“They lived out the Koranic commandment that there is no compulsion in religion and also that God said in the Koran I made you into many tribes so you might know one another, and as such, they enrolled me and my siblings in a Hebrew day school for nine years, where we learned Hebrew, read the Torah, prayed in a synagogue almost every morning. They always wanted us to learn about other faiths and they always made sure we knew the difference, though, between Islam and Judaism, they also made sure we respected our Jewish sisters and brothers in faith. My story is just one of 1.5 billion stories in some 57 countries.”
Zeba Khan speaking in an October 2010 Intelligence Squared debate sponsored by the Rosenkranz Foundation.
Many of my Facebook buddies who may glance at the “status update” accompanying this post’s distribution either know this clip or the territory it represents, and they’re not going to give it five minutes, much less an hour and forty-seven minutes; however, as the signal travels from Riyadh to Islamabad, to young and old, to Christians, Jews, and Muslims and others, to high school graduates and Ph.Ds, some may take a few minutes to hear how some of the sharpest minds in this arena field the proposition.
Also Debating
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: ” “I respect and admire Zeba Khan, and I want to acknowledge that indeed you are a demonstration of the assimilation of a Muslim woman into western society, and that you come from a middle class family that was very eclectic and respected pluralism . . . and I think you are an example to others; however, I disagree with you that you represent Islam or that you speak for Islam. The problem that is inherent in Islam from the time of its foundation up to this moment is who speaks for Islam?”
Majid Nawaz: “This debate is not about making excuses for suicide bombers, even inside of Israel . . . we . . . acknowledge that Muslims do need to speak out against extremism and to challenge it, and more Muslims need to do that more actively. We acknowledge that Muslims bear responsibility for reclaiming their faith from those, the minority, who have hijacked Islam and who have captured the public imagination in their definition of Islam.”
Not to tease my few readers to watch (at 23:34), but Nawaz will go on to talk about Islam as a religion integrated with (this is my term) the global campus of religions on behalf of the cause of peace. It is a stunning turnabout and worth the listen.
Douglas Murray: “let’s not have a debate about Islam and whether Islam is a religion of peace without talking about the facts to do with Islam. It’s an absurd situation we’re in where nothing that anyone does whilst being Muslim has any responsibility of Islam, yet anything anyone does whilst being a Christian or Jew is the responsibility of all Christians or Jews.”
I didn’t mean to watch the whole thing, but even while posting I am.
🙂
At about 45 minutes, Ayaan: “It would be more accurate if you said, Zeba, the scholars that you find attractive say that, but there are a bunch of scholars” — and she starts with Bin Laden and ends, not quite but close, with Ayatollah Khamenei and by no means misses Hassan al-Banna or Qaradawi — “they are attractive to many Muslims, not thousands, but in the millions, and what they say, that’s why they’re influential, they challenge every single Muslim individual, ‘Are you a true Muslim? If you are a true Muslim, you live by what the Koran dictates, you follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad,’ and those scholars who insist on that are far more influential and more powerful than you” (Zeba intended, I think, with a social verbal wiggle to include Majid) “who are soft spoken, wonderful, cuddly scholars.”
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