CIP In The News: International Director Al-Alawi in The Independent [London], February 17, 2007
[http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2278078.ece]
Saudi couple victim of rise in 'forced divorce'
by Daniel Howden
Published: 17 February 2007
Fatima al-Timani is facing the end of her sixth month in prison in the Saudi town of Damman. Her only crime is to refuse to be separated from the man to whom she had been happily married for the past four years and with whom she has two children.
Fatima is the latest victim of a growing practice in the oil-rich Saudi kingdom of forced divorce, when disgruntled relatives have used hardline Islamic courts to dissolve matches against the will of the married couple.
The plight of 34-year-old Fatima, who was pregnant when court proceedings began in 2005 and is now in prison with her one-year-old son, Suleiman, has drawn widespread public sympathy in the tightly controlled kingdom.
Fatima is forbidden from seeing her husband, Mansour al-Timani. He now looks after their two-year old-son Noha, who has only been allowed occasional visits to his mother. Fatima's relatives have accused Mansour of lying about his tribal background to win their father's approval for the marriage and want it annulled so she can have an arranged marriage to a spouse of their choosing.
She was arrested in October of last year in the city of Jeddah and charged with living illegally with Mansour. The couple's efforts to be reunited suffered a further setback this month when an appeals court in the capital, Riyadh, upheld the original ruling forcing the divorce.
Mansour said he will not accept the appeals court ruling and that he still considers Fatima his wife."This ruling is a non-Islamic one and, therefore, I refuse to acknowledge it," he said.
"If her family wants to marry her to another man while we both still consider ourselves married then there is nothing I can do about it. But God will be our judge."
A human rights activist, Fawziya Al-Ouyoni, one of the women behind a petition calling on Saudi's King Abdullah to personally intervene said: "When the divorce is carried out with the couple's approval then this is just the way it happens all over the world. But when the divorce is forced on the couple with an order from a high court then that is a massive disaster."
Saudi Arabia has possibly the worst record on women's rights of any country. The kingdom has been ruled since the 1920s by the House of Saud whose clerical allies, the Wahhabists, have imposed an austere state faith on what had been a religiously diverse mixture of Muslims with Sunni, Shia and Sufi communities.
Under Wahhabi rule, women have no voting rights, almost no employment rights and are barred from even driving.
Despite a concerted effort to present a more reformist image to the outside world since the death of King Fahd in August 2005, rights groups have noted continuing erosions of human rights under his successor Abdullah. Dr Irfan Al Alawi a British Muslim and director for The Centre for Islamic Pluralism based in London, said that the case was not an isolated incident and that as many as 19 forced divorces were working their way through the courts.
The case of Rania Albou-Enin, a 27-year-old Saudi physician has caused particular concern. In her last month of pregnancy, she is anxiously awaiting an appeals court decision in a case of forced divorce brought by her father.
Her husband, Saud Al-Khaledi, is being held in a police jail in Alkhobar, according to her lawyer Ibrahim Al-Behairi. Rania, who had been paying all her family's bills, has claimed she was beaten by one of her brothers and that the family brought the case to ensure they would not lose their main breadwinner.
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Turkish Murder Echoes Throughout the West
by Ali Sirin
Fifty-three-year old Turkish-Armenian journalist, editor and columnist Hrant Dink was slain by gunfire in Istanbul on January 19, 2007. He was not only a courageous outspoken member of the Armenian minority in Turkey, he was husband to Rachel, who read aloud her letter to him at his funeral, and the father of several children.
According to eyewitnesses, Dink was shot three times at point blank range in the back of his head by a young man who shouted, “I shot the unbeliever!” before he fled the scene. Reports are that the three-shot assassination style is that of the Turkish Hezbollah.
Turkey has mourned the untimely death of Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian weekly journal Agos, and the loss of such an important voice for its political conscience. But how sincere was the public weeping for him? Before his death, he was treated by the media and politicians as a public enemy because of his comments about Turkish-Armenian relations and the massacres of Armenians during the First World War, which he characterized as genocide. We cannot but suspect that for some Turkish politicians, the condemnation of Dink’s assassination was motivated not by his death itself but by fear about the consequences of this atrocity for potential Turkish entry into the European Union.
The murder reflected the toxic political atmosphere in Turkey. For a lot of journalists “paragraph 301” of the common law remains significant, in that it bans supposed insults to Turkish national identity. Even the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was charged under this law, and Dink himself was prosecuted three times for insulting Turkishness. In fact, he received numerous death threats from Turkish nationalists who accused him of treason. Public prosecutor Kemal Kerincsiz must listen to the voices of those who blame his judicial career for the murder, since he charged Hrant Dink under the same law. Kerincisiz rejects any complicity in Dink’s death and defends his action against Dink as well as this clause in the law which, in the present author’s opinion, should be abolished for the sake of Turkish intellectual freedom.
The killing of journalists has a dreadful history in Turkey. Abdi Ipekci and Ugur Mumcu were among the famous victims of aggression based on nationalist fantasies as well as religious intolerance. In fact, today, critics still live in great danger in Turkey. Sadly, the Turkish-Islamist construction of national identity diverts people from seeking the recovery of cultural and political pluralism in Turkey, a very great loss indeed.
Many Turkish people paid their last respects to the Turkish-Armenian journalist who always supported dialogue between Armenians and Turks and who refused to leave Turkey even though he received threats. The slogans “We all are Hrant Dink” and “We all are Armenians” stand as evidence for Dink’s high reputation as a prominent intellectual in Turkey. The impressive demonstrations express nothing less than the highest appreciation of Hrant Dink’s commitment to freedom of opinion and democracy.
Regrettably, however, Turkey must accept the reality that nationalist groups celebrated this unspeakable crime. They showed publicly that the nationalist image is more important to them than a human life. Acclaim for the murder of Hrant Dink showed that the Turkish propensity for extremism has changed, but that the bloody tradition persists. The nationalists saw Hrant Dink as a separatist, who risked the unity and alleged honor of the country. Important politicians like premiere Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer were absent from the funeral. The political barriers were too high to be overcome. Other items on their agendas seemed more important for them. Erdogan thus indicated that the bullets which killed the 53-year old journalist and publisher were aimed at all Turkish citizens.
Conspiracy theorists in Turkey very quickly argued that foreign influences are inflicting political harm on the country. Still, the people ask: why do dissidents fear for their lives?
How could a seventeen-year old teenager be so manipulated by nationalistic agitation as to commit a cold-blooded murder? After his arrest he said that Dink described Turkish blood as unclean, and had to pay for it. The assassin came from the margins of the nationalist milieu, where teenagers are misused and dissidents are attacked. Other suspects were also arrested, as well they should be; there is certainly more behind the murder of Dink than a simple act by an enraged teenager.
The claim that the crime was not political, which Turkish politicians want people to accept, has no ring of truth. The young assassin is a child of this nationalistic rhetoric that describes Turks as honest, hard-working and accomplished. But proof of such an identity cannot be found in Turkish society, or in its bloody history, even after the formation of the republic.
What this will mean for Turkey’s acceptance into the European Union remains to be seen; but the shots fired into Hrant Dink’s head were certainly heard throughout the West.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ali Sirin is a German journalist in the Alevi Muslim community. This text was translated by Hasan Canoglu and is distributed by the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington and London
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Canada is Different, Even In Its Muslims
by Stephen Schwartz
Dateline: Toronto-Montréal
A common, cynical definition of Canadian identity is that it is “not American.” That is, while Canada, in its English-speaking majority, has little to distinguish itself in literature, art, science, and other facets of culture, its residents console themselves with the distinction between their political attitudes, which run toward socialism and reluctance about global intervention, and those of their southern neighbor, perceived as ultra-capitalist and expansionist.
It is said that Canadians are more modest and polite, slower to be offended and less aggressive in their assertion of pride than Americans. Nevertheless, Canada contributes to the anti-terrorist struggle in Afghanistan. Canadian Forces recruiting publicity on television, which I viewed during a visit to Muslim intellectuals north of the U.S. border, expresses a commitment to combat absent from similar messages directed to American recruits. The U.S. military, in its appeals to enlist, emphasizes educational, training and other opportunities, while the Canadians stress a single word: “Fight.” Canada is also different, as I shall examine, in its inclusion of a large non-English population, in French-speaking Québec and other Francophone areas.
Canadian Islam is equally different, in a promising and heartening way.
American Islam and Islam in England are completely dominated by extremists. There is no room for doubt about this. In the U.S., the leadership and representation of Sunni Islam is monopolized by the “Wahhabi lobby,” made up of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and their various satellites. American Shia Muslims, most of whom still express great gratitude to President George W. Bush for ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein, are marginalized and disorganized.
In the worst aspect of this situation, the mainstream media (MSM) and significant elements of the U.S. government turn to the Wahhabi lobby and their academic apologists to speak for the American Muslims, as if there were no other Islam than that which its most radical exponents offer. The MSM and government do not seem to know who the moderate Muslims are, and demonstrate no understanding of how to communicate with them or support them in opposing the extremists.
Sunni Islam in England is even more subjugated, by members of the Deobandi sect that produced the Taliban, and jihadists from Pakistan and Bangladesh. England is the epicenter of radical Islam in International. Furthermore, England is diffident about the Saudi-Wahhabi threat. British ruling circles are tightly bonded to Saudi reactionaries by a similar monarchical heritage, energy policy, and a really bizarre passivity in the face of terrorist attacks. Many among the English seem to believe that since they survived the Irish Republican Army’s urban terror campaigns, they will also get through the ordeal of bombings and related bloodshed on the London subway system and elsewhere. The shock experienced by Americans after September 11, 2001, when it was revealed that 15 out of 19 of the suicide pilots on that terrible day were Saudis – i.e. “America’s best friends in the Arab world” – has yet to be felt in England.
In one of the most absurd instances of English blindness to the reality of radical Islam, Charles, the Prince of Wales, went to the Saudi kingdom last year and delivered a lecture at the Imam Muhammad Bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, the capital – an institution known to moderate Saudis as “the terror factory.” Charles attended a dinner party hosted by Saudi prince Sultan Bin Salman, at which “architectural heritage” was allegedly discussed, even though Saudi vandalism of the Islamic legacy in Arabia is a widely-resented scandal among Muslims.
Yet another example of extraordinary obtuseness came when the British authorities subsidized a so-called “Radical Middle Way” tour of the island that claimed to counteract extremism with “traditional” (sic) Islamic fundamentalism. Insisting on “engagement” with the radicals, the UK government legitimized Islamist agitation in the name of dialogue. The consequence has been to more firmly reinforce the hold of jihadist ideology in the Muslim communities of England. Even with successive media and law enforcement investigations of terror recruitment and conspiracies, Deobandi and Wahhabi elements have gained further power as the recognized spokespeople for the English Muslim communities.
It is therefore unsurprising that in both American and English Islam, authentic moderates and opponents of radicalism are seldom heard. Notwithstanding the blandishments of the MSM, there is no real debate about the future of Islam among the American and English Muslims. Insistence on religious conformity, hatred of the West and Israel, and the vocabulary of alleged victimization remain standard in Muslim discourse.
But to repeat, Canada is different. In the English-speaking provinces, groups like CAIR-Canada and ISNA are present but do not control all discussion as they do in America. Indeed, Toronto is a center of Muslim dissent. The Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), which I founded two years ago, enjoys the support of academic and journalist Salim Mansur, a Canadian member of the Center’s board, and of Professor Mansur’s former student, Imaad Malik, of Canadian origin. Brother Imaad is the first CIP Fellow, and writes for Family Security Matters.
Canadian Islam is more diverse and pluralistic than American or English Islam in some part, it seems, because of immigration by heterodox Shia Muslims from east Africa, including groups known as Khojas and Bohras, who despise extremism and adjust easily to Canadian life. Yet another factor is Canada’s energy independence; the country exports hydrocarbon products to the U.S. and has no incentive to truckle to Saudi Arabia. Whatever the explanation, Canadian Muslims are engaged in a debate about their future, which offers an immense contrast with the environments of American and English Islam.
French-speaking Québec has seen a different development, which offers lessons for many countries. Canadian Muslims, as a minority, must additionally contend with the reality of the Québécois independence movement. The Québécois feel their culture is threatened by their historic rulers, the Anglo-Canadians. For the Québécois, “accommodation” to other minorities – the term the Québécois prefer to “multiculturalism” – has an ambiguous legitimacy; they insistently define their society as Catholic and French-speaking, first and foremost.
The vulnerability of small nations in the face of multicultural demands is little appreciated. While the U.S. and Anglo-Canada offer open space as well as vast economic opportunities and a global reach, Québec, like Holland and Denmark, is culturally unique and often misunderstood. Québécois journalists and authors are mainly read only in Québec, just as Dutch and Danish intellectuals are known almost exclusively among their own people. Choosing to affirm Québécois culture, like a decision to write in Dutch or Danish, cuts the creative elite off from much of the world, but members of these elites still do so out of love for their people.
Holland and Denmark accepted multiculturalism when they needed immigrants to fill jobs and when the program seemed attractive as an embodiment of established traditions of socialist internationalism in both lands. But Muslims who immigrate to such countries must understand that they have to accept the law and language of the local society, to enjoy the economic and social benefits – including democratic freedoms – they seek. Islamist separatism is more disruptive in small and isolated cultures than in large, “melting-pot” societies. This conundrum has been dramatized by recent developments in Québec that have gone unreported on the American side of the border.
Last month, the Québécois village of Hérouxville north of Montréal, with a population of 1,338, adopted a code of conduct that many observers defined as biased against Muslims: residents affirmed that in their town, people drink alcohol, women do not wear face coverings except at Halloween, and stonings are not permitted. Similar resolutions appeared elsewhere in Québec.
The Hérouxville code did not order the compulsory consumption of alcohol, which would have offended plenty of people who are not Muslim, aside from making settlement there impossible for a Muslim believer. But in Québec “reasonable accommodation” had already become the subject of a serious dispute. Prior to the Hérouxville incident, most of the episodes in this controversy involved the Jewish community. Protests followed a decision by a Montréal branch of the YMCA to frost the windows of its gym so that young members of a neighboring Orthodox synagogue would not be exposed to women exercising. Women police officers in the same city were called on to refrain from speaking directly to Orthodox Jewish men, and an ambulance driver was ordered from the premises of a Jewish hospital for eating non-kosher food in its cafeteria. Almost as a footnote, another man was told to leave a public swimming pool at the apparent demand of some Muslim women. But Anglo-Canadian media often seem to emphasize cultural squabbles involving Jews in Québec, in an effort to reinforce a perception that the French-speaking province, which has assimilated a considerable population of Tunisian Jews, is bigoted in its Catholicism.
Anglo-Canadians and Québécois, Catholics and Jews, Canadian Muslims and non-Muslims, Sunnis and Shias, are now compelled to argue the meaning of reasonable accommodation of minorities. But at least the condition of Islam is being argued, and silence cannot be imposed as in the U.S. and England. This is a necessary step toward the triumph of Islamic pluralism, and one which no moderate Muslim should fear. Canada is indeed different, and may offer hope for other non-Muslim societies contending with the challenge of immigrant and radical Islam. CIP in Canada will do everything possible to preserve and develop Canada’s difference.
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Creating a Judeo-Islamic Peace Movement
by Imaad Malik
Muslims today face two corrosive socio-political ideologies undermining the original peaceful message of Islam. Many Muslims are steeped in Islamofascism and anti-Semitism. Believers in both these evils seek dominance or the destruction of Western democracies—primarily America and its ally, Israel.
