Muslim Heretics Conference

Obama’s overtures: Approach to win Muslims flawed

Kashmir Watch, Aug 3
By Balraj Puri
Recent developments in Iraq, Iran and Af-Pak provide enough evidence to measure the success of Barack Hussain Obama (he specifically used his middle name in his Cairo speech) friendship offensive on the Muslim world and to reflect on its inadequacies.
His most radical departure from the policy of his predecessor George Bush was on Iraq. American attack on Iraq, in retaliation of Al Qaeda-sponsored attack on New York, in retrospect, has proved to be a monumental blunder. As Iraq was being ruled by Saddam Hussain, who claimed to be a socialist, it could not even remotely be connected with Islamic extremist Al Qaeda.
Another excuse for the attack on Iraq was the assumption that it possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was later proved to be false by American intelligence agencies themselves.

It was a costly gamble. An estimated 100,000 Iraq civilians were killed in Operation Iraq. From American point of view, what mattered was that a trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money was spent and 4000 American soldiers were killed. The way Guantanamo and Abu Garib interrogation centres were run undermined American standards of democracy and human rights.
Obama reversed this policy and announced withdrawal of American army from Iraq. By June 30, it had withdrawn from Baghdad and other cities of Iraq. It was celebrated by the Iraqi government headed by Nouri al-Maliki, during American occupation.
However, it also exposed fissures in Iraqi society, which were kept under check by Saddam Hussain, though he used authoritarian methods. Baghdad city is now completely divided between Shia and Sunni parts. Most symbols of Iraq’s glory and its precious common heritage have been destroyed. The occupying power did not attempt to make constitutional or institutional arrangement to facilitate living together of the two main religious denominations.

Nor could an arrangement be made for the satisfaction of the aspirations of the ethnic minority of Kurds, who have raised a banner of revolt. In no case, Shia-Sunni differences and Kurdish revolt are covered by Obama’s appeal for friendship with Muslims.
Obama also extended his hand to Iran and appealed to it to unclench its fist. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded positively to his appeal. But the June election not only divided Iran but also strained the Iranian government’s relations with the West, which had sympathies with the opposition candidate Mir Hossian Mousavi considered as liberal and modern. It also believed that the election was rigged in favour of the present president.
The orthodox opinion in Iran and Muslims elsewhere was further alienated. The spiritual head of Iran Ali Khamani declared election to be valid and threatened American and its Western allies of united action against them for their interference in the internal affairs of Iran.
It is not the question of fairness of election or supporting one party or the other. The real question is of legitimate interests of Iran, which should be respected. In this context, reported permission by Saudi Arabia, a close ally of America, to permit passage to Israel for nuclear attack on nuclear installations of Iran is ominous. Iran’s right for having nuclear energy for purely peaceful purposes and protection against threats should be considered.

Iran is a predominantly Shia country and is unlikely to he influenced by Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda who are Sunni extremists. The recent killing of 14 Sunnis belonging to the Balochi ethnic minority in Iran shows degree of intolerance between the two sects of Islam.
Instead of encouraging Iran’s relations with a moderate country like India, America discouraged it to build a gas pipeline with Iran. India has the largest Shia population after Iran and both had close interaction in the field of literature and philosophy ever since pre-Islamic days.
Obama is concentrating his entire attention in crushing terrorism in Afghanistan, which extends to Pakistan. The principal terrorist outfit is Taliban, which consists of Pushtoon community in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The effectiveness of all the military might and money that Obama intends to use to eliminate the nucleus of terrorism in the world would be multiplied if ethnic urges of Pushtoons divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan by Durand Line are satisfied.

Instead of a centralised Afghanistan, a federal and decentralised system recognising Pushtoon as well as other ethnic communities, which are roughly half and half, is more feasible. Similarly, the promise that Benazir Bhuttoo made during election campaign to give NWFP and Balochistan autonomy should be implemented and freer movement of Pushtoons across Durand Line should be considered.
In the rest of Pakistan also non-religious ethnic identities need to be recognised. Otherwise, Islam, in a more and more extremist form, may be the only unifying factor in the country. Federalism can be a more effective and less divisive way to do so. If Bengali urge for autonomy had been recognised, Bangladesh may not have seceded in 1971. Sub-national identities of Pakistan share common cultural heritage with their counterparts in India and are the best guarantee of Indo-Pak friendship.

Many Pakistani intellectuals have raised their voice against Arabisation of Islam in their country. For instance, the Urdu (as also Persian) phrase Khuda Hafiz (God be with you) is being replaced by Arabia phrase Allah Hafiz.
Salafi or Wahabi Islam is the greatest export of Saudi Islam, backed with money power, under the patronage of America. It is trying to replace Sufisim which originated in Iran or Central Asia and incorporated local religious thoughts and cultures of South Asia. Other schools of Islamic thought, in the subcontinent like that of Deoband are more tolerant of other religions. Alama Iqbal, the greatest influence on Muslims of Pakistan, had declared that Islam in India (undivided) had an Aryan soul and Semitic body the growth of which “was stunted by Arab imperialism”.
Arabs are a tiny fraction of the Muslim world. All schools of Islam must recognise indigenous traditions of Islam. Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, is not noticed by American policymakers. With a long tradition of living together of different religious communities, Indonesia has become the target of Islamic terrorism in the recent years.

India has the second largest Muslim population. Its contribution to Islamic thought is second to none. Why Obama failed to take notice of Islam in India and Indonesia? India’s Minister for Minority Affairs Salman Khurshid specifically pointed out India’s omission.
Well-intentioned polices of Obama to befriend Muslim world tries to homogenise Islam and fails to recognise its diversities and ethnic dimension. It is for this reason that revolt of Uigher Muslims in Xinjiang is being dismissed as an extension of Al Qaeda whereas it is mainly due to suppression of their Turkic identity. While trying to reject Huntington’s theory of “Clash of Civilisation,” Obama’s approach still recognises religion as an exclusive basis of identity, which is far from the reality.
The author can be reached at: institute.jk.affairs@gmail.com

Kashmir Watch :: In-depth coverage on Kashmir conflict

By Joshua Partlow

Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 3, 2009

GOJRA, Pakistan, Aug. 2 — They do not want to bury the Christians. They want the nation to see them.

By nightfall Sunday, hundreds of residents of the Christian enclave here stood in defiant vigil around seven particleboard coffins neatly aligned on the train tracks that run through town. They had demands: Until the government investigates the killings and finds those responsible, they will not remove the bodies.

Police waited warily in the street. A man on a loudspeaker bellowed the villagers’ sentiments, which included anger at provincial authorities for not stopping the killings.

“Death to the Punjab government!”

A spasm of religious violence came to this rural town in the shape of an angry Muslim mob Saturday morning. The Muslims marched to avenge what they believed was the desecration of a Koran one week earlier. When it was over, dozens of houses were torched and Faith Bible Pentecostal Church lay in ruins. Two villagers were shot dead, residents said. Five others, including two children, burned alive.

Killing has become commonplace in Pakistan. But this attack startled the country both for its ferocity and for its stark message to religious minorities. Many saw the violence as further evidence of the growing power of the Taliban and allied Islamist militant groups in Punjab province, home to about half of Pakistan’s population.

“They have made up their minds to crush Christianity. They always call us dogs of America, agents of America,” said Romar Sardar, an English teacher from the area. “There has been no protection by the police. Nothing.”

 

The conflict apparently began with a wedding. On the evening of July 25, a wedding procession for a Christian couple passed through the nearby village of Korian, according to a police report. Revelers danced and threw money in the air, as is local custom. In the morning, a resident told police he had picked up scraps of paper on the ground and found Arabic writing. “We examined them, and it was the pages from the holy Koran,” the man said in the report.

Four days later, the accused, a member of the wedding party named Talib Masih, faced a meeting of local elders, who demanded that he be punished. Instead of repenting, the report said, he denied the desecration, and as a result, “the whole Muslim population was enraged.” The house burning began that night and then quieted down until Saturday morning.

That day, Riaz Masih, 68, a retired teacher, grew increasingly worried as a crowd gathered, chanting anti-Christian slogans and cursing Americans. He locked his house and rushed with his wife and children to the home of a Muslim friend nearby. The crowd, some wearing black veils and carrying guns, turned down Masih’s narrow brick alley near the train tracks and into the Christian Colony, according to several witnesses. Residents and marchers threw rocks at each other, and gunfire broke out. Using what residents described as gasoline and other flammable chemicals, the mob torched Masih’s house.

“We have nothing left,” he said, standing in the charred remains of his living room, his daughter’s empty jewelry box at his feet. “We are trying to face this in the name of Jesus Christ. The Bible says you cannot take revenge.”

On Sunday, the scenes of wreckage and dismay played out in house after house. Residents tossed burned blankets and clothing, broken televisions, and charred beds into heaps on the street. Fruit seller Iqbal Masih, 49, stepped over his mangled carts on his patio and tried to assess what was left of his daughter’s dowry. The armoire, a refrigerator, the bedding were burned; the $675 for furniture had disappeared.

