A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds
James Estrin/The New York Times"Here you don't know what will solve a problem. It's about looking for a key." Sheik Reda Shata, the imam of a thriving mosque in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/nyreg ... 0&emc=eta1
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
Published: March 5, 2006
The imam begins his trek before dawn, his long robe billowing like a ghost through empty streets. In this dark, quiet hour, his thoughts sometimes drift back to the Egyptian farming village where he was born.
In the subway, Sheik Reda Shata wears Western clothes instead of his traditional robe to avoid being taunted.
But as the sun rises over Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Sheik Reda Shata's new world comes to life. The R train rattles beneath a littered stretch of sidewalk, where Mexican workers huddle in the cold. An electric Santa dances in a doughnut shop window. Neon signs beckon. Gypsy cabs blare their horns.
The imam slips into a plain brick building, nothing like the golden-domed mosque of his youth. He stops to pray, and then climbs the cracked linoleum steps to his cluttered office. The answering machine blinks frantically, a portent of the endless questions to come.
A teenage girl wants to know: Is it halal, or lawful, to eat a Big Mac? Can alcohol be served, a waiter wonders, if it is prohibited by the Koran? Is it wrong to take out a mortgage, young Muslim professionals ask, when Islam frowns upon monetary interest?
The questions are only a piece of the daily puzzle Mr. Shata must solve as the imam of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, a thriving New York mosque where several thousand Muslims worship.
To his congregants, Mr. Shata is far more than the leader of daily prayers and giver of the Friday sermon. Many of them now live in a land without their parents, who typically assist with finding a spouse. There are fewer uncles and cousins to help resolve personal disputes. There is no local House of Fatwa to issue rulings on ethical questions.
Sheik Reda, as he is called, arrived in Brooklyn one year after Sept. 11. Virtually overnight, he became an Islamic judge and nursery school principal, a matchmaker and marriage counselor, a 24-hour hot line on all things Islamic.
Day after day, he must find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life. Little in his rural Egyptian upbringing or years of Islamic scholarship prepared him for the challenge of leading a mosque in America.
The job has worn him down and opened his mind. It has landed him, exhausted, in the hospital and earned him a following far beyond Brooklyn.
"America transformed me from a person of rigidity to flexibility," said Mr. Shata, speaking through an Arabic translator. "I went from a country where a sheik would speak and the people listened to one where the sheik talks and the people talk back."
This is the story of Mr. Shata's journey west: the making of an American imam.
Over the last half-century, the Muslim population in the United States has risen significantly. Immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa have settled across the country, establishing mosques from Boston to Los Angeles, and turning Islam into one of the nation's fastest growing religions. By some estimates, as many as six million Muslims now live in America.
Leading this flock calls for improvisation. Imams must unify diverse congregations with often-clashing Islamic traditions. They must grapple with the threat of terrorism, answering to law enforcement agents without losing the trust of their fellow Muslims. Sometimes they must set aside conservative beliefs that prevail in the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam.
Islam is a legalistic faith: Muslims believe in a divine law that guides their daily lives, including what they should eat, drink and wear. In countries where the religion reigns, this is largely the accepted way.
But in the West, what Islamic law prohibits is everywhere. Alcohol fills chocolates. Women jog in sports bras. For many Muslims in America, life is a daily clash between Islamic mores and material temptation. At the center of this clash stands the imam.
In America, imams evoke a simplistic caricature — of robed, bearded clerics issuing fatwas in foreign lands. Hundreds of imams live in the United States, but their portrait remains flatly one-dimensional. Either they are symbols of diversity, breaking the Ramadan fast with smiling politicians, or zealots, hurrying into their storefront mosques.
Mr. Shata, 37, is neither a firebrand nor a ready advocate of progressive Islam. Some of his views would offend conservative Muslims; other beliefs would repel American liberals. He is in many ways a work in progress, mapping his own middle ground between two different worlds.
Marking the end of Ramadan, Mr. Shata's mosque, the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, attracted an overflow crowd. Since the mosque was founded a few blocks away in 1984, it has grown into a vital center for new Muslim immigrants.
Each morning, Mr. Shata accompanies his daughters Esteshhad, 10, left, and Rahma, 6, to the bus stop of their Islamic school. Along the way, he quizzes them on passages from the Koran.
The imam's cramped, curtained office can hardly contain the dramas that unfold inside. Women cry. Husbands storm off. Friendships end. Every day brings soap opera plots and pitch.
A Moroccan woman falls to her knees near the imam's Hewlett-Packard printer. "Have mercy on me!" she wails to a friend who has accused her of theft. Another day, it is a man whose Lebanese wife has concealed their marriage and newborn son from her strict father. "I will tell him everything!" the husband screams.
Mr. Shata settles dowries, confronts wife abusers, brokers business deals and tries to arrange marriages. He approaches each problem with an almost scientific certainty that it can be solved. "I try to be more of a doctor than a judge," said Mr. Shata. "A judge sentences. A doctor tries to remedy."
Imams in the United States now serve an estimated 1,200 mosques. Some of their congregants have lived here for generations, assimilating socially and succeeding professionally. But others are recent immigrants, still struggling to find their place in America. Demographers expect their numbers to rise in the coming decades, possibly surpassing those of American Jews.
Like many of their faithful, most imams in the United States come from abroad. They are recruited primarily for their knowledge of the Koran and the language in which it was revealed, Arabic.
But few are prepared for the test that awaits. Like the parish priests who came generations before, imams are called on to lead a community on the margins of American civic life. They are conduits to and arbiters of an exhilarating, if sometimes hostile world, filled with promise and peril.
An Invitation to Islam
More than 5,000 miles lie between Brooklyn and Kafr al Battikh, Mr. Shata's birthplace in northeastern Egypt. Situated where the Nile Delta meets the Suez Canal, it was a village of dirt roads and watermelon vines when Mr. Shata was born in 1968.
Egypt was in the throes of change. The country had just suffered a staggering defeat in the Six Day War with Israel, and protests against the government followed. Hoping to counter growing radicalism, a new president, Anwar Sadat, allowed a long-repressed Islamic movement to flourish.
The son of a farmer and fertilizer salesman, Mr. Shata belonged to the lowest rung of Egypt's rural middle class. His house had no electricity. He did not see a television until he was 15.
Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother's voice. At bedtime, she would tell him the story of the Prophet Muhammad, the seventh-century founder of Islam. The boy heard much that was familiar. Like the prophet, he had lost his mother at a young age.
"She told me the same story maybe a thousand times," he said.
At the age of 5, he began memorizing the Koran. Like thousands of children in the Egyptian countryside, he attended a Sunni religious school subsidized by the government and connected to Al Azhar University, a bastion of Islamic scholarship.
Too poor to buy books, the young Mr. Shata hand-copied from hundreds at the town library. The bound volumes now line the shelves of his Bay Ridge apartment. When he graduated, he enrolled at Al Azhar and headed to Cairo by train. There, he sat on a bench for hours, marveling at the sights.
"I was like a lost child," he said. "Cars. We didn't have them. People of different colors. Foreigners. Women almost naked. It was like an imaginary world."
At 18, Mr. Shata thought of becoming a judge. But at his father's urging, he joined the college of imams, the Dawah.
The word means invitation. It refers to the duty of Muslims to invite, or call, others to the faith. Unlike Catholicism or Judaism, Islam has no ordained clergy. The Prophet Muhammad was the religion's first imam, or prayer leader, Islam's closest corollary to a rabbi or priest; schools like the Dawah are its version of a seminary or rabbinate.
After four years, Mr. Shata graduated with honors, seventh in a class of 3,400.
The next decade brought lessons in adaptation. In need of money, Mr. Shata took a job teaching sharia, or Islamic law, to children in Saudi Arabia, a country guided by Wahhabism, a puritan strain of Sunni Islam. He found his Saudi colleagues' interpretation of the Koran overly literal at times, and the treatment of women, who were not allowed to vote or drive, troubling.
One of Mr. Shata's least favorite tasks is granting divorces. Still, he is often called upon to counsel congregants like this one who want to end marriages.
Five years later, he returned to a different form of religious control in Egypt, where most imams are appointed by the government and monitored for signs of radicalism or political dissent.
"They are not allowed to deviate from the curriculum that the government sets for them," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mr. Shata craved greater independence, and opened a furniture business. But he missed the life of dawah and eventually returned to it as the imam of his hometown mosque, which drew 4,000 worshipers on Fridays alone.
His duties were clear: He led the five daily prayers and delivered the khutba, or Friday sermon. His mosque, like most in Egypt, was financed and managed by the government. He spent his free time giving lectures, conducting marriage ceremonies and offering occasional religious guidance.
In 2000, Mr. Shata left to work as an imam in the gritty industrial city of Stuttgart, Germany. Europe brought a fresh new freedom. "I saw a wider world," he said. "Anyone with an opinion could express it."
Then came Sept. 11.
Soon after, Mr. Shata's mosque was defiled with graffiti and smeared with feces.
The next summer, Mr. Shata took a call from an imam in Brooklyn. The man, Mohamed Moussa, was leaving his mosque, exhausted by the troubles of his congregants following the terrorist attacks. The mosque was looking for a replacement, and Mr. Shata had come highly recommended by a professor at Al Azhar.
Most imams are recruited to American mosques on the recommendation of other imams or trusted scholars abroad, and are usually offered an annual contract. Some include health benefits and subsidized housing; others are painfully spare. The pay can range from $20,000 to $50,000.
Mr. Shata had heard stories of Muslim hardship in America. The salary at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge was less than what he was earning in Germany. But foremost on his mind were his wife and three small daughters, whom he had not seen in months. Germany had refused them entry.
He agreed to take the job if he could bring his family to America. In October 2002, the American Embassy in Cairo granted visas to the Shatas and they boarded a plane for New York.
A Mosque, a Magnet
A facade of plain white brick rises up from Fifth Avenue just south of 68th Street in Bay Ridge. Two sets of words, one in Arabic and another in English, announce the mosque's dual identity from a marquee above its gray metal doors.
To the mosque's base — Palestinian, Egyptian, Yemeni, Moroccan and Algerian immigrants — it is known as Masjid Moussab, named after one of the prophet's companions, Moussab Ibn Omair. To the mosque's English-speaking neighbors, descendants of the Italians, Irish and Norwegians who once filled the neighborhood, it is the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.
Mosques across America are commonly named centers or societies, in part because they provide so many services. Some 140 mosques serve New York City, where an estimated 600,000 Muslims live, roughly 20 percent of them African-American, said Louis Abdellatif Cristillo, an anthropologist at Teachers College who has canvassed the city's mosques.
The Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, like other American mosques, is run by a board of directors, mostly Muslim professionals from the Palestinian territories. What began in 1984 as a small storefront on Bay Ridge Avenue, with no name and no imam, has grown into one of the city's vital Muslim centers, a magnet for new immigrants.
Its four floors pulse with life: a nursery school, an Islamic bookstore, Koran classes and daily lectures. Some 1,500 Muslims worship at the mosque on Fridays, often crouched in prayer on the sidewalk. Albanians, Pakistanis and others who speak little Arabic listen to live English translations of the sermons through headsets. It is these congregants' crumpled dollar bills, collected in a cardboard box, that enable the mosque to survive.
Among the city's imams, Bay Ridge is seen as a humbling challenge.
"It's the first station for immigrants," said Mr. Moussa, Mr. Shata's predecessor. "And immigrants have a lot of problems."
Skip 911. Call the Imam.
Mr. Shata landed at Kennedy International Airport wearing a crimson felt hat and a long gray jilbab that fell from his neck to his sandaled toes, the proud dress of an Al Azhar scholar. He spoke no English. But already, he carried some of the West inside. He could quote liberally from Voltaire, Shaw and Kant. For an Egyptian, he often jokes, he was inexplicably punctual.
Muslims in America (March 4, 2006) The first thing Mr. Shata loved about America, like Germany, was the order.
"In Egypt, if a person passes through a red light, that means he's smart," he said. "In America, he's very disrespected."
Americans stood in line. They tended their yards. One could call the police and hear a rap at the door minutes later. That fact impressed not only Mr. Shata, but also the women of his new mosque.
They had gained a reputation for odd calls to 911. One woman called because a relative abroad had threatened to take her inheritance. "The officers left and didn't write anything," Mr. Shata said, howling with laughter. "There was nothing for them to write."
Another woman called, angry because her husband had agreed to let a daughter from a previous marriage spend the night.
To Mr. Shata, the calls made sense. The women's parents, uncles and brothers — figures of authority in family conflict — were overseas. Instead, they dialed 911, hoping for a local substitute. Soon they would learn to call the imam.
A bearish man with a soft, bearded face, Mr. Shata struck his congregants as an odd blend of things. He was erudite yet funny; authoritative at the mosque's wooden pulpit and boyishly charming between prayers.
Homemakers, doctors, cabdrivers and sheiks stopped by to assess the new imam. He regaled them with Dunkin' Donuts coffee, fetched by the Algerian keeper of the mosque, and then told long, poetic stories that left his visitors silent, their coffee cold.
"You just absorb every word he says," said Linda Sarsour, 25, a Muslim activist in Brooklyn.
The imam, too, was taking note. Things worked differently in America, where mosques were run as nonprofit organizations and congregants had a decidedly democratic air. Mr. Shata was shocked when a tone-deaf man insisted on giving the call to prayer. Such a man would be ridiculed in Egypt, where the callers, or muezzinin, have voices so beautiful they sometimes record top-selling CD's.
But in the land of equal opportunity, a man with a mediocre voice could claim discrimination. Mr. Shata relented. He shudders when the voice periodically sounds.
No sooner had Mr. Shata started his new job than all manner of problems arrived at his worn wooden desk: rebellious teenagers, marital strife, confessions of philandering, accusations of theft.
The imam responded creatively. Much of the drama involved hot dog vendors. There was the pair who shared a stand, but could not stand each other. They came to the imam, who helped them divide the business.
