Muslim Heretics Conference

Especially after the terrorist strikes of 9/11, Islam has often been accused of being intrinsically violent. Many point to the Koran and other Islamic scriptures and texts as proof that violence and intolerance vis-à-vis non-Muslims is inherent to Islam. In response, a number of apologetics have been offered. The fundamental premise of almost all of these is that Islam’s purported violence—as found in Islamic scriptures and history—is no different than the violence committed by other religious groups throughout history and as recorded in their scriptures, such as Jews and Christians. The argument, in short, is that it is not Islam per se but rather human nature that is prone to violence.

So whenever the argument is made that the Koran as well as the historical words and deeds of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and his companions evince violence and intolerance, the counter-argument is immediately made: What about the historical atrocities committed by the Hebrews in years gone by and as recorded in their scriptures (AKA, the Old Testament)? What about the brutal cycle of violence Christians have committed in the name of their faith against both fellow Christians and non-Christians?

Several examples are then offered from the Bible as well as Judeo-Christian history. Two examples especially—one biblical, the other historic—are often cited as paradigmatic of the religious violence inherent to both Judaism and Christianity and usually put an end to the debate of whether Islam is unique in regards to its teachings and violence.

The first is the military conquest of the land of Canaan by the Hebrews (c. 1200 BC), which has increasingly come to be characterized as a “genocide.” Yahweh told Moses:

But of the cities of these peoples which Yahweh your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy them—the Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite—just as Yahweh your God has commanded you, lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations which they have done for their gods, and you sin against Yahweh your God (Deuteronomy 20: 16-18).

So Joshua [Moses' successor] conquered all the land: the mountain country and the South and the lowland and the wilderness slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as Yahweh God of Israel had commanded (Joshua 10:40).

The second example revolves around the Crusader wars waged by Medieval European Christians. To be sure, the Crusades were a “counter-attack” on Islam—not an unprovoked assault as is often depicted by revisionist history. A united Christendom sought to annex the Holy Land of Jerusalem, which, prior to its conquest by Islam in the 7th century, was an integral part of Christendom for nearly 400 years.

Moreover, Muslim invasions and atrocities against Christians were on the rise in the decades before the Crusades were launched in 1096. For example, in 1071, the Seljuk Turks had crushed the Byzantines in the pivotal battle of Manzikert and in effect annexed a major chunk of Byzantine Anatolia (opening the way for the eventual capture of Constantinople centuries later). A few decades earlier, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim desecrated and destroyed a number of important churches—such as the Church of St. Mark in Egypt and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—and decreed several even more oppressive than usual decrees against Christians and Jews. It is in this backdrop that Pope Urban called for the Crusades:

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians [i.e., Muslim Turks]…has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion (from the chronicles of Robert the Monk).

Nonetheless, history attests that these Crusades were violent and bloody. After breaching the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders slaughtered almost every single inhabitant of the Holy City. According to the Medieval chronicle, the Gesta Danorum “the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles.” Moreover, there is the 1204 sack of Constantinople, wherein Crusader slew Christian.

In light of the above—one a prime example of “Hebraic” violence from the Bible, the other from Christian history—why should Islam be the one religion always characterized as intrinsically violent, simply because its holy book and its history also contain violence? Why should non-Muslims always point to the Koran and ancient history as evidence of Islam’s violence while never looking to their own scriptures and history?

While such questions are popular, they reveal a great deal of confusion between history and theology, between the temporal actions of men and what are understood to be the immutable words of God. The fundamental error being that Judeo-Christian history—which is violent—is being conflated with Islamic theology—which commands violence. Of course all religions have had their fair share of violence and intolerance towards the “other.” Whether this violence is ordained by God or whether warlike man merely wished it thus is the all-important question.

Old Testament violence is an interesting case in point. Yahweh clearly ordered the Hebrews to annihilate the Canaanites and surrounding peoples. Such violence is therefore an expression of God’s will, for good or ill. Regardless, all the historic violence committed by the Hebrews and recorded in the Old Testament is just that—history. It happened; God commanded it. But it revolved around a specific time and place and was directed against a specific people. At no time did such violence go on to become standardized or codified into Jewish law (i.e., the Halakha).

This is where Islamic violence is unique. Though similar to the violence of the Old Testament—commanded by God and manifested in history—certain aspects of Islamic violence have become standardized in Islamic law (i.e., Sharia) and apply at all times. Thus while the violence found in the Koran is in fact historical, its ultimate significance is theological, or, more specifically, doctrinal. Consider the following Koranic verses, better known as the “sword-verses”:

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the pagans wherever you find them—take them [captive], besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due [i.e. submit to Islam], then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful (K 9:5).

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger [i.e. do not adhere to Islamic law], nor acknowledge the religion of Truth [i.e. Islam], from the people of the book [i.e. Jews and Christians], until they pay tribute with willing submission, and feel themselves utterly subdued (K 9:29).

As with Old Testament verses where Yahweh commanded the Hebrews to attack and slay their neighbors, the sword-verses also have a historical context. Allah first issued these commandments after the Muslims under Muhammad’s leadership had grown sufficiently strong enough to invade their Christian and pagan neighbors. But unlike the bellicose verses and anecdotes of the Old Testament, the sword-verses became fundamental to Islam’s subsequent relationship to both the “people of the book” (Christians and Jews) and the “pagans” (Hindus, Buddhists, animists, etc). For instance, based on 9:5, Islamic law mandates that pagans and polytheists must either convert to Islam or be killed, while 9:29 is the primary source of Islam’s well-known discriminatory practices against Christians and Jews.

In fact, based on the sword-verses (as well as countless other Koranic verses and oral traditions attributed to Muhammad), Islam’s scholars, sheikhs, muftis, imams, and qadis throughout the ages have all reached the consensus—binding on the entire Muslim community—that Islam is to be at perpetual war with the non-Muslim world until the former subsumes the latter. (It is widely held by Muslim scholars that since the sword-verses are among the final revelations on the topic of Islam’s relationship to non-Muslims, that they alone have abrogated some 200 of the Koran’s earlier and more tolerant verses, such as “there is no coercion in religion” 2:256.) Famous Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, who is revered in the West for his “progressive” insights, also puts to rest the notion that jihad is “defensive” warfare:

In the Muslim community, the holy war [jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force…The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense… They are merely required to establish their religion among their own people. That is why the Israeilites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority [e.g. a "caliphate"]. Their only concern was to establish their religion [not spread it to the nations]… But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations (The Muqudimmah, vol. 1 pg. 473).

Perhaps what is most unique about the sword-verses is the fact that when juxtaposed to their Old Testament counterparts, they are especially distinct for using language that transcends time and space, inciting believers to attack and slay non-believers today no less than yesterday. Yahweh commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did Yahweh give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their descendants the Jews, to fight and kill gentiles. On the other hand, though Islam’s original enemies were, like Judaism’s, historical (e.g., Christian Byzantines and pagan Persians), the Koran rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book—”until they pay tribute with willing submission and feel themselves utterly subdued” (Koran 9:29) and to “slay the pagans wherever you find them” (Koran 9:5).

The two conjunctions “until” (hata) and “wherever” (haythu) demonstrate the perpetual and ubiquitous nature of these commandments: there are still “people of the book” who have yet to be “utterly subdued” (especially in the Americas, Europe, and Israel) and “pagans” to be slain “wherever” one looks (especially Asia and sub-Saharan Africa). In fact, the salient feature of almost all of the violent commandments in Islamic scriptures is their open-ended and generic nature: “Fight them [non-Muslims] until there is no more chaos and all religion belongs to Allah” (Koran 8:39). Also, in a well-attested tradition that appears in the most authentic hadith collections, Muhammad proclaims:

I have been commanded to wage war against mankind until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah; and that they establish prostration prayer, and pay the alms-tax [i.e., convert to Islam]. If they do so, their blood and property are protected [Sahih Muslim C9B1N31; also in Sahih Bukhari B2N24].

Aside from the divine words of the Koran, Muhammad’s pattern of behavior—his “Sunna” or “example”—is an extremely important source of legislation in Islam. Muslims are exhorted to emulate Muhammad in all walks of life: “You have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern [of conduct]” (Koran 33:21). And Muhammad’s pattern of conduct vis-à-vis non-Muslims is quite explicit. Sarcastically arguing against the concept of “moderate” Islam, terrorist Osama bin Laden, who enjoys half the Arab-Islamic world’s support per an al-Jazeera poll, portrays the prophet’s Sunna thus:

“Moderation” is demonstrated by our prophet who did not remain more than three months in Medina without raiding or sending a raiding party into the lands of the infidels to beat down their strongholds and seize their possessions, their lives, and their women” (from The Al-Qaeda Reader, page 56).

In fact, based on both the Koran and Muhammad’s Sunna, pillaging and plundering infidels, enslaving their children, and placing their women in concubinage is well founded (e.g. 4:24, 4:92, 8:69, 24:33, 33:50, etc.). And the concept of “Sunna”—which is what 90% of the billion plus Muslims, the “Sunnis,” are named after—essentially asserts that anything performed or approved by Muhammad and his early companions is applicable for Muslims today no less than yesterday. This does not mean that Muslims in mass are wild hedonists who live only to plunder and rape. But it does mean that those particular persons who are naturally inclined to such activities, and who also happen to be Muslim, can—and do—quite easily justify their actions by referring to the “Sunna of the Prophet”—the way al-Qaeda, for example, justifies its attacks on 9/11 where innocents, including women and children, were killed: Muhammad authorized his followers to use catapults during their siege of the town of Taif in 630 A.D., though he was aware that women and children were sheltered there. Also, when asked if it was permissible to launch night raids or set fire to the fortifications of the infidels if women and children were among them, the prophet is said to have responded, “They are from among them” (Sahih Muslim B19N4321).

While law-centric and legalistic, Judaism has no such equivalent to the Sunna; the words and deeds of the patriarchs, though recorded in the Old Testament, never went on to be part of Jewish law. Neither Abraham’s “white-lies,” nor Jacob’s perfidy, nor Moses’ short-fuse, nor David’s adultery, nor Solomon’s philandering ever went on to instruct Jews or Christians. They were merely understood to be historical actions perpetrated by fallible men who were often punished by God for their less than ideal behavior.

As for Christianity, much of the Old Testament law was abrogated by Jesus. “Eye for an eye” gave way to “turn the other cheek.” Totally loving God and one’s neighbor became supreme law (Matt 22:38-40). Furthermore, Jesus’ “Sunna”—as in “What would Jesus do?”—is characterized by altruism. The New Testament contains absolutely no exhortations to violence. Still, there are some who strive to portray Jesus as having a similar militant ethos as Muhammad by quoting the verse where Jesus—who “spoke to the multitudes in parables and without a parable spoke not” (Matt 13:34)—said, “I come not to bring peace but a sword” (Matt 10:34). But based on the context of this statement, it is clear that Jesus was not commanding violence against non-Christians, but was predicting that strife will often exist between Christian converts and their environment—a prediction that was only too true as early Christians, far from taking up the sword, passively perished by the sword in martyrdom (as they still do today in many Muslim nations). At any rate, how can one honestly compare this one New Testament verse that metaphorically mentions the word “sword” to the literally hundreds of Koranic injunctions and statements by Muhammad that clearly command Muslims to take up a very real sword against non-Muslims?

And it is from here that one can best appreciate the Crusades. However one interprets these wars—as offensive or defensive, just or unjust—it is evident that they were not based on the “Sunna” of Jesus, who exhorted his followers to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you” (Matt 5:44).

In fact, far from suggesting anything intrinsic to Christianity, the Crusades ironically help better explain Islam. For what the Crusades demonstrated once and for all is that, irrespective of religious teachings—indeed, in the case of these so-called “Christian” Crusades, despite them—man is in fact predisposed to violence and intolerance. But this begs the question: If this is how Christians behaved—who are commanded to love, bless, and do good to their enemies who hate, curse, and persecute them—how much more can be expected of Muslims who, while sharing the same violent tendencies, are further validated by the Deity’s command to attack, kill, and plunder non-believers?

Conflating History with Theology: Judeo-Christian Violence vs. Islamic Violence - Middle East Forum

March 18, 2009
by Uriya Shavit and Frederic Wiesenbach
Middle East Quarterly Spring 2009,
pp. 3-14
Middle East Forum
The conversion of Christians in Europe and the United States to Islam has become a matter of debate in some Western countries. Muslim scholars have called on immigrant Muslims to become involved in summoning non-Muslims to their faith. Indeed, the call on Muslim migrants to proselytize has become central in contemporary Islamic writings, not only in books, but also in sermons-many online on YouTube-and others on DVDs, and Islamic websites.

The strategies that the global Islamic media uses to promote conversion of Christians to Islam illustrate both the perceptions of Islamists and can expose themes to defend and promote in cultural and public diplomacy.

Background

Many convert narratives depict Islam as a remedy to the growing secularization of Western life that Christianity fails to fill. Former pop star Cat Stevens gave up a highly successful career in music and converted to Islam. He has since opened several Muslim schools in the U.K.

