"Islam's Silent Moderates"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch Parliament and a critic of Islam, has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times.

It's a call for moderate Muslim voices to shout.

(I wonder if UWM's Muslim Student Association dashed off a letter to the Times, "demanding" that this critical column not be published, for fear of inciting violence toward Muslims.)

Hirsi Ali begins her column by citing the Koran:

The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. (Koran 24:2)

"Let no compassion move you."

NO COMPASSION.

As a Catholic, I find that to be stunning.

Hirsi Ali continues:

IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.

A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.

Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks the “girl from Qatif,” as she’s usually described in news articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her “crime” has tarnished her family’s honor.

We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40 lashes. When she began a reading project with her class involving a teddy bear, Ms. Gibbons suggested the children choose a name for it. They chose Muhammad; she let them do it. This was deemed to be blasphemy.

Then there’s Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who bravely defends women’s rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. In August she was assaulted by Muslim militants in Hyderabad, and in recent weeks she has had to leave Calcutta and then Rajasthan. Taslima Nasreen’s visa expires next year, and she fears she will not be allowed to live in India again.

I think these punishments qualify as torture.

It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

I want to believe that the vast majority of Muslims are moderates.

I give that very silent majority of Muslims the benefit of the doubt. I sincerely believe they're out there, but I just haven't any proof that they exist. I guess I take it on faith.

...[W]hile the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

The evidence does mount up.

Groups are so concerned about Islam's image, yet these same groups fail to speak out against Islamic justice, such as hundreds of lashes with bamboo canes or beheadings.

Hirsi Ali argues that it's a lack of compassion that traps Muslims in the extremism that rules in the Islamic world:

Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.

She asks:

If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?

Excellent question.

It really troubles me that Muslim groups are so quick to complain about affronts to Islam's image.

Walid Shoebat's appearance at UWM earlier this week is an example.

The MSA protested that Shoebat's message is hate-filled and supposedly incites people to violence, but there weren't incidents of violence against Muslim students as a result of Shoebat's lecture.

I don't understand why the groups don't mobilize to condemn the torture meted out by Islamic extremists.

A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.

No compassion.

So often it's said that U.S. needs to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world.

Isn't that backwards?

Shouldn't the onus be on Islam to win over the hearts and minds of people who consider Islamic justice, with its lashings and beheadings, to be barbaric?

"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."

--MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.