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'We Are What We Do'
ISNA's new president Ingrid Mattson says American Muslims' 'special obligations' are as important now as when 9/11 occurred.

Interview by Dilshad D. Ali
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/198/story_19898.html

When the Islamic Society of Northern American (ISNA) elected Ingrid Mattson, the director of the Islamic chaplaincy program at the Hartford Seminary and vice president of ISNA, as its president last week, Muslims and non-Muslims took note. Mattson is the first female to head the organization, which is the largest, most inclusive Muslim group in North America, with a sizeable political and social reach.

Mattson takes ISNA’s helm at a challenging time when American Muslims are struggling to promote their religion, encourage interfaith dialogue, create standards for their community, and separate themselves from the views of extremists. Mattson spoke with Beliefnet’s Islam editor Dilshad D. Ali about her goals for ISNA, why women’s rights isn’t her primary platform, and the new obligation American Muslims have in the fight against terrorism.

What does your election mean for the women in Muslim leadership roles? Does it have an impact on religious or spiritual leadership as well?

Certainly, it’s both things. First of all, women have been involved on the board of ISNA for many years. In fact, women were founding members of the Muslim Students Association--MSA national--more than 40 years ago. The presidency is looked at by many people as a form of religious leadership. And to that extent I do believe it’s a significant step for the Muslim community to choose a woman as a leader of this organization.

ISNA Secretary-General Sayyid Saeed was quick to say that you will lead “ritual worship” for women–and not lead prayer. What does that mean?

It means salat, the five daily prayers and the Jumaa (Friday) prayer--the congregational prayer. It doesn’t mean invocations or supplications or du’a, which are all other forms of prayer.

So you’ll lead prayer for women, but not for mixed gender groups?

That’s correct, and that’s what I’ve always done.

A lot of women are seeing this election as a victory for Muslim feminism. What does the term “Muslim feminism” mean to you?

Feminism--the idea that women have rights, that women and men should exert themselves to ensure that women have a meaningful way to achieve their rights--is a good concept. But it shouldn’t be a defining worldview. My agenda is not a narrow one of only looking at the interests of women. I’m looking at the interests of our whole community. We live in a world where we have to be concerned if anyone is suffering injustice. Muslim women shouldn’t be parochial in the sense of only being concerned about women’s issues.

One of the popular misconceptions about Islam is that women are seen as lesser figures, that they don’t have rights.

This perception that women in Islam are oppressed is based both on misinformation as well as am amplification of certain unfortunate tendencies in some parts of the Muslim world. It’s true that people have seen some Muslim authorities using Islam as a justification for the oppression or suppression of women. That’s a reality, we can’t deny it. But we have to balance those incidents with what’s going on in the rest of the Muslim world, in which most women are participating in their societies. We’ve seen that within recent times four Muslim-majority nations have had female heads of state. In most countries that I’ve traveled to, Muslim women are involved in all aspects of society.

Some conservative pundits see ISNA as a shield for shady practices, and as an organization that harbors radical thinking. What would you say to these critics?

I would say they have to support their views with evidence and not simply resort to vague conspiracy theories or general, unsubstantiated accusations. We are what we do. We’re an umbrella organization that’s inclusive of Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufi and provides a broad and open platform for all North American Muslims. And our goal is to bring the diversity of the Muslim community together so that we can get to know each other as the Qur’an compels us to. We want to offer the Muslim community the opportunity to know the greater American society, especially faith groups--to come to understand our Christian and Jewish neighbors and others and find ways that we can come together to do something good for this society.

What are your goals for ISNA? Where do you want to take the organization?

My major concern is institution-building and to emphasize the need for standards in our community. There is no ordination in Islam, no hierarchical church that determines what all communities should do. We don’t want to be that, but at the same time we can help the community develop some standards for religious leaders and our religious community. We can raise the level of professionalism in our communities and harness the energy and goodwill that is in our congregation.

Unfortunately, many of our communities are not functioning in a really dynamic and vital fashion. So we need to implement more training, provide educational opportunities for those running these institutions, and give models of successful communities that engage both their congregants and the broader community.



How do the standards you speak of differ from the fatwas that many imams, sheikhs, and Islamic organizations issue?

What I’m speaking about are skills of the religious leaders themselves. For example, our imams, our chaplains, and community leaders are called upon to mediate domestic disputes. Do these religious leaders have the qualifications and the knowledge to provide this advice and counseling? What about public speaking? Do they have the skills to engage the congregation? What about the Islamic centers themselves? Do they know how to organize adult-education programs that are engaging, interesting, relevant, and informative? This is what I’m talking about, not forming legal opinions.

You wrote an essay for Beliefnet after 9/11 about American Muslims having a special obligation to condemn violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Five years later, have they lived up to that obligation?

I do believe that American Muslim communities have been good in this respect--have worked hard to write their opinions about terrorism, about extremism, about violence committed in the name of Islam. Unfortunately, those positions are not being heard by the general American public. Many Muslims engaging in public speaking find themselves in the frustrating position of being asked why Muslims do not condemn terrorism. Sometimes people are not hearing the message despite our best efforts.

That can be frustrating. I want to also make sure people understand that although American Muslims do have a responsibility to clarify their views on terrorism and violence done in the name of Islam, we don’t have control over these situations. We don’t have some sort of magic power over all Muslims in the world.

And at the same time it’s important that people understand that a justification for an action is not the same as the motivation or cause for an action. What I mean by that is that there may be Muslims around the world who claim that the actions they are taking are justified in Islam. But if we analyze the political context of that situation, we will see that in fact the cause of their actions is not a religious motivation, but it is a political reason. Because Islam is the dominant, normative discourse in their society, they will call upon Islam as a justification for their actions.

Have American Muslims successfully found ways to fight terrorism and also oppose the oppression of Muslims around the world?

I think we’re in a very difficult position in our time. Unfortunately, there are many groups that continue to try to use current conflicts to further political agendas that have nothing to do with fighting or preventing terrorism. And some of these groups are opposed to Islam and Muslims—ideologically and politically and are making it very difficult for Muslims to separate true Islam from extremism. These groups are encouraging the use of terms like “Islamic fascism” that simply confuse the issue further. So there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.

Many Muslims in this country say they have repeatedly denounced acts of violence, and that they’re working with FBI and government officials and doing dialogues to get their point across. Why aren’t they being heard?

Because the actions of American Muslims are not being televised. What’s being televised are bombings from Iraq and kidnappings from Gaza and so on. We live in a time in which what is shown on TV is thought to be reality. Not many people read alternative publications or even mainstream newspapers anymore. So although we may be doing all of these good actions, and some of them may be publicized here and there, it’s not brought to the attention of the mainstream American audience. That’s just the reality of media and the dissemination of information in our time.

What’s the next obligation for the American Muslim community?

We have to keep exemplifying the right way of living as Muslims. We should be working with international organizations that monitor human rights in all places, including those places where our own government is suspected of violating human rights. We should be as diligent in doing our duty as citizens of our country in making sure that our government does not violate its values and laws and international law.

It’s a difficult time that we live in, but we need to recommit to universal human rights, to true engagement and realize that there are lots of great people out there working for peace and justice. We need to publicize those efforts so that we can get some hope to our youth.

A few weeks ago, I was working with an American Jewish lawyer who took a case of a Muslim inmate who was being denied his religious rights. And to me, working as a partner with this lawyer on this case was really encouraging and reminded me of how much good there is in this country. We need to continue reaching out to those people from every segment of American society who are interested in furthering the dignity of human beings and the stewardship of this earth. This is our work. That’s the only way we can go forward into the future

The following story is an example of how fundamentalist attitudes and thinking distorts the perception of Islam as a faith that encourages the participation of women in society.

Mosque may be barred to women
Some women say they are already being kept away

Donna Abu-Nasr
The Associated Press


Friday, September 08, 2006

Officials are considering an unprecedented proposal to ban women from performing the five Muslim prayers in the immediate vicinity of the Grand Mosque, Islam's most sacred shrine in Mecca.

Officials are considering an unprecedented proposal to ban women from performing the five Muslim prayers in the immediate vicinity of Islam's most sacred shrine in Mecca. Some say women are already being kept away.

The issue has raised a storm of protest across the kingdom, with some women saying they fear the move is meant to restrict women's roles in Saudi society even further.

But the religious authorities behind the proposal insist its real purpose is to lessen the chronic problem of overcrowding, which has led to deadly riots during pilgrimages at Mecca in the past.

It was unclear why the step was being considered now, but officials say they have growing concerns about overcrowding, particularly at Mecca's Grand Mosque. The mosque contains the Kaaba, a large stone structure that Muslims around the world face during their daily prayers.

The chief of the King Fahd Institute for Hajj Research, which came up with the plan, told The Associated Press on Thursday the new restrictions are already in place. There have been word-of-mouth reports of women being asked to pray at new locations away from the white-marbled area surrounding the Kaaba in recent weeks.

But Sheik Youssef Khzeim, deputy chief of the Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs, a Saudi government organization in charge of implementing the proposal, denied the reports, saying the old arrangements that allow women to pray in the Kaaba's vicinity are still in effect. He said if any woman were asked to move to the back "it's only to maintain order.

"This is still a study and nothing has been implemented," Khzeim said.

Such discrepancies are not unusual in Saudi Arabia and could signal an attempt to introduce the controversial arrangements slowly.

Many Saudis say the proposal, released two weeks ago in the form of a study, violates the spirit of Islam.

"The prophet, who is the first leader of Muslims, didn't do it," said Mohsen al-Awajy, an Islamist lawyer and cleric. "Those who are proposing the change after him have to come up with legal justification for it."

Al-Awajy urged the Saudi government to put an end to "such a rigid and austere mind-set that could become the core of a violent trend in the future."

Prominent Saudi female writers have written angry editorials denouncing the plan as discriminatory and urging authorities not to adopt it.

Osama al-Barr, head of the hajj institute, said the fuss was unwarranted because the study was meant simply to find a solution to the problem of overcrowding at the Grand Mosque.

But historian Hatoon al-Fassi wondered why the study did not restrict men. Plus, she said, such a decision should be made by all the Muslim world, not simply by Saudi authorities.

© The Calgary Herald 2006

Islam and the West: How Great a Divide?
Monday, July 10, 2006
Washington, D.C.

On July 7, 2006, the Pew Global Attitudes Project released an international survey focusing on Muslim and Western perceptions of each other and on the Muslim experience in Europe. The poll surveyed more than 14,000 people in 13 nations: India, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Spain. A survey of Muslim populations in the four European countries was conducted in partnership with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

In a wide-ranging interview at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Amaney Jamal, assistant professor in the department of politics at Princeton University and a specialist in the study of Muslim public opinion, commented on the survey's findings and their implications. Jamal is also a senior advisor for a Pew Research Center project on a comprehensive study of the views and attitudes of Muslim Americans. The Forum is a partner in this year-long survey project, which will be completed by next summer.

In the interview, Jamal discusses, among other things, the negative perceptions Westerners and Muslims have of each other, the role of the media in perpetuating stereotypes and what the findings mean for U.S. foreign policy.

Featuring:
Amaney Jamal, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University

Interviewer:
Mark O'Keefe, Associate Director, Editorial, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life



Do the results of this survey, as you look at them, reveal a growing divide between the Islamic and Western worlds?

The results certainly reveal that there is a divide. Whether it's growing or not is not very clear, however, because we don't have very good data across time in all these countries. Where there is systematic data across time, we tend to see that attitudes have remained pretty constant.

Were there any survey results you found particularly encouraging in terms of bridging the divide?

Is it encouraging that we still have these decades-old stereotypes emanating both ways: the West versus the Muslim world, and the Muslim world versus the West? No, it is not encouraging at all. Actually, it's quite disappointing. It's more disappointing if you look at the fact that it is in the United States' strategic interest in the region to win the hearts and minds of people in the Muslim world. U.S. troops are on the ground in Iraq. Where there is a need for U.S. involvement and U.S. mediation of conflicts, such as the Arab-Israeli and Afghanistan conflict, there is a total loss of trust in the Muslim world of all things American or Western. This also hurts our ability to deal with issues and problems diplomatically because there is this huge tension.

Similarly, the Muslim world is not effectively communicating with the Western world. What we do see is that [Osama] bin Laden is communicating with the Western world or the president of Iran, [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is communicating with the Western world. What we don't see are the moderate Muslim voices communicating with the Western world.

On the topic of democracy and Islam, you do see some hope in the survey findings from Western Europe. Are you optimistic there?

What we see among the Western European Muslim population is great enthusiasm reflected in percentages of more than 75 percent and 80 percent of people who believe Islam and democracy are compatible. That's because they are living experience and proof of the compatibility of the two. They are maintaining a cultural, religious tradition, and also enjoying the freedoms of democracy.

What, in your view, is working and what isn't, to increase communication and dialogue between the Islamic world and the West?

I think what's not working, or what we're underestimating, is the influence and power of media, including satellite television, to circulate irresponsible statements made by public officials on both sides, the dehumanizing of Westerners in the eyes of Muslims and of Muslims in the eyes of Westerners.

The U.S. has acknowledged the problem and that's why it is funding an Arabic language satellite television network for the Middle East. But we're not doing much to combat the stereotypes that exist. Muslims want Westerners to think of them more respectfully, to think of them as equals. Westerners don't see Muslims as thinking similarly to them. When it comes down to it, humans think alike, but we have to listen to one another more carefully. That type of communication is missing.

What stereotypes are you seeing?

If we were to survey popular movies that have captured the interest of Muslims and Americans that come out of Hollywood, the pattern in those movies is often of a fundamentalist Muslim raging wildly for some lunatic reason.

The same pattern of portraying the Muslim “other” can be seen in the findings of the Pew survey. Again, Muslims are not seen as tolerant. They are seen as fanatics, not respecting democracy. And yet, if you deal with Muslims on a daily basis — and I don't say this because I'm Muslim — you see this is not the reality.

I'm also saddened by the fact that Muslims also tend to misunderstand what Westerners are all about: They see Westerners as arrogant, greedy and selfish — through the lens of colonialism.

The more erroneous and pervasive these stereotypes, the more justification it gives people to hold images of the other as less human, which ultimately leads to conflict. Once you dehumanize another people, it becomes easier to use a military option against those people.

You say that neither the Muslim world nor the West see the moderate middle in the other. What role is the U.S. media playing in perpetuating this problem?

If we examine what type of news is being broadcast from the U.S. to the Muslim world we are likely to see statements that come off as anti-Islamic, as implicating an entire religion. You are likely to get statements, however irresponsible, that there is this ongoing rift between Christianity and Islam.

How do you see Islamic media portraying the West?

As a society obsessed with sex, drugs and alcohol, a society that doesn't understand the larger meaning in life. And there is nothing further from the truth. When you know Americans and Westerners and you know about their values, they're very committed to many of the same values that Muslims take pride in holding and cherishing.

It's not that there is a cultural divide; it's that we've constructed this cultural divide. And what this survey report illustrates is that we've been all too successful in constructing this cultural divide, this constructed dichotomy of good and evil. Which side you are on determines who is called good and who is called evil.

The survey shows that Muslims in Muslim countries view the West as immoral. Is this an Islamic perception of Western culture gleaned from movies, TV and the Internet, or a perception of government policy, such as the Iraq war? Or is it a combination of factors?

I think it's certainly a combination. I think Muslims know the West through the type of shows and movies that are broadcast in the region. The type of movies that will sell are those that are either overtly violent or tend to be more sexual. That's unfortunate.

Muslims then think that American culture stands for alcoholism and relationships that are outside of the boundaries of marriage. Those are still big taboos in the Muslim world. So you're dealing with a very conservative, traditional society on these issues. And what they see from the West is basically the flaunting of these immoral acts in the media.

Muslims also hear news stories of teenage pregnancy and child molestation, and these stories are given increasingly more attention in the Muslim press than they are even here. In the minds of Muslims, you have this sad civilization in the West that is trying to dictate to the rest of the world how to live their lives. There is a strong conviction that the Western world does not have the moral foundation to be dictating to Muslims how to lead a decent life.

You have said that the West increasingly sees Osama bin Laden as the primary spokesperson for the Muslim world, but the survey shows bin Laden is losing credibility in the Muslim world.

Look at the last year of news coverage coming out of the Middle East. Who has been covered in Western media? Hamas spokespeople, the Iranian president; Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri and that little video of Abu Musab al Zarqawi when he was killed. What other speakers or images from the Muslim world have we seen? Have we seen intellectuals? Have we seen researchers? Have we seen thinkers? Have we seen ordinary people on the street?

As you point out, and as the data point out, support for bin Laden is falling in the Muslim world. Yet it is almost as if the Western media has still “elected” him as an evil icon. In the Arab Muslim world, where we tend to see the highest levels of anti-Westernism, bin Laden has never really enjoyed solid support. Yet he has become an icon to the West, and that is a great concern. It affects and angers Muslims, and it also frightens Westerners. It reifies the divisions.

The survey shows declining support for terrorism in some Muslim countries. For example, we see a significant drop in support for suicide bombings in Pakistan and Jordan between 2004 and 2005. What explains this drop and do you think this represents a lasting development?

I think it is a lasting development because the suicide bombers have used their operational tactics in these countries. We have seen the Jordan hotel bombings in November 2005. We have seen suicide bombers attack hotels in Morocco in 2003. We have seen the Bali attack in Indonesia. We have seen many suicide bombings happening in various mosques in other locales, such as Pakistan.

The Muslim world has come to understand that if you support suicide bombings, there may be attacks targeting your own people. In addition, they see the daily images emanating out of Iraq, the senseless loss of life due to suicide bombings in marketplaces, mosques and whatnot. These images are having a huge effect across the Muslim world. Muslim suicide bombers are killing other Muslims, and I think a lot of people are beginning to question what is going on in the lives of suicide bombers.

This is one of those topics that have to be dealt with and negotiated internally within Muslim societies. If you give Muslims this opportunity to learn through trial and error, we see that they are rational people who have rational interests and regard for human rights.

The survey shows there is no common view of Muslims in Europe. Great Britain, for example, seems to have a much more negative view of Muslims than France. What explains this difference from country to country?

I think each European country's view of its Muslim minority population is really contingent on the relationship the country has had with their Muslim communities and with the broader issue of immigration. For example, Britain has just emerged from the July 7, 2005, bombings.

France has a better relationship with the Muslim community because it has a better understanding and a more favorable opinion about immigration. Therefore, it will have a more favorable stance toward Muslim immigrants. Also, remember that France just emerged from the riot issue last fall, and there is a lot of questioning, self-doubt and almost guilty feelings about the Muslim population.

We're fast approaching the fifth anniversary of 9/11, yet a majority of the public in several Muslim countries, including 65 percent in Indonesia, does not believe Arabs were responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. What, in your view, explains this?

In parts of the Muslim world, there's a sense of victimization and the feeling that 9/11 epitomizes the culmination of Western imperialism. In their opinion, 9/11 set the stage for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for complete U.S. domination of the region. The U.S. needed a reason, a justification, to go into Iraq and 9/11 provided it. People from these regions believe this.

People wonder how 19 hijackers ordered and directed by a man in a cave can attack the largest nation, which also owns a vast military arsenal. They say it's simply impossible, that the U.S. wanted it to happen so it could set the stage for complete domination of the region.

They believe the U.S. doesn't care about people, doesn't care about their religion and that, in fact, implicating their religion serves U.S. interests in a grandiose fashion. That, I think, is what's more remarkable about this disbelief about 9/11. It's not that Muslims are in denial, or however you want to characterize it. It is that there's no trust. The only thing that they understand about the West is that the West is out to get them.

This transcript has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar.

The following article discusses the internal weaknesses of the Ummah some of which of tragic dimensions, which have lead to the misconceptions of the faith of Islam.

Identity Politics and the Ummah
By Sheila Akbar

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asked a shrewd question on April 23rd, 2006. Writing about the Muslim silence on the genocide in Darfur, he asked, "Isn't the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?"

Isn't it? Well, yes, of course it is. But the reason there haven't been any KFC-burnings or kidnappings over Darfur is complex. Mainly, it's because Muslims have to be told which conflicts "matter," and no Muslim leader has had the courage to say that this one matters a hell of a lot more than anything else Muslims have protested of late.

The conflict in Darfur is a long-standing political and economic one that has taken on racial dimensions: those being wiped out are ethnically African Muslims, and those committing these crimes against humanity are ethnically Arab Muslims, affiliated with the fundamentalist Islamic government of Sudan. So it's not just that thousands of Muslims are being murdered, starved to death, or forced to flee their homeland; the real kicker is that all of this is at the hands of Muslim brothers. Even more shockingly, the tragedy in Darfur includes a variety of what we would call religious hate-crimes. Human Rights Watch reports mosques being burned, Qur'ans desecrated, Imams (prayer-leaders) and worshippers killed during prayer.

Yet, we've witnessed fierce riots over pen-and-ink cartoons, and utter reticence on the mass-murders and hate crimes in Darfur. What is the root of the pick-and-choose outrage of the Muslim world? It starts with the concept of a single, united "ummah," the Arabic word for community. Raised in a Muslim household myself, I was taught to think of my fellow mosque-goers as brothers and sisters in faith. I was taught to look out for them, to help them in times of need, and treat them with the respect and love with which I'd treat my actual family. This principle is practiced on a global level: Muslims are called upon by their very faith to help their brethren in times of need, oppression, and turmoil.

Unfortunately, this strong sense of community is easily manipulated. The resulting mentality is often one of communalism – defined as "strong devotion to the interests of one's own minority or ethnic group rather than to those of society as a whole." Case in point: when Osama bin Laden rallies his mujahiddeen to protect Islam from the West, he preys upon their radical communalist tendencies.

