Islamic Reformation!

It's always darkest before the dawn is true in more ways than one. We have Islamist terrorists on one hand and guys like this on the other.

A very inspirational piece that bears repeating here!

GUEST POST: Losing My Jihadism, Opinion - Mansour al-Nogaidan
The Washington Post:

Islam needs a Reformation. It needs someone with the courage of Martin Luther.

This is the belief I’ve arrived at after a long and painful spiritual journey. It’s
not a popular conviction — it has attracted angry criticism, including death threats, from many sides. But it was reinforced by Sept. 11, 2001, and in the years since, I’ve only become more convinced that it is critical to Islam’s future.

Muslims are too rigid in our adherence to old, literal interpretations of the Koran.

It’s time for many verses — especially those having to do with relations between Islam and other religions — to be reinterpreted in favor of a more modern Islam.

Daniel Shayesteh talks about his former life as a member of the Islamic Fundamentalist Revolutionary Movement, Teacher of Islam and his new life now as a Christian.

Research resources on Islam. It’s time to accept that God loves the faithful of all religions.

It’s time for Muslims to question our leaders and their strict teachings, to reach our own understanding of the prophet’s words and to call for a bold renewal of our faith as a faith of goodwill, of peace and of light.

I didn’t always think this way. Once, I was one of the extremists who clung to literal interpretations of Islam and tried to force them on others. I was a jihadist.

I grew up in Saudi Arabia. When I was 16, I found myself assailed by doubts about the existence of God. I prayed to God to give me the strength to overcome them.

I made a deal with Him: I would give up everything, devote myself to Him and live the way the prophet Muhammad and his companions had lived 1,400 years ago if He would rid me of my doubts.

I joined a hard-line Salafi group. I abandoned modern life and lived in a mud hut, apart from my family. Viewing modern education as corrupt and immoral, I joined a circle of scholars who taught the Islamic sciences in the classical way, just as they had been taught 1,200 years ago.

My involvement with this group led me to violence, and landed me in prison. In 1991, I took part in firebombing video stores in Riyadh and a women’s center in my home town of Buraidah, seeing them as symbols of sin in a society that was marching rapidly toward modernization.

Yet all the while, my doubts remained. Was the Koran really the word of God? Had it really been revealed to Muhammad, or did he create it himself? But I never shared these doubts with anyone, because doubting Islam or the prophet is not tolerated in the Muslim society of my country.

By the time I turned 26, much of the turmoil in me had abated, and I made my peace with God. At the same time, my eyes were opened to the hypocrisy of so many who held themselves out as Muslim role models.

I saw Islamic judges ignoring the marks of torture borne by my prison comrades. I learned of Islamic teachers who molested their students. I heard devout Muslims who never missed the five daily prayers lying with ease to people who did not share their extremist beliefs.

In 1999, when I was working as an imam at a Riyadh mosque, I happened upon two books that had a profound influence on me.

One, written by a Palestinian scholar, was about the struggle between those who deal pragmatically with the Koran and those who take it and the hadith literally.

The other was a book by a Moroccan philosopher about the formation of the Arab Muslim way of thinking.

The books inspired me to write an article for a Saudi newspaper arguing that Muslims have the right to question and criticize our religious leaders and not to take everything they tell us for granted. We owe it to ourselves, I wrote, to think pragmatically if our religion is to survive and thrive.

That article landed me in the center of a storm. Some men in my mosque refused to greet me. Others would no longer pray behind me. Under this pressure, I left the mosque.

I moved to the southern city of Abha, where I took a job as a writer and editor with a newly established newspaper.

I went back to leading prayers at the paper’s small mosque and to writing about my evolving philosophy. After I wrote articles stressing our right as Muslims to question our Saudi clerics and their interpretations and to come up with our own, officials from the kingdom’s powerful religious establishment complained, and I was banned from writing.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave new life to what I had been saying.

I went back to criticizing the rote manner in which we Muslims are fed our religion.

I criticized al-Qaeda’s school of thought, which considers everyone who isn’t a Salafi Muslim the enemy.

I pointed to examples from Islamic history that stressed the need to get along with other religions. I tried to give a new interpretation to the verses that call for enmity between Muslims and Christians and Jews.

