A Muslim woman from West Virginia, Asra Nomani, writes in the New York Times (thanks to Steve) about hate in her local mosque. This is the same mosque, and the same woman, that we posted about in February, when she was protesting having to enter it by the back door — only the men could go in the front.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Not long ago in my little mosque around the corner from a McDonald's, a student from the university here delivered a sermon. To love the Prophet Muhammad, he said, "is to hate those who hate him." He railed against man-made doctrines that replace Islamic law, and excoriated the "enemies of Islam" who deny strict adherence to Sunnah, or the ways of Muhammad. While he wasn't espousing violence, his words echoed the extremist vocabulary of Wahhabism, used by some followers to breed militant attitudes.Like others who listened that day, I was stung by the sermon. It stands in chilling contrast to reforms taking place within Muslim communities nationwide. In fact, only months earlier at my mosque, my mother, sister-in-law, niece and I prayed in the main hall, an act of defiance that led to a reversal of the policy that women had to pray in a secluded balcony. Sadly, I have learned that the realization of an inclusive Islam is a fragile thing, even in this country. Americans need not look elsewhere to hear hate-filled rhetoric preached by fundamentalists. It resounds in our own back yards.
Like many small mosques, mine does not have an imam. Instead, a governing board — which appoints its own members — sets policy. An elected executive committee is supposed to decide who will lead prayers and deliver sermons. With infighting, that committee disintegrated over the last year, and went vacant after the board failed to hold elections in November. The board took over managing the mosque. A month before the student's speech, he and about 10 other men staged the equivalent of a coup. They appointed five in their ranks as the "temporary executive committee" and usurped the board's power to choose who will lead prayers, preach and make management decisions.
These men rally around strict interpretation of the Koran and Sunnah, which last week entailed a sermon that criticized women working outside the home and called women who have lost their chastity worthless. The group has packed the mosque's bookcases with fundamentalist publications.
Note that these hardliners rely on a "strict interpretation of the Koran and Sunnah," and use the Prophet Muhammad to justify their hatred.
Nomani's conclusion:
It saddens me that these Muslim organizations and my mosque leadership are reluctant to take a strong stand, because ending hate begins at home. If Muslims in America and elsewhere expect religious tolerance, we must ourselves enforce a zero-tolerance policy against preaching hatred and bigotry. At the very least, American Muslims need to follow the lead of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, which sent a letter to 1,000 British mosques urging members to oppose extremism and provide "Islamic guidance" to help "maintain the peace and security of our country."The goings-on in my small mosque may seem inconsequential, but we are a microcosm of the challenges moderate Islam faces throughout the world. If tolerant and inclusive Islam can't express itself in small corners like Morgantown, where on this earth can the real beauty of Islam flourish?
Evidently Nomani's idea of the "real beauty of Islam" has nothing to do with a strict interpretation of the Qur'an and Sunnah. Yet if people like her don't refute the radicals' strict interpretations on Islamic grounds, they will never be able to defeat them. This is the great challenge for moderate Muslims, which has yet to be taken up.
Hello, Mr. Spencer-
I have a question: I'm re-reading the Quran at the moment. It looks like there's no doctrinal/social support for moderates [Surah IX 81-9, 'Repentance', Tahrike Tarsile trans.]. Is that a correct reading?
If so, how can moderates have any impact/legitimacy in the Moslem world?
My dear urthshu:
I have said many times that while there are many moderate Muslims, a moderate Islam is harder to find -- i.e., a peaceful Islam that takes into account the texts the radicals use to justify violence and proffers a convincing alternative interpretation of them.
That being the case, I think moderates can only have impact and gain legitimacy in the Muslim world by doing their best to construct such an Islam, forthrightly confronting and challenging radical exegesis. (By way of explanation: most self-proclaimed moderate Muslims in the West do not confront and refute radical texts. Instead, they just ignore them, rendering their moderation ineffective in the Muslim world, however effective it may be for non-Muslims.)
Will this be easy? No. Will they succeed? There are more obstacles than would allow for a simple positive answer to that. But the attempt must be made.
Cordially
Robert Spencer
When are people going to realize that God is not in a church or only available through religious channels? And that those who claim to be Men of God or religiuos leaders are the same type of indiviuals that make good con men. For countless centuries the sheeple of weekness have fallen victim to these "holy" manipulators. Who for reason of personal gain or power tell there followers that they and they alone know the way to salvation.
