1001 Inventions and The Library of Secrets - Muslims' Contribution to our World's Civilization

starring Sir Ben Kingsley as Al-Jazari

Is The Bible More Violent Than The Quran? (NPR report)

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
for NPR
March 18, 2010

Listen to story

As the hijackers boarded the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, they had a lot on their minds. And if they were following instructions, one of those things was the Quran.

In preparation for the suicide attack, their handlers had told them to meditate on two chapters of the Quran in which God tells Muslims to "cast terror into the hearts of unbelievers."

"Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them," Allah instructs the Prophet Muhammad (Quran, 9:5). He continues: "Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites! ... Hell shall be their home, an evil fate."

When Osama bin Laden declared war on the West in 1996, he cited the Quran's command to "strike off" the heads of unbelievers. More recently, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan lectured his colleagues about jihad, or "holy war," and the Quran's exhortation to fight unbelievers and bring them low. Hasan is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year.

Given this violent legacy, religion historian Philip Jenkins decided to compare the brutality quotient of the Quran and the Bible.

Defense Vs. Total Annihilation

"Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible," Jenkins says.

Jenkins is a professor at Penn State University and author of two books dealing with the issue: the recently published Jesus Wars, and Dark Passages , which has not been published but is already drawing controversy.

Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack.

"By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane," he says. "Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide."

It is called herem, and it means total annihilation. Consider the Book of 1 Samuel, when God instructs King Saul to attack the Amalekites: "And utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them," God says through the prophet Samuel. "But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."

When Saul failed to do that, God took away his kingdom.

"In other words," Jenkins says, "Saul has committed a dreadful sin by failing to complete genocide. And that passage echoes through Christian history. It is often used, for example, in American stories of the confrontation with Indians — not just is it legitimate to kill Indians, but you are violating God's law if you do not."

Jenkins notes that the history of Christianity is strewn with herem. During the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the Catholic popes declared the Muslims Amalekites. In the great religious wars in the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries, Protestants and Catholics each believed the other side were the Amalekites and should be utterly destroyed.

'Holy Amnesia'

But Jenkins says, even though the Bible is violent, Christianity and Judaism today are not for the most part.

"What happens in all religions as they grow and mature and expand, they go through a process of forgetting of the original violence, and I call this a process of holy amnesia," Jenkins says.

They make the violence symbolic: Wiping out the enemy becomes wiping out one's own sins. Jenkins says that until recently, Islam had the same sort of holy amnesia, and many Muslims interpreted jihad, for example, as an internal struggle, not physical warfare.

Andrew Bostom calls this analysis "preposterous." Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, says there's a major difference between the Bible, which describes the destruction of an enemy at a point in time, and the Quran, which urges an ongoing struggle to defeat unbelievers.

"It's an aggressive doctrine," he says. "The idea is to impose Islamic law on the globe."

Take suicide attacks, he says — a tactic that Muslim radicals have used to great effect in the U.S., Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East. It's true that suicide from depression is forbidden in Islam — but Bostom says the Quran and the Hadith, or the sayings of Muhammad, do allow self-destruction for religious reasons.

"The notion of jihad martyrdom is extolled in the Quran, Quran verse 9:1-11. And then in the Hadith, it's even more explicit. This is the highest form of jihad — to kill and to be killed in acts of jihad."

'Out Of Context'

That may be the popular notion of jihad, says Waleed El-Ansary, but it's the wrong one. El-Ansary, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of South Carolina, says the Quran explicitly condemns religious aggression and the killing of civilians. And it makes the distinction between jihad — legal warfare with the proper rules of engagement — and irjaf, or terrorism.

"All of those types of incidences — [Sept. 11], Maj. Nidal Hasan and so forth — those are all examples of irjaf, not jihad," he says. According to the Quran, he says, those who practice irjaf "are going to hell."

So what's going on here? After all, we all have images of Muslim radicals flying planes into buildings, shooting up soldiers at Fort Hood, trying to detonate a bomb on an airplane on Christmas Day. How to reconcile a peaceful Quran with these violent acts?

El-Ansary says that in the past 30 years, there's been a perfect storm that has created a violent strain of Islam. The first is political: frustration at Western intervention in the Muslim world. The second is intellectual: the rise of Wahhabi Islam, a more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam subscribed to by Osama bin Laden. El-Ansary says fundamentalists have distorted Islam for political purposes.

