Muslim Heretics Conference

HRT

Sadiq al Mahdi. Photo ©

4 December 08 - The Sudanese Imam, Sadiq al Mahdi advocates for an Islam that is more tolerant towards women. He was taking part in a seminar on women and Islam co-organised by the Institute for Public Law in Bern. Interview.

Carole Vann / Human Rights Tribune - Notorious for its ultra conservative Islamic laws, it may come as a surprise in the West that Sudan also embraces more modern interpretations of Islam. One of its representatives, Imam Sadiq al Mahdi, took part last week, with other reformist Muslims, in a seminar organised at the University of Bern by the Institute of Public Law, run by Walter Kalin, and the Geneva Institute for Human Rights. Delegates discussed the issue of compatibility between woman and Islam and human rights.

Imam Sadiq al Mahdi is the grandson of the founder of the religious movement Al Ansar in Sudan. At the end of the 18th century this movement stood out for its openess towards women and influenced, amongst others, muslims in Tunisia. A religious leader himself and head of one of the largest opposition parties in Sudan, the National Umma Party, Al Mahdi was prime minister in the coalition government between 1986 and 1989, right up to the coup d’etat led by the current President, Omar al-Bashir. An Oxford graduate and member of the board of the Madrid Club, he is a key figure in the modern Islamic movement in the world today.

Are human rights compatible with the status of women in Islam?

Yes, absolutely. You have to look in detail at the religious texts, putting them in a modern day context and not reading them as they were written a thousand years ago. There is no link between the opinions that were accepted then and now. But let’s be careful, it is not a question of introducing western secularisation. There is an Islam that is based on rationality, humanism, science, plurality. It is an Islam where the status of women has been improved. There is no reason that this status should be diminished today.

How do countries such as Saudia Arabia react to such opinions?

Today Islam is dominated by conservative forces. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are the most extreme, wanting to link us to an idealised past. They want to subjugate women as inferior. Well known schools of law take ambivalent passages of the Koran or from other religious texts and interpret them literally. I think that there is room for a different approach.

Such as?

In the sacred texts, it is written that the testimony of two women is equal to that of one man. If this is taken out of context, you can become a prisoner of the past. At the time, most women were illiterate, so their testimony was based on memory (a reason why it was seen that two women were needed rather than one). Today the context is different and this passage should not be read literally. The testimony of a woman should be given the same value as that of a man.

Is wearing the veil enshrined in the Koran ?

This is also about a question of interpretation. The Koran requires that men and women dress decently. But I admit that here man is the weaker sex and it asks the woman to help him not to fail (laughter). Women and men are certainly not seen as equals there.

Two countries, Tunisia and Morocco have very progressive laws relating to women. Are they role models to follow ?

There is a fundamental difference in the two approaches. The Tunisian family code was drawn up with secular intent, outside of Islam, while the Moroccan code, the Moudawana, has based its laws on religious texts. The Moroccan approach is much more legitimate for a Muslim society than the Tunisian one.

How can these changes be concretely applied on the ground ?

In many countries, women sit on commitees that study laws. But the principle constraints are cultural. We have to work on laws but also change mentalities. In Sudan, for example, a woman has legal rights. The problem comes in applying them. There has to be political will. The changes in Morocco and Tunisia would not have happened without the agreement of the President or the King.

Do you think you are in danger because of your views ?

I don’t know. Some forces accuse us of a lack of religious respect. But important political players in Turkey, Malaysia, Morocco and Indonesia share our ideas. At the moment there is a lot of competition between the various interpretations of the Koran over the future of Islam.

Walter Kalin wants to show another side of Islam

Former member of the UN Human Rights Commission, Walter Kalin has since 2004 been the UN Secretary General’s representative for displaced people. He also heads the Institute for International Law at the University of Bern and is one of the organisers of the forum. “This type of debate is one of the biggest challenges facing our university. It is about showing how the Muslim world is not a monolithic block and that there are competing forces between those who favour a fundamental approach and those who are more reformist.

The reformists are not marginal players. Al Mahdi is head of one of the biggest political parties in Sudan. Others are members of the Egyptian and Jordanian parliaments where they are extremely socially and politically active. But in general Europe or the West tends to ignore this. C.V.

What status do women have in Islam ? | Human Rights Tribune - www.humanrights-geneva.info

Vladimir Putin was the first head of a non-Muslim majority state to speak at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a gathering of 57 Muslim states, in October 2003. That was a political and diplomatic feat, especially since Russia was waging a long-running war in Chechnya at the time. Putin stressed that 15 percent of the population of the Russian Federation is Muslim and that all the inhabitants of eight of its 21 autonomous republics are Muslim, and he won observer member status with the organization, thanks to support from Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Since then, Putin and other Russian leaders, including the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, claim that Russia “is, to some extent, a part of the Muslim world.” In an interview with Al Jazeera on Oct. 16, 2003, Putin stressed that, unlike Muslims living in Western Europe, those in Russia were indigenous, and that Islam had been present on Russian territory long before Christianity. So Russia now claims to have a privileged political relationship with the Arab and Muslim world and believes that, as a mostly European state, it has a historic vocation as a mediator between the Western and Muslim worlds.

There are reasons for these claims. The first is to counter the pernicious effect of the war in Chechnya, in Russia as much as in the rest of the world. The aim is to avoid, or at least limit, polarization between Russia’s ethnic majority and its Muslims by reinforcing Muslims’ feelings of belonging to the state. “We must prevent Islamophobia,” said Putin in the Al Jazeera interview. That will be difficult, given the way anyone suspected of being a Muslim fundamentalist is pursued, and not just in Chechnya. “Terrorism should not be identified with any one religion, culture or tradition,” Putin insisted. Before 9/11 he called Chechen rebels “Muslim fundamentalist terrorists.” Now he speaks of “terrorists connected to international criminal networks and drug and arms traffickers,” avoiding any reference to Islam.

The other purpose in seeking special ties with the Arab and Muslim world is related to Russia’s foreign policy aim to “reinforce multipolarity in the world” - to sustain and develop poles of resistance to U.S. hegemony and unilateralism. This means taking advantage of the hostility to U.S. foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim world. The Soviet Union used to present itself as the natural ally of anti-imperialist Arab states “with a socialist orientation.” Now Russia is seeking strong political relations not only with Iran and Syria, but also with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, which have long been close American allies.

Economic considerations are important, especially in the energy sector - the power behind Russia’s return to the international stage. The Kremlin believes there is a major future in nuclear energy and the export of nuclear power stations, which may give Russia a competitive edge in technology and make it more than just an exporter of raw energy. The same is true of high-tech weapons, which were the most successful economic sector of the former Soviet Union before serious difficulties in the 1990s.

The Kremlin is no longer seeking formal alliances. It wants strong but non-restrictive political ties in frameworks such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), which do not put it in direct opposition to the United States. Significantly, Iran only has observer status in this organization, although it would like to be a full member.

One more explanation for this new policy toward the Muslim world is the quest for a post-Soviet Russian identity at home and abroad. This is not just political opportunism. In 2005, the academic Sergei Rogov wrote in the official Foreign Ministry review: “The Islamic factor in Russian policy is first and foremost a question of identity. … That is one of the reasons why Russia cannot yet be a nation state in the European sense of the term. … Our relations with the Islamic world directly affect our security.”

It is important to grasp what that means. In September 2003, Igor Ivanov, then foreign minister, said the war in Iraq had increased the number of terrorist attacks on Russian territory as elsewhere in the world. That was before Beslan, but Russia was already fearful of terrorism as a consequence of the Iraq war. Russia had hoped that a new multipolar configuration would emerge from the concerted opposition at the UN Security Council by France, Germany and Russia, which had deprived the U.S. of international legitimacy for the war.

