As for the first article (1), please refer to my Japanese translation (http://www.danielpipes.org/14579/). As for the first article (2), please refer to (http://www.danielpipes.org/1841/stealth-islamist-khaled-abou-el-fadl). Gradually, everything will become much clearer. I think the‘Common Ground’is almost meaningless. Just talking. Time wasting. (Lily)
1.WorldWide Religious News (http://wwrn.org)
(1) Muslims name 37 groups that fuel Islamophobia
by Katherine Burgess ("The Washington Post," September 19, 2013)
WASHINGTON — Groups with a mission to spread prejudice and hatred against Muslims are coordinated and well financed, according to a report released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights group.
The report, titled “Legislating Fear: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States,” was released Thursday (Sept. 19), and it names 37 individuals and institutions that “were at the center of promoting Islamophobia in America” during 2011-2012.
The report, which found that incidents of hatred against Muslims had decreased slightly, includes a list of 32 other groups that promote Islamophobic themes as well as a “best list” of organizations that have sought to combat Islamophobia.
“American Muslims face discrimination every day,” said Nihad Awad, national executive director of CAIR. “Islamophobia is a threat to the safety of American Muslims.”
In 2012, CAIR rated Islamophobia as a 5.9 on a scale of one to 10, with one representing an America free of Islamophobia and 10 being the worst possible situation for Muslims. In 2010, CAIR rated the state of Islamophobia in America as a 6.4.
The nonprofit organizations whose purpose was to besmirch Islam made more than $119 million in revenue during 2011-2012, the report states.
Awad said these organizations have made “a lucrative profession out of targeting a religious community.” Many of the institutions share founders and funding.
During the report’s two-year period, 78 bills “designed to vilify Islamic religious practices” were introduced in 29 states and Congress. Of these bills, 62 contained language from legislation created by David Yerushalmi of the American Freedom Law Center, one of the institutions listed as part of the “inner core.”
Awad said the 37 organizations have had a “devastating effect” on how Muslims are viewed in the United States, resulting in the increase of Islamophobic rhetoric and behavior.
“We will continue to be attacked by these individuals and institutions,” Awad said. “Our purpose in publishing this information is to empower the people who are concerned about Islamophobia.”
According to a 2011 study by the Public Religion Research Institute, 30 percent of the American public believe American Muslims want to establish Shariah law in the United States.
Robert Muise, co-founder and senior counsel at the American Freedom Law Center, called CAIR’s objectives in releasing the report “nefarious,” saying the civil rights organization is a “Muslim Brotherhood front group.”
“CAIR wants to silence speech that sheds light on its illicit objectives by trying to marginalize that speech,” said Muise. “By being named in the report, it is evident that the American Freedom Law Center is having an impact on CAIR’s operations, which is good for America and all freedom-loving Americans.”
Nonie Darwish, founder of Former Muslims United, another group named to the list, said she took issue with the wording of the report.
“The word ‘phobia’ refers to people who are afraid without reason,” Darwish said. “I would be crazy if I were not afraid of Islam. I have lots of fear of Islam, and rightfully so. Islam is brutal. Islamic law is brutal.”
Ten of the groups from the “Islamophobia Network’s inner core” are:
・ACT! for America
・American Freedom Defense Initiative
・American Freedom Law Center
・Atlas Shrugs
・Center for Security Policy
・David Horowitz Freedom Center
・Investigative Project on Terrorism
・Jihad Watch
・Middle East Forum
・The Clarion Fund (now called The Clarion Project)
(2)Dominating religion in Egypt's pseudo-secular state
by Khaled Abou El Fadl ("Australian Broadcasting Company," September 15, 2013)
Recently, Egypt's ruling junta made a decision to withdraw the licenses granted to well over fifty thousand mosques. In a move that is unprecedented in Islamic history, hundreds of thousands of imams have been banned from leading religious services, and only clerics who, not only graduated from al-Azhar Seminary, but are also employees of the Ministry of Religious Endowments (Ministry of Awqaf) will be permitted to lead services in Egypt.
I do not believe that commentators fully understand the profound implications of this decision. It is no exaggeration to say that if the Egyptian government actually implements this decision, it will change the course of history in Egypt, and indeed the trajectory of modern Islamic history.
