The Chosen One

A Call for Moderation Sparks Tension. “There is a Civil War going on”

Posted on Tue, Jan. 03, 2006 Battle for the Heart of Islam: A call for moderation sparks tension “There is a civil war going on,” says a U.S. Muslim critic of more established groups. One in an occasional series on the disparate forces shaping the world’s second-largest religion. By Andrew Maykuth Inquirer Staff Writer PHOENIX – M. Zuhdi Jasser still gets worked up when he recalls what some Muslim Americans said after the 9/11 attacks. “Their criticism of America was just unbelievable,” said Jasser, an internist who describes himself as a pious Muslim. Jasser saw it differently. He grew up in Wisconsin, where his parents settled after escaping Syria’s dictatorship. He was raised an observant Muslim, and he prays five times daily. He served 11 years in the U.S. Navy. He has a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on his black Corvette convertible. “I cannot sit idly silent,” said Jasser, 37. “I have an obligation to do what I can to create a world where my children can grow up, and there’s no conflict in their hearts between being American and being Muslim.” Two years ago, Jasser and a few like-minded Muslims in Arizona founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. This Phoenix organization was one of the first created by Muslims to promote a tolerant form of Islam compatible with a secular, democratic nation. The leaders of the new organizations say the established national Islamic groups promote a political strain of Islam that creates sympathy for the extremists – a charge the national groups deny. “Until we as Muslims admit we have some illness in our religion that needs to be cured, we won’t go anywhere,” said Ali Homsi, a civil engineer who joined the Phoenix organization’s board. Daniel Pipes, executive director of Philadelphia’s Middle East Forum and a foe of radical Islam, says the new voices are shifting the debate within the faith. “I see the emergence of these new groups as vital to present an alternative view to Muslims,” said Pipes, who last year helped create a think tank opposed to militant Islamists, the Center for Islamic Pluralism, in Washington. The struggle in Phoenix is typical of the worldwide battle among Muslims over their faith. In the Middle East, the battle is waged on television, where several miniseries are presenting radical Islam for the first time in an unflattering light. In Britain, still stunned by the July suicide bombings in London’s transit system, the battle plays out over the “moderate” credentials of the nation’s most prominent Islamic organization, the Muslim Council of Britain, whose knighted leader endorsed the 1989 fatwa, or edict, against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. “There is a civil war going on within Islam,” Jasser said. The leaders of the new organizations acknowledge that their ranks are small. When Jasser’s group put together a Muslim antiterrorism march, about 400 people showed up. The majority were non-Muslims. Washington’s ear But the new groups have gained some legitimacy. Their calls on Muslims to alienate terrorists have resonated particularly with non-Muslims. Jasser was invited to write a column for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix. “Zuhdi seems to be that moderate Muslim voice that people have been waiting to hear,” said Phil Boas, the Republic’s assistant editorial-page editor. The reformists are also getting the ear of Washington’s leaders. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last spring named Kamal Nawash, president of the Washington-based Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism, to a delegation that attended an international conference in Spain on intolerance. “We grew very quickly and were recognized by the administration,” said Nawash, a lawyer. In the United States, critics have long complained that Islamists have propagated their point of view through advocacy groups and mosques that relied upon financing and radical literature from Saudi Arabia and Iran. “In the ’90s, we witnessed the takeover of power in America by elements of the Wahhabi trend, though they don’t claim that publicly,” said Walid Phares, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington. “They isolated dissenters to the margins.” ‘Uncomfortable question’ The national Muslim organizations deny that they are under the sway of extremists. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which calls itself the main defender of Muslim Americans, said the council would invariably clash with the government over civil liberties. He said dissent should not be confused with support for terrorism. “It’s the nature of civil rights work to challenge authority,” he said. Nevertheless, Muslims are under great pressure to take sides with other Muslims. “For a believing Muslim, asking what if anything went wrong with the Islamic faith is an uncomfortable question,” Islamic scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl writes in his book, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists. “A Muslim cannot help but feel that he or she is somehow playing into the hands of Islam’s enemies.” Indeed, Hooper said criticism from Muslims such as Jasser was “providing others with an opportunity to advance an agenda that is hostile to the American Muslim community.” Marwan Ahmad, publisher of the Muslim Voice newspaper in Phoenix, said Jasser was putting his allegiance to the dominant culture ahead of his faith. Last month, his newspaper printed a cartoon depicting Jasser as the Arizona Republic’s attack dog, mauling other Muslims. “Jasser is saying what they want to hear, and they publish it,” he said. “I can tell you from history in this country, with African Americans and Japanese, that there are always small groups that want to associate with the dominant group and stand against their own,” Ahmad said. “Eventually, the people who stand for their own will win, and the small group doesn’t have any respect in the end.” Jasser bristles at the suggestion that he is pandering. “So is their point that I’m contriving this, that I’m lying about my religious beliefs?” he said. “These are beliefs I’ve held since I was a youth.” Jasser acknowledges that he is living an American dream inaccessible to many more recent Muslim immigrants, who are more likely to be impoverished and resentful. Jasser’s parents had the skills to flourish in the United States; his mother is a pharmacist, and his father is a cardiologist. The Navy put him through medical school, and his last assignment was to provide medical care to members of Congress and U.S. Supreme Court justices. His Navy uniform still hangs on his office door, beneath a lab coat. “I have more freedom to practice my faith here in America than anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I didn’t bring with me baggage from the Middle East.” Growing up in the United States, Jasser became a “Jeffersonian Muslim,” a believer in a clear separation of religion and state. His belief in secularism – that the mosque should devote less time to politics and more to spiritual discussions about relationships with God – causes perhaps the greatest disagreement with the established Muslim groups. “These individuals want to convert Muslims in general to secularism,” said Ahmad, the Muslim Voice publisher. “Islam is not a secular society. They want us to separate religion from daily life and politics. They want to take everything but religion out of the mosque. That’s not something Muslims stand for.” Jasser said he did not want Muslims to separate religion from their daily lives. He said his faith governed everything he did – his treatment of patients, his respect for people of other faiths, his diet, his prayer schedule. But he does not believe his is a faith that can be imposed upon others. “I believe in the end, God is going to judge me by what I did when faced with this challenge,” he said. “Did I stand up and try to preserve that harmony between Islam and America? Or did I actually go asleep and let the radicals… speak for my faith?” http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/13537233.htm ONLINE EXTRA To read the previous story in the series, go to http://www.philly.com/islamic

Why American Muslims Remain Silent

TCS Daily Why American Muslims Stay Silent Four years after September 11, 2001, numerous non-Muslim Americans repeatedly ask, モWhy do American Muslims stay silent in the face of extremism and terrorism? Why do they not act to cleanse their religion of the reputation it has acquired?ヤ Paradoxically, Muslims in the US and Great Britain are, today, far more dominated by Islamist extremism than their counterparts in various Muslim countries. In many lands where the majority follows Islam, a struggle is underway between mainstream moderates and radicals inspired by the ultra-Wahhabi preachers of Saudi Arabia, the agitators of the Muslim Brotherhood in various Arab countries, and the virulent and volatile adherents of Pakistani jihadism. In some places, from Bosnia-Hercegovina to Indonesia and from Morocco to Mozambique, the moderates are winning. Yet the Islamic communities of the U.S. (dominated by the Saudis) and Britain (run by radical Pakistanis) suffer under a totalitarian regime of thought-control. What happens when ordinary Muslims rebel against radical domination in America? They are ostracized, thrown out of mosques, and subjected to extraordinary public insults and threats. I myself was harassed in a Long Island mosque in 2003, as noted in this article. Shia mosques are excluded from モSunni,ヤ i.e. Wahhabi-controlled bodies, and numerous incidents of expulsions of individual Shias from Sunni mosques in the U.S. have been reported to the Center for Islamic