For the last 1400 or so years there are the followers of mohahmed saying that allah is the only true God and if you don't beleive the way we beleive you are less than a human. With belief in mind they set out to either convert you or kill you, of course this is in the name of their god allah. The truth is that yes there is only one God and Gods name is God, and God is not in a church or mosque or any building.God is every where. God has created man for a reason and I doubt that killing each other in his name is that reason. I also doubt very much that there is some kind of competition to see who is worshiping God better or in the correct way. To kill Gods creations is to destroy that which belongs only to God, Life. To destroy life and to claim that it is done in Gods name is take Gods name in vane at that sins darkest level.
Any "religious leader" of any religion that would promote or instigate this action is of an evil born of mans lowness and greed. To use the ignorant as a tool to that purpose is even lower.
These "religious leaders desaratly need to keep the followers ingnorant and unenlightened or risk loosing the power the have over them.
In all the reading I have done I have found no group of humans more full of hate and death than the muslims. As a people they have allowed themselves, either through their laziness or forced ignorance to be used to commit atrocities upon there brethren equal to none. They blame those who beleive in God in different ways than they for what they have and have not.
What the have is a filthy dust filled region of earth mostly unfertile to all but the poison they grow to ship around the rest of the world to make money so they can butcher those they don't poison. A region plentiful in only one natural resource, the poisonous black liquid that stems from the ancient decay of all that is dead in the world. The profit from which they use for the murder of the innocent children of those who's only crime is to be more enlightened than they are.
When the enlightened use the advances afforded them by that enlightenment to save the ignorant their reward is to be blown to peices or machine gunned to death while holding a baby by the same ignorant muslim whose baby was cured of some horrific disease by the medicine supplied by the victim. All in the name of God.
When will all the little sheeple of islam learn that, yes God Is great and if enlightened are wrong God does not need your help in punishing them. God would just make them live in the same dust filled part of hell you live in.
Mr. Spencer,
You know the Koran and Hadith far better than I, so maybe I'm missing some basis for constructing a moderate Islam. Could you point me to the relevant passages? Can you name a moderate sect which is theologically consistant with Koran and Hadith, and might therefore serve as a model?
I appreciate that you are hoping for a peaceful way to permanently end Islam's propensity for violent Jihad; I wish I could share that hope. It seems to me, however, that Islam is so thoroughly corrupted with Mohammad's violent and perverse personality that the whole project must be abandoned.
Islam cannot be reformed by moderates and remain Islam. By one means or another, Islam must end.
My dear Dave,
"You know the Koran and Hadith far better than I, so maybe I'm missing some basis for constructing a moderate Islam. Could you point me to the relevant passages? Can you name a moderate sect which is theologically consistant with Koran and Hadith, and might therefore serve as a model?"
Dave, I assume this is in response to my post above, in which I spoke of the need for moderates to construct such an Islam. But in that post I said that "while there are many moderate Muslims, a moderate Islam is harder to find." That is precisely because of the contents of the Islamic sources.
There are relatively tolerant verses in the Qur'an (i.e., Sura 109), but they are generally early passages that are considered to have been abrogated by later, more violent and less tolerant ones (i.e., 9:29). There is not a large body of these peaceful passages. As Ibn Warraq has said, for every passage the moderates can quote, the radicals have 10 that are better attested.
As such there is no "moderate sect" for which you ask, and the basis for a moderate Islam will have to be, as I said, "constructed" -- that is, it isn't already there for the most part.
Yet as for hoping for one thing or another, I still believe it is more realistic and humane to hope for such reform, without any illusions whatsoever, than to hope for or to advocate the eradication of Islam. The latter would require a billion people to discard their belief system; reform would only require a few thousand (or even hundred thousand) influential and powerful ones to adjust theirs. So which hope is more realistic?
Cordially
Robert Spencer
Robert, you and I both know that if thousands of traditions were trashed, and the violence and hatred removed from the koran, it would be a very very thin book.
The only way I can see Islam being reformed in any way is to isolate Muhammad's ways as to being strictly relating to his time only, and not to be followed. Unfortunately, the rest of Islamic history up to present does not support that.
Harsh measures have to be taken in the free world, and the longer we prolong them, the bloodier it will be. These "fundamentalists" know the time to act is now, because they won't be able to prevent the information age we live in now from reaching into the core of ignorance in muslim countries.
well welcome to the real world of the muslim, hate and killing. she has a choice here she could leave her mosque and report any anti-american sermons to the u.s. goverenment. ofcours, being a muslim she will not, she will continue to tolerate the happenings in her small home town mosques as all female muslims do.
