Excellent, very much agree with the target audience being those in the West who will pay their speakers' fees rather than their alleged real targets (sincere Muslims).

OTOH, the Quran sections you quote do not undermine hte no compulsion. Those sections refer to punishments in the after-life or judgment day and not to punishments by poltical authorities or mobs or armies in normal earthly life. They do not essntially contradict, it is possible to believe your neighbor is bound for hell while protecting his right on earth to preach and practice what sends him there.

Of course there are other passages suggestive of compulsion on earth, but they can be interpreted away.

. . . and the doors of ijtihad and all.

"They do not essntially contradict, it is possible to believe your neighbor is bound for hell while protecting his right on earth to preach and practice what sends him there."

SOrry to quote myself. I always think the best Western exemplar, although one is not needed, (and a great guy) for transition from a pious society to a pious (even devoutly so) liberal one is English-American colonial Roger Williams.

This I suppose would be the 17th century Christian equivalent of the statement, but made by someone who was credible and whose ideas reached and were accepted by his audience, or a large part thereof.

Regarding the Koran...this is an enlightening quote...

Sura 3, verse 7:

"He [God] has sent down to you [Mohammad, pbuh] this Book which contains some verses
that are categorical and basic to the Book, [unequivocal or 'muhakkamat'] and others
equivocal. But those who are twisted of mind look for verses equivocal ['mutashabehat'
as opposed to 'muhakkamat'] seeking deviation and giving them interpretations of their own but none knows their meaning except God"

dear mh & st,

i didn't intend to start a tafsiir competition. all i wanted to point out is that if you want to argue along theological lines, you'll have to do MUCH better than akyol&baran. in any case, they do not have the qualifications necessary to be perceived as authorities in theology and thus their interpretation of which qur'anic verses should be emphasized and at the expense of others is completely irrelevant to the inner-muslim discourse. in other words - neither one of them is a nasr hamid abu zeid.

btw, matthew, 8:39 is a verse usually cited by jihadists in order to justify a fight until all people on earth are muslims. and yes, it does seem to contradict 2:256. ask your local imam about this, or you can ask sistani on his website, or send a request to al-azhar. good luck.

--raf*

Incidentally, this site which arabist.net pointed out a few days ago is kind of interesting - according to Issandr, it's an attempt at moderate - Islamist counterprogramming against the takfiri types. And not at all the kind of "moderate islam" that Irshad Manji would like to represent.

(currently on the front page: an exciting behind-the-scenes visit with Hamas militants! An expose of the Zionist plot behind the Samarra mosque bombing! (Not that there aren't some odd facts that need explaining in that case.)

And, of course, an Islamic agony aunt column, denouncing the fake western image of love & enjoining young muslims to either get married or that failing to repress any improper feelings, helpfully reminding them of "the Prophet Muhammad's words when he advised that God helps those who seek chastity."

dear tom,

the site is concerned that muslim disunity weakens the ummah in the face of external threat by the "west" & the jooos. as you yourself pointed out on issandr's blog - they are hardly "moderate" or "objective".

the article on "who killed arafat?"

(http://www.factjo.com/news_en/NewsDetails.aspx?Id=2451)

is a classic example ...

other posts from the site include such gems like:

"Recent developments in Iraq foretell, according to some observers, that a perilous conspiracy plotted tightly and precisely by Zionist hands is being carried out in Iraq by U.S. tools." (by no less than the site's very own "Investigation Unit"!!!)

"TEHRAN – A number of leading independent historians and scholars from different parts of the world have backed Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad who called the holocaust a myth earlier this month." (Source: Mehr News Agency, Iran)

"No Israelis Among London Victims - Jews had advance knowledge of imminent London attacks -- Army Radio quoting unconfirmed reliable sources reported a short time ago that Scotland Yard had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred. The Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu* remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address an economic summit."

yaaaaawn.

NEEEEEEEXT!

--raf*

ps: if you want a good example for muslim counterprogramming, there's a yemeni theologian who is meeting with jihadists in yemeni prisons and explains to them where their interpretation of qur'an & sunna is faulty. i think stacey (al-hiwar.blogspot.com) has an article on him somewhere but can't find it right now.

raf* --

I dont care what the *true* interpretation is as I am not Muslim. I just want it to get it there in a way that Muslims find credible. Any ammunition may help.

Societal/economic developments or opportunities will make the more liberal interpretations work (sorry to sound Marxist, which I ain't); the important thing is that the sources for change in broader acceptance, as you noted, must be credible. And not, as you noted by persons who at minimum, "do not have the qualifications necessary to be perceived as authorities in theology".

