God's Sake - Khuda Ke Liye

God's Sake - Khuda Ke Liye
http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2008/04/gods-sake-khuda-ke-liye.html

1. My Rebuttal to Myths of Modern Islam comments
2. Film opens Indian eyes to life in Pakistan
3. The myth of moderate Islam by Tavleen Singh

[( Rebuttal to Myths of Modern Islam )]

In Sunday's Indian Express, Tavleen Singh wrote the review for Khuda Ke Liye and has made a few wrong judgment calls. I am pleased to do a rebuttal.

My reaction would have been similar to Tavleen Singh’s, when the Pakistani hero tells his girl friend that “we built Taj Mahal”. We who, would have been my reaction too. The prejudices she has observed are well expressed. As Indians we are sensitive to what the Pakistanis say and I am sure the vice versa is true. The movie has to play it up too to arouse the sentiments of the audience. Then I am surprised at her conclusion “the film was that in seeking to show Islam in a good light, it accidentally exposes the prejudices that make moderate Muslims the ideological partners of Jihadis”. Since when did we start drawing conclusions based on a movie?

Tavleen Singh states that Moderation is in short supply among Muslims? In fact that is the only thing in abundance with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs or any one for that matter. Most are moderate people and they go on about their daily responsibilities of earning a living and taking care of their families. They do not wear their religion on their sleeves; one may know some one is Muslim or a Hindu, but they don’t wear a neon sign.

In Dallas, we are about 80,000 Indians and our Association’s membership is about 1+% - We are about 75,000 Hindus, but you will not find 2% of the Hindus on any given Sunday at the temple, same goes with the Muslims or Christians. You are always looking for the volunteers and you find the same faces over and over again in every place. A majority of the people do not want to be tied up with the politics, religion or even civic affairs. They mind their own lives. About 9/10th of a percent of people are worriers like you and I, worried about what the 1/10th extremists will do. The 99% cares less.

The majority of any group is moderate, they are plenty in numbers and you never see them in any broils or Hangamas. For a good movie, you see a lot more of Desis than you would see them at the place of worship; religious movies are seen by far fewer people, when Khuda Ke Liye was shown at Fun Asia, the turn out was very low, even the Pakistanis did not come to see Khuda Ke Liye, they went to Om Shanti instead. The number gets bigger if it is a Bollywood entertainment extravaganza.

Look at the Election results of Pakistan, whom did the people vote? Not the religious parties. Out of 336 Seats in the assembly only 6 went to the religious parties and 330 to the secular ones. 2.2% v 97.8%.

Tavleen Singh needs to study more before she draws the conclusions.

She fails to mention the 10 minutes of critical dialogue where Naseeruddin Shah challenges the traditionalists, some thing that compares to the Brahmins washing the water faucet several times after a non-Brahmin has collected water from the public tap. Neither was religious, but practiced regardless. As a Journalist one has to tell the story that people can relate, it is just not what others do that is weird; we do it too in our own unique way.

She is iffy “If 'moderate' Muslims believe that the West is the real enemy of Islam” She can keep that to herself, because she does not understand who the moderates are. Like the movies, she must be running into only those people who are not moderates and they are just a few. Look at your own group, any group, Caucasian, African Americans, Latinos, Chinese, Hindus or Muslims – go for a sample of 100, you will find only one or two bullies in such a small sample.

The world is run by extremists and bullies while the moderates silently endure. It is time to get the moderates activated and assertive for the good of humankind. It is also time for the Tavleen Singhs of the world to think before they have their runs on the key boards.

Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker, Writer and a Moderator. He is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing Pluralism, politics, Islam, Religion, Terrorism, India and civic issues. His comments, news analysis, opinions and columns can be found on the Websites and Blogs listed at his personal website http://www.mikeghouse.net/. He can be reached at mailto:MikeGhouse@gmail.comor (214) 325-1916

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Landmark film opens Indian eyes to life in Pakistan
By Amelia Gentleman
Published: April 11, 2008
http://iht.com/articles/2008/04/11/asia/letter.php?page=2

NEW DELHI: Of all the flattering headlines that greeted the release last week of the first Pakistani film to be shown in India in four decades, one stuck in the mind of the director Shoaib Mansoor.

"We didn't know that Pakistan had such good houses," the headline went, Mansoor recalled in an interview in Delhi.

It was a striking reminder of how little people in India know about the way their immediate neighbors across the border live.

For the past 43 years no Pakistan-made film had been distributed commercially to cinemas in India until Mansoor's "Khuda Kay Liye" ("In the Name of God") premiered here April 4 - a fact that has contributed to widespread ignorance in India about modern Pakistan.
This week, Indian filmgoers were offered a rare glimpse of life on the other side, the architecture, the unfamiliar landscape, the homes and the lifestyles. The film provided an unusual opportunity for audiences here to peer into the lives of middle-class Muslims in Pakistan, a country geographically close, but set apart by such entrenched political hostility that very few Indians have ever visited it.

