Muslim Heretics Conference

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election.”

So reads a website closely associated with Al-Qaeda, according to Nick Kristof in his Sunday New York Times column.

It’s no surprise that Bin Laden and his henchman are watching the American election (any bets on the cable channel they prefer?). But their presidential pick probably raised some eyebrows. I spent a good part of my Sunday wondering why they chose McCain.

I dismissed the idea that Bin Laden actually wants the rendez-vous that McCain promises at the Gates of Hell. I think the terrorist is probably pretty scared of the old Navy fighter pilot in a mano-a-mano situation.

Joe Nye, a former Clinton Administration official, makes an important point in the article: “From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is good for recruiting.”

But I think Kristof hits the nail right on the head when he compares McCain’s position to other mistakes made in recent American history:

“During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam. In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of ‘Islamofascism’ elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests.”

Bin Laden has been an amazing failure in attracting Muslims to his call for an all-out war against the West. Almost no Muslims want that war, and even fewer are actually willing to fight in it.

So Al-Qaeda has gone to Plan B: create the illusion that more than a tiny handful of Muslims are engaged in this battle. That’s one of the reasons that Al-Qaeda chooses respectable members of a society - engineers, doctors - to carry out attacks.

But illusions are only successful when the audience gets duped. Too many McCain supporters have bought the Al-Qaeda line.

Consider the Clarion Fund, who sent 28 million copies of a Muslim-hating film called Obsession to households in swing states in a clear attempt to influence the election in favor of McCain. I’ve written elsewhere about how this film has made people afraid of their Muslim neighbors

But even more importantly, it makes all of us less secure. Because as our suspicions are cast upon our law-abiding Muslim neighbors, genuine terrorists might slip through.
If Al-Qaeda really thinks a McCain administration would both boost real recruiting AND help advertise the illusion that all Muslims are the enemy, it’s no wonder they are pulling for him.

Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together. more »

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Eboo Patel: Why Al-Qaeda is Endorsing McCain - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

The Endorsement From Hell

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: October 25, 2008

John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

On the Ground

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“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda’s apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated.

“The transcendent challenge of our time [is] the threat of radical Islamic terrorism,” Senator McCain said in a major foreign policy speech this year, adding, “Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House.”

That’s a widespread conservative belief. Mitt Romney compared the threat of militant Islam to that from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Some conservative groups even marked “Islamofascism Awareness Week” earlier this month.

Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of “Islamofascism” elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests. Perhaps the best example is one of the least-known failures in Bush administration foreign policy: Somalia.

Today, Somalia is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur or Congo. The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame. But Bush administration paranoia about Islamic radicals contributed to the disaster.

Somalia has been in chaos for many years, but in 2006 an umbrella movement called the Islamic Courts Union seemed close to uniting the country. The movement included both moderates and extremists, but it constituted the best hope for putting Somalia together again. Somalis were ecstatic at the prospect of having a functional government again.

Bush administration officials, however, were aghast at the rise of an Islamist movement that they feared would be uncooperative in the war on terror. So they gave Ethiopia, a longtime rival in the region, the green light to invade, and Somalia’s best hope for peace collapsed.

“A movement that looked as if it might end this long national nightmare was derailed, in part because of American and Ethiopian actions,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. As a result, Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism have surged, partly because Somalis blame Washington for the brutality of the Ethiopian occupiers.

“There’s a level of anti-Americanism in Somalia today like nothing I’ve seen over the last 20 years,” Professor Menkhaus said. “Somalis are furious with us for backing the Ethiopian intervention and occupation, provoking this huge humanitarian crisis.”

Patrick Duplat, an expert on Somalia at Refugees International, the Washington-based advocacy group, says that during his last visit to Somalia, earlier this year, a local mosque was calling for jihad against America — something he had never heard when he lived peacefully in Somalia during the rise of the Islamic Courts Union.

“The situation has dramatically taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “The U.S. chose a very confrontational route early on. Who knows what would have happened if the U.S. had reached out to moderates? But that might have averted the disaster we’re in today.”

The greatest catastrophe is the one endured by ordinary Somalis who now must watch their children starve. But America’s own strategic interests have also been gravely damaged.