Russian leaders were seriously concerned that a “clash of civilizations” would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s most intransigent policies, Russian leaders thought potential U.S. attacks on Iran would be a catastrophe, with destabilizing consequences in Iran, so close to

How Moscow courts the Muslim world - International Herald Tribune

By MICHAEL J. TOTTEN

On Feb. 17, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, becoming the newest country in the world—and one of the most unusual. Most of its citizens are Muslim, an oddity in Europe; further, unlike most Muslim-majority nations, Kosovo is overwhelmingly pro-American, and its relations with Israel are excellent as well. No Arab countries have recognized the new nation’s existence yet, and only Saudi Arabia has said that it will. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, since Kosovars differ more radically from their brothers in the Arab world than any other Islamic people on earth.

Most of this difference is probably news to distant observers. Kosovo lies in the former Yugoslavia on Europe’s Balkan peninsula, a distant corner of southeastern Europe where relatively few travelers venture. The fog of war never really lifted after the combatants’ guns fell silent in 1999. The grievances that animated the warring parties seemed inscrutable to many Westerners, who often didn’t understand why Western powers got involved in the first place. Yet despite their obscurity, Kosovars today stand as a rebuttal to the notion that Muslims will be forever shackled to authoritarian rule and wedded to war with the modern, pluralistic “Other.”

About 90% of Kosovo’s two million inhabitants are ethnic Albanians; 7% are Serbs. Of the Albanians, about 3% are Catholic, and all the rest are at least nominal Muslims; the Serbs, meanwhile, are all Orthodox Christians. Against this backdrop, many observers interpreted the Balkan wars that tore Yugoslavia to pieces during the 1990s as an inevitable resurgence of ancient hatreds in a post-Communist ideological vacuum.

But the truth was that Serbian nationalists, led by Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, had deliberately crafted their own ethnic nationalism as an ideology to replace communism, seeking to retain power and seize as much territory as possible as the Yugoslav federation unraveled. On June 29, 1989, just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, Milosevic delivered a thunderous speech to throngs of budding Serbian nationalists in the Kosovar village of Kosovo Polje. Exactly 600 years earlier, on the nearby Field of Blackbirds, the Turks had defeated Serbian ruler Tsar Lazar in an epic battle, ending the sovereignty of Serbia’s medieval kingdom and beginning its absorption into the Ottoman Empire. “No one will ever beat you again,” Milosevic promised his audience.

Ethnic conflict was relatively new to the area. “There have been many battles and wars in Kosovo over the centuries,” historian Noel Malcolm writes in “Kosovo: A Short History,” “but until the last 100 years or so none of them had the character of an ‘ethnic’ conflict between Albanians and Serbs. Members of those two populations fought together as allies at the battle of Kosovo in 1389—indeed, they probably fought as allies on both sides of that battle.”

Nevertheless, Milosevic used the ancient grievance, along with others both real and imagined, to kindle Serbian nationalism—”a totalitarian ideology,” as Serbian writer Filip David calls it. Three months after his speech at Kosovo Polje, Milosevic revoked Kosovo’s political autonomy and imposed an apartheid-like system on its ethnic Albanian majority. There followed three wars, in the breakaway republics of Slovenia, Bosnia and Croatia, and then a fourth of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo at a time when the U.S. and NATO were in no mood to tolerate any more violent destabilization in Europe. NATO bombarded Yugoslav targets for 2½ months in 1999 until Milosevic capitulated and relinquished control of Kosovo to NATO and Russia.

Though Albanian nationalism is less ideological than Serbian nationalism, it, too, can express itself through ugly outbursts of violence. After ethnic Albanian refugees returned to Kosovo under NATO protection in 1999, some lashed out at Serb civilians, houses and Orthodox churches. Another wave of anti-Serb violence broke out in 2004, following rumors that Albanian children had drowned in the Ibar River after being chased off by Serbs.

But this violence, like the 1999 war, rose out of ethnic tensions, not religious ones. These were fights not between Muslims and Christians but between Albanians and Serbs—and though, again, most Albanians are Muslim and all Serbs are Orthodox Christian, the distinction is crucial. Kosovo’s Albanian Muslims and Albanian Catholics get along perfectly well with one another; in fact, during the war, they fought side by side. And in the later attacks, ethnic Albanian mobs burned Orthodox churches because they were Serb, not because they were Christian. Catholic churches weren’t touched—because their congregations were Albanian. (This isn’t a matter of anti-Orthodox sentiment among Muslims, either. Though no Albanian Orthodox Christians live in Kosovo, 20% of the population in Albania itself is Albanian Orthodox, and relations between them and the Albanian Muslim majority are perfectly fine.)

Some observers, especially in Serbia, have blamed the violence in 1999 and 2004 on Islamist jihadists. Those who live and work in Kosovo, and who are charged with keeping the peace, dismiss the allegation. “We’ve been here for so long and not seen any evidence of it that we’ve reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat,” says Zachary Gore, a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in eastern Kosovo.

Kosovo’s brand of Islam may be the most liberal in the world. I saw no more women there wearing conservative Islamic clothing—one or two a day at most—than I’ve seen in Manhattan. There is no apartheid by sex even in Kosovo’s villages. Alcohol flows freely in restaurants, cafes, and bars, where you’ll see as many young women in sexy outfits as you’d find in any Western European country. Aside from the minarets on the skyline, there is no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all.

“Here people are Muslims, but they think like Europeans,” says Xhabir Hamiti, a professor in the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina in Kosovo’s capital. “Muslims here identify themselves as Muslim Lite,” an American police officer tells me. As Afrim Kostrati, a young bartender, puts it: “We are Muslims, but not really.” And Luan Berisha, an entrepreneur, agrees: “We were never practicing Muslims like they are in the Middle East. . . . First of all, we are Albanians. Religion comes second.”

Religion in Kosovo is a private matter, not a public one. “We never talk about it,” Mr. Berisha says. “I just found out, one year ago, that a very good friend of mine is Catholic, and we have been friends for the last 10 years.” One Muslim woman tells me how startled she was when she attended a conference in Britain about young people who change the world. “I was shocked to find that the representative of the USA was a covered lady, originally from Iraq,” she says. “And the representative from Canada was another, originally from Afghanistan.” She herself was wearing shorts.

The reason for Kosovo’s relaxed attitude toward religion lies in its history. Albanians, including those in Kosovo, are the descendants of ancient pagan Greeks and Illyrians; more recently, they were Christian before the majority converted to Islam under Turkish Ottoman rule. Their religion may be Eastern, but Albanians have been culturally European for all of recorded history. “The Greeks hardly regard them as Christians, or the Turks as Moslems, and in fact they are a mixture of both, and sometimes neither,” Lord Byron wrote of them almost 200 years ago. “We Albanians,” writes Catholic priest Dom Lush Gjergji, “descendants of the Illyrians, are Christians from the time of the Apostles. . . . Without Christianity there would be no Albanian people, language, culture, or traditions. . . . Albanians consider Christianity their patrimony, their spiritual and cultural inheritance.”

Kosovar Muslims talk the same way. In fact, the feeling is reflected in the Albanian national flag, which flies all over Kosovo, despite minimal support for a “greater Albania.” Its black double-headed eagle is the seal of Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg, who led the resistance against the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. This national hero of a Muslim-majority country was Catholic.

Indeed, another sign of Kosovo’s complex religious identity involves the “crypto-Catholics,” those who just went through the motions of converting to Islam under the Ottomans. Kosovo’s cemeteries hold many tombstones engraved with Muslim names yet bearing the Catholic cross. Even now, the crypto-Catholics’ descendants are still “christened,” so to speak, with Muslim names, and then baptized into the church.

