Interpretation of faith in Islam

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star_munir
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Maldives, militant Islamists on the rise: The Hindu
Male, New Delhi, Nov 24: Growing numbers of young men from Maldives are answering the Islamist call to jihad. “Congratulations,” said the voice on the crackling phone line from Lahore, “your sons have become martyrs to the faith in Kashmir.”

Ever since that call came on January 27, 2007, the families of teenagers Mohammed Faseehu, from the Laam atoll island of Dhanbidhoo, and Shifahu Abdul Wahid of the Dhiffushi island in the Kaaf atoll have been desperately searching for their children.

Despite petitioning both the Maldives government and the Pakistan High Commission in Male, both families have drawn a blank. There is no trace either of Mohamed Niaz, a Lahore-based seminary student from Maldives who called with the news of their death.

But after the September 29 Sultan Park bombing in Male, the first-ever Islamist terror strike in Maldives, intelligence services across the world — those of India, the United States and the United Kingdom among them — have developed a new interest in the missing men.

A rising tide of violent Islamism, the Sultan Park bombing suggests, has begun to surge over Maldives. Dozens of local men who have fought in Islamist campaigns across the region are now preparing to bring home their war. Experts and many Maldives residents fear that the gathering storm could tear apart the island paradise.

Faseehu and Wahid travelled to Pakistan in March 2005 to study at a seminary in Karachi. Soon they moved to the Jamia Salafia Islamia — a Faisalabad seminary whose alumni are several Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders.

More than two decades ago, a young seminary student from Maldives made the same journey. Mohamed Ibrahim Sheikh returned to the islands in 1983, armed with the neo-conservative Salafism he had learned in Pakistan. He railed against the mainstream Shaafi-Sunni traditions the regime of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom propagated. Soon Sheikh was banished from Male to the southern atolls.

Out of sight, he continued to preach his faith though. Sheikh Ibrahim Fareed, Qatar-educated cleric now held for his links with the Sultan Park terrorists, was among his students. Salafi mosques operating without the permission required under the Maldives law were set up in Male. On the remote southern island of Himandhoo, in the Alif Alif atoll, Fareed was eventually to build a Shariah-bound mini-state modelled on the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the flow of students to Pakistan continued. Mohamed Halim, now vice-chief of administration for the Laam atoll, was among the first from Maldives to study at Jamia Salafia. “There were 23 students from Maldives there in 1989,” he recalls in perfect Urdu, “and dozens of others at other seminaries across Pakistan. Some used to go off for training with jihadi groups along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

Among Mr Halim’s contemporaries was a Fonadhoo island resident Ali Shareef, who has now been held for his alleged role in the Sultan Park bombing. Along with Mohamed Mazeed of Male, as well as Ali Rashid and Mohammad Saleem, both residents of the Kalaidhoo island in the Laam atoll, Shareef plotted to establish a Shariah-based state in Maldives. The plot failed but President Gayoom sent an envoy to Jamia Salafia to insist that the seminary watch its students more closely.

It was a futile enterprise: at the seminary, religious education and jihad were organically enmeshed. Shareef’s contemporaries included, for example, a Faisalabad resident Abdul Malik. As head of the Lashkar’s Umm ul-Qura camp between 1998 and 2003, he trained thousands of Lashkar operatives for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. Operating under the code-name Abu Anas, Malik was eventually killed in a 2003 firefight with the Indian troops near Sangrama in northern Jammu and Kashmir.

Several Maldives students thus continued at the Lashkar-run facilities in Pakistan, some during Malik’s tenure as head of Umm ul-Qura. Ahmad Shah, a Male resident now battling heroin addiction, was put through the daura aam, or basic combat course, in a camp in the late 1990s. “Many students from Maldives were there,” he recalls. Others were recruited from Karachi’s Binori Masjid seminary, which gave birth to the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s Maulana Masood Azhar. A Maldives national, Ibrahim Fauzee, spent time in Guantanamo Bay after intelligence officials learned of his association with Al Qaeda operatives.

In the run-up to the Sultan Park bombing, evidence emerged that these networks were preparing for more aggressive operations. Ali Shameem and Abdul Latheef Ibrahim, now held for their role in the terror cell, were arrested on charges of preparing to join the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. In April 2005, Ibrahim Asif was arrested in Kerala after attempting to source weapons from Thiruvananthapuram. Last year, Male residents Ali Jaleel, Fatimah Nasreen, and Aishath Raushan were arrested for preparing to go to Pakistan to receive jihad training.

Although acquitted for want of evidence, Nasreen made little effort to veil her ideological leanings. In one recent interview, she said of Osama bin Laden: “There are things I support and things I can’t decide on.”

Multiple strains

Just why did Islamism flourish in paradise — on islands apparently free from the deep social and political strains that drove its growth in Pakistan or India?

Answers lie in President Gayoom’s complex, ever-changing relationship with Islamists in Maldives. Having risen to power three decades ago on his religious credentials from the famous al-Azhar University in Cairo, Mr. Gayoom used Islam as a tool of social control, often characterising his critics as apostates, or, even worse, Christians. Islam, regulated and propagated by the state, was adroitly used to marginalise his increasingly vocal democratic opponents.

Islamists, often educated at state expense in West Asia and Pakistan, were quick to cash in on the situation. Journalist Aishath Velazinee has recorded: “A few islands even reverted to ‘the Prophet’s time,’ attempting to emulate the Arabian dress and lifestyles of the time of Prophet Muhammad. Men grew beards and hair, took to wearing loose robes and pyjamas, and crowned their heads with Arab-style cloth. Women were wrapped in black robes. Goats were imported, and fishermen gave up their vocation to become ‘shepherds.’ Young girls were taken out of school and married off in their early teens in religious ceremonies said to be sanctioned by Islam.”

Two key social classes in Maldives backed this rightward turn. Merchants and traders, the islands’ traditional elites, saw their influence decline as the power and wealth of new elites rose. Mr Gayoom’s regime had given birth to an affluent group of entrepreneurs, often linked to the tourism trade, and the traditional bourgeoisie saw piety as a means of reasserting power. Secondly, universal school education created a generation of young people with skills, but few entrepreneurial opportunities. Disinherited and disenfranchised, some turned to drugs and street violence; others to militant Islam.

With democratic voices silenced, religious fundamentalism emerged as the principal language of dissent. In December 1999, Islamists launched incendiary attacks on the regime, arguing that the planned millennium celebrations were part of a plot to spread Christianity. In 2003, posters appeared on the walls of a school on the Edhyafushi island, praising Osama bin Laden. A Male shop displaying Santa Claus was attacked in 2005.

Militant Islam now threatened the regime which had nurtured it. But while the government sometimes used coercive methods to punish Pakistan-trained Islamists involved in violence — some famously had their beards shaved off with chilli sauce instead of foam — for the most part, it chose accommodation. Islamists who accepted the established political order — a group which calls itself ‘super-Salafis,’ to distinguish itself from the jihadi ‘Dots’ – were given considerable freedom.

Ali Shareef, for example, returned to Maldives despite his abortive plan to overthrow the government, and secured an appointment in the judicial service. He used his influence to help build the Islamist mini-state on Himandhoo, which, among other things, ran a Salafi mosque that rejected state-approved liturgical practices. Charges against Ibrahim Asif were dropped after the police chose not to secure witnesses or forensic evidence from India. Jaleel, Nasreen and Raushan, too, were set free.

The police shut down the Himandhoo mosque in 2006 but it was allowed to resume operations within weeks. Ibrahim Shameem, a government supporter on the island who resisted the Islamists, was murdered two months later in a reprisal killing that went unpunished. And while Islamists and the police fought a street battle in June after officials attempted to close down a Salafi mosque in Male, at least two others operated unhindered. One, investigators have now found, gave birth to the cell which carried out the Sultan Park bombing.

Now under pressure, Maldives finally appears to be cracking the whip. Soon after the Sultan Park bombing, troops and the police moved to clear the mini-state in Himandhoo, while Salafi mosques have been closed down. Almost a hundred people have been arrested.

Still, trouble could lie ahead. Elections are scheduled for next year, and some analysts believe jihadists will escalate operations to ensure that their cadre are not won over by mainstream parties such as the secular Maldivian Democratic Party or Islamist Adaalath. Intelligence officials are also concerned at the possible use of the remote Maldives Islands by organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, as well as at the steady flow of funds to local Islamists from organisations in Pakistan, West Asia, and the United Kingdom.

Hell, it would appear, isn’t that far a journey from paradise.
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kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Mullahs corrupted the faith

Calgary Herald


Saturday, December 15, 2007


Islam - I am a Muslim. I grew up in Pakistan, and my observation is that honour killing is rampant in Pakistan's rural areas and also in some conservative families in urban Pakistan.

Usually, the most vocal species of our society in Pakistan and other such Muslim countries is a crude, rude, alienated, quasi-literate person, who is supposed to perform some routine types of religious rituals, mostly by default. He is a mullah.

Mostly, this mullah survives on alms and donations, which come largely from the feudal lords, who started corrupting Islam through mullahs and incorporated their vested agenda.

To ordinary Muslims who go to the mosque for prayers, the mullah draws respect, because of his status as a religious person and because he leads prayer.

Whatever the mullah says in his sermon, it is taken as a word from Allah. Mullahs thus started advancing their own rigid interpretations, one of which is about hijab.

Typically, if a young girl establishes a friendship with a male and doesn't follow hijab and other fashions, she is considered a risk for bringing a bad name to the family.

The father or brother would kill such a girl and mostly would connive with the police to go scot free. The family would act like they had performed a noble deed and avenged their honour by eliminating the cause of their bad name.

Islam is burning in the hands of mullahs; how this will change I do not know. I only know it has nothing to do with Islam.

I firmly believe we Muslims should collectively stand up and disown and isolate the mullah from mainstream Islam by whatever means we can.

Shahzad Gul, Calgary

****
Aqsa's death a sad day for Islam

Calgary Herald


Saturday, December 15, 2007


Hijab - Re: "Killing one's own child is the ultimate 'dishonour,' " Editorial, Dec. 13.

One more victory for the jihadists.

Aqsa Parvez did not want to put a hijab on while living in a free country. According to the tenets of Islam, belief and following come from the heart, not by force. Muhammad Parvez called the shots. He moved to a country where he thought his rights would be protected, while at the same time he denied those rights to his daughter. Shame on all of us to tolerate it. Aqsa is a true martyr. She died for what she believed in. Let us give a message to all the Muhammad Parvezes in this country.

It is a free country giving all equal rights to practise what they believe in. Nobody forces their beliefs on others and nobody should die because of what they believe in.

Salim Aziz, Calgary

Each day, a letter that expresses a view particularly well is featured on Q.

Each month, one outstanding letter will be chosen for a special prize.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

U.S. MUSLIMS ISSUE FATWA AGAINST RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM

The Fiqh Council of North America wishes to reaffirm Islam's condemnation of terrorism and religious extremism.

Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives. There is no justification in Islam for extremism or terrorism. Targeting civilians’ life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram - prohibited in Islam - and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not “martyrs.”

The Qur’an, Islam’s revealed text, states: "Whoever kills a person, unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land, it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a person, it is as though he had saved all mankind." (Qur’an, 5:32)

Prophet Muhammad said there is no excuse for committing unjust acts: "Do not be people without minds of your own, saying that if others treat you well you will treat them well, and that if they do wrong you will do wrong to them. Instead, accustom yourselves to do good if people do good and not to do wrong (even) if they do evil." (Al-Tirmidhi)

God mandates moderation in faith and in all aspects of life when He states in the Qur’an: “We made you to be a community of the middle way, so that (with the example of your lives) you might bear witness to the truth before all mankind.” (Qur’an, 2:143)

In another verse, God explains our duties as human beings when he says: “Let there arise from among you a band of people who invite to righteousness, and enjoin good and forbid evil.” (Qur’an, 3:104)

Islam teaches us to act in a caring manner to all of God's creation. The Prophet Muhammad, who is described in the Qur’an as “a mercy to the worlds” said: “All creation is the family of God, and the person most beloved by God (is the one) who is kind and caring toward His family."

In the light of the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah we clearly and strongly state:

1 - All acts of terrorism targeting the civilians are Haram (forbidden) in Islam.
2 - It is Haram for a Muslim to cooperate or associate with any individual or group that is involved in any act of terrorism or violence.
3 - It is the duty of Muslims to cooperate with the law enforcement authorities to protect the lives of all civilians.

We issue this fatwa following the guidance of our scripture the Qur’an and the teachings of our Prophet Muhammad –peace be upon him. We urge all people to resolve all conflicts in just and peaceful manners. We have deep concern for the suffering and pain of millions of Muslims in different parts of the world. We deplore those who cause death and destruction to them. However, we urge Muslims to not lose their moral grounds. God’s help is with those who follow the right path.

We pray for the defeat of extremism, terrorism and injustice. We pray for the safety and security of our country United States and its people. We pray for the safety and security of all inhabitants of this globe. We pray that interfaith harmony and cooperation prevail both in United States and every where in the world.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Rape victims 'must have abortions'
Monday, 31 December, 2007

Sunni Islam's highest seat of learning has ruled that any woman who becomes pregnant as a result of rape must undergo an abortion.

The Islamic Research Council of Cairo-based Al-Azhar has declared immediate terminations are essential to maintain "social stability".

Egyptian law bans abortion except on the grounds of "necessity", which includes instances when a woman's life or health is in danger, or in cases of fetal abnormality.

But Al-Azhar has called for changes to such regulations .

Doctor's permission

"A raped woman must terminate the pregnancy immediately upon learning of the pregnancy if a trusted doctor gives her clearance for the abortion," the institution said.

The independent Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights says an average of two women are raped every hour in Egypt.

Experts say many factors contribute to high levels of rape and sexual harassment, including rising unemployment, the huge cost of marriage and the fact that sex outside marriage is forbidden.

http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustral ... s39_537101
kmaherali
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Sharia law 'unavoidable' in Britain: leader of Anglican church

Thu Feb 7, 12:01 PM ET



The head of the Anglican church said Thursday the adoption of parts of sharia law in Britain looked "unavoidable", calling for "constructive accommodation" over issues like resolving marriage disputes.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, told BBC radio that people should approach Islamic law with an open mind, while stressing there was no place for "extreme punishments" and discrimination against women in Britain.

He conceded some people may be surprised by his comments but underlined the importance of making all communities in Britain "part of the public process" in order to limit any oppression.

The issue of Muslim integration has been particularly sensitive here since the 2005 bombings in London in which four young British Muslims killed themselves and 52 others on the public transport system.

"There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law," he said.

Williams went on to say it would be "quite wrong" to sanction a system which gave people no right of appeal.

"But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them."

He added: "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of sharia are already recognised in our society".

Williams called on people to look at sharia "with a clear eye and not imagine, either, that we know exactly what we mean by sharia and just associate it with...Saudi Arabia or whatever.

"Nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that has sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states: the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women."

Williams, whose comments come ahead of a lecture he is due to give Thursday night entitled "Islam In English Law", has consistently called for Christian and Muslim leaders to work together.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

February 21, 2008
For Muslim Students, a Debate on Inclusion
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN JOSE — Amir Mertaban vividly recalls sitting at his university’s recruitment table for the Muslim Students Association a few years ago when an attractive undergraduate flounced up in a decidedly un-Islamic miniskirt, saying “Salamu aleykum,” or “Peace be upon you,” a standard Arabic greeting, and asked to sign up.

Mr. Mertaban also recalls that his fellow recruiter surveyed the young woman with disdain, arguing later that she should not be admitted because her skirt clearly signaled that she would corrupt the Islamic values of the other members.

“I knew that brother, I knew him very well; he used to smoke weed on a regular basis,” said Mr. Mertaban, now 25, who was president of the Muslim student group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 2003 to 2005.

Pointing out the hypocrisy, Mr. Mertaban won the argument that the group could no longer reject potential members based on rigid standards of Islamic practice.

The intense debate over whether organizations for Muslim students should be inclusive or strict is playing out on college campuses across the United States, where there are now more than 200 Muslim Students Association chapters.

Gender issues, specifically the extent to which men and women should mingle, are the most fraught topic as Muslim students wrestle with the yawning gap between American college traditions and those of Islam.

“There is this constant tension between becoming a mainstream student organization versus appealing to students who have a more conservative or stricter interpretation of Islam,” said Hadia Mubarak, the first woman to serve as president of the national association, from 2004 to 2005.

Each chapter enjoys relative autonomy in setting its rules. Broadly, those at private colleges tend to be more liberal because they draw from a more geographically dispersed population, and the smaller numbers prompt Muslim students to play down their differences.

Chapters at state colleges, on the other hand, often pull from the community, attracting students from conservative families who do not want their children too far afield.

At Yale, for example, Sunnis and Shiites mix easily and male and female students shocked parents in the audience by kissing during the annual awards ceremony. Contrast that with the University of California, Irvine, which has the reputation for being the most conservative chapter in the country, its president saying that to an outsider its ranks of bearded young men and veiled women might come across as “way Muslim” or even extremist.

But arguments erupt virtually everywhere. At the University of California, Davis, last year, in their effort to make the Muslim association more “cool,” board members organized a large alcohol-free barbecue. Men and women ate separately, but mingled in a mock jail for a charity drive.

The next day the chapter president, Khalida Fazel, said she fielded complaints that unmarried men and women were physically bumping into one other. Ms. Fazel now calls the event a mistake.

At George Washington University, a dodge ball game pitting men against women after Friday prayers drew such protests from Muslim alumni and a few members that the board felt compelled to seek a religious ruling stating that Islamic traditions accept such an event.

Members acknowledge that the tone of the Muslim associations often drives away students. Several presidents said that if they thought members were being too lax, guest imams would deliver prayer sermons about the evils of alcohol or premarital sex.

Judgment can also come swiftly. Ghayth Adhami, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled how a young student who showed up at a university recruitment meeting in a Budweiser T-shirt faced a few comments about un-Islamic dress. The student never came back.

