-Caveat Lector-
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Mario SpyNews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2001 6:50 AM
Subject: [Spy News] Positive Signs that Islam is finally beginning to smell
the Gawah (Coffie)
Mario,
At last, Islam is beginning to deal with the most
critical question that has faced this faith in the
last millennium. If "All that the mullahs tell you
today is how to go back a millennium." then it is time
that the mullahs return to their original role within
the faith (scholarship) and get out of the business of
being "ministers" to their people.
Perhaps something good might just come out of the
current war after all - if the real causes of this
war, "poverty, dictatorship and religious anti-
modernism, each reinforcing the other" WITHIN the
Islamic world are finally addressed honestly (not just
the usual suspects - excuses about external
influences, historic wrongs, and the evil, grasping,
west). There is plenty of blame to go around in
modern Middle Eastern history, yet it is too easy to
do nothing when you have easy excuses as to why you
are poor - none of which reflect back on you (very
convenient). Perhaps attempting to live in the 14th
century while living in the 21st century might
actually have something to do with it as well?
Here's the gawah: "These countries can't survive
without opening up to global investment, the Internet,
modern education and emancipation of their women so
that they will not be competing with just half of
their populations." Perhaps, finally, these issues
will really begin to be addressed WITHIN Islam - as
opposed to having the same old excuses, get
perpetuated down to yet another hopeless generation,
by schools that graduate students with "religious
degrees" that have no relevance to life in the real
global community.
Regards,
Bruce W. Dobbins (Bd)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/16/opinion/16FRIE.html?todaysheadlines=&pagew
anted=print
November 16, 2001
Breaking the Circle
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
SLAMABAD, Pakistan
Although it was never his intention, Osama bin
Laden has triggered the most serious debate in years,
among Muslims, about Islam's ability to adapt to
modernity. In Arab states this debate is still muted.
But in Pakistan and other Muslim countries with a
relatively free press, writers are raising it openly
and bluntly. Nothing could be more important.
Here's why: Many Arab-Muslim states today share
the same rigid political structure. Think of it as
two islands: one island is occupied by the secular
autocratic regimes and the business class around them.
On the other island are the mullahs, imams and
religious authorities who dominate Islamic practice
and education, which is still based largely on
traditional Koranic interpretations that are not
embracing of modernity, pluralism or the equality of
women. The governing bargain is that the regimes get
to stay in power forever and the mullahs get a
monopoly on religious practice and education forever.
This bargain lasted all these years because oil
money, or U.S. or Soviet aid, enabled many Arab-Muslim
countries to survive without opening their economies
or modernizing their education systems. But as oil
revenues have declined and the population of young
people seeking jobs has exploded, this bargain can't
hold much longer. These countries can't survive
without opening up to global investment, the Internet,
modern education and emancipation of their women so
that they will not be competing with just half of
their populations. But the more they do that, the
more threatened the religious authorities feel.
Bin Laden's challenge was an attempt by the
extreme Islamists to break out of their island and
seize control of the secular state island. The states
responded by crushing or expelling the Islamists, but
without ever trying to reform the Islamic schools —
called madrasas — or the political conditions that
keep producing angry Islamist waves. So the deadly
circle that produced bin Ladenism — poverty,
dictatorship and religious anti- modernism, each
reinforcing the other — just gets perpetuated.
Some are now demanding the circle be broken.
Consider this remarkable open letter to bin Laden that
a Pakistani writer and businessman, Izzat Majeed,
wrote in last Friday's popular Pakistani daily The
Nation:
"We Muslims cannot keep blaming the West for all
our ills. . . . The embarrassment of wretchedness
among us is beyond repair. It is not just the
poverty, the illiteracy and the absence of any
commonly accepted social contract that define our
sense of wretchedness; it is, rather, the increasing
awareness among us that we have failed as a civil
society by not confronting the historical, social and
political demons within us. . . . Without a
reformation in the practice of Islam that makes it
move forward and not backward, there is no hope for us
Muslims anywhere. We have reduced Islam to the
organized hypocrisy of state-sponsored mullahism. For
more than a thousand years Islam has stood still
because the mullahs, who became de facto clergy
instead of genuine scholars, closed the door on
`ijtehad' [reinterpreting Islam in light of modernity]
and no one came forward with an evolving application
of the message of the Holy Quran. All that the
mullahs tell you today is how to go back a millennium.
We have not been able to evolve a dynamic practice to
bring Islam to the people in the language of their own
specific era. . . . Oxford and Cambridge were the
`madrasas' of Christendom in the 13th century. Look
where they are today — among the leading institutions
of education in the world. Where are our institutions
of learning?"
The Protestant Reformation, melding Christianity
with modernity, happened only when wealthy princes
came along ready to finance and protect the breakaway
reformers. But in the Muslim world today, the
wealthiest princes, like Saudi Arabia's, are funding
anti-modern schools from Pakistan to Bosnia, while the
dictators pay off the anti-modern mullahs (or use them
to whack the liberals) rather than reform them. This
keeps the soil for bin Ladenism ever fertile.
Addressing bin Laden, Mr. Majeed concluded, "The
last thing [Muslims] need is the growing darkness in
your caves. . . . Holy Prophet Muhammad, on returning
from a battle, said: `We return from little Jihad to
greater Jihad.' True Jihad today is not in the
hijacking of planes, but in the manufacturing of
them."
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