Muslim Heretics Conference

Indonesia’s Voters Retreat From Radical Islam

Achmad Ibrahim/Associated Press

Supporters of the Prosperous Justice Party, Indonesia’s largest Islamic party, at a rally in Jakarta on March 30. The party fell far short of its goal of 15 percent of the vote in this month’s election.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

Published: April 24, 2009

JAKARTA, Indonesia — From Pakistan to Gaza and Lebanon, militant Islamic movements have gained ground rapidly in recent years, fanning Western fears of a consolidation of radical Muslim governments. But here in the world’s most populous Muslim nation just the opposite is happening, with Islamic parties suffering a steep drop in popular support.

In parliamentary elections this month, voters punished Islamic parties that focused narrowly on religious issues, and even the parties’ best efforts to appeal to the country’s mainstream failed to sway the public.

The largest Islamic party, the Prosperous Justice Party, ran television commercials of young women without head scarves and distributed pamphlets in the colors of the country’s major secular parties. But the party fell far short of its goal of garnering 15 percent of the vote, squeezing out a gain of less than one percentage point over its 7.2 percent showing in 2004.

That was a big letdown for a party and a movement that had grown phenomenally in recent years, even as more radical elements directed terrorist attacks against Western tourists and targets. The party had projected that it would double its share of seats in Parliament even as it stuck to its founding goal of bringing Shariah, or Islamic law, to Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, with 240 million people.

Altogether, the major Islamic parties suffered a drop in support from 38 percent in 2004 to less than 26 percent this year, according to the Indonesian Survey Institute, an independent polling firm whose figures are in keeping with partial official results.

Political experts and politicians attribute the decline to voters’ disillusionment with Islamic parties that once called for idealism, but became embroiled in the messy, often corrupt world of Indonesian politics. They also say that the popular president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is expected to be re-elected in July, appropriated the largest Islamic party’s signature theme of clean government through a far-reaching anticorruption drive.

On a deeper level, some of the parties’ fundamentalist measures seem to have alienated moderate Indonesians. While Indonesia has a long tradition of moderation, it was badly destabilized with the end of military rule in 1998, which gave rise to Islamist politicians who preached righteousness and to some hard-core elements, who practiced violence. The country has only recently achieved a measure of stability.

Although final results from the election on April 9 will not be announced until next month, partial official results and exit polls by several independent companies indicate that Indonesians overwhelmingly backed the country’s major secular parties, even though more of them are continuing to turn to Islam in their private lives.

“People in general do not feel that there should be an integration of faith and politics,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “Even though more and more Muslims, in particular women, have become more Islamic and have a growing attachment to Islam, that does not translate into voting behavior.”

The Islamic parties’ 2004 surge occurred around the time that Indonesian terrorists were attacking hotels and nightclubs popular among Westerners, as well as the Australian Embassy here. A growing number of communities were adopting Shariah as some of the smaller, more hard-line Islamic parties also pushed to insert Islamic law in the Constitution.

The hard-line stance, though, was at odds with the attitudes of Indonesians; most of them practice a moderate version of Islam and were attracted to the Islamic parties for nonreligious reasons.

In 2004, just two years after its founding, the Prosperous Justice Party came out of nowhere, then joined the coalition government of President Yudhoyono and won several governors’ races. Although one of its founding principles is to bring Islamic law to Indonesia, the party attracted middle-class urban voters by emphasizing clean government, anticorruption policies and humanitarian activities.

Once the Islamic parties were in office, their pristine image was tarnished after several of their lawmakers were prosecuted in corruption cases. One member of the Prosperous Justice Party is under investigation in a bribery case.

The parties angered many Indonesians by pressing hard on several symbolic religious issues, like a vague “antipornography” law that could be used to ban everything from displays of partial nudity to yoga. The governor of West Java, a member of the Prosperous Justice Party, tried to ban a dance called jaipong, deeming it too erotic, but many people view it as part of their cultural heritage.

“There are now problems in hotels because they can’t serve alcohol,” said Jusuf Wanandi, a political analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research group based here. “That’s why people started to recognize what they are up to and why the middle class that supported them now have second thoughts.”

Ahmad Zainuddin, a lawmaker with the Prosperous Justice Party and one of its founders, acknowledged that support for his party had fallen considerably in the election. Mr. Zainuddin, 42, who had predicted that the party would double its share of the votes, now says that it would be hard pressed to expand its appeal.

