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  • thabet 1:19 pm on July 17, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: hizb-ut-tahrir, , ,   

    Thousands of Hizb ut-Tahrir members have been arrested in the West Bank:

    Officials from the Islamist movement Hizb Ut-Tahrir said Palestinian security services set up checkpoints on Friday to harass party supporters en route to an annual conference in Ramallah, which itself was quashed.

    “Security forces in Ramallah began installing security checkpoints early this morning on all of the entrances to Ramallah,” a statement from the organization, which promotes the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East, read, accusing the officers on the checkpoints of detaining men they believed were on their way to a party meeting.

    By evening, members of the movement said PA security had “shut down the gates of the school, confiscated equipment and arrested hundreds,” in addition to what a statement said was hundreds of others detained at the PA checkpoints.

     

  • thabet 1:08 am on April 12, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: , , , hizb-ut-tahrir, , ,   

    It’s the General Election, which means the inevitable calls from Hizb ut Tahrir that voting is haram:

    A member of the West Midlands Faith Forum has warned Muslims against flyers distributed outside mosques after Friday prayers urging them not to vote.

    Leaflets produced by Hizb-Ut-Tahrir, Britain, (HT) state that it is “haram” or forbidden for Muslims to vote in the UK parliamentary elections in May.

     

    • Pretty Pink Unicorns 5:02 am on April 12, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hizb-Ut-Tahrir can suck it. Didn’t they notice the Ahl as-Sunnah wa l-Jam3ah honour Khalifahs picked by a Shura (council)?

  • johnpi 11:57 am on December 20, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , hizb-ut-tahrir, , ,   

    Watching the anti-Muslim, Islamophobic, ‘counter-Jihadi’ blogosphere spread the news that Hizb ut-Tahrir’s American branch is holding a meeting today in Chicago is a case study in how the right-wing echo chamber works, albeit at a lower level where it probably won’t rise into the mainstream media.

    I followed links across four fearmongering blogs before I came to the original source for the info (I was unaware HuT had an active American website).

    Just because HuT has antagonists in common with all Muslims doesn’t mean HuT has much of anything in common with the Muslim mainstream. The seminar this evening will be about events in Pakistan, where it appears HuT will be trafficking in the same absurb, wild conspiracy theories and fantasies that tinfoil-hat-wearing Pakistani right-wingers do.

    It has become very clear that the one responsible for these explosions and the killings of innocent people is the Pakistani government, regardless of who actually committed these horrendous acts, whether or not they were private contractors (e.g.’ Blackwater) or someone else. For example the government knew about the explosion that was to take place at the military headquarter in Rawalpindi since July 2009, and instead of stopping it, the government let it happen to advance its own agenda, and used the attack on its military headquarters as a reason to justify the war as a necessity to establish security in the region.

    Yes, that’s right. The Pakistani military elite allowed a couple of their top generals along with a crowd of their own children and relatives to be massacred to better serve the agenda of their evil Western overlords. What a farce. Hizb ut-Tahrir is functioning at a level of credibility that’s about comparable to Lyndon LaRouche.

     

  • johnpi 9:08 am on December 6, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , hizb-ut-tahrir, , , , , , tribal elders   

    Remote-controlled roadside bomb kills two tribal elders in Bajur, Pakistan

    Militants have tried to weaken the long-standing tribal leadership structure in the northwest, killing scores of elders so they could impose their own reign.

    The roadside bomb that killed two elders Sunday in the Bajur tribal region also left two other tribesmen wounded, local government official Jamil Khan said. The two dead elders were on foot, leaving a mosque in the Malangi area after prayers.

    Meanwhile, over at the Hizb ut-Tahrir website, the Blackwater conspiracy theory is being perpetuated:

    …in order to incite Pakistan’s armed forces to fight in Waziristan, America employed lowly tactics to discredit the Muslim resistance. US private military organizations, that supervised explosions and assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan, now undertake their activities in Pakistan. And US intelligence has infiltrated some elements of the loosely gathered Taleban fighters, enticing some of them to turn their weapons away from the crusader occupying forces and onto their Muslim brothers in the armed forces.

    Yet, America’s campaign of explosions and assassinations would never have been possible, if it were not for Zardari’s regime.

    Riiiight. So wiping out the local tribal elders that are an alternative source of guidance and leadership to the Taliban is also a clever American plot?

