* Forgive Klevius for in the following
ridiculing this annoying self-important von oben habit of BBC not to
present news to the compulsory tax and license fee paying Brits but to
use their position to extol themselves and to treat the listeners as
they were completely excluded (e.g. by constantly addressing each other
with forenames instead of talking to the paying listeners). This ivory
tower snobbish navel gazing and self boasting is also visible in BBC's
sports and documentaries where the presenter(s) places her/himself as a
preposterous filter between the camera and what could have been shown to
the viewers.
Mishal, why don't you condemn sharia islam, especially the one by OIC,
Mishal?! Mishal, it's based on Saudi islam, Mishal, and therefore
essentially similar to the Islamic State's view on islam, Mishal?
Michal, you grew up in the worst of islamofascist countries, namely oil
rich Saudi Aarabia, whereas Ayaan grew up in the poorest (together with
Saudi bombed and terrorized Yemen) islamofascist country, namely
Somalia. But you, Mishal, were privilieged while Ayaan was terrorized.
However, Ayaan has been gifted with intelligence and after listening to
you Mishal on BBC I understand I can't put similar intellectual
expectations on you, Michal. But, Mishal, don't give up. The sharia
problem isn't that complicated after all Mishal, is it. The only issue
at stake Mishal is why the Saudi initiated, Saudi based, and Saudi
steered muslim world organization OIC had to abandon the most basic of
Human Rights in their Sharia declaration via UN (aka as the oxymoron The
Cairo Declaration on "human rights in islam"), Mishal? The reason was
that islam can't stand Human Rights scrutiny, not even on the most basic
level. Without at least OIC level sharia there is no islam as we know
it anymore. And you Mishal, Klevius has no problem whatsoever with you
not fasting during Ramadan and instead drinking alcohol, and to wear
whatever clothes etc. And Klevius really loves to hear that you feel
that your way of life isn't under any threat under Human Rights guided
laws, Mishal.
So the only thing you really have to do, Mishal, is to use your
privileged position at the BBC coterie as a microphone and tell the
world whether you are a sharia muslim or not, Mishal. And think what
encouragement that could be Mishal for all girls and women around the
world suffering because of sharia islam.
Is Mishal Husein evil, a sleazy coward - or just an "islamophobe" who
wants to keep her "islamophobia" less visible by calling herself a
"muslim" and make her "muslimhood" more profitable?
Klevius to Mishal: Compare yourself carefully to Ayaan Hirsi Ali by reading what she says below!
Samantha Lewthwaite, Mishal Husain and Michael Adebolajo all have sharia islam in common.And all of them say they defend islam.
When BBC's awarded (by BBC) muslim presenter Mishal Husain says she
doesn't think that her way of life is under any threat, while boasting
about not respecting muslim "modesty" or Ramadan but rather drinks some
alcohol, then this might not sound very helpful or comforting for the
millons of muslim girls and women who are still trapped in sharia
dominated communities and therefore out of reach for that protection
Mishal Husain enjoys thanks to Human Rights.
And here's the very opposite to those above. She wants to reform islam.
Klevius agrees with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and is also as far as one can get
from being racist. You can't defend racism or sexism if you ascribe to
basic Universal Human Rights. Just like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Klevius doesn't
blame Arabs or Africans but islam for atrocities and backwardness.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Koran and sharia not made by God. Ought to be altered.
Klevius foreword: To this some
islamofascists will argue that "God" inspired them. And to this stupid
answer Klevius counters with the Allah crushing formula; Erase those
evil parts of your "God" that obstruct universal Human Rights equality!
And if the "god" that is left no longer attracts you - then throw the
carcass away! And if you like to keep it as some sort of toothless
mascot, then that's fine with Klevius and, I believe Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: We have a problem—not a problem from hell, but
one that claims to come from heaven. That problem is sometimes called
radical, or fundamentalist, Islam, and the self-styled Islamic State is
just its latest iteration. But no one really understands it.
Last summer Major General Michael Nagata, the commander of U.S. special
operations forces in the Middle East admitted that “we do not understand
the movement (Islamic State),” he said. “And until we do, we are not
going to defeat it.”
