Category Archives: Islamophobia

Not So Swift Boat Apostasy

Apocalypse Watch, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Election 2008, Islam and Christianity, Islamophobia

In this American presidential campaign just about every possible prejudice has been let out of the soap box and it’s not even June. There was a Mormon, but Mighty Mitt dropped the ball when he was kicked in the polls by a Baptist preacher who plays the guitar. There is, though many wish we could see “was”, a woman who had already decorated the White House and whose husband would in turn (pun fully intended) be the first former president-spouse, not to mention the first admitted philanderer to get a second chance to serve tea on Pennsylvania Avenue. And there is a Black man, whose Kenyan father’s skin color seems to trump his white Kansan mother’s nurturing. And, by the way, he has a name that rhymes with Osama. And don’t forget that his father was born a Muslim. If this were American Gladiators, the battle would be simple indeed: White Naval hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton and answers to the call of Maverick vs. the young Chicago machine Black Muslim who, in the words of George Bush the Elder, kicked some — (rhymes with crass, which it is) in the primary (no matter how the folks in the backwoods down in the WV hills vote today).

So it’s full steam ahead for the mean-spitted Swift (and I don’t mean Jonathan) Boaters. Yesterday’s New York Times allowed one of the piratical advisors of John McCain a forum to broadside Obama. This was Edward N. Luttwak, whose overtly rhetorical and inadvertently satirical “President Apostate?” landed like an unexploded shell on the crowded stacked deck of media-hardened pundits. Luttwak takes his sly secular cue from the Left Behind armageddonites, viewing Arabs and Iranians as part of the Gog and Magog crowd out to destroy Israel. For those who love the plot of a clash of civilizations leading to a real-time nuclear armageddon, Luttwak obliges with a medievally-minded attack on Obama’s personal faith. Continue reading Not So Swift Boat Apostasy →

Battle in Brooklyn

Islam in America, Islamophobia, Languages

Battle in Brooklyn | A Principal’s Rise and Fall
Her Dream, Branded as a Threat
By ANDREA ELLIOTT, The New York Times, April 28, 2008

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in Brooklyn last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a “terrorist,” staff members and students said in interviews. Continue reading Battle in Brooklyn →

Jihadi studies

Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism Issue


The obstacles to understanding radical Islam and the opportunities to know it better

by Thomas Hegghammer, Times Literary Supplement, April 2, 2008

We were all frightened by the destruction caused on 9/11. Yet most of us, regardless of political orientation, assumed that there would be people in the intelligence services or in academia who possessed detailed knowledge about the jihadists. It might take time, and we might disagree on the methods, but the experts would eventually bring the perpetrators to justice. How wrong we were. Of course, the CIA knew the basics about al-Qaeda, such as the location of the Afghan training camps and the approximate whereabouts of the top leadership. But as Osama bin Laden slipped out of Tora Bora one foggy morning in early December 2001, al-Qaeda left the realm of tactical intelligence and became the complex organization-cum-movement which, six years later, we are still struggling to understand. For a few years, the commanders of the so-called War on Terror enjoyed the benefit of the doubt. After all, we did not know what they knew. However, it has become increasingly clear how little was known about al-Qaeda back in 2001, and how long it will take for us thoroughly to understand the dynamics of global jihadism. Continue reading Jihadi studies →

Who’s a Muslim Heretic?

Ethics, Islam in America, Islamic Sects, Islamophobia, Qur'an, Traditions (hadith literature)


“Augustine of Hippo Refuting Heretic,” (Illuminated manuscript, thirteenth century, from Morgan Library, New York, M. 92, ©Morgan Library)

The history of Islam, like that of any religion, is littered with heretics. When you start with a divine revelation, revealed only in an Arabic dialect understandable to a seventh century illiterate Prophet alone in a cave with an archangel, add a cult of personality adoration for this Prophet and then acknowledge a cycle of violence and assassinations within the emerging Muslim community, heresy is inevitable. So who were the heretics over the fourteen centuries of the Islamic ummah? In a sense, everybody. Certainly every single sect calling itself Muslim has been attacked by some other sect. It is not just the majority Sunni vs. the marginalized Shi’a, nor the rational Mutazilites vs. the hardline literalists, nor the Arabs vs. the non-Arab converts, nor the trained clerics vs. the itinerant dervishes, nor simply the women-can’t drive Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, the Buddha-bashing Taliban or those brave souls who pursue Queer Jihad. Simply put, the heretic is the person who does not take your truth as his or her own. Continue reading Who’s a Muslim Heretic? →

Bernard Lewis Gets It Wrong

Islamic History, Islamophobia, Terrorism Issue, Traditions (hadith literature)


[Editor’s Note: I include this article not because I agree with its spin, but due to the irony of someone attacking Bernard Lewis for being soft on terrorism in the name of Islam.]

By Andrew G. Bostom
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, March 14, 2008

Last week (March 6, 2008) The Jerusalem Post published an interview with historian Bernard Lewis that touched on a range of subjects, from Lewis’ own cultural identity, to his views on feminism and jihad.

Writer Rebecca Bynum has commented aptly on Lewis’ remarks about feminism, and the condition of women; I will confine my own analysis to Lewis’ remarkable statements on the jihad.