The only winner has been Islamic militancy. That’s probably the core reason why Al Qaeda militants prefer a McCain presidency: four more years of blindness to nuance in the Muslim world would be a tragedy for Americans and virtually everyone else, but a boon for radical groups trying to recruit suicide bombers.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Endorsement From Hell - NYTimes.com

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Muslim-born journalist baptized by Pope Benedict XVI at Easter asked the pope to tell his top aide for relations with Muslims that Islam is not an intrinsically good religion and that Islamic terrorism is not the result of a minority gone astray.
As the Vatican was preparing to host the first meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum Nov. 4-6, Magdi Allam, a longtime critic of the Muslim faith of his parents, issued an open letter to Pope Benedict that included criticism of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
In the letter, posted on his Web site Oct. 20, Allam said he wanted to tell the pope of his concern for “the serious religious and ethical straying that has infiltrated and spread within the heart of the church.”
He told the pope that it “is vital for the common good of the Catholic Church, the general interest of Christianity and of Western civilization itself” that the pope make a pronouncement in “a clear and binding way” on the question of whether Islam is a valid religion.
The Catholic Church’s dialogue with Islam is based on the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (”Nostra Aetate”), which urged esteem for Muslims because “they adore the one God,” strive to follow his will, recognize Jesus as a prophet, honor his mother, Mary, “value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.”
The council called on Catholics and Muslims “to work sincerely for mutual understanding” and for social justice, moral values, peace and freedom.
Allam told Pope Benedict he specifically objected to Cardinal Tauran telling a conference in August that Islam itself promotes peace but that “’some believers’ have ‘betrayed their faith,’” using it as a pretext for violence.
“The objective reality, I tell you with all sincerity and animated by a constructive intent, is exactly the opposite of what Cardinal Tauran imagines,” Allam told the pope. “Islamic extremism and terrorism are the mature fruit” of following “the sayings of the Quran and the thought and action of Mohammed.”
Allam said he was writing with the “deference of a sincere believer” in Christianity and as a “strenuous protagonist, witness and builder of Christian civilization.”
After Pope Benedict baptized Allam March 22 during the Easter Vigil and Allam used his newspaper column and interviews to condemn Islam, the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said that when the Catholic Church welcomes a new member it does not mean it accepts his opinions on every subject.
Baptism is a recognition that the person entering the church “has freely and sincerely accepted the Christian faith in its fundamental articles” as expressed in the creed, Father Lombardi had said.
“Of course, believers are free to maintain their own ideas on a vast range of questions and problems on which legitimate pluralism exists among Christians,” he said.

CNS STORY: Muslim convert to Catholicism tells pope Islam is not inherently good

WASHINGTON, Oct 28, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ — CAIR renews call for probes of Israel-based effort to influence election

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today renewed its call for Federal Election Commission (FEC) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigations of an apparent attempt by a foreign-based group to influence the presidential election.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said another media report has linked the Israel-based group Aish HaTorah to the distribution of millions of anti-Muslim DVDs to voters in presidential election swing states and to key opinion leaders nationwide.

An article in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch described an interfaith response to an effort led by an anti-Islam pastor to send the DVD “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” to hundreds of thousands of Christian and Jewish clergy nationwide.

The Rev. O’Neal Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., refused to say who paid for the massive mailing, but admitted that the donor “had been in touch with officials from Aish HaTorah.” Dozier also said, “I do believe that the religion of Islam…is a very dangerous and evil cult.” (”Obsession” interviewees include those who have said “Islam is the devil” and who claim no “practicing Muslim” can be a “loyal citizen to the United States of America.”)

SEE: Interfaith Partnership Rallies Behind Muslims Anxious About DVD (Post-Dispatch)

http://tinyurl.com/5bnoka

An earlier article in the St. Petersburg Times revealed ties between the film’s distributor, the Clarion Fund, and Aish HaTorah. The newspaper’s investigative report stated: “Clarion’s address, according to Manhattan directory assistance, is the same address as Aish HaTorah International, a fundraising arm of Aish HaTorah. The Clarion Fund and Aish HaTorah International are also connected to a group called HonestReporting, which produced Obsession. HonestAReporting’s 2006 tax return uses the same address.”

SEE: Senders of Islam Movie ‘Obsession’ Tied to Jewish Charity

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/article827910.ece

SEE ALSO: Israel-Based Group Behind Distribution of Anti-Muslim DVD (CNN Video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbq02h94ECI

A columnist for The Atlantic wrote that Aish HaTorah “operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank.”

SEE: The Jewish Extremists Behind “Obsession”

http://tinyurl.com/6yv54u

CAIR has also learned that the “Obsession” DVD is being distributed to local public officials “throughout the country” by the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC). An EPPC letter accompanying the DVD tells the officials to “get informed…before it’s too late.”

Based on these revelations and on the DVD distributor’s apparent attempt to use its non-profit status to impact the presidential election in favor of a particular candidate, CAIR filed complaints with both the FEC and IRS.

CAIR also noted that even those who once backed “Obsession” are withdrawing their support for the film that many commentators have called anti-Muslim “propaganda.” For example, the pro-Israel think tank the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) pulled out of “The Obsession Project.”

