Is there a nice side to radical Islamism?

Salah Uddin Shoab Choudhury has paid dearly for his struggle against radical Islamism in his native Bangladesh. His voice needs to be heard. Is there a non-nasty side to radical Islamism? Besides suicide bombing, repression and violence against women and despotic regimes, I guess they are OK if you like that sort of thing.

Nasty side of radical Islam
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury

Many nations having Shariah Law or Mullah rule in the world are continuing to commit various forms of notoriety in the name of Islam. I know, what Islamists and people like Ahmadinejad or Wahhabis or notorious groups like Hamas, Hezbollah or Al Qaeda are doing, is not Islam at all. To get more specific answer as to why I have drawn such conclusion, we need to carefully read this entire article to understand, what is happening in those nations, which are having Shariah law or laws of Mullahs. Here we have reports on sexual assualt inside Iranian prison by the prison guards by taking the refuge of sermons issued by Mullahs. It is evidently proved that such practices are continuing in Iran since the Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

A highly influential Shi'a religious leader, with whom Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly consults, apparently told followers last month that coercion by means of rape, torture and drugs is acceptable against all opponents of the Islamic regime. In the wake of a series of publications worldwide regarding the rape and torture of dissident prisoners in Iran 's jails, supporters of Ahmadinejad gathered with him in Jamkaran, a popular pilgrimage site for Shi'ite Muslims on the outskirts of Qom , on August 11, 2009. According to Iranian pro-democracy sources, the gathered crowd heard from Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi and Ahmadinejad himself regarding the issue.

According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center [ITIC], an independent intelligence analysis organization, Mesbah-Yazdi is considered Ahmadinejad's personal spiritual guide. A radical totalitarian even in Iranian terms, he holds messianic views, supports increasing Islamization, calls for violent suppression of domestic political opponents, and, according to the ITIC, "declared that obeying a president supported by the Supreme Leader was tantamount to obeying God."

At the Jamkaran gathering, Mesbah-Yazdi and Ahmadinejad answered questions about the rape and torture charges. The following text is from a transcript by Iranian dissidents to be a series of questions and answers exchanged between the Ayatollah and some of his supporters.

Asked if a confession obtained by applying psychological, emotional and physical pressure was valid and considered credible according to Islam, Mesbah-Yazdi replied: "Getting a confession from any person who is against the Velayat-e Faqih [Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists], or the regime of Iran's mullahs] is permissible under any condition."

The Ayatollah gave the identical answer when asked about confessions obtained through drugging the prisoner with opiates or addictive substances.

He was asked, "Can an interrogator rape the prisoner in order to obtain a confession?", which was the follow-up question posed to the Islamic cleric.

Mesbah-Yazdi answered: "The necessary precaution is for the interrogator to perform a ritual washing first and say prayers while raping the prisoner. If the prisoner is female, it is permissible to rape through the vagina or anus. It is better not to have a witness present. If it is a male prisoner, then it's acceptable for someone else to watch while the rape is committed."

This reply, and reports of the rape of teen male prisoners in Iranian jails, may have prompted the following question: Is the rape of men and young boys considered sodomy?

Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi: "No, because it is not consensual. Of course, if the prisoner is aroused and enjoys the rape, then caution must be taken not to repeat the rape."

A related issue, in the eyes of the questioners, was the rape of virgin female prisoners. In this instance, Mesbah-Yazdi went beyond the permissibility issue and described the Allah-sanctioned rewards accorded the rapist-in-the-name-of-Islam:

"If the judgment for the [female] prisoner is execution, then rape before execution brings the interrogator a spiritual reward equivalent to making the mandated Haj pilgrimage [to Mecca], but if there is no execution decreed, then the reward would be equivalent to making a pilgrimage to [the Shi'ite holy city of] Karbala."

One aspect of these permitted rapes troubled certain questioners: What if the female prisoner gets pregnant? Is the child considered illegitimate?

Mesbah-Yazdi answered: "The child borne to any weakling [a denigrating term for women] who is against the Supreme Leader is considered illegitimate, be it a result of rape by her interrogator or through intercourse with her husband, according to the written word in the Koran. However, if the child is raised by the jailer, then the child is considered a legitimate Shi'a Muslim."

Meanwhile, the same devil Ahmadinejad in another live interview with state run radio station said that that any rape or torture of political prisoners in Iranian detention centers in recent months had been carried out by "enemy" agents, not the government."

Recently two prominent members of Iran 's human rights community, the feminist lawyer and journalist Shadi Sadr and the blogger and activist Mojtaba Samienejad, published essays online from inside Iran arguing that far from being a new phenomenon, prison rape has a long history in the Islamic Republic.

In her essay Ms... Sadr wrote:

"Published reports are available about these types of torture committed against women political prisoners after the 1979 Revolution. The most systematic type of reported rape has been the rape of virgin girls who were sentenced to death by execution because of political reasons. They were raped on the night before execution.. These reports have been substantiated by frequent statements from the relatives of women political prisoners. On the day after the execution, authorities returned their daughter's dead body to them along with a sum considered to be the alimony. Reports state that in order to lose their virginity, girls were forced to enter into a temporary marriage with men who were in charge of their prison. Otherwise it was feared that the executed prisoner would go to heaven because she was a virgin!

"It is known beyond a shadow of a doubt, that during the 1980s, the rape of women political prisoners was prevalent. It was so prevalent as to make Ayatollah Montazeri, who was Khomeini's deputy at the time, write the following to Khomeini in a letter dated October 7, 1986: "Did you know that young women are raped in some of the prisons of the Islamic Republic?""

Recently Mr. Samienejad, who was imprisoned in the past for blogging but has managed to avoid detention this year, published a post, in English, headlined, Memories of Prison and Raped Prisoners. Mr. Samienejad's post began:

"The practice of rape on prisoners, brought up by [reformist Mehdi] Karoubi in his letter to [former President Ali Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani, has existed for the last three decades in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Many prisoners have written about it in their memoirs, and rumors have always existed about the issue... Prisoner rape is one of the most horrific forms of human rights violations in Iran , but not much has been said about it until now, despite its widespread practice. Social stigmas have made people reluctant to discuss the issue, and an admission of the practice would have had grave implications for the Islamic Republic. However the taboo is broken now; Rafsanjani, the second most powerful figure of the regime, has now publicly been informed about rape in prisons. A door has been opened and the issue must now be discussed. I saw and heard about many rape cases during my prison term. With the issue now open for discussion, I want to retrieve from my memories some of the stories and retell them, so we can better know who these rapists are.

In the first of five harrowing memories, Mr. Samienejad writes that during his detention four years ago:

"The terms 'coke bottle' and 'baton' were constantly used by my interrogators, who were threatening to use these objects on me."

Mr. Samienejad also describes his unsuccessful attempt to get prison authorities to accept a letter of complaint he wrote on behalf of another prisoner who appeared to have been raped. He concludes:

"Prison authorities never investigate these cases and do not take them seriously. If I were to write all my memories of such cases I would have to write about many cases. What you just read in this article are only a few examples of what I saw. In my two years of imprisonment, I witnessed and heard about hundreds of cases of rape. I will write about them gradually in the future."

Despite what he says is this first-hand knowledge of brutal abuses by Iranian authorities, Mr. Samienejad contacted The Lede to say that it is important to him that outsiders understand that the blame lies within specific individuals. According to Mr. Samienejad he and other Iranian activists were upset that an editorial about prison rape in New York Times was headlined "Shame On Iran ."

Iranian pro-democracy activist and eminet journalist Shirin Sadeghi wrote in an article: "On Friday June 19, a large group of mourners gathered at the Ghoba mosque in Tehran to await a speech about the martyrs of the post-election protests by presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. According to one Iranian blog, 28-year-old Taraneh Mousavi was one of a group of people that was arrested by plainclothesed security forces for attending the gathering.

"Taraneh, whose first name is Persian for "song", disappeared into arrest.

"Weeks later, according to the blog, her mother received an anonymous call from a government agent saying that her daughter has been hospitalized in Imam Khomeini Hospital in the city of Karaj, just north of Tehran -- hospitalized for "rupturing of her womb and anus in... an unfortunate accident".

"When Taraneh's family went to the hospital to find her, they were told she was not there.

"According to another Iranian blog which claims to have original information about Taraneh from her family, Iranian security forces contacted Taraneh's family after the hospital visit warning them not to publicize Taraneh's story and not to associate her disappearance with arrests made at post-election protests, claiming instead that she had tried to harm herself because of feeling guilty for having pre-marital sex.

"Witnesses have come forward to the various Internet sites who are covering Taraneh's story, stating that she was mentally and physically abused in Tehran's notorious Evin prison and also that a person who matches her physical description and injuries had been treated at the Imam Khomeini Hospital, was unconscious when witnessed and was later transferred out of the hospital while still unconscious.

"Taraneh's is not the first allegation of brutal raping of a post-election protester -- according to the UK Guardian, an 18 year old boy in Shiraz was repeatedly gang raped by prison officials while in detention after being arrested for participating in the protests on June 15. That boy's father won't let him back in the family home."

Despite its agitations for reform, Iranian society remains traditional, according to Iranian-British blogger Potkin Azarmehr, and it's the stigma of rape that is being used as a weapon against the protesters. "By killing protesters, the government makes martyrs of them, but by raping them and allowing them to live, it makes them shunned in society," Azarmehr said.

Not that the stigma of rape is exclusive to Iran and other more traditional societies. A friend of Azarmehr's who is presently in Iran told him that he's sick of hearing that people like Taraneh are better off dead" from friends abroad, just because they can't handle the fact that she's been raped.

The psychology of threatening protesters and political activists is not a new science. The strategies and ultimate goals are the same for any kind of torture: to humiliate, disembody [through denying the victim authority over his/her own physical self], extract confessions [whether true or false] and ultimately permanently terrorize the victims to prevent further 'disturbances'... The last part often fails spectacularly, as victims tend to feel even more antagonism toward the perpetrators, and even more of a 'do or die' mentality about agitating for change at any cost.

Prison abuse and torture is also about marking these victims as defiled human beings -- it's like a scarlet letter of social isolation against them, to deny them the community support and strength which they need to move past those memories and not be defined by them. This is where others can step in and change the very attitudes toward abuse which so many institutions count on when they commit these crimes.

The story of Taraneh's condition is still unfolding and there are no certain confirmations of its details beyond the reports of bloggers who are obliged to remain anonymous for safety reasons -- but the idea that political prisoners are being mistreated in this way is not new to Iran and is a significant element of a program of terror which has sustained the current system in Iran.

With allegations of sexual assault in prisons brought to the fore in Iran , authorities meet with Mehdi Karroubi, the figure who broached the taboo subject, to look into the claims.

Rapporteur of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Kazem Jalali, who heads a Parliament committee tasked with probing into the death and detention of those arrested in the post-election frenzy, said the board met with the leading opposition figure on August 24, 2009 for examination of evidence provided on alleged jail rape.

The three-hour meeting took place after Karroubi wrote a letter to the influential Head of the Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, on July 29, claiming that jailers brutally raped post-vote protesters in Iran 's detention centers.

The publication of the letter caused an uproar inside and outside Iran , with many clerics saying that if true, the issue would be a catastrophe for the Islamic Republic.

Jalali told Mehr News Agency that six lawmakers -- including himself, Omidvar Rezaei, Ali Motahhari, Mehdi Sanaie, Parviz Sorouri and Farhad Tajari -- met Karroubi in his office on Monday where he talked about four alleged victims of jailhouse rape at the hands of security personnel.

According to Jalali, the two-time former Majlis speaker will introduce the alleged victims to the probe committee for further investigation.

Karroubi, however, said that while these four victims are ready to testify before Parliament, they do not feel safe to do so.

The head of the Majlis probe committee said it would be scheduled that the four alleged victims speak up about their torment in front of the board.

He added that the committee is also set to hold a meeting on the issue with Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani and the country's newly-appointed Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani.

Alongside the meeting with the probe committee, Karroubi's party Etemad-e-Melli [National Trust] published a report on its website which made public remarks by an inmate who had allegedly been subject to sexual abuse.

The victim says defeated candidate Karroubi helped him get through difficult times after his dreadful experience and get rid of suicidal thoughts.

The victim adds that he had met with a representative of the former general prosecutor who after listening to his account expressed his sympathy to him, saying "alas" in reaction to the situation.

A 15-year-old boy, Reza, has alleged that he was locked up in Iran 's Basij militia base for 20 days, where he was beaten up, raped repeatedly and subjected to sexual humiliation and abuse.

Reza is so horrified with the incident that he refuses to go outside and is terrified of being left alone.

"My life is over.. I don't think I can ever recover," The Times quoted Reza, as saying.

A doctor who is treating him, has confirmed that he is suicidal, and bears the appalling injuries consistent with his story.

Reza's family is also enduring the pain with him and is exploring ways to flee Iran .

Reza's ordeal began in mid-July, when he was arrested along with 40 other teenagers during an opposition demonstration.

He claimed that the arrested teenagers were taken to the Basij militia base, where they were blindfolded, stripped to their underwear, whipped with cables and then locked in a steel shipping container.

Reza claims that three men on the first night singled him out and pushed him to the ground... He further said that one held his head down, another sat on his back and the third urinated on him efore raping him. [Source: Asian News International].

And here is another disturbing information from Bangladesh , on persecution of religious minorities and forceful conversion of Hindus by influential Muslim thugs. Bangladesh Minority Watch [BDMW] - Dhaka received an appeal from Ajoy Kumar Dey and his wife Mrs. Dolly Rani Dey of 84/1 Nagar Khanpur under Police Station and District – Narayanganj on the allegation that their only minor son –Suvashish Dey [17] was abducted on 30.07.2009 at about 12-30 p.m. from their house and forcefully converted to Islam. Suvbashis is a meritorious student and he passed Secondary School Certificate and Higher School Certificate examinations with credit. But the police neither assisted to recover their children nor arrested any perpetrators despite specific allegations made to police. [General Diary Entry No. 1713 dated 31.7.2009 filed by Ajoy Kumar Dey]. Ajoy Kumar and Dolly Rani believe that their only son was abducted for forceful conversion by the thugs belonging to Islamic fundamentalists groups.

Both the news on rape inside prison in Iran or forceful conversion in Bangladesh are matters of great concern. The global population favoring peace should raise voice against such atorocious attitude of the Islamist regimes or nations with majority Muslim population before one more male or female prisoner is sexually abused in Iran or another religious minority member is abducted for forceful conversion in Bangladesh .



SALAH UDDIN SHOAIB CHOUDHURY
Journalist, Columnist, Author & Peace Activist
Skype: shoaibnoca
Editor & Publisher, Weekly Blitz www.weeklyblitz.net
Director, FORCEFIELD NFP
PEN USA Freedom to Write Award 2005; AJC Moral Courage Award 2006
Key to the Englewood City, NJ, USA [Highest Honor] 2007; Monaco Media Award, 2007

Continued (Permanent Link)

A bit behind schedule, Saudi Arabia moves into the twentith century - with Movies

In 1961, Saudi Arabia took a bold step into the nineteenth century, when, under the pressure of the evil, colonialist, petroleum driven imperialist Americans, it abolished slavery. This step threatened the traditional Saudi way of life, and is a prime example of Western arrogance. Now, succumbing to the evil blandishments of the west, the Muslim monarchy has introduced, horror of horrors, the cinema. into the capital city of Riyadh. Protesters rightly pointed out that films violate Islamic values. There is no telling where this degeneracy will end. Will they grant women the right to vote? Drivers' licenses? Will they stop punishing homosexuality with death? Will they stop cutting off the hands of theives? Will they, horror of horros, allow Jewish sons of dogs and apes, or Christian sons of dogs and pigs, to practice their own religions or to enter the holy city of Mecca?  

Protests as Saudi film screened in Riyadh

Conservative protesters believe the film undermines Islamic values

People in the Saudi capital Riyadh are being allowed to go to the movies for the first time in 30 years.

 

The film is a Saudi-made offering called Menahi, a comedy about a naive Bedouin who moves to the big city.

A few religious hardliners have tried to turn movie-goers away, or to disrupt the performances.

No women were allowed into the performance, which followed similar initiatives in other Saudi cities with more liberal Islamic traditions.

The country has begun to open up to the arts since King Abdullah came to the throne in 2005.

But it still took the film's producers five months to gain government permission for showings in Riyadh, at a government-run cultural centre, and there was little advance publicity.

Public cinemas were shut down in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, as the country's deeply conservative leaders feared they would lead to the mixing of the sexes, and undermine Islamic values.

Since then, there's been little public entertainment, except for horse and camel racing, and festivals celebrating traditional Saudi culture.

Saudi Arabia is also the base of the Arabic entertainment company Rotana, owned by the billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

The Rotana network has produced Menahi, and it has already been showing it in several other Saudi cities, including Jeddah and Taif.

Woman were allowed into screenings outside Riyadh, although they sat on the upper floor while the ground floor was reserved for men. But Islamic practice is even stricter in Riyadh.

Popcorn

The film has been showing in Riyadh since Friday, at the King Fahd Cultural Centre, with two performances a day attracting near capacity audiences of about 300.

On Saturday, a group of conservative men gathered outside the centre, trying to persuade people from going in.

Most cinema-goers politely ignored them, as they queued up for soft drinks and popcorn, and for a chance to pose with the film's stars.

Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of King Abdullah, has said he believes that cinemas will eventually open in Saudi Arabia. And last year the kingdom held its first Saudi film festival.

The audience for Menahi has been enthusiastic, with one movie-goer, quoted by AFP news agency, calling it "the first step in a peaceful revolution".

In 2005, the Saudi authorities allowed a hotel in Riyadh to screen foreign cartoons dubbed into Arabic to audiences - but only to women and children.

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Continued (Permanent Link)

'Durban II' draft resolution drops Israel criticism

If this is factual, it is good news. The question remains, whether the meeting itself will be turned into a circus.

Draft for 'Durban II' meeting drops Israel criticism
Mar. 17, 2009
Associated Press , THE JERUSALEM POST

Muslim-backed references to 'defamation of religion' and Israel have been dropped from a draft being prepared for next month's world racism meeting, United Nations officials said on Tuesday.

The draft now speaks only of concern about the "negative stereotyping of religions" and does not single out Israel for criticism.

Muslim countries had demanded free speech be limited to prevent criticism of Islam and other faiths. They also wanted to take Israel to task for its treatment of Palestinians.

Israel and Canada have said that they will boycott the April 20-25 meeting in Geneva. The United States and Italy said that they would not attend unless countries committed to a balanced declaration. The European Union warned it may stay away unless Muslim countries back down.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Prostitution in the Middle East: Mothers pimp daughers in Iraq

We could predict that a repressed society would produce prostitution. Time magazine is shocked at the Iraqi sexportation industry, but in fact it is a staple of the Arab and Muslim world.

Here's an excerpt from Time's article on Iraq: Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

By Rania Abouzeid / Baghdad

She goes by "Hinda," but that's not her real name. That's what she's called by the many Iraqi sex traffickers and pimps who contact her several times a week from across the country. They think she is one of them, a peddler of sexual slaves. Little do they know that the stocky, auburn-haired woman is an undercover human rights activist who has been quietly mapping out their murky underworld since 2006.

That underworld is a place where nefarious female pimps hold sway, where impoverished mothers sell their teenage daughters into a sex market that believes females who reach the age of 20 are too old to fetch a good price. The youngest victims, some just 11 and 12, are sold for as much as $30,000, others for as little as $2,000. "The buying and selling of girls in Iraq, it's like the trade in cattle," Hinda says. "I've seen mothers haggle with agents over the price of their daughters." The trafficking routes are both local and international, most often to Syria, Jordan and the Gulf (primarily the United Arab Emirates). The victims are trafficked illegally on forged passports, or "legally" through forced marriages. A married female, even one as young as 14, raises few suspicions if she's travelling with her "husband." The girls are then divorced upon arrival and put to work.

Nobody knows exactly how many Iraqi women and children have been sold into sexual slavery since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, and there are no official numbers because of the shadowy nature of the business. Baghdad-based activists like Hinda and others put the number in the tens of thousands. Still, it remains a hidden crime; one that the 2008 US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report says the Iraqi government is not combating. Baghdad, the report says, "offers no protection services to victims of trafficking, reported no efforts to prevent trafficking in persons and does not acknowledge trafficking to be a problem in the country."

But it is not much different in other Arab and Muslim countries. Those that have stricter laws and better policing form lucrative export markets for their neighbors.

Cross posted: Israel News Middle East Analysis

Continued (Permanent Link)

See how a strong Muslim strikes

Legitimate criticism of Israel?

 

The [Jews] say: We are the second most powerful force on the face of the Earth. And America keeps supporting them – may Allah blow up all of them. The EU supports them with all its might – may Allah annihilate its leaders.

See how a strong Muslim strikes:

 

Then, Hamza landed a blow, which cut his hand and shoulder, and split his chest down to the navel, until his lung was exposed. See what bravery. See how a strong Muslim strikes. He landed a blow that cut his hand and his shoulder, and all the way to his navel, exposing his lung. A single blow of the sword, and he went straight to Hell.

 

MEMRI
January 12, 2009  Clip No. 2012
Egyptian Cleric Muhammad Al-Zughbi Draws Lessons from the Battles of Early Islam and Prays for the Annihilation of the US and European Leaders

Following are excerpts from an address by Egyptian cleric Muhammad Al-Zughbi, which aired on Al-Rahma TV on January 12, 2009:

 

Muhammad Al-Zughbi: The accursed Europe stood by the accused Jews, as is its custom. The pulverized United States – I pray that Allah destroys it and saves the Muslims from it – stood by these [Jews]. Today, it sent them over 40,000 tons of weapons, bullets, mortars, and missile launchers. Yes, they sent them crushing weapons. They sent them bombs.

 

[...]

 

[In the Battle of Uhud,] Abu Shaiba challenged [the Muslims] to a duel. He was such a champion that even the Muslims nicknamed him "the Ram of the Battalion." The Ram of the Battalion – he was strong. He was one of the Qureish horsemen. He cried: Who dares to fight me? Hamza stepped up against him. See what self-confidence! He placed his trust in Allah. They exchanged two blows. Then, Hamza landed a blow, which cut his hand and shoulder, and split his chest down to the navel, until his lung was exposed. See what bravery. See how a strong Muslim strikes. He landed a blow that cut his hand and his shoulder, and all the way to his navel, exposing his lung. A single blow of the sword, and he went straight to Hell. .

 

[...]

 

There was a strong man from among the polytheists, who was finishing off any wounded Muslims he saw. He would look for the wounded, cut off their heads, and mutilate their bodies. Whenever he found a wounded man, he would kill him. He would kill him! Not only that, but he would mutilate their bodies. Abu Dujana approached him. The polytheist was like a mule. A big jackass – like that accursed, shoe-stricken, big jackass from the White House, the one with the two big ears. A Jackass. A big jackass. Or like that lowlife [Olmert], who slaughters the Palestinians, who faces 13 corruption charges, including one for sexual harassment. May Allah curse him and all his supporters.

 

The big jackass came up to him. Al-Zubeir says: [Al-Dujana] was small, but the other one was a real mule. He was like all those Jewish and American mules. Zubeir said: I followed them to see what they were doing. They exchanged two blows. Abu Dujana deflected the blow with his shield. Then Abu Dujana jumped on him and finished him off. He killed him on the spot.

 

Zubeir said: I kept following him. I saw him turn towards a horseman, who was tearing Muslims to pieces. He crept up behind him, but as he was about to bring his sword down on his neck, he suddenly heard loud wailing of women. You know how it goes... He was surprised, so he lifted his sword rather than bring it down on the man's neck. It turned out it was a woman – Hind bint Utbah, the wife of Abu Sufyan. She was slaughtering Muslims, sowing death among them. Hamza said: No, the sword of the Prophet is too lofty to be used to kill a woman. By Allah, I will never do it. I will never strike a woman with the sword of the Prophet.

 

The Jewish dogs should learn moral values from us. He defeated this woman, who slaughtered Muslims and mutilated their bodies, but he refused to kill a woman with the sword of the Prophet – not a woman or a child. Have these dogs learnt this lesson? They slaughter women and children, and the other dogs keep sending them weapons. May Allah finish all of them off. May Allah destroy them completely.

 

[...]

 

The [Jews] say: We are the second most powerful force on the face of the Earth. And America keeps supporting them – may Allah blow up all of them. The EU supports them with all its might – may Allah annihilate its leaders.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Wife beating in Islam explained

From MEMRI

December 24, 2008 Clip No. 2006

Egyptian cleric Galal Al-Khatib Explains Wife-Beating in Islam

Following are excerpts from a sermon by Egyptian cleric Galal Al-Khatib, which aired on Al-Rahma TV on December 24, 2008.

Galal Al-Khatib: One of the husband's rights is to discipline his wife if she is disobedient. What does the word "disobedience" mean? Disobedience is to leave the house without the husband's permission, to refuse to obey the husband in bed, to speak to the husband impolitely, or to do the opposite of what he likes. All these are forms of disobedience. Religious law has instated several measures of disciplining a disobedient wife. These measures must be followed consecutively. You cannot jump to the third measure before despairing of the second, and you cannot jump to the second before despairing of the first. The order must be followed. The first measure for reforming a disobedient wife is to admonish her. The husband should talk to her gently, reminding her of God, and reminding her that if she wants to enter Paradise, she must obey him. He must tell her that by pleasing her husband, she pleases God, and that his rights supersede the rights of her parents.

[...]

Okay, if admonishing doesn't work, the next measure is "banishment." Some say that the wife should be banished from his bed, while others say he should refrain from having sex with her, although I do not agree with the latter view, because having sex is one of the rights of the husband, so how can he discipline her by depriving himself of sex? It's enough if he refrains from smiling and saying nice things to her, and instead, he gives her the cold shoulder, but he has the right to have sex with her, even during banishment.

Okay, he's tried admonishing, he's tried banishment – but nothing. Her emotions are numb, and she says: Good riddance. So what is the next measure? "...and beat them." Beating. The Prophet Muhammad said that the beatings should be light, and that one should avoid the face, or the sensitive areas, which might lead to broken bones, or might leave a mark that would spoil her beauty, whether on her face or anywhere on her body. Beatings that draw blood, or break bones, or leave a scar, a black mark on the skin, or any obvious mark, which would make people know that she was harshly beaten – this is forbidden.

How should the beatings go? Maybe a light slap on her shoulder, or maybe a not-so-light pinch, or a kind of gentle shove. He should make her feel that he wants to reform her, and let her know that he is displeased with her. It is like saying: None of the measures that work with sensitive people work with you. A word would be enough for any wife with lofty morals, but with you, words do not help. Then he attempts a new direction, appealing to her femininity and emotions, by making her feel that he doesn't want her or love her. When this doesn't work, he says to her: With you, I have reached a stage which is only appropriate for inhumane people – the stage of beating.

Beating is one of the punishments of religious law. What kind of people are beaten? Virgin adulterers, both men and women, are beaten as a means of discipline. Who else is beaten? A person who committed an offense and was sentenced by the judge to beatings. Who else is beaten? Someone who committed a crime. By beating his wife, the husband is saying: You've committed a grave sin that merits beatings.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Saudi op-ed protests against anti-Mickey Mouse crusade

This is not really about a mouse. It is about freedom:

 

This kind of hasty judgment reminds us that what we really miss in Saudi Arabia is the ability to discuss matters, and to have the right to disagree if we think differently on issues being discussed.

Amen brother!

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Death to Mickey Mouse!
Abeer Mishkhas | abeermishkhas@arabnews.com

A sheikh was recently on Al-Majd TV and spoke in great detail about rats. He went on and on about how bad rats and mice are, listing all the benefits gained by eliminating them. I don't know how informative that section of the sheikh's talk was but I am sure most people who were watching the program were either not listening or shaking their heads in disbelief. But the talk did not end with any obvious statements of harm caused by rats and mice; the sheikh continued by denouncing the fact that children these days are not getting the message about mice and rats because they have been influenced by Western cartoons that represent mice as funny and clever. Think Tom and Jerry and Mickey Mouse. To conclude and drive his point home he said, "They like Mickey Mouse whereas in reality Mickey Mouse should be killed." Thus ended the talk, and although it was as absurd as can be, it seems that such talks have become a normal thing on TV these days. As satellite channels proliferate, they pack their broadcasts with as much as they can of what they feel will attract viewers and religious programs are sure winners, especially in Ramadan.

The problem lies not only with the channels. Many of the programs often depend on people's calls and questions. Those questions can vary from asking for advice about a religious duty to asking the sheikh's opinion on any subject under the sun - hence the mouse question. On a panel of women scholars on an Egyptian channel last week, one of the interesting things the three women agreed upon was that some people ask for scholars' opinions on almost anything, whether it is a worthy matter or just a mundane everyday triviality. I have to say that those women's opinions were refreshing. They wanted people to stick to major, sensible and important issues. Which brings us back to the death sentence against Mickey Mouse.

This was not the first - and will not be the last - of verdicts that will make us question the person who issues it, or the stream of religious verdicts that almost everyone comes up with everyday and which have to be countered with questions, debates and discussions. We cannot just sit and listen and accept anything. When people hear these opinions, they rightly ask and question and criticize if need be. That is what reason dictates and it in no way contradicts faith. But this is not what a prominent Saudi scholar said last week. He actually demanded that journalists and writers who criticize or object to prominent Saudi scholars' pronouncements and fatwas be punished, and eventually sacked from their jobs. The punishment he asks for ranges from lashes to long imprisonment to firing them from their jobs.

