Why we don't see more Islamic reformers: Pro-Sharia group sues Muslim reform group over its use of the word "Islam" in its name

After all, InSane Lovers of Allah's Mohammed is I.S.L.A.M. for short.

There are Muslim groups that oppose Sharia and work towards secular governments. But are they really Muslims? Certainly other Muslims (Malaysian Assembly of Mosque Youths and others) do not view them as such. And their arguments are unsupported by the Qur'an.

While we should certainly encourage their efforts, Islam has failed to be reformed in it's 1400 year history. In this situation, I insist that we see the glass as only one sixteenth full.

I don't buy the "moderate Muslim" premise advanced by our cultural gate-keepers...one that supposedly incorporates the vast majority of Muslims, but I do whole-heartedly support avowed anti-Sharia, Muslim groups like 'Neither whores nor Submissives' and 'Muslims Against Sharia'.

I'm totally with you on this, Cornelius, that we must give moral support to those who would work to 'reform' Islam from within, even if it is still regressive Islam in all its odious and socially unacceptable practices. What is different today from the 1400 years history of oppression under Islamic doctrine, and its grotesque Jihad retro-Sharia, is that 'information' flows freely worldwide, right down to the simple village in some remote region with access to phone and internet. We have become a Global Village in this modern age of communications, which works to instruct and liberate minds from past superstitions and mental regressions, such as retro-Islam has successfully exploited over the past fourteen centuries. So to lump all Islam into one undifferentiated category is no longer tenable, since there are those within Islam as mentioned who are willing and ready to move up into modern ways of doing things. Their mission should be supported if they are fighting for respect for the individual, both men and women equally, respect for our natural human rights, including greater freedoms of expression without fear of reprisals. These are small steps, not to be expected to follow on a straight path, but to digress and reverse at times, that will lead a vast majority of the Islamic population out of its Dark Ages of Dar-al-Islam.

It is a badge of our humanity that we can see this progression out of primitive Islam, faulty and imperfect, that allows us to be tolerant of their faults while they struggle to join the rest of humanity in a progressive adherence to religion, not as oppressive politicized dogma, but as a private practice of faith. Islam has a very long road ahead to reform, which will require both patience and vision from everyone, both Muslims and non-Muslims, secularists and more modern adherents of any faith. This is something we can do, and we must do, to liberate a large swatch of humanity ground down under the heels of primitive Islam, Sharia and Jihad, to help them in their struggle to become free and join the rest of modern humanity.

I've never been one to believe that Islam as a religion can be reformed...but I DO believe Islamic SOCIETIES can be reformed, outside the purview of Islam. There are several historical examples...Akbar's India, Attaturk's Turkey, modern Tunisia, among others. They are imperfect examples (one reverted to the Islamic norm, another is in the process of reverting), but they are nonetheless instructional.

Wild-eyed schemes for mass expulsion and a neatly-delineated civilizational separation are simply beyond the pale of plausibility; it ain't gonna happen, folks, no matter how much we'd like to see it. Our only real hope is to work towards a paradigmatic shift in the Muslim collective psyche. And rote validation of Islam is the antithesis of what is needed (liberals be damned).

There will always be Muslim fanatics. What we need to do is to consign them - through the attrition of social and cultural evolution - to a TRUE tiny minority, not the imaginary one our cultural gate-keepers insist exists today. But doing so demands that we gain control of the historical narrative being promulgated in newsrooms, universities, and political campaigns (a fucking tall order).

Our job is to make Sharia enough of a dirty word that someday even most Muslims will recoil at its utterance. And that means incessantly associating it with the barbaric hudud punishments of stonings, amputations, and the killing of apostates.

Our job is to make Sharia enough of a dirty word that someday even most Muslims will recoil at its utterance.

Hear, hear! I think both "Sharia" and "Jihad" should be terms despised as soon as uttered as despicable primitive recidivist ideologies unbecoming of modern civilization. And "apostasy" within Islam, in any form whether outright rejection of the total-belief-system or work to modify it into something more acceptable in modern times, that illusive (impossible?) "reform" within Islam, should no longer condemn one to death. There is much work Islamic societies must do, starting with the keepers of the two 'holy' sites, to modern Turkey (about to regress retro-Islam), if the people with the ill luck of being born into that world are ever to see the light of liberty. It is a tall order indeed.

