Annotated Bibliography on Islam

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                “ In the aftermath of September 11, South African scholar Farid Esack has become one of the most sought-after interpreters of Islamic thought in the United States. A progressive Muslim theologian who cut his teeth in the anti-apartheid struggle, Esack received his theological education in Pakistan. While studying in some of the same Karachi schools that also educated the leaders of the Taliban, he became increasingly disillusioned with both the narrow Islamic ideology and the oppression of Christians he encountered there. The Pakistani Catholics he met in the 1970s and early '80s introduced Esack to the ideas of liberation theology.”

  

                 “Is Islam, as President Bush keeps repeating, "a faith based upon peace and love and compassion" committed to "morality and learning and tolerance"? Yes and no. Radical Islam is committed to jihad against the United States and Israel, or a war of civilizations between the Judeo-Christian West and the impoverished Muslim world. The Wahhabis and Deobandis hate all things American, and are intolerant vis a vis all religions outside their own warped view of Islam. Moderate Islam is yet to find a voice that will roll back the extremists, a sort of Islamic Martin Luther, or at least a Martin Luther King.”

 

                 "For many Americans who have been struggling to understand Islam, the war with Iraq has raised two new questions: What is a Shiite? And what is there about Shiism that might affect Iraq's future and the American role in rebuilding that nation?  The answer to the first question is relatively simple: Shiites are the largest minority sect in Islam, representing about 10 percent of more than a billion Muslims in the world. But in Iraq, they are the majority, representing about 60 percent of the population. (About 85 percent of the Muslims in the world, and almost 40 percent of Iraqis, are Sunni.)   The answer to the second question is anything but simple. But experts say the history and practice of Shia offer clues, if not a road map, for what is possible in post-Saddam Iraq."

 

            "African-Americans make up about a third of the estimated 4 to 8 million Muslims in the U.S.--conservatively, around 1.5 million, nearly 5 percent of all African-Americans. According to a poll conducted in 2001 by Muslims in the American Public Square (MAPS), 20 percent of African-American Muslims are converts while 80 percent were raised Muslim. More detailed information about Islam in the African-American community, however, is relatively scarce."

   

 “Americans, it seems, are doing an ever more sophisticated job of distinguishing betweenhomegrown adherents to a religion and the twisted faithful from other societies. Surveys by the Pew Research Center found that the image of Muslim-Americans actually improved after the Sept. 11 attacks and has slipped only a few percentage points since…The truth is, some Muslims are finding more acceptance in America than other places.”

“And Americans clearly feel they know more about Islam now than in the past. In 1993, when the Los Angeles Times poll asked Americans their impression of Islam, fully 64 percent said they did not know enough to have an opinion. Asked again last month, only 34 percent said they knew too little…

That greater knowledge, however, has not improved the overall view that Americans hold of Islam. In the poll a decade ago, 22 percent had an unfavorable impression of Islam, compared to 14 percent with a favorable view--a margin virtually identical to the one in the recent poll.

Many Muslim activists blame what one called "a troika of evangelical Christians, right-wing conservatives and the pro-Israel lobby" for their plight.”

          “A book by professor Khurshid Ahmad, a leading Pakistani intellectual of the Islamic revivalist movement, offers insight on why the United States faces such a tough sell. In his collection of essays, Amrika: Muslim Dunya ki Bey-Itminani (America and Unrest in the Muslim World), Abroad argues that the United States "dreams of world domination, resolves to control the resources of other nations, wants to shape the world according to its ideas, and seeks to impose its values and ideology on others by force." Only the Islamists, he says, offer a political force capable of resisting this Pax Americana.

             Ahmad's book is noteworthy because the author is neither a fire-brand cleric nor a jihadist crouching in the caves of Afghanistan. He is a Western-educated economist, a senator, and deputy chief of Pakistan's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami. Ahmad gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s as the Islamic movement's international spokesman. Even while the Islamists became more radical during the 1980s and 1990s, Ahmad was considered a voice of moderation within political Islam.”

“This study examines the impact of religion on the gender role attitudes of Arab-American women, members of an ethnic group comprised of Christians and Muslims. A popular stereotype of Arab-American women portrays them as Islamic traditionalists -- veiled and secluded within the home, yet few empirical studies document the effects of Islarn on Arab-American women's attitudes and behaviors. This study addresses this question and distinguishes particular cultural influences on women's gender beliefs using survey data collected from a national sample of Arab Americans. Results of the analysis find that Arab-American women are more diverse and less traditional than popular stereotypes imply. Over one-half of women sampled are Christian, nearly one-half are foreign-born, and many hold progressive gender role beliefs. Moreover, the analysis finds that religiosity and ethnicity are more important in shaping women's gender role attitudes than are their affiliations as Muslims and Christians.”