I certainly understand that if a writer has insulted or lied about a sheikh or any other person, he must face the legal consequences of his actions. The offended party has the right to sue the offender and this is how it should be. But what the sheikh has asked for is simple punishment for even criticizing and questioning the opinions of religious scholars. With all due respect to the sheikh, I beg to differ. Criticism and debate does not mean that writers are crossing any lines; writers and journalists are citizens and are affected - like everyone else - by religious discourse, and if they choose to discuss a religious issue, or differ with a scholar that does not warrant that they be lashed, imprisoned or lose their jobs.

This kind of hasty judgment reminds us that what we really miss in Saudi Arabia is the ability to discuss matters, and to have the right to disagree if we think differently on issues being discussed. And as a reminder we mention a small incident from Islamic history. When the second caliph, Omar, said in one of his sermons that women should not ask for high dowries, a woman who was present raised her voice and disagreed with him and provided proof from the Qur'an in support of women's rights for dowries. What did Omar do? He acknowledged his mistake in front of everyone. Just a reminder!

Continued (Permanent Link)

Ayatollah Jannati: U.S. Economic Woes 'Divine Punishment'

The Ayatollah forgot to mention 50% inflation in Iran last year...

 

From MEMRI:

October 3, 2008

No. 2070

Ayatollah Jannati In Iran Friday Sermon: U.S. Economic Woes 'Divine Punishment' – 'The Unhappier They [Americans] Become, The Happier We Get'; 'Americans Should Wait To Be Slapped In The Face By Islam, Muslims, And The Islamic Revolution'

In his October 3, 2008 Friday sermon at the Tehran University campus, Iranian Guardian Council secretary and interim Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said that Iran's enemies had targeted its economy, and that the U.S.'s economic crisis was "divine punishment" that had made Iranians very happy. Calling the U.S. presence on the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders a problem that "cannot be ignored." he said that Americans could expect to be "slapped in the face by Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic Revolution," and concluded his sermon by saying that since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, "drugs are being produced and distributed under U.S. supervision." [1]

Jannati: Iran Enemy Tactics Target Iranian Economy, Pit Sunnis Against Shi'ites, Undermine Iranian Officials

According to a report by the official Iranian news agency IRNA, Interim Tehran Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said today in his sermon that Iran's enemies have targeted its economy in vain hopes of countering the Islamic Republic.

IRNA said that Jannati told worshipers at the Tehran University campus that the enemies are bent on fanning economic crisis and problems, in a bid to confront Iran. He said that other enemy tactics included dividing Shi'ites and Sunnis and pitting Sunnis against Sunnis or Shi'ites against Shi'ites, and added that this policy is being pursued mostly in Iran and Iraq but also in other Muslim states.

Another enemy strategy, Jannati said, was distorting the image of Iranian officials. "They wish to undermine those who are backing the public and are trusted by them."

"We Are Happy That The U.S. Economy Has Come Across Difficulty... The Unhappier They Become, The Happier We Get"

Of the U.S.'s recent economic woes, Jannati said, "We are happy that the U.S. economy has come across difficulty. They are attesting unfavorable consequences of their conducts. They are experiencing divine punishment. We are happy over that. The unhappier they become, the happier we get, as they become happy as we get unhappy."

"Americans Should Wait To Be Slapped In The Face By Islam, Muslims, And The Islamic Revolution"

Jannati called the U.S. presence on the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders a problem that "cannot be ignored," saying, "They invade forcefully, refuse to observe any boundary, and are not committed to anything. They attack anywhere they wish; they kill anybody they want and consider anywhere as their property. Americans should wait to be slapped in the face by Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic Revolution."

In another part of his speech, Ayatollah Jannati hailed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his recent successful visit to the U.S. and speech at the U.N. General Assembly. "Anybody bravely raising the Islamic Republic and Revolutionary stances at the U.N. authoritatively and proudly, naming God, reciting the Koran, and citing the things that nobody dares to cite is worth admiration," he added.

He said that Ahmadinejad's announcement of support for the oppressed and for trying the U.S. for injustices it has committed, as well as his outlining if Iran's clear stances on Israel, are valuable subjects which deserve to be set as a precedent. He added that "Iranian ambassadors should honor the stance anywhere and should not show any weakness."

"Drugs Are Being Produced And Distributed Under U.S. Supervision"

To end his sermon, Ayatollah Jannati said that since the occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S., poppy cultivation has increased several times over, and drugs are being produced and distributed under U.S. supervision.

---

[1] IRNA (Iran), October 3, 2008.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Fatwa Watch: Fatwa prohibiting voting for a Chistian Candidate in Sudan

The question is, whether people will follow the Fatwa or the columnist.

October 6, 2008 No. 2072

Sudanese Columnist Criticizes Fatwa Prohibiting Voting for a Christian Candidate

The unprecedented nomination of a Christian candidate for Sudan's presidential election, by the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, a party representing the former southern Sudan rebels, has caused public upheaval, and sparked numerous reactions in the Sudanese press.

In response to the party's nomination of its chairman Salva Kiir Miardit, the Sudanese daily Al-Watan published a fatwa by Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hassan forbidding Muslims from voting for a non-Muslim candidate in any election, whether local or general.(1) In the Sudanese daily Al-Sahafa, columnist 'Omar Al-Qarai criticized the fatwa, as well as how the Sudanese ruling party exploits religion for political purposes.(2)

Following are excerpts from Al-Qarai's column:

"No One Has Noticed the Speciousness Of This Fatwa"

"The fatwa… [issued] by a religious scholar known from his appearances in the media, which bans a Muslim from voting for a non-Muslim in elections, has caused turmoil in the streets of Sudan. The reason for this is not [the ban's] religious import, but its political implications, and also [the fact that] its publication was timed, for propaganda purposes, to precede the upcoming elections.

"However, no one has noticed the speciousness of this fatwa. As a consequence of the 2005 peace agreement [between the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement], the Muslims in the North, including the sheikh who authored the fatwa, agreed that a non-Muslim should be appointed vice-president of the republic… This non-Muslim would bear responsibility at the highest level for the country and its residents, and in particular, for the Ministry of Religious Endowment, which appoints the imam preachers who issue such bizarre fatwas.

"If Islam does not allow voting for a non-Muslim to promote him to a position of power, why does it allow a non-Muslim to become a ruler without being voted in? Why does this sheikh speak to us about voting but fail to discuss the Islamic view of propitiating non-Muslims and accepting them as rulers over the Muslims?

"[Is it conceivable that] the author of this fatwa, and his superiors in the Ministry of Religious Affairs and in the Ministry of Religious Endowment, would obey this non-Muslim ruler and accept his authority, and then forbid us to vote for him?"

"The Fatwa Presupposes That... Justice, Loyalty, Honesty, Wisdom, Expertise, and [a Work Ethic] Cannot Be Found in a Non-Muslim... This Contradicts Our Practical Experience"

"According to the correct religious knowledge, which is based on the basic principles of Islam, this fatwa is a priori invalid; it clearly shows this mufti's ignorance of the veracity of religion and of the times in which we live. The fatwa's lack of validity stems from its premises, which are false both intellectually and traditionally. Indeed, the fatwa presupposes that the qualities of justice, loyalty, honesty, wisdom, expertise, and [work ethic] cannot be found in a non-Muslim. Consequently, he cannot be elected to conduct our affairs, nor can we accept his authority. This contradicts our practical experience, which shows that many non-Muslims are better qualified for [such positions] than Muslims, whether from a professional or ethical standpoint…

"When at the turn of the past century Imam Muhammad 'Abduh visited Britain, he made a famous remark: "In England, I found Islam but not Muslims, while in Egypt, I found Muslims but no Islam!" It is in non-Muslim countries, rather than in Muslim states, that 'Abduh found the characteristics of justice, loyalty, honesty, and responsibility, which justify the allocation of public offices to individuals…

"In Sudan, our brief experience with the national unity government(3) has shown that the government of southern Sudan has dealt with corruption, by investigating the incidents, meting out punishment to parties involved, and even firing several senior officials and appointing others in their place.

"As for the government of northern Sudan, although it is aware of corruption [in its midst], based on reports by the state comptroller, we have not heard of a single senior official who has been fired or tried on this charge. If so, which side is it proper for a citizen to vote for, if he wants a functional administration that acts for the good of the country, [disregarding] narrow personal interests?"

"Islamic Law… Permits Accepting Assistance from Non-Muslims in Performing Tasks For Which They Are More Qualified than Muslims"

"Perhaps this sheikh mufti is not familiar with, or does not accept, the Islamic knowledge that is rooted in basic principles. However, Islamic law [i.e. shari'a], compiled and interpreted by our ancestors in their books… permits accepting assistance from non-Muslims in performing tasks for which they are more qualified than Muslims.

"Our ancestors presented evidence to this effect from the [life of the] Prophet: When he and Abu-Bakr traveled from Mecca to Medina, they sought help from a polytheist who was expert in navigation.

"In the Islamic state, there were writers, accountants, and treasurers of Zoroastrian, Christian, or Jewish origin. If at that time, [people] had had to be voted in to these positions, the honest Muslims of early [generations] would have voted for capable non-Muslims, since they would have recognized their qualifications and trusted their loyalty and [moral] character."

This Fatwa "Has Nothing Whatsoever to Do With Islam – Rather, It Is One of the Pillars Supporting the Election Strategy"

"This ill-advised fatwa has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. Rather, it is one of the pillars supporting the election strategy of the National Congress [Party, headed by Sudanese President 'Omar Al-Bashir]. With the approach of election day, we will probably hear of more fatwas of this kind, which exploit the religions feeling of several foolish citizens in order to sell them the National Congress Party's worthless wares.

"In the past, mosques have been taken advantage of by this party in the worst possible manner for propaganda purposes, with both subtle and direct appeals being made to the worshippers to vote for its representatives. [The preachers] linked support for the National Congress with a war for the sake of Allah, warning time and again that whoever did not vote for it was doomed to burn in Hell!...

"A religiously motivated internecine war is a dangerous weapon, which has divided many a country [in the past], and will divide Sudan [as well], if wise people fail to expunge religious extremism from the political process…"

Endnotes:
(1) Al-Watan (Sudan), August 20, 2008.
(2) Al-Sahafa (Sudan), August 24, 2008.
(3) Following the signing of a peace agreement between the rebels of southern Sudan and the government, a national unity government was formed, incorporating the National Congress Party and Sudan's People's Liberation movement.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Barak: Arab areas in Jerusalem could be Palestinian capital

Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said some Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem could become the capital of a future Palestinian state as part of a final peace agreement. This is no different from the formula he offered in 2000. Palestinians continue to insist that Israel has no national rights whatever in East Jerusalem. The late Yasser Arafat amazed American politicians by claiming repeatedly that there had been no Jewish presence in Jerusalem in antiquity. Archeological finds give evidence of the Jewish monarchy as early as King Hezekiah in 700 BC and ancient writers commonly referred to Jerusalem as the former Jewish capital, but Palestinian leaders pretend this evidence does not exist. Arafat's views were frequently seconded by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Ikremah Sabri.

Prior to 1948, about 5,000 Jews lived in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. The community underwent attrition due to Arab riots in 1929 and 1936. In 1948, the entire community was ethnically cleansed by the Transjordan Legion under the supervision of British officers. East Jerusalem was also the site of the original campus of the Hebrew University, which was reconstituted after 1967. Arab media however, ignore the Jewish connection to East Jerusalem in modern times as well as ancient, and commonly refer to it as "Arab East Jerusalem" on the basis of the 19 year illegal Jordanian occupation.

East Jerusalem is also the site of Masjid Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, important Muslim holy places.

Fatah leaders have been promising a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem since the signing of the Oslo accords, though Israel never undertook to cede all of Jerusalem or any of it as part of a peace setltement.

"We can find a formula under which certain neighborhoods, heavily-populated Arab neighborhoods, could become, in a peace agreement, part of the Palestinian capital that, of course, will include also the neighboring villages around Jerusalem," Barak told Al-Jazeera television.

"I'm not sure whether the gaps are close enough," Barak said when asked if a deal was possible this year.

Officially, Israel is not discussing Jerusalem with the Palestinians at all, since the non-Zionist ultraorthodox Shas party insisted they would leave the coalition if any concessions were offered in Jerusalem. Orthodox and ultraorthodox Jews in the United States and Israel, rather than Zionists, are the chief opposition to Israeli compromise on the issue. As long as the Palestinians remain intent on excluding Israel entirely from East Jerusalem, the issue of Israeli compromise is a moot point.

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Did Hezbollah really lose?

This account of the Hezbollah victory in Lebanon, Armed and Dangerous, like many others, attempts to be optimistic about the final outcome: Hezbollah will be exposed as a group that is not really interested in fighting Israel so much as in taking over Lebanon. By using their arms against other Arabs, they forfeited their legitimacy and will eventually fail.

David Kenner writes in the New Republic article:

But by turning their weapons on their fellow countrymen earlier this month, Hezbollah has violated the "grand bargain" with the Lebanese public that has allowed them to remain militarized. And by targeting Sunni areas of Beirut and Druze villages in the Chouf, Hezbollah has revealed itself to be, at its heart, a sectarian militia after all, provoking new hostility among non-Shia Lebanese. "The street is very angry about what has happened," says Yehya Jaber, a journalist for The Future, a newspaper owned by Sunni leader Saad al-Hariri whose offices were ransacked and set aflame during the clashes. "No matter what the politicians do, this is a temporary peace."
....
If Hassan Nasrallah had kept his weapons aimed solely at Israel instead of involving them in Lebanon's sectarian struggle, he may still have won Rabih's grudging respect. But local threats weigh heavier on his mind than geopolitical concerns. "It's two different worlds," Rabih explains, gesturing towards Barbour, no more than a minute's stroll away. "There is a deep hatred between these neighborhoods now."

The resentment is even deeper among the few Sunnis who live in Barbour. "The army tried to come in [during the first day of clashes], but Amal humiliated them and told them to leave," says Sana, a Sunni shopkeeper whose son had to change his identifiably Sunni name to something more generic. "I used to have a picture of [assassinated former prime minister and Sunni leader] Rafik Hariri in my home," she continues, lamenting the need to adjust to life under Shia domination. "But I took it down when the fighting began, because I live next to one of the bodyguards of [Amal leader] Nabih Berri."

As the terror of last month's attacks subsides, the fear of Hezbollah among Lebanon's Sunni, Christian, and other minority communities is quickly turning to anger. By alienating the other sects, Hezbollah's short-term military victory seems to be turning into a long-term threat to its weapons and its autonomy. Their violation of the unspoken bargain of their militarization last month is a significant turning point in Lebanon's precarious sectarian balance--a move that has already started to undermine Hezbollah's special status among the Lebanese population.

Losing their weapons would be a major--and possibly fatal--blow to the group. Without its weapons, Hezbollah would probably lose the support of its Iranian sponsors (whose primary goal is to use the group as a front against Israel), making it difficult for the organization to maintain its patronage networks, and thus allowing space for new Shia leaders to emerge.


"It is difficult for me to imagine Hezbollah [surviving very long] as a toothless organization," Safa says. In light of this month's violence, that day may now be closer than ever before.

It might happen. The flaws in the above logic are legion however. Hassan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah are not stupid and they understood exactly how far they could go. They have engineered the takeover in such a way that from now on they no longer need force. They have veto power over any government decision according to the terms of the agreement. Therefore, it is almost inconceivable that they will be induced to lay down their arms. Moreover, while their might be a lot of dissatisfaction with the Hezbollah in Lebanon, this is meaningless unless it can be translated into armed force. How many divisions has Future TV? None. It was shut down in fact by Hezbollah thugs. In the showdown, the army sided with Hezbollah, working out a near-bloodless capitulation to Hezbollah demands, that only required that they remove their troops from the streets. Saad Hariri had no say in the matter. He was a prisoner in his own house, and his Future TV was put off the air. As Hezbollah had won all their demands, there was no reason for them to keep their troops in the streets. The Qatar agreement simply put the seal of approval on the Hezbollah victory. Moreover, Kenner ignores the huge capacity of Lebanese and their politicians to delude themselves. One has only to read the Beirut Daily Star to understand that a significant element of Sunni Arabs and Christians are willing to make believe that the Hezbollah are really working for the unity of Lebanon and that the Qatar agreement is a "good thing." This is no doubt preferable to opposing the Hezbollah, which has often proven to be very bad for the health of journalists and politicians.

Hebollah has managed to take power by assassinating its most important enemies and then using just enough armed force to make clear who is boss. It is far more likely that if Hezbollah ever "surrenders its arms" it will be because its own troops have been absorbed in, and have come to dominate the Lebanese army. At that point, there will be nothing left of Lebanese sovereignty. The issue of popular support doesn't matter. Islamic Republics like Iran are not dependent on the support of a democratic electorate. They maintain their rule at gun point. The AK-47 and the explosive device, rather than the ballot and the public opinion polls, will decide the future of Lebanon, just as they have now decided the Qatar "agreement."

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Salah Choudhury: The Man Islamists Cannot Silence

The Man Islamists Cannot Silence

http://www.israelenews.com/view.asp?ID=1594

Sunday, March 30, 2008 - By: Benkin, Richard

---

He fired the first salvo in 2003 and has been sticking his thumb in Islamist eyes ever since.  Bangladeshi journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury describes himself as a "Muslim Zionist."  He is unabashedly pro-US, pro-Israel, and anti-Islamist.  More importantly, he remains all of that from within the Muslim world, which he refuses to leave.  I have fielded any number of asylum requests for him, and he declined them all.  "Retreat is not in my vocabulary," he says, for he believes that if he were to leave his country, his credibility would be gone, and Islamists would claim victory; a satisfaction he refuses to give them.  "Bangladesh is my country," he says.  "Let the radicals leave!"

Since 2003, we have fought not only a battle of ideas but also a battle of wills with our adversaries; and the skirmishes never end.  Shoaib has been imprisoned and tortured.  He has been beaten, and Islamists bombed his newspaper before they and their cronies in the ruling party seized the premises.  All of this happened after Shoaib published articles that exposed the rising strength of Islamist radicals in Bangladesh, urged relations with Israel, and advocated genuine interfaith dialogue based on religious equality.

In November of that year, he was about to board a plane for Bangkok and then Israel (there are no direct flights between Dhaka and Tel Aviv), agents grabbed him.  Eventually, they charged him with sedition, treason, and blasphemy, which are capital offenses and could send Shoaib to the gallows. 

In 2005, however, after an intense seventeen month campaign for his freedom, Congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL) took on his case.  He summoned then Bangladeshi Ambassador Shamsher M. Chowdhury to his Washington office, and the three of us had a sometimes acrimonious, always difficult, hours-long meeting.  As Kirk (a member of the House Appropriations Committee) describes it, we had a "full and frank discussion," after which Dhaka agreed to free Shoaib Choudhury.

Our elation was short-lived, however, when Shamsher Chowdhury clarified that Shoaib would be freed on bail even though the ambassador had just admitted that there was no substance to the charges.  To be sure, we had won the most important point: Shoaib would be free.  Still, I looked up and said, "Not good enough.  It's an old and tired ruse used by tyrants," I continued.  "Free the dissident but keep the charges pending in order to silence him."  And so we argued some more until Chowdhury relented and agreed that Dhaka would drop the charges not long after Shoaib's release.

That was three years ago.  The charges remain, even though numerous Bangladeshi officials have made the same admission as the ambassador; that the charges are baseless and are maintained only to placate the country's radical Islamists.  Bangladesh's population is about 88 percent Muslim, a figure that is growing constantly, especially as Hindus are being ethnically cleansed from that country, falling from 18 to nine percent of the population.  Although radical Islamists affiliated with Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations represent only a small proportion of the population, they have infiltrated and taken charge of almost every major institution in Bangladesh from education and banking to police and the judiciary.

For months, both sides had settled into a sort of stasis until this past fall when the Bangladeshis tried illegally to revoke Shoaib's bail and send him back to prison.  The fact that we continued to frustrate these attempts could have had something to do with what happened next.  On the evening of March 18, as Shoaib sat at his desk working on another edition of his newspaper, Weekly Blitz, a large contingent of armed goons from the government's paramilitary squad -- the hated and feared Rapid Action Battalion or RAB -- burst into his office.  They ordered all employees out, seized Shoaib's means of contacting the outside, and began "interrogating" him. 

Fortunately, his driver quickly alerted Shoaib's brother, Sohail, who telephoned me in the United States.  Shoaib's life was in very real danger, so we determined on an immediate course of action.  Sohail called Luke Zahner, Second Secretary at the US Embassy in Dhaka, and a long time supporter of Shoaib's.  Zahner, who had previously helped set up USAID's elections support program in Iraq, notified U.S. Chargé d'Affaires Geeta Pasi.

I telephoned Kirk's office and described the events unfolding in Dhaka and their life-and-death nature to Andria Hoffman, who is Kirk's point person on the Choudhury case.  "These [RAB] are bad people.  I know them, and you don't even want them as friends, let alone be on their bad side.  They're the kind of group where people sometimes go into their custody and 'disappear.'" 

Hoffman got to Kirk, and they set up an emergency command center in his Longworth Building office.  I then called three other legislators who have been especially supportive of Shoaib:  Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ), and Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA).  Their staffs -- who had frequently worked with me on Shoaib's case -- said they would take action and coordinate further with Kirk's office. 

That done, I telephoned Bangladesh's DC embassy and told them the following:  "If I don't receive a telephone call confirming that Shoaib has been released unharmed and soon, you're going to have a s**t storm like you've never even imagined." Within a short time, the embassy received calls from all four members of Congress mentioned above, as well as several others who they got involved.  Hoffman called the Embassy's political secretary, Sheikh Mohammed Belal on his personal cell phone, demanding action.

Cut to Bangladesh.  After holding Shoaib for about an hour an a half, an RAB officer said (and I am paraphrasing here), 'Oh look, it appears he has some illegal drugs in his desk drawer.'  Now, I have known Shoaib as a brother for years, and we have spent a lot of time together.  The man is simply not involved in any way with drugs.  Moreover, he and I have spoken on many occasions of the paramount importance of his remaining  "squeaky clean" in every way so as not to give his enemies an excuse to further persecute him.  According to Sohail Choudhury, the evidence had to be planted, a tactic that RAB has been known to use rather liberally.  No matter; they blindfolded Shoaib and took him to a "detention center" within RAB's office in the capital.  According to Shoaib, the officers continued the verbal assault non-stop.  They threatened him specifically and journalists in general for their criticism of the current military-backed government.  They repeatedly called Shoaib a "Zionist spy and agent of the Jews."

At one point, Shoaib reminded them that they were violating a US Congressional Resolution that calls for an end to this sort of harassment, something with which the government said it would comply.  House Resolution 64, authored by Kirk and co-sponsored by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) calls on the Bangladeshis to drop all charges against Shoaib and end all harassment of him and his family. It passed last year by an overwhelmingly 409-1 margin.  Their response was a string of expletives about the United States and the value of its resolutions. 

As they approached the three hour mark, things were turning even nastier.  RAB officers told Shoaib that he could expect a steady diet of this, or even worse, unless he began working for them; something that he called "ridiculous."  Then the phone rang.  The officers told Shoaib that the call came from "a high government official" ordering them to let him go.  He phoned Sohail and asked him to bring him home. 

Before they allowed them to go, however, Shoaib's captors forced the pair to sign an affidavit giving RAB the power to enter their home or business at any time and for any reason; although it should be added that it had no warrant or other sort of order when its men broke into his newspaper earlier.  As such, Shoaib remains in danger, especially as his legal status remains equivocal at best.

Although Shoaib was released unharmed, the action represents a serious escalation of the government's and its Islamist cronies' attempt to silence this courageous journalist who now counts supporters on every continent.  Equally important, we have learned over the years that they do these things periodically to probe us and test our resolve.  They want to know if we are going to react or note.  They want to know if we still are ready to defend Shoaib and other anti-Islamists or if we have lost interest. 

Unfortunately, they started this false persecution on the assumption that no one would care what happened to Shoaib, and many in the government still believe that we Americans have little resolve -- and actually have told me that.  And so they go after us.  Our enemies count on this and point to success when they hear proposals to make concessions in Israel or to pull up stakes in Iraq and elsewhere.  If we don't respond, and respond with strength, they'll continue persecuting Shoaib and others like him.

Because, in fact, the stakes go beyond even the fate of this hero.  Muslim editors from Pakistan to Indonesia (and even the United States) have told us that Muslims throughout Asia are watching this case.  They want to know if it is possible to stand against the radicals and prevail -- without running to the safety of the West, as they put it.  If Shoaib prevails, they will be emboldened to act similarly.  If we let him go down -- and that is exactly how they will see it -- they will remain silent.

When Shoaib was in prison, his brother told me that people all over the world who need a champion to save them from oppression look only one place, the United States; not to Europe; not to tyrants like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or Fidel Castro who claim to be freedom fighters; and not to terrorist like Osama Bin Laden.  When we stand with Shoaib, we reinforce their belief in us.

In the meantime, Shoaib Choudhury refuses to be silent, especially he says given all the support he received.  Two days after his abuse at RAB's hands, he published another edition of Weekly Blitz.  Two of its headline articles were "RAB Cocoon of Terror" and "They want to Appease Islamists."  He is our ally; he is my brother; he is the bravest man I know.  He is the man whom Islamists cannot silence.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Continued (Permanent Link)

Breaking stereotypes: Muslim defends Jews in subway attack

Muslim saves Jews in subway attack

Published: 12/12/2007

A Muslim saved a group of Jews being attacked on a New York subway in an apparent hate crime.

Hassan Askari, a student at Berkeley College in Manhattan, came to the aid of Walter Adler when he and three friends were attacked on the Q train running between Manhattan and Brooklyn on the night of Dec. 7, according to The Associated Press.

Ten men and women, aged 19 and 20, verbally and physically assaulted Adler and his friends after they wished the assailants "Happy Chanukah" in response to their "Merry Christmas" wish.

Askari, 20, tried to fight off the attackers, which gave Adler time to pull an emergency brake on the Brooklyn-bound train. The assailants were arrested at the next stop.

The attack is being investigated as a hate crime. One of the attackers reportedly had been arrested previously for a hate crime.

"That a random Muslim kid helped some Jewish kids, that's what's positive about New York," Adler, 23, told AP. Adler suffered a broken nose.

Source

Continued (Permanent Link)

The unbearable lightness of a teddy bear named Muhammad

Carlos discusses the case of the terrible teddy bear. What is worse perhaps than the arrest of a teacher for allowing students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, worse even than the demonstrations in Khartoum calling for her execution, is the "protests" against Sudanese goverment behavior by moderate Muslims. These take the form of "the lady was a visitor and didn't know our customs." That implies that had she been a Muslim, it would be perfectly OK to give her 40 lashes for allowing kids to name a teddy bear "Muhammad."

Oh sinful and ammoral and decadent Western society, that can allow a teddy bear to be named Muhammad! May Allah strike down the infidel sons of dogs and pigs, who send their people to corrupt our children by teaching them to read and write!

Strangely, the Muslims do not protest against the fact that the dictator of Egypt is also called Muhammad.

Ami Isseroff

Teddy the Terrible

by Carlos

Wild and Ferocious

December 1, 2007 - Do not take this lightly. This is worse even than Saudi Barbie.

This is the story of Muhammad the Teddy Bear, the latest scourge of Islam.

It all started in a Sudanese classroom. The kids were seven years old. Their teacher, Gillian Gibbons, 54, had an idea. She would have the children name a Teddy Bear, then practice writing about it. What should they name him? she asked her students.

"Abdullah!" said one.

"Hassan!" cried another.

But in the end, the name Muhammad was chosen, in honor of a boy in the class who also bore that name.

The children photographed the bear, and took turns taking it home on weekends. They kept diaries detailing what they did with it on these visits, then collected all the entries in a special book with the bear's picture on the cover and the label "My Name is Muhammad."

Cute? Hardly. When some parents saw the book, they complained. Ms. Gibbons was arrested and charged with insulting Islam. Muslim clerics in Sudan demanded she be whipped. At her trial Ms. Gibbons wept and insisted that she meant no harm. The court decided to be "lenient." It sentenced her to 15 days in prison and subsequent deportation to Britain. She could have received 40 lashes, six months in prison, and a fine. Such punishment would be in accordance with the sharia law upon which the Sudanese judicial system is based.

Protesters in Khartoum demand the execution of a teacher convicted of insulting Islam after her students named a teddy bear "Muhammad." (AFP - Getty Images)

Even sentencing Gibbons to expulsion was not enough to satisfy many Sudanese. On Friday thousands of Sudanese demonstrators flooded the streets, some armed with swords and clubs, others beating drums. They burned Gibbons' picture and demanded her execution. "Kill her, kill her by firing squad!" they shouted, and "No tolerance: Execution!" One sword-carrying demonstrator said: "It is a premeditated action, and this unbeliever thinks that she can fool us? What she did requires her life to be taken." Her life very possibly in danger, Gibbons had to be moved from the women's prison in Oumdurman to a secret location.


This Israel News article is continued here

Continued (Permanent Link)

Saudi Arabian rape victim gets more lashes

Some of you may remember this story:

Sex, Gender and the Middle East: Happy Women's Day - Saudi Woman gets 90 lashes for being raped

Well we knew it wouldn't end that way, right? Nobody gets 90 lashes for being raped.

There is a sequel. The woman appealed, and will get 200 lashes instead. A gratifying sequel, isn't it?

Here's the story, from the BBC, below.

Ami Isseroff

Saudi gang rape sentence 'unjust'

A lawyer for a gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six-months in jail says the punishment contravenes Islamic law.

The woman was initially pnished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes - she was in an unrelated man's car at the time of the attack.

When she appealed, judges doubled her sentence, saying she had been trying to use the media to influence them.

Her lawyer has been suspended from the case and faces a disciplinary session.

