Islam’s Problem With Blasphemy

2015/01/15 Leave a comment

Good piece by Mustafa Akyol in the NY Times:

Before all that politically motivated expansion and toughening of Shariah, though, the Quran told early Muslims, who routinely faced the mockery of their faith by pagans: “God has told you in the Book that when you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.”

Just “do not sit with them” — that is the response the Quran suggests for mockery. Not violence. Not even censorship.

Wise Muslim religious leaders from the entire world would do Islam a great favor if they preached and reiterated such a nonviolent and non-oppressive stance in the face of insults against Islam. That sort of instruction could also help their more intolerant coreligionists understand that rage is a sign of nothing but immaturity. The power of any faith comes not from its coercion of critics and dissenters. It comes from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers.

Islam’s Problem With Blasphemy – NYTimes.com.

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No “Clash of Civilizations” – Commentary Magazine

2015/01/14 Leave a comment

From a surprising source, Commentary Magazine:

Surveys indicate that the broad majority of Muslims around the world are not in the violent, jihadist camp. A Pew poll in 2013, for example, found that across 11 Muslim countries, 67 percent of those surveyed said they are somewhat or very concerned about Islamic extremism and 57 percent said they had an unfavorable view of al-Qaeda while 51 percent had an unfavorable view of the Taliban. Moreover, “about three-quarters or more in Pakistan (89%), Indonesia (81%), Nigeria (78%) and Tunisia (77%), say suicide bombings or other acts of violence that target civilians are never justified.” Indeed the only place where a majority of Muslims justified suicide bombings was in the Palestinian territories.

It seems safe, then, to say that most Muslims around the world are moderate. But there is a substantial minority of extremists which, in absolute numbers, pose a serious threat, given the fact that there are an estimated 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. While those extremists pose a substantial threat to the West, they present an even bigger threat to fellow Muslims. The vast majority of victims of Islamist terrorist organization such as the Taliban, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Hezbollah have been fellow Muslims. Such organizations, after all, are principally bent on dominating their own societies, thus by definition oppressing and killing fellow Muslims; they generally attack the West only as an auxiliary line of operations. One of the truly disturbing aspects of modern-day Islamist movements is the ease with which they declare their Muslim enemies to be “takfir” (i.e. apostates) and therefore liable to be killed.

What is going on, then, is not a war between civilizations but a war within Islamic civilization pitting an armed, militant minority against a peaceful but easily cowed majority. Any talk of waging “war on Islam” is thus deeply misguided and harmful. What we in the West need to do is to help moderate Muslims wage war on the radicals. Sound impossible? Far from it. Just look at how successfully (if brutally) Muslim states such as Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria have fought to repress Islamist movements–or how courageously so many Iraqi and Afghan security officers have fought against Islamist extremists. (They would fight even more effectively if their own organizations were less corrupt and more effective.)

The “us-vs.-them” narrative only distracts from what needs to be done while playing into the terrorists’ hands–that is after all, precisely the narrative they seek to promulgate to rally Muslims to their side.

No “Clash of Civilizations” – Commentary Magazine Commentary Magazine.

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Drawing the prophet: Islam’s hidden history of Muhammad images

2015/01/13 Leave a comment

Interesting article on the history of devotional Islamic art that depicts the prophet Muhammad. Again, a sad forgetting of some of the rich traditions within Islam:

To many Muslims, any image of the prophet Muhammad is sacrilegious, but the ban has not always been absolute and there is a small but rich tradition of devotional Islamic art going back more than seven centuries that does depict God’s messenger.

It began with exquisite miniatures from the 13th century, scholars say. Commissioned from Muslim artists by the rich and powerful of their day, they show almost every episode of Muhammad’s life as recounted in the Qur’an and other texts, from birth to death and ascension into heaven.

Intended as private aids to devotion and prayer, these detailed scenes were made for both Sunni and Shia worshippers, and surviving examples can be found in dozens of major museum and library collections.

They also laid the foundations for a popular, if minority, tradition of devotional and inspirational images that still exists today, from icons cherished in homes to a five-storey government-commissioned mural in the heart of Tehran and even to revolutionary street art in Cairo – although the prophet’s face is obscured in both those public drawings.

In the wake of the murder of cartoonists at French magazine Charlie Hebdo, many Muslims and non-Muslims have argued that Islam has always banned any representation of the prophet, in part because of strong warnings in the Qu’ran and other religious texts against idolatry or anything that could be seen as a pathway towards idolatry.

This position is rarely challenged, perhaps because the existence of images of Muhammad is little known and almost never discussed outside communities that create, study or buy them. But their obscurity frustrates experts who see them as a rich part of Islam’s artistic heritage and resent the misconception that the only depictions of the prophet are mocking or racist creations by non-believers. “It’s really important for audiences that have never seen the pietistic images of Muhammad to make a radical distinction between the mystical and beautiful images that have been produced over the last 1,000 years by Muslims and for Muslims, and the offensive and sometimes pornographic images [currently in the news],” said Omid Safi, director of the Islamic Studies Centre at Duke University in North Carolina.

Drawing the prophet: Islam’s hidden history of Muhammad images | World news | The Observer.