Cornelius and Battle of Tours,

According to Kinana of Khaybar, a knowledgeable poster here on JW, the apologist Tarek Fatah -- about whose tortured mendacity much has been written already by Spencer, Hugh and Kinana below us in other articles and threads -- was among the anti-Shariah movement in Canada.

The mere ostensible stance of being "anti-Shariah" is certainly not enough to substantiate a stamp of approval on any given Muslim. More questions need to be asked of them.

Also, their past and present associations and statements on matters related to Islam and to their support of Israel and the West need to brought out to the light. There is a tendency to glibly embrace this or that Muslim just because ostensibly they seem to be anti-Islam. The outrageously anti-American and anti-Western Iranian "reformer" Maryam Namazie comes to mind. It often can well be that they are only anti-This-Particular-Islam, but not anti-Islam (as Hugh has analyzed Tarek Fatah to be really anti-Arab, not anti-Islam, thus explaining why he unconscionably ignores the deep and grotesque Islamic disease of his homeland, Pakistan).

Over the years, I have played this game, resembling the newspaper comics game Where's Waldo? -- where a given Moderate Muslim appears, or is touted by anxious Infidels desperately seeking a way out of the full horror they semi-consciously are realizing Islam is, and whenever one scratches beneath the surface, sometimes by a mere 5 minutes of Googling, one finds odd and disturbing indications that the supposed moderation is only skin deep. Early in my learning curve, many years ago, I had an email exchange with one such Moderate Muslim touted, even briefly here at Jihad Watch (and of course also touted in the pages of David Horowitz's ridiculously lax frontpage.com, where they have never met a Moderate Muslim they didn't immediately like, without even asking for proper background checks), who was head of an organization of Moderate Muslims we don't seem to have heard much of in the last few years, ever since their rather pathetic rally of a couple dozen souls (most of them non-Muslims) in Washington, D.C. In my emails to this Moderate Muslim, I was polite and framed my questions as intelligently as I could, but I did not also fail to be firm when I sensed a question was being evaded. So in my emails I asked him fair questions about the Islam he still must support, as he still calls himself a Muslim. As I maintained my composure, this Moderate Muslim became increasingly irascible, irrational, and angry, and before he aborted our exchange in a huff called me names such as "schizophrenic" and "no better than bin Laden".

Similarly, I asked the head (or one of the heads) of the MASH (Muslims Against Shariah) group if he would consent to an interview by me to be conducted by email. After an exchange of several emails (and again I tried to be unfailingly polite and patient), it became clear that he was tap-dancing around my questions: either he was incapable of elementary comprehension, or he was not answering in good faith. These two experiences I may supplement with innumerable debates and exchanges I have had with different Muslims from various places around the world in the Paltalk vocal chat rooms (which I discovered years ago when I read the JW story about a family of Coptic immigrants in New Jersey who had been slaughtered after they had received death threats from Muslims for, in part, the father's temerity to denounce Islam in Paltalk chat rooms). All these experiences -- plus the spectacles of Spencer's many debates with Muslims -- lead me to the exasperated question: Why can't any Muslim -- including Muslims who claim to be moderate and even anti-Shariah (and even willing to delete Koran verses, as the head of MASH is) -- answer simple fucking questions?

So far, then, I have implicitly adverted to two problems with the Moderate Muslim:

1) The problem of vetting them.

2) The problem of their profoundly confused state of mind, even if we somehow are able to conclude that they are sincere, thus making them unreliable allies.

