Common Ground News Service
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16 - 22 January 2008

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Inside this edition

1) Muslim charities, guilty until proven innocent? by William Fisher
William Fisher, who has managed economic development projects in the
Middle East for the US State Department and USAID, discusses the US
government's designation of certain Muslim charities as supporters of
terrorism, and the dilemma these cases have caused for American
Muslims.
(Source: Jordan Times, 8 January 2008)

2) Indonesian educators balance democracy and shari'a by Robert W.
Hefner
Robert W. Hefner, author, professor of Anthropology and associate
director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at
Boston University, describes the results of a 2006 survey of educators
in Indonesian madrasas, particularly with respect to views on the role
of shari'a and democracy in the school system.
(Source: Inside Indonesia, Nov-Dec 2007 issue)

3) Iranian couple cycles the world by Jennifer Redfearn
Jennifer Redfearn, a contributor to New York-based publication, The
Indypendent, describes the first stage of an Iranian couple's journey
around the globe by bicycle, facing their own fears, dispelling myths
about Iran and spreading a message of peace and environmental
conservation.
(Source: The Indypendent, 12 January 2008)

4) Islamic feminism in Morocco by Martina Sabra
Martina Sabra, a Qantara.de correspondent, examines the work of Asma
Lambaret, a Moroccan doctor and writer, who is making waves in Morocco
due to her claim that Islam and feminism are not irreconcilable.
According to Lambaret, a greater appreciation for women is needed and
will come from "re-reading the texts and identifying previous
interpretations for what they are: macho and patriarchal."
(Source: Qantara.de, 4 January 2008)

5) The lost jihad: love in Islam by G. Willow Wilson
G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim author and essayist, counters the
assumption that Arabic lacks a word to describe self-sacrificing love,
and that Islam is "a cold, dispassionate religion in its absence".
(Source: Islamica Magazine, Issue 20)

1) Muslim charities, guilty until proven innocent?
William Fisher

Old Chatham, New York - High officials in the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), the Department of Justice, and other US government
departments and agencies love to talk about how good they are at
"reaching out" to American Muslim communities.

They should be reaching out. It is just possible that folks in these
communities might be valuable sources of intelligence. Or credible
teachers of the customs and practices of Arabs and other Muslims.

The amazing thing about American Muslims is how well they have
assimilated into US culture. This is in sharp contrast to the
attitudes of European governments about their growing Muslim
communities - and vice versa.

There is certainly no shortage of examples of the Americanisation of
the Muslims among us. Many have been here for generations. Thousands
serve in the armed forces, many of them in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For American Muslims, though, the "material support" for terrorists
rap presents a real dilemma. One of the most fundamental tenets of
Islam is charitable giving. But giving to whom?

The President and Congress have given the Treasury Department the
authority to designate any charitable organisation as a supporter of
terrorism. With that authority, the Treasury Department has
investigated thousands of not-for-profit organisations that support
Muslim causes. And it has effectively closed down many of these by
seizing records and freezing assets - with virtually no due process at
all.

The outfits so designated have included the organisation that was the
largest and most prominent Muslim charity in the United States, the
Holy Land Foundation (HLF). The government seized HLF's assets in 2001
and didn't put it on trial until mid-2007. Meanwhile, donations from
supporters languished in frozen bank accounts.

The latest failure in a terrorism financing prosecution came late in
2007, when a Texas jury failed to render any guilty verdicts in the
trial of HLF. Several HLF officials were charged with giving money to
Hamas, the Palestinian organisation designated a terrorist group by
the United States in 1995. The trial ended with a mix of acquittals
and deadlocks.

William Neal, a juror in the HLF case, told the media that the
government's evidence "was pieced together over the course of a decade
- a phone call this year, a message another year". Instead of trying
to prove that the defendants knew they were supporting terrorists,
Neal said, prosecutors "danced around the wire transfers by showing us
videos of little kids in bomb belts and people singing about Hamas,
things that didn't directly relate to the case".

Civil liberties groups say the HLF case was just the latest in a line
of misguided prosecutions. One such group, OMB Watch, says that "once
a charitable organisation is so designated, all of its materials and
property may be seized and its assets frozen. The charity is unable to
see the government's evidence and thus understand the basis for the
charges. Since its assets are frozen, it lacks resources to mount a
defence."

One of America's foremost constitutional scholars, Prof. David Cole of
the Georgetown University Law Centre, argues that the "material
support principle is 'guilt by association' in 21st-century garb, and
presents all of the same problems that criminalising membership and
association did during the Cold War". He told Inter-Press Services
that the problem requires fundamental changes in the terrorism-
financing law.

