Note: How would YOU like to have to start negotiations with these gentlemen? Spare a kind thought for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who will have to deal with these lunatics.
Following are excerpts from the PA Legislative Council meeting granting Hamas a vote of confidence, aired on Al-Jazeera TV on March 28, 2006:
Parliament Speaker Aziz Dweik: The tenth Palestinian government, headed by the Palestinian prime minister, brother Ismai'l Haniya, has gained the absolute majority of the votes of the Legislative Council members.
[...]
Hamas MP: Allah Akbar, Allah be praised.
Other MPs: Allah Akbar, Allah be praised.
MP: Allah is our goal.
Other MPs: Allah is our goal.
MP: The Koran is our constitution.
Other MPs: The Koran is our constitution.
MP: The Prophet Muhammad is our model.
Other MPs: The Prophet Muhammad is our model.
MP: Jihad is our path.
Other MPs: Jihad is our path.
MP: Death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.
Other MPs: Death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.
MP: Allah Akbar, Allah be praised.
Other MPs: Allah Akbar, Allah be praised.
Comment: Every imam in Australia would agree with every word of this event. How can they be any good for Australian Muslims?
Is anyone awake in Canberra.
Friday, March 31, 2006
More Cynical Lies From Failure Rumsfeld.
Note: Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence peddles the 'moderate' muslims line to advance his failed wars. Sadly the vast mass of muslims in the world are either illiterate or dismally educated. They remain in the grip, mentally and spiritually, of their totalitarian imams.
The 'War Against Terrorism' is a fraud. The real war is to control vital resources that are within the territories of muslim countries. All wars about resources and power politics. No war has ever been fought for reasons other than power and control.
This item is from Jihad Watch...a very excellent site.
Rumsfeld: "The strategy must do a great deal more to reduce the lure of the extremist ideology by standing with those moderate Muslims advocating peaceful change, freedom and tolerance"
Sure, Rummy, count me in. Now where exactly do I find those moderate Muslims who are advocating peaceful change, freedom and tolerance? Ibrahim Hooper? Well, no, as it seems that CAIR no longer contests the assertion that it is an “organization founded by Hamas supporters which seeks to overthrow Constitutional government in the United States and replace it with an Islamist theocracy using our own Constitution as protection.” Hamid Karzai? Uh, no, there's that little matter of the death penalty for apostasy that is still allowed for by the Sharia provision of the Afghan Constitution, despite the freeing of Abdul Rahman. Ayatollah Sistani? Well, despite Rich Lowry's cheerleading, he still considers unbelievers to be unclean on par with urine and feces.
Rummy, can you give me a hint as to where I might find some real moderates?
Here, I'll help you by defining the term. A moderate Muslim, as far as I'm concerned, would be one who rejects jihad violence against non-Muslims; rejects the idea that Sharia law should be instituted in the Muslim and non-Muslim world; and teaches the idea that non-Muslims and Muslims should live together indefinitely as equals. A moderate Muslim would also teach that women should enjoy full equality of rights with men. An honest and forthright Muslim reformer will acknowledge that the Islamic mainstream has historically held just the opposite of these principles, and will reject the elements of the Qur'an and Sunnah that give rise to these imperatives to violence and subjugation.
"Rumsfeld: Terrorists Our Most Brutal Enemy," from AP, with thanks to Ray:
...``The enemy we face may be the most brutal in our history,'' Rumsfeld said. ``They currently lack only the means - not the desire - to kill, murder millions of innocent people with weapons vastly more powerful than boarding passes and box cutters,'' he added, referring to the terrorists who hijacked the airliners on Sept. 11....
Rumsfeld said progress is being made in the global war on terror, particularly in making it more difficult for the terrorist groups to recruit, train, raise money, establish sanctuaries and acquire weapons. But he stressed that more needs to be done.
``The strategy must do a great deal more to reduce the lure of the extremist ideology by standing with those moderate Muslims advocating peaceful change, freedom and tolerance,'' he said.
Comment: This item is an example of why we in Australia need to use our national resources to help the local muslim communities break away from the totalitarian imams in australia and develop a local version of Islam. Unless the local muslims free themselves from the ever growing disaster of America vs. Islam they will end up being 'collateral damage'.
The 'War Against Terrorism' is a fraud. The real war is to control vital resources that are within the territories of muslim countries. All wars about resources and power politics. No war has ever been fought for reasons other than power and control.
This item is from Jihad Watch...a very excellent site.
Rumsfeld: "The strategy must do a great deal more to reduce the lure of the extremist ideology by standing with those moderate Muslims advocating peaceful change, freedom and tolerance"
Sure, Rummy, count me in. Now where exactly do I find those moderate Muslims who are advocating peaceful change, freedom and tolerance? Ibrahim Hooper? Well, no, as it seems that CAIR no longer contests the assertion that it is an “organization founded by Hamas supporters which seeks to overthrow Constitutional government in the United States and replace it with an Islamist theocracy using our own Constitution as protection.” Hamid Karzai? Uh, no, there's that little matter of the death penalty for apostasy that is still allowed for by the Sharia provision of the Afghan Constitution, despite the freeing of Abdul Rahman. Ayatollah Sistani? Well, despite Rich Lowry's cheerleading, he still considers unbelievers to be unclean on par with urine and feces.
Rummy, can you give me a hint as to where I might find some real moderates?
Here, I'll help you by defining the term. A moderate Muslim, as far as I'm concerned, would be one who rejects jihad violence against non-Muslims; rejects the idea that Sharia law should be instituted in the Muslim and non-Muslim world; and teaches the idea that non-Muslims and Muslims should live together indefinitely as equals. A moderate Muslim would also teach that women should enjoy full equality of rights with men. An honest and forthright Muslim reformer will acknowledge that the Islamic mainstream has historically held just the opposite of these principles, and will reject the elements of the Qur'an and Sunnah that give rise to these imperatives to violence and subjugation.
"Rumsfeld: Terrorists Our Most Brutal Enemy," from AP, with thanks to Ray:
...``The enemy we face may be the most brutal in our history,'' Rumsfeld said. ``They currently lack only the means - not the desire - to kill, murder millions of innocent people with weapons vastly more powerful than boarding passes and box cutters,'' he added, referring to the terrorists who hijacked the airliners on Sept. 11....
Rumsfeld said progress is being made in the global war on terror, particularly in making it more difficult for the terrorist groups to recruit, train, raise money, establish sanctuaries and acquire weapons. But he stressed that more needs to be done.
``The strategy must do a great deal more to reduce the lure of the extremist ideology by standing with those moderate Muslims advocating peaceful change, freedom and tolerance,'' he said.
Comment: This item is an example of why we in Australia need to use our national resources to help the local muslim communities break away from the totalitarian imams in australia and develop a local version of Islam. Unless the local muslims free themselves from the ever growing disaster of America vs. Islam they will end up being 'collateral damage'.
'Secret Muslim War in Sydney' ?
Note: Is a 'secret war' taking place within the Sydney muslim community?
Commissioner Moroney says that the Police have good sources of intelligence. One wonders whether this is truth or spin.
Shootings not random: Moroney
March 31, 2006 - 8:22AM
Habib and son in police clash
NSW police are investigating links between a spate of gun crimes in western Sydney, including two drive-by shootings aimed at young families, Commissioner Ken Moroney says.
Three adults and three children escaped uninjured when a number of shots were fired at their house in Regents Park, south-west Sydney, just after 10pm (AEDT) last night.
Two of the bullets shattered a bedroom window but no one was hurt, police said.
It was the second drive-by shooting in the area involving a family in less than 24 hours.
A couple and their two children narrowly escaped injury when several shots were fired at their home in Guildford just before 1am (AEDT) yesterday morning.
Adding to the recent spate of gun crimes, a gang of armed robbers stormed a Sydney pub and fired a shot into its ceiling last night. In another incident robbers stole three guns while holding up an armoured bank van.
On Wednesday, professional boxer Bassam Chami and his friend Ibrahim Assad were shot dead on a street in Granville in the 22nd shooting incident in the city this year.
Mr Moroney today admitted gun crimes were on the rise.
"Certainly there is a problem with violence, that has been demonstrated by the activities of certain individuals over the last couple of months," he told ABC Radio.
"The efforts of police ... are very much focused on identifying those responsible and their network of associates."
Police were investigating possible links between the incidents, particularly the drive-by shootings.
"I don't believe these are just random 'let's pick at a house here and a house there'. I believe that there is some association between the occupants of some of these houses and some other activities," Mr Moroney said.
"We will be looking at any patterns of similarity where there may be some connection between a shooting at one location and a shooting at another."
Mr Moroney said police were focusing their efforts on the western Sydney area and were determined to restore order.
"The issue of policing numbers across the whole of the state is always an important issue," he said.
"Let me assure you that the police do have a strong intelligence networks ... (and) we are going to continue our efforts for as long it takes to restore order."
It was important for the public to be patients and appreciate that police need to heed the demands of the judicial system.
"It's one thing for us to know who we believe is responsible for any or all of these crimes but courts only accept evidence, they don't accept hearsay," he said.
Asked about the robbery in Sydney this morning that put three more guns in the hands of criminals, Mr Moroney said: "That obviously causes me concern as to the fact that there are three more firearms out there in the broader community".
Comment: Readers should pay close attention to this situation. Do not be too trusting of the Police to tell the truth about this matter. Neither they nor the government want to solve any of these problems...covering up is more their style, in the hope that they go away.
A forlorn hope.
Commissioner Moroney says that the Police have good sources of intelligence. One wonders whether this is truth or spin.
Shootings not random: Moroney
March 31, 2006 - 8:22AM
Habib and son in police clash
NSW police are investigating links between a spate of gun crimes in western Sydney, including two drive-by shootings aimed at young families, Commissioner Ken Moroney says.
Three adults and three children escaped uninjured when a number of shots were fired at their house in Regents Park, south-west Sydney, just after 10pm (AEDT) last night.
Two of the bullets shattered a bedroom window but no one was hurt, police said.
It was the second drive-by shooting in the area involving a family in less than 24 hours.
A couple and their two children narrowly escaped injury when several shots were fired at their home in Guildford just before 1am (AEDT) yesterday morning.
Adding to the recent spate of gun crimes, a gang of armed robbers stormed a Sydney pub and fired a shot into its ceiling last night. In another incident robbers stole three guns while holding up an armoured bank van.
On Wednesday, professional boxer Bassam Chami and his friend Ibrahim Assad were shot dead on a street in Granville in the 22nd shooting incident in the city this year.
Mr Moroney today admitted gun crimes were on the rise.
"Certainly there is a problem with violence, that has been demonstrated by the activities of certain individuals over the last couple of months," he told ABC Radio.
"The efforts of police ... are very much focused on identifying those responsible and their network of associates."
Police were investigating possible links between the incidents, particularly the drive-by shootings.
"I don't believe these are just random 'let's pick at a house here and a house there'. I believe that there is some association between the occupants of some of these houses and some other activities," Mr Moroney said.
"We will be looking at any patterns of similarity where there may be some connection between a shooting at one location and a shooting at another."
Mr Moroney said police were focusing their efforts on the western Sydney area and were determined to restore order.
"The issue of policing numbers across the whole of the state is always an important issue," he said.
"Let me assure you that the police do have a strong intelligence networks ... (and) we are going to continue our efforts for as long it takes to restore order."
It was important for the public to be patients and appreciate that police need to heed the demands of the judicial system.
"It's one thing for us to know who we believe is responsible for any or all of these crimes but courts only accept evidence, they don't accept hearsay," he said.
Asked about the robbery in Sydney this morning that put three more guns in the hands of criminals, Mr Moroney said: "That obviously causes me concern as to the fact that there are three more firearms out there in the broader community".
Comment: Readers should pay close attention to this situation. Do not be too trusting of the Police to tell the truth about this matter. Neither they nor the government want to solve any of these problems...covering up is more their style, in the hope that they go away.
A forlorn hope.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Charged for Telling the Truth.
Note: The European authorities are caught in a bind. They have invented a world of perfect people who all have lovely liberal values and when it is pointed out to them that there are big enemies right in the middle of Europe of this 'lovely liberal values' universe, the authorities have to arrest and charge the person who has warned them, not the enemies of the 'lovely liberal universe'. If they don't charge him, they will be tacitly admitting that there are indeed enemies of the 'lovely liberal 'universe living among them.
Such an admission destroys their ideology. The world around them is unintelligible without this ideology. Hence the bind.
The European people know full well that there are enemies of European culture living among them. They will take action within the next 5 years, I suspect.
Brussels Prosecutes Aramaic Priest and Fugitive for Islamophobia
From the desk of Paul Belien on Mon, 2006-03-27 13:35
One of the rare Belgian churches that is packed every weekend is the church of Saint Anthony of Padova in Montignies-sur-Sambre, one of the poorest suburbs of Charleroi, a derelict rust belt area to the south of Brussels. Holy Mass in Montignies is conducted in Latin and lasts up to four hours. Yesterday over 2,000 people attended the service by Father Samuel (Père Samuel). The priest’s sermon dealt with his persecution. The Belgian authorities are bringing the popular priest to court on charges of racism.
Father Samuel has been prosecuted for “incitement to racist hatred” by the Belgian government’s inquisition agency, the so-called Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), because of a remark he made in a 2002 television interview when he said:
“Every thoroughly islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when they have become a minority.”
Père Samuel
Last Thursday the Belgian judiciary decided that the priest will have to stand trial before the penal court in Charleroi. He reacted by repeating his time bomb statement and added that he would be honoured if he had to go to jail for speaking his mind. He added that Jesus, too, had been convicted. During yesterday’s sermon he called upon the faithful to accompany him to court. “We will turn this into an excursion, driving there in full buses.”
Father Samuel’s passport gives his name as Charles-Clément Boniface. That is not entirely correct. He was born in 1942 in Midyat, Turkey, as Samuel Ozdemir. The latter is a surname the priest dislikes because, he explains, it was imposed on his family by the Turks. Samuel was a Christian: “At home we spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus.” The Aramaics are a Catholic minority in Syria and Turkey. They speak an old Semitic language, which Jesus and the apostles used and which Mel Gibson had his actors use in his movie The Passion of the Christ.
Young Samuel became a Catholic priest. In the mid-1970s he fled to Belgium, claiming that the Aramaic Christians were being persecuted in Turkey. He became a Belgian and adopted the surname of Boniface – “he who does good things.” He was appointed to the diocese of Tournai, but soon became caught up in the culture war between Christians and secularists. Tournai is a thoroughly secularised, modernist diocese. Father Samuel clashed with the bishop, who suspended him in 2001. He then bought the St-Antoine-de-Padoue church in Montignies-sur-Sambre. There he conducts the Mass according to the traditional rites of the Catholic Church.
Hundreds of faithful from all over the country and even from the north of France attend Sunday Mass in Montignies-sur-Sambre. The congregation includes African immigrants, a large number of young people and many young families with small children. In his sermons and on his website Father Samuel speaks out against secularism, but also fights on another front of the three-way culture war, warning against “the islamic invasion” of the West. He says he has witnessed in Turkey what the future has in store for Europe. He claims Muslims are invading Europe and warns for an impending civil war. According to Father Samuel “so-called moderate Muslims do not exist.”
Comment: Many Australians will soon enough see these sorts of events and link them to the growth of muslim numbers in Australia. This will lead to calls for an end to migration to Australia of religious muslims, so as to avoid these crises in Australia.
Local muslims are very pressed for time in developing an Australian Islam, if they want to prevent serious actions being taken against Islam in Australia.
Such an admission destroys their ideology. The world around them is unintelligible without this ideology. Hence the bind.
The European people know full well that there are enemies of European culture living among them. They will take action within the next 5 years, I suspect.
Brussels Prosecutes Aramaic Priest and Fugitive for Islamophobia
From the desk of Paul Belien on Mon, 2006-03-27 13:35
One of the rare Belgian churches that is packed every weekend is the church of Saint Anthony of Padova in Montignies-sur-Sambre, one of the poorest suburbs of Charleroi, a derelict rust belt area to the south of Brussels. Holy Mass in Montignies is conducted in Latin and lasts up to four hours. Yesterday over 2,000 people attended the service by Father Samuel (Père Samuel). The priest’s sermon dealt with his persecution. The Belgian authorities are bringing the popular priest to court on charges of racism.
Father Samuel has been prosecuted for “incitement to racist hatred” by the Belgian government’s inquisition agency, the so-called Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), because of a remark he made in a 2002 television interview when he said:
“Every thoroughly islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when they have become a minority.”
Père Samuel
Last Thursday the Belgian judiciary decided that the priest will have to stand trial before the penal court in Charleroi. He reacted by repeating his time bomb statement and added that he would be honoured if he had to go to jail for speaking his mind. He added that Jesus, too, had been convicted. During yesterday’s sermon he called upon the faithful to accompany him to court. “We will turn this into an excursion, driving there in full buses.”
Father Samuel’s passport gives his name as Charles-Clément Boniface. That is not entirely correct. He was born in 1942 in Midyat, Turkey, as Samuel Ozdemir. The latter is a surname the priest dislikes because, he explains, it was imposed on his family by the Turks. Samuel was a Christian: “At home we spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus.” The Aramaics are a Catholic minority in Syria and Turkey. They speak an old Semitic language, which Jesus and the apostles used and which Mel Gibson had his actors use in his movie The Passion of the Christ.
Young Samuel became a Catholic priest. In the mid-1970s he fled to Belgium, claiming that the Aramaic Christians were being persecuted in Turkey. He became a Belgian and adopted the surname of Boniface – “he who does good things.” He was appointed to the diocese of Tournai, but soon became caught up in the culture war between Christians and secularists. Tournai is a thoroughly secularised, modernist diocese. Father Samuel clashed with the bishop, who suspended him in 2001. He then bought the St-Antoine-de-Padoue church in Montignies-sur-Sambre. There he conducts the Mass according to the traditional rites of the Catholic Church.
