Intellectual Poverty

I came accross this great interview with a Muslim academic based in Singapore, wherein he gives an inventory of the manifestations of intellectual poverty of the Muslim world today, particularly in theology, political science, and economics.

Orientalism, Muslim Intellectualism, and Political Islam

The Universal God

A fantastic article I stumbled accross.

Allah Hafiz vs. Khuda Hafiz

Trust me, my God can understand all the languages he created.

Driving change

There are fewer things more symbolic of the mysoginy of Arab culture than the Saudi ban on women driving. With no basis in any Islamic text, and the majority of scholarly opinion from Iran to England being against it, the ban epitomizes the backwardness of this 21st century kingdom, not just for non-Muslim liberals who cluck admonishingly at the repression of women, but for Muslims whose feeling about it range from anger to embarrassment.

Thanks to this woman, it might be about to change:

Story here.

Shorter Michael Taube

Stephen Harper's former speech writer, published every Saturday in the loony bin of the Postmedia news empire:

Geert Wilders' Canadian hosts did us a favour

While I knew that he felt threatened by Islam and wanted to ban the Qur'an, I was shocked to find out that Geert Wilders also doesn't like Muslims.

Like it or not . . .

A company like Newscorp can turn anyone into a sensation, even a third-rate fearmonger like the zany Randroid proprietor of the blog "Atlas Shrugs." Salon.com's Jason Elliot lays out a neat summary of how the media giant has turned a relatively uncontroversial construction project into America's national anti-Muslim hatefest.

How the "ground zero mosque" fear mongering began

. . . In short, there is no good reason that the Cordoba House project should have been a major national news story, let alone controversy. And yet it has become just that, dominating the political conversation for weeks and prompting such a backlash that, according to a new poll, nearly 7 in 10 Americans now say they oppose the project. How did the Cordoba House become so toxic, so fast? . . .

Fortunately, this would probably never happen in Canada, because it is a better country.

I think.

A new kind of politics for Pakistan

Dawn's Murtaza Ali Jafri introduces the MMM to Pakistan.

Man-Made Movement

Pakistanis need a new kind of political force to sweep the nation, and no, not another sycophantic NGO or dissident party. I think it’s time for a party to represent men. Allow me to introduce the manifesto of the Man-Made Movement (MMM), not to be confused with the dissident Jamaat-i-Islami offshoot ‘Majalis and Maulanas Rock Movement.’

The party shall be run by the Council of Man: members are to include movie star Shaan, rocker Ali Noor, cricketer Shahid Afridi, celebrity George Clooney, golfer/womaniser Tiger Woods, and man of the hour Ijaz Butt. I nominate myself as communications director and chief councilor of the MMM.

The first issue the MMM will address is the paucity of bills defending the rights of men. After all, there seem to be a lot of bills floating around to empower women and safeguard their rights, and I think men ought to get in on the action as well. For instance, we could do with a Men’s Anti-Bazaar Bill, which would outlaw forcing men to roam bazaars with womenfolk for it would be deemed an affront to a man’s emotional condition.

This will be followed up by the Men’s Anti-Bazaar (Room to Breathe Amendment) Ordinance, which will allow for more space dedicated to men in shopping malls. We envision spaces teeming with gaming arcades, Kabaddi rings, indoor football and cricket fields, and more. This will address the socio-psychological phenomenon by which men get bored while their wives shop, and feel pathetic following their womenfolk around (and we can’t let them go out alone… that might compromise their morality and our manliness!).

There are other issues, too, for which the MMM will advocate. Man-ic depression, for example, should be recognised as a medical problem and a curative special vacation is to be legally established. After all, which man wouldn’t go nuts working fulltime and managing his wife and children all at the same time, without frequent breaks.

A Man Rehabilitation Centre should also be established. Men will be re-taught the basics of fight club, will be shown how to blow smoke rings, given the chance to brush up on Kabbaddi skills, and be beaten to a pulp on a daily basis and conditioned not to cry in response. For extra fees, complete emotional detachment courses will also be included.

