bradford, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham - were interviewed as part of the inquiry, which is expected to be published next month.

During its investigation the organisation - the British arm of a longestablished US think-tank - received a number of complaints about imams who had turned a blind eye to cases of domestic violence, many of whom are followers of Wahabbism, a puritanical interpretation of the Koran espoused by Osama bin Laden.

There have also been similar complaints about clerics from the Tablighi Jamaat movement, which is accused of radicalising young British Muslims with its orthodox teachings.

The organisation’s international director, the Muslim scholar Irfan al-Alawi, told The Times that he would be forwarding the names of the imams to the Home Office, which has promised to investigate the allegations. He called for them to be stripped of any government grants that they may be receiving. He is also seeking legal advice about exposing the imams at public lectures and forums throughout the country.

“I have to make sure that I don’t end up with a lawsuit on my hands but at the same time expose what is going on in the community,” he said.

Yousif al-Khoei, spokesman for the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (Minab) - a government approved body set up to improve the standards among British imams - admitted that some clerics condoned domestic violence although he said it was a “minority practice”.

He insisted the problem was to do with specific cultural beliefs rather than religious ideology, but said that the board was determined to tackle the problem by promoting “proper Islamic guidelines in the public arena”.

However, he gave warning against the idea of publicly identifying imams, saying that would risk turning them into “martyrs” within their own community.

“Instead, we should encourage women to seek advice from proper imams,” he said.

While the number of domestic violence cases has almost doubled in the last three years, according to the Crown Prosecution Service, the figures fail to reflect the physical abuse cases within the Muslim community.

Such cases, on which there is no data because they are largely unreported, are driven by cultural and religious beliefs instead of alcohol and drug abuse, said Shahien Taj, director of the Henna Foundation, which deals with honour crimes and domestic abuse victims.

Ms Taj, who is a member of the Government’s Muslim Women’s Advisory Group, said women were reluctant to come forward about the abuse they experienced because they were “groomed and brainwashed” into becoming interdependent on their direct families and not encouraged to take their complaints to the outside world.

Dr al-Alawi said there were cultural and religious reasons why some imams would not want to raise the issue of domestic violence in the mosque. “A lot of women who are brought from foreign countries to join their spouse here, firstly they cannot speak English and the imam is very reluctant to have a conversation with a woman because they feel there is a barrier and the woman should not be approachable to the man.

“There’s a lot of sexual abuse as well, which is apparently considered taboo for Muslims to talk about, whereby husbands are forcing themselves on women after they had been out with other women - rape case,” he said.

Sheikh Irfan Chishti, director of the Light of Islam Academy and a former member of Tony Blair’s Preventing Extremism Together taskforce, said there was “religious justification” among some imams for the abuse and subjugation of women.

He said female victims were in many cases afraid of seeking help because they feared retribution and being accused of tarnishing or disobeying Islam.

“Women don’t speak up and if they do speak up they can get battered,” Sheikh Chishti said.

“Some men are brought up to believe that because they are superior therefore inadvertently or by default women are inferior and therefore submissive.”

He said that female Muslims needed to be empowered by moderate community leaders and the younger generation should be encouraged to condemn and report domestic violence.

Sheik Chishti also said young and British-raised community members should be encouraged to take over mosque committees. “You will not have change in the mosque until you change the culture of the leadership.”

Purge on Muslim clerics who turn a blind eye to the abuse of women -Times Online

Ted Vaden, Staff Writer

Readers obsessed with anti-Islam video

Ted Vaden, Staff Writer Comment on this story

Should The News & Observer allow itself to be used as a vehicle for disseminating offensive speech against a religious faith?

No, was the resounding response from readers who objected to a DVD that was distributed in The N&O last weekend. The video, titled “Obsession,” portrays radical Islam as an organized global terrorism campaign aimed at Jews, Christians and America.

It depicts armies of jihadist warriors, suicide bombers in training and armed children chanting anti-Western slogans. Images of Islamist militants are juxtaposed with scenes of goose-stepping Nazi troopers. Graphic footage displays carnage from attacks in New York, London and Madrid.

“This is a film about a radical world view and the threat it poses to us all, Muslim and non-Muslim alike,” a title says at the beginning of the video.

After the DVD was distributed Sept. 13, protests poured into News & Observer offices. We received at least 300 e-mail and phone messages, and about 50 people canceled subscriptions

“By taking responsibility for the delivery of this movie, an esteemed newspaper lent credence and stature to a movie which is, at best, hyperbolic, frightening propaganda. Surely, money cannot replace ethics,” wrote reader MARY HARRISON.

