Muslim Heretics Conference

Tuesday, 25 November , 2008, 12:37
Last Updated: Tuesday, 25 November , 2008, 14:34

London: With both countries facing the common threat of suicide bombings, India-born inter-faith champion Lord Khalid Hameed says a recent British exercise in bringing Muslim and Jewish students together holds important lessons for India.

“There is absolutely no room for suicide in Islam,” said Hameed who has been visiting top British universities along with a group of like-minded parliamentarians, addressing challenging religious issues.

Their visits follow reports of campus tensions between Muslim and Jewish students in Britain.

Lord Hameed is British Asian of the year 2007

“I’d say the same thing to Muslim youth audiences in Britain and in India,” the Lucknow-born Hameed, who was honoured with a Padma Shri in 1992 for services in the field of medicine, said.

“You need to come out of the margins and participate in nation-building. Be non-violent, go in for education and put in hard work. At the end of the day, the solution is education, education and education.

“The problem is that Muslims lack credible, sincere and honest leadership. There are no leaders - the community is like a ship with no anchor and no captain, travelling in all directions in turbulent waters,” he said.

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Hameed, a successful medical entrepreneur who is chairman of the Alpha Hospital Group and CEO of the planned super-speciality London International Hospital, said he was frank in his exchanges with the youth he met.

“I told them all these young people (who support terrorism) are totally un-Islamic. There is a blanket prohibition of suicide under Islam. And just as the Upanishads (Hindu scriptures) talk about the world as a single family, so Islam says that noble people look after strangers as they would look after themselves,” he said.

One problem, according to him, was that the Quran has been heavily edited by “various sides to their own advantage”.

“Once you start editing a holy book, you risk losing the gist of the message, which includes, ‘You shall not kill, you shall not take innocent life and you shall not take your own life’.”

Hameed, who has so far visited the universities of Middlesex, Oxford and Birmingham with other peers and MPs belonging to the Co-Existence Trust, a cross-party NGO, said Muslim youths also suffered from a “phobia of strangers” among host cultures.

“Everything about them is seen as ‘different’ - their clothes, rituals, food, skin colour… Therefore, you have people saying ‘They are taking over our jobs, hospital beds, education’,” he explained.

Hameed said one question he has been asked repeatedly by students is how democracy protects citizens from what are seen as deliberate provocations, such as cartoons about Prophet Mohammed.

“My reply is that here you have the freedom to practice your own faith. In return, because you love democracy, you have to exercise your democratic rights and protest. The bomb is not the answer.”

The tour, which takes in some of Britain’s biggest universities, is aimed at addressing campus tensions flowing chiefly from the Middle East conflict.

The conflict has led to Jewish and Muslim students in Britain leaving hostile message on Internet sites, putting up inflammatory posters on campuses and Muslim youth joining extremist groups.

Hostilities are reported to have intensified during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, when police were alerted.

‘There is no room for suicide in Islam’

Islamofascist slanders

Equating Muslims with Nazis is a hazard in the Middle East, and misfires as a smear on Obama

Comments (340)

• 

We live in McCarthyist times, or so it sometimes seems. An Indiana election official, it emerged last week, has distributed a blog that called Barack Obama a “young, black Adolf Hitler”, while elsewhere an email was sent to Jewish voters warning of a “second Holocaust” if the Democrat was elected. Meanwhile, campuses around America last week marked “Islamofascism Awareness Week” with events on jihad and Islamic totalitarianism.

“Islamofascism” slips easily from the mouth of war-on-terror ideologues but it has a deeper narrative, too, as it attempts to elide modern Islam with 1930s National Socialism, and equate Muslims and Nazis. Obama, by virtue of his Muslim father (whom he met once), earns a central place in this narrative, where (according to Colin Powell) calling someone a Muslim - accurately or not - constitutes a smear campaign. It follows, QED, that having studied the Qur’an makes you the antichrist.

It is, perhaps, understandable that Israel invoked the spectre of a Holocaust in the Middle East in the aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps; but Israeli historians have documented the ways in which, as the country became the dominant military power in the region, successive Israeli prime ministers deployed it as an ideological tool, even as the state demonstrated indifference to real Holocaust survivors in its midst. No one collapsed the differences between the Nazi genocide and the Middle East conflict more unashamedly than Menachem Begin who, at the height of his country’s bombardment of Beirut, sent a telegram to Ronald Reagan declaring that he felt as though he was facing Berlin where Hitler and his henchmen were hiding in a bunker. To which the novelist Amos Oz responded tartly: “Mr Begin, Hitler died 37 years ago … Again and again … you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists.”