The MMM will also advocate for a permanent five-day work week. Yes, we know women feel as if they contend with a seven-day work week, balancing professions with caring for their homes. But we still demand shorter working hours. If we get an extra day off, we’ll be less irritable, work better on our communication skills, and help out more with the house work… maybe.

Unlike other political parties that make false promises, the MMM will actively champion the development of infrastructure for the betterment of our constituency. For instance, in the arena of sports, we would like to sponsor and host the first-ever Man Olympics. Contests will include burping and eating show-offs as well as tests of endurance to see who can watch sports for the longest time without falling asleep. To ensure the success of such events, we’d like to occupy all seats on the parliamentary committee for sport. And while it may seem corrupt (mostly because it is) we will be taking free tickets to all local sporting events. In exchange, the party guarantees support for any legislation related to religious morality.

The MMM also has an eye towards boosting Pakistan’s economy. We promise to work for subsidies on foreign electronic equipment such as big-screen TVs, Play Stations, and cars (no Mini Coopers or any other feminine looking cars; a proof of manliness certificate will be required, listing the copious number of cup-holders, ashtrays, tinted windows, and noise-making gadgets).

Above all, though, the MMM promises to work endlessly and tirelessly to guarantee that Pakistani women be given as many rights and privileges as are legally permissible. Female empowerment, we believe, is the highest priority of the MMM manifesto, for no other reason than the more rights our women have, the less they will whine. And the less they whine, the more we can enjoy our cricket matches, TV shows, and video games in peace.

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam

Tariq Ramadan has emerged in this millenium as the foremost Muslim intellectual in the Western world, if not the World. The impact of his thought is evidenced by the number of prominent Western journalists and public intellectuals who have written about him, both in praise and in condemnation of what they perceive is his message. What exactly that is, however, has been itself a matter of some controversy - Carouline Fourest, a nationalistic French feminist, wrote an entire book on the subject, accusing Ramadan of an insidious "doublespeak", a message that was deviously designed to mean one thing to a Western audience, and another to a Muslim one.

Aside from Ramadan's own writings in such broadsheets as Le Monde, feature articles about him have been published in the American newspaper The New York Times, and the The New Republic magazine; French politicians up to then-Interior Minister (now President) Nicholas Sarkozy have debated him on French national television, an encounter which has followed him in almost every appearance he has made on French TV since.

To his detractors, Ramadan represents the Trojan horse of radical Islam, a smooth-talking representative of the jihadist conspiracy for world domination, making yet another play for the soul of Western Civilization. To his partisans, Ramadan represents a new Muslim consciousness and the possibility of a wider Muslim Renaissance. Ramadan's most recent work, Mon Intime Conviction, deals with the accusations of doublespeak that have been accruing against him.




But what do his writings actually say?

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam is Ramadan's 2004 book devoted to drawing, as he says in the introduction

the shape of European and American Islam: faithful to the principles of Islam, dressed in European and American cultures, and definitively rooted in Western societies.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Ramadan lays out what he considers to be the spiritual components of the Muslim personality. He points out that the current ways in which most Muslims view the world are outmoded, and were actually formulated by men, and not God, in response to the geopolitical realities that Muslims found themselves in following the dramatic spread of Islam and Muslim economic and military influence throughout the old world. Ramadan isn't particularly interested in answering anti-Islam calumnies in this section - what he wants to do is to convince the reader that the traditional wordviews held by Muslims are neither universally held by Muslims, nor are they a necessary consequence of the primary sources.

This section contains some interesting ideas. Firstly, Ramadan, as a Swiss-born Muslim, wants to establish that Islam is a Western religion. It is a point that seems relatively obvious, given the number of Muslims are now born and raised in Western cultures, but it is nevertheless one that appears to have escaped the majority of first-generation North American and European Muslims, who continue to see the countries in which they live and raise their children as host countries in which they are immersed in alien cultures that they strive to separate themselves from. Given that Islam is now a Western religion, argues Ramadan, it is high time that Muslims began to define for themselves what the parameters of "Western Islam" are; that is, what elements of Western culture should Muslims not only tolerate, but become active participants in, and what elements must they argue against.

