These are notes taken (and comments occasionally added) by a student (albeit an aging one). I am not a scholar of this complex subject. But if you find these notes of use, feel free to browse.
I stumbled across this in either Chapters or Indigo in Toronto -- it's an absolutely wonderful and gutsy book and I wholeheartedly recommend it to each of you -- gutsy because she receives lots of hate mail (but lots of support too) and the occasional death threat for her views.
Her website is www.muslim-refusenik.com
Tarek Fatah (one of the founders of the Muslim Canadian Congress) is against this book since he says she wrongly argues Muslim complicity in the holocaust (see his comments below) [RJA comment: but I think his objections are overstated when one looks at the book as a whole]
"what's our excuse for reading the Koran literally when it's so contradictory and ambiguous?" (p.2) [RJA comment: hear! hear!]
"we've got to end Islam's totalitarianism, particularly the gross human rights violations against women and religious minorities"
she's a lesbian -- that raises the question of the Qur'an's stance against homosexuality
"trying to answer how I reconcile my Muslim faith with the barbaric lashing of a rape victim" (p.39)
"Far from being perfect, the Koran is so profoundly at war with itself that Muslims who 'live by the book' have no choice but to choose what to emphasize and what to downplay." (p.40) -- [RJA comment: as a confused student, I certainly agree]
"At this stage, reform isn't about telling ordinary Muslims what not to think, but about giving Islam's one billion devotees permission to think. Since the Koran is a bundle of contradictions, at least when it comes to women, we have every reason to think." (p.40)
"We have to own up to the fact that the Koran's message is all over the bloody map. Compassion and contempt exist side by side. Look at its take on women. Hopeful and hateful verses stand only lines away from each other. So, too, with religious diversity. There's no single-thrust in this so-called perfect, indisputable, and straightforward text. The Koran's perfection is, ultimately, suspect." (p.49-50) -- [RJA comment: again as a confused student, I'm inclined to agree]
she talks about Muslim Spain and the Muslim governor of Seville getting help from the iron-fisted Moroccan Muslims to fight off Alphonso, the menacing Christian king at Castile -- but from the Moroccans got a lot of rampage for theological purity -- "They despised Jews, deplored women, abhorred debate, and assume a maniacal missionary position"
"You know what I find instructive about this whole episode? That Muslim Spain didn't crumble because of ravenous Christians. Oh, sure, Christians scooped up the pieces, but the brutes who brought down Muslim Spain were Muslims. And you know what this suggests to me? That Muslims were imposing martial law and bludgeoning each other's freedoms before European colonialism took off. My point is, our problems didn't start with dastardly Crusaders. Our problems started with us." (p.63)
goes on at great length about the closing of ijtihad (rational thinking) -- (p.65) -- some further notes on this subject are here
she asks: "Is Islam the uber-oppressor of creativity, dynamism, and democracy?" (p.144)
"Listen closely to Saudi Arabia's King Fahd. The 'democratic system prevalent in the world is not appropriate in this region,' he says. 'The election system has no place in the Islamic creed' since Islam views the leader as a 'shepherd' who's responsible for 'his flock'. Not only does the king equate Muslims to sheep, but he seamlessly suggests that what's bad for desert Arabia - the 'region' - must be bad for Islam - the 'creed'. You might protest, along with me, that he's wrong to make that leap. Clearly, though, Muslims aren't protesting it en masse. . . . Is colonization by desert Arabia the problem that we need help to reform?" (pp.145-146)
"Why should Islam be so hard to extricate from local customs - tribal customs - if there wasn't something profoundly tribal aboutthe religion to begin with? Every religion has its insular types, its tribes of the sould and mind. What must be unshrouded about Islam is its desert strain of tribalism, which takes the act of closing ranks to a crushing level." (p.152)
"The crucial equilibrium between past and future steadily degenerated into a defensive preoccupation with the past - and, in particular, into a fixatioon on the founding moment. I call it foundamentalism. Foundamentalism has fed severaltragedies. The clergy, Islam's arrivistes, became Islam's de facto gatekeepers. With the gates of ijtihad -- independent thought -- closing by the twelfth century, muftis were already gaining the power to patrol the truth." (p.158)
"As guardians of the founding moment, clerics went back to the original 'perfect' texts, the Koran and the hadiths, for proof that it's forbidden to seek any additional knowledge." (p.159)
mentions that Shias in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia are considered to be a Jewish conspiracy (p.165)
"fifteen female students died and dozens sustained injuried when religious police forced the girls back into the burning building to retrieve their abayas, which literally became body sacks" (p.167)
