The struggle for Islam's soul

Fabio P.Barbieri

As it happens, Nick Cohen has just published an article which basically argues that the whole Foreign Office, and pretty much the establishment, is in the grip of complete unreason on this matter, and consciously supports the Muslim Brotherhood. This seems to me to agree with all the known facts.

Truthtriumphs

Would that Sookhdeo's analysis is correct.
I think that there is a fair amount of wishful thinking on his part.
Militant Islam has been allowed to establish itself in so many places, that the problem is now global.
And what defines a moderate Muslim?
All the evidence points to a large constituency of "moderates" silently supporting the militant orthodoxy.

C. Gee

Those middle-class, usually leftist, university-educated proselytes of the new ijtihad have as much chance of persuading the closed-minded Muslim militants as any of us kufar blabbing about democracy and freedom. They are apostates to the militants.
And if you read the new ijtihad, which earnestly turns the Koran into a prototype for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Gender Equality and inspiration for the Discovery of the Atom, Fair Trade, and Climate Change Mitigation, one might be dubious that the new bunkum can drive out the old bunkum, or would be any better than multicultural socialism even if it did.

Merlyn

In Mecca, they were peaceful. But as they grew in numbers and strength in Medina, they became violent. They are still a minority here, and they know the Brits are about to set off a revolution against them, let us see what happens as the numbers swell
I would certainly like to espouse a new hopeful feeling,

Mjolnir de Jersiaise

Peace in our time!

Hmmm...

Joseph

1938...

Ah yes, the problem isn't Nazism per se, merely knowing how to seperate the moderate Nazis from the extremists...

Arius

Yes, the problem is now global and it will be played out to its bitter and violent end. By their foolish accommodation of retrograde Islam leaders in the West have set the stage for immense suffering to come.

barackobama

Ms Phillips is beginning to grasp the main point: that Islam is, and never was, a monolithic idea, but is essentially highly individualistic and allows people who declare their belief in the one true God and accept Mohammed as God's final Prophet to practice their faith as they see fit. The fact that Muslims pray together and collectively exercise their obligations during Ramadan and on holy festivals does not prevent each Muslim interpreting their faith as he or she believes is right. Muslims have problems with democracy because this suggests that humans know better than God, which is impossible. These are shared by Christianity and Judaism. But it does not mean that Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, cannot co-exist with democratic practices.
Muslims have problems with gender. Islam is a Brotherhood and attaches priority to men. But what is happening, and not just in the UK, is that Muslim women are demanding recognition in their own right. This more than anything else is the inspiration for the growth in the wearing of the Hijab. What secularists, agnostics, atheists and non-Muslims don't understand is that the hijab is principally directed at conservative Islamic men who believe that women not equal to men in the practice of their faith. In this too, Islam has similar problems to Christianity and Judaism.
Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is an ancient faith and inherently conservative. But if it is to survive, then Muslims themselves must work out how tradition can be reconciled with the new. This is something that those who are not Muslims should avoid interfering with as much as is possible. Nothing generates a collective response from Muslims more than the perception that Islam is under threat, particularly from secularists and non-believers.
That is why it would be better for Ms Phillips and other non-Muslims not to express strong support for sincere Muslims seeking to define a way for Islam to come to terms with the modern world. This gives their opponents the opportunity of accusing them of being stooges for non-Muslims and atheists.
Radical Muslims in the UK are deliberately provocative for three main reasons. The first is to polarise the debate within their own community and to put their opponents on the defensive. The second is to provoke a violent response from the non-Muslim community: nothing is more comforting to the radicals than the BNP. Third, they are simply showing off.
The best thing is to try and ignore them. The Muslim majority will sort them out on their own and don't need and, actually don't want, Ms Phillips' support.
Ms Phillips is absolutely right about the lamentable way that central and local government has responded to the growth in the number of British Muslims. They continue to treat Islam as if it is a cultural movement. It is not. It's a religion, like Christianity and Judaism, that inspires millions to behave in a particular way. Monkeying around with such powerful feelings is like playing with petrol and matches. Secularists, agnostics and atheists have nothing useful to contribute to the evolution of religious sentiments and should keep their noses of out it.

