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May 26, 2007

Islam: Where Are The Voices Of Sanity And Reform?

The problem that many Westerners feel about Islam is that groups like CAIR and MCB constantly whine about the "Islamophobia" of the West, but their condemnation of acts of terrorism committed in the name of their faith is superficial at best.

This site was established to document these globally-occurring atrocities, which cause innocent Muslims to suffer as much as - if not more than - non-Muslims. In the Muslim world, so many moderate voices are never heard, and many of those who profess to represent moderate attitudes have their own political agenda which is far from moderate.

CAIR, for example, claims to represent US Muslims, and is a "rights advocacy group". An interesting analysis of their financial spending by Patrick Poole can be found in FrontPage Mag. This shows that CAIR allots only 9% of its program to "civil rights" and 10% on government affairs - a combined total which is less than a fifth of its output. Mr Poole shows that the membership of CAIR is so small it can hardly be said to represent ordinary US Muslims.

There have been brave Muslims who have spoken out against radicalism and extremism, but these have received appalling treatment from their fellow Muslims. Taslima Nasrim was forced to leave her native Bangladesh in 1994, where she practiced as a doctor. A court had ruled that she should be detained for the "anti-Islamic" statements contained in her writing (she defended the rights of Hindu women from Islamist persecution). She had also been subjected to fatwa from a Bangladeshi imam, who had urged on her death, with a reward of $5,000 for her assasssins.

She moved to West Bengal to take care of her ailing mother, who has since died. In India, she has been subjected to threats. In March 2000 the head of a Muslim academy, the Raza Academy threatened to burn her if she ever set foot in Mumbai. In January 2004, the head cleric of Calcutta's main mosque, S.M.N. Rahman Barkati, issued threats against her. In front of a crowd of 10,000 at Friday pravers, the imam said "Her writings are against humanity and Islam....Her face can be blackened with ink, paint or tar. Or she can be garlanded with shoes." The latter are regarded as extreme insults in the Indian subcontinent. The cleric ordered a bounty of 20,000 rupees ($436) for anyone who would carry out the act. She had to remain under police protection, following this "fatwa".

In June last year, after she told a literary convention that "As a eight-year-old child, I was warned by my mother that if I abused Allah I would be punished, but I did that and nothing happened to me," the same cleric issued a fatwa against her. Syed Noor-ur-Rehman Barkati, main imam of Tippu Sultan Mosque in Kolkata had said that if anyone blackened the 43-year old author's face and drove her out of Kolkata (Calcutta), he would pay 50,000 rupees ($1,175). Barkati later claimed that he had been "misquoted".

In March this year, the president of All India Ibtehad Council, Taqi Raza Khan, issued a 500,000 rupee ($11,760) reward for anyone who would decapitate (sar qalam karna) her or drive her from India. Britain's National Secular Society sent a letter of protest against this fatwa to the Indian High Commissioner.

Her persecution continues, with no action taken against the imams who are effectively organizing a campaign of torment. Khan is unapologetic in his perverse and savage notion of religious "morality", saying: "Anyone who opposes the Prophet does not deserve to live. There have been a number of e-mails and telephone calls congratulating me for the bold stance I have taken."

There is nothing bold in manipulating a lynch mob to commit unspeakable atrocities against a defenseless woman. But where are the voices from within India's Islamic communities, condemning the imam's blatantly illegal acts of incitement? They are not to be found. If the secular government of India can not silence and punish one imam for advocating murder, then Muslim leaders need not bother condemning. Once again, the voices of Islamic barbarism prevail over those unheard voices of Muslim peace and moderation.

Throughout Islam's history, there have been movements that strive for a peaceful interpretation of Islam, which have grown alongside other movements within Islam that demand war, death and destruction of "infidels". Immediately following the death of Mohammed, a movement sprang up in North Africa, that of the Khawajites or Kharijites. It began in 657 AD, and soon amassed a following of 60,000. Kharijites were responsible for the deaths of three of Mohammed's close associates - Umar bin Khattab, Usman bin Affan and Ali bin Abi Thalib.

The direct descendants of his movement are Salafists and neo-Salafists, who treat their religion as if it is a doctrine of war against the unbeliever. Movements like the Tawwasuf or Sufis have strived for a more peaceful, less political form of Islam, where an individual connection with Allah is sought, rather than tribalist collectivism. Many Muslims around the world are Sufis, who are not particularly interested in establishing a Caliphate, or having apostates killed. But even within the Sufi movement, there have been extremists such as Tamerlane (Tamburlane - c.1330 - 1405), whose trademark was to leave piles of his victims' skulls outside the gates of cities he had conquered.

