Muslim Heretics Conference

Protocols of the Elders of Islam?

Tuesday, May. 19 2009 @ 1:58PM

By Nick Schou in The Hilarious Haters

As its name suggests, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in LA is supposed to promote the kind of cultural dialog that brings people together rather than pushes them apart. So it’s more than a little bit odd that the center showed a movie last weekend that has been compared to the gold-standard of anti-Semitic propaganda: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The latter tome was supposedly written by the Jews who secretly want to take over the world. Actually it’s pure fiction, but the book nonetheless helped pave the way for Russian pogroms in the 19th Century and the Nazi-era holocaust. The film in question, “The Third Jihad,” was screened at the Museum of Tolerance last Sunday. Like the book before it, the film claims to provide evidence of a global plot of subversion, in this case a plot to subvert America by blood-thirsty terrorists posing as regular-guy American Muslims.
“The Third Jihad” begins with a disclaimer saying that most Muslims are okay folks, and that this movie only talks about the ones that want to kill all Americans. It was produced by a shadowy outfit called the Clarion fund, which according to an Institute for Policy Studies report has ties to right-wing supporters of Israel who oppose all talks with the Palestinians. 28 million copies were distributed to voters in 14 swing states just before last November’s presidential election, perhaps to inflame fears that Barack HUSSEIN Obama might be part of this purported Muslim takeover plot.
The supposed evidence for this plot against America is a secret “American Muslim Brotherhood Jihad Manifesto” that the film’s producers claim was discovered and later released by the FBI in connection with its probe of the Holy Land foundation last year. Efforts by the Weekly to verify the existence, much less the text of that memo were inconclusive. Google “American Muslim Brotherhood” and “Jihad Manifesto” and all you get are links to stories about the “Third Jihad” movie.
On May 15, Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations‘ Greater Los Angeles Area chapter, sent a letter asking the Simon Wiesenthal Center to call of its showing of the film. “As an institution that claims as its goal battling hatred and bigotry across the world, I am disappointed to see the Wiesenthal Center engage in promoting hatred and bigotry against another minority–American Muslims,” Ayloush wrote.
The center wrote back saying that it wasn’t going to cancel the film because it wants to promote discussion. For his part, Ayloush says there’s a big difference between debating what American Muslims think about U.S. society and promoting the concept — familiar to Jew-baiters throughout modern history — that American Muslims want to take over the world.
“Claiming that American Muslims are part of some world-wide conspiracy to take over America is nothing short of concerted hateful fear mongering that intends to build animosity and even eventual violence against Muslims,” he argues. “The Holocaust in Europe and the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda did not happen in a vacuum. They were preceded with such baseless hateful material that dehumanized the intended targeted community and were promoted by many enablers who falsely hid behind the claim of “generating discussion and sharing views.” 

Orange County - Protocols of the Elders of Islam? - Navel Gazing - OC Weekly

In October 2005, with the war in Iraq headed off the rails and his own visions of a democratizing Middle East crumbling, George W. Bush tried to rally the nation with a call against a new global enemy: “Islamofascism.” In a series of speeches, he described America’s disparate enemies as a united force, bound together by a common vision. Unless America rose to the challenge, he argued, jihadists would realize their ambition to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.”

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Lin Zhang Jones/University of Michigan Photo Services

Juan Cole

ENGAGING THE MUSLIM WORLD

By Juan Cole

Illustrated. 282 pp. Palgrave Macmillan. $26.95

Related

Juan Cole’s Blog

Bush’s effort to equate America’s amalgam of new enemies to the Axis powers of World War II quickly fizzled. Even some in the White House admitted privately to embarrassment, and the word “Islamofascism” was stricken from presidential speeches. Evil? Yes. But not an organized force — and Bush’s speeches quickly came to be regarded as a huge mistake because they inflated the power of America’s enemies rather than dividing them by playing off their longstanding rivalries. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that the Iraqis and the Iranians were fighting a bitter war. And Bush was lumping Osama bin Laden’s Sunni extremists with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vision of a nuclear-capable Persia.

Juan Cole’s “Engaging the Muslim World” maps those fault lines, and one can only wish Bush had mulled over such material (in fact, much of it was contained in his briefing papers) before the misadventures of the post-9/11 era began. Like Lawrence Wright’s remarkable “Looming Tower,” published almost three years ago, this field guide to the politics of modern Islam traces the history of the different movements, whose violent offshoots are still morphing into new forms. Along the way, Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, explores what he sees as the twin dynamic of “Islam Anxiety” in the United States and “American Anxiety” in the Arab world.