     

  • johnpi 10:16 am on November 20, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , hizb-ut-tahrir, , , , ,   

    Inayat Bunglawala says the Nidal Hasan attack and Hasan’s relationship with Anwar al-Awlaki are being used to press a new ‘witch-hunt’ against UK Islamic organizations and Muslim leaders.

    …it should be made clear that those same Muslim organizations that had in the past invited Al-Awlaki to the UK are horrified by his more recent extremism and are well aware of the damaging impact his views could now have on British Muslims. Following Al-Awlaki’s praise for the Fort Hood suspect, some of these UK Muslim organizations (including the Islamic Society of Britain and the Jam`iat Ihyaa’ Minhaaj Al-Sunnah) issued public statements disavowing his latest comments.

    However, this was not enough for the new McCarthyists. A group of them — including the Centre for Social Cohesion (whose director, Douglas Murray, advocated in 2006 that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”), Shiraz Maher from Policy Exchange, and the pro-Israel blog Harry’s Place — have not been slow in seeking to smear those Islamic organizations that had invited Al-Awlaki to the UK in the past.

    These new McCarthyists must be firmly resisted.

    Former Hizb ut-Tahrir member-turned-anti-’Islamism’ activist Shiraz Maher responds here.

     

  • johnpi 8:11 am on November 10, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: hizb-ut-tahrir, , , ,   

    In case you haven’t read it before, Maajid Nawaz, the director and co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation is telling his story in a Malaysian newspaper about being radicalized into Hizb ut-Tahrir, and then leaving the group. I guess it’s part of his job description to tell this story because I keep seeing it again and again. He also has some commentary on Islamism and Islamists.

    Islamism is a modern ideology masquerading as an ancient religion. As such, it shares a common trait with many other constructed ideologies. This trait is its fundamental, theoretical justification for change regardless of circumstances. Ideologies do not merely provide “solutions” to perceived problems; they provide a framework within which to define problems in the first place.

    By doing this, they effectively “discover” problems where there may be none, and can act as an obstacle to solving other problems when the solution doesn’t fit certain dogma. Islamism is formed by superimposing certain western political paradigms onto the religion of Islam. The absence of such modern Islamist notions in Muslim political systems and society is subsequently equated to the absence of Islam itself. Whatever institutions are found in place are subsequently described as Kufr (disbelief), which must be overthrown as a religious obligation.

    A bit of back history: At Talk Islam, the Quilliam Foundation has been blasted with disdain and criticism by my fellow frontpagers Thabet and Plimfix. Maajid Nawaz’s cofounder, Ed Hussain, has been especially criticized. Quilliam has been accused of being “neoconservative,” ‘money grubbing,’ “idiot” and “stupid” (about Ed Hussain), and lambasted for being written about favorably by otherwise Islamophobic pundits like ‘Mad Mel’ (who turned around and villified the Quilliam Foundation when it criticized the Gaza massacre).

     

    • Khalid 12:12 pm on November 10, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This “Quilliam Foundation” along with its online blog “Spittoon” is purely a British govt. / MI5 production. Over a year ago near its hyped up launch, some commentators in the British press stated as much here:

      http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/21/allmodcons

      its job is to whitewash the British govt. of any responsibility of contributing to terrorism either via discrimination ot its own Muslim citizens (“too many brown people are allowed into the UK” as Ed Husain says) or of its foreign policy (Shiraz Maher and Maajid Nawaz both supported the Israeli bombardment of Gaza against “terrorist sympathizers” and Ed Hussain is on record as having supported Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq).

      They are people who have sold their deen for money:

      http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5549138.ece

      and should be shunned and ignored by Muslims as they are simply a state apparatus not any independent body in any way.

    • plimfix 5:20 pm on November 10, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Recently, Sir Edward Husain defended the UK secret service policy of spying on and collecting data about innocent British Muslims with no links to terror. Data collected apparently includes information about individuals’ sexual behaviour. Human Rights groups, and most other Muslim groups, lambasted this policy. It’s not just me that holds Ed in contempt. It’s pretty much everyone except for the usual suspects – but then again, even Mad Mel all but accused him of fibbing. Even the choice of the groups name was dumb – they paraded Quilliam as the first great British moderate Muslim, when in fact Quilliam’s views had for more in common with today’s “Islamists” than with Ed’s ninny foundation.

