ISIS AND ISLAM - CONNECTS AND DISCONNECTS

Recently, there's been heavy discussion and debate about the connections and disconnectionsbetween Islam and extremist groups such as ISIS.

There are many sources of this discussion. One says religion is religion, one of many aspects ofculture. What one brings to religion or takes from it is another thing. Over dozens of centuriespeople affiliated with one religion or another have done wonderful or terrible things. All majorreligions have had their wonderful periods and their terrible periods. No religion has a monopoly ongood or bad. Texts tell it both ways.

Even people supposedly with no religion, atheists, have done terrible things, eg Cambodia's PolPot. Have you read Hitler's Mein Kampf? In today's 21st century Buddhist monks slaughter Muslimwomen and children in Myanmar.

In the most highly populated Muslim country in the world, Indonesia (250 million), women aregenuinely equal with men. Women have led Muslim countries - Indonesia, Pakistan (BenazirBhutto, second most populous Muslim country), Bangladesh (two women over 23 years!), Turkey,Senegal, Kyrgystan (Muslim majority country led by a woman atheist), Kosovo (woman unanimouslyelected by parliament).

And then, there's the likes of ISIS.

Of numerous sources of discussion on Islam and extremism, here are 3:

1. An "Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi" endorsed by more than 100 Islamic scholars, clerics, andothers around the world including scholars at Al-Azhar University in Egypt. The Letter is availableonline in Arabic, English, German, Spanish, Bosnian, and Hungarian at< http://lettertobaghdadi.com/ >.Arabic and English versions are attached. News articles pertaining to the Letter are below.

2. An HBO television program 'Real Time with Bill Maher' included heated discussion andsparked even more heated debate on the alleged role of Islam in extremist violence. Besides BillMaher the discussion included author Sam Harris, actor Ben Affleck, and NYT columnist NicholasKristof. Strong reaction came from many sources including religion scholar Reza Aslan and FareedZakaria of CNN and The Washington Post. Here the link to the discussion and selected news articlesand essays pertaining to the episode are below.

Click here: Real Time with Bill Maher: Ben Affleck, Sam Harris and Bill Maher Debate RadicalIslam (HBO) - YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60

3. The Young Turks (TYT). If you haven't watched TYT before, have a taste. Very interestingly,and sensibly provocative. And don't miss the longer, indepth discussion with TYT and religionscholar Reza Aslan - "atheism is also a religion".

"An American liberal/progressive political and social commentary program hosted primarily by CenkUygur and distributed on a variety of Internet-based platforms. TYT was founded in 2002 by Uygur as atalkshow on Sirius Satellite Radio. The Young Turks claims to be "the world's largest online newsshow"; YouTube video views for the TYT Network stood at a total of 2 billion as of July 2014. The show offersinternet-only video content via their YouTube channel, which in April 2012 averaged 750,000 views a day. The Young Turks also have anetwork of other affiliated shows on separate YouTube channels, known collectively as the TYT Network."

Incidentally, religion scholar Reza Aslan holds 4 academic degrees including one from Harvard and isan author of top bestsellers. He has participated in many discussions and debates and the videos areavailable on YouTube, including a 2007 debate with Sam Harris<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKjcvZoxT9Q>. He was born in Iran and he is Muslim.

Click here: Bill Maher Destroyed Again And Again By Reza Aslan - YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ibKWVTFSak

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Full CNN conversation with Reza Aslan

Click here: Reza Aslan Slams Bill Maher for Facile Arguments’ About Muslim Violencehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzusSqcotDw

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A longer, more indepth discussion, 45 minutes - very worthwhile watching!

The Young Turks - Cenk Uygur and Reza Aslan Discussion

Click here: Reza Aslan - Bigotry, Fundamentalism and Neo-Atheism in the Media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F-SiZt0amg

Slate25 Sep 2014

Scholars’ Open Letter Adds to Chorus of Muslim LeadersCondemning ISIS

By Filipa Ioannou

More than 120 Muslim leaders and scholars have co-signed an open letter to Abu Bakral-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS, arguing the Islamic State caliphate's establishment andpractices are not legitimate in Islam. The letter includes a technical point-by-pointcriticism of ISIS' actions and ideology based on the Quran and classical religious texts.From Religion News Service:

Even translated into English, the letter will still sound alien to most Americans, said

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, who

released it in Washington with 10 other American Muslim religious and civil rights

leaders.

“The letter is written in Arabic. It is using heavy classical religious texts and classical

religious scholars that ISIS has used to mobilize young people to join its forces,” said

Awad, using one of the acronyms for the group. “This letter is not meant for a liberal

audience.”

The 18-page letter's thorough catalogue of the transgressions of ISIS "relies completelyupon the statements and actions of followers of the ‘Islamic State’ as they themselveshave promulgated in social media—or upon Muslim eyewitness accounts—and not uponother media," it says, a move meant to forestall criticism that ISIS has beenmisrepresented by Westerners. From the English translation of the letter:

The word ‘jihad’ is an Islamic term that cannot be applied to armed conflict against any

other Muslim; this much is a firmly established principle...Moreover, there are two kinds

of jihad in Islam: the greater jihad, which is the jihad (struggle) against one’s ego; and

the lesser jihad, the jihad (struggle) against the enemy.

In truth, it is clear that you and your fighters are fearless and are ready to sacrifice in

your intent for jihad. No truthful person following events—friend or foe—can deny this.

However, jihad without legitimate cause, legitimate goals, legitimate purpose, legitimate

methodology and legitimate intention is not jihad at all, but rather, warmongering and

criminality.

The letter is not the first instance of ISIS being denounced by Islamic scholars. The 21senior clerics of Saudi Arabia labeled terrorism a "heinous crime" in a recent fatwa, orlegal ruling, and the country has been increasingly vocal in its opposition to ISIS. Theinfluential Sheikh Abdullah Bin Bayyah, a native of Mauritania who teaches in SaudiArabia, issued a fatwa of his own condemning the establishment of a caliphate by force.Bin Bayyah's words—"We must declare war on war so the outcome will be peace uponpeace"—were cited by President Obama in his speech on Wednesday to the UnitedNations General Assembly.

Religion News Service25 Sep 2014

Muslim Scholars Release Open Letter To Islamic StateMeticulously Blasting Its Ideology

By Lauren Markoe

WASHINGTON (RNS) More than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world joined anopen letter to the “fighters and followers” of the Islamic State, denouncing them as un-Islamic by using the most Islamic of terms.

Relying heavily on the Quran, the 18-page letter released Wednesday (Sept. 24) picksapart the extremist ideology of the militants who have left a wake of brutal death anddestruction in their bid to establish a transnational Islamic state in Iraq and Syria.

Even translated into English, the letter will still sound alien to most Americans, saidNihad Awad, executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, whoreleased it in Washington with 10 other American Muslim religious and civil rightsleaders.

“The letter is written in Arabic. It is using heavy classical religious texts and classicalreligious scholars that ISIS has used to mobilize young people to join its forces,” saidAwad, using one of the acronyms for the group. “This letter is not meant for a liberalaudience.”

Even mainstream Muslims, he said, may find it difficult to understand.

Awad said its aim is to offer a comprehensive Islamic refutation, “point-by-point,” to thephilosophy of the Islamic State and the violence it has perpetrated. The letter’s authorsinclude well-known religious and scholarly figures in the Muslim world, including SheikhShawqi Allam, the grand mufti of Egypt, and Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, themufti of Jerusalem and All Palestine.

A translated 24-point summary of the letter includes the following: “It is forbidden inIslam to torture”; “It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God”; and “It isforbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslims until he (or she) openly declaresdisbelief.”