The history of Muslim-Christian relations is to some extent that of two civilizations championing a universalistic message and competing for world domination. In the early phases of this struggle, as demonstrated by Bernard Lewis, Islam was more tolerant: In Muslim lands conquered by Christians, Christianity was imposed by force, and Muslims were sooner or later forced to choose between conversion, exile, and death; in Christian lands conquered by Muslims, Christians were tolerated alongside Jews as “People of the Book.” One reason for this difference in attitude was that Muslims considered Christ a precursor while Christians considered Muhammad an impostor. In Muslim eyes, Christianity had some truth in it; in Christian eyes, Islam was completely false.[1] Today, the balance of tolerance has dramatically reversed: In the West, freedom of religion allows for people of all faiths to convince others that theirs is the one and only truth; on the other hand, in some Muslim societies, non-Muslims are prosecuted, and promotion of other religions is a punishable offense.

Exact data on the number of converts to Islam in the West is incomplete because conversions are not always recorded. While the data do not suggest a massive wave of new believers, there are enough to matter. In Germany, statisticians estimated that several thousand Christians convert to Islam every year.[2] In Spain, the number of converts reached around 20,000 in 2006,[3] and in the United Kingdom, perhaps 14,000 had converted by 2006.[4] In the United States, perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 people a year convert to Islam. The number of converts significantly increased in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack, although it is not yet certain that the conversion surge in the United States has continued.[5]

While the data do not suggest that conversions can fundamentally change existing European demographics, they do highlight the challenge of conflicting values for Western democracies. Freedom of religion guarantees every person the right to convince or be convinced that a different faith than his own is true; however, some Muslim converts reject the very liberal foundations that allow them to operate freely. And the same Muslims who accept conversions to their faith may not accept conversion away from it. When even a very small percentage of converts to Islam turn fanatic, there is a very real security risk, not only in the state of residence but also in every country with which that state enjoys reciprocal visa-free travel. Indeed, this is a major reason why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security now requests pre-screening even for travelers from countries not requiring visas prior to travel to the United States.[6]

Immigration for Proselytization

Many Sunni scholars urge their co-religionists in the West to spread the word of God actively. The call to convert, which increased along with the number of permanent Muslim immigrants to Europe, is part of a larger framework of identity and duties constructed by Sunni religious scholars in the Arab world since the 1970s. Islamic scholars found that to ban or ignore mass Muslim migration would only alienate immigrants. Instead, they focused on strengthening the immigrants’ Muslim identity while using them in the service of Islam. They called upon Muslim immigrants to consider themselves part of a global Muslim nation; to legitimize their presence in non-Muslim lands by acting as ideal Muslims; to build Muslim institutions such as mosques and charity organizations; to serve the political interests of Muslims worldwide; and to proselytize.[7]

Writing about the “duties of Muslims living in the West,” Egyptian-born Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, perhaps the most influential contemporary Sunni jurist, wrote:

Muslims in the West ought to be sincere callers to their religion. They should keep in mind that calling others to Islam is not only restricted to scholars and sheikhs, but it goes far to encompass every committed Muslim. As we see scholars and sheikhs delivering khutbas [sermons] and lectures, writing books to defend Islam, it is no wonder to find lay Muslims practicing da’wa [spreading Islam] while employing wisdom and fair exhortation.[8]

Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917-96), a renowned Egyptian religious scholar, a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood movement and the head of da’wa for Egypt’s ministry of religious endowments, expressed the hope that the hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants “will not only maintain their religion, but become pioneers in spreading it, if only the Muslim umma (nation) wished for that and worked for that to happen.”[9]

Hamdi Hassan, a professor of media studies at al-Azhar University in Cairo, wrote that the Muslim presence in Europe is an example of Muslim proselytizing turning from the defensive mode that characterized it during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a new mode of expansion.[10]

In Saudi writings, these notions of proselytizing acquire a militant, confrontational tone. One source of these writings is the Saudi scholar Safr al-Hawali, who has invoked the need to conquer the West with da’wa, using terms unequivocal in their combativeness:

And if one would ask: Why should we not invade Korea and Japan [as the Muslims have] human resources for da’wa? … to this someone else would answer: No, we should direct [the human resources for da'wa] to Europe and America. Who is right? The one who says the West. Why? Because [the West] is the enemy whose depth we must penetrate … It is the enemy who will attack us and is more dangerous to us.[11]

The call on Muslim immigrants to Islamize Westerners finds resonance in some works by Western Muslims. Muhammad al-Qadi al-’Umrani is a Sunni Muslim living in the Netherlands, who wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at King Muhammad I University in Morocco on migration. He invokes the conversion of “a considerable number of Westerners” to Islam as one positive result of migration and contends that migration for the purposes of commerce and da’wa has been proven throughout history to be a constructive contribution to the spread of Islam.[12]

Islamic Internet Proselytizing

Internet sites operated by Muslim scholars and organizations play an important role in encouraging the conversion of Christians. This role is part of an embrace and use of the Internet as a medium in the service of Islam. While policymakers have focused most attention in recent years on jihadi websites, these attract comparatively little traffic.[13] While the most widely viewed Islamic websites are not jihadi, they do, nonetheless, often include hateful depictions of the West.

Muslim scholars traditionally reacted to new technologies-especially those developed in the West-with skepticism, fearing that such new innovations could bring more harm than good to Muslims. Printing machines entered the Ottoman Empire three centuries after they were first introduced in Europe. Scholars regarded them as bid‘a, an unlawful innovation, and it took the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt in 1798 to allow acknowledgment of their merit. While liberalizing forms of interpretation have allowed more flexible approaches for some Muslim scholars since the late nineteenth century, this has not been the case in Saudi Arabia. During the 1920s, Saudi scholars protested King ‘Abd al-’Aziz Ibn Saud’s decision to use wireless communication, claiming it was devilish.[14] The introduction of television broadcasts in the 1960s also caused outrage.

The attitude towards the Internet has proved quite different. Even the strictest Wahhabi scholars have legitimized the Internet-and launched their personal websites. Clerics understand that the Internet is a crucial arena in the fight for the souls and minds of the younger generation, and also that the Internet can be better controlled and screened compared to other media technologies. Using the Internet for Islamic purposes was not only permitted by scholars, even strict Wahhabi ones, but even encouraged.

Ja’far Sheikh Idris, a Sudanese professor of theology, wrote in 1999 that new technologies allow Muslims to spread da’wa more easily and are, indeed, proof that Islam is the true religion (for only God could have known fourteen centuries ago that the day would come when the world would turn into one global village, needing only one global prophet-Muhammad). However, these new technologies also allow non-Muslims to do the same with their ideas; indeed, at this point in time, the West enjoys better capabilities in making use of these technologies and might weaken Muslims’ beliefs through them. But these risks, argued Idris, do not deny the merits of the Internet; they only emphasize the need for Muslims to further utilize these technologies in the service of Islam.[15]

Analyzing Convert Narrations

Some Internet sites created by Muslim scholars and organizations reserve significant space for literature on Christians converting to Islam. Conversion efforts are promoted also by print media,[16] books,[17] and DVDs,[18] but the Internet shines as an especially effective medium.[19]

Islamic Internet sites promote conversion in several ways: basic introductions to Islam; basic information for non-Muslims who wish to convert; news celebrating Islam as the world’s and the West’s fastest growing religion; and guides instructing Muslims in the West on how to bring others to Islam. Such guidelines are at times detailed and have the ring of marketing expertise.

A key method Internet sites use to promote conversions is through the testimonies of former Christians who have converted to Islam. Perhaps the most famous conversion narrative is The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the American black nationalist, who described his early life as one of gambling, doing drugs, and dating many women amid crime-ridden neighborhoods in Boston. After conversion, he headed the Nation of Islam and then, after pilgrimage to Mecca, found true Islam. What the Internet has done is replicate and mass produce the genre, allowing Islamists to bombard the audience with narratives, each with enough variation in personal stories so as to allow a greater opportunity for readers to identify with one narrative or another.

These narratives play a dual role: To a potential non-Muslim audience, they serve as apologia celebrating different aspects of Islam’s superiority over Christianity. They aim to prove that any difficulties faced during the process of conversion may be overcome. The other role narratives play is to reassure Muslims that their religion is the true one and to educate them on tactics of persuasion in bringing non-Muslims to Islam.

A connecting thread for many narratives on conversion, suggested directly or indirectly, is the concept of reversion: the idea that everyone is born in a natural state of Islam-a state of submission to the will of God-which is corrupted by family and society and that rather than converting away from something, coming to accept Islam is reverting to that original human state.[20] The way to Islam is thus depicted as natural, almost obvious, rather than rebellious or exotic.

Strategies of Persuasion

It is one thing to make conversion a goal. It is quite another to fulfill it. Studies on conversion to Christian sects found that only one of a thousand approaches by proselytizers resulted in conversion.[21] Eighty narratives of converts to Islam appearing on the most widely-accessed global Muslim Internet sites and two other Islamic web sites of lesser popularity, analyzed for the purpose of this study, demonstrate several arguments and strategies. While it is difficult to quantify narratives as they appear continuously, they do not differ significantly, and these eighty are representative.

There are several Islamic interest web portals involved in catalyzing conversion, among other activities. Islamway.com, launched in August 1998, is the world’s most popular Islamic website, according to the web traffic-ranking company, Alexa.com,[22] and offers content mainly in Arabic and in English from the ‘Asir region in southern Saudi Arabia. Its vast fatwa (religious edict) bank suggests it is dominated by the Wahhabi school. IslamOnline.net, one of the world’s most popular Muslim websites, launched in June 1997 and offers content in Arabic and in English. Yusuf al-Qaradhawi serves as head of the supervising committee. The Islamic Garden, launched in March 2001 and operating from Cairo, is a basic English-language site focusing on introductory contents; and diewahrereligion.de, a German-language site operating from Cologne, associated with the mass-converter Pierre Vogel, who studied Islam in Saudi Arabia, has some resonance with young German Muslims.

The narratives associated with these four websites divide generally into three sections. First, the narrator explains why he was discontent with Christianity or with his life in general; then, he depicts how he first came to learn about Islam; and, finally, he glorifies the merits of Islam. Narrations seem to depict real life experiences, emotions, and convictions and are rich with biographical details, some of which relate to sensitive personal issues such as crises in marital life. This creates an impression of authenticity and generates empathy, allowing the reader to forget that the confession is part of a larger project to persuade that Islam is a true religion.

Scholars studying conversion find that spiritual poverty is a frequent condition prior to conversion, and a sense of closing the distance to God is the result of embracing a new religion.[23] The online narratives by converts to Islam, much like the autobiography of Malcolm X, reflect this. Converts commonly begin with depictions of the agonizing lives they had before they found Islam. In narrating their religious affiliation prior to conversion, two main story lines are common: that of converts who were Christians either because they were coerced or because of opportunistic consideration, and that of converts who were strictly practicing Christians but developed grave doubts about their faith.

While an uneasy relationship with Christianity varies in its consequences and reasoning, all narrators describe practicing Christianity in their early life as a result of their social background, rather than from a self-made spiritual choice. Asserting the concept that every person is born a Muslim and only society corrupts him serves to rationalize the conversion process. The former relation to Christianity is depicted as having more to do with culture, tradition, and society than with true personal faith.

While secularism, and even atheism, is an option in Western societies, it hardly finds resonance in these narratives. Lacking empirical evidence, it is impossible to determine whether this background of religiosity reflects the overall reality of converts or an editorial decision made by site managers. However, because a wider spectrum of backgrounds would support the claim of these sites regarding Islam’s universality, there is reason to believe the common religious background is not an editorial manipulation.

In detailing doubts that clouded them, often from an early age, converts whose relation to Christianity was profound describe how they gradually developed an understanding that Christianity is an inherently irrational religion. They invoke a variety of disagreements with several Christian dogmas: the concept of God as a human being; the concept of the Trinity; the concept of sainthood; and the concept of original sin. Discrepancies in the Old and New Testaments are also mentioned by several narrators.

Convert Narratives

On IslamOnline.net, convert Abu Mohammed Abdullah Yousef offers non-Muslims a simple challenge: “You Are a Muslim, You Just Don’t Know It Yet.” Abu Mohammed describes a post-World War II, English childhood in a strictly Catholic home. Religion was one of his favorite subjects in school, and at the age of eleven, he earned a scholarship for a Jesuit boarding school. However, at school he began to notice “the inconsistencies between what was taught in religious lessons and what was taught in history classes.” He could not understand how the infallibility of the pope was commensurate with the changing of old rulings by new popes. [24] Of course, such changing interpretations are not unique to Christianity. Within Shi’i Islam, followers must find new sources of emulation when the Grand Ayatollah whom they follow passes away; this might mandate revision in the interpretation followed. And, of course, while Sunni leaders may not claim infallibility, Sunni scholars dispute among each other the authenticity of hadiths (narratives of the Prophet).

Another depicts Islam as a remedy to the growing secularization of Western life, which Christianity fails to fill. Hayat Anne Collins Osman, an American whose age is not specified, writes in “Could I Speak with God Directly” on IslamOnline.net that she was raised at a time when “Americans were more religious than they are now.” Her parents were involved in a church community, and they often invited priests to their home. In junior high school, she attended a Bible study program for many years. However, the more she learned her Bible, the more she doubted it. The idea of original sin did not make sense to her: “I had a baby brother, and I knew that babies were not sinful.” The concept of the Trinity also troubled her: “How could God have three parts, one of which was human?”[25]

Converts to Islam describe a range of circumstances for their conversions. They mention hostile Western media portrayals of Islam that encouraged them to further their knowledge; Muslim friends, colleagues, and neighbors who introduced them to Islam; falling in love with Muslims; incidental meetings; and traveling to Muslim countries.

