Category Archives: Islam

‘Islam for Dummies’: ISIS recruits have poor grasp of faith

The Associated Press reports: An AP analysis of thousands of leaked Islamic State documents reveals most of its recruits from its earliest days came with only the most basic knowledge of Islam. A little more than 3,000 of these documents included the recruits’ knowledge of Shariah, the system that interprets into law verses from the Quran and “hadith” — the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.

According to the documents, which were acquired by the Syrian opposition site Zaman al-Wasl and shared with the AP, 70 percent of recruits were listed as having just “basic” knowledge of Shariah — the lowest possible choice. Around 24 percent were categorized as having an “intermediate” knowledge, with just 5 percent considered advanced students of Islam. Five recruits were listed as having memorized the Quran.

The findings address one of the most troubling questions about IS recruitment in the United States and Europe: Are disaffected people who understand Shariah more prone to radicalization? Or are those with little knowledge of Islam more susceptible to the group’s radical ideas that promote violence?

The documents suggest the latter. The group preys on this religious ignorance, allowing extremists to impose a brand of Islam constructed to suit its goal of maximum territorial expansion and carnage as soon as recruits come under its sway. [Continue reading…]

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Pope Francis: Valuing money more than people ‘is a basic terrorism against all humanity’

Reuters reports: Pope Francis has said it was wrong to identify Islam with violence and that social injustice and idolatry of money were among the prime causes of terrorism.

“I think it is not right to identity Islam with violence,” he told reporters aboard the plane taking him back to Rome after a five-day trip to Poland. “This is not right and this is not true.”

The pope was responding to a question about the killing on 26 July of an 85-year-old Roman Catholic priest during a church service in western France. The attackers forced the priest to his knees and slit his throat. The killing was claimed by Islamic State.

“I think that in nearly all religions there is a always a small fundamentalist group,” he said, adding “We have them,” referring to Catholicism.

“I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I look at the papers I see violence here in Italy – someone killing his girlfriend, someone killing his mother-in-law. These are baptised Catholics,” he said.

“If I speak of Islamic violence, I have to speak of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent,” he said.

He said there were various causes of terrorism.

“I know it dangerous to say this but terrorism grows when there is no other option and when money is made a god and it, instead of the person, is put at the centre of the world economy,” he said.

“That is the first form of terrorism. That is a basic terrorism against all humanity. Let’s talk about that,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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A lesson for Newt Gingrich: What Shariah is (and isn’t)

Noah Feldman writes: Fortunately, no one is going to follow Newt Gingrich’s unconstitutional and un-American plan for an inquisition to “test every person here who is of a Muslim background” and deport the ones who “believe in Shariah.” Even Mr. Gingrich himself, a day after suggesting this policy in the wake of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, conceded that such a plan was impossible. But his proposal is a reminder of a persistent and inexcusable misunderstanding of what Shariah is, both in theory and in practice.

Put simply, for believing Muslims, Shariah is the ideal realization of divine justice — a higher law reflecting God’s will.

Muslims have a wide range of different beliefs about what Shariah requires in practice. And all agree that humans are imperfect interpreters of God’s will. But to ask a faithful Muslim if he or she “believes in” Shariah is essentially to ask if he or she accepts God’s word. In effect, Mr. Gingrich was proposing to deport all Muslims who consider themselves religious believers.

Start with a crucial distinction. Shariah doesn’t simply or exactly mean Islamic law. Properly speaking, Shariah refers to God’s blueprint for human life. It is divine and unchanging, reflecting God’s unity and perfection. It can be found in God’s revealed word in the Quran and in the divinely guided actions of the Prophet Muhammad.

In contrast, another Arabic word, “fiqh,” refers to the interpretation and application of Shariah in the real world. Fiqh is Islamic law as practiced by people. Because it’s a product of human reasoning used to understand God’s word, Islamic law is subject to debate and imperfection. [Continue reading…]

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A Saudi morals enforcer called for a more liberal Islam. Then the death threats began

The New York Times reports: For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — known abroad as the religious police — serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices.

Some of that resembled ordinary police work: busting drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that bans alcohol. But the men of “the Commission,” as Saudis call it, spent most of their time maintaining the puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but from most of the Muslim world.

