Common Ground News Service
Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
for constructive & vibrant Muslim-Western relations
02 - 08 May 2007
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Inside this edition
1) What is it about Western secularism? by Jorgen S. Nielsen
Jorgen S. Nielsen, director of the Danish Institute of Damascus and Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, considers the shared values between Western political systems and an “Islamic order”. If there is such a significant overlap, he asks, then why is the response to the concept of Western secularism so negative in the Muslim world?
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 1 May 2007)
2) Make Sharm el-Sheikh the turning point for Iraq and region by Yasar Yakis, Ghassan Al-Atiyyah, Khalid al-Dakhil and Scott Lasensky
Former Turkish foreign minister and MP Ya?ar Yaki?, leading Iraqi political analyst Ghassan al-Atiyyah, Saudi academic and writer Khalid al-Dakhil, and senior researcher at the U.S. Institute of Peace Scott Lasensky explore the opportunities for concerted action in Iraq emerging from this week’s foreign ministers’ conference in Egypt, adding: “If this new initiative is to succeed, the United States should also make clear that the American military presence in Iraq is also part of the agenda.”
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 1 May 2007)
3) Why I am not a moderate Muslim by Asma Khalid
Asma Khalid, a master’s student at the University of Cambridge in England, expresses her exasperation at the use of the term “moderate Muslim” in a complimentary manner. She explains: ” ‘Moderate’ implies that Muslims who are more orthodox are somehow backward and violent..”… “I refuse to live as a ‘moderate’ Muslim if its side effect is an unintentional admission that suicide bombing is a religious obligation for the orthodox faithful.”
(Source: Christian Science Monitor, 24 April 2007)
4) Environmental Protection through the Qur’an? by Martina Sabra
With stories of climate change predominating in the media, Martina Sabra, a freelance writer based in Germany, looks at the role of religion in mobilising civil society in this area. Not a new concept in Islam, she considers where religion helps in environmental development, and where it falls short.
(Source: Qantara.de, 20 April 2007)
5) Dialogue as a bridge between Islam and the West by Ahmad Qisa’i
Ahmed Qisa’i, an Indonesian freelance writer and political observer, attributes the “collision, friction and fierce competition” between Muslims and the West to globalisation. He explains how and why this new “close” contact simultaneously results in two different and contrary positions – a move towards violence and fundamentalism, and a move towards moderation and dialogue.
(Source: OhmyNews, 25 April 2007)
1)What is it about Western secularism?
Jorgen S. Nielsen
Damascus - Some years ago, the Tunisian Islamist leader-in-exile, Rashid Ghannoushi, wrote a book on public rights in Islam. He pointed out that there were particular historical reasons why Europe had separated religion and state. The church had misused its powers, had stood in the way of scientific progress, and the state had made religion a tool of oppression. That’s fine for Europe, he said, but in the Muslim world we don’t share that history, we have to find our own ways of doing things, ways that make sense for us.
This is a pretty mild Muslim response to the concept of Western secularism. In sharper versions, secularism is one of a list of unfavourable Western inventions which include materialism, Zionism, promiscuity and imperialism, to mention but a few in no particular order. At the extreme, Osama bin Laden has his own list.
Why is it that Muslims appear to find it so difficult to see anything positive in Western secularism? Are we so different after all?
There are clearly some Islamic movements that are serious in their call for a complete integration of religion and state, with religion predominating in public life as in private. Additionally, in some Muslim languages, the discussion is made almost impossible by the fact that the word used for secularism translates into English as “no religion” or “without religion”. This is the case, for example, in Urdu, whereas the original meaning of the word was simply “that which has to do with this world as opposed to the next”.
Once one gets underneath the surface of the topic, though, things become more complicated. And, very importantly, they differ from country to country. Saudi Arabia is not Egypt is not Iran is not Pakistan is not Syria, and so on.