Hundreds of faithful from all over the country and even from the north of France attend Sunday Mass in Montignies-sur-Sambre. The congregation includes African immigrants, a large number of young people and many young families with small children. In his sermons and on his website Father Samuel speaks out against secularism, but also fights on another front of the three-way culture war, warning against “the islamic invasion” of the West. He says he has witnessed in Turkey what the future has in store for Europe. He claims Muslims are invading Europe and warns for an impending civil war. According to Father Samuel “so-called moderate Muslims do not exist.”
Comment: Many Australians will soon enough see these sorts of events and link them to the growth of muslim numbers in Australia. This will lead to calls for an end to migration to Australia of religious muslims, so as to avoid these crises in Australia.
Local muslims are very pressed for time in developing an Australian Islam, if they want to prevent serious actions being taken against Islam in Australia.
High Grade Analysis of Islam in the World.
Note: Niall Ferguson is a British Professor at Harvard University.Stephen Crittenden is the presenter of Radio Religion at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney.
This is part of an interview given in March 2006.
Stephen Crittenden: Niall, I want to get back to demographics. Is demographic decline necessarily a sign of decadence and collapse?
Niall Ferguson: Well not necessarily, and I think one shouldn’t equate these things, but it is of course pretty hard to separate out from - let’s call it the balance of power. I mean shifts in global population have big implications. In 1950, there were three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. Well, by 1995 the population of Iran was bigger than that of Britain; by 2050 it will be 50% larger than Britain. It would be a fantasy to pretend that this didn’t matter. Extraordinarily high birthrates of societies like Iran are going to have profound geopolitical consequences. We really shouldn’t delude ourselves about that. It’s funny how some people recognise very clearly the importance of demographics because they’re facing it, so to speak, day to day, eyeball to eyeball. Israelis understand this because as Ariel Sharon realised in the final part of his career, demographics made it absolutely impossible for Israel to sustain its position in the occupied territories. Indeed it’s going to be hard for Israel to sustain its position per se as the number of Palestinians or the number of Arabs, non-Jews inside Israel itself, begins gradually to rise to be equal to the number of Jews. So when you’re confronted with these demographic shifts so to speak, in your own street, you very quickly realise how much they matter. It’s easy for people on enclaves of relative prosperity, I can’t resist mentioning Cambridge, Massachusetts as one of these – to pretend that this isn’t going on, because we’re not living it.
Stephen Crittenden: Right. You make a very interesting point in relation to Iran in this respect. Military historians sometimes make the argument that when a leader like say Napoleon has a big enough cohort of soldiers, he has to go to war to give them something to do. And you make a similar point about Iran. You talk about the extraordinary surplus of young men and you say that they represent a generation which is ready to fight.
Niall Ferguson: Well Iran had an amazing population boom in the wake of its revolution, and the war it waged with Iraq only fuelled that boom. I mean if you go back just ten years, something like 40% of the population of Iran was aged 14 or younger. This was really quite an extraordinarily youthful society, the very antithesis of West European societies where the younger are a tiny minority increasingly. So this matters, but of course I would be very wary of any deterministic theory that said young societies always go to war. It’s true that in the French Revolution military expansion was a kind of a solution to the problem of unemployed and politically unruly young men, but it’s not an absolutely necessary consequence of society.
Stephen Crittenden: You also make the point of course that Islamic societies like Iran are full of youthful energy, because of this young population. I want to put it to you actually that when you go to places like Libya or Iran or Syria, the people may be young, but that isn’t the image overall. You still have the image of a stagnant backwater where nothing happens because the religion has decreed that nothing can happen.
Niall Ferguson: Well there’s a real tension in Iran between a youthful population and the dead hand of the theocratic state, and that tension manifests itself in sometimes contradictory ways. One of the more puzzling things that emerges when you survey opinion in Islamic countries, is that while they say they hate the United States, they like a lot of things that we tend to associate with American popular culture. And so you have the paradox really of the quasi-Americanised young, say, Palestinian, who might listen to Eminem but then becomes a suicide bomber. And I think this is something that’s really hard to grasp about what’s going on in these societies. If you’re a teenager in the Islamic world, you have a very, almost schizophrenic attitude towards the West. You may be attracted by its pop culture because so many aspects of it are irresistibly cool, but you have a tremendous sense of inferiority and under-achievement in terms of your national culture. And of course economically you’re doing pretty miserably. You may well be unemployed or in a lousy job, and you may think economically, ‘Gosh wouldn’t it be great to go to the Untied States and become part of the most dynamic and wealth-creating society on earth. And at the same time you feel God, how arrogant these Americans are, how I’d like to give them a bloody nose. I think perhaps the inherent tension which is at work here, and it could of course flip either way, I mean in a really happy ending type scenario, ultimately the attraction of the West is just more powerful than the sense of frustration and inferiority that pushes in the other direction. But right now, I don’t feel optimistic, it seems to me that the other tendency is gradually prevailing in conditions of relative economic instability.
Stephen Crittenden: Finally Niall, I want to turn to the issue of the decline of Christian religious faith in the West. You make the point that it’s not just a question of the decline of population, there’s also this decline of religious faith. And at one point you write, ‘Why have Britons lost their historic faith? To be frank, I have no idea, but I do know it matters’.
Niall Ferguson: Yes, it’s one of the least studies and most important questions for modern historians, why organised Christianity, both in terms of observance and in terms of faith, sail off a cliff in Europe sometime in the 1970s, 1980s. And the explanations that have been offered for this phenomenon so far are relatively weak and unconvincing. What’s clear is it’s got nothing to do with economic development because it hasn’t happened in the United States, where Christianity is alive and well in what is a modern, secular society in so many ways. So we have a real puzzle here: why is Christianity dying out in its traditional core heartland, what used to be called Christendom, why are Europeans becoming godless? And it’s such an important question because it makes Europe quite vulnerable (I hesitate to use your term ‘decadent’) but it makes it vulnerable to penetration by –
Stephen Crittenden: I thought it was your term?
Niall Ferguson: I mean to me this is one of the reasons why it’s quite easy for radical Islamists to make inroads in Western Europe because there isn’t in a sense, any religious resistance there. In a secular society where nobody believes in anything terribly much except the next shopping spree, it’s really quite easy to recruit people to radical, monotheistic positions. It’s just that the monotheism that’s making the running at the moment is Islam, rather than Christianity.
Stephen Crittenden: Some people would argue that all of this de-Christianisation in Europe has created a moral vacuum. I wonder however, whether the majority of people in the population aren’t basically pretty conservative, and whether those Christian values have seeped into the DNA of the culture and that on the whole those values have – we hear lots of alarm bells and alarmist talk - but basically those values are still reasonably intact.
Niall Ferguson: Well of course it’s hard to measure that kind of thing. Clearly religious values cannot become part of the human DNA, that is a metaphor but it doesn’t have any biological reality. What one does see in urban Europe, and it’s really quite striking, is a level of low intensity criminality that wasn’t there before. Social order is not in great shape in the typical West European city, and it’s really quite a striking contrast, when you go to oh, I don’t know, San Antonio, Texas.
Stephen Crittenden: And as an economic historian, is your sense that the reasons for that are not economic? That they really are, if you like, civilisational?
Niall Ferguson: I think there’s no question there’s a connection between religion and economic and social behaviour. Max Weber was not the first person to make an argument about the relationship between Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. I think more recent work, for example Robert Barrow, my colleague here at Harvard, has done some very interesting work on the relationship between religious belief, religious observance and social order and economic behaviour, and it’s actually quite striking, there do seem to be some important correlations here. I myself, although I was not brought up in a religious household, and I suppose if I were pressed, would have to admit to being a kind of incurable atheist, I’m nevertheless strongly convinced that religion performs important social functions in the transmission say, of ethical values between generations, and that a society that does away with it, that ceases to engage in any kind of formal religious instruction, is a society that’s likely to be less good at maintaining social order than one which maintains a measure of religious faith and observance. And that is based purely on historical observation. The experiments with atheism as the basis for political order, say in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, did not produce happy results. So I think one really does away with Christianity, or indeed one does away with God at one’s peril. Human beings do seem to behave better when they have some sense of moral authority in the world, and indeed some kind of formal system for inculcating good ethical behaviour.
Comment: The best comment on these words by Professor Ferguson would be for readers to send them to the persons on your email list.
Australia will need to strengthen its demographic base with persons who are part of Western civilization; supporters of it, and opposed to replacing it with inferior structures. Race has nothing to do with this, but religion most certainly does.
This is part of an interview given in March 2006.
Stephen Crittenden: Niall, I want to get back to demographics. Is demographic decline necessarily a sign of decadence and collapse?
Niall Ferguson: Well not necessarily, and I think one shouldn’t equate these things, but it is of course pretty hard to separate out from - let’s call it the balance of power. I mean shifts in global population have big implications. In 1950, there were three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. Well, by 1995 the population of Iran was bigger than that of Britain; by 2050 it will be 50% larger than Britain. It would be a fantasy to pretend that this didn’t matter. Extraordinarily high birthrates of societies like Iran are going to have profound geopolitical consequences. We really shouldn’t delude ourselves about that. It’s funny how some people recognise very clearly the importance of demographics because they’re facing it, so to speak, day to day, eyeball to eyeball. Israelis understand this because as Ariel Sharon realised in the final part of his career, demographics made it absolutely impossible for Israel to sustain its position in the occupied territories. Indeed it’s going to be hard for Israel to sustain its position per se as the number of Palestinians or the number of Arabs, non-Jews inside Israel itself, begins gradually to rise to be equal to the number of Jews. So when you’re confronted with these demographic shifts so to speak, in your own street, you very quickly realise how much they matter. It’s easy for people on enclaves of relative prosperity, I can’t resist mentioning Cambridge, Massachusetts as one of these – to pretend that this isn’t going on, because we’re not living it.
Stephen Crittenden: Right. You make a very interesting point in relation to Iran in this respect. Military historians sometimes make the argument that when a leader like say Napoleon has a big enough cohort of soldiers, he has to go to war to give them something to do. And you make a similar point about Iran. You talk about the extraordinary surplus of young men and you say that they represent a generation which is ready to fight.
Niall Ferguson: Well Iran had an amazing population boom in the wake of its revolution, and the war it waged with Iraq only fuelled that boom. I mean if you go back just ten years, something like 40% of the population of Iran was aged 14 or younger. This was really quite an extraordinarily youthful society, the very antithesis of West European societies where the younger are a tiny minority increasingly. So this matters, but of course I would be very wary of any deterministic theory that said young societies always go to war. It’s true that in the French Revolution military expansion was a kind of a solution to the problem of unemployed and politically unruly young men, but it’s not an absolutely necessary consequence of society.
Stephen Crittenden: You also make the point of course that Islamic societies like Iran are full of youthful energy, because of this young population. I want to put it to you actually that when you go to places like Libya or Iran or Syria, the people may be young, but that isn’t the image overall. You still have the image of a stagnant backwater where nothing happens because the religion has decreed that nothing can happen.
Niall Ferguson: Well there’s a real tension in Iran between a youthful population and the dead hand of the theocratic state, and that tension manifests itself in sometimes contradictory ways. One of the more puzzling things that emerges when you survey opinion in Islamic countries, is that while they say they hate the United States, they like a lot of things that we tend to associate with American popular culture. And so you have the paradox really of the quasi-Americanised young, say, Palestinian, who might listen to Eminem but then becomes a suicide bomber. And I think this is something that’s really hard to grasp about what’s going on in these societies. If you’re a teenager in the Islamic world, you have a very, almost schizophrenic attitude towards the West. You may be attracted by its pop culture because so many aspects of it are irresistibly cool, but you have a tremendous sense of inferiority and under-achievement in terms of your national culture. And of course economically you’re doing pretty miserably. You may well be unemployed or in a lousy job, and you may think economically, ‘Gosh wouldn’t it be great to go to the Untied States and become part of the most dynamic and wealth-creating society on earth. And at the same time you feel God, how arrogant these Americans are, how I’d like to give them a bloody nose. I think perhaps the inherent tension which is at work here, and it could of course flip either way, I mean in a really happy ending type scenario, ultimately the attraction of the West is just more powerful than the sense of frustration and inferiority that pushes in the other direction. But right now, I don’t feel optimistic, it seems to me that the other tendency is gradually prevailing in conditions of relative economic instability.
Stephen Crittenden: Finally Niall, I want to turn to the issue of the decline of Christian religious faith in the West. You make the point that it’s not just a question of the decline of population, there’s also this decline of religious faith. And at one point you write, ‘Why have Britons lost their historic faith? To be frank, I have no idea, but I do know it matters’.
Niall Ferguson: Yes, it’s one of the least studies and most important questions for modern historians, why organised Christianity, both in terms of observance and in terms of faith, sail off a cliff in Europe sometime in the 1970s, 1980s. And the explanations that have been offered for this phenomenon so far are relatively weak and unconvincing. What’s clear is it’s got nothing to do with economic development because it hasn’t happened in the United States, where Christianity is alive and well in what is a modern, secular society in so many ways. So we have a real puzzle here: why is Christianity dying out in its traditional core heartland, what used to be called Christendom, why are Europeans becoming godless? And it’s such an important question because it makes Europe quite vulnerable (I hesitate to use your term ‘decadent’) but it makes it vulnerable to penetration by –
Stephen Crittenden: I thought it was your term?
Niall Ferguson: I mean to me this is one of the reasons why it’s quite easy for radical Islamists to make inroads in Western Europe because there isn’t in a sense, any religious resistance there. In a secular society where nobody believes in anything terribly much except the next shopping spree, it’s really quite easy to recruit people to radical, monotheistic positions. It’s just that the monotheism that’s making the running at the moment is Islam, rather than Christianity.
Stephen Crittenden: Some people would argue that all of this de-Christianisation in Europe has created a moral vacuum. I wonder however, whether the majority of people in the population aren’t basically pretty conservative, and whether those Christian values have seeped into the DNA of the culture and that on the whole those values have – we hear lots of alarm bells and alarmist talk - but basically those values are still reasonably intact.
Niall Ferguson: Well of course it’s hard to measure that kind of thing. Clearly religious values cannot become part of the human DNA, that is a metaphor but it doesn’t have any biological reality. What one does see in urban Europe, and it’s really quite striking, is a level of low intensity criminality that wasn’t there before. Social order is not in great shape in the typical West European city, and it’s really quite a striking contrast, when you go to oh, I don’t know, San Antonio, Texas.
Stephen Crittenden: And as an economic historian, is your sense that the reasons for that are not economic? That they really are, if you like, civilisational?
Niall Ferguson: I think there’s no question there’s a connection between religion and economic and social behaviour. Max Weber was not the first person to make an argument about the relationship between Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. I think more recent work, for example Robert Barrow, my colleague here at Harvard, has done some very interesting work on the relationship between religious belief, religious observance and social order and economic behaviour, and it’s actually quite striking, there do seem to be some important correlations here. I myself, although I was not brought up in a religious household, and I suppose if I were pressed, would have to admit to being a kind of incurable atheist, I’m nevertheless strongly convinced that religion performs important social functions in the transmission say, of ethical values between generations, and that a society that does away with it, that ceases to engage in any kind of formal religious instruction, is a society that’s likely to be less good at maintaining social order than one which maintains a measure of religious faith and observance. And that is based purely on historical observation. The experiments with atheism as the basis for political order, say in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, did not produce happy results. So I think one really does away with Christianity, or indeed one does away with God at one’s peril. Human beings do seem to behave better when they have some sense of moral authority in the world, and indeed some kind of formal system for inculcating good ethical behaviour.
Comment: The best comment on these words by Professor Ferguson would be for readers to send them to the persons on your email list.
Australia will need to strengthen its demographic base with persons who are part of Western civilization; supporters of it, and opposed to replacing it with inferior structures. Race has nothing to do with this, but religion most certainly does.
Nobel Prize Winning Advice on Islam.
Note: Anything written on Islam by Amartya Sen is worth reading. Mr. Sen is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998.
What Clash of Civilizations?
Why religious identity isn't destiny.
By Amartya Sen
Posted Wednesday, March 29, 2006, at 6:02 AM ET
This essay is adapted from the new book Identity and Violence, published by Norton.
That some barbed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed could generate turmoil in so many countries tells us some rather important things about the contemporary world. Among other issues, it points up the intense sensitivity of many Muslims about representation and derision of the prophet in the Western press (and the ridiculing of Muslim religious beliefs that is taken to go with it) and the evident power of determined agitators to generate the kind of anger that leads immediately to violence. But stereotyped representations of this kind do another sort of damage as well, by making huge groups of people in the world to look peculiarly narrow and unreal.
The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the form of a hat is obviously a figment of imagination and cannot be judged literally, and the relevance of that representation cannot be dissociated from the way the followers of the prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term "algebra" comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise "Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah"). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi's Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.
The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.
A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington's influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington's approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with "Islamic civilization," "Hindu civilization," "Buddhist civilization," and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.
In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to "the Islamic world," "the Western world," "the Hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.
The difficulty with the clash of civilizations thesis begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question "Do civilizations clash?" is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations.
This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history that overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations. And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.
The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove just as treacherous for programs of "dialogue among civilizations" (much in vogue these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings to one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.
Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for "other people" is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called "Islamic terrorism" in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define—or redefine—Islam.
To focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people. It also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of people, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain, a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the development of state-financed Muslim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to supplement pre-existing state-supported Christian schools. Under this system, young children are placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy. Now the same predetermination of "discovered" identities is now being allowed and, in effect encouraged, to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population.