Communalism is a particular form of identity politics, a more general term for a political agenda motivated by a pre-defined identity. These political models are not only found within Muslim populations, they exist in our own society, too. Even groups like the NAACP, Christian Coalition, or GLBTQ are identity-based political bodies, as their agenda is based on some facet of identity: race, religion, sexual-orientation or any of a whole host of demographic indicators. In fact, it is probably true that every political body buys into some form of identity politics.

But because identity can be defined by so many different components, identity politics can be easily exploited. For example, what happens when one aspect of an identity is at odds with another aspect? A gay Christian would most likely not be welcomed by Focus on the Family, even though he may espouse their political beliefs on everything but the issue of homosexuality. Likewise, an American Jew who criticizes Israeli policy is often labeled a traitor to his people. Here, identity is being prescribed and circumscribed: in order to be considered a valid member of the group, a person must accept an imposed definition of that identity while repressing his own interpretation of it. This internal conflict and the resulting self-doubt are extremely vulnerable to manipulation.

Such is the case within the Muslim world. Because of the Islamic notion of the ummah, communalism and identity politics are built into the religion. This, combined with low literacy rates, widespread poverty, a flood of anti-American propaganda, and a tribal tit-for-tat mentality that has plagued Islam since its inception, many Muslims fall prey to the hate-mongering of "religious authorities." These men (and they are always men) claim the authority to decide who is a Muslim or not, and label anyone who disagrees with them an unbeliever and a traitor. Most are not trained in Islamic history, philosophy, or law. And, as Islam has no institutionalized clerical system, none are ordained religious leaders. Yet these men enjoy popular authority simply because most Muslims don't know any better. Just as many Catholics do not understand Latin, many Muslims do not understand the Arabic of the Qur'an. Instead, they depend upon the loose translations and often warped interpretations of these religious demagogues.

It is these men who have fixed their own definition of a Muslim and expect others to conform to it; it is these men who have taught their followers not to think for themselves. It is these men who incite their followers to violence and hatred by filling their heads with stereotypes, half-truths, and "religious" fervor; it is these men who decide when or when not to riot. In the end, it is these men who have betrayed Islam.

So, why haven't Muslims spoken out against the Sudanese government? Are they afraid to criticize fellow Muslims, for fear they may be labeled traitors? Are they afraid to view themselves as critically as they view the West, for fear they may have to lower their standards? Are they afraid to denounce the racist motivations of the Arab Janjaweed militia, for fear they must address racism against non-Arabs, which is rampant in many Muslim communities (including those in America)? Or is it simply because no one has told them to speak out?

Maybe all of the above.

Incidentally, someone else was trying to get Muslims riled up about the situation in Darfur on that very same day: Osama bin Laden, trying to take control of the situation in his typical inflammatory and communalist manner, released a new video. In it, he urges Muslims to fight the "Zionist-Crusaders" in Darfur, portraying the West's involvement as a pretext for taking over the oil-rich lands of Sudan. He cites other conflicts involving the ummah (Bosnia, Chechnya , East Timor , Kashmir) precisely in order to provoke communalist reactions from Muslims around the world. He even criticizes the Sudanese government for not meeting his fundamentalist standards. He calls upon the ummah to protect Islam and Muslims in the region – not from each other – but from the West, ensuring that any peace-keeping effort mustered by the West will meet a jihadist resistance.

I hope Muslims will ask themselves whom that jihad would serve, their fellow Muslims in need, or Osama and his ilk. I hope Muslims will ask themselves whether protecting Islam should mean protecting lives, livelihoods, and mosques, or whether it should mean blowing up Western transports with RPG's and landmines (as Osama explicitly suggested). I hope Muslims will ask themselves by what authority does Osama demand that they commit murder in the name of Islam, and then, call them sinners if they don't support him.

But instead of merely hoping, how can we combat this type of communalist exploitation? The shameful silence of Muslim leadership, religious and political, has allowed despicable men and their actions to color the image of Islam itself. This cannot continue. For a start, the legitimate Islamic scholars must use the Qur'an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad to condemn the ideology and reactionary violence of figures like Osama and lesser "authorities" who abuse communalism.

Muslim heads of state must acknowledge and condemn the evils done by some Islamic regimes, and cease to give them political cover. (Unbelievably, the Arab League held its most recent conference in Sudan, effectively undersigning the murder of thousands of Muslims in Darfur.) Muslim political leaders must also appeal to Islam's core values of peace and respect, as well as take steps to provide an effective alternative to rioting.

Most importantly, Muslims must take their faith back into their own hands. It is indeed time for an Islamic Reformation (as scholar Reza Aslan has described), and the first step is for the ummah to stand up to those who bully it. Muslims must think for themselves, rebuff anyone who intimidates them into conforming to his vision of Islam, and never compromise their Islamic values, even in the heat of protest.

Meanwhile, the next time you wonder why Muslims seem to be in a perpetual uproar, remember that wherever widespread ignorance, complacency, and frustration are found, demagogues are sure to flourish. Just ask Rush Limbaugh.
Sheila Akbar is currently a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. She received her BA and MA from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.



This item is located at:
http://www.muslimwa keup.com/main/archives/2006/09/new_york_times.php

The following article discusses the changing perception of Islam within the political spectrum in the wake of recent events. It is quite alarming and I hope Muslims can correct it through projecting the correct vision of Islam.

October 11, 2006
Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to Center

By DAN BILEFSKY and IAN FISHER

BRUSSELS, Oct. 10 — Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values.

“You saw what happened with the pope,” said Patrick Gonman, 43, the owner of Raga, a funky wine bar in downtown Antwerp, 25 miles from here. “He said Islam is an aggressive religion. And the next day they kill a nun somewhere and make his point.

“Rationality is gone.”

Mr. Gonman is hardly an extremist. In fact, he organized a protest last week in which 20 bars and restaurants closed on the night when a far-right party with an anti-Muslim message held a rally nearby.

His worry is shared by centrists across Europe angry at terror attacks in the name of religion on a continent that has largely abandoned it, and disturbed that any criticism of Islam or Muslim immigration provokes threats of violence.

For years those who raised their voices were mostly on the far right. Now those normally seen as moderates — ordinary people as well as politicians — are asking whether once unquestioned values of tolerance and multiculturalism should have limits.

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain, a prominent Labor politician, seemed to sum up the moment when he wrote last week that he felt uncomfortable addressing women whose faces were covered with a veil. The veil, he wrote, is a “visible statement of separation and difference.”

When Pope Benedict XVI made the speech last month that included a quotation calling aspects of Islam “evil and inhuman,” it seemed to unleash such feelings. Muslims berated him for stigmatizing their culture, while non-Muslims applauded him for bravely speaking a hard truth.

The line between open criticism of another group or religion and bigotry can be a thin one, and many Muslims worry that it is being crossed more and more.

Whatever the motivations, “the reality is that views on both sides are becoming more extreme,” said Imam Wahid Pedersen, a prominent Dane who is a convert to Islam. “It has become politically correct to attack Islam, and this is making it hard for moderates on both sides to remain reasonable.” Mr. Pedersen fears that onetime moderates are baiting Muslims, the very people they say should integrate into Europe.

The worries about extremism are real. The Belgian far-right party, Vlaams Belang, took 20.5 percent of the vote in city elections last Sunday, five percentage points higher than in 2000. In Antwerp, its base, though, its performance improved barely, suggesting to some experts that its power might be peaking.

In Austria this month, right-wing parties also polled well, on a campaign promise that had rarely been made openly: that Austria should start to deport its immigrants. Vlaams Belang, too, has suggested “repatriation” for immigrants who do not made greater efforts to integrate.

The idea is unthinkable to mainstream leaders, but many Muslims still fear that the day — or at least a debate on the topic — may be a terror attack away.

“I think the time will come,” said Amir Shafe, 34, a Pakistani who earns a good living selling clothes at a market in Antwerp. He deplores terrorism and said he himself did not sense hostility in Belgium. But he said, “We are now thinking of going back to our country, before that time comes.”

Many experts note that there is a deep and troubled history between Islam and Europe, with the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire jostling each other for centuries and bloodily defining the boundaries of Christianity and Islam. A sense of guilt over Europe’s colonial past and then World War II, when intolerance exploded into mass murder, allowed a large migration to occur without any uncomfortable debates over the real differences between migrant and host.

Then the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jolted Europe into new awareness and worry.

The subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Moroccan stand as examples of the extreme. But many Europeans — even those who generally support immigration — have begun talking more bluntly about cultural differences, specifically about Muslims’ deep religious beliefs and social values, which are far more conservative than those of most Europeans on issues like women’s rights and homosexuality.

“A lot of people, progressive ones — we are not talking about nationalists or the extreme right — are saying, ‘Now we have this religion, it plays a role and it challenges our assumptions about what we learned in the 60’s and 70’s,’ ” said Joost Lagendik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Green Left Party, who is active on Muslim issues.

“So there is this fear,” he said, “that we are being transported back in a time machine where we have to explain to our immigrants that there is equality between men and women, and gays should be treated properly. Now there is the idea we have to do it again.”

Now Europeans are discussing the limits of tolerance, the right with increasing stridency and the left with trepidation.

Austrians in their recent election complained about public schools in Vienna being nearly full with Muslim students and blamed the successive governments that allowed it to happen.

Some Dutch Muslims have expressed support for insurgents in Iraq over Dutch peacekeepers there, on the theory that their prime loyalty is to a Muslim country under invasion.

So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege that the government last winter introduced a primer on those values for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing. The film does not explicitly mention Muslims, but its target audience is as clear as its message: embrace our culture or leave.

Perhaps most wrenching has been the issue of free speech and expression, and the growing fear that any criticism of Islam could provoke violence.

In France last month, a high school teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for writing an article calling the Prophet Muhammad “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass murderer of Jews and a polygamist.” In Germany a Mozart opera with a scene of Muhammad’s severed head was canceled because of security fears.

With each incident, mainstream leaders are speaking more plainly. “Self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in criticizing the opera’s cancellation. “It makes no sense to retreat.”

The backlash is revealing itself in other ways. Last month the British home secretary, John Reid, called on Muslim parents to keep a close watch on their children. “There’s no nice way of saying this,” he told a Muslim group in East London. “These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for suicide bombing, grooming them to kill themselves to murder others.”

Many Muslims say this new mood is suddenly imposing expectations that never existed before that Muslims be exactly like their European hosts.

Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese-born activist here in Belgium, said that for years Europeans had emphasized “citizenship and human rights,” the notion that Muslim immigrants had the responsibility to obey the law but could otherwise live with their traditions.

“Then someone comes and says it’s different than that,” said Mr. Jahjah, who opposes assimilation. “You have to dump your culture and religion. It’s a different deal now.”

Lianne Duinberke, 34, who works at a market in the racially mixed northern section of Antwerp, said: “Before I was very eager to tell people I was married to a Muslim. Now I hesitate.” She has been with her husband, a Tunisian, for 12 years, and they have three children.

Many Europeans, she said, have not been accepting of Muslims, especially since 9/11. On the other hand, she said, Muslims truly are different culturally: No amount of explanation about free speech could convince her husband that the publication of cartoons lampooning Muhammad in a Danish newspaper was in any way justified.

When asked if she was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Muslim immigration in Europe , she found it hard to answer. She finally gave a defeated smile. “I am trying to be optimistic,” she said. “But if you see the global problems before the people, then you really can’t be.”

Dan Bilefsky reported from Brussels, and Ian Fisher from Rome. Contributing were Sarah Lyall and Alan Cowell from London, Mark Landler from Frankfurt, Peter Kiefer from Rome, Renwick McLean from Madrid and Maia de la Baume from Paris.

October 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Looking for Islam’s Luthers
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Islam sometimes comes across the airwaves in the West as the faith of medieval fanatics wielding swords and wearing explosive vests. Western doubts are bolstered when the pope accuses Islam of violence and fundamentalists protest by killing a nun.

But the public images of Islam we sometimes see — the violence in the name of God, the intolerance, the obsession with the past — represent only some stones in a complex mosaic. And those images can’t explain why Islam appears to be in percentage terms the fastest-growing major religion in the world today.

Islam is on the rise for many of the same reasons evangelical Christianity is surging: they provide a firm moral code, spiritual reassurance and orderliness to people vexed by chaos and immorality around them, and they offer dignity to the poor.

While the thread of fundamentalism is real in Islam, so is the thread of reform. The 21st century may become to Islam what the 16th was to Christianity, for even in hard-line states like Iran you meet Martin Luthers who are pushing for an Islamic Reformation. One of the most surprising elements of this push for reform has to do with the emergence of a school called “feminist Islam.”

I’ve written often about the honor killings and other abuses suffered by women and girls in some Muslim countries, and many Westerners think Islam is inherently misogynistic. But Muslim women themselves naturally resent that kind of Western paternalism, for they want opportunities and equality — and yet they frequently don’t want to discard their faith (or even their head scarves).

“Yes, sexism exists in our culture, but that is not due to Islam,” says Rima Khoreibi, an author from Dubai who wrote a children’s book about an Islamic superhero who is female — Iman, a teenage girl with a cape, head scarf and deep religious convictions. That book, “The Adventures of Iman” (www.theadventuresofiman.com), was so successful that she is publishing a sequel in December.

Ms. Khoreibi says that she wrote “The Adventures of Iman” because of her “passion to promote Islamic feminism.” She cites Koranic verses that promote gender equality and call for treating sons and daughters equally.

A Koran-quoting female caped crusader is part of a broad ferment for more gender equality in the Muslim world. Islamic feminists often argue that the Koran generally raised the status of women compared to earlier Arabian society — banning female infanticide, for example, and limiting polygamy — and that what is needed today is that larger spirit of progress and enlightenment rather than precise seventh-century formulations that would freeze human society.

Often the battles are over Koranic verses. For example, some note that the Koran permitted up to four wives as a way to care for orphans after wars that had left many women widowed. So they turn the verse on its head and say that in today’s world where that situation doesn’t apply, the Koran actually bars polygamy.

Likewise, Saudi women sometimes argue that since the Prophet Muhammad’s wife drove camels, they should be able to drive cars.

“Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation,” Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Iran, writes in her autobiography. “It can be interpreted to oppress women or to liberate them.”

Female Muslim scholars like Fatima Mernissi of Morocco have also turned up evidence that Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife (and the person he said he loved most in the world), Aisha, vigorously contested the chauvinism of early clerics. Indeed, she sometimes comes across as the first Islamic feminist.

A well-known statement once attributed to Prophet Muhammad says that a man’s prayers are ineffective if a woman, dog or donkey passes in front of the believer. Aisha denounced that as nonsense: “You compare us now to donkeys and dogs. In the name of God, I have seen the Prophet saying his prayers while I was there.”

Likewise, Aisha denied various suggestions that her husband considered menstruating women to be unclean.

Aisha had prepared a series of corrections to early Islamic writings, but these have been largely ignored. Finally, these days, they are beginning to get a hearing.

All this underscores that Islam is much more complex than the headlines might suggest. The violence and fundamentalism gets the attention — and should be more loudly condemned by ordinary Muslims — but we would be close-minded ourselves if we ignored the more hopeful rumblings that are also taking place within the vast Islamic world ... including, perhaps, steps toward a Muslim Reformation.

An alarming and disturbing trend of radicalization of the Muslim youth in Britain.

October 21, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor

Covered Faces, Open Rebellion
By PAUL CRUICKSHANK

ON the streets of London and other cities in Britain, an incongruous sight has become increasingly common: young Muslim women covered from head to toe in black robes, including the niqab, a veil that obscures the face except for the eyes.

The niqab sets these young women off not just from most passers-by, but even from Muslim women who choose to wear the simple headscarf, or hijab, which covers only the hair and neck. And it is causing discomfort even in multicultural Britain. When Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, declared earlier this month that the niqab made positive relations between Muslims and non-Muslims more difficult because it was "such a visible statement of separation and difference," he struck a chord with many British voters, only 22 percent of whom think that Muslims have done enough to fit into mainstream society.

Having spent time getting to know young British Muslims, I believe that comments like Mr. Straw's will be counterproductive. That is because the niqab is a symptom and not a cause of rising tensions. Few young Muslim women in Britain are forced by their families to wear the niqab. British Muslims come predominantly from South Asia, where the prevalent school of Islam, Hanifi, makes no insistence on a woman fully veiling herself. Indeed, only one of the four schools within Sunni Islam, Hanbali, which is followed in Saudi Arabia, requires women to completely cover up.

The young British South-Asian Muslim women who veil Saudi-style are rejecting not just mainstream British society, but their parents' and grandparents' accommodation with its values. Ghulam Rabbani, an imam in East London, told me he was proud to be both British and Muslim but that some "misguided" youngsters in his congregation did not share that view. Khalil Rehman, one of Mr. Rabbani's congregants, told me he was worried about his children's generation. The young women who choose to wear the niqab, Mr. Rehman told me, are "rebelling against what their parents tell them to do, they're trying to differentiate themselves."

Frustrated by unemployment rates more than double those of members of other religious groups, put off by stereotyping in the news media, and estranged from British foreign policy, many alienated Muslims have turned to more overt forms of religiosity to express a contrarian identity. Says Murad Qureshi, the only Muslim councilor in London's Assembly: "Girls are choosing to reaffirm their Muslim identity because the community feels a sense of besiegement."

That sense of besiegement, not wardrobe decisions, is fueling the real problem that British politicians should be addressing, which is the creeping fundamentalism and Islamist radicalism of a significant portion of Britain's Islamic youth. In a recent poll, more than a quarter of British Muslims under the age of 24 said that the July 7, 2005, attacks on the London Underground were justified because of British foreign policy. Thousands of young British Muslims have been influenced by fundamentalist organizations like Hizb ut-Tahrir and militant groups like Al Muhajiroun.

These are the groups that have persuaded some Muslim girls that it is their religious duty to adopt the niqab. Kemal Helbawy, the influential founder of the Muslim Association of Britain, says that a very different message is coming out of the country's mainstream mosques, where most imams advise their congregations that the hijab is sufficient.

Calls by British politicians for Muslim women to stop wearing the niqab will only enhance the political symbolism of this act and make its practice more widespread. Instead, what is needed is an ambitious program to address the core grievances of Britain's young Muslims, for example by creating economic opportunities and tackling discrimination.

Britain's young Muslims need to be brought into the country's political process. More Muslims should be encouraged and selected to run for Parliament and to aspire to high office.

It will then be much harder for radicals to claim that the British government is at war with Islam. And then we will start seeing far fewer young Muslim women fully veiled.

Paul Cruickshank is a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

Islam, West clash fuelled by politics not religion
poll: Most Canadians blame 'intolerant minorities'

Andrew Duffy
CanWest News Service


Monday, February 19, 2007


Most Canadians reject the notion the Islamic and western worlds are engaged in a clash of civilizations based on culture and religion, according to a new international poll.

The GlobeScan survey found a majority, 56 per cent, of Canadians regard the conflict between Islam and the West to be primarily about "political power and interests."

Only 29 per cent said religious and cultural differences are to blame.

Many Canadians, 55 per cent, also cited "intolerant minorities" on both sides of the divide as an important contributor to the tension. Canadians were much more likely to assess shared blame than to specifically cite Muslim, 12 per cent, or western, seven per cent, minorities.

Pollsters interviewed 1,008 Canadians in December and January as part of an international survey in 27 countries. In theory, in 19 cases out of 20, the results of the poll wouldn't differ by more than plus or minus three percentage points from those obtained by interviewing all Canadian adults.

Canadian attitudes broadly reflected international sentiment.

Worldwide, 52 per cent of those polled said the current tension between Islam and the West is primarily due to conflicting political interests. Most, 58 per cent, blamed intolerant minorities -- rather than fundamental cultural differences -- for exacerbating the situation.

In the United States, the views were slightly more guarded. While 49 per cent said the conflict was primarily about political power and interests, 38 per cent also said differences in religion and culture were at the root of the problem.

Worldwide, Muslims tended to put most of the blame on politics with significant majorities holding that view in Lebanon, 78 per cent; Egypt, 56 per cent; Indonesia, 56 per cent; and Turkey, 55 per cent.

"Most people around the world clearly reject the idea that Islam and the West are caught in an inevitable clash of civilizations," said Steven Kull, director of University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, which helped design the poll.

The clash of civilizations is a notion popularized by Harvard University Prof. Samuel P. Huntington.

The international poll, conducted for the BBC World Service, found 56 per cent believe common ground can be found between Islam and the West, while 29 per cent said violent conflict is inevitable. Canadians were decidedly optimistic: 73 per cent of respondents told pollsters a peaceful accommodation is possible.

© The Calgary Herald 2007

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese356.html



Don't Be Fooled by Propaganda
by Charley Reese
by Charley Reese

There is an ongoing slander campaign against Islam, claiming that it is a religion that promotes violence and hinting that it seeks world conquest.

Before you buy the malarkey that is being produced by people with their own agendas or prejudices or who are just plain ignoramuses, follow these few suggestions:

Compare the history of Islam with the history of Europe, which for centuries was called Christendom. An objective look will show you that Christendom wins by a landslide when it comes to violence and wars. After all, Europe and its offspring did not come to dominate the world, including the Islamic countries, because they practiced the gentle virtues of Jesus.

As for the common practice of cherry-picking Scripture from holy writings and presenting it out of context, just check out what Christians call the Old Testament. There you will find God advocating a double standard of morality, condoning slavery, ordering the Israelites to commit genocide and committing infanticide himself on a mass scale. I don't believe you will find anything comparable in the Quran.