The immediate reason that the military junta decided to cancel the permits issued to what are typically small-sized mosques known as zawaya (pl.) or zawiyah (sing.) is that these underfunded, grossly overcrowded mosques have played an increasingly important role since the revolution, and have been overwhelmingly opposed to the military coup. But in reality, since the mid-1970s, the zawaya have played an active role as dynamic forums for social and political mobilization in financially disadvantaged communities and among marginalized low-income areas all over Egypt.
What distinguishes this move from the numerous other oppressive and blatantly unlawful manoeuvres El Sisi and his generals have undertaken since their coup?
The generals and the Egyptian media claim that this was a long needed measure to insure that sermons delivered in the many centuries-old mosques of Egypt meet basic levels of competence and proficiency in the Islamic religious sciences. Moreover, they claim that these zawaya mosques have become a breeding ground for fanatic and extremist discourses that incite and excite ill-educated parishioners. According to the El Sisi apologists, this was a measure that should have been taken a long time ago, but finally, El Sisi had the sheer courage to get the mission accomplished.
It is true that Mubarak's regime had long considered this measure, but never dared to go this far. And decades ago, Nasser shut down a thousand mosques that resisted the socialist government's order of nationalization.
However, to appreciate El Sisi's audacious, even insolent step, we need to consider some of the necessary background. For centuries, mosques in Egypt were funded through a complex matrix of private endowments known as the awqaf (sing. waqf). The awqaf performed a variety of social functions including: funding schools like al-Azhar, orphanages, water works and even animal shelters. Islamic law added layers of complexity by developing a set of rules as to the consecration of mosques, the inalienability of places of worship and, most importantly, the assumption that once land is consecrated as a mosque it cannot be dedicated to any other purpose.
During the Nasser era, all the Muslim religious endowments were nationalized and placed under the control of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. This made all mosques and Muslim religious institutions, such as al-Azhar Seminary, state owned property. The idea of secularism in Egypt was not a separation between church and state, but a complete dominion by the secular state over all religious institutions. In this capacity, the rentier state is able to control, manipulate and leverage religion to maintain a fundamentally unjust and exploitative power structure.
Interestingly, the Coptic religious endowments remained under the control of the Coptic Church, but the government did not allow for the construction of churches or synagogues without the prior approval of the state. While the Coptic Church could elect its own pope, the consecutive military governments of Egypt insisted on appointing the Shaykh of al-Azhar, the Mufti of the Egyptian State and the Minister of Endowments.
Throughout the 1970s and continuing to the present day, several problems (which I discuss below), led to an increasingly prominent role for the zawiyah mosques in the cultural and socio-political lives of Egyptians.
The secular state in Egypt consistently tried to leverage al-Azhar and its graduates as a legitimating sword used aggressively to justify certain policies, such as the Camp David Accords and the privatization of the public economic sector. At the same time, the state used al-Azhar as a defensive shield legitimating reactionary and conservative power dynamics, such as patriarchy and the monopolization of wealth in the hands of Egypt's new class of super-pashas.
To these ends, the secular state strictly controlled the intellectual activity and curriculum at al-Azhar. Meanwhile, economic and political corruption became rampant in religious institutions, such as al-Azhar and various Sufi guilds. But nothing compares to the infamous level of corruption that continues to plague the Ministry of Religious Endowments.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many of the medieval places of worship in Egypt fell into hopeless disrepair. At the same time, the Ministry of Awqaf did not meet the ever-growing demand for new mosques, and even worse, graduates from al-Azhar failed to meet the demand for imams. Since the 1970s, most of the qualified graduates of al-Azhar have left to work in the Gulf countries, Algeria, or other Muslim countries, while the remaining graduates have largely failed to meet even the minimal level of competency in memorizing and reciting the Qur'an.
Moreover, especially in the past two decades, the Ministry of Awqaf issued ready-made sermons to be delivered by clergy during Friday services. Before very long, all the Friday sermons delivered in the mosques directly owned by the Ministry of Awqaf sounded tediously the same. It is difficult to describe the mind-numbing repetitiveness, dogmatism, irrelevance and sheer monotony of the ten or so sermons authored by the institutions of the state, and regurgitated by uninspired, lethargic and subdued Azhari clergy in one mosque after another across the country.
