An idea whose time has come

"What America needs to understand is something unusual for us: From Morocco to Pakistan, we are no longer seen by the majority as the good guys." Pat Buchanan

Whether the Muslims have as yet propogated a system that desrves to be looked on as an alternative remains to be seen but it is pretty clear that in its dying throes the American Empire is disgracing and humiliating itself by its lies and double standards. In the ensuing vacum two forces will compete for a universal message, those that take their inspiration from God and those that do not.
The Muslims can certainly take the credit for stopping the American Empire in its tracks by holding them to a stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan but for bleeding to death from these wounds the Americans alone will have to take the blame. To their shame and discredit, the Muslim countries have failed to unite inspite of extreme provocation both from the US and Israel. This only encourages these two parties to treat them with the contempt that they deserve and the beatings can only continue. This can only promote the extreme elements within Islam and make them heros for having the guts to stand up for their land and honour.
The Muslims have now the uphill task of rejecting the West and rejecting their own extremists by following a message which is very much relevant and needed now more than ever, if only we could see it and have faith in it. At the core of this system is an uncompromising belief in morality which the West now only pays lip service to and have more or less taken out of their lives. The religious fundamentalists of all religions are simply peddling their texts for the worldly power and recognition that it affords them. The masses follow one side or the other because that is what they will always do.
I doubt if people will be mobilised by morality which, for most is too philosophical a subject but they will be mobilised by injustice. The idea whose time has come is Justice.
Khusro

Why is Islam receiving so much importance?

Why are people (non Muslims) giving so much importance to Islam? Why are they going out of their way to malign and demonise it? My answer is that this aspect has very little to do with Islam. The Muslims by themselves are backwords, powerless, divided, easily colonised or occupied and pose no significant threat to any one particularly the West. Yet we find, discussions about Islam dominate the media and Islam has overtaken the Soviet Union as the biggest threat to world peace and wellbeing. Pakistan has become the most dangerous country in the world. Surely, this concern with Islam or making it "the enemy" cannot be because a man sitting in a cave in one of the poorest countries in the world, issued some fatwas against the West or committed a daring act of terrorism in New York City.

If Islam has no role in deserving this importance then why have people become so crazy about it? I believe the answer lies in the oil that is almost the exclusive property of Muslims. Given below is a table of Oil reserves ( top 10 countries)from Wikepedia.

( Numbers show Millions of barrels per day)
Saudi Arabia 267
Canada 179
Iran 138
Iraq 115
Kuwait 104
Venezuela 99
UAE 98
Russia 60
Libya 41
Nigeria 36



This shows that amongst the top ten countries, Muslim countries have 70% of the world’s oil reserves. The non Muslim countries with oil are Canada, Russia and Venezuela. This might also partly answer your earlier question about the first Iraq war. If Saddam had occupied Kuwait , the oil reserves under his control would have been almost as big as Saudi Arabia.
Unwittingly, Muslim countries have gained an importance way beyond their position as movers and shakers of the world. There was a time not so long ago that Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were all under the control of the West. However recently Iran and Iraq have both spun out of the control of the West,causing great alarm. Not only have they spun out of control but under Saddam and the Ayatollahs they were under the control of governments considered hostile to the West.

I am not telling you anything that you do not know, nor do I wish to belabour that point but we tend to forget in these discussions that Religion alone is not driving the current "crisis".

There is a very clear strategy that the US has to protest its “interests" in the world, but this strategy under Bush was so idiotic that it has backfired and now alarm is giving in to panic. In fact the rise of the BRIC countries and the simultaneous military and economic decline of the US is unpalatable to the American right wing and they have a need to create one or more scape goats. This is where the interests of the Christian right wing and the Zionists are coinciding. The Zionists are also panicking because there is a greater urgency under Obama to resolve the Israel/ Palestine issue. This issue cannot be resolved by Obama but the Zionists are not used to so much pressure being put on them.

Again, I apologise if I am emphasising the obvious, but the US media is particularly bad in not telling the whole story. I am very tempted to also expound upon where this is all going but that is the subject of this blog, A New World.

Khusro

Islam is not responsible for 9/11

There is a time to show magnanimity and there is a time to stand your ground. In my view this is the time to stand your ground. There are false accusations being hurled at all Muslims and if Muslims as a minority are inclined to be pushed around and appease the screaming mobs then they will never be respected.
America respects those who stand up and refuse to be intimidated. Nine Eleven had nothing to do with Islam and that has to be made clear. Americas problems are with Alqaida and not Islam although vested interests keep dragging Islam into this issue. For this very reason the entire Muslim world thinks that America is fighting a war against Islam. The act of every Muslim is blamed on all of Islam. Islam is being maligned by a calculated strategy of certain lobbies and the more Muslims cow down to these lobbies, the more they will be humiliated. The Koch brothers are bankrolling the entire Tea Party drive in this matter. This matter is more complicated than appears on the surface. The Muslims never had a better case than the Cordoba project. Their project is approved, they are not building just a mosque and it is being done by a man who is widely respected and considered to be balanced. If we cannot support something this solid, then what will we support?

Still Imam Feisal has a difficult decision on his hands. I disagree with those who think that all the publicity has done more harm than good. A discussion on Islam is badly needed in this country. There is too much misinformation around both about Islam and about who is responsible for 9/11. A lot of healthy debate has come about presenting various thoughts on both subjects.
I do agree that this matter has the potential for getting out of hand. My concern is not that some Islamic fundamentlalist will create a situation ( although that can happen) but that other lobbies can also "create" situations which will show up Islam in a bad light.
There are parallel political agendas going on, such as embarrasing Obama and gaining votes by appealing to the insecurtity of Americans. Once we are past November, one can breath easy but until then, the situation is full of risks.
Khusro

Literalism and Islam

One has to separate Islam from the way Muslims practice it. Within Islam are many many things which were intended to be evolutionary and thus not frozen in time or to be taken literally. These have to do with worldly matters ( Huquq Ul Muamelat). The spirit of Islam ( Huquq ul Ibadat) is non negotiable and all worldly matters must be guided by this spirit.
There is and there needs to be greater flexiblity within Fiqh if it is ever to be taken seriously by other than literalists.
In matters of relations with non Muslims, Muslim majorities have a duty to protect their minorities and allow them the freedom to practice their own faith. Muslim Minorities have to be faithful to the law of the land in which they reside. India and Pakistan are very poor examples of the way they deal with their minorities. While the Ottomans were very fair to their minorities, these same minorities turned against them when the Ottoman empire crumpled. The Europeans are quite concerned about their Muslim minorities becoming the majority in time. Saudi Arabia and Israel are downright abusive towards their minorities.
The Muslims do not practice their religion well when it comes to dealing with non Muslims and are in need of reform but they are part of a bigger and more global issue. The US is a good example of how it deals with its minorities inside its borders but a terrible example of how it deals with Muslims world wide.
Khusro

Islam and America

The nine eleven incident created an unprecedented interest in Islam both amongst Muslims and non Muslims. It appears to be a fruit that keeps giving. Now nine years after the incident, it has given rise to another debate on Islam, that about building a mosque, two blocks away from ground zero. It was also the trigger that created the Iraq and Afghan wars, which have had their own long term implications.

The unintended results of Osama's actions may come as a surprise to him, if he is alive. History will remember the date as some sort of a turning point, certainly for Islam.

One aspect of this discussion is how Muslims have gained a toehold in America and are beginning to thrive in an environment that is more Islamic than what they have been able to create in their own homelands.

The 1900 mosques that have mushroomed in the US are just the tip of an emerging iceberg, if one sees what is happening in the UK. Those Americans who watch this with a lot of concern are rightly alarmed given the distorted view of Islam in the media. One thing unique to America is the interest amongst blacks in Islam. What started as a separate religion ( black Muslims) is now merging itself into mainstream Islam. The Muslim congressmen are currently black but perhaps better versed in Islam than people from Muslim countries. In fact many of the more influential Muslims in America are converts and are likely to be other Muslims born and brought up in America.

The unrecognised story so far is how America and Islam are a perfect fit.

Khusro

Who are moderate Muslims?

A well argued summary by Mr. Mohiyuddin. Whether one likes the term moderate Muslim ( I do not ), he still makes a fair representation of what most educated Muslims subscribe to, particularly those in favour of Ijtehad. The Quran advocates a middle path, which to me means finding the right balance between worldliness and spirituality. Those who interpret the middle path as finding the right balance between secularism and Islam, risk diluting Islamic thought. Islam already has the concept of worldliness built into it. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, the advent of Islam came about with a move to bring about reform in Civil society in all spheres of worldly life, whether it was the conduct of relations with non Muslims, the emancipation of women or the introduction of laws relating to divorce, inheritance or contracts.
The reforms brought about at that time were not intended to be the last word on any of those reforms and this is a mistake made by Muslim theologians. Just to give examples,two specific areas which I put in the category of continuing reform are 1. Slavery and 2. the Role of women. ( the four wife rule was part 1 ) The other mistake made by theologians is to reject science and to treat the Quran as a book of Science. This has cost the Muslims dearly.
So called moderate Muslims, do a service to Islam by remaining within the fold of Islam and wishing to contribute to its understanding rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water. They how ever frequently make the mistake of seeking inspiration from secular concepts which start with the precept that God cannot have a role in the affairs of men. Self interest is a primary urge of man which unless it is tempered by God's morality ( as opposed to man's morality) will degenerate into naked materialism and all its consequences.
Once the "moderate" Muslim accepts the Quranic concepts of Righteousness and being held accountable for our actions, he has to as does every other Muslim come to grips with very unambiguous definitions, of righteousness and standards on which man will be held accountable, given in the Quran.
Thankfully there is ample debate on matters such as apostasy, blasphemy and heresy and the " moderates" can rightly claim credit for raising awareness on these issues but there is insufficient discussion on issues like justice, equality, honesty, ethics, freedom. When I say discussion, I mean discussing what Islam's guidance to us on these issues. Syed Qutub is a man demonized by the West but his book Social Justice in Islam should be required reading for all Muslims. You may not agree with every thing he says but he was a man of great learning and insight.
While all Muslims need to read and re read the Quran to improve our understanding of what guidance it is providing to us, I am not averse to the study of other religions, other concepts, other philosophies. Thought and study will only help us to understand and appreciate the Quran better, but as Muslims we have to make up our minds whether the Quran is guidance from God or guidance from his prophet. This is a huge subject for discussion so I will not go on. My point is only to add a word of caution that there is a lot of work to be done within the Islamic world and we must continually seek to check that we are headed in the right direction.
Khusro

Who Are Moderate Muslims?