Pluralism, which I have established. The モWahhabi Lobbyヤ — an assemblage of groupings, headed by the Hamas- and Saudi-backed Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — controls the public life of many American Sunnis. It demands certification as moderate, but not in recognition of real moderation or loyalty to the American constitutional tradition. Instead, their demand for recognition and respect is a preemptive strike to shield them from a proper understanding and appreciation of their tactics and aims. And how does the CAIR gang react when a moderate Muslim activist raises a dissenting voice? It betrays its guilt: accused of extremism, CAIR reacts by the extremist methods of menace and hate-mongering. The latest such case involves one of the founders of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Jasser is a mild-mannered and manifestly moderate individual with a column in the Arizona Republic, the largest daily in the state, on Islamic affairs. Dr. Jasser previously founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He is knowledgeable and devoted to the religion of Islam. Cartoon Controversies Readers around the world have lately been treated to the despicable spectacle of Islamist rhetoric turned against Danish cartoonists, as if the spiritual force of the faith were so weak that trivial media products in the West could threaten it. Compared with the malicious tone of images employed by cartoonists in most Arab countries, the works of the Danes were innocuous. But the U.S. has had more than one モcartoonist caseヤ — and the latest involves none other than an Arizona Republic editorial caricaturist named Benson. The Republic published a work by Benson questioning why so many mosques are centers of extremist agitation. The cartoon included nothing offensive to moderate Muslims; it simply dramatized an obvious fact. CAIR, which serves as the U.S. equivalent of the Saudi mutawwiyyin or religious militia, leapt into hysterical action, calling for an apology from the Republic for publishing Bensonメs cartoon. CAIR, as usual, freely indulged in overheated rhetoric and unjustified demands. It utilized a local extremist scandal sheet posturing as a モcommunity paper,ヤ the Muslim Voice, with which it has close ties, to stir venom against the Republic, Benson, and Dr. Jasser. They did so only because both are published in the Republic, and because, in the words of the Islamist complainants, モMany Muslims and Islamic organizations in the Valley were outraged by the cartoon and articles printed in the Arizona Republic Newspaper. One of the writers was M. Zuhdi Jasser who wrote articles that led to Bensonメs poor depiction of Muslims.ヤ The link between Benson and Dr. Jasser was purely one of common opinions to which the Islamists objected, including Dr. Jasserメs frequent criticism of CAIR. In a gross cartoon, the latter two were portrayed as voracious dogs eating a Muslim. Curiously, the モMuslimsヤ in the cartoon, both victim and protestors to the Republic, are portrayed in Wahhabi dress, with skull caps of a kind few wear in large parts of the Muslim world but that everybody wears when they join the Wahhabi cult. But the intent of the cartoon is more important than its details. The motive of the CAIRites in Phoenix is to punish the Republic for printing a cartoon to which they object, and to silence Dr. Jasser. The portrayal of this gentle and sincere man as a vicious canine, is the epitome of totalitarian conditioning. It is comparable to the Jew-baiting cartoons of the Nazi era or the anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim caricatures that appeared in Serbian media at the beginning of Slobodan Milosevicメs dictatorship. The editor of Muslim Voice is Marwan Ahmad, an appointee to the Phoenix Human Relations Commission. Yet at his paperメs website, we find his signature over an editorial blaming Israel for the death of American service personnel in Iraq. What possible justification may be advanced for treating CAIR and papers like the Muslim Voice as anything other than an intrusion of radical ideology and extremist habits into the social life of American Muslims? Numerous モcommunityヤ periodicals like Muslim Voice have been established around the U.S., are distributed free in mosques and Islamic schools, and are often the only media read by the Muslim rank-and-file. In tandem, CAIR utilizes the camouflage of an alleged civil rights organization to enforce political and social submission to the dictates of the primitive clerics in the Saudi kingdom. Why should this be encouraged in America? A terrible blow has been inflicted on the religion of Islam in America by the refusal of the religious モestablishmentヤ — including CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and other entities — to abandon and denounce the radical legacy present in their formation and displayed in their long