Much of this anti-Western and anti-Semitic bigotry is disseminated, subsidized financially and supported politically by Arab and Muslim governments. Extremists in Iran, Syria and Lebanon fuel the flames of hate and mistrust between Jews and Muslims, using the Palestinian conflict with Israel as a pretext for state-sponsored propaganda.
Iran and Syria openly finance radical groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas in permanent war against the democratic nation of Israel. In the summer of 2006, a major provocation by Hezbollah against Israel led to the deaths of many innocent Jews, Muslims, and Christians, while the cowardly terrorists hid among innocent civilians, women and children among the general Lebanese population.
Hezbollah and Hamas claim they are disfranchised. Moreover, they assert that they suffer from poverty and oppression at the hands of the United States and Israel. This is a thin attempt to give their hateful and deadly ideology legitimacy.
Furthermore, in Saudi Arabia textbooks have indoctrinated Muslim children in anti-Jewish beliefs from the beginning to the end of their education. Combined with mosque preaching, this results in conditioning so that for many Muslims, from birth to death, hatred of Jews is second nature, like breathing or eating.
Islamist bigotry has caused the deaths of countless innocents. It is time for Muslims to challenge anti-Semitic and anti-Western hatreds that infiltrate so much of the Islamic world. It is time for moderate Muslims who seek peace between Jews and Muslims to make substantial efforts for a new Muslim approach to the global Jewish community.
Muslims must initiate a process of conciliation, in which both Jews and Muslims can produce a new Judeo-Islamic movement. Muslims do exist who desire and will work for peace between Jews and Muslims. Nevertheless, many of the mainstream Islamic institutions in the West embody the anti-Semitic and anti-Western bigotry visible in groups like al-Qaeda.
For that reason, there is much apprehension among moderate Muslims about speaking out and challenging the Islamic establishment. Moreover, there is a fundamental lack of debate among moderate Muslims about the future of Islam and the need to restore meaningful dialogue with Jews and Christians as well as Hindus and other traditional faiths.
The global Muslim community must first recognize Israel’s existence as a legal state. A new Judeo-Islamic movement must create exchanges and discussions based on shared religious values and individual human experience. A new Judeo-Islamic symbiosis would parallel the harmonious Judeo-Christian relationship and lead to a thorough reshaping of the Islamic global communion, with restoration of its vitality as a religion in the global society that emerged after September 11, 2001.
One of the greatest Jewish theologians, philosophers, and physicians was Moshe ben Maimon or Maimonides (1135-1204), known in Arabic as al-Hakim Ibn Maimun al-Qurtubi – “the wise doctor Ibn Maimun from Cordoba in Spain.” Maimonides followed in the footsteps of the Persian Muslim polymath Ibn Sina or Avicenna (930-1087). Maimonides, as the most prominent figure in medieval Jewish philosophy, wrote extensively in Arabic and had a significant impact on the development of Judaism. Among his many works Maimonides wrote on the relationship between classical Greek philosophy and Jewish theology. He composed a code of Jewish law, the Mishnah Torah. His development of this code caused much controversy within Jewish society.
One of his great achievements, the Emet or Truth, also known as the 13 Principles of Faith, summarized Jewish belief. Several of these principles, such as God's unity, God alone is deserving of worship, Revelation through God's prophets and Rewarding of good and retribution of evil, have universal philosophical and theological significance.
These principles are also embodied in the Qur’an. Maimonides remains controversial but his 13 principles may be found in the Siddur (Jewish prayer book).
The modern global Jewish community contains many Jews coming from diverse societies and cultures. One example is that of the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia, from the legendary city of Bukhara. Bukharan Jews are one of the oldest ethno-religious groups living in Central Asia and created their own unique culture. Many have moved to Israel and the United States. This is primarily because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. While Soviet census data systematically undercounted Jews, in 1989 as many as 120,000 Jews lived in Uzbekistan. Today, estimates range up to 35,000.
There are other aspects of Jewish history relevant to Muslims, involving Ashkenazi Jews in Northern Europe, and the Sephardic Jews who went from Spain and Portugal to the Arab and Turkish lands. Each group also has a distinct history and culture which Muslims should research. Muslims should educate themselves about the history and diversity of Jews as a model for pluralism in their own community.
The common elements in Islam and Judaism will be rediscovered and reinforced when Muslims research Jewish religious history. Like Islam, Judaism places great theological emphasis on the role of prophets, such as Abraham and Moses. Abraham, in Islam as well as in Judaism, has an irreplaceable role in recognizing God’s Divine Sovereignty.
In addition, the prophet Moses received the Decalogue from God and was lawgiver to Israel. Both faiths agree that Moses was the only prophet who saw and directly spoke to God. Furthermore, Moses is the most frequently-mentioned prophet in the Qur’an. Muslims should keep in mind that Abraham and Moses represent theological commonalities which Jews and Muslims can honor together.
Jews and Muslims represent two-thirds of the monotheistic, Abrahamic faith tradition. Along with Christians we are all descendants of Abraham. Muslims should therefore be natural partners for the Jewish community.
It is time for Muslims to think boldly in responding to Islamofascism and the anti-Jewish bigotry spreading in the Islamic global community like a cancer. It is time for Muslims to proclaim peace with the Jewish and Christian communities in America and throughout the world. Christians, Jews and Muslims must stand together and bridge our differences.
The world grows apathetic about the presence and law of God. Muslims, Christians and Jews must courageously address the significant differences among them, to defeat Islamofascism and extreme secularism in the global era. The continuing turmoil between Jews and Muslim must end.
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Why Iraq is Not Algeria
by Stephen Schwartz
Dateline: The Hague, Netherlands
Critics of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq, none of whom demonstrate much competence in reading history, keep searching for negative parallels between the obstacles faced in the liberation of Mesopotamia and earlier failures by Western nations fighting in former colonial lands.
First, of course, must come the false parallel with Vietnam, which is a standby for ‘60s nostalgics. Last June, in one of my first contributions to FSM, I outlined why the Iraqi struggle has nothing in common with the Vietnam war (www.familysecuritymatters.org/challenges.php?id=148727).
More recently, the fraudulent comparison of choice among critics of the U.S.-led effort in Iraq involves the Algerian war of independence, which ended with the withdrawal of France in 1962. British journalist Alistair Horne, author of A Savage War of Peace, a mediocre account of the Algerian conflict, has taken to preening over news that President George W. Bush is reading his book at the recommendation of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The entry of Kissinger’s name into play should be a warning of bad counsel for the president, since Kissinger’s “realist” approach to the Middle East has proven wrong time and again.
Mr. Horne bragged that he had sent his book to former defense-secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with paragraphs underlined. Rumsfeld was unimpressed, but Defense Department personnel had already been called on to watch Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. In contrast with Mr. Horne’s superficial narrative, Pontecorvo’s film is useful for understanding Algerian history, but neither the book nor the movie are relevant to the current battles in Baghdad or Basra.
The main, bogus parallels between Iraq and Algeria have been restated by Mr. Horne himself, and are three:
France was forced to defend its own Algerian Arab mercenaries, rather than fight the Algerian nationalists directly. Supposedly, the U.S. plays a similar role when it must defend the elected Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
France could not interdict the flow of arms and men from Morocco and Tunisia – mainly, in a reality overlooked by the instant experts in mendacious comparisons, financed by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The U.S. has admittedly not prevented extremists from entering Iraq.
France’s use of torture against the Algerian rebels undermined domestic support for the war. And America stands accused of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
The art of political polemic has clearly declined in recent years, as each of these three claims for lessons from Algeria can easily be shown to be utterly inappropriate for Iraq.
First, the Arab mercenaries France had to defend were a small minority, and the Algerian revolutionaries represented a large majority. The comparison with Iraq would hold if the U.S.-led coalition were to protect Sunni terrorists against the Shia-backed al-Maliki administration. But that, obviously, is not the case; rather, the U.S. helps the Shias against the Sunni terror.
It is true that neither the U.S. nor Iraq have prevented Saudi supporters of the Sunni terror, or Iranian troublemakers interested in inciting Shia excesses, from entering Iraq. But the difficulty of maintaining border control in the face of irregular armed activity is visible in every war since, at least, the end of the 19th century. The Germans could not prevent the British and U.S. from supplying men and materiel for the Resistance movements in Europe during the Second World War. Does that mean the U.S.-led coalition is comparable with Hitler’s forces, and the Sunni terrorists or Shia adventurists are peers of the Tito Partisans in Yugoslavia? Of course not, any more than the fact that all soldiers carry weapons or eat lousy food makes all wars the same.
Finally, France employed torture continually, as a standard weapon against the Algerian revolutionaries. France’s record in this regard was abominable, especially given the short time that had gone by since the aforementioned Nazis used the same methods against the Free French led by Charles de Gaulle. For someone like myself, who was sickened by French abuses in the Algerian War, the news of U.S. personnel involvement in human rights violations at Abu Ghraib prison was shocking. But Abu Ghraib was an exception, not policy.
If problems with sorting out the enemy's forces, cross-border infiltration, and incidents of torture were enough to establish parallels between wars, all wars would be the same. Certainly, there are many leftists and others who today think that any war is reprehensible. But all wars are not the same.
In the American Civil War, President Lincoln struggled over whether to free the slaves, and ordered the emancipation of those in Confederate territory mainly to undermine secessionist morale. The issue of how to deal with the Black slaves was no less a diversion from the immediate military campaign by the Union army than that of French concern for their Arab mercenaries in Algeria. (This is not to suggest that such slaves were mere pawns of Lincoln, although the Confederates would have argued such.) The Southern rebels received unofficial assistance from the British, just as radicals in Iraq do from neighboring countries, and the France of Napoleon III, much like certain Sunni rulers today, profited from fighting in the U.S. to launch an adventure in the colonization of Mexico. Lincoln also suspended the constitutional right of habeas corpus and locked up anti-Union editors. And one only needs watch the movie Gangs of New York to see how unpopular that liberation war was with the Northern public.
Do these bare and insubstantial parallels make Lincoln and Bush equal? Most politically-correct “liberals” would be horrified by the suggestion. Of that, more below.
Let us look, instead, at the differences that make a parallel between Iraq and Algeria absurd.
France’s aim in Algeria was to absorb the North African country, with its large Arab Muslim majority, into the French republic. France implanted thousands of colonists in Algeria, over the passage of more than a century, with the goal of transforming the country into a part of France. By contrast, nobody has ever suggested that Americans would colonize Iraq with settlers or that Iraq would become a 51st state.
To emphasize my earlier point, the Algerian Arab population became overwhelmingly opposed to any continuation of French rule. By contrast, Iraqi Shias, led by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, backed the overthrow and execution of Saddam, and do not want the U.S.-led coalition to leave Iraq until the country is stabilized.
The Algerian national liberation movement, although it engaged in terrorist tactics, also followed a course of normal advocacy in international bodies including the United Nations, and gained behind-the-scenes support from the U.S. against the French occupation. By contrast, the Sunni terrorists and Iranian provocateurs in Iraq must operate in the shadows, without presenting a respectable face to the world.
A proper comparison of Iraq with Algeria would begin by noting that “liberals” and leftists today complain over the fate of the former Sunni ruling class in Iraq, and bewail that of Saddam and his cohort – but they would never have defended the French colonists or French-Arab mercenaries in Algeria, whose role in oppressing the majority was the same as that of the Iraqi Sunnis.
As far as reading lists go, I recommend that President Bush throw away Mr. Horne’s second-rate volume, and that the gadflies who praise it because it is the only volume on the Algerian war in English learn some French and begin examining French and Algerian sources on that conflict. In general, I would hope President Bush reads Walt Whitman’s poetry on the Civil War and the biography of Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. Both are spine-stiffening in a time when a righteous cause pursued by an American president is under assault from domestic as well as foreign enemies.
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“MOTHER TERESA: SAINT OR CELEBRITY?”
by GËZIM ALPION
Routledge paperback, 284 pp., UK edition £16.99
Reviewed by Stephen Schwartz
Mother Teresa was born in the Balkans in 1910, died in India in 1997, and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003. She was a unique, global figure in recent religious life, and, as such, defines for many people the mission of the Catholic church. She never produced a work of theological reasoning, or spent much time as a public preacher of her faith. Yet as we approach the tenth anniversary of her death, she is still one of the world’s best-known and most admired modern Catholic personalities, for her humility and dedication. Although awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, she continued her activity as a nun, entirely devoted until her passing to the order she personally founded, the Missionaries of Charity (known in her native Albanian, by the way, as the Missionaries of Love).
There are many volumes about Mother Teresa, by individuals as prominent in their time as Malcolm Muggeridge, author of Something Beautiful for God, which is still in print, and as profound in their enthusiasm as Eileen Egan, poet and social activist, who wrote several books about her. Surprisingly, however, Gëzim Alpion has produced the first account of Mother Teresa to focus mainly on the details of her early and middle life, rather than spiritual inspiration and her later fame. He is an Albanian sociologist, a professor at the University of Birmingham in England , and a critic of the phenomenon of celebrity – certainly a modish topic in academia today. But in its depth, breadth, and seriousness, this volume may stand for some time to come as the single most important biography of Mother Teresa in English.
Mother Teresa was of ethnic Albanian origin, born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in the Macedonian city of Skopje in 1910. Perhaps because she became renowned in India , rather than the Balkans, and because Albanians are an isolated nation of which the rest of the world knows little, her childhood has been obscured. Her background as an Albanian Catholic was distinguished by intense ethnic pride and dedication to the church. When she was born, her family were subjects of the Ottoman empire, and the creation of an independent Albania was still two years distant, finally coming about in 1912. While they account for no more than 12 to 15 percent of all Albanians, who are Muslim in their majority, the Albanian Catholics have always been leaders of their nation in education, literature, and politics. Albanians in general represent a valuable example of a people among whom religious differences have remained insignificant.
Agnes Bojaxhiu was, as Prof. Alpion shows, a mystical believer by nature. In her childhood and adult years, she experienced frequent divine and saintly encounters, with such personalities as Saint Peter (the latter instance during a fever and accompanying delirium.) Her first call from God to serve the poor came in Skopje in 1922, before she was twelve. At 18, she departed the Balkans for Ireland , where she began training with the Sisters of Loreto. Three years later, she was in Calcutta , took vows as a nun and began 17 years’ service as a teacher in a Catholic girls’ school.
In 1946, she underwent her subsequent call from God, commanding her to leave the convent school – which she did in 1948 – and to care for the masses of poor, sick, abandoned, and despised in the byways of the great Indian city. She referred to this divine message as “the call within the call.” She was granted permission to form her Missionaries in 1950, and fulfilled her work without great publicity, until the British Broadcasting Corporation and Muggeridge came to her in 1969. The rest is commonly known. The ‘60s, with the illusory claim for radical redemption of society’s victims, needed her example of selfless, non-political compassion. She eventually traveled the world many times to support her order, which established new hospices, orphanages, and similar institutions.
But her prestige would also make her family’s ethnic identity a matter of competing claims. The Balkan sensibility has predictably interfered with the biographical works on Mother Teresa by writers unfamiliar with the region. Chroniclers offer differing quotes, some of which indicate that she preferred to speak a Slavic idiom, and Slav Macedonians treat her as one of their own. Her fellow-Albanians point to writings and statements demonstrating that she kept a command of her birth language even after years in India .
