Could this be a genuine international movement for Islamic moderation? I hope so, and will be trying to find out more about it. It is encouraging that they have condemned Qaradawi, who is hailed as a "moderate" even by John Esposito — a telling little detail that reveals volumes about the state of the public debate about Islamic terrorism in America today. But why are they asking the UN to do the job? What business is it of the UN? Shouldn't they be mounting a strong intellectual challenge to the theology and ideology of violent jihad within the Islamic community, instead of turning to unbelievers for help? And finally, is the reason why they are opposing the radicals only because they "give Islam a bad name," or out of broader human rights concerns? From Arab News, with thanks to Uncle Jeff:
JEDDAH/NEW YORK, 30 October 2004 — Over 2,500 Muslim intellectuals from 23 countries have signed a petition to the United Nations calling for an international treaty to ban the use of religion for incitement to violence.It also calls on the Security Council to set up a tribunal to try “the theologians of terror.” The petition is addressed to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and to all members of the Security Council and its current chairman.
“There are individuals in the Muslim world who pose as clerics and issue death sentences against those they disagree with,” says Shakir Al-Nablusi, a Jordanian academic and one of the signatories. “These individuals give Islam a bad name and foster hatred among civilizations.”
Nablusi said hundreds of Arab writers and academics were collecting more signatures and hope to have “tens of thousands” by next month. Among those collecting signatures are Jawad Hashem, a former Iraqi minister of planning, and Alafif Al-Akdhar, a leading Tunisian writer and academic. Most of the signatories are from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states plus Iraq, Jordan and Palestine.
The signatories describe those who use religion for inciting violence as “the sheikhs of death”. Among those mentioned by name is Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian preacher working in Qatar. The signatories accuse him of “providing a religious cover for terrorism.”
Last year Qaradawi raised a storm when he issued a fatwa allowing the killing of Israeli pregnant women and their unborn babies on the ground that the babies could grow up to join the Israeli Army. Last September, Qaradawi in a fatwa in response to a question from the Egyptian Union of Journalists said killing “all Americans, civilian or military” in Iraq was allowed.
“We cannot let such dangerous nonsense to pass as Islam,” Nablusi says.
The petition also names the late Egyptian preacher Muhammad Al-Ghazzali who, in 1992, issued a fatwa for the murder of Farag Foda, an anti-clerical writer in Cairo. Within weeks of the fatwa, zealots murdered Foda in his home.
Other “sheikhs of death” mentioned include the Yemeni Abdul-Majid Al-Zendani, and the Saudis Ali bin Khudhair Al-Khudhair and Safar Al-Hawali. The two Saudis have described the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the United States as “retaliations”, and thus justified under Islamic law.
Issuing murder fatwas has a long story.
In 1947 the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Ahmad Kasravi, one of Iran’s most prominent lawyers. A few weeks later, six men stabbed Kasravi to death in a court of law. In 1951 a group of mullas issued a fatwa for the murder of Iran’s Prime Minister Haji-Ali Razmara. He was shot dead a few days later. In 1989 Khomeini issued a fatwa for the murder of the British novelist Salman Rushdie.
And why is issuing murder fatwas something with a long history (which in fact goes back long before 1947)? Because Muhammad himself, as I detail in Islam Unveiled, ordered the killings of several of his opponents. Will this commission address that?
It's in the Koran which is taken as inalterable. It's part of the example created by "the perfect man, Mohammed." How can the intellectuals believe that changes can be made? Nevertheless, they are courageous for calling for change as they have set themselves up for a death sentence.
Epg,
You R rite. You can bet your very bottom dollar that even these moderates will say that although they want an end to kill in Allah's name ...that this must happen without the Quar'an being changed.
So in reality this cannot happen and never will happen..and tha's the bottom line.
There's taqiyya and kitman, and then there's TAQIYYA AND KITMAN.
This is the best they can do: denounce only the most egregious and currently well-publicized of atrocities by Muslims, based on worry about those who "give Islam a bad name and foster hatred among civilizations." others have also worried aloud about damage to the "image of Islam." "A bad name," "image," or Nabulsi's "letting dangerous nonsense pass as Islam."
One can look at this in various ways. On the one hand, it shows a recognition that the way many Muslims now behave -- including Qaradawi, the author of the most popular guide to what is Haram and what Halal in Islam, and a Sunni cleric with the greatest popular following -- just will not do, and one must distance oneself.
On the other hand, what is the motivation? It is simply to make life easier for Muslims in general, and to keep going as before: denouncing the greatest atrocities, but only in extremis, only when too many Infidels, despite the best efforts to hide things from them or get them wrong (e.g. today's New York Times carries an article about Korean missionaries in the Muslim world, and blandly asserts that Muslims who convert to Islam can be killed in "so-called honor killings" -- in other words, there is an ignorant attempt to assimilate the killing of apostates to the killing of women who "offend a family's honor" instead of explaining that apostasy is a separate, specific act for which death is an appropriate punishment in Islam, which does not permit freedom of conscience).
This petitition is more of the same worried response, and of course allows Muslims to claim, and to pretend to themselves, that they are "dealing with their own extremists." The only people one can trust on Islam are those who, like Ali Sina and Ibn Warraq and hundreds of thousands of Iranians in and out of exile, are those who have grown up in it, endured it, learned thoroughly both what is in the texts and what, in those texts, are part of the living Islam that is transmitted and that molds the minds of so many, and so completely.