"Basically what they do is they take verses out of context and then use that to justify these egregious actions," he says.

El-Ansary says we are seeing more religious violence from Muslims now because the Islamic world is far more religious than is the West. Still, Jenkins says Judeo-Christian cultures shouldn't be smug. The Bible has plenty of violence.

"The scriptures are still there, dormant, but not dead," he says, "and they can be resurrected at any time. Witness the white supremacists who cite the murderous Phineas when calling for racial purity, or an anti-abortion activist when shooting a doctor who performs abortions.

In the end, the scholars can agree on one thing: The DNA of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam code for a lot of violence. Whether they can evolve out of it is another thing altogether.

---

Excerpts: "Jesus Wars"

by Philip Jenkins

Ayloush and Rabbi Fischer discuss Irvine 11 on local PBS/KOCE

CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush debates Rabbi Dov Fischer of Young Israel of Orange County about 11 students protesting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at UCI on February 8.



Read more:
On the Irvine 11 - Ayloush and Lafferty: Rude, unpopular speech worth defending (Orange County Register)

A MUST Watch: Najla Said, Edward Said's daughter, reads of her teenage visit to Gaza

Najla Said, reads from her play, of her life changing visit to Gaza as a teenager, with her Palestinian activist father, the late Edward Said, after he learned he had leukemia.

Watch it. It will shake you.

Marine reservist accused of attacking priest in Tampa will not be charged - St. Petersburg Times

St. Petersburg Times
By Colleen Jenkins and Alexandra Zayas

March 9, 2010TAMPA — The Hillsborough State Attorney's Office will not pursue an aggravated battery charge against the Marine reservist accused last fall of beating a Greek Orthodox priest with a tire iron.

Assistant State Attorney Michael Sinacore said his office declined Tuesday to officially charge Jasen Bruce...

Bruce, 28, was arrested in November. Police said he was bent over the trunk of his car in the parking garage of Seaport Channelside condominium pulling out clothes when Father Alexios Marakis — who speaks little English and was lost — tapped him on the shoulder to ask for directions...

Police said Bruce hit the 29-year-old priest on the head with a tire iron, chased him for three blocks and pinned him, all while telling a 911 operator that the bearded, robed man was an Arab terrorist, that he had tried to rob him and that he had grabbed his genitals and propositioned him for sex.

The priest required stitches in his head.

Jews, Muslims worry body scanners violate religious laws | NewsOK.com

Jews, Muslims worry body scanners violate religious laws | NewsOK.com


OMAR SACIRBEY
The Oklahoman
March 3, 2010

(RNS) Canadian lawyer Kerry Gearin is planning to fly to Washington, D.C., this summer for a conference on Islamic family law, but the full-body scanners being deployed in some U.S. airports make her wonder if she'll be forced to leave her modesty at home.

''When I saw the pictures, I thought, it's too much information," said Gearin, a former atheist who said she "reverted" to Islam a few years ago.

Concerns about the grainy body images produced by the scanners prompted the 18-member Fiqh Council of North America to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, which said the scanners violate Islamic law. Muslims, the fatwa said, should instead request a pat-down.

''It is a violation of clear Islamic teachings that men or women be seen naked by other men and women. Islam highly emphasizes 'haya' (modesty) and considers it part of faith," the edict said.

But it's not just Muslims who are concerned.

Agudath Israel, an Orthodox Jewish umbrella group, has told lawmakers that scanners should only be used on passengers who had failed metal detectors. In a letter to Congress, the group called full-body imaging "offensive, demeaning, and far short of acceptable norms of modesty" within Judaism and other faiths.

Even Pope Benedict XVI has weighed in, however obliquely, telling Italian airport workers on Feb. 20 that "the primacy of the person and attention to his needs" must always be respected, although some said Benedict could well have been calling for improved customer service...

Read more: http://www.newsok.com/jews-muslims-worry-body-scanners-violate-religious-laws/article/feed/138344#ixzz0hKIOI7Qi

On the Irvine 11 - Ayloush and Lafferty: Rude, unpopular speech worth defending

By HUSSAM AYLOUSH and JAMES LAFFERTY

2/23/2010
The Orange County Register
Opinion

Eleven students heckled Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren at different intervals at a UC Irvine event recently and set off a debate on what constitutes free speech and when it should be protected.

