Posted on 09/12/2005 10:40:59 AM PDT by radar101
A FEW weeks ago, in an article written in response to the London bombings, I wrote about the urgent need for a “reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age Naturally there were those who rushed to dismiss my arguments because they came out of my mouth. “The man who lost his personality and beliefs should not speak about the great religion of Islam,” wrote Anna Tanha, of Glasgow.
However, there was an encouraging flood of more positive commentary, much of it coming from Muslims. “Absolutely right; it is time Muslims accepted that it is Islam’s 8th-century attitudes that are causing so much suffering in the 21st-century world,” wrote Mohammed Iqbal, who comes from Leeds, home of three of the 7/7 bombers. “Please keep dogma aside and let reason be part of the debate. We believers have done enough to harm ourselves. What European monarchs and clergy did in the Dark and Middle Ages is exactly what Muslim rulers and clergy are doing to the Muslim world,” argued Nadeem Akhtar, from Washington, DC.
Reformed Islam would encourage diaspora Muslims to emerge from their self-imposed ghettoes. It would emerge from the intellectual ghetto of literalism and subservience to mullahs and ulema, allowing open, historically based scholarship to emerge from the shadows to which the madrassas and seminaries have condemned it.
There must be an end to the defensive paranoia that led some Muslims to claim that Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks and, more recently, that Muslims may not have been behind the 7/7 bombings either (a crackpot theory exploded by the recent al-Jazeera video).
Not so much a reformation, as several people said in response to my first piece, as an Enlightenment. Very well then: let there be light.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
So? The fact is that "polite" people are just too darn polite to speak unpleasant truths, so you have to be a bit of a jerk to get your hands dirty in that regard.
I take my nick from Salman Rushdie, out of respect.
No he's not 100% American like me. How could he be?
But he told it like it is about Islam while most of us were sleeping. That must count for something.
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