At this time in Middle East with the continuing hostilities, it is
rather telling that in Israeli Newspapers there are dissenting views
published and voiced against the policies of the government. Now turning
to News Papers in English of any other country in that region on finds
no such opinions expressed. I thought maybe this because most countries
outside Turkey are not free societies. So notice my surprise when tuning
into a CBS News broadcast from Israel where they interviewed Israeli
Citizens of the Muslim faith and they had nothing good to say about
Israel but more telling had nothing bad to say about any group which was
none Jewish, there were understandings mitigating circumstances, but
nothing bad .
I than happened upon a book review by a Canadian Muslim Author which is
entitled “The Trouble with Islam Today”. After reading this I began to
understand. I wondered why Baha’is and Moslems on this News group did
not tackle this issue, although our Moslem friends are quick to point
out to us the superiority of Islam as a force of Justice in the world.
Albert.
"The Trouble with Islam Today is an open letter from me, a Muslim voice
of reform, to concerned citizens worldwide -- Muslim and not. It's about
why my faith community needs to come to terms with the diversity of
ideas, beliefs and people in our universe, and why non-Muslims have a
pivotal role in helping us get there.
The themes I'm exploring with the utmost honesty include:
* the inferior treatment of women in Islam;
* the Jew-bashing that so many Muslims persistently engage in; and
* the continuing scourge of slavery in countries ruled by Islamic regimes.
I appreciate that every faith has its share of literalists. Christians
have their Evangelicals. Jews have the ultra-Orthodox. For God's sake,
even Buddhists have fundamentalists.
But what this book hammers home is that only in Islam is literalism
mainstream.Which means that when abuse happens under the banner of
Islam, most Muslims have no clue how to dissent, debate, revise or reform.
The Trouble with Islam Today shatters our silence. It shows Muslims how
we can re-discover Islam's lost tradition of independent thinking -- a
tradition known as "ijtihad" -- and re-discover it precisely to update
Islam for the 21st century. The opportunity to update is especially
available to Muslims in the West, because it's here that we enjoy
precious freedoms to think, express, challenge and be challenged without
fear of state reprisal. In that sense, the Islamic reformation begins in
the West.
It doesn't, however, end here. Not by a long shot. People throughout the
Islamic world need to know of their God-given right to think for
themselves. So The Trouble with Islam Today outlines a global campaign
to promote innovative approaches to Islam. I call this non-military
campaign "Operation Ijtihad." In turn, the West's support of this
campaign will fortify national security, making Operation Ijtihad a
priority for all of us who wish to live fatwa-free lives.
That's the book. The question now becomes: What possessed me to write
it? Once I tell you a little about me, I think you'll see where my own
passion comes from.
Why I'm struggling with Islam
As refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda, my family and I settled just outside
of Vancouver in 1972. I grew up attending two types of schools: the
secular public school of most North American kids and then, for several
hours at a stretch every Saturday, the Islamic religious school (madressa).
I couldn't quite reconcile the open and tolerant world of my public
school with the rigid and bigoted world inside my madressa. But I had
enough faith to ask questions -- plenty of them.
My first question for my madressa teacher was, "Why can't girls lead
prayer?" I graduated to asking more nuanced questions, such as, "If the
Koran came to Prophet Muhammad as a message of peace, why did he command
his army to kill an entire Jewish tribe?"
You can imagine that such questions irritated the hell out of my
madressa teacher, who routinely put down women and trashed the Jews. He
and I reached the ultimate impasse over yet another question: "Where," I
asked, "is the evidence of the 'Jewish conspiracy' against Islam? You
love to talk about it, but what's the proof?" That question, posed at
the age of 14, got me booted out of the madressa. Permanently.
At this point, I had a choice to make: I could walk away from my Muslim
faith and get on with being my "emancipated" North American self, or I
could give Islam another chance. Out of fairness to the faith, I gave
Islam another chance. And another. And another. For the past 20 years,
I've been educating myself about Islam. As a result, I've discovered a
progressive side of my religion -- in theory.
But I remain a hugely ambivalent Muslim because of what's happening "on
the ground" -- massive human rights violations, particularly against
women and religious minorities -- in the name of Allah.
Liberal Muslims say that what I'm describing isn't "true" Islam. But
these Muslims should own up to something: Prophet Muhammad himself said
that religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others. By that
standard, how Muslims actually behave is Islam, and to sweep that
reality under the rug of theory is to absolve ourselves of any
responsibility for our fellow human beings.
That's why I'm struggling. That's why I'm passionate. And that's why I
call myself a Muslim Refusenik.
A Muslim Refusenik is...
By Muslim Refusenik, I don't mean I refuse to be a Muslim. If I did, why
would I care enough to write a book that puts me on the front lines of
anger, hate, even death threats? By Muslim Refusenik, I mean I refuse to
join an army of automatons in the name of Allah. Many Muslims applaud
Jewish Refuseniks -- those soldiers who protest the military occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza. In the same spirit of conscientious dissent,
we've got to protest the ideological occupation of Muslim minds. An
occupation perpetrated by our own mullahs, imams and civic leaders.
In that spirit, I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question:
Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to
clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens,
defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the
world in the first place?
My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the
intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us
Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?
The Trouble with Islam Today is a wake-up call for honesty and change on
everybody's part. Through the book and this website, let's create
conversations where none existed before.”
-------------- Irshad Manji
http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/aboutirshad.html
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