Author Archives: Faisal

Islam’s Attitude to Women

By Faisal | Published: July 23, 2010

Back in 2001, Madeleine Bunting of the Guardian came up with this:

Blaming Islam for practices such as female circumcision, they claim, is the equivalent of blaming feminism for domestic violence – it is linking totally unrelated phenomena. Again, the absence of a critical analysis of the tradition is striking, and there is no answer to the question of why, if Islam offers women a bill of rights, it has not liberated more women. The point, they reply, is that male chauvinism and its bid to control women exists the world over; it simply takes different forms, and when women are educated and know what Islam really means, they can fight back.

But what if the religious texts (Qur’an, Sunnah and exegeses) themselves have provided Muslim men with the religious justification for suppressing women.

The video above attempts to identify problematic content from the primary texts which may have done just that.

Posted in Exegesis | Leave a comment

Above is Peter Tatchell - the most principled, brave and tireless left-wing activist against hate crimes, homophobia, racism and anti-muslim bigotry, not to mention a one-man anti-Nazi movement – confronting Nick Griffin.

Terry Glavin says:

“Since the 1970s, the journalist and human-rights activist Peter Tatchell has been a singularly brave and principled voice for justice and human decency. It would be hard to name anyone in left-activist circles, anywhere in the English-speaking world, whose aim has been so true.”

The man is a national treasure.

Posted in Activism, Anti Fascism | 1 Comment

The Mad Mullahs

By Faisal | Published: July 22, 2010

On March 30 1953, TIME published an article called The Mad Mullahs on extremist sectarian violence that had erupted in Lahore. It places the blame squarely on the activities of the ‘Ahraris’. In 1953 the term ‘Islamist’ had not yet been coined but the events that are described are almost identical to sectarian violence perpetrated by the ‘Punjab Taliban’ in Lahore last month. Nothing changes.

It was a minor revolution which swept this capital of the fertile Punjab province—a revolution engineered by fanatical mullahs against the Pakistan government. Five and a half years ago, when millions of frightened refugees were pouring into newly created Pakistan, the mullahs were the people’s leaders. They had a strong voice in the government. But when the country began establishing industries, hospitals, schools and banks, the mullahs protested that these innovations clashed with Islamic law. When Pakistani women shed their veils and emerged from purdah (complete seclusion in the home), the more fanatic mullahs were outraged. When the time came for Pakistan to draw up a constitution, the mullahs demanded that it be based on the Koran. (Result: Pakistan, a nation of 76 million, is still without a constitution.) The government of Prime Minister Kwaja Nazimuddin avoided an open clash with religious leaders, but paid less attention to their counsel.

Posted in History, Islamism | 2 Comments

Relativism is the death of liberalism

By Faisal | Published: July 22, 2010

Gauri Viswanathan interviews Salman Rushdie for The Hindu. An excerpt:

GV: The question of relativism is a very interesting one in your work: it seems to work for you when it comes to resisting a single origin from which all things and beings derive. But you draw the line when it comes to saying that cultural difference cancels out a single standard of justice.

SR: I don’t know how unfashionable this is, but I think there are universals. I think there are things that are universally true and I think there are such things as universal rights. They are not culturally specific, in my view. The argument made by relativists is that it is culturally specific to argue that there are universals. I think there are other ways of approaching it.

Posted in Moral relativism | 1 Comment

When Tariq Met Mona

By Faisal | Published: July 21, 2010

Take a look at the video of the fascinating discussion on the banning of the niqab which saw the Mona Eltahawy, British-Egyptian feminist take on Tariq Ramadan’s dishonest dissembling.

The debate was electric, not least because this is probably one of the only times you will ever hear the “Muslim right wing” as a stakeholder in the niqab debate identified on British TV.

Kirsty Wark: But the question, surely, is not whether there are feminist reasons for wearing the veil or not. It is ‘why is wearing the veil becoming more prevalent rather than less prevalanet’?

Mona Eltahawy: I think it has become more prevalent because the space has been left completely uncontested to the Muslim right wing which does not respect anyone’s rights whatsoever except for this one right to cover a woman’s face. No one has pushed back against the Muslim right wing. I detest the political right wing but I equally detest the Muslim right wing and I will not sacrifice women. Integration has largely failed across Europe even in the UK, with multiculturalism. But we’re not going to sacrifice women for it.