Many Kosovars are starting to convert “back” to Christianity. Cafe owner Gazi Berlajolli ascribes the trend partly to American influence. “Most of these people were atheists and agnostics, but they don’t want to be seen as atheist Muslims,” Mr. Berlajolli adds. “So they needed to convert to something else. They want to be able to put ‘Christian’ on their pages on Facebook.”

There is, however, a small group of radicals inside Kosovo who would like to transform moderate Balkan Islam into the much sterner Wahhabi variety practiced in Saudi Arabia. Several well-funded Saudis and other Gulf Arabs moved to Kosovo after the 1999 war to rebuild destroyed mosques and to impose Wahhabism on the decadent locals. Most ethnic Albanians across the political and religious spectrum in Kosovo resent these intrusions, partly because ornate Ottoman-style mosques destroyed by the Serbian military are being replaced with severe Wahhabi-style monstrosities, but also because hardly any Albanians seek guidance from the backward and authoritarian Arab world. “We don’t call them Wahhabis here,” a well-connected Albanian woman tells me. “We call them Binladensa, the people of bin Laden.” In Kosovo, that isn’t a compliment.

“We never had them before,” a young Albanian journalist says. “We hear these rumors that they are paying people”—to visit mosques and cover their hair, that is. I can’t confirm the rumor, but it’s widely believed, and I heard it from almost a dozen people. If true, it means that even the tiny minority who are willing to adopt the outward trappings of conservative Islam will do so only if they’re paid. If false, the fact that so many believe it reveals a broad contempt for rigid Arabic Islam and a belief that Albanian culture will not bend naturally to it. “You should see how the general public receives these people,” says a Kosovo human rights official. “They certainly are not liked. I don’t think they will succeed.”

Wahhabis are encountering resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from its atheists and agnostics. “We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” says Mr. Hamiti. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for the faiths, for all religions. The traditional Islam that has been cultivated in these areas is the best guarantee for the future. If we allow foreigners to come here and to push us to war with their ideas, then the situation will be out of our control.”

Tellingly, Kosovo’s only Islamist party got just 1.7% of the vote in the last election. Not even during the 1999 war, when ethnic Albanians were desperate for help, were Islamists welcome in Kosovo. Contrast this with Bosnia, which did accept help from mujahideen: after the European community imposed an arms embargo on all warring sides in Yugoslavia, leaving the barely armed Bosnians to twist in the wind, about 1,000 veterans of the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan streamed into the country. “In Kosovo,” Mr. Berisha says, “they came to support us and we rejected them. . . . This is not jihad. We are not fighting for religion here. We are fighting for our freedom, for ourselves, and for our families.”

It certainly helped that NATO stopped the fighting in Kosovo long before it could fester as it did in Bosnia. Still, the secular nature of the old Kosovo Liberation Army is worth noting. “In the two years that I covered the conflict in Kosovo, never once did I see the mujahideen fighters I saw in Bosnia, or hear KLA soldiers even allude to any kind of commitment to Islam,” Stacy Sullivan wrote in Newsweek. “Most said they were offended by such allegations, bragged about how they were Catholic before the Ottomans came and converted them, and said their only religion was Albanianism.”

Even so, the KLA was a murky organization with alleged links to organized crime and political gangsterism, and it was dissolved in September 1999, almost immediately after NATO’s intervention. Many of its former commanders ran for office in Kosovo’s first postwar election and lost overwhelmingly to the Democratic League of Kosovo, led by the pacifist Ibrahim Rugova. Kosovo is almost unique in history for rejecting its militant would-be liberators after earning de facto independence. Perhaps this pacifism was exactly what Kosovo needed after the fires of war died down. Foreign soldiers were on hand to provide security. Militant ethnic nationalism or, worse, militant religious sectarianism could easily have turned Kosovo into the Iraq of Europe.

A big reason for Kosovars’ antipathy to radical Islamism is, in a word, America, which has been the political North Star for Albanians inside and outside Kosovo ever since NATO’s intervention in 1999. In 2004, a Gallup survey measured popular opinion of U.S. foreign policy around the world. Only 10 countries rated American foreign policy favorably, and among those, Kosovo scored highest, registering 88% approval. When one ethnic Albanian I met happened to make the uncontroversial statement that Kosovo was a European country, another broke in. “We aren’t European,” she corrected. “We’re American.”

Repeatedly, I heard that Kosovars were America’s most reliable allies in the world. American flags fly just about everywhere outside the Serbian enclaves—some even in front of official buildings—and are sold at kiosks on the street, along with T-shirts that say “Thank you USA.” The Hotel Victory has erected the world’s second-largest replica of the Statue of Liberty on its roof, and I found another replica in the southeastern town of Vitina. Kosovars are fans of George W. Bush, both because he recognized Kosovo’s independence and simply because he’s the president. Graffiti in one Kosovar village proclaims “Thanks USA and Bush.” “You should have seen President Bush’s face when he came to Albania,” says a Kosovar Albanian who works with the U.S. Agency for International Development. “All over Western Europe he was met by protests, but the entire country of Albania turned out to welcome him.”

And Bill Clinton, who ordered the 1999 military intervention, is lionized. Izeir Mustafa is sculpting a statue of the former president that will soon be erected on a major traffic artery—renamed Bill Clinton Boulevard—leading from the airport into downtown Pristina. Many businesses are named after Mr. Clinton. I even found a patisserie and disco bar named Hillary, decorated with pictures of the ex-president and his wife.

“Americans are our best friends in the world,” a waiter said to me at one of Pristina’s finest restaurants. “The U.K. is second.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We appreciate that. Some people don’t like us.”

“Bad people,” he said.

Kosovar Albanians also strongly support, of all countries, Israel. “Kosovars used to identify with the Palestinians because we Albanians are Muslims and Christians and we saw Serbia and Israel both as usurpers of land,” a prominent Kosovar told journalist Stephen Schwartz. “Then we looked at a map and woke up. Israelis have a population of six million, their backs to the sea, and 300 million Arab enemies. Albanians have a total population of eight million, our backs to the sea, and 200 million Slav enemies. So why should we identify with the Arabs?”

Mr. Berisha echoes the sentiment. “We have very much in common with Israel,” he says. “I would never side with the Muslim side to wipe Israel off the face of the world. Ninety percent of Kosovo feels this way.” Though that number sounds high, I didn’t meet anyone who said he felt otherwise. And Shachar Caspi, a Jewish Israeli restaurateur who moved from Tel Aviv to Kosovo, agreed. “Nobody has given me any problems or been against Israel,” he said. “Nobody here is radical. On the contrary, people are very warm, they are very nice, they have taken Islam to a beautiful place, not to a violent place. When they hear I am Israeli, they react very warmly.”

“Nobody cares?” I asked. Considering the vicious anti-Semitism that infects so much of the Muslim world, it was hard to believe. “On the contrary, people like it,” he said. “They come to speak to us. They want to be in contact. They tell me that in the Holocaust, they used to keep the survivors inside of shelters. And vice versa, in 1999 the first plane that landed in Pristina for [humanitarian] support was an Israeli plane.”

Few outside Albania and Kosovo know about the area’s heroism during the Holocaust, but the ethnic Albanians I met brought it up several times. “We sympathize a lot with the people who have suffered the same fate as us,” Mr. Berisha says. “We were Muslims even in the Second World War, stronger Muslims than now, but even then we protected [the Jews] with our lives.” And Hamiti says, “Albanians everywhere are aware that Jews want to help them in this conflict. And Jews are aware and thankful to Albanians for saving their lives during the Second World War.”