    • Abdullah 1:43 am on November 11, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The Quilliam Foundation is not independent! It is to all intents and purposes part of the Home Office, and everyone who works for it is a de facto civil servant. All of its funding comes from the government – the majority of that being from part of the Home Office called the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, an intelligence agency!

  • johnpi 9:50 pm on November 8, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: hizb-ut-tahrir, , , , , , , , , ,   

    Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulitzer prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, writes in The New Yorker that the greatest fear about Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists comes not from the Taliban but from the likelihood of a mutiny in the Pakistani military by Islamic extremist officers.

    The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military’s control over nuclear weapons.” Clinton—whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs—added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, “we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state.”

    Clinton’s words sounded reassuring, and several current and former officials also said in interviews that the Pakistan Army was in full control of the nuclear arsenal. But the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

    No conversation about such a mutiny is complete without a discussion of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and despite the dismissive approach of some of my fellow TI front-pagers, the US government is worried enough about the group that it has been discussed at top levels of the Obama administration.

    A senior Obama Administration official brought up Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a Sunni organization whose goal is to establish the Caliphate. “They’ve penetrated the Pakistani military and now have cells in the Army,” he said. (The Pakistan Army denies this.) In one case, according to the official, Hizb ut-Tahrir had recruited members of a junior officer group, from the most élite Pakistani military academy, who had been sent to England for additional training.

    “Where do these guys get socialized and exposed to Islamic evangelism and the fundamentalism narrative?” the Obama Administration official asked. “In services every Friday for Army officers, and at corps and unit meetings where they are addressed by senior commanders and clerics.”

    For more about Hizb-ut-Tahrir, check the history of posts on the group here at Talk Islam.

     

  • johnpi 9:25 am on November 1, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , hizb-ut-tahrir, , , Ukraine   

    Earlier, I linked a press release from the Russian Interfax News that asserted that 90 percent of the Crimean Tatars are members of an extremist Islamic organization” (Hizb ut Tahrir). This recent article from the NY Times about the struggle to build a large mosque in the Crimean capital puts that piece of propaganda in perspective.

    The Crimean Tatars were deported en masse by Stalin to work camps and gulags in other areas of the Soviet Union, where many died. Since the USSR collapse the Tatars have been immigrating back to Crimea in large numbers.

    The mosque was supposed to signify the revival of those expelled, the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group that suffered as wretched a fate as any under Communism. But with work held up by local authorities, the plan has instead stirred up a dispute involving politics, communal grievances, international tensions and historic traumas.
    ….

    The Tatars’ return has repeatedly touched off legal clashes over restitution of land and property, much of which is now owned by ethnic Russians. Some have turned violent.

    The situation is complicated by the political status of Crimea, which would generally prefer to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Crimea was transferred by Nikita S. Khrushchev, then the Soviet leader, to Ukraine in 1954, a move then thought to be a formality, since it remained in the Soviet Union and was populated mostly by ethnic Russians.

    Tatars have better ties with the Ukrainian government, and are often seen by ethnic Russian nationalists in Crimea as Kiev’s proxies. The three sides jockey for power on the peninsula, and the mosque has been one focal point.

    Tatar leaders maintain that the mosque is being blocked in part to stoke anti-Muslim and anti-Ukrainian sentiment, especially in advance of presidential elections in Ukraine, scheduled for January.

     

  • johnpi 8:43 am on October 30, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , hizb-ut-tahrir, , , , Tatarstan   

    Same planet, different world.

    Russian press release: ’11 members of Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist organization convicted in Tatarstan.’

    The Supreme Court of Tatarstan found 12 activists of the Kazan division of the international terrorist organization Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb ut-Tahrir) guilty of extremism.

    “Seven men, including Tajik citizen Dzhurayev and six Russians, have received four to eight years in a penal colony,” court press secretary Natalya Loseva told Interfax.

    Four other Kazan residents have received suspended sentences of three years and six months to five years in prison.

    “The accomplice Gimaliyev was found insane and is exempt from criminal liability. He will be forcibly treated,” Loseva said.

    “Forcibly treated.” Horrible.

    In another press release about extremist influence, the Russians claim that the number of followers of the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement among Crimean Muslims has jumped from 800-900 to 30,000, “including 90 percent of Tatars from Alushta.”

