NationStates Jolt Archive

COMMENTARY: Those who think that non-terrorist Muslims need to speak up should read this!


Muslim Dissenters
Make Public Stand Against Islamism (http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200603/FOR20060301b.html)


By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com International Editor
March 01, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - Islamism is the new totalitarianism, and the recent uproar over the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed has revealed the necessity of the struggle for freedom, equal opportunity and secular values.

So said British author Salman Rushdie and a group of other writers and intellectuals, including some of the Islamic world's most reviled figures, in a declaration published Wednesday.

"Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations," the document says, but adds that nothing - not even despair - justifies the choice of hatred.

"Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others."

The signatories said they refused to back away from criticism for fear of being accused of "Islamophobia," describing the term as "an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatization of its believers."

The statement was carried in a French weekly, and also appeared in Jyllands Posten, the Danish newspaper which last September published 12 caricatures satirizing Mohammed. Muslim anger over the issue continues to roil the Islamic world, and hundreds of people have been killed during protests and rioting in Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The declaration's best-known signatory, Rushdie - born to an Indian Muslim family - was in 1989 accused by Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei of apostasy and blasphemy because of his book, The Satanic Verses.

Iran has never abrogated the edict, and the official IRNA news agency declared on the fatwa's 17th anniversary last month that it would remain in force "forever."

The eleven other signatories include the Somali-born Dutch lawmaker and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has also faced death threats over her criticism of Islam; Canadian-based author and "Muslim refusenik" Irshad Manji; and Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym of a U.S.-based former Muslim and critic of the religion who wrote a book entitled "Why I am not a Muslim."

Under Islamic law, any Muslim who abandons his or her faith is guilty of apostasy, an offense which according to some Islamic scholars and according to the Hadith - sayings attributed to Mohammed - is punishable by death.

I'm sure a declaration by "the Islamic world's most reviled figures" is going to win over a lot of the rioters to a peaceful and rational way of thinking. But maybe that's just the cynical part of me talking.

It can be a very dangerous thing. A local (to me) family in Jersey City was butchered last year - supposedly because of anti-islamic fundamentalist posts on a website. Anyone who speaks out against the extreme is truly courageous.

Dissenters? That makes it sound like reasonable Muslims are a minority. The presumption that Muslims have to speak out against anything is absurd and xenophobic. What's going on is nothing to do with them. I don't see the reason for a Muslim living in Malaysia or France to speak out against a Saudi terrorist organisation, or some fundamentalists in Pakistan. I believe most Americans are familiar with the feelings of defensiveness provoked when the rest of the world assumes collective guilt and expects regular apologies. ("Oh yes, we're American, but it's OK, we didn't vote for Bush...") :rolleyes:

This is certainly a brave thing to do but calling them dissenters... Hell, just look up at Tactical Grace, that post sums it up real nice.

The people who wrote that aren't muslim dissenters because THEY AREN'T MUSLIMS. All of them are identified as former Muslims. Most of them criticize the religion in general because they were motivated to give it up.

I don't think this will help. In fact this will add to the "Islam under attack" paranoia. Many of the prominent signatories (Rushdie, Warraq..) are apostates and reviled figures in the circles which are hotbeds of extremism.

This is not an example of Muslims speaking out against Muslim violence. These are secular people who happened to be born in Muslim countries and who have since fled and rejected Islam.

Sane, legitamate, intellegent, and actual muslims, ones which actually follow it, not an extreme made up form of it, should launch they're own Jihad on terrorists.