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Peter Lamborn Wilson Interview Part 1 of 2: On Islam

2010-04-23T10:53:00.003-07:00

Peter Lamborn Wilson Interview
Part 1 of 2: On Islam

Notes

Interview conducted by the Affinity Project in December 2005; Published in July 2008.

AP = Affinity Project
PLW = Peter Lamborn Wilson

*

Interview

AP: Would you define yourself as a Muslim, and if so, what kind of Islam would you say you practice amongst the multiplicity of different forms?

PLW: Well, I've been many things in my life and I don't renounce any of them. But I don't necessarily practice any of them on a daily basis either. I never renounced Christianity or if I did, I take it back. I've been involved in Tantric things that I guess you could call Hinduism, although that's a very vague term. I practice Shia Islam. I still consider myself all those things but, obviously that's a difficult position to take vis-a-vis the orthodox practitioners of these different faiths. So, if I had to define my position now in terms that would be historically meaningful in an Islamic context, I would refer to Hazrat Inayat Khan and his idea of universalism, that all religions are true. And if this involves contradiction, as Emerson said, OK. We'll just deal with it on a different level. And the inspiration for this in his case was Indian synchrotism, between Hinduism and Islam especially, although other religions were involved too such as Christianity, Judaism and others. This happened on both a non-literate level of the peasantry and still persists to this day on that level, and also occurred on a very high level of intellectual Sufism which was almost a courtly thing at certain times, especially under some of the wilder Mughal rulers like Akbar who started Din-i Ilahi. So these things have precedents within the Islamic traditions, this universalism, this radical tolerance would be another way of putting it, but nowadays of course it's hard to find this praxis on the ground. I can't practice some Indian village cult here, that would be a little--well I sort of do, you know--but actually (laughs), it's highly personal.

AP: Would you say that it's radically tolerant or radically accepting? I would say that there is a distinction between tolerance and acceptance.

PLW: I know what you're getting at. Tolerance in this sense is a kind of weak position, and acceptance would be a strong position?

AP: I would say that, for example, I can tolerate homosexuals, Muslim homosexuals, or I can say well I accept them in the fold of Islam because they define themselves as Muslim.

PLW: Using the term in that sense, what I mean by radical tolerance is what you're calling acceptance. In other words it's not just ecumenicalism here. It's not a reformist position. It's a pretty radical position. And it got Hazrat Inayat Khan in a lot of trouble amongst orthodox Muslims. This movement still suffers from that today. But in India, there is this tradition of that, it still persists in India more than in other countries where the fundamentalist/reformist/modernist thing has swept away the so-called medieval creations which make up all the charm and difference. That's what they hate.

AP: What is it that interested or intrigued you in Islam in particular? And I believe you were introduced to it in Morocco, was it?

PLW: Well really, in New York. This goes back to the 60s and my involvement in one of the--I guess you could say--new religions of that era which came out of Moor Science tradition. I don't know if you've read any of my stuff on this. So already in New York I was taking an interest in these things.

AP: And why was that?

PLW: Well, because I got contact into that movement and also began to read Al-Ghazali on the recommendation of some of the people in that movement and we all became very interested in trying to find out whether there was such a thing as living Sufism. This was the 60s, there was no 'new-age' there on the ground. None of these people were so visibly active. Anyway, we didn't find them. So that was one of my reasons for going to the East.

AP: Well that's one of the things that is associated with Al-Ghazali, especially with regards to the fact that he was considered, or considered himself to be a Sufi. And then I believe that before he had passed away he had become a Sunni. And then he began to take more of a Sunni sort of path, and highlighted nonetheless of Sufism and the spiritual element with regards to the necessity of spirituality, the return to Islam.

PLW: Yeah sure, he was a great intellectual epitome of that position in a lot of ways. But we weren't reading him from that point of view because we weren't reading him from inside Islam. We were reading The Alchemy of Happiness and it was psychadelic. It was like, "Hey, why are we reading this Tibetan Book of the Dead stuff, this is really far out." And it's only years later that I came to see Al-Ghazali as this bastion of orthodoxy within Sufism. And this is how he's perceived in the tradition, you're quite right. But that isn't how we were reading it. And we got hold of a few other things some Ibn Arabi, very little, but we weren't scholars, we weren't Islamologists. There were such people around but they never would have occurred to us.

AP: But obviously in Islam, and I'm sure you're aware of this, is the concept of Ijithad...

PLW: More in Shi'ism.

AP: ...the fact that it is the duty of every Muslim, male or female, child or eldery, to strive to get to know more about Islam, more about the world, etc., as much as s/he can. Is that one of the things that interested you as well is that it's sort of an infinitum of desire to learn, to know what is the responsibility of every single individual--not just a particular scholar--and therefore removing the element of authority that exists within Islam?

PLW: I don't know whether I grasp that very fully in my initial contacts with the thing, because I wasn't reading Islam, I wasn't reading Sufism per se. So in other words these dialectical aspects that you're pointing out here were not so clear to me at the beginning. They're very clear to me now, I could almost say in a retrospective position, which I might take now. In that sense yes, obviously, this is one of the key elements that makes certain aspects of Islam interesting to certain aspects of anarchism, that precise thing which is often being called 'democracy.' Sociologists would label this as a 'democratic tendency' within Islam as compared to other religions and they would point out that the Ulema, although technically speaking do not occupy an authoritarian position, in practice often do. And especially now.

AP: Why do you think that is? Why do you think that turns out?

PLW: Well, I don't know. It's like the old saying, Sufism was once reality without a name and now it's a name without reality. We could talk about this in a completely Islamic way as the corruption and decline of the true original Islam, which for Sufism is not fundamentalist but is Sufi. The real origins are mystical origins. That's just the sociology of institutions from a secular point of view, what we're looking at is that institutions that become authoritarian, especially when they last for thousands of years. Yes?

AP: Yeah.

PLW: We could go on, we could go into Maxine Rodinson's critique of Islam as not having enough of a doctrinal framework to really be considered as opposed to capitalism. Have you read him?

AP: No, I haven't read him on Islam but I think with regards to the aspect of the anti-capitalist sentiments that exist within Islam, particularly with a pillar of Islam which is Zakat and the way of Islam...

PLW: And again, Shi'ism adds 'social justice' to the pillars, so if you combine those two you get as Ali Shariati did, you get the possibility of an Islamic socialism with strong non-authoritarian tendencies.

AP: Would you say an Islamic socialism or an Islamic anarchism?

PLW: No, in his case socialism. He did not go all the way to anarchism. He was interested, I think, in some anarchist thinkers but he didn't see that as... he was looking for something practical for Iran, I think, and as much as possible he embraced Sufism and anti-authoritarianism. His movement didn't, particularly; I'm talking about him as an individual thinker whom I find quite interesting and even sympathetic in a lot of ways. And I'm sorry I didn't get to know him when I was in Iran.

AP: Tell me, would you see the nodes of intersection that could become, in sort of Deleuze and Guattari's terms, lines of flight between Islam and anarchism? What do you see between both these movements?

PLW: Well, in my own work, I've tended to concentrate on the heretical penumbra. Extreme Sufism, Ishmaelism. If orthodox Sunni Islam is going to be taken as the norm, then this is not the norm. I would question this whole picture, but it is the picture of Islamology so let's just go with it and say, as I myself have said in subtitling my books on Islam and heresy, 'On the Margins of Islam,' and I think it's here in the penumbral aspects, the illumination around the dark body, that the interesting intersections occur. Now I was criticized in Fifth Estate by Barkley, for talking about Sufism as an anarchistoid element in Islam. He proposed a sort of Islamic puritanism and its democratic structure as something closer to anarchism. I was respectful of his critique, but on the other hand I had to disagree. I find the whole puritannical thing unsympathetic. It's freedom on every level that I'm interested in, not just freedom in the assembly. So this I find amongst the wild dervishes.

AP: Well it's the aspect that, if there's no compulsion in religion, how can there be compulsion with regards to anything?

PLW: And it's not often written because of the dangers of writing some of these things. It's expressed in poetry, poetry has the license for this. And you can say, as Mahmud Shabistari said, if Muslims only understood the truth they wouldn't become idol-worshippers. Did he get away with it? I don't think they killed him, because it was poetry.

AP: There's a lot of songs, too.

PLW: Yeah, because all Persian and Urdu, and I suppose Arabic poetry too, if it's written in a traditional meter, it can be sung to traditional modes. And certain meters are connected to certain modes. So you even have the tune already laid out. And then it's just up to you to do interesting variations on it. A Bardic reality which lacks into the Elizabethan period in the West.

AP: I spent some time with Naqshbandi Sufis in Montreal. What astonished me was that after a particular period of time, spending time with them, when I was actually considering embracing more of the Sufi elements that exist within Islam, I was a bit taken back by the issue of the Bayiah, which is the allegiance and the quest for allegiance. What do you think about that?

PLW: Well I've written about this. A very important influence has been the whole Uwaisi tradition, which is the anti-guru tradition within Sufism. This is based on the idea that you can seek initiation on the spiritual plane, such as in dreams or like the the Uwaisis in Turkey were actually influenced by Shamanism, they would actually meet magical animals or ghosts who would initiate them, and Julian Baldic wrote a nice book about this called Imaginary Muslims...

AP: I'm assuming those magical animals were not Djinn.

PLW: Well yeah, sure they were Djinn. And some of the Djinns were believers, too. Dealing with Djinns is not like necromancy, in the Christian West. Dealing with Djinn can be white magic, quite easily. This is why hermeticism is an easier time within traditional Islam than it has been within traditional Christian cultures.

AP: Where do you see Islam going, especially post-9/11? Where do you see Islam going on its own, and I'd like to hear your comments on what you expect that, for example, what Islam can bring to the table that something like anarchism can not bring to the table? Or vice-versa?

PLW: Well that's sort of crystal ball stuff, which has to be taken with a grain of salt (which is also crystal). I don't see much good ahead in Islamic culture or in the Western culture so it's hard to compare them in that sense. Sufism and radical tolerance and all these ideas seem to be on the retreat in the Islamic world. At least as we look at it from here. My finger is not on the pulse of the East here, but I'm looking at what's going on in America where you've got all these people publishing books called 'What's Right with Islam.'

AP: Or Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, that sort of thing.

PLW: I'm already so sick of this. And the liberal Muslims, why are they trying to make Islam in the image of reform Judaism? Why not pick something more exciting, like Sufism? As far as I can tell, these people are ignorant of Sufism and if they know anything about it, they agree with the reformers that it's a medieval ecretion that should be swept away.

AP: Do you believe it's an aspect of literacy that occurs here in the West, especially the new generation of Muslims, that they are born into a Muslim family, their family had migrated to North America, and they essentially know this thing which is called Islam but they sort of take it for granted apart from the ritualistic aspects or cultural aspects that exist within it. They never really truly identity with Islam, all they get is the surface level.

PLW: There are several interesting things going on in this respect. The Muslim punk movement, with Michael Muhammad Knight, he told me recently that his imagination seems to have started to come to life. There are actually Muslim punk bands and there weren't when he wrote the book, which is wonderful. And I hear from people like you're talking about, college students who suddenly realize that they've got roots, and these roots are interesting. But they can't stomach all this crap that's going on, so some of them find their way to my work.

AP: The other side of the coin with regards to college students, from what I've seen, is they actually turn the other way. They become very religious, very pious all of a sudden, and they start to develop a very hard line as to what is there in terms of Islam, and the concepts of Islam, and become very alienating to other Muslims and the people around them.

PLW: I was thinking of that in terms of 'image magic.' It's very hard to struggle against global image. Now we have this global image of Islam. Whether it arouses waves of hatred or desire, that's what we got. To be able to situate oneself even in a critical position to the image is so difficult, much less to exist outside it. That takes some wellspring of Himma. It's so difficult when you're on your own. Islam is a very communitarian religion and to be on your own, yes you can in theory, everyone is their own Imam in theory, but in practice with the sociology of institutions at work, it's so difficult to move against that sludge.

AP: What do you think it will take to break down that sociology of institutions. Do we need another Malcolm X or Elijah Muhammad to come about with reformed knowledge, or does it come with opening up zones or spaces and people become nomads coming in and out of those spaces, and Islam.

PLW: All those things would be nice. It would be nice to have some voices coming from the Islamic world that aren't either fundamentalist or anti-fundamentalist. It would be nice to have voices come from the Islamic world that remember something about the movement of the social, and haven't just given up on it before this wretched fundamentalism. It would be interesting to have young Muslims in America and England and France where it's at least possible to speak, to start working on these alternatives which we don't even know what they are. Maybe they're these seeds, but we can't talk about anything that's actually sprouting. That would be very difficult.

AP: What could Islams learn from anarchisms?

PLW: Phrased that way, we might be able to work with that question a little. The spiritual element within anarchism is already such a tiny minority, both intellectually and historically. It does exist and we could even talk about the Catholic workers, and I do consider myself a part of it, but it's an almost inaudible voice even within anarchism. And again, if we're talking about the wild dervishes within Islam, well most of these guys are living in the Middle Ages, and for their sake I hope they manage to succeed in continuing to do so. But they don't have anything to learn from anarchism, they're practicing it. And anarchists don't particularly have anything to learn from them, it would just be sort of nice to take inspiration, to cross-fertilize while retaining the differences. No ghastly unity, like the ideals of fundamentalism and capitalism, but to embrace difference.

AP: Let's say those dervishes would not be required to identify as muslim anarchists, or as anarchist muslims, but rather retain their identity.

PLW: It would be so historically difficult to make up some hybrid like that, just as it is so historically difficult to deal with the idea of gay Islam. Gay is the wrong word. It's just not a concept in the Islamic world. Really it means shallow Westernization, and naturally that's resisted. The strategy is wrong. The strategy should go to the Sufi love poetry, that's what the strategy should be. And these wacko 19th century pseudo-scientific Greek terms like homosexual and these lifestyle labels like gay should just be ignored.

AP: Should we go back to an oral tradition in Islam, if people aren't reading to the extent they should, is it better to stand on a box and talk to muslims, or go to the mosque to open these forums for discussions. The problem with that is if they don't like what they hear, you become visible.

PLW: Islam is a missionary religion and always has been. We could talk about Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, it's hard to find other such intensely missionary religions, so it would be hard to separate out the element of Tablee’kh, of propaganda of the faith, from any view that Islam might have of itself.

AP: How do reconcile that fact of Tablee'kh, which specifically came out from places like Pakistan, and which you actually see here in North America. You'll have these moments in Toronto or Montreal and they knock at your door in compulsion of religion.

PLW: Well it would be nice if there were counter-organizations, but I don't really see much evidence of it. Maybe you're more in touch with the fine currents here, which I imagine someone has to be on the line to be in touch with, and it would be nice if something would emerge, in terms of a counter-Tablee'kh, I don't know. Agit-prop? And it would have to be couched in Islamic terms. And that's why I'm saying that Sufism could be so important. And it's being ignored by all the counter-moves against Islamism.

AP: With regards to Muslim scholars in the West, I'm not sure you're familiar with Dr. Tariq Ramadan? He's married to the granddaughter of Hassan Al-Banna who started the Muslim brotherhood in 1948. He lives in Switzerland and migrates between Switzerland, France, England, and he often comes to North America and was supposed to teach in the States. As he was about to come in, the Department of Defense or Homeland Security forbid him from coming in. He's done some work on commenting on the left and the aspect of co-operatives as alternatives to capitalist space and organization. The issue with his work is, as far as I know, the lack of exposure to anarchisms. Have you read anything by him?

PLW: I haven't so I can't comment, but it'd be nice if he would read some Charles Fourier. But dream on, right?

AP: How do you feel about post-structuralism and whatever influence it might have on Islam?

PLW: Well I just wrote a little review of this book on Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. I didn't actually see the whole commentary, only Foucault's part, in First of the Month in New York, and I pointed out that it's true that Foucault was quite wrong in assessing the Iranian Revolution, and he had seen Ali Shariati as much more important than he actually turned out to be, sadly. His critics, including Maxime Rodinson, who wrote a very perceptive and not-nasty criticism, but a strong critique that really demolished Foucault's position.

AP: How did he get caught up in the Iranian Revolution? How did it happen to him, of all people?

PLW: He thought he had missed all the other revolutions and this was his chance. Just like Genet who went to the Palestineans in part because 'at least there's something, this is a chance.' Romanticism, and I'm a romantic myself, I sympathize. I compared the two, Genet's book with Foucault's work and said that desire had played a part in both cases. When he got to Tehran they were marching in the street and shouting two names: Ayotallah Khomeini and Sharati. Later on, of course, there was only the one name. By then he realized how wrong he'd been and shut up on the subject. But my point was that he had been wrong but for the right reasons. His heart had been very good on this. His head had let him down. My heart also went out to him, even though I never went through a period of romanticizing the Iranian Revolution because I saw it up close, on the ground and I realized it was in control of the mullahs right from the start. I had to shed a little tear for Foucault and his lost love.

AP: How do you feel with regards to the issue of violence and pacifism in Islam? Do you believe that the concept of "suicide bombings" ... well 9/11 is quite a different example from Palestine... but I'd like to hear you comment on both.

PLW: The only thing that really occurs to me that I can say on this is to point out how fascinating it is that the Hasan Al-Sabah archetype keeps turning up over and over again. If only Burrows were alive now, what a kick he would get out of this. He did realize that Khomeini was the sort of Hasan Al-Sabah type, which he was. And of course Osama is also, even though he's a Sunni which makes the comparison a little weird. Nevertheless, that's the archetype. He disappears up into the mountains and is never seen again. Believe me, he'll never be seen again. He'll live forever because of that. With the long white beard and sending out the Fedayeen to sacrifice themselves. It's an archetype that apparently just keeps popping up in Islam.

AP: I recently did a class talk with regards to Islam and sacrifice. It's interesting to see how the tactics have evolved with Iraq, 9/11 and Palestine. In Iraq the use of footage and videotape, the image and lighting that Deleuze talks about when he's discussing Bergsonian cinema, the aspect of the imagination colliding with reality. It places the viewer in the person who is being sacrificed. The use of the technique in Palestine, when they leave footage behind; now I'm not saying hostage-taking is the same as what happens in Palestine, the two are different in terms of the context, but do you feel sympathy with Palestine and what goes on there?

PLW: I was remembering what happened with Karlheinz Stockhausen after 9/11, when he blurted out his statement about what a fantastic work of art it had been, and I believe the poor sucker is still hiding out somewhere from the fallout of making that statement. But I thought the statement was so obvious, it was a work of art. It was meant to be image manipulation and it succeeded fantastically well.

AP: Like propaganda of the deed?

PLW: It was a viral image, just absolutely did the total Burrowsian thing from the grey room into everybody's head instantly. In a situation like that, it's so difficult to sort out ethical and even moral strands. When you're just being swamped with the grand illusion, the Orwellianism to the degree that would have made Orwell keel over in a dead faint. It's just a gargantuan behemoth of imagery, and it's got everybody.

AP: Do you think it was intentional to get that sort of image to the people?

PLW: Intention is such a.... who cares, does it even matter?

AP: Well I think it does, like Islam says that all actions are but by intention.

PLW: I mean, clearly these people are media mavens. If they hadn't read McLuhan, it must just have seeped into their unconscious through the dreamworld or something. They're manipulating the image, of course they are. And so is the U.S. It's an image war. That's why Baudrillard said about the first Gulf War, a statement he got in so much trouble for, saying it never happened. Which I presume he didn't mean to belittle the deaths and suffering that actually occurred, but he was talking about this aspect of this Manichean spectacle of clashing imagery. Which is sometimes the same imagery which makes it even more complicated. So it's really kinda hard to even answer your question. Yes, I've always been sympathetic to the suffering of the Palestineans. How could one not be? But to say that I have any kind of political insight into it, no.

AP: With regards to the aspect of Islam and desire, let's talk about desire and homosexuality. How do you feel about there being no path with regards to desire, in an Islamic framework. Islam says that not everything you desire can be fulfilled, for example alcohol, hashish or homosexual activities. Do you think a re-interpretation takes that apart?

PLW: You could do this in an Islamic legal context, but would have to call in Ishmaelism and certain kinds of Shiaism, Sufism and so forth in order to do it. I think the way you would do it would be to point out there is no hierarchy in Islam. There's no Pope to call on his cardinals in this. A Fatwah can be issued but whether anybody follows it is a voluntary process. If you issued a Fatwah based on hermeneutic exigesis, on esoteric interpretations of Quran and Hadith, it'd be a question of whether you had the Ummah, whether the community would accept those Fatwahs. Right now we see that it's not likely. Although I understand there's a so-called gay mosque in Toronto, and I wish them well, but that would be the way it would have to be done. Unless we're gonna talk about social disintegration. And again, I think it would be worthwhile talking about this in order to avoid this schizophrenia in the very use of a term like 'gay Muslim.' Gay is about a consumerist lifestyle, and if that's what they're interested, then I'm not sympathetic (terribly). I mean do what you want to do, you know, it's like gay marriage; from an anarchist perspective this is all big head-scratcher, you know what I'm saying? Are we asking permission of the state here or what?

AP: Well it goes back to Lacan, you never escape the structure or image that society has placed for you... the politics of demand... you always go back and forth in circles.

PLW: It's why language is important. What theory is supposed to be about.

AP: Did Muslims waste a lot of time by trying to apologize for 9/11, trying to teach people about Islam to get away from stereotypes of the terrorist Muslim...

PLW: You tell me. Has there been any improvement as a result of these efforts?

AP: There's a lot more reading going on.

PLW: Yeah, but reading of what? Like we talked about.

AP: A lot of people are actually reading the Quran.

PLW: A lot of my teachers say it's a mistake to start with the Quran. Listen to it in Arabic, get the spiritual vibe but save the text for later.

AP: Particularly with regards to the Quran being used by people, who don't know much about Islam, to bring out the elements they consider hateful against Jews and Christians.

PLW: You've got the Christians reading the Quran saying "It's all full of violence!", and unfortunately no Muslims came back with a reading of the Bible but some liberals did it for them. From a scriptual perspective it's always a double-edged sword, which is another reason to leave the Quran for later.

AP: Do you think that Islam, if reinterpreted, would constitute a non-Western form of anarchism? Anarchism that existed before the term was coined?

PLW: I question the idea of non-Western. A lot of people consider Islam one of the Western tradition. After all, it goes all the way up to France. Yes, you can talk about 'the East' in the spiritual sense, but you can take it in the large sense of the whole monotheist tradition which is a kind of Eastern Mediterranean tradition, and also involved Judaism and Christianity, then how do you separate Islam and call it Eastern and the others Western? That would be a difficult road to hoe. Maybe pre-modern? Would that be a better word?

AP: Sure.

PLW: So like a pre-modern form of anarchism, like how the anarchists always look for their forebearers in the Tao Te Ching or what have you? Yeah. There's certainly some elements there that you could play with.

AP: That interpretation of pre-modernity would really be post-modernity, cause what's pre-modernity?

PLW: Yeah. And theory now, everything is up for grabs. This is the postmodern ecstacy, everything is up for grabs. If we don't allow it to fall into a posty-constructionist apathy of relativism. But look on it as a kind of positive thing.

AP: The possibilities. I think looking for more practical relations, in terms of looking at local Muslim communities and speaking with them about the anarchist tradition.

PLW: We're talked about some of the possible points in a constellation that could be presented already.

AP: The aspect of consensus, of social solidarity, of acceptance...

PLW: You could put the emphasis on those things, pre-modern aspects, and you could talk about what we could call medieval aspects, like the wild dervishes. And between those two poles, perhaps something interesting would begin to spark.

AP: How would you deal with those legalistic people who would...

PLW: That's what I said, you get Fatwahs based on an esoteric position as you could, for example from a Shi'ite or Ishmaeli authority. Or someone who is both Sufi and orthodox, like an Algazel, that's the kind of position that's so sadly missing. If that kind of position existed in Islam in a normative way, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

AP: I think certainly with regards to Sufism, you pointed out with Al-Ghazali particularly, I think it's the aspect of spirituality being blended in or returning back, but unless you get something out of it it just becomes repetitive.

PLW: That would be a good definition of Sufism, you just gave. In this sense it's not a separate tradition of Islam. The Orientalist view of it being that is wrong.

AP: What about the adoption of techniques of innovation? How do you feel it would...

PLW: Well that's Bidi’a, and we can't call it that, we have to call it Ijtihad, then we can do it.

AP: But once again, Umar always said that sometimes there are good Bidi’as and sometimes there are bad Bidi’a.

PLW: Did he say that?

AP: Yeah. Sometimes there are good innovations and sometimes there are bad innovations. I recall the story of Umar and a woman standing up and correcting him, because he had a particular point of view with regards to something… for example with Taraweeh prayers. Taraweeh prayers did not occur during the time of the propet, per se. It was a good Bidi’a in the sense that they prayed during Ramadan, and then the prophet didn't show up the next day. Everyone was worried and they knocked on his door, and they said well you can pray Taraweeh on your own or you can pray it with Jama’a. And if you pray it within Jama’a then well, that's good, but you can pray it on your own.

PLW: This was during the lifetime of the prophet? After the lifetime of the prophet, it becames more problematic, almost synonymous with sin or heresy.That's why you need the Shi'ite ideas of the Noor Mohamed, something that shines through the consciousness of the collectivity--Messiah as collective--the radical view of certain Shi'ites. This could all be done, but the power points for it just don't exist, apparently.

AP: With regards to Shi'ite Islam, and the political apect and the concept of the Khalifa or the hidden Imam (Mehdi).