Howard Gordon, the executive producer of Fox’s drama “24,” withdrew his endorsement of the film because “the goal of co-existence and tolerance is not being served by films like Obsession.”

Dr. Khaleel Mohammed, a Muslim interviewee for “Obsession,” now calls the production a “vile piece of propaganda.” In a statement sent to the website www.obsessionwithhate.com, Dr. Mohammed said: “Sadly, it would seem that I have allowed myself to be used.”

The “Obsession with Hate” site was launched recently by the Hate Hurts America Multifaith Community Coalition (HHA), a group of religious and civic organizations seeking to challenge hate speech in our society.

CAIR, America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group, has 35 offices and chapters nationwide and in Canada. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

CONTACT: CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-488-8787 or 202-744-7726, E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com; CAIR Communications Coordinator Amina Rubin, 202-488-8787, E-Mail: arubin@cair.com

SOURCE Council on American-Islamic Relations

CAIR: Foreign Group Again Linked to Anti-Muslim DVD Campaign - MarketWatch

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own —

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the summer of 2006, a Gallup poll of more than 1,000 Americans found that one out of four favored forcing Muslims in the United States, including U.S. citizens, to carry special identification. About a third said Muslims living in the U.S. sympathized with al Qaeda.

Almost a quarter said they wouldn’t want a Muslim as a neighbor. Republicans, the poll said, saw Muslims in a more negative light than Democrats and independents, and were more opposed to having Muslim neighbors. Fewer than half those polled thought U.S. Muslims were loyal to the United States.

A few months after the poll, callers to a Washington area radio talk show suggested branding Muslims with crescent-shaped tattoos and special stamps in their identity papers, the better to spot potential terrorists.

Polls are snapshots of attitudes, and attitudes can change. But incidents during the U.S. presidential election campaign, now in its final sprint toward November 4, show that fear and suspicion of Muslims persist undiminished and are being used as a political weapon.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell became the most prominent member of the U.S. establishment to highlight the problem when he broke with John McCain, the Republican candidate and a personal friend of decades, to endorse Barack Obama, target of a prolonged campaign by activists who portray him as a Muslim.

One of his reasons: “I’m troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the (Republican) party say,” he told a television interviewer this week. “And it is permitted to be said such things as ‘well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.

“But the really right answer is, what if he is?” Powell continued.

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion ‘He (Obama) is a Muslim and might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

It was the first time that a senior figure of the American establishment had countered suggestions that Obama adheres to Islam by saying “So What?”, a question that should not be surprising in a country of immigrants that prides itself of its diversity. But the association is so toxic that even Obama himself has never asked that question.

FEAR AND BIGOTRY

Obama routinely denies the false notion that he is Muslim and stresses his commitment to Christianity and his regular church attendance. The website Obama has set up to rebuff a wide range of rumors notes the fact that he was sworn into the Senate on his family bible. That he finds it necessary to spell this out speaks volumes about a climate of fear and bigotry.

And about Obama’s caution: the first Muslim to win a seat in the 435-member House of Representatives, Keith Ellison, caused a storm of cyberspace criticism when he carried a Koran to his 2007 swearing-in ceremony. The hubbub subsided when it emerged that the Koran he used was once owned by an American with impeccable credentials - Thomas Jefferson.

Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, was the only Muslim in the House until last March, when he was joined by Andre Carson, a fellow Democrat from Indianapolis. Estimates of the number of Muslims in the United States range from 1.8 to more than 5 million. (The U.S. Census Bureau does not cover religious affiliation).

As the long election campaign neared its end, an obscure New York-based non-profit group called the Clarion Fund provided a textbook example of how fear of Muslims can be used for political ends. 

The fund paid 70 newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia to deliver, as an advertising insert, 28 million copies of a documentary on radical Islam. These are all swing states where the Obama vs McCain fight is close.

The one-hour documentary, entitled Obsession - Radical Islam’s War against the West — was produced almost three years ago. It intersperses scenes of violence, including the September 11, 2001, attack on New York, with footage from Nazi rallies. The film found no traditional distributor and was first screened on college campuses last year, introduced by a right-wing activist, David Horowitz.

So why is the DVD mailed out now? Purely for educational purposes, according to a spokesman for the Clarion Fund. Nothing to do with fear-mongering.

The DVD’s sleeve, however, carries a slightly different message. “The threat of radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today. But it’s a topic that neither the presidential candidates nor the media are discussing openly. It’s our responsibility to ensure we can all make an informed vote in November.”

In U.S. elections, fear of Muslims: Bernd Debusmann | Reuters

 

Sour note for American Muslims in election campaign

By Michael Conlon, Religion Writer Michael Conlon, Religion Writer – Tue Oct 21, 2:00 pm ET

Reuters – A woman hugs her child after taking the oath of citizenship to become an American citizen during a U.S. …

CHICAGO (Reuters) – These are uneasy times for America’s Muslims, caught in a backwash from a presidential election campaign where the false notion that Barack Obama is Muslim has been seized on by some who link Islam with terrorism.