While circumstances differ, four themes are repeated:

First, the converts knew nothing, or almost nothing, about the true foundations of Islam before embracing it.

Second, converts were not drawn to Islam because of any material benefit or social pressure.

Third, narrators present the path to Islam as an individual quest and never as a group experience.

Fourth, converts say that they were introduced to Islam by individual Muslims, most commonly ones without formal religious training but with a simple desire to share the truth with others.

In describing how negative press and social prejudices had the counter-effect of introducing Islam as the true religion, the narratives turn weakness into strength. It is God’s will that Islam spreads; thus, attempts to dishonor it in the West are bound only to promote it. Such is the narrative of David Pradarelli, whose age is not mentioned and whose story appears on IslamOnline.net under the title “Finding the Truth.” He testifies to having been raised as a Roman Catholic, who always had “deep fascination with the spiritualities of other cultures.” Spending some time in the Catholic Franciscan order, Pradarelli was disappointed in what he describes as the order’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Once he had left the order, he began searching for a way to find God. Then, “I decided to research Islam for myself and draw my own conclusions. What I found paled all the negative images that the satanic media spewed forth. I found a religion deep in love and spiritual truth, and constant God-mindfulness.”[26]

The Role of the 9/11 Attacks

Several narrators describe the 9/11 attacks as awaking their curiosity about Islam, which led them to embrace the religion. An anonymous female narrator on Islamselect.com, accessed through IslamOnline.net, wrote about a “Journey of a Lifetime: My Way to Islam,” explaining that, after 9/11, she wanted to examine whether Islam was really about killing and hatred. She Googled with an open mind the words Islam and Qur’an. It so happened that her search came at a time when, at seventeen years of age, she had began to question her Roman Catholic faith. Two years later, she moved to another city where she met Muslims at the university she was attending; they gave her books and DVDs about their faith. Joining her new friends in the mosque, she felt at home as she never had in church. That experience, she said, completed her journey to the true religion.[27]

It is not a coincidence that these narratives emphasize personal friendships with Muslims as essential to brining about conversion. Many studies have found that friendship and kinship networks facilitate conversion.[28] Religious scholars such as Qaradhawi, who emphasize the duty of the lay Muslim migrant to bring others to Islam, understand that while new media is powerful, it is no substitute for personal relations. Indeed, an emphasis on personal relationships underscores Fethullah Gülen’s movement and Tablighi Jamaat as well.[29] Islamic websites seek to encourage such relations by offering testimonies that demonstrate their efficiency. Muslim acquaintances are mentioned in several narratives as a bridge between complete ignorance and embracing the truth. They are depicted as particularly kind and warm people whose grace transforms the narrator’s prior prejudices against Muslims. While saving no effort in bringing others to Islam, these lay Muslims do so in a non-imposing, gentle manner. Their happiness, inner peace, devotion, and hospitality serve as the best incentive for others to embrace Islam.

Another account refers to Muslim friends and shows how they played a similar role in the conversion of Omar Faruq (formerly Thomas Ordinius), a 48-year-old German convert of thirty-one years who appears on diewahrereligion.de. He describes having a friend of Turkish descent in school who introduced him to other Turkish Germans. Through this group of friends, he was introduced to Turkish culture and embraced its warmth and hospitality. He started to learn Turkish and developed an interest in Islam. Visiting his friend’s village in Turkey, he was invited by a local imam to a Friday prayer. At the time, he still feared Islam, but he became increasingly involved in the religion. Back in Germany, a friend told him about a Turkish mosque in Mannheim, thirty kilometers from his home. He went there with the friend and officially converted. Three years after converting he traveled to Medina where he studied Islam and Arabic.[30]

“Islam’s Truth Is Inescapable”

Other narratives also echo the idea that the personal conduct of the individual lay Muslim migrant is crucial to bring Christians to Islam. When Muslims meet with Christians, narrators hint, patience and courtesy can make the difference. When Hayat Ann Collins Osman finally decided she wished to convert, she called a mosque, but the brother who answered the phone told her to “wait until you are sure.” However, that only further encouraged her, to the point that she “became obsessed with Islam” until some months later, while working in the kitchen, she “suddenly knew, knew I was a Muslim.”[31]

Selma Cook explains in a narrative, “Why I Became a Muslim,” on The Islamic Garden, how after moving into a new apartment and meeting Muslim neighbors, “I thought I would try out some missionary work on them. They listened to me patiently, and then I, too, listened to them. They didn’t try to explain any complicated issues to me; they just read to me from the Qur’an.”

This, it turned out, was enough: The beautiful sound of the Arabic language touched the narrator’s heart, and the plain and direct language of the English translation struck a chord within..[32]

Narratives also suggest that Muslims can bring people to Islam even without intending to. This again serves to emphasize the concept of reversion: Islam’s truth is inescapable, and therefore, the mere introduction to its tenets can open the process of fully embracing it. Here, a subtext is directed to Muslims reading the narrations: Interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims should not be feared; they will eventually serve the interests of Islam.

Sebastian from Kassel describes how falling in love with a Muslim was instrumental in his finding the true religion. While the relationship led him to the righteous path, conversion was not necessitated by a need to please a spouse but rather by deep belief. Sebastian testifies that at the time of developing a relation with a Muslim woman, he thought it was a sign from God that he should convert in order to be able to marry her. Two months later he ordered a copy of the Qur’an. His girlfriend noticed his transformation but apparently did not appreciate it. They broke up. However, his interest in Islam only increased. He read more and more of the Qur’an, and several months later he converted.[33]

Another narrator, Anna Linda Traustadottir, a native of Iceland, raised in Canada and the United States, mentions her Muslim spouse whom she met while working in Damascus: “To be honest, when I married Mohammad, I married him because I loved him, even though he was Muslim. Over time, I realized I love him because he was a Muslim. A good Muslim [emphasis in original].”[34]

In a narrative mentioned above, Abu Muhammed Abdullah Yousef says that he encountered Islam when he left the United Kingdom in 1976 for a Muslim country to teach electronics to commissioned and noncommissioned air force officers. Nothing in the behavior of his Muslim students impressed him: they neither prayed; nor did they have a religious attitude, and some were even drinking and womanizing. He started to read the Qur’an for two reasons: First, he wanted to be a good instructor and hoped reading the Qur’an would help him understand his students’ mindset; second, he wanted to prove Islam was wrong. However, the result of his endeavor was quite the opposite. Once the students found he was reading the Qur’an, they brought a sheikh to the classroom to speak with him. After questioning Abu Muhammed about his beliefs, the sheikh told him: “You are a Muslim. You just don’t know it yet.”[35] For several months Abu Muhammed continued to read the Qur’an, and the more he read, the more he was impressed by its logic, consistency, and purity. Several months later he converted.

Why Islam?

Converts invoke several reasons for embracing Islam: that, unlike Christianity, it makes sense to them; that Islam is commensurate with modern science; that Islam is an egalitarian religion, blind to the racial prejudices so common to Western culture; and that one betters himself upon embracing Islam, doing away with adverse personal and social behavior. In some narratives, a rather more emotional attitude is suggested, depicting a defining metaphysical moment of peace and understanding in which Islam was embraced; in some, this emotional attitude is preconditioned with a logical acceptance of Islam’s truthfulness. Many of these may sound doubtful to those not susceptible to conversion or familiar with the nuances of Islam, but they nonetheless illustrate the view which Islamists wish to convey.

One notion suggested directly or implied by almost all narrators is the complete transformation Islam brought about in their lives. Where there was a void, Islam brought meaning; where there was disorder, Islam brought harmony; where there was despair, Islam brought hope. After embracing Islam, all hesitation and confusion faded away. Each found peace with himself, with his surroundings, and with God.

In “Why I Came to Islam?” Susie Brackenborough advances as an ultimate proof for Islam’s truth that the Qur’an prefigured science in discoveries made by scientists only hundreds of years later. She suggests: “These ‘miracles’ have been discovered by scientists (such as the study of embryology) and explorers (such as the world is indeed round and not flat) many years after the revelation, and many more miracles are still to be found as our society develops and progresses.”[36] Her words echo a theory rooted already in nineteenth century Muslim scholarship, which remains resonant today in many Islamic books and websites, especially those directed to a Western audience. Still, this train of argument, while common, is ironic given Islamic societies’ contemporary deficit in science.[37]

Invoking science as proof for Islam’s truthfulness, Amina Islam, an Austrian scientist, contends that “the holy Qur’an confirmed not only my idea about God and the world, but all his statements, e.g., about natural sciences, did obviously not contradict the reality.”[38] Mosa Rigani contends that the Qur’an’s assertion that there exists a “partition wall between fresh water and salt water” fascinated him as a miracle, proving the holy book’s truthfulness.[39]

In some narrations, the egalitarianism of Islam is invoked as a reason for embracing it. Here, an incentive is offered for people of all colors and social strata to embrace Islam without fear of prejudice, but the subtle reference to Western society, where such differences still matter, is also clear. An anonymous narrator, depicting her conversion under the title, “Dressed all in white-the coward within,” recalls how on her first visit to a mosque she was impressed by seeing that “every country or race you could imagine was represented in these rows of people, all standing, bowing, and prostrating before the maker of all. No intermediary-just the individual and the Creator.”[40] John Pugh, a Catholic-born Australian, writes: “It is known in Islam that an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab.”[41]

Some narrators depict the transformation Islam generated in their lives. Fabio Mosa Rigani claims that embracing Islam was the best decision he has ever made: Islam changed him into a better human being; now he is punctual and has stopped smoking. Steven Krauss (Abdul Lateef Abdullah), an American from New York born in 1973, who embraced Islam at twenty-eight, explains that after converting to Islam, he understands why so many people who do not believe have so much fear inside them: Life can be frightening without God. Finding Islam, he has acquired the ultimate “self-help” program; a path that puts everything in its proper place, that makes sense of life: “Now, life is order. Now, I know why I am here.”[42]

Several narrators tell of an emotional experience that drew them to Islam. The anonymous “Dressed all in white” recalls that before going to the mosque for the first time, she felt her inner light was burnt out, but in the mosque, she found “a feeling of peace, inner solitude, and quietness that I’d also found in reading the Qur’an and pondering over its meaning and trying to practice what it tells us.”[43]

Other narrators combine an emotional occasion with prior rational acceptance of Islam’s truthfulness. Jennifer A. Bell tells how when her marriage was in trouble, she was losing faith in Christianity and found no comfort in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Shintoism, and other religions; she went on the Internet and visited chat rooms to escape from reality. There she met a man who was different from all the other men she talked to although she could not quite explain why. Only in their third or fourth meeting, did the gentleman tell her he was a Muslim. Then he started to explain to her what Islam was about and sent her e-mails with verses from the Qur’an that supported everything he told her. It “all felt right.” Nevertheless, Bell was still not convinced that Islam was the true religion. When her marriage finally broke apart, and she became depressed, she contacted the man again: “He seemed to know so much about everything.” He told her to take a bath, clean herself from head to toe, sit quietly to clear her mind, and concentrate on God. It sounded bizarre to her, but nevertheless, she did it. Then, “the most amazing thing” in her life happened: she started shaking, but as quickly as the shaking started, it stopped. Calming peace filled her heart and soul. That peace “was so absolute. I felt God enter my heart, and I accepted what he had to offer. Between this experience and what this friend has been telling me about Islam, I had finally found a religion that matched my feelings on theology.”[44]

Conclusion

Muslim religious scholars envision Islam as a universal religion and the Muslim nation as a global political-religious entity. In constructing a framework of identity and roles for Muslim immigrants in the West, they assign them a task: to bring non-Muslims to Islam. Islamic Internet sites are part of that effort. They offer introductory contents, practical information, guides for those converting, and the narratives of new Muslims.

Narratives from converts to Islam are dichotomizing: They depict Christianity as irrational and Christian life as empty; in contrast, they depict Islam as a rational religion that provides a connection to God, personal peace, and social harmony. Westerners may interpret these narratives as assaults on their culture. But perhaps their more important target is the Muslim immigrant: The narratives of converts offer these immigrants reassurance about their roots and task them with a spiritual mission, one that compensates them for the daily hardships many of them face and rewards them with honor and dignity. Some Muslim immigrants-especially young ones-obtain their knowledge on Islam and its relation to Christianity through immensely popular Islamic websites such as the Saudi Islamway.com; lacking access to other sources of information-for example, national programs for multi-faith dialogue, or more moderate Islamic media-might encourage these young Muslims to adopt views scornful of the societies in which they live.

The right of any person to proselytize, or the right of any person to convert to a religion of his choice, is a basic tenet of Western liberal societies. The unique context of some Muslim conversion efforts should not be ignored, though: They do not envision two civilizations living in harmony, but one, Islam, gaining world domination. There is some irony in the fact that the most vocal and popular proponents of efforts directed at the Islamization of the West and de-legitimization of values it holds dear either operate from within the boundaries of, or are inspired by, Arab regimes which officially preach for multi-faith dialogue and are dependent on American support for their survival.