PLW: Corbin points out you have this hyper-authoritarian structure, based even on blood, but suddenly it flips into esotericism and you can talk about the Imam of one's own being. That's how you do that. Then you combine that with Sunni 'democracy' and come up with an interesting model. Then it's not just ethical culture for Muslims.

http://affinityproject.org/interviews/plw1.html

Overcoming Tourism

2010-04-23T10:47:00.001-07:00

Overcoming Tourism

by Hakim Bey

In the Old Days tourism didnt exist. Gypsies, Tinkers and other true nomads even now roam about their worlds at will, but no one would therefore think of calling them «tourists».
Tourism is an invention of the 19th century-a period of history which sometimes seems to have stretched out to unnatural length. In many ways, we are still living in the 19th century.
The tourist seeks out Culture because -in our world-culture has disappeared into the maw of the Spectacle culture has been torn down and replaced with a Mall or a talk show- because our education is nothing but a preparation for a lifetime of work and consumption-because we ourselves have ceased to create. Even though tourists appear to be physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They're not really there, but rather move through a mind scape, an abstraction («Nature», «Culture»), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples' misery and even add to that misery.
Recently several people were assassinated in Egypt just for being tourists. Behold .... the Future. Tourism and terrorism:-just what is the difference?
Of the three archaic reasons for travel - call them «war», «trade», and «pilgrimage» - which one gave birth to tourism? Some would automatically answer that it must be pilgrimage. The pilgrim goes «there» to see, the pilgrim normally brings back some souvenir; the pilgrim takes «time off» from daily life; the pilgrim has nonmaterial goals. In this way, the pilgrim foreshadows the tourist.
But the pilgrim undergoes a shift of consciousness, and for the pilgrim that shift is real. Pilgrimage is a form of initiation, and initiation is an opening to other forms of cognition.
We can detect something of the real difference between pilgrim and tourist, however, by comparing their effects on the places they visit. Changes in a place-a city, a shrine, a forest-may be subtle, but at least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter for conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the social.

Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and they may even serve as centers of production, (like the silk industry of Benares) - but their primary «product» is baraka or maria. These words (one Arabic, one Polynesian) are usually translated as «blessing», but they also carry a freight of other meanings.
The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead saint (one of the «People of the Tombs») seeks initiation or advancement on the spiritual path, a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks healing; a childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her fertile if she ties a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the traveller to Mecca yearns for the very center of the Faith, and as the caravans come within sight of the Holy City the hajji calls out «Labbaïka Allabumma!» «I am here, O Lord!»
All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes seems to be a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased charisma or «luck». The shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it away. But blessing is a product of the Imagination-and thus no matter how many pilgrims take it away there's always more. In fact, the more they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a popular shrine grows with every answered prayer).
To say that baraka is «imaginal» is not to call it «unreal». It's real enough to those who feel it. But spiritual goods do not follow the rules of supply and demand like material goods. The more demand for spiritual goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is infinite.

By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The pilgrim we might say - leaves the «secular space» of home and travels to the «sacred space» of the shrine in order to experience the difference between secular and sacred. But this difference remains intangible, subtle, invisible to the «profane» gaze, spiritual, imaginal. Cultural difference however is measurable, apparent, visible, material, economic, social.

The imagination of the capitalist «first world» is exhausted. It cannot imagine anything different. So the tourist leaves the homogenous space of «home» for the heterogenous space of «foreign climes» not to receive a «blessing» but simply to admire the picturesque, the mere view or snapshot of difference, to see the difference.

The tourist consumes difference.

But the production of cultural difference is not infinite. It is not «merely» imaginal. It is rooted in language, landscape, architecture, custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or taken away, the less remains. The social can produce just so much «meaning», just so much difference. Once it's gone, it's gone.
Over the centuries perhaps a given sacred place attracted millions of pilgrims - and yet somehow despite all the gazing and admiring and praying and souvenir buying, this place retained its meaning. And now-after 20 or 30 years of tourism-that meaning has been lost. Where did it go? How did this happen?

Tourism's real roots do not lie in pilgrimage (or even in «fair» trade), but in war. Rape and pillage were the original forms of tourism, or rather, the first tourists followed directly in the wake of war, like human vultures picking over battlefield carnage for imaginary booty - for images.

Tourism arose as a symptom of an Imperial ism that was total - economic, political, and spiritual.
What's really amazing is that so few tourists have been murdered by such a meagre handful of terrorists. Perhaps a secret complicity exists between these mirror image foes. Both are displaced people, cut loose from all mooring, drifting in a sea of images. The terrorist act exists only in the image of the act without CNN, there survives only a spasm of meaningless cruelty. And the tourist's act exists only in the images of that act, the snapshots and souvenirs; otherwise nothing remains but the dunning letters of credit card companies and a residue of «free mileage» from some foundering airline. The terrorist and the tourist are perhaps the most alienated of all the products of post imperial capitalism. An abyss of images separates them from the objects of their desire. In a strange way they are twins.
Nothing ever really touches the life of the tourist. Every act of the tourist is mediated. Anyone who's ever witnessed a phalanx of Americans or a busload of Japanese advancing on some ruin or ritual must have noticed that even their collective gaze is mediated by the medium of the camera's multi faceted eye, and that the multiplicity of cameras, videocams, and recorders forms a complex of shiny clicking scales in an armor of pure mediation. Nothing organic penetrates this insectoid carapace which serves as both protective critic and predatory mandible, snapping up images, images, images. At its most extreme this mediation takes the form of the guided tour, in which every image is interpreted by a licensed expert, a psychopomp or guide of the Dead, a virtual Virgil in the Inferno of meaninglessness-a minor functionary of the Central Discourse and its metaphysics of appropriation-a pimp of fleshless ecstasies.
The real place of the tourist is not the site of the exotic, but rather the no place place (literally the «utopia») of median space, liminal space, in between space - the space of travel itself, the industrial abstraction of the airport, or the machine dimension of plane or bus.
So the tourist and the terrorist-those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction-suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the authentic recedes whenever they approach it. Cameras and guns stand in the way of that moment of love which is the hidden dream of every terrorist and tourist. To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning, and the terrorist destroys the tourist.
Tourism is the apotheosis and quintessence of «Commodity Fetishism.» It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of «goods» that will never arrive, because they have been exalted, raised to glory, deified, worshipped and absorbed, all on the plane of pure spirit, beyond the stench of mortality (or morality).
You buy tourism you get nothing but images. Tourism, like Virtual Reality, is a form of Gnosis, of bodyhatred and body transcendence. The ultimate tourist «trip» will take place in Cyberspace, and it will be

CyberGnosis SM_

a trip to paranirvana

and back,

in the comfort of your

very own

«workstation.»

Jack in,

leave Earth

behind!

The modest goal of this little book is to address the individual traveler who has decided to resist tourism.
Even though we may find it impossible in the end to «purify» ourselves and our travel from every last taint and trace of tourism, we still feel that improvement may be possible.
Not only do we disdain tourism for its vulgarity and its injustice, and therefore wish to avoid any contamination (conscious or unconscious) by its viral virulency we also lavish to understand travel as an act of reciprocity rather than alienation. In other words, we don't wish merely to avoid the negativities of tourism, but even more to achieve positive travel, which we envision as a productive and mutually enhancing relation between self and other, guest and host a form of cross cultural synergy in which the whole exceeds the sum of parts.
We'd like to know if travel can be carried out according to a secret economy of baraka, whereby not only the shrine but also the pilgrims themselves have «blessings» to bestow.
Before the Age of the Commodity, we know, there was an Age of the Gift, of reciprocity, of giving and receiving. We learned this from the tales of certain travelers, who found remnants of the world of the Gift among certain tribes, in the form of potlach or ritual exchange, and recorded their observations of such strange practises.
Not long ago there still existed a custom among South Sea islanders of travelling vast distances by outrigger canoe, without compass or sextant, in order to exchange valuable and useless presents (ceremonial art objects rich in mana) from island to island in a complex pattern of overlapping reciprocities.
We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity - even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map - even though tourism seems to have triumphed - even so - we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even «secret»- pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers' routes for freespirits, known only to the geomantic guerillas of the art of travel.

As a matter of fact, we don't just «suspect» it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel.
Perhaps the greatest and subtlest practitioners of the art of travel were the sufis, the mystics of Islam. Before the age of passports, immunisations, airlines and other impediments to free travel, the sufis wandered footloose in a world where borders tended to be more permeable than nowadays, thanks to the transnationalism of Islam and the cultural unity of Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world.
The great medieval Moslem travelers, like Ibn Battuta and Naser Khusraw, have left accounts of vast journies - Persia to Egypt, or even Morocco to China-which never set foot outside a landscape of deserts, camels, caravanserais, bazaars, and piety. Someone always spoke Arabic, however badly, and Islamic culture permeated the remotest backwaters, however superficially. Reading the tales of Sinbad the sailor (from the 1001 Nights) gives us the impression of a world where even the terra incognita was still despite all marvels and oddities - somehow familiar, somehow Islamic. Within this unity, which was not yet a uniformity, the sufis formed a special class of travelers. Not warriors, not merchants, and not quite ordinary pilgrims either, the dervishes represent a spiritualization of pure nomadism.

According to the Koran, God's Wide Earth and everything in it are «sacred». not only as divine creations but also because the material world is full of «waymarks» or signs of divine reality, Moreover, Islam itself s is born between two journies, Mohammad's hijra or «Flight» from Mecca to Medina, and his hajj, or return voyage. The hajj is the movement toward the origin and center for every Moslem even today, and the annual Pilgrimage has played a vital role not just in the religious unity of Islam but also in its cultural unity.
Mohammad himself exemplifies every kind of travel in Islam: - his youth with the Meccan caravans of Summer and Winter, as a merchant; his campaigns as a warrior his triumph as a humble pilgrim. Although an urban leader he is also the prophet of the Bedouin and himself a kind of nomad, a «sojourner» - an «orphan». From this perspective travel can almost be seen as a sacrament. Every religion sanctifies travel to some degree, but Islam is virtually unimaginable without it.
The Prophet said, «Seek knowledge, even as far as China». From the beginning Islam lifts travel above all «mundane» utilitarianism and gives it an epistemological or even gnostic dimension. «The jewel that never leaves the mine is never polished», says the sufi Saadi. To «educate» is to «lead outside», to give the pupil a perspective beyond parochiality and mere subjectivity.

Some sufis may have done all their traveling in the Imaginal World of archetypal dreams and visions, but vast numbers of them took the Prophet's exhortations quite literally. Even today dervishes wander over the entire Islamic world-but as late as the 19th century they wandered in veritable hordes, hundreds or even thousands at a time, and covered vast distances. All in search of knowledge.
Unofficially there existed two basic types of wandering sufi: the «gentleman scholar» type, and the mendicant dervish. The former category includes Ibn Battuta (who collected sufi initiations the way some occidental gentlemen once collected masonic degrees); and on a much more serious level - the «Greatest Shaykh» Ibn Arabi, who meandered slowly through the 13th century from his native Spain, across North Africa through Egypt to Mecca, and finally to Damascus.
Ibn Arabi actually left accounts of his search for saints and adventures on the road, which could be pieced together from his voluminous writings to form a kind of rihla or «travel text» (a recognised genre of Islamic literature) or autobiography. Ordinary scholars travelled in search of rare texts on theology or jurisprudence, but Ibn Arabi sought only the highest secrets of esotericism and the loftiest «openings» into the world of divine illumination, for him every «journey to the outer horizons» was also a «journey to the inner horizons» of spiritual psychology and gnosis.
On the visions he experienced in Mecca alone he wrote a 12 volume work (The Meccan Revelations), and he has also left us precious sketches of hundreds of his contemporaries, from the greatest philosophers of the age to humble dervishes and «madmen», anonymous women saints and «Hidden Masters». Ibn Arabi enjoyed a special relation with Khezr, the immortal and unknown prophet, the «Green Man», who sometimes appears to wandering sufis in distress, to rescue them from the desert, or to initiate them. Khezr, in a sense, can be called the patron saint of the travelling dervishes - and the prototype. (He first appears in the Koran as a mysterious wanderer and companion of Moses in the desert.)
Christianity once included a few orders of wandering mendicants (in fact St. Francis organised one after meeting with dervishes in the Holy Land, who may have bestowed upon him a «cloak of initiation» - the famous patchwork robe he was wearing when he returned to Italy) - but Islam spawned dozens, perhaps hundreds of such orders.
As Sufism crystallised from the loose spontaneity of early days to an institution with rules and grades, «travel for knowledge» was also regularised and organised. Elaborate handbooks of duties for dervishes were produced which included methods for turning travel into a very specific form of meditation. The whole Sufi «path» itself was symbolised in terms of intentional travel.

In some cases itineraries were fixed (e.g.,the Hajj); other involved waiting for «signs» to appear, coincidences, intuitions, «adventures» such as those which inspired the travels of the Arthurian knights. Some orders limited the time spent in any one place to 40 days; others made a rule of never sleeping twice in the same place. The strict orders, such as the Naqshbandis, turned travel into a kind of fullt~me choreography, in which every movement was pre ordained and designed to enhance consciousness.

By contrast, the more heterodox orders (such as the Qalandars) adopted a «rule» of total spontaneity and abandon -«permanent unemployment» as one of them called it - an insouciance of bohemian proportions - a«dropping out» at once both scandalous and completely traditional. Colorfully dressed, carrying their begging bowls, axes, and standards, addicted to music and dance, carefree and cheerful (sometimes to the point of «blameworthiness»!), orders such as the Nematollahis of 19th century Persia grew to proportions that alarmed both sultans and theologians - many dervishes were executed for «heresy». Today the true Qalandars survive mostly in India, where their lapses from orthodoxy include a fondness for hemp and a sincere hatred of work. Some are charlatans, some are simply bums - but a suprizing number of them seem to be people of attainment .... how can I put it? .... people of self realization, marked by a distinct aura of grace, or baraka.
All the different types of sub travel we've described are united by certain shared vital structural forces. One such force might be called a «magical» worldview, a sense of life that rejects the «merely» random for a reality of signs and wonders, of meaningful coincidences and «unveilings». As anyone who's ever tried it will testify, intentional travel immediately opens one up to this «magical» influence.
A psychologist might explain this phenomenon (either with awe or with reductionist disdain) as «subjective» ; while the pious believer would take it quite literally. From the sun point of view neither interpretation rules out the other, nor suffices in itself, to explain away the marvels of the Path. In sufism, the «objective» and the «subjective» are not considered opposites, but complements. From the point of view of the two-dimensional thinker (whether scientific or religious) such paradoxology smacks of the forbidden.
Another force underlying all forms of intentional travel can be described by the Arabic word adab. On one level adab simply means «good manners» and in the case of travel these manners are based on the ancient customs of desert nomads, for whom both wandering and hospitality are sacred acts. In this sense the dervish shares both the privileges and the responsibilities of the guest.

Bedouin hospitality is a clear survival of the primordial economy of the Gift - a relation of reciprocity. The wanderer must be taken in (the dervish must be fed) - but thereby the wanderer assumes a role prescribed by ancient custom - and must give back something to the host. For the bedouin this relation is almost a form of clientage: - the breaking of bread and sharing of salt constitute a sort of kinship. Gratitude is not a sufficient response to such generosity. The traveler must consent to a temporary adoption -anything less would offend against adab.
Islamic society retains at least a sentimental attachment to these rules, and thus creates a special niche for the dervish, that of the full time guest. The dervish returns the gifts of society with the gift of baraka. In ordinary pilgrimage the traveler receives baraka from a place, but the dervish reverses the flow and brings baraka to a place. The sufi may think of himself (or herself) as a permanent pilgrim - but to the ordinary stay at home people of the mundane world the sufi is a kind of perambulatory shrine.
Now tourism in its very structure breaks the reciprocity of host and guest. In English, a «host» may have either guests or parasites. The tourist is a parasite for no amount of money can pay for hospitality. The true traveler is a guest and thus serves a very real function, even today, in societies where the ideals of hospitality have not yet faded from the «collective mentality». To be a host, in such societies, is a meritorious act. Therefore, to be a guest is also to give merit.

The modern traveler who grasps the simple spirit of this relation will be forgiven many lapses in the intricate ritual of adab (how many cups of coffee? Where to put one's feet? How to be entertaining? How to show gratitude? etc.) peculiar to a specific culture. And if one bothers to master a few of the traditional forms of adab, and to deploy them with heartfelt sincerity, then both guest and host will gain more than they put into the relation and this more is the unmistakable sign of the presence of the Gift.
Another level of meaning of the word adab connects it with culture (since culture can be seen as the sum of all manners and customs); in modern usage the Department of «Arts and Letters» at a University would be called Adabiyyat. To have adab in this sense is to be «polished» (like that well traveled gem) - but this has nothing necessarily to do with «fine arts» or literacy or being a city slicker or even being «cultured». It is a matter of the «heart».
«Adab» is sometimes given as a oneword definition of schism. But insincere manners (ta 'arof in Persian) and insincere culture alike are shunned by the sufi - «There is no ta'arof in Tasssawuf [Sufism]», as the dervishes say; ..Darvishi» is an adjectival synonym for informality, the laid back quality of the people of Heart - and for spontaneous adab, so to speak. The true guest and host never make an obvious effort to fulfil the «rules» of reciprocity - they may follow the ritual scrupulously, or they many bend the forms creatively, but in either case they will give their actions a depth of sincerity that manifests as natural grace. Adab is a kind of love.

A complement of this «technique» (or «Zen») of human relations can be found in the sufi manner of relating to the world in general. The «mundane» world - of social deceit and negativity, of usurious emotions inauthentic consciousness («mauvaise conscience»), boorishness, ill will, inattention, blind reaction, false spectacle, empty discourse, etc. etc.-all this no longer holds any interest for the traveling dervish. But those who say that the dervish has abandoned «this world» «God's Wide Earth» - would be mistaken.
The dervish is not a Gnostic Dualist who hates the biosphere (which certainly includes the imagination and the emotions, as well as «matter» itself). The early Moslem ascetics certainly closed themselves off from everything. When Rabiah, the woman saint of Basra, was urged to come out of her house and «witness the wonders of God's creation», she replied, «Come into the house and see them», i.e., come into the heart of contemplation of the oneness which is above the manyness of reality. «Contraction» and «Expansion» are both sufi terms for spiritual states. Rabiah was manifesting Contraction: a kind of sacred melancholia which has been metaphorized as the «Caravan of Winter», of return to Mecca (the center, the heart), of inferiority, and of ascesis or selfdenial. She was not a world hating Dualist, nor even a moralistic fleshhating puritan. She was simply manifesting a certain specific kind of grace.
The wandering dervish however manifests a state more typical of Islam in its most exuberant energies. He indeed seeks Expansion, spiritual joy based on the sheer multiplicity of the divine generosity in material creation. (Ibn Arabi has an amusing «proof» that this world is the best world - for, if it were not, then God would be ungenerous - which is absurd. Q.E.D.) In order to appreciate the multiple waymarks of the Wide Earth precisely as the unfolding of this generosity, the sufi cultivates what might be called the theophanic gaze : - the opening of the «Eye of the Heart» to the experience of certain places, objects people, events as locations of the «shining-through» of divine Light.
The dervish travels, so to speak, both in the material world and in the «World of Imagination» simultaneously. But for the eye of the heart these worlds interpenetrate at certain points. One might say that they mutually reveal or «unveil» each other. Ultimately, they are «one»-and only our state of tranced inattention, our mundane consciousness, prevents us from experiencing this «deep» identity at every moment. The purpose of intentional travel, with its «adventures» and its uprooting of habits, is to shake loose the dervish from all the trance effects of ordinariness. Travel, in other words, is meant to induce a certain state of consciousness or «spiritual state» - that of Expansion.
For the wanderer, each person one meets might act as an «angel», each shrine one visits may unlock some initiatic dream, each experience of Nature may vibrate with the presence of some «spirit of place». Indeed, even the mundane and ordinary may suddenly be seen as numinous (as in the great travel haiku of the Japanese Zen poet Basho) - a face in the crowd at a railway station, crows on telephone wires, sunlight in a puddle....
Obviously one doesn't need to travel to experience this state. But travel can be used - that is, an art of travel can be acquired - to maximise the chances for attaining such a state. It is a moving meditation, like the Taoist martial arts. The Caravan of Summer moved outward, out of Mecca, to the rich trading lands of Syria and Yemen. Likewise the dervish is «moving out» (it's always «moving day»), heading forth, taking off, on «perpetual holiday» as one poet expressed it, with an open Heart, an attentive eye (and other senses), and a yearning for Meaning, a thirst for knowledge. One must remain alert, since anything might suddenly unveil itself as a sign. This sounds like a kind of «paranoia» - although «metanoia» might be a better term and indeed one finds «madmen» amongst the dervishes, «attracted ones», overpowered by divine influxions, lost in the Light. In the Orient the insane are often cared for and admired as helpless saints, because «mental illness» may sometimes appear as a symptom of too much holiness rather than too little «reason». Hemp's popularity amongst the dervishes can be attributed to its power to induce a kind of intuitive attentiveness which constitutes a controllable insanity: - herbal metanoia. But travel in itself can intoxicate the heart with the beauty of theophanic presence. It's a question of practise - the polishing of the jewel - removal of moss from the rolling stone.
In the old days (which are still going on in some remote parts of the East) Islam thought of itself as a whole world, a wide world, a space with great latitude within which Islam embraced the whole of society and nature. This latitude appeared on the social level as tolerance. There was room enough, even for such marginal groups as mad wandering dervishes. Sufism itself or at least its austere orthodox and «sober» aspect-occupied a central position in the cultural discourse. «Everyone» understood intentional travel by analogy with the Hail - everyone understood the dervishes, even if they disapproved.
Nowadays however Islam views itself as a partial world, surrounded by unbelief and hostility, and suffering internal ruptures of every sort. Since the 19th century Islam has lost its global consciousness and sense of its own wideness and completeness. No longer therefore can Islam easily find a place for every marginalized individual and group within a pattern of tolerance and social order. The dervishes now appear as an intolerable difference in society. Every Moslem must now be the same, united against all outsiders, and struck from the same prototype. Of course Moslems have always «imitated» the Prophet and viewed his image as the norm - and this has acted as a powerful unifying force for style and substance within Dar al Islam. But «nowadays» the puritans and reformers have forgotten that this «imitation» was not directed only at an early medieval Meccan merchant named Mohammad but also at the insan al kamil (the «Perfect Man» or «Universal Human»), an ideal of inclusion rather than exclusion, an ideal of integral culture, not an attitude of purity in peril, not xenophobia disguised as piety, not totalitarianism, not reaction.
The dervish is persecuted nowadays in most of the Islamic world. Puritanism always embraces the most atrocious aspects of modernism in its crusade to strip the Faith of «medieval accretions» such as popular sufism. And surely the way of the wandering dervish cannot thrive in a world of airplanes and oil wells, of nationalist/chauvinist hostilities (and thus of impenetrable borders), and of a puritanism which suspects all difference as a threat. This puritanism has triumphed not only in the East, but rather closer to home as well. It is seen in the «time discipline» of modern too Late-Capitalism, and in the porous rigidity of consumerist hyperconformity, as well as in the bigoted reaction and sex hysteria of the «Christian Right». Where in all this can we find room for the poetic (and parasitic!) life of Aimless Wandering - the life of Chuang Tzu (who coined this slogan) and his Taoist progeny - the life of Saint Francis and his shoeless devotees - the life of (for example) Nur All Shah Isfahani, a 19th century sufi poet who was executed in Iran for the awful heresy of meandering dervishism?
Here is the flip side of the «problem of tourism»: -the problem of the disappearance of «aimless wandering». Possibly the two are directly related, so that the more tourism becomes possible, the more dervishism becomes impossible. In fact, we might well ask if this little essay on the delightful life of the dervish possesses the least bit of relevance for the contemporary world. Can this knowledge help us to overcome tourism, even within our own consciousness and life? Or is it merely an exercize in nostalgia for lost possibilities - a futile indulgence in romanticism?
Well, yes and no. Sure, I confess I'm hopelessly romantic about the form of the dervish life, to the extent that for a while I turned my back on the mundane world and followed it myself. Because of course, it hasn't really disappeared. Decadent yes - but not gone forever. What little I know about travel I learned in those few years - I owe a debt to «medieval accretions» I can never pay - and I'll never regret my «escapism» for a single moment. BUT - I don't consider the form of dervishism to be the answer to the «problem of tourism.» The form has lost most of its efficacy. There's no point in trying to «preserve» it (as if it were a pickle, or a lab specimen)-there's nothing quite so pathetic as mere «survival».
But: beneath the charming outer forms of dervishism lies the conceptual matrix, so to speak, which we've called intentional travel. On this point we should suffer no embarrassment about «nostalgia». We have asked ourselves whether or not we desire a means to discover the art of travel, whether we want and will to overcome «the inner tourist», the false consciousness which screens us from the experience of the Wide World's waymarks. The way of the dervish (or of the Taoist, the Franciscan, etc.) interests us - finally - only to the extent that it can provide us with a key - not THE Key, perhaps - but . . . . a key. And of course - it does.
One fundamental key to success in Travel is of course attentiveness. We call it «paying attention» in English & «prêter attention» in French (in Arabic, however, one gives attention) suggesting that we're as stingy with our attentiveness as we are with our money. Quite often it seems that no one is «paying attention», that everyone is hoarding their consciousness - what? saving it for a rainy day?-and damping down the fires of awareness lest all available fuel be consumed in a single holocaust of unbearable knowing.
This model of consciousness seems suspiciously «Capitalist» however - as if indeed our attention were a limited resource, once spent forever irrecoverable. A usury of perception now appears: - we demand interest on our payment of attention, as if it were a loan rather than an expense. Or as if our consciousness were threatened by an entropic «heat death», against which the best defense must consist of a dull mediocre trance state of grudging half attention - a miserliness of psychic resources - a refusalto notice the unexpected or to savour the miraculousness of the ordinary - a lack of generosity.