By Ghulam Mohiyuddin



In the past many Muslims were reluctant to describe themselves as being 'moderate' for fear they might be wrongly suspected of being weak in their faith. With the rise of radicalism and extremism in Islam as manifested by Al Qaeda and the Talibans, as well as the growth of ultra-conservative movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat and the Jamiat-e-Islami, it becomes necessary for us to define the parameters of what we mean when we refer to 'moderate Muslims'. Other designations such as 'liberal Muslims' or 'progressive Muslims' are, for the purpose of this discussion, considered to have the same connotations as 'moderate Muslims’.

Moderate Muslims are not a monolithic group, and many moderate Muslims will not have all the characteristics described below. But there are certain characteristics that distinguish moderate Muslims. They tend to keep religion in a private space and do not make a public display of their faith. Religion for them has a place in their lives, but it is not their whole existence. They reason things out and think for themselves, rather than depend on advice from books or from fatwas.

They are guided by the spirit and ethos of the Quran. They base their thinking and behaviour on the fundamental tenets of Islam, namely the supremacy of the one and only God, His requirement that we live righteous lives and His holding us accountable for our actions. They revere Prophet Muhammad as well as Prophets Abraham, Moses and Jesus. The values that are most meaningful to them in pursuit of a virtuous life are also derived from the Quran, namely equality, justice, tolerance, compromise, compassion and rationality.

However they are not obsessed by rites, rituals and regimentation. Religion is important to them for spiritual sustenance and guidance but it does not dominate their lives. They participate fully and energetically in the rough and tumble, the competitiveness and the rat race of the temporal world. They strive to succeed in their educational and career goals, to provide well for their families' spiritual and material needs and to make their rightful contribution to the community they live in.

Moderate Muslims generally support major reforms in Sharia laws, reforms which conform to basic Quranic principles of fairness, justice, equality, compassion, common sense and human dignity, but which are also consonant with contemporaneous mores and realities. They would like to see polygamy and triple-talaq abolished, women enjoy equal status and equal rights in matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance, have full rights and opportunities to pursue their educational and career goals and be able to compete and work in professions, business, politics, arts, crafts etc just as their male counterparts. Moderate Muslims are not likely to be supporters of burqa or niqab. Regarding some strange fatwas issued recently by some seminarians, part of the problem, in the eyes of some moderates, lies with the fact that the system puts a vast range of issues under the purview of religion, which is defined not just as a "mazhab" or religion, but as a "deen" or way of life. The focus of religion should be on spiritual and moral matters. Issues of daily living and societal affairs such as dress, appearance, diet, personal laws, working conditions, banking, political systems etc should be governed by secular or laic norms even though they will be influenced by one's traditions.

In areas of public affairs, moderate Muslims support democracy and secularism. They highly value freedom of speech. They abhor blasphemy laws, apostasy laws and heresy laws. They strongly support human rights and minority rights. They are often strong critics of the abridgement of minority rights in Muslim majority countries, e.g. the rights of non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia or of Ahmadis in Pakistan or of Tamils in Malaysia. They have strong nationalistic allegiance to the country they live in, irrespective of whether the country is a Muslim-majority country or not.

The "Ummah" for them is an informal and nominal interconnectedness of world Muslims, characterized by empathy rather than by any tangible bonds or obligations. They do not subscribe to the idea of a future world caliphate. They do not consider 'jihad' or holy war to be a possibility in this day and age when Islam is not threatened and Muslims are not persecuted because of their religion. Any hatred of or threats to non-believers or 'kafirs' is unacceptable to moderate Muslims who believe in peaceful co-existence with people of other faiths. Moderate Muslims shun extremism in religion as well as in politics, they condemn all acts of terrorism, condemn killing of innocent civilians, and consider suicide bombers to be mortal sinners. They do not believe bizarre conspiracy theories with regard to either 9/11, 26/11 or any similar catastrophic event.

For moderate Muslims, 'Ijtihad' (innovation) is an important tool for change. It allows independent reasoning to reinterpret and expand on Islamic law. Ijtihad is essential to keep Islam in the vanguard of world religions.

Among recent and current leaders and writers, a moderate Muslim would be averse to the teachings of Maulana Maududi, Sayyid Qutb or Zakir Naik. He is more likely to favor the writings of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, Maulana Waris Mazhari, Chandra Muzaffar, Sultan Shahin, Ziauddin Sardar and Javed Anand.

A moderate Muslim feels comfortable and at home in a pluralistic or multi-ethnic society, and can enjoy rewarding social and collegial relations with Hindus, Christians, Jews, atheists and others. He is able to respect the beliefs of others and does not feel the need to argue that his faith is superior to those of others. He is able to listen with interest to the views of others. He can expound on his own beliefs with clarity and without obscurantism.

The traditional Muslim teaching is that there is only one Islam and any division of Muslims into orthodox and moderates is invalid. But there are distinct differences between the attitudes and lifestyles of the orthodox and the moderates and we should take cognisance of that fact. People in both groups should be comfortable with their own beliefs and should be able to draw sustenance from the like-minded others in their own group. But above all they should not hurl insults at members of the other group. If we cannot respect each other, we should at least tolerate each other since we do have to co-exist.

Ghulam Mohiyuddin is a retired physician of Indian origin.

Should the French deny citizenship on the basis of Religious practice?

First I agree that a country has a right to impose what laws it wishes for granting Citizen ship. In the case of France though they are violating their own concepts of tolerance. They are different from other European countries in this respect. It is not that the other countries are happy about the Burqua or Naqab, it is just that they wish to respect the beliefs of their Citizen or even those who wish to be their Citizen. France has a much bigger issue than just disciplining 1900 of it's citizen. This is the problem of showing intolerance to people for their beliefs about something as simple as a dress code. In every other way these 1900 people may well be the most law abiding citiizen.

The bigger issue here is that France has a misunderstanding about these practices being degrading to women. You or I may feel that women cavorting topless in public is more degrading to women. Again this is not a matter of individual values, a very large number of women wear a Hijab or other covering out of religious conviction. In Iran women wear the Chaddor but go about their duties as freely as any French woman. Clearly the French are looking at a very small minority and making up their minds about the beliefs of 1.2 billion people. I find this to be irrational and arrogant. It is as stupid as the Taliban blowing up Historic Statues because they think poorly of statues.
France more than any other Secular state has raised secularism to the level of a State Religion and that too an intolerant one. Let me make another point. Why would you or I not think of emigrating to France? Simple because our country was never colonised by France. People who wish to become French Citizen are people from countries which were previously colonized by France. These countries were not only colonised but robbed, raped and left impoverished. Their Citizen want to live in France because France has a better standard of living partly because they ( the French) set back these countries many generations of prosperity. Why is it that UK absorbs the West Indians, the Pakis, The Nigerians, and it must not be easy, and the French look down upon the Algerians?

This is not just about France but the whole of Europe is having issues absorbing their Muslim Minorities. In this respect the US and Canada have done a much better job. The Muslim Minorities that emigrate to Europe are not as well educated and are themselves resistant to merging into the host country culure.
In many respects they are like the Mexicans in America, who are becoming a headache for America for very different reasons. Like The Mexicans in America though, the Muslims are becoming a very sizeable minority in Europe. Some projections show that in 25 years they will become a majority.
Unlike America though, this thought is driving the Europeans crazy. The image of Muslims as terrorists is not helping matters either. There is an implied invasion from within which may cause the French if not the Eurpeans to close their borders and make citizenship qualifications more rigorous. Although you ignore this point but this is not a French problem, the French are just handling it differently. If any one has more reasons to be truly concerned it is the British who have Muslim British Citizen, wanting to blow up trains, bridges and buildings. In the UK it is not an issue of an "eye sore" but real issues of home made terrorism yet they have so far resisted pointing fingers at their minorities.

Maybe the French are right and the British and Americans wrong, I merely wish to point out that so far the French have come up with a solution which is different from the rest of secular thinking.
Khusro

Why blame religion for our failures

In order to examine what role religion plays in our lives, we should also look at what other factors influence or guide us in becoming what we do become. Any list would include, self interest, tribe, culture, parental or family influence, race, political ideology etc. In fact in much of the developed world, these factors far outweigh the factor of religious affiliation and Religion is looked upon as an obsolete notion. The developed world has in fact developed their own definitions of moral codes and morality which are exercised under man made laws in the cause of enlightened self interest.
Religion was supposed to transcend the self interest of man. It was supposed to transcend tribe,race,culture. Not replace them, but to be above these accidents of birth. Religion came when the self interest of man created unfairness and injustice and concentrated power in the hand of a few exploiters of humanity. Religion advocated a balance between worldliness and spirituality and the superiority of God's laws over those of men. It wasn't as if people were not religious before the great religions came but there was no evidence of guidance coming directly from God.

