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Progressive Islam?There is an alternative to fundamentalist Islam. Personally I believe we should work with Islamic thinkers such as Professor Tariq Ramadan and Alibhai-Brown, both of whom give vent to their thoughts below. I find their views no different to modern free thinking men – and we should encourage such progressive opinion.Professor Tariq Ramadan seeks to promote an independent European Islam. He calls for a 'silent revolution' for Islam in Europe and urges Muslims to reach out and integrate into European countries and not to withdraw into isolated communities. He has been named as one of the world's one hundred most innovative thinkers by Time Magazine; he's also been refused entry to the US under the Patriot Act. Professor Ramadan denies all allegations that he supports violence, the reason some say for his ban from the US. He has also been barred from many Muslim countries for preaching democracy and human rights. Professor
Ramadan on his ban in the US:
"Neither the State Department or the Homeland Security Department ever gave reasons as to why I was banned, the only thing we heard from them was the Patriot Act." On allegations the ban stemmed from alleged support of suicide bombings by Palestinians: "I have never endorsed or promoted suicide bombings. The point is very clear that the Palestinian resistance for me is a legitimate resistance - the means which were used after 1994 [suicide bombings] were illegitimate means. Suicide bombing is not legitimate for me, it is not right according to Islamic values." "I am saying we have to understand what is happening and to understand, or to explain, is not to justify." On accusations that he has a hidden agenda and that he talks with a liberal voice to non-Muslims and an extremist voice to believers: "My answer to all these allegations is to be here in London working with the government in the taskforce in tackling extremism and radicalisation. If there was something in my record about extremism, do you think it would be possible for the British government to ask me to be part of the process trying to prevent Muslims going in that direction?" "I have more than 150 tapes of my speeches to Muslims, come with these tapes and show me where the extremist views are. If you have the proof, then come with the evidence - it's very easy to dismiss someone by saying they practise in double talk." "Let me say something that should be clear - we are hearing about Muslims, and someone like me, today what we heard in the 30s and 40s about the Jewish people when we said to them you have a double talk, you have a double loyalty and there is an international conspiracy - this is exactly what we are saying about Muslims now." On the need for Muslims to play a greater role in public life in Europe: "Muslims have to be more present, more visible in the mainstream space with people in the public sphere and be more involved in domestic policies." Level of extremist Islamic terror threat in Europe: "I think that we have to keep in mind that we are here dealing with people on the margin of the margin. They are not in the Mosques - the people who did that [attacks in London, US and Spain] were not meeting in the Mosque they were meeting outside so we are dealing with people on the margin, even their own parents, their own family didn't know what they were doing. My point is that they had a very superficial political understanding, a very literalist and extremist religious involvement and they can be manipulated. No one can say when and where it could happen, but it could happen. I don't think we can say we are going to be protected." "What we should do is work on the grey area where you have young Muslims that can be attracted by this kind of discourse, we have to work on that in order to help them have a better understanding of Islam and its values and how we can help oppressed people." On people who say Islam itself is the problem: "You can be obsessed by the people in the West who are saying Islam is the threat and the Muslims are the fifth column. The point for me is just not to be upset and not to blame the other. We have to start to be self-critical and this is what I'm calling for, every one of us should be self-critical. So, the Muslims should understand: why this perception? Why are we not heard by the people around us? Are we not self-critical enough in order to come with a better understanding of Islam? And I think we have to face up to our responsibilities." Is Islamic feminism a contradiction in terms? "Absolutely not, it's what we need - we need Muslim women knowing the Islamic teachings and out of this understanding to act against all kinds of discriminations coming from literal readings or cultural readings [of the Koran] and these are things that should be done urgently." "Look at what is going on now in the Islamic world, in the Islamic majority societies, and even in the Muslim communities in the West and you will see that now the women are leaders and they are leading this new and critical reading of the sources. They are saying as a Muslim woman: 'I have my rights and I want these rights to be protected and I'm against any kind of, for example, forced marriages, domestic violence, female circumcision, and any kind of prevention for the woman to work''. I think this is what we have to promote." On headscarves: "It's against Islam to impose the headscarf on a woman, it's against human rights to impose on her to take it off - it's an act of faith and we have to respect that. I think this is the Islamic way of thinking about it and it's the human rights perception of it. As we are living in a society where we have freedom of conscience and freedom of worship then let the people choose, but you cannot impose in one way or another anything." Can Islam become a moderate European religion? "I'm speaking about a silent revolution, if you are obsessed by the people who are destroying you're not going to assess what is being done on the ground and we now have millions of Muslims who are becoming citizens and they know much more than their fathers and mothers about their environment and its values. So, we have to look at these people and I don't think the picture is as bad as we present it now, there are many things that are being done and my point is to look at the Muslims and to ask the Muslims to do exactly the opposite of the natural psychological response, which is to draw within to themselves, they have to reach out and be vocal and be visible." The article below is taken from
the London Evening Standard
Written by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: a modern Muslim Is it time the burqua was banned in Britain? A few weeks ago, while I was browsing in shops on London's Chiswick High Road, I became aware of a woman shadowing me, rather coo close in that private space we all subconsciously carry around us. She was covered from head to toe in a black burqa. Tight white gloves covered her hands and her heels clicked. She wore perfume, or hair oil, smelling of roses. At one point, I nearly tripped over her foot and she said "sorry" softly. I drove home, and 20 minutes later the doorbell rang. I opened the door to see the same woman standing there, her raven cloak billowing as a gust of wind blew up. Her eyes were light brown. She said nothing at first, then asked in perfect English if she could come in. I admit I felt panic rising. Because I write on controversial issues at this fraught time, death threats come my way and I have been advised by the police to be extremely careful about loitering strangers. "Please," she said, "I know who you are and I must speak to you. I saw you in the shops and followed you. I must show you something." "Who are you?" I asked, even more scared. She pleaded some more, told me her name, showed me her EU passport. I let her in. She took off her burqa to reveal a sight I shall never forget. There before me was a woman so badly battered and beaten that she looked painted, in deep blue, purple and livid pink. The sides of her mouth were torn - "He put his fist in my mouth because I was screaming," she explained. "My father and two brothers have forced me to wear the niqah (burqa) so no one can see what they've done. Many families do this. They beat up the women and girls because they want them to agree to marriages or just because the girls want a little more independence, to go to college and that. Then they make them wear the burqa to keep this violence a secret. They know the police are now getting wise to 'honour' killings and so they have this sheet to hide the proof." Over the afternoon she sobbed and told me about the horrors of her life. She was 25, came from a lower-middle-class Pakistani background in Bolton and was a chemistry graduate. She wanted to be a teacher, hut her brothers and father had resented her desire for independence and grown distrustful of her. At least she was alive. She told me of a dead friend, killed, she claims, by family members who felt she had shamed them: "Someone told the family they had seen heir daughter talking to a couple of men at the bus stop and that she was holding the hand of one of them." It was a lie. "This gossip can kill us," she said. In her own case, she says, at first her father and brothers wanted to know if she, too, was as "bad" as her friend. Any contact or flirtation with a man they had not chosen for her was enough to merit an argument - and violence. So they beat her, to get her to confess to things she hadn't done. Then they tried to get her to quit her teacher-training course. When she refused, they locked her in a bedroom and carried on abusing her; the youngest brother, in particular, was, she said, maddened with suspicion. A few days ago she escaped, with her passport, and a friend drove her to London . She was living with a friend's friend now, but she knew her family would find her and she was desperate to move on before they did. I have a contact who runs a safe refuge in north-west London. I got "S" a place there and gave her some money, enough to live on for a few weeks. She has my number and I hope she calls if she needs to. As I dropped her off, she said she was feeling guilty that her escape would break her mother's heart. Where had her mother been in all of this? Equally-powerless, it seemed. Her mother's heart, I said, should have broken to witness what had been done to her daughter. This incident shook me – and set me thinking again about the burqa and whether we, as a liberal country, should accept it. There has been a marked increase in the use of burqas in Britain - they are now a common sight on London streets. This is the next frontier for puritanical Muslims who believe females are dangerous seductresses