For years, U.S. policymakers have failed to grasp the nature of the
threat posed by militant Islam and have almost entirely failed to mount
an effective counteroffensive against it on the battlefield that matters
most: the battlefield of ideas.
Last September Barack Obama insisted that the Islamic State “is not
Islamic,” and later that month, he told the UN General Assembly that
“Islam teaches peace.” In November, Obama condemned the beheading of the
American aid worker Peter Kassig as “evil” but refused to use the term
“radical Islam” to describe the ideology of his killers. The phrase is
no longer heard in White House press briefings. The approved term is
“violent extremism.”
The decision not to call violence committed in the name of Islam by its
true name—jihad—is a strange one. It would be as if Western leaders
during the Cold War had gone around calling communism an ideology of
peace or condemning the Baader Meinhof Gang, a West German militant
group, for not being true Marxists. It is time to drop the euphemisms
and verbal contortions. A battle for the future of Islam is taking place
between reformers and reactionaries, and its outcome matters. The
United States needs to start helping the right side win.
How did the United States end up with a strategy based on Orwellian
Newspeak? In the wake of 9/11, senior Bush administration officials
sounded emphatic. “This is a battle for minds,” declared the Pentagon’s
no. 2, Paul Wolfowitz, in 2002. But behind the scenes, there was a
full-blown struggle going on about how to approach the subject of Islam.
According to Joseph Bosco, who worked on strategic communications and
Muslim outreach in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2002 to
2004, although some American officials defined Islam as inherently
peaceful, others argued that, like Christianity, it had to go through a
reformation. Eventually, an uneasy compromise was reached. “We bridged
the divide by saying that most contemporary Muslims practice their faith
peacefully and tolerantly, but a small, radical minority aspires to
return to Islam’s harsh seventh century origins,” Bosco wrote in The
National Interest.
Administration officials could not even agree on the target of their
efforts. Was it global terrorism or Islamic extremism? Or was it the
alleged root causes—poverty, Saudi funding, past errors of U.S. foreign
policy, or something else altogether? There were “agonizing” meetings on
the subject, one participant told U.S. News & World Report. “We
couldn’t clarify what path to take, so it was dropped.”
It did not help that the issue cut across traditional bureaucratic
demarcations. Officers from the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and
Psychological Operations Command argued for the integration of public
diplomacy, press relations, and covert operations. State Department
officials saw this as yet another attempt by the Pentagon to annex their
turf. Veterans of the campaign trail warned against going negative on a
religion—any religion—ahead of the 2004 election. For all these
reasons, by the middle of that year, the Bush administration had next to
no strategy. Government Accountability Office investigators told
Congress that those responsible for public diplomacy at the State
Department had no guidance. “Everybody who knows how to do this has been
screaming,” one insider told U.S. News. But outside Foggy Bottom, no
one could hear them scream.
Administration officials eventually settled on the “Muslim World
Outreach” strategy, which relied partly on humanitarian projects carried
out by the U.S. Agency for International Development and partly on
Arabic-language media outlets funded by the U.S. government, such as
Alhurra (a plain vanilla TV news channel) and Radio Sawa (a 24-hour pop
music station that targets younger listeners). In effect, “Muslim World
Outreach” meant not touching Islam at all. Karen Hughes, who was
undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs from
2005 to 2007, has said that she “became convinced that our nation should
avoid the language of religion in our discussion of terrorist acts.”
Here, if in few other respects, there has been striking continuity from
Bush to Obama. From 2009 to 2011, Judith McHale served in the same
position that Hughes had. “This effort is not about a ‘war of ideas,’ or
winning the hearts and minds of huge numbers of people,” McHale said in
2012. “It’s about using digital platforms to reach that small but
dangerous group of people around the world who are considering turning
to terrorism and persuading them to instead turn in a different
direction.” The whole concept of “violent extremism” implies that the
United States is fine with people being extremists, so long as they do
not resort to violence. Yet this line of reasoning fails to understand
the crucial link between those who preach jihad and those who then carry
it out. It also fails to understand that at a pivotal moment, the
United States has opted out of a debate about Islam’s future.