The Democratic White House candidate, who would be the first black U.S. president and whose middle name is Hussein, is a Christian. Son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, he spent part of his childhood in largely Muslim Indonesia.

The idea Obama is Muslim has circulated on the Internet for months, presented by some as a fact to reinforce the position that Obama is not a suitable candidate for the White House.

Not since the election of John Kennedy as the first Catholic U.S. president in 1960 has the faith of a White House hopeful generated so much distortion, said about 100 “concerned scholars” and others who have signed an October 7 proclamation aimed at countering Islamophobia they say is on the rise.

In recent weeks:

– More than 20 million video disc copies of a film called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” were included as advertising supplements in newspapers across the country, many in battleground states where Obama is in a close fight with Republican candidate John McCain. The film, distributed by a private group unaffiliated with the McCain campaign, features suicide bombers, children being trained with guns, and a Christian church said to have been defiled by Muslims.

– A city council candidate in Irvine, California, who is a Muslim convert, said he got a telephone call saying “I want to cut your head off just like all the other Muslims deserve,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

– A mosque in a suburb of Chicago, Obama’s home city, was vandalized four times in less than two months, with anti-Islamic messages left on its outer walls, and windows and doors broken.

– An account of an Ohio rally for McCain running mate Sarah Palin, filed by Al Jazeera and posted on YouTube, shows a woman saying “he is not Christian, and this is a Christian nation,” and a second woman saying she opposes Obama because of “the whole Muslim thing. A lot of people have forgotten about 9/11 (the September 11, 2001, attacks). It’s a little unnerving.”

“It is frightening to see at this point the label ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ being used de facto as an insult,” said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R).

There is a feeling, he said, that hate crimes increase as Islamophobia rises in public discourse, including that going on peripherally in this election campaign.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican crossing party lines to endorse Obama on Sunday, made a demand for tolerance when he referred to Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors.

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?” he asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion ‘he’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America,” Powell said, while making clear such sentiment was not coming from McCain himself.

Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population of 305 million, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, though some believe that number is low. About a third of the world’s population is Christian, another 21 percent Muslim.

Daniel Varisco, anthropology chair at Hofstra University, said he wrote the “statement of concerned scholars” after seeing Islamophobia on the rise.

“The attempts to label Senator Obama a terrorist or rhyme his name with Osama (bin Laden) or accent his middle name (Hussein), as well as false claims about his being sworn into (U.S. Senate) office on a Koran, demonstrate how near to the surface anti-Islamic sentiment is in the United States,” he said.

Circulating such falsehoods “avoids playing the race card directly but at the expense of Muslims,” he said.

The Clarion Fund, which distributed the film “Obsession,” through a huge newspaper advertising buy, says it is an independent education group focused “on the most urgent threat of radical Islam” and that placing the film in the hands of readers in battleground election states was an attempt to grab attention.

Spokesman Gregory Ross said, “we have no political or religious affiliations to any group whatsoever.”

The Islamic Circle of North America has meanwhile opened an offensive of sorts — a campaign promoting Islam and seeking converts. It said it placed advertising signs inside 1,000 cars in New York’s subway network.

In Chicago the group had a number of city buses adorned top to bottom with pro-Islam advertising, headlined “Islam: The Way of Life of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.”

Rehab of the Chicago C.A.I.R. office said that kind of approach may work to a limited degree, “but really the crux of the issue is not learning about the details of a religion but rather interacting with and understanding that the average Muslim is no different than yourself.”

(Editing by Andrew Stern and Frances Kerry)

Sour note for American Muslims in election campaign - Yahoo! News

Jeffrey Donovan 10/26/08
A EurasiaNet Partner Post from RFE/RL

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Is this end of a beautiful friendship?

The Taliban and Al-Qaeda have enjoyed a long alliance in Afghanistan. Their relationship, based on a seemingly shared brand of severe and militant Islam, even survived the US-led toppling of the Taliban in 2001, which came after leader Mullah Omar famously refused to turn over to the Americans his Al-Qaeda ally, Osama bin Laden.

To this day, that relationship endures. But will it last? Rifts and tensions between the Taliban and Arab Al-Qaeda, as well as vastly different Islamic traditions, suggest that a basis for separation exists. Whether it occurs could determine whether peace negotiations between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Taliban foes ever get off the ground.

Afghan Muslim traditions, including the Taliban, are culturally and historically distinct from Al-Qaeda’s Saudi-rooted Salafist Islam, says Francesco Zannini, an expert on modern Islam. In that sense, the two Sunni movements have always been awkward bedfellows.