This is not the first time Muslim leaders have joined to condemn the Islamic State. Thechairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, for example, lastweek told the nation’s Muslims that they should speak out against the “terrorist andmurderers” who fight for the Islamic State and who have dragged Islam “through themud.”

But the Muslim leaders who endorsed Wednesday’s letter called it an unprecedentedrefutation of the Islamic State ideology from a collaboration of religious scholars. It isaddressed to the group’s self-anointed leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and “the fightersand followers of the self-declared ‘Islamic State.’”

But the words “Islamic State” are in quotes, and the Muslim leaders who released theletter asked people to stop using the term, arguing that it plays into the group’sunfounded logic that it is protecting Muslim lands from non-Muslims and is resurrectingthe caliphate — a state governed by a Muslim leader that once controlled vast swaths ofthe Middle East.

“Please stop calling them the ‘Islamic State,’ because they are not a state and they arenot a religion,” said Ahmed Bedier, a Muslim and the president of United Voices ofAmerica, a nonprofit that encourages minority groups to engage in civic life.

President Obama has made a similar point, referring to the Islamic State by one of itsacronyms — “the group known as ISIL” — in his speech to the United Nations earlierWednesday. In that speech, Obama also disconnected the group from Islam.

Enumerating its atrocities — the mass rape of women, the gunning down of children, the

starvation of religious minorities — Obama concluded: “No God condones this terror.”

Here is the executive summary of their letter:1. It is forbidden in Islam to issue fatwas without all the necessary learningrequirements. Even then fatwas must follow Islamic legal theory as defined in theClassical texts. It is also forbidden to cite a portion of a verse from the Qur’an—or part ofa verse—to derive a ruling without looking at everything that the Qur’an and Hadithteach related to that matter. In other words, there are strict subjective and objectiveprerequisites for fatwas, and one cannot ‘cherry-pick’ Qur’anic verses for legalarguments without considering the entire Qur’an and Hadith.

2. It is forbidden in Islam to issue legal rulings about anything without mastery of theArabic language.

3. It is forbidden in Islam to oversimplify Shari’ah matters and ignore established Islamicsciences.

4. It is permissible in Islam [for scholars] to differ on any matter, except thosefundamentals of religion that all Muslims must know.

5. It is forbidden in Islam to ignore the reality of contemporary times when deriving legalrulings.

6. It is forbidden in Islam to kill the innocent.

7. It is forbidden in Islam to kill emissaries, ambassadors, and diplomats; hence it isforbidden to kill journalists and aid workers.

8. Jihad in Islam is defensive war. It is not permissible without the right cause, the rightpurpose and without the right rules of conduct.

9. It is forbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslim unless he (or she) openlydeclares disbelief.

10. It is forbidden in Islam to harm or mistreat—in any way—Christians or any ‘People ofthe Scripture’.

11. It is obligatory to consider Yazidis as People of the Scripture.

12. The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam. It was abolished by universalconsensus.

13. It is forbidden in Islam to force people to convert.

14. It is forbidden in Islam to deny women their rights.

15. It is forbidden in Islam to deny children their rights.

16. It is forbidden in Islam to enact legal punishments (hudud) without following thecorrectprocedures that ensure justice and mercy.

17. It is forbidden in Islam to torture people.

18. It is forbidden in Islam to disfigure the dead.

19. It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God.

20. It is forbidden in Islam to destroy the graves and shrines of Prophets andCompanions.

21. Armed insurrection is forbidden in Islam for any reason other than clear disbelief bythe ruler and not allowing people to pray.

22. It is forbidden in Islam to declare a caliphate without consensus from all Muslims.

23. Loyalty to one’s nation is permissible in Islam.

24. After the death of the Prophet, Islam does not require anyone to emigrate anywhere.

Reuters

25 Sep 2014

Muslim scholars present religious rebuttal to Islamic StateBy Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

(Reuters) - Over 120 Islamic scholars from around the world, many of them leadingMuslim voices in their own countries, have issued an open letter denouncing IslamicState militants and refuting their religious arguments.

An array of Muslim leaders and groups have publicly rejected the Islamist movementsince it imposed its brutal rule over large areas of Syria and Iraq this summer. FiveMuslim nations have also joined a U.S.-led military campaign against it.

The 22-page letter, written in Arabic and heavy with quotes from the Koran and otherIslamic sources, is just as clear as those groups in condemning the torture, murder anddestruction Islamic State militants have committed in areas they control.

"You have misinterpreted Islam into a religion of harshness, brutality, torture andmurder," the letter said. "This is a great wrong and an offense to Islam, to Muslims andto the entire world."

Its originality lies in its use of Islamic theological arguments to refute statements madeby self-declared Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani to justify their actions and attract more recruits to their cause.

The letter is addressed to al-Baghdadi and "the fighters and followers of the self-declared'Islamic State'", but is also aimed at potential recruits and imams or others trying todissuade young Muslims from going to join the fight.

Nihad Awad of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which presented theletter in Washington on Wednesday, said he hoped potential fighters would read thedocument and see through the arguments of Islamic State recruiters.

"They have a twisted theology," he said in a video explaining the letter. "They haverelied many times, to mobilize and recruit young people, on classic religious texts thathave been misinterpreted and misunderstood."

PROMINENT SIGNATORIES

The 126 signatories are all Sunni men from across the Muslim world, from Indonesia toMorocco and from other countries such as the United States, Britain, France andBelgium. Including Shi'ite or women signatories could have discredited the appeal in the

eyes of the hardline Islamists it addresses.

Amongst those who signed were the current and former grand muftis of Egypt, ShawqiAllam and Ali Gomaa, former Bosnian grand mufti Mustafa Ceric, the Nigerian Sultan ofSokoto Muhammad Sa'ad Abubakar and Din Syamsuddin, head of the largeMuhammadiyah organization in Indonesia.

Eight scholars from Cairo's Al-Azhar University, the highest seat of Sunni learning, alsoput their names to the document.

In the letter, the scholars not only denounced the killing of U.S. journalists James Foleyand Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines as murder, but also rejected itbased on the Muslim custom of protecting emissaries between groups.

The letter described as "heinous war crimes" several cases of militants killing prisoners,totaling at least 2,850. To stress this point in an Islamic way, it gave several quotes fromthe Prophet Mohammad forbidding such practices.

It said that Arab Christians and the Yazidis, followers of an ancient religion derived fromZoroastrianism, were both "people of the book" meant under Islamic sharia law to beprotected. Both groups were driven to flight as Islamic State militants swept acrossnorthern Iraq.

"Reconsider your actions, desist from them, repent from them, cease harming others andreturn to the religion of mercy," the letter concluded.

Al-Ahram Weekly29 Oct 2014

Religious intolerance imperils Islam

Like all the Abrahamic religions, Islam is founded on tolerance. So why aredroves of Islamic militants able to practise such brutality, asks Ahmed NaguibRoushdy

Once upon a time Iraq was a united country, largely by the efforts of Gertrude Bell, aBritish diplomat and spy, after World War I. She brought Iraqis together in order to bringstability and allow her country to siphon the abundance of Iraqi oil. But her legacy isabout to fade amid the sectarian violence between Sunni militants of the Islamic State ofIraq and Syria (ISIS), the Shia-led government, and the Kurds.

It has been a puzzling question asked by scholars and writers, why religious intolerancebecame the flagship tradition of certain Islamic groups when Islam, like Judaism andChristianity, calls for tolerance, forgiveness, peace and liberating people from theatrocities of tyrants. Why are Muslims in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Nigeria killing each otherand killing Christians? Why has the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt been using violenceagainst civilians and government personnel in the name of Islam, even during the Holymonth of Ramadan, in order to reinstate their leader, former president Mohamed Morsi,who was himself un-Islamic in his ruling of the country?

