By Sam Harris
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann said that anti-Muslim rhetoric in America is bad news for anti-terrorism efforts: "We are handing al Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup."
By many accounts, the man who could blunt the power of that coup is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the religious leader behind the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero. The imam has been surprisingly mum on the issue while he travels in the Middle East. What message of faith could he offer to Muslims and non-Muslims alike that could turn this moment of division into a time of healing?
As many have pointed out, the controversy over the "ground zero mosque" is a false one. The project is legal to build, and it should remain legal. That does not mean, however, that any concern about building a mosque so close to ground zero is synonymous with bigotry.
The true scandal here is that Muslim moderates have been so abysmally lacking in candor about the nature of their faith and so slow to disavow its genuine (and growing) pathologies--leading perfectly sane and tolerant people to worry whether Muslim moderation even exists.
Despite his past equivocations on this issue, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf could dispel these fears in a single paragraph:
"Like all decent people, I am horrified by much that goes on in the name of 'Islam,' and I consider it a duty of all moderate Muslims to recognize that many of the doctrines espoused in the Qur'an and hadith present some unique liabilities at this moment in history. Our traditional ideas about martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, and the status of women must be abandoned, as they are proving disastrous in the 21st century. Many of Islam's critics have fully justified concerns about the state of discourse in parts of the Muslim world--where it is a tissue of conspiracy theories, genocidal ravings regarding the Jews, and the most abject, triumphalist fantasies about conquering the world for the glory of Allah. While the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity also contain terrible passages, it has been many centuries since they truly informed the mainstream faith. Hence, we do not tend to see vast numbers of Jews and Christians calling for the murder of apostates today. This is not true of Islam, and there is simply no honest way of denying this shocking disparity. We are members of a faith community that appears more concerned about harmless cartoons than about the daily atrocities committed in its name--and no one suffers from this stupidity and barbarism more than our fellow Muslims. Islam must grow up. And Muslim moderates like ourselves must be the first to defend the rights of novelists, cartoonists, and public intellectuals to criticize all religious faiths, including our own."
These are the sorts of sentiments that should be the litmus test for Muslim moderation. Find an imam who will speak this way, and gather followers who think this way, and I'll volunteer to cut the ribbon on his mosque in lower Manhattan .
(End of article—comments on it from website follow below)
http://newsweek.washi...
This article is right on. Particularly relevant is the sentence: "While the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity also contain terrible passages, it has been many centuries since they truly informed the mainstream faith."
I specifically thought about the Spanish Inquisition or our own Salem Witchcraft trials as good historical examples. You would be hard pressed to find any Christians today, no matter how fundamental or radical, that would support a return to those environments.
This is the real difference between Islam and the other world's religions. Muslims of America : Are you listening?
Sam Harris did not go far enough in suggesting what Imam Rauf should say. Here is what Rauf should tell his followers:
My dear brothers and sisters in the Islamic faith
1. Islam was a remedy that Muhammad tried to give Arabic society for what he perceived to be the ills of Arabic society in the 7th century.
2. The Quran is not the word of God but that of Muhammad and whoever helped write the Quran. The Quran is mostly inapplicable for today's Muslim societies and here is what we must do. We do not have to rewrite the Quran.
a. We must rewrite Muslim laws that discriminate against women and non-Muslims. For example we must ban the beating up of wives for disobedience to their husbands as advised by Muhammad in verse 4:34.
b. We must allow non-Muslims to preach their religion to Muslims freely in Muslim countries and we must allow those Muslims who do not wish to continue to be Muslims to leave Islam and even become agnostics and atheists and freely preach their non-belief to Muslims.
c. We must allow non-Muslims to freely build their place of worship in all countries dominated by Muslims including in Mecca and Medina .
d. Until we give freedom of religion to non-Muslims we cannot demand freedom of religion in non-Muslim countries. We must put the Cordoba Mosque in NYC on hold until non-Muslims get full freedom of religion in Muslim countries.
e. We must boycott the hajj until full freedom of religion is allowed in Saudi Arabia . By doing the hajj while Saudi Arabia practices the apartheid against non-Muslims we are showing our support to Saudi Arabia . We waste $10 billion or more every year on the hajj. Instead let us use the money to educate our young Muslims in secular way so that they can become a productive section of modern societies.
I urge that all Muslims put the Cordoba mosque on hold until the majority of Americans support the mosque.
I would only add to Harris's statement:
"Find an imam who will speak this way, and gather followers who think this way,..." that these imams and followers who "speak this way" in both Arabic and English.
There are too many examples of so-called "moderate" Muslims saying one thing to the western world and something very different to the Muslim world
Feedback requested.
Silence is not moderation, and is not being conscious.
Speak up. Say something!
see also
http://www.carlisle.a...
Chris
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