Religious or civilizational classification can be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lt. Gen. William Boykin's blaring—and by now well-known—remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: "I knew that my God was bigger than his," and that the Christian God "was a real God, and [the Muslim's] was an idol." The idiocy of such bigotry is easy to diagnose, so there is comparatively limited danger in the uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in the use in Western public policy of intellectual "guided missiles" that present a superficially nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining Islam appropriately. They try to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a "true Muslim" must be a tolerant individual ("so come off it and be peaceful"). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must ask whether it is necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a "true Muslim" must be like.
******
A person's religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.
The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.
People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh's separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.
Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of "Western science," leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.
Even the frantic Western search for "the moderate Muslim" confounds moderation in political beliefs with moderateness of religious faith. A person can have strong religious faith—Islamic or any other—along with tolerant politics. Emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all.
The point that needs particular attention is that while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that liberality was in no way ordained—nor of course prohibited—by Islam. Another Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason, failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim because of his tolerantly pluralist politics.
The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable. The alternative to the divisiveness of one pre-eminent categorization is not any unreal claim that we are all much the same. Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization.
Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the neglect—and denial—of the roles of reasoning and choice, which follow from the recognition of our plural identities. The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live. The descriptive weakness of choiceless singularity has the effect of momentously impoverishing the power and reach of our social and political reasoning. The illusion of destiny exacts a remarkably heavy price.
Amartya Sen is the Lamont University Professor at Harvard and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Adapted from Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, by Amartya Sen.
Comment: This article complements the article below by Tariq Ali, in as much as both posit the notion that Islam has been ruined by the imams, over the ages and still today. Australian muslims must first come to this crucial observation before they can set out to construct an Australian Islam.
The function of a sensible Australian government would be to emphasise the other identities that Australian muslims have (ie. students, workers, women,writers/artists,mothers, fathers...you name it)and put resources into strengthening these identities. Do not leave the poor Australian muslims to the none too tender mercies of their ignorant and hostile imams. Despite the smooth lying on TV by these imams, none of them puts the interests of Australia ahead of the interests of his Islamic gang back in the 'old country'. Why should he? The gang back home is paying the bills.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
What Clash of Civilizations?
Why religious identity isn't destiny.
By Amartya Sen
Posted Wednesday, March 29, 2006, at 6:02 AM ET
This essay is adapted from the new book Identity and Violence, published by Norton.
That some barbed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed could generate turmoil in so many countries tells us some rather important things about the contemporary world. Among other issues, it points up the intense sensitivity of many Muslims about representation and derision of the prophet in the Western press (and the ridiculing of Muslim religious beliefs that is taken to go with it) and the evident power of determined agitators to generate the kind of anger that leads immediately to violence. But stereotyped representations of this kind do another sort of damage as well, by making huge groups of people in the world to look peculiarly narrow and unreal.
The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the form of a hat is obviously a figment of imagination and cannot be judged literally, and the relevance of that representation cannot be dissociated from the way the followers of the prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term "algebra" comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise "Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah"). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi's Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.
The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.
A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington's influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington's approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with "Islamic civilization," "Hindu civilization," "Buddhist civilization," and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.
In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to "the Islamic world," "the Western world," "the Hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.
The difficulty with the clash of civilizations thesis begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question "Do civilizations clash?" is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations.
This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history that overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations. And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.
The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove just as treacherous for programs of "dialogue among civilizations" (much in vogue these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings to one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.
Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for "other people" is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called "Islamic terrorism" in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define—or redefine—Islam.
To focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people. It also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of people, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain, a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the development of state-financed Muslim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to supplement pre-existing state-supported Christian schools. Under this system, young children are placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy. Now the same predetermination of "discovered" identities is now being allowed and, in effect encouraged, to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population.
Religious or civilizational classification can be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lt. Gen. William Boykin's blaring—and by now well-known—remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: "I knew that my God was bigger than his," and that the Christian God "was a real God, and [the Muslim's] was an idol." The idiocy of such bigotry is easy to diagnose, so there is comparatively limited danger in the uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in the use in Western public policy of intellectual "guided missiles" that present a superficially nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining Islam appropriately. They try to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a "true Muslim" must be a tolerant individual ("so come off it and be peaceful"). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must ask whether it is necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a "true Muslim" must be like.
******
A person's religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.
The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.
People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh's separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.
Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of "Western science," leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.
Even the frantic Western search for "the moderate Muslim" confounds moderation in political beliefs with moderateness of religious faith. A person can have strong religious faith—Islamic or any other—along with tolerant politics. Emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all.
The point that needs particular attention is that while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that liberality was in no way ordained—nor of course prohibited—by Islam. Another Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason, failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim because of his tolerantly pluralist politics.
The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable. The alternative to the divisiveness of one pre-eminent categorization is not any unreal claim that we are all much the same. Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization.
Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the neglect—and denial—of the roles of reasoning and choice, which follow from the recognition of our plural identities. The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live. The descriptive weakness of choiceless singularity has the effect of momentously impoverishing the power and reach of our social and political reasoning. The illusion of destiny exacts a remarkably heavy price.
Amartya Sen is the Lamont University Professor at Harvard and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Adapted from Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, by Amartya Sen.
Comment: This article complements the article below by Tariq Ali, in as much as both posit the notion that Islam has been ruined by the imams, over the ages and still today. Australian muslims must first come to this crucial observation before they can set out to construct an Australian Islam.
The function of a sensible Australian government would be to emphasise the other identities that Australian muslims have (ie. students, workers, women,writers/artists,mothers, fathers...you name it)and put resources into strengthening these identities. Do not leave the poor Australian muslims to the none too tender mercies of their ignorant and hostile imams. Despite the smooth lying on TV by these imams, none of them puts the interests of Australia ahead of the interests of his Islamic gang back in the 'old country'. Why should he? The gang back home is paying the bills.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
...the mullahs had destroyed Islam'
Note: Tariq Ali is a famous and creditable British leftist, of the sternest variety.
These words are his and are published here to help give some historical depth to the experience of 'being muslim' over the last 100years.
Mullahs and Heretics (Part 1)
Tariq Ali
I never believed in God, not even between the ages of six and ten, when I was an agnostic. This unbelief was instinctive. I was sure there was nothing else out there but space. It could have been my lack of imagination. In the jasmine-scented summer nights, long before mosques were allowed to use loudspeakers, it was enough to savour the silence, look up at the exquisitely lit sky, count the shooting stars and fall asleep. The early morning call of the muezzin was a pleasant alarm-clock.
There were many advantages in being an unbeliever. Threatened with divine sanctions by family retainers, cousins or elderly relatives - 'If you do that Allah will be angry' or 'If you don't do this Allah will punish you' - I was unmoved. Let him do his worst, I used to tell myself, but he never did, and that reinforced my belief in his non-existence.
My parents, too, were non-believers. So were most of their close friends. Religion played a tiny part in our Lahore household. In the second half of the last century, a large proportion of educated Muslims had embraced modernity. Old habits persisted, nonetheless: the would-be virtuous made their ablutions and sloped off to Friday prayers. Some fasted for a few days each year, usually just before the new moon marking the end of Ramadan. I doubt whether more than a quarter of the population in the cities fasted for a whole month. Café life continued unabated. Many claimed that they had fasted so as to take advantage of the free food doled out at the end of each fasting day by the mosques or the kitchens of the wealthy. In the countryside fewer still fasted, since outdoor work was difficult without sustenance, and especially without water when Ramadan fell during the summer months. Eid, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, was celebrated by everyone.
One day, I think in the autumn of 1956 when I was 12, I was eavesdropping on an after-dinner conversation at home. My sister, assorted cousins and I had been asked nicely to occupy ourselves elsewhere. Obediently, we moved to an adjoining room, but then listened, giggling, to a particularly raucous, wooden-headed aunt and a bony uncle berating my parents in loud whispers: 'We know what you're like . . . we know you're unbelievers, but these children should be given a chance . . . They must be taught their religion.'
The giggles were premature. A few months later a tutor was hired to teach me the Koran and Islamic history. 'You live here,' my father said. 'You should study the texts. You should know our history. Later you may do as you wish. Even if you reject everything, it's always better to know what it is that one is rejecting.' Sensible enough advice, but regarded by me at the time as hypocritical and a betrayal. How often had I heard talk of superstitious idiots, often relatives, who worshipped a God they didn't have the brains to doubt? Now I was being forced to study religion. I was determined to sabotage the process.
It didn't occur to me at the time that my father's decision may have had something to do with an episode from his own life. In 1928, aged 12, he had accompanied his mother and his old wet-nurse (my grandmother's most trusted maid) on the pilgrimage to perform the hajj ceremony. Women, then as now, could visit Mecca only if they were accompanied by a male more than 12 years old. The older men flatly refused to go. My father, as the youngest male in the family, wasn't given a choice. His older brother, the most religious member of the family, never let him forget the pilgrimage: his letters to my father always arrived with the prefix 'al-Haj' ('pilgrim') attached to the name, a cause for much merriment at teatime.
Decades later, when the pores of the Saudi elite were sweating petro-dollars, my father would remember the poverty he had seen in the Hijaz and recall the tales of non-Arab pilgrims who had been robbed on the road to Mecca. In the pre-oil period, the annual pilgrimage had been a major source of income for the locals, who would often augment their meagre earnings with well-organised raids on pilgrims' lodgings. The ceremony itself requires that the pilgrim come clothed in a simple white sheet and nothing else. All valuables have to be left behind and local gangs became especially adept at stealing watches and gold. Soon, the more experienced pilgrims realised that the 'pure souls' of Mecca weren't above thieving. They began to take precautions, and a war of wits ensued.
Several years after the trip to the Holy Land my father became an orthodox Communist and remained one for the rest of his life. Moscow was now his Mecca. Perhaps he thought that immersing me in religion at a young age might result in a similar transformation. I like to think that this was his real motive, and that he wasn't pandering to the more dim-witted members of our family. I came to admire my father for breaking away from what he described as 'the emptiness of the feudal world'.1
Since I did not read Arabic, I could learn the Koran only by rote. My tutor, Nizam Din, arrived on the appointed day and thanks to his heroic efforts, I can at least recite the lines from the opening of the Koran - 'Alif, lam, mim . . .' - followed by the crucial: 'This book is not to be doubted.' Nizam Din, to my great delight, was not deeply religious. From his late teens to his late twenties, he had worn a beard. But by 1940 he'd shaved it off, deserted religion for the anti-imperialist cause and dedicated himself to left-wing politics. Like many others he had served a spell in a colonial prison and been further radicalised. Truth, he would say, was a very powerful concept in the Koran, but it had never been translated into practical life because the mullahs had destroyed Islam.
Comment: to be continued.
These words are his and are published here to help give some historical depth to the experience of 'being muslim' over the last 100years.
Mullahs and Heretics (Part 1)
Tariq Ali
I never believed in God, not even between the ages of six and ten, when I was an agnostic. This unbelief was instinctive. I was sure there was nothing else out there but space. It could have been my lack of imagination. In the jasmine-scented summer nights, long before mosques were allowed to use loudspeakers, it was enough to savour the silence, look up at the exquisitely lit sky, count the shooting stars and fall asleep. The early morning call of the muezzin was a pleasant alarm-clock.
There were many advantages in being an unbeliever. Threatened with divine sanctions by family retainers, cousins or elderly relatives - 'If you do that Allah will be angry' or 'If you don't do this Allah will punish you' - I was unmoved. Let him do his worst, I used to tell myself, but he never did, and that reinforced my belief in his non-existence.
My parents, too, were non-believers. So were most of their close friends. Religion played a tiny part in our Lahore household. In the second half of the last century, a large proportion of educated Muslims had embraced modernity. Old habits persisted, nonetheless: the would-be virtuous made their ablutions and sloped off to Friday prayers. Some fasted for a few days each year, usually just before the new moon marking the end of Ramadan. I doubt whether more than a quarter of the population in the cities fasted for a whole month. Café life continued unabated. Many claimed that they had fasted so as to take advantage of the free food doled out at the end of each fasting day by the mosques or the kitchens of the wealthy. In the countryside fewer still fasted, since outdoor work was difficult without sustenance, and especially without water when Ramadan fell during the summer months. Eid, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, was celebrated by everyone.
One day, I think in the autumn of 1956 when I was 12, I was eavesdropping on an after-dinner conversation at home. My sister, assorted cousins and I had been asked nicely to occupy ourselves elsewhere. Obediently, we moved to an adjoining room, but then listened, giggling, to a particularly raucous, wooden-headed aunt and a bony uncle berating my parents in loud whispers: 'We know what you're like . . . we know you're unbelievers, but these children should be given a chance . . . They must be taught their religion.'
The giggles were premature. A few months later a tutor was hired to teach me the Koran and Islamic history. 'You live here,' my father said. 'You should study the texts. You should know our history. Later you may do as you wish. Even if you reject everything, it's always better to know what it is that one is rejecting.' Sensible enough advice, but regarded by me at the time as hypocritical and a betrayal. How often had I heard talk of superstitious idiots, often relatives, who worshipped a God they didn't have the brains to doubt? Now I was being forced to study religion. I was determined to sabotage the process.
It didn't occur to me at the time that my father's decision may have had something to do with an episode from his own life. In 1928, aged 12, he had accompanied his mother and his old wet-nurse (my grandmother's most trusted maid) on the pilgrimage to perform the hajj ceremony. Women, then as now, could visit Mecca only if they were accompanied by a male more than 12 years old. The older men flatly refused to go. My father, as the youngest male in the family, wasn't given a choice. His older brother, the most religious member of the family, never let him forget the pilgrimage: his letters to my father always arrived with the prefix 'al-Haj' ('pilgrim') attached to the name, a cause for much merriment at teatime.
Decades later, when the pores of the Saudi elite were sweating petro-dollars, my father would remember the poverty he had seen in the Hijaz and recall the tales of non-Arab pilgrims who had been robbed on the road to Mecca. In the pre-oil period, the annual pilgrimage had been a major source of income for the locals, who would often augment their meagre earnings with well-organised raids on pilgrims' lodgings. The ceremony itself requires that the pilgrim come clothed in a simple white sheet and nothing else. All valuables have to be left behind and local gangs became especially adept at stealing watches and gold. Soon, the more experienced pilgrims realised that the 'pure souls' of Mecca weren't above thieving. They began to take precautions, and a war of wits ensued.
Several years after the trip to the Holy Land my father became an orthodox Communist and remained one for the rest of his life. Moscow was now his Mecca. Perhaps he thought that immersing me in religion at a young age might result in a similar transformation. I like to think that this was his real motive, and that he wasn't pandering to the more dim-witted members of our family. I came to admire my father for breaking away from what he described as 'the emptiness of the feudal world'.1
Since I did not read Arabic, I could learn the Koran only by rote. My tutor, Nizam Din, arrived on the appointed day and thanks to his heroic efforts, I can at least recite the lines from the opening of the Koran - 'Alif, lam, mim . . .' - followed by the crucial: 'This book is not to be doubted.' Nizam Din, to my great delight, was not deeply religious. From his late teens to his late twenties, he had worn a beard. But by 1940 he'd shaved it off, deserted religion for the anti-imperialist cause and dedicated himself to left-wing politics. Like many others he had served a spell in a colonial prison and been further radicalised. Truth, he would say, was a very powerful concept in the Koran, but it had never been translated into practical life because the mullahs had destroyed Islam.
Comment: to be continued.
The Next 'East Timor'.
Note: The coming battle between Australia and an Islamist Indonesia gets closer by the day. There is no point in regretting this, it is inevitable. We, as a Nation, should get ready for the day approaching.
27 March, 2006
PAPUA NEW GUINEA - INDONESIA
Papua New Guinea bishop: “Islamic extremists coming to West Papua”
Bishop Giles Cote said terrorists were entering the Indonesian part of the island, with the consent of elements of Jakarta’s army, to fight against the Free Papua Movement.
Canberra (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Islamic extremist groups are entering West Papuan territory, with the consent of elements of the Indonesian army, to set up bases there. The charge has been leveled, according to a report in the Australian daily, “The Australian” by Giles Cote, the bishop of a diocese of Papua New Guinea on the border with West Papua, the Indonesian part of the island. The bishop said the extremists were fighting supporters of the separatist Free Papua Movement (OPM).
"Our information indicates that jihad militants are in West Papua to do the dirty work of the police and military," said Bishop Cote, whose diocese of Western Province borders Papua. Cote said the extremists were coming from Mindanao Island in the south of the Philippines and from Sulawesi and other islands in northern Indonesia. He voiced concern about the decision of Jakarta to shift thousands of Indonesian troops to Papua from Aceh, where Jakarta resolved an age-old separatist rebellion last year.
Nick Chesterfield, Free West Papua Campaign Australian organizer, said the bishop’s comments backed OPM claims that Muslim extremists were being armed by the Indonesian army to form militias to fight the pro-independence movement. He confirmed that at the end of last year, Indonesian troops were flown from the Lhoksamawe district of Aceh to the Papuan towns of Enarotoli, Nabire and Manokwari.
The bishop also touched upon the refugee problem: in Papua Nuova Guinea, the Catholic Church is assisting 6,000 refugees from West Papua, living in 17 camps.
“I am concerned that soon we will have another wave of refugees coming across the border for protection,” he said. “These people are afraid to go back. They fear they will be jailed or worse. Our information suggests it is not safe for them to be returned.”
Already smarting from Canberra’s decision to grant temporary protection visas to 42 out of 43 citizens of West Papua, who arrived in a boat on Cape York (a peninsula north of Australia) in January, Jakarta rejected Bishop Cote's claims. "It is not true that there are any religious militants backed by the TNI (Indonesian military) in Papua," said Dino Kusnadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra.
Comment: Long Live Free Papua! Death to the Indonesian Empire!