“I am out of my mind. I can’t look,” he said. “They have subjected us to severe cruelties. May God show them the right path.”

At least four of the dead came from a single house. As the mob approached, a bullet struck Hamid Masih, a builder, in the head as he stood in his doorway, said his son, Min Has. Has heaved his father onto a motorcycle and drove him to a hospital, while the rest of the family members crowded in a back bedroom. The house began burning, and smoked billowed into the rooms. At least three other relatives, including 5- and 8-year-old siblings, died in the flames, according to residents. “There was fire everywhere, and it was impossible for them to get out,” Has said.

“I know one thing. They want to destroy Christians,” said Atiq Masih, 22, a janitor who was shot in the right knee. “They were attacking everything.”

Christians, who make up about 2 percent of the Punjab population, have been targeted in other recent cases. In June, a mob attacked Christian homes in the Kasur district of Punjab for allegedly dishonoring the prophet Mohammed. In Pakistan, which has strict laws against blasphemy, people can be imprisoned for life or put to death for insulting Islam.

Residents in Gojra said that this was the first incident of its kind in the town and that Christians and Muslims have long lived alongside one another without serious problems. They blamed Muslim clerics for inciting anger over the Koran incident in mosque sermons and accused the Taliban and the militant group Sipah-e-Sahaba of involvement in the attack.

“The provincial government is not accepting that a large part of Punjab is suffering from religious intolerance due to the Taliban and religious outfits,” said Peter Jacob, executive secretary of the National Commission for Justice and Peace, which issues an annual report on religious minorities in Pakistan. “They have been very negligent. This conflict was brewing for three days, and they were not receptive. They were not taking it seriously.”

Pakistan’s president and prime minister have called for investigations into the violence. By Sunday, police and paramilitary troops had taken up positions in the town. Provincial authorities said they have already made arrests and registered cases against 800 people. Federal Minister for Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti denied that any Koran had been desecrated.

Police in Gojra said the violence Saturday was beyond their control.

“It happened all of a sudden. The police that were here were too few in number to stop it,” said policeman Kashif Sadiq. “It’s not fair to assume they let this happen intentionally.”

Special correspondents Shaiq Hussain and Aoun Sahi contributed to this report.

Spasm of Religious Violence Leaves a Pakistani Minority in Mourning, Frustration - washingtonpost.com

By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

When Columbia University President Lee Bollinger introduced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his school in September 2007, he denounced him as a “petty tyrant.”

Ahmadinejad is many bad things, including a Holocaust denier and a strong proponent of a nuclear Iran. But as recent events have underlined, Iran is not quite a tyranny, petty or grand, and the office Ahmadinejad occupies does not give him final say in Iranian affairs. That role is more truly occupied by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, head of the Council of Guardians and Iran’s supreme leader.

A real tyranny would never permit elections in the first place—North Korea never does—nor would it allow demonstrations contesting the election results to spiral out of control. Yet Iran is no liberal democracy. So what kind of beast is it? And in what ways should we want its regime to evolve?

Political scientists categorize the Islamic Republic of Iran as an “electoral authoritarian” regime of a new sort. They put it in the same basket as Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. By this view, Iran is fundamentally an authoritarian regime run by a small circle of clerics and military officials who use elections to legitimate themselves.

Others think of Iran as a medieval theocracy. Its 1979 constitution vests sovereignty not in the people, but in God, and establishes Islam and the Quran as the supreme sources of law.

The Iranian Constitution is a curious hybrid of authoritarian, theocratic and democratic elements. Articles One and Two do vest sovereignty in God, but Article Six mandates popular elections for the presidency and the Majlis, or parliament. Articles 19-42 are a bill of rights, guaranteeing, among other things, freedom of expression, public gatherings and marches, women’s equality, protection of ethnic minorities, due process and private property, as well as some “second generation” social rights like social security and health care.

 

The truly problematic part of the constitution is Section Eight (Articles 107-112) on the Guardian Council and the “Leader.” All the democratic procedures and rights in the earlier sections of the constitution are qualified by certain powers reserved to a council of senior clerics.

These powers, specified in Article 110, include control over the armed forces, the ability to declare war, and appointment powers over the judiciary, heads of media, army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Another article lays out conditions under which the Supreme Leader can be removed by the Guardian Council. But that procedure is hardly democratic or transparent.

One does not have to go back to the Middle Ages to find historical precedents for this type of constitution. The clearest parallel would be the German Constitution adopted after the country was unified in the 1870s. Pre-World War I Germany had an elected parliament, or Reichstag, but reserved important powers for an unelected Kaiser, particularly in foreign policy and defense. This constitution got Germany into big trouble. The unelected part of the leadership controlled the armed forces. Eventually, though, it came to be controlled by the armed forces. This seems to be what’s unfolding in Iran today.

Compared to Section Eight, the references in the Iranian Constitution to God and religion as the sources of law are much less problematic. They could, under the right circumstances, be the basis for Iran’s eventual evolution into a moderate, law-governed country.

The rule of law was originally rooted in religion in all societies where it came to prevail, including the West. The great economist Friedrich Hayek noted that law should be prior to legislation. That is, the law should reflect a broad social consensus on the rules of justice. In Europe, it was the church that originally defined the law and acted as its custodian. European monarchs respected the rule of law because it was written by an authority higher and more legitimate than themselves.

Something similar happened in the pre-modern Middle East. There was a functional separation of church and state. The ulama were legal scholars and custodians of Shariah law while the sultans exercised political authority. The sultans conceded they were not the ultimate source of law but had to live within rules established by Muslim case law. There was no democracy, but there was something resembling a rule of law.

This traditional, religiously based rule of law was destroyed in the Middle East’s transition to modernity. Replacing it, particularly in the Arab world, was untrammeled executive authority: Presidents and other dictators accepted no constraints, either legislative or judicial, on their power.

The legal scholar Noah Feldman has argued that the widespread demand for a return to Shariah in many Muslim countries does not necessarily reflect a desire to impose harsh, Taliban-style punishments and oppress women. Rather, it reflects a nostalgia for a dimly remembered historical time when Muslim rulers were not all-powerful autocrats, but respected Islamic rules of justice—Islamic rule of law.

So what kind of future should we wish for Iran, in light of the massive demonstrations? My own preference would be for Iran to some day adopt a new, Western-style constitution guaranteeing religious freedom, a secular state, and sovereignty vested firmly in the people, rather than God.

But a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence (we don’t have anything better) suggests this is not necessarily the agenda of the protesters. Many of them, including opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, say they want Iran to remain an Islamic Republic. They look at the radical regime change that occurred in next door Iraq and don’t want that for themselves. What they seem to wish for is that the democratic features of the constitution be better respected, and that the executive authorities, including the Guardian Council, and the military and paramilitary organizations, stop manipulating elections and respect the law.

Iran could evolve towards a genuine rule-of-law democracy within the broad parameters of the 1979 constitution. It would be necessary to abolish Article 110, which gives the Guardian Council control over the armed forces and the media, and to shift its function to something more like a supreme court that could pass judgment on the consistency of legislation with Shariah. In time, the Council might be subject to some form of democratic control, like the U.S. Supreme Court, even if its members needed religious credentials.

Eliminating religion altogether from the Iranian Constitution is more problematic. The rule of law prevails not because of its formal and procedural qualities, but because it reflects broadly held social norms. If future Iranian rulers are ever to respect the rule of law as traditional Muslim rulers once did, it will have to be a law that comes from the hearts of the Iranian people. Perhaps that will one day be a completely secular law. That is unlikely to be the case today.

Unfortunately, Iranians may never get to make the choice for themselves. The clerical-military clique currently exercising power is likely to drag Iran into conflict with other countries in the region. This could easily consolidate its legitimacy and power. Let us hope that the country’s internal forces push for an evolution of the political system towards genuine rule of law and democracy first.

Mr. Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy” (Yale, 2006).

Francis Fukuyama: Iranian constitution democratic at heart - WSJ.com

Iran’s Tragic Joke

By ROGER COHEN

Published: July 20, 2009

NEW YORK — Allow me to quote the British novelist Martin Amis, writing about Persia in The Guardian: “Iran is one of the most venerable civilizations on earth: it makes China look like an adolescent, and America look like a stripling.”

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Roger Cohen

Iranians, aware of that history, are a proud people. They do not take kindly to being played around with, nor to seeing their country turned into a laughingstock. They do not like the memory of an election campaign that now seems like pure theater, the expression of the sadistic whim of some puppeteer.

So the line I take away from the important Friday sermon of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the two-time former president who believes that the Islamic Republic’s future lies in compromise rather than endless confrontation, is this one: “We shouldn’t let our enemies laugh at us because we’ve imprisoned our own people.”

There’s been tragedy aplenty since June 12 — dozens of killings, thousands of arrests, countless beatings of the innocent — and I hope I belittle none of it when I say there’s also been something laughable.