In order to do this, Ramadan then defines those principles of Islam that he feels lie at the heart of the Islamic character, and that are, in his opinion, non-negotiable.

Ramadan also highlights the sad state of Muslim scholarship in Islamic theology, effectively confirming that the intellectual leaders of the Muslim world really haven't come to terms with "modernity," primarily because the societies in which they live do not fulfill Western criteria for being "modern" - a separation of church and state, capitalism, and political agency are much less pervasive in the Muslim world. Because of this, Ramadan argues, the rulings issued in the Muslim world in response to questions from Muslims in the West are logically invalid, because the response emanates from a place where the social, political, and economic conditions are sufficiently incomparable. What results, according to Ramadan, is a patchwork of compromises and accommodations of the Western reality, and not a comprehensively Western Islamic worldview.

In a highly interconnected world, argues Ramadan the old categories of "dar-al-Islam," "dar-al-Harb," and"dar-al-Ahd" (the Abode of Islam, the Abode of War, and the Abode of Treaty) are irrelevant, even potentially dangerous. Instead, he develops a new way of looking at the pluralist societies that Western Muslims live within today: "Dar-al-Shahada" - the Abode of Testimony.

Ramadan does not here mean here for Muslims to view themselves as missionaries out to convert the heathen. As he says in a later chapter:

In other words, "to invite" is first to "bear witness," as much as by one's behaviour as by the content and form of what one says, what the message of Islam is. It is not a matter of wanting to convert, because people's hearts are God's domain and secret. It is a matter of bearing witness, which is a invitation to remember and meditate. This meaning is also captured in another verse: "And thus have We willed you to be a community of the middle way, so that [with your lives] you might bear witness to the truth before mankind."

In the second part of the book, Ramadan lays out his vision as to how communities of Western Muslims should behave. For a Muslim who has lived in Canada for a long time now, most of this is unremarkable. Ramadan speaks against "Islamic schools" as a form of self-imposed ghettoization, and exhorts the believers to bring their faith into political action just on behalf of the ummah abroad - which is what often preoccupies new Muslim communities in Canada and the United States - but more importantly into social and political activism on behalf of social and economic justice, a core Islamic value. Ramadan encourages Muslims to make common cause with members of other faiths, people of various political persuasions, and even those with stridently atheist views in order to realize their shared goals of a more just society.

If there is anything controversial in the book, it must be the chapter on "Economic Resistance." Ramadan in this case assumes the position of the majority of Islamic scholars in his condemnation of all forms of interest as being "riba" (unlawful usury), but goes a step further in condemning speculation and price-fixing as also being immoral and un-Islamic. Here Ramadan is, however, forced to acknowledge the pervasiveness of these things in Western society, and effectively says, in so many pages, that while Muslims must forever strive to eliminate these things from the Earth, they have no hope of achieving this goal if they don't at least participate in the global neo-liberal economy in some limited way, necessitating at least the use of interest-bearing financial instruments.

And this epitomizes my major criticism of Ramadan's entire argument in the book. "Fine," I say, "I agree 100% with all of this. How exactly do we get there?" (I really don't agree with 100% of it, but close enough.) Ramadan is strong on justifying the ends, but weak on describing the means. Just as he seems unable to lay out practical means of avoiding the receipt and payment of interest, and just as he does not describe how to construct an economy that does not permit speculation, he also does not describe how exactly to bring about his vision of a Western Islam.

The best we have is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy - that because Tariq Ramadan, the superstar of Islamic scholarship, has said that it should be so, then ultimately enough people will work to make it so.

I am probably being too demanding - after all, I have no idea how to bring about Tariq Ramadan's world either, but I do agree that it should be brought about, which is a rare thing for me, especially given the abject stupidity that often passes for Islamic scholarship globally today.