The release of Mansoor's film (which broke all box-office records when it came out in Pakistan last year) was hailed here as a significant moment in the slow-motion Indo-Pakistan peace process.

An official ban was imposed by the Pakistan government on the distribution and broadcast of Indian movies, after the war between the two countries in 1965 (one of three wars fought between the two nations since the region was split by Partition in 1947). No formal reciprocal order was made by India, but initial political hostility to the idea of showing Pakistani films was superseded in later years by commercial considerations. In the second half of the 20th century, the Pakistani film industry (Lollywood) slipped into severe decline and produced nothing meriting distribution in India, (which is well-served by its own film industry).

Despite the ban, pirated, illegal copies of all the Bollywood hits have always been hugely popular in Pakistan. And in 2006, amid improving political ties, the Pakistan government gradually began to relax its approach, allowing a limited number of Indian films to be screened in cinemas legally.

The effect has been a cultural two-way mirror dividing the two countries, with Pakistan able to observe India (or a glitzier Bollywood version of India), but with Indians unable to see beyond its frontiers.

"Indian films never stopped coming to Pakistan, on DVDs," Mansoor said. "So every Pakistani is absolutely clear about the way of life in India, about how everything works in India. But there is nothing coming in the other direction, with the result that India has very clear misconceptions about Pakistan."

His film was edited in Delhi, where he was, he said, "shocked by the ignorance" of Indian colleagues in the cutting room. "They had very surprising ideas about Pakistan. They asked 'Do you have taxis there?' 'Can women drive?' 'Are women allowed to go to university?' They thought Pakistan consisted entirely of fanatics and mullahs.

"The opening of films between India and Pakistan will really help people know each other. These films will help these misconceptions to go away. People here will start seeing Pakistan as it really is."

Aside from their incidental curiosity at the unexpected beauty of Pakistani houses, filmgoers and reviewers have also been struck by the insight offered by the film into the difficulties of being a liberal Muslim in Pakistan after 9/11.

The film, which won the Silver Pyramid Award at the Cairo International Festival in 2007, shows two brothers, both talented musicians, living in Lahore, growing apart as they embrace different readings of Islam. One is brainwashed by the local mullah, abandons his Sufi rock group and his rich, liberal parents in their beautifully decorated home, and heads off to join the Taliban. The other leaves Pakistan to study music in Chicago, where he falls in love with America and marries an American before being arrested and subjected to Abu Ghraib-style torture by officials who are suspicious of his Muslim background, erroneously convinced that he played a role in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.

"That is the tragedy that a Muslim faces in these days," Mansoor said. "We are beaten up by fundamentalists, with the label that we are too Western, and when we go out of the country, we are labeled as fundamentalists just because we have Pakistani names."
The acting is patchy, but beneath the numerous plotlines, Mansoor successfully rams home his point: "All Muslims are not terrorists."

"People need to understand that Pakistanis are not all rabid fundamentalists."
He has been pleased by the response in India. "People clapped here at the same places people clapped in Pakistan. That's a good sign."

The Indian film critic Subhash K Jha, said it was a film everyone in India should see "to understand the isolation, to understand what it feels like to be deemed a terrorist, to be frisked extra hard, the pain and the humiliation."

"I don't think that is easy to understand as a Hindu." But he warned that the film would not have obvious appeal to most Indian viewers. "Sadly, not too many people will be interested to see a film that reveals life as a Muslim, so its impact will be rather restrained. It is not a pot-boiler, it doesn't have the audience-pulling big stars, it doesn't have any item numbers."

The Bollywood scriptwriter Javed Akhtar described it as a "very bold and honest film."
"Ignorance breeds suspicion and suspicion breeds hate, it creates huge villains," he said. "There is a lot to be heard and seen by Indian and by U.S. audiences here too."

The Indian certification board recommended a couple of cuts before approving the film for release (removing a reference to Muslims being killed in Indian-controlled Kashmir), but Shailendra Singh, managing director of Percept Pictures, the firm responsible for distributing the film, said the process of bringing the film to India had been surprisingly easy, and the initial box office response encouraging. He said he thought the film, which cost $1.5 million to make, would recoup $2.5 million over the next three months in India.

"We felt like we were being part of history," he said.

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The myth of moderate Islam by Tavleen Singh in Indian Express.

Tavleen Singh Posted online: Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 2316 hrs IST This is not a column that discusses cinema, but this week I make an exception because of a film I have just seen, which inadvertently exposes the myth of 'moderate' Islam. I went to see Khuda Kay Liye not just because it is the first Pakistani film to be released in Indian cinemas since anyone can remember, but because I gathered from reviews that it was a reflection of moderate Islam. This is a commodity in short supply in the subcontinent as well as across the Islamic world, where supposedly moderate Islamic countries like Indonesia and Malaysia have transformed in recent times into places where women have exchanged mini-skirts and western influence for the hijab and a return to medieval Arabia.