The word "jihad," which is so over-used these days, has, like a lot of words, more than one meaning. It means basically to struggle, but this can be personal or spiritual, or a peaceful political struggle. Only if Islam is attacked are Muslims required to defend it. As for that obnoxious propaganda term "Islamo-fascist," just recall that fascism is a European invention by nominal Christians. To my knowledge, the only fascist governments ever to exist on this planet were all European and nominally Christian.

Another canard is that Islam promotes forced conversion. Not so. Even when the Arab empire was expanding, rarely were any of the conquered people forced to convert. The Quran even forbids it, as I recall. Naturally, once Muslims were in charge, a lot of people decided it was in their own self-interest to convert, but this is just one of the sleazy aspects of human nature.

I remember when Florida elected its first Republican governor of the 20th century. I saw plenty of people crawl out from under their rocks and convert to the Republican Party, drawn by the smell of patronage. With some rare exceptions, human beings always act in what they perceive, rightly or wrongly, to be in their self-interest.

It was Christian Europe that slaughtered the Jews, and nothing remotely resembling the Holocaust is to be found in the history of Islam. In fact, during the past, when Jews were being persecuted by Christian Europe, they frequently fled to and found sanctuary in the Muslim countries. Until Israel was established, practically every Muslim country had sizable Jewish populations dating back centuries. And there are still Jews and Christians in some Muslim countries.

A final suggestion is that when you hear some individual radical Muslim being quoted, just remember he is one of a billion people and speaks only for himself and his small following. And be wary of the quotations he uses, for they are often deliberately fabricated or distorted.

If Muslims really desired to conquer the world, don't you think it's strange that we've been living in peace with them for nearly a millennium and a half, except for those times when we attacked them (the Crusades, the European colonial movement and our invasion of Iraq)? Don't forget either that some of the countries the Bush administration calls allies are themselves Muslim – Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.

You have nothing to fear from Islam. The al-Qaida movement is a tiny percentage of Muslims and wouldn't be the force it is except for the fact that the Bush administration has gone out of its way to make all of Osama bin Laden's propaganda become true.

May 5, 2007

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=5894814
Can the Muslim world be re-branded?
By Thomas Fuller

Monday, May 28, 2007
KUALA LUMPUR: Can the Muslim world be rebranded? Led by Malaysia and Indonesia, political and business leaders from Asia, North Africa and the Middle East vowed at a conference here Monday to reshape the image of Islamic countries, aiming to replace visions of poverty and violence with vibrancy, trade and, ultimately, prosperity.

"We must change our partners' perception of the Muslim world," said Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the president of Indonesia, who gave the keynote address.

"We must change their attitudes toward us from something negative or indifferent - if not hostile - to something positive and enthusiastic."

Whether or not the mission is successful, the meeting here of the third annual World Islamic Economic Forum put on display the frustration that many leaders in Muslim countries have for being associated with corrupt, dysfunctional governments and intractable conflict.

The speakers, including government ministers from Kuwait, Malaysia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, hardly mentioned the Palestinians, Iraq or terrorism.

Instead, they talked about job creation, streamlining bureaucracy and strengthening intellectual property rights.

By holding the conference in Kuala Lumpur, its organizers hoped to underline the successes of Malaysia and neighboring Indonesia in marrying moderate Islam with modernity.

Both are multicultural countries, a contrast to the rigid Wahhabi tradition of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, for instance.

In a series of speeches notable for their self-deprecation, leaders castigated Muslim societies for neglecting education and for offering copious rhetoric but little action.

"We as leaders of the Muslim world need to take responsibility for ourselves and our citizens," said Sheik Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, the crown prince and deputy ruler of Ras al-Khaimah, a part of the United Arab Emirates. "We need to make sure that our young people can find jobs."

Shortfalls in education in Muslim countries "make people vulnerable to misinformation," he added.

Yudhoyono said Muslim countries needed to change what is taught in madrasas, the Islamic schools that have been criticized for being heavy on religious training and light on science, technology and the humanities.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia, the host of the gathering, said Muslims needed to steer their populations toward the "idea of work as worship."

"We must break the shackles of rigidity and dogma that currently envelop Islam," he said, restating the theme that underlies his policies in Malaysia. "We must go beyond rituals and ceremonies."

Abdullah and Yudhoyono both said that the Muslim world should leverage its control over the world's oil resources - more than two-thirds of the world's energy needs are provided by Muslim countries, Yudhoyono said - to gain access to knowledge and technology.

"The wealth is there for us to invest," Abdullah said.

Despite a similar name and logo, the World Islamic Economic Forum has no connection to the annual meeting of business leaders in Davos, Switzerland.

The Islamic forum, which met for the first time in 2005, expanded this year to include meetings dedicated to the role of women and young people in Muslim countries.

By focusing on business both among Muslims countries and with the wider world, Islamic countries can help play down the stubborn issues that divide Muslims and non-Muslims, said P. Miles Young, the chairman of Ogilvy & Mather in Asia, which co-sponsored the conference.

"Business itself is a bridge for what seem to be two competing worlds or two clashing civilizations," Young said. "It is through business that there is common ground."

The notion of the "Muslim world" as an economic bloc is still mainly wishful thinking. Muslim countries conduct very little trade among themselves. Defined as the 56 member nations of the Islamic Development Bank, Muslim countries send 51.5 percent of their exports to industrialized countries, compared with just 13.5 percent to fellow Muslims nations, according to the bank.

Perhaps for that reason, some participants found the emphasis on Muslim solidarity retrograde and unhelpful.

Hakima el-Haite Mounir, director of the largest waste management company in Morocco, said the focus at the conference on Muslim solidarity could backfire.

"Aren't we moving backward in putting up religious boundaries?" she asked. "We should all be trying to remove barriers, to move against the segregation of the world."

Khalida Azbane Belkady, director of Groupe Azbane, a cosmetics company also based in Morocco, said the emphasis should be more squarely on business - whether among Muslims or non-Muslims.

"We are Muslims and we are women," she said. "But maybe we should stop talking about Muslim this-and-that and just get to work."

The meeting of women business leaders, which took place Sunday, was a feisty session that could have been mistaken for a convention of American feminists in the 1970s.

Norraesah Mohamad, a Malaysian who chaired the meeting, said Muslim countries neglected women entrepreneurs.

"The playing field is not about to be leveled, not soon enough," she said, adding: "We are quantitatively and qualitatively better than the guys in universities and the workplace."

Women face difficulty getting financing for projects, Norraesah said. "Every year, year in and year out, women get to eat only the humble pies," she said.

Suryani Sidik Mokti, head of a metalworking company in Indonesia, Prima Group, said women in business were getting more respect today.

She recalled early in her career inquiring at a bank about interest rates for a loan her company was seeking. "They said, 'Ma'am, this is too difficult for you. Why don't you bring your husband?' "

Illustrating the moderate form of Islam practiced in Malaysia and Indonesia today, the trade ministers in those countries, the Indonesian finance minister and Malaysia's central bank governor are all women.

Suryani said she found it logical that women would have these top jobs.

Traditionally, she said, men have handed over their paychecks to their wives, who pay the bills and budget for expenses.

"In day-to-day life women are managing finances in their houses," Suryani said. "Now it's happening at the level of the country."

Full text: Blair speech on Islam

Here is the full text of Tony Blair's speech to the "Islam and Muslims in the world today" conference in London on 4 June 2007:


I would like to thank Cambridge University and their partners, the Coexist Foundation and the Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue for hosting this important conference. As many of you will know, the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme is at the forefront of innovative teaching and research in terms of the study of world religions, their inter-relations and their relations with secular society.
The first and most obvious question about this Conference here in London is: why? The first and most obvious answer is that Britain is today a country of two million Muslims in a Europe that has over 20 million Muslims. I would like to pay tribute to our British Muslim communities today. In overwhelming part, they make a significant positive and growing contribution to modern Britain.

We have successful Muslims in all areas of our national life - business, sport, media, culture, the professions. We have our first Muslim MPs, first Muslim Members of the House of Lords; hopefully the next election will bring more and hopefully also the first women Muslim MPs.

Secondly, and again obviously as a result of what is happening in the world today, there is an interest and appetite across all sections of society to know more about Islam in all its diversity. This is not, repeat not, about equating interest in Islam with anxiety over extremism. But it explains, in part, the desire to learn about what moves and motivates our Muslim communities.

However, most of all but less obviously, the reason for this conference is to allow the many dimensions of Islam to speak about themselves in a more considered, more profound way than the short bursts of news coverage normally permit. When I have met groups of Muslims, especially younger ones - and in any part of Britain - of course the normal issues about foreign policy arise.

But actually the predominant complaint is about how they believe their true faith is constantly hijacked and subverted by small, unrepresentative groups who get disproportionately large amounts of publicity.

It is the way of the modern media world that what counts is impact. Those willing to come on television and articulate extreme and violent views make so much more impact than those who use the still small voice of reason and moderation.

The principal purpose of this Conference therefore is to let the authentic voices of Islam, in their various schools and manifestations, speak for themselves.

Some of the most distinguished scholars and religious leaders the world over are gathered here. I ask people to listen to them. They are the authentic voices of Islam. The voices of extremism are no more representative of Islam than the use, in times gone by, of torture to force conversion to Christianity, represents the true teaching of Christ.

In doing this, there is yet another purpose: to reclaim from extremists, of whatever faith, the true essence of religious belief. In the face of so much high profile accorded to religious extremism, to schism, and to confrontation, it is important to show that religious faith is not inconsistent with reason, or progress, or the celebration of diversity. Round the world today, along with the images of violence, are the patient good works of people of different faiths coming together, understanding each other, respecting each other.

Religious faith has much to contribute to the public sphere; is still a thriving part of what makes a cohesive community; is a crucial motivator of millions of citizens around the world; and is an essential if non-governmental way of helping to make society work. To lose that contribution would not just be a pity; it would be a huge backward step.

We shall be studying the outcomes of the conference with the keenest interest. We hope that the discussions over the next two days will produce ideas which we can explore and take forward - perhaps in partnership with some of you here today. We are especially interested to consider how the messages from this conference can best be conveyed to grassroots communities.

I want to set this conference in a broader context. Round the world today there is a new and urgent impetus being given to promulgating the true voices of Islam.

This is especially the case in the field of education. When I visited Indonesia last year, a Muslim majority country of over 200 million, I saw at first hand the way in which religious schools there are reforming to equip their students not just with a sound religious education, but also with training to boost their employment prospects. This work challenges the myth that religious schools need only focus on orthodox religious education.

The Pakistani Government too has undertaken an ambitious and difficult programme of madrassa reform, encouraging schools to register and develop a common syllabus and basic standards.

In Singapore, new more interactive teaching methods have been introduced by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore, moving away from teaching by rote to teaching which is specific to age group, more relevant to the wider context in which students live and more lively.

Many in our Muslim communities in the UK are encouraging reform and change in our madrassas here.

The Bradford Council of Mosques has agreed to incorporate citizenship education in the curriculum for their madrassas, an important initiative, which we hope will be adopted right across the country. And it is right to encourage links between schools in the state sector and institutions that provide religious education, given the hugely important role these institutions play in so many children's education and well-being.

But the role of education goes much wider than simply religious education. At the recent Middle East World Economic Forum, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, announced the creation of a groundbreaking $10 billion foundation to promote education in Arab countries.

The foundation will focus on human development, supporting and empowering young minds and focusing on research, education and investment in the infrastructure of knowledge. It will provide scholarships for study at world-reputed institutions. In neighbouring Qatar, the Government has invited top international universities to develop an "Education City" with the aim of becoming the beacon of educational excellence in the Arab world.

Many of these initiatives are designed to tap into the ages-old tradition of Islam where - in line with the Koran - knowledge is revered and Muslims urged to pursue it.

Then there are the many signs of political reform in the Muslim world, and the encouragement of women's rights. Suffrage has been awarded to women in Kuwait and women stood for the first time in Bahrain's elections last year.

In Morocco, fifty women have been appointed as state preachers for the first time. They will be able to give basic religious instruction in Mosques and support in prisons, schools and hospitals.

As highlighted by Emine Bozkurt's work, the position of women has improved in Turkey over recent years, with, in particular, a strong emphasis on education for girls.

In Afghanistan, the Afghan Women's Hour is a programme that would have been inconceivable not long ago. It offers girls, their mothers and their grandmothers a place to speak and to listen to one another. The full gamut of issues has been aired: standing for Parliament, learning to read, starting a business, the prevention of maternal mortality.

In Jordan, last month, a conference took place, with the assistance of Queen Rania, to build and empower Muslim female leadership across the Middle East.

There is also a clear move across the world to assert strongly the moderate and true authority of Islam.

In Jordan, in 2004, under the leadership of HM King Abdullah, a statement, the Amman Message was released seeking to declare what Islam is and what it is not, and how it should be manifested.

I was deeply impressed when, the next year, the King convened 200 leading scholars from no less than 50 countries, who unanimously - unanimously - issued a Declaration on 3 basic issues: the validity of different Islamic schools of thought and theology; the forbidding of declarations of apostasy between Muslims; and criteria for the issuing of fatwas - religious edicts - to pre-empt the spawning of illegitimate versions.

This was a clear message that Islam is not a monolithic faith, but one made up of a rich pattern of diversity, albeit all flowing from the same fount. This rich diversity needs to be more clearly appreciated and to inform our public debates more fully.

Also in 2005, the summit meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference issued a declaration and a 10-year action plan. The summit reaffirmed Islam as a religion of moderation and modernity. It rejected bigotry and extremism. It supported work to establish the values of Islam as those of understanding, tolerance, dialogue and multilateralism. It adopted the principles of the Amman Message - as indeed did other gatherings of scholars around the world.

And in 2006 the Topkapi declaration emphasised that Muslims have long played a distinguished part in European history and encouraged them to continue doing so. It stressed the opportunities for Muslims to flourish as full citizens the pluralistic societies which increasingly characterise every country in this continent, especially since the fall of Communism.

I draw four lessons from these and other similar examples.

Firstly, that the role of theology and philosophy is vital to Islam, indeed as it is to any religion, in helping its adherents to engage with the modern world whilst drawing on its core principles.

Secondly, Muslims overwhelmingly want to play a full part in the complex and diverse societies in which they find themselves - both contributing and shaping those societies. Most seek to play a part as loyal citizens of their countries and as loyal Muslims. This is of course contrary to the often crude portrayals in the media or by those who deal only in stereotypes and seek to whip up Islamophobic sentiment.

Thirdly, others in societies in which Muslims are co-citizens must also evolve and adapt in how they respond to the changing nature of their societies. This is a two way street. Each must learn from the other, about the other.

And fourthly, and as a natural consequence of my first three points, the great religions of the world most continue the dialogue between them, and help interfaith work to grow. Greater mutual understanding should be the aim of all of us. And a closer working together to tackle the needs of our shared world - needs which are often pressing and cry out for action.

We publish today the Siddiqui Report on the UK and what more we need to do to encourage the right intellectual and academic debate on these issues here in Britain.

We intend to follow-up on many of Dr Siddiqui's recommendations and will be providing significant funding to deliver on this commitment.

None of this, incidentally, is designed to screen out a healthy rigorous debate about the controversies of foreign policy.

Many Christians disagreed with the decisions I took over Afghanistan or Iraq. Leave aside for a moment whether they were the right or wrong decisions. What is damaging is if they are seen in the context of religious decisions.

The religious faith of either country was as irrelevant to the decision as was the fact that the Kosovo Albanians we rescued were Muslims, suffering under a Serbian dictatorship, whose religion happened to be Christian Orthodox; or in helping the people of Sierra Leone, 70 per cent of whom are Muslim.

This point is crucial at a number of different levels. The problem between faiths and communities, as too often in life and in politics, is not where there is disagreement about decisions; but where there is misunderstanding about motives. In turn, this is often derived from a misunderstanding of a deeper sort: a basic ignorance about the other's faith. I was asked the other day by a young person if it was true Muslims wanted to kill all Christians.

"No", I said. "And did you know that Muslims revere Jesus as a Prophet?" The youngster was astounded, barely able to believe there are significant passages in the Koran devoted to Jesus, and to Mary. I recommend the book "The Muslim Jesus" to anyone interested in this aspect.

But the point is this: one part of such a Conference is to explain Islam to the world: its common roots with Judaism and Christianity, how it began, how it developed, how far removed it is, from the crude and warped distortion of the extremists. Where there is ignorance, there is distrust, and sometimes hatred. Understanding is a great healer.

So this Conference is not about Government lecturing the Muslim world, or our Muslim communities. It is rather an opportunity to listen; to hear Islam's true voice; to welcome and appreciate them; and in doing so, to join up with all those who believe in a world where religious faith is respected because faiths respect each other as well as those of no faith; and are prepared in holding to their own truth, not to disrespect the truth clear to others. I wish you well in your deliberations.

The following are the sentiments expressed in a 5-faith interfaith conference in Indonesia the home of over 200 million Muslims, which clearly shows that Islam is tolerant and not fundamentalist.


http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... california


From the Los Angeles Times
BELIEFS
Leaders of 5 faiths decry violence in name of religion
Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Jews meet in Indonesia, where they urge others around the world to practice tolerance.
By K. Connie Kang
Times Staff Writer

June 30, 2007

In a historic action, top leaders of five great religions met this month in Indonesia — home to 200 million Muslims — to condemn violence inflicted in the name of religion.

The leaders representing Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim traditions came from five countries and included former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid and Los Angeles Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The group said in a joint communique that the world's spiritual leaders have a "special obligation" to denounce "horrific acts" committed in the name of religion. The Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center was a co-sponsor of the event.

"If we are honest with ourselves, we have not been up to the challenge," Cooper said in an interview last week after his return from Indonesia. "Part of it is that we have to get by the [politically correct] and just deal honestly."

The interfaith meeting was an important step toward that goal, participants said.

In the communique, the religious leaders said: "A blessing to all creation, religion is a constant reminder to humanity of the divine spark in every person. Yet, today the world shudders as horrific acts are justified in the name of religion. All too often, hatred and violence replace peace as religion is manipulated for political purposes."

They also urged that their counterparts around the world follow their example and commit to mobilizing their communities to "not only respect, but also defend, the rights of others to live and worship differently."

Political scientist Fred Balitzer, special ambassador to Brunei in the Reagan administration and an attendee at the meeting, called it an "extraordinary achievement."

"It's not exactly a Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail, but it's kind of like that," said Balitzer, who for 35 years taught political science at Claremont McKenna College. He referred to the passionate letter in which King called on the nation's clergy to live out their Christian faith by fighting injustice, "not sit on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities."

Balitzer said the conference also made other important points: Major Muslim and Jewish leaders met in a Muslim nation to discuss the Holocaust and affirm that it happened. The meeting also showed, he said, that there are "moderate Muslims in the world."

Meeting organizers said the event was partly aimed at countering a conference backed by the Iranian government last December that questioned the Holocaust. The organizers chose Bali — the scene of nightclub bombings in 2002 that killed more than 200 people — for its symbolism.

Called "Tolerance Between Religions: A Blessing for All Creation," the event was also sponsored by the LibForAll Foundation, a U.S.-based group that opposes Muslim extremism, and the Wahid Institute, which advocates peaceful Islam. The institute was founded by Indonesia's Wahid, who led the world's largest Muslim nation from 1999 to 2001.

Wahid set the tone when he said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was "falsifying history" by claiming that the Holocaust did not happen.

"Although I am a good friend of Ahmadinejad … I have to say that he is wrong," he said. "I visited the Auschwitz's Museum of Holocaust and I saw many shoes of the dead people in Auschwitz. Because of this, I believe Holocaust happened."

Wahid is thought to be the first major Muslim figure to publicly rebuke Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust a myth.

In addition to his presentation, Wahid also co-wrote with Israel Lau, the former chief rabbi of Israel, a Wall Street Journal column in which they denounced the Iranian president and the December conference.

"By denying the events of the past, the deniers are paving the way toward the crimes of the future," said the piece, which was read in its entirety at the conference. "Last year, Muslims from Nigeria to Lebanon to Pakistan rioted against what they saw as the demonizing of their prophet by Danish cartoonists. In a better world, those same Muslims would be the first to recognize how insulting it is to Jews to have the apocalypse that befell their fathers' generation belittled and denied."

Cooper, who moderated the plenary session, praised Wahid for "having the guts" to say what needed to be said.

An interfaith conference may not be news in L.A., he said, but convening one with top leaders in Indonesia and taking on "the most important questions of the day — namely to have religious leaders say that terrorism is a sin" — were significant, he said.

Security was tight, and not everybody who had been invited to participate in the all-day event at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel went.

Lau wanted to attend, but the Indonesian government wouldn't let him because, as Israel's former chief rabbi, he carries a diplomatic passport. Indonesia does not recognize Israel.

But Rabbi Daniel Landes of Jerusalem's Pardes Institute was allowed. He began his presentation with a quote from Psalm 34 in Hebrew:

Which man desires life,

who loves days of seeing good? Guard your tongue from evil

and your lips from speaking deceit.

Presenters also included Hindu leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of India; Buddhist scholar Yoichi Kawada of Japan; Trahjadi Nugroho, president of the Indonesia Pastors' Assn.; and Father Franz Magnis-Suseno, a Catholic leader in Indonesia.

Also speaking at the meeting were survivors of the Holocaust and terrorist attacks who choked up as they described their suffering to the predominantly Muslim audience.

Sol Teichman, 79, a Holocaust survivor from Los Angeles, tearfully recalled his family's deportation to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland and their demise in its gas chambers.

But Teichman, who said he was "blessed" with a family of his own after the war, urged survivors of terrorism to "never, never give up hope."

