Interpretation of faith in Islam

Current issues, news and ethics
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

star_munir wrote:The folllowing comment is totally wrong in the above article"For centuries, philosophers of Islam have been telling the story of the "Satanic Verses." The Prophet Muhammad accepted them as authentic entries into the Koran. Later, he realized they deify heathen idols rather than God. So he belatedly rejected the verses, blaming them on a trick played by Satan. Which implies that the Prophet edited the Koran. "
Thanks for pointing this out. We do however believe as per Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah that the Quran has been tampered with and therefore there would be 'Satanic Verses' although not in the manner indicated by the author. It does not change the essence of her argument that the Quran is not exactly the word of God.
star_munir
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Post by star_munir »

As per Zee News
Apology over retracted Quran desecration story not enough: Pak

Islamabad, May 17: Pakistan today spurned as "not enough" an apology and retraction by Newsweek of a report alleging desecration of Islam's holy book, the quran, at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay.

Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said the report "insulted the feelings of Muslims...Just an apology is not enough. They should think a 101 times before publishing news that hurt hearts."

His comments came a day after the Foreign Ministry reiterated a demand for a probe into the alleged desecration.

The report triggered riots in Afghanistan and protests in other Muslim countries including Pakistan, a key ally in the US-led war on terrorism.

The US magazine yesterday withdrew its story in its May 9 edition that interrogators at the US prison placed copies of Islam's holy book in washrooms and flushed one book in the toilet to get inmates to talk.

In New Zealand, visiting Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri said Newsweek's retraction of the story "will definitely help" defuse some of the anger in the Muslim world, but "unfortunately some damage has been done."

Qazi Hussain Ahmed, a hardline Pakistani Islamist leader and opposition lawmaker, rejected Newsweek's apology yesterday.

"The objective of the change in their statement is to cool the anger among Muslims of the world," Ahmed said.

He said Islamic groups in Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia, Britain, Turkey and other countries would go ahead with planned rallies on May 27 to protest the alleged desecration.

Bureau Report
star_munir
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Post by star_munir »

It is in Ginan that ,“A peom was composed and propagated entirely by the Lord. It has remained today as Quran.” [Ginan Sarve jeevu.. V#18 Pir Hassan Kabirdin]

Verse 4 Moman Chetamani : “In every Imam it is the same Noor of Ali and the scriptures bear that out of 40 parts of the Quran are a proof of that and verily 30 are in this world.

Verse 16 “The right knowledge has come from Ali and His progeny as is forecast by the Holy Quran and the Holy Quran has come from God Himself and the proof of all that is really here in this satpanth.”

I dont think that is it not appropriate for muslims to condemn the insult made of Quran and just apology is enough for what it was done....Muslims have right to condemn for the insult made of their Holy book and whether Quran is exactly the words of God or there were some changes, this not in any way justify what was done. In words of Guru Nanak,"“ I have read the Bible, Tauret, Zabur all these religious scriptures and have also read the Vedas But in this kaljug if there is any religious book for thorough guidance, it is only Quran.” [Vide Janam Sakhi, Bhai Bala]"

Making arguments is different thing and making fun of the religions you not follow is another thing. Both are different and just sorry is not enough I think for that.

It reminds me a scene from film border. It was shown that there was fire on house of man and he was crying. He was out side his home and there was not any other person in his home but he said that in his home there is Quran. The soldier without taking care of his life ran into his house which was on fire and brought the Quran from it. The man was happy and asked soldier that you are hindu, inspite of that why you ran into the house which was on fire and brought the Quran from it ? The hindu solier replied some thing like that taking care of people of other religions is what my hindu religion teaches me. Now that was example.

In Ginan Anant Akhado Pir Hassan Kabirdin says that hindus worship idols in which there is not lord but on other hand it is also said in same Ginan verse 177 that The Hindus and the Muslims are all the souls of the Lord
do not bring out the doubts(errors)
star_munir
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Post by star_munir »

From Zee News

Pak clerics declare suicide attacks 'un-Islamic'

Islamabad, May 18: Muslim clerics in Pakistan yesterday issued a decree declaring as "un-Islamic" suicide attacks in public places in an Islamic country but kept Kashmir out of its purview.

The clerics, who gathered in Lahore, said those who believe that suicide attacks are meant to earn blessings would be considered out of Islam.

However, 58 clerics from different schools of thought, said the decree does not apply to Palestinian and Kashmiri Muslims.

The decree was issued at a press conference by Mufti Muneeb-ur-Rehman, who heads an officials moon sighting body and the Government run federal Press Information Department.

He said murder of a non-Muslim is also prohibited if he comes to a Muslim state with permission as "Islam calls for protection of non-Muslims".

"State terrorism, individual terrorism and groups terrorism, all these should be condemned and there should be explanation of terrorism and liberation movement," he said.

Rehman said attacks on mosques are prohibited in Islam adding such attacks should be condemned at all levels.

He said the decree has been issued in view of the recent bomb blasts, which killed a large number of people at public and places of worship.

"There was a need to issue such decree as there was impression to defame Islam that religious clerics incite Muslims to kill each other," Muneeb ur Rehman said.

Several scholars opposed the decree and described the move as an attempt to please the Government of Pakistan and America.

Bureau Report
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

While Muslims across the world are quick in condemning the Americans for their disrespect for the Quran, they seem to be oblivious to the bigotry and intolerance demonstrated by the Saudis for other faiths and traditions as expressed in the following article.

COMMENTARY

Hypocrisy Most Holy

By ALI AL-AHMED
May 20, 2005

With the revelation that a copy of the Quran may have been desecrated by U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Muslims and their governments -- including that of Saudi Arabia -- reacted angrily. This anger would have been understandable if the U.S. government's adopted policy was to desecrate our Quran. But even before the Newsweek report was discredited, that was never part of the allegations.

As a Muslim, I am able to purchase copies of the Quran in any bookstore in any American city, and study its contents in countless American universities. American museums spend millions to exhibit and celebrate Muslim arts and heritage. On the other hand, my Christian and other non-Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia -- where I come from -- are not even allowed to own a copy of their holy books. Indeed, the Saudi government desecrates and burns Bibles that its security forces confiscate at immigration points into the kingdom or during raids on Christian expatriates worshiping privately.

Soon after Newsweek published an account, later retracted, of an American soldier flushing a copy of the Quran down the toilet, the Saudi government voiced its strenuous disapproval. More specifically, the Saudi Embassy in Washington expressed "great concern" and urged the U.S. to "conduct a quick investigation."

Although considered as holy in Islam and mentioned in the Quran dozens of times, the Bible is banned in Saudi Arabia. This would seem curious to most people because of the fact that to most Muslims, the Bible is a holy book. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia we are not talking about most Muslims, but a tiny minority of hard-liners who constitute the Wahhabi Sect.

The Bible in Saudi Arabia may get a person killed, arrested, or deported. In September 1993, Sadeq Mallallah, 23, was beheaded in Qateef on a charge of apostasy for owning a Bible. The State Department's annual human rights reports detail the arrest and deportation of many Christian worshipers every year. Just days before Crown Prince Abdullah met President Bush last month, two Christian gatherings were stormed in Riyadh. Bibles and crosses were confiscated, and will be incinerated. (The Saudi government does not even spare the Quran from desecration. On Oct. 14, 2004, dozens of Saudi men and women carried copies of the Quran as they protested in support of reformers in the capital, Riyadh. Although they carried the Qurans in part to protect themselves from assault by police, they were charged by hundreds of riot police, who stepped on the books with their shoes, according to one of the protesters.)

As Muslims, we have not been as generous as our Christian and Jewish counterparts in respecting others' holy books and religious symbols. Saudi Arabia bans the importation or the display of crosses, Stars of David or any other religious symbols not approved by the Wahhabi establishment. TV programs that show Christian clergymen, crosses or Stars of David are censored.

The desecration of religious texts and symbols and intolerance of varying religious viewpoints and beliefs have been issues of some controversy inside Saudi Arabia. Ruled by a Wahhabi theocracy, the ruling elite of Saudi Arabia have made it difficult for Christians, Jews, Hindus and others, as well as dissenting sects of Islam, to visibly coexist inside the kingdom.

Another way in which religious and cultural issues are becoming more divisive is the Saudi treatment of Americans who are living in that country: Around 30,000 live and work in various parts of Saudi Arabia. These people are not allowed to celebrate their religious or even secular holidays. These include Christmas and Easter, but also Thanksgiving. All other Gulf states allow non-Islamic holidays to be celebrated.

The Saudi Embassy and other Saudi organizations in Washington have distributed hundreds of thousands of Qurans and many more Muslim books, some that have libeled Christians, Jews and others as pigs and monkeys. In Saudi school curricula, Jews and Christians are considered deviants and eternal enemies. By contrast, Muslim communities in the West are the first to admit that Western countries -- especially the U.S. -- provide Muslims the strongest freedoms and protections that allow Islam to thrive in the West. Meanwhile Christianity and Judaism, both indigenous to the Middle East, are maligned through systematic hostility by Middle Eastern governments and their religious apparatuses.

The lesson here is simple: If Muslims wish other religions to respect their beliefs and their Holy book, they should lead by example.

Mr. al-Ahmed is director of the Saudi Institute in Washington.
star_munir
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Post by star_munir »

I think thats why Imam dont want us to follow the Arabs instead to follow the Ginans which Guide us towards true Islam.
Here is article on terrorist attack on Church in 2001 by Aryamon
SIXTEEN DEAD AT THE ALTAR

Yesterday six men came on fast motorbikes
To a church on Sunday afternoon in Bahawalpore.

They were bearded and carried high powered Uzis
Kalashnikovs, AK 57s, rapid firing German Mousers.

They parked and entered the church as though to pray
But turned and shut the huge doors behind them.

Silently, two stayed at the doors, two went to the right
Two to the left, advancing to fourth pew from back.

They unlimbered their weapons and adjusted
The sights and magazines and firing bolts.

The bishop, first aghast, calmed the congregation
"Don't panic, my children, I will ask what they want.'

And he asked, "My brothers this is a House of God
What can I, as his servant, do for you?".

The children in the congregation began to wail
Women sobbed, men felt the breath of cold death


The first volley of rapid fire cut the priest in half
And he fell onto the altar, staining it crimson red.

Someone yelled in Punjabi, "Pai, kee karde ho,
Tanu Rabb di kasam, is tarah bacche nu na maro."

With methodical precision each of the armed men
Slowly leveled their guns at shoulder level and fired

Halima Bibi, Zulekha Jan, Manual Masih,
Little John, 10 years old, and his old aunty Janu

Pow pow pow, the shots rand loud in the church
Bounding off the nave and shut doors and walls ...

As suddenly the men signaled each other
Nodded as though this was enough and time to go

They downed their weapons and hid them in cloth
Turned once and all on cue raised a fist and yelled

"Allah-o-Akbar!".

They unlocked the huge doors an stepped out
In bright morning sun, and settled on their bikes

And rode away into the dusty silent street
As men do when they return home after work

Inside in full view of their Christ eleven lay
Dead or dying, shattered, gasping, bewildered

In this strange moment of sudden death in church
Of St. Dominic which stands as it has always stood

In the busy streets of old Bahawalpore.

Arya.
star_munir
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Post by star_munir »

From Zee News
Heavy casualties in Afghan mosque blast

Kandahar, June 01: A bomb exploded today inside a mosque in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and local residents said as many as 40 people were killed or wounded.

The blast occurred inside the Mullah Abdul Fayaz mosque in the center of the city. The place of worship was named after a top Muslim leader who was killed by gunmen on Sunday in the city.

Daoud Khan, a resident near the mosque, said up to 40 people appeared to have been killed or wounded.

There was no immediate word from authorities.

A reporter at the site saw many body parts strewn around the mosque.

Bureau Report
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Islam Through the Front Door
Asra Nomani, founder of the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour, explains her effort to find a place for women in Islam.

Interview by Rebecca Phillips

Asra Nomani's "Tantrika" caused a stir when it was released in 2003; the Muslim journalist's first book was an account of her experiences while investigating the Tantric sex phenomenon. But it is her latest book, "Standing Alone in Mecca," that might prove to be more controversial. The story of her hajj pilgrimage and an exploration of the historical rights of Muslim women, the book includes what Nomani calls the "Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques" and the "Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Bedroom." Along with the book, Nomani recently launched the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour, a series of women-led Muslim prayer services in cities across the U.S. The tour kicked off on March 18, in New York, where Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led a Friday jum'ah service. On a break from the tour, Nomani spoke with Beliefnet about feminism in Islam, her vision for the tour, and the kind of Islam she hopes to impart to her son.

Were you surprised by the reaction to the prayer service on March 18?
I was shocked at the amount of opposition, from Mecca to Indonesia, but I'm thrilled by all the support. I wondered whether this event might help smoke Osama bin Laden out. The idea of women challenging men is so offensive to the extremist ideology that they're really incensed.

When I walked through the front door of my hometown mosque [in Morgantown, West Va.] and into the main hall, I was stunned at how fierce the opposition was to women's rights. I'm still trying to figure it out, to understand what the challenge is all about.

Do you view this struggle as a civil rights issue?

To me it's very much a social justice issue. The Muslim world can't pretend to practice social justice as long as we keep women in the shadows. Making women invisible is a precursor to violent societies.

When you were growing up, what was your formal Islamic training like? I know you think it's important to take back the faith intellectually--does your background allow for that?

At age 39, I'm having serious flashbacks to when I was a 10-year old girl and my mother was my teacher. I was so enthusiastic about learning the Qur'an. I wanted to be a hafiz who could memorize the entire Qur'an. I prayed five times a day, I invoked the divine powers in every step of my life, I fasted during Ramadan. But as I grew older, I felt less valued within my Muslim community. On one hand, my parents were telling me I could be everything I wanted to be. But the Muslim community expected me to be silent and docile and submissive. So I became a leader in a secular way, as a journalist. We all have dreams that we can change the world, yet I never felt that I could do that within my Muslim faith.

What's happened to me since September 11 is that I've come to recognize we can all step forward. At the March 18 prayer service, I stood before the congregation and spoke, which is not allowed in most of the Muslim world.

So in your own mosque, could you be in the same room as the men while praying?

No. In two out of three mosques in America, a woman is not even in the same room, let alone in the front row. In Morgantown, I have my little space in the back. Once I asked to make an announcement at the microphone, and was denied. No woman has ever stood at the microphone there.

This is a struggle of all faiths. But I've stood in the front of churches and synagogues where women have broken the barrier. And now I feel ready to stand as a leader in our mosque's prayer hall. It's like a personal revolution.

What is your sense of how many other women are having that same personal revolution?