Khuda Kay Liye is the story of a modern Pakistani family that is destroyed when one musician son ends up in the clutches of a bad mullah and the other ends up in an American prison cell, where he is tortured till he loses his mind. The Islamist son, under the influence of the evil maulana, coerces his London-bred cousin into a marriage she does not want and forces her to live in a primitive Afghan village so she cannot escape. He rapes her because the maulana instructs him to and gives up his musical career because the maulana tells him that the Prophet of Islam did not like music. And he becomes an involuntary mujahid after 9/11, fighting on the side of the Taliban government. This is a simple story of a young man misled in the name of Islam.

The other musician son's story is more revealing of the flaws of what we like to call 'moderate' Islam. He goes to study music in a college in Chicago, falls in love with a white girl, and generally has a good time living the American dream until 9/11 happens. Then he is arrested, locked up in a secret prison in the United States and kept naked in a filthy cell until he goes mad. The message of the film, in its essence, is that Islam is a great religion that has been misunderstood and that the United States is a bad, bad country and all talk of freedom and democracy is nonsense.

Alas, this is not how we infidels see things. What interested me most about the film was that in seeking to show Islam in a good light, it accidentally exposes the prejudices that make moderate Muslims the ideological partners of jihadis. In painting America as the villain of our times, the prejudices against the West that get exposed are no different from what Mohammad Siddique, one of London's tube bombers, said in the suicide video he made before blowing himself up. In the video, that surfaced during the trial now on in London, he describes himself as a soldier in the war against the West: 'I'm doing what I am for Islam, not, you know, for materialistic or worldly benefits.'

In Khuda Kay Liye, the prejudices against India come through as well. The hero, when he lands in Chicago, finds that his future wife does not know that Pakistan is a country. When he tries to explain where it is geographically, he mentions Iran, Afghanistan and China before coming to India.

It happens that India is the only country she knows and Taj Mahal the only Indian monument she has heard of. 'We built it,' says our hero, 'we ruled India for a thousand years and Spain for 800.' As an Indian, my question is: who is we? Those who left for Pakistan or the 180 million Muslims who still live in India? If we pursue this 'we' nonsense, we must urge the Indian Government to bring back Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and Taxila. And that is only the short list.
Let us not pretend that Muslims in India do not face hostility and prejudice. They do. But some of it comes from this idea that Muslims have of themselves as being superior because they 'ruled India' for a thousand years. The problem becomes more complex if you remember that Hindu fanatics also see Muslims as foreigners and use it to fuel their hatred.

If 'moderate' Muslims believe that the West is the real enemy of Islam and that the free societies of modern times compare poorly with the greatness of Muslim rule in earlier times, then there is little difference between them and the jihadis. As we infidels see it, the problem is that Islam refuses to accept that in the 21st century there is no room for religion—any religion—in the public square. Other religions have accepted this and retreated to a more private space. Islam has not. ***

Indian Muslims against Terrorism

Indian Muslims against Terrorism - An article by Yogi Sikand
http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2008/04/indian-muslims-against-terrorism.html

Article follows my comments;

Yogi Sikand has brought up two good points in his article below and I would like to address them. As always, I have taken to reading his writings, and have shared them on the Pluralism and or World Muslim websites and Blogs. He is a an open minded scholar.

“1. This effort is, however, hampered by the fact that the Muslim religious leaders who have organized these meetings have few, if any; relations with non-Muslim organizations, activists and media professionals who could have helped relay their message to a broader non-Muslim audience.”

Muslims have a tendency to live in enclaves where they are a minority, that may be the case with all minorities, even those from a majority, when they live elsewhere as a minority, may live in clusters. This has to change, intentional enclaves creates division and insecurities in the long run.

The image of Muslims is carved out by the media; TV, Radio, Blogs, Webs and the Newspapers. Shamefully their livelihood is dependent on creating a good guy and a bad guy duel, in the US they have successfully casted the Jews, the African Americans as the bad guys and now they got Muslims staged for a few more years until they find someone else, may be Mexicans or Chinese. It is time that the Media resorts to being truthful and more importantly, the Muslims need to change that image as did the Jews and African Americans.

Go to any party, birth day, wedding, anniversary, funerals or social gatherings including barbequing on July 4th and thanksgiving, you seldom see any one but ourselves and our community members. It is a shame that we are incapable of making friends with others. Indeed, we are depriving ourselves with good friendship and broadening our horizons and an opportunity to let every one know through friendship, that we are no different than any ones else. We are not a mystery and we are not secretive, we know that, but others don’t. At one time we could drive cars without seat belt, now we feel guilty if we don’t wear it. Let’s feel naked and guilty if we do not have people from other faiths and races in our gathering, not as a token, but genuine friendship. Let our language be faith sensitive and inclusive as well. It is good for Muslims, and good for the world and vice-Versa.