Why after ISIS established their Islamic caliphate in Mosul, the second largest city in

Iraq, is the group killing Iraqi Christians, forbidding them from praying in their churchesand removing the cross from tops of the churches and replacing them with their blackflags, expelling them from Mosul and trying to force them to convert to Islam? Not onlythat, ISIS after establishing its Islamic caliphate applied its strict interpretation of Sharia.There is news that ISIS has been beheading Muslim men in public for the least offenceand without a fair trial. It forced all women in Mosul to wear the niqab to cover theirfaces. ISIS ordered women to stay in the home with no access to education or jobs. Allof these killings and atrocities were made in the name of God.

Sectarian conflicts have virtually divided Iraq into two states: one governed by the Shia-led regime with a minority of Sunnis onboard; the second in Mosul headed by the leaderof ISIS, Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who declared himself the Caliph Abraham (Al-KhalifaIbrahim in Arabic). The Kurds have had semi-autonomy since former president SaddamHussein was overthrown by the Americans. Now the Kurds are demanding fullindependence.

ISIS, which also controls large swathes of Syria, is now fighting ill-trained Iraqi forcesand pressing to enter Baghdad. It also invaded Kurdish territories to prevent them fromgaining independence and managed to take over a dam there. It is planning to fight toextend the new caliphate to other countries in the Middle East, to keep them inembroiled in strife through acts of terrorism like those unfolding now in Lebanon, whichhas a majority of Christians and a minority of Muslims. ISIS militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Syria joined ISIS troops from Iraq in attacking the Lebanese army and seizedcontrol of Arsal, a Lebanese border town linked with Syria.

ISIS has resorted to the Internet to recruit young people from Islamic countries to fightfor its cause. But no one would have imagined that ISIS could attract unsatisfied youngmen from India, home to the second largest Muslim population. In a news report articlein The New York Times on 5 August, Ellen Barry and Mansi Choksi surprised readers withthis new development in India: that four well educated young men from rising middleclass families left their homes on the outskirts of Mumbai to join ISIS in Mosul, Iraq. Theprocedure, “relatively well known in the West, has not been documented in India”, thewriters said. They predicted this development would be turned against India when Indianjihadists bring terrorism back when they return home. Young men in Kashmir and TamilNado were seen displaying ISIS banners and insignia.

Young religious men become zealous about being heroes and ready to die in return for aplace in paradise. As happened with the Muslim Brotherhood and other ultra-conservatives in Egypt, like the Salafis, many well-educated young Muslims in Indiarefuse to allow television in their homes and get violent when they see young men andwomen chatting in public. They refuse to participate in voting or running for elections inIndia, although the Muslim Brotherhood changed its mind about that in order to seizepower in Egypt, as their offshoot — Hamas — did in Gaza.

Tolerance is a basic element in Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In his 2006 book, TheJesus Dynasty, James Tabor illustrated what Muslims believe — that Islam began withthe Prophet Abraham. “Islam insists that neither Moses, Jesus nor Mohamed brought anew religion. All ought to call people back to what might be called ‘Abrahamic faith’,”said Tabor. He further found in Christianity a confirmation of that Muslim belief. “LikeIslam, the book of James, and the teachings of Jesus … emphasis doing the will of Godas a demonstration of one’s faith,” he said. Tabor is right. It all started with the Prophet

Abraham and was extended by the prophets Moses, Jesus and Mohamed.

The sectarian civil war in Iraq between the Sunni minority and the Shia majority, andbetween both and the Sunni Kurds who enjoy semi-autonomy but aspire to fullindependence, and the acts of terrorism and demeaning of women by the MuslimBrotherhood and the Salafis in Egypt, Sudan and Nigeria are giving Islam a bad name.

Nicolas Kristof in his recent column in The New York Times affirmed that, “Islam washistorically tolerant”. He gave an example of a document issued by the ProphetMohamed in 628 AD protecting the monks of St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Buthe missed to mention that the Prophet Moses entered the monastery as a path to climbthe mount of Sinai to speak to God. That is why the whole area is holy for Muslims and itis required that anyone who enters the room where St Catherine is buried should take offhis or her shoes.

Adding to the complicity in understanding Islam is that Islamic ulema (scholars) arehesitant to add new interpretations of Sharia after closing that door (Bab Al-Ijtihad) inthe 14th century. Al-Ijtihad is complementary to the Quran and the Sunna (the prophet’ssayings and deeds): the two are the original sources of Sharia. Conservative Muslims ledby Ibn Taymia, along with Islamic scholars, recognise only those two sources and resortto a strict interpretation of Sharia. Al-Ijtihad was closed in order to monopolise theinterpretation of Sharia and stop others from competing with the then ulema. But thoseulema ignored the fact that ijtihad was approved and encouraged by the ProphetMuhammad. It is time ijtihad was opened, as I have called for in an earlier article in Al-Ahram Weekly.

The division of Muslims into sects, Sunnis and Shias, and the division of the Sunnis intofour sub-sects, adds to the misunderstanding of the real Sharia. In Egypt, the SunniHanafi sub-sect is the official one. But sects are not relevant to Sharia. In fact, I considerthe Egyptian law requiring that all court judgments follow the Hanafi sub-sect animposition on Muslims to follow one sub-sect, when the Quran says, “la ikraha fi eddeen”(there is no compulsion in religion).

Salon12 Oct 2014

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/12/bill_mahers_horrible_excuse_why_his_defense_of_islamophobia_just_doesnt_make_any_sense/

Bill Maher’s horrible excuse: Why his defense ofIslamophobia just doesn’t make any sense

For all his odes to liberal ideals, Maher's latest effort to demonize Muslimsreveals a disturbing, illiberal truth

MYRIAM FRANCOIS-CERRAH

Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy once said, “There’s really no such thing as the‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

Her words seem particularly apt this week in light of Bill Maher’s recent opening of the

Islamophobic floodgates during his “Last Word” interview with Sam Harris and BenAffleck. In the now infamous segment, Harris argues “Islam is the mother-lode of badideas” and that “We are misled to think the fundamentalists are the fringe.”Muslim American academic Reza Aslan was subsequently called on by CNN to commenton Maher’s views, which he demurely dismissed, but what was most interesting wascomparing the treatment of Aslan and Affleck, both voices arguing against anti-Muslimprejudice, by mainstream American TV anchors.

In his interview with CNN, Aslan, a professor of religion, was forced into an apologeticstance in which he sought to elicit a recognition that Muslims are diverse in theiroutlooks and beliefs, despite being persistently dismissed by both skeptical CNNinterviewers.

The discussion subsequently continued without Aslan, his voice having largely beenignored until that point anyway, but what was telling was that his contribution was recastas a hostile and angry response by a third CNN presenter, Chris Cuomo: “His tone wasangry. He wound up kind of demonstrating what people are fearful about when theythink of the faith in the first place, which is the hostility of it.”“Angry” is just another term used to invalidate someone’s position by attempting to roottheir arguments in emotion rather than rationality – it’s what men do to women in the“angry feminist” variation, and it’s what white people do to ethnic minorities (womenespecially, through the angry black woman stereotype). Cuomo was seeking to delegitimizeAslan’s perspective by making him appear as an extension of the irrational and angryfaith the anchors had consistently upheld as the only valid perception of Islam.

