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Tag Archives: islamic humanism

Comments: Qanta Ahmed – Kelly File – Real Islam : Revolutionary Islam – M. Zuhdi Jasser

03 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

authentic Islam, Islam, islamic humanism, M. Zuhdi Jasser, moderate Islam, Qanta Ahmed, religion

Posted to YouTube 10/2/2014.


“Shimmer” continues to apply, as may “The Long War” (which suits perfectly the journal that follows it), and the themes built up around authenticity vs invention, medieval vs modern, Islamic Supremacist vs Islamic Democratic Compatibility.

Despite Shadi Hamid’s arguments for a democratic but illiberal Islamicism, that project would seem to have failed in the Muslim-majority states in which autocratic leadership prevails either as expressive of Islamic idealization, as in Saudi Arabia, or as the secular response to the same, as in Egypt and Syria where Islamism has been rejected without successfully attenuating the political absolutism that binds both.

Championing the middle and moderate ranks, which may need a Harris organization to map out the intellectual terrain in its totality, Qanta Ahmed, whom I follow via Facebook, consistently stands up for Islam as essentially graced in the west by liberal multiculturalism and secular tolerance.  Indeed, in the western ethos, one’s deepest beliefs about God, nature, and the universe (and one’s self) are owned and sustained persons — free agents in their own lives — not their religious organizations (who may serve only at the pleasure of their subscribers), and not states.

In essence, I would cite Qanta Ahmed as the one (modern) “scholar more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”.

The problem is that not only to “BadDaddy and His Islamic Hate” but to others less obviously stuffed full of themselves and evil, Qanta Ahmed may draw also the moderate to plain nasty “takfiri”, those who accuse others of heresy or treason in relation to their idea of themselves within Islam.


Even in America, leading Muslim organizations and clerics bully with threats of ostracism those Muslims who dare to dissent. Old-guard ideologues, too, used to monopoly control, make it crystal clear to their Muslim critics: Take us on and we will make an example of you as a traitor to the Muslim community (the ummah).

“Muslim: I was bullied for criticizing Hamas”: 

http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2014/08/23/muslim-intimidation-eid-sermon/14445117/ – 8/25/2014:

Little more than a month ago, Arizona physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, who years ago embarked on a mission to keep separate “mosque and state”, found himself the target of a fellow of his own mosque, a chiding resembling, in my opinion, the hand-pat-to-cheek known to mafia worldwide.

A little leaning, I call that, a bit of “straighten up, boychick, and get with our program (or else)”.

Whatever it may be called, the incident was aggressive, uncalled for, and, for Dr. Jasser, discomfiting, and, indeed, he placed the best chosen plain word “bullying” in the title of his article.

Is there or is there not “no compulsion in religion”.

A grammatic switch in Islamic culture pits loyalty against integrity, validates lying for gain or power (look through this lens when you visit or revisit the screeds associated with the middle east conflict), and the good who by definition possess integrity find themselves on the outs in their own community of legacy.

We’ll get around to differentiating between the pleasing — and pandering — notes of a language and bedrock human universal wisdom, but for now, while “BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate” burn, rape, murder, and plunder their way around the Iraq-Syria back of beyond, it may bear suggesting that one was the real Islam, emulated in anachronist attitude, dress, language, and ritual, and the other a nascent up-to-speed, modern and progressive Islamic Humanism.

It’s not that one shouldn’t have to choose between Ahmed’s way and Baghdaddi’s blood and horror-filled statement, but that the choice, much less the encouragement to retrogress, should not be available at all.

However, today, that choice is available and “Syriamania” and “Prison Islam” and “Islamic Jihad”, which is just not about good medicine or much good anything else but the jihadist’s immense and unbridled ego and penchant for sadism — see this blog’s pages on “malignant narcissism” and “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” — are all real and but a handful of leaders have risen to turn the dismal tide.


Posted to YouTube 10/2/2014.

 # # #

From Shiite Islam — Should Be Famous Last Words

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

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Tags

Islam, islamic humanism, reformation, Revolution

Fahs emphasized that he backed the so-called Arab Spring from the very beginning: “I am human, I am Muslim, I am Lebanese and Arab, and I want reformation because our call for reformation includes liberation from tyrants, our call includes a renaissance which is free and not extremist in accordance with the framework of Islam.”

http://www.dailysabah.com/mideast/2014/09/17/shiite-scholar-claims-iran-behind-syrian-conflict – 9/17/2014.