“The whole Indian subcontinent, including Afghanistan, still lives an Islam that is profoundly rooted in local customs,” says Zannini, author of the recently published “Islam In The Heart Of Asia: From The Caucasus To Thailand.” “So they have always found themselves ill at ease with the strictly Arab Wahhabist doctrine and the entire Salafist movement.”

With the Afghan war worsening, NATO officers and political leaders have made it clear that the seven-year conflict won’t be resolved militarily.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that reconciliation among Afghan warring parties is not only necessary but constitutes NATO’s “obvious exit strategy.” And last month, in a first sign that reconciliation efforts may be afoot, Saudi officials hosted an encounter in Mecca between Taliban allies and envoys of Karzai.

While both sides have played down the Mecca meeting, insisting that no peace talks took place, sources who attended the gathering told RFE/RL’s Afghan Service that it might have served as a prelude to future peace negotiations.

However, the Afghan government says it will not engage in talks with people who maintain ties to Al-Qaeda. That has led some Islamists to fret about the Taliban ditching Al-Qaeda for a place in the government. The BBC on October 24 quoted one militant as saying on an Islamist Internet forum: “The Taliban are not the kind of people who would sell out Al-Qaeda in exchange for political power.”

Differing Ambitions

But tensions and differences have long existed between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. They came into view in 2005 when Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, criticized the Taliban in a letter to a fellow Islamist.

Zawahiri lamented that after the U.S.-led invasion, Taliban members retreated to their tribes and villages and showed little attachment to the global Islamist struggle. He unfavorably compared that behavior to Arab Sunni resistance to U.S. attacks on the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Al-Ramadi.

That letter, which was sent to Iraqi Al-Qaeda chief Abu al-Zarqawi and intercepted by the U.S. military, pointed out a key ideological difference between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda: their ambitions.

Al-Qaeda is a pan-Islamist group that does not recognize the borders that separate Muslim countries. The Taliban, partly the creation of the Pakistani intelligence services, has always been focused on Afghanistan and largely eschews pan-Islamism.

Beyond that lies of a sea of cultural and historical differences between the austere and puritanical Islam that developed in Saudi Arabia and an Islam rooted in much different local cultural traditions that grew up in South Central Asia.

Islam’s traditions in Afghanistan include mystical sects such as Sufism and the generally more open disposition of Hanafi Islam on the Indian subcontinent. That stands in contrast with the more severe Arabic Wahhabist traditions that Al-Qaeda has sought to impose in Afghanistan.

“I often tell my students that in Afghanistan, there’s not just one Shari’a — there are several different Shari’as tied to the traditions of the various ethnic and tribal groups present in Afghanistan,” says Zannini, who is a professor at the Pontifical Institute of Islamic and Arabic Studies in Rome. “This makes it easy to understand the difficulty of a dialogue with Al-Qaeda, which has reduced Shari’a to a few fixed norms that are clear for its political militants. But this goes against everything represented by the Islamic traditions of the Indian subcontinent.”

Taliban’s Spiritual Influences

The Taliban, in part, is said to follow Deoband Islam, a revivalist movement that started in the Uttar Pradesh region of India. Last February, the Deoband madrasah, in a gathering in India, announced a total rejection of “all forms of terrorism.”

While the Taliban has made no such pledge, the Deoband’s announcement has already triggered changes in Pakistan. There, the Jamiat Ulema-e Islam party, an important Islamic political force, split up in Baluchistan Province precisely over the issue of terrorism after the Deoband statement.

The Taliban have also since been engaged in a reported internal debate about their own tactics. Some members, possibly including Omar, have come out against targeting civilians, aid workers, and key infrastructure. Some reports also claim that Omar has severed all his ties with Al-Qaeda.

Complicating things in Afghanistan is that the insurgency is far from monolithic. Within it, two groups appear to enjoy closer ties to Al-Qaeda than the Taliban: One in the east led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a longtime Al-Qaeda ally and rival of Omar; the other led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran commander who is seen as strongly pan-Islamist.

For any peace talks to succeed, however, it would seem necessary to include all insurgents. But how that might happen, given the Afghan government’s precondition that militants sever all ties to Al-Qaeda, remains far from clear.

Indeed, few commentators have expressed optimism that such talks could get off the ground, let alone succeed. But the participation of Saudi Arabia, a symbolic seat of Muslim moral authority as well as a former Taliban paymaster, has at least inspired hope that progress can be made. Saudi backing is seen as partly motivated by concerns about stability in nuclear-armed Pakistan, where Al-Qaeda-allied Taliban groups have emerged as a major threat.