Compare this dismissal of Aslan’s polite frustration with the response to Ben Affleck’svisceral anger and disgust at Maher’s original statements. “It’s gross and racist” Affleckretorted, his annoyance evident. But unlike Aslan, who’s subaltern identity meant herequired approval from the anchors in order for his arguments to be given credence,Affleck’s white privilege allowed him to express a similar sentiment to Aslan in far cruderand more assertive terms, yet without being dismissed.

I was reminded in watching the clip of a statement by the activist Audre Lorde: “Blackand Third world people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.”Discussions involving Muslims begin with the assumption that Muslims must prove theirhumanity to a hostile audience, the same premise which requires Muslims with noconnection to ISIL or violent jihadis to begin a campaign like “Not In My Name” so theycan avoid guilt by association.

The debate has been framed as a discussion over the nature of liberalism but that is,frankly, to give Maher’s bigotry far too much credence. Maher called Islam “the onlyreligion that acts like the mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing,” astatement which, when deconstructed, is a textbook illustration of bigotry.

For a start, religions don’t do or think anything – people articulate ideas or act in thename of religion; Affleck was spot-on when he queried whether Maher had somehowdetermined the “the codified doctrine of Islam.” And he was even more accurate when helambasted Maher’s attempt to play on white victimhood by casting himself, a highlyinfluential TV host, as part of an oppressed group whose voice was somehow beingsuppressed on issues relating to Islam and Muslims — all the while demonizing Islam andMuslims, largely unchallenged, on primetime Television.

This phony martyrdom is a classic example of what the writer Richard Seymour terms“white victimhood,” rebranding minorities as aggressors with the fictitious power tomimic the type of systemic discrimination actually experienced by those cast asoutsiders. This attempt at “liberal victimhood” ultimately serves — just like white

victimhood serves to undermine anti-racist struggles — as a way of delegitimizing thevery real and enduring struggle against institutional racism and individual prejudiceexperienced every day by Muslims.

TV hosts like Maher appear to revel in deliberately inviting debate with known moderateMuslim figures in order to seemingly undermine them, and thus simultaneouslyundermine the very notion of a moderate Islam. There are no moderates, the common refraingoes; or as Maher himself stated on the show, “Its not a few bad apples”, implying thatthe net of suspicion should be cast on every Muslim who isn’t merely a “nominal Muslim.”(The thinking here being that the only good Muslim is one who doesn’t actually identifywith their faith.)The sheer recklessness of claiming that Muslims share “too much in common with ISIS,”a violent guerrilla group which has incidentally beheaded far more Muslims than it hasAmericans, can hardly be overstated. There is an increasing and alarming consonancebetween the far-right discourse of Muslims — that they are an existential threat out todestroy western civilization — and the language spouted by Maher and others, who insistthat it isn’t a minority, but the majority, of Muslims who represent a threat to liberalideals. And this discourse isn’t happening in a vacuum. New York City public transitcurrently features a series of ads paid for by the polemicist Pamela Gellar, featuring thephrase, “Yesterday’s moderate is today’s headline,” above a picture from the beheadingof James Foley. Meanwhile, the latest advertisement for TV series “Homeland” featuresClare Danes as a blonde red-riding hood in what writer Laura Durkey describes as a“forest of faceless Muslim wolves.”A consequence of this Islamophobia, and the intellectual jousting over the place of Islamin Western societies, is that Muslims are facing increasingly tough conditions. Accordingto NYPD figures, anti-Muslim hate crimes are up 143 percent since last year.

Just as minarets or face veils have become imbued with a significance beyond thatattributed to them by Muslims themselves, discrimination against those bearing religioussymbols becomes justified through the fallacious reasoning that people have chosen tosubscribe to those ideas, and thus are fair targets. But people don’t choose thesignificance that others attribute to their symbols — especially when they themselveshave so little access to defining them for themselves. People don’t have a choice in thestereotypes and assumptions people make on the basis of their skin color, nor do theyhave a choice in the stereotypes concerning the symbols which people interpretaccording to the dominant narrative of extremism and cultural incompatibility. To beMuslim in America today is to be first and foremost a walking signifier for other people’sprejudice — regardless of how many credentials come after your name.

It is the height of civilizational arrogance to assume you understand a creed, themanifestation of which varies not only in transit from Asia to Africa via the Middle eastand Europe; but which also varies in its understanding even within nations and amongpeoples. And it is bigotry without bounds to suggest that those adherents of a faith — afaith persistently maligned in the public sphere, with little to no ability to rectify its publicperception — are the ones wielding any power to redefine or even constrain Americanideals.

American Muslims are literally being left out of the conversation over what it means to beAmerican. When they are present, they are forced into justifying their own humanity inorder to absolve their very presence in the debate. More typically, they are simply keptabsent, a faceless monolith for Americans to cast their darkest prejudice upon, fuelled bya self-righteous notion that they are in fact the carriers of a superior moral ideal, underthreat from the enemy within.

It is a telling indictment of our times that some of our most illustrious academics, who

happen to be Muslim, should have to sit through the public humiliation of an interview inwhich their competency is questioned on the basis of their religious identity. In anyconversation in which American values are being discussed, Islam is the image againstwhich America constructs its own civility, the bogeyman against which to contrastAmerican greatness and American Muslims are the unwitting casualties of a strugglewhich persistently dismisses them as the unalterable “other.”

Salon13 Oct 2014

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/13/bill_maher_and_sam_harris_proof_is_wrong_their_argument_is_based_on_an_untrustworthy_poll/

Scholars’ Open Letter Adds to Chorus of Muslim LeadersCondemning ISIS

Maher, Harris back their Islam arguments up with a Pew Research poll, butthose respondents couldn't answer freely

AHMED BENCHEMSIA recent TV showdown between talk show host Bill Maher, author Sam Harris, comedianBen Affleck and columnist Nicholas Kristof has spurred a tsunami of passionate reactions.At stake, one central question: is it OK to criticize Islam as a religion that inspiresintolerant violence to its followers? Maher and Harris have no problem saying it is.Affleck and Kristof vehemently disagree, with the former angrily dismissing the notion as“gross and racist.” The latters’ argument is that bloodthirsty jihadists are only a tinyminority who should not be conflated with Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whomreject violently intolerant behaviors. Kristof later went on to call off abusivegeneralizations in a Muslim world made of “vast and varied multitudes.”As an Arab citizen who lived most of his life in the said Muslim world, and spent hisjournalistic career trying to make sense of its unending complexities, I can only agreethat generalizing never helps. The thing is, unlike what their adversaries claim, that isnot what Maher and Harris did. They did flatly condemn Islam as a “bad idea”—and eventhe “mother lode of bad ideas,” as Harris put it—but that was not a generalization. Itwas, rather, the legitimate expression of an opinion they are entitled to. How surprisingis it that outspoken atheist activists condemn religion? Both made a point in thatcriticizing any given faith does not amount to condemning its followers, which is true.However, Maher and Harris also affirmed that intolerance in the Muslim world is waymore than the fringe phenomenon their co-panelists say it is. That was not meant as ajudgment, but rather as a statement of fact. As Harris further elaborated, thereis “abundant evidence that vast numbers of Muslims believe dangerous things aboutinfidels, apostasy, blasphemy, jihad, and martyrdom.”The “abundant evidence” in question—which popped up in many previous debates on thesame topic—comes mainly from one source: a 2013 wide-ranging Pew Research Centersurvey examining religion-based beliefs and attitudes in 39 countries. Maher mentionedone of its findings, according to which 90 percent of Egyptians believe that “death is theappropriate response to leaving Islam.”

(That number is actually incorrect. The Pew poll rather indicates that among 74 percentof Egyptians who believe Sharia law should be the official law of their country, 86percent are favorable to punishing apostasy by death—which amounts to a final rate of

64 percent of Egyptians favoring the killing of apostates. Still, 64% prevalence isworrying enough for such a morbid preference.)