Certainly, Muslims do not like a lot of what they see as Western: the loneliness of the individual, the breakdown of the family, the destruction of drug addiction, random violence, recreational sex. Of course, they are not alone in feeling these concerns, and it is natural to conclude that they are the result of the decline of religion. But this is also an image made popular by the Western media, especially by American films which everyone can now see on their satellite TV.
But there are other perspectives. In the mid-1920s, the Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq, a professor at the ancient Islamic university of Al-Azhar, published a book entitled Islam and the Roots of Government. In it he argued that the Prophet Muhammad had founded a religion, not a state, so religion should not determine state structures today. The book was immediately condemned and, we are told by most Islamic scholars, is no longer of interest. But it has remained continuously in print since then and can still be bought in Cairo bookshops. So someone must be reading it!
Talking with a group of Islamic scholars in Britain recently from one of the more conservative movements, we got on to the topic of an “Islamic order”. Clearly, it was not enough that a government or economic system should call itself Islamic. It had to be Islamic. But what did that mean?
That led to things like social justice, a reliable legal system, personal liberty, equality, popular participation, accountable rulers and the like. One of them ventured that northern European welfare states were arguably a good deal more “Islamic” than any state in the Muslim world, whatever it called itself.
If there are such important shared values, why then such mixed feelings about the idea of secularism? Clearly the attack on secularism is encouraged by the clerics. If religion in its traditional forms is pushed to the margins of public life, what remains for them? But that on its own is unsatisfactory - the clerics have a widespread and receptive audience for their views.
On the so-called Arab street, secularism is more often than not seen as a foreign import. It was brought in by the colonialists as a way of limiting the power of the Islamic religious institutions which often provided the core of anti-colonial resistance, right back to when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. Many of the modern Muslim states are regarded as the heirs of the colonial powers. Secular politics is associated then with military dictatorships which were established and survived in alliance with the opposing powers of the Cold War period.
Today, the only effective challenge to this inheritance comes from the Islamist movements, and people arguing for a secular perspective run the constant danger of being accused of collaboration with the West. It is this twin-dynamic that makes it more likely for many to tilt away from modern, pluralistic secularism toward a religious political system.
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* Jorgen S. Nielsen is director of the Danish Institute of Damascus and professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.. This article is part of a series on secularism and Muslim-Western dialogue distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Source: Common Ground News Service, 1 May 2007, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
2)Make Sharm el-Sheikh the turning point for Iraq and region
Yasar Yakis, Ghassan Al-Atiyyah, Khalid al-Dakhil and Scott Lasensky
Istanbul, Riyadh and Washington - No one fears instability and violence in Iraq more than Iraqis and their neighbours. But mutual suspicions and rivalries, and a lack of U.S. commitment to regional diplomacy, have prevented Iraq and its neighbours from turning common anxieties into a common agenda. However, an emerging regional diplomatic initiative—the focus of this week’s foreign minister’s conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt—could be a turning point that leads all sides toward concerted action.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should use the Sharm el-Sheikh gathering to demonstrate Washington’s new commitment to sustained, high-level engagement and effective regional diplomacy. If this new initiative is to succeed, the United States should also make clear that the American military presence in Iraq is also part of the agenda.
As regional anxieties surge, reliance by the neighbours on uni-lateralism is giving way to renewed interest in multilateral diplomacy. “Iraq’s neighbours acknowledge their shared responsibility to support Iraqi reconciliation,” said a group of leading foreign policy figures in the Marmara Declaration, the recent product of non-official dialogue between Iraqis and their neighbours. Stabilizing Iraq, the group declared, “is inextricably linked to protecting [the neighbours'] own national security interests.”
The first order of business is to build an on-going, results-oriented process that includes all the pivotal players. Iraq and its neighbours have been holding regular ministerial meetings since 2003 as part of a Turkish initiative, but without the United States. The key international and regional players convened in late 2004 at Sharm el-Sheikh, but with little follow-up. Summit meetings should punctuate rather than define the process.