Unfortunately men used religion to create as much division as to create unity. The Crusades are only one such example. When the messages of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were still fresh, these religions helped to create vibrant tribes, nations, empires and legacies. In fact to this day a lot of our non religious morality is heavily influenced by what we learned from religion.

So we can see that religion can be a double edged sword. It inspired people to be good human beings because they believe it is the word of their Creator but it can also cause people to be bigoted, intolerant and close minded because for some reason they read into their scriptures that they are the rightly guided. The Quran is quite explicit in its texts to say that those people will not receive any guidance from it who do not think ( and are therefore embarking on a mindless activity). It is also quite clear in saying that those people will also receive no guidance from it who think but do not believe.

As long as people believe whether overtly or subconsciously that religion is but another tool to further their worldly goals, they will use it as such and not only give it a bad name but prove to those who are inclined to believe this that religion has done nothing to bring about a higher purpose of life to humanity. We live in a world today that is in need of a spiritual awakening because it has tilted far too much towards self interest and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few exploiters. We are not in need so much of an ideology ( the ideology is already there, belief in God) as a leader. The abject failure of Obama points to the failure of the chances of such a leader coming from the secular world. The forces of self interest are too powerful to allow one of their own sons to destroy the temple on which they pray.

Although religious extremism is being blamed for the ills of this world, the twenty first Century is truly being defined by the violence perpetrated by the worlds sole super power. As if the violence was not enough this same power then went on a lending frenzy not ever seen in the world's financial systems which almost led to the collapse of the worlds economy. Millions of people world wide are unemployed and struggling to make a living because of the excesses of the United States. We live in a world that is struggling not because of suicide bombers but because of the excesses of the rich and powerful.

I am trying to put things in perspective, lest we lose sight of who or what threatens the delicate balance of this world. It is not Afghanistan or Somalia that is causing the waste and depletion of the world's resources. It is OK to say that this is the price that must be paid for progress but whose progress are we talking about?

Khusro

Comments on Tariq Ramadan's ideas on reform in Islam

The 'ibâdât or ritual duties may be timeless, but when it comes to the mu'âmalât, or social issues, there is room to manoeuvre. The basic rule here is: everything is allowed which the text does not expressly forbid! This opens the door for progress, for a reformist interpretation of the law that responds to modern times and circumstances.



He therefore calls for “equal councils uniting 'ulamâs and specialists in the various fields (human and natural sciences) in order to enable legal statements in keeping with the age in which we live”’

Comments

Ramadan's suggestions make sense. One thing that Muslims should also study and learn from are the mistakes of Secular societies. Today we have greater evidence that there are very serious flaws in these models. The increasing trend towards greed, exploitation and racism confirm that Islam can offer many solutions to these societies. In fact these societies would be more accepting of Islamic Principles and their benefits if the Muslims were to actively practice them, themselves.



The "no compulsion in religion" principle is not practiced in large parts of Islamic Societies and is a major hurdle for Muslims to understand their own religion. The problem of Islam is not with modernity as the west makes us believe but in Muslims not practicing their own religion in its entirety. Ramadan is right in wanting to give more attention to Muamalat in which there is a need for greater discussion amongst Muslims.



Khusro

Are The Muslims up to it?

There is a message in this for all Muslims of the world. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire a decision seems to have been taken by the victors to enslave the Muslims and never allow them to even think of being free again. The Muslim territories contained oil and were rich in other natural resources which could fuel the economies of the victors.

Muslims nations world wide are now weak, Impotent and servile to the US and Isreal. No one is to blame for this more than the Muslims. The refusal to join the Industrial revolution, shows up in the weakness of the way Islam is interpreted. A 100 % focus on rituals has left Islam as nothing but a way of observing these rituals for the sake of observing them, in a mistaken belief that this all that God wants of us.

Forgotten are the lessons of Badr and Uhud. The fight has gone out of Muslims except a few. The few that are willing to fight are the ones who are the most ritualistic. On the other hand rituals are the main thing that has kept Islam alive. The faith of the many has sustained what the reasoning of the few would have fritterred away. I hope that this lesson is never forgotten. The fact that Islam has so much to offer to the world is lost both on Muslims and non Muslims alike.

There are those Muslims who would like to characterize Islam as a religion of peace. Whether they do it to appease those who accuse it of terrorism or they genuinely believe it, I do not know but I do know that that statement is incorrect and does an injustice to Islam. Islam is a Religion that seeks Jusice more than Peace. It advocates fighting against Injsutice. It advocates fighting to protect your religion and beliefs where they are threatened.
No Muslim should feel embarrased or apologetic in wanting to fight for their freedoms. Otherwise they deserve the humiliation and Injustice that is being waged on the Palestinians. ( a people composed not just of Muslims but also Jews and Christians).

In a world increasingly dominated by a powerful minority who are lording it over a powerless majority, the dirtiest word is now Democracy. The looming limitations of Capitalism, Secularism, Democracy are creating a vacum not fully visble to all but this vacum creates an opportunity for those who believe in Justice, whether they call themselves Muslim or not.
Let us be clear that Injustice cannot be overcome without a fight. Those who do not have a stomach for it should get out of the kitchen ( in fact they already have) including those who would like to call themselves Muslims but want to look the other way.

Those Muslims nations who take as their protectors the very nations who are responsible for most of the Injustices are a blot on the name of Islam. The powerful will never be the protectors of the powerless. It is only Islam that advocates that those that have a lot should and must share with those who have little. The powerless are the orphans of the world and one of Islams greatest message is to care for the orphans.

Are Muslims ready to fill this vacum ? Unfortunately I see no signs of it. Will Muslims be ready for the fight in a 100 years? If not, then they may never. Then they can keep their rituals and I hope that they will be very happy with them.

Khusro

Is the west thwarting Arab plans for reform?

Excerpt

"..a majority of Muslims is convinced that the west – interested only in a stability based on regional strongmen, the security of Israel and cheap oil – is engaged in a war against Islam and is bent on denying them the freedoms it claims for itself."


Editorial comment
There is a revival of interest amongst Muslims to follow a model other than that presented by the West. The thinking of people like Jamal uddin Afghani ,Mohammed Abdou and Rashid Ridha are being re examined. All of them had no issues with modernity but felt that Modernity without Islamic values would degenerate as it seems to have done recently in the West. Syed Qutub is not mentioned in the article but he advocated a complete abstinence from the West if one is ever to focus on Islam. Without Islamic Social Justice and Islamic Ethics, Capitalism is nothing but exploitation of one human being by another. Disillusionment with the West is setting the scene for a revival of Islam. Muslims are flocking in droves toward a greater religiosity, notwithstanding the Taliban. What remains is for Islamic thinkers of the calibre of Qutub, Afghani and Abdou to emerge and explain Islam in today's context. Khusro