What president would celebrate a “victory” by two-thirds of the vote with a clampdown resembling a putsch? What self-respecting nation would attribute the appearance in the streets of three million protesters convinced their votes were stolen to Zionists, “evil” media and British agents?

(The former British ambassador to Iran told me with a smile last January that Tehran was an interesting place to serve “because it’s one of the very few places left on earth where people still believe we have some influence!”)

What sort of country invites hundreds of journalists to witness an election only to throw them all out? What kind of revolutionary authority invokes “ethics” and “religious democracy” as it allows plain-clothes thugs to beat women?

What is to be thought of a supreme leader who calls an election result divine, then says there are some questions that need resolution by an oversight council, and then tells that council what the result of its recount is before it’s over?

Iran is not some banana republic. The events since the night of June 12 have been a shameful interlude. Iranians have not digested this grotesquery.

No, Iran is not a banana republic. It’s a sophisticated nation of 75 million people. It pretends to a significant role in the affairs of the world. It’s a land of poets who knew how to marry the sacred and the sensuous and always laughed at the idea of a truth so absolute it would not accommodate contradiction.

It’s an Islamic Republic and, as Rafsanjani said, “If the Islamic and Republican sides of the revolution are not preserved, it means that we have forgotten the principles of the revolution.”

Respecting that duality — the clerical and the republican — means that the price Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has to pay for his lifelong authority is the quadrennial holding of presidential elections that cannot remove him from office but must inform his actions.

Because Khamenei trampled on this principle, ignoring the will of the people, he created the “crisis” of which Rafsanjani spoke.

It will not abate quickly. Iranians believe the puppeteer must pay a price for such clumsy theater. Within the revolutionary establishment and within society, fissures have become chasms. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now the most divisive figure in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history.

As Rafsanjani said: “We could have taken our best step in the history of the Islamic Revolution had the election not faced problems.”

The campaign was of an exemplary openness. Supporters of Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist candidate, took to the streets without incident. Moussavi, with his impeccable revolutionary credentials, was the very emblem of unthreatening change.

But a hardline faction around Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards felt threatened — in their power, wealth and world view.

They do not believe, as Rafsanjani believes, in a China option for Iran: the possibility of normalizing relations with the U.S. and preserving the system.

While Rafsanjani spoke, Ahmadinejad was speaking in Mashad. “As soon as the new government is formed, it will enter the global sphere with a power that is 10 times greater than that of the West and overthrow the West from its hegemonic position,” he said.

I heard the president say the same thing, again and again and again, over the course of a three-hour press conference two days after the election. He is suffering from a pathology. Rafsanjani is not alone in believing it is dangerous.

A succession struggle of sorts has begun in Iran. Rafsanjani, 74, is challenging Khamenei, 70. So is Mohammad Khatami, the reformist former president who called Sunday for a referendum on the legitimacy of the election. They are saying Iran is a great and proud nation: open the prisons, free the press, allow debate, do not make a laughingstock of our institutions. That, they insist, is the only form of loyalty to the Revolution.

It’s also the only action worthy of a millennial nation. The joke has been too foul to stand.

Op-Ed Columnist - Iran’s Tragic Joke - NYTimes.com

Some residents say Taqwa mosque, in Isiolo, central Kenya, preaches a radical version of Islam. Somali insurgents have been recruiting fighters from Kenya.
Heba Aly

Friends of Tawakal Ahmed gathered in his village of Isiolo, Kenya. Tawakal, who grew more and more radical, was killed in the fighting in Somalia.
Heba Aly

A woman of Isiolo, which has a wide mix of cultures, wears the ‘niqab,’ covering all but her eyes.
Heba Aly

 

Like the Somali-American from Minnesota who was killed this weekend, Tawakal Ahmed was recruited through mosques in Kenya to fight for Islamic militants in Mogadishu.

By Heba ALY | Correspondent

from the July 19, 2009 edition

Isiolo, Kenya - A smattering of wispy clouds dots the blue sky as white-robed worshipers trickle into Taqwa mosque for Friday prayers. Our car is parked outside the mosque, slightly hidden by a hedgerow of tangled savannah brush that defines the mosque’s perimeter. A cool, dry wind blows across this arid town – refreshing against the equatorial heat, but leaving a blanket of dust on the whitewashed buildings.

The car’s tinted windows are rolled up to protect against the fine film of dust – and to conceal me from sight.

Isiolo is smack in the center of Kenya, far from Somalia. But the sermon pouring out of the mosque’s loudspeakers is in Somali. We listen for a few minutes before the driver abruptly pulls away.

“If they catch us spying on them, we’ll be stoned,” he says.

AFTER ATTENDING THIS MOSQUE and another near his home, Tawakal Ahmed, a young Kenyan man of Somali descent, journeyed to Somalia. Last November he blew himself up.

At least that’s what his family and friends say.

Muslim militants have recruited from elsewhere in Kenya, seeking those who will help them win control of Somalia. Until now, they’ve drawn from Eastleigh (Nairobi’s Somali enclave), Somali refugee camps in Kenya, and areas along the Kenyan-Somali border. But if what Tawakal’s family says is true, he is one of the first known cases of recruitment in Kenya outside those traditional hunting grounds.

Some analysts say this case in Kenya shows that the recruiting networks of Somalia’s insurgency may be more vast than once presumed. Similar cases are also coming to light in the United States.

On Tuesday, a Somali-American 20-year-old engineering student from Minnesota was reported killed in Somalia while fighting alongside Islamic militants. His uncle, Omar Ahmed Sheikh, told Reuters his nephew, was misled by clerics in Minneapolis and persuaded to go to Somalia in November 2008. “They told him they would teach him Islamic religion … But they are terrorists and cannot claim they are Muslims,” said Mr. Sheikh.

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Centre in Minneapolis, told Reuters Bana was one of 18 teenagers who ran away to Somalia last November after attending a youth programme at a local mosque.

ISIOLO SEEMS an unlikely place to recruit Islamic fighters. It has always been a cosmopolitan town. For decades, there have been intermarriages between tribes and ethnicities; churches and mosques share the same streets; men with sticks herd their cattle past niqab-covered women, their Muslim garb hiding everything but their eyes.

Somalis were first settled in this sleepy outpost by the British after World War I. The descendants of soldiers became Kenyans, living in shantytowns, marginalized by the Kenyan government but integrated nonetheless into this diverse town.

In the 1990s, as the civil war in neighboring Somalia intensified, refugees began streaming deeper and deeper into Kenya. Eventually they arrived here – and started to fill the mosques. With them came a new ideology, one that would change this moderate Kenyan community and the fate of at least one of its young men.

TAWAKAL’S FAMILY and friends say they know which path lead to his death. But they don’t know exactly how he died. They’ve heard different stories, from different sources. They’ve been told that Tawakal strapped on an explosive belt and walked onto the base of African Union peacekeepers in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. They’ve also been told that he was killed while fighting with Al Shabab insurgents trying to overthrow the Somali government or slaughtered when he tried to escape them.

The only thing of which they are certain is that one day in November 2008 the phone rang in their home in Isiolo. Someone speaking Somali said: “Your son is dead. May his soul rest in peace. He died in the cause of Allah.”

THE YOUNGEST of his siblings, Ta­wa­kal Ahmed was born into the Harti clan and a Somali family that had lived in Kenya for three generations. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by his aunts and older cousins.

As a child, his friends were a mix of Kenyans – some Muslim, some Christian, some ethnic Somalis, some of the Bantu and Turkana tribes. Together, they played soccer and chewed khat, a stimulant illegal in many countries but a staple in Somali society.

Tawakal’s family and neighbors are Muslims, but not strict adherents. They don’t pray five times a day, and khat and cigarettes are an integral part of daily life. Most of Tawakal’s friends speak English better than they do Somali or Kiswahili, Kenya’s national language.

Upon graduating high school, where he was chairman of the Muslim association, Tawakal tried unsuccessfully to find a job. He started the process for getting immigration papers to find work in Europe.

But slowly, Tawakal’s course changed. First he began frequenting a madrasa, or Islamic school, in town. Within a year, he had memorized the Koran.

Then one of his more religious friends took him to the local mosque, Masjid al-Nur, just steps from his home. He began spending all his time at the madrasa or at the mosque. He often disappeared, say family members, for a month at a time. They say he was performing Tabligh, in which Muslims travel from village to village, preaching while sleeping in mosques.

He became so religious that he could no longer sit in the same room as his family members – whose smoking and chewing of khat bothered him.

“He didn’t like that company,” says a cousin who does not want to be named for fear of retribution by extremists in the community or by the Kenyan government. “He never used to talk to anybody.”

One day in 2006, Tawakal abruptly left for the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Today, some family members recall that he went to look for a job. Others say he went for religious studies. Some say that he just left, without saying anything.

Family and friends disagree over where the indoctrination began – in Isiolo or in Nairobi. But it’s clear that when he returned to his village, Tawakal was a changed man.