Uriya Shavit is a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, and author, most recently, of The New Imagined Community: Global Media and the Construction of National and Muslim identities of Migrants (Sussex Academic Press, 2009). Frederic Wiesenbach is a graduate student at Frankfurt University, currently studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

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The Middle East Forum, a think tank, seeks to define and promote American interests in the Middle East. It defines U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam, whether terroristic or lawful; working for Palestinian acceptance of Israel; improving the management of U.S. democracy efforts; reducing energy dependence on the Middle East; more robustly asserting U.S. interests vis–vis Saudi Arabia; and countering the Iranian threat. The Forum also works to improve Middle East studies in North America.

MEF sees the region, with its profusion of dictatorships, radical ideologies, existential conflicts, border disagreements, political violence, and weapons of mass destruction as a major source of problems for the United States. Accordingly, it urges active measures to protect Americans and their allies.

Toward this end, the Forum seeks to help shape the intellectual climate in which U.S. foreign policy is made by addressing key issues in a timely and accessible way for a sophisticated public.

200903184046 | Muslim Strategies to Convert Western Christians | / | Global Terrorism

An Islamic State or a State for Muslims?
11/05/2006

Mshari Al-Zaydi

A Saudi journalist and expert on Islamic movements and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Saudi affairs. Mshari is Asharq Al-Awsat’s opinion page Editor, where he also contributes a weekly column. Has worked for the local Saudi press occupying several posts at Al -Madina newspaper amongst others. He has been a guest on numerous news and current affairs programs as an expert on Islamic extremism.

Last week, I followed an exciting debate in the Saudi press between Saad Al Breik, a famous Islamic preacher, and journalist Qanan Al Ghamdi. Al Breik attacked the concept of a civil state because, “there would be no place in it [the state] for Shariah as the civil state is antithetical to the religious state which rules according to Shariah,” (found in the Al Risalah supplement of Al Medina newspaper, 28 April 2006.)

On May 4 2006, Qanan Al Ghamdi responded in the Saudi newspaper Al Watan, with a heated article in which he clearly asked Al Breik, “what are the civil mechanisms that they (the West) apply in terms of freedoms and justice that are in conflict with Islam?” This level of debate is healthy and required because Saudi society, like any real society, is home to several opinions and orientations.

There are similarities between Al Breik and Abu Izzadeen, the new Jamaican leader of Al Muhajiroun and the successor of Omar Bakri, concerning his view on democracy. In an interview with Asharq Al Awsat published 8 May 2006, Abu Izzadeen said democracy was among one of the factors that undermines religion. Similarly, Al Breik in his article stated, “Democracy is an annulment of the concept of religion.”

However, this is not my concern here. The essence of the issue is that the question of the religious versus the political in Islamic culture is very complicated and not as clear-cut as Saad Al Breik thinks. Since the beginning, there has been debate and discussion on how to define politics in Islam, how to determine its characteristics, the role of religion in it and how to distinguish the amount of leeway. Disputes amongst jurists are not a new phenomenon. Generally, there have been more questions than answers since the days of the Al Saqifa until today.

The following questions have been raised: does the Islamic religion include a political project? Is Islam reduced to such a project or did Islam not establish a new doctrine and civilization? What is the political project of Islam if there is one? Who truly represented it? Why would the Abbasids, for example, be better representatives of that project than the Umayyad dynasty? Why is the Taliban the only contemporary and modern representative of the political Islamic project according to its supporters?

Some intellectuals consider that every religion has political potential. However, each religion is peculiar in terms of its structure, transformations, and particularly, the history of its foundation. For example, due to the Roman persecution of Christians, the notions of sacrifice and the kingdom of heaven, became central to the Christian doctrine even after the Roman Empire itself embraced Christianity in 313A.D.

In Judaism, something similar occurred. The Jews were persecuted for many years preventing them from applying their political project due to the Babylonian Captivity, as well as the destruction of the sacred temple in 70 AD by Roman Emperor Titus. Since then, the Jewish political project was dormant until Israel was established in 1948. However, according to American researcher Bernard Haykal, religion remains a complex issue in the current Jewish state. But what about the Islamic state?

The matter of the Islamic state is very complicated; however, let us divide Islamic history in to two stages: the Mecca period and the Medina period. In Mecca, the aim was to build the religion and establish it in the hearts and minds of the Muslims. This was a very difficult task but through the struggle of the Prophet and his companions, Islam succeeded. As the pressure increased, the Muslims had to leave Mecca for Medina. Here a huge transformation occurred that clearly distinguished the two periods. In Mecca, there was no state or authority, but in Medina, the political carrier existed. That carrier protected the group and ensured its existence. However, according to Dr Abdul Ilah Balqaziz in his book entitled, ‘The Foundation of the Political Realm in Islam,’ the state of Medina was a state of Muslims and not an Islamic state in the modern fundamentalist interpretation of the term. Balqaziz added, “Initially this state was not restricted to Muslims but also included the Jews. Later however, the Jews were excluded when they allied with the non-Muslims.”

Balqaziz stated an important point in his book that the short time spent in Medina prevented many (especially those from outside of Medina) from establishing firmly their beliefs, and in fact, followed Islam due to the new power situation. What indicated this is the large number of converts throughout the last two years of the Prophet’s life and the quick withdrawal from Islam by many after the Prophet’s death. Thus in the Ridda wars (the apostasy wars), Abu Bakr was obliged to connect Islam to the state through political power against revolutionary tribes. In other words, politics in Islam was used to hold the new Islamic society due to the ’softness’ of the doctrine. Balqaziz asserted, “During the peak of the prophet’s call, there was a need for political authority. After his death, the need doubled.” (p43)

Thus, perhaps the close connection between state and religion in early Islam was justified by the “softness” of the doctrine in the hearts of the new converts and due to the conditions of the foundational period and the necessity to protect the nascent group. This second reason is akin to the foundation of every new call, especially one as large, deep and inspirational as the call of Islam, which has had an impact on the whole of humanity. However, as 14 centuries have passed since this initial period, and since faith has become strongly entrenched in the hearts of Muslims who have become a major component of human history with their civilizations and cultures, the obsession with the protection of the group or entrenching the new religion may no longer be justified.

The relationship between state and religion has never been embodied in a single model throughout Islamic history. For example, each of the four rightly guided caliphs was selected through various methods. Then we have the example of the Umayyad state and its relationship with the religious scholars imposed by Muawiyyah. If we jump forward in history, the example of Arab and Islamic contemporary states belong to this era, just as the Abbasid caliphate belonged to its era and did not return to the example set by the Caliphs after it defeated the Ummayad dynasty. Why then would those who like to oversimplify history, want to impose a single model of the relationship between Islam and politics on us whilst history presents all kinds of colors and interpretations to us.

This is merely an attempt to come close to the issue of state and religion in Islamic history, completely aware of how much controversy and sensitivity surrounds the issue. However, it is necessary to open discussion and debate about it. It is like reaching the top of a mountain by following different routes. The most important thing is that debate keeps away from incrimination and stoning as we need not bleed more than we already have bled.

An Islamic State or a State for Muslims? Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English)

“Islamophobes, regardless of what they call themselves, blame Muslims for every terrorist attack and find them all guilty-by-association for the crimes of a few. The only “good” Muslims in the view of the Islamophobia industry are those who agree to be stereotyped as “moderate,” “modern,” “liberal,” “progressive,” “ordinary” - in other words, socially compliant and politically silent.”

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Just as some Jews betrayed their co-religionists by aiding the Nazi propaganda machine before and during WWII, today there are Muslims just as eagerly and effectively helping the Islamophobia industry to stereotype and marginalize their brothers and sisters of the faith. These Muslims are very much appreciated and celebrated by those who stand to benefit from the promotion of Islamophobia; in fact, they are in such demand that the hate-and-fear industry can’t find enough of them.

Islamophobia has been around for quite some time, but since 9/11 it began to take on form and structure, supported by financiers, researchers, writers and academics, many of whom were self-styled “experts” on Islam and terrorism. The Islamophobia industry directly filled a need created by right-wing politicians, war mongers, racists, lobbyists, and the military war business (from professional mercenary companies to arms dealers and manufacturers). Every time a perceived need is revealed in a capitalist society, an industry is created, sometimes by design, to fill that need.

The West led by the U.S. saw and promoted the need for an Islamophobia industry; and now that it is established, it will be around for years to come.

There are five central reasons for this phenomenon:

1. The Muslim world is rich in resources, especially crude oil, and the West is determined not to pay fair market value for it. Capitalist financial powers would rather rob Muslims and the entire Muslim world of this valuable resource, using violence if necessary, as in the case of Iraq,

2. In geopolitical terms, the Muslim world covers a strategically vital area, in which the West is determined to establish a permanent presence; military occupation is one favoured means of doing so, as in the case of Afghanistan.

3. The Muslim world represents a huge market of close to 1.5 billion people, whose buying power is essential if the West is to succeed in controlling the one-way flow of its goods — no matter how inferior they may be, compared to those of emerging economies in Asia and the flow of accumulated Muslim capital the other way.

4. The Israeli factor wields a persistently strong influence in Western politics, especially the powerful American Israeli lobby in Washington. The U.S and its allies are determined to maintain Israel as a strong military outpost in the Middle East and ensure that its anti-Muslim policies are immune from any negative judgment; hence the Israel-can-do-no-wrong bias.

5. The U.S.-led “war on terror,” plus the politicization of all terrorist attacks dating from 9/11 and later, translates in practical terms to a need for Islamophobes and other organizations to work together in both the public and private sphere. This has led to the enactment of anti-civil liberty laws, Muslim profiling by authorities, the restriction of Muslim immigration to the West, and the further marginalization of Muslim minorities already established in Western society.

Like other corporate entities, the Islamophobia industry has been very active in creating a public “branding” for its product and a new lingo or jargon to identify its artificially created place in our language. Thanks to the Islamophobia industry, terms like “Islamist,” “Islamofascism” and “Eurabia” are commonplace.

In the past, Islamist was used within academia to legitimately indentify specialists in Islam, just as the word Orientalist indicated someone specializing in the study of the Orient. But Islamophobes have mis-appropriated the term Islamist as a shorthand indicator of every imaginable negative idea pertaining to Muslims and Islam.

The term “Islamofascism” became familiar after the September 2001 attacks as a way to describe any ideology based on Islam, even if it had no connection whatsoever to negative constructs.

The American group FAIR — Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting - found in its search of a major reference database that Islamofascism was mentioned just twice before 9/11; both times in the British media. In 1990, a remark by Independent writer Malise Ruthven about governments in predominantly Islamic countries stated: “Authoritarian government, not to say ‘Islamo-fascism,’ is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan.” Ironically, considering the term’s current usage, most of these authoritarian governments — including Morocco and Pakistan — were backed by the U.S. at the time. The second mention, also from the Independent in 1990, came in a response criticizing Ruthven for coining the term.

Reviewing the term’s subsequent history, however, FAIR reports that: “Since 2001, use of the expression has exploded. That year, according to a search of major English-language papers in the Nexis database, the word and its variant ‘Islamofascist’ appeared 12 times, nearly all in reference to Al-Qaeda. The next year that number rose to 69, and it reached 92 in 2003 as the word’s definition began expanding to include Saddam Hussein’s historically non-religious and somewhat ecumenical Ba’athist regime. (As an example, Tariq Aziz, Hussein’s familiar spokesperson, was a Christian.)

“The word’s prevalence continued to increase in 2005,” FAIR continues, “the year George W. Bush used it in a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy (10/6/05); and in 2006 it appeared 594 times in major papers. David Horowitz’s ‘Islamofascism Awareness Week’ (IFAW) — organized on about a hundred (American) college campuses in October 2007 — was a sign that the term had fully arrived in some right-wing circles …”

The word “Eurabia” is another volatile word, coined to create a growing fear that every good thing in Europe (culture, economy, ethnic identity, etc.) will end as its Muslim population increases. The term motivates violence against Europe’s Muslim minorities. Meanwhile, American Islamophobes are using it to promote the idea that “you have to deal with the problem before it comes here.”

FAIR also reported that; “At Michigan State University, the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom invited a bona fide fascist — Nick Griffin, the head of the racist British National Party — to speak on how Europe is becoming ‘Eurabia’.”

These days, it seems any writer — including those who have never achieved much in the way of popularity, profile or status — can get a book, op-ed, article, or editorial letter easily published through the influence of the Islamophobia industry in Western publishing and media. Books on such a “hot” topic as the Islamic/Muslim “threat” are sure to be widely reviewed from coast to coast, regardless of their accuracy or quality.

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One of Europe’s Islamophobia industry leaders is Matthias Kuentzel, a political scientist in Hamburg, Germany, of whom his U.S. promoters say:

“Since 2004, he has been a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2006, he became a member of the Boards of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He is the author of the new book, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. It was awarded the London Book Festival’s annual grand prize for ‘books worthy of greater attention from the international publishing community’. His essays about Islamism and anti-Semitism have been published inter alia in The New Republic, Policy Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Telos, and they have been translated into more than ten languages. In (2008) he is going to present his new book in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Bangor, Augusta and Washington DC.”