Is the west thwarting Arab plans for reform?
By David Gardner,
Uneasy Lies the Head was the perhaps inevitable title of the autobiography of the late King Hussein of Jordan, the West’s favourite benign Arab despot. He was the improbable survivor of innumerable plots, coups and uprisings, of three Arab-Israeli wars, two Gulf wars and a civil war with the Palestinians, as well as around a dozen assassination attempts in the 46 years he wore the heavy crown of his improbable desert kingdom. The Hashemite monarch, descended from the family of the Prophet Mohammed and the Sharifs of Mecca, exuded total confidence in his legitimacy. Yet, this most open of Arab autocrats, this elegant and charming authoritarian, relied on the military and the Mukhabarat, his ubiquitous secret police, to stay in power, no less than in any other Arab state. To underline this truth is not necessarily to disparage King Hussein’s often liberal instincts. What it reveals is that even a leader willing to experiment with change, a regal populist who could utter the word “democracy” with a more or less straight face, a monarch who was once prepared to share (a bit of his) power with Islamists, was in the end no different from his peers.But a Hussein experiment of 20 years ago is jostling its way back onto the political agendas of the Arab world and wider Middle East: the attempt to marry Islam and democracy. This is the single biggest challenge facing a region mired in despotism and failure, where US and western collusion with local strongmen has created an Arab Exception – leaving the Arabs marooned in tyranny as waves of democracy broke over eastern Europe and Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia. There is no other part of the world – not even China – where the west operates with such little regard for the human and political rights of local citizens. The west’s morbid fear of political Islam has served to deny Arabs democracy in case they support Islamists, just as during the cold war many Latin Americans, Asians and Africans had to endure western-endorsed dictators lest they supported communists. Unless the Arab countries and the broader Middle East can find a way out of this pit of autocracy, their people – more than half of them under 25 – will be condemned to bleak lives of despair, humiliation and rage. Western support for autocracy and indulgence of corruption in this region, far from securing stability, breeds extremism and, in extremis, failed states. It will, of course, be primarily up to the citizens of these countries to claw their way out of that pit. But the least they can expect from the west is not to keep stamping on their fingers.So what was it King Hussein did? In 1989, the king risked an experiment in “guided democracy”. The main beneficiaries were Islamists, grouped mostly in the Jordanian chapter of the pan-Islamic Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen) . With 34 out of 80 assembly seats, the Islamists were the largest, and the only ideologically cohesive, bloc. In 1990-91, the king brought four Muslim Brothers into the cabinet. In private conversation four years later, he even foresaw the day when Jordan would have an Islamist prime minister, “and they and the people will see what government is about and who can do it”. But, first, he bound their leadership into a constitutional consensus. This set out the rules of managed democracy. Crucially, it also established Islam as but one fount of political legitimacy, alongside the parallel claims of Jordanian patriotism, Arab nationalism, and universal values. This Jordanian National Charter (al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Urduni) remains one of the most suggestive political documents to have emerged in the modern Arab world. It bucked the trend in the region. The minute the Brothers began to develop an agenda independently from the Palace, however, King Hussein changed the rules, enacting new electoral laws to guarantee majorities in parliament of Bedouin loyalists and tribal grandees. As the peace Jordan signed with Israel in 1994 grew ever more unpopular, moreover, so the king rolled back his democratic reforms, limiting change to largely meaningless changes of government (he ran through 56 prime ministers in 46 years).This episode nonetheless remains important, and transcends Jordan. King Hussein’s volte face meant an opportunity was lost to develop new forms of legitimacy – democratic legitimacy – by one of the few Arab leaders who had any reserves of this precious commodity left. Yet in the following two decades, there would be repeated attempts – from Khatami’s Iran to post-Saddam Iraq, from Erdogan’s Turkey to King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia – either to synthesise Islam and democracy or tilt towards forms of modernity the region’s religious heritage could sustain.The Islam and modernity debate, which accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman empire after the first World War, has emerged again nearly a century later. But there is an important difference. Few Muslims now invest much hope in the democratic western powers (essentially the US, Britain and France) that back the rulers who oppress them, even if, against the odds, they still admire “western” values, science and culture. There is no endemic or intrinsic conflict between Christians and Muslims. Rather, the root of the problem is that a majority of Muslims is convinced that the west – interested only in a stability based on regional strongmen, the security of Israel and cheap oil – is engaged in a war against Islam and is bent on denying them the freedoms it claims for itself.That is why it is so self-defeating to collude in tyranny as ostensibly a lesser evil than political Islam. The challenge now is to ensure that these Muslims are not driven into the arms of the jihadis who are poised to enter the Muslim mainstream. As poll after depressing poll shows, the moral credit of the west could hardly be lower in the Muslim and Arab worlds. As western client-rulers and local despots suppress all political challenge, leaving their people only the mosque and the madrassa as space to rally and regroup, Islamists are the beneficiaries. They build on doctrine common to all Islam: the concern to build a just society and to preserve the unity of the Umma, the worldwide community of believers. That is already a seductive political combination even before any spark of religious belief is added. Add to it the familiar list of timeless and actual Muslim grievances, the sense of a religion under siege and the lament for lost glory, and what emerges is a potent liberation theology.Democracy, in this unpromising context, could open a long period of illiberal politics that may be inimical to stability. Yet the west’s only realistic choice is to foster, or at least not actively obstruct, the right of Arabs to decide their own future, in whatever form they wish. That form will be heavily influenced by Islamism. Yet the west should be able to see the similarities between Islamism (or Islamic revivalism) and 19th-century nationalism in Europe. Both started as a sort of forced march into the future and then they detoured in sinister and destructive ways: fascism then and the jihadi cult of death now. Any sane policy would be devoted to preventing the evolution of a lethal form of radical Islam, in no small part by finding space for a thoughtful Islamism to emerge.That is no longer easy. The freedom agenda proclaimed by George W. Bush has been discredited. Yet the insight brought to the west so violently by al-Qaeda on September 11 2001 and subsequently – that tyranny breeds terrorism and instability, infantilises politics and holds back development – is no less valid. Not the least of the challenges facing Barack Obama is to rescue that insight before it is too late.It was never the spontaneous choice of the Arabs and the Muslims to retreat into Islam, even after colliding with a confident and expansionist Europe in the late 18th century. The Islamic revival only acquired legs when balance-of-power politics and subsequent western support for tyrants thwarted nationalist and democratic attempts at modernisation.Obviously, once the European powers thrust into Arab and Muslim lands in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries – taking Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Lebanon, and shrinking the Ottoman hinterland before pointing a dagger at its heartland – the question of modernity, much less democracy, must in many Muslim minds have been displaced by the question of survival. There had been no shortage of “modernist” Islamic thinkers, trying to tease out the lessons of western success and clear the thickets of superstition from Muslim minds. But, while looking forward, they also looked backwards to the dawn of Islam.Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97), probably, despite his name, a Persian who studied philosophy in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq, came to represent a flowing together of Islamic reform and nationalist assertion that would trickle into almost every political current in the region. As the historian Albert Hourani has pointed out, he brought a radical new emphasis on Islam as a civilisation rather than Islam as a religion, yet “only by a return to Islam can the strength and civilisation of Muslims be restored”. Islam needed to reclaim its scientific roots, and harvest the new fruits that had flowered in Europe from stems originally planted by the Muslims. With the unity of the Umma, Islam could once more have a universal mission in the world, because, as anyone who studied it could see, it was tolerant, rational and in harmony with the principles uncovered by science through the ages, not least by the great Muslim scientists who had not only adorned their own civilisation but recovered the civilisation of the west. Under Afghani’s disciples, however, the emphasis on reform, and the nature of universalism, gradually changed. Mohammed Abduh (1849-1905), an Egyptian scholar who in 1899 became the Mufti of Egypt, was above all concerned to show that the road to modernity could be discovered in the roots of Islam. Ostensibly modern concepts could be evolved out of traditional Islamic notions provided they were properly understood and adapted. Thus, Muslims could identify the principle of maslaha – whereby a judge could select from rival legal traditions to find the best outcome for public welfare – as the slightly more modern idea of the public good or interest. They would be able to recognise ijma – something between the consensus of the scholars and the acceptance of the community – as public opinion. Above all they could authentically claim their own tradition of democracy in the practice of shura or consultation.Abduh’s attempt to spring Islam into the vanguard of modernity was partly a job of reinterpreting and unifying Islamic law and adapting it to modern problems, partly a job of revealing the true meaning of old precepts and practices. It both cases it had to involve ijtihad – the exercise of independent but scholarly judgment – to confront the circumstances of modernity unforeseen at the dawn of Islam. Under Rashid Rida (1865-1935), a Syrian disciple of both Afghani and Abduh, many of the themes are the same, but he insistently argues that the technical skills of modernity arise out of the right moral habits and intellectual principles. If the teaching of Islam is properly understood, it will lead to success in this world and the next. In Rida’s al-Manar (The Lighthouse) periodical, which had an important influence on both Islamic revivalism and pan-Arab nationalism, “true Islam involves two things, acceptance of the unity of God and consultation [shura] in matters of state, and despotic rulers have tried to make Muslims forget the second by encouraging them to abandon the first”. But Rida increasingly looked back towards the Islam of the al-Salaf al-Salih – the pious forerunners of the first generations. That focus quickly led to the perception that decay had come about as a result of surrender to philosophy, speculation and mysticism – rather than surrender to God, the precise meaning of the word Islam. This meant all developments after the Salafi period and the subsequent establishment of the four orthodox schools of Sunni jurisprudence were deeply suspect. What started, therefore, as an injunction to learn the secrets of western culture as the prelude to relaunching Islam as a triumphantly universal civilisation subtly mutated into a highly defensive Islamic revivalism led initially by organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, determined to rid Islam of the seeds of western decadence. These ideas would mutate further, once detached from the sort of world that gave birth to them: an inclusive and entire world dislocated by the upheaval of modernity and the penetration of imperial power. Such Janus-like modernism easily cleared a path for the Islamic revivalism of this century, especially after nationalism was thwarted and the Arab world proceeded up one blind alley after another, following what Osama bin Laden has derided as “earthly flags”.With the bin Ladenists, the notion of the Umma has been corrupted into fascistic and supremacist ideas analogous to the Volk or the Razza, with their primacy over individual human rights and the universal rights of humanity, a muscular Islamism that appeals to the young yet elicits a vicarious thrill among orderly conservatives. As the American scholar of fascism, Robert Paxton, puts it well, “war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone”. Substitute “jihad” for war and “Islamist” for fascist and you have an important element of the attraction of the modern holy warrior.There are grounds for hope. Islamism comes in many guises. Turkey, for example, has shown that political Islam can evolve. The ruling Justice and Development party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan was rebuilt from the wreckage of two failed Islamist parties and broadened into a sort of Muslim equivalent of Christian Democracy. It is widely admired in the Arab and Muslim worlds, not as a model but because it works. Success sells.In Iran, by contrast, reformist attempts under Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) to create a freer society with a government accountable to the people under the rule of law mesmerised the region but eventually hit the buffers of theocracy. The silky and smiling Iranian president was rebuffed in his search for détente by Bill Clinton and rejected when he offered a “grand bargain” to George W. Bush in 2003. The price of failure was the shrewdly extremist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.Top Shia clerics in Iraq, however, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, take their inspiration not from Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 but from its constitutional revolution of 1906, aimed at establishing elected, representative government and the rule of law. While jealous of their prerogatives, the Iraqi clergy sought a new contract between ruler and ruled, not to become the new rulers like Iran’s theocrats. The 2005 Iraqi constitution, like the 1989 Jordanian National Charter, establishes Islam as a “basic” source of legislation, but states that no law can infringe the “principles of democracy” or the “rights and basic freedoms” enumerated in the rest of the constitution. This was no blueprint for secular liberalism. But nor, in a country that elected Islamists to two thirds of parliamentary seats, was it a warrant for theocracy.In Saudi Arabia, the region’s original theocracy, the ruling House of Saud’s hesitant steps to lead the kingdom towards a modernity its Islamic heritage can absorb means curbing the corrosive power of the Wahhabi religious establishment. King Abdullah’s most feasible way forward is to enlist Islamist progressives, the richest source of ideas for renewal. That is a risk the al-Saud may not be willing or able to take. As one senior prince, a moderniser who fears opening the door to Islamist reformers, puts it with a certain melancholy: “We liberals sit around a bottle of Scotch and complain to each other, and then, the next morning, do nothing. Yet if we don’t get real progress, economically, socially and politically, we are going to be in a terrible mess in five to 10 years.”While both the clerical establishment and al-Qaeda revile such “whisky liberals”, they see as their real adversary the Islamist reformers who advocate far-reaching change, many of whom have rediscovered the thinking of Islamic revivalists of a century ago. The ideas of, for example, Mohammed Abduh on maslaha (public interest), shura (consultation) and above all of ijtihad, or independent reasoning to marry Islamic belief with modern challenges, have resurfaced almost as a newly minted currency. The idea of civil society was reborn, with Muslim credentials the Wahhabi establishment justly fears. The turning point was the 2003 petition, called “A vision for the present and future of the homeland”, signed by leading Islamist reformers and liberals – although the former were and are the real force. As this pluralism implies, the document is founded on the principles of confessional and political diversity in Saudi Arabia. But for the first time, reformers both liberal and Islamist broke the taboo about speaking out against Wahhabism, implying that its totalitarian ideology was the deathly hand holding back the emergence of Saudi Arabia as a successful modern state its citizens would easily support.In this respect, the 2003 Saudi “Vision” document is as suggestive of a path forward as the 1989 Jordanian National Charter or the still unrealised Iraqi constitution of 2005. They all draw on and revisit the sources of renewal that are and will remain Islamic, and in important ways, Islamist. The Islamist reformers nonetheless want free elections, freedom of expression and association, an independent judiciary and a fairer distribution of wealth – in short, a constitutional monarchy, if not a bicycling monarchy.The idiom, however strange to western or liberal ears, is a large part of the story, because it gives those who use it to articulate reform a recognisable immediacy, an authenticity and a legitimacy that shields them from the usual charges of foreign influence and intrusion. Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Qassim, a former (defenestrated) Saudi judge and reformer, is a particularly authoritative version of the genre. “Al-Qaeda and the clergy are essentially doing the same thing in different ways – putting pressure on the House of Saud for being less devout than it should be. This paralyses reform,” he maintains. “The only way out of this is to dilute the link with Wahhabi fanaticism. The only way forward is to win the legitimacy of society itself – through political reform that does not depend on the approval of the clergy. If you make society part of reform you can overcome the clergy – it is the only way.” David Gardner is the FT’s chief leader writer. His book ‘Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance’ is published by I.B. Tauris next week
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Forgiveness and Irony