Some members push against the rigidity. Fatima Hassan, 22, a senior at the Davis campus, organized a coed road trip to Reno, Nev., two hours away, to play the slot machines last Halloween. In Islam, Ms. Hassan concedes, gambling is “really bad,” but it was men and women sharing the same car that shocked some fellow association members.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Ms. Hassan said. “I am chill about that whole coed thing. I understand that in a Muslim context we are not supposed to hang out with the opposite sex, but it just happens and there is nothing you can do.”

But as Saif Inam, the vice president of the chapter at George Washington put it, “At the end of the day, I don’t want God asking me, ‘O.K. Saif, why did you organize events in which people could do un-Islamic things in big numbers?’ ”

The debate boils down to whether upholding gender segregation is forcing something artificial and vaguely hypocritical in an American context.

“As American Islam gets its own identity, it is going to have to shed some of these notions that are distant from American culture,” said Rafia Zakaria, a student at Indiana University. “The tension is between what forms of tradition are essential and what forms are open to innovation.”

American law says men and women are equal, whereas Muslim religious texts say they “complement” each other, Ms. Zakaria said. “If the law says they are equal, it’s hard to see how in their spiritual lives they will accept a whole different identity.”

The entire shift of the association from a foreign-run organization to an American one took place over arguments like this.

The Americans won out partly because the number of Muslim American college students hit a critical mass in the late 1990s, and then, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, foreign students, fearful of their visas being revoked, started avoiding a group that was increasingly political.

Some critics view strict interpretation of the faith as part of the association’s DNA. Organized in the 1960s by foreign students who wanted collective prayers where there were no mosques, the associations were basically little slices of Saudi Arabia. Women were banned. Only Muslim men who prayed, fasted and avoided alcohol and dating were welcomed. Meetings, even idle conversations, were in Arabic.

Donations from Saudi Arabia largely financed the group, and its leaders pushed the kingdom’s puritan, Wahhabi strain of Islam. Prof. Hamid Algar of the University of California, Berkeley, said that in the 1960s and 1970s, chapters advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations and would brook no criticism of Saudi Arabia.

That past has given the associations a reputation in some official quarters as a possible font of extremism, but experts in American Islam believe college campuses have become too diverse and are under too much scrutiny for the groups to foster radicals.

Zareena Grewal, a professor of religion and American studies at Yale, pointed to several things that would repel extremists. Members are trying to become more involved in the American political system, Professor Grewal said, and the heavy presence of women in the leadership would also deter them. Members “are not sitting around reading ‘How to Bomb Your Campus for Dummies,’ ” she said.

Its leaders think the organization is gradually relaxing a bit as it seeks to maintain its status as the main player for Muslim students.

“There were drunkards in the Prophet Muhammad’s community; there were fornicators and people who committed adultery in his community, and he didn’t reject them,” Mr. Mertaban said. “I think M.S.A.’s are beginning to understand this point that every person has ups and downs.”
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm


Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts
By Robert Piggott
Religious affairs correspondent, BBC News



Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the Prophet Muhammad.

As such, it is the principal guide for Muslims in interpreting the Koran and the source of the vast majority of Islamic law, or Sharia.


This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation. Not exactly the same, but... it's changing the theological foundations of [the] religion
Fadi Hakura,

Turkey expert, Chatham House

But the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernise, and believes it responsible for obscuring the original values of Islam.

It says that a significant number of the sayings were never uttered by Muhammad, and even some that were need now to be reinterpreted.

'Reformation'

Commentators say the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.

Its supporters say the spirit of logic and reason inherent in Islam at its foundation 1,400 years ago are being rediscovered. Some believe it could represent the beginning of a reformation in the religion.


Some messages ban women from travelling without their husband's permission... But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone
Prof Mehmet Gormez,
Hadith expert,
Department of Religious Affairs


Turkish officials have been reticent about the revision of the Hadith until now, aware of the controversy it is likely to cause among traditionalist Muslims, but they have spoken to the BBC about the project, and their ambitious aims for it.

The forensic examination of the Hadiths has taken place in Ankara University's School of Theology.

An adviser to the project, Felix Koerner, says some of the sayings - also known individually as "hadiths" - can be shown to have been invented hundreds of years after the Prophet Muhammad died, to serve the purposes of contemporary society.

"Unfortunately you can even justify through alleged hadiths, the Muslim - or pseudo-Muslim - practice of female genital mutilation," he says.

"You can find messages which say 'that is what the Prophet ordered us to do'. But you can show historically how they came into being, as influences from other cultures, that were then projected onto Islamic tradition."

HAVE YOUR SAY Many Hadiths relate to life in the Middle East 1,400 years ago and are no longer relevant Brian, London

The argument is that Islamic tradition has been gradually hijacked by various - often conservative - cultures, seeking to use the religion for various forms of social control.

Leaders of the Hadith project say successive generations have embellished the text, attributing their political aims to the Prophet Muhammad himself.

Revolutionary

Turkey is intent on sweeping away that "cultural baggage" and returning to a form of Islam it claims accords with its original values and those of the Prophet.


But this is where the revolutionary nature of the work becomes apparent. Even some sayings accepted as being genuinely spoken by Muhammad have been altered and reinterpreted.

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

"There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband's permission and they are genuine.

"But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet's time it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons."

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said "he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone".

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet's goal was.

Original spirit

Yet, until now, the ban has remained in the text, and helps to restrict the free movement of some Muslim women to this day.


There's also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment... This does not exist in Islam... we have to explain that to them
Hulya Koc, a "vaize"

As part of its aggressive programme of renewal, Turkey has given theological training to 450 women, and appointed them as senior imams called "vaizes".

They have been given the task of explaining the original spirit of Islam to remote communities in Turkey's vast interior.

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran - one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

She says that, at the moment, Islam is being widely used to justify the violent suppression of women.

"There are honour killings," she explains.

"We hear that some women are being killed when they marry the wrong person or run away with someone they love.

"There's also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment by uncles and others. This does not exist in Islam... we have to explain that to them."

'New Islam'

According to Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey from Chatham House in London, Turkey is doing nothing less than recreating Islam - changing it from a religion whose rules must be obeyed, to one designed to serve the needs of people in a modern secular democracy.

He says that to achieve it, the state is fashioning a new Islam.

"This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation," he says.

"Not exactly the same, but if you think, it's changing the theological foundations of [the] religion. "

Fadi Hakura believes that until now secularist Turkey has been intent on creating a new politics for Islam.

Now, he says, "they are trying to fashion a new Islam."

Significantly, the "Ankara School" of theologians working on the new Hadith have been using Western critical techniques and philosophy.

They have also taken an even bolder step - rejecting a long-established rule of Muslim scholars that later (and often more conservative) texts override earlier ones.

"You have to see them as a whole," says Fadi Hakura.

"You can't say, for example, that the verses of violence override the verses of peace. This is used a lot in the Middle East, this kind of ideology.

"I cannot impress enough how fundamental [this change] is."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/e ... 264903.stm

Published: 2008/02/26 14:43:58 GMT

© BBC MMVIII
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Global Muslim networks

How far they have travelled

Mar 6th 2008 | BISHKEK AND ISTANBUL
From The Economist print edition


Amberin Zaman

A Turkish-based movement, which sounds more reasonable than most of its rivals, is vying to be recognised as the world's leading Muslim network

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IT IS a long way from the Anatolian plains to a campus in the heart of London, where eminent scholars of religion deliver learned papers. And the highlands that used to form the Soviet border with China, an area where bright kids long for an education, seem far removed from a three-storey house in Pennsylvania, where a revered, reclusive teacher of Islam lives.

What links these places is one of the most powerful and best-connected of the networks that are competing to influence Muslims round the globe—especially in places far from Islam's heartland. The Pennsylvania-based sage, Fethullah Gulen, who stands at the centre of this network, has become one of the world's most important Muslim figures—not only in his native Turkey, but also in a quieter way in many other places: Central Asia, Indochina, Indonesia and Africa.

With his stated belief in science, inter-faith dialogue and multi-party democracy, Mr Gulen has also won praise from many non-Muslim quarters. He is an intensely emotional preacher, whose tearful sermons seem to strike a deep chord in his listeners; but the movement he heads is remarkably pragmatic and businesslike.

As a global force, the Gulenists are especially active in education. They claim to have founded more than 500 places of learning in 90 countries. A conference they staged in London last October was co-hosted by four British universities, plus the House of Lords. Its organisers produced a slick 750-page volume that included all the conference papers.

In its homeland, the Gulen movement is seen as a counterweight to ultra-nationalism. But in places far from home, the movement has rather a Turkish nationalist flavour. In the former Soviet south, it fights the “Turkish” corner in areas where the cultures of Russia, China and Iran co-exist uneasily. “If you meet a polite Central Asian lad who speaks good English and Turkish, you know he went to a Gulen school,” says a Turkish observer. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, the movement runs a university and a dozen high schools, which excel in international contests. Even in Pakistan, pupils at Gulen schools learn Turkish songs, as well as benefiting from gleaming science labs.

Amazingly enough, the Gulen movement has built up a significant presence in northern Iraq, through schools, a hospital and (soon) a university. Although this arena of Turkish-Kurdish conflict is not the easiest environment for a Turkish-based institution, the movement has deftly built up relationships with all the region's ethnic and religious groups.

The influence that the Gulen movement has quietly accumulated would be a surprise to some veteran observers of Islam. Asked to name the world's most active Islamic network, many a pundit would think first of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose reach has extended a long way from Egypt, where it began in the 1920s as a movement of resistance to the twin evils of secularism and colonialism. And it remains true that in every Western country (including the United States) where Muslims are politically active, the influence of the brotherhood—or at least of movements that grew out it—is palpable.

Among the brotherhood's ideological affiliates is the biggest Muslim group in France; a federation that aims to co-ordinate Muslim activities all over Europe; and a “fatwa council” that offers moral guidance to European Muslims. In Britain, the pro-brotherhood camp has split between a pietist wing and a more political one, known as the British Muslim Initiative, which is now busy organising protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. On the face of things, the Gulen movement seems more benign—from a Western point of view—than either the brotherhood or any of the other networks that compete for a similar role. Although the brotherhood tells people to take full advantage of secular democracy, it also insists that the ideal form of administration is an Islamic one. The Gulenists say their embrace of democracy is wholehearted, not tactical. If there is one group of people who doubt this, it is secular Turks; many view the Gulenists as “chameleons” who only show their true, conservative face in deepest Anatolia.

Still, if the Gulen message is well received in the West, that is partly because the message from other Muslim networks (leaving aside the ones that openly espouse terror) is often so dark. Take, for example, Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation), which is active in at least 40 countries, including Britain and Australia. Its line is that Muslims should eschew electoral democracy altogether, on the ground that the only regime worth supporting is a global caliphate. Its maximalist stance, and the solidarity it proclaims with embattled Muslims across the world, can appeal to impressionable students. Yet another competitor is an Islamic revivalist movement, Tablighi Jamaat, rooted in south Asia but active in Africa and Europe, especially Britain. Compared with all these groups, the Gulen movement offers a message to young Muslims that sounds more positive: it tells them to embrace the Western world's opportunities, while still insisting on Islam's fundamentals.

This measured tone has won the Gulenists many admirers. But that does not mean that all Western governments automatically accept the movement's claims of moderation. “We know we are under surveillance from Western security services,” laments a Gulenist insider. That is quite true, but so far those services have not detected any hidden ties with extremism.
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Why Shariah?
By Noah Feldman

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Last month, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow non-Christian courts to decide certain matters of family law. Britain has no constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop noted that "the law of the Church of England is the law of the land" there; indeed, ecclesiastical courts that once handled marriage and divorce are still integrated into the British legal system, deciding matters of church property and doctrine. His tentative suggestion was that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce.

Then all hell broke loose. From politicians across the spectrum to senior church figures and the ubiquitous British tabloids came calls for the leader of the world's second largest Christian denomination to issue a retraction or even resign. Williams has spent the last couple of years trying to hold together the global Anglican Communion in the face of continuing controversies about ordaining gay priests and recognizing same-sex marriages. Yet little in that contentious battle subjected him to the kind of outcry that his reference to religious courts unleashed. Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams's mention of Orthodox Jewish law. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word "Shariah" that was radioactive.

In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word "Shariah" conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.

In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of Shariah has undergone an extraordinary revival in recent years. A century ago, forward-looking Muslims thought of Shariah as outdated, in need of reform or maybe abandonment. Today, 66 percent of Egyptians, 60 percent of Pakistanis and 54 percent of Jordanians say that Shariah should be the only source of legislation in their countries. Islamist political parties, like those associated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, make the adoption of Shariah the most prominent plank in their political platforms. And the message resonates. Wherever Islamists have been allowed to run for office in Arabic-speaking countries, they have tended to win almost as many seats as the governments have let them contest. The Islamist movement in its various incarnations — from moderate to radical — is easily the fastest growing and most vital in the Muslim world; the return to Shariah is its calling card.

How is it that what so many Westerners see as the most unappealing and premodern aspect of Islam is, to many Muslims, the vibrant, attractive core of a global movement of Islamic revival? The explanation surely must go beyond the oversimplified assumption that Muslims want to use Shariah to reverse feminism and control women — especially since large numbers of women support the Islamists in general and the ideal of Shariah in particular.Is Shariah the Rule of Law?

One reason for the divergence between Western and Muslim views of Shariah is that we are not all using the word to mean the same thing. Although it is commonplace to use the word "Shariah" and the phrase "Islamic law" interchangeably, this prosaic English translation does not capture the full set of associations that the term "Shariah" conjures for the believer. Shariah, properly understood, is not just a set of legal rules. To believing Muslims, it is something deeper and higher, infused with moral and metaphysical purpose. At its core, Shariah represents the idea that all human beings — and all human governments — are subject to justice under the law.

In fact, "Shariah" is not the word traditionally used in Arabic to refer to the processes of Islamic legal reasoning or the rulings produced through it: that word is fiqh, meaning something like Islamic jurisprudence. The word "Shariah" connotes a connection to the divine, a set of unchanging beliefs and principles that order life in accordance with God's will. Westerners typically imagine that Shariah advocates simply want to use the Koran as their legal code. But the reality is much more complicated. Islamist politicians tend to be very vague about exactly what it would mean for Shariah to be the source for the law of the land — and with good reason, because just adopting such a principle would not determine how the legal system would actually operate.

Shariah is best understood as a kind of higher law, albeit one that includes some specific, worldly commands. All Muslims would agree, for example, that it prohibits lending money at interest — though not investments in which risks and returns are shared; and the ban on Muslims drinking alcohol is an example of an unequivocal ritual prohibition, even for liberal interpreters of the faith. Some rules associated with Shariah are undoubtedly old-fashioned and harsh. Men and women are treated unequally, for example, by making it hard for women to initiate divorce without forfeiting alimony. The prohibition on sodomy, though historically often unenforced, makes recognition of same-sex relationships difficult to contemplate. But Shariah also prohibits bribery or special favors in court. It demands equal treatment for rich and poor. It condemns the vigilante-style honor killings that still occur in some Middle Eastern countries. And it protects everyone's property — including women's — from being taken from them. Unlike in Iran, where wearing a head scarf is legally mandated and enforced by special religious police, the Islamist view in most other Muslim countries is that the head scarf is one way of implementing the religious duty to dress modestly — a desirable social norm, not an enforceable legal rule. And mandating capital punishment for apostasy is not on the agenda of most elected Islamists. For many Muslims today, living in corrupt autocracies, the call for Shariah is not a call for sexism, obscurantism or savage punishment but for an Islamic version of what the West considers its most prized principle of political justice: the rule of law.The Sway of the Scholars
To understand Shariah's deep appeal, we need to ask a crucial question that is rarely addressed in the West: What, in fact, is the system of Islamic law? In his lifetime, the Prophet Muhammad was both the religious and the political leader of the community of Muslim believers. His revelation, the Koran, contained some laws, pertaining especially to ritual matters and inheritance; but it was not primarily a legal book and did not include a lengthy legal code of the kind that can be found in parts of the Hebrew Bible. When the first generation of believers needed guidance on a subject that was not addressed by revelation, they went directly to Muhammad. He either answered of his own accord or, if he was unsure, awaited divine guidance in the form of a new revelation.

With the death of Muhammad, divine revelation to the Muslim community stopped. The role of the political-religious leader passed to a series of caliphs (Arabic for "substitute") who stood in the prophet's stead. That left the caliph in a tricky position when it came to resolving difficult legal matters. The caliph possessed Muhammad's authority but not his access to revelation. It also left the community in something of a bind. If the Koran did not speak clearly to a particular question, how was the law to be determined?

The answer that developed over the first couple of centuries of Islam was that the Koran could be supplemented by reference to the prophet's life — his sunna, his path. (The word "sunna" is the source of the designation Sunni — one who follows the prophet's path.) His actions and words were captured in an oral tradition, beginning presumably with a person who witnessed the action or statement firsthand. Accurate reports had to be distinguished from false ones. But of course even a trustworthy report on a particular situation could not directly resolve most new legal problems that arose later. To address such problems, it was necessary to reason by analogy from one situation to another. There was also the possibility that a communal consensus existed on what to do under particular circumstances, and that, too, was thought to have substantial weight.

This fourfold combination — the Koran, the path of the prophet as captured in the collections of reports, analogical reasoning and consensus — amounted to a basis for a legal system. But who would be able to say how these four factors fit together? Indeed, who had the authority to say that these factors and not others formed the sources of the law? The first four caliphs, who knew the prophet personally, might have been able to make this claim for themselves. But after them, the caliphs were faced with a growing group of specialists who asserted that they, collectively, could ascertain the law from the available sources. This self-appointed group came to be known as the scholars — and over the course of a few generations, they got the caliphs to acknowledge them as the guardians of the law. By interpreting a law that originated with God, they gained control over the legal system as it actually existed. That made them, and not the caliphs, into "the heirs of the prophets."
Among the Sunnis, this model took effect very early and persisted until modern times. For the Shiites, who believe that the succession of power followed the prophet's lineage, the prophet had several successors who claimed extraordinary divine authority. Once they were gone, however, the Shiite scholars came to occupy a role not unlike that of their Sunni counterparts.