So many women are having it. They affirm for me every time they write to me--from Turkey, Malaysia, and Africa--that we're doing the right thing. For so long, women have had their voices denied and have been told that there can't even be a conversation about this. Now these women know they aren't alone.

So this is not just a phenomenon among American Muslim women?
No, this is a global phenomenon. The world can only be better served if women can break free.

I noticed a few protesters outside the prayer hall during the March 18 service. One sign took you to task for your previous book, "Tantrika." Do you question how valid a spokesperson for Muslim women you can really be, if other people condemned your previous book?

If they didn't have a problem with "Tantrika," they would have had a problem with something else about my life. That sign said, "Asra Nomani can speak about Islam when she repents for her Tantric sex fantasies." What it revealed to me was just how afraid people in our community are of discussing sexuality. Sexuality is something we have to process in our communities in a healthy way, rather than repressing it.

I hear so often the criticism that we could have a better spokesperson than I am. But I don't claim to be a spokesperson for anyone but myself.

This one prayer service got a lot of media coverage. How is this going to be sustained in the future?

I am leading another prayer service in Boston to help show the New York event was not a one-time event, that women will continue to reclaim their rights. I plan to go from city to city to talk about the issues I raise in my book, to tap the local scene, and to see what action they want to take to make our Muslim communities more tolerant. That's why I called my book tour the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour.

So will there be prayer events in many more cities?

Yes, I think there will be. We broke an important barrier and we have to continue to reclaim the rights that we asserted there and show that there are countless Muslim men and women who want Islam to be expressed in a different way. Right now it's expressed in such a dark way, yet it was so beautiful that Friday. It was a safe environment for everyone. We made it so all people could be comfortable, so families could pray together. It felt like the same kind of communal spirit that I felt in Mecca, where people naturally float into whatever space they want--if it's all women they want, they go there; if it's all men they want, they go there; if they want to pray beside their husband or brother, they do that. Our mosques and our communities take that natural flow out when they segregate women from men.

How else did your hajj help you clarify these issues?

The hajj [pilgrimage to Mecca] was really the transformative experience that people say it can be. I'm a real visual person. I had heard the name of Hajar [Abraham's concubine, mother of Ishmael], but when I walked in her footsteps, I could feel her strength. When I passed the Kentucky Fried Chicken in the Mecca of today, I thought about Mecca then, and about Khadijah, the prophet's first wife, and her life as a caravan trader. When I went to the mosque in Medinah and was unable to enter, I thought about the prophet Muhammad's wife Aisha, who was really one of Islam's first theologians. I could feel the pulse of all these strong women.

I came to realize that all my years working as a reporter had put me in a place to investigate the truth of women's place in Islam. My training makes me question. When they tell me that I have to take the back door and pray in the balcony, I question it and find out the truth--that I don't. I think what separates my frustration from the frustration of a typical Muslim is that I'm not afraid to pick up the phone and call anyone. I've spent my adulthood [as a Wall Street Journal reporter] challenging the spin doctors in corporate America, so it's natural to challenge the spin doctors in Islam.

Can you give some specific examples from the Qur'an or Islamic law that challenge the typical view of women's place in Islam?

There are a few passages that mean a lot to me. This isn't about what you're asking, but one that inspires me is from "Al-Nisa" (The Women):

Oh ye who believe!
Stand out firmly
For justice, as witnesses
To God, even if it may be against
Yourselves, or your parents
Or your kin.
Al-Nisa, The Women, 4:135

Some others that are used to assert women's equal rights are:

Whoever does an atom's weight of good, whether male or female, and is a believer, all such enter into Paradise.
--Al Ghafir, The Forgiver, 40:40

and:

The true believers, both men and women, are friends to each other. They enjoin what is just and forbid what is evil; they attend to their prayers and pay the alms and obey God and His apostle. On these God will have mercy. He is Mighty and Wise.
--Al-Araf, The Heights, 7:71

It was Amina Wadud [Islamic studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University] who was the one who told me about these passages. She liberated me from so much of the garbage that I had been told in the community. I had literally been told that a woman's voice is not supposed to be heard in a mosque. But really it's not that clear-cut, and there's a great argument against that position.

Was there ever a time in your life when you gave up on Islam, when you decided it wasn't the right religion for you?

I really wondered if I would continue as a Muslim when I came back from Karachi. I was still trying to absorb my friend Danny [Pearl]'s murder. I had a baby in my belly who my baby's father couldn’t accept because I was unmarried. I wondered at the time if this was really my faith. I went to a Methodist church and was welcomed there. They gave me kinship and friendship and strength. But then I stayed within the protection of my parents, who are good Muslims, and I started to see incrementally over time expressions of compassion from other Muslims.

I discovered the truth, and the truth has kept me within Islam.

Do you have a particular vision for the Islam that your son grows up with?

I really dream about sitting at my son's wedding one day with his bride beside him, with a woman equal to a man as a witness, a woman presiding over the ceremony, his beloved equal to him in the eyes of our community. I want my son to be the feminist and visionary that I believe the Prophet Muhammad was. He worked to improve the condition of women in the seventh century, and we've only gone backwards since.

********

What Are Muslim Women's Rights?
At a major Muslim convention, Asra Nomani addresses the crowd about gender equality in Islam.

By Asra Nomani

Excerpted from "Standing Alone in Mecca" with permission of HarperSanFrancisco.

Going to the Windy City meant going full circle. I had left in 1992 to pursue a lie. I had walked out of a relationship with a man because he was a Christian. I married another man because he had the right pedigree: Muslim. In the twelve years since, I had tried to resolve the paradoxes within my identity so that I could live truthfully and sincerely.

I was committed to being honest about who I am. Most women, although not all, wore the hijab in Chicago. Even women who didn't ordinarily cover their hair did for the convention so that they wouldn't be the subject of gossip. I cover my hair only in the mosque, and I wasn't going to do it now just for public appearance.

After all of the other panelists had spoken--most with Power Point presentations--I took the podium. I gazed softly at the audience and thanked the Islamic Society of North America. I explained that the presentation was the result of almost two years of work inspired by the transformative experience of praying together with my family in Mecca on the holy pilgrimage of the hajj in February 2003. I had made that journey with the help of the Islamic Society of North America, and I thanked the society for that experience and the opportunity to speak at the convention. My points were simple. "Islam is at a crossroads much like the place where the prophet Muhammad found himself when he was on the cusp of a new dawn with his migration to Medina from Mecca. Medina became 'the City of Illumination' because of the wisdom with which the prophet nurtured his ummah. In much the same way, the Muslim world has the opportunity to rise to a place of deep and sincere enlightenment, inspired by the greatest teachings of Islam. It is our choice which path we take. It is our mandate to take action to ensure that we define our communities as tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate places that value and inspire all within our fold."

The problem was clear. "There are many model mosques that affirm women's rights. Yet women are systematically denied rights that Islam granted them in the seventh century in mosques throughout America. Islam grants all people inalienable rights to respect, dignity, participation, leadership, voice, knowledge, and worship. These rights must be granted to women, as well as men, in the mosques and Islamic centers that are a part of our Muslim communities. Islamic teaching seeks expressions of modesty between men and women. But many mosques in America and beyond have gone well beyond that principle by defining themselves with cultural traditions that perpetuate a system of separate accommodations that provides women with wholly unequal services for prayer and education. And yet, excluding women ignores the rights the prophet Muhammad gave them in the seventh century when he created a Muslim ummah in Medina and represents innovations that emerged after the prophet died."

I gave evidence of the rights denied in mosques throughout America and laid out the Islamic arguments that had empowered me to take action in my mosque in Morgantown. "It is time for our communities to embody the essential principles of equity, tolerance, and inclusion within Islam," I said. "And it is incumbent upon each of us as Muslims to stand up for those principles."

I told them what I had come to realize in the two years since January 2001 when the Dalai Lama had set me on my path toward Mecca. Terrorists transformed our world into a more dangerous place when they attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Before we knew it, a minority of Islamic fundamentalists who preached hatred of the West were defining Islam in the world. Alas, moderates, including myself, have been a "silent majority," remaining largely quiet. A combination of fear, shame, and apathy has contributed to a culture of silence among even those of us who are discontented with the status quo in Muslim society. Moderate Muslims have a great responsibility to define Islam and their communities in the world. For me, this effort started at home when I walked up to the front door of my mosque for the first time on the eve of Ramadan 2003. It is time, I said, for us to reclaim the rights Islam granted to women in the seventh century. Toward that end, I humbly introduced my poster with the Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques.

The rights are simple: the right to enter a mosque; the right to use the main door; the right to have visual and auditory access to the musalla (the main sanctuary); the right to pray in the main sanctuary without being separated by a barrier; the right to address any and all members of the congregation; the right to hold leadership positions, including positions on the board of directors; the right to be greeted and addressed cordially; and the right to receive respectful treatment and to be exempt from gossip and slander.

After reading the rights, I told the audience, "Ultimately, it is incumbent upon Islamic organizations, community leaders, academics, and mosques to respond to this call for improved rights for women in mosques by endorsing and promoting a campaign, modeling it after their very successful educational and legal campaigns to protect the civil liberties of Muslim men and women in other areas. To do so would honor not only Muslim women but also Islam. The journey is never complete, and a long road remains in front of us, but we have as inspiration a time in the seventh century when a new day lay ahead of a caravan trader who had as much to fear as we do today but nonetheless transcended his doubts and fears to create an ummah to which we all belong today. Allow us all to rise to our highest potential."

With a deep breath, I sat down, not knowing what to expect next.

Although there were four other speakers, a torrent of questions came at me when members of the audience stood at the microphone.

There were three hecklers. One admonished me for not saying the code phrase "Peace be upon him" after the name of the prophet. Another part of our inside language is "Sall-Allahu aleyhi wa sallam" (May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, abbreviated as SAW), said after any mention of the prophet or an angel. "The Clans" in the Qur'an (33:56) says, "The Prophet is blessed by God and His angels. Bless him then, you that are true believers, and greet him with a worthy salutation."

At the dais, the director of the Long Island mosque, Faroque Khan, a physician originally from India, had just spoken about the powerful interfaith work his mosque had done after 9/11 by opening its doors, and he defended me from his seat. "She is a brave daughter of Islam. Do not criticize her for such little things." The critics were undeterred. A young man stood up and identified himself as a member of the Muslim Students' Association. "Where is your proof?" he demanded angrily, shaking his head, his beard a blur in front of me. I pointed to the seventy-four footnotes in the reprint of the article my father and I wrote for the Journal of Islamic Law and Society. "The Sunnah of the prophet will never change," he said, shaking his head fiercely again. I stared at his eyes, so wide and menacing. I will never forget those eyes, I told myself, not realizing how useful that observation would become when I confronted the young man's rage again, days later.

At that moment, though, I didn't know I'd ever cross paths with him again, and I actually felt sorry for him that he felt so threatened by the simple bill of rights. I wanted to scream: these rights are the Sunnah of the prophet. I knew what lay beneath his anger. Some men don't want to relinquish the power and control it has taken them centuries to accumulate. Some men think it is their God-given right to express this power and control over women. But the prophet gave women rights that men deny them today, and it is our Islamic duty to reclaim those rights so that we can be stronger citizens of the world.

A twenty-four-year-old African American woman from Boston, Nakia Jackson, stood up. The women in her mosque prayed in a urine-stained, rat-infested room that doubled as a storage closet. And they accepted the status quo. "I feel so alone. What advice do you have for someone like me?" she asked, her voice trembling.

"You are not alone," I told her. "So often I have stood physically alone in my mosque in Morgantown. But I have felt the spiritual press of so many kindred spirits who stand with me. I am with you. You are not alone."

Afterward, I was mobbed. I hugged so many women, young and old, that I lost count. And I received the encouragement of so many men, young and old, that my faith was renewed. "We did it!" I told my parents when I called home later.
tasbiha
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Post by tasbiha »

"I really wondered if I would continue as a Muslim when I came back from Karachi. I was still trying to absorb my friend Danny [Pearl]'s murder. I had a baby in my belly who my baby's father couldn’t accept because I was unmarried. I wondered at the time if this was really my faith. I went to a Methodist church and was welcomed there. They gave me kinship and friendship and strength. But then I stayed within the protection of my parents, who are good Muslims, and I started to see incrementally over time expressions of compassion from other Muslims.

I discovered the truth, and the truth has kept me within Islam. "

Come on, she just wants publicity.

Cheap shot, post 9/11 publicity.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

from the June 29, 2005 edition -

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0629/p09s01-cojh.html
Islamic women rise up

By John Hughes

SALT LAKE CITY - It may at present be only a whisper. But it could get louder and louder. It is the voice of Islamic women in the Middle East protesting their longtime political and economic second-class status. It is a voice of indignation from women who have long been suppressed in traditionally male- dominated societies.

In recent days it has been heard in Egypt where women were fighting back against harassment from supporters of the ruling party.

It has been heard in Iran where women, despite the election of a hard-line conservative president, demonstrated against sex discrimination under that country's Islamic leadership.

It was heard in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where Arab women responded approvingly as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bluntly condemned the refusal of their rulers to give women the right to vote.
It was heard in Kuwait as women's rights activists lauded - and some conservative men deplored - the appointment of the first-ever woman, political science professor Massouma al-Mubarak, to a cabinet position.
And it was heard in Pakistan where Mukhtar Mai defied the government that sought to silence her for speaking out against a barbaric custom imposed upon her: gang-raping a young woman for an offense committed by her brother, traditionally followed by the suicide of the rape victim.
In many Arab nations of Islam, women have often been relegated to obscurity, denied a role economically, politically, socially. One out of every two Arab women can neither read nor write. A 2002 report prepared by Arab intellectuals for the United Nations charged that "utilization of Arab women's capabilities through political and economic participation remains the lowest in the world." Women occupy only 3.5 percent of all seats in parliaments of Arab countries, compared to 11 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, and 12.9 percent in Latin America and Caribbean countries.

In many countries women suffer from unequal citizenship, and are denied the right to vote or hold office. In a somber conclusion, the UN report declared: "Society as a whole suffers when half of its productive potential is stifled." But at least in the countries I've named, some women are speaking out and declaring that they've lived under male-dominated rule long enough.

In Egypt the women's movement has been energized by attacks on females from supporters of President Mubarak. Women have been taking a key role in trying to organize opposition to the Mubarak regime. Earlier this year, Hosni Mubarak announced reforms that will permit more than one candidate to run for president later this year. Critics proclaim that all this is a sham, that Mr. Mubarak's reelection is greased, and that those who seek to generate legitimate opposition are being intimidated. Part of this intimidation, they say, is groping and abuse of women demonstrators and the female relatives of male opposition politicians.

This has caused a backlash with not only women, but also with disgusted males, who have inveighed against the government.