FOR TWO YEARS, no one heard from Tawakal. Friends say they finally learned that he had been seen attending Beit al-Mal madrasa and frequenting the Sixth Street mosque in Eastleigh, a crowded, poor suburb of Nairobi, inhabited mostly by Somalis. Family members went looking for him, without success. Then they heard he had gone to Somalia, where he was using a different name and fighting alongside Islamists.

His disappearance coincided with a heightening of the conflict in war-torn Somalia, where in late 2006, Ethiopian troops invaded to overthrow a Union of Islamic Courts that had taken power. The Ethiopians’ success sparked a new wave of insurgents among the ousted Islamists, who wanted sharia (Islamic law) installed and foreign troops off Somali soil.

Tawakal would later tell an Isiolo village elder that he’d been fighting “pagans” in Somalia.

According to the elder, Hussein Noor Roble, “He went to Somalia when the Ethiopians came…. He said: ‘I went to jihad.’ He said he was fighting with the Islamic Courts Union…. I said [to myself], ‘The boy is not the way he used to be.’ ”

Tawakal said he had been sent for training in the southern Somalia port town of Kismayo. He was then deployed to the front line in the Dinsoor area. But as government and Ethiopian troops continued gaining ground, Tawakal was pushed back with his fellow fighters to the insurgent stronghold of Raz Kamboni, the most southern tip of Somalia, on the Kenyan border. Raz Kamboni fell to the new Somali government on Jan. 12, 2007.

IN THE SPRING OF 2007, Tawakal called home. His aunt was on her deathbed and he was urged to come home. He showed up in Isiolo a few weeks later.

His aunt died the same day he arrived: April 1, 2007. He only stayed a few days. He told his family that he regretted missing the chance to speak to her, and participated in her burial service.

But he slept at the mosque, not at home. He regularly held long telephone conversations in private.

He harangued his friends when it was prayer time. He criticized them when they wore T-shirts portraying the American rapper Tupac Shakur and when they listened to music.

“He started calling me some [derogatory] names,” says his boyhood Christian friend, Frank Metro, “and telling our friends: ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s a lost one…. He’s a kafir [infidel].’ ”

Tawakal seemed to have more money than before. He had changed his entire wardrobe to costly kanzus, the knee-length garment worn over trousers cut above the ankle. He was more generous than usual, buying his friends sodas.

He avoided the subject of Somalia with his family. But he did tell Kamar Hussein, the village elder’s wife and the mother of one of Tawakal’s closest friends, that he had gone to Somalia with 15 other Kenyans and met another 20 there. “We were 36 in total from Kenya,” he told her.

His family urged him not to go back. But within a week of his aunt’s funeral, he was gone again. He told his family he was going to Nairobi to pick up a certificate from his studies. He said he’d be back in three days.

That was the last time they saw him.

TAWAKAL’S TRANSFORMATION – “We didn’t realize the magnitude of it,” says Mr. Metro – mirrors a radicalization within Isiolo and other parts of Kenya.

Over the years, newcomers from Somalia made-over two of Isiolo’s mosques with their ideologies. Visiting Somali clerics and graduates of Saudi Arabia’s theological colleges spread a more conservative, fundamentalist form of Islam.

Residents say they’re now told not to consume “infidel” products, such as Coca-Cola. Old traditions have been labeled un-Islamic. Last year, as village women gathered to celebrate the birth of the prophet Muhammad, according to the village elder’s wife, a group of young boys from one mosque stoned and beat the women with sticks, claiming that only God should be revered.

The man who runs both Masjid al-Nur and Taqwa Mosque in Isiolo goes by the name Dalai. He came to Kenya from Somalia some years ago, as a young refugee. He was eventually appointed imam, though he was still a young man in his early 30s.

Tawakal’s friends and family hold Dalai’s mosques responsible for Tawakal’s death. In his sermons, residents say, Dalai tells youths to fight for their religion in order to go to heaven. They say the imam likely influenced Tawakal to go to Nairobi and possibly connected him to extremists there.

But analysts are skeptical that such recruiting is directed from Somalia. The most militant insurgent group, Al Shabab, is not a monolithic entity with a clear hierarchical structure and does not necessarily have strong links directly into mosques.

“Sometimes Al Shabab’s work is done for them by others, unwittingly,” says Rashid Abdi, a Kenyan-Somali analyst at the Nairobi field office of the International Crisis Group. “Al Shabab is basically tapping into a wave, a radicalization phenomenon which is happening in the Muslim world.”

Tawakal’s family warned this reporter not to contact Dalai directly because, she was told, it would be unsafe for a foreign journalist, and for them.

According to Abdul Adam, the mosque’s treasurer, Dalai denies any responsibility for Tawakal’s fate. “He says it was Tawakal’s own wish,” Mr. Adam says.

Analysts say this radicalization is happening across Kenya, but they warn against reading too much into it. “I wouldn’t place all the blame on radical Somalis,” says one diplomat in Nairobi. “It’s more diffuse than that…. Not every radical mosque is a hotbed for recruitment.”

Still, some Isiolo parents now have private Koranic lessons for their children at home, instead of sending them to the mosque. Some residents are trying to raise money to build their own, less-strident Islamic school.

“The danger is imminent because of the desperation level in all the young people and the indoctrination that is going around,” says Tawakal’s boyhood friend, Metro.

The relative wealth displayed by those who control the mosques also leaves some residents suspicious. “Whether it’s coming from the Middle East or Mars, I don’t know,” says Milgo Ahmed, Tawakal’s older cousin. “But money is there. Money is being poured all over the place. That is how our children are being used and taken away.”

Asked if a hard-line message was leading Muslim boys astray, one of the more moderate Isiolo sheikhs answers affirmatively, but then panics.

“Anyone who preaches against these people will be shot. I don’t want to be shot on the pulpit,” he says.

He begins to suspect his interviewer is from Al Shabab, or an agent of Al Qaeda. He refuses to give his phone number, and then insists that he not be identified in this story.

“If I die, it is you who killed me.”

Despite their fear, Tawakal’s friends and family say the only way to fight this perceived encroachment on their town and their vision of Islam is to speak out. “After losing him, we started to understand the magnitude of this thing – of a young man being poached to do bad things in the name of helping his family,” Metro says. “It made us realize our vulnerability.”

Ms. Ahmed, Tawakal’s cousin, worries for the five recent graduates in her home who seem to have no opportunity for the future: “Tawakal is dead. He will no longer come [back]. But many, many other Tawakals are going to have the same fate if the international community does not take action,” she says.

Her family feels helpless, she says, with no protection from extremists and nowhere to turn. Complaints to Kenyan authorities fall on deaf ears.

“We are in big trouble,” Ahmed says. “We have nowhere to go…. Our children are not safe.” •

How one youth was drawn to jihad in Somalia | csmonitor.com

By MONA ELTAHAWY

Published: July 2, 2009

NEW YORK — I am a Muslim, I am a feminist and I detest the full-body veil, known as a niqab or burqa. It erases women from society and has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with the hatred for women at the heart of the extremist ideology that preaches it.

We must not sacrifice women at the altar of political correctness or in the name of fighting a growingly powerful right wing that Muslims face in countries where they live as a minority.

As disagreeable as I often find French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he was right when he said recently, “The burqa is not a religious sign, it is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission of women. I want to say solemnly that it will not be welcome on our territory.” It should not be welcome anywhere, I would add.

Yet his words have inspired attempts to defend the indefensible — the erasure of women.

Some have argued that Sarkozy’s right-leaning, anti-Muslim bias was behind his opposition to the burqa. But I would remind them of comments in 2006 by the then-British House of Commons leader Jack Straw, who said the burqa prevents communication. He was right, and he was hardly a right-winger — and yet he too was attacked for daring to speak out against the burqa.

The racism and discrimination that Muslim minorities face in many countries — such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and Britain, where two members of the xenophobic British National Party were shamefully elected to the European Parliament — are very real.

But the best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both racist Islamophobes and the burqa. We’ve been silent on too many things out of fear we’ll arm the right wing.

The best way to debunk the burqa as an expression of Muslim faith is to listen to Muslims who oppose it. At the time of Mr. Straw’s comments, a controversy erupted when a university dean in Egypt warned students they would not be able to stay at college dorms unless they removed their burqa. The dean cited security grounds, saying that men disguised as women in burqa could slip into the female dorms.

Soad Saleh, a professor of Islamic law and former dean of the women’s faculty of Islamic studies at Al-Azhar University — hardly a liberal, said the burqa had nothing to do with Islam. It was but an old Bedouin tradition.

It is sad to see a strange ambivalence toward the burqa from many of my fellow Muslims and others who claim to support us. They will take on everything — the right wing, Islamophobia, Mr. Straw, Mr. Sarkozy — rather than come out and plainly state that the burqa is an affront to Muslim women.

I blame such reluctance on the success of the ultra-conservative Salafi ideology — practiced most famously in Saudi Arabia — in leaving its imprimatur on Islam globally by persuading too many Muslims that it is the purest and highest form of our faith.