“Gee, if I was still teaching, this video could be a classroom aid to show how some use hate and religious intolerance to scare people,” wrote retired fourth-grade teacher MARY GILBERT of Raleigh. “However, I would not want to poison young minds by having them watch it.”

The DVD was distributed by The N&O as an advertising product, inserted along with the advertising circulars into the paper. Jim McClure, vice president for display advertising, said he recognized that the DVD would be controversial and consulted with other executives before accepting it.

But he concluded that the paper should not deny advertisers the opportunity to reach the N&O audience because their message is unpopular or offensive to some. “The ultimate question is, at what point do you draw the line and start censoring things based on comfort level?” he said.

Many readers, citing The N&O’s well-publicized revenue problems, accused the paper of selling out scruples for advertising dollars. McClure said the paper doesn’t disclose what customers pay for ads, because they expect confidentiality for competitive reasons, but money was not a factor: “There was no consideration that this was so lucrative that we have to lower our standards and accept this. It was accepted on its merits.”

The DVD was inserted into some 70 newspapers around the country, including The New York Times and sister McClatchy papers The Charlotte Observer and The Miami Herald. One of the few newspapers that did not accept it was The News & Record in Greensboro.

“Even though we would have loved to have had the revenue stream, we just felt that it was not material that we wanted to subject our readers to,” said publisher Robin Saul. “I just felt it was divisive and a ploy to play on people’s fears, and I didn’t see it to be educational at all.”

It should be pointed out that a minority of readers — perhaps 15 percent of my callers and e-mailers — were glad The N&O accepted the video. “Thank you for not siding with censorship,” wrote Jeffrey Cox of Raleigh.

Let’s point out also that some of the angry benders of my ear told me they had not actually viewed the DVD. I did sacrifice an hour to it, and I was alternately repulsed and bored. Although the film took pains to say that most Muslims are not violent, that disclaimer was buried in the avalanche of anti-Islamic images, slogans and interviews with experts of dubious credentials.

My instinct is to defend The N&O’s decision to distribute the DVD. The newspaper is in the business of fostering public debate of controversial ideas. It invokes regularly the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press when seeking information from recalcitrant governments and publishing stories that offend some readers.

Orage Quarles III, N&O publisher, said that in the arena of public debate, newspapers should err on the side of allowing too much free speech. “If we’re not upsetting somebody every six months, we’re not doing our job. That’s just in the nature of this business.”

In this case, The N&O went an extra step by publishing a front-page story about the DVD and the controversy it has caused nationwide. The story, published the same day as the distribution, explained The N&O’s reasons for accepting the DVD but included criticism from Muslim advocates and others.

Still, I have a problem with this particular entry into the free-speech marketplace, because we don’t know where the speech is coming from. The DVD package contained a name and address for the sponsor, The Clarion Fund of New York City. A Clarion Web site gives no information about its directors or its funding. It says the film was made possible by a large donor, but doesn’t identify who.

Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic studies at UNC-CH, has researched the video and the Clarion Fund. He says the producer of the video is a Canadian native who now is a rabbi and Zionist leader in Israel. Distribution was aided by a Christian Zionist organization headed by Texas evangelist John Hagee, he said, and a Clarion Fund Web site recently published, then removed, an article that endorsed John McCain over Barack Obama for president.

Safi noted that the DVD was placed in newspapers only in key election swing states, suggesting it’s intended to scare voters into the McCain camp. “The whole premise of this film is that the West doesn’t know what radical Islam represents,” Safi said. “Fair enough. Tell us what you represent.” My calls to the Clarion Fund were not returned.

I think newspapers have an obligation to be as transparent as possible with readers about the information they provide. In this case, I think the DVD fell short in two respects.

First, it should have been labeled as paid advertising content, as the newspaper would require of a political advertisement. Despite the story on the front page, it’s clear from their comments that some readers perceived the video as somehow endorsed by The N&O. McClure said it’s the first time he could recall that The N&O has distributed a DVD.

More important is the lack of information about the source of this controversial content. Without that, the readers were not in a position to make an informed judgment about the message they received.

The Public Editor can be reached at ted.vaden@newsobserver.com or by calling (919) 836-5700

A readers response

Dear Mr. Vaden: (Paper’s Public Editor)

Thank you for your article cited below. As a Muslim I’m in total agreement
with Mr. Jim McClure, the paper’s V.P. for advertising, who decided to
include the DVD “obsession” in the paper out of respect for free speech,
even if it was offensive to some. I totally support his stand on free speech
and decry the opposition of some people to this DVD. Thus may I have Mr.
McClure’s email and address to send 70 copies of the BBC documentary “THE
WAR PARTY” that details the push for the Iraq War by JEWISH NeoCons who were
in highly strategic government positions, think tanks paid for by right wing
extremist foundations, and the Jewish controlled media? I’d also like to pay
for the distribution of 70 ciopiues of the highly acclaimed scientifically
based investigation of the collapse of the WTC, especially WTC 7 that was
not hit by a plane, called “ZERO”.
 