He was deeply touched when, after his talk, Muslim students asked if they could take a photograph with him, he said in an interview. "Here I am, a Jew. Here is the Muslim," he said.

For 90% of the people in the room, this was their first encounter with a Jew, let alone a rabbi from Israel, Cooper said. He underscored the importance of having religious leaders gather for such a conference.

"The truth is that we're in this mess primarily because of religious leaders, and we're only going to get out of it if we find religious leaders who will have the guts to change this. That's the bottom line," Cooper said.

Where do they go from here?

They need to replicate the Bali summit elsewhere, participants said.

"If we wait for governments to do these things, we may be waiting for a very long time," Balitzer said.

connie.kang@...

Islam and the West
A former Catholic nun and author of books on many of the world's religions including Islam, English writer Karen Armstrong speaks about Western views of Islam, the mood after 11 September and her hopes for better relations between Islam and the West.


Karen Armstrong

"What more concessions should the West make to Muslims? When should we draw the line and stop sacrificing our ideals?" The question was posed by a young Englishman at the end of a lecture on "Understanding Islam" at Oxford University's Institute for American Studies in England. While the question revealed many Western concerns and assumptions, as well as the extent to which an anti-Islamic mood has prevailed in the West since the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September last year, the answer, however, was quick. "Muslims did not ask us to give up our ideals and values. On the contrary, it is the West which does not honour these very ideals when dealing with Muslims and Islam," said the lecturer, Karen Armstrong, a Catholic nun turned Christian theologian.

After studying English at Oxford, Armstrong became a nun, and 17 years later she left her convent and wrote a book called Through the Narrow Gate (1981), an account of her years spent there. This was followed by further books, including The First Christian, Tongues of Fire, The Gospel According to Woman, Holy War and Muhammad. In 1993 she published an important work on the three monotheistic religions called The History of God: From Abraham to the Present. This sold well and was followed by another best-selling book, Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet in 1996.

In Armstrong's view, what 11 September revealed was "a new awareness" striking at the integrity of Western culture and its value system. "We were posing as a tolerant society, yet passing judgment from a position of extremes and irrationality," the 58-year-old Armstrong told the Weekly in an exclusive interview at her house in London.

Since the attacks, Armstrong has been on mission in the United States and South America lecturing on Islam. It has not been an easy task. "September 11th has confirmed a view of Islam that is centuries old, which is that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant of others," she said, going on to offer a first-hand account of the situation in the United States nine months after the attacks.

"The events have been a great shock to the Americans, and they are now in a state of numbness and depression," Armstrong explained. "There is still a lot of hostility and anger directed against the Muslim community there. There is, however, some reason to believe that a change in the American perception is not impossible."

"On the East Coast where I spent most of my time, people descended en masse on the bookstores and took off the shelves everything they could find about Islam. While some did this to confirm old prejudices and fears -- depending on who you choose to read -- the majority was keen on learning about Islam." In fact, Armstrong's own handbook, Understanding Islam, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies on the East Coast of the United States alone. And many of the questions posed to Armstrong during her lecture tour reflected not only a sense of wanting to know more about Islam, but also how deeply rooted were media representations of Islam in the American psyche.

The key question would be, "why do they hate us?" Armstrong said, followed by others, such as: "What do Muslims think of Christians and Jews? Is Islam an inherently violent religion? Why do we always hear bad rhetoric about Christians? What about women in Islam? Is Islam against modernity?"

In responding to such questions, Armstrong walks a fine line between deconstructing long- held stereotypes while at the same time not becoming apologetic. She noted that there are differences in the way her views are received in the US and in Europe. "One of the good things about the Americans is that they do like to know," she says. "There is earnestness about them that one does not observe in a European society such as Holland, for example. They are open to criticism in a way that does not exist in Europe, where people assume they know it all."

At the age of 19, Armstrong joined a Catholic convent, staying there for 17 years before deciding to leave in order to study the world's monotheistic religions, beginning with Islam. Does she think that the religious establishment in the West -- ie the churches themselves -- are responsible for Western hostility to Islamic culture?

"Anti-Islamic doctrine is in-built in the Western ethos that was formulated during the Crusades," she says. "This was the period when the Western world was re-defining itself. The 11th century marked the end of the Dark Ages in Europe and the beginnings of the new Europe. The Crusades were the first co-operative act on the part of the whole new Europe, and the whole crusading ethos shaped the psyche of the key actors performing at this crucial time."

"Islam was the quintessential foreigner, and people resented Islam in Europe much as people in the Third World resent the US today. One could say that Islam then was the greatest world power, and it remained so up until the early years of the Ottoman empire. Muslims were everywhere in the Middle East, Turkey, Iran, South- East Asia, China. Wherever people went, there was Islam, and it was powerful, and people felt it as a threat."

The period of the Crusades was a crucial historical moment during which the West was defining itself, and Islam became a yardstick against which it measured itself. "Islam was everything that the West thought it was not, and it was at the time of the Crusades that the idea that Islam was essentially a violent religion took hold in the West. "Europe was projecting anxiety about its own behaviour onto Islam, and it did the same thing too with the Jewish people," Armstrong said.

Even in non-religious societies such as England, Armstrong believes that prejudice against Islam remains, saying that "I think it is in-built into people that Islam is a violent religion." These hostile feelings were given a new lease of life during the colonial period, Armstrong believes, since many of the colonised countries were Muslim countries, and the colonial powers saw in them what they regarded as 'backwardness', attributing this to Islam.

Although she feels that university campuses are almost the only places in the US where big questions are asked, Armstrong says that the events of 11 September divided US academics into two camps. The first camp, led by Martin Kramer, head of the Near and Middle East Studies Institute in Washington DC, accused Armstrong, together with academics such as John Esposito, head of Islamic-Christian Dialogue at Georgetown University, of 'duping' people into believing that Islam was not a threat, an argument Kramer claimed had been proved wrong by the attacks. Only a few weeks after 11 September, Kramer wrote an article, Ivory Towers Built on Sand, in which he put the blame squarely on academics for failing to predict the atrocities.

Armstrong explains how the media in the US attempted to silence opposing voices after 11 September. For example, she had been commissioned by the New Yorker magazine to write an article on Islam, but the article was killed and the magazine published one by the academic Bernard Lewis instead.

"They thought I am an apologist for Muslims, because my article was about the prophet as a peacemaker, and this did not suit their agenda as much as Lewis's did. Both Lewis and Kramer are staunch Zionists who write from a position of extreme bias. But people need to know that Islam is a universal religion, and that there is nothing aggressively oriental or anti-Western about it. Lewis's line, on the other hand, is that Islam is an inherently violent religion," she said.

Earlier, in the mid 1980s, Armstrong was commissioned by Channel Four television in Britain to make a documentary about the life of St. Paul. This required visits to the Holy Land and to Jerusalem. However, when Armstrong went to Israel and saw the kind of racism against Arabs that dominated Israeli society, she realised that "there was something fundamentally wrong" going on in Israel.

"I was deeply shocked that people could call other people 'dirty Arabs' when some 30 or 40 years before they had talked in Europe about 'dirty Jews'. I was struck by the inability of the Jewish people to learn from past sufferings, but of course it is human nature that suffering does not make us better. The problem with Israel now is that it cannot believe that it is not 1939 any more; the Israeli people are emotionally stuck in the horrors of the Nazi era," she says.

Could it be that this is an Israeli ploy to manipulate public opinion? Armstrong answers that "I don't think that this is the case at a profound level. Of course, there are politicians who will use this, but I think there is a profound inability among Israelis to believe that they have left the past behind. They still regard the present as a period of Jewish weakness, when in fact it is a period of Jewish power."

"The West has to share a responsibility for what is happening in the Middle East. If it had not persecuted the Jews, there would not have been the need for the creation of the State of Israel. The Muslim world did nothing to the Jews, and the Palestinians are paying the price for the sins of Europe. Therefore, a solution has to be found because there will be no peace in the world without one. But if Israel has America behind it, it does not have to worry about what the rest of the world thinks. This gives a sense of omnipotence. At the moment there is no hope; they, the Israelis, can do what they want because America will always support them. I wish Europe would play a better role, but Mr Blair is running after Mr Bush like a poodle."

Armstrong believes that the Israeli occupation is responsible for the kind of violent resistance it meets from the Palestinians. "The resistance will be as ruthless and violent as the occupation is," she says. "Every occupation breeds its own kind of resistance." Armstrong believes that the phenomenon of the Palestinian suicide bombers has more to do with politics and hopelessness than it does with religion. "I don't think people sit at home and read the Qur'an and say, yes, I must go and bomb Israel. This is not how religion works, and I see just absolute hopelessness when people have nothing to lose. Palestinians don't have F- 16s, and they don't have tanks. They don't have anything to match Israel's arsenal. They only have their own bodies."

"Violence of any sort always breads violence, and the occupation itself is an act of extreme violence, domination and oppression. The way things have been moving has been aggressively against the Palestinians."

While she believes that there has been a shift in the way British public opinion views the Palestinian struggle, she warns that the killing of civilians could create a backlash. "In the news coverage after every suicide bombing you see Israeli mothers with their children talking in plain English about their sufferings. One does not get to see the same sufferings of the Palestinian mothers and their children, though they are the weaker party in the conflict."

Armstrong thinks that charges of anti-Semitism in Europe play into the hands of the Zionist lobby in America because "this will discredit anything Europe says. They say Europe is anti- Semitic because for the first time Europe is becoming aware of the plight of the Palestinians. It is part of a campaign to discredit European input in any future peace process."

Turning to the recent rise of the extreme right in European politics, Armstrong feels that this has been more hostile to Europe's Muslim population than it has to European Jews.

However, she says, "I think it has to do with race rather than religion, especially in Britain where people are uninterested in religion. The riots in places like Bradford, for example, had to do with race. In Northern Europe, there is very little interest in religion, or knowledge about religion. It is not the case here that people are fired with religious zeal when they go after Muslims, since they are not interested in religion at all. In America, on the other hand, people are interested in religion and want to know what Muslims believe. Here, they don't care; they simply don't want Muslims in their country. They want a white England for white English people."

"We have to take the extreme right- wing groups very seriously," she says. "This is the European form of fundamentalism; because we don't express discontent in a religious form it comes out in a right-wing way. It's the desire to belong to a clearly defined group combined with a pernicious fear of the other -- a sense of pent-up rage and disappointment with multi-cultural society giving way to this kind of emotion, which feeds into fundamentalism."

Armstrong's Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet has sold millions of copies since it appeared in 1996, and she has become used to accusations of being "an apologist for Islam", while not taking much notice of such rhetoric. "It is very nice that people think that the book was written by a Muslim," she says, "but what a religious scholar tries to do is to enter into a religion by a leap of the imagination, in order to understand not just the beliefs, or the history and doctrine, but also the underlying feel of the religion, and I try to do this with all religions and not just with Islam. I did the same when I wrote the history of Judaism, and I am doing the same now that I am writing a biography of the Buddha."

Armstrong is currently also working on a history of the period from 800 BC to 200 AD when many great world faiths came into being. "Europe," she says, "is about the only place where religion does not matter much. People in Europe might need to rinse their minds of all their bad and lazy theology. People in Europe have not yet asked the big questions about religion; they have tried get rid of primitive forms of religion, but very often what we see in the churches today is exactly the kind of religion that these people are trying to get rid of... Jesus would be horrified by the practices of the church today. I would love to show him around the Vatican, when Christians cannot even share a church together. He would be appalled, much as Mohamed would be appalled if he knew that September 11th was done in the name of Islam."

How does she think that the Western world and Islam can come together? Is there any common ground between them?

Armstrong believes that both sides should try and deal with the extremism in their midst. "The West, like it or not, is a fact of life," she says. "Muslims should try to use the media; they have got to learn to lobby like the Jews, and they have got to have a Muslim lobby, if you like ....this is a jihad, an effort, a struggle, that is very important. If you want to change the media, then you have got to make people see that Islam is a force to be reckoned with politically and culturally. Have a march down the street at Ground Zero in New York, call it 'Muslims against Terror'. They need to learn how to manage the media and how to conduct themselves in the media."

"Similarly, the West has got to learn that it shares the planet with equals and not with inferiors. This means giving equal space in a conflict such as that between Israel and Palestine. It doesn't mean just using governments to get oil: you promote Saddam Hussein one day, and the next day he becomes public enemy number one. The West promoted people like the Shah of Iran simply because of its greed for oil, even though he had committed atrocities against his own people. There should be no more double standards, because double standards are colonialism in a new form. Western people have also got to disassociate themselves from inherited prejudices about Islam."

"Muslims can run a modern state in an Islamic way, and this is what the West has got to see... There are all kinds of ways in which people can be modern, and Muslims should be allowed to come to modernity on their own terms and make a distinctive Islamic contribution to it."



Karen Armstrong was interviewed by Omayma Abdel-Latif.
http://www.islamfortoday.com/karenarmstrong02.htm

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArti ... inion&col=

With friends like these…
BY AIJAZ ZAKA SYED

18 August 2007

WAS it George Bernard Shaw who argued that Islam is the world’s best religion and the Muslims are the worst followers?


I have often wondered what might have prompted Shaw, a diehard socialist with a life-long affair with Islam, to reach this conclusion.

But you don’t have to be Bernard Shaw to know that if Islam is constantly under fire around the world, it is not entirely because of some elaborate Zionist conspiracies or Western machinations.

If Islam faces an acute image crisis today with every imaginable atrocity attributed to it, you need not look too far to see who really is responsible for this state of affairs. Trust me, we Muslims are as responsible as Islam’s enemies, if not more, for discrediting our noble faith.

Just look at what the new defenders of Islam from Hyderabad have just done. I found the spectacle of a literally cornered Taslima Nasreen and her equally vulnerable hosts fend themselves helplessly against the physical and verbal onslaught by the rabble-rousers of Majlise Ittehadul Muslimeen too sickening to watch.

Disgusted, I switched the television off. But you couldn’t escape this bit of reality TV as most Indian and global networks ran the story ad nauseam for nearly a week. Clearly, anything involving the Muslims sells.

The incident was all the more shocking because all this happened in Hyderabad. Not because the city of Charminar once happened to be my home. But because the great city, at the confluence of the North and South, has always been known for its cosmopolitan culture.

HYDERABAD has always loved and pampered its intellectuals, writers, poets and artists. While the world has moved on and other traditional centres of culture like Delhi and Lucknow have performed the last rites for their once great civilizations and ethos, Hyderabad still lives in its rich past and the so-called Ganga-Jamni culture that celebrates the best of Islamic and Indian traditions.

Not long ago, accomplished men and artists from other parts of India and the globe regularly descended on the Nizam’s Hyderabad and they were richly rewarded for their talents.

From Dagh Dehelvi to Fani Badayyuni and from Josh Malihabadi to Maulana Maudoodi, Hyderabad had been home to some of the best names in literature and arts. And this patronage wasn’t limited to Muslims. It was in this great city that those brave foot soldiers of the Majlis attacked Taslima Nasreen and her hosts.

I am no defender of the Bangladeshi writer. I am not familiar with her work. And I don’t care for what she stands for. That is, if she indeed stands for something. Men and women like Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen do not stand for anything. They stand for themselves. And they know how to sell themselves.

The Rushdies and Nasreens of this world are smart enough to know that the quickest way of attracting the Western attention and making big bucks is to assail Islam and Muslims. Like I said, anything against Islam sells. This is all the more true in the post September 11 times.

This does not however mean we should go after everyone and anyone who seeks to target Islam and the Prophet. Just think for a moment what the Prophet himself or early Muslims, faced with men and women like Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie, would do?

The gentle soul who forgave all his tormentors and enemies baying for his blood when the whole of Arabia fell at his feet wouldn’t want his followers to physically target a woman. He even pardoned the woman who killed his beloved uncle Hamza and desecrated his body.

And the Book this Prophet brought us says, "Call to the way of thy Lord with wisdom and goodly exhortation, and argue with them (Islam’s detractors) in the best manner." (16:125). Elsewhere the Quran says: "Do not be transgressors, Allah does not like transgressors." (2:190).

Do the actions of our Hyderabadi friends come anywhere close to these teachings of Islam? But then whoever said these men were driven by their love of Islam!

Whatever their motives, such vandalism in the name of Islam is not exactly likely to promote the cause of our faith.

Just pause and ponder for a minute. What has this particular episode given us? Only shame and acute embarrassment in the eyes of the international community. While the world once again debates our alleged intolerance, Muslims everywhere stand with their heads bowed in shame.

What is the difference between these men and the Hindu fanatics who have meted out the same treatment to artist MF Hussain? Would anyone respect the faith whose followers behave in this scandalous fashion? With friends like these, do Muslims need any more enemies?

Besides, this episode has come as a Godsend to a mediocre writer, loathed by her own people. Taslima Nasreen couldn’t have found better promoters of her sagging career.

I know we have been here before. But today more than ever, Muslim intellectuals, leaders and ordinary believers need to come forward to protect Islam from such dangerous defenders of the faith. They must tell the world that Islam has nothing to do with these shameful actions.

Never has Islam in its 15-century long history ever faced such a challenge to its image and identity. It is under siege everywhere facing as it does a massive character assassination campaign from both within and from without.

On the one hand, you have the gargantuan global propaganda machine, controlled and manipulated by the powerful Jewish lobby in the West that is gunning for Islam.

Armed with their satellite television networks, think tanks, newspapers and countless other publications and of course the Hollywood, these forces are running a relentless campaign against Islam and Muslims.

The idea is to totally discredit Islam as a religion that is driven by a hatred of the civilized world and its followers as a people who are savage enemies of peace, progress and all that the West stands for. I consider this ideological offensive far more dangerous for the Muslim world than the neocons’ War on Terror.

On the other hand, you have the champions of Muslims like the Majlis variety. Their contribution in undermining Islam and Muslims is equally phenomenal. Steeped in ignorance and driven by their own partisan interests, they are ever ready to exploit and distort the teachings of this noble faith to suit their own narrow agenda.

What happened in Hyderabad is a case in point. Under pressure on their own turf, Majlis leaders have rushed to ‘defend Islam’ by visiting this disgrace on us.

So who gives a damn if Muslims as a result come under fire for their intolerance of dissent and freedom. So who cares if this episode has once again exposed Muslims to accusations of being mean to their women.

This is what we do to Islam day after day, from one end of the Muslim world to another. We dump all our insecurities, our wretchedness, our sins and all our crimes in Islam’s account.

Just look at how our brave defenders have exterminated nearly 400 innocent people, many of them young girls and boys, from the Yazidi community in Iraq’s north.

FROM the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of Islamabad and Hyderabad, Islam suffers daily at the hands of its followers.

You have the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan threatening to slay hostages with a gun in one hand and the Quran in another.

You have all sorts of militants, from Al Qaeda to Abu Sayyaf, promising death and destruction in the name of Islam to the West for its historical injustices against the Muslim world.

But even if the militants indeed believe theirs is a just and holy war, must they parade Islam and Quran before the whole world every time they take on their enemies? Who would ask them what the Holy Book has to do with it! If you are fighting oppression and injustice, fight them by all means. But must you, in God’s name, drag Islam and Quran into the mess.

This distortion and misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims has been going on for years. But Muslim intellectuals and leaders have been mostly silent, except for some lone and feeble voices here and there, over this continuing atrocity against their faith.

Do Muslim leaders and Ulema realise what our silence means to the rest of the world? It means we implicitly support and justify what is being perpetrated in our name by desperate and self-seeking men.

This is no time to remain silent. If we care for Islam and genuinely believe in what it stands for, then we must speak out and speak out now. We can take on the enemies of Islam by presenting the true face of this great faith. We must fight the falsehood being purveyed in the name of Islam by taking the true message of the religion to the world. As the Quran suggests, let us “Repel evil with what is better,” — not with greater evil.

Aijaz Zaka Syed is a senior editor and columnist of Khaleej Times. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached at aijazsyed@khaleejtimes.com.

From The Sunday Times
October 14, 2007

A lesson in humility for the smug West
Many of the western values we think of as superior came from the East and our blind arrogance hurts our standing in the world
William Dalrymple

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About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.

Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together.

Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.

All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori.

It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he “was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: “Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.

The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over the motion: “We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values”. (The motion was eventually carried, I regret to say.)

Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ethical source of these values.

Yet where do these ideas actually come from? Both Judaism and Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch, Constanti-nople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe.

Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value – universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.

And where was the first law code drawn up? In Athens or London? Actually, no – it was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient Iraq. Who was the first ruler to emphasise the importance of the equality of his subjects? The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, set down in stone basic freedoms for all his people, and did not exclude women and slaves, as Aristotle had done.

In the real world, East and West do not have separate and compartmentalised sets of values. Does a Midwestern Baptist have the same values as an urbane Richard Dawkins-read-ing atheist? Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same ethical tradition as Osama Bin Laden?

In the East as in the West there is a huge variety of ethical systems, but surprisingly similar ideals, and ideas of good and evil. To cherry-pick your favourite universal humanistic ideals, and call them western, then to imply that their opposites are somehow eastern values is simply bigoted and silly, as well as unhistorical.

The great historian of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, knew better. As he wrote at the end of his three-volume history: “Our civilisation has grown . . . out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.” He is right. The best in both eastern and western civilisation come not from asserting your own superiority, but instead from having the humility to learn from what is good in others, as well as to recognise your own past mistakes. Ramming your ideas down the throats of others is rarely a productive tactic.
There are lessons here from our own past. European history is full of monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, some of which – such as those of Salazar, Tito and Franco – survived into the 1970s and 1980s. The relatively recent triumph of democracy across Europe has less to do with some biologically inherent western love of freedom, than with an ability to learn humbly from the mistakes of the past – notably the millions of deaths that took place due to western ideologies such as Marxism, fas-cism and Nazism.