It’s one thing to argue about the burqa in a country like Saudi Arabia — where I lived for six years and where women are treated like children — but it is utterly dispiriting to have those same arguments in a country where women’s rights have long been enshrined. When I first saw a woman in a burqa in Copenhagen I was horrified.

I wore a headscarf for nine years. An argument I had on the Cairo subway with a woman who wore a burqa helped seal for good my refusal to defend it. Dressed in black from head to toe, the woman asked me why I did not wear the burqa. I pointed to my headscarf and asked her “Is this not enough?”

“If you wanted a piece of candy, would you choose an unwrapped piece or one that came in a wrapper?” she asked.

“I am not candy,” I answered. “Women are not candy.”

I have since heard arguments made for the burqa in which the woman is portrayed as a diamond ring or a precious stone that needs to be hidden to prove her “worth.” Unless we challenge it, the burqa — and by extension the erasure of women — becomes the pinnacle of piety.

It is not about comparing burqas to bikinis, as some claim. I used to compare my headscarf to a miniskirt, the two being essentially two sides to the same coin of a woman’s body. The burqa is something else altogether: A woman who wears it is erased.

A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to women’s rights. One blogger, a woman, lamented that “Sarkozy’s anti-burqa stance deprives women of identity.” It’s precisely the opposite: It’s the burqa that deprives a woman of identity.

Why do women in Muslim-minority communities wear the burqa? Sarkozy touched on one reason when he admitted his country’s integration model wasn’t working any more because it doesn’t give immigrants and their French-born children a fair chance.

But the Muslim community must ask itself the same question: Why the silence as some of our women fade into black either as a form of identity politics, a protest against the state or out of acquiescence to Salafism?

As a Muslim woman and a feminist I would ban the burqa.

Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born commentator on Arab and Muslim issu