 “While it is impossible, given their diversity, to paint one picture of women living under Islam today, it is clear that the religion has been used in most Muslim countries not to liberate but to entrench inequality.”

“This study involved in-depth interviews with 19 Iranian women over the age of 65 (age range was 65 to 85, with a mean age of 71). Between 1997 and 1998 we interviewed the participants in the Metropolitan Philadelphia and Washington, DC areas. These are urban centers in which a number of Iranian immigrants have settled over the past 20 years… We conducted interviews primarily in the participant's homes and mostly in Farsi, the principal language of Iran. Informal open-ended questions were designed for the purposes of the interview. The questions were broad and designed to elicit as much information as possible about their memories of the past, feelings about present life experiences, future goals and plans, coping strategies, sources of support, and life satisfaction.”

"Women's rights face an uncertain future throughout much of the Islamic world--though nowhere more pointedly than in the constitution-making efforts now underway in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In two nations widely viewed as test cases of the compatibility of Islamic and universal values, it remains to be seen whether and how the principles of sharia, or even the more general spirit of Islamic traditions, will inform their future laws. And behind those uncertainties loom even broader questions facing Muslim women everywhere. In particular, rights activists wonder, are the foundations of Islamic law and theology compatible with international standards of human rights in general and women's right in particular? And if so, what must be done to surmount the practical hurdles--including the crucial matter of who interprets the law--that stand in the way of reconciling Islam with universal principles of women's rights?”

“By the same token, the problem for those who want to believe that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism is not only that the terrorists themselves say otherwise. It is also the existence of a whole body of theory that is called upon to justify this activity, and which has zealous adherents. Admittedly, much of this theory is modern, as political as it is religious, with origins in the late 20th century. It is described variously as "fundamentalism", "Islamism" or "political Islam" (though these terms and definitions will need closer inspection later). But some of it also has, or claims to have, connections with some of the fundamental ideas and practices of the religion itself.”

 

“Q: Your book, The trouble with Islam, is a best seller in Canada, where you  live, and is due out in the U.S. in January.  So what is the trouble with Islam?

A: In my view, ever since the birth of my religion, with few exceptions, individual lives have been too small and the lies Muslims tell have been too big.

Q: What do you mean?

A: I mean look at the ill treatment of women under Islam today.  I mean look at the Jew-bashing – and I use that phrase deliberately.  Look at the continuing scourge of slavery in Islamist regions.  And the lies are that our problems are all the fault of the CIA, the Israelis, MTV, U.S. foreign policy or the House of Saud.  But we Muslims have been bludgeoning one another’s freedoms and imposing martial law on ourselves for centuries.  So all I’m asking of Muslims is to take ownership of the role we play in what ails Islam.

Q: What are your recommendations for breaking Islam out of its current state?

A:  We Muslims need to revive our tradition of engaging with the Koran.  Toward the end of the 11th century, the caliph in Baghdad closed political ranks to protect his empire from increasing internal division – and within a few generations Baghdad oversaw the closing of the doors of something called ijtihad, which is the Muslim tradition of independent thinking.  In the early decades of Islam, thanks to ijtihad, as many as 135 different schools of Islamic thought were allowed to flourish.  In the city of Cordoba alone, there were 70 libraries…

Q:  Some of your critics complain that you don’t understand the Koran.  You did get kicked out of the madrasa at age 14.

A:  I got kicked out for asking questions, which is a very scholarly thing to do.  And I spent the next 20 years studying Islam on my own.  I acknowledge that the Koran is difficult and complicated.  I celebrate that.  The Koran is complicated precisely because of its contradictions and ambiguities.  I challenge the men with fancy titles to acknowledge just how complicated the Koran is…

Q:  Homosexuality is not permitted in Islam.  How do you reconcile your open homosexuality with your faith?

A:  I accept the possibility that my sexual orientation might be a sin.  But only my creator can make that judgement.  But here’s a question : The Koran says that everything God made is, quote, excellent, and that nothing God has made is, quote, in vain.  If the creator did not wish to create me, a lesbian, then why didn’t he create somebody else in my place?  And given how explicit the Koran is that God has deliberately designed the world’s breathtaking multiplicity, I wonder how my critics can justify their utter condemnation of homosexuality.”

           

 

 

"Most Muslims still bitterly resent America's armed intrusion into the heartland of Islam. Yet, while some go so far as to applaud attacks on the occupying force, more have quietly begun to accommodate themselves to the new reality.

This change of heart owes little to American diplomacy. The widespread Muslim suspicion remains that Iraq is only part of a wider American plan to subvert the faith. The appointment--to a senior post in America's anti-terror team--of a general quoted as slurring Islam, along with the American administration's apparent approval of an Israeli airstrike earlier this month against Syria, has reinforced such fears."