says Koran only requires Prophet Muhammad's wives to wear veils [RJA comment: but Dawood translation seems to say all must]
"The time has come to take a hint from Kemal Ataturk, the architect of modern Turkey. In 1925 he proclaimed, 'I flatly refuse to believe that today, in the luminous presence of science, knowledge and civilization in all aspects, there exist . . . men so primitive as to seek their material and moral well-being from the guidance of one or another sheikh.' Ataturk proved himself a visionary precisely by jettisoning any association with Islam's founding moment. He didn't play the purity game because it can prodcue only one winner: the bearded guy who reduces everything to what's already been said, seen, and tried. For any society to grow, Ataturk knew, it has to hold out the possibility of many winners in many fields. His snub of the founding moment has produced a democracy in Turkey." (pp.170-171)
says Turkey is the Muslim world's most mature democracy
expresses some optimism: "I hereby cease to be a refusenik. Sign me up for Operation Ijtihad." (p.172)
Back to Top"It mght appear ridiculous that someone who's not a theologian, a politician, or a diplomat (in any sense of the word) has the chutzpah to comment on what could be done to reform Islam. On occasion, I've felt presumptuous just thinking about it - but only on occasion. I don't care to 'know my place.' Change has to come from somewhere. Why not from a young Muslim woman who's got no investment, emotional or otherwise, in defending the status quo?" (p.173)
"Here's what I'd picked up so far. Muslims exhibit a knack for degrading women and religious minorities. Could both of these troubles be tackled at the same time? I'd teased out enough strands of hope from the Koran, as well as from history, to believe in the possibility of reform. For instance. Muslims have a centuries-old love affair with commerce, which piqued my interest for two reasons. First, trade has always helped grease the wheels of good relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Second, there's no prohibition in the Koran against women becoming business-people. My tentative conclusion: God-conscious, female-fueled capitalism might be the way to start Islam's liberal reformation." (pp.173-174)
[about women] "You're your own person, acting in your own name, expressing your own thoughts and communicating them in your own voice. You have dignity. And the beauty is, that's what Prophet Muhammad wanted all along for Muslims - that we transcend tribe, with its inward-looking, contagiously neurotic impulses; the very impulses that made seventh-century Arabia a wasteleand of inequity, enmity, and violence. By liberating Muslim women's entrepreneurial talents, we in the twenty-first century can help transform honor into dignity and thereby reform how Islam is preacticed." (p.175)
talks about Grameen Bank ('village bank') started by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist -- bank loans tiny amounts of money to people whom the standard lendes consider untouchable -- especially the landless, who are mostly women -- 31 million people, 3/4 of them women and 2/3 classified as the 'pooreset of the poor' have received micro-loans in more than 40 countries with the Grameen Bank opened -- it has financed everything from cosmetics and candles to bread, umbrellas, mosquito nets, even mobile phones -- and the loan repayment rate? - 98%, thanks in large part to the peer pressure that exists in villages to keep the community's reputation clean -- That's a healthier way to channel tribal impulses than what most Muslim women are used to -- contrast that repayment rate to the 10% recovery boasted by the Bangladesh Industrial Development Bank, which serves only people with property -- No contest (pp.177-178)
in the mid-1980s Clinton recruited Yunus to create the Grameen-like Good Faith Fund for people of Pine Bluffs, Arkansas
what the printing press did for the Protestant reformation - relax the stranglehold on knowledge - indie TV channels can do for Islam (p.185)
"Will we move past the superstition that we can't question the Koran? By openly asking where its verses come from, why they're contradictory, and how they can be differently interpreted, we're not violating anything more than tribal totalitarianism." (p.236)
Back to Top"Dear Irshad, many people insist that that examination of the Koran must be done from the original; that there are inherent problems with using translations. How do you respond?" - Kevin
Irshad replies: It's a common argument. But there are inherent problems with relying on Arabic versions of the Koran as well. Arabic is a richly symbolic language in which one word, pronounced with a slightly different inflection, can have the exact opposite meaning of what it started with - thereby leading to ambiguous and wholly imperfect interpretations. "Haram" can be pronounced in ways that mean either "forbidden" or "sacred". Not exactly a subtle shift in meaning! The point is, Arabic versions of the Koran are suspect, too. Now add the possible mistranslation of the word for "virgins," and Prophet Muhammad's acceptance, then rejection, of some "satanic" verses, and the political motives behind compiling the Koran, and you see why I believe there's both room and reason to question the Koran in Arabic.