Op-Ed Contributor - Ban the Burqa - NYTimes.com

Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?
by Raymond Ibrahim
Middle East Quarterly
http://www.meforum.org/2159/are-judaism-and-christianity-as-violent-as-islam
Summer 2009, pp. 3-12
“There is far more violence in the Bible than in the Qur’an; the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.”[1] So announces former nun and self-professed “freelance monotheist,” Karen Armstrong.
This quote sums up the single most influential argument currently serving to deflect the accusation that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant: All monotheistic religions, proponents of such an argument say, and not just Islam, have their fair share of violent and intolerant scriptures, as well as bloody histories. Thus, whenever Islam’s sacred scriptures-the Qur’an first, followed by the reports on the words and deeds of Muhammad (the Hadith)-are highlighted as demonstrative of the religion’s innate bellicosity, the immediate rejoinder is that other scriptures, specifically those of Judeo-Christianity, are as riddled with violent passages.
Medieval times: The Crusades were violent and led to atrocities by the modern world’s standards under the banner of the cross and in the name of Christianity. But the Crusades were a counterattack on Islam. Muslim invasions and atrocities against Christians were on the rise in the decades before the launch of the Crusades in 1096. More often than not, this argument puts an end to any discussion regarding whether violence and intolerance are unique to Islam. Instead, the default answer becomes that it is not Islam per se but rather Muslim grievance and frustration-ever exacerbated by economic, political, and social factors-that lead to violence. That this view comports perfectly with the secular West’s “materialistic” epistemology makes it all the more unquestioned.
Therefore, before condemning the Qur’an and the historical words and deeds of Islam’s prophet Muhammad for inciting violence and intolerance, Jews are counseled to consider the historical atrocities committed by their Hebrew forefathers as recorded in their own scriptures; Christians are advised to consider the brutal cycle of violence their forbears have committed in the name of their faith against both non-Christians and fellow Christians. In other words, Jews and Christians are reminded that those who live in glass houses should not be hurling stones.
But is that really the case? Is the analogy with other scriptures legitimate? Does Hebrew violence in the ancient era, and Christian violence in the medieval era, compare to or explain away the tenacity of Muslim violence in the modern era? Violence in Jewish and Christian History
Along with Armstrong, any number of prominent writers, historians, and theologians have championed this “relativist” view. For instance, John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, wonders,
How come we keep on asking the same question, [about violence in Islam,] and don’t ask the same question about Christianity and Judaism? Jews and Christians have engaged in acts of violence. All of us have the transcendent and the dark side. … We have our own theology of hate. In mainstream Christianity and Judaism, we tend to be intolerant; we adhere to an exclusivist theology, of us versus them.[2]
An article by Pennsylvania State University humanities professor Philip Jenkins, “Dark Passages,” delineates this position most fully. It aspires to show that the Bible is more violent than the Qur’an:
[I]n terms of ordering violence and bloodshed, any simplistic claim about the superiority of the Bible to the Koran would be wildly wrong. In fact, the Bible overflows with “texts of terror,” to borrow a phrase coined by the American theologian Phyllis Trible. The Bible contains far more verses praising or urging bloodshed than does the Koran, and biblical violence is often far more extreme, and marked by more indiscriminate savagery. … If the founding text shapes the whole religion, then Judaism and Christianity deserve the utmost condemnation as religions of savagery.[3]
Several anecdotes from the Bible as well as from Judeo-Christian history illustrate Jenkins’ point, but two in particular-one supposedly representative of Judaism, the other of Christianity-are regularly mentioned and therefore deserve closer examination.
The military conquest of the land of Canaan by the Hebrews in about 1200 B.C.E. is often characterized as “genocide” and has all but become emblematic of biblical violence and intolerance. God told Moses:
But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord 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 the Lord 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 the Lord your God.[4]
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 the Lord, God of Israel had commanded.[5]
As for Christianity, since it is impossible to find New Testament verses inciting violence, those who espouse the view that Christianity is as violent as Islam rely on historical events such as the Crusader wars waged by European Christians between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The Crusades were in fact violent and led to atrocities by the modern world’s standards under the banner of the cross and in the name of Christianity. After breaching the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, for example, the Crusaders reportedly slaughtered almost every 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.”[6]
In light of the above, as Armstrong, Esposito, Jenkins, and others argue, why should Jews and Christians point to the Qur’an as evidence of Islam’s violence while ignoring their own scriptures and history? Bible versus Qur’an
The answer lies in the fact that such observations confuse history and theology by conflating the temporal actions of men with what are understood to be the immutable words of God. The fundamental error is that Judeo-Christian history-which is violent-is being conflated with Islamic theology-which commands violence. Of course, the three major monotheistic religions have all had their share of violence and intolerance towards the “other.” Whether this violence is ordained by God or whether warlike men merely wished it thus is the key question.
Old Testament violence is an interesting case in point. God 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. In short, biblical accounts of violence are descriptive, not prescriptive.
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 and intolerance have become standardized in Islamic law and apply at all times. Thus, while the violence found in the Qur’an has a historical context, its ultimate significance is theological. Consider the following Qur’anic verses, better known as the “sword-verses”:
Then, when the sacred months are drawn away, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way.[7]
Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day, and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden - such men as practise not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book - until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled.[8]
As with Old Testament verses where God commanded the Hebrews to attack and slay their neighbors, the sword-verses also have a historical context. God first issued these commandments after the Muslims under Muhammad’s leadership had grown sufficiently strong 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” (i.e., Jews and Christians) and the “idolators” (i.e., Hindus, Buddhists, animists, etc.) and, in fact, set off the Islamic conquests, which changed the face of the world forever. Based on Qur’an 9:5, for instance, Islamic law mandates that idolators and polytheists must either convert to Islam or be killed; simultaneously, Qur’an 9:29 is the primary source of Islam’s well-known discriminatory practices against conquered Christians and Jews living under Islamic suzerainty.
In fact, based on the sword-verses as well as countless other Qur’anic verses and oral traditions attributed to Muhammad, Islam’s learned officials, sheikhs, muftis, and imams throughout the ages have all reached 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. Indeed, 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 Qur’an’s earlier and more tolerant verses, such as “no compulsion is there in religion.”[9] Famous Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) admired 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 Israelites 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.[10]
Modern authorities agree. The Encyclopaedia of Islam’s entry for “jihad” by Emile Tyan states that the “spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare to spread Islam] can be eliminated.” Iraqi jurist Majid Khaduri (1909-2007), after defining jihad as warfare, writes that “jihad … is regarded by all jurists, with almost no exception, as a collective obligation of the whole Muslim community.”[11] And, of course, Muslim legal manuals written in Arabic are even more explicit.[12] Qur’anic Language
When the Qur’an’s violent verses are juxtaposed with their Old Testament counterparts, they are especially distinct for using language that transcends time and space, inciting believers to attack and slay nonbelievers today no less than yesterday. God 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 God give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their Jewish descendants, to fight and kill gentiles. On the other hand, though Islam’s original enemies were, like Judaism’s, historical (e.g., Christian Byzantines and Zoroastrian Persians), the Qur’an rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book-”until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled”[13] and to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them.”[14]
The two Arabic 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 humbled” (especially in the Americas, Europe, and Israel) and “idolators” 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 persecution and the religion is God’s entirely. [Emphasis added.]“[15] Also, in a well-attested tradition that appears in the hadith collections, Muhammad proclaims:
I have been commanded to wage war against mankind until they testify that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God; 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. [Emphasis added.][16]
This linguistic aspect is crucial to understanding scriptural exegeses regarding violence. Again, it bears repeating that neither Jewish nor Christian scriptures-the Old and New Testaments, respectively-employ such perpetual, open-ended commandments. Despite all this, Jenkins laments that
Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions … all are in the Bible, and occur with a far greater frequency than in the Qur’an. At every stage, we can argue what the passages in question mean, and certainly whether they should have any relevance for later ages. But the fact remains that the words are there, and their inclusion in the scripture means that they are, literally, canonized, no less than in the Muslim scripture.[17]
One wonders what Jenkins has in mind by the word “canonized.” If by canonized he means that such verses are considered part of the canon of Judeo-Christian scripture, he is absolutely correct; conversely, if by canonized he means or is trying to connote that these verses have been implemented in the Judeo-Christian Weltanschauung, he is absolutely wrong.
Yet one need not rely on purely exegetical and philological arguments; both history and current events give the lie to Jenkins’s relativism. Whereas first-century Christianity spread via the blood of martyrs, first-century Islam spread through violent conquest and bloodshed. Indeed, from day one to the present-whenever it could-Islam spread through conquest, as evinced by the fact that the majority of what is now known as the Islamic world, or dar al-Islam, was conquered by the sword of Islam. This is a historic fact, attested to by the most authoritative Islamic historians. Even the Arabian peninsula, the “home” of Islam, was subdued by great force and bloodshed, as evidenced by the Ridda wars following Muhammad’s death when tens of thousands of Arabs were put to the sword by the first caliph Abu Bakr for abandoning Islam. Muhammad’s Role
Moreover, concerning the current default position which purports to explain away Islamic violence-that the latter is a product of Muslim frustration vis-à-vis political or economic oppression-one must ask: What about all the oppressed Christians and Jews, not to mention Hindus and Buddhists, of the world today? Where is their religiously-garbed violence? The fact remains: Even though the Islamic world has the lion’s share of dramatic headlines-of violence, terrorism, suicide-attacks, decapitations-it is certainly not the only region in the world suffering under both internal and external pressures.
For instance, even though practically all of sub-Saharan Africa is currently riddled with political corruption, oppression and poverty, when it comes to violence, terrorism, and sheer chaos, Somalia-which also happens to be the only sub-Saharan country that is entirely Muslim-leads the pack. Moreover, those most responsible for Somali violence and the enforcement of intolerant, draconian, legal measures-the members of the jihadi group Al-Shabab (the youth)-articulate and justify all their actions through an Islamist paradigm.
In Sudan, too, a jihadi-genocide against the Christian and polytheistic peoples is currently being waged by Khartoum’s Islamist government and has left nearly a million “infidels” and “apostates” dead. That the Organization of Islamic Conference has come to the defense of Sudanese president Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, is further telling of the Islamic body’s approval of violence toward both non-Muslims and those deemed not Muslim enough.
Latin American and non-Muslim Asian countries also have their fair share of oppressive, authoritarian regimes, poverty, and all the rest that the Muslim world suffers. Yet, unlike the near daily headlines emanating from the Islamic world, there are no records of practicing Christians, Buddhists, or Hindus crashing explosives-laden vehicles into the buildings of oppressive (e.g., Cuban or Chinese communist) regimes, all the while waving their scriptures in hand and screaming, “Jesus [or Buddha or Vishnu] is great.” Why?
There is one final aspect that is often overlooked-either from ignorance or disingenuousness-by those who insist that violence and intolerance is equivalent across the board for all religions. Aside from the divine words of the Qur’an, 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 had a good example in God’s Messenger.”[18] And Muhammad’s pattern of conduct toward non-Muslims is quite explicit.
Sarcastically arguing against the concept of moderate Islam, for example, terrorist Osama bin Laden, who enjoys half the Arab-Islamic world’s support per an Al-Jazeera poll,[19] portrays the Prophet’s sunna thusly:
“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.[20]
In fact, based on both the Qur’an and Muhammad’s sunna, pillaging and plundering infidels, enslaving their children, and placing their women in concubinage is well founded.[21] And the concept of sunna-which is what 90 percent of the billion-plus Muslims, the Sunnis, are named after-essentially asserts that anything performed or approved by Muhammad, humanity’s most perfect example, is applicable for Muslims today no less than yesterday. This, of course, does not mean that Muslims in mass live only to plunder and rape.
But it does mean that persons 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, justified 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 Ta’if in 630 C.E.-townspeople had refused to submit-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 [women and children] are from among them [infidels].”[22] Jewish and Christian Ways
Though law-centric and possibly legalistic, Judaism has no such equivalent to the Sunna; the words and deeds of the patriarchs, though described in the Old Testament, never went on to prescribe 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 understood as historical acts perpetrated by fallible men who were more often than not punished by God for their less than ideal behavior.
As for Christianity, much of the Old Testament law was abrogated or fulfilled-depending on one’s perspective-by Jesus. “Eye for an eye” gave way to “turn the other cheek.” Totally loving God and one’s neighbor became supreme law.[23] Furthermore, Jesus’ sunna-as in “What would Jesus do?”-is characterized by passivity and altruism. The New Testament contains absolutely no exhortations to violence.
Still, there are those who attempt to portray Jesus as having a similarly militant ethos as Muhammad by quoting the verse where the former-who “spoke to the multitudes in parables and without a parable spoke not”[24]-said, “I come not to bring peace but a sword.”[25] But based on the context of this statement, it is clear that Jesus was not commanding violence against non-Christians but rather predicting that strife will exist between Christians 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 too often they still do in the Muslim world. [26]
Others point to the violence predicted in the Book of Revelation while, again, failing to discern that the entire account is descriptive-not to mention clearly symbolic-and thus hardly prescriptive for Christians. At any rate, how can one conscionably compare this handful of New Testament verses that metaphorically mention the word “sword” to the literally hundreds of Qur’anic injunctions and statements by Muhammad that clearly command Muslims to take up a very real sword against non-Muslims?
Undeterred, Jenkins bemoans the fact that, in the New Testament, Jews “plan to stone Jesus, they plot to kill him; in turn, Jesus calls them liars, children of the Devil.”[27] It still remains to be seen if being called “children of the Devil” is more offensive than being referred to as the descendents of apes and pigs-the Qur’an’s appellation for Jews.[28] Name calling aside, however, what matters here is that, whereas the New Testament does not command Christians to treat Jews as “children of the Devil,” based on the Qur’an, primarily 9:29, Islamic law obligates Muslims to subjugate Jews, indeed, all non-Muslims.
Does this mean that no self-professed Christian can be anti-Semitic? Of course not. But it does mean that Christian anti-Semites are living oxymorons-for the simple reason that textually and theologically, Christianity, far from teaching hatred or animosity, unambiguously stresses love and forgiveness. Whether or not all Christians follow such mandates is hardly the point; just as whether or not all Muslims uphold the obligation of jihad is hardly the point. The only question is, what do the religions command?
John Esposito is therefore right to assert that “Jews and Christians have engaged in acts of violence.” He is wrong, however, to add, “We [Christians] have our own theology of hate.” Nothing in the New Testament teaches hate-certainly nothing to compare with Qur’anic injunctions such as: “We [Muslims] disbelieve in you [non-Muslims], and between us and you enmity has shown itself, and hatred for ever until you believe in God alone.”[29] Reassessing the Crusades
And it is from here that one can best appreciate the historic Crusades-events that have been thoroughly distorted by Islam’s many influential apologists. Karen Armstrong, for instance, has practically made a career for herself by misrepresenting the Crusades, writing, for example, that “the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.”[30] That a former nun rabidly condemns the Crusades vis-à-vis anything Islam has done makes her critique all the more marketable. Statements such as this ignore the fact that from the beginnings of Islam, more than 400 years before the Crusades, Christians have noted that Islam was spread by the sword.[31] Indeed, authoritative Muslim historians writing centuries before the Crusades, such as Ahmad Ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri (d. 892) and Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (838-923), make it clear that Islam was spread by the sword.
The fact remains: The Crusades were a counterattack on Islam-not an unprovoked assault as Armstrong and other revisionist historians portray. Eminent historian Bernard Lewis puts it well,
Even the Christian crusade, often compared with the Muslim jihad, was itself a delayed and limited response to the jihad and in part also an imitation. But unlike the jihad, it was concerned primarily with the defense or reconquest of threatened or lost Christian territory. It was, with few exceptions, limited to the successful wars for the recovery of southwest Europe, and the unsuccessful wars to recover the Holy Land and to halt the Ottoman advance in the Balkans. The Muslim jihad, in contrast, was perceived as unlimited, as a religious obligation that would continue until all the world had either adopted the Muslim faith or submitted to Muslim rule. … The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic law.[32]
Moreover, Muslim invasions and atrocities against Christians were on the rise in the decades before the launch of the Crusades in 1096. The Fatimid caliph Abu ‘Ali Mansur Tariqu’l-Hakim (r. 996-1021) 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 even more oppressive than usual decrees against Christians and Jews. Then, in 1071, the Seljuk Turks crushed the Byzantines in the pivotal battle of Manzikert and, in effect, conquered a major chunk of Byzantine Anatolia presaging the way for the eventual capture of Constantinople centuries later.
It was against this backdrop that Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) 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.[33]
Even though Urban II’s description is historically accurate, the fact remains: However one interprets these wars-as offensive or defensive, just or unjust-it is evident that they were not based on the example 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.”[34] Indeed, it took centuries of theological debate, from Augustine to Aquinas, to rationalize defensive war-articulated as “just war.” Thus, it would seem that if anyone, it is the Crusaders-not the jihadists-who have been less than faithful to their scriptures (from a literal standpoint); or put conversely, it is the jihadists-not the Crusaders-who have faithfully fulfilled their scriptures (also from a literal stand point). Moreover, like the violent accounts of the Old Testament, the Crusades are historic in nature and not manifestations of any deeper scriptural truths.
In fact, far from suggesting anything intrinsic to Christianity, the Crusades ironically better help 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 often predisposed to violence. 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 commanded by the Deity to attack, kill, and plunder nonbelievers?
—-Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum and author of The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
[1] Andrea Bistrich, “Discovering the common grounds of world religions,” interview with Karen Armstrong, Share International, Sept. 2007, pp. 19-22.
[2] C-SPAN2, June 5, 2004.
[3] Philip Jenkins, “Dark Passages,” The Boston Globe, Mar. 8, 2009.
[4] Deut. 20:16-18.
[5] Josh. 10:40.
[6] “The Fall of Jerusalem,” Gesta Danorum, accessed Apr. 2, 2009.
[7] Qur. 9:5. All translations of Qur’anic verses are drawn from A.J. Arberry, ed. The Koran Interpreted: A Translation (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
[8] Qur. 9:29.
[9] Qur. 2:256.
[10] Ibn Khaldun, The Muqudimmah: An Introduction to History, Franz Rosenthal, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1958,) vol. 1, p. 473.
[11] Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 60.
[12] See, for instance, Ahmed Mahmud Karima, Al-Jihad fi’l-Islam: Dirasa Fiqhiya Muqarina (Cairo: Al-Azhar University, 2003).
[13] Qur. 9:29.
[14] Qur. 9:5.
[15] Qur. 8:39.
[16] Ibn al-Hajjaj Muslim, Sahih Muslim, C9B1N31; Muhammad Ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari (Lahore: Kazi, 1979), B2N24.
[17] Jenkins, “Dark_Passages.”
[18] Qur. 33:21.
[19] “Al-Jazeera-Poll: 49% of Muslims Support Osama bin Laden,” Sept. 7-10, 2006, accessed Apr. 2, 2009.
[20] ‘Abd al-Rahim ‘Ali, Hilf al Irhab (Cairo: Markaz al-Mahrusa li ‘n-Nashr wa ‘l-Khidamat as-Sahafiya wa ‘l-Ma’lumat, 2004).
[21] For example, Qur. 4:24, 4:92, 8:69, 24:33, 33:50.
[22] Sahih Muslim, B19N4321; for English translation, see Raymond Ibrahim, The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 140. [23] Matt. 22:38-40.
[24] Matt. 13:34.
[25] Matt. 10:34.
[26] See, for instance, “Christian Persecution Info,” Christian Persecution Magazine, accessed Apr. 2, 2009.
[27] Jenkins, “Dark_Passages.”
[28] Qur. 2:62-65, 5:59-60, 7:166.
[29] Qur. 60:4.
[30] Bistrich, “Discovering the common grounds of world religions,” pp. 19-22; For a critique of Karen Armstrong’s work, see “Karen Armstrong,” in Andrew Holt, ed. Crusades-Encyclopedia, Apr. 2005, accessed Apr. 6, 2009.
[31] See, for example, the writings of Sophrinius, Jerusalem’s patriarch during the Muslim conquest of the Holy City, just years after the death of Muhammad, or the chronicles of Theophane the Confessor.
[32] Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 233-4.
[33] “Speech of Urban-Robert of Rheims,” in Edward Peters, ed., The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 27. [34] Matt. 5:44.