Excerpt

"But the God of the Koran is not a lenient God. In His Koranic manifestation, God forgives sparingly and with obvious reluctance. He is manifestly not amused by human folly and weakness—"- Scruton

Editorial comment

I read the article with a lot of interest. It is extremely well written and on the face of it well argued but to me it comes across as written by a man who neither understands Islam or Secularism or the West. Let me explain :

Forgiveness The essence of the message of God as given in the Quran rests on two words,
Rahman and Rahim. See below for a very brief explanation. this could go on for pages.

The True Meaning of ‘Ar-Rahman’ and ‘Ar-Rahim’:

"Now, no attribute is perfect, unless it possesses within itself both Hossun (beauty/goodness) and Ihsan (beneficence) . That is, on the one hand the attribute does not possess any fault, flaw or dependency and is thus perfect in its Hossun; and, on the other hand, its Ihsan i.e., the benefits of the attribute, should also be reaching creation. For instance, generosity is a hossun, but irrespective to the extent to which it is present in any being, until its Ihsan, that is, its beneficence, reaches some other being, it is of no importance and it is immaterial whether that attribute exists or not. That is why God’s attributes are not only perfect in their Hossun (goodness/beauty) , but are also perfect in their Ihsan (beneficence) and it is the blessing of these attributes which is responsible for the emergence and sustenance of the entire creation.
‘Ar-Rahman’ (the Beneficent) is He whose generosity is so great that before the birth of man and without any effort or labour on man’s part, the entire resources required for his sustenance were provided. While ‘Ar-Rahim’ refers to the mercy which is granted repeatedly and these attributes manifest themselves time and again and have an excellent and improving effect on each person’s actions.
It is stated in the Hadith, that God, Most High, is the ‘Rahman’ (Beneficent) of this world and the ‘Rahim’ (Merciful) of the hereafter. This is because Rahman, before the birth of man, merely out of his beneficence provided the entire resources for the sustenance and progress of man. So this entire world is a manifestation of the attribute Rahman. The attribute Rahim rewards man for good works and this is fully manifested in the hereafter."

It is not God, who is not forgiving or "reluctant" in His forgiveness, it is man who is weak in seeking forgiveness. If a man seeks forgiveness and then commits the sin again then was he sincere in seeking forgiveness? If a man seeks forgiveness but in his heart does not believe that he has sinned, then what is he seeking forgiveness of? The "reluctance" on God's part is if there is forgiveness and no repentance. God will forgive, if man repents. God will forgive if man repents on his death bed.

What is the standard of forgiveness in Secular Society that Scruton refers to? He talks as if mercy and forgiveness is an invention of the West or Judeo Christian ethics. How does forgiveness of Secularism fit into the revenge of 9/11? Instead of forgiving the Saudis and Egyptians who were responsible for this attack, the West decided to teach a lesson to the Iraqis and Afghanis. Is this the Judeo Christian tradition of forgiveness that we are supposed to emulate? This is not even Justice let alone forgiveness.


Irony This is another word for not being judgmental. I will quote to you four verses from the Quran:

“There should be no compulsion in religion” (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:256)

“Your (Prophet’s)duty is only to convey the Message” (Surah Ash-Shura 42:48).

” And let the People of the Gospel judge according to what Allah has revealed therein.” (Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:47)

“Do not abuse the gods of other religions or their prophets and religious men, lest they should abuse your God or Prophet or your religious men.”

There are very clear instructions to Muslims not to be judgemental. Islam's Prophet had clear instructions to just deliver the message. Judgement is the sole domain of God.

Scruton talks about Secularism as follows:
"Citizenship is precisely not a form of brotherhood, of the kind that follows from a shared act of heartfelt submission: it is a relation among strangers, a collective apartness, in which fulfillment and meaning are confined to the private sphere. To have created this form of renewable loneliness is the great achievement of Western civilization"
Although he writes about this as a great achievement, I am not sure if a collective loneliness is something to aspire to. He admits to the lack of meaning in Secularism and agrees that it is forgiveness and irony which truly brings meaning but he appears to have a lower standard for both forgiveness and irony than there is in Islam. A collective apartness is bought together by self interest and this is a fleeting and self centered partnership. There is a loss of humanity in this relationship because at it's most basic self interest is about material self interest. Enlightened self interest is a step above this but again has serious limitations. In Islam, man's relationship to one another and to this world is a fiduciary relationship. Every thing belongs to God to whome we will return. Our relationships to one another and to the land is one of trust and caring.

Terrorism While Scruton, admits that Islam did not invent Terrorism, he insists on the use of words like Islamic terrorism. Missing from this whole discussion is State Terrorism.
When the worlds most powerful country invades one of the worlds weakest and poorest countries, it is not an act of war. It is an example of State Terrorism. The US carpet bombing of Afghanistan, the shock and awe of Iraq in which thousands of innocent people were killed is a bigger act of terrorism than any individual act of terrorism. The moral indignation in the West over suicide bombings completely by passes the immoral acts of the West in the abuse of their power and the rampant exploitation of less fortunate human beings. The theory that the end justifies the means has completely taken over Western thinking and in a fit of superiority makes them blind to their own double standards.
Let me quote again from Scruton:
"it is very difficult to kill the innocent Mrs. Smith and her children as they go about their family shopping. Hence this strategy for ego-building cannot begin simply from the desire to kill. Mrs. Smith must become something else—a symbol of some abstract condition, a kind of incarnation of a universal enemy. Terrorists of the modern kind therefore tend to lean on doctrines that remove the humanity from the people they target."

To me Mrs Smith could easily have been the mothers of Palestinian mothers going to pick up their children in Gaza. who were cut down by Israei forces. This was not collateral damage, this was an act of terror which surpasses all acts of terror. A cold blooded killing of innocent women and children in order to spread terror. Yet for some reason it is difficult for Scruton to see this as terrorism.

Threat to the West. Scruton talks about "..the experience of a déraciné Muslim confronting the modern world, and without the benefit of the two gifts of forgiveness and irony. Such a person is an unpredictable by-product of unforeseen and uncomprehended circumstances, and our best efforts to understand his motives have so far suggested no policy that would deter attacks."

Ben Laden and the Taliban have no interest in the West. Their only interest is not to be occupied by the West. Ben Laden wanted the Americans to withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia. The Taliban wants the West to withdraw from Afghanistan. I may nor agree with or condone the tactics of Ben Laden but time and again he has stated his prime motive was to resist occupation.
If some of these people want to revive an Islamic caliphate, let the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world decide if this makes sense. The Ku klux clan may have their own ambitions about white supremacy, no one is thinking of attacking America to get rid of these people. The Americans are quite capable of dealing with them. So where does any one get the idea that these people want to destroy the West? Neither do they have the power. The West as we are seeing has the power to destroy itself.