I wrote that they do not apply to us today and that Islam calls for friendship among all religions.

I lost a lot of friends after that. My old companions from the jihad felt obliged to declare themselves either with me or against me.

Some preferred to cut their links to me silently, but others fought me publicly, issuing statements filled with curses and lies. Once again, the paper came under great pressure to ban my writing.

I became a favorite target on the Internet, where my writings were lambasted and labeled blasphemous.

Eventually I was fired. But by then, I had started to develop a different relationship with God. I felt that He was moving me toward another kind of belief, where all that matters is that we pray to God from the heart.

I continued to pray, but I started to avoid the verses that contain violence or enmity and only used the ones that speak of God’s mercy and grace and greatness.

I remembered an incident when the prophet told a Bedouin who didn’t know how to pray to let go of the verses and simply to think of God and get closer to Him by repeating, “God is good, God is great.” Don’t sweat the details, the prophet said.

I felt at peace, and no longer doubted the existence of God.

In December 2002, in a Web site interview, I criticized al-Qaeda and declared that some of the Friday sermons were loathsome because of their attacks against non-Muslims.

Within days, a fatwa was posted online, calling me an infidel and saying that I should be killed. Once again, I felt despair at the ways of the Muslim world.

Two years later, I told al-Arabiya television that I thought God loves all faithful people of different religions. That earned me a fatwa from the mufti of Saudi Arabia declaring my infidelity.

But one evening not long after that, I heard a radio broadcast of the verse of light.

Even though I had memorized the Koran at 15, I felt as though I was hearing this verse for the first time. God is light, it says, the universe is illuminated by His light. I felt the verse was speaking directly to me, sending me a message.

This God of light, I thought, how could He be against any human? The God of light would not be happy to see people suffer, even if they had sinned and made mistakes along the way.

I had found my Islam. And I believe that others can find it, too. But first we need a Reformation similar to the Protestant Reformation that Martin Luther led against the Roman Catholic Church.

In the late 14th century, Islam had its own sort of Martin Luther. Ibn Taymiyya was an Islamic scholar from a hard-line Salafi sect who went through a spiritual crisis and came to believe that in time, God would close the gates of hell and grant all humans, regardless of their religion, entry to his everlasting paradise.

Unlike Luther, however, Ibn Taymiyya never openly declared this revolutionary belief; he shared it only with a small, trusted circle of students.

Nevertheless, I find myself inspired by Luther’s courageous uprising. I see what Islam needs — a strong, charismatic personality who will lead us toward reform, and scholars who can convince Islamic communities of the need for a bold new interpretation of Islamic texts, to reconcile us with the wider world.

Mansour al-Nogaidan writes for the Bahraini newspaper Al-Waqt.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 at www.God-101.com

Poor Pope!

Well, the Pope went and done it, and he done it good!

I realize that the Catholic Church is a two thousand year old institution, and they don't change fast, but this is the sort of idiotic, archaic thinking that I rant and rave about in my book "The Plain Truth About God-101" (What the Church doesn't want you to know!)

The Vatican issued a document yesterday restating its belief that the Catholic Church is the only true church of Jesus Christ.

It says although Orthodox churches are true churches, they are defective because they do not recognize the primacy of the Pope. (Ha, see what I mean? He's taking this personally!)

"It follows that these separated churches and communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation," it said.

The document adds that Protestant denominations — called Christian Communities born out of the Reformation — are not true churches, but ecclesiastical communities.

Well, that's going to be a hell of a disappointment to my Lutheran Mother.

Poor Catholic Church is still pissed because King Henry and Martin Luther gave them a hard time about five hundred years ago.

This is the type of church you want to follow?

Not me!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at www.God-101.com

Call it whatever, this is the Islamic Reformation!

Today, thanks to an increase in literacy and education, the advent of technology like the Internet, increased political and secular divisiveness and a "swelling sense of individualism," the authority of Islamic clerics and their schools of law are being challenged as never before. The institutions are becoming more and more marginalized.

Traditional authorities, beginning in the time shortly after Muhammad, viewed holy law as the revealed will of God and subordinated politics to holy decree.