A key offense was ikhtilat, or unauthorized mixing between men and women. The kingdom’s clerics warn that it could lead to fornication, adultery, broken homes, children born of unmarried couples and full-blown societal collapse.

For years, Mr. Ghamdi stuck with the program and was eventually put in charge of the Commission for the region of Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. Then he had a reckoning and began to question the rules. So he turned to the Quran and the stories of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, considered the exemplars of Islamic conduct. What he found was striking and life altering: There had been plenty of mixing among the first generation of Muslims, and no one had seemed to mind.

So he spoke out. In articles and television appearances, he argued that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was in fact Arabian cultural practices that had been mixed up with their faith.

There was no need to close shops for prayer, he said, nor to bar women from driving, as Saudi Arabia does. At the time of the Prophet, women rode around on camels, which he said was far more provocative than veiled women piloting S.U.V.s.

He even said that while women should conceal their bodies, they needed to cover their faces only if they chose to do so. And to demonstrate the depth of his own conviction, Mr. Ghamdi went on television with his wife, Jawahir, who smiled to the camera, her face bare and adorned with a dusting of makeup.

It was like a bomb inside the kingdom’s religious establishment, threatening the social order that granted prominence to the sheikhs and made them the arbiters of right and wrong in all aspects of life. He threatened their control.

Mr. Ghamdi’s colleagues at work refused to speak to him. Angry calls poured into his cellphone and anonymous death threats hit him on Twitter. Prominent sheikhs took to the airwaves to denounce him as an ignorant upstart who should be punished, tried — and even tortured. [Continue reading…]

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Will young reformers of Islam please stand up?

Tania Rashid writes: I recently completed a short documentary about Islamophobia in America’s heartland, Texas. I got to know members of a gun-toting anti-Muslim group called the Bureau on American-Islamic Relations, or B.A.I.R.

I recall standing in the middle of them preparing for an “Arab rising.” Each practice shot they let out had me thinking that I could be an apparent target. One of them yelled “don’t mess with white people,” and proceeded to show me how he would complete a mass killing if he saw a group of Muslims.

 

I thought of my father, the most secular Muslim I know, who was wrongly accused of being a terrorist and interrogated for hours before a flight to Arizona. Could these men shoot me or other innocent people in my family?

But as much as I was repulsed by the group and their violent response to Muslims, it made me wonder: Were they all that wrong to feel so scared? [Continue reading…]

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Muhammad Ali taught me to be proud of my skin and Muslim faith

Omar Musa writes: Once, when I was a child growing up in Australia, I got teased by another kid because I had brown skin. The kid told me my skin was the same colour as shit. I went home in tears and, for the only time in my life, I said to my parents that I wished I wasn’t brown.

My parents sat me down and told me to be proud of my skin and of being Muslim, even if other people put you down for it. I don’t know if it was connected but soon afterwards my dad began to show me tapes of a charismatic, handsome black boxer from America, a proto rapper who spat rhymes and cracked jokes, who drove a pink Cadillac, who stood up for his people and his convictions, all the while dancing on the canvas like no one before and no one to come.

And he was Muslim, like us, and proud of it! And a poet! And he had even fought in Malaysia (where my dad came from) once!

I went to the Queanbeyan library and photocopied pictures of him to stick in my school diary and on my wall. I could never be a boxer but I could have that unfuckwithable attitude.

Ali taught me to be brave, to stand up for myself, to fight for the underdog and that, even if society was against you, your conviction for what was right would be vindicated by history. That there was something radical in being completely and utterly yourself. That my brown skin was not the colour of shit – it shone brighter than gold. He taught me to be proud. [Continue reading…]

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Shadi Hamid on the past and future of political Islam

William Armstrong interviews Shadi Hamid and discusses his new book, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World:

This new book follows your previous book, published in 2014, “Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East.” Back then, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, you described how Islamist participation in democracy was inevitable and should be facilitated. Obviously the landscape has changed a lot since then. What big shifts did you want to address in the new book?

I really wanted to address the question of how much religion matters. How much of this has to do with “Islam” and how much of it has to do with political or economic factors. That’s the question that I’ve gotten so much from American observers. This book is an attempt to situate the role of religion, at a time when we’re trying to understand the rise of ISIS and the region’s descent into violence and civil war.