Other numbers from the same poll are deeply disturbing: 75 percent of Palestinians favorstoning as punishment for adultery, 58 percent of Jordanians support corporalpunishments (including cutting off the hands of thieves) as criminal penalties, and aslittle as 15 percent of Moroccans believe that sons and daughters should have equivalentinheritance rights (as opposed to the rest who favor the enforcement of the Quranic rulegranting females half the inheritance share of males).

Am I saying that Maher and Harris are right in asserting that Muslims in general —or inother words, in their majority—hold savagely violent, intolerant and misogynistic views?That would be the case if I trusted the Pew poll. But I don’t. What I am questioning hereis not the methodology of the respected research Institute, but rather the genuineness ofthe answers provided by many of the 38,000 individuals it surveyed. Just picture thetypical polling interview. Imagine you live in a country where Islam is the religion of theState, where criticizing the religion (let alone leaving it) is a criminal offense, where theeducational system and the pervasive state media gang up every day to hammer thatIslam is the highest moral norm ever—where, hell, even the opposition (mostly made ofIslamist groups) does nothing but double down on religious intransigence… And herecomes the Pew pollster, a total stranger with a list of disturbing questions pertaining toreligion—questions to which the wrong answers can get you in trouble in many ways…Not the best conditions to conduct a credible opinion poll.Polls, of course, are anonymous, and trained pollsters have their ways to fabricateempathy, including asking the interviewees if they had a good day before engaging themon more serious matters. But as nice as a warming-up chitchat might be, itsimply cannot fend off the self-preservation instinct built over a lifetime’s experience ofpsychological pressure. Of course, the extent of the pressure (which itself depends onthe extent to which religion is used as a political tool for social control) varies from oneMuslim country to another. But then, so do the answers. While the Pew numbers indicatea high prevalence of the opinion that Sharia should be the law of the land in countrieswhere Islam is the religion of the State (91 percent in Iraq, 83 percent in Morocco, 74percent in Egypt…), the rate drops to 12 percent in Turkey, where secularism is aforefront constitutional principle. In other words, the more the questioned citizens arecoerced into religiosity, the more likely they are to pick the safest answers—thoseconsistent with what they were force-fed about religion since they were kids—when apollster comes around.

The tricky part is that Western liberals such as Maher and Harris are the first ones todenounce the lack of freedom of thought and opinion in Muslim countries. However, theysee no contradiction in trusting opinion polls as solid evidence of what Muslims think.Actually, let’s get to the bottom of this. If the religious opinions of Muslims arequestionable, then so is their adherence to religion in the first place. I’m not saying thatno citizen from Morocco to Indonesia genuinely adheres to Islam. I’m just stating theobvious: no one knows how many really do—and no one will ever know until people arefree to form and state their religious opinions freely. This has an important implication:all of the mainstream Western debate about what 1.6 billion Muslims think is built on thefalse premise that… there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the first place.

When Sam Harris started lambasting Muslim intolerance, Ben Affleck jumped out todenounce his “racism”. But since when has Islam become a race? This goes beyond theaccidental use of an inadequate word; it reveals a larger, fundamental flaw in theAmerican race-related terminological system. The widespread use of the expression“Muslim-Americans” (as an equivalent to African-Americans or Indian-Americans, forinstance) bears testimony of a deeply ingrained Western belief: when it comes to

“Muslims” (understand: people living in or originating from the part of the worldspanning from Morocco to Indonesia,) religiosity is not a choice—forced or not—as muchas it’s a given. One that is as irrefutable as the color of the skin, or the ethnicity. Therehas been a centuries-long debate on whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity (mostbelieve it’s both). But no such debate was ever held in and about the so-called Muslimworld. That is simply because so-called Muslims already have a wide array of ethnicidentities to pick from: Arab, Persian, Kurd, Amazigh, Pashtun, and the list goes on.Simply put: Islam is neither a race, nor a skin pigmentation, nor an ethnicity; it’s apersonal belief. And personal beliefs, contrary to those things, are optional. Yes, even forArabs, Persians, Kurds, and so on.Even the Western liberals who burn cultural relativism with the torch of universal HumanRights are confused about this. At some point in Maher’s show, Sam Harris mentionedthe“hundreds of millions of Muslims who are nominal Muslims who don’t take their faithseriously.” What an oxymoronic marvel this phrase is. If these people don’t take Islamseriously, why call them Muslims, “nominal” or not? And by the way, who nominatedthem as such? Despotic governments who never let them free to openly choose a faith(or none), extremist groups who consistently bully them into forced religiosity… andproud American liberals like Sam Harris who, when Islam is around, can’t call an atheistan atheist. Also, “their faith”? The whole point of being an atheist is to not have any!Harris, who would never self-identify as a “Christian atheist,” doesn’t see any problem inspeaking about “Muslim atheists.”This is not just a semantical point. It’s a paradigmal one. If you define people asirremediably Muslims, then the only choice you believe they have is either being a goodor a bad Muslim, an extremist or a “moderate” (whatever that means). Western opinionmakers must realize that the 1.6 billion people they flatly call “Muslims” hold in fact anincredibly wide array of spiritual convictions, including atheism and agnosticism—andarguably not in small proportions. It’s not just about faith; it’s also about lifestyle. Justask whoever is familiar with the realities of the Middle East about the prevalence ofalcohol consumption, non-marital sex and other not so Islamic social practices. You’d beamazed. Of course, because of the risk of legal reprisal, not officially sanctioned beliefsand practices are generally exercised discretely. But they are nonetheless very commonwithin the alleged “Muslim populations,” and almost the norm within their educated civilsocieties. That is true to such an extent that speaking about “1.6 billion Muslims, most of whomare pious and devout,” as Washington Post and CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria recently did, isnothing short of delusional.All American commentators, from the right to the left, agree on the necessity toempower reformists in the Muslim world. This must start with the way they look at them.If “true liberals” are willing to “stand for liberal values everywhere,” as Bill Maherdramatically exhorts them to do, they should start by granting everyone the freedomsthey grant themselves. That despotic politicians in officially Muslim countries denyfreedom of religion to their citizens is not a reason for Western liberals to do the same.On the contrary, it’s a good reason to do just the opposite. The West has serious reasonsto fear the disease of Islamic extremism. But guess what: we local liberals are theantidote. Engaging in shouting matches about who among Western liberals holds thehigher moral ground won’t advance the global liberal agenda in any way. If Westernliberals truly believe in the universality of secular Human Rights, they should open theireyes and realize that we too are Humans—and part of the same universe.

The New York Times8 Oct 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/opinion/bill-maher-isnt-the-only-one-who-misunderstands-religion.html

Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Misunderstands Religion

By REZA ASLAN

BILL MAHER’s recent rant against Islam has set off a fierce debate about the problem ofreligious violence, particularly when it comes to Islam.

Mr. Maher, who has argued that Islam is unlike other religions (he thinks it’s more “likethe Mafia”), recently took umbrage with President Obama’s assertion that the terroristgroup known as the Islamic State, or ISIS, does not represent Islam. In Mr. Maher’sview, Islam has “too much in common with ISIS.”

His comments have led to a flurry of responses, perhaps none so passionate as that ofthe actor Ben Affleck, who lambasted Mr. Maher, on Mr. Maher’s own HBO show, for“gross” and “racist” generalizations about Muslims.

Yet there is a real lack of sophistication on both sides of the argument when it comes todiscussing religion and violence.

On one hand, people of faith are far too eager to distance themselves from extremists intheir community, often denying that religious violence has any religious motivationwhatsoever. This is especially true of Muslims, who often glibly dismiss those whocommit acts of terror in the name of Islam as “not really Muslim.”