27 March, 2006
PAPUA NEW GUINEA - INDONESIA
Papua New Guinea bishop: “Islamic extremists coming to West Papua”
Bishop Giles Cote said terrorists were entering the Indonesian part of the island, with the consent of elements of Jakarta’s army, to fight against the Free Papua Movement.
Canberra (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Islamic extremist groups are entering West Papuan territory, with the consent of elements of the Indonesian army, to set up bases there. The charge has been leveled, according to a report in the Australian daily, “The Australian” by Giles Cote, the bishop of a diocese of Papua New Guinea on the border with West Papua, the Indonesian part of the island. The bishop said the extremists were fighting supporters of the separatist Free Papua Movement (OPM).
"Our information indicates that jihad militants are in West Papua to do the dirty work of the police and military," said Bishop Cote, whose diocese of Western Province borders Papua. Cote said the extremists were coming from Mindanao Island in the south of the Philippines and from Sulawesi and other islands in northern Indonesia. He voiced concern about the decision of Jakarta to shift thousands of Indonesian troops to Papua from Aceh, where Jakarta resolved an age-old separatist rebellion last year.
Nick Chesterfield, Free West Papua Campaign Australian organizer, said the bishop’s comments backed OPM claims that Muslim extremists were being armed by the Indonesian army to form militias to fight the pro-independence movement. He confirmed that at the end of last year, Indonesian troops were flown from the Lhoksamawe district of Aceh to the Papuan towns of Enarotoli, Nabire and Manokwari.
The bishop also touched upon the refugee problem: in Papua Nuova Guinea, the Catholic Church is assisting 6,000 refugees from West Papua, living in 17 camps.
“I am concerned that soon we will have another wave of refugees coming across the border for protection,” he said. “These people are afraid to go back. They fear they will be jailed or worse. Our information suggests it is not safe for them to be returned.”
Already smarting from Canberra’s decision to grant temporary protection visas to 42 out of 43 citizens of West Papua, who arrived in a boat on Cape York (a peninsula north of Australia) in January, Jakarta rejected Bishop Cote's claims. "It is not true that there are any religious militants backed by the TNI (Indonesian military) in Papua," said Dino Kusnadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra.
Comment: Long Live Free Papua! Death to the Indonesian Empire!
Vital Information on Apostasy From Islam.
Note: The international debate on the question of apostasy from Islam is very beneficial. This opening up of Islam to the view...very critical view...of non muslims is a big shock to many muslims. So far, they are not handling this well.
This article is well worth reading, as it gives an insightful account of the complexities of muslim thought on questions of apostasy. This thought is their own business; it is their actions that are of careful concern for Western nations and peoples.
27 March, 2006
ISLAM
Killing apostates not in Qu‘ran but a strongly held view in the masses
by Bernardo Cervellera
Fundamentalist theologians have led people to believe that apostasy undermines the unity of the Ummah, the Muslim community. But for Prof Francesco Zannini, who teaches at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, the issue is hotly debated amongst Muslims.
Rome (AsiaNews) – The recent case of Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert from Islam threatened with the death penalty, has re-opened the debate over the practice of enforcing capital punishment for apostasy in Muslim countries. For Francesco Zannini, professor of Modern Islam at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), the death penalty is not prescribed in the Qu‘ran even though people believe it is. What is clear though is that fundamentalists are fanning the flames on this issue and that Muslim governments acquiesce.
Is the death penalty for apostasy applied in all Islamic cultures?
Support for killing a convert to another religion is strong at a popular level in some countries that enforce the Sharia like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and states within Malaysia. But elsewhere in the Islamic world, there is a debate over whether it is right to kill an apostate or not.
It must be first said is that the Qu‘ran does not provide any precise guidelines in the matter. Indeed, it says: “There is no compulsion in religion. Verily, the Right Path has become distinct from the wrong path” (Sura, 2: 256). Even though other verses in the Qu‘ran can be interpreted as justification for killing since they speak of making war against the enemies of Islam, most suggest that anyone who rejects Islam after accepting it will be punished at the end of his life in the Last Judgement.
The hadith (the collected sayings of the prophet) that deal with the issue carry little weight. Some fundamentalists like [sheikh Yusuf] al-Qaradawi, who speaks on al-Jazeera, claim that killing an apostate is right so long as there is a single hadith that orders it. Others say instead that we cannot rely on the hadith to impose the death penalty.
The debate over apostasy has become more complex. Muslims are still discussing how to define it, whether renouncing Islam has to be done in words, in deeds or just in the heart.
Some intellectuals like Egyptian Nasr Abu Zaid and Bangladeshi Taslima Nazrin have been declared apostate in ways that seem to reflect a desire to get rid of people who dissent from the dominant way of thinking.
Whatever the case, the legal and theological bases of apostasy are rather weak, and the debate surrounding it is heated. On the one hand, we have people like Muhammad al-Ghazali, a modern fundamentalist who defends the death penalty for apostates. On the other, there are Egyptian human rights groups who are critical of the practice. Many Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian Muslims also believe that no one can use the Qu‘ran to draw the inference that killing apostates is necessary.
Does the death penalty go back to the origins of Islam or has it emerged in recent decades with the rise of fundamentalism?
In the beginning apostasy got mixed up with politics, namely with what to do with non Muslims who might be spies for the enemy. This ruthless attitude got worse under Abu Bakr, the first caliph. His successor however, Omar, did not even apply the rule on Islam’s enemies. Afterwards there was an attempt to codify the practice but it was never easily accepted in Islam.
Why is support for killing apostates so widespread at a popular level?
Because there is a strong consensus among Muslims that one cannot abandon one’s faith (and this is stressed in the Qu‘ran). This led to the persecution of heretics and apostates. Al-Hallaj, one of the great Muslim mystics died a martyr’s death at the hands of his fellow Muslims. In this sense, the political use of apostasy by rulers was important in manipulating popular attitudes.
What drives Muslims to want to kill anyone guilty of apostasy in the name of their religion, relatives included?
There are two factors that come into play; one that is spiritual and the other that is linked to their sense of community. Since Islam is seen as a totality, leaving it is seen as damaging its growth. It is not a matter of faith, but one of the Ummah or community. An apostate, a Muslim who converts, is seen as someone who is undermining the social cohesion of the family itself. For example, in Malaysia, people are talking about what to do with modernised Muslims, i.e. those who “do not act like true Muslims” as defined by the tradition. Some Qu‘ranic scholars insist that they should be sentenced to death. By contrast, in Indonesia, where the principles of Pancasila recognise freedom for five religions, families can have members who are Muslim, Christian, Hindu, etc.
It is also important to make a distinction between the Sharia, which is divinely ordained, and Fiqh, i.e. Islamic jurisprudence, which is based on human intellect. Hence, some Muslims ask why, since there is no divine ruling [about apostasy], man should assume the right to pass laws?
How strong are liberal voices who defend religious freedom in the Islamic world?
Tolerance is present in the constitutions of Muslim countries except for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan. The Saudis have gone so far as to refuse to sign the Charter on Human Rights because they do not accept religious freedom.
Other Muslim countries recognise religious freedom but do not protect it, partly because they have mixed constitutions. Some sections are inspired by the Sharia; others refer to international treaties. And in all, Islam is seen as the basis and inspiration for law-making. This opens the door to manipulation.
Among the masses, fundamentalism, which must protect itself from the attacks of the West, has been growing. Fundamentalist theologians manipulate the Qu‘ran. They refer to Muhammad’s struggle against Pagans (during his stay in Makkah) and view the fight against apostasy as part of the fight against Paganism and idolatry. This is why killing a Westerner, a Christian, or even a moderate Muslim is seen as justified.
Aren’t Muslim governments a bit too shy in asserting the independence of their constitutions vis-à-vis Islam?
Of course they are. Muslim governments are afraid of the masses and of fundamentalists. Their constitutions assert that sovereignty is vested in the people, but then say that Islam is above everything. This misunderstanding leaves people secure in their traditional view of things, which fundamentalists like to heat up as part of their dream to see the entire world under Islam.
What can we do? The Pope and many governments have demanded clemency for Abdul Rahman…
The West faces a problem. There is not accountability for the funds invested in education and culture. More often than not, the money goes to governments who use it to strengthen their power bases and not to moderate voices.
None the less, whatever is done, it must avoid the use of force. Muslims by and large believe that Islam is in danger. If changes are pursued through force this fear can turn into closure.
Our appeals must be based on humanitarian grounds and connected to the fate of Muslim intellectuals to show that Islam itself defends religious freedom.
Comment: It strikes me, based on years of living and working in the Middle East, that there are very likely to be very many muslims who despise Islam and want to be free of it. I have met numerous such persons, old and young, male and female, in my times in the middle east. They would have their own reasons for this hatred, and it is not my place or your place to sit in judgement on them or their reasons. 'Let there be no compulsion in matters of religion' as the Koran so rightly says; even though muslim practise is very opposite to this in a multitude of examples throughout history and today.
Given this likely situation, I suggest that it would be in the interest of the West, and a strengthening of basic international human rights, for a major migration country like Australia to grant refugee status to those muslims who formally abandon Islam. For them to do so and stay in a muslim country will lead to their murder. Australia can elevate human rights and give honour to the Koranic injunction concerning non compulsion in religion, by welcoming muslim apostates to the safety of our Pacific shores.
Some body has to stand up for the principle of religious freedom in general, and not just talk big when a particular case attracts the world's attention.
That 'somebody' could be Australia.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
This article is well worth reading, as it gives an insightful account of the complexities of muslim thought on questions of apostasy. This thought is their own business; it is their actions that are of careful concern for Western nations and peoples.
27 March, 2006
ISLAM
Killing apostates not in Qu‘ran but a strongly held view in the masses
by Bernardo Cervellera
Fundamentalist theologians have led people to believe that apostasy undermines the unity of the Ummah, the Muslim community. But for Prof Francesco Zannini, who teaches at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, the issue is hotly debated amongst Muslims.
Rome (AsiaNews) – The recent case of Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert from Islam threatened with the death penalty, has re-opened the debate over the practice of enforcing capital punishment for apostasy in Muslim countries. For Francesco Zannini, professor of Modern Islam at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), the death penalty is not prescribed in the Qu‘ran even though people believe it is. What is clear though is that fundamentalists are fanning the flames on this issue and that Muslim governments acquiesce.
Is the death penalty for apostasy applied in all Islamic cultures?
Support for killing a convert to another religion is strong at a popular level in some countries that enforce the Sharia like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and states within Malaysia. But elsewhere in the Islamic world, there is a debate over whether it is right to kill an apostate or not.
It must be first said is that the Qu‘ran does not provide any precise guidelines in the matter. Indeed, it says: “There is no compulsion in religion. Verily, the Right Path has become distinct from the wrong path” (Sura, 2: 256). Even though other verses in the Qu‘ran can be interpreted as justification for killing since they speak of making war against the enemies of Islam, most suggest that anyone who rejects Islam after accepting it will be punished at the end of his life in the Last Judgement.
The hadith (the collected sayings of the prophet) that deal with the issue carry little weight. Some fundamentalists like [sheikh Yusuf] al-Qaradawi, who speaks on al-Jazeera, claim that killing an apostate is right so long as there is a single hadith that orders it. Others say instead that we cannot rely on the hadith to impose the death penalty.
The debate over apostasy has become more complex. Muslims are still discussing how to define it, whether renouncing Islam has to be done in words, in deeds or just in the heart.
Some intellectuals like Egyptian Nasr Abu Zaid and Bangladeshi Taslima Nazrin have been declared apostate in ways that seem to reflect a desire to get rid of people who dissent from the dominant way of thinking.
Whatever the case, the legal and theological bases of apostasy are rather weak, and the debate surrounding it is heated. On the one hand, we have people like Muhammad al-Ghazali, a modern fundamentalist who defends the death penalty for apostates. On the other, there are Egyptian human rights groups who are critical of the practice. Many Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian Muslims also believe that no one can use the Qu‘ran to draw the inference that killing apostates is necessary.
Does the death penalty go back to the origins of Islam or has it emerged in recent decades with the rise of fundamentalism?
In the beginning apostasy got mixed up with politics, namely with what to do with non Muslims who might be spies for the enemy. This ruthless attitude got worse under Abu Bakr, the first caliph. His successor however, Omar, did not even apply the rule on Islam’s enemies. Afterwards there was an attempt to codify the practice but it was never easily accepted in Islam.
Why is support for killing apostates so widespread at a popular level?
Because there is a strong consensus among Muslims that one cannot abandon one’s faith (and this is stressed in the Qu‘ran). This led to the persecution of heretics and apostates. Al-Hallaj, one of the great Muslim mystics died a martyr’s death at the hands of his fellow Muslims. In this sense, the political use of apostasy by rulers was important in manipulating popular attitudes.
What drives Muslims to want to kill anyone guilty of apostasy in the name of their religion, relatives included?
There are two factors that come into play; one that is spiritual and the other that is linked to their sense of community. Since Islam is seen as a totality, leaving it is seen as damaging its growth. It is not a matter of faith, but one of the Ummah or community. An apostate, a Muslim who converts, is seen as someone who is undermining the social cohesion of the family itself. For example, in Malaysia, people are talking about what to do with modernised Muslims, i.e. those who “do not act like true Muslims” as defined by the tradition. Some Qu‘ranic scholars insist that they should be sentenced to death. By contrast, in Indonesia, where the principles of Pancasila recognise freedom for five religions, families can have members who are Muslim, Christian, Hindu, etc.
It is also important to make a distinction between the Sharia, which is divinely ordained, and Fiqh, i.e. Islamic jurisprudence, which is based on human intellect. Hence, some Muslims ask why, since there is no divine ruling [about apostasy], man should assume the right to pass laws?
How strong are liberal voices who defend religious freedom in the Islamic world?
Tolerance is present in the constitutions of Muslim countries except for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan. The Saudis have gone so far as to refuse to sign the Charter on Human Rights because they do not accept religious freedom.
Other Muslim countries recognise religious freedom but do not protect it, partly because they have mixed constitutions. Some sections are inspired by the Sharia; others refer to international treaties. And in all, Islam is seen as the basis and inspiration for law-making. This opens the door to manipulation.
Among the masses, fundamentalism, which must protect itself from the attacks of the West, has been growing. Fundamentalist theologians manipulate the Qu‘ran. They refer to Muhammad’s struggle against Pagans (during his stay in Makkah) and view the fight against apostasy as part of the fight against Paganism and idolatry. This is why killing a Westerner, a Christian, or even a moderate Muslim is seen as justified.
Aren’t Muslim governments a bit too shy in asserting the independence of their constitutions vis-à-vis Islam?
Of course they are. Muslim governments are afraid of the masses and of fundamentalists. Their constitutions assert that sovereignty is vested in the people, but then say that Islam is above everything. This misunderstanding leaves people secure in their traditional view of things, which fundamentalists like to heat up as part of their dream to see the entire world under Islam.
What can we do? The Pope and many governments have demanded clemency for Abdul Rahman…
The West faces a problem. There is not accountability for the funds invested in education and culture. More often than not, the money goes to governments who use it to strengthen their power bases and not to moderate voices.
None the less, whatever is done, it must avoid the use of force. Muslims by and large believe that Islam is in danger. If changes are pursued through force this fear can turn into closure.
Our appeals must be based on humanitarian grounds and connected to the fate of Muslim intellectuals to show that Islam itself defends religious freedom.
Comment: It strikes me, based on years of living and working in the Middle East, that there are very likely to be very many muslims who despise Islam and want to be free of it. I have met numerous such persons, old and young, male and female, in my times in the middle east. They would have their own reasons for this hatred, and it is not my place or your place to sit in judgement on them or their reasons. 'Let there be no compulsion in matters of religion' as the Koran so rightly says; even though muslim practise is very opposite to this in a multitude of examples throughout history and today.
Given this likely situation, I suggest that it would be in the interest of the West, and a strengthening of basic international human rights, for a major migration country like Australia to grant refugee status to those muslims who formally abandon Islam. For them to do so and stay in a muslim country will lead to their murder. Australia can elevate human rights and give honour to the Koranic injunction concerning non compulsion in religion, by welcoming muslim apostates to the safety of our Pacific shores.
Some body has to stand up for the principle of religious freedom in general, and not just talk big when a particular case attracts the world's attention.
That 'somebody' could be Australia.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
Complexity Within Islam.
Note: The world of Islam is extremely complex and unquestionably interesting. This story tells of two muslim reactions; one of murder and one of love.
Date: 2006-03-28
Legacy of Slain Monks of Tibhirine Recounted by Priest Who Was in Ill-fated Monastery
Last Testament of Victim Prior Blesses Murderers
TIBHIRINE, Algeria, MARCH 28, 2006 (Zenit.org).- A friend of the prior of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine is trying to stir interest in the spiritual legacy of those men who were murdered a decade ago.
On the night of March 26-27, 1996, some 20 gunmen invaded the Monastery of Notre Dame of Atlas in Tibhirine and kidnapped its seven Trappist monks, of French nationality.
A month later, Djamel Zitouni, leader of the Armed Islamic Groups, claimed responsibility for the kidnappings and proposed an exchange of prisoners to France.
The following month, a second communiqué from the group announced: "We have slit the monks' throats." The killings reportedly took place May 21, 1996; their bodies were found nine days later.
Father Thierry Becker, of the Algerian diocese of Oran, was a guest of the monastery the night that the Muslim fundamentalists abducted Father Christian de Chergé, the prior, and the other six Trappists.
In recent statements to the Italian newspaper Avvenire, Father Becker asserted that he is recounting the legacy of the monks of Tibhirine.
Theirs was "a message of poverty, of abandonment in the hands of God and men, of sharing in all the fragility, vulnerability and condition of forgiven sinners, in the conviction that only by being disarmed will we be able to meet Islam and discover in Muslims a part of the total face of Christ," the priest said.