As described by professor Alpion – in specific circumstances missing from most of the literature about her – her vision of helping the poor and the drive to establish her Missionaries emerged from surroundings replete with social deprivation and tumult. Certainly, for her to be Albanian in the early 20th century fostered a heightened awareness of conflict between national groups; bloody attacks on her people did not begin with the Kosovo war of 1998-99, but had occurred for hundreds of years. The experience that led her to form the Missionaries, according to the author, was the horrifying “Day of the Great Killing,” on August 16, 1946, when violence exploded in Calcutta between Muslims and Hindus. The arc of her life would be marked by the similar cruelties inflicted, thanks to intolerance and fear, in her native Balkan land and in the Indian subcontinent.
Prof. Alpion, as a properly modern scholar, tends to a psychiatric view of Mother’s sublime spiritual experiences, pointing to illness in childhood as well as later in life as putative sources of such episodes. He might have been served by a closer examination of the literature of sacred ecstasy; he repeats the common assumption that in all religions, “mental anguish and poor health frequently seemed to have paved the way for ‘revelations.’ ” . Nevertheless, he goes on to quote Saint Paul ’s First Letter to the Corinthians, in which the apostle recognizes and distinguishes between the varieties of spiritual gifts with which an individual may be endowed, from wisdom through healing to inspired speech (tongues).
Still, the life of little Agnes Bojaxhiu was unquestionably harsh, physically and psychologically. She was frequently sick, including with the malaria that was then endemic in the southern Balkans, and suffered from a club foot. Her own mother was constantly worried that her daughter would not survive. Like other bed-ridden and sheltered children, Agnes Bojaxhiu was early attracted to literature, both secular and religious. She wrote poems and expressed the desire to become an author.
Fortunately, Prof. Alpion, in his search for a fuller portrait of Mother Teresa, turned to a person who was among those closest to her and wrote the most authoritatively about her. That is Dom Lush Gjergji, a remarkable priest, teacher, and author from Kosovo, who met with her some 50 times. Indeed, it is one of the many virtues of this book that it introduces to the non-Albanian reader the research – although still dismayingly limited – of Lush Gjergji, whom I am proud to call my friend.
Lush Gjergji has traveled through the Albanian-speaking lands collecting interviews and reminiscences from those who knew Agnes Bojaxhiu as a child. As Prof. Alpion indicates, “Gjergji was able to shed some light for the first time on the nun’s health, dreams, ambitions, frustrations, and talents as a little girl and as a young woman.” A diary kept in his youth by a male friend, Lorenc Antoni, a composer from Kosovo, and read by Gjergji, included many comments on Agnes, her love of reading, and her excitement about writing. She communicated to Antoni her decision to become a nun, which led to her departure from Macedonia for Ireland . Gjergji also interviewed Mother Teresa’s brother Lazar, who lived in Italy .
Lush Gjergji describes the early environment of Agnes Bojaxhiu as one filled with a spirit of Albanian patriotism. The city in which she was born, Skopje , had long been a cosmopolitan meeting place for several communities. In addition to Albanians – Catholics, Orthodox, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Sufis – as well as Macedonian Orthodox Christians and Slav Muslims, it included Turks, Serbs, Vlachs (a small, pastoral ethnic group speaking a Latinic language related to Romanian), Greeks, Roma or Gypsies, Catholic Slavs, and Sephardic Jews (the latter group were destined to be wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust). Agnes Bojaxhiu had non-Albanian friends and, as was later demonstrated by her, learned to speak Serbian.
Agnes’ father, Nikollë Bojaxhiu, was a highly charismatic figure; Prof. Alpion observes, in a comment that could apply to many public personalities, that “the global celebrity was the daughter of a local celebrity.” Her father was a leading businessman, investing in construction and a food company; he was then the only Catholic member of the Skopje city council, an artist, a traveler, and, in the memory of his neighbors, a model spouse and parent. He built Skopje ’s first theatre, and helped pay for the construction of a railroad into Kosovo. He was also extremely generous in his financial support for the church and for leading Albanian Catholic intellectuals.
Nikollë Bojaxhiu was “good-looking, brash, eloquent, a daredevil, and a steadfast friend,” Prof. Alpion writes. “You had status in Skopje if you were a friend or were seen in the company of Nikollë Bojaxhiu… Mother Teresa… would always keep in mind what he told [her and her brother] repeatedly when they were small: ‘Never forget whose children you are!’ ” Yet this ideal paterfamilias died suddenly in 1919, at 45, when his daughter was still a child and three years before she experienced her first call to aid the poor. His death was felt throughout the city and his funeral, with the different clergy of the town in attendance, was long-remembered.
Her path from the tormented Balkans to the brutalized Indian subcontinent may have assured that Mother Teresa would be especially sensitive to human suffering. But if one is compelled to choose a psychological rather than a spiritual explanation for the turn of Agnes Bojaxhiu to her commitment as a nun, and her great achievements for faith, it is doubtless equally easy to see a transmutation of her earthly father’s advice. She learned, and never forgot, that she was a child of God. And her simple personality seems to have reflected this throughout her life; she remained a wondering, curious, and uncomplicated person in her quest to attain and fulfill a divine purpose.
Professor Alpion’s encyclopedic narrative addresses many more issues about Mother Teresa, including certain reproaches and issues of her exploitation by others. But a great value of this book is that he has provided us with the fullest portrait yet of her native culture and her maturation, which is obviously necessary in fully understanding her. I have observed and admired Mother Teresa and her Missionaries for many years, but in reading this volume I was reminded, for the first time, of a Balkan archetype: that of the spiritual Albanian woman – regardless of religion. As Prof. Alpion demonstrates, the Albanians, both Christian and Muslim, have much to teach the rest of us.
(This volume, which at the time of review was available only in the U.S. as a hardback for more than $100, is worth purchasing online as a British paperback.)
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Karimov's Uzbekistan is a neo-Communist Dictatorship
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
There is no justification for defending the Karimov dictatorship, which is merely a pawn of Putinism
by Stephen Schwartz*
THE HAGUE, Netherlands
The post-Soviet regime of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan represents a complex of problems for Muslims, for supporters of global democratization, and for countries with Central Asian regional interests, including Turkey.
Uzbekistan's borders are artificial, having been carved out by the Soviets in an attempt to divide up the Islamic cultures of the Asian heartland. Its political order is also artificial, perpetuating a classic party-state police dictatorship almost undistinguishable from the Marxist-Leninist order that preceded it.
Because it is remote and little-known, Muslim authorities and Western states alike have made significant mistakes in dealing with the Karimov government. Soon after the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001 Uzbekistan was accepted as a worthy partner of the U.S.-led coalition in fighting radical Islamist terror.
Westerners noted the role of the now-defunct Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in the al-Qaeda front. The U.S. Defense Department took over the Karshi-Khanabad or K-2 airfield as a base for operations against the Taliban.
But the IMU was annihilated in Afghanistan. It had never struck roots among the Uzbek people; rather, it recruited a small number of poor and misled Uzbeks for combat in such other countries as Tajikistan, in addition to Afghanistan.
Karimov and his stooges could have taken pride in the failure of IMU to stir support among their people. Uzbekistan could have gained credit with the world as an exemplar of moderate, Sufi-oriented, Hanafi-Sunni Islam. Instead, however, Karimov followed the example of Russian demagogue Vladimir Putin in preferring to exaggerate the threat posed by the IMU and various other marginal Islamist groups.
The massacre of Andijan and more
For Karimov, there can be only one strategy: to proclaim all opposition and even criticism of him as jihadist. Merchants and other disaffected elements protested against the interference of Karimov's repressive system with commerce in the Ferghana Valley town of Andijan in May 2005. The Uzbek ruler responded as Tsar Nicholas the II (a.k.a. Nicholas the Bloody) did in 1905 in St. Petersburg and as Stalin dealt with recalcitrant peasants during the forced collectivization of the early 1930s. Ordinary people in Andijan were massacred in the hundreds and then falsely-labeled as Islamist radicals.
Soon after that, Karimov compelled the United States to carry out a decision that the Pentagon had pondered for two years: the K-2 airbase was closed.
But until Andijan the reactionary and brutal policies of Karimov were little understood in the West. Wahhabi agitators from Saudi Arabia conned Western human rights gadflies, whose ignorance of Central Asian Islam was and remains painfully obvious, into believing that failure to accept Wahhabi infiltration of Uzbekistan was a violation of Muslim religious rights.
At the same time, because Uzbekistan possesses a uniquely rich Islamic heritage, some Muslims in the West were fooled by the Karimov regime into thinking that public money spent on the restoration of tombs was an affirmation of Islamic spiritual revival.
Both perceptions were distorted, and each mirrored the other.
Uzbek Islam did not need Wahhabism to make it authentic, and official concern about Wahhabi “missionization” was justified. Calls by Western NGOs for dialogue between Uzbek authorities and Islamist radicals were absurdly misconceived.
But neither did Uzbek Islam require lavish expenditure on elaborate monuments to encourage the rebirth of Sufism, much less public relations efforts by Western Sufis and their acolytes to make Karimov appear a defender of traditional Islam.
Western democrats, Muslims everywhere – but especially those interested in Sufi spirituality – and representatives and friends of the Turkic heritage in the Islamic world should agree on one thing: There is no justification for defending the Karimov dictatorship, which is merely a pawn of Putinism. And Muslims who allied with him and other neo-Communists will find much to regret when they are called on to reflect on their errors.
*Stephen Schwartz is author of “The Two Faces of Islam” and executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. He visited Uzbekistan in 2003 and 2004.
© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. [www.turkishdailynews.com.tr]
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Arguing the World - 'Red' Ken Livingston tries to reconcile Socialism and Islamism.
by Stephen Schwartz
01/25/2007 12:00:00 AM
London
LAST SATURDAY, the mayor of London, "Red Ken" Livingstone, hosted one of the more bizarre events of recent times: a massively-promoted debate between himself and the Middle East Forum's Daniel Pipes. The official title of the event, which lasted all day and included many more speakers of less distinction, was "A World Civilization or a Clash of Civilizations?"
Livingston opened by asserting that the Cold War had been started by the United States and that every action of the West for the last 60 years had been based on support for corrupt dictatorships. He preened over the diversity of London's populace and treated the July 2005 bombings, which are now the subject of a court proceeding, as a mere footnote.
Pipes took the subject of the debate more seriously, pointing out that although he and Livingston agreed on the evils of terrorism, they proposed different ways of dealing with it. For London's mayor, Pipes explained, terrorism is to be solved with more multiculturalism. For his own part, Pipes believes that in a war between civilization and barbarism, the defenders of civilization--including decent, moderate Muslims--must prevail.
Pipes also noted that British authorities have demonstrated that terrorists planning attacks--including those of September 11, 2001--as well as others in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Algeria, Morocco, Russia, France, and Spain, all seem to have made stopovers in London. Livingston responded by seeming to treat such visits as part of London's commercial success.
Pipes then homed in on the strangest aspect of the present British situation: the alliance between the U.K.'s radical Left and fundamentalist Islamist ideology. Pipes identified the latter as a phenomenon distinct from, and contrary to, the traditions of the Islamic faith. The absurdity of the relationship between Islamism and Marxism--given that leftists are strident in their defense of modernism and feminism--was nicely illustrated by Livingston's choice of debating partner. The mayor chose Salma Yacoob, who represents the Respect party--best known as the shelter for George Galloway--in a local council in Birmingham. Yacoob appeared wearing a hijab, even though the Respect party is, in theory, an arm of the secularist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Late in the discussion, Livingston declaimed his atheism and proposed that British parents should have no chance to opt their children out of the state school system in order to receive faith-based education. It would seem that these sorts of attitudes should make the Marxist-Muslim alliance trickier than it appears.
But of course, the British left's adulation for Islamic fundamentalism is restricted to that single variety of religious experience. While Livingston flatters reactionary Muslim clerics such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, much of the Labour party spends its time assailing Catholic adoption agencies for declining to turn children over to homosexual couples. (Islam is generally opposed to adoption except by familial relatives, which might help square this particular circle for Britain's leftists; although Qaradawi has publicly called for homosexuals to be executed.)
Livingston's debate with Daniel Pipes only amplified the British left's bizarre cognitive-intellectual dissonance.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
© Copyright 2007, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved
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To: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Tehran, Iran
Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim, blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and upon his House, peace.
I write in response to your letter dated 29 November 2006 and directed to the people of the United States. As an ordinary American citizen, with no official responsibilities, I will address you similarly, without titles or salutations referring to your political status in your country.
You have taken to sending pretentious communications to Americans, including President George W. Bush himself, apparently without realizing that such an exercise in publicity-seeking does little credit to you or to the Iranian people.
Yet you address the American people as a “noble” people. I consider the Iranian people, also, a noble people. I am an American Muslim and for more than 40 years have been an admirer of the Iranian heritage and the followers of Ahl-ul-Bayt (the family of Prophet Muhammad, pbuh), as specially represented by the Shia sect.
I know the justifiable pride that Iranian Shia take in their devotion to classical logic and other pre-Islamic philosophy, to the works of outstanding Islamic men of wisdom such as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, and to the achievements of the Persian Sufi poets.
I wonder, then, why your letters are characterized by such pedestrian ramblings and twists of illogic.
Since your latest letter, stripped of its rhetoric, consists of a series of questions, I will attempt both to answer your questions and raise new ones.
You have chosen to aggravate the isolation and ostracism of the great Iranian people, and the difficulties faced by the Shia Muslims, who are daily slain in Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere. You have done this by adopting the bizarre and disreputable project of undermining the memory of the genocidal tragedy that befell the European Jews—religious believers in their majority—at the hands of the pagan, idolatrous, and antireligious Hitler regime. You have invited a despicable assortment of demagogues and other crazy people to Iran to “debate” this undebatable reality.
Do you not understand that no other government in the world—not even that of Wahhabi-dominated Saudi Arabia—involves itself in such disgusting propaganda?
Do you not understand that the Jews who were massacred in the Holocaust were killed only because of their monotheistic faith, and that such an unparalleled crime should horrify and repulse Muslims and inspire solidarity with the Jewish victims?
Do you not understand that Hitlerism, which you apparently wish to equate with resistance to imperialism, was in reality the most ferocious and evil form of imperialism in modern times?
I know that Iranian Muslims wept with shared pain when the peace-loving and virtuous Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina were attacked by Serbian fascists. Do you really not know that the same ideology that resulted in the Holocaust of the Jews brought about the horrific deaths of innocent elders and children, men and women, in the Balkan wars of the 1990s? And has nobody ever told you that American Jewish leaders were foremost in calling for military action to defend the Balkan Muslims, the faithful people who alone represent a permanent, historic Muslim presence in Europe?
You also issue allegations about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. Yet you implicitly admit that the foreign policy of the U.S., including its relations with Israel and the Palestinians, is subject to open and continuous debate in the U.S.—the kind of debate woefully absent in Iran today.
When will the Iranian people see a public debate over your squandering of resources in support of the adventurist and totalitarian Hasan Nasrallah, a national discussion of the kind that is the norm in the U.S. and inside the Jewish state?
You insult the American people by alleging that our government is controlled by Zionists. But your nation is held hostage by Palestinian Arabs who despise Iranians, and who hold Shias in deep contempt. The same Palestinian Arabs to whom you express such warmth and provide military and financial support exult in the murder of Iraqi Shias and the devastation of their holy places. Did nobody ever tell you how Yasser Arafat, an atheist and Marxist, once commented, “Alhamdulillah [Praise God], we have neither Shias nor malarial mosquitoes in Palestine”?
You admit, “Saddam was overthrown and people are happy about his departure.” Why do you not extend gratitude to the American people whose sons and daughters were killed in the liberation of Iraq alongside those sent from other Christian-majority nations?