The most notorious hot dog seller stood accused of stealing thousands of dollars in donations he had raised for the children of his deceased best friend. But there was no proof. The donations had been in cash. The solution, the imam decided, was to have the man swear an oath on the Koran.
"Whoever lies while taking an oath on the Koran goes blind afterward," said Mr. Shata, stating a belief that has proved useful in cases of theft. A group of men lured the vendor to the mosque, where he confessed to stealing $11,400. His admission was recorded in a waraqa, or document, penned in Arabic and signed by four witnesses. He returned the money in full.
Dozens of waraqas sit in the locked bottom drawer of the imam's desk. In one, a Brooklyn man who burned his wife with an iron vows, in nervous Arabic scrawl, never to do it again. If he fails, he will owe her a $10,000 "disciplinary fine." The police had intervened before, but the woman felt that she needed the imam's help.
For hundreds of Muslims, the Bay Ridge mosque has become a courthouse more welcoming than the one downtown, a police precinct more effective than the brick station blocks away. Even the police have used the imam's influence to their advantage, warning disorderly teenagers that they will be taken to the mosque rather than the station.
"They say: 'No, not the imam! He'll tell my parents,' " said Russell Kain, a recently retired officer of the 68th Precinct.
Marriage, Mortgage, McDonald's
Soon after arriving in Brooklyn, Mr. Shata observed a subtle rift among the women of his mosque. Those who were new to America remained quietly grounded in the traditions of their homelands. But some who had assimilated began to question those strictures. Concepts like shame held less weight. Actions like divorce, abhorred by Mr. Shata, were surprisingly popular.
Muslims in America (March 4, 2006) "The woman who comes from overseas, she's like someone who comes from darkness to a very well-lit place," he said.
In early July, an Egyptian karate teacher shuffled into Mr. Shata's office and sank into a donated couch. He smiled meekly and began to talk. His new wife showed him no affection. She complained about his salary and said he lacked ambition.
The imam urged him to be patient.
Two weeks later, in came the wife. She wanted a divorce.
"We don't understand each other," the woman said. She was 32 and had come from Alexandria, Egypt, to work as an Arabic teacher. She had met her husband through a friend in Bay Ridge. Her parents, still in Egypt, had approved cautiously from afar.
"I think you should be patient," said the imam.
"I cannot," she said firmly. "He loves me, but I have to love him, too."
Mr. Shata shifted uncomfortably in his chair. There was nothing he loathed more than granting a divorce.
"It's very hard for me to let him divorce you," he said. "How can I meet God on Judgment Day?"
"It's God's law also to have divorce," she shot back. The debate continued.
Finally, Mr. Shata asked for her parents' phone number in Egypt. Over the speakerphone, they anxiously urged the imam to relent. Their daughter was clearly miserable, and they were too far away to intervene.
With a sigh, Mr. Shata asked his executive secretary, Mohamed, to print a divorce certificate. In the rare instance when the imam agrees to issue one, it is after a couple has filed for divorce with the city.
"Since you're the one demanding divorce, you can never get back together with him," the imam warned. "Ever."
The woman smiled politely.
"What matters for us is the religion," she said later. "Our law is our religion."
The religion's fiqh, or jurisprudence, is built on 14 centuries of scholarship, but imams in Europe and America often find this body of law insufficient to address life in the West. The quandaries of America were foreign to Mr. Shata.
Pornography was rampant, prompting a question Mr. Shata had never heard in Egypt: Is oral sex lawful? Pork and alcohol are forbidden in Islam, raising questions about whether Muslims could sell beer or bacon. Tired of the menacing stares in the subway, women wanted to know if they could remove their headscarves. Muslims were navigating their way through problems Mr. Shata had never fathomed.
For a while, the imam called his fellow sheiks in Egypt with requests for fatwas, or nonbinding legal rulings. But their views carried little relevance to life in America. Some issues, like oral sex, he dared not raise. Over time, he began to find his own answers and became, as he put it, flexible.
Is a Big Mac permissible? Yes, the imam says, but not a bacon cheeseburger.
It is a woman's right, Mr. Shata believes, to remove her hijab if she feels threatened. Muslims can take jobs serving alcohol and pork, he says, but only if other work cannot be found. Oral sex is acceptable, but only between married couples. Mortgages, he says, are necessary to move forward in America.
"Islam is supposed to make a person's life easier, not harder," Mr. Shata explained.
In some ways, the imam has resisted change. He has learned little English, and interviews with Mr. Shata over the course of six months required the use of a translator.
Some imams in the United States make a point of shaking hands with women, distancing themselves from the view that such contact is improper. Mr. Shata offers women only a nod.
Daily, he passes the cinema next to his mosque but has never seen a movie in a theater. He says music should be forbidden if it "encourages sexual desire." He won't convert a non-Muslim when it seems more a matter of convenience than true belief.
"Religion is not a piece of clothing that you change," he said after turning away an Ecuadorean immigrant who sought to convert for her Syrian husband. "I don't want someone coming to Islam tonight and leaving it in the morning."
Ten months after he came to America, Mr. Shata collapsed.
It was Friday. The mosque was full. Hundreds of men sat pressed together, their shirts damp with summer. Their wives and daughters huddled in the women's section, one floor below. Word of the imam's sermons had spread, drawing Muslims from Albany and Hartford.
"Praise be to Allah," began Mr. Shata, his voice slowly rising.
Minutes later, the imam recalled, the room began to spin. He fell to the carpet, lost consciousness and spent a week in the hospital, plagued by several symptoms. A social worker and a counselor who treated the imam both said he suffered from exhaustion. The counselor, Ali Gheith, called it "compassion fatigue," an ailment that commonly affects disaster-relief workers.
It was not just the long hours, the new culture and the ceaseless demands that weighed on the imam. Most troubling were the psychological woes of his congregants, which seemed endless.
Sept. 11 had wrought depression and anxiety among Muslims. But unlike many priests or rabbis, imams lacked pastoral training in mental health and knew little about the social services available.
At heart was another complicated truth: Imams often approach mental illness from a strictly Islamic perspective. Hardship is viewed as a test of faith, and the answer can be found in tawwakul, trusting in God's plan. The remedy typically suggested by imams is a spiritual one, sought through fasting, prayer and reflection.
Muslim immigrants also limit themselves to religious solutions because of the stigma surrounding mental illness, said Hamada Hamid, a resident psychiatrist at New York University who founded The Journal of Muslim Mental Health. "If somebody says, 'You need this medication,' someone may respond, 'I have tawwakul,' " he said.
Mr. Gheith, a Palestinian immigrant who works in disaster preparedness for the city's health department, began meeting with the imam regularly after his collapse. Mr. Shata needed to learn to disconnect from his congregants, Mr. Gheith said. It was a concept that confounded the imam.
"I did not permit these problems to enter my heart," said Mr. Shata, "nor can I permit them to leave."
The conversations eventually led to a citywide training program for imams, blending Islam with psychology. Mr. Shata learned to identify the symptoms of mental illness and began referring people to treatment.
His congregants often refuse help, blaming black magic or the evil eye for their problems. The evil eye is believed to be a curse driven by envy, confirmed in the bad things that happen to people.
One Palestinian couple in California insisted that their erratic 18-year-old son had the evil eye. He was brought to the imam's attention after winding up on the streets of New York, and eventually received a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Mr. Shata had less success with a man who worshiped at the mosque. He had become paranoid, certain his wife was cursing him with witchcraft. But he refused treatment, insisting divorce was the only cure.
Time and again, Mr. Shata's new country has called for creativity and patience, for a careful negotiation between tradition and modernity.
"Here you don't know what will solve a problem," he said. "It's about looking for a key."
Interpretation of faith in Islam
There is a video presentation on the previous post at:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/ny ... ?th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/ny ... ?th&emc=th
Islam in Europe
Apr 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition
http://economist.com/world/europe/displ ... id=6800741
Sending a message to the faithful back home
“I BELIEVE there is no European Islam,” said Mustafa Ceric, a Bosnian imam, at a meeting of Islamic clerics and advisers in Vienna. Yet two months ago, his supreme Islamic department of Bosnia said that “Muslims who live in Europe have the right—no, the duty—to develop their own European culture of Islam.” Such contradictions are part of a broad debate over the role and character of Islam in Europe, which could have profound implications, and not only because Muslims are the continent's largest minority. It might affect the wider Islamic world if it shows that Muslims can adapt to modern, secular democracies.
Traditional teaching frowns on the idea of distinctive forms of Islam, holding that there is a single community of believers, the umma. Differences clearly exist between Sunni and Shia, or between Saudis and Malays, but Muslims are reluctant to proclaim fresh ones. As a declaration by Islamic organisations in Europe put it in 2003, “a ‘European’ Islam is non-existent; only the term ‘Islam in Europe’ offers an adequate definition.” Traditional teaching also divides the world into a house of Islam, under Muslim laws, and a house of war, where infidels prevail. But since Islam's earliest years, it has been accepted that there are also intermediate situations, with non-Muslim regimes that can provide tolerable conditions for Muslims.
Theologians have wrestled over the terms under which Muslims may live in non-Muslim lands. In the background is the belief that, if Muslim-friendly conditions do not exist, believers have a duty to migrate in search of more congenial places. But what makes the European Muslim experience challenging is that Muslims have migrated from their heartlands to places where they are a permanent minority. Theologians can hardly say that conditions in Europe are intolerable, when millions have voted with their feet. But given that Muslim life in Europe is a reality, on what terms should believers participate in secular western institutions? Some groups, especially the international Muslim Brotherhood, consider that they should participate vigorously in western, democratic institutions, even if they do not abandon their core belief that Muslim governance and law are ideal.
In the teeth of traditional teaching, European Muslims are creating a distinctive form of Islam. They are driven by their experience as minorities; by a desire to overcome ethnic differences; and by the trauma of emigration. The first encourages Muslims to co-operate with non-Muslims; the second encourages them to look beyond their traditions; the third forces them to come to terms with change and modernity. Sayed Ghaemmagami, mufti of the Shias in Germany, argues that the situation of Muslims in Europe is unique. “The existence of an Islamic diaspora”, he says, “is totally different from the past and requires new thinking about relations with non-Islamic peoples.” The Koran calls for peaceful relations between Muslims and others, so Muslims should engage with their new countries and not set up parallel structures. “We must participate in all activities of life, as students, as businessmen, as social workers,” says Ahmed al-Rawi, president of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe.
Muslims should also respect the difference between religion and politics. As Mr Ceric puts it, “a Muslim has allegiance to God as an act of faith but is a citizen with a duty to the state as an act of reason.” Mr Ghaemmagami says that “parallel societies are unIslamic. Muslims ought to feel accountable to the overall society and not manifest their customs in such a way as to run counter to the societies in which they live.”
Internal ethnic differences are reinforcing the minority experience to encourage a European Islam. Outsiders tend to see Europe's Muslims as all the same. But in fact they fall into at least five categories: those from European countries (Bosnia, Albania, bits of Russia); converts; first-generation immigrants; second- or third-generation Muslims born in Europe, who speak only European languages and, except in their religion, are indistinguishable from others; and those who have become largely secular.
The lure of fundamentalism
Olivier Roy, a French academic, has argued that, when Islam is torn from its traditional moorings—customs, family life and cuisine—it can become fundamentalist, and in some cases fanatical. Alienated both from their parents' way of life and their host societies, young European Muslims can be easily attracted by a back-to-basics version of Islam that acknowledges no national boundaries and has been disseminated with the help of plenty of Saudi oil money. As an example of the rupture between young European Muslims and their parents' homeland, take the Muslims of Bradford, England. When imams were brought in from north-western Pakistan to teach them, they failed completely to communicate with their young pupils. It is exactly in these circumstances, as Mr Roy points out, that Saudi-supported “neo-fundamentalism” becomes attractive.
The question is whether the search among young European Muslims for a new reading of their faith will stop there. Merely to live in pluralist western societies, where “choice” is important, is to pose questions that their parents never faced. In Bradford, the Islamic teaching curriculum had to be entirely overhauled to make it comprehensible to young Muslims. The development of a European Islam is, in a sense, at a caterpillar stage. As the final declaration of the conference of imams in Vienna said, there is no agreement on how to resolve the conflict between freedom of expression and defending Islam. Nor is there a consensus on the rights of European Muslim women.
For all these reasons, Europe's emerging Islam has not so far had any impact farther afield. But it is hard to believe that an Islam that is more open to democracy, sexual equality, and modernity would have no effect in the Middle East. And, uncertain and gradual as its gestation may be, that seems to be the Islam that European Muslims are trying to create.
Apr 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition
http://economist.com/world/europe/displ ... id=6800741
Sending a message to the faithful back home
“I BELIEVE there is no European Islam,” said Mustafa Ceric, a Bosnian imam, at a meeting of Islamic clerics and advisers in Vienna. Yet two months ago, his supreme Islamic department of Bosnia said that “Muslims who live in Europe have the right—no, the duty—to develop their own European culture of Islam.” Such contradictions are part of a broad debate over the role and character of Islam in Europe, which could have profound implications, and not only because Muslims are the continent's largest minority. It might affect the wider Islamic world if it shows that Muslims can adapt to modern, secular democracies.
Traditional teaching frowns on the idea of distinctive forms of Islam, holding that there is a single community of believers, the umma. Differences clearly exist between Sunni and Shia, or between Saudis and Malays, but Muslims are reluctant to proclaim fresh ones. As a declaration by Islamic organisations in Europe put it in 2003, “a ‘European’ Islam is non-existent; only the term ‘Islam in Europe’ offers an adequate definition.” Traditional teaching also divides the world into a house of Islam, under Muslim laws, and a house of war, where infidels prevail. But since Islam's earliest years, it has been accepted that there are also intermediate situations, with non-Muslim regimes that can provide tolerable conditions for Muslims.