After concluding my Kosovo trip, I attended a conference in Tirana, Albania, called “Albania, the Albanians and the Holocaust.” Among those in attendance were Albania’s prime minister and president. Dan Michman, chief historian at Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, was one of the speakers. “Is it really true that Jews had a 100% survival rate here during the Nazi occupation?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Actually, if you look inside the borders of ‘Little Albania’—excluding Kosovo and the Albanian regions of Montenegro and Macedonia—there were three times as many Jews living here at the end of the Holocaust as there were before the war started.” Albanians, Christian and Muslim alike, refused to surrender Jews to the Nazi authorities, and Jews were safer among Albanians than they were anywhere else in Nazi-controlled Europe.

At the conference, Albanian prime minister Sali Berisha delivered a thundering condemnation of Islamist radicals that you’d be unlikely to hear from a head of state anywhere else in Europe. “Israel will accept an independent Palestinian state,” he said. “But Israel cannot accept the fundamentalists amongst Palestinians because their ideology is identical to that of the Nazis.”

There is a difference between Islam and the culture,” Mr. Hamiti says. “Islam is not the culture.” I’ve seen no more convincing evidence that he’s right than the politics and culture of Kosovo, which offer the hope that Muslims need not be enemies of Christians, Jews and the West, and that Muslim societies are not inherently opposed to religious pluralism and democracy. True, Kosovo’s Muslims are very different from their Middle Eastern coreligionists. They often call themselves “culturally Christian”—because they’re immersed in a Christian-majority region and because they used to be Christians themselves—and one might with even more accuracy call them “culturally European.”

But they are Muslims nevertheless. And while the jihadist movements in the Middle East may appear to be an inevitable product of Islam, in many ways they are simply a religiously themed manifestation of the Arab world’s political backwardness. Perhaps Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians can even—as Mordechai Arbell, chairman of the World Jewish Congress Institute, said at the Tirana conference—”teach the world how people can live in harmony between religions and nations and how they can save each other.”

Mr. Totten is an independent foreign correspondent based in Portland, Ore.

Kosovo’s Moderate Muslims - WSJ.com

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful

By Dan Bilefsky

Friday, December 26, 2008

SARAJEVO: As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd Mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama’s image on the cover.

“Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?” the headline asked, using Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here.

Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is experiencing an Islamic revival.

More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling ?20 million, or $28 million, complex with a sports and cultural center.

Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are commonplace.

Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half of the population. But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in a fragile state.

Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others, while they chanted “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were hurt.

Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.

In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.

Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly the outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.

“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the Grand Mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.

“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers. We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”

Religious and national identity have long been fused in multifaith Bosnia. It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion - Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic - rather than as Bosnian, Serb or Croat.

In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become even stronger.

In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.

Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, hold to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.

Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodjenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences. Analysts say Saudi-funded organizations have invested ?500 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.

Wahhabism arrived via hundreds of warriors from the Arab world during the war and with Arab humanitarian and charity workers since, though sociologists here stress that most Bosnian Muslims still believe that Islam has no place in public life.

Dino Abazovic, a sociologist of religion at the University of Sarajevo, who recently conducted a detailed survey of 600 Bosnian Muslims, said that 60 percent favored keeping religion a private matter; only a small minority prayed five times a day.

Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultra-conservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism.

Nonetheless, Grand Mufti Ceric said Wahhabism had no future in Bosnia, even if more people were embracing religion.

“Children are fasting on Ramadan, going to the mosque more than their parents,” he said. “We had de-Islamification for 40 years during Tito’s time, so it is natural that people are now embracing the freedom to express their religion.”

Some critics of the mufti argue that he has allowed religion to encroach on civic life.

Vedrana Pinjo-Neuschul, who comes from a mixed Serb and Muslim household, has led the fight against Islamic classes in state-financed kindergartens across Sarajevo. Parents may remove their children from the religious classes, said Pinjo-Neuschul, whose husband is part Jewish, Catholic and Serb, adding that the policy would stigmatize non-Muslim children.

She recently withdrew her two young children from a public kindergarten and gathered 5,000 signatures against the policy, which has also been criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based group monitoring democracy.

“I do not want to explain to my 14-year-old son, Sven, who is in love with his Muslim classmate Esma, why they suddenly have to sit in different rooms,” she said at a Jewish community center in Sarajevo. “Nobody has the right to separate them.”

But she says she has been harassed by Islamic radicals on the street and had received hate mail in Arabic. “There are some people who want to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state,” she said.

Mustafa Effendi Spahic, a prominent liberal Muslim intellectual and professor at the Gazri Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo, went further, calling the introduction of religious education in kindergarten “a crime against children.”

“The prophet says to teach children to kneel as Muslims, only after the age of 7,” said Saphic, who had been imprisoned under communism for Islamic activism. “No one has any right to do that before then because it is an affront to freedom, the imagination and fun of the child’s world.”

Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic, has referred to Sarajevo as the new “Tehran,” and talks of a “political Islam and a fight against people who don’t share the same vision.”

But Muslim leaders and most Western analysts here counter such assertions, saying they do not correspond to Bosnia’s secular reality and are part of an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Simon Freeman, European Correspondent

• Last Updated: December 27. 2008 12:26AM UAE / GMT

The recently opened Duisberg-Marxloh mosque is conservative in comparison to some of Bohm’s designs. Wolfgang von Brauchitsch for The National

The German architect who designed an ambitious, if controversial, mosque in Cologne cannot wait for construction to begin in the new year so that he can watch his dream take physical shape.
Paul Bohm, a 49-year-old non-practising Catholic, admits to being nervous, but proud of what he has envisioned. He has good reason. His is a daring design of swirling columns and glass, alongside squat structures and minarets, which has excited and appalled in equal measure.

Traditionalists are unhappy with its modernity, while many non-Muslims say the mosque is further evidence of “creeping Islamisation” in Europe. Thousands protested in the German city.
Apart from a few fundamentals – such as the fact that the congregation must face Mecca when they pray and the call to prayer is inappropriate in western secular societies – Muslim activists, scholars and architects argue continually about how the new generation of mosques in Europe should look.

Some insist minarets and domes are essential because Muslim and non-Muslims expect them, though there is no theological imperative to have either. Some say mosques must be self-effacing to avoid upsetting non-Muslim communities. Others say mosques must be brash to show that Muslims are confident.
Despite pressure from local politicians, the public and even the church to make the mosque less imposing, Mr Bohm said his designs have remained largely unchanged.

“I only agreed to make the prayer hall more open, more inviting,” he said. “People kept saying, ‘Oh, make the minarets lower’, and I said, ‘No’. It would have been a big mistake to make the building quiet.” The minarets will be 55 metres tall, a third of the height of the spires of Cologne’s famous cathedral, just three kilometres away.
“I did not study Islam before I designed it. But I have many Turkish friends and know the kind of places they must pray in. I told them always, it is not right to be praying in these buildings. It makes you seem ashamed. With the new mosque it shows they are proud to be Muslim. It gives them an identity.”

Costing €25 million (Dh128m), the mosque will be built on the site of a factory where Muslims had previously worshipped. When it is opened in 2011, it will accommodate up to 4,000 worshippers, compared to the 600 who cram into the current factory. It will serve Cologne’s 120,000 Muslims – just over 10 per cent of the total population.
There is no central registry of mosque building in Europe but it is estimated that 184 new mosques are being built in Germany alone, which would more than double the number serving the country’s Muslim population of 3.2 million.

Many Muslims in Germany, the majority of Turkish origin, have had to make do with garages, former works canteens and ordinary houses. Now, thanks to money from the Turkish government – acting through its agency, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs – and the prosperity of local Muslims, the days of praying in buildings where cars were once repaired are over. Mosques are also being built in Holland, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and England, sparking concern among some that it will create greater division in communities.