I make an argument that I’m slightly uncomfortable with. I realize that some people will misinterpret it and some will abuse it for purposes that I’m against. I argue that Islam is in fact exceptional. Islam is fundamentally different than other major religions in important ways, primarily in how it relates to law, politics and governance. What that means in practice is that Islam – historically but also today – plays an outsize role in public life, and also that it appears to be uniquely resistant to secularization. There have been many attempts to neutralize or privatize Islam, or make it less relevant in everyday life. But those attempts have failed. This forces us to reckon with the possibility that we aren’t all the same. We don’t all necessarily want the same things.

I’m trying to challenge the liberal determinism that is implicit in so many of our conversations about Islam: That all peoples cultures and societies follow a linear trajectory toward a reformation, then an enlightenment, then secularization, then the “end of history” of liberal democracy. As an American, it is so much part of our culture to just assume that these things are inevitable. But what if they’re not? It’s hard for people to take on the prospect that in Muslim-majority populations there is a general unwillingness to push religion aside. That has major implications for how we understand not just the Middle East but also the future of Muslims in the West.

There’s a danger that this idea of “exceptionalism” plays into the hands of both the most fundamentalist Islamists and the worst Islamophobes.

Exactly. But I have to be faithful to my findings. What I’m saying is that the “difference” of Islam isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Whenever we hear that Islam is different and it can’t be extracted from politics, we assume it means that Islam is backwards, bad or problematic. But we have to move beyond this presumption that religion always plays a negative role in politics and that the solution is always to move to secularism. That’s why I self-consciously chose the word “exceptionalism.” For me that is a word that should be value-neutral. Exceptionalism can be good and it can be bad. We also talk about American exceptionalism – which can be seen in a negative or positive light. So I hope people will resist the temptation to just say “Islam is different and that is definitely a bad thing.” I argue that difference isn’t necessarily a bad thing. [Continue reading…]

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Unholy alliance: Muslim countries join forces with America’s religious right

Brian Whitaker writes: The United Nations will hold a three-day meeting in New York next month in a move towards ending the worldwide Aids epidemic by 2030. But preparations for the meeting were thrown into disarray last week when Egypt blocked 11 gay and transgender advocacy groups from attending.

In a letter to the UN, Egypt gave no reason for objecting to the groups’ participation but said it was acting on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which represents 57 predominantly Muslim countries.

The UN responded by emphasising the need for “nongovernmental organisations working on the ground” to contribute to the discussion, and to hear “the voices of people living with HIV and people most affected by the epidemic, including women and girls, sex workers, people who use drugs, gay men and other men who have sex with men and transgender people”.

Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the UN, also complained about the blocking action by Egypt and the OIC. “Given that transgender people are 49 times more likely to be living with HIV than the general population, their exclusion from the high-level meeting will only impede global progress in combating the HIV/Aids pandemic,” she said.

It is the second time in less than two months that something of this kind has happened at the UN. In March, Saudi Arabia – where the OIC has its headquarters – objected to a report from Juan Méndez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, who had been asked to consider how the prohibition of torture in international law could be applied “to the unique experiences of women, girls, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons”. [Continue reading…]

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With Iran-backed conversions, Shiites gain ground in Africa

The Wall Street Journal reports: Walking from classroom to classroom at the Ahl ul Bayt Linguistic Center, which teaches Arabic and Islam, director Ahmed Tijani pointed at his students, a mixture of teens and young adults.

“This one is Shiite, these ones are also Shiite,” he said. “And these ones, they are still Sunni.”

Mr. Tijani, whose office in the Cameroonian capital is decorated with an Iranian flag and a poster of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was also once a Sunni Muslim. Then he made the life-changing choice of enrolling at a similar Iranian-funded academy in the coastal city of Douala.

Since converting to Shiite Islam a decade ago, the 39-year-old educator has risen through the ranks, establishing this school in Yaoundé and even visiting Iran on a government-sponsored trip in 2012.

“There is a big difference between Shiite Islam and Sunni Islam,” he said. “Only the Shiites are spreading the truth.”

Such sectarian talk used to be exceedingly rare in much of Africa. So were actual Shiites. The few who could be found in Africa belonged to immigrant communities from Lebanon or the Indian subcontinent. Now, parts of the continent’s Sunni Muslim heartland are living through the biggest wave of Sunni-to-Shiite conversions since many Sunni tribes of southern Iraq adopted Shiism in the 19th century.