American policymakers have made two main arguments for avoiding the
subject of Islam, one strategic, the other domestic. The first holds
that the United States must not jeopardize its interests in the Middle
East and other majority-Muslim parts of the world by casting aspersions
on Islam. The second contends that the country must not upset the
delicate balance in Western democracies between Muslim minorities and
non-Muslim majorities by offending Muslims or encouraging so-called
Islamophobes. Yet it is becoming harder and harder to sustain these
arguments, since U.S. interests in the Middle East are in increasing
jeopardy and since the domestic threat of militant Islam is far greater
than the threat of a much-exaggerated Islamophobia.
The United States cannot wish away the escalating violence by jihadist
groups or the evidence that substantial proportions of many Muslim
populations support at least some of their goals (such as the imposition
of sharia and punishing apostates and those who insult Islam with
death). The Middle East and North Africa grow more violent by the day. A
substantial part of Syria and Iraq has fallen to the Islamic State.
Yemen has collapsed into anarchy. Islamists have set up bases in Libya.
The militant Islamist group Boko Haram is causing grave instability in
northern Nigeria, as well as in neighboring Niger and Cameroon.
The nonstrategy, in short, has failed. Indeed, the official U.S.
position collapses when the United States’ own Middle Eastern allies
begin openly referring to Islamic extremism as a “cancer” (in the words
of the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States) and
calling for a “revolution” in mainstream Islamic religious thinking (as
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has). As for the home front, an
estimated 3,400 Westerners, many of them young men and women with
promising futures, have voluntarily chosen to leave behind the West’s
freedoms and prosperity in order to join the Islamic State. More British
Muslims have volunteered for the Islamic State than for the British
military. The United States is not in this dire state, but the direction
of travel is troubling. Already, more than 50 young American Muslims
have tried to join the Islamic State, and around half of them have
succeeded. It is time to change course.
The first step is to recognize that the Muslim world is in the early
stages of a religious reformation. To understand its nature, it is
important to distinguish between the three different groups of Muslims
in the world today. The first consists of Muslims who see the forcible
imposition of sharia as their religious duty. The second group—the clear
majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal
to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice
or preach violence.
The third group consists of Muslim dissidents. A few, including myself,
have been forced by experience to conclude that we cannot continue to be
believers, yet we remain deeply engaged in the debate about Islam’s
future. But the majority of dissidents are reformist believers, among
them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if
its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of
political violence.
Yet there are two fundamental obstacles to a reform of Islam. The first
is that those who advocate it, even in the mildest terms, are threatened
with death as heretics or apostates. The second is that the majority of
otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to
acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrants for
intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.
Like Christians and Jews centuries ago, Muslims today must critically
evaluate their sacred texts in order to reform their religion.
Take the case of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious
mainstream institution of Sunni religious education in the world. One
former Al-Azhar student, Sufyan al-Omari, told the Belgian newspaper De
Standaard in March that the Islamic State “does not fall from the sky.”
He continued: “The texts to which IS appeals for support are exactly
what we learned at Al-Azhar. The difference is that IS truly puts the
texts into practice.” Following this logic, he said that he intended to
join the Islamic State. Mohamed Abdullah Nasr, another recent graduate
of Al-Azhar, did not express a desire to do the same. But, he pointed
out, “even if Al-Azhar students don’t join IS, they still retain these
ideas in their head. They spread the ideology in their communities.”
Critical thinking like Nasr’s is at the core of the Muslim Reformation.
Admittedly, the historical analogy is very rough. There are fundamental
differences between the teachings of Jesus and those of Muhammad, to say
nothing of the radically different organizational structures of the two
religions—one hierarchical and distinct from the state, the other
decentralized yet aspiring to political power. Nevertheless, three
factors at work in the Middle East today resemble the drivers of
religious reform in sixteenth-century Europe. First, new information
technology has created an unprecedented communications network across
the Muslim world. Second, a constituency for a reformation has emerged
in major cities, consisting of people disenchanted with Islamist rule
(as in Cairo and Tehran) or attracted by Western norms (as in London and
New York). Third, there is also a political constituency for religious
reform emerging in key regional states, such as Egypt and the United
Arab Emirates.