Abdel Rahman al-Lahem told the BBC Arabic Service that the sentence was in violation of Islamic law:

"My client is the victim of this abhorrent crime. I believe her sentence contravenes the Islamic Sharia law and violates the pertinent international conventions," he said.

"The judicial bodies should have dealt with this girl as the victim rather than the culprit."

The lawyer also said that his client his will appeal against the decision to increase her punishment.

Segregation laws

According to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in Qatif in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago.

Seven men from the majority Sunni community were found guilty of the rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from just under a year to five years.

The rapists' sentences were also doubled by the court. Correspondents say the sentences were still low considering the rapists could have faced the death penalty.

The rape victim was punished for violating Saudi Arabia's laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man.

On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence.

'Personal views'

Mr Lahem accused the court of letting personal views influence its decision:

"It seems that the sentence was influenced by the fact that the woman escalated the issue with her lawyer and also with the supreme judicial authorities," he said.

"This is astonishing because justice is supposed to be independent from all pressures as well as personal considerations, be it a feeling towards the lawyer or defendant herself," he added.

The Arab News quoted an official as saying the judges had decided to punish the girl for trying to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.

Mr Lahem said that the judges' decision to confiscate his license to work and stop him from representing his client is illegal.

From BBC

Continued (Permanent Link)

Islam and the scientific revolution - a critique

Hereunder is the last of Fjordman's three articles about Islam, Greeks and the Scientific revolution that are supposed to represent the Wisdom of the West about the East.

 

The other parts are here:

Part II of Islam, the Greeks and the Scientific Revolution

Do we know why Muslim society did not industrialize?

I am sorry for the size of this magnum opus, which will discourage those used to brief Web logs and articles. It is bad manners to pour out so many words in a Web log.  

 

I confess that I have reproduced these three articles out of the duty to consider views with which I disagree, so that I understand why I disagree. If you find them a torture, comfort yourself that such intellectual exercises are "good for the soul," like learning to conjugate Latin verbs. If you are looking for profound intellectual stimulation, you might do better watching Southpark.

 

They look like important intellectual documents. They mention important people like Pirenne, and Aristotle, and Martin Luther and even Albert Einstein. They remind us of things we know or ought to know: the invention of printing is related to the invention of paper, but printing was perfected only in the West; the Chinese and Arabs invented many things, but the inventions were only used by the West, and the like. We know all that, and we should not forget it. But do they tell us anything new, or anything about Islam?

 

As a brief review of the history of the rise of technology, they are not entirely without merit, though there are surely better ones (H.G. Wells Outline of World History for one). I won't comment much on Fjordman's views on the diffusion/importation of printing, gunpowder and the compass as opposed to their independent invention. I am not qualified to do so, and Fjordman, if he relies on sources like Wikipedia, may not be qualified either. In any case, if there was a reason for his discussion of that issue, it escapes me entirely. These three essays are mostly about Islam versus the West and specifically, why Islam failed to modernize, and that is what concerns us.

 

As an account of the fact that Muslim society failed to undergo modernization, whether it is called reformation, scientific revolution or industrial revolution, they pale beside Bernard Lewis's lucid and detailed accounts in numerous books and articles. A thesis doesn't qualify as worthy of intellectual merit just because it mentions a great many facts or quotes from intellectuals, or even because it is boring. An essay can be excruciatingly pedantic and chock full of minutiae and yet have less explanatory merit than an episode of The Simpsons. But Lewis, while he doesn't ever tell us why it went wrong, gives, in his earlier books, an erudite chronicle both of the glories of Muslim and the fact of its eventual failure. And Lewis is never boring.

 

As an explanation of why Muslim society failed to industrialize, or "What Went Wrong," Fjordman's trilogy is lacking. As I wrote in the introduction to the first installment of this work, nobody really knows what causes differences in development between human civilizations, or really what "causes" any history. Fjordman tells us that Islam failed to modernize because Allah is an illogical God, whereas Jehovah and the Christian Trinity are logical gods (or a logical God). He writes:

 

In my view, this failure to see the connection between cause, science and a free society, and effect, technological progress, stems from a fundamental flaw in the Islamic way of looking at the universe: They see no connection between cause and effect because their entire religious world view is based on the notion that everything is subject to the whims of Allah, and that there is no predictable logic behind anything. As Hugh Fitzgerald frequently says, this resigned Inshallah-fatalism ("If Allah wills it, it will happen") greatly inhibits progress of any kind. The ultimate irony and tragedy is that Muslims move to infidel societies in order to enjoy the commodities and consumer goods produced there, yet immediately set out to destroy the conditions which created these advances in the first place, political freedom and manmade laws.

 

Indeed! Ignoring the syncretic fallacies of the above logic, let's consider the empirical facts only. A visitor from Mars to the planet Earth about 700 AD would have had a quite different impression of the relative merits of Western and Muslim civilizations and their theologies. In the north of the British isles, he would have met the ancestors of James Watt, not thinking of inventing any steam engines, mostly naked and illiterate. Had he been lucky, he would have enountered the cream of British intellect: the Venerable Bede, writing his history, in which he chronicles all the instances in which holy water calmed angry seas, the bodies of dead saints did not decay, and sinners were punished by the plague. Bede's chief concern was that Easter must be celebrated at the proper time, since celebrating it at the wrong time would most certainly lead to hellfire and eternal damnation. Likewise, if priests got the wrong sort of haircut, according to Bede, they would be denied afterlife. This was the sort of "causality" beloved of Christian Europe until the modern age. At least, Bede was literate, a rare accomplishment.

 

As for natural phenomena, such as plagues, earthquakes, famines and eclipses - - these were all the works of an inscrutable God. Had he ventured further north, our visitor would have encountered the ancestors of Fjordman, in their skins and Viking boats, getting ready to plunder England and Ireland and everywhere else. Thus England and Scandinavia. In continental Europe proper at this time, there was more or less utter chaos, slightly better than Scandinavia only because of the remnant of Roman civilization left there. It was so desperately bad that even the reign of the illiterate Charlemagne, yet to come, was to be considered a great improvement.

 

This same visitor, had he chanced upon Muslim Spain, or visited the Caliphate in Baghdad, would have found physicians, mathematicians, philosophers, literati, comparative cleanliness and great buildings. Very likely he would have attributed this difference to the logical nature of the Muslim religion as opposed to the illogicality of the Nicene creed and its insistence that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, and also was the progenitor of the Son, that there are there three Gods, but only one God and so on.

 

Fjordman tells us:

 

"Certainly the Muslim world exhibited an active and sustained opposition to movable type technologies emanating from Europe in the fifteenth century and later. This opposition, based on social, religious, and political considerations, lasted well into the eighteenth century. Only then were presses of European origin introduced into the Ottoman Empire and only in the next century did printing become widespread in the Arab world and Iran. This long-term reluctance, the disinterest in European typography, and the failure to exploit the indigenous printing traditions of Egypt certainly argue for some kind of fundamental structural or ideological antipathy to this particular technology."

Our Martian visitor, had he come back to Europe a few centuries after Bede, could disabuse Fjordman of his enthusiasm for European culture. Had printing been introduced in Europe much before it emerged, the practitioners would most certainly have been hanged, especially if books had been printed in a language that people could understand. The distribution of a vernacular Bible by Wycliffe and his followers was quickly stamped out by an act of Parliament: De Heretico Comburendum. People who possessed such bibles were burned at the stake. Could our Martian have predicted that within 300 years, this nightmare of medieval bigotry would give birth to Newton and the scientific revolution? The arithmetic manipulations that Jewish rabbis had invented to calculate the end of days according to the mysteries of the Kabala, with the help of Arabic digits, would gradually be transformed into a workable system of arithmetic operations. Anyone who has seen what long division looked like in the Middle Ages, knows that the invention of simple ways to do division and other such lowly tasks was an essential step on the road to modern civilization.
.

 

That was not all, for many other wondrous transformations were to take place. The ancestors of Einstein believed that the seat of the conscience was in the kidneys and that study of anything but Talmud was sinful. But in the nineteenth century, Jewish society too was to undergo its own partial reformation and produce a series of intellectual giants.  

 

Our understanding of all these currents and processes is poor enough, but Fjordman is triply and unnecessarily handicapped. As he is a conservative, he is careful not to come to close to anything that might smack of Marxist analysis. There is no mention in these essays of the rise of the middle class, for example (only a passing reference below to a "merchant class" - not the same thing), which would appear to be a necessary part of modernization. It is difficult to write about the modernization of Europe without writing about the emergence of the middle class. It is so difficult, that Fjordman deserves great credit for that alone. Like one who succeeded in making a bridge without steel, using only cheddar cheese, his achievement is at most an admirable effort, but it can hardly be expected to support any automobile traffic.

 

Fjordman also has a rather interesting view of the history of science in Europe. He writes of Islam:

 

This failure was intimately linked to the Islam's hostility towards innovation and freethinking. In contrast, the Christian and Jewish religions proved more receptive towards new ideas. At the very least they were not as aggressively hostile to logic as was Islam, and in certain situations even facilitated it.

Why then, if Christianity was not aggressively hostile to logic (actually - presumably Fjordman means to empiricism - not the same thing) was Galileo forced to recant the heliocentric thesis?

 

Judaism had no political power, though they managed to persecute Spinoza. But as long as Catholicism had political power, all such heresies as heliocentricism and evolution would be banned, and Christian fundamentalism is still warring with scientific research. In some places, science is still fighting - and not necessarily winning - a battle for evolution and big bang theory versus Christian fundamentalist creationism.

 

Fjordman's third great handicap is what makes these essays popular among a certain political element. He is not writing to explore the truth. He is writing because he believes he can prove some point about the inherent inferiority of Islam. That appeals to many people, but essays and researches written "to prove a point" never really do that. They just keep the crowd happy. 

 

Science must serve truth and art must serve art. When either tries to serve politics, they suffer. That is, obviously  equally true of "scholarship" that attempts to justify the opposing viewpoint. 

 

Islamophobes will find much satisfaction in Fjordman's work. The conclusion of these three essays pours out indictment after indictment on the hapless followers of the prophet. Some of it follows in some sense from the groundwork laid in previous essays, but some is just gratuitously chauvinistic generalization:

 

Muslims failed to develop clocks and eyeglasses and were actively hostile to printing, yet immediately embraced gunpowder and firearms (though the development of the latter soon stagnated, too). I think this highly selective view of technology tells us something about their mentality: They didn't see the value in printing, but they liked gunpowder since it could be used to terrorize and intimidate non-Muslims. Infidel technology is primarily interesting if it can be used to blow up other infidels. Sadly, I'm not so sure Islamic mentality has changed significantly in the 800 years since then. During the past few decades, globalization, Muslim immigration to the West and the massive influx of petrodollars to Muslim nations with huge reserves of petroleum have enabled Muslims to acquire or buy technology they are unable to develop themselves. The result, along with a huge demographic increase in Muslims which is again caused by infidel advances in medicine, has been a tidal wave of Jihad sweeping across the world. The lesson for non-Muslims should be: If you provide Muslims with technology and know-how, this will not be used to create peaceful and prosperous societies; it will be used to kill or subjugate you.

 

Actually, Muslims "embraced" gunpowder and modern weaponry because they perceived that they were about to be wiped out by the West. The stimulus for modernization of the Turkish army was the landing of Napoleon in Egypt, not any Jihad on the West. It was the "Saracen" infidels who were about to be wiped out. Defensive weaponry is always a priority in societies. It will be remembered that the United States government was completely uninterested in German rocket technology until the Soviets started sending up satellites. Congress, uninterested in financing a trip to the moon, asked Edward Teller what scientists expected to find there. Teller's answer was to the point:

 

"Russians."

 

America sent men to the moon. If stem cell research could be used for a new weapon, President Bush would allow it. As it can only save lives, it is banned as sinful in the West, while Iran is free to forge ahead in this field. So much for logical and peaceful and tolerant Western Christianity versus illogical, bellicose and fanatic Islam.

 

Following Commodore Perry's visit, the Japanese, like the Muslims after Napoleon, perceived that they were hopelessly behind the West. The Japanese, like the Muslims, quickly learned to make weapons before just about anything else. But unlike the Muslims, the Japanese had iron and coal and could make steel. The Muslims had neither, and the use of oil was as yet unknown. That is more likely the explanation of the great difference between Islamic society and modern industrialized societies.

 

In a more or less non-sequitor, Fjordman marches to his inevitable conclusions:

 

"The problems faced by the West now in confronting Jihad have been facilitated by a failure of our education system, our media and indeed our entire society to uphold the ideal of critical thinking. If the rise of the West was linked to political liberty, rational thinking, free speech and universities championing free enquiry, the decline of the West can be linked to the decline of the same factors."

 

After explaining the infallible superiority of the West for three long articles, Fjordman now tells us the system is no good after all. For all their faults, the evil and narrow minded Muslims may triumph over the liberal and tolerant West:

 

I'm also not convinced Europe's Islamization is inevitable, yet, but if present trends continue, maybe we will see a reversal of roles in the twenty-first century: China will prosper and Europe will disintegrate. In the meantime, however, when Muslims get their hands on Western technology and Europe's accumulated wealth, the world from Britain to Thailand could be plunged into a new age of Jihad.

 

It is not clear how any of this relates to what came before. How can the Muslims, who don't "get" science according to Fjordman, harness it to their Jihad? That is, assuming all Muslims want a Jihad, in the bad sense of Jihad?

 

If the Muslims are to conquer Europe, won't they need modern societies, with compulsory education and mass literacy? And won't that, inevitably, lead to the downfall of extremist religious ideas, if not to democracy? If Americans adopt the credo of Fjordman's conservative allies in the United States, and ban the teaching of evolution, will that serve progress and science?

 

Can anyone be blamed for suspecting that the man began by writing the conclusion, "Islam is no good, but it is going to take over the world," and then wrote three essays full of verbiage to try to justify the conclusion?

 

Here then, is part three. Caveat Lector. Don't take any wooden intellectual nickels from neo (or paleo-) conservative theorists.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

 

Islam, the Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, part 3
Fjordman - 10/9/2007

 

The great British expert on Chinese science history Joseph Needham has written about how the "four great inventions of China," the compass, printing, papermaking and gunpowder, were exported to the rest of the world. Although Needham is good at writing about technology, he doesn't always provide sufficient evidence of transmission for these inventions. Only one of them, paper, can be said with absolute certainty to have reached the West as a fully developed product. According to Professor T.F. Carter, "Back of the invention of printing lies the use of paper, which is the most certain and the most complete of China's inventions."

 

As Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin write in The Coming of the Book, "It would have been impossible to invent printing had it not been for the impetus given by paper, which had arrived in Europe from China via the Arabs two centuries earlier and came into general use by the late 14th century." In the period from 1450 to 1550, Europe was becoming covered with paper mills. The traditional parchment was expensive and not well suited for mass production.

 

During the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the reformers wanted the Bible to be available in the common language, not in Latin. Martin Luther thus helped shape the modern German language. As scholar Irving Fang states in the book A History of Mass Communication, "Vernacular printing also led French readers to think of themselves as being part of France, and English readers to regard themselves as part of England."

 

In some ways, we are witnessing a reversal of this trend towards nationalization now with global communications and the rise of English as an international lingua franca. Febvre and Martin believe, though, that about 77% of the books printed before 1500 were still in Latin, with religious books still predominant. This gradually gave way to secular books and other languages, but "it was not until the late 17th century that Latin was finally overthrown and replaced by the other national languages and by French as the natural language of philosophy, science and diplomacy. Every educated European then had to know French." They estimate that about 20 million books were printed in Europe before the year 1500, and that "between 150-200 million copies were published in the 16th century. This is a conservative estimate and probably well below the actual figure." This is even more impressive if we remember that Europe of that day was far less populous than it is now and that only a minority could read. There was obviously a change then, and a swift one, compared to the slow, expensive and sometimes inaccurate process of copying each individual book by hand.

 

Printing did have a major impact in East Asia, but it didn't trigger quite the same revolution as it did in the West. Buddhism came to Japan via China and Korea, and Buddhist monks also brought with them, in addition to tea and thus the basis for the elaborate Japanese tea ceremonies, other aspects of Chinese civilization, among them printing in the eight century. Yet until the late sixteenth century the Japanese printed only Buddhist scriptures. Europe also benefited from having a more diverse book trade than China and from having more competition in general.

 

As Irving Fang states, "Printing had not disturbed the monolithic Chinese empire. The introduction of printing in mid-fifteenth century Europe might also have made little headway if Europe were not ripe for change." According to him, the "establishment of European universities from the twelfth century onward marked the end of the 700-year-old Monastic Age. The more secular age that followed saw the emergence of a literate middle class and a rising demand for books of all kinds."

 

Movable type printing had been invented in China by Bi Sheng around 1040, but it never gained widespread popularity. The nature of the Chinese language with its nonalphabetic script presumably didn't help. To solve this dilemma, in the first half of the 1400s the Korean King Sejong the Great encouraged book production and ordered his scholars to create an alphabet for the common people as opposed to the complicated Chinese script with its thousands of characters. They produced hangul, "Korean letters," a phonetic system inspired by other alphabetic scripts, among them Sanskrit.

 

Movable type printing with metal types and an alphabetic script was thus in use in Korea before Gutenberg began printing Bibles in Germany, but there are no indications of a connection between what happened in Korea and what happened in Europe. The geographical distance is too big and the time difference too small to make such a connection likely. The Chinese used baked clay for their characters, and only started employing metal types after their use in Europe. Gutenberg was a goldsmith and naturally created his letters out of metal.

 

According to Fang, "What Gutenberg produced that did not exist in Asia was a printing system. Most obvious among its elements were controlled, exact dimensions of alphabet type cast from metal punches made of hardened steel. These were not unlike the dies, stamps, and punches that were well known to European leather workers, metalsmiths, and pewter makers."

 

Although possible, no link between the Eastern and the Western printing traditions has ever been conclusively proven. The different nature of the systems involved has caused many historians to believe that printing was developed in Europe independently of Asia. In contrast, we know with 100% certainty that Muslims were familiar with East Asian printing. The Mongols left a trail of devastation across much of Eurasia in the 1200s, but their vast empire did open up unprecedented opportunities for cultural exchange. As scholar Thomas T. Allsen shows, however, being exposed to foreign ideas doesn't necessarily mean that you will adopt them. Local scholars often clung to the inherited tradition. He uses Russia at the time of Peter the Great as an example where some elements of that society were fanatically opposed to all innovation while others enthusiastically embraced all things foreign. Allsen has described how the authorities in Iran under Mongolian rule in 1294 attempted to introduce Chinese-style printed banknotes, but failed, despite severe threats, due to massive popular resistance:

 

"Certainly the Muslim world exhibited an active and sustained opposition to movable type technologies emanating from Europe in the fifteenth century and later. This opposition, based on social, religious, and political considerations, lasted well into the eighteenth century. Only then were presses of European origin introduced into the Ottoman Empire and only in the next century did printing become widespread in the Arab world and Iran. This long-term reluctance, the disinterest in European typography, and the failure to exploit the indigenous printing traditions of Egypt certainly argue for some kind of fundamental structural or ideological antipathy to this particular technology."

 

I am definitely not a believer in technological determinism, but some technologies do have a greater impact than others. One of the most important inventions ever made has to be printing. Surely it is no coincidence that the Scientific Revolution decisively took off in Europe after the introduction of printing, just as it is not a coincidence that the one civilization that came closest to a similar breakthrough, China, was the one where printing had first been invented. It is likely that the rejection of printing alone set the Islamic world back centuries vis-à-vis non-Muslims.

 

As David Crowley and Paul Heyer write in Communication in History: Technology, Culture, and Society, "Traditionally, the view has been that printing, along with numerous other developments, marked the transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern era. However, the more we study this remarkable invention, the more we realize that it was not just one factor among many. Although we hesitate to argue for historical 'prime-movers,' certainly the printing press comes close to what is meant by this term. It was a technology that influenced other technologies - a prototype for mass production - and one that impacted directly on the world of ideas by making knowledge widely available, thereby creating a space in which new forms of expression could flourish. The repercussions of the printing press in early modern Europe did not come about in an inherently deterministic manner. Rather, they resulted from the existence of conditions whereby print could enhance a context receptive to its potential."

 

The spread of printing in East Asia was intimately connected to the Buddhist religion, just as it was used in Europe to print Bibles. Yet while Buddhists, Christians and Jews eagerly embraced this new technology, Muslims stubbornly rejected it. The contrast is striking if we compare this to how eagerly Muslims embraced another Chinese invention: gunpowder. Gunpowder wasn't the first chemical substance used in warfare.

 

According to legend, "Greek fire," a feared weapon in its time, was invented in the seventh century by Callinicus, a refugee from the Arab conquest of Syria. It was successfully used to defeat sieges by Arab Muslims of Constantinople in 674 and in 718, and helped the Byzantine Empire to survive for as long as it did. Its qualities appear to be somewhat similar to modern napalm. James R. Partington suggests in his book A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder that it consisted of a mixture of "sulphur, pitch, dissolved nitre, and petroleum." The term "Greek fire" is a misnomer as the Byzantines called themselves Romans. The greatest revolution in the history of warfare, however, came with the introduction of gunpowder. According to Dr James B. Calvert, professor of engineering, "The fundamental inventions of gunpowder and cannon had been made by 1300, but the sources are rare, difficult to interpret, hard to date, and often contradictory. The best guess is that gunpowder followed quickly after saltpetre was discovered (that is, a process for its purification was developed) by Chinese alchemists around AD 900 and introduced to Europe via trade routes and travellers around AD 1225, and that cannon were invented in southern Europe just before AD 1300."

 

One of the problems in determining this accurately is that Chinese writers can be just as ethnocentric as Western ones, sometimes more so. There is some debate whether gunpowder was invented independently in several regions, but most historians have settled for the explanation that it was first manufactured in China. Gunpowder (black powder) consists of charcoal, sulphur and potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, and was impossible to create until you could manufacture saltpeter with a high degree of purity. This was a specialty of Chinese alchemists quite early. The discovery reached the Middle East and Europe, probably via the Silk Road, and became known as "Chinese snow." Black powder remained the principle explosive until the nineteenth century, when the invention of unstable nitroglycerine made it possible for Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel to patent the more stable version of dynamite in 1867, and accumulate the great wealth which was later used to fund the various Nobel Prizes.

 

In the thirteenth century, the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, as well as the German Dominican friar Albertus Magnus, both theologians and scientists with an interest in alchemy, mention a recipe for gunpowder. The Mongol conquests spread the knowledge of the fire-lance, a gunpowder-filled tube made of bamboo which could fire various projectiles, across Eurasia. The development of this weapon stagnated in China proper. According to James B. Calvert, "The place and time of the invention of the cannon is unknown, but its evolution from the fire lance among the Turks, Arabs and Europeans can hardly be doubted. (…) The earliest use of cannon is not definitely known, but occurred sometime between 1300 and 1350. The use of cannon spread rapidly between 1350 and 1400."

 

Cannon were used during the Hundred Years' War between France and England, and Turkish Muslims successfully employed prolonged bombardment by massive Hungarian-made cannon during the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to breach the walls of the city. Joel Mokyr, professor at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University and author of The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, writes about innovation and economic history. According to him (pdf), glass, although known in China, was not in wide use as tea was drunk in porcelain cups and the Chinese examined themselves in polished bronze mirrors. Islamic countries had a significant glass industry, yet they never came up with spectacles: "Tokugawa Japan had a flourishing industry making glass trinkets and ornaments, but no optical instruments emerged there either until the Meiji restoration [from 1867]. Not having access to the Hellenistic geometry that served not only Ptolemy and Alhazen, but also sixteenth century Italians such as Francesco Maurolico (1494-1575) who studied the characteristics of lenses, made the development of optics in the Orient difficult." The earliest known lenses were made of rock crystal, quartz, and other minerals, and have been used in Eastern and Western lands since ancient times. There is evidence that lenses were known in the Greco-Roman world. They have been used as burning glasses and magnifying glasses for centuries, and so-called reading stones were in common use during the Middle Ages, for instance the Visby lenses, lens-shaped rock crystals of high quality from in a Viking grave in Gotland, Sweden. The oldest one we know of is the Nimrud lens, found in modern Iraq. Estimated to be almost three thousand years old, it indicates that the ancient Assyrians did have some basic understanding of optics. Iraq, seat of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian kingdoms, is home to one of the world's oldest astronomical traditions. Babylonian astronomy greatly influenced many subsequent cultures, Middle Eastern, Greek and Indian, and the sexagesimal (based on the number sixty) numeral system of the Sumerians is still with us today, in the form of sixty minutes to the hour and 360 degrees in a circle.

 

The Iraqi-born scientist Ibn al-Haitham, known in the West as Alhacen or Alhazen, had a powerful influence on several Western scientists. Alhazen was a pioneer in the scientific method by basing hypothesis upon systematic observation. He is most commonly remembered for his great contributions in the field of optics, where he pondered the nature of light, speculated on the colors of the sunset and described the qualities of magnifying lenses. His eleventh century Book of Optics was translated into Latin during the late twelfth century, and left a significant impact on Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century.

 

Bacon was educated at Oxford and lectured on Aristotle at the University of Paris, the intellectual center among the small, but growing number of European universities. His teacher, the English bishop and scholar Robert Grosseteste, was a proponent of validating theory through experimentation. Roger Bacon wrote about many subjects, including optics, and was among the first persons to argue that lenses could be used for the correction of eyesight. He asserted that "philosophy is the special province of the unbelievers," and urged scholars to learn Arabic.

 

The Chinese experimented with lenses and mirrors, too, and produced a type of sunglasses, or eyeglasses with colored lenses. However, these appear to have been mainly for decorative purposes and possessed no corrective properties. The science of optics stagnated in China after initial advances. The first fully developed spectacles were made in Europe, in Northern Italy from the late thirteenth century onwards. The American scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals in the eighteenth century, during the early years of the United States.

 

In 1572 Freidrich Risner printed some of Alhazen's work on optics, as well as a work by the thirteenth century Polish friar Witelo which was similar to it, and thus made Alhazen widely known to new generations of scholars. Notable among them was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who died in 1601, was perhaps the most meticulous astronomer of the pre-telescopic era. During the final year of his life, Brahe passed on his observations of Mars to Kepler. These precise notes were important for Kepler's work on planetary motion, but another breakthrough that could verify his thesis was soon to come.

 

As corrective lenses for near-sightedness became more sophisticated, the demand for high quality glass lenses grew. In the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza could make a decent living as a skilled lens grinder while working on his philosophical theories. This was during the Dutch Golden Age when the country was a refuge for many groups suffering from religious persecution, for instance Huguenots (Protestants) from France. Spinoza descended from Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal following the Reconquista. The production of spectacles opened up new arenas for optics. A Dutch eyeglass maker, Hans Lippershey, is said to have created the first practical telescope and made it publicly available in 1608.

 

Within a few months of the news, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei had made his own telescope, and became the first person to turn the new invention towards the sky, discovering the four major moons of Jupiter in 1610. Kepler developed the Galilean telescope further by 1611 and described the theoretical basis for telescopic optics, in part inspired by Alhazen's work. The telescope had traveled from the Netherlands via Italy to Kepler in Prague within three years of its invention and had been improved along the way, a remarkable pace of innovation and diffusion of knowledge. Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica from 1687 and his laws of motion and gravity were derived from, among other things, Galileo's telescopic observations and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion.

 

Dutch eyeglass maker Zacharias Janssen and his father Hans are usually credited with inventing the first microscope in the late 1500s. The microscope was improved in the seventeenth century by their countryman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who was the first to spot bacteria and thus opened up an entirely new field of microbiology. This in turn led to great advances in the natural sciences. The German physician Robert Koch and the French chemist Louis Pasteur founded the science of bacteriology in the nineteenth century. The understanding that disease is caused by bacteria and microscopic germs produced the greatest strides in medicine in history.

 

According to the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, reading stone lenses were invented by polymath Armen Firman (Abbas Ibn Firnas) in Córdoba in Islamic-occupied Spain in the ninth century, and later spread throughout Europe. Wikipedia embodies both the good and some of the problematic aspects of the Internet. I have found useful information there more than once, but it can also be notoriously unreliable on certain subjects due to its numerous editors and lack of professional oversight. Let's assume for a moment that this information is correct. If so, how come lenses weren't developed further by Muslims? The telescope and the microscope were by-products of advances in the production of glass lenses. They made possible, for the first time ever, the study of what is not visible to the naked human eye and radically altered our understanding of the universe, both in the realms of the very small and the very big. All of this could have happened in the Islamic world. So why didn't it, despite the fact that lenses were know there at least as early as in Europe, and despite the fact that the region produced a gifted optical scientist, Alhazen?

 

Alhazen personally should be credited with being one of the greatest scientists of his age in any discipline, Eastern or Western, yet his inquisitive attitude and scientific mindset wasn't always appreciated by his contemporaries. Here is how his writings were received by fellow Muslims, as quoted in Ibn Warraq's book Why I Am Not a Muslim: "A disciple of Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, relates that he was in Baghdad on business, when the library of a certain philosopher (who died in 1214) was burned there. The preacher, who conducted the execution of the sentence, threw into the flames, with his own hands, an astronomical work of Ibn al-Haitham [Alhazen], after he had pointed to a delineation therein given of the sphere of the earth, as an unhappy symbol of impious Atheism."

 

Alhazen made numerous books, many of which are lost today. His groundbreaking Book of Optics survives to us in Latin translation. Muslims thus had access to ideas, but they failed to appreciate them and exploit their potential. This pattern was repeated on several occasions. The first windmills were probably made in Persia prior to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. Windmills were introduced in Europe during the High Middle Ages, at least from the twelfth century onwards, and spread rapidly across Western Europe during a prolonged period of great improvements. Persian-style windmills spread from Central Asia to China following the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, yet in 1206 the leading Arab engineer of the day observed to his readers that the notion of driving mills by the wind was nonsense.

