I had the good fortune of hearing Tariq Ramadan speak recently. Following are some of his comments and perspective which I found interesting.

The London bombers

The London bombers were fully ‘integrated/westernised’ culturally, socially and intellectually, but not psychologically. That is, they still identified themselves with the Iraqis with an ‘us vs them’ mentality. What was missing was a sense of belonging in the new culture. This is a two way street because people not only have to accept the new society they live in, they also have to be accepted. In practical terms, the society and the media have to stop portraying them as immigrants. Both groups have to drop the ‘us vs them’ mentality.

In France for example, Muslims are often described as 5th generation immigrants. How long until they are described as French citizens? Integration has been successful when people stop talking about integration. We need a post integration discourse.

Isolation is a defense mechanism common to all immigrants as a mechanism to protect self identity. Only after they are comfortable with that can they engage the broader community.

Scripture – immigrant Muslims must separate the text of the scripture from the context. They have left a place where both the text and context were the same or similar. They need to separate the culture from the religion and select from the new culture and the old religion. Tariq described himself as Swiss by nationality, Egyptian by memory, European by culture, universalist by principle, Moroccan by adoption (he like Morocco). You cannot ask people to abandon a history or memory that defines them.

‘Australian values’ are often used to exclude because people look for how we differ from others and define our values around those differences, rather than in an absolute sense.

Post September 11 many American Muslims were asked whether they are an American first or a Muslim first. This is as dumb as asking someone whether they are a vegetarian or a poet. When you eat you are a vegetarian and you don’t demand everyone else at the table be a poet. When you go to a poetry reading you don’t expect others to be vegetarian. Likewise an Australian Muslim may vote as an Australian, but mourn the death of their father as a Muslim.

There is no ‘double loyalty’. Muslims should and in general do abide by the law of their country – help your brother when he is right and when he is wrong (by not allowing him to do wrong). This does not mean blind nationalism – can protest within the framework of the law, or even go against the law within the framework of your conscience.

Beware of binary definitions – eg ‘good’ vs ‘bad’, extremists vs mainstream Muslims. Oversimplifying an issue does not help solve it. Extremist Muslims are overrepresented in the media and do not represent Islam.

Practical challenges for Muslim immigrants:

Define Islam in a positive manner, by what it is, rather than by what it isn’t. Recreate textbooks written where Islam is not dominant, so as to remove the cultural burden. Train local imams and set up appropriate institutions, so imams are aware of and sensitive to local culture. Don’t ‘Islamise’ local problems. Socio economic problems (eg ghettoisation in France) need socioeconomic solutions, not blaming on Islam. Avoid victim and minority mentality – Muslims must speak as a citizen, not a minority representative. Show your presence and expose problems by contributing creatively (eg music).

Islam has only been a major presence in Australia for 20 years – much shorter than Europe or America. There has been a silent revolution within Muslim groups. They have come a long way and we need to be fair to them. We will all ‘catch up’.

France – riots caused by socio economic, not religious problems. People complained of real problems and were told simply to ‘integrate’ even though they had been ‘ghettoised’. They had integrated and rioting (the french way) was proof of this.

Historical problems – in Muslim countries, secularism has been associated with colonialism, imposition of a new system and dictatorship, hence the misplaced opposition to secularism in the Arab world.

Islam is the first ‘transnational’ problem of it’s kind in that the number of people involved is creating fear among others that they may lose their identity. The global discourse is not helping.

Islamic extremists – let them speak and challenge them publicly, don’t ban them and drive them underground. Tariq wants extremists to come to his presentations so he can do this.

The Archbishop of Cantebury was misrepresented. What he suggested already exists in British law for Muslim and Jewish groups. It can be done within the framework of current law due to legal flexibility. Sharia law is not about importing a foreign model. Western Justice systems do a far better job of protecting fundamental sharia principles than many Islam dominated countries (eg Saudi Arabia). Money is silencing criticism of the Saudis.

Master of Islamist doublespeak


THE Swiss Islamic activist Tariq Ramadan has been invited by Griffith University to be the keynote speaker at its conference opening in Brisbane today.

The fact that Australia is allowing Ramadan to enter the country at all will raise eyebrows in security circles elsewhere. Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: the spiritual backers of al-Qa'ida and Hamas and whose goal is to Islamise the world.

While it is, of course, unfair to tar someone with his grandfather's views, there is ample reason to think that in the case of Tariq Ramadan the apple has not fallen far from the tree.

Ramadan has been banned from entering the US because of his alleged association with extremists. The Geneva Islamic Centre, with which he is closely associated, has been linked to terrorists of the Algerian FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) and the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). A Spanish police report claimed that Ahmed Brahim, an al-Qa'ida leader jailed in Spain, was "in frequent contact" with Ramadan, a claim he has denied.

Yet the Swiss activist has not only been allowed into Britain but is ensconced at St Anthony's College, Oxford as a research fellow and is much lionised by the British establishment, appearing at security seminars on Islamism and even serving as an adviser to the British Government on tackling Islamic extremism.

So how to explain this wild divergence of views about Tariq Ramadan? And does Australia have cause to be concerned?

Ramadan's message is highly seductive to a Western world terrified by Islamic radicalism. For Ramadan preaches the comforting message of an unthreatening Islam that can accommodate itself to modernity and to the West. He does so in a charismatic style combining high intellect, a winsome French accent and impossibly hip glamour. To the desperate British establishment, the picture he paints so beguilingly of a way out of the Islamist nightmare has made him into the rock star of the counter-terrorism circuit.

