Muslim Reformation? Yes Please!

Note: An excellent essay. Highly recommended for muslims who suspect that
'something' may be wrong with their situation in Australia...'something' for which the muslims themselves may be responsible.





No religion has a monopoly on violence. Christianity has the Spanish Inquisition and the bloody excesses of the Crusades. The Jews have the Book of Joshua and Baruch Goldstein. More recently, India's Hindus massacred thousands of Muslims in Gujarat province. Over the course of human history, hundreds of millions have died in senseless sectarian massacres, and a thousand more examples might easily be listed.
But it will not do to take the politically correct course and lump all religions in the same basket, at least not insofar as our own era is concerned. Christian civilization underwent a Reformation in the 16th century, embraced the Enlightenment with its intellectual and theological pluralism, separated Church from State and encouraged scholarship and democracy. Judaism has followed a similar process -- as have, more recently, the faiths of the far East. Islam, on the other hand, is still struggling with this transition. And if there is to be peace in the Middle East and an end to terror worldwide, Muslims must accept that their faith is overdue for a doctrinal overhaul.

Muslim history presents plenty of enlightened periods from which modern adherents may take inspiration. In the Middle Ages when much of Christendom was preoccupied with torturing heretics, the Islamic world was, by comparison, a bastion of civilization and tolerance. As historian Bernard Lewis has pointed out, from the 14th to 17th centuries there was "only one civilization that was comparable in the level, quality and variety of achievement [to the Islamic world]; that of course was China." But Chinese culture "remained essentially local, limited to one region ... and race. Islam, in contrast, created a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial, international."

Christianity still has its fanatical, bigoted elements. But those Christians who advocate the slaughter of non-believers make up an almost imperceptibly tiny fraction of the faithful. Much is made of the intolerant pronouncements of high-profile evangelists. A few deranged anti-abortion snipers aside, however, this is just talk. Even terrorists that claim to be part of the Christian world -- such as Spain's Basque extremists and America's Timothy McVeigh -- typically do not operate under any sort of religious aegis.

By contrast, a large minority of the world's one billion Muslims still adhere to militant interpretations of their faith, including the Wahabi sect of Sunni Islam, centred in and spread by Saudi Arabia. These interpretations all embrace as a central tenet the duty of jihad -- which, despite whitewashing efforts in the West, continues to mean what it has meant since the 7th century: the slaughter or forced conversion of non-Muslim "infidels." With few exceptions -- such as old-school Palestinian terrorists who cling to Marxist rhetoric -- Muslim terrorist groups all explicitly take Islam as their inspiration. Osama bin Laden is a hero to hundreds of millions of Muslims, and al-Qaeda continues to receive financing from a wide array of Muslim charities. Christians kill. Jews kill. Hindus kill.
But no other faith group on the planet has embraced random slaughter in anything approaching the manner of radicalized Muslims.

The mainstream Arabic media is shot through with the most extreme sort of hatred. Many televised sermons emphasize passages from the Koran that condone violence, such as that which exhorts Muslims to "slay the idolaters wherever ye find them." Also widely cited is a Hadith -- a pronouncement ascribed to Mohammed -- that states: "The day of judgment will not arrive until Muslims fight Jews, and Muslims will kill Jews until the Jew hides behind a tree or a stone. Then the tree and the stone will say: 'O Muslim, O servant of God, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.' " As groups such as Palestinian Media Watch and Middle East Media Research Institute have detailed, the problem is especially acute in the Palestinian media, which teaches teenagers that 72 virgins await in paradise should they "martyr" themselves.

Look through the Bible and you can find the equivalent fire and brimstone. But to contemporary Jewish and Christian clerics, well-steeped in the pluralistic principles of modern liberal democracy, these passages serve more as embarrassment than inspiration. Certainly, they are not the stuff of prime time television.

In many parts if the Muslim world, the level of intellectual discourse approximates that of medieval Europe. A prominent professor at a Riyadh university, funded by the Saudi government, asserts the truth of what Jewish organization refer to as the "blood libel" -- the hideous myth that rabbis the world over kill Christian and Muslim babies each year so their blood may be used to make the triangular pastries favoured during the Jewish holiday of Purim. Western academics may espouse a lot of rubbish, but nothing so outlandish, hateful, racist and grotesque as this -- and certainly not with state subsidy.

Muslim advocacy organizations in the West, including Canada's own Canadian Islamic Congress, typically reject the claim that there is a problem with contemporary Islam, preferring to lay the world's problems at the feet of Israel and U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, any critical scrutiny of their religion is decried as "bigotry" -- a label that will, no doubt, be hurled at this modest essay. But it is evident these commentators are putting pride of faith above truth. The celebrations in the Islamic world on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and the continued glorification of the "Magnificent 19" that performed the attack; the religious radicalization of governments in Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and parts of Pakistan; the wholesale support for Islamic jihadis by the governments of Syria and Iran; the spread of Islamist propaganda through mosques and Muslim organizations; and the spewing of vehement anti-Semitism in Islamic community newsletters, textbooks and media: These are symptoms of a civilization in crisis, not inventions of a bigoted media.

Thankfully, there is scant evidence that Canada's Muslim community has been radicalized, except in small pockets. But even so, it is disturbing that many North American Muslim groups act as a sort of counter-counter-terrorism lobby -- rejecting, by reflex, any effort to catch terror suspects or shut charities linked to terrorism. Many Muslims come to this debate honestly, and we understand their exasperation with security practices that often seem, from their perspective, like exercises in crude profiling. But some Muslim groups go further -- rejecting as a matter of principle the use of the word "terrorist" to describe Islamist slaughter in such places as Israel, India and Chechnya. In its most virulent mode, the counter-counter-terrorism campaign is a disturbing mixture of the Western concept of political correctness with the Islamist conceit that bloody jihad is always righteous.

There is some positive pressure coming from Muslims in the West and in the Islamic world. Irshad Manji, a Toronto journalist, calls on Muslims to purge their faith of radicals and zealots in her new book The Trouble With Islam, recently excerpted in the National Post. Thomas Friedman, a highly respected columnist with The New York Times who has travelled extensively in the Middle East, reports he has recently encountered prominent young Muslim leaders anxious to sever the bonds between their nations' absolutist rulers and religious hierarchies. And in a recent column on the subject, National Post contributor Daniel Pipes has identified a variety of Muslim intellectuals seeking to reform their religion -- including Abdelwahab Meddeb of the Sorbonne, Akbar Ahmed of American University and Salim Mansur of the University of Western Ontario.

These are encouraging signs. But until a Muslim majority worldwide rebels against the manner in which their ancient faith has been hijacked by extremists, good intentions will lead nowhere. What is needed is nothing less than a Muslim Reformation.



Comment: Will the Australian 'Mohammad' Luther please stand up.