Mr. Spencer,
Thank you for your response to my earlier post. Please allow me to clarify my position.
If "...a few thousand (or even hundred thousand) influential and powerful..." people set to the task of reforming Islam, could a thorough change be accomplished in an acceptable time span, e.g., our lifetimes? Christianity took centuries to accomplish an analogous transformation; can we afford to wait centuries?
I think the answers to the questions above are both "no." Thus, while I agree that reform is the more humane way to end our centuries old struggle with militant Islam, given the history and nature of Islam, plus the fact that Islamic radicals have already chosen war (and moderates have chosen complacency), I'm not the least sanguine that reform is a realistic option.
Second, as you noted, the body of tolerant verses in Islamic sources is not large, and are generally considered abrogated by later, nastier ones. Reforming Islam would require a radical reinterpretation, or even removal, of the bulk of the Koran and Hadith. Imagine the Christian Bible stripped down to nothing but Psalms; that is why I say that if Islam is reformed, it will no longer be Islam.
And thus my conclusion that, by one means or another, Islam must end.
Respectfully,
Dave
We cannot have these hate factories in our own backyards.
Mr. Spencer,
First off, thanks for this very useful website; your work is greatly appreciated.
In an earlier response, you stated:
"The latter would require a billion people to discard their belief system; reform would only require a few thousand (or even hundred thousand) influential and powerful ones to adjust theirs."
Isn't the adjustment process, as you call it, also calling on a very large number of Muslims to adopt the other alternative, that being discarding their belief system? I'm sure many of them would feel any "constructed" Islam would not BE Islam, in their minds. The end result of a constructed Islam would be schism, with the "reformed Islam" just another target for depredation. It seems to me that for every influential leader that would go along with this, a new "pure Muslim" leader would arise, denouncing the former leader as an apostate.
Ms Nomani is using "her mosque" a plateform to sell her book. She just wants publicity, and that she is getting a lot. In Islam, anything you to is for the sake of Lord, and NOT for personal gains or publicity. If someone uses Islam and/ or Quran for personal gains, or fulfilling his/her desire, he/she is using religion, and God does not accept anything of such people.
The sermons delivered in Morgantown mosque are not any different than the sermons on the ISNA website. Ms Nomani wants to hear only those commandments of Quran that conform to her way of life. She does not want any good for women , its just her own self she is worried about. And that is against the very essence of Islam, Islam teaches sacrifice, tolerance and patience. Islam forbids bragging about your sins, and shameful deeeds. The philosophy behind this is to stop the evil from spreading into the masses. Islam promotes sincerity of acts. Any act that is done by a believing Muslim is for the sake of God and NOT for the sake of any wordly gain, immediate or forthcoming.
If you need examples from History , I can quote for your enlightment.
Peace
You can't handel the truth ! You have a-lined yourself with a bunch of Savages!
Is there no way to arrest these people for yell-ing fire in a crowed room.
Part of the American Tribe
God Bless the USA and All who Fight with her give them Strength and Courage to Victory Amen
The war of 67 put them in their box We will do so again!
My dear Dave,
With respect, I find it ironic that you consider my calls for reform unrealistic and then recommend that "Islam must end." In doing so you are calling for something far less realistic, and far more likely to destroy utterly large sections of the planet.
Once again: I don't call for reform with any illusions, but I don't see any alternative.
My dear Ron:
I think you are absolutely right about what would be the outcome of a large-scale reform effort.
Cordially,
Robert Spencer
Dear Mr. Spencer,
Although I share your hope of peacefully reforming Islam, I'm afraid we are going to have to agree to disagree on how realistic the prospects of such reform are. I just don't see how Islam can be reformed without gutting it, ie., it'll no longer be recognizable as Islam. I agree with Ron that attempting to reform Islam is likely to result in schism; I think a bloody one.
I do not "recommend" the end of Islam by force of arms. I should have made that more clear. Instead, I tend to agree with Daniel Pipes, regretfully, that a crushing military defeat of Islamism and it's supporters is probably a prerequisite for launching (schism producing)reform.
Whichever course the world actually follows, the path will be bloody, and the end result will be something not recognizable as Islam. In effect, Islam will be ended. I am not "calling" for the end of Islam; I'm predicting that will be the result of Islam's intolerance and militancy.
Anyway, I find your site extremely interesting and informative; many thanks for your work. I have not yet purchased any of your books, but they are on my "must read" list. I'll buy 'em all, and copies for the library, as soon as I have two nickels to rub together. :-)
Respectfully,
Dave