“If we emphasize Shariah or religious matters, our supporters will decline, so we should emphasize mostly clean government and anticorruption,” he said in an interview at the party’s headquarters, whose facade mostly bears images of the party’s humanitarian activities and has no references to its religious goals.

But Mr. Zainuddin — who graduated from Lipia, a Saudi-financed university here that promotes Wahhabism, a rigid interpretation of Islam — also believes in the party’s founding goal of carrying out Shariah in Indonesia.

The party is now split between those committed to pursuing the party’s Islamist goals and those who want to stress good government.

Zulkieflimansyah, 36, a lawmaker with the Prosperous Justice Party, said many younger party members were trying to steer the party away from its Islamist origins and away from older members who were inspired by radical Islamic organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan.

Mr. Zulkieflimansyah, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name, added: “If we are too critical, they will kick us harder than we thought. Or, borrowing an expression from our friends in the United States, don’t force a pig to sing. It will not work, and it annoys the pig as well.”

Despite the Islamic parties’ decline, they remain influential, analysts say. The country’s major secular parties, including President Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party, have courted them and their supporters. And the Prosperous Justice Party, despite its minor gain of less than one percentage point, is pressing to increase the number of ministers it has in the coalition government to four from three.

“It’s still not clear where they stand on many issues like freedom of expression, morality, the place of women,” said Ahmad Suaedy, director of the Wahid Institute, a research organization based here. “The agenda of many people inside the party is still to Islamize Indonesia, and that’s a constraint on democracy.”

In Indonesia, Islamists Lost Political Ground - NYTimes.com

Liberal imam wins libel claim against Muslim newspaper

(John D McHugh/AFP/Getty)

The institute that the imam founded preaches that women should not wear the niqab, or face-covering, and that men should not wear beards

Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

A progressive Muslim imam from Oxford has won a libel action against a Muslim newspaper in what he claims is a “watershed moment” in the battle between liberal and extremist Muslims in Britain.

Dr Taj Hargey, who provoked controversy last year when he invited the first ever woman to lead and preach at Friday prayers in Britain, has been awarded a “substantial” five-figure sum in libel damages against the Muslim Weekly, which takes a conservative line on community issues.

In its latest edition, the newspaper urges the Government not to play a “divide and rule” policy over the Muslim Council of Britain. The Government has threatened to cut ties with the council after it refused to sack its deputy leader, Daud Abdullah, who signed a pro-Hamas declaration at a conference on Gaza in Istanbul.

Dr Hargey, who is originally from South Africa, describes himself as a “thorn in the side of the Muslim hierarchy” as a result of his liberal theology and his “integrationist, non-sexist views.”

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The Oxford institute he founded, the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford (Meco), preaches that women should not wear the niqab or face-covering and that men should not wear beards. He sanctions marriages of Muslim women to men of other faiths and promotes mixed congregations in mosques, where men and women are usually strictly segregated and women are sometimes not allowed at all.

He sued the Muslim Weekly when it claimed Muslim clerics had pulled out of a conference he organised in May 2006 because he was not a Muslim but a member of the Qadiani or Ahmadiyya sect, considered heretical by mainstream Muslims because of disagreements about the “finality” of the Prophet Mohammed. The paper also claimed he had been dismissed from a previous post at Cape Town university because of his theological affilations.

Dr Hargey argued successfully that he is not a heretic but a mainstream Sunni Muslim, and that he was not sacked from his university post but left South Africa during the apartheid era to pursue a successful academic career abroad.

He said today: “The historic case highlights the right to freedom and dissent within the British Muslim community. Iconoclastic thinkers, liberals and non-conformists who dare to challenge religious authority in Islam by striving to present a rational interpretation of their faith are invariably branded as apostates and heretics.”

He said he had “struck a blow for freedom of speech” within the British Muslim community. The Muslim Weekly, which today publishes an apology on its front page, declined to comment.

Liberal imam wins libel claim against Muslim newspaper -Times Online

By REUEL MARC GERECHT

‘The United States is not at war with Islam and will never be. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.”

Getty Images

So spoke President Barack Hussein Obama in Turkey last week. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamic radicalism,” or “Islamic extremism” aren’t in his speeches. “Jihad,” too, has been banished from the official lexicon.

