|
WSJournal covers secular Islam summit
ht to Instapundit; WaPo, NYTimes and other dailies are apparently not covering it but Al-Jazeera and some other arab media are At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no "moderate" Muslims. There are ex-Muslims: People like Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I Am Not a Muslim," who doesn't want an Islamic Reformation so much as he does a Muslim Enlightenment. There are ex-jihadists: people like Tawfik Hamid, who, as a young medical student in Cairo, briefly enlisted in the Gamaa Islamiya terrorist group and who remembers being preached to by a mesmerizing doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri. There are Muslim runaways: People like Afshin Ellian, who in 1983 fled Iran -- and the threat of execution -- on camelback and is now a professor of law at the University of Leiden in Holland. (Now threatened by European jihadists, he lives with round-the-clock police protection.) There are experts on Islamic law: People like Hasan Mahmoud, a native Bangladeshi who, as director of Shariah at the Muslim Canadian Congress, was instrumental in overturning Ontario's once-legal Shariah court last year. There are even a few practicing Muslims here, such as Canadian author Irshad Manji. Ms. Manji, whose documentary "Faith Without Fear" airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a "radical traditionalist" and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates and reformers: "Moderate Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it," she says [wonder if LH agrees with that definition]. "Reform-minded Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it." The difference is not trivial. For more than... [and Irshad should have also defined secular muslims who only know a half dozen verses of the koran and believe the terrorists are making stuff up as well as tayikka/kitman muslims who tell infidels one thing and muslims another] Posted by: mhw 2007-03-06 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=182385 |