“No one has anything against a mosque, but the large projects are Islamic centres that also do social work and child education on the basis of the Sharia. These centres don’t help to integrate people, they foster parallel societies,” Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-born expert on Islam at Berlin’s Protestant University of Applied Sciences, told a news agency.
The protests against the mosque in Cologne were partly caused by its size and the drama of the design. But they owed much, too, to the fact Cologne is proud of its Christian heritage.

There was no such backlash in Duisburg, an industrial town in the Ruhr valley, when plans were announced to build a mosque in the working class suburb of Marxloh.
Though it would be large – able to accommodate 1,200 people – its design was low-key. The budget was €7.5m, around half from the EU and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, half raised by local Muslims. The architects could have been more adventurous had they not been under instructions to avoid the showiness of Cologne.

The mosque, which opened last month, is a simple building which could pass as a community centre or a sport hall. The minaret is 34 metres high, a third of the height of the steeple of a nearby church. The windows are plain glass, the minaret just 23 metres high.
Inside, the art – designed by a Turkish specialist – is restrained, with the only opulent touch the golden chandelier, with its 99 lamps paying homage to Allah’s qualities.

But more than its humble design, there were social reasons for the mosque’s immediate acceptance: Marxloh’s people, non-Muslims and Muslim, worked, and died, together in mines and in factories. Though those industries have long since faded there is a social cohesion that is absent in Cologne.
Wilfried van Winden, 53, a respected Dutch architect who designed a mosque in the south of Rotterdam, a city with 300,000 immigrants, many of them from Turkey and Morocco, living with 300,000 ethnic Dutch, said the role of the mosque was to provide a visible link to the Muslim faith. “It is impossible to give a European identity to a mosque.”

For Iqbal Sacranie, the 56-year-old former head of the Muslim Council of Britain, the argument about domes and minarets is irrelevant. “A mosque must be sensitive to the community it is in. It must not create unnecessary commotion. It must teach Muslims to be good neighbours.”

Debating the shape of Islam in Europe - The National Newspaper

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful

By Dan Bilefsky

Friday, December 26, 2008

SARAJEVO: As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd Mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama’s image on the cover.

“Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?” the headline asked, using Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here.

Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is experiencing an Islamic revival.

More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling ?20 million, or $28 million, complex with a sports and cultural center.

Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are commonplace.

Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half of the population. But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in a fragile state.

Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others, while they chanted “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were hurt.

Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.

In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.

Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly the outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.

“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the Grand Mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.

“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers. We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”

Religious and national identity have long been fused in multifaith Bosnia. It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion - Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic - rather than as Bosnian, Serb or Croat.

In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become even stronger.

In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.

Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, hold to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.

Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodjenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences. Analysts say Saudi-funded organizations have invested ?500 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.

Wahhabism arrived via hundreds of warriors from the Arab world during the war and with Arab humanitarian and charity workers since, though sociologists here stress that most Bosnian Muslims still believe that Islam has no place in public life.

Dino Abazovic, a sociologist of religion at the University of Sarajevo, who recently conducted a detailed survey of 600 Bosnian Muslims, said that 60 percent favored keeping religion a private matter; only a small minority prayed five times a day.

Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultra-conservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism.

Nonetheless, Grand Mufti Ceric said Wahhabism had no future in Bosnia, even if more people were embracing religion.

“Children are fasting on Ramadan, going to the mosque more than their parents,” he said. “We had de-Islamification for 40 years during Tito’s time, so it is natural that people are now embracing the freedom to express their religion.”

Some critics of the mufti argue that he has allowed religion to encroach on civic life.

Vedrana Pinjo-Neuschul, who comes from a mixed Serb and Muslim household, has led the fight against Islamic classes in state-financed kindergartens across Sarajevo. Parents may remove their children from the religious classes, said Pinjo-Neuschul, whose husband is part Jewish, Catholic and Serb, adding that the policy would stigmatize non-Muslim children.

She recently withdrew her two young children from a public kindergarten and gathered 5,000 signatures against the policy, which has also been criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based group monitoring democracy.

“I do not want to explain to my 14-year-old son, Sven, who is in love with his Muslim classmate Esma, why they suddenly have to sit in different rooms,” she said at a Jewish community center in Sarajevo. “Nobody has the right to separate them.”

But she says she has been harassed by Islamic radicals on the street and had received hate mail in Arabic. “There are some people who want to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state,” she said.

Mustafa Effendi Spahic, a prominent liberal Muslim intellectual and professor at the Gazri Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo, went further, calling the introduction of religious education in kindergarten “a crime against children.”

“The prophet says to teach children to kneel as Muslims, only after the age of 7,” said Saphic, who had been imprisoned under communism for Islamic activism. “No one has any right to do that before then because it is an affront to freedom, the imagination and fun of the child’s world.”

Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic, has referred to Sarajevo as the new “Tehran,” and talks of a “political Islam and a fight against people who don’t share the same vision.”

But Muslim leaders and most Western analysts here counter such assertions, saying they do not correspond to Bosnia’s secular reality and are part of an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Channel 4’s decision to invite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver its “alternative” Christmas message may have been offensive to many people, but no one can say the station is neglecting its obligation to cater for minorities. Muslim fundamentalists were thrilled by the broadcast.

By Damian Thompson
Last Updated: 7:04PM GMT 26 Dec 2008

 

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain: the number of Muslims has grown from 1.6 million to two million since 2000. Moreover, every major public institution has changed its policies to accommodate the demands of Islamic “community leaders”. The Government, the Opposition, the police, schools, the Church of England, the BBC and now Channel 4 are all helping Muslims construct a parallel Islamic state.

Early next year, the think tank Civitas will publish a survey of 100 British Muslim schools. Entitled When Worlds Collide, it will argue that some of them are pushing pupils into ghettos. Young women, in particular, are forbidden to pursue career opportunities. “Every year, an incalculable number of Muslim young women are lost to the wider world,” says the report. One school website links to al-Qaeda; another directs pupils to a scholar who advocates the murder of Jews.

Until recently, these radical mullahs were blamed for turning disaffected youths into bombers. But, in August, a leaked MI5 report revealed that Islamist terrorists tend not to be obvious religious extremists. The Muslim community usually knows nothing about them.

For years, the Government has offered Muslim leaders self-governance in return for information about “dangerous” elements. But if terrorists cannot be accurately identified, this is a waste of time. Unelected community leaders extend control over Muslims, yet society is no safer.

Self-censorship is crucial to this growing separatism. The BBC’s director-general, Mark Thompson, says that Muslims should be treated more sensitively than Christians.

In America, Random House cancelled publication of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, about Mohammed’s six-year-old bride Ayisha. But Martin Ryna of Gibson Square in London did agree to publish. Three men were subsequently charged with conspiring to damage his home. Islamic groups have threatened Borders bookshops with violence if they sell the novel.

Although most Muslims do not condone such attacks, many support the proposal that Islam should enjoy privileged status. After the 7/7 terrorist murders, the Home Office commissioned reports from Muslim working parties. Their recommendations included “Muslim teacher accreditation” to ensure special treatment for Muslim children; Muslim oversight of policing methods; and a new verbal etiquette in which Islamist terrorism should be referred to as “criminal” rather than religiously inspired. There were also hints that British Muslims should be allowed an unofficial veto over foreign policy.

In the event, the Government backed away from the more extreme demands. Others have been quietly met. A National Association of Muslim Police was set up in 2007 and is regularly consulted by senior officers.

Government ministers rarely put the words “Islam” and “terrorism” in the same sentence. Conservative front benchers follow the same practice, except when addressing the Conservative Friends of Israel. “I have been told off by three members of the shadow cabinet for using the phrase ‘Islamist terrorism’ when I have appeared with them,” says Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion.