This sombre, dreary reality became the fertile grounds for the spread of the zawiyah mosque. Without exception, all zawiyah mosques have been built and maintained by private funds and donations. Some are as big as full-sized mosques built on private property, while most are the size of a conference hall, typically found at the street-level floor of residential buildings, and or in the basement of businesses or apartment complexes. Usually, after such structures are designated as mosques, a license is obtained from the Ministry of Awqaf, but the mosque remains private property.
Imams hired to lead prayers and give sermons in these privately-owned mosques are usually paid from donations raised by the congregation itself. In most cases, the imams are either retired Azhari shaykhs, unemployed university graduates from one of the professional schools, such as engineering, or young men who have attended one or two years of instruction in one of the privately-owned Qur'an institutes that have sprouted all over Egypt. After passing an examination in Qur'anic recitation and memorization, these imams are issued a license, and although not under the supervision of al-Azhar, they become community-supported religious leaders.
The zawiyah mosques posed a problem on two fronts: first, they often did become breeding grounds for extremist discourses and meeting points for fundamentalist groups; second, because of their small size, worshippers would often end up overflowing to the outside of the mosques, praying on street pavements and, at times, blocking street traffic.
Since the 25 January revolution, the zawiyah mosques have played an increasingly politicized role that contrasts sharply with the docile role played by the Azhari mosques. Critically, these mosques and their podiums constituted the only legitimate competition to the monopoly of state-sponsored religion in the crippled civil society of Egypt. By simply cancelling the licenses given to the imams and closing down thousands of zawaya mosques, the Egyptian government is forcing all religious discourse that is not under the formal tutelage of the government to go underground, and to grow more radicalized and polarized.
But even more troublesome is that the closure of these mosques once again demonstrates that Egypt will remain locked between the polarity of an authoritarian pseudo-secularism and an authoritarian pseudo-Islamism. Most of Egypt's secular intelligentsia, who have now become didactic apologists for the military, enthusiastically support the closure decision. In doing so, they once again demonstrate that the secularism of Arab countries such as Egypt has practically nothing to do with the post-enlightenment European tradition of toleration and religious freedom.
The patronizing secularism of Egypt's intellectuals and their military allies has little to do with the idea that a civil government should not presume to know God's will, and then claim to embody that will in its policies. It also has little to do with the state guarding the principle of freedom of religious belief and practice, including the right of religious groups to organize, assemble and participate fully in civil society.
Egyptian secularism is not about the separation of church and state. It is most decisively about the state dominating, controlling and leveraging religion. In effect, the state acts to form a church for the state, and then insures that this church has an uncontested monopoly over the voice of religion in society. Ultimately, the state defines the space that God may occupy and also defines the character that this God is allowed to have, and then allows this God a single voice, which invariably ends up supporting the state as the only real church within society.
We all recall the image of El Sisi bringing an end to Egypt's tragically short-lived democratic experience accompanied by the representatives of al-Azhar, the Coptic Church and the Wahhabi Nour Party. Soon El Sisi realized that there is a redundancy between al-Azhar and the Nour party because both are firmly in the comfortable control of Saudi Islam. In other words, even if the Nour party is suppressed, Saudi Arabia will not be strongly opposed because al-Azhar and the dependence of its administrators on lucrative deals with Gulf countries will insure that al-Azhar will never become a serious contender in civil society.
I wish that the smug pseudo-secularists in Egypt, and their short-sighted allies in the Pentagon, White House and State Department, would think seriously about the fact that the only secularism a country like Egypt has ever known is an autocracy that goes to great lengths to control and dominate the voice of God. God has one function in Egypt and that is to bless the privileges of the privileged, and to overlook the excesses of the self-indulgent.
I believe that we will witness in the not-too-distant future increasingly violent clashes between religious groups that feel secularism is hypocritically intolerant and unprincipled, and the old style Arab elite that thinks secularism means that religion must always protect and guard the status quo. I fear that, eventually, a vicious and bloody revolution will bring about an Iranian-style theocracy in Egypt. It is all too often forgotten that the CIA coup of the democratically elected Musaddiq government in Iran led to the Iranian revolution twenty years later.
・Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
2.Union of Catholic Asian News(http://www.ucanews.com)
Waiting for an Islamic reformation Will the Muslim world follow the same historical arc as the West?, 29 July 2014
by Fr Michael Kelly, Bangkok International
The eyes of many are focused on the unspeakable brutality and pointlessness of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. But alongside this event, minds and hearts across the world are assailed daily by barbarism across the Middle East and in different parts of Asia.