Under the constitutional theory that the scholars developed to explain the division of labor in the Islamic state, the caliph had paramount responsibility to fulfill the divine injunction to "command the right and prohibit the wrong." But this was not a task he could accomplish on his own. It required him to delegate responsibility to scholarly judges, who would apply God's law as they interpreted it. The caliph could promote or fire them as he wished, but he could not dictate legal results: judicial authority came from the caliph, but the law came from the scholars.

The caliphs — and eventually the sultans who came to rule once the caliphate lost most of its worldly influence — still had plenty of power. They handled foreign affairs more or less at their discretion. And they could also issue what were effectively administrative regulations — provided these regulations did not contradict what the scholars said Shariah required. The regulations addressed areas where Shariah was silent. They also enabled the state to regulate social conduct without having to put every case before the courts, where convictions would often be impossible to obtain because of the strict standards of proof required for punishment. As a result of these regulations, many legal matters (perhaps most) fell outside the rules given specifically by Shariah.

The upshot is that the system of Islamic law as it came to exist allowed a great deal of leeway. That is why today's advocates of Shariah as the source of law are not actually recommending the adoption of a comprehensive legal code derived from or dictated by Shariah — because nothing so comprehensive has ever existed in Islamic history. To the Islamist politicians who advocate it or for the public that supports it, Shariah generally means something else. It means establishing a legal system in which God's law sets the ground rules, authorizing and validating everyday laws passed by an elected legislature. In other words, for them, Shariah is expected to function as something like a modern constitution.The Rights of Humans and the Rights of God
So in contemporary Islamic politics, the call for Shariah does not only or primarily mean mandating the veiling of women or the use of corporal punishment — it has an essential constitutional dimension as well. But what is the particular appeal of placing Shariah above ordinary law?

The answer lies in a little-remarked feature of traditional Islamic government: that a state under Shariah was, for more than a thousand years, subject to a version of the rule of law. And as a rule-of-law government, the traditional Islamic state had an advantage that has been lost in the dictatorships and autocratic monarchies that have governed so much of the Muslim world for the last century. Islamic government was legitimate, in the dual sense that it generally respected the individual legal rights of its subjects and was seen by them as doing so. These individual legal rights, known as "the rights of humans" (in contrast to "the rights of God" to such things as ritual obedience), included basic entitlements to life, property and legal process — the protections from arbitrary government oppression sought by people all over the world for centuries.

Of course, merely declaring the ruler subject to the law was not enough on its own; the ruler actually had to follow the law. For that, he needed incentives. And as it happened, the system of government gave him a big one, in the form of a balance of power with the scholars. The ruler might be able to use pressure once in a while to get the results he wanted in particular cases. But because the scholars were in charge of the law, and he was not, the ruler could pervert the course of justice only at the high cost of being seen to violate God's law — thereby undermining the very basis of his rule.

In practice, the scholars' leverage to demand respect for the law came from the fact that the caliphate was not hereditary as of right. That afforded the scholars major influence at the transitional moments when a caliph was being chosen or challenged. On taking office, a new ruler — even one designated by his dead predecessor — had to fend off competing claimants. The first thing he would need was affirmation of the legitimacy of his assumption of power. The scholars were prepared to offer just that, in exchange for the ruler's promise to follow the law.

Once in office, rulers faced the inevitable threat of invasion or a palace coup. The caliph would need the scholars to declare a religious obligation to protect the state in a defensive jihad. Having the scholars on his side in times of crisis was a tremendous asset for the ruler who could be said to follow the law. Even if the ruler was not law-abiding, the scholars still did not spontaneously declare a sitting caliph disqualified. This would have been foolish, especially in view of the fact that the scholars had no armies at their disposal and the sitting caliph did. But their silence could easily be interpreted as an invitation for a challenger to step forward and be validated.

The scholars' insistence that the ruler obey Shariah was motivated largely by their belief that it was God's will. But it was God's will as they interpreted it. As a confident, self-defined elite that controlled and administered the law according to well-settled rules, the scholars were agents of stability and predictability — crucial in societies where the transition from one ruler to the next could be disorderly and even violent. And by controlling the law, the scholars could limit the ability of the executive to expropriate the property of private citizens. This, in turn, induced the executive to rely on lawful taxation to raise revenues, which itself forced the rulers to be responsive to their subjects' concerns. The scholars and their law were thus absolutely essential to the tremendous success that Islamic society enjoyed from its inception into the 19th century. Without Shariah, there would have been no Haroun al-Rashid in Baghdad, no golden age of Muslim Spain, no reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul.

For generations, Western students of the traditional Islamic constitution have assumed that the scholars could offer no meaningful check on the ruler. As one historian has recently put it, although Shariah functioned as a constitution, "the constitution was not enforceable," because neither scholars nor subjects could "compel their ruler to observe the law in the exercise of government." But almost no constitution anywhere in the world enables judges or nongovernmental actors to "compel" the obedience of an executive who controls the means of force. The Supreme Court of the United States has no army behind it. Institutions that lack the power of the sword must use more subtle means to constrain executives. Like the American constitutional balance of powers, the traditional Islamic balance was maintained by words and ideas, and not just by forcible compulsion.

So today's Muslims are not being completely fanciful when they act and speak as though Shariah can structure a constitutional state subject to the rule of law. One big reason that Islamist political parties do so well running on a Shariah platform is that their constituents recognize that Shariah once augured a balanced state in which legal rights were respected.From Shariah to Despotism
But if Shariah is popular among many Muslims in large part because of its historical association with the rule of law, can it actually do the same work today? Here there is reason for caution and skepticism. The problem is that the traditional Islamic constitution rested on a balance of powers between a ruler subject to law and a class of scholars who interpreted and administered that law. The governments of most contemporary majority-Muslim states, however, have lost these features. Rulers govern as if they were above the law, not subject to it, and the scholars who once wielded so much influence are much reduced in status. If they have judicial posts at all, it is usually as judges in the family-law courts.

In only two important instances do scholars today exercise real power, and in both cases we can see a deviation from their traditional role. The first is Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a distinguished scholar, assumed executive power and became supreme leader after the 1979 revolution. The result of this configuration, unique in the history of the Islamic world, is that the scholarly ruler had no counterbalance and so became as unjust as any secular ruler with no check on his authority. The other is Saudi Arabia, where the scholars retain a certain degree of power. The unfortunate outcome is that they can slow any government initiative for reform, however minor, but cannot do much to keep the government responsive to its citizens. The oil-rich state does not need to obtain tax revenues from its citizens to operate — and thus has little reason to keep their interests in mind.

How the scholars lost their exalted status as keepers of the law is a complex story, but it can be summed up in the adage that partial reforms are sometimes worse than none at all. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire responded to military setbacks with an internal reform movement. The most important reform was the attempt to codify Shariah. This Westernizing process, foreign to the Islamic legal tradition, sought to transform Shariah from a body of doctrines and principles to be discovered by the human efforts of the scholars into a set of rules that could be looked up in a book.

Once the law existed in codified form, however, the law itself was able to replace the scholars as the source of authority. Codification took from the scholars their all-important claim to have the final say over the content of the law and transferred that power to the state. To placate the scholars, the government kept the Shariah courts running but restricted them to handling family-law matters. This strategy paralleled the British colonial approach of allowing religious courts to handle matters of personal status. Today, in countries as far apart as Kenya and Pakistan, Shariah courts still administer family law — a small subset of their original historical jurisdiction.

Codification signaled the death knell for the scholarly class, but it did not destroy the balance of powers on its own. Promulgated in 1876, the Ottoman constitution created a legislature composed of two lawmaking bodies — one elected, one appointed by the sultan. This amounted to the first democratic institution in the Muslim world; had it established itself, it might have popularized the notion that the people represent the ultimate source of legal authority. Then the legislature could have replaced the scholars as the institutional balance to the executive.

But that was not to be. Less than a year after the legislature first met, Sultan Abdulhamid II suspended its operation — and for good measure, he suspended the constitution the following year. Yet the sultan did not restore the scholars to the position they once occupied. With the scholars out of the way and no legislature to replace them, the sultan found himself in the position of near-absolute ruler. This arrangement set the pattern for government in the Muslim world after the Ottoman empire fell. Law became a tool of the ruler, not an authority over him. What followed, perhaps unsurprisingly, was dictatorship and other forms of executive dominance — the state of affairs confronted by the Islamists who seek to restore Shariah.A Democratic Shariah?

The Islamists today, partly out of realism, partly because they are rarely scholars themselves, seem to have little interest in restoring the scholars to their old role as the constitutional balance to the executive. The Islamist movement, like other modern ideologies, seeks to capture the existing state and then transform society through the tools of modern government. Its vision for bringing Shariah to bear therefore incorporates two common features of modern government: the legislature and the constitution.

The mainstream Sunni Islamist position, found, for example, in the electoral platforms of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, is that an elected legislature should draft and pass laws that are consistent with the spirit of Islamic law. On questions where Islamic law does not provide clear direction, the democratically chosen legislature is supposed to use its discretion to adopt laws infused by Islamic values.
The result is a profound change in the theoretical structure underlying Islamic law: Shariah is democratized in that its care is given to a popularly elected legislature. In Iraq, for example, where the constitution declares Shariah to be "the source of law," it is in principle up to the National Assembly to pass laws that reflect its spirit.

In case the assembly gets it wrong, however, the Islamists often recommend the judicial review of legislative actions to guarantee that they do not violate Islamic law or values. What is sometimes called a "repugnancy clause," mandating that a judicial body overturn laws repugnant to Islam, has made its way into several recent constitutions that seek to reconcile Islam and democracy. It may be found, for example, in the Afghan Constitution of 2004 and the Iraqi Constitution of 2005. (I had a small role advising the Iraqi drafters.) Islamic judicial review transforms the highest judicial body of the state into a guarantor of conformity with Islamic law. The high court can then use this power to push for a conservative vision of Islamic law, as in Afghanistan, or for a more moderate version, as in Pakistan.

Islamic judicial review puts the court in a position resembling the one that scholars once occupied. Like the scholars, the judges of the reviewing court present their actions as interpretations of Islamic law. But of course the judges engaged in Islamic judicial review are not the scholars but ordinary judges (as in Iraq) or a mix of judges and scholars (as in Afghanistan). In contrast to the traditional arrangement, the judges' authority comes not from Shariah itself but from a written constitution that gives them the power of judicial review.
The modern incarnation of Shariah is nostalgic in its invocation of the rule of law but forward-looking in how it seeks to bring this result about. What the Islamists generally do not acknowledge, though, is that such institutions on their own cannot deliver the rule of law. The executive authority also has to develop a commitment to obeying legal and constitutional judgments. That will take real-world incentives, not just a warm feeling for the values associated with Shariah.

How that happens — how an executive administration accustomed to overweening power can be given incentives to subordinate itself to the rule of law — is one of the great mysteries of constitutional development worldwide. Total revolution has an extremely bad track record in recent decades, at least in majority-Muslim states. The revolution that replaced the shah in Iran created an oppressively top-heavy constitutional structure. And the equally revolutionary dreams some entertained for Iraq — dreams of a liberal secular state or of a functioning Islamic democracy — still seem far from fruition.

Gradual change therefore increasingly looks like the best of some bad options. And most of today's political Islamists — the ones running for office in Morocco or Jordan or Egypt and even Iraq — are gradualists. They wish to adapt existing political institutions by infusing them with Islamic values and some modicum of Islamic law. Of course, such parties are also generally hostile to the United States, at least where we have worked against their interests. (Iraq is an obvious exception — many Shiite Islamists there are our close allies.) But this is a separate question from whether they can become a force for promoting the rule of law. It is possible to imagine the electoral success of Islamist parties putting pressure on executives to satisfy the demand for law-based government embodied in Koranic law. This might bring about a transformation of the judiciary, in which judges would come to think of themselves as agents of the law rather than as agents of the state.

Something of the sort may slowly be happening in Turkey. The Islamists there are much more liberal than anywhere else in the Muslim world; they do not even advocate the adoption of Shariah (a position that would get their government closed down by the staunchly secular military). Yet their central focus is the rule of law and the expansion of basic rights against the Turkish tradition of state-centered secularism. The courts are under increasing pressure to go along with that vision.

Can Shariah provide the necessary resources for such a rethinking of the judicial role? In its essence, Shariah aspires to be a law that applies equally to every human, great or small, ruler or ruled. No one is above it, and everyone at all times is bound by it. But the history of Shariah also shows that the ideals of the rule of law cannot be implemented in a vacuum. For that, a state needs actually effective institutions, which must be reinforced by regular practice and by the recognition of actors within the system that they have more to gain by remaining faithful to its dictates than by deviating from them.

The odds of success in the endeavor to deliver the rule of law are never high. Nothing is harder than creating new institutions with the capacity to balance executive dominance — except perhaps avoiding the temptation to overreach once in power. In Iran, the Islamists have discredited their faith among many ordinary people, and a similar process may be under way in Iraq. Still, with all its risks and dangers, the Islamists' aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law while coming to terms with contemporary circumstances is bold and noble — and may represent a path to just and legitimate government in much of the Muslim world.
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ISLAM IN A NEW WORLD
Popularizing Islam through TV
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Egyptian Ahmed abu Haiba symbolizes a struggle in the Middle East with the influx of Western culture. He aims to give a voice to moderate Islam.
By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 6, 2008

CAIRO -- It was a boyhood of miniskirts and stern-faced imams. As Ahmed abu Haiba grew into a man, he felt a kinship with the clerics who recited the Koran in badly lighted television studios, but he feared they didn't stand a chance against the new Western temptations of pop divas pouting about carnal pleasures and broken hearts.

The screen beyond Abu Haiba's clicker was changing; the iconic images that defined Islam were being challenged in the 1990s from the Internet and Hollywood fantasy absorbed by tens of millions of satellite dishes humming on rooftops across the Middle East. It was an alluring cacophony that Abu Haiba, a playwright and TV producer, warned would tug the Arab world further from its culture.


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"The Islamic media was so poor, so traditional," he said. "It wasn't television. It was televised radio, a man in front of a camera speaking for hours and hours about obscure religious texts with no appeal. . . . Words with nothing connected to life."

Abu Haiba rejected the West's secular message, but he sought the power of its style and marketing. His creation, the latest in the struggle of faith, globalization and identity between East and West, is a music video channel that features Muslim piety through a slickly produced prism of Arabic rhythms to counter the thug pathos on MTV.

"I want a new Islamic media," said Abu Haiba, a 39-year-old father of three. "My point is not to condemn the West, but to build my culture with its own seeds, its own matrix. . . . I am more worried about Western culture than politics. It affects our thinking and ideals. It's a major danger we're facing on our beliefs, role models, habits. If I lose my culture, I become a stranger in my own country."

It is difficult to escape the West's imprint on Muslim society: Plastic surgeons are re-creating pop stars in Lebanon; independent women are appearing in Tunisian and Moroccan films; blogs are chiding political regimes from Cairo to Amman; Facebook and text messaging are circumventing religion-based dating rules; and in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, unveiled blond women peddle shampoo in commercials.

The Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war hardened the lines between Washington and the Arab world, accentuating what many scholars and diplomats say is a clash of civilizations. Muslims rallied against the U.S. invasion of Iraq; terrorism flared across the Middle East and into Europe. But something else was happening. Despite President Bush's rhetoric against Islamic militants and Osama bin Laden's screeds on infidels, Western culture was flourishing from Mecca to Tripoli.

A cultural schizophrenia

A crude, yet telling, sign of this was glimpsed in an Internet cafe in northern Iraq days before U.S. cruise missiles would strike Baghdad in 2003. An bearded militant visited two websites during his 30 minutes of surfing -- one sponsored by the terrorist group Ansar al Islam, the other featuring English-language porn.

The anecdote is an extreme illustration of the cultural schizophrenia Muslims in the Middle East say they face, caught on an uneasy plane between fundamentalist preachers and Western-inspired seductions.

"It's the search for an Arab identity, but we don't have an identity," said Emile Slailaty, who directs music videos and commercials in Beirut. "They want to be free and Westernized, but at the same time they want to be conservative.

"Look at what they're doing with the hijab. They're tying it different ways and doing more things with it to make it more sexy, fashionable. This is so trendy; young ladies can have lots of color but still be wearing a veil."

It is this in-between cultural landscape that Abu Haiba and other moderate Islamists want to seize from the provocative imagery and iconography of the West.

The Arab world has been absorbing and rejecting the West for centuries, since the Crusades and later when Napoleon's armies marched across the desert with books on the Enlightenment. What's troubling Islamists today, however, is the ubiquitous and consuming nature of Western culture; its capitalism and liberalism are at once dizzying and alarming, especially in the Middle East, where much of the population is poor and angry about its leaders' inability to improve their lives.

Muslim clerics worry that exposure to such unattainable materialism will weaken religious devotion, from the village prayer room to the city mosque. Their concern marks the crucial, antagonistic divide between a secular West that separates religion and state and a Muslim East where conservatives and many moderates adhere to Sharia law -- the strict belief that religion, government and society are indivisible.

"America targets only your religion, it takes your religion away, it will take everything away from you," radical Sheik Fawzi Said told worshipers in Cairo. "The devil knows that and it is the devil that drives the Americans."

Reclaiming religion

Meanwhile, Arab media moguls are reminiscent of cultural magpies, borrowing from the West to create sophisticated, hybrid television programs, such as reality shows and spinoffs of "Friends," to appeal to Muslim sensibilities. The result is Saudi rappers and an outspoken Egyptian sex therapist who wears a veil and speaks as knowledgeably about orgasms as she does about the prophet Muhammad.

Abu Haiba is distilling his own voice amid the clatter. He epitomizes the progressive Islamist. Urbane, lightly bearded and English-speaking, he talks of the complexities of infusing art with religion. He is careful to show plurality -- he happily mentions that he has a Jewish friend -- but is insistent that Islam should permeate all aspects of life. During a recent interview, he excused himself briefly to answer the sunset call to prayer.