     

  • johnpi 8:56 am on October 28, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , hizb-ut-tahrir, , ,   

    AltMuslim has more commentary and perspective on Hizb ut-Tahrir in the wake of the group’s interview with Obama’s Muslim policy advisor, Dalia Mogahed, on a UK talk show called Muslimah Dilemma.

    Mogahed expresses her anger about her treatment here.

    Rather than read more commentary about the incident, why not watch the Youtube clip of the show here and form your own impressions.

    I watched the show and did not find the Hizb ut Tahrir hosts to be nearly the cartoon bad guys Mogahed’s recollection of the experience led me to believe – though I did find Nazreen Nawaz’s (HT rep) narrative about current problems in Muslim majority countries to be evasive, and the vision of the problem-free life of the Caliphate unbelievable. Basically, every controversial incident in Muslim majority countries is a result of not following Shariah. All the self-identified Islamists whose understanding of Sharia has devolved into aggression, harsh punishment and repression of women are just wayward in their understanding of shariah. But the Caliphate is going to get everything right…

    She says Shariah comes directly from Allah (swt) as a way of explaining that you can’t go wrong with Shariah – problem is, the Shariah is being delivered and implemented by imperfect humans who are as at risk of being influenced by racism, classism, tribalism, greed, corruption, sexism, etc as any other human – but that part of the Shariah equation is elided, as so much else is in her comments.

    Removed to the plain of equivalency with other human-administered systems of justice, in example after example it seems too swift, too certain, too unrecoverable and brutal in its punishments (your amputated hands and feet will mark you with your crime for life), and too little interested in the redemption of those it punishes. In a religion that is thick with reminders (ritual) to return to God, it seems discordant to say that the ideal Islamic society removes that option from people by way of capital punishment.

     

    • Abu Noor Al-Irlandee 9:43 am on October 28, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      John, Thanks for your thoughtful comments in this post. I am not all that interested in further belaboring the Ms. Mogahed issue, and I’ve been discouraged from thinking it’s worthwhile to discuss HT with you, but you get to the larger more important issue of what Shari’ah is, how we should view it, and what it would or should mean for a modern society to be ruled by Shari’ah.

      Shari’ah is from Allaah in the sense that its primary sources are revelation: the Qur’an and the Sunnah. Yes of course as with any other system it will be interpreted, applied and enforced by imperfect human beings with all the flaws of any human being. I’ve never really understood why this would be an argument for completely human systems of law and government over Shari’ah, it is a fine point to make against the simplistic utopian rhetoric that is employed by a group like HT among others.

      I agree with the critique of HT’s simplistic utopian rhetoric, but it should be understood that HT is explicitly a political activist movement, not an intellectual one. Its appeal to me is limited by that factor, but it has been successful in achieving its political goal of popularizing the notion of the Khilafah in specific and ruling in general as being essential to Islam.

      I don’t buy the critique that a group like HT should be responsible to spend their time outlining in detail what society would be like under Khilafah, I think they actually spend too much time doing a certain kind of this, and this doesn’t help them. The details of what Islamic rule looks like in modern society will take a great deal of discussion and negotiation and experimentation and will be determined in practice more so than in theory. To the extent people are interested in theory, they should discuss in an academic/intellectual manner. Nothing is more deflating (at least in my view) than to hear political activist idealogues spout their party line as if it were intellectual or in a discussion of theory where it is just out of place.

      As to your specific comments regarding the criminal justice aspects of Shari’ah, I think you make a classic progressive mistake of seeming to throw out an argument that capital punishment is “discordant” with Islam in principle without grappling with the fact that the Prophet (saw) himself didn’t seem to have this great insight.

      Which is not to say that your basic point doesn’t have a lot of merit John. It is actually because I have a good deal of sympathy which such general arguments that I will continue to push “progressive Muslim” types to really grapple with the sources and resist the tendency to simply cloak ‘liberal progressive American’ arguments with vague flowery religious words and think of that as an Islamic argument.

      I know that this was just part of a blog post, and so I am not criticizing your statement here but more so pointing you towards things I think you need to incorporate and/or respond to in your argument if you want to further advance that line of thinking in the future. If you’re able to do that, it’s very possible I’ll be right there with you.

      Allaah Knows Best.