The Assassins or Hashishin would commit murder in the name of their faith. A subset of Ismaeli Muslims, the Assassins thrived from the 11th to 13th centuries, and they would be primed to kill Muslim leaders whom they considered "unIslamic". These would apparently give their jihadists or fedayeen a concoction of hashish to cause them to see visions of the paradise to come. Once fortified with this hallucinatory promise of eternal bliss and the whoring services of 72 virgins, the Assassins' jihadists would kill in the name of Allah. Takfiri Muslims are similar to the Assassins - though they do not take hashish to dream of Paradise. Takfiri target heretical Muslim rulers ("takfeer" is the denouncing of another Muslim as unIslamic), and like Assassins allow themselves the liberty of disguising themselves as secularists to achieve their ends.

The spread of radical Islam has been assisted by Saudi Arabia. When the nation was officially founded in 1932 by Abdul Aziz bin Saud, after his clan had conquered the smaller kingdoms in Arabia, he established the form of faith known as Wahhabism. This extremist form of Islam was developed by Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792). Wahhab had made an alliance with Abdul Aziz's ancestor, Muhammad Ibn Saud in 1744. Wahhab wrote one book which survives, called the Kitab al-Tawhid, the "Book of Monotheism". In Chapter 36 of this book, Wahhab stated that no-one should obey a scholar or ruler if the scholar or ruler contradicts the Qur'an or the Sunnah (actions of the Prophet) in any way. . In his own lifetime, Wahhab had a religious police force - henchmen who would rigidly enforce his strict edicts upon villagers and tribes. He commanded that there should be no gravestones for the dead, lest they become objects of pilgrimage or worship.

Saudi oil money has funded the expansion of this repressive and intolerant form of Islam throughout the world. In regions such as Indonesia, whose islands had formerly been home to a tolerant form of Islam for centuries, Saudi-influenced extremism has been increasing over the past decades. All Muslims on their Hajj pilgrimage must travel to Saudi Arabia and cannot help but be exposed to the draconian forms of Wahhabism which flourish at Mecca. Before Abdul Aziz became ruler of Saudi Arabia, he had been assisted in his campaign of expansion by a clique of Wahhabist extremists called the Ikhwan or Brotherhood. When Abdul Aziz had conquered most of the Arabian regions, the Ikhwan staged a rebellion in the 1920s on account of the Saud leader's contact with Christians. The Ikhwan was obliterated with force, but their tenets were upheld by their successors.

Two other movements have followed which promote Islamism - the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwanu I-Muslimin or Hizb al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimoon), founded in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna, and Hizb ut-Tahrir, founded in 1953 by an Islamic jurist, Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. He was an associate of the murderous Mufti of Jerusalem, Ayman al-Husseini, who had slaughtered Jews in Palestine and was welcomed by Hitler. Husseini had gone on to found a Muslim Nazi force in Bosnia. The leading luminary of the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayyid Qutb, a bizarre individual who was terrified of Western women and their "sexuality". His book Milestones on the Road is a document which lays the intellectual foundations of global jihad. He was hanged in 1966, aged 60. Osama bin Laden was a student of Mohammed Qutb, brother of Sayyid Qutb.

Muslim spokespeople in the West complain of Islamophobia, and claim that Islam condemns violence, but the latter suggestion is a falsehood. The Koran is littered with exhortations to violence. According to Sahih Bukhari (Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220), Mohammed said on his deathbed: "I have been made victorious with terror".

Most of the peaceful passages in the Koran are relegated to the end of the book. It is not written in chronological order. In his lifetime, Mohammed's earlier texts which were written in Medina were peaceful. After he had established himself at Mecca (which he took by force, riding at the head of four armies) - the tone of his suras changes dramatically, and encourage warfare. The following are Yusufali's translations:

Sura 8, verse 12 states: "Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): "I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them."

Sura 3, Verse 151 states: "Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority: their abode will be the Fire: And evil is the home of the wrong-doers! "

Sura 9, Verse 5 reads: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, an seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practise regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. "

Sura 9, Verse 29 states: "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."

There is a tradition that if a verse in the Koran contradicts one that was written earlier, the later verse is to be followed - thereby "abrogating" the original statement. One famous Sura of the Koran is often quoted by apologists of Islam - Sura 2: 256, which states "Let there be no compulsion in religion". This Sura is in fact early, and was composed around 634 or 625 AD, being generally assumed by some scholars to have been his 21st "revelation". Therefore, the Sura 2: 256 is "abrogated" by Sura 9: 29.