But the biggest weapon wielded by those intent on confusing Arabs or Muslims with Nazis is the person of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In a new book, Icons of Evil, two American academics rehash the charges against the Mufti - that he received funding from the Nazis, met Hitler, sat out much of the war in Berlin, and helped establish a Muslim-Balkan unit in the Waffen-SS. In their inflation of the importance of the Mufti (an inflation deliberately encouraged in Israel by the 1961 Eichmann trial), what such accounts fail to provide is evidence that the Mufti gained any power over Nazi policy. Conversely, plenty of evidence shows he lost almost all his influence over Palestinian Arabs in the period.

More recently, consanguinity is claimed between the Mufti and Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein - all of whom are brought in to retrospectively implicate the Palestinians in the Holocaust, as if this might somehow prove that they’re entitled to only a small portion of their own land. Since the Jewish genocide is used so shamelessly in legitimation of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, it’s hardly surprising if many Arabs and Muslims respond either with Holocaust denial or by trying to appropriate the Holocaust themselves. In a mirror-image of Arabs-are-Nazis, Zionism-is-Nazism: they accuse Israel of acting like Nazis even while they represent Jews in the crude and offensive stereotypes used by Nazi propaganda.

One consequence of using the Holocaust in this way is that it naturalises antisemitism, turning it into an endemic, unchangeable part of human nature. By refusing to see the differences between different kinds of antisemitism that might look similar but have different historical causes, antisemitism becomes paradoxically harder to challenge. It also encourages Jews to see themselves as permanent victims and live in perpetual fear: we can never escape Auschwitz. And it polemicises the Holocaust, devaluing the real event and traducing the memory of the millions who perished in it - genocide as metaphor.

Invoking the Holocaust won’t help solve the Middle East crisis, nor assuage the genuine anxiety felt by Jews who survived it. Nor, however it may chagrin some Republicans, has it succeeded in magicking away Barack Obama.

• This article is based on ideas in an essay in A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity; the volume developed from commentaries at guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/series/independentjewishvoices

Anne Karpf: Equating Muslims with Nazis is a hazard in the Middle East, and misfires as a smear on Obama | Comment is free | The Guardian

Abdul Khalik ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 11/26/2008 7:06 AM  |  Headlines

Most Islamic studies teachers in public and private schools in Java oppose pluralism, tending toward radicalism and conservatism, according to a survey released in Jakarta on Tuesday.

The study shows 62.4 percent of the surveyed Islamic teachers, including those from Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah — the country’s two largest Muslim organizations — reject the notion of having non-Muslim leaders.

The survey was conducted last month by the Center for Islamic and Society Studies (PPIM) at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, involving some 500 Islamic studies teachers throughout Java.

It reveals 68.6 percent of the respondents are opposed to non-Muslims becoming their school principle and 33.8 percent are opposed to having non-Muslim teachers at their schools.

Some 73.1 percent of the teachers don’t want followers of other religions to build their houses of worship in their neighborhoods, it found.

Some 85.6 percent of the teachers prohibit their students from celebrating big events perceived as Western traditions, while 87 percent tell their students not to learn about other religions.

Some 48 percent of the teachers would prefer for female and male students to be separated into different classrooms.

PPIM director Jajat Burhanudin said the teachers’ anti-pluralist views would be reflected in their lessons and contribute to growing conservatism and radicalism among Muslims in the country.

“I think they play a key role in promoting conservatism and radicalism among Muslims nowadays. You can’t say now that conservatism and radicalism only develop on the streets like what has been campaigned by the FPI (the Islam Defenders Front), but rather deep within the education (system),” he said, referring to a radical Islamic group.

Jajat said such intolerance threatened the civil and political rights of citizens of other religions.
The survey also shows 75.4 percent of the respondents ask their students to call on non-Muslim teachers to convert to Islam, while 61.1 percent reject a new Islamic sect.

In line with their strict beliefs, 67.4 percent said they felt more Muslim than Indonesian.

The majority of the respondents also support the adoption of sharia law in the country to help fight crime.

According to the survey, 58.9 percent of the respondents back rajam (stoning) as a punishment for all kinds of criminal and 47.5 percent said the punishment for theft should be having one hand cut off, while 21.3 percent want the death sentence for those who convert from Islam.

Only 3 percent of the teachers said they felt it was their duty to produce tolerant students.

With 44.9 percent of the respondents claiming themselves members of Nahdlatul Ulama and 23.8 percent supporters of Muhammadiyah, Jajat said the two moderate organizations had failed to establish their values at the grassroots.

“Moderation and pluralism are only embraced by their elites. I am afraid that this kind of phenomenon has contributed to increasing radicalism and even terrorism in our country,” he said

Most Islamic studies teachers oppose pluralism, survey finds | The Jakarta Post