You state, “Iraq [now] has a Constitution and an independent Assembly and Government.” Are you really so obtuse as to imagine that this was not purchased by the world at the price of American and Coalition blood, as well as that of the Iraqi martyrs to Ba’athist and Wahhabi terrorism?
Is this how you will honor the example of Imam Husayn, peace be upon him, whose martyrdom at Karbala will be remembered on the Day of Ashura (the 10th of Muharram) only a week from now, on the 29th of January 2007?
You should begin your communication with Americans in a spirit of Islamic appreciation for the sacrifices Americans and other people from distant, non-Muslim lands have made for the freedom of Karbala and Najaf, beloved to the Shias of the world.
But Karbala is worth less to you than an opportunity to insult the memory of the Jewish people, as well as the dignity of the American president.
Bear in mind, with the approach of Ashura, that Jews and Persians alike are ancient peoples with a long common history.
Remember, as you grieve for Imam Husayn (pbuh), the blood that has poured out of the bodies of American and Coalition men and women in arms, who put themselves in harm’s way to ensure the freedom of the Shias of Iraq. Do not endanger the new Iraq by permitting your associates to disrupt the stabilization of that country, and do not allow Karbala to once again escape Shia control.
The noble Iranian people pronounced a severe judgment on you and your reactionary fantasies in the December local elections, when your supporters received a small minority of votes cast by your fellow-citizens. This was a verdict much harsher than that delivered on the administration of President Bush, about which you comment impudently.
O Mahmoud! Let the workers, students, honest religious scholars, and Sufis of Iran be successful in their demands for dismantling of the failed clerical regime!
But above all, recall at Ashura how the sister of Husayn (pbuh), Hazrat Zeynab, spoke to the Muslims in the aftermath of her brother’s atrocious death: “The memory of those who die for freedom and liberty of Islam takes firm root in the heart of humanity and there it lives on forever.”
Some 3,000 Americans have died for the freedom and liberty of Islam in Iraq.
Do not forget it.
Sincerely,
Stephen Suleyman Ahmad Schwartz
Executive Director
Center for Islamic Pluralism
Washington, DC, USA
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"CAIR Vs. Real Friends of Muslims"
Family Security Matters, January 10, 2007
[http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/homeland.php?id=576680]
by Stephen Schwartz
There has been much controversy over the group widely known as CAIR, or the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR’s website proclaims that its “mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” There are many people however, such as FSM Contributing Editor Stephen Schwartz, in whose opinion CAIR has an additional agenda, as yet not stated publicly.
CAIR vs. Real Friends of Muslims
by Stephen Schwartz
In the study of comparative religion, Professor Michael Sells of the University of Chicago is known as an outstanding, sympathetic, but clear-eyed expert on Islam – and a resolute enemy of Islamist extremism.
Sells got in trouble with a few misguided Americans in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when his translation of the early sections of the Muslim scripture, Approaching the Qur’an, was adopted as the focus for summer reading by students at the University of North Carolina. Commentators who knew nothing of Sells and his work blasted him for allegedly trying to convert innocent American youth to Islam. None of his critics seemed aware that he had been among the few scholars warning the West, long before 9/11, of the danger represented by al-Qaida’s doctrine.
The really awful irony in that instance was that Sells was attacked as something like a “secret Islamist” just as he was being denounced by al-Qaida followers on American soil. Randall “Ismail” Royer was a sometime employee of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the bogus civil liberties organization, having worked for it in 1994 and from 1997 to 2001. Royer assailed Sells on the internet for “bigotry-fueled hysteria” because Sells exposed, in detail, the infiltration of the Saudi-Wahhabi death cult, which inspires Osama bin Laden, into the Balkan Muslim communities. Royer, like others before and after him, declared that Wahhabism was a “figment of the imagination” among Westerners and other alleged enemies of Islam.
Full disclosure here: I am a friend of Sells, and Royer denounced me, and other friends of mine, in similar terms, for shining a light on the Wahhabi threat. But Royer did not continue his campaign of attempted intimidation for long. In 2004, Royer was sentenced to 20 years’ federal imprisonment for his involvement in the so-called “North Virginia jihad network,” which incited participation in terror groups allied to al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Kashmir. As it happened, he had supplemented his vicious, menacing polemics with the habit of driving around the Washington area with a loaded assault rifle in his vehicle. Some of us were quite relieved when he landed behind bars and are pleased that he has a good, long time to ponder his crimes. We also note that many enablers of Royer have yet to face justice.
Another participant in the “North Virginia jihad,” Ali al-Timimi, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement with the conspiracy. Professor Sells, as an expert on Islam, has analyzed the public statements of al-Timimi, and published an extremely serious, scrupulous, and scholarly study titled “War as Worship, Worship as War,” tracing the jihadism of al-Timimi right back to Saudi Arabia, where the American-born al-Timimi lived and studied, and Wahhabism [the Sells paper may be read at http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/122006/war_as_worship.pdf].
CAIR alleges that its mission is to defend the civil liberties of American Muslims, but many believe their real agenda is to protect the Wahhabis and to legitimate their radicalism. It was therefore no surprise when CAIR suddenly issued an informal fatwa against Sells. The author was Ahmed Rehab, CAIR’s Chicago executive director and the same slippery individual nailed as an apologist for extremists in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation only weeks ago. (We covered that informative encounter in my column “CAIR And That 80 Percent,” on FSM, dated December 20, 2006).
Rehab began his “refutation” of Sells by offering a typically-perfumed definition of jihad, which according to CAIR refers to “struggling toward justice,” and only accidentally became associated with military combat and, more recently, terrorism. After belaboring this cliché to a rare excess, and adding a few backhanded compliments to Sells, Rehab turned to a more urgent topic for CAIR. According to Rehab, although the Saudi guidance al-Timimi followed demonized Jews and Christians, the Wahhabi personalities who promoted it (two Saudi commentators on Qur’an) allegedly “never themselves urged terrorist attacks.”
In this manner, CAIR shows that it has repeated the nasty habits of Communist apologists in the U.S., who argued that if Soviet supporters did not call for immediate revolution, they were harmless, regardless of their indoctrination of Americans in treason and recruitment for espionage. Rehab also tried to ignore the very point of Sells’ analysis: that the Wahhabi “interpretation” offered by two scribblers in Saudi Arabia produced radical incitement in America.
And of course, as a good example of a CAIR functionary, Rehab homed in on a non-Muslim purported culprit in the radicalization of al-Timimi: a rabbi who once hurt al-Timimi’s feelings by his remarks about Arab hatred of Jews. (Rehab was enabled in this disingenuous display by a rather clueless American Jewish writer, Milton Viorst.) But as Sells sensibly pointed out, the world is not run by behaviorist rules. Some people respond to humiliation by trying to promote better understanding between people, while others use it as a pretext for murderous violence. Indeed, as Sells noted, rather than living his life in a manner that might change the rabbi’s attitude, al-Timimi, whose family moved to Saudi Arabia a year after the incident, proceeded to fulfill the rabbi’s critique exactly, and to become a venomous Jew-hater.
CAIR’s man in Chicago settled the matter to his own satisfaction. According to him, Muslims, or better, Arabs, since Rehab seems not to care about any other adherents to Islam, are angry only because of American, Israeli, British, French, and even Italian aggression – all the work of “White Christian and Jewish colonialists.” Radical preaching is simply an effect, not a cause. Rehab thus tries to prove that radicals, militants, and extremists are not intolerant and hateful, but mere victims of “failed governments and dwindling [sic] economies,” and again, of the West and Israel.
Nobody sincere can doubt the contribution made by Professor Michael Sells to a fair understanding of Islam. But CAIR, which claims to defend liberty, simply cannot refrain from censuring a critic – any critic – of radical Islam. CAIR is embarrassed by the conviction of its former employee, Royer, and must attempt to absolve Royer’s accomplice. CAIR's Rehab may also feel irritated to have so eloquent an opponent nearby, at the University of Chicago.
By supporting convicted extremists even against conscientious scholars whose credentials as friends of Muslims are unchallengeable, CAIR hews to this function: that of an ideological police seeking to suppress all dissent and critical discourse about Islamist fundamentalism. CAIR may have something to do with the defense of the freedom of Muslims, but it also maintains heavy chains on the Muslim mind – and even on that of the proven friends of Muslims.
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Prof. Michael Sells on Ali al-Timimi and Wahhabi Version of Qur'an, December 2006
Selamaleykum warahmetallahuh wabarakatuh
The Center for Islamic Pluralism strongly recommends reading by all correspondents of an article by our friend Professor Michael Sells, of the University of Chicago, on the Islamic preaching of Ali al-Timimi, who was convicted in 2005 in the North Virginia jihad network case, also known as the "paintball jihad" affair. Al-Timimi was found guilty on 10 counts involving support for the Taliban regime and other radical forces, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Professor Sells links al-Timimi's preaching to the Wahhabi distortion of Qur'an as represented by English versions of the sacred text printed in the Saudi kingdom.
Professor Sells' paper is available at:
[http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/122006/war_as_worship.pdf]
Eid mubarek!
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz
Executive Director
Center for Islamic Pluralism
Washington, DC, USA
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Mega Mosque Plans Could Make London "Muslim Capital of Europe"
by Dale Hurd
CBN News
Today, a neglected piece of real estate on London's east end sees little more than commuter trains rumbling past it.
But it's the future location of what some say will be the biggest Islamic in-road into Christendom in 400 years – a gigantic mosque complex, the likes of which the West has never seen.
This is the site for the proposed mega mosque. Currently, a small building is the present makeshift mosque on an undeveloped piece of land. Imagine a huge modern Islamic complex – in effect, an Islamic village for worshippers.
Video from the website of the mosque architect Ali Mangera shows what will be called the London Markaz, a 17-acre Islamic worship center for as many as 70,000 Muslims. Planned to be the hub of an Islamic quarter for the 2012 London Olympics, it will dwarf many of Britain's Christian cathedrals.
"It's going to be very large,” said Alan Craig of the Christian Peoples' Alliance. “It's going to be a mosque, it's going to be an Islamic garden, there's going to be a library, there's going to be residential accommodation.”
Craig, who is a councilman for the London borough of Newham where the mosque would be built, is fighting its construction.
"I'm not anti-Muslim,” he said. “I'm a Democrat – I believe Muslims have the right to build mosques. But there's a difference between your average mosque down the road and this monster mosque, this mega mosque, which they want to build."
But it's not just the size of the mosque that's a concern. It is also about who is behind it – a shadowy group called Tablighi Jamaat. The Federal Bureau of Investigation states that Tablighi Jamaat has ties to al-Qaeda. Shoe bomber Richard Reid was associated with this group, as were two of the bombers who struck London's public transportation system in 2005. The money for the project comes from sources in the Middle East.
Even moderate British Muslims oppose the mosque and have circulated a petition against it. Dr Irfan al-Alawi, who says the mosque will be a security threat, is one of the leaders of the Muslim opposition.
“This mosque would lead to more violence in the U.K.,” al-Alawi said. “I think, yes. Once the youth have been brainwashed, and been captured by the satanic ideology of the Tablighis, yes, it will come as a very hard-hitting movement."
But while some moderate British Muslims may think the mega-mosque is a bad idea, it has one important booster – the Lord Mayor of London.
"The person who is really behind it is Ken Livingstone," al-Alawi said.
Livingstone has what some would describe as a pro-Islamist, anti-Jewish track record. He's called Ariel Sharon a "war criminal" and has said that British Muslims who go to the Middle East and kill Israelis should not be called terrorists. He has welcomed London radical cleric Yusef al Qaradawi, who defends suicide bombings against Israelis.
The mega mosque project might have sailed through before Sept. 11, 2001. But in 2007, Britain is now considered a major base for homegrown Islamic terrorism. Newsweek reports that Britons are traveling to Pakistan where they're being trained to carry out terrorist attacks in the U.K.
Al-Alawi says Pakistan is also where Tablighi Jamaat sends young British born Muslims to be brainwashed into extremism.
"The British government (is) really going to turn a blind eye on that and say let's go ahead and give these people a chance,” he said. “I don't think so. If they want a 9-11 in England, then by all means.”
Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, says the British left still believes that accommodating radical Muslims will somehow pacify them.
"It’s taken the line of least resistance and it, very foolishly in my view, believes that if you give in to the demands being made by extremists you kind of make the problem go away,” she said.
But if anything, the "problem" in Britain is growing. Polls last year showed almost a quarter of British Muslims believe the July 7, 2005 London bombings were justified, and one in three want to live under sharia law.
Those kinds of headlines have helped galvanize grass roots opposition to the mega-mosque project.
Councilor Craig, who lives in a city with 300 mosques and 500 madrassahs, suggests Britain not allow anymore mosques until Muslims allow churches in Saudi Arabia.
"Why should the Saudis pay for a mosque in the U.K. when there is not one single church, temple, goodwara, synagogue in Saudi at all?" he said.
Spokesman for Tablighi Jamaat Abdul Khalique refused an interview request by CBN News. But he told the British press the mega mosque "…will be something never seen before in this country. It is a mosque for the future as part of the British landscape"
If the mega mosque is built, you can be sure of one thing: it will be the symbol for the incredible growth of Islam in Britain and in International
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Executive Director Schwartz - "2007 Predictions and Hopes"
Family Security Matters, January 5, 2007
[http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/homeland.php?id=563088&PHPSESSID=b14a5fcffc3565e9f844aca3cb7e9f74]
Stephen Schwartz
First, I pray for stabilization in Iraq, with a lessening of risk to our and the coalition’s military forces there.
Second, I pray for the security of all Americans and other people against terrorism, and for adequate resources and support to those protecting them. I further pray that Western governments will not be lured into the trap of collaboration with fake Muslim moderates, but will assist genuine moderate Muslims in defeating radicalism.
To improve the situation of the global Muslim ummah and the planet in general, I fervently pray that Saudi King Abdullah will rapidly and decisively prevail over the backward elements of the royal family. I pray Abdullah will break the monopoly of Wahhabi Islam over religious life in the kingdom, restoring pluralism within Islam, and proclaiming general religious liberty with a written constitution, independent judiciary, and free media. In addition, I pray that all financing of international Wahhabi expansionism be cut off.
These are not utopian hopes; the Hejaz region of Arabia, which includes Mecca and Medina, had laid the foundations of such a system before the Wahhabi takeover in the 1920s. Saudi Arabia today has a growing middle class pressing against the old regime, and demanding to live in a normal society.
Next, I pray the domestic student, labor, and moderate religious opposition will prevail in Iran, driving Ahmadinejad from office.
Finally, I pray that Jews, Christians, Muslims and other believers will initiate a meaningful, respectful dialogue about the future of humanity.
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Update on Bosnian Islamic Cleric Mustafa Ceric and the Lebanon-Israel War of 2006, December 26, 2006
CIP Comment:
We missed this important text at the time it first came out. We would note the following:
1. Dani is an ex-Communist scandal sheet that systematically attacks the U.S., Islam, and the Bosnian Muslim leaders with purely sensationalist motives. Dani occasionally publishes useful comments by Muslim intellectuals, but its own reportage and editorials are uniformly irresponsible. This is mentioned in Stephen Schwartz's book The Two Faces of Islam.
2. Reis-ul-ulema Ceric commented in a khutba or sermon on July 21, 2005: "no one has a greater right, or obligation, than we in Sarajevo to raise our voices against the bombardment of Beirut and the rocket attacks against Haifa, because we know best what it means to live in a city under siege, without water and food, without electricity and defences against shells."
