Soren wrote on Oct 30^th, 2014 at 10:31pm:

I didn't suggest you should call him "Racist", Soren.  Anyway, doesn't this contradict what you've just said about Islam not being a "race"?   

Brian Ross wrote on Oct 31^st, 2014 at 12:36am:

I am unable to follow YOUR argument, Brain.  I posted an excerpt from an article that mentions no racism. Yet you insist on a question about racism. That follows only in your own dishonest mind.


Criticism of Islam is NOT Islamophobia or bigotry. Or racism.



The trend of history is being reversed. In Egypt, for instance, veiling was unheard of 50 years ago and was virtually extinct until the Islamists resurrected the practice in the 70s. Today an estimated 90 per cent of Egyptian women are veiled. In many other countries the veil — originally a tribal norm, not a religious one — is now ubiquitous, as are views on apostasy in countries that were far more progressive 50 years ago.

Many of my fellow Muslims are trying to reform Islam from within. Yet our voices are smothered in the West by Islamist apologists and their well-meaning but unwitting allies on the Left. For instance, if you try to draw attention to the stark correlation between the rise of Islamic religiosity and regressive attitudes towards women, you’re labelled an Islamophobe.

In America (and Australia) , other contemporary ideologies are routinely and openly debated in classrooms, newspapers, on talk shows and in living rooms. But Americans make an exception for Islamism. Criticism of the religion — even in abstraction — is conflated with bigotry towards Muslims. There is no public discourse, much less an ideological response, to Islamism, in academia or on Capitol Hill. This trend is creating an intellectual vacuum, where poisonous ideas are allowed to propagate unchecked.

My own experience as a Muslim in New York bears this out. Socially progressive, self-proclaimed liberals, who would denounce even the slightest injustice committed against women or minorities in America, are appalled when I express a similar criticism about my own community.

Compare the collective response after each harrowing high-school shooting in America. Intellectuals and public figures look for the root cause of the violence and ask: Why? Yet when I ask why after every terrorist attack, the disapproval I get from my non-Muslim peers is visceral: The majority of Muslims are not violent, they insist, the jihadists are a minority who don’t represent Islam, and I am fearmongering by even wondering aloud.

This is delusional thinking. (NB Brain) Even as the world witnesses the barbarity of beheadings, habitual stoning and severe subjugation of women and minorities in the Muslim world, politicians and academics lecture that Islam is a “religion of peace”. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia routinely beheads women for sorcery and witchcraft.

In the US, we Muslims are handled like exotic flowers that will crumble if our faith is criticised — even if we do it ourselves. Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats alike would apparently prefer to drop bombs in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond, because killing Muslims is somehow less offensive than criticising their religion? Unfortunately, you can’t kill an idea with a bomb, and so Islamism will continue to propagate.

Muslims must tolerate civilised public debate of the texts and scripture that inform Islamism. To demand any less of us is to engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Aly Salem is an Egyptian writer based in New York.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/losing-my-religion-...

Not a WORD on racism. Not a word.

And the next guy who cries Islamophobe or bigot when responding to criticism of Islam is ?

polite_gandalf wrote on Oct 31^st, 2014 at 10:23am:


Nonsense. I am not ridiculing Muslims for advocating an 'Islam-driven' reform. Never have.

I am saying that you are NOT setting the agenda for Islam, the jihadis are.  I am also saying that the doctrine of the immutability of the Koran has painted you into a corner you cannot escape from without declaring it to be not the eternal and final word of go but a text by Mohammed. 





Remember this?
Soren wrote on Oct 15^th, 2014 at 6:10pm:

polite_gandalf wrote on Oct 31^st, 2014 at 11:48am:

These are not exactly examples of "islam-driven reform of islam"  (your formulation a couple of posts ago). More like islam-sidelined reforms. And the sidelining is difficult.

Tunisia:
After the economy and the balance between secularism and Islam, security was the key issue in the vote. Many Tunisians reckon that the Nahda-led coalition government was culpably slow in responding to the spread of jihadist ideology in the country’s mosques after the fall of Mr Ben Ali. The public is no longer shocked by news of anti-terrorist operations. Just days before the election, a shoot-out with alleged jihadists left one policemen and six others dead (five women among them). The presence of armed national national guardsmen and soldiers outside polling stations made for a more sombre mood than the celebratory post-revolutionary election three years ago.
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21628920-surprising-defeat-...


Indonesia
Singapore-based scholar Martin van Bruinessen is editor of a new book with a misleadingly bland title, Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam, that sets out to explain the "conservative turn" in the faith of more than 200 million people who live on our doorstep.

"If you ask me what I find threatening in Indonesian Islam, it's not the terrorism," van Bruinessen says. "Terrorism has been reduced to a level that society can live with. The police are efficient, they will catch most of the would-be terrorists.

"It is this conservative trend that I find much more worrying than terrorism. It reduces the freedom of minorities in the first place, and the freedom of many people within the Muslim majority to develop their views."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/more-rigid-islam-in-indonesia/story-e...
A long and instructive article.

polite_gandalf wrote on Oct 31^st, 2014 at 2:36pm:


Are there? I thought it was pretty clear that Indonesia is so far from Islamicism the very idea is ludicrous.