Among those European and North American authors in greatest demand these days are a growing number of young Western Muslim women who have forged a public profile by blaming Islam for every problem and disadvantage in the lives of Muslims everywhere - including of course their own. They are strangely vague, or even silent, on the role of poor social and economic conditions that prevail in most developing Muslim countries and about the exploitation of resources in those countries by Western powers, their proxies, or even their operatives within those Muslim countries.

The Islamophobia industry is also responsible for translating books and opinion articles from other languages into English in order to accelerate the movement of anything that smears Islam and Muslims into the Western media bandwidth.

It is all too easy to make a career in the Islamophobia industry. Financing is readily available from governments and right-wing special interest groups, all of whom are interested in smearing Islam in order to promote their political agenda of dominating, exploiting, invading, and ultimately occupying Muslim countries and homelands. The power of Islamophobia is thus brought to bear heavily on Muslim minorities in Western countries, who are pressured into silence and the abandonment of their collective political voice.

Of course, those who work within and on behalf of the Islamophobia industry deny any wrongdoing or ethical compromise in their motivation. In fact, they deny that Islamophobia even exists! And when they are forced to actually acknowledge the term, it is always placed between quotation marks.

Moreover, they attack any voice coming from among the Western Muslim communities - their primary victimized group. They also cheer on other Islamophobes, as well as defending Muslim profiling by the FBI and the Red Alerts issued by the CIA against Muslim countries.

Islamophobes, regardless of what they call themselves, blame Muslims for every terrorist attack and find them all guilty-by-association for the crimes of a few. The only “good” Muslims in the view of the Islamophobia industry are those who agree to be stereotyped as “moderate,” “modern,” “liberal,” “progressive,” “ordinary” - in other words, socially compliant and politically silent.

In October 2008, the national media watchdog group FAIR, released a first-of-its-kind report “profiling 12 of the leading Islamophobic pundits and media figures and examining the ways they’ve negatively influenced media coverage in the U.S.”

The report, called “Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation,” describes a loose network of right-wing, anti-Muslim partisans “who regularly use innuendo, questionable sources of information and even lies to smear, and effectively marginalize, Muslims in the media.”

Steve Rendall, one of the report’s authors and a senior analyst at FAIR, said: “This report takes a fresh look at Islamophobia and its perpetrators in today’s media … We found prominent right-wing pundits and activists using misinformation and innuendo to broadcast hate against an entire community — in this case, Muslim-Americans — and major media have either fallen asleep at the wheel or, in many cases, have actively helped to spread the smears.”

“Media should seek various points of view, but the message of the Islamophobes cannot possibly comport with the standards and practices that should constrain media outlets from airing smears against ethnic and religious groups,” Rendall continued. “We’re talking about double standards.”

The report lists American talk show hosts like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck; American activists like Michelle Malkin, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz; and influential writers like Mark Steyn and Robert Spencer.

The report also features four case studies, or snapshots, that show how “smearcasting” has affected news standards and reporting, including the following:

Daniel Pipes led a successful campaign to oust the principal of a secular Arabic-language New York City public school by initiating a media-driven pressure campaign. The principal’s history of forging interfaith and interethnic alliances was ignored by a campaign that branded her as a “stealth Islamist.” Media pressure eventually forced her to resign.

Columnist and Internet activist Michelle Malkin pressured Dunkin’ Donuts into dropping an ad featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray wearing a black-and-white scarf — which Malkin falsely identified as a kafiyah (Middle Eastern men’s headdress), calling it a symbol of “murderous Palestinian jihad.”

Inevitably, Islamophobia emerged in the 2008 U.S. presidential election race, from nefarious whisper-campaigns directed at Senator (now President) Barack Obama to the recent distribution of an anti-Muslim propaganda DVD called “Obsession” to 28 million newspaper subscribers in electoral swing states.

“We’re not talking about people raving on a street corner downtown,” Rendall emphasized. “These are people who either have a powerful platform at their disposal, or are allowed unfettered access to powerful platforms by reporters and editors in what are considered mainstream publications.”

On a note of warning he added, “These Muslim-bashing attacks have a real impact, not only on Muslims in America but on our civil discourse.”

Home / Headlines / The Islamophobia Machine - A New Growth Industry - Media Monitors Network (MMN)

The Muslim extremists in Luton who jeered British troops returning from Iraq are continuing to defy public anger despite the simmering tension it has caused in a racially-mixed town.

By David Harrison
Last Updated: 11:01PM GMT 14 Mar 2009

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Muslim extremists protesting at the homecoming march in Luton Photo: SOUTH BEDS NEWS

Muslim extremists protesting at the homecoming march in Luton Photo: SOUTH BEDS NEWS

The Islamic extremist was in full flow, bellowing out his message on a busy street in Luton.

“British soldiers … murderers … rapists … not heroes …” Most passers-by ignored him.

A few, mostly young Muslim men on their way home from afternoon prayers, paused to listen and were immediately approached by the white-capped preacher’s fellow radicals, eager to recruit new members to their cause.

Suddenly a mustachioed businessman in Muslim dress strode over the group, jabbed a finger towards the preacher and shouted: “You are giving Muslims a bad name!”

The radicals argued with him and tried to manhandle him away from the scene. For a moment the confrontation threatened to turn ugly until the businessman decided to walk away, still seething, but his point firmly made.

The angry scene encapsulated the tension that has hung over Luton since the preacher and the rest of his group staged a demonstration last week as 200 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment paraded through the Bedfordshire town after a gruelling tour of duty in Iraq.

A group of around 20 protesters jeered the troops and waved placards denouncing them as “Butchers of Basra”, “murderers” and “baby-killers”.

Local people who had come to cheer the soldiers reacted angrily, shouting “scum” at the demonstrators and waving Union flags. Police had to corral the protesters into a small areas for their own protection.

The demonstration produced angry headlines and widespread condemnation led by John Hutton, the Defence Secretary, and Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, who described it as “offensive and appalling”.

But the men behind the protest have not retreated into their fundamentalist bunkers until the storm blows over.

On the contrary, they are back out on the streets of Bury Park, a predominantly-Muslim area of Luton, repeating their attacks on British soldiers and rejecting any criticism of the protest.

Many locals are unimpressed.

“Don’t listen to those lunatics,” one Muslim man in his thirties muttered to me as he walked past the radicals’ placard bearing the words “Iraq war casualties” and showing graphic photographs of children allegedly killed or maimed by British soldiers.

“Those people do not represent the Muslim community,” said another passer-by. “They are a bunch of troublemakers.”

But the protesters are not merely unrepentant; they are defiant. “I don’t understand why people are upset,” said Abu Shadeed, 29, who is unemployed. “The soldiers were mercenaries sent to Iraq to kill people in an illegal war.

“I was disgusted that the council wanted to celebrate the return of criminals who killed women and children and parade then as heroes. We held the demonstration because we wanted to highlight that reality.”

The Sunday Telegraph spoke to more than half of the protesters. Some were born in the UK to parents who came from countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ghana. Others moved to the UK when they were babies or toddlers.

They were brought up and educated in England but, although many live on benefits, they admit their loyalty is not to this country but to Islam. They want the UK to be an Islamic state, with sharia law and women in burkas.

Abu Abdullah, 30, an IT consultant who came to Britain when he was seven, said he left school at 12 and began “Islamic studies”.

He said: “I live here not as a British citizen but as a Muslim living in Britain. I pay tax and I have the right to speak out, to argue for an alternative way of life.”

He is scathing of moderate Muslim leaders who have criticised the demonstration and fear they will suffer from an anti-Muslim backlash.

“They are selfish,” he said. “They think their businesses and their families are more important than the plight of Muslims abroad who are suffering at the hands of British soldiers.”

Abdul Rahman, 27, who works at a takeaway in Luton, said the soldiers could not “hide behind claims that they were just doing their job. They can always leave the Army if they don’t agree with the war,” he said.

The fiery 30-year-old preaching on Luton’s Dunstable Road said the Anglian soldiers, who lost 12 of their comrades in Iraq, were not heroes.

The radical, who also gave his name as Abu Abdullah, and said he was “between jobs”, pointed at the photographs of the wounded children.

“This is what the soldiers marched through Luton for,” he said. “Muslims see this as an insult. How can they be heroes?”

One of the photographs used to condemn the British troops is of Ali Abbas, now 18, who came to the UK for treatment after losing his arms and his family to a US bomb in the war. On Friday Ali praised British soldiers and criticised the protesters. Britain has been kind to me,” he said. “Stirring up this kind of hatred isn’t going to help Iraqis in Britain of in Iraq.”

The fundamentalists claim not to be part of an organised group but it is widely accepted they are the successors to Al-Muhajiroun and Al Ghurabaa, extremist organisations banned in Britain under anti-terrorism laws.

The protesters admitted freely that they shared many values with Al-Muhajiroun whose leader, Omar Bakri Muhammad, was banned from Britain in 2005 and now lives in Lebanon.

Anjem Choudary, Bakri’s spokesman in the UK, admitted his supporters had organised the protest in Luton.

He described the British troops as “cowards doing the bidding of a British Government engaged in state-sponsored terrorism”, and said his ultimate aim was “to fly the flag of Allah above 10 Downing Street”.

Choudary’s group has also been referred to as Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah, although moderate Muslim leaders in Luton claimed the name had been “hijacked” by the extremists who had “brought it in disrepute”.

The Luton demonstrators said the protest was organised by a radical called Abdul Wali, who declined to answer calls from this newspaper. Another key figure is believed to be Sayful Islam, 29, the former leader of the town’s branch of al-Muhajiroun.

Islam, who was also condemning British soldiers on the streets of Luton after the protest, said he was not at the demonstration but described those who were as “the real heroes”. He added: “We can’t remain silent when the murderers march through Luton.”

Luton born and bred, Islam once said he felt “elated” when he watched the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers in New York. He said the the town’s protest group was part of the global “One Ummah” (one Muslim community) movement.

Luton, an industrial town of 200,000 people, saw waves of immigration in the 20th century. Around 30,000 of its residents are Muslims of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin.

At the town’s central mosque, most of those who came to pray admitted that, like many others, they were against the war in Iraq, but added that the protest against the soldiers was wrong.

Mohammed Sadiq, 58, who came to Luton as a 16-year-old, said: “It was outrageous and we were shocked by it. We totally condemn those extremists. They should respect the soldiers.”

Mohammed Bashir, chairman of the Khadmit advice centre for the Asian community, said: “They are nutters and criminals. What they did was disgraceful. There is no place in our society for people like that.

“The Muslim community in Luton is hard-working and respectful. The danger is that this irresponsible tiny minority will give us all a bad name.”

Elsewhere in Luton, non-Muslims could barely contain their disgust and anger with the demonstrators.

Graham Browning, 63, said: “They should be hanged for treason. The soldiers risked their lives for this country. If people don’t like our values and laws they can always leave and live somewhere else.”

David Harkness, 19, said: “If they did that in Muslim countries they would be hanged. Free speech is important but it has its limits.”

Sylvia Woods, 65, said: “It was so vicious, there was so much hatred. But they would not even be allowed to demonstrate if our soldiers had not fought to defend the freedoms we enjoy in a democracy.”

But back in Dunstable Road, the preachers continued to belt our their message of hatred of the British soldiers. Asif Shaid, a 56-year-old shopkeeper, looked on in disgust.

“They are there all the time, spitting venom,” he said. “We don’t need them in Luton, or anywhere else.”

Luton’s Muslim extremists defy public anger - Telegraph

Israel and Judaism

Efforts at Jewish-Muslim Understanding Grow Despite Attempts to Demonize Islam

By Allan C. Brownfeld

DESPITE THE efforts of some Israelis and some in the American Jewish community to demonize the religion of Islam rather than focusing their attention on the minority of extremists within the Islamic community, efforts toward Muslim-Jewish understanding are growing.

Recalls Rabbi Bruce M. Lustig, senior rabbi at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, one of the largest Jewish congregations in North America with more than 3,000 families served: “Shortly after 9/11, I invited Bishop John Chane (Episcopal bishop of Greater Washington and the National Cathedral) and professor Akbar Ahmed (Ibn Khaldun scholar of Islamic studies at American University) to share with them the idea of starting an Abrahamic faith dialogue. My simple premise was based on what my mother told me as a child: Stay away from strangers. If these two men and their faiths were to remain strangers to me, I would only grow to fear them, not know them. Soon after, we held one of the first Abrahamic faith forums in America. We also forged a friendship that has been transformative. These men are my friends, my mentors, my sounding boards.”

Although “we do not agree on every social or political question,” Rabbi Lustig notes, “we have deep respect for, and a deep honesty with, each other. Having others challenge my ideas and demand clarity of creed is a powerful and uplifting experience. They have helped me to become a stronger Jew and a better rabbi. To my children, the answer to what it means to be Christian or Muslim is not abstract; it is the love they know from John and Akbar, who join us at our table and who teach us by example.”

This past November, more than 50 mosques and synagogues across the country participated in the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding’s Weekend of Twinning.

With a stated premise that “we are all children of Abraham,” the weekend brought together synagogues and mosques to combat Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in their communities.