Peter from Maidstone

barackobama, where have the moderate Muslims sorted out the militant ones? In Saudi Arabia? In Afghanistan? In Iran? In Luton? The idea that the people of England should leave Muslims alone to deal with violent and terrorist supporting agents of an anti-Western ideology seems dangerous at best, disastrous at worst.

Frank P

Sadly, Melanie, I rate the promises of 'moderate islam' about as reliable as the promise of Fraser Nelson to post (yesterday) about Neather's 'bombshell' (or damp squib as it turned out to be): diversionary at best, but more likely, steaming horse shit! Still, let's give them both a little time. What else can we do?

logdon

I've tangled with Bunglawala on the pages of Cif.

He was more or less rooting for the Taliban by suggesting that we make nicey, nicey accommodation with them. I disagreed.

This, lets not forget, a man with our Governments ear, suggesting that fraternisation with an enemy who are sending maimed and dead soldiers back to Britain is acceptable.

My argument was met by his characteristic oily evasiveness, culminating with the parroted line, isn't it always better to engage? As they say, yeah right.

To me, that explained it all. His allegiance to Islam trumped any idea that we are at war with these people. His attempted lofty rising above it all and liberally couched language is completely at odds with the harsh monochrome actuality of Islam but lets get real, thats what they do.

They lie and evade when needed. They bluster and threaten when on firmer ground. They find the fault lines and slither in. Truth is whatever is most advantageous.

Islam is designed like that. Lies sanctioned by taqiya. Wars disengenuously ended by hudna or false treaty. Deception of the kuffar when in the Dar el Harb institutionalised by a tell them what they want to hear but always keep Islam in the heart.

It’s all in the Koran which unlike our evolving Bible is the word of Allah and can never be changed.

It is an acknowledged fact that they deliberately use our democratic rules and freedom of speech when it suits. And our sensitivity to others when it doesn't.

One conveniently allows them to spout at will, the other to shut down all disagreement. Compare this rally which is actually advocating the overthrow of our state with the cartoons and you get the picture.

It is literally going on all over the world. Wherever they are they undermine and plot. Nowhere is immune.

In other words they , as Melanie points in the piece, will twist and turn, nothing is ruled out and they openly gloat at our self hamstringing.

This is the Third Jihad. The infiltration of western society by adherents to a faith which is here not to share but to dominate.

The moderate voices are silenced and drowned out. Death threat is a political weapon. Violence often the first resort.

And according to Neather this was all planned by our government in an attempt to eradicate whatever trace of our settled culture still standing and to flood us with Labour voting minorities.

Selling us out to remain in power?

Thats what they’ve done, the worst criminal political act imaginable against a sovereign state.

Herbert Thornton

It would certainly be nice if Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo's optimism were justified, and if Muslims in general were inclining towards reformation but the silence of the bulk of the Muslim world, which if anything, shows quiet approval of Islam's new jihad on the non-Muslim world indicates otherwise.

Islam, is by its nature fundamentally incapable of embracing modern civilisation and enlightenment.

The most valiant attempt to modernise it was perhaps by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, but even his reforms have been preserved in place only by means of the Turkish army. In Turkey, the real, unchanging Islam continues to simmer under the surface.

To put our faith in hope for a new, benign Islam and to imagine that we can ally ourselves with "moderate" Muslims will not help us. It would be like a drowning man clutching at a straw.

Verity

"But what are the chances that Britain’s political and Church leaders will now understand the importance of supporting the right people and cutting off the extremists ..."?

None. Extreme islam is a handy weapon of control for Jack Straw & Cie. For example sending sniffer dogs into terrorist suspects' homes wearing little booties out of "respect" for terrorist supsect Muslims who don't want a dog walking around their house is done because it is so abnormal and goes against common sense. The socialists use these tactics constantly. I read somewhere that people had been asked not to eat around Muslims during their ramadan deal.

Moderate islam is the last thing Straw and the bruvvers want.

Barackobama writes: "Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is an ancient faith and inherently conservative. No it's not. It's fairly new. 8thC. Inherently conservative? No. It's inherently controlling, particularly of women and girls, who they appear to fear.

Entwhistle

Why would the Islamists retreat when they are on a winning streak - the Cairo speech and OIC sponsorship of the Goldstone report to give two examples?