Like other Egyptians raised in the 1970s, Abu Haiba grew up amid the trappings of the West. Miniskirts were common in Cairo and hijabs were many fewer than today; the children of the rich were often schooled in Europe and the U.S. But by the 1980s, a pan-Islamic revival replaced decades of failed Arab nationalism. The fervor spread to the young professionals, who, missing a religious core themselves, guided their children toward the Koran.

"The scene at the nursery school is the embodiment of today's Egypt," said Abu Haiba, who has three daughters. "The blond, unveiled mother arrives in high heels. The little girls look to their mothers who look so Western, yet the mothers want their daughters to wear the veil and pray. Mother and father want a religious life for their kids even though they were raised without it."

The intent of his production company, Light of the East, which has raised $4 million from investors, is to popularize Islam for a younger generation. The music video channel is expected to launch in June. Egyptian authorities closely monitor such ventures by Islamists and Abu Haiba has kept an air of secrecy around the project. He wouldn't give the names of his investors.

Sitting at his desk the other day, Abu Haiba played a promo for the channel on a large flat-screen TV. It cited ratings and demographics: In Egypt, 15- to 24-year-olds make up 50% to 64% of viewers tuning in to nearly 70 music channels. That group makes up 0% of the religious programming market.

That's a disturbing statistic for Abu Haiba, a mechanical engineer whose religious evolution mirrors that of many professionals of his generation. During his undergraduate years at Cairo University, Abu Haiba, who has been writing poems and plays since he was 13, founded a theater troupe. At the same time, he explored different strands of Islam, including extremism, before settling on the political and spiritual fusion espoused by the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood party, which has wide support among the middle and educated classes.

Abu Haiba's connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, which won 20% of seats in parliament in 2005 and since has seen hundreds of its members jailed, earned him a file with the state security services. He says the dossier is full of "fairy tales" but that in his artistic work, except for an occasional battle with censors, he has not been harassed. His new play, "The Code," a meditation on Western influence in his nation, brought closer scrutiny.

The play tells the story of the invasion of Egypt by a fictional nation strongly resembling the U.S. The conquered are controlled by robots and reclaim their freedom and cultural heritage only when they turn to God. The religious subtext is subtle, but persuasive. The villainous superpower craves Egypt's sand -- not gulf oil -- to manufacture silicon for its technological empire. The defeated people are powerless, becoming scared, yet seduced by the invader.

"The point of the play," said Abu Haiba, "is to ask the question: What happened to us? We were such a great nation. We lost our souls."

The America he portrays in "The Code" was borrowed from years earlier when he put a Muslim spin on one of Hollywood's most watched and globally successful sitcoms. In 1998, Abu Haiba was a marketing manager for Suzuki in Cairo when a colleague introduced him to a group of Saudi investors looking for a manager for a new media production company, Light of the East. Abu Haiba produced a series called "Boys and Girls," a chaste, Arabic version of "Friends."

A new approach

The show wasn't a hit, and Abu Haiba teamed up with friend Amr Khaled, a former accountant turned moderate Islamist preacher who was captivating young professionals, especially women who were seeking a less patriarchal interpretation of the Koran.

In 1999, Abu Haiba and Khaled collaborated on "Words From the Heart," a mainstream evangelical series that featured uplifting music and spiritual pep-talks from the likes of Soheir Babli, a renowned Egyptian actress who has donned a veil and dedicated her life to Islam.

Abu Haiba's Saudi investors weren't happy. There were no bearded clerics, no fundamentalist fervor. That's exactly what Abu Haiba wanted -- spontaneity instead of august recitations of holy texts. But other networks weren't interested, either. The show seemed unclassifiable, a moderate Islamic message presented in an Oprah-style format.

With no distributor, Abu Haiba passed tapes of the shows to street vendors. He sold 13,000 copies, and that quickly grew into tens of thousands more. The satellite channel Dream TV offered Abu Haiba and Khaled air time for the four original shows and 11 new episodes. "People suddenly started talking about this new trend, of how to plant the root of Islam in life," he said.

Abu Haiba is hoping for similar success with his music video channel, and sees an opportunity to loosen the grip of the West. In the promo for the channel, the narrator proclaims, "We must exert all effort to defend what's precious to us. . . . We can't turn a blind eye to this ghost who sneaks into our houses."

jeffrey.fleishman @latimes.com

Noha El-Hennawy of The Times' Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... full.story
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200 hurt in Dhaka as Islamist bodies protest law for women
Dhaka, April 12: Bangladesh's top judge and an Indian jurist have come out strongly in support of a move to formulate a law to ensure equal rights for women even as Islamist bodies termed it 'anti-Quran' and clashed on the streets, leaving 200 wounded.

"Women are about a half of the total population. Hence, their demand for equal rights is logical. Then why are various incidents taking place now on the issue?" Chief Justice M Ruhul Amin remarked at a seminar Friday as protests entered the second day.

He said: "The demand for equal rights for women in every aspect of life is logical."

Ombudsman of West Bengal, Samaresh Banerjee, who addressed the event as the guest of honour, said judicial systems in South Asian countries are not well equipped to deal with crimes on gender issues.

"Gender justice is a new jurisprudence all over the world," Banerjee said, underscoring the need for initiating judicial education on gender issues in the eight member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc).

Meanwhile, the police battled protestors in Dhaka and the Chittagong port city, the United News of Bangladesh (UNB) news agency said.

Bangladesh's Ismalist bodies that have forged a front are protesting the recently announced national women development policy.

The marchers outside Dhaka's Baitul Mukarram mosque chanted slogans demanding the resignation of Women and Children Affairs Adviser Rasheda K Chowdhury and of the interim government of Chief Advisor Fakhruddin Ahmed.

Three members of Islamist outfits beat up a policeman after the cop fell behind his retreating colleagues who chased the agitators near the mosque, a newspaper said Saturday.

The police used batons and fired rubber bullets and tear gas to break up the demonstrations. At least 52 policemen and five journalists were injured.

Hundreds of people who had gone to the mosque for Friday prayers were trapped inside.

Chief Adviser Ahmed, performing the prime ministerial functions, announced the National Women Development Policy-2008 on March 8, triggering protests from Islamist organisations.

Since then, some radical groups have been claiming that the policy gives equal inheritance rights to men and women, while the government maintained there is no such provision.

In efforts to scotch the discontent, four advisers of the caretaker government met Islamist leaders on March 27 and formed a review committee headed by the acting Khatib of Baitul Mukarram Mosque.

A report by the committee is due by April 16.

Bureau Report
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Egypt - A bit more religious freedom


Egypt

A bit more religious freedom

Feb 14th 2008 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition


Apostasy need not necessarily be punished by death

Get article background

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, Egypt revised its secular constitution to enshrine Muslim sharia as “the principal source of legislation”. To most citizens, most of the time, that seeming contradiction—between secularism and religion—has not made much difference. Nine in ten Egyptians are Sunni Muslims and expect Islam to govern such things as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Nearly all the rest profess Christianity or Judaism, faiths recognised and protected in Islam. But to the small minority who embrace other faiths, or who have tried to leave Islam, it has, until lately, made an increasingly troubling difference.

Members of Egypt's 2,000-strong Bahai community, for instance, have found they cannot state their religion on the national identity cards that all Egyptians are obliged to produce to secure such things as driver's licences, bank accounts, social insurance and state schooling. Hundreds of Coptic Christians who have converted to Islam, often to escape the Orthodox sect's ban on divorce, find they cannot revert to their original faith. In some cases, children raised as Christians have discovered that, because a divorced parent converted to Islam, they too have become officially Muslim, and cannot claim otherwise.

Such restrictions on religious freedom are not directly a product of sharia, say human-rights campaigners, but rather of rigid interpretations of Islamic law by over-zealous officials. In their strict view, Bahai belief cannot be recognised as a legitimate faith, since it arose in the 19th century, long after Islam staked its claim to be the final revelation in a chain of prophecies beginning with Adam. Likewise, they brand any attempt to leave Islam, whatever the circumstances, as a form of apostasy, punishable by death.

But such views have lately been challenged. Last year Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti, who is the government's highest religious adviser, declared that nowhere in Islam's sacred texts did it say that apostasy need be punished in the present rather than by God in the afterlife. In the past month, Egyptian courts have issued two rulings that, while restricted in scope, should ease some bothersome strictures. Bahais may now leave the space for religion on their identity cards blank. Twelve former Christians won a lawsuit and may now return to their original faith, on condition that their identity documents note their previous adherence to Islam.

Small steps, perhaps, but they point the way towards freedom of choice and citizenship based on equal rights rather than membership of a privileged religion.
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"Muslims Try to Balance Traditions, U.S. Culture on Path to Marriage"

By Michelle Boorstein ("Washington Post", May 27, 2008)

As imam of one of the Washington region's largest mosques, Mohamed Magid counsels married couples, including those with a problem he sees among Muslim Americans: husbands and wives who were virtual strangers before they wedded.

Islamic practice bans unsupervised dating, and in transient 2008 America,
traditional Muslims may wind up far from families who once oversaw the
connection of two single people. Many African American Muslims are converts and do not have Muslim relatives who can help with the process.

A few years ago, Magid, imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling, started something new: required premarital counseling for people who marry at the mosque. His wife recently launched a singles program meant to honor modesty and cut to the chase: participants meet in groups to discuss scriptural problems, read stories, and make lists of what they think are the most important characteristics for a Muslim wife or husband in the United States.

Although premarital counseling and singles programs are common for some faith groups, they are new in U.S. mosques, placing Magid and his wife on the vanguard of a drive to update Muslim practices and institutions surrounding marriage. The movement stems from concern among many Muslim American leaders that families are not keeping up with cultural changes, leading people to divorce and marry multiple times, or become alienated either from Islam or from mainstream American life.

Key issues include what Islam says about interfaith marriage, how well Muslims can know each another before they marry, and what the modern version is of a "wali," or guardian, a figure in Islam who is supposed to help women pick the right husbands.

"Generation gaps, cultural differences when people from the United States marry someone from overseas, interfaith marriage -- the issue of marriage is one of the most important in Islam here right now," Magid said. "Anytime there is a program at the mosque about these things, it's completely packed."

A commonly discussed problem is the surplus of single Muslim women. This stems partly from Islamic practice's broader acceptance of men marrying outside the faith than women.

Daisy Khan, a New York activist who counsels couples with her husband, an imam, organized a Valentine's Day event for singles -- 15 men and 63 women attended. Although she used to feel torn about interfaith marriage, she is now concerned that women will either be left unmarried or leave their faith. She tries to connect Muslim couples but also thinks pious Muslim women should be able to marry non-Muslims who also are pious.

"It's my obligation to shift a little, to give a little because it's important
for them to stay within the faith," she said. "You have to clear up the mandate of: What is God's mission? I see God's hand in this."

In a Pew Research Center poll of Muslim Americans released last year, 54 percent of women said interfaith marriage is acceptable, compared with 70 percent of men.

Marriage practices are a growing issue among Muslims in part because melding into the mainstream is increasingly their goal, experts said. This is true for many first- and second-generation Muslims and U.S.-born converts. It is a complex balance, however, testing relations between parents and children and within new couples.

Many Muslim dating and marriage traditions exist to promote sexual reserve, particularly among women, but in 2008, separation between potential mates has lost its cultural moorings.

"It creates these experiences of weirdness where you're more comfortable with [non-Muslim] John at work than Mohamed" at the mosque, said Zarinah El Amin-Naeem, 28, an anthropologist.

The Muslim Alliance in North America, a national group made up largely of
prominent black Muslims, held its first national conference in the fall and
named marriage reform as one of its top priorities. A concern is the rush into marriage, either to have sex or because structures that once screened potential spouses, such as close-knit, large families and cultural isolation, have diminished.

"In Islamic culture there is no dating and no kind of middle ground, so the
sense is, if this person is a good person, let's get married. The impulse isn't to prolong a courting relationship. Our advocacy is it needs to be prolonged somewhat," said Ihsan Bagby, co-founder of the Muslim Alliance in North America.

Issues related to marriage play out differently across the Muslim American community. The problem of strangers marrying is more common among African American Muslims than among immigrant families because many are converts and might not have families involved in their faith lives, experts said. Tensions surrounding interfaith marriages are more common among Muslims from South Asia, who tend to be more traditional, than those from Africa or Turkey.

And, of course, many Muslims are secular or are liberal about their faith,
perhaps using a Muslim dating Web site such as naseeb.com but not agonizing over premarital sex or seeking a wali. Even for non-observant Muslims, however, "when it comes to the issue of marriage, because Muslim families tend to be so involved, there is more tradition involved than in other aspects of their lives," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

Interfaith marriage is a huge topic with wide cultural ramifications. Because Islamic tradition, not law, holds that a Muslim man can intermarry but not a woman, a substantial gender gap in the dating pool has opened as children and grandchildren of immigrants have grown up.

The Koran says for Muslims to marry "believers," the meaning of which has long been the source of great debate but has been widely interpreted to include Christians and Jews. Although the Koran does not address the gender issue directly, tradition has held that women are more easily subjugated, and therefore a Muslim woman in an interfaith marriage could be forced by a Christian or Jew to live and raise her children outside of Islam, while a Muslim man in an interfaith relationship would be able to control the household's faith.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, an Islamic family law expert at Emory University, argues that gender dynamics have changed in a way that makes interfaith marriage more reasonable under Islamic tradition. "In social reality today, men are not dominant in the marriage relationship. The rationale of historic rule is no longer valid," he said. "But people are not willing to accept this. This is a major source of tensions."

Qur'an Shakir, who runs national Muslim dating events and writes a column on Muslim dating, said a lot of people debate the value of a dowry today, even as a symbolic commitment, while others think that the position of wali should be updated to be more like a relationship mentor and less like a guardian, and that men should have walis, too.

"People need to be open to different interpretations of the Koran," she said
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RELIGION
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139433/page/1

The New Face of Islam
A critique of radicalism is building within the heart of the Muslim world.

Christopher Dickey and Owen Matthews
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:07 PM ET May 31, 2008

Back in the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden had a problem, and it was Islam. He wanted to say the Qur'an gave his followers license to kill innocents—and themselves—in the cause of "jihad." That was how he could justify his global campaign of terror. But that's not what the Muslim holy book says, and that's not the way it was interpreted by any of the great scholars and preachers of the faith.

So bin Laden set about spinning the revelations contained in the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the Hadith, which provide much of the context for actual religious practice in the Muslim world. The Saudi millionaire wrote a diatribe that he called a declaration of war and then a fatwa, or religious edict, cherry-picking quotations from Islamic Scripture and calling on dubious scholars to back him up. The tracts were political propaganda, not theology, but for his purpose they worked very well. The apocalyptic notion of holy war he promoted—and the reality of it that he demonstrated on 9/11—became the dominant vision of Islam for those with little understanding of the faith, whether in the West or, indeed, the Muslim world. Even many religious scholars were intimidated.

Now that's starting to change. Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, "Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda's vision of the future." At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden's nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

Intellectually and theologically, a lot of the most ambitious work is being done by a group of scholars based in Ankara, Turkey, who expect to publish new editions of the Hadith before the end of the year. They have collected all 170,000 known narrations of the Prophet's sayings. These are supposed to record Muhammad's words and deeds as a guide to daily life and a key to some of the mysteries of the Qur'an. But many of those anecdotes came out of a specific historical context, and those who told the stories or, much later, recorded them, were not always reliable. Sometimes they confused "universal values of Islam with geographical, cultural and religious values of their time and place," says Mehmet Gormez, a theology professor at the University of Ankara who's working on the project. "Every Hadith narration has ... a context. We want to give every narration a home again."

Mehmet Aydin, who first conceived the Hadith project four years ago, when he was Turkey's minister of state for religious affairs, says it is obvious that in the seventh century, the time of the Prophet, life was very different. One Hadith, for instance, forbids women from traveling alone. In Saudi Arabia, this and other sayings are given as a reason women should not be allowed to drive. "This is clearly not a religious injunction but related to security in a specific time and place," says Gormez. In fact, the Prophet says elsewhere that he misses those days, evidently in his recent memory, when women could travel alone from Yemen to Mecca. In its first three centuries "Islam was interacting with Greek, Iranian and Indian cultures and at every encounter [scholars] reinterpreted Islam according to new conditions," says Gormez. "They were not afraid to rethink Islam then."

Liberal Muslim thinkers have made similar arguments in the past, but they were outliers and often not theologians. The Turkish project, on the other hand, has the quiet backing of the ruling AK Party, the world's most successful, democratically elected party with Islamist roots. The professors involved are quick to deny that their work represents some sort of Islamic Reformation—there is no Martin Luther among them, no theses are being nailed to a door. They call what they're doing a "rethinking" or a "re-understanding" of the sacred texts "according to modern concepts like democracy, human rights, women's rights and universal values," says Gormez. Yet their work has far-reaching potential, given the credibility of the source.

Many states, even those like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia that have tolerated radicalism in the past, have come to see that their own stability depends on encouraging greater moderation. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has moved to curb the zealous excesses of some 10,000 imams on the government payroll. The government isn't rethinking basic doctrines, one of the king's advisers, who wasn't authorized to speak on the record, told NEWSWEEK: "Let's say there is a theological debate about how to present their ideas and advice to the public." If a woman dresses a little immodestly by Saudi religious standards, it should be enough simply to say that without calling her a harlot, threatening her with punishment or worse. The idea is to tone down the fire and brimstone, which has inspired young Saudis to sign up for jihad in Iraq and elsewhere.