“What we realized is that we don’t know enough about each other,” said Rabbi Gregory Harris of Congregation Beth-El in Bethesda, Maryland. “We’re relatives in the Abrahamic sense, but we’re total strangers in every other sense of it.”

Beth-El paired with the Islamic Center of Maryland in Gaithersburg to hold “Judaism 101 and Islam 101” classes on the fundamentals of each religion.

The phrase Judeo-Christian should be replaced with “Abrahamic.”

According to Rabbi Marc Schneier, founder and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, who helped establish the weekend, the goal is to “create a paradigm of Jewish-Muslim support that we can export to other parts of the world…We must take advantage of these opportunities, especially within the Muslim world, where we are now beginning to see the emergence of a more moderate centrist voice that has a particular interest in reaching out to the Jewish religion.”

Rabbi Schneier met in New York in November with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, a core supporter of the initiative.

The weekend fulfilled a pledge faith leaders took in 2007 at the World Conference of Dialogue in Madrid. Co-sponsors are the World Jewish Congress, the Muslim Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America.

Daniel Spiro, author of the novel Moses The Heretic (Aegis Press), argues that the phrase Judeo-Christian should be replaced with “Abrahamic.” He notes that although the world faces a real problem of Islamic terrorism, the religion also contains elements that are “uniquely beautiful,” and that “We Jews need to seek them out. Most of us viscerally appreciate Christian ethics as a useful add-on to the foundation of Jewish ethics. But when we think about Islam, most of us don’t appreciate what is profoundly beautiful. We basically see Islam as a violent outgrowth of monotheism. I want that changed.”

In Spiro’s view, “To borrow from another religion, if we want peace in Israel we need to generate good karma. If we embrace what is beautiful in Islam and Muslims begin to embrace what is beautiful in Judaism, we can begin to produce a situation that might lead to peace.”

Bahrain’s Jewish Ambassador

Consider the case of Houda Ezra Nonoo, who in July presented her credentials to President George W. Bush as Bahrain’s ambassador to the U.S., making her the first Jew to represent an Arab country in Washington, DC.

In her first interview, with the Dec. 4, 2008 issue of Washington Jewish Week, Ambassador Nonoo explained: “Bahrain is an open and tolerant society and it doesn’t matter what religion you are. I’m Jewish, but I’m also Bahraini. My grandfather served on the Municipality Council as early as 1934, so we’ve always been integrated into society.”

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, as many as 1,500 Jews lived and prospered in Bahrain. “Things changed in 1948,” according to Washington Jewish Week, “with the establishment of the state of Israel. Riots erupted, the sole synagogue was closed and most of Bahrain’s Jews emigrated, leaving for Great Britain…Currently, about 35 Jews live among Bahrain’s 700,000 inhabitants. This is a constant source of pride for Bahraini officials…In November, King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa, during a meeting in New York, beseeched about 50 Bahraini Jewish expatriates to consider returning home—a move relatively unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.”

“This was something I never expected in my life,” Nonoo said, “to be ambassador in the United States. I think I’ve made a big impact on a lot of people, being female and representing Bahrain in the most important country in the world.” Her reception by fellow Arab diplomats in Washington has been incredibly warm, she reported: “The Syrian ambassador recently hosted a dinner to honor me. The Iraqi ambassador had one…and Oman is having one. They’ve really made me feel at home.”

On Yom Kippur, Nonoo attended Orthodox services. She may not, however, have any relationship with the Embassy of Israel, because Bahrain and Israel do not have diplomatic relations. “Understand that Israel and Judaism are two different things,” she stated. “I’ve never felt any discrimination or anti-Semitism. My father was a very well-known figure. When he died in 1993 in a car accident, the amount of people who came to offer condolences—including the emir, the prime minister and the emir’s other brother—was amazing. They all showed us respect.”

The idea that there has been an ancient enmity between Jews and Muslims is completely ahistorical, and those Jewish groups and individuals who promote such a view seem to be unaware of the long history of cooperation between the two religions. Much has been written In recent years about the Golden Age of Jews in Muslim Spain. Indeed, when Muslim rule came to an end and the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, they were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire. The anti-Semitism which plagued medieval Christian Europe was not to be found in the Islamic world.

In his recent book, Among The Righteous (Public Affairs Press), Robert Satloff, who has served since 1993 as executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, unearths the lost stories of Arabs who saved Jews during the Holocaust. When the Nazis occupied the countries of North Africa and sought to round up Jews and expropriate Jewish property, Satloff notes, “in every place that it occurred, Arabs helped Jews. Some Arabs spoke out against the persecution of Jews and took public stands of unity with them. Some Arabs denied the support and assistance that would have made the wheels of the anti-Jewish campaign spin more efficiently…And there were occasions when certain Arabs chose to do more than just offer moral support to Jews. They bravely saved Jewish lives, at times risking their own in the process. Those Arabs were true heroes.”

Nor was it only in North Africa that Muslims saved Jews. During the Nazi occupation, the Grand Mosque of Paris provided sanctuary for Jews hiding from German and Vichy troops, and provided certificates of Muslim identity to untold numbers of Jews. Satloff quotes reports describing the mosque “as a virtual Grand Central Station for the Underground Railroad of Jews in France.” This story is told in a 1991 film “Une Résistance Oubliée: La Mosque de Paris” (“A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris”) by Derri Berkani, a French documentary filmmaker of Algerian Berber origin.

The time has come to understand the real history of Jewish-Muslim relations—and those who are leading efforts to achieve mutual understanding between the two faiths are showing the way in this effort. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is political and should not be confused with religion. Perhaps the day will come when Israel helps makes that eminently clear by appointing as ambassador to the U.S. one of its own Muslim citizens.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Efforts at Jewish-Muslim Understanding Grow Despite Attempts to Demonize Islam

By Pamela Geller

There is an excellent Geert Wilders interview with Jeff Jacoby on Boston.com today here. Unlike the dhimmi media tools who do Islam’s bidding on a daily basis, Jacoby gives Wilders the opportunity to explain and/or refute the popular memes the media and the Islamic propagandists throw at Wilders in the traitorous attempt to marginalize and smear him.

Please read it all.

There is one issue in this interview I would like very much to address because there has been little refutation or coverage of the viability and intellectual integrity of “moderate” Muslim.

Q: What do you say to Muslims like Zuhdi Jasser? He is an American, a former Navy officer, a doctor. After 9/11, he was so horrified by what was done in the name of Islam that he founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy: pro-American, pro-democracy, anti-violence, anti-Islamist. How do you answer Muslims like him, who say: “I love my religion. I also love freedom, democracy, Western values. I believe in separation of mosque and state. But how can I be an ally with someone who says my religion itself is evil?”

A: Well, I would tell him I wish there were more people like you. It didn’t happen. I would not agree with [Dr. Jasser] about Islam, but I wish there were more like him.

Everyone loves the idea of Jasser and his “moderate Islam,” without doing even so much as the most preliminary analysis or review of his position and many of the things he has said.

In May 2007, I conducted an  interview with Zuhdi Jasser. Jasser NEVER met Dr. Andrew Bostom or read his work — let alone read an advance copy of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, the manuscript of which had just recently been completed and had only been viewed by a few close contacts, including myself.

“Empowering Moderate Muslims”
Pamela Geller interviews Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, Chairman American Islamic Democracy Forum
05-22-07
64:41
14.8MB

Alternative MP3 audio link here.

Jasser, in the interview linked above, had the temerity to claim that Muslim Antisemitism is a “Wahhabi” problem, which Bostom is “promoting.” I guess that makes it a combined Bostom-Wahhabi problem. Never mind that Muslim Antisemitism was fully functional without the Wahhabis for over 1000 years before the movement arose in the 18th century, or some 1300 years before Bostom was born in 1956.

Listen to ~ minutes 20-25. Also, Jasser makes a point of repeatedly referring to Judea/Samaria as “occupied” — (and he does not mean the historically accurate characterization Arab-occupied Judea-Samaria.). I strongly recommend you listen to the whole interview if you are buying into the moderate narrative.

It is also important to mention that Jasser was recently kicked out of his own “progressive” mosque because of his take on Islam, so who exactly is he representing? He’s living in his own private Islam. Islam considers Jasser a hyporcrite, an apostate. There is no interpretation of Islam. Reform or reinterpret the Qu’ran and you are a “hypocrite” — punishable by death.

Muhammad is to strike hard against the unbelievers (fight them with weapons and armaments — ibn Kathir. Fight them with swords—Jalalyn), hypocrites (punish them according to Sharia laws—ibn Kathir) and to be firm (harsh) against them; the abode for the unbelievers and the hypocrites is hell… 66:9

Another force behind the fallacious “moderate” Muslim meme is noted scholar Daniel Pipes — perhaps the most damaging propagandist of this impossible argument, because of his credibility.

Jacoby asks Wilders about Pipes as well here:

Q: What do you say to scholars of Islam like Daniel Pipes, who argues that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution?

Why should one accept what Geert Wilders says about Islam, rather than someone like Pipes?

A: I respect Daniel Pipes, but I fully disagree. There is no moderate Islam. It’s like the [prime minister] of Turkey, Mr. Erdogan, said himself recently: There is only one taste of Islam, and that is the taste of the Koran.

Q: But he’s an Islamist. You would expect him to say that. What about anti-Islamist Muslims, Muslims who reject the radicals?

A: Listen, the Koran is seen by Muslims, unlike all the other religions, as the word of God that can never be criticized. If you criticize the Koran, you are a renegade, an apostate. There are people who are moderate and call themselves Muslim. But moderate Islam is totally nonexistent. It will never have an Enlightenment as happened with Christianity.

Q: Why not?

A: Because unlike the interpretations of other holy books, Muslims believe that the Koran is the word of God and can never be changed.

Q: Hold on - the New Testament today is the same New Testament as a thousand years ago. What’s different is the way that book is read and understood. A thousand years ago, one could have said Christianity was a violent, militant religion; today one wouldn’t.

A: Yes, there was a change in Christianity. It was possible because Christians don’t believe that the Bible is literally the word of God - not like the Koran. If you really believe [the Koran] is the word of God, it will never have room to change

Pipes’s mantra is tired. We have all been listening to it for the past ten years without so much as a scintilla of supportive data. But now, thanks to repeated polling, reality paints a vastly different picture — here. for example is data from 2006/2007, reported by Dr. Bostom: The Muslim Mainstream and the New Caliphate.

The openly expressed desire for the restoration of a Caliphate from two-thirds of an important Muslim sample of Arab and non-Arab Islamic nations, representative of Muslims worldwide, should serve as a chilling wake-up call to those still in denial about the existential threat posed by the living, uniquely Islamic institution of jihad.

And with the most recent follow-up, reported at the end of February from World Opinion polls here, we can quantify how factually-challenged his formulation is — unless one accepts the absurd notion that desiring “strict application” of Sharia, and global Caliphate, are “moderate”. Overwhelming majorities i.e., better than 2/3 of the best conducted sampling of the world’s most populous Muslim countries, want these hideous outcomes.

As Bostom has previously written,

A World Public Opinion.org/ University of Maryland poll released February 25, 2009 indicated the following about our erstwhile Muslim ally nations of Egypt and Pakistan—81% of the Muslims of “moderate” Egypt, the largest Arab Muslim nation, desire a “strict” application of Shari’a, Islamic Law; 76% of the Pakistan’s Muslims—one of the most important, and sizable non-Arab Muslim populations—want this outcome. Moreover, 70% of Egyptian Muslims and 69% of Pakistani Muslims desire the re-creation of a “..single Islamic state or Caliphate.”

Earlier, I detailed the totalitarian impact of these fulfilled Islamic desires —based upon their doctrinal and historical application, across space and time.

When I first came to study Islam post 9/11, I watched and waited and wanted very much to believe in the Moderate meme. But I am not a fool. You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.

Wilders cites this Reagan quote frequently, “If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.”

Wilders, Islam and the Immoderate Moderates | EuropeNews

Democracy and the Muslim world: the “post-Islamist” turn

Written by Asef Bayat

An old argument over the compatibility of Islam and democracy is being transformed under the influence of new social and intellectual currents. The external advocates of democracy in the Muslim world should take note, says Asef Bayat.

The debate about the fragility of democracy in Islamic societies - with a particular focus on the middle east - has grown in intensity throughout the 2000s. It has been propelled by a combination of global and regional factors, and has focused largely on the real or imagined obstacles to democratic development: among them authoritarian family structures, clan-based social organisation, a social order antithetical to freedom, “oriental despotism”, colonial domination, repressive legal structures, and the rentier character of many Muslim states.

But there is a persistent and broad view that it is Islam itself which is responsible for the “democratic deficit” in much of the Muslim world. The experience of Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia (to name only these) is enough to illustrate that the condition being diagnosed is more specifically identified with the middle east; but even here, the argument is far from well-grounded.

It is important to examine this view at a time of transition, when both advocates and critics of Islam (admittedly a rather crude characterisation - though the arguments on each side can often be such) are repositioning themselves in face of wider changes in the geopolitical and intellectual arena (see Olivier Roy, Whatever Happened to the Islamists? [C Hurst, 2009]). These changes include a reassessment of the principles underlying the support or promotion of democracy in the Muslim world, which has had a high profile in western policy and rhetoric in the 2000s; a theme explored in a number of earlier articles in this openDemocracy/International IDEA debate.    