      • johnpi 11:02 am on October 28, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Shukran for the thoughtful response.

        This issue (for me as a relatively recent convert) of where am I going – what’s ahead on the path – is huge when the image that is thrown up there is this harshness that seems discordant with other parts of the revelation – the values of Allah (swt) in conflict with the values of the religion being practiced here on Earth. Notice, I used the word “seems” to communicate that I’m talking about what appears to me, rather than a conclusion I have come to.

        It’s a roadblock, a ’cause to pause’ before heading deeper into the religion, so I don’t think I can understate the importance of addressing this, as it’s likely that if it is an issue for me, it is for others…processing this kind of dilemma was a huge reason I started ‘blogging Islam’ in the first place…

        HT’s narrative about why things are the way they are seems specious, glib – it too easily steps around all these issues that arise from our flawed humanness, and refuses to acknowledge that they won’t go away just because we humans organize ourselves into a Caliphate (though you do acknowledge it and I appreciate that).

        I think the confusing thing here is that it seems like I’m questioning the Caliphate, but the deeper question is that if I accept that “the Caliphate” is the ineluctable path of the religion, then the question of how this thing called “the Caliphate” reconciles with the revelation throws the whole religion into questionable status. The repeated thud of internal inconsistency brought on by humans acting out their weakness under the flag of God’s own state – well, I fear will be terminally fatal to my Iman…

        • johnpi 11:42 am on October 28, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          And another related problematical question that arises from coercive Muslim state practices is this issue of living “faithlessly in Islam.” This issue is central to the criminal prosecution of apostates (which as you know, I’ve had a fascination with), but if the state retaliates against apostates, then the state is directing them to essentially live faithlessly in submission to the religion. It’s inaccurate to call these people hypocrites because they haven’t chosen hypocrisy, their choice was removed from them. This seems deeply contradictory.

          Another facet of this problem was represented well by hijaabified beauty’s post about hijabis who don’t take the hijab seriously. What good is it if you browbeat all the women into covering but they carry on without modesty while under cover? you could wind up with a whole society of faithless Muslims who otherwise walk, talk and keep up the appearance of being Muslim. This just does not compute as leading to a society of rightly guided Muslims…

        • Omar 2:14 pm on October 28, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Interesting paper by Dr. Khalid Blankinship called The History of the Caliphate (pdf).

    • Abu Noor Al-Irlandee 9:46 am on October 28, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I use “throw out an argument” above in the sense of “put forth an argument.” I think its clear in context but it was a sloppy way of putting it.

    • Omar 2:01 pm on October 28, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Here’s an interesting paper elucidating Islamic law (specifically criminal law) and its relationship with the state, called Keeping the State Out: The Separation of Law and State in Classical Islamic Law (pdf).

      • johnpi 6:41 pm on October 28, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        In advocating for the reintroduction of sharia, many are inclined towards codifying Islamic law so as to make its implementation easier— instead of multiple equally authoritative opinions, there is just one legal code for everyone to follow.

        However, many consider codification to be inherently contradictory to the nature of Islamic law. “Islamic law, being a doctrine and a method rather than a code . . . is by its nature incompatible with being codified, and every codification must subtly distort it.”

        This ideological difficulty, while often glossed over or ignored, presents serious problems for the implementation of Islamic law by modern Muslim nation- states.

        So when Islamic law was sucked up into the state apparatus, its codification caused its application to become harsher as the flexibility of its method was lost.

        Shopping around in the madhabs for the most forgiving doctrine may have been the classical tendency, but that potential has cut the other way in modern times. Here’s a contemporary example from Saudiwoman’s blog, writing about the most often cited reasons in Saudi Arabia for not allowing women to drive:

        2- That women driving is prohibited in Islam. This has been refuted by the majority of living Saudi sheikhs. However the people who use this argument keep going back to fatwas written by two dead sheikhs who were the inspiration for today’s Taliban lifestyle in Afghanistan.

        And this gets at another one of the insights in the linked article: harsh sentences are promoted today “as a sign of religious authenticity.” At this point we’re pretty far away from the dishonesty of oversimplification present in HT’s ‘Shariah comes from Allah and so you can’t go wrong with Shariah.”

        Whether Shariah is tied to or separate from the state, the presence of “us” in the equation easily thwarts God’s law. there needs to be more checks and balances against “us” and our worst tendencies the further we get from ‘the early days.’

