Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are...

Excellent article in The Specator called "The myth of moderate Islam" by Patrick Sookhdeo. He makes the point that Islam has been violent for 1400 years, almost since its inception. He concludes that a reinterpretation of the religion for the 21st century is sorely needed, but it will be a long and painful process to bring about such a change. Registration is required to read the article (but www.bugmenot.com is on your side).

So the mantra ‘Islam is peace’ is almost 1,400 years out of date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace and nothing but peace. From 622 onwards it became increasingly aggressive, albeit with periods of peaceful co-existence, particularly in the colonial period, when the theology of war was not dominant. For today’s radical Muslims — just as for the mediaeval jurists who developed classical Islam — it would be truer to say ‘Islam is war’. One of the most radical Islamic groups in Britain, al-Ghurabaa, stated in the wake of the two London bombings, ‘Any Muslim that denies that terror is a part of Islam is kafir.’ A kafir is an unbeliever (i.e., a non-Muslim), a term of gross insult.

Muslims must stop this self-deception. They must with honesty recognise the violence that has existed in their history in the same way that Christians have had to do, for Christianity has a very dark past. Some Muslims have, with great courage, begun to do this.

Secondly, they must look at the reinterpretation of their texts, the Koran, hadith and Sharia, and the reformation of their faith. Mundir Badr Haloum has described this as ‘exorcising’ the terrorism from Islam. Mahmud Muhammad Taha argued for a distinction to be drawn between the Meccan and the Medinan sections of the Koran. He advocated a return to peaceable Meccan Islam, which he argued is applicable to today, whereas the bellicose Medinan teachings should be consigned to history. For taking this position he was tried for apostasy, found guilty and executed by the Sudanese government in 1985.

Such reform — the changing of certain fairly central theological principles — will not be easy to achieve. It will be a long, hard road for Islam to get its house in order so that it can co-exist peacefully with the rest of society in the 21st century.

******* UPDATE *******

The New York Sun had an article yesterday called "Muslim 'Moderates' And Terrorism" which is also a good read. It focuses on the Sharm el-Sheik attack.

The terrorists know that the men they kill, wound, and destroy economically have nothing to do with imperialism, occupation, Palestine, Iraq, colonialism, and all the other explanations that the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, finds to explain their crimes. They know who the hundreds they are going to kill are: people who sleep 10 (exactly!) to a room, with no bathroom, one toilet, and one little kitchen; people who define themselves as "good Muslims," go the mosques once a week, pray three times a day, and when they forget, says Khaled, it is because they work too much or it is too hot; people who after the terrorist attack tremble because they will have no work anymore, now that the tourist season is destroyed and this will make them lose their $100 a month wage in the best cases for a family of five, six, 10 children.

These guys are the typical "moderate Muslim" that the holy rage of the jihadists destroys with fury, the one infected by the contact with the West and also the one that in our Western dreams and in many European and American experts' analyses should suddenly rise against the extreme Islam, their enemy.

So, let's test this thesis and ask: "Do they hate terrorists?" The answer is "Yes, very much so," and they really do, - they close their fists and watch in rage and repeat to me that they deeply hope that Mr. Mubarak will catch them all, will put them in prison, will kill them. Are they ready to fight them? Yes, at every level, with their hands, if requested, and with demonstrations that actually, while I'm in Sharm, suddenly appear in the hot streets and just in front of the cameras of the international press: "Down with terrorism," "We are against terrorism"...

But then, if it's so, why can the great moderate Muslim world not really fight their own enemy? They themselves give me the answers: "Bin Laden? The Muslim Brotherhood? Certainly the terrorist attacks are not their work, no! This is a lie. A Muslim could never do this. And if they say they do it in the name of Islam, they are not Islamic; or, most likely, this shows, like the television says, that someone uses the name of Islam just to hide the real perpetrators."