In Iran, Islamic women have participated in rare - and unauthorized - demonstrations against sex discrimination by the ruling Islamic regime. Iranian law requireswomen to assume inferior roles to men; they are rarely promoted to senior roles in government service, and need permission from their husbands to work outside the home or travel abroad. Though Iranian women are largely pessimistic about the prospects for reform until there is a regime change, they nevertheless forced candidates in the recent presidential election to pay lip service to the issue of women's rights.

In the Islamic land of Pakistan, Mukhtar Mai has defied tribal tradition and instead of committing suicide after being raped, has fought back and secured the conviction of the rapists - and she did it with the support of a local Islamic leader.

Her subsequent harassment by authorities, including house arrest, a ban on travel to the US, and seizure of her passport - let alone a court order freeing her attackers - has roused international anger and pressure from the US government upon a Pakistani government that has been an important ally of the US in the war against terrorism. Tuesday, Ms. Mai won a victory when Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered her attackers to be rearrested.

In a vocal manner that hasn't been evident before, women in the Islamic lands are speaking out. Their case is being given traction by President Bush's emphasis on fostering democracy in lands that lack it - even though they be longtime allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

There cannot be democracy while women of the region are disadvantaged. There cannot be economic progress while half of the region's productive potential is stifled.

• John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, is editor and chief operating officer of the Deseret Morning News.
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Post by kmaherali »

The following article illustrates the unpracticality of applying the Sharia in the present context. In most Muslim countries individuals simply ignore or show contempt for the law and act against it in private. Clearly there is a need for ijtihad and re evaluation of the archaic law.

The truth about Islamic law
By Ahmed R. Benchemsi
AHMED R. BENCHEMSI is editor of TelQuel, a weekly French-language magazine in Morocco.

August 21, 2005

AMERICANS MAY be hoping that Iraqis currently debating their constitution will resolve once and for all the thorny issue of what role Islam plays in society. But those of us who live in Muslim societies understand that this question is never fully settled, regardless of what the law says.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia are extremely strict. Saudis found guilty of adultery face the death penalty; anyone caught drinking alcohol, the selling of which is forbidden, or breaking their fast during the holy month of Ramadan is sentenced to long-term imprisonment plus a beating with a stick.

None of this, however, prevents the royal family or the bourgeoisie from doing whatever they want behind the concealing walls of palaces or mansions. But the common people are generally prevented from committing such horrible sins.

Yet some Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, are more liberal. Their laws are still backward, but society is governed by the rule of hypocrisy rather than by the rule of law.

And that's a good thing at times. The law in Morocco, for instance, bans the sale of alcohol to Muslims. It even says so right on the government-issued licenses to sell booze — presumably to non-Muslim residents and foreign visitors, who make up the non-Muslim resident population. But in our society, religion is a given, not a choice, and so roughly 99% of all Moroccans are deemed Muslims as matter of law. The beauty is, there is no way to prove if someone is a Muslim because it is not written on ID cards or on foreheads.

On any given day, there must be 100 times more cans of beer consumed than there are non-Muslims living in the country. The game is to turn a blind eye when it comes to the religion of the drinkers — a Moroccan version of "don't ask, don't tell" — and business goes on.

When someone buys alcohol in Morocco, the salesman hands him the bottle in a black plastic bag so that the buyer "shows respect" to Muslims in the street by not "exposing them" to alcohol. The side effect is that anyone carrying a black plastic bag, even if it contains Coca-Cola or diapers, is suspected of being a "bad Muslim."

Hypocrisy also applies, not surprisingly, to sex. Having sex outside marriage is a crime. Divorce is legal in Morocco, but living together if you are not married is technically a crime. Moroccan society glorifies virginity until marriage, at least in theory. Neither laws nor the social order can stop the hormones' call.

Such laws are not often applied, yet few advocate their repeal because they are meant to preserve the façade of religion and tradition. A respected elderly father will stick to the idea that his by-all-means-righteous, single 40-year-old daughter is a virgin. To admit otherwise, even when everyone knows it's not true, would mean dishonor to the family, so everyone plays along.

In Morocco, there is no such thing as an honor crime. Delusion works better.

Hypocrisy is a way to reconcile the needs for religiosity and freedom. The late King Hassan, who kept a firm grip on Morocco over four autocratic decades, often stressed the "Moroccan genius," consisting of blending tradition and modernity harmoniously. The thing is, it was a lie. Tradition and modernity never combined. They just coexisted side by side in contradictory ways, which prevented people from clearly choosing either. As Hoba Hoba Spirit, a famous rock band in today's Morocco, puts it:

A bit of tradition

A bit of science fiction

End result confusion

It's fusion that makes us dumb …

and completely lost….
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Post by kmaherali »

The following article that appeared in today's Calgary Herald discusses Nasr Abu Zaid's book "Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam". It highlights the issues that are currently being debated within Islam viz a viz, historicity of the Quran, the need for ijtihad and the role of intellect in faith.

Running afoul of Islam


Barry Cooper
For The Calgary Herald


September 7, 2005



Often western critics of Islam wonder why the voices of moderate reforming Muslims are so easily silenced by strident fundamentalist ones. "Where is the Muslim Luther?" these critics wonder.

Leaving aside the differences between reforming a hierarchy such as the late medieval Christian Church and the contemporary non-hierarchic Muslim community along with the issue of what Luther thought he was doing, the question is not entirely meaningless. Nasr Abu Zaid's recent book, Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam, tries to grapple with this question.

Zaid was honoured by being singled out for condemnation in 1995 by Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of Osama bin Laden's terrorist associates. Zaid committed two offences, according to al-Zawahiri: he argued that the holy texts of Islam should be understood and interpreted in light of the historical and linguistic context that accompanied their writing, and that new interpretations need to be made in light of changing circumstances.

Zaid's problems began prior to his having come to the attention of al-Zawahiri. In 1992, when he applied for tenure at the University of Cairo in the Department of Arabic Studies, he was turned down. The chief reason cited was that he used "independent reasoning" or "ijtihad," in his work. Many traditional Muslims believe "the gates of ijtihad" have been closed since the 13th century.

He also drew attention to historical evidence concerning the several versions of the text of the Qur'an in circulation prior to the textual standardization decreed by the third caliph, Uthman. Zaid drew the conclusion there was a human dimension to the Qur'an as well as a divine one.

That is, the historical contingency that the message of the Qur'an was revealed on a particular occasion in seventh-century Arabia mattered. This view also contradicted the view of the traditionalists that the Qur'an was God's eternal and thus uncreated speech.

Biblical scholars, whether of the Hebrew or the Christian texts, have long been accustomed to see beyond the contingent and human words of scripture to the divine meaning that the Biblical message expressed.

Even early Islam made room for a school of thought, the Mutazilites, who sought to interpret Muslim scriptures by taking its symbolic or metaphorical meaning into account. Of course, these approaches are disputed, but so too are equivalent schools of Biblical interpretation. As late as 1960, the publication of the Dutch Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church was highly controversial. The catechism took pains to assure Catholic traditionalists that having an "inquiring mind" was not evidence of "a non-Christian attitude."

The inquiring mind of Nasr Zaid earned him, as it did some of the Dutch Catholics, the charge of apostasy. His wife was instructed to divorce him because a Muslim woman cannot remain married to an apostate, and eventually they were both compelled to flee Egypt for the Netherlands.

The story he tells in this thoughtful memoir is filled with fascinating details of life in Cairo, of his struggle for an education, and, following the death of his father, of his struggle for enough money to keep his family both fed and respectable.

He also described the attractions of joining the radical Muslim Brotherhood and how he resisted the temptations of fundamentalism.

The persistent theme, however, is the conflict between the reflective investigation of the meaning of a sacred text and the loud preaching of religious dogma.

For example, just because the practice of wife-beating is mentioned in the Qur'an does not mean it is sanctioned by God or God's law. To understand such texts, Zaid argues, we must look both to the historical context and to the aim of the Qur'an, which, socially speaking, is justice. Likewise, the issue of polygamy, he says, is properly understood as a way of dealing with a serious social problem of seventh-century Arabia, the mistreatment of orphans.

The broad lesson of Zaid's book is that the inquiring mind of a Muslim thinker can even today join the great thinkers of the Christian and Jewish as well as of the Muslim and Greek past. He reminds us that the way beyond the dogmatic wars that enable so many in the west to dismiss all Muslims as fundamentalists and, reciprocally, to permit Muslims to dismiss western thinkers as Zionists and Crusaders, is by way of what all humans have in common, which must include their inquiring minds.

Barry Cooper is managing director of the Fraser Institute's Calgary office and a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.

© The Calgary Herald 2005
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Post by kmaherali »

The following article is about women in America who feel that they do not need the covers of hijab or burkha to identify themselves as Muslim women. They can still dress up modestly without the artificial coverings - very much in line with Ismaili thinking.

BEING ISLAMIC
Uncovering the truth
Stereotypes of submission, oppression anger many Muslim women

By Omar Sacirbey, Omar Sacirbey is an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow.


NADA SELAMEH doesn't hold back her opinions on the American media. "I don't like the way they represent us," she said. They make the American public attack us. What upsets me is the way they portray Muslim women as being oppressed by their men."

Before 9/11, Selameh never wore a hijab, the head scarf some Muslim women wear as an expression of modesty. But when dusty burkas became the defining image of Muslim women during the war in Afghanistan, the native of Dearborn, Mich., started wearing a hijab at 26.

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"I felt that I wasn't the female the media were showing as representative of Muslims," she said.

Ironically, few knew she was a Muslim in the first place. "When I'm not covered, I just blend in," she said. "But being covered, people know, 'OK, she's Muslim.' But I don't have 10 kids. I'm not married. I work. I have a master's degree."

Before she donned her hijab, Selameh was among the unveiled majority of Muslim women in the West who are less visible than those in burkas.

She was one of about 2,000 Arab Americans, most of them Muslims, attending the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's annual convention this summer. Most women were business casual — knee-length skirts, slacks and button-downs. Designer T-shirts, low-cut jeans and miniskirts were popular among younger women. Selameh was one of only a handful of women wearing the hijab. Still, she worried that "the face of the Muslim woman" would be that of a "hijabi," not the hijabless majority.

Selameh has reason to worry. "Veiled Praise" was a recent headline in the New York Times. "What It's Like When I Wear Hijab" was another in the Lexington Herald-Leader. The headline "Muslim women face decisions on traditional, modern values" appeared in the Boston Globe, accompanied by photos of women wearing head scarves. Add TV images of Arab women in niqabs or columns of Iranian women in chadors — and it's hard not to say "covered" when you think of Muslim women.

To most Westerners, "an authentic Muslim woman is always wearing a hijab," said Asma Barlas, a Koran scholar at Ithaca College whose female-centric interpretations of Islam's holy book have sparked controversy in the Muslim world.

In reality, most Muslim women in the United States and in Europe don't wear the hijab, except for worship, because they are members of a secular majority or see themselves as cultural Muslims, identifying more with rai music or rumi poetry than with salah, or Scripture. Still others are devoted Muslims but don't view the hijab as a prerequisite of spirituality.

To these Muslim women, the hijab is more than an annoying media stereotype. It obscures their independence, outspokenness and career-mindedness.

Without the hijab, "we don't exist. We're not allowed to be the face of Islam," said Laila Al-Marayati, a physician and the chairwoman of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Women's League."

An example of the media's preferred face of the Muslim woman recently appeared in a Seattle Times story headlined "Preserving modesty, in the pool." The piece featured a group of Muslim women who gathered at an indoor pool once a month to swim. Before swimming, they taped brown paper over the windows so men couldn't see them. "Because Islam requires Muslim women to fully cover themselves in public," the story said, "swimming in pools or the ocean is largely off-limits for many."

The face of Munira Sheriff better reflects Muslim women in secular societies. The recent graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government wore a midline skirt and button-down shirt when I met her.

"A lot of people forget that everybody is allowed to interpret the religion," she said. "I believe that Islam wants us to be modest. And I believe this midline skirt I'm wearing is acceptable modesty [in the United States]. In Pakistan, I would not wear this because it wouldn't be acceptable; it wouldn't be modest there."

In rejecting the hijab as a defining characteristic of Muslim women, Koran scholars such as Barlas contend that the head scarf is not rooted in theology but in the traditions of male-dominated societies. In her book "Believing Women in Islam," she argues that neither of the two Koranic verses cited by conservatives to justify the veiling of women specifies a preferred covering. Rather, women should "guard their modesty" and "draw their cloaks over their bosoms."

"There are many ways in which you can cover your bosom," a hijab being just one of them, Barlas said. The idea that women have to cover their head and face emerged a few hundred years after Islam's birth and was based on the belief that women's bodies are corrupting, a belief unsupported in the Koran, Barlas argued.

These arguments are not confined to academic circles. Muslim moderates around the world hear and talk about them. Last year, Barlas spoke at the annual convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy group, and spent several weeks this summer in Indonesia talking about her interpretations of the Koran.

"Things are happening," Barlas said, "but they are slow, and they will take time."

Barlas' story — a Muslim woman seeking to undo centuries of patriarchy infuriates the male establishment, with some wanting her head — is a good one. But there are lots of smart, opinionated Muslim women in the United States with equally good stories, if only the media drops their veil of preconceptions.
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Post by kmaherali »

The following article expressing the views of Russian Islam, highlights the need to embrace pluralistic nature of Islam with respect to socio/economic/cultural/political backgrounds of its various constituencies. It also underscores the need for Islam to adapt to the new realities of our times. It will be interesting to see how these sentiments find expression in the coming decades.

Perhaps our Jamats in Central Asia as they develop and evolve, could provide appropriate role models for socio/cultural/economic development within the framework of the balance between tradition and modernity.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4341648.stm



Russian Islam goes its own way

By Leonid Ragozin
bbcrussian.com, Moscow

"If people wear tight jeans or skirts and speak slang, it does not mean they have veered from the path of true Islam."

One in five Russians may be Muslim by 2020

Shamil Alyautdinov often says things you do not quite expect from an imam.

But 70 years of communism have bulldozed most religious and ethnic traditions in Russia, so do not be surprised when you hear him saying it is all right that most Muslims do not even attend the mosque.

"It is not obligatory," Mr Alyautdinov adds. "Life is very fast these days, so people don't have time to go to mosque."

The 31-year-old imam of the Moscow Memorial mosque, who graduated from a regular secondary school in the Russian capital's suburbia but studied Islamic theology in Egypt, finds new methods of reaching his flock, suitable for the new era.

Muslims from all around the country send him e-mails with questions on various aspects of everyday life and worship. His answers have already formed several books.

The most voluminous of them all - reflecting the readers' main area of interest - is the one called He And She and dedicated, as the name suggests, to relations between men and women.

Another bestseller sold across the country includes some of Mr Alyautdinov's texts, although the imam strongly objects to its "provocative" name: Love And Sex In Islam.