The international compact between donors and the Iraqi government, which will be ratified at Sharm el-Sheikh, provides a framework for regional and international economic assistance to flow in sync with Iraqi government reform. But much more needs to be done to address the worsening security vacuum. In this regard, the involvement of military, intelligence and police officials in both the ministerial meetings and the technical-level working groups is critical, as is the establishment of a joint crisis-response mechanism.
This new diplomatic initiative could also be used to generate regional support for Iraqi political reconciliation. It is a collective opportunity for the neighbours to signal unambiguously to the various Iraqi factions that reconciliation is a regional priority. But the key ingredient is for the Iraqi government to start a serious process of reform and reconciliation, and to demonstrate its effectiveness and credibility at home so that the neighbours can then provide more political backing.
For its part, Washington needs to generate new ideas to turn around the worsening crisis in Iraq. The United States should continue its dialogue with all Iraqi factions, including insurgents, with the objective of bringing all sides into the political process. Washington should pay more attention to its Arab allies, namely Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and demonstrate its commitment to sustained, high-level engagement with all the key players, including Iran and Syria. Moreover, the United States should step up its involvement in the working groups, which were established last month at a preparatory meeting in Baghdad, but have yet to get moving. With intense scepticism in the region about American intentions, the more Washington can do to demonstrate its commitment to multilateral solutions, the greater the chance engagement will work.
On the question of the U.S. military presence, there is no way to satisfy the expectations of all sides without declaring definitively that the United States will withdraw: not precipitously, but responsibly. A precipitous withdrawal would accelerate unilateralist impulses in the region, further imperil Iraq, and raise the prospects of a regional war. But digging in heels is also problematic, since it will impede the drive for greater regional diplomacy. Regional players—whether they want the United States to leave or to stay—need to be convinced that they will have more influence by acting within a process than by challenging it on the battlefield.
Finally, the United States can help generate incentives aimed at both defusing flashpoints and encouraging regional reconciliation. Stepped-up humanitarian assistance to the front-line states in the refugee crisis, Jordan and Syria, which also have the most fragile economies, could provide an early boost to the process. More broadly, expanding the agenda to cover a wider range of issues—including changes to the Iraqi constitution, the status of Kirkuk, economic development, and support for militias—would motivate the neighbours to invest in a process viewed as inclusive of their concerns. Last but not least, the United States should assist Iraq in taking concrete, visible steps to prevent armed groups from using Iraqi soil to attack Iraq’s neighbours.
Sceptics in the United States would argue that regional diplomacy and high-level engagement with Iraq’s neighbours is itself a concession, but the situation in Iraq is too desperate to cling to high-minded notions at the expense of pragmatic solutions. Hard bargaining and multi-lateralism have produced results elsewhere, from Afghanistan to the Balkans.
This emerging process could provide a framework to ease tensions in the region and deliver practical solutions for Iraq. Moreover, if this process succeeds it could provide a major boost to American credibility, at a time when the gap between U.S. power and influence seems so wide.
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* Yasar Yakis is an MP and a former Turkish foreign minister, Ghassan al-Atiyyah is a leading Iraqi political analyst, Khalid al-Dakhil is a Saudi academic and writer, and Scott Lasensky is a senior researcher at the U.S. Institute of Peace. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 1 May 2007, www.commongroundnews.org .
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication beginning 1pm EST on Wednesday 2 May 2007.
3)Why I am not a moderate Muslim
Asma Khalid
Cambridge, England - Last month, three Muslim men were arrested in Britain in connection with the London bombings of July 2005.
In light of such situations, a number of non-Muslims and Muslims alike yearn for “moderate”, peace-loving Muslims to speak out against the violent acts sometimes perpetrated in the name of Islam.
And to avoid association with terrorism, some Muslims adopt a “moderate” label to describe themselves.