        • Omar 11:51 pm on October 29, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          okay. I was a little sick and tired yesterday and didn’t realize my comment was deleted. Why was it deleted?

      • Omar 4:07 pm on October 29, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        This is an interesting excerpt describing late Ottoman palestine before nation states were installed. This is from a biographical essay on Marmaduke Pickthall.

        … The Orient came as a revelation. Later in life he [Marmaduke Pickthall] wrote, “When I read The Arabian Nights, I see the daily life of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Cairo, and the other cities as I found it in the early nineties of last century. What struck me, even in its decay and poverty, was the joyousness of that life compared with anything that I had seen in Europe. The people seemed quite independent of our cares of life, our anxious clutching after wealth, our fear of death.” He found a khoja to teach him more Arabic, and armed with a rapidly increasing fluency took ship for Jaffa, where, to the horror of European residents and missionaries, he donned native garb and disappeared into the depths of the Palestinian hinterland.

        Some of his experiences in the twilight of that exotic world may be re-read in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters. He had found, as he explains, a world of freedom unimaginable to a public schoolboy raised on an almost idolatrous passion for The State. Most Palestinians never set eyes on a policeman, and lived for decades without engaging with government in any way. Islamic law was administered in its time-honored fashion, by qadis who, with the exception of the Sahn and Ayasofya graduates in the cities, were local scholars. Villages chose their own headmen, or inherited them, and the same was true for the Bedouin tribes. The population revered and loved the Sultan-Caliph in faraway Istanbul but understood that it was not his place to interfere with their lives.

        It was this freedom, as much as intellectual assent, which set Marmaduke on the long pilgrimage which was to lead him to Islam. He saw the Muslim world before Westernization had contaminated the lives of the masses and long before it had infected Muslim political thought and produced the modern vision of the Islamic State, with its “ideology,” its centralized bureaucracy, its secret police, its Pasdaran and its Basij. That totalitarian nightmare he would not have recognized as Muslim. The deep faith of the Levantine peasantry which so amazed him was sustained by the sincerity that can only come when men are free, not forced, in the practice of religion. For the state to compel compliance is to spread vice and disbelief; as the Arab proverb which he well knew says, “If camel-dung were to be prohibited, people would seek it out.” Throughout his life, Pickthall saw Islam as radical freedom, a freedom from the encroachments of the State as much as from the claws of the ego. It also offered freedom from narrow fanaticism and sectarian bigotry. Late Ottoman Palestine was teeming with missionaries of every Christian sect, each convinced, in those pre-ecumenical days, of its own solitary rightness. He was appalled by the hate-filled rivalry of the sects, which, he thought, should at least be united in the land holy to their faith. But Christian Jerusalem was a maze of rival shrines and liturgies, where punches were frequently thrown in churches, while the Jerusalem of Islam was gloriously united under the Dome, the physical crown of the city and of her complex history…

        From Marmaduke Pickthall–A Brief Biography, by Sh. Abdal Hakim Murad

    • zahed 5:19 am on October 29, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Just to clarify, I didn’t want to go down the slippery-slope-to-terrorism angle and, in fact, had a paragraph arguing that notion was misguided. I specifically wanted to focus on the use of media and how something like what happened to Mogahed (who has every right to be pissed) could only happen by being subversive and parasitical about their approach to spreading their message and compounds the negative perceptions of them (which I don’t mind, of course, since they are utterly fantasist, as thabet has mentioned).

      There’s no way that incident could have happened if it was a “Hizb-ut-Tahrir Dilemma” show (nor do I think Islam Channel would allow it) and those involved in Muslim media will have to think about the context in which the issues they raise are debated, instead of falling victim to HT’s “Gotcha Islamism” (a play on “gotcha journalism,” for those that didn’t get it).

    • ned 10:38 am on November 14, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Pakistani ex-Muslim here. Only on an Islamic blog would it actually be nearly unthinkable to make the point that premodern laws are impossible to apply in the 21st century. Do you people enjoy being this frustrating, intellectually? You are absolutely part of the problem of the ideology of pan-Islamism (yes, I do see it as a major problem), as far as I’m concerned.

      • null 11:28 am on November 14, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Oh no. I guess it’s time to shut this whole operation down now, guys. It was fun while it lasted.

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