Tag Archives: Islam

Are the anti-jihadists more dangerous than the jihadists?

WASHINGTON—Hours before Anders Behring Breivik began his dual attack in Norway on July 22, killing 77 people, he posted a 1,500-page manifesto on the web detailing his plan and his motives.

His hatred cast a wide net—from liberal political parties he called “cultural Marxists” to feminists and multiculturalists.

But no group received more ire than Muslims. According to Breivik, his hours-long rampage, in which he systematically massacred dozens of people, would precipitate a decades-long crusade culminating in the execution and expulsion of Muslims from Europe.

Breivik backed his ideology with numerous quotes from American anti-Islam and Tea Party activists, which he praised as the “the first physical, political manifestation which [sic] indicates there is a great storm coming.”

He also encouraged unity between right-wing groups internationally, and with the recent re-emergence of right-wing militias and anti-Islamic groups in the U.S., the threat of a domestic terrorism incident may be much closer than Scandinavia, say terrorism experts both in and out of the government.

In the Spring 2011 issue of  “Year in Hate,” Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of right-wing extremist and hate groups in the United States shot above 1,000 for the first time since they began tracking them more than 30 years ago. It also reported that anti-government and militia groups have increased five-fold since the election of the nation’s first black president. Although the prevalence of these groups always surges during a Democratic presidency, the sharpness of this increase is without precedent, the report said.

At the same time, the U.S. has seen a rise in “anti-sharia” groups like Jihad Watch and Society for National Existence, which claim that Muslims in the U.S. are attempting to institute a brutal law enforcement code that would include lashing and stoning.

Asifa Quraishi, assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin and a comparative Islamic and U.S. constitutional law expert, said these groups’ inaccuracies start at the very definition of sharia.

“Sharia means ‘the path’ and is the way God asks Muslims to live in the world. The specific details of how to do that are not always answered in the Quran or other writings,” she said.

The human interpretation of sharia is called fiqh—or understanding—of which there are six main schools of thought that vary in specifics.

“Much of it is quite compatible with the rule of law in the U.S., like property rights, rules of inheritance and contracts by mutual consent,” she said.

Yet the anti-sharia movement has gained such a foothold that more than a dozen states have passed legislation banning its use. In Oklahoma, 71 percent of voters chose to ban sharia—although the bill has since been struck down in the courts.

In recent months, Tea Party presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., have signed pledges rejecting “Sharia Islam [sic] and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.” Fellow presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has also denounced sharia.

David Yerushalmi, whom the New York Times recently called “the father of the anti-sharia movement,” said the threat of sharia is real, citing a case in New Jersey in which a Moroccan woman accused her husband of rape and assault. The judge ruled against her, saying that since they had both agreed to a marriage under Islamic law, she was required to comply with her husband’s demands for sex. The decision was later overturned.

“The very telos [philosophy] of sharia is world domination and a hegemonic political order predicated upon sharia. The methods to achieve that telos include violence as in jihad,” he said in an email interview.

Breivik used language like this, ample in the blogosphere, to justify his actions. He cited Jihad Watch founder Robert Spencer 52 times in his manifesto, reprinting full essays on several occasions. He also praised Pamela Geller, who runs the Atlas Shrugs blog and was integral in the campaign against the Park51 Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan last year. Both have denounced Breivik’s actions and any culpability in the attacks.

“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” Geller said on her blog.

Spencer emphasized that he has never advocated violence. Yerushalmi called the idea “patently absurd” and “childish.”

In a recent report on domestic terrorism, the FBI said the greatest threat to the U.S. were so-called lone-wolf terrorists, “who commit acts of violence…without the prior approval or knowledge of these groups’ leaders.”

Although Breivik fits this description, critics also say it isn’t that simple. While leaders of the campaign against Park51 didn’t advocate violence, YouTube videos of the demonstrations show multiple assaults on Muslims and people perceived to Muslim by protestors.

While an act of anti-Muslim domestic terrorism has yet to occur in the U.S., Quraishi believes another lone wolf may have been incited to violence by extremist rhetoric: Jared Lee Loughner, the high school dropout charged with a shooting spree that killed six people and injured 14 others, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

“If we allow our conversation to get to that point just on political issues, if that can happen, I worry it could move over to Muslims,” she said. “But I would hope we could see Norway as a lesson and would give us pause. Otherwise we’re no better than the terrorists.”