3. CIP continues to closely monitor and coordinate with the Bosnian Muslim clerics, led by Ceric, in their struggle against Wahhabi infiltration, as noted in our site archive.
Please repost.
Bajram sherif mubarek olsun!
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz
Executive Director
Center for Islamic Pluralism
Washington, DC, USA
December 26, 2006
Bosnian commentary condemns Islamic leader for understating Israeli "crimes"
BBC Worldwide Monitoring - August 2, 2006, Wednesday
Text of commentary by Senad Pecanin entitled "Mustafa Ceric" published by Bosnian newspaper Dani on 28 July
If there is any doubt that for decades now, Israelis have pulled off a systemic and systematic eradication of the Palestinians in their Palestinian homeland, all the while terrorizing the entire Middle East, one need only read the sermon given last Friday [21 July] by Mustafa Ceric, the religious leader of Bosnia-Hercegovina Muslims.
Even as the entire civilized world, aside from the United States and Tony Blair, is appalled by the massive Israeli crimes in Lebanon and Gaza, the Bosnia-Hercegovina reisu-l-ulema "led the prayers at the Gazi Husrevbegova mosque in Sarajevo", after which he gave a sermon. In it, according to Dnevni avaz, he "called on the world to stop the war in the Middle East" and to "end the suffering of innocent civilians in Lebanon, Palestine and Israel". He then expressed to the assembled worshippers his disappointment with the "lethargic conscience of humanity", which cannot be awakened even by "the hundreds of bombs dropped on Lebanon and Gaza, nor by the hundreds of rockets fired at Israel".
Ceric also explained to the worshippers "no one has a greater right, or obligation, than we in Sarajevo to raise our voices against the bombardment of Beirut and the rocket attacks against Haifa, because we know best what it means to live in a city under siege, without water and food, without electricity and defences against shells".
Precisely because they experienced first-hand the full hypocrisy of the international "appeals for an end to the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina", the equation of the bloodthirsty aggressor with the helpless victim, and the shameless lies about a balance of military power and a balance of victims among the "belligerents" - for that very reason it is incumbent on Sarajevans most of all to be ashamed of Reis Ceric's quoted sermon. Dear God, just look at Ceric's Handke-like lie [reference to German left-wing playwright Peter Handke] when he talks about "hundreds of rockets fired at Israel", just look at how he says nothing about how one of the most militarily powerful machines in the world has been criminally laying waste to one of the world's most powerless states for days now, how the powerful Israeli Air Force is sowing crimes against hospitals, schools, homes, refugee camps and convoys in Lebanon and Gaza. How is it that Ceric has no fear of God, if he feels no shame towards Sarajevans?
His Unprofor [UN Protection Force] vocabulary in describing the latest Israeli crimes, and at a time when that has been abandoned even by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, offers an answer to the question posed at the beginning of this text. As long as Muslims around the world are represented by leaders who are more concerned with how their positions will please the local US ambassador than with the truth, the various extremist-terrorist movements in the Muslim world need not worry about recruiting new members. But Reis Ceric has no reason to worry either: with his latest sermon, he buttressed his candidacy as a global Muslim leader tailored to US-British policies, and he ensured that he will receive further invitations to important conferences about which Dnevni avaz will inform us on its front page. And he showed that the great international recognition that he recently accepted came from the right hands - those of Henry Kissinger.
Source: Dani, Sarajevo, in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian 28 Jul 06 p7
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CIP President Kemal Silay "Lawyers of Allah: Islamist Terror and Organized Crime in Turkey"
American Jewish Committee Counterterrorism Watch, December 2006
[http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=1556033&ct=3287529]
Lawyers of Allah: The Mutating Faces of Islamist Terror and Organized Crime in Turkey
by Kemal Silay
“We are the Soldiers of Allah! Allah is Great!” These were the words of a Turkish lawyer named Alparslan Arslan who, on May 17th, 2006, entered the Second Bureau of the Turkish Council of State with a Glock hand gun and opened fire on five judges who were then in session. Their “crime,” as stated by the assailant, was to have upheld a court order banning a teacher from wearing the headscarf. Arslan, age 29, with a law degree from Istanbul’s Marmara University, attempted to take the lives of the judges, inspired by the instructions of a medieval “law” and the front page of the jihadist newspaper Vakit, which had published their pictures and signaled them as targets. He succeeded in killing Judge Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin and wounding the four others. Immediately after the attack, he was arrested by the police.
Ideologically speaking, Arslan has an Islamist background but his political foundations were heavily influenced by the ülkücü movement, a racist offspring of Turkish/Turkic ultranationalism, with an increasing record of violence and militancy. The ideology of hate that he espouses is known as “Türk-İslam Sentezi” (“Turkish-Islam Synthesis”). He regularly attended Turkish Hezbollah meetings in Istanbul’s Üsküdar Gökçen Dormitory during his student years and he was subsequently sent to Iran for Hezbollah training. Arslan is also involved in the wide-spread Turkish organized crime called “çek-senet tahsilatı” or “çek-senet mafyası” (“check mafia”). Members of this mafia intimidate and/or punish those individuals who have “missed their deadlines” in making their “promised” payments to the Islamofascist business establishments. These Islamist terror networks do their jobs so “well” that more and more businesses are seeking their “services.”
Depending on the militant power and “connections” (usually involving powerful people from the government or the state) that a given mafia has and based on their previous “success record,” they can receive significant commissions from the Islamofascist businesses upon a “successful” operation. This can include anything from financial repercussions and psychological terror (surveillance, intimidation, threats of harming, kidnapping, or raping the debtor’s family members, including wives and children), to the confiscation of their homes at gunpoint, and ultimately to murder, to name but a few of their “methods.” Many of these mafia funnel the proceeds of their unlawful activities into organizations with known ties to international terror networks.
For example, the same law firm that Arslan worked for, the Yeditepe Hukuk Bürosu, is under investigation by Turkish law enforcement and anti-terror units for its connections with the Turkish Hezbollah, the most violent Islamist terror organization of Turkey.
Why did Arslan target the judges? After his capture, Arslan allegedly shouted out the motivations for his crime. His attack certainly illustrates the kind of retribution called for in the pages of the Qur’an: “Those that make war against Allah and His apostle and spread disorders in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the country. They shall be held to shame in this world and sternly punished in the next: except those that repent before you reduce them. For you must know that Allah is forgiving and merciful” (Al-Ma’ida, V:33, The Koran, translated with notes by N. J. Dawood, New York: Penguin Books, 1987, pp. 390-391).
It is highly probable that Arslan decided to declare jihad against the judges because he perceives them to be spreading “disorders in the land.” Thus, in the usual Islamist manner, he reduces Islam to the pages of the Qur’an, to a piece of cloth called the headscarf, or any other icon. Islamism neither historicizes nor contextualizes the Qur’an, only its apologists do. In order to read an Islamist’s mind, one needs to decontextualize the sources and icons of Islam. Though wrong in its essence, decontextualization would help an analyst get a handle on an Islamist’s psyche. If an Islamist reads a line in the Qur’an which starts something like “today we should …” he does not contextualize the word “today” as “thirteen hundred some years ago” but actually reads it as today, like 2001, or 2006. An Islamist’s mind is constructed around binary oppositions. For him, any given issue is either black or white. Contemporary methodologies which try to examine the gray areas often fail to understand this black-and-white mindset, thus resulting in apologetic explanations for the actions of an Islamist’s unbending mentality. Especially when it comes to the Turkish Hezbollah, killing a judge or any other “enemy of Islam” is justified, and indeed this barbaric practice is an integral part of the organization’s essence.
The Islamofascist qualifications of Arslan perfectly reflect the political, social, and economic realities of the Republic of Turkey since the 1980s. The September 12, 1980 military coup successfully crushed the Turkish “leftist danger” but also opened up unlimited opportunities for all forms of Islamism and organized crime to flourish. Coupled with the implementation of a primitive version of Western capitalism, these Islamofascist groups have taken advantage of the situation and have become an integral part of the economic development of Turkey over the course of the past twenty years. At the same time, they have used their newly found economic power to disseminate their seeds of hatred and destruction more widely throughout society.
Turkish legal and media records of the last decade especially are filled with stories of human devastation at the hands of these underground and quasi-legitimate crime organizations. There is almost no scholarship published on the organizational nature and hierarchal structures of these groups or their connections to international Islamist terror networks, but almost every other month there pops up a new mafia or, as it is commonly referred to in Turkish, a new “çete.” There are literally hundreds of these so-called çetes in present-day Turkey and, with the exception of some successful law enforcement operations to crush them, the overwhelming majority of these organizations have been operating in Turkey freely and with the state’s knowledge of their existence and operations. There is little evidence that Turkey’s efforts have even begun to weaken the power of these networks. Victims of these organizations are often afraid of going to law enforcement officials or hiring a lawyer to receive help, since many events have proven that these çetes frequently receive significant assistance from the law enforcement officials themselves or from high-level bureaucrats.
Since Alparslan Arslan and his accomplices were taken into custody and as the investigation continues to unfold, the world has been watching to see how Turkey will deal with this Islamist attack. It remains to be seen whether the government will properly punish the perpetrators involved and crack down on the ideology behind which they hide.
A similar case occurred in 1995 when a Turkish jihadist named İzzet Kıraç killed the Head of the Gümüşhane Bar Association, Judge Ali Günday, in the name of Allah. Ali Günday had approved the court decision to ban the entrance of lawyers into court if they were wearing a headscarf. Before the jihadist attack, the Akit daily (now known as Vakit) had signaled Judge Günday as a target with the headline “Sick Minds.” It is a known fact that when such a powerful radical Islamist newspaper targets a secular intellectual with such headlines, that person usually becomes the next victim of Islamist terror. İzzet Kıraç was sentenced to life in prison but ultimately spent only 6 and ½ years behind bars. Now a free man, Kiraç continues to assert: “I do not recognize any other law but shari’a!” Kıraç, like the majority of other Islamists, cannot change or go through any kind of genuine transformation or “rehabilitation,” since the universal ideology of Islamism that they believe in requires a blind and rigid acceptance and practice of it.
The long list of Turkish victims of Islamist terror ranges from journalists to university professors, to musicians and poets to judges and ordinary businessmen, is chilling, and there is little evidence that the Republic of Turkey is working hard enough to stop this nightmare. Twenty years ago, literary classics and handbooks of philosophy were bestsellers in Turkey; today, translations of jihadist tracts from Arabic, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf are among the bestselling publications. The level of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism is skyrocketing, as well.
The Alparslan Arslan event is a wake-up call that symbolizes what has become of Turkey in the last twenty years. Unfortunately, this traditional ally of the West, the United States, and Israel is beginning to resemble its totalitarian and theocratic neighbors more so than the State that was defined and shaped by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
However, this latest attack on Turkish secularism is also awakening the masses and mobilizing them against Islamism. At the funeral for Judge Özbilgin, thousands of people joined the mourners and turned the event into a protest against the government. The funeral procession-turned-protest made its way into the streets of the capital city, Ankara, and hundreds of thousands continued on to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Modern Turkish Republic.
After the funeral for the slain judge, Hilmi Özkök, Commander of the Turkish Armed Forces and Chief of the Turkish General Staff, openly encouraged the secular crowds to continue their demonstrations on a regular basis against those who pose a serious threat to the secular and democratic foundations of the Turkish State. He interpreted the demonstrations against Islamism as “hopeful” and congratulated those who participated in them. Özkök, sometimes criticized for not being tough enough towards Islamists, has certainly upset many of them with such a straightforward stance against Islamism. Many in Turkey seem to hope that Özkök’s very recent successor, General Yaşar Büyükanıt, will have a much more rigid approach in dealing with the Islamist danger in Turkey. Büyükanıt has been known as an uncompromising protector of Atatürkism and Turkish secularism. Despite the Islamofascist networks’ anti-Semitic propaganda alleging that “Büyükanıt is Jewish” and a “Zionist” and therefore “should not be appointed as the Chief of the Turkish General Staff,” on July 31st, 2006, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer approved the decision in appointing him as Özkök’s successor.
Sezer himself not only strongly condemned the attack but also stated that he “damned” the “ideology it represents.” He did not hesitate to link this attack with the previous Islamist assaults against the Republic and its secular and democratic formation. He underlined that these attempts to cripple the secular Republic will be answered with determination. Büyükanıt’s appointment certainly seems to uphold the promise he made over two months ago.
Those who watched and listened to these two most respected representatives of Turkish secularism, Özkök and Sezer, had no doubt that the warnings were being leveled at the Islamist networks of Turkey. Curiously, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan chose not to attend the slain judge’s funeral because of a previously scheduled appearance at a tourism event in Antalya. Some of his ministers who did attend the obsequies were attacked by the secular crowds who called Erdoğan a “murderer” and chanted slogans exhorting the government to resign. The Minister of Justice, Cemil Çiçek, tried to sneak out the rear doors of a mosque in order to avoid facing the crowds.
In the subsequent days and weeks following the Arslan event, the Erdoğan government attempted to establish that the attack was not necessarily on Turkish secularism but rather on the government itself, thus suggesting that the orchestration was organized by some retired hardcore members of the Turkish Armed Forces. In an accelerated manner, several ex-members of the Turkish army were arrested, and an effort was made to try to establish their connections with some other mafias.
Among the most interesting of these new mafias that the government is cracking down on is the Atabeyler Çetesi. The government’s police forces moved in quickly to execute a raid on the headquarters of this group in Ankara and arrest its members, some of whom possessed military identification cards, discovering various forms of weaponry and militant materials. The following day, Turkish newspapers published drawings of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s house that were allegedly confiscated from the headquarters of the Atabeyler mafia, some with headlines reading “Assassination Attempt on Erdoğan.” Many in the Turkish media have argued that these drawings were not authentic but that they were later planted among the items confiscated from the Atabeyler headquarters and that they were handed over to the media by some members of the police who are loyal to the Erdoğan government and its ideology.
On February 28, 1997, a “soft” coup d'état had put the brakes on Islamism when the Turkish National Security Council issued eighteen directives to the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan government. Today, it is hard to imagine a similar military intervention taking place due to the European Union process and the fact that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been struggling to eliminate the image of his Islamist past and his ties with Erbakan’s radical Islamist National Vision (Millî Görüş) ideology.
Indeed, except for the headscarf (türban) issue, he has been surprisingly conformist (most critics and analysts interpret this “conformity” as part of Erdoğan’s takiyye ‘political hypocrisy’ policy) to the demands and expectations of the President and the Turkish Armed Forces, and political observers have noted that he has recently pronounced the words “Atatürk” and “secularism” with respect more frequently than he ever had before in his long political career. After the Islamofascist attack, Prime Minister Erdoğan passionately declared: “We are going to make [Turkey] a safer country in order to protect the supremacy of laicism, democracy and law.”
In contrast, on the issue of the headscarf ban in Turkish schools, Erdoğan has been outspoken against the decisions of Turkey’s highest courts, the President, and the Turkish Armed Forces. Erdoğan and the Head of the Turkish Parliament, Bülent Arınç, are on record making numerous inflammatory statements regarding the unchangeable definition of laicism of the Turkish Constitution. The majority of Turks interpret their boldness as “irresponsible” and “provocative.” The names of these two politicians have been circulating as candidates for the position of Turkey’s President. The replacement of Ahmet Necdet Sezer with either of these individuals will no doubt create further discomfort and fear among the secular public, as the President has significant powers when it comes to the veto of decisions of the Turkish Parliament.
