Category Archives: Islam in Europe

Divorcing fundamentalism


Nasr Abu Zaid was a brave and honest scholar disgracefully persecuted for his attempts to read the Quran historically

by Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, July 6

The divorce case was what made him famous, though it wasn’t the usual kind of celebrity divorce and Nasr Abu Zayd was still in love with his wife.

Abu Zayd, the liberal Muslim thinker who died yesterday, first came to the attention of Islamists while teaching Arabic literature at Cairo university in the early 1990s. They decided that his research contained “clear affronts to the Islamic faith” and accused him of apostasy.

That in turn inspired a group of Islamist lawyers to file a third-party (“hesba”) case, seeking to divorce him from his wife on the grounds that a Muslim woman cannot be married to an apostate – and after a series of court hearings his marriage was declared null and void.

Such was the controversy after the verdict that Cairo university was “turned into a military fortress” to protect him the next time he made an appearance there. Realising that it was impractical to continue teaching under those conditions, and after one of his guards was heard describing him as “the infidel”, Abu Zayd and his “ex-wife” left Egypt and settled in the Netherlands. Continue reading Divorcing fundamentalism

The racist fascist in the Queen’s Garden, the fundamentalist preacher on the plane


by Gabriel Marranci, Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist, June 21

Recently two events made me question how the UK, and Europe in general, understand the concept of ‘freedom of speech’ – the invitation to attend the annual Buckingham Palace garden party extended to white supremacist BNP’s Nick Griffin and the Home Secretary’s decision to ban the popular Muslim tele-preacher Dr Zakir Naik from entering the UK.

There is no one single definition of ‘freedom of speech’ and an attempt to formulate one can only result in empty theorizing and utopian visions. Freedom of speech is linked to local, regional and international contexts, social realities, cultural differences and an understanding of what freedom means. What for one person is ‘freedom of speech’, for another is just ‘freedom of insult’ or ‘unacceptable behavior’.

States, as well as communities, limit individual rights of expression not because of the pleasure of doing so, but for fear of seeing their status quo, and hence power, challenged or questioned. However, the limitation of individuals’ right to express their thoughts and ideas is often justified by the argument that those ideas are ‘repulsive’ or ‘objectionable’ to the system of values held by a supposed majority (i.e. power holders). Said that, many of the ideas, values and concepts that are both well accepted and well liked today have been considered ‘objectionable’ or ‘repulsive’ at one time or another. Continue reading The racist fascist in the Queen’s Garden, the fundamentalist preacher on the plane

The future of Islam in Europe


by Khalil El-Anani, Al-Ahram, 17-23 June, 2010, Issue 1003

The current Western obsession with the niqab, or full- face veil, often seems part of a subconscious plot to restrict anything Arab and Islamic, symbolic as that may be. The niqab is not really Islamic garb, this I am sure something that Western politicians know. And yet it is becoming a target of hate because it is seen as a cultural symbol that is extraneous, and indeed dangerous, to European societies.

Sometimes I wonder, what if it were Indian women, or Sikhs and Buddhists for that matter, who wore the niqab ? Would European parliaments still spend entire sessions discussing the niqab ?

Theological debate on niqab aside, Western outrage against the niqab seems to be a by-product of Islamophobia, a phenomenon that is raging like wildfire across Europe, asserting itself sometimes as mosque- phobia and at other times as minaret-phobia. Should this trend continue, the day may come when European parliaments ban men from wearing their beards long and shaving their moustaches. I wonder what kind of phobia we’ll name that one! Continue reading The future of Islam in Europe

From Islamist Watch to Islamic Mimbar: The Politics of Hypocrisy


Raheel Raza at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Bethlehem

by Huma Dar, Dept. of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley

On Thursday, June 10, 2010, Jerome Taylor, the Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Independent posted an article headlined, “First Woman to Lead Friday Prayers in UK.” Two-thirds of the way down this article, we find that:

“Ms Raza’s appearance in Oxford is a repeat of a similar prayer session in 2008 which was led by Amina Wadud, an American-born convert and Muslim feminist. But this is the first time a Muslim-born woman will lead a mixed prayer service in Britain.”

Taylor’s differentiation between “American-born convert” and “Muslim-born woman” and labeling of the latter as the “first woman” in the headline create a false hierarchy and subtly delegitimize Dr. Wadud, a leading Muslim scholar and author of Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, a path-breaking text in the study of gender and Islam. Taylor’s late admission of “repeat” after the (mis)leading announcement of “First” in the headline does not quite cover up for the critical sins of omission and commission, especially as Raheel Raza, the Pakistani-Canadian woman leading the prayer at Oxford, is neither an ‘Alima or a scholar of Islam nor is she known for her advocacy of Muslims at large.