The major development, however, has been the encroachment of Sharia law into public life. Last February, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, declared that British Sharia was “inevitable.” In fact, instruments for expanding it already exist. A network of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals (MATs) has been set up with Home Office support. In theory, these bodies are just a form of “alternative dispute resolution”. They are “unable to deal with criminal offences”, says the MAT website. Yet it also confirms that they can “assist” the police with domestic violence, sometimes “with a view to reconsidering criminal charges”.

MATs also deal with wills, where Sharia discriminates against females. The Government is also anxious to attract Muslim investment by regulating British Islamic banking; the only way to do that is to grant legal recognition to Sharia.

According to Murray, “what we are seeing is the state deferring to a seventh-century Arabian tradesman as a source for secular law”. He was speaking on Christmas Eve. The next day, Ahmadinejad spoke to the nation. Yesterday it was reported that Baroness Butler-Sloss, one of Britain’s most senior legal figures, wants Sharia divorces to be enshrined in law. For the first time in decades, religion is moulding public life in this country; but that religion is not Christianity.

Indulgence of Islam is harming society - Telegraph

An Islamic Tale for Christmas: How I Became a Muslim By Accident

Thu Dec 25, 2008 at 06:51:44 AM

^{Our correspondent goes undercover.}
Maybe you’ve seen one of these Broward County buses around town that are wrapped with advertisements that describe Islam as being the religion of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed. “Got Questions? Get Answers!,” the ads promise. 
Considering that the threat of radical Islam has been described as, you know, the defining issue of our time, I did have some questions, actually — and 20 minutes to kill on my drive home. I’m also working on a story about a woman from Iran, and it would be helpful to better understand her religion.
So I called. And I was converted. I think.

As kind of a side note, an aunt had been urging me to pray lately, and in fact that very morning, I had been thinking that I should get right with God. I figured I would work on that after next week. Make it a New Year’s resolution.
I should note that I was raised Catholic (made Communion but was never confirmed); have a Jewish stepdad; and that the last church service I enjoyed was a Unitarian Universalist service two years ago. I always had trouble swallowing the idea of God being scary and vengeful, and certain Bible passages never really resonated with me or outright turned me off. Plus, this lady once came up to me and started speaking in tongues and asked me if I wanted to accept Jesus as my personal savior. Her approach scared the bejeezus out of me.   
Yet, I feel there are definitely miracles in the world. How else can a sperm and egg make a baby? How else could something as fascinating as a seahorse come to exist? Coconuts? Afternoon sunshine? Best I could figure out is that nature is always right; I try to always trust nature. So I had been moving through a pretty agnostic existence, not sure what to believe except that there’s something grand and spiritual out there. If I do my best to be good, hopefully he/she/it will forgive me for being a bumbling, questioning, thinking human being.    
So I dialed the number from the bus advertisement: 1-888-ISLAM-55. It connected me to a recording that said I could receive a free copy of the Qur’an. I was transferred to a young man who sounded like he was home cooking dinner. His name, it turned out, was Chandrajeet, and he was a 28-year-old computer programmer from Chicago who had volunteered to talk to callers. He took my name and address. He offered to answer any questions I had.
Are women considered equal under Islam? Yes.
What about that whole “kill the infidels” thing? Who is to decide who’s the infidel? If you kill someone, it’s like you killed the whole world; if you help someone, it’s like you helped the whole world. God alone will judge in the end.
Is there a heaven and hell? Yes, but not like a golden meadow or a flaming BBQ pit; both are way, way beyond what any human can comprehend.
At one point, he asked if I believed there was only one God, and I said I thought so, yes. It was a enlightening, reassuring, and very pleasant conversation that ended up lasting about 45 minutes.
As we were wrapping it up, Chandrajeet asked again if I believed in one God. I said that I already told him that I did. He asked if I would like him to be a witness of that. Not sure where this was leading and yet not wanting to offend him, I answered again, “Well, I already told you I think there’s only one God.”
“OK…,” he said, hesitating for a second and then eagerly launching into what I think was an Arabic prayer. Then, he congratulated me.
“Wait — am I a Muslim now?” I asked.
“Yes!!” I’m sure he was beaming on the other end of the line.
“Um… shouldn’t I read the Qur’an first?”
“I’ll send that out to you! And you know what?”
“What?”
“I am going to look for a headscarf to send you as well.”
“Aw, that’s really sweet of you!”
I thanked him for his time. He truly was adorable. Not long afterward, I opened an email he had sent out to several people, saying he had welcomed a “sister who is the newest in faith and as if a new born baby.” His wife had also emailed me saying, “A biggggggggggg hug n sweet kisses from my side to you sister!” I felt touched by their genuineness and warmth. 
However, I’m not sure where this leaves me. I’m not sure if I have inadvertently accepted some things I didn’t mean to. I also don’t want to disrespect anyone’s religion. I’m not sure if I am now in for some wrath from my Christian side. Am I going to be aggravating any bigwig in the sky if I attend Midnight Mass?
Anyway, my Qur’an is on its way.

– Deirdra Funcheon

Broward Palm Beach - The Juice - An Islamic Tale for Christmas: How I Became a Muslim By Accident

Generation Faithful

Jordanian Students Rebel, Embracing Conservative Islam

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

AMMAN, Jordan — Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.

As a high school student, Mr. Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a “wasta,” or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.

So Mr. Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.

“I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,” Mr. Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. “I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.”

Across the Middle East, young people like Mr. Fawaz, angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity, have accepted Islam as an agent of change and rebellion. It is their rock ’n’ roll, their long hair and love beads. Through Islam, they defy the status quo and challenge governments seen as corrupt and incompetent.

These young people — 60 percent of those in the region are under 25 — are propelling a worldwide Islamic revival, driven by a thirst for political change and social justice. That fervor has popularized a more conservative interpretation of the faith.

“Islamism for us is what pan-Arabism was for our parents,” said Naseem Tarawnah, 25, a business writer and blogger, who is not part of the movement.

The long-term implications of this are likely to complicate American foreign policy calculations, making it more costly to continue supporting governments that do not let secular or moderate religious political movements take root.

Washington will also be likely to find it harder to maintain the policy of shunning leaders of groups like the Brotherhood in Egypt, or Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, which command tremendous public sympathy.

Leaders of Muslim countries have tried to appease public sentiment while doing all they can to discourage the West from engaging religious movements directly. They see the prospect of a thaw in relations with the West, and see these groups as a threat to their monopoly on power.

Authoritarian governments view relative moderation as more of a political challenge than extremism, which is a security problem that can be contained through harsh methods.

“What happens if Islamists accepted the peace process and became more pragmatic?” said Muhammad Abu Rumman, research editor at the newspaper Al Ghad in Amman. “People see them as less corrupt and as the only real opposition. Israel and the U.S. might look at them differently. The regime is afraid of the Brotherhood when it becomes more pragmatic.”

The financial crisis only adds to the anxiety of governments in the Middle East that had hoped economic development could appease their citizens, create jobs for legions of unemployed and underemployed young people and dilute the appeal of Islamic movements. But the crisis and the drop in oil prices have hit hard, throwing the brakes on once-booming economies in the Persian Gulf region, and modest economic growth elsewhere in the region.

In this environment, governments are forced to confront a reality of their own creation. By choking off democracy and free speech, the only space where groups could gather and discuss critical ideas became the mosque, and the only movements that had room to prosper were religion-based.

Today, the search for identity in the Middle East no longer involves tension between the secular and religious. Religion has won.

The struggle, instead, is over how to define an Islamic society and government. Zeinah Hamdan, 24, has traveled a typical journey in Jordan. She says she wants a more religious government guided by Shariah law, and she took the head scarf at a younger age than anyone else in her family.