But if one visits the religious bookstores near Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar, or mosque libraries of Turkish immigrants in Rotterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt, one can still find a cornucopia of radical Islamist literature. Go into the bookstores of Arab and Pakistani immigrant communities in Europe, or into the literary markets of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, and you’ll find an even richer collection of militant Islamism.

Al Qaeda is certainly not a mainstream Muslim group — if it were, we would have had far more terrorist attacks since 9/11. But the ideology that produced al Qaeda isn’t a rivulet in contemporary Muslim thought. It is a wide and deep river. The Obama administration does both Muslims and non-Muslims an enormous disservice by pretending otherwise.

Theologically, Muslims are neither fragile nor frivolous. They have not become suicide bombers because non-Muslims have said something unkind; they have not refrained from becoming holy warriors because Westerners avoided the word “Islamic” in describing Osama bin Laden and his allies. Having an American president who had a Muslim father, carries the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, and wants to engage the Muslim world in a spirit of “mutual respect” isn’t a “game changer.” This hypothesis trivializes Islamic history and the continuing appeal of religious militancy.

Above all else, we need to understand clearly our enemies — to try to understand them as they see themselves, and to see them as devout nonviolent Muslims do. To not talk about Islam when analyzing al Qaeda is like talking about the Crusades without mentioning Christianity. To devise a hearts-and-minds counterterrorist policy for the Islamic world without openly talking about faith is counterproductive. We — the West — are the unrivalled agent of change in the Middle East. Modern Islamic history — including the Bush years — ought to tell us that questions non-Muslims pose can provoke healthy discussions.

The abolition of slavery, rights for religious minorities and women, free speech, or the very idea of civil society — all of these did not advance without Western pressure and the enormous seductive power that Western values have for Muslims. Although Muslims in the Middle East have been talking about political reform since they were first exposed to Western ideas (and modern military might) in the 18th century, the discussion of individual liberty and equality has been more effective when Westerners have been intimately involved. The Middle East’s brief but impressive “Liberal Age” grew from European imperialism and the unsustainable contradiction between the progressive ideals taught by the British and French — the Egyptian press has never been as free as when the British ruled over the Nile valley — and the inevitably illiberal and demeaning practices that come with foreign occupation.

Although it is now politically incorrect to say so, George W. Bush’s democratic rhetoric energized the discussion of representative government and human rights abroad. Democracy advocates and the anti-authoritarian voices in Arab lands have never been so hopeful as they were between 2002, when democracy promotion began to germinate within the White House, and 2006, when the administration gave up on people power in the Middle East (except in Iraq).

The issue of jihadism is little different. It’s not a coincidence that the Muslim debate about holy war became most vivid after 9/11, when the U.S. struck back against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Many may have found Mr. Bush’s brief use of the term “Islamofascism” to be offensive — although it recalls well Abul Ala Maududi, a Pakistani founding father of modern Islamic radicalism, who openly admired European fascism as a violent, muscular ideology capable of mobilizing the masses. Yet Mr. Bush’s flirtation with the term unquestionably pushed Muslim intellectuals to debate the legitimacy of its use and the cult of martyrdom that had — and may still have — a widespread grip on many among the faithful.

When Sunni Arab Muslims viewed daily on satellite TV the horrors of the Sunni onslaught against the Iraqi Shiites, and then the vicious Shiite revenge against their former masters, the debate about jihadism, the historic Sunni-Shiite rivalry, and the American occupation intensified. Unfortunately, progress in the Middle East has usually happened when things have gotten ugly, and Muslims debate the mess.

Iran’s former president Mohammed Khatami, whom Bill Clinton unsuccessfully tried to engage, is a serious believer in the “dialogue of civilizations.” In his books, Mr. Khatami does something very rare for an Iranian cleric: He admits that Western civilization can be morally superior to its Islamic counterpart, and that Muslims must borrow culturally as well as technologically from others. On the whole, however, he finds the West — especially America — to be an amoral slippery slope of sin. How should one talk to Mr. Khatami or to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the less curious but morally more earnest clerical overlord of Iran; or the Saudi royal family and their influential state-supported clergy, who still preach hatred of the West; or to the faithful of Pakistan, who are in the midst of an increasingly brutal, internecine religious struggle? Messrs. Khatami and Khamenei are flawlessly polite gentlemen. They do not, however, confuse civility with agreement. Neither should we.