There is a solution for stopping the attacks. Leave Afghanistan, leave Iraq, leave Palestine and we can all live happily. It has become politically correct for the perpetrator to act as the victim. This article is to me more evidence of this disease. Let the perpetrator admit to their violence, their bullying, their self righteous behaviour ( judging others and forcibly pushing their own ideas on them) and then see what happens. Let there be a truth and reconciliation on a global basis and then let us see as we did in South Africa how people in power abused their power and committed acts of terrible inhumanity. For the West it is the seeking of forgiveness that is important. It is much easier to forgive then to seek forgiveness. It is much easier to seek forgiveness than to repent.

Let me take this opportunity to point to two challenges for Muslims today;

1. Intolerance of others. This is not intolerance of non Muslims but intolerance of fellow Muslims. If Scruton was just talking about Islam as he sees Muslims practice it, then I understand where he is coming from. Despite the Quran strictly saying that it is God who leads astray whome He wills, and men must not sit on judgement of one another, many Muslims take upon themselves the role of deciding who is a good Muslim and who is a bad one. They go so far as to say who is a Muslim and who is not even amongst people of their own belief. This is a hurdle that unless Muslims cross, they will and are giving Islam a bad name.
2. The way many Muslims are treating women is also a blot on the advances that were made by Islam in the emancipation of women. Any Muslim nation that discourages the education of women is taking many backward steps. The West may encourage the education of women but their exploitation of women as sex symbols is contrary to the teachings of Islam. Muslims have to look to the Quran for guidance on man/woman relationship and no where do I read in the Quran that women should not be educated.

It is interesting that Scruton sees a rivalry or competition between Secularism and Islam, not between Secularism and Religion. It is true that Affluent countries as a whole have with drawn from Religion and are alarmed at the presence of practicing Muslims amongst them. Like Scruton these societies struggle to demonise Islam rather than understand them. As Secularism and Capitalism show signs of not being the perfect systems that they though they were, Islam gets a rare chance of contributing to many of the solutions. In fact Islam can contribute significantly in the present crisis in three major areas;

1. Economic Justice.
2, Role of women ( This may be a non starter because of the behaviour of the Taliban and others but the Islamic concepts could be life savers for society)
3. Ethics.

Unfortunately if the Muslims continue to be focused on the form and ignore the spirit of Islam, they are in no position to guide any one. They need to first get their own house in order.
Please feel free to share with others.


Khusro


Forgiveness and Irony

What makes the West strong
Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is a writer and philosopher. His article is adapted from his McNish Lecture for the Advancement of Western Civilization at the University of Calgary

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate?

That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.

That is what people want; it does not, however, make them happy. Something is missing from a life based purely on consent and polite accommodation with your neighbors—something of which Muslims retain a powerful image through the words of the Koran. This missing thing goes by many names: sense, meaning, purpose, faith, brotherhood, submission. People need freedom; but they also need the goal for which they can renounce it. That is the thought contained in the word “Islam”: the willing submission, from which there is no return.

It goes without saying that the word’s connotations are different for Arabic speakers and for speakers of Turkish, Malay, or Bengali. Turks, who live under a secular law derived from the legal systems of post-Napoleonic Europe, are seldom disposed to think that, as Muslims, they must live in a state of continual submission to a divine law that governs all of social and political life. The 20 percent of Muslims who are Arabs, however, feel the mesmerizing rhythms of the Koran as an unbrookable current of compulsion and are apt to take “Islam” literally. For them, this particular act of submission may mean renouncing not only freedom but also the very idea of citizenship. It may involve retreating from the open dialogue on which the secular order depends into the “shade of the Koran,” as Sayyid Qutb put it, in a disturbing book that has inspired the Muslim Brotherhood ever since. Citizenship is precisely not a form of brotherhood, of the kind that follows from a shared act of heartfelt submission: it is a relation among strangers, a collective apartness, in which fulfillment and meaning are confined to the private sphere. To have created this form of renewable loneliness is the great achievement of Western civilization, and my way of describing it raises the question of whether it is worth defending and, if so, how.

My answer is yes, it is worth defending, but only if we recognize the truth that the present conflict with Islamism makes vivid to us: citizenship is not enough, and it will endure only if associated with meanings to which the rising generation can attach its hopes and its search for identity. There is no doubt that the secular order and the search for meaning coexisted quite happily when Christianity provided its benign support to both. But (especially in Europe) Christianity has retreated from public life and is now being driven from private life as well. For people of my generation, it seemed, for a while, as though we could rediscover meaning through culture. The artistic, musical, literary, and philosophical traditions of our civilization bore so many traces of a world-transforming significance that it would be enough—we thought—to pass those things on. Each new generation could then inherit by means of them the spiritual resources that it needed. But we reckoned without two all-important facts: first, the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that without an injection of energy, all order decays; and second, the rise of what I call the “culture of repudiation,” as those appointed to inject that energy have become increasingly fatigued with the task and have eventually jettisoned the cultural baggage under whose weight they staggered.

This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the schools, across the spiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sense that nothing is left to believe in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in the freedom to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice. It is hardly surprising that so many Muslims in our cities today regard the civilization surrounding them as doomed, even if it is a civilization that has granted them something that they may be unable to find where their own religion triumphs, which is a free, tolerant, and secular rule of law. For they were brought up in a world of certainties; around them, they encounter only doubts.

If repudiation of its past and its identity is all that Western civilization can offer, it cannot survive: it will give way to whatever future civilization can offer hope and consolation to the young and fulfill their deep-rooted human need for social membership. Citizenship, as I have described it, does not fulfill that need: and that is why so many Muslims reject it, seeking instead that consoling “brotherhood” (ikhwan) that has so often been the goal of Islamic revivals. But citizenship is an achievement that we cannot forgo if the modern world is to survive: we have built our prosperity on it, our peace and our stability, and—even if it does not provide happiness—it defines us. We cannot renounce it without ceasing to be.

What is needed is not to reject citizenship as the foundation of social order but to provide it with a heart. And in seeking that heart, we should turn away from the apologetic multiculturalism that has had such a ruinous effect on Western self-confidence and return to the gifts that we have received from our Judeo-Christian tradition.

The first of these gifts is forgiveness. By living in a spirit of forgiveness, we not only uphold the core value of citizenship but also find the path to social membership that we need. Happiness does not come from the pursuit of pleasure, nor is it guaranteed by freedom. It comes from sacrifice: that is the great message that all the memorable works of our culture convey. The message has been lost in the noise of repudiation, but we can hear it once again if we devote our energies to retrieving it. And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices resentment and thereby renounces something that had been dear to his heart.

The Koran invokes at every point the mercy, compassion, and justice of God. But the God of the Koran is not a lenient God. In His Koranic manifestation, God forgives sparingly and with obvious reluctance. He is manifestly not amused by human folly and weakness—nor, indeed, is He amused by anything. The Koran, unlike the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, is a joke-free zone.

This brings us to another of our civilization’s gifts to us: irony. There is already a developing streak of irony in the Hebrew Bible, one that the Talmud amplifies. But a new kind of irony dominates Christ’s judgments and parables, which look on the spectacle of human folly and wryly show us how to live with it. A telling example is Christ’s verdict in the case of the woman taken in adultery: “Let he who is without fault cast the first stone.” In other words: “Come off it; haven’t you wanted to do what she did, and already done it in your hearts?” Some have suggested that this story is a later insertion—one of many that the early Christians culled from the store of inherited wisdom attributed to the Redeemer after his death. Even if that is true, however, it merely confirms the view that the Christian religion has made irony central to its message. It was a troubled, post-Enlightenment Christian, Søren Kierkegaard, who pointed to irony as the virtue that united Socrates and Christ.

The late Richard Rorty saw irony as a state of mind intimately connected with the postmodern worldview—a withdrawal from judgment that nevertheless aims at a kind of consensus, a shared agreement not to judge. The ironic temperament, however, is better understood as a virtue—a disposition aimed at a kind of practical fulfillment and moral success. Venturing a definition of this virtue, I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself. However convinced you are of the rightness of your actions and the truth of your views, look on them as the actions and the views of someone else and rephrase them accordingly. So defined, irony is quite distinct from sarcasm: it is a mode of acceptance rather than a mode of rejection. It also points both ways: through irony, I learn to accept both the other on whom I turn my gaze, and also myself, the one who is gazing. Pace Rorty, irony is not free from judgment: it simply recognizes that the one who judges is also judged, and judged by himself.

The West’s democratic inheritance stems, I would argue, from the habit of forgiveness. To forgive the other is to grant him, in your heart, the freedom to be. It is therefore to acknowledge the individual as sovereign over his life and free to do both right and wrong. A society that makes permanent room for forgiveness therefore tends automatically in a democratic direction, since it is a society in which the voice of the other is heard in all decisions that affect him. Irony—the recognition and acceptance of otherness—amplifies this democratic tendency and also helps thwart the mediocrity and conformity that are the downsides of a democratic culture.

Forgiveness and irony lie at the heart of our civilization. They are what we have to be most proud of, and our principal means to disarm our enemies. They underlie our conception of citizenship as founded in consent. And they are expressed in our conception of law as a means to resolve conflicts by discovering the just solution to them. It is not often realized that this conception of law has little in common with Muslim sharia, which is regarded as a system of commands issued by God and not capable of, or in need of, further justification.