But what if we treated our perceptions as gifts rather than payments? What if we gave our attention instead of paying it? According to the law of reciprocity, the gift is returned with a gift - there is no expenditure, no scarcity, no debt against Capital, no penury, no punishment for giving our attention away, and no end to the potentiality of attentiveness.
Our consciousness is not a commodity, nor is it a contractual agreement between the Cartesian ego and the abyss of Nothingness, nor is it simply a function of some meat machine with a limited warranty. True, eventually we wear out and break. In a certain sense the hoarding of our energies makes sense-we «save» ourselves for the truly important moments, the break throughs, the «peak experiences».
But if we picture ourselves as shallow coin purses - if we barricade the «doors of perception» like fearful peasants at the howling of boreal wolves - if we never «pay attention» - how will we recognise the approach and advent of those precious moments, those openings?

We need a model of cognition that emphasises the «magic» of reciprocity: - to give attention is to receive attention, as if the universe in some mysterious way responds to our cognition with an influx of effortless grace. If we convinced ourselves that attentiveness follows a rule of «synergy» rather than a law of depletion, we might begin to overcome in ourselves the banal mundanity of quotidian inattention, and open ourselves to «higher states.»
In any case, the fact remains that unless we learn to cultivate such states, travel will never amount to more than tourism. And for those of us who are not already adepts at the Zen of travel, the cultivation of these states does indeed demand an initial expenditure of energy. We have inhibitions to repress, hesitations to conquer, habits of introversion or bookishness to break, anxieties to sublimate. Our third rate stay athome consciousness seems safe and cozy compared to the dangers and discomforts of the Road with its eternal novelty, its constant demands on our attention. «Fear of freedom» poisons our unconscious, despite our conscious desire for freedom in travel. The art we're seeking seldom occurs as a natural talent. It must be cultivated practised perfected. We must summon up the will for intentional travel.

It's a truism to complain that difference is disappearing from the world - and it's true, too. But it's sometimes amazing to discover how resilient and organic the different can be. Even in America, land of Malls and tv's, regional differences not only survive but mutate and thrive in the interstices, in the cracks that criss-cross the monolith, beneath the notice of the Media Gaze, invisible even to the local bourgeoisie. If all the world is becoming one dimensional, we need to look between the dimensions.

I think of travel as fractal in nature. It takes place off the map as text, outside the official Consensus, like those hidden and embedded patterns that nestle within the infinite bifurcations of non linear equations in the strange world of chaos mathematics. In truth the world has not been completely mapped, because people and their everyday lives have been excluded from the map, or treated as «faceless statistics», or forgotten. In the fractal dimensions of unofficial reality all human beings - and even a great many «places» - remain unique and different. «Pure» and «unspoiled»? Maybe not. Maybe nobody and nowhere was ever really pure. Purity is a will o the wisp, and perhaps even a dangerous form of totalitarianism. Life is gloriously impure. Life drifts.

In the 1950's the French Situationists developed a technique for travel which they called the derive, the «drift.» They were disgusted with themselves for never leaving the usual ruts and pathways of their habit driven lives; they realised they'd never even seen Paris. They began to carry out structureless random expeditions through the city, hiking or sauntering by day, drinking by night, opening up their own tight little world into a terra incognita of slums, suburbs, gardens, and adventures. They became revolutionary versions of Baudelaire's famous flaneur, the idle stroller, the displaced subject of urban capitalism. Their aimless wandering became insurrectionary praxis.
And now, something remains possible - aimless wandering, the sacred drift. Travel cannot be confined to the permissable (and deadening) gaze of the tourist, for whom the whole world is inert, a lump of picturesqueness, waiting to be consumed - because the whole question of permission is an illusion. We can issue our own travel permits. We can allow ourselves to participate, to experience the world as a living relation not as a themepark. We carry within ourselves the hearts of travelers, and we don't need any experts to define and limit our morethan fractal complexities, to «interpret» for us, to «guide» us, to mediate our experience for us, to sell us back the images of our desires.
The sacred drift is born again. Keep it secret.

first published by
Musée Lilim
french title: voyage intentionnel
Musée Lilim
3 rue St. Jean, 11000 Carcassone, France

Islamist Fundamentalism The Primacy of Unreason

2010-04-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

The recent Europe-wide "headscarf debate" has re-ignited controversy about the limits of religious tolerance. Is Germany simply too soft on Islamist fundamentalism? Many moderate Muslims think so, according to Khalil Samir

Samir Khalil Samir

In an interview with the Zeitschrift für KulturAustausch, Khalil Samir analyses the background to the growth of fundamentalism in Muslim countries and describes the frustration felt by many Muslims when they see how Europe responds.

Khalil Samir, when people in this part of the world are talking about Islam, "reason" is not necessarily the first word that comes to mind. Yet you say that Islam, in its heyday, was distinguished by its aspirations towards rationality and logic. Can you expand on this?

Samir Khalil Samir: In its Golden Age, in the 9th and 10th centuries – during the so-called "Islamic Renaissance" – the Islamic world was indeed distinguished by "the primacy of reason". The question, "What is logical?" led to a great openness in the discussion between Muslims and the West. For some time now, however, people have been using religion as a foundation for politics, science and society. Their credo: "Islam is the solution!" This is where it starts to become irrational and fundamentalist – and fatally, it's always done by appealing to the Koran. For the Koran and the Hadiths – the collected deeds and sayings of Mohammed – are astonishingly multifaceted.

In principle, one can take from these books whatever one happens to need and ignore the rest; Mohammed's advocacy of democracy and debate, say, or his clear demand that people should acquire knowledge. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, has always been particularly good at producing one-sided interpretations of Islam. When people are miserable or desperate, they're happy to believe what they're told. "The economy's in a mess? Islam is the solution!" Why? Because in the Koran it says that the rich have a duty to help the poor. In this way, it is really possible to find an answer to any problem.

Obviously it works, even though the Muslim Brotherhood is a strictly forbidden organisation even in the Arab world.

Khalil Samir: The more they are repressed, the stronger they become. Not because of their arguments, but thanks to their repressors, the Arab leaders and the West. For all sides are oppressing the Arabs, instead of acting according to the – inherently valuable – principles of the Koran. In the mid-50s, Sayyed Qutb Ibrahim Husain Shadhili, former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote a six-volume commentary on the Koran. His book was entitled, "In the Shadow of Islam", and he wrote it after spending 18 months studying in the United States. It had been the most traumatic period of his entire life.

To him, the USA was the devil. He simply couldn't get over the fact that – as he saw it – the world's most powerful nation was interested only in suppressing other countries, politically and economically. This experience was the basis for his theory of the "neo-jahiliya". "Jahiliya" is the term used to denote pre-Islamic times, when the Arabs were still heathens who rejected Islam. So, according to Sayyed Qutb, we are currently living in a neo-heathen epoch that refuses to follow the good Islamic path.

And as the Muslim Brothers cling to the Islamic past, they have to oppose today's heathenism in the same way as Mohammed once did – in armed struggle?

Khalil Samir: Yes. "Takfir wa al-Hidjra": "Call them heathens, and then withdraw." What does this mean? Even Arabs often don't know the answer. When Mohammed was confronted with the heathens of Mecca, he simply withdrew from them and went to Medina. Then he returned to Mecca, this time armed. But before he attacked the heathens, he asked them three times whether they wanted to convert to Islam. Only after they had replied three times in the negative did he attack them. With this, he gave Islam clear rules for the conduct of war.

First of all, the declaration to the unbelievers and the withdrawal from them - a withdrawal that gives the believer time to fortify himself against the infidel, i.e. to arm himself. Then the infidel is given three chances to recant and join the faithful. After three refusals, the attack takes place. Today, a sub-grouping of the extremist movement "Gama'a al-Islamiya" actually calls itself "Takfir wa al-Hidjra". Naturally, they don't observe these rules of war. But it's important to understand what once formed the background to this idea of retreat – and to realise that it's now undergoing a revival all over the Arab world.

In Damascus today, one sees a remarkable number of veiled women, certainly more than in recent years. Syria was always comparatively liberal in this respect - much more open than Egypt, for example. But in the last year or so, something seems to have changed. Many Muslim women are not merely wearing a headscarf; they have positively vanished under long, opaque veils. They even wear black gloves, so that not even the tiniest part of their skin can be seen. Is this, too, a kind of retreat or withdrawal? And does it indicate that some kind of an attack is in the offing, on the pattern you've described?

Khalil Samir: The time has not yet come for a concerted attack on so-called infidels. At the moment, we are still in the "retreat" stage.

If and when Islamists do attack, who is likely to be the target?

Khalil Samir: First of all, their own governments. The Islamists know that the Arab Christians believe in God; so they count as believers, even if their faith is "imperfect". But to the Islamists, the worst of all are those who claim to be Muslims yet don't live according to the Sharia – the Islamic law based on the Koran. The Muslim Brotherhood declared war on such Muslims decades ago.

In Egypt, they murdered the Prime Minister, Mahmud Fahmi an-Nuqrashi, and attempted to assassinate Nasser. In Syria, they rose up against the dictator Assad at the start of the Eighties; in1982, he obliterated them in Hama. But they reformed; and for decades, they've been smuggling their ideas into Algeria. In their eyes, all Arab regimes, without exception, are "munafiqun": hypocrites.

The attacks in Riyadh in May of last year took place at a time when the United States were announcing the removal of their troops. It was as if the time had come to act against the regime collaborating with the Americans…

Khalil Samir: The Saudi Arabian regime would be the first up against the wall if the extremists were to gain power. After oil prices exploded in 1973, the Saudi monarchy accumulated a vast amount of wealth. Then they squandered billions of petrodollars on their own highly dubious private pleasures. At the same time, they tried to build a facade of Muslim piety by contributing billions to religious schemes and religious charities - above all to "Da'ua", the propagation of Islam in Koran schools. In fact, their money mainly benefited the Wahhabi fundamentalists, whose most prominent representative is Osama bin Laden.

The Wahhabis have controlled school curricula for decades. They subject Saudi youth to a drip-feed of fanaticism and xenophobia, and they yearn for a return to the original, pristine Islam. In this respect, their vision resembles that of the Muslim Brotherhood, the difference being that the Wahhabis have a great deal of money. For reasons of pure self-interest, the Saudi regime opposes all terrorism - and now it has bred a multi-tentacled terrorist monster, which regards that very regime as its bitterest enemy.

The attacks in Riyadh took place in areas populated mainly by foreigners. It's clear that the fundamentalists sense a threat to their religion from foreigners as such. But how do they see Arab Christians? As stooges and lackeys of Washington?

Khalil Samir: In Lebanon certainly not. In Syria and Egypt too, the situation remains calm, so far. The Christians of the Arab world have adopted a very clear stance against the Iraq war. The Pope's attitude has strengthened them in this, all the more so as he spoke out not just against the Iraq war, but against war in general.

And how does the Islamic world – as opposed to the Islamists – see Western Christians? You once said that the Arabs' former admiration of the West has now completely died away.

Khalil Samir: Yes, because they can't see that the West has any principles at all any more. The United States, for example, famously want to teach us democracy. Aha, say the Arabs; and what about Kyoto? Why are you the only ones who are allowed to pollute the environment with paying? And why are you, and nobody else, allowed to have nuclear bombs? And why is all right for you to use your veto constantly, and then to scream blue murder when France wants to use its veto for once? And why is Israel allowed to violate an endless series of UNO resolutions, while Syria is not even permitted to cough loudly? The Arabs don't understand much about the Western way of life because they aren't acquainted with it.

Thanks to satellite dishes, most Arabs "learn" about the West via sex-and-crime movies, which give them an enduringly twisted image of the West. They see a society without honour and without values; and, to top it all, this image is then thoroughly demonised by the fundamentalists. Should the actual behaviour of the West – for example, of the US – do anything to confirm this demonic image, the result is "Takfir": the conviction that one is dealing with a society of infidels from whom one has to keep one's distance. And I'm afraid this process of withdrawal is already well underway.

Does this also apply to Europe – and, in particular, to Germany?

Khalil Samir: To most Arabs, Europe doesn't look demonic but merely enfeebled. Germany especially appears to have no guts, no backbone, and thus to positively abet the Islamist groups on its own doorstep. Instead of providing Muslims with clear guidelines for integration, Germany simply leaves them in a ghetto situation – a hospitable environment for all those who demand tolerance while themselves pushing intolerant ideas. Germans do indeed tend towards a model of "multiculturalism" that is not so much romantic as neutral, indifferent to values. They are inhibited about expressing any kind of criticism of alien cultures; instead of taking an objective but self-confident stance, they simply say nothing.

But look at the speech given by Federal President Johannes Rau in May 2000: "Without fear, without dreams: living together in Germany." The need for clear rules governing integration could hardly have been stressed with more self-assurance or more objectivity. He made it quite clear that all immigrants to Germany would have to accept the democratically-established rules, and that no-one could deactivate these rules simply by pointing to their own ethnic origins or religious convictions.

Khalil Samir: Universally-valid laws are a good thing. But are they respected by all Muslims in Germany? And what about the Germans themselves? Do they have the courage to live their own democracy? Three million Muslims live in Germany. If they had all really integrated themselves into this secular society and if the Germans were more self-assured - not dodging the issue by escaping into a risky tolerance or an equally risky distance – then there would be nothing to prevent some real, open, rational dialogue.

Rational dialogue about what?

Khalil Samir: First of all: Islam itself is not something anyone should be frightened of. Islamism is, however – although it, in its turn, should not be equated with terrorism. The task is to look very closely at the various groupings in Germany and to distinguish them carefully from one another. Germany is secular, but the Islamic organisations in Germany are not, as a rule. Their system is based on the unity of religion and state, the principle of "Din wa daula". There's nothing wrong with this, but of course the German state can't tolerate two legal systems, its own and the Sharia, side-by-side. This should be a matter of public debate.

Above all, one has to find out whether or not the majority of German Muslims are in favour of two laws – and to see whether they are even familiar with Germany's constitution, its Basic Law. Perhaps educational work is necessary even at this level. For example, the Islamic associations favour a strict separation of the sexes, and this is in conflict with the Basic Law. Until recently, "Hizb ut-Tahrir" was represented at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I find this alarming, as we're talking about an organisation that's banned in all Islamic countries, that approves the use of violence and deliberately seeks out individual recruits. Hizb ut-Tahrir has been forbidden in Germany since 2003, but why did it take so long? With its excessive tolerance, Germany could become a playground for Islamists. That doesn't help the country, and it doesn't help its Muslim citizens.

In what areas do German Muslims require more help?

Khalil Samir: Let's take the notorious headscarf. More and more Muslim women in Germany are wearing it, and this frightens or angers Germans, although they do not address the topic directly and matter-of-factly. Yet this has nothing to do with assimilation or with an attack on religious liberties. Nowhere in the Koran is there any clear mention of a duty to cover the head. Only 30 years ago, most Muslim women all over the world did not wear a headscarf. Real faith requires no visible symbols. In this case, however, we're not talking about real faith, but about fundamentalist repression.

Right now, in Germany too, many Muslims are looking for something to hold on to, and they think they can find it in such apparent solutions. Germans will have to resist this more strongly and actively. They must demonstrate, by the way they live, what a functioning democracy actually looks like. This would also provide a lifeline to Muslims trying to find a firm footing in their adopted homeland. It would be a good basis for a respectful but open dialogue between Germans and Muslim immigrants.

But the Germans don't even dare to ask questions. It seems to me that German democracy is not really strongly rooted. Germany has a weak ego, so to speak. But how should Germany play its role amongst the democratic nations, how should it make its contribution to the development of mankind, if the country doesn't know what it is?

In addressing the question of German identity, you're putting your finger on a wound that still hasn't healed. What with post-war reconstruction, the conflicting aims of the victorious Allied powers and the still-ongoing process of reunification, Germans have not yet achieved a genuine identity.

Khalil Samir: No, the only identities they've allowed themselves have been political and economic. Everything else was a taboo subject. And now the danger is that these taboos might lead to a lack of preventive measures against fundamentalist tendencies. This would also be fatal for Muslims. After September 11th and the absurd equation, "Islam = terrorism", many Muslims were so hurt in their self-image that they became susceptible to "comforting" Islamist slogans. Thus the West's false image of Islam became a self-fulfilling prophecy; and in Germany, the extreme right found that people were prepared to listen to them once again.

What you're describing is two different, damaged identities or self-images facing each other across a divide. But as long as the very phrase "German identity" is tainted with the whiff of nationalism, there is no point in calling on the German people to "strengthen their ego". It's simply asking too much of them. Maybe it's not always possible for outsiders to understand this.

Khalil Samir: But there is no way around this debate. No society, and especially no multicultural society, can survive and remain healthy when it defines itself mainly in terms of "economic patriotism". Particularly when the basis - the strong economy – is crumbling away! Nor is loyalty to the constitution enough as long as it's only a mental attitude, with the heart a mere vacuum or filled with fear. Under such circumstances, individuals would have no moral motivation to defend democracy forcefully.

The German people will themselves conduct this debate, hopefully on as broad a basis as possible. As an Arab, I can only say this: Arabs admire Germany above all for its civilised, democratic values: equality, human rights, freedom and peace. To us, these are the European values, and thus also the values we associate with Germany. That's why it's so disappointing when Germany fails to uphold these values stalwartly, and instead hides behind self-doubt and a false idea of harmony.

Samir Khalil Samir was interviewed by Mona Sarkis.

© Zeitschrift für KulturAustausch 2003

Translation from German: Patrick Lanagan

Khalil Samir is the Director of the "Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Arabes Chrétiennes" in Beirut

Is the Arab world ready for a reading revolution?

2010-04-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

Abdo Khal's 'Arabic Booker'-winning novel is effectively banned in his native Saudi Arabia. But he says a new generation of readers is seeking out his work

An 'ambassador for creativity' ... Saudi Arabian writer Abdo Khal

The latest winner of the International prize for Arabic fiction – the "Arabic Booker" – puts Arab countries' censorship in the spotlight. I met the Saudi novelist Abdo Khal in Abu Dhabi, as he picked up his $60,000 award at a gala dinner in March. All his books are effectively banned in his home country, he told me, as well as in Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan. So I was startled to find the Saudi culture minister, Abdul Aziz Khoja, praising Khal as an "ambassador for creativity", whose win is a victory for Saudi literature.

Khal is a teacher and journalist in Jeddah, a prominent columnist and culture editor of the Okaz daily newspaper. Yet ever since he started writing short stories 30 years ago, he, like many Saudi novelists, has had to publish his books abroad (now in Beirut), for broaching what he calls the "trio of taboos" – sex, religion and politics.

While few books are explicitly banned in Saudi Arabia, if the censor's stamp is withheld, imports are barred. Khal's Lebanese publishers, Al Saqi, told me this happens with all his books – hence the euphemism that they are "unavailable" in the kingdom, which allows the government wriggle-room to deny that books are banned or confiscated. As in Egypt, the strategy is to keep shifting the goalposts while pandering to opposite constituencies: religious extremists and those lobbying for openness. Uncertainty about the boundaries fuels self-censorship and the resort to foreign publishers. Countries keep a firm hand on imports, while paying lip-service to freedom of expression. As Khal points out, such are the contradictions that even the novels of the Saudi labour minister, Ghazi al-Gosaibi, are "banned from local markets".

You can see why Khal's novel, Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles (its title is from a Koranic verse about hell), might alarm the censors. A grotesque satire on limitless wealth and the inequalities it spawns, it's about a boy from the Jeddah slums who rises as a henchman in a ruthless tycoon's palace, only to crave salvation for his fallen soul. A translated extract charts a Dante-esque division between The Pit, or slum quarter, and the palace. In Khal's view, "excessive wealth – which is not God-given but acquired – results in serfdom. When someone is excessively rich, he creates slaves to service his desires. It's like a stone used to crush bones and flesh; the reality is horrific. Money has created lords and serfs. In the past, it could buy the whole body. Now it buys a part of the being – but it's still serfdom." He likened wealth to "stagnant water, bringing in many diseases".

Khal was born in 1962 in al-Majanah, near the Yemen border – a mountainous area of Saudi Arabia known for its writers, artists and singers, but also latterly as a cradle of terrorists. The youngest child of an illiterate farming family, whose father died when he was small (he's the only survivor of 11 brothers), he moved to Jeddah then Riyadh. In the 1970s he was recruited into the militant Wahhabi Sunni movement led by Jahayman al-Otaibi, whose followers were to take thousands hostage in the Grand Mosque during Friday prayers in November 1979, in the so-called Siege of Mecca. Yet as a teenage muezzin, Khal was saved by his taste for cinema. He had already been excluded from the movement, he said, for habitually sneaking off to the movies.

He still sees literature and film as liberating alternatives to stifling interpretations of religion. "Art is the only way to open horizons in front of your eyes, instead of being bound by inhibitions and prohibitions. With art you can open up spaces, and make people feel what human beings should feel." Khal, who studied political science at university in Jeddah, sees the Juhayman movement as the source of "all the problems of the country". It was "the first movement to use religion ... against development, progress and modernity". Though the uprising in Mecca was crushed, "the state adopted Juhayman's ideas to placate his religious followers: no TV, no singing, no movies. The result was terrorism – including al-Qaida and 9/11 – which threatens the Saudi state."

Just before his prize was announced, there was an arson attack on the Al-Jouf literary club in Jeddah, of which Khal is a director. The club had been rebuilt after it was burned down in January 2009, partly for hosting women writers. But for Khal, the rise of Saudi book clubs is proof of a revolution among the young. As he wrote in 2004, Saudi society "is no longer as reserved as it used to be. The continuous revolution in communications has engendered a loosening of rigid fanatical attitudes." His novels find readers at home among those who buy books abroad, online or at book fairs in the kingdom, where, he said, the censors "turn a blind eye for 10 days in a game of cat and mouse". Some booksellers acquire stock at these fairs to sell under the counter. "What's beautiful in Saudi Arabia is we have a society of readers. Because of years of preventing people from accessing books and information, there's been a revolution in reading. People seek out authors whose work is unavailable. They feel you're expressing their own thoughts."

Like previous winner of the IPAF, Bahaa Taher, whose Sunset Oasis was published by Sceptre last year and is now longlisted for the Independent foreign fiction prize, and Youssef Ziedan, Khal is now likely to gain readers in many languages. When I asked if the prize might make his books, or those of other banned Saudi writers, more openly available at home, he was far less hopeful. But at least it "opens a window. We sons of the Gulf are looked upon as though we only have reservoirs of oil, not creativity."

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The Poem that shook the Islamic Establishment - The Chaos of Fatwas by Hissa Hilal

2010-04-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

The Chaos of Fatwas

I have seen evil from the eyes of the subversive fatwas in a time when what is lawful is confused with what is not lawful;

When I unveil the truth, a monster appears from his hiding place;barbaric in thinking and action, angry and blind;

wearing death as a dress and covering it with a belt
He speaks from an official, powerful platform,terrorizing people and preying on everyone seeking peace;

the voice of courage ran away and the truth is cornered and silent,when self-interest prevented one from speaking the truth.

-Hissa Hilal

FITNA - The Movie About Radical Islam by Geerat Wilder

2010-04-14T01:52:00.000-07:00

Somali music ban comes into effect today -- or else

2010-04-14T01:24:00.000-07:00

from jihadwatch.org

Giving a whole new meaning to "Don't touch that dial."

There Is No Fun In Islam* Alert: An update on this story. "The day the music died: Somali Islamists ban songs," from AP, April 13 (thanks to Michael):

MOGADISHU, Somalia - Somali radio stations have stopped broadcasting music following an order from Islamist insurgents who say songs are un-Islamic.
Somalia has a tradition of music and most residents greeted the ban with dismay. The edict is the latest unpopular order from Islamists, who have also banned bras, musical ringtones and movies.

So will they rise up and throw the bums out? They did it once before, of course. But like all Islamic supremacists, the anti-music forces here resort to a tried-and-true tactic to make that an unappealing option:

Abdulahi Yasin Jama at Tusmo broadcasting says stations had no choice but to comply with the order, which came into force Tuesday. Only one government-controlled station is defying the ban.
The Islamists frequently assassinate those who defy them or carry out Shariah-based punishments like amputating limbs.
The ban on music echoes rules enforced by Afghanistan's hardline Taliban regime in the late 1990s.

Yeah, isn't that funny how both the Somalis and the Afghans misunderstand Islam in exactly the same way?

* The Ayatollah Khomeini said that.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/04/somali-music-ban-comes-into-effect-today----or-else.html

When Muslims become Christians

2010-04-11T05:22:00.000-07:00

There's a widespread belief that the penalty for leaving Islam is death - hence, perhaps, the killing of a British teacher last week. But Shiraz Maher believes attitudes may be softening.

Ziya Meral's parents disowned him when he converted from Islam to Christianity.

"They said 'go away, you're not our son.' They told people I died in an accident rather than having the shame of their son leaving Islam."

FIND OUT MORE...

Shiraz Maher (right) presents Could I Stop Being a Muslim? on Radio 4 on 22 April at 2000 BST, repeated 27 April at 1700 BST.

Or listen to it on the BBC

Born and raised in Turkey, he decided to convert to Christianity after moving to university. He knew telling his parents would be a difficult moment even though they're not particularly observant Muslims, and he planned to break the news to them gently.

In the end, events overtook him. Before heading back to Turkey for the holidays, Ziya briefly visited a Christian summer camp where he was filmed eating a bowl of spaghetti.

The first his parents heard of his conversion was when they saw Ziya on the national news being described as "an evil missionary" intent on "brainwashing" Turkish children.