It’s obviously not for non-Muslims to decide what Islam means. Only the faithful can decide whether Islam is a religion of peace or war (historically it has been both). Only the faithful can banish jihad as a beloved weapon against infidels and unbelief. Only Muslims can decide how they balance legislation by men and what the community — or at least its legal guardians, the ulama — has historically seen as divine commandments.

Westerners can, however, ask probing questions and apply pressure when differing views threaten us. We may not choose to dispatch the U.S. Navy to protect women’s rights, as the British once sent men-of-war to put down the Muslim slave trade, but we can underscore clearly our disdain for men who see “child brides” as something vouchsafed by the Almighty. There is probably no issue that angers militants more than women’s rights. Advancing this cause in traditional Muslim societies caught in the merciless whirlwind of globalization isn’t easy, but no effort is likely to bear more fruit in the long term than having American officials become public champions of women’s rights in Muslim lands.

Al Qaeda’s Islamic radicalism isn’t a blip — a one-time outgrowth of the Soviet-Afghan war — or a byproduct of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. It’s the most recent violent expression of the modernization of the Muslim Middle East. The West’s great transformative century — the 20th — was soaked in blood. We should hope, pray, and do what we can to ensure that Islam’s continuing embrace of modernity in the 21st century — undoubtedly its pivotal era — will not be similarly horrific.

We are fooling ourselves if we think we no longer have to be concerned about how Muslims talk among themselves. This is not an issue that we want to push the “reset” button on. Here, at least, George W. Bush didn’t go nearly far enough.

Mr. Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Speaking Truth to Muslim Power - WSJ.com

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 DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise

Maura O’Neill taught classes on religion at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, was adviser to the Muslim student group there, and had served as Catholic campus minister at Cal State San Bernardino.

Yet despite her broad exposure to different religions, even O’Neill harbored stereotypes, especially toward religious conservatives.

“I thought that (religious) conservatives were narrow-minded and insecure,” O’Neill, a self-described progressive Catholic, said after a lecture she gave Tuesday night.

Story continues below

O’Neill no longer makes such assumptions.

Since then, O’Neill has talked to Orthodox Jewish women who define themselves as feminist, and to veil-wearing Muslim women who believe that feminist American women, not Muslim women, are oppressed.

Those conversations helped form her 2007 book, “Mending a Torn World: Women in Interreligious Dialogue,” which also was the title of the 22nd annual Morrow-McCombs Memorial Lecture that O’Neill delivered Tuesday night at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints near Cal State San Bernardino.

The setting for the address was fitting: A religious progressive speaking inside the chapel of a conservative denomination.

C.E. Tapie Rohm Jr., a former bishop at the Mormon congregation, said after the lecture that the only way to avoid religious polarization is by taking O’Neill’s approach.

“Her whole concept is dialogue: You can’t get to know individuals without talking to them,” Rohm said. “You have to understand the other’s viewpoint . . . and learn about other cultures and traditions.”

Rohm is a member of the interfaith advisory board that put together the lecture, which promotes understanding among Jews, Christians and Muslims.

O’Neill said religious progressives are most likely to come together for interreligious dialogue, but when they do, it’s typically to meet with fellow progressives from other faiths, not with conservatives.

“Lots of times progressives would say to me, ‘You’re going to get a conservative to dialogue?’” O’Neill said. “That’s a stereotype. And how many times have people said to me, ‘You just pick and choose what you want to obey.’ And that’s a stereotype.”

O’Neill said she became a feminist while living in a convent.

She was a nun for 15 years and was impressed by fellow sisters’ intelligence, educational levels and their lack of dependence on males.

Ina Katz, of San Bernardino, a member of Temple Emanu El, a Reform Jewish synagogue, said the lecture helped challenge her view that nuns and Muslim women who wear veils are by definition ritualistic and conservative.

“You shouldn’t just make a snap judgment about it,” Katz said.