God’s commandments are important to Christians and Jews, too; but they are not seen as sufficient for the good government of human societies. They must be supplemented by another kind of law, responsive to the changing forms of human conflict. The parable of the tribute money makes this transparently clear (“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”), as does the papal doctrine of the two swords—the two forms of law, human and divine, on which good government depends. The law enforced by our courts requires the parties to “submit” only to the secular jurisdiction. It treats each party as a responsible individual, acting freely for himself. This feature of law is particularly vivid in the minds of the English-speaking peoples, whose system of common law consists of freedoms—won by the citizen from the state—that the state must uphold. Sharia consists of obligations imposed by God that the courts must enforce. It is a means to ensure “submission” to the will of God, as revealed in the Koran and the Sunna.

How do these thoughts bear on our current situation? In particular, how does this invocation of deep aspects of our Judeo-Christian heritage help us respond to the threat posed by Islamist terrorism, and how can we achieve the much-needed reconciliation with Islam without which our political inheritance will remain in jeopardy?

Terrorism and Islam have become associated in the popular mind, and in response, well-intentioned commentators urge that there is nothing new in terrorism and nothing about Islam that predisposes its adherents toward the use of it. Wasn’t it the Jacobins of the French Revolution who unleashed the beast? Didn’t terrorism find its political home with the Russian nihilists of the nineteenth century, thereafter to be adopted by radical movements throughout the twentieth?

The response is reasonable, but it prompts us to explore the deeper question of motive. What draws people to the use of terror? Is it chosen, as its apologists suggest, as a tactical device? Or is it chosen as an end in itself? From a certain perspective, it seems plausible to trace modern terrorism to the Enlightenment, to the idea of human equality, and to the attitude of ressentiment that Nietzsche rightly discerned in the heart of modern communities—the desire to destroy what one longs for when seeing it in others’ hands. But such a diagnosis ignores the fact that terrorism, as typified by the Russian nihilists and recorded in their name, is radically disconnected from any goal. Sometimes, it is true, terrorists—the Bolsheviks, the IRA, ETA—have furnished themselves with a cause, making believe that with the achievement of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a united Ireland, or a Basque national state, their purposes will be achieved and they can lay down their arms. But the cause is usually vague and utopian to the point of unreality, and its nonachievement seems part of its point—a way to justify the constant renewal of violence.

Terrorists might equally be entirely causeless, or dedicated to a cause so vaguely and metaphysically characterized that nobody (least of all themselves) could believe it to be achievable. Such were the Russian nihilists, as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev described them. Such, too, were the Italian Brigate Rosse and the German Baader-Meinhof gang of my youth. As Michael Burleigh shows in his magisterial Blood and Rage, modern terrorism has been far more interested in violence than in anything that might be achieved by it. It is typified by Joseph Conrad’s Professor, in The Secret Agent, who raises his glass “to the destruction of all that is.”

The vague or utopian character of the cause is therefore an important part of terrorism’s appeal, for it means that the cause does not define or limit the action. It is waiting to be filled with meaning by the terrorist, who is searching to change not the world but himself. To kill someone who has neither offended you nor given just cause for punishment, you have to believe yourself wrapped in some kind of angelic cloak of justification. You then come to see the killing as showing that you are indeed an angel. Your existence receives its final ontological proof.

Terrorists pursue a moral exultation, a sense of being beyond the reach of ordinary human judgment, radiated by a self-assumed permission of the kind enjoyed by God. Terrorism of this kind, in other words, is a search for meaning—the very meaning that citizenship, conceived in abstract terms, cannot provide. Even in its most secularized form, terrorism involves a kind of religious hunger.

It is very difficult to kill the innocent Mrs. Smith and her children as they go about their family shopping. Hence this strategy for ego-building cannot begin simply from the desire to kill. Mrs. Smith must become something else—a symbol of some abstract condition, a kind of incarnation of a universal enemy. Terrorists of the modern kind therefore tend to lean on doctrines that remove the humanity from the people they target. Marx’s theories served this purpose well, since they created the idea of the bourgeoisie, the “class enemy,” who had the same function in Bolshevik ideology as the Jews did in the ideology of the Nazis. Mrs. Smith and her children stand behind the target, which is the abstract bourgeois family. It just so happens that, when the bomb hits this target made of fictions, the shrapnel passes easily through it into the real body of Mrs. Smith. Sad for the Smiths, and often you will find terrorists making a kind of abstract apology, saying that it wasn’t their fault that Mrs. Smith got blown up and that really people ought not to stand behind targets in quite that way.

Islamist terrorists are animated, at some level, by the same troubled search for meaning and the same need to stand above their victims in a posture of transcendental exculpation. Ideas of liberty, equality, or historical right have no influence on their thinking, and they are not interested in possessing the powers and privileges that their targets enjoy. The things of this world have no real value for them, and if they sometimes seem to aim at power, it is only because power would enable them to establish the kingdom of God—an aim that they, like the rest of us, know to be impossible and therefore endlessly renewable in the wake of failure. Their carelessness about others’ lives is matched by their carelessness about their own. Life has no particular value for them; death beckons constantly from the near horizon of their vision. And in death, they perceive the only meaning that matters: the final transcendence of this world and of the accountability to others that this world demands of us.

People inoculated by the culture of repudiation, reluctant to acknowledge the search for meaning as a human universal, tend to think that all conflicts are really political, concerning who has power over whom. They are apt to believe that the causes of Islamist terrorism lie in the “social injustice” against which the terrorists protest and that the failure of all other attempts to rectify things renders their regrettable methods necessary. This seems to me to misinterpret radically the motives of terrorism in general and of Islamism in particular. The Islamist terrorist, like the European nihilist, is primarily interested in himself and his spiritual condition, and he has no real desire to change things here below, where he does not belong. He wants to belong to God, not to the world, and this means witnessing to God’s law and kingdom by destroying all that stands in their way, his own body included. Death is his ultimate act of submission: through death, he dissolves into a new and immortal brotherhood. The terror that his death inflicts both exalts the world of brotherhood and casts a devastating blow against the rival world of strangers, in which citizenship, not brotherhood, is the binding principle.

This is why we should recognize that we face a new kind of threat, one that does not have limited or negotiable objectives, that we cannot easily meet with a military confrontation, and that the usual means cannot deter. There is nothing we can offer the Islamists that will enable them to say that they have achieved their goal. If they succeeded in destroying a Western city with a nuclear bomb, or a whole population with a deadly virus, they would regard it as a triumph, even though it conferred no material, political, or religious benefit whatsoever.

Of course, the mass of ordinary Muslims would be appalled at such an event and would regard mass murder of the kind contemplated by al-Qaida as an outrage absolutely forbidden by the law of God. And there are encouraging signs that thinking Muslims are attempting to find a way to declare a public commitment to coexistence with the other two Abrahamic religions and to uphold the love of neighbor, even when the neighbor is of another faith. Witness the 2007 letter to religious leaders in the West, signed by 140 distinguished Muslim scholars, calling for dialogue among the faiths and for mutual respect as the foundation of coexistence. However, we should note two important facts. The first is that Islam has never succeeded in establishing any decisive source of religious authority. Each spiritual leader is self-appointed, like the Ayatollah Khomeini, and has no credibility outside his own circle of followers. People often say what a pity it is that Islam has had no Protestant Reformation. In fact, it is one unending series of Protestant Reformations, each of which claims to be the sole truth in the matter of man’s obedience to God.

The second important fact—and it is, I believe, connected—is that Muslims show a remarkable ability to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed in the name of their faith and to rally against anyone who disparages it. The notorious Danish cartoons caused outrage, uniting Muslims everywhere in acts of destruction and calls for revenge. A few days later, the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the Shiite community’s holiest places, was blown up by Islamists. But where were the protests, outside Iraq? Far more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed by Islamic terrorists. But when do those who claim to speak for Muslims mention this statistic? For that matter, the whole point of the infamous cartoons was to make us look at the atrocious things done in the Prophet’s name. Does he approve or doesn’t he?

Muslims must face up to this question. But a rooted double standard often prevents their turning on fellow Muslims the self-righteous anger that they turn on enemies of the faith. Such double standards are the direct result of the loss of irony. They stem from an inability to accept the otherness of everything, to stand outside one’s own opinions, and even one’s own faith, so as to see it as the faith of someone else. Not that Islam has always lacked irony in this respect: the works of the Sufi masters are full of it. But the Sufi masters (I think of Rumi and Hafiz especially) belong to that great and self-knowing Islamic culture on which the Islamists have turned their backs, embracing instead the narrow-minded bigotry of Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab or the self-deceived nostalgia of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb.

The confrontation that we are involved in is thus not political or economic; it is not the first step toward a negotiation or a calling to account. It is an existential confrontation. The question put to us is: “What right do you have to exist?” By answering, “None whatsoever,” we invite the reply, “That’s what I thought.” An answer can avert the threat only by facing it down; and that means being absolutely convinced that we do have a right to exist and that we are prepared to concede an equal right to our opponents, though only on condition that the concession is mutual. No other strategy has a remote chance of succeeding.

Al-Qaida may be weak; the whole conspiracy to destroy the West may be little more than a fiction in the brains of the neoconservatives, who themselves may be a fiction in the brains of liberals. But the threat does not come from a conspiracy or from an organization. It comes from individuals undergoing a traumatic experience that we do not fully understand—the experience of a déraciné Muslim confronting the modern world, and without the benefit of the two gifts of forgiveness and irony. Such a person is an unpredictable by-product of unforeseen and uncomprehended circumstances, and our best efforts to understand his motives have so far suggested no policy that would deter attacks.