VirtueOnline - News - Theology, Research … - Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?

After listening to President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech — breathlessly anticipated by the sycophants who call themselves reporters — I believe the man needs to be educated about Islamofascism, terrorism, and religous radicalism. (And perhaps those mental giants in the news media could use an education as well.)
When the United States fought Nazi Germany during World War II, we were not fighting a war on blitzkriegs. When we declared war on Japan following their vicious sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, we were not fighting a war on militarism. Why do we continue to say we are at war against terrorism? When President George W. Bush rightly called terrorists “Islamofascists,” he was ridiculed, lambasted and vilified by the Democrats and their media lapdogs. So Bush never used the term again. In fact, he invited radical Islamic leaders to the White House in order to back away from his use of an accurate term.

To be sure, terrorism is an ambiguous term. I’ve heard some liberal-left newsman on a radio show say that Israel was engaged in “state terrorism” against the Lebanese people. All the Israelis wanted was for Hezbollah to stop lobbing rockets into Israel.
You have liberals within the US and Europe who call the United States a terrorist nation. How often have we heard this nugget of wisdom: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
However, when you say we are at war against Islamofascism or radical Islam or Muslim extremists, there is far less ambiguity and much more focus on whom the enemy is in this current war.
Yet, many political leaders — such as Sen. Chuck Schumer — who have no problem denigrating Christians on the floor of the US Senate, refuse to acknowledge the true enemy in this war.
Most of our political leaders are ignorant of Islam and the problems Muslims face when attempting to practice a cohesive religion. Islam is and always was an ambiguous religion. In order to understand how one group can argue that Islam is a religion of peace while another group commits atrocities in the name of Islam, one must return to the source of this religion which is diametrically opposed to liberal democracy.
The Koran is actually a very confusing book. It does not provide practitioners of Islam a clear and unambiguous roadmap to heaven. In fact, Arabic scholars have explained that the Koran is divided into two contradictory — opposing — viewpoints of how Muslims should interact with one another as well as non-believers. In fact, there are only two points on which all Muslims agree: one must accept Allah and Allah’s Trinity (Din, Dunya, Dwala); and Mohammad is the last and foremost prophet of God.
Scholars divide the Koran as written by Muhammad into the Mecca period from 610 to 622; and the Medina period from 622 to 632. Mecca is best described as a period of tolerance, even pluralism. It was a belief in “live and let live.” (”You shall have your religion and I shall have mine.”)
However, the Medina period can be characterized as a religion delving into politics, power and armed conflict in the name of Allah. (”And kill them wherever you find them.”)
So when we hear Islamic leaders discuss their beliefs, we come away as confused as the Muslims themselves. The fact is that some may be referring to Mecca, some may be referring to Medina, and some may be referring to both the Mecca and Medina. Besides the confusion caused by the Koran, add other components of Islam such as Sunna, Hadith and Rivya, and it’s no wonder that Koranic scholars are at odds with one another.
In short, Islam is at once a religion and an ideology. It’s totalitarian ideology is comparable to Nazism, Communism and Fascism. Islamic leaders in the United States tell politicians that Islam is a religion of peace and give them some verses from the Koran and they relay this to the American people. As with most politically correct jargon, people are encouraged to deny the evidence of their own senses.
Practitioners of Islam are today involved in conflagrations throughout the world. Here are a few violent conflicts occurring today:
* The continued battle in Iraq has morphed from the deposing of a dictator into civil unrest by opposing sects of Islam, as well as Al-Qaeda terrorists who believe in an Islamic mission of world domination.
* In Afghanistan, the remnants of the radical Islamic groups the Taliban and Al-Qaeda continue to wreak havoc in that fledgling democracy.
* In Somalia, Islamists have all but overthrown a newly formed government. These Islamists have been responsible for not only violence, but also the starvation of the Somali people. The unrest is growing, with neighboring Ethiopia becoming involved in the armed conflict.
* In India, a predominately Hindu nation, Islamists have conducted terrorist attacks and Kashmir remains a region of violent contention by Islamic and Hindu residents.
* Terrorist attacks have occurred in Spain and Europe. The armed conflict occurring in Russia is being perpetuated by Islamists. In one attack, these Muslim terrorist invaded a school and brutally murdered children.
Add the Islamic terrorist operations in the Philippines, Indonesia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., and it is clear to most observers that there exists an asymmetric war being waged by those whose religion-ideology favors Medina over Mecca.
There is nothing new with large scale violence perpetrated by Muslims. At the end of the 19th Century, a man arose who claimed he was the Mahdi (The Guided One) — the one promised by Mohammad — who would unite the Islamic world either peacefully or through violence and then conquer the world for Allah’s paradise.
This Mahdi created a massive army of followers who decided on the way to worshiping in Damascus — and while there, occupying Syria — they would overthrow the governments of the Sudan, Egypt and other nations. When the Mahdi wiped out a modern army in the desert and then brutally invaded the Sudanese city of Khartoum, the British found it necessary to send a large force to stop him and his murderous Dervish.
In short, it’s safe to say that Islamism is a political religion or a religious ideology. So political correctness be damned. We at war with radical Islamists, or a better term would be a war on Islamofascism.
Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org).  In addition, he’s the former blog editor for the House Conservatives Fund’s weblog.  Recently, the editors at Examiner.com appointed him as their Law Enforcement Examiner. Kouri also serves as political advisor for Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Michael Moriarty.
He’s former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations.  He’s also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country.   Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He’s a news writer for NewswithViews.com and News Analyst for Borderfire Report.net.  He’s also a columnist for AmericanDailyReview.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he’s syndicated by AXcessNews.Com.   He’s appeared as on-air commentator for over 300 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc.
We Invite You To Visit Jim Kouri’s Website

Islamic Terrorism: A brief history lesson for President Barack Obama | Jim Kouri

The most intriguing moment in President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world Thursday came about two-thirds of the way through, when he won a round of applause from his Cairo audience simply for uttering this line: “The fourth issue that I will address is democracy.”