During the last four months, and especially after the recent Islamofascist attack by Alparslan Arslan, the debate over the headscarf issue in particular and the interpretation of Turkish secularism in general have resulted in a high level of disorder and large public demonstrations throughout the country. Although Erdoğan is not directly blamed for Arslan’s attack, politicians and the military, many leading journalists, the opposition party, and the hundreds of thousands of Turks who protested in the streets have looked to Erdoğan as being responsible for the creation of the social and political climate that has allowed Islamism to operate and flourish. It has already been suggested that Erdoğan is in the process of orchestrating a “silent” Islamist revolution in Turkey with the help of the political freedom that he has gained through his democratically elected government, and, of course, the European Union process, which automatically eliminates the possibility of another military coup.
It seems likely that, with the direct encouragement and support of the Commander of the Turkish Armed Forces and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, along with the recent public reaction to the attack on the judges, a new kind of civil activism has already started curbing the power of the Justice and Development Party in the Turkish political and cultural arenas. Fears of Islamism and further Islamofascist terror, coupled with what Erdoğan calls Turkey’s “excellent” relations with the Palestinian government led by the Hamas terrorist organization and the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have brought Atatürkism to a level of appreciation that has not been seen in recent memory. In less than two days following the funeral, almost 300,000 Turks in Ankara visited the Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum, as a manifestation of their respect and gratitude to the secular founder of their Republic. This indeed may be the harbinger of a major political turning point in Turkey unlike any other since the 1980s.
[This article reflects CIP President Silay's remarks at a panel on "Turkish Islam: Nationalism, Religious Freedom and Europe," cosponsored by CIP and the Southeast Europe Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, November 29, 2006. This was the second event cosponsored by CIP and WWIC.]
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CIP In The News: Schwartz quoted on Internet jihadists, Fox News [excerpted], December 21, 2006
[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,237879,00.html]
Radical Islamic Groups Exploit Internet for Jihad
by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Thursday , December 21, 2006
FoxNews.com
The global jihadist movement wants the world to adopt Islam's 7th century values, and it's using 21st century technology to do it. In fact, Radical Islamic Web sites are years ahead of any Western counter-efforts, say Web watchers and terror trackers.
“In terms of the propaganda war, they are way ahead of us — they are 10 years ahead of us,” said Stephen Ulph, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, where he is a specialist in Middle East and North African affairs. “[The Internet] seems to me to be the real center of gravity for the jihad movement.”
On Wednesday, a video broadcast by Al Jazeera television network showed the deputy leader of Al Qaeda saying the United States is negotiating with the wrong people in Iraq and implying the U.S. needs to talk to his group.
The video — which bore the logo of Al Qaeda's media production house, al-Sahab — was the 15th time this year that Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri has sent out a statement. The video bore the hallmarks of his previous messages — all authenticated by CIA analysts.
Aside from the video itself — the growing technical sophistication of the terrorists was marked by the fact that U.S. intelligence officials learned about the emergence of a possible message by Al-Zawhiri from speculation that spread across "Jihad-type Web sites."
Days before the video surfaced, intelligence officials warned U.S. news outlets not to get too carried away by the announcement of an impending tape because the pattern of promoting upcoming videos via the Internet had been a technique used in the past to maximize media coverage.
Laws exist in the United States and other countries against Web sites that directly incite violence, but the U.S government has had a tough time monitoring and shutting those down. That challenge has been compounded by the fact that these jidahist sites are typically not in English, can be posted and removed quickly and utilize servers scattered across different countries on the globe.
Web sites that seek to inspire, indoctrinate and recruit Muslims for jihad don’t necessarily call for violent action. Instead, they seek to persuade potential recruits with mountains of literature, religious text, interpretations and the allure of a worldwide community of brotherhood.
Robert Steele, a former clandestine case officer for the CIA who works in open source intelligence, that is, building intelligence by monitoring and trolling public information, like the Internet, said one-third of the Jihadist Web sites operating today are used to incite violence, one-third raise funds for organizations that fund terrorists, and another third indoctrinate through theology and intellectual discourse.
They are all growing in popularity.
“It’s spreading like wildfire. It’s phenomenally successful,” Steele said.
Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror, said he is struck by the sophistication of technology and breadth of content on the sites, which are primarily used for indoctrination into the radical Muslim ideology of jihad.
“The jihadist Web sites are pretty extraordinary when you look at them,” he said. “The combination of money, youth imagination, fanaticism, the desire for simplicity and the desire to sweep people away — it’s really a potent mixture.”
Opinions differ about the goals of these sites are, but most agree they include spreading the pursuit of cleansing the Muslim world of tyrants and apostates — those Muslims not loyal to their vision of the faith — through jihad. Other more vociferous sites, particularly those linked to Al Qaeda, advocate some form of action and almost all reflect hostility toward the United States and the West.
The sites are generously funded by sources in Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, countries that are typically very restrictive about Internet activity but have so far been inept at controlling Web sites or fairly lax in their concern about this particular content, say those familiar with these outlets.
“The Saudis shut down a number of these sites for a while,” said Schwartz. “I don’t think Pakistan has done anything to control the e-jihad. A lot of the e-jihad is being run from Europe, some are run from the United States.”
Some terror analysts note the Catch-22 associated with controlling jihadist messages on the Internet — they suggest that Western adherence to civil liberties, like freedom of expression, is preventing law enforcement types from choking off the lifeblood of these Web sites.
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The Daily Standard, December 20, 2006
'Wahhabis or "Salafis" - what's in a name . . . '
by Stephen Schwartz
12/20/2006 12:00:00 AM
[http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/100fhbty.asp]
WHEN THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY of the global war against Islamist extremism is written, it may well be recorded that one of the psychological victories by al Qaeda and its Saudi financiers and commanders was to convince Western governments and media that Wahhabism, the fundamentalist Sunni sect that is the state religion in the desert kingdom, should not be mentioned by its name.
After September 11, 2001, Islamist adherents on our shores first denied that Wahhabism existed. There was, they insisted, just Islam. Excision of the W-word from Western discourse was a serious hit. Instead, Westerners were told that, in the words of a Der Spiegel writer, Bernhard Zand, the Saudi-backed extremists are "called Wahhabis by outsiders" and "describe themselves as Salafis."
This later led to further comical nonsense as Western commentators split hairs over whether to call the Sunni terrorists in Iraq "Salafi jihadists."
What's the difference?
First, Wahhabis are known as Wahhabis to most Muslims, including numerous Wahhabis themselves. But because of the Wahhabi history of attacks on non-Wahhabi Muslims, the term "Wahhabi" repels many Muslims. Wahhabis therefore often attempt to recast themselves as "Salafis" for the same reason Communists called themselves "progressives." Americans hated the word "Communist" because of the crimes of the Soviet regime, but associated "progressive" with honorable reformers like Theodore Roosevelt.
"Salafi" is, similarly, a respectable term referring to the original generations of pious Muslim scholars who emerged during and after Muhammad's death--and then to a group of 19th century Islamic reformers who wanted to simplify and modernize their religion. But while the "Salafis" 150 years ago execrated the spiritual Sufis, they did not preach violence.
Although they prefer the "Salafi" cover, Wahhabis throughout the Muslim world refer to themselves by that name when the doctrines of their inspirer are challenged, just as Communists flaunted their affiliations in their own milieu. Still, many Western commentators have adopted the habit of identifying Wahhabis by a palliative name in an effort to be "sensitive."
The Sunni terrorists in Iraq have worked even more linguistic magic on Western media, who have assigned them the title of "insurgents." But too much blood has been shed for Westerners to continue flattering Muslim extremists in this manner.
The Sunni murderers in Iraq are terrorists, not insurgents.
And they are Wahhabis, backed by Saudi Arabia, not pious "Salafis."
As George Orwell knew, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their real names.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
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Executive Director Schwartz on "Mullah Krekar," The Daily Standard, December 11, 2006
[http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/049kpieq.asp]
Mullah Krekar - Norway does its best to protect a terrorist.
by Stephen Schwartz
12/11/2006 12:00:00 AM
THE MAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF Mullah Krekar and claims to be an Iraqi Kurd is not quite a star of the global jihad, but he is worthy of attention nonetheless. Krekar is the emir, or chief, of Ansar al-Islam, a Sunni extremist network that has distinguished itself with murderous attacks all over Iraq. (In October of this year, 11 of Krekar's rank-and-file were executed in Iraqi Kurdistan.)
Krekar was also a key link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. The association with Saddam was based on necessity: Saddam knew that because of his atrocities in Kurdistan and the U.S. protective role in that area, he could not reestablish the Baath party there. So he enabled Saudi-financed humanitarian and religious outreach charities to introduce Wahhabism into Kurdistan.
In 1988, Mullah Krekar arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan as an armed Wahhabi missionary. From the beginning of the Wahhabi movement's introduction into Kurdistan the Muslim world was shocked by reports of beheadings ordered by freelance sharia courts, the slaying of Sufis, the targeting of non-Wahhabi Kurdish leaders--many with long careers as patriotic fighters and tragic family losses at the hands of Saddam--the desecration of graves, and other depredations.
When coalition troops invaded Iraq in 2003, Krekar's followers unleashed terror. On March 23, 2003, for instance, they were behind a bombing in Iraqi Kurdistan in which an Australian journalist, Paul Moran, was killed and eight others were injured. Krekar's disciple in that case was a Saudi subject, Abd al-Aziz al-Gharbi. Ansar al-Islam acknowledged responsibility for the bombing from inside the Saudi kingdom.
KREKAR'S GIVEN NAME is Najumuddin Faraj Ahmad. He is believed by many observers to be a Saudi posing as a Kurd. He trained in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden and was a disciple of bin Laden's mentor, the jihadist organizer Abdullah Azzam, who was killed in Pakistan in 1989. Krekar has described bin Laden as the "jewel in the crown of Islam." But perhaps the most interesting fact about Mullah Krekar is that today he runs his affairs from Norway, where he has been a political refugee since 1991.
On December 4, the Washington Post ran a piece about Krekar. The report acknowledged that Krekar has "frequently slipped back into . . . northern Iraq to lead an armed separatist movement called Ansar al-Islam, which has carried out attacks on civilians and U.S. troops." The piece does not go into the details of these attacks. Instead, the Post story concentrated on alleged CIA efforts to pursue Krekar in Norway, and on the Norwegian authorities' disagreeable reaction to Washington's "interference." Someone in the Norwegian government, it seems, recently tipped Mullah Krekar off to the fact that the CIA was on his trail. The mullah demanded official Norwegian protection. How far the Norwegians went to fulfill his requirements is undisclosed. But according to the Post, a CIA operation was blown and Mullah Krekar continues to enjoy life in his northern sanctuary.
Mullah Krekar is wanted by the Iraqi authorities and stated in official terms, his status as a terrorist has been affirmed in the Norwegian courts. He has even been ordered to be deported. But Norway will not send him to Iraq if he faces the death penalty there.
For the Norwegians, the death penalty is a worse evil than massacring whole villages, murdering peaceful Sufis, and trying to impose sharia among the Kurds, as Krekar and Ansar al-Islam, has sought to do.
Europe is demonstrating, once more, its passivity in the face of evil.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
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Rešid Hafizović - “We Will Return Saudi Arabia’s Aid,” Sarajevo, BH Federation TV, December 7, 2006
The following comments are excerpted from a TV discussion on Wahhabism in Bosnia with Prof. Rešid Hafizović of the Faculty of Islamic Studies. Prof. Hafizović is the leading authority on Islamic spirituality in the Balkans and was co-translator of Stephen Schwartz’s Two Faces of Islam (Dva Lica Islama, Sarajevo, 2005).
CIP correspondents, please repost.
Bosnia-Hercegovina Federation TV, December 7, 2006
Excerpted from BBC Monitoring European, December 10, 2006
Prof. Hafizović [On attacks against him for warning of the Wahhabi threat in Bosnia-Hercegovina]: “Look, such campaigns are launched by people who do not read books, unfortunately. I recognize only those arguments that are based on valid scholarship and valid works…”
Host: “Mr. Hafizovic, how would you explain the fact that the Wahhabi movement has found such fertile ground in Bosnia-Hercegovina, given that the Muslims in Bosnia-Hercegovina enjoy extensive cooperation with much more progressive parts of the Islamic world than Saudi Arabia? Incidentally, Reis Mustafa Cerić [head of the Islamic Community in BH] recently said in an interview, prompted by your interview, that we should not cut the branch on which we are sitting, referring to your criticism of the Saudi regime.”
Hafizović: “I would be very pleased if a full stop were put once and for all to the talk of the great and fabulous aid that Saudi Arabia has given [us]. A figure should finally be presented openly and publicly, including the funds that ended up in private pockets. We should then draw a line and say: ‘This is the amount of aid, what is the price that we have to pay for it?’ Because we have to pay. The Saudis and their envoys keeping asking us to pay that price… the price is such that we have to sell our people, our religion, our 500 years of religious and cultural tradition and legacy. And this is precisely what they want: our minds, our hearts, our souls. Look at just one detail: what has, for example, happened with [the Gazi Husrev] Beg’s Mosque [in Sarajevo]? For a handful of oil dollars, conceding to the demands of Saudi representatives, we lost decorations that were at least three-and-a-half-centuries old in the mosque, which used to be a world heritage site.*
The amount of that aid, which, frankly, was not the largest – Sweden, for instance, gave Bosnia more aid than Saudi Arabia – in official statistics Saudi Arabia ranks fifth or sixth.
Let us put an end to this story once and for all and say: Dear [Saudi] gentlemen, if you keep rubbing our noses in the aid – and you are – we will give it back to you…
And why has Wahhabism taken root? Briefly and simply: Because it is being given a green light; because it is being spoken of childishly; because every time the Rijaset [administration of the Islamic Community in Bosnia-Hercegovina] reacts in the spirit and tone of the press release with which they let me really have it the other day.** Because they receive a clear signal from the Saudi embassy – I know this. I have this information and it is sad. Let me finish: Wahhabism is dangerous. It is a virus in the very body of Bosnia-Hercegovina, among Bosniaks.”
* Wahhabi vandalism of the Gazi Husrevbeg mosque is described in The Two Faces of Islam.
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Executive Director Schwartz - "Counter-Jihad: The Specter Haunting Islam"
Family Security Matters, December 6, 2006
[http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/global.php?id=466833&PHPSESSID=dca28db642b9fa3e4d5257ecfc86bf5a]
What many Americans do not know, in large part because neither the media nor our government has found it appropriate to inform us, is that preaching jihad is a prevalent habit in American mosques, perhaps even more so than in the Middle East. As FSM Contributing Editor Stephen Schwartz observes, the Middle East is, surprisingly, host to a new movement of counter-jihad, a phenomenon that just may end the scourge of jihad, and thus America must support at every turn.
Counter-Jihad: The Specter Haunting Islam
by Stephen Schwartz
A specter is haunting Islam: the specter of counter-jihad.
“Counter-jihad” is unlike the term “Islamofascism,” which originated with and is used by Muslim intellectuals – notwithstanding the squeals of Islamist radicals and their apologists, who claim it is a slur on the entire religion.
By contrast, counter-jihad was invented by a clever Catholic friend of mine – perhaps thinking of the Catholic counter-reformation. He uses the term to refer to proven Muslim moderates seeking to expel radicals from the leadership of Islamic communities in the West.
The radicals preach jihad, and by it they mean a campaign of permanent, armed violence against non-radical Muslims, as well as against non-Muslims.
What, then, would counter-jihad look like?
Counter-jihad means that authoritative and respected Muslim rulers and clerics, both Sunni and Shia, as well as spiritual Sufis, would take the initiative – from the top levels of the Muslim worldwide community or umma – to defeat the extremists that dominate American and British Islam.