The book praised in the foreword by leading Muslim clerics, theologians, activists and even the Iranian cultural attache, covers such issues as sex change, masturbation, anal and oral sex - and many others - from the Islamic perspective.

But in a country that has one of the world's highest divorce and abortion rates, these two issues top Russian Muslims' agenda, along with cross-religious marriage and premarital sex.

Beliefs reassessed

The country's Muslim community is extremely diverse - from Volga Tatars and Bashkirs to the ethnic mishmash of the North Caucasus. But unlike Muslim minorities in Western Europe, most Russian Muslims represent native people of what is now Russia, who inhabited their land for over a millennium.

They spent centuries adapting to the official dominance of Orthodox Christianity in tsarist times and then underwent the communist experiment aimed at rooting out religion and melting all ethnic groups into one great Soviet nation.

The country's Muslim community makes up more than 10% of the total population. Demographers predict that by 2020 one out of five Russians will be Muslim. But the question is: How Muslim will they be?

The end of communism found many Muslims dispersed among the non-Muslim population and living a lifestyle nearly indistinguishable from their fellow citizens of Russia. In the 1990s, millions of them turned back to their roots, but many soon grew disappointed with mainstream Islam and called for reforms.

Rafail Khakimov, who heads the Institute of Tatar History, coined the term "Euroislam". Its main feature, he says, is a "critical attitude to everything that happens around us instead of blindly following the principles established in the Middle Ages".

"The traditions of the Islamic world were shaped between the 10th and 12th centuries and preserved ever since but the liberal Islam which started developing two centuries ago is open to all experiences existing in the world," he says.

'Room for everything'

Being an advisor to the president of Tatarstan, Mr Khakimov is one of those who shape the official ideology of this predominantly Muslim republic inside Russia which enjoys a high degree of autonomy.

"Europe is the point of reference for Tatarstan's elite, including the leadership," he asserts.

Mainstream clerics believe Islam does not need either a "euro" prefix or any other.

"Islam is a universal religion that answers all the questions an individual or society as a whole may face," says Nafigulla Ashirov, the chief mufti of the Asian part of Russia.

He says Islam gives enough room for diversity, for instance as regards what people want to wear: European-style clothes do not contradict the Koran.

"But this is not modernisation - it is what Islam allows anyway," Mr Ashirov says.

Some Tatar clerics add that the Hanafite theological school, dominant in Tatar Islam, is pluralistic and critical enough to answer the challenges of the epoch. Mr Khakimov, however, blames them for being out of touch with ordinary Muslims:

"Tatarstan has thousands of mosques, so why are they locked? Because many imams studied abroad, for example in Saudi Arabia. But the situation in Russia is completely different from that of the Arabian peninsula."

Euroislamists and mainstream clerics might disagree, but there is no feeling of enmity between them.

However, there is another Muslim reformist movement whose existence worries them both.

The militants

The leader of the Islamic committee of Russia, Geydar Dzhemal, who claims to be close to Salafism - a purist teaching dominant in Saudi Arabia - advocates Islamic guerrilla resistance against the "barbaric" authorities.

"Many young people who were provoked by the security forces, tortured and humiliated went off into the forests and mountains and most certainly perished there, but refused to kiss the boots of the new Mongols," he says.

Dismissing the leaders of Chechen separatists as failed role models, he praises the people of Andijan - an Uzbek town whose residents last May staged a revolt brutally suppressed by the government.

The popularity of such ideas largely depends on the Russian authorities' ability not to alienate Muslims like they did in the most notorious example of Chechnya.

But it also depends on how carefully Russian Muslim leaders strike a balance between tradition and the urge for change.
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Pak Hindu girls forced to convert to Islam
By: Hasan Mansoor
November 13, 2005

Karachi: An alarming trend — that of Muslims kidnapping Pakistani Hindu girls and forcing them to convert to Islam — in Pakistan’s Sindh province is forcing the worried resident Hindu community to marry off their daughters as soon as they are of marriageable age or to migrate to India, Canada or other nations.

Recently, at least 19 such abduction cases have occurred in Karachi alone, while several others have been reported in the media.

Sanao Menghwar, a Hindu resident of Karachi’s Punjab Colony, is a traumatised man; all three of his daughters —Aishwarya, Reena and Reema — have been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam.

In the police complaint that he filed at the behest of the Panchayat after two days of futile searching for his daughters, he stated that when he and his wife returned home from work, they discovered their daughters had gone missing.

The police arrested three Muslim youths in connection with the crime, who were later granted bail by a court because they’re minors. Menghwar’s daughters continue to remain missing.

“Kidnapping Hindu girls like this has become a normal practice. The girls are then forced to sign stamp papers stating that they’ve become Muslims,” says Laljee Menghwar, a member of the Hindu Panchayat in Karachi.

According to him, the Pakistani government needs to examine and put a stop to the social oppression of religious minorities in the country. “Hindus here are too frightened to vent their anger — they fear victimisation. But we have now decided to go public with these cases and demand justice,” Laljee says. Their cause has found support in the Pakistani Christian community, who carried out a demonstration with them in Karachi, protesting against this crime.

Similarly startling incidents have occurred in several districts of Sindh and evoked identical responses. At least six Hindu girls met this fate a few months ago in Jacobabad (a tribal area heavily inhabited by Hindus) and Larkana districts.

Sapna, the daughter of one Seth Giyanchand, was recently taken to a shrine (Amrote in Shikarpur district) by Shamsuddin Dasti. Dasti, a Muslim friend of Sapna’s brother, is a married man and father of two.

Nevertheless, the custodian of the shrine, Maulvi Abdul Aziz lost no time in converting Sapna to Islam (her names was changed to ‘Mehek’) and marrying her to Dasti. The case came to light only when Sapna’s parents stated that their daughter hadn’t eloped but been abducted.

Human rights activists, such as Nuzhat Shirin who belongs to the Aurat Foundation, says that religious extremism is rapidly increasing in Jacobabad and other Sindh districts.

Extremists in turn encourage shrines, which are involved with forced conversions. When a Hindu girl is converted to Islam, hundreds of extremists belonging to religious parties such as Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI), take to the streets and chant religious slogans.

In Sapna’s case, when she was presented in court with Dasti, extremists showered rose petals on them and loudly chanted religious slogans. The fanaticism was so daunting that Sapna was too frightened to even speak with her own parents who were also present in the courtroom. At that, Maulvi Aziz, who was also standing in the courtroom, was said to have remarked, “How can a Muslim girl live and maintain contact with kafirs (infidels)?”

Sapna’s story sparked widespread demonstrations by the Hindu community. Presidents and mukhis of Panchayats from various towns and districts met in Jacobabad to discuss this serious issue. Activists and leaders from educated segments of society strongly criticised the role of religious leaders, like Maulvi Aziz, in these forced conversion cases.

Still, the threat of victimisation by Muslims is palpable; Shirin says when forced conversion cases make it to court, lawyers themselves avoid taking them up, fearing a backlash from maulvis.

Giyanchand meanwhile has said that he has no other option but to migrate to India — it will be difficult for him to find grooms for his other daughters because of Sapna’s controversial conversion.

And forced conversions are not the only problem that the Hindu minority (there are 2.7 million Hindus in Pakistan; Pakistan’s total population is 140 million) is facing in the country.

A powerful syndicate of bandits and patrons in the northern districts of Sindh regularly kidnap rich Hindus for ransom. They not kill hostages if the ransom doesn’t arrive on time, they even kill some despite their ransom being paid.

Sadham Chand Chawla, the former president of the Hindu Panchayat, Jacobabad, was abducted and murdered. His killers remain at large despite enormous protests. Following his murder, his family had received several threats until they secretly migrated to India.
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A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds
James Estrin/The New York Times"Here you don't know what will solve a problem. It's about looking for a key." Sheik Reda Shata, the imam of a thriving mosque in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/nyreg ... 0&emc=eta1

By ANDREA ELLIOTT
Published: March 5, 2006
The imam begins his trek before dawn, his long robe billowing like a ghost through empty streets. In this dark, quiet hour, his thoughts sometimes drift back to the Egyptian farming village where he was born.

In the subway, Sheik Reda Shata wears Western clothes instead of his traditional robe to avoid being taunted.
But as the sun rises over Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Sheik Reda Shata's new world comes to life. The R train rattles beneath a littered stretch of sidewalk, where Mexican workers huddle in the cold. An electric Santa dances in a doughnut shop window. Neon signs beckon. Gypsy cabs blare their horns.

The imam slips into a plain brick building, nothing like the golden-domed mosque of his youth. He stops to pray, and then climbs the cracked linoleum steps to his cluttered office. The answering machine blinks frantically, a portent of the endless questions to come.

A teenage girl wants to know: Is it halal, or lawful, to eat a Big Mac? Can alcohol be served, a waiter wonders, if it is prohibited by the Koran? Is it wrong to take out a mortgage, young Muslim professionals ask, when Islam frowns upon monetary interest?

The questions are only a piece of the daily puzzle Mr. Shata must solve as the imam of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, a thriving New York mosque where several thousand Muslims worship.

To his congregants, Mr. Shata is far more than the leader of daily prayers and giver of the Friday sermon. Many of them now live in a land without their parents, who typically assist with finding a spouse. There are fewer uncles and cousins to help resolve personal disputes. There is no local House of Fatwa to issue rulings on ethical questions.

Sheik Reda, as he is called, arrived in Brooklyn one year after Sept. 11. Virtually overnight, he became an Islamic judge and nursery school principal, a matchmaker and marriage counselor, a 24-hour hot line on all things Islamic.

Day after day, he must find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life. Little in his rural Egyptian upbringing or years of Islamic scholarship prepared him for the challenge of leading a mosque in America.

The job has worn him down and opened his mind. It has landed him, exhausted, in the hospital and earned him a following far beyond Brooklyn.

"America transformed me from a person of rigidity to flexibility," said Mr. Shata, speaking through an Arabic translator. "I went from a country where a sheik would speak and the people listened to one where the sheik talks and the people talk back."

This is the story of Mr. Shata's journey west: the making of an American imam.

Over the last half-century, the Muslim population in the United States has risen significantly. Immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa have settled across the country, establishing mosques from Boston to Los Angeles, and turning Islam into one of the nation's fastest growing religions. By some estimates, as many as six million Muslims now live in America.

Leading this flock calls for improvisation. Imams must unify diverse congregations with often-clashing Islamic traditions. They must grapple with the threat of terrorism, answering to law enforcement agents without losing the trust of their fellow Muslims. Sometimes they must set aside conservative beliefs that prevail in the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam.

Islam is a legalistic faith: Muslims believe in a divine law that guides their daily lives, including what they should eat, drink and wear. In countries where the religion reigns, this is largely the accepted way.

But in the West, what Islamic law prohibits is everywhere. Alcohol fills chocolates. Women jog in sports bras. For many Muslims in America, life is a daily clash between Islamic mores and material temptation. At the center of this clash stands the imam.

In America, imams evoke a simplistic caricature — of robed, bearded clerics issuing fatwas in foreign lands. Hundreds of imams live in the United States, but their portrait remains flatly one-dimensional. Either they are symbols of diversity, breaking the Ramadan fast with smiling politicians, or zealots, hurrying into their storefront mosques.

Mr. Shata, 37, is neither a firebrand nor a ready advocate of progressive Islam. Some of his views would offend conservative Muslims; other beliefs would repel American liberals. He is in many ways a work in progress, mapping his own middle ground between two different worlds.

Marking the end of Ramadan, Mr. Shata's mosque, the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, attracted an overflow crowd. Since the mosque was founded a few blocks away in 1984, it has grown into a vital center for new Muslim immigrants.

Each morning, Mr. Shata accompanies his daughters Esteshhad, 10, left, and Rahma, 6, to the bus stop of their Islamic school. Along the way, he quizzes them on passages from the Koran.
The imam's cramped, curtained office can hardly contain the dramas that unfold inside. Women cry. Husbands storm off. Friendships end. Every day brings soap opera plots and pitch.

A Moroccan woman falls to her knees near the imam's Hewlett-Packard printer. "Have mercy on me!" she wails to a friend who has accused her of theft. Another day, it is a man whose Lebanese wife has concealed their marriage and newborn son from her strict father. "I will tell him everything!" the husband screams.

Mr. Shata settles dowries, confronts wife abusers, brokers business deals and tries to arrange marriages. He approaches each problem with an almost scientific certainty that it can be solved. "I try to be more of a doctor than a judge," said Mr. Shata. "A judge sentences. A doctor tries to remedy."

Imams in the United States now serve an estimated 1,200 mosques. Some of their congregants have lived here for generations, assimilating socially and succeeding professionally. But others are recent immigrants, still struggling to find their place in America. Demographers expect their numbers to rise in the coming decades, possibly surpassing those of American Jews.

Like many of their faithful, most imams in the United States come from abroad. They are recruited primarily for their knowledge of the Koran and the language in which it was revealed, Arabic.

But few are prepared for the test that awaits. Like the parish priests who came generations before, imams are called on to lead a community on the margins of American civic life. They are conduits to and arbiters of an exhilarating, if sometimes hostile world, filled with promise and peril.

An Invitation to Islam

More than 5,000 miles lie between Brooklyn and Kafr al Battikh, Mr. Shata's birthplace in northeastern Egypt. Situated where the Nile Delta meets the Suez Canal, it was a village of dirt roads and watermelon vines when Mr. Shata was born in 1968.

Egypt was in the throes of change. The country had just suffered a staggering defeat in the Six Day War with Israel, and protests against the government followed. Hoping to counter growing radicalism, a new president, Anwar Sadat, allowed a long-repressed Islamic movement to flourish.

The son of a farmer and fertilizer salesman, Mr. Shata belonged to the lowest rung of Egypt's rural middle class. His house had no electricity. He did not see a television until he was 15.

Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother's voice. At bedtime, she would tell him the story of the Prophet Muhammad, the seventh-century founder of Islam. The boy heard much that was familiar. Like the prophet, he had lost his mother at a young age.

"She told me the same story maybe a thousand times," he said.

At the age of 5, he began memorizing the Koran. Like thousands of children in the Egyptian countryside, he attended a Sunni religious school subsidized by the government and connected to Al Azhar University, a bastion of Islamic scholarship.

Too poor to buy books, the young Mr. Shata hand-copied from hundreds at the town library. The bound volumes now line the shelves of his Bay Ridge apartment. When he graduated, he enrolled at Al Azhar and headed to Cairo by train. There, he sat on a bench for hours, marveling at the sights.

"I was like a lost child," he said. "Cars. We didn't have them. People of different colors. Foreigners. Women almost naked. It was like an imaginary world."