His parents decided they would rather tell people that he was dead than acknowledge he was a Christian. And Ziya, who now lives in the UK, is not alone in this experience.

Sophia, which is not her real name, faced similar pressures when she decided to become a Christian.

Coming from a Pakistani background but living in east London, 28-year-old Sophia spoke about the extreme cultural pressures her family put her under.

SENTENCED TO DEATH

Hashem Aghajari, a history professor in Tehran (pictured), was sentenced to death for apostasy in Nov 2002

He had said Muslims should not follow clerics "like monkeys"

The sentence sparked off a month of student protests and was quashed by Iran's Supreme Court

Abdul Rahman began a new life in Italy after his trial for apostasy in Kabul collapsed

"They kept saying: 'The punishment is death, do you know the punishment is death?'"

In the end, Sophia ran away from home. Her mother tracked her down and turned up at her baptism.

"I got up to get baptised, that's when my mother got up, ran to the front and tried to pull me out of the water.

"My brother was really angry. He reacted and phoned me on my mobile and just said: 'I'm coming down to burn that church.'"

For Sophia and Ziya, a lot of the prejudice they faced seemed to be borne out of cultural ideas, which are particularly ingrained in the South Asian community relating to notions of family honour.

But it's too easy to say this is just a cultural problem. Dig a little deeper and you find that there is a theological argument which advocates the death penalty for apostates, which has serious implications for British society.

Last week, British teacher Daud Hassan Ali, 64, was shot dead in Somalia. His widow, Margaret Ali, said her husband was targeted by Islamists who "believe it is ok to kill any man who was born into Islam and left the faith".

Those renouncing their faith for atheism or agnosticism are viewed in a similar way to those who adopt another faith.

A poll conducted by the Policy Exchange last year suggested that over a third of young British Muslims believe that the death penalty should apply for apostasy.

Until recently, I would have shared that view, but since personally rejecting extremism myself, I've been re-examining the issues which I once regarded as conclusive.

Discretion

I was staggered to learn that the Quran does not say anything about punishing apostates and that its proponents use two hadiths instead to support their view. Hadiths are the recorded traditions and sayings of the Prophet which, in addition to the Quran, provide an additional source of Islamic law.

The hadiths which relate to apostasy are linguistically ambiguous and open to interpretation. Distinguished scholars told me that the hadiths actually speak about a death penalty for treason, not apostasy. And even then, they stressed the punishment is discretionary.

“ I believe the classical law of apostasy in Islam is wrong and based on a misunderstanding ”
Usama Hassan
Scientist and imam

Dr Hisham Hellyer is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies at University of Oxford, and has researched classical Islamic law.

He believes the death penalty punishment is no longer applicable and should be suspended under certain circumstances.

Usama Hassan, a Cambridge-educated scientist and an imam, goes further and says the classical scholars were wrong in how they interpreted the Quran. He is unequivocal in denouncing those who advocate the death penalty.

"I believe the classical law of apostasy in Islam is wrong and based on a misunderstanding of the original sources, because the Quran and Hadith don't actually talk about a death penalty for apostasy."

Last year Egypt's Grand Mufti, Ali Gomaa, unequivocally told the Washington Post that the death penalty for apostasy simply no longer applies. It provoked a flurry of debate in Egypt and the wider Middle East.

Traitor

The idea of killing apostates has become a resurgent theme in recent years, a fact closely-related to the increasing politicisation of Islam since 9/11.

It epitomises the "us and them" mentality felt by many Muslims between themselves and the West. And there's an uncomfortable conclusion to all this.

“ Muslim attitudes towards apostasy are a metaphor for the wider struggle taking place within Islam ”
Shiraz Maher

Aghajari's death sentence sparked protests and a review

If there is a death penalty for treason, then who defines what treason is?

Earlier this year a group of men from Birmingham pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to kidnap and behead a British Muslim solider because they regarded him as a traitor. Joining the British army was to them treason against Islam.

So while the debate surrounding one aspect of apostasy continues, it is simultaneously throwing up an entirely new series of challenges around other issues including what should be considered treason against Islam.

When Ziya talked about what happened to him, he was just finishing a report on the experiences of apostates, called No Place to Call Home. He had interviewed 28 apostates in six different countries as part of a year-long research project.

His report found that although the death penalty is rarely applied through the courts, apostates still face gross and wide-ranging human rights abuses at the hands of the state, radical groups and local communities."

It seems that Muslim attitudes towards apostasy are a metaphor for the wider struggle taking place within Islam, between those who argue for a progressive form of Islam and those who argue for more dogmatic interpretations.

Attitudes to apostasy may be a useful barometer for judging where it's headed.

I have a friend at church who came to the UK from the Sudan because he was threatened with being stoned to death following his conversion from Islam to Christianity. Even though some areas of the Islamic world may be moving away from the death penalty for apostasy, it still remains in force in some countries.
Sophie, UK

I was also born into Islam but have since become a Christian. My family never passed any such penalty on me or any of my siblings who had converted. We are still very much part of the family and never taken as outcast, which leads to believe that the penalty is more a Middle East cultural believe than Islamic law. I am from Nigeria and in fact from a very strong Islamic community, rather than pass any sure 'Death penalty' they are looking for ways to lure us back to Islam which is definitely not possible again.
OD Balogun, Grays

I really feel for the Muslim community who by and large are decent, ordinary people. They suffer so badly when things like this come up in the media. Unfortunately, individuals are going to read into any religious text exactly what they want to and give everyone a bad name it doesn't matter what religion it is. The saying is "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", when one person is given the power to speak for their God there is always going to be misinterpretation and megalomania.
Tori Law, Thurso, Scotland

The freedom of religious worship should be absolute, and any faith that still refers to a death sentence on those who convert away has no place in modern society. The Islamic faith is in the same position as the Christian faith was in the 1500s, namely in need of reformation and modernisation.
Ian Taylor, Lincoln, UK

A true Muslim would never ever change his/her religion. A Muslim who understands the true values of Islam would never disgrace it by converting. Islam is a religion of peace and harmony. It forbids its followers to even hurt an animal so the excessive propaganda against Islam needs to end now. The Holy Prophet S.A.W said; "Be kind to those who are on earth and He in the heavens will be kind to you"

My point is anyone abandoning Islam is destroying his life hereafter [life after death] and is his/her own enemy.
Lubna, Pakistan

The thing that puzzles most of non-Muslims about this article will be how insecure they are in their own religion. Why are they so scared of other religions? Basically they should grow up and learn to live in the real world and not the Stone Age.
Laurence, Edinburgh

If you have read the Quran then maybe you would know different, if you haven't then you do not see the dire consequences in changing your religion.
Waseem, England

The "over one-third" of British Muslims who believe converts should be put to death are potentially guilty of inciting religious hatred. Will the police investigate? When are they going to be arrested?
James Rigby, Wickford, Essex

A Fabled Iraqi Instrument Thrives in Exile By ERICA GOO

2010-04-06T03:34:00.000-07:00

An oud maker in his workshop in central Baghdad. Residents rarely play the oud in public now for fear of angering militants critical of secular music.

BAGHDAD — Dhia Jabbar hides his oud in a sack when he walks down the street in his Baghdad neighborhood.

He used to teach students in the back room of a photo shop, where the sound could not be heard. But last week, militia gunmen invaded the store, destroying one of his instruments and ordering him to stop teaching. He had dreamed of a performing career, but now he has lost hope.

“Iraq is dead,” he says.

Seven thousand miles away, Rahim Alhaj, who fled Iraq in 1991, carries his oud without a second thought through the streets of Albuquerque, where he now lives. In New York, Washington and other cities, he plays for audiences of hundreds. An album he recorded was recently nominated for a Grammy Award.

The two musicians are bound by their passion for the oud, a pear-shaped instrument whose roots run deep in Iraq’s history. Some say that in its music lies the country’s soul.

Both men trained at the same prestigious conservatory in Baghdad. Both have a deep love for traditional Iraqi melodies.

But Mr. Jabbar, 29, and Mr. Alhaj, 40, are also tied together by having watched — one from close up, one from far away — their country’s descent into sectarian violence.

Mr. Alhaj worries constantly about his mother and brother, who still live in Baghdad’s dangerous Sadr City neighborhood, in a house without electricity or running water. When there is fighting between Mahdi Army militia members and American and Iraqi forces there, as has been the case virtually every day in recent weeks, he calls his family frantically.

“It’s hard because I’m so far away from them and so far from their struggle, and I feel helpless,” he said.

The violence he reads about stirs troubled dreams: images of being tortured, as he was in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein’s government, or of seeing people being executed.

In 2004, he returned to Baghdad to give a concert at his family’s house. The friends he grew up with, he said, wore beards and felt uncomfortable listening to him play; secular music was considered “haram,” forbidden. An oud maker he knew was forced to build his instruments secretly in a tiny workshop on his roof.

One morning, Mr. Alhaj awoke in his family’s home to hear his niece singing a famous Iraqi love song. But the lyrics had been changed; the words no longer spoke of romantic love, but only of God, of heaven and damnation.

“What happened?” Mr. Alhaj asked. “What happened?”

Mr. Jabbar watched the transformation of Baghdad in real time. He saw religious fervor engulf the street outside his family’s house in the Shaab neighborhood, where he used to sit outside and play for passers-by. Salons and casual concerts, once common, became rare and clandestine. The teaching and performing jobs that used to await talented oud players when they finished training disappeared.

“I have lost 10 years of my life,” he said, “the years that I worked to be able to play for people.”

Iraq was once famous for its oud players. The instrument was a common sight in Iraqi households, much like the guitar in the United States. According to one legend cited in Grove Music Online, a standard reference, the oud was invented by Lamak, a descendant of the biblical Cain. When his son died, Lamak is said to have hung his remains in a tree and seen in the skeleton the bowled body and elegant neck.

A ninth-century jurist in Baghdad extolled the oud’s healing powers, as did Muhammad Shihab al-Din, a 19th-century writer. “It places the temperament in equilibrium,” he wrote. “It calms and revives hearts.”

Even Saddam Hussein was not immune to the instrument’s charms. He is reported to have received an oud, made from rare woods and inlaid with ivory, from a famous maker, Mohammed Fadhel. Mr. Hussein ordered a renowned oud player to teach him how to play, but arriving in the dictator’s presence, the man was so terrified he could not speak. Another oudist summoned to replace him gave Mr. Hussein two lessons, the story goes.

As a child, Mr. Jabbar fell asleep to music on his father’s tape recorder. Later, he sang national songs in a choir in secondary school. At 18, late for a professional musician, he took up the oud, studying the mysteries of the Iraqi maqam, the complex system of tonal sequences and improvisation passed from master to student. “I was born to learn it,” he said.

When American tanks rolled into Baghdad in 2003, Mr. Jabbar was filled with excitement.

“I used to sit with my friends and talk about our dreams and what would become of Baghdad after the invasion,” he said. “I was expecting that Baghdad would be just like Hollywood. We were moving around freely. Sometimes we would go home at 2 a.m.”

But the new freedom did not last. He heard whispered stories of musicians who had been threatened by religious extremists. One of his professors was attacked while driving from Syria to Baghdad. The gunmen smashed the man’s oud, and said they would kill him if he continued to play. A month later, the professor fled Iraq.

“I started to be more careful and not to talk about my studies,” Mr. Jabbar said. “I used to say that I was studying painting or history or to become an English teacher.”

In some neighborhoods, he could carry his oud without much fear. In others, he said, “it was suicide to carry it with me.”

He plays where he can, in occasional festivals, in secret gatherings with friends. Once in a while, he stops by the shop of an oud maker, Ahmad al-Abdalli, on a winding street of central Baghdad’s market district.

“Before this, many players would come here and gather and play and sing, and when they go home, they are relieved and happy,” Mr. Abdalli said. “But now, they do not come, or if they come, they are only one or two at a time and they play for only a few minutes, so as not to attract the attention of the fanatics.”

Mr. Jabbar owns a valuable oud, built, like Mr. Hussein’s, by Mohammed Fadhel, an instrument so precious even his wife may not touch it. But he thinks about selling the instrument.

Mr. Alhaj, too, owned a Mohammed Fadhel, given to him decades ago by his teacher in Baghdad. He used to sleep with it next to him. He even talked to it, worrying his parents.

But in 1991, when he left Iraq, slipping into Jordan, a border guard confiscated the oud. As he saw it disappear, Mr. Alhaj recalled, he started shaking and became ill. “This is the saddest moment of my entire life,” he said.

He arrived in the United States in 2000, after years in Syria, and a refugee worker found him a job at McDonald’s. “What kind of institute is that?” Mr. Alhaj said he asked. “Do they teach Arabic classical music there?”

Eventually, he began to perform again. He does what he can to keep Iraqi oud music alive, giving concerts to benefit Iraqi children and talking to audiences about the oud and its history.

He knows he is lucky to be able to play freely, to be able to speak out without fear. “I have a chance to raise my voice here,” he said.

He rejoiced when the Hussein regime fell, he said, but he opposed the American invasion. Sometimes the thought crosses his mind that “there is a soldier there, and I do not know if he is killing my brother.”

Mr. Jabbar, for his part, jokes that he harbors a secret fantasy.

“I am going to make a coup d’état and make everyone in all the neighborhoods play the oud,” he said. “It will be a revolution.”

Qais Mizher, Anwar J. Ali and Ali Hameed contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/world/middleeast/01oud.html?n=Top/News/World/Countries%20and%20Territories/Iraq/Iraqi%20Refugees

Interview: “The Qur’an Doesn’t Support Patriarchy”

2010-04-05T22:10:00.000-07:00

Naufil Shahrukh talks to Asma Barlas on her feminist interpretations of Islam,

with special reference to the post-9/11 world.

Published in ABC, The Nation, Pakistan, February 2005.

What is moderate Islam?

I do not like labeling Islam (as moderate or extremist or feminist) because not

only does it make the religion sound contradictory and schizophrenic, but it also

obscures our own role in interpreting it. To me, it makes more sense to speak of

moderate or extremist or liberal interpretations of Islam and of moderate or

extremist or liberal Muslims. This is also why I don’t like the label “political

Islam.” The truth is that Muslims use Islam for political purposes and that is a

rather different thing. Here I should also mention the quick and dirty habit in

the U.S. of speaking of Islam as if it were a person: Islam does this and Islam

does that, Islam has locked itself inside a prison, and so on. It’s utterly sloppy

and incoherent and no one would think of speaking in the same way about

Christianity or Judaism, for instance.

What are Washington’s objectives in particular and the West’s in general when

they want Muslims around the world to embrace moderate Islam?

The objectives are to neutralize any political resistance to the U.S. The way the

Bush administration has framed the issue one would think that if only “Islam”

became moderate, all the problems in the world would disappear. The truth, of

course, is that U.S. foreign policies are partly responsible for the political and

economic inequalities and inequities that lead people (and not just Muslims) to

oppose them. One cannot reduce all opposition to terrorism but it is becoming

increasingly customary in the U.S. and the West to cast even legitimate political

resistance to repression as terroristic.

Can Islam and secularism co-exist?

If by secularism you mean a government that does not enforce religious practice

through coercion, that respects human rights and guarantees civil and political

liberties to its citizens, and that is democratic and accountable to the people, why

not? What is there in “Islam” that says that governments must manage the

religious practice of individual Muslims, or be authoritarian, or undemocratic?

I know that many Muslims understand the Qur’anic injunction to enjoin the right

and to forbid the wrong as a license for the state to manage the religious life of

its citizens, but even the Prophet was forbidden to do that. His mission, as the

Qur’an makes clear, was to proclaim God’s message, not to enforce obedience to

it; hence the Qur’anic emphasis on avoiding excesses and compulsion in religion.

This impulse to cast politics in terms of the religious management of people’s

lives and to cast Islam in terms of a denial of political and human rights, has

nothing to do with the teachings of our scripture. It has to do with certain

Muslim anxieties and, if I may say so, social pathologies.

Is there a moderate secularism?

Secularism also has its fundamentalists who are no less dogmatic about their

beliefs than religious fanatics. However, what I find more disturbing is the ease

with which liberal and secular states that are based in tolerance, human rights,

democracy and liberty—states like the U.S., for instance—are able to engage in

repressive, antidemocratic, and authoritarian practices abroad without too much

opposition from their citizens. This is partly because we almost never talk about

the violence done in the name of secular values because of our tendency to

associate violence only with religion, and, post 9/11 almost exclusively with

Islam.

Is Washington’s drive to enforce moderate Islam legitimate?

I have already suggested the problems with framing the issue in this way. But,

so long as we are talking about moderation, the Bush administration could also

benefit from some moderation.

Do you think the West is qualified to define what is Islam better than the

Muslim world itself?

There are Muslims in the West who are as qualified to define Islam as anyone in

the “Muslim world” is (I put the phrase in quotes because it seems to imply that

the Muslim world is a cognitive unity that exists separately from planet earth!)

However, I suspect what you’re asking is if nonMuslims in the West should be

the ones to define Islam and I would say only those who practice a religion are

best placed to define it. But this does not mean that one cannot benefit from a

dialogue with people who have alternative understandings of the world.

Can Muslims in the West live in accordance to their religious beliefs?

It is hazardous to speak on behalf of all Muslims in the West but I would say that,

for the most part, yes. This does not mean that are no restrictions placed on

them and here I have in mind the ban on the head-scarf in France. However, to

me this is no more problematic than forcing women to wear a veil in some

Muslim countries. In both cases, the state is mandating women’s dress which I

believe should be strictly within the purview of individual Muslim women to

choose. In cases where women are being forced to veil when the Qur’an does

not call for certain forms of veiling, they also are not being allowed to live in

accordance with their religious beliefs even in the so-called Muslim world.

Do you think that the Hadith, Ijma-e-Sahaba, and the work of the early

scholars (Imams) of Islam were all patriarchal interpretations of the Quran and

that all, or a major part, of that work should be revised?

I should clarify that when I speak about patriarchal interpretations I use two

very specific definitions of patriarchy: as a form of father (and husband) rule

over women and as a politics of sexual differentiation that privileges males. My

own understanding of the Qur’an is that not only does it not support either form

of patriarchy, but that its teachings are fundamentally at odds with theories of

male privilege. To me it seems obvious, then, that we need to rethink religious

knowledge where this knowledge conflicts with the Qur’an’s teachings. If this

means questioning the knowledge produced by the imams you mention, what is

wrong with that? None of the imams ever claimed that their work was

complete or infallible and that it was incapable of being reformed. The Qur’an is

a universal text applicable for all times. One cannot undercut its universality by

claiming that it could only be understood by four scholars for all of eternity! To

me this is blasphemy because it elevates human beings over the word of God.

According to some religious scholars “equity” between men and women is more

appropriate a term than that of “equality.” Is it correct?

Equity and equality are very hard terms to define in practice and even in the

West the debate on what equality entails is far from over. As to why some

Muslims like to use the word equity, I think it is because they feel that equality is

a Western and feminist concept, hence somehow decadent. It’s amazing how

Muslims shortchange themselves! Equality is very much a Qur’anic concept and,

in the Qur’an, sexual equality is ontological in that it is a function of our very

being and existence since both women and men were created from the same

nafs, or self. However, Muslims disregard this crucial principle in favor of three

or four words or lines in the Qur’an that they read as establishing men as

guardians over women and giving them the right to beat their wives, and so on.

There are now several studies that show such readings to be flawed and

misrepresentative of the Qur’an’s teachings. Conveniently, however, many

conservative Muslims who want to cling to patriarchal readings of the Qur’an

dismiss this work on various pretexts in order not to have to deal with it.

How was your book “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal

Interpretations of the Qur’an received in the Muslim world?

There is no monolithic Muslim world and even if there were, it would be hard to

generalize. The book is being translated into Indonesian and of course now

there is a South Asian edition but it has only just been released, so one has to

wait and see. In the U.S., it has done very well since it is in its fourth printing in

two years.

What was the reason behind your leaving of your home country and settling in

the US?

I left Pakistan in 1983 after General Zia ul Haq had me dismissed from the

Foreign Service on two charges: having called him a buffoon in my diary (which

was turned over to him by my former husband’s family as punishment for

leaving a bad marriage), and for having said at a private dinner in the home of

Pakistan’s ambassador to the Philippines that the judiciary in Pakistan was

neither free and nor fair (this was after the hanging of Mr. Bhutto in 1979). I was

in the sixth year of my service when this happened and for a year or so I worked

as assistant editor of the Muslim in Islamabad. However, I eventually had to

leave for reasons of personal safety and later received political asylum in the U.S.

I did not mean to settle in the U.S., but life has its own way of unfolding and here

I am, more than twenty years later. For a very long time, I felt that I had no real

home but lately I’ve been trying to make peace with my life.

Where is the actual problem—the misinterpreted and misused Hudood Act in

Pakistan; or the Hudood law itself?

I am not a legal scholar and cannot answer the specifics of this question. But I do

want to note that the late Fazlur Rahman used to say that the Qur’an is not a law

book but that we need to derive laws from it. The process of deriving the law is

thus very much an interpretive act that is far from perfect; we should thus

always be willing to entertain the possibility that some laws may not be

consonant with the Qur’an’s teachings. I say this as a general proposition.

As for the implementation of the Hudood laws in Pakistan, I would say that it

has been terribly egregious because the weight of all moral crimes has fallen

disproportionately on women. There are thousands of women languishing in

Pakistan’s jails while the men with whom they are alleged to have committed

sexual crimes have magically disappeared. How just is that? And how just is it

not to be able to distinguish, from a strictly legal perspective, between rape and

consensual sex so that a victim of rape is actually treated as the criminal? And

how “Islamic” is it to mandate stoning to death for adultery when the Qur’an

doesn’t mandate such a punishment for any crime? It is true that the Prophet

(pbuh) sanctioned this punishment for a Jewish couple taken in adultery since he

was judging them by their own law. How has stoning become part of Islamic

law?

The US and the West have always supported the Muslim states where Islam is

used as a tool to enforce the writ of patriarchal monarchies or authoritarian

forms of government, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iraq (of 1980s). Do you

think that there is a role of the West in promoting patriarchal Islam?

Oh, absolutely! And that is partly why I find all this pious talk about “moderate

Islam” on the part of the U.S. and “the West” so hypocritical and galling.

What can be done to liberate Muslims from the holds of patriarchal

interpretations of Islam?

Since I have already suggested that the Qur’an is not a patriarchal text, I would

say reading the Qur’an in light of new understandings of the world that come as

the result of living in this world; of educating Muslims so that, among other

things, they can read the Qur’an for themselves; challenging the authority of all

those readings of the Qur’an that project sexual preferences and hatred onto

God; punishing tribal notions of “honor” that allow men to exercise the right of

life and death over their female relatives, and working to develop an Islamic

praxis of sexual equality. However, I realize that for any of this to happen, there

needs to be far reaching social, economic, and political reform so that Muslim

societies become more egalitarian and democratic. For me, the challenge isn’t

identifying what needs to be done, but finding the means to do what needs to be

done and that’s a totally different question.

http://www.asmabarlas.com/TALKS/20050201_NationPk.pdf

Bint al-Shati's Wives of the Prophet: Feminist or Feminine?

2010-04-03T22:46:00.000-07:00

Abstract

The Egyptian writer and Islamic scholar Dr. ^cA'isha ^cAbd al-Rahman (b. 1913), who originated from the countryside, was a pioneering woman in many respects, although she did not consider herself to be a feminist. She was one of the first Egyptians to write about the agrarian problems of the country and the plight of the peasants; and of the pioneering generation of female Arab literati. She was also the first Muslim woman to undertake Quranic exegesis. Writing under her pen name, Bint al-Shati', she was also one of the first women to deal with the life of the Prophet Muhammad through vignettes of the women in his life. Like many other modern Muslim biographers of the Prophet, she rendered classical Islamic materials in a new style. Although her book on the Wives of the Prophet often portrays women in a negative light, content analysis indicates that the work also reflects feminist themes.

Author: Ruth Roded - I would like to thank Professor Hilary Kilpatrick for her careful reading and comments on an earlier draft of this article as well as for her encouraging me to publish this preliminary work. Any inaccuracies that remain are, of course, my own responsibility.

DOI: 10.1080/13530190600603915

Publication Frequency: 3 issues per year

Published in: British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 33, Issue 1 May 2006 , pages 51 - 66

Subjects: Asian Studies; Middle East Studies;

Formats available: HTML (English) : PDF (English)

Previously published as: British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Bulletin (0305-6139) until 1991

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The Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques

2010-04-03T22:33:00.001-07:00

The Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques

Asra Nomani's ten principles of equality for women in mosques

BY: Asra Q. Nomani

1. Women have an Islamic right to enter a mosque.

2. Women have an Islamic right to enter through the main door.

3.Women have an Islamic right to visual and auditory access to the musalla (the main sanctuary).

4. Women have an Islamic right to pray in the musalla without being separated by a barrier, including in the front and in mixed-gender congregational lines.

5. Women have an Islamic right to address any and all members of the congregation.

6. Women have an Islamic right to hold leadership positions, including positions as prayer leaders and as members of the board of directors and management committees.

7. Women have an Islamic right to be full participants in all congregational activities.

8. Women have an Islamic right to lead and participate in meetings, study sessions, and other community activities without being separated by a barrier.

9. Women have an Islamic right to be greeted and addressed cordially.

10. Women have an Islamic right to receive respectful treatment and exemption from gossip and slander.

AL Jazeera : THE FABULOUS PICTURE SHOW 'The Infidel'

2010-04-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

Imagine if Homer Simpson were a Muslim named Mahmud who discovers one day that he is actually Jewish.

That is the premise behind The Infidel, a new British comedy written by David Baddiel and directed by Josh Appignanesi.