 

Sundials have been used in Egypt and other civilizations since prehistoric times. Water clocks, too, date from ancient times and had reached a certain level of complexity in the Greco-Roman world. The ancient Greeks created devices resembling clock-work, for instance the Antikythera mechanism (second century B.C.) which has been called a mechanical computer. Early clocks (though not fully developed) were made in Asia, especially China, and could have been known in the Middle East. Around the year 800, Caliph Harun al-Rashid from Baghdad presented Charlemagne with the gift of a complex water clock which struck the hours. In 850 the three Persians Banu Musa, as part of the translation efforts undertaken at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, published The Book of Ingenious Devices describing many mechanical inventions developed by earlier cultures. They were interested in the work of Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria who made the first known steam-powered device. Again, there is plenty of evidence that Muslims had at their disposal both the theoretical knowledge and the practical examples necessary to create mechanical clocks.

 

Despite having access to much of the same knowledge as did Christian Europeans, Muslims didn't develop fully mechanical clocks. This happened in Europe in the thirteenth century. The invention spread rapidly throughout Italy, France and England. One was installed in the Old St Paul's Cathedral in London in 1286. The fourteenth century English author Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned a clock, apparently meaning one with a bell which struck the hour. Salisbury cathedral is thought to have the oldest functioning clock in existence, dating back to the year 1386. Clocks were initially large and were used to decorate public buildings. By the year 1500, the coiled spring had been invented, paving the way for smaller clocks. The first portable timepiece was created in Nuremberg, Germany by locksmith Peter Henlein in 1505 in the shape of a sphere worn as a jewel. Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, by employing Galileo's law of the pendulum, in 1656 made the first pendulum clock, which was much more accurate than previous models. He also invented the balance wheel and spring assembly underlying many modern watches. French mathematician Blaise Pascal is said to have made a wristwatch by attaching his portable clock to his wrist with a string.

 

I'm not suggesting that no scientific achievements were made in the Islamic world. Avicenna's Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, and as late as the sixteenth century, Vesalius wrote a thesis commenting on Rhazes. It is impossible to write the medical history of the West during this age without mentioning Middle Eastern physicians such as Avicenna and Rhazes. What I am suggesting is that the number of achievements steadily declined, and I'm not sure how much Islam should be credited with those achievements that were actually made.

 

Muslims failed to develop clocks and eyeglasses and were actively hostile to printing, yet immediately embraced gunpowder and firearms (though the development of the latter soon stagnated, too). I think this highly selective view of technology tells us something about their mentality: They didn't see the value in printing, but they liked gunpowder since it could be used to terrorize and intimidate non-Muslims. Infidel technology is primarily interesting if it can be used to blow up other infidels. Sadly, I'm not so sure Islamic mentality has changed significantly in the 800 years since then. During the past few decades, globalization, Muslim immigration to the West and the massive influx of petrodollars to Muslim nations with huge reserves of petroleum have enabled Muslims to acquire or buy technology they are unable to develop themselves. The result, along with a huge demographic increase in Muslims which is again caused by infidel advances in medicine, has been a tidal wave of Jihad sweeping across the world. The lesson for non-Muslims should be: If you provide Muslims with technology and know-how, this will not be used to create peaceful and prosperous societies; it will be used to kill or subjugate you.

 

As writer Bassam Tibi notes, Muslims today tend to view science as something that is separated from society, and believe they can adopt or appropriate modern science and technology but not the wider framework that goes with them.

 

I agree with Tibi. Muslims have no understanding of science as the basis of technological progress, and free speech and rational criticism of everything, including religious doctrines, as the basis of science. They talk about science as if it were a commodity, a television or a personal computer, something which Muslims "had" earlier, then "lost" or handed over to Westerners who "took" it from them. Hence, Muslims shouldn't feel grateful for anything infidel science provides them with, since science was really "theirs" in the first place and they're just taking back something which rightfully belongs to them. But science isn't a commodity; it is a method, a way of looking critically and rationally at the world.

 

In my view, this failure to see the connection between cause, science and a free society, and effect, technological progress, stems from a fundamental flaw in the Islamic way of looking at the universe: They see no connection between cause and effect because their entire religious world view is based on the notion that everything is subject to the whims of Allah, and that there is no predictable logic behind anything. As Hugh Fitzgerald frequently says, this resigned Inshallah-fatalism ("If Allah wills it, it will happen") greatly inhibits progress of any kind. The ultimate irony and tragedy is that Muslims move to infidel societies in order to enjoy the commodities and consumer goods produced there, yet immediately set out to destroy the conditions which created these advances in the first place, political freedom and manmade laws.

 

At least two conditions are necessary for the creation of a successful nation: The ability to produce talented individuals with great ideas, and the cultural and structural ability of society to recognize the full potential of these ideas and utilize them. The Islamic world, for a while, performed reasonably well at the former task, but failed miserably and consistently at the latter. Even if it could occasionally give birth to gifted individuals they tended to be unorthodox Muslims or, in the case of Rhazes, outright hostile to Islam. The frequency of thinkers of Avicenna's and certainly Alhazen's stature also steadily declined. This strongly indicates that "Islamic science" had little to do with Islam, but was the amalgam of pre-Islamic knowledge, Greek, Indian, Persian, Jewish, Assyrian Christian and other. As Muslims gradually became numerically dominant and Islamic orthodoxy more firmly established, this pre-Islamic heritage was slowly extinguished, hence science declined and never recovered. This failure was intimately linked to the Islam's hostility towards innovation and freethinking. In contrast, the Christian and Jewish religions proved more receptive towards new ideas. At the very least they were not as aggressively hostile to logic as was Islam, and in certain situations even facilitated it.

 

Europe did produce many talented individuals, yet what ultimately set it apart from the Islamic world, and even from non-Muslim Asians at this age, was the remarkable pace of diffusion of new ideas, home-grown or imported, and the speed with which further improvements were made once an idea had been introduced. This was due to a combination of factors: A successful marriage between Christian doctrines and the Greco-Roman heritage during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the ability to continuously generate new knowledge and put it into practical application through the accumulation of capital and a dynamic merchant class, an institutionalized framework for scholarly debate through universities with a significant degree of free enquiry, the adoption of printing, which made communication easier and facilitated the accumulation of ever-more accurate knowledge, and last, but not least, a higher degree of individualism and political liberty, which encouraged freethinking, a non-traditionalist outlook and by extension innovation.

 

Upon saying this, I must confess that I cannot say with a straight face that these are hallmarks of Europe today. We have always been told that there is a basic conflict between religion and reason, which would presumably mean that the less religious we become, the more rational we should become. Western Europe is currently less religious than we have ever been, yet I see no indication that we have become more reasonable because of this. We may not have a formal index of forbidden books, as did the Catholic Church for centuries, but we do have an informal index of forbidden topics which can be equally effective in suppressing free enquiry and stifling debate. This is now done in the name of tolerance and Multicultural diversity, not God, but the result is much the same. The end of religion, thus, didn't herald an age of reason; it led to a new age of secular superstition and new forms of witch-hunts. Bad things can be said about medieval Europeans, but at least they didn't import Muslims in large numbers and congratulate themselves for their tolerance. Secular Europeans do.

 

Andrew G. Bostom keeps referring to Julien Benda and his 1928 book The Treason of the Intellectuals, about how the abandonment of objective truths abetted totalitarian ideologies, which led to World War II. Bostom identifies a similar failure of Western intellectuals to acknowledge the history of Jihad today. From what I gather, Benda was a bit too anti-religious and anti-nationalist for my taste, but otherwise I agree: The problems faced by the West now in confronting Jihad have been facilitated by a failure of our education system, our media and indeed our entire society to uphold the ideal of critical thinking. If the rise of the West was linked to political liberty, rational thinking, free speech and universities championing free enquiry, the decline of the West can be linked to the decline of the same factors.

 

Author V.S. Naipaul thinks Islam is parasitical by nature and preys upon the pre-Islamic culture in the conquered lands. I will add that it is also the kind of parasite which kills its host. I have no doubt that if Muslims should succeed in conquering Europe, this will in the future be hailed as a Golden Age of Islam. But it wouldn't be a Golden Age of Islam, it would be the twilight of Europe, just as the previous Golden Age was the twilight of the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Zoroastrian and Buddhist cultures from North Africa to Central Asia, and the much vaunted accomplishments of "Islamic medieval science" were echoes of the heritage of Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Syrians and Greeks.

 

Yes, I know Mughal emperors could create magnificent architecture such as the Taj Mahal in India, but this was still a slave-state based upon the exploitation and persecution of non-Muslims. And yes, there can be rulers such as Akbar the Great, with his religious tolerance and imperial garden with thousands of cheetahs, but he was tolerant precisely because he was a Muslim in name only. Any such ruler will be succeeded by more pious Muslims, as was the case with Aurangzeb who reinstated the Jizya tax for infidels and destroyed Hindu temples. Anything good that happens in countries under Islamic rule generally happens in spite of Islam, not because of Islam, and the good parts will soon be reversed in the name of sharia. There will always be at least a dozen Aurangzebs to every Akbar.

 

We are currently witnessing major global shifts in power. In a macrohistorical perspective, China was the leading civilization a millennium ago but was surpassed by Europe. I firmly believe free speech and political liberty have long-term effects, and I'm not convinced China can keep up her economic progress unless she undertakes reforms. I'm also not convinced Europe's Islamization is inevitable, yet, but if present trends continue, maybe we will see a reversal of roles in the twenty-first century: China will prosper and Europe will disintegrate. In the meantime, however, when Muslims get their hands on Western technology and Europe's accumulated wealth, the world from Britain to Thailand could be plunged into a new age of Jihad.

Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the past, but it is no longer active.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Continued (Permanent Link)

Part II of Islam, the Greeks & the Scientific Revolution

Here is some more of Fjordman's speculations concerning the reason for failure of the Scientific Revolution in the Islamic lands (his version of "What Went Wrong") -- and its 'retardation' in the west. Can we really take this sort of reasoning seriously? For example:

 

The reason why the Christian West for centuries didn't have easy access to the Classical learning of the Christian East was because Muslims and Jihad had made the Mediterranean unsafe. It has to be the height of absurdity to block access to something and then take credit for transmitting it, yet that is precisely what Arabs do. As stronger states slowly grew up in the West, regular contact with their Eastern cousins was gradually re-established, starting with the Italian city-states. And as soon as direct contact was established, Western Europeans gained access to the original Greco-Roman manuscripts preserved in Constantinople.

 

Firstly, can we really believe that the physics of Newton or the steam engine of James Watt were inevitable children of Aristotelian logic? Newtonian physics owes a tiny bit to Pythogoras, but nothing to Aristotle certainly. The modern atom, which devolved from the rediscovered ideas of Democritus, was still well in the future when the steam engine was invented. Second, let's face facts. Charlemagne, mentioned below in this context, was illiterate. If he got an Aristotelian manuscript, he would not know which end was right side up. The classical wisdom of the ancients was burned and pillaged by Fjordman's Teutonic and Gothic and Vandal kinfolk. There is a reason why it is called "vandalism." Whatever was left, was systematically suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church. Ancient manuscripts that were not burned were "recycled" for pious purposes such as copying over the Nicene creed or a book of hours, or a hymn to Mary Mother of God.

 

This is part II, or Islam and the Greek returns, as it were. Part 1 is here:

Islam and the Scientific Revolution - Part I

 

Ami Isseroff

 

 

Islam, the Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, part 2
Fjordman - 10/7/2007
According to scholar Lynda Shaffer, "Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an early advocate of the empirical method, upon which the scientific revolution was based, attributed Western Europe's early modern take-off to three things in particular: printing, the compass, and gunpowder. Bacon had no idea where these things had come from, but historians now know that all three were invented in China. Since, unlike Europe, China did not take off onto a path leading from the scientific to the Industrial Revolution, some historians are now asking why these inventions were so revolutionary in Western Europe and, apparently, so unrevolutionary in China."

The Song dynasty, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, was arguably the most dynamic period in Chinese history. Although printing "was invented by Buddhist monks in China, and at first benefited Buddhism, by the middle of the tenth century printers were turning out innumerable copies of the classical Confucian corpus."

According to Shaffer, "The origin of the civil service examination system in China can be traced back to the Han dynasty, but in the Song dynasty government-administered examinations became the most important route to political power in China. For almost a thousand years (except the early period of Mongol rule), China was governed by men who had come to power simply because they had done exceedingly well in examinations on the Neo-Confucian canon. At any one time thousands of students were studying for the exams, and thousands of inexpensive books were required. Without printing, such a system would not have been possible."

As she explains, "China developed the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated merchant marine and navy." The Chinese "could have made the arduous journey around the tip of Africa and sail into Portuguese ports; however, they had no reason to do so. Although the Western European economy was prospering, it offered nothing that China could not acquire much closer to home at much less cost."

In contrast, the Portuguese, the Spanish and other Europeans were trying to reach the Spice Islands, what is now Indonesia. "It was this spice market that lured Columbus westward from Spain and drew Vasco da Gama around Africa and across the Indian Ocean." In Shaffer's view, technologies such as gunpowder and the compass had a different impact in China than they had in Europe, and it is "unfair to ask why the Chinese did not accidentally bump into the Western Hemisphere while sailing east across the Pacific to find the wool markets of Spain."

Yes, Asia was the most prosperous region on the planet at this time. Europeans embarked on their Age of Exploration of the seas precisely out of a desire to reach the wealthy Asian lands (and bypass Muslim middlemen), which is why Christopher Columbus and his men mistakenly believed they had arrived in India when they reached the Americas. Asians did not possess a similar desire to reach Europe. But this still doesn't explain why the Chinese didn't embark on the final and most crucial stage of the Industrial Revolution in the West: Harnessing the force of steam and the use of fossil fuels to build stronger, more efficient machinery, faster ships and eventually railways, cars and airplanes.

Printing and literacy greatly expanded during Song times; the world's first printed paper money (bank notes) was introduced and a system of canals and roads was built, all facilitating an unprecedented population growth. Iron smelting and the use of coal multiplied several times over as China reached a stage sometimes called "proto-industrial." And yet China produced no Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen or James Watt to develop successful steam engines, nor a George Stephenson to build railway lines or a Karl Benz to make the first gasoline-powered automobile. Although experiments with flying had been undertaken in many nations around the world, the airplane was made possible only with the invention of modern engines, which is why China didn't produce the Wright brothers.

For thousands of years, human beings were limited by their ability to harness muscle power, of men and animals. This was later supplemented with windmills, watermills and similar inventions, which could be important, but in a limited fashion. The harnessing of steam power for engines and machinery was a revolution which provided the basis for enormous improvements in output and efficiency. For some reason, China never did take this final step, and although the country remained prosperous for centuries, later dynasties never quite matched the dynamism under Song times. Emphasis was on cultural continuity, and China experienced no great cultural flowing or event similar to the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment in Europe. China was in its own eyes the Middle Kingdom. It had some annoying barbarians at its frontiers, but no immediate neighbors to rival its size and power, and thus little incentive for improvement. The result was relative (though not necessarily absolute) scientific stagnation. China could afford to grow self-satisfied, and she did. In contrast, Europeans, who were divided into numerous smaller states in a constant state of rivalry instead of one, large unified state, had stronger incentives for innovation, including in weapons technology.

The Mongol invasion, which ended the Song dynasty, is sometimes blamed for this loss of impetus. After the conquest of Beijing in 1215 the soil was greasy with human fat for months. According to Genghis Khan, "The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters." He believed in practicing what you preach. DNA studies indicate that he may have as many as 16 million descendants living today.

The Mongols were notorious for their brutality, but they had a particular dislike for Muslims. Hulagu Khan led the Mongol forces as they completely destroyed Baghdad in 1258, thus ending what remained of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Christian community was largely spared, allegedly thanks to the intercession of Hulagu's Nestorian Christian wife.

The irony is that many Mongols soon adopted Islam as their preferred creed. Maybe the warlike nature of this religion appealed to them. It is possible to make a comparison between Muhammad and Genghis Khan. Temüjin, who gained the title Khan when he founded the Mongol Empire in 1206, did believe he had received a divine mandate to conquer the world, and he created an impressive military force out of nothing by uniting scattered tribes and directing their aggressive energies outwards. He created a Mongolian nation where no nation had existed before, similar to what Muhammad did with the Arabs. The difference is that the Mongols didn't establish a religion of their own throughout their empire which outlasted their rule. We should probably be grateful for that, otherwise the Organization of the Mongolian Conference would be the largest voting bloc at the United Nations today, our schools would teach us about the glories of Mongol science and tolerance and our media would constantly warn us against the dangers of Genghisophobia.

In Europe, the Mongol conquests had the most lasting impact in the Ukraine and Russia. The city of Kiev was devastated while a new Russian state slowly grew out of Moscow. Ivan the Great in the 1400s expanded the Russian state and defeated the Tatar yoke, as the now Islamized Turko-Mongols of the Golden Horde were called. The Mongols invaded Eastern Europe and in the course of a few years attacked Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Serbia. They had reached as far as Vienna in 1241 when the Great Khan suddenly died and the commanders had to return to elect a new leader.

The Black Death, the great Eurasian plague pandemic, swept from Central Asia along the Silk Road through the Mongol Empire, reaching the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the 1340s. The disease, which killed at least a third of the population and more than 70% in some regions, probably reached Europe after the Golden Horde used biological warfare during a siege of the Black Sea port of Caffa, catapulting plague-infested corpses into the city. It was then carried to the European continent with fleeing Genoese traders. The Mongols thus didn't invade Western Europe, but at least they gave us the plague.

Many historians place great macrohistorical importance on the Mongol conquest. It certainly had a disruptive impact, and the trail of devastation it left behind severely depopulated regions from China and Korea via Iran and Iraq to Eastern Europe. It ended the dynamic Song dynasty, yet even before the Mongol conquest, there were few indications that a development towards modern machinery was about to take place in China. Japan, which has always learned a lot from China, escaped unscathed. A series of typhoons, dubbed kamikaze or "divine wind" by the Japanese, saved the country from the Mongol fleets in 1274 and 1281, but they, too, didn't develop a fully fledged industry until they adopted a Western model during the Meiji Restoration in the late nineteenth century.

Moreover, even if Western Europe escaped the Mongols, we should remember that Western Europeans had recently experienced centuries of political disintegration and population decline, longer than in any period in Chinese history for several thousand years. Europe also had to face a much more prolonged assault by Islam. Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne in his work Mohammed and Charlemagne asserted that the definitive break between the Classical world and the Middle Ages in the West was not the downfall of the Western Roman Empire following the partition in 395, but the Islamic conquests in the seventh century.

In Pirenne's view, although the Germanic tribes caused imperial authority to collapse in the fifth century, Western Europe was not totally cut off from the Eastern Roman Empire. The Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum or "Our Sea" as the Romans called it, still remained a Christian lake. This changed decisively during the seventh century when North Africa came under Islamic rule, as did the Iberian Peninsula. Although the Arab conquest was halted by the forces of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in France in 732, arguably the most important battle in Western history, Islamic attacks continued for centuries since Jihad is a permanent obligation and should be carried out on regular intervals. Jihad piracy, slave trade and looting across the Mediterranean accompanied by inland raids, occasionally as far north as the Alps in Switzerland, made normal communication between the Christian West and the Christian East extremely difficult. In fact, Jihad piracy and slavery from North Africa remained a serious threat to Europeans for more than a thousand years, even into the nineteenth century. As historian Ibn Khaldun, a devout Muslim and therefore anti-Christian, proclaimed: "The Christian could no longer float a plank upon the sea."

This was certainly true in the West, though the Byzantines still held their ground in the Aegean Sea. The Eastern Roman Empire was attacked by Arab Muslims in the 630s and quickly lost Syria, Palestine and Egypt, but managed to survive. Only a few years earlier the official language had been changed from Latin to Greek. It is custom to call the remaining, smaller and Hellenized state the Byzantine Empire.

The Carolingian Empire, named after Charles Martel (Carolus in Latin), was the "scaffold of the Middle Ages." Although it didn't survive for long, the structures put in place by Charles Martel and his grandson Charlemagne were to shape Western Europe for centuries. While civilization in Europe had always been centered on the Mediterranean, the center of power in the West was now north of the Alps. The Carolingian capital was established in Aachen in present-day Germany, as Muslims made access to the sea difficult. Charlemagne held his imperial coronation by Pope Leo III in Saint Peter's Basilica in the year 800, yet already in the year 846 Muslims sacked Rome and stole every piece of gold and silver in Saint Peter's. Arabs also occupied Sicily for several centuries, and attacked Naples, Capua, Calabria and Sardinia repeatedly. As Pirenne says, "the coast from the Gulf of Lyons and the Riviera to the mouth of the Tiber, ravaged by war and the pirates, whom the Christians, having no fleet, were powerless to resist, was now merely a solitude and a prey to piracy. The ports and the cities were deserted. The link with the Orient was severed, and there was no communication with the Saracen [Muslim] coasts. There was nothing but death. The Carolingian Empire presented the most striking contrast with the Byzantine. It was purely an inland power, for it had no outlets. The Mediterranean territories, formerly the most active portions of the Empire, which supported the life of the whole, were now the poorest, the most desolate, the most constantly menaced. For the first time in history the axis of Occidental civilization was displaced towards the North, and for many centuries it remained between the Seine and the Rhine. And the Germanic peoples, which had hitherto played only the negative part of destroyers, were now called upon to play a positive part in the reconstruction of European civilization."

Pirenne's thesis has been debated for generations, and new archaeological evidence has been uncovered since it was published in the 1930s. I personally think he underestimated the extent to which civilization collapsed in the West after the Germanic raids, but he is right that the Mediterranean was still open for communication, and that this changed dramatically after the Arab conquest. Though contacts between the Byzantines and Western Europe were limited during this time period, we should remember that they were never zero. Findings from Viking graves indicate that there was trade between the Baltic Sea and Constantinople even at this point, but trade was greatly diminished compared to what it had been previously.

The reason why the Christian West for centuries didn't have easy access to the Classical learning of the Christian East was because Muslims and Jihad had made the Mediterranean unsafe. It has to be the height of absurdity to block access to something and then take credit for transmitting it, yet that is precisely what Arabs do. As stronger states slowly grew up in the West, regular contact with their Eastern cousins was gradually re-established, starting with the Italian city-states. And as soon as direct contact was established, Western Europeans gained access to the original Greco-Roman manuscripts preserved in Constantinople. They didn't need to rely on limited translations in Arabic, which were anyway made from the same Byzantine manuscripts in the first place, and frequently by Christians. Moreover, Muslims have spent more than one thousand years systematically wiping out Greek culture in the Mediterranean region, a process which continues at Cyprus even into the twenty-first century, which makes it patently ridiculous when they now brag about how much we owe them for their efforts at "preserving the Greek heritage." The efforts of Arabs are, in my view, as overrated as those by the Byzantine Empire are underrated.

John Argyropoulos, who was born in 1415 in Constantinople and died in 1487 in Italy, was a Byzantine expert on Greek history who played an important role in the revival of Classical learning in the West. He lectured at the universities of Florence and Rome. Among his students was Lorenzo the Magnificent from the influential Medici family, who sponsored Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and others. Sandro Botticelli was working under the patronage of the Medicis when he in the 1480s painted The Birth of Venus. Pagan motifs inspired by the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome were widely popular at this time. Apparently, Leonardo da Vinci, too, attended the lectures of Argyropoulos. The universal genius was passionately interested in Classical learning, perhaps especially in science and mechanical engineering, a field in which he created numerous inventions. He was certainly familiar with the Ten Books on Architecture by the Roman engineer Vitruvius, the only major work on architecture and technology to survive from the Greco-Roman world, which was also a vital inspiration for Renaissance architects Brunelleschi and Alberti. Leonardo's famous drawing the Vitruvian Man was inspired by Vitruvius' writings about architecture and its relations to the proportions of the human body.

In the words of Deno Geanakoplos, Professor of Byzantine History, "We know that until the ninth century the patron saint of Venice was not Mark but the Greek Theodore, and that in the eleventh century Byzantine workmen were summoned by the Doge in order to embellish, perhaps entirely to construct, the church of St. Mark. Venetian-Byzantine contacts became more frequent in the twelfth century as a result of the growth of the large Venetian commercial colony in Constantinople." These contacts continued to grow during the High Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, and "In the half century or so before Constantinople's fall in 1453, a gradually increasing number of refugees from the East poured into the West. Venice, as lord of important territories in the Greek East, especially the island of Crete, and as the chief port of debarkation in Italy, received the major part of these refugees. This stream quickened rapidly after 1453."

He stresses that it is a mistake to believe that all Greek texts were transported out after the fall of Constantinople. Most of the refugees fleeing the Turkish Jihad could carry few possessions with them. The process of transferring Classical knowledge to the West took generations, even centuries, but was now greatly aided by Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press, introduced around the year 1450 in Mainz, Germany.

It was a major stroke of historical luck – a religious person would probably say divine providence - that printing was reinvented in Europe at exactly the same time as the last vestige of the ancient Roman Empire fell to Muslims. The texts that had been preserved by the Byzantines for a thousand years after Rome collapsed could now be rescued forever instead of quietly disappearing. This ensured that the Renaissance marked a permanent infusion of Greco-Roman knowledge into Western thought, not just a temporary one.

As historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein says in her celebrated book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: "The classical editions, dictionaries, grammar and reference guides issued from print shops made it possible to achieve an unprecedented mastery of Alexandrian learning even while laying the basis for a new kind of permanent Greek revival in the West. (...) We now tend to take for granted that the study of Greek would continue to flourish after the main Greek manuscript centers had fallen into alien hands and hence fail to appreciate how remarkable it was to find that Homer and Plato had not been buried anew but had, on the contrary, been disinterred forever more. Surely Ottoman advances would have been catastrophic before the advent of printing. Texts and scholars scattered in nearby regions might have prolonged the study of Greek but only in a temporary way."

According to Deno Geanakoplos, in the late fifteenth century "only one city in Italy, Venice, could fulfil all the complex requirements of a Greek press. Venice possessed a class sufficiently wealthy to buy, and the leisure to read, the printed classics. Venice was less subject to papal pressures than other Italian cities. Important too in [printer] Aldus' thinking must have been Venetian possession of the precious collection of Greek manuscripts bequeathed by Bessarion — manuscripts which could serve as paradigms for his books. And hardly less significant for him must have been the presence in Venice of a large, thriving Greek community. (…) By the time of Aldus' death in 1515, his press had given to the world practically all the major Greek authors of classical antiquity."

Historian Bernard Lewis writes in his book What Went Wrong?: "In the vast bibliography of works translated in the Middle Ages from Greek into Arabic, we find no poets, no dramatists, not even historians. These were not useful and they were of no interest; they did not figure in the translation programs. This was clearly a cultural rejection: you take what is useful from the infidel; but you don't need to look at his absurd ideas or to try and understand his inferior literature, or to study his meaningless history."

Muslims who wanted translations of Greek or other non-Islamic works were primarily concerned with topics of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy. As Lewis says, they usually ignored playwrights and dramatists such as Sophocles and Euripides, historians such as Thucydides and Herodotus and poets such as Homer. This entire corpus of literature could only be saved from the Greek originals preserved in Constantinople. Moreover, in addition to being selective about Greek works, Muslims showed little interest in Latin writers, for instance Cicero. There was thus a large body of Greco-Roman learning and valuable literature that was never available in Arabic in the first place.

It is true that a number of Greek works were translated to Arabic, especially in the ninth century when a group called Mu'tazilites attempted, without lasting success, to reconcile Islamic with logic. As Ibn Warraq writes about them:

"However, it is clear now that the Mu'tazilites were first and foremost Muslims, living in the circle of Islamic ideas, and were motivated by religious concerns. There was no sign of absolute liberated thinking, or a desire, as [Hungarian orientalist] Goldziher put it, 'to throw off chafing shackles, to the detriment of the rigorously orthodox view of life.' Furthermore, far from being 'liberal,' they turned out to be exceedingly intolerant, and were involved in the Mihna, the Muslim Inquisition under the Abbasids. However, the Mu'tazilites are important for having introduced Greek philosophical ideas into the discussion of Islamic dogmas."

According to writer Patrick Poole, "Western Christianity's rational tradition developed in the Medieval era precisely as a result of the outright rejection of the irrationalism inherent in Islamic philosophy, not the embracing of it." As he states, "a rationalist philosophy had begun to develop under the Mu'tazilite school of interpretation, which advocated for a created, as opposed to an uncreated, Quran. But Caliph al-Mutawakkil [reign 847-861] condemned the Mu'tazilite school, which opened the door for the rival Ash'arite interpretation, founded by al-Ash'ari (d. 935), to eventually take preeminence within Sunni Islam." Rationalism also faced an uphill battle because of the view of Allah as an unpredictable and whimsical deity, since "only Allah truly acts with real effect; all seemingly natural observances of causation are merely manifestations of Allah's habits, for Allah simultaneously creates both the cause and the effect according to his arbitrary will. This view is best expressed by one of the Islamic philosophers cited by [Tariq] Ramadan, al-Ghazali (1059-1111), in his book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers."