Beyond this, there is a third problem:

3) In the larger scheme of things, the mere presence, and then the perceived viability, of a category of Moderate Muslims, serves to enable the Stealth Jihad. How can this be, you might ask -- when the Stealth Jihadists want to insinuate Shariah Law, and the anti-Shariah Moderates want to stop Shariah Law? A simple answer: the minuscule numbers of the latter, compared with the former, plus the problem of difficult-to-pinpoint numbers of insincere ones among the anti-Shariah and other Moderates (such as for example Tarek Fatah -- whose suspicious character might not have been discovered had he been able to control his temper with Wafa Sultan, for prior to that (and probably still to a great extent) he was touted by non-Muslims in Canada as a fine upstanding Moderate Muslim).

In the larger scheme of things, in the West as it is in reality, not as we might want to imagine it or hope it will become, anti-Shariah Muslims become just one more flavor of Muslim out there in the wonderful diversity of Islam that is "not a monolith". Their effect, then, tends to be get swallowed up in the generally perceived "diversity": some Muslims over here want Shariah; other Muslims over here want Shariah-Lite and claim that Shariah isn't so bad (but seem to always evade the tough questions on how a Shariah-Lite is viable given the masses of Muslims who want full-blooded Shariah, or tenable given a grounding in Islam); other Muslims claim to be anti-Shariah but how can they be Muslims if the Sunnah is necessary for a Muslim and the Sunnah necessitates Shariah -- and more importantly how influential can they be when the vast majority of Muslims in fact follow the Sunnah (and its Shia equivalent)? All the typical mainstream pleasantly illiterate-about-Islam non-Muslim sees is a complicated "diversity" of nice ethnic people with their nice "mosaic" of cultural variations. Sure, he's against stoning women, but hey, apparently Islam, being so "diverse", doesn't have to be about stoning -- and anyway what about the Crusades, Inquisition, Witch Burnings, Genocide of Native Americans, Slavery, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, Nixon and Bush? We're the ones with the potential problem of being too bigoted. So let's not be "haters"; let's show our enlightened tolerance and continue letting millions of Muslims into the West -- surely most of them will be harmless, good people and we can take care of the TMOE (Tiny Minority of Extremists) among them. After all, there was this group of anti-Shariah Muslims in Canada recently, so that proves that there's no real problem overall...

Hesp,

Your point is legitimate, Muslims SHOULD be vetted on a number of issues. But I reiterate,

1) it was 'Muslims Against Sharia' who were at the forefront of opposition to Canada's absurd attempt to introduce Islamic family law into its legal system; very few infidels even ventured an opinion and without MAS, the legislation surely would have been adopted. Here is an actual event demonstrating the utility of anti-Sharia, Muslim groups in the West. What say you?

2) even if their position on different issues is inconsistent, to assert that MAS is as "equally dangerous" as groups like ISNA, CAIR or any other Muslim Brotherhood front, reveals an astonishing absence of discernment....(even if you qualify the language of your assertion, as you subsequently did).

As for your last paragraph, you could look at it from an entirely different perspective...that anti-Sharia groups are the only hope of creating cultural space for other Muslims in their expression of opposition to this or that facet of Islam, and the net effect will be to loosen the grip of orthodoxy on the ummah. From there, the milquetoast Muslim and eventually even the apostate will hopefully be transformed from the anomaly to the norm, or in the case of the latter, the semi-norm.

You seem to have adopted the position that the more extreme Islam is, the better for the world (your "epiphany" that the reconstitution of the Caliphate would be a good thing). But this is based on the naive assumption that the galvanized West actually has the stomach for a civilizational conflict. All available evidence is to the contrary.

A much more realistic hope is the evolutionary transformation of Muslim thinking and ethics through civilizational cross-fertilization, i.e., "contamination" via Western concepts and mores. This is why the repudiation of multiculturalism is imperative; in order to facilitate such contamination, the West must rediscover its own identity.

Finally, let us return to the timetable for your redemptive conflagration in Europe; fifty years from now, Muslims will be nearing a majority in Europe and will have achieved a large majority among young people (those who would do the actual fighting). It is within this demographic backdrop that you predict Europe will find the gonads to fight for its survival and drive the Muslims out. To me, this is as fanciful as the coming of the Mahdi. Fifty years from now, native Europeans will be proportionately older and consequently more enfeebled, and certainly more culturally conditioned and dhimmified.

Better speed up that timetable.