Entertainment editor Amanda Palmer talks toThe Infidel's Omid Djalili and David Baddiel

The film stars Omid Djalili as Mahmud, along with Richard Schiff, best known as Toby inThe West Wing, as a Jewish London cabbie.

Does the "F-word" occasionally pass Mahmud's lips? It is hardly worth mentioning. Does he say his prayers five times a day? Of course! Well, usually… Does he fast every day of Ramadan? Who is counting, anyway?

He may not be the most observant, but in his heart he is as Muslim as it gets.

But after his mother's death a discovery turns Mahmud's world upside down. He finds his birth certificate, which reveals that not only was he adopted at birth… but he is also Jewish, and his real name is Solly Shimshillewitz.

Comedian and star of the film, Omid Djalili, plus fellow comedian and screenwriter David Baddiel join Amanda Palmer, Al Jazeera's head of entertainment, to talk about what provoked this ethnic comedy, which is infused with as many Jewish jokes as it is Muslim; the director of the film, Josh Appignanesi, also joins the FPS audience to talk about the challenges of shooting a comedy.

The Taqwacores

Islam and Punk collide in The Taqwacores

The Taqwacores is the unlikely collision of "Islam" and "punk" forged by young American-born Muslims attempting to reconcile the different sides of their identity.

It all began when Michael Muhammad Knight wrote the novel of the same name, in which he imagined moving into a house of punk Muslims.

The book became an underground sensation and spawned a real movement of Muslim punk bands.

Now, director Eyad Zahra has turned The Taqwacores into a feature film which launched at this year's Sundance film festival.

The Fabulous Picture Show was there when director Zahra, his cast and crew, original author Knight and the real Taqwacore punk bands all descended on Sundance in Park City, Utah, to launch the film.

The controversial low budget feature tells the story of Yusef, a strait-laced Pakistani-American student looking for Muslim room-mates.

He finds the house of Taqwacores, where everyone is indeed a Muslim, but finds his ideas of his faith challenged by his new friends who mix Quranic study with music, sex and partying.

The Fabulous Picture Show is with them from their punkish accommodation – everyone staying on the floor in one big house – through the press interviews where they attempt to explain the controversial film to both secular/Christian Americans and Muslims, and all the way to the movie's world premiere.

12 Angry Lebanese

Prisoners perfom in 12 Angry Lebanese

Gutsy theatre director Zeina Daccache has a history of working with traumatised and disadvantaged people – but when she decided to mount the play 12 Angry Men in Lebanon's notorious Roumieh prison, she went a step further than anyone ever had before.

Murderers, rapists and drug dealers were among the inmates who signed up for 15 months of her unorthodox workshops.

For most, it was the first opportunity they’d had to reflect on their crimes and emotional states.

Together, they adapted the play to their own experiences, and the resulting production brought the performers face-to-face with an audience of government officials and curious visitors from around the world.

FPS correspondent Lama Matta talks to Daccache about her new film, 12 Angry Lebanese, which documents this bold project and which she hopes will change attitudes towards prison therapy in the Middle East.

This episode of The Fabulous Picture Show can be seen from Thursday, April 1, at the following times GMT: Thursday: 0600; Friday: 0030 and 0830; Saturday:1130 and 2330; Sunday: 0630 and 2130; Monday: 1430; Tuesday: 0530, 1230 and 1930; Wednesday: 0300.

Source:

Al Jazeera

Inside The Gender Jihad Women's Reform in Islam by Amina Wadud

2010-03-31T23:04:00.000-07:00

In 2005, Amina Wadud made international headlines when she helped to promote new traditions by leading the Muslim Friday prayer in New York City. In her provocative new book, Inside the Gender Jihad, she brings a wealth of experience from the trenches of the jihad to make a passionate argument for gender inclusiveness in the Muslim world. Knitting together scrupulous scholarship with lessons drawn from her own experiences as a woman, she explores the array of issues facing Muslim women today, including social status, education, sexuality, and leadership. A major contribution to the debate on women and Islam, Amina Wadud’s vision for changing the status of women within Islam is both revolutionary and urgent.

Dr Amina Wadud is a professor of Islamic Studies and a mother of five. She is the author of Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective.

"Seen as a pioneering feminist, her last book, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (2006) was partly an experiment in autobiography, and included details of the threats to her life in New York." Independent, The
“Readers of Inside the Gender Jihad will be taken on a truly thrilling journey - not just through the problems that confront Muslims today, or the many gender injustices that plague contemporary articulations of the Islamic faith, but also through the many forms of intolerable oppression, which have become interminable causes of human suffering in our world.”
Khaled Abou El Fadl – Professor of Islamic law and Jurisprudence, UCLA School of Law

Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective by Amina Wadud

2010-03-31T23:02:00.000-07:00

Read Online at

http://www.questia.com/library/book/quran-and-woman-rereading-the-sacred-text-from-a-womans-perspective-by-amina-wadud.jsp

A Gender Jihad For Islam's Future : Asra O Nomani

2010-03-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

A Gender Jihad For Islam's Future

By Asra Q. Nomani
Sunday, November 6, 2005

BARCELONA

Several months ago, when a group of Spanish Muslims approached city officials here about sponsoring a conference on Islamic feminism, one responded, "Isn't that an oxymoron?" That's what many people believe. To conservative Muslims, the phrase is an insult to Islam. But to many moderate Muslims -- and I count myself among them -- an Islamic feminist movement fits with the religion's early teachings and offers one of our best hopes for countering extremism. Indeed, those of us who have joined the movement since it emerged in the 1990s have come to understand that Islam needs to go back to its progressive 7th-century roots if it is to move forward into the 21st century.

How difficult that is -- and how important -- became clear to me when I joined the first International Congress on Islamic Feminism, which was held in this Spanish city just over a week ago. When the floor was opened for questions during one session, a young Muslim man made the comment I've heard so often: "In Islam, there is no place for feminism. . . . " Sitting on the dais, where I had just chronicled our successful struggle to integrate some U.S. mosques, I took it in stride. I've become accustomed to belittling comments, even death threats. But what happened next stunned me.

From the middle of the audience of some 250 women and men, Amina Wadud, a Muslim scholar of Islamic studies who calls herself "a pro-faith feminist," stood up. "You are out of order," she said to the man. "What you are doing is exactly the kind of thing that we are here to be able to stop." The audience broke into cheers. Another Muslim man tried to protest. I interrupted him. "We're changing history today," I said. "We're not going to shut up."

What stunned me was not only the confidence with which we spoke but the willingness of the group to back us -- 12 Muslim women scholars and activists who had been invited to attend the conference by a small but ambitious group of largely Spanish Muslim converts, the moderate Catalan Islamic Board.

The force of our collective effort convinced me that we have the strength to challenge the men's club that defines most of the Muslim world. It was an affirmation of the commitment that had brought me and the 11 other participants here from as far away as Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and refugee camps in the disputed territory of Western Sahara to share stories from the trenches in the "gender jihad." We Muslim feminists view it as a struggle that taps Islamic theology, thinking and history to reclaim rights granted to women by Islam at its birth but erased by manmade rules and tribal traditions masquerading as divine law.

In the communities where we live, we have begun challenging customs that deny women rights from the mosque to the bedroom: gender segregation, mandatory veiling, forced early marriages, clitorectomies, polygamy, death for sex outside of marriage, domestic violence and strict domestic roles. We have many Muslim men on our side: The chief organizer of the conference was a man, Abdennur Prado, who hustled nonstop behind the scenes. And we are taking a lead from Christian and Jewish women who are generations ahead of us today in their efforts to challenge traditions that block them from the workplace, the political arena and the pulpit.

To many, we are the bad girls of Islam. But we are not anti-sharia (Islamic law) or anti-Islam. We use the fundamentals of Islamic thinking -- the Koran, the Sunnah, or traditions and sayings of the prophet Muhammad, and ijtihad , or independent reasoning -- to challenge the ways in which Islam has been distorted by sharia rulings issued mostly by ultraconservative men.

We are wrestling with laws created in the name of Islam by men, specifically eight men. The Muslim world of the 21st century is largely defined by eight madhhabs , or Islamic schools of jurisprudence, with narrow rulings on everything from criminal law to family law: the Shafi, Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali schools in the majority Sunni sect; the Jafari and Zaydi schools, for the minority Shiite sect; and the Ibadi and Thahiri schools among other Muslims. But the first centuries of Islam's 1,400-year history were quite different -- characterized by scores of schools of jurisprudence, many progressive and women-friendly. It is not Islam that requires women to wear a headscarf, but rather the scholars in the contemporary schools.

To many of the women I spoke with, their struggle to move Islam forward by reaching back to its past represents nothing short of a revolution. "This is a global struggle," says Valentine Moghadam, a native of Iran and the chief of the gender equality and development section of UNESCO in Paris. She sees the movement as an important response to "frustration with Islamic fundamentalism." And there is no doubt in my mind, either: The kind of ideology that willingly subjugates women can also foster hatred.

From the dais, activists dressed in everything from Parisian fashion to traditional African batik offered powerful stories of regional reform. From Malaysia, Zainah Anwar, executive director of the Sisters in Islam (dubbed "Satan in Islam" by conservatives), laid out a strategy for reforming Islamic family law in her country, by, for example, educating women about their right to refuse forced marriages. And like others, she is looking beyond her country's borders for support. The group's newsletter is being funded by the successful multinational cosmetics company the Body Shop. And the group is calling Moroccan legal experts to Malaysia next February to educate local leaders about the progressive family reforms that Morocco passed last year. This month, Anwar and other Sisters in Islam leaders will go to England to swap strategies with 10 Muslim women's groups.

In some local areas, groups like Anwar's have begun to see success. Peeking over her laptop and occasionally adjusting the flowing white head scarf she chooses to wear, Djingarey Maiga, the chief of a Mali-based group called Women and Human Rights, explained how she started a rural radio program in her country to promote women's rights. And BAOBAB, a Nigerian group founded in 1996, made headlines in 2003 when it helped win a victory for Amina Lawal, the mother sentenced to be stoned to death for having a baby outside of marriage. Mufuliat Fijabi, a senior program officer at BAOBAB, told us how a conservative sharia judge broke with tradition not long ago to oppose marital rape after going through training provided by his organization. One Nigerian imam, after hearing BAOBAB's message encouraging ijtihad surprised BAOBAB organizers by following up and encouraging Muslims to consider alternative schools of thought.

The challenge isn't just in poor villages in Nigeria or Mali. It's in the wealthy and supposedly well-educated West. In 2003, I set off a debate over the rights of Muslim women when I wrote in The Post's Outlook section about walking through the front door of my hometown mosque in Morgantown, W.Va., and praying in the main hall, thus defying an order that women enter through a back door and pray in a secluded balcony. Since then, I've been harassed in mosques from New York City to Seattle for refusing to accept separate quarters. After almost two years of public campaigning with other women, the country's major Muslim organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America, issued a 28-page report in July titled, "Women Friendly Mosques and Community Centers: Working Together to Reclaim Our Heritage," recommending reform, including an affirmative action program to get women on mosque boards.

Our movement also caused a stir earlier this year when Wadud led a congregation of about 125 women and men in a New York prayer service. As the chief organizer, I wondered what the impact of her action would be as I unfurled the massive roll of carpet I'd purchased from the ABC home furnishing store to serve as our prayer rug. Many clerics around the world attacked us at fiery Friday sermons for undermining our religion, and Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi claimed that our prayer "creates millions of bin Ladens" by challenging male authority. We're up against a formidable machinery of opposition, but we're convinced that now is the moment to coordinate the legal and policy reforms that Islamic feminism is promoting. Initially, I thought it was time for a new madhhab. But Islamic scholars have persuaded me that that would be too limiting. We need to focus instead on broad societal initiatives.

We see our struggle as part of a wider peace jihad. It was a national Islamic leader who oversees the Catalan Islamic Board, Mansur Escudero, who issued the first fatwa against Osama bin Laden, months before U.S. Muslim organizations issued their own. The organizers of the conference say they don't Vaccept support from Saudi Arabia, which has funded much of the spread of ultraconservative Islamic orthodoxy in the world.

At the Barcelona conference, I proposed a plan called "The Islamic Dream" -- an effort to connect our disparate efforts and develop a new approach for Islam in the 21st century. I would like to see us organize a summit of Islam's progressive thinkers to establish the terms of reform and define a 20-year plan to transform our world. That is where we are headed.

During Wadud's presentation on one of the last days of the conference, a Spanish American woman stood up and asked: "Would you lead us in prayer today?" Wadud assented. A group of about 30 Muslims gathered in a hotel conference room to pray behind her,men and women standing shoulder to shoulder -- grounds for banishment in mosques around the world. A Pakistani Canadian activist, Raheel Raza, ran to join the line, not far from a Pakistani American scholar, Asma Barlas, dubbed one of "the mothers of Islamic feminism." Together, we opened our hands as Wadud prayed, "We ask for Your protection."

Our prayer complete, we declared with one voice, "Ameen." "Please accept."

Author's e-mail:

asranomani@theislamicdream.com

Asra Nomani, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is the author of the book "Standing Alone in Mecca" (HarperSanFrancisco).

The discredit of the official ulama

2010-03-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

taken from http://abdennurprado.wordpress.com/

The discredit of the official ulama

January 28, 2010

[Chapter 3 of the book before Islam Islam (ed. Oozebap 2007)]

By "official ulama 'all those linked to institutions and government-related organizations, political movements, pressure groups or states: ulema councils, ministries of religious affairs, national muftis, imams and mosques of great presidents and other senior university Islamic. Speaking of his discredit, we find that many of the bodies or persons concerned have lost their authority over most of the Muslims, and how this loss of influence is growing. No doubt that in all bodies and institutions mentioned there are people of knowledge, whose teaching and service to the community deserves the utmost respect, but unfortunately, certain positions of some of these 'official' ulama 'connoting just to rest causing distrust of religious institutions in all Muslims. In this text, try to analyze the scope of this discredited, its causes and consequences. Before, it is necessary to understand what their position (which they should have) the ulema in Islamic tradition.

The word ulama is the plural of Alim : Wise, owner of 'ilm , science or knowledge. The transmission of knowledge is essential in a traditional society. If the basic practice of the pillars of Islam is transmitted in the family, a deeper understanding of the tradition should be achieved through a search that spans the entire life of the believer. Muhammad said: "Seeking knowledge is an obligation for every Muslim and Muslim".This quote includes knowledge of the Qur'an, Sunnah and Fiqh, they need to live as a Muslim and Muslim. Throughout the life of a believer, new situations will lead us to question several themes: sexuality, abortion, usury, marital problems, dealing with our neighbors, how to respond to violence, as understanding religious pluralism. Traditional science has developed answers to the thousand and one situations which may arise, based on the teachings of Islam. As circumstances change constantly, it is also necessary to contextualize these responses. Although it would be ideal, it is clear that not all Muslims can devote the necessary time to the task of finding answers to all questions. Thus, we call those ulema who have dedicated their lives to the study of the Koran, the Sunna and the Sharia and are responsible for the transmission of this knowledge.

The ulema are an essential part of the umma to the extent that their knowledge is aimed at helping other believers. The ulema are there to dispel the doubts that are presented to the Muslims in their daily lives, to help them in their own search for the best. It is important to understand that the mullahs are not a hierarchy or are nominated by anyone. An alim is to possess the knowledge, which seeks to serve the community, and not have a university degree or be in charge of an institution. The very term 'official' ulama 'is shocking. You can not be learned by decree, ministerial appointment. If we look at history, we realize that many of the mullahs today accepted as benchmarks had problems with power. This is evident in the case of large Alfaquis as Imam Malik, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd or Ibn Taymiyah.

Only taking into account this can be assessed the scope of the discrediting of the official ulema and destructuring effects that this has to discredit the Muslim communities. If we recognize that their role is so important, why Muslims turn their backs on the official ulema? Apart from other considerations (related to the advent of modernity and a break with the traditional model of transmission of knowledge), we must attribute the causes of this disgrace to their own ulema. We note two main reasons: intellectual poverty and collusion with power.

The intellectual poverty of the official ulema dyes acquires tragic when we talk about Alfaquis and muftis in the service of totalitarian regimes. We met with terrible judgments and legal considerations. Some of these cases are notorious: sentences for apostasy in Egypt, the death of homosexuals in Iran sentences women to death by stoning in Nigeria, cuts down to poor children for stealing an apple. Other lesser known cases are no less embarrassing, like the cases of rape in Pakistan, where the woman ends up being punished for the crime of fornication, not being able to bring together four eyewitnesses to the rape. Domestic violence against women is more acute in the Muslim-majority countries in Europe. The difference is that while Europe is fought from the institutions in the Islamic world can find a sentence such as the Supreme Court of United Arab Emirates, according to which the husband is entitled to beat his wife if he did not break a bone. Of course this is not the norm, but an anomaly, and it goes without saying that in most Muslim populated countries abuse is a crime severely punished. However, such a decision confronts us with the existence of judges whose vision of Islam can be regarded as obscurantist.

The examples are many and serious. This type of judicial decision, regardless of the injustice they represent, leading inexorably to the discredit of the sharia as a whole, both among non-Muslims and among Muslims themselves. There is in this respect a strong constraint on the part of this class of priests, consisting of Muslims to believe that such laws are part of the "law of God, when in reality they are legal constructions made by medieval jurists unlikely to find support in the Koran or the Prophet's example. However, with this evidence the official ulema respond with finger: all those who criticize its judgments are accused of being enemies of Islam and trying to dismantle the Sharia, the divine law, what has been prescribed by God as a duty inescapable. Personally, I have been called kafir ,^[[1]]heretic, infidel, unbeliever, etc., just for saying that stoning is not prescribed in the Koran, or that the crime of apostasy if it goes against the principle of freedom of conscience set in Quran and validated by the example of Muhammad, peace and the salat of Allah be upon him.

The speech which confuses the sharia (divine law) in fiqh (human development) helps to keep the Muslim-majority countries in the late, always invoking the name of Islam. Today, when talking about the presence of "Islamic law" in the Constitution of any country, the Muslims themselves we start to tremble. Rarely, this implies the prohibition of loans with interest, the establishment of freedom of conscience, social justice and gender equality, all guaranteed in the Koran. Generally, under 'Islamic law' can we expect the inclusion of family codes macho, some punishments and a retrograde and reactionary moralizing hypocrite. All this explains that the mullahs officers are viewed as a whole, with anger and even contempt for millions of believers.

The devastating effect of his speeches is evident in thousands of fatwas circulating on the Internet on many different topics. We have already noted the importance of transferring knowledge in the Islamic world has the fundamental role played by the ulema in shaping Muslim societies. What is the Koran, what is the Sunna, what God tells us through His Word, do you want from us? Many Muslims seek a single answer, a cookbook that will kick its problems, which discourage discord and remove their doubts. Who will answer our questions everyday when they affect the practice of Islam? The confusion among Muslims is huge, faced with an institutional apparatus unable to fulfill their mission of transmitting knowledge, and whose answers are not feasible Muslim's life (and especially Muslim) in the context of plural societies in the XXI century .

We mention some of the foolish, to clarify to what extent these mullahs have been disconnected from the lives of over a half billion Muslims in the world and how their only concern is maintaining itsstatus quo, . The most repeated points affecting the inferiority of women, rejection of other religions and the insistence on the literal application of the penalties established by the lawyers of the Abbasid period. Any attempt to contextualize the message of Islam in the XXI century is demonized as a deviation or innovation and in extreme cases it resulted in a takfir : declaration of Kufur or disbelief.

Many of the fatwas that can be found on the Internet show ordinary people seeking answers to everyday issues that they encounter a wall of rules impossible to apply without destroying their lives. For example, a Western Muslim write asking whether you can shake hands with men at work and get the warning that mix with men is haram ,^[[2]]more if they are not Muslims, you are advised to leave their work and that "migrating to an Islamic country "(presumably referred to Saudi Arabia, instead of the answer.)

In another case, a young Muslim asks if he is permitted to contribute to the purchase of a cake and preparations for the wedding of a couple of non-Muslims. The question now is strange in itself, but the response exceeded all expectations: there is nothing wrong in helping the wedding, but it is not advisable to contribute financially and it isharaam to waste money on promoting the haram . It is not convenient to attend the ceremony, as this kind of celebration usually be forbidden things: alcohol, scantily clad women, lewd dancing, men and women in the same room. At this end, our alim warns the unwary young you are not allowed to take a non-Muslim as a friend and it isharam to feel love towards non-Muslims.

In a third case, we have a young Palestinian taxi driver who emigrated to the United States, married with two children. Their concerns focus on the fact that often is forced to take drunken passengers. The answer: it is forbidden for a Muslim to carry alcohol, is forbidden to transport people or depraved sinners to fun places where they commit their sins. Doing so is considered cooperation with sin and will be a bad thing on the Day of Judgement. Thus, it is assumed that the young driver will have to refuse any passenger who had alcohol or going to a nightclub. At the end of his fatwa, and almost as a joke, if alim begs God to give the driver the best customers, so you can earn an honest living. We envision the new doubts about the young Palestinian, their distress at the time of taking passage ...

Alarmed by the above fatwa, one user asks: "I am a company driver and often my bosses ask me to take them to places where alcohol is served, what?". Answer: "If indeed you are a Muslim, you should not wear them. Fear Allah and the Last Day. " In the end, it seems clear that being a taxi driver and a Muslim is incompatible.

In another query at the same service on-line fatwas, a woman who works in the cleaning service of a hotel is concerned that often has to pick up where he has been drinking Drinking alcohol and clean rooms where he has committed fornication. The mufti replied that in that hotel if alcohol is sold or there is any sinful activity has to stop working there. We concluded that any work in the service sector is forbidden for Muslims. Conclusion powerful, since a large number of Muslim immigrants in the West working in this sector.

In all these cases we find Muslims little versed in Islam, who have normal lives in a pluralistic context, and work and friendships that bring them into daily relations with people of other religions and customs. Specific questions arise about the details of everyday life, which reveal a concern something unhealthy to live according to the principles of Islam. The answers are devastating: leave work and migrates rejects your friends, pave a decent life. We can not calculate the effect of these fatwas. This kind of chatter clerics seem unaware of their meaning words. The ease with which issue their judgments suggests that we seek the destruction of another. They seem blinded by the power that has been given the opportunity to affect people's lives. In any case, the ideological violence of these fatwas is incalculable, as is the damage they cause.

The alarmist language abounds, the threat of hell as a constant intended to coerce the Internet to obedience to the advice really hard to follow. The problem is exacerbated when these same messages are repeated by some imams of mosques to proliferate in the West, often formed in the same way of thinking, in the same idealized vision (essential) of Islam, which seeks to preserve the purity of communities to external contamination. All this tends to create a rarefied atmosphere. Young people who try to live honestly Islam are drawn into sectarian and surly attitudes. The more you increase your thirst for knowledge, more will this bolt-pervading thought. Such speeches may well understood among Muslim groups excluded from society, and whose hatred for everything Western predisposes them to accept anything that involves a break. The memory of colonization, Islamophobia and a lack of recognition of the rights of Muslims in the West favors the reactive attitudes. Faced with marginalization and hypocritical speeches about the virtues of democracy and the welfare society, many young people need to live Islam as contrary to everything that comes from the west, and these clerics and imams offered a model.

In most cases, these are fatwas issued from the reactionary feudal Arab thought. The ulema called upon to give answers know all of the contexts in which questions are asked. In particular, consultation with the Palestinian taxi driver from Qatar is answered by a mufti who lives in a country where alcohol is virtually absent (except for private parties of sheikhs) and where women are invisible (except for private parties the sheikhs!). The Mufti in question does not know or seem to care about which means to emigrate from Palestine to the United States, or how difficult it can be for this young man to find a stable job to support his family. Thus, the gap between these reactionary mullahs and believers consultants seem insurmountable.

This gap is most serious. It involves the dismantling of the "spiritual knowledge" as a service to the community, and introduces the "religious knowledge" as an instrument of ideological control. The reactionary mullahs remain anchored in an archaic Islam has nothing to do with this. A woman asked about the legality of contraception and get the following answer: coitus interruptus is permitted with his wife whenever she gives consent. With the slaves do not need your consent, neither for sex nor for coitus interruptus . This is the reply of Shaykh Abu 'Abdullaah ibn' Uthaymeen, professor at the Islamic University and Imam Muhammad ibn Sa'ud member until his death in 2001 of the Grand Ulema of Saudi Arabia.^[[3]]

The emphasis on the segregation of the sexes is a real obsession among these characters and situations conducive to creating truly violent. For many years director of the Council of Grand Ulema of Saudi Arabia was Shaykh 'Abdul-'Azeez Ibn' Abdullaah Ibn 'Abdur-Rahmaan Ibn Baaz, ^[[4]]taken as a reference for thousands of Muslims in the last decades of the twentieth century. When asked whether a university is allowed to return the greeting to their partners, offers the following response: You are not allowed to return the greeting, whenever done with decency, they are suitably dressed and mediate sufficient distance between you. But the fact of studying in the same college women is haram.

In other cases, the question of women's work, some alleged ulema as Mufti Ebrahim Desai ^[[5]]of South Africa cut to the chase and declare that, except in cases of extreme necessity, the woman is not allowed to work. It would be desirable to inform you that Muhammad himself was married 25 years with a working woman, which was employed. But the problem lies elsewhere: as mufti in a strange fatwa declaring that women suffer a degree of imbalance in nature, since it was created from a rib of Adam, peace and blessings. This imbalance is shown their ingratitude towards her husband and the lightness with which he curses those who hurt her feelings. According to the mufti, the husband must be patient and careful with it, for this imbalance in the nature of woman does not outcrop. He added: "This has been repeatedly confirmed by experience" .Thus, through its eccentric response, the mufti can not respond to the concerns of the client, but it gives us a sad picture of their marital relationships.

