ANDREW HARROD: MOSLEM REFORMERS DECLARE IDEOLOGICAL WAR
https://philosproject.org/muslim-reform-isis-war/
A recent Heritage Foundation panel – worth watching in full online – welcomed Muslim reformers from around the world to speak about the doctrinal roots of global dangers emanating from Islam today. The Washington, D.C. event was refreshingly frank about the urgency in fighting the violence in Islam.
Former Pakistani parliamentarian and author Farahnaz Ispahani called “Islamic extremism is the primary national security and human rights concern of the world today.” In a play off of the Islamic doctrine of Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, Danish-Syrian parliamentarianNaser Khader compared Christian and Islamic civilizations to two houses. “In the past, there were lots of wrongdoings in the name of Jesus,” he said. “But today, Christianity is a beautiful house.” He touched on human rights abuses that mark the Islam house’s dilapidation and impressed upon the audience the necessity of Islamic reform. “If we don’t start this enormous renovation project, I am afraid the house will collapse and turn even worse.”
According to Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim-American political activist, the problem in Islam is not merely the violence, but the extreme ideology of political Islam. “This is about the separation of mosque and state and something that the West went through,” he said, while noting the West’s history of abolishing church political power. “In order to counter the ideology, we have to recognize and get past the denial and own it.”
Jasser and his fellow panelists criticized the usage of neutral terms such as Countering Violent Extremism in the battle against Islamic threats. “To us, that doesn’t mean anything,” he said about CVE, while suggesting alternatives such as “Countering Violent Islamism.” “President Obama will just not embrace reality, and since he does not embrace reality, we cannot fight this ideological battle,” Ispahani said.
Khader focused on politically correct attempts by Western leaders (like the Arabic acronym Daesh) to obscure Islam’s connection to the Islamic State. “When well-meaning people try to disconnect Islam from the violence, I believe the wheels come off,” he said. “Religion is what the religious make of it. This is a dogma within religious studies.” After he described the Islamic State’s self-professed Islamic credentials, he added that, while supporting an intensified military campaign against the Islamic State with ground troops, “if we are to defeat them completely, we have to bomb them ideologically, as well.”
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani recalled the ideological implications of the 20002 jihadist murder of her colleague Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. In their hunt for the murder suspects, Pakistani police searched mosques and Islamic religious schools (madrassas). These Pakistani authorities “understood something that we are still struggling to grasp today: that there is a problem of ideology.”
While growing up in Morgantown, W.V., Nomani personally experienced the power of Islamic ideas. At her local mosque, she observed the “Saudi interpretation of Islam creeping and crawling in ways that no passports or visas or any type of immigration policy would ever control, because this was ideas seeping across borders.” Gender segregation began to regulate potluck dinners and Shiite imams could no longer lead religious services.
Applying Islamic doctrinal acceptance of polygamy, the imam at Nomani’s mosque also wed a second wife from Egypt without telling his first wife. “We saw her floating through the Wal-Mart in Morgantown in her burqa, and then the third wife came, and then the fourth wife,” Nomani said. Ispahani said that he also knew men who enjoyed Muslim community approval in America while secretly having additional wives beyond one legally recognized spouse.
Such subversive realities gave force to Jasser’s warning against “window dressing of the same oppressive religious tyranny” by various Muslims leaders and groups who hide their support for Islamic theocracy with superficial reform. The 2014 letter by Western imams to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi affirmed the Islamic doctrines of jihad holy war and Islamic governance in a caliphate, while merely criticizing the Islamic State’simplementation of these doctrines. While the letter condemned the Islamic State’s abuse of women, for example, Jasser said that “to the critical eye – to the reforming eye – nothing in their letter says equality.”
In demanding fundamental revisions to the various Islamic doctrines, Khader said that “the Prophet Muhammad has been put on an almost divine pedestal that I believe he would be opposed to. We have to re-read the Quran, and I firmly believe this can be done with respect for the sacred book.” Khader also condemned the traditional Quranic injunctions involving corporal punishments, and Nomani rejected literal readings of Quranic verses that give women half the value of men in matters such as testimony. To give a personal example for her argument, she spoke about how needed her female family members were to back up her father’s testimony during a Pakistani ceremony.
Nomani highlighted the struggles of Muslim feminists like her grandmother, who once ripped the veil off her conservatively raised mother. These individuals “were inspired by the spirit of Muslim women who … later were quiet, independent and advanced by the norms of their era,” Ispahani said.
The Muslim panelists themselves are no strangers to modern struggles. “We face so much pressure within our communities that we live in a modern-day Inquisition, where we are as a much targeted as those who are outside of our Muslim community,” Nomani stressed. Khader said that he worries about the fact that more Muslims in Denmark’s capital of Copenhagen protested against the 2005 Danish Muhammad cartoons than against the 2015 jihadist attacks in Paris.
To close out the panel, Ispahani noted that Muslim reformers like her will need the support of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to have any hope of success.
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