Significantly, there has also been encouragement from other authoritative Muslim voices. Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi, the grand imam of Cairo’s important Al-Azhar Mosque, added his influential voice last week to the call for Afghan peace talks.

“The job of Islamic associations, led by Al-Azar, is to help the [Afghan) government in the peace process and help that nation develop peacefully,” Tantawi, who is acknowledged as the highest spiritual authority for the world’s nearly 1 billion Sunni Muslims, said in an address in Cairo.

RFE/RL correspondent Abubakar Siddique and Afghan Service correspondent Hashem Mohmand contributed to this report.

EurasiaNet Eurasia Insight - Are Theological Tensions Distancing Taliban From Al-Qaeda?

Muslim watershed Germany’s biggest mosque opens

• Kate Connolly in Berlin
• The Guardian,
• Saturday October 25 2008
• Article history

It has a 34-metre minaret and a dome-shaped ceiling handpainted with floral patterns and verses from the Qur’an. Its crowning glory is a golden chandelier engraved with 99 epithets for Allah, and there is seating for 2,000 worshippers.

Germany’s biggest mosque opens tomorrow in the Ruhr valley city of Duisburg in what leaders of Germany’s 3 million Muslims have described as a watershed moment, bringing mosques out of the backyards and alleys and into the middle of urban life.

The multimillion-euro Merkez mosque in the working-class district of Marxloh, which was financed by private and public money, will transform the lives of the city’s Muslims. Their previous meeting place was the rundown canteen of a former mining company.

For some, its consecration is a sign that the country has finally integrated its Muslims, too long considered guest workers who would one day go home, while for others it shows that Islam is taking over the religious landscape.

“How many mosques can a country cope with?” the conservative newspaper Die Welt asked in a recent commentary.

For their part, Germany’s Muslims, of whom 70% are ethnic Turks, say they want their rightful place in a society they have been a part of for 50 years or more.

“The fact that we’ve been allowed to build a mosque is a sign for us that the community is telling us ‘you’re accepted’,” said Mustafa Kücük, a spokesman for the Merkez mosque.

However, there have been protests in Berlin, a citizens’ initiative was formed in Munich to prevent a mosque being built, and in Cologne rightwing populists used opposition to the building of a mosque to stoke Islamophobia.

Germany has 206 mosques, and more than 120 are under construction or in the planning stage.

Muslim watershed Germany’s biggest mosque opens | World news | The Guardian

A TRIPLE TRAGEDY

- Muslims in India have to contend with three major problems

Politics and play : Ramachandra Guha

An influential editor from Delhi, visiting Bangalore, hosted a dinner for some local politicians, and invited me along. Among the netas present was the Karnataka Youth Congress president, the spokesman for H.D. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular), and an office-bearer of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The conversation turned to the history of communal violence in Karnataka. Someone mentioned that whereas the southern parts of the state had been mostly riot-free, towns on the coast had witnessed periodic bouts of Hindu-Muslim violence. Asked to explain this — since the coast is where his party has always been strong — the BJP man said that in those towns the Muslims were the ‘dominant community’, and it was when non-Muslims sought to challenge their hegemony that trouble broke out.

I asked the politician to explain what, precisely, this ‘dominance’ consisted of. How many district collectors and superintendents of police in coastal Karnataka were Muslim? And how many judges, professors, or vice chancellors? We knew of the achievements in the field of business of the Pais of Manipal — were there any Muslim entrepreneurs of comparable wealth and influence?

A few days after this exchange, I was driving through Kamaraj Road, in the heart of the city. To get to my home, I had to turn left onto Mahatma Gandhi Road, which is the busiest, most prestigious, road in Bangalore, somewhat like Chowringhee in Calcutta. Just ahead of me was a Muslim gentleman, who was attempting to do likewise. Except that he was making the turn not behind the wheel of a powerful Korean car but with a hand-cart on which were piled some bananas.

That the fruit-seller was Muslim was made clear by his headgear, a white cap with perforations. He was an elderly man, about 60, short and slightly built. The turn from Kamaraj Road into M.G. Road was made hard by his age and infirmity; and harder by the fact that the road slopes steeply downwards at this point, and by the further fact that making the turn with him were a thousand screaming motor vehicles. Had he gone too slow he would have been bunched in against the cars: had he gone too fast he might have lost control of his cart altogether, with the bananas intended for his paying customers instead consumed, gratis, by the wheels of cars — Japanese and German as well as Korean.

I was, as I said, right behind this Muslim fruit-seller, close enough to see him hunch his shoulders as he manoeuvred his cart leftwards, close enough to see those shoulders visibly relax as the turn was successfully made, with cart and bananas both intact.