In another fatwa made a long tirade against oral sex, basing their ban in a hadith where the Prophet said: "Actually, your mouths are pathways for the Koran, so purify your mouths with siwaak (a kind of toothbrush) . Ebrahim Desai's argument is this: if the mouth is an instrument for the recitation of the Word of Allah, how can we use for sex?

A constant of this type of ulama of Puritanism is the end, really little in keeping with the example of the prophet Muhammad. Rashad Hassan Khalil El Sheikh, former dean of the Faculty of Shariah at the University of Al Azhar in 2006 sparked a sterile controversy by declaring that being completely naked during intercourse invalidates a marriage. This view was contested by the fatwa committee chairman of Al Azhar, Abd-Allah Megaw, whereby spouses can look when they are always naked, save the view of the sexual organs. Therefore I recommend to make love covered by a sheet. With this sort of mentality, it is understandable that Islam has evolved from being regarded as a religion prurient (this was a recurring charge from Christianity for centuries) to be considered Puritan (this is a widespread view today). Of course ordinary people can only laugh at such discussions.

On birth control, the Council of Grand Ulema of Saudi Arabia at the time determined it was illegal to take birth control pills, because the Muslim nation needs to grow in number to defend against plots against him throwing the enemies of Islam. What is not clear is that we can make the masses of hungry and vociferous Muslims against American military technology, or the strangeness of these enemies of Islam are allies and supporters of the Saudi regime itself, in which soil have military bases from which to prepare invasions predominantly Muslim countries.

Another constant in these fatwas is the rate of unbelievers, deviants, heretics, innovative or non-Muslims the followers of certain currents within Islam. A Muslim asks if it is permissible to marry a Shia. Answer: Sunnis and Shiites have different beliefs. The Shia are outside of Islam. It is forbidden to love and therefore you should stay as far away as possible from these people. A man explains that he made a funeral prayer without realizing that the imam was Qadiani (or Ahmadi ^[[6]].) The answer: you have to repeat the sentences, since these people arekuffar and out of Islam. This trend does not escape anyone. We have read fatwas declaring Kafur to virtually all the currents of contemporary Islam, from the most liberal to most conservative.

Very significant is the rejection of many of these so-called scholars of religious pluralism, which is very difficult to justify if one follows the message of the Koran, which says that God sent his messengers to all peoples, and that the Muslim has the obligation to believe in the Quranic revelation and all previous revelations, without distinction between the messengers of God, peace be upon them. ^[[7]]In spite of this, for our ulema all religions except Islam are kuffar, and all the followers of other faiths are unbelievers condemned to hell.

Sometimes the hostility and rejection of interreligious dialogue come to almost comical extremes. In a text of the aforementioned states ibn Baaz clear in stating that anyone who does not consider as infidels (orinfidels ) to the followers of other religions is himself an unbeliever, which is very serious, and that includes the Prophet Muhammad himself . There are many other things that, according to ibn Baaz, 'override a person's Islam'

This category includes those who believe that some criminal laws of Islam are not applicable in our time, such as cutting of hands for thieves or stoning adulterers. Also believe that one can refer to human laws for commercial transactions or business he makes one unbeliever.^[[8]]

This statement was endorsed in the 80s of XX century by the Standing Committee of Fatwas of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Later, the same Committee issued a fatwa prohibiting Muslims to read the holy books of other religions, except in the case of religious scholars (again, official ulema themselves), and these only to refute.^[[9]]

Among these reactionary mullahs, Judeophobia is not surprising. As an example of a brilliant analysis, we quote the response from Saudi Salah Al-Munajid to a question-Islamophobic complaint about the education received by children in Israel, a matter of deep concern. Answer: Muslims can teach their children to hate Jews without committing an injustice, because the Jews are hateful and enemies of God. But if the Jews teach their children to hate the Muslims are committing an injustice, because Islam is the only legitimate religion.

The intellectual poverty of these ulema contrasts with what we feel as we approach the example of the Prophet. All that Muhammad was a delicacy, sensitivity and service to his fellows, has turned to hatred and intolerance towards any difference. We can read over and over fatwas in recent years have given agencies like the Council of Grand Ulema of Saudi Arabia. There are notable exceptions, but generally the mercy absent. The only criterion taken into consideration is the rigid application of some provisions that have little to do with Islam, which have become the idols of a totalitarian religion.

A look from the outside tend to think that these mullahs must have some reason, they are valid representatives of Islam, and that we protest against them we are nothing but "modernists influenced by the West." That is clothed with robes and pompous titles, many of them are Arabs, they enter prestigious universities in history and holy places of Islam tends to favor this view. However, it should be absolutely clear that the views we have landfill have no basis in Islamic tradition, and that Wahhabism and Salafism are common modernist uneasily with traditional Islam, and have already been denounced as pernicious innovations themselves official ulama of the Ottoman caliphate. For my part, the rejection of these alleged scholars not based in an attempt to modernize Islam but to live Islam as fundamental tradition here and now. Only direct knowledge of the Quran gives us the keys to deal with this power structure, the Quraish ^[[10]]of our time.

Yet one can not help but ask: how can this radical transformation of Islam in a pseudo-religion that only seems to Islam Muhammad conveyed in its most external? What are these false ulema bases to justify all the provisions with which we are flooded? In a brilliant text, Asma Barlas has shown how the thinking of these reactionary mullahs (she calls them conservatives ). Extracting quote his speech:

Conservative Muslims have been entrenched behind the bulwark of tradition, passing directly from hermeneutics to historical issues. Thus, challenge in the name of tradition, new readings of the Koran, especially if they come from women. The tradition becomes more important than the words and, indeed, is used to invalidate it, since it shifts attention from the Koran to gender roles and traditional performance practices. But when someone disagrees with this construction of tradition and argues that the tradition also gives us the example of Umm Salama, the wife of the Prophet, who asked why the Qur'an was not addressing women when it was revealed, and Aysha, who narrated more hadith on the Prophet's life than anyone else, the Conservatives took refuge in reason and more specifically in the "public reason." Conservatives safeguard key Koran readings and their own interpretive authority from the text to tradition and reason (public) without paying attention to the criticism directed at them, without opening the text, tradition or reason to criticism .

This chain of elisions also acts precisely in the opposite direction and with the same results. Thus, if someone argues that public reason is socially constructed and reflects the power relations existing in a given society, or that women's interpretations can help reframe public reason and make it more inclusive, the Conservatives are hiding once more behind the tradition, specifically behind the artifice of public consensus (ijma) implied, but eternally binding, which dates back to early Islamic times, this time arguing that this consensus supports the legitimacy of male authority and interpretative readings Quran and it is not right to annul it. Now, tradition, reason and falsifies, again, conservatives can avoid facing feminine criticism of religious knowledge or his reading of the Koran.

When you can not help but comment on these readings, usually discredit conservatives accusing the authors do not use traditional methodologies. However, when somebody makes a critique of traditional methods or proposed new ones, the Conservatives returned to take refuge in the text, or more precisely in the immutability of the meaning of the text which, it claims, confirms once and for all the inferiority of women, making their criticism of the knowledge produced by men irrelevant. Thus closes the circle back to the place of departure, this time from the opposite direction.^[[11]]

This strategy is presented as an insurmountable wall, where the answers are not intended to seek the truth but to defend those privileges. Therefore not be entertained in analyzing the arguments, but see if the content is adapted or not previously established a vision. The interpretation advocated by these strategies are inevitably the most reactionary and repressive. Whenever the reactionary mullahs have to choose between two interpretive options, choose the one appropriate for your default view Islam as a patriarchal religion, legalistic and totalitarian.

It is remarkable to realize that there is no internal consistency in their approaches or respects a basic methodology. For example, although it should be clear that a verse of the Koran is above a saying of the Prophet, in many cases do not hesitate to reverse the preference. Take the case of the alleged crime of apostasy, which the reactionary mullahs claim to be punished with death. To justify this statement, citing a hadith narrated by Ibn Abbas, according to which the Prophet said: "It is permissible to spill the blood of someone who abandons his religion", and ignored all the Koranic verses that defend freedom of religion and consciousness: "And if thy Lord pleased, believe everyone on earth. Perhaps you can force individuals to be believers? " (Quran 10: 99-100), in addition to the numerous verses of the Quran which refers to the rebels than to prescribe any punishment. ^[[12]]If we put questioned the validity of the hadith in question, the reactionary mullahs refer to the legal tradition, which has accepted the hadith as authentic and has prescribed the death penalty for apostates. In this case, the tradition serves to nullify the revelation.

Something similar happens with the stoning for adultery. Although there is a sign that literally prescribes a punishment for adultery and even if another verse which prescribes forgiveness when repentance, the reactionary mullahs manage to sustain that stoning is the correct sentence. In this case, they cite a hadith of ibn al-Khattab Omar,^[[13]]according to which the verse that condemned to death by stoning adulterers was in the Koran, although it has now disappeared. The official ulema accept this, although in other contexts are not tired of repeating that the Koran is the Eternal Word of God, which has survived unchanged down to the smallest details, condemned as a heretic who claims otherwise.

We are facing a string of unrelated arguments presented as a wall. This wall has no texture, breaks down to a minimum analysis. Yet, mechanical repetition of slogans works as an exercise of hypnotism, blinding the hearts and minds. Only one person predisposed to blind obedience to swallow all this. Thus, it appears that the pillar the whole arrangement is the alleged duty of every Muslim to obey officers' ulama themselves, citing the danger of fragmentation that threatens the community of believers. And all this despite that the Messenger of God himself said: "Diversity of opinion is a mercy of Allah for the Ummah . "

As pointed out by Asma Barlas, the thought of the conservative clerics acting as ubiquitous as a cycle of oppression which is difficult to escape. One of the most commonly used tactics to justify the cancellation of the clearly established by God in the Koran is the doctrine of abrogation, whereby some parts of the Quran abrogate other. ^[[14]]On this basis, can afford some alleged Shaikh stated that one of most repeated verses of the Koran ("There is no imposition on religion", 2: 256) have been abrogated, and therefore Islam itself can be imposed. In cases like this, it becomes evident the totalitarianism of these alleged scholars, who placed themselves above God and whose interpretations collide dramatically with the Message of the Qur'an.

Dentro de las estrategias para justificar regulaciones no contenidas ni en el Corán ni en la Sunna, una de las más retorcidas es el principio de la prevención. Según esto, con el objeto de prevenir pecados, es posible justificar una ley que no tiene su base en el Corán ni en la Sunna. Este precepto se aplica para justificar la segregación de la mujer, incluyendo leyes discriminatorias ausentes en el Corán y en la Sunna y que de otro modo tendrían difícil explicación. Por ejemplo, la prohibición de conducir coches, vigente en Arabia Saudí, se justifica mediante el argumento de que para conducir hay que destaparse algo del rostro, lo cual es haram para nuestros alfaquíes. El mufti saudí Muhammad Kadwa declara: no hay nada que prohíba a la mujer el conducir conches; ahora bien, dado que el conducir implicaría la violación de los códigos de vestimenta impuestos por la sharia, hay que negarle este derecho (aquí, el código de vestimenta al que se alude es el niqab, que cubre todo el rostro). Y añade: todos conocemos las oportunidades de pecar que ofrecen los coches.

Dado que salir de casa puede conducir a la mujer a «cometer pecados», se la encierra. Para salir tendrá que hacerlo siempre con un acompañante masculino de su familia. A pesar de que el Corán afirma que hombres y mujeres son walis (protectores, allegados, íntimos) los unos de los otros, se ha instaurado la práctica de asignar una especie de guardián a las mujeres, llamado precisamente wali, quien debe velar por su castidad y su pureza, y sin cuyo consentimiento no pueden hacer nada. Aunque existe un hadiz que afirma: «No prohibáis a la mujer el acceso a la mezquita», se considera que es mejor prohibir el acceso de la mujer a la mezquita y mantenerla en casa para prevenir el pecado.^[[15]] Así, se establece una cadena de prohibiciones que no tienen fundamento en el Corán y que van claramente en contra del ejemplo de Muhámmad. Aquí, es el razonamiento deductivo el que anula el Corán y las tradiciones del Profeta. Mediante estos mecanismos, llega un momento en que nos damos cuenta de que el islam genuino que enseñó Muhámmad es literalmente destruido, sustituido por una religión que sólo se le parece en los ropajes, pero no en los contenidos.

La manipulación se extiende a los propios principios de la jurisprudencia, usul al-fiqh. El iÿtihâd (esfuerzo interpretativo, yihad del pensamiento) ha dejado de ser asociado a la libertad de conciencia, para convertirse en un derecho que ostentan en exclusiva los propios ulemas oficiales. Este es un elemento clave para la construcción del islam como religión controlada por el núcleo del pensamiento árabe reaccionario, y se encuentra incluso en pensadores tan avanzados como Tariq Ramadan, quien asume como suyas las restricciones establecidas por los ulemas reaccionarios.^[[16]] La táctica es siempre la misma: afirmar que «sólo tiene derecho a hacer iÿtihâd quien conozca el árabe a fondo, quien haya estudiado ciencias del islam, quien conozca las circunstancias de la revelación de cada aleya…»Es decir: solo los «expertos religiosos», que han sido preparados para ello en determinadas universidades islámicas. La «apertura de la puerta del iÿtihâd» reclamada por todos los movimientos reformistas de los siglos XIX y XX, lejos de constituirse en un elemento de progreso, ha sido transformada en un elemento represivo. La libertad de interpretación reclamada en exclusiva por los propios ulemas reaccionarios les permite dictar aquellas fatuas que sean del agrado de los gobernantes. De ahí el completo fracaso del llamado reformismo musulmán, asociado ya definitivamente a las corrientes más reaccionarias: wahabismo, salafismo, ijwan al-muslimin, yama’at tablig, yama’at-e-islam…

También el concepto de iÿma^[[17]] (consenso de la comunidad) ha pasado a designar el «consenso de los juristas del pasado». Lo que de entrada se presenta como un principio democrático, la búsqueda del consenso entre todos los miembros de una comunidad interpretativa, es transformado en un instrumento de control ideológico. Por ejemplo: en el rechazo al imamato femenino ante hombres y mujeres, el argumento más repetido es el del supuesto consenso de los juristas en su contra. En este caso, se desplaza el derecho de una comunidad determinada a establecer el imamato según el consenso entre los miembros de dicha comunidad. Al mismo tiempo, se ignora conscientemente el hecho de que destacados ulemas y alfaquíes del período clásico consideraron el imamato femenino como perfectamente lícito. En concreto, para un musulmán español es importante saber que dos de los más grandes pensadores de al-Andalus (ibn ‘Arabi e Ibn Rushd) consideraron válido el imamato femenino ante hombres y mujeres.^[[18]]

La manipulación operada por estos ulemas reaccionarios es tan evidente y de tal magnitud que difícilmente se puede reconocer el islam en la religión que propagan con sus fatuas. Todo parecido se mantiene en lo externo, las barbas y ropajes que se supone son los mismos que los de la Arabia de hace quince siglos. Sólo que ellos viven en palacios de lujo, usan coches caros fabricados en occidente e invierten el dinero del petróleo en corporaciones norteamericanas. Es fácil decirle (en nombre de Dios) a un joven emigrante que deje su trabajo y se gane la vida honradamente cuando se vive de lamerle los pies a un príncipe obeso, todo envuelto con fórmulas rituales que les confiere la apariencia de hombres piadosos.

En este punto, no podemos sino recordar algunos de los hadices que nos hablan sobre la degeneración interna de la umma. El Profeta dijo:

Llegará para mi umma un tiempo de desgracias en el que los hombres acudirán a sus ulemas en busca de guía, pero los encontrarán como cerdos y monos.

(Kanzul Ammal)

Según un hadiz transmitido por Ali ibn Abu Talib (que Dios esté complacido con él), el Profeta dijo:

Pronto llegará un tiempo en el que del islam no quedará más que el simple nombre. Nada quedará del Corán salvo sus palabras. Las mezquitas estarán llenas de devotos, pero éstos quedarán privados de la orientación divina. Los ulemas de ese tiempo serán las peores criaturas bajo el cielo. La corrupción procederá de ellos, y a ellos volverá.

(Mishkat, Kitab al-Ilm)

Y todavía un tercer hadiz:

El santo profeta dijo: «Pronto desaparecerá del mundo la ciencia (‘ilm), hasta que ya no quede nadie que comprenda las palabras de sabiduría y la inteligencia (del Corán)». Sus seguidores le preguntaron como podía esto ocurrir, si el Corán estaba con ellos, y ellos lo entregarían a sus descendientes. El Profeta respondió: «¿Acaso los cristianos no tienen el Evangelio y la Torah? ¿Y qué provecho extraen de ellos?». (Asad-ul-Ghabah)

No conozco las fuentes originales ni las cadenas de transmisión de estos tres hadices.^[[19]] En todo caso, sean o no auténticos dichos de Muhámmad, la paz y la salat de Dios sean con él, me parecen descripciones apropiadas de los ulemas a los que hacemos referencia.

Para ser justos, y como ya hemos dicho al principio, debemos repetir que esta crítica no se dirige a la totalidad de los ‘ulemas oficiales’, sino más bien a un núcleo duro del pensamiento árabo-musulmán contemporáneo, cuya onda expansiva se origina en Arabia Saudí y amenaza con intoxicar a todas las comunidades. Desde esta perspectiva, se comprende que mientras más nos alejemos (ideológica y geográficamente) de este núcleo duro saudí, más recuperamos la confianza en el papel tradicional de los ulemas. Ejemplos notables de ulemas al servicio de las comunidades de base los encontramos en el África negra, en Malasia e Indonesia, donde se encuentran la mayoría de los verdaderos sabios del islam actualmente. Sabios que malviven rodeados de baraka^[[20]]en situaciones semi clandestinas, ocultos en los velos de la rahma de Dios. Mientas, los falsos ulemas legajistas se aposentan en las cátedras de la ignorancia, esperando el día en que Dios les abra las puertas del infierno.

Quien esto escribe es un musulmán español, llegado al islam desde el ateísmo. Yo mismo me considero (hasta cierto punto) un producto del descrédito de los ulemas oficiales. Uno de los motivos que me ha movido a escribir sobre el islam es la ausencia de respuestas convincentes entre los que se autoproclaman «guardianes de la tradición». Llega un momento en que no podemos seguir tomando como referentes a esta gente, abrimos nuestros ojos y nos orientamos hacia la Creación, donde Dios se manifiesta. Todo a nuestro alrededor nos habla del islam, del sometimiento de todo a un designio inescrutable. Tomamos el Corán en nuestras manos y todo significa. El Corán ha sido revelado para cada uno de nosotros, sin necesidad de intermediarios. Por ello, hace tiempo que he dejado de lamentarme por la miseria intelectual de los ulemas oficiales, y doy gracias a Al-lâh por haber dotado al ser humano de un corazón pensante, de un raciocinio capaz de someterse y ser guiado por las leyes de la Misericordia Creadora.

Desde el reconocimiento de mi más completa ignorancia, reivindico el derecho a ser guiado únicamente por Al-lâh. Soy consciente de que este camino está lleno de errores, debido a mi falta de capacidad y a las limitaciones que mi ego impone a la recepción de la Palabra revelada. Pero también soy consciente de que este es el único camino, que exige una entrega total a Al-lâh, la consciencia de que sin Su ayuda nunca superaremos nuestro estado de fragmentación y de ignorancia.

Pido perdón por todo aquello que diga, piense o haga no conforme a las enseñanzas genuinas del islam y al ejemplo del Profeta Muhámmad, una bendición para la humanidad, que la paz y la salat de Al-lâh sean sobre él y todos sus seguidores. Pido a Al-lâh que me ayude en la tarea de pensar el islam aquí y ahora, como una fuente viva y llena de sentido para aquellos que rechazan toda idolatría y se postran voluntariamente ante el Creador de los cielos y la tierra, in sha Al-lâh.

[1] Kafir, mal traducido como infiel. La palabra kafir viene de la raíz KFR, de donde el verbo kafara: enterrar, cubrir. André Chouraqui la traduce al francés como les effaceurs, algo así como «los borradores», ya que ellos borran los signos de Dios. En ningún caso esta palabra árabe hace referencia a la falta de «fe» de «creencia», con lo cual las traducciones «infiel» o «incrédulo» son inapropiadas. La palabra árabekafir ha dado palabras como el maltés kiefer (‘cruel’) o el francés cafard(‘traidor’, ‘hipócrita’). En castellano tenemos la palabra cafre: alguien zafio, bárbaro y cruel. Ninguna de estas palabras tiene connotaciones religiosas.

[2] Haram, prohibido, vedado. Literalmente es «aquello que excluye». De la raíz H-R-M (harama, yahrimu) «alejar, defender, excluir», provienen adjetivos como «inviolable, reservado».

[3] Véase: http://www.fatwa-online.com/scholarsbiographies/15thcentury/ibnuthaymeen.htm.

[4] Véase: http://www.fatwa-online.com/scholarsbiographies/15thcentury/ibnbaaz.htm

[5] Véase: http://www.islam.tc/ask-imam/mufti.shtml

[6] Seguidores de Mirza Ghulam Ahmad de Qadian (1835-1908), un erudito indio que se proclamó el Mehdi, Reformador definitivo del islam e igual a Krishna.

[7] Véase: http://www.islam.tc/ask-imam/mufti.shtml

[8] Sobre esto volveremos en el capítulo 5. Véase también nuestro texto: El pluralismo religioso en el Corán, http://www.webislam.com/?idt=1358

[9] Esta actitud contrasta con el texto del Corán y el ejemplo del profeta. En el Corán se dice que los creyentes son aquellos que creen en la revelación coránica y en todas las revelaciones anteriores. Y el profeta incluso aconsejó aprender hebreo para acceder a los textos de los judíos.

[10] El Quraysh es la tribu dominante en la Meka en el siglo VII, contra la que el profeta Muhámmad se vio enfrentado. Representa aquí los detentadores del poder, que utilizan las tradiciones para justificar sus privilegios.

[11] «Texto, Tradición y Razón: Hermenéutica coránica y política sexual», conferencia impartida en la Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, octubre 2004. Publicado en Webislam: http://www.webislam.com/?idt=1678

[12] Para un desarrollo de este tema, véase nuestro artículo «Libertad de conciencia y apostasía en el islam», publicado en Webislam: http://www.webislam.com/?idt=7675

[13] Segundo de los llamados califas ortodoxos. Sucedió a Abu Bakr y gobernó entre 634 y 644.

[14] Muhámmad Asad considera la teoría de la abrogación como absurda. Véase El Mensaje del Qur’án, ed. Junta Islámica, p. 23. Reproducido en Webislam: http://www.webislam.com/?idt=2712

[15] Sobre el acceso de la mujer a la mezquita, véase nuestro artículo en El islam en democracia, ed. Junta Islámica 2006, p. 189-192. También en Internet:http://abdennurprado.wordpress.com/2006/03/08/el-acceso-de-la-mujer-a-la-mezquita/

[16] Tariq Ramadan, El islam minoritario, ed. Bellaterra 2002, p. 133-134.

[17] Iÿma: consenso comunitario, decisión tomada en grupo (yama’a). Uno de los conceptos fundamentales de la tradición jurídica, reivindicado como un argumento en pos de la democratización de las sociedades musulmanas.

[18] Véase nuestro artículo: http://abdennurprado.wordpress.com/2005/05/02/polemica-sobre-el-imamato-femenino/

[19] Tomados del libro de Ayatol-lâh Hübsch Las profecías del Islam, ed.Tikal, pp. 91-93.

[20] Baraka: bendiciones. Es la magia de algunos lugares, de algunas personas, de algunos objetos; una magia benéfica que aprovecha al que la recibe.

Islam and anti-globalization movement

2010-03-31T22:44:00.002-07:00

taken from http://abdennurprado.wordpress.com/

Islam and anti-globalization movement

February 4, 2010

Genealogy of reactionary Islam

The need for an Islamic theology of liberation appears to many as a logical conclusion the result of the vicissitudes suffered by Muslim communities in the last century and the international geopolitical situation in the early twenty-first century. To understand this need, we must go back to the Cold War era, when Western powers sided with the conservative currents of the Islamic world to prevent the meeting between the Islamist movements and the international left. An alliance that still acts as a suffocating on Muslim populations.

Everything leads us to the key issue of corporate globalization and the role they play in it from OPEC countries. We attended the collaboration reactionary sectors of the Islamic world with corporate globalization, to the point that today they are one of the pillars of it. Tariq Ramadan has referred to this alliance as follows:

"The entire Islamic world is under the tutelage of the market economy. The apparently Islamic countries from the standpoint of law and government, following the example of Saudi Arabia or petromonarquías, are more integrated economically neo-liberal system founded on speculation and submerged in transactions with interest (in reference to usury). " [1]

Already two decades ago, the economist Susan George highlighted the role that OPEC has played since the 70s of last century in the growing inequalities between North and South. Susan George says:

"The oil producing countries behaved like true capitalists, hoping to make lots of money to rely on professionals from New York or London. In this way, they lost an historic occasion and opened the door to tremendous coup concocted by countries that were already rich. The debt created by Western governments, banks and their agents, such as the IMF, has further weakened the South (comprising the member countries of OPEC), have been placed in a situation worse than before the great age of the loans, and opened the door to a real re-colonization ". [2]

Some countries have large external debts, including some of the self-proclaimed as "Islamic states", supposedly governed by Sharia law. Saudi Arabia (47.390 U.S. $ 2.006 billion), Pakistan (42.380 2006), Sudan (2006 est. 29.690.), And Iran (14,800 2006 est.).. Someone should remind the ulama , Grand Mufti and other government scientists that usury is forbidden in Islam ... Why Saudi Arabia, one of the major oil producers, has external debt, when thousands of Saud family members are assigned a monthly annuity only because the family? Most of this debt has been spent on weapons, bought from their owners. Make no mistake: these countries are only "Islamic" in those aspects which concern the State, especially in all matters relating to social control.