The Koran is, structurally speaking, deeply inconsistent and almost incomprehensible to an average reader. One verse says one thing, the next verse contradicts this. The notion that Allah as incomprehensible and provides no correlation between cause and effect had a serious impact on the development of empirical sciences in the Islamic world. In contrast, for Jews and Christians, God has created the universe according to a certain logic, which can be described and predicted. Kepler firmly believed the solar system was created according to God's plan, which he attempted to unlock. Sir Isaac Newton was passionately interested in religion and wrote extensively about it. Even Albert Einstein, who was certainly not an orthodox, religious Jew, still retained some residue of the idea that the universe was created according to a logic which is, to a certain extent, comprehensible and accessible to human reason: "I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

The Caliph al-Ma'mun (reign 813 - 833), who was influenced by the Mu'tazilite movement, created the House of Wisdom, a library and translation office. The Baghdad-centered Abbasid dynasty, which replaced the Damascus-centered Umayyad dynasty in 750, was closer to Persian culture and was probably inspired by the Sassanid practice of translating works and creating great libraries. Alkindus (Al-Kindi) was appointed to participate in the undertaking. Philosophical and scientific texts were translated into Arabic from Persian and Indian (Sanskrit) sources, but above all from Greek ones. Great efforts were made to collect and buy important Greek works and manuscripts from the Byzantines and have them translated.

In the book How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, De Lacy O'Leary states that "Aristotelian study proper began with Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. after 873), commonly known as 'the Philosopher of the Arabs.' It is significant that almost all the great scientists and philosophers of the Arabs were classed as Aristotelians tracing their intellectual descent from al-Kindi and al-Farabi."

At the heart of these efforts was a Nestorian (Assyrian) Christian named Johannitius (Hunayn ibn Ishaq). He had studied Greek by living in Greek lands, presumably in the Byzantine Empire, and was put in charge of translations at the House of Wisdom. Soon, he, his son and his nephew had made available in Arabic and Syriac Galen's medical treatises as well as Hippocrates and texts by Aristotle, Plato and others. In some cases, he apparently translated a work into Syriac and his son Ishaq translated this further into Arabic. All senior medical doctors in the Islamic world, including Avicenna and Rhazes, were later influenced by these translations of Greek medicine.

In 431 Nestorius, a Christian Patriarch, was expelled from Constantinople for heresy. The so-called Assyrian Church of the East thus split from the Byzantine Church. Their followers found a new home in the Syriac-speaking world and were welcomed in the Sassanid Persian Empire, the rival of Byzantium. They brought with them a collection of Greek texts, among them medical works of Galen and Hippocrates. It was these texts, aided by other manuscripts acquired and bought from Constantinople later, which provided the basis for translations of Greek texts into Arabic. The followers of this Eastern church, usually called Nestorians in the West, had communities spread out across much of Iraq, Iran and Central Asia, and were respected for their medical skills.

According to scholar Thomas T. Allsen, "Nestorians in the East were closely associated with the medical profession. A considerable body of Syriac medical literature, some in the original and some in translation, has been recovered in central Asia. This is hardly surprising, because Eastern Christians were an important fixture in West Asian medicine." Western medicine in Yuan (Mongol ruled) China, often characterized as "Muslim," was almost always in the hands of Nestorians, a situation that Western travelers found worthy of note.

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. It was once the lingua franca of the Middle East and was widely used among Christians and also Arabs and to some extent Persians. It had a major impact on the development of Arabic, which later replaced it following the Islamic conquests. The Nabataeans, a Semitic people associated with the famous rock city of Petra close to the Dead Sea in present-day Jordan, were greatly influenced by Aramaic, and the Arabic alphabet developed out of their alphabet. The most unorthodox scholars even suggest that the Islamic religion itself may have developed closer to this region, at the northern fringes of Arabia, than around Mecca in central Arabia.

Some researchers believe that Syriac, or Syro-Aramaic, was also the root of the Koran. When it was composed, Arabic was not fully developed as a written language. Syriac, however, was widely used in the region at the time. Ibn Warraq estimates that up to 20% of the Koran is incomprehensible even to educated Arabs because segments of it were originally written in another, related language before Muhammad was born. A German professor of ancient Semitic and Arabic languages writes about the subject under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg. If you believe Luxenberg, the chapters or suras of the Koran usually ascribed to the Mecca period, which are also the most tolerant and non-violent ones as opposed to the much harsher and more violent chapters from Medina, are not "Islamic" at all, but Christian:

"In its origin, the Koran is a Syro-Aramaic liturgical book, with hymns and extracts from Scriptures which might have been used in sacred Christian services. (…) Its socio-political sections, which are not especially related to the original Koran, were added later in Medina. At its beginning, the Koran was not conceived as the foundation of a new religion. It presupposes belief in the Scriptures, and thus functioned merely as an inroad into Arabic society."

Monte Cassino is a monastery in southern Italy, founded by Saint Benedict in the sixth century, which was sacked and burned and its monks killed in 883 by Arabs in one of their countless Jihad raids in Western Europe. It was later rebuilt, and from here the monk Constantine the African in the eleventh century translated medical texts from Arabic into Latin, including those of Hippocrates and Galen done by Johannitius in Baghdad. Constantine also translated medical treatises written in Arabic by the Egyptian Jew Isaac Israeli ben Solomon. He was influenced by Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle and Plato.

It is easy to track how Arabic translations of Greek texts from Byzantine manuscripts, often done by Christians, made their way from the Islamic East and ended up in the Iberian Peninsula in the Islamic West, where some of them were translated by Christians, for instance in the multilingual city of Toledo in central Spain, back to Latin. It is thus true that some Greek texts were reintroduced in the West via Arabic, sometimes passing via Syriac or Hebrew along the way, but this was always based, in the end, on manuscripts from the Byzantine Empire.

The work led by Johannitius in Baghdad preserved via the Arabic translation some of Galen's works lost in the Greek original. The Greek physician Galen worked in the second century A.D., systematized medical knowledge in the Greco-Roman world and supplied this with his own research. He lamented the fact that he couldn't perform dissection of human corpses, but this wasn't allowed during Roman times so he based his studies of human anatomy on dissections of animals such as dogs, apes and pigs. This is funny if you are familiar with the low status dogs, apes and pigs have in Islam, and know that all subsequent medicine in the Muslim world was inspired by Galen. Since dissection of human corpses was taboo in the Islamic world, too, Galen's errors remained unchallenged for centuries, until the Renaissance in Christian Europe. Leonardo da Vinci made numerous accurate anatomical drawings but didn't share this knowledge much at his time. The final breakthrough came with the anatomist Andreas Vesalius from Brussels, who published his book On the Workings of the Human Body in 1543 based on observation through autopsy. He is considered the father of modern anatomy in the Western world.

Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the past, but it is no longer active.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

 

Continued (Permanent Link)

Do we know why Muslim society did not industrialize?

Without necessarily agreeing with every word of this essay, I believe the question of why there was no scientific revolution in Islam is certainly interesting. It is certainly remarkable that the Arabs of Palestine, exposed to the industrialization introduced by the Zionists even before the creation of the state of Israel, have never developed any real industry to speak of, despite having a relatively high literacy rate. <

 

One thing to bear in mind - nobody knows why cultures develop unevenly. Fjordman's ancestors were cavorting about in skins when the Jews were building the first temple, and they were busy ransacking England in Viking boats when the Muslim civilization flourished.

 

Declarations susch as the following should be weighed carefully:

 

"Islamic rational scholarship, which we have mainly in mind when we speak of the greatness of Muslim civilisation, depends in its entirety on classical antiquity.....in Islam as in every civilisation, what is really important is not the individual elements but the synthesis that combines them into a living organism of its own....Islamic civilisation as we know it would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage."

 

European civilization as we know it would likewise would not have existed without the Greek heritage, the Arab heritage and the Jewish heritage, so what? But the Arabs also borrowed the zero from the Indians and they invented Algebra and a few other things.  

 

We have reproduced this essay with, I hope, credit to the original place it was posted. It is posted in several places.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Islam, the Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, part 1
Fjordman - 10/5/2007

I have written a couple of essays regarding the Greek impact on the rise of modern science, and why the Scientific Revolution didn't happen in the Islamic world. I find this to be an interesting topic, especially since there are so many myths regarding this perpetrated by Muslims and their apologists today, so I will explore the subject in some detail.

I mentioned the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in one of my previous essays. It has been claimed by one researcher that an Arab alchemist in the ninth century managed to decode some of the hieroglyphs. Even if this should be true, his research didn't leave any lasting impact and wasn't followed up by others, which is in itself significant. The proven track record is that Arab Muslims had controlled Egypt for more than a thousand years, yet never managed to decipher the hieroglyphs nor for the most part displayed much interest in doing so. The trilingual Rosetta Stone was employed by the French philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphs in 1822. He chose an intuitive (though ultimately correct) approach by employing the Coptic language, the liturgical language of the Egyptian Christians (which was a direct descendant of that of the ancient Pharaohs, as opposed to the language of the Arab invaders) rather than the more mathematical approach of his English rival Thomas Young.

For the sake of historical accuracy, it should be mentioned that when hieroglyphs were finally put out of use, thus ending one of the oldest continuous cultural traditions on the planet, dating back at least to the Narmer Palette celebrating the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in the 32nd century B.C., this was also done by Christians. The process was begun in the fourth century AD, before the partition of the Roman Empire, and was completed by the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Justinian who abolished the worship of Isis on the island of Philae in the sixth century. As the Egyptian religion was shut down, so the writing system associated with it was forgotten. The remnants of Plato's Academy were also closed in the name of Christian (Nicaean) unity.

Justinian is otherwise remembered for constructing the Hagia Sophia, the grandest cathedral in Christendom for almost a thousand years, and for his ultimately unsuccessful attempts at restoring the unity of the Roman Empire by reconquering the Western lands. This stretched the resources of the Empire, and along with a plague pandemic, drained its strength. The long wars between the Byzantines and the Sassanid (Persian) Empire weakened both states and were one of the reasons why the Arabs could make their Islamic conquests in the seventh century.

Logically speaking, the Middle East should be perfectly situated to combine the knowledge of all major centers of civilization in the Old World, from the Mediterranean and the Greco-Roman world via the Persian and other pre-Islamic cultures in the Middle East to India and the civilizations of the Far East. As I will demonstrate, the Muslim thinkers and scientists whose names are worth mentioning did just that.

According to scholar F. R. Rosenthal: "Islamic rational scholarship, which we have mainly in mind when we speak of the greatness of Muslim civilisation, depends in its entirety on classical antiquity.....in Islam as in every civilisation, what is really important is not the individual elements but the synthesis that combines them into a living organism of its own....Islamic civilisation as we know it would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage."

Greek thought was certainly an important inspiration for virtually all Muslim thinkers, but it wasn't the only one. Alkindus (Al-Kindi), the Arab mathematician who lived in Baghdad in the ninth century and was close to several Abbasid Caliphs, was one of the first to attempt reconciling Islam with Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, a project that was to last for several centuries and prove ultimately unsuccessful. His other lasting impact was his writings about Indian arithmetic and numerals. Alkindus was one of a handful of people primarily responsible for spreading the knowledge and use of Indian numerals in the Middle East.

India has a long-standing mathematical tradition and the Hindu numerical system is one of its most important contributions to world culture. It was slowly introduced in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, gained momentum after the Italian mathematician Fibonacci in 1202 published his book Liber Abaci and reached wide acceptance during the Renaissance. Europeans learned about Indian numerals via Arabs, which is why they were mistakenly called Arabic numerals in the West. They were superior to Roman numerals in several ways, the revolutionary concept of zero being one of them. There is no doubt that this numerical system reached the West via the Islamic world, but we should remember that since the Middle East is situated between India and Europe, any ideas from India by necessity had to pass through that region to reach Europe. I'm not sure how much credit we should give Islam for this geographical accident.

Al-Razi was a talented Persian physician and chemist who lived in the ninth and early tenth century. He combined Greek, Indian and Persian traditions, and relied on clinical observance of patients in the Hippocratic tradition. He also commented, and criticized, the works of philosophers such as Aristotle. Some of his writings were translated into Latin. As Ibn Warraq writes in his book Why I Am Not a Muslim, "Perhaps the greatest freethinker in the whole of Islam was al-Razi, the Rhazes of Medieval Europe (or Razis of Chaucer), where his prestige and authority remained unchallenged until the seventeenth century. Meyerhof also calls him the 'greatest physician of the Islamic world and one of the great physicians of all time.'" He was also highly critical of Islamic doctrines, and considered the Koran to be an assorted mixture of "absurd and inconsistent fables." Moreover, "His heretical writings, significantly, have not survived and were not widely read; nonetheless, they are witness to a remarkably tolerant culture and society - a tolerance lacking in other periods and places."

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was a Persian physician who continued the course set by al-Razi of mixing Greek, Indian, East Asian and Middle Eastern medical learning. His book The Canon of Medicine from the early eleventh century was a standard medical text for centuries. A striking number of the Muslims who did leave some imprint upon the history of science were Persians, who could tap into their proud pre-Islamic heritage. Historian Ibn Khaldun admitted that "It is strange that most of the learned among the Muslims who have excelled in the religious or intellectual sciences are non-Arabs with rare exceptions."


It is also interesting to notice that virtually all freethinkers and rationalists within the Islamic world, such as Avicenna or Farabi, were at odds with Islamic orthodoxy and were frequently harassed for this. Whatever discoveries they made were more in spite of Islam than because of Islam, and in the end, Islam won. As Ibn Warraq notes, "orthodox Islam emerged victorious from the encounter with Greek philosophy. Islam rejected the idea that one could attain truth with unaided human reason and settled for the unreflective comforts of the putatively superior truth of divine revelation. Wherever one decides to place the date of this victory of orthodox Islam (perhaps in the ninth century with the conversion of al-Ashari, or in the eleventh century with the works of al-Ghazali), it has been, I believe, an unmitigated disaster for all Muslims, indeed all mankind."
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was born in Córdoba, Spain (Andalusia) in the 12th century. He held comparatively progressive views on women, was in some ways a freethinker and faced trouble for this, yet he was also a jurist in the Maliki school of sharia law and served as a qadi, Islamic judge, in Seville. He supported the traditional view, held by leading scholars even into the twenty-first century, of the death penalty for persons leaving Islam: "An apostate…is to be executed by agreement in the case of a man, because of the words of the Prophet, 'Slay those who change their din [religion]'…Asking the apostate to repent was stipulated as a condition…prior to his execution."

Still, Averroes is chiefly remembered for his attempts at combining Aristotelian philosophy and Islam. According to Ibn Warraq, he had a profound influence on the Latin scientists of the thirteenth century, yet "had no influence at all on the development of Islamic philosophy. After his death, he was practically forgotten in the Islamic world."

Philosophy in general went into permanent decline. One of the reasons for this was the influential al-Ghazali, by many considered the most important Muslim after Muhammad himself, who argued that much of Greek philosophy was logically incoherent and an affront to Islam. Averroes' attempts at refuting al-Ghazali were ignored and forgotten.

The leading Jewish thinker of this era was the rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides. He was born in 1135 in Córdoba in Islamic-occupied Spain, but had to flee through North Africa when the devout Berber Almohades invaded from Morocco and attacked Christians and Jews in a classical Jihad fashion. Maimonides eagerly read Greek philosophy, some of which was available in Arabic. He also, for the most part, wrote in Arabic. His attempts at reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with the Torah influenced the great Christian thinker Saint Thomas Aquinas, who made similar efforts at reconciling Greek thought with biblical Scripture a few generations later.

It is true that some Greek and other classics were translated to Arabic, but it is equally true that Muslims could be highly particular about which texts to exclude. As Iranian intellectual Amir Taheri explains: "It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle's Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle's Politics in Persian until 1963."

In other words: There was a great deal of Greek thought that could never have been "transferred" to Europeans by Arabs, as is frequently claimed by Western Multiculturalists, because many Greek works had never been translated into Arabic in the first place. Muslims especially turned down political texts, since these included descriptions of systems in which men ruled themselves according to their own laws. This was considered blasphemous by Muslims, as laws are made by Allah and rule belongs to his representatives.

William of Moerbeke was a Flemish scholar and prolific translator who probably did more than any other individual for the transmission of Greek thought to the West. His translation of virtually all of the works of Aristotle and many by Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria and others paved the way for the Renaissance. He was fluent in Greek, and was for a time Catholic bishop of Corinth in Greece. He made highly accurate translations directly from the Greek originals, and even improved earlier, flawed translations of some works. His Latin translation of Politics, one of the important works that were not available in Arabic, was completed around 1260. His friend Thomas Aquinas used this translation as the basis for his groundbreaking work The Summa Theologica. Aquinas did refer to Maimonides as well as to Averroes and Avicenna and was familiar with their writing, but he was rather critical of Averroes and refuted some of his use of Aristotle.

Like Aquinas, William of Moerbeke was a friar of the Dominican order and had personal contacts at the top levels of the Vatican. Several texts, among them some of Archimedes, would have been lost without the efforts of Moerbeke and a few others, and he clearly did his work on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, one of the reasons why he did this was because the translations that were available in Arabic were incomplete and sometimes of poor linguistic quality. The Arabic translations, although they did serve as an early reintroduction for some Western Europeans to Greek thought, didn't "save" Greek knowledge as it had never been lost. It had been preserved in an unbroken line since Classical times by Greek, Byzantine Christians, who still considered themselves Romans, and it could be recovered there. There was extensive contact between Eastern and Western Christians at this time; sometimes amiable, sometimes less so and occasionally downright hostile, but contact nonetheless. The permanent recovery of Greek and Classical learning was undertaken as a direct transmission from Greek, Orthodox Christians to Western, Latin Christians. There were no Muslim middlemen involved.

As a result, by the late 1200s, Saint Thomas Aquinas and early Renaissance figures such as the poet Dante and the humanist Petrarch had at their disposal a much more complete and accurate body of Greek thought than any of the renowned Muslim philosophers ever did. What's more, many of the translations that did exist in Arabic had been undertaken by Christians in the first place, not by Muslims.

At the American Thinker, Dr. Jonathan David Carson dispels some of the hype regarding Islam's role in the history of science. In his view, "The 'Islamic scholars' who translated 'ancient Greece's natural philosophy' were a curious group of Muslims, since all or almost all of the translators from Greek to Arabic were Christians or Jews." Moreover, most Greek texts "did not make the long journey from Greek to Syriac or Hebrew to Arabic to Latin, and Western Europeans preferred [surprise!] translations of Aristotle directly from the Greek, which were not only superior but also more readily available."

In A History of Philosophy, Frederick Copleston says that "it is a mistake to imagine that the Latin scholastics were entirely dependent upon translations from Arabic or even that translation from the Arabic always preceded translation from the Greek." Indeed, "translation from the Greek generally preceded translation from the Arabic." This view is confirmed by Peter Dronke in A History of Twelfth—Century Western Philosophy: "most of the works of Aristotle, however, were translated directly from the Greek, and only exceptionally by way of an Arabic intermediary...translations from the Arabic must be given their full importance, but not more."

As Carson sees it, "the great rescue of Greek philosophy by translation into Arabic turns out to mean no rescue of Plato and the transmission of Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts of Aristotle, either directly or more often via Syriac or Hebrew, to a Christendom that already had the Greek texts and had already translated most of them into Latin."

Moreover, the intellectual curiosity was entirely one-sided. As Bernard Lewis states in The Muslim Discovery of Europe: "We know of no Muslim scholar or man of letters before the eighteenth century who sought to learn a western language, still less of any attempt to produce grammars, dictionaries, or other language tools. Translations are few and far between. Those that are known are works chosen for practical purposes and the translations are made by converts or non—Muslims." J.M. Roberts put it this way: "Why, until very recently, did Islamic scholars show no wish to translate Latin or western European texts into Arabic? (…) It is clear that an explanation of European inquisitiveness and adventurousness must lie deeper than economics, important though they may have been."

Much has been made of Spain's glorious Islamic past, yet more books are translated in Spain now in a single year than have been translated into Arabic over the past 1,000 years. As I have shown, what existed of advances in sciences in the early centuries of Islamic rule owed its existence almost entirely to the infusion of pre-Islamic thought, and even at the best of times the translations from non-Muslim ideas and books could be quite selective. Later, even the limited debate of Greek philosophy was curtailed. Muslims were assured of their God-given superiority and did not bother to look into ideas from worthless infidel cultures.

Toby E. Huff, author of the book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, explains this. A landmark in Western science was Nicholas Copernicus' The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres from 1543. The same years also saw another milestone in the rise of modern science: Vesalius' On the Fabric of the Human Body, which created the foundations for modern medicine by representing an empirical agenda, the first-hand examination of the body through human dissection (autopsy).

According to Huff, "Vesalius claimed to have corrected over 200 errors in Galen's account of human anatomy," and his "illustrations are far superior to anything to be found in the Arabic/Islamic tradition (where pictorial representation of the human body was particularly suspect) or, for that matter, in the Chinese and (I presume) Indian traditions." In astronomy, "Kepler went far beyond Ptolemy's methods, and discovered entirely new principles for the precise description of the motions of bodies in the heavens," thus proving the elliptical (and hence not perfectly circular) orbit of Mars.

In the eyes of Toby E. Huff, "the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a social, intellectual and legal revolution that laid the intellectual and institutional foundations upon which modern science was later constructed. At the heart of this development was the jurisprudential idea of a corporation, a collection of individuals who were recognized as a singular 'whole body' and granted legitimate legal autonomy. Such entities were given the right to sue and be sued, to buy and sell property, to make rules and laws regulating their activities, to adjudicate those laws and to operate according to the principle of election by consent as well as the Roman legal aphorism, what affects everyone should be considered and approved by everyone. Among the entities granted status as legitimate corporations were cities and towns, charitable organizations, professional guilds (especially of physicians) and, of course, universities. Nothing comparable to this kind of legal autonomy emerged in China or under Islam. In short, the European medievals created autonomous, self-governing institutions of higher learning and then imported into them a methodologically powerful and metaphysically rich cosmology that directly challenged and contradicted many aspects of the traditional Christian world-view."

This was also a time period noted for the growth of early modern capitalism, but Huff rejects any simplistic connection between money and science. Christian Europe exhibited an intellectual curiosity, a desire to uncover truth, that could not be reduced simply to a matter of economic interests: "There was indeed a 'commercial revolution' sweeping Europe from about the twelfth century, but that hardly explains the great interest in Aristotle in the universities of that period or the decision by medical practitioners to undertake dissections and to incorporate medical education into the university curriculum. Similarly, there was another rise in commercial activities in the sixteenth century, but this hardly explains either the motivation of the clerical Copernicus, or of Galileo, Kepler, or Tycho Brahe in developing a new astronomy against the interests of the Church."

One of the most groundbreaking innovations in Europe during the High Middle Ages was the creation of an ongoing, university-centered debate. This made all the difference, since, as Huff points out, "it is one thing if an activity is pursued randomly by various actors; it is something else altogether if that activity is carried on collectively as a result of a regularized process." While Islamic madrasas excluded all of the natural works of Aristotle, as well as logic and natural theology, European scholars benefited from "a surprising degree of freedom of inquiry" which "did not exist in the Arab/Muslim world then and does not exist now."

Centers of learning have existed in civilizations throughout recorded history, yet most of them did not possess all of the qualities generally associated with a university today. It is possible that the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Indians and others had institutions that could be called universities already at this early age; I don't know Asian history intimately enough to judge that. But the Islamic world definitely did not.

The German-Syrian reformist Bassam Tibi points out that the Muslim thinkers who developed Greek rationalism are today despised in their own civilization. As he writes in his book Islam Between Culture and Politics, "rational sciences were – in medieval Islam – considered to be 'foreign sciences' and at times heretical. At present, Islamic fundamentalists do not seem to know that rational sciences in Islam were based on what was termed ulum al-qudama (the sciences of the Ancients), that it, the Greeks."

Science was viewed as Islamic science, the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc. The Islamic madrasa was not concerned with a process of reason-based investigation or unrestrained enquiry but with a learning process in the sacral sense. Tibi believes it is thus incorrect to call institutions such as Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, the highest institution of learning in Sunni Islam, a university: "Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism, the cast of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university as a seat for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European innovation in the history of mankind."

It is noteworthy that the first medieval European universities were sometimes developed out of monasteries or religious schools. However, here the Greek knowledge was adopted in a far more unfettered manner than it was in the Middle East. The earliest European universities, such as the University of Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England, were created in the eleventh century. More were established during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for instance the University of Paris (Sorbonne), the University of Cambridge, the University of Salamanca in Spain and the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

According to Bassam Tibi, the situation has changed less than one might think: "In Muslim societies, where higher institutions of learning have a deeply rooted procedure of rote-learning, the content of positive sciences adopted from Europe is treated in a similar fashion. Verses of the Koran are learned by heart because they are infallible and not to be enquired into. Immanuel Kant's Critiques or David Hume's Enquiry, now available in Arabic translation, are learned by heart in a similar manner and not conceived of in terms of their nature as problem-oriented enquiries." As a result, "In contrast to the European and the US-model, students educated in a traditional Islamic institution of learning neither have a Bildung (general education) nor an Ausbildung (training)."

This is a problem members of this culture bring with them abroad if they move. In Denmark, Århus city council member Ali Nuur complained that one of the challenges certain immigrant groups face in the education system is that they are unfamiliar with tests rooted in a rational, critical and analytical way of thinking. Guess who?

Another issue is the lack of individual liberty. I still haven't read Atlas Shrugged, a novel I know many Americans hold in high regard, and I have mixed feelings about Ayn Rand's philosophies. However, one thing I do agree with her about is that "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." A Danish man who lived in Iran before the Revolution in 1979 noticed that if he suggested to his Muslim friends that he would like to enjoy some privacy for while, they thought he was crazy. The very notion of "privacy" was alien to them because it implies that you are an autonomous individual with needs of your own. A Muslim is simply an organic part of the Umma, the Islamic community. This lack of individualism and individual liberty is one of the main reasons why Muslims lost out to other cultures.

On the other hand, I believe the West has in recent decades gone too far in making individualism the sole basis of our culture. When a nation is reduced to nothing more than an atomized collection of individuals, with no ties to the past and no obligations to future generations, mounting a defense of a lasting society becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the past, but it is no longer active.

 

Cross posted: Israel News  Middle East Analysis

Continued (Permanent Link)

Understanding Al-Qaeda - a battle between Muslims

The conclusion to be derived from thesis presented in The Two Faces of Al Qaeda is fairly straightforward. The war of Al-Qaida is at present primarily a war between Muslims, not a war of Muslims against the west. Bin-Laden wants power in Saudi Arabia and the Arab and Muslim world first and foremost. Perhaps at a later stage this power would be used against the West. The aim of the terror attacks is not to destroy the West, but to mobilize support for extremism in the Muslim world.

It follows that criticism of Jihadist extremism is not "islamophobia," and that well meaning people who try to ignore or euphemize Islamism are not helping moderate Muslims in any way: quite the contrary.

Ami Isseroff

Chronicle of Higher Education

September 21, 2007

The Two Faces of Al Qaeda

By RAYMOND IBRAHIM

When the September 11 attacks occurred, I was in Fresno, Calif., researching my M.A. thesis on the Battle of Yarmuk, one of the first yet little-known battles between Christendom and Islam, waged in 636 A.D. That battle, in which the Arab invaders were outmatched and yet still triumphed, would have immense historical repercussions. A mere four years later, Egypt and Mesopotamia, and all the land between, would become Islamic. A century later, all the land between southern France and India would be added to the House of Islam.

The next time I came across any reference to this pivotal battle was four years later, as I was translating the words of Osama bin Laden. Surprisingly, an event that seemed so distant, almost irrelevant, to the West was to bin Laden a source not only of pride but of instruction. For him it was not mere history but an inspiring example of outnumbered and underequipped mujahedin who, through faith-inspired courage, managed to defeat the Western empire of Byzantium. When the Arab and Afghan mujahedin, including bin Laden's nascent Al Qaeda - outnumbered and underequipped - defeated the Soviet invaders, history was repeating itself.

Yet why would this band, so reminiscent of their seventh-century forebears, attack the United States, its onetime ally against the Soviets, and in such a horrific manner? What was its motivation?

Finding answers seemed easy enough. From the start, the Internet -- unregulated, uncensored, unfettered -- has been Al Qaeda's primary mouthpiece. Then, as now, whenever Al Qaeda has wanted to communicate with the West, it has posted videotaped messages, some complete with English subtitles.

After the events of 9/11, my increased interest in Arabic language and history led me to enroll in Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Before and during my studies at Georgetown, I avidly read any and all posted Al Qaeda messages. The group's motivation seemed clear enough: retaliation. According to its widely disseminated statements, the West in general, and the United States in particular, had been -- overtly and covertly -- oppressing and exploiting the Islamic world. The accusations included: unqualified U.S. support for Israel at the expense of Palestinians; deaths of Iraqi children due to U.N. sanctions; U.S. support for dictatorial regimes in the Muslim world; and, most recently, Western occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Every single message directed to the West by Al Qaeda includes most of these core grievances, culminating with the statement that it is the Islamic world's duty to defend itself. "After all this, does the prey not have the right, when bound and dragged to its slaughter, to escape? Does it not have the right, while being slaughtered, to lash out with its paw?" bin Laden asks.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Even the 9/11 strikes are explained as acts of reprisal. After describing the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, where several high-rise apartment buildings were leveled, reportedly leaving some 18,000 Arabs dead, bin Laden, in a 2004 message directed at Americans, said: "As I looked upon those crumpling towers in Lebanon, I was struck by the idea of punishing the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America -- giving them a taste of their own medicine and deterring them from murdering our women and children."

Soon after relocating to Washington in order to attend Georgetown, I landed an internship, which later evolved into a full-time position, at the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, where thousands of new books, serials, and microfilms arrive yearly from the Arab world.