A public faith

The notion has increasingly been heard that Islam is essentially incompatible with democracy because it emphasises God’s sovereignty rather than that of human beings; because it values men over women; and because it discourages dialogue and pluralism. Many Muslims contest such views by arguing that God has granted sovereignty to humans to govern themselves; and that Islamic justice disallows discrimination based on class, race or gender (because the noblest humans are the most pious). The shared frame of these opposing views tends to draw them into an often sterile philosophical-theological terrain. In general, little effort has been made to understand the politics of religious affiliation, and how in practice Muslims perceive their religion in relation to democratic ideals.

This perspective makes the persistently raised question of whether Islam is or is not compatible with democracy appear misconceived - and the key issue become how and under what conditions Muslims can make their religion embrace a democratic ethos. There is nothing intrinsic to Islam (nor indeed any other religion) that means it is inherently either democratic or undemocratic (see Fred Halliday, “The Left and the Jihad“, 7 September 2006). In this approach, the important factor is how the living faithful perceive and live through their faiths; and whether (in broad terms) they “deploy” their religions in exclusive and authoritarian terms or read in them justice, representation and pluralism.

Many individuals and groups continue to perceive and present the same scriptures differently - itself an intriguing phenomenon, given their different biographies, interests and social positions. In fact many theocratic Islamists (like their Christian counterparts) self-consciously declare that Islam and democracy are incompatible on the grounds that any Islamic polity worth the name - by basing itself on “divine sovereignty” - is opposed to man-made democratic governance. These include the older generation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; factions within the conservative Islamist camp in Iran; and groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir which aim at establishing a global Islamic khalafat. In privileging the rule of sharia, the political schemas of these currents emphasise Muslims’ religious obligations rather than civic rights.

In contrast, a growing trend within Muslim societies - what I have called “post-Islamism” - has opened up a productive space where pious sensibilities are able to incorporate a democratic ethos. The growth of such “post-Islamism” out of the anomalies of Islamist politics represents an attempted fusion of elements hitherto often seen as mutually exclusive: religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty. The daring logic is to turn the underlying principles of Islamism on their head by emphasising rights instead of duties, plurality in place of a singular authoritative voice, ambiguity instead of certainty, historicity rather than fixed scripture, and the future instead of the past.

Between Tehran and Cairo

In this light, the issue of Islam’s relationship to democratic ideas can be explored through the efforts of public advocates of Islamism and post-Islamism to increase their influence in society and the state. The history of socio-religious movements in two Muslim-majority countries - Iran and Egypt - since the 1970s offer interesting case-studies here (see Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn [Stanford University Press, 2007]).

In Iran, the 1979 revolution and the establishment of an Islamic state also established conditions for the rise of post-Islamist ideas and movements that aimed to transcend Islamism in society and governance. In their daily struggles, many forces - Muslim women, youth, students, religious intellectuals, and other social groups - incorporated into their faith notions of individual rights, tolerance, gender equality, and the separation of religion from the state. By their persistent presence in society, they compelled religious and political leaders to undertake a paradigmatic “post-Islamist” shift.

Among these groups, women have been at the centre (see Nikki R Keddie, “Iranian women and the Islamic Republic“, 24 February 2009). Many Iranian women participated massively in the Islamic revolution, and continued to insist on asserting their public role under the new regime - even in the face of much opposition from the puritanical ruling elite. The post-revolution years saw an efflorescence of activity in public life as women pursued education and employment opportunities, entered the professions and created voluntary groups, practiced sports and cultural activities, and ran for public office.

The making of such public roles took place in a context of negotiation with Iran’s new social and legal imperatives. In many cases, restrictive laws and customs had to be altered to accommodate the requisites of “public women” within the patriarchal religious system. Women’s public activity in itself raised a host of issues: their hijab (and its compatibility with the nature of women’s work), their relationships with men, their rights and the limits of their ambitions (if they could be high officials, would they still need to obtain their husbands’ permission to attend a foreign conference?; why could they not be elected president or supreme leader?).

It was precisely such questions, now debated widely in public, that compelled political and religious leaders to undertake new interpretations of the scriptures so that the powerful quest for gender equality could be rendered compatible with the Islamic polity. Muslim feminists were only too prepared to contribute to the process by embarking on “women-centred” interpretations that emphasised gender equality. Instead of pointing to individual verses of the Qur’an, they referred to the “general spirit” of Islam, which, they argued, was in favour of equality between men and women.

Alongside women activists, other groups - of students and young people, of democracy advocates, of intellectuals - became active in post-revolutionary Iran. Many focused on citizenship rights, the rule of law, and the circulation of power, deploying similar strategies to establish the idea that democratic demands and human rights were not foreign to the spirit of Islam but integral to it. They argued that freedom rather than compulsion, is intrinsic to faith. It was partially these social and discursive mobilisations in society that set the ground for the victory of the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, in 1997. Indeed, the “reform government” of 1997-2005 in Iran represented only one (that is, the political) aspect of this influential post-Islamist trend.

In Egypt, by contrast, there was no “regime change” as in Iran. But the search for an Islamic revolution was since the 1970s fired by a pervasive Islamist movement possessed of a conservative moral vision, a patriarchal disposition, and a strict adherence to scripture - though also using a strikingly populist language. The major actors in Egyptian society - the intelligentsia, the new rich, Muslim women activists, the al-Azhar university and religious institutions, the ruling elites, and the state - were engulfed by the “Islamist mode”; all converged around the language of nativism and a conservative moral ethos to configure a religious “passive revolution” in the country.

This “passive revolution” (a concept drawn from Antonio Gramsci) can be understood as a managed Islamic restoration whereby the state - the original target of change - succeeded in remaining fully in charge by co-opting, repressing, but also marginalising critical voices, innovative religious thought, and democratic demands. The bitterness and polarisation that ensued, and the relative lack of social mobilisation, helped ensure that religious thought in Egypt remained rigid; there was not the social pressure which would otherwise have compelled both religious thinkers and political leaders to rethink their orthodoxies in favor of an inclusive interpretation of religion and governance.

It was only in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the new period in global politics that they inaugurated that stagnant Egyptian politics acquired a new life. The militant Gama’a al-Islamiyya had already abandoned its violent insurrectionary strategy in favour of a peaceful and legalist turn, though it retained its Islamist ideology. The “young generation” of Muslim Brothers spoke the language of citizenship, pluralism, women’s and minority rights, even as it upheld the supremacy of sharia and the dictum “Islam is the solution”.

A nascent “democracy movement” centred around the Kifaya movement sought to transcend what many saw as the old-fashioned pan-Arab nationalist and Islamist politics. The efforts to place democracy on the nation’s political agenda remained fragile and confined to a narrow section of society. Only the Hizb-ul-Wasat, a small splinter group from the Muslim Brothers that accommodated both Muslim and Christian activists, heralded a new “post-Islamist” trajectory.

The power to change

The diverse experiences of Iran and Egypt have their more recent counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world. Indeed, a comparable field of changes or attempted changes has been visible since the 1990s in a number of Islamist movements in the middle east, central Asia and southeast Asia. Many of these attempt to accommodate aspects of democratic discourse, pluralism, women’s rights and youth concerns within an overall Islamic project.

Hizbollah, for example, has transcended its exclusivist Islamist platform by adapting to the pluralistic political reality of Lebanon. Saudi Arabia has witnessed the emergence (whose fate is uncertain) of a “post-Wahhabi” trend that seeks some form of compromise between Islam and democracy. In Tajikistan, the Islamic Renaissance Party has been integrated into that country’s secular political process, as has the Justice & Development Party in Morocco. The ruling Justice & Development Party (AKP) in Turkey too represents a developed post-Islamic trajectory where pious sensibilities are blended into the secular democratic polity. These instances represent some important conscious and reflective adjustments in Islamist politics in the past decade, even if there are significant variations in the depth, scope, and pace of change.

Yet none of these movements and trends (Turkey apart) have assumed full governmental power, and thus been obliged to consider how they would manage to realise an inclusive democratic polity. In Iran, the conservative Islamists fiercely subverted a democratic reform in the name of safeguarding Islam and the “Islamic system”; in Egypt, the ruling elite resisted reform in the name of preventing “religious extremism” from assuming governmental power. But the political impasse in these countries has been less a function of religion per se than of structural impediments and the longtime vested interests of ruling elites; the obstacle to democracy is politics not religion.

Such an impasse has tempted some opposition actors in the middle east to press for “regime change” via foreign intervention. The logic of the foregoing outline of the evolution of a “post-Islamist” trend (which has far from run its course) is to counsel caution here.

While international solidarity and support (whether from states or civil-society organisations) can be welcome - for instance, of the kind extended to the anti-apartheid movement by the majority in South Africa - the context in which it occurs and the nature of what it offers are crucial. In particular, democracy support and/or international assistance for human rights become truly meaningful and effective only when they are initiated and managed by credible movements centred in the relevant country or region, rather than unilaterally pushed from outside under whatever pretext.

It should be recalled that foreign intervention in the middle east has historically worked against, and not for democratic governance. Among the many examples are the creation of autocratic kingdoms in the Persian Gulf; the CIA’s toppling of Iran’s secular democratic prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstatement of the Shah in Iran; and long-term western support for Saddam Hussein.

The voice within

More recently, the “democracy-promotion” strategy pursued by the United States has caused more harm to everyday citizens and their democratic dreams than benefit. The proclaimed intentions of this strategy, noble as they  are - human rights, civic freedoms, the liberation of women, as well as the core institutions of democracy itself - have too often been submerged by what a military-imperial project with regime-change as an entry point and the rhetoric of democracy as its legitimation.

In any case, the regime-change version of democracy-promotion is rooted in the false assumption that installing democracy as the highest value justifies drastic violations. The occupation of Iraq, with all its disastrous consequences, is justified after the event on account of the incipient democratic system that on a benign view is evolving in the country. But an instrumental doctrine of this kind is flawed. Its coerciveness discredits the ideal of democracy; it provides a pretext for xenophobic and repressive rulers to play the “anti-imperialist” card; it is guaranteed to inflict widespread pain, death, and destruction; and it is unlikely to work even in its own narrow terms. Democracy cannot be “promoted” on top of a mountain of corpses.

Instead, a change in societies’ sensibilities is a precondition for a sustainable democratic turn. This can only be triggered through information and education, but especially by people from all areas of social life who in their everyday lives fulfil their civic responsibilities, voice their aspirations, broadcast injustice, and excel in what they do.

This applies to citizens of Muslim countries as to those of any other. The primary responsibility for realising the promise of a large-scale democratic shift is theirs, not that of foreign governments or international agencies. The change will occur as and when they master the art of presence - the skill and spirit to assert a collective will against all odds by circumventing constraints, utilising what is possible, and discovering new spaces within which to make themselves heard, seen, and felt.

The “post-Islamist” turn can be seen in this respect as part of an unfolding historic process. The implication is that any initiatives for sustained democratic reform in Muslim societies world must have the agency of people in these societies at its very heart. Even the most painstaking reform efforts will yield little outcome if democracy is led - and seen to be led - from outside, even more so if through coercion and conquest.

Asef Bayat is professor of sociology and middle-east studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His books include Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn  (Stanford University Press, 2007)

Democracy and the Muslim world: the “post-Islamist” turn

By Ivan Watson
CNN

(CNN) — The e-mail arrived from Uzbekistan on February 26. It was titled “Bad News.”

Abdul Dadahanov had intended to study business, but changed his mind after 9/11, his academic adviser said.

“Dear Mama Judy,” a young woman named Aziza Dadahanov wrote in shaky English. “Very very bad news!!! Abdul is given 8 years of prison. Today was the verdict. Now i feel myself very bad. And i can’t write now. I am shocked.”

“It was like being kicked in the stomach,” recalled Judy Skartvedt, a retired flight attendant living in Easton, Connecticut.

She knew Dadahanov’s husband, Abdul Dadahanov, as an Uzbek exchange student who had wanted to help heal people after the 9/11 attacks. She thought of him as an open-minded Muslim whom her family had hosted when he came on a scholarship to study at Fairfield University in 2001.

“We were totally shocked that someone like Abdul could be arrested for anything,” Skartvedt said. “We haven’t stopped worrying about his safety.”

The 32-year-old faces eight years in a labor camp for participation in what the Uzbekistan government says is an extremist religious organization, according to Forum 18, a religious freedom watchdog organization

The group says that Uzbek security forces arrested Dadahanov and four other men — Bakhrom Ibrahimov, Davron Kabilov, Rovshanbek Favoyev and Botyrbek Eshkuziyev — last summer after the men had written for an Islamic journal called Irmoq. The National Security Service reportedly claimed the magazine was “sponsored by a Turkish radical religious movement.”

Officials from the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Washington have refused to comment on the case.

Forum 18 says Dadahanov and the four other Uzbek men were convicted of “dissemination of information and materials containing ideas of religious extremism, separatism and fundamentalism, calls for pogroms or violent eviction of individuals aimed at creating panic among the population.”