At 18, Mr. Shata thought of becoming a judge. But at his father's urging, he joined the college of imams, the Dawah.

The word means invitation. It refers to the duty of Muslims to invite, or call, others to the faith. Unlike Catholicism or Judaism, Islam has no ordained clergy. The Prophet Muhammad was the religion's first imam, or prayer leader, Islam's closest corollary to a rabbi or priest; schools like the Dawah are its version of a seminary or rabbinate.

After four years, Mr. Shata graduated with honors, seventh in a class of 3,400.

The next decade brought lessons in adaptation. In need of money, Mr. Shata took a job teaching sharia, or Islamic law, to children in Saudi Arabia, a country guided by Wahhabism, a puritan strain of Sunni Islam. He found his Saudi colleagues' interpretation of the Koran overly literal at times, and the treatment of women, who were not allowed to vote or drive, troubling.

One of Mr. Shata's least favorite tasks is granting divorces. Still, he is often called upon to counsel congregants like this one who want to end marriages.

Five years later, he returned to a different form of religious control in Egypt, where most imams are appointed by the government and monitored for signs of radicalism or political dissent.

"They are not allowed to deviate from the curriculum that the government sets for them," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mr. Shata craved greater independence, and opened a furniture business. But he missed the life of dawah and eventually returned to it as the imam of his hometown mosque, which drew 4,000 worshipers on Fridays alone.

His duties were clear: He led the five daily prayers and delivered the khutba, or Friday sermon. His mosque, like most in Egypt, was financed and managed by the government. He spent his free time giving lectures, conducting marriage ceremonies and offering occasional religious guidance.

In 2000, Mr. Shata left to work as an imam in the gritty industrial city of Stuttgart, Germany. Europe brought a fresh new freedom. "I saw a wider world," he said. "Anyone with an opinion could express it."

Then came Sept. 11.

Soon after, Mr. Shata's mosque was defiled with graffiti and smeared with feces.

The next summer, Mr. Shata took a call from an imam in Brooklyn. The man, Mohamed Moussa, was leaving his mosque, exhausted by the troubles of his congregants following the terrorist attacks. The mosque was looking for a replacement, and Mr. Shata had come highly recommended by a professor at Al Azhar.

Most imams are recruited to American mosques on the recommendation of other imams or trusted scholars abroad, and are usually offered an annual contract. Some include health benefits and subsidized housing; others are painfully spare. The pay can range from $20,000 to $50,000.

Mr. Shata had heard stories of Muslim hardship in America. The salary at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge was less than what he was earning in Germany. But foremost on his mind were his wife and three small daughters, whom he had not seen in months. Germany had refused them entry.

He agreed to take the job if he could bring his family to America. In October 2002, the American Embassy in Cairo granted visas to the Shatas and they boarded a plane for New York.

A Mosque, a Magnet

A facade of plain white brick rises up from Fifth Avenue just south of 68th Street in Bay Ridge. Two sets of words, one in Arabic and another in English, announce the mosque's dual identity from a marquee above its gray metal doors.

To the mosque's base — Palestinian, Egyptian, Yemeni, Moroccan and Algerian immigrants — it is known as Masjid Moussab, named after one of the prophet's companions, Moussab Ibn Omair. To the mosque's English-speaking neighbors, descendants of the Italians, Irish and Norwegians who once filled the neighborhood, it is the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.

Mosques across America are commonly named centers or societies, in part because they provide so many services. Some 140 mosques serve New York City, where an estimated 600,000 Muslims live, roughly 20 percent of them African-American, said Louis Abdellatif Cristillo, an anthropologist at Teachers College who has canvassed the city's mosques.

The Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, like other American mosques, is run by a board of directors, mostly Muslim professionals from the Palestinian territories. What began in 1984 as a small storefront on Bay Ridge Avenue, with no name and no imam, has grown into one of the city's vital Muslim centers, a magnet for new immigrants.

Its four floors pulse with life: a nursery school, an Islamic bookstore, Koran classes and daily lectures. Some 1,500 Muslims worship at the mosque on Fridays, often crouched in prayer on the sidewalk. Albanians, Pakistanis and others who speak little Arabic listen to live English translations of the sermons through headsets. It is these congregants' crumpled dollar bills, collected in a cardboard box, that enable the mosque to survive.

Among the city's imams, Bay Ridge is seen as a humbling challenge.

"It's the first station for immigrants," said Mr. Moussa, Mr. Shata's predecessor. "And immigrants have a lot of problems."

Skip 911. Call the Imam.

Mr. Shata landed at Kennedy International Airport wearing a crimson felt hat and a long gray jilbab that fell from his neck to his sandaled toes, the proud dress of an Al Azhar scholar. He spoke no English. But already, he carried some of the West inside. He could quote liberally from Voltaire, Shaw and Kant. For an Egyptian, he often jokes, he was inexplicably punctual.

Muslims in America (March 4, 2006) The first thing Mr. Shata loved about America, like Germany, was the order.

"In Egypt, if a person passes through a red light, that means he's smart," he said. "In America, he's very disrespected."

Americans stood in line. They tended their yards. One could call the police and hear a rap at the door minutes later. That fact impressed not only Mr. Shata, but also the women of his new mosque.

They had gained a reputation for odd calls to 911. One woman called because a relative abroad had threatened to take her inheritance. "The officers left and didn't write anything," Mr. Shata said, howling with laughter. "There was nothing for them to write."

Another woman called, angry because her husband had agreed to let a daughter from a previous marriage spend the night.

To Mr. Shata, the calls made sense. The women's parents, uncles and brothers — figures of authority in family conflict — were overseas. Instead, they dialed 911, hoping for a local substitute. Soon they would learn to call the imam.

A bearish man with a soft, bearded face, Mr. Shata struck his congregants as an odd blend of things. He was erudite yet funny; authoritative at the mosque's wooden pulpit and boyishly charming between prayers.

Homemakers, doctors, cabdrivers and sheiks stopped by to assess the new imam. He regaled them with Dunkin' Donuts coffee, fetched by the Algerian keeper of the mosque, and then told long, poetic stories that left his visitors silent, their coffee cold.

"You just absorb every word he says," said Linda Sarsour, 25, a Muslim activist in Brooklyn.

The imam, too, was taking note. Things worked differently in America, where mosques were run as nonprofit organizations and congregants had a decidedly democratic air. Mr. Shata was shocked when a tone-deaf man insisted on giving the call to prayer. Such a man would be ridiculed in Egypt, where the callers, or muezzinin, have voices so beautiful they sometimes record top-selling CD's.

But in the land of equal opportunity, a man with a mediocre voice could claim discrimination. Mr. Shata relented. He shudders when the voice periodically sounds.

No sooner had Mr. Shata started his new job than all manner of problems arrived at his worn wooden desk: rebellious teenagers, marital strife, confessions of philandering, accusations of theft.

The imam responded creatively. Much of the drama involved hot dog vendors. There was the pair who shared a stand, but could not stand each other. They came to the imam, who helped them divide the business.

The most notorious hot dog seller stood accused of stealing thousands of dollars in donations he had raised for the children of his deceased best friend. But there was no proof. The donations had been in cash. The solution, the imam decided, was to have the man swear an oath on the Koran.

"Whoever lies while taking an oath on the Koran goes blind afterward," said Mr. Shata, stating a belief that has proved useful in cases of theft. A group of men lured the vendor to the mosque, where he confessed to stealing $11,400. His admission was recorded in a waraqa, or document, penned in Arabic and signed by four witnesses. He returned the money in full.

Dozens of waraqas sit in the locked bottom drawer of the imam's desk. In one, a Brooklyn man who burned his wife with an iron vows, in nervous Arabic scrawl, never to do it again. If he fails, he will owe her a $10,000 "disciplinary fine." The police had intervened before, but the woman felt that she needed the imam's help.

For hundreds of Muslims, the Bay Ridge mosque has become a courthouse more welcoming than the one downtown, a police precinct more effective than the brick station blocks away. Even the police have used the imam's influence to their advantage, warning disorderly teenagers that they will be taken to the mosque rather than the station.

"They say: 'No, not the imam! He'll tell my parents,' " said Russell Kain, a recently retired officer of the 68th Precinct.

Marriage, Mortgage, McDonald's

Soon after arriving in Brooklyn, Mr. Shata observed a subtle rift among the women of his mosque. Those who were new to America remained quietly grounded in the traditions of their homelands. But some who had assimilated began to question those strictures. Concepts like shame held less weight. Actions like divorce, abhorred by Mr. Shata, were surprisingly popular.

Muslims in America (March 4, 2006) "The woman who comes from overseas, she's like someone who comes from darkness to a very well-lit place," he said.

In early July, an Egyptian karate teacher shuffled into Mr. Shata's office and sank into a donated couch. He smiled meekly and began to talk. His new wife showed him no affection. She complained about his salary and said he lacked ambition.

The imam urged him to be patient.

Two weeks later, in came the wife. She wanted a divorce.

"We don't understand each other," the woman said. She was 32 and had come from Alexandria, Egypt, to work as an Arabic teacher. She had met her husband through a friend in Bay Ridge. Her parents, still in Egypt, had approved cautiously from afar.

"I think you should be patient," said the imam.

"I cannot," she said firmly. "He loves me, but I have to love him, too."

Mr. Shata shifted uncomfortably in his chair. There was nothing he loathed more than granting a divorce.

"It's very hard for me to let him divorce you," he said. "How can I meet God on Judgment Day?"

"It's God's law also to have divorce," she shot back. The debate continued.

Finally, Mr. Shata asked for her parents' phone number in Egypt. Over the speakerphone, they anxiously urged the imam to relent. Their daughter was clearly miserable, and they were too far away to intervene.

With a sigh, Mr. Shata asked his executive secretary, Mohamed, to print a divorce certificate. In the rare instance when the imam agrees to issue one, it is after a couple has filed for divorce with the city.

"Since you're the one demanding divorce, you can never get back together with him," the imam warned. "Ever."

The woman smiled politely.

"What matters for us is the religion," she said later. "Our law is our religion."

The religion's fiqh, or jurisprudence, is built on 14 centuries of scholarship, but imams in Europe and America often find this body of law insufficient to address life in the West. The quandaries of America were foreign to Mr. Shata.

Pornography was rampant, prompting a question Mr. Shata had never heard in Egypt: Is oral sex lawful? Pork and alcohol are forbidden in Islam, raising questions about whether Muslims could sell beer or bacon. Tired of the menacing stares in the subway, women wanted to know if they could remove their headscarves. Muslims were navigating their way through problems Mr. Shata had never fathomed.

For a while, the imam called his fellow sheiks in Egypt with requests for fatwas, or nonbinding legal rulings. But their views carried little relevance to life in America. Some issues, like oral sex, he dared not raise. Over time, he began to find his own answers and became, as he put it, flexible.

Is a Big Mac permissible? Yes, the imam says, but not a bacon cheeseburger.

It is a woman's right, Mr. Shata believes, to remove her hijab if she feels threatened. Muslims can take jobs serving alcohol and pork, he says, but only if other work cannot be found. Oral sex is acceptable, but only between married couples. Mortgages, he says, are necessary to move forward in America.

"Islam is supposed to make a person's life easier, not harder," Mr. Shata explained.

In some ways, the imam has resisted change. He has learned little English, and interviews with Mr. Shata over the course of six months required the use of a translator.

Some imams in the United States make a point of shaking hands with women, distancing themselves from the view that such contact is improper. Mr. Shata offers women only a nod.

Daily, he passes the cinema next to his mosque but has never seen a movie in a theater. He says music should be forbidden if it "encourages sexual desire." He won't convert a non-Muslim when it seems more a matter of convenience than true belief.

"Religion is not a piece of clothing that you change," he said after turning away an Ecuadorean immigrant who sought to convert for her Syrian husband. "I don't want someone coming to Islam tonight and leaving it in the morning."


Ten months after he came to America, Mr. Shata collapsed.

It was Friday. The mosque was full. Hundreds of men sat pressed together, their shirts damp with summer. Their wives and daughters huddled in the women's section, one floor below. Word of the imam's sermons had spread, drawing Muslims from Albany and Hartford.

"Praise be to Allah," began Mr. Shata, his voice slowly rising.

Minutes later, the imam recalled, the room began to spin. He fell to the carpet, lost consciousness and spent a week in the hospital, plagued by several symptoms. A social worker and a counselor who treated the imam both said he suffered from exhaustion. The counselor, Ali Gheith, called it "compassion fatigue," an ailment that commonly affects disaster-relief workers.

It was not just the long hours, the new culture and the ceaseless demands that weighed on the imam. Most troubling were the psychological woes of his congregants, which seemed endless.

Sept. 11 had wrought depression and anxiety among Muslims. But unlike many priests or rabbis, imams lacked pastoral training in mental health and knew little about the social services available.

At heart was another complicated truth: Imams often approach mental illness from a strictly Islamic perspective. Hardship is viewed as a test of faith, and the answer can be found in tawwakul, trusting in God's plan. The remedy typically suggested by imams is a spiritual one, sought through fasting, prayer and reflection.

Muslim immigrants also limit themselves to religious solutions because of the stigma surrounding mental illness, said Hamada Hamid, a resident psychiatrist at New York University who founded The Journal of Muslim Mental Health. "If somebody says, 'You need this medication,' someone may respond, 'I have tawwakul,' " he said.

Mr. Gheith, a Palestinian immigrant who works in disaster preparedness for the city's health department, began meeting with the imam regularly after his collapse. Mr. Shata needed to learn to disconnect from his congregants, Mr. Gheith said. It was a concept that confounded the imam.

"I did not permit these problems to enter my heart," said Mr. Shata, "nor can I permit them to leave."

The conversations eventually led to a citywide training program for imams, blending Islam with psychology. Mr. Shata learned to identify the symptoms of mental illness and began referring people to treatment.

His congregants often refuse help, blaming black magic or the evil eye for their problems. The evil eye is believed to be a curse driven by envy, confirmed in the bad things that happen to people.

One Palestinian couple in California insisted that their erratic 18-year-old son had the evil eye. He was brought to the imam's attention after winding up on the streets of New York, and eventually received a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Mr. Shata had less success with a man who worshiped at the mosque. He had become paranoid, certain his wife was cursing him with witchcraft. But he refused treatment, insisting divorce was the only cure.

Time and again, Mr. Shata's new country has called for creativity and patience, for a careful negotiation between tradition and modernity.