Numerous Arabic books dealing with Al Qaeda passed through my hands in this privileged position. A good number contained not only excerpts or quotes by Al Qaeda but entire treatises written by its members. Surprisingly, I came to discover that most of these had never been translated into English. Most significantly, however, the documents struck me as markedly different from the messages directed to the West, in both tone and (especially) content.

It soon became clear why these particular documents had not been directed to the West. They were theological treatises, revolving around what Islam commands Muslims to do vis-à-vis non-Muslims. The documents rarely made mention of all those things -- Zionism, Bush's "Crusade," malnourished Iraqi children -- that formed the core of Al Qaeda's messages to the West. Instead, they were filled with countless Koranic verses, hadiths (traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), and the consensus and verdicts of Islam's most authoritative voices. The temporal and emotive language directed at the West was exchanged for the eternal language of Islam when directed at Muslims. Or, put another way, the language of "reciprocity" was exchanged for that of intolerant religious fanaticism. There was, in fact, scant mention of the words "West," "U.S.," or "Israel." All of those were encompassed by that one Arabic-Islamic word, "kufr" -- "infidelity" -- the regrettable state of being non-Muslim that must always be fought through "tongue and teeth."

Consider the following excerpt -- one of many -- which renders Al Qaeda's reciprocal-treatment argument moot. Soon after 9/11, an influential group of Saudis wrote an open letter to the United States saying, "The heart of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is justice, kindness, and charity." Bin Laden wrote in response:

As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High's Word: "We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us -- till you believe in Allah alone." So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility from the heart. And this fierce hostility -- that is, battle-- ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed, or if Muslims are at that point in time weak and incapable. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy! Allah Almighty's Word to his Prophet recounts in summation the true relationship: "O Prophet! Wage war against the infidels and hypocrites and be ruthless. Their abode is hell -- an evil fate!" Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred -- directed from the Muslim to the infidel - is the foundation of our religion. And we consider this a justice and kindness to them.

Bin Laden goes so far as to say that the West's purported hostility toward Islam is wholly predicated on Islam's innate hostility toward the rest of the world, contradicting his own propaganda: "The West is hostile to us on account of ... offensive jihad."

In an article titled "I was a fanatic ... I know their thinking" published by the Daily Mail soon after the London and Glasgow terrorist plots, Hassan Butt, a former jihadist, helps explain the Islamist dichotomy between the propaganda of reciprocity and the theology of eternal hostility toward the infidel: "When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network ... I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings, and 7/7 was Western foreign policy."

One is reminded of the captured video showing bin Laden laughing and gesticulating soon after the 9/11 strikes, boasting that many of the hijackers weren't even aware that they were on a suicide mission. Butt continues:

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology. ... As with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today program, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."

Whatever position one takes as to why Al Qaeda has declared war on America, one thing is clear: We must begin to come to terms with all of Al Qaeda's rhetoric, not just what is aimed specifically at Western readers. We must particularly come to better appreciate the theological aspects that underpin radical Islam. As Butt puts it:

The main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology. They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever -- and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.

When news of The Al Qaeda Reader leaked to the press in 2005, some on the left questioned whether the book would be a pseudoscholarly attempt to demonize Muslims. Others on the right worried that unfiltered exposure to the radical beliefs and propaganda of bin Laden and his cohorts might unintentionally lead to more converts or sympathizers.

My reply is simply this: Whatever one's position in regard to the "war on terror," understanding the ideas of our enemy is both a practical necessity in wartime and a fundamental liberal value. It is my hope that both sides in this bitter debate will profit from a deeper acquaintance with these works. In any case, it simply will not do to dismiss Al Qaeda as an irrational movement without ideas.

Raymond Ibrahim is editor and translator of The Al Qaeda Reader, recently published by Broadway Books. All translations in this article are from the book.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 4, Page B13

Continued (Permanent Link)

Sabotaging moderate Muslims

Guess who wrote this?

"Islamist fundamentalist groups, which have concentrated virtually all their efforts on recruitment and consolidating forces, fear the open door from which the winds of independent thought might shake their unity of rank. Thus, their members have been left to create the contours of the fundamentalist dream on the basis of ancient works of jurisprudence. As a result, they have become even more rigid than their leaders and have come to form a powerful pressure group within the movement that not only hampers their leaderships' ability to proclaim fresh ideas but also restricts their leaderships' manoeuvrability, which is one of the essential prerequisites for any drive to attain a dream. What remains, then, is the vast ability to cause problems, bring down disaster on others and generally obstruct progress and development. "

Was it a Zionist Islamophobic Neocon? An advocate of war of civilizations? If we believe some Western whitewashers of Islamist fanaticism, only such people would write bad things about the nice Islamists like the Hezbollah, the Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood Group (see for example, Islamism: Perception versus Reality )

But in fact, it was written in Al Ahram newspaper, by Salah Eissa. In Muslim societies troubled by Islamist (or Jihadist) extremism, there is a growing movement of justifiable alarm and disillusionment with the extremist views and the narrow and reactionary concepts of society that these groups want to impose. Where "Islamist" or more properly "Islamic" political parties have succeeded democraticaly, in countries such as Turkey, they have abandoned, at least temporarily, the ambition of imposing Sha'aria law on all of society.

Paradoxically, in the West, the Islamist fanatics have recruited a coterie of apologists, who insist that any criticism of Islamism is "Islamophobia," and that Westerners had better learn to love restriction of intellectual life, persecution of homosexuals and repression of women in the interests of dialogue and multipluralistic liberal values. This paradoxical acceptance of an ultra-reactionary movement by "liberals" threatens to sabotage the efforts of moderate Muslims to return their societies to sanity, and to find a reasonable and progressive path between the corruption and failure pan-Arabist dictators and reactionary sheikhs on the one hand, and the threat of totalitarian religious societies posed by Islamists.

Ami Isseroff

Islamist inertia
In shutting the door to change, difference and reason, contemporary Islamist movements bind themselves to a mummified past, writes Salah Eissa*

Since 1979, when the Iranian revolution succeeded in toppling the peacock throne and founding an Islamic republic, "The Islamists are coming!" has been a cry that voiced the hopes of some and the fears of others.

For Islamist groups across the Arab- Islamic map, the Iranian revolution rekindled dreams of a victory of their own, even though these groups still suffered the after effects of successive waves of assault waged against them by Arab nationalist regimes from the early 1950s to the mid- 1970s. Not only did these campaigns throw Islamist groups into organisational disarray, and most of their leaders into prison, they also succeeded in turning the majority of the Arab public against them while luring it to the Arab nationalist model which seemed poised to realise their social and national aspirations.

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, the credibility of the Arab nationalist project waned and its popularity dwindled. By the time of the Iranian revolution, Islamist groups had just begun to emerge from their cocoons and present themselves as the alternative to all preceding national revival projects, as the untried path untainted by disaster and defeat.

Since then, all signs indicated that the Muslim fundamentalist movement was marching relentlessly forward. A military coup paved the way for their seizure of power in Sudan. They were steadily gaining ground in the parliaments in Kuwait, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Algeria and, indeed, they won sizeable majorities in legislative elections in Palestine and Turkey. Their mounting popularity across the Arab world was also reflected in their growing, if not controlling, presence in many civil society organisations, notably in the occupational syndicates.

One factor that facilitated this progress was that some governments allied themselves with moderate Islamists in the hope of obstructing the danger of radical fundamentalists that espoused the use of violence. Some political parties and movements also pursued the same tactic, if for different ends, such as to combine forces against a common external enemy (the US and Israel) or against a domestic adversary (dictatorial regimes) or merely to hitch up with the Islamist trend in order to win more votes in the polls.

The West, spearheaded by the US, was alarmed at this development, in spite of the fact that it was instrumental in fostering it. The West had worked assiduously to destroy Arab nationalist governments that were once a bulwark against the fundamentalist tide. It also enlisted Muslim fundamentalists in its fight against communism. This alliance reached its zenith in the war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation and came to a reverberating close with the events of 11 September 2001.

But is the march of Muslim fundamentalists towards power in the Arab world, whether they succeed by coup or through democratic processes, irreversible? Has the civil state ended as a phase in political evolution and must we ready ourselves for a theocratic state?

The answer to these questions is affirmative if we judge solely by the balance of power between Muslim fundamentalists and other political forces. But it quickly moves to the negative once we take a closer look at the contradictions within the greater Islamist movement itself and unearth a number of weak points that could hamper its progress and perhaps thwart its goals entirely.

The problem with the Muslim fundamentalist project is that it is founded upon the utopian dream of reviving the Islamic state as it existed in its golden era. What is conspicuously lacking in the discourse of proponents of this project is a clear conception of the material means needed to resuscitate that past so many centuries after its death and to revive all the attendant circumstances that had enabled that state to flourish.

True, the ability of abstractions to tickle the deep religious grain of the Muslim people is a major reason for the widespread popularity of the fundamentalist project. However, when forced to come down to earth and deal with the difficulties that obstruct its path, or with the brass tacks of rule as dictated by balances of power and the various demands of reality, the project runs out of steam.

The fact is that the fundamentalist project has an Achilles heel. It posits a dream of reviving the glory of the Islamic empire but ignores the fact that what enabled that empire to flourish was its openness to other cultures and civilisations. This applies to Muslim jurists and theologians, as long as the doors to dialogue and the exercise of reason in light of the changes and challenges of contemporary reality remained open, furnishing a constant source of inspiration and renovation. Conversely, the decline of Islamic civilisation began when the door leading to the application of reason and independent thought was slammed shut. If their aim is to revive our ancient glory, proponents of the fundamentalist project should first strive to breach the gap between the 4th century in the Islamic calendar, when the door to ijtihad was closed, and the present, so as to be able to formulate a philosophy that suits the times in which we live.

But this seems unlikely. Islamist fundamentalist groups, which have concentrated virtually all their efforts on recruitment and consolidating forces, fear the open door from which the winds of independent thought might shake their unity of rank. Thus, their members have been left to create the contours of the fundamentalist dream on the basis of ancient works of jurisprudence. As a result, they have become even more rigid than their leaders and have come to form a powerful pressure group within the movement that not only hampers their leaderships' ability to proclaim fresh ideas but also restricts their leaderships' manoeuvrability, which is one of the essential prerequisites for any drive to attain a dream. What remains, then, is the vast ability to cause problems, bring down disaster on others and generally obstruct progress and development.

The danger, therefore, is not so much that "The Islamists are coming," but that they still have the power to obstruct progress towards democracy in Muslim countries.

* The writer is editor-in-chief of Al-Qahira weekly newspaper.

Cross posted: Israel News Middle East Analysis

Continued (Permanent Link)

An open letter to Christiane Amanpour

 

An open letter  to Christiane Amanpour From Maurice Ostroff

August 26, 2007

Dear Christiane Amanpour

God's Warriors

Your mammoth three-part documentary "God's Warriors" is certainly a magnum opus. And while I admire the sheer professionalism of your presentation, I do hope you will accept the following comments in the constructive manner intended.

Please correct me if I err, but the program creates the impression that you do not see Islamic fundamentalist violence as more serious a threat than enthusiastic, or even zealous devotion to Judaism or Christianity.

This impression is confirmed by your responses to comments posted on CNN web site. For example in response to Regina Bowling of Charleston, who said she believes we are watching the gathering up of energy worldwide in the form of religious intolerance for the "perfect storm" of global holy war, you replied that you don't see right now the potential for global holy war. This despite 9/11, the London bombings and attempted bombings and other glaring incidents including the world-wide violence that erupted in the Danish Cartoon episode

The program also creates the impression that you believe there is no difference between God's Jewish, Muslim and Christian Warriors and that the Moral Majority and Evangelists are as dangerous as Islamic Fundamentalists. This was confirmed when you replied to Ms. Bowling that as long as people believe that only their holy book [Koran, Torah or Bible] or only their holy word matters and is relevant, then there will be no solution. (Words in parenthesis are mine).

It was disappointing to find in a purportedly objective program that you injected your own views, demonstrating occasional lack of knowledge. For example when an Israeli settler said God says Jews must live in Hebron, you interjected that the West Bank was designated by the UN to be the largest part of an Arab state.  Not only is this statement factually incorrect, it is out of context. May I ask whether you are aware that all Arab states rejected UN partition resolution 181 and that the West Bank was included in the area designated for encouragement of Jewish settlement by the Balfour Declaration and even endorsed in article 6 of the British mandate.

In retrospect I hope you will agree that the use of the very few isolated incidents of Jewish terror attempts over the past 15 years, created the erroneous impression that a religious Jewish terror movement exists on a par with the violent worldwide jihadist phenomenon of indiscriminate death and destruction.  Objectivity would require that you draw attention to the enormous difference between Islamic states which encourage terror and Israel which acts vigorously against attempts to engage in terror and where those very few Jews who did make attempts have been severely punished.

The relevance of God's Warriors to the so-called Jewish lobby in the USA is flimsy indeed.  It is difficult to accept your objectivity when you allow Jimmy Carter and Professor Mearsheimer to promote their controversial books that have been criticized by experts for blatant inaccuracies, without offering a balanced viewpoint from someone like Alan Dershowitz.

Surely you, of all people know that the Jewish Lobby is but one of dozens of diverse influential lobbies, including the ACLU and the very powerful, well-funded Arab lobbies that are part of the Washington scene.

Your repeated references to settlements as illegal are open to valid criticism. Obviously the most reliable sources from whom to seek clarification are the persons who played key roles in drafting the relevant resolution 242, namely British Ambassador to the UN, Lord Caradon, American Ambassador, Arthur Goldberg and US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Eugene Rostow. All have agreed that settlements are legal. In an interview in the Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, Lord Caradon stated:  "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967 because these positions were undesirable and artificial".

Professor Julius Stone, one of the twentieth century's leading authorities on the Law of Nations concurred that the Jewish right of settlement in the territories is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live there.

What must deeply concern everyone interested in maintaining Western democracy is the danger that this widely advertised documentary diverts attention from the real threat of Jihad, by equating it with non-violent religious movements.

Sorely missing from the entire series is any mention of the basic motivator of Islamic violence, the incitement to hatred emanating from state media as well as openly from mosques, not only in Arab countries but under the noses of European and British governments. As human beings, can we be unperturbed by the indoctrination of infants to become suicidal Warriors as shown in an interview with a three-and-a-half year old girl broadcast on Iqra? See video clip at http://tinyurl.com/kz5of

It is sad that in your documentary which could serve to create a genuine better understanding of the violence generated by religious zealotry, the authoritative voices of many experts in the field were omitted.

Among the many who would have added authoritative insight into the subject are Brigitte Gabriel, who lectures nationally and internationally about terrorism and who has issued an Urgent Warning to the West, Professor Salim Mansur the Muslim writer and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, Steven Emerson the internationally recognized expert on militant Islamic terrorism and national security and Dr. Khaleel Mohammed, the Islamic law specialist and professor of Religion at San Diego State University.

....

Your considered response would be appreciated.

Maurice Ostroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Pakistani Minister: Jews behind 9/11;Muslims, Jews and Christians cannot be friends

Pakistan's Federal Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Dr Sher Afgan Niazi, (no that's not a misprint, there is an "i" in the name) claims he knows who is at fault for the 9/11 attacks:

The minister said that events which followed the 9/11 incident proved that it was the brainchild of Jews. He said that according to holy Quran, Jews and Christians could never be friends of Muslims.

Them Jews will do it every time, right? Of course, if a Christian or a Jew had said they could never be friends of Muslims, there would be hell to pay, and churches and synagogues would be burnt to the ground.

Remember, after Musharraf, the Niazis will probably take over in Pakistan.

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Magdi Allam - Muslim Zionist

There are many things to appreciate in this story, not the least of which is the understanding that not all Muslims are enemies of Israel, not all Muslims are anti-Zionist and not all Muslims are fanatics bent on murdering non-believers. And enthusiasts of the Hamas and related causes should carefully weigh these words:

In his new book he describes his long road from profound admiration for Arafat and "the prophet of pan-Arabism," Gamal Abdel Nasser, and strong support for the Palestinian cause, to his unreserved support for Israel. "I want to tell you about my slow and tortured path from the ideology of lies, tyranny, hatred, violence and death, to the culture of truth, freedom, love, peace and life, until it ripened into absolute certainly that defending the sanctity of life is more than ever in keeping with defending Israel's right to exist," he writes. At the end of this "slow and tortured path" he reached the conclusion that the Arab countries' refusal to recognize Israel during the 1950s and 1960s hurt the Palestinians, and that Arafat was a tyrant, a megalomaniac, corrupt and corrupting, and the worst disaster to befall them.

Regarding the present situation in Gaza, Allam says he never had any illusions about Hamas. "I thought it was a big mistake to allow a terror organization to participate in elections. Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair deluded themselves in believing that Hamas' very participation in the government would turn the group into a pragmatic political power," he says. "Instead, it turned out that Hamas will never recognize Israel's right to exist, will not relinquish terror and will not honor international agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority. Hamas wants absolute rule in order to impose sharia and to revive the international Islamic caliphate. As it pushes for absolute rule, it does not hesitate to massacre its Palestinian brothers in Gaza. It will try to do the same thing in the West Bank."

Ami Isseroff

Muslim, Italian and Zionist

By Saviona Mane


It's not every day that a Muslim intellectual puts his own head on the line to defend Israel's right to exist. But that is exactly what Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born Italian writer and journalist, has been doing for years. He recently published a book whose name alone is enough to endanger his life: "Long Live Israel - From the Ideology of Death to the Civilization of Life: My Story."

Allam defends Israel even though Hamas condemned him to death in 2003, after he denounced the group's terror attacks. Because of this threat, the Italian government has provided him with round-the-clock bodyguards. But Allam is not afraid. He finds it hard to "live an armored life," but he tells Haaretz in an interview, "I'm willing to pay the price in order to continue to be who I am, to write and speak freely." Those who cut out tongues and slit throats will not subdue him, he writes in the book.

Allam, 55, is the assistant editor of Corriere della Sera and the 2006 Dan David Prize laureate. His new book, which immediately became a best-seller in Italy, is part of his consistent and uncompromising fight against extremist Islam and for Israel's right to exist. In addition, he is trying to convince people that "the culture of hatred and death that the West now attributes to Muslims is not embedded in Islam's DNA."

In "Long Live Israel" ("Viva Israele" in Italian), Allam directly links the denial of Israel's right to exist to the death cult being nurtured in fundamentalist Islamic circles, and refers to "the ethical erosion that has led to even the denial of the supreme value of the sanctity of life." Allam sees Israel as "an ethical parameter that separates between lovers of civilization and those who preach the ideology of death." The sanctity of life, he writes, "applies to everyone, or to no one."

Sanctity of life

In recent days Allam's attention has been focused on another major event - the birth of his son, Davide, brother to Sofia, 27, and Alessandro, 23. Allam says he and his wife Valentina Colombo chose the name Davide "because in the battle for life during the pregnancy, Davide subdued his Goliath, and because it meshes with the name of my new book."

And speaking of names, weren't you afraid when choosing such a strong, even provocative name for the book?

"Those who like me and more or less agree with me see it as a provocation. 'What did you need this for, don't you have enough problems?' they asked. Those who don't like me and condemn me for my opinions see this as additional proof that I am a traitor to the Arab cause and an enemy of Islam, have sold myself to Israel and work for the Mossad. But for me, 'Viva Israele' is a song of praise to Israel's life and to everyone's life. My book opens with the words: 'What you are about to read is a declaration of faith in the sanctity of life, 'the sanctity of life of every human being.'"

Allam was not always a defender of the Jewish state. "'Zionism' was a dirty word for me," he admits in his book. For years he considered Israel an aggressive, racist, colonialist, immoral entity, and he accepted the methods of the Palestinian struggle and its leader Yasser Arafat, "without criticizing the fact that Fatah adopted the path of terror extensively inside and outside Israel." After emigrating from Egypt to Italy in 1972, he even enlisted actively for the Palestinian cause, writing, lecturing and participating in demonstrations by the Italian left: "I also shouted 'Long live Palestine! Long live the Palestinian resistance!'" he writes in the book. "My passion for the Palestinian cause was strong, as was my enthusiasm for Arafat's personality."

In his new book he describes his long road from profound admiration for Arafat and "the prophet of pan-Arabism," Gamal Abdel Nasser, and strong support for the Palestinian cause, to his unreserved support for Israel. "I want to tell you about my slow and tortured path from the ideology of lies, tyranny, hatred, violence and death, to the culture of truth, freedom, love, peace and life, until it ripened into absolute certainly that defending the sanctity of life is more than ever in keeping with defending Israel's right to exist," he writes. At the end of this "slow and tortured path" he reached the conclusion that the Arab countries' refusal to recognize Israel during the 1950s and 1960s hurt the Palestinians, and that Arafat was a tyrant, a megalomaniac, corrupt and corrupting, and the worst disaster to befall them.

Regarding the present situation in Gaza, Allam says he never had any illusions about Hamas. "I thought it was a big mistake to allow a terror organization to participate in elections. Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair deluded themselves in believing that Hamas' very participation in the government would turn the group into a pragmatic political power," he says. "Instead, it turned out that Hamas will never recognize Israel's right to exist, will not relinquish terror and will not honor international agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority. Hamas wants absolute rule in order to impose sharia and to revive the international Islamic caliphate. As it pushes for absolute rule, it does not hesitate to massacre its Palestinian brothers in Gaza. It will try to do the same thing in the West Bank."

Do you believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be solved before the "ideology of death" is uprooted - that even if Israel returns all the territories it occupied in 1967, it will continue to live by the sword?

"The Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza demonstrates that the problem is not the need to withdraw from territories occupied in preemptive wars, but rather the Arabs' lack of desire to recognize Israel's right to exist. Israel erred in 1967 when it accepted the formula of territory for peace, and thus placed its very existence up for public auction. Experience teaches that the right to life cannot and should not be a subject for negotiation and bargaining. No negotiations should be held with extremists and terrorists who deny Israel's right to exist."

Interrogation trauma

Allam believes the defeat of the Arabs during the Six-Day War was the watershed between the waning of pan-Arabism and the rise of pan-Islamism. Allam, who was then 15, remembers the war, the brainwashing, the deceptive Egyptian propaganda machine, the blind admiration of Nasser and the masses he joined in the streets calling on Nasser not to resign. He devotes a substantial part of his book to the war: three autobiographical chapters seasoned with the fragrances, sounds, colors and flavors of his beloved Aunt Adreya's home and the streets of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo - a colorful, pluralistic and tolerant city where girls wore miniskirts and boys sported Beatles haircuts.

This was the city where he was detained, interrogated and imprisoned at age 15 by the Muhabarat, the secret services, on suspicion of spying for Israel, because of his relationship with a Jewish girl, also 15 and "the first true love of his life." "The trauma of that interrogation at the Muhabarat barracks accompanied me until that day on Christmas Eve 1972, when I left Egypt to continue my studies in Italy."

In the book you lovingly describe your childhood. Do you miss Egypt? Do you visit often?

"I miss an Egypt that no longer exists and that continues to live inside me thanks to the memories, the songs of Umm Kulthum, the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and the films of Yusuf Shahin. I long for the social fabric that embodied a genuine love of others and a simple life where emotion was more important than money. Unfortunately, for reasons of personal security, I haven't been back to Egypt since 2002."

Regarding the question of the Islamization of Europe, Allam says, "Europe is already a bastion of Islamic extremism. Just look at attack on Mike's Place in Tel Aviv, which was carried out by British suicide bombers drafted by Hamas; the massacre by Islamists in Madrid and in London; the slitting of director Theo Van Gogh's throat in Amsterdam; and the dozens of Islamic terror attacks that were prevented in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Holland.

"This bastion exists thanks to a widespread network of mosques, Koran schools, financial bodies and charitable institutions linked to the Muslim Brotherhood; Moroccan, Tunisian and Algerian Salfists; Saudi Wahabis; Al-Qaida jihadis and Pakistani groups. This multicultural Europe, which has trampled its values and betrayed its identity, is satisfied with reacting to the obvious terror, which is only the tip of the iceberg, but is afraid to deal with terror's ideological and organizational roots."

Why don't we hear the voices of the moderate imams?

"Because they're afraid. They're a minority and they're afraid. Only a handful of Islamic intellectuals, journalists, women and clerics have shown courage and condemned terror and Islamic extremism, and as a result they were sentenced to death by the terrorists. But make no mistake, even those moderates who condemn Islamic terror often legitimize terrorists who massacre in Israel. They feel there is good terror, which massacres Israelis, and bad terror, which threatens their lives."

What do you believe is the best way to deal with the Iranian threat?

"Israel has to prevent the Nazi-Islamic government of [Ali] Khamenei and [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad from acquiring nuclear weapons. I don't place my faith in the United Nations and I have no illusions about the Bush administration, which now wants only to leave Iraq without losing face. And of course I don't count on a weak, cowardly and divided Europe. I believe Israel is the last bastion in Islamic terror's war against all of human civilization. Therefore I hope Israel will have a strong national unity government, determined to confront the most serious threat to world security since World War II."

Last year, when he came here for his fourth visit, in order to receive the Dan David Prize, he visited Yad Vashem. This was "an experience that left an indelible impression on me," he says. "I hope that some day Israel will capture Ahmadinejad and force him to live the rest of his life between the walls of Yad Vashem."

Continued (Permanent Link)

British politicians are helping Muslim terror explains former Jihadist Hassan Butt

It is long past time to stop ignoring people like Hassan Butt, who wrote I was a fanatic...I know their thinking

Butt is not an Islamophobic Zionist neocon warmonger. He is a Muslim, and a former Jihadist fanatic, who explains where Jihadism differs from Islam and why British attitudes are helping them:

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

 

Islam is not a terrorist religion, but the Jihadist interpretation of Islam is. British politicians are giving a big boost to the Jihadists according to Butt:

 

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

 

And Butt shows just where the line between Islamic belief and Islamist terror has been crossed, and why: 

For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"

But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.

They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.

Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.

As Mellanie Phillips noted, Gordon Brown's attempt to deny that the bombings are related to religion is absurd. and Butt exposes the fallacies and dangers of this sort of reasoning. Butt notes that some scholars tried to "put terror back in the box."

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.

A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.

In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

What he doesn't say, is that the same scholars originally helped to take terror out of the box, by justifying terror against Israelis and others. It was only when tall buildings started exploding in Saudi Arabia that they tried to put terror back in the box, or more aptly, to put the jinn of terror back in the bottle.

And Butt has a local prescription for fixing it:

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.

For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.

But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.

Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.

And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

 

And what about Middle Eastern Muslims? Are they to go on living in the Middle Ages?

Inspired by: IT IS SAFE AND PROFITABLE TO BLOW UP BRITAIN

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Islamism: Sherlock Holmes and the strange case of the exploding airports

The strange behavior of the British government regarding the current attacks in Briatin is documented in this article:

Quote Of The Day: Islamophobia Edition

"Prime Minister Gordon Brown keeps repeating that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam - but, at the same time, keeps inviting "Muslim community leaders" to Downing Street to discuss how to prevent attacks. If the attacks have nothing to do with Islam, why invite Muslim 'leaders' rather than Buddhist monks?"
-- Amir Taheri, NY Post

Among the reasons why Islamists might want to self- and other-destruct in London and Glasgow, why they designed bombs of gasoline and nails and propane that would have killed hundreds if not thousands are these: Salman Rushdie was knighted, civilians have been killed in Afghanistan during fighting against the Taliban, and of course, Britain helped remove a despicable despot in Iraq and is now trying to reestablish order.

 

All of the suspects in the militant (we won't use the "T" word here) bombings in the UK seem to  be adherents of a certain religion: Dr. Mohamad Asha, Marwa Asha, Bilal Abdullah, Saudi junior doctor, 25, Saudi Junior doctor, 28, Mohammed Hanneef. A remarkable coincidence. What might one conclude from that? However, the attacks have nothing to do with Islam according to the British government. 

Suppose that the list had read, "Dr Amiram Goldowitz, Rotem Goldowitz, Ephraim ben Paz, Israeli Junior doctor, 25, Israeli Junior docter 28, Shlomo ben-Horin." Would the British government insist that the attacks have nothing to do with Israel or with Jews?

"I have reached an indisputable conlusion: All of the perpetrators of these crimes are of the Mohammedan persuasion. I would suggest, inspector LeStrade, that you enquire further into this most remarkable coincidence."

"By gum, Holmes, I think you are on to something there. I shall get my men on it at once. My top operatives shall be on the first packet steamers to Cairo and Kabul."

"My dear LeStrade, I have every confidence in the ability of your excellent men. I am sure they will get to the bottom of the plot soon. However, I would suggest widening the search to Damascus as well.

(After LeStrade has left, Holmes and Watson relax.)

"I say Holmes, astonishing reasoning."

"Elementary, my dear Watson. I perceived that all the gentlemen in question were wearing a peculiar Middle Eastern headress at the time of their apprehension, and screamed, "Allahu Akhbar." 

(Later)

"My dear Holmes, I am pleased to inform you that the malefactors behind the plot were quickly apprehended in Tehran and Kabul.

"My dear Holmes, the entire British nation owes you a deep debt of gratitude. Her Majest herself has suggested the award of an OBE."

"All in a day's work, my dear LeStrade."

(Music: Rule Britannia)

Ah, those were the good old days, when at least some Englishmen had sense.

Ami Isseroff

Cross posted: Israel News Middle East Analysis

Continued (Permanent Link)

Iraq and Gaza A History Lesson Unleashed

Mikael Knighton reports on his visit to Israel, Lawlessness in Gaza and parallels to Iraq.