Human rights organizations say the convictions appear to be part of a broader crackdown in the former Soviet republic, targeting members of “Nurchilar,” a moderate Muslim movement of Turkish origin, which follows the writing of a 19th-century Sufi Muslim theologian.

“Unfortunately this is not an unusual case,” said Igor Vorontsov, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in St. Petersburg. “The [Uzbek] government has persisted in its persecution of independent Muslims.”

Relations between the United States and Uzbekistan have been on a roller coaster for a decade, with Washington’s desire for allies in the volatile region coming up against Uzbekistan’s human rights record. Here are key developments:

• September 2001: Uzbekistan joins U.S.-led “war on terror,” allowing American forces to operate from base near Afghan border
• Fall 2001: U.S. airstrikes hit militants with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, who were fighting alongside the Taliban but were also threat to Karimov regime in Uzbekistan; the group has never regained former strength
• May 2005: Relations collapse after U.S. officials criticize government crackdown in city of Andijan that killed at least 190 people
• July 2005: Uzbekistan evicts U.S. forces from base in south of country
• February 2009: U.S. reaches agreement with Uzbekistan for new overland route to supply U.S. and NATO forces in neighboring Afghanistan; route is important alternative to suspended airlifts from Kyrgyzstan and difficult land crossing from Pakistan

Thousands of miles from the Republic of Uzbekistan, news of Dadahanov’s jail sentence has stunned academics and Christian community leaders in Connecticut. They fondly describe a committed social activist and observant Muslim, who rode between work and classes on a secondhand bicycle and spent more than a year distributing food to soup kitchens in one of America’s poorer cities.

“He had a naive trust in the goodness of human beings,” said Patty Jenson, an administrator at the Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport. “I am shocked. I know he is there [in prison] unjustly. What is happening is unjust.”

“He was a man of his word, he was gentle and kind,” said Charlene Chambers, the director of King’s Pantry, a nonprofit organization that distributes food to homeless people in Bridgeport. “Our common bond was feeding people who can’t feed themselves and clothing those people who can’t clothe themselves.”

Dadahanov’s academic adviser, Katherine Kidd, said the young Uzbek originally intended to study business when he arrived at Fairfield University on a scholarship from the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation. That changed September 11, 2001.

Kidd choked up as she recalled his visit to her office, hours after the terrorist attacks.

“He said, ‘Dr. Kidd, I have to do something to tell people that this is not what Islam is about.’ He said, ‘I want to be part of things that are done here to bring healing to people after 9/11.’ ”

Dadahanov began working closely with Kidd’s husband, Pastor John Kidd, who was a Lutheran minister and the executive director of the Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport. Pastor Kidd helped Dadahanov tour churches and work with synagogues, giving lectures on his interpretation of Islam. Dadahanov also appeared before audiences dressed in traditional Central Asian attire, in an effort to spread cultural awareness about Uzbekistan.

Advisers say the young Uzbek was inspired by his interaction with church and community groups. Gradually, he shifted his academic focus from business to grassroots community service and education reform.

“He would regularly say ‘Wow, how can I do this in Uzbekistan, and make my country and my community better and stronger?’” Katherine Kidd explained.

Dadahanov helped establish a small prayer room for Muslim students at Fairfield University. He also launched a book drive, shipping secondhand books to Uzbekistan to help teach English in his home country. And he was eventually hired at the Council of Churches, and tasked with distributing Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to 26 feeding programs across Bridgeport.

“He wanted to be involved in the frontline programs,” John Kidd said. “Ultimately, it’s sad that all these things he came to see in terms of how you build a community, how you take responsibility for the life of a community, is at least in part what put him at odds with the authorities in Uzbekistan.”

When he returned to Uzbekistan in 2004 after two and a half years in Connecticut, Dadahanov set up an English-language school with friends. The school offered English lessons to young Uzbeks at an affordable price — a remarkable achievement in a society in which the government controls almost all facets of the economy.

There is little tolerance for independent grassroots activism in Uzbekistan. The country has had the same authoritarian president, Islam Karimov, since it won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The State Department’s recently published 2008 human rights report states “torture remain systemic in [Uzbekistan's] law enforcement … human rights activists and journalists who criticized the government continued to be subjected to harassment, arbitrary arrest, politically motivated prosecution, forced psychiatric treatment and physical attack.”

Uzbek security forces frequently target religious activists.

“The government has almost a paranoia of any independent religious activity, particularly those related to Islam,” said Sean Roberts, a Central Asia expert at George Washington University.

“The Uzbek government tries to control the religious sector very similar to the way the Soviets did. They have a state Muslim board that oversees what is proper Islam - anything that falls out of that scope is seen as threatening and seditious.”

The Uzbek government says it “views the ensuring of human rights and freedoms of its citizens as its highest priority.” A statement posted on the Web site of the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Washington cited the passage of more then 120 laws and 60 international treaties aimed at improving the country’s human rights record. The Uzbek government says it is making reforms of its judicial and penitentiary system, aimed at “prosecuting and punishing for the use of torture and other forms of ill-treatment.”

Dadahanov’s former professors invited him to return on a scholarship to the United States after his arrest, and two families offered to house Dadahanov, his wife Aziza and young son Abdulrahman.

Dr. Orin Grossman, Fairfield University’s academic vice president, hoped the graduate school offer would allow Uzbek authorities to release Dadahanov. “It obviously didn’t work,” he wrote in an e-mail to CNN.

Accounts of appalling conditions in Uzbek prisons have worried Dadahanov’s American friends, who remember how the slim Uzbek rode to barbecues on his bicycle, carrying a giant watermelon in a backpack as a gift.

The hardest part has been trying to get information from Dadahanov’s family in Tashkent.

“The government is tapping their phone and tracking their e-mail,” Katherine Kidd said. “We’re pretty much sure neither of those is secure from the government.”

Friends fear for ‘gentle’ man sent to Uzbek labor camp - CNN.com

By Geert Wilders

March 8, 2009

Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch Parliament and head of the Freedom Party. In 2008 he released “Fitna,” a controversial film about the Koran and jihadist violence. Wilders was condemned as an anti-Muslim agitator but also hailed as a defender of Western values and free speech. In January, a Dutch court ordered Wilders prosecuted for allegedly inciting hatred against Islam. Last month he was invited to screen “Fitna” at Westminster, but the British government barred him from entering the country. He was recently interviewed by Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, who prepared the following edited excerpts:

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Q: You’ve said that England today is more Chamberlain than Churchill. Explain what you mean.

A: Well, Chamberlain was the biggest appeaser to a totalitarian ideology called fascism. Now we face the threat of another totalitarian ideology called Islam, at least according to me. And instead of defending our freedom, defending our values, when I was invited a few weeks ago to show “Fitna” in the House of Lords, they denied me entry to the United Kingdom.

Q: The letter from the British home secretary said: “Your statements about Muslims and their beliefs . . . would threaten community harmony, and therefore public security, in the UK.”

A: What really happened is that she was pressured. In the English press, there was a lot of news that Lord Ahmed [Nazir Ahmed, a British peer] threatened to have 10,000 Muslims demonstrating in front of Westminster.

Q: If you were allowed into the country.

A: Yes. And this is what I meant by Chamberlain. The UK government is giving in, appeasing the enemy. They should stand up and say: We might not like the political view of this guy, but he should be allowed to come here and say it.

Q: In the film, you show quotations from the Koran, together with video of statements and actions by Muslim extremists.

A: Exactly. I used reality. It was really made by radical Muslims themselves. I just combined the pictures with the source. If they don’t like the movie, they don’t like what they do themselves. At the end of “Fitna,” it talks about Islamic ideology - that we should defeat the threat of Islamic ideology. For that to not be allowed in the United Kingdom, to be prosecuted in my own country, is an absolute outrage.

Q: A few weeks ago at a demonstration in Amsterdam, people were yelling, “Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas.” Was there any prosecution of that type of speech?

A: This is the double standard: If you are a radical Muslim imam, and during your Friday prayer - this happened in the Netherlands - they said that Shariah should be installed, gays should be thrown from high buildings, women should be beaten up - terrible things. Sometimes the prosecutors brought them to trial, but they were always acquitted, because [of] freedom of religion. Now somebody like me stands up and says, “Hey, this is wrong,” and I’m being brought to court.

Q: This month is the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Back then, the West pretty much defended Rushdie. Yet now, 20 years later, you’re banned from Britain, prosecuted in your country. What accounts for such a different response?

A: What’s happened is that the cultural relativists believe that all cultures are equal, that Islam is just another leaf on the tree - and that everybody who says different is a xenophobe or racist. Within Europe, Muslims today have enormous political force. They all vote, and they’re represented by mostly leftist parties.

Q: You say: “I don’t hate Muslims; I hate Islam.” Is there really any difference?

A: I have nothing against the people. I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life - economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book - but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state. Islam is totally contrary to our values.

Q: What do you say to scholars of Islam like Daniel Pipes, who argues that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution? Why should one accept what Geert Wilders says about Islam, rather than someone like Pipes?

A: I respect Daniel Pipes, but I fully disagree. There is no moderate Islam. It’s like the [prime minister] of Turkey, Mr. Erdogan, said himself recently: There is only one taste of Islam, and that is the taste of the Koran.

Q: But he’s an Islamist. You would expect him to say that. What about anti-Islamist Muslims, Muslims who reject the radicals?

A: Listen, the Koran is seen by Muslims, unlike all the other religions, as the word of God that can never be criticized. If you criticize the Koran, you are a renegade, an apostate. There are people who are moderate and call themselves Muslim. But moderate Islam is totally nonexistent. It will never have an Enlightenment as happened with Christianity.

Q: Why not?

A: Because unlike the interpretations of other holy books, Muslims believe that the Koran is the word of God and can never be changed.

Q: Hold on - the New Testament today is the same New Testament as a thousand years ago. What’s different is the way that book is read and understood. A thousand years ago, one could have said Christianity was a violent, militant religion; today one wouldn’t.

A: Yes, there was a change in Christianity. It was possible because Christians don’t believe that the Bible is literally the word of God - not like the Koran. If you really believe [the Koran] is the word of God, it will never have room to change.

Q: But why couldn’t there be a movement within Islam that would say, “Yes, the Koran says X, Y, and Z, and it has been interpreted violently by violent people, but we give it a different interpretation”?

A: Then they are not Muslims anymore.

Q: How do you decide whether they are Muslims anymore?

A: I am not deciding. It’s the Koran that’s saying it.

Q: What Christians did at the time of the Inquisition was what Christianity was then; Christianity today has become something different.

A: Your premises are totally wrong. Islam is not a religion. Islam is an ideology. You keep comparing it to Christianity, Judaism. It’s not. It’s an ideology that wants to dominate every aspect of society. I know billions of people believe it’s a religion. I don’t.

Q: Is there any difference in your view between Islam and Islamism?

A: Islam and Islamism, it’s exactly the same.

Q: With an outlook like this, don’t you effectively exclude any Muslim from being an ally?

A: I am not excluding anybody. I don’t even want Muslims from the Netherlands to leave my country. I’m not a [Jean-Marie] Le Pen. I want to help people be educated, be part of our society, get a job, respect our values. But it can never be possible on the basis of their violent ideology called Islam.

Q: Doesn’t that contradict your defense of free speech?

A: Holland is not an Islamic country. I wouldn’t want to have a system like in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Their ideology [says] to beat women, to kill Jews, to kill homosexuals. You can say, “Well, isn’t that freedom of speech?” I want us to have more freedom of speech. But there is one red line - incitement of violence.

Q: You’ve said that under Dutch law, the Koran should be banned. Were you being rhetorical, or did you mean it literally?

A: I meant it. But you have to know the Dutch context for that. In the ’70s, “Mein Kampf” was banned, and the left was so pleased. I am now proposing a ban on a book that is even worse than “Mein Kampf.” And I’m not the first one - Winston Churchill compared “Mein Kampf” to the Koran in the 1950s.

Q: An American defender of free speech would say “Mein Kampf” shouldn’t be banned, the Koran shouldn’t be banned; books shouldn’t be banned. To publish ideas in a book, even if they’re hateful ideas - the First Amendment says you have that freedom. Is that what you would like in Holland as well?

A: I would, with the exception of incitement of violence.

Q: Do you think that multiculturalism and freedom of speech are ultimately incompatible?

A: No, Islam and freedom of speech are incompatible. Cultural relativism makes it difficult to fight, because cultural relativism says that Islam is the same as Christianity. Europe is being Islamized very, very quickly. In our prisons, we have a mark in every cell indicating the direction of Mecca. In Holland! I can give you 500 examples. People are getting beaten up on the streets of Amsterdam and Brussels for drinking water during Ramadan. We should have a sense of urgency.

Q: What do you say to Muslims like Zuhdi Jasser? He is an American, a former Navy officer, a doctor. After 9/11, he was so horrified by what was done in the name of Islam that he founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy: pro-American, pro-democracy, anti-violence, anti-Islamist. How do you answer Muslims like him, who say: “I love my religion. I also love freedom, democracy, Western values. I believe in separation of mosque and state. But how can I be an ally with someone who says my religion itself is evil?”

A: Well, I would tell him I wish there were more people like you. It didn’t happen. I would not agree with [Dr. Jasser] about Islam, but I wish there were more like him.

Islam and freedom of speech - The Boston Globe