Lecturer challenges religious stereotypes | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California

How is it that one religion – Islam – seems capable of undermining women and promoting them at the same time?
Anyone attempting to take stock of the position of women in the Muslim world cannot help but be confused. One finds stories in the media all the time about injustices committed against Muslim women, such as “honour” killings, child marriages and discriminatory legal judgments in matters of divorce, custody and inheritance.
On the other hand, one also comes across stories about the remarkable strides made by Muslim women in education, career development and political activism in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Morocco and Turkey.
How can we make sense of such a dichotomous picture?
The answer is simple: by distinguishing the religion of Islam from the Muslims who practice it.
Those who study the Qur’an know that Islam elevated the rights of women beyond anything known in the pre-Islamic world. In fact, in the seventh century Muslim women were granted rights not granted to European women until the 19th century, such as property ownership, inheritance and divorce.
That said, Muslims who codified the Qur’an and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) into Islamic law did not succeed in expunging the patriarchy of the pre-Islamic world from their practices.
This distinction between the faith and the various manifestations of its practice is a subtle but extremely important one.
When a Westerner is trained to pick up on the distinction, he/she comes to recognise that the Muslim woman who criticises Muslim practices is not usually rebuking her heritage in favour of Western ideals – the kind of rebuke that hits best-seller lists in the West and that feeds Western stereotypes about the religion – but is instead encouraging other Muslims claiming allegiance to Qur’anic teachings to live up to its highest principles.
This inward criticism and call to action is often called Islamic feminism, a promising paradigm which supports change from within, and not in imported formulas.
While adopting the Qur’an at its core, Islamic feminism challenges two main norms: the patriarchal cultural customs mistaken for Islamic teaching and patriarchal interpretations of certain Qur’anic verses.
The project of disentangling what is true Islamic teaching from cultural traditions historically practiced in a Muslim territory is an ongoing project for Muslim feminists.
Arifa Mazhar, the manager of gender issues for the Pakistan-based Sungi Development Foundation, whose goal is to effect policy and institutional changes relating to development by mobilising marginalised local communities, declared at the International Congress on Islamic Feminism in Barcelona in 2008: “Instead of debating Islam, we should be debating culture and its impact…. There are a lot of social taboos and tribal traditions that oppress women, and they have little to do with Islam.”
Islamic feminism’s second challenge is to attempt to reinterpret verses in the Qur’an – especially given the present context – that have been misinterpreted or over-generalised.
One example is the disproportionate weight given to the few Qur’anic verses giving men authority over women within family structures versus the many others that emphasise equality between men and women. Islamic feminism encourages women to study the words of the Qur’an for themselves, and to judge whether the misogyny and failure to take women seriously prevalent in some customs is a matter of Islamic doctrine or, indeed, of cultural impositions on such doctrine. Islamic feminism thus provides the grounds for changing civil and national law in ways that prove progressive for women.
Sisters in Islam, a leading Muslim women’s rights group in Malaysia, has been trying to reform the issue of polygamy. Rather than calling for the abolition of polygamy, for example, it calls only for its restriction to certain situations – such as obtaining permission from the first wife and from the court – and is working on public surveys that would provide empirical evidence of the negative effects of polygamy on society.
Rooted in Islam and the Qur’anic spirit of equity, Islamic feminism provides a credible political voice for women. It gives women’s organisations, women’s rights advocates, and gender scholars in the Muslim world legitimate grounds for action – and change – as fulfilment of society’s religious obligations.
###
* Amal Mohammed Al-Malki is an assistant teaching professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and a member of the Qatar National Competitiveness Council, which promotes reform and transparency in the national economy. This article first appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGnews) as part of a series on Muslim women and their religious rights.

Pakistan Christian Post

Italian Magazine Tries to Narrow Gap With Muslims

Andrea Frazzetta for Yalla Italia

An editorial meeting of Yalla Italia, which runs articles on how Muslims relate to non-Muslims.

• By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Published: April 4, 2009

MILAN — On one side of a drab street in working-class Milan, a squat structure houses a conservative mosque that was once believed to be a hub of radical Islam in Italy. Even now, after a government crackdown drove off extremists, the mosque’s deeply conservative members remain mostly aloof from Italian society.

Across the street, the newsroom of Yalla Italia (Let’s Go, Italy) churns out a magazine written by “2Gs” — or second-generation immigrants — that tries to introduce Italians to the cultures of its new residents and to help young Muslim immigrants navigate their dual identities.

The message behind articles and blog posts like “To wear or not to wear a burkini?” and “How to match kaftans with jeans” is clear: it is possible to assimilate without losing a Muslim identity.

