Is Islam relevant in a world that has come to believe in the vitality of human freedoms of choice, expression and reasoning? In a world confronted with the rising tide of Islamist terrorism, the question has assumed importance of critical proportions. Islam has come to be viewed, arguably, as a faith that is totalitarian in its world view and suffocating in its treatment of its adherents. There is a growing realization among Muslims that without accepting the validity of individual reasoning, Islam cannot hope to earn the kind of respectability that has become a norm for the peoples of other faiths – Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism etc.

 

There is no doubt that an ideology that doesn’t respect the right of individuals to have freedom of choice when it comes to choosing a way of life has contributed tremendously in the growth of militancy and religious intolerance threatening the very foundations of civilization. Muslims being brought up under the tutelage of Islamism refuse to allow their co-religionists to think independently and indulge in individual reasoning. The situation has forced the world to believe that Muslims will always remain a threat to world peace and stability unless they find a way to challenge some of Islam’s perceived foundations that are frozen in a time when barbarism, cruelty, ethnic cleansing and muzzling of opposing voices was the norm.

These were some of the thoughts on the minds of many who participated in a recently concluded Secular Islam summit in St. Petersburg, Florida, that was organized by the Center for Inquiry of New York. The summit provided Muslims with a platform to voice their concerns regarding the regressive hold of radical Islam on their lives. The summit empowered the Muslims to challenge the growing power of political Islam that threatens freedoms totally and absolutely. The Summit’s success ensured that the free thinking Muslims now have a stage and visibility to propose new ideas, introduce new concepts and advance the causes of secularism without being lynched.

The Muslim participants of the summit were aware that in their faith that has remained, traditionally and historically, a hostage of fundamentalist and literalist clerical establishment, any attempt toward reformation and any move to introduce new concepts and ideas is considered as Bid’a (religious innovation) and has always invited the wrath of fundamentalists who literally control the whole Muslim society. And such awareness on the part of participating Muslims made the whole exercise of staging such a conference a very bold and noble jihad against the forces of obscurantism.

The participants’ courage was due to their cognizance that the present sorry state of Muslim socio-economic affairs is because of the fact that Muslims have been forbidden to inquire and reason. Muslim free thinkers recognized the hurdles in their way. They knew that driven by its belief that Quraa’n, the holy book of Islam, is literally the word of Allah and contains the divine truth and therefore provides divine guidance for all times to come, Political Islam, and its fronts will never allow such summits to succeed. And the reaction of CAIR and other radical Islamist organizations confirmed this premise.

The biggest threat to the free thinking Muslims is the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam: Fundamentalists insist that the Quraa’n complemented by the Sunna, is the ultimate book of law and contains all the wisdom that human beings will ever need. Such rigid interpretations of faith have given rise to a mentality that Muslims are perfect and have a divine responsibility to force the world to agree with them. They suffer with a particular kind of Fascism that has convinced them that they are above everyone else. “This concept teaches Muslims that all bid’a, (religious innovation), is human presumption. One Islamic thinker notes wryly that, when Islamic believers debate, they score highest with accusations of bid’a. The ban on bid’a renders all non-Islamic learning, suspect. The ulama (Islamic scholars) see literacy itself as tempting the masses from God’s truth. In much of the Arab world the ulama have been persuaded only very reluctantly to accept the teaching of science and mathematics. Muslim orthodoxy would prefer to confine learning to the holy scriptures, to avoid undermining the faith. http://atheism.about.com/b/a/211876.htm

Thinking Muslims who had come to St. Petersburg were concerned that without challenging the basic tenets of Islamism, they couldn’t hope to bring about any reformation in Islam’s manipulated theology and contaminated sociology. They were motivated and encouraged by the fact that only in the U.S. a Muslim could use his right to correct what he or she finds regressive in his or her faith. Everywhere else, no Muslim could raise his voice in defiance of orthodoxy and hoped to live long after. It is a common knowledge that any Muslim who dares speak against the regressive sharia is immediately declared an apostate and in many cases is murdered.