Already, a growing number of ordinary citizens in the Muslim world, as
well as in the West, are calling for reform. The Muslim Reformation will
likely be driven by such lay reformers, rather than by the clergy, but a
number of clerics are still playing an important role. Among them is
Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of the Drancy mosque, near Paris, who
predicted earlier this year that “Islam will also follow the same
historical pattern as Christianity and Judaism,” in terms of reforming
its doctrine. “However,” he warned, “this battle for reform will not be
concluded if the rest of the world treats it as a solely internal battle
and sits as an idle observer, watching the catastrophe as it unfolds.”
Such Islamic thinkers envision a version of their religion that no
longer exalts holy war, martyrdom, and life in the hereafter. Abd
al-Hamid al-Ansari, a former dean of Islamic law at Qatar University,
has said that he “would like the religious scholars, through their
religious discourse, to make our youth love life, and not death.” He has
recommended that liberal reformers be permitted to sue inflammatory
Islamic preachers for any harm that befalls them from the preachers’
sermons. The Iraqi Shiite cleric Ahmad al-Qabbanji, meanwhile, has
argued that “the Koran was created by the Prophet Muhammad, but was
driven by Allah,” a clear break with orthodoxy, which holds that the
Koran is the direct word of God. As a report from the Middle East Media
Research Institute explains, he proposes “a modifiable religious ruling
based on fiqh al-maqasid, or the jurisprudence of the meaning”—code for a
more flexible interpretation of sharia. Another reformer, Ayad Jamal
al-Din, a Shiite cleric in Iraq who has argued for the separation of
mosque and state, has framed the choice this way: “We must make a
decision whether to follow man-made civil law, legislated by the Iraqi
parliament, or whether to follow the fatwas issued by Islamic
jurisprudents. We must not embellish things and say that Islam is a
religion of compassion, peace and rose water, and that everything is
fine.”
Like Christians and Jews centuries ago, Muslims today must critically
evaluate their sacred texts in order to reform their religion. That is
not an unreasonable request, as history shows. Of course, history also
shows that the path to religious reform can be bloody. By the
mid-seventeenth century, Europe had been ravaged by a century of warfare
between Roman Catholics and Protestants. But the result was to create
the room for the genuine freedom of thought that ultimately made the
Enlightenment possible.
One of the most important of these freethinkers was Baruch Spinoza, a
brilliant Jewish Dutch philosopher. For Spinoza, the Bible was a
collection of loosely assembled moral teachings, not God’s literal word.
Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community, and a council of
the Dutch Reformed Church called his Theological-Political Treatise “the
vilest and most sacrilegious book the world has ever seen.” One of
Spinoza’s contemporaries, Adriaan Beverland, was even jailed and then
banished from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland for questioning the
notion of original sin. Yet both men died in their beds. And it is their
ideas that prevail in the Netherlands today.
American presidents and secretaries of state need not give lectures on
the finer points of Islamic orthodoxy. But it is not too much to ask
them to support Islamic religious reform and make the fate of Muslim
dissidents and reformers part of their negotiations with allies (such as
Saudi Arabia) and foes (such as Iran) alike. At the same time, U.S.
officials need to stop publicly whitewashing unreformed Islam.
There is a precedent for this proposal. During the Cold War, the United
States systematically encouraged and funded anticommunist intellectuals
to counter the influence of Marxists and other fellow travelers of the
left by speaking out against the evils of the Soviet system. In 1950,
the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, dedicated to defending the
noncommunist left, opened in Berlin. Leading intellectuals such as
Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to serve as
honorary chairs. Many of the congress’ members were former
communists—notably, Arthur Koestler—who warned against the dangers of
totalitarianism on the basis of personal experience. Thanks to U.S.
funding, the group was able to publish such magazines as Encounter (in
the United Kingdom), Preuves (in France), Der Monat (in Germany), and
Quadrant (in Australia).
As détente took hold in the late 1960s and 1970s, the war of ideas died
down. When U.S. President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty—anticommunist stations funded by the U.S.
government—were operating with 1940s vacuum tube technology and rusting
transmitter towers. Under Reagan, however, funding for the war of ideas
was stepped up, largely through the U.S. Information Agency.
The conventional wisdom today is that the Cold War was won on economics.