"Here you don't know what will solve a problem," he said. "It's about looking for a key."
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a video presentation on the previous post at:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/ny ... ?th&emc=th
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Islam in Europe
Apr 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition

http://economist.com/world/europe/displ ... id=6800741

Sending a message to the faithful back home


“I BELIEVE there is no European Islam,” said Mustafa Ceric, a Bosnian imam, at a meeting of Islamic clerics and advisers in Vienna. Yet two months ago, his supreme Islamic department of Bosnia said that “Muslims who live in Europe have the right—no, the duty—to develop their own European culture of Islam.” Such contradictions are part of a broad debate over the role and character of Islam in Europe, which could have profound implications, and not only because Muslims are the continent's largest minority. It might affect the wider Islamic world if it shows that Muslims can adapt to modern, secular democracies.

Traditional teaching frowns on the idea of distinctive forms of Islam, holding that there is a single community of believers, the umma. Differences clearly exist between Sunni and Shia, or between Saudis and Malays, but Muslims are reluctant to proclaim fresh ones. As a declaration by Islamic organisations in Europe put it in 2003, “a ‘European’ Islam is non-existent; only the term ‘Islam in Europe’ offers an adequate definition.” Traditional teaching also divides the world into a house of Islam, under Muslim laws, and a house of war, where infidels prevail. But since Islam's earliest years, it has been accepted that there are also intermediate situations, with non-Muslim regimes that can provide tolerable conditions for Muslims.


Theologians have wrestled over the terms under which Muslims may live in non-Muslim lands. In the background is the belief that, if Muslim-friendly conditions do not exist, believers have a duty to migrate in search of more congenial places. But what makes the European Muslim experience challenging is that Muslims have migrated from their heartlands to places where they are a permanent minority. Theologians can hardly say that conditions in Europe are intolerable, when millions have voted with their feet. But given that Muslim life in Europe is a reality, on what terms should believers participate in secular western institutions? Some groups, especially the international Muslim Brotherhood, consider that they should participate vigorously in western, democratic institutions, even if they do not abandon their core belief that Muslim governance and law are ideal.

In the teeth of traditional teaching, European Muslims are creating a distinctive form of Islam. They are driven by their experience as minorities; by a desire to overcome ethnic differences; and by the trauma of emigration. The first encourages Muslims to co-operate with non-Muslims; the second encourages them to look beyond their traditions; the third forces them to come to terms with change and modernity. Sayed Ghaemmagami, mufti of the Shias in Germany, argues that the situation of Muslims in Europe is unique. “The existence of an Islamic diaspora”, he says, “is totally different from the past and requires new thinking about relations with non-Islamic peoples.” The Koran calls for peaceful relations between Muslims and others, so Muslims should engage with their new countries and not set up parallel structures. “We must participate in all activities of life, as students, as businessmen, as social workers,” says Ahmed al-Rawi, president of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe.

Muslims should also respect the difference between religion and politics. As Mr Ceric puts it, “a Muslim has allegiance to God as an act of faith but is a citizen with a duty to the state as an act of reason.” Mr Ghaemmagami says that “parallel societies are unIslamic. Muslims ought to feel accountable to the overall society and not manifest their customs in such a way as to run counter to the societies in which they live.”

Internal ethnic differences are reinforcing the minority experience to encourage a European Islam. Outsiders tend to see Europe's Muslims as all the same. But in fact they fall into at least five categories: those from European countries (Bosnia, Albania, bits of Russia); converts; first-generation immigrants; second- or third-generation Muslims born in Europe, who speak only European languages and, except in their religion, are indistinguishable from others; and those who have become largely secular.

The lure of fundamentalism

Olivier Roy, a French academic, has argued that, when Islam is torn from its traditional moorings—customs, family life and cuisine—it can become fundamentalist, and in some cases fanatical. Alienated both from their parents' way of life and their host societies, young European Muslims can be easily attracted by a back-to-basics version of Islam that acknowledges no national boundaries and has been disseminated with the help of plenty of Saudi oil money. As an example of the rupture between young European Muslims and their parents' homeland, take the Muslims of Bradford, England. When imams were brought in from north-western Pakistan to teach them, they failed completely to communicate with their young pupils. It is exactly in these circumstances, as Mr Roy points out, that Saudi-supported “neo-fundamentalism” becomes attractive.

The question is whether the search among young European Muslims for a new reading of their faith will stop there. Merely to live in pluralist western societies, where “choice” is important, is to pose questions that their parents never faced. In Bradford, the Islamic teaching curriculum had to be entirely overhauled to make it comprehensible to young Muslims. The development of a European Islam is, in a sense, at a caterpillar stage. As the final declaration of the conference of imams in Vienna said, there is no agreement on how to resolve the conflict between freedom of expression and defending Islam. Nor is there a consensus on the rights of European Muslim women.

For all these reasons, Europe's emerging Islam has not so far had any impact farther afield. But it is hard to believe that an Islam that is more open to democracy, sexual equality, and modernity would have no effect in the Middle East. And, uncertain and gradual as its gestation may be, that seems to be the Islam that European Muslims are trying to create.
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Post by kmaherali »

Ongoing debate about equal participation of women in worship....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/us/25 ... &th&emc=th

As Barrier Comes Down, a Muslim Split Remains

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24 — During Friday prayers at San Francisco's largest downtown mosque, Sevim Kalyoncu, a young Turkish-American writer, used to resent that the imam never addressed the women, as if his message was not intended for them. But the sermons underwent a sudden change when the Islamic Society of San Francisco took the controversial step of tearing down the barrier separating male and female worshippers.

Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times

At Darussalam, which lost some members to rival mosques, Amil Saunders, right, gathered with children and other women.
"He was always addressing the brothers during the Friday sermon," Ms. Kalyoncu said. "Now we hear 'brothers and sisters' because he can see us. Before, I felt very distant, but now it seems that women are part of the group. It's a first step."

Even after the slapdash, 8-foot wall across the back of the Darussalam mosque was demolished as part of a renovation last fall, however, the 400-member congregation remained divided.

After the demolition, a small knot of veiled women marched in brandishing a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read "We Want the Wall." Several men who pray at the mosque — on the third floor of an old theater in a particularly sleazy stretch of the city's Tenderloin district — are still grumbling, and some of them even decamped for a rival mosque. But the wall stayed down.

The norm in the United States and Canada — not to mention in the larger Muslim world — is to separate the women, if not bar them entirely. A small if determined band of North American Muslims, mostly younger women, have been challenging the practice, however, labeling the separation of men and women imported cultural baggage rather than a fulfillment of a religious commandment. They argue that while Muslims brag that Islam grants more rights to women than other religions do, the opposite is true.

"I am positive there will be an American Islamic identity that is separate from what you see in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world," said Souleiman Ghali, a founding member of the Islamic Society of San Francisco and the main force behind the wall's removal.

"We can discuss things that would be taboo in different countries," added Mr. Ghali, 47, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon when he was 20 and now runs a copy business in downtown San Francisco. "Here we can challenge ideas or change them, and there is no religious authority to come in with the power of the government to shut us down, accusing us of being infidels contradicting thousands of years of the religious norm."

In Regina, Saskatchewan, Zarqa Nawaz was so incensed when her 200-member mosque shunted the women into a small, dark room behind a one-way mirror that she made a documentary on the subject.

The film, "Me and the Mosque," was financed by the National Film Board of Canada and broadcast on Canadian national television in April. It will appear on two American satellite channels, Link TV and Free Speech TV, starting July 16.

Mrs. Nawaz said the issue had broader implications.

"The barriers have become a metaphor for keeping the women secluded in other ways, to having no role in running the community," she said.

In 2001, a survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of more than 1,200 mosques found that 66 percent of them required women to pray behind a partition or in a separate room, up from 52 percent in 1994. Another study, spearheaded by the Islamic Social Services Association of Canada, found that mosques generally "relegate women to small, dingy, secluded, airless and segregated quarters with their children."

Islamic scholars and women activists say they believe the trend has accelerated since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, attributing it to a newly pervasive insecurity on the part of North American Muslims who have counteracted it through a staunch adherence to tradition.

"There is a sense that there is a crusade out there against Islam, that Islam is under siege and we have to hold steadfast to our righteous ways more than ever," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a prominent Islamic jurist known for his moderate interpretations.

Dr. Abou El Fadl said the practice began in 18th-century Saudi Arabia, where the austere Wahhabi sect of Islam started walling off or banning women from mosques. (He added that the modern spread of Wahhabism is one facet of the pervasiveness of Saudi financial support for Muslim institutions worldwide.)

Mrs. Nawaz's film takes an alternately light-hearted and serious look at the arguments on both sides.

"In Islam, mixing is not encouraged; there is no mixing between sexes, and there are all kinds of reasons for that," Ghassan Joundi, the president of the Manitoba Islamic Association, says in the film. In Dr. Joundi's mosque, the men first erected a barrier with shutters, then nailed them shut.

At the Darussalam mosque, the dispute over the wall was just one skirmish in a larger battle over the entire tenor of the mosque. Mr. Ghali and other leaders at the mosque fired an imam they deemed overly militant, not least because he wanted to make the barrier between the sexes even more pronounced. The imam went to court, winning more than $400,000 in a wrongful dismissal suit, and then opened a competing mosque around the corner, where the women still worship behind a wall.

But Mr. Ghali and other mosque leaders say they believe North America provides fertile ground for melding the best of all cultural traditions because the Muslim population is so diverse.

"You can't take a tradition in Pakistan, Somalia or Egypt and bring it to America and make it part of the law; it doesn't make sense," said Mr. Ghali, who resigned as president of the mosque's board in February. "It's one of those cultural things that many immigrants brought from overseas without giving it much thought. It's time to get rid of those bad habits."

That outlook incited an exodus by some worshippers, and some who stayed have complained that a clique of "ayatollahs" who brook no dissent now run Darussalam.

"I don't want to be distracted by ladies in the back when I am praying," said Adel al-Dalali, 40, a Yemeni cab driver who prays at Darussalam, noting that mosques in his homeland were built with a mezzanine reserved for women. "Even if it is more culture than religious tradition, we feel it's needed."

At the back of the mosque, some of the roughly 30 women worshippers agreed. "As a Muslim woman, I was more at peace praying behind the wall," said Zeinab al-Andea, a 50-year-old Yemeni who spoke only Arabic. "As a veiled woman, I don't want to mix with men. It's a beautiful mosque, but I wish there was a wall."

The mosque occupies the top floor of a building that was filled mostly with sweatshops until 1991, when the Islamic Society moved in. The recent renovations turned the mosque into one large room flooded with light. Broad green stripes on the red carpet show the faithful where to line up, and, in a nod to tradition, men and women still do not pray shoulder to shoulder.

The wall across the back was replaced with small printed signs reading "Sisters Prayer Area Only Behind This Sign." The aim of knocking down the wall was not for the sexes to mingle, but to have comparable access to the imam.

Outside, the neighborhood is rife with all manner of vice. Intoxicated men and women occasionally stagger into one of the many liquor stores. Across Market Street, a pornography store called Sin City exhorts passers-by to "See the Beauty, Touch the Magic."

Yet a dedicated group of women who support the change at Darussalam navigate their way to the mosque each Friday.

These women say they hated the wall. With it, they had trouble hearing the sermon and often fell out of sync with the prayer movements. Distracted, some say they gave up praying and instead just gossiped or drank tea.

Proponents of barriers in mosques tend to argue that the Prophet Muhammad's wives, who inhabited a series of rooms attached to the main mosque at Medina, spoke to the faithful from behind a tentlike curtain. They also say a distinct space for women assures they will not have to jostle with men.

Muslim rituals are guided by the Koran and the Hadith, tomes that detail Islam as it was practiced in the prophet's time. Advocates and some religious scholars say the books support the women. Muhammad emphasized that the rules for his wives were distinct from those for other women, they note, and he never resorted to a barrier, despite similar debate in the seventh century.

Some early adherents of Islam showed up late for prayers so they could stay in the back and ogle the women's behinds, even penning bawdy odes to the sight, said Dr. Abou El Fadl, the U.C.L.A. scholar, so Mohamed recommended that all men pray at the front of their mosques. None of Islam's three holiest mosques — Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and those in Mecca and Medina — originally had barriers between the sexes.

"Men try to justify it now by creating arguments that are ludicrous, like saying that men back then were more moral," said Mrs. Nawaz, the filmmaker, a 38-year-old mother of four. "This is completely bogus. The men were exactly the same back then when it came to being distracted. The prophet didn't deal with it by separation, he dealt with it by education."
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June 1, 2007

A Growing Demand for the Rare American Imam
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — Sheik Yassir Fazaga regularly uses a standard American calendar to provide inspiration for his weekly Friday sermon.

Around Valentine's Day this year, he talked about how the Koran endorses romantic love within certain ethical parameters. (As opposed to say, clerics in Saudi Arabia, who denounce the banned saint's day as a Satanic ritual.)

On World AIDS Day, he criticized Muslims for making moral judgments about the disease rather than helping the afflicted, and on International Women's Day he focused on domestic abuse.

"My main objective is to make Islam relevant," said Sheik Fazaga, 34, who went to high school in Orange County, which includes Mission Viejo, and brings a certain American flair to his role as imam in the mosque here.

Prayer leaders, or imams, in the United States have long arrived from overseas, forced to negotiate a foreign culture along with their congregation. Older immigrants usually overlook the fact that it is an uneasy fit, particularly since imported sheiks rarely speak English. They welcome a flavor of home.

But as the first generation of American-born Muslims begins graduating from college in significant numbers, with a swelling tide behind them, some congregations are beginning to seek native imams who can talk about religious and social issues that seem relevant to young people, like dating and drugs. On an even more practical level, they want an imam who can advise them on day-to-day American matters like how to set up a 401(k) plan to funnel the charitable donations known as zakat, which Islam mandates.

"The problem is that you have a young generation whose own experience has nothing to do with where its parents came from," said Hatem Bazian, a lecturer in the Near Eastern studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, who surveys Muslim communities.

But the underlying quandary is that American imams are hard to find, though there are a few nascent training programs. These days, many of the men leading prayers across the United States on any given Friday are volunteers, doctors or engineers who know a bit more about the Koran than everyone else. Scholars point out that one of the great strengths of Islam, particularly the Sunni version, is that there is no official hierarchy.

But this situation is fueling a debate about just how thoroughly an imam has to be schooled in Islamic jurisprudence and other religious matters before running a mosque.

The downside for Islam in America, some critics argue, is that those interpreting Islamic law often lack a command of the full scope of the traditions carried in the Koran and the hadith, the sayings of the prophet Muhammad considered sacred.

"I call it 'hadith slinging,' " said Prof. Khaled Abou el Fadl, a specialist in Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles. "I throw a couple of hadiths at you, and you throw a couple of hadiths at me, and that is the way we do Islamic law," he added. "It's like any moron can do that."

Experts say the problem is exacerbated because few immigrant parents want their children to become imams.