Readers of Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, will find many of the arguments familiar, though they are well assembled here, with essays on the myths surrounding Saudi Wahhabism, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the unintended side effects of American meddling in Iran. Cole starts his book in the right place: America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil, which has skewed policy and often led us to support dictators we would ordinarily put on the list of human-rights violators. (The Saudis would probably qualify.) And he declares a truth that should be sobering to President Obama: “The fact is that we are likely to become more dependent on Islamic oil in the coming decades, not less,” he writes, noting that 11 of the top 15 exporters of oil are countries with Muslim majorities.

Oil, he points out, got us into Iraq in the first place. Faced with a coup in Baghdad in 1958 that overthrew a friendly government, President Dwight Eisenhower declared, “We have to act or get out of the Middle East.”

Cole is at his most effective in making the case that Western politicians who talk of Islamofascists not only insult an entire religion, they also misidentify the enemy. The terror groups we face are trying to hijack a religion. Cole argues that it makes no more sense to describe them in religious terms than to have called the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin a “Judaic terrorist” or Francisco Franco a “Christofascist.”

The Arab societies that fascinate us the most are the ones — like Egypt — where “Desperate Housewives” is a hit, enjoyed by the same television viewers who denounce the encroachment of Western values into their culture. Like all of us, they want to have it both ways, indulging guilty pleasures and still hoping to prevent “libertinism — casual sex, drugs and violence — from invading their neighborhoods.”

One of those upscale neighborhoods is Giza, the home of the father of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11. A Cairo attorney, the elder Mohamed Atta had initially denied that his son was involved. Four years later, he went on CNN to express approval that the young man had started a 50-year-long religious war, setting up cells that were like a “nuclear bomb that has now been activated and is ticking.”

But in seeking to explain such sentiments to Americans, Cole sometimes reaches for the wrong analogy. He compares the 9/11 hijackers to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who read white supremacist works before bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. To Cole, the two men “bear a number of striking similarities to members of such radical Egyptian groups as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping of the Blind Sheikh.” They all railed against “Jewish control of the U.S. government” and attacked tall buildings that were symbols of power. They all belonged to “fringe, if significant, movements.”

Did they? George W. Bush may have overinflated the power of Islamofascism, but certainly the radical Muslim movement, in all its incarnations, has a membership that is bigger and better financed than the American fringe groups, and with a presence in more countries than those home-grown extremists who threaten domestic terrorism.

There is a reason that we have tens of thousands of American troops on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan: to stop radical groups from taking over either state, which would create a sanctuary for planning attacks around the world, and — in the case of Pakistan — to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons. Those are problems of a vastly different scale than apprehending the next Timothy McVeigh. And they explain why a new president who came into office as the anti-Bush, ready to use diplomacy first, is extending American military action in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For Obama, the real test of his plans to engage the Muslim world comes in the place where there has been no real engagement for three decades: Iran. He has begun the process with a very public gesture, a message to the Iranian people in mid-March reassuring them that he has no intention of seeking regime change and respects their need for a restored place in the world of nations. It was the right gesture: as Cole notes, “Iran’s thirst for independence, political and technological, goes far beyond that of the other Gulf oil states.”

Obama’s message left open the question of how to slake that thirst and still fulfill his campaign commitment that he would never let Iran obtain a nuclear weapon — or even a nuclear-weapons capability. (It is already perilously close to that capability.) No one — not Obama, not the international inspectors — takes much solace in the declaration of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, that American allegations about Iran’s program are “a sheer lie,” or in his assurances that “we consider using nuclear weapons” to be “against Islamic rules.”

As Cole points out, the international community is going to need access to the thousands of Iranian scientists at work in the nuclear project. But he overstates the freedom inspectors have had to visit Iran’s facilities, leaving the impression that they have seen everything they have asked to see. The inspectors tell a very different story.

In the end, Cole backs very pragmatic approaches — confidence-building with Iran, and the kind of wooing of enemies that allowed Gen. David Petraeus to begin to tame Iraq. But mostly, he urges us to tear away our blinders. “The bigoted way in which some politicians have dealt with Islam,” he concludes, is bound to fail.