Or if he wishes I could send him a documentary of the brutal inhumane
savagery of Israel’s indiscriminate civilian bombing in Lebanon in 2006?
 
I can’t imagine him turning down such DVD’s given his strong support for
free speech. I could understand his reluctant fear for distributing a
revisionist history of the Holocaust or Jewish terrrorism against
Palestinians by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, two former Israeli Prime
Ministers.
 
Shame on those Christians, Jews, and Muslims who don’t respect Mr. McClure’s
strong belief in Free Speech no matter who it offends.
 
I look forward to your response and the kind agreement of Mr. McClure
 
Respectfully;
Mohamed Khodr

newsobserver.com | Readers obsessed with anti-Islam video

By Anwar Elshamy
TWO leading Islamic thinkers have urged Islamic movements in the Arab world to conduct a “radical intellectual revision” to their convictions, saying that these movements should abandon the idea of establishing a religious state.
Dr Radwan al-Sayed, a professor of Islamic Studies at the Lebanon University, said that Islamists should stop thinking of setting up an Islamic state, which he said, is “not possible because it is dogmatic”.
“While the religious state is not possible, it is the civil state, where the law rather than the Sharia rules, which we all should stick to. It is the insistence of Islamic movements to establish an Islamic state which triggered a horrendous clash with the Arab counties’ regimes. Any Islamic state would have a problem with democracy because Islamists seek to create a religious state in which the infallible Islamic Sharia would replace the law though Sharia is merely a way of life. Even the Islamic caliphate state was not a religious state at all,” al-Sayed said at “the Islamic Movements and Democracy: Lebanon as an Example” seminar yesterday. The seminar was organised by the Doha-based Arab Democracy Foundation (ADF).
Al-Sayed, who is also a visiting professor at Harvard and Chicago universities, slammed both Hamas movement and Hezbollah party for what he called “resorting to violence to attain their goals”.
“Islamic movements should denounce violence and ban it by all means because when they exercise it, they do that in the name of God. Though Hamas has developed its approaches as an Islamic movement, it has relapsed into violence against the Palestinians who voted for it. The same practice committed by Hezbollah when it swept Beirut and controlled it by the force of weapons this year just to obtain more advantages over the other rival factions,” he said.
He also blamed the rise of Islamic movements around the Arab world on what he called “the weakening of the religious institutions by the Arab regimes”, saying that this has created a vacuum, which Islamists sought to fill.
“A main obstacle to democratisation in the Arab countries is the ruling regimes themselves. They suppress all the civil society movements including the Islamists. In Egypt, as an example, Islamic movements flourished only after the Al Azhar authority has been sidelined and weakened by the State. One can easily notice that the violent fundamentalists appeared in every Arab country where the traditional religious institution was weakened,” he explained.
“Any democratisation in the Arab world would be impossible without involving Islamists who constitute 40mn around the Arab world and difficult to be ignored. But at the same time all the current Islamic movements need to conduct some sort of intellectual reform for their approaches.”
About the prospects of democratisation in Lebanon, al-Sayed ruled out the possibility of establishing any democratic system in Lebanon, saying that the different sects making up the country make it impossible to have any type of democracy.
“It is sects which exchange power in Lebanon rather than parties. I believe that there would be no future for democracy in Lebanon because of this. We have two armies, one for the government, and the other for Hezbollah. The aircraft of a Lebanese pilot was shot down only because he entered the zone controlled by Hezbollah. I can’t perceive any democracy in a country where sectarianism prevail the concept of the state,” he added.
He slammed the military regimes that assumed power in the region during the last decades, saying they undermined all the values of the Arab communities.
Dr Salah al-Din al-Jurashi, a Tunisian Islamic researcher and analyst, called on Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to abandon theme of “Islam is the solution”, saying this slogan creates confusion and make them “seem to be in monopoly of Islam”.
“I hope that Islamists can give up the idea that application of the Sharia will solve all the problems of our societies and do some sort of calm revision of their approaches. Without a radical revision made by Islamists, a relapse would remain possible,” he said.
He also warned against the aggravation of conflict among the Lebanese parties saying that “any conflict with Hezbollah would mean an all-out war between the Sunnis and Shias. I hope that we can denounce the inevitability of the conflict between the Sunnis and Shias as this will only benefit the enemies of Islam including the US and Israel,” he added.

Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - Qatar