Theologians have wrestled over the terms under which Muslims may live in non-Muslim lands. In the background is the belief that, if Muslim-friendly conditions do not exist, believers have a duty to migrate in search of more congenial places. But what makes the European Muslim experience challenging is that Muslims have migrated from their heartlands to places where they are a permanent minority. Theologians can hardly say that conditions in Europe are intolerable, when millions have voted with their feet. But given that Muslim life in Europe is a reality, on what terms should believers participate in secular western institutions? Some groups, especially the international Muslim Brotherhood, consider that they should participate vigorously in western, democratic institutions, even if they do not abandon their core belief that Muslim governance and law are ideal.
In the teeth of traditional teaching, European Muslims are creating a distinctive form of Islam. They are driven by their experience as minorities; by a desire to overcome ethnic differences; and by the trauma of emigration. The first encourages Muslims to co-operate with non-Muslims; the second encourages them to look beyond their traditions; the third forces them to come to terms with change and modernity. Sayed Ghaemmagami, mufti of the Shias in Germany, argues that the situation of Muslims in Europe is unique. “The existence of an Islamic diaspora”, he says, “is totally different from the past and requires new thinking about relations with non-Islamic peoples.” The Koran calls for peaceful relations between Muslims and others, so Muslims should engage with their new countries and not set up parallel structures. “We must participate in all activities of life, as students, as businessmen, as social workers,” says Ahmed al-Rawi, president of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe.
Muslims should also respect the difference between religion and politics. As Mr Ceric puts it, “a Muslim has allegiance to God as an act of faith but is a citizen with a duty to the state as an act of reason.” Mr Ghaemmagami says that “parallel societies are unIslamic. Muslims ought to feel accountable to the overall society and not manifest their customs in such a way as to run counter to the societies in which they live.”
Internal ethnic differences are reinforcing the minority experience to encourage a European Islam. Outsiders tend to see Europe's Muslims as all the same. But in fact they fall into at least five categories: those from European countries (Bosnia, Albania, bits of Russia); converts; first-generation immigrants; second- or third-generation Muslims born in Europe, who speak only European languages and, except in their religion, are indistinguishable from others; and those who have become largely secular.
The lure of fundamentalism
Olivier Roy, a French academic, has argued that, when Islam is torn from its traditional moorings—customs, family life and cuisine—it can become fundamentalist, and in some cases fanatical. Alienated both from their parents' way of life and their host societies, young European Muslims can be easily attracted by a back-to-basics version of Islam that acknowledges no national boundaries and has been disseminated with the help of plenty of Saudi oil money. As an example of the rupture between young European Muslims and their parents' homeland, take the Muslims of Bradford, England. When imams were brought in from north-western Pakistan to teach them, they failed completely to communicate with their young pupils. It is exactly in these circumstances, as Mr Roy points out, that Saudi-supported “neo-fundamentalism” becomes attractive.
The question is whether the search among young European Muslims for a new reading of their faith will stop there. Merely to live in pluralist western societies, where “choice” is important, is to pose questions that their parents never faced. In Bradford, the Islamic teaching curriculum had to be entirely overhauled to make it comprehensible to young Muslims. The development of a European Islam is, in a sense, at a caterpillar stage. As the final declaration of the conference of imams in Vienna said, there is no agreement on how to resolve the conflict between freedom of expression and defending Islam. Nor is there a consensus on the rights of European Muslim women.
For all these reasons, Europe's emerging Islam has not so far had any impact farther afield. But it is hard to believe that an Islam that is more open to democracy, sexual equality, and modernity would have no effect in the Middle East. And, uncertain and gradual as its gestation may be, that seems to be the Islam that European Muslims are trying to create.
Ongoing debate about equal participation of women in worship....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/us/25 ... &th&emc=th
As Barrier Comes Down, a Muslim Split Remains
SAN FRANCISCO, June 24 — During Friday prayers at San Francisco's largest downtown mosque, Sevim Kalyoncu, a young Turkish-American writer, used to resent that the imam never addressed the women, as if his message was not intended for them. But the sermons underwent a sudden change when the Islamic Society of San Francisco took the controversial step of tearing down the barrier separating male and female worshippers.
Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times
At Darussalam, which lost some members to rival mosques, Amil Saunders, right, gathered with children and other women.
"He was always addressing the brothers during the Friday sermon," Ms. Kalyoncu said. "Now we hear 'brothers and sisters' because he can see us. Before, I felt very distant, but now it seems that women are part of the group. It's a first step."
Even after the slapdash, 8-foot wall across the back of the Darussalam mosque was demolished as part of a renovation last fall, however, the 400-member congregation remained divided.
After the demolition, a small knot of veiled women marched in brandishing a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read "We Want the Wall." Several men who pray at the mosque — on the third floor of an old theater in a particularly sleazy stretch of the city's Tenderloin district — are still grumbling, and some of them even decamped for a rival mosque. But the wall stayed down.
The norm in the United States and Canada — not to mention in the larger Muslim world — is to separate the women, if not bar them entirely. A small if determined band of North American Muslims, mostly younger women, have been challenging the practice, however, labeling the separation of men and women imported cultural baggage rather than a fulfillment of a religious commandment. They argue that while Muslims brag that Islam grants more rights to women than other religions do, the opposite is true.
"I am positive there will be an American Islamic identity that is separate from what you see in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world," said Souleiman Ghali, a founding member of the Islamic Society of San Francisco and the main force behind the wall's removal.
"We can discuss things that would be taboo in different countries," added Mr. Ghali, 47, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon when he was 20 and now runs a copy business in downtown San Francisco. "Here we can challenge ideas or change them, and there is no religious authority to come in with the power of the government to shut us down, accusing us of being infidels contradicting thousands of years of the religious norm."
In Regina, Saskatchewan, Zarqa Nawaz was so incensed when her 200-member mosque shunted the women into a small, dark room behind a one-way mirror that she made a documentary on the subject.
The film, "Me and the Mosque," was financed by the National Film Board of Canada and broadcast on Canadian national television in April. It will appear on two American satellite channels, Link TV and Free Speech TV, starting July 16.
Mrs. Nawaz said the issue had broader implications.
"The barriers have become a metaphor for keeping the women secluded in other ways, to having no role in running the community," she said.
In 2001, a survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of more than 1,200 mosques found that 66 percent of them required women to pray behind a partition or in a separate room, up from 52 percent in 1994. Another study, spearheaded by the Islamic Social Services Association of Canada, found that mosques generally "relegate women to small, dingy, secluded, airless and segregated quarters with their children."
Islamic scholars and women activists say they believe the trend has accelerated since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, attributing it to a newly pervasive insecurity on the part of North American Muslims who have counteracted it through a staunch adherence to tradition.
"There is a sense that there is a crusade out there against Islam, that Islam is under siege and we have to hold steadfast to our righteous ways more than ever," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a prominent Islamic jurist known for his moderate interpretations.
Dr. Abou El Fadl said the practice began in 18th-century Saudi Arabia, where the austere Wahhabi sect of Islam started walling off or banning women from mosques. (He added that the modern spread of Wahhabism is one facet of the pervasiveness of Saudi financial support for Muslim institutions worldwide.)
Mrs. Nawaz's film takes an alternately light-hearted and serious look at the arguments on both sides.
"In Islam, mixing is not encouraged; there is no mixing between sexes, and there are all kinds of reasons for that," Ghassan Joundi, the president of the Manitoba Islamic Association, says in the film. In Dr. Joundi's mosque, the men first erected a barrier with shutters, then nailed them shut.
At the Darussalam mosque, the dispute over the wall was just one skirmish in a larger battle over the entire tenor of the mosque. Mr. Ghali and other leaders at the mosque fired an imam they deemed overly militant, not least because he wanted to make the barrier between the sexes even more pronounced. The imam went to court, winning more than $400,000 in a wrongful dismissal suit, and then opened a competing mosque around the corner, where the women still worship behind a wall.
But Mr. Ghali and other mosque leaders say they believe North America provides fertile ground for melding the best of all cultural traditions because the Muslim population is so diverse.
"You can't take a tradition in Pakistan, Somalia or Egypt and bring it to America and make it part of the law; it doesn't make sense," said Mr. Ghali, who resigned as president of the mosque's board in February. "It's one of those cultural things that many immigrants brought from overseas without giving it much thought. It's time to get rid of those bad habits."
That outlook incited an exodus by some worshippers, and some who stayed have complained that a clique of "ayatollahs" who brook no dissent now run Darussalam.
"I don't want to be distracted by ladies in the back when I am praying," said Adel al-Dalali, 40, a Yemeni cab driver who prays at Darussalam, noting that mosques in his homeland were built with a mezzanine reserved for women. "Even if it is more culture than religious tradition, we feel it's needed."
At the back of the mosque, some of the roughly 30 women worshippers agreed. "As a Muslim woman, I was more at peace praying behind the wall," said Zeinab al-Andea, a 50-year-old Yemeni who spoke only Arabic. "As a veiled woman, I don't want to mix with men. It's a beautiful mosque, but I wish there was a wall."
The mosque occupies the top floor of a building that was filled mostly with sweatshops until 1991, when the Islamic Society moved in. The recent renovations turned the mosque into one large room flooded with light. Broad green stripes on the red carpet show the faithful where to line up, and, in a nod to tradition, men and women still do not pray shoulder to shoulder.
The wall across the back was replaced with small printed signs reading "Sisters Prayer Area Only Behind This Sign." The aim of knocking down the wall was not for the sexes to mingle, but to have comparable access to the imam.
Outside, the neighborhood is rife with all manner of vice. Intoxicated men and women occasionally stagger into one of the many liquor stores. Across Market Street, a pornography store called Sin City exhorts passers-by to "See the Beauty, Touch the Magic."
Yet a dedicated group of women who support the change at Darussalam navigate their way to the mosque each Friday.
These women say they hated the wall. With it, they had trouble hearing the sermon and often fell out of sync with the prayer movements. Distracted, some say they gave up praying and instead just gossiped or drank tea.
Proponents of barriers in mosques tend to argue that the Prophet Muhammad's wives, who inhabited a series of rooms attached to the main mosque at Medina, spoke to the faithful from behind a tentlike curtain. They also say a distinct space for women assures they will not have to jostle with men.
Muslim rituals are guided by the Koran and the Hadith, tomes that detail Islam as it was practiced in the prophet's time. Advocates and some religious scholars say the books support the women. Muhammad emphasized that the rules for his wives were distinct from those for other women, they note, and he never resorted to a barrier, despite similar debate in the seventh century.
Some early adherents of Islam showed up late for prayers so they could stay in the back and ogle the women's behinds, even penning bawdy odes to the sight, said Dr. Abou El Fadl, the U.C.L.A. scholar, so Mohamed recommended that all men pray at the front of their mosques. None of Islam's three holiest mosques — Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and those in Mecca and Medina — originally had barriers between the sexes.
"Men try to justify it now by creating arguments that are ludicrous, like saying that men back then were more moral," said Mrs. Nawaz, the filmmaker, a 38-year-old mother of four. "This is completely bogus. The men were exactly the same back then when it came to being distracted. The prophet didn't deal with it by separation, he dealt with it by education."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/us/25 ... &th&emc=th
As Barrier Comes Down, a Muslim Split Remains
SAN FRANCISCO, June 24 — During Friday prayers at San Francisco's largest downtown mosque, Sevim Kalyoncu, a young Turkish-American writer, used to resent that the imam never addressed the women, as if his message was not intended for them. But the sermons underwent a sudden change when the Islamic Society of San Francisco took the controversial step of tearing down the barrier separating male and female worshippers.
Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times
At Darussalam, which lost some members to rival mosques, Amil Saunders, right, gathered with children and other women.
"He was always addressing the brothers during the Friday sermon," Ms. Kalyoncu said. "Now we hear 'brothers and sisters' because he can see us. Before, I felt very distant, but now it seems that women are part of the group. It's a first step."
Even after the slapdash, 8-foot wall across the back of the Darussalam mosque was demolished as part of a renovation last fall, however, the 400-member congregation remained divided.
After the demolition, a small knot of veiled women marched in brandishing a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read "We Want the Wall." Several men who pray at the mosque — on the third floor of an old theater in a particularly sleazy stretch of the city's Tenderloin district — are still grumbling, and some of them even decamped for a rival mosque. But the wall stayed down.
The norm in the United States and Canada — not to mention in the larger Muslim world — is to separate the women, if not bar them entirely. A small if determined band of North American Muslims, mostly younger women, have been challenging the practice, however, labeling the separation of men and women imported cultural baggage rather than a fulfillment of a religious commandment. They argue that while Muslims brag that Islam grants more rights to women than other religions do, the opposite is true.
"I am positive there will be an American Islamic identity that is separate from what you see in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world," said Souleiman Ghali, a founding member of the Islamic Society of San Francisco and the main force behind the wall's removal.
"We can discuss things that would be taboo in different countries," added Mr. Ghali, 47, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon when he was 20 and now runs a copy business in downtown San Francisco. "Here we can challenge ideas or change them, and there is no religious authority to come in with the power of the government to shut us down, accusing us of being infidels contradicting thousands of years of the religious norm."
In Regina, Saskatchewan, Zarqa Nawaz was so incensed when her 200-member mosque shunted the women into a small, dark room behind a one-way mirror that she made a documentary on the subject.
The film, "Me and the Mosque," was financed by the National Film Board of Canada and broadcast on Canadian national television in April. It will appear on two American satellite channels, Link TV and Free Speech TV, starting July 16.
Mrs. Nawaz said the issue had broader implications.
"The barriers have become a metaphor for keeping the women secluded in other ways, to having no role in running the community," she said.
In 2001, a survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of more than 1,200 mosques found that 66 percent of them required women to pray behind a partition or in a separate room, up from 52 percent in 1994. Another study, spearheaded by the Islamic Social Services Association of Canada, found that mosques generally "relegate women to small, dingy, secluded, airless and segregated quarters with their children."
