More than eight eventful years have passed, but in some ways it still feels like 2001. Republicans have clearly decided that fanning the public’s fears of rampant jihadism continues to be a winning strategy. Commentators furnish examples of backwardness and brutality from various parts of the Muslim world—and there are many—to highlight the grave threat we face.

But, in fact, the entire terrain of the war on terror has evolved dramatically. Put simply, the moderates are fighting back and the tide is turning. We no long-er fear the possibility of a major country succumbing to jihadist ideology. In most Muslim nations, mainstream rulers have stabilized their regimes and their societies, and extremists have been isolated. This has not led to the flowering of Jeffersonian democracy or liberalism. But modern, somewhat secular forces are clearly in control and widely supported across the Muslim world. Polls, elections, and in-depth studies all confirm this trend.
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The most influential statement on Islam to come out of the post-9/11 era was not a presidential speech or an intellectual’s essay. It was, believe it or not, a United Nations report. In 2002 the U.N. Development Program published a detailed study of the Arab world. The paper made plain that in an era of globalization, openness, diversity, and tolerance, the Arabs were the world’s great laggards. Using hard data, the report painted a picture of political, social, and intellectual stagnation in countries from the Maghreb to the Gulf. And it was written by a team of Arab scholars. This was not paternalism or imperialism. It was truth.

There are a lot of assertions made in this article that are disputable.

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Egyptians are protesting against a plan to install surveillance cameras in thousands of mosques throughout the country.

Egypt’s Ministry of Islamic Endowments (Awqaf) denied the existence of such a plan on Monday, but the reports have caused ripples throughout the Egyptian media and the blogosphere.

Critics say the security forces are abusing their power by violating people’s privacy in their efforts to fight terrorism and extremism.

Responding to a public outcry, ministry spokesman Sheikh Shawqi Abdel Latif told several media outlets that cameras have been set up in one mosque alone – the Sayyida Nafisa Mosque in Cairo – with the declared purpose of ensuring people do not steal money from charity boxes, rather than to monitor religious sermons.
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According to official government statistics, Egypt accommodates around 104,000 mosques, but has appointed only 48,000 preachers. The significance of this is that many mosques have preachers who are not on a government payroll, and who are not subject to government guidelines in their teachings.

(via)

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The Al-Shabab movement in Somalia has issued directives in schools located in areas under its control, in an effort to instill Islamist ideology in the younger generation.

Islamist authorities in Merca, located some 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of the capital Mogadishu, have ordered that boys and girls learn in separate classrooms and that the Somali national flag be replaced with the movement’s flag in schools, according to the London-based A-Sharq Al-Awsat.

Observers and human rights activists are concerned that the new directives will help the Islamists spread a radical ideology among impressionable schoolchildren.
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Analysts suspect the directives are a sign the movement is trying to push girls out of the school system in moves reminiscent of the Taliban’s attacks against girls’ schools in Pakistan, since imposing separate schooling for boys and girls is logistically and financially impossible.

“Al-Shabab has already demonstrated its clear need to subjugate women, and the expulsion of girls from schools fits into this,” Roque said, “in the same way that the Taliban separated men and women, their roles, their rights, and their role in the public and private spheres.”

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A remote Bosnian village that’s home to highly conservative Wahhabi Muslims was raided Tuesday by hundreds of police who said they were searching for an unspecified security threat.

The Office of the State Prosecutor said the raid in the northeastern village of Gornja Maoca was the largest police operation in Bosnia since the 1992-1995 war that killed tens of thousands and left millions homeless as Muslim Bosnians, Christian Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats clashed.

The isolated village is home to ethnic Bosnian families belonging to the Wahhabi sect — an austere brand of Sunni Islam promoted by extremists, including the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida fighters. Some of the villagers had fought in Bosnia’s war.

About 600 police officers raided the village looking for people suspected of “jeopardizing Bosnia’s constitutional order and spreading national, racial and religious hatred,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

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Kumar, who grew up in India, wrote some articles about his marriage and later found his name and address had been posted on an Internet hit list of Hindu ‘traitors.’ (a topic that resonates since we’ve been discussing Internet death threats so much recently (here, here and here).

The book starts with him sitting down to interview the man who likely put him on that list, a retired office worker living in Jackson Heights.

Like Mr. Barotia, I was born in the provinces and grew up in small towns. For me, the move to the city meant that I learned English and embraced secular, universal rationality and liberalism. Mr. Barotia remained truer to his roots and retained his religion as well as a narrower form of nationalism that went with it. His revenge on the city was that he also became a fanatic. I do not envy him his changes, but I can’t think of those changes without a small degree of tenderness.

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“It’s a small group but they have power,” said Abadirh Abdi Hussein, a 25-year-old hip-hop artist and “110-percent Muslim” who has become the best known Somali in Rinkeby because of his campaign to counter al-Shabab’s influence. “People don’t speak up against them. They don’t dare.”
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Hussein, the hip-hop artist, said youth who were approached by al-Shabab told him they were shown videos of al-Qaida suicide bombings and urged to become jihadists in their ancestral homeland.

As his worries worsened, he started going public to Swedish media on the issue last year. Since then, resistance to the extremists has grown and last month dozens showed up for a rally against al-Shabab in Rinkeby.

The singer’s campaign has also prompted Swedish politicians to talk about the spread of extremism in immigrant suburbs, something that in the past might have drawn charges of being hostile to Muslims.

“He is a real hero,” said Nalin Pekgul, a leading politician for the opposition Social Democrats said of Hussein. Pekgul, a Kurdish immigrant, is an outspoken critic of the radicals.

But Hussein has paid a price. In September he was attacked on the street by a masked man who slashed his forehead with a sharp object – he has an inch-long scar – and warned him in Somali to “leave us alone or we’ll kill you.” Police haven’t found a suspect.

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“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

I took this excerpt from an article titled, ‘Christian fundamentalists bring shame to America,’ which also makes this observation:

The Muslim world deals with this all the time. With 1.3 billion Muslims in the world over, even if only 3% are radical fundamentalists, their numbers are in the millions and they have come to represent the other 97%.

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The committee spokesperson suggested some conduct that, ipso facto, makes someone an ‘Islamist extremist.’

The letter did not spell out what such warning signs might be, but committee spokeswoman Leslie Phillips said they could include viewing jihadi websites or reading jihadi literature.

They could also include making statements that a service member’s loyalty is to fellow Muslims first and to the United States second, or that Muslim-American soldiers have a religious obligation not to fight in conflicts against Muslims and to disobey any related orders, she said.

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There’s an account of the conversation between the two, which was partially recorded.

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Further, the imams want to work with the Jamaican government to focus on Jamaican citizens who have been deported from other countries after converting to Islam in foreign prisons.

“There are going to be some changes there,” said Muhammad, who noted that there are a number of deportees coming back from prisons in America and England who have Islamic materials they have received while in the prisons in these countries.

“We will try to see how best we can get these persons back in the community from a positive point of view and ensure that if they still maintain their Islamic identity, it is in fact in a positive way instead of a negative way,” said Muhammad.

Also, according to the Jamaican newspaper I’ve linked here, al Faisal was successfully deported from Kenya to Gambia. It’s like a game of “Where’s Waldo” trying to figure out where assorted governments have stashed him.

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