Included in Cole's recommendations for major changes: the Treasury
Department should be required to permit closed charities to direct
their collected funds to charities mutually approved by the frozen
charity and the government; Congress should enact a statutory
definition of a "specially designated terrorist"; Treasury should
allow designated entities to use their own funds to pay for their own
defence; and the criminal material support statutes should be amended
to require proof that an individual supported a proscribed group with
the intent to further its illegal activities.

OMB Watch says the "material support" effort has resulted in the
government shutting down charities that were not on any government
watch list before their assets were frozen. The organisation says the
result is that Muslims have no way of knowing which groups the
government suspects of ties to terrorism. "Organisations and
individuals suspected of supporting terrorism are guilty until proven
innocent," it says.

When foreign policy experts who know about Middle Eastern and other
Muslim cultures counsel the Bush administration to be smarter in the
ways it pursues terrorism in our midst, they are not recommending that
we look the other way. Nor are they saying there are no bad apples in
the basket. What they are suggesting is that we need to stop
substituting post-September 11 paranoia for evidence. And that if the
Justice Department charges someone with doing something unlawful,
someone ought to be entitled to the due process enshrined in our
Constitution and our jurisprudence.

Using the law as a blunt instrument is highly unlikely to make many
friends for the United States in a community where we desperately need
all the friends we can find.

###

* William Fisher has managed economic development projects in the
Middle East for the US State Department and USAID. This abridged
article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and
can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org. The full text can be
found at www.jordantimes.com.

Source: Jordan Times, 8 January 2008, www.jordantimes.com
Copyright permission is granted for publication.

2) Indonesian educators balance democracy and shari'a
Robert W. Hefner

Boston, Massachusetts - The October 2002 terrorist bombings of a
beachfront pub in south Bali pushed concerns about Indonesia's Islamic
schools to a new high as students from an Islamic boarding school in
Lamongan, East Java were eventually convicted of the crime. For some
Indonesian observers, facts like these confirm that at least some of
Indonesia's Islamic schools had been turned into training camps for
terrorist militants.

However, Islamic education in Indonesia is nothing if not varied, and
its central streams look little like the radical fringe. With some
11,000 Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) and 36,000 Islamic day
schools (madrasas), Indonesia has one of the largest Islamic
educational sectors in the world. A full 13%% of the country's
elementary school population receives their primary education in
Muslim day schools. More than twice that number take evening or
weekend religious classes at Islamic schools. About one percent of
Indonesia's Islamic schools might be described as socially radical,
and the number that seems inclined to support militant violence is no
more than a few dozen.

Far more representative of the educational mainstream, then, is
Indonesia's system of State Islamic Universities (UIN, IAIN). Today,
every student admitted to the state Islamic university system fulfils
divisional studies requirements that begin with courses in Islamic
history and contextualising methodologies for the study of Islam. With
their undogmatic emphasis on alternative interpretations of key
historical events, these courses use methods similar to those in
comparative religion programs in the West, but are rarely used in
higher education in other Muslim countries.

Since the year 2000, seven of the state Islamic universities have
begun far-reaching restructuring that includes establishing new
faculties in non-religious fields like medicine, psychology, general
education and business. No less surprising, since 2004 all students
entering the state Islamic system have been required to take a civics
course which introduces students to the ideals of democracy, civil
society and human rights. Nowhere else in the Muslim world do Muslim
colleges provide comparable instruction on democratic values.

In an effort to examine Muslim educators' views on Islam and
democracy, in early 2006 I worked with staff at Syarif Hidayatullah
State Islamic University in Jakarta to carry out a survey of 940
Muslim educators in 100 madrasas and Islamic boarding schools in eight
provinces in Indonesia. A summary overview of the educators' views is
revealing.

Indonesian Muslim educators' ideas on democracy are neither
formalistic nor crudely majoritarian; they also extend to subtle civil
rights.

These rights include support for the idea of equality before the law
(94.2%% of educators agree); freedom to join political organisations
(82.5%%); protections for the media from arbitrary government action
(92.8%%); and the notion that party competition improves government
performance (80%%). These figures are as high as comparable data
collected by the World Values Survey for Western Europe and the United
States.

If this was all there was to educators' attitudes on Islam and
democracy, the results would be brightly optimistic indeed. However,
educators' views on democracy are not stand-alone. They co-exist with
an almost equally strong commitment to shari'a. For example,
notwithstanding the strength of their commitment to democracy, 72.2%%
of educators believe the state should be based on the Qur'an and
sunnah (traditions of the Prophet Mohammed) and guided by religious
experts.

