Jihad Watch's Hugh Fitzgerald in FrontPage this morning on Columbia University's Peter Awn:
The Dean of General Studies at Columbia University, Peter Awn is described as a “renowned scholar of Islamic and Comparative Religion” on a Columbia website. It informs us that he “has lectured widely to academic and business professionals on the role Islamic religion plays in the current political and social development of the Muslim world.”Before he assumed the duties of administration, Dean Awn, who received his Ph.D. in 1978 from Harvard, had published his tenure book: “Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology, a study of the devil in Islamic mysticism.” This study received an award from the American Council of Learned Societies. The word “Sufi” is one which many non-Muslims, naturally, associate with a kind of gentle mysticism, with the poetry of Rumi, with what they take to be its distance from jihad. But the Deobandis are Sufis, and Tabandeh, a theoretician of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was a Sufi. There are more Tabandehs than Rumis in Sufism.
Read it all. Many useful links in the original.
I bow to you, Mr. Fitzgerald, my learned friend!
(Please allow me to call you friend, I would be much honored!)
Every post of yours is a challenge for those willing to learn, and knowledge like yours is hard to come by these days, even for a lot of money.
It is infuriating to see that institutions of higher learning sell their favors like prostitutes at a time like this, when they should demonstrate that standing up is not the same as bending over.
I quote Frank Zappa:
Frank says:
Drop out of school, before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts... --
"Eminent Historians," the ironic title of his latest book comes from the self-description a group of Marxist historians, most of them academics, arrogated for themselves while signing a newspaper petition during the Ayodhya controversy. Although the group is not large in number, (42 is the maximum), the same set has also preempted for itself the titles of "prominent social scientists" and "leading intellectuals" in similar public petitions. The Marxist party line is to project Hindus as exploitative feudalists and Muslims as liberators! Arun Shourie's major thesis: During the past fifty years, "this bunch of Marxist historians have been suppressing facts, inventing lies, perverting discourse, and derailing public policy" by seizing control of institutions such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National Council of Educational Research Training (NCERT), large parts of Indian academia, and nearly all of the English-media newspapers and publishing houses.
http://www.indiastar.com/wallia19.html
So this taqqiyaing goes round all over. There is great need for the truth of Jihad to be told. AQlso this lying sufi peace whic in any event came into being on account of contact with christian hermits, buddhist/hindu priests etc.
The shiites themselves were/are a bloody lot:
`The Violent Truth Behind The Sufi Mask`
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate/sufi.html
Muhammad`s jihad was never the jihad of peace nonsense that is bandied about these days.
In essence it is a arabic expression of the `evil ideology`.
They will bow down at the grave of a Sufi saint without inquiring about what made the particular person holy. In a number of instances it was his slaughter of the infidels that was responsible for his sanctity, including the ancestors of these self-same Hindus. Hindus fail to examine what Sufis have done to Hindus historically and blind themselves to frequent Sufi alliances with Islamic militance and aggression. All a Sufi has to do is to appear a little tolerant and Hindus are quick to turn him into a saint, regardless of what he actually does throughout his life.
http://www.hindubooks.org/david_frawley/awaken_bharata/sufis_and_militance/page1.htm
Yes, it's comical to watch the Islam is peace mantra gradually morph into, "well anyway Sufi Islam is peace for sure because that's the side Stephen Schwartz belongs to, and he's on our side; he wouldn't bs us. Why of course not, why would he? And what about all the peace-loving law-abiding Muslims living productive lives - well it's racist, I tell you racist, to think they "can't make it." Oh pulleeeze.
Meanwhile, as the thin veneer of civilization is being rent in New Orleans, the rest of us are thinking, "good God, what have we wrought by electing these ninnies?" Does anybody think we just might be needing the National Guard in the event of another big jihad attack? And concerning those looters and rapers in the Big Easy and Houston, how many of them are motivated by Islam? Will we ever know? Of course not.