Islamic scholars and women activists say they believe the trend has accelerated since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, attributing it to a newly pervasive insecurity on the part of North American Muslims who have counteracted it through a staunch adherence to tradition.
"There is a sense that there is a crusade out there against Islam, that Islam is under siege and we have to hold steadfast to our righteous ways more than ever," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a prominent Islamic jurist known for his moderate interpretations.
Dr. Abou El Fadl said the practice began in 18th-century Saudi Arabia, where the austere Wahhabi sect of Islam started walling off or banning women from mosques. (He added that the modern spread of Wahhabism is one facet of the pervasiveness of Saudi financial support for Muslim institutions worldwide.)
Mrs. Nawaz's film takes an alternately light-hearted and serious look at the arguments on both sides.
"In Islam, mixing is not encouraged; there is no mixing between sexes, and there are all kinds of reasons for that," Ghassan Joundi, the president of the Manitoba Islamic Association, says in the film. In Dr. Joundi's mosque, the men first erected a barrier with shutters, then nailed them shut.
At the Darussalam mosque, the dispute over the wall was just one skirmish in a larger battle over the entire tenor of the mosque. Mr. Ghali and other leaders at the mosque fired an imam they deemed overly militant, not least because he wanted to make the barrier between the sexes even more pronounced. The imam went to court, winning more than $400,000 in a wrongful dismissal suit, and then opened a competing mosque around the corner, where the women still worship behind a wall.
But Mr. Ghali and other mosque leaders say they believe North America provides fertile ground for melding the best of all cultural traditions because the Muslim population is so diverse.
"You can't take a tradition in Pakistan, Somalia or Egypt and bring it to America and make it part of the law; it doesn't make sense," said Mr. Ghali, who resigned as president of the mosque's board in February. "It's one of those cultural things that many immigrants brought from overseas without giving it much thought. It's time to get rid of those bad habits."
That outlook incited an exodus by some worshippers, and some who stayed have complained that a clique of "ayatollahs" who brook no dissent now run Darussalam.
"I don't want to be distracted by ladies in the back when I am praying," said Adel al-Dalali, 40, a Yemeni cab driver who prays at Darussalam, noting that mosques in his homeland were built with a mezzanine reserved for women. "Even if it is more culture than religious tradition, we feel it's needed."
At the back of the mosque, some of the roughly 30 women worshippers agreed. "As a Muslim woman, I was more at peace praying behind the wall," said Zeinab al-Andea, a 50-year-old Yemeni who spoke only Arabic. "As a veiled woman, I don't want to mix with men. It's a beautiful mosque, but I wish there was a wall."
The mosque occupies the top floor of a building that was filled mostly with sweatshops until 1991, when the Islamic Society moved in. The recent renovations turned the mosque into one large room flooded with light. Broad green stripes on the red carpet show the faithful where to line up, and, in a nod to tradition, men and women still do not pray shoulder to shoulder.
The wall across the back was replaced with small printed signs reading "Sisters Prayer Area Only Behind This Sign." The aim of knocking down the wall was not for the sexes to mingle, but to have comparable access to the imam.
Outside, the neighborhood is rife with all manner of vice. Intoxicated men and women occasionally stagger into one of the many liquor stores. Across Market Street, a pornography store called Sin City exhorts passers-by to "See the Beauty, Touch the Magic."
Yet a dedicated group of women who support the change at Darussalam navigate their way to the mosque each Friday.
These women say they hated the wall. With it, they had trouble hearing the sermon and often fell out of sync with the prayer movements. Distracted, some say they gave up praying and instead just gossiped or drank tea.
Proponents of barriers in mosques tend to argue that the Prophet Muhammad's wives, who inhabited a series of rooms attached to the main mosque at Medina, spoke to the faithful from behind a tentlike curtain. They also say a distinct space for women assures they will not have to jostle with men.
Muslim rituals are guided by the Koran and the Hadith, tomes that detail Islam as it was practiced in the prophet's time. Advocates and some religious scholars say the books support the women. Muhammad emphasized that the rules for his wives were distinct from those for other women, they note, and he never resorted to a barrier, despite similar debate in the seventh century.
Some early adherents of Islam showed up late for prayers so they could stay in the back and ogle the women's behinds, even penning bawdy odes to the sight, said Dr. Abou El Fadl, the U.C.L.A. scholar, so Mohamed recommended that all men pray at the front of their mosques. None of Islam's three holiest mosques — Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and those in Mecca and Medina — originally had barriers between the sexes.
"Men try to justify it now by creating arguments that are ludicrous, like saying that men back then were more moral," said Mrs. Nawaz, the filmmaker, a 38-year-old mother of four. "This is completely bogus. The men were exactly the same back then when it came to being distracted. The prophet didn't deal with it by separation, he dealt with it by education."
June 1, 2007
A Growing Demand for the Rare American Imam
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — Sheik Yassir Fazaga regularly uses a standard American calendar to provide inspiration for his weekly Friday sermon.
Around Valentine's Day this year, he talked about how the Koran endorses romantic love within certain ethical parameters. (As opposed to say, clerics in Saudi Arabia, who denounce the banned saint's day as a Satanic ritual.)
On World AIDS Day, he criticized Muslims for making moral judgments about the disease rather than helping the afflicted, and on International Women's Day he focused on domestic abuse.
"My main objective is to make Islam relevant," said Sheik Fazaga, 34, who went to high school in Orange County, which includes Mission Viejo, and brings a certain American flair to his role as imam in the mosque here.
Prayer leaders, or imams, in the United States have long arrived from overseas, forced to negotiate a foreign culture along with their congregation. Older immigrants usually overlook the fact that it is an uneasy fit, particularly since imported sheiks rarely speak English. They welcome a flavor of home.
But as the first generation of American-born Muslims begins graduating from college in significant numbers, with a swelling tide behind them, some congregations are beginning to seek native imams who can talk about religious and social issues that seem relevant to young people, like dating and drugs. On an even more practical level, they want an imam who can advise them on day-to-day American matters like how to set up a 401(k) plan to funnel the charitable donations known as zakat, which Islam mandates.
"The problem is that you have a young generation whose own experience has nothing to do with where its parents came from," said Hatem Bazian, a lecturer in the Near Eastern studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, who surveys Muslim communities.
But the underlying quandary is that American imams are hard to find, though there are a few nascent training programs. These days, many of the men leading prayers across the United States on any given Friday are volunteers, doctors or engineers who know a bit more about the Koran than everyone else. Scholars point out that one of the great strengths of Islam, particularly the Sunni version, is that there is no official hierarchy.
But this situation is fueling a debate about just how thoroughly an imam has to be schooled in Islamic jurisprudence and other religious matters before running a mosque.
The downside for Islam in America, some critics argue, is that those interpreting Islamic law often lack a command of the full scope of the traditions carried in the Koran and the hadith, the sayings of the prophet Muhammad considered sacred.
"I call it 'hadith slinging,' " said Prof. Khaled Abou el Fadl, a specialist in Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles. "I throw a couple of hadiths at you, and you throw a couple of hadiths at me, and that is the way we do Islamic law," he added. "It's like any moron can do that."
Experts say the problem is exacerbated because few immigrant parents want their children to become imams.
"Immigrant parents want their children to become doctors, engineers, computer scientists," Dr. Bazian said. "If you suggested that they might want their kid to study to become an imam, they would hold a funeral procession." Ultimately, in the absence of trained sheiks, good religion in many American mosques has come to be defined through rigid adherence to rituals, Professor Abou el Fadl said, adding, "It's ritual that defines piety."
The few imams born or at least raised in the United States who win over their congregations tend to be younger men who can play pickup basketball with the teenagers, but also have enough training in classical Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence that the older members accept their religious credentials.
Imam Ronald Smith Jr., 29, who runs the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach, Fla., converted to Islam at 14 to escape the violence in his African-American community in Atlantic City. As part of his training, he spent six years studying at the Islamic University in Medina, Saudi Arabia.
"Foreign imams, because of the culture in their countries, kind of stick to the mosque and the duties of the mosque without involving themselves much in the general community," Imam Smith said. "The hip-hop culture is difficult to understand if you have never lived it."
The foreign imams' idea of mosque outreach, Imam Smith said, is sponsoring an evening lecture series where everyone sits around for an hour and listens to a speech about being devout or maybe world politics, which teenagers find less than compelling.
Mosque leaders say the risk is that younger Muslims, already feeling under assault in the United States because of the faith's checkered reputation, might choose one of two extremes. They either drift away from the faith entirely if they cannot find answers, or leave the mosque for a more radical fringe.
Here in Mission Viejo, Sheik Fazaga wears street clothes much of the time, but dons traditional robes to deliver the Friday sermon at the mosque, a building distinguishable from the surrounding strip malls and low-slung office buildings mostly by its airy exterior dome of metal filigree painted sea green. It was a practice he started 10 years ago when he first returned home and kind of fell into the imam's job around age 24, because some members considered him too young for the position.
Born in the East African nation of Eritrea, he moved to the Arab world before coming to Mission Viejo at age 15. Drawn toward Islam by college students, he enrolled in the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, a Virginia campus of al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The United States government expelled much of the faculty in 2004 as part of the crackdown on extremist Islamic rhetoric.
The school was accused of being an American outpost of the puritanical Wahhabi sect, a label Sheik Fazaga rejects. But that might be one reason he has been stopped for questioning some 20 times — every time he returns home from abroad.
" 'How come you don't dress like an imam?'— that's their favorite question," he said with a wry grin.
Younger Muslims seek him out for guidance, he said, and the fact that he is studying for a master's degree in psychological therapy helps. Teenagers have requested advice about being addicted to Internet pornography, he said, and about sexual orientation. He counsels adolescents — gay and straight — that sexual attraction is natural, but to act on it is wrong and that any addiction should be treated.
Previous imams would simply admonish the youths that something was a forbidden abomination, subject closed.
Gihan Zahran, 43, an Egyptian immigrant, remembers a previous Arab imam who even told a much perplexed teenager that wearing Nike shoes was "haram," or forbidden in Arabic, without explaining why. Some Muslims consider this aloofness particularly ineffective in America, given that they are a minority faced by majority practices like drinking alcohol that clash with their faith and that teenagers confront daily.
Ms. Zahran's sister Nermeen Zahran, 42, recently went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. She is a real estate agent, and has not veiled her hair at least partly because it might affect her livelihood in a conservative place like Orange County.
When she went on the hajj, as it is called in Arabic, a fellow pilgrim asked the Egyptian imam who accompanied them from Southern California his opinion of her not wearing the scarf afterward.
"He was so mad, so offended and said he couldn't believe it could happen," Nermeen Zahran recalled over a glass of orange juice in the neat condominium she shares with her sister. His basic reaction, she said, was that there was no point in seeking forgiveness for previous sins if one did not take the veil afterward.
Ms. Zahran has also consulted religious figures about periodic bouts of depression, but the usual response was that her faith lacked vigor.
Now she talks to Sheik Fazaga about it, she said. "He tries to solve the problems and doesn't tell you that you have to accept that this is your life, this is what Allah gave you, and if you don't then you are not a good Muslim."
She wonders, in the end, whether a purer form of Islam will develop in the United States, with prayer leaders focused on the concerns of the community, rather than not treading on the toes of the government that supports them, as in much of the Arab world.
Mosques will probably continue to address the wishes of the immigrant population for another decade, but after that the tide will shift away from them, experts suggest.
"Islam in America is trying to create a new cultural matrix that can survive in the broader context of America," said Prof. Sherman Jackson, who teaches Arabic and Islamic law at the University of Michigan. "It has to change for the religion to survive."
A Growing Demand for the Rare American Imam
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — Sheik Yassir Fazaga regularly uses a standard American calendar to provide inspiration for his weekly Friday sermon.
Around Valentine's Day this year, he talked about how the Koran endorses romantic love within certain ethical parameters. (As opposed to say, clerics in Saudi Arabia, who denounce the banned saint's day as a Satanic ritual.)
On World AIDS Day, he criticized Muslims for making moral judgments about the disease rather than helping the afflicted, and on International Women's Day he focused on domestic abuse.
"My main objective is to make Islam relevant," said Sheik Fazaga, 34, who went to high school in Orange County, which includes Mission Viejo, and brings a certain American flair to his role as imam in the mosque here.
Prayer leaders, or imams, in the United States have long arrived from overseas, forced to negotiate a foreign culture along with their congregation. Older immigrants usually overlook the fact that it is an uneasy fit, particularly since imported sheiks rarely speak English. They welcome a flavor of home.
But as the first generation of American-born Muslims begins graduating from college in significant numbers, with a swelling tide behind them, some congregations are beginning to seek native imams who can talk about religious and social issues that seem relevant to young people, like dating and drugs. On an even more practical level, they want an imam who can advise them on day-to-day American matters like how to set up a 401(k) plan to funnel the charitable donations known as zakat, which Islam mandates.
"The problem is that you have a young generation whose own experience has nothing to do with where its parents came from," said Hatem Bazian, a lecturer in the Near Eastern studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, who surveys Muslim communities.
But the underlying quandary is that American imams are hard to find, though there are a few nascent training programs. These days, many of the men leading prayers across the United States on any given Friday are volunteers, doctors or engineers who know a bit more about the Koran than everyone else. Scholars point out that one of the great strengths of Islam, particularly the Sunni version, is that there is no official hierarchy.
But this situation is fueling a debate about just how thoroughly an imam has to be schooled in Islamic jurisprudence and other religious matters before running a mosque.
The downside for Islam in America, some critics argue, is that those interpreting Islamic law often lack a command of the full scope of the traditions carried in the Koran and the hadith, the sayings of the prophet Muhammad considered sacred.
"I call it 'hadith slinging,' " said Prof. Khaled Abou el Fadl, a specialist in Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles. "I throw a couple of hadiths at you, and you throw a couple of hadiths at me, and that is the way we do Islamic law," he added. "It's like any moron can do that."