David E. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent of The Times, is the author of “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power.”

Book Review - ‘Engaging the Muslim World,’ by Juan Cole - Review - NYTimes.com

Does Islam Need A Reformation?

Some are trying to understand Islam from the perspective of the history of Christianity. To answer Thom Hartmann’s question: No, Islam does not need a Reformation. But some Muslims do, notes Hesham A. Hassaballa.

One day recently, I heard progressive radio host Thom Hartmann speak about whether Islam needs a “reformation” similar to that in Judaism or Christianity. It happened in the wake of the pirate attacks on American ships in the Indian Ocean, and the implication that al-Qaeda was behind the pirates (a dubious claim). In fact, Hartmann had been posited this question to a number of Muslim callers on his show during those days: “Is it time for a reformation in Islam?”

It does seem to me that given the often terrible news about Islam, it is understandable why this question would be raised in the first place. When people see constant references to vicious barbarity: beheadings, suicide bombings, public flogging, “honor killing” — all done explicitly in the name of Islam — it is only natural to wonder whether Islam itself is the problem. Yet, as tempting as it is to apply the Christian experience as analogy, it is a flawed premise.

The Protestant Reformation was a movement during the 16th and 17th centuries to reform the Catholic Church. It sought to change various beliefs and practices that were fundamental to the Church at the time, such as purgatory, particular judgment (the judgment of a soul immediately after death), devotion to Mary, devotion to the saints, most of the sacraments, mandatory celibacy, and the authority of the Pope. Of course, in Great Britain, the divorce of the Church of England from Rome was performed by Henry VIII, after he was denied an annulment from his wife by Pope Clement VII. Even in this case, it was a new church started in reaction to ‘wrong’ beliefs in the Roman Catholic Church.

That is the problem in trying to understand Islam from the perspective of the history of Christianity. There is no such corollary in Islam: The barbarity that is done in the name of Islam is a deviation from fundamental beliefs, principles, and traditions of Islam. Extremism in the name of Islam is nothing new to the faith: It began soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad with the Kharijites, who ended up killing the fourth Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib. After the Kharijites came the Hashasheen, or “Assassins,” who were Islam’s first “suicide terrorists.” They terrorized the Muslim populace for decades. And in contemporary times, we have the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Yet, throughout Islam’s history, these extremists have always been a tiny fringe minority who follow clearly heretical belief systems and are always rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims. The Islamic mainstream has always endured and won out against the extremists. Today, there are some people who want the world to think that the Muslim extremists are somehow the “mainstream.” Yet, only a criminal mind could cite the Qur’an to justify the murder of innocent people having lunch at Sbarro’s, or worshipping at a mosque on Friday, or buying fruit at the market. Just because a terrorist says “the Qur’an says so” does not make it the truth any more than it does if a terrorist used verses from the Bible.

Let us take suicide terrorism as an example. Everything about it violates Islam and its principles. The Qur’an says: “And do not take a life that God has made sacred, except for just cause” (17:33). In no way, shape, or form could the taking of innocent life be considered “just cause.” Moreover, as in Jewish and Christian scriptures and traditions, suicide is a grave sin:

“And spend for the sake of God, and do not invest in ruin by your own hands. And do good, for God loves those who do good” (2:195).

“And do not kill yourselves, for God has been merciful to you” (4:29).

Thus, the crime of suicide is clearly a deviation from Islamic faith and practice — therefore, rejected by the vast majority of Muslims.

If Islam needed a “reformation,” that would mean that suicide terrorism against “non-believers” is part of Islamic belief and needs to be “expunged” in the interest of bringing Islam into the 21st century. But, the truth is suicide terrorism has never been part of Islamic belief; it has always been an ugly deviation.

This does not mean, in any way, shape, or form, that a good number of Muslims are not in need of reformation. On the contrary, there needs to be a wholesale reformation of Muslims on a number of fronts. But whenever we see Muslims acting like barbarians, they are betraying the principles of Islam, they are violating the letter and spirit of the faith.

If every Muslim everywhere had kept to the principles of Islam, there would be no suicide terrorism; there would be no beheading of people in front of a banner saying “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger”; there would be no “honor killing.” Sadly, however, these things do happen, and it is because some few Muslims have strayed from the straight and narrow path of Islam — or are faithlessly using the religion in an abominable way.

So, to answer Thom Hartmann’s question: No, Islam does not need a Reformation. But some Muslims do.