"Immigrant parents want their children to become doctors, engineers, computer scientists," Dr. Bazian said. "If you suggested that they might want their kid to study to become an imam, they would hold a funeral procession." Ultimately, in the absence of trained sheiks, good religion in many American mosques has come to be defined through rigid adherence to rituals, Professor Abou el Fadl said, adding, "It's ritual that defines piety."

The few imams born or at least raised in the United States who win over their congregations tend to be younger men who can play pickup basketball with the teenagers, but also have enough training in classical Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence that the older members accept their religious credentials.

Imam Ronald Smith Jr., 29, who runs the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach, Fla., converted to Islam at 14 to escape the violence in his African-American community in Atlantic City. As part of his training, he spent six years studying at the Islamic University in Medina, Saudi Arabia.

"Foreign imams, because of the culture in their countries, kind of stick to the mosque and the duties of the mosque without involving themselves much in the general community," Imam Smith said. "The hip-hop culture is difficult to understand if you have never lived it."

The foreign imams' idea of mosque outreach, Imam Smith said, is sponsoring an evening lecture series where everyone sits around for an hour and listens to a speech about being devout or maybe world politics, which teenagers find less than compelling.

Mosque leaders say the risk is that younger Muslims, already feeling under assault in the United States because of the faith's checkered reputation, might choose one of two extremes. They either drift away from the faith entirely if they cannot find answers, or leave the mosque for a more radical fringe.

Here in Mission Viejo, Sheik Fazaga wears street clothes much of the time, but dons traditional robes to deliver the Friday sermon at the mosque, a building distinguishable from the surrounding strip malls and low-slung office buildings mostly by its airy exterior dome of metal filigree painted sea green. It was a practice he started 10 years ago when he first returned home and kind of fell into the imam's job around age 24, because some members considered him too young for the position.

Born in the East African nation of Eritrea, he moved to the Arab world before coming to Mission Viejo at age 15. Drawn toward Islam by college students, he enrolled in the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, a Virginia campus of al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The United States government expelled much of the faculty in 2004 as part of the crackdown on extremist Islamic rhetoric.

The school was accused of being an American outpost of the puritanical Wahhabi sect, a label Sheik Fazaga rejects. But that might be one reason he has been stopped for questioning some 20 times — every time he returns home from abroad.

" 'How come you don't dress like an imam?'— that's their favorite question," he said with a wry grin.

Younger Muslims seek him out for guidance, he said, and the fact that he is studying for a master's degree in psychological therapy helps. Teenagers have requested advice about being addicted to Internet pornography, he said, and about sexual orientation. He counsels adolescents — gay and straight — that sexual attraction is natural, but to act on it is wrong and that any addiction should be treated.

Previous imams would simply admonish the youths that something was a forbidden abomination, subject closed.

Gihan Zahran, 43, an Egyptian immigrant, remembers a previous Arab imam who even told a much perplexed teenager that wearing Nike shoes was "haram," or forbidden in Arabic, without explaining why. Some Muslims consider this aloofness particularly ineffective in America, given that they are a minority faced by majority practices like drinking alcohol that clash with their faith and that teenagers confront daily.

Ms. Zahran's sister Nermeen Zahran, 42, recently went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. She is a real estate agent, and has not veiled her hair at least partly because it might affect her livelihood in a conservative place like Orange County.

When she went on the hajj, as it is called in Arabic, a fellow pilgrim asked the Egyptian imam who accompanied them from Southern California his opinion of her not wearing the scarf afterward.

"He was so mad, so offended and said he couldn't believe it could happen," Nermeen Zahran recalled over a glass of orange juice in the neat condominium she shares with her sister. His basic reaction, she said, was that there was no point in seeking forgiveness for previous sins if one did not take the veil afterward.

Ms. Zahran has also consulted religious figures about periodic bouts of depression, but the usual response was that her faith lacked vigor.

Now she talks to Sheik Fazaga about it, she said. "He tries to solve the problems and doesn't tell you that you have to accept that this is your life, this is what Allah gave you, and if you don't then you are not a good Muslim."

She wonders, in the end, whether a purer form of Islam will develop in the United States, with prayer leaders focused on the concerns of the community, rather than not treading on the toes of the government that supports them, as in much of the Arab world.

Mosques will probably continue to address the wishes of the immigrant population for another decade, but after that the tide will shift away from them, experts suggest.

"Islam in America is trying to create a new cultural matrix that can survive in the broader context of America," said Prof. Sherman Jackson, who teaches Arabic and Islamic law at the University of Michigan. "It has to change for the religion to survive."
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June 12, 2007
A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/world ... &th&emc=th

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO, June 11 — First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.

For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.

“We were very angered when we heard about the Danish cartoons concerning our prophet; however, these two fatwas are harming our Islamic religion and our prophet more than the cartoons,” Galal Amin, a professor of economics at the American University in Cairo, wrote in Al Masry Al Yom, a daily newspaper here.

For many Muslims, fatwas, or religious edicts, are the bridge between the principles of their faith and modern life. They are supposed to be issued by religious scholars who look to the Koran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance. While the more sensational pronouncements grab attention, the bulk of the fatwas involve the routine of daily life. In Egypt alone, thousands are issued every month.

The controversy in Cairo has been more than just embarrassing. It comes at a time when religious and political leaders say that there is a crisis in Islam because too many fatwas are being issued, and that many of them rely on ideology more than learning.

The complaint has been the subject of recent conferences as government-appointed arbiters of Islamic standards say the fatwa free-for-all has led to the promotion of extremism and intolerance.

The conflict in Egypt served as a difficult reminder of a central challenge facing Islamic communities as they debate the true nature of the faith and how to accommodate modernity. The fatwa is the front line in the theological battle between often opposing worldviews. It is where interpretation meets daily life.

“It is a very critical issue for us,” said Abdullah Megawer, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at Al Azhar University, the centuries-old seat of Sunni Muslim learning in Egypt. “You are explaining God’s message in ways that really affect people’s lives.”

Technically, the fatwa is nonbinding and recipients are free to look elsewhere for a better ruling. In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.

“There is chaos now,” Mr. Megawer said. “The problem created is confusion in thought, confusion about what is right and what is wrong, religiously.”

Governments have tried to guide and control the process, but as they struggled with their own legitimacy, they have often undermined the perceived legitimacy of those they appoint as religious leaders. In Egypt, there are two official institutions responsible for religious interpretation: the House of Fatwa, or Dar Al-Ifta, which formally falls under the Ministry of Justice, and Al Azhar University. All court sentences of death must be approved by Dar Al-Ifta, for example.

“These people in fact are defined as agencies of the government,” said Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo. “They are not trusted anymore.”

While that view is disputed by officials from both institutions, everyone acknowledges that those who issue fatwas serve as mediators between faith and modernity and as arbiters of morality. They are supposed to consider not only religious teachings, but the circumstances of the time.

The position is without parallel in the West, and it combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.

In fact, the relationship between the Koran and a fatwa is a matter of dispute. Some Muslim scholars view the Koran’s words and ideas as fixed, with little room for maneuvering. Others see their job as reconciling modern life with the text by gently bending the text to fit new circumstances.

A second issue is the basis for interpretation. The sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, known collectively as the Hadith, also serve as the basis for many fatwas. But those sayings, of which there are thousands, have been passed down orally and may or may not be genuine. Some seek to limit fatwas to the written Koran, as a result.

A sign hangs on the back wall of a small room that serves as a fatwa center for Egyptians looking for guidance: “Brother Citizens, the Azhar Fatwa Committee welcomes the masses of citizens and announces that fatwas are free of charge and of fees.”

Tucked just inside the entrance of the historic Al Azhar Mosque in downtown, the center is open six days a week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is a worn room with a soaring ceiling, tattered black couches patched up with packing tape and rickety metal kitchen chairs. Five sheiks sit on the couches and receive people.

Sheik Abdel Aziz el-Naggar has been offering fatwas for 17 years as an employee of Al Azhar. Like other sheiks, he rotates each month to committees that operate in each of Egypt’s regional governates. Over the years, he said, the vast majority of the visitors have asked for help with their marriages.

“The greatest ill in society I observe is the lack of trust and knowledge between husband and wife,” he said. “A man will think masculinity is being a dictator.”

At 11:30 one recent morning, a young woman entered and sat in the chair opposite him. She held her son, about 4, on her knee as she explained that her husband had married another woman (four wives are allowed in Islam) and that the new wife was only 18. “He said he would spend five nights with her and one with me,” the woman complained. “Can I ask for a divorce?”

Under Islam, the sheik advised, all wives must be treated equally. So if she could not work the matter out “peacefully, then yes, she could ask for a divorce.”

That was her fatwa.

A couple approached. The man’s clothes were tattered, and his wife looked distressed. Their 9-year-old son’s clothing was clean, his hair gelled, his smile bright. The man explained that they had adopted the child when he was 9 months old, and that they had just heard that under Islam their son had to be put out of the house, because the mother had not given birth to him or breast-fed him.

He would reach puberty as an outsider, and could not, technically, be around the woman he knew as his mother. The imam at their local mosque said it was haram — forbidden under Islam — to live with the boy.

The sheik said yes, that was right, that the boy could not live with them. The father leaned in, disturbed, and said, “And that’s it.”

The sheik seemed stuck and referred them to another sheik for another opinion.

That was their fatwa.

A man wanted to know if he could keep money he had found. Another wanted to know if he needed to testify at a trial if called. A third wanted to know if it was O.K. to buy a car on an installment plan. A mother did not like her son’s wife and wanted to know if she could do anything about the marriage.

Each consultation took a few minutes. Such questions have been asked for generations.

Should ancient statues be destroyed or preserved? Should women be allowed to drive, to work, to travel without the permission of men? Can boys and girls attend school together? Is it permissible to buy insurance, to wear a sports jersey with a cross design, to shake hands with a non-Muslim, to take pictures, to view family photographs?

All of this has been addressed in fatwas.

“We are the conscience of the nation,” said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of Al Azhar Research Committee, a state-sanctioned body that issues religious opinions and is often behind decisions over which books should be stripped from store shelves and banned.

In Egypt, and other Muslim countries, where laws must abide by the Koran, fatwas by government-appointed officials can have the weight of law. “We have to be clear what is at stake here,” said Egypt’s grand mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, in a recent speech in London. “When each and every person’s unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.”

In his own role and practice, the grand mufti embodies many of the issues that have arisen around the fatwa practice. He has issued rulings that have been deemed by some as so progressive that they were offensive, and others that were so literal as to be considered offensive.

Sheik Ali issued the urine fatwa, now notorious, in a book, “Religion and Life.” It was published six years ago and told the story of a woman who drank the prophet’s urine. He had his own book taken off the shelves, and said the controversial statement was not a fatwa but his opinion, which was offered in response to a question.

“The reality is that the mufti is now ‘burned’ and lost religious recognition and the trust of the Muslims and his fatwas will not gain anything but carelessness from all the Muslims; as some will hate it as they hate drinking urine,” wrote Hamdy Rizk in an opposition newspaper.

But he was also criticized — and praised — earlier this year after he had issued a fatwa saying that it was permissible for women to have reconstructive hymen surgery before marriage to conceal that they were no longer virgins. He said that since it was impossible to tell whether a man was a virgin, women should have the same option.

But he took his opinion a step further, when he said that if a married woman had sex with another man, regretted her action and asked God for forgiveness, she should not tell her husband. The goal, he reportedly said, was to preserve the family.

The breast-feeding fatwa came in mid-May. A religious scholar, who headed a department that studies the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings at the Foundation of Religion College of Al Azhar University, wrote that there had been instances in the time of the prophet when adult women breast-fed adult men in order to avoid the need for women to wear a veil in front of them.

“Breast-feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” wrote the scholar, Izat Atiyah. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed.”

The ruling was mocked on satellite television shows around the region, and was quickly condemned at home. Mr. Atiyah was suspended from his job, mocked in newspapers and within days issued a retraction, saying it was a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
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Pak Christians told to convert or face death
Islamabad, July 07: Islamist militants in Pakistan have threatened to kill 10 Christian clerics in southern Punjab's Khanewal district if they did not "embrace Islam and stop preaching Christianity."

"We are feeling insecure and unsafe today because of these threatening letters from Muslim fanatics," said provincial lawmaker Naveed Amer Jeeva, coordinator of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA).

10 Christian clerics have received threatening letters from unidentified people warning them to "embrace Islam, stop preaching Christianity and quit your faith otherwise the countdown of your life has begun".

A state of fear prevails in Khanewal district's Shanti Nagar because the authorities have failed to address their security needs, said pastor Mehtab Masih at a press conference yesterday to highlight the issue.

Threatening letters have been received by Union Council Naib Nazim Fazal Masih, councillor Kalim Dutt, pastor Robin, Capt Irshad of the Salvation Army church, pastor Boez Enver, pastor Lemuel Calavary and Joseph Daniel, the post daily said.

Lawmaker Jeeva said pastor Mukhtar Barkat had received such a threatening letter and was assassinated on January 5, 2004 in Khurrampura Khanewal.

On June 12 Christians in Shanti Nagar village had also received anonymous letters written in Urdu asking them convert to Islam or leave the area.

The letters were sent to 10 religious, political and social leaders of this mainly Christian village.

Shanti Nagar village, which has about 3,000 Christians and 500 Muslim residents, was formed by the Salvation Army church before the partition of the sub-continent in 1947.

In May, Christian residents of a Muslim colony in Charsadda town of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), received a letter from militants asking them to convert to Islam.

Several Christian families fled their homes and others are living in constant fear. Minority and human rights groups have demanded that the government provide protection and security to Christian families living in NWFP. Though the authorities have assured security to the minority community and arrested few people in the earlier incidents, they have failed to boost the confidence of the Christians in the ability of the police to safeguard their lives and properties in the face of continuing threats.

There have been cases of people accused of blasphemy being murdered by religious extremists. Human rights activists say the country's blasphemy laws are misused to settle old enmities or personal disputes.

A Christian man, Younis Masih, was sentenced to death under the blasphemy laws of Pakistan for allegedly insulting Prophet Mohammad in September 2005 in Lahore. The All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) has sought legislative reforms to strike off the blasphemy laws that "discriminate against minorities" in the country.

Bureau Report
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Laying down religious law

Islam's authority deficit


Jun 28th 2007 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition


Don't count on state-sponsored greybeards to silence all awkward voices

GOVERNMENTS worried by Islamist extremism ought to get the message: the only real answer lay in more Islam—deeper, sounder, more careful readings of the Muslim faith, from scholars who could use the weight of collective experience, accumulated over 14 centuries, to solve the dilemmas of life in the modern age.

Such, broadly, was the argument laid out in London recently by Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, before a gathering of Islamic scholars and pundits. And his hosts took him seriously. The case for using scholarly Islam as a counterweight to the radical, hot-headed sort is familiar in the Middle East, but this time it won an unusually clear endorsement from a Western leader, Tony Blair.