What's conservative on the outside and liberal on the inside? The Bush Administration and it's program for the war. What we want, my good sirs, is a plain old fashioned conservative war. One that pushes back the tide of Islam, and holds it at bay. Good grief, even the liberals are beginning to see that, Robert Scheer, for example. Even the, shudder, New Duranty Times knows something is amiss with Sharia.
Sing along now boys and girls, liberals and conservatives, you can do it: "How do you solve a problem like Sharia?" (to the tune of "How do you solve a problem like Maria" from "The Sound of Music")
"knowledge like yours is hard to come by these days, even for a lot of money."
-- from a posting above
I'd be perfectly happy to trade (well, share) some of that "knowledge" even for less than "a lot of money." One and two-week courses in reading and writing that promise to change your life and your take on the universe, full refund if not satisfied. Idyllic setting in America or Europe possible. Do let me know.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations asserts that jihad "does not mean 'holy war.'" Instead, jihad is "a central and broad Islamic concept that includes the struggle to improve the quality of life in society, struggle in the battlefield for self-defense . . . or fighting against tyranny or oppression." CAIR even denies that Islam includes any concept of a "holy war."
In the Qur'an, however, and even in later Muslim usage, the term jihad is usually followed by the expression fi sabil Illah, which means "in the path of God." The description of violence against the enemies of the Muslim community as jihad fi sabil Illah gave a sacred meaning to what was otherwise just tribal warfare.
The Hadith follows the Qur'an as the most important source of Islamic law. In Hadith collections, jihad almost always refers to armed action. There are nearly 200 references to jihad in the most standard collection of hadith by al-Bukhari, and all assume that jihad means warfare. It is not surprising, then, that the majority of classical theologians, jurists, and traditionalists understand jihad in a military sense.
.In these contemporary times Jihad has become a political goal wrather than forced conversions of the past: bringing as much of the world under the control of Islam as is possible. This then allows for the fulfillment of two other goals: promoting Islam among non-Muslims and establishing a just political and social order (only possible under Islam) in Islamic thinking.
Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328) took a more active view of jihad. He argued that a ruler who fails to enforce the Shari'a in all aspects forfeits his right to rule - thus, jihad against this ruler becomes acceptable, if not mandatory. One of the aspects of Shari'a which a Muslim ruler must enforce is, in fact, jihad itself - but against the enemies of Islam, especially those who threaten it from the outside. Taymiya's views of jihad have heavily influenced Muslim extremists in the twentieth century, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden.
Many Muslims today believe that jihad explicitly recommend violence and war. Important examples of this strain of thought are Hasan al-Banna (1906-49) and Sayyid Qutb (1906-56), who followed Taymiya's arguments that jihad includes the overthrow of governments that fail to enforce the Shari'a, but then added that this jihad must occur first, before any jihad against external enemies can take place.
These ideas of a violent jihad are not the ravings of a few fringe lunatics. On the contrary, they are ideas which have influenced Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic political movements throughtout the Middle East. That these ideas have gained legitimacy is the reason why an extremists like Osama bin Laden can say to someone:
I know that you are living in stifiling poverty while other Muslims are living the good life, and I know why this is so. It is because our so-called Muslim leaders are really apostates who have sold out to the godless infidels of the West, corrupting our society and our religion. But if we fight back, restore the Shari'a, and drive off the disbelievers, then everything will be fine because a new, just social order just as Allah desires will be established.
And he won't be laughed at or driven off as someone who is polluting the pure, peaceful nature of Islam.
Even leading Muslim clerics send mixed messages regarding how peaceful Islam is. Two days before the September 11th attacks, Hamza Yusuf was outside the White House giving a speech in which he said that the U.S. "stands condemned," and that "this country has a great, great tribulation coming to it." On September 20th, he was meeting with President Bush, having joined with other religious leaders in a show of unity. There, he said that Islam had been hijacked, and now he says he regrets his earlier statements. It was that comment by Hamza Yusuf that lead to President Bush using the "hijack" term in his speeches.
If groups like CAIR wish to argue that jihad should not include violence, they are welcome to do so. However, they should not pretend that jihad has not historically included violence.