Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The Right to Criticize Islam

 

by Pilar Rahola

 

We women who defend liberty are not Islam's enemy. The enemy is in your house; it takes the name of God in vain and perverts it to serve a wicked ideology. One final request. Think twice before pointing your finger at us and accusing us of insulting Islam. For I wish to remind you that some of those about you might consider such an accusation [as indicating] a target.

 

The first quote: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali born Dutch parliamentarian who was issued a death sentence for fighting against the oppression of women in Islam, in her book J'accuse :"Two out of three wars in the world are fought in the name of Islam. The notion that Islam is a religion of peace is without basis in fact." Second quote: Wafa Sultan, Syrian psychologist, in an interview on Al Jazeera: "Only Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, murdering people and destroying embassies. This path will give no result. Muslims should ask themselves what they can do for Humanity, before asking Humanity to respect them." She lives under a death threat. Third quote: Fadela Amara, Muslim of Algerian origin and president of the French movement "Neither Whores nor Submissive": I am a believing Muslim and I consider the veil an instrument of oppression against women."

 

I could add to the names of these women many others whose struggle for freedom in the heart of Islam has forced them to live under threat. None of them insulted that religion, but all were accused of insulting it. The first and worst thing that we find when we try to hold a calm debate about Islam is the demonization of critical thought, and always in the mouths of those who arrogate unto themselves the role of universal spokespersons and who present Islam as an anti dialectic and ahistorical dogma.

 

Years ago I wrote that Islam needs to have a Voltaire. Seeing the response that Ms. Ndeye Andújar dedicates to me, an ad hominem attack (she kills the messenger twisting me into an entity filled with prejudices), and how she turns my critical arguments into insults of Islam, I consider it all the more urgent to appeal to the Enlightenment. I rebel against that sickness of thought that bases the truth of its arguments on the negation of any debate. I rebel because it is a manichaean and antidemocratic posture. Maybe Andujar is afraid of free thought (it's good to read Fromm), but she will not be able to keep, in spite of her demonization, some of us from being seriously critical with modern day Islam.

 

A fundamental note. No matter how much she tries, she will not find a single insult of Islam in any text of mine. I profoundly respect the beliefs of each person and, although I am cut from rationalist cloth, I don't believe faith to be the source of the problem. But she will indeed find many worried reflections on the perverted use of religion to advance a totalitarian ideology that today, in the name of Islam, educates people in fanaticism, suicidal nihilism and scorn for women. If Ms. Ndeye Andujar wants to find and call attention to those who insult Islam, I advise her to look at home. I'll give her a few ideas. Those who teach their children to be suicide bombers severely insult Islam. Those who establish laws that enslave woman insult Islam. Those who teach anti-Semitism, anti-Westernism and scorn for liberty, all insult Islam. Those who use 21st century technology to connect to the Middle Ages insult Islam. Those who encourage children to flagellate themselves to the point of delirium to commemorate someone who disappeared centuries ago insult Islam. And yes, they too insult Islam who from Western mosques encourage the covering of their women, the sending of young men to Iraq or consider democracy an evil of the infidel.

 

Didn't she know that this takes place in French and Spanish mosques? I invite her to read some reports, or even to learn the reasons for the expulsion of certain imams from France. All the mosques? Of course not. To be sure, there exists a progressive and democratic view of Islam. But along side it and flourishing, there lives a regressive, fanatical and anti-modern view. This view, to the misfortune of all of us, has a lot of power and receives a lot of money. And this view, by the way, has a particular obsession with imposing the veil, an unmistakable metaphor for the denial of a woman's freedom.

 

We could discuss other issues. For example,

 

Ndeye Andujar claims that the Islamic University of Al-Azhar denies the Koranic validity of female circumcision. But she chooses to forget that

there are scholars in the same university who support it. And she also forgets that in Al-Azhar are nourished certain fundamentalist Koranic readings that have done the most ideological harm. Founders of the Egyptian Brotherhood, from Hassan al-Banna to Sayid Qutb or Yussef al-Qardawi, have drunk from its springs. And its textbooks, a model of the most totalitarian fundamentalist currents, make up the readings for the majority of Islamic centers in Europe. So, the topic isn't so neat and pretty after all.

 

Instead of trying to demonize those of us who take pen in hand to denounce abuses made in the name of Islam, the Ndeyes of the world hereabouts would do well to apply their own energies to combatting them.

 

We women who defend liberty are not Islam's enemy. The enemy is in your house; it takes the name of God in vain and perverts it to serve a wicked ideology. One final request. Think twice before pointing your finger at us and accusing us of insulting Islam. For I wish to remind you that some of those about you might consider such an accusation[as indicating] a target.

 

Pilar Rahola is a Spanish-Catalan journalist, and a philo-Semite. She writes a regular column for the Barcelona paper La Vanguardia and in monthly El Periodico

 

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

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