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The state and Islam: Converting the preachers | The Economist

2014/12/13 Leave a comment

Good article in The Economist regarding state control of mosques and Imams to reduce radicalization:

In fact, the Saudi effort to tone down its clerics is mild, hesitant and belated compared to what some Muslim states do. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan already routinely use cameras. Kuwait has long installed tape-recorders to monitor Friday sermons. Preachers in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates need not write their own sermons. Except for a few trusted senior clerics, they read instead from a text delivered weekly by the government department for religious affairs that also pays all their salaries. “Protecting Youth from Destructive Ideas” and “Our National Flag, Symbol of Affiliation and Loyalty” provided two stimulating recent topics. Similarly, Turkey has for decades enforced a monopoly of Islamic discourse via a religious bureaucracy, known as Diyanet, that wields 121,000 employees and a budget of $2.3 billion.

Other governments aspire to such dominance. Tunisia’s government has in recent months restored strict state control of mosques that had slipped following its revolution of January 2011, leading to a brief flowering of Wahhabist-style jihad promotion. Morocco, whose king has traditionally posed as Commander of the Faithful, delivering televised Ramadan sermons, has steeply boosted state promotion of a relatively tolerant version of the faith. Its budget for training imams, including a growing number of foreign students, has swollen tenfold in the past three years. The unspoken aim is to counter the spread of extreme Salafist ideas in places such as Mali and northern Nigeria.

…Egypt’s government has of late clamped unprecedented controls. In January it decreed that all Friday sermons must adhere to a weekly theme set by the religious-affairs ministry, establishing a hotline to allow worshippers to denounce preachers daring to voice political dissent. Further decrees required all preachers to be government-licensed, imposed a code of ethics forbidding discussion of politics in mosques, and banned smaller prayer halls from holding Friday prayers. The ministry fired 12,000 preachers and now allows only those trained in government-approved institutes to deliver sermons.

…As a foil to the powerful Brotherhood, the [Egyptian] state had long allowed followers of quietist forms of Salafism to run some 7,000 mosques. But the ministry in September decreed it would take over their mosques too, after reports of a sermon forbidding the faithful from buying interest-bearing government bonds.

Amr Ezzat, an Egyptian researcher, sees the effort to impose state-ordained orthodoxy as misguided and possibly dangerous. Religious institutions will lose legitimacy with time, pushing more Muslims towards radical margins. And by acting in effect as the imam, the state takes upon itself a duty to enforce morality. It is perhaps as a sop to religious conservatives, for instance, that Egyptian authorities have mounted an increasingly lurid campaign against homosexuality, most recently by staging a midnight raid on a Cairo bathhouse on national television, dragging a score of naked men to prison.

The state and Islam: Converting the preachers | The Economist.

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Pope says it is wrong to equate Islam with violence

2014/12/02 Leave a comment

Much more productive approach than his predecessor:

The Argentine pope, who has been trying to foster cooperation with moderate Islam in order to work for peace and protect Christians in the Middle East, said it was wrong for anyone to react to terrorism by being “enraged” against Islam.

“You just can’t say that, just as you can’t say that all Christians are fundamentalists. We have our share of them fundamentalists. All religions have these little groups,” he said.

“They Muslims say: ‘No, we are not this, the Koran is a book of peace, it is a prophetic book of peace.”

Francis said he had made the suggestion of a global condemnation of terrorism by Islamic leaders in talks on Friday with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

“I told the president that it would be beautiful if all Islamic leaders, whether they are political, religious or academic leaders, would speak out clearly and condemn this because this would help the majority of Muslim people,” he said.

Francis several times condemned Islamic States insurgents during his three-day trip. On the plane, he said some Christians had been forced to abandon everything: “They are driving us out of the Middle East.”

Pope says it is wrong to equate Islam with violence | Reuters.

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Europe and Islam: Degrees of separation | The Economist

2014/11/19 Leave a comment

Interesting overview of some of the debates in Europe over the role, or not, of the state, in training of Imams:

In addition to all these ideological issues, there is a hard reality to consider. Being an imam in Europe is a rather thankless task. Of the 1,800 imams in France, about 1,000 offer their services for virtually no pay. Only 330 receive a decent, full-time salary—in most cases from religious authorities in their home countries, such as Algeria, Morocco or Turkey. Only 25-30% of the imams working in France have French citizenship. The idea of “home-grown” French imams, well-trained and correspondingly well paid, is an attractive one in principle—but poor Muslim communities seem unwilling or unable to finance such arrangements. And for the secular French state, putting imams on its payroll would be inconceivable.

Europe and Islam: Degrees of separation | The Economist.

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Book on apostasy in Islam earns writer the moniker Somalia’s Salman Rushdie – Religion News Service

2014/11/19 Leave a comment

Brave and courageous.

But it is a test within Islam between those more open believers and the literalists/fundamentalists:

Ismail said the book furthers the growing voice of Muslim scholars, intellectuals and prominent clerics worldwide who are increasingly rejecting the abuse of Islam by extremist groups such as the Islamic State, Nigeria’s Boko Haram and Somalia’s Al-Shabab.