In his parting thoughts (as prime minister, anyway) on Islam, Mr Blair lauded Jordan for its efforts to make the various legal schools of Islam respect each another and stop calling each other infidels. And just like Mr Gomaa, Mr Blair said how important it was to ensure that only qualified people could issue fatwas, or rulings on how to follow Islam in specific situations. Emboldened by his welcome, Mr Gomaa offered to help Britain set up a post like his own: state-certified grand mufti.

Britain may never again have a leader with such a personal interest in theology. But the very fact that Mr Gomaa and similar worthies from other Muslim countries were asked to London (formally by Cambridge University, but with keen official encouragement) reflects a long-term dilemma for all Western states with growing Muslim communities.

To stem extremism, should they follow the lead of many Muslim governments and get involved in Islamic affairs—by promoting some clerics (or theologies) over others? One would-be EU member that does so already is Turkey, where a big state bureaucracy regulates mosque-building and religious education, and pens sermons. Similar political controls on religion exist in many Sunni countries. (In Shia Iran, by contrast, religion has top place: the supreme leader is always a cleric.)

So how much hope should governments in any part of the world place in the promotion of “good”—in the sense of moderate and scholarly—Muslim clerics and theologians, as an answer to the bad sort?

This much is true: many of the Muslims who are drawn to jihadist violence, or to strident forms of political Islam, are indifferent to, or ignorant of, the nuances of theology; that makes them susceptible to “amateur” fatwas. But as a French scholar, Olivier Roy, points out, it doesn't follow that such people—when presented with sophisticated religious arguments—would change their mind. In many cases, they have a general aversion to the idea of elaborate theology.

A more basic problem is that even in states with no political freedom, no official imprimatur can drown the multiplicity of voices vying to influence Muslim hearts and souls. And the age of electronics has broadened the Muslim market-place.
Modern Muslims seeking a fatwa on a practical matter need no longer go to a local mosque, or to the state-salaried officials, or muftis, used by many Sunni Muslim countries as arbiters. (Malaysia has 14 muftis; one for each state.) They can call in to a radio or television show featuring a popular preacher, or use the dial-a-fatwa phone service that one Egyptian firm offers. Half a dozen websites in English alone (like efatwa.com, muftisays.com and askimam.com) offer online advice about everything from ablution to Zionism. A downloadable service, “FatwaBase”, can be used on handheld computers.

Much of the latest electronic guidance is sponsored from Saudi Arabia, and so reflects its conservative mores. More tolerant and mystical versions of the faith, as well as the ultra-puritanism of the Salafist movement, also compete for market share. With piety deepening worldwide, and with state clerics often seen as stooges, the faithful seek out scholarly views that are conservative enough to suit them.

Worried governments are not the only people calling for order in this noisy free-for-all. One of the star competitors—Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who preaches on the al-Jazeera satellite channel—has sponsored the creation of an international council of ulema, or religious scholars. As a scholar who is de facto spiritual adviser to the international Muslim Brotherhood, he seemingly contradicts the notion that political Islam and learning do not go together. But it remains true, says Mr Roy, that the Brotherhood's back-to-basics ethos is averse to highbrow theology.

That aversion certainly doesn't hurt, and it may even help, the Brotherhood as it competes with Mr Gomaa to influence Egyptians. As part of this struggle, Mr Gomaa has recently proposed a board to vet fatwas, with powers to punish those who issue incorrect or misleading ones.

Yet Mr Gomaa himself is no stranger to controversy. His own fatwas have often been challenged by a rival authority, the ancient university of al-Azhar. As a case of the bizarre effects of competition between scholars, take some recent exchanges on female circumcision. More clearly than before, Mr Gomaa laid down on June 24th (after an 11-year-old died under the knife) that it was not just “un-Islamic” but forbidden. Mr Qaradawi, by contrast, has suggested that genital cutting is permissible so long as the clitoris is “reduced in size”, not removed entirely. It says something about the mood of religious conservatism on the Egyptian street that Mr Qaradawi's ruling was seen as “playing to the gallery”.

Abdal-Hakim Murad, an influential British convert to Islam, says the only way to promote good sense and scholarship simultaneously is to have a transnational body of greybeards, free of all political influence. But if governments look to this or any clerical body to provide them with absolute clarity on what Muslims should believe and do, they won't get it: there are just too many interpretations.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world ... nted=print
October 26, 2007

Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 25 — On a marshy peninsula 50 miles from this Red Sea port, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology.

Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.

Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.

This undertaking is directly at odds with the kingdom’s religious establishment, which severely limits women’s rights and rejects coeducation and robust liberal inquiry as unthinkable.

For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners.

Supporters of what is to be called the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, wonder whether the king is simply building another gated island to be dominated by foreigners, like the compounds for oil industry workers that have existed here for decades, or creating an institution that will have a real impact on Saudi society and the rest of the Arab world.

“There are two Saudi Arabias,” said Jamal Khashoggi, the editor of Al Watan, a newspaper. “The question is which Saudi Arabia will take over.”

The king has broken taboos, declaring that the Arabs have fallen critically behind much of the modern world in intellectual achievement and that his country depends too much on oil and not enough on creating wealth through innovation.

“There is a deep knowledge gap separating the Arab and Islamic nations from the process and progress of contemporary global civilization,” said Abdallah S. Jumah, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco. “We are no longer keeping pace with the advances of our era.”

Traditional Saudi practice is on display at the biggest public universities, where the Islamic authorities vet the curriculum, medical researchers tread carefully around controversial subjects like evolution, and female and male students enter classrooms through separate doors and follow lectures while separated by partitions.

Old-fashioned values even seeped into the carefully staged groundbreaking ceremony on Sunday for King Abdullah’s new university, at which organizers distributed an issue of the magazine The Economist with a special advertisement for the university wrapped around the cover. State censors had physically torn from each copy an article about Saudi legal reform titled “Law of God Versus Law of Man,” leaving a jagged edge.

Despite the obstacles, the king intends to make the university a showcase for modernization. The festive groundbreaking and accompanying symposium about the future of the modern university were devised partly as a recruiting tool for international academics.

“Getting the faculty will be the biggest challenge,” said Ahmed F. Ghoniem, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulting for the new university. “That will make it or break it.” Professor Ghoniem has advised the new university to lure international academics with laboratory facilities and grants they cannot find at home, but he also believes that established professors will be reluctant to leave their universities for a small enclave in the desert.

“You have to create an environment where you can connect to the outside world,” said Professor Ghoniem, who is from Egypt. “You cannot work in isolation.”

He admitted that even though he admired the idea of the new university, he would be unlikely to abandon his post at M.I.T. to move to Saudi Arabia.

Festivities at the construction site on Sunday for 1,500 dignitaries included a laser light show and a mockup of the planned campus that filled an entire room. The king laid a crystal cornerstone into a stainless steel shaft on wheels.

Cranes tore out mangroves and pounded the swampland with 20-ton blocks into a surface firm enough to build the campus on. Inside a tent, the king, his honor guard wearing flowing robes and curved daggers, and an array of Aramco officials in suits took to a shiny stage lighted with green and blue neon tubing, like an MTV awards show. Mist from dry ice shrouded the stage, music blared in surround sound, and holographic projections served as a backdrop to some of the speeches.

From a laconic monarch known for his austerity, the pomp, along with a rare speech by the king himself, was intended to send a strong signal, according to the team charged with building and staffing the new campus within two years.

The king is lavishing the institution not only with money, but also with his full political endorsement, intended to stave off internal challenges from conservatives and to win over foreign scholars who doubt that academic freedom can thrive here.

The new project is giving hope to Saudi scholars who until the king’s push to reform education in the last few years have endured stagnant research budgets and continue to face extensive government red tape.

“Because Aramco is founding the university, I believe it will have freedom,” said Abdulmalik A. Aljinaidi, dean of the research and consultation institute at King Abdulaziz University, Jidda’s biggest, with more than 40,000 students. “For Kaust to succeed, it will have to be free of all the restrictions and bureaucracy we face as a public university.”

Even in the most advanced genetics labs at King Abdulaziz, the women wear full face coverings, and female students can meet with male advisers only in carefully controlled public “free zones” like the library. Scientists there tread carefully when they do research in genetics, stem cells or evolution, for fear of offending Islamic social mores.

Even in Jidda, the kingdom’s most liberal city, a status rooted in its history as a trading outpost, change comes slowly. This month the governor allowed families to celebrate the post-Ramadan Id al-Fitr holiday in public, effectively allowing men and women to socialize publicly on the same streets for the first time.

The religious police were accused of beating a man to death because he was suspected of selling alcohol. Conservatives have fended off efforts by women to secure the right to drive or to run for office, although women have made considerable gains in access to segregated education and workplaces.

Against this backdrop, said Mr. Khashoggi, the newspaper editor, the king has conceived of the new university as a liberalizing counterweight, whose success depends on how much it engages the rest of Saudi society. “Nobody wants to live in a ghetto, even a nice one,” Mr. Khashoggi said. “As a Saudi, I say, let’s open up.”

Upon completion, the energy-efficient campus will house 20,000 faculty and staff members, students and their families. Social rules will be more relaxed, as they are in the compounds where foreign oil workers live; women will be allowed to drive, for example. But the kingdom’s laws will still apply: Israelis, barred by law from visiting Saudi Arabia, will not be able to collaborate with the university. And one staple of campus life worldwide will be missing: alcohol.

The university president will be a foreigner, and the faculty members and graduate students at first will be overwhelmingly foreign as well. Generous scholarships will finance the 2,000 graduate students; planners expect the Saudi share of the student body to increase over the years as scholarships aimed at promising current undergraduates help groom them for graduate studies at the new university.

The university’s entire model is built around partnerships with other international universities, and faculty members are expected to have permanent bases at other research institutions abroad.

The university will also rely on a new free-market model. The faculty members will not have tenure, and almost all of them will have joint appointments. While the university will initially be awash in money, its faculty and graduate students will still have to compete with top international institutions for the limited pool of private money that underwrites most graduate research.

Suhair el-Qurashi, dean of the private all-female Dar Al Hekma College, often attacked as “bad” and “liberal,” said a vigorous example of free-thinking at the university would embolden the many Saudis who back the king’s quest to reform long-stagnant higher education.

“The king knows he will face some backlash and bad publicity,” Ms. Qurashi said. “I think the system is moving in the right direction.”
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FATWA

Click the link below or read the news below

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Re ... 1409142549

Religion

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Turkey: Fatwa allows Muslims to pray just three times a day

Ankara, 10 Oct. (AKI) - Turkish Muslims will be allowed to pray only three times a day from Wednesday instead of the usual five - without fear of committing a sin.

A member of the scientific council of Istanbul University, Muhammad Nour Dughan, has issued a controversial fatwa or religious edict cutting Islamic prayer requirements from five to three times a day.

The move has provoked widespread debate as well as opposition from orthodox imams or Muslim clerics.

Sharia law allows for the possibility of praying three times a day in case of sickness or travel.

The fatwa extends this option allowing Muslims to pray three times a day, especially when they are heavily committed with work or personal issues.

The Turkish debate echoes a similar one that has already taken place in Egypt where the fatwa has also drawn support.

Jamal al-Banna, brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, endorsed the Turkish move.

"Merging prayers has become a modern necessity," he told the al-Arabiya website. "In most cases, people do not always perform the five prayers on time due to the pressures of modern life."

Al-Banna is often criticised for his modern interpretation of Islamic rules. He said the Prophet Mohammad himself had given followers this option that could be applied when prayers cannot be carried out in a given time.

A member of Egypt's Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Youssef al-Badri, rejected the argument saying it was unacceptable to merge prayers unless it was due to travel, illness, rain or pilgrimage.
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Khaleej Times Online >> News >> MIDDLE EAST

Fatwas will be made available on Internet
By Habib Shaikh (Our correspondent)

2 November 2007


JEDDAH — Fatwas (religious rulings) will now be available on the net. The Riyadh-based Presidency for Scientific Research and Religious Edicts (Dar Al Ifta), which comprises prominent Islamic scholars that issues fatwas, has set up web site www.alifta.com.

The launch of the web site comes in response to calls for the authentication of religious edicts in Saudi Arabia. Certain radical groups sometimes issue sketchy fatwas urging Muslim youths to take part in jihad.

The web site is aimed at giving Muslims a place to review authentic and widely accepted fatwas issued by the Islamic authority in the Kingdom. The web site provides quick access to the fatwas issued by Dar Al Ifta, which is affiliated to the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars headed by Grand Mufti Shaikh Abdul Aziz Al Asheikh.

The site features fatwas issued by prominent Islamic scholars and has devoted a section for the fatwas of Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the former mufti who died in 1999.

Visitors to the new web site will be able to ask questions on various topics and get replies from well-known scholars. On the main page of the site, one can find the fatwas of the permanent committee for ifta, fatwas of Shaikh bin Baz, and of the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars as well as the Islamic Research magazine.

The site also contains some of the Hadiths reported by prominent women followers of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) including Khadeeja, Safiya, Zainab, Hafsa, Aisha, Fatma, Asma bint Abu Bakr, Umm Salama and Umm Dardaa.

Saudis and expatriates in the Kingdom welcomed the new fatwa web site and said it would help the public to receive authentic religious rulings and opinions on various issues.

Mohammed Habeeb, director-general of the Dawa Centre in Al Salama district in Jeddah, said Dar Al-Ifta’s site is very informative and would benefit a large number of people worldwide. He stressed the need for further developing the site with interactive facilities.

“People have been waiting for this site for quite a long time. It is a nice web site containing religious edicts made by prominent scholars like Bin Baz and Bin Othaimeen,” he said. He urged Dar Al Ifta to translate the religious rulings into English and other major languages.

“There is a multi-language web site set up by Egypt’s Al Azhar. Many foreigners make use of it,” he added. Saudi Arabia has emphasised the need for the compilation of religious edicts in order to unite Muslims.
In a previous statement, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal stressed the important roles that Islamic institutions, such as the Islamic Fiqh Academy, play in protecting Islamic beliefs and ideology.
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November 7, 2007
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR

SAN FRANCISCO — About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.

While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.

Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.

“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”

For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn homosexuality is gaining momentum.

In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more protected.

As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say, partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such research.

Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington failed largely out of fear, he said.

“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.

Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.

Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an abomination is remains open to interpretation.”

Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination, said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he said.

The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because sex was defined as penetration.

Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he said condemned homosexuals.

“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they had a virus.”

All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ. “Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does it? Not me or you, only by law.”

Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it given practices like open gym showers.

The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.

Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European colonialism.

“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist. “They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it helped me reconcile the two.”

Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.

Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him. He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.

He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”

A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too depressing.

But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat. “They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.

The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
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