Andre

Third time i've tried to post this - what's up?
Clutching at straws? The basic point about Islam is that it is wrong, wrong if you follow Christ, wrong if you are in fact are a member of another religion - Judaism, Mormonism. In our world we need to be free to say it is wrong and to argue this. Religion is a matter of personal conscience. However it seems to me we are rapidly reaching the stage where the atheistic left and Islamic radicals between them have made it all but impossible to say in public: Islam is wrong and we want no part of it - not in schools, certainly not in national life. Christians are called to love ones neighbor as oneself. if you truly love someone you must be free to preach the gospel - the means of eternal life, peace and fulfillment. This not on the basis that I wish you to conform to my concept of God. No, simply on the basis of saying again what Christ said 2000 years ago - a long time before Islam burst upon the scene. I take no comfort from the above article. I do not want Islam to prosper in any way. I love the people who practice it but I detest the religion as wrong before God.

Suffolkbor

Herbert Thornton :
"It would be like a drowning man clutching at a straw".

Or Jack Straw?

Suffolkbor

Does anyone have an opinion on Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation?

Verity

Irshad Manji also believes her religion is in need of its Reform. She's a Canadian, and you can read her robust, articulate arguments on her site. She's also written some books on the subject, and she has quite a following. Irshadmanji.com

Derek BLADES

barackobama, 30 October concluded a long and tedious post with this: "Secularists, agnostics and atheists have nothing useful to contribute to the evolution of religious sentiments and should keep their noses of out it."

What impertinent nonsense! "Secularists, agnostics and atheists" represent the best hope for mankind. All religions - Islam no less than any other - are in precipitous decline as the spread of universal education undermines the authority of the priesthood and shows up belief in gods for the nonsense that it so obviously is. Incidentally, universal access to proper education is one of the Millennium Development Goals promulgated by the United Nations. Yet another reason for supporting that excellent organisation.

Augustus

Whoever decides in the future to
pinpoint historically the moment when the new religious fanaticism of Islamic leaders and systems during the last decades of the 20th century began will come up with many
incidents, such as the Iranian revolution in 1979, or the attack by the Soviet Union on Afghanistan in the same year. But the overriding worldwide effect was only really made apparent when in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini issued the Fatwah against Salman Rushdie. It was in his book The Satanic Verses that the author suggested that a certain person, a religious leader who lived in exile was out for revenge, if needs be at the expense of his own people. an obvious parallel to Khomeini himself who lived in exile in France.

"I announce to the proud Muslim communities of the world that the author of the book The Satanic Verses, which is directed against Islam, The Prophet, the Koran, any anyone associated with the book is comdemned to death. I ask all Muslims, wherever they are, to execute him." The assassin would receive a bounty of $3m.
This Fatwah had the effect of a mental atom bomb which radiated through every continent. A kind of splitting of Muslim consciousness everywhere on earth. On the one hand it had a self-conscious effect on intellectual Muslims who saw fundamentalism and traditionalism as a brake to progress in developing Islamic interdependence, But on the other hand, and much deeper, it led to a jump start in radical thinking amongst the multitude of great and lesser clerics, as well as men, brothers, and sons,
who had long been experiencing a
weaker command of their own womenfolk. They all saw that Rushdie's satire could only be halted by a violent deed such as cutting his throat. Happily Rushdie survived the fatwah, but the Italian translator, Ettore Capriola, and his Norwegian colleague, William Nygard, were badly injured in an attack, and the Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered. In many Islamic countries, as well as in democratic India, the book is still banned. And in 2006 the Iranian press office declared that the Fatwah stood 'for all time'.

Today, anyone who declares that Islamic jihad is intent upon world domination is labelled extreme right-wing by left-liberal progressives. The ideal of Multiculturalism must be defended at all costs. The modern thought processes of the progressive elite, where cultural relativism is seen as an obvious part of social interaction and tolerance, do need to be warned that it has been proven beyond doubt that religion divides people like nothing else on earth, and leads inevitably to hatred and intolerance. Let's hope, therefore, that the phase of religious extremism will indeed pass away in time, and become just another historical detail in a freedom loving world.

Herbert Thornton

For anybody interested in the nature and extent of present-day extremist Islamic ambition, today's National Post has a fascinating piece by Clifford May. It has the chilling heading - “Think Global, Kill Local”.