"2. Nor have these meetings sought to critique the interpretations of Islam articulated by these groups in any detailed manner, beyond simply announcing that Islam has no relation with terrorism. This perhaps emanates from a fear of being attacked, even physically, if such groups were to be named. "

Zuhdi Jasser in his article “War of ideas” has spelled out the fear Muslims have in debating the issues. They are afraid that finding the truth is scary and don’t want to face it nor debate, it is a sign of weak faith or lack of trust in God and his words. I am a product of such fear, between a decade ago and a decade prior to that, I attempted to see the wisdom in the verses and closed the book in a hurry as I had difficulty in understanding some of the verses that appeared to be exclusive and arrogant, my access was limited to translations in English or Urdu. I had given up on Islam, every few years I tried to come back, but ran into the same wall and temporarily withdrew. You can read more about Qur'aan and its translations at: http://Quraan-today.blogspot.com , God willing I will make an attempt to address sixty some verses that are mis-translated and misrpresented for some one's personal gains.

The unfortunate tragedy of 9/11 to which I have dedicated for my life, Karen Armstrong’s book Muhammad, and a verse from Bhagvad Gita have become the catalysts and helped me understand Islam. The verse “finding the truth is one’s own responsibility” became a beacon to me and I applied that to Qur’aan. I went beyond the given translations and read newer translations and start seeing the difference in translations. Which one was the right one? My work on Pluralism for a decade has helped me in diving deep into the religion, every religion and again, thank God, I see the beauty in every faith including my own. I am sure, like me there are a lot of Muslims out there who feel saddened for the mis-translations of Qur’aan done for the last millennia by the European and then Muslims themselves.

Indeed, we need not fear discussing any aspect of Qur’aan, it is based on justice to humans as well as the environment and one cannot go wrong with it. Through open and fearless debates we can truly understand the faith and connect with it in toto. A Muslim is one who seeks to mitigate conflicts, his words and actions will not aggravate the situation but bring sense and nurtures good will for peaceful co-existence. Indeed, that is the purpose of religion, all religions.

Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker, Writer and a Moderator. He is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing Pluralism, politics, Islam, Religion, Terrorism, India and civic issues. He is the founder of the World Muslim Congress, a group committed to building bridges and nurturing a world of co-existence. He also heads the foundation for pluralism, an organization committed to studying religious pluralism and pluralistic governance. His articles can be found at http://www.worldmuslimcongress.com/ and its five Blogs listed on the site, the http://www.foundationforpluralism.com/ and its Blogs and http://www.mikeghouse.net/

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Yoginder Sikand

Recent months have witnessed a spate of seminars, public meetings, rallies and press conferences organized by various Muslim groups across India denouncing terrorism and insisting that it has no relation whatsoever with Islam. These have been widely reported in the Muslim press, but, barring the recently-held Anti-Terrorism convention held by the
Dar ul-Ulum Deoband, they have not received any attention by the so-called ‘mainstream’ Indian press.

The reason is simple: The ‘mainstream’ press rarely, if ever, highlights any positive stories or news about Muslims. It is as if only ‘bad’ news about Muslims is ‘good’ news for the ‘mainstream’ press.

These anti-terrorism meetings are of considerable significance in several respects. They clearly indicate the unfortunate predicament of the Muslim community, which has been unfairly singled out, both in India and elsewhere, as being allegedly inherently associated with terrorism. It is a sign of the massive, and still mounting, wave of Islamophobia, propelled by Western, Zionist, and, within India, Hindutva, forces, which is increasingly compelling Muslims and their organizations to be put on the defensive. No other community is being forced to explain itself and absolve itself of charges of ‘terrorism’ in even remotely the same way, although ‘terrorism’ is, needless to say, not specifically a ‘Muslim’ issue.

The anti-terrorism meetings show that the Muslim religious leadership is fast waking up to the need to reach out to an audience beyond that of their own followers, in particular to non-Muslims and to explain their stance to them. This follows mounting arrests and even killings of Muslims, many of them innocent, on charges of ‘terrorism’. Although on the whole unfortunate, this move to reach out to non-Muslims might have a welcome fall-out: they might help build important bridges of communication between Muslims and non-Muslims, promote much-needed inter-community solidarity and counter deeply-rooted communal prejudices. This effort is, however, hampered by the fact that the Muslim religious leaders who have organized these meetings have few, if any, relations with non-Muslim organizations, activists and media professionals who could have helped relay their message to a broader non-Muslim audience. Hence, most of their meetings have been both addressed and attended by Muslims themselves, reducing them largely to exercises in preaching to those who are already convinced of the argument that Islam has no relation with terrorism.

These meetings clearly suggest the growing willingness on the part of influential sections of the Muslim religious leadership to bring internal contestations about Islamic authenticity into the public domain and to openly deny the claims to such authenticity on the part of such fringe elements that target innocents in the name of Islam. By explicitly condemning acts of terrorism as anti-Islamic, even if these are carried
out by groups that claim to be ‘Islamic’, they clearly indicate the possibilities of developing alternate forms of religious expression that condemn terrorism in all its forms and stress the need for inter-community solidarity for social justice.