On the other, critics of religion tend to exhibit an inability to understand religion outsideof its absolutist connotations. They scour holy texts for bits of savagery and point toextreme examples of religious bigotry, of which there are too many, to generalize aboutthe causes of oppression throughout the world.

What both the believers and the critics often miss is that religion is often far more amatter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices. The phrase “I am aMuslim,” “I am a Christian,” “I am a Jew” and the like is, often, not so much adescription of what a person believes or what rituals he or she follows, as a simplestatement of identity, of how the speaker views her or his place in the world.

As a form of identity, religion is inextricable from all the other factors that make up aperson’s self-understanding, like culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexualorientation. What a member of a suburban megachurch in Texas calls Christianity maybe radically different from what an impoverished coffee picker in the hills of Guatemalacalls Christianity. The cultural practices of a Saudi Muslim, when it comes to the role ofwomen in society, are largely irrelevant to a Muslim in a more secular society like Turkeyor Indonesia. The differences between Tibetan Buddhists living in exile in India andmilitant Buddhist monks persecuting the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya, inneighboring Myanmar, has everything to do with the political cultures of those countriesand almost nothing to do with Buddhism itself.

No religion exists in a vacuum. On the contrary, every faith is rooted in the soil in whichit is planted. It is a fallacy to believe that people of faith derive their values primarilyfrom their Scriptures. The opposite is true. People of faith insert their values into theirScriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic andeven political perspectives.

After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation. Scripture requires a person to

confront and interpret it in order for it to have any meaning. And the very act ofinterpreting a scripture necessarily involves bringing to it one’s own perspectives andprejudices.

The abiding nature of scripture rests not so much in its truth claims as it does in itsmalleability, its ability to be molded and shaped into whatever form a worshiper requires.The same Bible that commands Jews to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus19:18) also exhorts them to “kill every man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep,camel and donkey,” who worship any other God (1 Sam. 15:3). The same Jesus Christwho told his disciples to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) also told them that hehad “not come to bring peace but the sword” (Matthew 10:34), and that “he who doesnot have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:36). The same Quran thatwarns believers “if you kill one person it is as though you have killed all of humanity”(5:32) also commands them to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5).

How a worshiper treats these conflicting commandments depends on the believer. If youare a violent misogynist, you will find plenty in your scriptures to justify your beliefs. Ifyou are a peaceful, democratic feminist, you will also find justification in the scripturesfor your point of view.

What does this mean, in practical terms? First, simplistic knee-jerk response amongpeople of faith to dismiss radicals in their midst as “not us” must end. Members of theIslamic State are Muslims for the simple fact that they declare themselves to be so.Dismissing their profession of belief prevents us from dealing honestly with the inherentproblems of reconciling religious doctrine with the realities of the modern world. Butconsidering that most of its victims are also Muslims — as are most of the forces fightingand condemning the Islamic State — the group’s self-ascribed Islamic identity cannot beused to make any logical statement about Islam as a global religion.

At the same time, critics of religion must refrain from simplistic generalizations aboutpeople of faith. It is true that in many Muslim countries, women do not have the samerights as men. But that fact alone is not enough to declare Islam a religion that isintrinsically more patriarchal than Christianity or Judaism. (It’s worth noting that Muslim-majority nations have elected women leaders on several occasions, while someAmericans still debate whether the United States is ready for a female president.)

Bill Maher is right to condemn religious practices that violate fundamental human rights.Religious communities must do more to counter extremist interpretations of their faith.But failing to recognize that religion is embedded in culture — and making a blanketjudgment about the world’s second largest religion — is simply bigotry.

Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, is theauthor, most recently, of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The New York Times8 Oct 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-diversity-of-islam.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

The Diversity of Islam

By Nicholas Kristof

A few days ago, I was on a panel on Bill Maher’s television show on HBO that became areligious war.

Whether or not Islam itself inspires conflict, debates about it certainly do. Ourconversation degenerated into something close to a shouting match and went viral onthe web. Maher and a guest, Sam Harris, argued that Islam is dangerous yet gets a passfrom politically correct liberals, while the actor Ben Affleck denounced their comments as“gross” and “racist.” I sided with Affleck.

After the show ended, we panelists continued to wrangle on the topic for another hourwith the cameras off. Maher ignited a debate that is rippling onward, so let me offerthree points of nuance.

First, historically, Islam was not particularly intolerant, and it initially elevated the statusof women. Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single outIslam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe andBuddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter.

Likewise, it is true that the Quran has passages hailing violence, but so does the Bible,which recounts God ordering genocides, such as the one against the Amalekites.

Second, today the Islamic world includes a strain that truly is disproportionatelyintolerant and oppressive. Barbarians in the Islamic State cite their faith as the reasonfor their monstrous behavior — most recently beheading a British aid worker devoted tosaving Muslim lives — and give all Islam a bad name. Moreover, of the 10 bottom-ranking countries in the World Economic Forum’s report on women’s rights, nine aremajority Muslim. In Afghanistan, Jordan and Egypt, more than three-quarters of Muslimsfavor the death penalty for Muslims who renounce their faith, according to a Pew survey.

The persecution of Christians, Ahmadis, Yazidis, Bahai — and Shiites — is far toocommon in the Islamic world. We should speak up about it.

Third, the Islamic world contains multitudes: It is vast and varied. Yes, almost four outof five Afghans favor the death penalty for apostasy, but most Muslims say that that isnuts. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, only 16 percent ofMuslims favor such a penalty. In Albania, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, only 2 percent orfewer Muslims favor it, according to the Pew survey.

Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to thereligious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanaticwho assassinated him. The Dalai Lama today is an extraordinary humanitarian, but thefifth Dalai Lama in 1660 ordered children massacred “like eggs smashed against rocks.”

Christianity encompassed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and also the 13th centurypapal legate who in France ordered the massacre of 20,000 Cathar men, women andchildren for heresy, reportedly saying: Kill them all; God will know his own.

One of my scariest encounters was with mobs of Javanese Muslims who were beheadingpeople they accused of sorcery and carrying their heads on pikes. But equally repugnant

was the Congo warlord who styled himself a Pentecostal pastor; while facing charges ofwar crimes, he invited me to dinner and said a most pious grace.

The caricature of Islam as a violent and intolerant religion is horrendously incomplete.Remember that those standing up to Muslim fanatics are mostly Muslims. In Pakistan, agang of Muslim men raped a young Muslim woman named Mukhtar Mai as punishmentfor a case involving her brother; after testifying against her attackers and winning in thecourts, she selflessly used the compensation money she received from the governmentto start a school for girls in her village. The Taliban gunmen who shot Malala Yousafzaifor advocating for education were Muslims; so was Malala.

Iran has persecuted Christians and Bahais, but a Muslim lawyer, Mohammad AliDadkhah, showed enormous courage by challenging the repression and winning releaseof a pastor. Dadkhah is now serving a nine-year prison sentence.

A lawyer friend of mine in Pakistan, Rashid Rehman, was a great champion of humanrights and religious tolerance — and was assassinated this year by fundamentalists whostormed his office.

Sure, denounce the brutality, sexism and intolerance that animate the Islamic State andconstitute a significant strain within Islam. But don’t confuse that with all Islam: Heroeslike Mukhtar, Malala, Dadkhah and Rehman also represent an important element.

Let’s not feed Islamophobic bigotry by highlighting only the horrors while neglecting thediversity of a religion with 1.6 billion adherents— including many who are champions oftolerance, modernity and human rights. The great divide is not between faiths, but onebetween intolerant zealots of any tradition and the large numbers of decent, peacefulbelievers likewise found in each tradition.