“What we need are secular states where there is democracy, justice and equality for all,” he said. “Not theocratic ones where leaders rule by the name of God.”

Ismail’s concern is that Somali Islamic militants, clerics and other extremist groups in Muslim-majority countries are applying apostasy as a political tool, branding those with contrary opinions as apostates who need to be killed. He has watched Al-Shabab justify the deaths of those who oppose their hard-line interpretation of the Quran by branding them apostates. Somali civil servants, national army officers, local or international nongovernmental organization officials, are considered devil’s spies who deserve death, he added.

“I wanted to explain to my people the true meaning of apostasy in Islam,” he said.

A graduate of the Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia, Ismail, 50,  has written four other books on globalization and economics.

But he appears to have struck a raw nerve with the latest book, which he had hoped would stimulate a debate on religious freedom in Islam. The book also touches on other issues, such as gender equality and stoning adulterers to death in Islam.

“Apostasy is crime in Islam,” said Sheikh Abdallar Kheir, a religious scholar at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. “It is mentioned in the Quran and the traditions of the prophet. It is like treason.“

But there conditions and situations in which the rule is applied,” Kheir added. “It must be in an Islamic state, there must be dialogue and reasoning before it is applied, and it is applied if the person in the new faith causes disturbance to Muslims or the Islamic faith.”

Sorry, Sheikh Kheir, your conditions don’t cut it from a human rights and dignity perspective.

Book on apostasy in Islam earns writer the moniker Somalias Salman Rushdie – Religion News Service.

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Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage

2014/11/15 Leave a comment

A reminder that our nominal allies in the struggle against ISIS have their own ISIS and Taliban-like tendency to obliterate history and anything that does not conform to their historical and cultural interpretation of Islam:

Over the last few years, mosques and key sites dating from the time of Muhammad have been knocked down or destroyed, as have Ottoman-era mansions, ancient wells and stone bridges. Over 98% of the Kingdom’s historical and religious sites have been destroyed since 1985, estimates the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation in London. “It’s as if they wanted to wipe out history,” says Ali Al-Ahmed, of the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, D.C.

Though the Saudi rulers have a long history of destroying historical sites, activists say the pace and range of destruction has recently increased. A few months ago, the house of Hamza, the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle, was flattened to make way for a Meccan hotel, according to Irfan Al Alawi, executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation. There have even been rumored threats to Muhammad’s tomb in Medina and his birthplace in Mecca.

Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage | TIME.

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Austria’s Muslims fear changes to historic Islam law

2014/11/05 Leave a comment

On foreign funding of mosques in Austria:

The draft law has also been criticised by constitutional experts, who say that some of its provisions fail to treat Muslims equally.

Professor Stefan Hammer from the University of Vienna says, while it is legitimate for the government to try and prevent misuse of donations from abroad, a blanket ban on foreign funding for the Islamic Community is constitutionally very problematic.

“Financing of religious communities is part of their internal affairs. This does not mean the state may not address any aspect of that, but it has to be proportional,” he says.

Other religious groups and churches receive external funding, notably the Russian Orthodox Church from Moscow, so differentiating between religions would clearly be excessive, he believes.

“It would be a clear breach of the principle of equal treatment.”Carla Amina Baghajati from the Islamic Community says the draft is infused with “a spirit of mistrust”, which she fears could play into the hands of the radicals.

“The radicals make use of the identity question, telling people: Look at the European societies, you wont ever be on the same level, you will always be an outsider. They wont accept you, so come and join us.

“This is very dangerous. We have to help young people to find their identity and the law is one of the important pieces in this identity building. It has helped in the past and we want it to help in the future.”

Seems like the solution could be a ban on any foreign funding for any religion to address the equal treatment issue.

BBC News – Austrias Muslims fear changes to historic Islam law.

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Islam and hadiths: Sifting and combing

2014/10/30 Leave a comment

Point well made in The Economist on religious and scriptural interpretation, and whether or not they lead to moderation:

Mr [Jonathan] Brown [author of Misquoting Muhammad] takes particular issue with The Economist for predicting that the information age will undermine the authority of old-time scholars and revolutionise the way in which ideas about Islam’s core teachings are formed. Given his fascination with long intellectual traditions, the author insists that nothing good can come of people going straight to texts which can foster extremist ideas unless they are leavened by scholarly wisdom.

In our defence, it is an already observable fact that electronics are making it much easier for ordinary Muslims, or self-taught “experts”, to bypass the older authorities and come to their own judgements on what their holy texts say and how they should be read. And as The Economist writing on the subject has made clear, this change can have bad consequences as well as good. Amateur theologians, bent on bypassing the professionals, can come to enlightened conclusions or appalling ones, such as the gimcrack theology used to justify acts of mega-terror by al-Qaeda or Islamic State.

However it’s also worth pointing out that neither conscientious scholarship nor participation in a centuries-old chain of editing and learning are foolproof guarantees of moderation. True, scholarly activities like hadith-sifting can sometimes help to mellow a religion. But remember, too, that the leaders of the Iranian revolution, who raised the standard of militant political Islam in the modern world, included many conscientious scholars.

Islam and hadiths: Sifting and combing | The Economist.

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