But this is a misunderstanding of history. In fact, in the 1950s and
again in the 1980s, the United States appealed to people living behind
the Iron Curtain not only on the basis of Americans’ higher standards of
living but also—and perhaps more importantly—on the basis of individual
freedom and the rule of law. Soviet dissidents such as Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel did not condemn the
Soviet system because its consumer goods were shoddy and in short
supply. They condemned it because it was lawless, lying, and corrupt.
Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam with as much
courage as the dissidents who spoke out against the Soviet Union. Just
as critics of communism during the Cold War came from a variety of
backgrounds and disagreed on many issues, so do modern critics of
unreformed Islam. Qabbanji, for example, has expressed strong criticism
of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, whereas other reformers, such as
Ansari, are more pro-American. But such differences are less important
than what the reformers have in common. They are all challenging an
orthodoxy that contains within it the seeds of an escalating jihad. Yet
the West either ignores them or dismisses them as unrepresentative.
The United States’ mistake in this regard has been twofold. First, after
the collapse of communism in Russia, political leaders assumed that the
United States would never face another ideological challenge. In 1998,
Congress disbanded the U.S. Information Agency. Its functions were
absorbed by other agencies. Then, officials assumed that Islam should
not be engaged as an ideology at all. They did so mostly because they
were—and remain—terrified of taking on Islam.
As William McCants of the Brookings Institution told The Atlantic, the
Obama administration “is determined not to frame this [conflict] or have
it be interpreted as a religious war.” Indeed, McCants explicitly
argued against taking the side of Muslim reformers because any U.S.
intervention in the debate on the reform of Islam “can discredit the
people who reach the same conclusions we do.” But supporting dissidents
who are pressing for a reform of Islam is hardly the same thing as
waging a religious war. Nor does fighting the war of ideas mean
trumpeting the U.S. policy of the day. It means focusing squarely on
encouraging those who, for example, oppose the literal application of
sharia to apostates and women or who argue that calls to wage holy war
have no place in the twenty-first century.
Imagine a platform for Muslim dissidents that communicated their message
through YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Imagine ten
reformist magazines for every one issue of the Islamic State’s Dabiq or
al Qaeda’s Inspire. Imagine the argument for Islamic reform being
available on radio and television in Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Pashto, and
Urdu. Imagine grants and prizes for leading religious reformers. Imagine
support for schools that act as anti-madrasahs.
Such a strategy would also give the United States an opportunity to
shift its alliances to those Muslim individuals and groups that actually
share its values and practices: those who fight for a true Muslim
reformation and who currently find themselves maligned, if not
persecuted, by the very governments Washington props up.
The task of backing Islamic reform cannot be carried out by the
government alone; civil society has a crucial role to play. Indeed, all
the major U.S. charitable foundations committed to humanitarian work can
help Islam reform. The Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation—all of which boast endowments
in the billions of dollars—have done almost nothing in this area. There
have been many grants for the study of Islam, but almost none to promote
its reform. The same goes for the United States’ leading universities,
which are currently paralyzed by their fear of being accused of
“cultural imperialism” or, worst of all, “Orientalism.”
I am not an Orientalist. Nor am I a racist, although like most critics
of Islam, I have been accused of that, too. I do not believe in the
innate backwardness of Arabs or Africans. I do not believe that the
Middle East and North Africa are somehow doomed to a perpetual cycle of
violence. I am a universalist. I believe that each human being possesses
the power of reason, as well as a conscience. That includes all
Muslims. At present, some Muslims ignore both reason and conscience by
joining groups such as Boko Haram or the Islamic State, citing textual
prescriptions and religious dogma to justify murder and enslavement. But
their crimes are already forcing a reexamination of Islamic Scripture,
doctrine, and law. This process cannot be stopped, no matter how much
violence is used against would-be reformers.
Yes, the main responsibility for the Muslim Reformation falls on Muslims
themselves. But it must be the duty of the Western world, as well as
being in its self-interest, to provide assistance and, where necessary,
security to those reformers who are carrying out this formidable task,
just as it once encouraged those dissidents who stood up to Soviet
communism. In her final testimony before Congress in January 2013,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got it right. “We’re abdicating the
ideological arena,” she said, “and we need to get back into it.” Either
that, or the problem from heaven will send the entire Muslim world—if
not the entire world—to hell.