service. They hate Dr. Jasser because he dares to expose their continued devotion to radicalism and their refusal to abide by American norms of religious respect and public dignity. Non-Muslim Americans as well as moderate Muslims must rally to Dr. Jasser and assist him in his just struggle. The Arizona Republic should be commended for providing him a platform, and must stand by its cartoonist, Benson. Dr. Jasserメs case illustrates why American Muslims stay silent: because the price of speaking out is immediate, coordinated attack. Sometimes the Wahhabi offensive on American soil is accompanied by physical threats; violence is not excluded. Born Muslims, living モin the community,ヤ seldom came to America expecting to find Islam in this country run by Wahhabis — to the immigrant, it was inconceivable that such a situation would be permitted in the US. And yet, thanks to the Saudis, it came to pass, and just as President Bush should push the Saudis to quit financing radicalism, ordinary Americans should write groups like CAIR out of the roster of respectability. These are militants with an incurable penchant for intimidation. Their psychological reign of terror in America must end no less quickly than the literal bloodshed brought by their mentors in Iraq. Stephen Schwartz is author of The Two Faces of Islam. http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122105F

Saudis Have Radicalized 80% of U.S. Mosques – (The Jerusalem Post)

Mainstream US Muslim organizations are heavily influenced by Saudi-funded extremists, according to Yehudit Barsky, an expert on terrorism at the American Jewish Committee. Worse still, Barsky told The Jerusalem Post last week, these “extremist organizations continue to claim the mantle of leadership” over American Islam. The power of the extremist Wahhabi form of Islam in the United States was created with generous Saudi financing of American Muslim communities over the past few decades. Over 80 percent of the mosques in the United States “have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence,” Barsky said. Before the 1970s, she explained, “Muslim immigrants who came to the United States would build a store-front mosque somewhere. Then, since the 1970s, the Saudis have been approaching these mosques and telling them it wasn’t proper for the glory of Islam to build such small mosques.” For many Muslims, it seemed the Saudis were offering a free mosque. However, Barsky believes for each mosque they invested in, the Saudis sent along their own imam (teacher-cleric). “These [immigrants] were not interested in this [Wahhabi] ideology, and suddenly they have a Saudi imam coming in and telling them they’re not praying properly and not practicing Shari’a [Islamic law] properly.” This Saudi strategy was being carried out “all over the world, from America to Bangladesh,” with the Saudis investing $70-80 billion in the endeavor over three decades. Barsky, who heads the AJC’s Division on Middle East and International Terrorism and is the executive editor of Counterterrorism Watch, said this means that “the people now in control of teaching religion [to American Muslims] are extremists. Who teaches the mainstream moderate non-Saudi Islam that people used to have? It’s in the homes, but there’s no infrastructure. Eighty percent of the infrastructure is controlled by these extremists.” The same is true, Barsky said, of many of the mainstream Muslim organizations in America. Many of them are “pro-Saudi and pro-Muslim Brotherhood organizations.” As examples, she listed three important groups: the Islamic Society of North America, which “supports the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi regime;” the Islamic Circle of North America, which “is composed of members of Jamaat e-Islami, a Pakistani Islamic radical organization similar to the Muslim Brotherhood that helped to establish the Taliban;” and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), “founded in the 1980s by pro-Hamas activists.” [The remainder of the article can be found on the Jerusalem Post website at this link]

The Real Muslim Moderates — The Boston Globe

FOR YEARS, Muslims have been criticized for their seeming complacency about Islamic terrorism. Time and again, Islamist radicals have committed some savagery, and time and again non-Muslims have wondered why there was no outcry of condemnation from the Islamic world. Let a fictional TV show depict Muslims unflatteringly, and Muslim spokesmen thunder in outrage. Where is that outrage when real atrocities are being carried out by killers professing Islam? Good news: Since 9/11 a growing number of Muslim moderates have been speaking out. They have denounced the jihadis’ ideology as a perversion of Islam and a disgrace to Muslims everywhere. More important, they have emphasized that decent Muslims have an obligation to enlist in the war on terror — not merely to denounce