Despite the desire of most Muslims to live a peaceful life, there are passages in the Koran which cannot be ignored, which are far from peaceful. The modern world is currently assailed by an extremist and purist form of Islam - that promoted by jihadists and Wahhabists. Where is the Martin Luther, prepared to nail a manifesto to the Ka'abah, declaring a reformation of Islam?

Salman Rushdie said in 2004 that to reform Islam, most of the chapters of the Koran would have to be thrown away. There have been those who seek to reinterpret Islam, much as the Jews have interpreted the violent passages of the Torah as being allegorical or not relevant to modern life.

One individual who struggled to convince Muslims of the need for a softer interpretation of Islam was Tashbih Sayyed, who has sadly died aged 66. He will be buried tomorrow in Los Angeles. An open advocate for reform of Islam is someone whose passing will diminish the struggle for peace within the Muslim world and the cause of greater understanding between Muslims and Westerners.

The sad truth is that no matter how many Muslims are moderate and peaceful, the continuous onslaughts of the jihadists and Salafists are eroding any hope of a reconciliation between Islam and the West, and also crushing harmony between Muslims in the global Ummah. As US army general John Abizaid said last year: "We must defeat the extremism of bin Laden and his associated movement. It's murderous. It's ruthless. It's very capable. It's got strength as a network unlike any nonstate actor has ever seen before. We've got to defeat it. Think of it as an opportunity to confront fascism in 1920 if only we'd had the guts to do it then. I believe that if we don't have guts enough to confront this ideology today, we will move toward World War III tomorrow."

One voice of sanity in the Muslim world is an Egyptian-born advocate of Islamic reform called Dr Tawfik Hamid, author of the book "Roots of Jihad. Hamid himself was a former member of a terrorist group Jamaa Islamiya (also called Gamaa Islamiya or al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya) which was once headed by former eye surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri, who now is the deputy leader of Al Qaeda.

Hamid has attended the Intelligence Summit's 2007 conference, and now argues that Islam itself needs to undergo some form of reformation to eradicate the voices of terrorism. His change of heart against radicalism led him and his family to flee Egypt and later to run from Saudi Arabia. He does not disclose his address, not even the country in which he usually esides, because of the threats of extremists. He has lectured at UCLA, Stanford and Georgetown University, and spoke at this year's Secular Islam Summit in March, which took place in Florida.

He has recently written in the Wall Street Journal: "It will not suffice to merely suppress the symptoms. It is imperative to adopt new Islamic teachings that do not allow killing apostates. Islamic authorities must provide mainstream Islamic books that forbid polygamy and beating women. Accepted Islamic doctrine should take a strong stand against slavery and the raping of female war prisoners, as happens in Darfur under the explicit canons of Shariah. Muslims should teach, everywhere and universally, that a woman's testimony in court counts as much as a man's, that women should not be punished if they marry whom they please or dress as they wish."

He claims that "Muslims should publicly show our strong disapproval for the growing number of attacks by Muslims against other faiths and against other Muslims. Let us not dwell on 9/11, Madrid, London, Bali and countless other scenes of carnage. It has been estimated that of the two million refugees fleeing Islamic terror in Iraq, 40 percent are Christian and many of them seek a haven in Lebanon, where the Christian population itself has declined by 60 percent. Even in Turkey, Islamists recently found it necessary to slit the throats of three Christians for publishing Bibles."

"Why was there silence over the Mumbai train bombings which took the lives of over 200 Hindus in 2006? We must not forget that innocent Muslims, too, are suffering. Indeed, the most common murderers of Muslims are, and have always been, other Muslims. Where is the Muslim outcry over the Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq?"

"...It is well past time that Muslims cease using the charge of 'Islamophobia' as a tool to intimidate and blackmail those who speak up against suspicious passengers and against those who rightly criticise current Islamic practices and preachings."

Islam is trapped by its history - no matter how hard some Muslims may wish to move forward, to keep up with the technological and sociological advances made in the modern non-Muslim world, the fundamentalists will always, like snakes in the Snakes & Ladders board game, drag them down to the lower positions. The Koran is the "perfect word of God", revealed to the "most perfect man who ever lived", claim the fundamentalists. But Mohammed was a man of his time and place - the savage world of 7th century Arabia, where girl children were often buried alive in the pre-Islamic period known as Jahaliyah (ignorance). Unless a reformation of Islam takes place soon, the loudest and most aggressive voices in the Muslim world will drag its peaceful members back to the 7th century. And if we in the West are not aware of this, then we will be dragged there with them.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at May 26, 2007 10:53 PM

Comments

Posted by: Chris at May 27, 2007 11:55 AM

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