As a recent global opinion survey showed, favourable attitudes to America have crashed in the past two years, especially in Muslim countries. The figure in Indonesia has plummeted from 61% to 15%, in Turkey from 52% to 15%, and in Jordan from 25% to 1%. Last week's speech at an Islamic summit by Malaysia's prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, caught the eye not only for its anti-Semitic insinuations but for its much-cheered reference to the need for a "counter-attack" against the "enemies of Islam".

“Since September 11th, discussions about Islam have abounded with phrases such as "political Islam", "Islamic fundamentalism", "Islamism", "radical Islam" and so forth. Almost nobody agrees with anybody else about what these terms mean or how they overlap. The body of ideas associated with Sayyid Qutb--the notion that man has only one choice to make, between jahiliyya or submission to the law of Allah in its entirety--is only one, extreme, form of Islamic fundamentalism. And fundamentalism is only one part of the bigger category of "Islamism" or "political Islam".”

“A handful of Muslims living in the West have turned to terrorism, as have a handful of Christians, Jews, atheists, Marxists, Maoists, nihilists, animal lovers and greens. But the numbers are tiny given the size of the West's Muslim population: about 10m each in the European Union and the United States. Western Muslims are, besides, anything but homogenous.”

“After five months of studying ways of reconciling religious belief and public conduct, the Stasi commission recommended banning ''conspicuous'' religious symbols -- not just scarves but also yarmulkes and ''large crosses'' from public institutions. It left room for discreet symbols, like Stars of David, small crosses and hands-of-Fatima pendants. It urged that Muslim chaplains be appointed for prisons and that a national school of Islamic studies be established. It suggested making Yom Kippur and Id al-Adha, the Muslim feast of Abraham's sacrifice, national holidays.

Confrontations between religion and secularism are arising across Europe, and evoking inconsistent responses. While most Germans register as members of a religion, the state of Bavaria banned the headscarf for teachers two weeks ago. While Britain has its established church, with the queen the ''defender of the faith,'' it also has Muslim policewomen in veils. While Denmark has an established (Lutheran) church, it is fighting hard to keep explicit references to God out of a European constitution. While many of Italy's religious Catholics, supported by the pope, have closed ranks against Muslims who sue to remove crosses from classrooms, other Catholics have joined Muslims in opposing the Iraq war and marching in pro-Palestinian rallies.”

 

“There are now more than 12 million people of Muslim origin in Western Europe, roughly half of them in France. Visiting the city of Marseilles, where nearly a third of the population is Arab, one sees the more familiar dimension of the phenomenon. The youths slouched against walls in the twisting, cobbled streets of the old port are three to five times less likely to have a job than their "French" counterparts. Whole neighborhoods could easily be in the Maghreb: many have little, if any, contact with the country beyond their walls. Among young men, particularly, Islam has turned from a faith into a rejection of the French system that many feel has failed them.

The real challenge, though, lies not with those who have checked out of the system, but those who want in, on their own terms. That's the role of a new crop of twenty- and thirtysomethings--call them Generation M-- who are Europeans in almost every sense of the word. Unlike their forebears, they are mostly born in Europe and claim it as their own society. They do well in school and the workplace and, often, have effectively "Christianized" their faith by making it a personal matter. "My religion is something private, something I don't feel like sharing in public," says Delilah Kerchouche, 30, a chic Parisian journalist whose immigrant parents raised her "as Algerian." "But it's definitely part of who I am." Rather than struggling to "fit in," these Gen Mers want Europe to make space for them, and as their numbers grow, Europe needs them to succeed.”

 

            "After Sept.11th, the finances of many U.S. Muslim organizations were investigated and sometimes frozen by the U.S. government.  Muslim organizations innocent of any wrongdoing are working to show other U.S. Muslims how to better protect their civil rights."

 

            “Since September 11, 2001, Arab and Muslim immigrants have confronted mounting discrimination at the hands of the U.S. government and private citizens. Individuals the Department of Homeland Security identifies as "potential terrorists" are subject to state monitoring, detention, deportation, special reporting requirements, and "voluntary" interviews. Arabs and Muslims have also been victims of physical and verbal attacks and targets of job and educational discrimination. Such problems have only intensified since the war in Iraq."

 

“This year, the two Muslim Bids (holidays) were somehow different than in the past. Our nation's estimated 7 million American Muslims joined the world's 1.2 billion Muslims by celebrating Bid al-Fitr last December and Bid al-Adha this past February….But the differences in the Bid al-Fitr celebrations this year also were quite apparent, however. Demonstrating their pride in both their nation and their faith, many worshippers--young and old--wore red, white and blue pins with phrases such as "Proud American Muslim."

“Oliver Watson, the collection's curator, who is on loan from the Victoria and Albert, underscored the relationship between artistic heritage and the current climate. ''People say that at this moment it is more important to recognize that the Middle East and the Islamic world was in its day as advanced culturally, as well as economically and militarily, as any country or empire in the world,'' he said.”

  

 

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