Experts say the problem is exacerbated because few immigrant parents want their children to become imams.
"Immigrant parents want their children to become doctors, engineers, computer scientists," Dr. Bazian said. "If you suggested that they might want their kid to study to become an imam, they would hold a funeral procession." Ultimately, in the absence of trained sheiks, good religion in many American mosques has come to be defined through rigid adherence to rituals, Professor Abou el Fadl said, adding, "It's ritual that defines piety."
The few imams born or at least raised in the United States who win over their congregations tend to be younger men who can play pickup basketball with the teenagers, but also have enough training in classical Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence that the older members accept their religious credentials.
Imam Ronald Smith Jr., 29, who runs the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach, Fla., converted to Islam at 14 to escape the violence in his African-American community in Atlantic City. As part of his training, he spent six years studying at the Islamic University in Medina, Saudi Arabia.
"Foreign imams, because of the culture in their countries, kind of stick to the mosque and the duties of the mosque without involving themselves much in the general community," Imam Smith said. "The hip-hop culture is difficult to understand if you have never lived it."
The foreign imams' idea of mosque outreach, Imam Smith said, is sponsoring an evening lecture series where everyone sits around for an hour and listens to a speech about being devout or maybe world politics, which teenagers find less than compelling.
Mosque leaders say the risk is that younger Muslims, already feeling under assault in the United States because of the faith's checkered reputation, might choose one of two extremes. They either drift away from the faith entirely if they cannot find answers, or leave the mosque for a more radical fringe.
Here in Mission Viejo, Sheik Fazaga wears street clothes much of the time, but dons traditional robes to deliver the Friday sermon at the mosque, a building distinguishable from the surrounding strip malls and low-slung office buildings mostly by its airy exterior dome of metal filigree painted sea green. It was a practice he started 10 years ago when he first returned home and kind of fell into the imam's job around age 24, because some members considered him too young for the position.
Born in the East African nation of Eritrea, he moved to the Arab world before coming to Mission Viejo at age 15. Drawn toward Islam by college students, he enrolled in the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, a Virginia campus of al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The United States government expelled much of the faculty in 2004 as part of the crackdown on extremist Islamic rhetoric.
The school was accused of being an American outpost of the puritanical Wahhabi sect, a label Sheik Fazaga rejects. But that might be one reason he has been stopped for questioning some 20 times — every time he returns home from abroad.
" 'How come you don't dress like an imam?'— that's their favorite question," he said with a wry grin.
Younger Muslims seek him out for guidance, he said, and the fact that he is studying for a master's degree in psychological therapy helps. Teenagers have requested advice about being addicted to Internet pornography, he said, and about sexual orientation. He counsels adolescents — gay and straight — that sexual attraction is natural, but to act on it is wrong and that any addiction should be treated.
Previous imams would simply admonish the youths that something was a forbidden abomination, subject closed.
Gihan Zahran, 43, an Egyptian immigrant, remembers a previous Arab imam who even told a much perplexed teenager that wearing Nike shoes was "haram," or forbidden in Arabic, without explaining why. Some Muslims consider this aloofness particularly ineffective in America, given that they are a minority faced by majority practices like drinking alcohol that clash with their faith and that teenagers confront daily.
Ms. Zahran's sister Nermeen Zahran, 42, recently went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. She is a real estate agent, and has not veiled her hair at least partly because it might affect her livelihood in a conservative place like Orange County.
When she went on the hajj, as it is called in Arabic, a fellow pilgrim asked the Egyptian imam who accompanied them from Southern California his opinion of her not wearing the scarf afterward.
"He was so mad, so offended and said he couldn't believe it could happen," Nermeen Zahran recalled over a glass of orange juice in the neat condominium she shares with her sister. His basic reaction, she said, was that there was no point in seeking forgiveness for previous sins if one did not take the veil afterward.
Ms. Zahran has also consulted religious figures about periodic bouts of depression, but the usual response was that her faith lacked vigor.
Now she talks to Sheik Fazaga about it, she said. "He tries to solve the problems and doesn't tell you that you have to accept that this is your life, this is what Allah gave you, and if you don't then you are not a good Muslim."
She wonders, in the end, whether a purer form of Islam will develop in the United States, with prayer leaders focused on the concerns of the community, rather than not treading on the toes of the government that supports them, as in much of the Arab world.
Mosques will probably continue to address the wishes of the immigrant population for another decade, but after that the tide will shift away from them, experts suggest.
"Islam in America is trying to create a new cultural matrix that can survive in the broader context of America," said Prof. Sherman Jackson, who teaches Arabic and Islamic law at the University of Michigan. "It has to change for the religion to survive."
June 12, 2007
A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/world ... &th&emc=th
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO, June 11 — First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.
For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.
“We were very angered when we heard about the Danish cartoons concerning our prophet; however, these two fatwas are harming our Islamic religion and our prophet more than the cartoons,” Galal Amin, a professor of economics at the American University in Cairo, wrote in Al Masry Al Yom, a daily newspaper here.
For many Muslims, fatwas, or religious edicts, are the bridge between the principles of their faith and modern life. They are supposed to be issued by religious scholars who look to the Koran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance. While the more sensational pronouncements grab attention, the bulk of the fatwas involve the routine of daily life. In Egypt alone, thousands are issued every month.
The controversy in Cairo has been more than just embarrassing. It comes at a time when religious and political leaders say that there is a crisis in Islam because too many fatwas are being issued, and that many of them rely on ideology more than learning.
The complaint has been the subject of recent conferences as government-appointed arbiters of Islamic standards say the fatwa free-for-all has led to the promotion of extremism and intolerance.
The conflict in Egypt served as a difficult reminder of a central challenge facing Islamic communities as they debate the true nature of the faith and how to accommodate modernity. The fatwa is the front line in the theological battle between often opposing worldviews. It is where interpretation meets daily life.
“It is a very critical issue for us,” said Abdullah Megawer, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at Al Azhar University, the centuries-old seat of Sunni Muslim learning in Egypt. “You are explaining God’s message in ways that really affect people’s lives.”
Technically, the fatwa is nonbinding and recipients are free to look elsewhere for a better ruling. In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.
“There is chaos now,” Mr. Megawer said. “The problem created is confusion in thought, confusion about what is right and what is wrong, religiously.”
Governments have tried to guide and control the process, but as they struggled with their own legitimacy, they have often undermined the perceived legitimacy of those they appoint as religious leaders. In Egypt, there are two official institutions responsible for religious interpretation: the House of Fatwa, or Dar Al-Ifta, which formally falls under the Ministry of Justice, and Al Azhar University. All court sentences of death must be approved by Dar Al-Ifta, for example.
“These people in fact are defined as agencies of the government,” said Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo. “They are not trusted anymore.”
While that view is disputed by officials from both institutions, everyone acknowledges that those who issue fatwas serve as mediators between faith and modernity and as arbiters of morality. They are supposed to consider not only religious teachings, but the circumstances of the time.
The position is without parallel in the West, and it combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.
In fact, the relationship between the Koran and a fatwa is a matter of dispute. Some Muslim scholars view the Koran’s words and ideas as fixed, with little room for maneuvering. Others see their job as reconciling modern life with the text by gently bending the text to fit new circumstances.
A second issue is the basis for interpretation. The sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, known collectively as the Hadith, also serve as the basis for many fatwas. But those sayings, of which there are thousands, have been passed down orally and may or may not be genuine. Some seek to limit fatwas to the written Koran, as a result.
A sign hangs on the back wall of a small room that serves as a fatwa center for Egyptians looking for guidance: “Brother Citizens, the Azhar Fatwa Committee welcomes the masses of citizens and announces that fatwas are free of charge and of fees.”
Tucked just inside the entrance of the historic Al Azhar Mosque in downtown, the center is open six days a week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is a worn room with a soaring ceiling, tattered black couches patched up with packing tape and rickety metal kitchen chairs. Five sheiks sit on the couches and receive people.
Sheik Abdel Aziz el-Naggar has been offering fatwas for 17 years as an employee of Al Azhar. Like other sheiks, he rotates each month to committees that operate in each of Egypt’s regional governates. Over the years, he said, the vast majority of the visitors have asked for help with their marriages.
“The greatest ill in society I observe is the lack of trust and knowledge between husband and wife,” he said. “A man will think masculinity is being a dictator.”
At 11:30 one recent morning, a young woman entered and sat in the chair opposite him. She held her son, about 4, on her knee as she explained that her husband had married another woman (four wives are allowed in Islam) and that the new wife was only 18. “He said he would spend five nights with her and one with me,” the woman complained. “Can I ask for a divorce?”
Under Islam, the sheik advised, all wives must be treated equally. So if she could not work the matter out “peacefully, then yes, she could ask for a divorce.”
That was her fatwa.
A couple approached. The man’s clothes were tattered, and his wife looked distressed. Their 9-year-old son’s clothing was clean, his hair gelled, his smile bright. The man explained that they had adopted the child when he was 9 months old, and that they had just heard that under Islam their son had to be put out of the house, because the mother had not given birth to him or breast-fed him.
He would reach puberty as an outsider, and could not, technically, be around the woman he knew as his mother. The imam at their local mosque said it was haram — forbidden under Islam — to live with the boy.
The sheik said yes, that was right, that the boy could not live with them. The father leaned in, disturbed, and said, “And that’s it.”
The sheik seemed stuck and referred them to another sheik for another opinion.
That was their fatwa.
A man wanted to know if he could keep money he had found. Another wanted to know if he needed to testify at a trial if called. A third wanted to know if it was O.K. to buy a car on an installment plan. A mother did not like her son’s wife and wanted to know if she could do anything about the marriage.
Each consultation took a few minutes. Such questions have been asked for generations.
Should ancient statues be destroyed or preserved? Should women be allowed to drive, to work, to travel without the permission of men? Can boys and girls attend school together? Is it permissible to buy insurance, to wear a sports jersey with a cross design, to shake hands with a non-Muslim, to take pictures, to view family photographs?
All of this has been addressed in fatwas.
“We are the conscience of the nation,” said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of Al Azhar Research Committee, a state-sanctioned body that issues religious opinions and is often behind decisions over which books should be stripped from store shelves and banned.
In Egypt, and other Muslim countries, where laws must abide by the Koran, fatwas by government-appointed officials can have the weight of law. “We have to be clear what is at stake here,” said Egypt’s grand mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, in a recent speech in London. “When each and every person’s unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.”
In his own role and practice, the grand mufti embodies many of the issues that have arisen around the fatwa practice. He has issued rulings that have been deemed by some as so progressive that they were offensive, and others that were so literal as to be considered offensive.
Sheik Ali issued the urine fatwa, now notorious, in a book, “Religion and Life.” It was published six years ago and told the story of a woman who drank the prophet’s urine. He had his own book taken off the shelves, and said the controversial statement was not a fatwa but his opinion, which was offered in response to a question.
“The reality is that the mufti is now ‘burned’ and lost religious recognition and the trust of the Muslims and his fatwas will not gain anything but carelessness from all the Muslims; as some will hate it as they hate drinking urine,” wrote Hamdy Rizk in an opposition newspaper.
But he was also criticized — and praised — earlier this year after he had issued a fatwa saying that it was permissible for women to have reconstructive hymen surgery before marriage to conceal that they were no longer virgins. He said that since it was impossible to tell whether a man was a virgin, women should have the same option.
But he took his opinion a step further, when he said that if a married woman had sex with another man, regretted her action and asked God for forgiveness, she should not tell her husband. The goal, he reportedly said, was to preserve the family.
The breast-feeding fatwa came in mid-May. A religious scholar, who headed a department that studies the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings at the Foundation of Religion College of Al Azhar University, wrote that there had been instances in the time of the prophet when adult women breast-fed adult men in order to avoid the need for women to wear a veil in front of them.
“Breast-feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” wrote the scholar, Izat Atiyah. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed.”
The ruling was mocked on satellite television shows around the region, and was quickly condemned at home. Mr. Atiyah was suspended from his job, mocked in newspapers and within days issued a retraction, saying it was a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/world ... &th&emc=th
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO, June 11 — First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.
For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.
“We were very angered when we heard about the Danish cartoons concerning our prophet; however, these two fatwas are harming our Islamic religion and our prophet more than the cartoons,” Galal Amin, a professor of economics at the American University in Cairo, wrote in Al Masry Al Yom, a daily newspaper here.
For many Muslims, fatwas, or religious edicts, are the bridge between the principles of their faith and modern life. They are supposed to be issued by religious scholars who look to the Koran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance. While the more sensational pronouncements grab attention, the bulk of the fatwas involve the routine of daily life. In Egypt alone, thousands are issued every month.
The controversy in Cairo has been more than just embarrassing. It comes at a time when religious and political leaders say that there is a crisis in Islam because too many fatwas are being issued, and that many of them rely on ideology more than learning.
The complaint has been the subject of recent conferences as government-appointed arbiters of Islamic standards say the fatwa free-for-all has led to the promotion of extremism and intolerance.
The conflict in Egypt served as a difficult reminder of a central challenge facing Islamic communities as they debate the true nature of the faith and how to accommodate modernity. The fatwa is the front line in the theological battle between often opposing worldviews. It is where interpretation meets daily life.
“It is a very critical issue for us,” said Abdullah Megawer, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at Al Azhar University, the centuries-old seat of Sunni Muslim learning in Egypt. “You are explaining God’s message in ways that really affect people’s lives.”
Technically, the fatwa is nonbinding and recipients are free to look elsewhere for a better ruling. In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.
“There is chaos now,” Mr. Megawer said. “The problem created is confusion in thought, confusion about what is right and what is wrong, religiously.”