Also Islamic societies are not going to have "secular" governments in a foreseeable future, unless forcibly imposed; but the fallacy, mainly felt on the contintental Euro-left, is that secular and liberal are identical or mutually necessary concepts.

Raf* & TS --

The Yemeni judge is here.

Good information Raf Bey, but I confess your intro paragraph was a bit hard to follow.

Can I convince you to do a follow-on analytical arty?

Matthew: Wow. Quite astonishing.

On the other hand, there's this:

Yet by the summer of 2005, as the war in Iraq continued to drag on, the RDC ran into problems. On June 1, 2005, al-Hitar told the Khaleej Times: "Resistance in Iraq is legitimate, but we cannot differentiate between terrorism and resistance in Iraq's situation because things are not clear in this case." Within a few months, however, his views had shifted slightly and he would only say: "Iraq is not a subject of the dialogue" (AP, October 11, 2005). This shift in thinking, or at least public descriptions of the dialogue sessions, seems to have been brought about by an incident in July 2005 when two former detainees, which al-Hitar had recommended for release, carried out a suicide bombing on U.S. forces in Baghdad. Al-Hitar initially denied this claim, which was originally reported by "anonymous Yemeni security sources" in the armed forces weekly paper 26th of September (October 13, 2005). Yet Jamal al-Amir, the editor of the weekly independent newspaper al-Wasat, has argued that the story is true, and that at least eight men from al-Hitar's program have found their way to Iraq to fight U.S. forces there.

These revelations have essentially spelled the end of al-Hitar's program. In December 2005, while al-Hitar was in Washington participating in a State Department sponsored conference on religious dialogue, Khalid al-Hammadi of al-Quds al-Arabi reported that sources within Yemen's security forces were convinced that al-Hitar's program had failed, and that it should be stopped (al-Quds al-Arabi, December 10, 2005). The sources pointed to the fact that al-Hitar had not been able to persuade the released militants to renounce violence, as a number of the former detainees were still in Iraq fighting. Yemen, of course, has worked extremely hard to keep its young men from traveling to Iraq, turning away suspicious passengers at the airport. Yet the borders are simply too porous to keep everyone in the country and out of Iraq.

dear l,

re: intro - that's my way to weed out the imbeciles.

re: follow-up - i'm already working on an article about that turkish movie, "valley of the wolves - iraq". do you have anything particular in mind re "analysis"?

--raf*

Weeding out imbeciles, you almost weeded me out as I found it too visually confusing.

Now while I can be a bit dim, a modicum of initial faux reader friendliness is not so bad (and you know what I think about kow towing to readers).

Re analysis, I am far too concerned about my emerging disaster to be profound, but my generic point, which is like yours, is "moderates" are the pious sorts people actually listen to, not fringy secular radicals that frankly largely would be cutting edge Left even in the West (e.g. Manji).

Something developing this a little better (presuming we agree) I am thinking off.

Wasn't Daniel Pipes, that renowned Muslim reformer, supposed to be fronting some kind of "Institute" to create moderate Muslims?

TS --

Interesting on the follow up, but I always wondered why they let them go. My original understanding was that if the terrorists won the "debate", they were let go. Otherwise punished, though there was some case of letting go in reward for information.

Releasing them after a "dialogue" seems mindlessly gullible.

Too bad, I had been working on suggesting something similar as a method to combat honor killings, but its failure means a second or third look.

I think you have that just about backwards - the people who were released were those who had given up on the idea of jihad. I suspect what happened (at least in the case of the backsliders) was that although they had given up on the idea of jihad at home, the idea of going off to Iraq to fight against the imperial oppressor in person was a bit too much to miss out on.

"I think you have that just about backwards - the people who were released were those who had given up on the idea of jihad."

Yes, but I had thought that the way it was originally designed was that they would be let go if they beat the judge in spiritual text battle, which would never happen as the judge made the call. Therefore all got jailed (maybe with some miktigation for the repentant) except a few who I thought were let go actually in return for informing. It looks like there was a lot of mitigation for the allegedly repentant.

As a practical matter, maybe they got them to agree to get out of town (to Iraq) in exchange for freedom.

From the original article:

The way to attract their interest was through the proposal of an all or nothing deal. The clerics who approached the detainees insisted that the dialogue would center on the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. If the detainees could persuade the clerics of the legitimacy of their Jihad they would join them. If not, the detainees would have to give up the idea of armed struggle.