But when she was in college, she was offended when an Islamist student activist chastised her for shaking a young man’s hand. She wants to be a modern religious woman, and she defines that as working and socializing in a coed environment.

“If we implement Shariah law, we will be more comfortable,” she said. “But what happens is, the people who come to power are extremists.”

Like others here, she is torn between her discomfort with what she sees as the extreme attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood and her alienation from a government she does not consider to be Islamic enough. “The middle is very difficult,” she said.

Focus on Popular Causes

Under a bright midday sun one recent day, Mr. Fawaz and his allies in the Islamic student movement put on green baseball caps that read, in Arabic, “Islamic Current of Jordan University” and prepared to demonstrate. Mr. Fawaz carried a large poster board reading, “We are with you Gaza.”

The university protest reflected the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country as a whole: precisely organized, deliberately nonthreatening and focused on popular causes here such as the Palestinians. The Brotherhood says it supports democracy and moderation, but its commitment to pluralism, tolerance and compromise has never been tested in Jordan.

Mr. Fawaz and about 200 other students stood in a straight line, extending nearly two city blocks, parallel to the traffic on the major roadway in front of the university. More than half of the students were women, many with their faces veiled.

State security men in plain clothes hurried up and down the line. “Brother, for God’s sake, when will you be angry?” one security agent screamed into his phone, recording for headquarters the slogan on a student’s placard.

At 12:30 p.m., the male students stepped into the road, blocking traffic, while the women rushed off to the sidewalk and melted back into the campus. One minute later, they walked out of traffic, took off their caps and folded up their signs, tucked them into computer bags and went back to school.

“I want to be able to express what I want; I want freedom,” Mr. Fawaz said, after returning to the campus. His glasses always rest crooked on his face, making him look younger, and a bit out of sorts. “I don’t want to be afraid to express my opinion.”

Mr. Fawaz grew up in a small village called Anjara, near Ajloun, about 50 miles from Amman. His father grew up in the Jordan Valley and worked as a nurse in Irbid. Mr. Fawaz said he was 8 years old he was first invited to “leadership retreats” with a youth organization of the Brotherhood.

When he was 13, the youth group took him on a minor pilgrimage to Mecca. So, he said, he had been enticed by religion at an early age. But he only decided to become politically active — and to join the Brotherhood — when he was denied a scholarship to study abroad.

While there are no official statistics on student membership in the Brotherhood, only a fraction of Jordan University students are formally affiliated. Yet many others say they share the same vague sense of discontent and yearning, the same embrace of the Brotherhood’s slogan, “Islam Is the Solution,” a resonant catchall in the face of many problems.

The university, with about 30,000 students from across the country, has long served as a proxy battlefield for Jordan’s competing interests.

Competing Loyalties

In Jordan, unlike Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is legal, with a political party and a vast network of social services. It also has a political party, called the Islamic Action Front. While some fear it as too extreme, others argue that it has sold out by working within a political system they see as corrupt and un-Islamic. On campus, the Islamists try to build sympathy, handing out study sheets or copying notes for students.

Mr. Fawaz decided this year to run as an Islamist candidate for the student council, an influential organization with its own budget and the right to put up posters, distribute fliers and hold on-campus events.

The Islamic students’ movement had boycotted the elections for years to protest a change of election rules that called for appointing — not electing — half of the council’s 80 members. The rule change, decreed by the former university president, was made in order to block the Islamists, who were the most organized group on campus, from controlling the council.

That is a direct echo of how the state has long tried to contain the Islamist movement in Jordan. The Brotherhood is allowed to operate, but the government and the security services broadly control the outcome of elections.

Indeed, as Islamist movements have swelled, governments across the Middle East have chosen both to contain and to embrace them. Many governments have aggressively moved to roll back the few democratic practices that had started to take root in their societies, and to prevent Islamists from winning power through the voting booth. That risks driving the leaders and the followers of Islamic organizations toward extremism.

At the same time, many governments have tried to appease popular Islamist fervor. Jordan recently granted a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned newspaper the right to publish daily instead of weekly; held private talks with Hamas leaders; arrested a poet, saying he had insulted Islam by using verses of the Koran in love poems; and shut down restaurants that had served alcohol during Ramadan, though they had been licensed by the state to do so.

This year, the new president of Jordan University permitted all student council seats to be elected, but with rules in place that would, again, make it nearly impossible for the Islamist bloc to have control.

Two days before the voting took place, Mr. Fawaz was campaigning on the steps of the education building, dressed in his best suit and tie. His campaign message to the students was simply, “For your sake.”

Running as an Islamist risks consequences: Mr. Fawaz said that he was approached by a student in his class who he believed was delivering a message from the security services. “He told me that they will write about me; I will never get a job,” Mr. Fawaz said.

But even when the police ordered him to take down his posters on election day, he remained resolute and confident.

“Everybody knows that I am going to win,” Mr. Fawaz said, without sounding boastful. “Because I represent the Islamic movement.”

But he did not win. Instead, a candidate representing a large tribe from the city of Salt won, reflecting the loyalty to bonds of kinship and family heritage even as tribal culture has begun to absorb more conservative Islamic practices and beliefs.

Yet Mr. Fawaz was untroubled. “What is important for me,” he said, “is to serve the movement by spreading the word among the students.”

Amjad al-Absy, 28, remembers the moment when he pledged to join the Muslim Brotherhood. He was 15 and he was identified by Brotherhood recruiters when he was playing soccer in a Palestinian refugee camp. He described how the Brotherhood monitors young men — when they play soccer, go to school, to mosque, to work, as well as in the street and singles out those who appear receptive.

“Once you say yes, they put you in a ring, in a family,” said Mr. Absy. “Outside of the Brotherhood, there is no concern for young men, there is no respect. You are alone.”

Mr. Absy and his friend Tarak Naimat, 24, said that while they were students at the university, they had helped to recruit other young men.

“In the computer lab, in the mosque, you buddy up,” Mr. Naimat said. “Then you participate in events together. Then he becomes a member. If he’s advanced, it can take six months. If less, maybe two years.”

The appeal, Mr. Naimat said, was simple: “It gives you the feeling you can change things, you can act, you can be a leader. You feel like you are part of something important.”

Recruiters to the movement operate in a social atmosphere far more receptive than in the past. Every one of five young men talking near the cafeteria of the university recently insisted that the only way Jordan would have democracy was under an Islamic government, which is what the Brotherhood says it wants to achieve.

Muhammad Safi is a 23-year-old with neatly gelled hair and a television-white smile who described himself as the least religious student at the table. He said he had lived in the United States for five years and was eager to marry an American so he could return. Yet he declared: “An Islamic state would be better. At least it would take care of people.”

A Political Crossroads

The task facing Middle East governments and Islamic leaders is to figure out how to harness the energy of the Islamic revival. The young — the demographic bulge that is defining the future of the Islamic world and the way the West will have to engage it — have embraced Islam with all the fervor of the counterculture.

But the movement is still up for grabs — whether it will lead to greater extremism, even terrorism in some cases, and whether the vague dissatisfaction of young people will translate into political engagement or disaffection.

So the cycle is likely to continue, with religious identification fueled not only by the Islamic movements, but also by governments eager to use religion to enhance legitimacy and to satisfy demands of their citizens. That, in turn, broadens support for groups like the Brotherhood, while undermining support for the government, said many researchers, intellectuals and political scientists in Jordan.

The battle lines are clear on the campus of Jordan University. Bilal Abu Sulaih, 24, is a leader in the Islamic student movement. He returned to school this year to study Islamic law after being suspended for one year for organizing protests, he said. During the year off, he said, he worked as a student organizer for the political party office of the Brotherhood. “We are trying to participate,” he said of the movement’s role on campus. “We do not want to overpower everyone else.”