On matters of women and non-Muslim religious minorities, we see a
tension between educators' enthusiasm for democracy and their
commitment to shari'a. Some 93.5%% of the educators believe that a non-
Muslim should not be allowed to serve as president. A full 55.8%% feel
that women should not be allowed to run for the office. About 20%%
would bar non-Muslims from teaching in public schools. In short, on
three matters - gender, non-Muslims, and the place of Islamic law in
government itself - educators do not appear to be particularly
tolerant.

We see in the survey data, then, that Muslim educators' stated
commitments to democracy, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press
are about as strong as anywhere in the democratic world. However, on
religious matters, Indonesian Muslims are not secularist liberals.
Where a democratic principle runs up against an issue on which shari'a
is seen as having something to say, most educators feel that they must
defer to shari'a. At times this deference results in judgments that
many observers, including most Muslim theorists who write on
democracy, would regard as undemocratic.

Inasmuch as attitudes like those of the educators are widespread in
Indonesian society (and other surveys indicate that they are), these
findings suggest that Muslim Indonesians are likely to continue to
grapple for some time to come with the question of how to balance the
ideals of shari'a with those of democracy. What is certain is that the
results of this ongoing debate will have serious implications for the
culture and practice of Indonesian democracy.

###

* Robert W. Hefner (rhefner@bu.edu) is professor of Anthropology and
associate director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World
Affairs at Boston University. This abridged article is distributed by
the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at
www.commongroundnews.org. The full text appeared in edition 90 of
Inside Indonesia (www.insideindonesia.org).

Source: Inside Indonesia, Edition 90, www.insideindonesia.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.

3) Iranian couple cycles the world
Jennifer Redfearn

New York, New York - Modern Iran shows a variety of perplexing faces
to the world: hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sophisticated
academics, outspoken exiles.

One young Iranian couple, determined not to leave their country's
public relations to others, is bicycling around the globe to spread a
message of peace and environmental conservation.

Somayeh Yousefi, 28, and Jafar Edrisi, 29, met nine years ago atop
Mount Damavand, the highest peak in Iran, and married four years
later. After selling their car and furniture for $12,000 last April,
they set off to educate the world about Iran and to plant trees across
the globe. They cycled through Turkey, crossed Europe and then skipped
across the Atlantic Ocean before arriving in New York City in
November. This is their first trip outside of Iran.

"We don't want to judge other countries by the bad stuff happening on
the news," said Yousefi, who was Iran's female rock-climbing champion
for six years. "We wish to convey a message of peace and friendship
from the people of Iran to other countries," she said.

The couple plans to cover a total of 12,500 miles during their two-
year odyssey. Living on an average of $10 a day, they haul the basics
-- tent, cookware and clothing -- from city to city. So far, they have
planted 14 trees and screened a video about Iran's natural wonders in
communities all along their route.

"People are very confused about Iran," Yousefi said. "They think
Iranian people are terrorists or aggressive or that we ride camels.
Iran is a rich country, but no one knows about it. So we think it is
our duty to show our culture to people."

Face-to-face contact with people in Europe and Canada countered many
of the couple's own misconceptions of different cultures. But they
said violent images from Hollywood movies and the media still made
them wary of travelling through the United States.

"At first, we were very afraid of American people," said Yousefi. "We
imagined that American people are aggressive with a lot of guns and
tattoos."

But the couple has been surprised by the Americans they have met since
crossing the Canadian border on Nov. 19. In Vermont, a stranger
invited them to camp out in her home that was under construction. They
met former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter in Albany.
Ritter encouraged the couple to educate Americans about Iran, they
said. In Poughkeepsie, New York, a fellow cyclist drove them to their
friend's house when it was too dark to bike.

These memories are recorded on a hand-painted banner they plan to
carry from the United States to Japan, Korea, China, Nepal, Pakistan
and Iran, the final leg of their journey.

"After my wedding ring, this is the most precious thing I have in my
life," said Yousefi, holding up the banner covered in signatures.

###

* Jennifer Redfearn is a contributor to the New York-based
publication, The Indypendent. This article is distributed by the
Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at
www.commongroundnews.org.

Source: The Indypendent, 12 January 2008, www.indypendent.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.