Governments have tried to guide and control the process, but as they struggled with their own legitimacy, they have often undermined the perceived legitimacy of those they appoint as religious leaders. In Egypt, there are two official institutions responsible for religious interpretation: the House of Fatwa, or Dar Al-Ifta, which formally falls under the Ministry of Justice, and Al Azhar University. All court sentences of death must be approved by Dar Al-Ifta, for example.
“These people in fact are defined as agencies of the government,” said Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo. “They are not trusted anymore.”
While that view is disputed by officials from both institutions, everyone acknowledges that those who issue fatwas serve as mediators between faith and modernity and as arbiters of morality. They are supposed to consider not only religious teachings, but the circumstances of the time.
The position is without parallel in the West, and it combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.
In fact, the relationship between the Koran and a fatwa is a matter of dispute. Some Muslim scholars view the Koran’s words and ideas as fixed, with little room for maneuvering. Others see their job as reconciling modern life with the text by gently bending the text to fit new circumstances.
A second issue is the basis for interpretation. The sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, known collectively as the Hadith, also serve as the basis for many fatwas. But those sayings, of which there are thousands, have been passed down orally and may or may not be genuine. Some seek to limit fatwas to the written Koran, as a result.
A sign hangs on the back wall of a small room that serves as a fatwa center for Egyptians looking for guidance: “Brother Citizens, the Azhar Fatwa Committee welcomes the masses of citizens and announces that fatwas are free of charge and of fees.”
Tucked just inside the entrance of the historic Al Azhar Mosque in downtown, the center is open six days a week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is a worn room with a soaring ceiling, tattered black couches patched up with packing tape and rickety metal kitchen chairs. Five sheiks sit on the couches and receive people.
Sheik Abdel Aziz el-Naggar has been offering fatwas for 17 years as an employee of Al Azhar. Like other sheiks, he rotates each month to committees that operate in each of Egypt’s regional governates. Over the years, he said, the vast majority of the visitors have asked for help with their marriages.
“The greatest ill in society I observe is the lack of trust and knowledge between husband and wife,” he said. “A man will think masculinity is being a dictator.”
At 11:30 one recent morning, a young woman entered and sat in the chair opposite him. She held her son, about 4, on her knee as she explained that her husband had married another woman (four wives are allowed in Islam) and that the new wife was only 18. “He said he would spend five nights with her and one with me,” the woman complained. “Can I ask for a divorce?”
Under Islam, the sheik advised, all wives must be treated equally. So if she could not work the matter out “peacefully, then yes, she could ask for a divorce.”
That was her fatwa.
A couple approached. The man’s clothes were tattered, and his wife looked distressed. Their 9-year-old son’s clothing was clean, his hair gelled, his smile bright. The man explained that they had adopted the child when he was 9 months old, and that they had just heard that under Islam their son had to be put out of the house, because the mother had not given birth to him or breast-fed him.
He would reach puberty as an outsider, and could not, technically, be around the woman he knew as his mother. The imam at their local mosque said it was haram — forbidden under Islam — to live with the boy.
The sheik said yes, that was right, that the boy could not live with them. The father leaned in, disturbed, and said, “And that’s it.”
The sheik seemed stuck and referred them to another sheik for another opinion.
That was their fatwa.
A man wanted to know if he could keep money he had found. Another wanted to know if he needed to testify at a trial if called. A third wanted to know if it was O.K. to buy a car on an installment plan. A mother did not like her son’s wife and wanted to know if she could do anything about the marriage.
Each consultation took a few minutes. Such questions have been asked for generations.
Should ancient statues be destroyed or preserved? Should women be allowed to drive, to work, to travel without the permission of men? Can boys and girls attend school together? Is it permissible to buy insurance, to wear a sports jersey with a cross design, to shake hands with a non-Muslim, to take pictures, to view family photographs?
All of this has been addressed in fatwas.
“We are the conscience of the nation,” said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of Al Azhar Research Committee, a state-sanctioned body that issues religious opinions and is often behind decisions over which books should be stripped from store shelves and banned.
In Egypt, and other Muslim countries, where laws must abide by the Koran, fatwas by government-appointed officials can have the weight of law. “We have to be clear what is at stake here,” said Egypt’s grand mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, in a recent speech in London. “When each and every person’s unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.”
In his own role and practice, the grand mufti embodies many of the issues that have arisen around the fatwa practice. He has issued rulings that have been deemed by some as so progressive that they were offensive, and others that were so literal as to be considered offensive.
Sheik Ali issued the urine fatwa, now notorious, in a book, “Religion and Life.” It was published six years ago and told the story of a woman who drank the prophet’s urine. He had his own book taken off the shelves, and said the controversial statement was not a fatwa but his opinion, which was offered in response to a question.
“The reality is that the mufti is now ‘burned’ and lost religious recognition and the trust of the Muslims and his fatwas will not gain anything but carelessness from all the Muslims; as some will hate it as they hate drinking urine,” wrote Hamdy Rizk in an opposition newspaper.
But he was also criticized — and praised — earlier this year after he had issued a fatwa saying that it was permissible for women to have reconstructive hymen surgery before marriage to conceal that they were no longer virgins. He said that since it was impossible to tell whether a man was a virgin, women should have the same option.
But he took his opinion a step further, when he said that if a married woman had sex with another man, regretted her action and asked God for forgiveness, she should not tell her husband. The goal, he reportedly said, was to preserve the family.
The breast-feeding fatwa came in mid-May. A religious scholar, who headed a department that studies the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings at the Foundation of Religion College of Al Azhar University, wrote that there had been instances in the time of the prophet when adult women breast-fed adult men in order to avoid the need for women to wear a veil in front of them.
“Breast-feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” wrote the scholar, Izat Atiyah. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed.”
The ruling was mocked on satellite television shows around the region, and was quickly condemned at home. Mr. Atiyah was suspended from his job, mocked in newspapers and within days issued a retraction, saying it was a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
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Pak Christians told to convert or face death
Islamabad, July 07: Islamist militants in Pakistan have threatened to kill 10 Christian clerics in southern Punjab's Khanewal district if they did not "embrace Islam and stop preaching Christianity."
"We are feeling insecure and unsafe today because of these threatening letters from Muslim fanatics," said provincial lawmaker Naveed Amer Jeeva, coordinator of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA).
10 Christian clerics have received threatening letters from unidentified people warning them to "embrace Islam, stop preaching Christianity and quit your faith otherwise the countdown of your life has begun".
A state of fear prevails in Khanewal district's Shanti Nagar because the authorities have failed to address their security needs, said pastor Mehtab Masih at a press conference yesterday to highlight the issue.
Threatening letters have been received by Union Council Naib Nazim Fazal Masih, councillor Kalim Dutt, pastor Robin, Capt Irshad of the Salvation Army church, pastor Boez Enver, pastor Lemuel Calavary and Joseph Daniel, the post daily said.
Lawmaker Jeeva said pastor Mukhtar Barkat had received such a threatening letter and was assassinated on January 5, 2004 in Khurrampura Khanewal.
On June 12 Christians in Shanti Nagar village had also received anonymous letters written in Urdu asking them convert to Islam or leave the area.
The letters were sent to 10 religious, political and social leaders of this mainly Christian village.
Shanti Nagar village, which has about 3,000 Christians and 500 Muslim residents, was formed by the Salvation Army church before the partition of the sub-continent in 1947.
In May, Christian residents of a Muslim colony in Charsadda town of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), received a letter from militants asking them to convert to Islam.
Several Christian families fled their homes and others are living in constant fear. Minority and human rights groups have demanded that the government provide protection and security to Christian families living in NWFP. Though the authorities have assured security to the minority community and arrested few people in the earlier incidents, they have failed to boost the confidence of the Christians in the ability of the police to safeguard their lives and properties in the face of continuing threats.
There have been cases of people accused of blasphemy being murdered by religious extremists. Human rights activists say the country's blasphemy laws are misused to settle old enmities or personal disputes.
A Christian man, Younis Masih, was sentenced to death under the blasphemy laws of Pakistan for allegedly insulting Prophet Mohammad in September 2005 in Lahore. The All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) has sought legislative reforms to strike off the blasphemy laws that "discriminate against minorities" in the country.
Bureau Report
Islamabad, July 07: Islamist militants in Pakistan have threatened to kill 10 Christian clerics in southern Punjab's Khanewal district if they did not "embrace Islam and stop preaching Christianity."
"We are feeling insecure and unsafe today because of these threatening letters from Muslim fanatics," said provincial lawmaker Naveed Amer Jeeva, coordinator of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA).
10 Christian clerics have received threatening letters from unidentified people warning them to "embrace Islam, stop preaching Christianity and quit your faith otherwise the countdown of your life has begun".
A state of fear prevails in Khanewal district's Shanti Nagar because the authorities have failed to address their security needs, said pastor Mehtab Masih at a press conference yesterday to highlight the issue.
Threatening letters have been received by Union Council Naib Nazim Fazal Masih, councillor Kalim Dutt, pastor Robin, Capt Irshad of the Salvation Army church, pastor Boez Enver, pastor Lemuel Calavary and Joseph Daniel, the post daily said.
Lawmaker Jeeva said pastor Mukhtar Barkat had received such a threatening letter and was assassinated on January 5, 2004 in Khurrampura Khanewal.
On June 12 Christians in Shanti Nagar village had also received anonymous letters written in Urdu asking them convert to Islam or leave the area.
The letters were sent to 10 religious, political and social leaders of this mainly Christian village.
Shanti Nagar village, which has about 3,000 Christians and 500 Muslim residents, was formed by the Salvation Army church before the partition of the sub-continent in 1947.
In May, Christian residents of a Muslim colony in Charsadda town of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), received a letter from militants asking them to convert to Islam.
Several Christian families fled their homes and others are living in constant fear. Minority and human rights groups have demanded that the government provide protection and security to Christian families living in NWFP. Though the authorities have assured security to the minority community and arrested few people in the earlier incidents, they have failed to boost the confidence of the Christians in the ability of the police to safeguard their lives and properties in the face of continuing threats.
There have been cases of people accused of blasphemy being murdered by religious extremists. Human rights activists say the country's blasphemy laws are misused to settle old enmities or personal disputes.
A Christian man, Younis Masih, was sentenced to death under the blasphemy laws of Pakistan for allegedly insulting Prophet Mohammad in September 2005 in Lahore. The All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) has sought legislative reforms to strike off the blasphemy laws that "discriminate against minorities" in the country.
Bureau Report
Laying down religious law
Islam's authority deficit
Jun 28th 2007 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition
Don't count on state-sponsored greybeards to silence all awkward voices
GOVERNMENTS worried by Islamist extremism ought to get the message: the only real answer lay in more Islam—deeper, sounder, more careful readings of the Muslim faith, from scholars who could use the weight of collective experience, accumulated over 14 centuries, to solve the dilemmas of life in the modern age.
Such, broadly, was the argument laid out in London recently by Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, before a gathering of Islamic scholars and pundits. And his hosts took him seriously. The case for using scholarly Islam as a counterweight to the radical, hot-headed sort is familiar in the Middle East, but this time it won an unusually clear endorsement from a Western leader, Tony Blair.
In his parting thoughts (as prime minister, anyway) on Islam, Mr Blair lauded Jordan for its efforts to make the various legal schools of Islam respect each another and stop calling each other infidels. And just like Mr Gomaa, Mr Blair said how important it was to ensure that only qualified people could issue fatwas, or rulings on how to follow Islam in specific situations. Emboldened by his welcome, Mr Gomaa offered to help Britain set up a post like his own: state-certified grand mufti.
Britain may never again have a leader with such a personal interest in theology. But the very fact that Mr Gomaa and similar worthies from other Muslim countries were asked to London (formally by Cambridge University, but with keen official encouragement) reflects a long-term dilemma for all Western states with growing Muslim communities.
To stem extremism, should they follow the lead of many Muslim governments and get involved in Islamic affairs—by promoting some clerics (or theologies) over others? One would-be EU member that does so already is Turkey, where a big state bureaucracy regulates mosque-building and religious education, and pens sermons. Similar political controls on religion exist in many Sunni countries. (In Shia Iran, by contrast, religion has top place: the supreme leader is always a cleric.)
So how much hope should governments in any part of the world place in the promotion of “good”—in the sense of moderate and scholarly—Muslim clerics and theologians, as an answer to the bad sort?
This much is true: many of the Muslims who are drawn to jihadist violence, or to strident forms of political Islam, are indifferent to, or ignorant of, the nuances of theology; that makes them susceptible to “amateur” fatwas. But as a French scholar, Olivier Roy, points out, it doesn't follow that such people—when presented with sophisticated religious arguments—would change their mind. In many cases, they have a general aversion to the idea of elaborate theology.
A more basic problem is that even in states with no political freedom, no official imprimatur can drown the multiplicity of voices vying to influence Muslim hearts and souls. And the age of electronics has broadened the Muslim market-place.
Modern Muslims seeking a fatwa on a practical matter need no longer go to a local mosque, or to the state-salaried officials, or muftis, used by many Sunni Muslim countries as arbiters. (Malaysia has 14 muftis; one for each state.) They can call in to a radio or television show featuring a popular preacher, or use the dial-a-fatwa phone service that one Egyptian firm offers. Half a dozen websites in English alone (like efatwa.com, muftisays.com and askimam.com) offer online advice about everything from ablution to Zionism. A downloadable service, “FatwaBase”, can be used on handheld computers.
Much of the latest electronic guidance is sponsored from Saudi Arabia, and so reflects its conservative mores. More tolerant and mystical versions of the faith, as well as the ultra-puritanism of the Salafist movement, also compete for market share. With piety deepening worldwide, and with state clerics often seen as stooges, the faithful seek out scholarly views that are conservative enough to suit them.
Worried governments are not the only people calling for order in this noisy free-for-all. One of the star competitors—Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who preaches on the al-Jazeera satellite channel—has sponsored the creation of an international council of ulema, or religious scholars. As a scholar who is de facto spiritual adviser to the international Muslim Brotherhood, he seemingly contradicts the notion that political Islam and learning do not go together. But it remains true, says Mr Roy, that the Brotherhood's back-to-basics ethos is averse to highbrow theology.