Significantly, these meetings have sought to widen the scope of public debate about ‘terrorism’ by also raising the issue of forms of terrorism engaged in by a range of non-Muslim actors, something that the dominant Western and Indian media have been reluctant
to discuss, name or even acknowledge. They have, accordingly, talked of the need to also condemn state terrorism, particularly American and Israeli, that has caused the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people. They have condemned with equal passion the
terrorism of the Hindutva brigade, often abetted by elements in the Indian state apparatus. Surely, as these meetings appeal to us to acknowledge, the debate on terrorism must move beyond its misplaced obsession only with Muslims to cover all forms of terrorism if we are at all serious about combating the problem.

These meetings have also forcefully called for more terminological clarity and balance about the very concept of ‘terrorism’. They have pointed out that in the case of several Muslim groups and movements in certain countries, anti-imperialist resistance forces
that have taken to violence in self-defence cannot be branded as ‘terrorists’, as the dominant media generally does. This is most striking in the case of the Palestinian and Iraqi resistance movements, that may use an ‘Islamic’ vocabulary for their anti-imperialist agenda.

It is significant to note that while denouncing terrorism done by Muslim groups (and simultaneously condemning terrorism engaged in by states and by non-Muslim forces), these meetings have not explicitly critiqued any Muslim group engaged in terrorism by name. Nor have these meetings sought to critique the interpretations of Islam articulated by these groups in any detailed manner, beyond simply announcing that Islam has no relation with terrorism. This perhaps emanates from a fear of being attacked, even physically, if such groups were to be named. It could also indicate a reluctance to admit that some Muslims,
like some others, too might actually engage in terrorism. Whatever the reason, this silence surely reduces the impact that these meetings might have otherwise had in countering terrorism in the name of Islam engaged in by some fringe groups.

The debate about ‘terrorism’ needs to move beyond the parallel sets of monologues engaged in by Muslim groups and their detractors. The series of anti-terrorism meetings organized recently by various Muslim groups across India has sought to do this in a limited way, although this effort has been marred by a lack of sufficient internal critique. That said, these meetings are undoubtedly a very welcome and significant development.

Islamists V. Anti-Islamists

Article follows my comments;

http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2008/04/islamists-v-anti-islamists-muslims.html

I wholeheartedly welcome the debate between Imam Al-Darsani and Zuhdi Jasser in the tradition of Prophet Muhammad to understand one’s faith back and forth. If some one claims righteousness of his belief, he or she must be willing to withstand the onslaught of questions and bring wisdom, rather than the circular logic to the debate.

Prior to the debate, I was not sure about the scope of it, however, it appeared that Jasser was blinded and was going to deepen the chasm rather than drive towards the intended solutions.

It is true that the establishment, be it Muslim or otherwise is usually short-sighted or perhaps overloaded with the issues and is inclined to ignore the unproven, un-established mavericks; Zuhdi is beyond that now. ISNA offers the platform to express one’s ideas in their legendary three day annual conferences. You have to be one of the many to be a presenter.

Most of the Muslims are opposed to extremist’s ideas, just like the majorities in every faith. However, Zuhdi’s approach may create a chasm rather than understand it, it may actually make each side to dig in their heels. You cannot push an idea onto others. Our effort is to bring about an understanding from Qur’aan, which is about Pluralism and co-existence. Qur'an, Al-Hujurat, Surah 49:13: "O mankind! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. The noblest of you, in sight of Allah, is the best in conduct. Allah Knows and is Aware." In fact our mission statement is driven by that verse.

It is the tiny weenie minority within each group that tends to be extremist, I believe they are 1/10th of 1% of each group. They are known as Neocons, Islamist, Zionists and Hindutvadis, they may be genuinely afraid of imaginary enemies and express that as the truth and proclaim a clear and present danger. Unfortunately for the World, but fortunately for them, they evoke enough passion to bring their respective groups to band together and are well funded for the wrong purpose. They are the most cohesive groups in the world; they are passionate about their fiction and go about making it happen. They are even willing to pre-empt God and bring about Armageddon.

Every war, genocide and killing of human beings is their work. They may adopt different methods, but killing, genocide and creating chaos is common to all of them. They just cannot sit quite and let there be peace. They feed off each other.

Our goal is to invoke a similar passion in the moderate people who are the majority and let them speak out sense and assure the Quad that if they put in the time to work on peace, their nightmares may vanish and bring some peace to them. We have to guard ourselves with our words and actions to cause peace, mitigate conflicts and nurture goodwill.