I wonder what the old boy's interest is. Shares in anti-Musel companies? Oil? News Limited?

Or is it simply that no one has the right to not be offended?

What Beatty chronicles at village level, van Bruinessen's book analyses within mass movements as important in Indonesia as they are unknown to most Australians.

The Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama are the two leading Muslim associations of Indonesia. With about nine million and 38 million followers respectively, these are "probably the largest and most complex organisations (in) the entire Muslim world," van Bruinessen says.

Founded in 1912 by an official of the Yogyakarta sultanate, the Muhammadiyah set out to steer a middle course between accommodation of old Javanese culture and a reformist purging of practices alien to Islam, such as intercession of saints and magic.

The bigger and more traditional Nahdlatul Ulama appealed to villagers and local businesses that clung to a much wider range of practices and beliefs than those sanctioned by the reformist canon of the Koran and the sayings of prophet Mohammed.

NU produced Abdurrahman Wahid, who parlayed his opposition to the Suharto regime and political Islam into a historic role as Indonesia's first elected president in 1999.

As a modernist organisation, the Muhammadiyah and its urban middle-class supporters built up a vast network of schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, orphanages and mosques. By the middle of the 2000s, both Muhammadiyah and NU faced infiltration by organisations linked to radical Muslim groups operating internationally. One of these challengers, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which hankers for a global caliphate under sharia law, also has a foothold in Australia.

What happened in Indonesia is recounted in van Bruinessen's book by Ahmad Najib Burhani, a scholar at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

In 2005, there were attempts to co-opt Muhammadiyah mosques, schools and universities by activists of a radical movement that took shape as a political party, the Prosperous Justice Party, inspired by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

Conservatives within the Muhammadiyah, already in the ascendant, shared some common ground with Muslim Brotherhood ideology. Yet they joined forces with Muhammadiyah liberals to protect their organisation against the PJP.

A few years later, when the Muhammadiyah staged its 2010 congress in Yogyakarta, staff wore Javanese costumes, complete with ceremonial daggers. There was Javanese music and dance, reflecting an organisation more at ease with local culture and less hidebound than was thought. But the struggle between liberals and progressives has left the Muhammadiyah unstable - only "shakily moderate", in Najib's formula - and this is one reason Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of the Bali bomber group, has dismissed it as banci, an Indonesian word meaning hermaphrodite or sexless.

As for the PJP, it has had a dramatic fall from grace because of a corruption scandal to do with Indonesia's beef import quota, a reminder that there is more to this trade than the troubles of Australia's cattle industry.

This pattern - of troubling shifts in Indonesian Islam that, under analysis, offer some reassurance - is repeated in the book chapter on Solo, the city in central Java notorious for jihadi groups and for vigilantes who harass Westerners in hotels and bars. Yet, as scholar Muhammad Wildan points out, there has been no serious push to impose sharia locally.

And it is the very weakness of orthodox Islam in Solo that gives these groups their "radical edge", for the city is a peculiar stronghold of Java's court tradition, which intermixes Hindu, Buddhist and animist elements. "Only a fraction of society supports the Islamic radical groups in the city," Wildan says.

The van Bruinessen book also charts the paradoxical failure of a sharia campaign in South Sulawesi, a region with a long history of militant and rebellious Islam. Even here, it may be that "sharia is not a very marketable political commodity", says researcher Mujiburrahman.

Yet another chapter follows the Suharto-era Indonesian Council of Muslim Scholars as it struggles to reinvent itself as a servant of a divided Muslim community. After the 2001 attacks in New York it contrived to condemn terrorism without abjuring warlike jihad, thereby exposing itself to criticism from hardliners as well as progressives. Academic Moch Nur Ichwan says some of its other fatwas on public morals, religious pluralism and minorities "have been used or abused" by Islamists to foment intolerance and violent conflict, including expulsion of Ahmadiyah families from their homes in Lombok.

He says: "Many critics consider (the council), because of the disproportionate influence of the relatively few radical members and the absence of balancing progressive voices, as a potential threat to human rights, freedom of thought and freedom of religious practice and conscience."

In van Bruinessen's book, there is a tension between deep unease and reassurance. He says: "I am worried and I want my readers to be worried, but I also want them to see that things cannot be reduced to a simple black and white view. There is resilience, there are still many liberals, many progressives, but they are no longer the dominant voice in Indonesian Islam."

Much of it is mainstream, not Muslim, politics, he says, as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his rivals play the religious card. If intolerant Islam always had its backers in Indonesia, democracy has amplified them.

I say, old chap, what nuanced, balanced and comprehensive articles on Indonesia. Good show.

Alas, they’re just the sort of thing FD hates but I, for one, will fight to the death for your right to post them.

You see? Freeedom does not need to be the expression of dumb, vain porkies. It is able to embrace well researched and intelligent points of view.

Alas, I’m no fan of Indonesian politics. It’s corrupt, nepotistic and favours big money and global corporations. The division of wealth is appalling. But the Indonesians do not tolerate Islamic extremism. Actually, Indonesian people in general, are actually very nice.

Thanks for pointing it out, dear boy.