4) Islamic feminism in Morocco
Martina Sabra

Bonn, Germany - Islam and feminism are not incompatible according to
Moroccan doctor and writer Asma Lamrabet. In 2004, she founded a
working group for women's issues and intercultural dialogue in Rabat.
The initiative has now become well known throughout the Arab world as
well as in some western countries.

Lamrabet is a diplomat's wife from a well-heeled suburb of Rabat. In
theory she could simply spend her time organising garden parties, but
she is not interested in the rituals of the Moroccan jet set. A
qualified medic, she works in a hospital every day. When she comes
home, she sits at her desk and writes books about feminism and Islam
as well as organising Qur'an workshops on the subject.

The position of women is grim in all Muslim and Arab countries,
Lamrabet says; a greater appreciation of women within Islam is needed.
This means re-reading the texts and identifying previous
interpretations for what they are: macho and patriarchal.

Such provocative statements, which can be read in more detail in her
three books, have won Asma Lamrabet increasing numbers of followers:
women and also men. Whether engineers, school inspectors, lawyers or
students, they all share the same interest. They are dissatisfied with
the dominant Islamic discourse increasingly spread by the pan-Arab
media.

The main problem with the dominant Islamic discourse is that women are
always reduced to some function or another, Asma Lamrabet claims; a
woman is either a mother, a wife, a sister or a daughter. She is never
presented as an individual, as a free, autonomous being. But the
Qur'an portrays women as human beings, she says, and seeing women as
human beings also means recognising their right to freedom and
autonomy.

In the working group for women's issues and intercultural dialogue,
interested women and men test the Qur'an for its egalitarian
potential. Asma Lamrabet believes the Islamic teachings are more
sympathetic to women than generally recognised. Islam does not have a
creation myth portraying women simply as appendages of men. The
Islamic Adam, according to Lamrabet is simply a human being; in the
Qur'an, Adam has no gender.

The group also includes lawyer Rachida Ait Himmich. She is a member of
a secular left-wing party: both secular and Muslim, which for Ait
Himmich is not a contradiction. She says she can live out the various
sides of her identity in the group. She can be a Muslim woman and at
the same time feel free; she can embrace universal ethical values as
well as the human values handed down by Islam, seeing it as a case of
re-reading the Qur'an.

In their group studies, Asma Lamrabet and her fellow campaigners
acknowledge the traditional Islamic interpretations as well as the
particular historical contexts. For her, although the Qur'an is indeed
the word of God, the teachings are only ever in practice experienced
within a specific social and political context. Many conservative
scholars of Islamic law see such an approach as blasphemy.

Between growing religious fanaticism in the Arabic and Islamic worlds,
and increasing Islamophobia in the West, Asma Lamrabet and her
feminist-Muslim working group are arguing the case for a so-called
"third way": a modern approach combining universal, humanistic ethics
with the humanitarian ideals of Islam.

To date, this so-called "third way" has had no majority appeal in Arab
and Muslim societies. The criticism comes from various directions.
Conservative Muslims accuse Lamrabet and her group of lacking the
necessary theological competence to interpret the sacred texts
correctly.

More secularly-orientated critics claim her approach to the Qur'an is
not historical and that she does not speak out strongly enough against
polygamy and violence towards women.

Asma Lamrabet points to the constitution of the working group for
women's issues and intercultural dialogue, which has just become
accepted as a registered association. The document is vague however,
like much of what Asma Lamrabet says and writes. Her books are
eloquent and passionate, but conceptually and in terms of methodology,
the treatises have many weak points.

At times, they border on the kind of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda
familiar from the Moroccan Islamic political activist, Nadia Yassine.
Lamrabet's treatment of her central subject, cultural identity, is
based on a notion of identity now seen as antiquated in the relevant
sociological debates. By clinging to a notional unambiguous Islamic
identity, Asma Lamrabet is positioning herself closer to political
Islam propagandists. The catchy concept of the "third way" cannot
alter this.

However, the verve with which Asma Lamrabet and her fellow campaigners
are fighting for a new, more humanitarian Islam is remarkable. The
positive resonance amongst young Muslim women shows once more that
Islamic feminism is no longer a marginal issue and this development
may form the impetus for an open discourse on Islam and society.

###

* Martina Sabra is a correspondent for Qantara.de. This article is
distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be
accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.

Source: Qantara.de, 4 January 2008, www.qantara.de
Copyright permission is granted for publication.

