One of the foremost heroes of our age will be speaking next week in Toronto. A press release about the Toronto Conference on "Sharia Law and the Globalization of Political Islam," with thanks to Andy:
Press conference begins at 6:30pmTogether with Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali made the 2004 film ‘Submission’ about the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. Dutch Muslims criticized the film for being disgraceful and blasphemous. Van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri on November, 2nd, 2004. Ayaan now lives under police protection in a safe house in the Netherlands.
Time Magazine named Ayaan one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2005.
Ayaan has been a Member of Parliament in the Dutch (Liberal) VVD party in the Tweede Kamer (Lower House) since January 30th 2003.
Irshad Manji and Homa Arjomand will also speak
Irshad Manji author of the #1-bestseller, ‘The Trouble with Islam’, is based in Toronto and hosts TVOntario’s “Big Ideas.” Oprah Winfrey honored her with the first annual Chutzpah Award. Ms. magazine named her a Feminist for the 21st Century.
Homa Arjomand is the Coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada. She started her campaign at Toronto in October 2003 with a handful of supporters, and today it has grown to a coalition of 87 organizations from 14 countries with over a thousand activists. Homa is a Toronto based transitional counselor and was a human rights activist in Iran until she was forced to flee in 1989.
About the Conference
The Toronto Conference on 'Sharia Law and the Globalization of Political Islam' will be held August 12, 2005...The ten-minute film ‘Submission’ will be shown and a 30-minute question period will follow the speakers....
The conference is produced and sponsored by the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada.
For more information go to www.nosharia.com.
I hope there are at least two dozen heavily-armed men available for security. Let's not be PC about searching bags upon entry either.
Expect the seethers to be out in force. The only consolation is that, this being summer vacation, the event won't draw the same kind of student seether crowd it would have during the rest of the year.
I hope the conference gets some media attention.
C-Span would be nice to.
Irshad Manji is a Muslim lesbian. Islam says kill the lesbians. Why would Irshad Manji continue to say she is a believer in Islam. I never have gotten that. It's illogical. Such is Islam.
Informed Christian-
A little more Christian love, please.
I think you're projecting too much onto Ms. Ali's remarks about the need for secular law.
If you allow a 'faith' (any 'faith') into the constitution (as with Islam and Shaira law worming their way in the Iraqi document) you doom the state to further theocratic intrusions as the demographics shift.
If "Christianity" were incorporated into the EU legal structure now, and then, in 30 years or so, the populace became more Muslim, they could insist that their religion be 'hyphenated' into the constitution, turning it into an "Abrhamic Judeo-Christian-Islamic" rule of law. (And the hell with the Buddhists, Hindus, Bahais, Sikhs, Celts, etc.)
Best to keep your faith to the realm where it belongs, the heart and soul. And 'not of this world'.
It can 'inform', but may not 'rule'. Because absolute power ALWAYS corrrupts. People are only human, and once you put God in their hip-pocket, they tend toward tyranny, intolerance, delusions of grandeur, and the sorry world slides toward one more all-too-familiar despotic hell.
History is a tragic, endless and stunningly bloody record of this failure of creeds to control themselves once they gain ANY secular strength.
I'll take my government "human".
And heed the old warning put so well by Angelus Silesius:
"While gazing at the Sun,
I almost lost my sight.
The fault lies in the eye,
Not in the light."
Hirsi Ali and Manji are two of the exremely few Muslims who are progessive and want to reform Islam. Islam should not only be the religion of Muslim men. Muslim women and non-Muslims should and must be treated with equality. I'm sure that if Allah is as just and compassionate as Muslims say he is than he would want to see Muslim women and non-Muslims be treated with the utmost compassion and dignity.
I hope the CBC, which has given up on critical journalism, will carry the debate and lectures.
Barry Kumar
Profitsbeard: what whas refused in the so-called European Constitution - a document which Robert vigorously opposed, you may remember - was the plain historical fact that the past of Europe was Christian. Instead, on the pressure of Supermenteur - France's affectionate nickname for its president: super-liar - a straightforward historical lie was forced into that already sufficiently corrupt compilation of PC nonsense and contradictions: that the roots of Europe are in Greece and in something called "the Enlightenment", deleting most European history and almost every European thinker or artist worth studying. If you stand for historical lies as the basis of constitution, well, that's just too bad.
As for Hirsi Ali, her prejudice against anything that she calls a religion is understandable: as the Italian proverb says, a person who has been scalded is scared even of cold water. But it is neither rational nor intelligent.