Across the Muslim world, people appear ready for this new message. Growing middle classes are no longer willing to accept the pieties of peasant life as guides for public and private conduct. "The rules of religion stay the same, but people's attitudes toward religion have changed," says Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government is working to bring Turkey into the European Union. "The urbanization of the country has brought increased wealth and a different understanding of life." Even in theocratic Iran, police frequently cancel speeches by 49-year-old mullah Mohsen Kadivar because, authorities say, "they may cause traffic and public disturbances outside." Kadivar's message? That the Iranian system of velayat-e-faqih, in which a cleric has the final say on all matters of state, is fatally flawed. "It is a centralized interpretation of Islam that is not democratic," says Kadivar. "The government should be answerable to ordinary human beings who live on earth!"

Bin Laden's prescription for change, meanwhile, has led to nothing but death and destruction. Radicals have turned their anger and their bombs against other Muslims whom they deem apostates or simply inconsequential. As a result, they've found themselves isolated. In Iraq, Al Qaeda's forces are on the ropes and largely indistinguishable from gangsters. In Pakistan, polls show public support for suicide bombings has dropped from more than 30 percent five years ago, to less than 9 percent today. In an open letter last year, a Saudi scholar bin Laden had long revered, Sheik Salman al-Oudah, demanded, "Brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocents among children, elderly, the weak, and women have been killed and made homeless in the name of Al Qaeda?"

The most ferocious attack on bin Laden's version of holy war has come from one of the few really respected religious thinkers within jihadist ranks, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif. Now imprisoned in Egypt, he has known Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's second in command, since they were in university. In a book his Egyptian jailers allowed him to publish last year, al-Sharif writes about the way the Sharia, Islamic law, has been tarnished by Al Qaeda's actions: "There are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of Jihad!" That, said al-Sharif, is unacceptable in the eyes of Allah, of his law and of his people. Once again bin Laden has a problem, and it is Islam.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/139433

****
As reported in LATimes

Jobs suffer as work is halted for woship.
Ten minutes is enough, says a respected
cleric
.

by Jefferey Fleishman

The call to prayer is pervasive,comforting echo
across the Middle East, but a prominent Islamic cleric
has urged Muslims to spend less time prostrating and
more time working .Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi said people
often prayer to slip away from their jobs longer than
they should.

" Praying is a good thing...10 minutes should be enough,"
according to a fatwa, or edict, posted on Qaradawi's website.
The sheik's opinion is shared by many clerics and highlights
the predicament between economic productivity and religious
devotion in a part of the world where piety is prized.

Devout Muslims pray five times a day during set time periods,
two of which fall during working hours.They kneel in mosques
or unfurl prayer mats in offices,clogging aisles and bringing
work to a halt.The time for ablution-washing face,arms and feet-
and a prayer can take 10 minutes,but many Muslims spend as
many as 30 minutes on the ritual.

Companies and store oweners have been complaining for years
about lost labor minutes and inefficiency.The problem goes well
beyond prayer time.A recent government study found that Egypt's
six million govt. employess,a massive platoon of bureaucracy,are
each estimated to spend only 27 minutes a day working.

If frustrated citizens or customers ask to speed things up,they are
met with a sigh,a roll of the eyes and the centuries-old reply:
"Inshahallah" (God willing).

Jeffrey.fleishman@...
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Post by kmaherali »

Author Looks to the Koran For 99 New Superheroes

By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 11, 2008; A14

KUWAIT CITY -- Naif al-Mutawa was in a London taxi with his sister
when she asked when he'd go back to writing children's books.
Mutawa, a Kuwaiti psychologist with two doctorates and an MBA from
Columbia, said the question sparked a chain of thoughts:

To go back to writing after all that education, it would have to be
something big, something with the potential of Pokémon, the Japanese
cartoon that was briefly banned by Saudi religious authorities. God
would have been disappointed by that, he thought; God has 99
attributes, or names, including tolerance.

"And then the idea formed in my mind," Mutawa said. "Heroes with the
99 attributes."

He mixed his deep religious faith, business acumen and firsthand
experience with other cultures -- his childhood summers were spent
at a predominantly Jewish camp in New Hampshire -- to create The 99,
a comic-book series about superheroes imbued with the 99 attributes
of God. Those traits represent one of Islam's most recognizable
concepts.

Mutawa's superheroes are modern, secular and spiritual, moving
seamlessly between East and West. They come from 99 countries and
are split between males and females.

The heroes include Darr the Afflicter, an American paraplegic named
John Wheeler, who manipulates nerve endings to transmit or prevent
pain. Noora the Light -- Dana Ibrahim, a university student from the
United Arab Emirates -- shows people the light and dark inside
themselves. Mumita the Destroyer, a ferocious fighter, is Catarina
Barbarosa, a Portuguese bombshell in tight clothes.

They distribute aid to starving Afghan villagers, battle elephant
poachers in Africa, fight the evil Rughal and train to increase
their powers.

"I wanted to create something that would be a classic, not another
made-in-the-fifth-world product," said Mutawa, 37, who has four
sons. "It was either going to be Spiderman or nothing."

After returning from London to Kuwait, Mutawa raised $7 million --
some from his old Columbia classmates, the rest from Persian Gulf
investors -- and set up the Teshkeel media group in 2004. He hired
some of the best people in the industry, including writers and
artists who had worked at Marvel and DC Comics. His current writing
partner, Stuart Moore, is a writer on the new Iron Man comics.

In November 2006, Mutawa's first comic book hit the newsstands.

Since then, his creation has gained many fans but also faced a
rumble of criticism across the Muslim world. Some have disapproved
of heroines' makeup and tight clothing. Others view the
personification of God's attributes as blasphemous. One Kuwaiti
cleric said the series promotes reliance on humans instead of God,
counter to the Koran's teachings.

Mutawa acknowledges he did not consult a cleric before creating the
series. "We should not allow a very limited number of people to tell
us how to practice our religion. An Islam where I can be an active
participant is the only Islam I can belong to. I believe in Islam
and I also believe in evolution," he said, sitting in his office in
a traditional long white robe and headdress.

When it was time to raise a second round of financing in 2007,
Mutawa sold 30 percent of Teshkeel to Unicorn Investment Bank, an
Islamic bank based in Bahrain. "Now, when people ask me religious
questions, I ask them to go to the board of Unicorn," he said,
smiling.

Over the past year, he said, he has given dozens of lectures around
the world, focused on pushing an Islam at odds with no one. "We
shouldn't be fighting globalization," he told a crowd in Indonesia
at the launch of the series there last year. "We should be
participating in it by putting our own ideas out there."

Mutawa describes The 99 as a modern tale with an ancient Islamic
architecture. Ninety-nine gemstones imbued with the wisdom and
knowledge of Baghdad's famous Dar al-Hikma library during the 13th
century, the golden age of Islam, are scattered around the world,
some on Christopher Columbus's ships, after an explosion of the dome
in which the stones were embedded. The stones seem to find the
people who become the superheroes, whose mystical link to the gems
gives them special powers.

Worldwide sales of the comic in English and Arabic, including in the
United States, have yet to exceed 30,000 copies a month, including
Internet downloads, but Mutawa has been inundated with licensing
demands. An American company wants to brand its halal hot dogs with
The 99. He has signed deals with Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian and
North African publishing companies.

In his office are pencils, rulers, backpacks, notebooks and folders
with The 99 logo, by a Spanish company. A Dubai firm is interested
in making action figures. A deal for an animated series by a
European company will be announced in July, Mutawa said. Last month,
he signed a deal for six theme parks.

This semester, the American University of Kuwait offered a
class, "The Superhero in the Arab World," that focused on The 99. As
a final project, students created their own comic-book heroes.

When Mutawa recently visited the class, a young student in a black
head scarf and makeup told him she was shocked by a scene in which
Noora the Light said she was going to go pray to God, even though
her hair was not covered.

"Why?" Mutawa asked. "Do you think only people who wear the hijab
ask God for help? There isn't just one way to be Muslim. There are
at least 99 different ways to be Muslim."
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... 6454.story

From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
Islamic law plays a role in British legal system

Muslims can seek rulings on family or property issues from Sharia councils, which work in cooperation with the civil courts.
By Kim Murphy


Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 20, 2008

LONDON — It was a clear case of irreconcilable differences.

The wife said there was no love left in the marriage, she wanted a divorce. The husband insisted that she had been put under the influence of a taweez, a talisman, that had erased her affections for him. He refused to divorce.

"The husband says he has been pushed away from his home because of this taweez business," said Sheik Haitham al-Haddad, a judge in North London's Sharia council, a panel of Muslim scholars gathered in a back room of London's biggest mosque to determine whether the woman should be granted a divorce under Islamic law.

For British Muslims, many of whom have one foot in Piccadilly Circus and the other in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Somalia, the British legal system is available, as it is to all. But it is singularly impotent when it comes to civil issues such as marriage, divorce and other disputes whose dispensation in heaven is often perceived as more crucial than any ruling that might be handed down by an English judge in a horsehair wig.

A tumultuous debate was set off in Britain this year when the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said it was time to consider "crafting a just and constructive relationship between Islamic law and the statutory law of the United Kingdom." Eventually, he hinted, this could mean allowing Britain's 1.8 million Muslims to seek legal recourse in Islamic courts in certain limited cases, such as marriage and divorce, as an alternative to the civil court system.

Little known to the general public, though, is that Sharia is quietly being applied every day in Britain, via Sharia councils that dispense Islamic civil justice in more than half a dozen mosques across the country.

The councils do not involve themselves in criminal law or any aspects of civil law in which they would be in direct conflict with British civil codes. The vast majority of their cases cover marriage and divorce. By consent of all parties, they may also arbitrate issues of property, child custody, housing and employment disputes, though their rulings are not binding unless submitted to the civilian courts.

"It is known that English judges are willing to accept agreements like this that are reached in Sharia courts, as long as it has been put into proper form," said Mohammed Siddique, a paralegal who advises the Sharia council in Dewsbury, in northern England, on the technicalities of British law.

"It saves time and hassle for the court, and it shows that both parties are willing to compromise and reach some sort of agreement."

In some cases, women have no trouble obtaining a divorce in civil court but run into unforeseen difficulties when they approach Muslim scholars to seal it with their blessing.

A few weeks ago, a Somali woman whose husband had been wounded and subsequently disappeared during the turmoil in her homeland several years ago approached the Sharia council in North London. She was accompanied by her neighbor, who had been helping her care for her children, and had offered to marry her if she obtained an Islamic divorce in addition to her civil divorce.

Instead of the expected rubber stamp, the couple got a tongue lashing.

"How do you allow a man who is not your husband to interfere with your life? He's proposing to marry you while you're already married? How come, sister?" Haddad asked.

"Because I haven't seen my husband in eight years," said the woman, looking confused and a little panicky.

"And you, brother," Haddad said, turning to the man, "do you allow this for any one of your relatives, that she is married, and while she is married, you allow someone to interfere?"

"I didn't interfere with her, and Allah knows I didn't interfere," the man said.

The judges told the woman to find a Somali cleric, who might be able to help her prove her husband is dead, or had abandoned her. Should that happen, they said, she could have her divorce, and marry whom she pleased.

Government officials have raised no objections to the councils, which first emerged in 1982 in Birmingham, because they operate in cooperation with British civil law, and British courts still issue all necessary legal decrees. Those who advocate granting some official status to the councils' deliberations, as the archbishop of Canterbury seemed to suggest, point out that Jews in Britain operate religious courts whose rulings, when all parties voluntarily participate, are recognized under civil law as a form of binding arbitration.

"Almost everything, Muslims living in Britain, or other societies that traditionally have not been Muslim societies, can arrange for themselves. They can arrange to have food slaughtered in halal fashion. They can set up Islamic financial instruments. They can build mosques. The one key area where there's a vacuum regards the access of women to divorce," said John R. Bowen, professor of anthropology at Missouri's Washington University, explaining the need for the Sharia councils.

Under many interpretations of Islamic law, men can easily obtain a divorce -- known as talaq -- by simply declaring their intention three times. A woman, however, usually needs the pronouncement of a Muslim judge who is a scholar in the field of Islamic jurisprudence.

"In most other European countries, there is no such council or judge. Many imams are approached at the mosque and asked, 'Can you give me an Islamic divorce? And they have to say, 'I have no standing to do that,' " Bowen said.

Suhaib Hasan, who sits on the North London council, said it tries to complement the work of the British civil courts. At the same time, he said, the Sharia council offers divorces that are cheaper and quicker than those available in the British courts, though a civil decree is still needed for legal dissolution of the marriage, and in the case of any property or child custody disputes.

"A woman can get a divorce from the civil court, but she will still come to us," he said. "Why? Because she has to satisfy her conscience as well. And in this way, we are providing a service to the Muslim community, and complementing the British legal system."

Shawzia, a 32-year-old physician who obtained a khula, the Islamic term for when a woman ends a marriage, through the London mosque this year, said her civil divorce didn't feel sufficient.

"Before this happened, I didn't consider myself divorced, spiritually," she said. "I couldn't move on with my life. I needed completion. I still felt married."

The Sharia council in Dewsbury operates in a former pub that has been converted to a mosque and Muslim school.

"Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim"-- In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate" -- one of the three judges intones as they begin their deliberations, which drift between Urdu, Arabic, Gujarati and English, depending on the people who appear before them.

The day's business begins with a man who is having an affair after 25 years of marriage; he is willing to divorce, but only if he gets to keep half the house. The wife, wearing a long dress over trousers and a scarf, is sitting nervously at the side of the room. The men sit together around a large table: her father, her husband and the judges.

She says she deserves the whole house; it is only right, she says, in light of her husband's infidelities.

But that, the judges advise, is too much. She can continue living in the house, and her husband will continue paying the mortgage, but once it's sold, he ought to get half the proceeds. She is reluctant, but agrees.

A nervous young nurse comes in next, her father and brother waiting outside. She says she was married to her first cousin in Pakistan by family arrangement when she was 13.

"Were you forced into this marriage?" asks one of the judges.

"No, I wasn't forced into it. It's just the way families do it," she says.

"But they don't allow that in Pakistan. Have you got a marriage certificate with you?" asks one of the council members, Moulana Ilyas Dalal, who is also a chaplain at a prison.

She produces a marriage certificate that states she was 16 at the time of her wedding, but the birth date printed in the corner of the same certificate would mean she was actually 13 -- suggesting that her age was inflated by whoever filled out the form in order to comply with Pakistani law.

"My God. Wow. And then what happened?" Dalal says.

The girl says she became pregnant while she was still in school. Her husband, she says, began beating her, and she swallowed 150 sleeping tablets in an attempt to end her life.

She returned to Britain to have the child, but her husband didn't join her for five years, largely because she hesitated to apply for a British visa on his behalf because of his behavior. When he arrived, she says, he began to sexually abuse her young son, at which point she reported him to the British authorities and sought a divorce.

"I thought he was really changed. He was so nice. If I'd have known for a second he was going to be like this, I wouldn't have called him over," she says.

Now, her husband is living with another woman in Pakistan, and she wants a divorce.

Have the couple tried raazi nama -- a process of reconciliation, aided by the family, the judges wonder?

At least nine times, she says, though the process has been made especially difficult because her sister is married to her husband's brother and has been "brainwashed" by the husband's family.

"I'm done. I've been doing raazi nama for the last 10 years. That's it. I'm done," she says. "Now he's applied for contact with my little boy, and I'm not losing my son to him. No way."

Because the child abuse case is in the British criminal court system, it will have to be resolved there, the judges say. But if the woman writes a letter to the Sharia council certifying that she has tried and failed to reconcile the marriage, the judges say, she can be granted an Islamic divorce.

Back in London, the judges there foundered over what they saw as the irrelevant issue of the taweez. The husband said he had paid about $10,000 to have the spell undone, but it seemed to have been wasted money.

"It seems these taweez people are just going into business now, one doing taweez, the other undoing taweez," said council member Hasan, with just a trace of irritation.

"We cannot take into consideration taweez in deciding Sharia matters," said the council president, Mohammed Abu Said.

What to do? Call in the parties, see who might still love whom.

"A meeting should take place," Hasan declared, and the judges flipped to the next document in their thick stacks of troubled lives.

kim.murphy@latimes.com
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http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/post ... amism.html

Lifestyle Islamism
Read This in Arabic »
The theme of our next guest voice explores two concepts not usually associated with each other: Islamism and consumer culture.

Islamists - those who believe the Koran is a political manifesto as well as moral guide - often chose to live differently than the rest of society, and as an increasing number of enterprising businessmen are now discovering, where there are choices, there’s money to be made.

Ursula Lindsey is an American journalist who has spent the past five years in Cairo, the self-styled seat of Middle Eastern culture, and writes a blog on Middle Eastern art and culture. Here she explores this brave new world of Islam as a lifestyle choice.


Moez Masoud is a young Egyptian TV preacher who's getting an increasing amount of attention in Cairo and beyond, offering Islam's version of American televangelism. He started out doing programs for expatriate Muslims, in English – a niche market - but he’s now a rising star among Arabic language preachers as well. He is probably the second most popular preacher after super-star Amr Khaled. As you can see from the clips available on YouTube, he has a very heart-felt, enthusiastic delivery, and a progressive (not to say New Age) outlook. He once explained his relationship to God to me during an interview in terms of a Bryan Adams song: "Everything I do, I do it for you. I would die for you. I'd cry for you. Walk the wild for you. etc." He concluded, "That is submission to Allah.” The message of someone like Masoud--globalized, pop-culture heavy--isn't anti-Western or anti-modernity. His real message is, "You can have everything the West has, just the Islamic version of it." Masoud is a representative of a larger trend of taking Western trends and concepts and re-branding them as Islamic. (Islamist TV executives who founded an Islamic satellite channel once told me their number one role model was Oprah.) Today you have Islamic fashion, Islamic real estate, Islamic recreation, Islamic soda, Islamic banking of course. You have veiled aerobics instructors that give classes only to women. You have magazine spreads on the latest most fashionable way to pin your hejab. You have tens of thousands of kids going to the concerts of Sami Youssef, who sings pop songs about the Prophet Muhammad and Allah. In today's Cairo, there is a large section of the population who express their religiosity through consumer choices. And there is a growing industry that capitalizes in a myriad ways on the "Islam" brand. This kind of "lifestyle Islam" is mostly devoid of political content. Masoud and Amr Khaled avoid any comment on domestic Egyptian politics--they certainly don't advocate for the overthrow of the state, or for any form of violence. In fact, when I interviewed Masoud I was struck by how naive his political views were--basically, that if everyone were to become "a good Muslim," all the country's problems would be solved. The preachers and the businessmen who support various Islamic ventures also aren't generally anti-Western. They want to beat the West at its own capitalist game--present Islam in a sleek, competitive, appealing package (and make a bit of profit along the way). Of course they are socially conservative by Western standards, and may have aspirations of eventually changing Egyptian society. But it seems to me that the middle class Egyptian who are fans of Masoud and who buy into an Islamic lifestyle just want progress and luxury with an Islamic coating. This movement, which Swiss researcher Patrick Haenni has labelled in his brilliant book as "Market Islam," is strikingly reminiscent of the Christian conservative movement in America, which also has gone into aggressive merchandising, and has its own media, TV stars and motivational literature, and an emphasis on material success.
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ISLAM IN A NEW WORLD
New Saudi Arabia university will have a Western feel

http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... full.story

Email Picture
KAUST
An artist's rendering of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).