Unfortunately for the world, radical Islam resembles Soviet Communism in many ways. Both have been totalitarian – and totalitarian social ideologies excel at keeping those they rule over under tight control, in Muslim communities in the West no less than in Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, I will argue that Islamist totalitarianism succeeds better in the West than in the Muslim world.
When Soviet Communism fell, it did so after shedding the blood of millions of innocent victims. But it had also suppressed a series of heroic uprisings from below. In 1921, anti-Leninist sailors rose up and were massacred in the Russian port of Kronstadt. During the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, indigenous Spanish liberals and reformers had to fight infiltration by Soviet police terrorists.
After the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, rebellion was a recurring problem for the Muscovite rulers of “their zone.” In 1953, workers and young people were killed in then-East Berlin, fighting Soviet tanks with their bare hands. Three years later and 50 years ago this year – in an anniversary shamefully ignored by the West – ordinary people of every description, from intellectuals to peasants, rose up in the Hungarian Revolution, aimed at securing the independence of their country from Soviet direction. Thousands were killed by Russian arms and thousands more fled from Hungary.
Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia had managed to attain independence from Russian dictation by peaceful means – although he preserved communist governance at home. A similar process began with the emergence of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in 1989, but aimed at abolishing communism altogether. Still, neither Tito nor the Poles could alone undermine the Soviet system. And many people continued fighting Sovietism with weapons in hand – notably, the Nicaraguan contras, whose brave struggle coincided with the strikes and demonstrations of the Poles.
But the end of world Communism did not come from Poland or Nicaragua – it had to come from Moscow itself, which buckled under pressure from the U.S.
The “counter-revolutionary” or “contra” movements for liberation from Moscow provide a precious storehouse of experience for counter-jihadists seeking to end the threat of radical Islam to the world.
The anti-Communists fought in the streets, with rocks when they had nothing else; but their main tools were intellectual – dissident writings, unlicensed publication, underground dissemination of anti-regime literature.
They were typically motivated – especially in Poland, Hungary, and Nicaragua – by the morals and principles of the Christian churches.
The Catholic church and its official representatives stood with the anti-Communists.
The opponents of Communist rule concentrated, to the degree they could, on creating a new society within the shell of the old, by establishing independent civil institutions.
Muslims in countries ruled by radicals are following an amazingly similar path, whether the mainstream media bothers to report it or not.
In Iran, for example, dissident students have turned their universities upside down in a bid to end clerical interference in their personal life. Iranian labor union members have paraded with signs calling on the government to forget Hezbollah in Lebanon and spend money improving people’s lives at home. Iranian Sufis have repeatedly confronted government officials in mass protests against restrictions on their rights.
Saudi Arabia has seen a remarkable development in the commercial capital of Jeddah: women there now refuse to wear the face-covering known as niqab or, in the West, the veil. The women of Jeddah have effectively driven the Saudi religious militia or mutawwa, who previously patrolled the streets whipping those who were insufficiently pious, out of their city. Jeddah is now nicknamed “the San Francisco of Saudi Arabia” – not because of the bizarre sexual identity the West Coast city has acquired, but because, as in the 1960s, it is the center of new ideas and habits.
Millions of Muslims in Islamic countries yearn for an end to radicalism and hope the much-feared “clash of civilizations” can be avoided. They want their religion to enjoy a positive image in the world, much as Christian dissidents under Communism struggled for freedom of conscience.
Moderate Muslim clerics and intellectuals must now step forward to affirm their commitment to the values of the counter-jihad: an end to religious aggression by Muslim extremists, a renewal of coexistence with other faiths, general religious and political freedom everywhere. Muslim clerics and Sufi shaykhs can provide indispensable help in creating new alternatives to old and brittle structures. Instead of financing terrorism, Muslim charitable donations can support modern schools, including centers for religious debate within Islam, and between Muslims and non-Muslims.
But America still faces problems in this context.
First, the American and British Muslim communities are so thoroughly penetrated by radicals that moderate Muslims find almost no space in which they can express themselves. American and British Islam embody an extraordinary and shocking fact: in Muslim countries, mosques are typically the only places where free discussion can take place, since all other institutions exist to monitor and prevent expressions of discontent.
As perverse and weird as it must seem, there is now more freedom to discuss the future of Islam in Saudi mosques than inside American mosques. America has general freedom, but mosques are an island of conformity. Muslim countries have little or no civic freedom, but mosques are often a free speech area.
Second, America must act directly to oppose radical Islam by pressing consistently for change from the rulers of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as by identifying and seriously assisting the proponents of counter-jihad.
Third, Western mainstream media will probably not help in the liberation of the Muslim world. Anti-Communist counter-revolution never got a fair treatment in the Western media, and with appeasers like James Baker and Lee Hamilton doing their best to put the genie of democracy back in the bottle in the Middle East, it is doubtful that the spreading counter-jihad will get any decent publicity before it prevails. I predict Americans will be caught by surprise when Saudi Arabia turns the corner to a normal system of governance, and if, as so many of us wish, the deluded Ahmadinejad falls in Tehran.
But capitalism and democracy will succeed in the Islamic world, even if the enemies of both free markets and political liberty, back here in the West, scoff at the concept. History does not move backward, even in the sands of Arabia. Counter-jihad may end the menace of jihad to the world.
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Appeal to Support Mixed Albanian Catholic-Muslim Primary School in Kosovo, Illyria [New York], November 28, 2006
Donors interested in supporting the Kosovo primary school described in this article are invited to contact CIP. This article appeared in abbreviated form in the Albanian-American newspaper Illyria. Please repost where possible.
Stephen Schwartz at Korenica Sufi Teqe, Kosovo, 1999 (Photo by Fra Iilja Stipic)
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Massacres of Albanian Catholics, 1999
by Stephen Schwartz
On August 9, 2006, a Kosovar Albanian Catholic woman, Lizane Malaj, appeared as a witness before the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, in the trial of six Serbian nationalist and Yugoslav leaders, Milan Milutinovic, Nikola Sainovic, Nebojsa Pavkovic, Sreten Lukic, Dragoljub Ojdanic and Vladimir Lazarevic. Aside from the late Slobodan Milosevic, the six were the highest officials of the Belgrade regime involved in the assault on Kosovo in 1999. The case is known as Milutinovic et al.
The testimony of Lizane Malaj recalled her presence in the Kosovo Albanian village of Korenica, west of the major city of Gjakova, on April 27, 1999. That day, she suffered the deaths of her husband, son, brother, and nephew in an assault on the community by Serbian police, paramilitaries, and soldiers of the Yugoslav army. The atrocities occurred one month after the commencement of the NATO bombing of Serbia.
I have been to Gjakova many times, as well as to Korenica, and know a great deal about what happened there. As Mrs. Malaj stated in her testimony, “Korenica is neither big nor small, I would say. It has about 70 houses... We are all Albanian. We are Catholics and some Muslims.” The wider vicinity of Korenica is overwhelmingly Catholic, and Gjakova itself has one of Kosovo’s largest and most respected Catholic communities. The Christian Democratic Party of Kosovo is a leading political force in the city today. But in 1999, because of its history of Albanian patriotism, Gjakova suffered the worst Serb violence of all the Kosovo cities. .
The paramilitaries arrived in Korenica on April 27 of that year in buses, with red bandanas tied on their heads or as armbands, as described by a local resident, Tom Dedaj. When the Serbs had completed their raid on Korenica, at least 129 people, and as many as 155, were dead, all unarmed, including women and children. One survivor said every man in the village over 16 had been killed. The ratio of victims was approximately the same as that of the living: 90 percent Catholic, 10 percent Muslim.
The inhabitants of Korenica returned there, in June 1999. The returnees found mass graves filled with bones and hair, although many of the dismembered corpses lay where they had fallen. In a burned house, limbs and other parts of men’s bodies lay on the top floor.
When some survivors of the massacre first came streaming into the Catholic church at Gjakova that day, courageous Franciscan Pater Ambroz Ukaj went to a Serb army commander and demanded to know what had happened. Pater Ambroz was interrogated as to how he knew anything had happened at all, and he replied that women in the village reported the mass arrest of all males. “I was told to shut up.” Pater Ambroz recalled when I interviewed him. “Then I said that there were injured people in my church. Thank God, I had already sent them to a hospital, because the Serb officer was prepared to take them away.”
The story of one Korenica villager, Daniel Berisha, 40, is extraordinary. Berisha had once been a famous Kosovo soccer player, then worked as a driver for the mission in Kosovo of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Tom Dedaj recounted that on the evening of the massacre he had found Berisha hiding in the hills with bullet wounds in his leg and burns on his arms and forehead. Berisha said that the Serbs had come at 7:30 in the morning and separated the men from the women and children. They gathered the men on the third floor of the Berisha home and a local policeman who Berisha recognized ordered them to turn their backs and then began shooting them at close range.
Berisha said he fell and pretended to be dead. The Serbs set blankets afire and covered the bodies with them. After the Serbs left Berisha escaped, although wounded. The next day, the group hiding in the hills attempted to break out of a Serb encirclement, but they were caught. Another witness, Flora Merturi, said she saw Berisha beaten to death, but when his corpse was found he also had five more bullet wounds, two in his forehead and three in his chest.
Mrs. Merturi claimed the Serbs had paid Gypsies to bury the dead, with the Catholic and Muslim corpses separated. Muslim corpses seemed to have deliberately been left in shallow graves, with a hand sticking out of the ground here, a skull half uncovered there.
Many bodies were unrecognizable, and were buried without identification. The Serb assault on Korenica was said at the time to be a reprisal for a skirmish in which three local Albanians ostensibly took part, and in which seven Serbs died. In testimony at The Hague, however, Serb lawyers asserted that continuous fighting was underway between Milosevic’s forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and that the indicated clash had occurred in the nearby community of Meja, with five dead – four Serbs and one Albanian collaborator with them. Two weeks before the Serb terror invasion of Korenica, on April 4, 1999, the Albanians living there had been ordered to leave their homes for Albania.
The tomb of Baba Dan, founder of a Sufi or spiritual Muslim community in the village, today contains the bodies of several children killed in the April 27 mass slaying. Another leading Sufi from Gjakova was killed at Korenica. Meja was also the site of a Serb massacre of Albanians on the same infamous day, in which 430 adult males were murdered, after they had been forced out of their homes in the Catholic village of Guska and the Muslim settlement of Deva. They joined a long column or refugees headed for the Albanian border, but in Meja the men were separated out of the column and executed on the spot. International media reported immediately after the April 27 massacres, that bodies were scattered along the roads.
Aside from the unidentified corpses, many people were missing from the scene of the mass murder. International investigators estimated that 100 men from Korenica and 300 from Meja could not be accounted for. When she appeared at The Hague, Lizane Malaj said that the victims from her family had been among those who disappeared from the scene of the massacre. Their corpses had been removed to Serbia proper and were located in a mass grave at Batajnica, near Belgrade, distant from the original horror. Mrs. Malaj did not learn of their fate until spring 2004, in the case of her husband, and a year later, regarding her son. The death of her nephew was not confirmed until the end of 2005.
Meja also underwent the tragedy of a mis-directed NATO attack which struck a convoy of Kosovar Albanian refugees on April 14, 1999. Before Lizane Malaj testified at the Hague, on August 8, 2006, Fuat Haxhibeqiri, a Kosovar Albanian Muslim from Gjakova, active in human rights work, was asked in court his opinion of the NATO bombing. He said, “this is what I think about NATO. If it hadn’t been for NATO, the Albanians would have continued to be wretched, living under that regime. Because of NATO, a miracle happened.” It is because of the miracle of their liberation that Kosovar Albanians, both Catholic and Muslim, remain among America’a best friends abroad.
The pogrom against Albanians on a single day almost eight years ago, in which Catholics were slain along with Muslim fellow-Albanians, demonstrates both the essential unity of the Kosovo Albanians regardless of religion, and their common suffering at the hands of the Serbs. It also anticipates the solidarity between Albanians, other Catholics and Muslims, that will reemerge if the United Nations refuses to accept full independence for Kosovo, or, even worse, allows restoration of Belgrade’s control over the liberated territory.
At a recent meeting in London, I was informed of an important effort that, God willing, may help reinforce Albanian interfaith unity in the area where such terrible events occurred. Franciscans in Austria have donated funds for the reconstruction of the houses in Korenica. In Guska, a primary school is being reconstructed on the basis of private donations. The school is named for Pjeter Mugy, an Albanian Catholic killed at 18 in 1943, while fighting the Nazis.
During the period of Serb repression from 1987 to 1999, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians were expelled from the educational and health systems as well as from ordinary employment. Albanians of all faiths (and some of no faith) organized a parallel school and health system that educated children, mainly in homes, with teachers paid by parents or in food and other in-kind income. Serb police and soldiers repeatedly harassed the students and staff at the Guska school.
After the NATO occupation of Kosovo, it became clear that the creation of a new and adequate school system was low, if not nonexistent, on the agenda of the international community. Albanian parents who wanted to transform the parallel system into a legitimate educational system were rebuffed. Teachers are among the lowest-paid employees in Kosovo, and their representative organization, the Unitary Trade Union of Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Workers (SBASHK), is the most militant labor group in the territory.
The Guska school serves mainly Catholic, but also Muslim children. The building is dilapidated; it has no indoor sanitation; water is taken from a well, and the only heating is provided by small wood stoves. Like the rest of Kosovo, the school undergoes frequent electrical power cuts. Furniture and textbooks are old. Three computers were donated to the school but without a proper facility for them they must be brought to the school one day per week for use by older pupils. New texts and notebooks are provided by parents and teachers. Bread is served to the students twice daily – once in the morning and once at the end of instruction. The school has no medical service for the children, who this year numbered 136, aged from six to fifteen.
Of the pupils who attended school at Guska in the 2005-2006 term, 25 lost their fathers in Serbian massacres, and 12 more are orphans. In addition, of the school’s 12 teachers – 10 males and two females – one instructor lost all the males from her family.
Since I worked in Kosovo in 1999-2000, and in repeated visits since, I have frequently criticized the so-called “international community” governing the territory for their neglect of educational improvement. I believe the school at Guska must be rebuilt; Korenica, Meja and their martyrs must never be forgotten. But more important, the habit of educating Catholic and Muslim children together is an old one in the Balkans, and especially among Albanians. The maintenance of this custom will, I think, do much to benefit coexistence between the two faiths.
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Rešid Hafizović, "They Are Coming for Our Children"
Sarajevo, Oslobodjenje, November 25, 2006
CIP Correspondents:
Selamalejkum warahmetallahuh wabarakatuh,
A serious controversy, including shootings and other acts of violence, has begun in the Balkan lands of Islam, between the traditional and peaceful Muslims of the region and interlopers representing the Wahhabi sect of Saudi provenance.
CIP is translating and will circulate a series of key documents on this alarming matter. We will begin with Professor Resid Hafizovic's recent and highly provocative article in Oslobodjenje (Liberation), the honored Sarajevo daily that continued publication throughout the Bosnian war of 1992-95. Professor Hafizovic is one of the outstanding interpreters of Sufi thought in the world.
Correspondents are requested to repost this statement as widely as possible, insha'allah.