Hard figures are difficult to come by. But in Nigeria alone, Africa’s most populous nation, some 12% of its 90-million-strong Muslim population have identified themselves as Shiite in a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, up from virtually zero in 1980. The number is 21% for the Muslims of Chad, 20% for Tanzania, and 8% for Ghana, according to the survey.

That demographic change is occurring just as the Muslim world becomes increasingly polarized along sectarian lines, with Saudi Arabia, a self-proclaimed standard-bearer of the Sunni cause, engaged in proxy struggles from Yemen to Syria to Bahrain against a rival axis led by Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

“The core of the Saudi-Iranian confrontation over power and territory is in the Middle East. But West African Shiites are of symbolic value to Iran, for it to be able to say that its vision of Islam is expanding rather than shrinking. They give Iran more of a claim that they’re able to speak for Muslims in the whole world,” said Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of a book on the Shiite revival. [Continue reading…]

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Muslim leaders wage theological battle, stoking ISIS’ anger

The New York Times reports: As the military and political battle against the Islamic State escalates, Muslim imams and scholars in the West are fighting on another front — through theology.

Imam Suhaib Webb, a Muslim leader in Washington, has held live monthly video chats to refute the religious claims of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. In a dig at the extremists, he broadcast from ice cream parlors and called his talks “ISIS and ice cream.”

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, an American Muslim scholar based in Berkeley, Calif., has pleaded with Muslims not to be deceived by the “stupid young boys” of the Islamic State. Millions have watched excerpts from his sermon titled “The Crisis of ISIS,” in which he wept as he asked God not to blame other Muslims “for what these fools amongst us do.”

It is a religious rumble that barely makes headlines in the secular West since it is carried out at mosques and Islamic conferences and over social media.

The Islamic State, however, has taken notice.

The group recently threatened the lives of 11 Muslim imams and scholars in the West, calling them “apostates” who should be killed. The recent issue of the Islamic State’s online propaganda magazine, Dabiq, called them “obligatory targets,” and it said that supporters should use any weapons on hand to “make an example of them.”

The danger is real enough that the F.B.I. has contacted some of those named in the Islamic State’s magazine “to assist them in taking proper steps to ensure their safety,” said Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the F.B.I.’s field office in Washington. [Continue reading…]

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The time has come for a ‘Sexual Spring’ in the Arab world

Kacem El Ghazzali writes: When we say that nowadays to call for sexual freedom in Arab and Muslim societies is more dangerous than the demand to topple monarchies or dictatorial regimes, we are not playing with metaphor or attempting to gain sympathy. We are stating a bitter and painful fact of the reality in which we are living.

In Arab and Muslim milieus, sex is considered a means and not an end, hedged by many prickly restrictions that make it an objectionable matter and synonymous with sin. Its function within marriage is confined to procreation and nothing else, and all sexual activity outside the institution of marriage is banned legally and rejected socially. Innocent children born out of wedlock are socially rejected and considered foundlings.

This situation cannot be said to be characteristic of Arab societies only, but we experience these miseries in far darker and more intense ways than in other countries. This is especially so because of the dominance of machismo, which considers a man’s sexual adventures as heroics worthy of pride, while a woman who dares to give in to her sexual desires is destined to be killed — or at best beaten and expelled from home — because she has brought dishonor upon her family. [Continue reading…]

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A few miles from San Bernardino, a Muslim prom queen reigns

The New York Times reports: In the days after the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., when pictures of the hijab-wearing suspect filled television screens and newspapers, Zarifeh Shalabi’s mother and aunts stayed at home.

With their home just a few miles from the scene of the attack that left 14 dead, they worried about an anti-Muslim backlash. When they went shopping, Zarifeh, 17, said, other mothers pulled their children away when they saw the women wearing head scarves.

“We were more afraid that someone was going to hurt us,” Zarifeh said.

But this month, Zarifeh received the ultimate symbol of teenage acceptance: She was crowned prom queen after her non-Muslim friends campaigned for her by wearing hijabs in solidarity.

“We saw it as a chance to do something good, to represent something good,” said a friend, Sarahi Sanchez, who like Zarifeh is one of a few dozen peer mentors at Summit High School. “This was a way to prove we don’t have problems with bullying or racism.”