who must be hidden from sight. Women and girls as young as 12, they say, must cover up to avoid such provocation. The pernicious ideology is propagated by misguided Muslim women who claim the burqa is an equaliser and a liberator. In a film that 1 made for Channel 4, I met an entire class of teenagers at a Muslim secondary school in Leicester who told me that negating their physical selves in public made them feel great. I was shocked at the time by their mixture of modernity - they loved Madonna - and the restriction of the burqa which they said was voluntary. I think they were kidding themselves. I confess now I respond to this garment with aversion. I find the hijab (headdress) and the jilbab (the full body cloak) problematic too, because they again make women responsible for the sexual responses of men and they define femininity as a threat. But the burqa is much, much worse. It dehumanises half the human species. Why do women defend this retreat into shrouds? When I try to speak to some of these shrouded women on the street, they stare hack silently. In a kebab shop in Southall last week, a woman in a burqa sat there passively while her family ate - she couldn't put food into her own mouth. One mother told her daughter in Urdu to walk away from me, a "kaffir" or non-believer in her eyes. Domestic violence is an evil found in all countries, classes and communities. Millions of female sufferers hide the abuse with concealing clothes and fabricated stories. But this total covering makes it completely impossible to detect, which is why "S" and other victims of family brutality ate forced to wear it. I now have 12 letters from young British Muslim women making allegations like these, all too terrified to go public. Several say that in some areas where hard-line imams hold sway the hijab is seen as inviting because it focuses attention on the face. If the women refused to comply with wearing the burqa, they were beaten. Others write that their husbands insist on the covering because it is easier to conceal the brutality within the marriage. Mariyam writes: "He says he doesn't want his name spoilt -that his honour is important. If they see what he is doing to me, his name will be spoilt." Not all woman in burqas are the walking wounded, but some are, and the tragedy is that it is impossible to pick up the signs. The usual network of concerned people - neighbours, colleagues, pupils, teachers, police or social workers - would need to be approached by the traumatised women and girls, as I was by "S". Should the nation support all demands in the name of cultural or religious rights? In several schools now Muslim parents are refusing to let their girls swim, act or take part in PE -interference I personally find appalling. This is a society which prizes individual autonomy and the principle of equality between the sexes. The burqa offends both of these principles, yet no politician or leader has dared to say so. Even more baffling is the meek acceptance of the burqa by British feminists, who must be repelled by the garment and its meanings. What are they afraid of? Afghan and Iranian women fight daily against the shroud, and there is nothing "colonial" about raising ethical objections to this obvious symbol of oppression. The banning of the headscarf in France was divisive -yes. But it was also supported by many Muslims. The state was too arrogant and confrontational, but the policy was right. A secular public space gives all citizens civil rights and fundamental equalities and Muslim girls have not abandoned schools in droves as a result of the ban. The Shabina Begum case should have been the moment to confront the challenge. This spring the teenager took her school to the Appeal Court for refusing to let her "progress" from the hijab to the jilbab. She won the right. For many of us modernist Muslims this was a body blow, and today we fear the next push is well under way for Who said a mother had to hide her face from her babies in the park? Not the Holy Koran. Its injunctions simply call for women to guard their private parts, to act with modesty. Scholars disagree about the jilbab and even the hijab. More than half the world's Muslim women do not cover their hair except when in mosque. There are some who do choose the garment without coercion - the nun's option, you might say. I judge this differently. My experience of "S" and other women who have written to me in despair is that many are being forced or brainwashed into thinking their invisibility is what God wants. That is not a choice. The British state is based on liberal values - individuals can decide what they want to do as long as it doesn't cause harm to others. But within this broad liberalism, there are still restrictions for the sake of a greater good. Nudists cannot walk our streets with impunity, and no religious cult can demand the legal right to multiple marriages. Why should the state then tolerate the burqa, which even in its own terms turns women into sexual objects to be packed away out of sight? Thousands of liberal Muslims would dearly like the state to take a stand on their behalf. If it doesn't, it will betray vulnerable British citizens and the nation's most cherished principles and encourage Islam to move back even faster into the dark ages, when we all need to face the future together. |
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