Lewis’ Claim (1):

What we are seeing now in much of the Islamic world could only be described as a monstrous perversion of Islam. The things that are now being done in the name of Islam are totally anti-Islamic. Take suicide, for example. The whole Islamic theology and law is totally opposed to suicide. Even if one has led a totally virtuous life, if he dies by his own hand he forfeits paradise and is condemned to eternal damnation. The eternal punishment for suicide is the endless repetition of the act of suicide. That’s what it says in the books. So these people who blow themselves up, according to their own religion – which they don’t seem to be well-acquainted with – are condemning themselves to an eternity of exploding bombs.

Doctrinal and Historical Reality (1):

But Lewis conflates “suicide”—as the tragic outcome, for example, in modern parlance, of clinical psychiatric depression, which is impermissible in Islam—with “martyrdom,” which is extolled.

“Martyrdom operations” have always been intimately associated with the institution of jihad. Professor Franz Rosenthal, in a seminal 1946 essay (entitled, “On Suicide in Islam”), observed that Islam’s foundational texts sanctioned such acts of jihad martyrdom, and held them in the highest esteem: Continue reading Bernard Lewis Gets It Wrong →

Obama, Running for Antichrist?

Apocalypse Watch, Islamophobia, Luke R. E. Publican

Political candidates attract mud and the current presidential marathon on the Democratic side is no exception. Several conservative hit men have emphasized Obama’s Muslim middle name, Hussein, and used their rather pathetic poetic license to rhyme (without reason) Obama and Osama. Already relegated to the status of an urban legend, the smear tactic that Senator Obama is a mixed Muslim/Atheist still resonates in parts of rural America, no doubt among those white out-of-work blue collar men who think Hillary used to be a short-order cook.

But the image of a stealth Muhammadan running for President is outdone on the lunatic apocalyptic fringe of the Christian far-right by Dana Smith’s recent speculation about Barack Obama as the Antichrist. Here is the lead-in on the Raiders News Network:

People are swooning, falling headlong on the floor, while he speaks. Does Hillary get this reaction? An emphatic no is the answer! It seems today that from every corridor the people are talking about this. Is Obama the man? Is he the Anti Christ? Is he this or that? The truth is society is ready for the man of sin mentioned in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. But is Obama the man? The real verdict on that will be out until the end of his term. One thing for sure, his reign, if he is elected will be during a tremendously prophetic time on the calendar. All things are set for the uprising of the ‘man of perdition’. Continue reading Obama, Running for Antichrist? →

So if it’s not about religion …

Bible and Holy Land, Ethics, Iraq War, Islam and Christianity, Islamophobia, Terrorism Issue

The War on Terror, upon which the GOP presidential candidates (minus libertarian Ron Paul) have been feasting, is promoted as a clash of civilizations masquerading as religions. In this pop culture scenario there is the secular West, which promises freedom of religion and only tolerates freedom from religion, vs. the fanatically religious non-West currently reduced to mad mullahs and Islamic Jihadists. We are told it is not about religion. That is true. It is, however, about religions. The West assumes it has tamed its religious impulse to crusade and colonize the Gospel to the ends of the commercially driven earth. Our religious wars are in the history books. Or are they?

Inquistors with holy orders have been replaced by mega-church preachers with rock-music intros. Witch trials have been overturned by a mentality that still thinks the 10 Commandments trump the U.S. Constitution. The United States is in legal theory not allowed by law to prohibit religious worship (although it did so against Native Americans). But America has only a veneer of secularism. Religious organizations no doubt take in more money than the IRS and not all that goes to charity. Much of this freedom of religion is an invitation to convert others or to promote outmoded notions such as biblical creation and Noah’s flood. The fact that half of the population in the U.S. still holds on to the myth of Adam and Eve as an explanation for human origins, despite the evidence from scientific research, says we are not yet free of irrational thinking.

Then there is “their” religions. Continue reading So if it’s not about religion … →

The Problem with “Fundamentalism”

Bible and Holy Land, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia

[This is an excerpt from my article, “The tragedy of a comic: fundamentalists crusading against fundamentalists,” published in Contemporary Islam (2007, Vol. 3, #1).]

The issue of religious fundamentalism has been raised both in the popular media and by academicians as one of the most critical global challenges to a smooth transition into the third millennium. The Y2K alarm over cyberspace as the clock turned over 2000 was only the Book of Revelation in digital imagination. Debating the death of God, especially in the halls of Academe, has had little impact on the perpetual panopticon of apocalyptic scenarios literally decoded out of the Bible. The Catholic church and mainline Protestant denominations have largely left behind the baggage of prophecy as contemporary politics, though in the past Christian clerics of all persuasions had no trouble conjuring enemies, including the Ottoman Turks, as anti-christened candidates. In Christianity biblical literalists today are often, and erroneously, dismissed in blanket condemnation as “Fundamentalists” because of what they reject rather than what they believe. The problem with being a “Bible believer” is that this implies rejecting rationalism, modern science and theological reform. The problem with being labeled a “Fundamentalist” is that most people fit into the category do not use or accept the term.

“Fundamentalism” as a term should be of interest to scholars who study the phenomenon not only because of what it is said to represent, but also because it is “our” term – a word coined almost a century ago within American Protestantism to define a self-proclaimed conservative religious movement contra a liberal shift in mainline denominations.(1) Continue reading The Problem with “Fundamentalism” →