Father Becker is no stranger to strife in Algeria. He was vicar general in Oran when on Aug. 1, 1996, his own bishop, Pierre Lucien Claverie, 58, was killed along with an Algerian friend, Mohammed Pouchikhi. The Dominican prelate, born in Algeria, had dedicated his life to dialogue between Muslims and Christians. He had such a deep knowledge of Islam that he was often consulted on the subject by Muslims themselves.
A welcoming in truth
"Precisely the desire to welcome one another in truth, brought us together 10 year ago in Tibhirine," said Father Becker. "The meeting 'Ribat es-Salam,' Bond of Peace, was being held in those days, a group of Islamic-Christian dialogue which was oriented to share respective spiritual riches through prayer, silence….
"The Ribat still exists; it has not given up the challenge of communion with the spiritual depth of Islam. Thus we make our own the spiritual testimony of Father Christian de Chergé, whose monastic choice matured after an Algerian friend saved his life during the war of liberation, while that friend, a Muslim of profound spirituality, was killed in reprisal."
Father Becker continued: "'We are worshippers in the midst of a nation of worshippers,' the Prior used to say to his brothers in community, all of whom had decided to stay in Tibhirine even when violence was at its height.
"In the course of the decades, the monastery stripped itself of its riches, donated almost all of its land to the state, and shared its large garden with the neighboring village. The monks chose poverty, also in the sense of total abandonment to the will of God and of men.
"And great trust was born with the local people, so much so that 10 years after the events, nothing has disappeared from the monastery, everything has been respected. But the future of that holy place is in the hands of the Algerians."
Comment: Beside the violence which is now integral to Islam in the modern world, we have the reactions of the muslim peasantry who lived near the Monastery where the monks were murdered. It cannot be denied that the attitudes of these peasants exemplify Islam at its best...kind, appreciative, straight forward and non violent. Sadly, it is not this Islam which is the most active agent of the muslims in the world. Despite all the problems shown daily on TV in relation to Islam, readers should realise the true picture of Islam, which is one that has some light as well as much shade.
Date: 2006-03-28
Legacy of Slain Monks of Tibhirine Recounted by Priest Who Was in Ill-fated Monastery
Last Testament of Victim Prior Blesses Murderers
TIBHIRINE, Algeria, MARCH 28, 2006 (Zenit.org).- A friend of the prior of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine is trying to stir interest in the spiritual legacy of those men who were murdered a decade ago.
On the night of March 26-27, 1996, some 20 gunmen invaded the Monastery of Notre Dame of Atlas in Tibhirine and kidnapped its seven Trappist monks, of French nationality.
A month later, Djamel Zitouni, leader of the Armed Islamic Groups, claimed responsibility for the kidnappings and proposed an exchange of prisoners to France.
The following month, a second communiqué from the group announced: "We have slit the monks' throats." The killings reportedly took place May 21, 1996; their bodies were found nine days later.
Father Thierry Becker, of the Algerian diocese of Oran, was a guest of the monastery the night that the Muslim fundamentalists abducted Father Christian de Chergé, the prior, and the other six Trappists.
In recent statements to the Italian newspaper Avvenire, Father Becker asserted that he is recounting the legacy of the monks of Tibhirine.
Theirs was "a message of poverty, of abandonment in the hands of God and men, of sharing in all the fragility, vulnerability and condition of forgiven sinners, in the conviction that only by being disarmed will we be able to meet Islam and discover in Muslims a part of the total face of Christ," the priest said.
Father Becker is no stranger to strife in Algeria. He was vicar general in Oran when on Aug. 1, 1996, his own bishop, Pierre Lucien Claverie, 58, was killed along with an Algerian friend, Mohammed Pouchikhi. The Dominican prelate, born in Algeria, had dedicated his life to dialogue between Muslims and Christians. He had such a deep knowledge of Islam that he was often consulted on the subject by Muslims themselves.
A welcoming in truth
"Precisely the desire to welcome one another in truth, brought us together 10 year ago in Tibhirine," said Father Becker. "The meeting 'Ribat es-Salam,' Bond of Peace, was being held in those days, a group of Islamic-Christian dialogue which was oriented to share respective spiritual riches through prayer, silence….
"The Ribat still exists; it has not given up the challenge of communion with the spiritual depth of Islam. Thus we make our own the spiritual testimony of Father Christian de Chergé, whose monastic choice matured after an Algerian friend saved his life during the war of liberation, while that friend, a Muslim of profound spirituality, was killed in reprisal."
Father Becker continued: "'We are worshippers in the midst of a nation of worshippers,' the Prior used to say to his brothers in community, all of whom had decided to stay in Tibhirine even when violence was at its height.
"In the course of the decades, the monastery stripped itself of its riches, donated almost all of its land to the state, and shared its large garden with the neighboring village. The monks chose poverty, also in the sense of total abandonment to the will of God and of men.
"And great trust was born with the local people, so much so that 10 years after the events, nothing has disappeared from the monastery, everything has been respected. But the future of that holy place is in the hands of the Algerians."
Comment: Beside the violence which is now integral to Islam in the modern world, we have the reactions of the muslim peasantry who lived near the Monastery where the monks were murdered. It cannot be denied that the attitudes of these peasants exemplify Islam at its best...kind, appreciative, straight forward and non violent. Sadly, it is not this Islam which is the most active agent of the muslims in the world. Despite all the problems shown daily on TV in relation to Islam, readers should realise the true picture of Islam, which is one that has some light as well as much shade.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Islam In Action: Quick Reality Check.
Note: Institutional Islam is not represented by 'that nice muslim family next door'. There is a much harsher and very Islamic reality which we do not see in Australia. We should never forget that it exists, even if we don't see it in Sydney.
Spotlight on Sudan
In Depth
War and Genocide in Sudan: Chattel slavery in Sudan explained against the larger geopolitical context
Observations on Sudanese chattel slavery by the experts at the Sudan Human Rights Organization
Official findings of United Nations "rapparteurs"
First-hand experiences of Sudanese slaves freed by Christian Solidarity International
Slave redemption FAQ
More Resources
SudanActivism.com: Find out what you can do to stop genocide and slavery in Sudan
Escape from Slavery, by Francis Bok: the autobiography of a former Sudanese slave
Slave redemption in Sudan: discussion and debate
Human Rights Watch reports on Sudan
Smith College's Eric Reeves analyzes and reports on Sudan
To find out more about what you can do to stop slavery and genocide in Sudan visit SudanActivism.com.
Sudan's government is a radical regime that terrorizes its own population with brutal slave raids. Amidst civil war and inter-ethnic strife, the Sudanese government has launched a great revival of the country's once virtually-extinct institution of black chattel slavery. The victims: women and children abducted by militiamen during devastating raids.
Sudan means "land of the blacks" in Arabic, and for centuries black Africans were abducted in Sudan as part of the Arabian slave trade. Sudan's borders — drawn by the British during colonial times- encompass Muslim Arabs in the north and, in the south, black Africans of various faiths. A radical fundamentalist movement pressured the government to impose Sha'ria (Islamic law), on all of Sudan in 1983 — at which time slave raids were reintroduced against black African villages in the south and Nuba Mountains.
A 1989 military coup by the fundamentalist General Omar el-Bashir spurred a dramatic increase in slave raids, which still continue today. Armed by the government, militiamen destroy villages and take their pay in human booty. Grown men are shot, but women and children are the marauders' most prized reward. Forced labor without pay, severe beatings, acute hunger, forced religious and cultural conversion, rape, and ritual female genital mutilation are grim realities for the tens of thousands of children and young mothers now in bondage.
Chattel slavery in Sudan is perhaps the most intense form of human bondage seen today. Check out the above links to learn more about the history and horror of slavery and genocide in Sudan.
Comment: Most muslims you will ever meet will flatly deny that slavery exists (or has ever existed) in the Islamic world. The information available to you at SudanActivism.com should merit a few minutes of your time.
Spotlight on Sudan
In Depth
War and Genocide in Sudan: Chattel slavery in Sudan explained against the larger geopolitical context
Observations on Sudanese chattel slavery by the experts at the Sudan Human Rights Organization
Official findings of United Nations "rapparteurs"
First-hand experiences of Sudanese slaves freed by Christian Solidarity International
Slave redemption FAQ
More Resources
SudanActivism.com: Find out what you can do to stop genocide and slavery in Sudan
Escape from Slavery, by Francis Bok: the autobiography of a former Sudanese slave
Slave redemption in Sudan: discussion and debate
Human Rights Watch reports on Sudan
Smith College's Eric Reeves analyzes and reports on Sudan
To find out more about what you can do to stop slavery and genocide in Sudan visit SudanActivism.com.
Sudan's government is a radical regime that terrorizes its own population with brutal slave raids. Amidst civil war and inter-ethnic strife, the Sudanese government has launched a great revival of the country's once virtually-extinct institution of black chattel slavery. The victims: women and children abducted by militiamen during devastating raids.
Sudan means "land of the blacks" in Arabic, and for centuries black Africans were abducted in Sudan as part of the Arabian slave trade. Sudan's borders — drawn by the British during colonial times- encompass Muslim Arabs in the north and, in the south, black Africans of various faiths. A radical fundamentalist movement pressured the government to impose Sha'ria (Islamic law), on all of Sudan in 1983 — at which time slave raids were reintroduced against black African villages in the south and Nuba Mountains.
A 1989 military coup by the fundamentalist General Omar el-Bashir spurred a dramatic increase in slave raids, which still continue today. Armed by the government, militiamen destroy villages and take their pay in human booty. Grown men are shot, but women and children are the marauders' most prized reward. Forced labor without pay, severe beatings, acute hunger, forced religious and cultural conversion, rape, and ritual female genital mutilation are grim realities for the tens of thousands of children and young mothers now in bondage.
Chattel slavery in Sudan is perhaps the most intense form of human bondage seen today. Check out the above links to learn more about the history and horror of slavery and genocide in Sudan.
Comment: Most muslims you will ever meet will flatly deny that slavery exists (or has ever existed) in the Islamic world. The information available to you at SudanActivism.com should merit a few minutes of your time.
The Difficulty Of Reform In The Islamic World.
Note: The difficulty of reform and modernisation in the Islamic World is best described by a person from that world. Westerners cannot speak for the muslims. The essence of many such articles to recognise that reform is needed but they cannot see how this can happen without undermining Islam.
Are they right?
US reform threatens Arab identity
By Dr Sami Zebian
The Middle East remains in a state of turmoil
It could have been possible for any reform initiative, including the Greater Middle East Initiative proposed by the US, to succeed had it not been proposed in the present climate.
The Middle Eastern climate is volatile both politically and militarily from Palestine to Iraq, and even to the countries surrounding it - Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. The responsibility of such a climate is ironically, both directly and indirectly, that of the current US administration led by President George Bush - the same administration that proposed the initiative.
Therefore, not surprisingly, the American initiative comes saturated with the political hallmarks of that administration, which is perhaps best described as completely self-centred with no regard for Arab and/or Muslim societies led on by promises of reform while at the same time being existentially threatened.
Here the contradiction within the initiative becomes apparent: How can the people of the Middle East trust the American administration to be loyal in its initiative when they have been subjected to threats as a result of that administration's strategies?
Suppression
Reform initiatives - economic, social or administrative - proposed for any country or region have always gone hand in hand with political agendas. However, what is striking about the much needed and awaited current US initiative is that first and foremost it is based on political goals. This must be taken into account before it is accepted or refused.
And if I personally favour the rejection of the initiative, then it is because it is obvious that the hidden goal is to further weaken and intimidate Arab and/or Muslim societies - a kick them when they are down approach and make sure they stay down.
What is striking about the US initiative is that first and foremost it is based on political goals
If not, then why is it that such an initiative was not proposed at a time when its acceptance was much more likely, ie in the many years leading to the present explosive climate as opposed to during such a climate?
Therefore, the present American intention does not aim at reforming the situations of these Arab and/or Muslim societies but rather to achieve that double intimidation that I referred to, and which is two-fold.
Strategic intimidation
The aim of such strategic intimidation is to eliminate any form of Arab or Muslim unity considered as a threat to the US strategy, and that of its strategic ally, Israel. For that reason, the administration tried drowning any Arab or Muslim unity into the proposed US initiative, the Greater Middle East Initiative.
One US aim could be to break
Arab and Muslim unity
The US term for the success of such reform is that Arabs and Muslims were to forget what they have in common, moreover, also to forget Islam and its revered values.
The US initiative is to convince Arabs and Muslims that what they have in common is geographical not historical.
In addition, the US wanted, through its initiative, to include the Arab countries with the Muslim ones such as Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan and to unite them in a secure frame, the frame of the North Atlantic coalition, therefore having total domination and control over its security, similar to what it did with emerging eastern European countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
No nation excluded
The second aim of the American initiative is intimidation inside each country.
The American reform means to disturb the position of each Arab and Muslim country through forced development without considering its humanitarian, structural or social identity and culture, such as the woman's situation in these culture or attitude towards mixing between the two sexes.
This is similar to what the Shah's regime tried in Iran when it launched the White Revolution, applying the western way of life to Iranian society. The majority of Iranians refused such oppressive change and stayed faithful to the Islamic rules and way of life.
Is the West's political model
another Shah of Iran?
The same happened in Malaysia and other countries, where a natural social development occurred instead of a categorical change suggested by the American initiative.
One disturbing feature of the initiative is the concept of "no boundaries" between societies, therefore disregarding any human or social structure of such societies.
Such a concept is very dangerous. The level of freedom and rights varies from one Arab and/or Muslim country to another depending on the relationship and amount of communication between it and western culture.
In addition, political circumstances could hinder any prominent political openness: Syria, for example, is under pressure with the Israeli occupation of its Golan Heights.
Risks
The continuing war on Iraq and its negative consequences deny its neighbouring countries political openness. The war with Israel and the situation in Iraq both cause huge financial drains to the countries concerned, forcing them to put security and military needs before development projects.
This is the dangerous side of the American project. As for equality, pluralism, job opportunities, liberty for all citizens and women's rights in Arab and Muslim societies, they are the daily call in the writing of every Arab and Muslim writer.
The first step in any reform is to separate government resources from the personal benefits of leaders
The problem is not in depicting these problems, but in implementing them. A successful way of applying them is through a precise understanding of these societies that seem to be struggling under familial, tribal and sectarian groupings.
These characteristics obstruct democracy in some Arab states and have turned others into countries ruled by families and sects.
Therefore, the first step in any reform is to separate government resources from the personal benefits of leaders and reduce the authority of families and sects on it, making it a regime for all citizens.
Rule of law
The government should not be controlled by people getting their power from their sectarian background, but must be ruled by law and regulations.
And this requires time and money to be accomplished, to reach a state that will offer national health systems, pensions, maternity benefits, etc - like in Europe and the United States - to each and every citizen, irrespective of his/her sectarian identity.
If the intellectual Arab elites as well as the politicians reject this US project, it is because they clearly understand it. All members of the societies reject this project, since they perceive that its aim is to change their social habits. These habits need time to transform, unlike any political or economical issues that can be changed based on short-term plans.
Social change takes longer than
it does to vote in a government
Arab and Muslim societies have witnessed many political changes in the past 25 years, but social status has stayed more or less the same.
Any political situation can be easily changed through elections, and this can be done in less than a year. However, changing the social, cultural and behavioural structure of societies takes longer and cannot be done in the same way.
For instance, 50 years ago Turkey changed its political structure from an Islamic system to a European secular one, and still not much has changed in its social behaviour, evident by its having an Islamic party governing once again.
The hijab remains a dominant feature in Turkish society with the secular government unable to remove it, since secularism could not affect social composition at all its levels, leaving it with many of its old Islamic habits and behaviour.
Many Arabic and Muslim countries are similar to Turkey in preserving their Islamic identity.
Although it is highly recommended that we develop our societies and encourage change, this must be initiated from inside and not imposed from outside.
It is evident that the US project is rejected, since it does not recognise the true structure of the Muslim social order nor its identity. As a result, I think that the common people in the Middle East refuse this project more than the political elite.
Dr Sami Zebian is the author of many books and editor-in-chief of Al-Hawadeth Weekly magazine.
Comment: One would have to have a very hard heart not to feel some sympathy with many muslims. Their societies are not functioning, poverty in endemic and hopelessness is the pervading milieu. Reform beckons.
Yet reform will require that Islam be substantially modernised, as the Christian religion has been, at important junctures over the past 2000 years. The fear that this idea causes in muslim minds is an existential one.
'If you touch Islam will it die?'
It might...Shintoism died overnight in Japan in 1945 when the Emperor Hirohito declared to the defeated Japanese people that he was not 'a god'. They had believed that he was.
Islam, and muslims, are stuck between the Rock of the failed muslim societies and the Hard Place of reform. Something's got to give.
Are they right?
US reform threatens Arab identity
By Dr Sami Zebian
The Middle East remains in a state of turmoil
It could have been possible for any reform initiative, including the Greater Middle East Initiative proposed by the US, to succeed had it not been proposed in the present climate.
The Middle Eastern climate is volatile both politically and militarily from Palestine to Iraq, and even to the countries surrounding it - Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. The responsibility of such a climate is ironically, both directly and indirectly, that of the current US administration led by President George Bush - the same administration that proposed the initiative.
Therefore, not surprisingly, the American initiative comes saturated with the political hallmarks of that administration, which is perhaps best described as completely self-centred with no regard for Arab and/or Muslim societies led on by promises of reform while at the same time being existentially threatened.
Here the contradiction within the initiative becomes apparent: How can the people of the Middle East trust the American administration to be loyal in its initiative when they have been subjected to threats as a result of that administration's strategies?