With many selams
Center for Islamic Pluralism
Rešid Hafizović
Professor of the Faculty of Islamic Studies
University of Sarajevo
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina
THEY ARE COMING FOR OUR CHILDREN
Oslobodjenje [Sarajevo], November 25, 2006
Every civilization has its tragedies, declines, and failures, including the Muslim world, but the very nadir of the tragedy that happened to the Muslim world occurred in 1746, when a lunatic from Najd in eastern Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, with his phalanx of Bedouins and people willing to pillage, spill blood, and murder, declared an official jihad on all Muslims, just because the latter persisted in following and understanding Islam in accordance with the basic tenets of Islamic faith, following the example set by the Prophet of Islam, whom God praised and held in high regard, more than fourteen centuries ago. The fact that the declaration of official jihad by Wahhabis wasn’t just a formal and insignificant act, would be reinforced by ensuing horrible slaughters perpetrated by Wahhabi raiding groups, first in Karbala in 1802, where thousands of Muslims were slain, their property plundered, without sparing mosques, tombs, and cemeteries. It was followed by a massacre of Ta’if in 1803, Mecca, and then Medina in 1805, and throughout the cradle of Islam, without sparing the children, elderly, and weak. The raging Wahhabi sword left the Muslim cities and settlements in ruins, while thousands of Muslims died lying in their own blood (see Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, Hamid Algar, Zagreb, 2004; also The Two Faces of Islam, Bosnian edition: Dva Lica Islama, Stephen Sulejman Schwartz, Tugra, Sarajevo, 2005).
These events would be nothing special if they only represented a turbulent period in a long history of Islam and Muslims. Unfortunately, they are also a terrible scourge of our time and life. Just when the European Muslims in Bosnia, Bosniaks, as a native European ethnic group, thought that the worst had passed, having withstood a horrifying and bloody assault waged against their lands, a new nightmare beset them, more wicked, noxious, detrimental, and dangerous than any other one in the bloody history suffered by these Muslims. At the point at which their numbers are reduced to the level below which an ethnic group can’t sustain itself, Bosnian Muslims were contaminated by a new, fatal virus, as a relic of the recently finished war, whereas the virus embodies itself in an arrogant, disapproving, aggressive, and, for this region, anachronistic phenomenon called Wahhabism. It is the most effective weapon of the ideology and conspiracy intending the same as the Serb criminals like Mladić and Karadžić, that is, our destruction, yet it appears as an idea that shares our home and identity, while aimed against it and committed to the project left incomplete by this evil duo and their mentors. Sure enough, it was not only their idea, but also an idea of the diabolic Wahhabi mentors from the East and the West, from Saudi Arabia, but also from some centers of political power in Europe, the same ones whose dishonest role in the assault on Bosnia is well remembered and easily recognized. It is the same political triangle spanning Moscow, London and Paris, which was tightening the plot of Judas, pressing Bosnia with it, leaving very little air for it to breathe. They first deprived us of the right to self defense, and then they tied our hands making us sacrificial lambs. Today, they are sending Wahhabis to Bosnia and otherwise encouraging them, as their last secret weapon and a deadly virus designed to dissolve the very substance of Bosnian Muslims. That is supposed to be a good prelude to a scenario devised to solve the Muslim question in International, which is more Islamophobic than before (see Unfinest Hour – Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, Brendan Simms, Penguin Books, 2002).*
The conspiracy of Wahhabi mentors from the East and some power centers in the West is not uncommon and doesn’t demonstrate its first occurrence in the history of Muslims. As far back as 1865, we can see the first encounters and conspiratory, anti-Muslim alliances established between the British and already well structured Saudi-Wahhabi legions of Najd. Both parties to this disreputable anti-Muslim alliance had their precisely defined objectives: Saudi-Wahhabi gangs drew the borders of their state in the very heart of the Muslim world, while the British strengthened their dominance in the Persian Gulf and hammered plans out for breaking up the Ottoman Empire. As a sign of gratitude for dedication in the realization of the aforementioned British-Wahhabi anti-Muslim alliance, the British crown later decorated the Saudi ruler, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, with the Knight’s Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. The Saudi monarch wore the very same decoration for a joint picture with British Queen Eliabeth, during a visit to Her Majesty.
In addition to Chechen Muslims, as traditional Muslims with a proud legacy of Muslim spirituality and literature, Bosnian Muslims represent the second significant target of Wahhabism in this part of the world. Without tolerating our traditional and authentic values of Islam, which encourage coexistence, and which are intertwined with the most sophisticated spiritual aspects of Sufism, illuminated by Quranic interpretation (tafsir) and judicious, Gnostic, Irfan literature, the Wahhabis arrived in Bosnia, where they are now further aided by some followers from among the local Muslims, with an exclusive aim of rooting out all the traces of traditional Islam in Bosnia, to wipe out all visible elements of Ottoman culture that are easily recognized in abundant monuments, in our mosques, tombs, Sufi tekkes, cemeteries, fortresses, and the like. They attack everything that is fundamentally different from their primitive, monotonous, Bedouin culture and tradition. They have already done it in the cradle of Islam, having destroyed the most precious historic traces of Islam from the times of Prophet (pbuh); they also have done it in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq; wherever else they arrived, they grow like an uncontrollable weed. Having come under the pretext of aiding the Muslims, they, actually, similar to unwelcome emissaries, have left a bloody trail, with violence, death, and unprecedented horror. That’s exactly what they have in plan for this country, for its Muslims, and not only for them. They have come to get our children, they came for their devshirme (CIP Note: a levy of youth imposed by the former Ottoman authorities), to steal our hearts and souls as a payment for the trifles supplied to us by dubious humanitarians with dishonest intentions.
They are among us. By marrying related folk in our villages, towns, and cities, they have already infected our traditional social system. They are already present in our media, state administration and religious institutions: in our mosques, madrasahs, and academia, everywhere.
The Secretariat of the Islamic community in Bosnia (Rijaset) appears to have just awakened, and to be slowly grasping the magnitude of the plague threatening the European Muslims in Bosnia. Finally, a Resolution with an Addendum was issued, and a Commission was established to ensure the implementation thereof. How insufficient this is, and how shockingly belated it is! Furthermore, when one considers it, the scope of the Resolution will be no better than that of the already forgotten “Declaration of European Muslims,” [ www.islamicpluralism.org/texts/2006t/bosnianclericsdeclaration.htm] which was published by the Rijaset of the Islamic Community in Bosnia. However, the pinnacle of the irony is that the text of the new Resolution does not offer any mechanisms to keep the scourge in check, but it rather encourages the Wahhabis, and takes great care to protect their civil rights. Some of the closest associates of the head of the Islamic Community in Bosnia go as far as stating that those are “good people from good congregations.” If such essentially inconsequential documents as the Resolution of the Rijaset had not been published, one could easily think that Muslim religious institutions in Bosnia are friendly towards the Wahhabis. It is worse because these institutions do not object to the Wahhabi emissaries’ blatant and brazen lies about the Prophet of Islam: namely, their shallow spiritual teaching about him as a shepherd, a camel herder, and a Bedouin, although all accounts about his life, from Ibn Hisham’s Sira, to Martin Ling’s Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, bear witness to him as an aristocrat par excellence, and a noble from the Meccan society of the time. Wahhabis say that the Prophet of Islam (pbuh) wore an untidy, untrimmed, and messy beard, whereas all accounts of his life state that his culture of living was on the level that a good number of Muslims haven’t reached even today. They say that the Prophet of Islam (pbuh) wore women’s dress rolled up; therefore, they also wear short pants, although everyone knows today that the galabiyya used to be and still is traditional clothing in that part of the Muslim world, so the Prophet himself (pbuh) proudly wore it, as it is most comfortable for those climatic conditions. We will leave further details for another time.
However, everybody keeps quiet in the face of the notorious lies about Islam and the Prophet of Islam (pbuh), in the face of insults to our traditional Islamic values, vociferously spread by the Wahhabi emissaries every day, and it looks as though everybody likes having a barbaric Prophet and a backwards and outmoded Islamic faith.
While the responsible people of this country keep silent and pretend nothing uncommon is happening in our society, the Wahhabi caravan is moving along, placing an uncalled-for burden on this distressed country and its people…
Recognizing it as a continuation of the inferno in Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Palestine, the most responsible civil and religious authorities of this country should immediately take responsibility for preventing the hell Wahhabis are constructing in this country.
*CIP Note: the British Foreign Office sponsored a tour by British Muslim fundamentalists to Bosnia-Hercegovina in recent weeks.
Translation, slightly edited, by Faruk Bogučanin and Center for Islamic Pluralism
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Executive Director Schwartz
"A Dab of Adab"
Family Security Matters, November 29, 2006
[http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/global.php?id=446810&PHPSESSID=37031a0337a2c3cbdaa7a24dd7985e5b]
If an end to the silence of moderate Muslims is ever to happen, we need to stand up to the radicals in our midst, even if they live in other countries. FSM Contributing Editor Stephen Schwartz does just that in this piece discussing how “adab” can get in the way of good-hearted Muslims speaking out.
A Dab of Adab
by Stephen Schwartz
Adab is a term most non-Muslims will never have heard of. It is an Islamic concept, referring to good manners and proper etiquette in dealing with one’s peers, especially those with whom one might disagree.
Good conduct is a praiseworthy habit in any society, but among Sunni Muslims in the West – especially in the United States and Britain – the pretext of adab is abused by radicals to suppress dissent.
Such habits are a key to one of the most vexing challenges presently facing Westerners: the apparent silence of Muslims about terrorism. Why do so few Muslims step forward to denounce radicalism, extremist ideology, and violence committed in the name of their religion? Unfortunately, imposition of collective passivity in the name of politeness – a bogus version of “good adab” – is used by the radical leadership of Anglo-American Sunnis, to prevent Muslims from resisting terrorist incitement.
Add to this misfortune the realities of physical intimidation, group ostracism, and other means employed to maintain conformity, and a non-Muslim should be able to more easily comprehend why so many Muslims keep their mouths shut about terrorism. Immigrant Muslims, in particular, came to the West to improve their lives and those of their families – not to clean up their religion. Few of them realized that Islam in the U.S. and UK are under the control of violent fanatics. Many Muslims express shock when they arrive in the West and find out that the Saudi-financed Wahhabi sect – inspirers of al-Qaida – controls 80 percent of major Sunni mosques in America, while the Pakistani radical Deobandi sect – mentors of the Taliban – dominates British Islam.
Both the Wahhabis and the Deobandis are jihadists, and many immigrant Muslims left their birthplace to escape jihadism. When they go to a mosque in a Western city and hear hateful propaganda spread there, they are often paralyzed with fear. How, they ask, did Western governments let this happen? Who will protect them if they resist the radical leaders?
Adab as a means for suppression of dissidence also explains two aspects of Muslim life in the West that non-Muslims seldom grasp: that is, non-Muslims see these phenomena but do not recognize what they mean. The first is the peculiar fact that Arab and Pakistani Muslims living in the West are the first major group of immigrants who do not produce new leaders. The Anglo-American Sunni Muslims are as rigidly controlled, by a power elite, as were the old Communist parties. The same Wahhabi and Deobandi personalities have spoken for Islam in the U.S. and UK for some 20 years. Of course, this stratum of totalitarian theocrats puts forward younger faces from time to time – especially now when Islam is under intense scrutiny and Western non-Muslims want to hear the voices of youth. But the hard, bearded men continue to give orders from behind the scenes, obeying upper-echelon commands from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The same old organizations and names reappear again and again: the Saudi-founded Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Hamas-front Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and preachers Muzammil Siddiqi and Hamza Yusuf Hanson, who were screeching firebrands before September 11, 2001, and now seek to remodel themselves as moderates. I have written frequently and widely on these groups and individuals, for five years since 9/11. The record is ample, easily accessible, and clear.
The other byproduct of “bad adab” in the West is that American and British Sunni Muslim believers have produced no serious intellectuals and almost no respectable clerics. They cannot do so because real intellectual inquiry and religious study demands freedom from interference by mental police of any kind. For this reason, American Sunni Islam is a curiosity to believers living in the Muslim-majority countries, but little more. American Sunni Islam has generated almost no new commentaries, insights, or traditions of significance for the Muslim world – notwithstanding the permanent desire of Muslims to come here.
Here is how the adab racket works: an opponent of someone like Hamza Yusuf Hanson, such as myself, is accused of lacking “good adab” for publicly calling him a fake moderate. Good Islamic manners, it seems, would require me to humbly go to him and ask him to teach me the truth as he knows it, before saying anything negative about him. But there are two reasons I need not do this. First, Hamza Yusuf Hanson’s blazing denunciations of American society, before September 11, are a matter of public record. I do not have to ask for elucidation of them, because they are plain and direct, and are archived and accessible.
Second, why should I recognize Hamza Yusuf Hanson as an authority for me? He is a self-proclaimed religious leader, who pretends to be a spiritual Sufi but attacks the authentic Sufi orders. I do not ask him to become my student; indeed, I do not assume fancy religious titles or claim authority I do not possess. I am what I am – an American journalist first and foremost – and I know what I know; that’s all And as far as Hamza Yusuf is concerned, I only ask that U.S. and British governmental representatives not be fooled by his post-9/11 posturing as a benign soul deeply concerned for the security of the West.
But the use of adab to suppress embarrasing questions can appear with much greater bluntness – indeed, many Islamist apologists who demand that dissenting Muslims act with “good manners” completely lack them.
This week the Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), which I founded two years ago, made its first major appearance in British media. Dr. Irfan Ahmed al-Alawi is a British Muslim (note that – British first, Muslim second), a scholar and expert on Islamic cultural heritage. He is also a stern and active opponent of extremism in British Islam. He was recently appointed to direct CIP activities in International.
The Times of London, in its issue of November 27, published a major article on a highly- controversial proposal now under discussion in Britain. Tabligh-i-Jama’at or Call of the Community (TJ) is a fundamentalist Islamic movement originating in India, with theological links to the Taliban in Afghanistan. TJ has proposed to build a gigantic complex, known as the Markaz or Central mosque, next to the London 2012 Olympic park now under construction. The structure, with an ultramodern design, would accommodate up to 70,000 people.
Ordinary British Muslims oppose the giant mosque scheme, which they fear will aggravate already-existing tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims. According to The Times, when Muslims in East London announced a petition drive against the project, they collected 2,500 signatures in 10 days.
Unfortunately, London mayor Ken Livingstone, also known as “Red Ken” and an unprincipled rabble-rouser and Jew-baiter, supports the Markaz mosque project. In response, CIP International Director Al-Alawi expressed his “extreme concern” to The Times, declaring, “Tablighi are not moderate Muslims, they are a separatist movement.”
Then the “adab machine” went to work. The UK features an Islamic website, www.deenport.com, promoting the alleged benevolence of Hamza Yusuf Hanson and other “born-again moderates.” But deenport.com also exists to slander and intimidate. Monday had not ended when Fareena Alam, a semiliterate Muslim scribbler and deenport commissar living in Britain, went on the attack. Alam preens her success in inducing Newsweek International to publish a feeble defense of the Islamist veil. Now she asked, “Can someone who has hosted Irfan Alawi… please tell us what he is like in person?” She continued, “Why is he aligning himself to Stephen Schwartz?... This is not a good sign.”
The next commentator on the site reproached Alam for her lack of “good adab,” writing, “I think your post is extremely provocative and is likely to invite people to say negative things about Irfan Alawi on a public forum which would be slanderous. Especially from people in the Tablighi movement.”
To most Westerners, all this may seem too much inside baseball about Islam. But the internal controversies among Muslims result in throwing bombs, not baseballs (or, in Britain, cricket balls). A dab of adab will not suffice for Fareena Alam and her cohort at deenport.com, or anyone else, to shut the mouth of Irfan Al-Alawi. An end to the silence of moderate Muslims must come.