The right to freely express oneself, particularly against government policies, is a cherished freedom protected by our Constitution. That's why we were not surprised when people protested at health care town halls, when a congressman interrupted the president's address to Congress, or when audience members disrupted a speech by former White House lawyer John Yoo at UCI in 2005.

While some may argue that the students' tactics against Oren were loud and rude, our opinions on the politeness of such conduct are irrelevant. The students merely voiced their passionate discontent on a grave political and moral matter they deemed worthy of their activism.

Israel has undertaken a massive public-relations campaign to salvage its negative image over its violations of international humanitarian and human-rights law, and Oren – as the Israeli government's representative – must have anticipated vocal audience opposition, the same way supporters of Apartheid-era South African government speaking at U.S. campuses did in the 1980s.

Though their protest was delivered in a loud and shocking manner intended to express the gravity of Israel's immoral policies and actions, the students were nonviolent, nonthreatening and peacefully left the public gathering as soon as they spoke.

Some try to characterize this incident as a case of Oren's right to free speech. News reports and videos of the event clearly show that his talk was not wholly disrupted. The interrupting remarks amounted to no more than 10 seconds by each student, barely two minutes total, versus Oren's allotted time of about an hour. Oren left the stage for some time, but then returned and, despite shout-outs from supporters and opponents, was able to continue his speech.

Public speakers, including ourselves, know that speaking on highly charged topics invites opposing viewpoints. Our own public appearances over the past 15-plus years have been interrupted by jeers, heckling and protests. And, although we don't enjoy being subjected to that, we know that the freedom exercised by some who rudely interrupt us is the same that protects our right to publicly and freely speak our minds on important political matters.

We are troubled to see that, for exercising their right to free speech, the 11 students at UCI were cited by campus police and faced the threat of disciplinary action, including possible expulsion, not only by the university, but also potential criminal charges by the Orange County District Attorney's Office.

It is incomprehensible that an institution of higher learning that claims to engage in and promote the free exchange of ideas now seeks to punish its students for peacefully expressing political views, however unpopular, at a student-organized event.

Over the years, there have been countless instances of protest activities during campus speeches, including at UCI, with no comparable disciplinary action taken that we know of. By disproportionately and selectively punishing one set of protesters and not others, including the counterprotesters at the same event, who cursed, threatened and even assaulted students, the university has chosen to censure a particular set of political views – the legitimate criticism of Israel.

Freedom of speech is a two-way street, and it must not be restricted to what is popular, respectful, or appropriate speech, though such guidelines might be preferred by us and others. Oren has the right to speak, even if it is to justify Israel's occupation and brutal policies. Similarly, the students have the right to dissent, even discourteously.

Both sides exercised that right.

We urge the university to drop all charges and disciplinary actions against the 11 students and redouble efforts to reach out to all students, including Muslim and Jewish students. Not doing so will cause a chilling effect on First Amendment rights on college campuses and our society at large, and leave many students feeling excluded and unwelcome.

Muslims in America seek understanding

Muslims in America seek understanding
Monday, February 22, 2010
By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Nine years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many Americans still fear Muslims and ask the question, “Why do they hate us?”
Hussam Ayloush, 40, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, dealt with the question Monday at Montana State University as keynote speaker a day-long conference, Islam in America, sponsored by the MSU Muslim Students Association.

Former President George Bush’s answer that terrorists hate us because of “our freedoms” is obviously wrong, Ayloush said during a panel discussion. The reason Muslims around the world have problems with the United States is because of our policies, not our values, he said. Their No. 1 grievance is the plight of the Palestinian people, as the 9/11 Commission concluded.

Most people deal with grievances in legitimate ways, like lobbying or sending relief supplies, Ayloush said. Unfortunately, a few “deviant” Muslims, like Al Qaeda terrorists, have embraced violence and misinterpret Islam to justify it.

Ayloush argued it makes no more sense to fear and condemn all Muslims for the “tragic” 9/11 attacks by a few terrorists than to fear and condemn all Christians because a few fundamentalists have killed abortion doctors. Lots of people dislike the IRS, but most don’t fly planes into buildings and kill innocent people, as just happened in Texas, he added.