The book, however, did also satisfy one burning question that I had about Tariq Ramadan prior to reading it: Is Ramadan a fork-tongued religious zealot, intent upon subverting Western culture into something unrecognizable under the cover of a devious doublespeak, or is his representation of himself honest and straightforward?

The answer is very clearly the latter.

Rifqa Bary

The troubling case of Rifqa Bary.



I don't know if Rifqa's father actually threatened to kill her, or if she really has been brainwashed by Pastor Lorenz to lie against her family. Neither would surprise me. There exists no shortage of bigoted Muslim fathers or creepy wingnut Christan pastors in the world to make either story implausible. For all we know, both narratives may carry some element of truth.

Some parts of her story make sense, and some do not - the argument, for instance, that Islam mandates the death penalty for those who forsake it, is based on a particular reading of hadith (collections of narrations from the Prophet Muhammad's life), and not upon the Qur'an, the fundamental document of Islam. It is clearly a line she has been fed. Sri Lanka has a 7.6% Muslim population with the rest being Buddhists (the majority), Christians, and Hindus; hardly the environment for Muslims to be setting up insane asylums for the religiously wayward. "Honour killings" are called that because they are committed to preserve family honour, not because the murderer feels somehow honoured to have been involved - and they are a mostly South Asian phenomenon, and not restricted to Muslims.

The anti-Islam brigades are meanwhile exploiting the story to the hilt to demonstrate that misogyny and religious intolerance on the part of some Muslims is attributable to Islam itself.

Half of me does not want Rifqa Bary's story to be true, but the fact that it is so plausible is itself troubling. If this is a conceivable thing for a Muslim father anywhere to do - be it in Pakistan, Iraq, or in Canada - then the Ummah has failed; we are not the enlightened nation that we make ourselves out to be.

The other half of me wants it to be true - because if Rifqa Bary has fled her home, taken refuge with a Christian Pastor, and levelled these kinds of allegations against her own family, then I sincerely hope she has done it for good reasons. If she hasn't, then how can her family ever recover?

For now, though, the wise will wait for the truth to come out, because eventually it always does.

Protesters killed in Antananarivo, death toll nears 100.

If you don't know where Antananarivo is, I guarantee that you are not alone. I only know because sometime in elementary school I did a project on the country in which it is situated. The facts that have remained with me:

- It is the capital of Madagascar
- It is located in the northern half of the island, which itself is east of Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Madagascar has a lot of unique wildlife
- Whatever the local language is, it employs a large number of "a" sounds.
- In the south of the island there is at least one inactive volcano that is surrounded by extremely sharp rocks called "tsingy"s and the crater of which is now a lush, but threatened jungle that for most of the country's history was inaccessible to large-scale exploitation.

Actually, I'm not sure about that last one, but I know there are tsingys in Madagascar for sure.


They sure look pointy! I also remember that they are called "tsingy" because of the noise they make when you throw a rock against them. A little bit of local onomatopoeia.

At any rate, there has been a lot of turmoil in Madagascar, but you wouldn't know it if you lived in a Western country and watched the news or read the regular press. The president was recently sent into exile by the deposed mayor of the capital, himself a former DJ and talk show host, after the latter somehow took control of the army.

The astute amongst you (or those of you with a lot of time to kill) will have noticed that all of the sources above, are Western sources. It isn't that they aren't reporting the news from the island - it's that nobody really cares. Very few people in North America or Europe (or Egypt or Pakistan, for that matter), wake up in the morning unable to contain their desire to learn about the latest developments in Madagascar, and those that do probably have some sort of connection to the island.