These movements were not freak departures from form, so much as terrible expressions of the darker side of western civilisation, including our long traditions of antisemitism at home.
Alongside this we also have history of exporting genocide abroad in the worst excesses of western colonialism – which, like the Holocaust, comes from treating the nonwestern other as untermenschen, as savage and somehow subhuman.

For though we like to ignore it, and like to think of ourselves as paragons of peace and freedom, the West has a strong militaristic tradition of attacking and invading the countries of those we think of as savages, and of wiping out the less-developed peoples of four continents as part of our civilising mission. The list of western genocides that preceded and set the scene for the Holocaust is a terrible one.

The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by British hunting parties who were given licences to exterminate this “inferior race” whom the colonial authorities said should be “hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed”. Many were caught in traps, before being tortured or burnt alive.

The same fate saw us exterminate the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as tribe after tribe of Native Americans. The European slave trade forcibly abducted 15m Africans and killed as many more.

It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all – the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West.

For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for allthat is remarkable and beautiful in ourart, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-de-feating in western history.

The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right.

Tragically, this western tradition of failing to respect other cultures and treating the other as untermenschen has not completely died. We might now recognise that genocide is wrong, yet 30 years after the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia and My Lai, the cadaver of western colonialism has yet again emerged shuddering from its shallow grave. One only has to think of the massacres of Iraqi civilians in in Falluja or the disgusting treatment meted out to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to see how the cultural assertiveness of the neocons has brought these traditions of treating Arabs as subhuman back from the dead.

Yet the briefest look at the foreign policy of the Bush administration surely gives a textbook example of the futility of trying to impose your values and ideas – even one so noble as democracy – on another people down the barrel of a gun, rather than through example and dialogue.

In Iraq itself, we have succeeded in destroying a formerly prosperous and secular country, and creating the largest refugee problem in the modern Middle East: 4m Iraqis have now been forced abroad.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US attempt to push democracy in the region has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against its old client proxies – by and large corrupt, decadent monarchies and decaying nationalist parties. But rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed they would, Muslims have everywhere lined up behind those parties that have most clearly been seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention in the region, namely the religious parties of political Islam.

Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders “to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions.” It will be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.

We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility.

William Dalrymple’s new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... ments-form

Vatican rebuffs Muslim outreach:
Quran cited as the main obstacle

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Vatican has rebuffed a massive outreach effort by 138 Muslim religious leaders and scholars who sent a letter to Pope Benedict XVI in an attempt to improve Christian-Muslim relations.

The letter, titled "A Common Word Between Us and You," which is also addressed to Christianity's other most powerful leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the heads of the Lutheran, Methodist and Baptist churches, seeks to recognize similarities between Islam and Christianity as a way of fostering mutual understanding and respect between the two religions.

It compares texts from the Bible and the Koran to argue that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Both believe in "the primacy of total love and devotion to God," and both value love of neighbor and a peaceful world.

In a belated response to the Oct. 13 letter, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in the Roman Curia, told the French Catholic daily La Croix, on Friday (Oct. 26) that a real theological debate with Muslims was difficult as they saw the Quran as the literal word of God. "Muslims do not accept that one can discuss the Quran in depth, because they say it was written by dictation from God. With such an absolute interpretation, it is difficult to discuss the contents of faith."

Another reading of his comments suggests that the Vatican does not want a dialogue with Muslims unless they change their belief in Quran as a revealed book. Like most Christian theologians, the Muslims have to believe that sacred scriptures are the work of divinely inspired humans.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran's comments echo Pope Benedict's statement. In the summer of 2005, Pope Benedict devoted an annual weekend of study with former graduate students to Islam. During the meeting he reportedly expressed skepticism about Islam's openness to change given the conviction that the Quran is the unchangeable word of God.

Vatican response to the Muslim outreach is significant because in his Regensburg, Germany , speech last year Pope Benedict implied that Islam was violent and irrational religion. His remarks sparked bloody protests in the Muslim world and prompted the Muslim scholars to unite to seek better inter-faith understanding.

Pope Benedict recently re-established an office for interfaith dialogue that he had shuttered, but the Roman Catholic Church has taken hard line stance towards Islam since the death of John Paul II in 2005, supporting diplomacy but not theological discussion. Pope John Paul met with Muslims more than 60 times over the course of his pontificate to build bridges. In May 1999, Pope John Paul II received a delegation of Iraqi Muslims who presented him Islam's holy book, the Quran. The Pope bowed to the Quran and he kissed it as a sign of respect.

However, as a cardinal in the Holy See, the Pope Benedict was known to be skeptical of his predecessor John Paul II's pursuit of conversation. One of his earliest decisions as pope was to move Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, one of the Catholic Church's leading experts on Islam, and head of its council on inter-religious dialogue, away from the centre of influence in Rome, and send him to Egypt as papal nuncio.

Benedict has spoken publicly of Christianity as the cornerstone of Europe and against the admission of Turkey into the European Council. He had said Turkey should seek its future in an association of Islamic nations, not with the EU, which has Christian roots. However, during his visit to Turkey in November 2006, Benedict softened of his opposition to Turkey's long-sought membership in the European Union.

According to Marco Politi, the Vatican expert for the Italian daily La Repubblica: "Certainly he closes the door to an idea which was very dear to John Paul II - the idea that Christians, Jews and Muslims have the same God and have to pray together to the same God." Recently Pope Benedict promoted the old Latin Mass, which contains references to the conversion of the Jews. The Latin mass, largely abandoned after Vatican II, has long been hated by Jews for its emphasis on the Jewish role in turning Jesus over to the Romans for crucifixion and for its call for Jews to come into the church.

Reverting to the 29-page letter that was welcomed by various leaders and institutions, including the Baptist World Alliance and the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader to the world's 17 million Anglicans. Rev. Williams said: 'The letter's understanding of the unity of God provides an opportunity for Christians and Muslims to explore together their distinctive understandings and the ways in which these mould and shape our lives.'

The Evangelical Alliance in Britain welcomed the letter's call for peace and understanding, but also pointed to differences between the two faiths. Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali said that the letter seems to undercut the role of Jesus by emphasizing a part of the Quran that urges non-Muslims not to "ascribe any partners unto" God. The two faiths' understanding of the oneness of God is not the same, he told the Times of London. "One partner cannot dictate the terms on which dialogue must be conducted," he said. "This document seems to be on the verge of doing that."

The letter offers interpretations of both the Quran and the Bible on the love of God, love of neighbor and other spiritual concepts that are similar in Christianity and Islam. It pointed out that finding common ground between Muslims and Christians is not simply a matter for polite ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders and added that: Christianity and Islam are the largest and second largest religions in the world and in history.

The two faiths account for more than half the world's population, the letter notes. "Christians and Muslims reportedly make up over a third and over a fifth of humanity respectively. Together they make up more than 55% of the world's population, making the relationship between these two religious communities the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world."

"If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace."

The letter is signed by no fewer than 19 current and former grand ayatollahs and grand muftis from countries as diverse as Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq. Signatories include Shaykh Sevki Omarbasic, Grand Mufti of Croatia; Dr Abdul Hamid Othman, adviser to the Prime Minister of Malaysia and Dr Ali Ozak, head of the endowment for Islamic scientific studies in Istanbul, Turkey. They also include Shaykh Dr Nuh Ali Salman Al-Qudah, Grand Mufti of Jordan and Shaykh Dr Ikrima Said Sabri, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Imam of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

J

ordan's Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman has been working for more than three years to prepare this letter. The Royal Institute was also responsible for the widely read Open Letter to the Pope following his controversial speech last year, which was signed by 38 high-level Muslim leaders.

The Jordanian Institute is hopeful that this historic letter would provide a common ground for the many organizations and individuals who are currently busy in interfaith dialogue all over the world.

Read also: A common word between Muslims & Christians

www.amperspective.com/html/muslim_outre ... tians.html



Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com email: asghazali@gmail.com

November 28, 2007
To Muslim Girls, Scouts Offer a Chance to Fit In
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

MINNEAPOLIS — Sometimes when Asma Haidara, a 12-year-old Somali immigrant, wants to shop at Target or ride the Minneapolis light-rail system, she puts her Girl Scout sash over her everyday clothes, which usually include a long skirt worn over pants as well as a swirling head scarf.

She has discovered that the trademark green sash — with its American flag, troop number (3009) and colorful merit badges — reduces the number of glowering looks she draws from people otherwise bothered by her traditional Muslim dress.

“When you say you are a girl scout, they say, ‘Oh, my daughter is a girl scout, too,’ and then they don’t think of you as a person from another planet,” said Asma, a slight, serious girl with a bright smile. “They are more comfortable about sitting next to me on the train.”

Scattered Muslim communities across the United States are forming Girl Scout troops as a sort of assimilation tool to help girls who often feel alienated from the mainstream culture, and to give Muslims a neighborly aura. Boy Scout troops are organized with the same inspiration, but often the leap for girls is greater because many come from conservative cultures that frown upon their participating in public physical activity.

By teaching girls to roast hot dogs or fix a flat bicycle tire, Farheen Hakeem, one troop leader here, strives to help them escape the perception of many non-Muslims that they are different.

Scouting is a way of celebrating being American without being any less Muslim, Ms. Hakeem said.

“I don’t want them to see themselves as Muslim girls doing this ‘Look at us, we are trying to be American,’ ” she said. “No, no, no, they are American. It is not an issue of trying.”

The exact number of Muslim girl scouts is unknown, especially since, organizers say, most Muslim scouts belong to predominantly non-Muslim troops. Minneapolis is something of an exception, because a few years ago the Girl Scout Council here surveyed its shrinking enrollment and established special outreach coordinators for various minorities. Some 280 Muslim girls have joined about 10 predominantly Muslim troops here, said Hodan Farah, who until September was the Scout coordinator for the Islamic community.

Nationally, the Boy Scouts of America count about 1,500 youths in 100 clubs of either Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts sponsored by Islamic organizations, said Gregg Shields, a spokesman for the organization.

The Girl Scouts’ national organization, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., has become flexible in recent years about the old trappings associated with suburban, white, middle-class Christian scouting. Many troops have done away with traditions like saying grace before dinner at camp, and even the Girl Scout Promise can be retooled as needed.

“On my honor I will try to serve Allah and my country, to help people and live by the Girl Scout law,” eight girls from predominantly Muslim Troop 3119 in Minneapolis recited on one recent rainy Sunday before setting off for a cookout in a local park.

Some differences were readily apparent, of course. At the cookout, Ms. Hakeem, a former Green Party candidate for mayor, negotiated briefly with one sixth grader, Asha Gardaad, who was fasting for the holy month of Ramadan.

“If you break your fast, will your mother get mad at me?” Ms. Hakeem asked. Asha shook her head emphatically no.

The troop leader distributed supplies: hot dogs followed by s’mores for dessert. All was halal — that is, in adherence with the dietary requirements of Islamic law — with the hot dogs made of beef rather than pork.

It was Asha’s first s’more. “It’s delicious!” she exclaimed, licking sticky goop off her fingers as thunder crashed outside the park shelter with its roaring fire. “It’s a good way to break my fast!”

Women trying to organize Girl Scout troops in Muslim communities often face resistance from parents, particularly immigrants from an Islamic culture like that of Somalia, where tradition dictates that girls do housework after school.

In Nashville, where Ellisha King of Catholic Charities helps run a Girl Scout troop on a shoestring to assist Somali children with acculturation, most parents vetoed a camping trip, for example. They figured years spent as refugees in tents was enough camping, Ms. King recalled.

But a more common concern among parents is that the Girl Scouts will somehow dilute Islamic traditions.

“They are afraid you are going to become a blue-eyed, blond-haired Barbie doll,” said Asma, the girl who at times makes her sash everyday attire. Asma noted that her mother had asked whether she was joining some Christian cabal. “She was afraid that if we hang out with Americans too much,” the young immigrant said, “it will change our culture or who we are.”

Troop leaders win over parents by explaining that various activities incorporate Muslim traditions. In Minneapolis, for instance, Ms. Hakeem helped develop the Khadija Club, named for the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, which exposes older girls to the history of prominent Muslim women.

Suboohi Khan, 10, won her Bismallah (in the name of God) ribbon by writing 4 of God’s 99 names in Arabic calligraphy and decorating them, as well as memorizing the Koran’s last verse, used for protection against gossips and goblins. Otherwise, she said, her favorite badge involved learning “how to make body glitter and to see which colors look good on us” and “how to clean up our nails.”

Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. does not issue religious badges, but endorses those established by independent groups. Gulafshan K. Alavi started one such group, the Islamic Committee on Girl Scouting, in Stamford, Conn., in 1990. The demand for information about Muslim badges, Mrs. Alavi said, has grown to the point where this year she had the pamphlet listing her club’s requirements printed rather than sending out a photocopied flier. She also shipped up to 400 patches awarded to girls who study Ramadan traditions, she said, the most ever.

Predominantly Muslim troops do accept non-Muslim members. In Minneapolis, Alexis Eastlund, 10, said other friends sometimes pestered her about belonging to a mostly Muslim troop, although she has known many of its members half her life.

“I never really thought of them as different,” Alexis said. “But other girls think that it is weird that I am Christian and hang out with a bunch of Muslim girls. I explain to them that they are the same except they have to wear a hijab on their heads.”

Ms. Farah, who served as an outreach coordinator in Minneapolis and remains active in the Scouts, said she used the organization as a platform to try to ease tensions in the community. Scraps between African-American and Somali girls prompted her to start a research project demonstrating to them that their ancestors all came from roughly the same place.

Ms. Hakeem, the troop leader, said she tried to find projects to improve the girls’ self-esteem, like going through the Eddie Bauer catalog to cut out long skirts and other items that adhere to Islamic dress codes.

All in all, scouting gives the girls a rare sense of belonging, troop leaders and members say.

“It is kind of cool to say that you are a girl scout,” Asma said. “It is good to have something to associate yourself with other Americans. I don’t want people to think that I am a hermit, that I live in a cave, isolated and afraid of change. I like to be part of society. I like being able to say that I am a girl scout just like any other normal girl.”

Reform of Islam is Not Bush’s or the Pope’s business

Interfaith Dialogue Should Focus on Man not God

The Pope Rejects Muslim Outreach

By: Ali Baghdadi, Speech given at Northeastern University, Chicago, Interfaith Dialogue Day, Nov 13, 2007)

I was invited to talk to you about Islam. After serious consideration I declined. I am the wrong person. My views about Islam are not the norm. They are controversial. A few weeks ago I received an email, an assassination threat, from an Indian Muslim who will be traveling to the United States to accomplish his “holy” mission. My co-religionist, who works for the Arab American oil company in Saudi Arabia, accused me of being a “murtad”, a renegade. He was angered by an article in which I stated that Moses, according to archeology, a science, is a myth. He actually never existed. Muslims respect Moses as a prophet. My Indian Muslim “friend”, Z. T. Minhas, an insane and a coward, has not arrived yet. The U.S. intelligence, which intercepts our electronic, particularly international mail, has not reacted. Muslims, killing one another, is consistent with U.S. policy.

I was born in Islam. Documents of old torn up paper that I inherited claim that my family descends from Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in the shadow of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which according to the Quran, Islam’s holy book, Prophet Muhammad had journeyed to, and then ascended to heaven, and returned home to Mecca in Arabia, all in one night. Some influential Muslim scholars say that the journey was only a dream. Others, with the Dark Ages mentality, insist that it was physical.

For twenty-three years, without any interruption, I listened to al-Azan, the Muslim call for prayer, five times a day. Prior to starting public school at age 7, I attended a kuttab, a madrasa, a private religious school, at age 4. The elderly teacher, a sheikh, a former officer in the Ottoman army, dressed in a long black robe and a white turban, was occasionally paid with a few loaves of bread, or eggs, or a live chicken. My family couldn’t afford it. I rewarded my sheikh with a daily kiss of his hand, and a prayer, asking God to give him a comfortable and everlasting life in heaven. At age nine or ten I was able to recite most of the chapters of the Quran from memory. I studied the Quran, Islamic thought, Islamic history, Islamic culture and Arabic as language at all educational levels. I also attended lectures on political Islam given underground by some controversial scholars.

Things, however, have changed. My association with Islam throughout my adulthood has become political and not religious. I don’t go to a mosque. As you can tell, I don’t fast. I have no intention of ever performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. I suspended giving al-Zakat, charity, when Bush has designated almost all Muslim charitable organizations that aided the orphans and widows in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, as terrorists, and forced them to close.

I am not concerned about Islam. Islam has survived all foreign invasions. Bush’s crusade will be no exception. I am, however, concerned about Muslims, as well as Christians, in the Muslim World, who are targeted by the West, particularly the United States government, which possesses the most savage and destructive war machinery in human history.

Usually, I don’t defend religion, but people. Religion is faith not science. I insist that every individual has the right to believe or not to believe. Each man or woman has the right to accept a religion or to reject it. A person has the right also to choose to be an atheist. People must be judged by their deeds, and contributions, not their faith. I stand for justice, freedom, equality, peace, and prosperity for all. I support women and gay and lesbian rights.

The question that you may ask is why I am here? What changed my mind? The answer is the Pope. Yes, the Pope.

I was greatly disturbed by the Pope, who, citing the Quran as an obstacle, rebuffed a massive outreach effort by Muslims. Coming at the end of the holy month of Ramadan, three weeks ago, a 29-page letter was sent to leaders of major Christian dominations by 138 high-level Muslim leaders and scholars, representing 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. The letter appeals to religious tolerance, dialogue and understanding. It calls on Christian and Muslim religious leaders to work in unison for world peace, cooperation and prosperity. It emphasizes the similarities between Christianity and Islam as monotheistic religions. It speaks of the affinity between the Bible and the Quran. Both religions worship one God and call for the love of one’s neighbor.

Fortunately, the letter titled “a Common Word between Us and You”, was welcomed by various Christian leaders and institutions. It was well received by the Baptist World Alliance and the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Britain.

However, Pope Benedictine’s reaction was negative, and arrogant. It is also insulting to Christian Arabs, who are culturally Muslims. He chose to close the door to an idea which was very dear to his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who, when the Quran was presented to him, bowed and kissed it.

Benedictine’s hostility to Muslims is nothing new. In his speech in Germany, last year, he spoke of Islam as a violent and irrational religion. He quoted Emperor Manuel II of the Byzantine Empire, who said that Muhammad had brought only "evil and inhuman" things.

The office of interfaith dialogue established by John Paul II, was shut down, but later, under pressure, was reinstated.

Dr. Karen Armstrong of Oxford, a former nun, who is amongst the most renowned theologians and has written numerous bestsellers on the great religions and their founders, disagrees:

“Certainly not. 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. The Qur'an forbids aggressive warfare and permits war only in self-defense; the moment the enemy sues for peace, the Qur'an insists that Muslims must lay down their arms and accept whatever terms are offered, even if they are disadvantageous. Later, Muslim law forbade Muslims to attack a country where Muslims were permitted to practice their faith freely; the killing of civilians was prohibited, as were the destruction of property and the use of fire in warfare.”

The Vatican says: "Muslims do not accept that one can discuss the Quran in depth, because they say it was written by dictation from God. With such an absolute interpretation, it is difficult to discuss the contents of faith."

As a precondition for a dialogue, the Vatican demands that Muslims change their belief that the Quran is the word of God.

I say with a great certainty that the Pope’s action and conduct are not inspired by God, on whose behalf, “his holiness” speaks. It is dictated by politics, racism, ignorance and hatred. It is a part of the cruel crusade that George W. Bush, has declared against Muslims. Since his ascension to the papal throne, Benedictine, a former Hitler youth, has been putting the papacy, as well as Christianity, in the service of the U.S. empire.

Muslims are not asking for a theological dialogue. They are not trying to convince anyone that the Quran was dictated by God himself. Unlike Christians who are asking Jews to come to the Church, Muslims are not calling on Christians to come to the Mosque. Muslims are not demanding that Christians abandon the trinity and recognize Jesus only as a prophet. Though they don’t believe in the crucifixion and vindicate Jews from murdering Jesus, Muslims don’t see any reason for Christians to bring down the cross and raise up the crescent.

Muslims and non-Muslims ought to focus attention on common goals that are more important to humanity than theology, such as world peace, justice, freedom, equality, love, understanding, respect for one another, tolerance, cooperation, as well as mother earth and the environment.

In Muslim lands, Muslims, Christians and Jews have lived as neighbors for almost fifteen hundred years. They didn’t dialogue. They didn’t debate. They lived in peace and tranquility. The fact that Christianity and Judaism continued to exist alongside Muslims, who were and still are the majority, speaks of Muslim tolerance. The fact that Jews throughout the centuries fled Christian lands and took refuge in Muslim countries, demonstrates, beyond a doubt, Muslims’ respect of non-Muslims’ beliefs.

I do admit that the reform of Islam is urgently needed. But this is not the business of Jews or Christians. It is a Muslim problem. It requires a Muslim solution. It must be addressed and dealt with as a Muslim concern. Christians and Jews have their own enormous problems to acknowledge and resolve.

George W. Bush has been pushing for a new Islam that welcomes occupiers as liberators and labels oppression as democracy. He is promoting an Islam that requires his adherents to turn the other cheek to U.S. and Israeli soldiers, who are ordered to kill, maim, torture, burn, and destroy. He has been working hard to restrict Islam to spirituality, only to issues that deal with God but not man. No jihad! Jihad is not suicide, which is a great sin in Islam, but a struggle against injustice, oppression, occupation and aggression. Jihad is a legitimate resistance to daily murder of men, women and children. Bush’s Islam calls on Muslims to capitulate, kneel down in submission, not the Lord of the Universe, but to the satanic” god” who resides in the White House. Muslims’ answer came clear, brief and swift, “hell, no.”