Zarifeh said her win “proved that not all Muslims are something to worry about.” [Continue reading…]

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Islam is reshaping Europe

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Robert Kaplan writes: Orientalism, through which one culture appropriated and dominated another, is slowly evaporating in a world of cosmopolitan interactions and comparative studies, as [Edward] Said intuited it might. Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.

Although the idea of an end to history — with all its ethnic and territorial disputes — turns out to have been a fantasy, this realization is no excuse for a retreat into nationalism. The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.

“The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. [Continue reading…]

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Islam’s forgotten bohemians

Nile Green writes: Every year, thousands of festivals around the tombs of Sufi saints in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh demonstrate the vitality of Sufi poetry. Dotted throughout town and countryside, the shrines where these saints are buried still form the focus for the spiritual lives of tens of millions of Muslims. Their doors and rituals are open to people of any religious background; as a result, Sufi shrines in India still play an important role in the religious life of many Hindus and Sikhs. The work of the great Baba Farid, a 13th-century Punjab Sufi poet, also exemplifies this long history of religious co-existence, as his poems form the oldest parts of the Sikh scriptures.

Farid’s poems are still recited in Sikh temples around the world. In one of the verses from his Adi Granth (the sacred scripture or ‘First Book’ of Sikhism), Farid declares in rustic and homely Punjabi:

Ap li-ay lar la-ay dar darves say.

Translation: Those tied to Truth’s robe are true tramps on the doorstep.

The seeker after Truth must become a wandering beggar. The word Farid uses is darves, or ‘dervish’ – literally, a vagrant who goes from door to door. Read again that alliterative line of Punjabi: Ap li-ay lar la-ay dar darves say. It has the simple rhythm of repetition, the call of love’s beggar traipsing from house to house.

What the German philosopher Max Weber described as the disenchantment of the world, modernity’s discrediting of the supernatural and magical, has not been good for these beggars, these mystical troubadours, especially among the Muslim middle classes. Their pilgrimage places, however, retain mass appeal, especially among the large populations of poor and uneducated people. That is why fundamentalists, whether the Pakistani Taliban, the Saudi government or ISIS, have destroyed so many Sufi shrines and places of pilgrimage. The poetry sung at those places celebrates and advances an Islam that rejects political power, an Islam incompatible with the ambitions of religious fundamentalism. It is an Islam antithetical to political Islam, which sees political power as the foundation of religion. Although not all forms of Sufi Islam are non-political, the Sufism of the dervishes renounced political power as the most significant impediment on the long road to their divine beloved. It is a spirit of Islam still very much alive. [Continue reading…]

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Why ISIS hates the Sufis and blows up their shrines

Nile Green writes:

The soul that denies true love as its motto
Were better unborn; its existence is dishonour.
So be drunk with love, for love is all there is.
Unless you deal with love, the way to God is closed.

These words were among the hundreds of poems written by Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi apostle of love. Such was Rumi’s status in previous centuries that his epic Masnavi was called ‘the Quran in Persian’. For those who have read his verse, it’s hard to understand how anyone could despise the beauty of Sufi Islam. Considering that the Sufis always presented themselves as the loyal heirs of the Prophet Mohammad, it’s even harder to understand why Muslims should despise them. And yet over the past century, wave after wave of Muslim reform and renewal movements have rejected almost every aspect of Sufi Islam. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – whose franchises have sentenced Sufis to death in Syria and bulldozed their shrines in Libya – is only the latest of these anti-Sufis.

Why?

Here are a few reasons. [Continue reading…]

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How politics has poisoned Islam

Mustafa Akyol writes: We Muslims like to believe that ours is “a religion of peace,” but today Islam looks more like a religion of conflict and bloodshed. From the civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen to internal tensions in Lebanon and Bahrain, to the dangerous rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East is plagued by intra-Muslim strife that seems to go back to the ancient Sunni-Shiite rivalry.

Religion is not actually at the heart of these conflicts — invariably, politics is to blame. But the misuse of Islam and its history makes these political conflicts much worse as parties, governments and militias claim that they are fighting not over power or territory but on behalf of God. And when enemies are viewed as heretics rather than just opponents, peace becomes much harder to achieve.

This conflation of religion and politics poisons Islam itself, too, by overshadowing all the religion’s theological and moral teachings. The Quran’s emphasis on humility and compassion is sidelined by the arrogance and aggressiveness of conflicting groups. [Continue reading…]

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