A Provocative Look at "The Closing of the Muslim Mind"

WASHINGTON – “You might think the title of my book is somewhat provocative,” the author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind,” began, “but the publisher didn’t think it was sufficiently incendiary, so they added the subtitle: ‘How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.’”

Robert R. Reilly’s book, published in May, examines that alleged closing, how it came to be – and its present-day consequences. Reilly spoke about the book at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. ­ recently.

The reference to suicide in the subtitle, Reilly said, comes from a statement made by Muslim intellectual Fazlur Rahman in his own book, “Islam & modernity: Transformation of an intellectual tradition:” “A people that deprives itself of philosophy necessarily exposes itself to starvation in terms of fresh ideas – in fact, it commits intellectual suicide.”

Indeed, many scholars – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – challenge Reilly. They say that Islam – and Islamism,  or the political Islamic movement—have been at the forefront of enlightened religious debate and dialogue for many, many centuries. And while Reilly acknowledges this, he says the religion has essentially been hijacked by those who blindly follow a violent and unyielding version of the monotheistic religion.

During his Papal Address at the University of Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said that Islam has de-Hellenized itself. By de-H­ellenization, he meant the abandonment of reason in terms of the use of violence in spreading faith. Is such violence unreasonable and thus against God? In the pope’s view, it is – and thus acting unreasonable is acting against God.

But what if God is without reason or above reason? Reilly asked. “Then the inhibition to violence disappears – that very conception of a God without reason can directly lead to violence.”

In her introduction to Reilly’s talk, Heritage Foundation’s Senior Fellow in Public Diplomacy studies Helle Dale said the existing philosophical direction Reilly describes in his book has created the conditions for Islamist activism and terrorism today, “a problem that people are shocked and frightened by in the U.S. and elsewhere.” ­Many have speculated on how this ­came to be. Dale contends that in the Sunni-Shiite struggle, irrationality has won and now constitutes the main obstacle to finding common ground in the Muslim world.

“It is a battle that we too in the Western world are familiar with,” Dale said; “the battle between reason and irrationality.”

Reilly described what he called one of the greatest intellectual dramas in the history of mankind: Through its conquest of large swath­s of the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim world came into contact with centers of Greek learning. The first fully developed school of theology in Islam ingested Greek philosophical notions into its concept of God: “They discerned that God must be justice and rationality,” Reilly said, and the discernment between good and evil was through reason. These same Greek influences produced similar viewpoints in Christianity in terms of moral philosophy, Reilly said.

But the Islamic theological school of Ash’arites denied the viewpoint that man knows that God exists through speculative reason: According to the Ash’arites, God is not reason. God is pure will and power, unbound by anything, including his own word, Reilly said. And man doesn’t – and can’t – through his own reason know good and evil, partially because man is so corrupted by his self-interest that the only thing he can consider good is that which advances that self-interest. Additionally: there’s nothing to be known, Reilly explained: God is limitless, omnipotent and willful in the Ash’arite view. And there is only God: There is nothing else. God is the primary cause. There are no secondary causes and no natural law.

Reilly outlined the consequences of this philosophy: “You remove cause and effect from natural order.” And no narrative ties life together; it’s just a series of succeeding miracles that you can’t understand because they are acts of God. There’s a loss of objective morality and a loss of justice there: “Allah does not prohibit murder because it’s bad,” Reilly said, “it’s bad because he prohibits it.”

Where to go from here?

The Muslim world is in bad shape, Reilly said – adding that that’s just not his personal opinion: UN Arab Human Development reports, written and developed since 2001, show that the Arab-Muslim world comes in last or second-to-last (to sub-Saharan Africa) in health, education, gross domestic product, number of patents. How and why did this occur? Reilly said his book attempts to answer the “why” through tracing how an influence of ideas came to reign through the triumph of the Ash’arite world, which suffused the Shiite world and transformed it into the “stagnant culture it is today.”

Al-Qaeda and its terrorism are only one manifestation of the serious crisis Islam faces today, Reilly said. And even if al-Qaeda were wiped out tomorrow, that crisis would remain.

The book’s title, said Dale as she introduced Reilly, references Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind.” Not all American minds are closed, Dale said, and so too not all Muslim minds are closed.

Reilly said that the only way to effectively fight this crisis is to delegitimize extremist Islamists at the theological and moral level, and that would aid those in the Islam world who are themselves trying to do so.