Hitler, who proclaimed himself a “Christian” and a fighter for “his Lord and Savior”, didn’t claim to have spoken to God. George W. Bush did.

"God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda and I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

However, God warned Bush, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." Here, Bush’s destructive god is right. “The mother of all battles” will continue until all foreign troops return home.

His “obedience” to his killer god has resulted in the murder of over a million Iraqis. Iraqi death due to war and economic sanctions are three and a half million. Iraqi orphans number five million and widows are three million. Six million people fled Iraq or were displaced. Museums, libraries and educational institutions were bombed and ransacked. Their contents were stolen or burned. Thousands of scholars and scientists were assassinated. Seven thousand years of human civilization is leveled to the ground. The only ministry building that was left standing is the Ministry of Oil. What a coincidence!

What about Western achievements the Pope attempts to protect? The Church cannot take credit for the awakening, enlightenment, progress, and freedoms men and women enjoy in the West today. On the contrary, the Church resisted and continues to resist reform and change until this very moment.

Muslim leaders who enjoy the support and blessing of the United States are the obstacle for social change and development. The Saudi dynasty continues to forbid women from driving, and deny Saudi citizens the right to vote.

However, Islamic reform is taking place slowly but steadily. Polygamy was outlawed in Tunisia. Dr. Hassan al-Turabi, a former head of the Sudanese National Assembly, one of the most influential thinkers that I had the honor to meet several times, issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, which gives the right to Muslim females to marry non-Muslims, and for women to lead Muslim prayers.

Revolutionary change is taking place in Iran, U.S. enemy number one. A divorced woman has the property right to a half of the wealth her husband amassed while being married. Sex change is legal. The surgery is paid for by the state.

I must remind you that four Muslim countries, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia had women as heads of state.

I regret that the Pope’s stand has forced me to end my public silence on issues pertaining to religion, and make comparison between faiths.

The Pope wants Muslims to tailor Islam to fit Judeo-Christians values. However, in terms of peace, universal brotherhood, equality, freedom, logic and simplicity, Islam is far more rational and progressive than Christianity and Judaism. No Vatican. No sainthood. No priesthood. No present day miracles. No spiritual healing of the sick. Those who may claim to have the power of healing, end in a mental institution or a jail. The Old Testament, an integral part of the Bible, as described by Christian and Jewish researchers and historians, is blood and sex. The God of Israel, Jehovah, orders his “Chosen People”, to destroy burn, kill, enslave, and rape virgins of the goyem, non-Jews.

Furthermore, Islam’s religious affairs are not a hierarchy for clerics. Islamic affairs are not confined to graduates from al-Azhar University or other Islamic institutions. As a matter of fact, the greatest Muslim scholars are intellectuals, such as writers, physicians, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals.

According to an interpretation the Old Testament, Noah's three sons were the founders of the populations of the three known continents, Japheth/Europe, Shem <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shem> /Asia, and Ham/Africa. Ham’s children had been "blackened" by sin and a curse. Ham made fun of his lying down, drunk and naked father. Noah’s two other sons who covered him were blessed. Their descendents were not black.

In Islam black is not a curse, but a beautiful color in the rainbow of the human race. Muhammad declared that all men are equal. The Quran says, “O mankind! We (God) created ye from a single (pair) of a male and female, and made ye into nations and tribes, that ye may know one another, (not that ye may despise each other). Verily, the most honored of you in the sight of God is he who is the most Righteous of you.” Chapter 49, verse 13.

Islam has no confession and no intermediary. A man, a woman or a child has direct and private line of communication with God, free of charge, anytime and anywhere. In the Quran, God stresses that He is close to all. He responds if he is called.

In Islam, no one represents God on earth. No one is infallible. Muhammad, Jesus, Moses and all prophets are not divine, but humans.

All efforts and promises for a better life made by the Vatican and other Christian groups to convince Muslims throughout the world to convert have failed. What disturbs Christian missionaries is the fact that Islam today is the fastest growing religion. According to the Seattle Times, Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group. Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she's ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she's also been a Muslim.

To multiply the number of his constituents, Benedictine, in his visit to Latin America, last year, demanded from its poverty stricken natives not to use condoms. When it comes to sex, what or how, in the privacy of their bedroom, has always been the job of a married couple, not Muslim clergy.

The Quran reveres Bible prophets, not insults them. The Old Testament presents Abraham as a pimp. He gave his wife Sarah to the Pharaoh to sleep with and enjoy. In return, the Pharaoh granted him slaves, cattle, silver and gold. Abraham repeated the same trade with one of the kings of Jordan. What a bargain.

Read the Bible. I can go on and on and on.

Religion, particularly Judaism and Christianity which were written with fire and blood, have brought more evil and less good to humanity throughout history. Interfaith dialogue should not debate theology. It should work to end death, destruction and misery. Dialogue should concentrate on building bridges of good will and coexistence. It should put less emphasis on God and more on fellow man.

Muslims are condemned for their rejection to Western values. The question is why should they? They have their own values that were developed over seven thousand years of civilization. The decision to drop the two atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki took, according to President Truman, a snap of a finger. Non-whites’ life is worthless. A couple of weeks ago, in Israel, actually occupied Palestine, a young woman was savagely beaten by five of her fellow students of the Torah, because she refused to move to the back of the bus. Muslim men promptly evacuate their seats for women, anytime and anywhere. Muhammad assured his followers that Paradise is underneath the feet of mothers and entry is allowed only by their blessings and approval. Those values should remain.

Islamofascism, a new word coined by Norman Podhoretz, a former editor of Commentary Jewish magazine, the home of the neoconservatives. Bush loves the new word and sings it like a puppet, to drum up American support against Muslims, and to wage a new Zionist-white supremacist war against Iran, which insists on using nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. The October 22nd to 26th Islamofascism Awareness Week organized by the Jewish lobby and the neo conservatives, on 100 campuses, turned out to be a great disaster. Students protested and heckled the speakers. David Horowitz, author of Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... edirect=no> ), Jump to: navigation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unholy_All ... column-one> , search <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unholy_All ... earchInput>

Who received more than $15 million in handouts from ultra conservative foundations, was forced to flee. In the sixties, he was a Marxist and a member of the new left. His Jewish parents were long-standing members of the Communist Party. Horowitz later discovered that leftism doesn’t pay. The Zionist propagandist describes so-called Islam as the moral and historical equivalent of Nazism. Margaret Kimberley, a writer and a senior columnist, together with a group of influential anti-fascist activists, are calling for a counter-event: "Christian/Jewish Fascism Awareness Week."

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam has replaced communism as an imaginary enemy, and thus justified the astronomical military spending in service of big business. It does not take a nuclear or a space scientist to conclude that the 911 tragedy was a home-made conspiracy. It is naïve to believe that a man with a turban on his head and a cane in his hand hiding eleven thousand miles away in the caves of Tora Boro is responsible for such an almost impossible mission. 51% of the American people question the official story. Evidence points a finger at Bush, Cheney, their lieutenants, the Israeli Mossad and certain segments in U.S. intelligence. We must demand the creation of an independent commission of scholars, scientists, engineers, and experts on demolition and intelligence to find the truth and bring the criminals to justice.

The watch list of suspected terrorists, compiled by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has swelled to over 755,000. Certainly, if you oppose war and stand against genocide, regardless of your religion, or nationality, you can be sure that you are on this list. Ironically, it mainly contains scholars, academics, writers, journalists, artists, and anti-war activists.

What about Islamic “radicalism”?

Fifty years ago, in most Arab countries, one could seldom see a Muslim girl or a woman covering her hair. Today, one can rarely encounter a Muslim female without a headscarf. I must admit, all are beautiful, with or without a cover. However, I do hate the burqa, a veil, which covers the face. It is not a religious requirement. Those who impose it, as well as the women who accept it, bring shame and disgrace to the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

Muslims females wear the scarf mostly by choice. It is mainly a sign of political protest. It is a rejection to Western values, Western culture, Western domination, Western hypocrisy and Western occupation. It is a stand against theft of resources, ethnic cleansing, and genocide to which Muslims are subjected.

Muhammad said, “If you see evil, your duty is to stop it by your hand. If you cannot, you must oppose it by your mouth. But if you cannot, you should undo it in your heart.” In Muslim lands, Muslim fighters oppose U.S. and Israeli tanks and bombers with gun, and sometimes by an explosive belt. In the Quran, God says, “Think not that those who fall while resisting aggression will ever die. They are alive, in the company of their Lord.” Muslims believe that that is the highest form of martyrdom and the greatest honor.

Finally, I have been a U.S. citizen for over forty years. My country of origin, Palestine, is occupied, and my country men, women and children are killed daily. The United States has become my second home. I am grateful. Two of my children served in the U.S. military. Both took the oath to defend their country. Both were honorably discharged.

Regardless of my convictions and beliefs, Islam has formed my identity. It remains a source of my personal behavior and conduct. I will not abandon my heritage, my culture, my roots, or my people. The F.B.I. visited me twice, a year ago. I refuse to be intimidated. As long as the crusade against Muslims continues, as long as there is war on earth, and as long as there is hunger and disease, the least I must do is to not be in the silent majority.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim Dirty Laundry
Eboo Patel
The Faith Divide

When I wrote an article for this website a few months ago called On
Muslim Antisemitism, a Muslim friend of mine remarked, "What you say is
true, but why do you have to air our dirty laundry?"

I stared at her in disbelief. Did she really think that the world was
unaware of our dirty laundry?

The sad truth is that too many people think it's the only kind of
laundry Muslims have.

And one of the reasons for this is because mainstream Muslims aren't
talking openly about the problem.

My wife was at a dinner party last week and someone asked about the
English woman in the Sudan who, at the urging of her Muslim students,
named the class teddy bear Muhammad and received jail time and death
threats for her efforts.

My wife's friend asked: "Does Islam really say that she should be
punished?"

"I don't want to talk about it," my wife responded.

I understand why my wife took a pass. Mainstream Muslims are tired of
being put on the defensive, of only being asked about their religion in
relation to violence or the oppression of women, as if that's all that
Islam has ever or could ever produce.

But her friend still wanted an answer to her question. And if my wife
wasn't going to provide one, then she would have to find someone who
would.

In this case, it was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote an OpEd in The New York
Times effectively stating that Islam requires Muslims to severely punish
teachers who name teddy bears Muhammad (Sudan), rape victims who are
accused of being in the presence of a man who is not a family member
(Saudi Arabia) and female writers who criticize Islam (India).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right on two important points. The first is that all
of these punishments are appalling and brutal. The second is that
moderate Muslims should be louder about these matters. There are some
things that are true even if Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes them.

And once moderate Muslims are louder, not in the form of angry
indignation but as eloquent articulators of the depth and meaning of
their faith, then people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali will suddenly find
themselves consigned to the place where they should have been all along:
the margins, where they can froth at the mouth all they want.

Hirsi Ali and people like her are widely-read because they offer a
theory of the problem: they tell the world a convincing story of why
Muslims keep popping up on the front pages of newspapers in negative
articles. Hirsi Ali's theory, and the theory of other Islamophobes, is
that Muslims have dirty laundry because the body and soul of Islam are
dirty.

Hirsi Ali ends her Times OpEd with a subtle but scathing indictment of
Islam - that it is a tradition opposed to conscience and compassion.
"When a "moderate" Muslim's sense of compassion and conscience collides
with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion," she
writes.

I wonder if my wife's dinner part friend thinks that's true. As far as I
know, it's the only theory that she's heard.

A lesson for mainstream Muslims: Whenever you don't offer a theory of
the problem, someone else will. When there is a vacuum of information
about a hot topic and you don't fill it, other people will aggressively
move in.

Too many mainstream Muslims believe they have only two options in the
face of the current discourse on Islam: angry indignation or stony
silence.

I believe there is a third way. It is what University of Michigan
Professor Sherman Jackson, one of America's leading scholars of Islam,
calls 'Islamic literacy'.

Here is how someone literate in Islam, Muslim or not, might have
responded to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's contention that Islam and compassionate
conscience are mutually exclusive. First, by saying that there should be
no excuses made for those who sought the punishments in any of the three
cases she named. They were indeed brutal, and as such, were in conflict
with the core ethos of Islam - compassion and mercy, which are enshrined
both in the Muslim tradition and in the human conscience.

Compassion and mercy are the two most repeated qualities of God in
Islam, best illustrated by the most common Muslim prayer, "Bismillah
Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim" - In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the
most Merciful. As they are qualities of God, they are attributes that
Muslims are required to emulate.

Compassion and mercy are also enshrined in the first lesson that
classical Muslim scholars would teach their students, what came to be
known as the Tradition of Primacy in Islam: "If you are merciful to
those on Earth, then He who is in Heaven will be merciful to you."
Islam, like other traditions, has internal contradictions. The Qur'an
and Muslim law say different things in different places. That is
precisely why compassion and mercy play such an important role in Muslim
interpretation and practice. When in doubt about how to deal with a
particular situation, a Muslim should always be guided by compassion and
mercy.

Compassion and mercy are given to human beings by God - they are the
content of our conscience. Dr. Umar Abdallah, the most senior scholar in
Western Islam, writes in one of the most important essays in
contemporary Islam that mercy is the central quality that God "stamped"
on His creation.

Fazlur Rahman, amongst the most widely-respected Muslim scholars of the
twentieth century (and Dr. Umar's intellectual mentor), wrote that the
single most important term in the Qur'an is "taqwa", which translates
roughly as "God-consciousness" or "inner torch" or "conscience."

Khaled Abou El Fadl, one of America's most important scholars of Islamic
thought and law, believes that people are required to bring their
God-given compassion to the reading of the text of the Qur'an. "The text
will morally enrich the reader, but only if the reader will morally
enrich the text.," he writes in a remarkable essay called The Place of
Tolerance in Islam.

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, the most prominent Muslim scholar and preacher in
the West, wrote in a piece for this website, "Unfortunately, millions of
Muslims all over the globe are humiliated and betrayed by the ignorance
and lack of basic humanity that a small minority of Muslims too often
exhibits."

He continued, "True religion - as well as the highest secular values -
demands we ... attempt to understand each other, recognize our real
differences, and display mutual respect."

That is a statement of both liberation and guidance for mainstream
Muslims. Muslims who speak only of brutality and severity and punishment
are not just betraying mainstream Muslims, they are violating our
tradition. They do not speak for us. We are not required to defend them.

To mainstream Muslims everywhere: When we act and speak with compassion
and conviction and knowledge, even about our 'dirty laundry', we are
following the straight path of our faith, educating those with genuine
questions about Islam, marginalizing people with destructive agendas,
and doing our part to build a world based on understanding and respect.

Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth
Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith
cooperation. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths
apart and what brings them together.

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The New York Times
December 7, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Islam's Silent Moderates
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI

The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of
them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a
matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day.
(Koran 24:2)

IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen
Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise
up in horror.

A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been
abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the
victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called "mingling": when she
was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or
marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was
sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.

Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually
receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven
weeks the "girl from Qatif," as she's usually described in news
articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is
released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there
have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her
"crime" has tarnished her family's honor.

We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old
British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail
before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40
lashes. When she began a reading project with her class involving a
teddy bear, Ms. Gibbons suggested the children choose a name for it.
They chose Muhammad; she let them do it. This was deemed to be
blasphemy.

Then there's Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who
bravely defends women's rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee
Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want
her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. In August
she was assaulted by Muslim militants in Hyderabad, and in recent weeks
she has had to leave Calcutta and then Rajasthan. Taslima Nasreen's visa
expires next year, and she fears she will not be allowed to live in
India again.

It is often said that Islam has been "hijacked" by a small extremist
group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said
to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the
terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing
to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this
manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted - and that no matter
who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said,
this should no longer be done?

Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference
are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization,
which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader
of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from
Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by
Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad's behavior would be
unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark
protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators
be prosecuted.

But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more
to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting
the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the
hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome
some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq
Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of
Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so
concerned about Islam's image. We hear that violence is not in the
Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists
and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion
people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic
world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above:
more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command
that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah
above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim
in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.

If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the
girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?

When a "moderate" Muslim's sense of compassion and conscience collides
with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless
that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful
thinking.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch Parliament and a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of
"Infidel."

Informed Reader
January 4, 2008; Page B6
GLOBAL AFFAIRS
Civilizations Clash, With or Without Religion FOREIGN POLICY -- JANUARY/FEBRUARY

What would the world be like without Islam? No clash of civilizations? No 9/11? No holy wars?

Actually, all of these events would likely have occurred, says Graham Fuller, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a former forecaster for the Central Intelligence Agency. Take away Islam, and the world would still be left with the main forces that drive today's conflicts, including colonialism, cross-national ideologies, ethnic conflicts and terrorism, Mr. Fuller says.

Mr. Fuller ponders a litany of history's major battles to drive home his message that while Islam might be a convenient culprit, global strife, past and present, can't be blamed on any one religion. Europeans would still have wanted the spoils of the Middle East and launched the Crusades, he says, albeit under a different banner. The West still would have tried to get control of oil-rich areas. The French would still have gone into Algeria for its farm lands. The creation of Israel still would have displaced Palestinians, no matter what their religion.
The inhabitants of the Middle East wouldn't be more comfortable with these events if they belonged to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the Middle East's predominant religion when Muhammad arrived. In fact, a religious fissure between Western Europe and the Middle East would probably still exist, says Mr. Fuller, noting that Eastern Orthodox Christianity has an anti-Western narrative of its own dating to the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

True, without Islam, the people of the Middle East would lack a powerful, crossborder unifying force that sometimes is co-opted by a small number of people inclined toward violence. But the Middle East would have access to similar forces, such as Marxism or ethnic nationalism, that have served that purpose in other parts of the world. In 2006, the crime-data clearing house Europol said, only one of the 498 terrorist acts in the European Union was Islamist. The rest were largely committed by separatist and left-wing groups.

Muslim nations can pursue knowledge and growth
By Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
The writer is Malaysia's prime minister
Published: January 14 2008 18:05 | Last updated: January 14 2008 18:05

On Tuesday, in Madrid, politicians, non-governmental organisations and civil society leaders from across the globe begin two days of dialogue aimed at addressing the growing polarisation between nations and cultures worldwide. The objective is not only to promote cross-cultural understanding, but also to create and develop partnerships and joint initiatives aimed at promoting an “Alliance of Civilisations�.

This is, in my view, an honourable objective, and one around which we should all unite. But in doing so we need to ensure that the voice of the weak and marginalised is heard. A striking characteristic of the modern era is the rapid diffusion of ideas and values from the centres of global power to the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, there is a tendency among the powerful to expect the rest to accept their world view without question. This is not always possible, nor is it desirable.

Non-western civilisations and cultures have their own unique history, traditions and theology, which often embody ideas and values that are fundamentally different from what the west has to offer. Nowhere is this divergence more apparent than on issues pertaining to religion.

Many in the west expect that as Muslim societies develop materially, they will separate religion from the public sphere, treating it as a purely private matter, as happened during the period in Europe termed the “Enlightenment�. However, as many Muslim societies urbanise and modernise, what we witness is a growing attachment to Islam. The reasons for this are complex; people often want to protect their identity from being subsumed by a global norm. In some cases, the attachment to religion is a reaction against the monolithic forces of globalisation, forces that sometimes clash with Islam’s own search for deeper meaning and purpose, and concern for the needy. For Muslims, then, religion can never be a purely private matter for, unlike other prophets, Mohammed steered a state and established principles of governance that embody these values.

This does not mean that Muslims are driven to create Taliban-like states everywhere. Nor does it mean that Islam is anathema to economic growth. The identification of Islam and the Muslim world with violence, instability, poverty, illiteracy, injustice and intolerance is highly misleading.

In spite of this, it cannot be denied that large parts of the Muslim world are indeed among the most backward and economically underdeveloped. In many cases, Muslim countries have fallen behind because they have rejected the pursuit of knowledge, a fundamental injunction of Islam. Some Muslims have closed their minds and allowed the weight of tradition and narrow religious interpretation to stifle inquiry and innovation. Limiting knowledge to religious matters and an overemphasis on rote learning extinguishes the spirit of discovery. This is a disservice to Islam.

Similarly, Muslims often forget that work is also a form of worship and that Islam calls for diligence and industry. If Muslims adhere to these values, then Islam presents itself as a progressive world view, one that in the modern day should be focused on the furthering of knowledge and the development of human capital. While many Muslim countries are rich in natural resources, our greatest resources will always be our people. The Muslim world will progress farthest when it unlocks and develops this potential, through quality education at all levels. Moreover, this will never be achieved if some Muslims continue to neglect the right to education and work for women. Women constitute half the Muslim world’s human capital and in marginalising women we only impoverish ourselves.

The teachings of Islam can be faulted neither for economic deprivation in the Muslim world nor the recent discord between it and the west. Moreover, the problems that persist in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine are the vestiges of earlier projections of world power. The resulting humiliation felt by Muslims continues to engender a loss of trust and confidence towards the west. But, whatever the cause, these strategic issues have now become interwoven and interdependent, and their resolution will require greater understanding and trust, as well as the creation of economic opportunities.

If, in the coming days, we are successful in taking the first steps towards an Alliance of Civilisations, both the Muslim world and the west have much to learn from one another, as well as much to gain.