Today there are up to 8 million Muslims living in the United States, including immigrants from many nations, their American children, foreign students, engineers, auto workers and African-Americans. There are two Muslims in Congress, and 10,000 in the U.S. military. Muslims in American probably enjoy more rights to practice their religion here than anywhere else, he said.

An immigrant himself, Ayloush left Lebanon as a teenager for America, studied engineering and became a U.S. citizen. He said he believes America has “the best man-designed political system on earth,” which lets people debate and dissent.

“It’s worth fighting for, defending and celebrating,” he said.

But many American Muslims, he added, feel “like second-class citizens,” who are demonized on TV as “the enemy.”

About a quarter of the world’s people, 1.6 billion, are Muslims, and they are very diverse. Only about 18 percent are Arabs and fit the stereotype many Americans hold.

The world’s Muslims don’t fit our stereotype of hating America either. In every Muslim country’s capital, people line up at 2 a.m. to get visas to come to America, he said. They proudly display the diplomas they’ve earned at American universities in their homes or offices.

Since the 9/11 attacks and 2006 London subway bombings, CAIR has collected on its Web site messages of condemnation by hundreds of Muslim leaders and scholars from all over the world.

“We need to emphasize humanizing one another,” Ayloush said. “We need to insist again and again to reject hate-mongering.”

American attitudes may be slowly changing, said panel member David Grimland, a retired U.S. Information Agency spokesman who worked in U.S. embassies from Turkey to Bangladesh and now lives in Montana.

Grimland cited a Pew poll that in 2007 found 58 percent of Americans thought Islam was more likely to encourage violence than other faiths. By 2009, that had fallen to 38 percent.

Still, there are e-mail messages all over the Internet that spread a “twisted, aggressive, hateful, phobic” view of Islam, Grimland said.

“They take one or two spoonfuls of truth, a few cups of innuendo,” add it to “outright lies and disinformation” and end up with the fearful message that “this is a religious war against America,” Grimland said.

It’s vital that Americans learn to understand, not fear, Islam, he said.

Panel member Tim Spring, Lutheran pastor at Christus Collegium, said Christianity and Islam share common values of caring for the poor, the hungry and powerless.

MSU electrical engineering student Monther Abusultan, a Palestinian and head of the Muslim Students Association, said the two goals of the annual conference are to help Montanans feel comfortable with Islam, and to help Muslims not feel afraid to feel accepted. In general, he said, people in Bozeman accept difference cultures.

“They’re friendly,” he said.

Gail Schontzler can be reached at gails@dailychronicle.com or 582-2633.

L.A. Times Commentary: Desecrating a Muslim cemetery with a Center for Human Dignity

Palestinians in Israel have protested the piecemeal destruction of Jerusalem's Mamilla Cemetery over the decades. It's just that their complaints have fallen upon deaf ears.

February 16, 2010|By Hussam Ayloush
Los Angeles Times

It is a leap in logic for the Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to argue in his Feb. 13 Times Op-Ed article that because a parking lot has been built by Israel over part of the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem, or that power and sewage lines have been placed underground, the Muslim cemetery ceases to exist.

The crux of the dilemma is a simple moral one: The Wiesenthal Center is seeking to build a Center for Human Dignity on top of a Muslim cemetery, a historic landmark and a place held sacred by many. Under the Wiesenthal Center's supervision, more than 200 skeletons have been unearthed at the site.

The cemetery land, along with other property in the waqf (Islamic trust), was designated as "absentee property" when West Jerusalem came under Israel's control after 1948. The land was ruled no longer sacrosanct in 1964 by the state-sanctioned Islamic Sharia Court in Jerusalem, whose members were appointed by Israel and largely distrusted by the Muslim population. In violation of international law, the land was then designated by Israel as public open space, and the municipality built a parking lot on it.

Hier's claim that there has not been any opposition to the building of the parking lot ignores the fact that the government imposed martial law on Palestinians in Israel until 1966. Under this martial law, Israel ensured that any indications of national spirit or identity among Palestinians were quickly and forcefully crushed.

Despite this, Muslims in Israel did legally oppose the designation of waqf land as absentee property in the 1960s, lobbied to rebuild and maintain the Mamilla graves after the 1967 war, protested the desecration of the graves in the '70s and '80s, and today oppose the Center for Human Dignity's construction on the cemetery land. One cannot blame Muslims in Israel because their protests fall on deaf ears.

