aug 16th, 2006
says a rather colorful lesbian mohammedan woman who criticizes the mohammedan establishment for its hypocrisy -- i guess the right word would be al-taqiyah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/opinion/16manji.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
1 comments:
I find myself an admirer of Ms Manji since reading this ToI interview with Priyanka Dasgupta:
excerpt from ‘Allah is perfect; Allah’s interpreters are not’
So how does one propagate the theory of creative reasoning?
• But the answer, in my view, is not to leave ijtihad to the self-appointed ‘experts’. Such elitism only cements the pattern of submissiveness that afflicts the contemporary Muslim mind — an affliction that stops too many reformist Muslims from speaking up as extremists take over. The answer, I believe, is for open societies like Canada and India to democratise the practice of ijtihad while using all the legal tools at our behest, including criminal codes, to nail those individuals who preach hate in God’s good name.
In early June, after 17 Muslim men in Canada were arrested for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack, I publicly asked my country’s law enforcers and justice officials why it’s taken so long to prosecute the people who spread radical Islamist ideologies. Canada has used the criminal code to deport a Holocaust denier on the one hand and a Hitlerloving Aboriginal leader on the other, but has never gone after Hindu-bashing, women-scorning, minority-mincing Islamist preachers. Why not? So far, no answer. The problem is not too much ijtihad; it’s too much hypocrisy in treating those who abuse it.
What will be your message to the fear-ridden people of our country?
• Ultimately, my message is about more than reforming Islamic practice. It’s about fighting the forces that seek to turn any of us — Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, even atheists — into robots for received wisdom. Let us remember that we don’t cease to be individuals merely by belonging to identifiable groups. Let us lose the false — and dangerous — assumption that just because human beings are born equal, cultures are too. Cultures aren’t born. They’re constructed. Finally, let us bear in mind that the universality of human rights is premised on the dignity of the individual, not the sanctity of culture. When we sanctify that manmade construct called culture, we’re actually damning it. We drain culture of the dynamism that individual creativity injects. We wind up with groupthink otherwise known as fundamentalism.
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