The obsession with religion understood as an extreme moral, a stifling puritanism obsessed with honor and sexuality, is a means to alienate Muslim populations, acts as a veil that prevents analyze the real causes of social injustices they suffer, and presents the perpetrators of these injustices as guarantors of national identity and honor. We are witnessing an extreme form of darkness, the hand of the reactionary mullahs, who occupy prominent places for their significance in the history of Islam, such as the University of al-Azhar or Meka Mosques and Medina. Obscurantist vision of Islam that is thwarting any possibility of critical thinking among believers, condemning their companies to remain in backwardness and ignorance. If religion is reduced to this, we could certainly subscribe to Marx's phrase, according to which religion is the opium of the people . Fortunately, religion is much more than this, or is it something else, a potential that can be put at the service of human liberation, insha Allah.

At this point you have to place the anti-communist discourse promoted by certain Muslim institutions from the Arab world to Southeast Asia. We are in the era of cold war, when communism is the absolute evil that now represents Islam. A good example of the relationship between Islam, anti-communism, secular dictatorships and Western interests occurs at the time of the call infitah (opening) promoted by Sadat in Egypt in the 70s of last century, in order to liberalize the economy (after the stage of "Arab socialism," declared overcome). Left trade unions and oppose the privatization policies and openness to foreign investment, but they are supported by the ulema of al-Azhar and the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat supports the jamaat (assemblies) Islamic universities, to weaken left-wing student organizations, one of the main focuses of the opposition. It is in this context that we situate the emergence of anti-communism of the official ulama. Return to religion and liberalism go together. The successive shaykhs of al-Azhar fatwa issued anti-communist. Shaykh Muhammad Fahham launches a diatribe against students demonstrating against the government, called wicked and compel them to behave religiously. Abel Halim Mahmud Shaykh says that "Zionism is the mother of communism." Shaltut The imam said that "communism is Kafur. The Communist shells rosary does not say 'Al-lahu Akbar' but 'Marx is great'. "Hasanayan Muhammad Majluf, Mufti of the Republic, suggested that the Communists are regarded as apostates from Islam, in an era in which this could cause serious prejudice[3].

In Indonesia, the two largest Islamic organizations in the country (Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiya, with several million members) are involved in a decisive way in the anti-communist. During the years 1965-1966, Suharto unleashed a wave of killings that took the lives of over a million communists. As Noam Chomsky has reported, U.S. officials gave lists of communist sympathizers or local authorities, who were conducting a merciless manhunt, with the support. The Muhammadiya declare the jihad against the Gestapu (the Communist Party of Indonesia). It is sad to see the involvement of the two largest Islamic organizations in the country in one of the most tragic events of the twentieth century, which led to the deaths of more than one million people by the mere fact of being a communist militants.

But this alliance is not a thing of the past. Currently, some Muslim populated countries in the top positions in terms of income per capita in the world: Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Brunei, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia, countries develop their economies under U.S. military protection. But this privileged position not only manifests in the form of development cooperation from other Muslim countries. We must remember the many situations in which Muslims live in a dramatic situation. Hundreds of thousands of them crammed into refugee camps: Sahrawi in the Algerian desert, Sudanese in Darfur, Rohingya in Bangladesh and Thailand. Other situations are less dramatic, such as Chechnya, Somalia or Ethiopia. These situations of extreme poverty exist side by side with waste. In contrast, pharaonic projects include (in the sense of the word Koran) carried out by the petro-millionaire dynasties of the Persian Gulf, such as construction projects in Dubai ultra luxurious grand hotels gaining ground to the sea, in which you can even find ski slopes.

There is (that we know) a genuine development aid from rich Muslim countries organized by the third world. There is large-scale humanitarian aid, and hundreds of organizations working to alleviate immediate needs, but not a global project to help poor communities to generate their own coping mechanisms in the future. At this point one could deplore the way in which Saudi oil money wasted by financing major universities and hundreds of madrasas through which foreign populations are indoctrinated, creating a fracture in all Muslim countries between traditional Islam and Wahhabism. The only concern of Saudi Arabia in all human tragedies mentioned is to infiltrate and use them to impose their conception of Islam stickler destroying local traditions all in the name of religious purity, always at the service of imperialism. Saudi Arabia has earned hatred of the vast majority of Muslims in the world, both for its policy of dissemination of Wahhabism, for their support for U.S. domination, and by the contempt shown towards the plight of Muslims throughout the planet.

Wahhabism is not an orthodox interpretation of Islam but a reform movement, born in Saudi XVII century AD Later, the word reform has taken the sense of abandonment of an organic conception of the community in terms of power structures created with the industrialization. A state like Saudi Arabia represents the abandonment of tradition by economic interests, and was chosen by the British because it fit the plans for exploitation of natural resources designed for the Middle East. His appearance gives them an Islamic appearance, while the Modernist's work makes it easier to govern like their masters. Through the "open door ijtihad (interpretive effort in jurisprudence), the ulema in the service of the State are allowed to launch fatwas to justify everything that the government has an interest: the presence of American bases in Saudi, or the legality of political assassination, drug trafficking. In terms of international politics, Wahhabism is passing Islam as a piece of the market economy, working in particular with the International Monetary Fund.

Saudi Arabia: a country that trades in arms but it calls itself Islamicshort hand because the child who steals an apple, where the rulers live surrounded by an extravagant luxury while foreign debt reaches astronomical figures ... But the Prophet Muhammad (saws .) said: "He who racked with what has, that's who Al-Allah provides, and one that accounts for goods and accumulates to that is to whom Allah cursed and Al-away on your side" . What they have done in the cities of Medina Meka and leaves no room for doubt. Where a few years ago were the tombs of the companions of the Prophet (pbuh) now crowd the Mercedes dealership or Chrysler. In places associated with the prophetic mission of Muhammad (saws) there are now five-star hotels run by foreign companies. The destruction of heritage, collective memory of Muslims, is part of the policy of the Bani Saud since its inception. It's the same dislocation that is occurring on a large scale, operating from within Islam, from its very geographic center.

This is the entrance of Islam in the society of the spectacle: Wahhabism represents the Westernization of Islam, the abandonment of tradition to find its resemblance to the culture of representation and image. Image culture: the acceptance of images of different traditions, but not its contents. We are in a world where tradition says the idea of being reduced to folklore. This is what gives Wahhabism: not Islam but only its appearance, not truth but a stereotype. In this culture of the image are determined to "representatives of God on earth" of all religions, such as advertising, economists of the New World Order, news makers. Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of Islam, plays the perfect role for the policy of Western powers, a policy that can only end with the sacrifice of the image they have created themselves. The concise definition of Tariq Ramadan reflects a majority opinion:

"Saudi Arabia: the crossroads of all the lies and hypocrisy. First, from the West, where governments, although they know the horror of the dictatorship of the reactionary slavery and corruption, are silent for economic reasons. Then from the East and too many Muslims, who, because of financial manna, respond with silence more apparent betrayal and more odious to the principles of Islam. "[4]

Today we witness new episodes of this collaboration, never revoked. The reverse land reform carried out in 1999 by Mubarak, which involved the recovery of agriculture by capital leases, was backed by the Islamic Jamaat and the Muslim Brotherhood in the name of Sharia law and the right to property. You can still find on the website of Yusuf Qaradawi, an Egyptian also a fatwa in which he said that it is incompatible to be a communist and Muslim (the fatwa in response to a woman who asks her if she can marry "a Muslim communist" : the answer is no it is haram to marry a Communist, because the Communists are nothing short of evil who do not believe in anything ... even though the woman's question makes clear that the man in question is a Muslim). Qaradawi himself sitting to the right of the Emir of Qatar as U.S. troops prepare to invade Iraq from bases huge loan from the emirate, a country in which the Egyptian immigrants (among others) living in semi-slavery ... This certainly justifies the rejection of the left when working with Islamist movements, and highlights the close relationship between religious fundamentalism and neoliberalism. Quoting Samir Amin:

"In the realm of real social issues, political Islam is aligned in the field of dependent capitalism and imperialism dominant. It defends the principle of the sanctity of property and legitimizes inequality and the requirements of capitalist reproduction. The support from the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian parliament to recent reactionary laws that strengthen the rights of the owners at the expense of tenant farmers (most of the small peasantry) is but one case among hundreds. There is no example of even a single reactionary law promotion in any Muslim state to which Islamist movements have opposed ... It's easy to understand, therefore, that political Islam has always had in its ranks with the ruling class of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan . The local comprador bourgeoisie, the new rich, beneficiaries of the current imperialist globalization, generously support political Islam. And it has forgone an anti-imperialist perspective and replaced by a stance "anti-Western" (almost "anti-Christian") that obviously leads only to the companies concerned to a dead end and does not therefore constitute an obstacle to the deployment of imperialist control over the global system. The history of the Muslim Brotherhood is well known. The Brotherhood was created by the British and the monarchy in the 1920s to close the passage to the Wafd, secular and democratic. Their mass return of Saudi refuge after Nasser's death, organized by the CIA and Sadat, is also well known. We are all familiar with the history of the Taliban, trained by the CIA in Pakistan to fight the "communists" who had opened schools for all boys and girls. He is also well known that Israel supported Hamas in the beginning as a way of weakening the secular and democratic currents of the Palestinian Resistance. Political Islam would have been much more difficult to move beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan without the strong support for continued and determined United States. Saudi Arabian society had not even begun to move beyond its traditional boundaries when it was discovered oil in the ground. It was concluded between the two sides an alliance between imperialism and the traditional ruling class, sealed immediately, which gave a new lease of life to the Wahhabi political Islam ... It is easy therefore to understand the initiative taken by the United States to break the united front of Asian and African states established in Bandung (1955), creating an "Islamic Conference" immediately promoted (since 1957) by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Political Islam entered the region by these means. The minimal conclusion to be drawn is that political Islam is not the spontaneous result of the assertion of authentic religious convictions by the peoples concerned. Political Islam was erected the systematic action of imperialism, supported, of course, by obscurantist reactionary forces and subordinate comprador classes. " [5]

In short, Islam is being used in power, in many cases to justify privilege and oppression, and fight the Left. This use by the State is often linked to the imposition of a reactionary view of Islam, focusing on forms and in the imposition of a morality of the herd. Corporate globalization and religious fundamentalism feed on each other, are two sides of the same phenomenon. Structural measures promoted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank create the conditions that make it possible (even inevitable) the resurgence of fundamentalism, and ultimately, this fundamentalism justifies the intervention of the Western States. All this explains the Western support for reactionary vision of Islam.

But we must say that the analysis of Samir Amin is in excess maximalist: while it is clear that the dominant political Islam (especially the current Wahhabi / Salafi promoted from Saudi Arabia) appears as an ally of imperialism, it can not be inferred that all political Islam should be encased in that category. There is growing awareness of this problem within the Muslim movements, a problem whose resolution goes to build a new global alliance with the left and the global justice movement, as soon defend. There is no other choice but to work in this direction. It would be a blunder by the anti-capitalist movements in Muslim countries to raise their fight outside of Islam, Islam being the axis around which life in these societies. Fighting Islam and capitalism at the same time does not seem reasonable, and less if we realize that Islam is today one of the few living alternatives to neoliberal globalization.

Islamic theology of liberation

At this point we understand the importance of Islamic theology may charge release (TIL) in the context of the struggle of peoples against corporate globalization and the new imperialism and against the hegemony of alienating ways of understanding Islam that appear related to them. That is, to break the alliance between corporate globalization and religious fundamentalism.

TIL mean by a speech and a social practice that foregrounds the Quranic mandate to build a just and egalitarian society, in which the human being's spiritual dimension is taken into account, as opposed both to the reactionary views of Islam and neoliberalism. Facing drift towards Islamist movements ultra-conservative positions in the political and moral, the TIL recovery arises from the revolutionary message released by the Prophet Muhammad fourteen centuries ago, against the oligarchy of the time.

The TIL gains new strength in the post-11-S, with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the situation of Muslims in Burma and the continuing Palestinian Genocide. But above all, the TIL comes as awareness of the social impact of corporate globalization. The rise of neoliberalism and free market philosophy poses a threat to equality and social justice, as both conceived as a market society that reduces human beings to the extent of producer-consumer. A liberalized market economy, which has no regard for social affairs, or by indigenous cultures or by environmental concerns, can not promote overall economic and social welfare, not ensure sustainable development. Neoliberalism increasingly threatens civil rights, particularly the right to education, paid employment, and health.

Faced with this situation, the TIL proposes a radical reform of Sharia, which serves the disadvantaged. Proposes reform of Muslim family codes, in order to achieve full equality of women and men. It also proposes to incorporate the issue of economic justice in contemporary discourses based on Sharia, and concentrate on horizontal issues, themu'amalat or social transactions rather than on aspects of 'ibada or acts of worship. This reform is inspired by the notion of the sovereignty of Allah, that only Allah is our Lord, and therefore no one can be master or lord of his fellows. This understanding of Islam leads to question the ritualistic understandings and / or alienating religion. In applying these principles, it is necessary to create unions inspired TIL capable of vindicating the rights of workers in contexts where Islam is the religion of state, and where everything revolves around Islam.

The TIL supports the involvement of Islam in politics. If all components are removed ethical (religious) policy, medicine, economics ... what are we left? The post-Western civilization: a system of widespread depredation of the planet earth, which serves no rational or ethical criterion ... In western countries this system receives the counterbalance of civil society, mainly through the struggle of the communists and the anarchists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the civil rights movement emerged after the Second World War. But the counterweight is not strong enough today worldwide, and even less in the so-called third world, where large corporations embark on a policy of natural resource depletion, plundering villages and destroying their cultures, enthroned compliant dictators their interests and funding wars in those places where companies come together to address them. The TIL is presented as a challenge so-called "liberal Islam", which advocates a strict separation between religion and politics, a speech compliant with the new requirements for establishment . There is a policy of infiltration by think tanks Western, which promote anti-fundamentalist Islamic discourse and defense of the compatibility between Islam and democracy, human rights, etc., but is not critical of the policies promoted by the IMF International, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. It's called "moderate Islam", promoted by British and American governments, as an offensive parallel to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The TIL has a prominent representative in the Sudanese Mahmoud Taha, who in his famous work The second message of the Koranidentified the ideal society proposed by the Prophet Muhammad with a "democratic socialism" (although the proper term to define their proposals would rather Communism .) According to Taha, the achievement of this ideal of community is necessary for human fulfillment. In a society ruled by selfishness and exacerbation of passions, human beings can not activate their full potential or live as a creature capable of Allah. At the same time, he believes that socialism can not be done without taking into account the spiritual dimension of human beings. Hence the failure of historical materialism and the Soviet regime, whose materialist conception of man was no different in substance from the proposal by capitalist society. Taha includes the perspective of democracy, gender equality, ecological values ...

The TIL does not deny its links to Muslim and even reformist Islamist movements, and can cite Shariarti Ali Sayed Qutb or to support their positions. Roots in the reformist movement before it was phagocytosed by Saudi Arabia and was set to serve the interests of corporate globalization and conservative policies. This return to the revolutionary origins of Islamist movements is the proposal of Shabbir Akhtar, in The Final Imperative: An Islamic Theology of Liberation . This is a British intellectual who disciple of Sayed Qutb recognized. The TIL could be linked with Islam, which recognized the totalitarian excesses committed and promote an openness to gender equality, ecological and democratic values. The Egyptian-born Swiss thinker Tariq Ramadan is presented as a bridge figure, which explains why media violence with which it is treated in the West.

A book to consider is Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire of Iran Hamid Dabashi. The criticism of the Islamic Republic of Iran will not lead him to embrace Western modernity as a panacea, but quite the opposite. Dabashi believes that the Islamic ideology has ceased to be the main factor of resistance against "colonial modernity." Militant Islam emerged certain conditions and remains a prisoner of them. Not able to meet the needs of the present or the challenges of corporate globalization. To renew the aspirations of the Muslims is necessary to review the concept of "Islamic ideology" in the sense of providing a local response and therefore limited to what is presented as a global challenge. No ideology of otherness to awaken the energies and create the necessary synergies to deal with predation global centers operated from corporate globalization. Neither this globalization is the "West" or Bin Laden "Islam." Most notably, they must overcome the legal views of Islam, leading to a multiple split between Islam and the West, Islam and human rights, Islam and feminism ... A series of fractures that are exploited by the empire to undermine and discredit the Muslim resistance.

The only way to save these fractures is to think of an Islamic ideology of liberation in convergence with other similar movements throughout the world. Muslims are not alone in the struggle. They can not keep thinking about his struggle with his back to the rest of the world, neither in terms of Islamic supremacism. An ideology that divides the world between Islam and West or between believers and nonbelievers have nothing positive to contribute. The contemporary situation we are dedicated to syncretism and the acceptance of universal values. Believes that Islam must rearticulated in relation to global capital. As a result of the globalization process, the massive migration of workers have dismantled the dichotomy "center-periphery" or "islam-west", which might have its raison d'etre during the colonial era. Dabashi defends multiculturalism and explores the similarities and differences with Christian theology of liberation, called an understanding. The revolutionary potential of Islam should be put at the service of humanity, not to serve the cause of Islam. Think in terms of diversity and syncretism, and not in terms supremacists.

Rather than a theology, we should speak of a theodicy, natural theology and rational universalist court, which seeks its foundation within the human being. Theodicy Dabashi defines this as "a form of liberation theology that not only realizes the existence of their moral and normative shadows, but, in fact, embraces " [6]. In the view of Dabashi, this theodicy achieved Islam itself free of its ghosts, its atavistic and forms of idolatry generated over the centuries. It is not only to rethink Islam in terms liberators, but to think from an Islam free of itself.

Islam and anti-globalization movement

The statement "liberation theology" refers immediately to the struggles of Christians in South America and the Third World, to overcome the alienating vision of Christianity and recover as a message of individual and collective liberation ... So, speaking of a "Islamic theology of liberation" we are getting from the first game when converging forces on a global scale, moving towards a joint response of the various religions to the challenges of globalization.

But this alliance is not only between religions. We affirm that Muslims struggle for social justice is in line with the global justice movement, against the alliance of religious fundamentalism (which actually has nothing Islamic ) and corporate globalization. You can not separate our analysis on the current situation of Islam in the state of the world in the global era. The global dominance of financial corporations leads to the disintegration of countries and the hunger of millions. The effect of the prohibition of usury or other principles of Islamic economics in Muslim countries would fail to change the new world order. The major Western financial companies would easily find ways of penetration. This means that in the context of globalization, there is the slightest possibility of a local Islamic society. Everything points to the increasing participation of Muslims in the global justice movement , as a key to the future.

We are in the beginning of construction of a global civil society, civil society no longer finds its way to political participation through the framework of nation states, but through a new emerging global ethic, based on solidarity and love to the plurality, in the struggle of peoples for their survival. We are placed in the field of values: democracy, freedom of religion and conscience, ecological values, distributive justice and gender equality. At the same time implies a resistance to the savage capitalism that threatens entire populations to hunger and uprooted from their ancestral cultures and worldviews. This struggle to be done from the defense of diversity and against the Euro-centric paradigm, so linked to racism and colonialism.

While there is hunger in the world, everything else is secondary. In the early twenty-first century, 950 million people living in situations of chronic hunger, 30 million people die each year because of poor distribution of food, 11 million of them children under 5 years. These figures surpass us and embarrass us, we sink into despair and force us to rethink our way of being in the world. We can not keep thinking back to this reality that we are accused, which shows the darker face of modernity. In this field, every action must be preceded by a serious study of the real causes of hunger.

The causes us back to economic, political, social, global. The local can not be thought without reference to global and vice versa. The world is one, mankind is one. We can not think breaking up, nesting, as if the wealth of the West would be independent of third world poverty, as if the earth is not one, as if Indonesia might not lead to fields to feed livestock feed in Canada, if prices howto from seeds that a farmer has to plant in Korea is not decided in Chicago, as if the drugs that can save children from a village in Zambia, but they do not have money to buy, were not patented in Lausanne.

From the awareness that we are all one, we must say it clear that hunger is not an accident or an accident of nature. There are situations of natural disasters causing famine, chronic hunger but of whole populations we are talking about is not an accident but the result of certain economic structures, relations with criteria established international criminals. We are governed by criminals, mass murderers who wear silk ties and smiling in the media to the masses. We know that the present food production could feed twice the world population, population growth is not a direct cause of hunger, and that many of the countries that have suffered terrible famines are actually exporting food. We know that in Europe and North America each year are wasted or thrown away tons of food to keep prices set by large companies, prices unaffordable for the less disadvantaged. We have seen entire countries move from situations of prosperity to poverty in a few years, because of economic policies promoted by the World Trade Organization. We have seen how social services are deteriorating in countries rich in raw materials. We have seen how the debt contracted by dictatorial governments to buy arms choking the life of the peasants, double victims of an irrational international economic policy, which has lost all ethical and humanitarian approach.

It is a system based not on meeting the basic needs of the individual and the search for balance, but in the exacerbation of passions and creating artificial needs that enslave the individual, keeping in a constant state of dissatisfaction. From an Islamic point of view, it is clear that this system is reprehensible and must be combated. I do not intend to fall into anti-capitalist rhetoric hollow and outdated. The Islam is on the side of the trade. The ability to create wealth and technological development are essential tools for the eradication of poverty, an achievement of humanity. For the first time in history we are in a situation of overproduction, in which the human being is capable of producing food to meet or exceed the basic needs of the world population. From this knowledge, it is necessary to make a lucid review on the aims of this wealth creation and the development of production, which can not be to the mere accumulation of capital beyond the needs of the people.

All who have studied the problem of hunger in the world know about the difficulties faced by these attempts. From the institutions the situation seems blocked. International institutions responsible for poverty reduction are strongly influenced by the persons concerned in perpetuating inequalities. United Nations departments are both the International Monetary Fund and the FAO. The contradiction between measures that promote the body either can not be more confusing.

Faced with this situation, the civil society on the planet should be put in motion, and Muslims can not be outside of this search for global solutions to global problems. Several years ago we saw the emergence of a transnational social movement that aims to address the challenges of globalization, which has brought together around the World Social Forum. Social movements are at the forefront, and that means looking ahead, beyond the present political situation. This means placed against the dominant economic and political system. In this area, there are many measures already taken at which Muslims could (should) join:

• To join initiatives and campaigns that promote the reform of the United Nations, towards a participatory democracy that enables the achievement of its founding objectives.

• Work with the World Social Forum.

• Support the campaigns that promote debt forgiveness.

• Support these campaigns to ensure access to drinking water of every human being.

• Support the campaign for the implementation of the Tobin Tax.

• Report the business of war, and demand that our elected representatives to fight the arms trade.

• Report situations of collusion of religion with economic and political power designed to perpetuate situations of injustice

• Moderate your needs and make efforts to eradicate consumerism.

• Ensure that the investments we make are ethical, and not in contradiction with a culture of peace.

• Ensure that companies adopt codes of ethics, to respect fair trade criteria.

• To join the campaigns that promote the elimination of tax havens.

• Work towards the reduction of polluting energy sources and encourage the use of alternative energies.

However, the participation of Muslims in the global justice movement today faces significant challenges. One is the Islamophobia and stereotyping, as well as traditional religious militant anti-Western left fixed, unable to overcome the Eurocentrism in which Westerners are indoctrinated. The collaboration of religious traditions and social movements is difficult at a time which is imposed as a dogma of faith the idea of separation between religion and politics. This is to relegate religion to a strange "private sphere", denying the right to demand justice from our conviction. Therefore, from the religious traditions we must clarify what is our motivation in the project of building a global civil society. We must banish every shadow of doubt hanging over our traditions, to dispel the doubts raised by this collaboration. Fortunately, we are no longer in the era of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and anti-religious. On the contrary, there are many elements of spirituality within social movements.

The other impediment is internal to Islam: the difficulties of many Muslims to renounce the idea of a state based on the supremacy of Islam. Islam, at the moment which is reduced to a political identity, draw a border with non-Muslims, preventing their participation in the global justice movement. Islam has much to contribute in the fight against global injustice, if we are able to overcome a supremacist view and / or exclusive of our religion. We must break down the conceptual barriers separating Islam from other traditions or proposals and work on the basis of shared goals. The struggle against inequality, oppression and hunger, is the struggle for the dignity of every human being, and it is quite feasible to think this fight regardless of religion as the vehicle that gives meaning to most the inhabitants of the earth,insha Allah Al-.

Notes

[1] Globalisation. Muslim Resistance (ed. Tawhid 2002), including translation into Castilian.

[2] Jusqu'au cou, enquête sur la dette du tiers monde (ed. La Découverte, 1988, pp. 68-71)

[3]We take these references Zeghal Malika, Guardians of Islam , pp.140-144

[4] Minority Islam , ed. Bellaterra, p.333

[5]Samir Amin, Political Islam in the service of imperialism

[6] Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire , p. 18

Khomeini and the tutelage of the clergy

2010-03-31T22:44:00.001-07:00

taken from http://abdennurprado.wordpress.com/

Khomeini and the tutelage of the clergy

February 11, 2010

Whenever a head of state speaks of God ...
be assured that is once again preparing to exhaust his people-flock.
Bakunin, God and the State

To understand the theological and political debate in the post-revolutionary Iran must start with the system of government inherited from the Imam Khomeini, a work open to interpretation, an ijtihadunique, performed for the purpose of adapting Islam to mold a modern nation-state. Khomeini was not a closed and ignorant cleric, but a scholar who knew the policy mechanisms, and that took the concept of "reason of state" to its logical conclusion. Iran's constitution was drafted along the lines of French, 1958, which implies the establishment of a republic, elections by universal suffrage, Parliament, President, Council of Ministers, political parties and vote and the equivalent of a Supreme Court. Institutions that have little to do with traditional Islam and much to the modern history of Europe, according to the Jacobin centralist model and characteristic of the French Republic. This covered with religious language.