Iraq and Gaza A History Lesson Unleashed
by Mikael Knighton
Christians Standing with Israel


Lawlessness in Gaza

My apologies for the extended hiatus since my last entry. I have recently returned from Israel and jet-lag isn't exactly a writer's best friend. In walking the present-day streets of Jerusalem, one is hardly able to discern that just over the Judean Hills to the South, on the coastal sand dunes of the Gaza Strip, the essence of pure evil has manifested itself in the form of an isolated, radical Islamist state. Generally speaking, a visitor in Israel needs only to look at the faces of its everyday citizens in order to accurately discern the levels of safety and stability in the Holy Land. Quite literally, if they look worried, so should you.

Surprisingly, Israelis--or at least the ones I've encountered--have remained quite calm and collected despite Israel bearing witness to full-blown, Arab civil war within her borders. Israel has been here before. However, let us in no way be unclear: all hell has broken loose in the Gaza Strip, and the "flood waters" of chaos and anarchy have spilled over into the territories. Such is the case when the essence of pure evil is disengaged, allowed to multiply in numbers, and left to its own devices.

The manifestation of pure evil in the form of radical Islam in Gaza was left unchecked when Ariel Sharon ordered the complete, Israeli evacuation of the Gaza Strip in August of 2005.

Ever-willing to play the role of "control freak" in all things concerning Arab-Israeli relations, the foreign policy of the United States--specifically, the Bush administration's "vision" of a "two-state solution", ultimately cornered Sharon, applied the "chokehold" of international pressure on Israel to concede more land for nothing but death in return, and coercedthe Jewish state into taking yet another step toward demographic suicide.

Playing with Fire

Nearly five years ago to the day, President Bush, in an address outlining his "vision" for a new Middle East, stated, "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders". Well documented, in the days leading up to the Gaza evacuation, was the Bush administration's staunch opposition to Israel's further expansion of settlements in Judea and Samaria. Of no secret are several meetings between Bush and Sharon in which Bush advised the Israeli Prime Minister not to expand settlements in Judea and Samaria, while praising him for his "courage" in dismantling and evacuating all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip. Such "courage" gave birth to democratic elections in Gaza in January of 2006 through which Hamas--a lawless band of Islamic, terrorist, Iranian-backed thugs sworn to Israel's destruction--emerged the more popular. While indescriminately capping off AK-47 rounds into the skies over southern Israel, the Arabs of Gaza rejoiced in the streets--certain the "new sheriff in town" would bring with them the economic and social reform they promised. They brought only death and destructon.

Continued here http://www.christiansstandingwithisrael.com/Gaza-Civil-War.html

Continued (Permanent Link)

IDF arrests founder of Hamas Izzedin al-Qassam armed wing

Last update - 15:04 23/06/2007

IDF arrests founder of Hamas armed wing in West Bank

By Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondent and News Agencies

Israel Defense Forces troops on Saturday arrested senior Hamas militant Saleh Aruri, who is considered the founder of Hamas' military wing in the West Bank, in a village near Ramallah.

The detainee, Saleh Aruri, was taken from his home before dawn, his wife said.

Aruri was described on a Hamas Web site as the founder of Iz a Din al-Kassam, its West Bank military wing.

Aruri had served 15 years in an Israeli prison and was released in March, the Web site said.

Hamas alleged in a statement that its political rival, the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, is coordinating with Israel in an attempt to crush Hamas in the West Bank.

IDF officials said Aruri resumed involvement in violent Hamas activity in recent months.

Earlier on Friday IDF soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man at a West Bank roadblock near the city of Hebron.

The man was later identified as Shadi Matoor, 25.

The IDF said Matoor had tried to enter a military outpost north of Kiryat Arba. When he did not respond to soldiers' calls to stop, the troops shot at him, the army said.

According to a preliminary investigation, Matoor was unarmed.

The man was seriously wounded and taken to a hospital in Hebron, where he later died of his wounds.

Sources in the IDF maintain that Matoor was wearing IDF army pants and high boots, and soldiers suspected he was attempting to infiltrate to the outpost.

Security forces nab 'Hezbollah-trained' suspect in W. Bank raid
IDF and Border Police troops early Friday morning arrested three suspected militants in an overnight raid in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Security forces said one of the suspects, Yusuf Abu Layla, is a senior member of the Fatah-affiliated Tanzim who had received training and instructions from Hezbollah to carry out terror attacks in Israel.

The two other suspects are Moeib Hoteri, also of Tanzim, and Yusuf Mabruk, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

During the operation, soldiers opened fire on a car with five suspects that fled the scene, wounding one of the passengers. The wounded man and another suspect escaped, while the three others barricaded themselves in a building.

Troops surrounded the structure and called on them to surrender. They were caught while trying to escape. No IDF soldiers were hurt in the firefight.

Abu layla is an explosives device expert who planned bombings in Israel, the army said. In addition, it claimed he was involved in manufacturing suicide belts for Tanzim in Nablus, as well as training others how to make bombs.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Saudi cleric: Islam reveals the truth about women - they are twisted

"It [Islam] has shown that the twisted nature of women stems from their very creation." Not a quote from Steve Emerson or Pat Robertson, but from a Saudi cleric.

A great tradition, worthy of liberal support - and beloved by all men, surely. Alhamdillah - where do we sign up?

Solomonia gives us this:

Saudi Cleric: Wimins is Shtoopid, and Dats Why We Loves 'Em

MEMRI TV:Saudi Cleric Abd Al-Aziz Al-Fawzan: Husbands Should Put Up with Their Wives' Slips and Errors, Because the Twisted Nature of Women Stems from Their Very Creation

The following are excerpts from a lecture delivered by Saudi cleric Abd Al-Aziz Al-Fawzan, which aired on Al-Majd TV on June 11, 2007. It is followed by links to other MEMRI TV clips of Saudi cleric Abd Al-Aziz Al-Fawzan.

Abd Al-Aziz Al-Fawzan: The Prophet Muhammad said about women: "I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you," and so on. This hadith and others like it were misunderstood by the ignorant. Corrupt people interpreted it in a way that differs from its original intent. Because of their ignorance, their insolence, their stupidity, and because of their enmity towards Islam and Muslims, they turned this hadith into evidence that Islam disgraces women, diminishing her value, and describes her in inadequate terms...

...These hadiths provide some of the most decisive evidence that Islam protects women and guarantees their rights. Islam has surrounded the woman with a fence of compassion and mercy. It has shown that the twisted nature of women stems from their very creation. This is how Allah wanted woman to be. Therefore, the husband must adapt himself to her and be patient with her. He should not give her too many things to do, or things that she is incapable of doing. He should not make her do anything that is contrary to her nature, and to the way she was created by Allah. In addition, he should turn a blind eye to her mistakes, he should tolerate her slips and errors, and [he should] put up with all the silly ignorant things she might say, because this constitutes part of the nature of her creation. In addition, women have surging emotions, which in some cases, might overpower their minds. The weakness with which women were created is the secret behind their attractiveness and appeal to their husbands. It is the source of women's seduction of men, and one of the elements strengthening the bond between husband and wife. This is one of the wondrous miracles of Allah: The strength of a woman lies in her weakness. Her power of seduction and appeal lie in her emotions, which might overpower her mind at times.

Posted by Solomon at June 20, 2007 2:44 PM EDT

Continued (Permanent Link)

Egyptian Grand Mufti: Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a Fiction, and I never endorsed them

This is a remarkable and important statement.

 

The Grand Mufti of Egypt in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a "fictitious book" that "has no truth to it"; in his article he categorically denies having written the foreword to the 2003 edition of The Protocols , which was attributed to him

http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/elders_of_zion_p.htm

January 2007

2003

Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, denies having written the foreword to The Protocols, which is a "fictitious book" that "has no truth to it" (Al-Ahram, January 1, 2007 )

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their Biblical and Talmudic Roots (an edition published in Egypt in 2003). The book's anti-Semitic foreword was thought to have been written by Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt

1. In 2003, a new edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their Biblical and Talmudic Roots, was published in Arabic in Egypt . That edition was published jointly by Dr. Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa (Professor of Comparative Theology in Al-Azhar University ), and Hisham Khadr (a journalist working for Qatari newspaper Al-Sharq). That edition of The Protocols was—and, in our opinion, still is—distributed among Arab/Muslim communities in Britain and, in all likelihood, in other countries outside of Egypt.

2. The 2003 edition of The Protocols features a detailed foreword attributed to Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt and Lecturer of Islamic Jurisprudence Sources in Al-Azhar University . The foreword contains blatant incitement against the Jewish people and rules that it was the Jews who wrote The Protocols. Such a foreword provided that edition with an air of Islamic religious dignity and authority.

3. On January 1, 2007 , more than three years after that edition of The Protocols made its appearance, a clarification on behalf of the Grand Mufti was published in Egypt 's popular daily Al-Ahram, in the section titled "Religious Thought" (p. 13). In that article, the Grand Mufti categorically denies having written the foreword to "that fictitious book [ The Protocols ], which has no truth to it". Therefore, the Grand Mufti says that he sent a legal warning to the Egyptian publishing house of The Protocols, demanding it to remove the foreword from the copies of the books that it has and not publish it again without his permission.

4. To the best of our knowledge, such an article is highly unusual both in terms of its contents and in terms of its wording. It is highly significant, being a public renouncement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a popular Arabic-language newspaper by a senior Muslim-Arab religious personality, commanding extensive religious authority in Egypt and in the Sunni Muslim world. See Appendices for the article and its full translation.

Appendix A

Translation of the article in which the Grand Mufti of Egypt denies having written the foreword to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ¹

A Binding Warning

By Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of the Republic [i.e., Egypt ]

[Unfortunately,] I was forced to stop [writing] a series of articles [about] the sources of Islamic legislation; the reason is that I am very saddened by the [grave situation] of several publications, which in no way represent what is happening in the [field of Arabic-language] publishing-not in Egypt and not in the Arab world. [For these publications contain] lies, fabrications, and false attribution.

[This time] I am talking from personal experience, for I was surprised to find a book titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . I was likewise surprised [to discover] my name on it, with my original title—a lecturer in the esteemed university of Al-Azhar. Seeing my name [in the book] made me wonder; [so] I lifted my eyes [to read] what it said above [my name], and came across the word "foreword". I was even more surprised when I saw the year of publication, the year 2003, and [the name of] a publishing house called Maktabat al-Nafidha. Furthermore, the [book's main] title included, in addition [to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the sub-heading:] "and their Biblical and Talmudic Roots".

[Furthermore,] the first page [of the book] states [that the authors are] Dr. Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa and Hisham Khadr. Well, I do not remember writing a foreword to that fictitious book, which has no truth to it. ² Likewise, I recalled the meetings I had with the lecturer Dr. Abd al-Wahab al-Masiri, ³ who specializes in Jewish studies and pertaining subjects, and the long, extensive evidence [he presented to me] to prove that the document, or the book, has no truth to it—as we have believed ⁴ for a long time. Then I asked myself: "do you [suddenly] have amnesia? Did you write such a foreword to this book and forgot [about it]? And what did you say in it [i.e., in the foreword]—did you criticize it [the book] and ruled it out?" as it is etched in my memory.

Well, I started reading the foreword, and was surprised at how poorly-written it was, surprised by the [weak] arguments and citations, which cannot be attributed to me. What is more, it is inconceivable that I should use such statements, for I am no expert on the Torah to be quoting such things [i.e., verses] from it, and it is not my custom to seek the aid of the residents of the world, as written on page 13 by [the author of] the foreword, who spreads falsehoods: "O residents of the world, these are the Jews, be sure to notice: they are a people cursed by Allah, their Maker. They help the corruptors corrupt the land and the wicked spread wickedness in the world. But we Muslims want nothing from them except for them to convert to Islam, for 'If anyone desires a religion other than Islam (submission to Allah), never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter He will be in the ranks of those who have lost' [in the afterlife, i.e., those who go to hell]—[the Quran, Surat] Aal 'Imran [3], [verse] 85.

At that point, I became aware that these were not my words and that the name Ali Gomaa, which appeared on the cover of the book, could not be mine but was probably somebody else's name [with the same name and title]. [That is what I believed,] until I saw [my own full name and titles] at the end of these falsehoods, on page 14: Dr. Ali Gomaa Muhammad Abd al-Wahab, Lecturer of the Sources of Islamic Law in the University of Al-Azhar.

I [immediately] contacted the University of Al-Azhar, which I know well, to look for my "double", the possibility of whose existence is a billion to one—impossible odds, in light of my acquaintance with all those well versed in Islamic law in the entire world, not just in the University of Al-Azhar. [After my investigation,] I realized that I was being the victim of a criminal act since the year 2003, that criminal act being the illicit use of my name on those fabrications, of which I did not know up until now. Well, what could those [responsible for that criminal act] be preparing for us? Why are they doing this? They only do damage; they do no good. [Therefore, all] I can say on this occasion is: Allah is enough for us; He is the best protector [a quote from the Quran, Surat Aal 'Imran, verse 173], for the protection of Allah and His Messenger [Prophet Muhammad] is enough for me.

[In light of the above,] I sent a legal warning to the publishing house, demanding it to immediately remove the foreword from the books [i.e., copies] it has, and not publish it [the foreword] again in that book or in any other book which includes the foreword attributed to me, without my knowledge. [In this context,] I would also like to note that each foreword that I write bears my signature and stamp and is written on documents bearing my name, in Arabic and in English. [Furthermore,] after entering the office of the Grand Mufti [of Egypt ], I also added the emblem of Dar al-Ifta' [the official institution responsible for issuing binding Muslim religious rulings] and its official seal. Therefore, that foreword, of which I knew nothing until now, and into which I am trying to inquire, is a false one--unless it fulfills the criteria I have mentioned [above].

[While writing,] I remembered Abd al-Wahab al-Sha'arani's old complaint about the falsification of some of his books by some ill-wishers. I also remembered what Imam Al-Suyuti had to say about that, particularly in his book Al-Tahadduth bi-Ni'mat Allah [Glorifying Allah's Virtues]. I also remembered the words of [other Islamic] religious scholars about attributing words to a person who did not say them, likening it to attributing a child to another father. It seems that these [Muslim] religious scholars imply that such [phenomenon] can be described as "a criminal act of intellectual prostitution", for "we belong to Allah and it is to Allah that we return" [a quote from the Quran--Surat al-Baqara (2), verse 156—usually said on the occasion of a person's death, meaning acceptance of God's judgment. In this case, the author means to say that a disaster has befallen him (see below), but that, ultimately, everything is in God's hands].

Perhaps the words of [Allah], may He be glorified, [in the Quran]—"And those who do not give false testimony, [even] when they pass by idle talk, [they] pass by with dignity"--[ Surat ] Al-Furqan [25], [verse] 72—can be of some consolation in light of our disaster [today]. Indeed, Prophet [Muhammad], may Allah's blessings and peace be upon him, attributed considerable importance to this criminal act [false testimony], by saying: "Do you want me to tell you what are the three greatest wrongs?" They answered: "Indeed, O Prophet of Allah." Then [Prophet Muhammad] answered: "Polytheism, disobeying one's parents"--he said that while leaning [against something], and then he sat up straight [before mentioning the third wrong, to emphasize its gravity by changing the position of his body]--and telling fabrications." [The storyteller of that tradition] said: He [Prophet Muhammad] said those things [about the third wrong] over and over again, until we said: "We wish he would be silent." [That tradition] appears in Al-Bukhari's [authorized collection of Muslim traditions]. [In addition,] Prophet [Muhammad], may Allah's blessings and peace be upon him, considered lying in public to be one of the future signs of corruption which herald the Day of Judgment. It was [also] said [regarding the above] on behalf of Prophet [Muhammad], who said that among the signs of the Day of Judgment are the breaking up of family relations and perjury in public. [That tradition] is told by Al-Hakem, in [his book] Al-Mustadrak . ⁵

[In this context,] the poet says:

So many wretched people spread lies

[For] they do not fear God nor are they concerned with their disgrace

So eager were they to kill innocent lives

So that [in the end] nothing but sin and evil will they embrace

Appendix B

The original article (Al-Ahram, January 1, 2007, p. 13, in the section
titled "Religious Thought")

---

¹ The text in bold was highlighted by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center .

² It should be noted that the Grand Mufti uses a strong word--"fictitious"--to describe his most negative opinion of the book, that is, to say that the book is ridiculous, erroneous, and unimaginably nonsensical.

³ Dr. Abd al-Wahab al-Masiri is an Egyptian intellectual who "specializes" in writing about Jewish and Zionist religion. He has published many books of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist character. In one of his books, The Protocols, Judaism and Zionism (2003), he states that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fake, prejudiced document, which causes damage to the Arabs since it imbues the Jews with great ability which does not actually exist. For details see our Information Bulletin dated October 29, 2006: "The Arab hate industry: Egypt continues as a center for the publication of crude anti-Semitic literature encouraging hatred for Israel, the Jewish people and the West, and in effect justifying the use of violence against them".

⁴ The verb "believed" appears in plural in the Arabic original. The author could be referring to himself or to other similar-minded thinkers, but the verb does not refer only to him and to Dr. Al-Masiri.

⁵ "The completion", that is, a book containing hadiths (traditions) that complete those found in the known collections of hadiths.

Continued (Permanent Link)

The other Muslim: Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury

We have written often of the tribulations of journalist Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury, a fearless fighter for freedom and peace in Bangladesh. This interview from the Berliner Zeitung tells his story in depth.

Translation copyright 2007 MidEastWeb for Coexistence http://www.mideastweb.org

How Shall I Live?

The Other Muslim



April 2, 2007

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury argues for faith liberty and peace with Israel - that incurs torture in Bangladesh

Bernhard Bartsch

DHAKA. "When we were small children, we were afraid of ghosts. At night they were under the bed, in the closet, always there before the window. But we got accustomed eventually to it. Whoever lives for a long enough time with ghosts, loses their fear." Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury pulls strongly on his thin menthol cigarette. "In the prison it is like with the ghosts. If they lock up me again, I know exactly into which cell they will put me and with what they will torture me. There is nothing that they have not already done to me. Therefore they cannot be the source of fear for me. " He laughs and nods so imperturbably that one could nearly believe him.

Choudhury believes that Muslims, Jews and Christians can be friends, that there will be peace in the world only if each human lives his own faith freely and accepts the religion of the other as well, that the Islamic states would therefore do well to recognize the right of Israel to exist. And that he, a modern Muslim from a traditionally moderate Muslim country, can help to reconcile the three related religions. "Humans, who have a good heart, are close, regardless of which God they pray to", says Choudhury. The majority of mankind in his opinion, believes this. One should not be intimidated by the minority.

Torture and prison

Nevertheless, in Bangladesh the radical Islamics are gaining influence, and since they even belong to the latest government, the man lives dangerously. Because he went on record in his newspaper, the Weekly Blitz as pro-Israel and in numerous investigative reports documented the spread of terrorist camps, Al-Qaida camps camps and training centres for suicide bombers in Bangladesh, he is now standing trial for incitement of the masses, high treason and blasphemy. He is threatened with up to 30 years in prison or even the death penalty. "However they cannot beat me down," says Choudhury. "I am a fighter."

Actually Choudhury with his more than thirty years, has something of the boxer in him, still recovering from a knockout by a youngster. It is already over half a year since the time the hoodlums came into his office. A prominent politician accompanied them, says he, so prominent that the police refused afterwards to publicize the incident. Choudhury limps a little. His face is permanently swollen. If he speaks, it sounds as if it has something in his mouth. Also, in weakly illuminated areas he carries dark sun glasses, in order to hide his right eye, gone blind by glaucoma. An operation could have easily saved it, but during his prison stay treatment was denied. Nevertheless he is ready to be locked up for his convictions again in 40 degree celsius heat in solitary confinement. "The fan was turned off in my cell always," he says.

Choudhury is not a desperado. In Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, he belongs to the privileged few, who lead a life of ease. His father was a wealthy entrepreneur, who sent his son to study economics to England. "Before I left I had to promise him not to live with other Bangladeshis there, although there are many in London" says Choudhury. "Therefore I lived at the other end of the city and found friends from all world."

When he returned home in 1989, he worked first as correspondent for the Russian press agency Itar Tass and in 1995 initiated the first private television station of the country, "A-21 TV". It broadcast reports critical of the government for the first time in 1999 - a considerable risk, but the urge to oppose truth to state propaganda was overpowering. Within a few days A-21 TV was closed by the government and Choudhury condemned to a half year in prison for "incitement of the masses" . "At that time I was tortured for the first time", he reports. "They wanted to break my will. But they only strengthened it. "

A few months after the attacks of Septembers 11, he created the Weekly Blitz, as reaction to the growing extremism. "I am a living contradiction: A Zionist, in addition, a pious Muslim ", he says: "We believe nevertheless all in the same God. But the extremists falsify the teachings and drive a wedge between Muslims, Jews and Christians. "Beside like-minded Bengali journalists, soon also Jewish authors from Israel and the USA were writing for the Weekly Blitz. The association of the name to the word "blitzkrieg," common in English, is intentional. "We are a combat sheet for peace", says Choudhury, "and the editors are our army."

Provocation is Choudhury's program. He went so far in 2003 as to put one of the porno pictures found in Saddam Hussein palaces, on the cover of the Blitz. A tiny censorship bar over the nipple stressed the nudity more than it veiled it. "Many Muslims consider Saddam Hussein a hero, and I wanted to show what sort of a man he was actually," he says. The issue was immediately forbidden.

There is no question of fleeing

Only about five million of Bangladesh's 183 million inhabitants sympathizes with the radicals, estimates Choudhury. Nevertheless he get little support in his own country. Hardly anyone dares to openly take his side. Even relatives and friends turned away from him. "Many of them were threatened", say Choudhury. His house, a small mansion in one of the better quarters of Dhaka, is protected at night by watchmen with large rifles. Both of his children are brought to school in morning by a driver and brought home again later. They rarely visit friends. "However the situation welds us together as a family," explains Choudhury. "My wife and my children tell again and again, how proud they are of me."

Would Choudhury consider it, if along with this acknowledgment the request also nevertheless came to give up his fight and to free the family from their state of siege? The family would have enough money to lead a calm life abroad, and they would have a good chance of leaving Bangladesh despite the current legal procedings. But for Choudhury his struggle has long ago become his. "Who leaves the battleground, has lost", he says. "However, whoever struggles for the right cause always wins."

At the heart of contention: Israel and the Holocaust

Enterpreneur and Journalist Salah Uddin Shoib Choudhury founded the Weekly Blitz in his homeland. It is unlike hardly any another meda appearing in a Muslim country, as it demands the reconciliation of Muslims, Jews and Christians as well as the recognition of Israel. "Many Muslims believe still, that the Holocaust was a conspiracy of Nazis and Jews, to justify the demand of the Zionists for Israel," says Choudhury. Weekly Blitz has a staff of 32 and a press run of 6,000 copies as well as a Web edition (www.weeklyblitz.net ).

Journeys to Israel are forbidden to Bandladeshi citizens. In November 2003 Choudhury was arrested at the airport in Dhaka , because he wanted to fly to a peace conference in Tel Aviv. For 17 months he was locked up without an indictment and tortured according to his testimony. In 2005 he was released due to pressure of the American State Department.

For incitement of the masses, high treason and blasphemy he is presently on trial. He is threatened with the death penalty. The judge Shamsul Alam reportedly has close contacts with the Islamists.

The European Parliament and US House of Reppresentatives demand the cessation of the proceedings. The American PEN club honored 2005 Choudhury's commitment with the "Freedom to Write" prize, and in 2006 the American Jewish committee awarded him a "Medal for moral courage".

---

Berliner Zeitung, 2.4.2007

---

Der andere Moslem
http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/spezial/dossiers/wie_soll_ich_leben/75561/index.php
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury streitet für Glaubensfreiheit und Frieden mit Israel - das bringt in Bangladesch Folter ein Bernhard Bartsch

DHAKA. "Als wir kleine Kinder waren, hatten wir Angst vor Gespenstern. Nachts waren sie immer da, unterm Bett, im Schrank, vor dem Fenster. Aber irgendwann haben wir uns daran gewöhnt. Wer lange genug mit Gespenstern lebt, verliert die Furcht." Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury zieht kräftig an seiner dünnen Mentholzigarette. "Im Gefängnis ist es wie mit den Gespenstern. Wenn sie mich wieder einsperren, weiß ich genau, in welche Zelle sie mich stecken und womit sie mich foltern werden. Es gibt nichts, was sie mir nicht schon einmal angetan hätten. Deswegen können sie mir keine Angst einjagen." Er lacht und wirkt so unerschütterlich, dass man ihm fast glauben könnte.

Choudhury glaubt, dass Moslems, Juden und Christen Freunde sein können. Dass es auf der Welt nur dann Frieden geben werde, wenn jeder Mensch seinen eigenen Glauben frei lebe und zugleich die Religion anderer akzeptiere. Dass die islamischen Staaten deshalb gut daran täten, Israels Existenzrecht anzuerkennen. Und dass er, ein moderner Moslem aus einem traditionell moderat muslimischen Land, dabei helfen könne, die drei verwandten Religionen zu versöhnen. "Menschen, die ein gutes Herz haben, sind sich nah, egal zu welchem Gott sie beten", sagt Choudhury. Die Mehrheit der Menschheit sei seiner Meinung, glaubt er. Von der Minderheit dürfe man sich nicht einschüchtern lassen.

Folter und Gefängnis

Doch in Bangladesch gewinnen radikale Islamisten an Einfluss, und seitdem sie sogar der letzten Regierung angehörten, lebt der Mann gefährlich. Weil er sich mit seiner Zeitung Weekly Blitz für Israel engagiert und in zahlreichen Investigativreportagen die Ausbreitung von Terroristencamps, Al Kaida-Lagern und Ausbildungsstätten für Selbstmordattentäter in Bangladesch dokumentierte, steht er nun wegen Volksverhetzung, Hochverrat und Blasphemie vor Gericht. Ihm drohen bis zu 30 Jahre Gefängnis oder sogar die Todesstrafe. "Aber sie kriegen mich nicht unter", sagt Choudhury. "Ich bin ein Kämpfer."

Tatsächlich hat Choudhury mit seinen etwas mehr als 30 Lebensjahren etwas von einem Boxer, der sich gerade von seinem jüngsten Knockout erholt. Dabei ist es schon ein halbes Jahr her, dass zum letzten Mal die Schläger in sein Büro kamen. Ein prominenter Politiker habe sie begleitet, sagt er, so prominent, dass die Polizei sich hinterher weigerte, eine Anzeige aufzunehmen. Choudhury humpelt ein wenig. Sein Gesicht ist dauerhaft geschwollen. Wenn er spricht, klingt es, als habe er etwas im Mund. Auch in schwach beleuchteten Räumen trägt er eine dunkle Sonnenbrille, um sein vom grünen Star erblindetes rechtes Auge zu verbergen. Eine Operation hätte es leicht retten können, doch während seines Gefängnisaufenthalts wurde ihm die Behandlung versagt. Trotzdem ist er bereit, sich für seine Überzeugungen wieder einsperren zu lassen, in Einzelhaft, bei 40 Grad. "Der Ventilator wurde in meiner Zelle immer abgestellt," sagt er.

Choudhury ist kein Verzweiflungstäter. In Bangladesch, einem der ärmsten Länder der Welt, gehört er zu den wenigen Privilegierten, die ein Leben in Wohlstand führen. Sein Vater war ein wohlhabender Unternehmer, der seinen Sohn zum Wirtschaftsstudium nach England schickte. "Vor meinem Abflug musste ich ihm versprechen, dort nicht mit anderen Bangladeschis zusammenzuleben, obwohl es in London viele gibt", erzählt Choudhury. "Deshalb wohnte ich am anderen Ende der Stadt und fand Freunde aus aller Welt."

Als er 1989 heimkehrte, arbeitete er zunächst als Korrespondent für die russische Nachrichtenagentur Itar-Tass und baute 1995 den ersten privaten Fernsehsender des Landes auf, "A-21 TV". 1999 sendete er erstmals regierungskritische Berichte - ein beträchtliches Risiko, doch der Drang, der staatlichen Propaganda eine zweite Wahrheit entgegenzusetzen, war übermächtig. Innerhalb weniger Tage wurde A-21 TV von der Regierung geschlossen und Choudhury wegen "Volksverhetzung" zu einem halben Jahr Haft verurteilt. "Damals wurde ich zum ersten Mal gefoltert", berichtet er. "Sie wollten meinen Willen brechen. Aber sie haben ihn nur gestärkt."

Wenige Monate nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September gründete er Weekly Blitz, als Reaktion auf die erstarkenden Extremisten. "Ich bin ein lebender Widerspruch: Ein Zionist, aber auch ein frommer Moslem", sagt er: "Wir glauben doch alle an den gleichen Gott. Aber die Extremisten verfälschen die Lehre und treiben einen Keil zwischen Moslems, Juden und Christen." Neben gleichgesinnten bengalischen Journalisten schrieben bald auch jüdische Autoren aus Israel und den USA für Weekly Blitz. Die Assoziation des Namens zum auch im Englischen gebräuchlichen Wort "Blitzkrieg" ist Absicht. "Wir sind ein Kampfblatt für den Frieden", sagt Choudhury, "und die Redaktion ist unsere Armee."

Provokation ist Choudhurys Programm. Dabei ging er so weit, 2003 eines der Pornobilder, die in Saddam Husseins Palästen gefunden wurden, auf sein Cover zu heben. Ein winziger Balken über der Brustwarze betonte die Nacktheit mehr, als er sie verhüllte. "Viele Muslime halten Saddam Hussein für einen Helden, und ich wollte zeigen, was für ein Mann er tatsächlich war", erzählt er. Die Ausgabe wurde umgehend verboten.