Cornelius wrote:

"but I DO believe Islamic SOCIETIES can be reformed, outside the purview of Islam. There are several historical examples...Akbar's India..."

This would be a most curious example, as the Mughal emperor Akbar fought and killed thousands of Hindus in his perpetuation of the Mohammedan attempt to conquer and subjugate India, according to some sources personally beheaded a man, and had thousands of innocent Hindus massacred at Chitod. I'm sure Islam was centrally involved in his motivations.

The historian P.N. Oak writes of Akbar:

A perusal of accounts of Akbar's reign by contemporaries like Abul Fazl, Nizamuddin and Badayni and by western scholars like Vincent Smith is enough to convince the reader that slavery in its most abject forms flourished under Akbar and his reign was full of atrocities, lawlessness, repression and relentless conquests of a kind rarely paralleled in history.

See the chapter from his book on Akbar from which the above quote is taken here:

http://www.hindubooks.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1897

Also see --
http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/modern/akbar_vs.html

...that anti-Sharia groups are the only hope of creating cultural space for other Muslims in their expression of opposition to this or that facet of Islam, and the net effect will be to loosen the grip of orthodoxy on the ummah.

This is certainly a hope; the question is, is it a viable hope, given what we know about Islam and about Muslims, and about the dismaying number of "moderate Muslims" who turned out to be dangerous and/or enabling their dangerous brethren? And again, given the apparent paucity of numbers of such a type of Muslim, given the unique nature and degree of the dangers we face from innumerable Muslims pullulating out of the Umma, and given the massively indiscriminate acceptance of millions more Muslims besides them by our persistently ignorant West, such a hope tends to abet that perpetuation.

In my estimation, the more likely scenario is that, at best, there is a very small minority of Muslims who will suffer the anguish of only some of them barely getting out by the skin of their teeth as implacably venerable Islam continues to catch fire around the world in the undeniable global revival of its fullblooded self (put on necessary hold due to the stupendous -- and until only recently un-PC -- superiority of the West) currently metastasizing.

Christian Heretic:

The "conservative Muslim" trope used regularly by the MSM tends to reinforce the Equivalency Theory which in turn tends to reinforce two closely related canards:

1) that the problem is not Islam, nor an alarmingly large and worldwide and innumerable number of dangerous Muslims, but rather all "extremists" in any religion

and

2) that the problem of Islam is about its "extremist interpretation" not its mainstream texts, tenets, history and current beliefs & behaviors of its followers today.

If, for example, up to 80% of Pakistani Muslims support death for blasphemy, Pakistan must be the most "conservative" nation on Earth! Obviously, "conservative" is an inadequate term to describe such a massively barbaric sociocultural fact. Beyond Pakistan, we can multiply scores, if not hundreds, of other comparable examples in Muslim-majority (or Muslim-contested) regions from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and among Muslim populations within the West.

...this is based on the naive assumption that the galvanized West actually has the stomach for a civilizational conflict. All available evidence is to the contrary.

Most present evidence is to the contrary. The fact, however, that the single cause of the West's inability currently is only about 50 years old, and that for centuries before then it was otherwise, would indicate that a hope for a recovery of the un-PC past which constituted the bulk of the West's maturation and career, before this recent revisionist reversal, is not far-fetched -- far less so, I maintain, than one placed in trying to grow sufficient numbers of usefully reformist Muslims out of such abysmally inhospitable stock as the current Umma manifests.

Hesp,

1) You continually ignore the concrete example of 'Muslims Against Sharia' beating back the attempts of Canadian infidel society to codify Islamic family law...and with little or no help from non-Muslims. Were they or were they not an invaluable resource at that moment in time? You're one who castigates others for dodging uncomfortable questions. How about an answer?

2) Akbar the Great was certainly an autocrat, and he fought to expand the Moghul Empire at the expense of conquered Hindus. But your attribution of Islam as his motivation, as opposed to empire, is to completely misread the man and his reign.

Hindu art, culture, and literature flourished under Akbar. The great historian Will Durant writes about Akbar:

"He had quite discarded the dogmas of Islam, and to such an extent that his Muslim subjects fretted under his impartial rule."