Let us re-assure the world that the grand ideas of Muslims dominating the world are a fiction. There are enough Muslims to kill it even before it germinates. In the United States itself, Zuhdi Jasser, myself and millions of Muslims are out there who prefer nothing but a pluralistic Democracy. No, let me shoot it straight, we do not want any religious governance, let alone Islamic. Islam is a religion like other religions that helps one achieve peace for the individual and what surrounds him or her. To be religious is to be a peacemaker, one who constantly seeks to mitigate conflicts and nurtures goodwill for peaceful co-existence. God wants us to live in peace and harmony with his creation; life and mater. Indeed, that is the purpose of religion, any religion.

Zuhdi needs to substantiate his claims, “These elusive Islamists include a host of “political imams” (imams who use their pulpit to preach an Islamist domestic and foreign policy agenda) who are apparently a majority of imams in mosques around the U.S. Not only are political imams in the majority of mosques but the salafist orientation seems to predominate mosques also.”
This evokes an imaginary discomfort among all Americans. This is not the truth. He needs to prove it by statistics, at least drop the word majority from his statements. Opposing Islamism is one thing, frightening the public is another.

Zuhdi Jasser states, “This is augmented in the public place with their supporting and collaborating Islamist organizations which include ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), MAS (Muslim American Society), ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), MSA (Muslim Students Association), the North American…”
Labeling an organization as Islamist is the work of keyboard or the mouth. Zuhdi needs to substantiate it. From what I know of ISNA and CAIR, they are working for co-existence, peace and harmony. Apparently a CAIR Executive made a statement that Islam is here to dominate, he denied ever saying such a statement, and the journalist did not have anything to prove that the executive said something to that effect. An accusation of that magnitude without proof is dangerous to our society. Did CAIR founder say Islam to rule America?

“In fact, statistics would show that only a small minority of American Muslims maintain membership in any “Muslim” organizations.” Indeed, that is the case with most immigrant communities; be it a German-American association, or Czech-American, or Filipino American Association. Although it sounds right, I hope there is statistics available for it.

Zuhdi is not in touch with what is going on in the world when he states, “Wahhabism to salafism to deobandism to militant Islamism and its terror, we will be able to effectuate and progress a global anti-Islamist movement.” On March 10th, the Deoband Seminary held a conference in India gathering 10,000 Clerics who made a declaration condemning terrorism. Then similar declarations were made by Muslim organizations around the world.

http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2008/03/muslim-nations-condemn-terrorism.html

Mike Ghouse is the founder of the World Muslim Congress, a group committed to building bridges and nurturing a world of co-existence. He also heads the foundation for pluralism, an organization committed to study religious pluralism and pluralistic governance. His articles can be found at http://www.worldmuslimcongress.com/ and its five blogs, the http://www.foundationforpluralism.com/ and its blogs and http://www.mikeghouse.net/

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Finally, a debate occurred between an Islamist and an anti-Islamist Muslim
Part One of Two
M. Zuhdi Jasser

A public debate between two devotional Muslims occurred on April 5, 2008 at Edison College in Naples, Florida. We shared deeply conflicting ideas on Islam, political Islam, terrorism, and morality. Arguments so far seemingly relegated to “Muslim vs. non-Muslims” debates due to the Muslim activist predominance of the Islamist mindset were finally debated from a position deep within a Muslim consciousness.

Already a tired phrase, call it what you will, “the battle,” “the war,” “the contest” of ideas between the West (secular democracies) and the Muslim world (Islamist theocracies) remains an elusive target for many of us in the thick of the fight. As an American, the concept of debate and intellectual argumentation runs to the core of who I am. So many other anti-Islamist Muslims and I can imagine no other method of getting our ideas across to the “other” side whether discussing the political, religious, legal, social, or spiritual realm. But when it comes to our current target – the threat of political Islam within the devotional Muslim consciousness – leading Islamist figures in the U.S. have remained slippery targets, unwilling to engage anti-Islamists openly in the public square.

These elusive Islamists include a host of “political imams” (imams who use their pulpit to preach an Islamist domestic and foreign policy agenda) who are apparently a majority of imams in mosques around the U.S. Not only are political imams in the majority of mosques but the salafist orientation seems to predominate mosques also. This is augmented in the public place with their supporting and collaborating Islamist organizations which include ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), MAS (Muslim American Society), ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), MSA (Muslim Students Association), the North American Imams Federation, The Assembly of American Muslim Jurists, and the MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Council) to name a few. That, in and of itself, is telling. However, the obvious nature of their avoidance behavior in engaging anti-Islamists is not enough or even a start in the effort to win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims.

The entirety of mosques and Islamist and anti-Islamist Muslim organizations do not represent all American Muslims. Most American Muslims are actually unaffiliated with any element of the organized Muslim community. Some, if not most, are unaffiliated simply because they separate religion and politics. In fact, statistics would show that only a small minority of American Muslims maintain membership in any “Muslim” organizations.