Muslim participants of the Summit were well versed with the history of Muslims. In Muslim societies, the persecution and murders of intellectuals, free thinkers and scholars who believe in individual reasoning is not new. As far back as in ninth century, Mansur Al-Hallaj, a Sufi (Islamic mystic) master and a mentor of Sufi poet Rumi, who believed that God is found in all of human beings and uttered, “I am the Eternal Truth,” found himself persecuted by the fundamentalists soon after. Such an utterance went against the teachings of Hanbal the imam of Muhammad Abdul Wahhab, the father of present day fascism (Wahhabism) who believed that only Allah is the eternal truth. Consequently, the followers of Hanbal engineered Hallaj’s persecution and eventual execution by crucifixion.

The world that was introduced to the most radical and absolutist Islamist institution of Takfeer by the fatwa against Salman Rushdie did not know that Rushdie was not the only one against whom fatwa was issued by fascist clerics. Just to illustrate the depth of such anti-freedom state of mind here is a list of prominent victims of Islamist hatred for individual reasoning.

Ali Dashti, an Iranian statesman and Islamic historian was imprisoned and tortured to death in Iran in the early 1980s for writing “23 Years,” a “warts-and-all” biography of the Prophet of Islam. Hitoshi Igarashi, Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death in July 1991. Aziz Nesin, Turkisk publisher and writer, who had printed extracts of The Satanic Verses in a Turkish newspaper, was attacked by a crazed religious mob in 1993. They cornered him in a hotel and set it on fire, killing 37 people, but Nesin, an elderly man in his late 70s, escaped. William Nygaard, Norwegian translator and publisher of Rushdie’s book. Nygaard was shot four times in the back in 1993 by an Islamic extremist.

Naguib Mafouz, world-famous Egyptian author and Nobel Laureate narrowly escaped a knife attack in 1994, after Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, spiritual leader of the armed fundamentalist group al-Gama'a al Islamiyya, issued a death fatwa on his head. His “crime”: writing a book decades before that “insulted Islam.” Mafouz, physically and mentally traumatized by the attack, no longer writes.

Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladeshi-born physician, poet and author was sentenced to death in 1993 by clerics for “insulting Islam.” Farag Foda, an Egyptian writer and human rights defender was shot dead by militants from an Islamic fundamentalist group after being branded as an apostate by officials at Al-Azhar, the leading Islamic educational institute in the world.

Anwar Sheikh, a Kashmir-born man of letters, was targeted with a death fatwa for writing books that explored the imperialist nature of Islam. Nasr Abu Zaid, an Egyptian Quranic scholar was convicted in Egypt of being an apostate from Islam in 1995. He was involuntarily divorced from his wife of many years for advancing the cause of textual criticism of the Quran. He escaped to the West in fear of his life as a convicted apostate, where he reunited with his wife, but remains a target for assassination from Islamic fanatics.

Rashad Khalifa, Islamic reformer, an Egyptian immigrant to the USA who founded a movement in Islam called the “Submitters”, and denied the authenticity of many Islamic traditions was declared an apostate in a fatwa issued by 38 Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia and was murdered in 1990 in Tucson, Arizona.

Against this backdrop, St, Petersburg’s Secular Islam Summit will always be remembered as the first step towards empowering Muslim free thinkers. It will also be remembered as the embodiment of what the United States of America stands for and why it is feared by the fascists everywhere.

Here in the U.S. Muslims have found a platform from which they can work to liberate their faith from the fetters of Islamism by challenging the obscurantist forces of fundamentalism without being lynched or beheaded.

During this first week of March, 2007, Muslims, apostates, ex-Muslims, non-Muslims and free thinkers freely expressed their views on the existing psychological, religious and sociopolitical state of affairs in the Muslim societies. There were some who saw no possibility of reformation in Islam and there were some who were optimistic about the future of a faith that boasts of over one billion adherents globally. But all of them were mindful of the totalitarian hold of a radical and fascist ideology over Islam.

Organizations that represent radical Islam in the U.S. were unanimous in condemning the summit. Their condemnation was a testimony to the validity and need for such a platform. The summit has started a process that will conclude in the final defeat of all anti-reason forces globally.

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Tashbih Sayyed is a contributor to Family Security Matters. He is the Editor in Chief of Pakistan Today and The Muslim World Today, President of Council for Democracy and Tolerance, an adjunct fellow of Hudson Institute, and a regular columnist for newspapers across the world. He is the author of eight books, including: History Of The World, Left Of The Center, Pakistan - An Unfinished Agenda, Mohammad - A secularist's View, Foreign Policy Of Pakistan, and Shadow Warriors - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taliban.