What, then, should our stance be in this existential confrontation? I think we should emphasize the very great virtues and achievements that we have built on our legacy of tolerance and show a willingness to criticize and amend all the vices to which it has also given undue space. We should resurrect Locke’s distinction between liberty and license and make it absolutely clear to our children that liberty is a form of order, not a license for anarchy and self-indulgence. We should cease to mock the things that mattered to our parents and grandparents, and we should be proud of what they achieved. This is not arrogance but a just recognition of our privileges.

We should also drop all the multicultural waffling that has so confused public life in the West and reaffirm the core idea of social membership in the Western tradition, which is the idea of citizenship. By sending out the message that we believe in what we have, are prepared to share it, but are not prepared to see it destroyed, we do the only thing that we can do to defuse the current conflict. Because forgiveness is at the heart of our culture, this message ought surely to be enough, even if we proclaim it in a spirit of irony.


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Will the Muslims ever speak with one voice?

"How many of us should die and suffer for the Arab nation to wake up and take its destiny in its own hands?"

This is a question that I first asked myself in 2001. I did not think that a few million deaths would make any difference. I felt that the deaths needed to be humiliating. Women and children and old people needed to be slaughtered and made homeless. Even then it would not make a difference. Perhaps if all the women were raped before they were killed and all the men were brutually tortured before they were mercilessy killed and the Quran was despoiled before their eyes, then it would make a difference. I believed it would not but I did believe that it was a neccessary preamble to the awakening.

In the next 8 years George Bush as an agent of Destiny made it happen. He could not complete the course as I believe that one million Pakistanis need to die and probably will die. The cost of Muslim lives unfortunately has to be very heavy to wake up the Muslim world. The West believes that no amount of killing and humiliation will wake up the Muslims and are therefore quite relaxed about the Muslim Holocaust.

What the West did not reckon with was how much the killer is affected by the killing. Human beings, no matter how brainwashed they are by their love of wealth and money still have a ceratin level of Humanity. They will have to become dehumanized by their own inhumanity. Not every one in the West has sold their conscience and their morality. Not every one believes their own lies. To me, the cost of one helpless child or woman whether Muslim or not killed by the forces of the powerful are too many. That this is not so to the victim and perpetrator is the sign of how much both have fallen in their self esteeem. The one crushed by their ignorance and poverty, the other subsumed by their arrogance and affluence.

Unfortunately it is a neccesary part of the ultimate solution that the killings will continue. The arrogant must continue to be arrogant and the poor must continue to be humiliated to take this to it's logical conclusion. A just world will only rise from the debrise of Injustice. The poor must become defiant by the day and the affluent must become poorer by the day for there to be a more level playing field. It is no coincidence that one of the poorest countries of the world ( Afghanistan) is the most defiant against the richest countries of the world ( the US and Nato) and the rich countries continue planning to kill more and more of the people and lose what ever is left of their morality and their riches.

Things have come to a pass where it is the failed States of the world who will call the shots by becoming stateless. Non State actors who are being called terrorists and pirates will control the attention of the world. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia,Palestine are just the tip of the iceberg, of failed States who are being allowed to fail because they are Muslim. Sudan, Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey are ready to follow suit. Islam has replaced Communism as public enemy # 1 for the West. The resistance to Hamas, to the Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamists in Algeria and Somalia and the Taliban in Afghanistan are all symbols of the paranoia in the West of a phantom enemy who wants nothing but to develop outside the influence of the West.

There is an unmistakeable pattern in all of this which speaks to the original question. How Many Muslims must be killed to unite one billion people across 5 continents ? The shoe throwing Iraqi, represented the combined hatred of a segment of the world which sees itself targeted for abuse. New orders are not built on hatred and revenge but on Justice and fairness. This is the biggest challenge for the Muslims. Islam exists today in form and not in spirit. The form has been critical for their survival but the spirit has to be awakened if Muslims are ever to take their rightful place in the world.

Khusro

Letter to the Pope

Extract

We would like to point out that "holy war¡¨ is a term that does not exist in Islamic languages. Jihad, it must be emphasized,means struggle, and specifically struggle in the way of God.

The authoritative and traditional Islamic rules of war can be summarized in the following principles:

1. Non-combatants are not permitted or legitimate targets.This was emphasized explicitly time and again by the Prophet, his Companions, and by the learned tradition since then.

2. Religious belief alone does not make anyone the object of attack. The original Muslim community was fighting against pagans who had also expelled them from their homes, persecuted, tortured, and murdered them.Thereafter, the Islamic conquests were political in nature.

3. Muslims can and should live peacefully with their neighbors. And if they incline to peace, do thou incline to it; and put thy trust in God (al-Anfal ).

However, this does not exclude legitimate self-defense and maintenance of sovereignty. "

Editorial Comment

A letter signed by 38 Muslim Scholars contains a unified explanation of Issues such as conversion, apostasy, relations with non Muslims etc. This sheds light on these subjects not only for the Pope but also for Muslims worldwide. It needed the Pope to question Islam in order for these scholars to issue a public explanation.
This letter was written a few months back, but the text was not available to me. There is a need for bodies like this to issue their understanding on other issues also on which there is much confusion.

Khusro


Click here to read the text


http://ammanmessage .com/media/ openLetter/ english.pdf

Are the Muslims the Red Indians of the 21st Century?

By Khusro Elley

For centuries the Red Indians sat on the most valuable Real Estate in the world and did nothing with it. It took a bunch of adventurers , outcasts from society, religious exiles form their own countries to annihilate the Indians and start exploiting the riches of what has now come to be known as the United States of America.

Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia are sitting on a wealth of oil and doing nothing better than investing their oil Revenues in US Treasuries for the benefit of the ruling elite of these countries. Unlike the Indians they( the Muslims) cannot be liquidated quietly, away from the eyes of the world. In the age of globalization, the liquidation will be seen by all on their TV screens and Internet screens and newspapers. The best way to liquidate them is to have them kill one another and keep arming which ever side starts losing.

The Palestinians (who have no oil) have already been herded into reservations after their lands were confiscated and are ready to slaughter one another. The Iraqis are slaughtering one another. The Afghanis are slaughtering one another. The Pakistanis are about to slaughter one another. The Bangladeshis will disappear as a result of global warming under mountains of sea water. The Saudis and the Gulf Countries are very few in numbers and can be dealt with later. The Saudis are ready to slaughter the Iranians in any case so let them do that first (with a lot of help). Liquidating 1.2 billion people is beginning to look viable. Hitler tried to do this with the Jews but he made the mistake of trying to do it with his own bare hands. The Muslim Holocaust has begun.

There is just one problem. The Muslims have an impressive History and they have a Book.
How many Muslims have to die before the Muslims realize that they are their own worst enemy? Between the Iran/Iraq war and the war on terrorism over 2 million Muslims have died mostly at the hands of one another. I don’t believe the message has gotten through. Maybe after another two million, the penny may begin to drop. If non Muslims were killing Muslims that might unite the Muslims temporarily because once the threat is removed they would turn on one another. This became evident when the Russians were repelled in Afghanistan. Now with Muslims killing Muslims there is a greater finality. Unite or perish.

How many Muslims need to get killed before the Muslim Ummah starts asking some obvious questions. Let us assume that after another three million are slaughtered, the remaining billion will begin to get worried. What are they likely to do? They can let the slaughter continue to see who comes out on top, if any one or they can overthrow and slaughter all the Muslim elite, who are basically agents of Foreign interests. In either event another five million Muslims will get killed before any one realizes that these were not the problem. My conservative estimate is that at least another eight million Muslims need to get killed and I mean slaughtered before people start realizing that there must be something wrong with Islam the way it is being practiced. Unfortunately there is no other choice.

From 1618 to 1648, the Europeans fought a thirty year war amongst themselves and happily killed one another ostensibly for religious reasons. The seeds originated with a man called Martin Luther.

“Martin Luther (1483-1546) stands in history as one of those unique forces, an individual who by force of will and by his ideas changed the world fundamentally. There are several ironies incumbent on Luther's pivotal role in history: 1) he doesn't really represent a break with the past, but rather a flash point where ideas and trends which had been smoldering in Europe for several centuries suddenly blazed aflame; 2) Luther initially saw himself as a great reformer of the Catholic church, a simple monk who thought the force of his ideas would single-handedly redirect the Leviathan of the church; in the end, however, he divided Christianity into two separate churches and that second division, Protestantism, would divide over the next four centuries into a near infinity of separate churches; 3) finally, Luther (and all the other reformers) saw themselves as returning Christianity to its roots, they believed that they were setting the clock back; in reality, their ideas irreparably changed the world and pushed it kicking and screaming, not into some ideal past, but into the modern era.” **

The difference with Islam is that there is no church to reform. The difference with Islam is that there is no movement from within Islam which wants to challenge its practices or malpractices. The difference is that Muslims are becoming aware of their vulnerabilities through others taking over their lands, their resources, their freedoms. The similarity is that the Muslims do want to look at their past for inspiration. They do want to go back to basics before they can move forward. The difference is that Muslims have been asleep and therefore colonized ever since the Industrial Revolution. So deep is their slumber that there is no way to reawaken them without killing ten million of them. ( by there own hands). If they do wake up, the battle would have just begun.


**Richard Hooker (Washington State University).