But closer scrutiny of what he actually says - and perhaps even more importantly, does not say - suggests the talented Mr Ramadan is an Islamist wolf in moderniser's clothing. To the Islamic world he says one thing; to credulous Western audiences quite another in language that is slippery, opaque, manipulative and disingenuous.

His reputation as a Muslim reformer owes everything to the wishful thinking of those who want so much to believe in him that they fail to grasp what he is really saying.

Partly, this is because much of his work is in French. The writer Caroline Fourest has analysed it and her book, Brother Tariq: the Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan has just been translated from French into English.

All who are concerned to halt the spread of radical Islamism should read this book. For it shows without doubt that the poster boy for Islamic reform is in fact one of the most sophisticated proponents of the global jihad.

Ramadan claims he has "no functional connection" with the Muslim Brotherhood. But he was trained at the Leicester Islamic Foundation in England, the controversial institution that propagates the doctrines of the key Islamist ideologues Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb and which aims to promote "an Islamic social order in Great Britain".

And Ramadan has repeatedly said that his grandfather's views have "inspired" him and "there is nothing in this heritage that I reject".

So what is the heritage of Hassan al-Banna? He did not just promote the most reactionary and oppressive Islamic fundamentalism. He also devised a strategy of "graduated conquest" - pursued by the Muslim Brotherhood around the world - by which not only the countries of the former medieval Islamic caliphate, but all countries where Muslims live, are to be gradually Islamised and then taken over by an Islamic government under sharia law.

This is the "heritage" Ramadan endorses. The only difference is that he has developed a particularly subtle strategy for seducing the West into embracing Islamist thinking without realising what is happening.

On the issue of terror, he is particularly slippery. Professing to oppose terrorism, he denies that his grandfather had anything to do with jihadi violence. Yet al-Banna explicitly supported the armed jihad which he considered to be the highest and "most sacred" form of holy war.

Ramadan claims his grandfather limited this to "legitimate defence" or "resistance in the face of injustice". But this is precisely the weaselly formulation by which Islamists justify the "resistance" of human bomb terrorism in Israel or Iraq.

Behind the honeyed words about reform and tolerance which have entranced his Western fan club, Ramadan has consistently lined himself up with the forces of obscurantism, intolerance, hatred and violence.

The first association he set up in 1994, the Muslim Men and Women of Switzerland, promoted confrontation and stirred up tension. He wrote the preface for a compilation of fatwas by the European Council for Fatwa whose president, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has said human bomb operations in Israel and Iraq are a religious duty.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23307666-7583,00.html

How can you scrutinise what someone doesn't say?

Not speaking strongly against terrorism is tacit approval.

No it isn't.

Musician35 - perhaps ypu have a point. But a bit harsh to judge a faith on 4 spot quotes.
Even by my books. Perhaps if the actions of the leader and many more quotes and directions supported that, could be a case.

Oh - look what I found !!!!
Bukhari:V1B1N6 "Just issue orders to kill every Jew in the country."

Ishaq: 676 "‘You obey a stranger who encourages you to murder for booty. You are greedy men. Is there no honor among you?' Upon hearing those lines Muhammad said, ‘Will no one rid me of this woman?' Umayr, a zealous Muslim, decided to execute the Prophet's wishes. That very night he crept into the writer's home while she lay sleeping surrounded by her young children. There was one at her breast. Umayr removed the suckling babe and then plunged his sword into the poet. The next morning in the mosque, Muhammad, who was aware of the assassination, said, ‘You have helped Allah and His Apostle.' Umayr said. ‘She had five sons; should I feel guilty?' ‘No,' the Prophet answered. ‘Killing her was as meaningless as two goats butting heads.'"

Ishaq:369 "Thereupon Mas'ud leapt upon Sunayna, one of the Jewish merchants with whom his family had social and commercial relations and killed him. The Muslim's brother complained, saying, ‘Why did you kill him? You have much fat in you belly from his charity.' Mas'ud answered, ‘By Allah, had Muhammad ordered me to murder you, my brother, I would have cut off your head.' Wherein the brother said, ‘Any religion that can bring you to this is indeed wonderful!' And he accepted Islam."


Tabari IX:113 "Allah permits you to shut them in separate rooms and to beat them, but not severely. If they abstain, they have the right to food and clothing. Treat women well for they are like domestic animals and they possess nothing themselves. Allah has made the enjoyment of their bodies lawful in his Qur'an."

fancy that

mussician, yes, I recognised them.
numbers and leciticus are in the OT and for the jews to follow.
christians are not beholden by the OT.

christianity IS a mile different from islam.
Look at what christian and islamic countries have produced.
Chalk and cheese.

freediver - hahahah

"many of the clerics were migrants and, while their spiritual knowledge was sound, they often had problems engaging with the wider community. "


So, what hilali said was correct, muzzies don't disagree with what their clerics say. 
Aussies wont accept that violent nonsense, we won't accept that here.
Take it away and go.

Sprintcyclist wrote on Mar 10^th, 2008 at 9:40pm:


That's maybe your personal idea, but it's not backed up by Scripture. The Old Testament is important to Christians. It forms the backdrop and reference point for the entire NT. That's why it's included in the Bible:

Matthew 5:

5:19  Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

also Matthew 15.3 - 15.7

15:3  But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?      
15:4 For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.

(and I understand the context here)

Also read Luke 17:26-32

17:32  Remember Lot's wife.