We do, however, seem to take an awfully strong interest in other places. If an Israeli soldier is killed in battle, it isn't long before the whole world knows about it. Gilad Shalit (may God help him), is probably the most famous PoW in history - millions, if not billions, of people now know his name, and lots of people who've never been within 1000km of Gaza have an opinion about what to do about him. In that, I obviously include myself. Lots of middle-class North Americans now run around posing as experts on Pakistan's FATA region, and every time a Muslim detonates a bomb somewhere in the world, you can bet it will make the evening news. If it goes off in a Western country, it will be on page 1 of the paper and all day long on FOX.

And if 100 Chinese miners die in some sort of work-related accident, we'll probably all hear about that too.

It seems like there is a hierarchy, which, after you adjust for things like shared citizenship and same-city habitation, goes something like "North Americas & Western Europeans > Israelis > Australians > Arabs = South Asians > East Asians (except Japanese) = Eastern Europeans = South & Central Amercans > Everybody in Africa who lives south of the Sahara and isn't white.

Obviously, we could make some rearrangements there (who, if anybody, did the killing is also important) , but I think the point is clear enough - we care a whole lot more about people who a) look like us or b) we're scared will hurt us than we do about people who have nothing to do with us.

Why do we talk incessantly about Palestine but not about Sudan? Both the Western press and the Muslim community are guilty of this, even though the death toll in the latter in any given year is clearly higher.

Consensus is probably one contributing factor. Human beings are attracted to conflict - it is entertaining, after all, and news is, for many people, entertainment. Besides a few Arab nationalists, we can all more or less agree that the government of Sudan is not ideal, and that the peoples of southern and western Sudan have legitimate grievances that are being ignored or created by Khatoum. What we do about it is up for debate, but it's clear that almost nobody can take El-Bashir's side and be taken seriously.

Not so with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Especially in the United States, there is a large population of die-hard Zionists who would be able to justify almost anything that served the purposes of their ideology. It is, therefore, the combination of the outrageousness of the injustices, coupled with the volume of propaganda that defends it, that makes the debate heated.

An acquaintance of mine had another explanation - that Jews and Arabs share not an inconsiderable amount of history with Western Europeans, and that, for a variety of reasons, we have a material interest in the conflict. That's obvious enough, and a decent explanation, but it isn't a very good justification.

A fundamental precept of Islam is that all human beings a created equal, and that their moral worth is determined not by their place of birth or their race, but by their actions. "An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black, nor does a black have any superiority over a white except by piety and good action."

Those were the words of the Prophet from his last sermon. It was revolutionary thinking at the time. Reading this blog, and looking at the world in which it exists, I think it still is.

Obituary for Samuel Huntington

The man who coined the phrase "Clash of Civilizations" died on Christmas eve. The Hindustan Times recently carried this short, but informative article about the man:

. . . If the Huntington thesis survived, it was because of 9/11 and all that came afterwards. Today the most fanatical Huntingtonians are Osama bin Laden, the Arab street and the Bajrang Dal. It remains the best intellectual fit for their own conspiracy theories to explain the decline of the Arab world and legitimise their biases.

Huntington continued to produce books based on interesting concepts for which he had no supporting evidence. Among his last was a claim that Mexican immigrants to the US were endangering the country because they, unlike other immigrants, weren’t integrating fast enough. It was as weak as the Clash, but no crisis helped to propel this thesis into the limelight. . .

I started into (but never finished) most famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order back in the late nineties, not too long after it came out. I was sort of impressed by it at the time - it did provide a framework to understand the post-Soviet era, and I hadn't done that much reading in the field at that point. Huntington made the interesting observation that both Islamic and Western philosophy and theology were dualistic and universalist - they believe in Good and Evil, and they believe that they have the right answer for everyone. For this reason, said Huntington, they were destined forever to be in conflict.

The thesis, however, has increasingly been proven to be nonsense, its fundamental weakness being in its definition of a "civilization." The only "civilizations" it reasonably described were "the West" and "Islam," while everyone else got an awkward label that didn't really seem to fit. The "Sinic" civilization didn't seem to say much more than "Post-Mao China and current allies." The "Orthodox" civilization didn't say much more than "Latent Russian sympathy for ethnoreligiously similar peoples."