One should not read too much into a single encounter, a single image, but it does seem to be that that perilous turn into M.G. Road was symptomatic of an entire life — a life lived close to the margins, at the edge of survival and subsistence, a life taken one day at a time and from one turn to the next. If anything, the life must have got harder over time. Back in the 1980s, there would have been more Bangloreans who ate bananas off a cart. (Too many of these, nowadays, would rather drink Coke from a can or eat chips from a packet.) Back in the 1980s, the fruit-seller would have been 20 years younger, more in control of his cart, and having to contend with far less traffic too.

The life of that solitary fruit-seller is very representative of the life of Indian Muslims in general. Far from being ‘dominant’ or hegemonic, most Muslims are poor farmers, labourers, artisans, and traders. They are massively under-represented in the professions — few, too few, of India’s top lawyers, judges, doctors, and professors are Muslim. The proportion of Muslim parliamentarians and of Muslim civil servants has been steadily declining over time.

One reason that there is no substantial Muslim middle class is the creation of those two new nations in August 1947. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, the thinking elite of cities such as Mumbai, Lucknow, Delhi and Calcutta counted many Muslims in their ranks. In time, however, these liberal and cosmopolitan Muslims came to support Jinnah’s Pakistan movement. These bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, and entrepreneurs hoped that in a Muslim state they would be free of competition from the more populous Hindus.

The migration of a large chunk of the Muslim middle class to Pakistan did not work out well for them. Migrating to escape the Hindus, they found themselves encircled and subordinated by the Punjabis. But their flight was also a disaster for India. For the Muslims left behind in this country have since lacked an enlightened and educated leadership.

If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second has been the patronage by India’s most influential political party of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. This was not always so. Jawaharlal Nehru had placed much faith in two outstanding, and progressive-minded, Muslim politicians, Sheikh Abdullah and Said-ud-din Tyabji. However, the Sheikh fell prey to his own ambition, seeking to become the king of an independent Kashmir rather than the democratic leader of all of India’s Muslims. And Tyabji died young.

While Nehru at least sought to cultivate the modern Muslim, the Congress of Indira, Rajiv, and Sonia Gandhi has consistently favoured the conservative sections of the community. When one of his members of parliament, Arif Mohammed Khan, was willing to bat in public for the reform of Muslim personal laws, Rajiv dumped him in favour of the mullahs. The trend has continued, with the current Congress leadership likewise choosing to offer subsidies and sops to Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world.

The third tragedy of the Indian Muslim is that India’s other professedly national party has never really treated them as full-fledged citizens of the land. For the members and fellow travellers of the BJP, the Parsi is to be tolerated, the Christian distrusted, and the Muslim detested. One form this detestation takes is verbal — the circulation of innuendos, gossip and abuse based on lies and half-truths (as in the case of the Karnataka BJP man and the Muslims of the coast). Another form is physical — thus, the hand of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad lies behind some of the worst communal riots in independent India, for example, Bhagalpur in 1989, Bombay in 1992, and Gujarat in 2002, when, in all cases, an overwhelming majority of the victims were Muslims.

Prima facie, the justice system appears to be biased against the Muslims. The number of Muslim judges and senior police officers is miniscule. Again, while acts of violence by Muslims are quickly followed by the arrest and trial of the perpetrators (real or alleged), Hindus who provoke communal riots are treated with far greater indulgence by the law. This discrimination is violative of the rights of equal citizenship, and altogether unworthy of a country calling itself a democracy.

It is fashionable in some quarters to blame the Indian Muslims for their predicament. In my view, while the absence of a credible liberal leadership has contributed, a far greater role in their marginalization has been played by the malevolent policies of our major political parties. The Congress seeks to exploit the Muslims, politically. The BJP chooses to demonize them ideologically (but also with a political purpose in mind). The Congress wishes to take care of the (sometimes spurious) religious and cultural needs of the Muslims, rather than advance their real, tangible, economic and material interests. The BJP denies that they have any needs or interests at all.

ramguha@vsnl.com

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Opinion | A triple tragedy

U.S. Muslim voters are election-year outcasts

Civil rights lawyer: ‘American Muslims feel slightly politically radioactive’

Faiza Ali, center, from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, helps Muslims register to vote in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 11.

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Todd Heisler /The New York Times / Redux Pictures file

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updated 7:21 p.m. ET, Thurs., Oct. 23, 2008

Lepers. Untouchables. Politically radioactive.

These are ways American Muslims describe their status in an election year when Barack Obama’s opponents are spreading rumors that he is Muslim, when he is Christian, and linking him to terrorists.

So when Colin Powell, a Republican, condemned using Muslim as a smear — a tactic he said members of his own party allowed — there was an outpouring of gratitude and relief from American Muslims.