Maybe that is too complicated to convey in a TV brawl. But it’s the reality.

The New York Times10 Oct 2014

http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/readers-respond-on-islam-and-islamists/?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

Readers Respond: On Islam and Islamists

By MARIE TESSIER

As HBO’s Bill Maher set off a new round of public debate about Islam and its relationshipwith political violence recently, New York Times readers expressed their horror atIslamist acts of terror. Many decried human rights abuses by some Muslims andexpressed disappointment with the proliferation of demeaning stereotypes, in responseto two recent columns.

“The Islamic world contains multitudes: It is vast and varied,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in“The Diversity of Islam,” following his appearance on Mr. Maher’s show. “Beware ofgeneralizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religiousequivalent of racial profiling.”

In “Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Misunderstands Religion,” the writer Reza Aslanargued that “there is a real lack of sophistication on both sides of the argument when itcomes to discussing religion and violence.” Many Muslims too “glibly dismiss” extremists’claims of religious foundations, he wrote, but many critics also miss the point. “Making ablanket judgment about the world’s second largest religion — is simply bigotry.”

Readers were quick to separate religion from violent movements that claim to havereligious foundations, such as the Islamic State.

“Ninety-nine percent of Muslims may be peace-loving people,” the Wifely Person wrotefrom St. Paul. “But the 1 percent are scaring the pants off the rest of us, which is whythey’re called terrorists.”

Mr. Maher argued in the HBO broadcast that Islam generally is like the “Mafia” fortolerating human rights abuses such as death sentences for apostates. Many Timesreaders shared his view that Islam at-large should be held accountable. One challengedMr. Kristof’s characterization of Indonesia as a place where “only 16 percent of Muslimsfavor” such a death sentence.

“There surely is something out of kilter about regarding as moderate, a culture whereone in six Muslims favors killing one of their own for expressing an opinion,” John Weiserof Atlanta wrote. “We liberals go too far in trying to respect religious and cultural beliefsystems.”

Mr. Aslan faults many Muslims for dismissing repressive Islamic movements by assertingthat they are not Islamic. “Members of the Islamic State are Muslims for the simple factthat they declare themselves to be so,” Mr. Aslan wrote. “Dismissing their profession ofbelief prevents us from dealing honestly with the inherent problems. …”

Some readers addressed the matter as a state issue. “Member countries of theorganization of Islamic cooperation have some of the worst human rights records in theworld,” Chazak wrote from Rockville, Md. “Virtually all of them defend their policies inthe name of Islam.”

Others offered specifics about militants’ acts and said Muslims generally should respondmore forcefully. “They’re killing people. They’re beheading journalists, blowing upskyscrapers, all in the name of Islam,” Tom J. in Berwyn wrote.

But then Tom J. entered territory that was more disputed. “I haven’t seen yet aworldwide Islamic spokesperson denounce this, and if they have, they need to do it alittle louder,” Tom J. continued. “These extremists need to be officially cast from thereligion, to be excommunicated.”

Many readers challenged the view, commonly expressed in The Times comments acrossa range of news and opinion articles, that moderate Islam has failed to condemn theIslamic State militant group, or other Islamist violence. In fact, Muslim condemnation ofIslamists has been widespread, as recently reported in The Times, and elsewhere.

Some readers were offended by those who overlook or fail to notice anti-Islamistresponses, including military action, by Muslims.

“What are the Muslims doing against ISIS? Who is exactly fighting them on the grounddaily — the Kurdish pesh merga and Iraqi Army, both Muslim dominated military units,”

Tarek al-Nahdi in Toronto wrote. “As a Muslim reading the comments section, I wasextremely disheartened to read this level of bigotry from my fellow liberals.”

Some readers shared Mr. Aslan’s perspective that religious movements can be criticizedwithout demeaning sincere adherents of one of the world’s largest religions. “Making ablanket statement about the deplorable edicts of a religion is different from making oneabout all the adherents of said religion,” Nathan wrote from Austin.

Others echoed actor Ben Affleck’s condemnation of Maher’s remarks as “gross” and“racist,” a view that Mr. Kristof said he shares.

“It offends me to hear people talk about ‘Muslims do this,’ and ‘Muslims do that,’” Rachelin NJ/NY wrote. “That isn’t because I’m oversensitive, it’s because I know so manyexceptions to it that I can view it for what it is: bigotry.”

Demarcating the difference between demeaning stereotypes and reasoned criticism isnot difficult, some said, and is the start of a more meaningful conversation.

“Acknowledge the damage those fringe beliefs cause, but acknowledge, too, that theyare an outgrowth of mainstream beliefs,” Elizabeth wrote from Seoul. “Celebrating thegood any religion can do is not enough.”

The Atlantic9 Oct 2014

Bill Maher's Dangerous Critique of Islam

There's a constructive way for liberals to oppose illiberalism, and then there'sthe approach the comedian took.

PETER BEINART

Bill Maher, meet Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Last Friday, the cranky comedian, aided by atheist author Sam Harris, enraged actor BenAffleck by calling Islam, in Harris’s words, “the mother lode of bad ideas.” Then onMonday, Maher condemned liberals for being so afraid of being called Islamophobes thatthey won’t denounce brutality committed in Islam’s name. “We’re liberals!” Maherdeclared about himself and Harris. “We’re liberals … we’re trying to stand up for theprinciples of liberalism! And so, y’know, I think we’re just saying we need to identifyilliberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [agroup that] people perceive as a minority.”

Schlesinger would have been able to relate. In his 1949 manifesto, The Vital Center, theHarvard historian and future Kennedy administration aide attacked what he called“doughface” liberals. Borrowing a term for pre-Civil War northerners who had refused todenounce slavery, Schlesinger deployed it against liberals who refused to denounceSoviet communism. “The infiltration of contemporary progressivism by Communism,” hewrote, “has led to the same self-flagellation [that prevented doughfaces from denouncingslavery], the same refusal to take precautions against tyranny.”

Schlesinger’s point then, and Maher’s now, is that the enemies of liberals do not resideonly on the right. In the 1930s and 1940s, some liberals grew so focused on thestruggles against fascism and racism—struggles in which communists proved staunchallies—that they refused to acknowledge Joseph Stalin’s crimes. Today, some liberals areso focused on the struggle against American militarism and Islamophobia that they can’tmuster much outrage against ISIS. According to Schlesinger, occupying the Vital Centermeans opposing totalitarianism wherever you find it, regardless of whether it claims themantle of progressivism, as the Soviet Union did during his time, or anti-imperialism, asjihadists do now.

So far, so good. Where Maher goes wrong is in forgetting two other lessons of the liberalanti-totalitarian tradition. The first is to be precise about what you’re opposing. Thesecond, to not get so carried away with your own virtue that you end up justifyingterrible crimes.

Let’s start with the point about precision. At their best, the liberals of the early Cold Wartrained their fire on Stalin, a particular ruler in a particular country at a particularmoment in time. When they began making sweeping generalizations about communismper se—forgetting that communist regimes and movements varied depending on theirtime and place—they got in trouble. In the 1940s and 1950s, the myth of a monolithiccommunist movement blinded some liberals to the fact that European socialists andcommunists—many of whom had their own national loyalties—could prove effective alliesagainst Soviet power. “A recalcitrant Communist Yugoslavia,” in George Kennan’s words,“proved more resistant to Soviet Communist pressures than any non-Communist regimewould have been likely to do.”