I am a Muslim who embraces peace. But, if we must attach stereotypical tags, I’d rather be considered “orthodox” than “moderate”.
“Moderate” implies that Muslims who are more orthodox are somehow backward and violent and, in our current cultural climate, that progress and peace are restricted to “moderate” Muslims. To be a “moderate” Muslim is to be a “good”, malleable Muslim in the eyes of Western society.
I recently attended a debate about Western liberalism and Islam at the University of Cambridge where I’m pursuing my master’s degree. I expected debaters on one side to present a bigoted laundry list of complaints against Islam and its alleged incompatibility with liberalism, and they did.
But what was more disturbing was that those on the other side in theory supported the harmony of Islam and Western liberalism, but they based their argument on spurious terms. While these debaters - including a former top government official and a Nobel peace prize-winner - were well-intentioned, they in fact wrought more harm than good.
Through implied references to moderate Muslims, they offered a simplistic, paternalistic discourse that suggested Muslims would one day catch up with Western civilisation.
In the aftermath of September 11, much has been said about the need for “moderate Muslims”. But to be a “moderate” Muslim also implies that Osama Bin Laden and Co. must represent the pinnacle of orthodoxy; that a criterion of orthodox Islam somehow inherently entails violence; and, consequently, that if I espouse peace, I am not adhering to my full religious duties.
I refuse to live as a “moderate” Muslim if its side effect is an unintentional admission that suicide bombing is a religious obligation for the orthodox faithful. True orthodoxy is simply the attempt to adhere piously to a religion’s tenets.
The public relations drive for “moderate Islam” is injurious to the entire international community. It may provisionally ease the pain when so-called Islamic extremists strike. But it really creates deeper wounds that will require thicker bandages because it indirectly labels the entire religion of Islam as violent.
The term “moderate Muslim” is actually a redundancy. In the Islamic tradition, the concept of the “middle way” is central. Muslims believe that Islam is a path of intrinsic moderation, wasatiyya. This concept is the namesake of a British Muslim grass-roots organisation, the Radical Middle Way. It is an initiative to counter Islam’s violent reputation with factual scholarship.
This was demonstrated through a day-long conference that the organisation sponsored in February. The best speaker of the night was Abdullah Bin Bayyah, an elderly Mauritanian sheikh dressed all in traditional white Arab garb, offset by a long grey beard. The words coming out of the sheikh’s mouth - all in Arabic - were remarkably progressive. He confronted inaccurate assumptions about Islam, spoke of tolerance, and told fellow Muslims an un-pleasant truth: “Perhaps much of this current crisis springs from us,” he said, kindly admonishing them. He chastised Muslims for inadequately explaining their beliefs, thereby letting other, illiberal voices speak for them.
I was shocked by his blunt though nuanced analysis, given his traditional, religious appearance. And then I was troubled by my shock. To what extent had I, a hijabi Muslim woman studying Middle Eastern/Islamic studies, internalised the untruthful representations of my own fellow Muslims? For far too long, I had been fed a false snapshot of what Islamic orthodoxy really means.
The sheikh continued, challenging Bin Laden’s violent interpretation of jihad, citing Qur’anic verses and prophetic narrations. He referred to jihad as any “good action” and recounted a recent conversation with a non-Muslim lawyer who asked if electing a respectable official would be considered jihad. The sheikh answered “yes” because voting for someone who supports the truth and upholds justice is a good action.
The sheikh, not Bin Laden, is a depiction of true Islamic orthodoxy. The sheikh, not Bin Laden, is the man trained in Islamic jurisprudence. The sheikh, not Bin Laden, is the authentic religious scholar. But to call him a moderate Muslim would be a misnomer.
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*Asma Khalid is pursuing her master’s degree in Middle Eastern/Islamic studies at the University of Cambridge in England. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: Christian Science Monitor, 24 April 2007, www.csmonitor.com
Copyright © The Christian Science Monitor. For reprint permission please contact lawrenced@csps.com .