Hesham A. Hassaballa is a physician and writer living in Chicago. He is co-author of The Beliefnet Guide to Islam (Doubleday).

Middle East 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.”

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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

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.”

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

The fragile promise of Muslim diversity.

By Irshad Manji | Newsweek Web Exclusive

At a recent event in India, I asked Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, whether he would support his country’s tireless human-rights activists. He invited me to pose a different question. I didn’t.

“Sit down!” the retired Army general then ordered.

Things probably won’t get that tense when Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari, visits Barack Obama next week. But maybe they should, given the Taliban’s growing reach and Zardari’s plunging credibility. The two presidents will be joined by a third, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a religious “moderate” who routinely barters away the rights of women and minorities to warlords and mullahs.

As a reform-minded Muslim, I admit that these guys make the notion of diversity in my faith look laughable. Their track records underscore why we have to venture beyond geopolitical hotspots to fathom the future of progressive Islam.

A year ago, I traveled to Indonesia during Kartini Days. That’s when almost 300 million people, most of them Muslim, pay tribute to an early 20th-century Indonesian feminist named Kartini. Although a controversial figure—too revolutionary for some, not radical enough for others—the nationwide affection that I witnessed for her rivals the respect I observe each April in the U.S. for Martin Luther King Jr.

I arrived in Jakarta to launch my book and film, both of which call on Muslims to embrace human rights and freedom of conscience for all. Hundreds of students showed up, ranging from transsexuals to Islamists. They spoke their minds. They disagreed. In between the verbal sparring, guitarists strummed, poets recited and dancers kicked up their Javanese heels. Nobody downplayed their conflicts; instead, they treated dispute as a necessity of democracy. Everybody left safely—including the most vocal transsexual, who proudly announced that after her surgery, she fought for the right to wear a headscarf. She won. My uncovered head spun at the layers of nuance being expressed.

For all its promise, exemplified by last week’s national elections favoring secular parties, Indonesia nonetheless flirts with peril. In only 10 years, Islamism has gone from being a joke to a force. Once an authoritarian state whose military quashed any inconvenient element, Indonesia introduced democratic reforms a decade ago. Since then, a free press has emerged. So has political Islam.

Like Muslims elsewhere, Indonesians are watching the import of Saudi-style Islam. Sometimes known as Salafism, it preaches a borderless caliphate anchored in the moral absolutes of the Prophet Muhammad’s initial successors. A global village for the virtuous and valorous, Salafism purports to offer a way—no, the way—to combine reverence with modernity. Binding black and white, rich and poor, woman and man, mighty and weak, the theory of Salafism is transcendently pluralistic.

Then there’s reality. In practice, Salafis displace pluralism with puritanism. True to the dictates of dogma, they use intimidation and violence to spread their gospel. This summer, a small but steroidal gang of Islamists assaulted human-rights activists in Jakarta. Police stood by as the extremists crashed a religious freedom rally, organized after Indonesia’s government imposed restrictions on a minority Muslim sect.

Salafis call the move a defense of Islam’s integrity. Pluralists call it a violation of Indonesia’s Constitution. Moderate Muslim leaders call it none of their business. Those moderates embody the communal silence that has allowed militant Islamism to metastasize worldwide. Emanating from a secular democracy like Indonesia, such silence is made all the more tragic—with implications that can be frighteningly personal.

Consider the e-mail sent to me by Sakdiyah, a student who attended my film screening at Indonesia’s largest university. Since 2005, she has passionately promoted progressive Islam in the same city that houses the Indonesian Mujahedin Council, a radical Islamist outfit. No longer can she and her friends deny their fears: “We tried to organize a seminar on pluralism and received phone calls saying that they would send hundreds of Allah’s soldiers to stop us.”

Spartan Islam is hitting home. “My family will send me threatening letters whenever I get my work published,” Sakdiyah writes. “I often find myself giving up when I face my father,” Sakdiyah writes. “Then I lie. I don’t want to hurt him, and I don’t want him to hurt me because I don’t want to hate him. So how can we get along? How can I use my freedom of speech in a matter that will make people understand, especially when they are conservative?”