King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will feature coed classes, a curriculum in English and other touches seen as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists.

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 13, 2008

THUWAL, SAUDI ARABIA -- Up the corniche, along a coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea.

Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation. When finished next year, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coed classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other touches loathed as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists.



Related Content
KAUST Map Construction
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology website
The West may be dependent on Saudi crude, now as high as $145 a barrel, but this campus outside an ancient fishing village is recognition that the country that is home to Islam's holiest shrines needs the likes of USC, Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to survive globalization.

An architect's rendering shows a campus of canals and reflecting pools running along sleek silver and glass libraries and laboratories. A marina with slips for 140 boats stands in a cove lighted by a tapered beacon. Students and professors will live in villas and apartments looking out on date palms and furnished with eggshell and white Swedish-style sofas and chairs.

Saudis have studied in the U.S. and Europe for decades, bringing back expertise without directly exposing the kingdom to Western classrooms and professors. But the new university is inviting the secular West a step closer in another ideological battle between Saudi reformers led by King Abdullah and the Wahhabi sect of puritanical Islam that has resisted outside influences since the days of desert caravans.

Pursuing happiness behind the veil "Saudis are beginning to realize they are not the center of the universe," said Tariq Maeena, a writer and aviation expert. "The king hopes that a young Saudi will be in a class with an American professor. The king is jabbing the conservatives from all sides. He's not doing it with a massive decree, but incrementally, and all the radicals can do is roll their eyes and say, 'Uh-oh, we're losing more power.' "

Amira Kashgary, a literature professor at a women's college, said, "We are part of the global world now. Whether we like it or not, and regardless of our political and religious systems, there are changes seeping through our lives.

"The radicals ran a wicked Internet campaign against the university. They said it is another sign liberals are invading us."

The kingdom's huge oil reserves cannot mask Saudi Arabia's problems: 40% of its population is younger than 18, its schools are backward and its economy is not diverse enough to compete in a high-tech future balanced between the West and the rising powers of China and India.

King Abdullah is building the university, along with six multibillion-dollar Economic Cities, to provide jobs and open the country to global markets. Conservatives fear that these international voices, from South Asian construction workers to Western scientists, will change the religious fabric.

"Men and women learning together should remain forbidden," said Mohammed Ben Yehia Nogeemy, a member of the Saudi Juristic Academy, a religious organization that issues fatwas. He said that such an atmosphere could be regarded as sedition and "if any Saudi official has the intention to allow the establishment of a coeducational university, that will be a big mistake that will need to be corrected."

But the king, for now, is a step ahead of the conservatives. Nogeemy was not in attendance on a recent afternoon when oil money seduced brainpower at a hotel along the Red Sea in Jidda.

Silver trays of hors d'oeuvres and alcohol-free champagne glided through a crowd of Western academics gathered for a conference on the university's goals. Soldiers with Humvees and .50-caliber machine guns stood guard outside to scare away would-be terrorists, while inside mathematicians and molecular biologists tried on blue university ball caps and pocketed Lamborghini pens left on seats as gifts.

The university, known as KAUST, is promising academic freedom, the mixing of cultures and religions, and subjects as varied as nanotechnology and crop development. The country's ubiquitous and often abusive morality police will not patrol the campus, depicted on the university's interactive website with unveiled women. Going unveiled is a crime in Saudi society that could lead to lashings and imprisonment.

KAUST will be "a new house of wisdom," Ali Ibrahim Naimi, the Saudi minister of petroleum and mineral resources, told the guests. He said world research projects and the Saudi economy, with a 12% unemployment rate, would benefit from the "easy flow of ideas and people into and out of the region."

To ensure that, KAUST is not under the jurisdiction of the Education Ministry, which is controlled by fundamentalists and often forbids the teaching of music, art and philosophy.

The project is overseen by Aramco, the Saudi oil company founded by U.S. firms in the 1930s. Aramco has experience in creating a parallel world: In its gated communities in the eastern part of the country, alcohol is available but hidden, there's a pee-wee baseball winter carnival, and Western women drive cars, a practice forbidden to Saudi women.

With a chocolate-scented cigar in one hand and a honey-flavored coffee in the other, Maeena sat in his favorite Jidda cafe, nodding hellos to young men with laptops and waiters who know his preferences. This is the world he likes, a place to write, a den of intellectual freedom in Saudi Arabia's most liberal city.

He said KAUST, which is being built 50 miles north of the cafe, is another sign that the country's religious and ideological barriers are weakening.

"It's an act of opening us up to a better side of education," said Maeena, who, like many of his generation, attended college in the U.S. "The West has planted those seeds of liberalism in me and thousands like me. We were young Saudis educated in the West in the '60s, '70s and '80s, but this slowed as the seeds of fundamentalism took hold here in the 1990s."

The Saud family's alliance with the Wahhabis dates to the 1700s, but the most recent wave of fundamentalism intensified in the 1980s and was fueled by anger over U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, leading to terrorist attacks.



When militants struck in the kingdom after the Sept. 11 attacks, the government began cracking down on Wahhabi religious schools and radical preachers. Abdullah has not moved as swiftly as many reformers would like -- Wahhabis control the courts, and ultraconservative members of the royal family hold key government posts, including the Interior Ministry.

"The king is older and doesn't have a lot of time," said Maeena, a columnist for the Arab News. "Every good Saudi says, 'I pray for the king's long life.' He is our hope. We were a pariah nation after Sept. 11, and he's slowly taking us out of this."

Samar Fatany, a radio commentator, said of the fundamentalists, "They are the ones who want to make us live in the dark ages of camels and caravans and tents."

But conservatives remain powerful. They desire Western scientific and technological advances, but want nothing to do with democracy, women's rights, religious rights and other cultural freedoms that cloud the Wahhabi goal of evoking the centuries-old golden era of Islam.

That vision was less threatened when the students of Maeena's generation went abroad to study. Now, with the new university rising, Nogeemy wants the professors to find separate lives, like the Aramco oil engineers before them.

"I do not fear any creeping Western influence," he said, "because Westerners who come to Saudi Arabia are experts of very high caliber who live in isolated communities where they can maintain their own culture."

Of the university, Nogeemy said, "We can tolerate that a male professor teaches female students. . . . There would not be sedition there. But male and female students should not be together."

After the alcohol-less cocktail party at the hotel in Jidda, the Western academics and their Saudi hosts retired. The slide shows that whirled with DNA-like designs were put away, and Sami M. Angawi, an architect, drove through the streets wondering whether the university would melt into the community or become another gated pocket of Western ideals.

Angawi stopped his car at a hospital he had designed. It was after midnight. The building didn't look like a hospital; one hallway resembled the nave of a cathedral, another opened to a mosque, and another to a courtyard bright with moonlight.

His intent, he said, was to mix different styles into one voice, to allow architectural nuances from one culture to seep into another.

"To just implant a foreign university here will not work," he said. "What do we do with it? Put fences around it? We don't allow it to interact with the rest of Saudi society?

"Do we just want science without culture? Does science grow without culture? You have to have a unity. Without interaction you create polarization, and with that the extreme will grow more extreme."

The sliding doors opened and Angawi stepped from the stone floor back into the night.

jeffrey.fleishman @latimes.com

Noha El-Hennawy of The Times' Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.
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Post by kmaherali »

The uses and abuses of lipstick
Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Sep 11, 2008

Twenty-four hours before the anniversary of 9/11, a specious debate has been raging in America. Forensically dissected is Barack Obama’s statement that you can slap lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

The “pig” is John McCain’s economic record. It’s not a reference to his running mate, Sarah Palin, who has described herself as a pitbull with lipstick.

Still, the Republican campaign is expertly fanning small-town resentment against urban elites to turn this into another culture war. Pitbulls, indeed.

Amid all that noise, I’ve learned of an attempt to make Sharia law friendlier for women. Problem is, this might be an effort to put lipstick on a legal pig.

No doubt, reactionary types will accuse me of having called Islam a “pig.” To these McCain-aping Muslims, I say: No way. No how. No chance. You’re not going to Palinize me.

Islam is a divinely inspired faith. Sharia is human interpretation of divinely inspired words. The world-renowned scholar, Prof. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, attests that Sharia law and Islamic faith are not the same. Read his latest book, Islam and the Secular State, and you’ll appreciate the professor’s point that Sharia, when encoded in law, often betrays the better angels of Islam.

So I have to wonder: Does any move to make Sharia law less unfair only amount to cosmetic change? Is the real journey to justice launched by avoiding religious law altogether and encouraging personal belief to be exactly that — personal?

Given the complexity of the issue, I don’t know the answer just yet. But I’m willing to ask the question, out loud.

Judge for yourself. Here’s the news story about an attempt by Muslims in Britain to update Sharia law so that married women have rights equal to those of their husbands. Let me know what you think.

And if you’re going to send me a threat, for God’s sake show a sense of humor. Write it in lipstick.

http://www.irshadmanji.com/im-the-uses- ... f-lipstick
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DELETED (It was already posted last year)
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First helpline in UAE to fight extreme interpretations of Islam
Dubai, October 10 2008

Muslim clergies in the UAE have put in place the world's first
Islamic helpline in an attempt to root out extreme interpretations
of Islam by extremists.

The UAE, which established the call centre three months ago, ensures
that the rulings based on Islamic law comply with the government's
moderate religious stance.

"The hardest questions I am asked involve sex. I feel shame, but I
have to answer the questions because it is my duty," Mufti
Abdulrahman Ammoura was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph
newspaper on Friday.

His advice counts as an official fatwa in the UAE, under new rules
issued by the General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Endowments.

A group of 48 Islamic scholars and Imams man the call centre
telephones from morning till evening and deliver rulings in an
attempt to root out extreme interpretations of Islam.

Muslims from all over the world are reaching out to the helpline,
with organisers putting the number at about 3,700 calls a day.

The helpline staff work in teams, with six men and two women on
six-hour shifts and a skeleton staff takes calls for "religious
emergencies" during the night, the report in the British daily said.

Callers have a three minute time slot and have the option of choosing
service in Arabic, Urdu or English.

The authorities are surprised by the overwhelming response. "We were
not prepared for the popularity. Already, we get more calls than
Emirates Airlines," one official said.

With growing popularity of the service, plans are being sketched to
employ extra 50 muftis and open satellite centres elsewhere in the
Muslim world.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... ory?page=1

From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
The Koran, punk rock and lots of questions

This much Hiba Siddiqui knows: She is a Muslim teenager living in America. But what does that mean for her?
By Erika Hayasaki

November 19, 2008

Reporting from Sugar Land, Texas — The front door shuts with a thud, and Hiba Siddiqui heeds her father's footsteps, heavy from a day at work, plodding across the foyer downstairs.

Time to change clothes, Hiba thinks, peeking her face over the balcony to shout "Hi, Baba!" before rushing into her bedroom, brightened by lime green and tangerine bed covers, splashed with the words "I ROCK." A magazine photo of a punk band called Anti-Flag is taped behind her door.

Hiba slips out of the white T-shirt with black letters that read "HOMOPHOBIA IS GAY," which she wore to Kempner High School, where she is a junior. It's one of a collection of slogans the 17-year-old has silk-screened on T-shirts in her bedroom, unbeknownst to her parents, both Muslim immigrants from Pakistan.

There are other aspects of Hiba's life lately she thinks they might not approve of either, like the Muslim punk music she has been listening to with lyrics such as "suicide bomb the GAP," or "Rumi was a homo." Or the novel she bought online, about rebellious Muslim teenagers in New York. It opens with: "Muhammad was a punk rocker, he tore everything down. Muhammad was a punk rocker and he rocked that town."

This much Hiba knows: She is a Muslim teenager living in America.

But what does that mean?

It is a question that pesters her, like the other questions she is afraid to ask her parents: Can she still be a good Muslim even though she does not dress in hijab or pray five times a day? If Islam is right, does that make other religions wrong? Is going to prom haram, or sinful? Is punk?

Hiba loves Allah but wrestles with how to express her faith. She wonders whether it is OK to question customs. Behind her parents' backs, she tests Islamic traditions, trying to decipher culture versus religion, refusing to blindly believe that they are one.

"Isn't that what Prophet Muhammad did?" asks Hiba, raising her thick black eyebrows and straightening her wiry frame, which takes on the shape of a question mark when she stands hunched in insecurity. "Question the times? Question what other people were doing?"

Hiba's hunt for answers has led her to other books too. They line her bedroom wall next to copies of Nylon magazine, one with "Gossip Girls" on its front cover. There's "Radiant Prayers," a collection from the Koran, and "Rumi: Hidden Music," a Persian poet celebrated in parts of the Muslim world.

But lately it is the subculture of punk Muslims -- a young movement that has captivated many Muslim teens across the world -- that speaks most loudly to Hiba's confusion.

One day, Hiba typed the word "punk" into an online search engine and stumbled across a book by writer Michael Muhammad Knight. "The Taqwacores," a 2003 novel -- its title a combination of the Arabic word "taqwa," or consciousness of God, and "hardcore" -- is about a group of punk Muslim friends: a straight-edged Sunni, a rebel girl who wears band patches on her burka and a dope-smoking Sufi who sports a mohawk. The characters drink alcohol, do drugs, urinate on the Koran, have sex, pray, love and worship Allah.

Hiba related to the main character's take on his identity, in which the author wrote: "I stopped trying to define Punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. . . . Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth."

Hiba devoured the book, passing it around to her friends.

On MySpace, she discovered Muslim punk bands that had adopted Knight's book as a manifesto. The bands used their lyrics to turn stereotypes upside down, speaking to a generation of Muslim youth in America who feel discriminated against by their non-Muslim peers, and not devout enough for fellow followers of their Islamic faith.

The punk rockers called themselves Muslims, yet they challenged everything Hiba had been taught about her faith.

She sent online requests to Knight and the bands, asking them to be her friends.

Hiba was 10 when the World Trade Center Twin Towers crumbled.

She learned terrorists crashed the planes. You know who did it? she remembers a Christian classmate, who knew Hiba was Muslim, asking on the bus ride to 5th grade the next morning. The terrorists, Hiba realized, were Muslims.

The jokes began. "Osama's mama." "Go back to your terrorist cell." "What are you going to do, bomb me?" By the time she got to high school, her Muslim friends had started using them against each other.

It all helped her relate to The Kominas, a band formed by two young Muslims in Boston after they read "The Taqwacores." They wrote songs like "Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay" and "Sharia Law in the U.S.A," with lyrics such as "I am an Islamist, I am the Antichrist," in response to fears among American Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks and the Patriot Act.

For Hiba, being Muslim and growing up in Texas came with its share of confusion, long before Sept. 11, 2001. When she was in kindergarten, she remembers telling kids it was against her religion to say the Pledge of Allegiance. She didn't know why, she just figured it was. Hiba sensed she should not ask such questions of her parents.

About 170,000 Muslims live in the Houston metropolitan area. Hiba and her family live 30 minutes from Houston in Sugar Land, population 80,000, named after the Imperial Sugar Co. They have a two-story brick home with a basketball hoop, a double-car garage, and a tan minivan out front.

It is the largely conservative hometown of Tom DeLay, former Republican House majority leader, as well as Norm Mason, former chairman of the Texas Christian Coalition. It boasts a thriving oil industry, which employs Hiba's dad as a petroleum engineer. Her mother is a resident in a psychiatric studies program in New York who flies home on her breaks and weekends.

Hiba's school, Kempner High, has 2,700 students, with an almost equal distribution of white and Asian students, including Middle Easterners, and about 20% Latinos and 16% African Americans. The school's Muslim Students Assn. boasts nearly 100 members and meets every Friday.

Hiba did not start attending MSA meetings until recently. She wears the head scarf during prayers, but when they're over, she takes it off. She thinks there must be other Muslim students at Kempner High who feel conflicted, like her. That is why a few weeks ago, she decided to run for MSA president.

"I just want to reach out to them," she says, gazing through rectangle-framed glasses. "And let them know it's OK to be confused."

It is a Friday in late May, and voting in the MSA elections will begin after school.

The girls giggle, scrubbing their feet in a large silver sink in the bathroom, adjusting their head scarves in the mirror. They saunter into a science lab across from room 827, which smells like formaldehyde. Biology students dissected pigs today.

Hiba arrives late, carrying her speech typed on a sheet of paper ripped in half, marked up by pen.

"Anyone got an extra hijab?" a girl shouts.

Two girls without scarves pull the hoods of their sweat shirts over their hair. Hiba wraps a tan flowered scarf around her head and sits cross-legged in the third row of girls, as the boys kneel in rows in front of them.

The room falls silent. A boy's hum rises to a loud chant. "Allahu akbar." God is great.

After the prayer, the candidates are given 30 seconds to speak.

"OK, um Hiba Siddiqui?"

Hiba rises, and holding her speech, she takes a breath: "Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. So, as female president I hope to accomplish that."

Polite clapping follows Hiba back to her seat.