Kevin, don't get me wrong: I'm not looking for perfection. Quite the opposite. I welcome the Koran's imperfections, contradictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities. I would welcome even more the day that a critical mass of my fellow Muslims acknowledges these realities. Maybe then we'll be able to revive ijtihad, Islam's lost tradition of independent thinking.
Back to TopDon't paint Muslim people as Nazis
By TAREK FATAH
It is not often that a person thanked in the acknowledgement of a book turns around and announces publicly, "Thanks, but no thanks." And yet this is precisely what I am about to do in the case of Irshad Manji, the author of the newly released book The Trouble with Islam.
My reason? To assuage the souls of the thousands of Muslims from places as diverse and Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, India, Pakistan and, yes, even Palestine, who laid down their lives in the Second World War in battles from Stalingrad, which broken Hitler's back, to North Africa, where we helped send Hitler's Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, scurrying back to his Berlin den.
Despite the sacrifices of these men, Ms. Manji's book refers to the "Muslim complicity in the Holocaust." I froze as I read this serious accusation. Could I have missed something when I sat at the feet of Muslim veterans of battles in Crete, Burma, Egypt, and Italy, and heard their horror stories? In one fragment of a sentence, Ms. Manji places all these warriors on the wrong side of the battleground.
Has Ms. Manji ever heard of the Palestine Regiment, a unit in which Jew and Muslim fought side-by-side against Hitler's Afrika Korps in Libya? In the cemeteries of El-Alamein lie the dead Muslims, the Mohammeds, the Alis and the Ismails who gave their lives so that Nazism could be defeated. The cemeteries of Stalingrad bear the names of the young Central Asian Muslims who lie buried, unable to refute the falsehoods being spread by fast-food historians. And what about the hundreds of thousands of Indian Muslims who fought shoulder-to-shoulder with our own Canadians in Italy and France?
So how did Ms. Manji come up with her charge? She bases it on one Haj Amin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who, as she writes, argued against Jewish refugees coming to Palestine and "wound up as Hitler's special guest in Berlin, presiding over the unveiling of the Islamic Central Institute in December 1942." She reasons that because one Muslim Mufti accepted the hospitality of Hitler, after being expelled from Palestine by the British colonial authorities, all we 1.2 billion Muslims, a quarter of humanity, deserve to be accused of complicity in the Holocaust.
And what about other prominent Palestinians, such as Hazim Khalidi, a London School of Economics grad who volunteered to serve in the Indian army's Palestine Battalion? Or perhaps Ms. Manji may like to visit the cemetery in Mississauga where Sgt. Hannah Hazineh lies buried. This decorated Palestinian veteran of the Second World War was wounded in battle at El-Alamien while fighting Germans.
There's no doubt that Haj Amin was an influential Muslim cleric in Jerusalem. But so were countless Catholic and Protestant clergy in Europe who supported Hitler, or looked the other way while their Jewish neighbours were being dragged off. Should we talk of Christian complicity in the Holocaust? Or, like the German parliamentarian who talked of a Jewish complicity in the Bolshevik uprising, allow the actions of a few to stain an entire people?
Ms. Manji says her book is addressed to fellow Muslims. Had it been written in good faith, I would have understood her reasoning, even if I did not agree with her. However, her book is not addressed to Muslims; it is aimed at making Muslim-haters feel secure in their thinking. And so, I politely tell Ms. Manji: Thank you for thanking my wife Nargis and me for a "spirited discussion" that landed you "important insights." But we'd appreciate any mention of us being removed from future editions.
Tarek Fatah is host of the weekly Vision TV show The Muslim Chronicle and a founding member of the Muslim Canadian Congress.
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