That aversion certainly doesn't hurt, and it may even help, the Brotherhood as it competes with Mr Gomaa to influence Egyptians. As part of this struggle, Mr Gomaa has recently proposed a board to vet fatwas, with powers to punish those who issue incorrect or misleading ones.
Yet Mr Gomaa himself is no stranger to controversy. His own fatwas have often been challenged by a rival authority, the ancient university of al-Azhar. As a case of the bizarre effects of competition between scholars, take some recent exchanges on female circumcision. More clearly than before, Mr Gomaa laid down on June 24th (after an 11-year-old died under the knife) that it was not just “un-Islamic” but forbidden. Mr Qaradawi, by contrast, has suggested that genital cutting is permissible so long as the clitoris is “reduced in size”, not removed entirely. It says something about the mood of religious conservatism on the Egyptian street that Mr Qaradawi's ruling was seen as “playing to the gallery”.
Abdal-Hakim Murad, an influential British convert to Islam, says the only way to promote good sense and scholarship simultaneously is to have a transnational body of greybeards, free of all political influence. But if governments look to this or any clerical body to provide them with absolute clarity on what Muslims should believe and do, they won't get it: there are just too many interpretations.
Islam's authority deficit
Jun 28th 2007 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition
Don't count on state-sponsored greybeards to silence all awkward voices
GOVERNMENTS worried by Islamist extremism ought to get the message: the only real answer lay in more Islam—deeper, sounder, more careful readings of the Muslim faith, from scholars who could use the weight of collective experience, accumulated over 14 centuries, to solve the dilemmas of life in the modern age.
Such, broadly, was the argument laid out in London recently by Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, before a gathering of Islamic scholars and pundits. And his hosts took him seriously. The case for using scholarly Islam as a counterweight to the radical, hot-headed sort is familiar in the Middle East, but this time it won an unusually clear endorsement from a Western leader, Tony Blair.
In his parting thoughts (as prime minister, anyway) on Islam, Mr Blair lauded Jordan for its efforts to make the various legal schools of Islam respect each another and stop calling each other infidels. And just like Mr Gomaa, Mr Blair said how important it was to ensure that only qualified people could issue fatwas, or rulings on how to follow Islam in specific situations. Emboldened by his welcome, Mr Gomaa offered to help Britain set up a post like his own: state-certified grand mufti.
Britain may never again have a leader with such a personal interest in theology. But the very fact that Mr Gomaa and similar worthies from other Muslim countries were asked to London (formally by Cambridge University, but with keen official encouragement) reflects a long-term dilemma for all Western states with growing Muslim communities.
To stem extremism, should they follow the lead of many Muslim governments and get involved in Islamic affairs—by promoting some clerics (or theologies) over others? One would-be EU member that does so already is Turkey, where a big state bureaucracy regulates mosque-building and religious education, and pens sermons. Similar political controls on religion exist in many Sunni countries. (In Shia Iran, by contrast, religion has top place: the supreme leader is always a cleric.)
So how much hope should governments in any part of the world place in the promotion of “good”—in the sense of moderate and scholarly—Muslim clerics and theologians, as an answer to the bad sort?
This much is true: many of the Muslims who are drawn to jihadist violence, or to strident forms of political Islam, are indifferent to, or ignorant of, the nuances of theology; that makes them susceptible to “amateur” fatwas. But as a French scholar, Olivier Roy, points out, it doesn't follow that such people—when presented with sophisticated religious arguments—would change their mind. In many cases, they have a general aversion to the idea of elaborate theology.
A more basic problem is that even in states with no political freedom, no official imprimatur can drown the multiplicity of voices vying to influence Muslim hearts and souls. And the age of electronics has broadened the Muslim market-place.
Modern Muslims seeking a fatwa on a practical matter need no longer go to a local mosque, or to the state-salaried officials, or muftis, used by many Sunni Muslim countries as arbiters. (Malaysia has 14 muftis; one for each state.) They can call in to a radio or television show featuring a popular preacher, or use the dial-a-fatwa phone service that one Egyptian firm offers. Half a dozen websites in English alone (like efatwa.com, muftisays.com and askimam.com) offer online advice about everything from ablution to Zionism. A downloadable service, “FatwaBase”, can be used on handheld computers.
Much of the latest electronic guidance is sponsored from Saudi Arabia, and so reflects its conservative mores. More tolerant and mystical versions of the faith, as well as the ultra-puritanism of the Salafist movement, also compete for market share. With piety deepening worldwide, and with state clerics often seen as stooges, the faithful seek out scholarly views that are conservative enough to suit them.
Worried governments are not the only people calling for order in this noisy free-for-all. One of the star competitors—Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who preaches on the al-Jazeera satellite channel—has sponsored the creation of an international council of ulema, or religious scholars. As a scholar who is de facto spiritual adviser to the international Muslim Brotherhood, he seemingly contradicts the notion that political Islam and learning do not go together. But it remains true, says Mr Roy, that the Brotherhood's back-to-basics ethos is averse to highbrow theology.
That aversion certainly doesn't hurt, and it may even help, the Brotherhood as it competes with Mr Gomaa to influence Egyptians. As part of this struggle, Mr Gomaa has recently proposed a board to vet fatwas, with powers to punish those who issue incorrect or misleading ones.
Yet Mr Gomaa himself is no stranger to controversy. His own fatwas have often been challenged by a rival authority, the ancient university of al-Azhar. As a case of the bizarre effects of competition between scholars, take some recent exchanges on female circumcision. More clearly than before, Mr Gomaa laid down on June 24th (after an 11-year-old died under the knife) that it was not just “un-Islamic” but forbidden. Mr Qaradawi, by contrast, has suggested that genital cutting is permissible so long as the clitoris is “reduced in size”, not removed entirely. It says something about the mood of religious conservatism on the Egyptian street that Mr Qaradawi's ruling was seen as “playing to the gallery”.
Abdal-Hakim Murad, an influential British convert to Islam, says the only way to promote good sense and scholarship simultaneously is to have a transnational body of greybeards, free of all political influence. But if governments look to this or any clerical body to provide them with absolute clarity on what Muslims should believe and do, they won't get it: there are just too many interpretations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world ... nted=print
October 26, 2007
Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 25 — On a marshy peninsula 50 miles from this Red Sea port, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology.
Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.
Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.
This undertaking is directly at odds with the kingdom’s religious establishment, which severely limits women’s rights and rejects coeducation and robust liberal inquiry as unthinkable.
For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners.
Supporters of what is to be called the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, wonder whether the king is simply building another gated island to be dominated by foreigners, like the compounds for oil industry workers that have existed here for decades, or creating an institution that will have a real impact on Saudi society and the rest of the Arab world.
“There are two Saudi Arabias,” said Jamal Khashoggi, the editor of Al Watan, a newspaper. “The question is which Saudi Arabia will take over.”
The king has broken taboos, declaring that the Arabs have fallen critically behind much of the modern world in intellectual achievement and that his country depends too much on oil and not enough on creating wealth through innovation.
“There is a deep knowledge gap separating the Arab and Islamic nations from the process and progress of contemporary global civilization,” said Abdallah S. Jumah, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco. “We are no longer keeping pace with the advances of our era.”
Traditional Saudi practice is on display at the biggest public universities, where the Islamic authorities vet the curriculum, medical researchers tread carefully around controversial subjects like evolution, and female and male students enter classrooms through separate doors and follow lectures while separated by partitions.
Old-fashioned values even seeped into the carefully staged groundbreaking ceremony on Sunday for King Abdullah’s new university, at which organizers distributed an issue of the magazine The Economist with a special advertisement for the university wrapped around the cover. State censors had physically torn from each copy an article about Saudi legal reform titled “Law of God Versus Law of Man,” leaving a jagged edge.
Despite the obstacles, the king intends to make the university a showcase for modernization. The festive groundbreaking and accompanying symposium about the future of the modern university were devised partly as a recruiting tool for international academics.
“Getting the faculty will be the biggest challenge,” said Ahmed F. Ghoniem, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulting for the new university. “That will make it or break it.” Professor Ghoniem has advised the new university to lure international academics with laboratory facilities and grants they cannot find at home, but he also believes that established professors will be reluctant to leave their universities for a small enclave in the desert.
“You have to create an environment where you can connect to the outside world,” said Professor Ghoniem, who is from Egypt. “You cannot work in isolation.”
He admitted that even though he admired the idea of the new university, he would be unlikely to abandon his post at M.I.T. to move to Saudi Arabia.
Festivities at the construction site on Sunday for 1,500 dignitaries included a laser light show and a mockup of the planned campus that filled an entire room. The king laid a crystal cornerstone into a stainless steel shaft on wheels.
Cranes tore out mangroves and pounded the swampland with 20-ton blocks into a surface firm enough to build the campus on. Inside a tent, the king, his honor guard wearing flowing robes and curved daggers, and an array of Aramco officials in suits took to a shiny stage lighted with green and blue neon tubing, like an MTV awards show. Mist from dry ice shrouded the stage, music blared in surround sound, and holographic projections served as a backdrop to some of the speeches.
From a laconic monarch known for his austerity, the pomp, along with a rare speech by the king himself, was intended to send a strong signal, according to the team charged with building and staffing the new campus within two years.
The king is lavishing the institution not only with money, but also with his full political endorsement, intended to stave off internal challenges from conservatives and to win over foreign scholars who doubt that academic freedom can thrive here.
The new project is giving hope to Saudi scholars who until the king’s push to reform education in the last few years have endured stagnant research budgets and continue to face extensive government red tape.
“Because Aramco is founding the university, I believe it will have freedom,” said Abdulmalik A. Aljinaidi, dean of the research and consultation institute at King Abdulaziz University, Jidda’s biggest, with more than 40,000 students. “For Kaust to succeed, it will have to be free of all the restrictions and bureaucracy we face as a public university.”
Even in the most advanced genetics labs at King Abdulaziz, the women wear full face coverings, and female students can meet with male advisers only in carefully controlled public “free zones” like the library. Scientists there tread carefully when they do research in genetics, stem cells or evolution, for fear of offending Islamic social mores.
Even in Jidda, the kingdom’s most liberal city, a status rooted in its history as a trading outpost, change comes slowly. This month the governor allowed families to celebrate the post-Ramadan Id al-Fitr holiday in public, effectively allowing men and women to socialize publicly on the same streets for the first time.
The religious police were accused of beating a man to death because he was suspected of selling alcohol. Conservatives have fended off efforts by women to secure the right to drive or to run for office, although women have made considerable gains in access to segregated education and workplaces.
Against this backdrop, said Mr. Khashoggi, the newspaper editor, the king has conceived of the new university as a liberalizing counterweight, whose success depends on how much it engages the rest of Saudi society. “Nobody wants to live in a ghetto, even a nice one,” Mr. Khashoggi said. “As a Saudi, I say, let’s open up.”
Upon completion, the energy-efficient campus will house 20,000 faculty and staff members, students and their families. Social rules will be more relaxed, as they are in the compounds where foreign oil workers live; women will be allowed to drive, for example. But the kingdom’s laws will still apply: Israelis, barred by law from visiting Saudi Arabia, will not be able to collaborate with the university. And one staple of campus life worldwide will be missing: alcohol.
The university president will be a foreigner, and the faculty members and graduate students at first will be overwhelmingly foreign as well. Generous scholarships will finance the 2,000 graduate students; planners expect the Saudi share of the student body to increase over the years as scholarships aimed at promising current undergraduates help groom them for graduate studies at the new university.
The university’s entire model is built around partnerships with other international universities, and faculty members are expected to have permanent bases at other research institutions abroad.
The university will also rely on a new free-market model. The faculty members will not have tenure, and almost all of them will have joint appointments. While the university will initially be awash in money, its faculty and graduate students will still have to compete with top international institutions for the limited pool of private money that underwrites most graduate research.
Suhair el-Qurashi, dean of the private all-female Dar Al Hekma College, often attacked as “bad” and “liberal,” said a vigorous example of free-thinking at the university would embolden the many Saudis who back the king’s quest to reform long-stagnant higher education.
“The king knows he will face some backlash and bad publicity,” Ms. Qurashi said. “I think the system is moving in the right direction.”
October 26, 2007
Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 25 — On a marshy peninsula 50 miles from this Red Sea port, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology.
Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.
Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.
This undertaking is directly at odds with the kingdom’s religious establishment, which severely limits women’s rights and rejects coeducation and robust liberal inquiry as unthinkable.
For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners.
Supporters of what is to be called the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, wonder whether the king is simply building another gated island to be dominated by foreigners, like the compounds for oil industry workers that have existed here for decades, or creating an institution that will have a real impact on Saudi society and the rest of the Arab world.
“There are two Saudi Arabias,” said Jamal Khashoggi, the editor of Al Watan, a newspaper. “The question is which Saudi Arabia will take over.”
The king has broken taboos, declaring that the Arabs have fallen critically behind much of the modern world in intellectual achievement and that his country depends too much on oil and not enough on creating wealth through innovation.
“There is a deep knowledge gap separating the Arab and Islamic nations from the process and progress of contemporary global civilization,” said Abdallah S. Jumah, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco. “We are no longer keeping pace with the advances of our era.”
Traditional Saudi practice is on display at the biggest public universities, where the Islamic authorities vet the curriculum, medical researchers tread carefully around controversial subjects like evolution, and female and male students enter classrooms through separate doors and follow lectures while separated by partitions.
Old-fashioned values even seeped into the carefully staged groundbreaking ceremony on Sunday for King Abdullah’s new university, at which organizers distributed an issue of the magazine The Economist with a special advertisement for the university wrapped around the cover. State censors had physically torn from each copy an article about Saudi legal reform titled “Law of God Versus Law of Man,” leaving a jagged edge.