Even more tragically, in the 1960s, some Cold War liberals could not distinguish betweenthe communism of Joseph Stalin and the communism of Ho Chi Minh. By seeing Ho onlyas a communist, they overlooked the fact that many Vietnamese saw him primarily as ananti-colonialist. And by pretending that the ideological distinctions between North andSouth Vietnam resembled the ideological distinctions between East and West Germany,pro-war liberals ignored the reality that in Indochina, America’s allies were no moredemocratic than its communist foes.

“The tragedy of Vietnam,” wrote Schlesinger in 1967, “is the tragedy of the catastrophicoverextension and misapplication of valid principles.” And the engine of thatoverextension and misapplication was ignorance. Most pro-war liberals simply didn’tknow enough about Vietnam to realize that their anti-communism was leading themastray. As Graham Greene wrote of Alden Pyle, the idealistic CIA agent in his novel, TheQuiet American, “He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and hisignorance.”

Maher is similarly armored today. It’s one thing to denounce the Saudi monarchy for itsfanatical illiberalism. Like Stalin’s dictatorship, it’s a particular regime in a particularplace. But to imply that Islamism—and by extension organizations such as Tunisia’sEnnahda Party or Turkey’s AKP, both of which have won democratic elections—are justmilder versions of ISIS is dangerously sloppy. As Kennan insisted again and again,national circumstances often play a larger role in determining how cultures and politicalsystems function than do transnational beliefs.

That’s especially true when the ideology isn’t even Islamism but Islam.Maher wants Americans to denounce Islam because while “all religions are stupid, Islam

just happens to be the one right now, in this century, that’s most dangerous andviolent.” That’s a wild overgeneralization. “Islam” is not violent or peaceful, dangerous orbenign. Like every great religion, it includes a vast array of diverse and oftencontradictory teachings, which different people interpret in different ways in differentplaces and times. Yes, in some Muslim-majority countries, women and religiousminorities are treated brutally. But that has far more to do with their particular nationalcircumstances than with the fact that Muslims populate them. After all, other Muslim-majority countries have elected female heads of state. To lump together Indonesia andYemen because both countries are mostly Muslim makes about as much sense aslumping together Ireland and the Dominican Republic because both countries are mostlyCatholic.

The second lesson from the Cold War is that while anti-totalitarianism is important, it canbecome an excuse for America’s own misdeeds. In 1954, eager to prove their anti-communist bona fides in the face of McCarthyite attacks, liberal stalwarts HubertHumphrey, Paul Douglas, and John F. Kennedy introduced legislation banning theAmerican Communist Party—thus using America’s crusade against Soviet repression tomassively repress free speech here at home. America’s war in Vietnam, justified as astruggle for freedom and human rights, took close to a million lives.

When Affleck told Maher that America has “killed more Muslims than they’ve killed us byan awful lot … and somehow we’re exempt from these things because they’re not really areflection of what we believe in. We did it by accident,” he was making a crucial point. Asthe great liberal Cold War theologian Reinhold Niebuhr stressed, nations, like individuals,are often unable to acknowledge the degree to which selfish interest infects theirsupposed pursuit of high principle. Restraining the evil that lurks within our own culturerequires facing our own history of, and ongoing capacity for, terrible crimes. It requirestrying to see largely Christian America the way we are seen by the Muslims whose citieswe have bombed. By contrast, declaring that the essential barbarism in today’s world lieselsewhere—not even just in a foreign regime or movement but in an entire religion—letsus off easy.

“The pride and self-righteousness of powerful nations,” wrote Niebuhr, “are a greaterhazard to their success than the machinations of their foes.” It took the Vietnam War forSchlesinger to truly appreciate that point. Given America’s experience in the Middle Eastover the last decade, Maher has no excuse.

Click here: Fareed Zakaria: "Let's be honest . . ."

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/10/11/lets-be-honest-islam-has-a-problem-today/?iref=allsearch

The Washington Post9 Oct 2014

Let’s be honest, Islam has a problem right now

By Fareed Zakaria

When television host Bill Maher declares on his weekly show that “the Muslim world .  . .has too much in common with ISIS ” and guest Sam Harris says that Islam is “themother lode of bad ideas,” I understand why people are upset. Maher and Harris, an

author, made crude simplifications and exaggerations. And yet, they were also talkingabout something real.

I know the arguments against speaking of Islam as violent and reactionary. It has afollowing of 1.6 billion people. Places such as Indonesia and India have hundreds ofmillions of Muslims who don’t fit these caricatures. That’s why Maher and Harris areguilty of gross generalizations. But let’s be honest. Islam has a problem today. Theplaces that have trouble accommodating themselves to the modern world aredisproportionately Muslim.

In 2013, of the top 10 groups that perpetrated terrorist attacks, seven were Muslim. Ofthe top 10 countries where terrorist attacks took place, seven were Muslim-majority. ThePew Research Center rates countries on the level of restrictions that governmentsimpose on the free exercise of religion. Of the 24 most restrictive countries, 19 areMuslim-majority. Of the 21 countries that have laws against apostasy, all have Muslimmajorities.

There is a cancer of extremism within Islam today. A small minority of Muslimscelebrates violence and intolerance and harbors deeply reactionary attitudes towardwomen and minorities. While some confront these extremists, not enough do so, and theprotests are not loud enough. How many mass rallies have been held against the IslamicState (also known as ISIS) in the Arab world today?

The caveat, “Islam today,” is important. The central problem with Maher’s and Harris’sanalyses are that they take a reality — extremism in Islam — and describe it in waysthat suggest it is inherent in Islam. Maher says Islam is “the only religion that acts likethe Mafia, that will [expletive] kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong pictureor write the wrong book.” He’s right about the viciousness but wrong to link it to “Islam”— instead of “some Muslims.”

Harris prides himself on being highly analytical — with a PhD, no less. I learned ingraduate school that you can never explain a variable phenomenon with a fixed cause.So, if you are asserting that Islam isinherently violent and intolerant — “the mother lodeof bad ideas” — then, since Islam has been around for 14 centuries, we should haveseen 14 centuries of this behavior.Harris should read Zachary Karabell’s book “Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries ofMuslim, Christian and Jewish Conflict and Cooperation.” What he would discover is thatthere have been wars but also many centuries of peace. Islam has at times been at thecutting edge of modernity, but like today, it has also been the great laggard. As Karabellexplained to me, “If you exclude the last 70 years or so, in general the Islamic world wasmore tolerant of minorities than the Christian world. That’s why there were more than amillion Jews living in the Arab world until the early 1950s — nearly 200,000 in Iraqalone.”

If there were periods when the Islamic world was open, modern, tolerant and peaceful,this suggests that the problem is not in the religion’s essence and that things can changeonce more. So why is Maher making these comments? I understand that as a publicintellectual he feels the need to speak what he sees as the unvarnished truth (though his“truth” is simplified and exaggerated). But surely there is another task for publicintellectuals as well — to try to change the world for good.

Does he really think that comparing Islam to the Mafia will do this? Harris says that hewants to encourage “nominal Muslims who don’t take the faith seriously” to reform the

religion. So, the strategy to reform Islam is to tell 1.6 billion Muslims, most of whom arepious and devout, that their religion is evil and they should stop taking it seriously?

That is not how Christianity moved from its centuries-long embrace of violence,crusades, inquisitions, witch-burning and intolerance to its modern state. On thecontrary, intellectuals and theologians celebrated the elements of the religion that weretolerant, liberal and modern, and emphasized them, while giving devout Christiansreasons to take pride in their faith. A similar approach — reform coupled with respect —will work with Islam over time.

The stakes are high in this debate. You can try to make news or you can make adifference. I hope Maher starts doing the latter.Alex Atroushiatroushi@gmail.comparty@kdp.se+46707904097