BACKGROUND: Smug theorizers are supporting their crimes through naiveness and inaction, unaware of what is really going on in the world, trapped in the lies of corrupt mass media, unconcerned with the slavery and starvation of billions of human beings. To awake to these facts and to step out from this net of corruption is our last hope. ---------------------- September 14, 2001 What Became of Tolerance in Islam? By KHALED ABOU EL FADL, Khaled Abou El Fadl, acting professor at UCLA Law School Extracts: [In Islamic law, terrorism (hirabah) is considered cowardly, predatory and a grand sin punishable by death. Classical Islamic law explicitly prohibits the taking or slaying of hostages or diplomats even in retaliation against unlawful acts by the enemy. Furthermore, it prohibits stealth or indiscriminate attacks against enemies, Muslim or non-Muslim. One can even say that classical jurists considered such acts to be contrary to the ethics of Arab chivalry and therefore fundamentally cowardly. All of this begs the question: What happened to the civilization that produced such tolerance, knowledge and beauty throughout its history? A lot has happened. The Islamic civilization has been wiped out by an aggressive and racist European civilization. Colonialism and the expulsion of Palestinians happened. Numerous massacres against and by Muslims happened. Despotic and exploitative regimes have taken power in nearly every Muslim country. Most important, however, a dogmatic, puritanical and ethically oblivious form of Islam has predominated since the 1970s. This brand of Islamic theology is largely dismissive of the classical juristic tradition and of any notion of universal and innate moral values. This orientation insists that only the mechanics and technicalities of Islamic law define morality. Paradoxically, it also rejects the classical juristic tradition and insists on a literal reinterpretation of all Islamic texts. The extreme form of this puritanical Islam does not represent most Muslims today. But there are two ways in which contemporary Muslim culture, Arab or non-Arab, inadvertently feeds these extreme trends. First, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the onslaught of colonialism, Islamic intellectuals have busied themselves with the task of "defending Islam" by rampant apologetics. This produced a culture that eschews self-critical and introspective insight and embraces projection of blame and a fantasy-like level of confidence and arrogance. Second, Muslims got into the habit of paying homage to the presumed superiority of the Islamic tradition but marginalize this idealistic image in everyday life. Muslim intellectuals justified hijacking airplanes and taking hostages. Terrorist attacks such as the 1976 Entebbe operation or the 1972 killing of Israeli Olympic athletes were justified on purely pragmatic grounds: How else are we to fight Israeli arrogance and belligerence? The reality of contemporary Muslims is unfortunate. Easy oil money, easy apologetics, easy puritanism, easy appeals to the logic of necessity have all but obliterated the incentive for introspection and critical insight.] -------------------------------------------- July 17, 2001. A readerīs review on "Culture and Imperialism" (by E. Said) Extracts: [Before E. Said can legitimately condemn Western "domination" of other cultures, he ought to thoroughly examine the ills inflicted by Pan-Arabism and Islam on non-Arabs and non-Muslims throughout the Middle East and world. As mentioned by others, Arabs have subjugated--or all but eliminated--Egypt's Coptic Christians, Algeria and Morocco's Berbers, Sudan's southern Christians, Lebanese Christians and Iraqi Kurds. Then there are the Turkish Armenians. Sudan's Arab government actively pursues genocide and enslavement of Southern Sudan's Black Christians. Meanwhile, the Taliban have imposed Hitlerian restraints on Afghanistan's women and Hindu minority. In Indonesia, Muslims are willfully murdering thousands of Christians. Syrian society reviles the idea of peace with the Jewish people, exhorting all children to fight, kill and seek death, with the promise of both material reward for their families and eternal happiness in paradise. School texts inciting racial hatred, religious intolerance and, outright genocide to him seem emblematic of a "fundamentalist rejectionism," "older than the [Israeli] settlements, older than the state of Israel," reflecting the spirit of Jerusalem Grand Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini, who during World War II fled to Berlin, blessing Muslim SS arms and "begging Himmler to let him handle his own version of the final solution in Palestine against the Jewish settlers in Haifa, Jaffa and Tel-Aviv." The constitution of Fateh--the PLO's "national, revolutionary" military wing-- invokes the vision of a Pan-Arab "nation" which would coincidentally eradicate Zionism, Israel and the Jewish people there. A Friday June 6 sermon broadcast live by the PA called for the enslavement of Israel's 5 million Jewish people as Dhimmis. "We welcome the Jews to live as Dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah." In this vein, the Arafat-appointed Jerusalem Mufti on June 29 incited Muslims to prepare "armies to fight the Jews and to remove Israel from Existence" and called for an Islamic Khilafah State, just as he has done in myriad Al Aksa Friday sermons for more than a year.] _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp - >>> email 'unsubscribe listening-l' or 'subscribe listening-l' or 'info listening-l' >>> to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> in the body of the message