Historically however, it was politics (tribal or otherwise) that invariable shaped Islamic law and led to complex discourse on a subject that was contentious on the surface but at its base rather simple.

The religious precepts are pretty straightforward, but the task of explaining them and choosing a method for their application is left in human hands. This means they are automatically constrained by human limitations.

In the past, for example, a person who had a question about Islam would go to a mosque and question an Imam, who would issue a legal ruling - or fatwa.

Now, anyone can go to any number of websites to access any number of rulings. This allows believers to search for rulings they like, not the one’s they dislike.

Remember, the Koran, just like the Bible, is more than capable of supporting both sides of an argument!

This scattering of interpretations has led, precisely as it did during the Christian Reformation, to a whole host of competing ideologies.

There are groups, individuals and institutions that are literally killing each other to maintain the loyalty and the following of the world's Muslims.

Just as the Protestant Reformation opened the door to multiple, sometimes conflicting and often baffling interpretations of Christianity, so has the Islamic Reformation created a similar situation in which you have voices competing with one another to be heard!

Since there is no single voice - no Pope who speaks for the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world - it is the loudest voices that are heard, and frankly, nothing is louder that the voice that rams planes into skyscrapers.

As individuals seized this authority, it was inevitable also, that men and women with radical ideas of Islam would surface - men like Bin-Laden, who have killed Muslims in pursuit of their goals, but who have also taken on the West.

This is why Al Qaeda is so widespread and popular amongst the radical sects of Islam and it has also given rise to the mis-perception that the West is his primary target.

Bin Laden's (Al Qaeda’s) own messages have often referred to the West as the "far enemy," while his immediate foe is anyone who doesn't share his puritanical version of Islam.

Bin Laden, who is not a cleric or a scholar, issues his own fatwa’s to deliberately challenge the authority of the clerics and he has found a following of disaffected young people, particularly second generation Muslims living in Western countries.

This disaffection, combined with political, sectarian, and even tribal frictions has brought Islam to the point where it is in danger of sliding into a general conflagration in the Middle East.

In Afghanistan, various Islamic factions still loyal to the Taliban are brutally murdering those who are trying to create a secular nation and Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank are little more than civil wars between various Islamic factions!

The question we have to ask now is, what are the factions in Iraq?

Both the Sunnis and the Shi'ites appear to be splitting into smaller, mutually hostile elements. There are indications that among the Sunnis, the secularists, who are mostly Ba’athists and the Islamists, are starting to go at it as well!

Several secularist militias recently made a public announcement that they want the head (severed or otherwise) of al-Qaeda's local rep, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's recent war with the Americans had less to do with resisting the occupation than with positioning himself within the Shi'ite community.

Meanwhile, the shaky ceasefire between Israeli and Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip held more or less during December, due mainly to Israeli restraint in the face of dozens of unprovoked Kassam rocket attacks upon Israeli civilian communities. At the same time, violent clashes escalated between supporters of the PLO Fatah party and the militant Hamas movement.

This came as international pressure grew upon Israel to hand over more land to the Palestinians - despite the fact that they are obviously engaged in a substantial domestic struggle for power, and therefore can hardly be trusted as reliable peace partners under such tumultuous circumstances.

Then, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday declared Hamas' militia in the Gaza Strip illegal, and the Islamic movement responded by defiantly announcing plans to double the size of the paramilitary unit.

When this is combined with the American's attack upon the Muslims as a recreation of the Crusades, and this all played out against the intensifying Iranian nuclear program, it threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in a major war in 2007.

To show you just how divided Muslims everywhere are, we only have to travel to the U.K. where a "potentially explosive" dispute between Islamic factions inside Wandsworth prison has been revealed by an independent watchdog.

The Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) published a report last week detailing a "schism" that had emerged in the prison between Asian Muslims and those from North Africa and Afro-Caribbean areas.

A particular Imam was said to have caused deep division among the prison's 265 Muslim prisoners and there was a warning that some inmates were pressuring others to adopt "more militant lifestyles and belief systems".

Yes, the fundamentalists, extremists, factions and sects are causing trouble left right and centre, and if the U.S. and Israel are smart, they will just step back and let Islam sort it all out internally!

Your "wait and see" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com