While most of President Obama’s Cairo speech was directed at the average Muslim citizen, his message on democracy targeted Islam leaders. But are there prominent leaders who will ally themselves with the president? Capital Journal columnist Jerry Seib discusses.

That sentence, and the cheers it produced, said two important things. First, the words told skeptics that Mr. Obama intends to continue George W. Bush’s crusade for democracy and political reform as powerful tools in fighting Islamic extremism.

And second, the audience reaction told Islamic leaders, especially those in the Middle East, that they ignore those cheers for democracy at their peril.

Now, the question that arises is simply this: Are there any Islamic leaders with the courage to heed the call? Is there a Middle Eastern leader willing to test the proposition that freedom is ultimately a better weapon than repression in combating radicalism and terrorism?

Sadly, the answer probably is no, at least for now. If there is a Nelson Mandela among the Islamic world’s leaders, he hasn’t emerged. And that may be the biggest problem Mr. Obama faces in trying to turn his finely crafted address into the “new beginning” he called for.

European Pressphoto Agency

President Barack Obama visits the Great Pyramids of Egypt on Thursday.

In many ways, the Obama call for democracy and freedom was the most sensitive and important element of his 55-minute address, probably the most closely scrutinized set of remarks a president has ever delivered abroad. He covered a lot of other ground, of course. He was tough on Israel, calling bluntly for it to stop building settlements on the West Bank, and putting Palestinians’ aspirations for a state on a rhetorical par with those of Israelis. That will cause some tension next time he sees Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

There also will be speculation about why he avoided using the words “terrorism” and “terrorists” in describing extremist violence. He probably did so because those terms have become loaded in the Middle East, where one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.

But most of all, the speech was meant to create a bond between an American president with a unique link to Islam, and the average listeners in the streets of Islamic lands.

“I’m a Christian, but my father came from generations of Muslims,” Mr. Obama said. I’ve heard the Islamic calls to prayer while living in Indonesia. I know something of the Islamic world, he said. If the audience were American, he would have used one of his favorite lines: “I get it.”

 

 

Associated Press

Mr. Obama and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak shake hands during their meeting at the Qubba Palace.

Having tried to establish that bond, he said, in effect: Surely we can agree to reject the killing of innocent civilians, the demonization of Jews, the subjugation of women, and the myth that Islam and modernity are incompatible.

But such words matter more if they change not just Islamic minds, but Islamic regimes. And on that point, the president’s words clearly were directed not to the Islamic street, but to Islamic palaces.

“You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion,” he told Islamic leaders. “You must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party.”

But is there any Islamic leader capable of rising up to embrace this vision? History shows big changes are easier when presidents have world-class foreign partners: Franklin Roosevelt had Winston Churchill, Jimmy Carter had Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, Ronald Reagan had Mikhail Gorbachev.

Is there such a partner now, one willing to bet on democracy and peaceful transfer of power? Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak should be, but he’s proved too afraid of real democracy. Saudi King Abdullah is surprisingly progressive, but works within a rigid monarchy. Jordan’s King Abdullah has admirable impulses, but his land is small and weak.

President Obama faces a question as well. Will he continue to call for democracy, or, as have so many of his predecessors, decide over time that it’s easier to work with the monarchs and dictators we know than the democrats we don’t? The tests ahead, it seems, are on both sides of the Western/Islamic divide.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com

Messages to the Street — and Rulers - WSJ.com

Chewing the Fat in Mecca, Medina, Damascus…

Books

RAGUI ASSAAD

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East
By Neil MacFarquhar
Public Affairs, 359 pages, $26.95.

Having seen more than enough violence during a decade-long stint as a reporter in the Middle East, Neil MacFarquhar branched out from his beat as Cairo Bureau Chief at The New York Times to write a book about the warmer, fuzzier, more moderate aspects of the Middle East.

Instead of following a mainstream media intent on focusing laser beams on the bloodshed and destruction permeating the region, he wanted to tell other, more hopeful stories: to inject them into public discourse. MacFarquhar felt the world needed to know that there are many “ordinary Arabs who are aware that their nations are out of step with the rest of the world, that they are fed up with both the incompetence of their rulers and the unpredictable quality of their lives. They crave normalcy but despair at ever having the wherewithal to attain it in the face of an oppression that brings at least jail terms and even death to anyone trying to organize dissenters.”

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A quick glance at MacFarquhar’s biography offers some clues as to what may have drawn him to this endeavor. Rugged, handsome and 6 foot 3, he never had a solid sense of any single place as home. He spent his childhood years living in a walled-off compound in Libya, where his father worked as an engineer for Esso. While still a teenager, he was sent away to the best boarding schools in the United States before eventually earning his degree in international political economy from Stanford University. His worldview seems to have developed like President Obama’s: exposure from a young age to people from different religions and cultures opened up his mind to different states of being and thinking. Becoming an international reporter for the Times allowed him to pursue his inquiries at the highest level.

Appearing throughout this unusually compelling book are lengthy interviews with a wide variety of clerics, high-ranking members of various royal families, intellectuals and average citizens looking for signs of progressive change, but the overwhelming picture he paints is toxic. He travels throughout Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, finding countries ruled by royal families flush with money but remain embedded in unholy unions with fundamentalist clerics who control the lives of millions. There is no freedom of the press or right to organize or equal rights for women, and education options are severely limited or nonexistent. Different Islamic factions espouse hatred and mistrust of one another as each lays claim to an exclusive stronghold on Islamic truth.

Perhaps most unsettling is the animosity toward Westerners that infiltrates all levels of society. The author records his own bewilderment when, at a dinner party in Saudi Arabia, a college professor of Islamic law turned to him unprovoked and said in exasperation, “Well, of course I hate you because you are a Christian, but that doesn’t mean I want to kill you.”

At another event he attended, a 2004 seminar in Cairo called “Islam and Reform,” led by a group of moderate Muslims, crowds began to gather and shout at the panelists: “You are just agents for America. What kind of Islam are you talking about? Are there any Islamic scholars here? Where are they? You are Jews! You are wrecking Islam and rotting the minds of the young.”

With the obstinacy of a psychotherapy patient denying what he himself has revealed, MacFarquhar keeps looking for moderate voices. He finds some solace in the unusually brazen written work of Saudi Prince Bandar, who has admitted that the problems in Saudi Arabia have “nothing to do with America or Israel or the Christians or the Jews…. So let us stop blaming others while the problem comes from us.”

Even Bill Maher of HBO’s “Real Time” seemed to hit a more genuine, although politically incorrect, note when he said recently to a Muslim guest on his television show: “Please don’t tell me that we’re all people and we’re all the same and we’re all equally bigoted. I mean, excuse me, in America, yes, we do have our problems, and you know the Catholics are as backwards as it gets. The debate on women is whether they should be priests. In the Muslim world, the debate is should we stone them to death because they talk to a man who’s not their husband. Okay, civilizations are not equal.”

Neil MacFarquhar is a gifted writer and a natural storyteller and has used his unprecedented access to illustrate for us a vivid rendering of the Middle East in all its complexity, congestion and paranoia. But he fails to integrate his own findings into his analysis, and this makes the reader wary.

Most of us accept that the media has sometimes been guilty of portraying all Muslims as violent and barbaric, and this most certainly is a gross distortion. Yet, the vitriolic threads permeating the societies that MacFarquhar describes are deeply disturbing. In particular, with regard to antisemitism, the author remains peculiarly and uncomfortably silent, never once mentioning throughout his entire narrative the corrosive effect this has had on the entire region and its people. This oversight seems unforgivable and makes the reader wonder whether MacFarquhar’s attachment to his own preset agenda may have distorted his otherwise compelling book.

Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist for The Jerusalem Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.

Chewing the Fat in Mecca, Medina, Damascus… – Forward.com