Related:

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/Sep-18/271087-anti-hezbollah-shiite-scholar-hani-fahs-dies.ashx#axzz3DiWcTZ8y – 9/18/2014.

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Programming – Nihilism – Islamists

09 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Al Qaeda, Islam, islamic humanism, Islamists, Kurdish community, northern Syria, political Islam, terrorism

By labeling the acts of radical Islamists as mere “terrorism” we imply that there is an Achilles heel to expose — a political demand or a territorial gain with which they might barter, with which we might naively appease.

The reality is completely different. Their goals are nihilistic and non-negotiable: they want the total elimination of all who are not with them. Nairobi was possibly the most explicit demonstration of such.

Qanta Ahmed – The new jihad — a violent, intrusive and dangerous threat to world order | Fox News – 10/9/2013.

Someone raised expectations, perhaps; someone provided explicit instruction; someone’s words were received amplified, heightened, deified, perhaps; and someone challenged The Wisdom, saying in effect, “Prove it – it is either of the stars or not.”

Along the line of the Christian anti-Jihad, there is no way away from elements of scripture delivered in practical and literal terms.  Their experience of what on this blog I call “shimmer” starts with their examination of the Quran plus impression from history plus, finally, an acquaintance with Hadith.  None of that ends well, and less for Christian pride than its basis in Jewish thought after Hillel.

For the Jews, the noise starts somewhere beyond the arguments and themes inspired by — but seldom stated explicitly in — the Torah.  Even with something as simple as “The Binding of Isaac”, the reader is never told whether the test is of Abraham’s obedience, which is the common interpretation, or one given to children by their parents, or of conscience, which is a little bit more incisive and likely to arrive as epiphany with sufficient fascination and reflection.

The Jews long ago formed a culture apart and have learned a great deal about themselves and others.  Credit the Torah for that.  Or credit the necessity of separation given the humanity that must have gathered in the ancient desert appalled with the world, and, later, with Pharaoh.  Muslims, by comparison, have formed of the seduced or the conquered of the world, and whatever spirit predated Muhammad would seem to persist in expression now conflated with Islam.

Whether what is in Qanta Ahmed to grasp as a modern Muslim woman a progressive and humanist Islam is actually in Islam, I don’t know, for there are many forces in the Ummah — the “Islamists” but a facet, the “sword verses” another, the conflations with child marriages and honor killings producing yet additional self-slander and fuel for critics, and the  history of conquest (start with the wholesale slaughter of the men and rape of daughters and wives of the Banu Qurayza) — that would belie the assertion.

For the Kurds fighting Al Qaeda today in northern Syria, nothing has changed: they know their old enemy.

Additional Reference

Concerns with terrorist atrocities in Christian or western states may overlook the inkblot spread of Al Qaeda-defined conflict in ungoverned or autonomously governed spaces.  That context tells of a format in warfare as familiar to the 7th Century as it is to the morning news sifted by foreign affairs wonks.

The Kurdish community in northern Syria hasn’t to care about the modern humanist assertion, reformation, or survival of Islam: a Muslim army, self-appointed, self-defined, has arrived on their doorstep to convert or annihilate them, and they know it and have taken up defensive positions and initiated diplomatic efforts congruent with that.

Syrian Kurdish Leader Urges Turkey to End Support for Salafists – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East – 10/9/2013.

Syria: Al-Qaeda wants to control Iraq and Turkey border zones | News | World | Mail & Guardian – 10/5/2013.

Syria: Al-Qaeda Branch Battles Kurds, Threatens Ankara | Al Akhbar English – 10/1/2013.

Al-Qaida claims rare attacks in northern Iraq Republican American – 10/8/2013.

Addendum

Abdul Hakim Quick – a preacher from the Islamic Education and Research Academy, who has called upon God to “clean and purify Al-Aqsa from the filth of the Yahood [Jews]” and to “clean all of the lands from the filth of the Kafirun [non-believers].” He has also stated: “They said ‘what is the Islamic position [on homosexuality]?’ And I told them. Put my name in the paper. The punishment is death. And I’m not going to change this religion.”

UK Charity Commission Permits Hamas Charity :: Gatestone Institute – 10/4/2013.

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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