"Moderate" Muslims such as the people behind this, who refuse to go far, who do not call for the re-examiantion of texts, or who if they do only allow for a bit of tinkering with the "authentic" hadith and may allow for some kind of bland denial of certain episodes in the sira (the biography of Muhammad), but will never touch the Qur'an (e.g. Mustafa Akyol), or others, including "reverts" who want all the blame placed on the "Wahhabis" (Stephen Schwartz, or the remarkably similar "Sufi" convfert Mr. Jalal Eddine Weiss, now of Aleppo --those Western seekers of the Peace That Is Islam, god save us all), objectively further, by continuing to confuse or mislead the unwary Infidels, the Jihad.
The proper response is to be largely unimpressed, and to keep one's mental powder dry. It changes not one whit the need to prevfent, through demography and Da'wa, the further enlargement of the Muslim populations in the Bilad al-kufr of Europe and America. There is no way to distinguish those Muslims whose Islam remains, in a sense, inoffensive because it is largely a matter of ritual and filal piety, and that which can-- at any minute, and for any reason, which may be entirely a reflection of personal disarray or disappointment expressed in the only way Muslims woul d naturally express such feelings, through blaming the Infidel ---- and those who quite obviously are a threat, through word and deed and silence in the face of deeds by others (and this defines the three categories of the hadith, incidentally), a menace to Infidels.
As for that phrase "war of civilizations" -- it is silly. There is no such war between "civilizations" in the plural. Whatever rivalry there may in the future be between America and China, for example, it is not a clash between the Sinic and the Western, as Huntington might have it, but simply Great Power rivalry like that between England and Germany in 1914. There is only one part of the world, or one element in the world's population, that is making war -- as its canonical texts tell Believers to -- against all others. That war may not be through terrrorism, or even through qital (combat). It has a variety of instruments. It is Islam -- not against the West, but against everyone who is not part of Islam.
Infidels must not for one minute let down their guard, nor cease to work in a kind of counter-Da'wa -- with one's own family and acquaintances, in the schools, in the prisons, wherever the siren song of Islam -- beginning with those Ramadan show-and-tell visits to schools, and ending with the mass conversion behind bars of assorted gangmembers and psychopaths to Islam as the solution of all their woes, a way to legitimize, to explain, to dingify their alienation and hatred for the System, and to provide both an ideological grid for that hatred, and a new community, an umma al-islamiyya, for those who feel keenly the need to be part of some quasi-military group or secret society, anything at all to avoid the difficulty of being a Leibnizian monad or nomad, seemingly alone in the universe.
Again it comes down to who has heros and who doesn't?
Germany in the 40s didn't have many who were against the flow? and they were taken out?
This ia what will happen to this [followers of MONSTERS who cut peoples heads off and kill women for what they call honnor and rape children and call it marraige][iran to wed a child of 10 yrs old] way of life that holds their people prisnor if they can not find those to lead them out of the darkness, the Rest of the world will not live in Darkness it has proven time and time again there are those who will stand and Fight!!
I'm proud to be with those who Stand and fight against the Darkness!!
Are there no Heros in the mulsum world are they all cowards?? pitty
GOD BLESS THE COUNTRY WHO HAS HEROS AMEN
pitty the country who needs them??
This means when the country who has heros and is not willing to help those who do not things like what happened in germany russia europe sudan rewanda vitenam china iraq iran will contuine to happen !!
Look around the the Monsters are in this time killing around the world are Islamic Terrorist and the world crys there are Heros Fighting and still the world crys we can not help well they will fall to the Darkness because they will not help themselves?
What is the saying give the man a fish and feed him for a day, or teach a man to fish and feed him for a life time!!
Mi. Storm and Denver these are both places in the USA with huge pop of mulsums?? People without power??
Part of the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and ALL who Fight with her give them Strength,Wisdom,Sight and Courage to stay the course to Defeat ALL Islamic Terrorist and ALL who Support them Open the Worlds Eyes to their Threat Amen
Hugh:
Isn't that what I said? :-) (Just kidding.)
The UN already bans the incitement to violence in Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.
What more can the UN be expected to do? Storm the mosques and madrasses and arrest the sheikhs? Robert is absolutely right - these people are barking up the wrong tree.
Moderate islam is akin to a moderate pregnancy we think.....as,
Islam originates from the human sacrifice cults and idolatrous sects that were once prevalent throughout the Middle East. Islam's homicidal identity was hidden under a mantle of false Judeo-Christian theology by Muhammed in the seventh century and militarized into a vast militia so as to create an army large enough to force the practice of human sacrifice back into the mainstream of human affairs, in much the way that the western world has done, say, with democracy, the spread of the nation-state, and the elimination of such things as pagan human sacrifice practices or cannibalism. Islamic terror, no stranger to human affairs over the past 14 centuries, is the process by which middle easterners have been indoctrinating human sacrifice into the modern world. Let it suffice to say, that these so-called muslim intellectuals and moderates, well-intentioned as they are, are unlikely to make real progress in eliminating Islamic terrorism. They are not going to be able to eradicate a practice they do not truly understand. And that in a nutshell is the underlying tragedy of the 'moderate islam' movement.
But, although we would wish these moderates and intellectuals well in their endeavours, once the true nature of Islam as a human sacrifice culture in the same vein as the Aztecs or Mayan civilizations is understood, it becomes clear that their desired outcome is not in the cards. Since Islam is designed to destroy human life it cannot be modified in any Islamically consistent or meaningful way to protect human life. One might as well try to use a camel as a sewing needle.