4)Environmental Protection through the Qur’an?
Martina Sabra
Cologne, Germany - In a rural school 150 kilometres south of Casablanca, today’s topic is environmental protection. We must take care of the trees and plants, explains the teacher, not just because they provide shade but because they must be respected as part of God’s creation. To make this point, the teacher quotes a passage by the Prophet Muhammad. The children listen attentively.
Islam as a foundation for environmental protection and the preservation of natural resources? This approach is not new in development work. Many development organisations have been incorporating Islamic values and authority figures into their everyday work for decades, and they have been successful at it.
“Of course we first turn to the sura (chapter of the Qur’an) and to the congregation of village elders,” says Wiltrud Gutsmied, a representative from the Maltese aid organisation responsible for 18 mostly rural development projects in Afghanistan.
Ayman Mazek, founding member of the Christian-Muslim aid organisation “Green Helmets” sees cooperation with Islamic structures as something run-of-the-mill.
“Of course you’ve got to have close contact with the local Islamic authority figures. They are well respected,” says Mazyek. “And it would also be helpful if some of the aid workers had more detailed knowledge of local Islamic practices. But all in all, it’s a person’s technical qualifications and social skills that are more important than religious conviction or in-depth knowledge of the religion.”
“Islam-sensitive” development work is not a new invention. The fact that the issue is being debated more intensively now is due to the changed political landscape.
“After September 11, 2001, there was much more debate about Islam,” says Ruth Bigalke, an expert on Islam and West Africa. “And of course it became apparent that while much work had been done in Latin America with the churches, for example, there had always been reservations about working with Islamic organisations.”
In recent years Ruth Bigalke has helped to set up an internal counselling centre at the German Association for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) to address the topic of Islam.
“However, having these kinds of reservations is simply not appropriate in West Africa,” says the young scholar, who now works at the Federal Ministry for Development (BMZ). “Taking care of God’s creation, social justice, compassion for the weak – all this is not just important in Christianity, but also in Islam.”
In Mali, Ruth Bigalke saw Muslim clerics protest in public against the exclusion of people with HIV – in the name of Islamic compassion. In Mauritania, she reports, Islamic leaders are currently working on drafting a law banning the genital mutilation of girls.
In addition to the shock waves elicited by September 11, other factors have also led development organisations to concentrate on Islam in development cooperation. For church organisations, an important issue has been the accusation in Islamic countries that their work is missionary. This calls on church groups to take a stand.
A further factor is that Islamic non-governmental organisations, individuals and entrepreneurs are increasingly serving as actors in development cooperation. Islamic banks, Islamic aid organisations and wealthy Muslim patrons are competing in some countries with Western donors.
The Islamic organisations are often better able than Western groups to gain the trust of the local population. But blindly supporting such religious organisations with the argument that they are more “authentic” or credible runs the risk of strengthening discourses based on a totalitarian Islamic identity and promoting anti-democratic currents.
A further factor is the gaining strength of Islamic political movements and groups in many Muslim countries.
The most recent prominent example is Palestine. After the so-called Islamic Hamas won the elections in 2005, Western development aid was pulled from the country. Ruth Bigalke says she would not support direct cooperation with Hamas.
But on the other hand, in Palestine it is impossible to avoid working with Islamic actors because they are among the decision-makers in Parliament and in the municipal councils responsible for constructing everything from water pipes to hospitals. “The Islamists are a current that represents the mainstream,” says Bigalke. “To say that we will only cooperate with secular elites is to defeat the purpose and leave no chance of having a wider effect.”
In other words, to return to the issue we began with: Qur’anic passages are certainly useful in increasing Arab or Muslim school children’s awareness about the environment.
But when it comes to preserving natural habitats or cracking down on those who abuse the environment, in Muslim countries such as Morocco the only thing that helps is tough laws and police enforcement of those laws.