Suppression
Reform initiatives - economic, social or administrative - proposed for any country or region have always gone hand in hand with political agendas. However, what is striking about the much needed and awaited current US initiative is that first and foremost it is based on political goals. This must be taken into account before it is accepted or refused.
And if I personally favour the rejection of the initiative, then it is because it is obvious that the hidden goal is to further weaken and intimidate Arab and/or Muslim societies - a kick them when they are down approach and make sure they stay down.
What is striking about the US initiative is that first and foremost it is based on political goals
If not, then why is it that such an initiative was not proposed at a time when its acceptance was much more likely, ie in the many years leading to the present explosive climate as opposed to during such a climate?
Therefore, the present American intention does not aim at reforming the situations of these Arab and/or Muslim societies but rather to achieve that double intimidation that I referred to, and which is two-fold.
Strategic intimidation
The aim of such strategic intimidation is to eliminate any form of Arab or Muslim unity considered as a threat to the US strategy, and that of its strategic ally, Israel. For that reason, the administration tried drowning any Arab or Muslim unity into the proposed US initiative, the Greater Middle East Initiative.
One US aim could be to break
Arab and Muslim unity
The US term for the success of such reform is that Arabs and Muslims were to forget what they have in common, moreover, also to forget Islam and its revered values.
The US initiative is to convince Arabs and Muslims that what they have in common is geographical not historical.
In addition, the US wanted, through its initiative, to include the Arab countries with the Muslim ones such as Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan and to unite them in a secure frame, the frame of the North Atlantic coalition, therefore having total domination and control over its security, similar to what it did with emerging eastern European countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
No nation excluded
The second aim of the American initiative is intimidation inside each country.
The American reform means to disturb the position of each Arab and Muslim country through forced development without considering its humanitarian, structural or social identity and culture, such as the woman's situation in these culture or attitude towards mixing between the two sexes.
This is similar to what the Shah's regime tried in Iran when it launched the White Revolution, applying the western way of life to Iranian society. The majority of Iranians refused such oppressive change and stayed faithful to the Islamic rules and way of life.
Is the West's political model
another Shah of Iran?
The same happened in Malaysia and other countries, where a natural social development occurred instead of a categorical change suggested by the American initiative.
One disturbing feature of the initiative is the concept of "no boundaries" between societies, therefore disregarding any human or social structure of such societies.
Such a concept is very dangerous. The level of freedom and rights varies from one Arab and/or Muslim country to another depending on the relationship and amount of communication between it and western culture.
In addition, political circumstances could hinder any prominent political openness: Syria, for example, is under pressure with the Israeli occupation of its Golan Heights.
Risks
The continuing war on Iraq and its negative consequences deny its neighbouring countries political openness. The war with Israel and the situation in Iraq both cause huge financial drains to the countries concerned, forcing them to put security and military needs before development projects.
This is the dangerous side of the American project. As for equality, pluralism, job opportunities, liberty for all citizens and women's rights in Arab and Muslim societies, they are the daily call in the writing of every Arab and Muslim writer.
The first step in any reform is to separate government resources from the personal benefits of leaders
The problem is not in depicting these problems, but in implementing them. A successful way of applying them is through a precise understanding of these societies that seem to be struggling under familial, tribal and sectarian groupings.
These characteristics obstruct democracy in some Arab states and have turned others into countries ruled by families and sects.
Therefore, the first step in any reform is to separate government resources from the personal benefits of leaders and reduce the authority of families and sects on it, making it a regime for all citizens.
Rule of law
The government should not be controlled by people getting their power from their sectarian background, but must be ruled by law and regulations.
And this requires time and money to be accomplished, to reach a state that will offer national health systems, pensions, maternity benefits, etc - like in Europe and the United States - to each and every citizen, irrespective of his/her sectarian identity.
If the intellectual Arab elites as well as the politicians reject this US project, it is because they clearly understand it. All members of the societies reject this project, since they perceive that its aim is to change their social habits. These habits need time to transform, unlike any political or economical issues that can be changed based on short-term plans.
Social change takes longer than
it does to vote in a government
Arab and Muslim societies have witnessed many political changes in the past 25 years, but social status has stayed more or less the same.
Any political situation can be easily changed through elections, and this can be done in less than a year. However, changing the social, cultural and behavioural structure of societies takes longer and cannot be done in the same way.
For instance, 50 years ago Turkey changed its political structure from an Islamic system to a European secular one, and still not much has changed in its social behaviour, evident by its having an Islamic party governing once again.
The hijab remains a dominant feature in Turkish society with the secular government unable to remove it, since secularism could not affect social composition at all its levels, leaving it with many of its old Islamic habits and behaviour.
Many Arabic and Muslim countries are similar to Turkey in preserving their Islamic identity.
Although it is highly recommended that we develop our societies and encourage change, this must be initiated from inside and not imposed from outside.
It is evident that the US project is rejected, since it does not recognise the true structure of the Muslim social order nor its identity. As a result, I think that the common people in the Middle East refuse this project more than the political elite.
Dr Sami Zebian is the author of many books and editor-in-chief of Al-Hawadeth Weekly magazine.
Comment: One would have to have a very hard heart not to feel some sympathy with many muslims. Their societies are not functioning, poverty in endemic and hopelessness is the pervading milieu. Reform beckons.
Yet reform will require that Islam be substantially modernised, as the Christian religion has been, at important junctures over the past 2000 years. The fear that this idea causes in muslim minds is an existential one.
'If you touch Islam will it die?'
It might...Shintoism died overnight in Japan in 1945 when the Emperor Hirohito declared to the defeated Japanese people that he was not 'a god'. They had believed that he was.
Islam, and muslims, are stuck between the Rock of the failed muslim societies and the Hard Place of reform. Something's got to give.
What Is It With Australian Converts to Islam?
Note: Yet another deranged Australian convert to Islam gets into trouble. Who is overseeing these conversions? This silly woman has now exposed herself to a trial under the Terrorism Act, and her already incarcerated boyfriend.
Is being a half-wit a precondition for conversion to Islam?
A woman charged at the weekend with plotting to bomb Sydney was a convert to Islam who planned the attack at the behest of a jailed murderer angered over anti-Muslim race riots here late last year.
Jill Courtney, 26, was arrested at her suburban Sydney home on Friday in a swoop by Federal and local police operating under anti-terrorism laws.
She was charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosives to be placed in or near a public place....
Police were not required to detail the allegations against Courtney during a brief court hearing yesterday, but Sunday newspapers quoted police sources saying they believed she was acting out of love for a jailed murderer, Hassan Kalache.
Kalache, 28, is serving a 22-year sentence for killing a rival drug dealer in 2002 and allegedly told Courtney he was angry over race riots in Sydney last December and that he would marry her if she carried out a retaliatory bombing.
A police detective said Courtney converted to Islam after becoming "besotted" with Kalache. "It's a pretty sad case, she's a bit of a candle in the wind," he was quoted as saying
Comment: With this track record being set, it wont be long before ever more Australians start grumbling to their Members of Parliament about letting any more Muslims into Australia.
If they are endless trouble, the grumblers will say, why do we need more?
I'm sure that someone has a good reason to explain to Australia why more muslims are needed.
The muslims themselves are creating this problem for themselves. Can they not see this?
Is being a half-wit a precondition for conversion to Islam?
A woman charged at the weekend with plotting to bomb Sydney was a convert to Islam who planned the attack at the behest of a jailed murderer angered over anti-Muslim race riots here late last year.
Jill Courtney, 26, was arrested at her suburban Sydney home on Friday in a swoop by Federal and local police operating under anti-terrorism laws.
She was charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosives to be placed in or near a public place....
Police were not required to detail the allegations against Courtney during a brief court hearing yesterday, but Sunday newspapers quoted police sources saying they believed she was acting out of love for a jailed murderer, Hassan Kalache.
Kalache, 28, is serving a 22-year sentence for killing a rival drug dealer in 2002 and allegedly told Courtney he was angry over race riots in Sydney last December and that he would marry her if she carried out a retaliatory bombing.
A police detective said Courtney converted to Islam after becoming "besotted" with Kalache. "It's a pretty sad case, she's a bit of a candle in the wind," he was quoted as saying
Comment: With this track record being set, it wont be long before ever more Australians start grumbling to their Members of Parliament about letting any more Muslims into Australia.
If they are endless trouble, the grumblers will say, why do we need more?
I'm sure that someone has a good reason to explain to Australia why more muslims are needed.
The muslims themselves are creating this problem for themselves. Can they not see this?
Monday, March 27, 2006
Blow to Sharia Law.
Date: 2006-03-26
Afghan Convert Spared; Pope Made Plea
VATICAN CITY, MARCH 26, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI was one of many world leaders who appealed to the president of Afghanistan to spare the life of a man sentenced to death for converting to Christianity.
Officials today, in fact, said an Afghan court dismissed the case against Abdul Rahman, paving the way for his release as early as Monday. Muslim extremists, who have demanded death for Rahman, 41, as an apostate from Islam, warned the decision would trigger protests across Afghanistan.
On Saturday the Vatican press office reported that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, wrote a letter March 22 in the Pope's name to President Hamid Karzai, to spare the life of Rahman.
The United States, Germany and Australia had also formally appealed for the life of the convert.
The Holy Father's appeal was based on "profound human compassion and firm belief in the dignity of human life, based on respect for the freedom of conscience and religion of every person," Cardinal Sodano's letter said.
The letter further stated that dropping the charges "would be the most significant contribution for our common mission to foster mutual understanding and respect among the different religions and cultures of the world."
Rahman was formally accused in a court of having converted to Christianity 15 years ago, while working in Pakistan with a group that assisted Afghan refugees.
Comment: This will lead to much unhappiness in many powerful muslim circles. They will see it for what it really is: a buckling of the Muslims to the religious sensibilities of the Christians. This is NOT what Islam is about, in the eyes of vast numbers of muslims. It is also a major international public humiliation to Sharia Law, which can be now be overturned in one of the most strongly muslim countries in the world.
Expect some very serious repercussion from this; probably an attack on a soft target like a famous church or church leader. President Karzai's life insurance policy will need to be strengthened.
Islam is NOT about seeing the 'other fellow's' point of view or working out a nice compromise, or celebrating that 'alls well that ends well'. Real Islam is not any of this.
From an Australian perspective, it would be useful to broaden our refugee intake criteria to specifically include persons who leave Islam, whether or not it is for another religious community or for no religious community at all.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
Afghan Convert Spared; Pope Made Plea
VATICAN CITY, MARCH 26, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI was one of many world leaders who appealed to the president of Afghanistan to spare the life of a man sentenced to death for converting to Christianity.
Officials today, in fact, said an Afghan court dismissed the case against Abdul Rahman, paving the way for his release as early as Monday. Muslim extremists, who have demanded death for Rahman, 41, as an apostate from Islam, warned the decision would trigger protests across Afghanistan.
On Saturday the Vatican press office reported that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, wrote a letter March 22 in the Pope's name to President Hamid Karzai, to spare the life of Rahman.
The United States, Germany and Australia had also formally appealed for the life of the convert.
The Holy Father's appeal was based on "profound human compassion and firm belief in the dignity of human life, based on respect for the freedom of conscience and religion of every person," Cardinal Sodano's letter said.
The letter further stated that dropping the charges "would be the most significant contribution for our common mission to foster mutual understanding and respect among the different religions and cultures of the world."
Rahman was formally accused in a court of having converted to Christianity 15 years ago, while working in Pakistan with a group that assisted Afghan refugees.
Comment: This will lead to much unhappiness in many powerful muslim circles. They will see it for what it really is: a buckling of the Muslims to the religious sensibilities of the Christians. This is NOT what Islam is about, in the eyes of vast numbers of muslims. It is also a major international public humiliation to Sharia Law, which can be now be overturned in one of the most strongly muslim countries in the world.
Expect some very serious repercussion from this; probably an attack on a soft target like a famous church or church leader. President Karzai's life insurance policy will need to be strengthened.
Islam is NOT about seeing the 'other fellow's' point of view or working out a nice compromise, or celebrating that 'alls well that ends well'. Real Islam is not any of this.
From an Australian perspective, it would be useful to broaden our refugee intake criteria to specifically include persons who leave Islam, whether or not it is for another religious community or for no religious community at all.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
Sunday, March 26, 2006
An Australian Islam? First Stirrings?
Note: This article is good news for Australian muslims. There is no 'ducking and weaving', just a straight forward denunciation of the primitivism of Afghan Muslims. Good work. Now build on it.
Prosecution of convert 'un-Islamic'
By Frank Walker
March 26, 2006
AUSTRALIAN Muslim leaders yesterday condemned moves in Afghanistan to execute a man who converted to Christianity.
The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils said the prosecution of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan was "barbaric" and "un-Islamic".
Spokesman Haset Sali called on the Australian Government to see if the Afghan prosecutors could be charged with crimes against humanity unless the religious charges against Mr Rahman were dismissed.
"Such barbaric action by anyone seeking to quote Islam as supporting their criminal action needs to be dealt with as a crime against humanity," Mr Sali said.
He said the Koran stated there must be "no compulsion in religion".
"The prosecution of Mr Rahman, seeking the death penalty against him for converting to Christianity is reminiscent of the fascist era that caused the Second World War and the pointless death of 55 million people."
Mr Sali said Afghans should respect the sanctity of life.
Comment: These remarks are most welcome.
Of course, Mr. Sali is factually wrong, in Islamic Law. While it is true that the Koran does not mandate the death penalty for apostasy and the abandonment of Islam, Sharia Law does. All four Sunni Muslim codes of Sharia Law and the Shi'ite code of Sharia Law are unanimous in agreeing that death is mandatory for a muslim who leaves Islam. This reading has stood for 1400 years.It is Sharia Law which governs the life of the muslims on a day to day basis, not the Koran. Islam is not really a 'religion of peace'.
Mr. Sali is confusing Sharia Law with life in Australia.
He is correct in calling the proceedings in Afghanistan 'barbaric',but is wrong in calling these proceedings 'un-Islamic'. These proceedings are perfectly Islamic.
Australian muslim leaders appear to be aware that the classical Islam in which they were raised is unsuitable for Australian conditions. They should take this opportunity to start the development of a particular Australian Islam.
This Islam will have to cancel the traditional violence that underpins all Islamic relations, private and public; it will have to incorporate the standard Australian notions of equality, between men and women and between muslim and non muslim; it will have to cancel all the affectations of 'stand out' clothing (dropping the pretense that 'Allah makes me do it');above all, an Australian Islam will have to commit to Australia, not the Muslim Ummah.
I wish the muslim leaders good luck as they set out to develop an Australian Islam. Unless they are successful in this endeavour, muslims will never be really accepted in the Australian community; which, in fact, is the very difficult position in which they find themselves in 2006.
Prosecution of convert 'un-Islamic'
By Frank Walker
March 26, 2006
AUSTRALIAN Muslim leaders yesterday condemned moves in Afghanistan to execute a man who converted to Christianity.
The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils said the prosecution of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan was "barbaric" and "un-Islamic".
Spokesman Haset Sali called on the Australian Government to see if the Afghan prosecutors could be charged with crimes against humanity unless the religious charges against Mr Rahman were dismissed.
"Such barbaric action by anyone seeking to quote Islam as supporting their criminal action needs to be dealt with as a crime against humanity," Mr Sali said.
He said the Koran stated there must be "no compulsion in religion".
"The prosecution of Mr Rahman, seeking the death penalty against him for converting to Christianity is reminiscent of the fascist era that caused the Second World War and the pointless death of 55 million people."
Mr Sali said Afghans should respect the sanctity of life.
Comment: These remarks are most welcome.
Of course, Mr. Sali is factually wrong, in Islamic Law. While it is true that the Koran does not mandate the death penalty for apostasy and the abandonment of Islam, Sharia Law does. All four Sunni Muslim codes of Sharia Law and the Shi'ite code of Sharia Law are unanimous in agreeing that death is mandatory for a muslim who leaves Islam. This reading has stood for 1400 years.It is Sharia Law which governs the life of the muslims on a day to day basis, not the Koran. Islam is not really a 'religion of peace'.
Mr. Sali is confusing Sharia Law with life in Australia.
He is correct in calling the proceedings in Afghanistan 'barbaric',but is wrong in calling these proceedings 'un-Islamic'. These proceedings are perfectly Islamic.
Australian muslim leaders appear to be aware that the classical Islam in which they were raised is unsuitable for Australian conditions. They should take this opportunity to start the development of a particular Australian Islam.
This Islam will have to cancel the traditional violence that underpins all Islamic relations, private and public; it will have to incorporate the standard Australian notions of equality, between men and women and between muslim and non muslim; it will have to cancel all the affectations of 'stand out' clothing (dropping the pretense that 'Allah makes me do it');above all, an Australian Islam will have to commit to Australia, not the Muslim Ummah.
I wish the muslim leaders good luck as they set out to develop an Australian Islam. Unless they are successful in this endeavour, muslims will never be really accepted in the Australian community; which, in fact, is the very difficult position in which they find themselves in 2006.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Gosh! Who'da Thunk It !?!?
Note: This is a very interesting article. The book will not be widely reviewed by our third rate press, but deserves a wide audience.
Conversely, is Islam (Koran and Sharia) responsible, mainly, for the world-wide poverty of the muslims individually and as societies? Yes? No?
This issue certainly deserves public discussion and not the avoidance which is the current format in dealing with every problem associated with Islam.
Researcher credits Christianity with West's success
It’s one of history’s most important questions: Why did Europe and North America embrace democracy and thrive economically while nations elsewhere suffered oppression and stagnation?
According to leading U.S. sociologist Rodney Stark, many scholars purposely overlook the obvious answer: It was the spread of Christianity that made possible political and economic freedoms, modern science and resulting Western advancement.