But his reassurances were brushed aside as another student confronted him. “It’s not true,” shouted Ahmed Qabai, 28, who was seated on a nearby bench. He thrust a finger in Mr. Sulaih’s direction.

“You want to try to control everything,” Mr. Qabai said. “I’ve seen it before, your people talking to women and asking them why they’re not veiled.”

Mr. Sulaih, embarrassed by the challenge, said, “It’s not true.”

Mr. Qabai made it clear that he detested the Muslim Brotherhood, getting more and more worked up, until finally he was screaming. But what he said summed up the challenge ahead for Jordan, and for so many governments in the region: “We all know Islam is the solution. That we agree on.”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.

Generation Faithful - Jordanian Students Rebel, Embracing Conservative Islam - Series - NYTimes.com

By JAMES TARANTO

New York

By his own description, Geert Wilders is not a typical Dutch politician. “We are a country of consensus,” he tells me on a recent Saturday morning at his midtown Manhattan hotel. “I hate consensus. I like confrontation. I am not a consensus politician. . . . This is something that is really very un-Dutch.”

Zina Saunders

Yet the 45-year-old Mr. Wilders says he is the most famous politician in the Netherlands: “Everybody knows me. . . . There is no other politician — not even the prime minister — who is as well-known. . . . People hate me, or they love me. There’s nothing in between. There is no gray area.”

To his admirers, Mr. Wilders is a champion of Western values on a continent that has lost confidence in them. To his detractors, he is an anti-Islamic provocateur. Both sides have a point.

In March, Mr. Wilders released a short film called “Fitna,” a harsh treatment of Islam that begins by interspersing inflammatory Quran passages with newspaper and TV clips depicting threats and acts of violent jihad. The second half of the film, titled “The Netherlands Under the Spell of Islam,” warns that Holland’s growing Muslim population — which more than doubled between 1990 and 2004, to 944,000, some 5.8% of the populace — poses a threat to the country’s traditional liberal values. Under the heading, “The Netherlands in the future?!” it shows brutal images from Muslim countries: men being hanged for homosexuality, a beheaded woman, another woman apparently undergoing genital mutilation.

Making such a film, Mr. Wilders knew, was a dangerous act. In November 2004, Theo van Gogh was assassinated on an Amsterdam street in retaliation for directing a film called “Submission” about Islam’s treatment of women. The killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, left a letter on van Gogh’s body threatening Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the film’s writer and narrator.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, had renounced Islam and been elected to the Dutch Parliament, where she was an ally of Mr. Wilders. Both belonged to the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, known by the Dutch acronym VVD. Both took a hard line on what they saw as an overly accommodationist policy toward the Netherlands’ Muslim minority. They argued that radical imams “should be stripped of their nationality,” that their mosques should be closed, and that “we should be strong in defending the rights of women,” Mr. Wilders tells me.

This made them dissenters within the VVD. “We got into trouble every week,” Mr. Wilders recalls. “We were like children going to their parents if they did something wrong, because every week they hassled us. . . . We really didn’t care what anybody said. If the factional leadership said, ‘Well, you cannot go to this TV program,’ for us it was an incentive to go, not not to go. So we were a little bit of two mavericks, rebels if you like.”

Mr. Wilders finally quit the party over its support for opening negotiations to admit Turkey into the European Union. That was in September 2004. “Two months later, Theo van Gogh was killed, and the whole world changed,” says Mr. Wilders. He and Ms. Hirsi Ali both went into hiding; he still travels with bodyguards. After a VVD rival threatened to strip Ms. Hirsi Ali’s citizenship over misstatements on her 1992 asylum application, she left Parliament and took a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Mr. Wilders stayed on and formed the Party for Freedom, or PVV. In 2006 it became Parliament’s fifth-largest party, with nine seats in the 150-member lower chamber.

Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. “We believe that — ‘we’ means the political elite — that all cultures are equal,” he says. “I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You’re not a xenophobe, you’re not a racist, you’re not a crazy guy if you say, ‘My culture is better than yours.’ A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better.”

He acknowledges that “the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people.” But he says “it really doesn’t matter that much, because if you don’t define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change — all the freedoms we have will change.”

The murder of van Gogh lends credence to this warning, as does the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005 in Denmark. As for “Fitna,” it has not occasioned a violent response, but its foes have made efforts to suppress it. A Dutch Muslim organization went to court seeking to enjoin its release on the ground that, in Mr. Wilders’s words, “it’s not in the interest of Dutch security.” The plaintiffs also charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and inciting hatred. Mr. Wilders thought the argument frivolous, but decided to pre-empt it: “The day before the verdict, I broadcasted ['Fitna'] . . . not because I was not confident in the outcome, but I thought: I’m not taking any chance, I’m doing it. And it was legal, because there was not a verdict yet.” The judge held that the national-security claim was moot and ruled in Mr. Wilders’s favor on the issues of blasphemy and incitement.

Dutch television stations had balked at broadcasting the film, and satellite companies refused to carry it even for a fee. So Mr. Wilders released it online. The British video site LiveLeak.com soon pulled the film, citing “threats to our staff of a very serious nature,” but put it back online a few days later. (”Fitna” is still available on LiveLeak, as well as on other sites such as YouTube and Google Video.)

An organization called The Netherlands Shows Its Colors filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Wilders for “inciting hatred.” In June, Dutch prosecutors declined to pursue the charge, saying in a statement: “That comments are hurtful and offensive for a large number of Muslims does not mean that they are punishable.” The group is appealing the prosecutors’ decision.

In July, a Jordanian prosecutor, acting on a complaint from a pressure group there, charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and other crimes. The Netherlands has no extradition treaty with Jordan, but Mr. Wilders worries — and the head of the group that filed the complaint has boasted — that the indictment could restrict his ability to travel. Mr. Wilders says he does not visit a foreign country without receiving an assurance that he will not be arrested and extradited.

“The principle is not me — it’s not about Geert Wilders,” he says. “If you look at the press and the rest of the political elite in the Netherlands, nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. This is the worst thing, maybe. . . . A nondemocratic country cannot use the international or domestic legal system to silence you. . . . If this starts, we can get rid of all parliaments, and we should close down every newspaper, and we should shut up and all pray to Mecca five times a day.”

It is difficult to fault Mr. Wilders’s impassioned defense of free speech. And although the efforts to silence him via legal harassment have proved far from successful, he rightly points out that they could have a chilling effect, deterring others from speaking out.

Mr. Wilders’s views on Islam, though, are problematic. Since 9/11, American political leaders have struggled with the question of how to describe the ideology of the enemy without making enemies of the world’s billion or so Muslims. The various terms they have tried — “Islamic extremism,” “Islamism,” “Islamofascism” — have fallen short of both clarity and melioration. Melioration is not Mr. Wilders’s highest priority, and to him the truth couldn’t be clearer: The problem is Islam itself. “I see Islam more as an ideology than as a religion,” he explains.

His own view of Islam is a fundamentalist one: “According to the Quran, there are no moderate Muslims. It’s not Geert Wilders who’s saying that, it’s the Quran . . . saying that. It’s many imams in the world who decide that. It’s the people themselves who speak about it and talk about the terrible things — the genital mutilation, the honor killings. This is all not Geert Wilders, but those imams themselves who say this is the best way of Islam.”

Yet he insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: “I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don’t subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to.” He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.

His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: “You have to give up this stupid, fascist book” — the Quran. “This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book.”

Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.

Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.

Geert Wilders: ‘Our Culture Is Better’ - WSJ.com