This is a defining dilemma for the new generation of Muslims in Indonesia, Algeria, Nigeria, India, Iran, France, the United States and elsewhere. They are wired enough to witness how others live, making many of them disgruntled by the maldistribution not just of material wealth but also of individual liberties. They struggle loudly against the colonizing cudgels of U.S. foreign policy. They denounce their own arrogant governments. And in the West, they finger the catchall specter of racism. But behind the placards, they text their peers about how they’re resisting what a Muslim lad in Britain described to me as “tribalism”—community pressures to clam up and conform.

Now for the irony. Moderate Muslims are ignoring this frustration while Salafis are eagerly tapping into it. Hard-core Islamists open the doors of inquiry, usher the vulnerable through and then extinguish the very curiosity that attracted their recruits. They achieve this by providing “safe” spaces in which Muslims who feel suffocated by their own can question conventional teachings, especially those of mainstream imams whose smug feudalism oozes the warning: do as you’re told. Tribalism to a T.

Moderate Muslims fail to appreciate at least two realities. One: at a time when youth are constantly engaging their minds to navigate the ocean of information flowing through the Web, it’s humiliating to be told you can’t think for yourself. Two: in our era of mass migration, young Muslims have more questions than ever. I draw strength from the most common remark sent to me through my Web site these days—”Can we, as Muslims, marry non-Muslims?” A hot 21st-century issue, interfaith love is helping to drive a new school of Islamic jurisprudence that reinterprets theology for Muslim minorities in the multicultural West.

Reinterpretation will be painfully messy because it demands excising tribal tradition from the practice of Islam. It’s not just Salafis who confuse culture with faith. Seemingly integrated Muslims do, too. I remain amazed at how often Muslim-American students whisper to me what is, in fact, an open secret: that they can’t voice their support for progressive Islam because they would be accused of “dishonoring” their communities.

The shame-soaked culture of honor comes straight out of the desert. It predates Islam. Why should children of the First Amendment sacrifice their authenticity at the ancient altar of a non-Islamic, even un-Islamic, mindset?

Culture is emotional, and a critical mass of Arabs may feel deeply attached to the code of honor. But with equal emotional sincerity, non-Arab Muslims often resent this custom being foisted on them. Previously colonized by the Dutch, Indonesians detect Saudi cultural imperialism today. After one of my film screenings, Professor Hindun Annisa lectured to an auditorium of students that “when theologians talk about Islamic history, they’re really talking about Arab history.” The audience instantly understood. Their reaction gives me hope that a cultural shift away from honor is possible in the world’s largest Muslim nation.

Which leads me back to Sakdiyah, who echoes countless young Muslims today. She wants to be honest with her father but compromises her conscience the moment she faces him. How to help her harmonize faith with freedom? The key, I’m convinced, is to replace honor with dignity.

As a starting point, Muslim children ought to be taught higher expectations of themselves. Some of them will rise to the occasion, as I glimpsed at an Indonesian Islamic boarding school. The adolescent girls didn’t need to be persuaded that Islam and human rights can be reconciled. Instead, they asked whether Indonesians, so distant from the news media’s attention, could emit that vision effectively.

Invited to reply, I assured them that compelling ideas have historically come from the edges. Witness the Grameen Bank, the world’s most energetic lender to the poor. Created by Muslims in Bangladesh, Grameen is now bringing its wisdom to America. The students began to buzz.

Seizing on their excitement, I reminded them of their precious democratic privileges. Use your freedoms of thought, speech and conscience to invent a fresh future for Islam, I advised. Then use digital technology to circulate your ideas. You’ll show open-minded Muslims everywhere that they’re not alone.

At the end of our session, a gaggle of girls surrounded me to ask more questions, shake hands and snap photos. One confided in slow and deliberate English, “I am so inspired. Thank you, Wonder Woman.”

Her reference to a universal superheroine assured me of two things. First, honor can indeed be redefined if the feminist heart of Kartini beats in the religious enclaves of the most populous Muslim country on earth. Second, the potential for a cross-cultural and contemporary Islam can be found in the unlikeliest corners.

In that cross-cultural vein, it’s vital to peer past conventional combat zones for hints of where progressive Islam still has a fighting chance. The Prophet Muhammad reportedly counseled going as far as China to gain knowledge. I’m reinterpreting his guidance to include Indonesia. Same time zones.

A scholar with New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the European Foundation for Democracy, Irshad Manji is the author of “The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith” and creator of the Emmy-nominated PBS film “Faith Without Fear.”

Examining the Fragile Promise of Muslim Diversity | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com