Such is the Baylor University professor’s contention in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success, one of the more provocative of recent books whose vigorous prose reflects the author’s one-time employment as a newspaper reporter.
Although Western intellectuals downplay theology, Stark said he sees Christian beliefs as the key. He said the basis for the West’s rise was “an extraordinary faith in reason’’ resulting from Christianity, which “alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.’’ Faith in humanity’s reasoning capacity, in turn, stimulated scientific theory-making, democratic theory and individual freedoms. Capitalism applied this to economics, producing an explosion of wealth, he said.
Stark rejects the century-old scenario of Max Weber that Protestantism under-girded capitalism. He said that the main elements were invented by Catholic monks and lay Italians centuries before the Reformation.
But Stark ignores the impact of the Jews’ biblical view of the world that was later adopted by Christians. He also impugns Islam, arguing that a major segment of Muslim thought “condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act. Thus, Islam did not fully embrace the notion that the universe ran along on fundamental principles laid down by God at the creation.’’
— The Associated Press
Comment: This book 'The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Lead to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success' should be on the history syllabus in every Australian school. It won't be, of course, because of the intellectual decay that has taken place at the top of Australian public administration.
Perhaps a sensible Australian government could finance translations of this book into all the languages of Asia, especially Bahasa Indonesia.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
Conversely, is Islam (Koran and Sharia) responsible, mainly, for the world-wide poverty of the muslims individually and as societies? Yes? No?
This issue certainly deserves public discussion and not the avoidance which is the current format in dealing with every problem associated with Islam.
Researcher credits Christianity with West's success
It’s one of history’s most important questions: Why did Europe and North America embrace democracy and thrive economically while nations elsewhere suffered oppression and stagnation?
According to leading U.S. sociologist Rodney Stark, many scholars purposely overlook the obvious answer: It was the spread of Christianity that made possible political and economic freedoms, modern science and resulting Western advancement.
Such is the Baylor University professor’s contention in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success, one of the more provocative of recent books whose vigorous prose reflects the author’s one-time employment as a newspaper reporter.
Although Western intellectuals downplay theology, Stark said he sees Christian beliefs as the key. He said the basis for the West’s rise was “an extraordinary faith in reason’’ resulting from Christianity, which “alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.’’ Faith in humanity’s reasoning capacity, in turn, stimulated scientific theory-making, democratic theory and individual freedoms. Capitalism applied this to economics, producing an explosion of wealth, he said.
Stark rejects the century-old scenario of Max Weber that Protestantism under-girded capitalism. He said that the main elements were invented by Catholic monks and lay Italians centuries before the Reformation.
But Stark ignores the impact of the Jews’ biblical view of the world that was later adopted by Christians. He also impugns Islam, arguing that a major segment of Muslim thought “condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act. Thus, Islam did not fully embrace the notion that the universe ran along on fundamental principles laid down by God at the creation.’’
— The Associated Press
Comment: This book 'The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Lead to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success' should be on the history syllabus in every Australian school. It won't be, of course, because of the intellectual decay that has taken place at the top of Australian public administration.
Perhaps a sensible Australian government could finance translations of this book into all the languages of Asia, especially Bahasa Indonesia.
Is anyone awake in Canberra?
Shouts and Whispers in the Classroom.
Note: Developments in important areas like education tend to quickly disperse widely in the Western world. It is useful for readers to keep abreast of movements involving muslims and education. It will help us here in Australia get the polcy settings right when we get around to integrating the muslim schools into the State Education System.
The problems inherent in the real world of muslim education in the West are already being recognised in Italy. There is much to be discussed, as this story from the Vatican shows.
The more hawkish line of this papacy on Islam was on clear display again this week, triggered by recent comments of Cardinal Renato Martino, President of both the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Refugees. In response to a request from the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy for religious instruction for Muslim children in Italian schools, Martino was favorable, saying that European countries "cannot backtrack" on religious pluralism.
In contrast, two senior figures in the Vatican power structure have taken a tougher line in response to the Muslim request.
Speaking to the Italian paper La Repubblica, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's Secretary of State, was ambivalent about teaching Islam, saying he would stress "reciprocity."
Muslim states, Sodano said, should give Christians the same rights that Muslims enjoy in the historically Christian countries of Europe. Among these rights, he said, is free exercise of one's religion.
In a March 20 address to the Permanent Council of the Italian bishops' conference, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the conference and the pope's vicar for the Rome diocese, was even stronger.
"As a matter of principle, instruction in the Islamic religion does not appear impossible," Ruini said. "It's important, however, to underline some fundamental conditions that must apply to any kind of instruction in Italian public schools: in particular, there must not be any conflict in the content of that teaching with respect to our Constitution, for example regarding civil rights, starting with religious liberty, or equality between men and women, or marriage."
"As a practical matter, up to now there's not been any representative subject for Islam that could establish an accord with the Italian state in this regard," Ruini said.
"Further, it would be necessary to ensure that teaching the Islamic religion would not give way to a socially dangerous kind of indoctrination," he said.
Ruini argued that it's false logic to say that because the state teaches Catholicism, therefore it should also teach Islam.
"Any comparison with teaching the Catholic religion doesn't hold up, given that this instruction, as article nine of the Accord of Revision of the Concordat affirms, has among its motives the fact 'that the principles of Catholicism are part of the historic patrimony of the Italian people,'" Ruini said.
"Proposals to suppress this instruction, eventually substituting it with teaching the history of religions … on the basis of greater religious pluralism born from immigration, as well as a presumed but non-existent decline in the vitality of Catholicism in Italy, don't take account of the fact that 91 percent of students freely attend lessons in the Catholic religion, to say nothing of the demand to conserve and reinforce our roots that's strongly present in the Italian people."
Comment: Muslims in Australia should not have their own schools. They currently have about 23 schools, all financed directly or indirectly from Wahhabi sources in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. This is not in Australia's interest because the muslim curriculum taught in these schools is the severest type of Islam. This Islam is deeply opposed to proper muslim integration into Australian society.
All the state requirements for these schools are met, but it is the curriculum and pro-Wahhabi atmosphere that pervades these schools which creates the problems which we (and the poor muslims) will face in future years.
Most Australian muslims do not send their children to these schools. They prefer the State or Catholic schools. These muslim parents and children are on their way to proper integration into Australia. No exceptions should be made for this 'minority within a minority'to promote a form of Islam that is incompatible with Australian norms.
The Australian people have a right to expect that all citizens integrate properly into our Nation.
The muslim schools should be integrated into the nation's mainstream school system.
The problems inherent in the real world of muslim education in the West are already being recognised in Italy. There is much to be discussed, as this story from the Vatican shows.
The more hawkish line of this papacy on Islam was on clear display again this week, triggered by recent comments of Cardinal Renato Martino, President of both the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Refugees. In response to a request from the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy for religious instruction for Muslim children in Italian schools, Martino was favorable, saying that European countries "cannot backtrack" on religious pluralism.
In contrast, two senior figures in the Vatican power structure have taken a tougher line in response to the Muslim request.
Speaking to the Italian paper La Repubblica, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's Secretary of State, was ambivalent about teaching Islam, saying he would stress "reciprocity."
Muslim states, Sodano said, should give Christians the same rights that Muslims enjoy in the historically Christian countries of Europe. Among these rights, he said, is free exercise of one's religion.
In a March 20 address to the Permanent Council of the Italian bishops' conference, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the conference and the pope's vicar for the Rome diocese, was even stronger.
"As a matter of principle, instruction in the Islamic religion does not appear impossible," Ruini said. "It's important, however, to underline some fundamental conditions that must apply to any kind of instruction in Italian public schools: in particular, there must not be any conflict in the content of that teaching with respect to our Constitution, for example regarding civil rights, starting with religious liberty, or equality between men and women, or marriage."
"As a practical matter, up to now there's not been any representative subject for Islam that could establish an accord with the Italian state in this regard," Ruini said.
"Further, it would be necessary to ensure that teaching the Islamic religion would not give way to a socially dangerous kind of indoctrination," he said.
Ruini argued that it's false logic to say that because the state teaches Catholicism, therefore it should also teach Islam.
"Any comparison with teaching the Catholic religion doesn't hold up, given that this instruction, as article nine of the Accord of Revision of the Concordat affirms, has among its motives the fact 'that the principles of Catholicism are part of the historic patrimony of the Italian people,'" Ruini said.
"Proposals to suppress this instruction, eventually substituting it with teaching the history of religions … on the basis of greater religious pluralism born from immigration, as well as a presumed but non-existent decline in the vitality of Catholicism in Italy, don't take account of the fact that 91 percent of students freely attend lessons in the Catholic religion, to say nothing of the demand to conserve and reinforce our roots that's strongly present in the Italian people."
Comment: Muslims in Australia should not have their own schools. They currently have about 23 schools, all financed directly or indirectly from Wahhabi sources in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. This is not in Australia's interest because the muslim curriculum taught in these schools is the severest type of Islam. This Islam is deeply opposed to proper muslim integration into Australian society.
All the state requirements for these schools are met, but it is the curriculum and pro-Wahhabi atmosphere that pervades these schools which creates the problems which we (and the poor muslims) will face in future years.
Most Australian muslims do not send their children to these schools. They prefer the State or Catholic schools. These muslim parents and children are on their way to proper integration into Australia. No exceptions should be made for this 'minority within a minority'to promote a form of Islam that is incompatible with Australian norms.
The Australian people have a right to expect that all citizens integrate properly into our Nation.
The muslim schools should be integrated into the nation's mainstream school system.
Saturday History Break.
Note: In dealing properly and fairly with the crisis involving Islam and the West, it is necessary for readers to start replacing the nonsense in their heads with some more factual historical understanding.
Go for reality not propaganda;you will feel better for it.
The Crusades (circa 1100AD-1300AD) is an important and fascinating subject. It's influence is very real today, especially for muslims. 1100AD may be a long time ago for contemporary readers, but it was only 'yesterday' in the souls and psychology of muslims, including australian muslims. To deal fairly and properly with muslims it is necessary to understand their world view and the issues in their collective life.
The article below is from a Catholic perspective.
The Crusades are much in the news of late. President Bush made the mistake of referring to the war against terrorism as a "crusade" and was roundly criticized for uttering a word both offensive and hurtful to the world’s Muslims. If it is painful, then it is remarkable indeed how often the Arabs themselves make use of the word. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar have repeatedly referred to Americans as "crusaders" and the present war as a "crusade against Islam." For decades now Americans have been routinely referred to as "crusaders" or "cowboys" among Arabs in the Middle East. Clearly the crusades are very much alive in the Muslim world.
They are not forgotten in the West either. Actually, despite the many differences between the East and West, most people in both cultures are in agreement about the Crusades. It is commonly accepted that the Crusades are a black mark on the history of Western civilization generally and the Catholic Church in particular. Anyone eager to bash Catholics will not long tarry before brandishing the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Crusades are often used as a classic example of the evil that organized religion can do. Your average man on the street in both New York and Cairo would agree that the Crusades were an insidious, cynical, and unprovoked attack by religious zealots against a peaceful, prosperous, and sophisticated Muslim world.
It was not always so. During the Middle Ages you could not find a Christian in Europe who did not believe that the Crusades were an act of highest good. Even the Muslims respected the ideals of the Crusades and the piety of the men who fought them. But that all changed with the Protestant Reformation. For Martin Luther, who had already jettisoned the Christian doctrines of papal authority and indulgences, the Crusades were nothing more than a ploy by a power-hungry papacy. Indeed, he argued that to fight the Muslims was to fight Christ himself, for it was he who had sent the Turks to punish Christendom for its faithlessness. When Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his armies began to invade Austria, Luther changed his mind about the need to fight, but he stuck to his condemnation of the Crusades. During the next two centuries people tended to view the Crusades through a confessional lens: Protestants demonized them, Catholics extolled them. As for Suleiman and his successors, they were just glad to be rid of them.
It was in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the current view of the Crusades was born. Most of the philosophes, like Voltaire, believed that medieval Christianity was a vile superstition. For them the Crusades were a migration of barbarians led by fanaticism, greed, and lust. Since then, the Enlightenment take on the Crusades has gone in and out of fashion. The Crusades received good press as wars of nobility (although not religion) during the Romantic period and the early twentieth century. After the Second World War, however, opinion again turned decisively against the Crusades. In the wake of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, historians found war of ideology–any ideology –distasteful. This sentiment was summed up by Sir Steven Runciman in his three-volume work, A History of the Crusades (1951-54). For Runciman, the Crusades were morally repugnant acts of intolerance in the name of God. The medieval men who took the cross and marched to the Middle East were either cynically evil, rapaciously greedy, or naively gullible. This beautifully written history soon became the standard. Almost single-handedly Runciman managed to define the modern popular view of the Crusades.
Since the 1970s the Crusades have attracted many hundreds of scholars who have meticulously poked, prodded, and examined them. As a result, much more is known about Christianity’s holy wars than ever before. Yet the fruits of decades of scholarship have been slow to enter the popular mind. In part this is the fault of professional historians, who tend to publish studies that, by necessity, are technical and therefore not easily accessible outside of the academy. But it is also due to a clear reluctance among modern elites to let go of Runciman’s vision of the Crusades. And so modern popular books on the Crusades–desiring, after all, to be popular–tend to parrot Runciman. The same is true for other media, like the multi-part television documentary, The Crusades (1995), produced by BBC/A&E and starring Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. To give the latter an air of authority the producers spliced in a number of distinguished Crusade historians who gave their views on events. The problem was that the historians would not go along with Runciman’s ideas. No matter. The producers simply edited the taped interviews cleverly enough that the historians seemed to be agreeing with Runciman. As Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith quite vehemently told me, "They made me appear to say things that I do not believe!"
So, what is the real story of the Crusades? As you might imagine, it is a long story. But there are good histories, written in the last twenty years, that lay much of it out. For the moment, given the barrage of coverage that the Crusades are getting nowadays, it might be best to consider just what the Crusades were not. Here, then, are some of the most common myths and why they are wrong.
Myth 1: The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression against a peaceful Muslim world.
This is as wrong as wrong can be. From the time of Mohammed, Muslims had sought to conquer the Christian world. They did a pretty good job of it, too. After a few centuries of steady conquests, Muslim armies had taken all of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, and most of Spain. In other words, by the end of the eleventh century the forces of Islam had captured two-thirds of the Christian world. Palestine, the home of Jesus Christ; Egypt, the birthplace of Christian monasticism; Asia Minor, where St. Paul planted the seeds of the first Christian communities: These were not the periphery of Christianity but its very core. And the Muslim empires were not finished yet. They continued to press westward toward Constantinople, ultimately passing it and entering Europe itself. As far as unprovoked aggression goes, it was all on the Muslim side. At some point what was left of the Christian world would have to defend itself or simply succumb to Islamic conquest. The First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II in 1095 in response to an urgent plea for help from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Urban called the knights of Christendom to come to the aid of their eastern brethren. It was to be an errand of mercy, liberating the Christians of the East from their Muslim conquerors. In other words, the Crusades were from the beginning a defensive war. The entire history of the eastern Crusades is one of response to Muslim aggression.
Myth 2: The Crusaders wore crosses, but they were really only interested in capturing booty and land. Their pious platitudes were just a cover for rapacious greed.
Historians used to believe that a rise in Europe’s population led to a crisis of too many noble "second sons," those who were trained in chivalric warfare but who had no feudal lands to inherit. The Crusades, therefore, were seen as a safety valve, sending these belligerent men far from Europe where they could carve out lands for themselves at someone else’s expense. Modern scholarship, assisted by the advent of computer databases, has exploded this myth. We now know that it was the "first sons" of Europe that answered the pope’s call in 1095, as well as in subsequent Crusades. Crusading was an enormously expensive operation. Lords were forced to sell off or mortgage their lands to gather the necessary funds. They were also not interested in an overseas kingdom. Much like a soldier today, the medieval Crusader was proud to do his duty but longed to return home. After the spectacular successes of the First Crusade, with Jerusalem and much of Palestine in Crusader hands, virtually all of the Crusaders went home. Only a tiny handful remained behind to consolidate and govern the newly won territories. Booty was also scarce. In fact, although Crusaders no doubt dreamed of vast wealth in opulent Eastern cities, virtually none of them ever even recouped their expenses. But money and land were not the reasons that they went on Crusade in the first place. They went to atone for their sins and to win salvation by doing good works in a faraway land.
Myth 3: When the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 they massacred every man, woman, and child in the city until the streets ran ankle deep with the blood.
This is a favorite used to demonstrate the evil nature of the Crusades. Most recently, Bill Clinton in a speech at Georgetown cited this as one reason the United States is a victim of Muslim terrorism. (Although Mr. Clinton brought the blood up to knee level for effect.) It is certainly true that many people in Jerusalem were killed after the Crusaders captured the city. But this must be understood in historical context. The accepted moral standard in all pre-modern European and Asian civilizations was that a city that resisted capture and was taken by force belonged to the victorious forces. That included not just the buildings and goods, but the people as well. That is why every city or fortress had to weigh carefully whether it could hold out against besiegers. If not, it was wise to negotiate terms of surrender. In the case of Jerusalem, the defenders had resisted right up to the end. They calculated that the formidable walls of the city would keep the Crusaders at bay until a relief force in Egypt could arrive. They were wrong. When the city fell, therefore, it was put to the sack. Many were killed, yet many others were ransomed or allowed to go free. By modern standards this may seem brutal. Yet a medieval knight would point out that many more innocent men, women, and children are killed in modern bombing warfare than could possibly be put to the sword in one or two days. It is worth noting that in those Muslim cities that surrendered to the Crusaders the people were left unmolested, retained their property, and allowed to worship freely. As for those streets of blood, no historian accepts them as anything other than a literary convention. Jerusalem is a big town. The amount of blood necessary to fill the streets to a continuous and running three-inch depth would require many more people than lived in the region, let alone the city.