More importantly, the dualism and universalism that Muslims and Westerners share has never been shown to be the reason for their conflict. Bin Laden, for example, in his video after the New York/Washington attack, made fairly reasonable, fairly material demands: troops out of Arabia, end the occupation of the Palestinians, and end the sactions on Iraq. There is no evidence that the subsequent hostility create by the "Global War On Terror" had anything to do with ideology - everybody knows that America didn't invade Iraq to install a democracy, and that Muslim militants aren't travelling to Brazil or Ireland in a search for defenseless Christians to blow up.

Samuel Huntington's Clash got it wrong. Joe Strummer's Clash, on the other hand, was definitely on to something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dOv-UaWJ7M

They should have made him a prof at Harvard.

A great farewell

If you knew that your time in this world was coming to a close, what would you say?

Over 14 centuries ago, on the 9th of the month of Zul-Hijjah, 10AH, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), delivered the following sermon in the valley under Mount Arafat. Accounts differ on certain important theological points, but this is a common rendition of what he said.

O people, lend me an attentive ear, for I know not whether, after this year, I will ever be among you again. Therefore, listen to what I am saying to you very carefully and take these words to those who could not be present today.

O people, just as you regard this month, this day, this city as sacred, so regard the life and property of every Muslim as a sacred trust. Return the goods entrusted to you to their rightful owners. Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you. Remember that you will indeed meet your Lord, and that He will indeed reckon your deeds. God has forbidden you to take usury; therefore, all usury obligations shall henceforth be waived. Your capital, however, is yours to keep. You will neither inflict nor suffer inequity. God has judged that there shall be no usury and that all usury due to al-`Abbas ibn `Abdul-Muttalib shall henceforth be waived.

Every right arising out of homicide in pre-Islamic days is henceforth waived, and the first such right I waive is that arising from the murder of Rabi`ah ibn Al-Harith [a relative of the Prophet].

O mankind, the unbelievers indulge in tampering with the calendar in order to make permissible that which God forbade, and to forbid that which God has made permissible. With God the months are twelve; four of them are holy; three of these (holy months) are successive and one occurs singly between the months of Jumadah and Sha`ban.

O people, beware of Satan, for the safety of your religion. He has lost all hope that he will ever be able to lead you astray in big things, so beware of following him in small things.

O people, it is true that you have certain rights with regard to your women, but they also have rights over you. If they abide by your right then to them belongs the right to be fed and clothed in kindness. Treat your women well and be kind to them, for they are your partners and committed helpers. And it is your right that they do not make friends with anyone of whom you do not approve, as well as never commit adultery.

O people, listen to me in earnest. Worship God, say your five daily prayers, fast during the month of Ramadan, and give the share of Zakah [tax for those in poverty] in your wealth. Perform Hajj if you can afford to.

All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black, nor does a black have any superiority over a white except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is the brother of another Muslim and that Muslims constitute one brotherhood. Nothing shall be legitimate to a Muslim that belongs to a fellow Muslim unless it was given freely and willingly. Do not, therefore, do injustice to yourselves.

Remember, one day you will appear before God and answer for your deeds. So beware, do not stray from the path of righteousness after I am gone.

O people, no prophet or messenger will come after me, and no new faith will be born. Reason well, therefore, O people, and understand my words that I convey to you. I leave behind me two things, the Qur'an and my example, the Sunnah, and if you follow these you will never go astray.

All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others, and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly. Be my witness, O God, that I have conveyed Your message to Your people.

In his account, literary scholar Martin Lings wrote:

He ended his brief sermon with an earnest question. "O people, have I faithfully delivered unto you my message?" A powerful murmur of assent, "O God, yea!", arose from thousands of throats and the vibrant words "Allahumma n'am" rolled like thunder through the valley. The Prophet raised his forefinger and said "O God, bear witness!"