Hier's assertion that the "Israeli Supreme Court deliberated for almost three years before unanimously . . . authorizing the Wiesenthal Center to begin construction" must be understood in context. This is the same court that has long excused internationally condemned apartheid-like policies and human rights violations against Palestinians, including occupation, settlement construction and denying refugees the right to return. An organization like the Wiesenthal Center -- whose proclaimed mission is to protect the human rights and dignity of all people -- must certainly understand that the Israeli Supreme Court's decision does not settle the moral issue. Building a Museum of Tolerance over the cemetery will only add to the existing pain and suffering of Palestinians and Israelis, further damage relations between Muslims and Jews worldwide and sow new feelings of animosity and division for generations to come.

Ironically, the same Wiesenthal Center that now plans to destroy Jerusalem's historic Muslim cemetery previously spent nearly 15 years forcing the removal of a Roman Catholic convent from Auschwitz, which the organization's associate dean said in 2005 is "the largest Jewish cemetery -- the single largest unmarked human graveyard -- in history," and it "deserves universal respect." Does the Wiesenthal Center believe that a different set of standards should apply to Jewish cemeteries versus non-Jewish ones?

Out of respect for human dignity, which is what this museum is supposed to honor, it would behoove the Wiesenthal Center to relocate the building to land that is not a burial ground. Doing so would not only save the center time and money, it would also keep the name of their Center for Human Dignity from becoming a mockery.

Hussam Ayloush is the greater Los Angeles area executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Islamic group defends student protest (Daily Pilot)

District attorney should drop charges against 11 students because the incident took place on campus, says CAIR.

By Tom Ragan
The Daily PilotTuesday, February 16, 2010

A pro-Islamic group is urging UC Irvine to drop disciplinary actions against a group of students who were arrested after protesting the Israeli ambassador’s presence on campus by intermittently interrupting him during a speech last week.

In all, 11 students, many of whom yelled and screamed in protest, were detained and cited by campus police for causing a ruckus during Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech. Their tones at times reached fever pitch, according to scenes from the event that were captured in a video posted on YouTube.

Oren was trying to speak about diplomatic relations between Israel and the United States, but was interrupted so often that he had a hard time delivering his message, UCI officials said.

The matter has been forwarded to the Orange County district attorney for possible criminal prosecution, but a decision won’t be made until later this week because the office has not yet received the complaint, said Susan Schroeder, spokeswoman for the D.A.’s office.

But the D.A.’s office should drop the charges because the incident occurred on campus, said the Anaheim office of a pro-Islamic group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“We feel this is a campus event. It was noncriminal, nonviolent and nonthreatening,” said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR’s Greater Los Angeles Area office. “Off-campus police should not be involved in such matters. The D.A.’s office shouldn’t be involved in such matters. It was just a bunch of students who spoke out at a student event.”

If the campus decides to pursue disciplinary action, then it would only be perceived as “selective enforcement,” Ayloush said, adding that the campus probably does not want to be viewed in such a light.

“We strongly see the protest as a matter of free speech, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees,” he said. “Students complain all the time, they interrupt all the time, or they boo people all the time. This is nothing new. People have yelled to me, ‘Go home, you terrorist,’ and I take it. I don’t complain.”

UCI spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon said the process of disciplinary action has already begun and that the university will treat the case “just as it would with any student who faces university discipline.”

She said the students could face disciplinary consequences ranging from a simple warning to a suspension to all-out expulsion. She did not give a timeline on when a decision would be made.

This is not the first time that the Muslim Student Union or a pro-Palestinian group have stirred the pot at UCI as it pertains to Israel-Palestinian relations abroad.

The same can be said of pro-Israeli groups, including the Zionist Organization of America. Demonstrations by both factions have become quite common on campus.

At one point a few years ago, the pro-Palestinian groups during one of its demonstrations compared the plight of the Palestinians to the Holocaust, a view they announced on the back of T-shirts sold at the event.

Jewish students took offense to the comparison.

Eventually, the Zionist Organization of America complained to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, calling the atmosphere at UCI campus “anti-Semitic.” It cast partial blame at the university for standing by and not doing anything about what it viewed as a “hostile environment.”

Ultimately, investigations stemming from complaints in 2004 and 2007 were conducted by the Office of Civil Rights, and after three years of “extensive investigation,” it was determined that there was no basis to back up ZOA’s claims, according to Lawhon...