Khomeini denying his quality as a statesman is a contradiction. Another thing is we do about valuation. In the last thirty years, Iran has emerged from being just a colony of the West to be an independent state, one of the main actors in the context of contemporary politics. In this sense it can be argued that the triumph of the Revolution has been overwhelming. But is this the criteria by which should be judged? From another point of view it seems clear that the promises of the promoters of the Revolution, like so many others - have not been met, remain pending ... The promise of establishing social justice through the establishment of the sharia not been performed, and in Islamic Iran are enormous social inequalities, with 25% of the population of near-poverty, compared to the emergence of large fortunes linked to power. However, both the rejection and the blind acceptance of this legacy can only go against the interpretative effort by the great jurist.

In his book The Islamic government [1](collection of public speeches between 1963 and 1979), Khomeini realize their ideas about how an Islamic society should be governed. The separation between religion and politics is seen as a perverse idea that the colonialists are trying to inculcate among Muslims, with the aim of dismantling the egalitarian message of Islam and encourage their domination. Jewish infiltration by foreign agents trying to dismantle the revolutionary potential and social commitment of Islam, relegating to the private sphere. Khomeini speaks of "conspiracy concocted by the colonial government of Great Britain" , the "imposition of foreign laws" , which complicated the lives of people and brought new forms of oppression, and asserts that Islam is the pathway those who fight valiantly against colonialism. " face of these attempts, says that Islam is a complete life system, which covers individual and collective, so that for its effective implementation requires the existence of an executive (in match what the divine command, tradition and reason):

"In the same way that laws setting out the duties of man to worship, there are laws, rules and practices for social affairs and government. Islamic law is a legal system advanced, comprehensive and global. All bulky books that have been compiled from the earliest times on different areas of law such as judicial procedure, social transactions, criminal law, salaries, international relations, regulations on peace and war, public and private international law in together contain a mere example of the laws and rules of Islam. "[2]

His effort is focused on the need for an "Islamic government" (hokumat-i Islami ), protected by Muslim jurists, as the only guarantee that the rights that Islam gives to all citizens are respected. The government would also have the task of preventing oppression and preserve the Islamic order, as opposed to foreign influences. In addition, Khomeini stated as one of the arguments to justify the existence of an "Islamic government" against the need to provide innovations in the field of Shariah . And yet innovation is exactly what he did. As great mujtahid , Ayatollah Khomeini, Allah adapted the principles of Islam to a specific spacetime (contextualization), giving rise to the current Iranian parliamentary (the Majlis ). In what now concerns us, this interpretative effort had a double result: 1) Islam adapted to the structure of a modern state, and 2) the primacy given to the clergy. This takes the form of a hybrid system that combines traditional notions of shura (mutual consultation) and ijtihad(interpretive effort in jurisprudence). The recovery of the shura andijtihad are two of the claims of reform movements in Islam have emerged since the nineteenth century. In this sense, the movement led by Khomeini may be related to the "Muslim reformist, is in the line of political Islam promoted by Abdullah Sayed Qutb and Mawdudi [3], and is inseparable from the struggle against colonization.

The proposed by Khomeini's Islamic government is a constitutional government. He claims that Islam rejects both the monarchy as any form of hereditary succession, which considers essentially tyrannical. The legislative power and sovereignty reside solely in Allah and the executive power is conferred by divine command, as it acquired and exercised the Prophet and 'Ali. Given the absence of the Imam or Prophet's legitimate successor, the Alfaquis should exercise care. But this authority of the Alfaquis not mean that the power resides in their hands, or that they should govern. In numerous statements made before the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, Khomeini stated that the Islamic regime would not be theocratic. The role of Alfaquis is to ensure the implementation of the sharia and monitor the functioning of government, democratically elected, so that it respects the precepts of Islam. Will tolerate criticism of government policies, there will be political parties and general elections will be held.

The Alfaquis , in ensuring the correct implementation of sharia , are above the collective decisions: the " e-velate fiqh "(Guardianship of the jurists). This name deserves a comment. The word farsi " velate "is equivalent to the Arabic word wilaya (closeness to divinity, but also cooperation, mutual affection and protection.) By creating this figure, Khomeini was making a leap from tradition to modernity. There is a well-known hadith which states: "the intimate of Allah (walis) are the heirs of the prophets" . In the Shiite tradition, this has been interpreted as meaning that after the "cycle of Prophecy" , it was started the "cycle of wilaya" means the transfer of internal sense of prophecy through the men of knowledge. By creating the figure of the "Wilayat al-Faqih" , Khomeini makes the cycle of the wilaya (spiritual) guardianship ofAlfaquis (the law), leaving these as the only guarantors of the authentic transmission of prophetic messages. Hence the slogan: "follow the line of Imam", and his idea that every Muslim must do "imitation or monitoring" ( taqlid ) of a "licensed guide" ( marja ).

"We believe in the Wilayat ul-Faqih, and we believe that the Prophet (Blessings and Peace be upon him and his family) was told to appoint a successor, as he did ... It was necessary, of course, appoint a successor to exercise the tasks of government. The laws require a person who runs ... In time of the Prophet, the laws were not simply exposed and promulgated, they were also applied. The Messenger of Allah was an executor of the law. For example, applied the criminal provisions of Islam: cutting off hands of thieves and given lashes and stoning. The successor of the Prophet must do the same, his work is not to legislate but to apply the laws of God that the Prophet has been enacted. For that reason are necessary to form a government and the establishment of executive bodies. Believing that need is part of the general belief in the Imamate, and as valuable as the effort and struggle to establish it. "[4]

At first, the wilayat al-fakir is considered an Islamic government in place and awaiting the true possessor of the right to govern in the name of the Prophet, the Hidden Imam of Twelver earthquake. But in practice takes its place. So no surprise when, on 6 January 1988 at the tenth Anniversary of the Revolution, Khomeini pronounced a fatwa declaring that the Islamic government represented "the delegated sovereign power of Allah Most High to Prophet," and that thus the al-fakir velayatshould be considered as equivalent to the caliphate of the Prophet, as holder of an authority that comes of Allah directly. According to Khomeini,

"This is the most important religious precepts (ahkam) and takes precedence over the rest ... If the authorities of the Islamic government had to be considered among the secondary precepts, then the authority delegated to the Prophet would be empty and meaningless ... In this case, the legislative and administrative powers of the Islamic government would be severely restricted. " [5]

Khomeini gives examples of these limitations, at legislative, administrative, including economic and military policy. The State (now identified as "Islamic government") could not be considered an owner of land and property for public works like roads, could not establish a compulsory military service, or to regulate foreign trade, customs and excise by ... All may be necessary for the proper functioning of a modern state, but it is difficult to justify from the Message of the Quran or the Prophet's example. The problem is obvious: an Islamic government is one that is governed by the laws of Islam, established through the Koran and the Sunna. But the practice of a contemporary state government includes many unmet needs in them, and even inevitably diverge. Thus, one realizes that the proclamation of thevelayat al-fakir is equivalent to the caliphate, or succession of the Prophet's mandate does not come from the Koran, but of reason of state. In the words of Kalim Siddiqui:

"The process of ijtihad that preceded the Islamic Revolution and the emergence of an Islamic state led by al-fakir velayat, produced, after ten years, a fatwa of Imam Khomeini stating that he, a maximum al-fakir, and the Islamic state, exercised his authority as caliph or na'ib of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. This fatwa could only occur once the new Islamic state experienced the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of conducting its own executive, legislative and judicial, not provided with the ultimate source of authority and power in Islam as the caliph of the Prophet " .[6]

As well, who can argue with lawyers, heirs to the prophecy? Do you have some logic to think that the vice-regents of the Prophet have someone to account for their decisions, or they may be subject to any restrictions? It is understandable then that Khomeini to assert its right to exercise ijtihad unlimited, which means give it absolute power. We are far from the first statements by Khomeini, according to which the clergy would not take or exert power, but only act as guarantors of Islam from the policies pursued by the rulers. The drift of his thoughts to tyranny has been imposed with a logic. Once the power of alfaqui on the town and on the rulers, Khomeini comes forward and declares "the absolute rule of alfaqui on fiqh " ( velayat-e-ye faqih motlaqeh feqh bar ). The alfaqui has authority to issue new laws, which must be regarded as religiously binding, even temporarily repealed precepts can declare firmly established, based on the needs of the state (which are her own):

"The president is authorized to demolish a mosque or a house that sits in the middle of a road, and compensate their owners. The ruler can close demolish a mosque and even if the source of some evil, and this is the way to end it. The president has the power to unilaterally revoke any legal agreement with the people, if these agreements contradict the interests of Islam and the country. The hajj (pilgrimage to Meka), which is a major religious obligations, may be temporarily prohibited, if contrary to the interests of the Islamic country [7]... The government, which is an extension of absolute rule of the Prophet of Allah, is among the first ordinances of Islam, and has precedence over all secondary ordinances such as prayer, fasting or pilgrimage [8]. "

However, it seems clear that the ijtihad done by Khomeini has nothing to do with Islamic tradition. This is against a program by clearly Hegelian. The Will or Divine Providence leads the world. The State has appeared in the maturity of universal history, with the sacred mission of ensuring compliance. The supremacy of the state is an end in itself, has a religious character. You no longer have this conflict between political and religious powers. Secularization is not separation, but the fusion of both in the way state. Although the state represents all citizens, the administration of its power belongs to an elite or a breed of elected representatives. These are the ones who fall short of the mission entrusted to them, the only fully aware of the sense of history and their role in it. The individual will lack legitimacy, they are irrational to the extent that they are not consistent with the universal Reason or Spirit goal. The ultimate realization of reason occurs when the interests of the State and individuals are entitled. But for that to happen reached the State shall submit to tame the passions and individuals. Only when he has been fully embody the Spirit in the State as the perfect vehicle that enables its implementation. As the State isas God walking on Earth[9].

Notes

[1]We rely on the edition in Castilian: Iran's Imam Khomeini: On the Islamic government. Ibero-American Press and Publishing, 1988. Can be found online:http://www.iranchamber.com/history/rkhomeini/books/velayat_faqeeh.pdf.

[2] Ditto

[3]This is the thesis of Vali Nasr: T I Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama `at-i Islami of Pakistan (University of California Press, 1994).

[4]Khomeini, the Islamic government.

[5]The fatwa can be found in Imam Khomeini, Sahifeh-and e-nur , Vol 20, pp. 170-171. Cited by Kalim Siddiqui, in Stages of Islamic Revolution, Open Press, 1996. http://www.islamicthought.org/pp-ks-processes.html . The author (1931-1996) was director of the Muslim Institute in London and decided to Khomeini.

[6] Kalim Siddiqui, p.114.

[7]Quoted in Political leaders of the contemporary Middle East and North Africa Bernard Reich, Greenwood, 1990, p.314.

[8]Cited by Hamid Algar, Development of the Concept of velayat-i faqih Since the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

[9] Lessons from the Philosophy of History , Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1999. See also The reason in history , Seminars and 1972 editions.

Response to Peace Masuma Assad on Islamic feminism

2010-03-31T22:42:00.000-07:00

taken from http://abdennurprado.wordpress.com/

Response to Peace Masuma Assad on Islamic feminism

March 12, 2010

As salamu aleykum, sister in Islam

I read with interest you interview published on the website of UMMA(Union of Muslim Women Argentinas), in which criticism of Islamic feminism.

My purpose with this letter is clarificarte some of the positions of Islamic feminism, with a view to possible later, do not tainted by prejudice and unfounded accusations. For it is inappropriate to criticize a movement that will not hold positions. For example, suppose you would not like to see an interview in which a Muslim must be careful to call out the Union of Muslim Women Argentinas because it is an organization that advocates the abolition of polygamy, and abortion. We feel, rightly, offended: if you criticize, at least it is for those who actually hold positions. That is why I hope you do the same with regard to Islamic feminism. As I consider unfounded accusations, I will focus on two:

1. The claim that Islamic feminism is based on Western ideas.
2. The claim that Islamic feminism is opposed to the sharia.

Before going on I would like to draw attention to a series of matches between your approach and that of Islamic feminism. You start by quoting the Koran and saying that "among human beings does not differentiate by gender, but on the contrary, both male and female, will be judged with respect to their own actions and their relationship with God ... In this context, we say the woman is considered a human being like man . And this is exactly what they say authors such as Riffat Hassan and Amina Wadud, who insist the caliphate or moral agency as a characteristic of all humans, men and women. This account is derived from the moral autonomy of women, their individual responsibility with al-Allah and the rest of creation, a non-delegable responsibility that clashes with the subordinate role that a (false) gives traditionalism of Muslim women.

It also coincides with Islamic feminism by saying that the discrimination suffered by Muslims in many contexts are not due to the laws of Islam, but a misunderstanding, and worse they are implemented. And of course all of Islam feminists would agree with you that is discrimination not to allow a woman to wear hijab , as in many contexts in Turkey and other countries. In fact, many Muslim feminists have hijab , and some are discriminated against for it.

Islamic feminism as a champion of "Western culture"

You claim that Islamic feminism is "a new phenomenon that appears in the Islamic countries to inculcate Western culture among Muslim women and challenge the Islamic sources regarding their rights." It is at least surprising that definition, and more if we note that the definition is preceded by Margot Badran, that Islamic feminism "derives its understanding and mandate of the Qur'an" . For the centrality of the Holy Quran in Islamic feminism is unquestionable, if you stick to their own texts.

Remain focused on the Koran, and in consideration of the Koran as the Word of Allah, do not see how Islamic feminism could hope to "instill Western culture" . Islamic feminism derives its mandate solely from the Koran. And this is something we are all feminists agree Islam. On its website, the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam is presented as "a group of Muslim professional women committed to promoting women's rights within the framework of Islam. These efforts are based on the principles of equality, justice and freedom proclaimed by the Koran, as is evident in our study the sacred text. "

This does not mean they can not find points of convergence with other approaches or proposals, and who can not use categories characteristic of the social sciences. Khomeini himself did that many times, without necessarily regard it as a Muslim "Westernized" . Knowledge has no borders.

If you knew the works of the leading feminist theologians of Islam would know that many of them are quite critical of neo-colonial policies of the West toward the Islamic world. In the case of Asma Barlas, professor of political science at an American university, its commitment to Islamic feminism is linked to a radical critique of the pretensions of universality of "the West" , a criticism that it extends to human rights.

But there is something more worrying in this indictment. Dear Maimuna: you are in Argentina. When you talk about "western culture", can you tell me what you mean? I am a Western Muslim, born and raised in Barcelona for more than forty years, and I do not think there is any such thing. I am a Muslim, but my culture is that of a European citizen-century Catalan, with a specific cultural influences, and very different from my neighbors. You yourself must be culturally Argentina or Buenos Aires or La Plata, or whatever, without preventing you from being a Muslim and live in Iran. A country, indeed, culturally very diverse. Cultures in East and West there are many, as there are many philosophies or ideologies, or religions or conceptions of life. Speaking of "Western culture" as a homogenous entity is very unrealistic. And in fact, feminism is far from dominant in the West, as well as secularism. You talk about separation of religion and state as part of "Western culture" . But I do not know a single country in Europe in which there is such separation: most European countries are religious. And many of the laws of Western countries have their origin in ecclesiastical law. There is even an important influence of Islamic law in British Common Law and the Code Napoleon ... but this is another issue.

A criticism associated with the former refers to the use of sociological categories and terminology. You say that there is a patriarchal interpretation of the Koran, that's not part of Islamic methodology, and should not be anything like that. How right you are, sister Masuma! But the problem is that if we look at some classical commentaries of the Quran, we realize that many times the commentators on the text have projected their prejudices against women, and considering that man should be above women, because that these were deficient in their religion. With this, they have ignored and distorted the message of the Quran, according to which men and women have equal dignity in the eyes of Allah, according to which men and women are protectors of one another, and the only difference between one and the other is in his Taqua, level of consciousness. Ontological equality, which unfortunately is not and has been respected in practice. This leads us to the next topic.

Sharia Islamic Feminism

States: "Fundamentally among their slogans [of Islamic feminism] are: the separation of religion from the public sphere, ie religion is reserved for private life and should not intervene in social affairs or the government. The laws, religion is left out, ie no separation of politics and religion and therefore Islam does not participate in the government nor the law. "

Faced with a piece like this, I want to show yourself my surprise. I would ask that text or statement of the most prominent Muslim feminists have read that they are against Sharia, or who want a separation between religion and public sphere. What is certain is that Islamic feminism denounces the discriminatory laws against women, as contrary to Islamic values.

I can Mentioning the example of the Nigerian Ayesha Imam, Baobab for Women's Human Rights . After the battle of his organization because of the new Islamic code introduced in northern Nigeria, and in particular against the punishment of stoning for adultery, was expressed publicly in favor of the application of Sharia. Ayesha Imam, like many other Muslim feminists consider that the legal codes that apply in countries predominantly Muslim population are not really Islamic, but the product of a patriarchal reading of the Koran.

Another example is the Indonesian Lily Zakiyah Munir, who after the implementation of the family code "Muslim" in bandits lurk, asked:"Sharia has brought social justice?" Given the negative response, his conclusion was unequivocal: then, the Sharia is not being implemented properly. And that is precisely the problem of this, the need to recognize that the classical Islamic jurisprudence was codified in the context of patriarchal and authoritarian societies, and is burdened by this legacy. Fight to free the Sharia of this heritage is patriarchal and authoritarian Shariah combat, but by the Sharia.

For my part, I have no doubt that Muslims have not only the right but the obligation to abide by the Sharia, for a higher standard emanating from God. But this requires a clarification of what we mean by Sharia and we mean by "governed by the laws that God has sent down" . On the one hand, I do not clerical rule or the establishment of a theocracy have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, I think the claim that medieval law codes are applied objectively and are reflected at all times and contexts of the Koran is totally unfounded mandates. The great jurists of Islam did the best they knew how to implement Qur'anic principles in a given situation. And they did (as it can not be otherwise) from the premises dominant in his time. Why can not we do the same? Hence the insistence of feminists in Islam ijtihad.

As in any field is most clearly seen drifting in the patriarchal Islamic jurisprudence of the second and third centuries after the Hegira. This is not the place to go into details, but it is clear that the rights of the Holy Quran and our beloved Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) gave Muslim women were drastically reduced through the establishment of the figure of a man as chief family and women's obligation to obey. We say over and over again that Islam granted all rights to Muslim women in the seventh century, and cite as evidence the right to work, to family planning, education, to choose their husband, to have their own capital , to divorce, to receive part of the inheritance ... But we forget that Islamic jurisprudence these rights later submitted to a cutout. Right to work ... but only if the husband's consent, and prohibition of certain professions (judges, government offices), the right to choose spouses ... but obedience to the father in case of arranged marriages, the right to education ... but male guardianship; separation of property ... but the husband's right to beat women rebel, the right to divorce ... but with the price of losing the dowry, the family home and custody of the children ... We could go on. Suffice it to say that in many treatises on fiqh the chapter devoted marriage comes after the purchase and sale of slaves ... And this is a reality that we must not overlook, without this meaning that we throw into the trash the work of large Alfaquis of Islam. No: the question is to contextualize them in order to take advantage of them without falling into the blind imitation.

So no surprise that some of Islam's most prominent feminist lawyers. One is Sitti Musdah Mulia, a professor of Shariah at the Islamic University in Jakarta and spokesperson for the women's branch of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Islamic party in the world. When Musdah Mulia encountered in reforming the family code key Muslim with equality, made entirely from the Koran and the Sunna. Also worth seeing in the work of Aziza al-Hibri or Abdullahi an-Naim.

Disagreements

Where no doubt we disagree is the claim that the Islamic Republic of Iran, women enjoy all the rights that Islam gave them. I think the case of Iran is a clear example of patriarchal and authoritarian manipulation of Islam for political and economic interests spurious. I do not think that the segregation of the sexes has nothing to do with Islam, and limitations faced by Iranian women in many fields (taxes dress codes, bans on certain professions, a ban on access to certain areas, difficulties to obtain a divorce ...) I seem unfounded. Nor am I Muslim women should have a permission from their male guardians to travel through Iran to pull out the passport. And do not fall for it in a demonization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which got many positive things for women: what literacy events is an achievement that deserves my respect.

I also disagree that the Quranic exegesis should be left to the experts. There is no Qur'anic basis for such claim, which leads inevitably to totalitarianism. The Holy Quran tells us that this is a revelation to those who use reason, and I believe that ijtihad is an obligation for every Muslim and Muslim, we are all (potential) caliphs of Allah on earth.

All this leads us back to the question of differences of opinion theme. You can disagree, but Islamic feminism is a movement based entirely on the sources of Islam, Islamic methodology applied to the interpretation of these sources. If you want to refute his arguments, I recommend you do the same and leave aside the personal accusations or downgrade a whole. Therefore it seems so out of place your assertion that Muslim feminists "aimed at the destruction of Islam." You can disagree with some or all of their arguments, but to attribute evil intentions and demonize some Islamic feminism as movement is a little Islamic attitude. Especially when many of these Muslim feminists are fighting tooth and nail and making every effort to defend Islam and Muslims of the injustices committed against them, whether in the name of Islam or Western imperialism. I think it would be more beneficial for everyone staying at the exchange of ideas and not to move to make value judgments about the intentions of others. But understand that it is always easier to disqualify people who refute their arguments.

When I or other Muslims criticize certain acts or things that happen in Iran or Saudi Arabia or other Muslim-majority country, we do it on the grounds that these countries are very far from representing the Islamic ideal. We do not intent to destroy these countries or to attack Islam but with the aim of improving them. And that certainly applies to Shirin Ebadi, which you accuse of being "the most complacent U.S. Agent in Iran" . However, I read texts of Shirin Ebadi in which his defense of sovereignty from Iran and his opposition to the hegemonic pretensions of the U.S. is obvious.

Rather, I think they are reactive attitudes and the denial of critical thinking attitudes that lead not only to discredit but to the destruction of Islam as a credible alternative for the twenty-first century. There is much to correct and improve, and Islamic feminism is one of the most powerful movements leading to a real improvement in Muslim societies towards more just societies and free of tyranny, in which men and women to develop their innate potential and to act as caliphs of God on earth, insha Allah.

And Allah knows best.

2010-03-31T22:40:00.000-07:00

The political language of the Koran

In his new book, Abdennur Prado offers a renewed reading of the Koran, from the perspective of liberation. Beyond the usual discourse on the compatibility (or not) between Islam and democracy, a thorough reading reveals that the Muslim holy book is an appalling today. The rejection of tyranny and the oppressed-oppressor dialectic join the consideration of man as the Caliph of the creation, co-responsible for all matters affecting the community.

In the Quran, politics is an extension of an ethical message of liberation. The ethical is political and personal liberation leads inevitably to confrontation with the powers that be. It follows the mandate of combating all forms of oppression, whether economic, cultural, racial, political or economic.

The book addresses controversial issues such as apostasy and religious pluralism, the prohibition of usury or the jihad. Interfaith utopia defends the rights of homosexuals, the ecological paradigm and culture of peace. Islamophobia is positioned as the ideology of empire, and Eurocentrism underlying complaint in most Western discourses on Islam.

In short, this is a book that shows that a free and democratic reading of the Quran is possible, here and now. A popular reading and committed to the democratization of religious knowledge, regardless of any constituted power.

Standing Alone In Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam by Asra Nomani

2010-03-31T22:37:00.000-07:00

Standing Alone In Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam
Asra Nomani;

Publish Post
Synopsis:

As President Bush is preparing to invade Iraq, Wall Street Journal correspondent Asra Nomani embarks on a dangerous journey from Middle America to the Middle East to join more than two million fellow Muslims on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca required of all Muslims once in their lifetime. Mecca is Islam's most sacred city and strictly off limits to non-Muslims. On a journey perilous enough for any American reporter, Nomani is determined to take along her infant son, Shibli -- living proof that she, an unmarried Muslim woman, is guilty of zina, or "illegal sex." If she is found out, the puritanical Islamic law of the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia may mete out terrifying punishment. But Nomani discovers she is not alone. She is following in the four-thousand-year-old footsteps of another single mother, Hajar (known in the West as Hagar), the original pilgrim to Mecca and mother of the Islamic nation.

Each day of her hajj evokes for Nomani the history of a different Muslim matriarch: Eve, from whom she learns about sin and redemption; Hajar, the single mother abandoned in the desert who teaches her about courage; Khadijah, the first benefactor of Islam and trailblazer for a Muslim woman's right to self-determination; and Aisha, the favorite wife of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam's first female theologian. Inspired by these heroic Muslim women, Nomani returns to America to confront the sexism and intolerance in her local mosque and to fight for the rights of modern Muslim women who are tired of standing alone against the repressive rules and regulations imposed by reactionary fundamentalists.

Nomani shows how many of the freedoms enjoyed centuries ago have been erased by the conservative brand of Islam practiced today, giving the West a false image of Muslim women as veiled and isolated from the world. Standing Alone in Mecca is a personal narrative, relating the modern-day lives of the author and other Muslim women to the lives of those who came before, bringing the changing face of women in Islam into focus through the unique lens of the hajj. Interweaving reportage, political analysis, cultural history, and spiritual travelogue, this is a modern woman's jihad, offering for Westerners a never-before-seen look inside the heart of Islam and the emerging role of Muslim women.