The last female candidate gets up to speak. Her name is Shuruq Gyagenda, and she is 17. She recently moved to Sugar Land from Atlanta. The only African American Muslim female student in the room, Shuruq is coolly confident, standing tall in her canary yellow head scarf, long green-printed skirt and high heels.

"Do you all know T.I.P.?" Many students nod, familiar with the Atlanta rapper. "I don't listen to his music anymore," Shuruq says, "but in one of his songs, the first verse is: 'Do it to the maximum.' And the prophet Muhammad said: 'Whenever a Muslim endeavors to do something, he seeks to perfect it.'

"They're basically saying if you want to do something, you have to perfect yourself, from within, and from without. So, if I'm voted president, I will do my best to serve you in the best possible manner . . ."

Her speech receives the loudest applause of the day.

After school, Hiba thinks about Shuruq's words. Hiba does not feel perfect inside yet. She still has work to do, questions to ask.

At home that evening, the warm smell of roti bread cooking on a griddle drifts into the living room. Hiba crouches on a rug next to her mother, Samina Siddiqui, 47, who is elegantly draped in a lavender and violet-colored shalwar kameez, the traditional trousers and tunic.

They are a mother-daughter mirror, both barefoot, waves of black hair shrouding their shoulders, examining each other through eyeglasses. Siddiqui has just returned from New York for a visit. Hiba tells her about the MSA speeches. She will not learn the outcome of the votes until next week.

Siddiqui admits she seldom discusses Islam with her children. They are smart, Siddiqui says; she trusts they will find their way.

When it comes to Islam, Hiba says, "Sometimes, I feel like scared to ask."

"Who are you scared to ask?" Siddiqui says.

Hiba pulls back. "Just anyone, like family in general."

"Oh."

Hiba tries again, this time bringing up "The Taqwacores." The book, she tells her mother, is "centered around this one Muslim. He's kind of like the average kid, his parents want him to be an engineer and he comes from a good family. . . . "

Siddiqui nods.

"And then he goes to live at this house because of school and the house is full of, well, they call themselves Muslims."

Siddiqui raises her eyebrows.

"And they do things that are," Hiba pauses, giggling uncomfortably, "they do things that are considered, I guess you could say, bad. But deep down inside they have really strong faith, strong beliefs."

"I want to read this book," Siddiqui says.

"It's supposed to be shocking," Hiba says. "It doesn't mean I live like they do. They do things that are inappropriate."

Her mother looks startled, as if she has just been allowed to peek inside her daughter's barricaded mind: "Are you confused?"

"Sometimes I feel confused."

"OK," Siddiqui tells her. "Talk about that. Talk to us."

"I will," Hiba says, feeling guilty for assuming her parents would not listen. "I do want to be more open."

"Sometimes it gets mixed up, what is religion, what is culture?" Siddiqui tells her. "But I just want you to be a good human being."

Summer break comes and goes. Hiba travels to Pakistan for three weeks, and then to New York to visit family.

Standing beneath the lion's cove at the Bronx Zoo a few weeks before the beginning of her senior year, something about her is different.

Hiba lost the presidency to Shuruq and received another position. But since then, Hiba explains, she found herself. Shuruq taught her what it means to be devout.

"When people look at her they see a Muslim," Hiba says. "I don't know if I was ready to be the face of the MSA."

Hiba says she knows now that she is a Taqwacore. But the term born out of Knight's book has taken on a new meaning for her too. She could never bring herself to rebel like the characters, and despite the reverence she has for the lifestyle, she is not a punk.

"I'm not in-your-face. I don't have a mohawk," Hiba says.

"I think a Taqwacore can be anyone who is trying to find their own way."

Hiba has decided to pick which Islamic traditions to follow. After returning from Pakistan, she started praying five times a day.

She reads the Koran for guidance, remembering a proverb: "Whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy handhold, that never breaks."

Hiba has spent much time trying to figure out who she is. But in those moments when it is just her and Allah, Hiba knows.

In a sense, Hiba has always known.

Hayasaki is a Times staff writer.

erika.hayasaki@latimes.com
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Post by kmaherali »

Quranic Values as an Inspiration for Gay Marriage

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... riage.html

Like the Bible, and most other religious texts, the Qur'an doesn't have any verse that says, "God has made you black and white, male and female, straight and gay. Be you as brothers to one another, working, eating, praying, loving as one family." On the other hand, it also does not say "Marriage is only between one man and one woman," or even "between one man and up to four women."

There is a clear assumption in many passages in the Qur'an that marriage is between men and women. Passages that talk about how a couple should decide when to wean a child, what times of day it is permissible to have sexual relations during Ramadan, or what to do when conflict arises and a divorce seems the best solution.

But other passages -- passages that talk about the fundamental nature of human relationships as a duality -- do not have a gender dichotomy. The word "zauj," often translated as mate or spouse, signifies one half of a partnership, both husband and wife. This is a powerful concept which affirms the fundamental equality of both spouses and leaves room for a genderless conception of human partnering.

This fundamental pairing of human beings is described in several passages which talk about the creation of humanity as a people. The initial human entity -- the word in Arabic is grammatically feminine and is often translated as soul, though it can mean self, person, or ego -- is given a mate of like nature, created from her own substance.

4:1 O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord Who created you from a single soul and from her created her mate and from them twain hath spread abroad a multitude of men and women.

30:21 And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves, that ye may dwell in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your hearts: verily in that are Signs for those who reflect.

I acknowledge that it is radical to interpret these verses as providing a vision of human pairing that does not discriminate on the basis of gender, and that traditionalist Muslims would frown on such an interpretation. However, it remains a fact that the Qur'an is a living document, Islam is a living religion, and while there are those who would like to continue interpreting the Qur'an as it was interpreted five hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, I believe that the Qur'an must continually be understood in light of current information about human nature, race, gender, and class, and with reference to modern understandings of what is just, what is compassionate.

This process is going on in other areas of Qur'anic interpretation -- take for instance the verses which talk about human development in the womb. There were some quite amusing interpretations of these verses over the years -- at least from the point of modern gynecology. No Muslim in his or her right mind would say we should stick with the old interpretations and ignore modern science, especially when modern science gives us a picture that is very much in keeping with the Qur'anic verses.

Modern science has also shown that the brains of gay men and women are different, structurally, from the brains of straight men and women. Other studies point to factors in the womb that affect sexual orientation. And many studies point to a genetic bases for homosexuality. Our experiences of gay couples show us that gays find the same love, mercy and tranquility with others of the same sex that the majority of us find in heterosexual pairings.

How then can we fail to interpret the Qur'an in light of these understandings, this knowledge of human nature and physiology that simply did not exist in the 600s or the 900s?

Equally important, the Prophet teaches us to want for our brothers and sisters what we want for ourselves. The Qur'an teaches us to exemplify justice, mercy and compassion. If I want a warm, loving, fulfilling marriage with a person I choose, how can I deny that to my brother or sister? If social circumstances favor those who are married -- and in our society married couples have special benefits and/or rights in terms of economics, inheritance, visitation during sickness, adoption, etc -- how can we justify denying those rights and benefits to an entire segment of our society? If the Qur'an teaches that sexual activity outside of marriage is a sin (and it does), how can I condemn a significant portion of the population to sin or to a life of celibacy (which the Qur'an frowns upon as well)?

It may be a radical reading to use the Qur'an and the teachings of the Prophet to justify gay marriage, but to me it is the only one which upholds the fundamental Islamic ideals of fairness, equality of all human beings, compassion and mercy.

****
Close. Pamela K. Taylor
co-founder, Muslims for Progressive Values
"On Faith" panelist Pamela K. Taylor is co-founder of Muslims for Progressive Values and director of the Islamic Writers Alliance. She is a member of the national board of advisors to the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and served as co-chair of the Progressive Muslim Union for two years. Taylor is a strong supporter of the woman imam movement, which seeks the full participation of Muslim women in every aspect of life, including the pulpit. more »
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December 23, 2008
Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG

CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.

A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”

The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.

Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in a low-budget independent film based on the book.

A group of punk artists living in a communal house in Cleveland called the Tower of Treason offered the house as the set for the movie. The crumbling streets and boarded-up storefronts of their neighborhood resemble parts of Buffalo. Filming took place in October, and the movie will be released next year, said Eyad Zahra, the director.

“To see these characters that used to live only inside my head out here walking around, and to think of all these kids living out parts of the book, it’s totally surreal,” Mr. Muhammad Knight, 31, said as he roamed the movie set.

As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted “Osama McDonald,” a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr. Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam.

Noureen DeWulf, 24, an actress who plays a rocker in the movie, defended the film’s message.

“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100-percent American,” Ms. DeWulf said, “so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion? Punk? This is totally American.”

The novel’s title combines “taqwa,” the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music.

For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.

“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,” said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.

Ms. Zufari said she had listened to punk music growing up in Arkansas and found “The Taqwacores” four years ago.

“Here was someone as frustrated with Islam as me,” she said, “and he expressed it using bands I love, like the Dead Kennedys. It all came together.”

The novel’s Muslim characters include Rabeya, a riot girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa and leads a group of men and women in prayer. There is also Fasiq, a pot-smoking skater, and Jehangir, a drunk.

Such acts — playing Western music, women leading prayer, men and women praying together, drinking, smoking — are considered haram, or forbidden, by millions of Muslims.

Mr. Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad.

He said he wrote “The Taqwacores” to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.

After reading the novel, many Muslims e-mailed Mr. Muhammad Knight, asking for directions to the next Muslim punk show. Told that no such bands existed, some of them created their own, with names like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five.

One band, the Kominas, wrote a song called “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which became Muslim punk rock’s first anthem.

“As Muslims, we’re not being honest if we criticize the United States without first criticizing ourselves,” said Mr. Kamel, 23, who grew up in a Syrian family in Chicago. He is lead singer of the band al-Thawra, “the Revolution” in Arabic.

For many young American Muslims, the merger of Islam and rebellion resonated.

Hanan Arzay, 15, is a daughter of Muslim immigrants from Morocco who lives in East Islip, N.Y. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, pedestrians threw eggs and coffee cups at the van that transported her to a Muslim school, she said, and one person threw a wine bottle, shattering the van’s window.

At school, her Koran teacher threw chalk at her for requesting literal translations of the holy book, Ms. Arzay said. After she was expelled from two Muslim schools, her uncle gave her “The Taqwacores.”

“This book is my lifeline,” Ms. Arzay said. “It saved my faith.”
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There is a related video at:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethi ... elists/67/

May 16th, 2008
Muslim Televangelists

Christians and Muslims
David Gray: Republicans and Muslim Americans

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: It’s common to hear and read stories about Islamic fundamentalists and their rigid interpretation of the Qu’ran. But we have a story today about transformation in the Islamic Middle East — moderate Muslims challenging the fundamentalists. The contest is being played out on satellite TV channels where young Muslim televangelists are preaching a combination of piety and modern life. Kate Seelye has our special report from Cairo.

KATE SEELYE: At a cultural center in Cairo, there’s a buzz of excitement. Thousands of youth have gathered — but not for a concert or a play. They’ve come to hear a lecture by a young Muslim preacher.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Moez Masoud.

SEELYE: He’s 29-year-old Moez Masoud, a former advertising executive who turned to religion the death of several close friends. Masoud opens his lecture with a prayer and an appeal.

MOEZ MASOUD (Muslim Televangelist, speaking to audience, through translator): It’s not good to separate religion from life because life will turn into a jungle. Let’s take a closer look at religion and it won’t seem as so gloomy.

SEELYE: The audience is captivated by his message: it’s a call for compassion and love as well as tolerance.



Moez Masoud

Mr. MASOUD (speaking in Arabic to audience, through translator): Islam respects the principle of freedom of opinion, as long as the opinion is respectful of Islam.

SEELYE: Often referencing the Qu’ran, Masoud jumps from topic to topic. One moment he’s gently poking fun of religious fanatics, the next he’s talking about the beauty of art. Tonight he focuses on music. Is it allowed in the Qu’ran?

Mr. MASOUD (speaking in Arabic to audience, through translator): Is it really mentioned you shouldn’t play certain instruments? Or does it depend on the religious interpretation? There is a belief that certain instruments might be used for a good cause.

SEELYE: And then the highlight of the night: a musician comes on stage and sings about the beauty of marriage.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICIAN (singing in Arabic)

SEELYE: The audience loves it. Afterwards, many say Masoud’s message gives them hope.

MOHAMMED (through translator): I used to have some extremist ideas about faith, but when I heard Moez, so many things changed in my life. In my view so many things were wrong, wrong, wrong until I met him.

SEELYE: Masoud’s ideas are breath of fresh air for many young Arabs. In stark contrast to Islamist fundamentalists, he tells them they can be good Muslims and also enjoy life.

Mr. MASOUD: A lot of the Islamic faith is presented to them as only religious — meaning only outward things. It’s presented as a bunch of do’s and don’ts. And you know, with just globalization and a lot of the quote on quote, “Western culture” finding its way here, if Islam is not presented in its most expansive interpretation and really to just used, you know, every day in the coolest way possible, then there is no way people are going to approach it.



An audience listens to Masoud.

SEELYE: But Masoud doesn’t just encourage youth to believe, he also urges them to be active.

Mr. MASOUD: You’re also here to develop Earth and to make sure there’s charity and to make sure that everyone is eating and to make sure that there’s hospitals, and to just play God’s role on Earth.

SEELYE: Masoud began preaching about eight years ago after graduating from the American University of Cairo. In 2002, he landed his first TV show, but it was this program that introduced him to millions. “The Right Path” launched in 2007 on a popular religious satellite channel. Every week, Masoud travels the world, discussing issues like drugs and dating. He tries to help Muslim youth better understand the West. In one episode, he condemned the 2005 London bombings.

Mr. MASOUD (on “The Right Path,” speaking Arabic, through translator): The Qu’ran says the one who kills or spreads corruption, kills all humanity.

SEELYE: Masoud isn’t alone in calling for greater tolerance and reform. He’s one of a new wave of moderate Muslim preachers. Their goal: to mobilize Arabs and improve their societies. The most famous of them is Amr Khaled. Khaled started as an accountant but rose to fame about seven years ago with a TV show that encouraged piety and community activism. Khaled is now so popular in the Muslim world that his Web site gets more hits than Oprah Winfrey’s.



Abdullah Shleifer

Abdullah Shleifer teaches media at the American University of Cairo. He says many young Muslims, like those at this university, don’t relate to traditional religious scholars. They’re turning to what Shleifer calls the “New Preachers” like Masoud and Khaled for guidance.

Professor ABDULLAH SHLEIFER (American University in Cairo): The new preachers share with their audience modernity. They have clarified, no doubt, their own inner discourse on how you can be moderates and pious. And by modern I don’t mean, you know, using appliances. I mean a modern lifestyle that at the same time is a pious lifestyle, you know. And that’s very difficult for people and particularly when you’re getting images coming in from MTV where modernity means anti-piety.

SEELYE: Shleifer says the new preachers are using a very modern tool to get their message across — satellite television. There are now more than 300 satellite channels in the Arab world. They reach tens of millions, and they’re allowing voices like Masoud’s and Khaled’s to target large numbers of people.

Amr Khaled’s latest show airs on this channel — Risala. It’s a new, 24-hour religious station run by Tarek Suweidan, a Kuwaiti cleric. It airs talk shows and religious call-in programs. Today Suweidan hosts a show called “Wasatiya”– “In the Middle.” Suweidan says Risala brings fresh voices and opinions to Arab audiences with a specific goal in mind.

Sheikh TAREK SUWEIDAN (Station Director, Risala): We want them to be more moderate. We want them to be more modern. The second thing that we would like to change is the interests. Many off our youth, their interest is marginal. They care about things that have no real effect in their lives, in the future, or the modernization of the Arab world.

SEELYE: Suweidan says Risala has the power to help transform the region.

Sheikh SUWEIDAN: Satellite TV is the most powerful weapon in the hands of the Islamic revival today.

SEELYE: And that revival is taking place against the backdrop of increased religious fervor here. In the past decade, mosque attendance has exploded. Most Muslim women have donned the headscarf. Some are even starting to wear the all enveloping niqab.

Widespread poverty, political stagnation, and loss of hope have all fed the boom in religion. In poor neighborhoods like these, fundamentalist imams are increasingly popular with their promises of a better afterlife. They are known as Salafis, and they’ve also benefited from the media revolution. The Salafis dominate the many religious channels in Egypt and preach a rigid morality as well as a paranoia about other faiths and cultures like this cleric, Mohammed Hassaan.



Tarek Suweidan

MOHAMMED HASSAN (on TV, speaking in Arabic, through translator): Recent events have been exploited by Jews and their supporters to stab Islam.

SEELYE: So in today’s Egypt who has the greatest impact — the fundamentalists or the new preachers? Khalil Anani is a scholar with the Al Ahram Institute and an expert on Islamist movements. He says the Salafis are very influential among the poor, but the new preachers also play an important role.

KHALIL ANANI (Al Ahram Institute): I think the main task off this new preacher phenomenon is to spread tolerance and the values of coexistence and to be civilized in your thinking. This is the most important benefit now to decrease the tension between the West and Islam.

SEELYE: But Anani doesn’t think the new preachers, like Moez Masoud, will have much lasting impact.

Mr. ANANI: They are a temporary phenomenon. They have no organizational or institutional bodies. They won’t be effective in the future of Egypt.

SEELYE: American University of Cairo professor Abdullah Shleifer strongly disagrees.

Prof. SHLEIFER: I don’t think Moez is a temporary phenomenon. I think his message so meets the growing concerns of this new young portion of the mainstream that is, is becoming the mainstream as they grow. He is in rapport actually, now with television, with millions and will be in rapport with still greater millions and this is not a passing fad. This is part of the transformation of Arab society.

SEELYE: Back in his Cairo apartment, Masoud relaxes with his guitar. He’s playing a song he wrote, “Coffee for the Heart.” It’s about spiritual rejuvenation.