Flucht kommt nicht in Frage

Nur etwa fünf Millionen von Bangladeschs 183 Millionen Einwohnern sympathisieren mit den Radikalen, schätzt Choudhury. Trotzdem erfährt er im eigenen Land wenig Zustimmung. Kaum jemand wagt, offen für ihn Partei zu ergreifen. Selbst Verwandte und Freunde wandten sich von ihm ab. "Viele von ihnen wurden bedroht", sagt Choudhury. Sein Haus, eine kleine Villa in einem der besseren Viertel von Dhaka, wird nachts von Wachleuten mit großen Gewehren beschützt. Seine beiden Kinder bringt morgens ein Fahrer in die Schule und holt sie hinterher wieder ab. Zu Freunden gehen sie nur selten. "Aber die Situation schweißt uns als Familie zusammen", erklärt Choudhury. "Meine Frau und meine Kinder sagen mir immer wieder, wie stolz sie auf mich sind."

Ob Choudhury es merken würde, wenn in dieser Anerkennung dennoch die Bitte mitschwänge, seinen Kampf aufzugeben und die Familie aus ihrem Belagerungszustand zu befreien? Genügend Geld, um im Ausland ein ruhiges Leben zu führen, hätte die Familie, und wahrscheinlich fände sich auch eine Möglichkeit, Bangladesch trotz des laufenden Verfahrens zu verlassen. Doch für Choudhury ist sein Kampf längst sein Leben geworden. "Wer das Schlachtfeld verlässt, hat verloren", sagt er. "Aber wer für die richtige Sache kämpft, gewinnt immer."
------------------------------
Im Kern der Auseinandersetzung: Israel und der Holocaust

Der Unternehmer und Journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury gründete 2002 in seiner Heimat Bangladesch die Wochenzeitung Weekly Blitz. Wie kaum ein anderes in einem muslimischen Land erscheinendes Medium fordert sie die Versöhnung von Moslems, Juden und Christen sowie die Anerkennung Israels. "Viele Muslime glauben immer noch, der Holocaust sei ein Komplott von Nazis und Juden gewesen, um den Anspruch der Zionisten auf Israel zu rechtfertigen", sagt Choudhury. Weekly Blitz hat 32 Mitarbeiter und eine Auflage von 6 000 Exemplaren sowie eine Internetausgabe (www.weeklyblitz.net).

Reisen nach Israel sind Staatsbürgern Bangladeschs verboten. Im November 2003 wurde Choudhury am Flughafen in Dhaka verhaftet, weil er zu einer Friedenskonferenz in Tel Aviv fliegen wollte. 17 Monate wurde er ohne Anklage eingesperrt und nach eigenen Angaben massiv gefoltert. 2005 kam er auf Druck des amerikanischen Außenministeriums frei.

Wegen Volksverhetzung, Hochverrats und Blasphemie steht er derzeit vor Gericht. Ihm droht die Todesstrafe. Dem Richter Shamsul Alam werden enge Kontakte zu den Islamisten nachgesagt.

EU-Parlament und US-Repräsentantenhaus fordern die Einstellung des Verfahrens. Der amerikanische PEN-Club ehrte 2005 Choudhurys Engagement mit dem Preis "Freedom to Write" und das Amerikanische Jüdische Komitee 2006 mit der "Auszeichnung für moralischen Mut".

Berliner Zeitung, 2.4.2007

Continued (Permanent Link)

Ask the Ayatollah: Questions of Sex, Islam and Wood Alcohol

The Ayatollah Khomeini laid down the rules for the good life. It is OK for Muslims to drink methanol and denatured spirits according to the Ayatolla:

Industrial alcohol used for painting doors, tables, chairs, etc., is clean if one does not know it was made of something inebriating.

On the other hand, it is not OK to get divorced all the time:

Divorcing a menstruating woman is void.

There are some dietary laws too:

It is loathsome to eat the meat of a horse, a mule, or a donkey if someone has had coitus with the animal.

Elsewhere, the Ayatollah explains that it is OK to have sex with a chicken, but one must not eat the chicken. It is OK to serve the chicken to someone else however. If they ever open a KFC in Tehran, don't eat there.

Now we understand why Iranians are so fanatical. They are fighting to preserve their superior way of life -- and to make it your way of life. You better study up on this, as many people insist it is the wave of the future.

Ami Isseroff

---

The Ayatollah's Book Of Etiquette
http://www.harpers.org/2000-06-TheAyatollahsBookOfEtiquette.html

Posted on Thursday, February 10, 2005. From "A Clarification of Questions," by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, published in 1985 by the Westview Press. Khomeini's treatise sets out his position on 3,000 questions of everyday life. Translated by J. Borujerdi. Originally from June 1985.

64. Evacuation is unlawful in four places. First, in dead-end alleys. Second, on the property of a person who has not given his permission. Third, in a place assigned to a specific group of people, such as some schools. Fourth, over the graves of the faithful, if it would be considered disrespectful.

107. The whole body of an infidel, even the hair, the nails, and its wetness, is unclean.

112. Industrial alcohol used for painting doors, tables, chairs, etc., is clean if one does not know it was made of something inebriating.

120. The sweat of a camel that eats unclean substances is unclean.

125. When a clean object touches an unclean object and one or both are wet enough to convey that wetness to the other, then the clean object becomes unclean. But if the wetness is not enough to reach the other, the clean object does not become unclean.

145. If a host, while eating, realizes that the food is unclean, he must inform his guests. But if one of the guests realizes this, it is not necessary to inform the others, unless his relations with the others are such that as a result of remaining silent he himself becomes unclean.

462. Divorcing a menstruating woman is void.

464. If a woman begins menstruating while praying, her prayer is void.

2,054. These are the major abominable dealings. First, selling real estate. Second, butchery. Third, selling shrouds. Fourth, dealing with base people. Fifth, dealing between the morning azan and the onset of sunshine. Sixth, choosing to buy and sell wheat, barley, and the like as one's occupation. Seventh, entering into a deal involving the purchase of a commodity that another person is about to buy.

2,622. Eating locusts caught with the hand or by some other means is lawful after they are dead. It is not necessary that the person who caught them be a Moslem or that he mentioned the name of God when he caught them. But if a dead locust is held by an infidel and it is not known whether it was caught alive, it is not lawful to eat it, even if the person who caught it says that he caught it alive.

2,629. It is not unlawful to swallow the food that exits from between the teeth as a result of flossing if one's nature has no aversion to it.

2,631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of a horse, a mule, or a donkey if someone has had coitus with the animal.

2,637. Several things are loathsome (abominable) when eating. First, eating while satiated. Second, excessive eating (it has been said that the God of the World dislikes a full stomach more than anything else). Third, looking at other people's faces while they are eating. Fourth, eating hot food. Fifth, blowing at what one is eating or drinking. Sixth, waiting for something else after the bread has been put on the tablecloth. Seventh, cutting bread with a knife. Eighth, putting bread under a container of food. Ninth, cleaning the meat stuck to a bone so that nothing remains on it. Tenth, peeling fruit.

2,858. The prizes that banks give to encourage borrowers, and those that institutions give to encourage buyers and customers, are lawful. The thing that sellers put inside their merchandise to attract customers and increase buyers, such as gold coins in boxes of shortening, are lawful and of no concern.

2,874. It is not unlawful to introduce a man's semen into the uterus of his wife with devices such as suction cups.

2,882. When the preservation of a Moslem's life rests on grafting an organ from a dead Moslem, severing that organ and grafting it are acceptable

Continued (Permanent Link)

Bangladesh Journalist faces death for anti-Islamist activities

Salahuddin Shoaib Choudury is on trial for setition - a charge that faces the death penalty. The procedure began when he tried to visit Israel in connection with a peace dialogue meeting and has dragged on for years.

We have been following this story with anxiety for several years. The strategy of the Bangladesh authorities seems to be to hold a trial by attrition and to drag the procedings out for as long as possible. Mr. Choudhury for his part, has not shown all the discretion that might be appropriate in these circumstances, and has been unduly optimistic about his case.

---

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 28, 2007

CONTACT: Richard L. Benkin, Ph.D.; +1-847-722-7917;

drrbenkin@comcast.net; http://www.InterfaithStrength.com

Persecuted Journalist faces Set Back in Sedition Trial

Actions by Bangladeshi Court Belies Government Assurances


Dhaka, Bangladesh—Crusading Muslim journalist, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, suffered a major setback in the government case against him for alleged “sedition, treason, and blasphemy.” The current government of Bangladesh had recently given explicit assurances to several US and other officials that the admittedly false charges would be dropped and done so “within the framework of Bangladeshi laws.”

We have learned that the procedure would have three successive court dates at which government witnesses failed to show, forcing the charges to be dropped. That happened on January 22 and was supposed to happen again on February 28.

Instead, two government witnesses did show and the radical-affiliated judge signed an order forcing the trial to continue and accusing Choudhury of being a “threat to the security of Bangladesh.”

Choudhury has faced continued persecution since 2003 for writing articles exposing the rise of Islamist radicals, calling for relations with Israel, and advocating religious equality. He has been beaten, tortured and imprisoned for his efforts, and mobs have been allowed to attack him and bomb his newspaper with impunity. Today’s charge specifically mentions his journalistic activities.

Recently, resolutions condemning Choudhury’s persecution have been passed in the European and Australian Parliaments. A similar resolution in the US Congress recently passed the powerful House Committee on Foreign Affairs without opposition and with open support by the US State Department.

Choudhury had been encouraged by recent government promises and the outpouring of international support; but today’s events call into question the veracity of those promises.

For further information, a translated text of the order, or interviews with Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, contact Richard Benkin at the telephone or email above.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Inside Iranian power struggle

Is this wishful thinking or fact? In other accounts, it is Khameinei who is the "good cop," restraining Ahmadinejad

---

What Iranian 'pragmatists' want
John Samson, THE JERUSALEM POST
Feb. 27, 2007


After Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent defiant announcement about installing 3,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges in Natanz, signs of an emerging leadership crisis in Iran have appeared. They expose the power group of Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard supporters (usually backed by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei) and the more "pragmatic," though no less extreme in their final goals, clerical leadership.

In a speech on January 8 Khamenei warned against any withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear program by any person or Iranian official in the present or in the future. Recently there have been rumors that Khamenei is seriously ill, and may die soon. His speech seems to be the proclamation of a dying man's will.

Simultaneously, former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the recently elected chairman of the Experts Assembly, which has the authority to select the supreme leader, had an intensive two-day meeting with the top-level ayatollahs in the holy city of Qom. The most important issue discussed was the selection of a new supreme leader. Rafsanjani asserted in his speech in Qom that the Experts Assembly should choose the leader soon, in order to keep the regime safe and avoid a future power struggle after his death.

ACCORDING to article 111 of the Iranian constitution, the Experts Assembly may change the supreme leader should he become incapacitated. Until this happens, the president, Ahmadinejad, the head of the Supreme Court, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, and an ayatollah from the Constitution Guardian Council, probably Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, would collectively carry out the duties of the supreme leader. This would lead to control of the neo-hard-liners over the Iranian leadership.

The ongoing discussions among the Iranian leaders indicate that Khamenei's speech has caused concern, and objections from most of the mullahs. Their main objection could be the eligibility of a dying leader to make significant decisions on issues that may put the Islamic regime in danger. Since most of the members of the Assembly of Experts, all of whom are clergy, are pragmatists, and their own security and that of the Islamic regime is their main concern, it is likely that they will not let the fate of the regime be determined by a sick and dying man.

THE ACUTE leadership controversy was revealed on a live TV interview with Rafsanjani on February 10. The program was dedicated to recollections of Iranian leaders from the period of the Iranian revolution, which is now celebrating its 28th anniversary.

Rafsanjani, who is an obvious contender for the position of the supreme ruler but does not yet have the support of the Assembly of Experts, seized the opportunity to divert the interview to promote himself and attack his opponents.

He expanded on his religious background and scholarship since this is a point of weakness being used against him by his opponents. He then told about the controversy in the first period of the Islamic republic, when high-level Iranian mullahs and he especially opposed the appointment of the first Iranian president, Abol-hassan Banisadr, who was not a cleric, in opposition to the desires of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Khomeini proclaimed that the mullahs should be engaged in spiritual leadership only, and not be involved in political power positions. After one year Khomeini admitted that Rafsanjani's circle was right. Serving then as the spokesman of the parliament, Rafsanjani led the parliament to impeach Banisadr on the grounds of incompetence. Khomeini endorsed the decision, and Banisadr was replaced.

Rafsanjani alluded to the present situation in which Ahmadinejad, who is not a mullah, is supported by the supreme leader Khamenei, but does not have the support of the mullahs of Qom.

This interview was the strongest attack by Rafsanjani against Ahmadinejad since the beginning of his presidency. This probably indicates that Rafsanjani was successful in gaining support against Ahmadinejad among high ranking mullahs. Ahmadinejad's followers responded to Rafsanjani's interview by claiming that Ahmadinejad is not Banisadr, and Rafsanjani's power isn't what it was 26 years ago.

A FEW days after the interview, on February 15, Hossain Marashi, Rafsanjani's confidant and brother-in-law, suggested starting an investigation of the Iranian parliament because of the damage Ahmadinejad has caused to Iran's foreign relations, exposing Ahmadinejad's political incompetence and breach of trust.
The Iranian parliament can impeach the president by a two-thirds vote.

The dispute heated up with a new speech by Khamenei on February 18. He reiterated that the nuclear program must be continued and declared that anybody inside the regime who thinks that the nuclear activity should be stopped because of international threats must be "blockheaded" and does not understand the situation.
The next day, an opposition reformist group in Iran - Mojahedin Enghelab Eslami - published a statement calling for the cessation of uranium enrichment before the deadline of the UN Security Council and protesting that Iranian newspapers are not permitted to debate the risk involved in nuclear activity and the danger of war.

This is the first time a legal party within the regime had officially expressed an objection to the nuclear program. This is a significant event, even though the opposition is powerless in the Iranian regime.

One only need add to this picture the unpredictability and bravado of Ahmadinejad and his extreme Revolutionary Guard followers in order to appreciate the inflammatory nature of the situation.

THE CONCLUSION derived from this string of events is that, due to an emerging leadership vacuum, the Islamic regime of Iran is marching toward a historic crossroads, with substantial risks and instability.

One may also conclude that the recent military power moves directed by the American president, as minimal as they are, are starting to have an affect. The West must act now, with full force and vigor, and for the sake of world peace, so as not to miss the narrow window of opportunity and further destabilize this critically dangerous regime.

'John Samson' is the pseudonym of an Iranian scientist now in exile, previously connected with top Iranian political and scientific figures.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Muslim Lobby Muzzles Documentary about Terror

This is another illustration of why criticism of Islam is impossible in the United States. Any attempt to criticize Islam in any way is subject to censorship by the Muslim/Arab lobby. Nobody stopped Mel Gibson from showing his film, but the least criticism of Islam is censored.

---

February 26, 2007
Film’s View of Islam Stirs Anger on Campuses
By KAREN W. ARENSON

When Obsession: "Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” a documentary that shows Muslims urging attacks on the United States and Europe, was screened recently at the University of California, Los Angeles, it drew an audience of more than 300 — and also dozens of protesters.At Pace University in New York, administrators pressured the Jewish student organization Hillel to cancel a showing in November, arguing it could spur hate crimes against Muslim students. A Jewish group at the State University of New York at Stony Brook also canceled the film last semester.

The documentary has become the latest flashpoint in the bitter campus debate over the Middle East, not just because of its clips from Arab television rarely shown in the West, including scenes of suicide bombers being recruited and inducted, but also because of its pro-Israel distribution network.

When a Middle East discussion group organized a showing at New York University recently, it found that the distributors of Obsession” were requiring those in attendance to register at IsraelActivism.com, and that digital pictures of the events be sent to Hasbara Fellowships, a group set up to counter anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses.

If people have to give their names over to Hasbara Fellowships at the door, that doesn’t have the effect of stimulating open dialogue,” said Jordan J. Dunn, president of the Middle East Dialogue Group of New York University, which mixes Jews and Muslims. “Rather, it intimidates people and stifles dissent.”

The documentary’s proponents say it provides an unvarnished look at Islamic militancy. “It’s an urgent issue that is widely avoided by academia,” argued Michael Abdurakhmanov, the Hillel president at Pace.

Its critics call it incendiary. Norah Sarsour, a Palestinian-American student at U.C.L.A., said it was disheartening to see “a film like this that takes the people who have hijacked the religion and focuses on them.”

Certainly it is a new element in the bitter campus battles over the Middle East that have encompassed everything from the content and teaching of Middle East studies to disputes over art exhibitions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to debates over free speech.

“The situation in the Middle East has been a major issue on campus for decades, but the heat has noticeably turned up lately,” said Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

At San Francisco State University, for example, College Republicans stomped on copies of the Hamas and Hezbollah flags last October at an “antiterrorism” rally. At the University of California, Irvine, the Muslim Student Union drew criticism last year for a “Holocaust in the Holy Land” program about Israel.

Brandeis University officials pulled an exhibition of Palestinian children’s drawings, including some of bloodied Palestinian children, designed to bring the Palestinian viewpoint to the campus, half of whose students are Jewish.

Three years ago a video produced by a pro-Israeli group featuring Jewish students’ complaints of intimidation by Middle East studies professors at Columbia set off a campus-wide debate over freedom of speech and academic freedom, prompting an investigation that found some fault by one professor but “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.”

Into this milieu stepped the producer of “Obsession,” Raphael Shore, a 45-year-old Canadian who lives in Israel, with the documentary. It features scenes like the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Muslim children being encouraged to become suicide bombers, interspersed with those of Nazi rallies.

The film was directed by Wayne Kopping of South Africa, who had worked with Mr. Shore previously on a documentary about the failure of the Oslo peace efforts in the Middle East. Mr. Shore said in a recent interview that they had not set out to make a film for college students but to spur action against Islamic terrorism. “We want to spread this message to all people that will stand up and make a difference in combating this threat,” he said.

When no traditional film distributors picked it up, he said, colleges were an obvious outlet — it was screened on 30 campuses last semester — along with DVD sales on the Internet (ObsessionTheMovie.com), and showings at synagogues and other locales, including conservative ones like the Heritage Foundation in Washington. There were also repeated broadcasts of abbreviated versions or excerpts on Fox News in November and again this month, and on other media outlets like CNN Headline News.

“College students have the power with their energy, resources, time and interest to make a difference, often more than other individuals,” Mr. Shore said.

He hired a campus coordinator, Karyn Leffel, who works out of the New York City office of the Hasbara Fellowships program, which aims to train students “to be effective pro-Israel activists on their campuses.” “ ‘Obsession’ is so important because it shows what’s happening in Israel is not happening in a vacuum,” said Elliot Mathias, director of the Hasbara Fellowships program, “and that it affects all American students on campuses, not just Jewish students.”

Mr. Shore said that despite the collaboration with Hasbara, the goal was to draw a wide audience.

“The evangelical Christians and the Jews tend to be the softest market, the most receptive to the message of the film, so we have done lots with those groups,” he said. “But we are trying very hard to expand beyond those groups, because we specifically don’t want it to be seen as a film that has that connection.”

Mr. Shore describes his film as nonpartisan and balanced, and many viewers agree with him. Traci Ciepiela, who teaches criminal justice at Western Wyoming Community College in Rock Springs and has a screening scheduled this week, says she learned from the film and did not think that it was unfair or inflammatory.

But others see it as biased. Arnold Leder, a political scientist at Texas State University, San Marcos, decided not to use it for his course “The Politics of Extremism” because of what he called “serious flaws,” including that it did not address Islam in general, the history of Islam and the schisms within the faith.

“If it were used in a class,” he said, “it would have to be treated as a polemic and placed in that context.”

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, director of U.C.L.A. Hillel, called the documentary propaganda and said it was “a way to transfer the Middle East conflict to the campus, to promote hostility.”
While the film carries cautions at the beginning and end that it is only about Islamist extremists -- and that most Muslims are peaceful and do not support terror -- Muslim students who have protested say they believe the documentary will still fuel prejudice.

“The movie was so well crafted and emotion manipulating that I felt myself thinking poorly of some aspects of Islam,” said Adam Osman, president of Stony Brook’s Muslim Students’ Association, who asked that it not be shown.

While screenings were canceled under pressure at Pace and Stony Brook, Ms. Leffel said that most campus screening, like a recent one at Providence College in Rhode Island, had taken place without incident. Students at New York University decided they wanted to present it, despite misgivings by some Muslim students.

At the screening there late last month, the viewers — many of them Muslims — ganged up on Robert Friedman, a discussion leader who had been sent by the “Obsession” filmmakers. (The event was sponsored by the Middle East Dialogue Group at N.Y.U., the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life, Arab Students United and the Pakistani Students Association.)

Mr. Friedman told the audience, “You have to understand a problem before you can solve it.”
But most of the viewers, including both a rabbi and a Muslim chaplain on a discussion panel put together by the students, said the film did not foster understanding.

“The question about radical Islam and how do we fight it is unproductive,” said Yehuda Sarna, the New York University rabbi on the panel. “The question is how to break down the stereotypes facing the two religions.”

Steven I. Weiss, editor and publisher of CampusJ.com, an Internet site that covers Jewish news on campuses, said he was surprised by the Jewish skepticism to the film at N.Y.U. “Were a Jewish leader from virtually any significant organization to walk in on that discussion,” he said, “they’d be very surprised and displeased. This is the opposite of the change they’ve been looking for in campus rhetoric.”

Continued (Permanent Link)

Arabs vs Israel

Arabs vs Israel

By Farrukh Saleem http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=35880 Also at Zionist propaganda?: Arabs vs Israel Imam Ali Ibn Abi Taleb: "If God were to humiliate a human being He would deny him knowledge" The League of Arab States has 22 members. Of the 22, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman are 'traditional monarchies'. Of the 22, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria and Somalia are 'Authoritarian Regimes' (Source: www.freedomhouse.org). Of the 22, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Morocco and Somalia are among the 'world's most repressive regimes' (Source: A special report to the 59th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights). Of the 330 million Muslim men, women and children living under Arab rulers a mere 486,530 live in a democracy (0.15 per cent of the total). A mere two hundred and fifty miles from the 'League of Dictators' HQ in Cairo is the only 'parliamentary democracy' in the region; universal suffrage, multi-party, multi-candidate, competitive elections. Israel's 6,352,117 residents are 76 per cent Jewish and 23 per cent non-Jewish (mostly Arab). Israel spends $110 on scientific research per year per person while the same figure for the Arab world is $2. Knowledge makes Israel grow by 5.2 per cent a year while "rates of productivity (the average production of one worker) in Arab countries were negative to a large and increasing extent in oil-producing countries during the 1980s and 90s (World Bank; Arab Development Report)." Facts cannot be denied: The state of Israel now has six universities ranked as among the best on the face of the planet. Hebrew University Jerusalem is in the top-100. Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science are in the top-200. Bar Ilan University and Ben Gurion University are in the top-300. The Arab League does not have a single university in the top-400 (http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm). One in two Arab women can neither read nor write (remember, "If God were to humiliate a human being He would deny him/her knowledge"). Israel's universities are producing knowledge. Israeli society is applying that knowledge plus diffusing knowledge produced by others. On the other hand, within the Arab League, repressive regimes have erected religious, social and cultural barriers to the production as well as diffusion of knowledge. Look at how knowledge is abandoning the Arab world: Between 1998 and 2000 more than 15,000 Arab physicians migrated. According to the World Bank, "roughly 25 per cent of 300,000 first degree graduates from Arab universities emigrated. Roughly 23 per cent of Arab engineers, 50 per cent of Arab doctors and 15 per cent of Arab BSc holders had emigrated." Israel, on the other hand, has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country (for every 10,000 Israelis there are 145 engineers or scientists). Israel ranks among the top-7 countries worldwide for patents per capita. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Israel's pharmaceutical giant, is the world's largest producer of antibiotics (Teva developed Copaxone, a unique immunomodulator therapy for the treatment of multiple sclerosis, the only non-interferon agent available). Facts are hard to deny: Most members of the Arab League grant Muslim women fewer rights -- with regards to marriage, divorce, dress code, civil rights, legal status and education. Israel does not. Spain translates more books in a year than has the Arab world in the past thousand years (since the reign of Caliph Mamoun; Abbasid, caliph 813-833). Six million Israelis buy 12 million books every year making them one of the highest consumers of books in the world. Israel has the highest number of university degrees per capita in the world; the Arab world has the lowest. Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other country (109 per 10,000 Israelis); the Arab world -- next to nothing. Results are for everyone to see: The average per capita income in Israel is $25,000 while the average income within the League of Arab States is $5,000. The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance columnist. Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com

Continued (Permanent Link)

At war with women

At war with women
BY IRFAN HUSAIN

14 December 2006
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2006/December/opinion_December49.xml&section=opinion&col=

A FORTNIGHT after being signed into law, the Women's Protection Act is still
raising hackles among Pakistan's many fundamentalists. As cynical observers
had predicted, the holy fathers decided not to deprive our assemblies of their
austere presence by resigning their seats as they had threatened to after the
passage of the bill.

But this bitter controversy underlines yet again the problems most Muslims
have about the position of women in their society. Why should placing rape in
the category of crimes requiring internationally accepted laws of evidence
cause such a frenzy? For 25 years, Pakistani women have had to suffer from the
absurd requirement of providing four male witnesses of 'impeccable character'
to prove they had been raped. Failure to do so exposed them to jail sentences
if found 'guilty' of fornication. Apart from the agony and suffering this law, imposed by the military dictator Zia in 1979, caused thousands of women, it also encouraged rape as rapists were hardly ever sentenced....

Those supporting these repressive laws will be delighted to learn that they
have like-minded counterparts in Niger. According to a recent news item, this
West African country, with a 95 per cent Muslim majority, has already rejected
the Maputo Protocol. And yet fundamentalists there are protesting against any
attempt to implement this plan of action. Adopted by African leaders in
Mozambique in 2003, this Protocol addresses human rights abuses on the
continent, and has a separate section on gender issues. A far-ranging set of
proposals, it seeks to eliminate the worst kind of abuses against women.
Approved by 13 of the signatories, it has met resistance in Muslim-majority
countries, especially for its pro-women charter.

Ibrahim Oumarou, a Niger mullah, and one of the organisers of the protest,
probably reflected the opinion of most Muslim men when he said: "Ulema cannot
accept a man saying that his wife and he are equal in the sharing of their
heritage. It's unimaginable."

Not long ago, I received an email from a woman in the US with a Muslim name.
She wrote that she was 24, and asked why she should remain a Muslim, given the
low status she saw in the scriptures accorded to her gender. Normally, I never
enter into a discussion about somebody's faith, or the lack of it as I don't
think it's any of my business. But as she had asked me a specific question, I
replied that for its time, the Holy Quran signified a huge step forward for
women as it codified their rights in a manner no other religion or society had
at that point in history. She replied that this was all very well, but I was
talking about a stage 1,400 years ago, and the world had moved on since then.
Women in non-Muslim societies now enjoyed far more rights than their Muslim
sisters, so why should she follow a faith that made her inferior to men?

I had no easy answer, and our correspondence ended on this note. The truth is
that for many Muslim women today, several Islamic provisions regarding the
laws of evidence and inheritance do appear to disadvantage them. And as Islam
gives men authority over women, the former are naturally reluctant to
contemplate a change in this set-up. Indeed, the entire social order is tilted
in favour of men, and when one community or sex wishes to redress the power
balance, an intense struggle takes place. This happened in the West over the
last century, as women fought for, and won, equal rights. But although Western
women are equal under the law, pockets of discrimination and gender bias
remain.

Historically, Muslim societies were not the only ones to treat women unjustly.
Across the world, these attitudes have held women back for millennia. But as
mankind moved from hunting-gathering to farming to industry to a
knowledge-based economy, physical strength gave way to education and
intelligence in determining an individual's place in society. Especially in
the last fifty years or so, it became clear that to unleash a society's
potential, half the population could not be locked up at home. A major reason
why Muslim countries continue to lag behind the rest of the world is because
their women are not being allowed to make a full contribution to progress.

We need to remember that many archaic attitudes towards women are in fact
based on tradition, not religion. Thus, the practice of wearing a veil varies
from one Muslim country to another. Female circumcision or clitoral mutilation
has no sanction in Islam. In fact, it is a pre-Islamic tribal practice
confined to parts of Africa. It was inflicted to ensure that women derived no
pleasure from sex, and would therefore be more likely to remain chaste. And
yet, fundamentalist African Muslims insist on having this barbaric operation
performed on young girls on religious grounds.

This confusion between social practices and religious edicts has harmed women
greatly. In order to retain their control over women, Muslim clerics have
consistently favoured the most harsh and retrogressive interpretation of the
scriptures. And since this suits most Muslim men, they do not join their women
in their struggle to bring these laws into conformity with the requirements of
natural justice. Those women daring to question the status quo are branded
'Westernised' and 'secular', as though these labels somehow lessen the force
of their argument. And all the while, men continue maintaining with a straight
face that somehow, these repressive laws and practices protect women.

International opinion and foreign pressure to bring about change are countered
by the assertion that these anti-women laws and practices are sanctioned by
religion. In fact, few of them are. And in any case, Islam allows for 'ijtihad',
or consensus to change earlier rulings. While the Taleban were probably the
harshest in suppressing women, Saudi Arabia does not lag far behind. A couple
of years ago, several Saudi school girls were burned to death when their
hostel caught fire at night, and they were not allowed to escape by the
morality police as they were not properly dressed. Women are not permitted to
drive or work alongside men.

So apart from the larger questions of equality and justice, the plain fact is
that if the Muslim world wishes to catch up with the rest of the world, it
will have to emancipate its women.

Irfan Husain is an eminent Pakistani writer based in London. He can be reached
at irfan.husain@gmail.com

Continued (Permanent Link)