“We’re separated by 10 meters, but culturally we’re centuries apart,” said Martino Pillitteri, Yalla Italia’s chief editor. He said he saw the differences between his mission and that of Muslim conservatives as symbolic of the divide in Italy’s Muslim population — “one vision driving toward the past, the other driving toward the future,” he said.

Mr. Pillitteri said he decided to start the magazine because he believed that the Italian media presented a very one-dimensional view of Muslims: one that was often negative and too frequently focused on radicals and suspected terrorists.

The magazine’s articles are rarely political, although it has taken on some causes, including championing changes in laws to make the children of immigrants citizens automatically if they are born in Italy, rather than requiring them to apply for citizenship after 18 years of residence.

Most of the articles focus on how Italy’s Muslims live and interact with non-Muslim Italians, covering such topics as mixed marriages and the conflict between the older, less assimilated generation of immigrants and their often more open children.

Mr. Pillitteri likes to say that Yalla Italia’s staff is the medium as well as the message. Most of the reporters are women, some of them traditional enough to wear head scarves, and nearly all work during the few hours a week they snatch from their university studies or day jobs. Some came to Italy as children, others were born here of mixed marriages, still others came to study and married.

Lubna Ammoune, 20, who blogs for Yalla Italia and for the online edition of the Turin daily La Stampa, said she thought that second-generation immigrants could be vital to integration.

“I like to think of us as a bridge,” said Ms. Ammoune, who is Milanese by birth but of Syrian origin.

Yalla Italia’s attempts to narrow the cultural divide come as Italians have grown more resentful of immigrants and as the government has taken an increasingly tough stand on immigration.

Under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government has tightened immigration laws and increased security in cities as Italians’ fear of violent crimes by immigrants has risen.

The tough tone of the government and its allies was apparent in January when Italians reacted to protests by hundreds of Muslims in several Italian cities against the war in Gaza by praying in central squares (and therefore in front of cathedrals).

Giuseppe Pisanu, a former interior minister with Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, said the protests were “a fundamentalist operation, the preliminaries of terrorism,” the ANSA news agency reported.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni of the anti-immigrant Northern League Party, warned that Italy risked “a situation like the Parisian banlieues,” the heavily immigrant, disaffected suburbs where rioting erupted in 2005.

Italy’s immigrants are relative newcomers, compared with those elsewhere in Europe, and the country is still struggling with how to deal with its growing foreign population. After the Italian Senate passed a bill toughening immigration policies in February, Famiglia Cristiana, an influential Roman Catholic magazine, accused Italy of plunging “into the abyss of racial laws,” a series of anti-Semitic measures that were passed by the Fascist government in 1938. The lower house still has to approve the bill, which would be one of the strictest in Europe.

“Italy hasn’t chosen a specific model yet for how it wants to deal with Islam,” said Farian Sabahi, a professor of history of Islamic countries at the University of Turin. “It hasn’t been a priority of the government, and that is embarrassing, because it goes against what other European countries are trying to do.”

Yalla Italia, first published in May 2007, appears as a monthly insert of Vita, a magazine geared to the nonprofit sector that has a circulation of 36,000. Vita’s Web site averages 250,000 visitors a month, magazine statistics showed.

For the most part, the articles in Yalla Italia do not try to preach change. Instead, they aim to encourage mutual understanding. One article, for instance, acknowledged how awkward it can be for young immigrants to watch Italian television, which features many scantily clad women, with their parents.

And in an issue on mixed marriages last year, couples shared their efforts at balancing cultures. “We live our cultural and religious differences like an enrichment for each other,” wrote Ali Hassoun, a citizen of Lebanese descent who is married to an Italian. He said their daughter “recites the Sura in the Koran, but asks Jesus for a baby sister.”

Yalla Italia hopes “to show Italians a constructive reality they don’t expect,” said Ouejdane Mejri, 32, a magazine contributor who came from Tunisia to study in Italy and now teaches information technology at Milan Polytechnic. “Immigrants are not just people who wash ashore on a beach. We pay taxes, participate in society, strive to integrate.

“We are the future of Italy,” she said, “and we want to be protagonists of that future.”

Italian Magazine Tries to Narrow Gap With Muslims - NYTimes.com