After removing all discriminatory edicts against Hindus, Durant writes that...

"...it won him such loyalty from even those Hindus who did not accept his creed [a syncretic religion of his own invention designed to unify Muslims and Hindus] that his prime purpose - political unity - was largely achieved."

And about a particular period in Akbar's reign (1582-85) where Muslim opposition to him was at its zenith, Durant writes:

"The building of mosques, the fast of Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and other Muslim customs were banned. Many Muslims who resisted the edicts were exiled."

As you can see, Akbar was the PRIME example of a Muslim ruler who consciously and deliberately marginalized Islam within his realm.

Hesperado@ This is certainly a hope; the question is, is it a viable hope, given what we know about Islam and about Muslims, and about the dismaying number of "moderate Muslims" who turned out to be dangerous and/or enabling their dangerous brethren?

Islam is 'monolithic' in that its dogma extinguishes critical examination of itself, and consequently extinguishes any "moderates" hopes of reform. This is understood, and why I earlier said any such possible reforms will be "small steps, not to be expected to follow on a straight path, but to digress and reverse at times", to reverse the flow of worldwide Jihad and Islamic Sharia. Islam itself is not 'monolithic' as a total-belief-system, however, if its adherents have different political agendas for implementing Allah's Cult on Earth. So any cracks of light that become exposed within the body structure of Islam should be encouraged, and ultimately allowed to explode into larger populations, so the 'monolithic' mental oppression mind-lock of Islam starts to slip away as a way to liberate the masses trapped within Islam. The faith here is on the human nature of people, that they really would rather live free, self-deterministic lives, rather than live under the oppression of mullahood as "slaves of Allah".

A corollary to this is what happened in Medieval Europe and the Catholic Church powers of the time. Though no direct comparison can be made with the Islamic conditions today, since even under the rudimentary governments of Medieval times there already existed a crude 'separation of church and state', where temporal powers of punishment were given to kings; Islam augurs no such separation; there can be a comparison drawn with people within Islam, though still a tiny minority, who wish to break the ironclad mental hold their total-belief-system has on the attitudes and behaviors of Muslims at large. And that's how revolutions start, with a tiny minority, which given sufficient fuel and power can grow into world changing events. It happened in Europe at the time of Luther with overthrow of dogmatic and privileged Church tyrannies, later again in America and Europe's anti-monarchy revolutions, spreading to other parts of the world, but now in danger of regress because of Islamic supremacy, politicized world ambitions, which would drive the clock back to more Medieval times again. That tiny minority of dissenters within Islam should be encouraged and supported. The alternative is there are no changes to 'monolithic' Islam, and that leads to an eventual total world war between the West and the world of Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia. Europe, once again, will likely be the proving ground of whether or not human freedom is to survive into the millennium.

In conclusion, better to encourage dissent within the ranks of Islam, even if imperfect (while watching wearily for those who would be Trojans Horses) and encourage "divide and conquer" strategies against Islam (deporting Muslims with Sharia intent, for example), while the dissenters burrow from within. If this works, a world war is averted, and Islam is set for a revolutionary change from within, and reform itself as a 'personal faith' rather than politicized. Will it happen, can it happen? That will be the great question of future history in the making today.

...any cracks of light that become exposed within the body structure of Islam should be encouraged, and ultimately allowed to explode into larger populations...

If this "exposed light" that leads to "cracks" and then "explosions" is to be expected to be occurring within the West, I say, no thanks.

The process you are talking about, when we consider the internecine violence that characterizes Islam throughout the centuries into our present, is unlikely to involve peaceful changes of mind, peaceful assemblies, peaceful discussion. With millions of Muslim in the West, I don't want those hornets poked and prodded with reformist sticks. Just get them the hell out. Why should our West be part of a global petri dish to experiment with something that is, given history, unlikely to happen, and rather more likely to unleash more violence within our borders?

Fair enough Hesperado, but it still remains a fact that many conservatives do favor caning women for drinking alcohol by virtue of the fact that many Muslims do.