Myth 4: The Crusades were just medieval colonialism dressed up in religious finery.
It is important to remember that in the Middle Ages the West was not a powerful, dominant culture venturing into a primitive or backward region. It was the Muslim East that was powerful, wealthy, and opulent. Europe was the third world. The Crusader States, founded in the wake of the First Crusade, were not new plantations of Catholics in a Muslim world akin to the British colonization of America. Catholic presence in the Crusader States was always tiny, easily less than ten percent of the population. These were the rulers and magistrates, as well as Italian merchants and members of the military orders. The overwhelming majority of the population in the Crusader States was Muslim. They were not colonies, therefore, in the sense of plantations or even factories, as in the case of India. They were outposts. The ultimate purpose of the Crusader States was to defend the Holy Places in Palestine, especially Jerusalem, and to provide a safe environment for Christian pilgrims to visit those places. There was no mother country with which the Crusader States had an economic relationship, nor did Europeans economically benefit from them. Quite the contrary, the expense of Crusades to maintain the Latin East was a serious drain on European resources. As an outpost, the Crusader States kept a military focus. While the Muslims warred against each other the Crusader States were safe, but once united the Muslims were able to dismantle the strongholds, capture the cities, and in 1291 expel the Christians completely.
Myth 5: The Crusades were also waged against the Jews.
No pope ever called a Crusade against Jews. During the First Crusade a large band of riffraff, not associated with the main army, descended on the towns of the Rhineland and decided to rob and kill the Jews they found there. In part this was pure greed. In part it also stemmed from the incorrect belief that the Jews, as the crucifiers of Christ, were legitimate targets of the war. Pope Urban II and subsequent popes strongly condemned these attacks on Jews. Local bishops and other clergy and laity attempted to defend the Jews, although with limited success. Similarly, during the opening phase of the Second Crusade a group of renegades killed many Jews in Germany before St. Bernard was able to catch up to them and put a stop to it. These misfires of the movement were an unfortunate byproduct of Crusade enthusiasm. But they were not the purpose of the Crusades. To use a modern analogy, during the Second World War some American soldiers committed crimes while overseas. They were arrested and punished for those crimes. But the purpose of the Second World War was not to commit crimes.
Myth 6: The Crusades were so corrupt and vile that they even had a Children’s Crusade.
The so-called "Children’s Crusade" of 1212 was neither a Crusade nor an army of children. It was a particularly large eruption of popular religious enthusiasm in Germany that led some young people, mostly adolescents, to proclaim themselves Crusaders and begin marching to the sea. Along the way they gathered plenty of popular support and not a few brigands, robbers, and beggars as well. The movement splintered in Italy and finally ended when the Mediterranean failed to dry up for them to cross. Pope Innocent III did not call this "Crusade." Indeed, he repeatedly urged non-combatants to stay at home, helping the war effort through fasting, prayer, and alms. In this case, he praised the zeal of the young who had marched so far, and then told them to go home.
Myth 7: Pope John Paul II apologized for the Crusades.
This is an odd myth, given that the pope was so roundly criticized for failing to apologize directly for the Crusades when he asked forgiveness from all those that Christians had unjustly harmed. It is true that John Paul recently apologized to the Greeks for the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204. But the pope at the time, Innocent III, expressed similar regret. That, too, was a tragic misfire that Innocent had done everything he could to avoid.
Myth 8: Muslims, who remember the Crusades vividly, have good reason to hate the West.
Actually, the Muslim world remembers the Crusades about as well as the West–in other words, incorrectly. That should not be surprising. Muslims get their information about the Crusades from the same rotten histories that the West relies on. The Muslim world used to celebrate the Crusades as a great victory for them. They did, after all, win. But western authors, fretting about the legacy of modern imperialism, have recast the Crusades as wars of aggression and the Muslims as placid sufferers. In so doing they have rescinded centuries of Muslim triumphs, offering in their stead only the consolation of victimhood.
Comment: Australian governments, State and Federal have shamefully neglected the local muslim communities over the past twenty years; this is the principal reason why most governmental involvement with the local muslims now, is via the Federal Police. No opportunity has ever been taken to develop a non police outreach to these communities.
I have lived much of my life in Australia so the third rated-ness of governments in Australia is no surprise. But now the situation at home is getting serious. We definitely need a lot of non-police outreach.
A suggestion: History is very important for muslims, so why not have the Federal Government (the one with all the money) give a proper amount of money to have an Australian university put together a History of the Crusades, based on Western, Muslim and Church documents. Western and Muslim scholars can do it and the purpose is to use facts to drive out propaganda. Involving Australian muslim scholars in such a project would greatly increase their prestige and give the local muslim communities some thing to be proud of. This would be better than endless obsessions with unending grievances, which only lead to 'Cronullas' and, in the future, something worse.
Go for reality not propaganda;you will feel better for it.
The Crusades (circa 1100AD-1300AD) is an important and fascinating subject. It's influence is very real today, especially for muslims. 1100AD may be a long time ago for contemporary readers, but it was only 'yesterday' in the souls and psychology of muslims, including australian muslims. To deal fairly and properly with muslims it is necessary to understand their world view and the issues in their collective life.
The article below is from a Catholic perspective.
The Crusades are much in the news of late. President Bush made the mistake of referring to the war against terrorism as a "crusade" and was roundly criticized for uttering a word both offensive and hurtful to the world’s Muslims. If it is painful, then it is remarkable indeed how often the Arabs themselves make use of the word. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar have repeatedly referred to Americans as "crusaders" and the present war as a "crusade against Islam." For decades now Americans have been routinely referred to as "crusaders" or "cowboys" among Arabs in the Middle East. Clearly the crusades are very much alive in the Muslim world.
They are not forgotten in the West either. Actually, despite the many differences between the East and West, most people in both cultures are in agreement about the Crusades. It is commonly accepted that the Crusades are a black mark on the history of Western civilization generally and the Catholic Church in particular. Anyone eager to bash Catholics will not long tarry before brandishing the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Crusades are often used as a classic example of the evil that organized religion can do. Your average man on the street in both New York and Cairo would agree that the Crusades were an insidious, cynical, and unprovoked attack by religious zealots against a peaceful, prosperous, and sophisticated Muslim world.
It was not always so. During the Middle Ages you could not find a Christian in Europe who did not believe that the Crusades were an act of highest good. Even the Muslims respected the ideals of the Crusades and the piety of the men who fought them. But that all changed with the Protestant Reformation. For Martin Luther, who had already jettisoned the Christian doctrines of papal authority and indulgences, the Crusades were nothing more than a ploy by a power-hungry papacy. Indeed, he argued that to fight the Muslims was to fight Christ himself, for it was he who had sent the Turks to punish Christendom for its faithlessness. When Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his armies began to invade Austria, Luther changed his mind about the need to fight, but he stuck to his condemnation of the Crusades. During the next two centuries people tended to view the Crusades through a confessional lens: Protestants demonized them, Catholics extolled them. As for Suleiman and his successors, they were just glad to be rid of them.
It was in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the current view of the Crusades was born. Most of the philosophes, like Voltaire, believed that medieval Christianity was a vile superstition. For them the Crusades were a migration of barbarians led by fanaticism, greed, and lust. Since then, the Enlightenment take on the Crusades has gone in and out of fashion. The Crusades received good press as wars of nobility (although not religion) during the Romantic period and the early twentieth century. After the Second World War, however, opinion again turned decisively against the Crusades. In the wake of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, historians found war of ideology–any ideology –distasteful. This sentiment was summed up by Sir Steven Runciman in his three-volume work, A History of the Crusades (1951-54). For Runciman, the Crusades were morally repugnant acts of intolerance in the name of God. The medieval men who took the cross and marched to the Middle East were either cynically evil, rapaciously greedy, or naively gullible. This beautifully written history soon became the standard. Almost single-handedly Runciman managed to define the modern popular view of the Crusades.
Since the 1970s the Crusades have attracted many hundreds of scholars who have meticulously poked, prodded, and examined them. As a result, much more is known about Christianity’s holy wars than ever before. Yet the fruits of decades of scholarship have been slow to enter the popular mind. In part this is the fault of professional historians, who tend to publish studies that, by necessity, are technical and therefore not easily accessible outside of the academy. But it is also due to a clear reluctance among modern elites to let go of Runciman’s vision of the Crusades. And so modern popular books on the Crusades–desiring, after all, to be popular–tend to parrot Runciman. The same is true for other media, like the multi-part television documentary, The Crusades (1995), produced by BBC/A&E and starring Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. To give the latter an air of authority the producers spliced in a number of distinguished Crusade historians who gave their views on events. The problem was that the historians would not go along with Runciman’s ideas. No matter. The producers simply edited the taped interviews cleverly enough that the historians seemed to be agreeing with Runciman. As Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith quite vehemently told me, "They made me appear to say things that I do not believe!"
So, what is the real story of the Crusades? As you might imagine, it is a long story. But there are good histories, written in the last twenty years, that lay much of it out. For the moment, given the barrage of coverage that the Crusades are getting nowadays, it might be best to consider just what the Crusades were not. Here, then, are some of the most common myths and why they are wrong.
Myth 1: The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression against a peaceful Muslim world.
This is as wrong as wrong can be. From the time of Mohammed, Muslims had sought to conquer the Christian world. They did a pretty good job of it, too. After a few centuries of steady conquests, Muslim armies had taken all of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, and most of Spain. In other words, by the end of the eleventh century the forces of Islam had captured two-thirds of the Christian world. Palestine, the home of Jesus Christ; Egypt, the birthplace of Christian monasticism; Asia Minor, where St. Paul planted the seeds of the first Christian communities: These were not the periphery of Christianity but its very core. And the Muslim empires were not finished yet. They continued to press westward toward Constantinople, ultimately passing it and entering Europe itself. As far as unprovoked aggression goes, it was all on the Muslim side. At some point what was left of the Christian world would have to defend itself or simply succumb to Islamic conquest. The First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II in 1095 in response to an urgent plea for help from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Urban called the knights of Christendom to come to the aid of their eastern brethren. It was to be an errand of mercy, liberating the Christians of the East from their Muslim conquerors. In other words, the Crusades were from the beginning a defensive war. The entire history of the eastern Crusades is one of response to Muslim aggression.
Myth 2: The Crusaders wore crosses, but they were really only interested in capturing booty and land. Their pious platitudes were just a cover for rapacious greed.
Historians used to believe that a rise in Europe’s population led to a crisis of too many noble "second sons," those who were trained in chivalric warfare but who had no feudal lands to inherit. The Crusades, therefore, were seen as a safety valve, sending these belligerent men far from Europe where they could carve out lands for themselves at someone else’s expense. Modern scholarship, assisted by the advent of computer databases, has exploded this myth. We now know that it was the "first sons" of Europe that answered the pope’s call in 1095, as well as in subsequent Crusades. Crusading was an enormously expensive operation. Lords were forced to sell off or mortgage their lands to gather the necessary funds. They were also not interested in an overseas kingdom. Much like a soldier today, the medieval Crusader was proud to do his duty but longed to return home. After the spectacular successes of the First Crusade, with Jerusalem and much of Palestine in Crusader hands, virtually all of the Crusaders went home. Only a tiny handful remained behind to consolidate and govern the newly won territories. Booty was also scarce. In fact, although Crusaders no doubt dreamed of vast wealth in opulent Eastern cities, virtually none of them ever even recouped their expenses. But money and land were not the reasons that they went on Crusade in the first place. They went to atone for their sins and to win salvation by doing good works in a faraway land.
Myth 3: When the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 they massacred every man, woman, and child in the city until the streets ran ankle deep with the blood.
This is a favorite used to demonstrate the evil nature of the Crusades. Most recently, Bill Clinton in a speech at Georgetown cited this as one reason the United States is a victim of Muslim terrorism. (Although Mr. Clinton brought the blood up to knee level for effect.) It is certainly true that many people in Jerusalem were killed after the Crusaders captured the city. But this must be understood in historical context. The accepted moral standard in all pre-modern European and Asian civilizations was that a city that resisted capture and was taken by force belonged to the victorious forces. That included not just the buildings and goods, but the people as well. That is why every city or fortress had to weigh carefully whether it could hold out against besiegers. If not, it was wise to negotiate terms of surrender. In the case of Jerusalem, the defenders had resisted right up to the end. They calculated that the formidable walls of the city would keep the Crusaders at bay until a relief force in Egypt could arrive. They were wrong. When the city fell, therefore, it was put to the sack. Many were killed, yet many others were ransomed or allowed to go free. By modern standards this may seem brutal. Yet a medieval knight would point out that many more innocent men, women, and children are killed in modern bombing warfare than could possibly be put to the sword in one or two days. It is worth noting that in those Muslim cities that surrendered to the Crusaders the people were left unmolested, retained their property, and allowed to worship freely. As for those streets of blood, no historian accepts them as anything other than a literary convention. Jerusalem is a big town. The amount of blood necessary to fill the streets to a continuous and running three-inch depth would require many more people than lived in the region, let alone the city.
Myth 4: The Crusades were just medieval colonialism dressed up in religious finery.
It is important to remember that in the Middle Ages the West was not a powerful, dominant culture venturing into a primitive or backward region. It was the Muslim East that was powerful, wealthy, and opulent. Europe was the third world. The Crusader States, founded in the wake of the First Crusade, were not new plantations of Catholics in a Muslim world akin to the British colonization of America. Catholic presence in the Crusader States was always tiny, easily less than ten percent of the population. These were the rulers and magistrates, as well as Italian merchants and members of the military orders. The overwhelming majority of the population in the Crusader States was Muslim. They were not colonies, therefore, in the sense of plantations or even factories, as in the case of India. They were outposts. The ultimate purpose of the Crusader States was to defend the Holy Places in Palestine, especially Jerusalem, and to provide a safe environment for Christian pilgrims to visit those places. There was no mother country with which the Crusader States had an economic relationship, nor did Europeans economically benefit from them. Quite the contrary, the expense of Crusades to maintain the Latin East was a serious drain on European resources. As an outpost, the Crusader States kept a military focus. While the Muslims warred against each other the Crusader States were safe, but once united the Muslims were able to dismantle the strongholds, capture the cities, and in 1291 expel the Christians completely.
Myth 5: The Crusades were also waged against the Jews.
No pope ever called a Crusade against Jews. During the First Crusade a large band of riffraff, not associated with the main army, descended on the towns of the Rhineland and decided to rob and kill the Jews they found there. In part this was pure greed. In part it also stemmed from the incorrect belief that the Jews, as the crucifiers of Christ, were legitimate targets of the war. Pope Urban II and subsequent popes strongly condemned these attacks on Jews. Local bishops and other clergy and laity attempted to defend the Jews, although with limited success. Similarly, during the opening phase of the Second Crusade a group of renegades killed many Jews in Germany before St. Bernard was able to catch up to them and put a stop to it. These misfires of the movement were an unfortunate byproduct of Crusade enthusiasm. But they were not the purpose of the Crusades. To use a modern analogy, during the Second World War some American soldiers committed crimes while overseas. They were arrested and punished for those crimes. But the purpose of the Second World War was not to commit crimes.
Myth 6: The Crusades were so corrupt and vile that they even had a Children’s Crusade.
The so-called "Children’s Crusade" of 1212 was neither a Crusade nor an army of children. It was a particularly large eruption of popular religious enthusiasm in Germany that led some young people, mostly adolescents, to proclaim themselves Crusaders and begin marching to the sea. Along the way they gathered plenty of popular support and not a few brigands, robbers, and beggars as well. The movement splintered in Italy and finally ended when the Mediterranean failed to dry up for them to cross. Pope Innocent III did not call this "Crusade." Indeed, he repeatedly urged non-combatants to stay at home, helping the war effort through fasting, prayer, and alms. In this case, he praised the zeal of the young who had marched so far, and then told them to go home.
Myth 7: Pope John Paul II apologized for the Crusades.
This is an odd myth, given that the pope was so roundly criticized for failing to apologize directly for the Crusades when he asked forgiveness from all those that Christians had unjustly harmed. It is true that John Paul recently apologized to the Greeks for the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204. But the pope at the time, Innocent III, expressed similar regret. That, too, was a tragic misfire that Innocent had done everything he could to avoid.
Myth 8: Muslims, who remember the Crusades vividly, have good reason to hate the West.
Actually, the Muslim world remembers the Crusades about as well as the West–in other words, incorrectly. That should not be surprising. Muslims get their information about the Crusades from the same rotten histories that the West relies on. The Muslim world used to celebrate the Crusades as a great victory for them. They did, after all, win. But western authors, fretting about the legacy of modern imperialism, have recast the Crusades as wars of aggression and the Muslims as placid sufferers. In so doing they have rescinded centuries of Muslim triumphs, offering in their stead only the consolation of victimhood.
Comment: Australian governments, State and Federal have shamefully neglected the local muslim communities over the past twenty years; this is the principal reason why most governmental involvement with the local muslims now, is via the Federal Police. No opportunity has ever been taken to develop a non police outreach to these communities.
I have lived much of my life in Australia so the third rated-ness of governments in Australia is no surprise. But now the situation at home is getting serious. We definitely need a lot of non-police outreach.
A suggestion: History is very important for muslims, so why not have the Federal Government (the one with all the money) give a proper amount of money to have an Australian university put together a History of the Crusades, based on Western, Muslim and Church documents. Western and Muslim scholars can do it and the purpose is to use facts to drive out propaganda. Involving Australian muslim scholars in such a project would greatly increase their prestige and give the local muslim communities some thing to be proud of. This would be better than endless obsessions with unending grievances, which only lead to 'Cronullas' and, in the future, something worse.
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