the fanatics from afar, but to delegitimize and defeat them at home. As Anouar Boukhars, a Moroccan graduate student at Old Dominion University, has written, this war is ultimately ”not a clash between Islam and the West. The real battle is taking place within a Muslim civilization in severe internal crisis, and the stakes of that battle are high indeed.” Another moderate is Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor and US Navy veteran who launched the American Islamic Forum for Democracy in 2003. The forum’s stated purpose: ”to take back the faith of Islam from the demagoguery of the Islamo-fascists.” Writing after the London bombings last month, Jasser argued forcefully that it is not enough for well-meaning Muslims to issue ”empty condemnations” of the extremists. ”As Muslims we must help bring these barbaric Islamists to justice and assist in dismantling the systems that create them,” he wrote. ”We can publicly embarrass radical imams and organizations . . . We can publicly expose the twisted interpretations of the Koran . . . We need to force a public debate with the Islamists, not run from it . . . It is time to . . . teach Muslims to dismantle terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah . . . The war against Islamo-fascism has many fronts, and moderate Muslims need to be leading the struggle.” Other anti-Islamists include Mansoor Ijaz, who says Muslim communities should form ”watch groups” to monitor the activities of Islamist radicals; Ahmed al-Rahim, who calls for a ”Million Muslim March” — a massive denunciation of the jihadis and their teachings; and Kamal Nawash, who declares bluntly: ”Throughout the Islamic world, we must acknowledge that we have a problem of fanaticism, we have a problem of terrorism, and it is our responsibility . . . to stop this.” The rest of Jeff Jacoby’s column can be found at this link at the Boston Globe

U.S. Muslims Getting Tough on Terror

“Why haven’t Muslim leaders condemned terrorism?” This is the most common question that Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), gets on a daily basis from media and other inquirers. Nearly four years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 Muslim organizations disagree on the best way to battle the perception that they are soft on terrorists who attack in their religion’s name. At issue is the public relations strategy of U.S. Muslim groups. At stake is the way Americans view the world’s second largest religion, with more than 1 billion adherents, as the U.S. wages a global war on terrorism. While groups hone their media relations skills and issue immediate statements in the wake of attacks, lingering criticism remains. Frustrated, an increasing number of Muslim leaders say they will focus more on taking concrete actions to eradicate terrorism from their faith communities than on winning the war of words. In this spirit, the Muslim American Society (MAS), another Washington-based national advocacy organization, on Monday announced a national initiative comprised of seven “action items” intended to eradicate terrorist ideology, extremism and violence from the American Muslim community. The MAS said that it planned to partner with the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations, led by Imam Abu Malik-Johari, to ensure that the message did not get stuck in the media stratosphere of published statements, but reached local Muslims in their area Islamic centers. Muslim leaders insist that despite often-repeated claims on talk radio, they have repeatedly denounced terrorism. In the wake of the July 7 London bombings, a panoply of American Muslim groups responded quickly, with the Muslim Public Affairs Council organizing a press conference within hours, and at least nine major groups, including CAIR, issuing a ream of statements decrying the atrocities. Nevertheless, many Muslim leaders say they fear that their message isn’t getting through to the majority of Americans. “It’s really frustrating, sometimes we get the feeling nobody’s listening,” Hooper said. “We often ask ourselves, what more can we do? Shout from the rooftops? Skywriting?” WORLDWIDE CONCERN Joking aside, Hooper said CAIR is stepping up its “Not in the Name of Islam” campaign, airing public service announcements on television stations nationwide to distance the beliefs of terrorists from mainstream Islam. The group is also considering a wristband or lapel pin campaign to raise awareness of Muslim opposition to terrorist tactics and ideologies. The London bombings happened at a moment when Muslims worldwide were already grappling with how to strengthen a global Islam that is politically and socially moderate, one that leaves no room for terrorism. The day before the bombings, more than 150 Muslim leaders from around the world met in Jordan and issued a statement forbidding any Muslim from being declared an apostate, or