Better knowledge of Islam certainly doesn’t hurt, but for development projects to succeed, this kind of “Islam sensitivity” is of limited help.
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* Martina Sabra is a freelance writer based in Germany. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: Qantara.de, 20 April 2007, www.qantara.de
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
Translated from German by Christina M. White.
5)Dialogue as a bridge between Islam and the West
Ahmad Qisa’i
Jakarta - Globalisation has partly contributed to this situation. The world has become “flat” - to use the term coined by Thomas L. Friedman - and a small village has been created in which each and every member of the communities that live in the village bumps into and interacts with other members. Globalisation has obliterated any distance that ever existed.
Thus collision, friction and fierce competition become inevitable. Survival of the fittest becomes the rule that everyone must embrace. And the current trend, in which domination by Western civilisation of the global village has become apparent, has made other groups, in this case Islam, feel insecure. The recent development of Islam in Indonesia provides an example of this phenomenon.
Several Muslim groups in Indonesia advocate an aggressive stance toward the West. They believe that Islam is incompatible with the West and seek to destroy the latter. Their small, yet aggressive, number and oppositional stance toward the “enemy of Islam” have put Indonesian Muslims in the difficult position of being branded as radicals and fundamentalists.
The feeling of being insecure and threatened has forced people to seek solace and protection from something or someone. When a group feels threatened by perceived domination by another group, it digs deep into itself to seek answers as a rejection of this domination. And if Islam is threatened by another civilisation - by Western civilisation for example - Muslims would dig deep into Islam and come up with ideas and answers to reject that domination. And these digging efforts might achieve different results which may be contradictory.
The first possible result is strong rejection and confrontation. By digging deep into Islam, a Muslim might come up with an idea of fundamental Islam that rejects anything that is different. Fundamentalist movements in the name of religion then spring up to fight the “enemy”. Thus if the domination of the West is perceived as a threat to Islam, it must then be rejected and confronted with all force. Violence and force must be maximally utilised to implement this idea and to demonstrate the presence of its adherents. Furthermore, these fundamentalists believe that Islam must win over Western civilisation at all costs.
The second result is to embrace the moderate values and principles of Islam and teach its followers to confront any differences wisely and with an open heart. Mainstream Muslims view Islam as a way of life that possesses a high degree of tolerance towards other groups or followers of other religions for the sake of creating a harmonious society in the midst of disparities and differences. Moderation is the key, and Islam teaches its followers to be moderate. Thus any perceived threats to Islam must be solved wisely through the process of dialogue and discussion to find the middle way and to avoid confrontation and the use of force.
From the illustration above, we find that from one source there can be two contradictory results: the first, an embrace of fundamentalism and the use of force and violence; and the second, moderation and dialogue as tools to solve problems and differences.
So far, the first group, though in the minority, has been dominating the limelight with its aggressive actions. It has stolen the show and successfully painted a bleak picture of Islam: Islam means violence, according to this group’s followers. Meanwhile, the second group, the majority of Muslims, has been silent and unable to project the moderate values of Islam. It seems to struggle to erase the depiction of Islam as a religion of violence. Thus, it is time to re-define Islam.
Islam rejects violence and the use of force to solve problems. Instead, Islam clearly advocates dialogue and discussion to find the middle way. Muslims must understand this principle in order to change the current situation. Loud rejection of violence and the use of force along with the promotion of dialogue and discussion to solve problems by mainstream Muslims will, I believe, erase the depiction of Islam as a religion of violence.
Furthermore, reciprocal action must also be taken to successfully change the situation. Non-Muslims, notably those in the West, must also help this process. Both sides need to embark upon developing sustainable dialogue to understand each other’s culture and civilisation. It is only through this process that any clash between the two in this globalised world can be avoided, and the notion of fundamentalism and radicalism can be suppressed.
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* Ahmed Qisa’i is a freelance writer and political observer. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: OhmyNews, 25 April 2007, www.english.ohmynews.com
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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