5) The lost jihad: love in Islam
G. Willow Wilson

Cairo - "At the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow,"
wrote Egyptian author Adhaf Soueif in her novel, The Map of Love. She
was indulging in a very beautifully written digression about Arabic
grammar, comparing words derived from the same root: in this case,
qalb, "heart"; and enqilab, "overthrow". At this level, where the
interplay of meaning and construction is visible, Arabic becomes an
extraordinary language, forcing into cooperation concepts and ideas
that are entirely unrelated in English.

Despite the tremendous conceptual range and utility provided by the
root-and-pattern system of the language, there is a common assumption
among non-speakers that Arabic - and thus, Islam - lacks an equivalent
of agapé, a Greek term used by Christians to mean the boundary-less,
self-sacrificing love between believers, or between a believer and
God. More passionate than filia, less explicit than eros, agapé is
love stripped of expectation, in which the lover is humbled and
disciplined before the beloved. A Google search for "agapé" and
"Islam" yields literally hundreds of sites claiming there is no such
term in Arabic, and painting Islam as a cold, dispassionate religion
in its absence.

Over the years, Sufi Muslims have co-opted many of the romantic Arabic
words for love and made them serve an ideal very much like agapé. The
poetry of 10th and 11th-century Sufis helped inspire the troubadour
culture and ideals of courtly love that flourished in the medieval
kingdoms of southern France, Navarre and Aragonne; one of the positive
artistic developments to arise from contact between Christian Europe
and the Muslim Near East during the Crusades. But many of the greatest
Sufi thinkers, including al Ghazali, were themselves influenced by
Platonic, Neoplatonic and Gnostic Christian ideals of love, kept alive
in the medieval Middle East by the translation of Greek, Roman and
Byzantine texts into Arabic and Persian. The question remains: we know
the Prophet Muhammad meant Muslims to love and serve God, but did he
mean them to be in love with God - and to reflect this love and
service among each other?

The answer is, simply, yes. Though it has classically been overlooked
by Islam's detractors, there is a word for agapé in Arabic. It carries
the same non-specific "boundary-less" connotation as the Greek word,
and is used contextually in the same way. Better yet, it is entirely
original; not borrowed, adapted, or modelled on a word from another
language. The Arabic word for agapé is mahubba, and it is fascinating
for two reasons: one, because it comes from hub - in its feminine form
- meaning, love. Two, because of the prefix 'ma'. Adding the letter
mim to the beginning of a word in Arabic means "one who is/does",
"that which is/does", or "is in a state of" the word that follows it.
Junun is mad, and majnun is "one who is mad" or "in a state of
madness"; baraka is a blessing, and mubarak is "one who is blessed" or
"in a state of blessedness".

Thus, mahubba means quite literally "in love", but it is rarely used
in an erotic sense. It can describe either love among people or love
for the divine, and is used most commonly in a spiritual context in
both cases. Implicit in mahubba is service; the lover puts the beloved
at the centre of the discourse, and submits to his/her demands. Author
Fethullah Gulen describes mahubba as "obedience, devotion and
unconditional submission" to the beloved, quoting Sufi saint Rabi'a al-
Adawiya's couplet, "If you were truthful in your love, you would obey
Him/for a lover obeys whom he loves."

While it is, again, primarily Sufis who have propagated the ideal of
mahubba over the centuries, the word and the concept have roots in
mainstream Islamic tradition: verse 3:31 of the Qur'an is sometimes
called 'ayat ul'mahubba', and reads "Say: if you do love Allah, follow
me, and Allah will love you." A hadith qudsi (God's words as repeated
by the Prophet Muhammad) included in the collection of hadith compiled
by Imam Malik is even more explicit: "God said, 'My love [mahubbati]
necessarily belongs to those who love one another [mutahubinna] for My
sake, sit together for My sake, visit one another for My sake, and
give generously to one another for My sake'."

Mahubba differs from agapé in one crucial respect: because serving and
approaching the beloved is a form of ongoing personal struggle,
mahubba is a form of jihad. A far cry from the violent and
indiscriminate "small jihad" preached by militants, mahubba is a form
of the greater jihad, or jihad against one's own ego. But Adhaf Soueif
is right: at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow.
The struggle to serve God, and one another, out of love, is the jihad
of human potential against the jihad of violent ideology. If
resurrected, it has the power to change the world.

###

* G. Willow Wilson is a Muslim author and essayist. Her articles have
appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic
Monthly. Her graphic novel CAIRO, with artist MK Perker, is now
available from Vertigo Comics. This article is distributed by the
Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at
www.commongroundnews.org.

Source: Islamica Magazine, Issue 20, www.islamicamagazine.com
Copyright permission is granted for publication.

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