So "we'll let you go" was never on the table - just "we'll join you if you can convince us". And those al-Hitar felt were sincere about giving up the struggle were then picked to be released.

A small pointer upstream for newcomers: http://www.aqoul.com/archives/2006/03/how_to_be_a_mus.php

Do you have a comment on this moderate Muslim manifesto?

...Osama bin Laden never forced anyone to go to Iraq, kill its people and destroy its infrastructure. He has forced no one to kill innocent people in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, America and Europe. Bin Laden didn’t tell European Muslims hate the countries that have given them refuge and made them rich after their poverty, fed them after their hunger, provided them with freedom after being enslaved in their own Muslim counties, and finally educated them after they were ignorant. You, the Muslims of the West, made all of these catastrophic choices out of your own free will. You willfully sought evil and failed to return the West’s goodwill with goodwill. What do you expect from the Westerner, when he sees his own citizens killed in the name of religion? Sees hate in the name of religion? Sees terrorism harm him in the name of religion?...

Oops, I see that I should have read your article more clearly (I just followed the link from elsewhere and noticed the similarity to the article I was reading)... But it turned out to be exactly the same article.

In short I would say that Mustafa Akyol & Zeyno Bar are perfectly logical and reasonable... And that's where they get into trouble with your sort. Your own theology and attitudes reject both reason and the reasonable.

It's time for you to grow up and accept a modern sense of reason and responsibility, even when that means rejecting irrational theology.

At some point you have to accept that even God can't make one plus one equal three.

dear joshua,

i also think that mustafa akyol and zeyno baran are, in your words "perfectly logical and reasonable". and i didn't claim otherwise.

as for "my sort" - i don't know what kind of sort do you think i am. since i am an agnostic, i don't have anything like "my own theology". and as for my attitudes - i've been educated and trained in some of the finest scholarly institutions that "the west" has to offer. one simply doesn't survive european and/or u.s. grad school if one rejects "both reason and the reasonable".

since i've already established that i have no theology to begin with, i will not bother responding to the last 2 paragraphs of your 2nd comment.

but i WILL explain what my post was about, since you don't seem to have the mental capacity to do so on your own: i argued that akyol/baran (a) have no standing in the muslim community whatsoever & (b) do not have the kind of theological training to successfully use passages from the qur'an to bolster their arguments. i proved that by showing that anyone could simply pull some other quotes from the same qur'an that would "prove" the exact opposite of what akyol/baran argue for.

i did not take issue with their general attitude - which i happen to share - but with their stupidity of chosing medium (the national review???) and method.

btw - the moment you say that "even God can't make one plus one equal three" it shows that you have a rather limited understanding what the concept of "god/s" is all about.

so you're not just unable to read, you're also a dimwit.

cheers,

--raf*

A little note on Hirsi Ali: she did not convert to Christianity. She presents herself sometimes as an atheist, sometimes as an ex-Muslim, sometimes as a liberal Muslim.

dear martijn,

thank you for your note. you don't happen to have, by any chance, some references? quite frankly, i don't remember where i got the "conversion to x-ianity" thing from.

in any case - since you have a dutch name i will just take your word for it. i guess, "atheist" & "ex-Muslim" could be interchangable?

cheers,

--raf*

If it's the Martijn who runs this blog (on the Aggregator sidebar), he knows what he's talking about.

Thinking back, I've only seen references to Hirsi Ali leaving Islam and/or being an atheist. It's in the linked Wiki article as well.

yes that is my site, i will look for an interview in english for you to refer to

Well, as promised, here they are then:

In French:
http://www.lexpress.fr/info/monde/dossier/islamisme/dossier.asp?ida=433059
Je suis devenue apostate: je ne crois plus en Dieu depuis les attentats du 11 septembre 2001.

And the English translation:
http://trans-int.blogspot.com/2005/05/ayaan-hirsi-ali-on-left-and.html
Since the September 11 attacks, I no longer believe in God.
(read the whole thing, it is also about her break up with the political left in the Netherlands

Very informative (although some minor mistakes are in it) is this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03ALI.html?ex=1270267200&en=7272f7f8332d2c15&ei=5090
Although she now describes herself as an atheist (''I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter''), she had not at that point wholly lost her faith.

11 Sep caused her to lose her faith?

Not much of a bloody faith then, now was it?

Bloody whanking posturing is what that is.

Hah, that's not even subtle pandering.

dear martijn,

thank you very much for your diligent work! i have put a correction into the article.

again, thanks for the info.

--raf*