In fact Raza is a rather polarizing figure amongst Muslims in North America and her record does not indicate much learning in the letter or spirit of Islam, as in speaking truth to power and standing with the oppressed. Continue reading From Islamist Watch to Islamic Mimbar: The Politics of Hypocrisy

Fiddler on the mosque

By JONNY PAUL, JERUSALEM POST, April 23, 2010

Released this week in the UK is a timely and wholesome comedy that celebrates Jewish and Muslim culture in a way not often seen in cinema. It uses comedy to take a light-hearted look at religion.

The Infidel is about a Muslim who discovers that he adopted and is actually Jewish. Written by renowned Jewish comedian and author David Baddiel, the film is a timely reminder of the commonality between both religions and goes further than most ethnic comedies.

It champions the Jewish and Muslim everyman, celebrating and laughing at aspects that are both unique and common to both religions. The film is novel in that it shows a normal Muslim family, rarely seen in cinema with the tendency to portray Muslims as radicals. Other ethnic films tend to revolve around the idea of ethnic minority adapting to the dominant culture. This film doesn’t do that, it is about minority cultures. Continue reading Fiddler on the mosque

Ramadan: Slow not fast justice


Mirror, mirror on the terrorist list wall,
Whose the most likely terrorist of them all?

In the post 9/11 world it is not easy to have a Muslim name. Just because your name is Khan, does not mean you are a terrorist. Just because your university (Harvard, for example) has a fellowship paid for by the Bin Laden family does not mean it is an academic haven for suicide bombers. But if you have a last name of Ramadan, you are not going to be put in the fast lane for an entry visa. Literally. In 2004 the distinguished Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan was appointed to a tenured professorship at the University of Notre Dame. One would think having a major contemporary voice for Islam, especially Muslims living in secular societies, at an acclaimed Catholic university would help break down or at least counter the hatred that fueled the Twin Towers bombers. Such thinking was not on the agenda of the Bush administration, which was more attuned to the slimy interrogation technique of water boarding than interfaith dialogue. Continue reading Ramadan: Slow not fast justice

Eurabian Follies

Eurabian Follies
The shoddy and just plain wrong genre that refuses to die

by Justin Vaïsse, Foreign Policy, January/February, 2010

By 2050, Europe will be unrecognizable. Instead of romantic cafes, Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Germain will be lined with halal butcheries and hookah bars; the street signs in Berlin will be written in Turkish. School-children from Oslo to Naples will read Quranic verses in class, and women will be veiled.

At least, that’s what the authors of the strange new genre of “Eurabia” literature want you to believe. Not all books of this alarmist Europe-is-dying category, which received its most intellectually hefty treatment yet with the recent release of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, offer such dire and colorful predictions. But they all make the case that low fertility rates among natives, massive immigration from Muslim countries, and the fateful encounter between an assertive Islamic culture and a self-effacing European one will lead to a Europe devoid of all Western identity.

For the rest of this much longer article, click here.


Justin Vaïsse is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe and co-author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France.

Saliba on Europe and Islamic Science

[On Rorotoko, historian of science George Saliba discusses the writing of his recent book, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).]

This book started almost ten years ago. Initially, I wanted to know what were the conditions under which a civilization could produce science afresh.

I was trained in ancient Semitics, and mathematics, but I was always interested in these rumors that the general reader knows about, that the great invention of science was a really Greek project. And that everything else is either a shadow or a continuation of the classic antiquity.

Growing up, you assimilate these paradigms. You begin to think that these are the normal things. But then, trained in mathematics, and beginning to read a little bit of what was produced in the Islamic civilization, in science, I grew curious. I grew curious because I began to note that some of the science produced was not a shadow of the Greek project. It was more re-focusing of light, a new way of looking at things, which the Greeks did not know.

I began to also wonder about a fact that many a student of history and general reader would know. That there was this period of fantastical effervescence in the classical Greek tradition, say from the 4th century BC to the 2nd century AD. All the major names that we can think of happen to be in this period, all the major classics, in every discipline you can think of, from Plato to Aristotle to Ptolemy to Euclid to Diophantus to Galen to Dioscorides. And all comes to an end by the 2nd century. Then nothing happened. And then, all of a sudden, we begin to hear, in the 9th century, of the crazy caliphs of Baghdad who are spurring this and that, translating this and that, incorporating all of the Greek material. Continue reading Saliba on Europe and Islamic Science