From the inside, it looks different

Last night CBC showed a docudrama, supposedly about the lives of the 9/11 hijackers and the CIA's sporadic attempts to monitor them. I didn't catch the title, and didn't watch more than 20 minutes of it. As a piece of TV, it wasn't awful, but it wasn't great either. The politically-loaded content aside, non-Muslim actors can never seem to get their Muslim characters right, unless they've grown up somewhere with a strong Muslim presence.

There's something about the way they stress their "Insha'allahs" and their "Alhamdulillahs" - translating only makes it sound goofier. The words are thrown in for the sake of authenticity, but to anyone who's ever used such expressions conversationally, it sounds so obviously forced, and blemishes whatever talent the actor might actually have. The fact that the "Islamic expressions" vary with language and culture is never captured in North American films very well either, which are still struggling to overcome their confusion between Arabs and Muslims.

I recall hearing an Egyptian (I think) author on the radio, talking about this problem in literature. She said something to the effect of "If you take the literal translation, it means something different. If you write 'Wa'nabi, pass me the spoon,' and translate it without knowing its cultural context, you get 'By the Holy Prophet, Pass me the spoon,' when really it should be 'Please pass me the spoon'."

This lack of mutual understanding leads to bigger problems. Take, for instance, the insistence of many Westerners, conservatives and liberals alike, that Islam needs to be "reformed." Professional warmonger Daniel Pipes recently penned an article in the conservative-zionist Jerusalem Post, offering his weighty opinion on a Turkish project to create a new compilation of Prophetic narrations. Quoth Pipes:

. . .Other observers are more skeptical. Hashim Hashimi, a former MP, for example, states that "There are established views on Islam and how it should be practiced that have been in place for 1400 years. And they aren't going to change any time soon." Even the head of the ministry, Ali Bardakoğlu, acknowledges that "we are not reforming Islam; we are reforming ourselves."

What to make of this initiative? Serious efforts to modernize Islam, which this appears to be, are most welcome. At the same time, one has to wonder about agendas when government intercedes in the subtle and even subversive domain of religious reform. . .

. . . By limiting its subject matter, the project might forward Islamism more than modernize Islam. True reform awaits true reformers – not Islamist functionaries but independent, modern individuals intent on aligning Islam with the best of modern mores.

To Pipes's sense of faux-expertise, Bardakoğlu's statement seems like a disappointment. "Aw, you mean you're not actually reforming Islam? Dang it, why won't these Muslims learn?"

This is because when many "Westerners" speak of Islam, they are speaking of something deeply, but subtly different from what Muslims mean when they speak of Islam. The European religious experience included the Reformation and Counter-Reformations of the Church, which opened new chapters in Christian theology and in the religious practices of Christians all over the continent.

A church though, is an organization that can be reformed. Islam is not, and that's where the confusion lies.

Islam, in the minds of Muslims, is not defined by what the Muslims do, and its definition is only hinted at in the scripture and secondary texts. Islam, in the end, is defined by God. This is why every religious opinion published by an Islamic scholar ends with the formulation "And Allah knows best" as a reminder of their own human uncertainty. The traditional schools of jurisprudence came to the understanding amongst themselves that contradiction between them had to be expected and accepted - they were only seeking what was praiseworthy in the sight of God; none of them could claim total certainty about the answer.

So how could the Turkish project ever claim to be "Reforming Islam" and maintain any credibility at all? All Muslims understand that Islam is what it is, not what you want it to become. What is recognized, however, is that Muslims must ponder what Islam is, and discard old ways of thinking that they may have thought were "Islamic" in favour of beliefs and practices that are more profoundly so.

With this understanding of Islam, the "reform" that is "required" (required by whom?) sounds like gibberish, if not cultural imperialism. What kind of arrogant pipsqueak would attempt such a monstrosity - to redefine sanctity and morality according to his own whims, or even those of "modernity." The credibility of such sentiments certainly isn't helped by Daniel "Let's Bomb the Muslims" Pipes.

Reform Islam? Astaghfirullah!