Despite the obstacles, the king intends to make the university a showcase for modernization. The festive groundbreaking and accompanying symposium about the future of the modern university were devised partly as a recruiting tool for international academics.
“Getting the faculty will be the biggest challenge,” said Ahmed F. Ghoniem, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulting for the new university. “That will make it or break it.” Professor Ghoniem has advised the new university to lure international academics with laboratory facilities and grants they cannot find at home, but he also believes that established professors will be reluctant to leave their universities for a small enclave in the desert.
“You have to create an environment where you can connect to the outside world,” said Professor Ghoniem, who is from Egypt. “You cannot work in isolation.”
He admitted that even though he admired the idea of the new university, he would be unlikely to abandon his post at M.I.T. to move to Saudi Arabia.
Festivities at the construction site on Sunday for 1,500 dignitaries included a laser light show and a mockup of the planned campus that filled an entire room. The king laid a crystal cornerstone into a stainless steel shaft on wheels.
Cranes tore out mangroves and pounded the swampland with 20-ton blocks into a surface firm enough to build the campus on. Inside a tent, the king, his honor guard wearing flowing robes and curved daggers, and an array of Aramco officials in suits took to a shiny stage lighted with green and blue neon tubing, like an MTV awards show. Mist from dry ice shrouded the stage, music blared in surround sound, and holographic projections served as a backdrop to some of the speeches.
From a laconic monarch known for his austerity, the pomp, along with a rare speech by the king himself, was intended to send a strong signal, according to the team charged with building and staffing the new campus within two years.
The king is lavishing the institution not only with money, but also with his full political endorsement, intended to stave off internal challenges from conservatives and to win over foreign scholars who doubt that academic freedom can thrive here.
The new project is giving hope to Saudi scholars who until the king’s push to reform education in the last few years have endured stagnant research budgets and continue to face extensive government red tape.
“Because Aramco is founding the university, I believe it will have freedom,” said Abdulmalik A. Aljinaidi, dean of the research and consultation institute at King Abdulaziz University, Jidda’s biggest, with more than 40,000 students. “For Kaust to succeed, it will have to be free of all the restrictions and bureaucracy we face as a public university.”
Even in the most advanced genetics labs at King Abdulaziz, the women wear full face coverings, and female students can meet with male advisers only in carefully controlled public “free zones” like the library. Scientists there tread carefully when they do research in genetics, stem cells or evolution, for fear of offending Islamic social mores.
Even in Jidda, the kingdom’s most liberal city, a status rooted in its history as a trading outpost, change comes slowly. This month the governor allowed families to celebrate the post-Ramadan Id al-Fitr holiday in public, effectively allowing men and women to socialize publicly on the same streets for the first time.
The religious police were accused of beating a man to death because he was suspected of selling alcohol. Conservatives have fended off efforts by women to secure the right to drive or to run for office, although women have made considerable gains in access to segregated education and workplaces.
Against this backdrop, said Mr. Khashoggi, the newspaper editor, the king has conceived of the new university as a liberalizing counterweight, whose success depends on how much it engages the rest of Saudi society. “Nobody wants to live in a ghetto, even a nice one,” Mr. Khashoggi said. “As a Saudi, I say, let’s open up.”
Upon completion, the energy-efficient campus will house 20,000 faculty and staff members, students and their families. Social rules will be more relaxed, as they are in the compounds where foreign oil workers live; women will be allowed to drive, for example. But the kingdom’s laws will still apply: Israelis, barred by law from visiting Saudi Arabia, will not be able to collaborate with the university. And one staple of campus life worldwide will be missing: alcohol.
The university president will be a foreigner, and the faculty members and graduate students at first will be overwhelmingly foreign as well. Generous scholarships will finance the 2,000 graduate students; planners expect the Saudi share of the student body to increase over the years as scholarships aimed at promising current undergraduates help groom them for graduate studies at the new university.
The university’s entire model is built around partnerships with other international universities, and faculty members are expected to have permanent bases at other research institutions abroad.
The university will also rely on a new free-market model. The faculty members will not have tenure, and almost all of them will have joint appointments. While the university will initially be awash in money, its faculty and graduate students will still have to compete with top international institutions for the limited pool of private money that underwrites most graduate research.
Suhair el-Qurashi, dean of the private all-female Dar Al Hekma College, often attacked as “bad” and “liberal,” said a vigorous example of free-thinking at the university would embolden the many Saudis who back the king’s quest to reform long-stagnant higher education.
“The king knows he will face some backlash and bad publicity,” Ms. Qurashi said. “I think the system is moving in the right direction.”
FATWA
Click the link below or read the news below
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Re ... 1409142549
Religion
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Turkey: Fatwa allows Muslims to pray just three times a day
Ankara, 10 Oct. (AKI) - Turkish Muslims will be allowed to pray only three times a day from Wednesday instead of the usual five - without fear of committing a sin.
A member of the scientific council of Istanbul University, Muhammad Nour Dughan, has issued a controversial fatwa or religious edict cutting Islamic prayer requirements from five to three times a day.
The move has provoked widespread debate as well as opposition from orthodox imams or Muslim clerics.
Sharia law allows for the possibility of praying three times a day in case of sickness or travel.
The fatwa extends this option allowing Muslims to pray three times a day, especially when they are heavily committed with work or personal issues.
The Turkish debate echoes a similar one that has already taken place in Egypt where the fatwa has also drawn support.
Jamal al-Banna, brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, endorsed the Turkish move.
"Merging prayers has become a modern necessity," he told the al-Arabiya website. "In most cases, people do not always perform the five prayers on time due to the pressures of modern life."
Al-Banna is often criticised for his modern interpretation of Islamic rules. He said the Prophet Mohammad himself had given followers this option that could be applied when prayers cannot be carried out in a given time.
A member of Egypt's Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Youssef al-Badri, rejected the argument saying it was unacceptable to merge prayers unless it was due to travel, illness, rain or pilgrimage.
Click the link below or read the news below
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Re ... 1409142549
Religion
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Turkey: Fatwa allows Muslims to pray just three times a day
Ankara, 10 Oct. (AKI) - Turkish Muslims will be allowed to pray only three times a day from Wednesday instead of the usual five - without fear of committing a sin.
A member of the scientific council of Istanbul University, Muhammad Nour Dughan, has issued a controversial fatwa or religious edict cutting Islamic prayer requirements from five to three times a day.
The move has provoked widespread debate as well as opposition from orthodox imams or Muslim clerics.
Sharia law allows for the possibility of praying three times a day in case of sickness or travel.
The fatwa extends this option allowing Muslims to pray three times a day, especially when they are heavily committed with work or personal issues.
The Turkish debate echoes a similar one that has already taken place in Egypt where the fatwa has also drawn support.
Jamal al-Banna, brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, endorsed the Turkish move.
"Merging prayers has become a modern necessity," he told the al-Arabiya website. "In most cases, people do not always perform the five prayers on time due to the pressures of modern life."
Al-Banna is often criticised for his modern interpretation of Islamic rules. He said the Prophet Mohammad himself had given followers this option that could be applied when prayers cannot be carried out in a given time.
A member of Egypt's Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Youssef al-Badri, rejected the argument saying it was unacceptable to merge prayers unless it was due to travel, illness, rain or pilgrimage.
Khaleej Times Online >> News >> MIDDLE EAST
Fatwas will be made available on Internet
By Habib Shaikh (Our correspondent)
2 November 2007
JEDDAH — Fatwas (religious rulings) will now be available on the net. The Riyadh-based Presidency for Scientific Research and Religious Edicts (Dar Al Ifta), which comprises prominent Islamic scholars that issues fatwas, has set up web site www.alifta.com.
The launch of the web site comes in response to calls for the authentication of religious edicts in Saudi Arabia. Certain radical groups sometimes issue sketchy fatwas urging Muslim youths to take part in jihad.
The web site is aimed at giving Muslims a place to review authentic and widely accepted fatwas issued by the Islamic authority in the Kingdom. The web site provides quick access to the fatwas issued by Dar Al Ifta, which is affiliated to the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars headed by Grand Mufti Shaikh Abdul Aziz Al Asheikh.
The site features fatwas issued by prominent Islamic scholars and has devoted a section for the fatwas of Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the former mufti who died in 1999.
Visitors to the new web site will be able to ask questions on various topics and get replies from well-known scholars. On the main page of the site, one can find the fatwas of the permanent committee for ifta, fatwas of Shaikh bin Baz, and of the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars as well as the Islamic Research magazine.
The site also contains some of the Hadiths reported by prominent women followers of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) including Khadeeja, Safiya, Zainab, Hafsa, Aisha, Fatma, Asma bint Abu Bakr, Umm Salama and Umm Dardaa.
Saudis and expatriates in the Kingdom welcomed the new fatwa web site and said it would help the public to receive authentic religious rulings and opinions on various issues.
Mohammed Habeeb, director-general of the Dawa Centre in Al Salama district in Jeddah, said Dar Al-Ifta’s site is very informative and would benefit a large number of people worldwide. He stressed the need for further developing the site with interactive facilities.
“People have been waiting for this site for quite a long time. It is a nice web site containing religious edicts made by prominent scholars like Bin Baz and Bin Othaimeen,” he said. He urged Dar Al Ifta to translate the religious rulings into English and other major languages.
“There is a multi-language web site set up by Egypt’s Al Azhar. Many foreigners make use of it,” he added. Saudi Arabia has emphasised the need for the compilation of religious edicts in order to unite Muslims.
In a previous statement, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal stressed the important roles that Islamic institutions, such as the Islamic Fiqh Academy, play in protecting Islamic beliefs and ideology.
Fatwas will be made available on Internet
By Habib Shaikh (Our correspondent)
2 November 2007
JEDDAH — Fatwas (religious rulings) will now be available on the net. The Riyadh-based Presidency for Scientific Research and Religious Edicts (Dar Al Ifta), which comprises prominent Islamic scholars that issues fatwas, has set up web site www.alifta.com.
The launch of the web site comes in response to calls for the authentication of religious edicts in Saudi Arabia. Certain radical groups sometimes issue sketchy fatwas urging Muslim youths to take part in jihad.
The web site is aimed at giving Muslims a place to review authentic and widely accepted fatwas issued by the Islamic authority in the Kingdom. The web site provides quick access to the fatwas issued by Dar Al Ifta, which is affiliated to the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars headed by Grand Mufti Shaikh Abdul Aziz Al Asheikh.
The site features fatwas issued by prominent Islamic scholars and has devoted a section for the fatwas of Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the former mufti who died in 1999.
Visitors to the new web site will be able to ask questions on various topics and get replies from well-known scholars. On the main page of the site, one can find the fatwas of the permanent committee for ifta, fatwas of Shaikh bin Baz, and of the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars as well as the Islamic Research magazine.
The site also contains some of the Hadiths reported by prominent women followers of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) including Khadeeja, Safiya, Zainab, Hafsa, Aisha, Fatma, Asma bint Abu Bakr, Umm Salama and Umm Dardaa.
Saudis and expatriates in the Kingdom welcomed the new fatwa web site and said it would help the public to receive authentic religious rulings and opinions on various issues.
Mohammed Habeeb, director-general of the Dawa Centre in Al Salama district in Jeddah, said Dar Al-Ifta’s site is very informative and would benefit a large number of people worldwide. He stressed the need for further developing the site with interactive facilities.
“People have been waiting for this site for quite a long time. It is a nice web site containing religious edicts made by prominent scholars like Bin Baz and Bin Othaimeen,” he said. He urged Dar Al Ifta to translate the religious rulings into English and other major languages.
“There is a multi-language web site set up by Egypt’s Al Azhar. Many foreigners make use of it,” he added. Saudi Arabia has emphasised the need for the compilation of religious edicts in order to unite Muslims.
In a previous statement, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal stressed the important roles that Islamic institutions, such as the Islamic Fiqh Academy, play in protecting Islamic beliefs and ideology.
November 7, 2007
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR
SAN FRANCISCO — About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.
While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.
Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.
“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”
For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn homosexuality is gaining momentum.
In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more protected.
As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say, partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such research.
Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington failed largely out of fear, he said.
“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.
Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.
Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an abomination is remains open to interpretation.”
Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination, said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he said.
The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because sex was defined as penetration.
Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he said condemned homosexuals.
“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they had a virus.”
All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ. “Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does it? Not me or you, only by law.”
Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it given practices like open gym showers.
The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.
Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European colonialism.
“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist. “They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it helped me reconcile the two.”
Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.
Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him. He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.
He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”
A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too depressing.
But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat. “They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.
The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR
SAN FRANCISCO — About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.
While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.
Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.
“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”
For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn homosexuality is gaining momentum.
In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more protected.
As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say, partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such research.
Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington failed largely out of fear, he said.
“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.
Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.
Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an abomination is remains open to interpretation.”
Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination, said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he said.
The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because sex was defined as penetration.
Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he said condemned homosexuals.
“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they had a virus.”
All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ. “Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does it? Not me or you, only by law.”
Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it given practices like open gym showers.
The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.
Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European colonialism.
“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist. “They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it helped me reconcile the two.”
Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.
Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him. He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.
He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”
A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too depressing.
But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat. “They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.
The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
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- Joined: Tue Apr 22, 2003 12:55 am
- Contact:
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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
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
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
Get article background
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.
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
Get article background
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.
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.
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.
ISLAM IN A NEW WORLD
Popularizing Islam through TV
template_bas
template_bas
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.
Vision
click to enlarge
Related Stories
- Dutch film 'Fitna' draws muted response from Muslims
- 'Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West' by Benazir Bhutto
- Muslim nations condemn terrorism
"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
Popularizing Islam through TV
template_bas
template_bas
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.
Vision
click to enlarge
Related Stories
- Dutch film 'Fitna' draws muted response from Muslims
- 'Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West' by Benazir Bhutto
- Muslim nations condemn terrorism
"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
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
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.
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.
"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
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
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@...
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@...