Posted in Human Rights, Islamism | 16 Comments

Wish you were here

By Faisal | Published: July 20, 2010

Pictures from Afghanistan from a bygone age before it was decimated by the Soviets, the USA, Hafizullah Amin and, much later, the Taliban.

Pop music without fatwas

The old guard

Education for girls

Jobs for women (in skirts and cute head scarfs)

More jobs for women

University with some decadent gender mixing thrown in

Honest jobs in industries

Adequate fuel and electricity

Big hat tip: Tarek Fatah

Posted in History | 7 Comments

The Niqab Ban in Syria

By Faisal | Published: July 19, 2010

In CiF, Faisal al Yafai discusses the under-reported limited ban of the full-face veil by the Syrian government; where teachers wearing the full niqab in public schools have been removed.

Islamists groups in Syria will decry this as a gesture to suppress its growing influence in the country as the only viable opposition to the secular authoritarian Syrian government. But the dynamics are complicated. The influence of the Salafis, who regard the Islamist tendency to equate temporal power (their own, preferably) with divine authority as a perversion of Islam.

Islamist response to this criticism is to embrace and include conservative Salafi doctrine into its politics which has the effect of pushing the Islamists further to the right. The case of the niqab ban is an example in point. Islamists are not unanimous in their agreement of the religious mandate of the full niqab, however they support the niqab for women because (a) they do not want to alienate the support of the ultra conservatives (the Salafis) and (b) the niqab has become a flashpoint in faith identity politics which the Islamists have claimed as their ‘political space’.

Posted in Islamism, Secularism | 4 Comments

It is wrong to ban the good, the bad and Maududi

By Faisal | Published: July 17, 2010

The Bangladeshi government has banned the works of Maududi and has ordered mosques and libraries to remove all books written by the Islamic scholar and South Asia’s pre-eminent formulist of Islamic clerical fascism.

From a BBC news report:

The Bangladeshi government has ordered mosques and libraries across the country to remove all books written by a controversial Islamic scholar.

The chief of the government-funded Islamic Foundation told the BBC that the books by Syed Abul Ala Maududi encouraged “militancy and terrorism”.

The chief of the government-funded Islamic Foundation told the BBC that the books by Syed Abul Ala Maududi encouraged “militancy and terrorism”.

Mr Maududi – who died in 1979 – is the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami party.

His works are essential reading for supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in the region.

Posted in Freedom of Expression, Islamism | 12 Comments

Paul Berman: What You Can’t Say About Islamism

By Faisal | Published: July 13, 2010

Paul Berman is very good at getting under the skin of Islamism’s white liberal cognoscenti. His latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, has irked almost everyone in that esteemed group. Particularly those who would like to sell us the notion that Islamism is a force for good, or that Isaiah Berlin, and not Sayyid Qutb, is a precursor to Tariq Ramadan.

He also pulls the rug out from under Islamists who are working hard to dress up clerical fascism as a “liberal” antidote to western capitalism and US imperialism. In other words, Berman has a lot of detractors, but he knows how to deal with them.

And how. This came out originally in the WSJ. But you can get past the paywall and read Berman at GayandRight and here:

Posted in Islamism | 8 Comments

Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979

By Faisal | Published: July 8, 2010

A book for any self-respecting Spittoon reader’s bedtime book list, I should think. And here’s a review from the THE:

How could jihadi violence break out in a country seen as the historical heartland of Islam and ruled by a state that boasts about its many Islamic credentials? Here, Thomas Hegghammer unpacks the paradox of jihadi militancy in an Islamic state.

The book is based on fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, and draws on an impressive collection of biographies and written sources from al-Qaeda websites. Its 10 chapters trace the evolution of militant Islamism and its later containment by Saudi authorities.

Since 9/11, scholars and security specialists have searched for plausible explanations to account for jihadi militancy at local and global levels. Wahhabi radical theology, Western foreign policies, socio-economic deprivation, dictatorships in the Muslim world and, more recently, the rise of the internet, are often cited as causal factors. In a global world, it has become difficult to isolate local conditions from global contexts.