It's the paradox of liberalism that pluralistic secular democracies such as in Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and other parts of Asia afford citizens far greater freedoms than some of its citizens would be ready to concede if they were in charge.
Authorities in those countries readily approve the right of Muslims to build mosques, get government subsidies for their schools and dress as they wish. Not so for Christians in parts of the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, Iran and a dozen other countries where churches are outlawed and Christians are persecuted, even condemned to death if they convert from Islam. In states where the mullahs govern and sharia law prevails, there is no margin for the concessions freely granted in secular, pluralistic democracies.
Some societies in Asia and elsewhere have received Muslims as workers or refugees. But these countries also have Islamic citizens who would welcome the day that sharia law trumps the hard won victory of an independent judiciary, the rule of law and the weighty tradition of the secular, democratic processes.
The flashpoint that shows all the signs of a new- and world-endangering totalitarianism is the collapse underway in Iraq.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the greatest dislocation is occurring in Iraq where Sunni forces operating for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) are cutting a swathe through northern Iraq, adding on a daily basis to the 1.2 million internally displaced people there, including 500,000 displaced coming from one province alone since January. ISIS forces are targeting Christians in particular, with Christians fleeing parts of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, staying outside UNHCR camps and general facilities like schools and municipal buildings. Churches and monasteries are bombed by the Sunni insurgents of ISIS, along with religious shrines of their Muslim opponents, the Shia.
These expulsions are occurring in parts of Syria and Iraq where there have been Christian communities for more than one and a half millennia. But the sharp rise in brutal intolerance doesn't stop in the Middle East. Add to the Iraq catastrophe the pointless war between the Palestinians and the Israelis, violent tactics of the Chinese military toward large Christian communities around the city of Wenzhou and elsewhere and the abusive treatment of Rohingya Muslims by Buddhists in Myanmar all suggest that humanity is in the midst of a powerful outbreak of violent intolerance not seen since the days of carnage in Rwanda 20 years ago.
What are we to make of this mayhem? Reactions across the world vary from the impotent outrage to the nonchalance of secularists who just murmur, “I told you so. Religion brings nothing but trouble”.
But these reactions -- often felt and uttered by Europeans and Americans -- need to keep in mind that for many hundreds of years, Europeans indulged in such exercises in intolerance and brutality, costing countless millions of lives. The mere mention of the wars of religion (16th to 17th centuries) that followed the Protestant Reformation, and proved to be the most costly in history for the human lives it claimed relative to the population of Europe at the time, should give anyone from the West pause before denigrating Muslims.
The whole sorry history of the two world wars of the 20th century is testimony to how little we humans learn from our experience. And this apparently never ending catastrophe begs the question of how we humans can live together peacefully, tolerating our differences and each other's peculiarities? While the West has little to boast about in its record, there is something that Europe, the US, Australia and all countries described as secular states have in common. And the course of its development is the subject of one of the most significant books of the last decade - A Secular Age, by the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor.
A monumental work of almost 800 pages, Taylor's thesis is rather simple: where the marriage of altar and throne kept Western society relatively well regulated during the reign of Christendom, the Protestant Reformation broke the political consensus and the controlling devices holding Europe together; it broke up and Europeans behaved badly; eventually they came to recognize that civilized life meant self-control, the rule of law and the resolution of disputes in a rational way was the only way for humanity to thrive. As Europe unraveled, the Church lost its role as the moral regulator, kings and queens lost their all-controlling rule by divine right, the voice of democratic change became heard through parliaments and assemblies and the function of an independent judiciary was progressively defined.
Islam had its reformation very soon after the prophet's death when the basic division between Shias and Sunnis occurred. But there has never been any equivalent of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution or the US Declaration of Independence that shaped what rationally operating Western political states inherited.
What there has been over the last century is the growing oil wealth of many Islamic states able to finance the opportunism of fanatics along with poor diplomacy by Western states beginning with the way the Middle East was divided up and then dealt with. Many will be the calls for external intervention to bring hordes of marauding militias to heel. Many will be the expressions of despair over the international community's impotence before this and other offences to our shared humanity and sense of what civilized humanity requires.