The writer is Malaysia’s prime minister
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

In the CBC Man Alive interview 1986, MHI stated in response to the question: "Another image we have is of the Ayatollah and we associate Islam with terrorism. Is terrorism Islamic?":

A: It certainly isn't. Unfortunately it is a part of our modern life and in fact it is also part of our history. But it is prevelant in Western Europe, it is prevelant in South America. It takes religious expressions, it takes economic expressions. I don't think one should in all honesty look at terrorism as being an Islamic force. I don't think it is in any way an Islamic force. It is an expression of other forces which may seek at times to use Islam as one of the binding ingredients. Just as I think other terrorists forms in Western Eurooe for example do the same thing - the I.R.A. can hardly be expressive of the Catholic Ghurch and yet it calls itself a Catholic movement. So I think we have to be careful not to attach to the term terrorism a religion connotation "par excellence". That there are elements in those forces of terrorism which may seek legitimacy from a faith is something which is world wide not specific to the Islamic world.

The following article echoes the above sentiments.

Imagine A World Without Islam!
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
17 January, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Take away Islam, and the world would still be left with the main forces that drive today's conflicts, including colonialism, cross-national ideologies, ethnic conflicts and terrorism, says Graham Fuller, a former Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long-range strategic forecasting and currently a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada).

In his article entitled A World Without Islam, published in Foreign Policy, Fuller believes that given our intense current focus on terrorism, war, and rampant anti-Americanism it's vital to understand the true sources of these crises. He poses a question, is Islam the source of the problem or does it tend to lie with other less obvious and deeper factors?

Fuller presents his thoughts on Islam in an extended game of "what if." What if Islam had never arisen in the Middle East? What if there had never been a Prophet Mohammed, no saga of the spread of Islam across vast parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa? Would there still be violent clashes between the West and that part of the world? Would the Middle East be more peaceful? How different might the character of East-West relations be?

Fuller ponders a litany of history's major battles and events to drive home his message that while Islam might be a convenient culprit, but global strife, past and present, can't be blamed on any one religion. Europeans would still have wanted the spoils of the Middle East and launched the Crusades albeit under a different banner. " After all, what were the Crusades if not a Western adventure driven primarily by political, social, and economic needs? The banner of Christianity was little more than a potent symbol, a rallying cry to bless the more secular urges of powerful Europeans.

In fact, the particular religion of the natives never figured highly in the West's imperial push across the globe. Europe may have spoken upliftingly about bringing "Christian values to the natives," but the patent goal was to establish colonial outposts as sources of wealth for the metropole and bases for Western power projection."

And so it's unlikely that Christian inhabitants of the Middle East would have welcomed the stream of European fleets and their merchants backed by Western guns, he says adding that Imperialism would have prospered in the region's complex ethnic mosaic--the raw materials for the old game of divide and rule. And Europeans still would have installed the same pliable local rulers to accommodate their needs. We doublespeak about promoting democracy in the Middle East as we back autocratic, despotic and undemocratic client regimes there.

On the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he says that it would not have been welcome by Iraqis even if they were Christian. Fuller points out that the United States did not overthrow Saddam Hussein, an intensely nationalist and secular leader, because he was Muslim and other Arab peoples would still have supported the Iraqi Arabs in their trauma of occupation. "Nowhere do people welcome foreign occupation and the killing of their citizens at the hands of foreign troops. Indeed, groups threatened by such outside forces invariably cast about for appropriate ideologies to justify and glorify their resistance struggle. Religion is one such ideology."

The West still would have tried various ways to get control of oil-rich areas, according to Fuller. But Middle Eastern Christians would not have welcomed imperial Western oil companies, backed by their European vice-regents, diplomats, intelligence agents, and armies, any more than Muslims did. Look at the long history of Latin American reactions to American domination of their oil, economics, and politics. The Middle East would have been equally keen to create nationalist anti-colonial movements to wrest control of their own soil, markets, sovereignty, and destiny from foreign grip--just like anti-colonial struggles in Hindu India, Confucian China, Buddhist Vietnam, and a Christian and animist Africa.

On the current Israeli-Palestinian problem, Fuller believes that Jews would have still sought a homeland outside Europe and the Zionist movement would still have emerged and sought a base in Palestine even if the Middle East was Christian. Why, because, he explains, it was Christians who shamelessly persecuted Jews for more than a millennium, culminating in the Holocaust. These horrific examples of anti-Semitism were firmly rooted in Western Christian lands and culture, he says.

"And the new Jewish state would still have dislodged the same 750,000 Arab natives of Palestine from their lands even if they had been Christian--and indeed some of them were. Would not these Arab Palestinians have fought to protect or regain their own land?"

The Israeli-Palestinian problem remains at heart a national, ethnic, and territorial conflict, only recently bolstered by religious slogans, Fuller said adding that we should not forget that Arab Christians played a major role in the early emergence of the whole Arab nationalist movement in the Middle East. He recalls that the ideological founder of the first pan-Arab Baath party, Michel Aflaq, was a Sorbonne-educated Syrian Christian.

On blaming Islam for current violence and terrorism, Fuller echoes Robert Pape's argument about the strategic, social and personal motivations work together to encourage suicide terrorism. Pape, in his book Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, argues that nationalism and religious difference between the rebels and a dominant democratic state are the main conditions under which the "alien" occupation of a community's homeland is likely to lead to a campaign of suicide terrorism. He finds that religion plays a smaller part than thought.

Fuller reminds that the West's memories are short when it focuses on terrorism in the name of Islam. He recalls: "Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine. Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil "Tigers" invented the art of the suicide vest and for more than a decade led the world in the use of suicide bombings--including the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Greek terrorists carried out assassination operations against U.S. officials in Athens. Organized Sikh terrorism killed Indira Gandhi, spread havoc in India, established an overseas base in Canada , and brought down an Air India flight over the Atlantic. Macedonian terrorists were widely feared all across the Balkans on the eve of World War I. Dozens of major assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were carried out by European and American "anarchists," sowing collective fear.

The Irish Republican Army employed brutally effective terrorism against the British for decades, as did communist guerrillas and terrorists in Vietnam against Americans, communist Malayans against British soldiers in the 1950s, Mau-Mau terrorists against British officers in Kenya --the list goes on. It doesn't take a Muslim to commit terrorism."

Fuller points out that even the recent history of terrorist activity doesn't look much different. "According to Europol, 498 terrorist attacks took place in the European Union in 2006. Of these, 424 were perpetrated by separatist groups, 55 by left-wing extremists, and 18 by various other terrorists. Only 1 was carried out by Islamists."

Fuller makes a compelling argument that conflict between East and West remains all about the grand historical and geopolitical issues of human history: ethnicity, nationalism, ambition, greed, resources, local leaders, turf, financial gain, power, interventions, and hatred of outsiders, invaders, and imperialists. Faced with timeless issues like these, how could the power of religion not be invoked, he asked.

He also reminds us that virtually every one of the principle horrors of the 20th century came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It was Europeans who visited their "world wars" twice upon the rest of the world—two devastating global conflicts with no remote parallels in Islamic history.

Some today might wish for a "world without Islam" in which these problems presumably had never come to be. But, in truth, the conflicts, rivalries, and crises of such a world might not look so vastly different than the ones we know today, Fuller concludes.

In short, Fuller has done a great job in spelling out the real root of the contemporary problems which lie in imperialism/colonialism, more than religion, although certainly religion is a part. His paradigm repudiates uninformed and biased pundits and neoconservatives who condemn Islam as the root of all conflict and see "Islamofascism" the sworn foe of the West in a looming "World War III."

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com E-mail: asghazali@gmail.com

It has been alleged that violence, terrorism and fundamentalism are aspects of Islam. The video shows these tendencies in Christianity…

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=owCXbDVTLRE&NR=1

The Muslim World Beyond the Western Media
Not All Veils and Guns
By B. R. GOWANI

The influence of the western media, especially the US, can be gauged from its success in creating the image of Muslim men as gun-toting religious fanatics and that of Muslim women as veiled ignorant cows. From Australia to the United States this image is now permanently engraved on the minds of the majority of westerners, and on many others' who would like to see Muslims in that light because of their countries' disputes with neighboring Muslim countries. And yet there are others who would equate Muslim sympathy for the suffering of Palestine, Iraq, or Afghanistan, as "terrorism."

There are terrorists in all communities, including Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim. On the other hand, like other religious communities, Islam also has artists, intellectuals, athletes, entertainers, and rebels.

If a terrorist incident happens in Sri Lanka (where the majority is Buddhist), which the electronic media finds it worthy to display, than Sri Lanka will be in the news once only -- unless the US is planning to wage a war against that nation, in which case the coverage will be 24/7.

There are over fifty countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. If the above criterion is applied to Muslim countries, than over fifty times those countries will be in the news. Now add the past animosities of the Crusades; the late 1940s creation of Israel on Palestinian land; Western greed for the Middle Eastern oil -- which is the US "national interest;" the total US control of Middle East oil in order to cut off its allies Europe and Japan's oil supplies, in case they show any trace of independent policies; its support of China's oil-rich neighbors (the Central Asian nations) with the aim of locking China's energy requirements when present relations deteriorate; its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; its planning of war against Iran; and its dragging of Pakistan into the "war on terror."

Reader can now imagine how many times the Muslim countries will be in the news?

After 2001's ghastly act on the US soil, no other terroristic incident has happened and yet the government and the news media never shy away from creating a fear mania.

Paranoia makes people, as well as nations, do all sorts of crazy things. However, the US has gone pathologically crazy. Two news items of last year will make it clear: The FBI went through the grocery stores' customers' data for the year 2005 and 2006 for the San Francisco area. Its aim was to check any rise in the sales of Middle Eastern food such as falafel, together with other information, and thus get to the Iranian agents in the area. However, it was discontinued after the operation's legality was questioned.
The Los Angeles Police Department's Deputy Chief, Michael P. Downing, ordered general mapping of Muslim areas "seeking to identify at-risk communities," because he is "looking for communities and enclaves based on risk factors that are likely to become isolated." The LAPD wants to "reach out to these communities," and for that it's necessary "to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are."

Five words sums up the LAPD plan: Keep an eye on Muslims.
Under heavy criticism the plan was shelved.

There are three million Muslims in the United States. Let's say that 1 per cent, or 30,000 of them, are terrorists and on average four of them join hands to carry on their nefarious activities. So now we have 7,500 terrorist groups and they all plan to destroy this country. However, out of those 7,500, only 1 per cent or 75 groups (or 300 "terrorists") succeed in their plan. Imagine the scale of devastation! If they attack the major highways, airports, sea ports, bridges, down towns, and rail tracks the US economy would come to a standstill and China would be at its doorstep asking back for its loaned money. (Not that the US is going to pay back. It would probably declare a war on China-a final nail in the coffin of US imperialism.)

(Encyclopedia Britannica, PBS, and many others give a figure of 5 to 7 million where as some Jewish groups go for half that number. May be they are right or perhaps it's their anti-Muslim bias. I have gone for the lower figure to make the Jewish Lobby happy. On the contrary, the Lobby in this example would, I am sure, prefer the higher figure.

The US State Department says that by 2010 the number of Muslims in the US will exceed that of Jews. Currently there are about two per cent Jews, or approximately 6 million.

In TV news, they frequently show how the reporters just slip in at the major airports without going through the security checks. So it is not an impossible task.

Like many non-Muslims, Muslims may feel hurt by the deaths and devastation visited upon Iraq and Afghanistan by the US. There may be many who would feel outraged and will think about avenging. But basically it is limited to that feeling only. Next day they may be going (as students, employees, or owners) to their offices, educational institutions, courts, liquor stores, gas stations, motels, hotels, and other working and business places.

But the image persists because the ordinary people are not given any respite from constant hateful bombardments from the mad media.

Another familiar sight on the TV news is the introductory footage to items about Muslim countries, which invariably shows Muslim men in various postures of prayer, as if they don't do anything else in life. One can only wonder as to how the Muslim population is on the rise (besides the new converts), or how the economy runs, or how the underpaid adults and children produce goods for the Western countries, or so many other things.

Not every Muslim man is brandishing a gun nor is every woman clad in a burka.
Many Muslims are not only proficient in their fields but several of them also create history. A tiny uneven sample related to few fields:

Leila Ahmed is a professor who teaches at the Harvard Divinity School and is the author of "Women and Gender in Islam" and her autobiography "A Border Passage: From Cairo to America, a Woman's Journey."

Halid Beslic is a famous Bosnian folk singer.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (previously Yasmin Damji) is a journalist who lives in London, England, and writes for London's Independent newspaper. Prior to that, she used to write for New Statesman. She frequently appears on BBC to debate on racialism and other issues.

Shamim Ara started out as an actress, a very fine and successful one, who later turned film producer and director. She is South Asia's most prolific and successful woman director.

Another actor turned producer/director of several films is Sangeeta.
Inul Daratista means "the girl with the breasts." (Ainul Rokhimah is the birth name of this Indonesian dancer.) The Islamists targeted her for her dengdut dancing (a mixture of Arabic, Indian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Malay) which has been termed as "drilling." With bended knees, Inul gyrates her derriere with such a speed that it seems like a "glittering piston," in the words of Time magazine reporters.

She counters her critics such as the Indonesian Ulemas Council in these words: "MUI should realize that Indonesia is not a Muslim country, it's a democratic country." Backers she has many too, including the former Presidents Ms. Megavati Soukarnoputri and Mr. Abdurrahman Wahid, leader of Nadhlatul Ulama, an Islamic organization.

Deeyah (since 1992, originally Deepika Thathaal) is a Norwegian born singer of Pakistani and Afghan parents. She is known as the "Muslim Madonna." She has received her music training from Ustad Bade Fateh Ali Khan and Ustad Sultan Khan. But when one of her video had her with a bare back, her troubles began, and then harassment and threats forced her to move to London, England.

There too she faced similar problems from her co-religionists for her dancing with a black man in a video "Plan of My Own." Another of her video "What Will It Be" made many Muslims furious. The video starts with her in a burqa (a tent-like head to toe covering which some Muslim women don), but once the burqa is removed the only thing she has on is a bikini set.

Waris Dirie of Somalia is a former fashion model and an activist who concentrates her energy to abolish the practice of FGM or female genital mutilation.

FGM, wrongly called "female circumcision," is a process which involves a partial or full cutting of the external female genitalia, in order to decrease a female's sexual desire so at the time of marriage she is virgin. It is an extremely painful, torturous, and inhumane custom.

This cruelty Dirie herself experienced when she was five. She has described it in one of her book, a novel, "The Desert Flower." In 1997, she was appointed the United Nation's Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation. She is cousin of another famous Somali-born model Iman Abdul Majid.

Sabina England is a deaf playwright of Indian origin who grew up in India, US, and England. She is currently living in the US.

Saghi Ghahraman is an Iranian/Canadian poet and lesbian who left Iran in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. In her recent interview to an Iranian newspaper "Shargh," she said that "sexual boundaries must be flexible... The immoral is imposed by culture on the body." The newspaper was shut down by the government.

Yasmeen Ghauri is a Canadian supermodel and has worked for Versace and Victoria's Secret. (Some people declined to be led in prayers by her father, who was then an imam in a mosque in Quebec, Canada, because of Yasmeen's work.)

Tissa Hami was born in Iran and raised in the US. She holds degrees in international relations and, besides her regular job, is a standup comic since 9/11. On stage she has tried to remove her black chador but the audience likes to see her covered.

Sabrina Houssami is Miss World Australia 2006 and Miss World Asia Pacific 2006.

Asma Jehangir is a lawyer, activist, and is associated with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. She has successfully defended many victims (Christians, Hindus, and Muslims) of the draconian blasphemy (anything deemed insulting to Islam or Muhammad) laws and female victims of the Hudood Ordinance, introduced in 1979 and replaced by Rape Bill in 2006. Recently she was put under house arrest for opposing the baby martial law but was later released.

She and her family has been threatened and harassed several times. (In Yash Chopra's film "Veer Zara," Rani Mukherji's character is loosely based on her.)
Farah Khan is one of the most famous choreographers in India and is the director of a hit film "Mein Hoon Na" and the recently released "Om Shanti Om." She also choreographed Columbian/Lebanese singer Shakira in her video, "Hips Don't Lie," and the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical "Bombay Dreams."

Another great Indian choreographer is Saroj Khan.
Irene Zubeda Khan is the first Muslim woman (also the first woman and the first Asian, for that matter) to be the Secretary General of the London-based human rights organization the Amnesty International. She has been serving in that capacity since August 2001. In 2006 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

Shahrukh Khan "is the biggest film star in the world" who commands an audience of more than 3.5 billion, according to BusinessWeek. With his wife Gauri (who is Hindu) he produces films. His wax statue has been placed at Madam Tussaud's wax museum in London and soon the Graven Museum in Paris is also going to have his wax statue. Actress Penelope Cruz has expressed her desire to work with him in a film. The "King Khan" as he is known has also hosted "Kaun Banega Crorepati," India's version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

Few of the other top actors in India who are Muslims are Amir Khan, Salman Khan, and Saif Ali Khan.

Sania Mirza is the tennis player who is ranked 31st in the world and has become inspiration for many South Asian girls.

For wearing clothes such as short skirts, shorts, and sleeveless tops, she was issued with a fatwa, a religious decree, by Sunni Ulema Board's cleric Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui because Islam doesn't permit those clothes:
"She will undoubtedly be a corrupting influence on these young women, which we want to prevent."

Mirza has rightly ignored Siddiqui's fatwa.
Shazia Mirza is a British writer and stand-up comedian.
Three weeks after 9/11 she was back on stage:
"Hello, my name's Shazia Mirza, at least that's what it says on my pilot's license."

In 2003:
"Last year, I went to Mecca to repent my sins, and I had to walk around the black stone. All the women were dressed in black, you could only see their eyes. And I felt a hand touch my bottom. I ignored it. I thought, 'I'm in Mecca, it must be the hand of God.' But then it happened again. I didn't complain. Clearly, my prayers had been answered."
A couple of more:

"I got on the plane to Denmark dressed like this, and this woman refused to sit next to me. So I said to her, 'I'm going to sit on this plane and blow it up. And you think you're going to be safer three rows back?'"

"I am becoming increasingly worried that if I die a virgin, when I get to heaven I'll be one of the 72 virgins that have to sleep with one of the suicide bombers. I suspect they'd be a bit disappointed."

Mariyah Moten is known as "Pakistan's first Miss Bikini." The Houston-based girl came to be known as such after she contested the Miss Bikini Universe 2006 pageant held in China. Her "main aim is to project Pakistan to the world as a moderate place."

Aznil Nawawi is a Malaysian actor, director, and TV host who is credited with drastically changing the TV hosting. In 2005 he received the Best Talk Show Host award at the Asian Television Awards.

Asra Q. Nomani was born in India and raised in the US. An author and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she was the main person in arranging the woman-led prayer in New York City in March 2005. (Amina Wadood led the prayer.)

A friend and colleague of Daniel Pearl, in the movie "Mighty Heart," based on Pearl's abduction and murder in Karachi, Pakistan, her character is played by Archie Punjabi.

Three manifestoes "The Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Bedroom," "Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Mosque," and the "99 Precepts for opening Hearts, Minds and Doors in the Muslim World" are written by her.

Nighat Rizvi initiated aid's awareness in Pakistan and also staged Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologue" in that country. A very daring act on her and the artists' part who acted in it. Ensler and Nadia Jamil were some of the artists.

When it was performed in Pakistan's capital Islamabad, Hibaaq Osman, a Somali Muslim and the special representative for V-Day (i.e., the Vagina-Day), said that she was eager to see the play being performed in a Muslim country. "Vaginabad" is what she renamed Islamabad and said: "I know if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere."

(For a day Islamabad was "Vaginabad," no doubt. But otherwise, unfortunately, the country has been turned into a Dickistan of feudal lords, ruthless capitalists, military dictators, Saudi rulers, fanatic mullahs, US diplomats, CIA agents, arms merchants, foreign corporations, and corrupt politicians.)
"Vagina Monologue" has also been performed in other Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Nigeria.

Shahzad Roy is a Pakistani pop singer who once said: "I feel so sad when I see some child working, or on the streets, not going to school. The [Zindagi] Trust is my best effort to do something about that." His NGO (nongovernmental organization) offers Rupees 20 per day to a poor child who attends school and meets certain requirements.

Criticism has been levied against Roy which he is aware of: "Some people say its wrong to bribe children to be in school." Very rightly he shoots back: "But well-off kids are rewarded for their marks all the time. There is no reason poor children should not have the same support."

Salma (real name A. Rokkaiah) is an Indian poet and author who writes in Tamil on women-related issues. When she turned thirteen she was prohibited from attending school and had to stay home, but unknown to others she started writing.

Kolo Toure is a football player from Ivory Coast. He plays for Arsenal in England.

Chali 2na (real name Charlie Stewart) is a US rap singer and an emcee with the hip-hop group Jurassic 5. His music takes up political and social issues.
K'Naan Warsame is a Somali born poet and hip-hop artist residing in Canada. His poetry touches on turmoil in Somalia and race and colonialism related issues.
"With a sound that fuses Bob Marley, conscious American hip-hop, and brilliant protest poetry," according to Jim Welte, K'Naan was "the most promising artist at the 2006 Reggae on the River festival."

These are just a few names. The list can go on and on and on. Suffice it to say that the image of Muslim women and men in the western media is the product of Goebbels's progeny who control the propaganda machinery.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

Pop preacher sings of a tolerant Islam

The Globe and Mail

Mark Mackinnon

February 21, 2008



CAIRO -- 'Here comes the story of the world today," sings the young man with the gentle voice, oblivious to the stares he earns from passing gaggles of tourists. "A world in which religion has learned to hate, a world in which justice has become a cliché."