The ideas expressed in this debate will possibly expose why. Most Islamist organizations and imams have little to no moral leadership or credibility when they espouse apologetics and excuses trying to convince the world that moral imperatives have exceptions. Hopefully the mainstream media, government officials, and the average non-Muslim American will begin to see that “Islamists” are in no way synonymous with “Muslims.” The “battle for the soul of Islam” between Islamists and anti-Islamists needs to be forged expeditiously or the Islamists will assiduously continue their grand scheme of eventual and total domination.

Since its inception, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy was created by anti-Islamist Muslims upon a foundation that our guiding ideologies simply need to be heard in the Muslim community. Then, let the chips fall where they may. With that public hearing, or “forum,” we will begin to openly challenge the ossified precepts of salafism, Wahhabism, Islamism, and various pre-modern identifications of eastern Muslim culture. With that challenge we pray that an awakening – possibly very similar to the modernization of the West, which ushered in “enlightenment” – may occur within the consciousness of Muslims everywhere, forever separating spiritual Islam or the domain of God (faith) from the domain of government and the state (reason).

It is direct forays between Islamists and anti-Islamists which highlight the profound areas of disagreement. For example, when AIFD sponsored the nation’s first Muslim rally against terrorism in 2004 entitled “Standing with Muslims Against Terrorism” and invited the local Islamist Politburo (also known as the “Valley council of imams”) to join us in a universal unqualified condemnation of terrorism, they explicitly refused citing a host of morally defunct explanations. As a group, they refused to make a public moral imperative without qualifications (apologetics) about American foreign policy as an excuse for terrorism. They not only stayed home from the rally despite repeated public calls to join us, but the imams have also repeatedly refused to go on record regarding AIFD’s mission of ideologically engaging Islamism, let alone directly engage anti-Islamists. In fact in the 2007 controversial documentary by ABG Films Islam v Islamists, local imam, Ahmed Shqeirat described our work as “liberal extremism.”

The debate this week against an imam in Naples proved that these apologetics are apparently and most unfortunately common across the nation (from Arizona to Florida) in many imam circles as a litmus test for Islamists who believe in political Islam and the Islamic state. Make no mistake: my opponents in the clerical realm try to brush off our work as “anti-imam” or anti-scholarship in Islam. A cartoon in a local Islamist publication tried to portray just such propaganda against me in 2005. The reality is quite the contrary. Many humble scholarly imams have provided the intellectual underpinnings for our anti-Islamist Muslim precepts at AIFD. In fact it is the persona of the morally corrupt imam who has been the greatest liability for the real scholars of Islam who are the anti-Islamist, anti-Wahhabi imams of virtue which are so marginalized in the American public square.

This challenge of opening this debate and even acknowledging its existence is no small undertaking, considering the number of Islamist forces working within the Muslim community against such an awakening. Further challenges include tendencies of the general public to accept minority and identity politics in the U.S. and the inherent Islamist exploitation of that in order to further tribal behavior and foment divisiveness in America. By doing so, they craftily avoid self-critique, not to mention the collaborating forces outside the Muslim community (mainstream media and many U.S. Government officials) that are all too ready to accept Islamist ideology as the de facto consensus of the orientation of the faithful.

Yet, frustratingly, many anti-Islamist Muslims have been standing alone ready to challenge the Islamist position within the Muslim community, unable to gain any traction against the conventional wisdom that Islam is Islamism and Islamists are the only devotional Muslims. Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, Ayaan hirsi Ali’s Infidel and other expressions exposing radical Islamist ideology are able to conflate Islam with political Islam and militant Islam because they have been almost inarguably unable to find a palpable debate within the Muslim community concerning the ideas they critique. Islamists often whine in an oversimplified denial immersed in pathetic victimology, while anti-Islamist Muslims remain unheard and unable to find a forum.

Certainly, many anti-Islamist Muslims have been writing and speaking out all over the world. But we have generally been “preaching to the choir” and past the Islamists and their collaborators who disagree with us. Why have we have often ended up speaking “past” them? The answer is their unwillingness to engage openly in a debate over our central differences on Islam and the Muslim consciousness. Theirs is a strategy cloaked in deliberately ignoring the debate and deliberately clouding Islam with Islamism – much to the chagrin of the average non-Islamist Muslim.

The Islamists conveniently call internal challenges to their theology a manifestation of a societal ill which they equate with “division” (fitna in Arabic). They feel that their moves to politically collectivize the Muslim community, or the “ummah,” can never be challenged. They ignore the fact that the political collectivization of Muslims runs contrary to the national interests of our collective nation and our citizenship. For the few who do accept the challenge they do so only on their terms, privately, within the community, away from media and away from any accountability to the greater American community.

This blind collectivism is the exact reason the Muslim mind in so many mosques and activist organizations is hopelessly and cowardly paralyzed in apologetics and victimization. The Islamists are thereby easily able to muster the courage of their faulty convictions enough to champion political Islam and secure its stranglehold upon the public manifestation of the Muslim consciousness.