traitor to the faith. It was necessary, they said, because insurgents in Iraq have used claims of apostasy to justify the executions of Muslim “infidels.” Despite public statements, some commentators have questioned the seriousness with which worldwide Muslims are approaching the reality of terrorists in their midst, given that the London attackers appear to have been native Britons. “It is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst,” wrote Thomas L. Friedman in the July 8 New York Times. Friedman added that “no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.” U.S. Muslim groups take exception to Friedman’s characterization, arguing that countless U.S. leaders have condemned bin Laden’s actions, and that an official fatwa, or Islamic edict, was issued in March 2005 by the Islamic Commission of Spain. Additionally, leaders worldwide have issued recent fatwas that decry terrorism and its consequences. Britain’s largest Sunni Muslim organization issued a July 17 fatwa calling terrorism a “perverted ideology” and declaring that the London bombers, if proved to be Muslims, would no longer be allowed to consider themselves part of the faith. Days earlier, another group of British imams and scholars condemned the London attacks because civilians were killed. However, that group distinguished between those attacks and suicide bombings carried out for Muslims to “defend themselves from occupiers,” which they said were sometimes justified. These different interpretations point to the difficulty of managing an “international message” for Islam. “Islam is not like the Catholic Church, there is no central authority who can give you one quote. Therefore it is impossible for all Muslims to speak in one voice, just as it is impossible for all Americans to speak in one voice,” said Muqtedar Khan, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, who studies international politics. Some Muslim groups are frustrated with the task that public relations experts refer to as “reputation management.” Mike Paul, a veteran public relations professional in New York City, says that religious communities should present a consistent message that offers concrete historical examples to back up their statements. “People aren’t going to believe you if you just say, ‘These people don’t represent our faith,'” Paul said, “They’re going to say, ‘Show me the truth.'” WORDS AND ACTION Muslim leaders agree that written or spoken statements increasingly feel inadequate against the perception problem facing the community. These leaders say they don’t plan on skipping the step of issuing written condemnations after attacks, but neither do they plan to rest on the laurels of words over actions. “We are past condemnations; that’s not the page we’re on,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a national civil rights organization that is part of the Muslim American Society (MAS). MAS did issue a statement of condemnation following the London bombing, but Bray said that his group is far more focused on concrete actions aimed at protecting young American Muslims from being “misguided in Islam.” The group has opened eight youth centers nationwide, including locations in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Minneapolis; Cleveland; Dallas and San Diego. They plan to open even more in the future, including centers in Sacramento, Calif.; Los Angeles; Washington; Raleigh, N.C.; Kansas City, Detroit, Seattle and Chicago. The centers provide “wholesome and good” after-school youth programs and summer camps, and are based on the model that is used to combat gang violence in inner cities, Bray said. Additionally, Bray’s organization is providing media training in local Muslim communities, urging each American mosque to have a trained spokesperson to approach the media without “waiting for a crisis” to strike. “We don’t want to do symbolic gestures,” he said, “We want to do things that really affect the policies for our safety.” A consensus has emerged that more needs to be done. M. Zuhdi Jasser, the founder and chairman of the Phoenix-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy, is among the most outspoken. He criticizes his fellow American Muslims, saying that with the privilege of belonging to a worldwide Muslim community comes a charge to root out terrorism and extremism from that community. “If we’re going to get the benefits of this community, then a reciprocal responsibility that we have is to say that this community has been hijacked by barbarous criminals,” he said. Jasser, who served 11 years in the Navy, suggests that more Muslims should serve in the armed forces in order to achieve this goal. “Secure the world — this is part of our civic duty,” he said. “Until we clear out and fix the cancer within our faith community, we’re going to have no credibility,” he added. This report was provided by the Religion News Service