A Google search of ‘National Post Canada Clifford May think global kill local’ will take you more or less straight to it.

Derek BLADES

Augustus, 31 October, tries to "...pinpoint historically the moment when the new religious fanaticism of Islamic leaders and systems during the last decades of the 20th century began"

I don't know why he restricts his search to the last decades of the 20th century but if he wants the true reason for Islamic antipathy to the West he should consider the foundation of Israel in 1948. It was widely, and correctly, seen by its Arab neighbours as a colonial implant from Europe and America.

Israel is there and it is obviously not going to go away but it could at least try to live in peace with those it has wronged by seizing their homes and farms. Until it does that, hatred of the West will continue to fester in the hearts of Moslems whether living in their home countries or as immigrants in the Western world.

Why cannot Augustus see the obvious?

Florence of Arabia

Logdon says, of Muslims, “They lie and evade when needed.” Yes, and lies and evasions, as long as in the service of Allah or Islam, have names: taqqiya and kitman.

What is more, and this is the reason they can never be allowed to swear on their q’ran in court is, they can swear the truth in the name of Allah, even though they’re swearing a lie, and as long as it is in the service of Islam, not only is it OK, but you get extra points

Augustus

Derek BLADES- I think that you are drawing a false conclusion regarding my post. I was attempting to put, what Melanie elsewhere calls 'the march of Islamic supremacism', into a modern historical context. I don't think that going back to the foundation of the state of Israel, however it effected Palestinian Arabs or their sympathizers, relates to what you might call the modern-day conveyor-belt to Islamic extremism and fundamentalist trend-setting which I certainly didn't see or hear about during my formative years in the last century. Of course, I may be wrong in assessing the historical moment in terms of Rushdie's fatwa. But one thing I do know for sure; before let's say the 1990s, the idea that there would have to be anti-terrorism acts to protect communities in the Western world, or democratic laws would be in danger of being subverted by repressive Islamic ones, or that suddenly non-believers in the Prophet Mohammed would become subjected to abuse because they happened to be born in the West, would have appeared only in the realms of fiction.

Caspar

"[A] change may well take place. Islam may gradually acquire the spirit as well as the form of modern Europe. Centuries were needed before mediaeval Christianity learned the need for submission to the new spirit. Within Christendom itself, it was non-Christian ideas which created the new movement, but these were completely amalgamated with pre-existing Christianity. Thus, too, a Renaissance is possible in the East, not merely by the importation and imitation of European progress, but primarily by intellectual advancement at home even within the sphere of religion."

C.H. BECKER, CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM (1909)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11198/11198.txt

seb

Much of the impetus to reform Islam comes from the growing contempt for and lack of interest in Islam so evident in young people in, for example, Turkey and Iran. In Turkey, fundamentalism is associated in many minds with the sort of savage oppression meted out to Iranian women and secularists. In Iran, fundamentalism is associated with the force-feeding of the population with an embarrassingly pious, medieval religiosity that huge numbers increasingly resent and loathe, not least because the Islam is seen, even today, as a foreign imposition. If Islam is at some sort of crossroads, it's because the world has entered the twenty first century and younger people will obviously prefer the modern world to a feudal one.

David McDaid

Melanie, You and Mr. Cohen should get together and form a new political party. I can vouch for millions in this country that you would have our vote.

People don't want to vote Lab/Lib/Con and are being drawn towards BNP. We need a new party that stands for honesty. Please, consider it Melanie.

michael

I have noted with interest, that for some time after the riots here in Bradford and the various acts of terrorism, the wearing of the Hijab became far more commonplace.

I suspect that this was an expression of compliance with respect to a shift in the 'powers that be' within a closed community.

We continue to bury our heads.

hadrian

As one whose church supports Barnabas I must first applaud the sheer courage of Dr Sookhdeo -not least when supposed fellow Christians with what is actually a humanist agenda do not hesitate to expose him to the ire of fanatical Moslems in the specious name of PC community relations.
His analysis of developments within Islamic ideology is interesting but at heart we cannot expect a religion that essentially based on self righteous works and not sheer grace to be able to withstand the fanatical destructive tendencies that fuels. Still we can hope that some restraining elements from within might start to open up many of its devotees to unprecedented self exmaination of what exactly it is they are supporting.