There is no better way for Muslims to generate credibility and speed up our growth than to encourage and participate in an open public debate. Once anti-Islamist and pro-Islamist Muslims intellectually engage one another, the rest of the world can finally see that the most effective means to counterterrorism is a devotional Muslim counter to political Islam and the religious validity of the Islamic state. The determination of whose version of Islam is closer to the central message of Islam is vital to countering the visceral drive of militant Islamism.

By avoiding debate, the Islamists are not only ignoring the Prophet Mohammed’s tradition of intellectual engagement with all those who disagreed with him inside and outside the faith community, but they are falling lockstep with the fascist precept that supremacist ideologies have to be superior by virtue of their own standing and should never be challenged by other non-conforming Muslims.

Engagement can be a tenuous and possibly dangerous endeavor. Many Islamists by virtue of their apologetics for terrorism and facilitation of the Islamist ideology end up associated (if not hatched from) international and often militant Islamist organizations like Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. But debating them is still quite helpful and infinitely revealing.

The most important element to be underscored is that debate and confrontation cannot be equated with endorsement and facilitation. It is far more dangerous to ignore these organizations and Islamist thought leaders and hand them the intellectual reins of the Muslim community unchallenged than to engage them and highlight the ideas which put them at odds with reason, spirituality, and modernity.

Recently on February 23, 2008, while I was participating in a panel on radical Islam’s threat to the West in Naples Florida, a local imam, Mohamed Al-Darsani of the Islamic Center for Peace challenged my ideas and cast me out with little substantiation as being “outside the mainstream Muslim community.” It seemed that my orthodox adherence to traditional Sunni Muslim worship and spiritual devotion made little difference to him. His charge about my position in the Muslim community was made concerning my stand on terrorism and political Islam.

I immediately responded with an open challenge to engage him in a debate on the threat of Islamism (the desire to form an Islamic state) to American security. To my surprise (and thanks to the Florida Security Council), he agreed.

With the tenacity of the local Florida Security Council, within six weeks, I had an official debate with Imam Mohammed Al-Darsani, with Michael Cromartie of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy moderating. We agreed to debate the question: “Is the Establishment of the Islamic State a Clear Ideological Threat to the United States?” I debated the affirmative and Mr. Al-Darsani the negative.

The two-plus hour long debate covered a lot of ground. Most poignantly, it highlighted the great chasm between the corruption of Islamist apologetics and the struggle to renew the moral truth of spiritual Islam separated from Islamist demagoguery. A review of the debate demonstrates the wide abyss which separates so many faithful anti-Islamist Muslims from Imam Al-Darsani and other similar Islamist apologists. One has to give the imam credit for showing up and having the courage of his convictions. Sadly, it is those very convictions which are the primary fuel for terrorism worldwide. Once we understand the relationship of political Islam and its various permutations from Wahhabism to salafism to deobandism to militant Islamism and its terror, we will be able to effectuate and progress a global anti-Islamist movement.

Debates like the one which occurred last week in Florida are the beginning of a “contest” of ideas which will herald either the victory of post-modern Islam over theocratic Islam or the converse. Global security and the continuation of American society as we know it hangs in the balance.

The debate was videotaped by both sides – ours (AIFD) and theirs (Imam Al-Darsani and the Islamic Center for Peace of Fort Myers, Florida). Our copy is in production and will not be available for a while. A Muslim member of Mr. Al-Darsani’s mosque, Greg George, has posted the entire debate online in six parts. He is apparently also a documentary producer and an unconventional (to say the least) candidate for Congress in his district. I refer you to his video links of the debate which he posted. But that is certainly no endorsement of Mr. George or Mr. Al-Darsani and his Islamic Center for Peace.

Watch the debate at these links at Google Video.

Watch the debate at these links at Google Video.

[Part 1 (Introductions and Al-Darsani Opening)]
[Part 2 (Jasser opening, Rebuttals]
[Part 3 Cross-Examinations]
[Part 4 Audience Q+A]
[Part 5 Audience Q+A and Al-Darsani Closing]
[Part 6 Jasser Closing- End of Debate]

As you watch the debate, know that this is one of the first of its kind publicly that I know of in the West between two devotional Muslims over the topic of political Islam and terror.

Human beings may often err as we engage in the confrontation of ideas. But to err is human. The only thing worse than an occasional misstep or misspeak in the public contest of ideas is the apathetic indifference and avoidance of any challenge to our own ideas. Such avoidance comes from individual weakness and the inability of many Islamists to muster the courage of their convictions. Those unwilling to withstand a public challenge to their ideas deserve neither the respect of their convictions nor the leadership of the communities which they purport to represent. In fact, their failure to do so points to a murkier Islamist plot of silencing discourse and stifling criticism to evade accountability, not only to Muslims, but to America as a whole.
In Part II of this column I will review my own perceptions of the obvious ideological demarcations made in the debate between the Islamist (Al-Darsani) and the anti-Islamist (Jasser).

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