“That speech really came out of left field and really shocked us,” said Wajahat Ali, 27, an attorney and playwright from Fremont, Calif. “The sense is that it’s about time. He said something that needed to be said.”

The retired general, who was President Bush’s first secretary of state, made the comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” as he broke with his party to endorse the Democratic nominee for president. Powell noted in last Sunday’s broadcast that Republican John McCain did not spread rumors about Obama’s faith, but Powell said he was “troubled” that others did.

“The correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America,” Powell said. “Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated (with) terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

Powell said he felt especially strongly about the rumors because of a photo he saw in The New Yorker magazine of the mother of a Muslim soldier in Arlington Cemetery embracing her son’s grave, which was marked with a Muslim crescent and star. The soldier, Kareem R. Khan of New Jersey, was 20 when he was killed in Iraq.

“We American Muslims have talked about our patriotism and the heroism of some American Muslims till we were blue in the face, and neither the media nor the people listen,” said Seeme Hasan, a Pueblo, Colo., Republican whose family has given tens of thousands of dollars to the GOP.

“Gen. Powell made people listen and at a very humane level,” said Hasan, who is backing McCain. “More people in leadership positions need to say this and recognize this — that American Muslims have worked very hard to fight this war on terror.”

Combating claims
The inaccurate claims that Obama is secretly Muslim started as soon as he was mentioned as a potential presidential candidate. There were false rumors that he was educated at a radical Islamic school as a child in Indonesia and that he was sworn into the Senate on the Quran.

His opponents emphasized his middle name — Hussein — and circulated a photo of him wearing traditional Somali garb on a 2006 visit to Kenya.

Kari Ansari, a mother of three from Villa Park, Ill., said the allegations upset her 10-year-old son.

“It sort of made him feel like, ‘If they won’t elect him president just for trying on Muslim clothes, they will never elect me because I’m a real Muslim,’” said Ansari, a founder of America’s Muslim Family, a quarterly magazine. “That’s heartbreaking for us as Muslim parents.”

Obama has combated the claims in speeches and on a campaign Web site dedicated to debunking inaccuracies about him. But the belief persists.

A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found 12 percent of voters believed the Illinois senator is Muslim. That poll was released Tuesday — coincidentally, the same day the head of a New Mexico Republican women’s group called Obama a “Muslim socialist” and said “Muslims are our enemies.” County and GOP officials condemned the statements.

“Muslims feel jaded by the 2008 election precisely because they see the smearing of their identity,” Ali said. “Muslim or Arab is seen as a scarlet letter, political leprosy, kryptonite. There is that taint there. We’re the lowest of the low.”

The experience isn’t entirely new for American Muslims, who have struggled for acceptance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The major parties have quietly courted them for years, yet presidential candidates have refused to publicly associate with them, leaders say.

The exact number of U.S. Muslim voters is not known. But many are wealthy professionals who came to the country to earn graduate degrees in engineering, medicine and business. They settled in significant numbers in key states including Michigan and Florida.

Presidential candidates “are not willing to have their photo taken, they don’t meet with Muslim organizations, and they shy away from any issue that may link them to the Muslim community,” said Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a Los Angeles advocacy group leading a national Muslim voter registration campaign.

“We’re treated as untouchables in politics,” al-Marayati said.

Yet, this year has been especially painful because of the attacks on Obama.

‘Anti-Muslim rhetoric’
Hesham Hassaballa, a physician and author from Chicago, said this month he formally left the GOP, partly because of the allegations.

Like many other Muslims, Hassaballa had joined the Republican Party because of its small-government philosophy, social conservatism and pledge to limit taxes. In 2000, he supported McCain in the primaries, then Bush in the final election. Four years later, he backed Democrat John Kerry for president, partly to protest Bush policies on detaining and interrogating terror suspects, but remained Republican.

Now, he says the party has abandoned its principles.

“The McCain of 2008 is not the McCain of 2000,” Hassaballa said. “With the way the campaign has been going and a lot of the anti-Muslim rhetoric, just how the McCain campaign has conducted itself, just really turned me off.”

The McCain campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

In defending himself, Obama has rejected the idea that being called Muslim is an insult. His campaign also has an outreach coordinator to the Muslim community.

Some American Muslims said they wished the Democratic nominee would say more forcefully that their religion should not be used as a smear, but said they understood that it could damage his presidential bid in this political climate.

“I don’t think there could have been any better messenger than Colin Powell, being someone who is a well-respected Republican, a former secretary of state and an army general,” said Arsalan Iftikhar, a Washington, D.C., civil rights lawyer and writer who supports Obama. “American Muslims feel slightly politically radioactive at this time. This sends a resounding message of inclusiveness.”

U.S. Muslim voters are election-year outcasts - Faith- msnbc.com