Mr. MASOUD: So, what I’m doing right now is at least, you know, trying to put the light back into the attempts to religiously revive any thing because religion, when misunderstood, can take on a very dark form.

SEELYE: Masoud isn’t worried about the impact he’ll have. He’s pretty confident that with time more and more Muslims will discover what he calls “the right path.”

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Kate Seelye in Cairo.
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http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/06 ... sia-fatwa6

Yoga fatwa? They won’t stand for it
Although Indonesia is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, many view Islamic clerics’ fatwas as anachronistic and unnecessary.

By Paul Watson
February 06, 2009 in print edition A-3

Indonesia’s most powerful Islamic scholars weren’t looking for a debate when they handed down their latest fatwas on how to be a good Muslim.

But they still got an argument and, perhaps worse, a chorus of “Who cares?” after decreeing that it is haram, or forbidden, to smoke in public, or for children and pregnant women to have a puff of tobacco anywhere.

It didn’t matter that the clerics were providing sound health guidance. The council of clerics that interprets Sharia, or Islamic law, for the world’s largest Muslim population often leaves many shrugging their shoulders in confusion or disbelief.

When about 700 members of the council handed down a fresh list of fatwas last week, they included ones on marriage to minors, cornea donations and yoga. As usual, most Indonesians blithely ignored the rulings.

Unlike more fundamentalist Islamic cultures such as Iran, where fatwas can be a life-or-death matter, most people in this overwhelmingly Muslim country of 237 million pay little attention because the edicts usually have little to do with what really matters to them, said Rumadi, a lecturer at an Islamic state university here.

“If a fatwa can’t be seen as solving a problem, it will only create more problems,” added the lecturer, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name.

Fatwas don’t have the force of law in Indonesia, which is officially a secular society that protects the rights of non-Muslim minorities, including Christians, Hindus and Buddhists. With that in mind, many Indonesian Muslims view the Council of Ulema’s judgments as unnecessary, often anachronistic meddling in their personal lives.

One of the latest fatwas approved of men marrying child brides, as long as their motives are good. Islam doesn’t set a minimum age for marriage, the council declared, adding that “early marriage” is prohibited if “it is only for pleasure.”

As the country’s emerging democracy gains strength, so have the council’s detractors, who like many people here in Jakarta, the capital, wish the Islamic scholars would just butt out.

Days after the anti-smoking fatwa made national headlines, Jakarta’s air is still pungent with the sweet scent of Indonesians’ favorite smoke: clove cigarettes called kreteks because of the soft crackling sound the 19th century originals made as flecks of spice burned. Near high schools across the city, whether Muslim madrasas or secular public schools, hawkers were happily selling single cigarettes to crowds of kids.

Battered by waves of bad economic news, the government appeared relieved that the fatwa seemed to have little effect on the craving for cigarettes in a country that has the world’s fifth-largest population of smokers. Tobacco taxes bring more than $4 billion into the treasury each year, and the head of customs and excise estimated that revenue could drop 10% if people followed the fatwa.

What’s lucrative for the tax man is lethal for many smokers: About 200,000 Indonesians die each year from tobacco-related illnesses, according to the World Health Organization.

To some Indonesians, the council crossed a democratic line with a fatwa that said a Muslim shouldn’t abstain from voting. Opponents insist that voters have the right not to cast ballots in this summer’s national elections.

The Jakarta Post defiantly said in a headline, “Do I go to hell if I don’t vote? Hell, no!”

The council tried to ease any fears among electoral abstainers, who make up at least 40% of voter rolls in local elections, saying the fatwa is merely helpful advice.

The council was set up in 1975 by President Suharto, who, after seizing power in a military coup a decade earlier, drew support from Islamic parties that liked his tough anti-communist stand.

Suharto tolerated moderate Muslim leaders, particularly those who supported him, while banning radical Islamic parties.

The dozens of Suharto-era fatwas were easily ignored. The first batch in 1976 included instructions on how to perform Friday prayers in a boat, and told government officials to live modestly, an unlikely proposition in Suharto’s graft-laden bureaucracy.

Seven years later, the clerics defined proper praying in a two-story mosque, forbade the eating of rabbit meat and prohibited the singing of Koranic verses. More food edicts followed against dining on frogs, worms, crickets and crabs.

The council behaved “just like a [trained] seal” under Suharto, said Novriantoni Kahar, program manager for the Liberal Islam Network.

Yet even after gaining more authority over interpretation of Sharia, the clerics still have a credibility problem, Kahar said.

“People criticize the [council] for issuing an ineffective fatwa,” Kahar said. “Well, it should be ineffective. By issuing ineffective fatwas, we know that its role is insignificant.”

Still, there is increasing friction between liberal and conservative Muslims, and between Muslims and minority religious groups, as hard-line Muslims press for changes that most Indonesians view as excessive.

When parliament toughened an anti-pornography law last year, the government of the Indonesian resort island of Bali, which is predominantly Hindu, said the law threatened cultural rights by vaguely defining as illegal anything that inflames sexual desire.

Last week, the council deliberated on the propriety of yoga and decided it was OK for Muslims to do the poses as long as they don’t chant. The clerics also condemned vasectomies.

Such rulings haven’t satisfied a group of more fundamentalist clerics, who have tried to muscle out the government-sanctioned council in a fatwa fight.

Last weekend, a group of extremist clerics here declared its own fatwa against the Rotary and Lions clubs, insisting that a Zionist plot controls the service clubs better known in the West for chicken lunches and charity work.

The council said it would investigate the two clubs, which were banned until 2000, and issue its own findings. The clerics responded by defying the council’s authority, warning Muslim members of the clubs to quit immediately, and leaving them to worry about what might happen if they don’t.

Recent edicts by Islamic clerics
Fatwas handed down by the Indonesian council of Islamic clerics in recent days:

On smoking: It is forbidden to smoke in public, or for children and pregnant women to smoke tobacco anywhere.


On marriage: Men are allowed to wed child brides, as long as they have good motives and are not just seeking pleasure.

On exercise: Yoga can be practiced as long as there is no chanting during the routines.

On birth control: Vasectomies are forbidden.

Source: Times research
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Post by kmaherali »

Yoga is a Part of Holistic Islam

by Firoz Bakht Ahmed

Let me inform you that I am a staunch Muslim following all the Islamic tenets in the right interpretation and spirit and there is no such thing as yoga being 'haram' (disallowed) in Islam. In my case, I have found that Islamic yoga is a reality. It is possible to employ the skills of yoga to worship Allah better and be a better Muslim.

A fatwa by some Malaysian and Indonesian ulema declaring yoga anti-Islamic is nothing but misunderstanding and misinterpreting the fact that yoga and namaz are almost identical. Such half-baked ulema and intellectuals are actually responsible for letting Islam and Muslims down.

Having practiced yoga during my school days, I found it is easily integrated with Islamic life, in fact the two assist each other. Islam and yoga together make a mutually beneficial holistic synergy. Both are agreed that, while the body is important as a vehicle on the way to spiritual realization and salvation, the human being's primary identity is not with the body but with the eternal spirit.

Maintaining a healthy and fit body is a requirement in Islam, which teaches a Muslim that his or her body is a gift from Allah. Yoga happens to be a common ground between Hindus and Muslims.

The purposes of yoga and Tariqat-e-Naqshbandi (Sufi lifestyle) is apparently similar as both aim at achieving a mystical union with the ultimate reality.

The Indian Muslims' love affair with yoga is a complex thing. There's the general disenchantment with strict, orthodox Islam of the myopic clerics and the accompanying pull to alternative forms of spirituality.

Yoga, according to Ashraf F. Nizami's book "Namaz, the Yoga of Islam" (published by D.B. Taraporevala, Mumbai 1977), is not a religion. Rather, it is a set of techniques and skills that enhance the practice of any religion. Nizami writes that in namaz various constituents like sijdah is like half shirshasana while qayam is vajrasana in the same way as ruku is paschimothanasana.

Even Father Rev. M. Dechanel wrote a book on Christian yoga recording that practising yoga is encouraged because it is a way towards the realization of Christian teachings.

According to Badrul Islam, a yoga instructor at a government academy in Dehradun, one of the most obvious correspondences between Islam and yoga is the resemblance of the salat (five-time prayer a day) to the physical exercises of yoga asanas. The root meaning of the word salat is 'to bend the lower back', as in yoga; the Persians translated this concept with the word namaz, from a verbal root meaning 'to bow', etymologically related to the Sanskrit word namaste.

Since the yogic metaphysic of Advaita Vedanta is in perfect accordance with the Islamic doctrine of tauhid (God's oneness), there is perfect compatibility between Islam and yoga on the highest level.

The "Book of Sufi Healing" by Hakim G.M. Chishti clearly states that life, from its beginning to end, is one continuous set of breathing practices. However, in Tariqat-e-Naqshabandiyah, the Sufi tradition of Islam, breathing practice has been there exactly as in yoga.

The enigmatic and most revered qari, Abdul Basit of Egypt, whose recitation of the holy Quran is considered the best till date, practiced breathing exercises exactly similar to pranayam and was able to recite a surah by holding his breath for such a long duration that even medical experts were amazed. However, no one told the qari that he did it with yoga!

Nowadays, yoga is commercially promoted for health. In fact, less exercise owing to long office hours on computers is one of the problems of the modern world. Cars, motorcycles and computers are the pulse of contemporary life. Because of these conveniences people no longer think about physical exercise, which makes a good excuse for Muslims to be offered yoga lessons.

Yoga today is a way of life for the followers of all religions.

The place of yoga in the lives of most Muslims, I imagine, will not be shifted by Indonesian and Malayian ulema's far-fetched fatwas. Those who practice will practice, the so-called super-pious will frown. Even in the Middle East and Iran, yoga is a pet with Muslims.

Most Muslims in India are dazed that the all encompassing credentials of yoga need to be debated. Let's appreciate that at this time the pro-yoga fatwa by the renowned Darul Uloom Deoband seminary has given it a nod and Swami Ramdev has also given the green signal that Muslims can use the word Allah for Om.

(The author is a commentator on social and religious issues. He can be contacted at firozbakhtahmed07@...)
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Post by kmaherali »

Muslim challenges in western society

By Graeme Morton, Calgary HeraldMarch 15, 2009
http://www.calgaryherald.com/News/Musli ... story.html

Salma Mohiuddin works from home for the online journal Western Muslim, which serves her fellow followers of the faith. She says the meditative aspect of her faith keeps her life in perspective.
Photograph by: Ted Jacob, Calgary Herald,

Calgary Herald

Muslims in the western world continue to walk a fine line between remaining true to their faith and integrating effectively into a complex, increasingly secular society.

That's the conclusion of a new study prepared for the Institute for Research on Public Policy by Karim H. Karim, director of the school of journalism and communications at Ottawa's Carleton University.

"Among the study participants, there was a keen interest in engaging with western society," says Karim. "However, in wanting to become, say, good Canadian citizens, their values were naturally drawn from their faith."

Karim said Muslims he polled were hungry for more guidance from their religious leaders in addressing the evolving ethical and moral issues of western society. A number of participants said imams who come from foreign backgrounds can struggle to understand the western culture in which members of their faith community live. Some said that on contemporary issues such as bioethics, they draw their guidance from scientists who were Muslims, rather than religious leaders.

The report is the result of months of interviews that Karim conducted with lay Muslims in Montreal, Ottawa, Washington and three cities in England.

"Many people said the imams were well versed in the theology and practice of Islam, but in terms of pastoral care, they felt there was something lacking," says Karim.

Calgary Imam Fayaz Tilly is part of a new wave of North American Muslim leaders. Born in Toronto and theologically trained in Buffalo, N. Y., Tilly says being part of the North American social fabric from birth helps him relate to the day-to-day issues facing local Muslims.

"My training was very traditional, but the scholars I studied with were educated in England. They understood the desire of our people to be, say, proud Canadians but at the same time hold onto our Muslim values," says Tilly. "We can strive to be part of an inclusive society, but that doesn't mean we have to compromise on our faith."

Tilly says he's often asked for advice from local Muslims on basic, day-to-day issues such as health and diet, economics and dress codes.

Salma Mohiuddin, a planner for the City of Calgary who also edits Western Muslim, an online journal for local Muslims, says Canadian Muslim youth face challenges in being drawn toward pop culture while remaining true to Islam's teachings.

"I strive to succeed in all aspects in my life, of being part of the greater Calgary community, but also actively practising my faith, to have that important spiritual element in my life," says Mohiuddin. "The meditative aspect of my faith helps keep things in perspective in my daily life."

Ayaz Gulamhussein, a local petroleum geologist, said he feels "totally comfortable" being Muslim and Canadian at the same time.

Gulamhussein says North American Muslims were never really challenged to talk about their faith before the 9/11 attacks. He adds Muslim history is not traditionally studied in a Judeo-Christian society and that misconceptions about Islam continue to dominate the perception of many North Americans.

"It's sad the Muslim world is noted in the West for the violence of certain minorities rather than for the peacefulness of the vast majority of its people," says Gulamhussein.

He says western Muslims can integrate successfully in their community by demonstrating the spiritual values of Islam while taking part in practical projects that benefit the larger society, not just their own faith communities.

Khadijah Chmilovska, Muslim chaplain at the University of Calgary, says many young Muslims she meets are conscious of a daily balancing act between faith, work, education and personal life.

"They draw inspiration from other Muslims they see here in Calgary who are raising their kids with that great balance," says Chmilovska.

She says foreign-born imams relate well culturally to members of the older Muslim generation, who want their children to fully integrate into Canadian society. However, she admits the shortage of younger, North American-raised imams "can create a bit of a disconnect from the community for Muslims in their teens and 20s."

Karim notes while many issues in his focus groups were universal, there were differences between Canada, the U. S. and Britain.

"In Britain, Muslims tend to be more isolated from the larger community, while in Canada, there is a substantially greater sense of citizenship," says Karim.

A common theme in all three countries, Karim notes, was a desire for more engagement by Muslim leadership in larger social, cultural and even economic projects that would better the greater community.

"They wanted the people who preached in the mosques to practise what they preached," says Karim.

Karim says the press often simplistically portrays the Muslim world as an ongoing feud between moderates and fundamentalists, but that the soul of Muslim society in the West is much more nuanced than that.

"I'm hoping this report provokes a discussion and a better understanding among front-line workers, policy-makers and the media about the complexities of Muslim society," said Karim.

GMORTON@

THEHERALD. CANWEST.COM

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Post by kmaherali »

What do Muslims want? 21st-century religious leaders

KARIM H. KARIM
The Gazette

Saturday, March 21, 2009


"My ultimate fantasy would be to find an imam ... who goes out to work from nine to five, takes the bus, is dealing with his kid who is picking up a marijuana joint at the age of 13. This is the kind of person that I want instructing me on Friday - not speaking about the battles we won 1,200 years ago."

Such was the complaint and hope of a Montreal participant at a discussion on intellectual leadership among Muslims living in Western countries.

The discussion was one of a series of focus groups in Canada, the United States and Britain that revealed dissatisfaction among Muslims with their religious leaders' lack of cultural understanding. Most mosque imams brought over from Muslim-majority countries do not have the knowledge to help congregants deal with life in the West.

An Environics study revealed that most Muslims are keen to integrate into Canadian society. The focus groups' findings show that they also want to remain faithful to Islam and engage with modernity on their own terms.

As with adherents of other religions, ethics for Muslims are faith-based. Islam favours a close connection between religion and the material world, and its followers see good citizenship as intimately linked with being good Muslims.

However, many feel unable to receive the Islamic guidance that they are seeking in their new environments. Not only are "imported imams" unaware of the socio-cultural contexts of Western countries, most of them appear ill-equipped to handle contemporary ethical dilemmas raised by technological advances.

Focus group participants indicated that they found the advice of Muslim medical practitioners to be more useful than that of theologians in matters of bio-ethics.

"What I am looking for is an intellectual Islam that examines where we are today and how we move forward," said a participant in Leicester, England. "(But) when I go to the mosque ... all I see (is) this red face, beard, and shouting and screaming."

Members of congregations are often much better educated than mosque imams. Canadian Muslims tend to have high levels of education, contrary to popular stereotypes. "Nearly one in three Muslim women has a university degree, compared with one in five among all (Canadian) women," notes the Canadian Council of Muslim Women.

Women appear to be very keen to conduct their own examination of Islamic theology. They are studying scripture and secondary material, and sometimes challenging the rules that govern their lives. A participant in the all-female focus group in Washington asserted that "when it comes to some issues like women, fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) is so flawed."

Participants in various locations said they did look up to some scholars of Islam who had both traditional and Western training. Such intellectuals are praised for their critical examination of received wisdom. Religious leaders working to alleviate poverty, engaging in social development, and seeking ways to prevent extremism are also admired.

In addition to traditional Islamic institutions, there have been established in Western countries some facilities to train religious teachers how to enable Muslims to interact with modernity. The California-based Zaytuna Institute's seminary program seeks to provide "intellectual tools and understanding to effectively engage Western society and thought." The Muslim College and the Institute for Ismaili Studies, both in London, seek to educate teachers who can enable Muslims to live productive lives in the contemporary world.

The preparation of such religious personnel might determine the kinds of relations that future generations of Muslims will have with their compatriots. Some of the frustrations currently felt about the quality of Islamic leadership might have contributed to the militancy adopted by some Western Muslims.

One focus-group participant in London referred to an acquaintance who had favoured "martyrdom operations" because he was fed up with the sermons that did not address Muslims' present-day problems. This discussion took place a few weeks before the July 2005 bombings in that city.

Although much smaller than Christianity, Islam is now the second-largest religion in almost all Western countries. Policy makers and journalists often tend to perceive Muslim communities within the binary frame of "fundamentalists" and "moderates." Such reductionist views prevent an informed understanding of the complexities in the soul-searching taking place among Muslims regarding their identities, civic ethics and citizenship in Western societies.

Karim H. Karim, director of Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication, is the author of Changing Perceptions of Islamic Authority among Muslims in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, www.irpp.org

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2009

http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/ ... 45e0b0ccdc
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