Europe and the US became civilized, started to develop and respect the rule of law and saw better ways of resolving disputes than killing opponents the hard way.
Let's hope that Islam can learn the same lesson fast, separate religion and law, learn how intellectually unsustainable and practically destructive it is to read a literal truth into a 1,500-year-old document (Qu'ran) and join the post-modern world. If the Islamic world can learn the lesson, the world will be a better place.
・Jesuit Fr Michael Kelly is executive director of ucanews.com.
3.Common Ground News(http://www.commongroundnews.org)
Why 72 per cent of Indonesians want sharia, 11 June 2013
by Jennie S. Bev
Santa Clara, California – A Pew Research Center’s report titled The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society published last month caused a stir in Indonesian media as it concluded that 72 per cent of Muslim Indonesians, including women, prefer the implementation of sharia. The survey included 1,880 Indonesians in 19 provinces.
So, what does the survey indicate?
The fact that a high percentage of Indonesians welcomed the implementation of sharia should not be alarming, considering the semantic differences in the use of the term sharia among Indonesians. These Pew survey results should not be taken as a sign of Indonesian society’s approval for what is often stereotyped as a legal system that enforces harsh corporal punishment, a strict Islamic dress code and the public classification of non-Muslims.
Islam as a religion, a legal system, a culture and a lifestyle means many things to many people. One person’s definition of sharia is not identical to another’s, even amongst scholars and religious leaders.
The term sharia is often associated with equality and social justice, as Amaney Jamal, special adviser for Pew Research from Princeton University clarifies. Words mean different things to different people. Sharia in Arabic means “path” or “way.” It is similar to tao in Chinese, which also means “path” or “way.” However, contemporary use of the term sharia has been associated with Islamic law, and to permission (halal) and prohibition (haram). Another meaning of sharia is related to social justice and fairness among those who have lost faith in the government and institutions.
In short, the Pew Research report must be read with this caveat.
Sharia in Indonesia is seen through a particular lens. For example, in a scenario with strict interpretations of Islamic legal principles, non-Muslims are viewed as second class citizens. Yet such classifications don’t occur in Indonesia and violate fundamentals of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, of which Indonesia is a signatory.
Some might point to Aceh, a special territory of Indonesia, as an example of what Indonesians understand as sharia, since it has adopted Islamic legal principles requiring women to wear a headscarf in addition to prohibiting alcohol and gambling and enforcing zakat (an Islamic requirement to give 2.5 per cent of one’s income to those in need). While non-Muslims in Aceh aren’t subject to Islamic legal principles, some individuals feel that they are being pressured to adhere to these principles. However, Aceh’s unique views do not match the practices in the rest of the country, which is more syncretic and has elected not to follow Aceh’s model.
According to Asghar Ali Engineer, an Indian scholar of Islam, certain classifications are contextual and thus are no longer valid in a modern context. In a 2010 article distributed by the Common Ground News Service he referred specifically to the example of slavery which was eventually outlawed in the Qur’an, noting also that concepts of democracy and citizenship today had no equivalent in the Qur’an. By extension, his argument suggests that certain concepts understood to be part of sharia had their time and place are no longer relevant in the contemporary context. His viewpoint is echoed by many Islamic scholars and religious leaders from around the world.
Boston University professor Robert Hefner stated in the 2011 publication of Sharia Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World (Indiana University Press) that among Indonesian Muslims, the support for both sharia and democracy is high. The Pew Research survey also found that 61 per cent of Indonesian Muslims prefer democracy over authoritarianism. Thus, sharia in the meaning of a draconian Islamic law enforced under an authoritarian regime is unlikely to occur. It makes more sense for sharia to mean a “fair and just society” within a democracy.
As a sovereign country that has adopted the UN Declaration of Human Rights and is currently considered a rising star among the G20, it would be unthinkable for it to turn into an authoritarian theocracy.
More people should be encouraged to study the compassionate side of Islam. Peace and compassion are required to establish a fair and just society, and were likely the impetus for the high percentage of Indonesian Muslims who supported sharia in this poll.
・Jennie S. Bev is an author and a columnist. She writes for “The Global Viewpoint” in Forbes Indonesia and the op-ed section of The Jakarta Post. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
・Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 11 June 2013,www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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