The young man crooning in the lobby of Cairo's Marriott hotel is Moez Masoud, and he doesn't mind the attention. He wants as many people as possible to hear his message: that religion, specifically his own Muslim faith, is being dangerously abused in the modern world.



The lines Mr. Masoud sang were the lyrics of a song he penned about Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher jailed in November in Sudan after allowing her students to give a teddy bear the name Mohammed. To Mr. Masoud, the absurd case proved how far some interpretations of Islam have drifted from his own reading of what's in the Koran.



Though you might miss it if you were reading only the headlines out of the Middle East these days, Mr. Masoud's more tolerant version of Islam is on the rise. In addition to being an aspiring pop star, the 29-year-old Egyptian is one of a new wave of Muslim "televangelists" who are reaching wide audiences across the region, converting many to an interpretation of Islam that encourages social contacts between men and women, compassion toward gays and lesbians and a rejection of the anti-Western fundamentalism.



It's a message that's reaching millions of people via television shows broadcast on satellite channels across the Middle East, and many more through Mr. Masoud's slick website and a Facebook group that has more than 10,000 members.



Critics call his message "Islam lite," but Mr. Masoud sees himself as helping reclaim a religion that for too long has been controlled by angry fundamentalists, people he says preach in the name of Islam without following its basic precept of loving other human beings.



"These people have presented views that are just blatantly wrong about women, about homosexuals, about Jews, about jihad," he said, sipping at a cappuccino between fielding calls on his mobile phone. "There's been a misconstrual of some [Koranic] verses and a decontextualization of others."



Dressed in Western clothes and sporting a stylish goatee, Mr. Masoud hardly looks the part of an Islamic preacher. Nor does he have the traditional upbringing.



Raised in an affluent family and educated at the American University in Cairo, he said that as an adolescent, he drifted a long way from his current path. At university, he said, he distanced himself from his family, dated the wrong girls and "ingested too many substances."



It's those experiences, he said, that help him connect with young, Westernized Muslims who often are put off by what they see as Islam's strictures. "It's not about the rules, it's about the love. The rules are supposed to save you, not harm you."



That's something he said he learned the hard way. He rediscovered his religion only after a series of scares that included a friend's death in a car accident and a cancer scare. He woke late on the day of Jan. 1, 1996, not quite sure how he'd made it home after a night of heavy drinking at a New Year's Eve party, and decided he needed to change.



From that day, he observed the Koranic proscription against alcohol and made a point of praying five times a day. He memorized the Koran, discovering that reading its passages gave him the same high he once got from drinking and partying.



After graduating, he took a marketing job with an American pharmaceutical firm and moved to the United States. One day, he was invited to lead the prayers at a mosque in Rochester, N.Y. By the time he finished speaking, it was apparent to everyone in the room that Mr. Masoud had found his calling.



"I didn't preach, I shared my experiences," he recalled of that night. "There was something happening."



Someone made a videotape of the talk he gave, and soon afterward Mr. Masoud was contacted by a Saudi Arabia-based satellite channel about taping a series of shows. He agreed on the condition that he could do it his way.



His first series was called Parables of the Koran, a groundbreaking show because of its laid-back tone, in which a panel of young men and women chatted with Mr. Masoud about the issues of the day and the role of religion in the modern world. While some of the women on the show wore the Islamic hijab, others left their heads uncovered.



"Some people are afraid of new things. I'm not," Mr. Masoud shrugged. "There's no Islamic law barring [men and women] in the same place, though some people think there is. The only way to change things is to just do it."



Parables of the Koran was a hit around the world and a staple on some Canadian cable channels. At first his shows were all in English, as Mr. Masoud was trying to appeal to Muslims living in the West. He warmed up his audience by telling his life story and kept them engaged by mixing quotes from the Koran with Bryan Adams and Aerosmith lyrics. More recently, he's begun preaching in Arabic to get his message out to Muslims across the Middle East.



Abdallah Schleifer, a specialist in media and Islam at the American University in Cairo, said the new style adopted by Mr. Masoud and other Islamic televangelists like Amr Khaled is drawing the quasi-secular middle class - people put off by what he calls "nutty fundamentalism" - back to their faith. Many of today's youth, he said, feel like they live in "another world" from the old-style imams in their traditional garb. Mr. Masoud's style bridges a gap for them.



"We live in a world of television and lifestyle changes. Young people, young Muslims, want to be part of that world. Into that void have come people like Moez and Amr Khaled," Prof. Schleifer said. "The message of these guys is very different. Being decent and compassionate, and at the same time being faithful to the tenets of their religion."



Mr. Masoud personally rejects the "Islam-lite" label, insisting that he hasn't added or subtracted anything from the Prophet Mohammed's message. "All I'm doing is reading the faith in a contemporary way," he said. "I'm just removing the extra baggage that extremists have put in."



His message is a simple one: It's all right for a Muslim to have fun, to enjoy life, to appreciate art and members of the opposite sex. "Engage in art, appreciate beauty. Don't believe that if you commit to your faith, you're going to be a depressed person," he said. "If Islam says kill your neighbours, I don't want to be a Muslim."



It's a message Prof. Schleifer, himself a convert from Judaism to Islam, appreciates. "You could say the style is light, which it is in the way TV is light compared to a newspaper. But the content isn't. I certainly wasn't attracted to Islam because it had hard edges, quite the contrary."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080227/ts ... gionethics

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080227/ts ... gionethics

Major survey challenges Western perceptions of Islam
by Karin Zeitvogel1 hour, 40 minutes ago
A huge survey of the world's Muslims released Tuesday challenges Western notions that equate Islam with radicalism and violence.

The survey, conducted by the Gallup polling agency over six years and three continents, seeks to dispel the belief held by some in the West that Islam itself is the driving force of radicalism.

It shows that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemned the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 and other subsequent terrorist attacks, the authors of the study said in Washington.

"Samuel Harris said in the Washington Times (in 2004): 'It is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam'," Dalia Mogahed, co-author of the book "Who Speaks for Islam" which grew out of the study, told a news conference here.

"The argument Mr Harris makes is that religion in the primary driver" of radicalism and violence, she said.
"Religion is an important part of life for the overwhelming majority of Muslims, and if it were indeed the driver for radicalisation, this would be a serious issue."

But the study, which Gallup says surveyed a sample equivalent to 90 percent of the world's Muslims, showed that widespread religiosity "does not translate into widespread support for terrorism," said Mogahed, director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews.

In majority Muslim countries, overwhelming majorities said religion was a very important part of their lives -- 99 percent in Indonesia, 98 percent in Egypt, 95 percent in Pakistan.

But only seven percent of the billion Muslims surveyed -- the radicals -- condoned the attacks on the United States in 2001, the poll showed.

Moderate Muslims interviewed for the poll condemned the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington because innocent lives were lost and civilians killed.

"Some actually cited religious justifications for why they were against 9/11, going as far as to quote from the Koran -- for example, the verse that says taking one innocent life is like killing all humanity," she said.

Meanwhile, radical Muslims gave political, not religious, reasons for condoning the attacks, the poll showed.
The survey shows radicals to be neither more religious than their moderate counterparts, nor products of abject poverty or refugee camps.

"The radicals are better educated, have better jobs, and are more hopeful with regard to the future than mainstream Muslims," John Esposito, who co-authored "Who Speaks for Islam", said.

"Ironically, they believe in democracy even more than many of the mainstream moderates do, but they're more cynical about whether they'll ever get it," said Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University in Washington.

Gallup launched the study following 9/11, after which US President George W. Bush asked in a speech, which is quoted in the book: "Why do they hate us?"

"They hate... a democratically elected government," Bush offered as a reason.
"They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

But the poll, which gives ordinary Muslims a voice in the global debate that they have been drawn into by 9/11, showed that most Muslims -- including radicals -- admire the West for its democracy, freedoms and technological prowess.

What they do not want is to have Western ways forced on them, it said.
"Muslims want self-determination, but not an American-imposed and -defined democracy. They don't want secularism or theocracy. What the majority wants is democracy with religious values," said Esposito.

The poll has given voice to Islam's silent majority, said Mogahed.
"A billion Muslims should be the ones that we look to, to understand what they believe, rather than a vocal minority," she told AFP.

Muslims in 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East were interviewed for the survey, which is part of Gallup's World Poll that aims to interview

A24 CALGARY HERALD Saturday, March 15,2008

Muslim leader calls for Islamic Renaissance'

Summit votes on new charter, attacks U.S., Taliban and al-Qaeda

COUMBASYLLA
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

A summit of Muslim nations on Friday agreed on measures to give their group greater global clout, as the head of the world's most populous Muslim country Indonesia called for an "Islamic Renaissance."

The summit's final declaration attacked the United States, which has named a special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, for passing sanctions against Syria.

It also condemned "pressure" being put on Iran over its nuclear program, but "strongly condemned" the Taliban militia and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The QIC summit adopted a new charter allowing faster decision-making and creating new institutions for the 57-nation body.

QIC secretary general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said the Dakar summit was "historic" because of the unanimous adoption of the new charter, replacing a 1972 version that he insisted was outdated. The new constitution streamlines the QIC's operations, allowing new states to join with just a majority vote instead of the usual unanimous agreement for which decisions are normally taken.

Agreement was reached after several days of intense talks and despite the absence of several prominent leaders — including Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf.

The QIC leaders used the summit to complain about Islamophobia in the West, complaining that Muslims were often unjustifiably treated as terrorists.

Many leaders called for stronger action by the QIC and western governments to stop "insults" such as cartoons published in Denmark which lampooned the Prophet Muhammad and the looming release of an anti-Islam film by a Dutch far-right MP.

In a speech to the summit, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yud-hoyono called for a jihad of peace, including greater democracy and efforts to empower Muslims to improve the religion's image and boost its influence.

"The possibility of an Islamic Renaissance lies before us," Yudhoyono told the summit, but first, he added: "We need to get our act together as an organization of Muslim nations.

"When the Islamic Renaissance comes, it will be the natural fruit of a peaceful and constructive 'jihad.'"

Yudhoyono said the OIC was "unique" because it covers three continents and "Muslim countries supply 70 per cent of the world's energy requirements and 40 per cent of its raw material exports."

But he said "protracted conflicts in Muslim societies bring shame" to the Muslim world and meant that "Islam has unjustly been associated with violence."

"We must disabuse the world of this terrible misconception," he said, calling for greater efforts against 'Islamophobia' in the West but also greater democracy in Muslim nations.

The summit's final declaration "condemned" the United States over its sanctions against Syria last year which the leaders called "blatant prejudice in Israel's favour."

The declaration attacked the "terrorist and criminal activities" of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, specifically highlighting the growing number of suicide attacks.

The next OIC summit will be held in Cairo in 2011.

Sponsored By
Christian Rage and Muslim Moderation
Despite recent provocations against Islam in the West, many Muslims seem weary of the same old tit for tat.

Christopher Dickey

Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 11:35 AM ET Mar 27, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI, an exiled Egyptian journalist, a bleach-blond Dutch parliamentarian and Danish cartoonists all have something in common with a Teddy bear named Mohammed. They have been at the center of that seething storm called Muslim rage in the last few months, and, with the exception of Mohammed T. Bear, they appear to be testing that anger to see if it will erupt … yet again.

If it does, the crisis could peak just as Benedict begins his visit to the United States in mid-April. As he preaches world peace before the United Nations, once more we'll witness scenes of books and flags and effigies burning in the world of Muslims. If precedent holds, rioters may die in Kabul, a nun could be murdered in Somalia, a priest might be gunned down in Turkey. All this is all too predictable, as provocateurs like the peroxide blond must certainly know.

And yet, this time the shockwaves may amount to nothing more than ripples. If the satellite networks allow their lenses to zoom back from the book burners, they may discover there's no raging crowd there, just the usual collection of unemployed malcontents on any street in Karachi. And what is most important, we may find that the Muslims of this world are just as weary of this sorry spectacle—maybe even more so—than the Christian, Jewish and secular publics in the West.

There are several signs of change, and not always from the usual suspects.

In Turkey, the once militantly secular government is now dominated by the AK Party, which has Islamic roots and recently passed a constitutional amendment that ended the ban on women wearing Muslim headscarves at state universities. Yet the same government is supporting theological scholarship intended to modernize—and moderate—traditional Islamic teachings. An initiative run out of the prime minister's office is re-examining interpretation of the Qur'an itself as well as the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet. Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey at Chatham House in London, recently told the BBC, "This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation. Not exactly the same, but if you think, it's changing the theological foundations."

In Lebanon, Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah once was known as the spiritual leader of Hizbullah and of its suicidal shock troops, who blew up American Marines and diplomats in Beirut in the early 1980s. Today, instead of calling the faithful to arms in response to perceived Western insults, Fadlallah calls on Muslim intellectuals, elites and religious scholars to work through the media and political organizations as well as "legal, artistic and literary" channels.

Fadlallah tells the faithful that the goal of Westerners who commit "aggressions against the Muslim world's sacred symbols" is to create a rift between Muslims and Western societies—and to isolate those Muslims who live in Western societies. He decries those Muslims he calls takfiri who claim they are fighting heresy with violence. He says they play into the hands of Islam's enemies. He even calls for "a united Islamic-Christian spiritual and humanitarian front."

In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah was pushing an agenda of political and religious moderation even before he assumed full control of the country in 2005. The kingdom still holds to the ultraconservative Sunni religious dogmas known as Wahhabism, and the monarchy's legitimacy is tied to its custodianship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam. That won't change. But Abdullah has fired 1,000 of the Muslim prayer leaders on the government payroll and decreed that the 40,000 who remain must be retrained to make sure they are not stoking radical violence.

Yes, there may be less here than meets the eye. When I talked to Hakura on the phone Wednesday morning, he cautioned that the Turkish rethink of Islam is rooted in national traditions and might be a hard sell in the Arab Middle East. Fadlallah may be enthusiastic about reconciliation with Christians, but on his Web site he still presents himself as an implacable foe of what he calls Israel's "Zionist project that is based on violence, arrogance and despise [sic] of other countries." A highly placed Saudi friend assured me the other day the so-called "retraining" of Saudi Arabia's retrograde imams really would be more like "a dialogue" to discuss the best ways to preach.

Islam, like any faith, has plenty of violent fools and fanatics. Certainly it is hard to credit the judgment or intelligence of anyone in Sudan connected with the arrest of British expatriate schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons a few months ago. You'll recall she made the nearly fatal mistake of letting her class of seven-year-olds in Khartoum name a Teddy bear Mohammed. To the kids, many of whom were named Mohammed themselves, the name just sounded friendly and cuddly. Sudanese authorities claimed Gibbons was inciting religious hatred and insulting the Prophet. Eventually she apologized and they released her—against the wishes of the mob calling for her death.

But even with many qualifications and reservations, in my view the conciliatory trends in Islam make an interesting contrast with renewed provocations coming out of Europe.

There's no use wasting much space on the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, the dyed blond with ugly roots who is promoting a film he says will prove his belief that "Islamic ideology is a retarded, dangerous one." What to say about a politician reminiscent of Goldmember in an Austin Powers film who claims the Qur'an should be banned like Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf"? No Dutch television network will show his little movie, and it seems nobody has seen it, but Wilders promises he will put it on the Internet before the end of this month. I suggest he wait until April Fools'.

Danish cartoonists and editors previously unknown to the wider world garnered international attention when they published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 that brought on bloody riots in several Muslim countries in 2006. Having sunk once again into obscurity, the editors decided to publish one of the cartoons again last month, reportedly after the arrest of an individual plotting to kill the cartoonist. Great idea. Take one man's alleged crime and respond with new insults to an entire faith.

The most problematic event of late, however, was Pope Benedict's decision to baptize the Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam in Saint Peter's on the night before Easter, thus converting a famously self-hating Muslim into a self-loving Christian in the most high-profile setting possible. Perhaps Benedict really thought, as the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano opined, that the baptism was just a papal "gesture" to emphasize "in a gentle and clear way religious freedom." But I am not prepared to believe for a second, as some around the Vatican have hinted this week, that the Holy Father did not know who Allam was or how provocative this act would appear to Muslim scholars, including and especially those who are trying to foster interfaith dialogue.

Ever since 2006, when Benedict cited a medieval Christian emperor talking about Islam as "evil and inhuman," and the usual Muslim rabble-rousers whipped up the usual Muslim riots, more responsible members of the world's Islamic community have hoped to restore calm and reason. And now this. "The whole spectacle, with its choreography, persona and messages provokes genuine questions about the motives, intentions and plans of some of the pope's advisers on Islam," said a statement issued by Aref Ali Nayed, a spokesman for 138 Muslim scholars who established the Catholic-Muslim Forum for dialogue with Rome earlier this month.

Bishop Paul Hinder, the Vatican's representative in Arabia, was reluctant to criticize the pope, of course, but when I reached him in Abu Dhabi Wednesday morning he clearly had reservations about the way Allam was received into the Church. He said that local Christians took him aside at Easter services and asked him "why it had to be done in such an extraordinary way on a special night." Hinder contrasted Allam's conversion to Catholicism with former British prime minister Tony Blair's, which "was done in a private chapel."

"What I cannot accept is if it is done in a triumphalistic way," said Hinder. That is, if Allam were not declaring only his personal beliefs but intentionally demeaning the faith of Muslims. Yet it is hard to read the spectacle of his conversion otherwise, because that's exactly the tone in which Allam writes. He has made his career portraying Islam as a religion that terrorizes. Allam says he has lived in hiding and in fear for years because of reaction to his columns in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra, which regularly denounce excesses by Muslims and praise Israel. Allam converted to Catholicism, he says, as he turned away from "a past in which I imagined that there could be a moderate Islam." Speaking as if for the pope, Allam told one interviewer in Italy, "His Holiness has launched an explicit and revolutionary message to a church that, up to now, has been too prudent in converting Muslims."

Allam claims he is hoping his public embrace of Catholicism will help other converts to speak out in public. But that hardly seems likely. The more probable scenario is that others will feel even more vulnerable, while Allam's books, like many Muslim-bashing screeds that preceded them, climb the best-seller lists.

Unless—and this really would be news—the Muslim world just turns the page.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/129237

Commentary

For all its hype, the Dutch anti-Islam film falls flat
IRSHAD MANJI

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

April 1, 2008 at 6:07 AM EDT

Last week, the anti-immigrant Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, released on the Internet a 15-minute film intended to smear Muslims. But his movie, Fitna, is such a bore that it has only given freedom of expression a bad name.

Fitna, the Arabic word for "social strife," is being trumpeted as a provocative manifesto with the potential to create yet more strife in the cosmic confrontation between Islam and the West.

I have watched it. Others should too, not because it is compelling but because, in its utter predictability, the film reminds us why freedom of expression is worth defending. To remain powerful, freedom demands creativity - the very creativity that Fitna lacks.

It is a patchwork of scenes plucked straight from the stock image warehouse: news footage of 9/11 and the Madrid train bombings spliced with clips of hate-spewing imams, interrupted by headlines about Theo van Gogh's murder in the streets of Amsterdam, all juxtaposed to incendiary passages from the Koran.

To be sure, egregious events, preachers and scriptures exist, and should be put on the public record, in all their vileness.

(Just be sure to secure permission. Fitna features a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban-turned-bomb - one of many cartoons
published by a Danish newspaper in 2006. Ironically, affirming
expression is never completely free, the artist who sketched the
bomb-donning Prophet has said he will sue Mr. Wilders for violating
copyright.)

The politician's problems do not stop there. By stitching together one inflammatory visual after another, Mr. Wilders has achieved little more than a garden-variety harangue. This makes Fitna not only dull but, worse, easily dismissed by those who deserve to be held accountable for their silences about violence and human rights abuses committed under the banner of Islam. A more engaging approach would have been to pepper the film with positive verses from the Koran, thereby revealing that Muslims who expound hostility are actively choosing to ignore the better angels of Islam.

There are plenty of positive Koranic passages to highlight. The possibility for women's dignity is shown by one (3:195) that states God rewards "any worker among you, be you male or female - you are equal to one another." Imagine aligning that passage with the shot of a woman's body mutilated by an honour killing.

To shame the imams who cry death to non-Muslims, Mr. Wilders could
have followed their words with these (2:62): "Jews and Christians and Sabians, all who heed the One God and the Last Day, have nothing to fear or regret as long as they remain true to their scriptures."

Indeed, he could have hammered home this point with the simpler passage (109:6) that proclaims "unto you your religion, unto me my religion."

Above all, Mr. Wilders missed the opportunity to give Wahhabi sermonizers a real run for their oil money. He could have done so by cutting between their fevered warnings of hellfire on the one hand and, on the other, diverse Muslims reading the Koran (2:256): "There is no compulsion in religion." The resulting message is simple yet nuanced: If Saudi-inspired Muslims insist on literalism, then why not take literally the Koran's crystal-clear decree against compulsion?

None of this demands deleting or diluting reality. I believe Mr. Wilders has every right to publicize harsh verses from the Koran. He also has the right to make a painfully stale statement.

In so doing, however, he debases the value of free expression. As it stands, Fitna reduces liberty to banality. If that is the best a freedom fighter can do, then what is the big deal about having freedom at all?

It is, of course, a huge deal when cleverly exercised. Exposing the range of choices offered by the Koran, Fitna could have put the onus on Muslims to look deep within. Non-Muslims would have learned something new. And Mr. Wilders might have advanced a serious debate - to say nothing of a necessary one - that lives up to freedom's promise.

Irshad Manji, a scholar at New York University and the European Foundation of Democracy, is creator of the award-winning film "Faith Without Fear." She can be reached aat http://www.irshadmanji.com